Freikorps (English: Free Corps) were German volunteer military or anti-communist paramilitary units. The term was originally applied to voluntary armies formed in German lands from the middle of the 18th century onwards. Between World War I and World War II the term was also used for the paramilitary organizations that arose during the Weimar Republic. An entire series of Freikorps awards also existed, mostly replaced in 1933 by the Honor Cross for World War I veterans.
First Freikorps[]
Painting of three famous Free Corps members, 1815. - Heinrich Hartmann, Theodor Körner and Friedrich Friesen
The first Freikorps were recruited by Frederick II of Prussia in the 18th century during the Seven Years' War. On July 15, 1759, Frederick II ordered the creation of a squadron of volunteer hussars to be attached to the Hussar Regiment No. 1 von Kleist. He entrusted the creation and command of this new unit to Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm von Kleist. This first squadron (80 men) was raised in Dresden and consisted mainly of Hungarian deserters. This squadron was placed under the command of Lieutenant Johann Michael von Kovacs. At the end of 1759, the first 4 squadrons of dragoons (aka Horse-Grenadiers) of the Freikorps were organised. They initially consisted of Prussian volunteers from Berlin, Magdeburg, Mecklenburg and Leipzig but later recruited deserters. The Freikorps were regarded as unreliable by regular armies, so they were mainly used as sentries and for minor duties.
During the Napoleonic Wars, Freikorps were formed for the purpose of shaking off French rule in Germany. Those led by Ferdinand von Schill were decimated in the Battle of Stralsund (1809); many were killed in battle or executed at Napoleon's command in the aftermath. Later, Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von Lützow, a survivor of Schill's Freikorps, formed the Lützow Free Corps, which took part in the German War of Liberation. The anti-Napoleonic Freikorps often operated behind French lines as a kind of commando or guerrilla force.
Throughout the 19th century, these anti-Napoleonic Freikorps were greatly praised and glorified by German nationalists, and a heroic myth built up around their exploits. This myth was invoked, in considerably different circumstances, in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I.
Post-World War I[]
The meaning of the word Freikorps changed over time. After 1918, the term was used for the paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. They were the key Weimar paramilitary groups active during that time. Many German veterans felt disconnected from civilian life, and joined a Freikorps in search of stability within a military structure. Others, angry at their sudden, apparently inexplicable defeat, joined up in an effort to put down communist uprisings or exact some form of revenge (see stab-in-the-back legend). They received considerable support from Minister of Defense Gustav Noske, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, who used them to crush the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the Marxist Spartacist League and arrest Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were killed on 15 January 1919. They were also used to defeat the Bavarian Soviet Republic in May 1919.[1]
On 5 May 1919, 12 workers (most of them members of the Social Democratic Party) were arrested and killed by members of Freikorps Lützow in Perlach near Munich based on a tip from a local cleric saying they were communists. A memorial on Pfanzeltplatz in Munich today commemorates the incident.[2][3][4]
Freikorps also fought in the Baltic, Silesia, Poland and East Prussia after the end of World War I, including aviation combat, often with significant success. Anti-Slavic racism was present, although the ethnic cleansing ideology and anti-Semitism that would be expressed in later years was not developed yet.[5] In Latvia Freikorps murdered 300 civilians in the town of Mitau that were suspected of having "Bolshevik sympathies" and after capture of Riga further 3000 people were killed,[6] including summary executions of 50-60 prisoners daily.[7] Though officially disbanded in 1920, many Freikorps attempted, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the government in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920.[citation needed] Their attack was halted when German citizens who were loyal to the state went on strike, cutting off many services and making daily life so problematic that the coup was called off.
In 1920, Adolf Hitler had just begun his political career as the leader of the tiny and as-yet-unknown Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/DAP German Workers Party, which was soon renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) or Nazi Party in Munich. Numerous future members and leaders of the Nazi Party had served in the Freikorps, including Ernst Röhm, future head of the Sturmabteilung, or SA, Heinrich Himmler, future head of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, and Rudolf Höß, the future Kommandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Hermann Ehrhardt, founder and leader of Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, and his deputy Commander Eberhard Kautter, leaders of the Viking League, refused to help Hitler and Erich Ludendorff in their Beer Hall Putsch and conspired against them.
Hitler viewed some of them as threats. A huge ceremony was arranged on November 9, 1933 in which the Freikorps leaders symbolically presented their old battle flags to Hitler's SA and SS. It was a sign of allegiance to their new authority, the Nazi state.[8] When Hitler's internal purge of the party, the Night of the Long Knives, came in 1934, a large number of Freikorps leaders were targeted for killing or arrest, including Ehrhardt and Röhm. Historian Robert GL Waite claims that in Hitler's "Röhm Purge" speech to the Reichstag on July 13, 1934, he implied that the Freikorps were one of the groups of "pathological enemies of the state".[9]
Freikorps members included[]
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Notable Freikorps units[]
- Freikorps Oberland
- Kurt Benson
- Volunteer Division of Horse Guards (Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision)
- murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Jan 15, 1919[12]
- led by Captain Waldemar Pabst[12]
- disbanded on order of Defense Minister Gustav Noske, Jul 7, 1919, after Pabst threatened to kill him[13]
- Freikorps Maercker (Maercker's Volunteer Rifles, or Freiwillige Landesjägerkorps)[14]
- had Reinhard Heydrich as a member[15][16]
- founded by Ludwig Maercker
- Freikorps Roßbach (Rossbach)
- founded by Gerhard Roßbach
- rescued the Iron Division after an extremely long march across Eastern Europe.[17]
- had Rudolph Hoess as a member.
- Marinebrigade Ehrhardt (The Second Naval Brigade)
- Iron Division (Eiserne Division, related to Eiserne Brigade)
- Fought in the Baltic.
- Got trapped in Thorensberg by the Latvian Army. Was rescued by the Rossbach Freikorps.[17]
- Freikorps Lützow
- Occupied Munich following the revolution of April, 1919.
- Commanded by Major Schulz[20]
- Sudetendeutsches Freikorps
- Formed by Czech German nationalists with Nazi sympathies which operated from 1938 to 1939
- Part of Hitler's successful effort to absorb Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich
See also[]
References[]
- Notes
- ↑ Carlos Caballero Jurado, Ramiro Bujeiro (2001). The German Freikorps 1918-23: 1918-23. Osprey Publishing. ISBN 1-84176-184-2.
- ↑ Max Hirschberg & Reinhard Weber. Jude und Demokrat: Erinnerungen eines Münchener Rechtsanwalts 1883 bis 1939.
- ↑ Morris, Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany
- ↑ Freikorps Lützow in the Axis History Factbook
- ↑ Michael Mann, Fascists, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University, 2004, ISBN 9780521831314, p. 153.
- ↑ A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler Nigel Jones, Carroll & Graf, 2004
- ↑ Walking Since Daybreak : A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century by Modris Eksteins, page 73, 2000)
- ↑ Waite, p. 197.
- ↑ Waite, pp. 280–1.
See also the full text of the speech at http://members.tripod.com/~Comicism/340713.html - ↑ Hoess et al., pg 201
- ↑ Axis History Forum
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Waite, p. 62.
- ↑ Waite, p. 145.
- ↑ Waite, pp. 33–7.
- ↑ "Axis History Factbook". http://www.axishistory.com/index.php?id=5788. Retrieved 2009 1 3.
- ↑ Mueller, p 61
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 Waite, p. 131, 132.
- ↑ Waite, pp. 140-2.
- ↑ Waite, p. 203, 216.
- ↑ Waite, p. 89.
- Bibliography
- Blanke, Richard. Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939, University Press of Kentucky, 1993, ISBN 081311803
- Eley, Geoff (1990). "Conservatives and radical nationalists in Germany: the production of fascist potentials, 1912–28". In Martin Blinkhorn, ed., Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-Century Europe (pp. 50–70). New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-049-40087-0.
- Hoess, Rudolf. Constantine Fitzgibbon, and Primo Levi. Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, Sterling Publishing Co., 2000. Translated by Constantine Fitzgibbon, Joachim Neugroschel. ISBN 1-84212-024-7, ISBN 978-1-84212-024-8
- Koepp, Roy G. (2011). Conservative Radicals: The Einwohnerwehr, Bund Bayern Und Reich, and the Limits of Paramilitary Politics in Bavaria, 1918–1928. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest. ISBN 978-1-243-84111-7.
- Kolko, Gabriel (1994). Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society since 1914. New York, NY: The New Press. ISBN 978-1-565-84192-5.
- Morris, Douglas G. Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany, 2005, University of Michigan Press, ISBN 0-472-11476-X
- Mueller, Michael. Canaris, Naval Institute Press, 2007
- Read, Anthony. The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. ISBN 0-393-04800-4, ISBN 978-0-393-04800-1
- Waite, Robert G. L. (1969) [1952]. Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Post-War Germany, 1918–1923. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. OCLC 3633548
External links[]
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Freikorps. |
- Axis History Factbook; Freikorps section – By Marcus Wendel and contributors; site also contains an apolitical forum
- Freikorps Master list on Axis History Forum {reference only}
The original article can be found at Freikorps and the edit history here.