Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

  The gulf between the momentous nature of the events taking place before his eyes and this brief and laconic account came not unnaturally to fuel speculation that Hitler was trying to obfuscate his own actions and conceal a role which might prove embarrassing to the later nationalist hero. It does seem likely that this was indeed his aim, and to a considerable extent he succeeded in it. What Hitler did, how he reacted to the drama unfolding around him in Munich in the first half of 1919, remains for the most part a dark spot in his personal history. Even so, the evidence, patchy in the extreme though it is, reveals one or two surprises.

  I

  The German Revolution, which had been triggered by the mutinies at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel at the end of October and beginning of November, and rapidly spread to most cities and large towns, reaching the national capital on 9 November, was a messy, largely spontaneous and uncoordinated affair. It arose not, as the Right claimed, from the treacherous machinations of hard-core left-wing revolutionaries, but, as we have already noted, out of massive disaffection and mounting popular protest demanding an end to the war, an end to the hunger and misery at home, and the removal of a monarchy capable of bringing about neither. Following the German request on 3 October for an armistice, which had shocked a German population totally unprepared for defeat, the movement for peace had gathered pace like a bush-fire. The American President Woodrow Wilson had indicated on 23 October, in his third note replying to the German request, that military rulers and autocratic monarchs posed an obstacle to peace negotiations.4 It was only at this stage that revolutionary groups and organizations, until then weak and not numerous, found themselves at the head of a groundswell of popular demand for radical change. Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils sprang into existence; monarchies tumbled. The House of Wittelsbach, rulers of Bavaria for over seven centuries, was the first German monarchy to fall, on 7 November; the Kaiser himself abdicated on the 9th. The Red Flag fluttered over the palace in Berlin where the Imperial standard had flown.5 But ending the old system was easier than erecting a new one. Almost all the representatives of the mobilized masses wanted democratization. But opinion varied on what that meant in practice, and how to achieve it. Improvisation rather than planning was the hallmark of the Councils Movement.6 The great majority of Councils favoured a move to parliamentary democracy. But the minority wanting more radical solutions by building on and extending the power of the Councils gradually became more extreme in their demands, as the Majority Social Democrats under Friedrich Ebert showed themselves too fearful of what was coming out of the Pandora’s box of potential social change that had been opened; too timid to trust even their own mass support; and too willing to side with the forces of the old order rather than risk more democracy. Nothing was done to meet demands for the socialization of industries (especially mining), the democratization of the army, and drastic reform of the civil service. Instead, the forces of reaction, for a short time in disarray, were allowed to regroup. The splits within the revolutionary movement that had been there from the outset widened alarmingly. In Berlin, the Independents left the government – the Council of People’s Representatives – at the end of December. The move to the right had its most fateful moment in the deployment by the SPD government of troops and counter-revolutionary Freikorps units to suppress the small, ill-organized, and mismanaged so-called ‘Spartacus Rising’, carried out by left radicals, mainly supporters of the newly-formed KPD, in Berlin in early January 1919. The murder of the Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January was the symbolic sealing of the disastrous rift within the working-class movement that throughout the Weimar Republic prevented any united front being formed against the growing threat of National Socialism.

  The revolution in Bavaria had preceded that in the rest of the Reich. It took place in circumstances and developed in ways that were to leave a profound mark on Hitler, and to fit more than the events in Berlin into what became the Nazi caricature of the 1918 revolution. It was more radical, with the leadership in the hands of the Independents; it degenerated into near anarchy, then into a short-lived attempt to create a Communist-run Soviet-style system; this in turn led to a few days – though a few days which seared the consciousness of Bavarians for many years to come – that amounted to a mini-civil war, ending in bloodshed and brutality; and a number of the revolutionary leaders happened to be Jewish, some of them east European Jews with Bolshevik sympathies and connections. Moreover, the leader of the Bavarian revolution, the Jewish journalist and left-wing socialist Kurt Eisner, a prominent peace-campaigner in the USPD since the split with the Majority Social Democrats in 1917, together with some of his USPD colleagues, had unquestionably tried to stir up industrial unrest during the ‘January Strike’ in 1918, and had been arrested for his actions. That was to fit nicely into the Right’s ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend. The same was true of Eisner’s subsequent publication of official Bavarian documents revealing Germany’s complicity in Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914, which fed right-wing allegations of treason against him and his entourage even after the Minister President’s assassination in February 1919.7

  When, with a cry of ‘off to the barracks’, workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors attending a huge peace demonstration on Munich’s Theresienwiese on 7 November 1918, addressed by Eisner, had headed for the city’s main garrison area, they had met with no resistance from the troops.8 There was relatively little genuine revolutionary fervour in the barracks, but nevertheless as good as no opposition to the revolution, and no support left for the monarchy. War-weariness was the main determinant of the mood. ‘These people wanted neither continued war nor revolutionary tribunals and burning stately homes,’ wrote one eye-witness, long after the events. ‘They wanted to get home to their farms and workshops.’9 Without support from the army, the monarchy was finished. The ailing King Ludwig III and his family fled that night. Hitler, over two decades later, was to remark that at least he had to thank the Social Democrats for ridding him of ‘these courtly interests’.10

  The provisional government that was soon constituted under Eisner’s leadership was from the outset a highly unstable coalition, mainly composed of the radical but largely idealistic USPD and the ‘moderate’ SPD (which had not even wanted a evolution).11 Moreover, it stood no chance of mastering the daunting social and economic problems it faced. Without support from the countryside, in a largely rural province, the provisioning problems alone could not be tackled. But the price of any such support was the abandonment of radical land-reform plans. Conditions continued to worsen. The political turmoil mounted. Elections in January reduced the USPD to a rump. Rapidly, and predictably, the radicals had lost support above all in the Bavarian countryside – massively disaffected, but remaining at the same time innately and overwhelmingly conservative. The assassination of Eisner by a young, aristocratic former officer, currently a student at Munich University, Graf Anton von Arco-Valley, on 21 February 1919, provided then the signal for a deterioration into chaos and near anarchy.12

  With ‘Red Guards’ tramping the corridors and rooms of the Wittelsbach Palace ‘where once maids-in-waiting and powdered lackeys had fawned attendance on their royal masters’,13 a meeting in the one-time bedroom of the Queen of Bavaria, dominated by members of the USPD and anarchists, proclaimed a ‘Councils Republic’ in Bavaria. Majority Socialists and Communists – the latter dubbing it a ‘Pseudo-Councils Republic’ (Scbeinräterepublik) – refused to participate.14 An attempt to unseat it by using troops loyal to the elected government, now exiled in Bamberg, failed on 13 April. But the initial failure of the counter-revolution simply strengthened the resolve of the revolutionary hot-heads and ushered in the last phase of the Bavarian revolution: the full Communist takeover in the second, or ‘real’ Räterepublik – an attempt to introduce a Soviet-style system in Bavaria. ‘Today, Bavaria has finally erected the dictatorship of the proletariat’, ran the proclamation of the new Executive Council under the direction of the Communist Euge
n Leviné, a veteran of the 1905 Russian revolution.15 It lasted little more than a fortnight. But it ended in violence, bloodshed, and deep recrimination, imposing a baleful legacy on the political climate of Bavaria.

  In conditions of a proclaimed ten-day general strike, a ‘Red Army’ of around 20,000 workers and soldiers drawn mainly from Munich’s big factories and army garrison was gathered under the command of the twenty-three-year-old sailor and ‘veteran’ of the Kiel Mutiny, Rudolf Eglhofer. But it was without hope against the Prussian and Württemberg troops, combined with Bavarian Freikorps units, that now massed around Munich. The day after Eglhofer, on 29 April, had proclaimed the ‘dictatorship of the Red Army’, eight (including a woman) of the ‘Red Army’s’ prisoners, among them several from the völkisch Thule-Gesellschaft, held as hostages in the Luitpold-Gymnasium, together with two captured soldiers from the government troops, were badly maltreated then shot by their captors. The fateful order for the shooting had been given as retaliation for atrocities committed by the encroaching ‘White Guard’ on the outskirts of Munich. News of the shooting of the hostages spread like wildfire, horrified the city, and incited the counter-revolutionary army to speed up its assault on Munich, and to undertake drastic and savage reprisals. The street-fighting in the city centre of Munich and in some working-class districts was bloody. Flame-throwers, heavy artillery, armoured vehicles, even aircraft, were deployed in a short but merciless civil war. The victims of the ‘White Guard’ included fifty-three Russian prisoners-of-war who had had nothing whatsover to do with the Räterepublik but were driven into a quarry and summarily dispatched, a group of first-aiders mown down as supposed revolutionaries, twelve civilian SPD supporters in the working-class district of Perlach who had been denounced by political enemies, and twenty-one members of the Catholic St Joseph’s Association, mistaken for Spartacists. For several days, terror ruled Munich’s streets. All involved in the socialist experiment had to fear for their lives. When Munich was finally ‘liberated’ on 3 May, the death-toll numbered at least 606 persons, 335 of them civilians. Of the leaders of the Räterepublik, only the Russian-born Communist Max Levien escaped the clutches of the right-wing backlash. Eglhofer and the Jewish anarchist and writer Gustav Landauer were murdered by Freikorps troops; Leviné was executed for high treason (amid a storm of protest and a one-day general strike in Berlin); the anarchist Jewish writer Erich Mühsam was sentenced to fifteen years; Ernst Toller, another Jewish writer, to five years. In all, the draconian sentences meted out totalled some 6,000 years: sixty-five of those indicted were sentenced to hard labour, 1,737 to periods of imprisonment, and 407 to lighter internment.16

  It would be hard to exaggerate the impact on political consciousness in Bavaria of the events between November 1918 and May 1919, and quite especially of the Räterepublik. At its very mildest, it was experienced in Munich itself as a time of curtailed freedom, severe food shortages, press censorship, general strike, sequestration of foodstuffs, coal, and items of clothing, and general disorder and chaos.17 But, of more lasting significance, it went down in popular memory as a ‘rule of horror’ (Schreckensherrschaft) 18 imposed by foreign elements in the service of Soviet Communism. In reality, the revolutionaries had achieved nothing – beyond gaining some genuine .support from Munich’s soldiers and workers. Neither the threat to confiscate private property nor the creation of a new political and social order had any prospect of implementation. The shooting of the hostages in the Luitpold-Gymnasium was deplorable, and horrified the Munich bourgeoisie. But it paled alongside the atrocities perpetrated by the ‘liberating’ troops, which were regarded with relative equanimity as ‘restoring order’.

  However, as so often, images were more telling than reality. And the image, constructed and massively shored up by rightist propaganda throughout the Reich as well as in Bavaria itself, was that of alien – Bolshevik and Jewish – forces taking over the state, threatening institutions, traditions, order, and property, presiding over chaos and mayhem, perpetrating terrible acts of violence, and causing anarchy of advantage only to Germany’s enemies. Even more moderate press organs painted much the same picture. The mainstream newspaper of Munich’s middle class, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, spoke of the ‘aims and methods of Russian Bolshevism’, ‘Russian emissaries’, ‘Bolshevik agents’, the ‘practice of asiatic Bolshevism’, and ‘foreign agitators’. It placed the blame for the ‘criminal atrocities’ and the ‘bestial slaughter of innocent hostages’ squarely on the ‘communist leaders’. Any leniency shown towards such ‘criminals’ would be ‘a sin against the laws of humanity and justice’, it was stated. In contrast, the troops who had ‘liberated’ Munich from the ‘red terror’ had, it was claimed, ‘in strict discipline’ restored ‘the spirit of order’.19

  A mere eighteen months after the Russian Revolution and fuelled by reports of the terrible civil war taking place in Russia (in which the Bolsheviks eventually defeated their counter-revolutionary enemies, but only after immense mortalities and unspeakable savagery on both sides), it is not hard to recognize how penetrating and pervasive the neurotic fear of Bolshevism was in a rural province of deeply ingrained conservatism, and in politically polarized towns and cities. The real gainers from the disastrous weeks of the Räterepublik were the radical Right, which had been given the fuel to stoke the fear and hatred of Bolshevism among the Bavarian peasantry and middle classes.20 Not least, extreme counter-revolutionary violence had come to be accepted as a legitimate response to the perceived Bolshevik threat and now became a regular feature of the political scene.

  Its flirt with left-wing socialism over, Bavaria turned in the following years into a bastion of the conservative Right and a magnet for right-wing extremists throughout Germany. Though their political tendencies differed sharply, ‘white-blue’ Bavarian separatists, ‘black-white-red’ nationalists, and völkisch extremists found common cause in their hatred of the Bolshevik (and broader ‘Marxist’) Left.21 And the Bavarian Reichswehr became a stronghold of reactionary, anti-Republican, counter-revolutionary forces, which were strengthened still further after March 1920, when the leaders of the failed right-wing Kapp Putsch and their paramilitary organizations found a haven awaiting them in Bavaria. These were the conditions in which the ‘making of Adolf Hitler’ could take place.

  Not least, as already indicated, the history of the Bavarian revolution was almost tailor-made for Nazi propaganda. Not just the legend of the ‘stab-in-the-back’, but the notion of an international Jewish conspiracy could be made to sound plausible in the light of the Munich Räterepublik. Though right-wing extremism had no stronger traditions in Bavaria than elsewhere up to this point, the new climate provided it with unique opportunities and the favour of a sympathetic establishment. Many of Hitler’s early followers were deeply influenced by the experience of the turbulent months of post-revolutionary Bavaria. For Hitler himself, the significance of the period of revolution and Räterepublik in Munich can hardly be overrated. It has been said that Hitler did not decide to become a politician; rather, through the revolution and the rule of the Councils, politics came to him, into the barracks.22 It is time to explore the truth of that assertion.

  II

  On his return to Munich on 21 November 1918, Hitler had been assigned to the 7th Company of the 1st Reserve Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment, where, a few days later, he met up again with several wartime comrades. A fortnight later, he and one of these comrades, Ernst Schmidt, were among the fifteen men from his Company (and 140 men in all) assigned to guard duties at the Traunstein prisoner-of-war camp. Probably, as Schmidt later recounted, Hitler suggested they let their names go forward when volunteers were called for to make up the deputation.23 Hitler, remarked Schmidt, did not have much to say about the revolution, ‘but it was plain enough to see how bitter he felt’. Both, according to Schmidt, were repelled by the changed conditions in the Munich barracks, now in the hands of the Soldiers’ Councils, where old standards of authority, discipline, and mora
le had collapsed.24 If that was indeed the reason for volunteering, Hitler and Schmidt could have found no improvement on reaching Traunstein. The camp, meant to contain 1,000 prisoners but much overcrowded, was also run by the Soldiers’ Councils which Hitler allegedly so detested. Discipline was poor, and the guards, according to one source, included some of the worst elements among the troops who – like Hitler – saw the army ‘as a means of maintaining a carefree existence at the expense of the state’.25 Hitler and Schmidt had an easy time of things, mainly on gate-duty, at Traunstein. They were there in all for almost two months, during which time the prisoners-of-war, mainly Russians, were transported elsewhere. By the beginning of February the camp was completely cleared and disbanded. Probably in late January, as Schmidt hinted, Hitler returned to Munich.26 He certainly returned no later than mid-February (not March, as he himself stated), since, on 12 February, his own military record shows that he was assigned to the 2nd Demobilization Company to await discharge.27