Part of the problem with the seeming incongruity of the activities of the Landwehr and its ilk is that much of the popular historical narrative of WWI is dominated by the Western front experience which has given short shrift to the experience of the Eastern front. While the evacuation of German forces from the West was more orderly and by and large peaceful, the collapse of German military occupation of Eastern Europe was not. The breakup of the tsarist and Hapsburg empires created a power vacuous within the region in which various political actors and ethnic groups sought both security and to expand their influence. In this situation, paramilitaries enjoyed a degree of power and leverage. This is where the Baltische Landwehr comes in.

The Landwehr originates partly out of the growing cleavages within the German occupation of Eastern Europe in 1917. In short, the German military did not know what to do with the vast tracts of land ceded to them by Brest-Litovsk. One vocal group within the Army wanted Germany to annex this area, termed by them Ostland, and the inhabitants would be Germanized through military occupation. This faction saw the German Volksdeutsche elite of the Baltic as their natural allies in this process.

German defeat forced a change within this policies of this faction, but not its underlying principles. For many of the Freikorps, setting up a German state in the Baltics would stand in stark contrast to the alleged treason and effeteness of the new Weimar Republic. If Germanness failed in the homeland, then it could succeed within the frontier. The provisional Latvian government aided these sentiments by promising German fighters land in exchange for military service.

Anticommunism also added a degree of messianic mission for the Landwehr, its commander Rüdiger von der Goltz would claim that it was a bulwark of the West against the tide of Bolshevik barbarism. This rhetoric lead to an internal purging of any moderate elements (such as there were) within the Landwehr. This anticommunism also had a pratical effect of giving the departing German Army a rationale for transferring military material and personnel who volunteered over to the Landwehr. What this created was a dangerous mix in which the Landwehr conflated a sense of ethnic superiority with a sense that their enemies posed an existential threat to civilization. Rudolf Höss's memoirs would indicate that the Landwehr's violence was "more brutal and vicious than anything I had experienced before. There was hardly a front line; the enemy was everywhere."

The violence that characterized the Landwehr became its undoing once the situation stabilized in the Baltic. The Latvian government saw the Landwehr as a tool that was too unruly and whose usefulness had passed. The Latvian government reneged on its promises of citizenship and land. Ebert in Germany wanted nothing to do with them. The Landwehr had became state within a state, but its days were numbered. Although it continued to act independently, the German Landwehr veterans gradually trickled back into Germany under agreements between Weimar and the Baltic states. There they perpetuated a myth of German martial heroism that had again been stabbed in the back by politicians.

Sources

Baron, Nick, and Peter Gatrell. Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918-1924. London: Anthem Press, 2004.

Liulevicius, Vejas G. The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Sammartino, Annemarie. The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914-1922. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010.