Mutiny in the German fleet

On 2 August 1917 Wilhelmshaven, the main base of the German High Seas Fleet, saw the largest sailors’ protest since the beginning of the war. About 600 seamen and stokers of the battleship Prinzregent Luitpold went ashore without leave and marched to Rüstersiel on the outskirts of the town to speak up for comrades arrested the day before. The protest was peaceful, but the command treated it as a mutiny and a conspiracy aimed at the fleet’s fighting readiness. The British chronology of the war records the outbreak of the mutiny in the German fleet under 3 August, although German studies consistently date the march out to 2 August.

An idle fleet

After the Battle of Jutland the big ships of the German fleet hardly ever put to sea. The best young officers were transferred to the U-boats, and their places were taken by inexperienced lieutenants who, according to many accounts, made up for their lack of authority with severity and petty harassment. The crews were given ever worse food, while in the officers’ messes, as the sailors complained, people still ate and drank well. After the hungry winter of 1916/1917 it was food that became the main cause of complaint. On 6 June 1917 the stokers and seamen of Prinzregent Luitpold refused to accept a spoiled meal. Similar protests were repeated on other ships. The navy finally agreed to the creation of committees on board ships in which the sailors had a say on food.

Politics was added to the disputes over food and treatment. After the February Revolution in Russia many sailors came to believe that peace was near. The officers, meanwhile, were giving talks on board about a “victorious peace” with annexations. The sailor Max Reichpietsch of the battleship Friedrich der Große, and after him, among others, the senior stoker Albin Köbis of Prinzregent Luitpold, met in Berlin in June with deputies of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), including its chairman, Hugo Haase. The deputies took note of the complaints but, according to later findings, warned the sailors against rash steps. In July, after the Reichstag Peace Resolution, signatures were collected among the crews in support of a peace without annexations and of the planned socialist conference in Stockholm. Some of the activists talked of a fleet strike if other means failed.

The march off Prinzregent Luitpold

The immediate cause was a trivial matter. On 1 August word went round the battleship that instead of the promised film show and free time the crew would get drill. In the morning 49 stokers of one watch left the ship without permission. On their return eleven of them were arrested. In the evening Köbis called a meeting on the dockyard grounds, and the decision to protest was taken. On 2 August almost the whole crew left the ship, apart from the men needed to maintain fighting readiness. According to German studies this was about 600 men. The sailors marched to Rüstersiel on the outskirts of Wilhelmshaven, where Köbis demanded the release of those arrested, and in an inn speeches were made about peace. No one used weapons, no one attacked the officers, and in the evening the sailors returned to the ship.

The squadron command raised the alarm, and Prinzregent Luitpold went out into the roads, cut off from the shore. When she returned, interrogations and arrests began, which also extended to other ships. The naval judge conducting the investigation presented the protest as the work of a secret organisation directed by the USPD with the aim of paralysing the fleet. A planned solidarity strike on other ships did not take place.

The sentences

At the end of August courts martial passed harsh sentences. On 25–26 August five sailors, including Reichpietsch and Köbis, were sentenced to death for “treasonable incitement to mutiny”. The fleet commander, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, confirmed two of the sentences and commuted three to fifteen years’ penal servitude each. Reichpietsch and Köbis were shot on 5 September 1917 at the Wahn training ground near Cologne. Many other participants were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment or sent to the front in Flanders.

The sailors’ movement had been broken, but the causes of discontent remained. In October the affair reached the Reichstag, where the Chancellor, Georg Michaelis, accused the USPD deputies of treason without having any evidence. A later Reichstag committee in the 1920s found no evidence that the USPD leaders had incited the sailors. The executions were remembered in the fleet as an injustice. A year later, in the autumn of 1918, the sailors’ revolt at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel became the beginning of the November Revolution.