The German Revolution 1918

Was Germany fighting a low level civil war from 1918 onwards? A social truce the Burgfreid (peace within the fortress) had been informally agreed upon at that outset of World War One by the left and right, the social tensions that had in some ways made war more attractive to the Kaiser were suspended until at least 1916, thus indicating to the Emperor that an appeal to national sentiment had paid off.
From 1916 onwards Hindenburg and Ludendorff ruled Germany as de-facto military dictators. The failure of the Schlieffen Plan had placed unsustainable pressures on Germany, she was now faced with a war on two fronts, the kind of war that Bismarck had spent three decades trying to keep Germany out of because he could predict the likely consequences.
One of those consequences was an end to the Burgfried, and by 1918 there was more than simply a clamour for peace. Germany's working classes, represented by the SPD and KPD parties (the KPD having split off from the SPD during the war) now began to articulate a very different idea of what Germany should be about. They looked beyond simply an armistice and began to envision a post- Imperial Germany, a country without a warlike and militaristic Kaiser, who seemed to have dragged Germany into a titanic conflict she couldn't win. They agitated for both political and social revolution, a profound re-ordering of society, the removal of the anachronistic Junker class and on the moderate left, the creation of a fully representative party. On the far left the likes of Karl Liebnicht and Rosa Luxembourg demanded a soviet style government, akin to the new USSR.
In the end the decision to send the German Navy back out to see in one last suicide mission against British Admiral Jellicoe's Dreadnoughts to salvage German honour and die in the process, pushed German sailors over the edge, resulting in mutiny. Convinced the revolution had broken out and that he was likely to suffer the Czar of Russia's fate, The Kaiser fled, ensuring that the 'revolution' of 1918 was successful. It was Ludendorff that helped to send the Kaiser on his way, telling him that he had no other choice and then arranging for a civilian government to take his place. Prince Max of Baden headed up a government of Social Democrats and Centre Party members, while Ludendorff laughed into his sleeve. Their first task would be the task that meant they were permanently despised by most Germans, it would be the signing of the armistice and then the Treaty of Versailles.

Ludendorff ensured that he and the army and his old aristocratic Junker friends were not tarred with the traitor brush by having nothing at all to do with Versailles. Max of Baden was quickly replaced by Friedrich Ebert, Social Democrat, and Germany's old order, the aristocracy, army, civil service and judiciary sat back to see how the new civilian government would get along. Knowing that the government was forever crippled by the treaty of Versailles meant that it would be easy at some point to take power back from them and re-shape German society in the interests of those on high.

The left were not the only people in 1918 with new ideas about how Germany should be run. Soldiers returning from the war found it difficult to comprehend how the war had been lsot, from their perspective, they had been winning, in the summer of 1918 they were 40 miles from Paris. Many of them thought that the war had been lost at home, but instead of blaming the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, the British Naval Blockade, the incompetence of the Kaiser's rule and the end of the Burgfreid, they looked to more convenient scapegoats. When Hitler began ministering to demobbed soldiers about the Jews in 1919, his words filled an emotional and conceptual gap in the thinking of many demobbed Wehrmacht men. Further to this there were many on the right in the 1920s who thought a new war was necessary and that an Imperial Germany with an empire in the east was the goal that should really be achieved. All the ideas that appear in Mein Kampf were free floating around the trenches and the barracks and other centres of reaction by 1919. Hitler articulated these ideas, crystalised them and repeated them ceaslessly to a receptive audience