It is fitting that I should discuss this on Philipp Heinrich Scheidemann’s 158th birthday, given his régime’s rôle in deploying the following paramilitary.

I have a feeling that you all already know the basics, but in case somebody does not: the Freikorps was a counterrevolutionary paramilitary that the Weimar Republic’s social democratic élite used as pawns against the communists and other discontented elements from the lower‐classes. Similarly to the White Army and the szabadcsapatok, it was protofascist: technically not fascist (yet), but still an important inspiration and many members would go on to explicitly support Fascism when it evolved into an institutional phenomenon in Germany. It actually has a pretty long history, but the focus here is on the early twentieth century.

This paper refutes the misconception that ‘the far left was as bad as the far right’, and if you want a refresher course on the Freikorps then this is perfect; it is only twenty‐four pages long. Nonetheless, I suspect that many of us are less familiar with the Freikorps’s misogyny and its colonial heritage. First, here is an excerpt:

As a number of historians have argued, challenging claims that both left and right engaged in violent acts, the violence from the right was of a qualitatively different scale and nature (Jones 2016; Schumann 2009). Indeed, by comparison with other revolutionary contexts, violence from the left was minimal. The post‐war wave of radical right violence subsided by 1921, the work of containing revolutionary movements largely complete, but that violence had profound longer‐term impacts, not least in setting in place precedents and practices that enabled the rise of [Fascism].

[…]

In his analysis of Freikorps writings, primarily from the 1919–1933 period, Matthias Sprenger finds that 30% were oriented to a more traditional imperial Prussian conservatism, 20% to a soldierly nationalism like that of Jünger and 50% were Nazi‐oriented (Sprenger 2008, p. 28). Granted those who wrote tended to have more developed political views, but what virtually all fighters shared was an implacable hostility to socialism. That included the SPD, but in the context of the revolution stabilising the SPD‐led government against the greater Bolshevik evil was the primary goal.

[…]

As was the case more broadly, the unreformed judiciary treated radical right fighters exceptionally leniently. Two low‐ranking soldiers were charged, but served paltry jail terms. Urging them on were posters from organisations like Stadtler’s Anti‐Bolshevik League or the Association for Combatting Bolshevism. The counter‐revolution grew in organisational complexity, resources, scope of action and levels of violence in the months that followed.

A familiar pattern developed as left‐wing actions and attempts to establish alternative administrations were met by massive paramilitary violence. Berlin was most active, the suppression of a general strike in early March leading to the killing of well over 1000 purported communists, including many after Noske authorised on the spot executions, but a similar dynamic also played out in Bremen, Mühlheim, Halle and Hamburg.

[…]

In the ensuing chaos, a Soviet Council Republic was declared. It was led by a motley collection of radicals, with the KPD only reluctantly participating, Paul Levi (1919) and others denouncing it as an example of revolutionary adventurism. Again the Freikorps led the response against a hastily organised and rather ineffective Red Army, the pitched battles in this case resembling more closely a situation of civil war.

The left executed a number of prisoners, many members of the radical right Thule Society, but the Freikorps response was on a different scale. By early May they controlled the city, their rampage killing over 1000 suspected communists. Leaders like the Expressionist playwright Ernst Toller only survived by going into hiding, but he and many others were given lengthy prison sentences in the aftermath.

Now, examples of the Freikorps’s misogyny:

Especially notable in Munich was the extent to which the Freikorps targeted women, the “male fundamentalism” (Weisbrod 2000) that structured their politics generating a profoundly misogynist violence. Erich Mühsam, who both participated in and was one of the most perceptive analysts of the Munich events, reflected in 1931 on the brutality of a sexualised mutilation visited upon women who were killed, a practice we will see again in the Freikorps’ Baltic campaigns (Mühsam 1980).

[…]

In his memoir of his participation, Erich Balla writes that when faced with young women, “The Baltic Germans [the Freikorps fighters] showed no mercy. They did not see their youth or their charm. They saw only the face of the devil and hit, shot, stabbed them dead (schlugen, schossen, stachen), whenever they saw them” (quoted in Sammartino 2010, p. 58).

Its colonial heritage:

Certainly a number of scholars […] have linked German colonialism to Nazism, generally drawing links between the [populicide] against the Herero (or Ovaherero) and Nama (or Namaqua) in German South West Africa (GSWA) that began in 1904. […] As Susanne Kuß (2010) notes, however, given the gap of over 30 years, it is in fact difficult to establish concrete connections between these [populicides] and the Holocaust. […] I would suggest, however, without having space to develop the argument further here, that bringing in a consideration of the German revolutionary period helps to bridge some of these interpretive gaps.

Setting aside these larger questions, what is clear is that the virulence and quasi‐exterminationist drive of the anti‐socialist radical right violence of the 1918–1923 period was profoundly shaped by these colonial histories. Colonial racism shaped anti‐socialism more broadly, and a colonial logic was especially evident in the Freikorps campaign in the Baltics that paralleled the anti‐Bolshevik fight in Germany.

Even more striking that the conceptual linkages, we find remarkable continuities in personnel, with many Freikorps leaders having served in the colonial military. The colonial experience thus provides a crucial historical and analytical backdrop to understanding counter‐revolutionary violence in post‐war Germany.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Events that happened today (July 26):

1879: Shunroku Hata, Axis field marshal and politician, was born.
1936: The Third Reich and Fascist Italy decided to intervene in the Spanish Civil War in support of Francisco Franco and his fellow fascists.
1937: The Spanish fascists won the battle of Brunete.
1941: Allied forces on Malta foiled an attack by the Axis Decima Flottiglia MAS during the battle of Grand Harbour. Fort St. Elmo Bridge, covering the harbour, was demolished in the process. Meanwhile, in response to the Axis occupation of French Indochina, the Western Allies froze all Japanese assets and cut off oil shipments.
1944: The Axis lost Lviv, a major city in western Ukraine, to the Red Army. Sadly, only 300 Jews out of 160,000 survived the Axis occupation.
1945: An Axis kamikaze pilot sunk the HMS Vestal, the British Royal Navy’s last vehicle to sink during the war. (Coincidentally, the Labour Party won the U.K.’s general election of July 5 and ousted Winston Churchill from power, the Allies signed the Potsdam Declaration in Potsdam, Germany, and the USS Indianapolis arrived at Tinian with components and enriched uranium for the ‘Little Boy’ nuclear bomb.)