It seems that you cannot talk about German politics without encountering a private army of thugs. On one hand you have th Freikorps of the Weimar Republic. The Freikorps was made up mostly of military men who had been discharged but felt out of place in civilian life. They joined in order to be with people who understood them. For the most part, they were used as a paramilitary force to combat the rising communists. The SPD used them to put down the German Revolution, the Marxist Spartacist League, and the Bavarian Soviet Republic. With the rise of the German Workers Party, later renamed the National Socialist Workers Party, many former Freikorps joined and later became members of the Nazi party.
The Nazi party employed their own brand of thugs. The Sturmabteilung, the SA or Storm Troopers, were used in Hitler's rise to power. Though after the "Night of the Long Knives", they were superceded by the SS. Called "Brownshirts", the SA was used as the right arm of the party. Their specialty was intimidation. However, the SA's ambitions drew the ire of the regular army when they planned to replace them with the a strengthened SA. Hitler, in order to gain support of the regular army, made a plan to dispose of the SA. The SS arrested and executed all the leadership of the SA in one night. It was known as the "Night of the Long Knives".
Anyway, it is just interesting to see the use of thugs by both the SPD in the Weimar Republic and Hitler during the Third Reich. Most people like to point out the differences between the "Democratic" Weimar Republic and the "dictatorship" of the Third Reich. It just goes to show you that politics seems to go hand and hand whether you are the "good guys" or the "bad guys".
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I think it is very important to mention the SPD's use of the freikorps. These men felt annexed from the rest of society and were willing to fight against any opposition. The fact the SPD used these men to eradicate other socialists is very important. It seems this situation of socialists killing other socialists to combat opposition is comparable to the Nazis ultimately killing German deviants, socially undesirables, etc.
ReplyDeleteI still feel like the frekorp are a little bit easier to understand, and "sympathize" with than the SS. As you mentioned, they were made up almost entirely of soldiers returning home from the war, and felt like outcasts in a society that had been taught to glorify war and the soldiers who fought it, only to end up on the losing side having been completely crushed. That still doesn't exempt them from the murders they committed, just that I think they're a little bit more complex than the SS.
ReplyDeleteThe more things change, the more things stay the same. It seems as though no matter what government was in power, thugs were everywhere. I guess this explains to an extent why there was so much violence during this time, and why the people gradually moved away from moderate to increasingly radical political views.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the use of thugs by the SPD from an early stage indicates the limits of the German committment to democracy. Rather than letting voters decide or relying on the regular police, the SPD chose to use these mercenary groups to regain control. While I understand the need to meet force with force, it also questions one's believe in democracy when the government had to rely on force rather than popular acclaim to defend itself.
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