by Thomas Weber
With the king out of town and government officials all at home, there had been no immediate danger to the safety of the royal family and the government. As USPD revolutionaries reached the first military barracks, the noncommissioned officers who had been left in charge during off-hours decided there was no need to put up a fight. Hence, they allowed soldiers to leave the barracks and join the revolutionaries in the streets of Munich if they so wished. With one exception, similar scenes subsequently occurred in barracks all over the city, including that of Hitler’s unit. All the while, occasional shots were being fired.10
Prior to the evening of November 7, there had been precious few signs that people in Munich were demanding revolutionary change. When Swiss photographer Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille, who had visited her friend and lover Emmy Krüger in Munich in the days leading up to the revolution, left Munich to return to her native Switzerland, she had no inkling that a revolution might erupt within hours. Renée’s mother noted in her diary after her daughter’s return home that she had “not noticed anything, & that night we had a Republic in Bavaria!”11
Only a small number of decisive and idealistic radical left-wing leaders, many of them dreamers in the best sense of the word, rather than moderate Social Democratic ones, took part in the action that night. In the words of Rahel Straus, a medical doctor and Zionist activist who had attended the rally in the afternoon: “But a handful of people—allegedly barely a hundred—seized the moment and started the revolution.”12
Close to midnight, as almost everyone in Munich was fast asleep, Eisner declared Bavaria a Freistaat, a free republic—literally, a free state—and instructed newspaper editors to make sure his proclamation would make it into the morning papers. The Bavarian revolution really was a left-wing coup d’état that few people had expected and fewer had seen coming. It was not a popular wave of protest headed by Eisner that carried out a revolution; rather, Eisner had waited for the masses and their leaders to go to bed before usurping power. As the press office of the newly established Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Council cabled to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland, “Literally overnight, the night from Thursday to Friday, the cleverly managed coup was brought off after a large mass rally.”13
On the morning of November 8, as Munich was waking up, most people at first did not realize that it was not to be just another ordinary day. For instance, Ernst Müller-Meiningen, one of Bavaria’s liberal leaders, told the woman who broke the news about the revolution to him that it was the wrong time of the year to tell him April Fools’ Day jokes. Ludwig III, meanwhile, who during the night had made his way to a castle outside Munich, did not learn until the afternoon that he had become a king without a kingdom.14
As Josef Hofmiller, a teacher at one of Munich’s grammar schools and a moderate conservative essayist, put it in his diary, “Munich had gone to bed as the capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria but awoke as the capital of a Bavarian ‘People’s State.’” And one may add that even when Hitler’s train from Berlin drew into Munich later that month, the future dictator arrived in a city with a fairly moderate political tradition—one that, despite its recent experience of a radical takeover through the decisive actions of a sectarian minority, was an unlikely birthplace for a political movement that would bring unprecedented violence and destruction to the world.15
When on November 21, 1918, he finally reported to the Reserve Battalion of the Second Infantry Regiment, the demobilization unit of the List Regiment in which he had served, Hitler again faced a choice. He could opt for demobilization and go home, the expected standard procedure for men who were not professional soldiers now that the war was over. Indeed, the men reporting to their demobilization units on their return to Munich were handed preprinted discharge papers. Alternatively, Hitler could accept demobilization and then join one of the right-wing Freikorps, as the militias were called that were fighting in Germany’s eastern borderlands against ethnic Poles and Russian Bolsheviks alike or were guarding Germany’s disintegrating southern border. The latter was a course of action to be expected of someone antagonized and politicized by the outbreak of Socialist revolution.16
Hitler had yet another choice: to take the unusual step of rejecting demobilization and thus of serving the new revolutionary regime, which is what he did, joining the Seventh Ersatz Company of the First Ersatz Battalion of the Second Infantry Regiment. In the words of Hofmiller, it was, first and foremost, “adolescents, louts, the work-shy” who made the same decision as Hitler did and stayed in the army. By contrast, “It’s the good, mature, hardworking soldiers who go home.” Most soldiers, he noted, “just go home. Our people are immensely peace-loving. The long war wore down the people on the front.”17
In postrevolutionary Munich, men like Hitler who had defied demobilization roamed around the city. Their colorful appearance was a far cry from their disciplined look on the home front during the war. “They wore their round field caps at a rakish angle. On their shoulders and chests they had red and blue ornaments, such as bows, ribbons and little flowers,” observed Victor Klemperer, a Jewish-born academic and journalist, of his visit to Munich in December 1918. Klemperer added, “But they all carefully avoided a combination of red, white and black [the colors of Imperial Germany], and on their caps there was no sign of the imperial cockade, while they had kept the Bavarian one.” There was little that was counterrevolutionary in the behavior of soldiers in the streets on Munich. On one occasion, one and the same group of soldiers sang in turns traditional Bavarian military marches and the German Worker’s “Marseillaise,” a German Socialist song sung to the melody of the French national anthem with the refrain: “Unafraid of the enemy, we stand together and fight! We march, we march, we march, we march; through pain and want if need be, for freedom, right and bread!”18
The reputation of Hitler’s Ersatz unit and its sister units in Munich was not merely that they helped to sustain the revolution but that, as the vanguards of radical change, they had carried out the revolution in the first place. Some people in Munich even referred to soldiers serving in the city as “Bolshevik soldiers.” Indeed, in the days after the revolution, groups of soldiers from the Second Infantry Regiment were seen marching with red flags around Munich.19
Hitler’s decision to stay in the army was not necessarily driven by political considerations. As his only valued social network at this time was the support staff of regimental HQ, his decision to reject demobilization no doubt resulted, at least in part, from a realization that he had no family or friends to whom to return. It is not inconceivable that material concerns also played a role in his decision to stay in the army. He had returned from the war dirt poor. His savings amounted to 15.30 marks by the end of the war, approximately 1 percent of the annual earnings of a worker. If he had opted for demobilization, he would have faced the prospect of living on the street, unless he managed to find immediate employment, which was no easy feat in the aftermath of the war. Turning to the Austrian Consulate for help would have been futile, too, as Munich was swarming with Austrians. According to the consulate, Austria’s diplomatic mission in Munich was supposed to provide for twelve thousand Austrian families, yet it simply lacked the resources for doing so.20
Staying in the army, by contrast, provided Hitler with free lodging, food, and monthly earnings of approximately 40 marks. He would later confirm in private how important the army provisions he received had been for him. “There was only one time when I was free of worries: my six years with the military,” he would state on October 13, 1941, in one of his monologues. At his military HQ, “nothing was taken very seriously; I was given clothes—which, while not very good, were honorable—and food; also lodgings, or else permission to lie down wherever I wished.”21
Hitler’s ultimate motive in refusing demobilization may well have been opportunistic. Nevertheless, he demonstrated through his active and unusual decision to stay in the army that he did not mind serving the new Socialist regime if that choice allowed him t
o avoid poverty, homelessness, and solitude. In short, at the very least, opportunism had trumped politics.
Hitler’s service did not allow him to keep his head down, for soldiers in Munich were ordered to support and defend the new order. As increasingly often people were willing to challenge the new regime, Kurt Eisner had to forgo his pacifist convictions and rely upon the support of those soldiers in Munich, who, like Hitler, had opted not to be demobilized. As Josef Hofmiller noted on December 2: “The crowd made its way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to demand for Eisner to come out and to demand from him that he shall resign. But immediately a military vehicle drew up. Machine guns were directed at the crowd, which as a result quickly dispersed. Soldiers occupied the [neighboring] ‘Bayerischer Hof.’”22
One of the tasks for Hitler and other soldiers in Munich was to defend the regime against anti-Semitic attacks, which had been proliferating, not in the least due to the prominent involvement in the revolution of Jews born outside Bavaria. For instance, both Eisner and his top aide Felix Fechenbach were non-Bavarian Jews. Rahel Straus and some of her friends among Munich’s established Jewish community had felt worried from the moment of Eisner’s takeover as to how attitudes toward Jews might be affected by the revolution. “We found it worrying at the time how many Jews suddenly had become ministers,” recalled Straus many years later. “Things were probably worst in Munich; it was not just that there were a lot of Jews among the leaders, but even more among the government workers that one encountered in government buildings. [… ] It was a great misfortune. It was the beginning of the Jewish catastrophe [… ] And it is not as though we only knew this today; we knew it then, and we said so.”23
Indeed, within hours of the overthrow of the old order, voices were heard in Munich denouncing the new regime as being run by Jews. For instance, opera singer Emmy Krüger, Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille’s friend and lover, noted in her diary on November 8: “Ragged soldiers with red flags, machine guns ‘keeping order’—shooting and shouting everywhere—the revolution in full swing. [… ] Who is in power? Kurt Eisner, the Jew?? Oh God!” The same day, Hofmiller wrote in his diary: “Our Jewish compatriots appear to worry that the fury of the mob might turn against them.” Furthermore, little handbills directed against Eisner and Jews in general had been glued to the Feldherrnhalle, the monument celebrating Bavaria’s past military triumphs and the site of many a public assembly.24
A week after his return to Munich, Hitler’s decision to stay in the army paid off. It allowed him to reconnect with the member of his “surrogate” family from the front to whom he had been closest during the war: Ernst Schmidt, a painter and member of a trade union affiliated with the Social Democratic Party. Like Hitler, Schmidt opted to stay in the army when, on November 28, he reported to the demobilization unit of the List Regiment. Schmidt returned to Munich well before the other men of the regiment would arrive back in Bavaria’s capital, as he had been on home leave since early October. Due to the collapsing western front, he had no longer been required to return to northern France and Belgium.
Schmidt had been one of Hitler’s fellow dispatch runners for regimental HQ on the western front. This was far from the only feature Hitler and Schmidt shared. Both were non-Bavarians, born in the same year within miles of the Bavarian border—Schmidt came from Würzbach in Thuringia, whereas Hitler had been born on Bavaria’s southern border, in Braunau am Inn in Upper Austria. Both Schmidt and Hitler had lived in prewar Austria and their mutual passion was painting: Hitler as a postcard painter and aspiring artist, Schmidt as a painter of ornamental designs. They even looked fairly similar; both were skinny, even though Hitler was slightly taller and Schmidt had blond hair. Like Hitler, Schmidt was single. Like Hitler, he had not displayed any apparent deep interest in women, and like Hitler he had no close family to which to return. The only real difference lay in their religious upbringing: unlike Hitler, who was nominally Catholic, but like so many future National Socialists, Schmidt was Protestant. Aside from that, Schmidt and Hitler appeared and acted almost like twins.25
With Schmidt’s return to Munich, Hitler could cling to the hope that he could just continue his life from the war in regimental HQ that he had found emotionally so satisfying. If Schmidt’s subsequent testimony is to be trusted, the two friends spent their time sorting military clothing in the days following their reunion, while Hitler kept his distance from everyone else. It is safe to assume that the two men eagerly awaited the return to Munich of their peers from regimental HQ.26
Up to this point, during the two weeks that he spent in Bavaria’s capital on his return from the war, Hitler acted very differently from the story National Socialist propaganda would tell about how he became a National Socialist leader. He was a drifter and opportunist who quickly accommodated himself to the new political realities. There was nothing antirevolutionary in his behavior.
The Munich he experienced was now in the grip of Socialist revolutionaries who, unlike Bolshevik leaders in Russia, eschewed the use of force during their coup, a largely bloodless revolution. Indeed, its leader, Kurt Eisner, had tried to build bridges toward Social Democratic centrists and moderate conservatives. As was to become clear in the weeks and months to come, the problem with Bavaria’s future did not lie with Eisner’s goals. It lay with the fact that his coup d’état had destroyed Bavaria’s existing institutions and political traditions, without replacing them with sustainable new ones. For the time being, however, Hitler showed few signs that he was troubled by any of this. The future dictator of the Third Reich was not an apolitical person but an opportunist for whom the urge to escape loneliness trumped everything else.
Hitler’s dream of reunification with his wartime peers was not realized. Early on the morning of December 5, a week prior to the return to Munich of their brothers-in-arms from the List Regiment, Hitler and Schmidt packed their belongings in Luisenschule, a school building just to the north of Munich’s Central Station where their unit was housed and where Hitler had recuperated in the winter of 1916/17 from his injury on the Somme. They put on their winter gear and set off for a short journey that would take them to Traunstein, a small, picturesque town to the southeast of Munich, close to the Alps, where they were to serve in a camp for POWs and civilian internees.27
On the train that took them to Traunstein, they were among 140 enlisted men and two noncommissioned officers from the Ersatz Battalion of their regiment ordered to do service in the town not far from the Austrian border. In total, fifteen men from Hitler’s company had been picked to work in the camp. Hitler’s medical status may well have landed him on the list of soldiers bound for Traunstein, as locals in the town described the unit in which he was to serve as being essentially a “convalescent unit.”28
Hitler and Schmidt would later claim for political expediency that they had volunteered for service in Traunstein, so as to support the story that the future leader of the Nazi Party had returned from the war as an almost fully minted National Socialist and hence had felt nothing but disgust toward revolutionary Munich. In Mein Kampf, Hitler asserted that his service in “the reserve battalion of my regiment which was in the hands of ‘Soldiers’ Councils [… ] disgusted me to such a degree that I decided at once to go away again if possible. Together with my faithful war comrade, Schmiedt Ernst, I now came to Traunstein and remained there till the camp was broken up.” Schmidt, meanwhile, later would state that when volunteers for service in Traunstein were sought, “Hitler said to me, ‘Say, Schmidt, let’s give in our names, you and me. I can’t stick it here much longer.’ Nor could I! So we came forward.”29
Hitler’s and Schmidt’s claims do not add up. Even if they did volunteer to carry out their duty in the camp, their decision would still not have been one directed against the new revolutionary regime, as the two men were still serving the very same regime in Traunstein. Soldiers’ Councils existed elsewhere in Bavaria as much as they existed in Munich. Revolutionary councils had been set up in military units all over Bavar
ia, in factories as well as by farmers, in the belief that they, rather than parliament, now represented the popular will and would drive political change. Only by joining a Freikorps or by agreeing to be demobilized could Hitler have avoided serving Eisner’s regime.
When Hitler and Schmidt arrived in Traunstein, an almost exclusively Catholic town of a little more than eight thousand people, they were welcomed by a setting that was stunning, particularly after their having experienced the devastated landscape of the western front for more than four years. On a crisp winter day, the snow-covered majestic mountain chain of the Bavarian Alps visible in the near distance from Traunstein looks almost unreal.30
Hitler and Schmidt were now members of a guard unit that, just like the Grenzschutz (borderguard) unit housed together with it, supported the new revolutionary government. On the day of the revolution, soldiers in Traunstein had indeed cheered the new republic. And in the wake of the revolution, the members of the guard and Grenzschutz units had elected a Soldiers’ Council firmly in support of the new order.31
The camp to which Hitler and Schmidt had been sent was located in a former salt works factory lying below the elevated historic center of Traunstein. At the beginning of the war, the cross-shaped building, crowned by a big chimney at its heart, had been fenced off by wooden planks. Even though the camp previously had housed both enemy civilians and POWs, its civilian internees had left by the time of Hitler’s arrival. Its remaining POWs, who no longer saw themselves as prisoners due to the end of the war, now spent their time walking in and out of the camp, exploring the region, or visiting the farms and workshops at which they previously had been deployed as laborers.32
