There were many reasons for the final collapse of Germany in 1918. With loved ones starving at home and no foreseeable victory, German fighting men became demoralized. Even the German advances of that spring played a part in this, for when the Germans overran Allied rear areas they found abundant food and drink, fine leather boots, sheepskin jerkins, and a great deal of military equipment. It was a cruel contradiction of the stories told about a Britain on the point of starvation and surrender.
For General Erich Ludendorff, First Quartermaster General of the German Army and the most powerful man in Germany, the spring advances brought a more personal blow. He found the body of his stepson, shot down on the first day of the offensive.
By the summer of 1918 there were a million American soldiers in France and more were arriving at the rate of a quarter million each month. The Germans were now fighting the whole world.
To compound Ludendorff’s problems, an epidemic of Spanish influenza caused his armies to report that they were too weak to repulse Allied attacks. The epidemic was affecting the Allied troops too, but the malnutrition of the Germans and the way in which the Allied armies were being constantly reinforced by soldiers from the United States meant that the Germans suffered most. Soon the Spanish influenza epidemic was to kill more people than did the war itself.
In 1918 Allied armies were using the newly invented tank in ever more skillful ways. On 8 August their resources were enough to put about 600 British and French tanks into the battle of Amiens. Light tanks and armored cars penetrated the German rear and attacked artillery positions, a divisional headquarters, and even a corps staff far behind the lines.
The German front did not collapse completely because the Allies had nothing with which to exploit the breakthrough. The Germans put their front line together again and even managed some vigorous counterattacks, but no one could doubt that it was the beginning of the end. Ludendorff himself wrote that as German reinforcements arrived they were jeered at as “black-legs” and asked why they had ccrne to prolong the war.
“August 8th was the black day of the German Army in this war,” wrote Ludendorff, and on 11 August Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German Emperor, said that the war must be ended and told his Secretary of State to begin peace talks.
The British official history says, “It pleased the Germans to attribute their defeat in the field to the tank. The excuse will not bear examination.” Major General J. F. C. Fuller, tank pioneer and military historian, disagrees strongly with the official history, stressing that the morale effect of the tank gave it its importance. He selects— to support this argument—these telling words spoken by a German prisoner: “The officers and men in many cases come to consider the approach of tanks a sufficient explanation for not fighting. Their sense of duty is sufficient to make them fight against infantry, but if tanks appear, many feel they are justified in surrendering.” As we shall see, these words echoed through France in May 1940.
Kaiser Wilhelm thought better of his decision to open peace talks, and his two senior officers, Ludendorff and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, comforted each other with false hopes of a last-minute miracle. But it did not materialize. Instead, Ludendorff endured the agonies of failure and watched his army in its death throes. This, the death of his stepson—and his wife’s inconsolable reaction to it—and the strain of overwork turned Ludendorff’s mind. By the time of the surrender he was mentally deranged.
These three—the Kaiser, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, and General Ludendorff—were, respectively, the most senior in rank, the most exalted, and the most powerful men in Germany. They had inflicted a military dictatorship on the country but displayed no skill in statesmanship. Their final error of judgment was to wait too long before opening up peace talks. By now the army was at the end of its strength and the Germans had little choice but to accept any terms that their powerful enemies offered. Rather than suffer the humiliation at first hand, the army sent a civilian to ask for a cease-fire.
The American President, Woodrow Wilson, had already told the Germans that, unless they got rid of “the military authorities and monarchical autocrats,” the Allies would demand complete surrender. In October 1918 Prince Maximilian, heir to the small provincial Grand Duchy of Baden, was chosen to assume the duties of Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia, as part of the transfer of power back to civil government.
At this final hour, Ludendorff suddenly had second thoughts about asking for peace and supported his plans to fight to the death with nonsensical statistics. It was enough to make the Kaiser regain his optimism. But Prince Max rejected their demands, saying, “The desire to perish with honour may well occur to the individual but the responsible statesman must accept that the broad mass of the people has the right soberly to demand to live rather than to die in glory.” Prince
Max repeatedly advised the Kaiser to abdicate, and, when he did not do so, simply announced the abdication anyway, adding that the Crown Prince, Wilhelm’s heir, had also renounced the throne.
Then, in one of the most casual transfers of power in modern history. Prince Max walked up to Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Social Democratic Party, and said, “Herr Ebert, I commit the German Empire to your keeping.”
The Kaiser, who had so proudly led his country into this terrible war, now packed his many bags and ordered the imperial train to the Dutch frontier. In Holland he went to the chateau of Count Godard Bentinck and asked for a cup of tea—“strong English tea”—and shelter. It was a tradition of the Knights of the Order of St. John that one gave sanctuary to a brother. But finding space for Kaiser Wilhelm’s retinue was more difficult; most of them returned to Germany.
World History
