Hitler's First Victims

by Timothy W. Ryback

  Wintersberger knew that the forty Assault Troop members had met at the bowling alley of the Torbräu beer hall at six o’clock on the evening of November 8, 1923, boarded trucks in Balanstrasse a little while later, and arrived at the Bürgerbräu on Rosenheimerstrasse at 8:30. He also knew that Wilhelm Knörlein had positioned a machine gun on Rosenheimerstrasse, and Karl Fiehler and Emil Dannenberg each aimed a machine gun at the beer hall entrances. He knew that Josef Gerum led the assault into the hall. Wintersberger even noted the number of shattered windowpanes in the ransacked offices of the Münchner Post—380 by Wintersberger’s count—and who was responsible for each action in descending order of culpability. He chronicled the Assault Troop’s subsequent march the following day to Odeonsplatz, where they advanced with “the writer Adolf Hitler”—his legally registered profession—into the fusillade of police gunfire.

  Wintersberger employed “all means of judicial rhetoric and sophistry,” according to one defendant, to prove their culpability in the “collective crime of treason.” Faced with the overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence, the judge, despite his evident sympathies for the defendants, was compelled to sentence all forty Assault Troop members to prison. The judge then exercised judicial prerogative and suspended the sentences, letting the unrepentant Nazis march triumphantly from the Palace of Justice.

  Wintersberger remained undaunted. A week later, he returned to court wielding an appellate decision overturning the verdict. According to the new ruling, the defendants had demonstrated “an exceptional measure of cruelty and brutality” and “absolutely no sign of regret.” “It is necessary,” Wintersberger argued, “to demonstrate to the defendants, who have not shown the slightest remorse, the seriousness of the legal system.” Within a week, the entire Assault Troop was in Landsberg Prison to begin serving their sentences. The upended verdict inspired lasting admiration among many of Wintersberger’s colleagues and the enduring enmity of the Munich-based National Socialists.

  Now, a decade later, Wintersberger remarkably found many of these convicted beer hall putschists in government positions, with Hitler as chancellor and Hermann Göring, who had escaped prosecution in 1923 by fleeing across the border to Austria, as president of the Reichstag. Ironically, these men were now often forced to function within the constraints of governmental responsibility, ultimately accountable to President Hindenburg, who possessed the constitutional authority to appoint or dismiss the chancellor and his ministers at will. Two years earlier, Hindenburg had issued the presidential “Decree for Public Order” that criminalized the “terror against religious communities” or “language that was slanderous or malicious.” In the face of a growing number of assaults on Jews, Hitler was compelled publicly to denounce storm trooper excesses and to call for them to cease and desist in their attacks. Himmler was also forced to rise to the Jews’ defense. “For us, the citizen of the Jewish faith is as much a citizen as those not of the Jewish faith,” he said during a March 12 press conference on protective custody, “and his life and his property are equally protected. We recognize no differences in this regard.”

  On April 13, 1933, the Nazi newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter underscored the seriousness of intent in a report on the murder of a Jewish lawyer earlier that week. “In Chemnitz the Jewish lawyer Dr. Wiener was seized in his apartment by three men in green uniforms with SA armbands and abducted in an automobile. On Tuesday his body was found in the Wiederauer Meadow with a gunshot wound to his head.” The paper stated that it had clearly been an act of murder rather than a robbery, noting that “valuables and 440 reichsmarks in cash were found on his body.” The local National Socialists had urged their members to cooperate with the police in identifying and apprehending the three killers, the article continued, noting that the party was reviewing its membership rosters from the previous six months, looking for potential suspects. They also assigned storm troopers to man roadblocks around Chemnitz inspecting cars and checking identity papers, and released detailed descriptions of the suspected perpetrators. Two of them were “tall, slender, and blond” and the third “heavyset with a narrow, somewhat pointed face and glasses.” All three were in their twenties. The newspaper emphasized to its readers that nothing less than the reputation of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was at stake. “By all appearances, this is a case of provocateurs who could either be outside or within our ranks,” it observed, “and are seeking to discredit our movement.”

  A day later, Wintersberger sat at his desk across from his deputy, Hartinger, who was insisting that Jews were being executed in a concentration camp that was being run under the auspices of Himmler. Despite their differing natures and investigative styles, Wintersberger and Hartinger in their two years together in Munich II had invariably arrived at the same conclusions, but on this occasion Wintersberger curtly dismissed his deputy’s suspicions. Wintersberger knew firsthand the Nazi potential for violence. He also thought he knew their limitations. “Das machen die nicht,” he told Hartinger flatly. Not even Nazis would do that.

  Hartinger knew when he had reached the limit with his superior. But he had looked into Wäckerle’s cold blue eyes and fathomed his capacity for atrocity. He knew Wintersberger was wrong on the Dachau killings. He also knew that a criminal indictment, especially one involving chain-of-command responsibility and multiple murders, demanded hard and incontrovertible evidence. It needed to meet the Wintersberger standard. Meanwhile, the surviving victim of the shooting, thirty-two-year-old Munich salesman Erwin Kahn, lay in a hospital bed across town, fully conscious and talking.

  4

  Witness to Atrocity

  AT 11:30 ON THE EVENING of April 12, a man was brought into the emergency room of the Munich Surgical Clinic at Nussbaumstrasse 35. His face was horrifically disfigured by two gunshot wounds. One bullet had penetrated his skull just above his cheekbone, bruising the surrounding tissue and blinding his left eye, which showed heavy bleeding around the cornea. According to the emergency room report, the ruined eye was “distended” as a result of the injury. The other eye showed subcutaneous bleeding but was fully intact. The man was lucid. He related an incident that the attending physician appended to his medical record:

  The injured man stated: On April 12, the patient and three other Jews were called to an urgent work assignment. While the evening meal was being distributed, someone suddenly called: “The four Jews should step forward.” When they were being led away, suddenly shots were fired [at them] from [a distance of] 2–3 meters. The injured man fell to the ground but did not lose consciousness and shortly thereafter he was lifted up by the guards and since he was wounded in the head was taken for medical treatment to Dr. Welsch in Dachau. There his wounds were treated and he was taken to the hospital in Dachau and from there to the Surgical Clinic.

  Erwin Kahn could not have been delivered into more capable hands. The Nussbaumstrasse clinic was Bavaria’s leading hospital for reconstructive surgery and, indeed, one of the country’s foremost surgical centers for more than a century. It was here that Joseph Lister pioneered the use of liquid antiseptic—until then, medical tools were sterilized by open flame—reducing surgical mortality rates by as much as 70 percent and establishing a medical standard for the entire profession. It was also here that Dr. Erik Lexer, a student of Berlin’s legendary surgeon Ernst von Bergmann, compiled his two-volume landmark compendium Comprehensive Reconstructive Surgery, which served as the profession’s reference work around the world. The hospital treated as many as two hundred ambulatory patients each day, most of whom had suffered household and work-related accidents, though there were occasional victims of street violence as well.

  For Kahn, the late-night arrival in the Nussbaumstrasse clinic marked the end of a monthlong ordeal that had begun early in the afternoon of March 11. Kahn was a gentle-spirited man who had never been particularly political, but the sight of brownshirted Nazis hoisting a swastika flag over a state office compelled him to act. He was joined by nearly fifty other
fellow Bavarians and the scuffle turned into a melee, as a result of which Kahn was taken into protective custody along with the others. He spent the next three days in the Ettstrasse police station and was then transferred to Stadelheim Prison on the outskirts of Munich. He was living apart from his wife, Eva, but she visited him there daily for the next ten days, bringing him fresh clothing and updating him on their young daughter.

  On March 22, Kahn was among the first detainees to be transferred to the newly opened concentration camp outside Dachau. “You probably came to Stadelheim today and heard this time that I was forced to change to my current, and rather undesirable, domicile,” he wrote Eva. “I am now in Dachau and specifically in a building in the former gunpowder factory.” Kahn explained that he was still awaiting a formal interrogation to determine exactly why he was being held, but assured her that all was well. “There is no need for any fear since I am not a party member and never had any function, as you know,” he wrote. His only real complaint was the cold floors in the barracks. He asked his wife to send “thick socks” along with shaving supplies and cigarettes. “I am only curious how long this thing will go on for, until we, or at least I am interrogated,” he wrote. “I don’t want to just eat and sleep and wait, but would like to get back to my job. In any event, please have no worries.” He added a postscript. Eva should not have any concerns about their financial situation. He had been told by the camp officials that either the city or the state would provide a subsidy to the families of detainees for the duration of their incarceration.

  About a week later, Kahn sent a second letter. He thanked his wife for the food she had sent and again expressed his desire to have the situation resolved as soon as possible. “I have but a single wish, to finally be interrogated so that things are clarified,” he wrote. “I was not in any party and was not a capitalist. What do they want from me? I am trying to keep my head high.” Eva knew her husband to be both patient and optimistic, but understood the situation was wearying if not worrying.

  A few days later, Kahn wrote his parents. He thanked them for a food parcel, informing them that on April 1 he had officially requested an interrogation to clarify matters. He urged them not to worry. “I assure you once again that I don’t know why I was arrested. In my entire life I was never in a party, and was just arrested on the street by an SA man. The main thing though is that I am still healthy, which helps me keep my head high. In general I cannot complain. I ask you not to worry about me too much: I hope!! to be free before too long.”

  Five days later, authority for the concentration camp was transferred from the Bavarian state police to the SS. The following afternoon, Erwin Kahn mistakenly responded to Steinbrenner’s call for “Kahn!” and was taken outside the compound with the three other Jews, and shot in the face. Erspenmüller sauntered over, his gun drawn, but someone screamed for him to stop. Erspenmüller hesitated, then relaxed his pistol. Kahn was lifted from the ground and carried back to the footbridge, then to the camp infirmary. An ambulance was called and Kahn was transported to the local hospital in Dachau, and from there to the Nussbaumstrasse clinic.

  “Average-sized man with somewhat lowered blood pressure,” the attending physician recorded on Kahn’s arrival. He noted that the patient had suffered significant bruising and bleeding from multiple gunshots, observing, “A bullet wound over the left cheekbone has already been operated on.” He recorded the damage to the left eye. Since his right eye was completely intact, Kahn could “clearly see those standing around him. There was no sign of unconsciousness on arrival.”

  Kahn was treated and placed in intensive care. He remained stable throughout the night. “Condition is basically unchanged,” the physician recorded that Friday. “The patient remains fully conscious. Slight rise in temperature.” On Saturday, the clinic informed Eva that her husband had been injured and wished to see her. She rushed to the hospital and found her husband lying in bed two in Hall 126, a sixteen-bed ward with bars on the windows and two storm troopers at the door. When they refused her entry, she summoned the attending physician, Dr. Hecker, who curtly dispatched the guards and led her to her husband’s bed. She spent the next several hours at her husband’s bedside. He described the shootings in detail. He said he watched as an SS guard raised his pistol, took aim at Benario, and fired. Benario collapsed, then Goldmann, and then suddenly he himself was struck by bullets, Kahn said. “My husband went on to explain that he then put his hands over his face and fell to the ground,” Eva remembered. “He had no idea what happened next because he lost consciousness.” Afterward, Eva consulted with Dr. Hecker. He informed her that her husband had managed well through the operation and would probably be fine, though he could well suffer from some paralysis as a result of the injuries. She departed, intending to return the next day.

  “Fever rising. The patient is somewhat dazed, the injuries look good. In general no change in the clinical results,” the medical record noted. “In the evening the patient is restless and no longer answers properly.” Kahn’s condition deteriorated with increasing rapidity as the night wore on. His breathing grew labored. His throat, clotted with blood, began to close. His sinus passages filled with pus from an infection. In the early hours of Easter Sunday, he began to fail, finally expiring at four o’clock in the morning.

  AS PREDICTED, Easter proved to be a festive day, with clear skies and mild weather. Pageants, processions, and celebratory masses took place across this most Catholic corner of Germany. In the Dachau Concentration Camp, a barrack was outfitted as a chapel to make good on Gauleiter Wagner’s promise that mass would be available for those detainees who could not be home in time to celebrate the occasion with their families. Since many of the detainees were communists, only twenty-eight of the camp’s 539 detainees took advantage of the administrative beneficence. “Nevertheless, these twenty-eight as a ‘small flock’ received this moving hour of religious service with deepest gratitude,” Father Friedrich Pfanzelt reported afterward, “and were so happy for every kind word that the priest was able to offer them, both collectively and individually.”

  News of the four dead men at Dachau came to their families in Munich, Nuremberg, and Fürth in small, painful doses. In Nuremberg, Bernhard Kolb, who was responsible for the city’s Jewish affairs, first learned of Arthur Kahn’s death when he received a request from the Dachau camp administration to retrieve Kahn’s body. The corpse arrived by hearse in a sealed coffin. Suspicious, Kolb had the coffin opened and called in a local physician to perform an autopsy. The physician discovered a gruesome postmortem intrusion. The flesh around the bullet holes had been gouged and sliced away. “In my opinion and that of the doctor,” Kolb later noted, “this was done because the camp administration wanted to conceal the fact that the bullets that killed Kahn had been shot at close range.”

  News of the shooting brought grief and dismay to the home of shopkeeper Levi Kahn and his wife Marta. Arthur was the oldest of their four children. He was an exceptionally bright and talented young man. He had been a state chess champion and had studied medicine at the University of Würzburg with the intent of entering the emerging field of cancer research. Like Benario, Kahn had been a political activist at the university, attempting to counter the rising tide of National Socialism among the students. Kahn was planning to attend the prestigious medical school at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and had returned to Würzburg only briefly to retrieve his student records when he was recognized by a local Nazi. He was taken into protective custody and dispatched to Dachau on April 11, on the same transport as Benario and Goldmann. The manifest identifies Kahn incorrectly as a “communist functionary.”

  “When the news came that Arthur had been ‘shot trying to escape,’ my parents knew right away that he had been intentionally shot,” Kahn’s younger brother, Lothar, recalled. “I remember my father had to pay money before they would release his body.” When word of Kahn’s death reached the university in Würzburg, an administrator noted his passing on his student
record: “According to newspaper reports, shot while escaping from the Dachau Concentration Camp.”

  Whatever rift life had torn between Ernst Goldmann and his parents was not healed in death. Siegfried and Meta Goldmann left it to Ernst’s brother to travel from Denmark to identify the corpse and arrange for it to be interred in the New Cemetery in Fürth.

  On the Tuesday after Easter, Leo Benario laid his son to rest. That day, he published a tribute to him in the Fürther Tagblatt. “With great sadness life was cut short for our dear son, brother, and fiancé, who was so filled with a thirst for knowledge and a life filled with such promise,” he wrote.

  That same day, Dr. Flamm conducted an autopsy on Erwin Kahn in the company of another physician, Dr. Müller. The cause of death was determined to be an acute infection of the bronchial passages and a high-grade inflammation of the larynx resulting from the two bullet wounds. The two physicians also determined there had been internal bleeding in the muscles around the larynx and on the left side of the chest. They underscored the fact that this internal bleeding was unrelated to the bullet wounds.* Kahn’s corpse was interred in the Jewish Cemetery in Munich the following day.