1924: The Year That Made Hitler (8 page)

Germany’s turmoil was Hitler’s gain. The more dazed and disillusioned people were, the more they responded to his extremist message. For the Nazi leader, the fall 1923 political season had gotten off to a good start. On September 1, returned and refreshed from his mountain retreat, Hitler found himself standing shoulder to shoulder with the vaunted General Ludendorff at a bombastic “German Day” rally in Nuremberg, Bavaria’s second city. The odd couple—the stolid general and the unpredictable beer hall politician—shared the reviewing stand with seventeen-year-old Prince Ludwig Ferdinand of Prussia,
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representing Germany’s deposed but, in some quarters, still-loved royal dynasty. As the trio reviewed the marching by of an astonishing one hundred thousand people
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expressing their nationalist sentiments and distaste for the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s standing as the leading political celebrity in the right-wing movement was confirmed. With Ludendorff’s blessing implied, Hitler gave a fiery speech that pulled no punches. “We need another revolution in Germany, not that Socialist, bourgeois, and Jewish revolution of 1918 but a nationalist revolution today to restore Germany’s might and greatness.… We need a revolution, bloodshed, and a dictatorship.… We need no parliament, no government like the present,” he said, pouring out his disdain for the creaky parliamentary process and its “weak majorities,” as he liked to put it.
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Majority rule, he believed, was equivalent to mediocre rule; it weakened strong leadership. Hitler’s contempt for parliamentary democracy was so complete that he refused to let the Nazi Party participate in elections. His was a purely revolutionary party whose only imaginable path to power was the overthrow of the existing order.

On the following day, September 2, while still in Nuremberg, Hitler’s Storm Troopers joined forces with two hard-line nationalistic paramilitaries—the Bund Oberland, led by a veterinary
professor named Dr. Friedrich Weber, and the Reichskriegsflagge, led by Captain Ernst Röhm, a scar-faced World War I officer who was still an active member of the Reichswehr. Together, they formed the Kampfbund, or Fighting League. Its military chief was retired Lieutenenat Colonel Hermann Kriebel, a tall, bullet-headed, hardened veteran of World War I. Mincing no words, the Kampfbund immediately called for the abrogation of the “disgraceful” Treaty of Versailles and the overthrow of the Berlin government.
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Hitler would soon be named the Kampfbund’s political leader, dramatically expanding the forces at his disposal just at the moment when he was contemplating a grand strike.

These developments were only the beginning of a hot political autumn of moves and countermoves that would culminate, within two months, in Hitler’s play for power. The chessboard jousting was among three forces: Hitler’s team, including the paramilitaries; the Bavarian triumvirate of Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, with their control over the Reichswehr’s Bavaria Division and the Bavarian State Police; and the national government in Berlin, including the German army, though its loyalties were often uncertain.

The explosions began on September 26 when the new national government under Gustav Stresemann announced the end of the failed passive resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr region. This unleashed peals of protest from
völkisch
nationalists. It also triggered the creation of the dictatorial commissioner general’s job for Kahr, the former governor who had earlier proclaimed Bavaria a “bastion of order.” Known as a cautious bureaucrat—“a man of eternal preparations,” complained Göring—Kahr’s new powers rested entirely on the support of the Bavarian State Police and the Reichswehr. That meant Lossow and Seisser. Thus, they found each other in a common embrace that made them an unofficial but iron triumvirate.

Declaring the appointment of the indecisive Kahr “a heavy blow” to the
völkisch
movement, Hitler also attacked the Stresemann government for lifting the passive resistance policy. To protest the changes, he announced fourteen rallies and fourteen speeches for the following day, September 27. Commissioner Kahr’s first official act using his new dictatorial powers was to declare a state of emergency in Bavaria, automatically banning Hitler’s rallies. This drastic step was soon followed by another move that, by contrast, played favorably with the Nazis—the forced expulsion from Bavaria of more than one hundred families of oft-vilified “Eastern Jews.” In Berlin, Chancellor Stresemann denounced the Bavarian action as “medieval.”
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Now it was Berlin’s move. By early morning on September 27, the Stresemann government had announced a
national
state of emergency, placing full executive powers in the hands of the defense minister—which effectively meant in the hands of General Seeckt, the Reichswehr chief of staff. Figuratively, Berlin and Bavaria were looking down their gun barrels at each other.

But by late morning, the order of battle had shifted again. Into the war of words and indirect armed standoff came the element of public insult. In its edition of September 27, Hitler’s
Völkischer Beobachter
published a front-page article headlined “The Stresemann-Seeckt Dictators.” Credited to the newspaper’s Berlin bureau, the story denounced the national government’s state of emergency as a bald-faced attempt to wipe out the
völkisch
movement. But the offending lines were personal. Driving General Seeckt’s decisions, the
Völkischer Beobachter
declared, was the political influence of his Jewish wife, “née Jakobsohn, born in 1872 in Frankfurt and registered on her birth certificate as
mosaisch
[Jewish].” Chancellor Stresemann’s wife, the article mentioned, was also Jewish.
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In fact, Seeckt’s wife was half Jewish, but the very mention of
her name, much less her religious preference, infuriated the aristocratic general. He struck back. Using his executive powers, he ordered the
Völkischer Beobachter
shut down. As Reichswehr chief of staff, he told his commanding general in Bavaria, Lossow, to execute the ban on Hitler’s mouthpiece. Lossow, a good German officer but an even better Bavarian, refused to carry out the order. His fig leaf was a refusal by Commissioner Kahr to recognize General Seeckt’s right to intervene in Bavarian affairs. General Seeckt, in turn, fired General Lossow, effective immediately. But Lossow would not go. Citing overriding authority from Kahr, the Bavarian-born general defied his own commanding officer. Kahr announced that Lossow and the Reichswehr Seventh Division now worked for
him
and that Bavaria “must in this hour serve as the besieged bastion of true Germanness.”
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Lossow swore an oath to the Bavarian government, implicitly breaking his oath to the Weimar constitution. On October 22, at 11 a.m., the entire Bavarian Division was marched onto its drill grounds, where every soldier—almost all of them Bavarians to begin with—happily swore an oath to Bavaria.
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Lossow and the Seventh Division were now in full mutiny against General Seeckt, shaking Reichswehr morale throughout Germany.
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Seeckt wrote a letter to President Ebert warning of “civil war.”
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The only remaining question in some parts of Germany, wrote a spy working for Lossow in Saxony, was: “When will Bavaria march? Any delay is considered dangerous.”
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But just because the Bavarian triumvirate had broken with Berlin did not mean it had joined with Hitler and his newfound ally, Ludendorff. On the contrary, the Hitler-Ludendorff camp continued to joust with Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser over how to deal with Berlin. Hitler wanted to proclaim a national putsch and march on Berlin. But he first needed the Bavarian Reichswehr and triumvirate on his side, and that seemed to be a question of timing. Hitler’s
intellectual sidekick, Scheubner-Richter, wrote in a September memo to Hitler: “The popular mood is such that
any
political change would be welcome. It’s just a matter of finding the right psychological moment to take advantage of this mood.”
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To Hitler, the psychological moment was now. He was ready to
losschlagen.
Inspired by the Mussolini model of a march on the capital, Hitler would mount a putsch in Munich, proclaim a new national government, then stage a 379-mile march on Berlin to topple the old one. The plan, informed and guided by Scheubner-Richter, seemed infallible.

But it was not the triumvirate’s plan. Though they shared Hitler’s desire for an authoritarian right-wing government in Germany, they were deeply ambivalent about an armed march on Berlin. Among the three, Lossow was the most conflicted, declaring at one point, with a bang of his fist on a tabletop, “God knows, I want to march—I really want to march!” But, he added, he would do so only with “a fifty-one percent” chance of success—just the kind of equivocation that drove the all-or-nothing Hitler to outrage. One thing the three triumvirs agreed on: They did not want hotheaded Hitler at the fore of any march or takeover in Berlin, not even with Ludendorff by his side. And rather than a dictatorship led by a strongman—especially a strong-headed one like Hitler—the triumvirate wanted a group leadership in Berlin, what they called a
Direktorium,
or directorate (utterly overlooking its negative associations with the brutal excesses of the French Revolution).

Hitler’s quixotic and bristling team—with its battle-hardened Kriebel, bespectacled veterinarian Weber, disfigured Röhm, dour Rosenberg, conspiratorial Scheubner-Richter, and even debonair Hanfstaengl—were by now spoiling for action. Hermann Göring, the high-spirited leader of the Storm Troopers, had blood in his eyes. In a Munich meeting with his commanders from around
Bavaria, he laid out a murderous scenario: even before the coup began, he said, he wanted all unit leaders to prepare lists of people in their towns and districts “to be eliminated” as soon as the putsch was sprung. “At least one of them will have to be shot immediately after the proclamation [of the putsch] to set an example,” he said.
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Göring was not the only conspirator who envisioned a quick reign of terror if and when the Nazis succeeded in their takeover. Theodor von der Pfordten, a Bavarian state Supreme Court judge and a crypto-Nazi, drafted for Hitler a draconian provisional constitution to replace the Weimar constitution the minute the putsch succeeded. The new constitution would have abruptly ended democracy and substituted a radical dictatorship, starting with dissolving the parliament. The constitution draft banned strikes and union activity, removed all Jews from public jobs, confiscated Jewish money and holdings, and forced “unproductive consumers” or people regarded as “security risks” into labor or “collection camps,” a euphemism for concentration camps. Freedom of the press, assembly, and speech were suspended. Worse, the draft constitution was rife with threats of the death penalty. It would be applied for such crimes as refusing to work, participating in illegal meetings, or not turning over funds “earned from the suffering of the German people during the war”—another swing aimed at alleged Jewish profiteers. All violations and sentences were to be dealt with in fewer than three days by summary courts-martial, with no appeal. “The death penalty shall be executed by hanging or shooting,” von der Pfordten’s draft constitution read.
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Throughout October, the jousting between Hitler’s team and the triumvirate continued. One of its greatest ironies was the high level of cooperation between the Kampfbund paramilitaries and the established forces of the Reichswehr and the Bavarian State Police—even as their political leaders squabbled. In order to take any serious
action, such as ousting the French invaders from the Ruhr region (which they considered), holding back the reds now agitating in Thuringia and Saxony, or marching on Berlin, they knew they needed one another. Weber, leader of the Bund Oberland, the best-armed of the Kampfbund militias, was approached about moving his heavy artillery into Reichswehr and Bavarian State Police units on Bavaria’s northern border—“apparently because they didn’t have any of their own,” he noted, a plausible scenario given the postwar restrictions on the Reichswehr’s size and budget.
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In addition to such prospective force-sharing, Hitler’s men were regularly trained in Reichswehr barracks, sometimes even wearing Reichswehr uniforms. Kampfbund weapons were stored in official arsenals; paramilitary troops spent their off hours drilling with the regulars. Lossow sent orders to all his commanders around Bavaria to prepare for integrating paramilitaries from the so-called Patriotic Leagues into their units. Since the whole business was a glaring violation of the Treaty of Versailles, in October Lossow called for an “Autumn Exercise” to disguise the melding process from Allied observers assigned to enforce the treaty.

While the triumvirate prevaricated about marching on Berlin and joining political forces with Hitler, the would-be rebels were gearing up for action. In a November 1 meeting arranged by Weber in his own apartment, Hitler confronted the state police commander, Seisser: “The time has come. Economic misery is causing such despair among our people that we must act or they will swing over to the Communists.”
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Seisser replied that he was traveling to Berlin the next day to find out if General Seeckt would support a march on the capital or some other takeover by force. He pleaded with Hitler to refrain from any solo acts of revolution, at least until he returned from Berlin. Hitler responded: “Colonel Seisser, I will wait until you return, but then you must take action and get the
Commissioner General [Kahr] to take action. If you return and nothing happens, I will be forced to act on my own.”
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According to some reports, Hitler also retracted his earlier pledges not to stage a putsch.
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