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The Creation of the Modern German Army: General Walther Reinhardt and the Weimar Republic, 1914-1930 (review)

General Walther Reinhardt appears only sporadically in the scholarly literature on the Weimar Republic. Unlike figures such as Paul von Hindenburg, Friedrich Ebert, or Gustav Stresemann, the reader really must dig for mention of him. Professor Mulligan has brought together a variety of sources in the book under review here to give us the first complete view of General Reinhardt. Reinhardt was a professional soldier and nationalist who created the Reichswehr, Germany’s first truly national army. Before 1918, the Prussian Army along with the armies of the larger German states constituted a German army under the command of the Kaiser. After 1919, this was swept away and the army was commanded from Berlin and responsible to the President of the Republic. Germany would now have a single War Minister and not several (one for each component state of the old Reich). Organizing the Reichswehr was no mean feat. It had many opponents, such as the radical street militia, the ultra Right-wing Freikorps, and nervous Allied powers who desired as small a German army as possible. Reinhardt required a great deal of tact and diplomacy to accomplish his mission. Over time, the Reichswehr became a highly professional organization and served as a strong foundation for Hitler’s military build-up during the 1930s. Mulligan tries to prove that Reinhardt created a prototype of the later Blitzkrieg type of warfare. We should note, however, that many German officers were doing a great deal of soul-searching about how to win the next war. We should not forget the path-breaking theories of generals Guderian and Rommel. The Blitzkrieg was ultimately a joint product of many minds. If German officers had anything in abundance during the Weimar era, it was time to think about what went wrong in 1918 and how victory might be attained the next time around. As Mulligan demonstrates, we should not lose sight of the fact that Reinhardt was a Rightist who disdained the 1918 armistice and the Versailles Treaty. He had ties to the Freikorps which in the long run were not conducive to formation of a professional army loyal to the Republic. The efforts he and his colleagues made to circumvent the restrictions imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty were highly ingenious. We can only speculate about how Reinhardt would have handled a major war, but it likely would have been an impressive performance. Mulligan’s research is prodigous and demonstrates to me that there remain important German officers of the interwar era of whose careers we know little. Perhaps his book will stimulate future biographies of these men. German military history during the Weimar period is more than generals Groener and Seeckt and it is high time we learn more of the other officers who built and managed the Reichswehr.