1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  To accomplish regime change in Berlin, Kahr told the group assembled in his office, there were two choices: the “normal path” and the “abnormal path.” The normal path ran through Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, allowing President Ebert to declare an emergency and create a directorate. This seemed unlikely, especially in view of Seisser’s unsuccessful overtures to General von Seeckt. “Therefore, the abnormal path is prepared,” continued Kahr, meaning an armed takeover: “the preliminaries are done.” Then, sounding like the man of eternal preparations that Göring called him, Kahr added: “But action can be taken only according to a unified and meticulously worked-out plan.” And such a plan had to be led by Kahr himself. “Only I will give the order to begin,” he said. The commissioner hinted that it might happen within two weeks.25

  Lossow added, “The Bavaria Division is ready.”26

  All these details reached Hitler’s ears within hours. Finally, he realized, Kahr seemed serious about acting—but not yet quite ready to losschlagen. Still, Hitler was beginning to feel outflanked. Kahr seemed to be trying to neutralize him into inaction by waiting. Meeting that evening with Scheubner-Richter and Theodor von der Pfordten, Hitler told the men their moment had come. He had made his decision: after four years of dreaming about revolution, they were finally going to get one, and it would carry them to the pinnacle of power.

  First, they would seize power in Munich. By usurping the Bavarian instruments of control—the government, the military, and the Bavarian State Police—Hitler could establish an unassailable power base in Bavaria. He would then proclaim a new national government and march to the German capital. Modeled on Napoleon’s 1815 trek from the Isle of Elba to Paris, Hitler’s march would trigger a “national uprising,” he believed. But the undertaking could succeed militarily, Hitler knew, only if he forced Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser into his corner. Hitler intended to capture the Bavarian triumvirate at gunpoint and make them his co-conspirators, pushing them to finally do what they had been saying they would do: march on Berlin. He wanted to “help them make the leap,” as he put it. Colonel Kriebel described it as “giving them a little push into the water.” The plan was bold, complicated, oddly inspired—and highly risky. The penalty for failure could be death.

  Following his meeting with Scheubner-Richter and von der Pfordten, Hitler planned his storming of the barricades for the coming weekend, November 10 and 11. “All the people in the administration are then away from their offices and the police are only at half strength. That is the time to strike,” Hitler told Hanfstaengl.27 Colonel Kriebel suggested announcing night exercises by Kampfbund forces on Saturday, with troops then marching into the city on Sunday morning, their bands playing—all common enough occurrences in Munich. Those smartly marching troops would then turn into coup makers, seizing key government buildings, police stations, and communication centers. But as Hitler and other Kampfbunders discussed this plan on Wednesday morning, November 7, news arrived that dramatically altered the timetable, shifted the order of battle, and may have determined the outcome of events. Hitler learned that Commissioner Kahr would be making a speech on the following night, Thursday, in the Bürgerbräukeller, a large beer hall where Hitler had often spoken. Kahr was hardly a rabble-rouser, but beer halls were the venues of choice in 1920s Munich, as much public meeting places as drinking and eating establishments. Though “few other places are so democratic” as a Munich beer hall, wrote one American visitor in 1909,28 the capacious watering holes could of course become scenes of nasty brawls among political factions. Many a skull had been cracked with a flung beer stein. Drinking, like 1920s politics in Bavaria, was a contact sport. For the last few years, Hitler had been cutting his teeth on just such confrontations. But no fireworks were to be expected on this Thursday night.

  Organized by a nationalistic Munich businessman to shore up support for Kahr, the meeting was meant to give the new commissioner a chance to rail against the Bolshevist threat while explaining his economic program, which had so far failed to bring relief to Bavaria.29 Even the prices of beer and bread—the two economic issues that the government could directly influence and that were uppermost in Bavarians’ minds—were out of control.30 Last-minute invitations to Kahr’s speech were delivered by hand to all the Munich elite: the business community, leading politicians, city officials and parliamentarians, academics, the top newspaper editors. Bavarian governor Eugen von Knilling, who supported giving his executive powers to Kahr, was coming. So were Justice Minister Franz Gürtner, Baron von Berchem, and Count Soden, a representative of the deposed, but still widely respected, Wittelsbach royal house of Bavaria. Among the business elite, of course, were Jews like Ludwig Wasserman, a factory owner. The Bavarian Industrialists Association sent notices to its members with a comment: “This gathering is intended to be a historically significant moment.”31 The meeting would feature the establishment talking to the establishment.

  Best of all, Hitler was told, both General Lossow and Colonel Seisser would be present. Under one roof, in one hall, at one time—the triumvirate would be there for the grabbing. He could finally act on a line he’d often said to Hanfstaengl: “We have to compromise people into joining our cause.”32 The Bürgerbräukeller was like a theater waiting for a play, and Hitler was going to be its star. On Wednesday morning, he moved the putsch up from the weekend to the very next day, Thursday, November 8. He had to move fast.

  For two days, November 7 and 8, Hitler and his closest confederates were in a whirl of secret preparations. They held war councils and dashed around Munich. The Kampfbund’s assorted armed units, including many outside Munich, needed to be put on alert without knowing what for. Hitler insisted, for good reason, on tight secrecy; any leak of his putsch plans could foil the plot. Only a handful of fellow schemers were drawn into the circle of secrecy. One of those was Röhm, the former World War I army captain (and future head of the Storm Troopers), who headed the Reichskriegsflagge paramilitary. Röhm was told to invite his three hundred men to a “comradely evening” of drinking and singing at the cavernous Löwenbräukeller on the Stiglmaierplatz and await a signal from Hitler’s men in the Bürgerbräukeller. If the initial putsch succeeded, the code words for the night would be: “Glücklich entbunden” (a charming but ambiguous phrase meaning “happily relieved” or “baby successfully delivered”). Röhm’s beery social evening would then turn into an attack on key buildings in Munich.

  Even as he was giving these orders, Hitler did not know that General Lossow was making his own preparations for the possibility of an uprising in the coming days. On November 7, Lossow ordered all the Reichswehr unit commanders in Bavaria to Munich, informing them that “a Hitler-Ludendorff Reich dictatorship” was brewing and that their troops should be put on highest alert. Lossow told the commanders he had let Hitler know that if he prematurely staged a putsch, “he would have the Bavarian Reichswehr against him.” He added: “We’re not going to be part of this craziness.”33

  While Lossow was girding his forces for trouble, however, others were paving the way for Hitler’s success. One of the key military institutions in Munich was the Reichswehr’s Infantry School—the training academy for future infantry officers. A hulking, four-story edifice with its own drilling grounds in the Blutenburgstrasse, not far from the Löwenbräukeller, the Infantry School had about five hundred cadets. The place was a hotbed of youthful enthusiasm, nationalist sentiment, and Nazi leanings. Speakers like Ludendorff and Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, the former Kapp putschist and Organisation Consul leader, had lured the cadets toward the völkisch movement. In one speech, Ludendorff had called Hitler a “fabulous person.”34 One Infantry School officer, Lieutenant Gerhard Rossbach, was secretly a member of the Nazi Party and did not hesitate to spread his beliefs through the school’s humming grapevine.35 Rossbach’s spadework would pay off on the night of the putsch.

  On November 8, the day of the planned putsch, Hitler moved through Munich trying to make preparations without making noise. Von der
Pfordten had worked out a detailed plan for takeover of Munich’s main telephone exchange—“six men enter the Residenzstrasse door, take the stairs to the right, arrest Director Wild on the second floor.”36 At midday, Hitler showed up at the cramped offices of the Völkischer Beobachter and told its editor, Rosenberg, the disorganized Baltic German, what was up. “Tonight we strike,” he said. Hanfstaengl was there, too. Hitler told both men to meet him at eight o’clock in the evening at the Bürgerbräukeller—“and don’t forget to bring your pistols.”

  Hitler made a quick visit to Hermann Esser, the slightly unsavory member of Hitler’s inner clique whose bullying style alienated many, though Hitler found it useful. Esser lay sick with jaundice, but Hitler persuaded him to rise from his bed. “I need you tonight,” he insisted. Esser, the good soldier, pulled himself up and hurried to join Röhm at the Löwenbräukeller.

  As evening fell, some of Munich’s blue-uniformed city policemen—not to be confused with the green-uniformed military-style Bavarian State Police—noticed armed men, some in steel helmets, assembling in company-sized units on small squares near the Isar Gate, not far from the Bürgerbräukeller. Some were Nazi Storm Troopers. One Twelfth District officer, Georg Albang, overheard a passing bicyclist say: “You guys know something? Tonight it’s happening!” By six o’clock, with the evening chill setting in, Officer Anton Zauner had seen seventy men in mixed uniforms, many carrying bayonets or short daggers, marching across the Maximilian Bridge in the general direction of the Bürgerbräukeller. Officer Joseph Bömerl, dressed in street clothes, noticed gatherings of paramilitaries on the Gärtnerplatz and at the Nazi offices in the Corneliusstrasse. Twice he heard someone say, “Tonight the balloon goes up!”37 Clearly Hitler’s obsessive secrecy had sprung leaks; the paramilitaries knew why they were assembling.

  With its formidable intelligence operation, the Munich City Police always maintained a tight watch on just such activities; they received detailed overnight reports on every significant political meeting in town, sometimes several per night. Even the street cops were trained to report suspicious activity. But on this of all nights their system failed: when Officer Bömerl phoned the political division at police headquarters at 6:45 p.m., he was told: “Don’t worry. The Nazis are invited to that big meeting [at the Bürgerbräukeller]. There’s probably nothing to these rumors that something is going to happen tonight.”38 Forewarned, the police—who had fended off unfounded putsch rumors for years—took no action.39 This time, however, the sky really was about to fall.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Putsch

  “I will never let those swine take me. I will shoot myself first.”

  —ADOLF HITLER, NOVEMBER 11, 1923

  With his stumpy build and bureaucratic style, Gustav Ritter von Kahr was anything but charismatic; certainly, he was no crowd-pleaser. The last thing Kahr was expected to do was draw a large turnout to a beer hall.

  But in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of 1923, people in Munich, like everywhere in Germany, were desperate for a ray of hope. So many people showed up for Kahr’s appearance on this cold and soon-to-be-snowy November night that they could not all fit into the Bürgerbräukeller. The plainspoken Kahr had drawn three thousand people to hear a hastily organized speech in defense of his new regime. Even Hitler was surprised.

  When the Nazi leader arrived in a red Mercedes at the beer hall’s gates at 8:30 p.m., he could barely get inside. A contingent of police had closed the doors, explaining to a clamoring crowd in the street that the hall was filled to bursting. “It was so tight that you couldn’t have fallen over,” remarked one man standing near the podium.1

  At the dais, Commissioner Kahr was droning away about “state authority” and the “nationalist spirit” and “the will to act.”2 The distinguished audience, their beer steins filled, listened in polite silence.

  Suddenly, the doors to the capacious hall flew open. A platoon of uniformed men pushed their way inside, their military gear clanking. At their head was Hitler, his eyes flashing and his face “wildly distorted” with excitement. Wearing a frock coat pinned with his two World War I Iron Cross medals, he looked like, depending on whom you asked, an operatic hero or a “forlorn little waiter,” as one observer put it. Turning to his bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, Hitler said, “Make sure I don’t get shot in the back.”3

  The crowd was so thick, Hitler recalled, that he had to “use my fists and elbows to clear my path” to the podium. Commissioner Kahr, interrupted in mid-sentence, stood stock-still, his face a mask of indignation. The room erupted in confusion and outrage.

  “Quiet!” shouted Hitler. “Silence!” The room roared.

  Jumping onto a chair, Hitler raised his Browning pistol and fired a single shot into the twenty-five-foot-high coffered ceiling. “Silence!” he shouted again. “The national revolution has begun.”

  Now “dead silence reigned,” said one man present. Hitler had the meeting’s attention. His pistol still held aloft, he warned: “The building is surrounded by six hundred heavily armed men! No one is allowed to leave. If you don’t stay calm, I will have a machine gun placed in the balcony!” Many in the audience thought they had a madman in their midst.

  As Hitler spoke, a platoon-strength unit led by Hermann Göring had occupied the main entrance with a heavy machine gun. They blocked all the side doors. Through the windows to the beer garden, people could see steel-helmeted men carrying carbines. Hitler had gotten the drop on three thousand of Munich’s finest, turning a dignified if boring event into a massive hostage-taking. Kahr was now “trembling and pale.”4

  From atop his chair, Hitler continued to shout: “The Bavarian government is deposed. The national government is deposed. A provisional government is being formed. The Reichswehr and Bavarian State Police barracks are occupied. Reichswehr and police units are marching here under the swastika flag.”5

  Much of what Hitler said was exaggerated (he did not have six hundred men, but perhaps half that many), untrue (the Reichswehr and Bavarian State Police barracks were not occupied), or only aspirational (Hitler hoped to create a new government in the next hour). But, like so much Hitler would do in his political career, he painted the dream first, then tried to fill in the facts.

  Besides Kahr, the two most important men in the room were those in uniform, General Lossow and Colonel Seisser. Seated near the podium, they looked on in disbelief and fury, unable to defend themselves or anyone else. Lossow’s first thought when he heard commotion at the door was that a leftist coup must be in the making. “It never occurred to me that men of nationalist politics would attack a gathering of nationalists,” said Lossow. “I hadn’t even brought a sidearm.”

  As Hitler approached the podium, a police officer, Major Hunglinger, moved into his path, his hand in his pocket. But the fiery-eyed Hitler was quicker; he lifted his pistol to the major’s head and growled: “Take your hand out of your pocket.” The major’s hand came out empty.6

  Commissioner Kahr stood like a statue at the podium, his interrupted speech still in his hand, his face betraying nothing. Hitler gruffly addressed the triumvirate: “Gentlemen, I must ask you to come with me to the side room. I guarantee your safety. It will take only ten minutes.” At close range, Lossow noticed that Hitler seemed carried away, in “a state of ecstasy.” As Hitler marched the three men through a gauntlet of Storm Troopers toward the Bürgerbräukeller’s side room, Lossow whispered to Kahr and Seisser: “Play along!” The words in German are Komödie spielen—“playact,” “make theater,” or “create comedy.” What was about to happen was part comedy, part tragedy.

  As Hitler herded the three men into the side room, Göring, the Storm Trooper commander, took over the main room. Shouts of disgust and derision rose again from the restless crowd: “Theater!” “Mexico!” “South America!” Hitler was being ridiculed as a tinpot insurrectionist. Göring stopped the shouting with another pistol shot into the high ceiling. Assuring the assembled dignitaries that the Nazis’ actions were not an a
ttack on Kahr but the beginning of a “national uprising,” Göring asked the audience to be patient for a while.7

  “And, besides, what are you worried about? You’ve got your beer,” he said.

  In the Bürgerbräukeller’s side room, Hitler faced the thorniest part of his improbable undertaking: converting his three chief hostages into his three closest collaborators. Hitler seemed still in a kind of rapture, according to those present. “He was covered with sweat,” said the general. It was true: when Hitler made speeches, holding forth for two or three hours at a time, he always ended up soaked in sweat.8 Tonight, in the midst of the greatest gamble of his political life, the putsch leader was drenched in a matter of minutes.

  Despite Göring’s anodyne assurance that Kahr was not under attack, Hitler was threatening his three hostages. “Nobody leaves the room alive without my permission,” he said. Calling Bavaria “the springboard for the Reich government,” Hitler told the men their new roles: General Lossow would become Germany’s new defense minister, Colonel Seisser the head of the new “national police,” and Commissioner Kahr the chief regent of Bavaria. Hitler would assume “political leadership,” he added, without specifying a job. To lead a new “national army” with the Storm Troopers and other paramilitaries at its core, Hitler had chosen General Ludendorff. As the former hero of World War I—he won the great battles of Liège in Belgium and Tannenberg in East Prussia that knocked Russia out of the war—Ludendorff was still a demigod to many Germans. He was also the chief promoter of the infamous stab-in-the-back legend, disingenuously claiming that Germany’s army had been near victory in 1918 when it was betrayed from behind by craven civilians, especially Socialists and Jews. Ludendorff’s name and military heroism were the perfect cover for Hitler’s chief biographical weaknesses: he was uneducated and he had never achieved noncommissioned officer’s rank, despite two medals for bravery. But, as the putsch unfolded, Ludendorff was not yet at the Bürgerbräukeller.