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In late October 1918, with the First World War in its final days, German naval officers ordered the fleet based at Kiel to sail out for a final battle they knew was suicidal. The sailors refused. They mutinied, took control of the city, and raised red flags over the ships. The Kiel Mutiny of November 3, 1918 sparked the German Revolution that spread to Hamburg, Munich, and Berlin within days, forced Kaiser Wilhelm II to abdicate, ended the war, and created the Weimar Republic. All of this began on the waterfront of a Baltic port city that Prussia had turned into its principal naval base in 1865. There is a memorial to those sailors near the main station. Not everyone in Kiel agrees about how to commemorate it.

Kiel was rebuilt almost entirely from scratch after the Second World War, during which Allied bombing destroyed more than eighty percent of the old town.

The result is a city that wears its postwar architecture without apology: wide streets, concrete civic buildings, a functional harbour front designed for the ferry services to Scandinavia and the Baltic states that keep the city economically relevant. The Kiel Canal, which enters the Baltic at the Holtenau locks just north of the city, is the world's busiest artificial waterway. On any given afternoon, the parade of container ships, tankers, and leisure yachts passing through it is its own kind of spectacle.