Wolfgang Kapp

Wolfgang Kapp (born July 24, 1858, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died June 12, 1922, Leipzig, Ger.) was a reactionary Prussian politician who led the Kapp Putsch (1920), which attempted to overthrow the fledgling Weimar Republic and establish a rightist dictatorship.

Kapp’s father, a revolutionary of 1848, had immigrated to the United States in 1849 but in 1870 returned to Germany, where he became a liberal member of the Reichstag. The younger Kapp received a doctorate in law, after which he managed an estate in East Prussia. In 1900 he became a councillor at the Prussian ministry of agriculture, and from 1906 to 1920 he served as director general of the East Prussian agricultural credit banks. A Pan-German annexationist, Kapp was a member of the conservative opposition in World War I and, with Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz, founded the German Fatherland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei) in 1917. Before the November 1918 revolution that saw the demise of the monarchy, Kapp served briefly in the Reichstag.

The immediate cause of the Kapp Putsch was the government’s resolve to force the demobilization of the right-wing Freikorps (“Free Corps”) brigades, Ehrhardt and Baltikum. With the cooperation of the commander of the Berlin army district, however, the Ehrhardt troops took Berlin (March 13, 1920). When Kapp formed a government with the help of Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s World War I chief of staff, the legitimate republican regime, having been denied the support of the army, fled to southern Germany. Within four days, however, a general strike called by labour unions and the refusal by civil servants to follow Kapp’s orders led to the collapse of the coup. Kapp and several other conspirators fled to Sweden but returned to stand trial. He died awaiting trial in 1922.