Armistice of 11 November 1918
The guns stopped at eleven in the morning on 11 November 1918, and the terms had been signed six hours earlier in a railway carriage. Germany's position had become impossible over the preceding eight weeks. The Hundred Days offensive had broken the Hindenburg Line, Bulgaria capitulated in September, the Ottomans in October and Austria-Hungary in early November, and Ludendorff had told the government on 29 September that an armistice was needed at once. The armistice was requested by a new civilian government on the basis of Wilson's Fourteen Points, which is a detail that mattered enormously afterwards. The naval mutiny at Kiel in early November spread into a revolution, the Kaiser abdicated on the 9th and left for the Netherlands, and a republic was declared. The delegation that signed at Compiègne was headed by a civilian, Matthias Erzberger, which allowed the army to maintain afterwards that it had not surrendered. The terms were not a negotiation: withdrawal from all occupied territory in fourteen days, the Rhineland evacuated and bridgeheads occupied, the surrender of 5,000 guns, 25,000 machine guns, 1,700 aircraft, the fleet and the submarines, and the blockade to continue. Some 2,700 men were killed on the last morning, after the signature and before the hour. Erzberger was murdered by nationalists in 1921. Hitler had the same carriage brought out of a museum in June 1940. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was chosen for its symmetry rather than for any military reason. Foch had signed at five in the morning and the fighting could have stopped then.
- Year: 1918 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
