In Europe

by Geert Mak

  In its forecasts, too, the Münchener Post is highly revealing. As early as 9 December, 1931, the paper succeeded in getting hold of a secret plan that was circulating among the SA top brass, in which the measures actually taken later against the Jews are summed up with astonishing accuracy, up to and including vague plans for a ‘definitive Endlösung’: ‘labour details’ in swampy areas, whereby ‘the SS in particular can play a supervisory role’.

  One month later one reads of the first plans for the sterilisation campaign. On 12 January, 1932, the paper reports a speech by a Dr Stammberg from Chemnitz, ‘Racial Hygiene in the Third Reich’, in which he proposes a scoring system. The severely handicapped, prostitutes and professional burglars receive minus one hundred points, persons belonging to a non-European race receive minus twenty-five and the non-intelligent are given a minus six. Anyone receiving more than twenty-five minus points falls within the category of ‘persons with undesirable progeny’.

  On 8 April, 1932, the Post reveals in considerable detail the Nazis’ plans for what they will do when they come to power: the local SA units will be given ‘free rein for a full twenty-four hours’ to round up their known opponents and ‘rid themselves of them’.

  The most fascinating thing about the Post was and is its editorial premise: the editors considered the Nazis not only a political phenomenon, but above all a subject for their crime reporting.

  In his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw quotes top-ranking Nazi Hans Frank, who, as a twenty-year-old boy, went to hear Hitler speak in 1920. He saw a man in a threadbare blue suit and a rather loosely knotted tie, with flashing blue eyes and slicked-back hair, a plain speaker. At that point Adolf Hitler had been in politics for less than six months, but the public – the middle class shoulder to shoulder with workers, soldiers and students – lapped up every word. ‘He expressed everything that concerned him and us most deeply.’ His speech on 13 August, 1920 – entitled ‘Why are we anti-Semites?’ – was interrupted 58 times by cheers from the crowd of 2,000. The next day, the Post's city page reported on ‘a new attraction that has recently added lustre to the meetings of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party … a young fellow reminiscent of Heinz Bothmer, who has been put forward with verve and vigour … a humble writer, as he calls himself’, a ‘zealous Mr Hitler’.

  In the years that followed, the pages of the Post gradually revealed a glimpse of a movement closely allied with criminal circles, and with everything that went along with that: intimidation, mishandling, blackmail, forgery, even murder. On 12 July, 1931, under the headline ‘This is Hitler's Rank and File’, the paper published a prison letter from a disappointed Nazi who said his former comrades included ‘burglars, pimps, purse snatchers, cheats, blackmailers, thugs and perjurers’. Shortly afterwards one reads about a young woman who worked in a refreshment bar and was forced into prostitution by members of the SA. 27 December, 1932: ‘Yuletide sullied by bloody SA vs SS melee in Anhalter Strasse Nazi clubhouse’. 29 December: ‘Hitler Youth is Forger’. And these are only random selections.

  Nowadays, the sinister birthplace of National Socialism is covered by a bare car park beside the Hilton Hotel on Rosenheimer Strasse, skilfully dynamited, demolished and smoothed over. This was the site of the famous Bürgerbräukeller, the giant beer hall where visitors ate and drank heavily, and where Adolf Hitler further honed his showman's talents. It was here, too, that he and General Ludendorff held their unsuccessful coup on 8 November, 1923. When the whole thing fizzled out, the beer hall claimed damages from this drunkards’ revolution: 143 broken beer mugs, 80 broken glasses, 98 stools, 148 pieces of missing cutlery, to say nothing of the bullet holes in the ceiling.

  It was in that same year that Hitler began moving in more cultured circles. He may have been a beer-hall orator, but he was also a fervent lover of Wagner. That helped him to quickly make friends with the rich young publisher Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengel, who introduced him into high society as early as 1922. One year later he met Siegfried and Winifred Wagner at Bayreuth, and became a welcome friend of the family. Two fashionable Munich ladies entered into an ongoing rivalry to befriend the upand-coming young Hitler. Helene Bechstein, mentioned earlier, invited him to all her receptions. She also bought him neat shoes and respectable evening dress. Elsa Bruckmann, a Romanian princess by birth, taught him not to put sugar in his wine and other useful rules of etiquette. Both of them helped to mould him and make him ready for the bigger world.

  Young Baldur von Schirach – later a prominent Nazi – saw how finally even his reserved, aristocratic father fell for Hitler's charms. Looking back on it, he could find only one explanation for this bewildering phenomenon: amid the prevailing mood of doom in the old German Empire, people from the upper reaches of society as well were desperately in search of a saviour. And Hitler, ‘like a sorcerer’, was able to forge together two concepts that had until then ‘been as irreconcilable as fire and water: nationalism and socialism’.

  The eternally nagging question about Munich remains: how in the world could this friendly southern city, this uncommonly pleasant town, this centre of the arts and good cheer, have been the birthplace of such a fanatical and destructive movement? Here, after all, was where the NSDAP was set up, it was here that Hitler discovered his own charismatic powers, here that the movement's first martyrs fell in 1923, and it was here that the 1938 peace conference was held.

  In the late nineteenth century, Munich, capital of the conservative kingdom of Bavaria, developed into a baroque city of refuge with broad boulevards and glorious palaces. It was a haven for the writers, artists and theatrical people who wanted to escape the confines of Berlin. The Schwabing district was a second Montmartre. There were more painters and sculptors working in Munich than in Vienna and Berlin: traditional artists, but also people like Franz Marc, Paul Klee and other avant-gardists involved in the almanac Der Blaue Reiter. It was no coincidence, therefore, that the twenty-four-year-old painter Adolf Hitler decided to move from Vienna to Schwabing in 1913. ‘Schwabing was a spiritual island in the great world, in Germany, mostly in Munich itself,’ wrote the Russian artist Vassily Kandinsky. From 1896 it served as the home base of the celebrated Simplicissimus, a satirical magazine with a red dog as its symbol, a publication full of jokes about emperor and church, as well as advertising pages with ‘power pills’ for men and detoxification cures ‘for alcohol, morphine, opium and cocaine’. After the magazine was banned, its circulation rose from 15,000 to 85,000 within a month.

  Less than twenty years later Munich had become the official seat of the Nazi party, the second capital of the Third Reich. But this same Munich was also the city of the White Rose, one of the rare resistance groups in Nazi Germany. It was in this town, in the midst of the war, that female students of the university booed the gauleiter of Bavaria when he called on them to leave school and bear children for the Führer. And in autumn 1939 it was in the Bürgerbräukeller, of all places, that the first attempt was made to assassinate Hitler, with a time bomb hidden in a cleverly hollowed-out pillar, the singular resistance of a cabinetmaker, Johann Georg Elser.

  Schwabing today is a pretty posh neighbourhood of broad streets, almost Parisian-looking apartment buildings and countless restaurants, shops, bookstores and art galleries. Striking features are the massive office and school buildings from the early nineteenth century, of a size rarely seen in such surroundings. These are clarion calls from the past: here we are and here we shall remain, we kings of Bavaria.

  With the exception of Amsterdam, Munich is the only major European city where even the mayor travels by bicycle. Bicycle paths have been built everywhere in recent years, and along them today a minority of the population bikes zealously, on professional-looking two-wheelers, at breathtaking speed. These Germans have embraced cycling in their own, thoroughgoing fashion. When one bicycles, then one Bicycles. Cycling here is a Deed, a Credo.

  My own bike is simply tied to the back of my van. It is a straightforward Amsterdam nag, an impl
ement full of dents and rust spots, a plain fellow amid the perfect racing machines of the believers. We feel a little out of place, both my bicycle and I.

  And so I thread my way carefully through Athens-on-the-Isar, as Munich was often called before the First World War, the cultural pleasure garden of Henrik Ibsen, Wagner and the Bavarian monarchs Ludwig II and Luitpold. Creaking loudly, I cycle through old archways, past graceful fountains, the pseudo-Roman national theatre and the taut, nineteenth-century Ludwigstrasse. Look, it's still there, the Bayerische Hof, the hotel where Mrs Bechstein taught Adolf Hitler how to handle oysters and artichokes. And look, that was his apartment here in Munich, on the second floor of Prinsregentenplatz 16, now home to just another genteel Munich family. And here, the street in Schwabing where he started out, filled today with the exotic odours of Chinese, Indian, Russian, Italian and Mexican restaurants, at Schleissheimer Strasse 34. The enormous plaque that once hung here is now concealed under a thick layer of mortar.

  Schwabing was an island, Kandinsky so aptly observed. Until well into the twentieth century it lent Munich a certain fame, but it remained an island. The staid citizens of Munich were disgusted by this neighbour-hood full of prostitutes, students and anarchists. The residents of Schwabing, in turn, looked down on the coarse Müncheners who lived only for a plummy marriage and three litres of beer a day. According to the Bavarian historian Georg Frans, that divided Munich can be traced back to the trauma of the middle class concerning the period from 1919 up through Kurt Eisner's short-lived People's Republic of Bavaria. The rise of the Nazis in Munich, he says, was a direct result of that bloody civil war. David Large, in his account of Hitler's Munich, goes a few steps further. He feels that Munich's oft-praised urban culture has always had an anti-cosmopolitan and anti-liberal side.

  In that sense, Munich resembled Vienna: beneath the harmony and good cheer lay a society deeply at odds with itself, marked by great tension between rich and poor. In the space of three decades from 1880–1910, Munich grew from a provincial town into a metropolis. The population doubled, the housing was as wretched as Vienna's, but the immigrants kept on coming. Jewish merchants, scientists and bankers set the tone in this new urban climate. It was here that Hermann Tietz, of Jewish origin, inaugurated his chain of department stores: the small shopkeepers were furious. Property prices rose: Jewish financiers were blamed. Prostitution increased: people claimed that Tietz drove his salesgirls to disrepute by underpaying them. The fashionable Staatsbürgerzeitung began complaining about ‘the alarming rise in our city's Jewish element’, and predicted ‘the decline of the best among Munich's merchants’. Munich's first anti-Semitic party was set up in 1891. Then came the war, and after that violence crept into local politics. Finally, the tatty rabble-rouser from the Bürgerbräukeller took over the town.

  Munich was built to please the eye and inspire thoughts of awe, and the Nazis knew that. From their Braunes Haus on Brienner Strasse they expanded their territory further and further. By 1940 an entire Nazi district had arisen adjacent to the centre of Munich, consisting of more than 50 buildings and providing work for more than 6,000 people. Grand plans were made for the future: the corner of Türkenstrasse was to be the site of, among other things, Hitler's monumental tomb.

  The Braunes Haus was bombed, then in 1945 demolished with explosives, all except its system of secret corridors and bunkers. A fair amount of the former Nazi district is still standing, however. It was in the Führerbau, a building on Cheisstrasse that seems on the inside to consist almost entirely of an incredibly huge ceremonial staircase, that the 1938 peace conference was held with Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini. Today it is a house full of song and runs on the grand piano, the Academy for Theatre and Music, but history still shines through in the form of the chic stretch of pavement once laid in front of it to honour the Führer. Across the street one can also still admire the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, a gallery of overbearing pillars, hasty ornamentation, all façade architecture with no hint of eternity. Of the two Pantheons built by the Nazis at the corner of Königsplatz, only the foundations remain, now overrun by bushes. The square itself has been divested of its granite slabs. Today, covered in a great deal of pacifist lawn, it has once again become the Athenian agora the Bavarian kings dreamed of for themselves. Everything here has been ploughed under and buried.

  Later on I cycle down monumental Ludwigstrasse to Professor-Huber-Platz, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz and the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität. The names speak for themselves. Here at the university is where it all converges: the pompous stairways, the pseudo-Roman statues beside them (in reality, two Bavarian kings in costume), the stupendous dome covering the hall, but also the wispy, innocent, desperate little pamphlets that the students Hans and Sophie Scholl let flutter down from the galleries here on 18 February, 1943.‘In the name of Germany's young people we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler's state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure that we have, out of which he has swindled us in the most miserable way.’

  They had spread tracts and left behind graffiti on earlier occasions as well: ‘Freedom’, ‘Down with Hitler’. That was all the White Rose did. This time, though, they were caught by the caretaker and turned over to the Gestapo. Four days later they were beheaded, along with their comrade Christoph Probst. The remaining activists – the students Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and their professor Kurt Huber – were arrested within the year and executed. A few Munich chemistry students tried to continue the pamphleteering. They, too, were executed. After that no one dared to carry the torch.

  The big university amphitheatre is further down the corridor. On this April morning, huge beams of sunlight come pouring into the building. I open a door cautiously. There is no one in sight. On the podium, a boy is playing the piano alone. Bach. He is oblivious to everything around him. His friends slip into the auditorium, remain listening breathlessly, they are young, their vision is clear. The room is full of light and sounds, images that come back, no one can escape them.

  In Munich you would think that Italy was just around the corner. Here the living is easy, even a bit lazy. The city already has something un-German to it, more like Bologna than Berlin. But if you head southwards, they are suddenly there in the distance, the Alps, the guardians, the massive grey-white wall that closes this flat country off from the warm sunlight. It has been spring for some time already, but here it has started snowing again. The sky is almost black. The trees grow thicker as time ticks away, my little van groans up the slippery inclines, the roads become white and empty.

  I take a room at Hotel Lederer am See, overlooking the dark Lake Tegernsee in the village of Bad Wiessee. Every now and then an avalanche puffs up on a distant mountain. The other guests are all retired couples, and the background music is perfectly attuned to their happiest years: Glenn Miller, party songs from the 1930s. I see in a commemorative book that, back then, the hotel was called Pension-Kurheim Hanselbauer. The book tells of the founders, of parties and celebrations, of the staff's hobbies; they tell of everything, in other words, that has to do with this ‘wonderful world on the Tegernsee’. Interestingly enough, however, one event is left unmentioned, and it is precisely the one which gave this hotel an immortal place in European history: the Röhm Putsch.

  It was from Hotel Lederer am See that Hitler, in the early hours of 30 June, 1934, had Ernst Röhm and other members of the SA elite pulled from their beds (which a few of them happened to be sharing with handsome SA youths). They were arrested and, in the days that followed, executed one by one. Hitler also seized the opportunity to settle accounts with a whole series of other old enemies, particularly those from national conservative circles. It has been estimated that during this ‘Night of the Long Knives’ – which in reality lasted a weekend – some 150–200 of Hitler's political opponents were murdered. Röhm was the last. Hitler hesitated at first; Röhm was, after all, his old companion in arms. Finally, in his cell, Röhm was given a copy of the Völkischer Beobachter containing
an account of his ‘treachery’, and a pistol. Not getting the hint, he sat down and started reading the paper. In the end, two SS officers had to shoot him anyway.

  30 June, 1934 was almost as much a key moment in Hitler's career as 30 January, 1933 had been. It was in 1933 that he seized power, but only in 1934 did he succeed in consolidating it. That is the deeper meaning of the events at Pension Hanselbauer.

  The Nazis justified the Night of the Long Knives as an act of political and moral purification. Yet the homosexual practices of Röhm and his companions had been public knowledge for a long time. As early as 22 June, 1931 the Münchener Post, under the cynical headline ‘Brotherly Love in the Brown House’, had published an exposé concerning the sexual predilections of a number of Nazi leaders, and the blackmail attempts that had resulted from them. But that, in fact, was hardly the point.

  The way many of the victims were killed – in their living rooms, in their doorways, on the street – was reminiscent of a gangland war, and in some ways that is what it was. Hitler used the wave of killings to settle accounts once and for all with a whole slew of political opponents, but most of the victims came from his ‘own’ SA. After the Nazis seized power, Röhm's men had been allowed to do as they pleased, but before long a flood of complaints started pouring in concerning the violence and capriciousness of the SA. In her diary, Bella Fromm describes how a cocktail party she had organised, with a great number of diplomats and other top officials in attendance, had almost been ruined by a few SA men who wanted to ‘smoke out’ her house as a ‘non-Aryan’ den of spies. Only rapid intervention on the part of Hitler's personal staff prevented a diplomatic disaster. There were many such incidents – incidents Hitler the revolutionary would have applauded, but which caused Hitler the chancellor endless headaches. The SA had become a major nuisance, even for the Nazis. In 1934 the movement had four million followers, and Röhm had hopes of usurping the power of the military. Among the SA rank and file there was already talk of ‘the need for a second revolution’. After all, where were the cushy jobs, the appointments, the rewards for all their efforts? Where, in gangster teminology, was their share of the loot?