#27 Enemy: The Germans' War, ep. 3 - The Fighting Man

Darryl Cooper (0:03)

Hello, everybody, this is Daryl Cooper and you are listening to The Martyr Made Podcast. You guys have been waiting for this episode for a while, and so I'll make this quick. You'll notice I do not run ads on this podcast. I decided a long time ago that I would continue to do this only as long as there were enough of you out there who wanted me to do it. And so this podcast survives entirely on donations and subscriptions. I'm often told by people who understand the business end of this stuff much better than I do that I'm leaving a lot of money on the table now that this podcast has grown to have such a large audience. But I guess I just prefer it this way. I like not having to worry about keeping anybody happy except for you guys.

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I'm content to die for my beliefs.

SPEAKER_2 (2:16)

So cut off my head. And make me a martyr.

Darryl Cooper (2:22)

The people will always remember it.

It was early morning on January 19th, 1919, and the people of Berlin were already on the streets, making their way to their local polling stations to cast their votes in the first national elections ever held in the new German Republic.

The Germans had voted in elections before, but not like this. At issue in this election were not questions of tax rates or housing policy or agricultural regulations as they might have been in ordinary times. Now, these elections were a show of force, a counting of heads between factions with fundamentally different ideas about the future of Germany. Not what its government should or shouldn't do, but what kind of government it should have. Or in the case of the Anarchists, whether it should really have one at all.

As the people walked to their polling stations, they were passing by the rubble of destroyed buildings. And whole city blocks that were leveled and still smoldering. These were the ruins of the failed uprising recently launched by the communists and their allies to prevent the very election in which the Berlin people were about to participate.

Lacking sufficient forces under its own command, when the communist uprising began, the provisional government headed by Friedrich Ebert, leader of the German Social Democrats, was forced to call on help from Freikorps nationalist militias made up of war veterans and right-wing young men who had just missed the war and jumped at the chance to earn their stripes. The Freikorps formations joined the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division of the Regular Army, and together they laid into the leftist insurgents with ruthless efficiency. The most visible leaders of the rebellion, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, had been captured, beaten and executed, and their followers had been scattered to the winds, throwing off their red armbands and hoping they wouldn't be recognized, or, in the case of many of them, just fleeing Berlin altogether.

Communist propaganda screamed that Ebert and his deputy Philipp Scheidemann were power-hungry mass murderers who'd made a pact with the devil to preserve their own power. There was little disagreement in Germany over just who had caused the disaster that had unfolded in Berlin in the previous weeks. Even Count Harry Kessler, the homosexual poet laureate of Weimar decadence in the years to come, someone whose political and social views would earn him the nickname The Red Count, hardly a right-wing reactionary. Even he wrote, quote, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg found a tragic and fantasized end. They had so many dead on their consciences due to the civil war they started that their violent end seemed like a mandatory and necessary consequence of their deeds. End quote.