Wilhelm Seegers was a Major-General of the Imperial German Army during World War I and a leader of the Black Reichswehr paramilitary during the Interwar period.
Biography[]
Wilhelm Seegers was born to an aristocratic Prussian family, and he rose to the rank of general in the Imperial German Army by the time of the Great War. Seegers became a celebrated hero for defeating the British at the Battle of Heidekrug in Flanders and for capturing Memel from the Russians on the Eastern Front, and he came to believe that the war was lost only because Social Democrats had stabbed the German military in the back. Seegers became the military leader of the Black Reichswehr paramilitary during the Interwar period, opposing the democratic government of the Weimar Republic. A close associate of nationalist industrialist Annemarie Nyssen, he served on the advisory board of the Nyssen Trust, in which capacity he maintained and preserved war monuments and cared for officers' widows. This also enabled him to use Nyssen AG as a front for the importation of Russian weapons.
In 1929, he, political advisor Gottfried Wendt, and industrialist Alfred Nyssen planned Operation Prangertag, in which 4,000 Black Reichswehr soldiers - utilizing poison gas and other weapons imported from the USSR - would overthrow the Weimar regime. In May 1929, he was among fifteen German army officers to be arrested during a police crackdown on the Black Reichswehr after the Soviet ambassador Denis Trokhin was blackmailed into giving up their names, and Seegers defended his actions by saying that a constitution that endangered the existence of the nation was no protection. He also treated political police chief August Benda with anti-Semitism, telling him to leave matters of national defense to the people (ethnic Germans) on whose ground he worked.
Seegers and all of his fourteen comrades were released by order of the police command, enabling them to resume their planned coup. However, policeman Gereon Rath - whom Seegers had briefly met at a Black Reichswehr meeting - foiled the plot by incapacitating the plotter Florian Scheer, who was then shot by Wolter to cover up the plot. The police still had evidence of Seegers' role in the plot from a release form he signed to allow the Soviet train to cross into Germany, but President Paul von Hindenburg had them call off a press conference where they planned to present Seegers and the evidence against him. Seegers was thus released from prison without incident.
By September 1929, Seegers was appointed head of the Reichswehr by President Hindenburg. In this capacity, he met with the likes of political police chief Gottfried Wendt, German Center Party politicians Heinrich Bruening and Franz von Papen, general Kurt von Schleicher, and the Nyssen family to coordinate the conservative camp's strategies, and he opposed Wendt's plan to unleash the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) to create panic on the streets, instead supporting his former rival Gustav Stresemann's plan to establish a European Germany and an alliance between the military and monarchists.