Wolfgang Kapp

Kapp was born in New York City, where his father Friedrich Kapp, a political activist and later Reichstag delegate for the National Liberal Party, had settled after the failed European revolutions of 1848. In 1870, the family returned to Germany, and Kapp's schooling continued in Berlin at the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium. Wolfgang Kapp married Margarete Rosenow in 1884; the couple had three children. Through his wife's family, Kapp acquired connections with politically conservative elements. He studied law at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the Georg-August University of Göttingen, where he became a member of the student organization Corps Hannovera Göttingen. In 1886, he completed his doctorate in law and was appointed to a position in the Prussian Ministry of Finance the same year.

In 1907, through the intercession of his friend Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, an influential Junker from East Prussia, Kapp took over the lucrative position of director of the East Prussian Agricultural Credit Institute, a post he held until March 1920. He 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. In 1912 he was elected to the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank. He was also an honorary doctor of the University of Königsberg.

During World War I, Kapp became widely known among the German population as one of the most high-profile advocates of far-reaching German war goals. He called for extensive annexations and high reparations payments from the nations of the Triple Entente. He 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.

As a vocal advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare, Kapp came into conflict with Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, who sought to prevent it out of fear that it would lead to America entering the war. A pamphlet of Kapp's published in the early summer of 1916 entitled "The National Circles and the Chancellor" (Die Nationalen Kreise und der Reichskanzler) criticised German foreign and domestic policy under Bethmann Hollweg. The pamphlet evoked an indignant reply from Bethmann Hollweg in the Reichstag in which he spoke of "loathsome abuse and slanders".

In reaction to the Reichstag Peace Resolution of 1917, Kapp and Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz founded the German Fatherland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei), of which Kapp was briefly the chairman. Through a by-election, he became a member of the last Reichstag of the Empire on 2 February 1918 for a constituency in Gumbinnen, East Prussia. Kapp felt the defeat of the First World War as a national disgrace. He 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, Freemasons and communists at home. He joined the German National People's Party (DNVP) in 1919 and participated in the anti-republican National Union (Nationale Vereinigung). The members, which included General Erich Ludendorff, Colonel Max Bauer and Captain Waldemar Pabst, were the core group behind the Kapp Putsch that attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic.