1. Wolfgang Kapp was a German conservative and nationalist and political activist who is best known for his involvement in the eponymous 1920 Kapp Putsch.
17 Facts About Wolfgang Kapp
1. 2.
Wolfgang Kapp spent most of his career working for the Prussian Ministry of Finance and then as director of the Agricultural Credit Institute in East Prussia.
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Wolfgang Kapp returned to Germany in late 1921 to appear in court, but died while under medical care before he could testify.
4.
Wolfgang Kapp was born in New York City where his father Friedrich Wolfgang Kapp, a political activist and later Reichstag delegate for the National Liberal Party, had settled after the failed European revolutions of 1848.
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In 1870 the family returned to Germany, and Wolfgang Kapp's schooling continued in Berlin at the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium.
6.
Wolfgang Kapp married Margarete Rosenow in 1884; the couple had three children.
7.
In 1907, through the intercession of his friend Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, an influential Junker from East Prussia, Wolfgang Kapp took over the lucrative position of director of the East Prussian Agricultural Credit Institute, a post he held until March 1920.
8.
Wolfgang Kapp successfully lobbied for the agricultural workers' movement, peasant settlement and agricultural debt relief, and against strong opposition he founded a non-profit public life insurance company.
9.
Wolfgang Kapp was an honorary doctor of the University of Konigsberg.
10.
Wolfgang Kapp called for extensive annexations and high reparations payments from the nations of the Triple Entente.
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Wolfgang Kapp considered it indispensable that occupied Belgium be permanently linked to the German Empire militarily, economically and politically, that German naval bases be established on the coast of Flanders and that vigorous action be taken against Great Britain.
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Wolfgang Kapp felt the defeat of the First World War as a national disgrace.
13.
Wolfgang Kapp became a proponent of the stab-in-the-back myth, the belief that the German army had remained undefeated in the field and was stabbed in the back by Jews and communists at home.
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Wolfgang Kapp joined the German National People's Party in 1919 and participated in the anti-republican National Union.
15.
Wolfgang Kapp, who was in Berlin with a delegation from East Prussia, met with Luttwitz to help plan the coup.
16.
Wolfgang Kapp wanted a complete overthrow of the government, while Luttwitz had more limited and personal aims.
17.
Wolfgang Kapp died of cancer shortly after the operation to remove it.