The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils

The vehicles of the revolution were the workers’ and soldiers councils. Within six days of the mutiny of the fleet and the organization of the first such body in Kiel on November 3, 1918, workers’ and soldiers’ councils had sprung up throughout Germany and—against very little resistance—had assumed control of the machinery of government. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils were not new to Germany or to central and western Europe in the fall of 1918. They had first appeared during political strikes in Leipzig in April 1917 and again in Berlin and Kiel in January 1918 when striking workers, disavowed by their labor unions, organized councils on an adhoc basis to represent their demands. By 1920 there were 126 manufacturing enterprises with 20 or more employees and a total of nearly 24,000 workers in the city. Four out of five of these workers were engaged in machine and tool fabrication, the textile industry, or the building trades.