The German nationalist politician Wolfgang Kapp (1858-1922) led a putsch in March 1920, an abortive rightist-military coup.

Wolfgang Kapp was born in New York City on July 24, 1858, the son of a lawyer-politician. Returning to Germany in 1870, the young Kapp earned a doctorate of law and entered the Prussian civil service in 1886. A hardworking bureaucrat, he advanced through the ranks of district magistrate in 1891 and councilor in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture in 1900 until he was appointed director general of the East Prussian Land Bank in Königsberg in 1906, a position he held until his putsch in 1920.

A partisan of the ultra nationalist Pan-German League, Kapp emerged during World War I as a determined foe of a negotiated peace and campaigned bitterly against the moderate chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and the Reichstag (parliamentary) Peace Resolution of 1917 in two violent pamphlets. In September 1917, with Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz and...