In Europe (40 page)

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?

In addition to all this, Hitler's position was also being threatened from within political circles. The nationalistic and conservative elites began to realise that unknown forces had been unleashed, ungovernable movements they could no longer control. They felt responsible for the fact that ‘this fellow’ had come to power, and wanted him to lose that power again as quickly as possible. The groups around Franz von Papen and the military top brass hoped to use the SA crisis to undermine Hitler's power. President Hindenburg was weakening with age, and they had no intention of seeing his position also fall into Hitler's hands. There was even talk of restoring the monarchy. Anything, in fact, was possible, as long as Hitler did not gain absolute power.

On 17 June, Papen gave a speech that, coming from him, was quite sensational. He railed against all the ‘egoism, lack of character, insincerity, arrogance and dearth of chivalry’, and even criticised the ‘false cult of personality’. The same day, Hitler struck back: ‘This is the clenched fist of a nation that will strike down all who dare to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage.’ So when the Nazi leaders met with Hitler on 29 June, 1934, Goebbels thought the meeting was about a settling of accounts with the chic conservative circles around Papen. To his amazement, however, it turned out to be about the party's ‘own’ SA. Röhm's ‘high treason’ was never actually proven, and nothing points to any serious SA plans for a coup. The ‘evidence’ given for such plans was almost certainly trumped up.

Foreign observers saw the work of gangsters, openly now, for the first time. The reactions were outraged. Within Germany itself, however, little protest was heard. Even the churches remained silent, although Erich Klausener, chairman of Berlin's Katholische Aktion, was among those murdered. The military hierarchy forbade its officers to attend the funeral of General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife.

Ian Kershaw rightly notes that, without backing from the army – which
could only profit from the dismantling of the SA – the Night of the Long Knives would have been an impossibility. The consequences were dramatic: ‘Through its complicity in the events of 30 June, 1934, the army was, now more than ever, bound to Hitler.’

In this way, the generals walked into the same trap Papen had been caught in one year earlier. They believed they were using Hitler, but in fact the army itself had become a Nazi tool.

My room – the nicest corner room, between the warm oak walls of the old hotel – is on the same corridor where it all took place. Snow is coming down by the bucketful. The flakes fall on the black water, on the trees and lawns, on the pier from which Röhm's boys would dive into the lake. Did they sleep here, in this room? Did Hitler come storming in here, foaming at the mouth?

The true sense of living history will not come. That doesn't trouble me too much. The most industrious of chambermaids, after all, have been scrubbing here for the last sixty years, and scrubbing washes away the evil, snow covers everything, stillness and silence and time do the rest.

THERE SEEMS NO ESCAPING THIS LONG WINTER. ON MY WAY TO AUSTRIA
and Italy it starts snowing again, with a vengeance. The trucks drive slower and slower, they growl and blow great clouds of exhaust fumes into the frozen air. Blue lights flash in the distance, a snow-covered policeman waves us onto a side road, the Brenner Pass is in complete chaos, not even the snowploughs can get through.

Night falls in Innsbruck. The streets are deathly quiet, the snowflakes keep tumbling down amid the old yellow and pink houses, along the archways, against the windows of the empty
Weinstubes
– for who would send a dog out on a night like this? Some boys are playing football on the Marktgraben, a child rushes outside to catch snowflakes on his tongue, but otherwise everything is only lonely and a bit sad, this new winter in the spring.

On my way here I had come across two intractable spirits; both of them at places where, to be honest, I had never expected them.

The first one I met at the Obersalzberg, where the Alps begin and where Hitler's holiday residence, the Berghof, once stood. Four years ago the Americans opened the site to the public. From 1923, Hitler spent a great deal of time there, first in a little wooden holiday bungalow in the grounds of the Moritz
gasthaus
, later in a rented villa, and from 1933 in the Berghof. During the 1930s the area was transformed into a complete Nazi mountain, ruled and run by Hitler's secretary and right-hand man Martin Bormann. The whole party leadership moved into villas there. Pension Moritz became a
Volkshotel
for party members, Hotel Zum Türken was wrested from its owner for a pittance by Bormann himself. When
there was nothing left to do above ground, he started on the construction of the enormous Alpenfestung, a system of myriad bunkers and at least five kilometres of tunnel. Most of that fort is still there.

The Kehlsteinhaus, also known as the Eagle's Nest, is there as well, high atop the rocks. The observation post, grim on the outside but decorated on the inside in ‘steamboat style with a rustic touch’, could be reached only by elevator. Built in 1938 through extreme hardship on the part of hundreds of workers, it was a present for Hitler's fiftieth birthday. A few hundred metres below it lies the pastureland of the Scharitzkehl and the old tourist café run by the Hölzls, a family of woodcutters. In the café's hallway I came across a framed and yellowing eviction notice, addressed to grandfather Simon Hölzl and signed M. Bormann. For security reasons, it seems, the Nazis wanted to have the café torn down, but Hölzl refused. He had no intention of giving up his lively trade in milk, coffee and beer there in that mountain pasture. The first sentence of Bormann's final reminder reads: ‘The only possible reply to your correspondence of 10-2-1940 would be to send you to the concentration camp at Dachau.’