by Thomas Weber
Indeed, the Bavarian election results call into question the frequent assumption that, at least for the region that would give birth to German National Socialism, the First World War was the “seminal catastrophe” for the twentieth century’s subsequent disasters.52 The prospects for democratization, or at least a moderate political future, in Bavaria continued to be promising in January 1919, not in spite of but because of a lack of a break with the past. Bavarians’ political ideas and preferences had been affected surprisingly little by the war; the same vote counts that in the past had fueled Bavaria’s prewar reformist political order now supported the new liberal parliamentary order in Germany.
Back in Traunstein, trouble was brewing, as according to Hans Weber, one of the camp’s officers, the men with whom Hitler was serving were individuals “who appeared to regard their military employment after the armistice and the revolution purely as a means of continuing their carefree existence at the expense of the state. [… ] They were the vilest creatures ever to have visited Traunstein: idle, undisciplined, demanding and insolent. They regularly left their posts, failed to attend their duties, and stayed away without leave.” Due to their lax behavior, the head of the Soldiers’ Council urgently requested that the soldiers be returned to Munich once the majority of the remaining POWs had been repatriated in late December. The request was granted. Yet officers in the camp excluded Hitler and Schmidt from those asked to leave Traunstein.53 The decision by his superiors to keep Hitler, when sending away so many other guards, indicates that, in the eyes of his officers, he continued to be the conscientious soldier and dutiful recipient of orders that he had been during the war. That is, unlike most of the other soldiers who had been sent with him to Traunstein, he was neither undisciplined nor rebellious. There was no sign yet of any transformation in Hitler’s persona at least outwardly.
Therefore, Hitler and Schmidt were still in Traunstein after the great majority of POWs had been sent home. It is not entirely clear when the two men did return to Munich. Hitler himself claimed falsely in Mein Kampf that they stayed on in the camp until its dissolution and that “in March, 1919, we again returned to Munich.”54 This was a self-serving lie, as it placed Hitler conveniently outside Munich during the political turmoil that was to break out in late February.
It is most likely that Hitler and Schmidt left Traunstein shortly after the departure of the last remaining Russian POWs on January 23, 1919. Henceforth, only a skeletal staff remained behind to close down the camp, which was dismantled by late February. It would appear that by February 12 at the very latest, Hitler returned to Munich, as it was on that day that he was transferred from the Seventh Ersatz Company of the Second Infantry Regiment’s Ersatz Battalion to the regiment’s Second Demobilization Company.55
The fact that Hitler and Schmidt were not among the guards who were sent back to Munich as soon as the majority of POWs had left the camp is important not just for revealing Hitler’s continuing to please his superiors. It also indicates that a gulf existed between Hitler and the majority of the men he served with, as had been the case during the war. His conscientious service had driven a wedge between the undisciplined majority of the men serving in Traunstein and him. As a result, Hitler and Schmidt continued to be outsiders there just as they had been during the war as members of regimental HQ.
As Hitler returned to Munich, the recent experiences of the future leader of the Third Reich on the edge of the Alps had done nothing to make him turn against the new revolutionary regime. Both Schmidt and he dutifully served it, making no effort to be demobilized at this point. Their continued support of the Bavarian and German government, despite its change from a monarchy to a republic, constitutes no contradiction to the idea that Hitler was essentially the same man that he had been during the war, when, just as now, he had been on good terms with his superiors and followed their orders obediently. After all, many members of the old regime, including the commander of Hitler’s division, served the new one, too. It would be only after his return to Munich that Hitler’s involvement with the new political order would start to go much further than that of his former superiors.
CHAPTER 2
A Cog in the Machine of Socialism
(February to Early April 1919)
Sometime on February 15, 1915, poet-novelist Rainer Maria Rilke sat at his desk in Munich and stared at the photo that Countess Caroline Schenk von Stauffenberg, an acquaintance of his, had included in her most recent letter. It depicted the countess’s three sons, Claus, Berthold, and Alexander.
The political situation in Munich had taken a sharp turn for the worse since the time that Rilke had written his cautiously optimistic Christmas letter to his mother. Nevertheless, as he started to compose his letter to Countess Caroline, he tried to remain positive, bringing to paper his hope that out of the present misery a better world would emerge for Countess Caroline’s “boy who even now shows such great promise for the future.”
Rilke wrote: “Who knows whether it may not fall to us to overcome the greatest confusion and danger, so that the coming generation will grow up as it were naturally in a world that is very much renewed.” He told Countess Caroline that there was hope that, despite the current destitution, the future would be bright for her three sons, “for surely beyond the watershed of the war, for all its appalling height, the course of the river must flow easily into the new and the open.”
Cautiously optimistic about the future of twelve-year-old Claus and his brothers, he expressed a hope that the current crisis would not be a harbinger for something worse to come but would result in a “decision in favor of humanity as such.” On the day that Rilke wrote his letter, it was simply inconceivable that, twenty-five years later, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and his brother Berthold would be executed for their attempt to assassinate, on July 20, 1944, the man who was now just a twenty-nine-year-old nobody who had recently returned to Munich from his service in Traunstein.1
One of the reasons why Munich’s political situation had deteriorated rapidly by mid-February was the continued economic hardship and hunger reigning in the city that again provided a home to Hitler.
A few days after the revolution, essayist and teacher Josef Hofmiller had half-jokingly doubted that the revolution would ever have occurred, “had we only had drinkable beer.” Things really had not improved markedly since then, which many in Munich blamed on the victor powers of the war. As Zionist activist Rahel Straus recalled, “The armistice agreement did not bring an end to the blockade leveled against Germany. That really was terrible. People had been able to endure hardships in the knowledge that there was no alternative, it was war. The war was over [but] still the borders were closed, the hunger remained. Nobody could understand why a whole people was allowed to go hungry.”2
These feelings of hunger and betrayal described by Straus did far more to fuel the city’s political radicalization than either the experience of war or preexisting political sentiments from before the war. That, at least, was the assessment of two British intelligence officers, Captains Somerville and Broad, who had been dispatched to Munich. In late January, they reported back to London that “unless assistance is given before April, when food supplies will be exhausted, it will not be possible to keep the people of Bavaria—already undernourished—within bounds.” They predicted, “Hunger will lead to rioting and Bolshevism, and there is no doubt that this is a great cause for anxiety to the authorities.”3
Yet fanning the turn for the worse in Bavaria’s capital even more than the continued blockade was that Kurt Eisner simply did not know how to govern. Even though he had his heart in the right place, he simply did not understand the art of politics. He did not comprehend that being a successful politician required an entirely different tool kit than did being a successful intellectual. Many of the qualities that are virtues in thinkers are active liabilities in politicians, which is why theoretical acumen, more often than not, is combined with political failure.4 At the same time, Bavaria’s revolution
ary leader lacked adaptability and cunning, as well as a capability, once in power, to think on his feet and quickly exploit situations to his advantage. He was likeable but had no idea how to inspire, charm, and lead. In all this, he was the polar opposite of Hitler, who would emerge on the political scene later in the year.
Critics across political boundaries believed that Eisner was an intellectual without any talent for leadership. In the eyes of journalist Victor Klemperer, Eisner was “a delicate, tiny, fragile, bent little man. His bald head was not of an imposing size. Dirty grey hair straggled over his collar, his reddish beard had a dirty, grayish tinge; his eyes were a dull gray behind the lenses of his spectacles.” The Jewish-born writer could detect “no sign of genius, of venerability, of heroism.” For Klemperer, Eisner was “a mediocre, worn-out person.” Some of the ministers in Eisner’s government who did not come from his own party were even less complimentary about his talents as a politician. For instance, Heinrich von Frauendorfer, the minister of transportation, had told Eisner in a cabinet meeting on December 5: “The entire world says that you do not know how to govern,” adding, “You are no statesman,… you are a fool!”5
Another problem was that a high number of senior figures in the government and in the councils were not Bavarians by birth. Kurt Eisner failed to realize that putting more homegrown revolutionaries in the driver’s seat of the revolution would have enhanced the popular legitimacy of the new regime. In February, Klemperer, who covered the Munich revolution for a Leipzig newspaper, quipped in one of his articles, “What used to be true of the arts in Munich has become true of politics; everyone says: Where are the people of Munich, where are the Bavarians?”6
Worse still, as a result of his lack of talent as a political operator, Eisner had no realistic idea how best to contain radical revolutionaries within his own ranks and in groups further to the left of his own party, such as the Spartacists—the revolutionary group named after Roman slave leader Spartacus, which advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat—once the euphoria of the first few days of the revolution had ebbed away. Eisner brushed repeated and urgent warnings aside that he was far too trusting toward the extreme left and that he underestimated the danger of a coup from the far left. He told his cabinet that people on the extreme left were just letting off some steam: “We need to let people get it out of their systems.”7 He failed to realize that by trying to tame the far left in Munich, he had achieved the opposite: he had fanned the growth of the radical left, himself digging the grave for his conciliatory approach to politics.
Radical revolutionaries felt that Eisner had sold out to reactionaries—which in their eyes comprised everyone from the Social Democrats (SPD), liberals, and moderate conservatives, to genuine reactionaries. In their idealistic but paranoid worldview, which followed standard Bolshevik reasoning, parliamentary democracy, liberalism, gradualism, and reformism on the one hand, and right-wing authoritarianism on the other, were but two sides of the same coin.
In early December 1918, Fritz Schröder, one of the representatives of Eisner’s Independent Social Democrats, had come out in the Soldiers’ Council explicitly against parliamentary democracy: “The cry for a national assembly was nothing but reactionary babble.” Similarly, anarchist Erich Mühsam had demanded the establishment of a benign dictatorship, aimed not at supporting the proletariat, but “to do away with the proletariat.” Meanwhile, a close associate of Mühsam, Josef Sontheimer, had essentially called for a violent rule of the mob. “I hope,” Sontheimer had shouted during a meeting in early January, “that we will all take up arms to settle our scores with the reaction.” A few days earlier, Communists had demanded in a public rally in Munich that people should “go to the elections of the National Assembly holding not ballot papers but hand-grenades.”8
By late November 1918, Erhard Auer, the minister of the interior and leader of the SPD, had already come to the conclusion that the continued radicalism of the extreme left made Bavaria’s democratization unsustainable. Deeply worried that tyranny might erupt, Auer continually lashed out at Eisner and his lack of decisive action against left-wing radicals, declaring on November 30, “There cannot, there must not be a dictatorship in our free people’s state.” As Eisner’s supporters had felt increasingly beleaguered from all sides, they effectively suspended freedom of expression as early as December 8. That day, they ordered a few hundred soldiers to storm the offices of conservative, liberal, and moderate SPD newspapers. Two days later, Americans residing in Munich received urgent notification from the US State Department that it was no longer safe to reside in Germany; they were told “to leave for home at the earliest possible date.”9
Elsewhere in Germany radical left-wing attempts to overthrow the new liberal political order were even more extreme, proving that Auer’s concerns had not been unwarranted. In early January, Communists tried to stage a coup d’état in Berlin aimed at bringing down the national government, killing off parliamentary democracy by preventing the national elections from taking place, and establishing a German Soviet Republic in its place. It was only with the help of militias that moderate Social Democrats were able to save Germany’s nascent parliamentary democracy. And left-wing attempts to overthrow parliamentary democracy in Germany by force were not limited to the capital. For instance, from January 10 to February 4, a Soviet Republic had existed in Bremen, the old Hanseatic city in the northwest of Germany. In late 1918 and early 1919, the primary challenge to the establishment of liberal democracy in Germany did not emanate from the right. It came from the left.10
The only serious challenge in Bavaria not emanating from the radical left came from Rudolf Buttmann, a librarian working in the library of the Bavarian parliament who had recently returned from the war and who would head the Nazi Party in the Bavarian parliament between 1925 and 1933. Together with the Pan-German publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann and other coconspirators, Buttmann was planning an overthrow of Eisner’s government and to that end set up a Bürgerwehr (militia) in late December. However, his collaborators were politically diverse. They included both conservatives and radical right-wing extremists who dreamed of staging a putsch against Eisner, and featured members of the Thule Society, a radical right-wing secret society that would play a prominent role in the rise of the early Nazi Party. Buttmann’s coconspirators also included leading Social Democrats; indeed, when setting up the Bürgerwehr, he had liaised with Erhard Auer—who also collaborated with another member of the Thule Society, Georg Grassinger, on trying to bring Eisner down.11
After coming to the realization early on that a restoration of the monarchy, as he would have preferred, was not a viable option, Buttmann decided to throw his weight behind moderate revolutionaries. During the winter of 1918/1919, he repeatedly advocated a pragmatic cooperation with Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other groups. Unlike those on the radical left, he was willing to go along with the new postwar parliamentary system. At this time, Buttmann was not yet the National Socialist activist and politician he was to become. The diary entry of Lehmann’s wife, Melanie, of January 6, 1919, suggests that Buttmann and Lehmann were genuinely collaborating with SPD ministers. It also indicates that the two men did not envisage at that point actively overthrowing the government but rather aiding it against anticipated challenges from the extreme left. “In early December a militia was quietly formed in Munich,” wrote Melanie, “to oppose the violent activities of the Spartacus squad, which had disrupted a series of gatherings with armed intruders and forced the resignation of the minister of the interior, Auer, a moderate socialist.” She added: “Julius worked with great pleasure and fervor and it was hoped that the militia would be organized and ready to defeat the Spartacists’ next venture, which was expected to take place before the elections. The government knew about it and the moderate ministers were greatly in favor.”12
As the case of Buttmann and Lehmann indicates, Bavarian postwar democratization was not stillborn; at that time, some of the men who in future woul
d become some of the most important supporters of Hitler were still willing to go along with a parliamentarization and democratization of Bavaria. Even the Thule Society, of which Julius Friedrich Lehmann was a member, had then envisaged a future for Bavaria headed by a SPD leader. In early December, the SPD drew up plans for arresting Eisner and replacing him with Auer.13
As the political situation in Munich continued to radicalize in early 1919, Hitler and Schmidt continued, through their actions, to bolster the revolutionary government, even when, on their return from Traunstein to their regiment in Munich, its staff was being encouraged to demobilize. To facilitate the quick return to civilian life of its members, the regiment had set up a “Department for Employment Services” and allowed its members to take leave for up to ten days at a time to seek employment, with the right to return to the unit if no work could be secured during that period.14 And yet Hitler and Schmidt chose to continue to serve the new regime, even when people opposed to Eisner tried to stage a coup to unseat him on February 19.
The coup attempt of February 19 remains clouded in secrecy to the present day. Aimed at removing Eisner from power, it was led by a sailor, Obermaat Konrad Lotter, a member of the Bavarian Soldier’s Council. Featuring six hundred sailors—most of whom were Bavarians—who only a few days earlier had returned to Bavaria from the North Sea, the putsch ended in a showdown and shootout at Munich’s central station. Most surviving pieces of evidence suggest that Lotter had been worried that Eisner was neither willing nor able to hand over power to the parties that had won the Bavarian elections, and therefore that a more radical revolution, aided by troops sympathetic to the extreme left, was imminent. Significantly, neither the regiment of which Hitler was a member nor other Munich-based troop contingents came to the rescue of Lotter and his men.
