Reich Citizens' Council

The Kapp Putsch of March 1920 split and seriously weakened the council, but it was still able to use its influence to help elect Paul von Hindenburg president of Germany in 1925 and block a referendum to expropriate the properties of the former German princes in 1926.

Meeting with little to no resistance, they formed quickly, took over city governments and key buildings, caused most of the locally stationed military to flee and brought about the abdications of all of Germany's ruling monarchs, including Emperor Wilhelm II when they reached Berlin on 9 November 1918.

[4] According to its initial statement, the Reich Citizens' Council was a "non-partisan collective movement" in which politicians from the centrist DDP to the national-conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) worked together.

[8] On 26 July 1919, the Reich Citizens’ Council went public with an action programme with the goals of ‘"educating the people to have a sense of community and devotion to the state", "promoting the efforts to establish local citizens' defence forces", "supporting the spread of anti-Bolshevik information", "bridging class antagonisms", "dismantling the command economy" and "maintaining a healthy class of artisans and small traders".

It included demands for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles – a brochure about the “war guilt lie” was distributed with a print run of 4.5 million copies[10] – and for the elimination of the domestic political consequences of the collapse of the German Empire.

[8] The vice-chairman, Rudolf Meyer-Absberg, saw the Citizens' Council as the nucleus of a bourgeois united front, which had only "one enemy to fight in every form of its appearance: Marxism".

A majority, including the Reich Citizens' Council, opposed the general strike that the SPD initiated to stop the putsch, called for the maintenance of law and order and thus passively supported the putschists.

Loebell visited Wolfgang Kapp on the evening of 14 March and informed him of the initially wait-and-see attitude of most of the citizens‘ councils, which is said to have made a “strong impression” on him.

[14] In 1921 the Council helped found the Working Committee of German Associations to Create a United Front to Combat the Guilt Lie, which developed into one of the most active and influential nationalist propaganda organisations.

It disliked the party system under the Weimar Republic and had proposed amending the constitution to strengthen the president while weakening the Reichstag and the role of the cabinet.

Without setting any recognisable agenda of its own, it worked with the old right-wing conservative camp in its agitation against the political left, the Locarno Treaties (1925), Germany's entry into the League of Nations (1926), and the Young Plan (1929).