Freikorps
자유군단
Right-wing volunteer paramilitary units of demobilised soldiers, young men and nationalists formed in Germany after its defeat in the First World War, 1918–1923. The Social Democratic government used them in 1919 to crush the Spartacist uprising and the council republics, and they also fought in the Baltic and Silesia. They murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; most were dissolved after the Kapp Putsch of 1920, and many of their men went on to the Nazi SA and SS.
In depth
The name came from the volunteer units of the eighteenth century and the patriotic volunteer corps of the Napoleonic Wars, such as the Lützow Free Corps. After the November Revolution of 1918 it came to mean something quite different. With the old imperial army disintegrating and the republican government in need of a force it could rely on, officers gathered demobilised soldiers, students and young men too young to have fought into volunteer units. The historian Gunther Mai counted some 365 Freikorps in the early Weimar years. Three quarters of their men were unmarried and 25 or younger; one estimate puts formal membership at about 500,000, with many more taking part informally.
When the Independent Social Democrats left the government in December 1918, the Social Democrat Gustav Noske, who took one of their places, declared that "someone has to be the bloodhound" and built the Freikorps into the main force against the enemy at home. In January 1919 Freikorps troops crushed the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, retaking the Vorwärts building with heavy weapons, and on 15 January officers of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division, on the orders of Waldemar Pabst, murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In February they put down the Bremen Council Republic, and in early May some 30,000 Freikorps men, together with government troops, destroyed the Bavarian Council Republic in Munich; about 600 people died in the suppression.
On the eastern borders the Freikorps fought Polish, Estonian and Latvian forces as well as the Bolsheviks. Freikorps such as the Iron Division joined the German forces in the Baltic under Rüdiger von der Goltz, and men from all over Germany came in on promises of Latvian citizenship and land. They were beaten by Estonian and Latvian troops at the Battle of Cēsis in June 1919. In Silesia, too, Freikorps and their successor groups fought the Polish risings.
After the law on the Provisional Reichswehr of 6 March 1919, units were absorbed into the Reichswehr one by one, but once the Treaty of Versailles capped the army at 100,000 men the surplus units faced dissolution. In protest the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade launched the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. The putsch collapsed within five days before a general strike and the refusal of officials to obey, yet it was Freikorps who went on to crush the Ruhr uprising. Most units were then forcibly dissolved. Veterans of the disbanded Ehrhardt Brigade formed the secret Organisation Consul, which assassinated Matthias Erzberger in 1921 and Walther Rathenau in 1922. Freikorps members are counted as having committed 354 murders between 1918 and 1922. The remaining men drifted into right-wing leagues such as the Stahlhelm and into the Nazi SA and SS, and in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 Hitler purged former Freikorps leaders as well. The force the Social Democratic government called up to stop the revolution became a seedbed of the far-right movement that turned against the Weimar Republic.