The next morning, people all around Berlin headed toward the city center, wave after wave assembling together. The workers first arrived at their factories and called roll under the instructions of the workers’ unions before abandoning their posts and marching through the town as one. Other people came directly from outside of town. They worked their way to the city center, the net of their siege slowly tightening.
The protestors formed a massive river, filling the streets and squares. People packed the streets tightly enough to hide the gaps in the sidewalks. Signs reading PEACE, BREAD, AND FREEDOM waved in the throng. The words dripped with the obvious anger of people who had families taken by war, health robbed by food shortages, and loved ones stolen from them by starvation and disease.
The crowd spilt into two groups toward their destinations. One group headed for the Berlin Palace still void of its emperor, while the other struck out for the Reichstag.
Armed members of the Spartacus Group led each body. Some soldiers in the German Army had not stood with the government, but joined the protesters instead. They marched with their rifles, ready to fire immediately in case of emergency.
The guards around the palace and the Reichstag erected barriers and waited behind them for the crowd to arrive. If the protestors turned violent, these men would bear the brunt of their assault. They had strict orders to prevent the crowd from entering the buildings.
The guards frowned through steaming breath as they watched the wave of oncoming masses. If ordered to, their job required them to turn their guns and cannons on the people.
A heightened energy seemed to propel the crowd today. This was the first time the authority of the emperor had shown signs of crumbling since the founding of the nation. The guards might be crushed along with it… The thought tormented their nerves.
They secretly envied the turncoat soldiers hidden among the crowd. The guards couldn’t turn against the nation so easily. A guard’s duty is to protect the country, a duty that sometimes calls on them to fire on their own citizens. But the outcome seemed uncertain today.
Jörg’s corpus carried a hunting rifle in front of him as he marched with Fritz at the head of the crowd. Fritz observed everything with a careful eye. Another armed group had joined them on the way. Rebel soldiers.
Jörg remained trapped, but he could feel himself gradually disassociating from his corpus’s body. The magic joining them had weakened slightly. Jörg tried to interfere with his corpus’s movements. He could, though the change was minimal. Xandra’s medicine was certainly working. Milos and Lila followed behind him in support, their bodies invisible to the world.
With flushed cheeks, Fritz watched the people’s expressions and movements. The tightly packed throng filled the air around him with hot steam and stink, but he didn’t seem affected.
A dry cracking sound came from in front of them. From their time on the battlefield, Jörg’s corpus and Fritz recognized it as the report of a gun.
Someone had fired off a round somewhere, but the tension didn’t seem to spread, and they saw no wave of people trying to flee in their direction. It was most likely someone shooting their gun into the air. The people in the back continued to push forward. Even the sound of gunfire wouldn’t stop them.
Jörg’s corpus spoke to Fritz. “If any shooting breaks out, get out of here immediately. Go back to my apartment and wait for me there.”
“Okay.”
“If I don’t make it back, then get out of Berlin as fast as you can. You have to make a record of this.”
“Of course. Just you wait and see. I’m going to create something incredible.”
They turned left in front of a long-abandoned butcher and continued their march forward.
At the same time, the advancing crowd of protesters and the guards in front of the Reichstag were about to begin their showdown.
The police on foot and horseback in the front row issued final orders to the mass of people and tried to intimidate them. Guards yelled at the crowd to advance no farther, to disperse immediately, and to return to work, but the masses kept marching.
“Peace! Freedom! Bread!” they chanted as they pressed upon the guards. “Stop the war!” “The politicians must resign!” “Get rid of the kaiser!”
Spurred on by the intensity of the crowd, the members of the Spartacus Group in the front waved their weapons and yelled “We demand that Wilhelm II step down!” “Dissolve the government!” “The republic is the future!” “Build the Bavarian Soviet Republic!” “Long live the Bavarian Soviet Republic!”
The throng wedged between the police and pushed them back in two directions. The horses beneath the officers began to fret and back away. In previous protests, the mounted police had chased demonstrators away and mercilessly trampled them as they fled, but that intensity was gone today. Realizing they couldn’t withstand the crowd, they decided to open a path for the surging protesters.
The masses moved toward the barricade like a wave crashing inside a compact harbor.
Dismayed, the guards pointing their rifles at the throng cast their eyes around, seeking the tacit order of the commander standing behind them. Sweat dripped down the commander’s back in the frigid air.
If the police weren’t going to stop them, then he and the guards would face the group head-on. The people leading the masses carried rifles. They weren’t all socialists. The group contained large numbers of army deserters. If either side shot, the bullets would certainly hit their marks, and even one shot killing someone on either side would doom the day. The protest would become a riot. Once that happened, there was no going back. The commander couldn’t see the end of the masses. His soldiers stared intently at him as if clinging to his presence. Asking him for orders, questioning him about what to do.
Trembling, the commander inhaled deeply. Freezing air rushed into his lungs, but it didn’t calm his nerves, and his body burned. Giving himself over to that heat, he declared, “All soldiers, lower your weapons. Stand down.”
For a moment, the soldiers stirred. But they all soon followed the order, draping their rifles over their shoulders and moving away from the barricade.
“It’s the tide of the times,” the commander told himself. “At a time like this, there’s nothing we can do.”
The crowd rushed past the guards and occupied the area in front of the Reichstag. No one could predict what they would do next or where their enthusiasm would lead them. Prince Maximilian of Baden—Max von Baden—observed the developments with a growl. The situation couldn’t be saved. The German Empire was over. If the crowd entered the plenary chambers, disaster would follow. Anything could happen.
Max phoned the German Supreme Army Command in Spa, Belgium. He called to recommend a formal declaration of abdication from Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was residing there. Some voices within the Reichstag had already been calling for him to step down for a while. Now was the time to decide.
But the kaiser gave only a vague reply, not actually responding to Max’s request. Max couldn’t fathom how the man still didn’t understand the current situation. Chief of Staff Hindenburg was still in Germany, but Deputy General Ludendorff, by now essentially leading the war effort, had already fled to Sweden on October 27. That same day, the German government expressed its desire to end the war in final negotiations with US President Wilson, and on October 28 preparations began for a transition to a parliamentary monarchy. The kaiser should have already been back at the royal palace in Berlin to provide instruction to the people, but he lingered in Spa, deaf to Berlin’s requests. Germany’s only route out of this war was for the government to decide things independently and work it out on their own.
Before noon, without having received approval from the kaiser, Max declared the abdication of Wilhelm II to the Reichstag. With that, the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany demanded that Max resign as chancellor. He agreed and stepped down from his position, with Friedrich Ebert of the MSDP inheriting the role.
Ebert had studied under Rosa Luxemburg, even working alongside Karl Liebknecht for a time. He later broke off ties with them when they formed the Spartacus Group. Two of his sons died fighting in the war, and the youngest son returned home seriously injured. He immediately accepted Max’s nomination as temporary chancellor.
Meanwhile, at two that afternoon, Philipp Scheidemann, a member of the same party as Ebert, received a piece of disturbing news from his assistant during lunch. Liebknecht planned to declare Germany a free socialist republic without waiting to hear a statement from the German government.
Afraid that Liebknecht would steal the right to govern from underneath them, Scheidemann rushed to the window, threw it open, looked down at the crowd, and shouted:
“The Hohenzollerns have abdicated! Long live the German Republic!”
After he finished speaking, Scheidemann calmly returned to his lunch.
How dare they try to create a socialist state. Now Germany is officially a republic.
Two hours later, at four p.m., Liebknecht of the Spartacus Group stood on the palace balcony and announced the Free Socialist Republic of Germany. As this announcement came after Scheidemann’s, it naturally could not be enforced.
As temporary chancellor, a furious Ebert slammed a fist on his table, raging at Scheidemann’s unauthorized actions. Ebert was factoring in the continuation of the monarchy—that is to say, the kaiser still officially reigned, and they planned to transition to a political system with a constitutional assembly.
But Scheidemann’s actions prevented Germany from following the same path as postrevolutionary Russia. It ensured that Germany would not have a new kaiser and would not move toward socialism, but would engage in the journey toward becoming a republic.
The following day, Wilhelm II fled for the Netherlands. After the war, the Netherlands refused to surrender him to the Allies, allowing him to escape retribution for his sins in the Great War.