35. The Weimar Republic

35. The Weimar Republic

Stab-in-the-Back

The reason Germans were so susceptible to German propaganda, explained Elmer Davis, was because “three generations of Germans have been conditioned by [Wagner’s] Ring operas to the conviction that the German Hero can never be struck down except by a stab in the back,” such as the dark Hagen inflicted on the blond Siegfried.[1] After reading the memoirs of Aufbau member General Erich Ludendorff, Richard Wagner’s wife Cosima believed he was the man to save Germany. In September 1919, she wrote: “Ah, if only Ludendorff could be our dictator,” in a letter to Ernst II, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1863 – 1950), whose sister-in-law was the wife of Grand Duke Kirill of the SOSJ.[2] Faced with the war effort’s collapse and a growing popular revolution, Kaiser Wilhelm II forced Ludendorff to resign. After the war, although he had been responsible for unleashing Lenin, who led the Bolsheviks to victory in Russia in 1917, and supported acceptance of Wilson’s Fourteen Points—written by the “The Inquiry” assembled by Round Tabler “Colonel” Edward House, also a friend of George Sylvester Viereck—Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader. Along with Alfred Rosenberg, a fellow member of the Aufbau, and the Thule Society, Ludendorff was a promoter of the Stab-in-the-back myth, which posited that the German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially by Marxists, Bolsheviks, Freemasons and Jews who were furthermore responsible for the disadvantageous settlement negotiated for Germany in the Treaty of Versailles.

The Stab-in-the-back myth arose out of the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic. At the end of the World War I, awareness of imminent defeat sparked a revolution in Germany, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, formal surrender to the Allies, and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic on November 9, 1918. The German Revolution of 1918–1919 was primarily a power struggle between the Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which favored a social democracy, and the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (1871 – 1919), and dissenting members of the SPD, which wanted to set up a Bolshevik as in Russia. Liebknecht was the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, who, along with August Bebel, was one of the founders and key leaders of the SPD, which had its origins in the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), founded in 1863 by Lassalle, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), founded in 1869 in Eisenach as part of the First International.

Karl Liebknecht was baptized a Lutheran in St. Thomas Church. According to the Liebknecht family tradition, their lineage was directly descended from Martin Luther.[3] His godparents included Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.[4] At the Friedrich Wilhelm University, now the Humboldt University of Berlin, he attended lectures by Heinrich von Treitschke, (1834 – 1896), one of the signers of the Antisemitenpetition of 1880.[5] With his brother Theodor and the socialist and Oskar Cohn (1869 – 1934), a Zionist affiliated with Ber Borochov and the Poale Zion movement, he opened a law office in Berlin in 1899.[6]

Born and raised in a secular Jewish family in Congress Poland, Rosa Luxemburg became a German citizen in 1897. The Luxemburg family were Polish Jews living in the Russian sector of Poland, after the country was partitioned by Prussia, Russia and Austria almost a century earlier. Rosa’s father Edward, like her grandfather Abraham, supported the Jewish Reform movement.[7] During the November Revolution, she co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne (“The Red Flag”), the central organ of the Spartacist movement.

Right-wing groups like the Anti-Bolshevik League had been agitating against German Communists and the leaders of the Spartacus League even before the January uprising. The Anti-Bolshevik League in 1918 was founded by Eduard Stadtler (1886 – 1945) had begun advocating the creation of a “national socialist” dictatorship.[8] The circle around Stadtler and Heinrich von Gleichen (1882 – 1959) operated a magazine called Das Gewissen (“The Conscience”), which included Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who would go on to become a major figure in the German Conservative Revolution and coin the term “Third Reich.”[9] Heinrich von Gleichen was a cousin of Friedrich Schiller’s last great-grandson, the writer Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm, whom he provided with a life annuity until old age. Gleichen played a leading role in the Kulturbund, founded in 1915 and supported by the Reich government, which included, among others, Max Planck, Walter Rathenau and Max Liebermann of the Berlin Secession movement of artists associated with Richard Dehmel’s Pan magazine.[10]

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, after 1880, the Gesellschaft der Freunde (“Society of Friends”)—founded by leading members of the Haskalah, around Moses Mendelssohn—became an organization where leading Jewish bankers, entrepreneurs, merchants, and managers met, including the Mendelssohns, Liebermanns, Ullsteins, Mosses, Rathenaus, and Bleichroeders.[11] On January 10, 1919, around fifty leading representatives of the German industrial, commercial and banking , many of them members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, met and set up an Anti-Bolshevik Fund. Among the invited participants were industry association head Hugo Stinnes, Albert Vögler, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, Otto Henrich of Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Ernst von Borsig, Felix Deutsch from AEG, Arthur Salomonsohn from Disconto-Society.[12] Felix Deutsch (1858 – 1928) was a German-Jewish businessman and industrial manager who is considered a co-founder of AEG, one of the world’s largest electrical companies. Arthur Salomonsohn (1859 – 1930) was a German-Jewish banker. Deutsch, Salomonsohn and von Siemens were members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde. At the beginning of the Weimar Republic, Salomonsohn supported Hugo Stinnes and Albert Vögler in their projects to reorganize and vertically concentrate German industry through the formation of interest groups.[13]

The group, according to Stadtler, agreed to provide 500 million marks in funding to all anti-Bolshevik groups, including the Anti-Bolshevik League and the right-wing Freikorps (“(Free Corps”), who were motivated by Pan-German militarism and völkisch doctrines.[14] Following the Armistice of 1918, and of the Bolshevik revolution, as there were many disturbances throughout Germany, World War I General Georg Ludwig Rudolf Maercker (1865 – 1924) suggested the formation of Freikorps to suppress these and a number of formations formed themselves, usually around individual army officers.[15] Maercker paid strict attention to discipline and subordinated the Freikorps to the Reich government.

Stadtler also received funds from Friedrich Naumann (1860 – 1919), originally a follower of the conservative-clerical and antisemitic Berlin movement led by Adolf Stoecker, who was also involved in the Antisemitenpetition.[16] Naumann, however, later distanced himself from Stoecker’s conservatism and antisemitism, and became interested in the social theories advocated by his friend Max Weber (1864 – 1920), one of the central figures in the development of sociology. Weber classified Jewish people as having been a “pariah people,” which meant that they were separated from the society that contained them.[17]

Weber was a prominent member of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League). In 1891, Alfred Hugenberg (1865 – 1951) co-founded, along with Karl Peters (1856 – 1918), the ultra-nationalist General German League, and in 1894 its successor movement, the Pan-German League. Peters, who had acquired the majority of Germany’s colonial holdings, initiate a congress on German overseas interests, had been a student of Heinrich von Treitschke at Humboldt University of Berlin and wrote a dissertation on Schopenhauer. The League wanted to uphold German racial hygiene and were against breeding with so-called inferior races like the Jews and Slavs. At the League’s congress in 1894, Weber argued that Deutschtum (“Germanness”) was the highest form of civilization.[18] After World War I, the League supported Ludendorff and the Stab-in-the-back myth.

Nevertheless, according to Etan Bloom, among the important non-Jewish figures in German culture who were attracted to Zionism in the first decade of the twentieth century was Naumann, whose writings appeared in Die Welt, the main publication of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (“German Zionist Organization,” ZVfD), by far the largest Zionist organization in Germany, having attracted 10,000 members by 1914.[19] Naumann believed that the Zionists would be helpful to German colonial interests, and that decreasing Europe’s Jewish population would help resolved the Jewish Question.[20]

Naumann became acquainted with the Zionist Franz Oppenheimer (1864 – 1943), the editor-in-chief of the magazine Welt am Morgen. Franz father, Dr. Julius Oppenheimer (1827 – 1909), served for many years as a preacher and teacher at the Jewish Reform temple of the Berlin.[21] Like many assimilated Zionists, Oppenheimer excused his German nationalism as a virtue that would serve for the elevation of the Ostjuden. In 1910, in his article Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein (“ethnic consciousness and national consciousness”), for the Oestereichische Rundschau, he wrote:

We are, collectively, [either] Germans by culture or French by culture and so on...because we have the fortune to belong to cultured communities that stand in the forefront of nations… We cannot be Jewish by culture because Jewish culture, as it has been preserved from the Middle Ages in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, stands infinitely lower than the modern culture which our [Western] nations bear. We cannot regress nor do we want to.[22]

When Herzl asked him help work on the Jewish colonization of Palestine, Oppenheimer submitted a plan to the Zionist Congress of 1903. Oppenheimer, Zelig Soskin (1872–1959) and Otto Warburg (1859 – 1938), a cousin of the German-based Warburgs, received formal permission and funding from the World Zionist Organization (WZO) to begin planning the colonization of Palestine. Soskin wrote in the proposal: “We need only refer to how the Aryan people colonize. I refer to the Germans in the African colonies, etc.”[23] Based on that plan, Oppenheimer founded the agricultural cooperative Merchawia in 1911, south of Nazareth.[24] In 1914, Oppenheimer was joined by Loe Motzkin (1867 – 1933) and Theodor Herzl’s associate Max Bodenheimer, who founded the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD), to create a German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, which was supported by the German Empire.[25] Motzkin participated in the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and became close to Herzl, who sent him on a mission to Palestine to investigate the problems of the Jewish community. Motzkin proceeded to establish a Jewish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to represent the interests of Jews across Europe. This committee became a permanent institution under the League of Nations.[26]

Bodenheimer, explains Jay Ticker, “was the chief advocate of the pro-German policy for the Zionist movement.”[27] Bodenheimer and a small circle of other early Zionists, including Oppenheimer, formed the original leadership of the ZVfD. Bodenheimer had been president from its foundation in 1897 until 1910, and when the war began, he served as head of the Jewish National Fund. Bodenheimer and Oppenheimer, along with several other Zionists, travelled to the Eastern Front, where they were received by Aufbau member General Ludendorff and later also by Field-Marshal von Hindenburg. Already in the late autumn of 1914, Ludendorff, in his capacity as general Chief of Staff of the Eastern Command of the Imperial Armies, issued an appeal in the Yiddish language “to my dear Jews in Poland.”[28] Bodenheimer wrote about the meeting that Ludendorff:

…showed lively interest in our endeavors. He welcomed our intention to inform the Jewish population of the political situation and of the prospect of an improvement in their position in the case of the axis powers achieving victory. To him we proposed sending our trustworthy men into the occupied territory so that understanding between the military and the Jews would be facilitated.[29]

The Anti-Bolshevik League printed posters and appeals to the population of Berlin offering a high reward for the Bolshevik ringleaders to be found and handed over to the military. One leaflet that circulated in large numbers proclaimed:

The Fatherland is close to ruin. Save it! It is not threatened from outside, but from within: from the Spartacus League. Strike their leaders dead! Kill Liebknecht! Then you will have peace, work and bread. – The frontline soldiers.[30]

On November 9, 1918, in a move that was contrary to the constitution because only the Kaiser could appoint a chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, at the request Friedrich Ebert (1871 – 1925), transferred his powers as chancellor to him. On the death of Bebel in 1913, Ebert, a former student of Rosa Luxemburg, was elected leader of the SPD. On November 11, an armistice was signed at Compiègne by German representatives. On November 15, Ebert appointed Hugo Preuss (1860 – 1925), a German-Jewish, a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, and a teacher of constitutional law to the Reich Office of the Interior, after he wrote Obrigkeitstaat und Volksstaat (“Government by bureaucrats versus popular government”). Preuss developed a theory of politics that aimed to bridge the gap between revolution and constitution by institutionalizing the power of the Volk. Preuss believed that the old elites of Prussia and other states, and the parties of Reichstag, including the liberals, had failed to accept democracy. Additionally, Preuss saw in the spread of anti-Semitism and anti-socialism the successful strategy of the old elites to deflect attention from their own failures and preserve their power. During the war, Preuss transformed these criticisms into a proposal for transforming the empire into a demokratischer Volksstaat (“democratic people’s state”).[31] Ebert charged Preuss with drafting a Reich constitution, which he based in large part on the Frankfurt Constitution of 1849 which was written after the German revolutions of 1848–1849 and intended for a unified Germany that was not realized at the time. The constitution designated the old black-red-gold tricolour flag of the Lützow Free Corps and the Burschenschaften as the national flag. In 1919, Preuss was among the founders of the social liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei (“German Democratic Party,” DDP) with Theodor Wolff and Friedrich Naumann.

Ebert allied himself with conservative and nationalistic political forces, in particular the Freikorps, with whose help his government crushed Spartacist uprising of January 5–12, 1919. Ebert ordered the rebellion quashed, and Gustav Noske (1868 – 1946), who was in charge of the Army and Navy, used both regular forces and Freikorps units to end the uprising. On January 15, 1919, members of the Freikorps led by Captain Waldemar Pabst abducted and extrajudicially murdered Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The vigilante group responsible for their murders received a high reward, which, as author Frederik Hetman suspected, came from the Anti-Bolshevik Fund.[32] Emperor Wilhelm II fled the country and abdicated his throne, allowing elections for the National Assembly to take place on January 19. Out of the four possible locations that were considered for the assembly, including Bayreuth, Nuremberg and Jena, Weimar was chosen to symbolically connect republican Germany with the purportedly humanistic and enlightenment traditions of Weimar Classicism.[33] As part of its duties as the interim government, it debated and reluctantly approved the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

German National People’s Party (DNVP)

While Naumann is not considered a forerunner of the Nazis’ antisemitism, historian Götz Aly accuses him of having “combined social, imperial, and national thought into a cohesive intellectual current that could eventually blend with the NSDAP’s mindset.”[34] Stadtler, whose Anti-Bolshevik League was funded by Naumann, was a member of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) until 1933 when he defected to the Nazi Party weeks prior to it being dissolved.[35] Theodor Fritsch (1852 – 1933), who would become one of the founders of the Thule Society, was a major figure of pre-war German anti-Semitism, and in the politics of Germany between 1900 and 1914. Fritsch created an early discussion forum, Antisemitische-Correspondenz (“Antisemitic Correspondence”) in 1885 for antisemites of various political persuasions. In 1887, he sent several editions to Nietzsche but was brusquely rebuffed. Nietzsche sent Fritsch a letter in which he thanked him to be permitted “to cast a glance at the muddle of principles that lie at the heart of this strange movement,” but requested not to be sent again such writings, for he was afraid that he might lose his patience.[36] In 1894, Fritsch offered editorship to Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg—who with Nietzsche’s brother-in-law Bernhard Förster, was the author of the Antisemitenpetition—whereafter it became an organ for Sonnenberg’s Deutsch-Soziale Partei (German Social Party) under the name “German Social Articles.” In 1881, Förster and Sonnenberg set up the Deutscher Volksverein (German People’s League).

In June 1889, at Bochum, an anti-Semitic conference, attended by many representatives from France, Hungary, Germany and Austria, including Georg von Schönerer, led to the establishment of two German anti-Semitic parliamentary parties, the German Social Party (DSP) under the leadership of Sonnenberg, and the Antisemitische Volkspartei, led by Otto Böckel (1859 – 1923). Sonnenberg’s DSP became the Deutschsoziale Reformpartei (DRP) when it merged with Böckel’s Deutsche Reformpartei in 1894. For a time, the party organ was Antisemitische-Correspondenz after Sonnenberg had acquired the rights to the paper from Fritsch. The DRP, whose main basis was anti-Semitism, was active in 1898 in support of campaigns to restrict the immigration of Russian Jews into Germany and argued that such laws could form the basis of their ultimate aim of removing rights from all Jews in Germany.[37] Wilhelm Giese emerged as a prominent member of the group and was especially noted for his criticism of Zionism, an idea that had some support among contemporary anti-Semites as a possible solution to the “Jewish problem.” In 1899, Giese ensured that the party adopted the Hamburg Resolutions explicitly rejecting removing the Jews to a new homeland and instead called for an international initiative to handle the Jews by means of complete separation and final destruction of the Jewish nation.[38] The program helped to lay the foundations for the future Final Solution, a term it used.[39]

The later version of the DRP was established in either 1889 or 1890 by Otto Böckel and Oswald Zimmermann (1859 – 1910), who had been involved in the original party, under the name Antisemitic People’s Party. In 1894, the DRP merged with the similarly antisemitic German Social Party (DSP) to form the German Social Reform Party (DSRP). The party split entirely in 1900 with the DSP re-established. The remnants of the group would subsequently be absorbed into the German National People’s Party (DNVP) in 1918. The DNVP was formed in December 1918 by a merger of the German Conservative Party and the Free Conservative Party of the old monarchic German Empire. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major conservative and nationalist party in Weimar Germany. Several prominent Nazis began their careers in the DNVP.

Germanenorden

When Fritsch wanted to establish a broad and powerful anti-Semitic movement outside parliament, in January 1902, he founded the Hammer, a periodical, which was to act as a catalyst for the new movement. Among its contributors were Lanz von Liebenfels. Numbering more than three thousand persons, Hammer readers began organizing themselves into local Hammer-Gemeinden (“Hammer-Groups”). In 1904, Fritsch’s collaborator, and Bernhard Förster’s brother, Paul Förster (1844 – 1925), had published an appeal for a völkisch general staff to spearhead a nationalist-racist revival of Germany and so unite the many groups and leagues, while “cleansing” the nation of Socialists, the Jews, and any other opponents of opponents of German imperialism.[40]

At a meeting at his Leipzig home on May 24 and 25, 1912, Fritsch and some twenty prominent Pan-Germans and anti-Semites formally founded two groups to indoctrinate German society. Karl August Hellwig, a retired colonel and a List Society member, headed the Reichshammerbund, a confederation of all existing Hammer groups. Hermann Pohl, became the chief officer of the Germanenorden (also called the Teutonic Order), founded with Philipp Stauff (1876 – 1923), who held office in the Guido von List Society and High Armanen Order.[41] The High Armanen-Orden claimed descent from the Templars, and wished to reestablish the science of runes and the worship of Wotan (old High German for Odin, progenitor of the Scandinavians who migrated from “Asgard”) as well as an Aryan-dominated empire loosely based on the Teutonic Knights.[42]

The notion of an anti-Semitic group organized like a secret quasi-masonic lodge, to counteract the widespread Jewish secret conspiracy, appears to have arisen amongst völkisch activists around 1910. As explained by Johannes Hering, who belonged to the local Hammer group in Munich as well as the Pan-German League, and who was friendly with both List and Liebenfels, wrote that he had been a Freemason since 1894, but that this “ancient Germanic institution” had been polluted by Jews and called for the need for an Aryan lodge.[43]

In late 1911, Pohl announced to potential collaborators that the Hammer group in Magdeburg had already formed a lodge conforming to the appropriate racial principles and a ritual based on Germanic pagan tradition. The Wotan lodge was accordingly instituted on April 5, 1911, with Pohl elected Master, which formulated the rituals of the Grand Lodge founded on April 15, with Fritsch as Grand Master. On March 12, 1912, the organization adopted the name Germanenorden, upon the recommendation from Fritsch.[44] The Germanenorden, whose symbol was a swastika, had a hierarchical fraternal structure based on Freemasonry, and celebrated the summer solstice, an important festivity in Völkisch circles. Members were encouraged to study the Prose Edda as well as some of the German mystics, including Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus. In addition to occult and magical philosophies, it taught to its initiates nationalist ideologies of Nordic racial superiority and anti-Semitism.

Thule Society

In 1916, the Germanenorden split into two parts. The schismatic offshoot: the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy Grail, was joined in the same year by Rudolf von Sebottendorf (1875 – 1945), the pseudo-aristocratic alias of German occultist Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer, a Freemason, with an interest in Sufism, Kabbalah, Theosophy and astrology, and also an admirer of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels. Sebottendorf increased the Germanenorden’s membership from about a hundred in 1917 to 1500 by the autumn of the following year.[45] The Munich lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater when it was formally dedicated on August 18, 1918 was given the cover name, the Thule Society. Sebottendorf invited the numerous pan-German societies to join forces: Heinrich Class’ Alldeutsche Verband, Joseph Rohmeder’s Schulverein, Fritsch’s Hammerbund, Hans Dahn’s National Liberal Party, the Iron Fist, Old Reich Association and Der Stahlhelm. At the society’s founding, Sebottendorff proclaimed his commitment to fighting the Jewish conspiracy:

I intend to commit the Thule Society to his combat, as long as I hold the Iron Hammer… I swear on this swastika, on this sign which for us is sacred.[46]

Sebottendorff and his lodge members founded the Thule Society to counter looming threat of a Soviet-style communist takeover of Bavaria. After the proclamation of the Free People’s State of Bavaria on November 8, 1918, by Kurt Eisner, whom the opponents of the revolution denounced as a traitor, a destroyer of Bavarian traditions and as a Jewish immigrant from Galicia, the Kampfbund (“Thule Combat League”) was established as the military arm of Thule Society. The weapons provided by Thule associate Julius Friedrich Lehmann (1864 – 1935), a leading publisher of eugenic and pan-German literature.[47]

By August 1918, Sebottendorf accumulated enough money from the Germanenorden and the army to buy a small local paper from Franz Eher Verlag called the Münchener Beobachter. Along with fellow Thule member and sportswriter Karl Harrer (1890 – 1926), Sebottendorf turned the Beobachter into an anti-Semitic tabloid with a sports section.[48] On May 24, 1919 Philipp Stauff (1876 – 1923), a Berlin journalist, good friend of Guido von List and Armanist, and who had been active in both the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden, wrote an obituary to him which appeared in the paper. Among the Beobachter’s attacks on the left was calling Bavarian Communist leader Max Levien a syphilitic and accusing Kurt Eisner’s widow of having an affair with Gustav Landauer, the husband of Hedwig Lachmann, and a minister of the first Bavarian Soviet Republic.[49]

Eisner, the first premier of the People’s State of Bavaria, was assassinated on February 21, 1919 by Prince Arco-Valley (1897 – 1945), and seven Thule members were executed by the communists, becoming the first martyrs of the movement that would become the Nazi party.[50] Arco-Valley’s mother, Emily Freiin von Oppenheim (1869 – 1957), was from a wealthy Jewish banking family. According to Goodrick-Clarke, Arco-Valley was resentful at his exclusion from the Thule Society and wanted to prove his patriotism.[51] “Eisner” Valley claimed, “is a Bolshevist, a Jew; he isn’t German, he doesn’t feel German, he subverts all patriotic thoughts and feelings. He is a traitor to this land.” The killing of Eisner made von Arco-Valley a hero to the far right.

However, Arco-Valley’s action triggered retaliation by socialists, communists and anarchists throughout Munich, during which a number of people were killed, including another member of the Thule Society, Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis (1888 – 30 April 1919). Prince Gustav’s uncle was Prince Paul of Thurn and Taxis, King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s homosexual lover, who helped Wagner intercede with the king on behalf of Bismarck to have the pro-Prussian Chlodwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst appointed Minister President of Bavaria.[52] Paul’s brother, Maximilian Anton, Hereditary Prince of Thurn and Taxis (1831 – 1867), was married to Duchess Helene in Bavaria, a granddaughter of Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria. Duchess Helene’s father, Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria, was introduced to Wagner through his cousin of Ludwig II and became his patron.[53] Duchess Helene was also a cousin of Pedro I of Brazil, the father of Pedro II of Brazil, and the friend of Wagner and Arthur de Gobineau.

Johannes Hoffmann (1867 – 1930) succeeded Eisner as minister-president of the People’s State of Bavaria on March 17, 1919 as the first freely elected Bavarian Minister President. After the assassination of Eisner, opposing factions of the far left competed for control of Munich, and turned on those they thought were traitors. Some of the “reds” had seized several leading members of Thule society, and on April 30 they made the fatal mistake of executing them. As the news spread, volunteers calling themselves the Volkswehr (“the people’s defense”) organized themselves within the city to retaliate, and crushed the red revolution on May 2. At Hoffman’s commission, Sebottendorff, who joined the Volkswehr, founded a second paramilitary group, the Freikorps Oberland, a force that later would put down workers’ insurrections.[54]

Kapp Putsch

On March 6, 1919, the Weimar Assembly authorized the Reich President to dissolve the existing army and to form a provisional Reichswehr (“Reich Defence”), which became the official name of the German armed forces during the Weimar Republic and the first years of the Third Reich. The first Reichswehr Minister was Gustav Noske. The revolution effectively ended on August 11, 1919, when the Weimar Constitution was adopted, and Ebert became the first president of Germany. On January 20, 1920, the Treaty of Versailles came into force, restricting the German army to 100,000 men or less. On February 28, 1920, Noske, following orders of the Interalliierte Militärkontrollkommission, which oversaw Germany’s compliance with the Treaty, dissolved the branches of the Freikorps. The highest ranking general of the Reichswehr, Walther von Lüttwitz (1859 – 1942), who had directed the suppression of the Spartacist Uprising by the Freikorps refused to comply, resulting in what became known as the Kapp Putsch.[55]

“Fritsch and Pohl,” explained Eric Kurlander, managed to build a remarkably broad coalition of like-minded politicians and intellectuals,” to which could be added Ludendorff, who was also among the leaders of the Kapp Putsch[56] According to Michael Kellogg, Ludendorff and Wolfgang Kapp (1858 – 1922) used demobilized Germans and White émigrés to undermine the Weimar Republic. Kapp was born in New York City where his father, Forty-Eighter Friedrich Kapp, a Reichstag delegate for the National Liberal Party, had settled after the failed European revolutions of 1848. In New York, Friedrich founded Zitz, Kapp & Fröbel, with Julius Fröbel and another Forty-Eighter, Franz Dr. Franz Heinrich Zitz (1803 – 1877), who married Kathinka Zitz-Halein, called “the poet laureate of the German Revolution.” Fröbel’s father Friedrich was a disciple of Father Jahn and edited Wagner’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. Julius was also a friend of Alexander von Humboldt, of Weimar Classicism, whose friend and benefactor was Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph. Julius was also a teacher of Carl Schurz’s Jewish wife Margarethe, as well as a friend of Wilhelm Marr.

Friedrich Kapp was close friends with the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872), whose criticism of religion strongly influenced Karl Marx. Feuerbach was the brother of mathematician Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach (1800 – 1834) and uncle of painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829 – 1880). Their father, the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, was identified by the French imperial police as a member of the Illuminati.[57] In 1801, Feuerbach was professor at the University of Jena, and in the following year accepted a chair at Kiel, where attended the lectures of fellow Illuminati members Karl Leonhard Reinhold, son-in-law of Christoph Martin Wieland, and Gottlieb Hufeland.

Kapp was also acquainted with Ludwig Bamberger, who was among the Jewish bankers, along with Rothschild agent Gerson von Bleichröder, and Eduard Lasker, who backed Bismarck’s plan for German unification.[58] Other acquaintances of Friedrich from his time as a student included Berthold Auerbach—of the Committee for Jewish Affairs in Berlin and member of the Judenlodge—and Bettina von Arnim. Bettina was the sister of Clemens Brentano, who married Achim von Arnim, who belonged to the Gesetzlose Gesellschaft (“Lawless society”) with Tugendbund member, Ernst Moritz Arndt, a friend of Henriette Herz, whose husband was a close friend of Moses Mendelssohn and David Friedländer.[59] Bettina numbered among her closest friends Goethe, Beethoven, Schleiermacher, with whom she attended Sara Itzig Levy’s salons, as well as Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Johanna Kinkel, the wife of Gottfried Kinkel, and Franz Liszt, with whom she had an affair with.[60] Auerbach was intended for the ministry, but was estranged from Jewish orthodoxy by the study of Spinoza. The uprisings of March 1848 in Germany prompted Kapp to go to Frankfurt to work as a journalist. Due to his involvement in the September Rebellion he had to flee to Brussels. There he worked as a private teacher for the son of Alexander Herzen.

In 1870, the Kapp family returned to Germany. In 1907, Wolfgang Kapp took over the position of director of the East Prussian Agricultural Credit Institute. In 1912, he was elected to the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank. Kapp became a proponent of the stab-in-the-back myth. He joined the German National People’s Party (DNVP) in 1919 and participated in the anti-republican Nationale Vereinigung (“National Union”). In reaction to the Reichstag Peace Resolution of 1917, Kapp, with Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (1849 – 1930), who had been Secretary of State of the German Imperial Naval Office, and Heinrich Class (1868 – 1953), founded the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (“German Fatherland Party,” DVLP), which all the members of the Wagner family joined, and of which Kapp was briefly the chairman.[61] The DVLP also included members of the Anti-Bolshevik Fund, like Ernst Borsig, Hugo Stinnes, and the Jewish banker Arthur Salomonsohn, who was also a member the Gesellschaft der Freunde.[62]

German Fatherland Party included Thule members Julius Friedrich Lehmann and Anton Drexler. Lehmann and fellow Thule Society member Theodor Fritsch were on the advisory board of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (“German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation”), founded in 1919, the largest and the most active antisemitic federation in Germany after World War I, and an organization that formed a significant part of the völkisch movement during the Weimar Republic. The director of Trutzbund was Alfred Roth (1879 – 1948), sometimes known by his pseudonym Otto Arnim. Roth met Georg von Schönerer in 1904 and became an enthusiastic supporter of his pan-German ideas. He was an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate for Sonnenberg’s Deutsch-Soziale Partei (German Social Party) in 1907, and was also a member of the Pan-German League. As leader of the Trutzbund he was credited with attracting some 200,000 members to the group.[63] Roth was active in Fritsch’s Reichshammerbund before serving as an officer in World War I.[64]

The Trutzbund’s manifesto was Wenn ich der Kaiser wär (“If I Were the Kaiser”), which was written by Heinrich Class, President of the Pan-German League, whose slogan was “Germany for the Germans.” Class had been a student of Heinrich von Treitschke, one of the signers of the Antisemitenpetition. Other students of Treitschke included Karl Liebknecht and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963), a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose board included Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise.[65] Working as a lawyer, Class defended Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was also heavily influenced by Treitschke.[66]

On March 13, 1920, Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz led the so-called Kapp Putsch, an attempted coup against the German national government in Berlin, to undo the German Revolution of 1918–1919, overthrow the Weimar Republic, and establish an autocratic government in its place. Kapp’s press chief at the time was Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln (1879 – 1943), a lager-than-life character, a Jewish adventurer of Hungarian origin, who spent parts of his life as a Protestant missionary, Anglican priest, British Member of Parliament for Darlington, German right-wing politician and spy, Nazi collaborator and Buddhist abbot in China. Trebitsch-Lincoln was initiated to the occult by Harold Beckett, an ex-Indian Army officer who allegedly had ties with Maître Philippe and Papus, after which Trebitsch-Lincoln went on to join numerous secret societies including the Freemasons, the OTO and Chinese triads.[67] René Guénon had described Trebitsch-Lincoln as a representative of dark occult influences with a close connection to Crowley. Another French writer, Pierre Mariel, also insists that Trebitsch-Lincoln was a member of the OTO.[68] In 1915, Trebitsch-Lincoln visited the offices of Crowley and Viereck’s The Fatherland’s, after which he was arrested by the Americans upon pressure from the British government.

American intelligence regarded Trebitsch-Lincoln as the organizer of the Kapp Putsch.[69] Guido Preparata, author of Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, believes that the British used Trebitsch-Lincoln as “an agent steeped in counter-insurgency tactics and disinformation to thwart, expose and burn all the monarchist conspiracies against the Weimar Republic.”[70] Preparata refers to a British report which suggests that Trebitsch-Lincoln was sent to Germany by then Secretary for War Winston Churchill. The same report claims that when the right-wing Kapp plot began to fail, Trebitsch-Lincoln switched to “working to bring about Bolshevism in Germany.” Although US military intelligence reports declared that Trebitsch-Lincoln “was and still is an English agent,” he was also reported to be “actively engaged in the ‘Red Movement’” and “working in the interest of the Soviet Government in Austria and Hungary.”[71] In 1920, following the putsch, Trebitsch-Lincoln was appointed press censor to the new government. In this capacity he met Hitler, who flew in from Munich the day before the putsch collapsed.

After the failed Kapp Putsch of 1920, the organization gained further support from dissolved Freikorps units. In 1923, the former DNVP politician Theodor Duesterberg (1875 – 1950) joined Der Stahlhelm (The Steel Helmet”) and quickly rose to deputy of Franz Seldte (1882 – 1947). As a reaction to the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Seldte founded Der Stahlhelm in 1918, agitating against the Treaty of Versailles and German war reparations, and promoting the Stab-in-the-back legend and the “November Criminals” bias against the Weimar Coalition government. Financing was provided by the Herrenklub. In March 1924, Duesterberg and General Maercker, the founder of the Freikorps, and forced Seldte to adopt the “Aryan clause” and expel all Jews from Der Stahlhelm. The “Aryan clause” of 1924 was later to serve as the inspiration for similar “Aryan clauses” under the Third Reich, and in particular influenced the War Minister, General Werner von Blomberg (1878 – 1946) in his attempts to keep the Wehrmacht “racially clean.”[72] In 1932, Duesterberg was nominated by Der Stahlhelm and DNVP to run for President of Germany, but the Nazis ultimately destroyed any his chances when they revealed he had Jewish ancestry. Duesterberg learned for the first time that his grandfather was a Prussian Jewish doctor who converted to Lutheranism in 1818, a revelation that caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown and to submit his resignation in shame from Der Stahlhelm.[73]

[1] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[2] Correspondence between Cosima Wagner and Prince Ernst zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg, 11. September 1919, in Cosima Wagner. Das zweite Leben: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen 1883–1930 (ed.) Dietrich Mach (Munich, 1980), pp. 747f; cited in Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 163.

[3] Martin Hundt. “Noch einmal über Liebknechts Weg in den Bund der Kommunisten. Eine notwendige Ergänzung.” Marx Forschung, pp. 186–187. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20220120110402/https://marxforschung.de/2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/BzMEF-29-M.-Hundt-S.-186-192.pdf

[4] Karl W. Meyer. Karl Liebknecht, Man Without a Country (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1957).

[5] Heinz Wohlgemuth. Karl Liebknecht. Eine Biographie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1973), p. 29.

[6] Ludger Heid. Oskar Cohn: ein Sozialist und Zionist im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2002), pp. 173, 178.

[7] Rory Castle. “Rosa Luxemburg, Her Family and the Origins of her Polish-Jewish Identity.” Praktyka Teoretyczna (June 16, 2013). Retrieved from https://www.praktykateoretyczna.pl/artykuly/rory-castle-you-alone-will-make-our-familys-name-famous-rosa-luxemburg-her-family-and-the-origins-of-her-polish-jewish-identity/

[8] Gerald D. Feldman. Army, industry, and labor in Germany, 1914-1918 (Providence, Rhode Island, US; Oxon, England, UK: Berg Publishers, Inc., 1992), p. 529.

[9] Hans-Joachim Schwierskott. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und der revolutionäre Nationalismus in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1962).

[10] Dirk Stegmann. “Die deutsche Inlandspropaganda 1917/18.” In: Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 2/72, p. 78 f. m. Anm. 25.

[11] Herman Rosenthal, Peter Wiernik. “HASKALAH.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[12] Jörg-R. Mettke. “Das Große Schmieren.” Der Spiegel (December 3, 1984). Retrieved from https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13510803.html

[13] Martin L. Müller. “Salomonsohn, Arthur Moritz.” In Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). Band 22, (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005), p. 395 f.

[14] Gerald D. Feldman. Hugo Stinnes. Biographie eines Industriellen 1870–1924 (München: Beck, 1998), p. 553

[15] Wolfram Wette. The Wehrmacht (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 63.

[16] Eduard Stadtler. Erinnerungen. Als Antibolschewist 1918–1919 (Düsseldorf: Neuer Zeitverlag, 1935).

[17] Dirk Kaesler. Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Translated by Hurd, Philippa (University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 127.

[18] Karen Schönwälder. “Invited but Unwanted? Migration from the East in Germany, 1890-1990.” In Roger Bartlett, Karen Schönwälder (eds.). The German lands and eastern Europe. Eassays on the history of their social, cultural, and political relations (St. Martin's Press, 1999). pp. 206–207.

[19] Etan Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 144.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Claudia Willms. Liberale Erziehung im Milieu (Bohlau Verlag, 2018), pp. 78–91.

[22] Poppel. Zionism in Germany, p. 58; cited in Etan Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 122.

[23] Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des sechsten Zionisten-Kongresses (Vienna, 1903), p. 272. Cited in Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture, p. 140.

[24] “Co-operation in Palestine.” New York Times (March 17, 1914). Retrieved from https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1914/03/17/101754909.pdf

[25] Sean McMeekin. The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (2010), p. 346.

[26] “Leo Motzkin (1867 - 1933).” Israel and Zionism. Department of Jewish Education. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20071113200527/http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/people/BIOS/motzkin.html

[27] Jay Ticker. “Max I. Bodenheimer: Advocate of Pro-German Zionism at the Beginning of World War I.” Jewish Social Studies, 43:1 (Winter, 1981), p. 12.

[28] Klaus Polkehn. “Zionism and Kaiser Wilhelm.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1975), p. 88.

[29] Ibid., p. 87.

[30] Wette Wolfram. Gustav Noske. Eine politische Biographie (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987), pp. 312 f.

[31] Peter C. Caldwell. “Hugo Preuss’s Concept of the Volk: Critical Confusion or Sophistical Conception.” The University of Toronto Law Journal, 63:3 (Summer 2013), p. 358.

[32] Frederik Hetmann. Rosa L. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), p. 266.

[33] Sturm Reinhard. “Weimarer Republik: Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik 1918/19.” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (December 23, 2011). Retrieved from https://www.bpb.de/themen/erster-weltkrieg-weimar/weimarer-republik/275834/vom-kaiserreich-zur-republik-1918-19/

[34] Götz Aly. Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden?: Gleichheit, Neid und Rassenhass (S. Fischer Verlag, 2011).

[35] Hermann Beck. The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: the Machtergreifung in a New Light. First Paperback Edition (Berghahn Books, 2010), p. 246.

[36] “Nietzsche’s Letters: 1887.” Consciencia. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20101230113158/http://www.consciencia.org/nietzsches-letters-1887

[37] Jack Wertheimer. Unwelcome Strangers (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 165.

[38] David Cesarani & Sarah Kavanaugh. Holocaust: Hitler, Nazism and the "Racial State" (Psychology Press, 2004), p. 78.

[39] Herbert A. Strauss. Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism, 1870-1933/39 (Walter de Gruyter, 1993), p. 72.

[40] Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 125.

[41] Ibid., p. 73.

[42] Sedgwick. Against the Modern World, p. 96.

[43] Ibid., p. 127.

[44] Ibid., p. 127–128.

[45] Ibid., p. 142–43.

[46] Joseph Howard Tyson. Hitler’s Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Milieu (iUniverse, 2008), p. 118.

[47] Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods, p. 108.

[48] Tyson. Hitler’s Mentor, p. 117.

[49] Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods, p. 122.

[50] David Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 129.

[51] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 148.

[52] A. Nolder Gay. Some of My Best Friends: Essays in Gay History and Biography (1990), p. 116.

[53] Aloys Dreyer. Herzog Maximilian in Bayern, der erlauchte Freund und Förderer des Zitherspiels und der Gebirgspoesie (Munich: Lindauer, 1909).

[54] Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods, p. 120.

[55] “Gustav Noske 1868–1946.” Deutsches Historisches Museum (September 14, 2014). Retrieved from https://www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/gustav-noske.html

[56] Kurlander. Hitler’s Monsters.

[57] le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, p. 709.

[58] Mork. “German Nationalism and Jewish Assimilation: The Bismarck Period,” p. 81.

[59] “Schloss Scharfenberg.” Schloss Scharfenberg. Retrieved http://www.schloss-scharfenberg.de/

[60] Nigel Cawthorne. The Mammoth Book of Sex Scandals (Little, Brown Book Group, 2012).

[61] Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany’s Rebirth after the First War,” p. 161.

[62] Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (C.H.Beck, 2003).

[63] Donald L. Niewyk. The Jews in Weimar Germany (1980), p. 46.

[64] Richard S. Levy. Antisemitism (2005), p. 623.

[65] Howard Sachar. “Working to Extend America's Freedoms.” My Jewish Learning. Retrieved from http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history_community/Modern/Overview_The_Story_19481980/America/PWPolitics/CivilRights.htm

[66] Geoffrey G. Field. Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Columbia Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 392–93

[67] Serge Hutin. Governantes Invisiveis e Sociedades Secretas (Sao Paulo: Hemus, 2004), p. 28, 46, cited in Richard B. Spence. “The Mysteries of Trebitsch-Lincoln: Con-man, Spy, ‘Counter-Initiate’?” New Dawn No. 116 (Sept-Oct 2009).

[68] Spence. Secret Agent 666.

[69] Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation (BI), #202600-1356, “Trebitsch Lincoln and the Kapp Putsch,” AmMission, Budapest, c. 1920.

[70] Guido Preparata. Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005), p. 90.

[71] BI, #202600-1356-2, 5 March 1921, Col. Smith, MID to Baley, BI; BI, #202600-1356, Baley to B. Morton, 22 April 1921.

[72] Wolfram Wette. The Wehrmacht (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 63.

[73] Ibid.