October 23, 1918 - German Political Prisoners Amnestied
Pictured - Karl Liebknecht was an implacable enemy of the Wilhelmine government and one of the prisoners released on October 23.
The rapid advance of the Allied armies was matched by a extreme change in the German political atmosphere. The appointment of the moderate Prince Max as Chancellor had done nothing to quell the rising forces of republicanism and socialism. Germans were fed up with the war, and increasingly, fed up with the Kaiser and his warlords.
On October 23 the Kaiser decreed a general amnesty for the state’s political prisoners. He hoped this might appease the mounting discontent. It did the exact opposite. Karl Liebknecht was one of the prisoners to go free. He had been jailed for his anti-war activism, as well as his vocal leadership of the socialist Spartiacist League, alongside Rosa Luxemburg. Upon his release a crowd of 20,000 people went to the Berlin train station to welcome him back to the city. Lenin, fighting for survival in the Russian Civil War, found a Marxist solace in watching the collapse of the Central Powers. “Three months ago people used to laugh when we said there might be a revolution in Germany.” No one would laugh if he said it about Austria-Hungary: in Italy that day Croat troops behind the lines mutinied and seized the port of Fiume before being suppressed by loyalist Habsburg forces.
