Hitler's First Victims

by Timothy W. Ryback

  That Thursday, a week after Hartinger received the call about the Dachau shootings, Eva Kahn appeared in his office to report Erwin’s murder. She told Hartinger of her husband’s ordeal at the Dachau Concentration Camp. “Hartinger was very nice to me and I came away with the definite impression that he was not a Nazi and had nothing in common with the perpetrators,” she later recalled. She told Hartinger that while her husband had been unhappy with the situation at Dachau, he was willing to be patient until he was released. She had letters to prove it. More important, she told Hartinger what she had learned of the shooting incident from her husband in the hospital. The newspaper accounts of a failed escape attempt were untrue, she insisted. Her husband and the three other men had not attempted to escape. They had been led into the woods and gunned down in cold blood. She wanted Hartinger to press murder charges against the commandant and his men. She was willing to testify. “Nevertheless, [Hartinger] advised me, given the circumstances, to do nothing,” she later recalled, “since there would be the risk that, if I pursued the matter further, I would also be arrested, and, as he said, might possibly end up on the same path as my husband.”

  Hartinger knew that without Wintersberger’s support, he could not help Eva pursue justice, but he also knew that negligence was a frequent and common consort to arrogance. He was certain Wäckerle would kill again. He needed only to be patient and vigilant.

  * * *

  * Dr. Wolfgang Eisenmenger, professor emeritus of the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the University of Munich, has studied the Erwin Kahn autopsy and observes that by underscoring the absence of a connection between the multiple instances of internal bleeding, Dr. Flamm and Dr. Müller may have wanted to alert authorities to the possibility that the SA guards in the clinic were “not uninvolved” in Kahn’s death.

  PART II

  … UNTIL PROVEN …

  5

  The State of Bavaria

  THE HEADLINE-MAKING NEWS for the Völkischer Beobachter on the day that Benario, Goldmann, and the two Kahns were shot was the appointment of the new state government in Bavaria. For the previous six weeks, since the arson attack on the Berlin Reichstag and the imposition of a presidential emergency decree, the Free State of Bavaria had been overseen by a caretaker government.

  On the last Monday in February, fire was seen in the glass-domed and wood-paneled plenary hall of the Reichstag shortly after 9 p.m. The alarm was sounded immediately, but by the time the first firefighting units arrived, the flames had already consumed the plush red carpets and were churning across the delegates’ velvet seats and scaling the oak-paneled walls, filling the chamber with heat and smoke. Shortly after 9:30, the vast dome collapsed. Shards of glass crashed into the inferno below. Flames leaped through the emptied steel frame into the night sky. Ten thousand Berliners gathered to watch a dozen fire engines battle the blaze in the winter chill, while two boats equipped with water cannons joined the desperate fray from the Spree. The conflagration had come a week in advance of national elections intended to break a gridlock in the Reichstag, which President Hindenburg had suspended, and to serve as a referendum on the Hitler government after it had been in office just over four weeks.

  Suspicion and recrimination abounded. “That can only be an attack by the communists on our new government!” Hermann Göring, head of the Reichstag, claimed. The communists blamed the Nazis in return. “The burning of this symbol of free parliamentary government was so providential for the Nazis that it was believed they staged the fire themselves,” Robert Jackson was to observe thirteen years later at Nuremberg. “Certainly when we contemplate their known crimes, we cannot believe they would shrink from mere arson.” Some suspected Göring, whose residence was said to be connected to the Reichstag by a subterranean corridor. Others accused the Social Democrats, who were said (incorrectly) to have fled en masse to France. The next morning, during an emergency cabinet meeting, Göring cited a communist plot, allegedly discovered in a police raid, that provided for even greater disruption. “Based on the confiscated materials, it is clear that the communists wanted to create terror groups,” the cabinet minutes record, “that they intended to burn down public buildings, poison public kitchens, even at the cost of sacrificing their own supporters.” The terror plot, Göring said, also included provisions to sabotage power networks, rail systems, and industrial facilities, and to take hostage prominent persons as well as their wives and children.

  Hindenburg called Hitler into his office and questioned him about rumors that the arson attack had been orchestrated by storm troopers as a pretext for arresting communists in advance of Sunday’s elections. “Hitler said they were tendentious inventions by the foreign press,” state secretary Otto Meissner recalled, “and referred to the investigation protocols of the police and prosecutors, which showed strong evidence of communist plans to overthrow the government through terrorist acts, armed uprisings, and strikes.” Hitler urged the president to issue an emergency decree empowering the government to take security measures to avert a potentially wide-scale communist uprising.*1

  During the previous two years, Hindenburg had repeatedly exercised executive authority, guaranteed by Article 48 of the constitution, to issue presidential decrees. He had restricted the sale of firearms and suspended the right to public assembly. He banned the wearing of Nazi uniforms and the display of swastika banners in public. In March 1931, he responded to the desecration of synagogues and increasingly frequent attacks on Jews by mandating a minimum three-month prison sentence for anyone “who insults or desecrates establishments, customs, or objects relating to religious communities recognized by public law.” Now, a day after the Reichstag had gone up in flames and with Hitler expressing alarm over even greater potential disruption, Hindenburg issued a “Presidential Decree for the Protection of the People and the State.”

  The emergency decree provided for the suspension of seven articles of the constitution protecting civil liberties, “including freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and association, as well as intervention in the mail, postal, and telegraphic and telephonic communications, orders of house searches and seizures.”

  While most people focused on the implications of the emergency decree on the civil liberties of the country’s 65 million citizens, the state government of Bavaria was concerned by the less dramatic but more ominous implications of Article 2. “If adequate measures are not taken to reestablish public safety and order,” the paragraph stated, “the Reich government can temporarily assume the responsibilities from the state authorities as necessary.”

  Bavaria’s prime minister Heinrich Held assured Berlin there was no need for a Reich governor in his state. The state could manage its own affairs without interference from Berlin. Held was a measured, conservative man, a trained lawyer and a founder of the Bavarian People’s Party who had ruled the Free State of Bavaria with elegance and equanimity for nearly a decade. In a state legendary for its beer hall radicals, Held stood above the political fray in his top hat, tails, and walking stick. Many thought he should run for president. Held was also one of Germany’s most outspoken advocates of local autonomy, who viewed with suspicion any dictate coming from Berlin. In 1919, when the newly minted Weimar constitution was being hailed for its accommodation of democratic values and structures, Held saw only peril. “Naturally, the conditions incorporated in the German national constitution are very flexible and unclear,” he cautioned, “and open wide doors for skepticism about their legal nature and content, thus putting into question their possible impact on state law.”

  Held was particularly disquieted by Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, the “emergency decree article,” that accorded the president the power to suspend the Reichstag and rule by decree. He saw in it the “seeds of dictatorship.” Held had his apprehensions confirmed in 1931 when, amid growing political and economic crisis, Hindenburg exercised those powers by issuing forty-four presidential decrees, and when in the following year he dismissed three chancellor
s in quick succession. Adolf Hitler was his fourth chancellor in less than seven months. “The recent developments in public affairs in Germany are causing the Bavarian State Government great anxiety,” Held wrote to Hindenburg. Held was especially disquieted by “rumors” about the imminent “abolition of state sovereignty.” Held knew that the prime minister of Saxony had already written to Hindenburg expressing similar concerns, and wanted the president to know that anxieties ran equally high in the Free State of Bavaria. He appealed to Hindenburg as “guardian of constitutional law and justice” to stand as the bulwark for state sovereignty. Held’s request was met with a disquieting silence. Two weeks later, the Reichstag erupted in flames.

  While many viewed Hitler’s panic as calculated histrionics masking a National Socialist appetite for power, Held saw it additionally as northern imperialism, an attempt to assert Prussian authority over a Bavarian dominion. It was a centuries-old story that had seen generations of Hohenzollerns and Wittelsbachs battling over power and territory so fiercely that in 1805 Bavaria sided with Napoleon against Prussia. After German unification in 1871, Bavaria retained its own railway system, its own postal service, its own monarchy, and its own military. In 1914, Bavarian soldiers marched to war in Bavarian regiments commanded by Bavarian generals under the authority of Bavaria’s Royal Ministry of War. In November 1918, when the monarchy collapsed, Bavaria bolted from the Reich, declaring itself an independent country, and returned reluctantly the following year as part of the Weimar Republic with a special constitutional provision for reestablishing the Wittelsbach monarchy in times of emergency. When Hitler proposed installing Franz von Epp as Reich governor of Bavaria, Held threatened to invoke the monarchy clause and recall Prince Ruprecht to the Bavarian throne. There was serious concern among Hitler’s ministers that the decrees could precipitate a Bavarian exit from the Reich.

  Three days later, when the national elections delivered the National Socialists more than 40 percent of the electorate, Hitler moved to break the back of Bavarian independence. “We are masters of the Reich and of Prussia now, all others have withered to the ground in defeat,” Hitler’s future propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, crowed in his diary that evening. “Our success in these elections really hit new heights in southern Germany. This is especially gratifying because we now have the opportunity to crush the separatist federalism there.” Hitler huddled with his key lieutenants to plan to eliminate this last bastion of state independence in the Reich. “In the evening we all met with the Führer and it is decided that we will now tackle Bavaria,” Goebbels wrote in his diary three days later. “Although some squeamish souls who do not belong to the party continue to object, waffling about resistance of the Bavarian People’s Party, etc., we are firmly convinced that Herr Held will not play the hero.”*2 A plan was designed to destabilize the state through orchestrated public disorder as a means of invoking Paragraph 2 of the emergency decree and installing a Reich governor.

  On the morning of March 9, Held was in his office in the Palais Montgelas when he heard a disturbance outside his window. Several hundred storm troopers had gathered on the square, shouting, chanting, and singing “The Horst Wessel Song.” Shortly before noon, three top Hitler lieutenants, Munich gauleiter Adolf Wagner, the SA leader Ernst Röhm, and SS chief Himmler, marched into Held’s office in jackboots and storm trooper uniforms. They pointed to the crowd outside the window. Röhm expressed concern about public safety, invoking Article 2 of the Hindenburg emergency decree. It was time, they told Held, to install Epp as Reich governor. Wagner slapped Held’s desk with his whip. Held rose from the table. “I categorically reject this request,” he said. “A decision like that cannot even be taken by me alone. I will convene a cabinet meeting for 2:30 this afternoon. I have nothing else to say, gentlemen!”

  By then, however, storm troopers from across the state were thronging Munich. They arrived by train, bus, and automobile. Some reportedly came by bicycle. They moved through the streets, both celebrating and menacing, and converged on the square before Held’s office. At 12:30, two Hitler Youth scrambled atop the old city gate on Karlsplatz and unfurled a swastika banner. By one o’clock, a second banner fluttered over the city hall. Röhm, Wagner, and Himmler returned to Held’s office at four o’clock, this time with Epp. “The cabinet has decided not to follow your recommendation,” Held informed them. “We will not be pressured by the SA.” Two hours later, despite Held’s decision, the Nazis proclaimed triumph. “General von Epp has just assumed complete power in Bavaria,” Max Amann, the publisher of the Völkischer Beobachter, told a crowd from the balcony of the city hall. “Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler has assumed command of the police.”

  Held telegraphed Hindenburg requesting support from the Reichswehr Division VII garrisoned in Munich. Hindenburg wrote back suggesting that Held install a Reich governor. When Held dispatched a second request to Hindenburg, the response came from a Hitler associate, Interior Minister Hans Frick. “Since the restructuring of Germany’s political situation has caused some disruptions within the population, public order and safety in Bavaria seem to be in jeopardy,” Frick telegraphed Held at 8:15 that evening. “I shall therefore assume the responsibility of Senior Federal State Authority of Bavaria for the Reich’s government, in accordance with §2 of the Public and State Protection Decree. Furthermore, I transfer the executive authority to General Ritter von Epp in Munich.”

  Two hours later, Epp appeared on Odeonsplatz before a sea of brownshirts and sympathizers that extended down Ludwigstrasse. The crowd was jubilant. “In order to prevent the spread of any potential rumors about Prussia or northern Germany forcing anything unfavorable upon Bavaria,” the aging general said with awkward assurance, “I would like to remind you that the original path to our current liberation was led from Munich, that men like Hitler and Frick too come from southern Germany, and that nobody will ever dare to even consider restricting Bavaria’s rights and that which it has historically, rightfully, and proudly earned.”

  Held ignored Frick’s appointment of Epp. The Hindenburg decree explicitly stipulated that it was left to the individual state prime ministers to appoint Reich governors. But the next morning, when Held arrived at work, he found the Palais Montgelas swarming with brownshirts. An American journalist witnessed the “relentless march of the Nazi steamroller” that spring as brownshirts, “bristling with swastikas and other insignia, their revolvers dangling in plain sight from their hips,” swarmed public offices across the country. “These rough characters contrasted ludicrously with the officials left over from the pre-Nazi era,” he observed, “who were going about as if ashamed of their ceremonial toggery, looking—and doubtless feeling—like fish out of water.” Held served out the week. On Saturday, he departed Munich to “visit” his brother in Switzerland. Shortly thereafter he resigned as prime minister.

  On April 12, the day of the first murders at Dachau, Epp appeared amid the provincial baroque splendor of the Palais Montgelas to install his new state ministers. The aging general was a rough-hewn man who had earned his aristocratic title the old-fashioned way, through battlefield slaughter, and at age sixty still preferred the trench helmet to the top hat. In June 1916, as Colonel Franz Epp, a soldier of fortune and the son of a middling Bavarian landscape painter, he had led an assault with flamethrowers and hand grenades that brought him to the outskirts of Verdun. The French held, but Epp emerged from the battle with an Iron Cross First Class and the title “Ritter von Epp,” or Knight of Epp. In the spring of 1919, having returned to Bavaria at war’s end, he marched on Munich to crush a Bolshevik coup with bloody vigor, slaughtering hundreds of communists while his own soldiers suffered only minor losses. His appointment as Reich governor was hailed in the right-wing press as “Epp’s Second March on Munich.”

  Now, standing in the Palais Montgelas, Epp mustered his new ministers into service. Adolf Wagner was to serve as minister of interior. The Nazi Party lawyer Dr. Hans Frank was the new minister of justice. The Nazi SA le
ader, Ernst Röhm, was made “minister without portfolio,” as was an intimate Hitler associate, Hermann Esser, who was eventually placed in charge of tourism. Hans Schemm, the founder of the National Socialist Teachers’ League, was appointed minister of culture. Heinrich Held’s former post of prime minister, which Epp had occupied for the past month, was filled by Ludwig Siebert, the Nazi mayor of Lindau, who was assigned double duty as minister of finance. The appointments offered no surprises, since the new ministers were all Nazis and most had been serving in caretaker roles for the past month. The only real news came at the end when Epp announced that the position of the state foreign minister would not be filled and that the ministry itself was being dissolved. The Palais Montgelas was to serve henceforth as the offices of the Reich governor. The Free State of Bavaria was no longer free. It was not even a state.

  The following day, Epp hosted a reception for the ministers in his offices. On this occasion, he dispensed with formality. He was relaxed, even sentimental. “Everything that has been achieved in the past weeks would have been impossible if my colleagues had not been members of the ‘movement’ with the same soul and the same heartbeat, and had not been dedicated in complete harmony to the same ambitions and ideas,” he told them. The elimination of Bavaria’s ministry for foreign affairs, he said, would now permit the state to cooperate fully with the national government. “We are delighted to have been part of this development that sprang from the mind of our Führer and from the Reich president,” he said, “and that has been recognized as the best and most fortunate solution for Germany.” Epp envisioned “a thriving Bavaria in a strong Reich.” The general closed his remarks with a heartfelt “Sieg Heil!” to the German people, to the Nazi movement, and, of course, to Adolf Hitler.