by Thomas Weber
Contrary to the claim by Nazi propaganda that Hitler’s task was to police the comings and goings at the gate to the camp, meant to support the story of him as an upright, counterrevolutionary future Nazi who had escaped the madness of Munich to uphold order, he seems to have worked in the clothing distribution center of the camp, carrying out tasks similar to those assigned to him in Munich. In other words, Hitler served the revolutionary regime in Traunstein in a position at the very bottom of the camp’s pecking order.33
On his arrival in Traunstein, the camp was well below full capacity. Only sixty-five French POWs and approximately six hundred Russian POWs were left. This was almost certainly the first time in his life that Hitler encountered a large number of Russians at close quarters. He also was exposed to a group of Jews who were housed together as belonging to one ethnicity, as camp authorities expected that Russian POWs would be repatriated by ethnicity due to the breakup of the tsarist empire.34
Frustratingly, it remains unclear what the impact was of Hitler’s encounter with the captives from the country that ultimately would become so central to his ideology as well as with the religious community with which he soon would become so obsessed. He arrived in the camp at a time of few remaining tensions between the Russian POWs and their captors. The minimally supervised prisoners felt politically close to Bavaria’s leader Kurt Eisner. Besides, Germany and Russia had been at peace with each other since early 1918.35 Hitler’s day-to-day encounters with Russians at Traunstein are therefore unlikely to have had an immediate negative impact on him. It was only later, well after becoming a right-wing radical, that he would turn into a Russophobe.
When Hitler was off duty and walked up the rocks to the center of Traunstein, he encountered a town that did not feel bitter or full of revenge, for the simple reason that the realization of Germany’s defeat had not yet sunk in. This became evident in a parade that the town put on in early January 1919 to honor its local veterans returning from the war.
On the appointed, sunny winter day, veterans and members of local clubs and associations marched through a town in which private houses flew the Bavarian flag and Traunstein’s local flag. Only public buildings had put up the imperial German flag. All the while, church bells were ringing, marching music was played, cannons were fired, and people were cheering. In his official speech, Georg Vonficht, the mayor of Traunstein, celebrated the returnees from the war as “victors.”36
Undoubtedly, locals were aware that the French and British clearly saw themselves as the war’s victors and had demanded peace terms reflecting that reality. Yet Hitler and other newspaper readers in Traunstein in all likelihood believed that the British and French were unlikely to get their way and that the war had ended in a tie. People’s comprehension of the reality of Germany’s defeat, which would be so important for Hitler’s genesis as a National Socialist, still lay in the future.
In December 1918, Traunstein’s local newspapers reported repeatedly that the US president, Woodrow Wilson, was still committed to his Fourteen Points, his blueprint for a new world order and postwar peace settlement that would forgo punitive measures. Hitler could read in Traunstein’s local newspapers that Wilson did not believe in annexations and thought that German land had to remain German. Further, the press reported that the American officials who had recently arrived in Paris in preparation for peace talks supported German membership in a soon-to-be-founded League of Nations and believed that German interests should be accommodated in any peace settlement. This international news coverage in local newspapers explains why it still looked to the residents in Traunstein as if their veterans had returned home as “victors,” or at the very least not as losers.37
At the end of the speech by the mayor of Traunstein, everyone present sang the “Deutschlandlied” (Song of Germany) with its famous phrase “Deutschland über alles” (Germany above all), which was supposed to complete the proceedings of the day. But then something happened that must have reminded Hitler that Traunstein was unlikely ever to feel like home for him.
Without so much as having been invited to do so, Lieutenant Josef Schlager—a twenty-six-year-old local and veteran of the U-boat campaign—went up on the platform and started railing against three groups of people in their midst: shirkers, “women and girls with no honor” (i.e., those who had supposedly slept with POWs), and “the oppressors of the prisoners [of war]!” The mentioning of the last group was a clear reference to the officers and guards of Hitler’s camp and to the belief that internees had been maltreated there. Schlager’s intervention against Hitler and his peers was not the opinion of a lone voice. It was followed by sudden applause from the crowd.38 This is not to say at all that Hitler personally maltreated POWs, particularly since he had only arrived in Traunstein after the end of the war. But irrespective of how he personally treated captives, the wartime behavior of the camp guards affected how the locals treated the new guards, thus ensuring that Hitler and Schmidt would not have felt particularly welcome in Traunstein.
While in Traunstein, Hitler had to rely on newspapers and word of mouth to follow how the new political order continued to unfold in the city to which he would soon return. News from Munich suggested that even though the revolution in Bavaria had been of a more radical kind than was occurring in much of the rest of Germany, the future still looked hopeful. Particularly on New Year’s Eve, many people in Munich wanted to enjoy life after years of war. As Melanie Lehmann, the wife of nationalist publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann, noted disapprovingly in her diary on January 6: “Munich started into the New Year with a great deal of noise in the streets, lots of shooting, much high-spirited dancing. Our people still seems not to have given itself to any earnest reflection. After 4 years of deprivations the soldiers now want to enjoy themselves, and so does the urban youth.”39
In the winter of 1918/1919, uncertainty, rather than despair, was the order of the day in Munich. Sometimes, people were hopeful and guardedly optimistic about the future; at other times, they were apprehensive, worried, and full of doubts. The world in which they had grown up was no more, and many people were still figuring out for themselves what kind of future world they wanted to live in. Seemingly all the time, they met up with friends and acquaintances to try to make sense of the events that had been and were still unfolding around them and to talk about their expectations and hopes for the future.40
While the old order had disintegrated into “a chaotic medley of anonymous fragments,” as poet, novelist, and Munich resident Rainer Maria Rilke put it, it was still uncertain how these fragments would be reassembled to form something new. Nevertheless, on December 15, 1918, Rilke thought that the upcoming Christmas would be much happier than the previous one had been. As he wrote to his mother, he thought that things were not so bad in comparison, not with a picture-perfect world, but with the past: “When we compare, dear Mama, this Christmas with the four last ones, then this one appears to me immeasurably more hopeful. However much opinions and endeavors may diverge—now they are free.”41
Even politically, things still looked hopeful, despite the fact that, due to Eisner’s coup and American policies, Bavaria had already lost out on its best chance at successful democratization—a chance that would have built on the region’s tradition of gradualism and reform, one similar to British constitutional traditions rather than to the revolutionary spirit of 1776 and 1789. As Josef Hofmiller had written in his diary on November 13: “I believe that the general feeling is that having a revolution is no bad thing, but that the people of Munich would want a revolution led by Herr von Dandl [the prerevolutionary Bavarian minister president] [… ] and maybe by King Ludwig or, better still, by the dear old regent.” He had concluded, “There is a lot of servility at play here, but also a natural instinct that the monarchy has its practical points, even from a Social Democrat point of view.”42
When push came to shove, Crown Prince Rupprecht gave a clear endorsement of a continued democratization of Bavaria. On December 15, Rupprecht
sent a telegram to the cabinet, requesting the establishment of a “constitutional national assembly.” Even though there had been growing resentment toward his father during the war, as in the eyes of many Bavarians, Ludwig III had become the poodle of the Prussians, and more often than not it had not translated into a questioning of the monarchy as an institution, or even of the House of Wittelsbach that had ruled Bavaria for seven hundred years. Indeed, many Bavarians saw in Crown Prince Rupprecht an anti-Ludwig. Many had celebrated how he had stood tall against the Prussians, as his enmity toward Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, the de facto military supreme commanders late in the war, was well known. It even had been widely rumored in Bavaria that toward the end of the war Rupprecht had refused to continue sacrificing his troops to a conflict that was already lost, and so had shot Hindenburg dead in a duel.43
In November 1918, the triumph of the republican revolutionary spirit of 1776 and 1789 over the homegrown spirit of gradual reform—akin to British traditions of reform—had inadvertently removed a moderate and moderating force at the center of politics. The risk that ultimately extremist groups of the left or the right might derail Bavaria’s democratization increased manifold as a result.
Of course, the revolution in Bavaria did not occur in isolation. It took place not only within the context of fundamental upheavals all over Germany, but also within a great global phase of upheaval, unrest, and transition extending from the time of the regicides and anarchist terror attacks of the 1880s and after, through the revolutions of the prewar decade, to the mid-1920s.44 Yet the point here is precisely that many of the polities that made their way best through this period of global upheaval—in that they were not brought down by internal discontent—stuck to a path of gradual reform and constitutional monarchy. Britain and its dominions, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Belgium spring to mind. And although the polities mentioned here had either been on the winning side of the war or had stayed out of the war, monarchies in territories on the losing side of the war had not been unsustainable. After all, the Bulgarian monarchy survived defeat in the war.
In Germany, the monarchy might well have survived in a constitutional form had Wilhelm II and his sons listened to Wilhelm’s brother-in-law and many others and abdicated. The reformers’ wartime belief that political change would be most successful if it came in the form of a constitutional monarchy had not been confined to reformist Social Democrats, Liberals, and reform-minded Conservatives in Germany. Finland, for instance, saw an attempt at the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1918, which, however, the victor powers of the war killed off. Similarly, during the war, Tomáš Masaryk, the leader of the Czech national movement who was to become Czechoslovakia’s first president, had tried to persuade the British that a new postwar independent state “could only be a kingdom, not a republic.” Masaryk’s contention was that only a monarch—and only one who was not a member of one of the ethnic groups in Czech and Slovak lands—could prevent ethnic tension and thereby keep the country together.45
If its own political traditions and institutions had pointed to a moderate future, why did Bavaria lose out on its best shot at democratization, which ultimately gave Hitler a stage?
The conditions that made possible the sudden collapse of the German monarchies resulted from a feeling of collective exhaustion and a desire for peace almost at any price. By and large, the revolution had not been of a social nature. Rather, it had been a rebellion against the war. As Melanie Lehmann had noted in her diary four days after the outbreak of the Bavarian revolution: “The vast majority of the army as well as the people only want peace, and so we must accept a shameful peace: not because we have been defeated by our enemies (we have not), but only because we gave up on ourselves and lacked the strength to endure.” Furthermore, people believed that the precondition for securing acceptable peace terms—based on President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and subsequent American statements—was an abolition of the monarchy. The combination of these sentiments weakened Bavaria’s immune system and made it almost defenseless to fatal blows. Whether Wilson really had intended for the abolition of the monarchy or merely that of autocracy, he was understood by most Germans to mean the former.46
Thus, the behavior of the victor powers was more important in ending monarchy in many territories in Europe east of the Rhine than was those regions’ loss of the war. In Bavaria, it facilitated the leftist putsch and determined to a large degree how people responded to the coup. The actions of the war’s victors removed from power an institution that in the past had often been both moderate and moderating. In the territories ruled by the House of Wittelsbach, a sense of collective exhaustion had lowered defenses and arguably been the most important reason for the acceptance by most people of both the collapse of the old order and Eisner’s coup. A longing for peace at almost any price was heard loud and clear at meetings and assemblies taking place in Munich in the weeks and days leading to the revolution.47
Although Bavaria’s best chance of successful democratization based on traditions of Bavarian gradualism and reform was killed by Eisner’s revolution and the demands of the war’s victors, a transitioning toward a more democratic future was far from stillborn. As Hitler’s own political transformation was—as would become clear over time—dependent on the political conditions around him, Hitler’s future was also still undetermined.
One of the reasons that democratization à la bavaroise was not doomed from the outset lay in the willingness of the moderate Social Democrats to form a government with Eisner’s radicals. While Bavarian SPD leaders would have preferred to carry out a different kind of revolution, they were willing to go along with Eisner’s government, in this manner taming the radicals on the left. For a while this strategy on the part of the SPD worked surprisingly well, aided by Eisner’s own conciliatory and high-minded idealistic approach to politics, and his ability, at least initially, to know where to stop, not to push things too far. Even though he headed the USPD, he did not share the goals of the extreme revolutionary left in Munich. Eisner considered himself a moderate Socialist in the tradition of the great philosopher of the Enlightenment Immanuel Kant, rather than in those that had produced the Bolsheviks who carried the revolution in Russia.48
Another, equally important reason that Bavarian-style democratization still had a chance lay in the pragmatic willingness of many members of the old elite and regime loyalists to cooperate with the new government, even if often their preference clearly would have been for a very different political order. It was due to the behavior of loyalists of the previous regime that the revolution had gone so smoothly in the first place. When they awoke to the republic on November 8, they just went along with the new realities, rather than put up a fight.
Of course, it goes without saying that many regime loyalists would have preferred to reform rather than abolish the old order. Yet they accepted the new one. Even Otto Ritter von Dandl, the king’s last minister president, urged Ludwig to resign, adding that he, too, had lost his job. Similarly, Franz Xaver Schweyer, a high-ranking official under the king and a staunch royalist, would nevertheless loyally serve the republic first as an official in Berlin and then as Bavarian minister of the interior. Max von Speidel, one of Hitler’s former wartime commanders and a staunch monarchist, also aided the new regime. Three days after Eisner seized power, he went to see Ludwig to persuade him to release Bavarian officers from their oath of allegiance to the monarch. As Ludwig was nowhere to be found, Speidel decided to issue a decree himself that urged the soldiers and officers to cooperate with the new regime. Even Michael von Faulhaber, Munich’s archbishop, who believed that the revolution had not brought “an end to misery” but “misery without end,” told the priests of his diocese to help uphold public order. He also instructed them to replace the traditional prayer for the king in church services “as inconspicuously as possible” with a different one, and to maintain “official relations with the government.”49
Th
e most important reasons why Bavaria’s future looked promising were the results of two elections that took place on January 12. They revealed that Eisner and his fellow Independent Social Democrats, who had spearheaded the Bavarian revolution through their coup, had next to no support among the population and thus no legitimacy. Eisner’s party won only a meager 3 out of the 180 seats of the Bavarian parliament, which signaled overwhelming support for, or at least acceptance of, parliamentary democracy. Moreover, the combined vote for the Social Democrats, the Left-Liberals, and the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) earned the three parties a combined 152 seats in the new Bavarian parliament. The political camps behind those parties had already cooperated with one another on the national level during the war, when pushing for a peace without annexations as well as for constitutional reform. Now, after the war, they were the prime forces behind establishing the Weimar Republic, as it was called, after the city in which the country’s constitutional assembly had met.50
The results of the election to the National Assembly that took place a week later, on January 19, revealed the existence of a line of continuity of support for reformist parties across the watershed of the First World War. The outcome in Bavaria proved that neither the war nor the revolution had fundamentally changed the political outlook and preferences of Bavarians. The combined vote for the SPD, the Left-Liberals, and political Catholicism in Upper Bavaria was almost exactly the same as in the last prewar elections, the Reichstag elections of 1912: in 1912, 82.7 percent of voters had cast their votes for one of the three parties, compared to 82.0 percent in 1919.51 If a person totally ignorant of the history of the twentieth century were asked to date, with the help of nothing but the Bavarian election results from the entire century, a cataclysmic war later said to have changed everything, he or she certainly would not pick the 1912–1919 period.