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82-545: In order to circumvent the limitation, Seeckt created the Black Reichswehr as purportedly civilian "labour battalions" ( Arbeitskommandos ) attached to regular Reichswehr units. The Arbeitskommandos received military training, provisioning and orders from the Reichswehr, although ultimately they were never involved in military action. The Black Reichswehr reached a peak membership estimated at 50,000 to 80,000 in 1923 and

164-512: A National Liberal candidate who was in part responsible for Wirth's life-long dislike of the "parties of property and education". At the start of World War I , Wirth volunteered for military service but for health reasons was deemed unfit. He then volunteered with the Red Cross and served on both the Western and Eastern Fronts until 1917, when he left after contracting pneumonia. Wirth voted for

246-655: A Reichstag member and government minister. During the Nazi era he went into exile and worked with several anti-Nazi groups. Following the end of World War II , he opposed Konrad Adenauer 's policy of integration with the West. Although he lived in West Germany , he had contacts with the Soviet Union and East Germany , the latter of which awarded him two prestigious honours. He died in his hometown of Freiburg in 1956. Karl Joseph Wirth

328-634: A German officer and pacifist, about the Feme murders of more than twenty members of right-wing groups. In January 1926, at the request of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), an investigative committee of the Reichstag was set up under the name "Feme Organizations and Feme Murders" to investigate the crimes and their political environment within parties, the Reichswehr and the judiciary. The project

410-481: A combination of trusted individuals, not as members of a coalition. On 16 April 1922, Wirth and Walther Rathenau signed the Treaty of Rapallo , under which Germany and Soviet Russia renounced all war-related territorial and financial claims against each other and opened friendly diplomatic relations, a move which ended Germany's post-war foreign policy isolation. After Rathenau was assassinated by far-right extremists of

492-646: A few days later. Following the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by members of a right-wing terrorist group in April 1922, his government attempted to confront political violence with the Law for the Protection of the Republic . Wirth's second government resigned after just over a year when it was unable to expand its political base. After his two terms as chancellor, Wirth continued to fight right-wing political forces as

574-521: A head when President Friedrich Ebert placed Bavaria under a state of emergency. The Reich government was then able to disarm the paramilitary Bavarian Citizens' Defense groups ( Einwohnerwehr ), and Kahr, without their armed support, stepped down as Bavarian minister president. The strife which arose out of the crisis in Bavaria had only just abated when in mid-October the League of Nations ' announcement of

656-540: A large number of contacts among the Right. Defence Minister Otto Gessler had made such contacts illegal in February 1923, and some Reichswehr members had been discharged from the service as a result. Seeckt nevertheless encouraged regional Reichswehr leaders to keep up the contacts. In the spring of 1923, he himself talked with Freikorps leaders Georg Escherich , Gerhard Rossbach and Franz von Epp about bringing their troops into

738-674: A leftist. In March 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg, Wirth spoke passionately in the Reichstag against the Nazi-sponsored Enabling Act , which gave Hitler dictatorial powers. Bowing to the pressure of party unity, he nevertheless voted in favour of the Act with the rest of the Centre parliamentary contingent on 24 March. After its passage, Wirth emigrated to Switzerland, settling in Lucerne and purchasing

820-601: A letter to the court admitting that there was such a group and defending the need for it and for keeping it secret. The revelations about the Black Reichswehr led to the fall of the government of Wilhelm Marx at the end of 1926. A group of a few hundred Black Reichswehr men led by Bruno Buchrucker attempted a coup on 1 October 1923. It centred around the fortress at Küstrin , on the Elbe river in Brandenburg , and at Spandau in Berlin, and

902-537: A postponement of the next payment. The extreme Right reacted to Wirth's reparations policy by calling for his assassination. Two members of the right-wing terrorist group Organisation Consul assassinated Matthias Erzberger on 26 August 1921 for his role in signing the Armistice of 11 November . At about the same time, the conflict between the Berlin government and the Bavarian government of Gustav Ritter von Kahr came to

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984-612: A small amount of financial aid. In 1954 he was awarded the East German "Peace Medal" and received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1955. The CIA file "The background of Joseph Wirth" states that Wirth was a Soviet agent. According to a CIA document, Wirth claimed that he met with Lavrentiy Beria , chief of the Soviet secret police , in Berlin in December 1952. Wirth said Beria asked him to join

1066-601: A villa there. He communicated with leading statesmen in Britain and France about the dangers of Nazism and travelled to the US, where he met with the exiled former chancellor Heinrich Brüning and gave lectures on the Nazi regime at Harvard University and Princeton University . Wirth lived in Paris from 1935 to 1939, after which he returned to Lucerne. In the early days of World War II , he worked with

1148-450: Is not known how many were killed in the Feme murders, which are most often considered a distinct category from political assassinations. The number may have been in the hundreds, although one source reports just 23 between 1920 and 1923 in Bavaria and the eastern states of East Prussia , Pomerania , Mecklenburg , Brandenburg and Upper Silesia . In spite of a number of investigations into

1230-664: The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold , a paramilitary organization formed by the SPD, Centre and DDP for the non-violent protection of the Republic from the enemies of democracy. Wirth used its rallies to speak in opposition to the Centre Party's drift to the right. When it joined the government of the independent Hans Luther in January 1925, Wirth criticized it for working with the nationalist German National People's Party (DNVP) in

1312-497: The Allies of World War I over German war reparations . Wirth accepted the Allies' conditions and began a policy of fulfilment – an attempt to show that Germany was unable to afford the reparations payments by making the effort to meet them. He resigned after less than six months in protest against the partition of Upper Silesia by the League of Nations and formed a second, minority cabinet

1394-577: The Bavarian Landtag set up its own investigative committee to look into the situation after former Reichswehr soldier Hans Dobner was unsuccessfully targeted when he attempted to sell information on a weapons cache to the authorities. In 1924, the Landtag of Prussia set up a "Political Murders" investigative committee, and two years later instituted a second. In November 1925, the journal Die Weltbühne published an unattributed article by Carl Mertens,

1476-533: The Black Reichswehr were convicted and imprisoned before an amnesty for the Feme murders was declared in 1930, but Germans who exposed the killings were tried and convicted for insulting the military establishment for their role in doing so, even when their allegations against the military were true. The deficiencies in law enforcement were matters of concern for several parliaments during the Weimar period. In 1920,

1558-459: The Feme murders were carried out under the orders of Reichswehr leaders, including Bock, Schleicher and even Seeckt. Whether or not those allegations were true, the press coverage of the trials revealed a considerable amount of secret information about the Black Reichswehr and its activities. The Reichswehr and Defence Minister Gessler denied publicly that the Black Reichswehr existed, although Seeckt wrote

1640-668: The Grand Duke 's ministers, Wirth became Finance minister of Baden. The peaceful course of the revolution there made it possible for the Centre Party to work with the moderate Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD). Wirth engaged with Catholic workers to keep them from becoming radicalised and spoke in favour of a leading role for the Centre Party in building a democratic Germany. His position reflected his beliefs in Catholicism's social teaching and in Christian democracy. In January 1919, Wirth

1722-582: The Luther cabinet . He left the Centre's Reichstag contingent in protest against the party's social policies In August 1925 but returned in July 1926. In August of that year, Wirth, Paul Löbe of the SPD and Ludwig Haas of the Baden DDP formed a Republican Union as a way to maintain cooperation between representatives of the working class and those of the progressive middle class. The Centre Party then removed Wirth's name from

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1804-516: The Organisation Consul on 24 June 1922, Wirth gave a speech in front of the Reichstag in which he warned that "we are experiencing in Germany a political brutalisation" that was characterized by "an atmosphere of murder, of rancour, of poison," and famously proclaimed: There stands the enemy, who drips his poison into the wounds of a people. There stands the enemy, and about it there is no doubt:

1886-516: The Treaty of Versailles . The Fehrenbach cabinet resigned on 4 May when it was unable to reach a decision on whether to accept the London Schedule of Payments , which set German war reparations at 132 billion gold marks. The London ultimatum issued on 5 May threatened an Allied occupation of the Ruhr if Germany did not accept the terms within six days. The Centre and SPD were in favour of accepting

1968-586: The University of Freiburg . He obtained his doctorate in mathematics in 1906 with the thesis "On the elementary divisors of a linear homogeneous substitution". From 1906 to 1913, he taught mathematics at a Realgymnasium (secondary school) in Freiburg. In 1909, he was a co-founder and first president of the Akademische Vinzenzkonferenz ( Society of Saint Vincent de Paul ), a charity run by laymen for

2050-439: The 27th Reichstag commission officially differentiated political assassinations from Feme murders. Assassinations were by definition carried out against political opponents, whereas the commission defined Feme murders as "Attacks on human life on the basis of an organisation's or individual member's conspiracy against members and former members as well as against outsiders because of behaviour they consider treacherous or harmful to

2132-680: The AK's were under the army's control and not independent militia units, on call for potential use against the French. None of these units, however, ever went into action. Major Fedor von Bock was in overall command of the Arbeitskommandos and the Black Reichswehr; Kurt von Schleicher , who later became the Weimar Republic's last chancellor, served as his main liaison with the Reichswehr. Captain Eugen Ott

2214-512: The AKs increase the number and extent of arms searches and then had them keep the good weapons that they found for the Black Reichswehr's use and turn the useless ones over to the Allies. When French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in January 1923 in response to Germany's default on its reparations payments, both the Berlin government and General Seeckt knew that they could not use the Reichswehr to oppose

2296-450: The AKs. Within two years, he had expanded it to a group with 2,000 permanent members and 18,000 more on standby. The latter came mostly from nationalist organisations and underwent four- to six-week training courses. Some of the work that the AKs did technically fell under the terms of Article 206, for example collecting and disposing of illegal arms left over from the war. Because the Reichswehr wanted its auxiliaries to be well-armed, it had

2378-494: The Black Reichswehr were extremely angry with their officers, whom they felt had betrayed them. ... [They] complained that on the day the Potsdam Uhlans arrived, no officers were to be seen, so that they were completely leaderless. The members of the Black Reichswehr were all arrested. Some were given the offer to join the Reichswehr if they complied with the prescribed conditions. Most of them had no inclination to do so. Although

2460-427: The Black Reichswehr". Buchrucker admitted that he had done so in order to be prepared for an imminent communist uprising. Bock issued an arrest warrant against Buchrucker, who hurried to Küstrin to initiate the putsch, which was quickly put down by Reichswehr troops. Buchrucker was taken into custody and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. In response to the putsch, General Seeckt dissolved the Black Reichswehr. Some of

2542-484: The Black Reichswehr, First Lieutenant Paul Schulz commanded a special unit that killed those who were seen as having betrayed the country by leaking military secrets. The following is a selected list of victims: Joseph Wirth Karl Joseph Wirth ( German pronunciation: [kaɐ̯l jo:zɛf vɪɐ̯t] ; 6 September 1879 – 3 January 1956) was a German politician of the Catholic Centre Party who

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2624-420: The Black Reichswehr. The Black Reichswehr saw essentially no direct action. During the crises of early 1923, there were only about 1,000 Black Reichswehr troops in Berlin, making it of little use there. They were occasionally on active duty, for example as sentries at government buildings such as the presidential palace. Some of the guards there spoke of being able to take President Friedrich Ebert into custody at

2706-504: The British government and an anti-Nazi group around Admiral Wilhelm Canaris on a possible coup and peace settlement, but the talks ended when Germany invaded France in 1940. Subsequently, he made efforts to inform the Vatican about the threat of Nazi Germany's anti-Jewish policies, and during World War II, he secretly kept in touch with anti-Nazi Solf Circle and Kreisau Circle in Germany. He

2788-548: The Feme!" – Victims – Murderers – Judges (1919–1929)). While the Weimar judiciary rigorously prosecuted leftists involved in the German revolution of 1918–1919 and in the political activities of the Bavarian Soviet Republic , police and judicial investigations of the Feme crimes were slow, and the murderers, if they were identified, often received lesser sentences or acquittals. Some military officers such as Paul Schulz of

2870-451: The Freikorps. The loss of government support for the Freikorps in 1920 and then its banning in 1921 left large numbers of former members at loose ends. General Seeckt and Chancellor Joseph Wirth were able in the short run to focus the men's anger towards the outside rather than against the Republic. With Wirth's agreement, Seeckt used the opportunity to clandestinely increase the strength of

2952-572: The Freikorps. It is estimated that between 1918 and 1923 some 500,000 men were formal Freikorps members with another 1.5 million participating informally. In the turbulent early days of the Weimar Republic, the government in Berlin accepted the Freikorps as necessary and used them to defeat the Spartacist uprising in January 1919 and put down several local attempts to set up soviet republics, such as in Bremen and Bavaria . The Kapp Putsch of March 1920 caused

3034-510: The French demand and banned the Freikorps. Also playing a role in his decision was the London ultimatum of 5 May 1921, which threatened an occupation of the heavily industrialized Ruhr district if Germany did not accept a new schedule for war reparations payments. It included a statement declaring Germany in default of the Treaty of Versailles' disarmament requirements, in part due to the number of men in

3116-471: The German military. It limited the army to a total of 100,000 men and 4,000 officers. Conscription was prohibited, and the military was to be exclusively devoted to the maintenance of internal order and control of the borders. The Treaty also prohibited the construction of aircraft, heavy artillery and tanks, and the production of materials for chemical warfare. The navy was placed under equally tight restrictions and

3198-421: The July 1917 Reichstag Peace Resolution , which was sponsored by Matthias Erzberger , also of the Centre Party, and called for a negotiated peace without annexations. In the final year of the war, Wirth increasingly often criticized the policies of the imperial government and pushed for internal reforms. In the first days of the German revolution of 1918–1919 , after Baden's provisional government had replaced

3280-533: The London Schedule in spite of the anger it had aroused in the German public. Since Wirth was the only candidate for chancellor whom the SPD would accept, and no government could be built without them, Wirth and the Centre Party formed a coalition on 10 May with the SPD and the German Democratic Party (DDP). Wirth remained Finance minister in his new cabinet. The Reichstag ratified the London Schedule

3362-585: The Reichswehr beyond the 100,000-man limit imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, which he thought was not enough to defend Germany's borders. In order to get around the treaty restrictions, the Reichswehr created labour battalions ( Arbeitskommandos , or AKs) attached to regular army units. The Treaty of Versailles allowed work groups such as the AKs but only for the limited purposes that were spelled out in Article 206: "The German Government must in all cases furnish at its own cost all labour and material required to effect

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3444-590: The Reichswehr had a large proving ground, included the following: At the Döberitz training camp two days ago, a troop unit of the Black Reichswehr, the Löwenfeld regiment, which was 2 battalions strong, was disarmed by the Potsdam cavalry regiment (Uhlans) of the Reichswehr. The Black Reichswehr in Döberitz had a battery of 8 guns, including 21 and 15 cm guns. Heavy mine launchers and machine guns were also present. The members of

3526-557: The Reichswehr if a military conflict broke out. On 23 August there was a meeting at Ludendorff's house attended by Adolf Hitler , Buchrucker and Kurt Jahnke . They talked about what to do if resistance to the Ruhr occupation broke down and agreed that the response should start with the Black Reichswehr. Most of the attendees – but not Hitler – wanted to set up a right-wing dictatorship when the government abandoned passive resistance, which it did in September, although without any response from

3608-428: The Reichswehr to set up the framework for the AKs. Its members, officially volunteer civilian labourers on short-term contracts, wore regular Reichswehr uniforms, were quartered with the Reichswehr and received military training and orders from it. They also had identifications that corresponded to the Reichswehr's. In the summer of 1921, Bruno Ernst Buchrucker was hired by the Reichswehr on a private contract to build up

3690-416: The Reichswehr; and from support given by other militias and right-wing groups. Following the occupation of the Ruhr, Chancellor Cuno held talks with various right-wing militias who offered their assistance in dealing with the French. Representatives of heavy industry, including the conglomerate owned by Hugo Stinnes , were involved in the talks. Stinnes introduced General Seeckt to Erich Ludendorff , who had

3772-652: The Treaty's terms became an important part of the politics of the Weimar Republic . Nationalists were drawn to parties on the Right that promised to rearm Germany and restore its great power status in Europe and the world. The Black Reichswehr had its roots in the Freikorps movement that sprang up following the end of World War I. Many demobilised soldiers from the Imperial Army joined paramilitary groups collectively known as

3854-409: The carrying out of Feme justice, which generally took the form of quick and secret murders of those suspected of being traitors. It is not certain how many murders the Black Reichswehr was responsible for; the number killed under the Feme by all right-wing extremist groups is estimated at about 350. In 1925 a former member of the Black Reichswehr named Carl Mertens revealed many of the activities of

3936-642: The community". The meaning can also be seen in the phrase " Verräter verfallen der Feme! " ("Traitors fall to the Feme!"), which was in the statutes of the Organisation Consul and often used in mass media reports regarding violent acts of vengeance among the German right. The first to attempt to study the phenomenon systematically and for all of Germany was the Jewish statistician Emil Julius Gumbel , who in 1929 published Verräter verfallen der Feme!“ Opfer – Mörder – Richter (1919–1929) ("Traitors fall to

4018-410: The deliveries and the works of destruction, dismantling, demolition, and of rendering things useless, provided for in the present Treaty." It was these innocuous sounding labour groups that became what was later called the Black Reichswehr. The Prussian state government under Minister President Otto Braun and Interior Minister Carl Severing , both of the Social Democratic Party , actively worked with

4100-665: The division of Germany permanent. Together with Wilhelm Elfes  [ de ] , he founded the neutralist " Alliance of Germans, Party for Unity, Peace and Freedom " (BdD) in 1953. The party was supported by the SED , the ruling communist party in East Germany . Although Wirth did not approve of Stalin 's policies, he believed in a compromise with Soviet Russia in line with the Rapallo Treaty . In 1951, Wirth visited Moscow for political talks. Unlike West Germany , East Germany paid Wirth

4182-455: The enemy is on the Right! On 21 July 1922, the Reichstag passed the Law for the Protection of the Republic on the initiative of the Wirth government. It increased the penalties for political assassinations and banned organisations opposed to the "constitutional republican form of government" along with their printed matter and meetings. Wirth tried to extend his government's minority coalition to

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4264-523: The fictional ringleader of the plot, is an amalgamation of several historical Reichswehr officers, including Hans von Seeckt and Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord . Fememord The Feme murders ( German : Fememorde [ˈfeːməmɔʁdə] ) were extrajudicial killings that took place during the early years of the Weimar Republic . They were carried out primarily by far-right groups against individuals, often their own members, who were thought to have betrayed them. Due to their secretive nature, it

4346-578: The first of the presidential cabinets . Wirth's main task at the Interior Ministry was to try to hold back the growing power of the Nazis. He was highly popular with the Social Democrats and acted as mediator between them and the new government. In October 1931, he was pushed out of office and replaced by Wilhelm Groener on the personal initiative of President Paul von Hindenburg , who regarded Wirth as

4428-405: The following day, 11 May, and Wirth began his "fulfilment policy" ( Erfüllungspolitik ). By attempting to comply with the Allied demands – and thus prevent them from occupying the Ruhr – Wirth wanted to show that the annual payments of three billion gold marks were beyond Germany's means. On 31 August 1921, after considerable effort, Germany was able to pay the first half-yearly instalment. During

4510-404: The government's view of the Freikorps to change from acceptance to concern about whether they could be controlled. When Defence Minister Gustav Noske ordered two major Freikorps units to be disbanded in late February 1920, they refused and took a leading role in the putsch. General Hans von Seeckt , who was appointed chief of the Army Command shortly after the putsch collapsed and who had disliked

4592-401: The group, including the Feme murders, to the magazine Die Weltbühne . An investigation by the Prussian Parliament corroborated the published information, and the matter was turned over to the courts. Paul Schulz was put on trial for his role in the Feme and sentenced to death in 1927, although in the end he served only a few years behind bars. During the testimony, counsel alleged that

4674-415: The list of candidates for the 1928 Reichstag election. Wirth had to submit to a number of conditions before his name was restored. In April 1929, Wirth became minister for the Occupied Territories (the Rhineland region occupied by the Allies ) in the second Müller cabinet . After the government's resignation in late March 1930, Wirth became minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Heinrich Brüning ,

4756-402: The members continued to receive support for their activities from large landowners in East Prussia , while others, especially officers, went to Bavaria and joined the Nazi Party . At the cabinet session of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann on 3 October 1923, a report was delivered that detailed the disarming of the Black Reichswehr units at Döberitz and Spandau. The section on Döberitz, where

4838-580: The move without sparking a war. The official German policy was therefore limited to passive resistance. At around the same time, Poland demanded the "rectification" of the German-Polish border and Lithuanian troops occupied Memel . Realizing that they could not protect the nation's borders, Seeckt and the government under Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno , a political independent, agreed to expand the Arbeitskommandos . By September 1923, their number had reached an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 men. In addition, Reichswehr leadership put various paramilitary units, which like

4920-429: The murders, few of the perpetrators were ever identified or prosecuted. The Feme murders had largely ended by 1924. Fememord (from Middle High German vëme , meaning "punishment", and mord meaning "murder"), refers to an act of vigilante justice by a political group: the killing of "traitors" who knew about the group's secrets and had reported them to authorities or threatened to do so. The name alludes to

5002-414: The name Black Reichswehr is sometimes applied to all Freikorps that were used by the German government or the Reichswehr, it is most commonly limited to the clandestine units that were directly a part of the Reichswehr. The differing usages can lead to confusion as to whether an individual or even a group belonged to the Freikorps or to the Black Reichswehr. The following men were in the Black Reichswehr under

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5084-453: The narrower definition: The Black Reichswehr is featured in Babylon Berlin , the German neo-noir television series based on the 2008 novel Der nasse Fisch (The Wet Fish) by Volker Kutscher . In the first two seasons, the organisation is depicted as plotting a coup of the Weimar Republic to restore the German Empire, returning Wilhelm II to the throne and installing Erich Ludendorff as Chancellor. The character of Generalmajor Seegers,

5166-505: The partition of Upper Silesia between Germany and Poland aroused considerable anger throughout Germany. Almost sixty percent of the vote in the March 1921 plebiscite in ethnically mixed Upper Silesia was in favour of staying part of Germany, but the heavily industrialised eastern part of the region was nevertheless awarded to Poland. Wirth believed that its severance from Germany would fatally affect Germany's capacity to pay its reparations. On 22 October 1921, he resigned in protest over

5248-448: The partition. Three days later, President Friedrich Ebert once again asked him to form a government, which Wirth did on 26 October with the second Wirth cabinet . Because the DDP and German People's Party (DVP) had refused to accept the partition of Silesia or join any coalition that agreed to it, the SPD and Centre Party formed a minority government. On 26 October, Wirth gave a government statement in which he presented his new cabinet as

5330-441: The period of relaxed diplomatic relations that surrounded the payment, the U.S.–German Peace Treaty was signed, and Walther Rathenau , then minister of Reconstruction , concluded a comprehensive agreement with France for paying reparations in kind for the reconstruction of the devastated regions of the country. The fulfilment policy was quickly broken off due to the problems of financing it. In December 1921 Germany had to request

5412-409: The policies of his predecessor, Matthias Erzberger (Centre). They included the centralisation at the national level of the authority to tax and spend and the redistribution of taxes to lighten the burden on those with low to moderate incomes. Through ties with military leadership, he also saw that funds were provided to help begin secretly rearming Germany in contravention of the restrictions imposed by

5494-421: The poor. Social issues were consistently his main concern after he entered politics. In 1911 Wirth was elected to the Freiburg city council for the Catholic Centre Party . From 1913 to 1921, he was a member of the Baden Landtag , the lower house of parliament of the Grand Duchy (after 1918 the Republic) of Baden . In 1914 he became a member of the Imperial Reichstag following a difficult campaign against

5576-401: The right moment. Black Reichswehr troops also paraded in front of Reichswehr Minister Gessler and Army chief of staff Seeckt. Within the Black Reichswehr, discipline for offenses such as insubordination were handled by methods similar to those used by the regular Reichswehr. The situation was entirely different when it came to thefts from the Black Reichswehr's illegal arms stockpiles or – which

5658-427: The right to include the DVP, but even his own Centre Party was becoming increasingly unhappy at having to work with the SPD, which had reunited with the more radical Independent Social Democrats (USPD) in September 1922. After the government lost a key vote on the grain levy in November, the government resigned. On 22 November, Wilhelm Cuno , a political independent, replaced Wirth as chancellor. In 1924 Wirth joined

5740-447: The secretive Vehmic court system of the Middle Ages, which had authority to ordain capital punishment. In the politically heated turmoil of the early Weimar Republic , the media frequently used the term Fememord to refer to right-wing political killings by groups such as the Organisation Consul , e.g. the murder of Jewish politicians Kurt Eisner and Walther Rathenau and other politicians including Matthias Erzberger . In 1926,

5822-416: The southeast of the state of Prussia to fight the Polish insurgents. After the Freikorps won the Battle of Annaberg on 23 May 1921, the French issued an ultimatum demanding that Germany end its support of all paramilitary forces. The next day, to the shock of the Freikorps, who were expecting to follow up their victory by keeping all of Upper Silesia for Germany, German president Friedrich Ebert bowed to

5904-410: The un-military spirit of independence and rebellion within the Freikorps, then removed almost all of its members from the Reichswehr and limited Freikorps access to government funding and equipment. The Freikorps' last large-scale military action came during the third Silesian uprising , which began on 2 May 1921. Current and former Freikorps members from all over Germany went to the contested area in

5986-475: Was chancellor of Germany from May 1921 to November 1922, during the early years of the Weimar Republic . He was also minister of four government departments between 1920 and 1931 (Foreign Affairs, Finance, Interior, and Occupied Territories). Wirth was strongly influenced by Christian social teaching throughout his political career. He was named chancellor in May 1921 when Germany was facing difficult negotiations with

6068-447: Was a reaction to the government's decision to end passive resistance against the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr. Buchrucker believed that he could use the extreme Right's anger at the government to start a national uprising with the assistance of various right wing defence organisations. Bock, who had received intelligence about increased activity among such groups, called Buchrucker in and asked him about "excessive recruitment to

6150-424: Was also one of the founders of "Democratic Germany" ( Das Demokratische Deutschland ), a working group with SPD members in exile. It drew up guidelines for the re-establishment of a democratic Germany that they hoped would avoid the mistakes that had brought down the Weimar Republic. Wirth returned from exile to Freiburg in 1948. He opposed Konrad Adenauer 's policy of integration with the West for fear of making

6232-617: Was born on 6 September 1879 in Freiburg im Breisgau in what was then the Grand Duchy of Baden , a federal state of the German Empire . He was the son of Karl Wirth, a master machinist at a printing company, and his wife Agathe (née Zeller). The involvement of his parents, who were Catholic, in Christian and social causes had a strong influence on him throughout his life. From 1899 to 1906, he studied mathematics, natural sciences and economics at

6314-446: Was considered far worse – the betrayal of their locations or of other members. Given the fact that the Black Reichswehr were officially civilians, the military penal code could not be used against such "traitors", and because of the need for secrecy, neither could they be handed over to civil authorities. The result was the use of the Feme , named after medieval special courts that judged particularly serious offenses. Paul Schulz oversaw

6396-519: Was dissolved the same year after a group of its members launched the failed Küstrin Putsch . Its existence became widely known in 1925 when its practice of Fememord , the extra-judicial killing of "traitors" among its ranks, was revealed to the public. When the Treaty of Versailles set the conditions for peace following Germany's defeat in World War I , it put tight restrictions on the size and weaponry of

6478-838: Was elected to both the Baden Constituent Assembly and the Weimar National Assembly , which wrote the new constitutions for the Republic of Baden and the Weimar Republic . After the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, when Chancellor Gustav Bauer of the MSPD resigned and was replaced by Hermann Müller (MSPD), Wirth became Germany's minister of Finance. He continued to hold the portfolio in the subsequent cabinet of Constantin Fehrenbach (Centre Party). As Finance minister, Wirth continued

6560-487: Was hindered from the beginning by the right wing-majority in the Reichstag, the Bavarian judicial authorities' refusal to cooperate, and not least by the indecisiveness of the SPD itself. Nearly all of the Feme murders occurred during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic. A peak was reached in 1923 when hyperinflation , Allied occupation of the Ruhr and numerous putsch and separatist efforts shook Germany. Within

6642-465: Was in particular prohibited from building or acquiring submarines. The harsh terms of the Treaty, which also included demilitarisation of the Rhineland , payment of reparations to the Allies and Germany being forced to accept sole responsibility for the war, were intended to ensure that Germany could never again pose a military threat to Europe. The Germans saw it as a national humiliation, and revising

6724-489: Was the intelligence officer. First Lieutenant Paul Schulz worked with Bruno Buchrucker in setting up the Arbeitskommandos . The Black Reichswehr was funded from a number of sources at levels that generally are not known. The majority of the support came from secret government accounts; from heavy industry, which expected to benefit from rearmament; agricultural groups, especially in the east where owners of large estates felt particularly threatened and were natural allies of

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