German Empire
The high command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff increasingly controlled the country, but in October after the failed offensive in spring 1918, the German armies were in retreat, allies Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, and Bulgaria had surrendered. The Empire collapsed in the November 1918 Revolution with the abdications of its monarchs. This left a postwar federal republic and a devastated and unsatisfied populace, which later led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
Paris in World War I
By November, the Germans and their Allies were unable to continue the war. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy collapsed on November 3, then the German monarchy on November 9. Germany was proclaimed a republic, and the German Emperor Wilhelm II fled to the Netherlands. The new German government sent a delegation to Compiègne, north of Paris, and the armistice was signed at 5:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918. The day was described by the French historian René Héron de Villefosse, who was a young student in a Paris college: