We traditionally think of soldiering as a temporary occupation. Wars begin, men join up, and they fight for the duration. When the struggle is over, they return to their homes and their loved ones and get on with their lives. The model in the West has long been the early Roman army —farmers who tilled the soil in peacetime and then responded to the call of duty when enemies threatened the republic.The citizen-soldier (or yeoman farmer) remains our cultural ideal.
It’s an inspiring narrative, but what if it isn’t always true? What if the reality of war and peace is more. . . complicated? What if a man cannot stop soldiering, even after wading through blood for four long years? What if he has just fought the most terrible war of all time, and he still has not had enough? What if we train killers who are not so easily turned off? In the years of turmoil following World War I Germany faced such questions, and none of the answers was very reassuring.
While World War I ended in 1918, the years that followed were almost as horrible as the war itself. In Germany a once-proud people were drinking defeat to the dregs: humiliation at the hands of their enemies; starvation from the Allied naval blockade, which continued into 1919; even the ravages of plague, in the form of the global influenza pandemic.
The glory days were gone, and so was Kaiser Wilhelm II. Germany was now a republic, and power was in the hands of the moderate Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD in German), under the leadership of President Friedrich Ebert. As in all revolutions, however, stresses and strains marked the early weeks. Right-wing supporters of the monarchy were off-balance for the moment, but left-wing rivals of the SPD were already on the march, especially the more extreme Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD in German), as well as the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), Germany’s nascent communist party under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Moreover, as the central government had melted away in the fall of 1918, power in most German cities had fallen into the hands of hastily formed Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte), “soviets” that had sprung up more or less spontaneously. Anyone who had lived in Europe during the past two years could read the tea leaves: It was the same revolutionary path Russia had taken, and Ebert probably went to bed at night wondering whether he’d still be in charge when the sun came up, and perhaps whether he’d even be alive.
International tensions were just as severe, with newly established states on the periphery casting aggressive eyes on German territory. The resurrected republic of Poland, for example, had claims on almost all of the Reich east of the Oder River, and indeed Polish nationalists in Posen (present-day Pozna) would soon rise up and seize control of the city and the wealthy province surrounding it. Behind the Poles, of course, lay an even graver threat: Soviet Russia, proclaiming a revolution without borders and making no secret of its intent to carry Bolshevism to the rest of Europe on the bayonets of the Red Army.
Normally, with enemies howling for blood, one calls on one’s army. Unfortunately, Ebert no longer had one. Early in the revolution he had signed off on a pact with the German General Staff— Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his able chief of staff (actually first quartermaster general), Wilhelm Groener. The officer corps had pledged to defend the new republic, and in return Ebert promised to support the army, restore law and order and do everything in his power to resist Bolshevism.
This was a marriage of odd fellows, a moderate socialist cozying up to the militarists, and the early results were not encouraging. For all their promises Hindenburg and Groener no longer had an army, either. Instead, they now had in their hands a thorny challenge: how to bring home their immense defeated army from the four corners of Europe and demobilize it in an orderly fashion. Part one went off pretty well, considering some German formations lay as far away as the central Ukraine and that the road and rail network of Eastern Europe —never robust in the best of times— had broken down under four years of war. Units generally returned home on schedule, under discipline, so Hindenburg managed to avoid the nightmare of a broken German army pillaging its way across Europe in marauding bands.
Part two—the demobilization—was utter chaos. Once returning formations crossed the German border, they tended to dissolve. Officers lost control, the men fled, and even record-keeping (the signal virtue of the Prussian-German army) broke down. A prominent example was the great military parade in Berlin on Dec. 10, 1918, to greet 20 divisions of the returning army at the Brandenburg Gate. Having marched into Berlin and assembled for the festivities, the soldiers drifted away in the aftermath; whole units simply vanished. “The pressure to be at home for Christmas,” Groener later wrote with considerable understatement, “proved stronger than military discipline.”
With the regular army gone, the General Staff encouraged individual veteran officers to recruit independent volunteer units known as Freikorps (“free corps”). Hindenburg and Groener were in touch with loyal commanders on all levels, and these officers in turn knew men in their ranks willing to stay with the colors. Over the next few months the once-great German army gave way to a kaleidoscopic mix of quasi-military units of different sizes, shapes and capabilities, all more or less supported logistically by what remained of the army’s quartermaster service. Unit designations varied, but most took their names from their place of origin or, more often, their commanding officer, the charismatic figure who had formed the unit and who held it together—hence Freikorps Haase, Freikorps Lüttwitz, Freikorps Hülsen, the Ehrhardt Marine Brigade, Maercker’s Volunteer Rifles and dozens more. It was a bewildering array, and it would take a brave man indeed to try to list a comprehensive order of battle.
It is easy enough to understand the officers’ motivations; the army was their life. But why did so many soldiers remain in uniform? Their reasons varied. Some had no home to which they could return—or at least felt that way. Others had come to crave the bonding unique to men under fire. Some were legitimately unhinged after four years of mud, blood and bombardment—the unholy trinity of trench warfare. Many others were too young to have fought in the war at all (a fact generally unrecognized in studies of the Freikorps) and were eager to grab a late chance for glory.
Politically, a “freebooter” (Freikorpskämpfer) was a man of the right, but he was more than that. He was also a hater. He hated the revolution, hated the new German republic, hated the socialists who led it, and hated the communists trying to replace them. Indeed, he hated civilians in general. He believed Germany had not lost the war but been stabbed in the back by the same pack of traitors now ruling in Berlin. He might have had a sentimental attachment to the old Germany of the kaiser, but he was savvy enough to realize those days were gone forever. While most of his ideas remained inchoate, he yearned for a powerful Germany united under a strong leader (führer), and a political system stamped with the same military virtues of authority and obedience as the army at the front.
While their republicanism was suspect, these ad hoc units soon proved themselves tough fighters. The first Freikorps went into action along the Polish border in December 1918, fighting collectively as Grenzschutz Ost (Border Defense East), but their center of gravity soon shifted to the domestic front. In January 1919 the Spartacus League (now renamed the Communist Party of Germany, or KPD in German) staged an uprising in Berlin. Armed workers seized control of much of the central city, including train stations, public buildings and the offices of the major Berlin daily newspapers, and Liebknecht declared the Ebert government deposed. It might have worked a few weeks earlier, but the government by that point had just enough Freikorps on hand to crush it. Leading the effort was the minister of defense in the Ebert cabinet, Gustav Noske. A lifelong socialist but also a law-and-order man (not that odd a combination in the Social Democratic Party), he set up ad hoc headquarters at a girls’ school in Dahlem and organized and armed the various formations. He knew it was going to be dirty work, but someone had to be the “bloodhound,” as he put it.
A week of gritty street fighting ensued, but it was an uneven fight from the start. The Freikorps—Freikorps Reinhard (Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard), Freikorps Potsdam (Major Franz von Stephani) and the Iron Brigade from Kiel, under Noske’s direct command—held all the high cards. They had clear lines of command, well-trained soldiers and the sophisticated assault tactics (Stosstrupptaktik) they had learned in the recent war. They could even call upon a full range of support weapons if needed: artillery, flamethrowers and armored cars.
As a result, “Spartacus Week” saw the Freikorps clearing Berlin, routing out bands of indifferently armed rebels and invariably killing them. This last fact deserves emphasis. Civil wars are always brutal, but the zeal with which the Freikorps went about their business was out of all proportion. They killed during and after battle with equal gusto, and any prisoner unlucky enough to fall into their hands could usually expect a bullet or a gun butt to the back of the head. Those freebooters who wrote their memoirs bragged about such doings.
Among their most infamous victims were KPD leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, captured by soldiers of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division (Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division). Their captors first tortured them, then shot them for “attempting to escape,” perhaps the first use of this characteristic 20th century phrase. Luxemburg was small, physically frail and suffered from a congenital hip deformity that left one leg longer than the other. It is difficult, to put it mildly, to imagine her trying to escape from a troop of heavily armed soldiers. In classic gangster style her killers tossed her body into the icy waters of Berlin’s Landwehr Canal and dumped Liebknecht’s corpse without any identifying information on the steps of a local mortuary.
Spartacus Week set the pattern for the republic’s first year. Leftist uprisings rolled across the country in 1919, first in the northern ports of Bremen, Bremerhaven and Cuxhaven, next in the heartland provinces of Westphalia and Brunswick, then in Leipzig. The Freikorps crushed them all with maximum brutality. A second wave of KPD violence roiled Berlin in March, followed by an even bloodier wave of Freikorps terror. In April a left-wing coup toppled the state government of Bavaria and installed a “Bavarian Soviet” in Munich. Freikorps from all over the Reich rushed to Bavaria, crushing the Soviet regime by May. There had been a Red Terror in Munich, to be sure, with arbitrary arrests and killings, but the White Terror that followed exceeded it many times over.
In the end the Freikorps kept the republic in power but could also be more trouble than they were worth. A Germany crawling with thousands of heavily armed soldiers was hardly going to be acceptable to the victorious Allies. In March 1920, under Allied pressure, Ebert ordered most of the Freikorps disbanded. In response, one of the soon-to-be-demobilized units, the Ehrhardt Marine Brigade, rose up in revolt and occupied Berlin. Troops of the tiny regular army, the provisional Reichswehr, stood aside and offered no resistance. That was due in part to the army’s small size, but there was also undeniable sympathy within the regular ranks for the uprising. As army commander General Hans von Seeckt put it, “Troops do not fire on troops.” The mutineers installed their own chancellor, Wolfgang Kapp, thus the attempted coup has gone into the books as the Kapp Putsch.
Running Germany proved more difficult than occupying Berlin, however. The Social Democrats finally showed some muscle by calling out the workers on a general strike, paralyzing the great city of 3 million people. With the Berliners uncooperative and no support materializing outside Berlin, the putsch soon collapsed. As the Ehrhardt Brigade was evacuating the city, it left behind what we can only call a typical calling card, opening fire with rifles and machine guns on a crowd of jeering civilians and killing many of them. Far from being an anomaly, it was a perfect expression of the freebooter’s civilian-hating ethos. It was the Freikorps being Freikorps.
The Freikorps proved equally troublesome to German foreign policy. They actually campaigned abroad twice in their brief history. In spring 1919 they marched off to the Baltic region to fight alongside the new Latvian army. Their mission, approved by the Allies, was to help stiffen Latvian defenses against the Red Army. Naturally, the Freikorps soon exceeded their brief, overthrowing the duly constituted Latvian government of Ka¯rlis Ulmanis, openly discussing plans to colonize the region and actually storming the capital, Riga, on May 22, 1919. They also carried out the usual massacres, shooting 300 Latvians suspected of Bolshevism in Jelgava, 200 more in Tukums and another 125 in Daugavgri¯va. The death toll in Riga would be nearly 3,000.
Unfortunately for the Freikorps, they had just “conquered themselves to death,” as Iron Brigade commander Major Josef Bischoff, put it (“Wir haben uns totgesiegt!”). There was zero chance the Allies would permit a Germandominated state on the Baltic littoral. They put pressure on Ebert, Ebert pressured the General Staff, and orders went out almost immediately for the recall of the entire force. While some sought to stay on and serve in the army of White Russian adventurer Pavel BermondtAvalov, most had no choice but to comply with their orders and return to Germany.
The second campaign took place in Upper Silesia, a trouble spot of mixed Polish-German population. The Allies had scheduled a plebiscite there for March 1921, a vote to ascertain the wishes of local inhabitants as to future national affiliation. Tensions ran hot, however, and as the vote neared, ethnic clashes, claims of harassment and acts of violence on both sides wracked the province. The power structure of Upper Silesia was still German, few Poles expected a fair plebiscite, and there were Polish uprisings in both August 1919 and February 1920. When the vote resulted in a clear German victory (60 percent to 40 percent), the Germans exulted, the Poles cried fraud, and the Allies decided to partition Upper Silesia. Before they did that, however, a third uprising took place in May, led by Polish nationalist Wojciech Korfanty. It managed to seize two-thirds of the province and most of its heavy industry.
Once again the Freikorps rushed to the scene. In a smart little campaign of just three weeks they took back most of the province and placed an exclamation point by storming the Polish fortified position atop the Annaberg on May 21. But this affair, too, ended short of total victory. The Freikorps had once again “conquered themselves to death.” Defending German-settled districts was one thing. Conducting aggressive maneuver campaigns to conquer whole provinces was something else, and the Allies were no happier with this affair than with the one in the Baltic. They forced the Ebert government to solve the problem once and for all, making it clear that mere withdrawal from Upper Silesia was not enough. On May 24 Ebert issued a decree outlawing all Freikorps and volunteer formations.
The suppression of the Freikorps virtually guaranteed that former members would remain a disruptive element in German life. Many went underground and waited for the day of revenge. Others joined such paramilitary groups as the Nazi storm troopers. Still others carried out a campaign of terror and murder against government figures, replete with death lists and secret courts (Femegerichten) that hunted down and killed “traitors” to the German people. The Freikorps had shed their thin veneer of soldiering and become killers.
It is a depressing tale. In June 1921 they murdered Karl Gareis, a key figure in the USPD. In August of that year they hit the leader of the Catholic Center Party, Matthias Erzberger, one of the officials who had signed the Armistice in November 1918. Their most senseless crime came in June 1922 when they killed Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, ambushing his car on a country road and riddling it with bullets. Rathenau was a nationalist who had given yeoman’s service during the war by reforming and reorganizing the German economy. Indeed, he probably did more than any other man to keep the German army in the field for four long years. His real crime in the eyes of his killers? He was Jewish.
Many who had served in the Freikorps—commanders and men alike— served prison terms for their crimes in the 1920s and early 1930s. Indeed, one of the conspirators in the Rathenau murder, Ernst von Salomon, would later pen a semiautobiographical novel called Die Geächteten (The Outlaws). When the Nazis came to power in 1933, however, they reversed the verdict. The outlaws now became heroes, prototypes of the new National Socialist man. The verdict seems entirely apt. In so many ways— their hatred of democracy and the Jews, their lust for unrestrained brutality, their contempt for civilian life and traditional morality—the Freikorps were nothing if not the advance guard of the Third Reich.
For further reading Rob Citino recommends Vanguard of Nazism, by Robert G.L. Waite, and The Reichswehr and the German Republic, 1919–1926, by Harold J. Gordon Jr.
Originally published in the November 2012 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.
