November 9th - a date in German History

Wow.  It’s been 25 years since the Berlin Wall came down.  Where has the time gone?  I was still a 2Lt at Beale AFB, CA, getting ready to turn 27 the next day.  It was just another day for Carol and I and our two dogs.  As is my wont I was channel surfing on TV when I saw this strange image on CNN.  There were people standing on top of the Berlin Wall.  Ever since I could remember, I knew that whoever came close to the Wall from the East German side usually ended up dead, and yet here were all these people standing on it.  What the hell happened?

In the summer of 1989, Hungary [still a Warsaw Pact country at the time] pretty much dismantled their armed border with Austria.  East Germans vacationing in Hungary found this out and began to flee to Austria by the thousands.  After a while the Hungarians refused to let more East Germans cross into Austria.  Instead of returning to East Germany, these Germans flooded the West German embassy in Budapest.  The same thing happened in Czechoslovakia.  East Germans flooded the West German embassy in Prague and refused to leave.  This situation gained international attention.  Ultimately, Erich Honecker allowed these “refugees” to go to the West, but only by sealed trains via East Germany. 

While many East Germans squatted in the West German embassies, many East Germans in Leipzig began peaceful protests after each Monday’s “prayer for peace.”  Their demands were to be given the freedom to travel anywhere and the right to elect a democratic government.  The backdrop of all these activities was Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost [“openness”] and perestroika [“restructuring”]. The peaceful protests from Leipzig spread across the country that culminated in the Alexanderplatz demonstration in Berlin on November 4^th.  Prior to the Alexanderplatz demonstration, Erich Honecker [who built the Wall in 1961 and who had ruled the East German Communists since 1971] “resigned” on October 18^th.  He had dispatched troops to deal with the protests spreading across the country, but local Communist party bosses prevented them from firing on their own people.  The situation was getting out of hand, and Honecker was also very ill at the time.  So on October 18^th, the East German Politburo removed Honecker [saying he “requested to be released” from his posts] and replaced him with Egon Krenz.  Apparently these actions were taken with Mikhail Gorbachev’s blessing. 

As wave of East Germans leaving their country by whatever means increased, Egon Krenz decided on November 9^th to allow East Germans to go to the West directly through East German-West German checkpoints, including Berlin.  The word got out and spread quickly.  So many East Berliners descended upon the Wall that the guards were overwhelmed- they didn’t know what to do.  They couldn’t find anybody to take responsibility for using lethal force against those who wished to go west.  As East Berliners came pouring through the Wall with no guards to stop them, West Berliners started to jump on top of the Wall.  They were soon joined by many of their East Berlin brethren.  It was all so surreal and seemed to happen so quickly.  I had the sense that Cold Warriors everywhere would have the same question that Wiley E. Coyote had when he finally caught the Roadrunner – now what?

There must be something weird in Germany that allows strange, albeit historic events to happen on November 9^th.  In October 1918, World War I was still raging, but the writing was on the wall [no pun intended] as to the outcome.  The German High Seas Fleet had been inactive in port since the Battle of Jutland in 1916.  But the Naval High Command decided it would launch one last “glory ride” against the Royal Navy.  Sailors in Wilhelmshaven and Kiel saw this as a suicide mission and mutinied, thus sparking the November Revolution.  The sailors began to elect worker and soldier councils like the Soviets from the Bolshevik Revolution.  These councils took over military and civil powers in many cities, including Munich.  Rebellion spread across Germany which led to the proclamation of a republic on November 9^th.  On that date, German Chancellor Prince Max of Baden announced Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication from the German and Prussian thrones. He handed the German government over to Freidrich Ebert, thus beginning Germany’s road to become a democratic nation.

In November 1923, a group of approximately 2,000 men marched in the streets of Munich to seize power in that city.  Once secure in Munich, this band of brawlers planned to march on the Weimar Republic [inspired by Mussolini’s March on Rome].  Their grievance –these nationalists claimed the German army of World War I was undefeated on the battlefield, only to be “stabbed in the back” by Marxists on the home front.  They dubbed the people who did the stabbing as the November Criminals.  Between 1920 and 1923, the Bürgerbräukeller [one of the largest beer halls in Munich] served as a meeting place for a small group called the German Workers Party, later to be known as the National Socialist German Workers Party – Nazis for short.  Their leader was an ex-corporal from the German Army named Adolf Hitler.  Hitler saw an opportunity to seize power when the Bavarian State Commissioner was giving a speech at the Bürgerbräukeller on November 8^th.  The state commissioner [Gustav von Kahr], head of the Bavarian State Police [Hans Ritter von Seisser] and a Reichswehr general [Otto von Lossow] ruled Bavaria under a state of emergency.  They were all present at the Bürgerbräukeller on November 8^th.  Hitler’s men surrounded the Bürgerbräukeller, rounded up the three men and “persuaded” them to support what became the Beer Hall Putsch.  Hitler made a mistake, though.  He left the beer hall to attend to another matter, and while he was away Erich Ludendorff released Kahr and the others.  When Hitler realized his crass mistake, he and his men marched on the Bavarian Defense Ministry on November 9^th, but the putsch was easily put down in a hail of gunfire.  Hitler was arrested for treason and sent to jail, where he decided he would use legal means to gain power.

Fifteen years later in 1938, another historic event occurred on November 9^th.  This occasion is remembered as Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass.  On November 7^th, a German diplomat in Paris named Ernst vom Rath was shot by a Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan.  His grievance was the deportation of Polish Jews from Germany back to Poland.  No one knows why Grynszpan picked vom Rath as his target, but vom Rath died from his injuries on November 9^th.  The Nazis used this as a pretext to organize a pogrom against Germany’s Jews.  On that evening, troops from both the SA and the SS [wearing civilian clothes] went about destroying Jewish property, to include stores, businesses, homes, cemeteries and synagogues.  Jews were rounded up – some thrown into jails, others sent to concentration camps.  Others were murdered.  Police all over Germany let it happen.  Kristallnacht has been cited by some as the beginning of the Holocaust.

November 9^th has brought many things to Germany – the end of the German Empire, the rise to prominence of the Nazi Party, the beginning of the Holocaust, and the beginning of the end of the Cold War.  That’s a lot of history packed into a single date, but there it is.