From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement
In Germany, following the events of Christmas 1918, the Independent (USPD) ministers left the Ebert government. Gustav Noske, Rudolf Wissell, and Paul Löbe took their place. With even the mild scruples of people like Haase, Dittmann, and Barth now removed, the Social Democrats showed the face of repression more explicitly. Noske stated his mission without any pretence: One of us must act as executioner
.
The leaders’ indecision
On December 29th, a crowd accompanying to the cemetery the coffins of the sailors who had been killed, held a banner on which was written: We charge Ebert, Landsberg, and Scheidemann with the murder of sailors
. On the same day, the SPD organised a counterdemonstration with the watchword: Down with the Spartacus League’s bloody dictatorship
. Both sides were preparing for civil war.
The masses were in ferment, but without leadership. The November Revolution, victorious without any real fighting, fuelled the myth of the power of the masses and, with it, the illusion of an easy victory. In this climate, the Berlin workers showed their impatience and were tempted by a coup de main. Trotsky, in The History of the Russian Revolution, recalls that in July 1917 there had been a similar state of affairs among the workers and soldiers of Petrograd: Before they could find the way to change the personal composition of the soviets, the workers and soldiers tried to subject the soviets to their will through direct action
.
In Germany, however, revolutionary impatience did not find any organisational counterpart. The class vanguard was indecisive and revealed its internal divisions: it did not succeed either in orienting the workers in the political struggle or, in the face of defeat, in organising an orderly retreat. Trotsky observes again: Indecisiveness in their leaders exhausts the nerves of the masses. Fruitless waiting impels them to more and more insistent knockings at that door which will not open to them, or to actual outbreaks of despair
.
The “Freikorps”
By contrast, the forces of the counter-revolution were organising. At the beginning of December, under pressure from General Hindenburg, Friedrich Ebert had ordered ten divisions from the front, led by General Arnold Lequis, to enter Berlin. Some of these troops would turn their guns on the sailors at Christmas. The armistice signed in the forest of Compiègne allowed an orderly repatriation on the Western front. Thanks to this, Ebert could greet the solemn arrival of these divisions — perfectly lined up, singing patriotic hymns, and waving the Hohenzollerns’ red, black, and white flag — declaring that the German army had not been defeated by the enemy
. He thus endorsed the legend of the stab in the back
struck by an internal enemy, specifically the revolutionaries: a legend which would feed German nationalist revanchism right up to Nazism.
However, the soldiers who returned from the front were worn out by the horrors of war and tired of following the orders of those who had led them to slaughter for four years. Arriving in Berlin, Lequis himself admitted that the influence of the Spartacists’ extraordinary propaganda had made itself felt
. In his testimony at the trial for the stab in the back
, General Wilhelm Groener would state: I had sent ten divisions to Berlin, but we lost control of them
.
As a consequence, after the events of December 24th, when many of Lequis’ troops had already dispersed, it turned out to be difficult to use these soldiers in street fighting. Under Noske’s leadership, the counterrevolution therefore resorted to using the Freikorps (“Free Corps”), the shock troops of repression, trained for civil war. These were paramilitary militias, composed of demobbed and unemployed soldiers, often vagrants in reality, recruited from nationalist right-wing circles.
The Eichhorn case
Although the Independents had left the government, one of them, Emil Eichhorn, remained in charge of the Berlin prefecture. He was very popular with the capital’s workers. An old Social Democratic militant, he was one of the founders of the USPD and was the prefect during the November Revolution. In memory of 1848, and because of his radical democratic positions, he was nicknamed the German Caussidière
. On the eve of repression, the government could not allow a man with revolutionary sympathies to remain at the prefecture. On January 1st, 1919, Vorwärts launched a smear campaign against Eichhorn, accusing him of fraud and armed robbery. On January 4th, the Prussian cabinet decided to replace him with the Social Democrat Ernst, but Eichhorn refused to be removed from office.
On the morning of January 5th, Berlin’s USPD, the Revolutionary Stewards and the KPD staged a protest march in the capital, the size of which surprised even the organisers. A huge tidal wave of workers invaded the heart of the city, from the Siegesallee to Alexanderplatz. Eichhorn stated: I received this post from the revolution and I will hand it over only into the hands of the revolution
.
In reality, the conflict, preceded by a smear campaign against the Spartacists, had clearly been premeditated by the government and presented the opportunity for repression. Maximalism succumbed to provocation: the voices that condemned reckless actions and incidents — including those of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Radek, who feared the repetition of the Commune — gave way to impatience. Karl Liebknecht himself, on the wave of the protests, believed the time was ripe for overthrowing the government, and for creating a new executive headed by the Independent Georg Ledebour.
Until the first days of January the Communist Central Committee ruled out seizing power, but the impression raised by the huge protest march on January 5th, by the exhilarating power of the compact lines of workers, changed their minds. The rather unusual Liebknecht-Ledebour alliance was decisive in luring them into a gamble: it was no longer enough to protest over the Eichhorn case, they had to engage in the battle for power. To this end, a revolutionary committee
was appointed, chaired by representatives of the three workers’ organisations: Ledebour (USPD), Liebknecht (KPD), and Paul Scholze (Revolutionary Stewards). They even signed a proclamation of the future provisional government, to be issued upon seizing power.
As at the founding of the KPD, Rosa Luxemburg again spoke out against the prevalence of adventurist extremism over revolutionary strategy. Warning that it was not possible to go beyond a protest strike, she observed that even if the overthrow of the Ebert government was possible in Berlin, the revolution would remain isolated because the rest of Germany was not ready to act.
On January 6th, an incident occurred beyond the leaders’ control: a number of armed workers, acting autonomously, occupied the head office of Vorwärts and other press organisations. The revolutionary leaders, incapable of either directing or restraining events, let themselves be carried away, stating that the occupation of Vorwärts presented them with a fait accompli
[Ledebour], i.e., it was the start of the uprising.
But already on January 6th, it was becoming clear that the masses were not ready for an armed struggle. The outburst of protest died down and it became brutally clear that the idea of seizing power was a serious mistake.
Meanwhile, the government had not lost any time. Noske concentrated his Free Corps in the capital. An attempt at negotiation, undermined from the start by a government determined to attack, was broken off on January 8th. On the morning of the 11th, the troops shelled the Vorwärts building. The brutality of the repression threw the KPD into confusion.
On behalf of the Bolsheviks, Radek exhorted the organisation to make an orderly retreat, as in Russia in July 1917. But by now, in the disaster of a desperate battle, the Spartacist leaders, including Rosa Luxemburg, were dragged into a heroic but futile resistance, right up to the tragic end. Noske deployed the Freikorps in systematic sweeps of the capital. At least 150 revolutionaries fell in combat or were summarily executed. For days, posters stating Kill Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht
had appeared on Berlin walls. The repression was only just beginning: it would reach its bloodiest phase in the spring.
Three forms of counterrevolution
In the book published by Pantarei, Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Germania (“Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany”), we observed: It is impossible not to grasp how the depths of that counterrevolutionary action produced conditions, men, and ideologies which, just over a decade later, would establish themselves in the Nazi form. In this sense, the paramilitary Free Corps set a new paradigm: their recruitment calls were published calmly in Vorwärts!
.
In his book Defying Hitler: A Memoir the liberal-conservative Sebastian Haffner wrote: We should observe that at the time, in the spring of 1919, when the left-wing revolution tried in vain to take shape, the subsequent Nazi revolution was already ready, there to act and efficient, with only Hitler missing: the Freikorps which at that moment saved Ebert and Noske were the same thing, including their personnel and certainly as regards their opinions, behaviour, and way of fighting, as the future Nazi storm troops. They had already invented ‘killed while escaping’, had notably perfected the science of torture, and were already masters of the magnanimous practice, which anticipated June 30th, 1934, of simply putting their less important adversaries up against the wall, without questions or distinctions
.
In the SPD’s use of the Freikorps, we can see an analogy with the use of the Arditi (“shock troops”) on the part of Fascism in Italy, with the consent of the liberal bourgeois institutions and political forces.
Arrigo Cervetto observed that the counterrevolution in the West has taken on three political forms: Stalinism, Nazi-fascism, and Social Democracy. Despite the different forms, their class content in defence of the bourgeois order revealed itself punctually when faced with revolution.
In a letter to August Bebel of December 11th-12th, 1884, Friedrich Engels had grasped the political forms of the German counterrevolution with foresight: As to pure democracy and its role in the future, I do not share your opinion. Obviously, it plays a far more subordinate part in Germany than in countries with an older industrial development. But that does not prevent the possibility, when the moment of revolution comes, of it acquiring a temporary importance as the most radical bourgeois party […] and as the final sheet-anchor of the whole bourgeois and even feudal regime. At such a moment, the whole reactionary mass falls in behind it and strengthens it; everything which used to be reactionary behaves as democratic
.
At the moment of crisis, Engels continued, the whole bourgeois class and the remnants of the feudal landowning class, a large section of the petty bourgeoisie, and also of the rural population will then mass themselves around the most radical bourgeois party, which will then make the most extreme revolutionary gestures, and I consider it very possible that it will be represented in the provisional government and even temporarily form its majority
.
What Engels could not foresee was that precisely the SPD would become this most radical bourgeois party
.
Lotta Comunista, October 2025