So Goering, well pleased with himself, joined the Nazi Party and at the age of twenty-nine assumed once more what he most desired, the command of men.
II
Failure and Exile
FOR GOERING the command of the storm troopers, which at his own suggestion he did not formally assume for two months, became an absorbing task. As he put it himself: “At first it was important to weld the S.A. into a stable organization, to discipline it, and to make of it a completely reliable unit which had to carry out the orders which I or Adolf Hitler should give it . . . I strove from the beginning to bring into the S.A. those members of the party who were young and idealistic enough to devote their free time and their entire energies to it. . . . In the second place, I tried to find recruits among laborers.”1 These men were needed for organized street fighting and as an offensive force at Hitler’s political meetings. Goering was the ideal man to raise morale. As Hitler himself put it, recalling this early association: “I liked him. I made him the head of my S.A. He is the only one of its heads that ran the S.A. properly. I gave him a disheveled rabble. In a very short time he had organized a division of eleven thousand men.”2
From the very beginning of their extraordinary relationship, Hitler, the corporal in the raincoat, exercised supreme power over Goering, the famous commandant of the Richthofen squadron. Hitler was not of good birth, nor had he had a good education; for years he had lived in destitution, unable to solve the elementary problem of making a bare living. In the Army, where he was a Meldegänger, or officer’s runner, he had gained one stripe and no more. But now he was obsessed with the need for political power, and his gift for argument and agitation had made him the accepted master of Goering. They seemed a most unlikely pair, but each had the perception to recognize the advantages the other could bring him. Goering offered Hitler the services of an officer and a gentleman of fortune; Hitler offered Goering the chance to become an active revolutionary and to shake a bloody fist with the cry, “To hell with Versailles!”
Goering brought Carin down from the mountains to Munich, and they set up a new home in the suburb of Obermenzing. They furnished the little house as best they could, and soon it became a meeting place for the more permanent members of the new party. Carin met Hitler and attended the first big Marsfeld parade, on January 28, 1923. She liked Hitler, who knew how to charm women, and soon the Goerings were offering their hospitality to the Leader and his friends, such as Rudolf Hess, who had also been a pilot in the Air Force, Alfred Rosenberg, the so-called philosopher, a Baltic German from Riga who had fled to Germany at the time of the Russian Revolution after living in Moscow and had become a virulent anti-Communist, and Captain Ernst Roehm, a professional soldier aged thirty-six, who still held an Army commission; although not by birth a member of the officer caste, Roehm had during the war become known to General Ludendorff, the last Chief of Staff of the German Army. Apart from Rosenberg, these men were militarists who made suitable company for Goering even if they scarcely seemed so for his aristocratic wife.
Roehm, in particular, was useful because of the wide variety of friends he had in Army circles, and he had done much to increase the number of volunteers for the S.A. In fact, he saw in the S.A. the nucleus of a secret army which would eventually replace the Reichswehr, the defense forces of the Republic, which consisted mainly of the Army and which the Versailles Treaty had supposedly limited to 100,000 men. This thick-necked homosexual was an able man who regarded Goering more as a rival than as an ally. But Hitler, already practicing his future policy of divide and rule, recognized that Goering would be a useful brake on the unruly energies of Roehm, to whom he gave the high-sounding title of chief of staff, while Goering was the actual commandant of the S.A.
Carin, the former baroness of gentle upbringing and mystical outlook, must have regarded with a strange kind of awe these men who tramped in and out of her house and talked themselves hoarse, after the companions she had known during her sheltered life in Stockholm. But Hermann was evidently in his element, and greatly helped by his wife’s Swedish bank account. Carin was determined that her husband should serve to the best of his ability the country that was now hers as well as his. Above all, she, like her husband, accepted Hitler’s genius without question, and she listened to the endless discussions in which the behavior of the new democracy represented by the Weimar Republic and the treatment of Germany by the Allies after the defeat were invariably denounced, along with the Jews and the Communists, who were regarded as the powerful promoters of Germany’s disgrace and suffering.
To show their seriousness of mind, both Hess and Goering went to the University of Munich and attended, according to Ernst Hanfstaengl, who first met them at this period, a course of lectures on the German war of liberation against Napoleon, delivered by the historian Karl Alexander von Müller.3 Hanfstaengl, who found Goering amusing company though “a complete condottiere, the pure soldier of fortune,” says that he also had a humorous contempt for the provincial Bavarians by whom at this time Hitler was surrounded; he tried to assert his birth by wearing a monocle. Hitler apparently returned the compliment when Goering was not there by making fun of the uxorious “darlings” with which Carin was always addressing her husband. Yet Hanfstaengl found Goering attractive and intelligent, with “a much broader fund of common sense than the other Nazis.”
The S.A. was one of the many semimilitary refuges for the displaced soldiers of the postwar years. Many of them had originally joined the Freikorps movement, which was deliberately tolerated by the Allies after the formal dissolution of the Imperial Army, because of fear of the Communist strength in Germany and the revolutionary fervor of the Soviet Union. The Freikorps movement was the answer of the right to the left both inside and outside Germany; it was organized regionally on a private basis and financed by the wealthy to oppose the left-wing government. Nevertheless, the Freikorps men had soon become undisciplined freebooters, out of favor with both the Allies and the Weimar Republic. They formed ideal recruits for the Nazis, who were themselves freebooters. To Hitler the Freikorps had always acted as an inspiration; according to Gerald Reitlinger, he took over from them the swastika banner, the brown shirt and what became the Hitler salute. He also took over Roehm, who had been a Freikorps leader after the war.
When eventually in 1921 the Allies enforced the disarming of the Freikorps, Hitler immediately turned what was in effect his own particular Freikorps movement into a “sports” organization; later he renamed it the Sturmabteilung, or S.A., which, as we have seen, is what it was already called when Goering took over its command. While Roehm wanted to link the Sturmabteilung with the “Black Reichswehr,” the undercover supplementary army secretly supported by the Weimar Republic, Hitler wanted to retain the S.A. for himself to act as a bodyguard and a propagandist force for the development of political agitation through violence directed against the Weimar Republic and left-wing Germany. For this reason alone, Goering was from Hitler’s point of view a more suitable commander of the S.A. than Roehm.
Throughout 1923 Goering worked on the reorganization of the S.A., which rapidly grew in numbers until even the right-wing Bavarian government became alarmed. Hitler, though still an amateur in revolution, knew that at this stage of complication and chaos in German politics he was not strong enough to lead a rebellion on a national scale; he needed allies who shared his views sufficiently to work with him and whom he could eventually seek to dominate by the force of his own personality. For this reason, 1923 was for him a year of strenuous and mostly abortive negotiation, in which Goering was closely involved, while at the same time the S.A. was being disciplined and drilled in military style in the woods on the outskirts of Munich. The Bavarian government, always uncertain of its relations with Hitler, was nevertheless in the latter part of 1923 itself in open rebellion against the government in Berlin. In this situation lay Hitler’s hope of the amalgamation of forces which would unseat the national government and bring him personally to some form of power on the
crest of a revolutionary wave originating from Bavaria.
In January Hitler succeeded in persuading the Bavarian authorities to permit him to hold a rally of some five thousand storm troopers in Munich. At this mass meeting he spoke against the central government in an attempt to show his followers that the party’s bid for political power in Germany was far more important than training to fight the French in the Ruhr. Opposed to any association with the Army, Hitler was also aware that to succeed he must ally himself with kindred nationalist movements and so swell the strength of his forces. This he managed to do in February with the help of Roehm. In the spring he began his attempts, without success, to persuade General Otto von Lossow, the Army commandant in Bavaria, to march with him on Berlin after the manner of Mussolini. In April Goering occupied the offices of the Nazi Party newspaper, the daily Völkischer Beobachter, in order to prevent the arrest of Dietrich Eckart, the disreputable writer who edited the paper for Hitler. This act was a further challenge to authority.
On May 1 Hitler made a fatal error. He had planned a major demonstration for this traditional day when the Munich Socialists held their rally; he had expected to receive the support of Lossow, but this support, asked for at the last moment, was resolutely refused. This put him in a most embarrassing situation, since, if he caused the disturbance that he intended, both the Army and the police would be forced to attack instead of support the storm troopers, who had already been ordered to assemble in full strength bearing all the illegal arms they possessed. Hitler himself, still anxious about what to do, met Goering and other prominent colleagues and associates at the Oberwiesenfeld paradeground, where thousands of men were waiting for orders. He, Goering and the rest wore their decorations; both Goering and Hitler aimed to look fierce and formidable in their steel helmets. Roehm, in his turn, exceeded himself by bluffing the regular Army into surrendering arms to the storm troopers. This was too much for General von Lossow. He summoned Roehm, who was still a regular officer, and told him he must return the arms at once. He then sent Roehm under escort to the paradeground with an ultimatum that the storm troopers must not march or cause any further disturbance. Hitler knew he was defeated, accepted the fact against the angry advice of the others and, in front of all his men, capitulated to Lossow, without whose support he knew there could be no successful outcome to large-scale violence. Eventually he returned to his Berchtesgaden home to replan the future, and for some weeks he took little part in the discussions that followed in Munich. He spent most of the summer in the mountains.
The discussions, with or without Hitler present, took place endlessly in the party offices, in the homes of the leaders, more particularly in Goering’s house in Obermenzing, and at the Bratwurstglöckle tavern near the Frauenkirche, in the center of Munich. Here Goering and Roehm, Heines, the homosexual friend of Roehm and a convicted murderer, Anton Drexler, one of the founders of the Nazi Party, Eckart and Rosenberg, the so-called intellectuals of the group, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, the wealthy representative of Munich culture, would variously sit together in the evening at a regular table, drinking their beer and discussing their politics in loud, uncompromising voices. Often Carin would join them as their principal woman companion, and occasionally Julius Streicher would come over from Nuremberg to add his particular contribution of foulmouthed anti-Semitism. When Hitler was in Munich he would join them, though it seems he preferred to visit Obermenzing and the quieter comforts provided by Carin. It was she who put new heart into both Hitler and her husband in the dark days that followed the defeat of May 1.
By the autumn, Hitler and Goering were once more on General von Lossow’s doorstep urging him to join with them in the common cause against the central government. Meanwhile, in August, Gustav Stresemann had become Chancellor in Berlin, and on September 27, alarmed by the insurrection that now seemed inevitable in Bavaria, he proclaimed martial law throughout Germany. Three weeks prior to this, on September 2, Hitler had strengthened his consolidation of nationalist forces at a mass meeting held in Nuremberg, at which his speech against the central government had been loudly cheered; General Ludendorff had also consented to appear in support of the movement. Quite apart from the Nazis and their Bavarian associates, unrest had been growing since January, when the French had occupied the Ruhr in order to enforce the delivery of the reparations promised them in the Treaty of Versailles. The Freikorps movement had gone into a phase of passive resistance to harass the invader, and, encouraged by this, the Black Reichswehr, the illegal supplementary corps of the regular Reichswehr, had shown itself ready to lead a revolt against the government in Berlin. This Black Reichswehr, under Major Buchrucker, numbered some twenty thousand men and had been tolerated in the past because it guarded the eastern frontier of Germany against the Poles. But now this illegal force had ugly associations with the secret society known as the Feme, which practiced a medieval tradition of brutality and atrocities, and, like the militaristic movements in Bavaria, it was a growing threat to the security of the central government in Berlin.
It was Stresemann’s objective to end the passive resistance in the Ruhr, to save Germany from anarchy and to come to terms with the Allies; the Bavarian government, on the other hand, was opposed to any form of concession to the Allies. Meanwhile inflation had gripped the German economy, and the mark, already fallen to over seven thousand to the dollar in January, had declined into astronomical figures by November.
Goering during this period had been trying, on behalf of Hitler, to persuade General von Lossow, as commander of the Bavarian Military District, to break his formal allegiance to Berlin and march with the S.A. and its associates to unseat the Stresemann government, which by the winter had come to regard Bavaria as the chief center of rebellion in Germany and so was prepared to bring force to bear to suppress any likely outbreak. Mussolini had provided them all with a splendid demonstration of what could be done when he had staged his March on Rome in October of the previous year. Hitler’s uneasy attempts at alliance with the Bavarian government could not, however, be developed to the point of action, and Hitler decided to force the issue with his own immediate associates. While he was deciding what action to take, a political meeting was announced by Gustav von Kahr, the new State Commissioner and virtual dictator of Bavaria. This was due to take place on November 8, 1923, and Hitler was deeply suspicious that Kahr, whom he did not trust, would on his personal initiative announce Bavarian independence and so steal the thunder of the Nazis. This Hitler determined should not happen, and he ordered Goering to get the storm troopers ready for action. Goering hurried to take up his duties from the bedside of Carin, who had had pneumonia and was still feverish. To add to his worries, his mother had recently died. He kissed Carin and told her he might be very late and that she was not to worry. Then he rushed to join Hitler and assemble the storm troopers.
The public meeting called by Kahr was held in the vast auditorium of the Bürgerbräukeller, a tavern in the suburbs that could accommodate an audience of three thousand people. Kahr took the platform with the Premier of Bavaria, Dr. von Knilling, General von Lossow and other ministers of state. Kahr spoke to his audience as they sat drinking from their great mugs of beer; he spoke of the need for a new German Army to inherit the glory of that which was lost. For the audience this was familiar stuff, and they were settling down to steady drinking when suddenly they heard a man’s voice shouting and the sound of pistol fire. Hitler, looking odd in an ill-fitting morning coat, was standing on a table pointing his pistol at the ceiling. Beside him were Hess and Goering and the Leader’s bodyguard, a wrestler called Graf. They pushed forward to the platform, where Kahr stood, shocked like his audience by this savage intrusion.
Hitler strode in front of him and shouted, “The national revolution has begun. The building is occupied by six hundred armed men. No one may leave the hall.” The beer drinkers saw that a machine gun was posted at the main entrance. Hitler bluffed the audience into believing that the governments of both Bavaria and the Reich were
overthrown, and that the Army and the police had joined the ranks of the swastika. Then at pistol point he removed the ministers from the platform for a conference in another room. Goering was left in charge.
The audience recovered from the shock and began to talk. Goering could see that they were not satisfied, so he decided to address the meeting himself, speaking from the platform.
“There is nothing to fear,” he shouted. “We are your friends. You’ve no reason to grumble—you’ve got your beer!” A new government was formed, he added, indicating the room where Hitler, gun in hand, was feverishly bluffing the three ministers to join with him in a government to be formed with General Ludendorff,. Ludendorff in fact knew nothing of this, though at that moment he was being brought by Hitler’s emissaries to the beer hall.
The ministers, uncertain what to do with Hitler, who was in a desperate state of excitement, parried his demands. The situation was tense because Ludendorff was expected at any moment, and the huge audience could not be kept under duress for an indefinite time. Hitler had to act. Without further discussion he rushed back onto the platform, announcing to the astonished audience that a new national government was in process of being formed with the collaboration of the ministers outside. He announced that he would be in control of the policy of the national government and that General Ludendorff would lead the new national army which would march forthwith on Berlin. The audience, believing that Hitler was indeed in a powerful association with men whom they trusted as much as they trusted anyone, began to raise a cheer. Then Ludendorff arrived. Although he was furious at the surprise that had been sprung on him, he let his presence appear to give support to what was happening. Hitler, deliriously happy, swore vengeance on the “November criminals” of 1918 and claimed that a new, strong, free, splendid Germany was being born. “Tomorrow,” he shouted, “will either see a new national government or it will see us dead! I shall win tomorrow, or I shall be a dead man.” And, like an actor in a melodrama, he pressed the pistol to his head.
Goering Page 5
