Once the threat of revolution had subsided, and the workers’ councils began to dissolve, the bourgeois looked for the removal of the Noske-Scheidemann-Ebert government. On 13 March, 1920, 12,000 troops from the Ehrhardt Brigade and the Baltikum Brigade under General Lüttwitz, entered Berlin in order to establish a military dictatorship, and declare Wolfgang Kapp, a founder of the old Fatherland Party, as the new Chancellor.
Noske, the Commander-in-Chief, called upon Reichswehr officers to put down the rebellion, which they refused point blank to do. The head of the army, General Hans von Seeckt, simply announced he was going on “indefinite leave”. To save its skin, the government fled from Berlin, firstly to Dresden, where a Freikorps general threatened to put the entire cabinet under arrest, and then to Stuttgart.
As a matter of self-preservation the SPD, USPD and trade union leaders appealed to the workers to put down this military putsch and defend the republic. A general strike was called which so paralyzed Berlin that Kapp could not find a single secretary to issue the decree that he had assumed power!
In a completely ultraleft fashion the young KPD issued a statement that the workers should remain neutral as it was a fight “between two counter-revolutionary wings”. Within 24 hours the KPD were forced to reverse their position 180 degrees. The German workers were solid in their determination to defeat the military coup and the communists had no alternative but to participate in the struggle.
The coup electrified the whole country. From Berlin, the strike spread spontaneously through the Ruhr, Central Germany and Bavaria. Such was the counter-movement that, in nearly every city and town, the military were driven out by mass demonstrations of workers and the middle class. The sheer scale of the resistance to General Lüttwitz was gigantic.
In the Ruhr armed workers began to join forces in a ‘Red Army’ that put the Reichswehr to flight. They were estimated as 50,000 strong, fully equipped with modern weapons and artillery. They became, for a period, masters of the Ruhr.
Workers took action all over. Typically, in Chemnitz, the post office, railway station and town hall were occupied by armed workers. The Executive Council established on 15 March was made up of ten KPD members, nine SPD, one USPD and one Democrat, and extended its authority over a radius of 50 kilometers.
The spontaneous movement of the masses against the coup was similar to the later actions of the Spanish proletariat in July 1936 after Franco’s revolt. As in Spain, with a revolutionary leadership, the German workers could have taken power easily.
Lenin had compared the Kapp putsch to the Kornilov uprising in August 1917 in Russia. In a similar way the forces of counter-revolution attempted to overthrow the Kerensky government and restore the old regime of the Tsar. Unlike the KPD, the Bolshevik Party immediately threw itself into the forefront of defending the revolution, organizing a united front with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in order to defeat reaction. It was a huge blunder for the German KPD initially to advocate neutrality in such a struggle. Such ultraleftism simply put up barriers between themselves, the social democratic workers and ordinary trade unionists.