Hitlerland

ready. Confident that they wouldn’t open fire on a war hero like Ludendorff, both the general and the ex-corporal proceeded with their plan, leading the march. They were met with machine-gun fire. Fourteen Nazis died on the spot, along with four policemen.

The American consul Robert Murphy and his German colleague Paul Drey had rushed to the scene to see what was happening. “I can testify that both Hitler and Ludendorff behaved in an identical manner, like the battle- hardened soldiers they were. Both fell flat to escape the hail of bullets,” Murphy recalled. In the brief pandemonium, it was hard to see what actually transpired—and Hitler may have dropped to the ground for another reason. One of those struck by the hail of bullets was Scheubner-Richter, Hitler’s close aide, who was marching with him arm-in-arm. Killed instantly, he may have jerked Hitler to the ground. In any case, the Nazi leader fled the scene with a dislocated shoulder.

Several top Nazis were immediately arrested and Ludendorff surrendered to the authorities, but he was set free after giving his officer’s word that he wouldn’t evade trial. Putzi, who had missed the shooting, rushed to see the outcome, and a Brownshirt medic he encountered told him that Hitler, Ludendorff and Goering were all dead. “My God, Herr Hanfstaengl, it’s too terrible,” he said. “It is the end of Germany.” Believing all was lost, Putzi advised other Nazis he met to get out of Munich immediately, crossing the border into Austria. And he promptly followed his own advice.

In fact, Hitler had managed to escape to his waiting car, along with Walter Schultze, the chief doctor for the storm troopers and others. And, unlike Putzi, he sought refuge in the Hanfstaengls’ country house in Uffing, about an hour from Munich. “The last place it would have occurred to me to go was my own home in Uffing, where I surely would be caught and arrested,” Putzi noted later.

In Hitler’s case, that’s exactly where he ended up, although apparently not by initial design. Still, he probably went there in part because, as Putzi put it, Hitler had developed “one of his theoretical passions” for Helen. Putzi was quick to suggest that Hitler was impotent, and that Hitler’s infatuation with his wife never went beyond hand- kissing and bringing her flowers. “He had no normal sex life… somehow one never felt with him that the attraction was physical,” he declared. Helen agreed that her admirer was probably “a neuter,” but she had no doubt that he was strongly attracted to her.

Whatever the reason, Helen suddenly found herself with an unexpected house guest on the evening of November 9. She had been hearing reports about the putsch and the rumors that Hitler and Ludendorff were dead, but she didn’t know what to believe. While she and Egon were having supper in the upstairs living room, a maid reported that someone was knocking softly on the door. Helen went downstairs and, without opening the door, asked who was there. “To my utter amazement, I recognized the weak but unmistakable voice of Hitler,” she recalled.

Helen quickly opened the door and found herself facing a very different Hitler than the one who normally showed up: “There he stood, ghastly pale, hatless, his face and clothing covered with mud, the left arm hanging down from a strangely slanting shoulder.” The doctor and a medic were holding him up from both sides, but they, too, looked “pathetically rampaged.” Once inside, Helen asked Hitler about Putzi. He told her he wasn’t in the confrontation because he was working on putting out the party newspaper and that he’d probably show up soon. Hitler kept talking, despondent about the deaths of his aides and possibly of Ludendorff, and furious about what he called the treachery of the Bavarian officials. He also swore to her that “he would go on fighting for his ideals as long as breath was in him.”

Hitler was running a temperature and in pain from the dislocated shoulder, so the doctor and the medic eased him upstairs to a bedroom. From there, Helen heard him moaning as they tried to push his arm back into his shoulder.

During the night, the doctor explained to Helen that they, too, had tried to flee to Austria, but their car had broken down. When the driver couldn’t fix it, Hitler had suggested going to Hanfstaengl’s house since they could reach it by foot, although it was a long, difficult walk for the three worn-out men. What that story didn’t explain was how Hitler imagined he could stay hidden in the house of one of his well-known followers.

The next morning, Hitler sent off the doctor to Munich to see if he could arrange for another car to pick him up and still get him to Austria. His arm was in a sling and he appeared to be in less pain than the previous evening, but he was pacing nervously about in a blue bathrobe, asking where the car might be. Helen’s mother-in- law called to say that the police were already in her nearby house. Suddenly, an official cut her off and took the phone himself, telling Helen that he and his men would be arriving at her house next.

Helen went upstairs to let Hitler know that he was about to be arrested. Standing in the hallway, he looked devastated by the news. “Now all is lost—no use going on!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. Then, with a quick motion, he picked up his revolver from the cabinet. “But I was alert, grasped his arm and took the weapon away from him,” Helen recalled.

Alarmed that he might have shot himself, she shouted: “What do you think you’re doing? After all, are you going to leave all the people that you’ve gotten interested in your idea of saving the country and you take your life… They’re looking for you to carry on.”

Hitler hadn’t resisted when she grabbed the gun, and he sank into a chair, burying his head in his hands. While he was still sitting like that, Helen quickly took the gun away to dispose of it, settling on a large flour bin where it easily vanished from sight as she pushed it down deep inside. Returning to Hitler, she urged him to dictate to her all his instructions for his followers before the police arrived; that way, they would know what to do while he would be in prison. She added that he could then sign each sheet containing instructions and she would make sure they would be delivered to his lawyer. “He thanked me for helping him remember his duty to his men, and then dictated the orders which were to be of such importance in carrying on the work,” she recalled.

Soon, the police with guard dogs surrounded the house. Helen answered the knock at the door, and a shy young army lieutenant, accompanied by two policemen, apologetically explained that he had to search the house. Helen told them to follow her upstairs and she opened the door to the room where Hitler was standing. Startled, the three men took a step back for a moment. The Nazi leader had regained his confidence and immediately began berating the lieutenant in a loud voice, particularly when he told him he had to arrest him for high treason.

There was no use arguing, however, and even Hitler realized that. Refusing Helen’s offer of Putzi’s clothes to shield him from the cold, he was still dressed in the blue bathrobe, with his own coat draped over his shoulders, as the men led him down the stairs. At that moment, little Egon ran out, calling, “What are the bad, bad men doing to my Uncle Dolf?” Looking moved, Hitler patted Egon on the cheek. Then he shook hands with Helen and the maids before going out the door. Helen caught a last glance at his face when he was seated in the police car. It was “deathly pale,” she remembered.

Most of the press coverage that followed, at home and abroad, quickly wrote off Hitler and the Nazis. The Beer Hall Putsch had been laughably amateurish, and now all that awaited the arrested leaders was a trial and certain convictions.

Few people realized then that the trial and even imprisonment would serve Hitler surprisingly well. And only a few insiders knew then that it was a young American woman, the wife of one of his earliest followers, who may have prevented him from taking his own life—an act that would have delivered humanity from the devastating consequences of his political resurrection later. It was Helen Hanfstaengl, nee Niemeyer, who, in the worst possible way, may have changed the course of history.

Like Knickerbocker who quickly became a close friend, Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News was a new arrival in Berlin in 1923, showing up late that year and staying for a decade, right through Hitler’s rise to power. And, like Knickerbocker, Wiegand and other correspondents, he was as much intrigued by the German capital’s dynamism in the arts as by its chaotic politics. The city was “a cultural riot, the wilder for the lack of such deep traditions as still had held sway in Paris and London,” he recalled. Along with his British-born wife Lilian, he was quickly swept up in that cultural riot.

At the annual Press Ball in the huge Zoo Restaurant, the Mowrers had the chance to mingle with everyone from top government officials and the high-society crowd to the playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Carl Zuckmayer, composer Richard Strauss when he was visiting from Vienna to conduct an opera, and conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler. The event brought together “the leaders of totally different worlds,” Mowrer wrote. “It was as though Paris had merged the Elysee, the Opera, and the Beaux Arts Ball into one vast get- together that opened with the dignity of a state reception and ended in a bacchanal.”