Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen

three thousand people sitting at the timber tables of the Bürgerbräukeller—where a stein of beer cost one billion marks—as Commissar Gustav von Kahr had tendentiously condemned Communism, putting many in the audience to sleep. At precisely half past eight, Captain Hermann Göring had invaded the hall with twenty-five storm troopers carrying machine guns. Women screamed, tables were overturned, brass steins rang across the floor, and fleeing men were struck down. Wearing a black, long-tailed morning suit, as if it were a formal wedding, Hitler had strode toward the stage, gotten up on a chair, fired a Browning pistol into the ceiling, and shouted, “Quiet! The national revolution has broken out! The Reichswehr is with us, and the hall is surrounded!”
    Hitler had then ordered into a side room Reichswehr Lieutenant General Otto von Lossow, the military commander of Bavaria who was, he thought, an ally, Colonel Hans von Seisser, head of the state police, and Gustav von Kahr, the head of government, and there he’d promised them all high-level appointments in a People’s National Government that would put the former quartermaster general Erich Ludendorff in charge of a great national army that would march on Berlin just as Benito Mussolini and his Blackshirts had successfully marched on Rome thirteen months earlier. All three were older aristocrats of high rank in the Reichswehr, and they had looked at the thirty-four-year-old former lance corporal with contempt. Hitler had held up his pistol and threatened, “There are still four rounds in this. Three for you, my collaborators, if you abandon me,” and he’d held it to his forehead, “and one for me if I fail.”
    An angry, fifty-eight-year-old General Ludendorff had then arrived in full regimentals and with all his decorations. While he thought Hitler had gone too far in a unilateral way, he did think revolutionary change was necessary in Germany, and he’d sought a private conversation with the three politicians to work out concessions.
    Hitler had hurried back to the stage and heard whistles, catcalls, and jeers, but he had first assured the crowd that the cabinet ministers were now fully behind him and then, with his wily instincts for mass psychology, had found all the right things to say to convert the various factions in the hall, hinting that he might restore the Wittelsbachs by praising “His Majesty Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria,” and haranguing about the Weimar Republic and the despised Prussians who ruled that sinful Tower of Babel in Berlin, where “we shall establish a new Reich, a Reich of power and glory, Amen!”
    It had been an oratorical masterpiece. Within a few minutes, the crowd was completely his. A historian there said it was like “hocus-pocus, or magic,” it was as if he’d turned them inside out, “like a glove.” “Loud approval roared forth, no further opposition was to be heard.”
    General Ludendorff had brought out the cabinet ministers, who’d formed a gentlemen’s agreement to join a coalition government, and the tearfully ecstatic crowd began singing “Deutschland über Alles” while a blissful Hitler went about the hall, shaking hands and accepting cheers. And to Gustav von Kahr, whom he’d just threatened to shoot, he had promised, “Excellency, I shall stand faithfully behind you like a hound!”
    Hearing him, one skeptic had turned to a cowed policeman and said, “All that’s missing here is the psychiatrist.”
    After midnight Captain Röhm and the SA had taken over General von Lossow’s headquarters on the Schönfeldstrasse, “enemies of the people”—mainly Jews—had been taken prisoner, and the police had been told to wait and do nothing as the six bridges of München were blockaded with machine guns, the infantry school of one thousand officer candidates affiliated themselves with the Nazis, and a few Brownshirts scoured the telephone directory for names that sounded Jewish, then went to their