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.
Egon Bahr
In an interview with the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" in 2005, Bahr confessed that, as a teenager, he had felt a “certain pride” that Poland, France, Denmark, and Norway had been conquered so quickly by the German Wehrmacht. According to a book by German politicians Bernhard and Hans-Jochen Vogel, Bahr reportedly said at the beginning of November 1989, “For heaven’s sake, let’s stop dreaming and blathering about German unity”; the Berlin Wall fell only days later on 9 November 1989.