Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (25 page)

In early November 1922, the Munich correspondent for the Cologne newspaper
Kölner Anzeiger
wrote: “It is today a given that none of the biggest halls in Munich, not even Zirkus Krone, is large enough to accommodate the storm of people when Hitler speaks. Thousands have to go home after failing to be admitted.” The correspondent for the conservative but democratic paper went on to describe how he himself had been captivated by the speaker’s “overwhelming strength of conviction.”
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In late January 1923, Karl Alexander von Müller attended a talk by Hitler and was dumbfounded by how much he had changed since the time he had been in Müller’s audience:

He passed me closely by, and I could see he was a different person than the fellow I encountered here and there in private homes. His gaunt, pale features seemed to have been pinched together by an obsessive rage, and cold flames darted from his eyes, which seemed to glance right and left for enemies to be put down. Was it the masses that gave him this mysterious power? Or did it flow from him to them?
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A woman from Munich who attended a hopelessly overfilled event a few days later in the Löwenbräukeller offered one answer to Müller’s questions. He had so warmed to and spoken so passionately about his subject that his speech couldn’t leave anyone unaffected, she wrote to Hitler the very next day: “For us…those hours were a wonderful experience and constantly reminded me of the days when our troops marched out of Berlin in August 1914. Hopefully we will experience such hours once again.”
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Hitler’s increasing significance was not lost on foreign observers. Britain’s consul general in Munich, William Seeds, who had dismissed Hitler as a bit player in April 1922, reported in December: “During the last few months…Herr Hitler has developed into something much more than a scurrilous and rather comic agitator.” An observer from the British embassy in Berlin, John Addison, advised that it was unwise “to treat him as if he were a mere clown.” The British Foreign Office instructed Seeds to keep Hitler under close observation in future.
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In the space of only four years, Hitler had gone from an unknown soldier in the First World War to a popular public speaker who was a main attraction in Munich and who had begun to capture the imagination of people beyond Bavaria. He owed his phenomenal rise to the particular social and political crises of the post-war period, which provided an unusually advantageous situation for a right-wing populist of his ilk. On the other hand, his success was also down to his highly developed sensitivity to the unique chance that had opened up to him in the extremely anti-Semitic political climate in Munich. Initially uncertain and clumsy in his personal behaviour, he grew step by step into the role of the party leader who dispatched all his competitors for power and collected a horde of blindly loyal followers. Hitler refined his rhetorical and acting repertoire until he was comfortable that his posturing would produce the desired effect. The more intoxicating his triumphs in the large arenas of the Bavarian capital became, the more confident he grew in the role ascribed to him by his disciples. He was no longer the “drummer,” but rather the “saviour,” called to rescue Germany from its “humiliation and misery,” and lead it to new heights, much as the national saviour Rienzi had done for Rome.

As stubbornly as he clung to his obsessive anti-Semitism, he was all the more capable of adapting when it came to fitting in with the social conventions of upper-class salons. He realised how important it was to be connected to influential patrons like the Bechsteins, Bruckmanns and Wagners, and he knew how to use them for his own ends. In this phase of intensive political apprenticeship, Hitler already possessed all the characteristics that would later typify him as a politician: the ability to overwhelm audiences rhetorically, the capacity to trick others and to disguise himself, as well as extreme tactical cleverness.

Wartime comrades encountering him again scarcely believed that this was the same quiet, nondescript man they had known as a private at the front. “My dear Hitler, anyone who has had the opportunity to follow you from the founding of the movement until now can hardly fail to express admiration,” a former member of the List Regiment wrote on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday in 1923. “You have achieved something that probably no other man in Germany could have, and we, your former comrades, are at the disposal of your will. Thousands and thousands of men think this way.”
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6

Putsch and Prosecution

“When I fell flat on my face in 1923, the only thing I thought about was getting back up again,” Hitler once tersely remarked about the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 8 and 9 November 1923.
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It was no surprise that Hitler did not enjoy talking about this event, which after his rejection by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts represented his second-biggest failure. After four years of what seemed like an unstoppable rise to populist political prominence, Hitler suddenly plummeted back into irrelevance. His own fate and that of his movement seemed to have been sealed. The
New York Times
concluded that the putsch represented the certain end of Hitler and his National Socialist supporters.
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If the Bavarian judicial system had enforced the letter of the law, Hitler would have spent many years in prison for his attempted coup d’état, making a political comeback almost inconceivable. Thus the leader of the NSDAP had every reason to be grateful to his judge for giving him the minimum sentence. Moreover, he was also allowed to use his trial as a stage for self-aggrandisement, during which he styled his dilettantish attempt at armed rebellion into a heroic defeat. The failed putsch was to become a central element in Nazi Party legend. The party comrades who died in it were glorified as “blood witnesses” to the movement’s struggle, and Hitler would dedicate the first volume of
Mein Kampf
to them. After 1933, 8 and 9 November 1923 would become the high point of the Nazi calendar. Every year, Hitler would commemorate those events with a speech to the “old fighters” in the Bürgerbräukeller, a ceremony which ended with a ritual re-creation of the Nazis’ march from the beer hall to the Feldherrnhalle, where four policemen and fourteen Nazis had been killed.
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The year 1923 had started with a bang. On 11 January, French and Belgian troops entered the industrial Ruhr Valley region to punish Germany for falling behind in its reparations payments for the First World War. A wave of animosity arose throughout the country, and the simmering German nationalism reminded some observers of the mood in August 1914. The politically independent Reich Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno, who had led a minority government formed by the parties of the political centre since November 1922, called upon Germans to engage in “passive resistance.” Economic life along the Rhineland and Ruhr Valley pretty much came to a standstill. The French and Belgian occupiers responded by imposing harsh sanctions, arresting striking workers and taking railways and mines into their own hands. This only increased German outrage. “1923 looks as though it will be a year of destiny for Germany,” prophesied Georg Escherich, the founder of the anti-Communist Bavarian home guards. “It’s a matter of existence or non-existence.”
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Much to the surprise of his supporters, Hitler did not join the “unified front” against the French and Belgians. He was more concerned with redirecting the general hostility at Germany’s purported enemies within. On the evening of 11 January, Hitler gave a speech in Zirkus Krone in which he excoriated the “November criminals.” By “stabbing the army in the back,” Hitler raged, political leaders at the end of the First World War had left Germany defenceless and exposed to “total enslavement.” A Germany reborn vis-à-vis the rest of the world would only be possible “when the criminals are held accountable and condemned to their just fates.” The “babble about a unified front,” Hitler proclaimed, only served to distract the German people from their main task.
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Hitler thus refused to take part in a demonstration by the Fatherland Associations against Germany’s arch-enemy France in Munich on 14 January. It was a sign of how self-confident he had become in his ability to stake out political positions on his own.

The economic consequences of “passive resistance” were disastrous. The only way the Reich could cover the costs for wages in the dormant factories, mines and companies was to print massive amounts of money. The devaluation of the reichsmark, which had already begun at the end of the war, reached a dizzying pace. Overnight, the middle and working classes saw their savings disappear, while financial adventurers and speculators exploited the chance to amass huge fortunes. The demise of the currency was accompanied by the decay of fundamental social values. Cynicism was the mood of the day. In his book
Defying Hitler
, Sebastian Haffner described the dramatic events his generation went through: “We had just put the great game of war and the shock at how it ended behind us, as well as a very disillusioning political lesson in revolution, and now we were treated to the daily spectacle of all rules of life breaking down, and age and experience being revealed as bankrupt.”
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One side effect of the almost apocalyptic despair produced by spiralling currency devaluation was the appearance of travelling preachers known in popular parlance as “inflation saints.” They included Friedrich Muck-Lamberty, nicknamed the “messiah of Thuringia,” who intoxicated audiences with his troupes of dancers and performers, and the former sparkling-wine manufacturer Ludwig Christian Häusser, who employed modern advertising methods to attract masses of people to his sermons.
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In Bavaria, Hitler was the one attracting the desire for religious awakening and salvation of those who had fallen down the social ladder or who feared they might be about to. The National Socialists were one of the main profiteers from Germany’s economic catastrophe. “While other political events are poorly attended due to the enormous entry fees and beer prices, the halls are always full when the National Socialists put on one of their mass meetings,” Munich police reported.
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Crowds of people felt drawn to the NSDAP and Hitler’s tirades against capitalist and Jewish criminals and usurers: the sudden impoverishment of broad segments of the German populace made Hitler’s words seem much more plausible. In Munich the National Socialists were stronger than all the other parties on the right and in many other towns and cities the movement was flourishing too, Rudolf Hess reported in early 1923. Between February and November 1923, the party picked up 35,000 new members. By the time of the putsch, total enrollment was 55,000. Maria Endres, who worked at the party headquarters in Corneliusstrasse, recalled that so many people wanted to sign up that she could hardly process all the membership applications.
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Rumours that the National Socialists were planning a putsch had been circulating since the autumn of 1922. In early November, Count Harry Kessler reported that the diplomat and author Victor Naumann had told him that Hitler and his de facto deputy Hermann Esser had complete control over the streets. They had a “large, well-organised and armed group of followers,” capable of striking any day “against the Jews and against Berlin.” The Reichswehr, Naumann warned, would be “unable to resist.”
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On the other hand, the president of Bavaria, Eugen von Knilling (BVP), who had just succeeded Lerchenfeld-Köfering, told the American consul in Munich, Robert Murphy, in November 1922 that Hitler did not have it in him to become anything more than a populist speaker and would fail to achieve the successes of either Benito Mussolini or Kurt Eisner. “He has not the mental ability,” Knilling scoffed, “and furthermore the government is now on its guard, as was not the case in 1918.”
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Knilling was yet another person who gravely underestimated Hitler’s abilities and the danger he represented. But not all members of the Bavarian government shared the president’s estimation. In an official note from mid-December 1922, the ministerial councillor in the Bavarian Interior Ministry, Josef Zetlmeier, described the Nazi movement as “undoubtedly a threat to the state.” If the Nazis were able to realise even some of their “grim ideas” concerning Jews, Social Democrats and banking capital, Zetlmeier warned, there would be “considerable unrest and bloodshed.” Hitler had heeded none of the official admonitions to be more moderate, which was not surprising given the energy of a movement “that was aiming for dictatorship.” Zetlmeier called upon the Bavarian government to change its practice of tacit tolerance towards the NSDAP.
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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.
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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.
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