by Thomas Weber
The hunt for suspected members of the Red Army was fueled not just by paranoia, fear, and chaos, but also by the fact that hard-core Red Guardists were continuing their fight, employing guerrilla tactics, even after Munich had been occupied. Friedrich Lüers, who lived on Stiglmayrplatz, north of Munich’s Central Station in a district with heavy support for the Soviet Republic, still witnessed “red” activists fight and snipe at “white” invaders for days after the first arrival of “white” troops. Indeed, sometimes posts of progovernment units were killed at nighttime under the cover of darkness.4 The escalation of violence in the early days of May ultimately followed the logic of asymmetric urban warfare, in which the unequal distribution of casualties among attackers and defenders does not necessarily reveal which side had a more violent mind-set.
Yet Hitler managed not to get caught up in the violence directed against real and imagined supporters of the Munich Soviet Republic. According to his friend Ernst Schmidt, he was released again from captivity through the intervention of an officer who encountered him in the wake of his arrest and who knew him from the front.5
As Hitler’s actions in March and April exposed, at least for the time being he had not mastered the most important art of all in politics: conjecture—the ability to project beyond the known and to form an opinion based on incomplete information. In other words, he had not yet learned how best to deal with the uncertainty surrounding choices and to opt for a path of action that would produce a maximum degree of advantage. Nevertheless, he had succeeded in transforming himself from someone in whom no one had ever seen any leadership qualities, into someone who held authority over others. Significantly, authority had not been bestowed on him from above but democratically from below. Although in the process he had maneuvered himself to the edge of the abyss, as he demonstrated in the chaotic early days of May, he had already mastered the art of coming back from behind and of turning defeat into victory. Here we can see the first signs of a pattern in Hitler’s public life, in which he would almost always be more successful when operating in a responsive, rather than a proactive, mode.6
If anything, the political situation in Munich grew more volatile during May. While the bloody events of the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Republic hardened the resolve of both sides in the conflict, the moderate center of politics evaporated. Moderate Social Democrats had been the big losers in the Munich Soviet Republic, even though, objectively speaking, they had done more than any other group to defend the new postwar democratic order. Yet in the eyes of moderates and conservatives, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had proven incapable of reining in radical revolutionaries and defending the new order, whereas to many people on the left, the SPD had betrayed its roots.7
As poet-novelist Rainer Maria Rilke noted in a letter he wrote to a friend on May 20, there simply was no light visible at the end of the tunnel. Due to the legacy that the Soviet Republic and its crushing had left behind, “our cozy and harmless Munich is likely to remain a source of disturbance from now on. The Soviet regime has burst into a million tiny splinters which will be impossible to remove everywhere. [… ] Bitterness, hiding away in many secret places, has grown monstrously and will sooner or later burst forth again.”8
Fearing that the explosion of bitterness and the implosion of the center of politics in Munich might lead to a resurgence of the radical left, the new rulers of the city decided that military units that had been based in Munich during the days of the Soviet Republic were to be disbanded as soon as possible. Concerned that soldiers in troops who had served in those units might still be infused with radical left-wing ideas, the military authorities decreed on May 7 that all remaining soldiers in the Munich garrison who prior to entering the armed forces had resided in the city were to be decommissioned immediately. Within weeks, most soldiers of the old Bavarian army were removed from service.9
As disbanding units that had experienced the Soviet Republic might not be sufficient to prevent a resurgence of left-wing radicalism, military authorities also wanted to remove as many “splinters” as possible from military units that the Soviet Republic had left behind as they were being disbanded. Their goal—to identify and punish the soldiers who most eagerly had supported the Soviet Republic—gave Hitler an opening. Exploiting the fear among Munich’s new rulers about a repeat of the Munich Soviet Republic, he volunteered to become an informant for the new masters of the city. By becoming a turncoat, he managed, against all odds, not only to escape decommissioning and thus to escape an uncertain future, but also to emerge strengthened from a situation that otherwise might have resulted in deportation to his native Austria, imprisonment, or even death.
Hitler’s new life as an informant started on May 9, when he walked into the chamber of the former regimental soldiers’ council and started to serve on the Investigation and Decommissioning Board of the Second Infantry Regiment. He was the junior member of a three-man board that consisted of an officer, Oberleutnant Märklin; a noncommissioned officer, Feldwebel Kleber; and himself. In the days and weeks to come, the board was tasked with determining, prior to the decommissioning of soldiers, whether the men had seen active service in the Red Army.10
Hitler might have been proposed to serve on the board by the commander of the Second Infantry Regiment, Karl Buchner, who briefly headed the regiment in the wake of the crushing of the Munich Soviet Republic. The two men probably had encountered each other during the war, when Buchner had headed the Seventeenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. As that unit had been the sister regiment of his own unit, Hitler, as a dispatch runner for regimental headquarters (HQ) of the List Regiment, had regularly been dispatched to the regimental HQ of Buchner’s regiment.11 If it is indeed true that after his arrest on May 1 Hitler was released through the intervention of an officer who knew him from the war, it is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to point to Buchner as likely having been that officer.
To serve on the board, Hitler was pulled out of his battalion, which was in the process of being dissolved, and transferred to a company that became directly attached to the HQ of the Second Infantry Regiment on May 19, 1919.12 Thus, driven largely by opportunism, Hitler had managed to grab another lifeline within the restructuring army.
He now informed on his own regimental peers. In testimony given to the board, Hitler implicated, for instance, Josef Seihs, his predecessor as Vertrauensmann of his company, as well as Georg Dufter, the former chairman of the Battalion Council of the Demobilization Battalion, for having recruited members of the regiment into joining the Red Army: “Dufter was the regiment’s worst and most radical rabble-rouser,” Hitler would state when giving testimony on May 23 in a court case that had been triggered by the investigation of the board on which he, himself, had served. “He was constantly engaged in propaganda for the Soviet Republic; in official regimental meetings he would always adopt the most radical position and argue in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” He elaborated, “It is doubtless as a result of the propagandist activities on the parts of Dufter and Battalion Councilor Seihs that individual parts of the regiment joined the Red Army. His rabble-rousing speeches against pro-government troops, whom he pestered as late as May 7, caused members of the regiment to join the Pioneers in hostilities against government units.”13
In becoming a turncoat, Hitler was far from unique. In fact, at that time Munich was full of turncoats. For example, some former members of the Red Army joined Freikorps.14
As soon as Hitler joined the board, he started to reinvent his past of the previous half-year. In many subtle and not so subtle ways, he began to create a fictional character of himself in line with the story of his genesis that he now desired to tell: that he always had stood in opposition to successive revolutionary regimes. Hitler’s attempt to rewrite the history of his involvement with revolutionary Munich has to been seen as an early sign of his subsequent ability constantly to reinvent himself by recasting his own past. For instance, he would tell one of his superio
rs that after his return from Traunstein (i.e., during the time of Eisner’s assassination), he had sought employment outside the army.15 In other words, he purported that he had tried to find a way out of having to serve the revolutionary government. Yet as he does not seem to have made use at the time of the provision in his demobilization unit that had allowed soldiers to find other work, this seems to have been a self-serving lie, crafted to support his claim during the postrevolutionary period that he had never been tainted with the more radical incarnations of the Bavarian revolution.
It must be stressed that it was relatively easy for Hitler, unlike those who actively participated in combat on the side of the Red Army, to become a turncoat. Even though he had held office within the Munich Soviet Republic, he had not been committed to the ideals of the leaders of that regime. As someone whose sympathies had been with the SPD and moderates among the extreme left, he is unlikely ever to have harbored genuine sympathy for the radical internationalist left, which made him a viable candidate to serve on the Investigation and Decommissioning Board of his regiment.
Whereas earlier in the year Hitler had been a cog in the machine of socialism, he now was one in the machine of the postrevolutionary army. Even though the Bavarian government was, in theory, again in charge of affairs in Munich, in reality the army called the shots on the ground, as the Bavarian government would not return to Munich for more than three months, staying put in Bamberg until August 17. Hitler’s new masters were the officers of the new army command in Munich, the District Military Command 4 (Reichswehr-Gruppenkommando 4), which had been set up on May 11. Headed by General Arnold von Möhl, it was put in charge of all regular military units based in Bavaria. As martial law was upheld throughout the summer, the District Military Command 4, in effect, held the executive power in Munich.16
The command’s political outlook was fervently antirevolutionary. However, the board on which Hitler served targeted those who had involved themselves with the radical left, rather than the moderate left, as Hitler’s testimony at Seihs’s trial showed. As the decree that established the board stated, “All officers, NCOs, and enlisted men who can be proven to have been members of the Red Army or to have been engaged in Spartacist, Bolshevist or Communist activities, will be arrested.” It should be added that, on May 10, Hitler’s regiment was put back into the hands of an officer who at the very least was positively predisposed—either for pragmatic reasons or out of conviction—toward the moderate left: Oberst Friedrich Staubwasser, who had been the regiment’s commander from late December 1918 until February 1919. Staubwasser advocated the creation of a “Volksheer” (People’s Army) that would serve the republic headed by an SPD government. In short, clearly there was still space for moderate Social Democratic ideas in the military in Munich after the fall of the Soviet Republic.17
The fact that the antileft restoration in the city was directed first and foremost against the radical rather than the moderate left also found its expression in the visit of German president Friedrich Ebert and the Reich minister of defense Gustav Noske to Bavaria’s capital in May, where the two senior Social Democrats attended a parade of “white” troops.18 Hitler himself also still expressed sympathies for the SPD, if we can believe testimony that the liberal daily Berliner Tageblatt published on October 29, 1930: “On May 3, 1919, 6 months after the revolution, Hitler said he was in favor of majoritarian democracy at a meeting of members of the 2nd Infantry Regiment in the regimental canteen on Oberwiesenfeld.” The testimony states that the meeting had been called to discuss who should become the new commander of the regiment, adding that Hitler identified himself “as a supporter of Social Democracy [Mehrheitssozialdemokratie; i.e., the SPD], albeit with some reservations.”19
The growing volatility of the political situation in Munich, and the erosion of the center of politics, was not solely, and possibly not even chiefly, a result of the series of revolutionary regimes that Bavaria had experienced between November and May. As the British intelligence reports from April had indicated, further political radicalization could be averted, or even reversed, if two conditions were met: an improvement of the food situation in Bavaria and the conclusion of a peace deal that Germans would not perceive as being too punitive.
Neither condition was met. Unsurprisingly, pandemonium ensued. On May 7, two days before Hitler started to serve as an informant, the peace terms for Germany devised by the war’s victor powers in Paris were made public. They demanded from Germany large territorial losses, a dismantling of most of its armed forces, the payment of reparations, and an acceptance that Germany had been responsible for the war. Within hours, the peace terms had caused great shock in Munich as well as all over the country. “And so we Germans have learned,” opined the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten, the newspaper of the Bavarian conservative Catholic establishment, in its editorial the following day, “that we are not only a beaten people, but a people abandoned to utter annihilation, should the will of our enemies be made law.”20
The issuance of the peace terms on May 7 crushed the early postwar optimism in Munich that peace would come, more or less, along the lines sketched out by President Wilson and thus be agreeable to all sides. The peace terms were not extraordinarily harsh. Objectively speaking, they were no more severe than those that had brought previous wars to an end. Furthermore, the majority of peacemakers in Paris were far more reasonable men than their subsequent reputations would suggest.21 The point is that in Munich in 1919, the peace terms were perceived as extremely punitive. The total disregard by the war’s victors of the desire of the Provisional National Assembly of German Austria for Austria to join Germany showed that there was not to be a dawn of a new era of international affairs based on the principle of national self-determination. Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his vision of a new kind of international order, as well as subsequent promises made by his administration, were now viewed as having been hollow, nothing but a perfidious ploy.
From the moment news about the peace terms reached Munich, political discontent began mushrooming in the city. Heinrich Wölfflin, a Swiss professor of art history at Munich University, for instance, wrote to his sister on May 8 about “the enormous tension over the peace treaty” in Munich. Three days earlier, Michael von Faulhaber, Munich’s archbishop, had shared his thoughts with Bavaria’s other bishops: “Such an enforced peace [will] not create a foundation for peace but for eternal hatred which would expose society to incalculable internal shocks and make wholly impossible the existence of the League of Nations, to which the Holy Father had looked during the war as the objective of development and the guarantor of peace.”22
The discontent triggered by the release of the peace terms did not go away. For instance, on June 18, opera singer Emmy Krüger scribbled in her diary: “This humiliation the entente dares to hand to my proud Germany! But she shall rise again. No one can crush a people like ours!”23
The shock felt about the peace conditions took such intense forms because it was only now, in the days and weeks following May 7, 1919, that people in Munich realized Germany had been defeated. Almost overnight, the revelation poisoned the city’s already volatile political climate, as evident, for instance, in the interaction of locals with representatives of the countries with which Germany had been at war.
Prior to the publication of the peace terms, there had been surprisingly few Franco-German tensions in Munich, despite the high losses Bavarian troops had incurred fighting against the French during the war. As Jewish journalist Victor Klemperer noted, due to the fact that many Bavarians had blamed the war on the Prussians, French officers and officials serving on military commissions that had been set up as part of the armistice agreements had been treated well when people encountered them in the streets of Munich. Klemperer had witnessed this for himself, noting that “they appeared neither vengeful nor even haughty, just gay and pleased with their reception. And clearly not without cause, because there were no hostile glances; indeed, some were even sympathetic—and not
only from female eyes.” He added, “I believe the war had ceased to exist for the people of Bavaria. The war had anyway been a matter of the Prussianized Reich; the Reich was no more, Bavaria was herself again. Why should the new Free State not behave companionably toward the French Republic?”24
Scenes like these were now a phenomenon of the past. For instance, in August 1919, German POWs returning to Bavaria from Serbia were full of scorn for the French. “Everybody is of the opinion that the French are chiefly to blame for the shameful peace treaty,” declared a soldier who encountered the POWs. “They all said that if we were to fight the French again, they would all be there.”25
It may well be true that in Central Europe the First World War left behind a highly explosive and dangerous mix of bitter hatred, militancy, and unfulfilled dreams.26 Yet for many people—not just in Munich, but all over Germany—there would be a half-year’s delay until they comprehended that the war had not ended in some kind of draw but that Germany really had lost.27
Due to the legacy of the Soviet Republic and its violent aftermath, continued material hardship, and the issuance of harsh peace terms in Paris, the situation in Munich remained extremely volatile in June, as evident to everyone by the sight of the wire obstacles and makeshift trenches that were erected and dug in the streets of the city. Elsewhere in Bavaria, things were no calmer. As an official working for the District Military Command 4 reported in early July from rural Lower Bavaria and the Bavarian Forest, not only had left-wing radicalism not been curtailed, but support for the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) was, in fact, on the rise. According to him, “There is immense propaganda activity for the USPD in the Bav[arian] Forest, and almost no counteraction.” The official had witnessed how in the region support for the government headed by moderate Social Democrats had evaporated, concluding, “It seems that there has been much defamation and stirring again in preparations of another coup.” He also alerted military authorities in Munich to the fact that “the rural population has a hostile attitude toward the new Reichswehr,” as the new postwar army was called.28
