In the tense standoff in the beer hall’s side room, Hitler now became more menacing. “Each of us must accept his assigned role,” he growled, waving his pistol. “Otherwise he has no right to live. You must fight with me, win with me or die with me. If things go wrong, I have four bullets in my pistol: three for my collaborators, if you desert me, and the last one for myself.” Hitler suddenly lifted the Browning to his own head.
Kahr, who had been silent since the putsch began, seething with “disgust and hatred,” finally spoke up: “You can arrest me, you can have me shot, you can shoot me yourself. Dying or not dying is unimportant.”
Hitler was stuck. Ten minutes had passed, and the triumvirate was not playing the game he had planned. Ludendorff, his trump card, had not yet arrived (Hitler had sent Scheubner-Richter to pick him up). Hitler’s threats of violence, even suicide, as well as his appeals to patriotism—none of these had moved the triumvirate to join Hitler’s adventure. The impetuous putschist was left with only one weapon, but it was his strongest: his voice.
Leaving the triumvirate under guard—the three men were not allowed to converse with one another—Hitler returned to the raucous main hall, where the Bürgerbräukeller beer maids were still busily delivering one-liter mugs to the tables. More shouts of “Cowboy tactics!” “Mexico!” and “South America!” Again, Hitler silenced the crowd with a pistol shot.
Now Hitler was on his home turf. At a beer hall podium, with an audience spread before him like a carpet, Hitler shifted into gear. In his usual evangelical style, he told the crowd of his plans for the new government led by the men from Bavaria. The time had come, he said, “to march on that godless Babel called Berlin. We must use all of Bavaria’s power… to save the German people.” Exactly five years earlier, Hitler noted, Germany had suffered the “greatest disgrace” when the 1918 revolution was proclaimed. “Today that disgrace comes to an end!”9 Already, the assemblage that had been jeering was beginning to cheer—loudly (the Münchener Zeitung called it stürmischer Beifall, “stormy applause”). “In the other room, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser are wrestling hard with their decision,” said Hitler. “I ask you now: Are you in agreement with my proposed solution to the German question? You can see that we are not driven by selfish motives or personal gain, but only by the battle for the fatherland in the eleventh hour.” More stürmischer Beifall.
Finally, Hitler added an appeal to local sensibilities: “In a free Germany, there is also room for an autonomous Bavaria. One thing I can say to you: either the German revolution begins tonight or we will all be dead by dawn!”10
The crowd went wild. In the space of a few minutes, Hitler’s rhetoric had won the approval of much of the Munich establishment, including those who only moments before had dismissed him as a half-baked caudillo. “It was an oratorical masterpiece,” wrote historian Karl Alexander von Müller, who was present. “He swung the temper of the crowd with just a few sentences. It was like turning a glove inside out. Hitler left the hall with the total endorsement of the gathering to tell Kahr that if he joined Hitler’s coup, he would have everyone behind him.”11
As if on cue—he had arrived late on purpose—Ludendorff, the Lion of Tannenberg and Liège, entered the hall. Shouts of Achtung! (“Attention!”) and Heil! (“Hail!”) rose from the crowd. Though dressed in civilian clothes, the upright general was unmistakable and, through his appearance alone, commanded men to their feet. As Ludendorff passed to the side room, it was as though the imprimatur of a righteous Germany with an honorable past had been stamped on the proceedings.
Hitler followed the general into the side room. Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser heard the cheering; they knew the temper of the crowd. Still, they hesitated. Ludendorff addressed the three men: “Gentlemen, I am just as surprised as you are by what has happened.”12 That was probably not true, but Ludendorff obviously felt confronted with new facts on the ground. “What’s done is done,” he said. “The issue is the fatherland and the great völkisch cause. I can only advise you to join with us in this undertaking.”
Looking directly at his fellow German general, Ludendorff said: “Okay, Lossow, let’s do it.” Lossow apparently felt bound to take orders from Germany’s greatest living soldier. With tears in his eyes, Lossow clicked his heels and said: “Your Excellency’s wish is my command.”13 The men shook hands. Seisser, a mere colonel, had no choice left. He, too, shook Ludendorff’s hand, a classic silent agreement.
Only Kahr held out. Hitler pressed: “The deed is done. There is no going back. This is an historic moment.” The crowd outside would “carry you on their shoulders,”14 Hitler told Kahr. Finally, the equivocating commissioner general found a way to take Hitler’s assignment of Bavarian regent: “Gentlemen, in the end we are all monarchists. I’ll accept the job [of leading Bavaria] as a placeholder for the [deposed but possibly returning] king.”
Hitler, whose mood and appearance had gone from agitated revolutionary to delighted schoolboy, insisted that the men carry their newfound unity onto the public stage. As he returned to the main hall, his face “was beaming,” said one observer. Hitler had clearly won the first round.
But victory wasn’t enough. Hitler needed to set his actions in a historical context to limn their appeal and justify their meaning in a larger time frame. Speaking to the crowd, Hitler said: “Tonight I want to fulfill the promise I made to myself five years ago today as I lay, blinded and crippled, in a military hospital—never to rest, never to give up until the criminals of November [1918] were toppled and the German people had risen again on the ruins of today’s troubled Germany, with power, greatness, freedom, and joy. Amen!”
Hitler’s words were greeted again by stormy applause, even though they were a perfect example of Hitler’s rewriting of history. He was never crippled by the gas attack that temporarily blinded him, and he never again made such a claim. And most historians doubt his melodramatic story about having sworn to reverse the revolution right after it happened. More likely he was presenting a myth he’d created about himself. But no one in the Bürgerbräukeller knew that.
Ludendorff added his share of sentimentality, claiming to be “deeply touched by this momentous event” and ready to serve again. “Today it’s about the highest possible stakes (Es geht heute um das Ganze).… This hour is a turning point in German history.”15 Ludendorff later said that he was in the grip of “barely contained inner excitement.”
The other men spoke briefly but with seeming sincerity, pledging themselves to the new cause. Gazing deeply into one another’s eyes, they all exchanged what appeared to be heartfelt handshakes. Obviously moved, Hitler placed his left hand on their joined right hands; some observers compared it to the historic hands-atop-hands “Rütli oath” that formed the Swiss confederation in the sixteenth century. Tears were shed on the stage and in the crowd. Finally, the entire assemblage burst into a robust rendition of the “Song of Germany”—“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” According to historian Müller, many people were “so choked up that they couldn’t sing at all.”
But the final uplifting scene of nationalist fervor and comradely unity masked brutal aspects of Hitler’s putsch that were unfolding in the Bürgerbräukeller and elsewhere. Göring’s prediction of widespread arrests, with the underlying threat of targeted assassinations, was becoming reality. Now that the performance was over, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser were escorted back to the side room under guard. The crowd was free to leave—except for certain people. Storm Troopers and other Kampfbunders began pulling people out of the Bürgerbräukeller crowd as Rudolf Hess read out their names from a list he and Hitler had drawn up. The surprised captives were hustled off under guard to an upstairs holding room, where they became hostages with no inkling of their fates. These included members of the Bavarian government and legislature, even Governor Eugen von Knilling—all of them invited guests to Kahr’s speech. They were now theoretically out of their jobs; their administration had been deposed. In some cases, as with the representative o
f the Bavarian royal house, a sly game of courtliness was played until it became obvious that the aristocrat had become a hostage. The hostages were transported to the suburban villa of conservative publisher Julius Lehmann, a gilded cage.
In other cases, especially involving Jews, courtliness was replaced by nastiness and rough treatment. Ludwig Wasserman, the factory owner, was pulled out of the crowd and placed in isolation in a small room—with the warning that if he tried to flee, “he would be shot.” Two Nazis told him he would be hanged the next morning in front of city hall on Marienplatz, Munich’s central square.16 Other Jews were dragged from their homes in Bogenhausen, a prosperous neighborhood thought to be home to many Jews. The Nazis and Kampfbunders picked out Jewish-sounding names from a telephone book, or off the nameplates on house doors, breaking in, firing shots into ceilings, and terrorizing the inhabitants. More than twenty Jews were eventually held hostage at the Bürgerbräukeller, including one seventy-four-year-old gentleman who was brought in with his daughters. One Nazi suggested executing them all immediately, but Göring told him: “We don’t have the right to shoot them yet.”
Across the Isar River, in the heart of old Munich, another scene of pillage and destruction was unfolding at the offices of the Münchener Post, the Social Democratic newspaper that vocally and often criticized Hitler and his Nazis. With Social Democratic politician Erhard Auer as a key editor, the Münchener Post was one of the few publications that had, early on, spotted Hitler’s views and extremism for the danger they represented. The Post consistently denounced the message, the messenger, and his methods. To Hitler, the Münchener Post was a “poison kitchen” that had to be eliminated at the first opportunity—and tonight the opportunity had come. Sent by Göring and led by Storm Trooper Josef Berchtold, the Hitler Shock Troops smashed every window, trashed every desk, destroyed or stole every typewriter, and wrecked the presses and typesetting equipment of the Post in an orgy of anger and destruction. They smashed a revered symbol of the newspaper’s philosophical origins, a bust of August Bebel, one of the 1869 founders of the Social Democratic Party. Scheubner-Richter sent law student Hermann Fobke to Auer’s office on the third floor. “There’s an entire file cabinet full of papers here!” Fobke gleefully reported. Gathering up stacks of personal and political documents, Fobke proudly delivered them to Hitler in the Bürgerbräukeller.17
Destroying the newspaper was not enough. The Nazi wrecking crew also forced its way into Auer’s apartment in Munich; but the editor had heard of an impending putsch and fled. Deprived of their target, the housebreakers (with Hitler’s driver, Emil Maurice, in the lead) manhandled Auer’s wife, frightened his two daughters, and led away his son-in-law.18
From his new command post in the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler was trying to oversee his putsch’s planned operations around town. News had arrived of at least one successful operation. After receiving the code phrase, “baby safely delivered,” Röhm had departed the Löwenbräukeller and marched his three hundred men to the Reichswehr district headquarters. Located on the grand boulevard of the Ludwigstrasse, right next to the Bavarian State Library, this was General Lossow’s command post. At the head of the march, carrying the banner of the Reichskriegsflagge, strode a new member of Röhm’s detachment, a bespectacled and expressionless young man named Heinrich Himmler. A trained agronomist, Himmler was fanatically attached to Röhm and, in time, would feel the same way about Hitler (Himmler would become chief of the SS during the Third Reich and a chief perpetrator of the Holocaust). At the Reichswehr district headquarters, Röhm’s men quickly convinced General Lossow’s thin guard that they had valid orders to take over the building. Stringing barbed wire around the edifice, they soon had full control of a strategic installation at a key location.
Things were not going so well elsewhere. Neutralizing Lossow’s Reichswehr command post was not the same as capturing and converting the actual arms and troops of the Reichswehr in Munich. These were chiefly located in the barracks of the First Battalion, Nineteenth Infantry, and the Engineers’ Barracks on the northwest edge of the city. But when Kampfbunders arrived and tried, like Röhm’s men, to talk their way into control of the barracks, they were rebuffed by sentries who said they had their own orders to obey. Their steadfastness proved crucial to reversing the tide of the putsch. When word of this unexpected opposition arrived at the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler impulsively decided to solve the problem himself. Just as he had earlier turned the resistance of the crowd at the Bürgerbräukeller “inside out like a glove,” he believed he could, with his always persuasive rhetoric, talk the skeptical Reichswehr troops into his arms. He left his command post for the trip across town to the barracks. Fatefully, he left Ludendorff in charge of his still-captive “co-conspirators,” Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser.
It was the wrong move. Ludendorff respected Hitler’s new pawns as fellow officers and gentlemen (even Kahr had been commissioned during World War I). A lifelong military man (he began cadet academy as a teenager), Ludendorff was schooled in the Prussian rules of duty and honor, not the sordid wiles of hardball politics. Even in the völkisch movement, where he had been agitating for several years, Ludendorff served more as a father figure than as an on-the-ground tactician. That the political game was played with ever-shifting rules and alliances of convenience was foreign to him. When Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser asked for their freedom—giving their words of honor that they needed to carry out their duties as members of the new government—the old general smelled nary a rat. He set the hostages loose.
Meanwhile, other Storm Troopers and Kampfbund units were carrying out orders from above. One company marched, puzzled, to a church attached to a monastery on St. Anna Square. Then the troops understood: man after man was coming out of the monastery’s cellar door carrying a carbine. After a while, they formed a relay line, handing the weapons up to men on trucks. In all, more than three thousand rifles were retrieved from the underground vaults of the monastery, all illegally stashed there by Bavarian militias. Another weapons cache was opened near the university. In the basement of a fraternity house called Palatia, more than one hundred rifles were retrieved by Storm Troopers; they had been hidden there a week earlier by Röhm, nicknamed the “machine-gun king” for his skill at procuring and caching weapons.19
Yet for all their preparations, the ill-coordinated putschist units were unable to capture any more ground. Although they outnumbered the government forces—the putschists had roughly four thousand armed men while the Reichswehr and state police combat units numbered only twenty-six hundred—Hitler’s troops did not successfully mount another attack.20 Even Röhm’s attempt to seize Kahr’s administrative headquarters a few blocks from the military command post had met with stiff resistance; he withdrew without firing a shot. Only the police headquarters was successfully commandeered for a while by the former police chief and his deputy, now part of the putsch. But in less than two hours, the police building flipped back into the hands of the constituted authorities, who arrested the putschists.
Hitler had arrived at the infantry and engineers’ barracks. But his vaunted persuasive powers had finally met their limit. Barracks guards refused him admission. Hitler admitted defeat and left. When he returned to the Bürgerbräukeller, he was appalled to learn that Ludendorff had let his hostages go on their words of honor. Hitler exploded. He began a stream of abuse that was abruptly cut short by the general. “I forbid anyone to challenge in my presence the word of honor of a German officer.”
The worm had turned, and Hitler knew it. The freed hostages soon renounced their very public and—to everyone who was there—apparently very sincere statements of collaboration with Hitler’s putsch. It took the slow-footed Kahr longer than the other two to recant, and he made a few odd moves that left his staff wondering which side he was on. Lossow’s turning of his coat back to its original side was hastened by the confrontational question of one of his top officers as he walked into the Infantry Barracks: “Well, General, that scene in the Bü
rgerbräukeller, that was all just a bluff—right?” Lossow knew his answer: of course, it was all Komödie spielen—just playing along. Lossow began sending orders for Reichswehr units around Bavaria to march on Munich. The battle against Hitler’s putsch had begun.
Near midnight, the upheaval in Munich was reverberating in the outside world, starting in Berlin. General Seeckt had been immediately notified of the coup and reacted swiftly, mobilizing troops around Berlin. He was prepared to attack Bavaria if necessary, finally inaugurating the civil war many had feared. Other countries took note as well. Already, the New York Times was preparing a banner headline across its entire front page: “Bavaria in Revolt, Proclaims Ludendorff Dictator; Its Monarchist Forces Reported Marching on Berlin; Capital Cries Treason and Masses Troops for Defense.” The headline was full of errors, and notably left out Hitler, but captured the gravity of the situation. Benito Mussolini’s envoy to Munich even paid a call on Kahr before he switched his allegiance for the second time, congratulating him on the coup and the anticipated march on Berlin.
There was also the battle of the wall posters. In the lively print age, before the arrival of radio for the general public, every European city had a slew of newspapers—Munich had more than ten—and a daily stream of posters on public walls and special street columns where news and events were announced. Fast-printed wall placards were a key means of communication, especially between government and citizenry. For this part of the battle, the Hitler putsch had been prepared. The Nazis and Kampfbunders let loose with a quick broadside designed to convince Munichers that a new era had dawned. “Proclamation!” read the headline in huge black letters. “The government of the November criminals in Berlin is deposed. A provisional government has been formed.” This straightforward statement of regime change was anemic, however, compared to other bloodcurdling announcements plastered around town by the putschists. One proclaimed a new “National Tribunal” as the highest court in the land. The court would pass sentence on unspecified “crimes against the nation or the state.” Only two verdicts were possible: guilty or innocent. “Innocence means freedom, guilt means death,” read the statement. “Sentences are to be carried out within three hours. There is no appeal.”21 But even three hours was too long to wait for Hitler and his henchmen to apply their form of justice to the “villains of November 1918.” A decree was prepared that named top government officials, including President Ebert and former chancellor Scheidemann, declaring them “outlaws” (vogelfrei) who could be shot on sight. “Every German… has the duty to deliver them dead or alive to the national government,” stated the decree.22
1924: The Year that Made Hitler Page 8