Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

  Hitler returned to the hall after about ten minutes amid renewed tumult. He repeated Göring’s assurances that the action was not directed at the police and Reichswehr, but ‘solely at the Berlin Jew government and the November criminals of 1918’. He put forward his proposals for the new governments in Berlin and Munich, now mentioning Ludendorff as ‘leader, and chief with dictatorial power, of the German national army’.246 He told the crowded hall that matters were taking longer than he had earlier predicted. ‘Outside are Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer,’ he declared. ‘They are struggling hard to reach a decision. May I say to them that you will stand behind them?’ As the crowd bellowed back its approval, Hitler, with his pronounced sense of the theatrical, announced in emotional terms: ‘I can say this to you: Either the German revolution begins tonight or we will all be dead by dawn!’247 By the time he had finished his short address – a ‘rhetorical masterpiece’ in the opinion of Karl Alexander von Müller, an eye-witness – the mood in the hall had swung completely in his favour.248

  About an hour had passed since Hitler’s initial entry into the hall before he and Ludendorff (who had meanwhile arrived, dressed in full uniform of the Imperial Army), together with the Bavarian ruling triumvirate, returned to the podium. Kahr, calm, face like a mask, spoke first, announcing to tumultuous applause that he had agreed to serve Bavaria as regent for the monarchy.249 Hitler, with a euphoric expression resembling childlike delight, declared that he would direct the policy of the new Reich government, and warmly clasped Kahr’s hand. Ludendorff, deadly earnest, spoke next, mentioning his surprise at the whole business. Lossow, wearing a somewhat impenetrable expression, and Seißer, the most agitated of the group, were pressed by Hitler into speaking. Pöhner finally promised cooperation with Kahr. Hitler shook hands once more with the whole ensemble.250 He was the undoubted star of the show. It appeared to be his night.

  From this point, however, things went badly wrong. The hurried improvisation of the planning, the hectic rush to prepare at only a day’s notice, that had followed Hitler’s impatient insistence that the putsch should be advanced to the evening of the Bürgerbräukeller meeting, now took its toll, determining the shambolic course of the night’s events. Before the hall was cleared, those members of the government present in the Bürgerbräukeller tamely surrendered to arrest when Heß read out a list of names given to him by Hitler. News of a successful coup was relayed to the meeting at the Löwenbräukeller on the other side of the city centre, where Kampfbund troops were being addressed by Esser and Röhm. There was delirium in the hall. But outside, things were running less smoothly. Röhm did manage to take over the Reichswehr headquarters, though amazingly failed to take over the telephone switchboard, allowing Lossow to order the transport to Munich of loyalist troops in nearby towns and cities. Frick and Pöhner were also initially successful in taking control at police headquarters. Elsewhere, the situation was deteriorating rapidly. In a night of chaos, the putschists failed dismally, largely owing to their own disorganization, to take control of barracks and government buildings.251 The early and partial successes were for the most part rapidly overturned. Neither the army nor the state police joined forces with the putschists.

  Back at the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler, too, was making his first mistake of the evening. Hearing reports of difficulties the putschists were encountering at the Engineers’ Barracks, he decided to go there himself in what proved a vain attempt to intervene. Ludendorff was left in charge at the Bürgerbräukeller and, believing the word of officers and gentlemen, promptly let Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer depart. They were then free to renege on the promises extracted from them under duress by Hitler.252

  A visitor to Munich staying in a city centre hotel that night recalled disturbances into the small hours as bands of young men in high spirits marched through the streets, convinced that the Bavarian revolution had been successful.253 Placards were put up proclaiming Hitler as Reich Chancellor – the first time this designation had been attached to him.254 Surprisingly, and a reflection of the haphazard and chaotic organization of the putsch, Hitler delayed putting out this proclamation of the ‘national dictatorship’ until 9 November.255 Some time before midnight, he placed Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiting head of the NSDAP in Franconia, in charge of the party’s organization and propaganda – presumably because he was expecting his hands to be more than full if developments went according to plan.256 The reality was that by midnight, even if the putschist leaders had not by then fully realized it themselves, the ill-fated attempt to take control of the state had failed.

  By late evening, Kahr, Lossow and Seißer were in positions to ensure the state authorities that they repudiated the putsch. All German radio stations were informed of this by Lossow at 2.55a.m.257 By the early hours, it was becoming clear to the putschists themselves that the triumvirate and – far more importantly – the Reichswehr and state police opposed the coup.258 At 5a.m. Hitler was still giving assurances that he was determined to fight and die for the cause – a sign that by this time at the latest he, too, had lost confidence in the success of the putsch.259 Shortly before, on the way back to the Bürgerbräukeller from the Wehrkreiskommando, he had in fact already told Ulrich Graf that ‘it’s looking very serious for us’.260 From what he later said, it was on returning to find that Ludendorff had let Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer go that he had immediately had the feeling that the cause was lost.261 The mood in the beerhall itself was dispirited. The pall of stale tobacco smoke hung over the hundreds who listlessly lounged around the tables or stretched out wearily on chairs they had dragged together.262 The mountains of bread rolls and gallons of beer which contributed in good measure to the bill of 11,347,000 Marks eventually sent to the Nazi Party for the evening’s entertainment had by now largely been consumed.263 And still there were no orders. No one knew what was happening.

  The putschist leaders were themselves by this time unclear what to do next. They sat around arguing, while the government forces regrouped. There was no fall-back position. Hitler was as clueless as the others. He was far from in control of the situation. Clutching wildly at straws, he even contemplated driving to Berchtesgaden to win over Prinz Rupprecht, known to be hostile to the putschists.264 Kriebel argued for armed resistance, organized from Rosenheim. Ludendorff said he was not prepared to see the affair end in the slush of a country road. Hitler, too, favoured armed resistance, but had few practical suggestions to offer, and was cut short in mid-peroration by Ludendorff. For hours, the putschist troops in the city received no orders from their leaders.265 As the bitterly cold morning dawned, depressed troops began to drift off from the Bürgerbräukeller.266 Around 8a.m. Hitler sent some of his SA men to seize bundles of 50-billion Mark notes direct from the printing press to keep his troops paid.267 It was more or less the only practical action taken as the putsch started rapidly to crumble.

  Only during the course of the morning did Hitler and Ludendorff come up with the idea of a demonstration march through the city. Ludendorff appararently made the initial suggestion.268 The aim was predictably confused and unclear. ‘In Munich, Nuremberg, Bayreuth, an immeasurable jubilation, an enormous enthusiasm would have broken out in the German Reich,’ Hitler later remarked. ‘And when the first division of the German national army had left the last square metre of Bavarian soil and stepped for the first time on to Thuringian land, we would have experienced the jubilation of the people there. People would have had to recognize that the German misery has an end, that redemption could only come about through a rising.’269 It amounted to a vague hope that the march would stir popular enthusiasm for the putsch, and that the army, faced with the fervour of the mobilized masses and the prospect of firing on the war-hero Ludendorff, would change its mind.270 The gathering acclaim of the masses and the support of the army would then pave the way for a triumphant march on Berlin.271 Such was the wild illusion – gesture politics born out of pessimism, depression, and despair. Reality did not take long to assert itself.

  Aroun
d noon, the column of around 2,000 men – many of them, including Hitler, armed – set out from the Bürgerbräukeller. Pistols at the ready, they confronted a small police cordon on the Ludwigsbrücke and under threat swept it aside, headed through Isartor and up the Tal to Marienplatz, in the centre of the city, and decided then to march to the War Ministry. They gained encouragement from throngs of shouting and waving supporters on the pavements. Some thought they were witnessing the arrival of the new government.272 The putschists could not help but note, however, that many of the posters proclaiming the national revolution had already been ripped down or papered over with new directions from the ruling triumvirate. Earlier in the morning some bystanders had already started to make fun of the putsch. ‘Has your mummy given you permission to play with such dangerous things here on the street?’ one worker had asked, as Hans Frank’s unit had taken up position with machine-guns not far from the Bürgerbräukeller.273 The participants on the march knew the cause was lost. One of them remarked that it was like a funeral procession.274

  At the top of the Residenzstraße, as it approaches Odeonsplatz, the marchers, accompanied by the occasional ‘Heil’ from the crowd and trying to keep up their spirits by singing the ‘Sturm-Lied’ (Storming Song) composed by Dietrich Eckart, encountered the second, and larger, police cordon. ‘Here they come. Heil Hitler!’ a bystander cried out.275 Then shots rang out. Who fired the first shot was never fully clarified, but the evidence points to it being one of the putschists.276 A furious gun-battle lasting almost half a minute followed. When the firing ceased, fourteen putschists and four policemen lay dead.277

  The dead included one of the putsch architects, Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had been in the front line of the putsch leaders, linking arms with Hitler, just behind the standard-bearers. Had the bullet which killed Scheubner-Richter been a foot to the right, history would have taken a different course. As it was, Hitler either took instant evasive action, or was wrenched to the ground by Scheubner-Richter.278 In any event, he dislocated his left shoulder.279 Göring was among those injured, shot in the leg. He and a number of other leading putschists were able to escape over the Austrian border.280 Some, including Streicher, Frick, Pöhner, Amann and Röhm, were immediately arrested. Ludendorff, who had emerged from the shoot-out totally unscathed, gave himself up and was released on his officer’s word.281

  Hitler himself was attended to by Dr Walter Schultze, chief of the Munich SA medical corps, pushed into his car, stationed nearby, and driven at speed from the scene of the action. He ended up at Hanfstaengl’s home in Uffing, near the Staffelsee, south of Munich, where the police, on the evening of 11 November, found and arrested him.282 While at Hanfstaengl’s – Putzi himself had taken flight to Austria – he composed the first of his ‘political testaments’, placing the party chairmanship in Rosenberg’s hands, with Amann as his deputy.283 Hitler, according to Hanfstaengl’s later account, based on his wife’s testimony, was desolate on arrival in Uffing.284 But later stories that he had to be restrained from suicide have no firm backing.285 He was depressed but calm, dressed in a white nightgown, his injured left arm in a sling, when the police arrived to escort him to prison in the old fortress at Landsberg am Lech, a picturesque little town some forty miles west of Munich. Thirty-nine guards were on hand to greet him in his new place of residence. Graf Arco, the killer of Kurt Eisner, the Bavarian premier murdered in February 1919, was evicted from his spacious Cell no.7 to make room for the new, high-ranking prisoner.286

  In Munich and other parts of Bavaria, the putsch fizzled out as rapidly as it had started. With the sympathies of a good part of the population in Munich behind the putschists, there were initial demonstrations there and elsewhere against the ‘treachery’ of Kahr.287 But the adventure was over. Hitler was finished. At least, he should have been. The American consular representative in Munich, Robert Murphy, presumed Hitler would serve his sentence then be deported from Germany.288 The author Stefan Zweig later remarked: ‘In this year 1923, the swastikas and stormtroops disappeared, and the name of Adolf Hitler fell back almost into oblivion. Nobody thought of him any longer as a possible in terms of power.’289

  VII

  Like the high-point of a dangerous fever, the crisis had passed, then rapidly subsided. The following months brought currency stabilization with the introduction of the Rentenmark, regulation of the reparations issue through the Dawes Plan (named after the American banker Charles G. Dawes, head of the committee which established in 1924 a provisional framework for the phased repayment of reparations, commencing at a low level and linked to foreign loans for Germany), and the beginning of the political stabilization that marked the end of the post-war turbulence and was to last until the new economic shock-waves of the late 1920s. With Hitler in jail, the NSDAP banned, and the völkisch movement split into its component factions, the threat from the extreme Right lost its immediate potency.

  Sympathies with the radical Right by no means disappeared. With 33 per cent of the votes in Munich, the Völkischer Block (the largest grouping in the now fractured völkisch movement) was the strongest party in the city at the Landtag elections on 6 April 1924, gaining more votes than both the Socialists and Communists put together.290 At the Reichstag election on 4 May, the result was little different. The Völkischer Block won 28.5 per cent of the vote in Munich, 17 per cent overall in the electoral region of Upper Bavaria and Swabia, and 20.8 per cent in Franconia.291 But the bubble had burst. As Germany recovered and the Right remained in disarray, voters deserted the völkisch movement. By the second Reichstag elections of 1924, a fortnight before Hitler’s release from Landsberg, the vote for the Völkischer Block had dwindled to residual limits of 7.5 per cent in Franconia, 4.8 per cent in Upper Bavaria/Swabia, and 3.0 per cent in Lower Bavaria (compared with 10.2 per cent there seven months earlier).292

  Bavaria, for all its continuing ingrained oddities, was no longer the boiling cauldron of radical Right insurgency it had been between 1920 and 1923. The paramilitary organizations had had their teeth drawn in the confrontation with the legal forces of the state. Without the support of the army, they were shown to be little more than a paper tiger. In the aftermath of the putsch, the Kampfbund organizations were dissolved, and the ‘patriotic associations’ in general had their weaponry confiscated, a ban imposed on their military exercises, and their activities greatly curtailed.293 The triumvirate installed by the Bavarian government as a force on the Right to contain the wilder and even more extreme nationalist paramilitaries lost power and credibility through the putsch. Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer were all ousted by early 1924.294 With the General State Commissariat terminated, conventional cabinet government under a new Minister President, Dr Heinrich Held – the leading figure in the Catholic establishment party in Bavaria, the ΒVP – and with it a degree of calm, returned to Bavarian politics.

  Even now, however, the forces which had given Hitler his entrée into politics and enabled him to develop into a key factor on the Bavarian Right contrived to save him when his ‘career’ ought to have been over. The ‘Hitler-Putsch’ was, as we have seen, by no means merely Hitler’s putsch. Hitler had provided the frenetic pressure for action without delay – a reflection of his ‘all-or-nothing’ temperament, but also of the need to prevent the dynamism of his movement ebbing away. The half-baked planning, dilettante improvisation, lack of care for detail all bore the imprint of Hitler’s characteristic impulse to act without clear thought for the consequences, and without a fall-back position. But Hitler’s influence on the undertaking of the putsch would not have been possible had the idea of a strike against Berlin not been kept alive within the Bavarian government and army leadership as well as among the different and competing factions of the paramilitary formations for months before the actual events of November 1923. Without the dogmatic anti-Berlin stance of the ruling groups in Bavaria, where shrill anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and anti-Prussian feeling combined to bracket together otherwise antagonistic forces to the general ai
m of counterrevolution, Hitler’s all-or-nothing gamble in the Bürgerbräukeller could never have occurred. The Bavarian Reichswehr had colluded massively in the training and preparation of the forces which had tried to take over the state. And important personages had been implicated in the putsch attempt. Whatever their subsequent defence of their actions, the hands of Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer were dirty, while the war-hero General Ludendorff had been the spiritual figurehead of the entire enterprise. There was every reason, therefore, in the trial of the putsch leaders held in Munich between 26 February and 27 March 1924 – the sentences were read out four days later, on 1 April – to let the spotlight fall completely on Hitler.295 He was only too glad to play the role assigned to him.

  Hitler’s first reaction to his indictment had been very different to his later triumphalist performance in the Munich court. He had initially refused to say anything, and announced that he was going on hunger-strike. At this time, he plainly saw everything as lost. According to the prison psychologist – though speaking many years after the event – Hitler stated: ‘I’ve had enough. I’m finished. If I had a revolver, I would take it.’296 Drexler later claimed that he himself had dissuaded Hitler from his intention to commit suicide.297

  By the time the trial opened, Hitler’s stance had changed diametrically. He was allowed to turn the court-room into a stage for his own propaganda, accepting full responsibility for what had happened, not merely justifying but glorifying his role in attempting to overthrow the Weimar state. This was in no small measure owing to his threats to expose the complicity in treasonable activity of Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer – and in particular the role of the Bavarian Reichswehr.

  The way Hitler would exploit his trial could scarcely have come as a surprise to the Bavarian authorities. It was signalled as early as two days after his arrest, during his interrogation by Hans Ehard, a brilliant state attorney who, after 1945, became Minister President of Bavaria. At first, Hitler had refused all comment on the putsch attempt. Ehard had said that his silence might prolong his internment and that of his fellow-prisoners. Hitler had replied that there was more at stake for him than for the others. ‘It was a matter for him of justifying before history his action and his mission (sein Tun und seine Sendung); what the court’s position would be was a matter of indifference to him. He denied the court any right to pass judgement on him.’ He then issued a veiled threat. He would save his best trump cards to play in the court-room. And he would call numerous witnesses, summoning them only during the trial to prevent prior notification.