The World Turns to War

By Jay Wertz

The World Turns to War weaves stories of combat veterans into an event-by-event history of the war. Includes the words of veterans of all forces — in all theaters of operation. Illustrated by high-quality photographs, full-color images and detailed maps,

War Stories: World War II Firsthand™ is the only multi-volume history of the war to include hundreds of first-person interviews and oral history recollections of the soldiers on the ground, the sailors on the high seas and the airmen in the sky. Their words, augmented by quotes from military and political leaders and modern historical thought, give a complete picture of the war from those who fought it. This volume features firsthand recollections and perspectives from those who witnessed the Rise of Fascism in Europe, the invasion of Poland, and the 1940 German Blitzkrieg across Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monroe Publications
• Release date: Dec 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998889313

Jay Wertz

Jay Wertz is the author of seven books: D-Day: The Campaign Across France; The World Turns to War; The Pacific, Volume One: Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal; The Pacific, Volume Two: The Solomons to Saipan; The Native American Experience; The Civil War Experience 1861-1865 and co-author of Smithsonian’s Great Battles and Battlefields of the Civil War with prominent historian Edwin C. Bearss. He is currently writing additional volumes of War Stories: World War II Firsthand, a twelve-part book series of eyewitness accounts. He has also been a feature writer for America in WWII and Aviation History magazines and is the author of Pearl Harbor and the Day of Infamy, They Called Themselves the Battling Bastards of Bataan and Midway: The Battle that Changed the Pacific War, graphic histories which include installments of a graphic novel, Separated by War. He is the producer-director-writer of the award-winning 13-part documentary series Smithsonian’s Great Battles of the Civil War for The Learning Channel and Time-Life Video. He started his 42-year film and TV career in Hollywood working on military projects. He lives in Phillips Ranch, California.

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Introduction

Ibelieve the reason we are fascinated with war from a historical perspective is because it is the most all-encompassing of human endeavors. Individuals, groups and increasingly, the very fiber of whole civilizations, are swept into war’s process, its causes and outcome. The more people and societies involved, the more lasting the consequences and the greater the depth of study necessary to understand what happened. This book deals with the causes and beginnings of the greatest war of all time, World War II.

The story begins at the end of World War I, which participants called the Great War. To understand World War II, one must first understand how the outcome of the Great War set the stage for a new period of unrest in Europe and the world Europe controlled. The treaties between the Western Allies and the Central Powers quickly faltered in the political climate of Europe after 1918. Compromises and modifications permitted a resurgent and unified Germany to disrupt European stability, which led to more bloodshed. World War II was in large part the result of the failure of Great War settlements to bring lasting peace and security to the world.

Although the United States was not at war at the time, Americans should understand why the events of the period of 1919-40 led us to war. The U. S. government, leery of involving the country in the continuing political turmoil of Europe, refused to support the war’s settlements as negotiated. By failing to back, politically and monetarily, the major concession wrought from France to achieve settlement, America contributed to increasing tensions between Germany and its neighbors. When Hitler came to power he targeted the United States in his speeches, writings and plans. He recognized the need to bring down the world’s most powerful democracy. Soon President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other Americans began to voice outrage over Hitler’s policies. When Western Europe was invaded, British and French leaders begged the Roosevelt administration for logistical support. American involvement, however, was a complex issue, with differing strategies and opinions; a result of the U. S. being the world’s greatest participatory democracy.

I could not have written this work without the enormous help of learned World War II historians of our time. Foreword author Gerhard Weinberg, PhD, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina, gave essential guidance on the European political situation between the wars. Dr. Weinberg is an expert on the life and writings of Adolf Hitler. He edited Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to MEIN KAMPF after he discovered it in 1958 among captured German records in an Alexandria, Virginia repository.

Thanks also to my longtime principal editor, Colonel, USA (ret.), Jerry Morelock, PhD, former Executive Director of the Winston Churchill Memorial & Library at Westminster College and former history department head at the U. S. Army Command & General Staff College. Thanks also to Edwin C. Bearss, former Chief Historian of the National Park Service and a World War II Marine Corps combat veteran who has guided me through every project I have undertaken. Thanks to the staff of Monroe Publications, veteran contributors to War Stories: World War II Firsthand™. Finally, thanks to the veterans and eyewitnesses, whose firsthand experience of the events included in this volume make it a unique document of the period. They are the inspiration that drives us to continue this work.

-Jay Wertz

Phillips Ranch, California

Marshal Ferdinand Foch (second from right) and other Allied representatives pose in front of the railway car in which the armistice ending World War I was signed at Compiègne Forest, France on November 11, 1918.

Chapter 1

Two Decades of Violence and Diplomacy

The Great War

The European war of the early 20 th century that history now calls the First World War, or World War I, was a devastating conflict with political ramifications that went far beyond the suffering, death and destruction waged across France and elsewhere in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands and the world’s oceans. Eventually it involved all the world’s great powers, including the United States. The fighting in what was commonly called at the time the Great War ended when an armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, at Compiégne Forest, France, by a delegation headed by Matthias Erzberger, the leader of Germany’s Catholic Center Party, and representatives of the victorious Allied nations of the West. Treaties officially ending the war were signed the following year. The Great War was also called the war to end all wars, but this was far from attainable.

What began as an assassination crisis in Europe’s Balkans on June 28, 1914, quickly escalated into an opportunity for old adversaries to settle scores and assert dominance over their neighbors. Territorial wars had been part of European history since the Middle Ages. What made the 20th-century version of this cyclical history different was the willingness of the traditional European powers to risk war by establishing, or sometimes failing to establish, complicated security treaties. Kaiser Wilhelm (William) II, Germany’s wartime ruler, claimed to have never wanted war and blamed it on his uncle, King Edward VII of Great Britain, and British politicians who, the Kaiser claimed, disdained the monarchies of the mainland. But the Kaiser had already begun an aggressive campaign to build a navy capable of challenging Britain at sea and adding to Germany’s colonial empire. Wilhelm II’s Germany, together with its closest ally, the decaying Habsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire—the offended party in the incident that sparked the war—and Russia were the most powerful of these monarchies, and they clung to a style of rule that was evaporating in Continental Europe. The Kaiser pursued and ignored alliances in a haphazard fashion as he sought to proclaim to the world the power of Germany’s military.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of the Germanic states during the Great War.

Compared to other European monarchies, Germany was young; at the beginning of the 20th century it was only recently united by the efforts of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and King Wilhelm I (pictured here during his coronation at France’s Palace of Versailles), when a victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) allowed the formation of the Second Reich from Prussia and a coalition of other Germanic states, excluding Austria-Hungary. In the treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War, Germany demanded large sums from France as reparations, foreshadowing the application of this punishment to Germany at the conclusion of World War I.

Thus, Great Britain entered into an unlikely alliance with its traditional enemy, France, to protect the Gallic nation and the smaller countries of Western Europe from German expansion. Perhaps content to stay out of the land war, Britain could not ignore the powerful High Seas Navy, which Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz created under orders from the Kaiser. This navy, launched from Baltic and North Sea ports with an ample supply of submarines, became a direct threat to British North Sea naval dominance. These empires and their allies embarked upon a collision course that any spark could—and did—ignite.

Colonial, cultural and treaty affiliations served to globalize the war of the European adversaries. At the same time, new political forces sprung up to exploit the unstable situation, most notably the rise of communist parties in much of Europe. Along the Mediterranean Sea, a reinvigorated Italy explored its warrior roots and became a nation willing to fight for the side that would offer the most in postwar spoils, which eventually pushed it to join the Western Allies. The Ottoman Empire—controlled by Turkey and comprising parts of the Caspian–Black Sea region and the Middle East—was at first neutral. Together these three empires became the Central Powers. Inside Russia the Red Revolution and Marxists’ seizure of power affected the conduct of the war in the East. Half a globe away Japan, having spent 50 years metamorphosing from feudal isolation to a virile industrial and military presence, recognized the importance of allying with the British, a towering colonial force in the Far East.

Finally, when Germany was winning in the Balkans and making peace with the new communist government in Russia—freeing hundreds of thousands of soldiers for Western Front combat—Germany’s blunder of reintroducing unrestricted submarine warfare off the British Isles brought the United States into the war as a full military partner of the Western Allies in 1917. Coming on top of an already significant infusion of U. S. industrial muscle, the efforts of American sailors, aviators, army doughboys and support personnel ground the third phase of the German effort to win the war to a halt in the Second Battle of the Marne in June and July 1918. German military leaders on the Western Front recognized the need to arrange for a cessation of hostilities and communicated their desire to the Kaiser.

Beyond the influx of Americans to the Front, there were other reasons the German High Command felt the war to be unwinnable in late 1918. Thanks to America’s entry into the war and effects of the British-led Allied naval blockade, the High Command expected a breakthrough in the West. Though still prepared to fight, the morale of the soldiers on the front line had sunk to a condition of nearly hypnotic fatalism. Prince Maximilian of Baden, one of the liberal members of the German aristocracy, took over as Chancellor on September 28 and forced the Kaiser to resign. Thinking that there was nothing more the Army General Staff could do once soldiers had lost faith in the Kaiser, Supreme Commander Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his right-hand man, Colonel General Erich Ludendorf, resigned. Wilhelm fled to the Netherlands; and on November 9 Prince Maximilian handed over control of the country to Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the majority Social Democratic Party.

When the Allies forced Germany to consider a cease-fire, it still had control of a large portion of the Ukraine in the East and was stubbornly giving ground on the Western Front. As yet no Allied troops had crossed into Germany. But recently named Quartermaster General Wilhelm Groener advised Ebert to explore terms of peace while Germany still held some strategic and tactical advantages. Both German military and civilian leaders were responding to the 14-point peace plan put forth by U. S. President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s peace was not intended to severely punish Germany for its war involvement. That was what German leaders understood when the armistice was signed two days after the humble beginnings of Germany’s first republic and the sudden laying down of arms by its army and navy. Instead, they soon discovered they were to negotiate from the perspective of a vanquished foe, a situation similar to that of France after its defeat by Bismarck’s Prussian–German forces in the 1870 war.

Not only did Britain, France, Italy and their democratic allies wish to see the fabled Prussian– German military culture destroyed, they desired a reshuffling of Europe’s political landscape. The treaties reformed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and parts of Germany by adjusting boundaries to peoples, rather than confining peoples to boundaries not of their choosing; which previously had led to local conflicts that eventually grew into a great conflagration. Some among the victors viewed the treaty with Germany as a way to add to their colonial empires, which they had built up over more than two centuries, at Germany’s expense.

This 800mm (31.5-inch) Heavy Gustav Cannon Railway Gun was an example of the might of German weapons manfacturing and extreme firepower that the Kaiser’s forces used in the Great War.

The French delegation led the way in handing down stringent terms of peace, spearheaded by President Georges Clemenceau and war leader Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The French wanted Germany to compensate them for the 1.5 million men lost on the battlefields, the destruction of French industry in German-occupied France and the scarring of hundreds of square miles of French countryside. For nearly four years much of the Western Front had bogged down in devastating trench warfare along the Meuse, Marne and Somme Rivers in northeastern France.

The British joined the French in dictating the terms of peace; more than 921,000 loyal British subjects did not return home. Although Prime Minister H. H. Asquith was head of the Commonwealth and effectively the most powerful man in the British Empire when he reluctantly committed it to war in 1914, he was no longer in charge at war’s end. New Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his delegation went to Paris to seek compensation for Britain’s dead and invalid citizens and to ensure Germany would not be able to rise up again to challenge the British Empire. Helping Lloyd George stir the fires of retribution was then Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill.

Churchill was a rising political figure at the dawn of the 20th century. Born of a socialite American mother and a politician father, he was a poor student in subjects outside history and military science, but he graduated eighth in his class from Sandhurst Military College. He proved his courage and wit on battlefields in India and the Sudans as a soldier and, during the Second Boer War, as a newspaper correspondent. The most impressive result of this was how his chronicles of these experiences captivated the British people. He soon became a Member of Parliament. As British leaders vacillated about the merits of honoring a complex set of treaties that would take them into the Great War, Churchill was encouraging the war hawks from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty. By the time the war ended, Churchill had become a critic of the war and Great Britain’s part in it. But rather than exercise mercy over the conquered Germanic peoples, as suggested by some world leaders, Churchill joined other London leaders in their desire to punish Germany.

Vittorio Orlando, the Italian Premier, was there to protect his nation’s interests. Specifically, he was after certain parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire secretly promised to him in 1915 by Britain and France in exchange for Italy’s entrance into the war on the Allied side. When he failed to see these commitments fulfilled entirely he went home—but returned to sign the treaty.

Forming the fourth part of the guiding Allied presence at the treaty conference was the United States and the country’s principal representative, President Woodrow Wilson. The leader of the world’s most powerful democracy arrived armed with his 14-point (later 24-point) plan, which initially attracted Germany to the peace table. Wilson’s plan envisioned a world at peace and sought fair treatment of Germany and its allies. Because Wilson’s proposals appeared to lack the vengeful rhetoric of the European victors, Germany sought refuge in them. Wilson also called for the establishment of the League of Nations, a world body charged with preventing violent solutions to international conflicts.

An elderly French couple visits the ruins of their former house, leveled by German shelling in 1916.

In countering German heavy artillery, tanks, machine guns, gas and manpower in the trenches of Northern Europe the British and French were greatly aided by forces of the British Commonwealth and American doughboys. Here, on September 29, 1918, Americans of the 30th Infantry Division stand guard over German prisoners following the capture of Bellicourt earlier in the day. In the background are British tanks of the V Tank Brigade which were assigned to the American and Australian forces operating in this sector.

Great Britain and France immediately took Wilson’s 14-point plan to task. The British could not agree to freedom of the high seas— the island nation had to be allowed to patrol its empire with its strong navy. A primary component of Wilson’s proposal was the idea of national self-determination. Neither crown, nor conquest nor internal revolution would be used to choose leaders and governments. This was a new concept in most of Europe—that the people of multiethnic regions would determine through plebiscites (popular votes) what nation or government would rule them.

The treaty took a number of months to hammer out. When it was complete the Treaty of Versailles, named after the French palace where it was signed, revealed that self-determination was unequally applied to peoples freed by the war. The timing of these changes to the makeup of Europe’s nations added to disillusionment and unrest in a continent already in the grips of worker-driven revolution.

Friedrich Ebert and the rest of Germany’s infant republican government were given almost no voice in the proceedings, so they resorted to protesting loudly about the terms of the treaty outside the negotiations. They were only permitted to respond in writing to the treaty’s points. In the end, they were able to gain only a single concession, to have a plebiscite determine the new border between Poland and Upper Silesia. Even Woodrow Wilson failed to prevent the misapplication of his original plan and, except for the demilitarization of the Rhineland and formation of the League of Nations, the American president ultimately acquiesced to the agendas of the other Western Allies.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill was hawkish on going to war against Germany and the Central powers.

A priest reads a funeral mass as French soldiers are buried in a trench on a World War I battlefield.

Germany lost territory from all compass points. To the southwest, Alsace and Lorraine, provinces Germany seized in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, were returned to French rule. In the northern and eastern parts of Germany, a sliver of land bordering the Baltic—Memel— went to one of the three new states in that region, Lithuania. East Prussia was separated from the rest of Germany to return Polish lands seized in the 18th century and provide Poland with a corridor to the Baltic Sea. In a compromise favoring Germany, Danzig on the Baltic coast was not returned to Poland but was instead declared a Free City under international rule. The Sudetenland, a region of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bohemia populated by ethnic Germans, was given to the new country of Czechoslovakia instead of uniting it with Germany or Austria.

Belgium received Eupen and Malmedy, and restored to Denmark was some of the neck joining its southern border with Germany. In the breaking up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire parts inhabited by Slavs in the formerly independent nations of Serbia and Montenegro were included in a new nation, Yugoslavia. Transylvania and Bukovena were added to Rumania. Together with Czechoslovakia, these two countries were referred to as the Little Entente. Land was also ceded to Greece at the expense of Bulgaria.

German colonies were stripped from the Fatherland in Africa and the Far East. German East Africa was divided among Great Britain, Belgium and Portugal, to be governed as mandates guided by the League of Nations toward eventual independence. The islands of Micronesia and Melanesia in the western Pacific went to the British Commonwealth countries of Australia and New Zealand if they were below the equator and, if north of that latitude, were handed over to a nondemocratic country of reckless ambition strengthened by the war—Japan. Though the Japanese involvement in the war was minimal it entered the treaty talks aligned with the West and even received the power to participate in monitoring the German Memel region of Lithuania.

In addition to the outright loss of territory, a small coal-mining region on the French border, the Saar, was detached from Germany to be administered by the League of Nations for 15 years. A much larger area, the rich German industrial region of the western Rhine River Valley, on the border with France, was the subject of one of the Treaty of Versailles’ greatest compromises. In a deal brokered by Wilson this region, which included the large portion west of the Rhine and a small strip east of the river, would become a demilitarized zone for 15 years, subject to Allied occupation. In exchange for this area remaining part of Germany, rather than being ceded to France, the United States and Britain promised to enter into a defense alliance with France. When the U. S. Senate failed to ratify the treaty, Great Britain also abandoned the defense guarantee, and a major tenet of the treaty was erased.

Germany had to endure a major reduction to its military resources. No aerial force was permitted. Ship inventories were greatly reduced. U-boats (submarines) were outlawed. A proud German admiral, rather than turn his fleet over to the Allies when it was ordered to Scapa Flow, north of Scotland, secretly commanded the crews to scuttle them after arrival.

Besides these territorial and military reductions, Germany was hard hit economically. It was given a harsh set of international commerce rules to adhere to that created a vast trade imbalance. Finally there were the reparations, initially due to France to pay for the cost of waging war against the Kaiser’s forces, the destruction of French industries and the suffering of its people. Although the payments were not indemnities—the punitive payments of previous Europe wars—the list of charges began to resemble reparations more and more. Included, for example, were pension payments to surviving British and British Commonwealth soldiers. It took more than three years just to calculate the bill.

Wilhelm Groener (third from left) pictured with his staff after he became Reichswehrminister (Minister of Defense) for a time during the Weimar Republic. In 1919 he was responsible for downsizing the German military to comply with treaty requirements. He also cut a deal with Ebert to retain military influence within the new government.

The Council of Four, the Big Four Allied leaders standing outside the Hotel Crillon in Paris during the peace talks on May 27, 1919. They are, from left to right, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando, President Georges Clemenceau of France and U. S. President Woodrow Wilson.

Critics charged that the total amount of reparations, 132 billion marks, was inflated and broadened by the Allies for political reasons: to satisfy their citizens that Germany was indeed being punished. In France, over the course of the next two decades, the scorched earth was replanted, factories were rebuilt and British and French soldiers received their pensions. Most of this work, however, was financed by the victors; Germany only paid 20 billion of the 132 billion marks, in cash and goods.

Beyond territorial, financial and other penalties meted out to Germany, the Allies demanded that the Central Powers accept responsibility for the Great War. This point was rammed home by German politicians to the extent that it was more than even the most war-weary German citizen could bear. Ebert and his cabinet rejected the treaty. The Allies responded by setting a deadline for when the treaty had to be accepted by German leaders. Chancellor Ebert consulted with his military staff to see if the threatened Allied military response to any German rejection of the treaty could be resisted. The answer was no. With less than six hours to the deadline, Ebert and the rest of the German delegation agreed to the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in the palace’s storied Hall of Mirrors on June 28, 1919.

On June 28, 1919 a large international audience in the Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Versailles at the French palace outside of Paris which gave the treaty officially ending World War I with Germany its name. Separate treaties concluded over the next several months officially ended World War I with the other Central Powers.

During the six months the Allies worked out the terms of Germany’s capitulation before presenting the treaty to the world, the new German government grappled with a number of problems. One was the continuation of the British blockade of German ports, which denied food to the hungry people of Germany. The casualties from the blockade—the number of people who died from starvation—actually increased after the firing stopped. The scarred economy and agitation by extremists led to the danger the republic would not survive long enough to sign the treaty.

Across the ocean the price in American lives weighed heavily on the minds of U. S. Senators. Feeling the negative effects of being involved in what was viewed as a conflict among European monarchies, they refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the defense guarantee to France in the Rhineland compromise. Nor did American lawmakers support America’s participation in President Wilson’s international peacekeeping body, the League of Nations. As a result American lawmakers, responding to the mood of the nation, began two decades of cautious and restrained diplomacy with Europe’s existing and new governments.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union and the leading founder of practical Communism, in a painting entitled Lenin on the Rostrum by Aleksandr Gerasimov

Communism and Fascism

Though the Great War was a factor in the demise of the ruling monarchies of Europe, it was simply the catalyst to permanently break the strong hold these monarchs had over their subjects. With economic changes in Europe brought on by the massive shift from an agrarian to an industrial-based economy, social change was in the wind. A vast number of socially minded intellectuals began the process of breaking down existing economic and class barriers in traditional Europe. They also found opportunities in newly minted democracies. These people wrote in pamphlets and newspapers, organized groups for change—and sometimes revolution—while sharing ideas across national borders. By the mid-1800s Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Georges Sorel, among others, were pushing hard for societal acceptance of new ideas regarding labor, religion and politics.

Besides the dissolution of the two Germanic empires, the other great Continental European empire of the 19th century met its demise in the early 20th century. While the fall of the monarchy of Tsar Nicholas II was affected by the events of World War I, it was the emergence of internal revolution that unraveled the Tsar’s empire. The first practical application of the theories of Marxism, or communism, as its creator called it, came under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in Russia. The 1917 Bolshevik (Russian Communist Party) Revolution provided Europe with its next powerful authoritarian government. The new model of economic socialism was not about to be thrust upon the Russian people without a healthy dose of dictatorial power.

In Germany the victors of the First World War were not the only ones making the young German democracy labor through every step. The panacea of communism sweeping over Europe was making a splash in Germany. Before Ebert’s government could draft a constitution, Berlin (the former Prussian and Reich capital) was rocked by worker strikes and street fighting. Late in the first day of the government changeover Ebert, fearing the Left more than the Right, made a secret agreement with the Supreme Command of the Imperial Army. Brokered by Quartermaster General Wilhelm Groener, the deal read that if Ebert’s government thwarted a Marxist takeover and preserved the officer corps, the army would step in when necessary to maintain law and order.

By December Berlin was embroiled in crisis. Even a naval unit, in Berlin to protect the buildings used by the new government, had to be forcibly removed by soldiers after the sailors resorted to looting. Leftist soldiers’ and workers’ circles that had been forming for weeks caused havoc in the capital. Ebert and his new Defense Minister, Gustav Noske, soon found that the thinned ranks of the army and the partisan local militias were not reliable sources of military manpower, no matter how committed the army leadership was to backing the government. So they turned to a group of private armies financed and armed by the Supreme Command, called the Freikorps (Free Corps), to do the job.

General Hans von Seeckt, a traditional Prussian career soldier, was charged with restoring order in the Weimar Republic military, called the Reichswehr, and making its forces and equipment comply with the tenets of the Treaty of Versailles.

In Berlin the workers’ movement called for a general strike on March 3, 1919. Minister on Defense Gustav Noske called on the Freikorps under General Lüttwitz to oppose them.

The first time this army of ex-soldiers, partisans, adventurers and the young unemployed heeded the call was when the Maercker Brigade came to Berlin on January 10, 1919, to put down a wave of strikes and disruptions by Berlin communists. This mission suited the Freebooters, as they called themselves, because though they were well disciplined in drill and combat instruction, they were also generally politically conservative bullies. Fervent nationalists and sometimes monarchists, they strongly opposed Marxism, democracy, socialism and Jews. They were at the forefront of a new movement in Europe counterbalancing communism, a far-right philosophy combining nationalism with authoritarianism backed by a strong military, what an up-and-coming star of the movement would term Fascism.

The clash between the Freebooters and the Spartacists in Berlin was over in less than two weeks. The two leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were captured and executed without trial. The calm lasted long enough for elections to be held to form a constituent assembly for Germany, with women voting for the first time and three-quarters of the electorate supporting the moderate parties of Germany’s developing republic.

With this mandate Ebert commenced to draw up of a constitution. Even after the Freikorps quashed the Berlin communists, Berlin was not serene and secure. So Ebert moved the constitutional convention to the city of Weimar in central Germany. The constitutional republic that grew out of this gathering was designated the Weimar Republic.

The government returned to Berlin in September 1919, but there were still deep crises awaiting now-President Ebert and the legislature, called the Reichstag (as it had been when the bicameral legislative body was a group of princes and powerless commoners under the monarchy). The blockade of German Baltic ports was lifted only after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, continuing critical food shortages for months in 1919. The overall economy was still in terrible condition. Just as seriously in the long run, Ebert had not chosen his words carefully when welcoming home the troops from the Front. He validated their notion that they left the battlefield unvanquished. This was a concept that Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and other top commanders of the Great War clung to, and it was picked up by right-wing groups determined to move Germany away from democracy.

Berlin and other major population centers continued to see the emergence of workers and soldiers bent on establishing Marxist power over the nation. The Freikorps often battled these groups in open street fighting. Ebert and Noske came to realize their previous ally, the existing army, was a bigger threat than the communists. The matter came to a head when, to comply with the treaty, the new army—largely made up of Freikorps units and called the Reichswehr (Reich defense) under the republic—was reduced to 100,000 officers and men in February 1920.

Friedrich Ebert, German Chancellor after World War I. The Treaty of Versailles included an admission by Germany that it caused the war. This guilt clause was a sensitive issue for Ebert when dealing with the German officer corps, whose support his government desperately needed.

One unit slated for disbandment was the 2nd Marine Brigade, a notorious Freikorps unit under Captain Hermann Ehrhardt that was camped at Döberitz outside Berlin. Seeing the opportunity for a military coup, the commander of the Berlin troops, General Walther von Lüttwitz, and a civilian, Dr. Wolfgang Kapp, encouraged the Ehrhardt Brigade to advance on the capital. This they did early on Saturday, March 11, forcing the Weimar Republic’s President and cabinet to flee Berlin. Dr. Kapp was named Chancellor in the Putsch (coup) that bore his name. Besides Ehrhardt and Lüttwitz, the Kapp Putsch had another well-known military officer lurking in the wings, Erich Ludendorff. As Quartermaster General the pugnacious Ludendorff was considered the master German strategist and virtual leader of Germany during the last two years of the Great War.

From March 3 to 16 more than 1200 were killed in street fighting and executions. The crisis ended with the occupation of the Lichtenberg district of Berlin by Freikorps and government troops.

At the end of the Kapp Putsch, violence erupted as a Freikorps unit known as the Ehrhardt Marine Brigade, under Captain Hermann Erhardt, left the capital. In this photograph they clash with workers in the streets of the Charlottenburg area of Berlin on March 18, 1920.

Kapp and his cronies were not prepared to govern, and no help was offered by government bureaucrats, who simply refused to carry out the new leaders’ directives. As word of the coup became public, workers’ groups organized a massive general strike. Defeated by its own lack of planning and organization, the Kapp Putsch ended on March 17. Violence erupted as the Ehrhardt Brigade left the capital. Ebert and his cabinet returned to Berlin with a new attitude of antimilitarism. However, a standing army was still necessary. The internal strife continued with new communist uprisings in the industrial areas of western Germany and a seething right-wing movement rippling through Bavaria in the South.

Ebert turned to Reichswehr Commander General Hans von