On Saturday the 28th of September, Ludendorff told Hindenberg that
collapse on the West Front could only be averted by getting an armistice
based on Wilson's 14 Points. (Ludendorff had never read the 14 Points
but had heard that they offered peace to Germany without any loss of
territory.) On Sunday the 29th, the two Field Marshals visited Kaiser
William face to face.
For more than a year, William had been willing to name a Chancellor who
could have the sup****t of the Reichstag majority, but the "great team"
of Ludendorff and Hindenberg had always lectured him that would be a
concession that was not made necessary at the present time. On Sunday
the 29th, they were no longer opposing the Chancellor's subordination to
the legislature.
William made a snide remark that the German people had fought gallently,
but had been yet down by their politicians. In making that comment,
William did not include himself as one of the architects of failure. He
was a God-anointed monarch, and not a politician.
So what next? William asked.
Ludendorff said that the "government had to be reconstituted on a
broader basis" (1). Pick someone who had not previously fouled up in
office, Ludendorff told his king and emperor.
And who would be that Chancellor? Two weeks earlier, Prince Max of
Baden, heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden, had visited William and tried
to argue him into making the Chancellor responsible to the Reichstag.
On that earlier occasion, William had told Max that such suggested
reforms were not needed. On Sunday the 29th, the Kaiser dispatched a
telegram to Max, inforning the Prince that he was now German Chancellor.
Follow up telegrams made it plain to Max that the Kaiser and his General
Staff felt the War had irreversably turned against Germany. "I thought I
should have arrived five minutes before the hour," Prince Max would
moan, "but I arrived five minutes after it" (2).
On Monday the 30th, Prince Max arrived at the Reichstag for his first
day as Chancellor. To his dismay, he discovered that the leaders of the
various party delegations had only that morning been briefed by a
General Staff officer to the effect that the West Front would collapse
no later than Wednesday the 2nd of October 1918. A week before their
official briefing had been that the German Army was a wall like iron and
the Allies would buckle by Christmas 1918.
Prince Max told the Reichstag chiefs that the Kaiser had approved of
responsible government and was going to put that in writing. Max also
told F. Ebert of the Socialists that military control would leave the
Kaiser and go to the Chancellor and Cabinet (a concession that William
had not authorized).
Woodrow Wilson's responses to German peace offers plainly stated "the
nations of the world do not, and cannot trust, the word of those who
have been the masters of German policy. If the Government of the United
States must deal with the military masters and the monarchical autocrats
of Germany now, . . . it must demand not peace negotiations but
surrender" (3).
William raged that Wilson, an arch hypocrite, a scheming liar, "put
aside his mask . His object is to bring down my House, to throw the
monarchy aside" (4). The Kaiser complained to house servants as his
Ministers and Generals were too busy to attend William's soloquies.
The next three weeks were wasted and the Allies came up alongside the
German West line, seemingly readying for another big push, probably
before the snows of winter arrived. Germany never replied to American
questions on who was in charge of the German state, and the Americans
repeated that concessions would not be made to Germany in advance of
German surrender.
Also during those three weeks in October 1918, William wavered from an
announcement that he would never abdicate as he was of the blood of
Friedrich the Great, to questions of whether the throne could pass from
him and over the Crown Prince to one of his younger heirs. Likewise,
Hindenberg and Ludendorff wavered, insisting at intervals that peace had
to be immediate to talk about spring offensives in 1919.
On Friday the 1st of November 1918, Prince Max of Baden sent a civil
servent to the Kaiser to tell him that Max's Cabinet had agreed by a
majority vote that Wilhelm had to abdicate. "I have no intention of
quitting the throne because of a few hundred Jews and a thousand
workmen," Kaiser William shouted angrily. "Tell that to your masters in
Berlin" (5).
The Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, wanted to preserve the monarchy
but William was not making that task easy to accomplish. In October he
had made each of his sons swear personally to him that they would
refuse any elevation to the throne offered to them by Prince Max.
Moreover, William was brooding, asking his lackies to sound out fellow
officers as to how far the Army would go in protecting their Kaiser
against Chancellor Max.
On Friday the 1st, a twenty man squad of soldiers approached the Kaiser,
pointed rifles at him, and took him to a downtown hotel under house
arrest. "Oh my God, this is revolution!" the Kaiser screeched and wept.
"You Jews will kill me like you did Nicky!" (6)
When William was driven off in an Army truck, many saw the departure but
none tried to interfere with it. That afternoon, the Chancellor
announced the Kaiser had abdicated (he hadn't), cooling down street
demonstrations at Wilhelmshaven which had begun the previous day when
sailors had learned that hard-line officers had proposed a suicide
mission by the whole High Seas Fleet against the British Navy.
The Crown Prince wandered the Pomeranian Coast, not finding a
counterrevolutionary Army willing to fight for his father. On Saturday
the 2nd of November 1918, the Crown Prince, his family and entourage
snuck to Denmark.
At the honeymoon suite of a hotel, the captive ex-Kaiser predicted that
Prince Max was a traitor who would usurp the throne for the benefit of
Jews and Marxists. Unknown to William, Friedrich Ebert of the Socialists
was asking Prince Max to resign in favor of Ebert.
"The days of princes are over for the time being," said the labor
organizer and ex-saddler to the aristocrat (7).
Prince Max told Ebert that he thought he had done as much as he could on
most issues, but there was one more achievement he planned to make
before he retired from power. "If the German people are introduced to a
Republic as the companion of defeat and misery, they will never give the
new state a fair chance," said Max to the Socialist.
Prince Max had hoped that a son or grandson of the Kaiser would take the
throne, but they were in hiding at the moment and had all pur****tedly
sworn an oath to evade agreement with Max. Failing that, one of the
other German dynasties might find themselves promoted to German Emperor.
The difficulty was that monarchs were being ousted from their palaces
across Germany so none seemed ready to imperial elevation.
On Monday the 4th of November 1918, Prince Max as Chancellor announced
that the Government of the German Reich was now responsible to the
national legislature, the Reichstag; that the Kaiser and the
Hohenzollern dynasty had abdicated and that the German throne was now
vacant, and that Germany sought a complete peace on the basis of
Wilson's 14 points.
In London, Winston Churchill heard the news and asked the Prime
Minister, David Lloyd George, who the Germans had for their new Kaiser.
"It sounds to me as if they do not know who their new Kaiser shall be"
(8), the Prime Minister replied.
Notes:
(1) Ludendorff quoted p.394 in Michael Balfour, The Kaiser And His Times
(NY 1972).
(2) Prince Max quoted p. 395 in Balfour, Kaiser.
(3) Wilson quoted p.397 in Balfour, Kaiser.
(4) William quoted p. 398 in Balfour, Kaiser.
(5) William quoted p. 402 in Balfour, Kaiser.
(6) William quoted p. 32 in John Channing, The German Peace Of 1918
(London 1965).
(7) Ebert quoted p. 40 in A.N. Wilson, King And Kaiser (London, 2001)
(8) Lloyd George quoted 2:355 in Winston Churchill, The Great War
(London 1927).
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