Army of Evil: A History of the SS (3 page)

Meanwhile, the Kaiser’s abdication had become a sticking point in armistice negotiations with the Allies. He hoped that he could at least remain King of Prussia, if not Kaiser, but Prince Max finally put an
end to the matter by announcing Wilhelm’s abdication from both roles on 9 November. Wilhelm looked to the army for support, but none was forthcoming: Ludendorff had already resigned and fled to Sweden at the end of October; and, in any case, the High Command had little control over its own forces.
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The German soldiers were prepared to return home in relatively good order, but Germany could count on no more than that. The Kaiser confirmed his abdication and left for exile in the Netherlands on 10 November. Prince Max had brought some moderate members of the German Socialist Party (SPD)—the largest single party in the Reichstag—into his government as soon as he was appointed. Now, they were anxious to try to establish some order, so that Germany should not follow Russia into Bolshevism. With the Kaiser gone, though, Prince Max had no authority or mandate to remain as Chancellor, so he resigned in favour of the SPD leader, Friedrich Ebert, the same day.

That was the catalyst for a power struggle between several leftist groups. In addition to the SPD, there were the USPD, independent socialists who had opposed the war, and the
Spartakusbund
(Spartacus League), a communist group led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The USPD were prepared to work with the SPD; the Spartacists were not. Throughout November and December, Germany effectively had two parallel governments: the “constitutional” provisional government under Ebert; and the radical “workers’ and soldiers’ councils,” of which there soon were more than ten thousand across the country. Crucially, the armed forces, under Ludendorff’s successor, General Groener, pledged support to Ebert’s government. On 16 December 1918, the councils held a congress in Berlin and agreed to the formation of a constituent assembly that would be tasked with drawing up a new constitution. By this time, it was clear that the SPD and its allies
were in the majority in most of the councils. The Spartacists, acknowledging that they would not be able to take power by democratic means, decided to follow the Russian model and seize power through armed rebellion, using various republican militias.

This political turmoil, together with external threats from the newly independent Poland and Czechoslovakia, led to a spontaneous upsurge of nationalist and patriotic sentiment among many recently returned German officers, NCOs and soldiers. In part, this was fostered by the High Command’s creation of semi-official militias staffed by loyal volunteers, in the hope that they would preserve order among the rest of the soldiery. But the end result was the birth of the
Freikorps
(Free Corps) movement—bands of freebooting ex-soldiers who would haunt German politics and threaten the nascent German democracy for years to come.

On 23 December 1918, the Spartacists, together with renegade sailors of the
Volksmarine
Division, attempted to seize power in Berlin. Units of the regular army were summoned to help but refused to fire on civilian defenders supporting the revolutionaries, and the best that could be managed was the rescue of the provisional government. So the Spartacists remained in occupation of the seat of government. On 30 December, they formally renamed themselves the German Communist Party (KPD), and on 5 January 1919 they summoned seven hundred thousand demonstrators onto the streets of Berlin, effectively seizing control of the capital.

The provisional government’s response was to turn to the Free Corps. The previous month, General Maercker, a divisional commander in the army, had created a volunteer corps from several thousand of his men, and his example had been followed by a number of commanders in the area around Berlin. The forces they led were not necessarily very large or well equipped, but they were well disciplined and had a sense that they were fulfilling their patriotic duty. On 10 January, they began to move towards Berlin, where they proved more than a match for the larger but poorly organised and badly led revolutionary
forces of the KPD. Just two days later, the Free Corps were in control of much of the city. On 15 January, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested by members of the
Garde-Kavellerie-Schützen-Division
(Guards Cavalry Soldiers’ Division). Luxemburg was beaten with rifle butts, then shot. Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal, which runs through the centre of the city. Liebknecht was shot and dumped in the Tiergarten, next to the government quarter of the city. Hundreds of their supporters were also killed, both in the fighting and after their surrender.

While the Free Corps were mopping up in the capital, elections for the National Assembly were held. The SPD emerged victorious, and it was decided to move the seat of government from Berlin to Weimar in Thuringia, where the Constituent Assembly could begin its work. Over the next eight months, the so-called Weimar Constitution was drafted, amended and finally passed into law, establishing the German Reich as a federal parliamentary republic.

It was under this constitution that the SS was established and the National Socialist Party found a route to power. In 1919, though, it was widely regarded as a model of liberalism. It contained a number of devices that many people assumed would guarantee the long-term flourishing of a flawless and equitable democracy. With the benefit of hindsight, much has been made of its “weaknesses,” and how they allowed Hitler to come to power, but the reality at the time was not so clear cut. It may not have been a perfect document, but it was fit for its purpose and contained no more flaws than other parliamentary democracies’ constitutions. In effect, it was a modified version of the constitution created by Bismarck for the newly unified Germany in 1871,
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with the Kaiser replaced by an elected Reich President, and a federal parliament—the Reichstag—elected by universal adult (over twenty years of age) suffrage in an electoral system of direct proportionality. The problems that beset Germany in the inter-war period and ultimately led to the collapse of democracy were not so much due to this constitution as to the perceived lack of legitimacy of the state
it defined. For most of the lifetime of the Weimar Republic, fewer than half of the deputies sitting in the Reichstag represented parties that supported the democratic republican system. Even the Social Democrats—who were widely perceived as the party that had created the republic—were ambivalent, with many of them clinging to their Marxist heritage. The institutions of state—the civil service and the military—were equally ambivalent, when not actively hostile. For many, the republic was an undesirable and temporary system that had been forced upon Germany because of its defeat in the war.

The chaos of the immediate post-war period was the backdrop for the political awakening of a Bavarian infantryman of Austrian birth named Adolf Hitler, who had spent the previous four years serving at the front as a messenger in the headquarters of the List Regiment. He was awarded the Iron Cross (second and first class), and finished the war as an
Obergefreiter
(lance corporal). The final military defeat of the German Army was inexplicable to Hitler. He was caught in a British gas attack at the beginning of October that left him temporarily blind, so he did not see the final collapse of his comrades, literally or metaphorically. But while in hospital, he later claimed, he had vowed to reverse the personal and national humiliation of defeat.
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On his discharge, after the armistice, he made his way through a country he no longer recognised. The old order was being violently swept away: the Kaiser had abdicated; the Social Democrats were in power; communist and socialist revolutionaries were establishing their councils. In Munich, Hitler found the barracks of his regiment under the authority of a committee of junior soldiers. Unwilling to serve in such a system, he volunteered instead as a guard at a POW camp, where he stayed until February 1919.
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Under Eisner, Bavaria had been pursuing a policy of confrontation with the central provisional government. But that February, Eisner was murdered by a right-wing extremist, Count Arco-Valley. This provoked a violent backlash from the left. On 7 April, a group of extreme leftists seized power and proclaimed a
Räterepublik
(councils’—or
soviet—republic) in Bavaria. SPD militias attempted to overthrow this, but they were defeated. In response, the KPD founded a “Red Army” for the republic, and initiated a reign of terror against their political opponents. Communists rampaged through the streets of Munich, looting and plundering, while schools, businesses and newspapers were shut down.

The provisional government’s response was to mobilise about thirty thousand members of the Free Corps, with whom they surrounded Munich at the end of April. While this was happening, the KPD struck at nationalists within the city, arresting seven members of the extreme right-wing Thule Society—an occultist, anti-Semitic group that was organising nationalist agitation against the communist regime. Among the seven were Countess Heila von Westarp and Prince Gustav von Thurn und Taxis, who were both shot dead in the cellars of the Luitpold Gymnasium on 30 April. The next day, the Free Corps attacked, and gained control of the city forty-eight hours later. A rightist reign of terror then replaced the leftist one: some 650 people were shot by the Free Corps, more than half of them “civilians.” But the net effect was the restoration of central government control over Bavaria.

For all his later hostility to communism, the “November criminals”
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and the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Hitler’s role in all of this was curiously ambiguous. He acted as a company and battalion representative on one of the soldiers’ councils,
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and as far as he made any public comment on the situation at the time, he was generally supportive of the SPD-led provisional government. Certainly, he played no part in the Free Corps’ attack on the leftists.

It was at this point that Hitler’s fortunes changed. Although he was scheduled to be demobilised from the army, he had come to the attention of Captain Karl Mayr, an officer who had been assigned to organise courses of political instruction to guide the soldiery away from
radical, revolutionary views. Mayr seems to have met Hitler in the aftermath of the suppression of the communists in Munich and recognised some hitherto unseen talent in him. He booked Hitler onto a short political indoctrination course at Munich University—in which the students were both indoctrinated themselves and taught how to indoctrinate others—and then assigned him to a camp for returning soldiers as part of an “enlightenment squad.” The idea was that the soldiers would be given the “correct” perspective on recent events in Germany. Having impressed his superiors in this task, in the late summer Hitler assumed the role of liaison officer between the army and the bewildering number of intensely right-wing parties and factions that had sprung up across Bavaria. It was a fateful appointment. On 12 September, he was commissioned to visit and write a report on a group calling itself the German Workers’ Party, which had formed around a former locksmith, Anton Drexler, and a sports journalist, Karl Harrer. During the course of discussions among the group’s members, someone suggested that Bavaria should secede from Germany and seek union with Austria. Unable to contain himself, Hitler jumped in, angrily denounced the idea and railed against the proposer of the motion. Impressed by his eloquence, the leaders of the group invited him to come to their next meeting. Two days after his second visit, Hitler accepted the party’s invitation to join as the member responsible for propaganda and recruitment.

He threw himself into the role with enthusiasm, and within a month had organised a public meeting attended by over a hundred people. Spurred on by this success, in February 1920 he persuaded nearly two thousand people to pack into the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. There he faced down some noisy opposition from a rowdy audience, changed the name of the organisation to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party,
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and presented a twenty-five-point plan to solve
Germany’s ills. Hitler remembered this meeting as the moment when he realised where his destiny lay: as a politician and orator. A few months later, he was discharged from the army and set off down the path that would lead, less than thirteen years later, to the chancellorship of Germany and the subsequent horrors of the Third Reich.

Hitler rapidly struck a chord in post–First World War Bavaria, appealing not only to the ex-servicemen and street-corner toughs who comprised the early membership of the NSDAP, but to a much wider audience. Many of his fellow ex-soldiers firmly agreed that they had not been defeated in the war, but “stabbed in the back” by socialists, Bolsheviks, Jews, capitalists and speculators, who had then tried to take over the country while the heroes of the armed forces were stuck at the front. (Of course, this ignored the reality that many of the revolutionaries were themselves soldiers.) The population of Germany endured great deprivation during the war but was continuously misled by its leaders into thinking that the military and strategic situation was much better than it actually was. That partly explains why the final defeat of the German Army came as such a shock to soldiers and civilians alike, most of whom were convinced that victory was near at hand.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, a division had started to widen in the German middle class. At the upper end, professionals, successful businessmen and high-ranking civil servants had become almost indistinguishable, both financially and socially, from the aristocracy and traditional “ruling” class. After all, their activities had given the emerging Reich the industrial and intellectual muscle to take its place on the world stage. Meanwhile, the lower middle class of small farmers and businessmen, shopkeepers and, above all, the great army of white-collar clerks, low-level officials, teachers, civil servants and junior managers had come under the twin pressures of large-scale corporate capitalism from above and organised labour from below. This had produced a move towards right-wing radicalism with undertones of nationalism and anti-Semitism even before the outbreak of
the First World War. But Germany’s defeat, and the subsequent upheavals as the old order collapsed, greatly exacerbated the lower middle class’s dislocation: small businesses failed and hard-earned savings were wiped out by rampant inflation. The National Socialist message was that this was the work of the Jews and the communists—as far as Hitler was concerned, the two were virtually synonymous—not the inevitable result of German expansionist nationalism. This perspective resonated as much with the struggling lower middle class as it did with the bewildered ex-soldiers.