The parallel ends there, bec. Germany was the loser, so the Freikorps embodied the added potent element of revanchism. Plus, these guys were storm trooper units in wartime, cannon fodder hyped up with ramboesque elitism. The first Freikorps was formed by General Georg von Maercker in December 1918.
During the disbanding of the German army as per the Versailles treaty, units simply took off with their arms. The 1919 Spartakist revolt followed. Noske saw it coming and decided to use the Freikorps against them. After the bloody repression - in which the great Werner Heisenberg took part, as noted in another thread - the Freikorps were sent to fight the Russians in the Baltics, and then supported the revanchist Kapp-Luettwitz Putsch, but switched sides a week later and brought he Socialists back, smashing up the Kapp troops with the same ferocity as when they killed Liebknecht & Luxemburg and massacred the Munich Soviet. After the Kapp fright the Socialists decided Noske had fucked up and dropped him.
So the FK were initially loose cannon being used and funded by whoever was at the slippery, rickety Weimar helm. They gradually woke up to the fact that they were being manipulated; they needed someone to show them who the real enemy was in the Weimar fog. Enter Hitler.
Hakki
|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Charles Jannuzi
|| After the first world war, who paid to keep all those
|| 'freikorps' around in
|| Germany? I know it wasn't the communists. Serious question,
|| though, since my
|| history needs brushing up here.
||
|| Charles Jannuzi
||
||