French End Six-Week Occupation of Frankfurt
The French tricolor flying in Frankfurt during the occupation.
May 17 1920, Frankfurt--The general strike in reaction to the Kapp Putsch had continued in the Ruhr valley after the putsch had been defeated, and forces aligned with the USPD and the communist KPD had organized themselves into a Red Ruhr Army. Negotiations with the government in Berlin failed, and the German Army, assisted by various Freikorps units (including the Ehrhardt brigade that had sparked the putsch), spent the first week of April defeating the Red Ruhr Army and violently suppressing the general strike.
While the French had no love for the Reds, the use of the German Army in the Ruhr valley, which was less than 50km from the Rhine, was expressly prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles as a âhostile actâŚcalculated to disturb the peace of the world.â In response, on April 6, French troops pushed out from their bridgehead around Mainz to occupy Frankfurt and its suburbs. The British and Belgians, whose occupation zones directly adjoined the fighting in the Ruhr, took no action; neither did the Americans. Nine civilians were killed when a machine gun of a Moroccan regiment open fired on a crowd on April 7; otherwise, the occupation largely proceeded without incident.
By mid-May, the fighting in the Ruhr was long over and the French had made their point; on May 17, after nearly six weeks of occupation, the French pulled out of Frankfurt.
