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On this day in 1918, Germany was declared a Free Socialist Republic by the revolutionary communist leader, and Friedrich Engels' godson, Karl Liebknecht. In front of Berlin's city palace, which was now occupied by workers, he said: "the day of the revolution has come".
Liebknecht's declaration took place amidst the German Revolution, whose onset a month earlier was described by Nadezdha Krupskaya, as "the happiest days" of Vladimir Lenin's life. He anticipated that not only would it bring a decisive end to the bloodshed of WWI, but also saw it as a sign socialist revolution was spreading to the rest of Europe.
Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution one year prior, Germany's revolution swiftly got rid of the monarchy and saw women vote for the first time during workers' councils elections in Berlin.
It encompassed hundreds of thousands of workers and soldiers who returned from the front fed up of being used as cannon fodder by their ruling classes, who in contrast were lounging around in luxury.
Tens of thousands of soldiers were deserting, and others began disarming their officers and refusing their orders, instead using their arms to defend workers' councils and strikes now sweeping the country.
Germany's revolutionaries opposed WWI and saw it as an inter-imperialist war. They committed to focus on overthrowing their own bourgeoisie instead of Russia's, Britain's or the US'. The ruling-class smeared them as Russian and British agents.
Within a few months, the revolution would be brutally crushed, betrayed first and foremost by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) which today rules Germany.
Its then leader, Friedrich Ebert, is today regarded as the godfather of German democracy.
Ebert loved the war and his nation more than he did its working class soldiers. When they refused to crush the revolution, he collaborated with right-wing nationalists in the paramilitary Freikorps, many of whom already sported swastikas on their helmets, and had participated in the genocide of Namibia's Herero and Nama peoples.
By late December, the counter-revolution was in full-swing, and it was only by the end of that month that Liebknicht and his comrade Rosa Luxemburg would form the Communist Party. A few weeks later they would be murdered by the Freikorps.
To crush a general strike in Berlin in March 1919, 1,200 workers were killed by air raids, the first time civilians in a German city were bombed.
The revolution had been crushed by the SPD and the the Freikorps, which was led by early Nazi Party members and would later be dissolved into the SA. But Berlin remained rebellious and Ebert had to go to Weimar, to found Germany's first so-called "democracy", the Weimar Republic. 14 years later, it would be replaced by the Nazi Third Reich.
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