Hitler And The Bavarian Soviet Republic

The most famous Bavarian soldier, General von Epp, began to recruit men to oust the Red Government in Munich. He had seen colonial service, and in the war was, first, Colonel of the Bavarian Guard and later general officer commanding the Bavarian Alpine Corps, élite troops. He had fled to Ohrdruf in Thuringia and, with one Captain Ernst Röhm as his chief-of-staff, formed the Epp Free Corps, which all patriotic Bavarians tried to join.

In Munich, the Red Government, fearing the attack, arrested hundreds of hostages, chiefly officers, and now a very sinister thing happened, which deserves a much greater place in the history of the Jews in politics than it has received. Among the hostages were twenty-two members of the 'Tulle Society', a small and unimportant body which fostered the cult of old German literature, traditions, folklore, legends, and the like. Anti-Semitism was an integral part of its teaching; so was anti-Christianity. It was an insignificant group without any power or possibility of putting its theories into practice. It had no single politician among its members, only a few old professors and noblemen.

Of all the hundreds of hostages precisely these twenty-two people, including several women, among them Countess Westarp, were taken out and shot by the alien Jewish Government of Munich!

The Epp Free Corps took shape for the expedition against Red Munich. All the figures who later played a big part in the European drama gathered for this smaller one - save Hitler!

Hitler was in Munich. He was still a soldier. He had, as he tells in Mein Kampf, taken that fearsome anti-Bolshevist oath in hospital at Pasewalk. He was already resolved to save the world from Bolshevism. Yet he did not spring to save Munich from Bolshevism. He did not make his way out and join the Epp Free Corps, although he avowedly burned to fight. He was in Munich, and he was a soldier. But the soldiers in Munich were under the orders of the Red Government, the Jewish Government ruled from Moscow. If he was in barracks, he must have been - a Red!

There was much muttering and murmuring among the National Socialist leaders, much shaking of puzzled heads, in later years, about this, but not the hint of an explanation of his doings in Munich at that time ever came from Hitler. This is a complete gap in Mein Kampf. It is one of the darkest things in all his dark history. I would give almost anything I have to know for whom that man really worked, not only then, but at all times later.

Otto Strasser first drew my particular attention to this remarkable episode in Hitler's life. Although I had closely studied these things, I had overlooked it, and I do not think any other writer has noticed its significance or discussed it. Indeed, a man who was up to the neck in the political turmoil of those days, as was Otto Strasser, is needed to put it in its true proportion, and future historians will be indebted to him for this, because it is one of the most important of the things we know, and they are too few, about the man Hitler. Later, when we know more of him, and the double or triple game he always played is clearer to see, it may prove to be the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle.

It is worth explaining more fully, for this reason. The Red regime in Munich lasted from November 1918 until May 1st, 1919. Hitler, according to his own account in Mein Kampf, was filled with the most violent hatred of the Jewish-Communist revolution in Germany from the moment it broke out, in the first days of November. In the last days of November, cured and discharged from hospital, he reported to his regimental depot - in that very Munich where the Reds were most powerful.

His own battalion was under the orders of the revolutionary 'Soldiers' Council'. This so disgusted him, he says, that by some means he contrived to be sent to a camp at Traunstein, a few miles away. He says that he returned to Munich 'in March'. The Reds were driven out by von Epp and the Prussian troops at the end of April. For about two months, therefore,' Hitler, a serving soldier, was in Munich when the Red regime was at its height, under the rule of a Russian Jew sent from Moscow, when the hostages were being shot.

Good Bavarians who were there at the same time contrived, by hook or by crook, to get out of Munich and make their way to von Epp, returning with him to drive the Reds out. Otto Strasser did this, at the risk of his life and after surmounting many difficulties.

Hitler, who devotes so many pages in his book to windy abuse of the Reds in Moscow and of International Bolshevism in general, stayed quietly in Munich. He says no word of his life in Munich during those two months. He gives no description of the horrors he saw -- he, who later rails for pages at a time about the wholesale massacres in Moscow -- or of conditions in Munich at all.

But, and this is the vital point, he was a soldier, and soldiers who stayed in Munich were under the orders of that Red Government; if they didn't like it, they deserted by night to von Epp, in Thuringia, and Hitler did not do that. He was then - a Red! He probably wore the red arm-band. Presumably, with the rest of the Munich garrison, he took part in the fighting against von Epp's troops.

What other leader of such a party as the National Socialist Party would in a book pass over in silence such a period as this? All Hitler has to say about it is the vague and unintelligible remark that he was 'nearly arrested' three days before the Reds were driven out. From that he calmly passes on to a sentence beginning: 'A few days after the liberation of Munich I was ...' Nothing about his reasons for staying in Munich, nothing about the horrors of a Red regime which he actually knew, nothing about the severe fighting that preceded the liberation of Munich, nothing about the triumphal entry of von Epp's troops.

Every other notable National Socialist leader or Storm Troop commander, in those days, fought with one or other of the Free Corps somewhere in Germany; this was the very thing that gave them a claim to subsequent advancement in the Party. But the Führer himself, the arch anti-Red - was in Munich. He, who was always filled with a religious horror and hatred of the Bolshevists, retained from these months spent under their rule in a city that he regarded as his adopted birthplace no single memory worth putting on paper.

I believe that future historians will need to start their researches into his life in Munich, in the period between March and May 1919, and unless all the tracks have faded they will discover some strange things. Otto Strasser says that for many years afterwards -- until the advent to power placed Hitler on a pedestal elevated above all such doubts, which would have cost the audible doubter his life -- the National Socialist leaders, when they were talking together of this and that, always returned to the question 'What was Adolf doing in Munich in March and April 1919?' and the answer was always a perplexed shrug of the shoulders or shake of the head.