March 2, 1919. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in Berlin and Lila Lee in Puppy Love.

On this day in 1919, the German survivors of Germany's commitment to East Africa marched under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin under their commander, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.  Berlineres put aside their internecine strife to turn out in huge numbers to welcome them as returning heroes.

War time poster featuring Von Lettow-Vorbeck.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck, who had entered the German army in 1890, had commended German forces, which contained 3,000 German troops and 11,000 African troops, highly successfully against British and Portuguese forces in Africa.  He is regarded as largely undefeated in a wide ranging war that had guerrilla aspects.  His success caused him to be widely admired by the Germans and the Allies at the time, ignoring the fact that his troops lived off the land and were responsible for stripping the countryside where they were to the detriment of Africans, who had little real stake in the outcome of the war.  This resulted in famine in some instances which produced predictable results when the Spanish flu struck Africa.  In his defense, his forces were grossly outnumbered the entire time, facing 300,000 combined Allied troops (including colonial troops) which left his options somewhat impaired.  365,000 civilians are estimated to have died by famine and disease in areas in which his troops operated due to the stripping operations of his troops.  He surrendered under orders following the war.  His surviving German troops were ultimately repatriated by the British shortly before this date.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck thereafter took command of a unit in the Reichswehr and subsequently put down a Sparticist uprising in Hamburg without bloodshed, an impressive feat.  He also married for the first time at age 49, and started a family.

He was associated, at least by his right wing sympathies, with the Kapp Putsch, however, and thereafter lost his commission in the German republican army.  He thereafter took up a civilian occupation as an import export businessman.  He served in the Reichtag as a conservative politician in 1928 through 1930 and was offered the ambassadorship to the UK by the Hitler in in 1935 but he rudely declined as he was adamantly anti Nazi.  He was rendered destitute by World War Two but his finances recovered after the war.  His two sons were killed in the war, but his two daughters survived.  He died in 1964, having out lived his wife who was ten years his junior, by a decade, the same year the Bundestag authorized the back back of his former African troops to be paid, by which time there were less than 400 living.

The romance that's been attached to the war in Africa, which was no doubt not very romantic for those who endured it, and his subsequent rejection of the Nazis at a great personal cost to himself, has lead Von Lettow-Vorbeck to have a lingering positive reputation both in Germany and outside of it. 

Paramount released the film Puppy Love on this day in 1919, featuring Lila Lee in one of her first roles.  Lee would go on to be a major film star.  She was just 14 at the time that this movie premiered.  Lee made the transition to sound pictures, but her star did fade a bit during that time, in part because of alcoholism, and in part because she had a long diagnosed condition of tuberculous.  She stopped making  movies in 1938, only to return to film for one final time in 1967.