Adding insult to injury was the treaty’s Article 231, which read: “The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.” In other words, Germany was to bear the sole blame for the war.
It was no small point: Germany’s “guilt” provided the legal underpinnings, the legitimacy, for dismembering the German Reich—Silesia, sections of East Prussia and the Rhineland were all taken away from Germany and either demilitarized or given to one of the newly formed nations in Central Europe—as well as the imposition of crippling reparations and the dissolution of Germany’s armed forces. More than any other of the Allies’ punitive provisions in the treaty, this would be the most deeply resented by the German people, an open wound for which there was to be no healing. It would become a grudge which the German people bore against the Allies, and which demagogues and agitators would use as a weapon to hack away at the limitations and provisions of the Versailles treaty, claiming that it was unfair to saddle the German nation and people with the total guilt for a conflict for which, they insisted, all the warring nations, victors and vanquished, bore some degree of responsibility.
Nonetheless, the Allies were unyielding: unquestioning acceptance of the terms of the Versailles treaty was the price of peace for Germany, and yet there would be no peace for the Germans. Even as Gustav Bauer, Weimar’s chancellor, affixed his signature to the document on June 28, 1919, right-wing Freikorps led by General Rüdiger von der Goltz were summarily executing leftists in Germany’s Baltic districts. For that matter, violence had erupted between armed gangs of every political persuasion in the weeks that followed the Kaiser’s abdication, a lamentable but predictable byproduct of the confusion of those days. But the formal introduction of murder and terror as ineradicable parts of Germany’s new political process can be said to have taken place on January 4, 1919, in what became known as the “Spartacist Uprising.” For reasons never fully explained, a large group of workers spontaneously began erecting barricades in the newspaper quarter of Berlin; the Socialist and Communist political leadership at first refused to cooperate, but within days saw a political opportunity and called for a general strike throughout the city—some half-million Berliners complied. The co-founders of the radical Spartacus League, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, both ardent and dedicated Communists, were the most visible political leaders in the strike, and their faction inadvertently lent its name to the uprising. On January 7, the Socialists and Communists, loudly unhappy with what they perceived as collusion and collaboration between Friedrich Ebert’s government and the conservatives, decided that the moment had arrived to stage a coup which would topple the fledgling republic.
The defense minister, Gustav Noske, acting on Ebert’s orders, had already brought several Freikorps units into Berlin to suppress the radicals; once the general strike was announced, Ebert ordered them to clear the streets. The Freikorps, all ex-soldiers, well-armed and to a man determinedly anti-socialist and anti-communist, quickly re-took the barricaded thoroughfares—by January 15 the rising was over. About a hundred strikers were killed in confrontations with the Freikorps, whose casualties were a fraction of that number; but, more sinister in its implications for the future of the Weimar Republic, even as the actual fighting died out, thousands of Socialists, Communists, and Spartacists were being hunted down throughout Berlin and executed by Freikorps troopers, including Liebknecht and Luxemburg.
As early as December 1918 it had been obvious that the infant German Republic needed an army of its own, if only to be the instrument that imposed order onto a nation daily falling further into chaos. As the German Empire had disintegrated in November 1918, so did the German Army. Like the Prussian Army, the armies of Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg marched home to their respective kingdoms. Except that, like the Kingdom of Prussia, none of those monarchies any longer existed: in Munich, Ludwig III actually anticipated Wilhelm II in abandoning his throne, abdicating on November 7, 1918, bringing an end to the 738-year rule of the House of Wittelsbach in Bavaria, while Friedrich August III of Saxony surrendered his crown six days later. Friedrich of Baden abdicated on November 22; the last holdout was Wilhelm II of Württemberg, who finally gave up his throne on the last day of the month. With the dissolution of the five kingdoms that composed the German Empire, their respective armies were left leaderless, their chains of command broken, with no one and no institution empowered to issue orders. On March 6, 1919 the Weimar government issued a decree which established the Vorläufige Reichswehr (“Provisional National Defense Force”), with a nominal strength of 400,000 officers and other ranks. This lasted until January 1, 1921, when a new Reichswehr was officially established according to the limitations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.
The new provisional army proved to be anything but reliable, however. On Christmas Eve 1918, in a bloody confrontation in Berlin with a group of armed revolutionaries, made up mostly of sailors from Kiel that called itself the Volksmarinedivision (“the People’s Naval Division”), the provisional army was humiliated. Brought in to clear out the Stadtschloss (“State Castle”—the Kaiser’s former residence), where the sailors had billeted themselves, the soldiers were instead driven off, but not before large numbers of them were seen leaving their units to openly join the sailors. The Volksmarinedivision withdrew from the castle later that same day, but the provisional army’s reputation and the government’s prestige had both suffered severely in the wake of the incident. The skirmish at the Stadtschloss led Major Kurt von Schleicher, the protege of General Wilhelm Gröner and something of a political opportunist, to create the Freikorps to prevent the occurrence of another such incident.
Schleicher’s idea was to recruit Army veterans and former Imperial officers to create paramilitary volunteer units which could be used to suppress any organized opposition to the Republic—but most particularly radical Socialists and Communists. The plan was a stroke of evil genius. After the Armistice, there had been no orderly, systematic demobilization of the German Army: it withdrew from France and Belgium in reasonably good order, but once inside Germany’s borders, the corps, divisions, and regiments simply dissolved, and most German soldiers made their way as best they could to their homes, individually or in small groups. Others, who had no real home to which they could return—or, given the looming specter of massive unemployment, no prospects for a stable future once they arrived—felt disconnected from civilian life, and sought the reassuring, stable familiarity of military life found in the Freikorps. These paramilitary bands also exerted a powerful attraction on those disillusioned veterans, angry at Germany’s sudden, apparently inexplicable defeat, who sought some form of revenge against political and social enemies they held responsible for Germany’s failure to win the war. This melange of arch-nationalistic paramilitary units would be involved in nearly every act of political violence in Germany between 1919 and 1923.
It should be noted that the explicit purpose of the Freikorps was not the protection of the Weimar Republic, per se, rather it was the repression of the left-wing elements of Germany’s political processes. The Freikorps were essentially indifferent to the survival of the Republic, seeing it only as a placeholder to eventually be supplanted by some form of arch-conservative, autocratic government. This was openly demonstrated in March 1920, in a near-comic opera incident known as “the Kapp Putsch.” Also known as the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, after its leaders Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz, the affair was an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic and establish a military regime. Kapp was a career politician of an ultranationalist bent who viewed Germany’s defeat in the Great War as a national humiliation and who was one of the most ardent evangelists of the “Dolchstoss myth”—the “stab in the back” betrayal of the German Army by liberal politicians who made p
eace with the Allies. Von Lüttwitz had been a general in the Imperial Army who currently held command of the Berlin military district; his loathing of the Treaty of Versailles equaled that of Kapp’s. He had been the commanding officer of the Freikorps units that had put down the Spartacist Uprising, and apparently this gave him a taste for military coups.
On March 11, 1920 von Lüttwitz, who was maneuvering behind the backs of his nominal civilian superiors, sent instructions to Hermann Ehrhardt, a Freikorps leader who commanded the eponymous Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, to enter Berlin, secure the Reichskanzlie—the Chancellery—and depose the Republican government. By mid-morning on March 13, joined by a battalion of provisional Reichswehr troops, the Freikorps held all of the major buildings in the city, and the government fled first to Dresden then to Stuttgart. Kapp announced the creation of a provisional government, with himself as Reichskanzler (chancellor) and von Lüttwitz as minister of defense; they believed their position was secure, as they had the open support of several Reichswehr units and senior officers, along with the Freikorps and other conservative, nationalist and monarchist groups.
What Kapp and von Lüttwitz did not have was support of the majority of the old aristocracy, the civil service, the labor unions or the general populace, all of whom, for various, sometimes contradictory reasons, had no love for Kapp, von Lüttwitz, or their goal. Two days after the putsch, Ebert struck back, confident that, no matter how indifferent were most Germans to the Republic, they were not prepared to accept a military dictatorship in its place, issuing a decree from Stuttgart that called for a general strike all across Germany. William Manchester memorably described the response: “When Germans obey, they really obey; next day, not a single water tap, gas range, electric light, train or streetcar would function.” The nation was paralyzed, and so was the bureaucracy: most of the civil servants refused to report for work, making it impossible for Kapp to govern. He resigned on March 17 and immediately fled to Sweden; Lüttwitz held out for another day before he, too, gave up and departed for Hungary.35
The indifference of the Freikorps to the fate of the Weimar Republic was unmistakable in their refusal to evict Kapp and von Lüttwitz from the Reichskanzlerie. What should have been equally disturbing to any objective observer was the matching indifference of the Reichswehr, under the command of General Hans von Seeckt. When asked by Reich President Ebert and Chancellor Bauer where the Reichswehr stood in the crisis, von Seeckt, at once evasive and revealing, famously replied, “The Reichswehr stands behind me!” He then refused an order from Ebert, Bauer, and Defense Minister Gustav Noske to put down the putsch by whatever means necessary, claiming that “There can be no question of sending the Reichswehr to fight these people.” (Later he would declare that “Reichswehr do not fire on Reichswehr!”) At this point Ebert asked von Seeckt straight out “Is the Reichswehr reliable?” The general replied, “I do not know if they are reliable, but they do obey me!”36
Von Seeckt regarded the Reichswehr as “a state-within-a-state” and took the position that as such it was dedicated to the defense of Germany, rather than any particular German government. Whatever the Weimar Constitution might say about the Reichspräsident’s authority over Germany’s military, Ebert understood that had the Reichswehr as a whole openly sided with Kapp and von Lüttwitz, the Weimar Republic would have died in its infancy. In practical terms Ebert could exercise little if any control over the Reichswehr without von Seeckt’s active cooperation. The price of that cooperation would be for the Weimar regime to merely turn a blind eye to the Reichswehr’s evasions, deceptions, and at times outright defiance of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, through which von Seeckt planned to reduce that document to utter impotence; it was active collusion in such undertakings Ebert, even as he was genuinely dedicated to a popular, responsible government for Germany, was far from immune to the sense of national humiliation heaped upon Germany by the Allies with their peace treaty: he saw no reason why a German republic should not be permitted to be as proud and powerful as the German Empire. Weimar had survived the Kapp Putsch—barely. There was no guarantee that it could survive another such challenge to its legitimacy and existence without the support of the Reichswehr, and so Ebert gave a tacit consent to cooperation with von Seeckt’s goals and ambitions.
Admittedly, the Reichswehr was an unusual institution, placed in peculiar circumstances. On September 30, 1919, the Vorläufige Reichswehr was reorganized as the Übergangsheer (“Transitional Army”) numbering about 400,000 men. On January 1, 1921, the Transitional Army was, in turn, supplanted by the Reichswehr officially sanctioned in the Treaty of Versailles. The terms of the treaty were rigorous and detailed, drawn up to ensure that Germany would never again possess the capacity to wage an aggressive war. Technically, the name Reichswehr now referred to the unified defense organization composed of the Reichsheer, the army, and the Reichsmarine, the navy, but “Reichswehr” quickly came to mean the army in the minds of most Germans and foreigners alike. The strength of the new army was limited to a maximum of 100,000 men—4,000 officers and 96,000 other ranks—organized into seven divisions of infantry, and three of cavalry. The elaborate reserve system of the old Imperial Army, which allowed it to more than treble the army’s peacetime strength when mobilized, was abolished; there would be no army reserve of any description. The navy’s strength was established at 15,000 men of all ranks, its ships limited to six pre-dreadnought battleships, a half-dozen light cruisers, and a minor assortment of destroyers, minesweepers and gunboats—submarines were absolutely verboten. There would be no German air force of any kind or description.
Heavy weapons such as artillery with a bore larger than 105 mm (205 mm for naval guns), were banned, as were any tanks or armored cars; when, where, and how replacements for worn-out equipment would be procured—and in what numbers—was strictly regulated. The establishment of an army general staf, regarded by the allies as the embodiment of Teutonic aggression, over which the Kaiser’s government had, they believed, exerted far too little control, was prohibited. Compliance with all of the terms and restrictions imposed by the Versailles treatywould be monitored until at least 1927 by the Military Inter-Allied Control Commission.
Hans von Seeckt was the man responsible for putting into effect all of these restrictions on what was left of the German military. He had become the commanding officer of the Reichswehr on October 11, 1919, succeeding Wilhelm Gröner as Chief of the General Staff; he would be the last man to hold that position. When the articles in the Versailles treaty which applied to the German armed forces went into effect, the office of chief of staff was abolished, along with the General Staff itself, and von Seeckt assumed the more pedestrian title of Chef der Heeresleitung (“Chief of the Army Command”). The responsibilities of some branches of the General Staff were taken over by civilian departments of the Weimar government, others by new bureaus created to conform the new army command structure to treaty requirements; the purely operational functions of the General Staff, however, were deliberately devolved upon the Truppenamt (“Troop Office”), a deceptively mild name that hid its true function. Working hand-in-glove with the newly created Weapons Office and the branch inspectorates, the Truppenamt, under von Seeckt’s careful guidance, set about reshaping and rebuilding Germany’s postwar standing army.
Slender, ram-rod backed, always impeccably turned out, with the inevitable monocle screwed firmly in place, von Seeckt came from a military family and first served in the elite Emperor Alexander Guards Grenadiers of the Prussian Gardekorps. He was no military genius, at least not as a fighting soldier: he never led a unit in combat, having spent almost his entire career as a staff officer. In that capacity, however, he displayed a remarkable talent for planning and organization: the great German victory over the Russians at Gorlice-Tarnow in the summer of 1915, which came near to causing the collapse of the Russian army, was made possible by von Seeckt’s planning and staff work as chief of staff to Field Marshal August von Mackensen. Later he was transferre
d to the German military mission to the Ottoman Empire; while there, von Seeckt sent a communiqué to Berlin which gave a chilling insight into the set of his moral compass. Reporting on the massacre of Armenian civilians by units of the Turkish Army, the news of which was raising a storm of outrage among the Allies and Central Powers alike, he declared that when faced with an impossible choice between morality and necessity, as he believed the Turks to be, morality must give way. Put another way, to von Seeckt the end always justified the means.
In the aftermath of the Armistice, von Seeckt was given the task of overseeing the withdrawal of German forces in Eastern Europe, in the formerly Russian territories occupied under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He was then posted as part of the German delegation to the Versailles peace conference, where he argued unsuccessfully for a 200,000-man Reichswehr. Succeeding General Wilhelm Gröner as the Chief of the General Staff in October 1919, he became responsible for the creation of Germany’s new national defense force, the Reichswehr. It was a task that would have overmastered a lesser man; for someone with von Seeckt’s organizational skills, it was the quintessential professional challenge.
Even before the final terms of the Treaty of Versailles were set down, von Seeckt was determined that the Reichswehr, in whatever size and form permitted by the Allies, would be a thoroughly professional fighting force, prepared to serve as the framework, the cadre, of a greatly expanded German army. Only an officer who had displayed extraordinary ability either as a combat leader or in a staff position, would be permitted to become an officer of the Reichswehr. Limited to a strength of just 4,000 men, there was no room for placeholders in the new offizierkorps. A similar standard was applied to the non-commissioned officers and other ranks. Officers signed on for a minimum term of 25 years, rankers enlisted for a minimum of 12—there was to be no conscription, each man was a volunteer.
Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Page 11