African Freikorps Soldier in Munich (1919)

This photo shows an African soldier at the wheel of a car, wearing the uniform of the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Korps, a paramilitary Freikorps unit. The photo was taken in Munich in May 1919, while the unit was involved in the suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. It was taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, who documented the revolution in Bavaria and its violent suppression and later became Hitler’s official photographer. It is possible that the soldier was a former member of the so-called colonial “Schutztruppen” in East Africa under the command of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Most of the African soldiers who fought in the German colonial forces were interned in Allied prisoner-of-war camps at the end of the First World War. Neither the identity nor the life story of the soldier pictured here is known.