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Freikorps Wikipage

Post World War I

The meaning of the word Freikorps changed over time. After 1918, the term referred to specific paramilitary organizations that sprang up across Germany following the country's defeat in World War I. Of the numerous Weimar paramilitary groups active during that time, the Freikorps were, and remain, the most notable. While exact numbers are difficult to determine, historians agree that some 500,000 men were formal Freikorps members, with another 1.5 million men participating informally.

Amongst the social, political, and economic upheavals that marked the early years of the Weimar Republic, the tenuous German government under Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), utilized the Freikorps to quell socialist and communist uprisings. Minister of Defence and SPD member Gustav Noske also relied on the Freikorps to suppress the German Revolution of 1918-19 as well as the Marxist Spartacist League, culminating in the summarily execution of revolutionary communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January 1919.

Bavarian Soviet Republic
The Bavarian Soviet Republic was a short-lived and unrecognized socialist-communist state from 12 April 1919 - 3 May 1919 in Bavaria during the German Revolution of 1918-19. Following a series of political revolts and takeovers from German socialists and then Russian-backed Bolsheviks, Noske responded from Berlin by sending various Freikorps brigades to Bavaria in late April, totalling some 30,000 men. The brigades included Hermann Ehrhardt's second Marine Brigade Freikorps, the Gorlitz Freikorps under [./Https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm%20Faupel Lieutenant Colonel Faupel], and two Swabian divisions from Württemberg under General Haas and Major Hirl, and the largest Freikorps in Bavaria commanded by Colonel Franz Ritter von Epp.

While they were met with little Communist resistance, the Freikorps nonetheless acted with particular brutality and violence with Noske's blessing and at the behest of Major Schulz, adjutant of the Lützow Freikorps, who reminded his men that it "[was] a lot better to kill a few innocent people than to let one guilty person escape" and that there was no place in his ranks for those whose conscience bothered them. On 5 May 1919, Lieutenant Georg Pölzing, one of Schulz's officers, travelled to the town of Perlach outside of Munich. Pölzing chose a dozen alleged communist workers — none of whom were actually communists, but members of the Social Democratic Party — and shot them on the spot. The following day, a Freikorps patrol led by Captain Alt-Sutterheim interrupted the meeting of a local Catholic club, the St Joseph Society, and chose twenty of the thirty members present to be shot, beaten, and bayoneted to death. A memorial on Pfanzeltplatz in Munich commemorates the incident. Historian Nigel Jones notes how there were so many Freikorps victims that Munich's undertakers were overwhelmed, leaving bodies to decay in streets until mass graves were dug.

Eastern Europe
The Freikorps also fought against the communists in the Baltics, Silesia, Poland and East Prussia after the end of World War I, including aviation combat, often with significant success. Anti-Slavic racism was sometimes present, although the ethnic cleansing ideology and anti-Semitism expressed in later years had not yet developed. In the Baltics, they fought against communists as well as against the newborn independent democratic countries Estonia and Latvia. In Latvia, Freikorps murdered 300 civilians in Mitau who were suspected of having "Bolshevik sympathies". After the capture of Riga, another 3000 alleged communists were killed, including summary executions of 50–60 prisoners daily.

Freikorps gender and identity
Freikorps ranks were composed primarily of former World War I soldiers who, upon demobilization, were unable to reintegrate into civilian society having been brutalized by the violence of the war physically and mentally. Combined with the government's poor support of veterans, who were dismissed as being hysterical when suffering from post-traumatic disorder, many German veterans found stability, comfort, and a sense of belonging in the Freikorps. Jason Crouthamel notes how the Freikorps’ military structure was a familiar continuation of the frontlines, emulating the Kampfgemeinschaft (battle community) and Kameradschaft (camaraderie) and thus preserving “the heroic spirit of comradeship in the trenches”. Others, angry at their sudden, seemingly inexplicable defeat, joined the Freikorps in an effort to put down communist uprisings or exact some form of revenge on those they considered responsible for Germany's defeat.

In Klaus Theweleit's two-volume study, Male Fantasies, they argue that Freikorps men internalized radical conceptions of masculinity into a perpetual war against women and femininity, which they viewed as the antithesis to themselves. The degree of violence and brutality unleashed by the Freikorps throughout Germany and Eastern Europe is, as Theweleit argues, “the only part of their ‘masculinity’ [and identity] remaining”. In this sense, Theweleit establishes an understanding of the Freikorps as living and protean reflections of the war’s impact on German veteran identities and conception of gender and masculinity.

Historians Nigel Jones and Thomas Kühne echo Theweleit’s gendered framework of understanding the Freikorps, arguing that their masculine displays of violence, male hardness and solidarity, and aggression established the beginnings of the fascist New Man the Nazi Party would come to build on.

Demobilization
Though officially disbanded in 1920, some of them continued to exist for several years and many Freikorps attempted, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the government in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. Their attack was halted when German citizens loyal to the government went on strike, cutting off many services and making daily life so problematic that the coup was called off.

Nazi legacy
In 1920, Adolf Hitler had just begun his political career as the leader of the tiny and as-yet-unknown Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/DAP German Workers' Party, which was soon renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) or Nazi Party in Munich. Numerous future members and leaders of the Nazi Party had served in the Freikorps, including Ernst Röhm, future head of the Sturmabteilung, or SA, Heinrich Himmler, future head of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, and Rudolf Höß, the future Kommandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Hermann Ehrhardt, founder and leader of the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, and his deputy commander Eberhard Kautter, leaders of the Viking League, refused to help Hitler and Erich Ludendorff in their 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and conspired against them.

Hitler eventually viewed some of them as a nuisance and threat. A huge ceremony was arranged on 9 November 1933 in which the Freikorps leaders symbolically presented their old battle flags to Hitler's SA and SS. It was a sign of allegiance to their new authority, the Nazi state. When Hitler's internal purge of the party, the Night of the Long Knives, came in 1934, a large number of Freikorps leaders were targeted for killing or arrest, including Ehrhardt and Röhm. Historian Robert G. L. Waite claims that in Hitler's "Röhm Purge" speech to the Reichstag on 13 July 1934, he implied that the Freikorps were one of the groups of "pathological enemies of the state", By 1934 most of them were either forcefully disbanded or voluntarily dissolved or supplanted by and absorbed into the SA and SS.