The Kapp Putsch

Shortly after six in the morning on Saturday 13 March 1920 the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade marched singing through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin – several thousand soldiers of a volunteer Freikorps (PL), many with white swastikas painted on their helmets. A quarter of an hour earlier President Friedrich Ebert, Chancellor Gustav Bauer and the Social Democratic ministers had driven away from the Reich Chancellery. Waiting for the soldiers at the gate were General Walther von Lüttwitz, commander of the Reichswehr troops in eastern Germany, General Erich Ludendorff and a nationalist civil servant from East Prussia, Wolfgang Kapp. Kapp declared the government deposed and the National Assembly dissolved, and appointed himself Reich Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia. The Reichswehr did not lift a finger to defend the republic. Yet after four days the putschists had to give up, because they were confronted by something they had not expected: the largest general strike in German history and the refusal of the civil service to serve them.

An army that had to shrink

On 10 January 1920 the Treaty of Versailles came into force. Germany was to reduce its land forces to 100,000 professional soldiers and disband the volunteer formations that had protected the government against the left since the winter of 1918. In 1919 the Reichswehr numbered some 350,000–400,000 men, and another quarter of a million served in various Freikorps. For many officers and volunteers the reduction meant the end of their careers and a return to a civilian life in which there was no place for them. Among the most embittered were the soldiers returning from the Baltic states, who had fought the Bolsheviks and the Latvians there in 1919 and had been forced to withdraw at the demand of the Allies and of their own government. All of them blamed the defeat on the “November criminals”, and Versailles on those who had signed it.

Many Freikorps were hostile to the republic from the start. In the autumn of 1919 the National Association (Nationale Vereinigung) was formed, a conspiratorial organisation meant to unite the far right, from the German National People’s Party to the volunteers. Its leadership included Kapp, Ludendorff, Colonel Max Bauer, Ludendorff’s former associate at the Supreme Army Command, and Captain Waldemar Pabst, who in January 1919 had ordered the killing of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. They wanted to replace party government with an authoritarian cabinet of “experts”. They did not plan to bring back the Kaiser, although many of them were monarchists. Their most important ally was in the Reichswehr itself. Lüttwitz, the most senior serving general in the army, commanded Group Command No. 1 (Gruppenkommando 1), which controlled the troops in northern and eastern Germany, and in the ranks he was known as the “father of the Freikorps”. It was his soldiers who in 1919 had crushed the Spartacist uprising and the March fighting in Berlin.

The general’s ultimatum

On 29 February 1920 the Reichswehr minister, Gustav Noske, ordered the disbandment of two naval brigades, among them the 2nd Naval Brigade of Korvettenkapitän Hermann Ehrhardt. It numbered five to six thousand men – former officers and petty officers of the Imperial Navy as well as “Balts” – and had been stationed since January at the Döberitz training ground near Berlin. It was an elite formation that had fought the left in Munich and Berlin in 1919, and at the same time the most politicised unit in the country. On 1 March the brigade held a parade to which the minister was not invited. Lüttwitz declared there that he would not allow so fine a formation to be broken up in such turbulent times. It was an open refusal to obey.

On the evening of 10 March Lüttwitz went to see Ebert. In Noske’s presence he demanded the withdrawal of the order disbanding the brigades, the dissolution of the National Assembly and new elections to the Reichstag, the election of the president by the people, the appointment of experts as ministers of foreign affairs, the economy and finance, the dismissal of the Chief of the Army Command, General Walther Reinhardt, and supreme command over the whole army for himself. Ebert refused and demanded his resignation. When it did not come, Noske suspended the general from duty on 11 March. Lüttwitz drove to Döberitz and asked Ehrhardt whether he could occupy Berlin that same evening. Ehrhardt needed a day to prepare. Only then did Lüttwitz inform Kapp and the conspirators of the National Association that they should be ready to take power on Saturday morning. They were taken by surprise and unprepared. They did not even have a list of ministers.

The night of 12–13 March

By Friday 12 March rumours of a coup were already circulating in Berlin, and the evening papers wrote about it. Noske ordered two regiments of the Security Police and one Reichswehr regiment to occupy the government quarter, but during the night their commanders agreed with other units that they would not shoot. At about 10 p.m. the Ehrhardt Brigade set out from Döberitz with orders to “break all resistance ruthlessly”. At one in the morning Noske assembled the senior commanders at the ministry on the Bendlerstraße and demanded that they defend the government. All refused except Reinhardt and one other officer. The head of the Truppenamt – the camouflaged General Staff – General Hans von Seeckt, spoke of the comradeship of officers who had fought the enemy side by side. The words attributed to him, “Reichswehr does not fire on Reichswehr”, were not recorded at the time and come from later accounts, but they capture his position well: fighting in defence of the republic would have split the army he wanted to preserve.

At four in the morning Ebert called a cabinet meeting. There was nothing to defend the government with, so by a majority – not unanimously – it was decided to leave Berlin and call a general strike. The Vice-Chancellor and Minister of Justice, Eugen Schiffer of the German Democratic Party, and some of the non-SPD ministers stayed in the capital so as to be able to negotiate with the putschists. The proclamation calling for a strike, issued in the name of the president and the Social Democratic ministers, was circulated in the morning by the Chancellery’s press chief, Ulrich Rauscher (PL). Some of the signatories later claimed they had not signed it. “Workers, party comrades! The military putsch has come!” it read. “Strike, down tools, choke off this military dictatorship!” At 6.15 a.m. the meeting broke up and the ministers fled. Ten minutes later the brigade was marching through the Brandenburg Gate.

The putschists occupied the Reich Chancellery and the government quarter, supported by a battalion of the regular Reichswehr. Kapp proclaimed a “government of order, freedom and action”, and Lüttwitz became Reichswehr minister and commander-in-chief. Traugott von Jagow (PL), Berlin’s police president under the Empire, was to be minister of the interior. Adventurers also came forward, such as the Hungarian swindler and former British MP Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln, who became censor of the foreign press. Several well-known conservatives who were offered ministerial portfolios declined.

A government that could not govern

Ebert and the ministers went first to Dresden, but the military commander there, General Georg Maercker, had received orders from Berlin to take them into “protective custody”. They were saved from arrest by the presence of Rudolf Heinze, a leader of the German People’s Party. The government therefore moved on to Stuttgart, where the army had remained calm. It arrived on 15 March, and on 18 March the National Assembly met in Stuttgart.

Meanwhile the trade unions took up the call to strike. On 13 March itself it was joined by the great Social Democratic trade union federation led by Carl Legien, by the white-collar employees’ federation and by the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. The Communist Party of Germany at first refused to support a government that had crushed its uprisings in 1919, but changed its mind on 14 March. On Sunday the strike paralysed Berlin, and on Monday the whole of Germany. By some estimates up to twelve million people took part. Trains and trams stopped running, the post and telephones ceased to work, and no newspapers appeared. The capital was left without water, gas and electricity. On 15 March the civil servants’ union joined the strike.

Just as damaging was the quiet refusal of senior officials. The ministries did not carry out the orders of Kapp, who had no people of his own to replace them. The most senior under-secretary of state at the Interior Ministry, Theodor Lewald, took the view that, unlike in November 1918, no new legal order had come into being, and refused to pay out money to the putschists. The Reichsbank would not give them money either. Kapp’s government could not print its proclamations or communicate with the provinces except by courier. Neither the threat of the death penalty for strikers nor the promise of new elections forced people back to work.

Outside Berlin the picture was more mixed. Military commanders in East Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg and Silesia recognised the new authorities, and in East Prussia almost the entire administration supported them. The head of the navy, Admiral Adolf von Trotha, sided with the putschists at once. Commanders in western and southern Germany waited to see how events would turn out. Where the army and volunteers took Kapp’s side and workers took up arms, blood was shed. In Mecklenburg, where the brigade of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck backed the coup, 91 people were killed in those days. There were bloody clashes in Thuringia, Saxony and Harburg near Hamburg. In the Ruhr the strike turned into armed resistance by the workers.

In Munich the coup took a different form. Under pressure from the Reichswehr commander in Bavaria and the leaders of the citizens’ militias, the Social Democratic government of Johannes Hoffmann resigned, and on 16 March the Bavarian parliament elected the conservative Gustav von Kahr prime minister. Two visitors from Munich also turned up in Berlin in those days. On 17 March Dietrich Eckart and Adolf Hitler – the propagandist of a party that had been called the NSDAP for three weeks – flew in on an aircraft piloted by Robert von Greim to make contact with the putschists. At the Reich Chancellery Trebitsch-Lincoln told them that Kapp had just fled.

The end after a hundred hours

The putschists were also weakened by disputes among themselves. Kapp wanted to overthrow the government and the constitution and replace the republic with strong-arm rule. Lüttwitz, who had launched the coup partly for personal reasons, wanted above all to force through his demands and was prepared to talk even to the Social Democrats. From 15 March the putschists negotiated with the politicians who had remained in Berlin, led by Schiffer. Representatives of the right also took part in the talks, among them the leader of the German People’s Party, Gustav Stresemann, whose party had not condemned the putsch. The middle-class parties judged that the greatest danger was now “Bolshevism” and that the officer corps had to be “won back”, not humiliated. They therefore proposed new elections, changes in the government and an amnesty if the leaders of the coup stood down of their own accord.

On 17 March Kapp, under pressure from the military, resigned, handed power to Lüttwitz and fled; in April he made his way to Sweden. Lüttwitz still tried to govern as a military dictator, but his own commanders deserted him, and that same evening – according to some sources on 18 March – he too resigned. Schiffer, on Ebert’s behalf, accepted his resignation, preserved his pension rights and suggested that he leave the country until a decision on an amnesty had been made. In Lüttwitz’s place Schiffer, again in the president’s name, appointed Seeckt. The Ehrhardt Brigade was given a guarantee that its commander would not be arrested as long as the brigade itself left Berlin. As it marched out of the city, jeered by the crowd, its soldiers opened fire with machine guns. According to accounts, twelve civilians were killed and about thirty seriously wounded.

The putsch lasted about a hundred hours. The government returned to Berlin around 20 March, but the strike went on. The trade unions demanded changes in the government, Noske’s removal, the punishment of the putschists, the “socialisation” of certain branches of industry and the purging of enemies of the republic from the administration and the army. After a compromise with the governing parties the strike was called off on 22–23 March. Noske was forced to resign on 22 March, and Reinhardt left with him in solidarity. On 26 March Bauer’s government resigned, and the next day Hermann Müller became chancellor. Seeckt, the general who had refused to defend the government, became Chief of the Army Command on a permanent basis.

Punishment and impunity

The republic treated the putschists with a leniency it never showed the left. The amnesty law of 2 August 1920 covered all participants in the coup except its “instigators” and “leaders”. Of more than 700 cases against civilians, only one ended in a conviction: in December 1921 the Reich Court sentenced Jagow to five years’ fortress detention, the mildest form of imprisonment, and allowed him extenuating circumstances because he had acted out of “selfless love of the fatherland”. Forty-eight officers were dismissed from the army; most proceedings were dropped. Lüttwitz went to Hungary and returned after the amnesty. Kapp gave himself up to the court in April 1922 but died of cancer in custody before he could be tried. The Ehrhardt Brigade was disbanded in the spring of 1920, but many of its men were taken into the Reichswehr and the navy. Meanwhile workers who had taken up arms in the Ruhr were sentenced by courts martial to long prison terms, and the army and the Freikorps – the same ones that a few days earlier had backed the putsch – shot them without trial.

Reichstag elections, brought forward because of the crisis, were held on 6 June 1920. The Social Democrats and the Democrats together lost almost half their voters. The gains went to the Independent Socialists on the left and the nationalists on the right. The Weimar Coalition – the SPD, the Centre and the German Democratic Party – lost its majority and never regained it.

The long shadow of the Kapp Putsch

At first sight the putsch was a victory for the republic: it had defended itself without using the army, thanks to the solidarity of millions. In the longer run, however, it had consequences that weakened it. Under Seeckt the Reichswehr became a “state within the state”, an army formally above politics but mistrustful of the republic and closed to parliamentary control. The government learned that the army would not defend it against the right, but would readily turn against the left. Kahr’s Bavaria became a refuge for participants in the coup. Ehrhardt went into hiding in Munich and founded Organisation Consul there, a secret terrorist organisation whose members murdered Matthias Erzberger in August 1921 and the foreign minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922. Many SA members came from this milieu, and the song about the swastika on the helmet, sung by Ehrhardt’s soldiers, was later taken over by the Nazis in an altered version.

Hitler, who had witnessed the collapse of an ill-prepared coup in Berlin, drew the lessons from it only after his own putsch in Munich in November 1923, in which Ludendorff once again stood at his side. He then understood that in Germany power could not be seized against the army and the civil service, and decided to reach for it by legal means, with their acquiescence. That is what happened in January 1933. This time there was no general strike. The trade unions, weakened by the Depression and unemployment, and the divided Social Democrats and Communists did not repeat March 1920, and the army, which had then stood aside, accepted the new chancellor without objection.