This is more than just a lost war. A world has come to an end.
—WALTER GROPIUS
As Hitler left the side room, he turned to a small, bald man wearing a pince-nez and told him that it was time to fetch Ludendorff. This man, First Lt. Dr. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, was one of the many shadowy figures who flocked to the fledgling National Socialist Party.
An engineer by trade, with a specialty in chemistry, Scheubner-Richter was a thirty-nine-year-old German Balt from Riga with many social connections. He had come to Munich in 1910, bringing his newlywed aristocratic wife, Mathilde von Scheubner, nearly thirty years older. They had met during the uprising of 1905 when his cavalry unit was posted to guard her father’s estate. He legally took his wife’s name, becoming Scheubner-Richter (his family name was Richter).
During the war, Scheubner-Richter had volunteered for a Bavarian light cavalry regiment, and then, in December 1914, joined the German consulate in Erzurum, Turkey. He was soon promoted to vice consul, and in this capacity he would witness the genocide of the Armenian people. His diplomatic cables back to Berlin described in horrifying detail how the Ottoman regime scapegoated its Armenian minority in the aftermath of its military defeats at the hands of the Russians.
Entire villages were emptied and plundered; the women and children marched away in caravans for “resettlement” only to face hunger, disease, and massacre, their bodies strewn along the roadside, burnt and butchered with bayonets. His dispatches, along with his official protests at this slaughter, remain one of the valuable early eyewitness accounts of this humanitarian tragedy that killed anywhere from 300,000 to 1.5 million Armenians.
Paradoxically, Scheubner-Richter’s outrage at this persecution and genocide of a minority coexisted with a rabid anti-Semitism that only became more prominent over time. Transferred to the Baltic, where he served as press officer for the German 8th Army, Scheubner-Richter deplored the effects of the Russian Revolution. Bolshevism, he argued, was nothing more than terror, plunder, slavery, and starvation that aimed to exterminate the middle and upper classes and annihilate Western civilization. It was also, he claimed, a Jewish-led conspiracy.
In October 1920, Scheubner-Richter created an elite secret society, the Aufbau, or Reconstruction, to build an alliance between German and Russian nationalists. The goal was to fight “international Jewry,” overthrow the supposed Jewish regimes in Russia and the Weimar Republic, and, ultimately, restore the monarchy in both Moscow and Berlin.
It was in this right-wing conspiratorial atmosphere that Scheubner-Richter first came in contact with Munich’s National Socialist Party, which was not yet widely known by the shortened nickname of Nazis. The organization, only four years old, was originally one of about forty similar right-wing extremist groups emerging in the chaos of postwar Munich. Like many of its nationalistic rivals, the young party was known at the time more for what it opposed than what it advocated: It was anti-republic, anti-parliament, anti-Communist, and anti-Semitic.
Yet at the same time the party had some considerable strengths on a tactical and organizational level. It boasted a political office with a strong focus on propaganda. Its paramilitary wing, the Storm Troopers, was being militarized, making them one of Munich’s first political parties to have a veritable private army. They aggressively recruited youth, which brought dynamism and zeal. By one modern estimate, two-thirds of its membership in November 1923 were under the age of thirty-one. And of course there was the party’s main attraction: a speaker who could fill the beer halls and whip the throngs into a frenzy.
Scheubner-Richter had gone to hear Hitler speak for the first time on November 22, 1920, on a tip from a fellow Balt, Alfred Rosenberg, whom he had known back in Riga, where they had belonged to the same fraternity. Scheubner-Richter had joined the Nazi Party shortly thereafter and, like Rosenberg, became a fixture on the scene. They gave the impression of a powerful clique, or “Baltic Mafia” within the echelons of the party.
For the next three years, Scheubner-Richter rendered many services to Hitler. He cultivated Munich’s sizable right-wing Russian and Ukrainian émigré community, many of whom were old tsarist noblemen who had fled the revolution and civil war. He stirred up anti- Bolshevism, and solicited donations from his contacts among conservative industrialists and landlords who feared the rise of left-wing parties. He also took advantage of his royal connections, including no less than Bavaria’s crown prince, Rupprecht, and Russia’s Grand Prince Kirill. Hitler acknowledged Scheubner-Richter’s contributions: “All the others are replaceable,” he later said, “but not him.”
Indeed, Scheubner-Richter had been one of the many people encouraging Hitler to launch the beer hall putsch. Drawing upon the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution, he noted how Lenin and a small, determined minority could, by a daring act, change the course of history. Mussolini had done the same in Italy and Mustafa Kemal (later given the surname Atatürk) had in Turkey as well. The right-wing conspirators in Munich could not fail either, he argued. The corrupt regime of Berlin was tottering. It was time to sweep it away.
At Hitler’s command, Scheubner-Richter pressed through the Bürgerbräu lobby now swarming with Storm Troopers. Three men joined him at his side: his butler, Johann Aigner; Ludendorff’s valet, Kurt Neubauer; and Ludendorff’s own stepson, a young veteran and pilot in the war named Heinz Pernet.
Outside, they passed a line of trucks, barricading the front entrance of the beer hall, to prevent possible police reinforcements. A trolley car in the distance rang its bell incessantly for the vehicles to move out of the way.
Waved through by a Storm Trooper, the men headed off on the fourteen-mile drive to pick up the general whose support was critical to the success of the plan.
THAT NIGHT, GEN. Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff was at home in his upstairs study. He had been pacing up and down the room, rather than sitting at his writing desk, as was his habit in the evening. Shortly after eight thirty, the telephone rang and a voice on the line announced that his presence was “urgently desired” at the Bürgerbräu.
When he asked what was happening, Ludendorff later said, he was only told that he would soon be informed. He claimed that he had not recognized the caller, nor, for that matter, known of Hitler’s intentions in advance. (The caller had been Scheubner-Richter.)
Fifty-eight years old, General Ludendorff was struggling to adjust to his life as a civilian. He had been a soldier or a cadet since the age of twelve, when he entered a military academy in Holstein. Born in Kruszewnia in the West Prussian province of Posen in today’s Poland, Ludendorff was the son of an impoverished merchant—not a nobleman—despite the many incorrect references to him, then and later, as “von Ludendorff.” As a commoner, Ludendorff was unable to enter the prestigious cavalry and joined instead the German Great General Staff, earning his red stripes in 1894.
Ludendorff had made his name in the first month of the First World War, pulling off an unexpected victory at the citadel of Liège. He won bigger still at Tannenberg on the eastern front, encircling a larger Russian army and seizing more than 90,000 prisoners. Ludendorff and his superior, Gen. Paul von Hindenburg, would later knock Russia out of the war altogether, thereby consolidating Ludendorff’s reputation as a grand strategist.
H. L. Mencken, then a foreign correspondent in Germany, described Ludendorff as a man of intelligence worth “ten Kaisers.” He elaborated on his impressions of the general during the summer of 1917 in a piece for the Atlantic Monthly:
Once his mind is made up, he gets to business at once . . . He has imagination. He grasps inner significances. He can see around corners. Moreover, he enjoys planning, plotting, figuring things out. Yet more, he is free of romance. Have you ever heard of him sobbing about the Fatherland? Or letting off pious platitudes, like Hindenburg? Of course you haven’t. He plays the game for its own sake—and he plays it damnably well.
Ludendorff was hailed, Mencken said, as “the esoteric Ulysses of the war.”
To many people who encountered him at headquarters, however, Ludendorff appeared arrogant, cold, and aloof, and incapable of compromising or admitting a mistake. He could not bear being contradicted either. He would scowl at subordinates, a category in which he seemed to include almost everyone, especially civilians, and he wore his monocle so frequently that he was rumored to sleep with it. His trademark lack of humor had become its own source of amusement.
Ludendorff had not always been so ambitious and harsh, his wife, Margarethe, said. She remembered a time when he had been “cheerful and free from anxiety,” his facial expression not yet frozen into “that look of unbending obstinacy.” It was the experience of war, she thought—and probably also the immense fame that it brought—that had hardened him into an overbearing and feared man, whose feelings “had been turned to ice.”
But as the German Army collapsed on the western front and critics of his bold offensives gained influence, Ludendorff had suffered his own near mental breakdown. Unable to sleep, he flew into rages at the least provocation and succumbed to crying fits without consolation. Ludendorff’s reliance on alcohol deepened and he indulged in fantasies, imagining the Spanish flu then hitting the trenches would decimate the enemy, paving the way for a miraculous German triumph.
In October 1918, Ludendorff found himself dismissed from the army. “The Kaiser has sacked me,” he told his wife, dumbfounded at the turn of events. His dismissal, coupled with the German defeat the following month, had been, he said, “the bitterest moments of my life.” The former commander now fled in disguise, with false beard, dark glasses, and a fabricated passport, to Denmark and then to Sweden, where he stayed in a country estate at Hässleholm.
“No human fate has been as hard as mine,” Ludendorff later wrote, comparing himself to the ancient Carthaginian general Hannibal, who after the wars with Rome went into exile and took poison. He had nothing to look forward to, Ludendorff said, feeling at war with himself and the world. He spent his days taking long walks in the woods and brooding over his wartime experiences for a series of memoirs that he later wrote.
In February 1919, Ludendorff returned to Germany, regretful that he had not acted more decisively at the end of the war, and, as he put it, “snatched the dictatorship for [himself].” One year later, after he joined a poorly planned attempt to install a right-wing military regime in Berlin, the so-called Kapp Putsch, Ludendorff was forced again to admit defeat. He boarded a train for Munich in the summer of 1920, richer, he said, for the lessons he learned from the experience. Ludendorff was welcomed with open arms in Kahr’s Bavaria.
Ludendorff had become obsessed with the idea that Germany had not lost the war—certainly not because his own reckless gambles on the western front had exhausted its manpower and resources, and certainly not, either, because his insistence on unrestricted submarine warfare helped bring the United States into the struggle. Instead, his country had been “stabbed in the back.” Left-wing politicians had cowardly sold out the country, surrendering first on the battlefield and then a second time when they signed the Versailles Treaty. Germany, as a result, lay weakened and exposed, while foreigners waited, like vultures, to pick at its carcass.
The general saw the same sinister forces of treason and cowardice at work again in the postwar world, undermining his country’s moral fiber. He blamed the decline and fall of Germany, above all, on the Jews, the Bolsheviks, and the Catholics, all of whom he equated with unwelcome foreign influences. He joined Scheubner-Richter’s secret society Aufbau, and, in March 1921, met Adolf Hitler for the first time. It was Scheubner-Richter who introduced them.
Hitler was soon praising Ludendorff in public as “Germany’s greatest commander.” He spoke of how Ludendorff’s recent book, War Leadership and Politics, helped him understand many important facts about the modern world, not least how the Jewish international conspiracy had been exerting powerful influence in France and England, if not also controlling the Allied governments. Ludendorff, in turn, admired Hitler for his “driving determination” and called him the only political leader left with any common sense.
By the summer of 1923, Ludendorff had turned his villa outside Munich into a veritable Nazi party headquarters—his wife compared the activities to “the continual coming and going in a pigeon loft.” The general had covered up his conspiratorial endeavors well, she added. He went out to his garden, and, like an old pensioner, pruned roses, watered flowers, and cared for the lawn, seemingly aloof from the swirl of intrigue plotted around him.
When the delegation from the beer hall reached the exclusive neighborhood of Sollen-Ludwigshöhe, their car turned onto Heilmannstrasse and pulled up to the estate at Number 5. The driver blew the horn. Scheubner-Richter hopped out of the backseat and went inside with Heinz Pernet. Ludendorff greeted them in a brown tweed hunting jacket. To save time, he said, he decided not to change into uniform.
They were indeed in a hurry, but there was almost certainly another motive for the general’s unaccustomed lack of formality. If the conspiracy failed, Ludendorff the civilian would plead ignorance of any plots against the state.
After a brief talk in the book-lined study adorned with a wartime painting of the general peering over maps with Hindenburg, Ludendorff slipped on his overcoat, grabbed his green fedora, and climbed into the car. They raced off in the foggy night, as Ludendorff put it, at a “whirling speed.” Snow had begun to fall.