1924: The Year That Made Hitler (10 page)

As evening fell, some of Munich’s blue-uniformed city policemen—not to be confused with the green-uniformed military-style Bavarian State Police—noticed armed men, some in steel helmets, assembling in company-sized units on small squares near the Isar Gate, not far from the Bürgerbräukeller. Some were Nazi Storm Troopers. One Twelfth District officer, Georg Albang, overheard a passing bicyclist say: “You guys know something? Tonight it’s happening!” By six o’clock, with the evening chill setting in, Officer Anton Zauner had seen seventy men in mixed uniforms, many carrying bayonets or short daggers, marching across the Maximilian Bridge in the general direction of the Bürgerbräukeller. Officer Joseph Bömerl, dressed in street clothes, noticed gatherings of paramilitaries on the Gärtnerplatz and at the Nazi offices in the Corneliusstrasse. Twice he heard someone say, “Tonight the balloon goes up!”
³⁷
Clearly Hitler’s obsessive secrecy had sprung leaks; the paramilitaries knew why they were assembling.

With its formidable intelligence operation, the Munich City Police always maintained a tight watch on just such activities; they received detailed overnight reports on every significant political meeting in town, sometimes several per night. Even the street cops were trained to report suspicious activity. But on this of all nights
their system failed: when Officer Bömerl phoned the political division at police headquarters at 6:45 p.m., he was told: “Don’t worry. The Nazis are invited to that big meeting [at the Bürgerbräukeller]. There’s probably nothing to these rumors that something is going to happen tonight.”
³⁸
Forewarned, the police—who had fended off unfounded putsch rumors for years—took no action.
³⁹
This time, however, the sky really was about to fall.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Putsch

“I will never let those swine take me. I will shoot myself first.”

—
ADOLF HITLER, NOVEMBER 11, 1923

With his stumpy build and bureaucratic style, Gustav Ritter von Kahr was anything but charismatic; certainly, he was no crowd-pleaser. The last thing Kahr was expected to do was draw a large turnout to a beer hall.

But in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of 1923, people in Munich, like everywhere in Germany, were desperate for a ray of hope. So many people showed up for Kahr’s appearance on this cold and soon-to-be-snowy November night that they could not all fit into the Bürgerbräukeller. The plainspoken Kahr had drawn three thousand people to hear a hastily organized speech in defense of his new regime. Even Hitler was surprised.

When the Nazi leader arrived in a red Mercedes at the beer hall’s gates at 8:30 p.m., he could barely get inside. A contingent of police had closed the doors, explaining to a clamoring crowd in the street
that the hall was filled to bursting. “It was so tight that you couldn’t have fallen over,” remarked one man standing near the podium.
¹

At the dais, Commissioner Kahr was droning away about “state authority” and the “nationalist spirit” and “the will to act.”
²
The distinguished audience, their beer steins filled, listened in polite silence.

Suddenly, the doors to the capacious hall flew open. A platoon of uniformed men pushed their way inside, their military gear clanking. At their head was Hitler, his eyes flashing and his face “wildly distorted” with excitement. Wearing a frock coat pinned with his two World War I Iron Cross medals, he looked like, depending on whom you asked, an operatic hero or a “forlorn little waiter,” as one observer put it. Turning to his bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, Hitler said, “Make sure I don’t get shot in the back.”
³

The crowd was so thick, Hitler recalled, that he had to “use my fists and elbows to clear my path” to the podium. Commissioner Kahr, interrupted in mid-sentence, stood stock-still, his face a mask of indignation. The room erupted in confusion and outrage.

“Quiet!” shouted Hitler. “Silence!” The room roared.

Jumping onto a chair, Hitler raised his Browning pistol and fired a single shot into the twenty-five-foot-high coffered ceiling. “Silence!” he shouted again. “The national revolution has begun.”

Now “dead silence reigned,” said one man present. Hitler had the meeting’s attention. His pistol still held aloft, he warned: “The building is surrounded by six hundred heavily armed men! No one is allowed to leave. If you don’t stay calm, I will have a machine gun placed in the balcony!” Many in the audience thought they had a madman in their midst.

As Hitler spoke, a platoon-strength unit led by Hermann Göring had occupied the main entrance with a heavy machine gun. They blocked all the side doors. Through the windows to the beer garden, people could see steel-helmeted men carrying carbines. Hitler had gotten the drop on three thousand of Munich’s finest, turning a dignified if boring event into a massive hostage-taking. Kahr was now “trembling and pale.”
⁴

From atop his chair, Hitler continued to shout: “The Bavarian government is deposed. The national government is deposed. A provisional government is being formed. The Reichswehr and Bavarian State Police barracks are occupied. Reichswehr and police units are marching here under the swastika flag.”
⁵

Much of what Hitler said was exaggerated (he did not have six hundred men, but perhaps half that many), untrue (the Reichswehr and Bavarian State Police barracks were not occupied), or only aspirational (Hitler
hoped
to create a new government in the next hour).
But, like so much Hitler would do in his political career, he painted the dream first, then tried to fill in the facts.

Besides Kahr, the two most important men in the room were those in uniform, General Lossow and Colonel Seisser. Seated near the podium, they looked on in disbelief and fury, unable to defend themselves or anyone else. Lossow’s first thought when he heard commotion at the door was that a leftist coup must be in the making. “It never occurred to me that men of nationalist politics would attack a gathering of nationalists,” said Lossow. “I hadn’t even brought a sidearm.”

As Hitler approached the podium, a police officer, Major Hunglinger, moved into his path, his hand in his pocket. But the fiery-eyed Hitler was quicker; he lifted his pistol to the major’s head and growled: “Take your hand out of your pocket.” The major’s hand came out empty.
⁶

Commissioner Kahr stood like a statue at the podium, his interrupted speech still in his hand, his face betraying nothing. Hitler gruffly addressed the triumvirate: “Gentlemen, I must ask you to come with me to the side room. I guarantee your safety. It will take only ten minutes.” At close range, Lossow noticed that Hitler seemed carried away, in “a state of ecstasy.” As Hitler marched the three men through a gauntlet of Storm Troopers toward the Bürgerbräukeller’s side room, Lossow whispered to Kahr and Seisser: “Play along!” The words in German are
Komödie spielen
—“playact,” “make theater,” or “create comedy.” What was about to happen was part comedy, part tragedy.

As Hitler herded the three men into the side room, Göring, the Storm Trooper commander, took over the main room. Shouts of disgust and derision rose again from the restless crowd: “Theater!” “Mexico!” “South America!” Hitler was being ridiculed as a tinpot
insurrectionist. Göring stopped the shouting with another pistol shot into the high ceiling. Assuring the assembled dignitaries that the Nazis’ actions were not an attack on Kahr but the beginning of a “national uprising,” Göring asked the audience to be patient for a while.
⁷

“And, besides, what are you worried about? You’ve got your beer,” he said.

In the Bürgerbräukeller’s side room, Hitler faced the thorniest part of his improbable undertaking: converting his three chief hostages into his three closest collaborators. Hitler seemed still in a kind of rapture, according to those present. “He was covered with sweat,” said the general. It was true: when Hitler made speeches, holding forth for two or three hours at a time, he always ended up soaked in sweat.
⁸
Tonight, in the midst of the greatest gamble of his political life, the putsch leader was drenched in a matter of minutes.

Despite Göring’s anodyne assurance that Kahr was not under attack, Hitler was threatening his three hostages. “Nobody leaves the room alive without my permission,” he said. Calling Bavaria “the springboard for the Reich government,” Hitler told the men their new roles: General Lossow would become Germany’s new defense minister, Colonel Seisser the head of the new “national police,” and Commissioner Kahr the chief regent of Bavaria. Hitler would assume “political leadership,” he added, without specifying a job. To lead a new “national army” with the Storm Troopers and other paramilitaries at its core, Hitler had chosen General Ludendorff. As the former hero of World War I—he won the great battles of Liège in Belgium and Tannenberg in East Prussia that knocked Russia out of the war—Ludendorff was still a demigod to many Germans. He was also the chief promoter of the infamous stab-in-the-back legend, disingenuously
claiming that Germany’s army had been near victory in 1918 when it was betrayed from behind by craven civilians, especially Socialists and Jews. Ludendorff’s name and military heroism were the perfect cover for Hitler’s chief biographical weaknesses: he was uneducated and he had never achieved noncommissioned officer’s rank, despite two medals for bravery. But, as the putsch unfolded, Ludendorff was not yet at the Bürgerbräukeller.

In the tense standoff in the beer hall’s side room, Hitler now became more menacing. “Each of us must accept his assigned role,” he growled, waving his pistol. “Otherwise he has no right to live. You must fight with me, win with me or die with me. If things go wrong, I have four bullets in my pistol: three for my collaborators, if you desert me, and the last one for myself.” Hitler suddenly lifted the Browning to his own head.

Kahr, who had been silent since the putsch began, seething with “disgust and hatred,” finally spoke up: “You can arrest me, you can have me shot, you can shoot me yourself. Dying or not dying is unimportant.”

Hitler was stuck. Ten minutes had passed, and the triumvirate was not playing the game he had planned. Ludendorff, his trump card, had not yet arrived (Hitler had sent Scheubner-Richter to pick him up). Hitler’s threats of violence, even suicide, as well as his appeals to patriotism—none of these had moved the triumvirate to join Hitler’s adventure. The impetuous putschist was left with only one weapon, but it was his strongest: his voice.

Leaving the triumvirate under guard—the three men were not allowed to converse with one another—Hitler returned to the raucous main hall, where the Bürgerbräukeller beer maids were still busily delivering one-liter mugs to the tables. More shouts of “Cowboy tactics!” “Mexico!” and “South America!” Again, Hitler silenced the crowd with a pistol shot.

Now Hitler was on his home turf. At a beer hall podium, with an audience spread before him like a carpet, Hitler shifted into gear. In his usual evangelical style, he told the crowd of his plans for the new government led by the men from Bavaria. The time had come, he said, “to march on that godless Babel called Berlin. We must use all of Bavaria’s power… to save the German people.” Exactly five years earlier, Hitler noted, Germany had suffered the “greatest disgrace” when the 1918 revolution was proclaimed. “Today that disgrace comes to an end!”
⁹
Already, the assemblage that had been jeering was beginning to cheer—loudly (the
Münchener Zeitung
called it
stürmischer Beifall,
“stormy applause”). “In the other room, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser are wrestling hard with their decision,” said Hitler. “I ask you now: Are you in agreement with my proposed solution to the German question? You can see that we are not driven by selfish motives or personal gain, but only by the battle for the fatherland in the eleventh hour.” More
stürmischer Beifall
.

Finally, Hitler added an appeal to local sensibilities: “In a free Germany, there is also room for an autonomous Bavaria. One thing I can say to you: either the German revolution begins tonight or we will all be dead by dawn!”
¹⁰

The crowd went wild. In the space of a few minutes, Hitler’s rhetoric had won the approval of much of the Munich establishment, including those who only moments before had dismissed him as a half-baked caudillo. “It was an oratorical masterpiece,” wrote historian Karl Alexander von Müller, who was present. “He swung the temper of the crowd with just a few sentences. It was like turning a glove inside out. Hitler left the hall with the total endorsement of the gathering to tell Kahr that if he joined Hitler’s coup, he would have everyone behind him.”
¹¹