Nigel H. Jones - Hitlers Heralds: Story of the Freikorps, 1918-1923
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The birth pangs of Nazism grew out of the death agony of the Kaisers Germany. Defeat in World War I and a narrow escape from Communist revolution brought not peace but five chaotic years (1918-1923) of civil war, assassination, plots, putsches and murderous mayhem to Germany. The savage world of the trenches came home with the men who refused to admit defeat. It was an atmosphere in which civilised values withered, and violent extremism flourished.
Nigel H. Jones: author's other books
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Nigel H. Jones
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Colonel Rod Paschall
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Strohn Matthias(Editor)
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HITLERS HERALDS:
THE STORY OF THE FREIKORPS 1918-1923
Nigel Jones
Foreword by Michael Burleigh
First published by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd in 1987
Copyright Nigel Jones 1987, 2004
This edition published in 2020 by Lume Books
30 Great Guildford Street,
Borough, SE1 0HS
The right of Nigel Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
To Ernst Jnger (18951998)
Fighter & Writer
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
Nigel Joness book is an important, well-researched and vividly written account of a group of men who connected the mass death of the First World War with desolation and disorder on post-war Germanys streets, and hence with the early Nazi movement that thrived in such conditions of mass despair. Jones tells the story of the Freikorps with great economy in a book that has the intensity and pace of a thriller, although its subject matter is the formation of a Fascist mind-set, not simply in Germany, but also elsewhere.
The Freikorps were born amidst the carnage of the trenches. General Erich von Ludendorff formed units of Storm troops to spearhead massed infantry attacks. They wore green uniforms with silver facings, some consisting of the Deaths Head insignia once worn by Bluchers Prussian Hussars, and subsequently emblazoned on the caps of Hitlers feared SS.
Armed with pistols, rifles and grenades, these highly mobile units were expected to punch holes in enemy lines wide enough for massed infantry to pour through. They developed a unique esprit de corps based on their lite status and skill in inflicting maximum damage on the enemy. Some of the stormtroopers had literary proclivities too, although they included only one writer Ernst Jnger of near genius, producing a body of literature that glorified and mystified war as the breeding ground and school for a new lite that was aristocratic in spirit but democratic in social origins. Like the Italian arditi whom they resembled, the stormtroops were the prototypical Fascist new man, with straight jaw and empty killers eyes staring from beneath the shadow of their steel helmet. The Nazis would regard them as their immediate precursors.
The first Freikorps, or volunteer units, were formed to assist the Social Democrat Provisional government of what shortly became the Weimar Republic in order to suppress attempts by the anti-democratic extreme Left to seize power through revolutionary violence. Many of the volunteers were newly demobilised stormtroops, their ranks augmented by middle class youths and students with the right-wing nationalist sympathies common to their age and social class at the time.
When the hard-core Spartacist Left attempted to seize power in central Berlin, volunteer Freikorps under the command of the Social Democrats Defence Minister Gustav Noske blasted and shot their way into the heart of the city, and massacred any Spartacists they found alive. The Spartacist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were tracked down and killed after being interrogated in the Eden Hotel. Nigel Jones tantalisingly suggests that they may have been betrayed by fellow communist Wilhelm Pieck, who after the Second World War became East Germanys first President, a state which mythologized Liebknecht and Luxemburg as Communist martyrs.
Worryingly, for Germanys fledgling democracy, the Freikorps were almost as hostile to their Social Democrat masters as they were to the Red rabble they had wiped out at the formers behest. As one Freikorps leader wrote in his diary: The days of the revolution will forever be a blight on German history. As the scum hate me I remain strong. The day will yet come when I will knock the truth out of these people and tear the mask from the faces of the whole miserable, pathetic lot. Another described the Ebert government as A miserable socialist rabble. In the meantime, the Freikorps exacted their vengeance on the working class quartiers of eastern Berlin, bombarding the suburb of Lichtenberg, before running amok and killing between twelve and fifteen hundred people. By March conditions were sufficiently stable for the Assembly at Weimar to promulgate a constitution. The SPD newspaper Vorwrts retrospectively exculpated the Freikorps, when it editorialised:
In a struggle to the death in which the Spartacists gave no quarter, it is only natural that the volunteers should fulfil their duty with resolute firmness. They have performed a very difficult task, and if isolated acts of brutality have occurred, our judgement can only be that their actions were only human.
Freikorps units were next recruited to intervene in the Baltic region, where the peace of Brest-Litovsk had vastly extended Germanys control. German dominance was jeopardized by the Bolsheviks, Poles, and the governments of the newly proclaimed republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which were supported by the western Allies, who included Britain. Latvian troops, backed by British naval guns, proved a rather different proposition than German urban radicals, and the Freikorps suffered humiliating defeat. The Freikorps attributed this to the cowardly authorities in Berlin, giving themselves further grounds for diffuse resentment as misunderstood and misused heroes. A desultory struggle against insurgent Poles also took place in Upper Silesia.
In Germany, the Freikorps were used to suppress the abortive Munich Soviet and figured in the armed resistance to French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. They were involved in every prominent political murder and nationalist plot that the Weimar Republic experienced, so their history also sheds light on paramilitary terrorist violence in general. Their most prominent victims were the Catholic politician Matthias Erzberger and the Republics Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. Erzberger was killed on a hiking holiday. Two young hikers he encountered pulled pistols from their rucksacks and killed Erzberger who was armed with a rolled umbrella. Rathenau was shot in the face and then blown up with a grenade in the back of his open car. Seven hundred thousand people lined the streets for his memorial service, a reminder of the extensive basis for democracy in Germany, notwithstanding the activities of small undemocratic minorities.
As this suggests, the Freikorps final mutation was to become members of shady paramilitary death squads, from whence they debouched into the rough-house security organisations of the early Nazi Party where there was unlimited demand for their absence of scruples or squeamishness. They were among those who participated in Hitlers abortive 1923 Beerhall Putsch. Although in 1934 many Freikorps men who had joined the strong arm SA would be murdered by the SS chiefly to placate Hitlers conservative partners others would go on to enjoy notoriety under the Third Reich, something Jones discusses in his newly written Afterword. By this time, Hitler had no need of the buccaneering mentality that the Freikorps embodied, preferring the more disciplined and bureaucratised killers of the SS for the enormities he then committed. Some former Freikorps veterans figured in German resistance to his rule.
Jones has written an extremely accomplished book that clarifies a very confused and turbulent period in German history, and which vividly illustrates a particular Fascist mind-set based on experience of mass death, intense camaraderie and a democratic form of elitism to which Jnger and other radical rightist intellectuals attempted to give shape. I am sure many readers will enjoy this remarkable book that is a major contribution to the history of paramilitary violence and to the shocking consequences of the First World War.
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