The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  Hitler had planned a putsch, not a civil war. Despite his feverish state of excitement he was in sufficient control of himself to realize that he lacked the strength to overcome the police and the Army. He had wanted to make a revolution with the armed forces, not against them. Bloodthirsty though he had been in his recent speeches and during the hours he held the Bavarian triumvirs at gunpoint, he shrank from the idea of men united in their hatred of the Republic shedding the blood of each other.

  So did Ludendorff. He would, as he had told his wife, string up President Ebert “and Co.” and gladly watch them dangle from the gallows. But he did not wish to kill policemen and soldiers who, in Munich at least, believed with him in the national counterrevolution.

  To the wavering young Nazi leader Ludendorff now proposed a plan of his own that might still bring them victory and yet avoid bloodshed. German soldiers, even German police—who were mostly ex-soldiers—would never dare, he was sure, to fire on the legendary commander who had led them to great victories on both the Eastern and the Western fronts. He and Hitler would march with their followers to the center of the city and take it over. Not only would the police and the Army not dare to oppose him, he was certain; they would join him and fight under his orders. Though somewhat skeptical, Hitler agreed. There seemed no other way out. The Crown Prince, he noted, had not replied to his plea for mediation.

  Toward eleven o’clock on the morning of November 9, the anniversary of the proclamation of the German Republic, Hitler and Ludendorff led a column of some three thousand storm troopers out of the gardens of the Buergerbräukeller and headed for the center of Munich. Beside them in the front rank marched Goering, commander of the S.A., Scheubner-Richter, Rosenberg, Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s bodyguard, and half a dozen other Nazi officials and leaders of the Kampfbund. A swastika flag and a banner of the Bund Oberland were unfurled at the head of the column. Not far behind the first ranks a truck chugged along, loaded with machine guns and machine gunners. The storm troopers carried carbines, slung over their shoulders, some with fixed bayonets. Hitler brandished his revolver. Not a very formidable armed force, but Ludendorff, who had commanded millions of Germany’s finest troops, apparently thought it sufficient for his purposes.

  A few hundred yards north of the beer cellar the rebels met their first obstacle. On the Ludwig Bridge, which leads over the River Isar toward the center of the city, stood a detachment of armed police barring the route. Goering sprang forward and, addressing the police commander, threatened to shoot a number of hostages he said he had in the rear of his column if the police fired on his men. During the night Hess and others had rounded up a number of hostages, including two cabinet members, for just such a contingency. Whether Goering was bluffing or not, the police commander apparently believed he was not and let the column file over the bridge unmolested.

  At the Marienplatz the Nazi column encountered a large crowd which was listening to an exhortation of Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter from Nuremberg, who had rushed to Munich at the first news of the putsch. Not wishing to be left out of the revolution, he cut short his speech and joined the rebels, jumping into step immediately behind Hitler.

  Shortly after noon the marchers neared their objective, the War Ministry, where Roehm and his storm troopers were surrounded by soldiers of the Reichswehr. Neither besiegers nor besieged had yet fired a shot. Roehm and his men were all ex-soldiers and they had many wartime comrades on the other side of the barbed wire. Neither side had any heart for killing.

  To reach the War Ministry and free Roehm, Hitler and Ludendorff now led their column through the narrow Residenzstrasse, which, just beyond the Feldherrnhalle, opens out into the spacious Odeonsplatz. At the end of the gullylike street a detachment of police about one hundred strong, armed with carbines, blocked the way. They were in a strategic spot and this time they did not give way.

  But once again the Nazis tried to talk their way through. One of them, the faithful bodyguard Ulrich Graf, stepped forward and cried out to the police officer in charge, “Don’t shoot! His Excellency Ludendorff is coming!” Even at this crucial, perilous moment, a German revolutionary, even an old amateur wrestler and professional bouncer, remembered to give a gentleman his proper title. Hitler added another cry. “Surrender! Surrender!” he called out. But the unknown police officer did not surrender. Apparently Ludendorff’s name had no magic sound for him; this was the police, not the Army.

  Which side fired first was never established. Each put the blame on the other. One onlooker later testified that Hitler fired the first shot with his revolver. Another thought that Streicher did, and more than one Nazi later told this author that it was this deed which, more than any other, endeared him so long to Hitler.*

  At any rate a shot was fired and in the next instant a volley of shots rang out from both sides, spelling in that instant the doom of Hitler’s hopes. Scheubner-Richter fell, mortally wounded. Goering went down with a serious wound in his thigh. Within sixty seconds the firing stopped, but the street was already littered with fallen bodies—sixteen Nazis and three police dead or dying, many more wounded and the rest, including Hitler, clutching the pavement to save their lives.

  There was one exception, and had his example been followed, the day might have had a different ending. Ludendorff did not fling himself to the ground. Standing erect and proud in the best soldierly tradition, with his adjutant, Major Streck, at his side, he marched calmly on between the muzzles of the police rifles until he reached the Odeonsplatz. He must have seemed a lonely and bizarre figure. Not one Nazi followed him. Not even the supreme leader, Adolf Hitler.

  The future Chancellor of the Third Reich was the first to scamper to safety. He had locked his left arm with the right arm of Scheubner-Richter (a curious but perhaps revealing gesture) as the column approached the police cordon, and when the latter fell he pulled Hitler down to the pavement with him. Perhaps Hitler thought he had been wounded; he suffered sharp pains which, it was found later, came from a dislocated shoulder. But the fact remains that according to the testimony of one of his own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr. Walther Schulz, which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler “was the first to get up and turn back,” leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in the street. He was hustled into a waiting motorcar and spirited off to the country home of the Hanfstaengls at Uffing, where Putzi’s wife and sister nursed him and where, two days later, he was arrested.

  Ludendorff was arrested on the spot. He was contemptuous of the rebels who had not had the courage to march on with him, and so bitter against the Army for not coming over to his side that he declared hence forth he would not recognize a German officer nor ever again wear an officer’s uniform. The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank into which he had been carried and then smuggled across the frontier into Austria by his wife and taken to a hospital in Innsbruck. Hess also fled to Austria. Roehm surrendered at the War Ministry two hours after the collapse before the Feldherrnhalle. Within a few days all the rebel leaders except Goering and Hess were rounded up and jailed. The Nazi putsch had ended in a fiasco. The party was dissolved. National Socialism, to all appearances, was dead. Its dictatorial leader, who had run away at the first hail of bullets, seemed utterly discredited, his meteoric political career at an end.

  TRIAL FOR TREASON

  As things turned out, that career was merely interrupted, and not for long. Hitler was shrewd enough to see that his trial, far from finishing him, would provide a new platform from which he could not only discredit the compromised authorities who had arrested him but—and this was more important—for the first time make his name known far beyond the confines of Bavaria and indeed of Germany itself. He was well aware that correspondents of the world press as well as of the leading German newspapers were flocking to Munich to cover the trial, which began on February 26, 1924, before a special court sitting in the old Infantry School in the Blutenburgstrasse. By the time it had ended twe
nty-four days later Hitler had transformed defeat into triumph, made Kahr, Lossow and Seisser share his guilt in the public mind to their ruin, impressed the German people with his eloquence and the fervor of his nationalism, and emblazoned his name on the front pages of the world.

  Although Ludendorff was easily the most famous of the ten prisoners in the dock, Hitler at once grabbed the limelight for himself. From beginning to end he dominated the courtroom. Franz Guertner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice and an old friend and protector of the Nazi leader, had seen to it that the judiciary would be complacent and lenient. Hitler was allowed to interrupt as often as he pleased, cross-examine witnesses at will and speak on his own behalf at any time and at any length—his opening statement consumed four hours, but it was only the first of many long harangues.

  He did not intend to make the mistake of those who, when tried for complicity in the Kapp putsch, had pleaded, as he later said, that “they knew nothing, had intended nothing, wished nothing. That was what destroyed the bourgeois world—that they had not the courage to stand by their act … to step before the judge and say, ‘Yes, that was what we wanted to do; we wanted to destroy the State.’”

  Now before the judges and the representatives of the world press in Munich, Hitler proclaimed proudly, “I alone bear the responsibility. But I am not a criminal because of that. If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the revolution. There is no such thing as high treason against the traitors of 1918.”

  If there were, then the three men who headed the government, the Army and the police in Bavaria and who had conspired with him against the national government were equally guilty and should be in the dock beside him instead of in the witness stand as his chief accusers. Shrewdly he turned the tables on the uneasy, guilt-ridden triumvirs:

  One thing was certain, Lossow, Kahr and Seisser had the same goal that we had—to get rid of the Reich government … If our enterprise was actually high treason, then during the whole period Lossow, Kahr and Seisser must have been committing high treason along with us, for during all these weeks we talked of nothing but the aims of which we now stand accused.

  The three men could scarcely deny this, for it was true. Kahr and Seisser were no match for Hitler’s barbs. Only General von Lossow defended himself defiantly. “I was no unemployed komitadji,” he reminded the court. “I occupied a high position in the State.” And the General poured all the scorn of an old Army officer on his former corporal, this unemployed upstart, whose overpowering ambition had led him to try to dictate to the Army and the State. How far this unscrupulous demagogue had come, he exclaimed, from the days, not so far distant, when he had been willing to be merely “the drummer” in a patriotic movement!

  A drummer merely? Hitler knew how to answer that:

  How petty are the thoughts of small men! Believe me, I do not regard the acquisition of a minister’s portfolio as a thing worth striving for. I do not hold it worthy of a great man to endeavor to go down in history just by becoming a minister. One might be in danger of being buried beside other ministers. My aim from the first was a thousand times higher than becoming a minister. I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I am going to achieve this task, and if I do, the title of Minister will be an absurdity so far as I am concerned.

  He invoked the example of Wagner.

  When I stood for the first time at the grave of Richard Wagner my heart overflowed with pride in a man who had forbidden any such inscription as “Here lies Privy Councilor, Music Director, His Excellency Baron Richard von Wagner.” I was proud that this man and so many others in German history were content to give their names to history without titles. It was not from modesty that I wanted to be a drummer in those days. That was the highest aspiration—the rest is nothing.

  He had been accused of wanting to jump from drummer to dictator. He would not deny it. Fate had decreed it.

  The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled. He wills it. He is not driven forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this. Is it immodest for a worker to drive himself toward heavy labor? Is it presumptuous of a man with the high forehead of a thinker to ponder through the nights till he gives the world an invention? The man who feels called upon to govern a people has no right to say, “If you want me or summon me, I will co-operate.” No! It is his duty to step forward.

  Though he might be in the dock facing a long prison sentence for high treason against his country, his confidence in himself, in the call to “govern a people,” was undiminished. While in prison awaiting trial, he had already analyzed the reasons for the failure of the putsch and had vowed that he would not commit the same mistakes in the future. Recalling his thoughts thirteen years later after he had achieved his goal, he told his old followers, assembled at the Buergerbräukeller to celebrate the anniversary of the putsch, “I can calmly say that it was the rashest decision of my life. When I think back on it today, I grow dizzy … If today you saw one of our squads from the year 1923 marching by, you would ask, ‘What workhouse have they escaped from?’ … But fate meant well with us. It did not permit an action to succeed which, if it had succeeded, would in the end have inevitably crashed as a result of the movement’s inner immaturity in those days and its deficient organizational and intellectual foundation … We recognized that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously have been built up and be ready to one’s hand … In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a State by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up and all that remained to do was to destroy the last remnants of the old State—and that took but a few hours.”

  How to build the new Nazi State was already in his mind as he fenced with the judges and his prosecutors during the trial. For one thing, he would have to have the German Army with him, not against him, the next time. In his closing address he played on the idea of reconciliation with the armed forces. There was no word of reproach for the Army.

  I believe that the hour will come when the masses, who today stand in the street with our swastika banner, will unite with those who fired upon them … When I learned that it was the Green police which fired, I was happy that it was not the Reichswehr which had stained the record; the Reichswehr stands as untarnished as before. One day the hour will come when the Reichswehr will stand at our side, officers and men.

  It was an accurate prediction, but here the presiding judge intervened. “Herr Hitler, you say that the Green police was stained. That I cannot permit.”

  The accused paid not the slightest attention to the admonition. In a peroration that held the audience in the courtroom spellbound Hitler spoke his final words:

  The army we have formed is growing from day to day … I nourish the proud hope that one day the hour will come when these rough companies will grow to battalions, the battalions to regiments, the regiments to divisions, that the old cockade will be taken from the mud, that the old flags will wave again, that there will be a reconciliation at the last great divine judgment which we are prepared to face.

  He turned his burning eyes directly on the judges.

  For it is not you, gentlemen, who pass judgment on us. That judgment is spoken by the eternal court of history. What judgment you will hand down I know. But that court will not ask us, “Did you commit high treason or did you not?” That court will judge us, the Quartermaster General of the old Army [Ludendorff], his officers and soldiers, as Germans who wanted only the good of their own people and Fatherland, who wanted to fight and die. You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court. For she acquits us.10

  The sentences, if not the verdicts, of the actual judges were, as Konrad Heiden wrote, not so far from the judgment of history. Ludendorff was acquitted. Hitler and the other accused were found guilty. But in the face of the law—Article 81 of the German Penal Co
de—which declared that “whosoever attempts to alter by force the Constitution of the German Reich or of any German state shall be punished by lifelong imprisonment,” Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in the old fortress of Landsberg. Even then the lay judges protested the severity of the sentence, but they were assured by the presiding judge that the prisoner would be eligible for parole after he had served six months. Efforts of the police to get Hitler deported as a foreigner—he still held Austrian citizenship—came to nothing. The sentences were imposed on April 1, 1924. A little less than nine months later, on December 20, Hitler was released from prison, free to resume his fight to overthrow the democratic state. The consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of the extreme Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good many antirepublicans took notice of it.

  The putsch, even though it was a fiasco, made Hitler a national figure and, in the eyes of many, a patriot and a hero. Nazi propaganda soon transformed it into one of the great legends of the movement. Each year, even after he came to power, even after World War II broke out, Hitler returned on the evening of November 8 to the beer hall in Munich to address his Old Guard comrades—the alte Kaempfer, as they were called—who had followed the leader to what seemed then such a grotesque disaster. In 1935 Hitler, the Chancellor, had the bodies of the sixteen Nazis who had fallen in the brief encounter dug up and placed in vaults in the Feldherrnhalle, which became a national shrine. Of them Hitler said, in dedicating the memorial, “They now pass into German immortality. Here they stand for Germany and keep guard over our people. Here they lie as true witnesses to our movement.” He did not add, and no German seemed to recall, that they were also the men whom Hitler had abandoned to their dying when he had picked himself up from the pavement and ran away.