Impact of the First World War on Germany
In August 1914 millions of Germans cheered the outbreak of war. By November 1918 sailors were mutinying, workers were striking and the Kaiser was on a train to Holland. Understanding how a confident empire collapsed in just over four years is essential because almost every problem of the Weimar Republic — reparations, the ‘stab in the back’ myth, hyperinflation — began here.
The Burgfrieden and the Mood of August 1914
When Wilhelm II declared war on Russia and France he announced that ‘I no longer recognise parties; I recognise only Germans’. The SPD agreed. On 4 August 1914 every party in the Reichstag, including the Social Democrats, voted for war credits. This political truce was called the Burgfrieden — literally ‘castle peace’ — meaning class and party conflict would be paused for the duration. Crowds in Berlin and Hamburg sang patriotic songs. For a few weeks Weltpolitik appeared to have done its job.
The unity rested on a short-war assumption. Generals expected Paris to fall in six weeks (the Schlieffen Plan). Workers expected a Christmas victory. When the war stalemated in muddy trenches that autumn, those expectations curdled. By 1916 fewer than half of military-age men remained outside uniform.
The Burgfrieden of August 1914 united the Reichstag — including the SPD — behind the war effort. It depended on the assumption of a short victory and broke down once stalemate, hunger and casualties exposed the gap between elite war aims and working-class suffering.
The Allied Blockade and the Turnip Winter
The Royal Navy began blockading German ports in August 1914. Germany imported about a third of its food before the war — fertiliser from Chile, grain from Russia, dairy from Denmark. The blockade cut all of that. Inside Germany, the army requisitioned horses, men and machinery away from farms. By 1916 food rations had been cut to roughly 1,000 calories a day for civilians, well below subsistence.
In the autumn of 1916 the potato crop failed. Civilians fell back on the only thing left: turnips, normally fed to livestock. The winter of 1916–17 became known as the turnip winter. Around 750,000 German civilians died of hunger or disease linked to malnutrition over the course of the war. Birth rates collapsed. Mothers queued for hours for bread.
The blockade was not just a foreign-policy tool. By starving urban Germany it broke the Burgfrieden from below. Workers struck for food in Berlin in April 1917 and again in January 1918, when over a million workers downed tools across major cities. The same workers had cheered for war in 1914. Their anger by 1917 was at the regime that had failed to feed them, not just at Britain or France.
War Weariness and Political Splits
By 1917 the SPD itself split. A breakaway party, the Independent SPD (USPD), refused further war credits. From the USPD's far-left fringe came the Spartacus League, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, calling for revolution. Strikes spread. Soldiers home on leave reported that civilians on trains and in queues now openly criticised the war. Inflation made things worse: by 1918 the mark had lost half its 1914 value.
From 1916 the army effectively ran the country. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was Chief of the General Staff with Erich Ludendorff as his deputy. They imposed a ‘silent dictatorship’, directing factories, food rationing and even Reichstag debates by sheer force of military prestige. Civilian Chancellors became figureheads.
The Spring 1918 Offensive and Defeat
Russia's collapse in 1917 freed German divisions for one final gamble. In March 1918 Ludendorff launched a massive offensive on the Western Front. It made the largest gains of the war — but stalled forty miles from Paris when American troops arrived in numbers. From August 1918 the Allies counter-attacked. By late September the German army was in retreat. Ludendorff lost his nerve and told the Kaiser the war was lost.
Crucially, this conversation happened privately. The German army was still on French and Belgian soil. To civilians, defeat seemed sudden and unexplained. This gap — between an army that had not been beaten in battle on home ground and a government suddenly suing for peace — would later be exploited by the right-wing ‘stab in the back’ myth.
Ludendorff insisted that civilian politicians, not generals, sign the armistice. He wanted the army's reputation untouched and the blame placed elsewhere. In early October a new civilian government under Prince Max of Baden took office, and on 9 November the SPD's Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic from a Reichstag balcony. The next day, 10 November, the Kaiser fled across the border into the neutral Netherlands. Within forty-eight hours Matthias Erzberger of the Centre Party had signed the armistice on 11 November 1918.
Kiel, Revolution and the Republic
The trigger was the navy. In late October 1918 admirals ordered the High Seas Fleet to sea for one last battle. Sailors refused, and on 3 November the mutiny broke out at Kiel. It spread along the coast. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils, modelled on Russia's soviets, sprang up in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin. The empire collapsed in less than a week. Wilhelm II, abandoned by his army, abdicated on 9 November after his generals told him the troops would no longer fight for him.
In four years Germany had gone from cheering crowds to revolutionary councils, from confident empire to mutinous republic. Every problem the new democracy would face — food shortages, returning soldiers, the ‘stab in the back’ lie — had its roots in this collapse.
When the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918 the German army was still on French and Belgian soil — retreating, but not crushed. The hidden truth that Ludendorff had told the Kaiser the war was lost in late September made the right-wing ‘stab in the back’ myth possible, blaming civilian politicians for a military collapse the generals had concealed.