Emil Barth

There is still no biography of Barth and the sources are thin; the most important source on his life is his own memoir, published in 1919. He is said to have sympathised at first with anarchist ideas, and between 1902 and 1909 he was sentenced to prison five times by various courts. When the war began he fiercely opposed the war policy backed by his party and the unions and the vote for war credits, and he joined the circle of oppositional officials in the Berlin metal industry known as the Revolutionary Stewards.

At a meeting of the stewards on 9 February 1918, urged by Richard Müller, who had been drafted again, he took over the chair. In his memoir he cast himself as the revolution's chief of staff, collecting arms and money, but Müller firmly denied that Barth led the rising of 9 November. At a meeting on 2 November, 21 of the 40 stewards voted against a mass strike on 4 November and action was postponed to the 11th; the revolution broke out before that.

When Liebknecht and Ledebour refused to work with the "Scheidemann men", Barth joined the Council of People's Deputies with Dittmann on Haase's proposal. He chaired the assembly of workers' and soldiers' councils in the Circus Busch on 10 November and took charge of social policy on the Council, though he wrote that he was always outvoted five to one. He urged soldiers not to submit to the old discipline of their officers and argued that the revolution must not be "debased to a movement for wages". On 29 December he resigned in protest at Ebert's suppression of the People's Navy Division. His memoir was later used by the right as evidence that the left had stabbed the army in the back.