'socialist' Hangmen Who Crushed a Revolution

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Schleicher. "You have always fire power but by the mass said that if such an event took mobilisation of the local proletplace you would come to our ariat, who convinced the ordinassistance. Now is the time to ary soldiers not to fight. act." But what did the reformists This open lining up with the conclude from this: that they last vestiges of the old imperial should join with the workers? •The government is made state machine in fact failed.

The army was routed not by looked for more reliable forces Germany at the end of the first imperialist world war, was reduced to economic and political ruins.

The defeat of its armies led inexorably to the sort of internal class struggles which posed sharply the question of the working class taking the power.

Workers councils

The Kaiser was thrown out and a republic declared; workers' and soldiers' councils sprang up.

On the streets, groups of armed workers. began the struggle to overthrow the last vestiges of bourgeois rule.

Only the social democrats, pushed into power on the wave of insurrectionary struggles, stood between the working class and the German revolution.

Yet these reformists clung desperately to power and sought at every turn to find new ways of restoring 'order' within the continuing framework of capitalism.

Fought against

They not only shrank from the tasks of revolution, they actively fought against it.

By December 1918 much of Berlin was in the hands of groups of armed workers, demobilised soldiers and the spontaneously created People's Naval Division.

The Social Democrats, recognising that control was slipping out of their hands, set out to smash the revolution.

On December 23 Ebert, the Chancellor, called remnants of the old imperialișt army command to crush the armed workers.

Time to act prisoner.., he told Major von Not on your life! They who would not shrink from suppressing the mass of workers.

Gustave Noske, a right wing social democrat, was brought in as defence minister and charged with the task of defeating the "Someone must become the bloodhound" commented Noske, "I won't shirk the task"

The counter-revolutionary policies of Noske and Ebert Scheidermann y Colin Morro Noske with Freikorps thugs and violence against the German working class.

The leaders of the young German Communist Party, Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebnecht, lacking as yet the necessary mass proletarian organisation to actually smash rounded founder is state pater, were murdered.

Ebert, like a good democrat, was suitably upset by these