Hitler
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And in fact the Bavarian government, alarmed by persistent rumours of a putsch, did impose some restrictions on the annual Nazi Party conference scheduled for late January 1923 in Munich. The large rally planned for the Königsplatz was forbidden, and only small gatherings and marches were permitted outdoors. In a heated discussion with Pöhner’s successor as police president, Eduard Nortz, on 25 January, Hitler threatened to use violence to get his way. “He would lead the columns of his supporters, and the government could get out their guns and shoot him, if they wished,” Hitler was quoted as braying. The first shot would precipitate a bloodbath, and the government would be finished. “We’ll meet again at Philippi,” Hitler said, quoting Shakespeare, and stormed out of the room.13 The Bavarian government took him at his word and declared a state of emergency throughout Bavaria on 26 January. Hitler might have suffered an embarrassing defeat if his influential patrons had not intervened on his behalf. Thanks to mediation by Röhm and Ritter von Epp, Hitler was granted an audience with the commander of the Reichswehr in Bavaria, Lieutenant General Otto von Lossow, to whom he swore that there would be no attempted putsch. Hitler repeated his solemn promise to Gustav von Kahr, who was once again the head of government in Upper Bavaria. Lossow and Kahr then had a word with Knilling. Another meeting was scheduled with Nortz for the evening of 26 January. Hitler suddenly behaved quite tamely, pledging “on all his honour that the party conference would not give rise to a single objection.” The event was allowed to proceed with only minor restrictions.14
Hitler, however, was unwilling to observe any limits. On the evening of 27 January, the NSDAP staged twelve gatherings—not the six that had been approved. “Celebrated by the masses like a saint,” Hitler spoke at every one of them, and he scarcely missed an opportunity to heap scorn on the Knilling government. “So, Herr Minister, where do you get your information that the National Socialists are planning a putsch?” Hitler asked sarcastically. “Of course, the milkwoman must have told him! A tram conductor said something to that effect, and an operator overheard something of that sort in a telephone conversation. And the Münchener Post newspaper wrote that.” National Socialists, Hitler boasted, had no need for putsches since they were not a “soon-to-be-extinct” political party but rather a youthful movement that was growing in strength and numbers from week to week. They could wait for their day to come, and when it did, it would not require a putsch to clear away the old government: a small breeze would suffice.15
During the three-day party conference, Munich was more or less in Nazi hands. Columns of marching SA men were everywhere on the streets, and the party’s disregard for official rules resulted in a severe loss of face for the Bavarian state president. Carl Moser von Filseck, the envoy of the state of Württemberg to Bavaria, noted that people generally felt the government had “completely embarrassed itself” and damaged its reputation.16 Yet instead of learning that the idea of coexisting with Hitler and his movement was illusory, government officials maintained their accommodating attitude towards the NSDAP. One reason was that they feared they would lose popular support if they moved decisively to block Nazi activities. After all, in nationalist circles the Nazis were considered useful allies in the struggle against the socialist left. The Bavarian military leadership also saw a “healthy core of the Hitler movement” capable of instilling patriotism in the minds of the working classes. “We did not want to suppress the Hitler movement with force, but rather to place it on the solid ground of what was possible and attainable,” Lossow later testified during Hitler’s trial.17
The Reichswehr leadership also considered paramilitary units in general, including the SA, as a secret military reserve they could activate in case of a conflict. In early February 1923, after Ernst Röhm’s encouragement, a “Working Association of Patriotic Fighting Organisations” was constituted—at its core were the SA and paramilitary Freikorps organisations like Bund Oberland and Reichsflagge. Its military leader was the retired first lieutenant Hermann Kriebel, formerly chief of staff for the citizens’ militias. The Reichswehr itself trained the association’s members. Its involvement in this changed the character of the SA, which went from being a party militia to a fighting force reorganised along military lines under its new boss Göring. The storm troopers were organised into companies, battalions and regiments. The self-defined task of the Working Association, as spelled out in a memorandum by Hitler in mid-April 1923, was: “1. To take over political power. 2. To brutally cleanse the fatherland of its internal enemies. 3. To train the nation, both in terms of its will and practical skills, for the day when the fatherland will be liberated, the period of November betrayal will come to an end and we will be able to hand over a German empire to our sons and grandsons.”18 These paramilitary organisations were quick to demonstrate their determination to act outside the law. On 15 April they staged large-scale military exercises in the moorland north of Munich and violated the non-military zone around the Bavarian Landtag when they marched back into the city. Hitler also inspected a Nazi parade directly in front of the home of the Prussian envoy on Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse—a clear provocation. “Hitler is becoming a megalomaniac,” remarked the director of the press office at the Bavarian Foreign Ministry in reaction to the lack of police curtailment of the Nazi leader.19
At the same time, young SA men were increasingly throwing their weight around in the streets. When they forced the owner of a bookshop in Brienner Strasse to remove works they found objectionable from his main window display, he complained in an angry letter to Hitler about “thugs posing as dictators.” At the end of one of Hitler’s appearances, a woman who had been taking notes of his speech was subjected to a humiliating body search by the SA security men in the venue. Her companion, a female doctor, was outraged: “What we encountered there was sheer terror, worse than anything in the Eisner era.” Jews were accosted and even physically attacked on the streets; Jewish shopkeepers were accused of stirring up animosity towards Hitler’s cause “in the most unheard-of fashion.”20
In late April, Hitler decided that it was again time to test the Bavarian government. The bone of contention was 1 May, which was both the German Labour Day celebrated by leftists and the anniversary of Munich’s conservative “liberation” from the rule of the soviets in 1919. Hitler demanded the government ban the SPD’s and the unions’ celebrations on Munich’s Theresienwiese; and when it refused, he called upon the Working Association to prevent the “Reds” from holding their parade by “aggressive intervention including the use of weapons.”21 In the early morning hours of 1 May, some 2,000 paramilitaries assembled on the Oberwiesenfeld in the north of the city. They were armed with rifles and machine guns from the Reichwehr’s arms depot, in direct defiance of Lossow’s orders. While they were still forming their ranks—with Hitler, decked out in a steel helmet and wearing his Iron Cross, First Class, at their centre—they were encircled by units of the Bavarian police. In addition, Reichswehr troops were put on alert in their barracks. This time, the Bavarian government and the military leadership were willing to confront the challenge head-on and show Hitler that there were limits to his power. “The decisive and unambiguous stance of the police forces manning the cordon was to thank for the fact that any inclination towards action on the part of those assembled on the Oberwiesenfeld was quickly banished,” the final report by the Munich Police Directorship would conclude.22
Around noon, a Reichswehr commando appeared and demanded that the stolen weapons be returned. Hermann Kriebel and other hotheads wanted to resist this order, but Hitler shied away from an armed battle with the Reichswehr and the police, which, as he knew all too well, could quickly put an end to his political ambitions. The paramilitaries handed over the weapons and dispersed. By that time the leftist festivities on Theresienwiese had ended without disturbance. Munich breathed a sigh of relief. The confrontation that so many people feared had been averted.
For Hitler, the ignominious end to his 1 May agitation was an early pol
itical blow. Years later in his monologues, he still spoke of it as the “greatest humiliation” of his life.23 He tried to buoy the spirits of his disappointed SA men by telling them that their day would come, but that could not paper over his own loss of prestige in the wake of the fiasco.24 Hitler had “no clear goals and is pushed by backstage figures who increasingly called for a ‘deed’ of salvation,” noted Georg Escherich, who had only known Hitler since that February and who had an unfavourable impression of him, describing him as “a small-time demagogue who can only sling slogans.” Escherich publicly accused Hitler of being unable to constrain the “desperadoes” in his own ranks.25 Many observers at the time thought Hitler had passed his zenith. U.S. Consul Murphy reported to Washington that the National Socialists were “on the wane.”26 That impression, however, was mistaken. The defeat of 1 May only temporarily slowed the Hitler movement’s momentum.
Nonetheless, Hitler faced the unpleasant reality that the Bavarian state prosecutor’s office, after prodding by the Bavarian interior minister, had begun investigating him for “forming an armed mob.” That was a criminal offence subject to punishment by several months’ imprisonment. Hitler threatened to reveal details about the secret collaboration between the SA and the militias with the Reichswehr, should it come to a trial. After that Bavarian Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner, who had only been in office since August 1922, postponed the investigation—for reasons of state—until a “calmer time.” No progress was ever made towards indicting Hitler.27 It was another instance of how the accommodating Bavarian government was utterly unable to restrain the demagogue.
After all the excitement of the previous months, Hitler apparently needed a rest and temporarily withdrew from the limelight. He travelled to the remote mountain village on the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, where his friend Dietrich Eckart, who had fled the threat of arrest, had been hiding out for some time. Using the alias “Wolf,” he checked into the Pension Moritz, a guest house run by a couple who were well disposed towards the Nazi leader. It was then, he later recalled, that he “fell in love with the landscape…For me the Obersalzberg had become a magnificent place.”28 It was only with difficulty that he was coaxed back to Munich on 10 June to take part in the Fatherland Associations’ memorial for Leo Schlageter, an insurgent in the Ruhr region who had carried out a number of bombings, for which he was sentenced to death by French occupiers and executed on 26 May 1923. Hitler returned to his mountain idyll immediately after his speech. Rudolf Hess, who visited in July, found him in excellent health: “Thankfully, Hitler is now getting some rest and relaxation in the mountains. It’s an unusual sight to see him in lederhosen with his knees exposed and his shirtsleeves rolled up. He looks better than he did before.”29
Joachim Fest believes that Hitler lapsed into his old habits of lethargy and idleness on the Obersalzberg.30 Hess, however, painted a different picture: “His life is still strenuous, morning till night. One meeting follows another, and sometimes he doesn’t even take time to get a bite to eat in between.”31 Hitler was now being chauffeured comfortably from one event to another in the new Mercedes-Benz he had just acquired.
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Starting in the summer of 1923, the economic and political crisis in Germany came to the boil, which did not allow the head of the NSDAP to absent himself from Munich for very long. Hyperinflation was reaching its high point. “In August, [the exchange rate with] the dollar reached one million,” Sebastian Haffner recalled.
We read the news with bated breath, as though the reports were of some astonishing new record. Fourteen days later we could only laugh about it. It was as if the dollar had gained a tenfold of energy from surpassing the million mark. Its value began to increase by increments of hundreds of millions and even billions. By September, the million-mark note was practically worthless. The billion became the new standard unit, and by the end of October it was the trillion.32
The bottomless plunge in the value of the reichsmark meant hardship and despair for broad segments of the German populace. An eyewitness in south-western Germany reported in late August that the mood was unusually depressed: “There’s unemployment and hunger on many people’s doorsteps, and no one knows how to ward off these dangers.” In October the Senior state official of Upper Bavaria compared the mood to that of November 1918: “Statements to the effect that it makes no difference whether everything is smashed to bits…are no rarity.”33
A wave of demonstrations, strikes and food riots shook the entire country. In August, Wilhelm Cuno stepped down as chancellor, to be replaced by the chairman of the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, or DVP), Gustav Stresemann, who had gone from being a national expansionist and supporter of Erich Ludendorff in the First World War to a converted democrat who believed the parliamentary system was the least of all evils. He formed a grand coalition with the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei, or DDP), the Centre Party and the SPD. The new government faced the daunting task of stopping hyperinflation, since without a stable currency, economic recovery would be impossible. But that demanded an end to the financially ruinous struggle in the Ruhr. On 26 September 1923, the government announced it was ceasing the policy of passive resistance. The political Right immediately launched an emotionally charged campaign accusing Stresemann and his grand coalition of capitulating to foreign interests.34
Resentments towards “Red Berlin” were greater in Bavaria than in other parts of Germany, and resistance towards this governmental change of course formed immediately. On 1 and 2 September, the Fatherland Associations convened for a “Germany Day” in Nuremberg. “The streets were a sea of black-red-and-white and white-and-blue flags,” reported the Nuremberg-Fürth police department, referring to the colours of Imperial Germany and Bavaria.
Masses of people surrounding the guests of honour and the parade called out “Heil” in greeting…It was a joyous expression of relief of hundreds of thousands of despondent, cowed, mistreated, desperate people who thought they glimpsed a sliver of hope of liberation from enslavement and destitution. Many men and women stood there crying, overcome with emotion.35
In Nuremberg there was a public display of solidarity between Hitler and Ludendorff. Hess had introduced the two men in 1921, and at his trial in February 1924, Hitler said that he had been very happy to make the acquaintance of the general, whom he had once “idolised.” For his part, Ludendorff testified that after their first meeting he had foreseen Hitler’s rise. “Here was someone the people could understand, someone morally elevated who could offer salvation,” Ludendorff stated. “That was how Herr Hitler and I found our way to one another.”36 As a wartime hero, Ludendorff was particularly valuable to Hitler. With Ludendorff backing him, the leader of the NSDAP could realistically hope that the Reichswehr would support his plans for a coup d’état. The events of 1 May had taught Hitler that without military support, all his plans were condemned to failure from the very start.
Another major result of Nuremberg was the founding of a Patriotic Fighting Association, which united the activist cores of militia organisations like the SA, the Bund Oberland and the Reichsflagge. Here, too, Hermann Kriebel functioned as military leader, while the diplomat Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter ran the day-to-day operations. On 25 September, Hitler was made the association’s “political leader.” Its “action plan” was utterly unambiguous: the goal of “putting down Marxism,” that document read, required the association “to seize the instruments of state power in Bavaria.” Furthermore, “The national revolution must not be allowed to precede the takeover of political power in Bavaria. On the contrary, the takeover of the political instruments of power of the state is the precondition for a national revolution.”37
The constant invocation of an imminent national revolution fuelled right-wing hopes that a coup d’état would soon be at hand. Rumours of a putsch again made the rounds and ratcheted up the feverish mood. Hitler and his movement felt increased pressure to act. Wilhelm Brückner, the leader of
the SA’s Munich regiment, warned that the day was fast approaching when he would be unable to restrain his men: “If nothing happens now, the men will simply start devouring things.”38
Mountains of letters from all parts of Germany arrived at the NSDAP’s headquarters in September and October, urging Hitler to take action. As one correspondent put it, all hope rested on the “rescuer from Bavaria” who would clean out the Aegean stables with his “iron broom.” With a “truly energetic act,” comparable to Mussolini’s takeover in Italy, Hitler could do Germany an “extraordinary service.” Ordinary people were waiting for the signal to “storm forward” and prayed that “Our Lord might lead our Hitler to complete victory.” One of the letter-writers was a resident of the affluent Munich district of Bogenhausen, who had attended every speech Hitler gave in Zirkus Krone for the previous two years and queued for hours to secure a good spot, so that she could “take in every word, every subtlety of tone, and call out ‘Heil’ to our honoured Führer from close proximity.” She wrote in early November: “Now may the Almighty make your arm as strong as your words are beautiful so that the day of liberation will be upon us.”39 Such overwhelming declarations of loyalty must have strengthened the Nazi leadership’s belief that they had to hurry up and take action.