as early as 1913 to become a pacifist. That year, he married Maud Lichfield-Woods, a Mancunian suffragette, born to British colonial officer and the great-granddaughter of an Indian princess in Hyderabad. They had one daughter, Rosalinda. During World War I, Ossietzky was drafted much against his will into the Army and his experiences during the warwhere he was appalled by the carnageconfirmed him in his pacifism. During the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), his political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society. Discovery of illegal German rearmament In 1921, the German government founded the Arbeits-Kommandos (work squads) led by Major Bruno Ernst Buchrucker. Officially a labour group intended to assist with civilian projects, in reality, they were used by Germany to exceed the limits on troop strength set by the Treaty of Versailles. Buchrucker's Black Reichswehr took its orders from a secret group in the German Army known as Sondergruppe R comprising Kurt von Schleicher, Eugen Ott, Fedor von Bock and Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord. The Black Reichswehr became infamous for its practice of murdering Germans suspected of working as informers for the Allied Control Commission. The killings perpetrated by the Black Reichswehr were justified under the so-called Femegerichte (secret court) system under which secret "trials" were conducted that the victims were unaware of and after finding the accused guilty they would send out a man to execute the "court's" sentence of death. The killings were ordered by the officers from Sondergruppe R. Regarding the Femegerichte murders, Ossietzky wrote: Lieutenant Schulz (charged with the murder of informers against the Black Reichswehr) did nothing but carry out the orders given him, and that certainly Colonel von Bock, and probably Colonel von Schleicher and General Seeckt, should be sitting in the dock beside him Reflecting his pacifism, Ossietzky became secretary of the German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft) in 1919. "Homeless left" In the 1920s, Ossietzky became one of the leaders of the "homeless left", centered on the newspaper Die Weltbühne which rejected Communism, but found the Social Democrats too inclined to compromise with the old order. Ossietzky often complained that the men who staffed the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the military under the Kaiser (German Emperor Wilhelm II) were the same men serving the Weimar Republic, something that was a major concern for him as he frequently warned that these men had no commitment to democracy, and