transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] What's up, everyone? This is Darryl Cooper and you're listening to The Martyr Made Podcast. You're about to hear episode two of Enemy, The German's War, The Work of the Men, a story of the Second World War told from the perspective of the Germans. In the last episode, I tried to convey the horror and helplessness of trench warfare during the First World War. Over the next few episodes, we're going to discuss how the men who experienced that tried to reconstruct themselves and their nations in the aftermath. If you pick up any history book, you'll learn that the First World War began in 1914 and ended in 1918. But at the time, that might have been news to anybody living in the defeated countries. Because while the Allies were toasting their glorious victory, civil wars, revolutions, and territorial conflicts between newly created states would rage for several more years and claim millions of lives, from Germany in the West to Siberia in the East and everywhere in between. These would be no mere military conflicts, but wars of annihilation and terror that pitted nation against nation, class against class and in which whole categories of human beings would be deemed unworthy of continued existence. As always, thank you so much to all of you who support the podcast by subscribing to The Martyr Made Substack. You are the only reason I'm able to do this. As you know, this is a 100% listener-supported show. I will always be grateful to you. If you are not currently a subscriber, please do consider supporting the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at subscribe.martyrmade.com. It's just five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year. Again, you might notice that I don't, that I have never and that I will never run ads on this podcast. The audience size has grown to a point where I'm actually giving up significant revenue at this point by not doing that, but I very much prefer just to work for you and only for you. And so once again, finally, I know coming up with the money for a subscription is not always easy. Believe me, I've been there. So if you love the show and would like to get access to the paid content, just shoot me an email at martyrmade.gmail.com and I will hook you up. And I know there's people out there that have probably sent me emails. I'm not great at catching up on them, but it's first thing on my list this week is to go through my emails and catch up on all that. So if you can swing the subscription fee, though, please do consider it because again, this is the only way that I'm able to do this. All right, enough of that. You're about to listen to Martyr Made number 26, Enemy, the German's War, The Work of the Men. Here we go. I must tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion. It didn't feel like defeat. Not at first. If anything, it felt like a mistake. A temporary reversal that would be corrected as soon as the right officer noticed it, and the general staff adjusted their plans. The German's 1918 offensive had bogged down, but her army still held lines deep in the territory of her enemies, and no enemy boot stood on the soil of the Reich. Sure, maybe they would have to retreat some distance, shorten the line, but the line would hold just as it had always held. True, the Americans had finally joined the battle, and to give the Americans their due, they were rushing in with a headlong enthusiasm that the Germans had beaten out of the French and British the year before. But the Americans were inexperienced, and they were taking casualties at a higher rate than they had in their own civil war, when it was her own sons dying on both sides. All the armies had marched off to war with high spirits and dreams of glory. But by the autumn of 1918, the Americans are losing 25,000 men, killed, wounded or missing, every week. And they don't even have a real stake in this thing. So let's see how long their enthusiasm holds up. The French had long since lost their enthusiasm for the offensive, but while they remained pretty stout on defense, and the British were living up to their reputation for relentless determination, none of that was new. The German soldier was hungry and short of ammunition, but that wasn't new either. The front soldier only knew one thing. He knew that the man to his right and the man to his left remained ready to fight, so let them come. But then the rumors began to rumble in, like artillery reports from just over the horizon, when the shells hadn't fallen yet. They said Bulgaria had stopped fighting. Not that Bulgaria was defeated or Bulgaria had surrendered, but that they had just stopped fighting. That was ridiculous, seemed impossible. Soldiers didn't stop. Stopping was something civilians did at the end of a day in the office or the factory. This was the first bad news from the Bulgarian front since she entered the war in October 1915. She was a small country, no great power. Her population was just over 4 million. But Bulgaria's armies had never been defeated in a major engagement, and had withstood sustained assaults by the Entente for three years. These were game fighters and proud. But by the summer of 1918, the Bulgarians were running out of food. They were running out of ammunition. They were running out of other fundamentals like shoes and clothing. Their uniforms had fallen apart on their bodies after years of hard fighting in the elements. And there was no longer any material with which to repair shoes. For several months, though, Bulgarian soldiers held the line anyway. They even mounted counterattacks running barefoot over rocky earth with no helmets and makeshift uniforms made out of old sandbags. But on September 29th, 1918, their strength ran out and it was confirmed. The collapse of the Bulgarian front was no longer a rumor, but a fact. Still, it was only Bulgaria. There was no great power waiting to rush in from the south, as there had been from the east and west. This was a setback. It was not a catastrophe. Then the rumors from the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to roll in, and these landed closer to home. Only a couple weeks after the fall of Bulgaria, as the Allies, now bolstered by 2 million American soldiers and counting, unleashed their full fury on the Western front, Hungary seceded from the dual monarchy and requested a separate peace. And, just like that, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was, for the most part, just Austria. The German home front was in disarray, and the military censors were being less thorough about screening out bad news sent to and from the front. So rumors multiplied and spread quickly. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no text messages. There were reinforcement soldiers going to and from the front carrying news with them. There were letters from home, and there was word of mouth. The soldiers heard news of massive strikes in munitions factories and other industries throughout Germany. They heard of vast demonstrations by angry crowds waving the red banners of the Communist Revolution. They heard that rather than crushing this traitorous insurrection, the government tried to appease the crowds by releasing prisoners who had been put away for subverting the war effort and working on behalf of foreign powers. Chief among them was a revolutionary named Karl Liebknecht, who along with his comrade Rosa Luxemburg had formed the militant communist Spartacus League within days of the outbreak of the war. To the front soldier, this was almost unbelievable. They'd been the ones suffering out in the mud and watching their friends die, and the people back at home were rebelling? They said that Liebknecht had exited the prison into a waiting open car, taunting the police and prison guards all the way, and treating them and his gathered crowd of supporters to a speech in which he openly called on German soldiers to turn on their officers and follow the example of the Russian Bolshevists and to join the Soviet Red Army in bringing the Communist Revolution to Germany. From the prison, Liebknecht was driven directly to the Russian Embassy, where he gave another short speech, calling on Germans to join the Red Army and to fight for the worldwide Communist Revolution. The following day, it was said, Liebknecht left his home and went straight back to the Russian Embassy, where he was greeted by the Bolshevik ambassador as if he were a foreign dignitary, treated to a gourmet feast on fine china and served champagne and crystal glasses, while just outside the embassy German citizens were quite literally dying of starvation. Liebknecht and the Soviet ambassador exchanged speeches praising each other, promising to expand the Russian Revolution to Germany, and all in the open. After that, Liebknecht had simply gone home, apparently without fear. How was it possible? How could the government stand by and witness such brazen treason? How had no patriotic civilian approached Liebknecht in the crowd and with his own pistol done what the government had apparently lost the nerve to do? Two days later, the news came like a lightning bolt. General Erich Ludendorff, the Dragon Slayer, the hero of Liege and Tannenberg, vanquisher of the Russian Empire and the man who'd run the German war effort for over two years, had been relieved of his command. Some said he'd suffered a nervous breakdown. Others that he'd gone stark raving mad. Only two days after that, more news. Czech politicians and activists had seized control of Prague and seceded from what was left of the Habsburg Austrian Empire. The next day, Slovaks did the same in Bratislava. The historian and journalist Gustav Mayer wrote in his diary at the time, Every day brings a new republic. Today, Bulgaria, republics in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw, presumably soon in Vienna. To patriotic supporters of these ancient empires and their ruling houses, this was like watching their parents be cut into pieces and fed to dogs. The next day confirmed Mayer's worst fears. The Ottoman Empire was defeated and had requested a separate peace, and mutinying Austrian soldiers had occupied Vienna and were running amok. Finally the revolution came to Germany. Sailors in the northern port city of Kiel had turned on their officers, tore the flag of the German Empire down from their ships' masts, and raised the red flag of revolution in its place. No sooner had the revolution kicked off than sailors, whipped up by false rumors of counter-revolutionary armies heading their way, started firing their weapons at ghosts, killing ten people and wounding another twenty-one. The sailors were joined by disaffected workers, and the rebellion spread along the northern coast, through all the port cities of Germany, and in a matter of days, the revolution was popping off in every other city in the Reich— Hamburg, Cologne, even Berlin. They said the Kaiser had fled in the night to save himself and his family, and was no longer even in the country. In Munich, a Jewish theatre critic named Kurt Eisner led the overthrow of the House of Wittelsbach, which had ruled Bavaria since the eleventh century, and whose descendants still sit on the throne of Great Britain to this day. Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Wittelsbach. For centuries, these names had been spoken of. The way people would speak of oceans or mountains as permanent features of the European landscape, almost synonymous with the continent's history. And just like that, they were all gone. Soldiers and workers wearing red armbands took control of the German street. If you came to a train station and the trains happened to be running, which was getting rarer and rarer, it was the red armbands who gave you permission to ride. Military officers and cadets who once walked proudly in their uniforms were afraid to appear in public lest they be assaulted or worse. Everywhere you looked, the very people who denigrated the empire, denigrated the army and the German valk were lording it over everyone else. To ordinary people, this was terrifying. To the volunteer front soldier and the German patriot, it was enraging. Karl Hampe, another well-known German historian, wrote in his diary, The most wretched day of my life. What has become of the Kaiser and the Reich? From the outside we face mutilation and a sort of debt servitude. Internally we face civil war, starvation, chaos. In our current mood, it seems as if life would hardly be worth living were it not for our children and our concern for them. Inside oneself one feels deeply cold. Compared to this coercive force of mob rule, there was infinitely more freedom under the monarchy. Of course, these forces will not remain unopposed. And then the forceful claims of those who hold power will be tried with similar means as in Russia. They never cease talking about the responsibility and political maturity of our people, just because up to now the revolution has caused little blood. But that was the same as what happened in Russia in the beginning. It was during this time that the ideas with which the world has come to most associate Adolf Hitler began to coalesce into something like a coherent worldview. Like many right-wing German Austrians, Hitler held anti-Semitic views before the war. But people who knew him back then, and even during the war, consistently said that they couldn't remember him ever, or almost ever at least, ever mentioning Jews at all. A Jewish officer had recommended him for the Iron Cross First Class, an award rarely given to a corporal. He even had Jewish acquaintances who remembered him as always polite, and who found it hard to imagine that the person who emerged after the war was the same man. The man they'd known. Until the end of the war, Hitler's anti-Semitism was still mostly in his head. It was an intellectual project, something to read about in books and pamphlets, which theoretically had to do with events in the real world, but apparently with no real expression or application in his daily life. In Mein Kampf, he tells us that during his time in Vienna and Munich before the war, he had begun to notice that Jews seemed to predominate among the socialist activists, who unbeknownst to anyone at the time would go on to lead the revolutions that spelled the end of the Central Powers. He did his research and found that Jews dominated the socialist newspapers and publishers. He knew, as all Germans and Austrians did, that the Jewish minority controlled much of the vice trade and smuggling, and that they promoted cultural products that conservative and right-wing people would have called degenerate. But until the end of the war, these were all things that existed almost in the abstract, because the threat it all represented was still largely theoretical. The Kaiser still ruled the Reich, the Emperor still ruled the Habsburg Empire. The growing acceptance of degenerate cultural products was disturbing, but it was still something that mostly existed at the margins of society, where people had to actively seek it out, not something that walked proudly down the main streets as it would in the days after the war. One could be alarmed over the rhetoric of the socialists and even notice the discontent it was creating among workers and people on the street. But what had they really accomplished? The revolutions hadn't happened yet, none of them. No socialist revolution had ever happened up to this point. And so even among the alarmists, even among the socialists themselves, few had the imagination to believe that they ever actually could happen. Many could nod their heads when Rosa Luxemburg said, Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible. After it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable. Many could agree, in theory, but very few could really bring themselves to believe it in their hearts. If Hitler's ideas had been largely abstract before the war, during and after the war, they began to take concrete form. On his couple of visits to the home front, once on leave and again while convalescing from battle wounds, Hitler says he couldn't help but notice that the rear echelon jobs, the administrative personnel, the supply clerks, the uniformed office workers at the military hospitals and administrative buildings, seemed to be held by an inordinate number of Jews, in contrast to what he experienced at the front where they were almost non-existent. That's something that may have been true enough in his personal experience, who can say, but probably also something that was exaggerated by the ideas already in his head. Because in fact, there were about 600,000 Jews in Germany when the war broke out, and out of that 600,000, about 100,000 were mobilized, which is only a bit less than the German population itself. Out of a total population of about 67 million, just over 13 million Germans were called up. So about 19% to 16% for German Jews. And even the claim that the Jews wormed their way out of front line duty in favor of positions at the rear, the best numbers I could find say that out of the 100,000 called up, about 70,000 Jews put in time at the front. That could be that there's some nuance to this that I'm missing. Maybe a lot of that 70,000 did a short stint at the front before getting themselves reassigned to the rear, or after getting lightly wounded, they found ways to avoid being sent back to the front so that by the time Hitler was first wounded and sent back for treatment, those numbers had skewed. But over 40%, 42% actually, of the 100,000 Jews who were called up became casualties. Again, just a bit lower than the number for Germans. And the percentage of Jewish soldiers awarded the Iron Cross first class was similar to Germans as well, which I would take as an indication that they spent a similar amount of time in combat. Who knows? The relevant point here, and this is something to keep in mind throughout the series, is not so much whether Hitler's experiences were true for the whole army in some objective sense, but that he thought they were true. And that in saying so, he was expressing something that if not universal, common knowledge, was common enough that nobody would have been surprised to hear it. As the revolutions took off at the end of the war, Thomas Mann, the famous author, wrote in his diary that Austria was being led into anarchy and Bolshevism by Red Guards under the command of a Galician Jew. Something that he was embarrassed about in later years as he and the world got to see the consequences of such thoughts play out in the real world, but he was not embarrassed about it at the time, is my point. This way of thinking was common. And we'll get much deeper into this in the next episode and throughout the series, because it's obviously a very important part of the story. But for now, we're going to put a pin in this topic and just repeat that this is not meant to be a 30,000-foot objective history of this period. The series would be 100 episodes long if I tried that. What I'm trying to do is open a window into a perspective on the story that's often neglected, the perspective of the German people living through it. I quote a small bit of this passage written by Hitler in the previous episode, but I want to quote it at length here because it captures very well the emotional turmoil, the sense of trauma that not only he but many, many millions of soldiers and patriots of the German Reich were experiencing as their whole world came down around them. Quote, One day, suddenly and unexpectedly, the calamity descended. Sailors arrived in trucks and proclaimed the revolution. A few Jewish youths were the leaders of this struggle for the freedom, beauty, and dignity of our national existence. None of them had been at the front. By way of a so-called gonorrhea hospital, the three Orientals had been sent back from their second line base. Now, they raised the red flag in the homeland. My first hope was that this high treason might still be a more or less local affair. I also tried to bolster up a few comrades in this view. Particularly my Bavarian friends in the hospital. Hitler spent the last weeks of the war in a hospital recovering from a gas attack. Particularly my Bavarian friends in the hospital were more than accessible to this. The mood there was anything but revolutionary. I could not imagine that the madness would break out in Munich too. Loyalty to the venerable house of Wittelsbach seemed to me stronger after all than the will of a few Jews. Thus I could not help but believe that this was merely a putch on the part of the Navy and would be crushed in the next few days. The next few days came, and with them the most terrible certainty of my life. The rumors became more and more oppressive. What I had taken for a local affair was now said to be a general revolution. To this was added the disgraceful news from the front. They wanted to capitulate. Was such a thing really possible? On November 10th, the pastor came to the hospital for a short address. Now we learned everything. In extreme agitation, I too was present at the short speech. The dignified old gentleman seemed all at tremble as he informed us that the House of Hohenzollern would no longer bear the imperial crown, that the Fatherland had become a republic, that we must pray to the Almighty not to refuse his blessing to this change and not to abandon our people in the times to come. He could not help himself. He had to speak a few words in memory of the royal house. He began to praise its services in Pomerania, in Prussia, nay, to the German Fatherland, and here he began to sob gently to himself. In the little hall, the deepest dejection settled on all hearts, and I believe that not an eye was able to restrain its tears. But when the old gentleman tried to go on, he began to tell us that we must now end the long war, yes, that now it was lost, and we were throwing ourselves upon the mercy of the victors. Our fatherland would be for the future exposed to dire oppression, that the armistice should be accepted with confidence in the magnanimity of our previous enemies. I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again, everything went black before my eyes. I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow. Since the day when I had stood at my mother's grave, I had not wept. When in my youth fate seized me with merciless hardness, my defiance mounted. When, in the long war years, death snatched so many a dear comrade and friend from our ranks, it would have seemed to me almost a sin to complain. After all, were they not dying for Germany? And when at length the creeping gas in the last days of the dreadful struggle attacked me too and began to gnaw at my eyes, and beneath the fear of going blind forever, I nearly lost heart for a moment. The voice of my conscience thundered at me, miserable wretch, are you going to cry when thousands are a hundred times worse off than you? And so I bore my lot in dull silence, but now I could not help it. Only now that I see how all personal suffering vanishes in comparison with the misfortune of the fatherland. And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations. In vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless. In vain the hours in which with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty. And in vain the death of two millions who died. Would not the graves of all the hundreds of thousands open? The graves of those who with faith in the fatherland marched forth never to return? Would they not open and send the silent mud and blood-covered heroes back as spirits of vengeance to the homeland which had cheated them with such mockery of the highest sacrifice which a man can make to his people in this world? Had they died for this? The soldiers of August in September 1914? Was it for this that in the autumn of the same year the volunteer regiments marched off after their old comrades? Was it for this that these boys of seventeen sank into the earth of Flanders? Was this the meaning of the sacrifice which the German mother made to the fatherland when with sore heart she let her best loved boys march off never to see them again? Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland? Verily, these heroes deserved a headstone. Thou wanderer who comest to Germany, tell those at home that we lie here, true to the fatherland and obedient to duty. Miserable and degenerate criminals! The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned in my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes, compared to this misery? There followed terrible days and even worse nights. I knew that all was lost. Only fools, liars, and criminals could hope in the mercy of the enemy. In these nights, hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed. In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me. I could not help but laugh at the thought of my own future, which only a short time before had given me such bitter concern. Was it not ridiculous to expect to build houses on such ground? At last it became clear to me that what had happened was what I had so often feared, but had never really been able to believe in my emotions. Kaiser Wilhelm II was the first German Emperor to hold out a conciliatory hand to the leaders of Marxism without suspecting that scoundrels have no honor. While they still held the imperial hand in theirs, their other hand was reaching for the dagger. There is no making pacts with Jews. There can only be the hard either or. I, for my part, decided then and there to go into politics. End quote. So again, we'll return to this theme later. And of course, it will comprise a primary theme of the whole series. But for now, I just want to drive home this one thing, that in the context of the time, these were not the words of a lunatic. They were not the words of a crazy person. They were words that could have come from the mouth or pen of a very large number of disillusioned Germans as their country fell apart. The same day as the sailors mutiny in Kiel, the Russian embassy in Berlin, the same that had hosted Karl Liebnick on his first day out of prison, was discovered spreading propaganda around Germany, calling for bloody revolution, passing out instruction manuals for urban guerrilla warfare, and telling the German proletariat that the revolution would only succeed if they were ready to kill without mercy and to inspire terror in the streets. The Bolsheviks were sending money to Liebnick to recruit desperate workers to his cause, which was their cause. And there were even rumors that they were sending weapons and seasoned revolutionaries to agitate among the hundreds of thousands of Russian POWs on German soil, who had been taken prisoner and placed under guard by a government that in just a few days would no longer exist. Overall, there was remarkably little deadly violence during the first weeks of the German Revolution. In the first days, there were the handful of people who were shot and killed in Kiel and a few other places that we mentioned before, mostly due to panic gunfire by mobs and inexperienced revolutionaries who were reacting to rumors that the Kaiser's armies were closing in on them from every direction. None of those rumors were true. There were no counter-revolutionary armies. Instead, one night, the Kaiser's government just ceased to exist, and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the SPD, which had been the largest party in a mostly ceremonial parliament, scrambled to put Humpty Dumpty back together before their society crossed the point of no return. The SPD had split apart about a year earlier when the more radical wing of the party broke off after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. They started calling themselves the Independent Social Democrats, or USPD for the German acronym. Throughout the war, the Social Democrats had held to a pledge not to take advantage of the crisis to press their demands by going on strike, and thus hampering the war effort. But after the Russian Revolution put the Communists in power, the Independent Socialists reneged on that agreement and tried to spark a general strike in the munitions industry to hurt Germany's war effort against Russia. After the November Revolution in Germany, the SPD and the USPD had different plans for the future of the Revolution. The SPD were basically moderates. They wanted to create a parliamentary system like those in Western European countries. The USPD wanted a Councils Republic, made up of organized workers' and soldiers' councils on the model of what was happening in Russia, where they called the Councils Soviets. At a meeting on November 10th, the day after the abdication of the Kaiser, the SPD and the USPD made a compromise. They formed a six-man temporary governing council, the Council of People's Deputies, that would be made up of three members from each of the two parties, with Social Democratic Leader Friedrich Ebert as its chairman, ostensibly the head of state, such as it was. The Council of People's Deputies was understood by everyone to be a stopgap measure, to manage the revolution until a constitution could be drawn up and the way forward determined. From the jump, it was a very uneasy coalition. Plans were being made for an election to appoint a national assembly, along the lines of the SPD's program. But at the same time, the Council of People's Deputies was supposed to include the Soldiers and Workers' Councils in its decision-making, even though many of them favored the Soviet-style system. It was doubly uneasy because the USPD was affiliated with very radical elements, including the most radical, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and their openly Bolshevist Spartacus movement. The new head of the German General Staff, General Wilhelm Gruner, met with Friedrich Ebert around this time and assured him of the Army's loyalty to the new government. In return, Ebert promised to leave the internal affairs of the Army to its officers, to schedule and hold elections for a new national assembly as soon as it was practical, and to act decisively against communist rebels. All three of these demands were made with one thing in mind, preventing at all costs the slide of Germany into the chaos and anarchy taking place in Russia. The demand to clamp down on the radicals was tough though, for two reasons. The first was what we just said, the communist rebels were affiliated with the USPD, and so technically part of the governing coalition. And the second was that Ebert's shaky government did not have anything resembling control of the country, or forces in being to stop revolutionary violence if it erupted. The army still had units intact, yes, but they were still making their way back from the front. Most of them wouldn't arrive for several weeks. Plus, there were plenty of radicalized soldiers, and there was really no telling if their return was going to make things better or worse. In fact, in early December, Walter Reinhardt, who was about to be appointed war minister, warned that the soldiers' return may precipitate a crisis, and he recommended that ordinary citizens obtain weapons and prepare to possibly defend themselves. You add to that the hundreds of thousands of Russian POWs on German soil, thousands of whom had already been freed by the revolutionaries and were roaming about the German cities, and there was a palpable sense that Germany stood at the edge of an abyss. After the Bolsheviks were caught trying to incite a violent revolution from their embassy in Berlin, the German government, if you want to call it that, shut down the embassy and expelled the ambassador and his staff. But then, just a couple of days later, the same government released Rosa Luxemburg, the devoted communist agitator from prison. The day after her release, Luxemburg linked up with her Spartacist comrade Karl Liebnick and accompanied him to the Royal Palace in Berlin. The monarchy was dead, and Liebnick and Luxemburg wanted a prominent stage to gloat over its corpse. On the very same balcony of the Royal Palace from which Kaiser Wilhelm II had addressed the German nation on the eve of war in 1914, Liebnick told a large crowd that the revolution up to now was just the beginning, and that Germany would join the Russian Bolsheviks and spread the communist revolution to the rest of Europe and to the world. The spirits of millions, who have sacrificed their lives for the holy cause of the proletariat, with their heads split open, bathed in blood, these were victims of the rule of tyranny. They are followed by the spirits of millions of women and children, who in sorrow and suffering have come forward for the cause of the proletariat. And they are followed by millions of bloodied victims of this world war. He denounced the government of the new German Republic for expelling the Bolshevik embassy, and said that he had spoken to the Russians before they left. When they bid us farewell, our Russian brothers told us, you have one month to achieve what we have achieved. Otherwise, we will turn away from you. End quote. Then he led the crowd in raising their hands and taking an oath to complete the revolution in Germany and to spread it to the rest of the world, whatever it took. After his speech, a group of Spartacus demonstrators under the red banners marched to the newspaper district where they took over the printers of one of Berlin's biggest newspapers and began printing their own under the masthead Derot Fan, the red flag. Liebknecht and Luxembourg filled its pages with accusations against the new government that was barely a day old at this point. They warned that Ebert and the Social Democrats, sure, they wore the vestments of revolutionaries. They played the part, but that already there was talk of retaining the bureaucrats and administrators from the old imperial regime. The Social Democrats countered that those were the only people who understood the machinery of government well enough to keep the lights on and the trash collected for the time being, but then, as now, revolutionaries have never really been known for nuance. The Spartacus paper accused Ebert of trying to abort the revolution while it was already halfway through the birth canal. They called for the German flag to be replaced with the red flag of the Paris Commune of 1871 and of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. While this is happening, Friedrich Ebert was busy worrying about more immediate concern, such as the fact that the German people were starving and what little food they had left was running out. Now that the war was ending and the Kaiser's government had been deposed, it was widely expected that the Allies would finally lift the hunger blockade, finally allow shipments of food to enter the country. But the port cities were still paralyzed by the Revolution. Shops and warehouses were closed, the supply chain was shut down, and hundreds of thousands of armed, hungry men were on their way back to Germany. So Ebert called on the Revolutionaries to leave the streets, go home, let the new government do its work for the good of the nation. The Spartacus mocked Ebert's message. They called on the people to ignore him and his illegitimate government that was even now betraying the Revolution that had brought it to power. Quote, do not leave the streets. Instead, stay armed and alert at every moment. The cause of the Revolution is only safe in the hands of the people. The demands of the fallen Kaiser's brand new Reich Chancellor have only one purpose, to send the masses home, to retrieve the old order. Workers, soldiers, stay alert. End quote. The German people, who were about as exhausted as it is possible for a people to be, and for the most part only wanted a reprieve from the stress and deprivation of four years of war, they listened to Ebert, and they went back to their homes. But the fact remained that in the homes they went back to, the cupboards were empty. And figuring out how to get some food to the people was the overwhelming emergency priority of the new regime. See, the way the people of Germany and of German Austria saw it, it wasn't them who had brought their countries into this war. They lived under autocracies. They were ruled by emperors. Those emperors had been overthrown, along with their governments, and replaced with representative republics. Allied propaganda, literally leaflets, dropped over German lines on the Western front, was telling the soldiers in the trenches that this was not their war, that the Allies' war was not against them. It was actually to free them from the tyranny of the Kaiser. Now, that they had been freed, and the new German government did represent the people with whom the Allies insisted they were not at war. Those people naturally assumed that at the very least, the hunger blockade would be lifted while the Allies decided Germany's fate. That is not what happened. Instead, as the German army dissolved after the armistice was signed, the blockade remained in place. As revolution took over the streets of every major city, the representatives of the new German government, they went to the Allies, like, hello, you don't know me, I'm new here. But yes, so we were wondering that now that the war is over, maybe you could stop starving us and our children. I'm sure you just forgot, totally get it. There's so much going on, but what do you say? No. Oh, you probably think the Kaiser is still in charge. Don't worry about him. He fled the country. We chased him out of here. It's just us now. So no. But I thought no. But you said no. We'll lift the blockade after you've signed the final surrender documents. Oh, okay. Well, let's get going. When do we start negotiations? You don't. How will we know what's in the treaty? We'll tell you when it's finished. That doesn't seem fair. Well, you'll just have to compare that to how unfair it is to watch your kids starve. Now, obviously, I'm dramatizing that a bit, but that is what happened. The terms of the armistice Germany had agreed to included a promise that the winners were to, quote, provision Germany as shall be found necessary. One of the reasons the revolution seemed to have so much support from diverse quarters of society in the early days was that many Germans who had been patriots of the Kaiser right, they supported or at least acquiesced to it because they thought it meant they'd soon be able to feed their children. Instead, the blockade remained in place to hold the German population hostage until they had agreed to whatever terms the Allies came up with. To make matters worse, French military forces would soon be seen throughout Germany, compensating themselves by confiscating the livestock and food stores that Germany still had. As a result of this, hundreds of thousands of German people in both Germany and Austria would die directly of starvation, and countless more would die from diseases they likely would have survived if they hadn't been starving. I know I described some of the more lurid scenes in the last episode. Gaunt mothers with their skin hanging off their bones, standing in bread lines for hours with their children. The children with no muscle on their arms and legs, distended bellies bulging out from edema. Children and old people digging around in fields looking for any half edible root or grass or insect they could find. It's really impossible for us, the vast majority of us anyway, to even imagine what it's like to go through something like that. If you're a mother, just imagine looking down at your child. See their face, sunken eyes with dark circles, every bone in their face sticking out, so weak they can hardly stand. Looking to you for help. Or watching your infant starve, because your own starving body can't make the milk to feed it. If you're a father, just imagine your kids looking to you, your wife looking to you, still hopeful, still actually believing that dad will figure something out, because that's what dad does. But knowing that you have no ideas, there's nothing you can do. Because while they haven't eaten in two days, you haven't eaten in four, because you give them every calorie you can, every bit except the bare minimum you need to keep up the strength to get yourself out of bed in the morning. Imagine what you would do, what you would sacrifice or do to other people, to keep your children from starving to death. God forbid any of us ever have to learn what that's like. But that was what the people of Germany and German Austria were going through in 1918 and 19. And so just imagine that the war ends, and it ends with an armistice that explicitly promises to resume shipments of food, only to have the other side pull the rug out from under you once you stood down and it was too late to go back. Just imagine how you'd feel. Imagine if it was your kid who died of starvation after the war had ended. In the moment, we'd probably feel disappointment, fear, hopelessness. But once things settled down and we regained our footing enough to think about things other than how to get our family's next meal, we'd start to think about how it had happened and why and who had done it. In a feeling of rage that had been drowned out by our desperation, we'd take over. As bad as things were in Central Europe, everybody knew, everybody had a visible example of how much worse things could get. Like Germany and Austria, the Russian Empire was already suffering from widespread hunger when their revolution kicked off. In fact, the revolution is usually said to have begun with a series of bread riots. Their problems weren't due to a naval blockade, but a total breakdown of their social, political and economic systems over the course of the war. Millions of peasant farmers had been called up to serve in the army, to fight a war that everybody involved on all sides expected to last a few months at most when it all got started. Now many of those peasants were dead, and many more were still in the army several years later, so the Russian food system just lacked the necessary manpower to keep up with the country's needs. Even where there were still farmers available, the mobile warfare between Russia and the Central Powers made it more and more difficult to plant and harvest with any reliability. The chaos brought on by the revolution, and especially the violent coup d'etat by the Bolsheviks in the fall of 1917, made things exponentially worse. The Russian state, which had stretched from the Arctic to the Black Sea, and from Poland to the Pacific Ocean, had simply ceased to exist. Workers in mines and factories, men serving in the army and navy, all kinds of formations basically defined by occupation and geographical location, began to come together as local self-governing collectives called Soviets. They called them councils in Germany. The Bolsheviks had seized power, but all that really meant at this point was that they controlled the government buildings in St. Petersburg, and there was no one around yet to seriously oppose them. Their ability to project power beyond that zone, let alone exercise control over the whole country they now claim to rule, that did not exist. The Soviets, again, which the Germans call councils in their revolutions, same thing. I'm just repeating that again because it's important to keep in mind. The Soviets were very localized. They were at first meant to allow the people to govern their immediate surroundings and meet their needs in the absence of provincial or national government. There was no uniform structure to the Soviets and ideologically they ran the gamut from social democratic to communist to anarchist. Each Soviet governed itself as it saw fit. And the idea, the idea was that each Soviet set up by a given factory or mine or military unit or what have you, would manage their own local affairs. Each of them would elect delegates to represent them in a larger organization, a larger Soviet, and that larger Soviet would manage affairs that required coordination beyond the local level, say the level of the region or of the industry. Those larger Soviets would elect delegates to an organization that would represent them at the level of the central government, and in fact would be the central government, with the ruling party basically just in charge of ensuring that this system runs smoothly. That's a hyper simplification, and again, there were different ideas about the details of how the whole thing was supposed to work, but you get the idea. It was supposed to be a government built from the bottom up, with the central government being a manifestation of this bottom up system, rather than this entity that imposed its rule from the top down. I probably don't have to tell you that that is not how things worked out. Much of the tyranny that came to define the Soviet Union was probably built into the ideologies and the intentions of the people who put over the Bolshevik Revolution in the first place, but it was also partly the result of the conditions it was reacting to in the early days. After the Bolsheviks took over, civil society began to collapse entirely. One of the reasons so many revolutions lead to long-term tyranny is that they create chaos in society that now has to be brought under control by this weak revolutionary government that has only a few days of built-up legitimacy behind it. Almost every Russian city experienced a total break-down of the social order. Mobs were breaking into the royal and aristocratic houses, engorging themselves on expensive liquor, then rioting in the streets. The hunger problem became an acute starvation crisis. People in the capital were down to receiving four ounces of bread per day per adult. In any attempts to get food by any other means, such as the black market, was called speculation or hoarding, and was punished with arrest, deportation or death. The Russian winter was coming, and there was very little coal, and people were tearing apart the great houses to use the wood for fires. Members of the party were just stealing everything that wasn't nailed down, from jewelry to money to cars to houses and apartments in the name of the government, ostensibly, and arresting or shooting anybody who tried to stop them. The army disintegrated, and many of the soldiers were a thousand, two thousand, five thousand miles from home, with no food and no supplies and no train at the station waiting to take them back to where they came from. And so, many of them roamed the country side, individually or in groups, looting farms and villages, and in response, peasants were forming up self-defense militias to try to fight them off. Again, to say the Bolsheviks took over the government in November 1917 is really to exaggerate what happened. If someone asked who was in charge in most places, the answer was nobody. Or, it was whoever had the most guns in a given locality. Organized crime gangs became the de facto local government in many towns and cities, as criminals figured out that if they put on a red band on their arm, they uttered a few marxist platitudes, they could rob and call it revolutionary expropriation. They could kill and call it revolutionary justice. They could declare anybody who had a problem with it to be enemies of the people. The revolutionaries raided the state treasury, raided all the banks, opened all the safe deposit boxes, took every bit of currency, gold, silver, jewelry, anything they could find that was of value. You would think that any government would be interested first and foremost in getting this under control. But the Bolsheviks were not really a government at this point. Their leaders were not politicians, they were not administrators. Lenin had spent his recent years ranting about politics in Swiss cafes. Trotsky had been in New York City editing a Jewish tabloid. Yakov Sverdlov, who would chair the Central Committee for the first few years, was a forger. Stalin spent the war running stick-ups and bank robberies. And his appointment as Commissar of Nationalities after the Revolution was the first actual job he had had since he was a teenager. And all of a sudden these people were in charge of making sure the light stayed on and the supply chain was functioning. After seizing power, the Bolshevik leadership set up shop in a building that had been an old 18th-century girls finishing school. And with a few tables and busted couches for their furniture, they established a government. Lenin's office was this grimy room that everybody had to walk through to get anywhere else in the building. And for a while, this new government didn't even hold any formal meeting. There was a wooden partition, behind which was a desk with a typewriter. They called that the chancellery. There was a cubicle for a telephone operator. They called that their communications bureau. The former headmistress of the school, before they took it over, was still sleeping in one of the rooms. Thirteen Bolsheviks were appointed as various commissars. They were told to go take over the government agencies that corresponded to their new duties. So one of these guys would show up to the building of the agency they were trying to commandeer, and they would start barking orders at the people there. And most of the time, the employees just got up and left and didn't come back. As Commissar of Nationalities, Stalin didn't have an equivalent agency to take over, so his deputy found an empty table and posted a handwritten sign over it that said People's Commissar of Nationalities. After that, his deputy led on that he had taken a few classes in economics back in London, and so he was made the head of the state bank, which didn't exist yet. They issued all these decrees, abolishing social hierarchies, guaranteeing social insurance for all workers, just absurd proclamations under the circumstances that were filled with mumbo jumbo about world imperialism and proletarian revolution, which they had no ability whatsoever to enforce or fulfill. It was a government of fantasy. This was literally as if a handful of antifa stormed the White House and the US. Capitol building, and the US government just gave up and ran away, and that was it. They're now, these guys are now in charge of the United States of America. That might sound like hyperbole. It is really not. It was that ridiculous. And so what happened next was exactly what you would expect to happen in a situation like that. Everything just fell apart. The thing is, that was just what the Bolsheviks were aiming at, at least for this day to the revolution. Their announced strategy was to encourage as much chaos as possible. Not even a month after their seizure of power, a group of representatives from a rural Soviet in the western part of the country, they came to St. Petersburg to ask what plans the Bolsheviks had to bring the spiraling anarchy under control. And they were told by Felix Dzerzhinsky, who would go on to lead the Soviet secret police for many years, The task at hand is to break up the old order. We, the Bolsheviks, are not numerous enough to accomplish this task alone. We must allow the revolutionary spontaneity of the masses to take its course. We are only here to channel and direct the hate and legitimate desire for revenge of the oppressed against the oppressors. End quote. Anarchy was the point. Chaos was the point. Suffering and brutalization were the point. Right now, the task is to burn down the house. When that's done, we can discuss what color to paint the new one. As the entire social and economic structure broke apart, the Bolsheviks channeled and directed the hate of the masses by blaming the breakdown on people they identified as class enemies. A government proclamation announced, high-ranking functionaries in state administration, banks, the treasury, the railways, and the post and telegraph offices are all sabotaging the measures of the Bolshevik government. Henceforth, such individuals are to be described as enemies of the people. Their names will be printed in all newspapers, and lists of the enemies of the people will be put up in public places. A few days later, this was followed by another proclamation stating that any of these individuals who were found, as well as anyone who engaged in a list of vaguely defined subversive activities like speculation, which at this point could just mean trading supplies with other people, and opportunism, whatever that means, were to be arrested and thrown in prison. Again, this is days after the Bolshevik seized power. The survival of the Bolshevik Revolution was still very much in doubt at this time. It would be for some time. German armies were advancing through the western part of the Russian Empire. Regions like Ukraine and the Baltics were taking steps toward breaking away. And the Bolsheviks were in no position to deal with either of those two problems. Despite that, their real concern, their most immediate concern, was the very people in whose name they had supposedly seized power, the workers in the cities. A lot of them weren't even Bolsheviks to begin with, but they went along with the seizure of power because they had, as many people did, delusions about where this thing was headed. But even the ones who were explicitly supportive of the Bolsheviks would not maintain that support for long if the new government could not figure out a way to get people some food. And so the Bolsheviks stood up militias, composed of soldiers, sailors, workers, communist Red Guards, often criminals, freed from prisons for the purpose, and they gave them weapons and sent them out to the countryside to seize food from the farmers and peasants and bring it back to the cities. Relations between the country and the city had never been particularly warm in the Russian Empire, and needless to say, this did not improve matters. It would have been bad enough if a regiment of uniformed soldiers showed up to your door and informed you that your surplus was required for the war effort, but this was grimy, disheveled, undisciplined gangs of thugs, often literal criminals, usually drunk, kicking down your door, putting their guns on your wife and kids while the other guys searched your house and barn. Abuses were endemic. People who had no extra food were accused of hiding it and beaten or shot. Women were raped, or sex was extorted from them in exchange for allowing their families to keep a few scraps of bread. The professional revolutionaries and urban intellectuals in charge of the movement, they agreed with the communist writer Maxime Gorky that the peasants were a mass of half savage people whose cruel instincts and animal individualism needed civilization imposed on them by the organized reason of the city. In early December, as winter was setting in, and worker and peasant discontent was becoming more organized and visible, Leon Trotsky told the Soviet Central Committee that in less than a month, our terror is going to take extremely violent forms, just as it did during the Great French Revolution. Not only prison awaits our enemies, but the guillotine, that remarkable invention of the French Revolution, which has the capacity to make a man a whole head shorter. A few weeks later, Vladimir Lenin told a workers assembly, quote, the Soviet regime has acted in the way that all revolutionary proletariat should act. It has made a clean break with bourgeois justice, which is an instrument of the oppressive classes. Soldiers and workers must understand that no one will help them unless they help themselves. If the masses do not rise up spontaneously, none of this will lead to anything. For as long as we fail to treat speculators the way they deserve, with a bullet in the head, we will not get anywhere at all. End quote. It wasn't until the early months of 1918 that the Bolsheviks were really faced with any kind of genuine organized opposition. So until that time, you could say they controlled vast swaths of Russian territory, even though they had no ability to effectively exercise that control. Ukraine and Finland had seceded by this point, and they declared their independence, but neither of them was showing any signs of military aggression. By the spring, the forces that would become known collectively as the White Armies began to push back, and the Bolshevik terror went to another level. In regions suspected of being sympathetic to the Whites are simply opposed to the Bolsheviks. Even if they were suspected, they sent their forces in and committed atrocities of extreme scale and brutality. In Taganrog, down on the Black Sea east of Crimea, Bolshevik forces arrested 50 former officers from the Russian Imperial Army, bound them hand and foot, and threw them into a blast furnace. In Evpatoria, on the west coast of Crimea, several hundred former officers, as well as many bureaucrats and businessmen, were also tied up. They were tortured. They were thrown into the freezing Black Sea to die. There are innumerable similar accounts from Sevastopol, Yalta, basically every city in Crimea that was occupied by Bolshevik forces. A commission was set up to investigate Bolshevik atrocities in 1919, and it was extremely graphic and detailed, recording cases of, quote, corpses with the hands cut off, broken bones, heads ripped off, broken jaws and genitals removed, end quote. In the Bolshevik stronghold, the capital, St. Petersburg at this point, they hadn't yet moved to Moscow. A group of bureaucrats who had not been paid for months and who were starving and freezing went on strike, and by that action were instantly transferred from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie and declared enemies of the people. With brutal force, Bolshevik gangs arrested the leaders, as well as a number of moderate socialist activists and politicians. Moderate compared to the Bolsheviks anyway. Now, these weren't rowdy peasants, these were socialists. Isaac Steinberg, the People's Commissar of Justice, was a member of the left-wing Socialist Revolutionary Party and one of many, many people who apparently still did not understand what kind of people they were dealing with in the Bolsheviks. He visited Lenin to complain that the secret police were acting like a state under themselves, totally outside any legal boundaries. He asked Lenin, What is the point of a People's Commissariat for Justice? It would be more honest to have a People's Commissariat for Social Extermination. People would understand more clearly. Lenin said, Excellent idea. That's exactly how I see it. Unfortunately, it wouldn't do to call it that. We're left to wonder if Steinberg left that meeting with a better understanding of Lenin and his movement. The crackdown did not help endear the Bolsheviks to the workers and non-Bolshevik socialist revolutionaries. Even districts that had been solidly behind them just a month earlier were starting to buck. And so by mid-January, the threat of workers' uprisings in St. Petersburg had gotten to the point that the Bolsheviks were scrambling to move their entire government to Moscow. Meanwhile, the food situation had only gotten worse. So, Lenin declared that every factory, every Soviet, every military unit were to form up their own detachments and go out into the countryside and seize the food from the farmers. It was not a suggestion. Anyone who resisted being collared into one of these requisition detachments was to have their ration card taken away and be left to starve. As for the peasants, Lenin ordered that any who resisted handing over their food were to be executed on the spot. His people, though, were not yet in full control. There were still more moderate socialists as well as anarchists, both in the government and in effective control in given regions. And so for the time being, that order was not carried out. It showed where Lenin's mind was, though, and where things were headed. Since December, the Germans had halted their advance into Russia and were negotiating the terms of peace with the Bolshevik representatives. Some of the scenes would be comical if we didn't know the tragedy that was coming down the pipe. Here you have these aristocratic German generals, probably some of the most officious, serious, august, conservative men literally anywhere on the planet in 1918. When the Russian delegation's train rolls in, they're throwing propaganda pamphlets out the window at the German soldiers, calling on them to turn their guns on their own officers. This is how they opened the peace negotiations. The Russians came shabbily dressed, many of them stank from not bathing. Some of them farted and picked their nose at the negotiation table just to upset the Germans and show their disrespect for the proceedings. Karl Radek seated across the table from Baron Richard von Kuhlmann, the German foreign minister and Army Chief of Staff Major General Max Hoffmann. Radek leaned over the table and blew smoke in their faces. At a formal dinner hosted by German Field Marshal Prinz Leopold of Bavaria, a member of the Russian delegation got up and treated everyone to a reenactment of her murder of a Tsarist governor. These people were pigs, and they made a show of it. The Germans could also not help but notice that more than half of this Russian delegation were actually Jews, and that very much played into their perception of the whole affair. The Russians had insisted that the negotiations be held in public, with members of the press present, and it quickly became clear that they were there less to negotiate than to use the occasion to generate headlines that they hoped would spark revolutions in other countries, including Germany. The Germans' demands were far-reaching, and included independence for Poland and several other regions of the Western Russian Empire. The Russians stalled and grandstanded, and it was soon clear that the negotiations were going nowhere, so they were broken off, and the German armies resumed their march towards St. Petersburg. The Bolshevik revolutionaries basically called for a communist jihad, and demanded that all the people take up arms and fight a guerrilla war against the Germans. Anyone suspected of shirking, of buying or selling on the black market, which meant buying and selling it all. Anyone who might be a spy, saboteur, agitator or hooligan, which often enough just meant anyone not sufficiently enthusiastic about the Bolshevik's leadership was ordered to be shot on sight. The secret police, now called the Cheka, and communist Red Guards carried out this last duty with great enthusiasm. These conditions were not confined to the big cities in the West. Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan now, was 98% Turkic Muslim. But the Tashkent Soviet, which was overwhelmingly made up from the handful of Slav colonists and soldiers garrisoned there, issued a decree that no Muslim could serve in the government or be a part of the Soviet. Naturally, this was not a popular policy, so the Muslim leaders convened their own congress and, being accustomed to petitioning colonial authorities under the czarist regime, they petitioned the Tashkent Soviet to change their policy. A small group of Muslims in the town of Kokond went a step further and declared their autonomy, but making clear that they still considered themselves part of this Russian federation, however, that shook out. Thousands of Muslim men from Kokond went to Tashkent and marched toward the headquarters of the Soviet to announce their decision, and on the way, they stormed a prison full of their political prisoners. The guards opened fire and killed many of them. The people scattered, the prisoners were recaptured, and then they were put up against the wall and shot on the spot. After this, the Muslim leaders petitioned the central government in St. Petersburg to consider their demands, but St. Petersburg said, basically, don't look at us. The Soviets are self-governing. We don't tell them what to do. And so again, they demanded that the local Soviet call elections to a constituent assembly, which of course would have brought in a massive Muslim majority. And so at this point, on February 14th, the Tashkent Soviet called on soldiers, gangs and militias from all over the region, attacked the city of Kokand, and set about massacring the population. They killed about 14,000 people. A huge number of them just shot down with machine guns in large crowds on the street. Others murdered in their homes. Then the Soviet forces looted the city and burned it to the ground. After that, since they had a significant armed force at their disposal, the Soviet marauded through the countryside, stealing every bit of food they could find among the Muslim population. 900,000 people would die in the ensuing famine. Talking about real monsters, monsters like no one had ever really seen, honestly, in human history, certainly in the history of Europe. Not at this scale. You know, to give you an idea, the Tsarist regime, which was considered by most enlightened Europeans to be the most brutal, backward major power in Europe, they issued 6,321 death sentences between the years 1825 and 1917. 6,321 death sentences in 92 years. And that 92 years was a period where there were multiple revolutions. Tsars were being assassinated. Literally thousands of government officials were being murdered by revolutionaries. And a lot of those 6,321 sentences were never even carried out. Thus, Dajewski is probably being the most famous commutation. Now, to compare, the Bolsheviks executed 6,185 people in just two months in 1918. And this does not count any of the massacres like at Tashkent or any other extrajudicial killings that were taking place all over the country. That's just executions with somebody's signature on it. And they bragged about this in their speeches in newspapers. The food problems only became worse as the spring planting season came and went. There were no trains running to transport crops. There were no functioning markets to sell crops in. The entire food distribution system in the country, in other words, had broken down. And so, farmers, rather than go through all the trouble and expense of planting their usual crops on their whole property only to watch them rot in their storehouses for lack of customers, or else maybe to be seized by bandits or revolutionaries, many of them planted just enough to feed their families or to help provide for the village or local community. And that was it. Speaking to the Central Committee on April 29th, Lenin announced, quote, the small holders, the people who owned only a parcel of land, fought side by side with the proletariat to overthrow the capitalists and the major landowners. But now our paths have diverged. Small holders have always resisted discipline and organization. The time has come for us to have no mercy and to turn against them, end quote. Trotsky, speaking to the same Central Committee a few days later, shouted, I say it quite openly. We are now at war. And it is only with guns that we will get the grain we need. Our only choice now is civil war. Civil war is the struggle for bread. Long live civil war. In May, the government ordered the formation of a new army that was specifically tasked to gather all food, all of it, into the hands of the government. And the government would decide who got fed and how much they got. Tens of thousands of hungry unemployed workers answered the call because anyone who did was guaranteed a share of the food that was confiscated. Next they went out into the countryside. They found all the poorest and most discontented peasants and gave them the means and the authority to confiscate food and property from their more prosperous neighbors. And the second initiative took some time to get going because the Bolsheviks, well, they just didn't really understand peasant society. They imagined it to be divided into classes at war with each other, the way they understood the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the urban context, but the countryside was not really like that. And even most poor peasants distrusted people from the city much more than they disliked their wealthier neighbors. When the peasant food committees were stood up, they didn't really work the way the Bolsheviks intended. Instead of taking the food from their neighbors and handing it over to the government, they often simply took the food and distributed it more equitably among people in the same village, often with little resistance, often with the cooperation of the prosperous peasants. In a short time, these peasant committees essentially started supplanting the local Soviets as the organized power base in many agricultural regions. Well, at the same time, the city's food detachments, the militias they'd stood up, they would come through the same region and they were arrogant, they were brutal, not just abusing the peasants and taking their food, but humiliating them. And within about a month, the peasants led by these peasant committees were getting organized and fighting back. In just two months in the summer of 1918, there were at least 110 peasant uprisings that were quickly coalescing into an organized guerrilla war. Meanwhile, the cities were still hungry, and the workers and other left-wing parties were starting to become very unhappy with how things were going. Well, if you haven't heard, Lenin was not the compromising type. He responded by shutting down all non-Bolshevik publishers, forcibly dissolving all non-Bolshevik Soviets, arresting opposition leaders and anyone who spoke against the Bolsheviks and using extreme force to break strikes, which despite the violence used against them, continued to break out everywhere because the people were just that desperate. Historian Nicholas Wirth writes, quote, In May and June 1918, 205 of the opposition socialist newspapers were finally closed down. The mostly Menshevik or socialist revolutionary Soviets of Kaluga, Tver, Yaroslavl, Ryazan, Kostroma, Kazan, Saratov, Penza, Tambov, Voronezh, Orel and Volgodha were broken up by force. Everywhere the scenario was almost identical. A few days after victory by the opposing party in the consequent formation of a new Soviet, the Bolshevik detachment would call for an armed force, usually a detachment of the Cheka, which then proclaimed martial law and arrested the opposition leaders. Dzerzhinsky, the leader of the Cheka, who had sent his principal collaborators into towns that had initially been won by the opposing parties, was unabashed about his advocacy of the use of force, as can be clearly seen from the directive he sent on 31 May 1918 to AV. Eiduk, his plenipotentiary on a mission to Tver. And now quoting Dzerzhinsky, the workers, under the influence of the Mensheviks, the socialist revolutionaries and other counter-revolutionary bastards, have all gone on strike and demonstrated in favor of a government made up of all the socialist parties. Put big posters up all over the town saying that the Cheka will execute on the spot any bandit, thief, speculator, or counter-revolutionary found to be conspiring against the Soviet. Levy an extraordinary tax on all bourgeois residents of the town and make a list of them, as that will be very useful if things start happening. You ask how to form the local Cheka? Just round up all the most ruthless people you can, who understand that there is nothing more effective than a bullet to the head to shut people up. Experience has shown me that you only need a small number of people like that, to turn a whole situation around. End quote. Well, by going after the other socialist parties, again, many of whom helped the Bolsheviks seize power and had cooperated with them up to this point, Lenin's government showed what it was really about, and soon protests and strikes erupted in working class neighborhoods and towns. In Kolpino, up near St. Petersburg, workers protested that after their bread ration was cut to just two pounds per person, per month, about one ounce of bread per day. The Cheka detachment there just gunned them down, killing ten people, wounding a bunch more. That same day in a factory near Ekaterinburg, people came out to protest against the commissars who were confiscating all of the nicest properties for their own personal use, and keeping for themselves the tax imposed on the bourgeoisie. The detachment of Red Guards gunned them down, killing 15. The next day, the Cheka declared martial law in the area and just executed 14 locals they've been keeping as hostages. They didn't even bother informing the central government. Other protests were put down with similar brutality in dozens of other places over the next two months. Lenin and his cadre knew that no amount of brutality was going to protect them from the wrath of the workers and the other socialist parties, unless they got their hands on some food and fast. And so Lenin called on one of his lieutenants, who, while important, was not a leading member of the party yet, and whose name was not really known outside of the party's immediate circles. His parents had named him Yosef Vissarionovich Yugosvili. He called himself Stalin. Lenin put Stalin on a train and sent him down to Tsaritsyn, the city that would later be renamed Stalingrad, in the southern agricultural region, with a force of 460 armed men and orders to procure the food needed to feed the capital, which by now had been transferred to Moscow by any means necessary. A Cheka detachment had been established in the region shortly before Stalin arrived. They had set up shop in a two-story mansion with the upper floors serving as offices, and the whole bottom floor used as a stinking, blood-crusted dungeon and torture chamber. I'm getting this from the historian Stephen Kotkin. He writes, quote, Targets included bourgeois, clergy, intelligentsia and czarist officers, many of whom had answered a local appeal to join the Red Army. Workers and peasants were also arrested as counter-revolutionaries if they dared to criticize the arbitrary arrests and torture, or if someone said they had. Rumors of atrocities constituted part of the Cheka's mystique. The Kharkov Cheka was sent to scalp victims, the Ekaterinoslav Cheka to stone or crucify them, and the Kremenchug Cheka to impale them on stakes. In Saritsen, the Cheka was said to cut through human bones with handsaws. Alexander I. Chervyakov, who emerged as the regional Cheka boss in Saritsen, conducted himself like a tyrant, and he and his leather-clad thugs settled their own scores, including with other Cheka operatives. Now, they answered to Stalin. On his first day of work, Stalin wrote to Promise Lenin, eight train cars of grain would soon be on their way. News, Lenin quickly disseminated in the capital. Without seeking authorization from Trotsky, ostensibly the commander-in-chief of the Red Army, Stalin dismissed the local Red Army commander and assumed control of the 20,000-man force built up in the region. He ordered troops holding the line against the White Army in the north and west to abandon their lines and shift to the south instead for an offensive. When several officers objected, he had them arrested and put on a barge in the Volga River near the Cheka headquarters. These were Trotsky's men, and so Trotsky sent Stalin a telegram to intervene, but Stalin just wrote on it, Take no account. Nearly 400 men were locked up on the barge, and they were given no food. They drank river water. By the end of the summer, almost all of them would starve to death or be shot. Moscow was also severely short of fuel, and the Russian oil fields were mostly in the south, and so a petroleum specialist was dispatched with a group of commissars, 10 million rubles, and a tanker train to collect what fuel they could to bring back to the capital. To get where they were going, they had to pass through Tsaritsyn. When they got there, Stalin informed them, I haven't been able to discover if this was true or not, he told them that the rail lines to the south had been seized by rebels, and that they couldn't go any further, too dangerous. A messenger was dispatched back to Moscow to inform them of the situation, leaving the 10 million rubles in a locked case with his wife, who was along for the trip. Once he was gone, Stalin's men confronted her and demanded the money, which she refused, and so Stalin had her, the specialist, and several others he considered to be Trotsky's people arrested. When the messenger returned to find his wife in jail, he was arrested too, though his mission had been personally approved by Lenin. He was beaten and interrogated, but Stalin eventually let him and his wife go. Stalin remained in possession of the money, the vehicles, the train, and all the other property that had been sent. Holding up the millions of rubles they had stolen, Stalin and the Tsarits and Cheka announced that they had discovered the money in a raid, and that it was intended to fund counter-revolutionary activities. On this pretext, he ordered mass arrests, and 23 people were executed without trial. The petroleum specialist was beaten until he was unrecognizable, then shot along with his two sons, one of whom was a teenager. Other specialists were arrested as well, with the justification that all specialists were bourgeois. Others who had been rounded up for totally unrelated reasons, or because they were suspected of being associated with people who had been rounded up, were declared to be part of the grand conspiracy Stalin was supposedly fighting and dealt with accordingly. When news of Stalin's reign of terror spread throughout the region, a force of Don Cossacks, cavalry warriors who opposed the Bolsheviks, surrounded Tsaritsyn. Stalin's prisoners were forced to dig trenches around the town and then claiming that they were spies for the Cossacks, many of them were tortured and executed. As white forces took control of more territory in the region, Trotsky sent orders to Stalin to mount a defense. Stalin didn't just ignore the orders, he had experienced military officers arrested and either deported or shot, while he armed workers in Tsaritsyn to prepare for a siege. A former Tsarist officer who had joined the Red Army but later defected was in Tsaritsyn with Stalin during this time. He wrote, quote, Stalin does not hesitate in the choice of paths to realize his aims. Clever, smart, educated and extremely shifty, Stalin is the evil genius of Tsaritsyn and its inhabitants. All manner of requisitioning, apartment evictions, searches accompanied by shameless thievery, arrests and other violence used against civilians became everyday phenomena in the life of Tsaritsyn. To be fair, Stalin's energy could be envied by any of the old administrators, and his ability to get things done in whatever circumstances was something to go to school for, end quote. On June 20, 1918, a Bolshevik leader in St. Petersburg was assassinated by a socialist revolutionary. Red guards and Cheka men swept through the working class districts of the city, rounding people up to hold them as hostages. The workers responded by calling a general strike. Lenin, either because he was misinformed or just lying, told people that the workers were striking because they were upset about the assassination. Whatever the reason, it led Lenin to believe that the right move was not to stop the protesting workers, but to fan the flames. He wrote to Grigory Zinoviev, an important official and one of Lenin's comrades from before the revolution, quote, Comrade Zinoviev, we have just learned that the workers of Petrograd, at St. Petersburg, wish to respond to Comrade Volodarsky's murder with mass terror, and that you, not you personally, but the members of the party committee are trying to stop them. I want to protest most vehemently against this. We are compromising ourselves. We are calling for mass terror in the resolutions passed by the Soviets, but when the time comes for action, we obstruct the natural reaction of the masses. This cannot be. The terrorists will start to think we were being half-hearted. This is the hour of truth. It is of supreme importance that we encourage and make use of the energy of mass terror directed against the counter-revolutionaries, especially those of Petrograd, where the example is decisive. Regards, Lenin. End quote. Just seems like an insane approach, even if the protest hadn't been directed against the Bolsheviks. But maybe not. The Bolsheviks' grip on power was slipping, and every one of them knew that a bullet to the back of the head would be the most merciful outcome that they could hope for if they were overthrown. They were under siege, and they were paranoid, and Lenin may have simply thought that encouraging mass chaos was the best way to prevent opposition to Bolshevik rule from organizing itself into something that could really challenge them. The German ambassador wrote back to Berlin, The Bolsheviks are saying openly that their days are numbered. A veritable panic has taken hold over Moscow. The craziest rumors imaginable or rife about so-called traitors who are supposed to be hiding in and around the city. It wasn't only angry socialist revolutionaries in Mensheviks, or striking workers that they had to worry about. The military opposition to the Bolsheviks was finally beginning to coalesce, and they were facing increasing pressure on at least three fronts. To the south, they had the Don Cossacks and General Denikin's White Army. To the west, they had Ukraine, which had broken away and declared independence with the support of the German Army, which still occupied the territory. And then all along the Trans-Siberian Railway, towns and cities were falling to the Czech Legion, which deserves some attention here in their own right, because they'll go on to be an important part of the story later. They call it the Czechoslovak Legion, but it was mostly Czech. During the war, the Russian Empire captured around two million prisoners of war, mostly from the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, which included a lot of Czechs and Slovaks. Like most minorities living under the rule of a great empire, there were Czechs who supported the empire, Czechs who were indifferent and just wanted to go about their lives, and Czechs who were fiercely nationalistic and hostile to the empire. Austria-Hungary didn't discriminate when they started conscripting men for the war, and if they did, they probably would have prioritized sending the nationalists to the front, so they could keep them under tight discipline. Either way, by the latter days of the war, the Tsar's armies had about 40,000 Czechs and Slovaks who jumped at the chance to fight for Russia against Austria-Hungary. They stayed true after the first revolution in Russia. They took part in the Kerensky Offensive of 1917 for the new Republican government. After the Bolshevik Revolution, as the former Russian Empire was completely falling apart and peace had been declared with the Germans, the Czech Legion was placed under the command of France. Trotsky wanted them for his new Red Army, which hadn't really even gotten off the ground yet. But the French and the Legion said, no way, we're going to France. Well, the closest Russian port was way up north, about 750 miles north of Petrograd, and it was going to be iced over and unusable for several more months. And so these 40,000 Legionnaires, these guys are battle hardened, well armed, and extremely motivated soldiers. They get put on a train to go all the way across Siberia. We're talking 4 or 5,000 miles to the eastern port city of Vladivostok, where they were to be loaded onto ships, sailed across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, across the Atlantic, and their reward for making it through that journey was to be a long stay in the trenches on the Western Front. Unfortunately, while they were traveling through Siberia, the peace treaty between Germany and the Bolsheviks was signed, and one of its provisions was that the Bolsheviks were to stop and disarm the Czech Legionnaires, since the Germans didn't want to see 40,000 of them on the Western Front. Meanwhile, the Allies were demanding that they be sent back to northwestern Russia to be used against the Germans there, and the Japanese decided to withdraw their agreement to transport the Legion using their boats from Vladivostok, so they're stranded. They're starting to get very wary thousands of miles from home in a country that looks like it's about to break into civil war. Well, just then, the Legion was moving through Chelyabinsk in the eastern Ural Mountains, when another Russian train carrying Hungarian POWs from the army the Czechs had defected from came by. Words were exchanged, then objects were thrown, and when a metal object wounded one of the Czechs, the Czechs stormed the Hungarian train and lynched the guy who threw it. The local Soviet arrested a few of the Czechs, pending an investigation, and then Trotsky very stupidly ordered that the Czechoslovak Legion be disarmed completely and that any member who was found with the weapon was to be shot on sight. A completely ridiculous order because the Bolsheviks had absolutely no means of enforcing it and because of the predictable reaction. Just like that, the Bolsheviks had another experienced, cohesive, well-armed army to deal with because the Czechs revolted. They seized Chelyabinsk and then they moved along the Trans-Siberian railway, seizing one town and railway junction after another, cutting off western Russia from everything east of the Ural Mountains, effectively half the country. Encountering almost no resistance, they took control of much of the Volga Valley, and before Trotsky even had time to consider what he had done, the Czech Legion was in control of about two-thirds of the former Russian Empire. To put them in perspective, they conquered more territory in the matter of a few months than any of the actual countries in the First World War. And so needless to say, more about the Czech Legion in the next episode, by the way, needless to say, the Bolsheviks are under a tremendous amount of pressure at this point. Their newspaper articles were just full of just scathing articles, many of them by government leaders calling for mass terror and extermination of entire classes of human beings. The newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta announced, quote, We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable so that no mercy will enter them, and so that we will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands. Let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Yuritsky, Zinoviev and Volodarsky, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois. More blood as much as possible. End quote. The peasants were mounting a more and more organized and vigorous resistance against the party militias trying to take their food. Lenin's rage was incandescent. In a telegram to the leader of the Soviet Nizhny Novgorod, he wrote, quote, Your first response must be to establish a dictatorial troika, i.e. you, Markin and one other person, and to introduce mass terror, shooting or deporting the hundreds of prostitutes who were causing all the soldiers to drink, all the ex-officers, etc. There is not a moment to lose. You must act resolutely with massive reprisals. Immediate execution for anyone caught in possession of a firearm. Massive deportations of Mensheviks and other suspect elements. The next day, he sent another telegram to the Penza Soviet, quote, comrades, the kulak. Kulak meant a wealthy peasant, but in Bolshevik terminology, it often just meant a peasant family with two cows or a little more food than they needed in storage, or really any peasant that disapproved of the Bolsheviks. The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution require this, for the final decisive battle is underway everywhere. You must make an example of these people. One, hang. Hang without fail so that people see it. At least 100 kulaks, rich bastards and bloodsuckers. Two, publish their names. Three, seize all their grain. Four, designate hostages. Do it in a way that for miles around, people will see, tremble, know, shout. They are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks. Reply saying you have received these instructions. Yours, Lennon. PS, find tougher people. In the summer, Lennon ordered his food commissar to draw up an order to all Soviets and Cheka detachments in grain producing regions to take 25 hostages from prominent families in each district. And if that district did not turn over a certain quota of food, whether or not they even had it, execute the hostages. Next, Lennon ordered concentration camps to be constructed, and that all ordered that all kulaks, priests and suspected subversives, which in their paranoia at this point could mean just about anybody, be rounded up and jailed in them. First, among the subversives were any remaining leaders or prominent members of the non-Bolshevik socialist or left-wing parties or workers movement. In an article in the newspaper Izvestia on August 23rd, one of Cheka boss Felix Derzinski's lieutenants explained that the laws of war do not apply in civil wars. Quote, capitalist wars have a written constitution, but civil war has its own laws. One must not only destroy the active forces of the enemy, but also demonstrate that anyone who raises a hand in protest against class war will die by the sword. In a civil war, there should be no courts for the enemy. It is a fight to the death. If you don't kill, you will die. So kill if you don't want to be killed, end quote. By July 1918, the Czech Legion was close to marching on Yekaterinburg. That's where the Bolsheviks were holding the Russian Tsar and his family hostage. Yakov Sverdlov, the chairman of the Central Committee, possibly on his own initiative, gave the order to murder the entire family, lest they be liberated to become a rallying point for the Bolsheviks' enemies. Historian Sean McMeekin describes what happened, quote, On the night of 16-17 July, Yurovsky, Yurovsky is the head of the local Cheka, ordered Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, her ladies-in-waiting, their five children, and Dr. Botkin down to the basement. After reading out a perfunctory verdict of guilt against the Tsar, Yurovsky's execution squad opened fire. Only Nicholas was killed immediately. The gun that fired the fatal shot was later put on display in the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow. The other victims were finished off one by one at close range, execution style. What transpired next was gruesome. In the words of Yurovsky's own rather clinical recollection, and now quoting Yurovsky, It was discovered that Tatyana, Olga and Anastasia were dressed in some kind of special corsets. The detachment began to undress and burn the corpses. AF was wearing a whole pearl belt. Around each girl's neck was a portrait of Rasputin with the text of his prayer sewn into the amulets. The diamonds were instantly removed. And we put everything valuable into bags. The rest of what was found on the corpses was burnt, and the corpses themselves were lowered into a mine. Now back to McMeekin. The four brothers' mine where the bodies were initially dumped, alas, turned out to be too shallow to afford much camouflage if the Czechs or another hostile anti-Bolshevik force came through. And so the corpses were lifted up again and put back in the truck. Because of heavy rain, the roads were soon impassable. After some debate, the Bolshevik disposal team simply stopped along the Yekaterinburg-Moscow road, dumped the bodies and poured sulfuric acid all over them. Yurovsky then covered the bodies with brushwood and ran them over repeatedly with a truck to mangle the corpses beyond recognition in case they were discovered. Buried in a shallow grave, the remains lay undisturbed until 1989. For good measure, on the next day, July 18th, the Tsar's blood relatives held at nearby Alaphevsk, including two Romanov Grand Dukes, a Grand Duchess and their children, were strip-searched, robbed of valuables, shot and dumped in a mine shaft, while at least several of the victims may have still been alive. One week later, the Bolsheviks were forced to flee Yekaterinburg as the Czech Legion closed in. Short time after that, the Legion took Kazan, which the Bolsheviks were forced to flee in such a panic that they didn't have time to clean out the banks in the city. And so the Czech Legion got their hands on almost 500 tons of gold, 100 million rubles, which were worth about 50 million dollars then, about 5 billion today, a large store of platinum and countless other valuables. Trotsky was so enraged that he ordered any Red Army soldier that retreated for any reason except an order from above was to be shot along with his commander and the commissar overseeing his unit. Things became unimaginably worse on August 30th, 1918. Moisey Urytsky, one of the men who traveled with Lenin by train to take part in the Revolution, and the head of the Cheka in St. Petersburg, was shot and killed by a Jewish socialist revolutionary. The same day, another Jewish socialist revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin himself twice, once in the shoulder and once in the lung. He didn't die, but his survival would be in doubt for some time. The Bolsheviks were certain that the assassinations were connected to a larger conspiracy meant to overthrow their government, and more recent scholarship has lent some credence to that. Stalin was summoned from the capital, rather to the capital, from his post in Saritsyn, and everything that came before August 30th, 1918, was absolutely nothing compared to what came after. It was only then that the period notoriously known as the Red Terror began. The next day, Pravda ran an article calling for total war against anyone who opposed the Bolsheviks. Quote, workers, the time has come for us to crush the bourgeoisie or be crushed by it. The corruption of the bourgeoisie must be cleansed from our towns immediately. Files will now be kept on all men concerned, and those who represent any danger to the revolutionary cause will be executed. The anthem of the working class will be a song of hatred and revenge. End quote. The same day, Chekhov boss Felix Zerzhinsky promulgated a message of his own. Quote, the working classes must crush the hydra of the counterrevolution with massive terror. We must let the enemies of the working classes know that anyone caught in possession of a firearm will be immediately executed, and that anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp. End quote. They were in a frenzy of paranoia and rage. On September 3rd, 500 hostages were taken and simply shot. 29 more hostages, including many high officials in the Tsarist government, were executed in Moscow. Every night, Moscow's jails filled up and then emptied again as hundreds of people were rounded up as potential spies and saboteurs, abused and shot to make way for the next batch. This was not good enough for Grigory Petrovsky, the Commissar for Internal Affairs, who sent instructions to all Soviets in the country, quote, The time has come to put a stop to all this weakness and sentimentality. All the right socialist revolutionaries must be arrested immediately. A great number of hostages must be taken among the officers and the bourgeoisie. The slightest resistance must be greeted with widespread executions. The Cheka's and the other organized militia must seek out and arrest suspects and immediately execute all those suspected of involvement with counterrevolutionary practices. No weakness or indecision can be tolerated during this period of mass terror. Trotsky ordered the Red Army to shoot any soldier suspected of planning to desert, as well as any soldier who exaggerated an injury or illness to avoid his duty or was suspected of doing so. On September 5th, the Soviet government issued a decree freeing up all local authorities to employ mass terror and wage unrestrained war against all suspected enemies by whatever means necessary without seeking advice or approval from above. In all the provinces under Bolshevik control, the Cheka, Red Guards and local Soviets competed with each other in a mass murder spree, executing hostages and prisoners and rampaging through towns and villages burning and murdering indiscriminately to strike terror into the people. In St. Petersburg alone, well over 1,000 hostages were executed in September, including at least 400 in one night at Kronstadt. The hostages were forced to dig long trenches, then lined up on the edge, shot and covered up in the mass grave. In two months they murdered, in two months they murdered at least 15,000 people, more than twice the number of people executed by the Tsarist regime in the previous 100 years. Conditions became so severe, the violence so indiscriminate that Petrovsky, the Internal Affairs Commissar whose order I just read a moment ago, he was calling for steps to be taken to get the Cheka under control. He said it had degenerated into an organization man by criminals and pathological sadists, many of them recruited from jails and organized crime rings. Hordes of refugees from the Red Terror streamed to the West, seeking the protection of the German army and bringing with them stories of brutality almost impossible to believe. So, peace treaty or not, it was too much for the Germans to take and they started making preparations to resume their offensive, to take over St. Petersburg and put an end to the terrorist regime. It was setting Russia on fire. History would have been very, very different if they had had just a few more months to carry this out. But it was just at this moment that Bulgaria began to crack. The Allies blew open a 20-mile wide hole and cleared a path to march on Belgrade and from there to Vienna. On September 27th, General Ludendorff called off the advance in Russia. And two days later, the Western Allies punched a hole in the Siegfried Line in Northern France and the Germans were forced to sue for peace. Everything I just described was taking place in 1918. While the First World War was still being fought, when we started this story in Germany, with the revolutions in Luxembourg and Liebknecht getting out of prison, that was the fall of 1918. All of this for the most part is all happening before that. Okay, so this is what they've been watching and hearing about take place in Russia before the revolutions kick off. The stories about what was happening over there were making their way to the rest of the world by now, but especially to Germany, where most of the refugees who were fleeing from all this were ending up. And so people knew what was going on, and it is very important to know that in order to understand how people at the time took it. When Carl Liebknecht, the German revolutionary, emerged from prison making speeches about bringing the Russian Revolution to Germany and the rest of Europe. What that might mean was no longer a matter of speculation. People could see exactly what it meant. Liebknecht was calling for a kind of revolution that had brought chaos, starvation, mass slavery, and indiscriminate murder to Russia. A revolution that did not only overthrow the government, but was rounding up and massacring priests, turning churches into latrines, and would even build a monument to honor Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ in Moscow. It was a vision of hell, and Liebknecht was not only calling to bring it to Germany, but had a movement behind him that was actively working for it, backed by money and professional revolutionaries, including Karl Radek and his entourage, sent by the Bolsheviks to help put it over. Now, Germany was not at that point in the period immediately following the end of the war. People were hungry, but this was a very conservative society, a very well-organized one, with a much stronger middle class than in Russia and an above-ground social democratic movement that had been much better established before the war. So for a lot of reasons, Germany didn't experience the rapid collapse into anarchy and bloodshed that the Bolsheviks brought to Russia. But there were signs, signs of the same insolence, the same sadistic joy of a person who perceives himself as an underdog and finally gets the advantage over the people above him. That's the gasoline that fuels the engine of every revolution. A Berlin newspaper editorial complained that, Respected officers and junior officers who after four years of gray battle came back from the field without any idea and who left the German railway station without knowing what had happened were attacked by a mob of adolescent scallywags and termagant women and abused in the worst way from a pack of riffraff that pretended to act as representatives of the revolution. I know of one case when a fully crippled officer who was on two crutches after receiving ten shots was thrown into a filthy pool of water by the mob, his cockades and epaulettes were forcibly robbed off him and he was left there lying helplessly in a pool of filth. Ernst von Solomon was a patriotic German cadet who was 16 years old when the war ended and so narrowly missed service in the war. Might sound like he got lucky, but there was this small cohort of German youths known as Class 1902 or the Class of 1902, which in this context meant the class born in 1902, that just missed serving in the war and who were as a rule, more right-wing and intensely patriotic than anybody. And it's easy to understand why. All of them with brothers and cousins just one year older, everyone they knew in school just a year ahead of them, a good portion of all the guys they knew and know had seen combat at the front. They had experienced the great war, participated in it, the heroic struggle that defined a generation of European men. And this small cohort had just missed it. Well, Ernst von Salomon was one of these, and he was disgusted by the revolution taking place in his country. He later wrote a book, technically a novel, but based on his true experiences with alterations, like taking incidents that happened to several different people and having them all happen to the same person just for narrative continuity. Basically, a true account, though, of what guys like von Salomon were seeing and feeling as they went through this. And the events that he describes as he goes through his story, were all events that he did take part in. Quote, I suddenly heard sounds of a disturbance in one of the main streets, and resolved to find out what was happening. I felt very nervous, I remember he's 16 years old at this point, but I set my teeth and said, buck up to myself. And again, buck up, as I heard scraps of shrills singing and shouts from many throats, and sensed confusion and tumbled. A gigantic flag was being carried in front of a vast procession, a red flag. Limp and damp, it hung from its pole. Then floated like a patch of blood over the crowd which had rapidly collected. I stood and watched. Tired multitudes plodded after the flag. Women were in front, in voluminous skirts, their gray skins hanging slackly over sharp cheekbones. Hunger seemed to have hollowed them out. From under their dirty ragged handkerchiefs, they sang in trembling voices a song whose martial rhythm was ill-matched with their wary tread. The men, old and young, soldiers, workmen, small shopkeepers, walked with dull, tired faces, in which there was a hint of sullen resolution. From time to time they fell into step and then immediately did their best to break step again as though detected in some fault. Many of them carried their food with them, and behind the wet red flag on which the rain made dark stains, umbrellas billowed over the crowd. So marched the army of the revolution. The wild dreams of reform, of blood and barricades were to be realized by this gray rabble. I was determined not to give way to them. I stiffened and thought, can I mob, rabble, riff raff? I half shut my eyes and watched the vague, smudged figures. Like rats, I thought, with the filth of the gutters on them, gray, furtive, with little red-rimmed eyes. Suddenly some sailors appeared. Sailors wearing immense red sashes, carrying rifles in their hands, with laughing faces under beribboned caps and loose, easy clothes on supple figures. Our boys in blue shot through my mind. And then I thought, disgust might choke me. But it was not disgust. It was fear. These were the leaders of the revolution. These young fellows with their determined faces, these wild lads arm in arm with girls, singing, laughing, joking, boasting. A motor car came along, with sailors on the running board, sitting on the radiator, waving a red flag like a pennon. Some of them were looking around for mischief to do, shouting hoarsely. The women yelled to them and pointed. What were they pointing at? At me? Were they pointing at me? Here was the danger. Instantly, the thought rose in my mind that whatever happened, I must not flinch. I felt for my sword. He was wearing his cadets uniform and carrying his ceremonial sword, and remembered that it had not been sharpened. However, I kept my hand on the pommel and squared my shoulders. A soldier walked past me, a young fellow with no belt, wearing brown gaiters and eyeglasses, carrying a dispatch case, and with the shoulder strap still on his gray coat. They went for him. One of them, an artilleryman, with a broad and thick set, with heavy riding boots and a red cockade in his cap. Here is another of them. He yelled as he landed the young soldier one in the eye with his fist. Then he tore off his shoulder strap so violently that the boy stumbled and nearly fell, went ashy pale and stammered, but why? In God's name, why? The swine, I thought, the cadds. At that instant, the gunner's eye fell upon me too. He had little sly eyes, an unshaven chin and bristly hair. He put up his fists, a big, red, hairy set of fists. I looked around quickly. The crowd had formed a circle around me. There were women amongst them, and a man in a bowler hat waved an umbrella at me. Somebody laughed. Several people laughed. But I only thought of my shoulder straps. Everything depended on those shoulder straps. My honor, how absurd. What did they matter? Yes, they were all important. I drew my sword. Then the fist was planted in the middle of my face. For a moment, I almost lost consciousness, and blood flowed over my chin. Hit him, I thought. There's only one thing to be done. Hit him! I did, but the artillery men laughed and spat in my face, and a woman screamed at me, You jacknapes! You fancy boy! You ninny! A stick struck the back of my neck, and I fell. Someone kicked me, then the whole crowd seemed to be kicking and beating me. I lay and hit out as best as I could in all directions, though I knew it was useless. They all laughed and jeered and hit me. Blood ran from my eyes and nose. Suddenly the tumult ceased. Someone came out from the Carlton Hotel. With my swollen eyes, I could just see that it was an officer. He was tall and slim, and wore the blue uniform of a hussar. His cap was tilted jauntily, and he had on patent leather boots with silver lacing. On his tunic was the iron cross, first class, and in his eye a monocle. He tapped his boots with the riding whip. He tapped his boots and came straight towards the mob. The women were silent. The crowd parted. The man with the bowler hat had vanished, and the gunner cleared off. The tall, elegant, blue figure bent over me and gripped me by the arm. I stumbled to my feet and stood to attention. Stand at ease, boy, he said. I've been a cadet too. Come along to my hotel. I went with him, wiping the blood off my face and saying, Anyhow, they didn't get my shoulder straps. The German historian, Gustav Meyer, we quoted him earlier, wrote in his diary on November 21st, so we're about two weeks into the revolution in Germany, One hears only pessimistic voices. In Berlin, the victory of Bolshevism can no longer be stopped. Leibniz has already triumphed completely. Things are no better in Hamburg, in Cologne. If they want to try to save themselves and their property, they must abandon Berlin. Leibniz's Spartacus were only a minority of the population, and even a minority within the USPD, which was the more radical wing of the Social Democratic Party, and everybody knew that. But everybody also knew that the Bolsheviks had been a tiny minority among the revolutionary movements in Russia. As one journalist wrote in a big Berlin newspaper, all that mattered in times like this was who had the guns and the least hesitancy to use them. The novelist Thomas Mann wrote that people were saying the extremists had 100,000 armed thugs and ex-soldiers, as well as Russian POWs, ready to take to the streets at Liebknecht's command. And a journalist who had just come back to Berlin from Russia told his readers that, quote, in half a year, things will take the same course and it will look like St. Petersburg, end quote. Wealthy and upper middle class Germans were paying bribes to Spartacists so that Liebknecht's revolutionaries might spare their homes and their families once they came to power. Reinhardt, the war minister, warned that this was futile and that their only chance was to organize for armed defense, get ready to fight, or else they'd be picked off one by one. The historian Ernst Trolch wrote in his diary that Germany was suffering from, quote, general military, economic, and nervous collapse. One can hardly ex-cogitate the tremendousness of events. One still fears for the most elementary personal existence. No one can foresee the future for Germany or the world. One hardly has peace to think about it. When you leave the house, you cannot help but wonder that houses and trees are still standing, end quote. Meanwhile, the Spartacus newspaper, the Rothfond, red flag, hammered its readers every day with rumors that reactionary forces were on their way from every direction to exterminate every single one of them. Tension was at a boiling point. The example of Russia fleshed out by stories from refugees who were now coming in to Germany proper, as well as by journalists and soldiers who'd been there, made the German people feel that they were standing at the edge of a cliff. And then came Bloody Friday. Around 5 p.m. on December 6th in Berlin, a group of soldiers and sailors forced their way into the Chancellery Building and demanded that Friedrich Ebert, the head of the transitional government, go out onto the street. And so Ebert goes outside, and he sees several rows of soldiers and sailors all armed with rifles. One of them, a junior officer, takes to an improvised podium and makes a speech demanding that Ebert stop compromising with the extremists and rid the government of the radical influence of the soldiers and workers councils, the Soviets. At the same time, just a short distance away at the Prussian Parliament building, another group of 25 armed soldiers, in coordination with those at the chancellery, burst into a meeting of the executives of the councils and announced that everybody present was under arrest. Back at the chancellery, the junior officer, to the approval of the crowd, demanded that Ebert hold elections for the National Assembly in two weeks, December 20th. He promised Ebert that armed soldiers and sailors, those standing in the ranks before him and others as well, would back him with the necessary force to assume the powers of a dictator. Then he announced that Ebert was no longer a transitional head of state, but was now the president of the German Social Republic. When he was finished, Ebert took the podium and immediately rejected the officer's demands. He told the crowd that it would be impossible to hold elections so soon because most soldiers would not have returned to Germany or to their hometowns by then. He told them that his government would continue to work with the soldiers and workers' councils despite his personal dislike of them and his disapproval of their goals because civil war would benefit nobody. The other part of the plan failed as well because when the 25 soldiers who were sent to arrest the soldiers and workers' council executives, one of the executives was a member of the six-man Council of People's Deputies, of which Ebert was the head, and he was able to convince the men that their arrest could not be carried out because it hadn't been approved by that body. It's kind of funny that that line of argument actually worked, especially in a time of general lawlessness, but the Germans are nothing if not a people who respect procedure. Of course, before this is even finished, news of these two events spreads across Berlin like wildfire, and the Spartacists take to the streets in demonstrations at three different locations. They march and converge and begin to make their way to Central Berlin, where the two events were taking place. Otto Vels, an official of the SPD and the commander of Berlin City Guard, ordered a contingent of 60 soldiers to confront them. The soldiers got out ahead of them on the road, ahead of the marching crowd, and drew a chain across the road to block them from going any further. As the crowd approached, the soldiers stood at the ready with bayonets fixed and a machine gun set up for good measure. Remember, this is happening in the middle of Berlin. And so soon enough, hundreds of ordinary people come out of their houses and apartments to see what's going on. Among the onlookers was a group gathered at a tram stop waiting to be picked up. And as the tram, already crowded with people, approached the stop, all of a sudden gunfire erupted up and down the street. Bullets tore through the tram car, immediately killing a soldier on board and splashing his blood all over the clothes of several other passengers. Also on the tram, a 16-year-old girl was riddled with bullets and killed. Several people on the street simply dropped to the ground instantly as bullets ripped through their bodies. A newspaper account the next day read, and quote, a short order, fire. Then the machine gun in the Chassenstrasse directed toward the Iranian Burger Gate began to rattle. In addition, the soldiers fired rapidly in both directions. Everyone scurried apart as people screamed and called out for help. The fire dominated the entire street. Everyone ran to try to save their lives. In a mad rush, people pushed and shoved each other to the side, in some cases pulling one another to the ground. In blind fear, some twenty people threw themselves through the large display window of the fabished department store, which as the situation had become threatening had closed its doors and turned out the lights in the entire building. Taking no care of the cuts, which those escaping this way endured, many people pushed after them. A number thirty-two tram, whose driver unsuspectingly had driven up to the scene, came likewise into the fire. Screaming and calling for help, the passengers pushed to escape, knocking one another down in the process. A furniture transport cart, which was trying to pass the tram, also came into the line of fire. The horse was hit by several bullets, while the driver got away with a light injury to his arm. In all of the buildings, the residents had turned out the lights and moved back, terrified, into the rooms at the rear. When the soldiers had stopped firing, for a while, there was almost complete silence. Then, the first people ventured out of the houses and looked at the battlefield. End quote. The dead silence was only occasionally broken by footsteps of fleeing people, or by an isolated scream or moan. Bodies lay everywhere, and the streets ran so thick with blood that it flowed in the gutter and pooled up on the sidewalks and in the middle of the road. When it was over, 16 people were dead and another 80 wounded. Many of them just bystanders. What started the shooting has been a matter of controversy ever since. The soldiers said that the Spartacus shot first. One observer even said that the Spartacus had ordered the soldiers to drop their weapons and put up their hands before they opened fire. Others said that the protesters had shouted slogans supporting Carl Liebknecht immediately before they started shooting. Liebknecht and his supporters in speeches and in their newspapers told the opposite story that it was a premeditated mass murder of peaceful protesters planned and carried out by the SPD itself. Whatever started it, all sides rushed to politicize the incident before the bodies had even been removed from the street. The SPD, as well as liberals and conservatives, put all the blame on Liebknecht and the Spartacists. The Deutsche Zeitung newspaper in an article titled Liebknecht is Marching quoted a witness who claimed that Spartacists had begun to assemble even before they heard about the incidents at the chancellery and parliament building, and that they were heard declaring that the time had come for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the favored term of the Bolsheviks for their government. According to the newspaper, it was only after that that someone rushed into the assembly and told everyone that Ebert had just been declared president and that armed troops were occupying the streets. Other newspapers described similar accounts and added that even before the Spartacists had encountered the soldiers' blockade, they were shouting that they were going to avenge the attempted arrest of the council executives and to hang Ebert from the nearest lamp post. One paper reported a rumor that 20,000 armed sailors were marching from Kiel to Berlin to throw their weight behind the Spartacists. Flyers went up in public spaces and posters calling for the death of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg demanding that the government use force to keep the Spartacists from dragging Germany down into Russian conditions. Russian conditions was the scare phrase that appeared in every speech, every newspaper, every discussion, and the fear was palpable. Even more palpable because the Spartacists openly announced that it was their goal to bring Russian conditions to Germany. That rumor about the 20,000 Kiel sailors was false, but for the most part it's hard to suss out fact from fiction because a historian's usual resources, like newspaper accounts and diaries, are so contradictory and unreliable. Rumors were flying around the city, shaping what people thought they heard or thought they saw, so that even eyewitnesses reported diametrically opposed versions of events. The Spartacists were adamant that not only had the government soldiers started the shooting, but that the whole thing was an ambush, a planned, deadly assault to support what they said was an attempted push, led by Ebert and his cronies. They claimed that the only reason the massacre wasn't much worse was that freed Russian POWs had rushed over from a nearby street to intervene. The next day, the Rotfond, the Spartacus newspaper, called on the workers of Berlin to join in a general strike to protect the revolution, and announced a demonstration to take place the following day in East Berlin. But they were disappointed with the turnout. The workers did not go on general strike, and only a relatively small number of people showed up for the demonstrations. Those who did show up, though, were still in the thousands, and they were rowdy and militant, and their presentation bumped the intensity of the situation up another notch. In a parade led by two armored cars with men on mounted machine guns, a crowd of armed Spartacus supporters made for the government district of Berlin. They stopped at an important junction, set up barricades, directed several machine gun nests around monuments to Otto III and Johann I, while trucks full of armed men and more machine guns drove up and down the boulevard in a menacing fashion, passing back and forth in front of the Reichstag. None of this led to another gunfight, but the Spartacus show of force only added to Berliner's assessment of the severity of the threat that they posed. At mass demonstrations that night, Karl Liebknecht again told a crowd of 12,000 to 15,000 supporters that the Ebert government had murdered their comrades on purpose and so to arm themselves and form a Red Guard along the lines of the Red Guard in Russia to get ready to fight. He led the giant procession to the Reichstag, led again by armored cars with machine guns and ranks of revolutionaries ostentatiously displaying their rifles and hand grenades. On the way, the crowd stopped at the Russian Embassy in Liebknecht, Luxembourg and others mounted the steps and used it as a backdrop for more speeches. That evening, a conservative newspaper told its readers, quote, Liebknecht has achieved what he wanted. Blood has flowed on the streets of Berlin. The crowd of people that he and his ideological comrades incited and brought marching to the streets have been fired upon. Now he has the explosive event which he needed to bring the souls of his followers to a boiling point, to bring them to boil over, as he says to them, the government of Ebert allows gunfire at the people, just like the so-called reactionary government of old, end quote. The newspaper described Liebknecht as a mad fool and a fanatic who would stop at nothing until a Russia-style terror and dictatorship had been established in Germany. It said if people did not recognize the seriousness of the threat and act accordingly, Germany would quote, go down in blood in masses, end quote. These are major newspapers talking like this. Outside of far left circles, it was generally accepted among the people of Berlin that the violence of Bloody Friday had been the fault of Liebknecht and of the increasing belligerence of the Spartacists. Karl Hampe, the historian, wrote in his diary at this time that it was, quote, the long-awaited first-punch attempt of the Spartacists and said that everyone expected more fighting in the near future. And that was fine as far as Hampe was concerned. Things had gone far enough and it was time to deal with these people once and for all. As Liebknecht and his thousands of supporters patrolled the streets with their weapons, representatives of the Council of People's Deputies and the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils came together for a meeting to discuss the events of Bloody Friday. Things were heated. The radicals and the soldiers and workers' councils were turning on the more moderate social Democrats on the Council of People's Deputies. And in return, the deputies were more and more beginning to shut the councils out of the governing process. The meeting went long into the night, and the city waited to see what the outcome would be. Historian Mark Jones, in his book Founding Weimar, writes about this time that the whole city is waiting on pins and needles to see if they'd wake up to a civil war. Quote, Social Democratic People's Representative Philip Scheidem stormed out halfway through the meeting when he felt that he was being treated as a schoolboy. In his diary, a Colonel Vandenberg from the War Ministry summed up the nervous mood among the officials waiting anxiously to learn of the meeting's outcome. He had been told that they expected Ebert to be voted out of the government by five votes. In response, he described another meeting that he held later that night with the War Minister Heinrich Scheuch as a council of war. When he returned home, he explained the situation to his wife and, in his words, they made our own plans for war. At this point, his diary describes his family's plans to flee Berlin at a moment's notice should Liebknecht come to power. You're now quoting Colonel Vandenberg's diary. The guideline given for the government means get out of Berlin, because under Liebknecht, none of us would remain at large. Therefore, Greta, too, could not stay at home. Greta's his wife. For this case, we wanted to relocate the entire family to Potsdam, to Frau Otto, and early on Sunday morning, 8 December, we made all of the preparations to do it. Greta, with Bertha and the three children, had to be ready upon a telephone call to go by bicycle to Potsdam at any time. A small suitcase was packed for each of us. It contained only things that were absolutely necessary. The rest was all kinds of provisions. I received a small packet wrapped in paper with the most necessary things, and in each coat pocket I put a can of tinned foods. That is how I left. With the help of Erhard, Greta prepared our home. The remaining food was divided and hidden, just the same for a few valuables. The nameplate in front of the door was taken away. Like that, everything was ready. End quote. And then Jones writes, At the same time as Vandenberg was packing food into his pockets to prepare for Armageddon, intelligence agents warned the Guard Division and the General Command that they should expect to come under attack from the Spartacus later that night. The attack did not materialize, but the next morning, the Social Democrats' official newspaper, Vovertz, wrote, quote, A Sunday has dawned like none ever seen in Berlin. A stifling tension lies over this massive city, which faces the coming events like a patient animal being led to the slaughter. Even in this moment, we do not want to abandon the hope that tomorrow a sigh of relief will pass through the people, that the calm, the wise sense which is always defined, the proletariat of Berlin will once again prove itself today, end quote. The newspaper called on supporters of the government to come out into the streets the next day to show the Spartacus what they would be dealing with if they tried to take power by violence. About 20,000 people showed up to rally at the Lustgarten, an important symbolic space between the Berlin Palace and the city's old museum. Ebert mounted the podium and made a speech. Almost exactly a month after his first speech, following the Kaiser's abdication, when he had called on the people to stay in their houses and not allow the country to descend into chaos, he told his followers, quote, Every day, Liebman's fanatical followers call for violence. Every day, they distribute weapons. Every day, they threaten to attack the government with force of arms. We will oppose all of these attempts with the fullest determination. People interrupted, shouting, send them away, get rid of them. We are not a government of violence. Our legitimacy is fully and only drawn from the will of the people, end quote. The Social Democrats were very averse to being perceived as too militant, in large part because, well, obviously because they were trying to avoid civil war, if possible. They were the ones in charge of the government and likely to win if a national assembly was elected, so they benefited from the status quo. But another big reason was that one of the unifying aspects of the revolution was that it was meant to throw off the yoke of quote-unquote Prussian militarism, which had become a sort of scapegoat for Germany's entry into the war. But patience was running out, and people were afraid and angry, and a consensus was forming that armed conflict with the Spartacus was inevitable. Vorwärts, the SPD's newspaper, promised on our word that the defenders of the government have far more machine guns than Liebknecht. And then very important to note at this point, this official organ of the SPD, the ruling party in the government, was not calling for police action, because there were no police to speak of. They weren't even really calling for action by the army, because the army was still mostly not in town, but was instead calling on non-state militias and armed civilians to defend the government. The paper assured its readers that the army would soon be home, and if the Spartacus wanted to fight, they would get a short and decisive one against German front soldiers. The ordinary people of Germany, the middle class, the non-revolutionaries who only wanted food for their families and to return to the routine of work and daily life, they all reassured themselves each day that the army was on its way home. The patriotic cream of German youth would soon arrive and set the world back on its axis. Soldiers were indeed coming back. They marched until they reached German rail lines and then they proceeded on trains. They were supposed to report back as a unit, but once they reached Germany, the conscripts, even some of the volunteers melted away as soldiers just got off the train and deserted when it pulled through their hometowns. It might be too harsh to call them deserters actually. You know, they had joined the army of the German Empire, not the army of whatever it was they were looking at now. Plenty of units were intact, though. The men of Germany were coming home, but these were not the same men who had departed to fanfare in 1914. These men had survived four years in hell. The smell of their closest friends' rotting flesh had filled their nostrils for so long that they had forgotten the smell of natural air. Many of them had left as boys, with a history of violence that didn't go beyond a schoolyard shoving match, and now they were young men for whom killing had become a day job, for whom violent death had become unremarkable, and seeing the man you shared breakfast with reduced to a mangled mass before lunch had become routine, all of it an experience of industrial regularity. I mean, you heard the last episode. The generation of men who endured that were on their way home. Ernst Younger, the hero of our last episode, wrote a short book addressed to fellow soldiers, really, about their shared experience at the front, and he conveys scenes that ordinary people can know only in nightmares, because anyone who really witnesses scenes like this can no longer ever again be called ordinary. Quote, What was the point of covering the new dead with sand and lime, or spreading sheets over them, to escape the constant sight of those black, swollen faces? There were too many of them. The spade was always met with a buried body. All the mysteries of the trench lay in the sunlight, a hideousness before which the wildest nightmares paled. Hair fell in clumps from skulls like foliage from trees in autumn. The flesh of some corpses turned greenish like that of a fish, and glowed at night among the tattered uniforms. If stepped on, the boots left phosphorescent footprints. Others were dried into chalky, slowly decaying mummies. In others, the flesh would peel from the bones like reddish brown jelly. On the sultriest nights, the bloated corpses would awaken like spirits, the gases escaping from their wounds hissing and foaming. Most terrible of all, however, was the swarming that emerged from those consisting of nothing more than a mass of worms. Why should I spare your nerves? Didn't we ourselves once, for four whole days, lie in a trench surrounded by corpses? Weren't we all, dead and alive, covered with a dense carpet of bluish black flies? Could it get any worse? Yes, among the dead lay people with whom we had shared a few night watches, a few bottles of wine, and a few loaves of bread. Who, if not us, can really talk about the war? Ernst von Salomon, the young cadet whose story of being assaulted by the red mob we quoted earlier, wrote about the day the returning army came to his town. And I want to quote him at length here. And I want you to remember that these people are close to starving and that most of them have lost friends or relatives to violent death in the last few years, and that they are all terrified that their society is about to collapse into an abyss of mass murder and tyranny. Quote, in the middle of December, the troops returned from the front. Only one division from the neighborhood of Verdun was expected in the town. The crowd was gathered on the footpaths. A few houses timidly displayed red, white and black bunting. There were a great many women and girls, some of them carrying baskets of flowers or little parcels. The main streets were crowded with people who, after some pushing, consented to stay quietly on the pavements waiting for the troops. We felt as if the depression which had hung over the town for weeks had suddenly been lifted a little, as if the spell that had kept people apart had all at once been broken. It almost felt like the old days when a big victory had been announced. We were ready to give rain to our enthusiasm. We were inclined to credit everybody with being moved by the same sensations as ourselves. We had all suffered and the troops would bring the solution to our difficulties. We stood, craning our necks to see if they were not yet in sight. And all our hopes centered on this one idea, that everything would be changed. We stood and waited for the best of the nation. Their sacrifice could not have been worthless. The dead had not died in vain. That could not be. That was impossible. It seemed significant to me that we were all standing and waiting, each one formulating his own wishes. How various these wishes must be. Yet they must be at one in recognizing that each wished for the best. Our troops were coming. Our brave army, which had done its duty to the uttermost, which had given us glorious victories, victories that seemed almost unbearably splendid, now that we had lost the war. The army had not been conquered. Our men had stood firm to the last. They were coming home, and they would knit up all the old bonds. The multiplicity of the wishes which swayed the crowd sought for expression. There were murmurs, groups were formed. Little knots of people surrounded gesticulating speakers. They were saying that the men had come on foot all the way from the front, that they had refused to form councils, that the French were following at their heels. These troops were not staying in the town. They were departing the following day. However, the town felt that it was its duty and its pleasure to give them the joyful reception which was their due. Our unconquered heroes were coming, though a jealous fate had denied them the rewards of their bravery. And in spite of sorrow, in spite of changes at home, it was no more than bare justice to forget small dissensions and to receive them with joy and unity. The day was old and damp and gray. I was wedged hotly and uncomfortably among the crowd. The buzz of excitement re-echoed from the houses as we waited, listening and chattering, shivering with the cold and damp. All at once the soldiers appeared. We scarcely heard them, but there was a sudden movement among the crowd. A few shouts were heard, which no one took up and which soon died down again. A woman wept, her shoulders heaving. Sobbing quietly, her hands clenched. The police spread out their arms and tried to keep back the crowd. They were swallowed up as the wall of people pressed forward. There they were. There they were. Gray figures, a forest of rifles over the round flat helmets. Why is there no music? Somebody whispered hoarsely, breathlessly. Why hasn't the mayor arranged any music? Indignant whispers, then a deathly silence. Then a voice shouted, Hurrah! from somewhere in the back. Then again silence. The soldiers marched quickly in close formation. They had stony, expressionless faces. They looked neither to right nor left, but straight ahead, fixedly, as though magnetized by some terrible goal, as though they were gazing from dugouts in trenches over a wounded world. Not a word was spoken by those haggard-faced men. Just once, when someone sprang forward and almost imploringly offered a little box to the soldiers, a lieutenant waved him aside, impatiently, saying, For goodness sake, don't do that! A whole division is following on! One platoon passed, the ranks close. A second, a third, then a space. More space. Could this be a whole company? Three platoons? God, how terrible these men looked! Gaunt, immobile faces under shrapnel helmets, wasted limbs, ragged, dusty uniforms. Did they still carry terrible visions of battle in their minds as they carried the dust of the mangled earth on their garments? The strain was almost unbearable. They marched as though they were envoys of the deadliest, loneliest, iciest cold. Yet they had come home. Here was warmth and happiness. Why were they so silent? Why did they not shout and cheer? The next company advanced. The crowd thronged forward again, but the soldiers trudged on rapidly, doggedly, blindly, untouched by the thousand wishes, hopes, greetings, which hovered around them. And the crowd was silent. Very few of the soldiers were wearing flowers. The little bunches which hung on their gun barrels were faded. Most of the girls in the crowd were carrying flowers, but they stood trembling, uncertain, diffident, their faces pale and twitching as they looked at the soldiers with anxious eyes. The march went on. An officer was carrying a laurel wreath negligently, dangling it at his hand, hunching his shoulders. The crowd pulled itself together. A few hoarse shouts were heard, as though from rusty throats. Here and there a handkerchief was waved. One man murmured, convulsed, Our heroes, our heroes! They passed on, unmoved, shoulders thrust forward, their steel helmets almost hidden by bulky packs, dragging their feet, company after company, little knots of men with wide spaces between. Sweat ran from their helmets, down their worn gray cheeks, their noses stood out sharply from their faces. Not a flag, not a sign of victory. The baggage wagons were coming in sight. So this was a whole regiment. As I beheld these fiercely determined faces, set as though carved in wood, these eyes which looked frigidly past the crowd, coldly, malevolently, inimically, yes, inimically, I knew, I realized, I felt, numbly, that everything was absolutely and completely different from what I and all of us here had imagined. It must have been different all through these past years. Then what did we know? What did we know of these men, of the front line, of our soldiers? Nothing, nothing, nothing. God, this was terrible. Was nothing true that we had been told? We had been cheated. These were not our boys, our heroes, our defenders. These were men who had no part or lot among those who were gathered here in the streets. They were of another race. They obeyed other laws. Suddenly everything for which I had hoped, by which I had been inspired, seemed to me shallow and empty. An officer appeared mounted on a wretched, dirty horse. He was a major and passed close to me. I stood to attention, but he did not so much as look at me. He turned his horse so that it stood in front of us, and its hind legs pushed aside the crowd. He faced the troops and raised his hand in salute. An officer sprang out from amongst the troops and called out a command. The soldiers came to life. With one movement, they turned their heads. Their legs seemed to be jerked in their sockets, and their boots rang on the paving stones. The major stooped in his saddle. His regiment marched past, their tired, worn out feet resounding on the asphalt. The crowd stood motionless. The whole affair seemed senseless. What was the meaning of this parade with no music, no flags, nothing to account for it, no pageantry? Or perhaps, after all, there was some reason in it. Some deeper, more obscure reason than we could probe. Was this a show for us, or was it not? In truth, it seemed to me that it was a challenge. It was mockery, defiance, contempt. A demonstration of the power of the army. The absurd goose step, the ridiculous stiffness and the way that they threw about their legs. To them, it did not seem absurd. They knew that we were the ones ashamed of ourselves. That we could not make fun of them. Neither Reds nor Townspeople, though we had been ready to admit in our peace and security and respectability that the goose step was ridiculous. The regiment passed on. Even the policemen did not dare to smile. The Major put his horse to a heavy jog trot and followed. Now more baggage wagons. The drivers sat motionless. And if anyone threw them things, they gave no thanks or even acknowledged them. There were a few tiny flags stuck in the wagons. Cheap cloth hanging limply on little sticks. Camouflaged machine gun carriages rolled past. The men with the girths over their shoulders. Eight men to a trailer. Then came the big guns, with the gunners sitting down on them, their steel helmets tilted over their faces by the jolting. A few of the bolder spirits gave them flowers. One man took no notice at all. Another accepted the bunch without thanks and laid it down beside him. Another looked up dazedly, never smiling, took the flowers and held them awkwardly in his hands. All this time the woman was weeping with dull, strangled sobs that seemed to have come from deep down in her breast. Then came more infantry, and they took no notice of us either. Was it because they were still so filled with the horror of what they had lived through? This battalion came straight from the front line. These eyes fixed and staring under their helmets had seen things of which we have no conception, in a world which meant nothing to us, of which we had only vague ideas gleaned from sketchy accounts and faulty pictures. Dumbly, drearily, they continued their march, as though they were still in the shadow of death. People, country, home, duty. We spoke all those words, and we believed in them. But what about the troops? What were their feelings? Company after company passed. Pathetic little groups of men surrounded by a terrifying atmosphere of blood, of steel, of explosives, of fierce contests. Did they hate the revolution? Would they fight against it? Would they come back amongst us as workmen, farmers or students, and take part in our sorrows, our desires, our battles? Suddenly, I realized that these were no workmen, farmers, students. They were not laborers, clerks, shopkeepers or officials. They were soldiers. They were the men who had answered the call. Here were no mummers, no conscripts. They had a vocation. They came of their own free will. And their home was in the war zone. Home, country, people, nation. They were imposing words when we said them. But they were shams. That was why these men would have nothing to do with us. They were the nation. What we had blazoned about the world, they understood in a deeper sense. It was that which had urged them to do what we smugly called their duty. Their faith was not in words. It was in themselves. And they never talked about it. War had taken hold of them and would never let them go. They would never really belong to us into their homes again. This attempted fusion of them with the peaceful, ordered life of ordinary citizens was a ridiculous adulteration which could never succeed. The war was over, but the armies were still in being. The mob was fermenting, unwieldy, with thousands of little hopes and desires, size its only might. But the soldiers would work for revolution, a different revolution, whether they wanted to or not, urged on by powers which we could not realize. War had provided no solution. Soldiers were still needed. Now came the last battalion in the division. I watched, perplexed, anguished, trembling, rebellious. The last platoon swung past. The ground still echoed to their tread, and the crowd began moving. I listened to the last steps of the soldiers. What did I care for the revolution now? The marching soldiers settled in to rest for the night. Many of them had no intention of returning to their homes. The frontiers of Germany were undefended. The cities were erupting with revolutionary violence. Soldiers were still needed. When the troops were settled, flyers went up around the town. Officers were calling for volunteers, boys and men who would help defend the honor and the territory of Germany in independent militias that came to be known as Freikorps, free armies. Ernst von Salomon, just 16 years old, sought out the army and volunteered that very day. Fragments of the army began to arrive in Berlin. They paraded through the streets in a formal fashion. Directed by the government to demonstrate the army's willingness and ability to take ownership of the streets. The purpose was to force the society to unlearn the lesson of the previous month. The lesson that politics was not actually taking place in the Reichstag or the state parliaments, but on the streets. The army's presence was meant to send the message that ownership of the streets was no longer a matter for debate or contest, and to drive politics back into the institutional structures. Instead, all it did was affirm that ownership of the streets was the all-important thing. Still, the army's presence did have the effect of calming the nerves of many ordinary people who had hoped for a return to normalcy. Seven thousand soldiers marched through the streets carrying their regional and unit flags, and the flag of the German Republic. And for the first time since the Revolution began, the great mass of non-revolutionary middle-class people who had kept their heads down and their curtains drawn while the radicals marched and brawled outside had come out in force. Mostly this was a pleasant fantasy. Most of the army marching through Berlin was made up of conscripts, and their service was up. After the entry parades, most of the units broke up and the men went home. Many of them had no particular loyalty to the new gang currently calling itself the government. A good number held the government responsible for the betrayal that had lost Germany the war. And there was no firm reason to believe that this would be the government in a week. Or a month, never mind a year. No one knew if the government called for soldiers, how many would actually show up, let alone whose side they'd be on. About a week after the army parades in Berlin, after many of the soldiers had dispersed, the radicals made their first attempt to recontest the streets. The demonstrations were organized by the revolutionary Schopp Stewards, a very well put together group of socialists on the radical left, who answered to neither the Spartacists nor the USPD, the Independent Social Democrats. The occasion was the opening of the National Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, set to take place in the Prussian Parliament building. This was the most important political meeting to take place since the first days of the Revolution. The Congress was an opportunity to take a head count of supporters of the various factions. Well, out of the 512 delegates selected by the various councils to represent them, 300 were Social Democrats, giving them a strong standalone majority, while the Spartacists were only able to secure 12 seats for their representatives. This was one of the strange aspects of this period. The Spartacist League never really had as much influence as they or the people who feared them thought. Even on the far left, their influence was limited. But Liebknecht and Luxembourg were so adept at finding ways to put themselves at the center of major public events and confrontations, and they were so willing to identify themselves as agents of the Russian Bolsheviks, that it seemed to people at the time that they were much more powerful and frightening than they were. Neither Carl Liebknecht nor Rosa Luxembourg were able to secure a mandate from a Soviet to represent them at the Congress. And so on the first day, the 12 Spartacist delegates who did, twice put forward motions to allow their two leaders to attend in an advisory role with voting rights. Both times the measures were soundly rejected. Instead, a mob of Spartacists interrupted the proceedings, barging into the Congress announcing that they had a mandate from the 250,000 protesting workers on the streets outside the building. That was a ridiculous exaggeration, but that wasn't clear to the people who were inside the building who were looking out and seeing a big crowd but couldn't really tell how far back it stretched. Meanwhile, the Spartacist interlopers began reading a list of demands, first and foremost to abolish the compromised government and turn all power over to the councils. They also demanded that all counterrevolutionaries, which meant anyone to the right of themselves, be disarmed and banned from possessing weapons and that Red Guard militias be created and armed instead. Finally, they demanded the Congress issue a proclamation calling on soldiers and workers across the world to form Soviets of their own and begin the revolution in their own countries. Meanwhile, outside, Liebknecht is up on a platform addressing the crowd. He demands that the Congress unite with the Russian Bolsheviks to work for world revolution and strike down those were his words. Strike down the social democratic officials Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann. Inside the building, the Congress waited until the intruding Spartacus ran out of steam and sort of moved on, eventually voting in an overwhelming majority to support Ebert's plan to hold elections for a national assembly on January 19, 1919. Elections would mark the end of the road for the Spartacists and others who favored a system governed by councils on the model of Russia. They knew that once the people came out to participate in their millions, those people would see the National Assembly for which they cast their votes as the legitimate government of Germany. The revolution would have been considered complete. And any group trying to overthrow that system could not credibly claim to be doing so in the name of the people. And so the clock was ticking. They had to act. The following day, Leibniz published an article in the red flag announcing that the moment had arrived for the final struggle. He knew that the votes taken by the Congress inside the Prussian parliament building were only part of the story. In his opinion, looking at the example of Russia, the much less important part, the real question, the only question, as always, was who controlled the streets. If you couldn't control the streets, you couldn't hold an election. If you couldn't hold an election, then everyone would see that the question of how and by whom Germany would be governed was still an open one. All he needed was an opportunity and he found one tailor made just days after the Congress completed its work. On December 21st, 1918, revolutionaries would be out in force for the funerals of the 14 people killed or 14 of the people killed of the 16 killed on Bloody Friday. When the day came, 150,000 to maybe 200,000 people were on the streets, 25,000 to 30,000 of them revolutionaries carrying red flags and signs blaming Ebert and his government for the killings. The procession accompanied the 14 coffins carried in seven carriages through the streets of Berlin, stopping at symbolic spaces to give and hear speeches in accordance with revolutionary custom. Liebmanich did not organize these funerals, nor did his people constitute a majority of the marchers. But once again, he managed to make himself central to the entire proceeding. In front of the Imperial Chancellery, when the crowd arrived there, he told them that the government itself was a conspiracy to cheat the workers of the revolution that they had worked for and that their friends had died for. He said, These victims are a burning indictment against the government of Ebert and Scheidemann. The blood of these poor victims who fell for their proletarian brothers on the 6th of December cries out to the heavens, and in front of this house, their wounds open up once again. The dead must also be a warning to those up there, who believe that they can betray and cheat the people without facing punishment. The dead should warn them that their fall will be worse. End quote. The crowd shouted that Ebert and Scheidemann were traitors, bloodhounds, murderers. Speaking of Bloody Friday, the Social Democrats newspaper warned, quote, We will only have certainty that such sad events will not be repeated when the Spartacus League resolves to recognize the free order of the Socialist Republic, when it stops inciting people to kill their brothers. Unless that happens, there will be yet more victims, and so too their blood will be on the heads of the Spartacists. End quote. Carl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had made themselves the heroes of a radical minority, but the great Satans to the overwhelming majority of German people. Princess Blücher, who was writing out the revolution in her family's country house, received a letter from a friend in Berlin telling her that Liebknecht had become a boogeyman, used to frighten children to go to bed. It wasn't a joke. In the same letter, the friend said, None of us can tell how soon we may be sleeping at the side of the little pale 17-year-old milliner's girl who was shot on her way home in the green shady groves of the burial ground where the victims of the March Revolution of 1848 are buried. Gustav Meyer wrote in his diary that Liebknecht's terror of the streets would sink Germany into the night of barbarism and lead to the disintegration of everything. A former army general who was calling up a volunteer militia to defend Germany and the government told his first recruits that the Spartacus were the greatest threat to the fatherland and would drag the whole place down to the level of Russia unless they were stopped. Quote, this threat is huge. This Rosa Luxemburg is a female devil and Liebknecht the fellow who takes risks and knows exactly what he wants. More than anything, this group wants to prevent the convening of the National Assembly, since the National Assembly will lead to something these people don't want, namely peace and the restoration of law and order in the country. Rosa Luxemburg can today destroy the German Empire without punishment, since there is no powerful institution which can oppose her. On the morning of December 24th, Christmas Eve, Germans awoke to the sound of artillery and rifle and machine gun fire erupting near the Berlin city center. Those who went outside to look saw pillars of smoke rising in the direction of the blasts. It was a full blown battle. Back in November, with the backing of the War Minister and Commander of Berlin's city guard, a detachment of armed sailors of the German Navy had been assigned to protect several important buildings in the government district from looting. They were quartered nearby in a makeshift barracks in the Royal Palace and in its stables, but by mid-December, the sailors were suspected not only of supporting the Spartacists, but had been looting the very buildings that they had been assigned to protect. The city commander wanted them out, but the sailors demanded ransom before they would vacate the premises. The government, of course, refused to even discuss that, and on December 23, two groups of sailors burst into a meeting of the Council of People's Deputies and threatened to arrest and imprison everybody present unless their demands were met. At the same time that this was happening, some sailors got into a gunfight with the government patrol on the main street, leaving one sailor dead and another injured. Armed sailors, with support from the Spartacists, surrounded the chancellery building and the headquarters of the city guard, arrested the guard commander and two of his aides, and brought them back to the palace as hostages. Ebert, who for a month and a half had appeased these radicals and tried to delay any kind of direct confrontation until elections made confrontation unnecessary, called on the army for help. To the government's horror, only about 800 men showed up. That was how many soldiers the government in Berlin had at its command. Ernst von Salomon, the 16-year-old who joined up with the Freikorps militia after the army had passed through his town, was one of them. The small force was ordered to assault and disarm the sailors and Spartacus in the palace complex if they refused to give themselves up voluntarily, and it was already clear that they had no intention of doing that. A perimeter was established around the royal palace. But the people of Berlin, many of them, were simply walking back and forth like it was a normal day. Salomon writes, quote, There was a crack from the wall above my head, flew dust and splinters of stone. A man came headlong around the corner, flattened himself against the wall, and laughed. I laughed too. Some women peeped out of the porches, and people passed to and fro unconcernedly. I shouted, Halt! A nod of people collected rapidly. A shot was fired from the palace. You can't pass here, I said, and pulled my coat collar up over my chin. A hand grenade dangled from my belt. The NCO appeared. It's a non-commissioned officer for all you non-military folks. The NCO appeared. We both hurried to get behind the advertising column. There was a large crowd in front of the palace. The general is trying to come to terms with them, said the NCO. Then the rest of my squad appeared, running with their rifles in front of them. We're to go as reinforcements. Why? What's up? Orders are that no one else is to pass. A line of sentries surrounded the palace square. What's up? We already locked up the comrades, and the general wanted to arrange matters with them. But then the sailors all came out, and some others as well, and now they're all amongst us. Get back there! We fell in. Suddenly, we were in the middle of things. And as suddenly, I found myself alone, hardly within sight of the NCO's tin hat. A woman planted herself directly in my way and laughed in my face. She was fat and gray, and was wearing a coarse gray overall. There were gaps in her teeth, and she had a wart at the side of her nose. I wondered what she was laughing at, with her arms folded over a mighty paunch and decided that it was at me. Devil take the woman, the hag. I felt like ramming the barrel of my rifle in her face. But I turned away. If only I didn't look so young. Other people came too. They stood close around me, and presently some sailors joined them, carrying rifles and wearing red sashes. They looked at me and one of them said, What are you fighting against us for, lad? Send your officers to the devil. You don't want to follow those slave drivers. I did not know what to do. However, to my relief, I saw the NCO returning. He pushed his way through, looked at the sailors and said, Come off it. Mind your own damn business. There was a stir in the square. Get back! The NCO shouted suddenly and put his rifle to his shoulder. A space was cleared instantly. There was a horrible noise and women screamed. The sailors ran under the archway. We advanced slowly. At the window, I saw a young fellow with red hair, a sailor who leaned out and took a good look at us. Then he quietly removed the pin from his hand grenade. A bang! We flopped down. The devil! It crashed into the pavement. I leapt up and tore back. There were bangs and whistles. Three men were already lying behind the pillar. And in the square here and there were bundles. Queer, dark, gray, long drawn out shadows. The NCO was at my side. Where the devil is the machine gun, damn it? At that moment, it began firing from behind the other pillar. This way! shouted the NCO. Then came the second machine gun. We moved closer together. Now go ahead. Yes, you. Let's see what you can do. That's it. Stop. Not yet. Bring around this way first. Shoot off that chap's head on the bridge. The rattling muzzle leapt forward, kicked back. I got the range of the row of windows where the young sailor had stood. He was there again and turned a gun on to us and fired in our direction. I aimed, fired. The window was empty. We lay there for a long time. Bullets hailed around us. We fired back. Good lads, said the NCO. Get back, someone shouted. Why? What for? Oh, I see. We crawled back hastily. At the corner, a big gun on its slender wheel stood in position. We had hardly got back before somebody touched it off. There was a roar. The shell screamed over our heads in burst, tearing a hole in the façade, scattering stones. Out of the window was hurled half the body of a man, which was caught and remained hanging in the arches. Slowly, the night drew on. End quote. When I read through these accounts, I have to keep reminding myself that they are taking place in the middle of a populated city. You hear stories from guys who were in Iraq. Jockos told me these stories, being in the middle of insane firefights in Ramadi. And he or one of his guys would kick down the nearest door and dive inside for cover, and they'd look around and they're just in a house with pictures on the wall and children's toys and a mother and a couple kids hiding under a table in the next room and outside just automatic weapons fire and explosions and people screaming. Most of us are fortunate enough to have no idea what that's like, especially to be on the receiving end of it. What it's like to have the sidewalk outside your front door turned into a war zone. These masses of civilians presented a major problem for the assaulting soldiers, many of whom were reluctant to fire their guns even as they were being fired upon from behind and within the crowds. The sailors and some Spartacus supporters used this to their advantage. They rounded up more and more people to fill the square and whip them up so that many of them, unarmed but numerous, began to confront the soldiers themselves, like that woman did to Ernst von Salomon. Many of the demonstrators who flooded the square in support of the sailors were women, and many of them brought their children, further complicating things for the assault force. And even as all this was going on, people were still strolling the streets and drinking in bars just a few blocks behind the battle line. Salomon continues, Opposite the Admiralty House, Sergeant Purcell Fell, Shot through the head. He was a man who had fought all through the war from the very first day, and he had come through with a few very light wounds in the Iron Cross First Class. There he lay, by a wooden fence, and his brains were splashed all over it. Above him was a big yellow notice about a ball for some charity for war widows, and behind the fence were the booths and tents of an amusement park, where every evening there were merry-go-rounds and scenic railways and girls enjoying themselves. We carried him through the narrow streets crowded with people, past places of amusement, whence hot red lights shone through the opening doors. As we went by, panting for breath, we heard music from bars and dancing saloons. We saw profiteers and prostitutes, noisy and drunk. Saw the townspeople and their wives sitting in private boxes, at tables bright with glasses and bottles. They danced their feverish erotic dances on glassy floors, while the last stray shots of our companions were still sounding in the distance. We exchanged shots with snipers. We tore around corners, hugging the walls, our rifles at full cock, looking for openings. We crouched behind hastily piled up barricades. We lay behind advertising columns and lamp standards. We forced doors and stormed up dark staircases. We shot at anyone carrying arms who did not belong to our company. And every now and then, men would fall who had not been carrying arms. And sometimes women and even children. And the bullets whistled over their bodies. Behind our line, prostitutes were strolling about. They sauntered up and down the Friedrichstrasse while the shooting went on in the Unter den Linden. They approached anyone who stood to rest for a moment, giving us, who were still in the grip of this confused battle, who were still sighting the enemy over our rifles, a curious feeling of nausea. It was not the whispered solicitation that seemed so intolerable. It was the calm, matter-of-fact way in which they snatched at our bodies, those bodies which a moment before had been exposed to rivers of bullets pouring from the machine guns. We forced our way through the disorder in the streets. All our nerves strung up to their highest pitch. We pushed past hordes of beggars, of wounded soldiers, of blind men. Artillery rounds had torn huge chunks out of the buildings, and window glass covered the streets in the square. The sailors opened up with machine guns on the soldiers from a window who returned efficient fire and made the machine guns go silent. Assault soldiers rushed across the square and prepared to force their way into the palace, but they came under fire from more sailors shooting out of the windows and from the roof. Just in that one place and time, in that moment, four soldiers were killed and ten were wounded. The rest of them managed to get across the open space and pressed themselves against the wall of the palace where the sailors had trouble getting an angle to fire on them. They blew a door open with hand grenades and rushed in. Soldiers and sailors exchanged a few shots and then they fought hand to hand in this large, beautiful ballroom used by the royal family for their most important receptions. Fists flew, boots stomped faces, knives and bayonets entered bodies. Civilians entered behind the soldiers and some tried making off with the fancy things in the palace and so the soldiers were forced to divide their effort between fighting the sailors and thwarting the looters. To make matters worse, more left revolutionaries were arriving to reinforce the sailors, while at the same time, the Berlin Chief of Police, Emil Eichhorn, who had been appointed at the insistence of the independent socialist back in November, not only refused to reinforce the government soldiers, but set up blocks and checkpoints to prevent the government from reinforcing them. He was even providing the sailors and their allies with weapons and ammunition from the armory of the city police. It was soon clear to the ground commanders that there was no way to dislodge the sailors without mowing down huge numbers of civilians. Finally, the soldiers were ordered to abandon the assault and pull back. The sailors and their allies had lost 11 killed and 23 wounded, but the army had lost 56 killed and 35 wounded. Both sides had retrieved their own dead before an official count could be made, and both sides disputed those numbers, so they're not exactly clear, but that's what you'll find in most mainstream accounts today. In addition to the fighting men, an unknown but large number of civilians were killed and wounded as well. The general commanding the operation complained, My men had already made it into the palace when a negotiator came from the stables asking to negotiate. I agreed and gave a twenty-minute respite according to conditions. During this time, the city commander and his adjutants were released. Meanwhile, crowds of people wound up by Spartacus leaders and filled with women and children were set in movement against my soldiers. As a result, my units, who under no circumstances were to fire at women and children, were taken out of the battle. Some of them were pushed aside. It came to a pause in the firing, and I withdrew my troops back to the university. Another officer told the exact same story. A ceasefire made it possible for the unarmed mob, including many women and children, to intervene against my soldiers. My soldiers do not fire at women and children. I too ruled that out. That's why we failed. A couple of my soldiers were pushed away. They put down their weapons, and the remainder returned back to the university. The excuses were irrelevant to the effect that it had on the city. The front soldiers, upon whom the frightened people of Berlin had placed all their hopes, the last line of defense against Bolshevism and chaos had just been defeated, driven back. Rumors spread that Liebnick had already seized power, and that Spartacus, backed by armed Russian POWs, were taking control of key points in the city. More rumors that 30,000 armed revolutionary sailors were marching to Berlin from the northern port towns to reinforce Liebnick's forces. Some military officers were even demanding to be released from their service so that they could return to their homes to defend their families. Other rumors had it that the Spartacus were set to attack the headquarters of the German army on New Year's Eve. In the chancellery building, Ebert ordered that ladders be put up in case he and his government had to take to the rooftops to escape. Ebert's family had fled their home after receiving a phone call warning that they would soon come under attack by the Spartacists. Ebert himself later recalled about these days around Christmas 1918 that he, quote, expected to be killed every night, end quote. Amidst the panic, the government issued a proclamation attacking the Spartacists and specifically Liebknecht and Luxembourg in the most aggressive terms yet. Quote, It is them, they are the ones whom we accuse, day after day they have blamed our comrades and the government for every crime. Even though they are waiting in blood, the only word that they still know is bloodhound. They who pretend to struggle for the revolution and want nothing but anarchy, destruction, terror. For them, the Russian wasteland and its starving people are not enough. They're striving to create another wasteland in Germany. They preach world revolution, but they will only achieve one thing, the end of the world. End quote. The next day, Christmas Day, Liebman joined several groups of sailors who participated in the battle to lead thousands of supporters on a demonstration through the streets of Berlin. As was customary, they stopped at important symbolic spaces and made their speeches. Only now, they were much more saturated with calls for and the necessity of sacrificial violence. When the demonstration wound down, a group of the protesters made their way to the newspaper district and forced their way into the building of the Social Democrats' newspaper, Vorwärts, and briefly occupied it, leaving only once they had secured a promise to print a revolutionary declaration on the front page of the next day's paper. This incident created a new wave of rumors that Liebknecht had seized control of the government. It's really important to remember, people were not following events minute by minute on their smartphones. Berlin was an enormous city. There was no such thing as television, no such thing as radio. Newspapers came once, maybe twice a day, maybe there was an evening edition. In any way, they often contradicted each other. It was extremely difficult, even for well-connected people, even people in government, to get a grip on what was actually going on. In a pressurized, confusing environment like this, rumors spread like wildfire and so many unprecedented things were happening so fast that nobody had any point of reference to tell fact from fiction. Every time you said, no, that's impossible, that can't be, well guess what, something crazier just got proven true. The famous journalist and author Victor Klempurer in Leipzig at the time wrote that, quote, At this point, there is only confusion and darkness. Anything is possible. It has never been so chaotic in Germany, end quote. The interference of civilians during the assault, while it may have eased the pride of soldiers beaten back by a ragtag band of revolutionaries, it also had another effect. They had seen how the sailors and their allies had used the civilians as weapons against them, as human shields, and that the civilians, many of them at least, seemed happy to help. And a consensus started to form among the military men and the Freikorps that it was precisely their willingness to negotiate, their hesitancy to fire through the crowds of civilians that had caused their defeat. And this all played very well into the already prevalent belief among German front soldiers that they had lost the Great War because the army had been betrayed by civilians on the home front, the very people they were now refusing to shoot. And this opinion was not only held by soldiers. Referring to the soldiers' unwillingness to kill civilians, Karl Homme, the historian, wrote in his diary, quote, This humanitarian stupidity is turning into a crime because it has the effect that revolt, which at the beginning could be choked with little blood, grows like an avalanche and finally costs entire rivers, not to even look at all the other destruction. One can hardly see how things can be brought under control without an invasion by the Entente, end quote. The next day, social democrats called a demonstration to march against the bloody dictatorship of the Spartacus League. Quote, We do not want violence or civil war. We want freedom and unity. This does not need to be emphasized any more. But we know, too, that the others have set their aims upon raw force and civil war. At no point must we forget that we must be ready at every minute to stand up for our comrades in the government and for social democracy to the very end. Should it nevertheless occur that Liebnick and his people succeed through a surprise attack to come into possession of government buildings, it is the duty of the organized working class to turn up the following day with their fists ready to throw them out. We the people must show them that we will not allow them to walk all over us. If they failed, said the SPD, Germany would succumb to the dictatorship of terror and the order of the graveyard. Posters went up all over Central Berlin, warning that a Spartacus victory would mean, quote, anarchy, Bolshevist terror, robbery, plunder and murder. Therefore workers, citizens, comrades, if you want to save future and if you care about your lives and the lives of your women and children, protect yourself from Spartacus. Protect yourself from Liebknecht. Support the government. Make it strong. Do not allow a gang of criminals to take its place. End quote. The press of the moderate socialists, the liberals, conservative, even the right-wing nationalists, were all in agreement that it was government inaction, the unwillingness of the government to take harsh decisive measures that had brought Germany to this point. And there were loud calls for large-scale military suppression of the Spartacists. The SPD's demonstration was to take place on December 29, the same day as the mass revolutionary funerals for the sailors killed in the Christmas Eve battle. In a deliberate move to delegitimize the Spartacists and their supporters, the social democrats announced that neither the dead sailors nor any future revolutionaries who died opposing the government would be permitted a burial in the graveyard of the fallen of March, which held the remains of those killed in the 1848 revolution, as well as those who died in the first phase of the revolution in November 1918. Both sides came out in force. The independent socialists who until now had remained in the shaky coalition with the social democrats now marched with the anti-government demonstrators. And this marked the end of the compromise and the breakup of the Council of People's Deputies. The social democrats just brought in their own people to replace them. They had the backing of the main centrist and liberal parties, and again even some support from the right. The anti-government demonstrators displayed their rifles and machine guns, and the pro-government supporters displayed theirs. Armored cars patrolled the streets for both sides. Gustav Meier in his diary entry marking the new year wrote. And where all moral relationships have been put into question. We live the days which follow an unprecedented earthquake, unsure if the last tremor was the worst, unsure if it makes any sense to go to the rubble and begin to rebuild, since everything which still stands today might at any moment also end up in the dust. More and more right-wing Freikorps militias, manned by young zealots like Ernst von Salomon and veteran front soldiers, poured into Berlin. The government's general commitment to nonviolence and compromise had so far mostly kept these guys on the leash, but they were pulling against it hard. They had all witnessed scenes like the one Salomon described, scenes of loyal German soldiers being harassed, spat upon, beaten by crowds wearing red armbands, wounded winners of the Iron Cross, humiliated by unwashed mobs, high on the feeling of lording over the soldiers. They'd seen their German Imperial flag, the flag their friends had died for, dragged through the mud behind carriages on the street, burned by crowds. All the symbols for which the soldiers had given everything and seen their brothers killed turned into objects of contempt and mockery. And since the glorious November Revolution that destroyed the centuries-old dynasties of Germany, they'd watched these revolutionaries do nothing but tear their country apart. All this from the very people in the eyes of the soldiers whose home front strikes and revolution had broken the back of the German war effort. And they wanted revenge so badly, they practically had blood running from their eyes. A week into 1919, the Radicals gave them their opportunity. It started when the Berlin Chief of Police, Emil Eichhorn, the one who'd armed and aided the sailors against the government soldiers on Christmas Eve, got into a dispute with the Interior Minister, who was a Social Democrat and who had authority over the Berlin Police. Well, at least theoretically, he had authority, because technically there was no Constitution yet, no government that had been legitimized by national elections. And the Interior Minister didn't command any forces capable of telling Eichhorn or his police force what to do. The Social Democrats said that they were the government. Independent Socialists and the Spartacists said they weren't. And there was no higher authority to whom either side could appeal. A government's final appeal, the final appeal of every state, from the most open and representative to the most totalitarian, is violence. A serviceable definition of the state is the entity that reserves for itself a monopoly on legitimate violence. But Ebert and the Social Democrats had just shown that they were unable to dislodge a handful of sailors from the royal stables. And so Icahorn told the Interior Minister to go jump in a lake. He said, I don't recognize your authority over me. I don't work for you. I work for the people. And so Ebert and the name of the government fired Icahorn, and the independent Socialists and the Spartacists hit the roof, telling their followers that the police force was the last institutional bastion of the revolution and the last defense against Ebert's government imposing a reign of terror on the city and in the country. They called on all workers to hit the streets on January 5th, 1919, in support of Icahorn. That day, some 700,000 people took to the streets of Berlin under the red flag of revolution. At first, the demonstrations looked like just a larger version of the countless other demonstrations that had taken place over the last two months. Crowds of people with red armbands, banners, red flags, marching from one symbolic space to another, stopping for speeches and moving on. But the tone was different. After the Christmas Eve battle seemed to show the limits of the social Democrats' power, the anti-government forces were feeling very confident. The speeches given during this march became more and more violent and confrontational at each stop. They said the compromise in November had been a mistake all along, that they had failed to recognize that Ebert and the social Democrats were nothing less than counter-revolutionary Trojan horses, that once the revolution began, they should have kept pressing and not given these traitors an opportunity to hijack it. As the demonstrators made their way toward the city center, toward the government district, they occasionally encountered soldiers in uniform who were mocked, spat upon, their patches and awards ripped off, sometimes beaten and left lying on the street. The crowd grew as it moved, and by the time it reached its final destination, the police presidium, it was gigantic. Many of them were armed, and armored cars with mounted machine guns patrolled the boundaries of the demonstration. The crowd called out for Eichhorn, who was inside the police presidium, and he came out onto a balcony to speak. He told the crowd that he did not receive his position from this so-called government, but from the revolution, from all the people assembled there. He said he would only give it back to the revolution, back to the people, and if the so-called government wanted to try and take it, they were welcome to try. Well, the crowd loved that and was becoming more and more excited by the minute. Then Liebknecht emerged on a balcony and told the crowd to be ready. If the government went ahead with its plans to elect a national assembly, be ready to disperse the government by force. He told everyone who didn't have a weapon to get one and to form an iron ring around the police presidium. He called the leaders of the Social Democrats criminals and said that they would be treated like criminals. Now is the time for the most determined struggle of the revolutionary proletariat. It must do more than protect the gains of the revolution which it still holds to ensure that they are not stolen by this government of Ebert. It must make this revolution into a socialist revolution, which in turn must become world revolution. Count Harry Kessler was present and wrote, ...only a part of Leibniz's words were intelligible, but his sing-song inflection carried over the heads of the silent and attentive crowd right across the square. When he ended, there was a roar of approval, red flags were flourished, and thousands of hands and hats rose in the air. He was like an invisible priest of the Revolution, a mysterious but sonorous symbol to which these people raised their eyes. The demonstration seemed halfway between a Roman mass and a Puritan prayer meeting. The wave of Bolshevism surging in from the East resembles somewhat the invasion by Islam in the seventh century. Fanaticism and power in the service of a nebulous fresh hope are faced, far and wide, by nothing more than the fragments of old ideologies. The banner of the prophet waves at the head of Lenin's armies too. End quote. After dark, the demonstrations broke up, and demonstrators made their way in small groups back to their neighborhoods, calling out to people in the houses and buildings, saying that the time for talk was over, the time for action had come. About 600 of the demonstrators did not go home. They made for the newspaper district, again headed for the building of Vorwärts, the Social Democrats' newspaper. The building was being guarded by about 80 men under the command of the city guards, and although they had a couple machine guns with them, they decided against getting into a nighttime gunfight with the 600 armed people coming their way. The demonstrators waltzed right in, rifles at their shoulders, hand grenades dangling from their belts. Piles of posters were hauled out to the front of the building, posters that were meant for the campaigns for the upcoming National Assembly election, and they were all set on fire. They used the Vorwärts printers to make posters insulting the paper and declaring that the workers had once again taken it over. More groups of protesters broke into the buildings of other newspapers and occupied them as well. Others took over the telegraph bureau. Others took over several important business buildings. Back at the police presidium, a meeting was being held by the leaders of the anti-government revolutionary groups. There were about 90 people present, including the leaders of the revolutionary shop stewards, the independent socialists, and the former Spartacus League, which had officially reconstituted itself as the German Communist Party, the KPD. The topic being discussed was whether it was time for a second revolution, this time to overthrow the social democratic government. When they'd met the night before to discuss the same question, even the extremists of the KPD were against it. But now, less than 24 hours later, after seeing 700,000 people take to the streets at their command, they were drunk on success. The commander of the People's Navy Division spoke up and said that the sailors were ready to fight, that he could call on tens of thousands if necessary, and that he was confident the whole Berlin garrison of soldiers would join them. Some people stood up to say that that was unlikely, but just then a group of supporters rushed into the meeting room and told them that to the west of Berlin in Spandau, quote, large masses are already waiting to rush to our help if necessary with 2,000 machine guns and 20 artillery pieces, end quote. Others reported that thousands of men in Frankfurt were ready to fight for the revolution if they were called on. The skeptics were shouted down as the leaders of the three main factions started to believe that the moment they had been waiting for had come. Liebman gave an impassioned speech and said his people were making preparations to take Ebert and other influential opponents and government officials prisoner that very night. Just then another group rushed in, reported that the masses had spontaneously seized control of the newspaper district and part of the business district, as well as the telegraph office. Well, that settled it. From the sound of things, the revolution was already on, and so they decided, in the words of one of the people present, to go for the whole thing. Only six of the ninety people present opposed the idea, and the debate was over. The revolutionary executive was hastily elected and placed under the direction of Leibniz and Paul Schultz, a leader of the revolutionary shop stewards. An announcement was sent out, calling on the workers to join them in overthrowing the government of Ebert the next day. The red flag told its communist readers that it was time to defend the revolution with their bodies. The proletariat of the entire Reich is watching Berlin at this time. There is only one solution. Fight until your last breath. When the crowds assembled the next day, Liebmanck told them that this was no show of force. This was no demonstration of intent. This was the revolution. And they were to paralyze the city until the social democrats relinquished their hold on government. Count Harry Kessler, who embedded himself in the crowd to record all these events, wrote, Berlin has become a witch's cauldron, whereupon opposing forces and ideas are being brewed together. Today, history is in the making, and the issue is not only whether Germany shall continue to exist in the shape of the Reich, but whether East or West, war or peace, an exhilarating vision of utopia, or the humdrum everyday world shall have the upper hand. Not since the great days of the French Revolution has humanity depended so much on the outcome of street fighting in a single city. With no credible forces to oppose the communists, the government passed a resolution legalizing the Freikorps militias and called on them to defend the government from Bolshevik tyranny. By late morning, the streets were filled with supporters of the hostile camps. Philip Scheidemann addressed a crowd of Freikorps men and pro-government demonstrators who had assembled to protect the Reich Chancellery building. Quote, Things cannot continue the way they have gone up to now. This dirty mess has to be brought to an end. If it continues like this, we will all starve. It cannot be tolerated that a small minority rules the people. Today, that's just as unacceptable as before. The entire people must decide, and the minority must give way to the majority. That's why we are demanding the National Assembly. You have formed a living wall around us here, but you must wait a little longer, for we are busy with important decisions, which we will immediately tell you about. We appeal to the entire people, especially those who are armed, the soldiers, that they remain available to the government. As he spoke, Scheidemann was interrupted by cheers and by loud demands that weapons be distributed to the crowd. When the debates inside the Chancellery were finished and the important decisions had been reached, Ebert appeared at a window and told people that Germany was on the brink of civil war imposed by an extremist minority and warned that all women and children in the crowd should return to their homes immediately. Another official addressed the crowd, telling them that the Russian Bolsheviks had sent veteran revolutionaries to help overthrow their government and that even now they were making plans to flood Germany with Red Army soldiers and to use the Reich as a staging ground to renew the war against France and Britain. There will be further loss of blood. It was difficult for us to declare our agreement when we know that there will be shooting at women and children, shooting at fathers and mothers. But the Spartacus gang will have it no other way, and now we too must act. Soldiers, those of you who did your duty there in the field, you have to realize that it is now your duty to see to it that order returns to Berlin. That we obtain peace, and that you can finally take off the rags which you have had to wear for four and a half years. Finally, now is the time to bring things to an end. Women and children, go home. Don't be like the Spartacus who pushed women and children to the front. Now the work of the men has begun. End quote. That was music to the ears of the men of the Freikorps. By the late afternoon, gunfire and mortars were heard in various parts of the city, as anti-government demonstrators clashed with armed supporters of the government and with Freikorps soldiers. A group of heavily armed communists surrounded the barracks of the city guard and demanded that the men come out and join the fight on their side. When they refused, the communists opened up on the building with machine guns. The soldiers inside managed to negotiate a ceasefire on the condition that they were to remain in the barracks under communist guard. Karl Liebnick went to the palace to rouse the People's Naval Division, the very sailors who'd fought government soldiers on Christmas Eve. But they refused. And slowly, it began to dawn on the communists and their supporters that they did not have anywhere close to the support they thought they had. The leaders of the insurrection came together for another meeting, and this time all the enthusiasm of the previous night had evaporated. Karl Radek, the veteran Russian Bolshevik, told them that the decision to take down the government had been a mistake, and three days later he would be begging them to call the whole thing off. Over the next two days, the streets were relatively quiet because they were dominated by pro-government forces. The rebels fell into depression as the reality of their situation dawned on them. The newspaper of the independent socialists called for negotiations with the government to avoid the coming reckoning, but the communist red flag remained strident. Rosa Luxemburg, who just days before had written that their movement would never under any circumstances try to seize power by force, but only with the full support of the people, now excoriated those who wanted to give up without seeing the fight through to the end. Quote, It is not only necessary to storm the imperial chancellery and chase away or arrest a handful of people, more than anything, it means to seize every single position of power and make use of them, end quote. She especially went after the people calling for negotiations with what she called their mortal enemies. On January 9th, the Communist Party ordered their supporters to launch an armed insurrection. If Luxemburg's abhorrence of negotiations was not shared by many on her own side, she had good company among her mortal enemies. The pro-government and non-socialist press were demanding swift, decisive, violent action to put an end to the Spartacists once and for all. They needed to be taught a lesson. Pedagogic violence is the term used in many academic histories of this period. Violence to show the whole country what this government, which had lost all deterrents after the battle on Christmas Eve, was willing to do to defend its prerogatives. The government issued an announcement. Force can only be fought with force. The organized force of the people will bring an end to oppression and anarchy. The enemy's individual successes, which they exaggerate in a ridiculous way, are only of temporary importance. The hour of revenge draws near. And with that, the men of the Freikorps were let off their leashes. Eight divisions of them streamed into the city. Ernst von Salomons was among them. His unit marched through the suburbs toward the city center, and residents of the houses and apartments cheered them through flowers in their path. Entering the city proper, they joined with more and more Freikorps units streaming in on every street. They set up shop and empty school houses and offices on the outskirts, staged their supplies and ammunition, cleaned their weapons one last time before storming the city center. Shots rang out in the distance, and they were impatient to get into the fight. Finally they moved out, toward an apartment building known to be a hotbed of rebellion. Kicked in the door and stormed it. We were back on the staircase and hardly knew which way to go. The whole house was in an uproar and fiercely hostile to us. It seemed to be charged with hatred, with poverty, with a hundred unknown lurking dangers. In the building, dwellings were huddled close together, like cells in a honeycomb. Life seemed to be a continuous stream, only broken up here and there by walls. The rooms and cupboards threatened to burst with a terrible mixture of smells diffused by the closely hurted bodies. We searched dwelling by dwelling. There were dark landings on which stood pales and broken brooms. Sooty lamps hung so low that more than one swung against our helmets. The boards groaned and splintered under our tread. Our feet kicked against the mortar and balks of wood. The ceilings, and how low those ceilings were, showed bare laths and crumbling plaster. Each door was close beside the next one. If one was open to us, the others flew open too. And in a moment, the passage was full of people. Men, women, and a great many children. Children of all sizes, mostly half naked and unspeakably dirty. Their arms and legs so thin, they looked as if they would break if they were touched. They stood on the threshold of their miserable, gloomy rooms, and hundreds of eyes seemed to be looking at us. While the others went inside, I stood outside the door and faced them alone. Hatred diffused itself about me like a cloud, and a confused battle of jeers re-echoed around me. Women pushed by me and laughed and then spat on the floor. And the men, with shirts open so that I could see the rough hair on their chests, shouted to one another, Let's kill these swine and take the bastard's gun away. But they did me no harm. They only raised their fists and shook them in my face and imitated the squashing of a bug between their fingers. This went on till the others came out and went on to the next dwelling. I passed in with them and examined the place. It was a room not more than 12 feet square and crammed full of beds. Seven people were sleeping in this space, men, women and children. Two women were still in bed and each had a child with her. As we entered, one of them laughed shrilly and breathlessly, and the people outside crowded to the doorstep. The NCO approached and the woman suddenly shrieked and kicked off the bedclothes and pulled up her nightgown and then burst out laughing. We recoiled and the crowd outside yelled. They shrieked with laughter and slapped their thighs. They could not stop laughing. Even the children laughed. Bloodhounds! They screeched. Bloodhounds! The children shouted at as well as the women. And suddenly the whole place was filled up with a howling mob so that we withdrew step by step until we stood in the passage again. This sense of seething disgust permeates the recollections of the Freikorps men sent in to put down the rebellion. As the Freikorps pushed toward the government and newspaper districts, the communists set up barricades on every street, and with rifles and machine guns ready, they prepared for the assault. There were many times more armed rebels than there were Freikorps men, but many of the Freikorps volunteers had come from the elite units of the German Army. Storm troopers like Ernst Younger and they smashed through the communist barricades. With rifles, machine guns, flame throwers and artillery, they stormed buildings with a speed and efficiency that precluded serious resistance, and the communists were routed block after block. The communists had had their chance to go peacefully, and the Freikorps were in no mood to let this opportunity for revenge slip. As they moved through the city, liquidating centers of resistance and searching for weapons caches, they found many Russians fighting alongside the German communists, which intensified their fury. The independent socialists, now trapped in a war they had only tepidly supported, continued to call for negotiations. But Liebknecht in Luxembourg ridiculed and condemned them. Luxembourg was particularly vitriolic in her columns in the Rote Fond, which continued to be published even as this battle raged, at least for a few days. She said that the independent socialists were intent on paralyzing the masses and sowing confusion. She called them a corpse whose products of decomposition poisoned the revolution. On the morning of January 11th, almost a week into the uprising, Freikorps soldiers surrounded and assaulted the Vorwärts building, both a symbolic location and a command and control center for the Communists. The Freikorps brought machine guns and artillery pieces, and about 45 minutes into the assault, as they were reducing the building to rubble, the Communists inside the building sent two couriers to sneak past the Freikorps to deliver a message, but they were caught and taken prisoner. Those two prisoners were brought back to a nearby barracks, and a short time later, five more exited the building under a white flag and were likewise taken prisoner. The rest of the rebels surrendered in less than three hours. Once that happened, the Communists occupying the rest of the newspapers and government buildings abandoned them, putting their red armbands in their pockets or throwing them away as they tried to slip through the streets without being caught. The assault on the Vorwerts building had cost the lives of five Freikorps men, with several others wounded. When it was back up and running, Vorwerts would write, The rage among the soldiers against the Spartacus is particularly strong. One can hardly imagine it. The five prisoners taken at the Vorwerts building were tied up and brought back to the nearby barracks to join the other two. Any mystery about the fate that awaited them was solved the moment they entered the courtyard and saw the two prisoners who had preceded them on the ground. They had been seized by enraged soldiers as soon as they entered, called Russian pigs and beaten to a pulp. When the soldiers were tired of beating them, the two prisoners were stood up, their faces smashed against the wall and they were shot in the back of the head. They were still in the place where they'd been shot when the other five were brought in. And the scene before them was two of their friends slumped against a wall with bits of brain and skull and blood dripping down the wall toward their bodies. Accounts vary on the details of what happened next, but every story ends with all seven prisoners dead. One of the soldiers who was present, Wilhelm Helms, tells a typical version, saying that the prisoners were incapable of action. They were completely covered with blood and no longer looked like humans. They were now only spineless pieces of meat. Quote, the prisoners were lined up, then they were shot. The command, fire, was given. The first two were shot around eight times. The effects were so terrible that their brains were left on the ground, as if one was buying brains in a butcher's shop. Afterwards, someone happily shot again at the bodies, as one of them was allegedly still moving. This was almost an hour later. However, there was no command given for this. The group of five were treated in a more precise manner. They were lined up against a wall. They could hardly walk, and some of them were partially led there. They stood against the wall, some of them already collapsing. Twenty men lined up and shot them. A sergeant took command and organized the soldiers, who in fact did the shooting when he ordered fire. End quote. Rosa Luxemburg, who like Liebknecht was in hiding, moving from one supporter's flat to another every day as Freikorps men tore through the city looking for them, wrote her final article on January 14, 1919. Focusing on the massacre at the barracks, she wrote, quote, The government's rampaging troops massacred the mediators who had tried to negotiate the surrender of the Vorwärts building, using their rifle butts to beat them beyond recognition. Prisoners were lined up against the wall and butchered so violently that skull and brain tissue splattered everywhere. In view of such glorious deeds, who would remember the soldiers' ignominious defeat at the hands of the French, British, and Americans? That last jab was meant to hurt. Luxembourg had recently written to a friend telling her that she now wished to die for the cause, and mocking the Freikorps for Germany's loss of the war was a good way of making sure that happened. She would get her wish the following night. Liebknecht was captured first, when he was discovered hiding out in the Eden Hotel, and a detail was assigned to transport him to the jail. As they marched him out to a waiting car, a group of soldiers swarmed him, beat him with their fists, feet, and rifle butts until he was insensible. The detail got Liebknecht back from the mob of soldiers and rushed into the open top car, but before they left, one more soldier jumped onto the running boards and punched Liebknecht in the face. As the car pulled off, the soldier returned to his cheering comrades, holding his bloody fist in the air in triumph. The car drove off into the dark to Tiergarten Park, where the men threw Liebknecht out of the car and executed him. Then they took his body to a nearby morgue. 30 minutes later, Rosa Luxemburg was discovered hiding in the same hotel as Liebknecht. As she was being let out through the lobby, crowds of soldiers and civilians insulted her and shouted that she would be beaten to death. As she exited through the hotel's revolving door, she was met by a soldier who bashed her twice in the head with his rifle butt. And then she was lost in a crowd of soldiers who set upon her with tremendous fury, beating her senseless. A mass of blood, she was thrown into the back of a truck, and it was about, as it was about to pull away, the soldier stood up on the truck and put a bullet in her head. The next day, when the truck was examined, there was still blood almost an inch deep in the bed. Her body was driven away, weighed down, and dumped into a canal where it wouldn't be found for several months. Thus did the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 come to an end. The Freikorps had routed the Communists so efficiently that many of the insurgents abandoned the fight before it came to them and did their best to melt into the crowd and disappear. And so as a result, only about 150 to 200 people were killed and a larger number, of course, wounded. Over the next several months, thousands will be killed in Germany as the Freikorps bounced from region to region putting down Communist insurrections. But these men, born of blood and fire, were not ready to lay down their arms and return to offices, factories and mines. They were not prepared to go back to the world of bank loans and grocery lists and arrogant bosses who had never been in the trenches. These were men of war, and men of war they would remain. When their work in Germany was complete, they would turn east toward Germany's poorest frontier, beyond which Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Balts, Finns and others set upon each other and upon the ethnic German minorities in their midst with a savage fury that would leave millions dead in wars of annihilation for which the trenches were no education. And many people, among them Adolf Hitler, but not only in Germany, throughout the West, were beginning to notice a pattern, could not help but notice it, among the leading figures who plunged the defeated empires into chaos.

Speaker 2:
[243:59] My dear fellow Germans, we are already used to being called monsters. And it is perceived as particularly monstrous that we are in the vanguard on the question that most unnerves certain gentlemen in Germany today, namely the question of opposition to the Jews. Our people understands so much, but this one thing we do not want to understand, and above all because the worker asks, what does the Jewish question have to do with the workers at all?