Christmas fighting in Berlin

On 24 December 1918, Christmas Eve, shortly before eight in the morning, government troops opened fire with guns and machine guns on the palace in the centre of Berlin and on the neighbouring building of the court stables (Neuer Marstall). Quartered in them was the People’s Navy Division (Volksmarinedivision), a revolutionary formation of sailors which the day before had imprisoned the city commandant and surrounded the seat of the government. After several hours of fighting the troops, surrounded by a crowd of civilians and armed workers, withdrew. The Christmas fighting (Weihnachtskämpfe) was the first bloody clash of the revolution in the capital. It ended in the humiliation of the government and the break-up of the coalition of the two socialist parties.

Sailors in the palace

The People’s Navy Division was formed on 11 November from sailors who had come to Berlin after the Kiel mutiny and from sailors stationed in the capital. At its peak it numbered more than 3,000 men. It was to guard the government district and was regarded as the elite of the revolution, although politically it was mixed. From mid-November its staff was housed in the abandoned palace of the Hohenzollerns and its men in the Marstall. The Social Democratic commandant of Berlin, Otto Wels, considered it increasingly troublesome. On 12 December the Prussian finance minister accused the sailors of looting the palace’s treasures. The Council of the People’s Deputies decided to take the most reliable sailors into a new republican guard and to discharge the rest with severance pay. The division was to leave the palace and shrink to 600 men. The sailors refused. On 17 December their delegation burst into the hall of the congress of councils, demanding the democratisation of the army. To force them to give way, Wels stopped their pay, which just before Christmas was a painful means of pressure.

Tension within the government grew. The three Majority Social Democrats, led by Friedrich Ebert, had no intention of implementing the Hamburg Points adopted by the congress, which took away the officers’ authority over the soldiers. The three Independent Socialists, led by Hugo Haase, accused them of colluding with the generals. Since 10 November Ebert had indeed been in contact with the First Quartermaster General, Wilhelm Groener: the army recognised the new government, and the government promised help in maintaining order. Between 10 and 15 December the Supreme Army Command brought into Berlin ten front-line divisions under General Arnold Lequis, which were to restore order and disarm the capital. The soldiers, however, who only wanted to go home, quickly dispersed.

23 December

On 21 December the government instructed the city commandant’s office to take the keys of the palace from the sailors in exchange for their arrears of pay, according to German studies 80,000 marks. On 23 December the leaders of the division, among them Lieutenant Heinrich Dorrenbach, handed the keys not to Wels but to the Independent Socialist Emil Barth of the Council of the People’s Deputies. Wels refused to pay out the money without an instruction from Ebert, and Ebert would not receive the sailors. Then a detachment of them closed all the entrances to the Reich Chancellery, occupied the telephone exchange and cut the lines. The members of the government found themselves under house arrest.

Another group of sailors went to the commandant’s office on Unter den Linden. In front of the building there was an exchange of fire with the guard, in which at least one sailor was killed (according to some accounts, three). The shots were heard in the nearby opera house, whose audience fled. The sailors abducted Wels and two of his officers to the Marstall, where they were beaten. Ebert meanwhile used a secret line, which the sailors did not control, to contact the Supreme Army Command at Kassel. Major Kurt von Schleicher promised to send loyal troops from the area around the capital, and Groener urged decisive action. From Potsdam and Babelsberg the remnants of Lequis’s troops set out, according to different sources between 800 and 1,200 soldiers with field artillery.

In the evening the two sides faced each other at the Chancellery. Ebert promised to settle the matter the next day by a government decision, and the units dispersed: the sailors to the Marstall, the troops to the Tiergarten. The Independent Socialists left the Chancellery without knowing that the army had been summoned. At about two in the morning, convinced that Wels’s life was in danger, Ebert gave the order to attack. The three Social Democratic members of the government, without consulting their USPD partners, instructed the war minister Heinrich Scheüch to “do what is necessary” to free the commandant. The German historian Ulrich Kluge called this a blank cheque for the army. According to Scheidemann, however, Wels had already turned up at the Chancellery at about three, several hours before the attack.

Christmas Eve at the palace

The shelling began before eight. In the first hour about 60 shells hit the palace and the Marstall, seriously damaging the buildings but not breaking the defenders. Between nine and ten crowds of unarmed Berliners gathered, including women and children, calling on the soldiers to stop fighting. At about ten a pause was announced so that the civilians could be led away. When the fighting flared up again at 10.30, the sailors were joined by the security guard, which answered to the Berlin police chief Emil Eichhorn of the USPD, and by armed workers. Some of the government soldiers went over to the other side or left the ranks. At about noon the troops agreed to leave. Ebert ordered the fighting to stop.

Both sides took away their dead and wounded, so there are no independent figures for the losses. According to the most often quoted accounts, 56 government soldiers and 11 sailors were killed, as well as civilians. The generals explained the defeat by saying that they had not wanted to fire on women and children. Modern historians, such as the Irishman Mark Jones, also point to the poor planning of the attack and the too small force, which was meant to demonstrate strength rather than to fight a battle.

Consequences

The government had to meet the sailors’ demands. The division received its arrears of pay and joined the republican guard as a whole, and its reduction was postponed. Wels had to step down as commandant. When the fallen sailors were buried, thousands of people came to the funeral with banners: “We accuse Ebert, Landsberg and Scheidemann of the murder of the sailors”. Liebknecht wrote of “Ebert’s bloody Christmas”.

The Independent Socialists demanded an explanation. A joint session of the government and the Central Council, which consisted solely of Majority Social Democrats, nevertheless backed Ebert’s conduct. On the night of 28/29 December the three USPD members left the Council of the People’s Deputies, and their places were taken by Social Democrats, among them Gustav Noske, who took charge of army and navy affairs. The defeat of the regular army convinced the government and the command that the demoralised conscript army could not be relied on. Noske increasingly relied on the volunteer units of the Freikorps (PL). When at the beginning of January the Prussian government dismissed Eichhorn, an uprising broke out in Berlin, which these units bloodily suppressed.