The third reason affecting the course of the Majority Socialists has already been referred to in passing. This was the feeling of party solidarity, which still existed despite the fact that the Independents had had their own party organization for some six months. Most of the prominent men in both Socialist parties had worked together in a common cause for many years, and while, in the heat of purely partisan conflicts this was sometimes forgotten for the moment, it nevertheless united the two factions when, as now, the attack came from the extreme Right.
Complete details of the mutiny of this summer have never been given out. According to the best reports available, it started on the battleship _Westfalen_ at Wilhelmshaven and included altogether four vessels, one of which was the _Nürnberg_. The captain of the _Nürnberg_ is said to have been thrown overboard. Rumor and enemy report made the most of the affair and undoubtedly exaggerated it greatly, but there can be no doubt that it was serious and that the morale of the fleet was greatly affected by it. Some of the ring-leaders--how many it is not known--were executed, and a considerable number were imprisoned for long terms. The extent and severity of the sentences added fuel to the discontent already prevailing throughout the fleet. The men's fighting spirit sank as their revolutionary spirit rose. Von Capelle's boast that the fleet's preparedness for battle "shall and will not be brought in question for a moment" was a vain boast. The fleet was already rotten at the core.
Ironic fate had led the men who directed the affairs of the German Empire to forge one of the weapons with which it was later to be destroyed. On April 9, 1917, Nicholas Lenine, with thirty-two fanatical followers, had been brought from Switzerland through Germany in a sealed car and sent into Russia to sow the seeds of Bolshevism. How the plan succeeded is only too well known. November brought the overthrow of the Kerensky government. Released from the necessity of the intensive pre-revolutionary propaganda at home, the Bolsheviki turned their attention to imperialistic Germany. Their missionaries, liberally equipped with corruption funds, entered Germany by secret routes and worked with Germans in sympathy with their cause, notably Liebknecht. Foremost among their propagandists was a man who called himself Radek. His real name was Sobelsohn, a Jew from Austrian Galicia. Expelled from his labor union before the war for robbing a _Genosse_, he had settled in Bremen and was even then the guiding spirit in the most radical and rabid circles. After the Russian Bolshevik revolution he quickly took up the severed threads of his former connections. He was intimate with all the Independent Socialist leaders already named, and with many others. A man of acknowledged organizing and propagandizing ability, he contributed markedly to making Germany ripe for revolution.