On the morning of 21 February 1919 the young count loitered in a doorway near the offices of Kurt Eisner. When Eisner and his bodyguards passed, he rushed up from behind and shot him in the head. Count von Arco-Valley was also shot on the spot, but survived. Over the course of his protracted recuperation, he was able to witness Munich’s slide into anarchy, as it had been Kurt Eisner who had held back the extremist forces of both the left and the right. Eisner’s death began a chain reaction which ended in civil war.6
Almost immediately after Eisner’s murder, an epidemic of political assassinations swept across the city. Workers and groups of revolutionary soldiers turned on the middle classes, making random arrests and raiding private homes, and the more moderate members of Eisner’s coalition abandoned the city and formed an alternative government in the provincial town of Bamberg. By the middle of April 1919, this alternative government had amassed a small army of volunteers who blockaded the city. The ensuing crisis in Munich led to the formation of a new government, most of whom were of German-Russian background; one was Lenin’s former press secretary. Their leader, Eugen Leviné, was a veteran of the failed Russian Revolution of 1905.
The first real confrontation between the Army of Bavaria’s government-in-exile and Munich’s ‘Red Army’ militia took place (ironically enough given what was to emerge from Munich) at a little town north of Munich called Dachau. When the Reds won that encounter, the Bamberg government turned to Berlin for help. The force that was then dispatched to crush Red Munich included units of the Freikorps – the Free Army.
The Freikorps were veterans of the regular army, who in the immediate aftermath of the war had bonded together in volunteer militias. Many fought with the devout aim of saving their nation from the forces of socialism. Others were merely unwilling to accept their nation’s defeat and psychologically unable to find a way back to civilian life. Robbed of their youth, they were men whose closest bonds were to each other and to the unit. In their private war against the socialists and revolutionaries, they sought to recreate the camaraderie they had known at the front.
While the soldiers and junior officers of the Freikorps were the ‘youths of the trenches’, many of their officers were former colonial soldiers, and a surprising number of the most important figures in the movement had taken part in the genocides against the Herero and Nama, or been involved in Germany’s other colonial wars. The first Freikorps unit, which provided the model for the entire movement, was formed by General Ludwig von Maercker, who had served in German South-West Africa. In the aftermath of the Nama War, von Maercker had overseen the internment of the Nama survivors of the Shark Island concentration camp in the former stables at Okawayo, where they had remained until the arrival of the South Africans in 1915.
By 1918 von Maercker was a veteran not only of the wars for Lebensraum in South-West Africa, but also of Germany’s attempt to create an empire in the East, leading the 214th Infantry Division. In late 1918 von Maercker found himself back in Berlin as the German Revolution began. A traditional Prussian conservative, he was deeply fearful of revolution and of socialism, so in December 1918 he took the fateful step of re-forming what was left of his division into the Freiwillige Landesjägerkorps (the Volunteer Riflemen’s Corps). This was a force dedicated to confronting socialist revolutionaries, upholding law and order, and defending the borders of the Reich. Von Maercker also forged the ethos of the Freikorps, in which the intense camaraderie of the trenches was invoked to bond officers and men together, re placing the suffocating hierarchy of rank and class that had, it was claimed, been a factor in the army’s defeat.
By Christmas 1918 von Maercker’s Freikorps had received official recognition from the government in Berlin. In January 1919 the Freiwillige Landesjägerkorps and several other newly formed Freikorps units entered Berlin and crushed the uprising of the Marxist Sparticist League in open battle on the streets of the capital. They then marched on to the city of Weimar and the northern ports of Bremen and Hamburg before confronting communist and revolutionary forces in the industrial cities of the Ruhr. As was the case with many Freikorps units, several of the men who served under von Maercker went on to hold key positions during the Third Reich. By far the most important of von Maercker’s former comrades was the young Reinhardt Heydrich, later the head of the Reich Main Security Office and architect of the Final Solution.
Another veteran of the Herero and Nama genocides who formed a Freikorps unit in 1919 was Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, who had conducted a brilliant four-year-long guerrilla war in German East Africa finally surrendering two weeks after the Armistice in Europe had been signed. In one of his last acts before abdicating, Kaiser Wilhelm had promoted von Lettow-Vorbeck to the rank of Major General, and when he returned to Germany, von Lettow-Vorbeck and his East Africa Schutztruppe were the only unit in the entire German army to be permitted a victory parade through the Brandenburg Gate.
Within months of his return von Lettow-Vorbeck had formed a Freikorps unit, and in May 1919 they saw action in the violent suppression of renewed left-wing rioting in Hamburg and Berlin. Although now fighting on the streets of Germany, von Lettow-Vorbeck continued to wear his Schutztruppe uniform and broad hat. An ardent monarchist and a conservative, von Lettow-Vorbeck did not become a member of the Nazi party. However, many of the men who fought under him made an effortless transition from the ranks of the Freikorps to the rallies of the early Nazi party.
The largest of the Bavarian Freikorps that assembled for an assault on ‘Red Munich’ in April 1919 was commanded by a man who had fought alongside von Lettow-Vorbeck at the battle of the Waterberg and in the Omaheke Desert. Knighted, elevated to the rank of General, and a recipient of Germany’s most prestigous military decoration, the Pour le Mérite, Franz Xavier Ritter von Epp was a war hero and now commander of a menacing new force – Freikorps von Epp. They were 600 strong, had retained their field grey army uniforms but on their Stalhelm (steel helmets) they had painted a white ‘E’ – for Epp. On their sleeves they wore their unit’s badge, a black diamond out of which stared a lion’s head – an appropriate symbol for a unit commanded by a colonial soldier. General von Epp’s fanatical belief in Germany’s great racial destiny was undiminished by four years of war, much of it spent in the East. Two years after the formation of his Freikorps unit, von Epp was formally reprimanded by his superiors in Reichswehr (the official post-war German army) for distributing racist pamphlets to soldiers under his command.7
In 1919, however, most of the men who had been recruited to the Freikorps von Epp were in no need of indoctrination. The membership of von Epp’s unit reads like a Who’s Who list of the later Nazi elite. Among the future Nazis who marched on Munich with an ‘E’ on their steel helmets was Wilhelm Stukart, the Nazi lawyer who was involved in drafting the Nuremberg Laws and attended the Wannsee Conference, at which the Nazis devised their ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish question. Another of von Epp’s men, Karl Astel, went on to become leader of the Nazis’ Racial Hygiene Office in Munich and co-publisher of the magazine Volk und Rass. Astel also sat as a judge on Nazi Genetic Health courts in Jena and authorised thousands of forced sterilisations of the mentally ill and socially undesirable. Gerhard Wagner went on to hold the Nazi title ‘Führer’s Commissioner for National Health’. As such, Wagner was one of the men behind the sterilisation programmes of the Jews and the pre-war Nazi adult euthanasia programme. Walther Schultze, another of von Epp’s followers, was one of the earliest members of the Nazi party and rose to become their Reich Leader of University Teachers. He too was implicated in the euthanasia of the mentally ill. Gregor Strasser was the Nazis’ Reich Propaganda Leader, former commanding officer of Heinrich Himmler and the man who recruited Joseph Goebbels into the party. The figure from the Freikorps who was to play the most critical role in the birth of Nazism was General von Epp’s aide-de-camp Ernst Röhm, Hitler’s right-hand man and the driving force within the Nazi Brown Shirts.
Alongside Freikorps von Epp on the march
on Munich in April 1919 was another Freikorps unit commanded by a veteran of German South-West Africa. Hermann Ehrhardt had fought as a marine in the war in the south against the Nama between 1905 and 1906. Having risen to naval lieutenant-commander, Ehrhardt was a proud veteran of the battle of Jutland, and by the end of April 1919 he had formed a Freikorps unit that had fought with von Maercker’s men across central Germany. Freikorps Ehrhardt were renowned for their fanaticism and excessive violence. Like the Thule Society, they had already adopted the swastika as their emblem, painting it on their steel helmets. Freikorps Ehrhardt even sang a marching tune that, with a few small changes, became the official song of Hitler’s personal bodyguard.8 From the ranks of Ehrhardt’s unit came yet more future Nazis. In fact, most of the men who dominated the Nazi party, Martin Bormann, Reinhardt Heydrich, Hans Frank, Otto Strasser, Wilhelm Keitel and many others, had been members of one or other of the Freikorps. Hitler was a notable exception.
In late April 1919, Freikorps units, including those of von Epp and Ehrhardt, were marshalling their forces on the outskirts of Munich. In the city itself, the more determined members of Munich’s ‘Red Army’ had taken around one hundred members of the city’s bourgeoisie hostage in the Luitpold Gymnasium. On 30 April, the order was given to kill them; of the twenty or so who were shot, seven were members of the Thule Society. News of these atrocities was carried out of Munich by right-wing students and members of the Thule Society, who slipped through the frontlines to join the Freikorps on the edge of the city. Among them was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s future deputy, who now joined the ranks of Freikorps von Epp.
When reports of the massacre in Luitpold Gymnasium reached von Epp and Ehrhardt, they redrafted their plans and launched an early assault on the city. On 1 May, as Lenin stood before an enormous May Day crowd in Moscow’s Red Square and declared that ‘The liberated working class is celebrating its anniversary freely and openly not only in Soviet Russia, but in Soviet Hungary and Soviet Bavaria’, the Freikorps were breaking into Munich.9
There was determined resistance in some working-class areas, but in much of the city opposition melted away as the Red Army volunteers deserted their posts. In the attack on Munich, the Freikorps and the other units of the ‘White Guard’ deployed machine-guns, artillery, aircraft and even an armoured train. Within three days the city was pacified, but it was after the resistance had ended that much of the worst violence took place. With the population cowed, the Freikorps began a wave of retribution and executions. Citizens who had welcomed von Epp, Ehrhardt and others as their liberators now recoiled in revulsion as over a thousand communists, communist sympathisers and many hapless innocents were murdered. Some of the killings were carried out in the Hofbrauhaus, later the scene of Hitler’s failed coup. The Freikorps were aided in this grim work by members of Munich’s far-right organisations, including the Thule Society, who now emerged from hiding.10
The coming of the Freikorps marked the end of Munich’s brief civil war and the beginning of the period during which the city became a sanctuary for disparate elements of the far right, including many disaffected former Freikorps men. For much of 1919 Munich was run directly by the army, with General von Epp at one point installed as a virtual dictator. In August the Bamberg government-in-exile returned to the city. However, the army soon overthrew the civilian regime they had ostensibly fought to defend. In its place a right-wing, anti-republican government, with strong links to the army, was installed under the presidency of Gustav von Kahr. With the arrival of the Freikorps and the transformation of Munich into a haven for the ultra-nationalist, much of the cast who were to take leading roles in the Nazi epic tragedy were assembled in one city: the future Nazis of the Thule Society were joined by their future comrades from the Freikorps.
In one of his later essays Arthur Count de Gobineau, the nineteenth-century philosopher regarded by many as the spiritual father of modern racism, described the fate that would befall an authoritarian state such as Germany if the ruling elite were toppled and a weak government set in their place. A firm believer in aristocracy, Gobineau claimed:
It is from above that inspiration and direction are fated to descend to the people; and when in these spheres of authority there no longer is any belief, no more confidence, no more will, no more striving for good and for the better, one may state with all the certainty of a mathematical proposition that power will fall to the first corporal who, in passing, will seize it.11
In the Munich of 1919, as the Freikorps of Ritter von Epp and Hermann Ehrhardt rampaged through the street with swastikas on their helmets, in a corner of the Türken-Strasse barracks of the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment sat Gobineau’s corporal.
Hitler’s meteoric rise to political prominence has been well documented elsewhere. Less well explored is the importance of a series of patrons who eased Hitler’s ascendancy. One of the most important and most often overlooked of these figures was von Epp.
Von Epp’s initial involvement with the Nazis was somewhat detached. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Freikorps von Epp was incorporated into the 21st Bavarian Infantry Brigade – part of the Reichswehr, Germany’s official post-war army. One of the units that came under von Epp’s influence was a new intelligence and propaganda unit commanded by Captain Karl Mayr. In May 1919 Mayr had come across Adolf Hitler, and recruited him as an informer and political re-educator. In September Hitler had been assigned the task of monitoring the Deutsches Arbeiterpartie, one of the fifty or so parties that had emerged on the Völkisch fringes of Munich beer-hall politics. The Deutsches Arbeiterpartie (DAP) had been founded in January 1919 by Anton Drexler, an associate member of the Thule Society. It had just a handful of committed members, but within three months Hitler became its public face, later renaming it the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – the NAZIS for short.
There is no evidence that Adolf Hitler, the working-class corporal, had met von Epp, the upper-class general, at this point. However, Hitler certainly had extensive dealings with von Epp’s former adjutant and Freikorps comrade, Ernst Röhm. Hitler was first introduced to Röhm by Captain Mayr in the autumn of 1919. Röhm is known to have attended the first German Workers’ party meeting at which Hitler spoke on 16 October 1919, and he joined the party shortly afterwards. In early 1920 Mayr took Hitler to a meeting of Röhm’s Iron Fist Club, a band of extremist nationalist officers, and it is around this time that Röhm seems to have decided Hitler was ‘the man for Germany’ and worth supporting. In the Munich of 1920, the support of Ernst Röhm was no small matter.
In the chaos of the immediate post-war period, politics and organised political violence had become inextricable, particularly in Munich. Just months before Hitler became leader of the Nazi party, the Bavarian Minister President Gustav von Kahr, under pressure from the victorious Allies, was forced to disband the Einwohnerwehr, a right-wing citizens’ militia formed in the aftermath of the Freikorps’ ‘liberation’ of the city. The resulting power vacuum was filled by a plethora of new paramilitary formations. From von Epp’s Freikorps emerged the Bund Oberland. Hermann Ehrhardt and his men formed the Wiking Bund. But the National Socialists had no paramilitary wing, only a small gang of thugs to keep order during its beer-hall meetings. In November 1920 these strongmen were formed into the party’s ‘Gym and Sports Section’, which concentrated on providing physical training for young party members. A year later, Hitler redesignated them the Sturmabteilung ‘Storm Section’, or SA. They quickly became known as the Brown Shirts. The final transformation of the SA, from a training programme for young party members into a fully-fledged paramilitary force, was primarily the work of Ernst Röhm and Hermann Ehrhardt.
By the time he began his association with the Nazis, Ernst Röhm had become the key link between Munich’s paramilitary organisations and the regular army.12 His official role was to supply von Epp’s Reichswehr brigade with weapons, but in this position he also channelled Reichswehr funds and weapons into those paramilitary groups that
the army believed might be deployed as reserves in time of trouble. Secure under the protection of General von Epp and the Bavarian Minister President von Kahr, it was Röhm who decided which groups received financial support and access to the large cache of arms and ammunition he had been busily stockpiling, in flagrant contravention of the terms of the Versailles Treaty and the Allied Disarmament Commissions. As the ‘Machine-Gun King’ of Munich, Röhm supported the slow growth and development of the SA and helped strengthen the party’s connections to the real brokers of power in the city, including General von Epp. As the fledgling party learned how to spread its new paramilitary wings, Hitler and the Nazis increasingly found themselves in legal difficulties and Röhm’s influence with von Epp became ever more beneficial.
What Hermann Ehrhardt brought to the SA was not guns, but men and money. After playing a critical role in a disastrous attempted coup in Berlin in 1920, Ehrhardt and his men became virtual fugitives and naturally sought sanctuary in Munich. With Röhm most likely acting as an intermediary, Hitler and Ehrhardt agreed that former members of Ehrhardt’s Freikorps would be channelled straight into the SA, and funds to train them into a paramilitary force would be provided.
General von Epp did not become directly and personally involved with the Nazi party until late in 1920. In the middle of that year, the Nazis had learned that the Völkischer Beobachter, the newspaper of the Thule Society, formerly the Münchener Beobachter, had fallen upon hard times and was on the verge of folding. Unable to secure the funds to buy the paper outright and aware of a number of rival bidders, Hitler and his supporters approached General von Epp, who agreed to illegally supply the party with a loan of 60,000 marks, taken from the funds of the Reichswehr. This allowed the party to seize control of the paper that remained its prime propaganda organ until 1945, and made von Epp one of its greatest benefactors.
The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism Page 33