Hitler’s Heralds: The Story of the Freikorps 1918-1923

By Nigel Jones

A dramatic history of a group that would give birth to Nazism…

The birth pangs of Nazism grew out of the death agony of the Kaiser’s Germany. Defeat in World War I and a narrow escape from Communist revolution brought not peace but five chaotic years (1918-1923) of civil war, assassination, plots, putsches and murderous mayhem to Germany. The savage world of the trenches came home with the men who refused to admit defeat. It was an atmosphere in which civilised values withered, and violent extremism flourished.

In this chronicle of the paramilitary Freikorps – the freebooting army that crushed the Red revolution and then themselves attempted to take over by armed force – historian and biographer Nigel Jones draws on little-known archives in Germany and Britain to paint a portrait of a state torn between revolution and counter revolution.

Raised in the chaotic aftermath of war, the Freikorps were composed mostly of veteran soldiers, embittered and out of place in civilian life, and young, right-wing students determined to crush those forces who had “betrayed” their homeland. The ideology of the Freikorps was adopted, almost unmodified, by the Nazis, who, fittingly, marked their arrival in 1934 with the massacre of many former Freikorps members.