Freikorps
These sometimes exotically equipped units served as infantry and cavalry (or, more rarely, as artillery); sometimes in just company strength and sometimes in formations of up to several thousand strong.
Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, and South Slavs, as well as Turks, Tatars and Cossacks, were believed by all warring parties to be inherently good fighters.
During Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia, the hussar Denis Davydov, a warrior-poet, formed volunteer partisan detachments functioning as Freikorps during the French retreat from Moscow.
These irregular units operated in conjunction with Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov's regular Russian Imperial Army and Ataman Matvei Platov's Cossack detachments, harassing the French supply lines and inflicting defeats on the retreating Grande Armée in the battles of Krasnoi and the Berezina.
After the French under Emperor Napoleon had either conquered the German states or forced them to collaborate, remnants of the defeated armies continued to fight on in this fashion.
Famous formations included the King's German Legion, who had fought for Britain in French-occupied Spain and mainly were recruited from Hanoverians, the Lützow Free Corps and the Black Brunswickers.
Personal ideologies Nationalisms After World War I, the meaning of the word Freikorps changed compared to its past iterations.
[5] Minister of Defence and SPD member Gustav Noske also relied on the Freikorps to suppress the Marxist Spartacist uprising, culminating in the summary executions of revolutionary communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January 1919.
Following a series of political revolts and takeovers from German socialists and then Russian-backed Bolsheviks, Noske responded from Berlin by sending various Freikorps brigades to Bavaria in late April totalling some 30,000 men.
[15][16] The following day, a Freikorps patrol led by Captain Alt-Sutterheim interrupted the meeting of a local Catholic club, the St Joseph Society, and chose twenty of the thirty members present to be shot, beaten, and bayoneted to death.
The Freikorps demonstrated fervent anti-Slavic racism and viewed Slavs and Bolsheviks as "sub-human" hordes of "ravening wolves".
[5] Historian Nigel Jones highlights the Freikorps's "usual excesses" of violence and murder in Latvia which were all the more unrestrained since they were fighting in a foreign land versus their own country.
[19][20] Jason Crouthamel notes how the Freikorps' military structure was a familiar continuation of the frontlines, emulating the Kampfgemeinschaft (battle community) and Kameradschaft (camaraderie), thus preserving "the heroic spirit of comradeship in the trenches".
To a lesser extent, German youth who were not old enough to have served in World War I enlisted in the Freikorps in hopes of proving themselves as patriots and as men.
[20] Regardless of reasons for joining, modern German historians agree that men of the Freikorps consistently embodied post-Enlightenment masculine ideals that are characterized by "physical, emotional, and moral 'hardness'".
[22][23] Described as "children of the trenches, spawned by war" and its process of brutalization, historians argue that Freikorps men idealized a militarized masculinity of aggression, physical domination, the absence of emotion (hardness).
[5][23] They were to be as "swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, [and] hard as Krupp steel" so as to defend what remained of German conservatism in times of social chaos, confusion, and revolution that came to define the immediate interwar era.
[13] Although World War I ended in Germany's surrender, many men in the Freikorps nonetheless viewed themselves as soldiers still engaged in active warfare with enemies of the traditional German Empire such as communists and Bolsheviks, Jews, socialists, and pacifists.
[18][23] Historians Nigel Jones and Thomas Kühne note that the Freikorps' displays of violence, terror, and male aggression and solidarity established the beginnings of the fascist New Man upon which the Nazis built.
[15][24] The extent of the Freikorps' involvement and actions in Eastern Europe, where they demonstrated full autonomy and rejected orders from the Reichswehr and German government, left a negative impression with the state.
[25] Von Seeckt was successful, and by 1921 only a small yet devoted core remained, effectively drawing an end to the Freikorps until their resurgence as far-right thugs and street brawlers for the Nazis beginning in 1923.
[14] Moreover, the Nazis elevated the Freikorps as a symbol of pure German nationalism, anti-communism, and militarized masculinity to co-opt the lingering social and political support of the movement.
Martin Bormann, eventual head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Private Secretary to Hitler, joined Gerhard Roßbach's Freikorps in Mecklenburg as a section leader and quartermaster.
[5] Reinhard Heydrich, future chief of the Reich Security Main Office (including the Gestapo, Kripo, and SD) and initiator of the Final Solution, was in Georg Ludwig Rudolf Maercker's Freikorps as a teenager.
Starting in October 1939, the French Army raised a number of Corps Franc units with the mission of carrying out ambush, raid, and harassing operations forward of the Maginot Line during the period known as the Phoney War (Drôle de Guerre).
Between April – September 1944, the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire unit operated as part of the French Resistance.
They fought alongside the British 139th Brigade at Kassarine and Sidi Nasr, where they famously conducted a heroic bayonet charge, facing two to one odds, against the Italian 34th Battalion of the 10th Bersaglieri near the mountain of Kef Zilia on the road to Bizerte, taking 380 prisoners, killing the Italian battalion commander, and capturing the plans for Operation Ausladung.
The GCA went on to fight at Pianosa, Elba, Salerno, Provence, Belfort, Giromagny, Alsace, Cernay, Guebwiller, Buhl, and the Invasion of Germany.
