by Bill Yenne
In July 1919, two months after the death of Guido von List and three months before Heinrich Himmler entered the university, Hitler got an assignment that changed his life and the course of twentieth-century history. The Reichswehr ordered him to spy on Anton Drexler’s Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. Among the right-wing and left-wing organizations screaming for attention around Munich in the summer of 1919, the DAP was still a relatively tiny organization, with just fifty-four members. Hitler was captivated by Drexler and his message, especially the DAP hatred for the Bolsheviks and the part about how the Jewish industrialists were to blame for Germany’s embarrassing defeat in World War I. Such individuals were considered to have greedily stabbed the Reich in the back. Furthermore, they were lumped together in the mind of the Völkisch nationalists with the Weimar Republic’s government as the “November criminals,” who sold out the Reich by agreeing to the November 1918 armistice.
Instead of infiltrating the DAP, Adolf Hitler joined, becoming member number fifty-five. It was a match made in heaven—or hell, as we see in historic hindsight. Just as Hitler fell in love with a doctrine that was so congruent with his own beliefs, Drexler was mesmerized by Hitler’s uncanny personal presence and his gift for oratory.
Drexler knew that the key to running an organization was membership, and when you have just fifty members, you have plenty of work to do. A skilled orator can attract members, and Hitler did not disappoint Drexler. The party grew in number, as well as in prominence. Soon, prominent men such as World War I flying ace Hermann Göring joined. Even the popular and prestigious General Erich von Ludendorff, arguably Germany’s greatest World War I commander, supported the cause.
By the winter of 1919, the DAP “workers” party had expanded the scope of its appeal by adding terms to its name to appeal to both nationalists and socialists—though the socialists to whom they appealed were socialist only insofar as they despised Jewish capitalists. In February 1920, the DAP became the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party). With such a cumbersome moniker, the “nationalsozialists” of the NSDAP naturally sought a short, phonetic abbreviation, and thus came to refer to themselves simply as “Nazis.”
A saluting Hitler is the centerpiece of this Heinrich Hoffman photo of a 1928 Nazi Party rally in Nuremburg. Hermann Göring is in the foreground on the left. U.S. National Archives
Heinrich Himmler was probably attending Nazi Party events with Ernst Röhm while he was still in the university, and he had certainly been acquainted with Adolf Hitler before he formally joined the NSDAP in August 1923.
Within the Nazi Party, Himmler soon found a number of members of the Thule Society. The Ariosophists gladly embraced a supportive myth, and the idea of the Aryan race rising from a distant, ice-bound land seemed as stirringly real as anything for the Nazis, just as it did for Himmler.
Hitler had already superseded Drexler as the central figure of the NSDAP even before he officially became party chairman in July 1921. By the time that Himmler met him, Hitler had progressed within party leadership to the all-new post of Führer, meaning simply that he was the leader. Under a policy known as the Führerprinzip, or leader principal, the Führer became the party dictator, the exclusive determiner of party policy. As his deputy Führer, he chose Rudolf Hess.
Himmler’s mentor, Ernst Röhm, had been named to head the NSDAP’s paramilitary security apparatus, their inhouse freikorps. As noted earlier, the Munich of the postwar years was a tough and violent place, where the police were outnumbered and the streets were ruled by street gangs. In the sea of chaos, where assassinations were rampant, extremist groups on both political extremes needed private armies to defend themselves against one another. The NSDAP freikorps took its name, Sturmabteilung, from the shock troops or “storm troopers” that had been used during World War I to infiltrate enemy lines or the spearhead infantry assaults by the German army. Abbreviated as SA, the Sturmabteilung outfitted its members in military-style uniforms that included brown shirts. For this reason, the SA thugs were also referred to as brownshirts. In the service of the NSDAP, the brownshirts were used to break up fights at meetings, to intimidate rival organizations, and to beat up Bolsheviks.
By the fall of 1923, the NSDAP had grown from fifty-five members to around 20,000, not just in Munich, but across Germany. The party’s newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer), a decades-old suburban weekly taken over by the Nazis, grew rapidly in circulation. Among the key staff members at the paper during the early 1920s were Thule Society stalwarts Dietrich Eckart, Alfred Rosenberg, and Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff.
A megalomaniac like Hitler is nothing without grandiose dreams, and in Hitler’s case, he looked at the weak leadership within the government of Germany’s Weimar Republic and thought he could fill the void. He promised his members a restoration of Germany’s national pride, and all the things that Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels had imagined in their Aryan utopia.
By the fall of 1923, the time seemed right for Hitler’s scheme. The situation was so turbulent that the Bavarian ministerpräsident (state governor), Eugen von Knilling, declared martial law. He brought in his predecessor, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, a well-known, right-wing political leader, as Staatskomissar, or state commissioner. Kahr was the senior part of a triumvirate that also included police chief Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser and Reichswehr general Otto von Lossow, and the three ran Bavaria as a virtual dictatorship.
With Kahr—a man Hitler assumed to be sympathetic to his cause—in power in Bavaria, Hitler decided to stage a coup against the November criminals, the German national government. He hoped that by getting the ball rolling in Munich, his coup—called a putsch in German—would spread all the way to Berlin.
On the evening of November 8, 1923, there was a huge meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller on Rosenheimerstrasse, the immense beer hall operated by the Bürgerliches Bräuhaus brewing company. There were around 3,000 people present. Gustav Ritter von Kahr was scheduled to address them, and he was expected to back Hitler’s scheme. Both Seisser and Lossow were also present. However, the night turned dark for Hitler when Kahr and the others withdrew their anticipated support. Hitler then entered the vast room, surrounded by an entourage of armed henchmen, and took the triumvirate into a side room, where he unsuccessfully harangued and threatened them to change their minds. He returned to the stage to greet a crowd that began to jeer. Firing a pistol round into the ceiling to get their attention, he began to speak.
Present in the room was Dr. Karl Alexander von Müller, a history professor at the Universität München. In the description in his 1966 book Im Wandel einer Zeit (In the Change of Time), Müller recalls that the speech was “an oratorical masterpiece, which any actor might well envy. He began quietly, without any pathos…. I cannot remember in my entire life such a change in the attitude of a crowd in a few minutes, almost a few seconds. There were certainly many who were not converted yet. But the sense of the majority had fully reversed itself. Hitler had turned them inside out, as one turns a glove inside out, with a few sentences. It had almost something of hocus-pocus, or magic about it. Loud approval roared forth, no further opposition was to be heard.”
Heinrich Himmler missed the show at the Bürgerbräukeller. He and Röhm had been at another beer hall, that of the well-known Löwenbrau brewery, with a contingent of Reichskreigsflagge goons. Himmler was probably feeling rather self-important, for Röhm had entrusted him to carry the unit’s colors, an old imperial German battle flag. When they heard what was going on with Hitler, Röhm, Himmler, and the others moved out to join them. En route, they were intercepted by messengers carrying orders from Hitler, redirecting them to seize the offices of the Military District for Bavaria, in the former Bavarian war ministry. This they did, succeeding quite easily.
The following morning, buoyed by the response he received at the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler set out to lead a large number of his followers, including Dietri
ch Eckart and Rudolf Hess, on massive march to the Munich city hall, hoping the Reichswehr would join with the Nazis to march on Berlin. The idea was patterned on the March on Rome, in which Fascist leader Benito Mussolini had seized power in Italy in October 1922.
Hitler was confident—indeed, overconfident. But why not? He had even earned the support of General Ludendorff, who would march at the head of the throng.
As they marched, the destination was changed to the former war ministry, but the marchers made it only as far as the Odeonsplatz, where they ran into a cordon of state police. The Bavarian government had regrouped overnight and was keen to prevent the putsch from succeeding. When feeling threatened, nervous men with guns are a prescription for disaster. Shots rang out, and the march dissolved into a disorganized herd scrambling for safety. The old soldier Ludendorff was among a handful who remained steadfast, facing down the police. Hitler and most of his followers ran. Ludendorff never forgave Hitler for his cowardice. When the dust settled, sixteen marchers and four police lay dead in the street. Among the wounded was World War I pilot Hermann Göring.
Heinrich Himmler missed the showdown in the Odeonsplatz, but got his own taste of the action when the police launched an armed attack to recapture the ministry building. Not wanting to inflame tensions, the police made few arrests. After ordering the insurgents to stack their weapons, the police let most simply walk away. Röhm, however, was taken into custody. So too were Hitler, Ludendorff, and a number of others. Ludendorff was acquitted. Röhm had his fifteen-month sentence suspended, but was kicked out of the Reichswehr. Dietrich Eckart was jailed, though briefly; he died of a heart attack a month later. Convicted of treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years, although he would be released after just one. Göring, among others, escaped to Austria to avoid prosecution until a general amnesty for the putsch participants was enacted in 1927. The NSDAP was officially banned, and the Völkischer Beobachter was ordered to cease publication. Naturally, the Nazis did not go away, but merely slithered underground to weather the storm.
For Hitler, his incarceration at the minimum-security facility in Landsberg worked to his advantage. Assisted by both Röhm and Hess, he used the time to finish his book, which was dedicated to Dietrich Eckart. Entitled Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the book begins autobiographically, but goes on to outline Hitler’s views of the world as it was and as he thought it should be.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler displayed a great deal of Völkisch nostalgia. The book conveyed a spiritual reverence for the Germanic national identity and its sacred roots in the distant and heroic past of Nordic mythology. In a diatribe that seems cribbed from the Armanenism of List, the Ariosophy of Lanz, and from ideas Hitler gleaned from reading Ostara, Hitler embraced the by then well-established doctrine of Aryan superiority. He describes the Jews as the worst of the worst in society, linking them with the perceived evils of both the industrialists and the Bolsheviks. He also lavished his wrath on the Slavic peoples, whom he despised.
Hitler blended the core philosophy of the Völkisch New Age with the political anger at Bolshevism then current on the right side of the German street and with the animosity toward Versailles that was found on both sides. He also outlined his vision for a greater Germany and a crying need for Lebensraum (living space), to accommodate an exploding German population outside the crowded borders of 1920s Germany. Where exactly was this living space to be?
Floating around Völkisch ideology since the mid-nineteenth century was a concept called Drang Nach Osten (eastward urge), which idealized a notion that it was the manifest destiny of ethnic Germans to occupy the homelands of the Slavic and Baltic people to the east. Thanks in part to the empire building of the Teutonic Knights, there had been Germanic settlement in the east since the Middle Ages, but it was only after the late eighteenth century that a modern political Drang Nach Osten got its start. It began when Poland was dismantled as a nation state by the Congress of Vienna after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The country’s land was partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia. A century later, the Treaty of Versailles took away land from various countries, but mainly Germany, to re-create Poland. The Völkisch and nationalistic among the Germans, who were used to there not being a Poland, greatly resented this. So in Mein Kampf, Hitler proposed an eastward campaign of Drang Nach Osten to gain the Lebensraum that he felt was needed by the German people. He predicted the Germans’ attempted occupation of the Soviet Union, which he would undertake seventeen years later.
When the word got out that Heinrich Himmler had carried the flag for the Beer Hall Putsch, that he had literally been the standard-bearer, he became a celebrity among the Nazis. For perhaps the first time in his life, the girls took notice of young Himmler. The putsch had been a tranformative moment both for Germany and for Heinrich Himmler.
It was almost like hocus-pocus.
CHAPTER 4
A Call to Duty
ALTHOUGH THE BEER HALL PUTSCH had worked to Heinrich Himmler’s advantage, after it, he was at loose ends. The political party to which he had devoted his attention was now out of business, and to make matters worse, he was also out of a job. According to the municipal archives in Schleissheim, he had quit or been laid off at Stickstoff-Land GmbH three months before the putsch. Now his resumé was being turned down all over town. He might have had trouble getting work because of his image as standard-bearer for a failed insurrection. The girls liked the bad boy on the motorcycle, but potential employers did not.
However, his ongoing unemployment may also have been a result of the dire economic collapse of the Weimar Republic. During 1923, Germany watched the value of its currency spiral out of control. Back in 1922, it had taken almost 300 reichsmarks to buy one American dollar. By February 1923, it took 20,000 reichsmarks, and in July 1923, the month that Himmler had joined the NSDAP, the number was around four million. By the time of the Beer Hall Putsch, hyperinflation had pushed it to four billion.
Like many who have tasted politics, Himmler savored the tang. After the NSDAP was banned, Ernst Röhm and many other Nazis moved to the Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung (NSFB, or National Socialist Freedom Movement). Himmler followed. Having no alternative, he sought paying work in a political campaign. In the months leading up to the May 1924 Bavarian elections, Himmler became a tireless campaign worker, racing about the countryside on his motorcycle, giving speeches, and carrying election propaganda for NSFB candidates, including Röhm. Himmler was in his element, relishing the opportunity to carry the Völkisch message to the Völkisch heartland of rustic Bavaria.
Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, is seen here on the left (in helmet and glasses). Saluting next to him is Kurt Daluege (1897–1946), who was his first and only serious rival for power within the SS. Himmler won, sidelining Daluege to posts far from the seat of power in Berlin. U.S. National Archives
As he put solitary miles on his BMW, Himmler had many hours to enjoy the scenery and wax romantically about the credo of Blut und Boden, blood and soil. On his metal steed in these remote lanes and medieval villages, he might have imagined himself as Heinrich I, a noble peasant king, a man of the earth, a man of the purist Aryan blood, riding through the villages and lanes of his domain on a mighty warhorse.
While not exactly mighty, the electoral success of the National Socialist and Völkisch parties in the election May 1924 election was significant. The NSFB alone won thirty-two seats in the Reichstag, the national parliament. This victory greatly buoyed the spirits of the closet Nazis. Having failed six months earlier to overthrow the German government, they now had “former” members seated in the Reichstag, as well as the Bavarian state legislature. Among the newly elected officials were General Erich Ludendorff and Ernst Röhm.
Adolf Hitler walked out of Landsberg prison on December 20, 1924. The following day, a New York Times headline read “Hitler Tamed By Prison,” and the corresponding report explained that he had abandoned politics. Two months later, on February 27, 1925, the NSDA
P was reconstituted, and Hitler resumed the post of Führer. The NSFB and some other smaller, like-minded parties happily folded themselves into the new NSDAP. Other National Socialist parties continued to exist independently of the NSDAP, mainly in northern Germany.
Like the New York Times, the conventional wisdom in Germany also optimistically held that Hitler’s political career was over. It was hard to imagine that he could make a comeback, but he was determined to continue his rise to power all the way to the top. He renounced, at least for the near term, the sort of violence that had gotten him in trouble. To put a more civil face on the party, he forbade the SA from engaging in street fights with communists and other factions. He had learned an important political lesson. What he had failed to do in the street, he would now do by ballot box, smoke-filled room, and the sheer magnetism of his remarkable “hocus-pocus” charisma.
Given a job within the party, Himmler now found himself back in Landshut, staring up at thirteenth-century Burg Trusnitz, the stone edifice of his youth, and drawing a salary from the NSDAP. His job in 1925, as it had been the year before, was to function as a community organizer in the rural heartland of the Völkisch dream. Before long, the slender young man on the motorcycle was named as deputy regional NSDAP leader for Upper Bavaria and Swabia.
Despite having a rising career within the NSDAP hierarchy, he had decided to make a life for himself in the countryside. While rambling beneath the oaks and chestnut trees, traveling from village to village, Himmler became so enthralled with getting back to the earth that he decided he would buy a farm.
It was also during this time that Himmler met the blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman he would marry. There are at least two versions of the story. Heinz Höhne, writing in The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, tells that Himmler met her in Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria, in 1926 when he dashed into a hotel lobby to get out of the rain. Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fränkel, in their biography Heinrich Himmler: The Sinister Life of the Head of the SS and Gestapo, say that he met her on a visit to Berlin in 1927. They tell that she was Polish, and that her name was Margarete Concerzowo. On the other hand, Höhne cites a 1966 interview he did with a relative who wished to remain anonymous. From this interview, Höhne learned that Himmler’s wife’s maiden name was Margarete Boden, although she had previously been married to man named Siegroth. Höhne’s source said that she was the daughter of a German landowner in Goncarzewo (a.k.a., Goncarzewy), then in West Prussia, now in Poland. In either case, she was a trained nurse, had an interest in homeopathy and folk remedies, and operated a small clinic or nursing home in Berlin.