Did the German Empire fall on the 8th or the 9th of November in 1918( Why were assassins and hotmen let off the hook in the early period of the weimar Republic? These and other questions are to be addressed.

1. FROM THE FALL OF THE WITTELSBACH AND
HOHENZOLLERN MONARCHIES (NOVEMBER 8-9, 1918)
TO HITLER’S ‘BEER HALL PUTSCH’ (NOVEMBER 8-9, 1923)
I
From November the Ninth to November the Eleventh in 1918: the
Three Days that Changed Germany and the World Forever.
On the ninth of November 1918 Kaiser Wilhelm lost the position of Germany's
head of state when Prince Max von Baden, the German Empire's last chancellor,
transferred the powers of his office to Friedrich Ebert, the leader of a three-party
coalition of parties -his party, the SPD (Social Democrats), the Catholic Centre
Party and the German Liberal Party - which had attained a dominant position in
the Reichstag. On the same day Philipp Scheidemann, a leading member of the
SPD, declared from a window of the Reichstag that the Kaiser had abdicated. The
fact that the Kaiser had not truly done so made no difference. The German
monarchy was over for good.
On the following day Ebert received an unexpected phone call from General
Wilhelm Groener the head of the top joint staff that exercised authority over the
German armed forces in the Kaiser’s name, although the Kaiser was the Emperor
in name only. The war was not over, albeit only a day off. but its end was
imminent. The western allies had made it clear that there would be no peace
settlement as long as Wilhelm was still on the throne, Groener made a surprising
proposal.
The military would defend the prospective government - on certain conditions, of
course, chief among them being an acceptance that the military should retain
independence from civil control and would thus pose 'a state within the state.'
The parties agreed that Ebert's provisional regime would draw up a constitution
that ensured that a future president could suspend the normal parliamentary
process ‘in the case of need’ as when a revolution threatened or any situation

2. arose that the President saw as dangerous.
Was this deal a sensible arrangement or a pact with the devil that promised short-
term benefits but denied the attainment of long-term goals. Clearly a new
government would have to rely on military support of some kind in a period of
massive change and volatile politics with the radical wing of the socialist
movement under the direction of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg lurching
towards the Russian soviet model of state control. In one way or another the
Kaiser, von Hindenburg, Ludendorff and Groener himself endorsed the Ebert-
Groener deal, though its terms were not revealed to the public until 1925.
However, those named above interpreted its import in very different ways. To
Ludendorff the deal offered a chance to lumber the new parliament with
responsibility for expected reverses that Ebert and his coalition would inevitably
have to suffer in their dealings with the western allies and when contending with
social unrest. Besides, the deal would also divert attention from the failure of von
Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the conduct of the war by pinning blame on certain
'traiterous elements' that undermined the patriotic war effort. The so-called stab-
in-the back- myth was already in the making.
Groener himself, I contend, did not share in this cynical construction if we take his
subsequent career as a loyal servant of the Weimar Republic into account., in
which role he did his best to resist the inroads of Nazi influence.
On the eleventh of November Matteus Erzberger, the leader of the Catholic
Centre party, signed the document that certified his acceptance of the Armistice
provisions on behalf of the German nation and thus acknowledged his country's
defeat after over four years of horrendous warfare. In view of his assassination on
August 28 in 1921 by agents of an ultra-nationalist paramilitary group, a successor
of the infamous Ehrhardt Brigade which had orchestrated the murders of Karl
Liebknech and Rosa Luxembourg on the 15th of January in 1919, he also signed
his own death warrant.
If any three people became the chief objects of the most intense hatred in the
minds of ultra-nationalists at the end of the Great War three candidates for this
dubious honour stand out: Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxembourg and, yes, Philipp

3. Erzberger, neither a socialist nor a Jew. Though swept up by pro-war enthusiasm
in 1914 he came round to the recognition that continued warfare proved futile
and injurious to the true interests of the suffering German people. Ebert, who had
enough trouble on his hands anyway , must have felt slightly relieved that no
member of his own party would incur the onus that attached to any German who
endorsed the Armistice's provisions, however necessary and however inevitable,
such a submission was, even in the eyes of the Kaiser, von Hindenburg and
Ludendorff.
The Eber-Groener deal could not itself have encouraged the culture of violence
and intrigue that marred not least the reputation of the SPD itself during 1919
and 1920 as its terms were not made public, but those who led contingents of the
Freikorps down the path of murder and terrorism were under the impression that
they could continue their activities with impunity when judges, soldiers and
politicians turned a blind eye to their criminal pursuits. Gustav Noske, the first
minister of home security in the provisional government, sided with the forces of
reaction and brutal suppression rather than with workers and defenders of
parliamentary government as when the short-lived Kapp Putsch took place to be
followed by the crushing of the Ruhr rebellion with ruthless energy.
The stresses caused by popular resentment as the Versailles Treaty were made
known, by the tensions of a situation close to civil war and the specter of the
Rhineland's secession from Berlin frittered away the initial advantages enjoyed by
the SPD-led 'coalition of the three colours of democracy,’ (black for the Catholic
Centre Party, red for the SPD and gold for the Free German Democrats (the
colours that composed the symbol of hope for a unified and democratic Germany
since 1848) . In the first election of the Weimar Republic the SPD could now
muster less than forty percent of the electorate's votes, which made it
increasingly difficult to form viable majorities in parliament, if t all. The seeds of
the Weimar Republic's decline and fall were sown perhaps even before its
establishment, perhaps even during the transitional three-period from November
the Ninth until to November 11 and the end of what once went by the name of
‘The Great War.’

4. II
And What Part did November the Eighth Play in German History since
1918?
.?
November the Ninth has gone down in history as Germany's 'day of destiny.' On
the ninth of November the Kaiser was forced into retirement and Germany adopted
a republican form of government. On the ninth of November Hitler and General
von Ludendorff failed in their attempt to stage a coup d'etat in Bavaria. Again on
this date the so-called Reichs-Kristallnacht against Jews was staged and, on a
brighter note, the Berlin Wall was breached, allowing East Berliners the freedom to
enter the western half of their city, which in turn set the premise for German
reunification. But what about November the eighth?
Events that occurred in Germany on that date, though less sensational in the impact
they created than those I have just cited, were hardly less important and
consequential in the long term. Indeed, the failure of the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch
marked the decisive inflection point in the course of German history between the
establishment of the Weimar Republic and Hitler's seizure of power in 1933.
Though the date of the so-called Beer Hall putsch is placed on the ninth of
November, by the close of the eighth of November it seemed that Hitler and
Ludendorff were on the point of achieving their goal. Those who composed the
ruling triumvirate of the Bavarian government were held as hostages in the
Bürgerbräukeller beer hall, one of Munich's largest meeting places of the drinking
classes, that had been surrounded by heavily armed members of the SA. The head
of the triumvirate, Gustav Ritter von Kahr vacillated over the decision to back the
putsch but, in Hitler's view at least, was moving in Hitler and Ludendorff's direction.
There was more than one reason as to why the coup failed on the following day.
Hitler left the beer hall too early to clinch a deal with the government triumvirate
and Ludendorff released them somewhat too early for his own good. Though von
Kahr fully shared Hitler's attitude to Jews and the acceptance of Germany's defeat,
he was first and foremost a Bavarian nationalist and therefore ill-disposed to accept
the authority of Ludendorff, a prime representative of the Prussian military

5. establishment. Leading Catholic traditionalists withheld support of the putschist
cause at a decisive moment.
The events to which I ascribe such great significance both occurred in Bavaria at a
juncture in history when it was by no means certain that Germany would preserve
its unity. Powerful secessionist trends were at work not only in Bavaria but also -
and more pressingly - in the Rhineland where Conrad Adenauer and fellow
Rhinelanders advocated the establishment of an independent Rhineland under
French protection. There were calls for the independence of Saxony too.
With such a background in mind we note that Kurt Eisner, both a reputed Jewish
intellectual and a popular and widely admired radical socialist politician, became
the president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. It must be admitted, however, that
he lacked the practical skills required of a state leader in his crucial position, a lack
shared by those who followed him in that capacity. They were philosophers and in
the case of Ernst Toller they installed an inspired poet but they were not
competent leaders of state. Their poor example deepened the rift between
themselves and the more moderate SPD. By the way, It is not generally appreciated
that the aristocratic order of the German empire collapsed not in Berlin but in
Munich, not with the overthrow of the Hohenzollern dynasty but with that of the
Wittelsbachs. Further to being a member of the Social Democratic Party, which was
bad enough from a certain point of view, Eisner was also a proponent of its most
radical wing. a man who had opposed any support of the German war effort, which
he did on the basis of the perceived need to defend international workers'
solidarity. His convictions entailed his imprisonment for opposing national security
and the German war effort. Worse still in the eyes of extreme nationalists, he
maintained the ultimate heresy , the position that Germany was chiefly to blame
for starting the Great War and was thus ready to accept the terms that the
victorious allies would impose on Germany after the war. For this there was a bitter
consequence. He was assassinated in February i919 by Anton Graf von Arco, a man
who laid great stress on his military and aristocratic prowess and saw himself as an
avenger of injury to German and Bavarian honour Even so, the Bavarian Soviet
Republic was not immediately brought down. The assassin got off lightly in court.
as did many another terrorist or hitman on the extreme right of German politics.

6. Among the most notorious elements in this category were members of breakaway
members of in the Freikorps, a loose confederation of disaffected servicemen who
believed that socialists and Communists had brought about Germany's defeat in
the Great War, Amid the uneasy and ambiguous compromise between the German
High Command and the new republican government militant activists on the
politically right side of the postwar scene could rest assured that their elimination
of leftist politicians would not call down severe punishments in courts of law. This
proved to be the case when a group of ten military men in their self-appointed role
of defenders of the authority of the state brutally murdered Rosa Luxembourg and
Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the Spartacus or Communist faction, while 'escorting
them' to police headquarters in Berlin in January 1919. At the ensuing court martial
the ringleader Captain Waldemar Pabst, first general staff officer of a recently
formed crack division of the Prussian army, and immediate followers were
acquitted while two subaltern servicemen received relatively mild sentences as it
could not be denied that Liebknecht and Luxembourg must have received ‘unduly
rough handling’ during their transfer towards the police headquarters. The party of
radical socialists movement never truly recovered from the blow, despised as
much by the SPD minister of the Interior Gustav Noske as by General von
Hindenburg.
We return to the Bavarian Soviet Republic which lingered on for several months in
1919 until it fell victim as much to its inner weaknesses and the ideological
infighting of its membership as to the intervention of hostile external forces when
Gustav Noske ordered the invasion of Bavaria by the German army, thus 'killing two
birds with one stone,' that is to say: by extinguishing the Bavarian Soviet Republic
and by bringing Bavaria back into the fold of a seemingly united Germany.
Even today Bavarians are proud of being citizens of the 'Freistaat Bayern. They may
be less proud of the fact that for no fault of their own Bavaria was the stamping
ground of the early Nazis. Most of those who became leading National-Socialists
had been Hitler's cronies during the party's Bavarian interlude. The list merely
begins with Hess, Himmler, Roehm, Rosenberg and Goering. Goebbels, a
Rhinelander, poses a notable exception and he did have certain misgivings about
being fully committed to Hitler's Bavaria-based new movement before dispelling
them entirely.

7. Hitler learned from the Beer Putsch fiasco that the way to destroying democracy
lay in exploiting the apparatus of the democratic state as a weapon against itself.
The trauma of his first attempt to take control of the German state left a mark
though. He never forgave von Kahr for thwarting the plan to take over the Bavarian
state. The score was settled on the 'Night of the Long Knives’ in June 1934.