Hitler (36 page)

As the meeting broke up, Prime Minister von Knilling, the ministers present, and the police commissioner were arrested. The leader of the SA student company, Rudolf Hess, took charge of transferring the prisoners to the villa of the rightist publisher Julius Lehmann. Meanwhile, Hitler was called away to deal with some minor crisis outside the barracks of the engineers. As soon as he left the room, at about 10:30
P.M.,
Lossow, Kahr, and Seisser said comradely good-byes to Ludendorff and disappeared. When Scheubner-Richter and Hitler returned, they immediately expressed suspicion. But Ludendorff snapped that he forbade them” to doubt a German officer's word of honor. Some two hours earlier, Seisser had protested that Hitler in launching the putsch had broken his word of honor. Honor was certainly a fetish with these people. They were crippled by their high principles, while Hitler, the new man, respected nothing but the pragmatics of power. For years he had been piously using these bourgeois principles and platitudes of honor, solemnly invoking rules that he despised, at the same time recognizing their erosion. This gave him a great advantage vis-à-vis a class unable to free itself from principles in which it no longer believed. But on this night Hitler had run into “opponents who answered breach of faith with breach of faith, and won the game.”
⁴⁸

All the same, it was a great night for Hitler, rich in the elements he loved best: drama, cheering, defiance, the euphoria of action, and the supreme ecstasy that comes of half-realized dreams, an ecstasy that no reality can yield. In the anniversary ceremony he was to stage in later years, he would attempt to recapture the momentousness of this evening. “Now better times are coming,” he said extravagantly to Röhm as he embraced him. “We shall all work day and night on the great task of rescuing Germany from shame and suffering.” He issued a proclamation to the German people and two decrees establishing a special tribunal to try political crimes, and declaring “the scoundrels who engineered the betrayal of November 9, 1918,” outlaws from this day: it was every citizen's duty “to deliver them dead or alive into the hands of the
völkisch
national government.”

 

In the meantime countermeasures were already under way. Lossow had met with his officers. They greeted him with the rather menacing remark that they assumed the show of solidarity with Hitler had been sheer bluff. Whatever the vacillating general's real position may have been, in the face of his outraged officers he abandoned any thoughts he may have had of really undertaking a putsch. Shortly afterward, Kahr issued a proclamation rescinding his statements in the Bürgerbräukeller; they had been wrung from him at gunpoint, he claimed. He declared the National Socialist Party as well as the Kampfbund dissolved. Hitler, all unsuspecting and reveling in his role, was mobilizing his forces for the great march on Berlin. The state commissioner general had already given orders that no Hitler followers should be allowed to enter Munich. One SA shock troop, carried away by revolutionary fervor, smashed the premises of the
Münchener Post,
the Social Democratic newspaper. Other units were rampaging, taking hostages, and looting a bit at random, while Röhm seized control of the District Army Command headquarters on Schónfeldstrasse. Once that was done, no one quite knew what to do next. A light, wet snow began to fall. Midnight came, and still Hitler had no word from Kahr and Lossow. He began to grow uneasy. Messengers were sent out but failed to return. Frick seemed to have been arrested, and somewhat later Pöhner could not be found. Hitler began to realize that he had been tricked.

As always, when he found himself blocked or disappointed, Hitler's sensitive nervous system gave way. With the collapse of this one project, all his projects collapsed. In the wee hours of the morning Streicher turned up at the Bürgerbraukeller and urged Hitler to address an impassioned appeal to the masses and thus seize the initiative again. According to Streicher's story, Hitler stared at him wide-eyed and then scrawled a statement handing “the entire organization” over to Streicher, as if he had completely given up.
⁴⁹
He then went through a strange alternation of moods, first apathy, then violent despair, histrionics that anticipated the convulsions and rages of later years. Finally he let himself be persuaded to order a demonstration the following day. “If it comes off, all's well, if not, we'll hang ourselves,” he declared, and this statement, too, anticipated those of later years, when he swung from one extreme to another, from total victory to downfall, from conquest of the world to suicide. However, a group he had dispatched to sound out the general mood returned with a favorable report, and Hitler instantly regained hope, exuberance, and faith in the power of agitation: “Propaganda, propaganda,” he exclaimed, “now it all depends on propaganda!” He promptly slated fourteen mass meetings for the coming evening, at each of which he would appear as the principal speaker. The day after that, an enormous rally would be held on the Kónigsplatz, where tens of thousands would celebrate the national uprising. As dawn broke, he was giving instructions for posters to be printed for these events.

This last-ditch effort was not merely a typical Hitler reaction; it represented the only avenue still left to him. Most historians have concluded that Hitler failed as a revolutionary at the decisive moment. Such criticism, however, ignores Hitler's basic assumptions and goals.
⁵⁰
True, his nerves gave way, but it would not have been consistent with his policy for him to try to occupy telegraph offices and ministries, railroad stations and barracks. He had never planned a revolutionary take-over in Munich; rather, he had intended to march against Berlin, with Munich's might behind him. His resigned attitude, after this one night, was more realistic than his critics would have us believe. For he saw that the loss of his partners rendered the entire undertaking impossible. He apparently did not hope for any turnabout as a result of the demonstration and the planned wave of propaganda; all he counted on was that a massive show of support would serve to protect the erstwhile conspirators from reprisals. Now and then, during one of the wild shifts of mood he went through that night, Hitler must have dreamed of sweeping the masses along and heading for Berlin after all, leaving Munich aside. Drunk with such visions, Hitler conceived the plan of sending patrols through the streets shouting, “Show the flag!” “Then we'll see if we don't whip up some enthusiasm!”

And in fact the prospects for a “March on Berlin” were by no means unfavorable. As became clear the next morning, public sentiment was clearly on the side of Hitler and the Kampfbund. From numerous apartment house windows and even from City Hall and public buildings the swastika flag fluttered, and the newspaper accounts of the events in the Bürgerbraukeller had an approving tone. Many people came to the campaign headquarters the Kampfbund had set up in various parts of the city, while in the barracks the lower rank officers and the enlisted men frankly expressed their sympathy with Hitler's plans for the march. The speakers whom Streicher had sent around were met with hearty applause in the strangely feverish atmosphere of that bleak November morning.

But during these hours Hitler was isolated from the public, cut off from the impetus and encouragement he might have received from the crowds. Thus, as the day wore on, he began to have second thoughts; even at this early stage in his career he appeared to be entirely dependent on the masses for increasing or diminishing his assurance, energy, and courage. Early in the morning he had sent the Kampfbund's communications director, Lieutenant Neunzert, to Crown Prince Rupprecht in Berchtesgaden to ask him to act as intermediary. Now he was waiting inactively for Neunzert's return. He also feared that a demonstration might lead to a clash with armed soldiers and police and thus repeat the debacle of May 1 in a far more fatal manner. Ludendorff finally put an end to Hitler's temporizing with an energetic, “We shall march!” Toward noon several thousand persons lined up behind the standard bearers. The leaders and officers were sent to the head of the line: Ludendorff appeared in civilian clothes; Hitler had thrown a trench coat over his tail coat of the previous evening. Beside him stood Ulrich Graf and Scheubner-Richter; then came Dr. Weber, Kriebel, and Göring. “We set out convinced that this was the end, one way or another,” Hitler later remarked. “I remember someone who said to me as we were coming down the steps, ‘this finishes it!' Everyone had that same conviction.” They set out singing.

On the Isar bridge the procession was met by a strong detachment of state police, but Göring intimidated the policemen with the threat that if a single shot was fired, all the hostages would be killed instantly. As the policemen wavered, they found themselves being pushed aside by the columns of sixteen men abreast, surrounded, disarmed, spat, upon, and cuffed by the crowd. In front of the Munich City Hall Streicher was just delivering a speech from the top of a staircase; the crowd was large. How grave a juncture this was for Hitler can be measured from the fact that he, to whom the masses had rushed as “to a savior,” marched silently on this day. He had taken Scheubner-Richter's arm as if he needed support; this, too, was an odd gesture, scarcely according with his image of a Führer. Amidst the cheering of the crowd the procession swung haphazardly into the narrow streets of the Old City; when it neared the Residenzstrasse the lead party began to sing “O Deutschland hoch in Ehren” (“Oh, Germany high in honor”). At the Odeonsplatz the procession again encountered a police cordon.

 

What happened next is not exactly clear. From the confusion of accounts, some fanciful, some in the nature of apologies, agreement prevails on only one point: a single shot rang out, provoking a steady exchange of fire that lasted only about sixty seconds. The first to fall was Scheubner-Richter, fatally wounded. In his fall, he pulled Hitler with him, wrenching his arm out of joint. Oskar Korner, the former vice-chairman of the party, was hit, as was Chief Magistrate von der Pfordten. When it was all over, fourteen members of the procession and three policemen lay dead or dying on the street, and many others, including Hermann Göring, had been wounded. Amidst the hail of bullets, while all were dropping to the ground or scurrying for cover, Ludendorff stalked upright, trembling with rage, through the police cordon. The day might possibly have ended differently had a small band of determined men followed him; but no one did. It was certainly not cowardice that forced many to the ground; it was the rightists' respect for the legitimate representatives of government authority. With grandiose arrogance the general stood waiting for the commanding officer and allowed himself to be arrested. Brückner, Frick, Drexler, and Dr. Weber also submitted to arrest. Rossbach fled to Salzburg, Hermann Esser to Czechoslovakia. In the course of the afternoon Ernst Röhm also capitulated; earlier he had occupied army headquarters, after a short exchange of gunfire that had cost two members of the Kampfbund their lives. His standard bearer on this particular day was a young man with a somewhat girlish face and wearing glasses, the son of a respected Munich
gymnasium
headmaster. The young man's name was Heinrich Himmler. In a farewell march, the company paraded silently through the streets, unarmed, the men carrying their dead on their shoulders. Then it disbanded. Röhm himself was arrested.

Ludendorff's heroic bearing had cast an unflattering light on Hitler, whose nerves had again failed him. The reports of his followers are contradictory only in small details: they agree that even while the situation was still fluid, he scrambled up from the pavement and took to his heels, leaving behind him the dead and wounded. His later excuse that in the confusion he had thought Ludendorff had been killed was hardly impressive, for in that event there would have been even more reason for him to stay. In the midst of the general chaos he managed to escape with the help of an ambulance. A few years later he concocted the legend that he had carried a child out of the firing line to safety; he even produced the child. But the Ludendorff circle demolished this legend before Hitler himself abandoned it. He reached Uffing on the Staffelsee, about thirty-five miles from Munich, where he took refuge in Ernst Hanfstaengl's country house and nursed the painful sprained shoulder he had suffered in the course of the battle. Broken in spirit, he kept repeating that the time had come to put an end to things and shoot himself, but the Hanfstaengls managed to dissuade him. Two days later he was arrested and taken off to the fortress of Landsberg am Lech. “His face was pale and hunted, with a wild lock of hair falling into it.” Concerned with his image even in the depths of defeat, he had the officer of the arrest party pin the Iron Cross First Class to his lapel before he was led off.

Once behind bars he remained in a state of total despondency. At first he believed “that he was going to be shot.” In the following days Amann, Streicher, Dietrich Eckart, and Drexler were also brought in. Scattered about in various Munich jails were Dr. Weber, Pöhner, Dr. Frick, Röhm, and others. The government had not dared to arrest Ludendorff. Hitler himself apparently felt he was in the wrong simply because he had survived. In any case, he considered his cause lost. For a few days he considered—how seriously it is impossible to say—cheating the firing squad by starving himself to death in a hunger strike. Anton Drexler later claimed credit for talking him out of this plan. The widow of his slain friend, Frau von Scheubner-Richter, also helped him come through the depression of this period. For the shots fired in front of the Feldherrnhalle meant not only the sudden end of three years of progress that had verged on the miraculous; it also meant a terrible collision with reality. Hitler's whole system of tactics had been demolished.

Characteristically enough, he regained his spirits when it became apparent that an ordinary court trial was in the offing. He instantly saw his chance for playing a dramatic role. Later he referred to the defeat of November 9, 1923, as “perhaps the greatest stroke of luck in my life.” As part of the good fortune he must have included the opportunity offered by this trial, which shook him out of his despondency and cast him in his favorite role, that of gambler. Once more he could stake everything on a single card. The disaster of the bungled putsch could be converted into a demogogic triumph.