tore off his badges, designed a new flag for his Corps and had his men swear allegiance away from the Reich to himself. Ignoring the orders of the government and von Seekt, the Corps marched to Riga to join the “iron division” fighting to retain the Baltic provinces. It was however forced to withdraw in conformity with the remainder of the troops there, and Rossbach with his fifteen hundred men returned to Germany where he was charged with desertion … But Rossbach refused to submit to disbandment and instead offered his services by press advertisement to any individual that would use it for “a national interest”. Soon after, the corps was subsidised by the promoters of the Kapp Putsch in which it took part, and after its failure it, like all the others involved, was for a second time ordered to disband, but it again refused, and, assisted by the Pommersche Landbund (League of Pomeranian Landowners) it set up as a “Worker’s Community”. Its arms which had been left behind after the Kapp Putsch were forwarded to it, consigned as “component parts”.
Reinforced to four thousand men of all arms, the Rossbach corps mobilised in 48 hours and joined other insurgents to fight the Polish insurgents in Upper Silesia during the disturbances which had just broken out there in the spring of 1921. But on the signing of an armistice, the corps was ordered to hand over its arms to the Allied Disarmament Commission in the Plebiscite area and to demobilise. Instead it escaped back to Pomerania and resumed its role as “Worker’s Community”; its arms, which had been hidden in farms and houses in Upper Silesia, followed. Shortly after all such workers’ organisations were prohibited in Prussia by virtue of the Treaty, and a decree was also published once more ordering the dissolution of the “Illegal Freikorps” throughout the Reich. Rossbach now blossomed out as a “Mutual Savings Association”, with his men “on leave” and dispersed in formed bodies on estates, but with a central office in Berlin. When this organisation was in turn forbidden, Rossbach changed his command into an “Agricultural Workers Union”, only to be declared illegal a week later. However he boasted that he could found organisations more quickly than the authorities could suppress them. A little later Rossbach entered the Nazi Party and became its delegate in Mecklenburg where he organised semi – military physical training societies. Arrested a second time, he was nevertheless able to get to Munich and take part in the Putsch of 9th November 1923. After its failure he sought refuge in Vienna, and many of his Corps became party members.’23
During the disorders in Berlin, Ebert’s government had been forced to quit the city for Weimar, some 150 miles away, and the German republic of 1918–1933 has ever after been known to history as the ‘Weimar Republic’. This republic, powerless since the armistice, had now to bear the burden of the Treaty of Versailles which the victorious allies imposed upon it. The American President Wilson’s idealistic 14 points, which the hapless Germans had presumed would form the basis of the treaty, were brushed aside as far as Germany was concerned, and the disarmed republic had now to accept the cup of humiliation and defeat. There were no negotiations. Alsace Lorraine was returned to France, and German minorities in the East were to be ruled by the newly independent Czechs, Poles and Lithuanians. The fleet was lost, the army reduced to 100,000 men. The Rhineland was ‘demilitarised’, heavy artillery and military aeroplanes were forbidden. Of her arable land 15% and of her iron ore deposits 75%, were gone, her steel capacity was reduced by 38%, pig iron by 44%, coal by 18%. She was branded with the guilt of the war. As reparation, she was forced to pay to the victorious allies 132 billion gold marks, equivalent in 1918 rates to some 33 billion dollars. In addition, the war had cost the Germans some 150 billion reichsmarks, nearly all of it borrowed.24
All this added to the bitterness, not only towards the allies, but more importantly, of German for German. Disorder, faction, the occupation of the Ruhr by the French, a catastrophic inflation, a Soviet Republic in Bavaria and, between 1919 and 1922, 376 political murders, (356 by rightist extremists) told of the ruin of Germany. Ten years earlier, in 1912, Rupert Brooke, writing in Berlin, had parodied the orderliness of the German people25; now chaos and paramilitary hooliganism stalked the streets.
The philosophical legacy of war for defeated Germany was thus essentially different from that in the west, particularly in Britain. Among the victors it had become ‘the war to end war.’ The generals were regarded as incompetent butchers, blundering fools, who were careless of the lives of their soldiers and indifferent to their suffering.
Flag-waving patriotism seemed to have been sullied by the conflict. The Roman poet’s contention, that it was fitting and proper to die for your country, was now called ‘the old lie.’ Socialist ideas gained ground, in which the true nature of man was held to be good and noble, but was everywhere sullied by a system of oppression and exploitation, by greed, militarism, elitism, jingoistic nationalism and racialism – remove the restraints, take men and women into the daylight, and they would rise to new heights.
In Germany it was the misfortune of these ideas almost to triumph before the end of the war, and therefore to be seen in some circles as not the solution to war, but the cause of the defeat and humiliation. This made the considerable gulf between left and right unbridgeable, particularly as the extreme right began to regard the leadership and focus of the left as being intrinsically different, inveterate, sub-human and degenerate.
‘If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world,’ wrote Hitler, ‘his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity.’26 These, however, had supposedly been Hitler’s thoughts before the war, although here expressed as a rallying call to the Nazi party some six years afterwards. Jewish thinkers had indeed been at the forefront of left wing activism and philosophy, from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels through to the soviet revolutions in Russia, Hungary and the Soviet Republic of Bavaria. That Jewish people were also at the forefront of the very capitalism that the revolutionaries sought to destroy was not seen by Hitler as the proof of individualism and disunity, or as evidence that personal considerations were paramount over ‘national’ with most human activity, but as further evidence of a concerted and world wide Jewish plot, in which the ‘lesser’ races, such as the Slavs were, in a cosmopolitan equality, manipulated in order to corrupt the purity of the ‘German blood.’ This, however, remained for years the extreme doctrine of an embittered fanatic, head of a party which, nationally, could attract no more than some 6% of the electorate in 1924, after defeat, inflation, revolution, French invasion and civil bloodshed had heated political feelings to fever pitch.
Understandably, both victors and vanquished felt reverentially towards the ‘fallen’, those who had died in the service of their country. In the highest circles of church and state, it was held that they had done so as a sacrifice – their lives had been ‘given’ to their native land – and the easy presumption, which perhaps assuaged the grief or guilt of the survivors, became adapted to the prevailing spirit of the times. In the west, the belief that it had been ‘the war to end war’ introduced the idea that the fallen had given their lives for peace. Ten million separate and individual reasons for death in battle were easily and understandably collated by horror, grief, religion and politics into a common sacrifice.
In Germany, the power which had almost single handedly defied the other great powers for four years, which had, indeed, come close to defeating them, whose brave, well led and disciplined armies and fleets had won the respect, even admiration, of their foes, the soldiers could hardly be said to have sacrificed themselves for peace. They had only just been baulked of outright victory. The surviving front soldiers must have had great difficulty coming to terms with their apparently useless suffering, and the loss of their comrades. The honoured dead and their devotion to Germany were a constant source of anger and recrimination among the large and menacing organisations of the right wing. Perhaps guilt, or fear, now gripped those soldiers who had deserted, or formed soldiers councils, or who had called their more devoted comrades ‘blacklegs’ for continuing the war. What could be more natural than to join in the accusations, particularly when the Jews and the Communists
