The impact of the Reichswehr's program of clandestine armament on Weimar Germany's civil society is a phenomenon largely overlooked by post-war historiography. Not only did it fail to identify the wide support enjoyed by the illegal preparations for a general mobilization on the national and local levels,Footnote ¹ but it also failed to address the question why the officials collaborated with the Reichswehr under the aegis of “national defense” at all.Footnote ² The reasons for both omissions are easy to find. While the role played by civilians within the militarization of society has been largely ignored (due to the historiographical dominance of the interpretation model of the army as an autonomous “state within the state”Footnote ³), the few authors who recognized its importance considered a more detailed analysis of civilian dispositions to be dispensable in view of the well-known nationwide anti-Versailles sentiment.Footnote ⁴

Yet, mere rejection of the peace treaty does not necessarily explain the extensive participation of civil authorities in the building of an illegal “national protection organization” (Landesschutzorganisation) as undertaken by the Reichswehr between the early 1920s and 1934. This essay will try to bridge this incongruity between the rejection of Versailles and an extremely extensive engagement in the program of clandestine rearmament by introducing the concept of “national defense” as the synonym for the overlap between republican and military concepts of how to provide security for a radically disarmed state.

This common ground was limited and was not able to prevent emphatic disagreement between the civilian and military elites.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, it included neither the democratization of the army as demanded by the democratic camp, nor the preparation for revanchist military action (Revisionskrieg) as favored by the officer corps. Yet, it included a program of clandestine defensive armament and to a certain extent, the militarization of state and society. The concept of “national defense” will be considered here as the key to understanding the mindset of democratic elites supporting a mobilization directed against “the law and constitution.”Footnote ⁶

Using an analysis of civil military interaction within the program of clandestine armament, this essay seeks to demonstrate both assertions: the existence of large-scale civil-military collaboration, as well as the significance of the commonly shared concept of “national defense” thus by demonstrating the support by the Prussian administration for the clandestine preparations for a mobilization. This is especially telling, since these democratic elites, the Prussian government, and its district and provincial governorsFootnote ⁷ have so far been considered as having had an “antagonistic relationship” with the military authorities.Footnote ⁸ The cohesion of the originally “leftist” concept of “national defense” was strong enough to prevent even the social democratic Prussian government from breaking the consensus on defense in the face of a situation in which NSDAP members were found to be serving in the illegal, so-called “black,” Reichswehr.

The following analysis has three parts. The first seeks to exact different meanings of “national defense” for the various parties involved, by providing an outline of its conceptual history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part will draw conclusions from this conceptual history regarding the involvement of the Prussian administration in clandestine armament activities between 1923 and 1928 on a macro level, while the third part will provide support for these rather general findings using a case study, the Kirchhain affair. This affair, which gained a high degree of public prominence and newspaper coverage for a number of weeks in the fall of 1928, will serve as an example for the patterns of action that connected high-ranking Prussian civil servants to the program of clandestine armament in the course of the Wehrhaftmachung (the increase of Germany's military preparedness).

The Key Concept of “National Defense”

When one sifts through the civil-military correspondence regarding mobilization preparations and the militarization of society in Weimar Germany, it immediately becomes apparent that the authors of the documents used striking terminology. They did not use obvious terms such as Geheimrüstung (clandestine armament) or “Schwarze Reichswehr” (black Reichswehr), nor did they employ phrases with the connotation of “illegality” when talking about the subject. Instead, they referred in a rather abstract manner to “national defense,” “national protection,” “border protection,” or Wehrhaftmachung.

One could disregard this linguistic phenomenon, explaining it away as euphemism or an example of coded language. Yet, if one follows the assumptions of conceptual history, which state that concepts not only indicate interpretations of reality but also determine political behavior,Footnote ⁹ one might be prompted to take this notion more seriously. Use of one of the main terms of conceptual history, the “sedimented experience” could prove to be especially fruitful in this analysis. This could provide a fresh insight into the patterns of action of the civil elites involved in the program of clandestine armament of the 1920s and early 1930s.

The term “national defense,” structuring the discourse on defense in Weimar Germany, had in fact already been the key term of oppositional discourse on defense in the course of the “long nineteenth century.” In the period of the Wars of Liberation, liberal citizens and publicists used the term to legitimate their call for the arming of the people and their incorporation into a militia system.Footnote ¹⁰ Both were opposed to the rather more offensive oriented “aristocratic” system of standing armies.Footnote ¹¹

“National defense,” depending in turn on “military preparedness” (Wehrhaftigkeit), an important piece of the self-perception of the German liberals,Footnote ¹² became the right of free men, and the militia a means of the liberation of society. The neglect of this bourgeois achievement, the Prussian Landwehr, by the political and military elites ensured that the term “national defense” was reserved as a term denoting opposition to the official military doctrines of a standing army. Consequently, in the course of the revolution of 1848/49, the militia-enthusiastic liberal bourgeoisie subsumed their military efforts (here and later, in close connection with a concept for a new order of society) under the term “national defense.”Footnote ¹³

Yet, having been reconciled with the Prussian-German army through the system of the general conscription,Footnote ¹⁴ the bourgeoisie relinquished the monopoly of a call for a people's militia to the labor movement, which, having its roots in the radical-democratic movement of the 1840s, continued to use the term “national defense” to legitimate their ideas of society and defense. August Bebel took particular care to integrate the once Jacobin and later liberal military ideas into socialist ideology. “The defense of home soil,” Bebel claimed, mirroring the bourgeois poet of the Napoleonic Wars Ernst Moritz Arndt, “is a duty for all those capable of fulfilling it.”Footnote ¹⁵ Again, the means for the defense “of the home soil” were to be provided by a “people's army” that would require military preparations for the youth.

In the years preceding the First World War, leading revisionist Social Democrats such as Eduard Bernstein and Gustav Noske used the terms “military preparedness” and “national defense” in order to differentiate the social democratic idea of a democracy capable of providing for the defense of the realm from what they understood as “Prussian militarism.” Their understanding of “Prussian militarism” was restricted to a preoccupation with combating the “inner enemy” while following a “cult of the offensive.”Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, it is hardly surprising to see the party leadership legitimating their acceptance of the war credits in August 1914 by referring to the necessity of “national defense.”Footnote ¹⁷

The frequency with which the term “national defense” with its requirement for “military preparedness” as well as its means, the people's army, was employed in oppositional discourses on defense corresponded with the widespread resistance the terms met within the conservative and professional military discourses on defense at that time. While a defensive warfare was considered inadequate for Germany's geographic “central position,”Footnote ¹⁸ a people's army seemed to be “un-German” on the grounds of its lack of professionalism.Footnote ¹⁹ Only general conscription met the needs of a Germany aspiring to world-power status.Footnote ²⁰

It was the dissolution of the old army and the loss of general conscription in the fall of 1918 that caused a change of view among the post-war military elite. The immediate use of the term “national defense,” referring to military activities designed to secure the eastern borders, indicates the new way in which the rump officer corps perceived the new military reality. The military elite of the new 100,000-man army was now forced to adopt a concept of security, which it had previously rejected. They may well have spoken of and planned a revanchist, offensive war,Footnote ²¹ yet circumstances forced them to secure the security of the Reich by practicing low-scale rearmament.Footnote ²²

In following years, the officer corps used “national defense” as a portmanteau term referring to a range of measures aimed at providing a minimum of security for the Reich. These ranged from the development of the civilian infrastructure to meet military needs to the establishment of a “national protection organization” that combined elements of a Volkswehr and general conscription, to the exploitation of the civil authorities for military tasks. “National defense” thus changed from a legitimating to a programmative concept.

The civilian elites on the other hand continued to understand “national defense” as a concept with a predominantly defensive meaning. Furthermore, it never lost its democratic connotation among these circles, due to its tradition within the Liberal and Social Democratic movements. It was in this sense that they accepted “national defense” as the appropriate concept to provide security for their republic. Thus, the concept of Landesverteidigung served to span the considerable gap between the two camps, legitimating military measures in both discourses. The term provided the adequate concept with seriousness in the civilian and relevance in the professional-military debate on defense.Footnote ²³ The fact that civilians and soldiers spoke the same language (while referring to different concepts) provided the necessary conceptual overlap of ideas, which facilitated an otherwise barely possible collaboration, the practice of which will now be illustrated.

The Militarization of the Civil Service

Cooperation between the Prussian administration and the military began shortly after the armistice of November 1918. Facing revolutionary uprisings, Polish incursions into the eastern provinces, and the allied occupation of the Rhineland, paramilitary mobilization of the population, reminiscent of the revolutionary concept of the people in arms, was widely tolerated and even supported by the civil authorities, including the new republican officials. One example is the liberal provincial governor of Pomerania, Julius Lippmann, who accepted the raising of rural militias in April 1919 despite its violation of the armistice conditions.Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, after 1920, the provincial governors of East Prussia and Upper Silesia, Ernst Siehr and Joseph Bitta, implemented the integration of the regional self-protection units in Reichswehr-led border defense systems.Footnote ²⁵ In addition, there was a close degree of cooperation between the Prussian police headquarters and military counterintelligence from 1922 onward.Footnote ²⁶ In several Prussian provinces, the rural police (Landjäger) were entrusted with the task of warning the nearest Reichswehr garrison in the case of an inspection by the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission.Footnote ²⁷ In most of the provinces, civil authorities tolerated the establishment of clandestine arsenals of weapons for illegal military units.Footnote ²⁸

These regional incidences of civil-military collaboration could be viewed as short-term reactions to immanent dangers rather than manifestations of a new concept of security. From a legal point of view, they could be considered “teething troubles” of the young republic, destined to disappear in time with political stabilization and the reestablishment of law and order. Instead, far from disappearing, the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 led to an extension of civil-military cooperation in armament matters during the so-called period of stabilization. The action taken by the French occupiers against the mineworkers, the mass deportation of Prussian officials,Footnote ²⁹ and the growth of a popular mood reminiscent of the “spirit of 1914” nurtured a new consensus on armament founded on an anti-Versailles consensus.Footnote ³⁰ Since the occupation of the Ruhr seemed proof that the Versailles system was not able to protect the republic against enemy attacks, clandestine armament in locations away from the immediate border regions became increasingly plausible to the administrative elites.

Thus, leading social democratic politicians returned to a combination of August Bebel's calls and revisionist terminology. In February 1923, President Friedrich Ebert called on the German people to conduct a “true people's war against the occupying forces,”Footnote ³¹ harking back to social democratic calls for a Volkswehr. A few weeks later, the Prussian minister of the interior, Carl Severing, assured Reichswehr minister Otto Geßler, that he would “gladly welcome every measure and [would] support wholeheartedly anything that might add to the instruments of power the Reich had against an external enemy.”Footnote ³² These words were not just empty rhetoric. While the Reich government funded the mobilization preparations of the Reichswehr with the so-called Ruhr funds,Footnote ³³ Severing approved and supported the mobilization of volunteers by the army.Footnote ³⁴

Even the extreme product of the “boom-years of clandestine armament,”Footnote ³⁵ the Schwarze Reichswehr, received (if only retrospective) official approval.Footnote ³⁶ “A bitter yet good cause” was the verdict of the senior Social Democratic official, Robert Breuer, speaking in 1926 regarding the radically bellicose organization.Footnote ³⁷ “After all, not even the Treaty of Versailles can demand that Germany submit to having its throat slit by a rampant neighbor [France].”Footnote ³⁸ “Adequate,” even “understandable,” and “to some extent even legitimate,” was the description used by Ferdinand Friedensburg (the DDP deputy police president in Berlin and later district president of Kassel) in his memoirs for the deployment of the partly terrorist “black Reichswehr.”Footnote ³⁹

Up to this point, the clandestine “national protection organization” that the Reichswehr was constructing did not lie outside the area of overlap between republican and Reichswehr concepts. An area for which, however, no consensus existed was the collaboration between the Reichswehr and paramilitary associations in order to establish the Landesschutz. In this case, the “guidelines regulating border and national protection” from 1923, negotiated by the ministers Carl Severing and Otto Geßler, were designed to regulate this situation.Footnote ⁴⁰ The “guidelines” represent pseudo-legal foundations for civil-military cooperation over rearmament. They arranged limited support of the clandestine armament by the Prussian civil service and in return, obliged the military to “abolish its support for private organizations,”Footnote ⁴¹ which meant that the Reichswehr had to cut all links to the paramilitary associations.

According to the historiography, these “guidelines” were a complete failure.Footnote ⁴² The military “cold-bloodedly and systematically violated them behind the back of the civil authorities.”Footnote ⁴³ The Reichswehr officers were seen to have largely continued to collaborate with “right-wing gang chiefs” while, as the Social Democrat members of the Reichstag Hermann Müller and Otto Wels complained in a memorandum in December 1926, they never provided the civil authorities with any insight into the clandestine national protection organization.Footnote ⁴⁴ In contrast, there turned out to be, in the words of Colonel Kurt von Schleicher, “fruitful cooperation” with the civil authorities in the realm of the program of national defense after 1923.Footnote ⁴⁵ According to the Social Democrat Bernhard Rausch, the administrative elites, like the military authorities, considered “Wehrkraft” a “vital issue” for Germany's future.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hence, they supported “national defense” despite the various violations of the “guidelines”Footnote ⁴⁷ by the Reichswehr.

Insofar as many provincial governors (Oberpräsidenten) were individually involved in a contractual relationship with their respective army district commander, it is not possible (as the previous academic debate has done) to identify two clear-cut groups—the civil and military parties—diametrically opposed to each other. Rather, it is much more accurate to speak of regional civil-military armament networks that defy classification using traditional categories. The historical research has thus far ignored the existence of so-called agreements negotiated between the Prussian provincial governors and district army commanders during autumn 1923 on the grounds of the “guidelines.” Effectively, these agreements represent an implementation of rules of the “guidelines.”

The records of the provincial governing board (Oberpräsidium) of the border province of Posen-West Prussia contain several of these agreements transmitted between the provincial governing boards in Schneidemühl, Stettin, and Berlin on the one hand, and between the army district commands in Stettin and Berlin on the other.Footnote ⁴⁸ These agreements exceeded the frame of the “guidelines” significantly. The version negotiated between the provincial governing board in Schneidemühl and the Army District Command III in Berlin prescribed, for example, that the civil authorities were to promote the “military preparedness” of the youth.Footnote ⁴⁹ The provincial governors explicitly pledged themselves to provide the army district commands with “statistical material” containing data about the population fit for military duty.Footnote ⁵⁰ It was these “agreements” negotiated on a provincial level that paved the way for the militarization of the civil administration.

Even if not every provincial board negotiated such contracts with the army, every provincial governor as well as the district presidents were informed. According to Regierungsrat Duvigneau from Schneidemühl, the agreements had been openly discussed during the conference of the provincial governors on October 10, 1923.Footnote ⁵¹ “Generally one agreed with the version negotiated by us,” he informed the responsible captain in the Army District Command III, Friedrich Fromm. This general agreement did not mean, however, that the Prussian government necessarily accepted responsibility for the contracts made at its behest; the presidium of the border province did not receive written approval from the interior ministry despite several requests. Following a note requesting the files, the civil servant responsible received a telephone call in the course of which a Ministerialrat from the ministry explained that:

Severing shrank from signing such a document that would have brought his senior officials in the east into official connection with “right-wing gang chiefs,” as the pacifist camp within the SPD used to call the “civil employees” of the Reichswehr serving in the national protection organization. This dilatoriness highlights the limits of the consensus on defense in Weimar Germany's polarized society. The fear of being compromised caused social democratic politicians in particular to start a tightrope walk between support of the program of national defense and attempts to transform it.Footnote ⁵³

Here lies the crux of civil-military relations in the realm of the program of clandestine armament in Weimar Germany. There was wide consensus that the nation—or the republic—needed to be militarily prepared, which required a level of manpower greater than that of the 100,000-man army permitted by the Treaty of Versailles. Nevertheless, this consensus was accompanied by antagonistic models of the society needed to enable an adequate defense of the Reich under the conditions of total war. While the representatives of the republican parties, following their long liberal tradition, considered the community of free citizens or workers to be the ideal base for the defense of the republic, the national camp as well as progressive sections of the military elite favored an authoritarian model, specifically a military state (Wehrstaat) with a nationalistic ideology as its motivating force.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet, it was unnecessary to reach a decision in this matter in the 1920s and early 1930s as long as the limited resources of the Republic and the inter-allied military control kept the level of armaments low. The degree of accord was, however, sufficient to produce the militarization of the civil service.

This became manifest in the fact that the provision of statistical documents, as foreseen by the agreements between the provincial governors and the Army District Commands, became a standard procedure at least in the provinces of East Prussia, Upper Silesia, Border Province, and Brandenburg.Footnote ⁵⁵ In addition, the coordinating offices of the criminal investigation departments (Kriminalpolizeileitstellen) became systematically embedded within military counterintelligence.Footnote ⁵⁶ Moreover, the subordinated services, the schoolteachers, and officials of the financial and agricultural administration also became involved.Footnote ⁵⁷ The provincial governors in Stettin and Schneidemühl advised their officials to join “national defense courses” conducted by civil employees of the national protection organization, for which they were granted paid holiday.Footnote ⁵⁸

The nationalization of the national defense organization became manifest in the issuing of identification papers by the civil authorities. The provincial governors in Schneidemühl, Stettin, and Berlin annually issued dozens of service papers for every civil employee of the national protection organization. In possession of these papers, the organizers of the national defense could identify themselves to each district administrator and police officer as “acting in the service of the army” (im Dienste des Reichsheeres tätig).Footnote ⁵⁹ By this means, the usually right-wing “national protection officers” (Landesschutzoffiziere), some of them rooted in the radical nationalistic terrorism of the early 1920s,Footnote ⁶⁰ were accorded the status of a “national defense public official.”

The provincial governors were supposed to issue papers only to civil employees, whose “reliability”—a term with political connotations—was beyond question. The exchange of information necessary for this process of accreditation usually proceeded without friction. Indeed, it did not reject the service of numerous right-wing radicals within the realm of the clandestine national defense. Yet, there are also various examples of civil authorities denying certification or even demanding a confiscation of such a document when its owner became politically conspicuous.Footnote ⁶¹

The civil authorities are thus to be understood as having actively shaped the program of clandestine armament rather than acting merely as passive objects of a process that ultimately resulted in their own militarization.Footnote ⁶² This becomes apparent on the one hand through their influence on the personnel of the national protection organization and on the other hand through corresponding statements of senior officials. In December 1928, as the Kirchhain affair to be discussed below had reached its peak, the liberal Oberpräsident Julius Lippmann sent a memorandum to interior minister Grzesinski, stating that he considered “the institution of a program of national protection, especially a system of border protection, to be of absolute necessity in the east.”Footnote ⁶³

Supported by republicans such as Lippmann, the Reichswehr was in a position to start a systematic rearmament policy designed to enable the army to conduct at least defensive warfare against one enemy.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet, even for such a minimalist aim, the level of civil-military cooperation needed to expand further. As collaboration had worked relatively successfully in Eastern Prussia—and not because of its alleged failureFootnote ⁶⁵—the new chief of the army, Lieutenant General Wilhelm Heye, and Colonel Kurt von Schleicher aimed at producing new “guidelines” from 1927 onward, negotiated this time with the Reich government and all the governments of the federal states.Footnote ⁶⁶ When these new “guidelines” were adopted by the Reich cabinet on April 26, 1929, and, after some delay, finally implemented in Prussia in December 1930 by the then-Interior Minister Severing, the consensus on defense had finally found its administrative form of organization.

A Case Study: The Kirchhain Affair

The delay in implementing the new guidelines in Prussia was caused inter alia by the Kirchhain affair, which will function here as a case study providing an insight into the micro level of the collaboration described. History has so far conceived of two representations of this affair. The first was the contemporary assessment, which emerged in the weeks after November 29, 1928, when the affair was initially uncovered in a regional newspaper. Adolf von und zu Gilsa, the Prussian district administrator of Kirchhain, near the university town of Marburg in middle Hesse,Footnote ⁶⁷ had concealed the existence of secret military exercises by a group of National Socialists from his immediate superior, Ferdinand Friedensburg, the district president in Kassel.

This constellation gave the republican press reason to sensationalize the story with titles such as “Coup of the Swastika-Men—a District Administrator Suspended”Footnote ⁶⁸ and “Swastika-Men Play Soldiers Protected by a District Administrator!,”Footnote ⁶⁹ thereby writing the danger of a National Socialist coup into being. Their interpretation seemed to be supported by the engagement of the NSDAP Reichstag deputy Gregor Strasser, who traveled to Kassel to pin the blame on the military as the initiator of the exercises, and eager to avoid a further party ban, to negotiate with the civil authorities. Yet, with the dismissal of the district administrator, calm was soon restored and, Kirchhain came to be seen (if it was remembered at all) as representing a portent of National Socialist radicalism.

The second interpretation became established by post-war historiography. On the base of the archival documents it was possible to demonstrate that Gregor Strasser had in fact reason to shift responsibility for the military exercises to the Reichswehr (a step that caused sharp attacks by the republican press).Footnote ⁷⁰ In fact, the National Socialists from the small village of Speckswinkel did not act on the behalf of their party, but as members of a suborganization of the national protection organization, the clandestine Feldjägerdienst. Since the civil authorities were deeply disturbed by this disclosure (Kassel's district president Friedensburg, for example, called for “very unambiguous measures” to be taken against the Reichswehr institutions involvedFootnote ⁷¹), the Kirchhain affair was taken as an example of the poisoned relationship between the military and the Prussian government, and of the antagonism between the Reichswehr and the republic.Footnote ⁷²

In contrast to this approach, the affair is interpreted here as an example that demonstrates the existence of a civil-military consensus on defense backed up by the action-oriented belief in the need for an organized program of national defense. Thus, the district administrator who had sparked the entire affair was less an anti-republican reactionary than painted in the press. Rather he should be assessed as a Conservative Vernunftrepublikaner, yet eager to support the military as prescribed by the concept of national defense. The descendant of the ancient Hessian nobility, former front officer and chief of the German civil administration of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in 1917/18, von Gilsa presumably first learned of the clandestine national protection organization in fall 1923. Officers from the training battalion of the 15th Infantry Regiment, stationed in Marburg, had been observed as “frequent visitors” in von Gilsa's district office from this time onward.Footnote ⁷³

It is not clear what the talks between these officers and von Gilsa might have been about, but they evidently included the topic of national defense, since von Gilsa then became a recurring guest of the public “national protection lectures” (“Landesschutzvorträge”) organized by the Reichswehr as a measure to recruit former officers of the imperial army for the national protection organization.Footnote ⁷⁴ Von Gilsa must also have offered his district office as a suitable location for these lectures and in fact, they took place there several times. Thus, he furthered the fusion of civil and military authority on the local level as implied by the concept of “national defense.”

Nevertheless, when questioned in December 1928, he considered this collaboration to have been anything other than illegal or ultra Vires. When questioned regarding his motives, he (probably truthfully) pointed out that he had felt obliged to visit and to host these lectures, which were “purely professional” (“absolut fachlich”) and apolitical. Furthermore, he had even received permission to attend the lectures from his immediate superior, the district president Springorum.Footnote ⁷⁵ Springorum in turn did not act on his own initiative, as it is almost certain that he had attended the conference in Berlin on October 10, 1923, when the heads of the Prussian administration deliberated upon the “agreements” between the provinces and the army districts. It is thus to be assumed that he was well informed about the extent of the civil-military collaboration in the east.

Von Gilsa was also well informed, and affirmed that he knew “that these lecturers are permitted by the common ‘guidelines.’”Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet, the “guidelines” not only paved the way for the exploitation of the civil authorities for military purposes and the establishment of national defense networks between active and former officers, but they also made militarization of the society a possibility even in a region such as the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, far from any international border. The instrument of this militarization of the rural population was one of the Reichswehr's clandestine organizations, the Feldjägerdienst.Footnote ⁷⁷

The Feldjäger service was indeed already born in 1922, when the new chief of the army department (Heeresabteilung) in the Truppenamt (the de facto general staff), Lieutenant-Colonel Joachim von Stülpnagel began with the buildup of the organization.Footnote ⁷⁸ It was intended to be one of the first steps in the preparation of a future peoples' war (Volkskrieg), one of the most influential concepts in the history of the Reichswehr,Footnote ⁷⁹ and was enthusiastically supported by the Reich Secretary of Labor, Heinrich Brauns, from whose budget the terror-war against the French and Belgian occupation troops at the Ruhr was financed from January 1923.Footnote ⁸⁰ During the Ruhr occupation the Feldjäger service operated side by side with protagonists of the right-wing extremist Bellizismus against the occupation troops, then led by Lieutenant-Colonel von Voß.Footnote ⁸¹ Accordingly, von Voß became the head of the department in the Truppenamt responsible for the Feldjäger service. In the course of the establishment of this organization, von Voß personally traveled through the German provinces to campaign for the foundation of Feldjäger groups.Footnote ⁸² In the course of 1924, von Voß also visited Kassel to initiate the establishment of the Feldjäger organization in this region. In the officer's mess of the 15th Infantry Regiment, he spoke in front of a group of about fifty handpicked guests—local dignitaries, former officers, civil servants, and the district administrator of Frankenberg Richard von WinterfeldFootnote ⁸³—to encourage them to establish and support the groups of the Feldjägerdienst in their region. According to an eyewitness account, the assembly, protected by uniformed Reichswehr guards, closed with the “silent agreement of all participants” to follow the call of von Voß.Footnote ⁸⁴

This report is a rare document that sheds light on the manner in which the Reichswehr was able to establish clandestine organizations illegally and achieve the participation of the civil service. The way in which this assembly was staged—by personal invitation, probably from the regimental commander; the presence of uniformed guards; and the presence of aristocrats such as the district administrator von Winterfeld—intensified the semi-official character of the meeting and played a central role in its success, cemented by the concluding appeal from a high-ranking Reichswehr officer. The participating subordinate civil servants, foresters, and police officers could hardly have harbored serious reservations in supporting the Feldjäger. At least, as pointed out by von Voß, “the Ministry of the Reichswehr would act in contact with the Reich government, i.e. with its approval.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The presence of district administrator von Gilsa at the assembly for the foundation of the Hessian Feldjäger service is not documented. Yet, there is proof that von Gilsa was aware of the activities of a certain Richard Koch, civil employee of the 3rd Cavalry Division in Weimar, as organizer of the Feldjäger service (Feldjägerorganisator) in his district, and of the existence of a Feldjäger group in the 200-inhabitant village of Speckswinkel. It is highly possible that an officer of the 15th Infantry Regiment introduced Koch to von Gilsa or that Koch called on von Gilsa at the end of 1924 or in 1925, identifying himself with identity papers signed by the commander of the cavalry division; there are examples of both activities.Footnote ⁸⁶ Nevertheless, as he was later to point out,Footnote ⁸⁷ von Gilsa was convinced that the Feldjägerdienst was an official institution in the service of the program of national defense.

Indeed, the behavior of the well-dressed, energetic, and eloquent Koch, a young former officer in his late twenties, gave him no reason to doubt the official character of the Feldjägerdienst. Koch was far removed from the typical stereotype of a “Schwarze Reichswehr” officer spread by the republican media: a putching, fanatical anti-republican. He had never been, as a Weimar Kripo officer stated, “politically conspicuous.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Instead, together with his comrade Lieutenant (ret.) Josef Gensthaler (the latter in charge of the Feldjäger groups south of the Kassel district) he had remained in close contact with Prussian civil servants, district administrators, head foresters, and even police officers while organizing the build-up of his Feldjäger units. In 1928, “agents” of the national defense organization such as Koch and Gensthaler were employed by the Reichswehr and paid a “fixed salary of 420 Reichsmarks, moreover expenses up to 300 Reichsmarks monthly”Footnote ⁸⁹ by the Reich (and thus no longer supported by private donations).Footnote ⁹⁰ They were in fact now “defense officials” rather than the paramilitary “warlords” characteristic of the illegal military units of the immediate post-war years.

Nor were the members of the Feldjäger groups always right-wing extremists, as far as one could tell from their dispositions. It appears that the organizers of the Feldjäger groups were neither members of the black Reichswehr, nor particularly right-wing in terms of their political standing. The young physician Dr. Karl Braun from Rosenthal, leader of the local Feldjäger, claimed, for example, that he entered the Landesschutz organization out of concern for the maintenance of the “idea of military preparedness” (“Wehrgedanke”) and driven by “patriotic interests.”Footnote ⁹¹ Braun proved himself to be an exponent of an integrative concept of national security. As a physician, he remained in contact with all social classes and political camps. Accordingly, his Feldjäger group consisted of several artisans, a police officer, a forester, a pharmacist, and a lawyer. Due to its heterogeneity, Dr. Braun's group was intricately involved in the local rural community and the regional bureaucracy. It was unlikely to get into legal difficulties.

The Speckswinkel group led by Braun's comrade Hans Bossenberger, however, exhibits no such connections. Bossenberger was certainly not a reliable figure in the sense envisaged by the “guidelines.” His service in the cause of national defense was conditioned by economic necessity rather than any patriotic or otherwise idealistic reasons. The business situation of his farm was so bad that in fall 1927 his wife asked a police officer to intervene against the clandestine organization of which her husband was a member so that “he would spend more time working, so that our finances will improve.”Footnote ⁹² Bearing in mind the contemporary rural work ethic (“there could not have been a more disastrous judgment about a villager than laziness” Footnote ⁹³), it becomes plausible why Bossenberger's wife chose to talk to a police officer: recourse to the law must have appeared as the last method of fending off economic and social descent.

This interpretation fits with the fact that Heinrich Bossenberger joined the NSDAP in 1927, when it was enjoying success in mobilizing the Hessian peasants by exploiting their economic fears.Footnote ⁹⁴ Bossenberger was obviously able to encourage all the—peasant—members of his Feldjäger group to join the party. Henceforth, the personal makeup of the various voluntary groups in Kirchhain made for a potentially explosive situation: enemies of the prevailing constitutional form were receiving semi-official paramilitary training. For the young police officer Pfeiffer following the advice of Mrs. Bossenberger, the situation was clear: a secret group in Speckswinkel consisting of members of the National Socialist party was conducting military exercises. For what, if not for a coup? Pfeiffer reported his findings to the responsible district administrator in January 1928.

District administrator von Gilsa was now stuck in a dilemma, caught between his “national duty” of protecting the Landesschutz and his official duty of reporting these developments to his superior. He told constable Pfeiffer that he would forward his report to district president Friedensburg, yet never did so. Friedensburg had been transferred to Kassel a year before from his position as Berlin's deputy police president. Von Gilsa must have known that his new superior was a staunch republican and that it would thus be difficult to convince him of the necessity of the Feldjäger, especially in view of the overlap in personnel with the NSDAP. Since according to von Gilsa's worldview, national defense definitely ranked before the need to protect the republican constitutional order, he acted accordingly and did not forward the report but put it in his desk to “forget” about it until further notice.Footnote ⁹⁵

Ten months later, on November 16, 1928, Feldjägerorganisator Richard Koch learned from a member of the staff of the 3rd Cavalry Division in Weimar that his Feldjäger group in Kirchhain was in serious trouble. Heinrich Bossenberger had handed over a telegram to the division, reporting of his interrogation the day before by police investigators from Kassel.Footnote ⁹⁶ Bossenberger refused to give evidence and referred the investigating officers to the 3rd Cavalry Division. Interestingly, Koch, whose office was located in the barracks used by the staff of the 3rd Cavalry Division, was astonished by the news. It is testified that he remarked, “never before has something like that happened to us; things will be put straight shortly.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Koch drove to Speckswinkel immediately to settle the matter and met the district administrator von Gilsa in the late evening of November 16. Nevertheless, it soon became clear that the situation was far graver than he had assumed, and that it would not be possible to “put things straight quickly.” It was not von Gilsa as Koch had assumed, but district president Friedensburg who had ordered the police to begin investigations into the existence of the Feldjäger.

District president Ferdinand FriedensburgFootnote ⁹⁸ learned of National Socialist military activities in the Kirchhain district in late October 1928. Wondering why his report had not led to any visible action being taken against the Feldjäger, Officer Pfeiffer reported directly to the regional administrative authority in Kassel. As a result, Friedensburg ordered the Kassel police to start investigations without informing von Gilsa. In the ensuing investigation, Heinrich Bossenberger, Dr. Karl Braun, Richard Koch, Lieutenant (ret.) Gensthaler, and others were interviewed by officers of the Kripo. Most of them refused to give evidence, stating only that their groups were part of an organization for national protection. As Friedensburg stated in December 1928, however, the Prussian authorities did not believe them. The “Guidelines Regulating Border and National Protection” of 1923 and the following agreements permitted military exercises only in the eastern provinces and committed the military authorities to informing their civil counterparts of any measures taken.Footnote ⁹⁹ As interior minister Grzesinski remarked to Reichswehr minister Groener ironically, however, “since the province of Hesse was not classed as an eastern province”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and since the officials in Kassel had had no information about the existence of national protection units, the civil authorities regarded the Feldjäger as a purely NSDAP formation preparing to stage a coup.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Friedensburg believed there was a National Socialist background to the military exercises until November 17, when, at 11 a.m., an unanticipated visitor called at the regional administrative authority in Kassel. The visitor was Colonel Cord von Brandis, commander of the 15th Infantry Regiment stationed in the townFootnote ¹⁰² and the “responsible national protection commissary” of the Reichswehr, the liaison officer for the civil authorities in matters concerning the clandestine armament. In this capacity, von Brandis found himself in a difficult position on November 17, being forced to explain to Friedensburg that “the activities investigated by the police in the district of Kirchhain were in fact, those of a purely nonpolitical organization, operating under the aegis of the military authorities in the interest of the program of national protection.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Conversely, according to the report of his visit, he did his best to explain to Friedensburg that it was in the “interests of national defense.” Even though Friedensburg strongly disliked the “fanatic, right-wing extremist officer,”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ as he called von Brandis in his memoirs, the new fact of a national defense background to the activities in Speckswinkel obviously made it difficult for the district president to refuse his collaboration. Indeed, he refused von Brandis' request to settle the case without involving the Prussian government. Nevertheless, supportive of the concept of “military preparedness,”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Friedensburg somehow felt obliged to exculpate himself from having endangered the national protection. He pointed out that:

Furthermore, he ended on a concessive note: both he and his office would do everything to keep the matter strictly confidential and to hinder any publication in the press.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Thus, district president Friedensburg collaborated with von Brandis by shielding the national defense-character of the Speckswinkel exercises. He repeatedly instructed the chief editors of the local newspapers not to publish a word regarding the military background of the Speckswinkel Feldjäger service group.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Indeed, Friedensburg even bribed the chief editor of the Kasseler Volksblatt via police president Hohenstein in order to prevent him from publishing a story about hints from Gregor Strasser pointing at the Reichswehr's probable responsibility.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

En Route to the Military State

The macro level of civil-military collaboration in Weimar Prussia and the micro level of the Kirchhain affair merge in the patterns of perception and action of the then-minister of the interior, Albert Grzesinski. The former metal turner, trade unionist, and Berlin police president became the personification of the new, democratic PrussiaFootnote ¹¹⁰ upon being promoted to interior minister. Furthermore, he possessed considerable knowledge in both military matters and issues of civil-military cooperation stemming from his period of employment as Reichskommissar for demobilization (1919–1921).Footnote ¹¹¹

Indeed, he took a stand against the practice of the military “taking any steps [regarding the Landesschutz] alone, without the knowledge or assent of the civil authorities.”Footnote ¹¹² Yet, like his senior officials, he was not opposed to national defense in general. Moreover, Grzesinski had phrased his own vision of the concept of national defense, which is typical for Weimar's social democratic policy makers: he endorsed cooperation with “politically judicious Reichswehr leaders,” who had, as early as 1926, if only in a few small cases, “organized an entirely appropriate and successful operation among all the circles of the population that came into question, even the trade unions.”Footnote ¹¹³

In this statement, “national defense” was not limited to a concept of security but fitted into a model of social order drafted by August Bebel and his liberal predecessors. The social democratic “inclusive” (contrary to the “exclusive” National Socialist) version of the “people's community” (Volksgemeinschaft) based upon unity, homogeneity, and overcoming polarization,Footnote ¹¹⁴ is thus brought into connection with the integrative model of national defense even in the republican discourses on defense. On the contrary, it was the potential contained in the politicized program of illegal armament to deepen the polarization of society to which the minister was opposed, not its illegitimacy.

Appropriately, and contrary to the way he is depicted by traditional historiography,Footnote ¹¹⁵ he was not as hostile in his attitude toward the representatives of the Reichswehr ministry during negotiations of the new “guidelines” designed to increase the extent of civil-military cooperation.Footnote ¹¹⁶ These negotiations with the military, represented by Reichswehr minister Wilhelm Groener and Colonel Kurt von Schleicher were indeed slow to get going, yet were close to completion at the beginning of November 1928, with the Prussian government willing to sign the new “guidelines.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ In all likelihood, Grzesinski had concluded that it would be better to agree to the “guidelines” and thereby gain a measure of influence on the practice of illegal armament than to lose all control through fundamental opposition.

Accordingly, he did not make use of information (provided to him by a former Feldjägerdienst organizer from the border province Posen-West Prussia, the Lieutenant Gustav Richter, and secondly by the investigations of district president Friedensburg) regarding an additional clandestine organization exceeding the scope of the well-known border protection organizations, the Feldjägerdienst, to end the collaboration with the Reichswehr. Yet in fact, Grzesinski's freedom of action was limited, as he was superior to an administration that was effectively a part of the national protection organization. This situation was demonstrated by the fact that his informant regarding the Feldjägerdienst, Gustav Richter, had possessed a service certificate signed by the president of the border province of Posen-West Prussia.

Consequently, the interior ministry backed the Reichswehr during the Kirchhain affair. The press release of November 30 from the Prussian interior ministry regarding the events in Kirchhain made no mention of the Reichswehr, preferring instead to play up the role of the NSDAP.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Furthermore, the minister agreed to Friedenburg's proposal to suspend von Gilsa, despite knowing full well that von Gilsa was not exceptional in his actions: the minister himself, as Grzesinski pointed out in a letter to Reichswehr minister Groener from December 14, 1928,Footnote ¹¹⁹ had also shielded the Reichswehr several times, since, as he himself said, “I was not in a position to abandon the Reichswehr.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Yet, with the suspension of von Gilsa, Grzesinski made a further concession to the Reichswehr in his “sacrifice” of a member of his staff in order to clear the affair, while its originator, Colonel von Brandis, remained in office unscathed.Footnote ¹²¹

Indeed, when the affair became settled on the Reich level, in a meeting on December 22 among Chancellor Müller, the heads of the Prussian government Braun and Grzesinski, and the heads of the military, Groener and von Schleicher, Grzesinski again criticized the uncooperativeness of the military.Footnote ¹²² Since Groener had opened the meeting with the announcement that the controversial Feldjäger-service was to be dissolved and that the appropriate order had already been given, however, Grzesinski finished his statement on a conciliatory note. He hoped that future collaboration in the realm of national defense would be frank and trustful. While the less pragmatic and more critical prime minister Otto Braun maintained his opposition, his interior minister, who was closer to the practice of civil-military cooperation in the provinces, agreed in spring 1929 to the new “guidelines,”Footnote ¹²³ which were adopted by the Reich government on April 26, 1929.Footnote ¹²⁴

After the allied occupation of the Rhineland ended in June 1930, however, the Prussian prime minister was no longer able to resist Groener's pressure to agree to the new “guidelines,” as Braun himself regarded the border protection in his home province East Prussia as justified, especially in light of the fact that the East Prussian population expressly demanded it.Footnote ¹²⁵ Yet, the new “guidelines” prepared the way for a militarization of the Prussian bureaucracy and transformed even those leading bureaucrats formerly critical of rearmament into members of the regional armament network.

In summer 1930, Colonel von Brandis' successor as the commander of the 15th Infantry Regiment, Colonel von Schickfus und Neuendorf, proposed to district president Friedensburg that he let the district administrators participate in the “national protection lectures.” His intentions were clear: through their involvement, the senior officials could gain an insight into the nature of the potential “national defense officers” and the “civil employees” whom the lectures were designed to recruit. Mistakes could thereby be avoided. With the term “mistakes,” von Schickfus was referring to the recruitment of members of the national camp for a position in the Landesschutz organization. In short, the senior officials of the Prussian bureaucracy were to become a part of the selection procedure designed to provide a replacement for the illegal Landesschutz.

This would have brought the bureaucracy even in the center of the Reich into the position for which military “prophets” had already consigned it in their Wehrstaat conception developed in 1923 and that had been realized in the eastern provinces following the mutual agreements between province presidencies and army districts.Footnote ¹²⁶ Still, even more interesting than this proposal is the fact that Friedensburg regarded it favorably.Footnote ¹²⁷ The district president, who had entered into friendlier relations with the military elite in Kassel after the dismissal of Colonel von Brandis,Footnote ¹²⁸ promoted this idea at the next meeting of the province and district presidents in Berlin and received supreme acceptance: in his letter of November 2, 1930, the then-Prussian Minister of the Interior Carl Severing approved this “providential proposal.”Footnote ¹²⁹

The mutual cohesiveness of the consensus on defense born during World War I and as practiced by the civil and military authorities is illustrated tellingly by the further career of the two main actors portrayed in this case study. District Administrator von Gilsa, removed from office, was in fact not dismissed, but rather temporarily suspended. In January 1929, the “protector of the swastika men,” as the press had named him, was transferred to Hanover and promoted to Oberregierungsrat.Footnote ¹³⁰

Yet, not only Grzesinski, but also the Reichswehr rewarded cooperation in the realm of national defense. When in the aftermath of the so-called Papen coup of July 20, 1932 (when Chancellor Franz von Papen illegally removed the legitimate Prussian government from office), dozens of republican senior officials were dismissed, at least one of their most prominent number was spared. The Reichswehr ministry intervened in favor of the district president of Kassel. “Friedensburg had,” as the then-chief of the Reichswehr group command in Kassel, General Baron Seutter von Lötzen wrote in a letter of support, “intervened persistently and emphatically to uphold the interests of the Reichswehr.”Footnote ¹³¹ Accordingly, he was not dismissed until the National Socialists purged the Prussian administration in the course of the Machtergreifung, when collaboration with the civil elites seemed to be dispensable and the process of combining civil and military authorities was abandoned along with the concept of national defense, to be replaced by a program of massive and limitless rearmament.Footnote ¹³²