The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

Their influence both on the civilian population and on the exhausted troops fighting off the final Allied onslaughts in the West was disastrous. Under the spell of such slogans as “Peace and Bread,” whole units gave themselves up to the Allies without resistance in August 1918 and retreating troops jeeringly called reservists coming up to relieve them “strikebreakers.” War weariness, subversion, and treason, however, did not of themselves bring about the German collapse in November 1918. Only when Germany had been militarily defeated in the field, only when the High Command publicly proclaimed defeat by suing for an armistice, did the exhausted population, so worn out by four years of privation and a diet of nauseous ersatz foods that workers fainted in the factories, lose faith both in victory and authority.

Returning POWs from russia