by Ron Hansen
Wearing his new Norwegian ski cap and riding proudly in his uncle’s car as Hitler went from town to town in Bavaria, Leo heard his uncle speak at twelve huge public rallies on January 27th, offering Germany only two choices, that of the red star of Communism or the swastika of National Socialism. Leo later told his family of the fanatical excitement of the people for Uncle Adolf and of his own awe in watching six thousand storm troopers hold themselves in rigid attention as they listened to Hitler talk on the windy Marsfeld, withstanding the ferocious cold through sheer effort of will. Röhm saw to it that Leo was given a copy of his uncle’s speech, and in the flat in Wien afterward Leo would quote his uncle saying to the Sturmabteilung, “You who today fight on our side cannot win great laurels, far less can you win great material goods. Indeed, it is more likely that you will end up in jail. But sacrifice you must. He who today is your leader must be first of all an idealist, if only for the reason that he leads those whom the world is trying to destroy. But dream I will.” The crowd was ecstatic. Afterward, Leo said, Hitler had taken him to the fancy Carlton Tearoom on Briennerstrasse where he talked with his intimates on a host of subjects. Leo told Geli and Angela, “Everybody listens with reverence to anything he has to say. What an extraordinary person!”
Angela herself heard no more of her half-brother until November 1923, when she read the headlines of an Austrian newspaper saying that General Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler had attempted a putsch, or revolution, in Germany.
It seemed that on Thursday night, November 8th, cabinet ministers who were scheming to restore the Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria had been on stage at a mass meeting of three thousand people sitting at the timber tables of the Bürgerbräukeller—where a stein of beer cost one billion marks—as Commissar Gustav von Kahr had tendentiously condemned Communism, putting many in the audience to sleep. At precisely half past eight, Captain Hermann Göring had invaded the hall with twenty-five storm troopers carrying machine guns. Women screamed, tables were overturned, brass steins rang across the floor, and fleeing men were struck down. Wearing a black, long-tailed morning suit, as if it were a formal wedding, Hitler had strode toward the stage, gotten up on a chair, fired a Browning pistol into the ceiling, and shouted, “Quiet! The national revolution has broken out! The Reichswehr is with us, and the hall is surrounded!”
Hitler had then ordered into a side room Reichswehr Lieutenant General Otto von Lossow, the military commander of Bavaria who was, he thought, an ally, Colonel Hans von Seisser, head of the state police, and Gustav von Kahr, the head of government, and there he’d promised them all high-level appointments in a People’s National Government that would put the former quartermaster general Erich Ludendorff in charge of a great national army that would march on Berlin just as Benito Mussolini and his Blackshirts had successfully marched on Rome thirteen months earlier. All three were older aristocrats of high rank in the Reichswehr, and they had looked at the thirty-four-year-old former lance corporal with contempt. Hitler had held up his pistol and threatened, “There are still four rounds in this. Three for you, my collaborators, if you abandon me,” and he’d held it to his forehead, “and one for me if I fail.”
An angry, fifty-eight-year-old General Ludendorff had then arrived in full regimentals and with all his decorations. While he thought Hitler had gone too far in a unilateral way, he did think revolutionary change was necessary in Germany, and he’d sought a private conversation with the three politicians to work out concessions.
Hitler had hurried back to the stage and heard whistles, catcalls, and jeers, but he had first assured the crowd that the cabinet ministers were now fully behind him and then, with his wily instincts for mass psychology, had found all the right things to say to convert the various factions in the hall, hinting that he might restore the Wittelsbachs by praising “His Majesty Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria,” and haranguing about the Weimar Republic and the despised Prussians who ruled that sinful Tower of Babel in Berlin, where “we shall establish a new Reich, a Reich of power and glory, Amen!”
It had been an oratorical masterpiece. Within a few minutes, the crowd was completely his. A historian there said it was like “hocus-pocus, or magic,” it was as if he’d turned them inside out, “like a glove.” “Loud approval roared forth, no further opposition was to be heard.”
General Ludendorff had brought out the cabinet ministers, who’d formed a gentlemen’s agreement to join a coalition government, and the tearfully ecstatic crowd began singing “Deutschland über Alles” while a blissful Hitler went about the hall, shaking hands and accepting cheers. And to Gustav von Kahr, whom he’d just threatened to shoot, he had promised, “Excellency, I shall stand faithfully behind you like a hound!”
Hearing him, one skeptic had turned to a cowed policeman and said, “All that’s missing here is the psychiatrist.”
After midnight Captain Röhm and the SA had taken over General von Lossow’s headquarters on the Schönfeldstrasse, “enemies of the people”—mainly Jews—had been taken prisoner, and the police had been told to wait and do nothing as the six bridges of München were blockaded with machine guns, the infantry school of one thousand officer candidates affiliated themselves with the Nazis, and a few Brownshirts scoured the telephone directory for names that sounded Jewish, then went to their addresses and assaulted them.
Waiters had been cleaning a Bürgerbräukeller that still held a few hundred drunken storm troopers when Hitler, who’d made his headquarters there, found out that Ludendorff had permitted the cabinet ministers to go free, for they’d promised their cooperation, and “an officer,” Ludendorff had frostily told the corporal, “would never break an oath.”
Hitler had fallen heavily into a chair, flummoxed and disheartened, feeling his revolution was now doomed, and he’d heard further bad news from Berchtesgaden, where Crown Prince Rupprecht had coldly rejected Hitler’s messengered offer of the post of regent ad interim and instead had sent Commissar von Kahr the order to “Crush this movement at any cost. Use troops if necessary.” By three a.m. all of Germany’s wireless stations were sending out the message that von Kahr, von Seisser, and von Lossow had repudiated the Hitler putsch, and that their expressions of support, extracted at gunpoint, were invalid.
Word had gotten to the putsch headquarters in the Bürgerbräukeller at sunup that Röhm’s headquarters were under seige by Reichswehr and state police troops. Claiming “the heavens will fall before the Bavarian Reichswehr turns against me,” General Ludendorff had suggested a parade into the heart of the city to win the people to their side, and had then sipped red wine as preparations were made.
A band of musicians was supposed to form in the front and play marching songs, but they’d neither been paid nor been given breakfast, so they’d offered a raucous version of Hitler’s favorite march, the “Badenweiler,” and had then skulked off. Which left in front Ludendorff in his formal helmet and a brown overcoat, Hitler in his white trench coat and slouch hat, and beside him a confidant, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, followed by Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring, then the hundred men of the “Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler,” a bodyguard that was a forerunner of the SS and was outfitted with carbines, hand grenades, and steel helmets as large as kettles. Easing along behind them was an automobile with machine guns on its backseat, then there had been a full regiment of the hung-over SA, holding rifles from which the firing pins had been removed, and perhaps a thousand shopkeepers, workers, officer candidates, and university students, “all higgledy-piggledy” as one witness said.
Wet snowflakes had been falling on a cold, gray noon as the putschists walked through the Marienplatz, where the Nazi flag had been flying atop city hall, and toward the gray, high-arched, Italianate Feldherrnhalle, where a hundred green-uniformed state police were forming a blockade. Scheubner-Richter had shaken Alfred Rosenberg’s hand and said, “Things look ugly,” then had linked arms with Hitler and taken off his pince-nez, telling his friend, “This may be our last walk together.”
The parade had begun singing “O Deutschland hoch in Ehren”—“O Germany, High in Honor”—and those with carbines and bayonets had leveled them on the waiting police. Hitler had shouted, “Surrender! Surrender!” And then someone had fired a shot and a police sergeant was killed. The police had hesitated, and then, a fraction before the shouted order to do so, had fired a salvo on the parade. Scheubner-Richter had been killed with those first shots, and as he’d collapsed he’d pulled so heavily on Hitler’s arm that he’d dislocated Hitler’s left shoulder. Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s bodyguard, had flung himself in front of Hitler and been hit eleven times before falling, but had lived. Alfred Rosenberg had crawled to the rear. Old soldier Ludendorff had thrown himself flat to the street at the first sounds of gunfire, hiding behind Scheubner-Richter’s body until there was silence, and had then gotten up again and frowned as he’d marched forward, his hand in his left coat pocket, still confident that no one would shoot him. They had not.
Hermann Göring, who as a flying ace had won Germany’s highest medal for valor in the war, the Pour le Mérite, and wore it ostentatiously over his fine, black leather jacket, had been hit in the upper thigh and groin. On his hands and knees he’d gotten to a hiding place behind the lions in front of the Residenz Palace where a friend had found him and helped him to the house of the first doctor he saw, at Residenzstrasse 25. The friend had asked if the owner would help them. “Of course, I’ll give aid to any wounded man,” Dr. Robert Ballin had said. “But I call your attention to the fact that this is a house of Jews.” And still they’d gone inside.
Twenty men were killed, four of them police, and hundreds were injured in a skirmish that had lasted less than a minute. Of the sixteen Nazis whom Hitler would finally make heroes and martyrs, four were merchants, three were bank officials, three were engineers, and there had been a hat maker, a locksmith, a headwaiter, a butler, a retired cavalry captain, and a judicial official of the Bavarian Supreme Court whose bloodstained draft of a new Nazi constitution had been found folded in his pocket.
Quickly as that the putsch was over. A journalist would later call the day Kahrfreitag, Kahr Friday, a play on the German for Good Friday, Kar-freitag. A few revolutionaries had run off to a nearby girl’s academy and had scrambled under the beds to hide from the police; others had fled to a Konditorei and had concealed their weapons in pastry ovens and flour sacks; some had just returned to their jobs as if they’d only been onlookers.
With Dr. Walter Schultze helping him, Hitler hurried away in agony, his hair falling over his face, white with failure and shame, and got into a yellow Opel automobile that had a red cross painted on its side. An old friend, Emil Maurice, got behind the wheel and drove them south toward the Austrian border as fast as he could. “What a fiasco,” Hitler sighed, then said nothing more until Mur-nau, where he remembered that Ernst Hanfstaengl, the party’s foreign press secretary, owned a country home not far away, in Uffing, on the lake called Staffelsee.
They went there. The quiet was stunning. The fields and lawn were white with snow. A farmer was walking his brown milk cows along the five-foot-high granite wall that surrounded the house. Emil Maurice and Dr. Schultze hunkered low in the Opel as Hitler trudged up to the front door and was greeted by Egon, a three-year-old boy whom Hitler often played with, and who knew him as Onkel Dolf. Egon yelled upstairs for his mother and Frau Helene Hanfstaengl came down. She was a pregnant, serene, and glamorous American woman of German descent with whom Hitler thought himself in love. Without saying anything of the putsch, or why his left arm was in a sling, he kissed her hand and meekly asked if she would let him stay for the night, and she put him up in an attic room. And it was there, still threatening suicide, that he was arrested by the police on Sunday night and taken to Landsberg fortress.
Ernst Hanfstaengl himself had fled to Rosenheim, on the Austrian border, where a physician’s secretary helped him find his way across the frontier illegally. And he was surprised to later learn that the führer had selected Uffing rather than Austria for his hideaway. In fact, Hitler’s odd reluctance to go back into his homeland again only became a greater mystery for Hanfstaengl when, in 1938, at the time of Germany’s Anschluss with Austria, he heard that the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, took it as one of their first obligations to haul off from police headquarters in Wien a box of dossiers having to do with Adolf Hitler in his twenties. And those who knew what was in them were soon found dead.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MERRY WIDOW, 1923
Urged by Lorenz Roder, Hitler’s lawyer, to stay away from Germany for a few more months, Herr Ernst Hanfstaengl hid in the house of a National Socialist in Salzburg until the ennui was so great that he journeyed east to look up his leader’s family just out of curiosity.
The Raubals owned no telephone, so they weren’t listed in the Wien directory, but through a few inquiries Hanfstaengl found out that Frau Angela Raubal worked full-time in the kitchen of a Jewish girls’ hostel in the Zimmermannsdamm area. Angela was highly thought of there, he was told. She’d once quelled an anti-Semitic rally in front of the hostel simply by the challenging force of her presence, and she prepared meals that were so perfectly kosher that an Orthodox rabbi brought Jewish housewives to the hostel kitchen to have her show them how it was done. A girl at the hostel thought the Raubal family was renting a flat on the fourth floor of a five-story building on Blumengasse, near the Westbahnhof.
Imagining Angela a formidable lady, the female version of the tyrant Adolf could be, Ernst Hanfstaengl took along as gifts of homage a box of Empress chocolates and a book of art reproductions that his family’s firm published, Old Masters in the Pinakothek, and visited the Raubals’ flat on a Wednesday afternoon in December. Children already old with misery forlornly watched him as he went up scuffed wooden stairs as cupped as spoons with wear, watched him, too, as he waited in a filthy hallway for one of the Raubals to answer his knock. And then he heard, “Who is it?”
“Herr Hanfstaengl, my lady. A family friend.”
Paula Hitler hardly opened the front door five inches as she warily peered up at him. “Which side?”
“Adolf’s.”
She slammed the door and called, “Angela!”
Hanfstaengl heard Angela hurrying down the hallway, and then she opened the flat’s door wide. She was far less like Hitler than he had expected, just a handsome, solid, ill-used Hausfrau of forty, the kind of charwoman his wife would hire on streetcorners whenever their city house wanted cleaning. “Ernst Hanfstaengl,” he said. “I’m the party’s foreign press secretary.”
She disliked Hitler’s politics, he could tell, but she tried to hide it by considering her chafed and reddened hands. “We heard about the riot. And the arrest. How is Adolf?”
“We lost some dear comrades in the fighting, so he’s sick at heart, but otherwise well. You know how he thrives on adversity.”
She didn’t. A flicker of unease seemed to cross her face, as if she were unused to the size and heartiness of men. “Won’t you come in?” she asked, but then flushed and withdrew farther from him as he filled the foyer.
“Oh, I forgot,” he said, and handed her his gifts.
“Chocolates! And a book!” Angela cried, as if she’d just noticed them. “You are too kind.”
“You’re tall, aren’t you,” Paula called. She was a stout woman of almost twenty-eight. She was hiding behind the icebox in the kitchen so that only her tilted head showed. She was just a little fuller in the face than Adolf; otherwise the resemblance was obvious.
Hanfstaengl doffed his hat and smiled. “You must be Fräulein Hitler!”
“Oh, yes; must be, forced to be, had no choice.” She fell back from view and called, “We don’t have any money! You go away now!”
“Quiet, Paula!” Angela shouted. She turned back to Hanfstaengl and with chagrin confided, “She’s strange, you know.” His frown told her he didn’t know; Hitler had hidden that. She realized it was the hour for Kaffee und Kuchen.
“Shall I take your coat?” Angela asked. “We still have some coffee, I think.”
But Hanfstaengl was focused on the squalor of the flat, seeing Leo’s foul straw mattress in the hallway, the old three-legged green sofa that was Geli’s bed, and the few frail pieces of other furniture that hadn’t yet been sold. “I hope you will pardon the observation, Frau Raubal, but it looks like you have had a difficult life here lately, just as we have had in Germany.”
She told him, “We all get to eat at the hostel, so we have it better than most.”
“We have lost a war,” he somberly said, “and the world won’t let us forget it.” Then his gaze shifted farther down the hallway, and Angela saw that he was smiling at Geli.
She’d been studying geometry on the floor of the bedroom that Angela shared with Paula, but she’d been so intrigued by the American accent she’d heard that she’d hastily fussed with her hair and changed into her finest gray wool skirt and the pink angora sweater that Angela thought was too formfitting for a girl of fifteen. And then she’d sashayed out to find in the foyer a homely but jolly man with a jutting jaw and underbite, fully six feet four in height, in a chalk-gray English suit and black cashmere topcoat, a gray fedora in one huge hand, his brown hair oiled slick and middle-parted and still grooved by his hat.