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Spartacist Revolt
The Spartacist uprising (German: ), also known as the January uprising (), was a general strike and the accompanying armed struggles that took place in Berlin from 5 to 12 January 1919. It occurred in connection with the November Revolution that broke out following Germany's defeat in World War I. The uprising was primarily a power struggle between the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) led by Friedrich Ebert, which favored a social democracy, and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, which wanted to set up a council republic similar to the one established by the Bolsheviks in Russia. In 1914 Liebknecht and Luxemburg had founded the Marxist Spartacus League (), which gave the uprising its popular name. The revolt was improvised and small scale and quickly crushed by the superior strength of government and paramilitary troops. The death toll was roughly 150–200, mostly among the insurgents. The most prominent deaths wer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
German Revolution Of 1918–1919
The German Revolution or November Revolution (german: Novemberrevolution) was a civil conflict in the German Empire at the end of the First World War that resulted in the replacement of the German federal constitutional monarchy with a democratic parliamentary republic that later became known as the Weimar Republic. The revolutionary period lasted from November 1918 until the adoption of the Weimar Constitution in August 1919. Among the factors leading to the revolution were the extreme burdens suffered by the German population during the four years of war, the economic and psychological impacts of the German Empire's defeat by the Allies, and growing social tensions between the general population and the aristocratic and bourgeois elite. The first acts of the revolution were triggered by the policies of the Supreme Command () of the German Army and its lack of coordination with the Naval Command (). In the face of defeat, the Naval Command insisted on trying to precipita ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (german: link=no, Weimarer Republik ), officially named the German Reich, was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is also referred to, and unofficially proclaimed itself, as the German Republic (german: Deutsche Republik, link=no, label=none). The state's informal name is derived from the city of Weimar, which hosted the constituent assembly that established its government. In English, the republic was usually simply called "Germany", with "Weimar Republic" (a term introduced by Adolf Hitler in 1929) not commonly used until the 1930s. Following the devastation of the First World War (1914–1918), Germany was exhausted and sued for peace in desperate circumstances. Awareness of imminent defeat sparked a revolution, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, formal surrender to the Allies, and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic on 9 November 1918. In its i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Otto Landsberg
Otto Landsberg (4 December 1869 – 9 December 1957) was a German jurist, politician and diplomat. He was a member of the revolutionary Council of the People's Deputies that took power during the German Revolution of 1918–19 and then served as Minister of Justice in the first democratically elected government of Germany in 1919. In that capacity, he also was a member of the German delegation that went to Versailles to receive the Allies' Treaty of Versailles. Early life Landsberg was born on 4 December 1869 in Rybnick in the Province of Silesia, to a Jewish family. His father was a medical doctor. After passing the Abitur in 1887 in Ostrowo, he moved to Berlin to study law. In 1895, having passed the First (1890) and Second State Examination (1895), he opened a lawyer's office in Magdeburg and made a name for himself as a trial lawyer. Political career Having joined the SPD in 1890, Landsberg was a member of the Magdeburg city council from 1903 to 1909. After failing to get ele ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philipp Scheidemann
Philipp Heinrich Scheidemann (26 July 1865 – 29 November 1939) was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In the first quarter of the 20th century he played a leading role in both his party and in the young Weimar Republic. During the German Revolution of 1918–1919 that broke out after Germany's defeat in World War I, Scheidemann proclaimed a German Republic from a balcony of the Reichstag building. In 1919 he was elected Reich Minister President by the National Assembly meeting in Weimar to write a constitution for the republic. He resigned the office the same year due to a lack of unanimity in the cabinet on whether or not to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He continued to be a member of the Reichstag until 1933 and served as mayor of his native city of Kassel from 1920 to 1925. After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in 1933, Scheidemann went into exile because he was considered one of the "November criminals" held ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Otto Wels
Otto Wels (15 September 1873 – 16 September 1939) was a German politician who served as a member of parliament from 1912 to 1933 and as the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1919 until his death in 1939. His 1933 speech in the Reichstag in opposition to Hitler and against the Enabling Act marked the end of the Weimar Republic prior to the Act passing into law. Life and career Born in Berlin on 15 September 1873, Wels was the son of an innkeeper (Johann Wels and his wife Johanne). The restaurant served as a meeting place for early SPD supporters exposing Wels to the workers movement at a young age. In 1891, he began an apprenticeship as a paper hanger and joined the SPD. Around 1893, he married Bertha Antonie Reske, a seamstress and they had two sons, Walter and Hugo. In the early 1890s, he represented other workers in the Berlin Craftsmens Chamber and was elected the first Chairman of the local SPD branch. From 1895 to 1897 he served his military s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Volksmarinedivision
The Volksmarinedivision (People's Navy Division) was an armed unit formed on 11 November 1918 during the November Revolution that broke out in Germany following its defeat in World War I. At its peak late that month, the People's Navy Division had about 3,200 members. In the struggles between the various elements involved in the revolution to determine Germany's future form of government, it initially supported the moderate socialist interim government of Friedrich Ebert and the Council of the People's Deputies. By December of 1918 it had turned more to the left and was involved in skirmishes against government troops. In March 1919, after the success of the Ebert government in the elections to the National Assembly that drew up the Weimar Constitution, the People's Navy Division was disbanded and 30 of its members summarily shot by members of a Freikorps unit. Structure The People's Navy Division initially comprised about 600 men, rising to 1,500 by 13 November and 3,2 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dictatorship Of The Proletariat
In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a condition in which the proletariat holds state power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate stage between a capitalist economy and a communist economy, whereby the post-revolutionary state seizes the means of production, compels the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party, and instituting elected delegates into representative workers' councils that nationalise ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership. During this phase, the administrative organizational structure of the party is to be largely determined by the need for it to govern firmly and wield state power to prevent counterrevolution and to facilitate the transition to a lasting communist society. Other terms commonly used to describe the dictatorship of the proletariat include socialist state, proletarian state, democratic proletarian state, re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Revolutionary Stewards
During the First World War (1914–1918), the Revolutionary Stewards (German: ''Revolutionäre Obleute'') were shop stewards who were independent from the official unions and freely chosen by workers in various German industries. They rejected the war policies of the German Empire and the support which parliamentary representatives of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) gave to these policies. They also played a role during the German Revolution of 1918–19. Their leader Richard Müller stated its goal was a "council republic in the Russian style”. Background The SPD, at the time the largest workers' party in Europe, voted for war bonds for the imperial government in 1914. Karl Liebknecht was initially the only SPD member of the Reichstag who publicly rejected the measure. He was absent for the vote in August and then voted against the measure in December 1914. With the split between the USPD and the "Majority" SPD there was a party in the Reichstag opposing the so-called pol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilhelm Groener
Karl Eduard Wilhelm Groener (; 22 November 1867 – 3 May 1939) was a German general and politician. His organisational and logistical abilities resulted in a successful military career before and during World War I. After a confrontation with Erich Ludendorff the Quartermaster general () of the German Army, Groener was reassigned to a field command. When Ludendorff was dismissed in October 1918, Groener succeeded him. Groener worked with the new Social Democratic president Friedrich Ebert to foil a left-wing take-over during the German Revolution of 1918–19. Under his command, the army bloodily suppressed popular uprisings throughout Germany. Groener tried to integrate the military, which was dominated by an aristocratic and monarchistic officer corps, into the new republic. After resigning from the army in the summer of 1919, Groener served in several governments of the Weimar Republic as minister of transportation, interior and defence. He was pushed out of the govern ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ebert–Groener Pact
The Ebert–Groener pact, sometimes called the Ebert-Groener deal, was an agreement between the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, at the time the Chancellor of Germany, and Wilhelm Groener, Quartermaster General of the German Army, on November 10, 1918. This occurred on the day after the German Revolution had brought Ebert to power. Groener assured Ebert of the loyalty of the armed forces. In return, Ebert promised that the government would take prompt action against leftist uprisings, that he would call a national assembly, that military command would remain with the professional officers corps and most importantly that the military would retain its traditional " state within the state" status. The agreement gave the government the means to defeat the challenge posed to its authority by those on the political left. However, it also drove a wedge between Ebert's Social Democratic Party and other socialist groups, who accused him of allying himself with the enemy of the revolution. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supreme Army Command
The ''Oberste Heeresleitung'' (, Supreme Army Command or OHL) was the highest echelon of command of the army (''Heer'') of the German Empire. In the latter part of World War I, the Third OHL assumed dictatorial powers and became the ''de facto'' political authority in the empire. Formation and operation After the formation of the German Empire in 1871, the Prussian Army, Royal Saxon Army, Army of Württemberg and the Bavarian Army were autonomous in peacetime, each kingdom maintaining a separate war ministry and general staff to administer their forces. On the outbreak of war, the Constitution of the German Empire made the German Emperor Commander-in-Chief of the combined armies (''Oberster Kriegsherr'', Supreme Warlord). The Emperor's role as Commander-in-Chief was largely ceremonial and authority lay with the Chief of the German General Staff, who issued orders in the Emperor's name. The pre-war Chief of the General Staff was Colonel General Helmuth von Moltke (The Younger) an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
German Empire
The German Empire (),Herbert Tuttle wrote in September 1881 that the term "Reich" does not literally connote an empire as has been commonly assumed by English-speaking people. The term literally denotes an empire – particularly a hereditary empire led by an emperor, although has been used in German to denote the Roman Empire because it had a weak hereditary tradition. In the case of the German Empire, the official name was , which is properly translated as "German Empire" because the official position of head of state in the constitution of the German Empire was officially a "presidency" of a confederation of German states led by the King of Prussia who would assume "the title of German Emperor" as referring to the German people, but was not emperor of Germany as in an emperor of a state. –The German Empire" ''Harper's New Monthly Magazine''. vol. 63, issue 376, pp. 591–603; here p. 593. also referred to as Imperial Germany, the Second Reich, as well as simply Germany, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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