Pierre Broué

“Lenin doubted for a moment the veracity of the issue of Vorwärts which announced the vote, and considered that the German General Staff might have forged it. (…) We still lack documents today about the real motives of the Social-Democratic leaders, whether they expressed them or not, and about their intimate thoughts during this crucial week. Scheidemann has confessed that he was greatly impressed by the size of the chauvinist demonstrations in Berlin. A letter and notes by Ebert express his fear that the War and the eventual reawakening of the Russian workers’ movement would give new force to the plans of ‘the Rosa group’. It certainly seems that fear was the dominating sentiment. By the evening of 30 July, Ebert and Otto Braun had left for Switzerland with the Party’s treasury. In applying the state of siege, the military authorities had dictatorial powers. It seemed clear that, from one day to the next, they could destroy the gigantic edifice which had been so patiently built up, abolish the social conquests, destroy the organisations, and close the press, that they could arrest members and leaders, and with one stroke of the pen erase all the results of decades of Social-Democratic activity. (…) The turn was much more decisive than those people who submitted to ‘the Party’ believed it to be. The Social Democrats joined in the War, giving it their blessing. The falseness of their declarations about attachment to principles, the international solidarity of the workers, peace and socialism, assurances about the purely defensive character of the War, and the indignant denials that there would be any annexations, was now clear. Their words were exposed as a paltry rhetorical cover for a reality that consisted of shrapnel, bombs, machine guns, poison gas and imperialist aims. The Social-Democratic leaders soon became as ‘annexationist’ as the military and political chiefs. They assured the German workers that Wilhelm II’s army was defending the prospects of socialism and its future victory in Europe when it fought against Tsarism and British imperialism. In France, the Socialists in turn declared that German militarism and pan-German imperialism had to be destroyed if the possibility of socialism were to be ensured. The International died on 4 August 1914.”
― Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923