Герман Эрхардт: от морского офицера к лидеру фрайкора и антигитлеровскому оппозиционеру.

German Freikorps commander

Hermann Ehrhardt (29 November 1881 – 27 September 1971) was a German naval officer in World War I who became an anti republican and anti Semitic German nationalist Freikorps leader during the Weimar Republic. As head of the Marine Brigade Ehrhardt, he was among the best known Freikorps leaders in the immediate postwar years. The Brigade fought against the local soviet republics that arose during the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and later was among the key players in the anti democratic Kapp Putsch of March 1920. After the Brigade's forced disbanding, Ehrhardt used the remnants of his unit to found the Organisation Consul, a secret group that committed numerous politically motivated assassinations. After it was banned in 1922, Ehrhardt formed other less successful groups such as the Bund Viking (Viking League). Because of his opposition to Adolf Hitler, Ehrhardt was forced to flee Germany in 1934 and lived apolitically in Austria until his death in 1971.

Ehrhardt was born in 1881 into a family that had long provided pastors for Diersburg (now part of Hohberg, Baden Württemberg) in the Grand Duchy of Baden. On 13 August 1927 Ehrhardt married Margarethe Viktoria, Princess of Hohenlohe Öhringen (1894–1976). They had two children, Marie Elisabeth and Hermann Georg. As a primary school student Ehrhardt slapped his teacher's face out of a bruised sense of honor and had to leave the grammar school in Lörrach. In 1899 he joined the Imperial Navy as a cadet and entered into a naval officer's career. In 1904, as a Leutnant zur See (the lowest officer rank in the German navy), he took part under Lieutenant Colonel Ludwig von Estorff in the Herero and Namaqua genocide in German South West Africa. At the beginning of World War I, Ehrhardt was captain lieutenant in charge of a torpedo boat half flotilla. In the Battle of Jutland, his group participated in the sinking of the British 1,000 ton destroyer HMS Nomad, and his own flagship, the SMS V27 was sunk in action. Ehrhardt's half flotilla was transferred to Flanders in October 1916 for anti submarine duties in the English Channel. After being promoted to corvette captain (Korvettenkapitän) in 1917, he was given command of the 9th Torpedo Boat Flotilla and remained in that capacity until the end of the war. Under the terms of the Armistice of 11 November 1918, he led his unit to Scapa Flow, where the Germans scuttled the ships in 1919. Before that was done, Ehrhardt returned to Wilhelmshaven on a transport ship with most of his former crew. When they mutinied in the face of the dangerous mine belt off the German coast and refused to proceed, Ehrhardt forcibly took command and brought the ship safely to port.

In her 1971 book Die Brigade Ehrhardt, Gabriele Krüger supported the claim made by Ernst von Salomon, an Organisation Consul member who later became a novelist, that Ehrhardt was not an anti Semite. He was "first and foremost a soldier, politically without any ideas of his own." The military historian Wolfram Wette, however, ranked Ehrhardt among "the anti Semitic desperados of the postwar period" who did not find their way back into civilian life after World War I. Wette wrote that all Organisation Consul assassinations were guided by the delusion of a Jewish Bolshevism. Historian Hubertus Büschel called Ehrhardt "one of the best known and most wanted anti Semitic, German nationalist, anti republican Freikorps leaders."