Weimar and the Freikorps

Consider the political circumstances in Germany in November and December of 1918, where an old system of rule had died but a new one was yet to be born. Friedrich Ebert, the new Social Democratic Chancellor, stressed that the task before him, the object of the German Revolution itself, was to create a stable parliamentary democracy. The challenge to this came not from the right but from the left; from people like Rosa Luxembourg, who responded sarcastically "Oh how German this German Revolution is! How proper, how pedantic, how lacking in verve and grandeur." This was a view shared by her comrades in the extreme left Spartacist League, soon to be reconstituted as the Communist Party of Germany. Over much of Germany the fragile republic came under challenge, with major risings in Berlin in January and March 1919. At first Ebert and his Minister of Defence, Gustav Noske looked to their allies in the trade union movement to provide militia forces. When no such support was offered they were obliged to turn elsewhere. It was Kurt von Schleicher, a career officer, who offered a solution to a serious problem-and that solution was the newly-organised Freikorps.

Who were they? Young men, essentially, uprooted by war, who had grown in a cult of violence; men with no past employment and no family; men who were motivated, first and foremost, not by politics, but by the appeal of adventure. A great many of them had actually been trained as Stormtroopers, the elite strike force of the Imperial Army, who wished to continue in service, or whose opportunity to serve had been frustrated by the sudden end of the war. Politically, the natural home for many of these individuals was in the nationalist right, though only a minority joined the new formations for political reasons alone. As many as 25% of the Freikorps volunteers had trained as officers. A large number of these were men of middle class origin who had received battlefield commissions, and were unhappy about losing the social and personal prestige associated with this. Even more were students or cadets, too young to have served, but anxious for the chance of action. They were, in essence the same men who had served in the Italian Arditi or the British Black and Tans. Though most really wanted to fight in the east to defend the Reich's uncertain frontiers against the Poles or the Russians, action for the sake of action was the supreme imperative. Communists, Russians or Poles: in the end it made little real difference who the enemy was.

Oh, on a point of personal information, my German great-grandfather served with Freikorps Rossbach, but-ssssh-we don’t talk about that. :-))

A Tale of Two Tyrannies

There were similarities between the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic inasmuch as they were both based on a rejection of the liberal tradition; both based on a single ideology and a monolithic ruling party; both on the same coercive forms of social control.

But the differences were far greater than the similarities. National Socialism was regressive and backwards, defined as a repressive cult of power, and no more than a cult of power. The GDR, even at its most oppressive, drew its logic and inspiration from transcendent notions of human liberation, which made its internal contradictions all the greater. It was forced constantly to dissimulate, prevaricate and explain; to justify itself by forms of ideology in every sense alien to that of National Socialism. The Nazi state, moreover, was based on an unstable combination of charisma and mass engagement. The GDR was based on boredom and bureaucratic torpor. One died of excess; the other died of senility.

The Boring Reich

Paul Anton de Lagarde was one of those misty-minded right-wing intellectuals, ever in pursuit of nebulous notions of 'spiritual renewal'. This, he believed in the period before 1871, would come with German unification; that the creation of a new nation would also entail the creation of a new, more elevated type of human being. But the reality of the Second Reich came nowhere near his expectations, making his disappointment-and his reaction-all the greater. Indeed, he went so far as to argue that Bismarck's creation was the very antithesis of what he had looked for; that it was more likely to bring collapse rather than spiritual renewal. Quite simply, it was boring! The new Reich was stultifying; it crushed the individual beneath its stolid sobriety, and thus annihilated the only source of cultural vitality-"Everything depends on the human being, and Germany lacks nothing so much as men; there is nothing toward which Germany, with its adoration of the State, of public opinion, of Kultur, and of success, directs so much hostility as toward the individual, who alone can bring it life and honour

Some Thoughts on Operation Barbarossa

I wrote the following as a response to a question on how close Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, came to success. It seems appropriate to save it here now we are close to the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

How close did the German invasion of Russia come to success? Far, far closer than many people care to allow. The suggestion that the whole thing was a piece of political and strategic madness by Hitler, pushed most assiduously after the war by Franz Halder, the Wehrmacht Chief of Staff, among others, does not stand up to examination. His own wartime diaries reveal that he was as keen on the whole operation as anyone. As early as 3 July he wrote, "It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in a space of two weeks".

We now known, from documents released by the Russian archives since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that this was a view that even Stalin was close to accepting. At the end of that month one of the agents of Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, made attempts through the Bulgarian ambassador to discover if Hitler would accept large territorial concessions in return for peace. The Russian historian, Dimitri Volkogonov, has also uncovered evidence to suggest that the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, was actively preparing for a second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which had ended Russian involvement in the First World War. The thinking seems to have been that of Lenin in 1918: trade territory for political survival.

The real crisis came in October after the great enveloping battle at Vyazma and Briansk, the opening move of the final advance on Moscow, where the Germans took 660,000 prisoners, leaving a mere 90,000 men to face the whole of Army Group Centre. It is even rumoured that some Moscovites put out welcome posters for the Germans. Zhukov later reported that Stalin was more desperate than ever for peace. He was also on the point of leaving Moscow. Document No. 34 of the State Defence Committee, dated 15 October 1941, and now in the public domain, shows just how serious Stalin believed matters had become. It is resolved, the document proceeds,

To evacuate the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the top levels of Government...(Comrade Stalin will leave tomorrow or later, depending on the situation)...In the event of enemy forces arriving in Moscow, the NKVD are ordered to blow up business premises, warehouses and institutions which cannot be evacuated, and all underground railway electrical equipment.

The following night an armoured train made ready to carry Stalin east.

Nevertheles, it is by no means certain that the Soviet Union would have fallen even if Moscow had been taken; but it would have given the Germans crucial control over the whole Russian transport network. More than that, the collapse of Russia's ancient capital, and the flight of Stalin, is likely to have had the most devastating effect on both morale and fighting ability. If Stalin was a coward, it has rightly been written, then everyone could be a coward.

There are two things surely that saved Russia at this most crucial point in its history; the decision of Stalin, for reasons yet unkown, to remain in Moscow, and crucial intelligence forwarded from Tokyo by Richard Sorge, a Communist secret agent, that the Japanese were not going to attack Russia, not at least until after Moscow had fallen. In a huge gamble the guard on Manchuria, occupied by the powerful Kwantung Army, was dropped, and the Siberian divisions moved west. If Sorge had been wrong it is difficult to know how the Soviet Union could have survived. But he was not wrong. Zhukov deployed his fresh units to the north and south of Moscow. For once it really is appropriate to say that the rest is history