Military Traditions and Democratic Approaches in the Weimar Republic
For Germany the First World War ended in November 1918 with defeat and with the collapse of the monarchy. The German Empire emerged from the revolutionary convulsions of the post-war period as a parliamentary republic. The new government of the Empire secured its political power with the help of the army and voluntary paramilitary units, the Freikorps. The police recruited their personnel from these organizations. The police were under the control of the individual federal Länder, or states.
From the very beginning the Republic was under attack by extremist forces. The police, furnished with military equipment, were involved in particular in the forcible suppression of leftist revolts. This experience left its mark on the behaviour of the police in their further operations.
In 1924 the political situation began to ease. The Social Democratic Home Minister Carl Severing began to transform the police into a civilian and modern “People’s Police” (Volkspolizei), at first in Prussia and then in the entire German Reich. Despite a number of successful reforms he failed in his attempt to alter the military self-understanding and anti-republican mindset of the police’s officer corps.
