Hitler: A Short Biography. A. Wilson N.

his liberal-socialist Cabinet expressed the desire to close down the scurrilous right-wing Bavarian newspaper, the in-effect Nazi Völkischer Beobachter (The Nazi Observer – the word ‘völkisch’ meaning literally ‘of the people’ came to stand for the whole bundle of patriotic or nationalist feelings which the Nazis represented). They also wanted to replace the right-wing General Otto von Lossow as leader of the army in Bavaria and put General Kress von Kressenstein in his stead. This set of proposals delighted Hitler by causing violently anti-government feelings to be aroused in otherwise moderate Bavarians. ‘Auf nach Berlin!’ – ‘On to Berlin!’ – became a nationalist watchword.

      But then Stresemann’s government appeared to be on top of things. They broke the threat of a Communist uprising. General Müller suppressed the governments of Saxony and Thuringia, which had the effect of strengthening central power and was designed pour encourager les autres. Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser warned Hitler and the Bavarian would-be rebels that, in the event of a putsch, there was no hope that malcontents in the north of the country would join it.

      By now it was too late. Hitler had already primed his followers, telling them that he would take part in a putsch. On 8 November Kahr was due to speak to a sympathetic right-ring audience in the Bürgerbräukeller or Citizen’s Beer Hall. Twenty minutes after Kahr had begun to speak, Hitler, Göring and twenty-five armed Brownshirts burst into the building.

      One symptom of Hitler’s being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things, was his gift for wearing inappropriate or ludicrous clothing. Even if you overlook his fondness for lederhosen and knee-length pale socks, his dress sense was, to put it mildly, uncertain. On this occasion, when he was supposed to be starting a militaristic revolution, he was wearing evening dress and an ill-fitting black tailcoat, which reminded one observer of ‘the slightly nervous sort of provincial bridegroom you can see in scores of pictures behind the dusty windows of Bavarian village photographers’,³ and his army medals. He fired a revolver in the air and shouted, ‘The National revolution is begun!’ It was Hitler’s aim to persuade Kahr, and the army, supported by Ludendorff, to march on Berlin, and overthrow the left-wing government. Any such adventure would have been doomed to end in failure, and Kahr had no intention of going along with the Nazi plans. Kahr behaved unflappably. ‘You can arrest me or shoot me. Whether I die or not is no matter.’ Colonel Seisser reproached Hitler for so flagrantly breaking his word. ‘Yes, I did’, admitted Hitler. ‘Forgive me. I had to, for the sake of the Fatherland.’⁴ He then announced that the Berlin government had been overthrown and that Herr von Kahr was the ‘Regent’ – not an honour which he accepted. But the crowd liked it. Hitler’s announcement that they had replaced the Berlin government was greeted with applause.

      Two Hitlers were on display that evening. One was the strutting populist revolutionary demagogue, thirsting for the applause of the crowd. But his sense of timing had deserted him, and he knew that this coup d’état was not going to happen. So there was seen that other Hitler, the cringing lower middle-class man who felt ill at ease with his social or military superiors and would do all in his oleaginous power to be ingratiating. Almost bowing to Kahr, he said, ‘If your Excellency permits, I will drive out to see His Majesty [that is the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht] at once and inform him that the German people have arisen and made good the injustice done to His Majesty’s late lamented father.’

      Kahr agreed that this should be done. But he had no intention of bowing to Hitler’s pressure. He and his Cabinet withdrew during the night to Regensburg where they continued the legal government of Bavaria. General Lossow returned to barracks, where the commander of the Munich garrison, General Danner, asked drily, ‘All that was bluff, your Excellency?’ The next day, Hitler and General Ludendorff returned to the Bürgerbräukeller with a column of Nazi storm-troopers. They were met, not by the army, which would have provided too great a clash of loyalty in some storm-troopers’ hearts, but by the police. In the exchange of gunfire, which lasted only a minute or so, sixteen Nazis were killed and three police. Göring was wounded and smuggled across the Austrian border and given hospital treatment at the expense of the Wagners. Hitler suffered a dislocated shoulder.

      A few days after the attempted putsch, Hitler was arrested.

      If Hitler had been an inhabitant of the rational world, the world of John Locke or Abraham Lincoln, the ridiculous putsch of 1923 would have been seen as an abject and humiliating exposure of weakness. But he lived in strange times, and he had an altogether anti-rational take on events.

      Hitler made his trial a piece of drama. General Lossow was the man who did not survive the trial. He emerged as a Prince Hamlet, unable to decide whether he had or had not supported the Nazis and their putsch. ‘The well-known eloquence of Herr Hitler at first made a strong impression on me, but the more I heard of him, the fainter this impression became. I realized that his long speeches were always about the same thing, that his views were partly a matter-of-course for any German of nationalist views, and partly showed that Hitler lacked a sense of reality and the ability to see what was possible and practical.’⁵

      Exactly. Which was why Hitler, in the topsy-turvy world of the Weimar Republic, was going to succeed and why Lossow was on the heap. Lossow accused Hitler of personal ambition, and said that he was a mere ‘drummer’. While attempting to subdue the infuriating Hitler he had in fact given the great diva his cue for a magnificent aria in the court room –

      ‘How petty are the thoughts of small men! Believe me, I do not regard the acquisition of a minister’s portfolio as a thing worth striving for. I do not think it worthy of a great man to endeavour to go down in history just by becoming a minister …’⁶

      So, Hitler, the thirty-four-year-old down-and-out failed art-student who had never achieved anything at all in his life, was now the ‘great man’. The judge, the lawyers, the generals, and the elected politicians in the court room were the also-rans. It was a useful lesson for them to learn.