The United States, having turned down Versailles, is thus still technically at war with Germany. To end that unpleasantness, diplomats negotiate one of the least-known agreements in history, the 1921 Treaty of Berlin, which reserves most of the American rights and demands while ending the state of war. It withdraws from the Reich the 1,200 American members of the Allied Control Commission, the U.S. Third Army from the Rhineland, and resumes normal diplomatic relations. After the low-level diplomats sign the paperwork, they find they have time for a few drinks before dinner.
But in 1919 Germany, violence continues. And the new 100,000-man Reichswehr is determined to eliminate it as a threat to the Army's fragile existence. To do so in Bavaria, Captain Karl Mayr is put in charge of Section Ib/P 4th Bavarian Reichswehr Group HQ in the spring of 1919, a bureau organized to investigate subversive political activities among the troops. Mayr taps Obergefreiter Adolf Hitler, on the basis of his war record, and because "he was like a tired stray dog looking for a master," for the job. To Mayr, Hitler seems "ready to throw in his lot with anyone who will show him kindness" and "totally unconcerned about the German people and their destinies."
Not at all. In his barracks in the long summer of 1919, Hitler is devouring more anti-Semitic pamphlets, his hatred against Jews in general being simmered by the bloodshed in Munich's streets. He sees Jews everywhere conspiring to destroy Germany. And he's delighted to investigate these plots.
To prepare for the great task, Hitler goes to a special indoctrination course at the University of Munich with other political agents. All the classes, run by right-wingers, do is confirm Hitler's belief that the new Weimar Republic, founded on the "stab-in-the-back" legend, will only hasten the Communist revolution. Hitler does well. One of the professors, the arch-conservative Karl Alexander Von Muller, tells Mayr that Hitler is a "natural orator." Mayr puts Hitler to work giving political lectures to the troops, telling them about the evil Marxist-Jewish conspiracy. Hitler enjoys the work, even if he annoys his fellow agents with his endless talking.
Hitler also gives political talks to the angry soldiers awaiting demobilization, supposedly to tell them to be good patriots. Instead, Hitler tells them to hate the "November criminals" and politicians who led the revolution that overthrew the Kaiser and signed the Armistice, as well as the Western powers. The officers are impressed. One calls Hitler "the born people's speaker, and by his fanaticism and his crowd appeal he clearly compels the attention of his listeners, and makes them think his way."
In September 1919, Hitler is busy investigating 50 radical organizations in the Munich area, across the political spectrum. The Army wants to know who to back, who to suppress, and who to ignore. The list of enemies includes the Society of Communistic Socialists and the Bavarian Monarchist Party.
One of them is a small outfit called the German Workers' Party, founded on January 5, 1919, by a railroad works toolmaker and locksmith named Anton Drexler. Its 23 members, mostly fellow railway workers, support a vague program of socialism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism. It draws inspiration from the ultra-Nationalistic Thule Society, whose leaders sought out Drexler to organize a nationalist party among workers. The Thule big shots bankroll other right-wing outfits, including one run by a Franconia sexual pervert and sadist named Julius Streicher.
On September 12, 1919, Gabriele D'Annunzio occupies Fiume with a militant group of Italians. That evening, Hitler attends a meeting of the Workers' Party at Lieber Room of the Sterneckerbrau, a Herrenstrasse beer hall, wearing a baggy suit, to take notes for the Army. He even signs in as "Lance Corporal Hitler, 2nd Infantry Regiment."
He writes down that the outfit seems to be one of those ephemeral groups that "sprang out of the ground, only to vanish after a time." But when engineer Gottfried Feder's dull speech on Jewish control over lending capital ends, Drexler asks for audience participation. A member says that Bavaria should secede from Germany. At this, Hitler jumps up and delivers an impromptu 15-minute talk that leaves everyone, including Drexler, stunned. "This one has what it takes, we could use him!" Drexler gasps.
Before the corporal can leave, Drexler shoves his pamphlet, "My Political Awakening," under Hitler's nose, and urges him to read it and return. Hitler loves pamphlets. He spends the evening setting out bread crusts to feed mice in his room and reading the pamphlet, riveted to its phrases on "National Socialism" and "new world-order."
Hitler is invited to the next meeting, and he goes to the Alles Roemerbad Restaurant at 46 Herrn Street, to find the six-man executive board reading endless minutes, arguing over the 54-man membership and 7.5 marks in the treasury, and discussing correspondence (three letters) at great length. He asks if the leaders have any practical ideas on running the party. Not one. They do not possess any program, leaflet, or even a rubber stamp. Hitler leaves, steamed. The club seems absurd. But it hasn't "frozen into an organization."
Hitler reports his findings to Mayr, who passes them up the chain of command with the usual endorsements to a group of capitalists and army brass who meet at the Hotel Four Seasons to talk about rebuilding the Reichswehr. They agree with Hitler's conclusion: rebuilding the German Empire can only be achieved with the support of the workers. They think the German Workers' Party would be a good start. As Mayr has noted, it "speaks for the front generation." They suggest Hitler join it, even though such moves by active-duty soldaten are illegal.
So Hitler does, and also joins the party as member No. 555. To make it seem more imposing, Party memberships start at member No. 501. He also is named in the Executive Committee as Member No. 7.
On September 16, 1919, Hitler writes a friend, Adolf Gemlich, saying that the Jews have brought about "the racial tuberculosis of peoples." He rejects "anti-Semitism from purely emotional grounds," in favor of an "anti-Semitism of reason," which will aim at "the planned legislative combating and removal of the Jews' privileges." He adds, "Its final aim must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether."
Hitler puts his formidable energy to work to strengthen the party. He bats out its invitations to meetings on the barracks typewriter. He finds an office and hires a sergeant to be the party's business manager, whipping the party bureaucracy into existence.
At the events, he's the main speaker, and electrifies audiences with angry, anti-Semitic, anti-Versailles, rhetoric. He avoids the dull lectures his contemporary right-wing politicians give. He starts his speeches quietly, his hoarse voice rising in pitch, building up to an emotional climax. The words and phrases he uses are also firm: terms like "absolute," "uncompromising," "irrevocable," "undeviating," "unalterable," and "final." He will use the same words all of his life, even when ordering the final defense of Berlin.
On October 16, while Leon Trotsky's Red Guards battle White General Anton Denikin's troops outside Moscow, more than 70 people attend Hitler's meeting.
On November 13, the same day the US Senate adopts the Lodge Reservations to the League of Nations covenant, and the day Brian Horrocks makes his escape from Omsk, more than 130 people come to hear Hitler speak, paying 50 pfennig a head. Listeners are impressed by Hitler's energy. He offers audiences self-confidence, aggression, and a belief in Germany's destiny. His accounts of his poverty-stricken life and frontline experience resonate in the hearts of his listeners, who react with an almost religious fervor. Soon Hitler is changing the party's politics, too, awing Drexler.
Already Hitler is showing the signs of the oratorical powers that will be his greatest strength. He gives the impression of being out of control, but stops himself just before going into incoherence. He answers hecklers with quick wit, hurls sarcasm when necessary, and above all, repeats over and over, his simple points: Germany must overcome her betrayal.
Germany's ferment is not the only Reich news. In November 1919, Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity finally impacts on the general public, when the study of a solar eclipse proves one of its major points - that starlight can be deflected by gravity. Proof of Einstein's theories mean that Newton's picture of a universe of absolute time and space is inaccurate…time and space are relative concepts. Outside of university campuses and scientific bodies, nobody understands Einstein's theories. But within academia's walls, his ideas have great impact, pointing science toward the most devastating weapon in history.
On November 6, The Royal Astronomical Society announces its findings at London's Burlington House, beneath a portrait of Newton, showing that Einstein's theories are correct and have overturned Newton's. The Times calls the report a "Revolution in Science."
German anti-Semites have harsher words for the theory's creator, a 43-year-old scientist whose bushy hair and controversial statements make him the model for stage and film "mad scientists" everywhere. More importantly, Einstein has sat out the Great War as an ardent pacifist, and supports internationalism and the League of Nations. An anti-Semitic group billing itself as the Committee of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Scholarship denounces Einstein as a tasteless self-promoter and Relativity as Jewish corruption. Einstein is irritated, fires off a defensive article, but later finds it more amusing.
The Treaty of Versailles comes into force on January 10, 1920 - five days after the Boston Red Sox sell Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000 - along with the League of Nations' Covenant, and the hope of world peace moves to the Palais des Nations in Geneva, where the League gets down to business. To everyone's surprise, the League actually gets some things done: it prevents Italy from taking over Albania in 1920 and Corfu in 1923. It also prevents France from permanently taking over the Saar, assists war refugees, and successfully fights diseases and epidemics.
The League of Nations' beginning has little impact on Brian Horrocks, still fleeing Red troops in Siberia. On January 7, 1920, his train lies stopped in a small town eight miles west of Krasnoyarsk. Outside of the train, White Russian officers and men are throwing away their rifles. The Reds have outflanked the White defenders, and taken Krasnoyarsk on January 3. Horrocks' six-week and 1,000-mile journey has been in vain. With nothing left to do, the British crew cooks supper.
While cooking, the Red Army turns up in the form of a soldier with a huge red cockade on his fur cap. His officers arrive next, and say the British are their prisoners, but can they join in for supper?
Hayes and Horrocks consider buying a sleigh and a couple of ponies, and heading 500 miles southeast to Mongolia. But Vining points out that Horrocks is the only officer in the crew who can speak Russian. Horrocks also sees the wisdom in not trying to flee across Siberian wilderness. He and the other 41 British prisoners go to Krasnoyarsk, finding it jammed with soldiers, refugees, Poles, Czechs, and thousands of White Russian POWs.
In a weird state of prisoner life, Horrocks and his crew have to take jobs to raise money to buy food. One officer plays piano in a café. Horrocks teaches English in a girls' school at 250 rubles (10 shillings) a week.
Fed up with long queues, little food, and having to trade his last shirt for a pair of skates and bag of nuts, Horrocks walks to the head of the queue to see the Krasnoyarsk commandant, and barks, "An English delegation to see the commandant." Horrocks' manner wins the trick, and he gets into the commandant's office, where the top Bolshevik returns Horrocks' salute. "We hold you personally responsible for our safety," says Horrocks.
"Of course," the Russian says. "But I did not know there were any British in the town. What do you want?"
"First of all, food, and secondly, to go back to the UK." The commandant gives Horrocks and his crew food cards, but tells them there's little chance of getting out - the Reds are fighting the Japanese between Krasnoyarsk and Vladivostok. The railways are broken-down, the horses all being eaten. "I will try and send you to Vladivostok as soon as possible, but in the meantime you must remain here," the commandant says.
Horrocks and his team are stuck for a month, so he studies the Red Army. It lacks discipline, and the political commissars have the real power. The rest of the time, he and his pals squat grimly in two rooms, short of food. They do not complain - 200 White Russian POWs are dying each day in their ghastly camp.
Orders finally come through to send the British home, and they board a fourth-class carriage in the station, and sit for days, waiting. At that point, Horrocks becomes one of 30,000 people in Krasnoyarsk to suffer typhus, caught from one of the stacks of naked corpses and sleighs packed with frozen bodies.
With Horrocks running a temperature and a burning thirst, there is no question he can stay in a railway wagon. However, the Krasnoyarsk hospital is no improvement - Horrocks has been there before, and been overpowered by the stench. He's taken there anyway, through corridors that stink of urine, delirious, thinking that he will die or be tried for treason. He later calls it the lowest point in his life.
Horrocks spends six days unconscious, with George Hayes there every day, covered with anti-louse powder. Hayes and Vining make sure that Horrocks is taken to the best hospital in the city, a former school, and Hayes makes sure Horrocks gets very rare milk and white bread. Told that his party has not left and is waiting for him, Horrocks recovers.
On March 18, while Germany suffers the Kapp Putsch, Horrocks finally leaves Krasnoyarsk, going to Irkutsk, where his party has to wait for two months, under the control of a ferocious female Commissar.
Another young officer is about to embark on a lengthy journey. In late December 1919, the Prince of Wales asks Lord Louis Mountbatten to join him on him on a Royal Tour of Australia and New Zealand. His title will officially be flag-lieutenant, but actually serve as ADC and companion to the Prince, six years Mountbatten's elder.
The Royal Party sails on HMS Renown, fresh from a specialized refit, on March 15, 1920, the same day the U.S. Senate shoots down the Treaty of Versailles. Renown is well-prepared for this voyage: a 4-inch gun and her seaplane catapults have been removed to make extra space for her Royal guests. High-grade wooden planking has been laid over the quarter-deck, forecastle, and boat deck, and special crews are handpicked for the voyage.
The trip lasts 210 days, and takes the Prince and Mountbatten first to New Zealand, arriving in Auckland on April 24, 1920, where dense crowds hail the cheery young man who will ascend their throne. Next day, he attends the ANZAC Day service at St. Mary's Catehdral. Even the striking railway engine-drivers toot their whistles and cheer the Prince of Wales. The loyalty doesn't go far, though - next day, they refuse to take out the royal train. The railway authorities scrape up a train for him anyway, and he visits 21 towns and cities before reaching Wellington.
Mountbatten handles much of the organization, keeping the Prince on schedule. He seems to miss his lady friend back in London, Mrs. Freda Dudley Ward, and causes annoyance by failing to attend a Returned Soldiers' Dance in Reefton.
From there, the Prince and Mountbatten head for Melbourne, reaching it in immense fog on May 26, to begin a lengthy tour of that nation.
Other officers are not going as far as Horrocks or Mountbatten. Lt. Col. Bernard Law Montgomery finally gets the call to the Staff College at Camberley on January 22, 1920, and is quickly disenchanted. The school seems mostly concerned with hunting and socializing, to enable a young regimental officer to serve as Brigade-Major.
Monty is furious at the lackadaisical attitudes and pace. He lets everyone know as often as possible for the coming year. Nobody can stand his complaints and blistering tongue. The Staff College magazine for Christmas 1920, asks in its "Things We Want to Know" column, "If and where Monty spent two silent minutes on Armistice Day?"
But he studies under fine minds - John Dill and Philip Neame - and alongside other ones: Bernard Paget, Richard O'Connor, and George Lindsay.
Two other officers are having a hard time with their espousal of new ideas. George Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower's article on the future use of tanks has not played well with the Army's leadership. They have called for maneuver warfare. The Army War College will say in 1922 that warfare means fighting and that war is never won by maneuvering.
Ike is told by the Chief of Infantry, Maj. Gen. Charles S. Farnsworth, that "my ideas were not only wrong but dangerous and that henceforth I would keep them to myself. If I did not, I would be hauled before a court-martial." Eisenhower knows that he cannot take on the whole US Army. Not that he's taking on a large organization. By June 1920, when the National Defense Act becomes law, the Regular Army is authorized at 300,000 men. Actually there are only 200,000 men on the payroll of an Army that mustered 3.7 million men in 1918. By January 1921, Congress cuts the Army down to 175,000…then in June of that year to 150,000…and the following year to 12,000 commissioned officers and 125,000 enlisted men, the figure it holds until 1936. By 1922, the US Army ranks 17th among nations with standing armies, its men scattered across domestic posts, the Mexican border, America's overseas possessions, and the 15th Regiment in Shanghai.
Among the casualties of these sweeping cuts is the Tank Corps…the remaining FT17 tanks go to the infantry. In 1921, Congress provides the Infantry Corps with a mere $79,000.
Ike and Patton are busted to their pre-war permanent ranks of captain. Then they are promoted in those ranks to major. Their pay is cut from $290 a month to $220. This is no burden for the wealthy Patton, but a massive one for Eisenhower. He spends $800 - most of his savings - fixing up the run-down barracks he and Mamie are given as quarters. They sleep on surplus Army cots. And Ike supplements his income with poker winnings, and spends his free time playing with his beloved son, "Icky."
Patton, however, has an easier time. His father-in-law, Massachusetts textile king Frederick Ayer, holds an estate valued at $19.2 million, and the Ayer family takes care of Bea and Georgie's money. Patton regards Bea's cousin, attorney Arvin "Jerry" Brown, who handles the paper, as "the Jew," and warns his father, "I see in an announcement that Jerry is in a new business and that you are a director. Be careful that this modern Shylock does not get more than a pound of your flesh." But Brown shows Patton that he is scrupulously honest, and the flamboyant cavalry major winds up trusting the office man. From the Ayer family Patton draws his increasing distrust of labor, radicals, Italians, and Jews.
But Patton finds peacetime alternately boring and worrisome. In February 1920, he writes to his father, saying, "Universal training has been beaten and things for the future of the U.S. are very black. We will surely have a revolution and there are no troops to hold. Unless they change the Army Bill the Cavalry will be reduced to about 11 regiments all always on the Border. The infantry will almost certainly gobble the Tanks and there will be general hell to pay."
Such grim thoughts do not occupy the minds of the 1,150 British officers and tars who put the Empire's newest and proudest warship into her first commission on March 29, 1920, in Rosyth. HMS Hood breaks out the White Ensign. On May 15, she puts to sea for the first time, headed for her next decade's homeport, Plymouth. She misses the battleship Warspite steaming to the Mediterranean for exercises and patrolling the Irish coast.
December 1919 sees Germany in chaos and Hitler hard at work at a table in Munich, which is decorated with a small sculptured wooden gallows, from which hangs a realistic figure of a dangling Jew.
At the table, sculpture present, Hitler unveils his 25 points at the Hofbrauhaus to 2,000 people, on February 24, 1920. "These points of ours are going to rival Luther's placard on the doors of Wittenberg!" Hitler bellows. He whips up the crowd, attacks the Jews, the government's fiscal policies, and gains converts. One of them is a 20-year-old law student from Karlsruhe named Hans Frank, who will become Poland's vassal king under Hitler, slaughtering millions for the Fuhrer.
Finally come Hitler's theses: union of all Germany in a single Reich, colonies for the excess population, revocation of Versailles, ruthless war on crime, abolition of all income unearned by work. He also demands that Jews be treated as aliens, denied public office, and expelled immediately if they entered the country after August 2, 1914. In addition, Jews cannot hold or publish German-language newspapers.
Hitler's appeal is straight to the hordes of de-mobilized Frontkämpfer in the beer halls: respect for the veterans and the families of the killed and wounded. Communists, Socialists, and Jews in Moscow's pay stabbed Germany in the back and are blaming the soldiers for losing the war. Capitalists are also unpatriotic: they use cheap overseas labor for imported goods and send the profits to foreign banks. Hitler also blames Jewish merchants for raising the prices of goods. These theories aren't true, but to men who have struggled pointlessly for four years in Flanders mud, ending their war on humiliating terms, it is the explanation they want to hear.
By the end of the two-hour speech, Frank is just one of hundreds who believe that "If anyone could master the fate of Germany, Hitler was that man."
Soon Hitler has scores of converts and allies. Dietrich Eckart, the cultured writer, drug addict, drunkard, and anti-Semite, joins up to correct Hitler's grammar, chat about music, and introduce Hitler to Munich's power elite. And Hitler changes the name of his outfit to the National Socialist German Workers Party, rendered in German as the Nazional Socialistische Deutsches Arbeiters Partei, or "Nazis," for short.
Hitler gets his party's symbol from the nationalist Thule Society, whose well-heeled right-wingers practice occult rituals and support right-wing parties, including a newspaper called the Munich Beobachter. A Thule big shot suggests the Swastika, which rotates right handed and clockwise. Hitler flips the Indo-Mongolian symbol around, making it - probably unknowingly - a symbol of darkness, black magic, and destruction.
Hitler takes propaganda seriously. He hunts through old art magazines and the Munich State Library's heraldry department to find the exact drawing of the eagle he wants for the party's rubber stamp.
Hitler's political dogma also comes from the Thule Society and its mixture of black magic, Nordic supremacy, anti-Semitism, and German Nationalism. Hitler doesn't offer concrete economic or political policies. He just says that a nation of pure German blood will solve all problems. He doesn't get too specific on how that will be accomplished.
By 1920, strutting Nazis are marching in Munich's streets, brandishing Swastika banners, howling against Versailles. But their rhetoric is buried in the chaos in Berlin, where a tougher force, the Freikorps, tries to overthrow the government.
Among the many dictates of Versailles is that the Freikorps must be disbanded. A few become regiments of the Reichswehr, but many have to become "athletic societies," "circuses," "detective agencies," "haulage companies," and "labor gangs" who use their "machine tools" to harass their enemies.
The Freikorps have been busy folks. Hired by the newly independent nation of Latvia, thousands of Freikorps fighters have been battling in the Baltic States against the advancing Red Army, promised 90 acres of land after victory. However, the Freikorps soon wear out their welcome. After they chase the Reds out of Latvia, they murder Latvians who don't want to give up their land to the government and its German mercenaries. Now the Latvian government fears its own hirelings.
When the Freikorps free Riga, they proclaim martial law and fill the jails with anyone considered "pro-Bolshevik," and shoot them in batches of 50. The Latvians and the Allies order the Freikorps to leave. The Germans, demanding their 90 acres (and mules, presumably), refuse.
The British and French, outraged at continued German militarism, blockade the Latvian coast. The Latvians raise their own armies and counterattack the Freikorps. When Versailles is signed, the Freikorps must agree to evacuate the Baltic States. On their way home, they burn, murder, and pillage, enraging the Allies and the new Weimar government, which no longer sees the Freikorps as a useful ally.
The Generalstab is angry, too. Versailles has cut the Reichswehr's numbers to 100,000. The Reichswehr, in the form of the new commanding general, monocled Hans Von Seeckt, warns the government that the Army has no confidence in the civilian politicians. Everyone fears a Freikorps coup.
Which is just what happens. The 2nd Eberhardt Naval Freikorps Brigade, however, led by the goateed Dr. Wolfgang Kapp and Ludendorff himself, provides the punch. During the war, the New York-born Kapp was a Department of Agriculture bigwig who bossed the Fatherland Party, a nationalist group that called for higher taxes and sterner measures against suspected backsliders.
Now Kapp and his pals, General Walther von Luttwitz and Colonel Reinhard, call the government a "gang of villains" in late January 1920. 12,000 men of the Eberhardt Freikorps and the Freikorps Iron Division, back from the Baltic States, march on Berlin to await the signal for a coup.
The spark lights on February 3, 1920, when the Allies present their list of 900 Germans they want extradited for war crimes trials. They include Hindenburg, the Crown Prince and two of his brothers, field-marshals, politicians, officers, and NCOs.
Predictably, Germany is outraged. Seeckt says that if the government does not oppose the Allied demands, the army will resume the war, using the Freikorps if necessary. The Allied Control Commission reacts by ordering the Eberhardt Naval Brigade and the Iron Division to disband.
Instead Luttwitz, a 61-year-old typical Prussian general who seeks to restore the Kaiser, reviews the two brigades on February 1, tells them he will never allow the Allies or anyone else to disband them, and calls for a march on Berlin.
Noske warns Kapp and Luttwitz not to march, suggesting he'll call elections instead. Kapp reacts by marching into Berlin on the night of March 12, two days before the US Senate votes down the Treaty of Versailles. Kapp rallies his men with promise of a bonus if they launch the coup. That appeal apparently works, and the Kapp Putsch is on.
Noske calls upon Seeckt to quell the coup at a special council early on March 13. Seeckt fixes Noske with a glare from his monocle and says he is ordering his men to stay in barracks and remain neutral.
"Our troops do not fire on our troops…when Reichswehr fires on Reichswehr, then all comradeship within the officer corps has vanished," Seeckt answers. The Army will not fight the Freikorps. He is going on "indefinite leave." And off he goes by car.
So does the government, heading for Dresden, taking with them the core of German government, all their rubber stamps. Noske, broken, burbles, "This night has shown me the bankruptcy of my policy. My faith in the officers' corps is shattered. There is nothing left for me but suicide." Instead, he just resigns.
The same evening, the Freikorps strike in Munich. Local Reichswehr commander General Arnold von Moehl presents an ultimatum to Social Democrat Premier Hoffmann, demanding a rightwing government under Gustav von Kahr, a stodgy monarchist. Von Moehl tells Hoffmann that the Reichswehr cannot "keep the peace" without being given power. Hoffmann looks into the Freikorps-Army bayonets and agrees, and Bavaria becomes the center of Freikorps and nationalist activities.
That done, the Reichswehr sends an emissary to Berlin to hook up with the Kapp Putsch - Cpl. Adolf Hitler. He makes his first airplane flight in a machine piloted by World War ace Ritter Robert von Greim, who will in 1945 become Hitler's last field marshal and boss of what's left of the Luftwaffe. Hitler spends the flight throwing up, and vows never to fly again. He will break that promise, too.
Meanwhile, Kapp's motley legion marches through the Brandenburg Gate, with bands playing. Ludendorff and Luttwitz meet them in full uniform, Kapp and his "cabinet" in fancy dress. A British colonel with the Armistice Commission goggles from his Adlon Hotel window at the sight of German troops in coal-scuttle helmets, armed with rifles, 77-mm guns, and grenades, camping out on Berlin's streets.
While he watches, armored cars and trucks mounted with machine-guns rumble into the Unter den Linden, spewing out Kapp's pamphlets, announcing the coup. Among Kapp's proclamations in the piles of paper is that there will be no more examinations at the University of Berlin. That statement puts the student body on Kapp's side.
However, the crowd watching the display is far less impressed, even when the bands boom out the usual German brass standbys, including "Deutschland Über Alles."
Kapp tries to take over, but he and his romantic revolutionary cronies, like many Byrons, are completely unprepared for the tedious and grim realities of government. For one thing, they don't have any rubber stamps. For two days they can't find anyone to type up their political manifesto. And when the Imperial Bank refuses to hand over money and gold bars, Kapp's crew has no cash to pay off its troops and thugs. Whitehall tells Luttwitz that even if Kapp maintains his hold on Berlin, London will not recognize the new government. A German historian calls the Kapp Putsch: "A political movement, which, aiming at a revolution, succeeded in achieving nothing more than a riot."
With no troops to command, Ebert relies on his political base, the trade unions, ordering a general strike. The unions shut Berlin down completely - no electricity, trolley cars, subways, or water. Garbage rots in the streets. Prostitutes as young as 11, however, still walk the streets, competing for business with leather-clad war widow dominatrixes. This is not something Kapp has planned for. Noske and Ebert send a plane flying over the Reichhauptstadt to drop leaflets on Berliners, saying that the real government still exists.
Luttwitz answers the strike by sending troops into the Unter Den Linden who fire on strikers. After shooting defenseless men and women down, the Freikorps men march across the square behind one of their bands. A civilian remarks to the British colonel, "The bloodhounds! First they shoot us and then they play music!"
The brutality overshadows the comic-opera nature of the Kapp Putsch, but also reveals character traits in some Germans that will re-appear on a vaster scale in 20 years: executions done in a triumphant and at times casual manner, and a callous disregard and contempt for humanity.
After five days of posturing, "Reich Chancellor" Kapp flags down a taxicab, and takes it to Tempelhof Airfield, where a special plane takes him to Sweden and obscurity.
As Kapp flees the scene, Hitler arrives in Berlin to see if the Bavarian Reichswehr, its Freikorps, and the Nazis can cooperate with Kapp. Hitler bounces into the Reichskanzlei just after Kapp has left, and meets a dark-skinned little man, coming out, clutching a bulging briefcase.
"Where do I find the Herr Reich Chancellor," Hitler asks importantly. "I have just flown in form Munich on a special mission. It is urgent that I see His Excellency without delay!"
The little man, a Hungarian Jew and journalist named Trebitsch-Lincoln, is just quitting his three-day position as Kapp's Chief Press Officer and Censor. "Get out of here just as fast as you can and fly right back to Munich," Trebitsch-Lincoln says. "Dr. Kapp and the others have all gone. The whole thing is over. The police are on their way here. They'll be arriving any minute. Don't let them find you here, unless you want to get yourself arrested. Sorry I can't stay to talk with you. I must go. Good luck!"
Hitler alertly heads back to Tempelhof and Munich, disgusted by the sight of prostitutes brandishing whips on Berlin's streets. Trebitsch-Lincoln, who has just saved Hitler from prison, continues on to serve as an Evangelist preacher, a member of the British House of Commons, and winds up in a Buddhist monastery in China.
With Kapp subdued and the trains running in Berlin again, the Red-dominated trade unions present their demands to Ebert. They want full power, so as to prevent another Kapp Putsch. To make their point, Ruhr Kumpel - coal miners - and metalworkers walk out of their jobs, shutting down the mines and factories.
Both Allied and Reichswehr troops are barred from the Ruhr. That absence of authority enables 70,000 leftist Rote Soldatenbund guards to occupy Düsseldorf, Essen, and most of the "Workshop of Germany." On March 19, 1920, the day after Brian Horrocks finally leaves Krasnoyarsk, the leftists shoot it out with cops and Freikorps men in Essen, defeating the authorities, and taking over the Krupp works. The same day, the U.S. Senate shoots down (for the second time) the Treaty of Versailles.
Max Holz establishes a "Soviet Republic" in Thuringia. Red Guards loot arms depots in Spandau and Koepenick in Berlin and ambush Reichswehr patrols, killing German soldiers and fighter ace Rudolf Berthold, strangling him with the ribbon of his Pour le Mérite.
Ebert and the defense minister, Otto Gessler, are forced to call in Seeckt (miraculously back from leave) and ask him to use the Reichswehr to put down the new revolt. Seeckt can't do it unless he gets help from the Freikorps, so the Eberhardt mutineers are recalled into government service under their own bosses, to maintain law and order. Ebert even has to pay the Freikorps men the bonus that Kapp promised them in return for overthrowing the government.
Seeckt is given great powers. He places General Staff officers in relevant civil ministries. The Topographical Section's men go to the Ministry of the Interior. The Railway Section's crew goes to the Ministry of Transport, where Groener is the Minister, and the Military History section goes to the government archives. The Army is a state within a state.
Once again the democratic government of Germany must depend for its survival on the very elements that despise it and have sought its destruction, further weakening Weimar Germany in the eyes of its own people.
The Freikorps men, who have plenty of experience at committing butchery in the Baltic States, march into the Ruhr on Easter Sunday, April 3, bayoneting wounded men and shooting prisoners. It takes the Freikorps men one day to end the revolt. The final battle is fought before a church, in full view of congregants in Easter bonnets. After defeating the rebels, the Freikorps tries them and shoots them. Two sisters in their teens, standing on the church steps, leave their mothers, to help tend the wounded. When Walter Duranty of The New York Times catches up with them for the interview, one says, "I think all soldiers ought to be put in front of their own machine-guns and shot till there are none of them left."
One Freikorps student volunteer writes about shooting 10 Red Cross nurses on sight "with pleasure - how they cried and pleaded with us to save their lives. Nothing doing! Anybody with a gun was our enemy." This ethos will power the SS Einsatzkommandos 20 years later.
After two weeks of violence, order is restored, and Max Holz escapes. Gustav Krupp returns to his office to find the office thermometer over 70 degrees. A cold-air fanatic, he flings open the windows and shuts off the heat.
Meanwhile, the Allies get down to the serious business of disarming Germany. The Reich in 1920 consists of 65 million people living across 182,000 square miles of territory. The Allies send 383 offices and 737 enlisted men (other ranks) to disarm the Reich. As the Americans have not ratified the Treaty of Versailles, there are no doughboy officers among the French horizon bleu and British khaki. From the start, they don't have a chance.
On January 28, 1920, New York City reports 5,589 new cases of Spanish Influenza in the last 24 hours, the largest daily total since the epidemic began in 1918. Some 118 flu victims have died in the last 24 hours. Spanish Influenza is hitting the whole world. Cdr. Andrew Cunningham, commanding the destroyer HMS Termagant of the Dover Patrol, finds he has only 26 men out of 150 fit for duty. And Cunningham's duties are serious - he has to ferry VIPs like Prince Albert and Lloyd George to and from France.
The next day, the French and Germans begin the opening meeting of the disarmament commission in Berlin. Germany's representative, General Cramon, "declares this meeting open."
France's General Nollet roars, "Stop! It is for me to declare this meeting open. We are in control here!"
Cramon snarls, "You are a foreign mission, on our territory in time of peace. By all diplomatic precedents it is for me to decide."
Nollet retorts, "There are no precedents. The Treaty has made one. The Treaty has placed us in control, and control means supervision."
"Very well," Cramon barks, "then I must report to my government."
"And I to mine," Nollet answers. The two generals snap their briefcases shut and march out of the room. Nobody's had a chance to sit down, let alone try the coffee and crullers. The two sides never meet again.
Back at the shabby Hotel Bellvue, General Nollet angrily tells his staff that he has beaten the Germans four times in battle, and he will not lose now.
Initially, the Control Commission doesn't lose. British and French officers hustle off to Germany's 7,000 factories, and report that the schlotbarone are converting their plants to civilian purposes. Even Krupp A.G., known to its owning family as Die Firma, the world's largest armaments complex, is switching over. More than two-thirds of the 180,000 Kruppianer have been laid off. The Gusstahlfabrik, Krupp's main plant in Essen, has switched from turning out 36,000 shells in a 10-hour day to producing sewing machines and tractors.
