Without the applause of the Munich beer drinkers, he was unable to act.
—OTTO STRASSER ON HITLER
By the early afternoon of November 9, the police had cleared out the remaining Hitler supporters from the Bürgerbräu beer hall. They also freed the last prisoners, who had been held in a private room on the second floor, and seized the stockpile of weapons and ammunition, which filled almost four trucks.
Estimating the wreckage to the beer hall, the Bürgerbräu manager would later send a bill to the already-banned Nazi Party totaling 11,344,000,000,000. In addition to the enormous quantities of food, beer, and coffee consumed, there was a long list of charges for missing and broken items: 143 beer steins, 80 glasses, 98 stools, 2 music stands, 1 mirror, and 148 sets of cutlery. Oddly, there was no mention of any holes shot out of the ceiling.
At around three p.m., Lossow sent word to Gustav von Kahr: “Excellency, the Ludendorff-Hitler Putsch has been broken.” But this was not exactly how it looked in the center of Munich.
Demonstrators had poured into the Odeonsplatz, chanting “Heil Hitler!” and “Down with Kahr!” Several people raised fists at the police and shouted insults, calling them “traitors,” “bloodhounds” and “Jew protectors.” One of the officers, Capt. Johann Salbey, remembered how the crowd “yelled, whistled, jeered, and threatened.” He answered by ordering his men to show their batons and arrest the worst offenders.
Another officer, staff sergeant Alfons Gruber, hoped to calm the crowds by instructing his men to pour eighteen tankards of water to wash away the blood outside the Feldherrnhalle. All the while, the dead bodies remained in the courtyard of the Residenz Palace. Police requested that no one attempt to move them until nightfall because of the growing unrest in the city.
Some Storm Troopers were indeed reassembling. They were spotted around the city center singing and shouting. Crowds were gathering outside the hospital and National Theater, while others appeared to be headed to the Residenz Palace, where they believed that Ludendorff was being held, and, authorities feared, they would attempt to free him. The threats of violence would become more menacing, and state police deemed it unwise to dismount the machine guns on street corners.
Rumors circulated that Hitler, hiding out in the mountains, would return in triumph, like a modern King Frederick Barbarossa. He was said to have been spotted in a hunting lodge in Otterfing in southern Bavaria or in Kufstein in the Tyrol. Others suspected that he had decamped to one of the small Austrian villages between Innsbruck and Salzburg. At any rate, wherever he was, many people believed he was rallying supporters for a grandiose plan to surround Munich and enact vengeance.
By 6:00 p.m., police reported approximately 1,000 “Hitler people” marching toward the railway station. By 8:45, there was a mob of 1,500 to 2,000 milling about outside the offices of Münchner Neueste Nachrichten. The police feared attacks against the newspaper comparable to the devastation at the Münchener Post.
Citizens seemed out of control, leading to widespread fears of riots and plundering. In the eastern part of Munich, mounted police lowered lances and charged the crowd, the Chicago Sunday Tribune reported. Five people were carried away on stretchers and several others were less seriously wounded, including reporter Percy Brown of London’s Daily Graphic, who was beaten trying to capture a photograph of the turmoil.
Many residents of Munich were bitter at the Bavarian authorities for suppressing the national revolution and unleashing its “Danube Cossacks” on the people. They would agree with Stosstrupp Hitler commander Josef Berchtold, when he later complained of the “sheer reactionary cowardice” and “the betrayal of the whole thing.” Demonstrations against Kahr and the treasonous triumvirate continued all night and into Saturday.
Police patrolled the streets, cordoned off the main squares, and manned gun nests on the roofs of public buildings. No public gatherings of more than three people would be permitted, and neither would pamphlets, handbills or posters that did not originate with the officials. Curfew was imposed at 8 p.m. Cafes, restaurants, and beer halls had to close by 7:30 p.m., and all other forms of public entertainment, such as theatre, concerts, cinema, and dances, were forbidden. The main train station was locked down, out of fear it would be used for Hitler’s impending attack on Munich.
WHILE THE POLICE attempted to secure the city center, the national and international press were conducting a postmortem on the failed putsch. “General von Ludendorff,” the New York World began on November 10, making the common mistake of ennobling the general with a false von, was “the most dangerous man in Germany for the last four years.” Now, however, he had come “to the end of his rope”:
Driven mad by ambition to reunite Teutonic peoples into a solid fighting force which yet would conquer the world, Ludendorff allied himself with Hitler. When Hitler went off half-cocked last night, declaring the Fascist revolution in Munich, Ludendorff was dragged down with him.
The putsch had then “collapsed like a punctured balloon . . .”
The state police action marked “the end of the buffoonery,” Ernst Feder wrote for Berliner Tageblatt—a “second Ludendorff putsch” that failed even more abjectly than the first attempt in 1920 to seize power in Berlin. The putschists’ efforts reminded him of a childish prank that was flawed strategically as well as tactically. Crying out for revenge against the “November criminals,” Hitler and Ludendorff had become, in fact, November criminals themselves.
There was still not much reliable information about Adolf Hitler’s whereabouts or even his background. On November 10, the New York Times ran one of the most detailed accounts yet, identifying Hitler as a sign painter and “alien agitator” from Austria and not even “a German of Germany.” Hitler’s age, however, was identified as thirty-nine (it was thirty-four), his place of birth located outside Vienna (it was Braunau on the River Inn), his military service depicted as in the Austrian Army (it was the Bavarian List Regiment), and his first arrival in Munich in January 1922 (it was May 1913).
More accurately, the New York Times identified Hitler as a master beer hall orator with an abundance of energy. He excelled at exploiting grievances. All of the country’s resentments and frustrations were woven by Hitler into a portrait of Germany succumbing to Communists and traitors, who were, in turn, subservient to Jews and industrialists. Hitler was a demagogue extraordinaire. He had built up his small political party from a core of Bavarian veterans of war, the report noted, parading them around at his speeches for dramatic effect.
The state of affairs worried France’s République Française. The paper cautioned its readers from concluding that the beer hall putsch was a simple battle between republic and monarchy, much less a clash between pacific democracy and military reaction. It was instead a war between two different visions of dictatorship, and the most dangerous one, it believed, was not the one suppressed at the Odeonsplatz. Several papers on the left agreed with this assessment. Hitler, in his defeat, looked ludicrous and less menacing than the state authorities who had stopped him. This illusion would only grow in the upcoming months.