Bombing Hitler (5 page)

At the site of the speaker's platform, the debris was about ten feet high. The ceiling had fallen in on itself and an exterior wall about fifty feet long had collapsed inward. Hitler would not have survived the blast. The Nuremberg
Gauleiter
(District Leader) Julius Streicher quickly went back into the hall and took a look at the spot where he had been sitting a short while before. “Tables and chairs have been reduced to thousands and thousands of splinters, and right where my chair was there is now an iron beam weighing hundreds of pounds.”

After the initial confusion, police and Gestapo sealed off the entire area with the help of the SS and SA, many of whom were wearing steel helmets. Inside the collapsed hall, the National Labor Service went about the business of rescue and recovery. For the time being, they could not consider shoring up the remaining part of the hanging ceiling—they did not have the necessary boards. Ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks were constantly arriving with sirens wailing. Wild rumors were flying around the neighborhood, where people had clearly heard the detonation. Outgoing telephone connections in the city were blocked for a long time. At one in the morning the Gestapo ordered a shutdown that affected even central facilities such as Army Intelligence in Berlin.

A very objective radio report was recorded and broadcast by National Radio in Munich on the morning of November 9. This source lies unpublished in the Radio Archive in Frankfurt and is given here in some detail. The reporter does not embellish his report with outrage at the assassination attempt or grief for the victims. Instead, his intent is for listeners to gain an authentic impression of the gruesome scene. While he talks calmly, in the background we can hear shovels scraping up the debris:

Upon entering the courtyard in the rear, one finds an enormous pile of beams—a gigantic tangle of beams; a mountain of bricks; broken tables and chairs strewn all around; smashed beer glasses, stained grayish black with plaster and filth. And now we are here inside the former hall: above us a gigantic hole, the sky clearly visible through it. The work of debris removal is in progress. The ceiling came down—it fell in, partially collapsed. Pieces of plaster are still hanging on it, some of it crumbling away. The chandeliers are hanging at a sharp angle, dented and missing bulbs . . . a jumble of bricks . . . splintered wood. The blast obviously smashed all the window panes—pushed them outward. It is a scene of terrible destruction . . . here large piles of debris. We are now standing about ten feet from the spot where yesterday the Führer's platform stood. Reed matting is hanging down . . . parts of the wall are still standing. An I-beam has tilted into the room at an angle . . . above us, as we said, there's open sky. Snarls of wire, girders, paneling, support columns . . . lying everywhere. The floor above has fallen down, and up there beams are jutting from every direction into the room like skewers. As we have said, it is a terrible scene, and one must struggle to find the words to describe something like this.

The reporter then interviews Party member Frank, a Swabian technician or architect who was there during the explosion. This man clearly delights in precision and objective coolness. His technical curiosity informs his report, and he even lets two distinct compliments to the assassin slip out—not at all in keeping with the ranting of the press about instigators behind the scenes. This is the classic technical clinician speaking, unperturbed by the politically tinged surroundings:

I was just about to leave the hall and was perhaps three feet from the exit, when suddenly there was a flash up above in the room. In the same instant [I felt] a hard push from behind . . . not actually a blow—it felt like I was being shoved forward, and in the next instant I found myself five or six feet closer to the exit. At the same moment there was a thunderous noise, a [he imitates the sound]; and then it was all over, actually. Before you could figure out what was going on, you were standing there in a cloud of dust so thick that first, you couldn't see anything at all, and second, you couldn't breathe. At first, we couldn't think about what had happened—we just put our handkerchiefs over our mouths and made sure we got to the exit. Out in the cloakroom it became possible to breathe a little; then, as quickly as possible, we turned around and headed back into the hall. On the ground floor, where the windows were still intact, we broke out the glass in order to get some fresh air in there. And then, after a minute or maybe a minute and a half, the dust began to settle; that's when we discovered that the ceiling had caved in. And then immediately the first of the injured started coming out, those who had been able to free themselves from under tables or chairs. They were somewhat better off since they were able to get to safety. But the more seriously injured ones we had to gradually dig out.

The reporter then asked him how this all happened, and Frank replied:

After the flash that one saw . . . that came from above. That means the blast definitely didn't come from below, from the floor; the explosive charge must have been placed at the gallery level, in the first pillar on the side where the Führer's podium was located—at the gallery level. That is the pillar where we are standing now, which was about ten feet to the right of the Führer's podium; that's where the explosive charge [must have been placed]. You see the girders up there are bent and cracked—up here we see the effects of the explosion. So the charge must have been situated on the gallery either under the plank flooring or under the wood paneling on the wall. First, this support beam came down. . . . And since the support beam was gone, the longitudinal beams, which provided support between the gallery and the hall itself, came loose and sagged down. There were two of these: This one here, with stone still attached to it, was at the level of the gallery floor, and the large iron T-girder we see there . . . it tipped downward because the upper part of this vertical beam here also gave way after it had been cracked by the explosion.

Infected now by curiosity, the reporter asked innocently, “So that was the spot from which someone was able to bring down the entire hall?”

Frank had no reservations about expressing praise for the assassin:

Yes, this was technically the most effective spot . . . besides the two longitudinal beams a large transverse beam dislodged—it came loose too and fell down. And lying on top of this transverse beam there was also a steel girder that spanned the middle of the hall and wasn't supported by the next beam, but was attached to the next beam only by rivets and side plates and supported from above by the roof structure. And because of this structure, which gave way, the girder tilted down; the spot here where it was riveted gave way—the rivets were ripped out—the girder came down, the next one dropped; in addition, the whole roof structure was brought down because that was what the girder was attached to. And therefore an extraordinarily comprehensive collapse could be achieved.

There were no arrests made on the evening of November 8, as there was still a great deal of uncertainty: Who could it have been? Three people died immediately, four of the injured died soon thereafter in the hospital where an additional sixty-three injured people were being treated. On November 13 an eighth died of his injuries.

For a long time afterward, postwar Germany refused to admit that the attempt on Hitler's life was justified and dwelled instead on the eight “innocent victims” killed in the collapse of the Bürgerbräukeller, rather than on the millions murdered by Hitler in the camps, or the “euthanasia” victims, or the fifty million victims of World War II.

A glance at the
Völkischer Beobachter
might have dampened this sympathy. Except for the part-time waitress Maria Henle, the dead were all members of the Nazi Party or the SA. In the obituaries, the Party and the families indicated their pride in these recipients of the
Blutorden.
Many had belonged to the
Freikorps
Epp and to the
Stoss-trupp
Adolf Hitler, which in 1923 had set out to destroy the Republic and establish a dictatorship. The obituaries of Michael Wilhelm Weber can serve to illustrate this. As his widow wrote, he had died “for his beloved Führer, for his free Germany.” Weber was the owner of the large perfume concern Bavaria, a Party member, recipient of the
Blutorden,
recipient of the
EKII
(Iron Cross 2nd Class) and the Bavarian Military Service Cross, a
Freikorps
veteran, a Hitler supporter since 1920, a
HauptsturmFührer
in the
NSKK
(National Socialist Motor Corps), and deputy Führer of the
NSKK-Motorstandarte
86.

Three of the victims who died in the vicinity of Hitler's podium were members of the
Reichsautozug
(the organization responsible for motorcade logistics) and were
SA Hauptsturmführer
or
Truppführer.
They were on duty. According to Nazi values, one did not need to mourn those who died in the service of the Party; they were accepted into the ranks of Party heroes. Their deaths were considered a noble contribution to the victory of the “Movement.” As Hitler's followers were told at the official state ceremony of November 11, the tragedy of the individual meant nothing, as long as the Führer was alive.

H
ITLER HAD ARRIVED
with his entourage at the main station in Munich five minutes before the train was to depart. The “simple corporal,” as he liked to think of himself, had as usual exactly a dozen suitcases. At 9:31 p.m. the private train left for Berlin. The mood in the parlor car was cheerful, even boisterous. The topic, as always after such events, was the glorious past of the Party before 1933—the
“Kampfzeit”
(Time of Struggle). And now there was the
Blitzkrieg
against Poland, the second country in the East to be conquered in just a few weeks. Hitler had always been right; now he was assured of the absolute support of his people. So what if there was some reluctance in the military? The general staff officers had always had reservations—they never wanted to take any risks, but he had always gotten his way. And now they were to move against England. First, however, they needed to invade France and occupy Paris in another
Blitzkrieg.

In the car they were intoxicated with victory. Hitler, as always, drank mineral water, but several in the entourage were deeply into the alcohol. The train would not arrive at the Anhalter Station in Berlin until 10:20 a.m., so there would be plenty of time to sleep it off. Along the route, two stationmasters, one of them in Augsburg, tried in vain to stop the train to tell Hitler about the attack—the engineer kept going in order to maintain the tight schedule.

There was no stop planned until Nürnberg, where Goebbels got off to have some teletypes dispatched and returned as white as a sheet. But Hitler thought the news about the Bürgerbräukeller was a macabre joke—Goebbels after all had a bit of a mischievous bent. Before the bombing, Hitler's officers had discussed the risk of an attack many times. Hitler was prone to wade into a crowd to bask in the adulation of his followers. His security forces broke out in a cold sweat every time he ignored safety measures in order to have contact with his admirers, accept flowers, or let people get close to his car— any one of them might someday toss a grenade.

However, at this moment the pallor on Goebbels's face and his seriousness spoke against the possibility of a joke. Hitler wondered if it was simply a false report. But the propaganda minister had already excluded this possibility by contacting Berlin. So indeed, at the very site of the self-glorification of the Party, someone had been out to get Hitler. But the mood on the train was so cheerful, with victory so close, that Hitler reacted in a way that yields deep insight into his mentality. His spontaneous comment was, “A man has to be lucky”— the attitude of a gambler. Until then he had always gotten by with that. Now he wanted to verify the news for himself and got off the train to phone the men directing the operation at the Bürgerbräukeller: Gauleiter Adolf Wagner and Munich chief of police Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein.

When Hitler returned he looked transformed, according to his secretary. His face, she reported, took on “a determined and hardened appearance. . . . In his eyes there glowed the mystical fire that I had so often seen in him at times of great decisions.” In a flash Hitler determined that attempt on his life proved to be an even greater victory for him, and he shouted into the parlor car: “Now I am completely at peace! My leaving the Bürgerbräu earlier than usual is proof to me that Providence wants me to reach my goal.”

Thoughts turned next to the instigators. Hitler was still so filled with hatred toward England from his speech that his suspicion immediately fell on the British Secret Service. At the following train stations, where new reports from Munich awaited them, the first orders were given out. All night long, it was so hectic aboard the train that Goebbels only managed to get one hour of sleep before they arrived in Berlin. During the night Himmler had launched inquiries. Hitler demanded the best experts for the criminal investigation and charged Arthur Nebe,
Reichskriminaldirektor
(Commissioner of the Criminal Police, or Kripo) and chief of Office V of the
Reichssi-cherheitshauptamt
(Central Office of Reich Security) in Berlin, with undertaking the investigation.

Hitler's idea of holding the British Secret Service responsible was transmitted to Berlin by Goebbels that night. By the next day, November 9, the press releases of the National Socialist news agency DNB
(Deutsches Nachrichten Büro)
had established the Party line. It wasn't until November 21 that Hitler gave the press another angle: that the mastermind of the Munich attempt was Otto Strasser, a left-leaning National Socialist, who, at the time, was living as an emigrant in Switzerland. Strasser had been an opponent of Hitler since 1930, and his brother Gregor had been murdered in connection with the bloody assault against the SA in 1934. Otto Strasser had already been held responsible for other assassination attempts in Germany, and Hitler had sent several murderers out after him in Czechoslovakia.