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In March 1920, two men, Adolf Hitler and Dietrich Eckart, arrive at an airfield just outside of Munich, Germany. Here they board a light aircraft. One of them, Hitler, is an extremely nervous flyer. The prospect of boarding this tiny plane terrifies him, but personal fears must be put to one side for the sake of this mission. It's not strictly legal. That's why these two senior Nazis are in disguise. Hitler is actually wearing a fake beard.
Their destination is the German capital, Berlin, where a right-wing uprising is underway. This is not an event that Adolf Hitler can afford to miss. My name is Paul McGann. This is part five of Hitler's early years. And this is Real Dictators. The plane carrying Hitler and his trusted mentor, Eckart, rises above the clouds and begins its journey northwards. In Berlin, the Cap Putsch has just been launched.
Putsch being the German term for a violent attempt to overthrow a government. This uprising has come from the far right. Groups similar to the Nazis in outlook have taken up arms against the establishment. It's an attempt to seize power from the Weimar administration. So these two men are desperate to get to Berlin as soon as possible. They don't want to miss history being made. It's a chance to make the Nazis part of a much bigger movement. But also for Hitler, if he can spend as little time as possible up in the air then that would be ideal.
Professor Thomas Weber. He initially thinks that maybe they can link up with military groups, irregular groups in the rest of Germany. This is why in March of 1920, Dietrich Eckart and he, despite Hitler's being totally scared of flying, fly together on a trip on which Hitler throws up several times over Germany to Berlin, where a coup d'etat attempt has just occurred. Hitler has visited Berlin just once before.
He actually hates the city. He detests everything it stands for. You might find that rather odd for a dictator who one day will make Berlin his base. But in the post-war years, the capital could hardly be more different from Hitler's beloved Munich. Dr. Chris Dillon.
Berlin in the early 20s is a very different environment to Munich. Berlin is the Babylon behemoth of the Weimar Republic. It's got 4 million people in 1919, so it's the third biggest city in the world after New York and London. So whereas Munich after the First World War becomes increasingly conservative, anti-socialist, culturally stodgy, Berlin enjoys a real surge in cultural creativity and innovation. Berlin has its problems.
Poverty, social unrest, but its art scene is thriving. Up here they call it the Roaring Twenties. Relief at the end of World War I is finding form in an explosion of creativity. The city's jazz bars and nightclubs are doing a roaring trade. There's an atmosphere of reckless abandon, of sexual liberation. Professor Claudia Kuhns,
Berlin had the reputation for being sin city. Cabarets were everywhere, internationally famous artists, the Dada movement, the theater, houses of prostitution, homosexual bars, nude dancing. This was sin in Hitler's puritanical mind.
In politics too, Berlin's a red city and it moves leftwards during the Weimar Republic. Many districts in Berlin become quite early communist strongholds. So Hitler loathes everything Berlin stood for, most especially its liberal social ethos and its experimental socialist culture. And this loathing of Berlin is very widely shared in Munich. On this mission with Eckart, Hitler has no interest in the city's nightlife.
They are here for a very different, a very serious purpose. The plane lands. Thank goodness. Hitler has vomited several times on board. He and Eckhart disembark and head into the city. They're disappointed to find that the Cap Putsch is already fizzling out. At first, on March the 13th, as the Putsch was launched, it had looked as though it might succeed, but over the coming days it has collapsed.
An enormous general strike of 12 million workers has paralyzed the insurrectionists and forced them to flee. For a time at least, Berlin has been saved. There's nothing for it but to board the plane once again. After another bumpy ride, Hitler and Eckart return to Munich, empty-handed. But the kaputsch, while a failure, will have one useful outcome for Adolf Hitler. In the weeks and months following the Berlin coup, other groups across Germany make copycat claims to power.
In Bavaria, Hitler's home state, the left-wing Social Democrats are booted out of office by a new right-wing administration. The members of this regional government are not Nazis, but on some issues they're not a million miles away. The political mood seems to be shifting to Hitler's advantage. Fast forward a few months, to July 1921, and Hitler has just ascended to the leadership of the Nazi party. Now, as he commences his tenure as party dictator,
The memory of the kaputch stays in his mind. The lesson Hitler has taken is that when the time comes you need a whole lot of muscle to take what you want. And not just to take it, to hold it decisively. Intermittent or half-baked uprisings are no good. A strongman must be uncompromising.
He must seize power with utter surety. Between 1919 and 1923, Hitler undergoes on the one hand a kind of intellectual journey where he's trying to figure out what kind of political ideas will best help to redo Germany. But he also needs to figure out how can these ideas being translated, what kind of tools does he need in order to gain power? Democracy and inclusiveness are not on Hitler's agenda.
If they were, he wouldn't have demanded to become the dictator of his party. He wouldn't have banned anyone without so-called pure Aryan descent from joining.
At this point, Hitler doesn't really believe in elections. In many ways, the Nazi party or the party bit of their name is a kind of misnomer. They never contest elections. They don't want to participate in the democratic political process. They think that they can seize power. But for that, obviously, he needs allies. To Hitler's way of thinking, if he's ever to have a shot at power, speeches and persuasion alone won't be enough.
he's going to need an iron fist. So Hitler is determined to get on with assembling his own paramilitary group. There are plenty of fascists and bloodthirsty thugs in Bavaria that might be interested in joining the Nazi corps. The mass demobilization of troops after World War I has led to the emergence of Freikorps, mercenary bands of ex-soldiers looking for a fight. But there are so many different groups out there, all with their own goals and motivations.
Winning them over and keeping them all happy will be no mean feat. Luckily for him, Hitler is about to link up with a man who can steer him through these choppy waters. His approach between March of 1920 and his putsch is to try to find allies within Bavaria and to build up paramilitary groups within Bavaria and to link up with other irregular troops. This again is also what brings him together with Ernst Röhm,
Hitler has already been introduced to Ernst Röhm. Röhm has been a member of the Nazis and the predecessor German Workers Party since 1919. But it's now, in the summer of 1921, that these two men really become useful to each other. Röhm is a barrel of a man. His chins wobble when he barks orders. His pink, porky face, set atop his tree-trunk neck, is permanently scarred from a battle back in 1914.
He's a serious individual to behold, a living reminder of Germany's First World War. Brohm is still a serving officer in the Bavarian army. Hans Drohm had at that point made his name through being a military officer. He was extremely well connected to the Bavarian establishment and crucially he could also easily raise money in Bavaria and in Munich, which Hitler had for a long time found difficult.
So he is a kind of connection and Ström is a kind of connection to the German armed forces and the kind of the security apparatus of Bavaria that makes it possible for the Nazi party to grow. He's playing a very dangerous game. His powers have an underground fight back within the military. This sect wants another revolution, a proper revolution from the right.
one that restores the supremacy of the army and overturns the humiliations of the post-war settlement. The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to disband much of its military. Ernst Röhm cannot abide the thought of disarmament. He's secretly building networks of militiamen. He's also stockpiling weapons. So Röhm comes with guns and foot soldiers. Having this guy as the key ally is a no-brainer for Hitler. Hitler was never an army officer.
In military terms, Rome is his superior in rank. And boy, doesn't he know it. He's someone who likes to assert himself. He feels he's a natural commander. Rome thinks that when the time is right, he will be able to ease this Austrian out of the frame and take on the mantle of the Nazi leadership. Rome might be awkward and ambitious, but he's certainly not lazy. At Hitler's behest, he immediately sets about creating the Nazis' very own paramilitary force.
They're called the Sturmableitung, literally the Storm Detachment, or the SA for short. They'll be known colloquially as the Brown Shirts, after their distinctive uniforms.
A lot of the inspiration for the essay comes from Italy, from Mussolini's black shirts. And these were fascist thugs who were loosely aligned to Mussolini, who fought the Italian left during his ascent to power in the early 1920s. As is typical of street thugs in any era, street toughs, the essay
were overwhelmingly young men between the age of 15 and 30. They're childless, they're unmarried, and they're very often unemployed. This is a combustible material that can be recruited by political warlords in all kinds of different contexts. And these were essentially the strong-arm security squads who were recruited to protect Nazi meetings and also over time to disrupt the meetings of political rivals. Large paramilitary organizations are outlawed within Germany, but Rome has a canny operator
He knows his way around the law. The SA are actually registered, initially, as a gymnastics group, to avoid prohibition. Creating the SA is an extremely shrewd move. It gives the Nazis a cutting edge, a presence on the streets.
He very quickly uses them as a parliamentary force to be reckoned with in Bavaria. And he also wants to use them in order to be taken seriously by other nationalists who want to overthrow the government so that he can say, well, look, I don't just have ideas, but I also have my own forces that I can bring to the fight. So Hitler is always thinking about not just about what are the best ideas, but how can I translate them into reality?
And the essay is very important to the ethos and the self-conception of the Nazi Party as being a movement. So rather than simply being a party that was complicit in the hated system of the Weimar Republic, having a paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung, supported this conception of being a movement, something bigger than a vulgar party. As soon as their boots hit the streets, they set about causing a right scene. Their hooliganism is a deliberate tactic. Munich is a violent place.
And Hitler feels the only way to get through to some people is to put a fist through their face. The SA, they provoke disorder and then they stand as the protectors of the order that they have first disturbed. So they'll stir up the left and then they'll come in and fight with the left in order to show that they after all are the ones that are on the side of the state and that the right-minded ordinary German
The SA fought with knuckle-dusters, truncheons, beer glasses, daggers and pistols. And it's all been described quite rightly by one historian as a politics of hooliganism. And it can be very, very difficult to determine from the historical record whether SA men had any kind of deep ideological conviction about Nazism, or whether what they're doing reflects more masculine thrills of violence and comradeship. The Nazi Party are almost entirely male-oriented. They're comprised of workers and former soldiers.
and the SA especially are a macho, tub-thumping band of men. In later years and decades, the National Socialists will make a concerted move to gain the support of German women. But right now, they're doubling down on their angry male demographic. You might think that as Nazi leader, Hitler would want to keep a degree of distance between these thugs and himself. Not in the slightest. In September 1921,
Hitler leads a contingent of SA shock troops to the Löwenbräukeller, one of Munich's beer halls. Tonight it's playing host to the Bavarian League. Hitler hates this group. They have no time for the far-right politics of the Nazis. The League's leader, an engineer called Otto Ballerstedt, steps up to address his audience. Hitler and his heavies arrive. They start heckling the speaker, demanding he give up the floor and let Hitler speak. Ballerstedt plows on.
So the Nazis haul him down off the platform and beat him up. A brawl breaks out. The night ends with Hitler and his men in police custody. Hitler will be sentenced to three months in jail, though he'll serve just one month behind bars. No matter. It's more publicity. Two months later, with Hitler out of prison, they're at it again. Hitler makes a speech at the Hofbräuhaus beer hall. Another drunken brawl breaks out between the Nazis and their enemies.
This time, the communists. In the melee, shots are fired towards the Nazi leader as he stands on stage. Hitler is unbowed. As bullets ricochet off the walls around him, he continues to hold the floor, ranting for 20 more minutes. His SA henchmen scrapping with the enemy in the stalls below. You might wonder how Hitler is allowed to get away with building a private army. Well, the Treaty of Versailles states that the German military must not exceed 100,000 men.
Many in Germany are outraged by this. And not just those on the far right. For generals and even politicians, paramilitaries like the SA are useful idiots.
a way of keeping Germany armed in this uncertain world without explicitly breaching the treaty's terms. The SA were all part-time volunteers. For Hitler, the emphasis was on the political, that the SA were there to serve his political objectives, his ideological program. Whereas for Ernst Röhm, soldiering was more important. And for Röhm, an institution like the SA was a way of getting around the Versailles restrictions on the size of the German army, making Germany great again.
Bavaria's ruling conservatives want a return of the monarchy. They're not Nazis. They don't want Hitler and his men to rule the country. But they feel they have enough in common with the National Socialists to turn a blind eye to their street violence. The reason why the Nazi Party can grow in Bavaria at that time is because the Bavarian establishment
see them as weapons that they can use. They see in the Nazi party a group that just like them is against Berlin, that like them is against the liberal and democratic regime or government in Berlin. And so they basically just see the Nazis as useful because they see that they connect with a certain kind of clientele, certain kind of electorate that is
the Bavarian establishment can't reach. This is why people like Ernst Röhm are so important, because they can broker all these links between Hitler and the Bavarian establishment. As tales spread of their booze-fueled rampages, the SA take the Nazi party straight to the front pages. The Nazis are requiring a presence in mainstream media coverage that they haven't earned through the ballot box.
And part of the goal for the Nazi Party was not only to beat Bolshevik rivals to a bloody pulp, but to make headlines, to give themselves a media presence, whether they won or they lost.
And so if a communist rally was announced for a particular square in Munich, the Nazis would be sure to march in their brown shirts, in their military garb, and attack them. They'd start heckling from the margins. They'd pick fights with people. Violence, street violence, was every day, was endemic. The SA are a vital part of the movement that Hitler is trying to build. But while he loves the chaos they ferment...
It remains vital to keep these combustible thugs on a short leash. Hitler knows he needs to put a supremely loyal ally in charge of the SA. He doesn't entirely trust Ernst Röhm. And besides, Röhm is the Nazi's inside man with the Bavarian establishment. It makes sense to keep him, to some extent, in the shadows. But Hitler needs someone with Röhm's gravitas, with his natural authority. Right now, the perfect man for this job is yet to make Hitler's acquaintance.
He's not even a member of the Nazi party. But once he does sign up, this man will thrust himself straight to the front of the job's queue. There are others who very quickly play a major role. One of them is Hermann Göring. Hermann Göring has piercing blue eyes, a pale pink complexion and light brown hair, which he wears slicked back. At 28 years old, he's four years Hitler's junior. Göring has the face of a man who believes his own hype.
His privileged childhood has left him with a permanent smirk. He's fairly wide set, but yet to develop the jowls and the belly that he'll carry in later life. Göring is a former fighter pilot of some renown. Like Hitler, he's a veteran of the First World War. Right now, in the early 1920s, Göring misses the prestige his military rank afforded him. But in the coming years, he will more than regain this status. He will become a central figure in the rise of the Nazis.
and the second in command of Hitler's Third Reich. Professor Frank McDonagh. Goering was the opposite of Hitler. He was a hugely decorated World War I pilot. You know, he really was, you know, one of the most decorated pilots of the First World War. He came from a very affluent family. And he was literally the man about town. He was big, he was bold, he was interesting, he was funny. And he was a mover and a shaker, definitely. Rewind to the First World War.
And Hermann Goering is a man of glory and daring do. Hitler may gloat about his own war record, but Goering's military career is of a whole other calibre. James Wiley is author of Goering and Goering, Hitler's henchman and his anti-Nazi brother. He's dumped in the infantry initially, but he's desperate to get in the play. And he has some friends who are in the Air Force, so he manages to get in.
He wins the Blue Max, the most prestigious medal for the number of kills he'd achieved as a pilot. And towards the end of the war, he inherited the most elite squadron, which was the Von Richthofen Squadron, which was the Red Baron's squadron. So when a Red Baron was killed, Hermann became the leader of that squadron. As the Red Baron's successor, Göring is a celebrity.
He's in his element in World War I, swashbuckling around the German airfields, posing for photographs in front of his fighter aircraft, before taking to the skies to shoot it out with the British and the French.
Fighter pilots in Germany were the equivalent of football stars today. I mean, they were the glamour celebrity side of that conflict. Trench warfare is not glamorous, and it's telling that the monuments to the infantry of World War I are to unknown soldiers. It couldn't be more different for fighter aces like Goering. They have the opportunity for individual heroism. Legendary characters like the Red Baron emerge.
They're in the newspapers, on playing cards. Songs are sung about them back home. It follows then that the armistice hits Goering like a ton of bricks. As the news filters through to the front, Goering is distraught. Where does a man like him go next, after tasting such glory in the skies? A legend spreads through the ranks of the German airmen. Goering is so dismayed by the armistice, so the story goes, that he decides to engineer a moment of potent symbolism.
If Germany has given up fighting the war, then the nation itself deserves to pay penance. Goering supposedly orders the pilots under his command to crash land their aircraft on purpose. As the men fly home to Germany, they direct the noses of their planes downwards. Then they bail out and watch the aircraft pummel the earth. Whether or not this tale is true, the intended meaning is clear. Goering is a man who does not retreat. If the German people have given up the chance of victory,
Then they are weak and deserve punishment. The German soil itself deserves to be beaten by the crashing aircraft. Returning home, Göring struggles to adjust back to civilian life. He's someone who's lost his purpose. A man from his well-to-do family should be doing better in life. Göring had an extremely odd childhood. One that seeded a love for war and a high regard for ideas of chivalry and destiny.
His father had been a cavalry officer in the army, before becoming the first Governor General of the German colony of South West Africa. As a young boy, Göring watched his mother become the mistress of his Jewish godfather, a man called Baron von Eppenstein. Göring seems to have been quite close with his surrogate dad. Von Eppenstein's wealth and status gave him a childhood most boys his age could only dream of. Raised in a Bavarian castle, Göring grew up with a ridiculous, almost cartoonish view of the world.
full-on medieval turrets, towers, the whole thing. Tapestries and he'd have minstrels play, you know, when they had dinner. So there's Herman growing up in this fairy tale kind of environment. Herman, you know, was obsessed with medieval warfare, chivalry, war games, he had toy soldiers. So he was already drawn to that.
He learned to hunt very young, and he started climbing mountains when he was about nine or ten years old. So he's an action man. Göring was raised to expect great things from life. Now, in post-war Germany, he's still a well-known public figure, but his martial values have slipped out of fashion. He insists on wearing his military regalia in day-to-day life, even in places where the army is less than popular. One day in Munich, as he strolls through the city in full uniform,
He's attacked by a left-wing mob. They tear his medals, his symbols of gallantry, from his person. Germany is offering very little to Göring. Adrift, he heads north to Scandinavia. In Sweden, Göring becomes a star acrobat flyer. This is a bit more like it. At least he can feel the acclaim of the crowds. But once you've seen one airshow, you've seen them all. And the public's appetite for his airborne antics soon wanes. So Göring joins a commercial airline.
It's a steady income and he has a side hustle in private flights. One of these private commissions changes his life. In the winter of 1920, a Scandinavian aristocrat called Erik von Rosen pays Herman Göring to fly him from the city of Stockholm to his ancestral estate in the icy depths of rural Sweden. Outside the small private plane, temperatures are well below freezing.
The aircraft, buffeted this way and that by icy air currents, makes its way over the dense forests, frozen lakes, and mountain ridges below. Inside the plane, the two men are getting on like a house on fire. Hermann Göring might resent his role as aeronautical chauffeur, but he can't help but admire the bearing of his esteemed Swedish passenger. For his part, von Rosen observes this pilot's skill in handling the aircraft, and his composed demeanor in the testing weather conditions.
The plane comes in to land in the grounds of Rocklstaed Castle. Red brick medieval-style turrets tower into the sky. Conditions are so grim, there's no chance of a return flight that evening, so Goering is invited into the castle to stay the night. Finally, after two years doing loop-the-loops for gormless onlookers, this is an environment befitting Goering's sense of grandeur. Something very significant happens inside the castle that night.
Goering becomes acquainted with his host's sister-in-law. Her name is Karin von Canzau. She will become a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi and a key figure in the movement. She'll also become Mrs. Goering. Supposedly, it's on this fateful night that Goering first lays eyes on what will become one of the most distinctive symbols in all of history. Above the Count's fireplace, cut into the wooden chimney piece, is the von Rosen family badge. At its center, a distinctive insignia.
The count explains that it is a symbol found across many cultures, with various meanings. To the Vikings, it symbolized, good luck, the swastika. So Göring recognizes this symbol when he sees it again some months later. Except this time, it's 1000 miles away from Rockelstadt Castle, in the German city of Munich, on an advert for a Nazi party meeting. Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader, has given his party a fresh logo.
The swastika sits at the heart of the new Nazi flag. Set against a blood-red background, this new flag takes pride of place on posters and pamphlets. In years to come, it will be worn on armbands by tens of thousands of Nazi Party members. The swastika was something that was used by a lot of German nationalist movements and it went back into the 19th century. It was an Aryan symbol as well. You know, Hitler knew about the swastika. The actual armband was designed by Hitler.
Hermann Göring has returned to his native Bavaria reinvigorated. His time spent fraternizing with the Swedish aristocracy has reinflated his ego. Now, he's ready to get stuck into German politics, to inject the braggadocio that, to his mind, it so desperately needs. Göring attends his first Nazi meeting and sees Hitler speak for himself. He and his new wife, Karin, join the party soon after.
Everyone has their kind of origin story with Hitler. The moment when I heard him say this and that was that. And Herman had several versions of quite how that went. But he basically heard him speak at a meeting, at a public meeting in Munich. He was impressed and he engineered a meeting with Hitler.
But the real driver is Karen, Herma's wife. Her family background, they're quite into Nordic racial ideology. So she was already an anti-Semite. And she had that kind of conversion moment that people speak about when they talk about Hitler. And she just completely fell for him. So she was, of the two, she was the fanatic. In that early period, she was the fanatic.
Goering admires Hitler, his rhetorical firepower, his commitment to remaking Germany. But at this stage, idealism is balanced out by more than a little opportunism. Goering sees an opening for himself, a chance to build his own career and carve out his own sphere of influence within the young Nazi party. For his part, Hitler knows immediately that he's stumbled across a huge asset. Goering will be a boon to the Nazi cause.
His public profile, his inbuilt Bavarian etiquette, his military background and society connections. Goering will open doors that are still firmly closed to Hitler himself. Goering is now joining forces. And this is good news for Hitler and the Nazi parties on so many fronts. In part because he's well connected. He has got this legendary standing amongst the German public. And he can just bring in so many new people. And crucially,
Goering is more than willing to become the leader of Hitler's paramilitaries, the SA. By the beginning of 1923, the jigsaw pieces are starting to form a coherent picture. With the help of Dietrich Eckart, Hitler has become a highly polished public speaker. He has a dedicated inner circle of advisors and confidants. He has a loyal band of paramilitaries, who are now being whipped into shape by his new acquisition, Hermann Goering. The next step on the road to power must be to elevate Hitler himself
to turn him into an iconic national figure. This will be no mean feat. Hitler is a leader amongst Munich's fascists, but he's miles off the visibility and status that he'll need to become Germany's dictator. It's time for the Nazis' media operation to truly achieve liftoff. In the next episode of Real Dictators, Hitler releases a secret autobiography and begins to turbocharge his cult of personality.
The Nazis profit from an economic meltdown as millions of Germans lose their life savings overnight. And a catastrophe unfolds on Germany's western border as France and Belgium send troops onto German home soil. In this atmosphere of chaos and resentment, Hitler and his aides will finalize plans for their very own revolution. The Munich Putsch will begin to take shape. That's next time on Real Dictators.
Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The show was created by Pascal Hughes. Produced by Joel Dodal. Editing and music by Oliver Baines. With strings recorded by Dory McCauley. Sound design and mix by Tom Pink. With edit assembly by George Tapp. Follow Noiser Podcasts on Twitter for news about upcoming series. If you haven't already, follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows or check us out at realdictators.com. Tune in on Wednesdays for new episodes.
