Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen Page A

addresses and assaulted them.
    Waiters had been cleaning a Bürgerbräukeller that still held a few hundred drunken storm troopers when Hitler, who’d made his headquarters there, found out that Ludendorff had permitted the cabinet ministers to go free, for they’d promised their cooperation, and “an officer,” Ludendorff had frostily told the corporal, “would never break an oath.”
    Hitler had fallen heavily into a chair, flummoxed and disheartened, feeling his revolution was now doomed, and he’d heard further bad news from Berchtesgaden, where Crown Prince Rupprecht had coldly rejected Hitler’s messengered offer of the post of regent ad interim and instead had sent Commissar von Kahr the order to “Crush this movement at any cost. Use troops if necessary.” By three a.m. all of Germany’s wireless stations were sending out the message that von Kahr, von Seisser, and von Lossow had repudiated the Hitler putsch, and that their expressions of support, extracted at gunpoint, were invalid.
    Word had gotten to the putsch headquarters in the Bürgerbräukeller at sunup that Röhm’s headquarters were under seige by Reichswehr and state police troops. Claiming “the heavens will fall before the Bavarian Reichswehr turns against me,” General Ludendorff had suggested a parade into the heart of the city to win the people to their side, and had then sipped red wine as preparations were made.
    A band of musicians was supposed to form in the front and play marching songs, but they’d neither been paid nor been given breakfast, so they’d offered a raucous version of Hitler’s favorite march, the “Badenweiler,” and had then skulked off. Which left in front Ludendorff in his formal helmet and a brown overcoat, Hitler in his white trench coat and slouch hat, and beside him a confidant, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, followed by Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring, then the hundred men of the “Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler,” a bodyguard that was a forerunner of the SS and was outfitted with carbines, hand grenades, and steel helmets as large as kettles. Easing along behind them was an automobile with machine guns on its backseat, then there had been a full regiment of the hung-over SA, holding rifles from which the firing pins had been removed, and perhaps a thousand shopkeepers, workers, officer candidates, and university students, “all higgledy-piggledy” as one witness said.
    Wet snowflakes had been falling on a cold, gray noon as the putschists walked through the Marienplatz, where the Nazi flag had been flying atop city hall, and toward the gray, high-arched, Italianate Feldherrnhalle, where a hundred green-uniformed state police were forming a blockade. Scheubner-Richter had shaken Alfred Rosenberg’s hand and said, “Things look ugly,” then had linked arms with Hitler and taken off his pince-nez, telling his friend, “This may be our last walk together.”
    The parade had begun singing “O Deutschland hoch in Ehren”—“O Germany, High in Honor”—and those with carbines and bayonets had leveled them on the waiting police. Hitler had shouted, “Surrender! Surrender!” And then someone had fired a shot and a police sergeant was killed. The police had hesitated, and then, a fraction before the shouted order to do so, had fired a salvo on the parade. Scheubner-Richter had been killed with those first shots, and as he’d collapsed he’d pulled so heavily on Hitler’s arm that he’d dislocated Hitler’s left shoulder. Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s bodyguard, had flung himself in front of Hitler and been hit eleven times before falling, but had lived. Alfred Rosenberg had crawled to the rear. Old soldier Ludendorff had thrown himself flat to the street at the first sounds of gunfire, hiding behind Scheubner-Richter’s body until there was silence, and had then gotten up again and frowned as he’d marched forward, his hand in his left coat pocket, still confident that no one would shoot him. They