The political and military situation at the beginning of the war

The declaration of war on France and Russia in August 1914 was greeted with immense enthusiasm throughout Germany. Thousands of men spontaneously flocked to the nearest assembly points to board the trains to the front. They were seen off by their wives and girl-friends – some of them apprehensive, no doubt, but also carried away by the wave of patriotic fervour. Meanwhile the parties in the Reichstag voted almost unanimously for the hastily introduced war credits in an atmosphere of elation. Most Social Democrats, hitherto the alleged ‘enemies of the State’, supported the government's request for funds; and many soldiers who were going off to the trenches belonged to the class which fellow-Germans thought to lack patriotism. No one was more surprised by the attitude of the SPD leadership and its supporters than the military. For many years they had prepared the Army not merely for a foreign conflagration, but also for civil war. The officer corps represented the most hardline conservatism among the Wilhelmine elites, viewing itself as the main pillar of the monarchical system in a sea of revolutionary ferment and as the last bastion of the existing order, should the Left ever dare to challenge it directly.

It was this mentality which had produced on various occasions suggestions of preventive action against the working-class movement as long as the risks were still supposed to be calculable.