was held in a guarded villa at the edge of Budapest. Later, he was handled over to the representatives of General Louis Franchet d'Espèrey's Allied army, and he was held as a military prisoner in Futog, Serbia, until November 1919. He was one of the 896 Germans on the Allied list of accused war criminals, which was eventually allowed to lapse. By 1920, Mackensen retired from the army. Although standing in opposition to the conclusion of the Treaty of Versailles and the newly-established parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic, he initially avoided public campaigns. Around 1924, he changed his mind and began to use his image as a war hero to support monarchist and nationalist groups. He routinely appeared in his old Life Hussars uniform and became very active in pro-military Conservative Revolutionary movement organisations, particularly Der Stahlhelm and the Schlieffen Society, which advocated the stab-in-the-back myth and openly endorsed the murder of Minister Matthias Erzberger in 1921. During the German presidential election of 1932, Mackensen supported Paul von Hindenburg against Adolf Hitler, whose political skills he nevertheless admired. After Hitler gained power in January 1933, Mackensen became a visible, if only symbolic, supporter of the Nazi regime. One of Mackensen's ceremonial visits brought him to Passau, where he received a hero's welcome. Occasionally mocked as the "Reich Centrepiece", Mackensen's distinctive public profile in his black Life Hussars uniform was even recognised by the Hausser-Elastolin company, which produced a 7 cm figure of him in its line of Elastolin composition soldiers. His fame and familiar uniform gave rise to two separate Third Reich units adopting black dress with Totenkopf badges: the Panzerwaffe, which claimed the tradition of the Imperial Cavalry, and the Schutzstaffel. In October 1935, the government vested Mackensen with the Brandenburg demesne of Brüssow in recognition of his merits. Mackensen's relationship to the Nazis remained ambiguous: embodying the Prussian traditions adopted by Hitler's regime, he appeared in his black uniform at public events organised by the German government or the Nazi Party such as the Day of Potsdam on 21 March 1933. On the other hand, he objected to the killing of Generals Ferdinand von Bredow and Kurt von Schleicher during The Night of the Long Knives purge of July 1934, to the Nazi Kirchenkampf measures against the Confessing Church and to the atrocities that were committed during the invasion of Poland in September 1939. By the early