Killing Hitler (2 page)

The situation in Bavaria was no less fraught. There, the upheaval of the previous few years had awakened thoughts of separatism. The regional government in Munich was already plowing its own furrow, ignoring Berlin’s strictures when it chose to and tolerating the radical right. Indeed, the two power bases in the province, the monarchist “old right” of the government and the revolutionary “new right” of Hitler and his allies, existed in a curiously symbiotic relationship. Both held the government in Berlin in contempt and were keen to cooperate in their intrigues
against it. Both, too, were impatient to raise the standard of revolt. However, their visions of the would-be revolution differed widely. Put simply, the “old right” wanted to create an independent Bavarian government, while the “new right” wanted to replace the Reich government. One wanted to defect from Berlin, and the other wanted to march on it.

In the Bürgerbräukeller that evening, Hitler appeared finally to have succeeded in persuading Munich’s ruling triumvirate to join in
his
vision of a revolution. About an hour after he had entered the hall, he returned to the podium, accompanied by his new confederates and the freshly arrived former army quartermaster, General Ludendorff. All five shook hands repeatedly and made short speeches to the assembled throng, announcing their new roles and their earnest intentions to cooperate. As they finished, the crowd, enthused by what they had heard, broke into an impromptu rendition of
“Deutschland über Alles.”
One eyewitness recalled that the crowd had been “turned inside-out” by Hitler’s words and that “it had almost something of hocus-pocus about it.”
⁴
Ominously, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s secretary, then began calling names from a list of those present who were to be detained for interrogation and trial. With that, the remainder of the audience was allowed to leave, while sympathizers began arriving from around the city. Hitler, it appeared, had succeeded.

Beyond the confines of the beer hall, however, the putsch was proceeding less well. Troops loyal to Hitler had scored some early victories. They had been bolstered by the defection of the cadets of the Infantry School and had succeeded in occupying the three main beer halls in Munich. Elsewhere, they had taken over the Bavarian War Ministry and the offices of the influential
Münchener Post
newspaper. But as the night progressed, they achieved no more significant successes. Their own incompetence and the stiffened resolve of their opponents combined to prevent them from seizing other key buildings and barracks.

Moreover, the authorities in Munich were preparing for a fight. The members of the ruling triumvirate, far from serving the putsch, had now repudiated it and were directing the resistance. The government, transferred to Regensburg for its own safety,
had banned the morning newspapers and drafted in military reinforcements from the provinces. Across the city, its forces were now fully apprised of events and had specific orders on how the revolt was to be countered. As the would-be revolutionaries in the beer hall settled down for a long night, succored by a generous supply of beer and bread rolls, they were still optimistic. In truth, they had already lost the initiative and now faced a precarious stalemate.

The following day, as a cold dawn broke, the putschists finally recognized that their initial attempt to storm the bastions of power had failed. A British correspondent from the
Times
found his way to the Bürgerbräukeller that morning, where he discovered Ludendorff and Hitler in a small upstairs room. Hitler, he wrote, was “dead-tired” and barely seemed to fill the part of the revolutionary: “this little man in an old waterproof coat with a revolver at his hip, unshaven and with disordered hair, and so hoarse that he could scarcely speak.” Ludendorff, in turn, was “anxious and preoccupied.”
⁵

The putschists were considering their options. One suggested that the Bavarian crown prince could be induced to lend the revolt his support. Another proposed a tactical withdrawal to continue their resistance from the town of Rosenheim near the Austrian border. In the confusion, meanwhile, orders were delayed, and further troops drifted away from their positions, considering their cause to be lost. By midmorning, however, the idea of a demonstration march through the city was mooted. That way, the putschists besieged at the War Ministry could be relieved and the enthusiasm of the local population could be harnessed. The stalemate could be broken. After all, it was thought, the army would surely not turn its machine guns on Ludendorff, one of the most prominent generals of the First World War. The hotheads even considered that a march on Berlin could be attempted, in imitation of Mussolini. “We would go into the city,” Hitler later recalled, “to win the people to our side.”
⁶

Shortly before noon that morning, a column of around two thousand men, armed and defiant, stepped out of the Bürgerbräukeller and headed for the center of the city. In the front rank,
beneath the swastika banner and the flag of imperial Germany, Hitler marched with Ludendorff on one side and his fellow conspirator Erwin von Scheubner-Richter on the other. Alongside them were Hitler’s bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, a bull-necked apprentice butcher and amateur wrestler; the Nazi “philosopher” Gottfried Feder; and the leader of the storm troopers, Hermann Göring, resplendent in a full-length leather coat, with his
Pour le Mérite
—Germany’s highest military award—visible at his throat. Behind them, the ranks of Hitler’s security force, the Munich storm troopers and the paramilitary
Bund Oberland
marched four abreast, followed by a car bristling with weaponry. Bringing up the rear was a ragtag collection of students, tradesmen, and fellow travelers, many inspired by the events of the previous night, many long-term disciples. Some marched smartly in uniform, some donned their medals from the Great War, and others shuffled along wearing work overalls.

Jeered and cheered by a curious Munich public, the putschists moved steadily on, sustaining themselves by singing nationalist songs. Close to the river, they encountered their first serious obstacle when they confronted a police cordon on the Ludwigsbrücke. With bayonets leveled and exhortations to the policemen not to fire on their comrades, they swept the picket aside and continued unhindered across the bridge and into the heart of Munich. Proceeding through the Isartor, they came to the Marienplatz, where large crowds had gathered to watch events unfold. From there, they turned north in the direction of the Odeonsplatz, beyond which the War Ministry was located. As they approached the Feldherrnhalle, however, barely fifty meters from their target, they were confronted by a second, larger police presence. Linking arms, they advanced, some singing, some with bayonets at the ready, down the Residenzstrasse.

This time, the police would not be brushed aside. As the two forces met, a shot rang out and the police opened fire. In the chaos, as a brief firefight ensued, the front rank of putschists fell to the ground, while the remainder fled. After a couple of minutes, only the dead and wounded remained. Göring had been shot in the groin. Scheubner-Richter, to Hitler’s left, fell mortally
wounded with a bullet in the chest. Graf, who had shielded Hitler from the onslaught, took numerous bullets and was gravely injured. Four Munich policemen had been killed as well as a further thirteen of Hitler’s followers. The youngest of them, Karl Laforce, was barely nineteen.

Hitler, meanwhile, had fallen in the melee, believing himself to have been shot. In fact, though wild rumors quickly circulated that he had been killed, he had merely suffered a dislocated shoulder from being violently pulled to the ground by the dying Scheubner-Richter.
⁷
In the aftermath, he struggled to his feet and found his way to a nearby square, where supporters spirited him to a waiting car and south toward Austria. Later that day, after an eventful escape from Munich, he arrived at the house of his fellow putschist Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, in Uffing, where he was tended by a sympathetic doctor. Two days later, in the early evening of 11 November, the police finally tracked him down. According to one account, Hitler broke down when he heard of the police’s arrival. With a cry of “Now all is lost!” he reached for his pistol.
⁸
Yet, rather than turn the gun on himself, as he had promised to do at the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler submitted meekly. The arresting officer found him in a bedroom, dressed in pajamas, waiting calmly in sullen silence.
⁹

Hitler had escaped death but had nonetheless failed. His “National Revolution” had been crushed, his party outlawed, and his loyal henchmen killed, arrested, or in exile. Tried for high treason the following spring, he was sentenced to five years’ detention in the fortress at Landsberg. Contemporary opinion concluded that the name of Adolf Hitler had been a footnote in history, a chimera, soon to rank alongside countless other crackpots, radicals, and failed revolutionaries. He was haughtily dismissed by the
Times as
a “house decorator and demagogue.”
¹⁰
Many took to speaking of him only in the past tense. The author Stefan Zweig, for example, considered that Hitler had fallen back “into oblivion.”
¹¹

Hitler himself was immune to such prophecies, for he considered himself to be subject to another, higher calling. “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over,” he railed to the state
prosecutor at his trial, “but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters…the sentence of this court.”
¹²
The bullets of the Bavarian police that had routed his forces in Munich had also given him his first brush with providence. He emerged from that experience, and from his imprisonment at Landsberg, with the unshakable belief that his life had been preserved so that he might fulfill a “historic destiny” to save Germany. He emerged as a man with a mission.

CHAPTER 1
Maurice Bavaud: God’s Assassin

One day a completely harmless man will establish himself in an attic flat along the Wilhelmstrasse. He will be taken for a retired schoolmaster. A solid citizen, with horn-rimmed spectacles, poorly shaven, bearded. He will not allow anyone into his modest room. Here he will install a gun, quietly and without undue haste, and with uncanny patience he will aim it at the Reich Chancellery balcony, hour after hour, day after day. And then, one day, he will fire.

—ADOLF HITLER
¹

SHORTLY BEFORE NOON ON THE WINTRY MORNING OF 30 JAN
uary 1933, the leader of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler, was ushered into a meeting with the German president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Accompanied by the members of his new cabinet, he was received frostily by the president, who was irritated at being kept waiting and was dubious about Hitler’s appointment. Hindenburg grunted a perfunctory welcome and expressed his pleasure that the nationalist right had finally overcome its differences. He then proceeded to the matter in hand: Hitler was to be sworn in as chancellor of the German Republic.

Dressed in a sober dark suit and tie, Hitler solemnly swore to uphold the constitution, to carry out his obligations without party bias, and to serve for the good of the entire German nation. In a short, unscheduled speech, he then promised to defend the rights
of the president and to return to parliamentary rule after the next election. Hindenburg was less than loquacious in response: “And now, gentlemen,” he intoned, “forward with God.”
²

That afternoon, the new cabinet sat for the German press in the Reich Chancellery. Hitler, seated in a generously upholstered chair, was surrounded by his new cabinet colleagues, with Göring seated to his right and von Papen, the kingmaker and vice chancellor, to his left. The remainder stood behind the trio, looking distinctly uncomfortable. Little of the expected camaraderie was on show. Though they knew one another well, few of them made eye contact. Ministers stared sternly ahead or off to either side. Only Hitler allowed himself a broad smile. In his first public proclamation as chancellor, he congratulated his followers on their “great political triumph.”
³

In truth, Hitler’s ascent to power was less glorious than his propagandists would later proclaim. Though the head of the party with the largest share of the popular vote, he was not appointed as a result of due democratic process. Rather, he was levered into power by the political élites in a grubby backstairs intrigue. Power had not been seized; it had been handed to Hitler like a poisoned chalice. Hitler, it was thought, would swiftly embarrass himself and discredit his movement. And if by some miracle, he did not, he would lend the establishment his popularity in the country, while they, in turn, would endeavor to control him and rein in his wilder ambitions.

To this end, Hitler was appointed the head of a government containing only a minority of Nazis. Of eleven posts, just three were held by his men: the chancellorship, the Ministry of the Interior, and a ministry without portfolio. Beyond these, all the most important government positions had gone to the conservatives, thereby strengthening their belief that they could, between them, hold the rabble-rouser Hitler in check. Despite these restraints on Hitler’s freedom of action, his appointment was still deeply unpopular among his new colleagues, and a number of additional concessions had been wrung out of him. For one thing, he had sworn to leave the cabinet unaltered regardless of the result of the elections he planned to hold. For another, he had made an
empty promise to broaden the basis of his new government by approaching the centrist parties. It looked very much as though the conservative ruse had succeeded. Hitler appeared to have been laced into a political straitjacket. He would serve, it was hoped, as a popular figurehead but wield little in the way of genuine power.