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When, in November 1918, imperial rule collapsed in Germany, this was not at its inception the result of the revolutionary activity of the working masses. The front had been pierced, the soldiers were deserting in their thousands. In this situation, the sea-lords of the German navy conceived the idea of a last great show of strength, to take the form of a desperate battle on the North Sea. The sailors believed, rightly or wrongly, that they would all find their deaths in this battle, and on the warships this then provoked desertions on a mass scale. Having once taken this course, the sailors were compelled to persue it to the bitter end, because otherwise the crews which had mutinied, together with their ships, would have been shot to pieces by the "loyal" troops. For this reason they struck the red flag, and this became the signal for a general uprising of the sailors. With this the decisive action had been taken; the die was cast, and the sailors were forced to continue the struggle they had started. With an iron logic of its own, one action led to another. In this way they marched on Hamburg, in order to appeal for help from the workers there. How would they be received? Would they be repulsed?
Approaching Hamburg, there was no question of any resistance being offered to the revolutionary sailors. In their hundreds of thousands workers declared themselves in solidarity with them, whereupon all revolutionary activity found its expression in the Councils of Workers, Soldiers and Sailors, and the triumphal march of the German Revolution began to move throughout the whole of Germany. And here a peculiar feature of this revolutionary development began to make itself manifest: although the military censorship had controlled all reports concerning the Russian Revolution since 1917, and although for that reason absolutely no propaganda had been made on behalf of the Council concept, indeed in spite of the fact that the council structure of the Russian workers was completely unknown to the German workers, within a period of a few days an entire network of Workers' Councils had sprung up all over Germany!
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