The third reason affecting the course of the Majority Socialists has already been referred to in passing. This was the feeling of party solidarity, which still existed despite the fact that the Independents had had their own party organization for some six months. Most of the prominent men in both Socialist parties had worked together in a common cause for many years, and while, in the heat of purely partisan conflicts this was sometimes forgotten for the moment, it nevertheless united the two factions when, as now, the attack came from the extreme Right.
Complete details of the mutiny of this summer have never been given out. According to the best reports available, it started on the battleship Westfalen at Wilhelmshaven and included altogether four vessels, one of which was the Nürnberg. The captain of the Nürnberg is said to have been thrown overboard. Rumor and enemy report made the most of the affair and undoubtedly exaggerated it greatly, but there can be no doubt that it was serious and that the morale of the fleet was greatly affected by it. Some of the ring-leaders—how many it is not known—were executed, and a considerable number were imprisoned for long terms. The extent and severity of the sentences added fuel to the discontent already prevailing throughout the fleet. The men's fighting spirit sank as their revolutionary spirit rose. Von Capelle's boast that the fleet's preparedness for battle "shall and will not be brought in question for a moment" was a vain boast. The fleet was already rotten at the core.
Ironic fate had led the men who directed the affairs of the German Empire to forge one of the weapons with which it was later to be destroyed. On April 9, 1917, Nicholas Lenine, with thirty-two fanatical followers, had been brought from Switzerland through Germany in a sealed car and sent into Russia to sow the seeds of Bolshevism. How the plan succeeded is only too well known. November brought the overthrow of the Kerensky government. Released from the necessity of the intensive pre-revolutionary propaganda at home, the Bolsheviki turned their attention to imperialistic Germany. Their missionaries, liberally equipped with corruption funds, entered Germany by secret routes and worked with Germans in sympathy with their cause, notably Liebknecht. Foremost among their propagandists was a man who called himself Radek. His real name was Sobelsohn, a Jew from Austrian Galicia. Expelled from his labor union before the war for robbing a Genosse, he had settled in Bremen and was even then the guiding spirit in the most radical and rabid circles. After the Russian Bolshevik revolution he quickly took up the severed threads of his former connections. He was intimate with all the Independent Socialist leaders already named, and with many others. A man of acknowledged organizing and propagandizing ability, he contributed markedly to making Germany ripe for revolution.
All the gates were thrown down to Bolshevism following the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, when Joffe, the Bolshevik Ambassador, was permitted to come to Berlin and establish himself in the palace of the former Imperial Russian Embassy in Unter den Linden. He brought a staff of men and women whose sole duty it was to carry on Bolshevist propaganda against the government to which he was accredited. Leading Independent Socialists were frequent visitors at the embassy, and Haase, at an elaborate banquet held there in May, 1918, responded to the toast, "The Red International."
Closest to Joffe of all Germans was Dr. Oskar Cohn, one of the founders of the Independent Socialist Party. Cohn, who is a Berlin lawyer, possesses that curious combination of characteristics so often encountered in extreme Socialism. In his private life of undoubted probity, he rejoiced at an opportunity to accept and distribute money given by a foreign government to overthrow the government of his own Fatherland. Mild-mannered and an opponent of force, he made the cause of Liebknecht's murderous Spartacans his own. Scholarly and of deep learning, he associated freely with the dregs of the population, with thieves and murderers, in furtherance of the cause of the international proletariat. He became the legal adviser of Joffe and one of the main distributors of the Bolsheviki's corruption fund.
The political police were at all times cognizant of the revolutionary propaganda that was being carried on, but they were greatly hampered in their work by a limitation which had been imposed in 1917 upon the so-called Schutzhaft, literally "protective arrest." This had been freely used against suspected persons from the beginning of the war, and hundreds had sat in jail for weeks in what was equivalent to a sentence of imprisonment, without having had an opportunity to hear what the charge against them was. The abuse of this right became so glaring that it was provided in 1917 that arrested persons could not be detained without a definite crime being charged against them. The police made a long report on Joffe's activities in June, 1918, and the authorities, with some hesitation, placed the matter before the "Ambassador." He lied bravely, declaring that he cherished no plans against the integrity of the German Empire and that his large staff existed solely to carry on the legitimate business of the embassy.
The authorities, unconvinced, maintained a watch on the activities of the Russians. They were particularly suspicious of the unusual number of diplomatic couriers passing between Berlin and Petrograd. Their number was said to reach nearly four hundred. The press began to voice these suspicions. Joffe, with a fine show of indignation, declared that it "was beneath his dignity" to take any notice of them. The tenuity of Herr Joffe's dignity and the value of his word became apparent on November 5, 1918, in the revolution week, when a box in the luggage of a courier arriving from Russia was—"accidentally," as the official report put it—broken open at the railway station. Its contents proved to be Bolshevik propaganda literature inciting the Germans to institute a reign of terror against the bourgeoisie, to murder the oppressors of the proletariat and to overthrow the government. One of these appeals came from the Spartacan Internationale and contained a carefully worked-out program for instituting a reign of terror.
Even the Vorwärts, which had been reluctant to credit the charges against Genosse Joffe, was now compelled to admit that he had lied and misused his diplomatic privileges. Joffe, still denying his guilt, was escorted from the embassy in the middle of the following night by an armed guard and placed aboard a special train for Moscow, with the whole staff of the embassy and of the Rosta Telegraph Agency, ostensibly a news agency, but really an institution for carrying on Bolshevik propaganda. Once safe in Russia, Joffe admitted his activities in Germany and gloried in them. In a wireless message sent on December 8, 1918, he said the Bolshevik literature had been circulated "through the good offices of the Independent Socialists." He declared further that a much greater number of weapons than had been alleged had been handed over to the Independent Barth, together with "several hundred thousand roubles." He added:
"I claim for myself the honor of having devoted all my powers to the success of the German revolution through my activities, which were carried on in agreement with the Independent Socialist ministers Haase and Barth and with others."
Following the publication of this wireless message, Cohn also issued an explanation of his activities in connection with Joffe. He said: