THE GENERAL SITUATION
In 1923 Germany was chaos. After losing World War I it suffered every kind of revolution possible — Communist, monarchist and right wing — pretty much everything except democratic. The widely despised legal government, the Weimar Republic, hung on for dear life amid the raging winds of revolution.
The German economy was also a complete disaster. A key reason was that the German government didn’t have the money to pay the high amount of reparations demanded by the French, who were feeling quite vindictive that their country had been invaded, fought over for four years, and had lost millions of their citizens and soldiers. Before the war Germany had been the growing power in Europe, with the largest population of the western countries and the most technically advanced industry. It just didn’t make sense to most Germans that they had lost the war, especially to the French, their sagging, democratic, arch-enemy whom Bismarck had so easily manhandled in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. But now, unemployment in Germany was high, and rampant inflation — at its worst in 1923 when prices doubled every two days — had eroded the currency to the point that a cup of coffee cost billions of marks. Wheelbarrows had replaced wallets.
The Prussian officer corps longed for the inherent stability of a country organized around the codes and traditions of the Prussian military killing machine that they all had come to know, love, and trust. It was an article of faith among the defeated and disgraced Prussian officers of noble birth, who had marched the country into war before inadvertently plunging it into the chaos of revolution, that their glorious army was the crucial backbone of the German nation. They believed it was their duty to make a last stand for unchallengeable, oligarchical rule — or their country might disappear under the converging waves of radical Communism, radical democracy, or an evil and unimaginable combination of both.
The most vehement of these former soldiers were the “Freikorps,” groups of former soldiers secretly hired, armed, and silently sanctioned by the legitimate government into illegal paramilitary companies. The Freikorps were tacitly given a free hand in crushing the revolutionaries of the left in exchange for propping up the Social Democratic regime of President Friedrich Ebert, who had inherited the tottering German state after the abdication by the Kaiser.
But the Freikorps were uncontrollable by anyone, including the hard-bitten officers who commanded them. The troops were invariably front-line veterans who had survived years of the unimaginable horror of trench warfare, and could in fact no longer exist in a peaceful society. Many of the German masses agreed with the aim of the Freikorps, if not the jackbooted tactics they had perfected on the rest of Europe.
The revered loser of World War I, Field Marshal Ludendorff — he of the big lie that Germany had been “stabbed in the back by the November criminals” to save his skin — was turning out to be an impatient, naïve putschist. He had been one of the organizers of the Kapp Putsch in 1920, a failed attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic, and with its collapse was forced to once again flee Germany in disguise. Ludendorff ended up in Munich, where he installed himself in a suburban villa and began to interview candidates for the open position of German dictator.
Adolf Hitler, a complete nobody at the end of the war, with a war record blemished solely by his own survival, also landed in Munich, where his army regiment put him to work haranguing returning soldiers against the evils of Communism. Marked down as a promising intelligence officer, he was assigned to keep tabs on the burgeoning right-wing revolutionary scene, which resulted in his visit to the tiny, nascent Nazi party in a beer hall on September 12, 1919. Impressed by his ability to shout down the half-dozen members of the party, they invited Adolf to join them. A week later he signed up.
Feeling inspired for the first time since the end of the war, Hitler honed his raw haranguing power; through hard work and dedication he grew the party with his message that Germany’s woes were due to the Jews and the Communists. Hitler’s rhetorical pictures of a racial fantasyland, where honor and order would be restored to the proud Germans, proved much more popular than the bad watercolors he had sold on the streets before the war. The growing masses who attended his beer-hall speeches soon made him a local celebrity.
By 1922 Hitler had attracted two of his main cohorts who were to prove instrumental in bringing him to power and then crashing the world into World War II. Hermann Goering, after a war in which he had taken over the famed Richthofen squadron from the Red Baron in 1918, had moved back into his mom’s apartment in Munich. A bigger humiliation, however, was the open contempt he received from the left-wing revolutionaries who often stripped the medals off the chests of soldiers in public.
Goering often vented his anger at beer-hall rallies. He was soon window-shopping for a radical party to join that was as bitter and determined to avenge the defeat as he was. He quickly found Hitler in the fall of 1922. When Goering heard Hitler’s harangue about the injustices of the Versailles Treaty, it was love at first rant.
Hitler instinctively knew the dashing, decorated former war ace was a great addition to the still-small party. Goering possessed the rare combination of a common touch covering a ruthless cunning. Shortly after their first meeting, Hitler handed him command of the SA (
Meanwhile, Heinrich Himmler, the son of a middle-class devoutly Roman Catholic Munich family, joined the team as an anonymous peon. While not the usual background for a grand terrorist-in-the-making, Himmler was overly influenced by his history-obsessed father. He nurtured dreams of the good old days when racially pure Teutonic knights ruled the forests of Prussia with nary a Jew or Communist to mar the vision.
Little Heinrich always strived to be the best in whatever he did, and as a German youth he craved to serve his country by joining the futile slaughter of World War I. But the German army was very strict in denying non- nobles the opportunity to become officers and direct the carnage. The rules changed only when the ranks of young noblemen started to grow thin at the end of the war.
Heinrich finally landed his officer post, but to the dismay of millions of his future victims he missed all the action and failed to achieve the ultimate sacrifice for his country. Back home in one piece he set his hopes on tilling the soil of a far-flung Prussian outpost like a knight from his juvenile Teutonic fantasies. He joined a Freikorps but narrowly missed out on the bloodletting as his unit failed to join the thrashing of the Reds in 1919. After a year of chicken farming in 1921 in preparation for tilling his Prussian fantasyland, he met Ernst Röhm at a weekend Teutonic fantasy camp. Röhm, another embittered veteran, was an active army officer whose main job was to hide weapons from the Allied soldiers who were haplessly trying to control the growing chaos in Germany. Röhm was in a position to help any political group he favored by giving them access to the stashed weapons. He soon took a shining to Hitler’s promising little group of Nazis. As the Nazis grew in popularity, they needed brawlers to control their raucous beer-hall meetings, and Röhm nurtured the fledgling SA by providing it with men and weapons. Himmler, part of one of Röhm’s groups, tagged along and was soon sucked into the growing vortex of the Nazi party.
After Munich had been brutally cleansed of its Bolshevik-styled government a few years earlier, it became the focal point of a right-wing revolution, its streets and beer halls bubbling with fascistic energy. In the evenings the Freikorps leagues kept themselves in trouble and prepared for the next day of unemployment by battling each other for control of the streets. In their quieter moments, they crowded into the beer halls to discuss the various violent methods of overthrowing the elected government. Like blood and beer mixing in the gutters, the right wingers, Communists, and socialists could agree on only one thing: anything had to be better than the democracy they were suffering under.
The Prussian generals were determined to keep the rowdy Freikorps under their control, and they kept a wary eye on Munich. Gustav von Kahr had installed himself as Bavaria’s right-wing dictator in Munich. Kahr was amenable to any right-wing government, but particularly enamored of monarchy, and still pined for the recently scuttled Wittelsbachs, one of the minor royal families who had been tossed back on the monarchical scrap heap after their seven-hundred-year interlude of ruling Bavaria.
By 1923, Hitler was in full control of the Nazi party. He gave his buddy Röhm the task of staffing up the violence bureau, and he brought in the angriest of the Freikorps rowdies. Hitler’s first big speech as a politician had been in February 24, 1920, in the Hofbräuhaus before 2,000 people. Now his little party had almost 100,000 members, including 15,000 SA brawlers, and was recognized as a real threat by the government and the Prussian officers who really controlled the country. Determined not to invite retaliation by the French before the German army was slowly rebuilt into its former Europe-stomping glory, the government, still struggling with the obscure
