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Summary

An attempted coup against the Weimar Government in March 1920.

The immediate cause was the attempt to disband an elite Freikorps unit, the Marinebrigade , in an Army seething with anger about the Treaty of Versailles and the new Republic.  The Army refused to oppose the rebelling soldiers.

The Army Commander Lüttwitz invited Wolfgang Kapp and the National Association to join the coup. 

The coup failed when a massive general strike brought the country to a halt ... but the putschists got wanted they wanted (an early election and an end to the pro-Weimar Coalition in the Reichstag) and they were leniently treated afterwards.

 

 

The Kapp Putsch, 1920

Causes

  1. Many members of the Army hated democracy & socialism, and the Treaty of Versailles, and felt betrayed by the Weimar government. 

  2. Needing to save money, the government announced the disbanding the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, an elite Freikorps unit.  The unit refused and paraded in Berlin in defiance of the government.  General Walther von Lüttwitz, the Army’s commander in Berlin, supported the Brigade, demanded the dissolution of the National Assembly, new elections for the Reichstag, the appointment of himself as supreme commander of the army, and the revocation of the orders of dissolution for the Marinebrigaden. 

  3. Lüttwitz contacted the Nationale Vereinigung (‘National Association') – a nationalist party led by Wolfgang Kapp, a Prussian civil servant, who had been planning a coup against the republic for a while.  They were supported by WWI general Ludendorff.

 

Events

  • On 13 March Marinebrigade Ehrhardt marched on Berlin. 

  • When the Minister of Defence asked the Army to defend the government, he was told by General Hans von Seekt: “Reichswehr does not fire on Reichswehr”. 

  • The government fled.  Ebert called on the workers for a general strike. 

  • The coup occupied the Chancellery, Kapp declared himself Chancellor, Lüttwitz Head of the Army.  The army, the civil service heads, and the states (notably Bavaria, where the right-wing politician Gustav von Kahr formed a new government) either supported the coup, or did not oppose it.

  • The Unions came out on a general strike, which was supported by 12 million workers.  Everything – most importantly gas, water and power – stopped. 

  • The Putschists were forced to abandon the coup.  Kapp and Lüttwitz fled abroad.  There was a small clash between troops and a civil militia near Hamburg on 15 March, and the Marinebrigaden fired on a group workers who heckled them as they march out of Berlin, killing a dozen of them.  Otherwise, the coup was bloodless. 

 

Results

  1. Most of the perpetrators were given an amnesty, including Lüttwitz.  The Marinebrigade was disbanded, but the soldiers were transferred to other Army units, where they had successful careers.  Seeckt became Chief of Army Command.  There were some court-martials, but only one person was punished – the former Berlin police chief Traugott von Jagow, who was given the minimum sentence of five years because (the judge allowed) he had acted “under the spell of selfless love for the fatherland at a seductive moment.”

  2. The Putsch provoked a socialist uprising in the Ruhr, which was much more brutally put down (by Army units including former members of the Marinebrigade). 

  3. The government returned.  It brought forward elections for the National Assembly, as the putschists had demanded.  In the elections of June 1920 the SPD and Democratic Party lost their majority – i.e.  “The Weimar Coalition lost its majority in parliament and would never regain it”.

 

 

 

Consider:

Study the events of the coup and analyse them into two columns of 'Messages for the Weimar Government':

   •  Reasons for Hope;

   •  Causes for Concern.

 

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