Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

As part of Hitler’s circle of advisors, Putzi tried to act on his initial impulse to explain more of the world to this young firebrand—particularly the growing importance of the United States. Pointing out that it was America’s entry into World War I that determined the final outcome, he told Hitler, “If there is another war it must be inevitably won by the side which America joins.” All this, he continued, made it vital for Hitler to advocate a policy of friendship with the United States. While Hitler conceded his point, he didn’t really seem to register it. Putzi concluded that his ideas about America were “wildly superficial.” The only American who interested him then was Henry Ford, since he saw him as a fellow anti-Semite who might be tapped for funds. He was equally interested in the Ku Klux Klan. “He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own,” Putzi noted.

By the fall of 1923, Hitler was openly calling for a revolt against the government. Inflation had turned into hyperinflation, and Putzi recalled that when he pushed his way into the Bürgerbräukeller on November 8, the night of what would go down in history as the beginning of the Beer Hall Putsch, the price for the three beers he ordered was 3 billion marks. He handed one to Hitler, who took a sip even though he already considered himself a nondrinker. With three top Bavarian officials sitting at the speaker’s platform, Hitler—wearing his Iron Cross over his trench coat and grasping a whip—ordered his Brownshirts to seize control of the hall. “Quiet!” he shouted. When the crowd continued to talk in the general confusion that followed, he jumped on a chair and fired a shot into the air. “The national revolution has broken out. The hall is surrounded!” he proclaimed.

Even greater confusion followed. Hitler marched the Bavarian officials out to a side room, telling them he wouldn’t accept anything but their support for his putsch. He would reward them with top positions, he vowed; if they refused, the alternative would be grim, he warned. “Gentlemen, not one of us shall leave this hall alive! There are three of you, and I have four bullets. That will be enough for all of us if I fail.” By some accounts, he held a pistol to his head as he said so. No one seemed impressed, and General Ludendorff, who had arrived late but dressed in his full Imperial Army uniform, allowed the Bavarian officials to slip away after supposedly securing their assurances that they were on the plotters’ side.

Hanfstaengl held an impromptu press conference, telling foreign correspondents that a new government had been formed. Cabling from Berlin, Wiegand accepted that version of events as fact and ran with it. “REBELS IN COUP SEIZE BAVARIAN RULE, BEGIN ARMED MARCH AGAINST BERLIN” proclaimed the giant two-line headline across the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in its November 9, 1923, edition over his story. He reported that after “the long expected coup,” Hitler’s storm troopers were in control of key communications in Munich and had cut off contact with Berlin, Ludendorff had taken charge of the army, and Hitler had proclaimed the end of the republic.

In reality, Hitler and Ludendorff had lost control of events as soon as the Bavarian officials had left the beer hall. Overnight, the officials made arrangements to put down the rebellion. Although they had largely tolerated Hitler’s movement up till then and sympathized with some of its aims, they weren’t about to let him dictate to them. By the time Hitler and Ludendorff had ordered their troops to march from the Bürgerbräukeller to the center of the city around noon on November 9, the state police was lined up to stop them, with two machine guns at the ready. Confident that they wouldn’t open fire on a war hero like Ludendorff, both the general and the ex-corporal proceeded with their plan, leading the march. They were met with machine-gun fire. Fourteen Nazis died on the spot, along with four policemen.

The American consul Robert Murphy and his German colleague Paul Drey had rushed to the scene to see what was happening. “I can testify that both Hitler and Ludendorff behaved in an identical manner, like the battle-hardened soldiers they were. Both fell flat to escape the hail of bullets,” Murphy recalled. In the brief pandemonium, it was hard to see what actually transpired—and Hitler may have dropped to the ground for another reason. One of those struck by the hail of bullets was Scheubner-Richter, Hitler’s close aide, who was marching with him arm-in-arm. Killed instantly, he may have jerked Hitler to the ground. In any case, the Nazi leader fled the scene with a dislocated shoulder.

Several top Nazis were immediately arrested and Ludendorff surrendered to the authorities, but he was set free after giving his officer’s word that he wouldn’t evade trial. Putzi, who had missed the shooting, rushed to see the outcome, and a Brownshirt medic he encountered told him that Hitler, Ludendorff and Goering were all dead. “My God, Herr Hanfstaengl, it’s too terrible,” he said. “It is the end of Germany.” Believing all was lost, Putzi advised other Nazis he met to get out of Munich immediately, crossing the border into Austria. And he promptly followed his own advice.

In fact, Hitler had managed to escape to his waiting car, along with Walter Schultze, the chief doctor for the storm troopers and others. And, unlike Putzi, he sought refuge in the Hanfstaengls’ country house in Uffing, about an hour from Munich. “The last place it would have occurred to me to go was my own home in Uffing, where I surely would be caught and arrested,” Putzi noted later.

In Hitler’s case, that’s exactly where he ended up, although apparently not by initial design. Still, he probably went there in part because, as Putzi put it, Hitler had developed “one of his theoretical passions” for Helen. Putzi was quick to suggest that Hitler was impotent, and that Hitler’s infatuation with his wife never went beyond hand-kissing and bringing her flowers. “He had no normal sex life… somehow one never felt with him that the attraction was physical,” he declared. Helen agreed that her admirer was probably “a neuter,” but she had no doubt that he was strongly attracted to her.

Whatever the reason, Helen suddenly found herself with an unexpected house guest on the evening of November 9. She had been hearing reports about the putsch and the rumors that Hitler and Ludendorff were dead, but she didn’t know what to believe. While she and Egon were having supper in the upstairs living room, a maid reported that someone was knocking softly on the door. Helen went downstairs and, without opening the door, asked who was there. “To my utter amazement, I recognized the weak but unmistakable voice of Hitler,” she recalled.

Helen quickly opened the door and found herself facing a very different Hitler than the one who normally showed up: “There he stood, ghastly pale, hatless, his face and clothing covered with mud, the left arm hanging down from a strangely slanting shoulder.” The doctor and a medic were holding him up from both sides, but they, too, looked “pathetically rampaged.” Once inside, Helen asked Hitler about Putzi. He told her he wasn’t in the confrontation because he was working on putting out the party newspaper and that he’d probably show up soon. Hitler kept talking, despondent about the deaths of his aides and possibly of Ludendorff, and furious about what he called the treachery of the Bavarian officials. He also swore to her that “he would go on fighting for his ideals as long as breath was in him.”

Hitler was running a temperature and in pain from the dislocated shoulder, so the doctor and the medic eased him upstairs to a bedroom. From there, Helen heard him moaning as they tried to push his arm back into his shoulder.