alternatehistory.com
Chapter XXII
It has always been hard to find truly objective history and not always for conscious reasons. Whilst I have attempted to report my own research and those of reputable sources in this work there is no doubt that somewhere I will have accidentally printed a myth, an exaggeration, or some sort of bias which I’m not even aware of exuding. We are, all of us, subject to human error.
There is a limit to which this can be tolerated however. The willingness to skew the most objective of facts into politically loaded retellings deserves no place in British schools. Even those utterly opposed to any dialogue with the socialist states must acknowledge that understanding is more important than misinformation.
This is certainly what Hitler ascribed the disaster in Munich to and as accounts go he had a particularly bad time of proceedings. Many on each side would later claim to have fought in his midst, with some of such accounts being contradictory to the extreme. Often these are the exaggerated statements of liars and frauds who deliberately exaggerated Hitler’s bravery or cowardice in the name of sensationalism and profit.
What has been proven as almost certain is that Adolf Hitler was amongst a number of men who defended the large Marienplatz hotel and the streets adjacent to it. Like many instances of fighting in the city it seems that, like other small cells of KPD fighters involving former soldiers, this group held off the Freikorps advance for some time until being surrounded and forced to retreat into the hotel itself.
Whether at that point the fighting continued is a subject of some dispute. Captain Ernst Rohm, the Freikorps commander on the scene, describes how the communists continued to fire until running out of ammunition and setting fire to the hotel out of spite. Heinrich Stoph, a KPD member who fought alongside Hitler on the day insisted that Hitler had retreated in the hotel with the group but wasn’t to be seen by the time the Freikorps gave up trying to take the hotel by force and opted to burn out the defenders instead. Regardless of the final outcome, the Marienplatz was ablaze by the evening of May 8, 1919. Hitler and Stoph were only a handful of survivors from the communist ranks.
Though Stoph successfully escaped the city shortly after the collapse of the Bavarian Soviet, it seems that Hitler planned to stay in Munich for a while and allow the mood to calm before making his escape. Rebuilding the city after the battle called for many hands and Hitler worked as a labourer for several days, as he had done in Vienna, before being identified by an enraged passer-by who insisted that Hitler had thrown her out of her house.
Shortly after, Hitler found himself once again the hands of the Bavarian constabulary.
~ Geoffrey Corbett, Hitler's First Revolution
---
The cell was damp and dark, the drips of water and feint screeches of rats joining the chorus of the exasperated sobs of the shivering wretch sitting on his wooden board that doubled up as a bed and a seat. A moment beforehand it had been a scene of pounding and screeching but the guards hadn’t even bothered to check. This was a prison after all, after the inmates got over their little tantrum they would soon quieten down. Adolf had seemingly proven them right.
His leg was shaking, creating an odd effect between his boot and the detached sole flapping back and forth, as if it were a mouth guffawing at him. His knuckles were burst. He had done in his hands and one of his boots in conflict with the wall of his prison cell, and it wasn’t long before he was reminded that that was only the second most pathetic fight he had got wrapped up in in the last few months.
The imperialist slaughter would have to count as the first. He would have given his life for his country as has millions of Germans had had to, yet it had all turned out to be a horrific lie. The defence of Bavarian revolution was a truly noble cause at least but it had been so poorly led he’d had to flee before being completely overwhelmed by the white guards of capitalism, many of them former soldiers like him, unable to see their folly. His fight with the wall had no loftier ideals, it was sheer rage at his position. It had been an act of passion with no lasting benefit.
The temporary numbness was comforting but it was only there for a moment, the pain that followed at least served as a distraction but not nearly enough to remind him why was here.
He was Adolf Hitler and once again he had run afoul of the Bavarian police.
The last time he had been in their custody he had been full of hope and confusion, growing only more elated when the police had chosen to ignore his desertion when he had proclaimed his intention to join the German army. Now there was no admiration, not even any pity, he was an agent of chaos, a traitor. He was a communist.
In the same way he had joined up to fight for Germany only to be used as cannon fodder for some feckless aristocrats, hadn’t he been left to fend for himself and end up in a cell due to the orders of naïve intellectuals, self-proclaimed revolutionaries who wouldn’t know how to spell ‘strategy’ amongst their world of meetings and ‘isms’.
It was a demoralising state to be in, betrayed by both sides, aware that the glory of Germany had been turned into a malicious lie but now equally knowledgeable of how incompetent the purported leaders of the communist movement where. All he had got in reward for his idealism was living in hell amongst almost certain death thanks to the incompetence of others and eventually ending up in prison. He realised that he was just another young dreamer who had been used for the indulgence of imperialists and philosophers. It was a role he would play no longer.
He tried to think of going back to Franz in Vienna, or perhaps back to his family in Linz, back to painting and some more honest work where he could live and pursue his interests without being caught up in the endless cycle of humiliation and disappointment that he had found himself in.
Then he saw the wall again and it all came rushing back.
His blood was still on it, and the rage he remembered being afflicted with was printed on it as well. He wasn’t just in this cell because of others who had failed him for he had also helped put himself in here. He had been stupid, too easily led, too willing to ascribe a universal truth to questions he hadn’t thought about in any great deal by himself.
The answer wasn’t to wallow alone in self-pity nor to curse others, he had to become cleverer. He had to understand the motivations of those who had helped crush the revolution, he had to work out ways to mobilise those who had sat idle whilst the revolution was underway. Most importantly he had to excise the socialist movement of incompetence.
He was not going to give up on the communist party, he was too far gone now. He would never forget who he had been treated at the front and now he had seen the way the state reacted why they rose up. Those in charge would have to be cast out, and he would help build a movement to bring that about. Together the German people would restore German greatness by building a new society free of the bungling imperialists and the parasitic capitalist class and when that world was built he would go back to his painting.
Adolf looked at the blood on the wall again, there would be much more of that required, both within the party and without. His blood wouldn’t be wasted on rage anymore, only in the sharpest state of mind could it be spilled.
He flexed his broken hands and smiled, soon the German streets would be awash with blood and only the German workers could emerge victorious from such a mass struggle. In the wake of their victory, when the time came to wash the streets again, Germany itself would be cleansed of all filth.
The ceiling of the cell was utterly dark in the night, all above was the consuming darkness. A new day would come, and Adolf Hitler finally knew what he had to do.
---
The painting is "Black Square" by Kazimir Malevich
'Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.'
~ Mao Zedong
Before detailing the events of final battle in Munich it is unfortunately important to note how many conflicting accounts of Hitler’s role in the battle there are. Whilst there are of course restrictions provided by Hitler’s own unwillingness to go into any great depth about his actions it seems that this vacuum has been met not with any earnest attempts to seek great clarity but instead to manipulate the ambiguity to forward the political opinions of the author. Many have been quite forceful in doing this, with the British government being shamelessly complicit.~ Mao Zedong
It has always been hard to find truly objective history and not always for conscious reasons. Whilst I have attempted to report my own research and those of reputable sources in this work there is no doubt that somewhere I will have accidentally printed a myth, an exaggeration, or some sort of bias which I’m not even aware of exuding. We are, all of us, subject to human error.
There is a limit to which this can be tolerated however. The willingness to skew the most objective of facts into politically loaded retellings deserves no place in British schools. Even those utterly opposed to any dialogue with the socialist states must acknowledge that understanding is more important than misinformation.
This is certainly what Hitler ascribed the disaster in Munich to and as accounts go he had a particularly bad time of proceedings. Many on each side would later claim to have fought in his midst, with some of such accounts being contradictory to the extreme. Often these are the exaggerated statements of liars and frauds who deliberately exaggerated Hitler’s bravery or cowardice in the name of sensationalism and profit.
What has been proven as almost certain is that Adolf Hitler was amongst a number of men who defended the large Marienplatz hotel and the streets adjacent to it. Like many instances of fighting in the city it seems that, like other small cells of KPD fighters involving former soldiers, this group held off the Freikorps advance for some time until being surrounded and forced to retreat into the hotel itself.
Whether at that point the fighting continued is a subject of some dispute. Captain Ernst Rohm, the Freikorps commander on the scene, describes how the communists continued to fire until running out of ammunition and setting fire to the hotel out of spite. Heinrich Stoph, a KPD member who fought alongside Hitler on the day insisted that Hitler had retreated in the hotel with the group but wasn’t to be seen by the time the Freikorps gave up trying to take the hotel by force and opted to burn out the defenders instead. Regardless of the final outcome, the Marienplatz was ablaze by the evening of May 8, 1919. Hitler and Stoph were only a handful of survivors from the communist ranks.
Though Stoph successfully escaped the city shortly after the collapse of the Bavarian Soviet, it seems that Hitler planned to stay in Munich for a while and allow the mood to calm before making his escape. Rebuilding the city after the battle called for many hands and Hitler worked as a labourer for several days, as he had done in Vienna, before being identified by an enraged passer-by who insisted that Hitler had thrown her out of her house.
Shortly after, Hitler found himself once again the hands of the Bavarian constabulary.
~ Geoffrey Corbett, Hitler's First Revolution
---
The cell was damp and dark, the drips of water and feint screeches of rats joining the chorus of the exasperated sobs of the shivering wretch sitting on his wooden board that doubled up as a bed and a seat. A moment beforehand it had been a scene of pounding and screeching but the guards hadn’t even bothered to check. This was a prison after all, after the inmates got over their little tantrum they would soon quieten down. Adolf had seemingly proven them right.
His leg was shaking, creating an odd effect between his boot and the detached sole flapping back and forth, as if it were a mouth guffawing at him. His knuckles were burst. He had done in his hands and one of his boots in conflict with the wall of his prison cell, and it wasn’t long before he was reminded that that was only the second most pathetic fight he had got wrapped up in in the last few months.
The imperialist slaughter would have to count as the first. He would have given his life for his country as has millions of Germans had had to, yet it had all turned out to be a horrific lie. The defence of Bavarian revolution was a truly noble cause at least but it had been so poorly led he’d had to flee before being completely overwhelmed by the white guards of capitalism, many of them former soldiers like him, unable to see their folly. His fight with the wall had no loftier ideals, it was sheer rage at his position. It had been an act of passion with no lasting benefit.
The temporary numbness was comforting but it was only there for a moment, the pain that followed at least served as a distraction but not nearly enough to remind him why was here.
He was Adolf Hitler and once again he had run afoul of the Bavarian police.
The last time he had been in their custody he had been full of hope and confusion, growing only more elated when the police had chosen to ignore his desertion when he had proclaimed his intention to join the German army. Now there was no admiration, not even any pity, he was an agent of chaos, a traitor. He was a communist.
Am I though?
In the same way he had joined up to fight for Germany only to be used as cannon fodder for some feckless aristocrats, hadn’t he been left to fend for himself and end up in a cell due to the orders of naïve intellectuals, self-proclaimed revolutionaries who wouldn’t know how to spell ‘strategy’ amongst their world of meetings and ‘isms’.
It was a demoralising state to be in, betrayed by both sides, aware that the glory of Germany had been turned into a malicious lie but now equally knowledgeable of how incompetent the purported leaders of the communist movement where. All he had got in reward for his idealism was living in hell amongst almost certain death thanks to the incompetence of others and eventually ending up in prison. He realised that he was just another young dreamer who had been used for the indulgence of imperialists and philosophers. It was a role he would play no longer.
He tried to think of going back to Franz in Vienna, or perhaps back to his family in Linz, back to painting and some more honest work where he could live and pursue his interests without being caught up in the endless cycle of humiliation and disappointment that he had found himself in.
Then he saw the wall again and it all came rushing back.
His blood was still on it, and the rage he remembered being afflicted with was printed on it as well. He wasn’t just in this cell because of others who had failed him for he had also helped put himself in here. He had been stupid, too easily led, too willing to ascribe a universal truth to questions he hadn’t thought about in any great deal by himself.
The answer wasn’t to wallow alone in self-pity nor to curse others, he had to become cleverer. He had to understand the motivations of those who had helped crush the revolution, he had to work out ways to mobilise those who had sat idle whilst the revolution was underway. Most importantly he had to excise the socialist movement of incompetence.
He was not going to give up on the communist party, he was too far gone now. He would never forget who he had been treated at the front and now he had seen the way the state reacted why they rose up. Those in charge would have to be cast out, and he would help build a movement to bring that about. Together the German people would restore German greatness by building a new society free of the bungling imperialists and the parasitic capitalist class and when that world was built he would go back to his painting.
Adolf looked at the blood on the wall again, there would be much more of that required, both within the party and without. His blood wouldn’t be wasted on rage anymore, only in the sharpest state of mind could it be spilled.
He flexed his broken hands and smiled, soon the German streets would be awash with blood and only the German workers could emerge victorious from such a mass struggle. In the wake of their victory, when the time came to wash the streets again, Germany itself would be cleansed of all filth.
The ceiling of the cell was utterly dark in the night, all above was the consuming darkness. A new day would come, and Adolf Hitler finally knew what he had to do.
---
The painting is "Black Square" by Kazimir Malevich
- The Red
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