by Thomas Weber
Since the end of the war, the radical right in Germany had more often than not been in responsive mode. It had harbored precious few positive thoughts about the new liberal, parliamentary political system. Nevertheless, on several occasions it had helped both national and state governments to respond to challenges from the radical left, such as during the Spartacus uprising of January 1919 in Berlin and the Soviet Republic in Munich. In 1918 and 1919, radical right-wing attempts to unseat parliamentary democracy had been half-baked, at best. Yet as discontent had been brewing among its adherents, the radical right had made the switch from responsive to proactive mode. By early 1920, Kapp and a number of coconspirators were plotting to unseat the national government in Berlin, kill off liberal democracy, and prevent the imminent reduction of the armed forces by 75 percent. On March 13, regular and militia troops under the command of General Walther von Lüttwitz had occupied Berlin with the goal of setting up a military dictatorship under Kapp’s leadership.2
As Eckart, the false-bearded Hitler, and their pilot took off in an open plane from an airfield in Augsburg, Eckart pretended to be a paper merchant and Hitler, his accountant, on their way to do business in the German capital. Their real mission was to establish a direct line of communication between the putschists in Berlin and Mayr.3
On the day of the coup, an emissary of the putschists had arrived in Munich and had gone to see General Arnold von Möhl, the de facto head of the armed forces in Bavaria. As Hermann Esser recalled, Möhl had “instantly asked his political right-hand man to join the conversation. This was Captain Mayr.” Yet the general had quickly turned down the request of the putschists’ emissary to support the coup. The emissary had then tried his luck with Mayr, sensing he would be more receptive. In Esser’s words, Mayr had been “the only one [… ] with precise knowledge about the plans of the people in Berlin,” and had expressed his willingness to help take the putsch to Bavaria.4
However, as Mayr soon must have realized to his dismay, the majority of the inner circle of officers close to Möhl were lukewarm about Kapp’s coup. Thus, Mayr decided to go behind Möhl’s back and take things into his own hands. To that end, he had liaised with Dietrich Eckart with the intent of having Eckart help him coordinate procoup activities in Bavaria. On realizing that no direct regular communication was possible with the putschists in Berlin, Mayr had decided to send Eckart and Hitler on their secret mission.5
Eckart was an obvious choice for the job, as he and Kapp had known each other ever since Kapp had seen, and admired, one of Eckart’s plays in 1916. Kapp had concluded at the time that Eckart’s work needed to be spread widely, so as to bring about an “awakening of national life.” In the winter of 1918/19 Kapp had donated 1,000 marks to Eckart after the playwright had launched his weekly magazine Auf gut Deutsch. Thanking Kapp for his donation, Eckart had written: “That which lifts me up the most is the certainty you give me that I am running my paper in the right spirit, and I am running it in your spirit.” Furthermore, a few weeks prior to the putsch, Eckart had met with Kapp in Berlin.6
It is difficult to know what Hitler thought he would be able to achieve in Berlin, as his plane headed north and as he, due to his fear of heights, kept throwing up over the wooded hills of northern Bavaria and central Germany.7 It can no longer be established whether, as the bitter cold wind blew into his face high above Germany, he believed that he was using Mayr to further his own goals and ambitions, or was being used by him.
Irrespective of who was playing whom, Mayr, Hitler, and Eckart all had failed miserably to gain a realistic sense of the degree of support enjoyed by the putschists in Berlin, Munich, and the rest of Germany. Filling the Hofbräuhaus to the brim was one thing; adequately assessing the political situation in Munich and Berlin and overthrowing a government was altogether different, well out of the league of the three coconspirators.
Things went wrong almost from the beginning. Hitler’s experiences during the first flight of his life were such that it would take years before he would board a plane again. The plane initially did not even make it to Berlin. Over the plains to the south of Berlin, the aircraft suddenly ran out of fuel. This necessitated a landing in the town of Jüterbog, where a hostile crowd of left-wingers soon surrounded Hitler, Eckart, and their pilot. Yet the three men managed to talk themselves out of the situation, which allowed them to continue on their way to the German capital.8
When they finally made it to Berlin, Kapp’s coup attempt was already in the process of collapsing. Most civil servants in Berlin had refused to support the putschists. Furthermore, many conservatives who would have been critical to the success of the coup decided to continue to sit on the fence. For instance, Ulrich von Hassell, who at that time served as a diplomat at the German Embassy in Rome and who had been earmarked as foreign minister by the putschists, decided to stay put in Rome, to wait things out. Once the coup failed, he simply continued serving the Weimar Republic.9 The far right had overestimated its power and the level of support it enjoyed.
Hitler and Eckart’s trip to Berlin had turned into a complete fiasco, except for the fact that it brought the two men closer together. They tried to get back to Munich as soon as possible but were held up by rain on March 17, and had to wait one more day until they could fly back to Munich.10
Karl Mayr had failed to spread the Kapp Putsch to Bavaria. Nevertheless, the attempted coup had triggered a political sea change in Germany’s most southern state. On March 13, Möhl had not only turned down the putschists’ emissary; he had also publicly declared his support of the government. Yet by the evening of that day, an increasing number of officers had put pressure on him not just to stand by. In response, the general had put pressure on the Bavarian government to declare a state of emergency and temporarily to transfer power to him.
Möhl had been playing a very different game than Mayr. As a Bavarian monarchist (but not a secessionist), Möhl’s goal was arguably to exploit the crisis as an opportunity to make Bavarians masters in their own house again without breaking up Germany, as well as to bring about a government headed by the Bavarian People’s Party. Mayr and Eckart, by contrast, had wanted to side with the putschists in Berlin.
In a dramatic meeting of the Bavarian cabinet at which Möhl was present, he was handed emergency powers, thus becoming state commissioner (Staatskommissar). Yet the decision made by the cabinet had broken up the coalition government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), and the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) that had existed since the previous May. While all Social Democratic ministers—other than the minister president, Johannes Hoffmann—had voted in favor of passing emergency powers to Möhl in the belief that would prevent a spread of the Kapp Putsch to Bavaria, the SPD ministers nevertheless concluded that their position in the government had become untenable, and all handed in their resignation that same day.
The events of the night of March 13/14, 1920, had been the trigger, not the root cause, of the breakup of the coalition government between the SPD and its two bourgeois partners. Ever since the coalition government had been formed, the SPD and the BVP had clashed almost constantly over policy, particularly over the role of the Catholic Church in schools. At any rate, it was unlikely that the BVP would accept for good its role as junior partner of the SPD, when in fact the BVP was the largest party in parliament, holding five more seats than the Social Democrats did. The granting of emergency powers to Möhl was the last straw that broke the government’s neck.
Möhl had no interest in keeping power himself. His preferred choice was to hand it to the BVP, which wanted to keep the SPD in government, albeit as junior partner—now a moot point. Meanwhile, the obvious choice to head a BVP-led government, Georg Heim, was unlikely to get a majority in parliament, due to his strong Bavarian separatist views. Therefore the BVP had decided to put forward as minister president a technocrat, Gustav von Kahr, president of the district of Upper Bavaria. His appointment was confirmed two days later, on March
16, in parliament.11
The change of government in Bavaria was not a coup. Nor did the change of government constitute a sea change that brought about a new leadership that would walk hand in hand with National Socialists into the abyss and turn Munich into the “Capital of the (National Socialist) Movement,” as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) would refer to Munich once it was in power.12 After only two days, on March 16, the state of emergency had ended. The military under General von Möhl had handed power back to the civilian government—on the very same day that Mayr had sent Hitler and Eckart off to Berlin to help set up a military dictatorship there.
The new Bavarian government, supported by the BVP, the national liberal German People’s Party, and the Peasants’ League, commanded a majority in parliament. Furthermore, upon being elected minister- president, Kahr had declared: “I shall of course adhere to the Reich and State constitutions.”13 The difference between what had happened in Munich and what had occurred in Berlin is epitomized by Möhl’s and Mayr’s competing visions for the future. Both desired a more conservative and authoritarian Germany. Yet the former’s vision was a Bavarian conservative one, whereas the latter’s was a German nationalist one. One favored, at least in 1920, a constitutional path, while the other advocated the establishment of a military dictatorship.
Nevertheless, the establishment of the new government in Bavaria did constitute a sharp move to the right. It also provided the NSDAP with a new ray of hope, despite Hitler and Eckart’s failure in Berlin. Kahr started to turn Bavaria into an Ordnungszelle (cell of order), in which the Einwohnerwehren—the local militias that had been set up in the wake of the defeat of the Soviet Republic—were given prominence. With the blessing of the Catholic Church—which saw the militias, in the words of the papal nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, as “the chief protection against Bolshevism”—Kahr’s government would try to prevent the dismemberment of the Einwohnerwehren, which had been demanded by the victor powers of the First World War. Furthermore, Kahr’s Ordnungszelle would offer refuge to right-wing extremists from all over Germany, including some of the leaders of the Kapp Putsch. Some of them would eventually set up the “Organization Consul,” the militant group that in the years to come would assassinate two government ministers, Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathenau. In particular, Munich’s police president, Ernst Pöhner, a Protestant migrant from Bavaria’s most northeastern tip, would support and protect right-wing extremists flooding into Bavaria, by issuing, for instance, fabricated passports to them.14
Despite the minute electoral gain of solidly right-wing parties, the Bavarian elections of June 6, 1920, produced an even more solidly conservative government. Headed again by Kahr, it rested on the support of the parties of his previous government as well as on that of the Bavarian arm of the right-wing German National People’s Party.15 Unlike the SPD, which lost half of its voters to the radical left, the BVP, although deeply divided in its approach to parliamentary democracy and the republic, held its ground. As a result, the BVP became the natural party of government in Bavaria, until its power was forcefully taken away in 1933, and even then the BVP-led Bavarian government held out longer against the Nazis than would any other German state government. Throughout the years of the Weimar Republic, unlike conservative parties in the rest of Germany, the BVP would manage to keep both moderates and right-wingers inside its fold.
Nevertheless, BVP-led governments would provide safe havens for right-wing groups, in part out of genuine sympathy for them by people on the right wing of the BVP. More important, just as BVP leaders had exploited the Kapp Putsch to bring power back to Bavaria and to take control of the Bavarian government, successive BVP-led Bavarian governments would use groups on the extreme right, including those whose ultimate policy goals had little in common with those of the BVP, as tools they thought they could use to bring even more power back to Bavaria, all to make Bavarians masters in their own home again.
To obtain this tactical gain, Kahr’s government provided fertile soil in which radical right-wing groups could grow. In the wake of the events of mid-March 1920, both the moderate and the radical right were hence on the ascendancy in Bavaria. Yet curiously, for some months to come, the NSDAP would not be one of the prime beneficiaries of the rise of the right in Bavaria.
The failure of the Kapp Putsch was not the only disappointment that lay in store for Hitler in March 1920. On the last day of the month—after sixty-eight months in the military—he was finally demobilized, forced to terminate his service in the armed forces that he had so cherished ever since voluntarily joining up in 1914. He was handed one set of clothes, consisting of a military cap, a uniform jacket, one pair of trousers, underwear, one shirt, a coat, and shoes, as well as 50 marks in cash, and he was out.
The most likely reason Hitler left the army is that Karl Mayr’s clash with Möhl, as well as Hitler’s flight on Mayr’s behalf on the very day that Möhl handed power back to the civilian Bavarian government, robbed Hitler of an influential backer at a crucial moment. When decisions had to be made in late March about who would be decommissioned in the planned dissolution of Military District Command 4, Private Hitler, as Mayr’s protégé, was an obvious choice.16
With his departure from the army, Hitler, for the first time in more than five years, had to fend for himself. As he had to move out of his lodgings in the military barracks, a member of his new surrogate family helped him to find a new home. Josef Berchtold, the owner of the stationery and tobacco store who had donated a typewriter to the executive committee of the NSDAP and who for a brief time would run the SS in 1926, found Hitler a room sublet by a Frau Reichert on the street in which he and his parents lived, too, on Thierschstraße. Hitler now lived in a petty-bourgeois neighborhood close to the river Isar, within easy walking distance of Munich’s old town. With his daily tasks in the army gone, he had to find a new structure to fill his days.
His rectangular, narrow room lay at the southern end of the corridor of Frau Reichert’s flat in a building on Thierschstraße 41 whose facade featured a niche that housed a weather-beaten statue of the Virgin Mary. The turn-of-the-century furnishings of Hitler’s room were of a cheap and simple kind: next to the window stood a bed on which he would lie down late and from which he would rise even later. The bed was too wide for the corner in which it stood, and its headboard thus partly covered the window. There was a dresser and a wardrobe as well as a sink without access to running water. In the middle of the room on the linoleum floor stood a sofa and an oval-shaped table, where he would read the newspapers of the day over breakfast.
Toward lunchtime, Hitler would leave his room, walk down the creaking stairs to the street, and walk to the party office at Sterneckerbräu, either eating there, in one of the nearby cheap restaurants, or in a soup kitchen where lunches made mostly from vegetables and turnip, augmented occasionally by small pieces of meat, were available for 30 pfennigs. He would then spend all afternoon, well into the evening, in meetings. Almost overnight, Hitler had become a professional politician. In fact, he was the party’s only professional politician for the time being, as he was the only member without a day job who could hence devote his entire time to party activities. Technically, Hitler was the first propaganda officer (I. Werbeobmann) of the party.17
While now he could devote all his time and all his talents to the NSDAP, Hitler soon had to realize that the party and he were not rushing from success to success, despite the fertile soil that the new government had provided for right-wing groups. The spring and summer of 1920 was indeed a time of disappointments for the NSDAP. Twice during that time, in May and July 1920, the Bavarian parliament debated the role of Jews in Bavaria and contemplated the deportation of East European Jews from Bavaria, yet on neither occasion was the NSDAP mentioned a single time in parliamentary debates. Although Hitler made the topic the theme of some of his speeches and was loudly cheered by his audience for his demand immediately to expel Jews from Germany, his demand was rarely echoed outs
ide the venues at which he spoke.18
In the busy marketplace of right-wing politics in Bavaria, the NSDAP failed to make a mark even in its signature policy—anti-Semitism. Even though by the summer of 1920 the party was managing to fill the biggest venues inside Munich’s beer halls, it still was not seen as a major force with which to reckon. It had grown too big and too vocal by that time to be able to go back to Harrer’s strategy of spreading influence as a quasi-secret society, even if it had so wished. Yet it was not big enough and not nearly vocal enough to be able to make a difference.
By July, Anton Drexler, after concluding that recent developments had demonstrated that the NSDAP was not strong enough to stand on its own feet, proposed that the party consider merging with other groups, notably the German Socialist Party (DSP). Just as in his standoff with Harrer, Hitler disagreed strongly with Drexler’s strategy. And just as with Harrer, he prevailed. No doubt due in no small degree to the way he had been shunned by the DSP when he wanted to join the party, Hitler had no desire to share a party with the very same people who had rejected him in the past. Rather than merging with another party, the NSDAP entered into a loose and, in effect, nonbinding national socialist association with the German Socialist Party and with two national socialist groups from Austria and Bohemia.19
Yet Hitler’s triumph ran the risk of being a hollow victory unless the NSDAP started to make a splash with its signature topics to such a degree that the party could no longer be ignored in parliament. With his extraordinary talent as an orator, Hitler seems to have seen in the NSDAP moment of crisis an opportunity for himself, which he seized wholeheartedly. Among the senior members of the party, only he possessed the skills to present an argument in a way that would attract attention in the busy marketplace of right-wing politics in Munich. Both what he said and the way he staged himself made him stand out. It was thus in the wake of the failure of the NSDAP to make itself heard in parliamentary debates on anti-Semitism that on Wednesday, August 13, Hitler gave a programmatic speech on anti-Semitism in front of an audience of more than two thousand in the great hall of the Hofbräuhaus. The speech asked: “Why are we anti-Semites?”
