The key factors leading to the revolution were the extreme burdens suffered by the German people during the war, the economic and psychological impacts of the Empire's defeat, and the social tensions between the general populace and the aristocratic and bourgeois elite.

Under the de facto leadership of Friedrich Ebert of the moderate Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD), the Council acted as a provisional government that held the powers of the emperor, chancellor and legislature.

[3] The Council of the People's Deputies' immediately removed some of the Empire's harsh restrictions, such as on freedom of expression, and promised an eight-hour workday and elections that would give women the right to vote for the first time.

Its official espousal of Marxist revolutionary socialism[6] aroused the distrust of the parties of the centre and Right, and its members were often disparaged as "journeymen without a fatherland" (Vaterlandslose Gesellen) because their class antagonism was seen to transcend national boundaries.

[8] In contrast to the widespread enthusiasm for the war among the educated classes (the "Spirit of 1914"), the majority of SPD newspapers were strongly anti-war, although some supported it by pointing out the danger posed by the Russian Empire, which they saw as the most reactionary and anti-socialist power in Europe.

[9] Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg turned down plans by high-ranking military officials to dissolve the SPD at the start of the war[10] and exploited the party's anti-Russian stance to gain its approval for it.

The Spartacists, who had formed the SPD's far left wing, joined with revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein and centrist Marxists such as Karl Kautsky to found the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) under the leadership of Hugo Haase on 6 April 1917.

Otto Braun clarified the SPD's position in an article titled "The Bolsheviks and Us" (Die Bolschewiki und Wir) in the party newspaper Vorwärts of 15 February 1918:[23] "Socialism cannot be erected on bayonets and machine guns.

On 29 September 1918, the Supreme Army Command informed Emperor Wilhelm II and Chancellor Georg von Hertling that the military situation was hopeless in the face of the enemy's overwhelming advantage in manpower and equipment.

[26][27] In a veiled reference to the workers who had struck the armaments plants, the Social Democrats who had helped pass the Reichstag Peace Resolution in July 1917 and the radical Spartacists who wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, he said to his staff officers on 1 October:I have asked His Majesty to bring into the government those circles to whom we mainly owe it that we have come this far.

[44] They had no intention of risking their lives so close to the end of the war and were convinced that the credibility of the new government, engaged as it was in seeking an armistice with the Entente, would be compromised by a naval attack at such a crucial point in the negotiations.

[44] Faced with the rapidly escalating situation, Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, the naval commander in Kiel, released the imprisoned sailors and asked the protestors to send a delegation to meet with him and two representatives of the Baden government who had arrived from Berlin.

One of the representatives from the Reich government, Gustav Noske of the Majority Social Democrats (SPD), calmed the immediate situation with a promise of amnesty, but by then Kiel was already in the hands of a workers' and soldiers' council, and groups of sailors had gone to nearby cities to spread the uprising.

There, Kurt Eisner of the radical Independent Social Democrats (USPD) was elected president of the Bavarian Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Council, and on 8 November he proclaimed the People's State of Bavaria.

[47] King Ludwig III and his family fled Munich for Austria, where in the 12 November Anif declaration he relieved all civil servants and military personnel from their oath of loyalty to him, effectively abdicating the Wittlesbach throne.

Once the monarchy had collapsed under the pressure of the workers' and soldiers' councils, it was up to the leadership of the socialist parties in Berlin to quickly establish the new order and address the many critical problems the defeated nation faced.

It lifted the state of siege and censorship, granted amnesty to all political prisoners, guaranteed freedom of association, assembly and the press and abolished the rules that governed relations between servant and master.

It also promised the introduction of direct, equal and universal suffrage for all women and men from the age of 20 years, the eight-hour workday and improvements in benefits for unemployment, social insurance and workers' compensation.

[75] The government saw its immediate tasks as fulfilling the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, demobilisation, providing adequate food and fuel supplies for a nation still under the Allied blockade and ensuring both internal and foreign security against separatists in the Rhine Province and Polish insurgents in the East.

At the insistence of the USPD representatives, the Council of People's Deputies appointed a "Nationalisation Committee" that included the Marxist theoreticians Karl Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding, the chairman of the Socialist Miners' Union Otto Hue and a number of leading economists.

When the Reich Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils (Reichskongress der Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte) met in the hall of the Prussian House of Representatives, it consisted mainly of SPD followers.

To further undermine the Republic's credibility, far-right extremists (especially certain members of the former officer corps) used the stab-in-the-back myth to blame an alleged conspiracy of communists, socialists and Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I.

[citation needed] After the Reich government and the Supreme Command refused at an early stage to acknowledge their responsibilities for the war and the defeat, the majority parties of the Reichstag were left to cope with the resulting burdens.

[141]Lending himself to far too optimistic illusions, which the SPD leadership also might have had, the liberal journalist Theodor Wolff wrote on 10 November in the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt: Like a sudden storm, the biggest of all revolutions has toppled the imperial regime, including everything that belonged to it.

On 10 November, conservative journalist Paul Baecker wrote an article in Deutsche Tageszeitung which already contained essential elements of the stab-in-the-back myth: The work fought for by our fathers with their precious blood – dismissed by betrayal in the ranks of our own people!

Fritz* Ebert, whom you cannot heighten to a personality by calling him Friedrich, opposed the establishment of a republic only until he found there was a post of chairman to be had; comrade Scheidemann è tutti quanti, all were would-be senior civil servants.

What made it extraordinary is that a mere sailors' mutiny triggered an earthquake which shook all of Germany; that the whole home army, the whole urban workforce and in Bavaria a part of the rural population rose up in revolt.

In his view, the political situation at the beginning of the revolution was open: the moderate socialist and democratically oriented workforce had a chance to become the social foundation of the republic and to drive back the conservative forces.

[147] As most Social Democrats were forced to join with the old elites to prevent an imminent council dictatorship, the blame for the failure of the Weimar Republic was to be put on the extreme Left, and the events of 1918/19 were successful defensive actions of democracy against Bolshevism.

Authors like Ulrich Kluge, Eberhard Kolb and Reinhard Rürup argued that in the first weeks of the revolution the social base for a democratic redesign of society was much stronger than previously thought and that the potential of the extreme Left was weaker than the SPD's leadership, for example, assumed.