Kiel mutiny

On the evening of Sunday 3 November 1918 in Kiel, the main base of the German fleet on the Baltic, several thousand sailors, soldiers and workers set off towards the military detention prison on Feldstraße to free their comrades from the battleships who were held there. On Karlstraße they were stopped by a patrol of recruits under Lieutenant Oskar Steinhäuser, who ordered his men to fire. Seven people were killed, two more later died of their wounds, and about thirty were wounded. The German historian Sebastian Haffner called these the first shots of the revolution. After them there was no way back for the mutineers. A day later Kiel was in their hands, and within a week the rebellious city had carried the whole of Germany with it.

The fleet’s last sortie

The mutiny began with an admirals’ plan. On 24 October, the same day on which the Supreme Army Command issued a proclamation rejecting Wilson’s note, the Naval Command of Admiral Reinhard Scheer and his chief of staff, Captain Magnus von Levetzow, together with the command of the High Seas Fleet under Admiral Franz von Hipper, prepared Operations Order No. 19. The fleet was to strike at British forces and shipping off the Flanders coast and in the Thames estuary, and on the way back, somewhere off Terschelling, fight a decisive battle with the Grand Fleet, which would first have been weakened by mines and submarines. The submarines were available because a few days earlier Scheer had recalled them from the war on commerce at the government’s demand.

The government of Prince Max of Baden, which was just then seeking an armistice, was told nothing. The fleet’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Adolf von Trotha, wrote to Levetzow that officers were seized by “horror and shame” at the thought that the fleet might perish from within without having fought. Most historians judge the operation’s chances as negligible. Many of them also believe that it was not only about the honour of the fleet and its future, but also about torpedoing the negotiations conducted by a government based on the Reichstag majority.

On 29 October the ships lying in the Schillig Roads off Wilhelmshaven were ordered to put to sea the following day. The sailors, who had gathered from the officers’ conversations and the preparations what was in store, had no intention of dying in a “death ride” a few days before the end of the war. On the evening of 29 October there were “excesses” aboard the battleships of the III Squadron, among them König, Markgraf and Kronprinz, and on several cruisers. According to German accounts, Hipper called off the operation in the early hours of 30 October. The following night the crews of the battleships Thüringen and Helgoland of the I Squadron refused to weigh anchor and damaged some of the equipment. They surrendered only when torpedo boats and a submarine threatened to open fire. Several hundred sailors were arrested. After the mutiny of August 1917 and the execution of Reichpietsch and Köbis, everyone knew they faced the death penalty.

The squadron in Kiel

The commander of the III Squadron, Vice Admiral Hugo Kraft, decided it would be best to split up the fleet, and led his ships through the Kiel Canal to Kiel. On the way he had 47 sailors from Markgraf, considered ringleaders, arrested. During the night before 1 November the squadron anchored in Kiel, and the arrested men were taken to the prison on Feldstraße and to Fort Herwarth. It was a disastrous choice. Kiel was a city of shipyards and armaments works with tens of thousands of workers, strong trade unions and a strong socialist movement. Since 30 October the governor of the fortress had been Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, former commander of the cruiser Goeben and of the Turkish fleet. He feared precisely that the sailors would join forces with the workers, but Kraft gave the crews shore leave in the hope that this would calm them.

On the evening of 1 November about 250 sailors, stokers and petty officers met at the trade union house and resolved to prevent the fleet from putting to sea again and to win the release of their comrades. The ships’ captains refused to receive their delegates. On 2 November Souchon barred sailors from the union house, so about 600 men gathered on the drill ground in the Vieburg wood. There Karl Artelt, a leading stoker from the torpedo division, called for refusal of duty, immediate peace and the removal of the “militarists” from power. Activists of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, among them Lothar Popp, promised help. Leaflets were printed during the night: “Comrades, do not shoot at your brothers!”

Sunday 3 November

In the morning the captain of Markgraf had another 57 men arrested. In the afternoon, at 3.30 p.m., the town commandant sounded the alarm and ordered all servicemen back to their ships and barracks. Many did not obey, and some learned of the gathering only because of the alarm. At about 5.30 p.m., according to German accounts, 5,000–6,000 soldiers and male and female workers assembled in the Vieburg wood. The Kiel trade union leader Gustav Garbe asked them to wait a few more days, but no one listened to him. The crowd moved on to the “Waldwiese” inn, where a company of sailors that had refused orders the day before was quartered. The building was taken without a fight, the detainees were freed and weapons were seized.

The march, growing all the time, passed through the city centre in the dark. People sang the workers’ Marseillaise, cheered the republic, and the cry “Down with the Kaiser!” was greeted with enthusiasm. At about 7 p.m. on Karlstraße, a few hundred metres short of the prison, the way was barred by Steinhäuser’s patrol from the training unit of the torpedo division. The course of events is not entirely clear. According to the most likely version, the recruits first fired into the air and then, after a second order, in panic straight into the crowd, before running away. Steinhäuser was badly beaten and shot, but survived. A fire engine and further detachments eventually dispersed the crowd, but the dead and wounded were left on the cobbles.

In the evening Souchon decided he had the situation under control and cancelled the call for infantry from neighbouring districts. In a telegram to Berlin, however, he asked for “a prominent Social Democratic deputy” to be sent to speak to the sailors against revolution and revolt.

Soldiers’ councils

The shots on Karlstraße did not intimidate the mutineers; they united them. From the morning of 4 November the workers of the Germania shipyard and the torpedo workshops went on strike, and in the large barracks complex in the Wik district the torpedo division mutinied, joined by further units. The sailors disarmed their officers and elected soldiers’ councils. Artelt became head of the first of them in Germany. Among other things the councils demanded the abdication of the Hohenzollerns, the lifting of the state of siege, the release of those arrested from the III Squadron and of the prisoners of 1917, the release of all political prisoners, and universal, equal and secret suffrage for both sexes. Infantry detachments brought in from Rendsburg and Neumünster arrived too late or went over to the mutineers.

After 2 p.m. Souchon banned the use of weapons and opened talks. He agreed to withdraw the outside troops and to release those arrested from Markgraf, who were led out of prison in the evening to the cheers of the crowd. In the evening the Social Democratic deputy Gustav Noske arrived from Berlin, sent by the government together with the state secretary Conrad Haußmann. At the night-time negotiations at the governor’s headquarters Popp reportedly said: “You keep talking about a sailors’ mutiny. Perhaps it was a mutiny yesterday and the day before, but not today. We are at the beginning of the German revolution.” By the evening of 4 November Kiel was in the hands of about 40,000 mutinous sailors, soldiers and workers.

The spark

On 5 November red flags were hoisted on the ships in the harbour, and aboard König, lying in dock, a shoot-out killed two officers defending the war ensign and one sailor. The workers declared a general strike and formed a workers’ council. Noske, who had intended to put out the mutiny, concluded that at most he could keep it in check. On 7 November the soldiers’ council elected him governor of Kiel in place of Souchon.

Meanwhile the sailors were dispersing across the country, taking the revolution with them. Over the following days workers’ and soldiers’ councils took power in Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Hanover and Cologne, meeting almost no resistance anywhere. On 7 November the revolution reached Munich, and two days later Berlin. The plan for a last battle, meant to save the honour of the fleet, led to the November Revolution and the fall of the empire. The High Seas Fleet itself never again sailed out to fight.