Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  The statistics confirm these generalizations (see Figure 11). The number of crimes prosecuted fell significantly during the war. The precipitous decline at the onset reflected the atmosphere of popular elation, in which many minor infractions went unprosecuted. The rise in several categories of crime after 1915 suggests a correlation between criminality and protest, however, insofar as many of the criminal acts could be traced to the privations of the war.

  Figure 11 Wartime criminality Source: Liepmann, Krieg und Kriminalität, 15, 56, 98, 134.

  The rise of criminality among male youths, whom the war had deprived of parental supervision, was one case in point. Another was the growth after 1916 of the crime rate among women. Women made up a much larger portion of those convicted than they had before the war. Most of their convictions fell into a single category of dereliction: crimes against property. This category in fact comprised about three-quarters of all convictions during the last years of the war. War drove women and men (and young people) to steal; and they stole the things they needed to survive, such as food, clothing, shoes, and wood.

  Was this sort of criminality political? Did it represent protest against the war or opposition to the “war-making” system? These questions beg a circumspect answer. The war led to a revolution in both the German economy and the legal system, insofar as the market mechanism retreated before a command economy – a system of rations, production quotas, and price controls whose ultimate sanction was the law. Economic decisions – how much to produce or sell, and at what price – were determined in the first instance by regulations that were framed in administrative agencies and enforced by the police and courts. There were many, many new laws to break. Producers and merchants faced legal action for violating price ceilings, withholding goods from the controlled market, and participating in the black market. Punishments ranged from jail to fines or temporary suspensions of commercial licenses. Most of these cases were handled in administrative action rather than the courts, however (unless they were appealed), so they did not register in the criminal statistics. They burgeoned nonetheless, for they were basic features of a new economic regime in which the public realm expanded, in the form of legal restraint and compulsion, into manifold phases of private life. The system itself nurtured criminality, if only because so many new laws invited violation.

  And violated they were, ritually. “Everything is being stolen nowadays – literally everything,” came the lament from a south German editor early in 1918. “Nothing – absolutely nothing – is secure. The ‘big fish’ defraud the state of hundreds of thousands…[T]he littler thieves naturally have to make do with less.”31 The rations system seemed almost calculated to breed a culture of crime. Its failure to provide for basic wants posed not only a temptation but also an injunction to acquire goods illegally, whether by stealing, fraud, or otherwise circumventing the myriad of laws on which the controls rested. Farmers were merely the most practiced in evasion, but they were in good company. Merchants slipped extra supplies to their families, friends, and long-standing customers. Restaurateurs did the same. Consumers hoarded to the extent they could. The black market rivaled the ration system as a source of food and other scarce goods. Officials had little choice but to connive in the workings of this illegal system, without which scarcities would have been even more debilitating. In northern Bavaria and elsewhere, extra trains were scheduled to accommodate the (illegal) Hamsterfahrt. Officials in Munich estimated in March 1916 that the evening train from Dachau arrived every day in the Bavarian capital laden with 20,000 illegal eggs.32 During the last years of the war many major war contractors, such as the Rhine Metal Works in Düsseldorf, trafficked routinely in the black market in order to supplement the rations of their workers. In Düsseldorf and elsewhere, as one official conceded of this practice, “the authorities closed their eyes to it.”33 That one broke the law was a fact of life. To this extent, criminality enjoyed a cultural sanction. And its ramifications were political. Criminal behavior eroded the authority of the state, which embodied the laws that were so commonly defied.

  Another category of criminal behavior also had political implications. “Crimes against public order” comprised various collective breaches of the public peace and defiance of the police, from unruliness to riots and acts of revolution. These cases were much less numerous than other types of crime, but their pattern was familiar (see Figure 12). Before the war this category had featured violent incidents that accompanied strikes and other forms of labor protest. During the war it covered several additional kinds of behavior. In 1917 nearly half the convictions pertained to acts of vandalism by youth gangs. Most of the rest, however, reflected the growing disorder attendant on the “polonaise.” Market squares in cities everywhere became stages for consumer violence. In Münster the arrival of a shipment of herring in February 1916 was the signal for a riot, in which, according to one report, “hundreds of people screamed, women and children squealed, old people fell.”34 In Rostock in July 1917 the army had to impose martial law after a mob plundered shops in search of bread, butter, and milk. Thirty people were arrested.35 The drop in the statistics of this category of criminality in 1918 was deceptive, for the unruly incidents at the market had become so common that many were not pursued. Another index of the problem was the conviction in 1917 of 1,256 women who had threatened violence against policemen or other public officials.

  Figure 12 Crimes against public order Source: Liepmann, Krieg und Kriminalität, 22.

  The numbers provided a glimpse into the mechanism that turned private concerns into the trigger of public protest. These concerns were immediate, concrete, and material; above all, they had to do with the supply and price of food. The concerns were also universal. They led large numbers of people to act together in violation of the law. They thus raised issues of public order and the authority of the state, which was massively implicated in the supply and price of food.36 In these circumstances, the continuation of war became a public issue.

  Early opposition

  It was hard to oppose the war. The obstacles were as vast as the investment of moral and material resources into the slaughter. Pervasive institutional controls discouraged dissent, which was plagued, in addition, by its own conceptual ambiguities. Opposition to the war meant several different things. Basic to all forms was the belief that continuing the war was wrong, but this proposition rested on competing representations of the conflict. One portrayed the war as a tragic mistake, for which responsibility was shared among all the great powers. This view prescribed a compromise settlement in order to bring the war to an immediate, diplomatic end. Another represented the conflict not as a tragic mistake but, instead, as the result of basic internal disorders in the belligerent powers. In this view, revolutionary social and political change alone promised lasting peace.

  The popularity of the war initially overwhelmed every manner of dissent. By the time the elation had begun to subside, institutional safeguards were in place to make public opposition to the war’s continuation exceedingly difficult. All forms of political expression fell within the broad police powers of the deputy commanding generals, who could censor newspapers, read mail, confiscate pamphlets, prohibit public meetings, and imprison opponents of the war on a variety of grounds. While these controls stifled dissent for the first half of the war, they also established the framework in which protest developed during the second half of the conflict. Several truths about this process deserve emphasis. Large-scale opposition was not born in ideological maturity. It grew instead obliquely out of the privations of war. It took shape spontaneously around specific “bread-and-butter” grievances, such as prices, shortages of food and fuel, working conditions, and censorship. However (and this is a second truth), it did not spontaneously turn against either the war or the established structures of power. Before it could acquire the kind of cohesiveness, self-awareness, and political force that the word “ideology” connotes, dissent required the resources of established organizations.


  Few were available. Churches of both major denominations were massively implicated in the conflict, so neither Protestant nor Catholic theology proffered a reading of the war to sustain an ideology of opposition, at least until the papal peace note. Marxism offered a much more plausible language of opposition, but most of the Socialist labor movement, where this ideology had been at home, joined the war effort in 1914. The central event in the gestation of effective protest was thus the fracture of the German labor movement.

  The feeble history of the non-Socialist opposition bears witness to these truths. The so-called peace movement had never enjoyed much success in Germany.37 Its focus, the German Peace Society, comprised only a few hundred men and women in 1914, most of them middle-class progressives from the southwestern parts of Germany. They called their kind of opposition to war “pacifism”; it rested on a secular ideology of free-trade liberalism, the proposition that the nations of the world were united in a community of material and moral interest. The efforts of the pacifists to promote this principle had featured a series of international peace congresses, which preached the virtues of arms limitation and the arbitration of international disputes. Like everyone else, however, the German pacifists supported the war that broke out in 1914, for they had never questioned the right of national self-defense and they, too, were persuaded that Germany was the victim of aggression. Nevertheless, they were among the least enthusiastic about the conflict and among the first to conclude that it had been a tragic mistake, the benefits of which could not possibly justify the costs. The only remedy that they could prescribe was to urge the belligerent governments to negotiate a settlement, whose basis would be a return to the status quo of 1914 – a proposition that implied German renunciation of annexations in Belgium and elsewhere.

  Their hapless efforts on behalf of this goal encountered the state’s formidable power to muzzle dissent.38 Pacifists were branded as defeatists, subversives, or traitors. Even in the liberal southwest the deputy commanding generals had little patience with them and invoked a full repertoire of devices to frustrate the campaign. Peace groups found their pamphlets and journals censored or confiscated, their mail watched, their meetings broken up, and their leaders shadowed or put in jail. As the membership in local peace societies dwindled further, they became little more than private debating circles. Official suppression aside, the German Peace Society rested on too narrow a social base to provide an effective foundation for opposition to the war; most of the pacifists’ social peers supported the war for the duration. Attempts to establish several alternative organizations, such as the League for a New Fatherland (Bund neues Vaterland) and a section of the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, foundered on the same obstacles. Nor did the pacifists’ efforts find support or resonance abroad, for the international networks that had linked the peace movement before the war collapsed in 1914.

  The potential for resistance to the war appeared to be much greater among organizations of the Socialist working class. Publicly at least, on the eve of the war the Socialist labor movement had represented the largest, best-organized, and most determined opponent of war in principle. The ideological roots of this opposition were Marxist; its premise was that capitalism caused wars and that the workers of the world had nothing to gain by fighting one another. The Socialist International had ritually affirmed this principle at its congresses, which continued into the last days of peace to threaten concerted action by the laboring masses to prevent the outbreak of a European war. The fact that the German Social Democratic Party thereupon endorsed the German entry into the war testified to the power of national emotions in August 1914, as well as to the erosion of anti-war sentiment, which had accompanied the growing integration of the labor movement into the social and political institutions of Imperial Germany.

  Socialist affirmation of the war in 1914 reflected prevalent views among the movement’s leadership, both in the Social Democratic Party and the Socialist trade unions.39 Most of these leaders remained supporters for the duration of the conflict, while some began to rival the nationalists in advocating German annexations as the reward for victory. To Friedrich Ebert, the general secretary of the SPD, Philipp Scheidemann, the party’s parliamentary leader, and Carl Legien, the head of the Socialist unions, loyal participation in the war effort promised enormous benefits for their constituency – above all, an end to the animosity and discrimination that Socialist workers had suffered in Germany, from the shop floor to the halls of parliament. Because the government, particularly officials in the War Ministry, recognized the importance of organized labor in the management of the workforce in the war industries, labor leaders could bargain from strength to achieve a number of critical advances, including the right to organize, the establishment of arbitration boards in larger factories, and the unions’ participation in administering the Auxiliary Service Law after its passage in 1916. These gains turned organized labor into an agent of mobilization, a vehicle to ensure the disciplined loyalty of the workforce. The price paid was the practical abandonment of Marxism as a conceptual guide to the war’s meaning. The bulk of the labor movement henceforth became another of Germany’s interest groups; and its agitation in favor of the peaceful reform of Germany’s social and political institutions adjusted to the legitimacy of the war effort. As this transformation generated yet another institutional bulwark against opposition to the war, it channeled dissent against not only the state but also the dominant institutions of the labor movement itself.

  The Socialists’ decision to support the war in 1914 had by no means been unanimous. Traditions of international working-class solidarity, revolutionary opposition to capitalism, and resistance to war lived on in some sectors of the German labor movement.40 In August 1914 fourteen of the 110 Social Democrats in the Reichstag had expressed opposition to the war in the party’s caucus, but they bowed to party discipline and voted publicly in favor of the loans to finance the war. The next time this issue was put to a vote in the Reichstag, in December 1914, a lone Socialist, Karl Liebknecht, broke discipline and publicly opposed the war. At the end of 1915 twenty Socialists did. The importance of their action was more than symbolic, for these deputies enjoyed immunity to criticize the war in parliament; and not even the deputy commanding generals could censor publication of the Reichstag’s proceedings. The modest growth of parliamentary opposition accompanied the spread of anti-war sentiment in several centers of prewar labor radicalism, such as Bremen, Braunschweig, Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Leipzig, where it crystallized around the editorial staffs of Socialist newspapers – including (until it was disciplined by the party central in 1916) the national daily, Vorwärts.41 Socialist opposition had to contend not only with the deputy commanding generals but also with the power of the party and trade unions, which moved against recalcitrant editors and local officials. But party discipline had its limits, particularly on young workers who were new to the movement. Resistance thus bred in pockets of the labor movement, whose network of Vereine – including the neighborhood pubs, where like-minded workers gathered – provided nascent channels of communication among dissident factory groups and party cells.

  The anti-war sentiment that took root in these circles was more radical than middle-class pacifism, for it embraced a revolutionary vision of politics and society. Opposition to the war was couched here in opposition to the institutions of capitalism, whose overthrow promised lasting international peace among socialist nations. Yet Marxist opposition was itself broad enough to suggest two potentially antagonistic strategies of action. The first prescribed agitation to force an immediate end to the war, which would be the direct prelude to the thoroughgoing democratic reform of society and politics at home and the reestablishment of the Socialist International as the best guarantee of a durable peace. This approach, which was known as the “Centrist” position, corresponded to the views of most of the German Socialists who came to oppose the war, including the dissidents in the party’s parliamentary group. To their left, a small grou
p of agitators known as the Socialist “Radicals” entertained a more cataclysmic scenario. In their view, the war would continue as long as capitalist institutions survived; peace accordingly demanded a revolutionary assault on the war-making regimes – including the institutions of the labor movement that had connived with these regimes. The Socialist International, they insisted, was dead. In its stead, a new international organization of revolutionary workers was needed to complete the transition to socialism and peace. This radical position gestated primarily in Switzerland, where its proponents included Lenin and a small group of revolutionary exiles from Russia and other lands. In Germany its adherents initially numbered but a handful of intellectuals who stood on the fringe of the opposition – in the literal sense that its two most prominent figures, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, spent much of the war in jail.42 Nonetheless, the endless prolongation of the carnage lent cogency to their representation of the war, while they themselves attempted to provide coherence to this vision in a series of newsletters, called the “Spartacus letters,” which began in 1916 to circulate clandestinely among opposition cells in the labor movement.