Gerhard Roßbach

Gerhard Roßbach (February 28, 1893 – August 301967) was a German Freikorps leader and organizer of nationalist groups after World War I.

Roßbach organised music festivals which combined folk and classical music to instil national pride and construct conservative community values. [Celia Applegate, Pamela Maxine Potter (eds), "Music and German Natinal Ideanity", 2002, University of Chicago Press, p.136] He took part in the Beer Hall putsch of 1923 mobilising students, cadets and officer candidates of the Reichswehr Infantry, fleeing to Austria after the "putsch" failed. He later fell out with Adolf Hitler during his rise to power and was arrested but not killed during the Roehm Purge. After World War II he operated an export-import company near Frankfurt and wrote his memoirs in 1950. [Roßbach, Gerhard. "Mein Weg durch die Zeit: Erinnerungen unt Bekenntnisse (My Way Across The Era: Recollections And Confessions)". Vereinigte Weiburger Buchdruckverein, Weiburg an der Lahn, 1950.] In his last years he took a prominent part in organising the Bayreuth festivals of Richard Wagner's music.

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References

*Snyder, Louis. "Encyclopaedia of the Third Reich". Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1998
*Dornberg, John. "The Putsch That Failed, Hitler's Rehearsal for Power". Weidenfels & Nicholson, 1982
*Jones, Nigel. "The Birth of the Nazis, How the Freikorps blazed a trail for Hitler". Constable & Robinson Ltd, 1987,2004