If Berlin had evaded physical damage during the First World War, it certainly did not do so now, as the troops made ample use of their heavy weapons to smash Communist outposts. Reports of Communist atrocities prompted Noske to issue an order to execute anyone caught in possession of unauthorized weapons. Taking full advantage of this license to kill, troops of the Reinhard Freikorps and the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division ranged through the city rounding up suspected Communists and executing them on the spot. George Grosz, who identified with the Communist cause, managed to elude arrest by sleeping in a different flat each night. A band of soldiers gunned down twenty-four sailors whose only offense had been to demand their back pay. Especially bitter fighting took place in the proletarian quarter of Lichtenberg. The novelist Alfred Döblin, who was then working as a physician in that district, was appalled by the apparent indifference in wealthier parts of the city to the bloodshed in his neighborhood: “I was in Lichtenberg and witnessed the [Communist] putsch and the grisly, unspeakable tactics of the White troops in putting it down. But at the very moment that in our district houses were being demolished and men executed by the score, in other parts of the city people happily danced, there were balls and newspapers. Nobody protested the events in Lichten-berg; even Berlin’s thousands of workers kept quiet.”
The government’s efficiency in putting down the Communist uprising was evident in the final casualty tolls: Noske’s forces killed between 1,200 and 1,500 insurgents at a cost to themselves of 75 dead, 150 wounded, and 38 missing. Berlin’s central morgue became a very busy place, as relatives of the dead came to collect their loved ones. Käthe Kollwitz recalled the scene: “A dense crowd of people filing by the glass windows, behind which the naked bodies lie. Each has its clothing in a bundle lying upon the abdomen. On top is a number. I read up to number 244. Behind the glass windows lay some twenty or thirty dead.. .. Now and then some of the people waiting would be led out past me to the other room, and I heard loud wailing from that room. Oh, what a dismal, dismal place the morgue is.” Noske proclaimed “victory over the enemy at home” on March 12, 1919, but the victory simply papered over gaping social cracks. “In the northern and eastern parts of the city, seething hatred of the ‘West’ is said to be the preponderant mood,” observed Kessler on March 8. He might have said the same thing in 1929—or, for that matter, in 1995.
Berlin was still reeling from this latest flare-up in its civil war when, on May 7, 1919, the Allies presented Germany with their bill for World War I: the Treaty of Versailles. By the terms of the treaty, Germany was to lose all its colonies, 13 percent of its home territory, and 10 percent of its population. The easternmost province of East Prussia would be cut off from the rest of the Reich by the Polish Corridor—a provision that was especially hard on Berlin, which depended on easy access to its agricultural hinterlands in the east. Germany’s new army, the Reichswehr, would be limited to 100,000 men, all volunteers, and its famous General Staff was to be disbanded. To guarantee fulfillment of the treaty’s military provisions, the Reich’s westernmost territory, the Rhineland, was to be occupied by Allied forces for fifteen years and kept demilitarized indefinitely after that. In the notorious “War Guilt Clause,” Germany was deemed responsible for the outbreak of the war and therefore liable for all the losses and damages incurred by her enemies; she would have to pay reparations (as yet unspecified) and hand over those of her citizens whom the Allies suspected of having committed acts in violation of the laws and customs of war. Germany was given no opportunity to dicker over these terms, which were handed over to the Reich’s representatives at Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, where, forty-eight years before, the German Empire had been proclaimed. When the German government presented counterproposals, the Allies immediately rejected them and gave Berlin an ultimatum: sign the treaty or face invasion.
Chancellor Scheidemann could not bring himself to comply—“What hand would not wither that binds itself in these fetters?” he cried—and resigned with some others in his cabinet on June 19. President Ebert, convinced that Germany had no recourse but to sign, set about putting together a new government that would be willing to swallow the bitter pill. As he did so, Berlin broke out in new turmoil, with USPD-backed mobs marching in favor of signing, conservative factions demonstrating against. Rumors abounded that various Freikorps groups would stage a putsch if the government signed. On June 21 Ebert finally scraped together a new cabinet, which agreed under protest to sign the treaty two days later, just one hour before the Allied deadline elapsed. The most persuasive voice in favor of compliance was the Center Party politician Matthias Erzberger, who had also signed the armistice in November 1918. Upon learning of Erzberger’s role, Kessler wrote in his diary: “I am very much afraid that Erzberger will share Liebknecht’s fate. Not undeservedly, like Liebknecht, but self-incurred on account of his pernicious activity.” Two years later Erzberger would in fact be gunned down by right-wing assassins.
No group was more outraged over the Versailles Treaty than Germany’s military officers. Their anger increased when the Allies insisted upon immediate reductions in personnel to meet the new manpower ceiling of 100,000 men. In response, a group of counterrevolutionaries calling themselves the National Association began plotting to establish a military dictatorship. Among its members was General Lu-dendorff, who after a brief exile in Sweden found refuge at the Hotel Adlon under a false name, and Wolfgang Kapp, a Prussian civil servant who had been one of the founders of the Fatherland Party during the war. The leader of the group was Walther von Lüttwitz, the commandant of Berlin.
Under increasing pressure from the Allies, in February 1920 the German government ordered the dissolution of several units of the Provisional Reichswehr, among them the so-called Ehrhardt Brigade, led by Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, which in its earlier incarnation as the Ehrhardt Freikorps had earned a reputation for extreme brutality. It was now stationed at Doberitz, about fifteen miles west of Berlin. General Lüttwitz, who insisted that the Ehrhardt Brigade was vital for the protection of Berlin, demanded that the order to disband the brigade be rescinded. When Ebert refused, Lüttwitz ordered Ehrhardt to march on the capital.
An armored truck belonging to the Kapp forces, March 1920
Learning of the rebels’ plans, Minister of Defense Noske appealed to the military command to call out the Berlin garrison to defend the city. The army’s new commander, General Hans von Seeckt, responded that he could not order one unit of troops to fire on another. Surely, he added, Noske “did not intend that a battle be fought before the Brandenburg Gate between troops who [had] fought side by side against the common enemy.” The government would have to deal with this challenge on its own, he said.
On the morning of March 13 Ehrhardt’s men, carrying banners with the imperial colors and wearing helmets emblazoned with swastikas, marched into Berlin. They were greeted at the Brandenburg Gate by Ludendorff and Kapp, the latter decked out in top hat and tails, befitting his status as titular head of the new government that now claimed to run Germany.
The legally elected government, meanwhile, fled the city, traveling first to Dresden, then on to Stuttgart, some 250 miles to the southwest. Before leaving the capital, the ministers issued an appeal to the workers of Berlin to resist the rebels by walking off their jobs in a general strike, a tactic that the Ebert government had recently condemned as Bolshevistic. The irony was not lost on Berlin’s factory workers, but they knew that a Kapp regime would be far worse than Ebert’s, and they accordingly threw down their tools and went home. They were joined by utilities workers, tram drivers, civil servants, sales people, waiters, and even some prostitutes. For the first time in its modern history, Berlin totally shut down. “At night it’s completely dark in our neighborhood,” wrote Käthe Kollwitz in her diary on March 17. “A darkness like one experiences in the countryside: totally black.” The strike was so thorough that the mayor of Berlin was obliged to get around town in an ambulance, disguised as an accident victim.