Kapp Putsch - Aftermath

Aftermath

Among the grievances which Kapp and his followers had voiced against the government were (a) that the national assembly, which had been elected to serve temporarily, was beginning to act as a permanent Reichstag; (b) that it seemed this assembly might revise the constitution with respect to the election of the President of the Republic so that the Reichstag, rather than the electorate of the country, was responsible for the President's election. There was something in these complaints, and as a consequence the date of the general election for the first republican Reichstag was hastened and was fixed for the following June, while all attempts to change the method of election for the presidency of the Republic were abandoned. "At first sight the collapse of the Kapp putsch could be viewed as a major success for the Weimar Republic. In the six days of crisis, it had retained the backing of the people of Berlin and had effectively withstood a major threat from the extreme right."

The effects of the Kapp Putsch throughout Germany were more lasting than in Berlin. On the one hand, strikes continued and led to a succession of leftist and Communist insurrections, the most serious of which was the Ruhr Uprising which was suppressed by reactionary troops and with reactionary severity in March–April 1920. On the other hand, it left a rump of military conspirators such as Col. Bauer, Maj. Pabst and Capt. Ehrhardt, who found refuge in Bavaria under the reactionary government of Gustav von Kahr (itself an indirect product of the Kapp coup) and there attempted to organize plots against the republican constitution and government of Germany. The crisis in the relations of Bavaria with the Reich (August–September 1921) which ended in von Kahr's resignation was a further phase of the same trouble.

Kapp returned to Germany in April 1922 and died the same year in prison while awaiting trial. Lüttwitz returned to Germany as part of an amnesty in 1925.