(1870-1941)
forester and paramilitary leader; helped organize and lead the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr. Born in the Upper Pa-latinate town of Schwandorf, he studied forestry. After teaching for several years, he became a counselor at the forestry office in the Upper Bavarian town of Isen. In 1913 the Colonial Office appointed him leader of a scientific expe-dition to Cameroon. He served in World War I, was wounded on the Western Front, and ended the war as chief of the army s forestry administration in Bi-alowicz, Poland.*
In April 1919, during the weeks of Bavaria's* Raterepublik, Escherich re-turned to Isen to found a people's militia.Once the Raterepublik was suppressed, his militia became the nucleus of the Einwohnerwehr. Independent of state con-trol, but the beneficiary of state financial support, the Einwohnerwehr numbered 300,000 at the time of the Kapp* Putsch (March 1920). Using the putsch as an excuse for action, Escherich engineered the coup d'etat that removed the Ba-varian government of Johannes Hoffmann*. Thereafter the rightist regime of Gustav von Kahr,* formed in March 1920, became his means of support.
Escherich's contacts enabled him to establish Organisation Escherich (Orgesch) in May 1920. A paramilitary unit headquartered in both Regensburg and Munich, Orgesch instituted rather reasonable goals: defense of the Constitution*; protection of work, property, and people; preservation of the Reich, including opposition to overt separatism; and resistance to putsches from both the Right and the Left. But Escherich also viewed Orgesch as the nucleus for a national union of Wehrverbande. With sixteen organizational districts throughout the country, Orgesch claimed a membership by late 1920 in excess of one million. Such success was its undoing; not only did it violate the Versailles Treaty s* disarmament* clauses, but Carl Severing,* Prussian Interior Minister, found its existence unacceptable. Soon banned in every German state outside Bavaria, Orgesch was camouflaged by Kahr until, after its May 1921 involvement against the Poles in Upper Silesia,* Berlin* forced its disbanding. Since the paramilitary successor organizations to Orgesch were increasingly radical, Escherich fell out of favor. After May 1921 he returned to Bavaria s Forestry Administration. Although he was reinstated as head of the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr in December 1929, his powers were quite limited. Bavaria s chief forest ranger, he retired in 1931 to write travel guides.
REFERENCES:Diehl, Paramilitary Politics; Garnett, Lion, Eagle, and Swastika; Large, Politics of Law and Order; NDB, vol. 4.