Babylon Berlin: The Black Reichswehr

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20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Babylon Berlin, Black Reichswehr, Erich Ludendorff, Fritz Thyssen, Military Stuff, Weimar Republic

One of the major plots in the second season of Babylon Berlin is a plot to overthrow the Weimar Republic and return Kaiser Wilhelm II to power. It revolves around a coterie of military and former military officers who are working with a wealthy industrialist to build a covert air force in the Soviet Union. Is there any basis for any of this?

Yes, quite a bit.

 

The Shadow of the Great War

The German military in the 1920s struggled to make peace with its defeat in the Great War. Many of the officers had far more loyalty to their old emperor than they did to the new democratic government. Convinced that the German military was the best in the world (which arguably it was at the start of the war), it was far easier to place the blame for Germany’s defeat on the civilian population than on its own mistakes, Kaiser Wilhilm’s ineptitude, and on the simple fact that by the end of the war it was fighting all the other major industrialized powers almost single-handedly. When defeat became inevitable, the military sought to protect Wilhelm II from the humiliation of defeat by persuading him to abdicate. That way the new Weimar Republic would have to shoulder the burden of surrender. Having thus engineered the surrender of the new government, the military then turned around and blamed the government for surrendering.

The surrender wasn’t just humiliating. It was also shocking. Like all the belligerent nations, the German government had aggressively controlled its press and propagandized the population into believing that the war was someone else’s fault but that nevertheless Germany was just about to win the war. Defeat was not considered possible, so when it came, the population was shocked and confused. If we were winning just a few months ago, why did we surrender?

These forces gave rise to the idea of the Dolchstoß, the ‘Stab in the Back’ theory. This idea maintained that Germany had been defeated from within, that someone somewhere inside the government had betrayed Germany and engineered the defeat of the military. This idea was appealing because it explained Germany’s military failure in a way that freed the military from any blame for what had happened.It created a sense of victimization that festered in German culture throughout the 20s and 30s, especially after the terrifying hyperinflation of 1923. Ultimately, Hitler blamed the Dolchstoß on the Jews, drawing imaginary lines between actual Jews in the Weimar government and a fictitious ‘International Jewish Conspiracy’ that supposedly encompassed bankers, industrialists, politicians, and communists, among others.

To make things a little bit worse, when the Spartacist League staged an uprising in Berlin, the young government turned to the military to suppress it and continued doing so later in the decade, thus legitimizing the idea that the military had a role to play in civilian political affairs. Just a few years later, both the Kapp Putsch and the Beer Hall Putsch included military elements, demonstrating that there was a taste for anti-democratic politics within the German military. The civilian government abandoned all efforts to reconcile the military with the new democratic principles that were supposedly guiding Germany.

A crowd during the Kapp Putsch

Adding to the military’s resentment was the Treaty of Versailles. In addition to staggering reparations payments to France and Britain that undermined the Germany economy, the Treaty also sought to eliminate the possibility of a future German threat to France and Britain by imposing strict limits on the German military. The German military was allowed to have a total of 100,000 soldiers (three units of cavalry and seven of infantry), with no more than 4,000 officers. The navy could have no more than 15,000 men, six battleships, six cruisers, six destroyers, and 12 torpedo boats. Civilians were not to receive military training and the manufacture and import of weapons and poison gas were prohibited. For a nation that had prided itself on the power of its military, these requirements were deeply unpopular. So it’s no surprise that the military made regular efforts to evade them.

 

The Black Reichswehr

In 1921, General Hans von Seeckt established the illicit Sondergruppe R, a secret group of military leaders who were tasked with evading the Treaty of Versailles’ limits. Sondergruppe R quickly reached an agreement with the Soviets in which the Germans would provide the Soviets with technology and training for the Soviet arms industry in exchange for Soviet assistance in evading the enforcement of the Treaty. The Sondergruppe established a series of shell corporations known as the GEFU, whose purpose was to funnel German funds into the Soviet Union for the creation of tanks, aircraft, poison gas, and other contraband weapons.

One example of this was the creation of the Lipetsk Air Base in the Soviet Union. In this arrangement, the Germans trained Soviet pilots in exchange for the Soviets allowing the construction of a secret air force. In the show, Inspector Rath (Volker Bruch) is sent in an airplane to get evidence of this illegal arrangement by flying over Lipetsk so that photographs can be taken. Although Rath’s efforts to expose this fall apart by the end of the season, the existence of the Lipetsk airbase was eventually exposed in 1931 in an article in the Weltbühne, the same newspaper that Samuel Katelbach (Karl Markvocics) edits in the series.

 

Sondergruppe R almost immediately began creating illegal paramilitary units, known as the Black Reichswehr. These were civilian recruits of nearly 20,000 who received illegal military training based in Küstrin in what is today western Poland. Because they did not officially exist, the German government could deny all knowledge of them while using them for its own ends. Between 1923 and 1925 France occupied the Ruhr Valley, one of Germany’s industrial centers, to enforce reparations payments in the form of coal and timber. The Occupation of the Ruhr was understandably unpopular in Germany, the Black Reichswehr engaged in sabotage efforts against the French. The Black Reichswehr were also used to commit a series of Feme Murders, a form of vigilante justice directed against those accused of helping enforce the Treaty’s provisions in which vigilante courts would convict someone in absentia and then sentence them to death by assassination. An effort by the Weimar government to enforce the Occupation triggered the Küstrin Putsch, in which the local Black Reichswehr tried to seize control of the city. The Putsch was thwarted by the regular army and the Küstrin paramilitary was disbanded.

But there were numerous other Freikorps groups that fall under the general banner of the Black Reichswehr. These groups appealed to veterans who were worried about the direction the country was moving in, who were hostile to Socialism, or who resented the treatment of the army after the war. The Black Reichswehr also developed ties to numerous more legitimate groups. For example, the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet) was a veterans organization numbering around 500,000 that helped veterans find jobs and housing. After 1929 it became active in anti-Republican politics. Initially it was a rival to the Nazi Party for leadership of the nationalists in Germany, but in 1933, the Nazi Sturmabteilung (itself the Nazi Freikorps) raided the Stahlhelm’s organization and eventually forced it to merge with the SA and dissolve itself.

In the show, the industrialist Alfred Nyssen (Lars Eidinger) is actively working with Major General Kurt Seegers (Ernst Stötzner) to fund these efforts and import a train-load of phosgene gas from the Soviet Union to help the coup that is being planned. Neither character is a real person, but Nyssen is clearly modeled on Fritz Thyssen, an anti-communist industrialist who increasingly supported and funded Hitler’s efforts, including dismissing all of his Jewish employees, until he broke with Hitler in 1938 and fled the country. Seegers seems loosely based on nationalist general Erich Ludendorff, who led the German army in the second half the Great War. He was active in anti-Republican efforts throughout the 1920s. He participated in both the Kapp and Beer Hall Putsches, and was a vocal proponent of the Dolchstoß theory. He supported Hitler and ran as the Nazi Party candidate for president in 1925, with little success. He eventually broke with Hitler as well.

Ernst Stötzner as Kurt Seegers

 

This review was made possible by a generous donation from one of my loyal readers. Peter, I hope you feel you got your money’s worth! If you would like me to review a specific film or series, please make a generous donation to my PayPal account and let me know what you would like me to review. If I can get access to it and think it’s appropriate for this blog, I’ll be glad to review it.

 

Want to Know More? 

Babylon Berlin is available on Amazon if you want to own it, and by streaming on Netflix. The novels by Volker Kutscher are also available: Babylon Berlin, The Silent Death, and Goldstein.

If you’re interested in the Weimar Republic, a good place to start would be with Eric D. Weitz’ Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy.

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Wonder Woman: Just a Few Thoughts

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Chris Pine, Erich Ludendorff, Gal Gadot, Patty Jenkins, Steve Trevor, Superheroes, Wonder Woman, World War I

I saw Wonder Woman last week. I loved it, despite a rather plebian third act that was, frankly, boring and generic. Patty Jenkins brought plenty of feminist elements to what might otherwise have been a rather weak Zach Snyder script. I thought I would offer just a thought or two about things that particularly connected to this blog’s purpose, namely history.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re one of the few people in the country who hasn’t seen the movie yet, you may want to put off reading this until you do, because I discuss a couple major plot points.

 

Wonder Woman and WWII

When I heard that the movie would be set during the Great War (World War I) instead of World War II, I was puzzled. Wonder Woman is in origin a World War II character. She debuted in 1941, and was to some extent a nod to the role women had taken in the US Armed Forces during the war. While women did not hold combat positions, they played a range of important roles during the war. WACs, WAVEs, WASPs, SPARs, Marine Corps Women’s Reserve members, and others served in a wide range of roles, including typists, secretaries, nurses, air traffic controllers, weather forecasters, interrogators, intelligence interpreters, drivers, mechanics, and even pilots. By 1945, there were more than 100,000 American women in uniform, with 6,000 of them being officers. Several dozen US servicewomen died during the war and others became POWs, and many received Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, and other medals. So a female superhero was an obvious choice for a time when women were demonstrating their ability to directly contribute to the US war effort.

Wonder Woman’s origin involves an American pilot, Steve Trevor, crashing his plane near Paradise Island (later renamed Themiscyra). Although the comic never definitely stated where Paradise Island was located, it was broadly hinted that it is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean (although how Greek Amazons got to the Pacific Ocean was not explained). A location in the Pacific makes sense, since the US probably had a larger Air Force presence in the Pacific theater than the European theater and because Paradise Island was located a long way from civilization; it’s unlikely a solo American pilot in Europe could be a long way from civilization.

Wonder Woman’s original costume strongly emphasized her specifically American identity. Her costume is red, white, and blue; she has an eagle on her bustier; and her skirt is blue with white five-pointed starts.

Note her costume

 

In the early comics, she frequently fought Nazis and Japanese, as most superheroes did. Her first recurring villain was the German spy and saboteur Baroness Paula von Gunther. The villainous Dr. Poison was revealed to be a Japanese princess. Other Nazi opponents included Mavis and Gundra the Valkyrie. The Duke of Deception turned out to be the driving force behind Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union. In the 4th issue of Wonder Woman (April-May 1943), she led a group of marines in an attack on the Japanese, and for a while her battle cry was “Keep ’em flying”, a common WWII slogan.

 

Why the Great War? 

So initially I was really puzzled why the decision was made to push Wonder Woman’s origin back two decades and have her involved in the Great War instead. On the surface, it’s a little forced. The film has to contort things a bit in order to make the American Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) be able to crash on Themiscyra, given that the Americans only got into the war comparatively late, in April of 1917. Trevor must be a damn good spy to be able to fake being a German flying ace and sneak into a secret munitions base in modern Turkey. Apparently in this film, Themiscyra is located in the eastern Mediterranean (which makes more sense in terms of the Amazon origin story, but not in terms of comics history).

But very soon after Diana (Gal Gadot) and Trevor get to Britain, I realized that transplanting Wonder Woman to the Great War actually makes good sense. Diana’s mission is to put an end to the whole idea of war by locating the god Ares and killing him. The idea of killing the very concept of war echoes the post-war notion that the Great War was the War to End All War, a war so awful it would teach people not to wage war. That makes Diana essentially the incarnation of this optimistic approach to the horrors of the war, and her essential optimism starts to seem both realistic and impossibly idealistic at the same time. Faced with the horrors of the Great War, how could she not want to end warfare once and for all, but how can she possibly accomplish such a huge goal?

The film positions her in a remarkably complex war that ought to serve as a good foil for her goals and idealism, because it is hard to say who were really the good guys and bad guys in this war, as opposed to just who were the winners and losers. As has been pointed out, however, the film betrays this approach by making it clear that the Germans really are the bad guys, since they’re willing to embrace Dr. Poison (Elena Anaya) and her murderous super-weapon, and Gen. Ludendorff (Danny Huston) is willing to negotiate an armistice in bad faith, while the British are sincere in their desire for peace.

 

General Ludendorff

Erich Ludendorff was a smart choice to serve as a major protagonist for a heroine who wants to end all war, because he was one of the most militaristic of German generals during the Great War. He was a brilliant general. He was an advocate for ‘total war’ in which the German military essentially took control of much of the German government and geared Germany’s economy toward the waging of war. Although he never completely accomplished that during the war, his approach still helped drive the collapse of the German economy by the end of the war. He pressured Kaiser Wilhelm II into permitting unrestricted submarine warfare against Britain, ignoring the warnings that sinking US ships might bring the US in to the war against Germany, which in fact happened after the sinking of the Lusitania. When an armistice was proposed in 1918, he advocated for using it to quickly rebuild and then launch a renewed attack on France. This was a man who truly was committed to warfare and so he makes a plausible candidate for the mortal incarnation of the God of War. And he was in Belgium in 1918, which is when the film has to be set.

Gen. Erich Ludendorff

 

However, he didn’t slaughter the rest of the German High Command, and he wasn’t killed in the waning months of the war. He survived the war, opposing the German surrender because he refused to accept that the German army could possibly be defeated; he denied reports that German army units were refusing to obey direct orders. He was suffering from severe sleep deprivation, which may account for his growing fanaticism at the end of the war. He was briefly exiled, but returned to Germany in 1919. After the war, as he began to be blamed for the failure of the war and the collapse of the German economy, he resorted to promoting the theory that the real reason for the German defeat was the ‘Stab in the Back’, the notion that the German army and government had been betrayed by unrecognized traitors in their midst. He blamed the Stab in the Back on German Jews, thereby helping promote the anti-Semitism that became such a major element of Hitler’s ideology. And he was an early supporter of Hitler, although he began to become disillusioned with the man during the 30s. He died in 1937 from liver cancer, not a sword through the chest.

 

Want to Know More?

Wonder Woman is still in the theaters, so it’s not available for home viewing yet. But you should read about Wonder Woman’s history, because it’s really interesting. Her creator, William Moulton Marston, lived a very…non-traditional life, and is credited with helping invent the lie detector (the Lasso of Truth…). He was a bondage fetishist, a female supremacist, and had a polyamorous marriage long before that was a thing. So take a look at Jill Lapore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman.