Waldemar Pabst

Waldemar Pabst was a professional staff officer of the Imperial Army who, after the defeat of 1918, became one of the most active organisers of counter-revolution in Germany and Austria. In January 1919, as the de facto commander of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division, he decided that the leaders of the German communists, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, should be murdered. He never stood trial for it, and towards the end of his life he boasted that he had had them “executed” and that he had acted with the knowledge of a Social Democratic minister. He went on to conspire against the Weimar Republic, was one of the leading figures of the Kapp Putsch, built up the paramilitary Heimwehr in Austria, propagated fascism on the Italian model and did business in the arms trade. His life shows how the soldiers who saved the republic from revolution in 1919 became its gravediggers.

Staff officer

He was born in Berlin on 24 December 1880, the son of Arthur Pabst, director of the museums in Cologne. He was brought up in the Prussian cadet corps, where he became friends with Franz von Papen, later Chancellor of the Reich. In 1900 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant of infantry in a regiment stationed in Silesia; in 1907–1910 he graduated with distinction from the War Academy in Berlin, and in 1911–1913 he served on the Great General Staff. In 1914 he was promoted to captain.

He spent the whole war on staffs. He was a divisional staff officer in Belgium, lived through the Battle of Verdun in 1916 on the staff of a reserve corps, and then, until 1918, was first General Staff officer of the 7th Reserve Division. Early in 1918 he took up the same post in the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division (Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division), an elite formation of dismounted Guards cavalry placed directly under the Supreme Army Command. Its commander, General Heinrich von Hofmann, had a heart condition, so in practice the division was run by Pabst, with Hofmann covering for his decisions.

Counter-revolution in Berlin

After the November Revolution and the armistice the division returned home as one of the few units that had kept their discipline. Pabst regarded the revolution as the work of traitors and Bolshevism as a mortal threat to Germany and Europe. In December 1918 the division arrived in Berlin and took part in the failed attack on the mutinous sailors at Christmas. In January 1919, after the outbreak of the Spartacist uprising, it became the largest of the volunteer formations on which the minister Gustav Noske relied. On 13 January, once the fighting was over, it marched into the city, and its staff took over the Hotel Eden on what is now Budapester Straße. From there Pabst directed the hunt for the leaders of the revolution.

On the evening of 15 January Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who had been arrested by a citizens’ militia, were brought to the Hotel Eden. After several hours of interrogation, during which they were beaten, Pabst decided that both should die and that the killings should be made to look like shooting while trying to escape and lynching by a mob. According to his later accounts he telephoned the Reich Chancellery, and Noske is supposed to have told him that he must know for himself what to do. He chose the killers from among the naval officers in the division. Liebknecht was shot in the Tiergarten, and Luxemburg in a car after leaving the hotel; her body was thrown into a canal. That same evening Pabst drafted a communiqué giving a false version of events, which the press repeated the following day.

The trial of the perpetrators in May 1919 took place before a court martial of his own division. One of the judges, nominated by Pabst, was the naval Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Canaris, who before the trial had helped the accused to coordinate their testimony. Most of the accused were acquitted, two received light sentences, and Canaris helped one of them escape abroad. Pabst himself was never charged at all.

In the spring of 1919 the division, expanded into a corps that numbered some 40,000 men by the summer, put down further left-wing risings in Berlin and other cities. When in June Noske, under pressure from his own party, withdrew the troops from the striking railways, Pabst wrote him off as a mere party politician and began to plan a coup. He wanted to replace the government with a “directory”, leaving Friedrich Ebert as president, and to ban strikes on pain of death. On 21 July 1919 his troops set off for Berlin, but Generals Walther von Lüttwitz and Georg Maercker halted them in the suburbs. General Wilhelm Groener noted that Pabst had fallen into “complete megalomania”. The affair was hushed up, and in December 1919 Pabst left the army.

The Kapp Putsch and flight to Austria

In the autumn of 1919 he became the chief organiser of the National Association (Nationale Vereinigung), a conspiratorial organisation whose leadership included Wolfgang Kapp, Lüttwitz, Erich Ludendorff and Colonel Max Bauer. Its aim was to overthrow the government and replace it with a cabinet of experts independent of the parties. In March 1920, when the government ordered the disbandment of the Freikorps, including the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade, the conspirators struck prematurely. During the Kapp–Lüttwitz Putsch Pabst was Lüttwitz’s closest aide and coordinated the movements of the putschist troops. The putsch collapsed after a few days in the face of a general strike and the refusal of the civil service to cooperate, and Pabst fled abroad.

He settled in Austria, in Innsbruck. In the early 1920s he became chief of staff of the Tyrolean Heimwehr, a right-wing paramilitary force led in the Tyrol by the Christian Social politician Richard Steidle. He organised it on military lines and helped it obtain weapons, and after the failed Munich putsch of 1923 he gave assistance to the wounded Hermann Göring, who had fled to Austria. In 1925, thanks to the efforts of the Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, he was covered by an amnesty, and from then on Pabst also worked as a paid informant of German diplomacy in Austria.

When in 1927 the regional units of the Heimwehr merged into a nationwide federation, Pabst became its chief of staff. The organisation fought the Austrian Social Democrats and their defence force, and was funded by industrialists in Austria and Germany and by Benito Mussolini, with whom Pabst kept in touch. He dreamt of a “White International”, an alliance of the anti-Bolshevik and anti-liberal movements of Germany, Italy, Austria and Hungary. In 1930 the government of Chancellor Johann Schober, which wanted to bring the Heimwehr to heel, expelled him from Austria. The organisation, whose leadership soon passed to Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, later became one of the pillars of the authoritarian regime that dismantled Austrian democracy in 1933–1934.

A fascist, but not a Nazi

After returning to Germany, Pabst became a director of the armaments concern Rheinmetall in 1931. He founded and ran the Society for the Study of Fascism (Gesellschaft zum Studium des Faschismus), an exclusive club in which conservatives, industrialists and Stahlhelm activists met Nazis, among them Göring, Walther Funk and Hans Frank. The club’s aim was to prepare a dictatorship on the Italian model. By his own account, in 1931 Pabst turned down an offer from Adolf Hitler to become head of organisation of his party, because he considered himself a conservative and saw Hitler as a socialist. He never joined the NSDAP.

During the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 he was arrested, probably because of his past contacts with the SA leadership, but he was released after six weeks thanks to the intercession of Canaris, Göring and other acquaintances. He went into the arms trade on a large scale. At the beginning of the war he briefly served as a major in the War Economy and Armaments Office of the Wehrmacht High Command, and then ran a firm that imported weapons and machinery for the German army from Switzerland and other neutral countries. In 1943 he moved to Switzerland, where he looked after the business of an arms factory in Solothurn, and according to some accounts he was also in contact with the American intelligence chief there, Allen Dulles.

“I had them executed”

He returned to Germany, to Düsseldorf, in 1955. He went on dealing in arms and moved in far-right circles. In 1962 the bulletin of the Federal Republic’s government press office described the killing of Liebknecht and Luxemburg as a “summary execution” that had saved Germany from communism. A few weeks later Pabst told the weekly Der Spiegel in an interview that he had had them “executed” and that Noske had agreed to it. By then Noske had been dead for more than a decade. Pabst died in Düsseldorf on 29 May 1970. Among his papers was found a copy of a letter of 1969 in which he wrote that he could not have carried out the operation without Noske’s consent, “with Ebert in the background”, and that for fifty years he had kept silent, out of honour, about his cooperation with the Social Democrats. Historians believe that Pabst really did consult someone in the government or the military command, but it is impossible to establish exactly what he was told.

Significance

Pabst belonged to a generation of officers for whom the defeat of 1918 and the revolution were a single catastrophe brought about by the “enemy within”. The murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, which he committed without any consequences, entrenched the hatred between German communists and Social Democrats, and at the same time showed the far right that in the Weimar Republic political murder could go unpunished. His later path – from the Freikorps through the Kapp Putsch and the Austrian Heimwehr to a club of admirers of fascism where conservatives and Nazis met – mirrors that of a large part of the German right, which in 1933 helped Hitler to take power in the belief that it would be able to control him. Pabst’s papers went to the German Federal Archives and became one of the main sources for the history of the murders of 15 January 1919.