The Coming of the Third Reich, page 26
Goring’s longing for action found its fulfilment in the Nazi movement. Ruthless, energetic and extremely egotistical, Goring nevertheless fell completely under Hitler’s spell from the very start. Loyalty and faithfulness were for him the highest virtues. Like Röhm, Goring too regarded politics as warfare, a form of armed combat in which neither justice nor morality had a part to play; the strong won, the weak perished, the law was a mass of ‘legalistic’ rules that were there to be broken if the need arose. For Goring, the end always justified the means, and the end was always what he conceived of as the national interest of Germany, which he considered had been betrayed by Jews, democrats and revolutionaries in 1918. Goring’s aristocratic connections, his chiselled good looks, his cosmopolitan mastery of French, Italian and Swedish, and his reputation as a chivalrous fighter-pilot persuaded many that he was a moderate, a diplomatist even; Hindenburg and many like him thought of Goring as the acceptable face of Nazism, an authoritarian conservative like themselves. The appearance was deceptive; he was as ruthless, as violent and as extreme as any of the leading Nazis. These varying qualities, allied to the rapidly growing abnegation of his will before Hitler’s, made him the ideal choice as the new leader of the stormtroopers in place of Röhm early in 1923.67
With Goring in charge, the stormtroopers could now be expected to toe the Nazi line again. Preparations went ahead, in conjunction with the wider paramilitary movement, which Röhm steered as far as he was able, for a rising throughout the spring and early summer of 1923. The crisis finally came when the Reich government in Berlin was forced to resign on 13 August. Its successor, a broad coalition that included the Social Democrats, was led by Gustav Stresemann, a right-wing liberal nationalist who over the coming years was to prove himself the Republic’s most skilled, most subtle and most realistic politician. Stresemann realized that the campaign of passive resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr had to be ended, and the galloping hyperinflation brought under control. He instituted a policy of ‘fulfilment’, in which Germany would fulfil the terms of the Peace Settlement, including the payment of reparations, while lobbying behind the scenes for them to be changed. His policy met with notable success during the next six years, during which he held the position of Reich Foreign Minister. But to the extreme nationalists it was nothing more than national betrayal. Realizing that they were now likely to stage an uprising, the Bavarian government appointed Kahr as a General State Commissioner with full powers to maintain order. Backed by Lossow and the police chief, Hans Ritter von Seisser, Kahr banned a series of meetings planned by the Nazis for 27 September while they pursued their own plans for the overthrow of the government in Berlin: Pressure mounted on all sides for action; amongst the rank-and-file of the paramilitaries, as Hitler was repeatedly warned, it was becoming almost irresistible.68
In Berlin, the army leader General Hans von Seeckt refused to go along with the plans of Lossow, Seisser and Kahr. He preferred to remove Stresemann’s government by backstairs intrigue, which indeed he eventually did, though it was succeeded by another coalition in which Stresemann remained Foreign Minister. Feverish negotiations in Munich failed to produce any unity between the Bavarian army under Lossow, the police under Seisser, and the paramilitaries, whose political representative was of course Hitler. Aware that he would lose the support of the paramilitaries if he dithered any longer, and worried that Kahr was himself considering action, Hitler, now backed by Ludendorff, decided on a putsch. The Bavarian government would be arrested, and Kahr and his allies would be forced to join with the paramilitaries in a march on Berlin. The date for the putsch was set, more under the pressure of events than by any search for a symbolic date, for 9 November, the anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolution of 1918 that had overthrown the Kaiser’s regime. On the evening of 8 November, Hitler and a body of heavily armed stormtroopers broke into a meeting addressed by Kahr in the Bürgerbräukeller, a beer-cellar just outside the centre of Munich. Hitler ordered one of his men to fire a pistol-shot into the ceiling to silence the crowd, then announced that the hall was surrounded. The Bavarian government, he declared, was deposed. While Goring calmed the audience, Hitler took Kahr, Lossow and Seisser into an adjoining room and explained that he would march on Berlin, installing himself at the head of a new Reich government; Ludendorff would take over the national army. They would be rewarded for their support with important positions themselves. Returning to speak to the crowd, Hitler won them over with a dramatic plea for backing in what he called his action against ‘the November criminals of 1918’. Kahr and his companions had no option but to return to the podium and, joined now by Ludendorff, declare their support.69
But translating histrionic demonstrations into political power was not so easy. The Nazis’ plans for a putsch were half-baked. Röhm occupied the army headquarters in Munich, and Nazi units also took over the police headquarters, but other buildings including, crucially, the army barracks, remained in government hands, and while Hitler went into the city to try and sort things out, Ludendorff released Kahr and the other prisoners, who promptly backtracked on their enforced compliance with the plot and immediately got in touch with the army, the police and the media to repudiate Hitler’s actions. Back in the beer-cellar, Hitler and Ludendorff decided to march on the city centre. They gathered about two thousand armed supporters, each of whom had been paid 2 billion marks (worth just over three dollars on this particular day) from a hoard of more than 14,000 billion marks ‘confiscated’ from two supposedly Jewish banknote printers in raids carried out by brownshirt squads on Hitler’s orders. The column set off at midday on 9 November and, encouraged by the cheers of their supporters, they marched through the centre of the city in the direction of the Ministry of War. At the end of the street they were met by an armed cordon of police. According to the official report, they pressed pistols with their safety catches off against the policemen’s chests, spat on them and pointed fixed bayonets in their direction. Then someone on one side or the other - there were conflicting claims - fired a shot. For half a minute the air was filled with whizzing bullets as both sides let fly. Goring fell, shot in the leg; Hitler dropped, or was pushed, to the ground, dislocating his shoulder. Scheubner-Richter, Hitler’s diplomat friend and connection to patrons in high places, was killed outright. Altogether, fourteen marchers were shot dead, and four policemen. As the police moved in to arrest Ludendorff, Streicher, Röhm and many others, Goring managed to get away, fleeing first to Austria, then Italy, before settling in Sweden, becoming addicted in the process to the morphine he took to relieve the pain of his wound. Hitler was taken off, his arm in a sling, to Hanfstaengl’s country house, where he was arrested on 11 November. The putsch had come to an ignominious end.70
REBUILDING THE MOVEMENT
I
It did not take Hitler long to recover his nerve after the events of 9 November 1923. He knew that he could implicate a whole range of prominent Bavarian politicians in the putsch attempt, and expose the army’s involvement in training paramilitaries for a march on Berlin. Aware of this threat, which had emerged already during Hitler’s interrogation, the Bavarian government managed to persuade the authorities in Berlin to hold the trial not in the Reich Court in Leipzig, but before a specially constituted ‘People’s Court’ in Munich, where they had more control over events.71 It seems likely that they offered Hitler leniency in return for his agreement to carry the can. As judge they picked Georg Neithardt, a well-known nationalist who had been appointed by Bavaria’s reactionary Justice Minister Franz Gürtner in 1919 and had presided over Hitler’s previous trial, early in 1922. When the trial began, on 26 February 1924, Hitler was allowed to appear in civilian dress, wearing his Iron Cross, and to address the court for hours on end without interruption. While Neithardt let him bully and insult prosecution witnesses, the state prosecutor failed to call a number of key figures whose testimony would have proved damaging to the defence case. The court suppressed evidence of Ludendorff’s involvement, and rejected a plea for Hitler to be deported as an Austrian citizen, because he had served in the German army and shown himself to be a German patriot.72 Hitler took the entire responsibility on himself, declaring that serving the interests of Germany could not be high treason. The ‘eternal Court of History’, he declared, ‘will judge us ... as Germans who wanted the best for their people and their fatherland.’73
Despite the fact that the participants in the putsch had shot dead four policemen and staged an armed and (in any reasonable legal terms) treasonable revolt against a legitimately constituted state government, both offences punishable by death, the court sentenced Hitler to a mere five years in prison for high treason, and the others were indicted to similar or even lighter terms. Ludendorff, as expected, was acquitted. The court grounded its leniency in the fact that, as it declared, the participants in the putsch ‘were led in their action by a pure patriotic spirit and the most noble will’. The judgment was scandalous even by the biased standards of the Weimar judiciary. It was widely condemned, even on the right. Hitler was sent to an ancient fortress at Landsberg am Lech, west of Munich, where he took over the cell held up to that point by Count Arco-Valley, the assassin of Kurt Eisner. This was what was called ‘fortress incarceration’, a mild form of imprisonment for offenders thought to have acted from honourable motives, such as, before the war, gentlemen of honour who had killed their opponent in a duel. Hitler’s cell was large, airy and comfortably furnished. Visitors had free access. Over five hundred of them came during the course of his stay. They brought him presents, flowers, letters and telegrams from well-wishers outside. He was able to read, indeed there was little else to do when he was not receiving visitors, and he ploughed his way through a variety of books by authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, searching them in the main for confirmation of his own views. More importantly, at the suggestion of the Nazi publisher Max Amann, Hitler also sat down to dictate an account of his life and opinions up to this point to two of his fellow-prisoners, his chauffeur Emil Maurice and his factotum Rudolf Hess, an account published the following year under the title, probably proposed by Amann, of My Struggle.74
My Struggle has been seen by some historians as a kind of blueprint for Hitler’s later actions, a dangerous and devilish book that was unfortunately ignored by those who should have known better. It was nothing of the kind. Heavily edited by Amann, Hanfstaengl and others in order to make it more literate and less incoherent than the rambling first draft, it was none the less turgid and tedious, and sold only modest numbers of copies before the Nazis achieved their electoral breakthrough in 1930. After that it became a best-seller, above all during the Third Reich, when not to own a copy was almost an act of treason. Those people who read it, probably a relatively small proportion of those who bought it, must have found it difficult to gain anything very coherent out of its confused mélange of autobiographical reminiscences and garbled political declamations. Hitler’s talent for winning hearts and minds lay in his public oratory, not in his writing. Still, no one who read the book could have been left in any doubt about the fact that Hitler considered racial conflict to be the motor, the essence of history, and the Jews to be the sworn enemy of the German race, whose historic mission it was, under the guidance of the Nazi Party, to break their international power and annihilate them entirely. ‘The nationalization of our masses’, he declared, ‘will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.’75
The Jews were now linked indissolubly in Hitler’s mind with ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Marxism’, which received far greater prominence in My Struggle than the finance capitalism that had so obsessed him during the period of monetary inflation. For Russia was where Germany’s conquest of ‘living-space’ would be made at the same time as the elimination of the ‘Jewish-Bolsheviks’ who he supposed ruled the Soviet state. These ideas were laid out in more detail in the book’s second volume, composed in 1925 and published the following year; they were central to Hitler’s ideology from now on. ‘The boundaries of the year 1914 mean nothing at all for the German future,‘he declared. Drawing a comparison with the vast Eastern conquests of Alexander the Great, he announced that ‘the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state’. The soil now occupied by ‘Russia and her vassal border states’ would in future be given over to ‘the industrious work of the German plough’.76
Hitler’s beliefs were clearly laid out in My Struggle, for all to see who wished to. No one familiar with the text could have emerged from reading it with the view that all Hitler wanted was the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, the restoration of the German borders of 1914 or the self-determination of German-speaking minorities in Central Europe. Nor could anyone have doubted the visceral, fanatical, indeed murderous quality of his antisemitism. But beliefs and intentions are not the same as blueprints and plans. When it came to working out how to implement these views, Hitler’s text naturally reflected the politics of the particular period in which it was written. At this time, the French were the enemy, having only recently withdrawn from the Ruhr. The British, by contrast, looked like a possible ally in the struggle against Bolshevism, having lent their support to the ‘White’ forces in the Russian civil war only a few years before. A little later, when Hitler composed another, similar work, unpublished during his lifetime, the clash between Italy and Germany over the South Tyrol was on the international agenda, and so he concentrated on that.77 What remained central through all these tactical twists and turns, however, was the long-term drive for ‘living-space’ in the East, and the fierce desire to annihilate the Jews. This, again, could not be done all at once, and Hitler obviously, at this stage, had no clear idea as to how it would be achieved, or when. Here, too, there would be tactical manoeuvres along the way, and a variety of interim solutions would present themselves. But none of this affected the genocidal quality of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, or his paranoid conviction that they were responsible for all of Germany’s ills and that the only long-term solution was their complete annihilation as a biological entity; a conviction easily discernible not only from the language of My Struggle, but also from the words and phrases he used in his speeches, and the atmosphere of revivalist intolerance in which they were held.78 The Jews were a ‘pestilence’, ‘worse than the Black Death’, a ‘maggot in the decomposing body of Germany’, and they would be driven from what he thought of as their positions of power, and then expelled from the country altogether, if necessary by force. What would happen to the Jews of Eastern Europe once Germany had acquired its living-space there, he could not say; but the murderous violence of his language left little doubt that their fate would not be a pleasant one.79
The composition of his book, the massive publicity he gained from the trial, the adulation that poured in from the nationalist right after the attempted putsch, all helped convince Hitler, if he had not been convinced before, that he was the man to turn these views into reality. The failed putsch also taught him that he would not even be able to take the first step - the acquisition of supreme power in Germany itself - by relying on paramilitary violence alone. A ‘march on Rome’ was out of the question in Germany. It was essential to win mass public support, by the propaganda and public-speaking campaigns which Hitler knew were his forte. The revolutionary conquest of power, still favoured by Röhm, would not work in any case if it was undertaken without the support of the army, so conspicuously lacking in November 1923. Hitler did not, as was sometimes later said, even by himself, embark on a path of ‘legality’ in the wake of the failed putsch. But he did realize that toppling the Weimar ‘system’ would require more than a few ill-directed gunshots, even in a year of supreme crisis such as 1923. Coming to power clearly required collaboration from key elements in the establishment, and although he had enjoyed some support in 1923, it had not proved sufficient. In the next crisis, which was to occur less than a decade later, he made sure he had the army and the key institutions of the state either neutralized, or actively working for him, unlike in 1923.80
Meanwhile, however, the situation of the Nazi Party seemed almost irretrievable in the wake of Hitler’s arrest and imprisonment. The paramilitary groups broke up in disorder, and their arms were confiscated by the government. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, badly compromised by the putsch, were pushed aside by a new cabinet under the Bavarian People’s Party leader, Heinrich Held. Bavarian separatism and ultra-nationalist conspiracies gave way to more conventional regional politics. The situation calmed down as the hyperinflation came to an end and the policy of ‘fulfilment’ took hold in Berlin, bearing fruit almost immediately with the rescheduling of reparations under the Dawes Plan. Deprived of their leader, the Nazis split up into tiny squabbling factions again. Röhm continued to try and reunite the remaining fragments of the paramilitaries in allegiance to Ludendorff. Hitler put Alfred Rosenberg in charge of the Nazi Party as virtually the only leading figure left in the country who was still at large. But Rosenberg proved completely incapable of establishing any authority over the movement.81
