Franz Epp

Franz Ritter von Epp - General and Protector of the Nazi Party.A conservative General who was one of the most influential protector's of the Nazi Party in its early days, Franz Ritter von Epp was born in Munich on 16 October 1868, the son of a painter. A professional soldier, he entered the service of the Royal Bavarian Ninth Infantry Regiment in 1887 and in October 1896 was appointed First Lieutenant. During 1901 - 2, von Epp was in China with a German colonial detachment and between 1904 and 1907, he took part as a volunteer in the cruel and inglorious colonial war against the Hereros in German South - West Africa. During World War I, von Epp had a distinguished record - he was awarded the Pour le Merite and the Iron Cross (First and Second Classes). On 8 February 1919, the Epp Freikorps was established and utilized in the liberation of Munich, being noted for its brutality. It was responsible for the murder of Gustav Landauer, the anarchist revolutionary, and for the massacre of its socialists at Greising, a Munich suburb. For a breif period, von Epp was the the military dictator of Bavaria, which became a center of oppositional and Nazi activity against the government in Berlin and the communists. Among von Epp's paid informers was Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler, who had attracted the attention of his aide-de-camp, Ernst Rohm. It was through Rohm that von Epp raised 60,000 marks for converting the Volkische Beobachter into a Nazi Party mouthpiece, obtaining the money from the Reichswehr treasury and Bavarian capitalists. Von Epp's troop's were used by the Republican government to crush the communists in the Ruhr, and he also exerted his influence on behalf of the SA in Bavaria, becoming its area commander in Munich in 1926. Three years earlier, during the abortive November putsch, von Epp had sat on the fence, distancing himself from the coup once it had failed. In 1928 he joined the NSAPD, and immediately became a Reichstag deputy for the electoral district of Upper Bavaria-Swabia. He was also put in charge of the Wehrpolitisches Amt (the defense political office) of the Nazi Party. On 9 March 1933, von Epp dismissed the government of Bavaria and was appointed Governor, a position he held until the fall of the Third Reich. The conservative monarchist was also made head of the Colonial Policy Office of the Reich Leadership on 5 May 1934, he clashed with Himmler and Heydrich over the 'improper use of protective custody' in Bavaria, expressing anxiety in the 'confidence in the law' might be undermined. His outmoded authoritarian concepts condemned him to little more than a figurehead role in the Third Reich. At the end of the war, von Epp fell into the hands of the Americans and died in an American internment camp on 31 January 1947.