Reinhard Volunteer Regiment

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Members of the Reinhard Freikorps on Unter den Linden (1919)
During the March fighting in Berlin from March 3 to 12, 1919, Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard, the commander of the Freikorps Regiment deployed in Lichtenberg, made an inspection trip from Friedrichshain

The Reinhard Volunteer Regiment (also Freikorps Reinhard ) was a paramilitary German Freikorps association formed after the end of the First World War , which played an important role in the suppression of the Berlin Spartakus uprising in 1919 and shortly afterwards also took part in the March fighting . After 1919, several former members of this unit operated at the junctions of organized right-wing radicalism. The regiment was named after its commander, the Colonel - and later SS-Obergruppenführer - Wilhelm Reinhard . In the meantime it was expanded to a brigade, and on May 1, 1919 it was accepted into the Army of the Republic as Reichswehr Brigade 15 .

development

The formation of the regiment began on December 24, 1918 immediately after the Berlin Christmas fighting , the course of which had proven that the remaining front formations could not be used as a civil war force. Reinhard initially resorted to the so-called NCO Battalion Soup (about 300 men), remnants of the Prussian Guard troops - especially the 4th Guards Regiment on foot - and individual volunteers. It is not known whether the initiative came from Reinhard himself or from someone else. According to the same information from Reinhard and his "Führer assistant" Hans von Kessel , the regiment was financially and politically supported by the Greater Berlin Citizens' Council , an association of Berlin industrialists, bankers and civil servants formed on November 18, 1918. The Executive Council of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Councils was surprised by the sudden appearance of this troop, the formation of which took place "almost unnoticed". The regiment was housed in the barracks on Rathenower Strasse in Moabit and after a few days was about 2,500 men strong; it was initially divided into two battalions and an officer company. His relatives initially wore white armbands, later sewn on metal sleeve plaques with an embossed "R" and the year "1919".

Beginning in January 1919 were Reinhards measures from shortly before the Council of the People's Deputies been moved Gustav Noske "covered and encouraged" by an official transfer. Immediately after the Christmas fights, Noske and the Prussian Minister of War Walther Reinhardt tried to install Reinhard as the successor to the city commandant Otto Wels, who had become untenable , but failed because the colonel - looking back on a social democrat like Albert Grzesinski who was close to Noske himself, "was a special one unpleasant appearance ”- was not enforceable against the resistance of the Berlin soldiers' councils. On January 3rd, Noske subordinated the regiment to the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division , the remains of which gathered after the Christmas battles in the Teltow area , where they were re-established - now as a Freikorps. Reinhard's association had already taken over the guarding of the Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse .

At the beginning of the Spartacus uprising , Reinhard's regiment was the only combat force that the government had in the center of the city. The rest of the Berlin garrison did not go over to the revolutionaries, but they were also not ready to fight for the Ebert government. Noske , who was appointed commander-in-chief of the troops loyal to the government in and near Berlin , basically saw the Republican Army Armed Forces , which was still set up under Wels and into which numerous supporters of the USPD had joined, as an opponent. The organizational consolidation of armed SPD supporters under the command of former officers and NCOs (in the form of the Regiments Liebe and Reichstag ) did not begin until after January 6th. Social democrats like Ernst Heilmann later occasionally tried to relativize the importance of Reinhard's regiment with reference to these formations - of which Noske, however, “didn't think much”. Until the Noske troops marched into the center of Berlin, which began on the evening of January 10th, the Reinhard Regiment made sure in particular that the government buildings in the Wilhelmstrasse area did not fall to the insurgents (which apart from one unorganized advance on January 6th) January, which cost 25 lives, made no serious attempt to get hold of it). Machine gunmen of the regiment posted on the balcony of the Prinz-Friedrich-Leopold-Palais fired on January 6th at the crowd gathered on Wilhelmplatz , which allegedly killed 60 people. After January 10, the regiment took part in the attack on the newspaper district and made advances into the working-class districts in the north and east of Berlin.

From February 1919 the regiment officially operated as the 2nd Guard Infantry Brigade or Brigade Reinhard. In March, the association was involved in the renewed military occupation of Berlin and Lichtenberg and the planned terrorist crackdown, particularly against the KPD . On March 3, Reinhard soldiers occupied and destroyed the editorial office and printing plant of the Rote Fahne ; a “patrol company” of the brigade, commanded by Lieutenant Eugen von Kessel , targeted communists. At that time there were 4,500 political prisoners in the Moabit cell prison, "run" by the Reinhard Brigade , who, according to Reinhard's own testimony, could barely move in the overcrowded cells. Wieland Herzfelde was also held here for a few days , about whose impressions Harry Graf Kessler noted on March 21, 1919:

“Wieland Herzfelde called me early and informed me that he was free. (...) His descriptions from the prisons are so terrible that I felt sick with disgust and indignation. Dostoyevsky's 'house of the dead' is surpassed. The mistreatment of the prisoners from spitting in the face to putting them on the wall and killing is so general, the torture in the presence of the officers so natural that Wieland's belief in a rehearsed lynching , with an instruction session where it is taught, seems almost reasonable. "

On March 11, soldiers of the brigade murdered 29 former members of the People's Naval Division in a bank building on Französische Strasse on the orders of Lieutenant Marloh - who had previously been informed accordingly by Reinhard .

On April 1, 1919, the brigade was subordinated to the Guard Cavalry Rifle Corps and incorporated into the Provisional Reichswehr in June as Reichswehr Brigade 15. Reinhard, now promoted to Infantry Leader 15 , made himself so impossible in the following months through repeated anti-republican statements and activities that Noske, who supported him for a long time with Ebert, could no longer avoid dismissing him in December 1919. In October 1919, in a speech in Kassel that was widely regarded as a “sensation” , Philipp Scheidemann described the continued adherence to Reinhard as “unbearable”, but Ebert and Noske rebuked him for this.

A rescue organization for the former members of the Reinhard Regiment from the Brandenburg province who were not taken over into the Reichswehr was the "Sports Association", the German Association for Physical Exercise Olympia, founded in 1920 . Around 1925 it was the strongest right-wing extremist military association active in conspiracy in the Berlin area. In May 1926 it was banned together with the Wikingbund . Many of its members - including Hans Eberhard Maikowski and probably Horst Wessel - then joined the SA .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Research Institute for War and Army History (ed.), Die Wirren in der Reichshauptstadt and in Northern Germany 1918-1920, Berlin 1940, p. 49.
  2. ↑ See Reinhard, Wilhelm, 1918-19. Die Wehen der Republik, Berlin 1933, p. 68.
  3. ↑ See Kessel, Hans von, hand grenades and red flags. A factual report from the fight against red Berlin 1918–1920, Berlin 1933, pp. 204ff.
  4. ↑ See also Bieber, Hans-Joachim, Bürgerertum in der Revolution. Citizens' councils and citizen strikes in Germany 1918–1920, Hamburg 1992, pp. 197f.
  5. ↑ Schulze, Hagen, Freikorps und Republik 1918–1920, Boppard am Rhein 1969, p. 72.
  6. ↑ See Engel, Gerhard, Holtz, Bärbel, Huch, Gaby, Materna, Ingo (eds.), Greater Berlin Workers 'and Soldiers' Councils in the Revolution 1918/19. Documents of the plenary meetings and the executive council. From the 1st Reichsrätekongress to the general strike resolution on March 3, 1919, Berlin 1997, p. 340.
  7. ↑ See collective of authors, History of the revolutionary Berlin workers' movement. From the beginnings to the present, Berlin 1987, Volume 2 (1917 to 1945), p. 60 and Drabkin, Jakov S., Die Novemberrevolution 1918 in Deutschland, Berlin 1968, p. 480.
  8. ↑ See Wirren in der Reichshauptstadt, p. 194.
  9. ↑ Bet, Wolfram, Gustav Noske. A political biography, Düsseldorf 1987, p. 291.
  10. ↑ See Gietinger, Klaus, Der Konterrevolutionär. Waldemar Pabst - a German career, Hamburg 2008, p. 101.
  11. ↑ Grzesinski, Albert (ed. By Eberhard Kolb), In the fight for the German republic. Memories of a Social Democrat, Munich 2001, p. 102.
  12. ↑ See Drabkin, November Revolution, p. 410.
  13. ↑ See Dreetz, Dieter, Gessner, Klaus, Sperling, Heinz, Armed Fights in Germany 1918-1923, Berlin 1988, p. 52.
  14. ^ See Gietinger, Counterrevolutionär, p. 110.
  15. ↑ In the course of the suppression of the January uprising, Noske had the Republican Army, whose departments, with a few exceptions, had also declared themselves "neutral", largely disarmed. See Engel, Holtz, Huch, Materna, Groß-Berliner Arbeiter- und Soldräte, pp. 262f. and Drabkin, November Revolution, p. 509.
  16. ↑ See Wirren in der Reichshauptstadt, p. 55.
  17. ↑ Bet, Noske, p. 390.
  18. ↑ See Susanne Miller , The Burden of Power. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1918–1920, Bonn 1978, p. 234 and Wette, Noske, p. 327.
  19. ↑ See Wirren in der Reichshauptstadt, p. 60.
  20. ↑ See Dreetz, Gessner, Sperling, Armed Fights, p. 56.
  21. ^ See Drabkin, Jakov S., The emergence of the Weimar Republic, Berlin 1983, p. 153 and Wirren in der Reichshauptstadt, p. 83.
  22. ↑ See Drabkin, emergence, p. 167.
  23. ↑ Kessler, Harry Graf (edited by Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli), Diaries 1918–1937, Frankfurt am Main-Leipzig 1996, p. 162.
  24. ↑ See Dreetz, Gessner, Sperling, armed struggles, p. 72 and Gietinger, counterrevolutionär, p. 149f.
  25. ↑ See Wette, Noske, p. 585 ff.
  26. ↑ See Miller, Bürde, p. 364.
  27. ↑ See Sauer, Bernhard, Black Reichswehr and Fememorde. A milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic, Berlin 2004, p. 50.
  28. ↑ See Siemens, Daniel, Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist, Munich 2009, p. 55.