1918 Christmas crisis
A brief battle that turned the German Revolution violent.
On 24 December 1918, a clash between revolutionary sailors of the Volksmarinedivision and regular German army units erupted at the Berlin Palace, leaving 67 dead. This battle, part of the German Revolution, ended the revolution's largely peaceful phase. The government's attempt to reduce and relocate the sailors sparked the fighting. The violence caused radical members to abandon the revolutionary government and fueled worker resentment toward Friedrich Ebert's Social Democratic government, paving the way for the larger Spartacist uprising in January 1919.
Quick Facts
- Part of
- the German Revolution of 1918–19
- Date
- 24 December 1918
- Location
- Berlin Palace
Facts from the source article.
Background
The Volksmarinedivision formed on 11 November 1918, starting with a few hundred revolutionary sailors from Kiel who had been arrested upon reaching Berlin but freed two days earlier. More sailors from Berlin joined, and on 12 November, Berlin’s military commander Otto Wels requested an additional 2,000 from Kiel. At its largest, the division had over 3,000 members and was seen as the revolution’s top fighting unit. On 15 November, its staff took over the Berlin Palace, the former home of the Hohenzollerns and the Kaiser, while the troops stayed in the nearby Marstall. Their job was to protect the government district. Politically, they leaned far left, backing the USPD and the Spartacists. But within four weeks, the unit’s position shifted sharply. By mid-December, Wels appeared to be pushing for its breakup. The Council of People’s Deputies ordered the division to relocate outside Berlin and shrink from about 1,000 to 600 soldiers. To pressure them, Wels withheld their pay.
23 December 1918
On 23 December, the leaders of the division went to the Reichskanzlei. The government, the six-man Council of People's Deputies, was on the verge of breaking apart with increasing differences between its USPD and MSPD members. The soldiers were ordered to hand over the keys to the Palace and left. In the afternoon the soldiers' leaders returned, with the keys but also with a group of armed troops. The soldiers' leaders under Lieutenant Heinrich Dorrenbach gave the keys to Emil Barth, a People's Deputy of the USPD. Barth called Wels and asked him to hand over the outstanding pay. Wels refused. When Barth sent the soldiers to Friedrich Ebert, Ebert refused to see them. On Dorrenbach's orders the troops closed all access to the Reichskanzlei, occupied the room with the telephone switchboard and cut the lines. Some of the soldiers then marched to the Kommandantur where the guards resisted. Three members of the Volksmarinedivision were killed. Otto Wels and two of his officers were abducted, brought to the nearby Marstall and physically abused. The soldiers also took their outstanding pay.
24 December 1918
Just before 8 a.m., army troops stationed at Palace Square began firing their artillery. The opening volleys of machine-gun and cannon fire came from multiple directions but did little real damage, though they heavily struck nearby buildings. Roughly sixty shells hit the Berlin Palace and the Marstall during the first hour. Between 9 and 10 a.m., large crowds of unarmed civilians, including women and children, gathered and pleaded with the soldiers to stop. A brief ceasefire followed around 10 a.m. so these civilians could leave the area. Fighting resumed at 10:30 with greater intensity, and this time the Volksmarinedivision took the offensive. Some government soldiers reportedly changed sides. The Sicherheitswehr—a Berlin police unit under Emil Eichhorn of the USPD—along with armed and unarmed civilians, joined the division against the regular troops. The clash ended around noon. The army units agreed to withdraw, and the Volksmarinedivision, though it held the ground, consented to return to its barracks. Both sides removed their dead and wounded, so no independent casualty count exists. Reports, however, list 56 dead and 35 wounded among the regular troops, compared to 11 dead and 23 wounded for the Volksmarinedivision.
Consequences
The confrontation forced Otto Wels to step down as Berlin's military commander, a political loss for Friedrich Ebert. The sailors' division vacated the Palace and Marstall but remained intact, received their back pay, and avoided immediate downsizing. More significantly, the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) quit the Council of People's Deputies on 29 December. The next day, Social Democrats Gustav Noske and Rudolf Wissell replaced them, while the Spartacists broke fully from the USPD to form the Communist Party (KPD), joined by some USPD members from Hamburg and Bremen. This pushed the revolution's radical wing out of government; the USPD now opposed the SPD alongside the Spartacists, leaving no advocates of social revolution in power, and the fractured far left lacked a leader like Lenin. At the funeral for the fallen sailors in Friedrichshain, thousands of bitter mourners carried signs accusing Ebert, Landsberg, and Scheidemann of murdering sailors and shouted against them as traitors. This bitterness set the stage for January 1919. When Emil Eichhorn, who had backed the sailors, refused his dismissal as Berlin police chief, mass protests erupted in his support. These events sparked the so-called Spartacist uprising, more accurately called the January Uprising, as revolutionary workers tried to repeat their November success and reclaim what they had since partly lost.
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