1924: The Year That Made Hitler (11 page)

As if on cue—he had arrived late on purpose—Ludendorff, the Lion of Tannenberg and Liège, entered the hall. Shouts of
Achtung!
(“Attention!”) and
Heil!
(“Hail!”) rose from the crowd. Though dressed in civilian clothes, the upright general was unmistakable and, through his appearance alone, commanded men to their feet. As Ludendorff passed to the side room, it was as though the imprimatur of a righteous Germany with an honorable past had been stamped on the proceedings.

Hitler followed the general into the side room. Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser heard the cheering; they knew the temper of the crowd. Still, they hesitated. Ludendorff addressed the three men: “Gentlemen, I am just as surprised as you are by what has happened.”
¹²
That was probably not true, but Ludendorff obviously felt confronted with new facts on the ground. “What’s done is done,” he said. “The issue is the fatherland and the great
völkisch
cause. I can only advise you to join with us in this undertaking.”

Looking directly at his fellow German general, Ludendorff said: “Okay, Lossow, let’s do it.” Lossow apparently felt bound to take orders from Germany’s greatest living soldier. With tears in his eyes, Lossow clicked his heels and said: “Your Excellency’s wish is my command.”
¹³
The men shook hands. Seisser, a mere colonel, had no choice left. He, too, shook Ludendorff’s hand, a classic silent agreement.

Only Kahr held out. Hitler pressed: “The deed is done. There is no going back. This is an historic moment.” The crowd outside would “carry you on their shoulders,”
¹⁴
Hitler told Kahr. Finally, the equivocating commissioner general found a way to take Hitler’s assignment of Bavarian regent: “Gentlemen, in the end we are all monarchists. I’ll accept the job [of leading Bavaria] as a placeholder for the [deposed but possibly returning] king.”

Hitler, whose mood and appearance had gone from agitated revolutionary to delighted schoolboy, insisted that the men carry
their newfound unity onto the public stage. As he returned to the main hall, his face “was beaming,” said one observer. Hitler had clearly won the first round.

But victory wasn’t enough. Hitler needed to set his actions in a historical context to limn their appeal and justify their meaning in a larger time frame. Speaking to the crowd, Hitler said: “Tonight I want to fulfill the promise I made to myself five years ago today as I lay, blinded and crippled, in a military hospital—never to rest, never to give up until the criminals of November [1918] were toppled and the German people had risen again on the ruins of today’s troubled Germany, with power, greatness, freedom, and joy. Amen!”

Hitler’s words were greeted again by stormy applause, even though they were a perfect example of Hitler’s rewriting of history. He was never crippled by the gas attack that temporarily blinded him, and he never again made such a claim. And most historians doubt his melodramatic story about having sworn to reverse the revolution right after it happened. More likely he was presenting a myth he’d created about himself. But no one in the Bürgerbräukeller knew that.

Ludendorff added his share of sentimentality, claiming to be “deeply touched by this momentous event” and ready to serve again. “Today it’s about the highest possible stakes (
Es geht heute um das Ganze
).… This hour is a turning point in German history.”
¹⁵
Ludendorff later said that he was in the grip of “barely contained inner excitement.”

The other men spoke briefly but with seeming sincerity, pledging themselves to the new cause. Gazing deeply into one another’s eyes, they all exchanged what appeared to be heartfelt handshakes. Obviously moved, Hitler placed his left hand on their joined right hands; some observers compared it to the historic hands-atop-hands
“Rütli oath” that formed the Swiss confederation in the sixteenth century. Tears were shed on the stage and in the crowd. Finally, the entire assemblage burst into a robust rendition of the “Song of Germany”—
“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”
According to historian Müller, many people were “so choked up that they couldn’t sing at all.”

But the final uplifting scene of nationalist fervor and comradely unity masked brutal aspects of Hitler’s putsch that were unfolding in the Bürgerbräukeller and elsewhere. Göring’s prediction of widespread arrests, with the underlying threat of targeted assassinations, was becoming reality. Now that the performance was over, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser were escorted back to the side room under guard. The crowd was free to leave—except for certain people. Storm Troopers and other Kampfbunders began pulling people out of the Bürgerbräukeller crowd as Rudolf Hess read out their names from a list he and Hitler had drawn up. The surprised captives were hustled off under guard to an upstairs holding room, where they became hostages with no inkling of their fates. These included members of the Bavarian government and legislature, even Governor Eugen von Knilling—all of them invited guests to Kahr’s speech. They were now theoretically out of their jobs; their administration had been deposed. In some cases, as with the representative of the Bavarian royal house, a sly game of courtliness was played until it became obvious that the aristocrat had become a hostage. The hostages were transported to the suburban villa of conservative publisher Julius Lehmann, a gilded cage.

In other cases, especially involving Jews, courtliness was replaced by nastiness and rough treatment. Ludwig Wasserman, the factory owner, was pulled out of the crowd and placed in isolation in a small room—with the warning that if he tried to flee, “he would
be shot.” Two Nazis told him he would be hanged the next morning in front of city hall on Marienplatz, Munich’s central square.
¹⁶
Other Jews were dragged from their homes in Bogenhausen, a prosperous neighborhood thought to be home to many Jews. The Nazis and Kampfbunders picked out Jewish-sounding names from a telephone book, or off the nameplates on house doors, breaking in, firing shots into ceilings, and terrorizing the inhabitants. More than twenty Jews were eventually held hostage at the Bürgerbräukeller, including one seventy-four-year-old gentleman who was brought in with his daughters. One Nazi suggested executing them all immediately, but Göring told him: “We don’t have the right to shoot them yet.”

Across the Isar River, in the heart of old Munich, another scene of pillage and destruction was unfolding at the offices of the
Münchener Post,
the Social Democratic newspaper that vocally and often criticized Hitler and his Nazis. With Social Democratic politician Erhard Auer as a key editor, the
Münchener Post
was one of the few publications that had, early on, spotted Hitler’s views and extremism for the danger they represented. The
Post
consistently denounced the message, the messenger, and his methods. To Hitler, the
Münchener Post
was a “poison kitchen” that had to be eliminated at the first opportunity—and tonight the opportunity had come. Sent by Göring and led by Storm Trooper Josef Berchtold, the Hitler Shock Troops smashed every window, trashed every desk, destroyed or stole every typewriter, and wrecked the presses and typesetting equipment of the
Post
in an orgy of anger and destruction. They smashed a revered symbol of the newspaper’s philosophical origins, a bust of August Bebel, one of the 1869 founders of the Social Democratic Party. Scheubner-Richter sent law student Hermann Fobke to Auer’s office on the third floor. “There’s an entire
file cabinet full of papers here!” Fobke gleefully reported. Gathering up stacks of personal and political documents, Fobke proudly delivered them to Hitler in the Bürgerbräukeller.
¹⁷

Destroying the newspaper was not enough. The Nazi wrecking crew also forced its way into Auer’s apartment in Munich; but the editor had heard of an impending putsch and fled. Deprived of their target, the housebreakers (with Hitler’s driver, Emil Maurice, in the lead) manhandled Auer’s wife, frightened his two daughters, and led away his son-in-law.
¹⁸

From his new command post in the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler was trying to oversee his putsch’s planned operations around town. News had arrived of at least one successful operation. After receiving the code phrase, “baby safely delivered,” Röhm had departed the Löwenbräukeller and marched his three hundred men to the Reichswehr district headquarters. Located on the grand boulevard of the Ludwigstrasse, right next to the Bavarian State Library, this was General Lossow’s command post. At the head of the march, carrying the banner of the Reichskriegsflagge, strode a new member of Röhm’s detachment, a bespectacled and expressionless young man named Heinrich Himmler. A trained agronomist, Himmler was fanatically attached to Röhm and, in time, would feel the same way about Hitler (Himmler would become chief of the SS during the Third Reich and a chief perpetrator of the Holocaust). At the Reichswehr district headquarters, Röhm’s men quickly convinced General Lossow’s thin guard that they had valid orders to take over the building. Stringing barbed wire around the edifice, they soon had full control of a strategic installation at a key location.

Things were not going so well elsewhere. Neutralizing Lossow’s Reichswehr command post was not the same as capturing and converting the actual arms and troops of the Reichswehr in Munich.
These were chiefly located in the barracks of the First Battalion, Nineteenth Infantry, and the Engineers’ Barracks on the northwest edge of the city. But when Kampfbunders arrived and tried, like Röhm’s men, to talk their way into control of the barracks, they were rebuffed by sentries who said they had their own orders to obey. Their steadfastness proved crucial to reversing the tide of the putsch. When word of this unexpected opposition arrived at the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler impulsively decided to solve the problem himself. Just as he had earlier turned the resistance of the crowd at the Bürgerbräukeller “inside out like a glove,” he believed he could, with his always persuasive rhetoric, talk the skeptical Reichswehr troops into his arms. He left his command post for the trip across town to the barracks. Fatefully, he left Ludendorff in charge of his still-captive “co-conspirators,” Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser.

It was the wrong move. Ludendorff respected Hitler’s new pawns as fellow officers and gentlemen (even Kahr had been commissioned during World War I). A lifelong military man (he began cadet academy as a teenager), Ludendorff was schooled in the Prussian rules of duty and honor, not the sordid wiles of hardball politics. Even in the
völkisch
movement, where he had been agitating for several years, Ludendorff served more as a father figure than as an on-the-ground tactician. That the political game was played with ever-shifting rules and alliances of convenience was foreign to him. When Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser asked for their freedom—giving their
words of honor
that they needed to carry out their duties as members of the new government—the old general smelled nary a rat. He set the hostages loose.

Meanwhile, other Storm Troopers and Kampfbund units were carrying out orders from above. One company marched, puzzled, to a church attached to a monastery on St. Anna Square. Then the
troops understood: man after man was coming out of the monastery’s cellar door carrying a carbine. After a while, they formed a relay line, handing the weapons up to men on trucks. In all, more than three thousand rifles were retrieved from the underground vaults of the monastery, all illegally stashed there by Bavarian militias. Another weapons cache was opened near the university. In the basement of a fraternity house called Palatia, more than one hundred rifles were retrieved by Storm Troopers; they had been hidden there a week earlier by Röhm, nicknamed the “machine-gun king” for his skill at procuring and caching weapons.
¹⁹

Yet for all their preparations, the ill-coordinated putschist units were unable to capture any more ground. Although they outnumbered the government forces—the putschists had roughly four thousand armed men while the Reichswehr and state police combat units numbered only twenty-six hundred—Hitler’s troops did not successfully mount another attack.
²⁰
Even Röhm’s attempt to seize Kahr’s administrative headquarters a few blocks from the military command post had met with stiff resistance; he withdrew without firing a shot. Only the police headquarters was successfully commandeered for a while by the former police chief and his deputy, now part of the putsch. But in less than two hours, the police building flipped back into the hands of the constituted authorities, who arrested the putschists.

Hitler had arrived at the infantry and engineers’ barracks. But his vaunted persuasive powers had finally met their limit. Barracks guards refused him admission. Hitler admitted defeat and left. When he returned to the Bürgerbräukeller, he was appalled to learn that Ludendorff had let his hostages go
on their words of honor.
Hitler exploded. He began a stream of abuse that was abruptly cut short by the general. “I forbid anyone to challenge in my presence the word of honor of a German officer.”

The worm had turned, and Hitler knew it. The freed hostages soon renounced their very public and—to everyone who was there—apparently very sincere statements of collaboration with Hitler’s putsch. It took the slow-footed Kahr longer than the other two to recant, and he made a few odd moves that left his staff wondering which side he was on. Lossow’s turning of his coat back to its original side was hastened by the confrontational question of one of his top officers as he walked into the Infantry Barracks: “Well, General, that scene in the Bürgerbräukeller, that was all just a bluff—right?” Lossow knew his answer: of course, it was all
Komödie spielen
—just playing along. Lossow began sending orders for Reichswehr units around Bavaria to march on Munich. The battle against Hitler’s putsch had begun.