To Anglo-American ears, any German phrase can sound somewhat troubling, given the association between the German language and Nazism in the political arena. As such, Ordnungszelle may seem frightening. The word roughly translates to English as “cell of order.” The term came to life during the early years of the Weimar Republic.
It is the point of this article to support the cell of order ideal as possible alternative the urban and rural decay affecting parts of America. While far from a one-size-fits all solution, the cell of order praxis, along with its spirit of authority and discipline, could go a long way toward curing some of our modern ills. A cell of order government, which would begin and end at the local level (i.e. state, county, or municipal governance), would institute sweeping reforms designed to curb crime, strengthen private property rights, rid local society of filthy habits and degenerate “freedoms”, and create a truly conservative government that would be an alternative to the totalitarian and liberty-destroying ideologies of anarcho-communism, democratic socialism, national socialism, and individualistic democracy.
Weimar Chaos and Cell of Order Origins
To understand the origin and context of the term Ordnungszelle, let us begin with a refresher of events that happened in Deutschland before and after the declaration of an armistice on the eleventh hour of November 11, 1918. On October 28, 1,000 sailors of the Imperial Fleet mutinied and refused to carry out orders instructing them to leave the port of Wilhelmshaven. Soon thereafter, the mutinying sailors were joined by striking workers, thus paralyzing the German port city of Kiel. While many of the sailors revolted out of a mixture of exhaustion and boredom (the Imperial Navy had essentially been left idle at Wilhelmshaven and other German ports after the Battle of Jutland in 1916), the disturbance at Kiel was part of a larger political action. Karl Arteldt, one of the mutiny's leaders, was a member of the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) who had earlier been imprisoned by military authorities in 1917. He, along with fellow USPD member Lothar Popp, convinced thousands of sailors and workers to take to the streets on November 3. Their march was met by armed soldiers, who at some point opened fire. Nine people were killed and twenty-nine were wounded.[1] By November 4, 40,000 sailors and workers were in control of Kiel.[2] The socialist nature of this rebellion became clear with the issuance of the “Fourteen Points” (patterned on US President Woodrow Wilson's equally utopian Fourteen Points):
These demands are orders of the Soldiers' Council and are binding for every military person.[3]
On November 7, Prince Maximilian of Baden, the Chancellor of the German Empire, met with Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democratic Party. These two men tried to convince Kaiser Wilhelm II to abdicate, even though the real power in Germany had been in the hands of General Erich Ludendorff and General Paul von Hindenburg since 1916.[4] On November 9, it was announced that the emperor had abdicated, even though Wilhelm had not yet agreed to abdication. In a mixture of euphoria and haste, the German Socialist Party (SPD), which had been the largest party in the German Reichstag before the war, declared the new German Republic in Berlin. At the same time, members of USPD, which had never forgiven the SPD for voting to support Germany's war effort in 1914, were planning their own rebellion against legitimate authority.
On November 12, Ebert decided to end martial law in Germany. He and other members of the ruling SPD rushed through several pieces of legislation, getting German industrialists to agree to union rights and the right of collective bargaining. On December 16, the new SPD government also created an elective assembly. Eight days later, the “red army” from Kiel (rechristened as the People's Naval Division) marched on Berlin and demanded their wages. Ebert called out the army, but the Kiel sailors won the day. This victory was due to two facts: 1) most of the German army just wanted to go home after four years of fighting in the trenches, and as such their enthusiasm for policing was nil; and 2) the People's Naval Division was joined by the USPD's Spartacist League, a pro-Bolshevik organization led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Another important Spartacist was Berlin police commissioner, Robert Eichhorn. Eichhorn armed the workers of Berlin on January 5, 1919. This led to weeks of fighting in Berlin and elsewhere between the “reds” and the newly created Freikorps.[5]
The story of the Freikorps has already been covered at Zeroth Position here. Suffice it to say that Ebert and Noske, two law-and-order politicians who supported the monarchy and the army, created the Freikorps out of necessity. Within less than a year, the Freikorps had won the war against the Bolsheviks in Germany. They put down the Spartacists in Berlin and killed their leadership. In Bavaria, various Freikorps militias put down the Munich Red Army, which had been formed by the Russian-supported Bavarian Soviet.[6] (One of the soldiers of this Red Army was Adolf Hitler.) Once order was restored in Bavaria, Berlin, and the industrial Ruhr Valley, some of the Freikorps units struck out against their employers, the republican government. On March 13, 1920, the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch tried to overthrow the left-wing republic and replace it with a nationalist and monarchist government. The coup failed and the more radical elements of the Freikorps went underground, forming cells that would carry out assassinations throughout the turbulent 1920s.[7]
The Ordnungszelle ideal was put in place on March 14, 1920 in Bavaria. On that date, General Arnold Ritter von Mohl, the commander of Group IV of the German Army (at this point called the Reichswehr), carried out a quiet coup. Von Mohl tried to convince Johannes Hoffmann, the Bavarian prime minister and a member of the ruling SPD, to hand over all executive authority to him. Von Mohl's compatriots included the monarchist politician Georg Escherich, Munich police chief Ernst Pohner, and Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the district president of Upper Bavaria. Hoffmann balked at the ploy and resigned. Von Kahr was elected by a single vote to replace Hoffmann, and his government would rule with a coalition made up of the populist Bavarian Peasants' League, the liberal German Democratic Party (DPP), and the monarchist Bavarian People's Party (BVP).[8] Von Kahr's government intended for Bavaria, Germany's second largest state and an ancient bastion of Catholicism and traditional conservatism, to be a refuge for all right-wing dissidents accused of trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic. It is here, in von Kahr's Bavaria, that the German Workers' Party (DAP) got their feet under them and established a power base in Munich.
At this point, the question must be asked: why study von Kahr and the “cell of order” idea at all? If von Kahr gave protection to the DAP-NSDAP, and if von Kahr's authoritarian government failed to stop the Nazi monstrosity, then what benefit could his story be to us today? The answer: quite a lot. Von Kahr may have turned Bavaria into a hiding place for right-wing radicals, but he was no Nazi or Nazi sympathizer. Indeed, the Beer Hall Putsch began after Hitler and his supporters stormed the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich during a speech by von Kahr. Von Kahr, along with General Otto von Lossow, the head of the Bavarian Army, and Colonel Hans von Seißer of the Bavarian state police, were placed in a private room by Hitler. Here, Hitler, along with the war hero Ludendorff, convinced all three to support a Nazi takeover of Bavaria. This was all bluster, for as soon as Hitler left to try and stop Nazi street thugs from shooting it out with the Reichswehr, von Kahr and the officers issued a public statement saying that their political “conversion” had come at gunpoint and was therefore invalid.
On the morning after the debacle in the beer hall, some 3,000 Nazis marched on Munich. They were met by German soldiers and Bavarian police officers. It is not known who fired first, but somewhere between fourteen and sixteen Nazis, along with three police officers, died in the fighting.[9] Von Kahr and the Ordnungszelle won the day, but ultimately von Kahr, the Bavarian arch-nationalist and monarchist, was murdered by the SS during the infamous “Night of the Long Knives.” Hitler's goons branded him a traitor and shot him down like a dog. From here the Third Reich plunged the world into the deadliest conflict in human history.
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