The Chris Moeller Archives

These members of the Freikorps were right-wing extremists. They believed that they had not so much lost the war but been betrayed by those that were now in charge, the moderate Socialist Democrats. They hated the new Weimar Republic, the Socialists who led the government, and the Communists trying to replace them, yet they collaborated with officials in the government in the repression of the workers’ movement and other leftist movements. They were well-armed. They had taken control of the artillery, flamethrowers, and armored tanks of the German war effort. When they were forced to evacuate Berlin after an unsuccessful occupation, they opened fire with rifles and machine guns, killing several hundred people. 

They were a thorn in the side of national foreign policy. They fought on the side of the Latvian national army against “the Reds” in 1919 and helped overthrow the constitutional government there. They killed nearly 3,000 people suspected of Bolshevism in the capital of Riga. Underground in Germany, they carried out terror campaigns, murdering government figures, and hunting down “traitors.” In 1919, they most famously murdered leftist revolutionary leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Liebknecht was arrested and ordered to walk through one of Berlin’s largest parks on foot. He was shot in the back and the Freikorps claimed he was trying to escape. In 1921, they murdered one of the German signers of the Armistice. In 1922, they killed the country’s foreign minister, who was Jewish. Their ideology was not uniform among the members, but as a whole they were deeply opposed to Marxism and very anti-Semitic. They proclaimed their patriotism ferociously and advocated an authoritarianism that they claimed was missing from German society which had been present under Wilhelm. Their goal was an ultra-militarized, fascist Germany with a professional army flanked by millions of paramilitary civilians. Racist resentments were the political strategy, along with imagery of a pure homeland, and cities demonized as places of social rot and decadence. They hated the government, the Republic, and the citizens in general. They hated. 

They were officially dissolved in 1920, but their members took part in Adolf Hitler’s failed coup attempt of the Weimar government in 1923. When the Nazis eventually came to national power in 1933, the “outlaws” of the old Freikorps officially became German national heroes. On November 9th of ’33, at a large ceremony, the Freikorps presented their flags to Hitler’s SA and SS. They had been the advance guard of the Third Reich. 

So, yeah…