On this day in 1919, socialists declared a new Bavarian Soviet Republic during the German Revolution of 1918-19. Revolutionaries formed a Red Army and expropriated factories for the workers and luxury apartments for the homeless.
The movement to create this Republic came after the assassination of left-wing revolutionary Kurt Eisner, who had led a "People's State of Bavaria", founded a few months earlier. Energized by news of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Bavarian communists and anarchists declared their own soviet government, with left-wing playwright Ernst Toller as chief of state.
Toller was quickly ousted, however, by German Bolsheviks led by Eugen Leviné. These communists received a blessing from Lenin to make Bavaria a Bolshevik-aligned state (some leftists, such as Kurt Eisner, were deliberately distant from the Bolshevik movement).
The new communist leadership formed a Red Army from factory workers, seized cash, food supplies, and privately owned guns, expropriated luxurious apartments and gave them to the homeless, and arrested members of the aristocracy.
The Bavarian Soviet Republic was short-lived, however, as the German Freikorps succeeded in violently crushing the revolution by force on May 6th. 600 people were killed in the fighting, half of whom were civilians. More than 1,200 anarchists and communists were put on trial and several, including Eugen Leviné, were executed.
Leviné himself had opposed the declaration of the Republic initially, thinking that the action was premature and that the revolution would be betrayed by social democrats. Florian Keller, of In Defense of Marxism, quotes him explaining his vote to oppose declaring the Bavarian Soviet Republic:
"We Communists harbour the greatest mistrust against a Soviet Republic whose sponsors are the Social Democratic Ministers Schneppenhorst and Dürr, who at all times fought the idea of councils with every possible means. We can only explain this as an attempt by the bankrupt leaders to join the masses through apparently revolutionary action, or as a deliberate provocation.
We know from examples in northern Germany that the majority socialists [then common name for the SPD] often endeavoured to bring about premature action in order to stifle them all the more successfully. The whole of your approach calls for the greatest vigilance. A Soviet Republic is not being proclaimed by an armchair decision, it is the result of serious struggles by the proletariat and its victory.
...We are preparing for [the Soviet Republic] and we have time. At the present time, the proclamation of a Soviet Republic is extremely unfavourable...After the first rush, the following would happen: the majority socialists would withdraw under the first good pretext and consciously betray the proletariat. The USPD [Independent Social Democratic Party] would join in, then give way, begin to vacillate, negotiate, and thereby become unconscious traitors. And we Communists would pay for your deeds with the blood of our best."