by Thomas Weber
That said, most units based in Munich did not support the Soviet Republic actively and militarily. Opinion in most of the city’s units was divided. Some soldiers supported the Soviet Republic and thus entered newly formed units of the Red Army that were ready to fight, while the majority of men tried to remain neutral. This is indeed what happened in Hitler’s unit.22 The future leader of the Nazi Party was among the men of his unit who stood back and did not join one of the newly formed active units of the Red Army.
And yet Hitler was no longer just any soldier. He was in a position in which it was almost impossible to take a neutral stance. And it was a position in which appearing neutral could easily be misread as support for the status quo—or as insufficient support, for that matter. By running for office and serving as his unit’s representative after the (second) Soviet Republic had been established, while not supporting the newly formed units of the Red Army at a moment that the new regime was under siege, Hitler inadvertently may have found himself caught between two stools. He risked the ire of the new regime for being in a position of influence and yet not exercising it by supporting the republic more actively; likewise, he risked the ire of Hoffmann and Noske’s troops in case they retook Munich, for serving the Soviet Republic in an elected position of influence. Hitler thus faced possible arrest from either side.
As the rope tightened around the neck of the Soviet Republic in late April, life for any real or perceived counterrevolutionaries left in Munich grew very dangerous indeed. For instance, on April 29 and the following day, revolutionaries showed up at the neoclassical palace on Brienner Straße that housed the papal nunciature, entering the building and threatening the nuncio, Eugenio Pacelli, with guns, daggers, and even hand grenades. Pacelli was hit so hard in his chest with a revolver that it deformed the cross that he carried on a chain around his neck.23 The attack on the future Pope Pius XII was not the only reported case of aborted action taken against real or perceived adversaries of the Soviet Republic. The second most famous case involved Hitler himself.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that on April 27, Red Guards came to his barracks to take him hostage: “In the course of the Councils’ Revolution I acted for the first time in a manner which invoked the displeasure of the Central Council. On April 27, 1919, early in the morning, I was supposed to be arrested; but in facing the rifle I presented, the three fellows lacked the necessary courage and marched away in the same manner in which they had come.” Ernst Schmidt, who would not have been present at the arrest but who remained close to Hitler, made a similar claim in his 1930s interview with the pro-Nazi Hitler biographer Heinz A. Heinz: “One morning, very early, three Red Guards entered the barracks and sought him out in his room. He was already up and dressed. As they tramped up the stairs Hitler guessed what was afoot, so grasped his revolver and prepared for the encounter. They banged on the door which immediately opened to them: ‘If you don’t instantly clear out,’ cried Hitler, brandishing his weapon, ‘I’ll serve you as we served mutineers at the Front.’ The Reds turned instantly, and tramped downstairs again. The threat had been far too real to face an instant longer.”24
Hitler and Schmidt might have fabricated the story of Hitler’s attempted arrest, or more likely, embellished a story that had some basis in truth. It is difficult to see how exactly Hitler would have managed to hold off three men. The core of their claims about the narrow escape from arrest, however, is not implausible. Even though the power of the rulers of the Munich Soviet Republic had been weakened by April 27, it was that very weakness that made the regime dangerous. It indeed acted most aggressively, as doomed political movements often do, once weakened.25
On April 29, two days after the purported incident involving Hitler, Rudolf Egelhofer, the leader of the Red Army, planned to round up the members of Munich’s bourgeoisie on Theresienwiese and execute them if troops loyal to the government in Bamberg moved into Munich. In a meeting of Soviet leaders, his proposal was defeated by only one vote. In fact, eight political prisoners—seven of them members of the Thule Society—arrested in Munich on April 26 would be executed on April 30 in the courtyard of a local school, where, following an order issued by Egelhofer, they were put against the wall and shot dead.26
Additional arrests were made across Munich in late April27 while the military leaders of the Soviet Republic were trying desperately to rally as many troops as possible behind them ahead of the expected attack on Munich. So, it is perfectly plausible for Hitler to have been arrested for not actively supporting the Red Army. Even if the encounter he described never took place, the unwillingness of an elected representative to come out in support of the newly formed active units of the Red Army would have earned him the ire of the Soviet regime.
On April 27, the troops that Hoffmann and Noske had amassed—a formidable force of thirty thousand men—crossed into Bavaria. They included the remnants of the forces defeated in Dachau, units from Swabia and Württemberg, and militias from all over Bavaria and other parts of the Reich. By April 29, they had retaken Dachau.28
Government troops expected to have to face considerable resistance in Munich. A memorandum drawn up on April 29 warned against underestimating the Red Army. It estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 men were under arms in Munich, of whom 10,000 had to be considered “serious and utterly determined fighters.” The memorandum listed Hitler’s unit, the Second Infantry Regiment, neither as a unit that “will not back the Soviet Republic and are inclined to defect” nor as one that “[can be assumed to] stand wholly with the Reds.” On the following day, mass desertion in the Red Army set in. Hitler, however, did not defect. Furthermore, a sufficiently large number of men stayed behind for Rudolf Egelhofer to organize a last stand.29
On April 30, nervous uncertainty reigned supreme all over Munich. As the formerly impoverished Romanian Princess Elsa Cantacuzène—whose marriage to Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann had transformed her into Elsa Bruckmann and returned her to wealth—witnessed, the city was in turmoil. People walked around town chasing the latest news, soldiers were manning machine guns or sitting on ammunition cars and trucks, and all the while the roar of cannons could be heard in the far distance in the east. All signs of regular life had vanished. Trams had ceased to operate, and a general strike had brought business to a halt. Everywhere, posters had been put up that either vented the revolutionaries’ hatred toward the government, the advancing troops, and the Prussians, or provided details about the casualty and dressing stations soon expected to be in high demand. Everywhere, fliers were distributed. One could hear speeches full of discontent on every corner.
At nighttime Princess Elsa sat down with a heavy heart and started to compose a letter to her husband, her “beloved, dear Treasure,” who had left the city. She wondered “whether tonight and tomorrow really will bring the decision and our salvation, as everybody is saying?” and continued, “Where will this end?! Many say the Reds will surrender quickly; others believe they will fight to the end, and that the Wittelsbach Palace, the barracks and the railway station will have to be taken by force. In that case, those desperate men would force the people to engage in street fighting.”30
At the eleventh hour, the rulers of the Soviet Republic embarked on desperate yet hopeless measures. For instance, they put up yellow notices late at night on April 30 that tried to capitalize on Munich’s anti-Prussian sentiment. The notices read: “The Prussian White Guard stands at Munich’s gates.” The following morning, as the arrival of government troops was imminent, citizens of Munich loyal to the government and with access to weapons started to rise against the Soviet Republic. Early on May 1, soprano Emmy Krüger witnessed “riots in the streets” and saw how members of the Red Army “shot at people.” The attack on Munich was supposed to start on May 2, yet with the eruption of street fighting, it was brought forward by a day. As government troops and militias started to move against the city and made contact with the Red Army, fierce fighting took place, not least due to the involvement of battle experience
d former Russian POWs as storm troopers.31
Wherever the Red Army had erected barricades, street fighting ensued. The population of Munich was so hungry by this point that Michael Buchberger, a Catholic priest, witnessed outside his apartment people going out into the street, despite the combat that was raging, to cut meat from the corpses of four horses killed in crossfire. By the late morning of May 2, counterrevolutionary forces—commonly called “white troops” after the anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia—had finally managed to fight their way into the city. “Civil war,” as Krüger wrote in her diary, ensued, “Germans against Germans, roads blocked—soldiers with revolvers and bayonets clear the houses, and reds are shooting from the roofs.”32
“White” troops acted with particular ferocity toward real or imagined Red Guards whenever they thought themselves under fire from snipers. One of those moments occurred when Prussian and Hessian troops approached Hitler’s Karl Liebknecht Barracks late in the morning of May 1.33 If we can trust the account that Hitler, looking “pretty pinched and peaky,” gave to Ernst Schmidt a few days later and that Schmidt subsequently retold, “when the Whites entered a few stray shots seemed to come from the barracks. No one could account for them, but the Whites made short work of the business.” They thus “took every man in the place, including Hitler, prisoner, and shut them up in the cellars of the Max Gymnasium.”34
Just like Schmidt’s version of Hitler’s narrow escape just a few days earlier, his account of Hitler’s arrest at the hands of government troops is plausible.35 For one thing, it does not follow Schmidt’s usual pattern of exaggerating the degree to which Hitler and he had stood against the revolution. According to that pattern, Schmidt is unlikely to have mentioned the story of the arrest at all, and would likely have told a story instead of how the units occupying Hitler’s barracks would have immediately recognized in Hitler an anti-Soviet activist. Furthermore, arrests of the kind Schmidt described were common in the aftermath of the Soviet Republic’s fall. Anyone with sympathies for, or involvement with, the Red Army risked being apprehended. Arrests were made so frequently that it became common to see captives, arms aloft, walking through the streets of Munich to holding centers for arrestees. In total, at least 2,500 people were held in captivity in Munich for at least a day in the aftermath of the defeat of the Munich Red Army.36
Whether or not Hitler was really arrested and incarcerated at the Max Gymnasium, he now faced a very uncertain future in the wake of the arrival of “white” troops in Munich. How could he ensure that his previous activities would not be understood as service for the Soviet Republic beyond the call of duty? Hitler needed to figure out how to save his own neck, which would depend more on what others made of his service in previous weeks than on how he himself had defined his political allegiances in April.
One of the most lasting legacies of the Munich Soviet Republic was an enormous rise in anti-Semitism. Yet, in the spring of 1919, it rose in a fashion inconsistent with the eventual emergence of Hitler’s own radical anti-Semitism. It will be impossible to understand how the latter occurred later that year without comprehending the nature of the anti-Semitism from which it differed.
Unlike Nazi anti-Semitism, the most popular brand of anti-Semitism in Munich in 1919 was not directed against all Jews alike. In fact, many Jews in the city expressed their open disdain for Jewish revolutionaries and did not perceive the surge in anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism in the spring of 1919 as being directed against them as well. As the son of Rafael Levi recalled, his father, a physician, had been in equal parts a deeply religious Orthodox Jew and a patriotic monarchist: “My father and all of our friends had a conservative outlook,” he stated. “They did not think they would be affected by this. They thought it was only directed against revolutionaries like Eisner. My father, my uncle, as well as their Jewish and Gentile fellow soldiers—none of them displayed any sympathy for those revolutionary ‘hotheads’ and ‘atheists.’ I still remember that vividly.”37
Unlike Hitler’s subsequent anti-Semitic conversion, the growth of anti-Semitism in revolutionary Munich of early 1919 was very much a phenomenon of the city’s Catholic establishment, borne out of encounters with the protagonists of the Soviet Republic. Its most famous expression is to be found in a diplomatic report by Eugenio Pacelli of April 18, in which the future pope detailed, using the language of anti-Semitism, a rude encounter his aide Lorenzo Schioppa had had with Max Levien and other revolutionaries in the Residenz, the royal palace, then being used as the seat of the rulers of the Soviet Republic. It detailed how the revolutionaries had turned the royal palace into “a veritable witches’ cauldron” full of “unprepossessing young women, Jewesses foremost among them, who stand about provocatively in all the offices and laugh ambiguously.” Levien, who in fact was not Jewish, was described as a “young man, a Russian and a Jew to boot,” who was “pale, dirty, with impassive eyes” as well as “intelligent and sly.”38
In their report, the future Pope Pius XII and his aide clearly shared the sentiment popular among many in Munich that the revolution had been a predominantly Jewish endeavor. In addition to his anti-Communism with strong anti-Semitic undertones, Pacelli also rejected Jewish religious practices (similarly to the way that he, as the head of the Catholic Church, rejected all non-Catholic religious practices). Yet he was happy to support Jews in nonreligious matters, repeatedly aiding Zionists who turned to him for help, trying to intervene in support of Jews concerned about rising anti-Semitic violence in Poland, or in 1922 warning the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, a Jew, about an imminent assassination plot. Pacelli’s actions to help Jewish communities were matched by those of Michael von Faulhaber, Munich’s archbishop, who was happy to oblige when Jewish representatives repeatedly approached him with requests for help. And in a letter to the chief rabbi of Luxembourg, Faulhaber disapprovingly mentioned the rise of anti-Semitism in Munich: “Here in Munich, too, we have seen attempts [… ] to fan anti-Semitic flames, but luckily, they did not burn well.” The archbishop also offered the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith help to prevent the distribution of anti-Semitic pamphlets outside churches.39
In short, unlike Nazi Judeophobia, Pacelli and Faulhaber’s anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism and their rejection of non-Catholic religious practices did not treat Jews as being the source of all evil. Rather, Jews were treated as fellow human beings who deserved help in all nonreligious matters, as long as they did not support Bolshevism. And at its core, Pacelli and Faulhaber’s anti-Semitism was not racial in character. In that respect it differed fundamentally from the heart of Hitler’s anti-Semitism during the Third Reich. This is not to diminish mainstream Catholic anti-Semitism. Rather, it suggests that looking at the rise of anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism in Munich in the spring of 1919 may not get us very far in explaining Hitler’s anti-Semitic transformation. Certainly, for some Bavarians, racial and anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism went hand in hand. Yet for a far larger number of Bavarians, the two strands of anti-Semitism did not converge.
The same was true of the anti-Semitism of the traditional Bavarian political establishment. For instance, on December 6, 1918, a month after the revolution, the unofficial newspaper of the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), the Bayerischer Kurier, stated: “Race does not play a role either for the BVP,” and that the party’s members “respect and honor every honest Jew. [… ] What, however, we need to fight are the many atheist elements who form part of an unscrupulous international Jewry which is chiefly Russian in character.” Similarly, Georg Escherich, who was to head one of the largest right-wing paramilitary groups in Germany in the postrevolutionary period, had expressed the opinion to Victor Klemperer, during a chance encounter on a train in December 1918, that a future BVP government would be open to Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike. He had told Klemperer, “The man of the future is here already: Dr. Heim, the Organizer of the Bauernbund [Peasants’ League]; a Center Party man but not a ‘black’ one [i.e., one appealing only
to Catholics]. Protestants and Jews are also part of the Bauernbund.”40
The Judeophobia of Pacelli, Faulhaber, and the BVP matters in explaining Hitler’s eventual anti-Semitic transformation, for two reasons: First, it epitomized mainstream anti-Semitism in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Munich. Second, it defined an anti-Semitism that Hitler would deem pointless at the very moment when he turned into an anti-Semite. Significantly, mainstream anti-Semitism in Bavaria as well as the attitudes of Pacelli, Faulhaber, and the political establishment of Bavaria had more in common with the anti-Semitism of Winston Churchill than with that of Hitler once he turned against Jews. In February 1920, the then British secretary of war would write in a Sunday newspaper that, for him, there were three kinds of Jews: one good, one bad, one indifferent. The “good” Jew, for Churchill, was a “national” Jew who was “an Englishman practicing the Jewish faith.” By contrast, the “bad” Jew was an “international Jew” of a revolutionary Marxist kind who was destructive and dangerous and who, according to both many Bavarians and Churchill, had been in the driver’s seat of the revolution. Churchill would write: “With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving comes from the Jewish leaders.”41
The nonracial character of the anti-Semitism of many Bavarians explains why, despite the meteoric rise of anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism during the revolution, Jews could, and Jews did, serve in Freikorps and other militias that helped quash the Munich Soviet Republic. It also explains why non-Jews were willing to serve alongside Jews to stop Communism in its tracks. More important, the service of many Jews in Freikorps challenges the common understanding that the political movement headed by Hitler had grown out of Freikorps. Freikorps are often believed to have been the vanguards of Nazism, fueled by a fascist ethos as well as a complete rejection of democracy, culture, and civilization. According to common wisdom, Freikorps members formed a cult of violence that longed for unity and the establishment of a racial community. Members of Freikorps allegedly followed an uncontrolled and uncontrollable “logic of extermination and cleansing” that would provide the spirit that later would drive the SS (the Schutzstaffel), the paramilitary force of the Nazi Party that would be in charge of the implementation of the Holocaust. They are also believed to have been in equal parts anti-Semitic and anticapitalist, or in fact far more anti-Semitic than they were anticapitalist.42 If this indeed is how National Socialism was born, how is it possible that many Jews served in Freikorps?