Hitler's Charisma Read Free Page A

triumvirate—Kahr, von Seisser and von Lossow—into an adjoining room.
    But then Hitler faced a problem—none of the three men was enthusiastic about supporting the Nazi cause. It took the arrival of Ludendorff at the beer hall to make them finally offer their lukewarm consent. Hitler, who had announced melodramatically to Kahr and his colleagues that he would kill himself if the coup did not succeed, left to try and shore up support for the putsch elsewhere in Munich, leaving Ludendorff in control at the Bürgerbräukeller. However, Ludendorff—old-fashioned officer as he was—then decided to release Kahr, von Seisser and von Lossow on their word of honour to support the revolution. It was a catastrophic mistake, as Hitler realised when he returned to the Bürgerbräukeller later that night and found the three men had disappeared. All of them now disavowed their support for Hitler and actively worked against the Nazi-inspired putsch.
    No strategy for the revolution had been thought through, so a march through Munich was swiftly improvised for the next day, after a group of Nazis had robbed a factory where billion-Mark notes were being printed. Emil Klein took part in the march, and remembers how shots rang out when the Nazi supporters reached the war memorial at the Feldherrnhalle in central Munich and were confronted by Bavarian security forces. “The first thing: is Hitler wounded?” says Emil Klein. “Is Ludendorff wounded? And everyone split up. Of course, if there are shots you have to take cover. We, of course, were well-trained SA men who knew what to do when there were shots … And people got up and started looking about to see what was happening. There was a real ballyhoo, partly because the masses who were all there—all in uniform—didn’t know what was going on. But one thing we did know. Kahr had betrayed the whole deal. They did notkeep their word. They shook hands on it, and this handshake was broken by Kahr and his colleagues leaving Hitler apparently standing alone.” 22
    In the midst of the shooting at the Feldherrnhalle—and no one knows exactly who started the gun battle—the man standing next to Hitler, Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, was shot dead. Hitler dropped to the ground—with his critics subsequently suggesting this was evidence of his cowardice. 23 But Emil Klein vehemently disagrees, saying that Hitler “always” showed that he was brave and courageous. “I was always amazed that Hitler only had a couple of bodyguards who accompanied him on his journeys, [and] when he drove around it was always in an open car.”
    Ludendorff demonstrated his own bravery by carrying on marching through the police lines and out the other side unscathed. But sixteen of Hitler’s supporters were killed that day, as well as four members of the Bavarian security forces. Many more were wounded—including Hermann Göring. Shot in the groin, he was helped away from the Feldherrnhalle, patched up and smuggled across the Austrian border to hospital in Innsbruck.
    Hitler was arrested just two days after the firefight. He had appallingly mismanaged the whole operation, from his failure to ensure that Kahr, von Seisser and von Lossow were securely held by the plotters once the Bürgerbräukeller had been stormed, to his lack of any coherent plan as to what to do if the Bavarian leadership seemed less than enthusiastic about the putsch. Moreover, Hitler had demonstrably not lived up to his promise to kill himself if the revolution failed, since he was now in the custody of the Bavarian authorities awaiting trial. It was scarcely the behaviour of a “charismatic hero.”
    Hitler’s trial began on 26 February 1924 in Munich. And from the start Hitler pursued what appeared to outsiders to be a high-risk strategy—he not only admitted what he had done, but he gloried in it. Not just that, he openly stated in court what he saw as his own role in the fight ahead. “I have resolved to be the destroyer of