The U.S. Bureau of Fisheries sat for a group portrait on this day in 1919.
Faced with an ongoing and increasingly effective Communist rebellion in Berlin, which the German Army had not been able to put down, the German socialist government turned to the Freikorps and they went into action.
The arrangement had actually been made the prior day, January 9, and it signaled the beginning of a strange development in which the left of center provisional government was forced to seek the help of the paramilitary right, which was largely controlled and aided by the German army. The Freikorps was well equipped and indeed some units had adopted uniforms that were a bit more modern than the German Army's itself. Large numbers of discharged lost Frontsoldaten had joined them and they were, at this point, a combat element that rivaled the Germany army in effectiveness.
They did not, as would soon be evident, rival the army in the degree to which they were controlled.
This latter fact means that in modern parlance the Freikorps is associated with what would become the German radical right. But the Freikorps as a revolutionary era institution was not new and dated back to Napoleonic times, which Germans had formed such units in opposition to Napoleon. They had a track record of being undisciplined at that time but were looked back upon heroically. In some instances, Freikorps units in post World War One Germany made intentional associations with their earlier predecessors as a result.
Elsewhere, the Arab Revolt took Medina.
No comments:
Post a Comment