The German Revolution of 1918-23 was not the great experience of the German people, but it was the great experience of its officers. A strange grey terror rose from the trenches and overpowered them. They began to study this terror and turn it to their own ends. Army and revolution entered upon a struggle for the source of power in modern society: the proletariat.The educated worker, the intellectual of the fourth estate, is the strength of present-day armies. This proletarian worker, who more and more is becoming the actual intellectual of the technical age, is the human reservoir of modern society. Any militarism which does not want to die of malnutrition is dependent on him. The modern army is an army of technicians. The army needs the worker, and that is why it fights against the revolution; not for the throne and not for the money-bags, but for itself.The army devours the people. A fatherland rises up within the fatherland.... Germany is: a tank park, a line of cannon, and the grey human personnel belonging to them. "I find", wrote one of those two hundred thousand officers in his autobiography, "that I no longer belong to this people. All I remember is that I once belonged to the German army."The words are by Ernst Röhm. This Röhm, more than any other in his circle, is the key figure we were seeking when we asked: Who sent out the murderers? who gave the judges their orders? A young officer in his mid-thirties, a captain like a thousand others, the kind who might gladly and easily disappear in the mass, he stood modestly aside in the dazzling parades where generals and marshals, personally responsible, perhaps, for the loss of the war, were applauded by a misguided patriotic youth. Röhm was only an adjutant to the chief of the infantry troops stationed in Bavaria, a certain Colonel von Epp. But from this modest post he established, in defiance of the law and against the will of every Minister in Berlin and Munich, a volunteer army of a hundred thousand men, calling themselves modestly the Einwohnerwehr (citizens' defence). When this armed mass was finally disbanded by orders from above, he formed new nuclei. New organizations kept springing up, with all sorts of names, under constantly changing official leaders, all having ostensibly nothing to do with the Reichswehr. Actually all were an extension of the Reichswehr, under the command of Röhm.Röhm was a professional soldier of petty bourgeois origin. His father was a middling railway official in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, where Röhm was born on November 28, 1887. The boy became an excellent soldier, the embodiment of personal bravery. In 1906 he joined the army, in 1908 became a lieutenant. Three times wounded in the war, he returned each time to the front. Half his nose was shot away, he had a bullet hole in his cheek; short, stocky, shot to tatters, and patched, he was the outward image of a freebooter captain. He was more a soldier than an officer. In his memoirs he condemns the cowardice, sensuality, and other vices of many comrades; his revelations were almost treason against his own class.(4) Rudolf Olden, Hitler the Pawn (1936)Röhm had also been convicted of high treason, but, together with others like him who were found guilty in a lesser degree, had been discharged on the day sentence was pronounced. The indefatigable soldier at once started again at the very point where he had stopped: recruiting, drilling and holding parades. Against the Notbann of Epp he set up a Frontbann which was to unite all the defence leagues.His conviction remained what it always had been: a soldier had to play his part in politics. Röhm did not understand that politics, in other words the leadership of a nation or a party, must be homogeneous; he believed in the necessity of dualism, of a duplication of functions. His ideal was not modelled on Frederick the Great or Napoleon, the soldier-sovereign. He followed the example of Moltke and Ludendorff, who wanted only to guide and check the politicians, and not supplant them. He might have learnt a lesson from the events that followed the Great War. But clever and competent as he was, he could never grasp the main thing. He says, it is true, that he demands the chief position in the State for the soldier, but he cannot understand that in that case the soldier must be a politician, a political leader. No one has taught with greater insistence than Clausewitz that the Army must be subordinate to politics. Exactly like Ludendorff and the majority of German officers, Röhm studied the great Prussian military philosopher to little advantage.Hitler never recognised military claims in his party. For this reason he always had to fight his military advisers. He required troops for political guerilla warfare, for his mass meetings and for service in the streets. He knew the magic influence that marching and fluttering banners exercise on the German mind, and in his propaganda campaign he could not do without them. He granted banners and military titles, founded brigades and divisions. But he never wanted to use them for anything except intimidation, and he was anxious to leave war preparations to the experts in the Army.
The German Freikorps 1918-23 Pdf Free
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