The questions growing out of the manner of conducting the submarine warfare became acute in the first months of 1916. The government was determined to prevent any open debate on this subject in the Reichstag, and the deputies of all parties bowed to the government's will. Haase and his little group of malcontents, however, refused to submit. They carried their opposition to the authority of their own party to such an extent that a party caucus decided upon their exclusion. The caucus vote was followed on the same day—March 24, 1916—by the formal secession from the party of Haase and seventeen other members, who constituted themselves as a separate party under the designation of "Socialist Working Society" (Arbeitsgemeinschaft). The seceders included, among others, Georg Ledebour, Wilhelm Dittmann, Dr. Oskar Cohn, Emil Barth, Ernst Däumig and Eduard Bernstein. Liebknecht, who had been excluded from the party a year earlier, allied himself to the new group. All its members were internationalists.
The formation of the new party furnished a rallying point for all radical Socialists and also for the discontented generally, and the numbers of these were increasing daily. Under the protection of their parliamentary immunity these members were able to carry on a more outspoken and effective agitation against the war. Haase, Ledebour and other members of the group issued a manifesto in June, 1916, wherein it was declared that the people were starving and that the only replies made by the government to their protests took the form of a severe application of martial law. "The blockade should have been foreseen," said the manifesto. "It is not the blockade that is a crime; the war is a crime. The consolation that the harvest will be good is a deliberate deception. All the food in the occupied territories has been requisitioned, and people are dying of starvation in Poland and Serbia." The manifesto concluded with an appeal to the men and women of the laboring-classes to raise their voices against the continuance of the war.
The underground propaganda against the war and the government assumed greater proportions, and encouraged the revolutionaries in the Reichstag. Grown bold, Haase announced that a pacifist meeting would be held in Berlin on August 30. It was prohibited by the police. Sporadic strikes began. Rühle had staged the first avowedly political strike at Leipsic on May Day. It failed, but set an example which was followed in other parts of the empire.
Liebknecht, who had been mustered into the army and was hence subject to military regulations, was arrested on May Day in Berlin for carrying on an anti-war and anti-government agitation among the workingmen. On trial he was sentenced to thirty months' imprisonment and to dishonorable dismissal from the army. This was the signal for widespread strikes of protest in various cities. There was serious rioting in Berlin on July 1st, and grave disorders also occurred at Stuttgart, Leipsic and other cities. Liebknecht appealed from the conviction and the appellate court raised the sentence to four years and one month, with loss of civil rights for six years. This caused a recrudescence of July's demonstrations, for a sentence of this severity was most unusual in Germany. Liebknecht's personal followers and party friends swore vengeance, and many others who had theretofore kept themselves apart from a movement with which they secretly sympathized were rendered more susceptible to radical anti-war propaganda.
The autumn of 1916 brought the government's so-called Hilfsdienstgesetz, or Auxiliary Service Law, intended to apply military rules of enrollment and discipline to the carrying out of necessary work at home, such as wood-cutting, railway-building, etc. This law produced widespread dissatisfaction, and Haase, by attacking it in the Reichstag, increased his popularity and poured more oil upon the flames of discontent. In March, 1917, he declared openly in the Reichstag that Germany could not win the war and that peace must be made at once.
The Russian revolution of this month was a factor whose influence and consequences in Germany can hardly be exaggerated. Not even the wildest dreamer had dared to believe that a revolution could be successfully carried through in war-time while the government had millions of loyal troops at its disposal. That it not only did succeed, but that many of the Tsar's formerly most loyal officers, as, for example, Brussiloff, immediately joined the revolutionaries, exerted a powerful effect. And thus, while Germans loyal to their government hailed the revolution as the downfall of a powerful enemy, the masses, starving through this terrible Kohlrübenwinter, cold, miserable, dispirited by the bloody sacrifices from which few families had been exempt, infected unconsciously by the doctrines of international Socialism and skillfully propagandized by radical agitators, began to wonder whether, after all, their salvation did not lie along the route taken by the Russians.
The radical Socialists who had left the old party in 1916 organized as the Independent Socialist Party of Germany at a convention held in Gotha in April, 1917. Eighteen men had left the party a year earlier, but one hundred and forty-eight delegates, including fifteen Reichstag deputies, attended the convention. Haase and Ledebour were chosen chairmen of the executive committee, and a plan of opposition to the further conduct of the war was worked out. Party newspaper organs were established, and some existing Socialist publications espoused the cause of the new party. Revolution could naturally be no part of their open policy, and there may have been many members of the party who did not realize what the logical and inevitable consequences of their actions were. The leaders, however, were by this time definitely and deliberately working for the overthrow of the government, although it may be doubted whether even they realized what would be the extent of the débâcle when it should come.
Reference has already been made to strikes in various parts of the empire. These had been, up to 1918, chiefly due to dissatisfaction over material things—hunger (the strong undercurrent of all dissatisfaction), inadequate clothing, low wages, long hours, etc. They were encouraged and often manipulated by radical Socialists who perceived their importance as a weapon against the government, and were to that extent political, but the first great strike with revolution as its definite aim was staged in Berlin and Essen at the end of January, 1918. The strength of the Independent Socialists and of the more radical adherents of Liebknecht, Ledebour, Rosa Luxemburg and others of the same stamp, while it had increased but slowly in the rural districts and the small towns, had by this time reached great proportions in the capital and generally in the industrial sections of Westphalia. Two great munition plants in Berlin employing nearly a hundred thousand workers were almost solidly Independent Socialist in profession and Bolshevist in fact. The infection had reached the great plants in and around Essen in almost equal degree. A great part of these malcontents was made up of youths who, in their early teens when the war broke out, had for more than three years been released from parental restraint owing to the absence of their soldier-fathers and who had at the same time been earning wages that were a temptation to lead a disordered life. They were fertile ground for the seeds of propaganda whose sowing the authorities were unable to stop, or even materially to check. Even Liebknecht, from his cell, had been able to get revolutionary communications sent out to his followers.
The January strike assumed large proportions, and so confident were the Berlin strikers of the strength of their position that they addressed an "ultimatum" to the government. This ultimatum demanded a speedy peace without annexations or indemnities; the participation of workingmen's delegates of all countries in the peace negotiations; reorganization of the food-rationing system; abolishing of the state of siege, and freedom of assembly and of the press; the release of all political prisoners; the democratization of state institutions, and equal suffrage for women. The strikers appointed a workmen's council to direct their campaign, and this council chose an "action commission," of which Haase was a member.
The authorities, in part unable and in part unwilling to make the concessions demanded, took determined steps to put down the strike. Their chief weapon was one that had been used repeatedly, and, as events proved, too often and too freely. This weapon was the so-called Strafversetzungen, or punitive transfers into the front-army. The great part of the strikers were men subject to military duty who had been especially reclaimed and kept at work in indispensable industries at home. They were, however, subject to military law and discipline, and the imminent threat of being sent to the front in case of insubordination had prevented many strikes that would otherwise have come, and the carrying into effect of this threat had broken many revolts in factories. Thousands of these men, who had been drawing high wages and receiving extra allowances of food, were promptly sent into the trenches.