Kaiser Wilhelm
♦ Wilhelm was the last German emperor (Kaiser) and king of Prussia, whose
bellicose policies helped to bring about World War One.
♦ Wilhelm II (1859-1941), the German Kaiser (emperor) and king of Prussia
from 1888 to 1918, was one of the most recognizable public figures of
World War I (1914-18). He gained a reputation as a swaggering militarist
through his speeches and ill-advised newspaper interviews. While Wilhelm
did not actively seek war and tried to hold back his generals from
mobilizing the German army in the summer of 1914, his verbal outbursts
and his open enjoyment of the title of Supreme War Lord helped bolster
the case of those who blamed him for the conflict. His role in the conduct
of the war as well as his responsibility for its outbreak is still controversial.
Some historians maintain that Wilhelm was controlled by his generals,
while others argue that he retained considerable political power. In late
1918, he was forced to abdicate. He spent the rest of his life in exile in the
Netherlands, where he died at age 82.
♦ Wilhelm damaged his political position in several ways. He meddled in
German foreign policy based on his emotions, resulting in incoherence and
inconsistency in German relations with other nations.
♦ Wilhelm’s most important contribution to Germany’s pre-war military
expansion was his commitment to creating a navy to rival Britain’s.
♦ Led to war in August 1914 due to Wilhelm’s behaviour during the crisis,
still of which is controversial.
♦ Wilhelm succeeded his father on June 15, 1888, at the age of 29. Within
two years of his coronation, Wilhelm broke with Otto von Bismarck (1815-
98), the “Iron Chancellor” who had dominated German politics since the
1860s.
♦ On November 10, the former emperor took a train across the border into
the Netherlands, which had remained neutral throughout the war. He
eventually bought a manor house in the town of Doorn and remained
there for the remainder of his life.
♦ In 1938, Wilhelm remarked that for the first time he was ashamed to be a
German. After two decades in exile, he died in the Netherlands on June 4,
1941, at the age of 82.
,
,Erich Ludendorff
♦ General Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937) was a top German military
commander in the latter stages of World War I. Educated in the cadet
corps, Ludendorff was named chief of staff to the Eighth Army after the
outbreak of war and earned renown for the victory at the Battle of
Tannenberg.
♦ Erich Ludendorff embodied the strengths and weaknesses of the imperial
German army in the twentieth century. He is frequently described as
representing everything negative in the rising generation of officers:
bourgeois by birth, specialist by training, and philistine by instinct.
♦ When war broke out in August 1914, Ludendorff was restored to favour as
deputy chief of staff to the Second Army. On August 8, he proved he was
more than a desk soldier, rallying demoralized troops to play a crucial role
in the capture of the Belgian fortress of Li[egrave]ge. On August 22 he was
assigned as chief of staff to the Eighth Army in East Prussia.
♦ Eventually, Falkenhayn proved the author of his own downfall when he
launched the attack against Verdun in January 1916. Combined with the
Allied offensive at the Battle of the Somme six months later, the result was
the kind of attrition war that Germany had little chance of winning.
♦ Ludendorff also played an active part in German politics. His involvement
was facilitated by the inability of Kaiser Wilhelm II to fulfil the role of a
pivot figure, above the everyday frictions between soldiers and statesmen,
and by the fierce rivalry among the political parties, which prevented the
emergence of any effective civilian rival.
♦ His artifice at an end, Ludendorff first called for peace, then argued for a
fight to the finish, and finally on October 26, 1918, resigned his post and
fled to Sweden. Apart from a figurehead role in the Munich putsch of 1923,
his post-war political career was inconsequential.
♦ From 1914 to 1918 Erich Ludendorff remained prisoner of his faith in the
decisive battle. He refused to face the fact that a great power’s armed
forces could not be crushed by the combinations of mobility and firepower
existing between 1914 and 1918; instead, he continued to insist that he
had never been given quite enough resources to achieve the triumph
glimmering over the horizon.
♦ After the war, Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader, which
posited that the German loss in World War I was caused by the betrayal of
the German Army by the Marxists, Bolsheviks and Jews who were
essentially responsible for the disadvantageous settlement negotiated for
Germany in the Treaty of Versailles.
,Friedrich Ebert
♦ Friedrich Ebert was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of
Germany and the first President of Germany from 1919 until his death in
office in 1925. Ebert was elected leader of the SPD on the death in 1913 of
August Bebel.
♦ He soon became a Social Democrat and trade unionist, representing so-
called revisionist—gradualist, liberal— “trade-union” socialism, without,
however, displaying a deep interest in the ideological struggles of
Marxism. His attention was always directed toward practical improvement
in the living conditions of the German working class and, above all, its
social and moral betterment. In 1905 Ebert became secretary general of
the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The party had steadily
increased in membership and electoral support and had accumulated
physical assets and property.
♦ Ebert could not hold the entire party to his course for long. In March 1917
a left-wing faction left the party to become the Independent Social
Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), strenuously rejecting war
appropriations and Germany’s war policy. Another group split from the
SPD to form the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The leftists who had
withdrawn from the SPD sought a social revolution, while Ebert and his
party wanted to establish a German parliamentary democracy. Even in the
midst of the war, the Catholic Centre Party, the Democratic Party
(previously the Progressive Party), and the Social Democrats had formed
the so-called Black–Red–Gold (Weimar) coalition, named after the colours
of the flag of the liberal revolution of 1848.
♦ The judgment of a German court, which ruled that Ebert had committed
high treason, at least in the legal sense, during the war by his support of a
munition workers’ strike, contributed to his early death.
SPD = Social Democratic Party
USPD = The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany
KPD = The communist Party of Germany
, Karl Liebknecht
♦ Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht was a German socialist, originally in
the Social Democratic Party of Germany and later a co-founder with Rosa
Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany
which split away from the SPD. Liebknecht was killed in the Spartacus
Revolt of January 1919.
♦ During World War I Liebknecht became a leading figure in the
development of opposition movements to the wartime government. He
was the first in the Reichstag to vote against war credits and spoke out
publicly, as early as January 1915, for the transformation of the national
war into a civil or class war.
♦ In 1916 he was expelled from the Social Democratic Party for opposing its
leadership. The ouster brought him into close alliance with another
revolutionary personality, Rosa Luxemburg. Together, they provided the
leadership for illegal opposition to the war through the subversive
Spartakusbund, which disseminated through its network of confidential
underground agents' various kinds of revolutionary propaganda.
♦ On May 1, 1916, Liebknecht participated in a May Day demonstration in
Berlin and called for the overthrow of the government and an end to the
war and was tried and imprisoned.
♦ The Russian Soviet government celebrated his release from prison by a
dinner for him at its embassy in Berlin. He planned to develop, through the
Spartakusbund, a German revolution after the Soviet pattern.
♦ He played a leading role in the formation of the German Communist Party,
which attempted without success to organize the radical elements.
♦ His use of force stimulated the growth of the counterrevolution, and both
he and Rosa Luxemburg were among its first victims. On Jan. 15, 1919,
they were shot to death by counterrevolutionary volunteers on the pretext
of attempted escape while under arrest.
♦ Wilhelm was the last German emperor (Kaiser) and king of Prussia, whose
bellicose policies helped to bring about World War One.
♦ Wilhelm II (1859-1941), the German Kaiser (emperor) and king of Prussia
from 1888 to 1918, was one of the most recognizable public figures of
World War I (1914-18). He gained a reputation as a swaggering militarist
through his speeches and ill-advised newspaper interviews. While Wilhelm
did not actively seek war and tried to hold back his generals from
mobilizing the German army in the summer of 1914, his verbal outbursts
and his open enjoyment of the title of Supreme War Lord helped bolster
the case of those who blamed him for the conflict. His role in the conduct
of the war as well as his responsibility for its outbreak is still controversial.
Some historians maintain that Wilhelm was controlled by his generals,
while others argue that he retained considerable political power. In late
1918, he was forced to abdicate. He spent the rest of his life in exile in the
Netherlands, where he died at age 82.
♦ Wilhelm damaged his political position in several ways. He meddled in
German foreign policy based on his emotions, resulting in incoherence and
inconsistency in German relations with other nations.
♦ Wilhelm’s most important contribution to Germany’s pre-war military
expansion was his commitment to creating a navy to rival Britain’s.
♦ Led to war in August 1914 due to Wilhelm’s behaviour during the crisis,
still of which is controversial.
♦ Wilhelm succeeded his father on June 15, 1888, at the age of 29. Within
two years of his coronation, Wilhelm broke with Otto von Bismarck (1815-
98), the “Iron Chancellor” who had dominated German politics since the
1860s.
♦ On November 10, the former emperor took a train across the border into
the Netherlands, which had remained neutral throughout the war. He
eventually bought a manor house in the town of Doorn and remained
there for the remainder of his life.
♦ In 1938, Wilhelm remarked that for the first time he was ashamed to be a
German. After two decades in exile, he died in the Netherlands on June 4,
1941, at the age of 82.
,
,Erich Ludendorff
♦ General Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937) was a top German military
commander in the latter stages of World War I. Educated in the cadet
corps, Ludendorff was named chief of staff to the Eighth Army after the
outbreak of war and earned renown for the victory at the Battle of
Tannenberg.
♦ Erich Ludendorff embodied the strengths and weaknesses of the imperial
German army in the twentieth century. He is frequently described as
representing everything negative in the rising generation of officers:
bourgeois by birth, specialist by training, and philistine by instinct.
♦ When war broke out in August 1914, Ludendorff was restored to favour as
deputy chief of staff to the Second Army. On August 8, he proved he was
more than a desk soldier, rallying demoralized troops to play a crucial role
in the capture of the Belgian fortress of Li[egrave]ge. On August 22 he was
assigned as chief of staff to the Eighth Army in East Prussia.
♦ Eventually, Falkenhayn proved the author of his own downfall when he
launched the attack against Verdun in January 1916. Combined with the
Allied offensive at the Battle of the Somme six months later, the result was
the kind of attrition war that Germany had little chance of winning.
♦ Ludendorff also played an active part in German politics. His involvement
was facilitated by the inability of Kaiser Wilhelm II to fulfil the role of a
pivot figure, above the everyday frictions between soldiers and statesmen,
and by the fierce rivalry among the political parties, which prevented the
emergence of any effective civilian rival.
♦ His artifice at an end, Ludendorff first called for peace, then argued for a
fight to the finish, and finally on October 26, 1918, resigned his post and
fled to Sweden. Apart from a figurehead role in the Munich putsch of 1923,
his post-war political career was inconsequential.
♦ From 1914 to 1918 Erich Ludendorff remained prisoner of his faith in the
decisive battle. He refused to face the fact that a great power’s armed
forces could not be crushed by the combinations of mobility and firepower
existing between 1914 and 1918; instead, he continued to insist that he
had never been given quite enough resources to achieve the triumph
glimmering over the horizon.
♦ After the war, Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader, which
posited that the German loss in World War I was caused by the betrayal of
the German Army by the Marxists, Bolsheviks and Jews who were
essentially responsible for the disadvantageous settlement negotiated for
Germany in the Treaty of Versailles.
,Friedrich Ebert
♦ Friedrich Ebert was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of
Germany and the first President of Germany from 1919 until his death in
office in 1925. Ebert was elected leader of the SPD on the death in 1913 of
August Bebel.
♦ He soon became a Social Democrat and trade unionist, representing so-
called revisionist—gradualist, liberal— “trade-union” socialism, without,
however, displaying a deep interest in the ideological struggles of
Marxism. His attention was always directed toward practical improvement
in the living conditions of the German working class and, above all, its
social and moral betterment. In 1905 Ebert became secretary general of
the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The party had steadily
increased in membership and electoral support and had accumulated
physical assets and property.
♦ Ebert could not hold the entire party to his course for long. In March 1917
a left-wing faction left the party to become the Independent Social
Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), strenuously rejecting war
appropriations and Germany’s war policy. Another group split from the
SPD to form the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The leftists who had
withdrawn from the SPD sought a social revolution, while Ebert and his
party wanted to establish a German parliamentary democracy. Even in the
midst of the war, the Catholic Centre Party, the Democratic Party
(previously the Progressive Party), and the Social Democrats had formed
the so-called Black–Red–Gold (Weimar) coalition, named after the colours
of the flag of the liberal revolution of 1848.
♦ The judgment of a German court, which ruled that Ebert had committed
high treason, at least in the legal sense, during the war by his support of a
munition workers’ strike, contributed to his early death.
SPD = Social Democratic Party
USPD = The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany
KPD = The communist Party of Germany
, Karl Liebknecht
♦ Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht was a German socialist, originally in
the Social Democratic Party of Germany and later a co-founder with Rosa
Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany
which split away from the SPD. Liebknecht was killed in the Spartacus
Revolt of January 1919.
♦ During World War I Liebknecht became a leading figure in the
development of opposition movements to the wartime government. He
was the first in the Reichstag to vote against war credits and spoke out
publicly, as early as January 1915, for the transformation of the national
war into a civil or class war.
♦ In 1916 he was expelled from the Social Democratic Party for opposing its
leadership. The ouster brought him into close alliance with another
revolutionary personality, Rosa Luxemburg. Together, they provided the
leadership for illegal opposition to the war through the subversive
Spartakusbund, which disseminated through its network of confidential
underground agents' various kinds of revolutionary propaganda.
♦ On May 1, 1916, Liebknecht participated in a May Day demonstration in
Berlin and called for the overthrow of the government and an end to the
war and was tried and imprisoned.
♦ The Russian Soviet government celebrated his release from prison by a
dinner for him at its embassy in Berlin. He planned to develop, through the
Spartakusbund, a German revolution after the Soviet pattern.
♦ He played a leading role in the formation of the German Communist Party,
which attempted without success to organize the radical elements.
♦ His use of force stimulated the growth of the counterrevolution, and both
he and Rosa Luxemburg were among its first victims. On Jan. 15, 1919,
they were shot to death by counterrevolutionary volunteers on the pretext
of attempted escape while under arrest.
