Last Stop Vienna Read online

  The credo they espoused focused mainly on saving the country from the reds, the Bolsheviks. And, as they kept repeating, many of those Bolsheviks were Jews like Bloody Rosa.

  The whole country was in constant revolt. There had been revolts in Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt am Main and almost everywhere else. The government of weaklings, led by the Social Democrat Ebert, was desperately trying to save itself. He was certainly afraid of us, but he needed us to help him put down the Spartacists, who didn’t give up easily. When the Spartacists looked like they might win, the government ran ads in newspapers calling for soldiers to join the Free Corps and “prevent Germany from becoming the laughingstock of the world.”

  Thousands of men responded. We—yes, I quickly and proudly thought of myself as part of that “we”—all hated the government that had accepted the shameful Treaty of Versailles, but we hated the reds more. True, both the reds and we hated the rich and talked about fighting for the rights of the workingman. But our grandiose goals were different: revolution versus nation. We believed in the ordinary German who, given the chance to regain his dignity and earn a decent wage, would help rebuild German pride. The reds derided anything to do with the nation, pontificating about the need for the working class to destroy the state and join in an international movement.

  “Never forget that only we can save our country,” Hermann would lecture me. “Only we can stop those who want to destroy it. That’s why we can’t show any mercy.” He paused. “Did you hear about the Red Cross nurses in the Ruhr? One of our groups caught a group of nurses there carrying guns, even though everybody had been warned that they’d shoot anyone carrying weapons. The nurses claimed it was for self-defense, but that’s what all the reds say. They shot them all.”

  I was shocked and impressed.

  Late one afternoon as we were returning to our improvised barracks, we found ourselves pinned down by fire coming from a factory building across the street. Hermann and two of his buddies spotted where the shots were coming from and told me to stay put while they circled around the back of the building to surprise the gunmen.

  “Let me go, too.”

  “No, we need you here,” Hermann insisted. “You cover us in case anyone comes from the other side.”

  I was convinced that he was merely protecting me. But after they had been gone for several minutes, I began to feel lonely and nervous. I crouched behind an empty vegetable stall, gripping my gun tightly. I heard shots from inside the factory building, then nothing. Suddenly, some instinct made me look behind me. A man wearing a brown cap and carrying a rifle was moving in my direction. I fired wildly. He stood up straight and took aim. At that moment, his forehead disintegrated, and he dropped like a stone.

  “Next time, you’d better steady yourself before you shoot,” Hermann said, trotting up and slapping me on the back. “I might not be around to help you out.”

  “I’m s-sorry.”

  “You’ll learn.” He paused and sucked in his lower lip. “Men have to learn fast around here, or else they’re not around for long.”

  He had called me a man.

  I didn’t have to wait long for the next chance to prove him right. A few days later we gave chase to four Spartacists, cornering them in a large warehouse. I was behind Hermann, walking down a dimly lit passageway, when he stumbled over some loose boards and fell. I saw the outline of someone rushing at us. I fired, and the figure collapsed, his hand releasing a large knife that went skittering across the floor.

  Hermann picked himself up. “You’re learning fast,” he said. “Good for you.” Then Hermann turned over the body, a boy probably no older than I was. The front of his shirt was soaked with blood, but he was still breathing slightly. His eyes were cloudy. A soft moan emanated from somewhere deep within him, an eerie, almost inhuman sound. Hermann looked at him, raised his gun in one swift motion and delivered a final shot to the side of his head. I looked away, tried to gulp back the vile fluid that pushed its way up into my mouth. I leaned over and puked.

  “No time for that, kid,” Hermann said. “There may be more of them to take care of.”

  There weren’t. Our comrades had finished off the other three Spartacists. As we emerged from the warehouse, my forehead was wet from sweat, and I couldn’t rid myself of the horrible taste in my mouth. But I felt calmer, my breath coming more evenly, my body temperature cooling.

  “First blood.” Hermann chuckled. “You know what they say about dogs: Once they taste the blood of any kind of bird or animal, they’ll always hunt that species. I won’t have to worry about you any longer—you can take care of yourself.”

  Those words marked Hermann’s changed attitude toward me, a change that dispelled whatever lingering doubts I might have had about the violence I was coming to take for granted. I realized he wasn’t treating me as just an inexperienced boy anymore, and taking their cue from him, the other men no longer thought of me as a mascot. I belonged.

  Late one night in the barracks, Hermann brought me an article in a Free Corps pamphlet written by someone called Ernst Jünger. I remember his words made me feel proud: “This is the New Man, the storm trooper, the elite of Central Europe. A completely new race, cunning, strong, and purposeful.”

  Hermann’s confidence that he had molded me into a New Man prompted him to introduce me to others, including Otto Strasser, who would eventually become my mentor. Strasser was a decorated veteran of the First Regiment of Bavarian Artillery in the Great War, a Socialist Party activist, a stocky, intense leftist student who had earlier organized workers’ brigades to combat groups like ours in Berlin. But he was now connected to a movement forming in Bavaria, which was attracting Free Corps men from all over the country. He was searching for recruits willing to consider deploying to Munich.

  It was Strasser who would first hook me up with and then set me on my collision course with a man in Munich called Adolf Hitler.

  Chapter Two

  Along with the rest of the small contingent of Free Corps men recruited by Otto Strasser in Berlin, I stepped off the train in Munich on a brisk November morning in 1920 and immediately felt that I was in a different Germany. A Germany that was, well, more German than Berlin. Gemütlich, in the best sense of the word—a cozy, snug world brimming with wonderful baroque architecture. Cleaner in every way, smaller yet more stately, less chaotic. Later I would discover that there were a lot of foreigners—Russians, Poles and others—in Schwabing, the city’s famous artists’ district. But there wasn’t anything like the hordes of foreigners who were so evident everywhere in Berlin, babbling away in languages that generated a perpetual fog of irritating, incomprehensible sounds. There were Jews, too, but again far fewer than in the capital.

  Maybe my initial impressions were shaped in part by what Otto had told me about Hitler’s reaction after moving from Vienna to Munich in 1913. The city had immediately felt warm and inviting to him, “as familiar as if I had lived for years within its walls.” But most important, as he told Otto and so many others, it felt like “a German city.” For Hitler, the contrast was with Vienna, which he complained contained “not a drop of German blood” and was the center of “the Babylonian empire” of the Hapsburgs, an unruly hodgepodge of nationalities, cultures and languages. Later he’d also talk about how much better Munich was than Berlin, a city he never liked.

  I hadn’t disliked Berlin, but it was still a place where I was afraid of running into people who remembered me from the days before I became a Free Corps fighter. I guess I was afraid they would see through this identity—or worse, expose me in some excruciatingly embarrassing way in front of my comrades. In those days, I also longed for a clean start, for myself and for Germany. Munich seemed like the answer to my prayers.

  Initially, I had shared the suspicious attitudes of my mates in the Free Corps when Otto came to talk about Hitler and his new party. But he returned several times, usually meeting with us as a group and always lingering afterward to strike up conversations with anyone who would
listen. I was one who always stuck around.

  It helped that Otto came with Rex, his young, frisky Irish setter who demanded nonstop attention. He’d nuzzle me and put his paw on my leg if I dared stopped petting him for a moment. I’d never had a dog, and I’d been jealous of my friends who did. Some of the other men laughed behind Otto’s back about his preoccupation with Rex, wondering aloud why he had picked that breed instead of something fiercer and smarter. “Aren’t setters a bit, well, you know . . .” Joachim asked him early on, not quite plucking up the courage to finish his thought.

  Otto laughed. “A bit dopey?”

  “That’s what people say.”

  “Dogs are like people,” Otto explained. “If you train them well, if they grow up with discipline, they’re well behaved. An Irish setter can be just as smart as any other breed. Never blame a dog for bad behavior, blame his master.”

  “He’s not much of a watchdog, though,” Joachim added.

  “No,” Otto freely conceded. “People should watch out for themselves. He’s a companion, the friendliest kind you can have.”

  I liked Otto’s straightforward approach, and his self-confidence. He was equally relaxed in talking about his politics, acknowledging that he had been naive to believe in those who called themselves progressives. He was bitterly disappointed with the lame performance of the Weimar government, which was filled with Social Democrats. His faith in the German socialists was shaken when they held a meeting in Halle, where the Russian revolutionary Zinoviev had held forth for hours in his heavily accented German. Zinoviev—who was also president of the Third International, which wanted to enroll the German leftists—had come straight from Moscow to deliver an unambiguous message. “It sounded like a new messiah doctrine,” Otto declared, his face flushing slightly. It was, he continued, a vision of a world socialist movement completely subservient to the rulers in the Kremlin. In other words, German socialists would be expected to allow Russia to dominate their country.

  That hardly fit Otto’s own sense of mission. As a result, he was in the process of abandoning his former allegiances and forging different ones. He was only a few years older than I was, but he had obviously given a lot more thought to political ideas. He wasn’t thinking only about how to fight but why and for what. You’d think all of us would have been thinking along similar lines, but I can’t say that I had at that point. And I’m not sure my comrades had, either. There was something impressive about someone who had really done some thinking. And about someone who seemed to have met everyone important and could tell a good story about them.

  Otto, of course, benefited from special proximity to Gregor, his older brother who had returned to his pharmacy in Landshut in Lower Bavaria a true hero of the war. Gregor’s fame as a commander had spread well beyond Bavaria; he had always led his men boldly into battle, and he was never tainted by the suspicion that he would demand anything of his men that he wouldn’t do himself.

  Gregor was putting together his own Free Corps brigade, consisting of infantry, artillery and machine-gun units. “He’s convinced that all our units need a common goal and a common rallying point,” Otto explained. “A common cause.” This was exactly what Otto was looking for, a doctrine and movement that would not fail him the way the socialists had.

  He hadn’t known where to look, he told us. But Gregor claimed that he had already found the answer. He invited Otto to visit him in Landshut on a day when he was expecting two special guests for lunch: General Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler.

  No one calling himself a German in those days would have passed up the chance to meet Ludendorff, the commander who had nearly succeeded in leading our troops to victory in the Great War. Otto didn’t know much about Hitler at that point, except that he was an agitator in Munich, an army corporal who had become famous for his speeches, which, even in those days of superheated political warfare, were considered unusually incendiary. Otto was as curious about the newcomer as he was awed by the prospect of meeting Ludendorff. As I listened, spellbound, he described the encounter.

  —

  The lunch was nothing like the way Otto had envisaged it. When he arrived at his brother’s pharmacy, where the shutters were already closed, he saw a strikingly elegant black car parked outside. “Not exactly socialist transport,” he said, chuckling. Otto had thought he’d arrive early and get a chance to talk to Gregor about what to expect, but now he had to walk into a meeting already in progress.

  Ludendorff was as imposing as his reputation. Otto’s first impression was of solid mass: a hefty individual in all parts of his body, topped by a face marked by extraordinarily bushy eyebrows and a defiant double chin. Otto was no scrapper himself, but he felt the near intimidating power of the general’s handshake. This was a man to be reckoned with.

  Hitler was a pale presence in a blue suit who projected both obsequiousness and resentment while remaining mostly silent. In fact, the first discussion about Hitler that day was one in which he never actively took part. Gregor had invited the three guests into the dining room where Else, his young wife, was waiting. Ludendorff proposed a toast to all those who had served in the Great War. Hitler raised his glass of water.

  “Herr Hitler, I should explain, doesn’t drink alcohol,” Gregor pointed out. Just then the maid brought in a large roast. Gregor smiled weakly at his wife. “He’s also a vegetarian.”

  As Otto tells it, Else smiled back, but her eyes flashed an unmistakable challenge at both her husband and the guest. “Like any true gentleman, Herr Hitler wouldn’t refuse to eat the food that I have so carefully prepared,” she said with mock charm. “I’m sure he’ll find it delicious.”

  Hitler said nothing but did not object to being served the meat and dutifully ate it. Which may have explained his silence for most of the meal; he only occasionally spoke up to agree with Ludendorff.

  When the men moved into the living room, Hitler acted jumpy, as if his previous silence had caused him to suppress too many feelings that were now bubbling to the surface. Ludendorff ensconced himself in a deep leather armchair and lit up a cigar, and the Strasser brothers sat opposite him, hanging on his every word. Hitler was pacing back and forth, his head down, until he abruptly broke into their discussion about the recent turmoil in Berlin with a furious harangue about Jews as the source of all the world’s evils.

  “Filth!” he shouted. “Jewish communists and Jewish capitalists—what difference does it make? They’re all filthy Jews who are destroying our country. They’re swarming all over this pathetic Versailles government, and they’ll be Germany’s ruin unless we act quickly and decisively.”

  “Aren’t you overdoing it a bit, Herr Hitler?” Otto asked. “Sure, Jews latch on to any movement that they think will be profitable for them—whether it’s socialism or capitalism. They’d even grab any opportunity to milk you and your followers. They’re crafty, no doubt, cynical profiteers. But they haven’t produced anything themselves, and they certainly don’t control anything.”

  Hitler’s face contorted in angry contempt. “You don’t know anything about the Jew, what he’s capable of,” he sneered. Then, in a leap that was hard to fathom, he began talking about the need to whip the Germans into shape to crush France.

  “Why France?” Otto asked. “If there’s to be war again, it’ll be with the Bolsheviks. And then we’ll need the help of France to make sure we can get the job done.”

  Ludendorff intervened, saying that our task was to build a national socialist state. “We have to be strong enough to make any enemy think twice about trying to attack or humiliate us.”

  Hitler looked eager to respond but thought better of it. Before he and Ludendorff left, he patted Otto on the shoulder and attempted to make light of their disagreement. “I’d rather be hanged by a Bolshevik than dragged to the guillotine by a Frenchman any day,” he said. It struck Otto as a strained attempt at humor by a humorless man.

  When the two guests had gone, Gregor asked Otto about his impressions. The youn
ger brother expressed his admiration for Ludendorff but left no doubt that he had hardly been awed by Hitler. “Why are you allying yourself with him?” he asked.

  Gregor hesitated, frowning, then offered a complicated explanation. With the authority of Ludendorff, what he called Hitler’s “magnetic quality” and his own organizational ability, he felt that they could create a powerful force in German politics—national socialism. Yes, he acknowledged, Hitler seemed more interested in the nationalism, but he would keep the socialist element in there as well. He knew Otto was sick of the socialists but not of socialism, and Gregor shared his commitment to helping German workers improve their lot. Besides, he argued, Ludendorff and he would control Hitler. “We need all sorts of leaders to make this work,” Gregor insisted. “And you haven’t seen Hitler in action in front of a crowd. He really knows how to excite them, how to make them rally to our side.”

  Otto was skeptical, but he respected his brother’s courage as a soldier and his political judgment. He was also eager to make a leap of faith. But instead of making a full leap, he agreed to send some men from Berlin to help the Free Corps build up its strength in Bavaria. He’d see what use they would be put to in Munich, he said, and watch the direction this national socialist movement would really take before enlisting himself.