The Kapp Putsch — or more accurately the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch — was a 1920 coup attempt during the German Revolution of 1918–1919 aimed at overthrowing the Weimar Republic. Based on opposition to the Treaty of Versailles imposed at the end of World War I, the putsch was later labelled as right-wing monarchist and reactionary.
Contents |
In early 1919 the strength of the Reichswehr, the regular army, was estimated at 350,000. There were in addition more than 250,000 men enlisted in the various Freikorps. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Germany was required to reduce its armed forces to a maximum of 100,000. Freikorps units were therefore expected to be disbanded.
In March 1920 orders were issued for the disbandment of the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt. Its leaders were determined to resist dissolution and appealed to General Walther von Lüttwitz, commander of the Berlin Reichswehr, for support. Lüttwitz, an organiser of Freikorps units in the wake of World War I, and a fervent monarchist, responded by calling on President Friedrich Ebert and Defense Minister Gustav Noske to stop the whole programme of troop reductions. When Ebert refused, Lüttwitz ordered the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt to march on Berlin. It occupied the capital on 13 March. Lüttwitz, therefore, was the driving force behind the 1920 putsch, even though its nominal leader was Wolfgang Kapp, a 62-year-old East Prussian civil servant and fervent nationalist. After the putsch Noske named Kapp, Waldemar Pabst and Hermann Ehrhardt as being responsible, despite the support from much higher up in the army.[1]
At this point Noske called upon the regular army to suppress the putsch. He encountered a blank refusal. The Chef der Heeresleitung General Hans von Seeckt, one of the Reichswehr's senior commanders, told him: "Reichswehr does not fire on Reichswehr." The government, forced to abandon Berlin, moved to Dresden, where they hoped to get support from Generalmajor Maercker. When they realized that Maercker did not want to take a clear stance they moved further to Stuttgart. Meanwhile, Kapp tried to form a government, with a number of desperate and in part criminal characters in the subordinate offices. Well-known conservatives and former secretaries of state, who were invited to assume the more important offices, declined to associate themselves with him.[2]
The Cabinet issued a proclamation calling on Germany's workers to defeat the putsch by means of a general strike. The strike call received massive support. This struggle claimed numerous victims among workers all over the country. With the country paralysed, and with the leading generals of the army — with the exception of Ludendorff — having at the same time informed Lüttwitz that his position and action were entirely irregular and that he must resign in the interests of the country,[2] the putsch collapsed; Kapp and Lüttwitz, unable to govern, fled to Sweden.
There were two main reasons why the Weimar Republic survived in 1920. Firstly, the working class rallied to its defense. Secondly, most of the leading Freikorps commanders refused to join the putsch, perhaps with the view that it was premature.
The chief grievances which Kapp and his followers had against the government were (a) that the national assembly, which had been elected to serve temporarily, was beginning to act as a permanent Reichstag; (b) that it seemed this assembly might revise the constitution with respect to the election of the President of the Republic so that the Reichstag, rather than the electorate of the country, was responsible for the President's election. There was something in these complaints, and as a consequence the date of the general election for the first republican Reichstag was hastened and was fixed for the following June, while all attempts to change the method of election for the presidency of the Republic were abandoned.[2]
The effects of the Kapp Putsch throughout Germany were more lasting than in Berlin. On the one hand, it led to a succession of communist insurrections, of which the most serious was that which was suppressed by reactionary troops and with reactionary severity in the Ruhr region, March-April 1920. On the other hand, it left a rump of military conspirators such as Col. Bauer, Maj. Pabst and Capt. Ehrhardt, who found refuge in Bavaria under the reactionary government of Gustav von Kahr (itself an indirect product of the Kapp coup) and there attempted to organize plots against the republican constitution and government of Germany. The crisis in the relations of Bavaria with the Reich (August-September 1921) which ended in von Kahr's resignation was a further phase of the same trouble.[2]
Between 1920 and 1922 a monument in honour of the workers who lost their lives in the wake of the Kapp Putsch was erected in the Weimar central cemetery. The memorial was commissioned by the Weimar Gewerkschaftskartell (Union Kartell) and built according to plans submitted to a competition by the architectural office of Walter Gropius. Although Gropius maintained that the Bauhaus should remain politically neutral, he ultimately agreed to participate in the competition staged among Weimar artists at the end of 1920. The monument was arranged around an inner space, in which visitors could stand, the repeatedly fractured and highly angular memorial rose up on three sides as if thrust up from or rammed into the earth.[3] In February 1936, the Nazis destroyed the monument due to its political overtones, and considered its design to fall under the category of degenerate art.