Wolfgang Kapp

Wolfgang Kapp was a senior Prussian civil servant and far-right activist whose name entered history thanks to five days in March 1920. During the First World War he became prominent as an advocate of annexations and unrestricted submarine warfare and as a co-founder of the German Fatherland Party, a movement that called for holding out until a victorious peace. After the defeat he refused to recognise the republic and conspired to overthrow it. On 13 March 1920, when General Walther von Lüttwitz’s soldiers occupied Berlin, he proclaimed himself Reich Chancellor. His government did not manage to govern for a single day: it was paralysed by a general strike and the refusal of the civil service to cooperate. The Kapp Putsch was the first major attempt by the right to overthrow the Weimar Republic and a harbinger of those to come.

The son of an emigrant

He was born in New York on 24 July 1858. His father, Friedrich Kapp, a lawyer and writer, had emigrated to America after the defeat of the revolution of 1848, and after returning to Germany sat in the Reichstag for the National Liberal Party. His mother, Luise Engels, was the daughter of a Prussian general. The family never settled in the United States, and in the early 1870s, when Wolfgang was twelve or thirteen, it returned to Berlin. Unlike his father, the son adopted conservative views at an early age. He studied law at Tübingen, Göttingen and Berlin. In Göttingen he belonged to the student corps Hannovera, from which he carried duelling scars on his face. He obtained a doctorate in law.

In 1884 he married Margarethe Rosenow, the daughter of an East Prussian landowner. They had a son, who was killed in the First World War, and two daughters. Through his wife’s family Kapp drew close to the conservative Junkers of the east, and in 1890 he himself became the owner of the Pilzen estate in the district of Preußisch Eylau.

Civil servant and agrarian

After passing his assessor’s examination in 1886 he began his career in the Prussian Ministry of Finance, where he worked on Finance Minister Johannes von Miquel’s tax reform. From 1891 to 1900 he was Landrat (district administrator) of the Guben district (today Gubin in Poland and Guben in Germany). From 1900, as a counsellor in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, he dealt with the affairs of farm labourers and took part in preparing the new customs tariff of 1902 and in negotiating trade treaties. When he was passed over for the post of president of a government district, in 1906 he accepted election as Director General of the East Prussian Landschaft (Ostpreußische Landschaft), a self-governing institution that provided credit to landowners. He held the office in Königsberg, with a break in 1916–1917, until 1920.

He was an efficient and inventive administrator. He promoted peasant settlement, which was intended to halt the flight from the land, and in the face of strong opposition he founded a public life insurance fund to help relieve estates of debt. The University of Königsberg awarded him an honorary doctorate, and in 1912 he joined the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank. He maintained good relations with bankers and industrialists, among them Hugo Stinnes.

Advocate of a victorious peace

The war made him a public figure. He was one of the loudest advocates of far-reaching war aims: he demanded annexations, heavy indemnities from Germany’s enemies, the permanent subordination of occupied Belgium to the Reich and naval bases on the Flemish coast. He was an ardent supporter of unrestricted submarine warfare against Britain. In May 1916 he wrote a memorandum, “Die nationalen Kreise und der Reichskanzler” (“The National Circles and the Reich Chancellor”), a sharp critique of the government’s foreign and food-supply policies, which he circulated to influential people. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg called its authors “pirates of public opinion” in the Reichstag, and the authorities refused to confirm Kapp’s re-election as director of the Landschaft. Kapp challenged the chancellor to a duel, but the latter did not accept the challenge.

When in July 1917 the Reichstag passed the Peace Resolution calling for a peace without annexations, Kapp responded in September by founding the German Fatherland Party together with Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Tirpitz became its chairman and Kapp his deputy. The party united conservatives, National Liberals and Pan-Germans and demanded a “strong Reich policy” and a victorious peace. On 2 February 1918 Kapp won a by-election in the Gumbinnen constituency (today Gusev) and sat as a Conservative in the last Reichstag of the Empire.

Conspirator

He regarded the defeat and the revolution as national disgrace and treason. He was one of the propagators of the stab-in-the-back myth, according to which the undefeated army had been betrayed by socialists and Jews at home. In July 1919 he joined the executive of the German National People’s Party, but its leadership was unwilling to back plans for a coup. From the summer of 1919, therefore, he plotted the overthrow of the republic with like-minded men: politicians such as Pastor Gottfried Traub, and officers such as General Erich Ludendorff, Colonel Max Bauer and Captain Waldemar Pabst. In the autumn of 1919 the National Association (Nationale Vereinigung) was formed under his leadership, intended to unite the far right and the volunteer Freikorps. The conspirators wanted to replace party government with an authoritarian cabinet, but did not plan to restore the monarchy.

Their preparations were not complete when General Walther von Lüttwitz went into action. On 8 March 1920 Kapp came to Berlin with an East Prussian delegation and over the following days met the general. When on 11 March the minister Gustav Noske suspended Lüttwitz, the general gave the order to march on Berlin and only informed Kapp and the conspirators afterwards.

Five days in March

On the morning of 13 March 1920 the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade entered Berlin and the government fled. Kapp declared the government of Chancellor Gustav Bauer deposed and the National Assembly and the Prussian government dissolved, and appointed himself Reich Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia. He proclaimed a “government of order, freedom and action”, but he had no list of ministers ready, and several well-known conservatives refused to join his cabinet. The general strike called by the legitimate government and the trade unions paralysed the country, and the officials in the ministries would not carry out his orders. It soon also became clear that he and Lüttwitz wanted different things. Kapp wanted to overthrow the republic and the constitution; the general wanted above all to save the army and force new elections.

On 17 March, under pressure from the military, Kapp resigned, handed power to Lüttwitz and fled Berlin. For several days he hid in Brandenburg, and in April he made his way to Sweden, where he was granted residence because the German government did not request his extradition. He settled at Hellekis on Lake Vänern, where his wife and younger daughter joined him. In exile he presented his putsch as a last attempt to save the “old Prussian state of officials” from “the rule of journalists and trade unionists” and from a “Jewish regime”, comparing the Weimar Republic to the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

The trial that never took place

In December 1921 three of his associates stood trial before the Reich Court in Leipzig. The former Berlin police president Traugott von Jagow was sentenced to five years’ fortress detention, and the cases against the others were dropped. The trial created the impression that Lüttwitz had only wanted to enforce respect for the constitution. Kapp decided to return and set out his aims openly in court. He intended to argue that his “March enterprise” had not been high treason, because the real criminals were the revolutionaries of November 1918. In April 1922 he presented himself in Leipzig and was placed in pre-trial detention. A medical examination revealed a malignant tumour behind one eye. He was operated on by his son-in-law, the surgeon Martin Kirschner, but the cancer had already spread. Kapp died in hospital in Leipzig on 12 June 1922, before the trial could take place.

Significance

Kapp was neither a charismatic leader nor the head of a mass movement. He represented the old Prussian elite of officials and landowners that never came to terms with defeat, revolution and democracy. The putsch that bears his name was prepared and set off by the military, in whose plans he played the part of the civilian face. Even so, his path from the wartime Fatherland Party to a conspiracy against the republic shows how the nationalist right carried wartime mobilisation over into peacetime. Many of the Fatherland Party’s slogans, from a victorious peace to the struggle against the “enemy within”, were later taken up by the NSDAP, which many former right-wing activists joined. The failure of the putsch taught Adolf Hitler – who in March 1920 flew to Berlin to make contact with Kapp’s people – that power in Germany could not be won against the army and the civil service. The leniency with which the republic treated the putschists, compared with its severity towards the workers of the Ruhr, was an encouragement to the enemies of democracy that they made use of in the years that followed.