This account shows how the birth of Nazism came out of the death throes of the Kaiser's Germany. Defeat in World War I and a narrow escape from Communist revolution brought not peace but five chaotic years (1918-23) of civil war, assassination, plots, putsches and murderous mayhem. It was an atmosphere in which civilized values withered and violent extremism flourished. The savage world of the trenches came home, carried by men who refused to admit defeat and 'who could not get the war out of their system'.In this chronicle of the Freikorps - the freebooting armies that crushed the Red revolution, then attempted to take over the State themselves by armed force - historian Nigel Jones draws on little known archives in Germany and Britain to portray a state torn between revolution and counter revolution. He reveals how that state nurtured the seeds of the Nazi era. This is the first in-depth study of the Freikorps to appear in English for fifty years. Yet the figures who flit through their shadowy world - Rohm, Hess, Goering, and Hitler himself - were to become frighteningly familiar just ten years after the turmoil that gave Nazism its chance. Irrational, violent, obsessed with war and death, the Freikorps failed, yet proved to be the harbinger of an even darker fate. Read Less