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• Franz Epp

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• Franz Epp

Franz Epp was born in Munich, Germany, on 16th October, 1868. He joined the German Army and served in China and South-West Africa before commanding the king's bodyguard regiment during the First World War where he won the Iron Cross.

During the Bavarian Soviet Republic the leader, Eugen Levine, argued: "Colonel Epp is already recruiting volunteers. Students and other bourgeois youths are flocking to him from all sides. Nuremberg declared war on Munich. The gentlemen in Weimar recognise only Hoffmann's government. Noske is already whetting his butcher's knife, eager to rescue his threatened party friends and the threatened capitalists."

Epp became one of the leaders of the Freikorps and in March, 1919, led 30,000 soldiers to crush the Bavarian Socialist Republic. It is estimated that Epp's men killed over 600 communists and socialists over the next few weeks.

In 1921 Epp purchased the Volkischer Beobachter and turned it into a newspaper that supported Adolf Hitler. However, he refused to take part in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

Epp joined the Nazi Party in 1928 and assumed control of the Sturm Abteilung (SA) in Bavaria. Later that year he was elected to the Reichstag.

In 1933 Epp became State Governor of Bavaria, a post he held arrested by allied forces at the end of the Second World War.

Franz Epp died in an American internment camp on 31st January, 1947.