Numbering around 30,000 men, the Freikorps were quick to get into position on the Bavarian border.
Most of the men hailed from outside of the state, although there was a large Bavarian contingent led by Colonel Franz Ritter von Epp. There was also an aviation unit and an armoured train. The plan was for a two-pronged attack to swing towards Munich from the north and west. Once the environs of the city were reached, a vice-like grip on its outskirts would be established. An overwhelming assault would then follow.
On 27 April the Freikorps crossed the state line. The formations easily smashed the Red Army units facing them. On 29 April, and setting the tone to the campaign, the Freikorps captured and shot 21 Red medical orderlies. At the end of the same day, a ring of forces surrounded the Bavarian capital at a distance of about ten miles. At this point it was decided to hold back from beginning the assault proper until after 1 May - May Day - for fear of making the Communists appear martyrs to their cause.
Inside the city the first creeping waves of panic among the communists had started to spread once news of the nearing Freikorps armies became common knowledge. Toller now had second thoughts about the whole enterprise and criticised the Communists for taking Bavaria to war. "We had no right to call the workers to battle when the only prospect was certain defeat; no right to call the workers to shed their blood for no purpose at all."
Those men who had joined the Red Army simply for the food and cash slipped away, leaving Egelhofer with far fewer troops than he initially thought available.
The afternoon of April 30 witnessed the last meeting of the Communist leadership. Toller informed them that he had contacted Hoffman to open negotiations, but had been rebutted - the Freikorps, Toller was told, would decide the terms, which of course meant there would be no quarter at all.
Out on the streets, a strange calm had descended as most people sensibly stayed indoors.
That evening, and already nervous from Toller's announcement, the Communists were thrown into further confusion when a messenger burst into a meeting in the Ministry of War and hurriedly announced that the enemy had taken the railway station.
Rather than verify the information – which was in fact faulty – the Communists began to flee from the Ministry; only Toller, Egelhofer and one of his bodyguards were left. Levien escaped the city and fled abroad, while Leviné and Axelrod raced off to find a suitable hiding place. The ‘Russians’ had deserted their own revolution.
Slaughterhouse
Emboldened by the mass desertion the Red Army was experiencing, and the rumours that the Communist leadership was in disarray, many Conservative and far right factions rose up in armed resistance.
The Wittelsbach palace was taken along with a number of other central buildings. Red banners were torn down and replaced with the traditional blue and white flags of Bavaria, while Cathedral bells rang out in celebration.
On the outskirts of the city the Freikorps' armoured train fired off a few salvoes to emphasise their proximity and the destructive powers they had at their disposal. Meanwhile, their aircraft took to the sky to drop leaflets warning those who would resist that no quarter would be given. In the outskirts, a number of streets were already in the hands of the Freikorps' forward units.
It was at this point that Egelhofer lost his head. During the last remaining days of power, the Communists had rounded up members of the bourgeois and those suspected of belonging to the Thule Society. These hostages were held in the Luitpold Gymnasium's school buildings.
On the night of April 30, Egelhofer ordered the wardens to begin executing these prisoners. Taken away in pairs they were either shot or bludgeoned to death with rifle butts. To his credit, Toller raced to the scene as soon as he caught wind of Egelhofer's order; but by the time he halted the massacre, twenty prominent members of Munich society were dead. Some of the bodies were so badly mutilated that it was difficult to identify who exactly had been killed.
Vengeance unchecked
News of the hostage murders - Geiselmord - quickly filtered back to the Freikorps. Jettisoning their plans for launching a strike on 2 May, it was decided to make an immediate attack on the morning of the 1st. In the meantime the Red Army was shrinking as desertion from the ranks became epidemic.
As they had done in Berlin, the Freikorps ripped into the city. Opposition, when it was encountered, was swiftly crushed. Altogether, only 70 Freikorps troops lost their lives compared with the die-hard few hundred Red Army men.
The last stand of Munich's Red Army was at the city's central railway station.
Opposition here was destroyed on 2 May. Egelhofer was caught when his car was flagged down trying to leave the city. The man responsible for much of Munich's recent suffering was promptly dragged out of the vehicle and shot.
Landauer - the coffee house intellectual and the man who had delivered Eisner's funeral eulogy - was taken to Stadelheim Prison. Here he was beaten to a pulp and eventually shot. His body was left to rot in the courtyard for two days before its removal.
Leviné was sentenced to face the firing squad. "Long live the world revolution!" were his last words. Toller was more fortunate: put on trial and facing a death sentence, a number of prominent Munich citizens sent in testimonials for his defence. He was sentenced to five years with no parole.
Axelrod saved himself by claiming Russian diplomatic status and by Lenin's insistence that if he were harmed then German diplomats in Russia would be shot out of revenge.
Most of Munich’s citizens welcomed the Freikorps with praise and thanks; by the time they left, even ardent supporters were glad to see the back of them.
As early as 4 May, it was clear as to the primary objective most Freikorps had in mind when entering Munich: to destroy all opposition, real or perceived. In a 'pep' talk to his colleagues Major Schulz of the Lützow corps announced: ‘Anyone who doesn't understand that there is a lot of hard work here, or whose conscience bothers him had better get out. It's better to kill a few innocent people than to let one guilty person escape.’
According to David Clay Large, 142 POWs were shot and were quickly followed by 186 executed after "lightning-fast court-martial proceedings". On 5 May, 12 workmen denounced by a priest were shot. On the next day, Catholic workers of a religious club met to discuss Education and the Theatre in a tavern on the Augustusstrasse. Bursting in on them, a patrol of Freikorps collared thirty men and had twenty of them butchered for being 'Communist terrorists'. Over 1,000 people, it is estimated, lost their lives within the space of six days.
On 7 May, von Oven reported to Noske that the city was 'cleansed', but it took until 13 May before control was handed back to Hoffman. And with that a very uneasy peace returned to Munich, although the scars of conflict ran deep.
Richard Watt in The Kings Depart wrote: "It was inevitable that in the course of these successive regimes practically every Bavarian class and faction would be left with some grievous suffering to brood over - and to avenge."
Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler had been assigned a job as an Army political agent. Apart from giving his own fiery talks to the rank and file, Hitler's job was to keep his ear to the ground and report on the political currents in the city. In September his Commanding Officer gave him a new assignment. He was to investigate a tawdry group of right wingers who were called - preposterously for such a parochial clique - the German Workers' Party.
One door opens as another one shuts
If asked to pick one city to highlight the pain and suffering of normal people on the German home front, then Munich would be a good choice. For the sizeable middle and upper classes life in Munich before 1914 was one of enlightenment and culture, with increasing standards of living.
For the workers, however, life was a grim pageant of backbreaking work, unemployment, unscrupulous landlords, disenfranchisement and hunger.
The Great War and all of its horrors and hardships slowly sucked the middle and upper classes into this world. As the larders became empty and the lists of those who had died at the Front grew, it amplified the suffering to breaking point.
Revolution, when it came, was a disorganised affair leaving right and left embittered and those in the middle apathetic. Anarchist rule, Red Terror and finally a brutal counter-revolutionary clampdown at the hands of the Freikorps heaped hardship onto hardship. Except perhaps for Berlin, no other city in Germany had experienced so much hatred, bitterness and disappointment in the months following the defeat.
In defence of the Freikorps – if defence is the word one can use – they put a halt to civil war and they did return social order. The Spartacists and others, such as Egelhofer, were just as brutal and bloodthirsty in their methodology – except they were less organised in their violence and thus caused less destruction.
That said the Freikorps’ behaviour towards innocent civilians was inexcusable even by post-First World War standards. Noske, Ebert and the SPD were playing with fire.
So where can one place what is seen by many as something of a 'blip' in the history of Germany? Were it not for Hitler would historians from outside the country place any major importance on the events of 1918-1919 in Bavaria?
Hitler and his henchmen
But of course Hitler was present, along with a number of his key supporters, including Hess and Himmler. Because of this, events of the time take on a deeper significance.
The crisis in Munich pushed the Thule Society and other völkish movements to become overtly militarised, while the thoughts and opinions voiced by local right wing thinkers became ever more extremist as the left became more powerful. Their arguments made a deep impact on the beerhall crowds and barrack room audiences. And the message became increasingly blunt as events became more bloodthirsty.
Hitler and the political party that he was meant to investigate, but ended up joining – the German Workers Party (soon to become the more well-known National Socialist Workers Party, or Nazis) – were the natural inheritors of this rage. There was a key difference, however: the party also attempted to develop a populist outlook together with a militaristic one. Indeed, it happily courted the lower middle and middle classes, playing on their experience and fears of anarchy.
Hitler also portrayed himself as a strong man – a man whose politics were 'fought' with the spirit of the trenches and, indeed, the spirit that the Freikorps used to defeat their ideological opponents. In times of trouble this dual projection of security and force was a powerful selling point and one that Bavarians and latter on Germans in general found disarmingly attractive when faced with hard times.
When Hitler talked of communists, Jewish plots and enemies of the state he recalled those he blamed for making Munich a battleground. It was in Munich 1919 Hitler witnessed and then learnt how total power could be used to crush political opposition totally.
However, it was only until Munich 1923, after the failed and somewhat farcical beerhall putsch, that Hitler realised that to secure this power that the democratic 'game' needed to be played and won.