Reichswehr (1919-35), the armed forces of the first German republic (Weimar Republic) later expanded by the Nazis into the Wehrmacht. Despite burdens of defeat in 1918 and the restrictions of the peace in 1919, the Reichswehr revived German military professionalism, assumed a pivotal role in the state, and laid the basis for rearmament and for a renewed push for German power in Europe. At the same time, the army played an at times loyal, at times baleful role in foreign and domestic politics, while its senior leadership contributed to the collapse of German democracy from 1930 to 1933. The November 1918 alliance between COS Wilhelm Groener and the socialist chancellor (later president), Friedrich Ebert, assured that the German professional soldier would endure in the first German republic and doomed to failure attempts to establish a new force on a liberal or revolutionary basis.
The preliminary Reichswehr (1919-21) comprised a transitional force manned by demobilized veterans returned to service amid civil disorder and along the contested eastern borders of the Reich. The arms control clauses of the Versailles peace settlement limited the Reichswehr to 100, 000 troops, abolished the general staff, and denied it such weapons as armour, heavy artillery, aircraft, and modern heavy battleships.
Once the first defence minister, the socialist Gustav Noske, and COS Gen Walter Reinhardt had used the provisional Reichswehr to quell the domestic communist threat in 1919, the reconstruction of the army began under the liberal defence minister Otto Gessler and COS Hans von Seeckt as a large army in miniature. This process combined the ethos of the Prussian general staff (reconstituted and hidden in various locations and led once more by officers from the nobility and educated middle class) with innovative operational ideals of air-land battle. Seeckt's cadre force would form the basis for wartime expansion by relying upon various paramilitary organizations.
The Reichswehr ministry consolidated the functions of strategic planning and management within its walls, with covert sections of the general staff located in other ministries such as transport. The army had two corps headquarters and seven divisions of infantry and cavalry, once again, all established upon an expansible basis. The officer and NCO corps embraced high intellectual and physical standards as well as sharpened training, tactics, and operations in order to master technological developments. Strategic and operational thinking foresaw France and Poland as Germany's opponents in the next war. The navy relied upon units left over from 1918; the need to update the pre-Dreadnought battleships with a type of pocket-battleship (Armoured Cruiser ‘A’) provoked parliamentary controversy in 1929.
The relationship between the army and the republic never fully escaped the impact of defeat and counter-revolution (1919), the Kapp putsch (1920), the French occupation of the Ruhr, and the Bavarian uprising (1923). Seeckt sought to banish partisan politics from the ranks, while, devoid of a democratic ethos, the army served first the state and secondly the republic. Parliamentary forces of the 1920s failed to integrate the Reichswehr fully into the executive branch of the Weimar Republic, despite the pro-military sympathies of the right-of-centre parties.
The Reichswehr broke the Versailles Treaty with clandestine military-to-military contacts that culminated in secret air and armour training in Soviet Russia, disguised design and arms manufacture and production in the Netherlands and Spain, and the so-called ‘Black Reichswehr’ of paramilitary auxiliaries. The latter units stood along the Polish border as a reserve for the overstretched regulars. This semi-independent military policy aroused the concern of the left-of-centre parties, and, combined with Seeckt's cult of monarchist martial tradition and his own political ambitions in the era 1923-6, drove him from office. His successor, Gen Wilhelm Heye (1926-30), and defence minister Wilhelm Groener brought the Reichswehr closer to the republic, which soon fell into a profound crisis of state, society, and economy. These events drew the Reichswehr once more into domestic politics, where Groener and COS Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord tried vainly to protect aspects of democratic statecraft, only to be undone, in part, by the sleight of hand of Gen Kurt von Schleicher, whose failed policies of 1932-3 did much to facilitate Hitler's chancellorship on 30 January 1933. As one observer said, ‘soldiers presided over the birth of the republic and had a hand in its burial’.
— Donald Abenheim
