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Unlock This CourseThe new Republic was attacked from two directions at once. Historians call these the challenges from the Left and the Right. Both sides wanted to destroy the Republic, but for opposite reasons.
The extreme Left were communists. They thought the revolution of November 1918 had stopped halfway, because factory owners, landowners, judges and generals had all kept their power. They wanted a second revolution like the one in Russia in 1917, with Germany run by workers' and soldiers' councils, not by an elected parliament.
The extreme Right were nationalists. Many were army officers, landowners and former officials of the Kaiser. They hated democracy, blamed the Republic for defeat and for the Treaty of Versailles, and wanted a strong ruler, a powerful army and an end to the treaty.
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The Spartacists were led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. At the very end of December 1918 they helped to found the Communist Party of Germany (the KPD). They did not trust Ebert, and they did not want the coming elections for the National Assembly to settle Germany's future.
The spark came on 4 January 1919, when the government sacked Emil Eichhorn, the police chief of Berlin, who was popular with the workers. The next day huge crowds protested in Berlin. Armed workers seized newspaper offices, including the offices of the SPD's own newspaper. On 6 January a revolutionary committee announced that Ebert's government was overthrown and called a general strike.
How it was defeated. Ebert had few soldiers he could rely on. Gustav Noske, the SPD minister in charge of the armed forces, turned to the army and the Freikorps. In the second week of January they attacked the buildings held by the rebels, and within a few days the rising was over. More than 150 people were killed. On 15 January Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested and then murdered by Freikorps officers.
Why it failed. The rising was badly planned and its leaders could not agree. Even Luxemburg thought it had started too soon. Most workers did not join the fighting, and the rebels were no match for trained soldiers with machine guns.
It was not the last challenge from the Left. In spring 1919 communists set up a 'soviet republic' in Bavaria, and the army and Freikorps crushed it with hundreds of deaths.
The Freikorps had saved the government, but they were no friends of the Republic. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany had to cut its armed forces, so early in 1920 the government ordered some Freikorps units to disband. One of them was the Ehrhardt Brigade, a force of about 5,000 men.
General Walther von Lüttwitz, who commanded the troops around Berlin, refused to obey. On the night of 12 to 13 March 1920 the Ehrhardt Brigade marched into Berlin and took over the government buildings. Wolfgang Kapp, a nationalist politician, was declared chancellor. The plotters wanted to end the Republic, bring back strong rule like the Kaiser's and reject the Treaty of Versailles.
Ebert asked the army to stop the putsch. Its leaders refused to order soldiers to fire on the Freikorps, who were their old comrades. The government had to flee from Berlin, first to Dresden and then to Stuttgart.
How it was defeated. The government and the trade unions called a general strike. Millions of workers stopped work. Berlin had no gas, electricity, water, trains or newspapers, and civil servants refused to carry out Kapp's orders. Kapp could not govern. After about four days he gave up and fled to Sweden. Lüttwitz fled abroad too.
There was a sting in the tail. In the Ruhr, Germany's main industrial area, striking workers formed a 'Red Army' of about 50,000 and took control of several towns. The same army that would not fight Kapp's men moved quickly against this left-wing rising, and over 1,000 workers were killed.
The violence went on. In June 1922 the foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, was shot dead in Berlin by right-wing extremists. A later attempt to seize power by force is covered in the lesson The Munich Putsch, 1923.
Don't mix up the two risings. The Spartacists were left-wing communists, beaten by the Freikorps in 1919. The Kapp Putsch was right-wing, carried out by Freikorps men, and beaten by a general strike in 1920. Also, don't say the army defeated Kapp. It refused to act.
(b) Explain two effects of the Spartacist uprising on the Weimar Republic. [8 marks]
One effect was that the Republic came to depend on the Freikorps. Ebert's government had few loyal troops, so in January 1919 his minister Noske sent the army and Freikorps units into Berlin to crush the rising. Because this worked, the government used the Freikorps again, for example against the communists in Bavaria in spring 1919. This meant the Republic's survival rested on armed nationalists who hated democracy, and when it tried to disband them early in 1920 they turned on it in the Kapp Putsch of March 1920.
A second effect was a lasting split on the Left. On 15 January 1919 the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by Freikorps officers after their arrest. Communists blamed the SPD leaders Ebert and Noske, because they had called in the Freikorps against fellow workers. As a result the KPD saw the SPD as traitors and refused to work with it, so the Republic kept a bitter enemy on the Left and its working-class supporters stayed divided.
What lifts this to the top level: each paragraph names one effect, backs it with precise facts (names, dates, events) and then shows step by step how the uprising led to it.
This question asks for effects, so don't retell the story of the rising. Write two separate paragraphs, one for each effect, and use linking phrases such as 'this meant' and 'as a result'. One effect alone, however good, cannot score more than 4 of the 8 marks.