Author: Ian Kershaw
Category: Nonfiction
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In the adjoining room, Hitler announced, waving his pistol about, that no one would leave without his permission. He declared the formation of a new Reich government, headed by himself. Ludendorff was to be in charge of the national army, Lossow would be Reichswehr Minister, Seißer Police Minister, Kahr himself would be head of state as regent (Landesverweser), and Pöhner Minister President with dictatorial powers in Bavaria. He apologized for having to force the pace, but it had to be done: he had had to enable the triumvirate to act. If things went wrong, he had four bullets in his pistol – three for his collaborators, the last for himself.
Hitler returned to the hall after about ten minutes amid renewed tumult. He repeated Göring’s assurances that the action was not directed at the police and Reichswehr, but ‘solely at the Berlin Jew government and the November criminals of 1918’. He put forward his proposals for the new governments in Berlin and Munich, now mentioning Ludendorff as ‘leader, and chief with dictatorial power, of the German national army’. He told the crowded hall that matters were taking longer than he had earlier predicted. ‘Outside are Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer,’ he declared. ‘They are struggling hard to reach a decision. May I say to them that you will stand behind them?’ As the crowd bellowed back its approval, Hitler, with his pronounced sense of the theatrical, announced in emotional terms: ‘I can say this to you: Either the German revolution begins tonight or we will all be dead by dawn!’ By the time he had finished his short address the mood in the hall had swung completely in his favour.
About an hour had passed since Hitler’s initial entry into the hall before he and Ludendorff (who had meanwhile arrived, dressed in full uniform of the Imperial Army), together with the Bavarian ruling triumvirate, returned to the podium. Kahr, calm, face like a mask, spoke first, announcing to tumultuous applause that he had agreed to serve Bavaria as regent for the monarchy. Hitler, with a euphoric expression resembling childlike delight, declared that he would direct the policy of the new Reich government, and warmly clasped Kahr’s hand. Ludendorff, deadly earnest, spoke next, mentioning his surprise at the whole business. Lossow, wearing a somewhat impenetrable expression, and Seißer, the most agitated of the group, were pressed by Hitler into speaking. Pöhner finally promised cooperation with Kahr. Hitler shook hands once more with the whole ensemble. He was the undoubted star of the show. It appeared to be his night.
From this point, however, things went badly wrong. The hurried improvisation of the planning, the hectic rush to prepare at only a day’s notice, that had followed Hitler’s impatient insistence that the putsch should be advanced to the evening of the Bürgerbräukeller meeting, now took its toll, determining the shambolic course of the night’s events. Röhm did manage to occupy the Reichswehr headquarters, though amazingly failed to take over the telephone switchboard, allowing Lossow to order the transport to Munich of loyalist troops in nearby towns and cities. Frick and Pöhner were also initially successful in taking control at police headquarters. Elsewhere, the situation was deteriorating rapidly. In a night of chaos, the putschists failed dismally, largely owing to their own disorganization, to take control of barracks and government buildings. The early and partial successes were for the most part rapidly overturned. Neither the army nor the state police joined forces with the putschists.
Back at the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler, too, was making his first mistake of the evening. Hearing reports of difficulties the putschists were encountering at the Engineers’ Barracks, he decided to go there himself in what proved a vain attempt to intervene. Ludendorff was left in charge at the Bürgerbräukeller and, believing the word of officers and gentlemen, promptly let Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer depart. They were then free to renege on the promises extracted from them under duress by Hitler.
By late evening, Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer were in positions to assure the state authorities that they repudiated the putsch. All German radio stations were informed of this by Lossow at 2.55 a.m. By the early hours, it was becoming clear to the putschists themselves that the triumvirate and – far more importantly – the Reichswehr and state police opposed the coup. At 5 a.m. Hitler was still giving assurances that he was determined to fight and die for the cause – a sign that by this time at the latest he, too, had lost confidence in the success of the putsch.
The putschist leaders were themselves by this time unclear what to do next. They sat around arguing, while the government forces regrouped. There was no fall-back position. Hitler was as clueless as the others. He was far from in control of the situation. As the bitterly cold morning dawned, depressed troops began to drift off from the Bürgerbräukeller. Around 8 a.m. Hitler sent some of his SA men to seize bundles of 50-billion Mark notes direct from the printing press to keep his troops paid. It was more or less the only practical action taken as the putsch started rapidly to crumble.
Only during the course of the morning did Hitler and Ludendorff come up with the idea of a demonstration march through the city. Ludendorff apparently made the initial suggestion. The aim was predictably confused and unclear. ‘In Munich, Nuremberg, Bayreuth, an immeasurable jubilation, an enormous enthusiasm would have broken out in the German Reich,’ Hitler later remarked. ‘And when the first division of the German national army had left the last square metre of Bavarian soil and stepped for the first time on to Thuringian land, we would have experienced the jubilation of the people there. People would have had to recognize that the German misery has an end, that redemption could only come about through a rising.’ It amounted to a vague hope that the march would stir popular enthusiasm for the putsch, and that the army, faced with the fervour of the mobilized masses and the prospect of firing on the war-hero Ludendorff, would change its mind. The gathering acclaim of the masses and the support of the army would then pave the way for a triumphant march on Berlin. Such was the wild illusion – gesture politics born out of pessimism, depression, and despair. Reality did not take long to assert itself.
Around noon, the column of about 2,000 men – many of them, including Hitler, armed – set out from the Bürgerbräukeller. Pistols at the ready, they confronted a small police cordon on the Ludwigsbrücke and under threat swept it aside, headed to Marienplatz, in the centre of the city, and decided then to march to the War Ministry. They gained encouragement from throngs of shouting and waving supporters on the pavements. Some thought they were witnessing the arrival of the new government. The putschists could not help but note, however, that many of the posters proclaiming the national revolution had already been ripped down or papered over with new directions from the ruling triumvirate. The participants on the march knew the cause was lost. One of them remarked that it was like a funeral procession.
At the top of the Residenzstraße, as it approaches Odeonsplatz, the marchers encountered the second, and larger, police cordon. ‘Here they come. Heil Hitler!’ a bystander cried out. Then shots rang out. When the firing ceased, fourteen putschists and four policemen lay dead.
The dead included one of the putsch architects, Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had been in the front line of the putsch leaders, linking arms with Hitler, just behind the standard-bearers. Had the bullet which killed Scheubner-Richter been a foot to the right, history would have taken a different course. As it was, Hitler either took instant evasive action, or was wrenched to the ground by Scheubner-Richter. In any event, he dislocated his left shoulder. Göring was among those injured, shot in the leg. He and a number of other leading putschists were able to escape over the Austrian border. Some, including Streicher, Frick, Pöhner, Amann, and Röhm, were immediately arrested. Ludendorff, who had emerged from the shoot-out totally unscathed, gave himself up and was released on his officer’s word.
Hitler himself was attended to by Dr Walter Schultze, chief of the Munich SA medical corps, pushed into his car, stationed nearby, and driven at speed from the scene of the action. He ended up at Hanfstaengl’s home in Uffing, near the Staffelsee, south of Munich, where the police, on the evening of 11 November, found and arres
ted him. While at Hanfstaengl’s – Putzi himself had taken flight to Austria – he composed the first of his ‘political testaments’, placing the party chairmanship in Rosenberg’s hands, with Amann as his deputy. Hitler, according to Hanfstaengl’s later account, based on his wife’s testimony, was desolate on arrival in Uffing. But later stories that he had to be restrained from suicide have no firm backing. He was depressed but calm, dressed in a white nightgown, his injured left arm in a sling, when the police arrived to escort him to prison in the old fortress at Landsberg am Lech, a picturesque little town some forty miles west of Munich. Thirty-nine guards were on hand to greet him in his new place of residence. Graf Arco, the killer of Kurt Eisner, the Bavarian premier murdered in February 1919, was evicted from his spacious Cell no. 7 to make room for the new, high-ranking prisoner.
In Munich and other parts of Bavaria, the putsch fizzled out as rapidly as it had started. Hitler was finished. At least, he should have been.
V
Like the high-point of a dangerous fever, the crisis had passed, then rapidly subsided. The following months brought currency stabilization with the introduction of the Rentenmark, regulation of the reparations issue through the Dawes Plan (named after the American banker Charles G. Dawes, head of the committee which established in 1924 a provisional framework for the phased payment of reparations, commencing at a low level and linked to foreign loans for Germany), and the beginning of the political stabilization that marked the end of the post-war turbulence and was to last until the new economic shock-waves of the late 1920s. With Hitler in jail, the NSDAP banned, and the völkisch movement split into its component factions, the threat from the extreme Right lost its immediate potency.
Sympathies with the radical Right by no means disappeared. With 33 per cent of the votes in Munich, the Völkischer Block (the largest grouping in the now fractured völkisch movement) was the strongest party in the city at the Landtag elections on 6 April 1924, gaining more votes than both the Socialists and Communists put together. At the Reichstag election on 4 May, the result was little different. The Völkischer Block won 28.5 per cent of the vote in Munich, 17 per cent overall in the electoral region of Upper Bavaria and Swabia, and 20.8 per cent in Franconia. But the bubble had burst. As Germany recovered and the Right remained in disarray, voters deserted the völkisch movement. By the second Reichstag elections of 1924, a fortnight before Hitler’s release from Landsberg, the vote for the Völkischer Block had dwindled to residual limits of 7.5 per cent in Franconia, 4.8 per cent in Upper Bavaria/Swabia, and 3.0 per cent in Lower Bavaria (compared with 10.2 per cent there eight months earlier).
Bavaria, for all its continuing ingrained oddities, was no longer the boiling cauldron of radical Right insurgency it had been between 1920 and 1923. The paramilitary organizations had had their teeth drawn in the confrontation with the legal forces of the state. Without the support of the army, they were shown to be little more than a paper tiger. In the aftermath of the putsch, the Kampfbund organizations were dissolved, and the ‘patriotic associations’ in general had their weaponry confiscated, a ban imposed on their military exercises, and their activities greatly curtailed. The triumvirate installed by the Bavarian government as a force on the Right to contain the wilder and even more extreme nationalist paramilitaries lost power and credibility through the putsch. Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer were all ousted by early 1924. With the General Commissariat terminated, conventional cabinet government under a new Minister President, Dr Heinrich Held – the leading figure in the Catholic establishment party in Bavaria, the BVP – and with it a degree of calm, returned to Bavarian politics.
Even now, however, the forces which had given Hitler his entrée into politics and enabled him to develop into a key factor on the Bavarian Right contrived to save him when his ‘career’ ought to have been over. The ‘Hitler-Putsch’ was, as we have seen, by no means merely Hitler’s putsch. The Bavarian Reichswehr had colluded massively in the training and preparation of the forces which had tried to take over the state. And important personages had been implicated in the putsch attempt. Whatever their subsequent defence of their actions, the hands of Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer were dirty, while the war hero General Ludendorff had been the spiritual figurehead of the entire enterprise. There was every reason, therefore, in the trial of the putsch leaders held in Munich between 26 February and 27 March 1924 to let the spotlight fall completely on Hitler. He was only too glad to play the role assigned to him.
Hitler’s first reaction to his indictment had been very different from his later triumphalist performance in the Munich court. He had initially refused to say anything, and announced that he was going on hunger-strike. At this time, he plainly saw everything as lost. According to the prison psychologist – though speaking many years after the event – Hitler stated: ‘I’ve had enough. I’m finished. If I had a revolver, I would take it.’ Drexler later claimed that he himself had dissuaded Hitler from his intention to commit suicide.
By the time the trial opened, Hitler’s stance had changed diametrically. He was allowed to turn the courtroom into a stage for his own propaganda, accepting full responsibility for what had happened, not merely justifying but glorifying his role in attempting to overthrow the Weimar state. This was in no small measure owing to his threats to expose the complicity in treasonable activity of Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer – and in particular the role of the Bavarian Reichswehr.
The ruling forces in Bavaria did what they could to limit potential damage. The first priority was to make sure that the trial was held under Bavarian jurisdiction. In strict legality, the trial ought not to have taken place in Munich at all, but at the Reich Court in Leipzig. However, the Reich government gave way to pressure from the Bavarian government. The trial was set for the People’s Court in Munich.
Kahr had hoped to avoid any trial, or at least have no more than a perfunctory one where the indicted would plead guilty but claim mitigating grounds of patriotism. Since some at least of the putschists would not agree, this course of action had to be dropped. But it seems highly probable that the accused were offered leniency for such a proposal even to have been considered. Hitler had, at any rate, become confident about the outcome. He still held a trump card in his hand. When Hanfstaengl visited him in his cell in the courthouse, during the trial, he showed no fear of the verdict. ‘What can they do to me?’ he asked. ‘I only need to come out with a bit more, especially about Lossow, and there’s the big scandal. Those in the know are well aware of that.’ This, and the attitude of the presiding judge and his fellow judges, explains Hitler’s self-confident appearance at the trial.
Among those indicted alongside Hitler were Ludendorff, Pöhner, Frick, Weber (of Bund Oberland), Röhm, and Kriebel. But the indictment itself was emphatic that ‘Hitler was the soul of the entire enterprise’. Judge Neithardt, the president of the court, had reputedly stated before the trial that Ludendorff would be acquitted. The judge replaced a damaging record of Ludendorff ’s first interrogation by one which indicated his ignorance about the putsch preparations. Hitler, meanwhile, was given the freedom of the courtroom. One journalist attending the trial described it as a ‘political carnival’. He compared the deference shown to the defendants with the brusque way those arraigned for their actions in the Räterepublik had been handled. He heard one of the judges, after Hitler’s first speech, remark: ‘What a tremendous chap, this Hitler!’ Hitler was allowed to appear in his suit, not prison garb, sporting his Iron Cross, First Class. Ludendorff, not held in prison, arrived in a luxury limousine. Dr Weber, though under arrest, was allowed to take a Sunday afternoon walk round Munich. The extraordinary bias of the presiding judge was later most severely criticized both in Berlin and by the Bavarian government, irritated at the way attacks on the Reichswehr and state police had been allowed without contradiction. Judge Neithardt was informed in no uncertain terms during the trial of the ‘embarrassing impression’ left by allowing Hitler to speak for four hours. His only response was tha
t it was impossible to interrupt the torrent of words. Hitler was also allowed the freedom to interrogate witnesses – above all Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer – at length, frequently deviating into politically loaded statements.
When the verdicts were read out four days after the trial ended, on 1 April 1924, Ludendorff was duly acquitted – which he took as an insult. Hitler, along with Weber, Kriebel, and Pöhner, was sentenced to a mere five years’ imprisonment for high treason (less the four months and two weeks he had already been in custody), and a fine of 200 Gold Marks (or a further twenty days’ imprisonment). The others indicted received even milder sentences. The lay judges, as Hitler later acknowledged, had only been prepared to accept a verdict of ‘guilty’ on condition that he received the mildest sentence, with the prospect of early release. The court explained why it rejected the deportation of Hitler under the terms of the ‘Protection of the Republic Act’: ‘Hitler is a German-Austrian. He considers himself to be a German. In the opinion of the court, the meaning and intention of the terms of section 9, para II of the Law for the Protection of the Republic cannot apply to a man who thinks and feels as German as Hitler, who voluntarily served for four and a half years in the German army at war, who attained high military honours through outstanding bravery in the face of the enemy, was wounded, suffered other damage to his health, and was released from the military into the control of the District Command Munich I.’
Even on the conservative Right in Bavaria, the conduct of the trial and sentences prompted amazement and disgust. In legal terms, the sentence was nothing short of scandalous. No mention was made in the verdict of the four policemen shot by the putschists; the robbery of 14,605 billion paper Marks (the equivalent of around 28,000 Gold Marks) was entirely played down; the destruction of the offices of the SPD newspaper Münchener Post and the taking of a number of Social Democratic city councillors as hostages were not blamed on Hitler; and no word was made of the text of a new constitution, found in the pocket of the dead putschist von der Pfordten. Nor did the judge’s reasons for the sentence make any reference to the fact that Hitler was still technically within the probationary period for good behaviour imposed on him in the sentence for breach of the peace in January 1922. Legally, he was not eligible for any further probation.