nationalism. They had supported the war. No less
a personage than Field Marshal von Hindenburg,
testified that Ebert was sound and ‘loved his
fatherland’.
But this kind of ‘tame’ revolution did not satisfy
the more politically active. In imitation of the
Russian example, ‘soldiers’ and workers’ councils’
sprang up all over Germany. Ebert humoured
them, knowing that the parliamentary constituent
assembly he planned would soon give the gov-
ernment of the Reich a solidly based and legal
foundation. Then, too, the Social Democratic gov-
ernment was so weak that it had no military forces
of its own to resist any group seeking to wrest con-
trol from it. The Spartacists’ insurrections in
December 1918 and January 1919, followed by
political strikes and disorders, although fomented
by a revolutionary party with only little support
among the workers, nevertheless posed a serious
threat to the Ebert government. With the support
of the army command and irregular Free Corps
bands of soldiers, the violence of the extreme left
was met with counter-violence and lawless terror.
The two Spartacist (communist) leaders, Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered.
Violence continued in other parts of Germany
especially in Berlin and Munich. The Free Corps
units, fanatical opponents both of democracy
and of Bolshevism and the forerunners of those
who were to support the Nazis, everywhere, with
excessive brutality, suppressed the militant left.
The Social Democratic government and the
republic survived. What had maintained it in power
was the tacit alliance between Field Marshal von
Hindenburg and General Wilhelm Groener, the
army chief of staff, with Ebert and his government.
Their motives for cooperating with the socialist
government were to maintain German unity and to
prevent the ‘patriotic’ German Social Democrats
from being driven from power by the Bolshevik
‘internationalists’. They also believed that the tra-
ditions of the Prussian army represented the ‘best’
of Germany and that the new emerging Germany
could be imbued with these qualities provided the
Reichswehr retained a position of power in the
state.
It was a misfortune that the Social Democrats
were inevitably stained by the misdeeds of military
excess. The communists had not been suppressed,
only prevented from seizing power. The commu-
nists were never to gain as many votes as the
Social Democrats, but as the Social Democrats
weakened from their high-water mark of support
of 38 per cent of the electorate in 1919, the
Communist Party benefiting from the depression,
recovered to secure 13 per cent of the vote in
1930, which in the free elections in November
1932 rose to 17 per cent. By then the Social
Democratic support had sunk to 20 per cent.
Figures do not fully reveal how this split of the
socialists handicapped the strengthening of the
democratic parliamentary republic in the 1920s.
The growth of the Communist Party to the left
of the Social Democrats competing for the
working man’s vote sapped the will of the Social
Democratic politicians to lead the governments of
the republic boldly, even though they formed the
single largest party in the Reichstag throughout
the 1920s. After 1919 they enjoyed absolute
majority, so had they wished to govern they
would have had to form coalitions with the ‘bour-
geois’ parties of the centre and moderate right.
This, of course, they feared would lay them open
to the cry of having ‘betrayed’ the working class.
The early experiences of the republic also rein-
forced their conclusion that the danger to its
democratic existence arose from an extreme left,
that is, a communist takeover.
We know better now; but the sudden and
huge expansion of the Nazi vote between 1928
and 1932 was entirely unforeseen. The Social
Democrats were afraid of losing votes to the polit-
ical left by collaborating with the ‘bourgeois’
parties in coalition governments; only one of
the sixteen chancellors after 1920 was a Social
Democrat. Between November 1922 until June
1928 (except for a brief period of three months
in 1923) – that is, for the greater part of the life
of the parliamentary republic they had done so
much to create – the Social Democrats refused to
participate in government at all. The parties of the
centre and moderate right formed the basis of all
the coalition governments, sometimes seeking to
strengthen their position in the absence of the
Social Democrats by seeking the more extreme-
right support of the Nationalists. Even so, every