Ebert's first act was to proclaim the republic officially. He did this in an address to a crowd which filled Wilhelmstrasse and Wilhelmplatz in front of the Chancellor's official residence. Hysteric cheering followed the announcement that the German Empire had become history.
The greatest revolution of all times was an accomplished fact before three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, November 9th. The old system, with its tens of thousands of trained and specialized officials; with armies that had successfully fought for years against the combined resources of the rest of the world; with citizens trained from their very infancy to reverence the Kaiser and to obey those in authority; with the moral support of the monarchic Germans, who far outnumbered the republican—this system fell as a rotten tree falls before a gale. The simile lacks in perfection because the tree falls with a crash, whereas the old German governmental system made less noise in its collapse than did the Kingdom of Portugal some years earlier. It simply disappeared. Fuit Germania.
Up to this time the Majority Socialists, by stealing the thunder of the Independents and acting with a good deal of resolution, had kept themselves in the center of the stage. The real makers of the revolution, the Independents and Spartacans, had been confined to off-stage work. It was Liebknecht, with his instinct for the theatrical and dramatic, who now came to the front. A vast crowd had gathered around the royal palace. It was made up in part of the "class-conscious proletariat," but in large part also of the merely curious. Liebknecht, accompanied by Adolf Hoffmann [31] and another left wing Socialist, entered the palace and proceeded to a balcony in the second story, where, lacking a red flag, he hung a red bed-blanket over the rail of the balcony and then delivered an impassioned harangue to the crowd below. The real revolution, he declared, had only begun, and attempts at counter-revolution could be met only by the vigilance of an armed proletariat. The working-classes must arm themselves, the bourgeoisie must be disarmed. Hoffmann, who spoke briefly, said that he was enjoying the happiest and proudest moment of his life. While he was still speaking a red flag was hoisted over the palace, to the cheers of the people gathered around the building.
[ [31] Hoffman was for several years a member of the Prussian Diet and prominent in the councils of the Social-Democratic party. Although a professed atheist and unable to write a sentence of his mother-tongue without an error in spelling or grammar, he became under the first revolutionary government Prussian Minister of Education (Kultusminister), with charge over the church and schools. Hoffman left the old party at the time of the split in 1915, and has since been an abusive and virulent enemy of his former colleagues. He distinguished himself in the Diet chiefly by disregard of the ordinary amenities of civilized intercourse and parliamentary forms. Speaking from the speaker's rostrum in the Diet, with his back to the presiding-officer—after the usual European custom—he would utter some insult to the royal house, the authorities in general, one of the bourgeois parties of the house or one of the members. He appeared to know instinctively whenever his remarks were inadmissible, for he would pause, hunch up his shoulders like one expecting to be struck from behind, and wait for the presiding-officer to ring his bell and call him to order. A few minutes later the same scene would be reënacted.
Some of the palace guard had given up their rifles and left their posts. Others had joined the revolutionaries. The looting of the palace began. It did not assume great proportions on this first day, but many valuable articles had disappeared when night came. Government property of all kinds was sold openly in the streets by soldiers and civilians. Rifles could be had for a few marks, and even army automobiles were sold for from three to five hundred marks. Processions kept moving about the city, made up in part of soldiers and in part of armed civilians. Persons without red badges were often molested or mishandled. Cockades in the imperial or some state's colors were torn from soldiers' caps, their shoulder insignia were ripped off and their belts taken away by the embryo and self-constituted "red guard." The patriotic cockades inflamed their revolutionary hearts; the belts, being of good leather—a rare article—could be used for repairing the shoes of the faithful. Officers were hunted down, their shoulder-straps torn off and their swords and revolvers taken from them. Many officers were roughly handled. Hundreds escaped a like fate by a quick change into civilian clothing. The mobile vulgus had forgotten that forty per cent of Germany's active officer corps had been killed in fighting for their country, and that a great part of those left were crippled by wounds. It saw in these men only the representatives of an iron discipline and of authority—and authority is hated by all truly class-conscious Genossen. It was this same feeling that led, on the following day, to the disarming of the police—a measure which so quickly avenged itself in an increase of crime from which even the proletariat suffered that their sabers and revolvers were restored to the police within a month.
Thus far the revolution had been all but bloodless. The brave officer of the Maikäfer and the four revolutionaries who fell before him were the only victims. But about 6:00 P.M., as an automobile ambulance turned into the palace courtyard, a single shot was heard. Observers thought they saw the smoke of the shot in the central entrance to the royal stables, which are situated across the street just south of the palace. While the source of the shot was being investigated a second shot was fired. Almost immediately machine guns began firing from the cellar windows and the first and second stories of the stables. [32] The crowd filling the square melted away. Members of the Soldiers' Council returned the fire. The shooting continued until late into the night, when members of the Soldiers' Council entered the stables. They found nobody there.
[ [32] This story of the origin of Saturday evening's shooting comes from the Soldiers' Council, and is undoubtedly exaggerated. No other report of the incident is, however, available.
By whom or with what intention the first shots were fired is not known. The most radical of the revolutionaries, and especially the Liebknecht followers, saw in them the beginning of the dreaded "counter-revolution." The stables were at the time occupied by some of the marines who had been brought to Berlin two days earlier. These men, who were later to cause the new government so much trouble, [33] were in large part what is so aptly expressed by the slang term "roughnecks." Their leader was a degraded officer named Heinrich Dorrenbach. [34] Viewed in the light of their subsequent conduct it is impossible that they could have been won for any counter-revolutionary movement. The revolutionaries, however, who knew that they had been summoned by Prince Max's government, concluded that the shots had been fired by them. There were few casualties from the encounter.
[ [33] It was these men who surrounded the imperial chancellery on December 24th, held the cabinet members there incommunicado by severing the telephone wires, and compelled the government to grant their wage demands and to permit them to retain the royal stables as barracks. They also helped loot the palace. The government had to disarm them during the second "Bolshevik week" in Berlin early in March, when twenty-four of them were summarily executed.
[ [34] Dorrenbach was afterward indicted in Brunswick for bribery and looting.