Hitler

through the streets, swarming with soldiers who blared through bullhorns “Revenge for Eisner!”

For a month executive power was wielded by a Central Council (i.e., soviet) under Ernst Niekisch. Then a parliamentary government was formed. But at the beginning of April news came from Hungary that Bela Kun had seized power and proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here was evidence that revolution could succeed outside Russia. Once more the uneasy stability of Bavaria was shaken. A minority of radical leftist enthusiasts, without a mass basis and against the clear will, traditions, and feelings of the public, cried, “Germany is next!” and proclaimed a soviet republic. The poets Ernst Toller and Erich Muhsam, in a decree all too revealing of their romanticism, unworldliness, and weakness as leaders, announced the transformation of the world “into a meadow full of flowers in which each man can pick his share.” Work, subordination, and legalistic thinking were to be abolished. The newspapers were to print poems by Holderlin or Schiller on the front page alongside the latest revolutionary decrees. The government retreated to Bamberg; Ernst Niekisch and most of the ministers resigned; and the leaderless state was left to the muddled gospel of the poets, who soon found themselves supplanted by a group of hard-boiled professional revolutionaries. Chaos and terrorizing of the citizenry followed.

It was an experience that could not be forgotten. The arbitrary confiscations, the practice of seizing hostages, the curbs on the bourgeoisie, revolutionary whim, and increasing hunger accorded all too well with recent horror stories of the October Revolution in Russia and made so deep an imprint on the popular mind that the bloody atrocities committed by the units of the Reichswehr and Free Corps, which advanced on Munich at the beginning of May, faded into oblivion by contrast. The rightists murdered fifty released Russian prisoners of war near Puchheim, slaughtered a medical column of the soviet army near Starnberg, arrested twenty-one innocent members of a Catholic club in their Munich clubroom, took them to the jail on Karolinenplatz and shot them all down, likewise lined up and shot twelve innocent workmen from Perlach. In addition, there were the leaders of the soviet experiment who were beaten to death or shot: Kurt Eglhofer, Gustav Landauer, Eugen Levine. About these victims little was ever said. On the other hand, eight hostages—members of the conspiratorial radical rightist Thule Society—had been held in the cellar of the Luitpold Gymnasium. A minor functionary, reacting to the crimes of the rightist troops, had them liquidated. For years their memory was repeatedly invoked as an example of the horrors of the Red regime. Wherever the Reichswehr and Free Corps troops appeared, a contemporary diary notes, “the people wave cloths, applaud; everyone looks out the windows; the enthusiasm could not be greater…. Everyone is cheering.”² Bavaria, the land of revolution, now became the land of counterrevolution.

For certain bourgeois groups the experiences of the early postwar months brought a new sense of confidence. For the short-lived revolution revealed the impotence and want of ideas of the German Left, which obviously had more revolutionary enthusiasm than revolutionary courage. The Left as represented by the Social Democrats had proved a force for order; but the leftists who attempted to introduce soviet rule in Bavaria proved to be visionaries who knew nothing about power and nothing about the people. During those months the bourgeoisie, or at any rate the calmer portion of it, for the first time realized that its fears were unjustified, that it could well hold its own beside the supposedly invincible but really naive German working class.

The army officers of middle rank, action-hungry captains and majors, led the way in infusing new spirit into the bourgeoisie. They had enjoyed the war like a wine and were still intoxicated. Although they had often faced superior forces, they did not feel themselves defeated. Called to the aid of the government, they had tamed rebels and refractory soldiers’ councils and crushed the Bavarian soviets. On the unsecured eastern border of Germany they had stood guard against the Poles and Czechs. Then, as they saw it, the Versailles Treaty cutting the army down to 100,000 men had cheated them of their future, reduced their social status, and disgraced their nation. A combination of self-assurance and haplessness sent them into politics. Many of them clung to the glorious freedom of the soldier’s life or hated to give up the profession of arms and the company of males. With their knowledge of organization and the planned application of violence, they now set about combatting the revolution—which had long since been destroyed by the nation’s fears and craving for order.

The private military bands that appeared everywhere soon transformed the country into a bivouac of brutish soldiery who wore the nimbus of political militancy and patriotism. Secure in the possession of machine guns, hand grenades, and cannon kept in an extensive network of secret arms depots, they profited by the impotence of the political institutions and claimed for themselves a considerable share of power—although the size of the share differed in the various regions. In Bavaria, in reaction to the traumatic experiences of the soviet period, they were able to pursue their ends almost unhindered. During the rule of the soviets, the Social Democratic government had called for “organizing the counterrevolution by all possible means.” With such official encouragement, the paramilitary movements sprang up alongside the Reichswehr, intertwined with it in various obscure ways. Colonel (later General) von Epp organized the free corps called the Einwohnerwehr (militia). There were also the Bund Oberland (Oberland League), the officers’ association Eiserne Faust (Iron Fist), the Escherich Organization, the Deutschvolkische Schutz-und Trutzbund (Defense and Defiance League of the German Race), the Verband Altreichsflagge (Flag of the Old Reich Association), the Bayreuth, Wurzburg, and Wolf Free Corps, and a variety of other organizations. Taken together, they represented an ambitious politico-military autonomous power averse to any return to normality.

In addition to the support of the administration and the government bureaucracy, these associations also enjoyed the favor of much of the population. In a society with a military tradition, cross-grained individuals acquire enormous credibility on moral and national issues as soon as they appear in uniform and march in step. Given the chaotic background, the military association appeared to be an exemplary counterpoise, representing a concept of life and order dear to everyone’s heart. Sternly erect, faultlessly in step, the units of Epp’s Free Corps had paraded down Ludwigstrasse, along with units of the Ehrhardt Brigade. The latter had brought back from its battles in the Baltic regions an emblem loudly proclaimed in the unit’s marching song: “With swastika on steel helmet.”

These military groups appealed to the imagination of the public; they embodied something of the glory and security of previous times that were now only nostalgic memories. Bavarian Group Command IV was only expressing prevailing opinion when it issued a directive in June, 1919, referring to the Reichswehr as the “cornerstone” of any “meaningful reestablishment of all domestic affairs.” The parties of the Left made the naive mistake of thinking that the soldiers who had borne the brunt of the suffering shared their own hatred for war. The Right, however, began working on the soldiers’ injured pride and disappointed expectations. They launched a vigorous campaign to this effect.

Among the various activities organized by the propaganda department of the Group Command under bustling Captain Mayr was that course in “civic thinking” which Hitler had been sent to after he had done so well as an informant for the military tribunal. The classes were held at the university and were conducted by reliable nationalists. The object was to indoctrinate a select group of participants with certain historical, economic, and political theories.

In his consistent effort to deny or underplay any influences upon his thinking, Hitler would later imply that this course was important for him not so much for the information it provided as for the contacts he made. “For me the value of the whole affair was that I now obtained an opportunity of meeting a few like-minded comrades with whom I could thoroughly discuss the situation of the moment.” But he admits that in the field of economic theory he learned something new. He attended the lectures of Gottfried Feder, a rightist engineer, and “for the first time in my life I heard a principled discussion of international stock exchange and loan capital.”³

In the strict sense, however, the real importance of the lecture course lay in the effect Hitler made with his vehemence and his particular cast of mind. Up to now his audience had consisted only of ignorant chance listeners. One of the teachers, the historian Karl Alexander von Muller, has described how at the end of the lecture, while the hall was emptying, he found his way blocked by a group that “stood fascinated around a man in their midst who was addressing them without pause and with growing passion in a strangely guttural voice. I had the strange feeling that the man was feeding on the excitement which he himself had whipped up. I saw a pale, thin face beneath a drooping, unsoldierly strand of hair, with close-cropped mustache and strikingly large, light blue eyes coldly glistening with fanaticism.” Called up to the platform after the next lecture, the man came up “obediently, with awkward movements, in a kind of defiant embarrassment, so it seemed to me.” But “the dialogue remained unfruitful.”

Here we already have a picture of the two faces of Hitler: powerfully convincing when carried away by his own rhetoric, bumbling and insignificant in personal confrontation. According to his own story, he had his first,