ABSTRACT
Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp commanded the Royal Bavarian Infantry Bodyguard Regiment, the most select unit in the Bavarian Army, for all but a few months of the World War. His prowess on the battlefield brought him ennoblement and the award of the coveted Pour le Merite, Prussia’s highest military honor. In brigade command and senior division staff positions in Munich from 1919–1923, the staunchly Catholic and anti-socialist von Epp, with his energetic adjutant Captain Ernst Rohm, was a leading patron of the counterrevolutionary “patriotic leagues” which proliferated then in the “white-blue” Free State. The old campaigner’s political outlook, like that of many German veterans, was relatively simple and heavily colored by military analogy. Von Epp reportedly became progressively disillusioned in the mid-1920s with what he saw as the lack of strong will, ineffectiveness, and overly particularistic partisan self-interest of the Bayerische Volkspartei “‘petit-bourgeois resident ministers.’”.
