Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  There are strong reasons to believe that the SPD leadership had a hand in the putsch, as Lotter had met with the SPD’s leader, Erhard Auer, not long before the coup attempt to discuss the establishment of progovernment troops to safeguard Munich’s security. Lotter had also publicly declared on December 13 that if Auer became Bavaria’s revolutionary leader, 99 percent of Bavarians would support the revolutionary government. Furthermore, according to a diplomatic cable of the papal nuncio to Bavaria, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, Lotter’s sailors had stated that their goal had been to protect the building that housed parliament, to ensure that the opening of the new parliamentary session would go ahead on February 21 as planned.15

  In continuing to serve in a unit loyal to Eisner, Hitler, in effect, sided with Bavaria’s revolutionary leader rather than with Lotter. He continued to reside in the barracks of the Second Infantry Regiment on Lothstraße, just to the south of Oberwiesenfeld, where he had been stationed since his return from Traunstein, and to carry out his duties. One of his tasks was to perform guard duty at different locations in Munich. For instance, some of the soldiers from his company, thirty-six of them in total, which probably included Hitler himself, were deployed to secure the location at which Lotter’s coup had ended in a shoot-out and to guard Munich’s Central Station from February 20 to March.16 Through his service, Hitler helped to prevent others from attempting to depose Bavaria’s Jewish Socialist leader from power, thereby defending a regime that he would claim—once he became a National Socialist—always to have fought against.

  Despite the efforts by Hitler and his peers to protect Eisner, it took only two days from the time of Lotter’s failed coup until Eisner’s adversaries struck again. This time they did not fail. On February 21, on the day of the opening of the Bavarian parliament, a young student and officer in the Infantry Leib Regiment, Anton Count von Arco auf Valley, crouched up to Eisner from behind, just after the Independent Social Democrat (USPD) leader had stepped out of the Bavarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on his way to parliament for the opening of the Bavarian legislature, where he intended to hand in his resignation. Arco swiftly shot him twice in the back of the head. Eisner died on the spot.17

  It is most likely that Eisner died as a result of a plot hatched by officers of the Infantry Leib Regiment, the elite unit formerly charged with protecting the king. The great-niece of Michael von Godin, a fellow officer of Anton von Arco in the regiment and the brother of one of the commanders of Hitler’s regiment during the First World War, was told by one of her great-aunts that officers of the Infantry Leib Regiment had plotted to kill Eisner. Her great-aunt had shared with her that Michael von Godin and his peers in the Infantry Leib Regiment drew lots as to who would carry out the shooting, which determined that Arco would be the one to kill Eisner.18

  In the aftermath of the assassination of Eisner, nothing was anymore as it used to be, certainly not in the way imagined by Arco and his coconspirators. A high-ranking American official, Herbert Field, found this out the hard way. A few hours after the killing, Field, the US representative of the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control in Munich that had been set up after the Armistice, made his way to Munich’s Central Station, accompanied by a German officer. At the station, soldiers attacked the two men, throwing the German officer to the floor and tearing the epaulettes off his uniform. A few days after the occurrence, Field wrote in his diary, “The outlook is extremely dark. I expect to see a bolshevist reign installed in the near future.”19 As the station was manned by soldiers from Hitler’s company and its sister units, the occurrence gives us a good sense of the kind of men Hitler was serving with in his unit in late February 1919, irrespective of whether he personally had been on the scene during the attack on Field. (See Image 4.)

  If, as Hitler would suggest in Mein Kampf, he had been so out of tune with the leftist soldiers serving in Munich, why did he not request demobilization at this point? Why did he never talk about the Lotter putsch? In the years to come, he would talk ad nauseam about his own experiences in the war, but only in general terms about the revolution. After all, had he spoken about the attack on the American officer, or similar events that happened all over the city—that is, had he really opposed them—these anecdotes would have illustrated well some of his later contentions about the revolution, including his repeated claim that the revolution fatally weakened Germany at the very moment of Germany’s greatest need. But in Mein Kampf, Hitler preferred to remain silent about his service in Munich around the time of Eisner’s assassination and pretended that he was still at Traunstein at the time.

  In the hours, days, and weeks following the assassination of Eisner, Bavaria’s radicalization accelerated as the center of politics quickly eroded. In the eyes of many, compromise and moderation simply had failed to work.

  Yet Eisner’s killing was not the root cause of Bavaria’s subsequent radicalization. In reality, the radical left had never accepted the outcome of the Bavarian election in early January. Ever since the day that the results of the election were announced, plans had been afoot to abolish parliamentary democracy and put all political power into the hands of the Soviet-style Soldiers’, Workers’, and Peasants’ Councils.20

  For instance, in a meeting of the Workers’ Council in early February, Max Levien, the Moscow-born leader of Bavaria’s radical revolutionaries, the Spartacists, had made the case for the need for a new, second, “inevitable” revolution, aimed at crushing the bourgeoisie “in a civil war without mercy.” He thought the councils should seize all executive and legislative power until socialism was firmly established in Germany. In the same session, Erich Mühsam had demanded that the Council take action against Bavaria’s parliament in case parliament might act in a way that the councils did not like. He believed that, as in Russia, all power belonged in the hands of the councils anyway.21

  On February 16, a huge demonstration had taken place on Theresienwiese, organized jointly by Independent Social Democrats, Communists, and anarchists. En route to the rally, the crowd, which was awash with soldiers, howled “Down with Auer!” and “Long live Eisner!” Not only attended by Eisner, in all likelihood the event—at which red flags flew along with banners demanding the dictatorship of the proletariat—also featured none other than Adolf Hitler, as his unit was attending the event. During the rally, Mühsam declared that the protest constituted the prelude to world revolution, while Max Levien threatened that parliament must accept rule by the proletariat.22

  According to a diplomatic report of Eugenio Pacelli, the papal nuncio, from February 17, people had been asking themselves one big question in the days leading up to both the Lotter putsch and Eisner’s assassination: What would the radical left do once the new Bavarian parliament opened on February 21 (the day Eisner would be assassinated)? Pacelli argued that, judging by the faction’s recent activities, it seemed unlikely that the radical left would accept a transfer of power to parliament and forgo its belief in the need for a second, more radical revolution. He also argued that Eisner, after failing to secure any sizeable electoral support, had been leaning toward giving more power to the councils.23

  In short, the assassination of Bavaria’s revolutionary leader was not the original cause of the second revolution that occurred in the wake of his murder. Eisner’s death provided the radical left with an excuse for an attempt to grab power and kill parliamentary democracy altogether—essentially increasing legitimacy for something the group had desired to do anyway.

  Whatever his intentions had been, Eisner himself had sent out signals that could easily be understood as an encouragement to act against parliament. Not long before his assassination, he had stated, “We could do without the National Assembly sooner than without the councils. [… ] A national assembly is an elective body that can and must be changed when there is dissent from the popular masses.” Previously he had made many statements that, at the very least, lent themselves to being misunderstood. For instance, on December 5 he had told the m
embers of the Bavarian cabinet, “I do not care about the public, they change their minds daily.” He also had referred to parliament as a “backward body,” adding that he thought that the real problem with his government was that “we’re not radical enough.” When in the same cabinet meeting Johannes Timm, the minister of justice, had asked him, “Are you of the opinion that the soldiers should disperse the National Assembly in case you should not like it?” he had given an answer that suggests that he expected his resignation on February 21 not to pave the way to a peaceful transition of government but to a more radical revolution. His answer had been, “No, but under certain circumstances there will be another revolution.”24

  Irrespective of whether Eisner’s decision to resign on February 21 was a tactical one made in the expectation that his resignation would trigger renewed revolution, as many people at the time suspected,25 or whether he had genuinely accepted the supremacy of parliament, one thing was clear: members of the radical left finally could do what, for weeks, they had wanted to do all along—embark on a new revolution.

  On the very same day as Eisner’s death, the councils met and set up a Central Committee that essentially took over Bavaria’s executive power, doing whatever it could to prevent the formation in parliament of a new government. The following day, planes dropped fliers on Munich that announced that martial law was being declared. Soldiers roamed the city in the days following the assassination, while automobiles with red flags kept racing through the streets. A red flag—the color of the revolution—now also flew off the top of the university. Public notices, issued by the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, informed the population of Munich that “looters, thieves, robbers and those who agitate against the current government will be shot.” At nighttime the sound of rifle shots and machine gun fire filled the air of the city. Priests, who in the eyes of the revolutionaries were counterrevolutionary reactionaries, were no longer allowed to enter military hospitals.26

  The new regime was headed by Ernst Niekisch, a left-wing Social Democrat and teacher from Augsburg in Swabia. His ascendancy to power in Bavaria signaled a clear move away from a process of democratization compatible with Western-style parliamentary democracy. He was a supporter of National Bolshevism, a political movement that rejected the internationalism of Bolshevism but, other than that, believed in Bolshevism. Niekisch was of the opinion that Germany should turn its back on the West, which he thought would allow Germany to halt its decline. Thinking that the future lay in the East, the new leader of Bavaria thought that if the spirits of Prussia and Russia were combined and liberalism was rejected, golden days would lie ahead for both Russia and Germany.27

  Five days after his assassination, on Wednesday, February 26, Kurt Eisner was cremated. Earlier that day, church bells were sounded and shots fired for half an hour to honor him, before a funeral march set off from Theresienwiese. Attended by tens of thousands of people, it snaked its way through central Munich, while planes circled overhead. Delegations of Munich’s Socialist parties and trade unions, Russian POWs, representatives of all Munich-based regiments, as well as a myriad of other groups marched with Eisner’s coffin through the city. The march ended at the square in front of Ostbahnhof—Munich’s East Station—where eulogies were given prior to the reduction of Eisner’s body to ash at nearby East Cemetery.28

  As the huge attendance at his funeral march testifies, Eisner was in death more popular than he had ever been while alive. However, the sentiment of those attending the march was not necessarily representative of Munich’s populace at large. The government had requested that residents put up flags all over Munich to honor Eisner on the day of his cremation. Yet the request was widely ignored. Flags were seen mostly on public buildings; very few private homes flew them. To Friedrich Lüers, a supporter of the liberal German Democratic Party who had served together with Hitler in the same company of the List Regiment early in the war, the funeral march looked like “a bad joke.”29

  Had Lüers himself participated in the march and walked all the way to Ostbahnhof, he might well have had a reunion with his former brother-in-arms, Adolf Hitler. A photo taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, eventually to become Hitler’s court photographer, depicts the arrival of the funeral march at Ostbahnhof. (See Image 6.) It shows a group of Russian POWs in uniform, one of them holding up a large picture or painting of Eisner. A number of German soldiers in uniform stand right behind them. One of them is believed to be Adolf Hitler. His attendance at the funeral march would indicate Hitler’s desire to pay respect to the slain Jewish Socialist leader, as attendance had not been mandatory for soldiers. Yet it remains hotly contested as to whether the group photo really does include Hitler. The picture is too grainy to identify the soldier with any degree of certainty. The body type, height, posture, and face shape of the person in question looks exactly how one would expect Hitler to look in a grainy photo. However, in February 1919, Munich housed without any doubt a number of other soldiers of a similar appearance. Nevertheless, there is a high likelihood that the man in the photo really is Adolf Hitler. For example, the copy of the image that was included among photos that Heinrich Hoffmann’s grandson sold to the State Library of Bavaria in 1993 features an arrow pointing to the person believed to be Hitler. The arrow was not drawn onto the print of the photo today owned by the State Library of Bavaria; thus, it must have been added to its negative either by Hoffmann or his son or grandson. Also, Hoffmann’s son confirmed in the early 1980s that the photo depicts Adolf Hitler.30

  Leaving aside the question of whether Hoffmann’s photograph really does depict Hitler, an event took place sometime between February and early April that is even more revealing in shedding light on Hitler’s intimate relationship with the revolutionary regime. That event was the Vertrauensmann (soldiers’ representative) election in Hitler’s company, the Second Demobilization Company. In the election, Hitler was picked as the representative of the men of his company. He now held a position that existed to serve, support, and sustain the left-wing revolutionary regime.

  Hitler’s task was to help facilitate the smooth running of the regiment.31 If we can believe an article published in March 1923 in the Münchener Post—a partisan Social Democratic newspaper but one that was generally well informed about the nascent National Socialist movement—his responsibilities eventually went further than that. According to the article, he also acted as a go-between with the propaganda department of his regiment and the revolutionary regime. The article claimed that Hitler took an active role in the work of the department, giving talks that made the case for the republic. The article was penned by Erhard Auer, Kurt Eisner’s antagonist, who in a revenge attack had almost been killed on the day of Eisner’s assassination and who in 1920 became editor in chief of the Münchener Post.32

  Even if Auer’s 1923 article in that newspaper exaggerated Hitler’s involvement in prorepublican propaganda work, the fact remains that, in early 1919, Hitler had actively and deliberately decided to run for a position whose purpose was to serve, support, and sustain the revolutionary regime. The exact date of his election has not survived. However, it took place no later than early April, as an order issued by the demobilization battalion of the Second Infantry Regiment, dated April 3, 1919, lists Hitler as Vertrauensmann of his company.33

  Hitler’s election as his fellow soldiers’ Vertrauensmann was a true turning point in his life, less so for its political implications than for the fact that now, for the first time in his life, he held a leadership position. His transformation from a dutiful recipient of orders—someone who all his life had been either at the bottom of hierarchies or a loner and drifter outside any hierarchies—to a leader of others was finally under way. Yet his metamorphosis did not start with a bang. Its context strongly suggests that it was ignited by the slow-burning fires of expediency and opportunism.

  How was it possible that a man who had never shown any leadership qualities and had no apparent desire to lead suddenly decided to run for office? Even at Traunste
in, Hitler had not displayed any leadership traits; had he done so, surely he would have been sent back to Munich with the majority of the guards from the Second Infantry Regiment in late December 1918—as he would have been held responsible for their behavior—rather than picked as someone the camp’s officers wanted to stay on. And how was it possible that his peers were now willing to cast votes for him, when in the past, at best, he had been treated as a well-liked loner?

  The only plausible answer to these questions is that Hitler’s transfer in mid-February to the Second Demobilization Company of his unit had signaled to him that his demobilization was imminent unless he could secure a position that prevented it. The Vertrauensmann vacancy clearly was such a position. The prospect of continued service in the army is most likely the reason why Hitler decided to throw his hat into the ring and run for office. Any other possible explanations are either contradicted by his previous behavior, in which he displayed no interest in leadership,34 or afford no a plausible explanation for the willingness of the men of Hitler’s company to vote for him.

  Had Hitler’s peers voted for him because the majority of them held radical right-wing attitudes and saw in him a like-minded kin, it would suggest that Hitler had voiced and discussed counterrevolutionary, xenophobic, nationalist ideas with them.35 However, the majority of soldiers in Munich, and thus of voters in Vertrauensmann elections, held left-wing convictions at the time.

  In Bavaria’s January elections, the overwhelming majority of the men of the Ersatz Battalion of the Second Infantry Regiment—well in line with the soldiers of other Munich-based units for whom special election districts had been set up—had voted for the Social Democrats. For instance, in one of the voting offices of the Ersatz Battalion of the Second Infantry Regiment, the one on Amalienstraße, a staggering 75.1 percent of votes had gone to the SPD. Eisner’s USPD had come in second with a paltry 17.4 percent share of the votes.36