Berlin

Ebert understood that giving in to the sailors would mean abandoning the capital to chaos, but he also knew that he could not face them down without help from the regular army, and that this would come at a price: carte blanche to deal with the radicals as the military saw fit. Full of qualms, he got on his secret line to military headquarters, now at Kassel. General Groner’s aide, Major Kurt von Schleicher, who thirteen years later would serve as Germany’s last chancellor before Hitler, took the call and promised to send a force of Horse Guards from Potsdam to clean up the mess in the capital. A few hours later Ebert got cold feet and tried to cancel the order, but General Groner informed him curtly that he and Field Marshal Hinden-burg were “determined to hold to the plan of liquidation of the Naval Division,” and would “see to it that it is carried out.”

At about midnight on December 23 the Horse Guards and other government troops set up artillery around the palace and began to shoot. One of the first shells tore away the balcony from which Kaiser Wilhelm had declared that he no longer recognized parties, only Germans. After blowing open the main portal, the Guards swarmed into the building, only to discover that the sailors had fled through a tunnel to the nearby Marstall, or stables. Switching their fire to the Marstall, the Guards kept shooting through the night until the beleaguered sailors, having suffered extensive casualties, put out white flags. It was 9:30 in the morning on the day before Christmas.

Before the government troops could take full control of the situation, thousands of proletarian Berliners, called to action by the Spartacists, appeared on the scene and interposed themselves between the soldiers and their quarry in the Marstall. Unwilling to fire on the crowd, which included women and children, the Guards pulled back. Palace Square now belonged to the radical sailors and their civilian saviors.

Christmas Eve undoubtedly seemed like May Day to Berlin’s would-be Bolsheviks, but to most Berliners it was time to celebrate in the traditional holiday fashion, despite, or perhaps because of, all the chaos and continuing deprivations. After strolling the streets of central Berlin, Harry Kessler jotted in his diary:

The Christmas Fair carried on throughout the blood-letting. Hurdy-gurdies played in the Friedrichstrasse while street-vendors sold indoor fireworks, gingerbread, and silver tinsel. Jewelers’ shops in Unter den Linden remained unconcernedly open, their windows brightly lit and glittering. In the Leipziger Strasse the usual Christmas crowds thronged the big stores. In thousands of homes the Christmas tree was lit and the children played around it with their presents from Daddy, Mummy and Auntie dear. In the Imperial Stables lay the dead, and the wounds freshly inflicted on the Palace and on Germany gaped into the Christmas night.

On Christmas day Liebknecht’s followers staged a giant march in the center of the city, culminating in their occupation of the Vorwärts

building, where they ran off red-colored leaflets celebrating the triumph of the “revolutionary sailors’ division, the revolutionary proletariat, [and] the international socialist world revolution.” Reviewing the situation, Kessler saw that the “core of the problem [for the government] is whether there are anywhere any serviceable and reliable troops available. Or, if not, whether the sailors can be bought and bribed to leave. Sheer Byzantine conditions!”

Aware that he could contend with the radicals in the capital only by bringing in stronger forces from outside, Ebert appointed as his commissioner for war one Gus-tav Noske, a tough-minded right-wing Social Democrat who was on good terms with the army command in Kassel. The army was in the process of recruiting new volunteer units called Freikorps, which were more than willing to help put down the “rabble” in Berlin. (Later it would become apparent that some of them were also quite prepared to turn against the democratically elected government.)

For Ebert and company, the offer of assistance came none too soon. On January 4, 1919, the simmering conflict between the provisional government and the radical left in Berlin boiled over when Ebert dismissed Chief of Police Emil Eichhorn, an Independent Socialist with ties to the Spartacists. The Spartakus Union, which together with some left-wing Independents and Revolutionary Shop Stewards had formed the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) on January 1, 1919, mobilized the city’s restless proletariat for a protest march. The following day some 200,000 demonstrators marched through central Berlin to the police headquarters in Alexanderplatz, where a defiant Eichhorn vowed he would not give up his post. Karl Liebknecht, for his part, urged the masses to complete the German revolution.