We must seize the initiative, or the others will.
—ADOLF HITLER TO ERNST PÖHNER
With guns in hand, Rudolf Hess and the Storm Trooper detachment loaded seven men onto a truck parked outside the Bürgerbräu beer hall: the Bavarian prime minister, three members of his cabinet, an adviser to Crown Prince Rupprecht, and two policemen, including the president of the police Karl Mantel. The distinguished captives were then driven away in the direction of the forest of Grosshesselohe.
The caravan stopped at a gravel driveway of a large house adorned in the gingerbread style at Holzkirchnerstrasse 2. This was the home of Julius F. Lehmann, the founder of the prominent publishing firm J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, which specialized in medical texts as well as nationalist, anti-Semitic works. Lehmann had agreed to open up his property on the recommendation of his son-in-law, Dr. Friedrich Weber, a young veterinarian who served as the political leader of the Bund Oberland.
“Please regard yourselves as my guests,” Lehmann said.
Privately, he was not too happy about the last-minute decision to house the hostages at his villa. “This cuckoo’s egg was laid in my nest by my dear son-in-law,” he said.
Each of the “guests,” as he called them, was assigned a different room in the cold, unheated house. Two Storm Troopers stood guard outside each makeshift cell, while other men patrolled the garden and the surrounding woods in case the police discovered the location and tried to free the men. A machine gun was placed outside, aimed at the road, and another one in the hallway at the front door. Conversation was strictly prohibited, and Hess warned the leaders that the Storm Troopers had instructions to shoot, should anyone attempt to leave the premises.
IN CONTRAST TO the seized War Ministry, which was now swarming with Röhm’s men, the Nazi Party office on Corneliusstrasse was strangely quiet. It gave no signs of being its usual bustling chaos of “conspiracy and intrigue” as Putzi dubbed it. Only three people were there: the twenty-four-year-old assistant business manager Philipp Bouhler, and two typists also in their early twenties: Else Gisler and Anna Schürz.
Bouhler had advised the two women to eat an early supper because there was going to be a heavy workload that night. Five hours later, however, the typists were still waiting at their desks. They had long since finished the correspondence and other clerical duties. No further instructions had arrived, nor, for that matter, had there been any other signs of activity, until sometime after eleven p.m., when Bouhler rushed into the office and told them to gather their belongings. They were moving to a new location.
Their boss, Max Amann, the business manager of the party, had found more luxurious headquarters for the nascent regime. Amann had been Hitler’s staff sergeant in the war, and still acted like one. He was short and blond, with his neck disappearing into his shoulders. He was, as Putzi’s wife, Helen, put it, “ruthless, hardheaded . . . [and] entirely without scruple.” One party member, the story went, had found himself bear-hugged and tossed out of the office for daring to ask to look into the accounting books.
Years later, the American wartime espionage organization the OSS, a precursor to the CIA, would sum up Amann as “a commonplace man [who] knows himself to be commonplace” and yet did not shy away from making decisions well beyond his expertise. Hitler, it added, had patterned his leadership skills on this bullying and sometimes brutal staff sergeant.
Earlier that night, Amann had barged into a bank and claimed the property on behalf of Hitler’s government. He knew the selected financial institution, the Siedelungs- und Landbank at Kanalstrasse 29, well. He lived on the fourth floor of the same building and had previously worked at the bank.
Their swank offices would complement the military operations planned at the War Ministry. One room was to be set up for the new finance department, which was to be led by Dr. Gottfried Feder, an engineer and building contractor who had been one of the oldest members of the party. It was Feder who had spoken at the Sterneckerbräu on the evening of September 12, 1919, when Hitler attended his first party meeting. The topic was “How and by What Means Can One Abolish Capitalism?”
As the provisional head of the new finance committee, Feder planned to freeze all bank accounts in the country; earlier that afternoon, he had taken the precaution of withdrawing his own savings deposits. That evening, when Hitler stormed the stage at the beer hall, Feder had felt as if he had just awoken from a dream.
Another office in the bank was reserved for the propaganda center, which would be led by Julius Streicher, a short, bald, and bull-necked publisher of the vicious anti-Semitic tabloid Der Stürmer. Streicher had arrived in Munich that evening, after leaving the elementary school in Nuremberg, where he worked as a senior master.
A third room was set aside for Hermann Esser, the speaker at the Löwenbräu rally. Esser had been summoned there to craft a proclamation of Hitler’s government for the newspaper and party posters. That was why the typists had been kept waiting at their desks.
In the early morning hours, the first of the Nazi proclamations would hit the streets triumphantly announcing the new government and the end of “the most shameful period in German history.” Some were signed using the earliest known reference to the future title: Adolf Hitler, German Reich Chancellor.
Later ones would issue inflammatory calls to action, declaring “open season . . . on the scoundrels responsible for the treason of November 9, 1918.” Fellow patriots, the blood-red posters announced, should do their duty and capture the president of Germany, Friedrich Ebert, and his government ministers—“dead or alive.”
AS AMANN SET UP shop at the bank, Hitler sent Ernst Pöhner to make arrangements with his former colleagues and staff at police headquarters.
Upon arrival, Pöhner sought out his old friend and protégé, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, and took him into the office of the police president Karl Mantel, who was still held hostage by the Storm Troopers. Yes, Pöhner said magnanimously, this was now Frick’s office.
The proposal of Frick as the new police president had actually been made in the back room of the Bürgerbräu by Gustav von Kahr, who knew how closely Pöhner and Frick had worked together. In May 1919, just two weeks after taking charge of the police, Pöhner had named Frick as head of its powerful political division. Pöhner divided his staff into two categories: men of promise, who were the officers, and the rest, who were assumed to aspire to little more than a paycheck and job security. He called them the “whores.”
In Pöhner’s mind, Frick was clearly an officer. He showed independence, carried out responsibilities with diligence, and proved his strength of will. He was no “weather vane,” as Pöhner put it. The close collaboration of Pöhner and Frick made them as inseparable and complementary as Castor and Pollux of classical mythology.
Captain Röhm explained the analogy. Pöhner was an intelligent hothead, “energetic, bold, and quick to make a decision,” though would readily change course if he met stiff resistance. Frick, on the other hand, showed a subtler, icy intelligence that proved most tenacious in the face of a challenge. The two men had carved out a formidable power base within the Munich police. Hitler expected that they would do so again on his behalf.
In the office of the police president, Pöhner and Frick plotted how to introduce the new Hitler regime to the people it claimed to represent. They decided to summon Munich’s leading editors and publishers to a midnight press conference in the library of police headquarters.
When everyone had arrived, Pöhner appealed to the patriotism of the newspapermen, warning of possible repercussions if they did not see “reason” and portray the events that night in an appropriately positive fashion. The leaders of Hitler’s new regime should be praised for steering the country out of the nightmare of 1918. If the editors showed responsibility in their work, or “discipline,” as Pöhner put it, there would be no censorship or other unpleasant consequences.
When Pöhner opened the forum to questions, Paul Egenter of the royalist Bayerischer Kurier, wanted to know if Kahr had secured the support of Crown Prince Rupprecht when he referred to himself as the king’s deputy. This was a good question—the answer was no—but Pöhner tried to evade it. Pöhner also dodged the follow-up question asking for comment on the fundamental contradiction between Kahr’s monarchism and Hitler’s “republican-dictatorial” ambitions.
Fritz Gerlich, the editor of Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, wanted to know about early reports of Jewish men and women being harassed by the Storm Troopers. The Jewish factory owner Ludwig Wassermann had been detained as he tried to leave the Bürgerbräu, and was being held hostage.
Pöhner was completely indifferent.