Standing in front of the Löwenbräukeller. Located at Nymphenburgerstraße 4 on Stiglmaier Platz, it was used as a substitute site for the anniversaries of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, after a 1939 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler by Georg Elser rendered the original site, the nearby Bürgerbräukeller unusable.
Earlier, this was where Hitler commanded the SA to break up a meeting of the rival Bavarian League on September 14, 1921, also ordering its main speaker—Otto Ballerstedt of the Bavarian League— to be assaulted, too. This federalist organisation objected to the centralism of the Weimar Constitution but accepted its social programme. Ballerstedt was an engineer whom Hitler regarded as "my most dangerous opponent". One Nazi, Hermann Esser, climbed upon a chair and shouted that the Jews were to blame for the misfortunes of Bavaria and the Nazis shouted demands that Ballerstedt yield the floor to Hitler. The Nazis beat up Ballerstedt and shoved him off the stage into the audience. Hitler and Esser were arrested and Hitler commented notoriously to the police commissioner, "It's all right. We got what we wanted. Ballerstedt did not speak". As the landmark documentary Nazis: A Warning From History reveals, on January 12, 1922 Hitler was sentenced to three months in gaol for this and ended up serving only a little over one month due to the sympathy of the judge who would later oversee his putsch trial.
the annual commemorative festivities began in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich. The usual site for the celebrations, the Bürgerbräukeller, destroyed in the mysterious explosion of the previous year, had not yet been completely restored. Though not invited to attend the 1940 festivities, the Royal Air Force nonetheless called at Munich to contribute a special fireworks display in the skies above the Bavarian capital.In a footnote on page 830 of Shirer writes:
Doramus (2113) The Complete Hitler
I learn from Hitler’s captured daily calendar book that the celebration had been moved from the old Buergerbraukeller, where the putsch had taken place, to a more elegant beer hall in Munich, the Loewenbraukeller. The Buergerbraukeller, it will be remembered, had been wrecked by a time bomb which had just missed killing the Fuehrer on the night of November 8, 1939.
Hitler and other Nazi officials celebrate Christmas at a party for ϟϟ officer cadets at the Lowenbraukeller on December 18, 1941. |
It aimed to boost morale, and to rally round the oldest and most loyal members of Hitler’s retinue after the difficult months of summer and autumn. Hitler described the scale of the Soviet losses. ‘My Party Comrades,’ he declared, ‘no army in the world, including the Russian, recovers from those.’ ‘Never before,’ he went on, ‘has a giant empire been smashed and struck down in a shorter time than Soviet Russia.’ He remarked on enemy claims that the war would last into 1942. ‘It can last as long as it wants,’ he retorted. ‘The last battalion in this field will be a German one.’ Despite the triumphalism, it was the strongest hint yet that the war was far from over.
when Hitler travelled to Munich to give his traditional address in the Löwenbräukeller to the marchers in the 1923 Putsch, the news from the Mediterranean had dramatically worsened. En route from Berlin to Munich, his special train was halted at a small station in the Thuringian Forest for him to receive a message from the Foreign Office: the Allied armada assembled at Gibraltar, which had for days given rise to speculation about a probable landing in Libya, was disembarking in Algiers and Oran. It would bring the first commitment of American ground-troops to the war in Europe.This happened to be the same day as the Anglo-American landings in North Africa and less than a week after the defeat of Rommel’s Africa Corps by the British at El Alamein. Given how catastrophic the effect all these events had been on German morale, Hitler would never have given a speech but he had used the commemoration of November 8 as a pretext for his stay at the Berghof and had no choice but to speak at the Löwenbräukeller. Unsurprisingly, the speech was one of the most miserable he ever gave and Doramus claims that the “'old marchers of 1923'” were so preoccupied with thoughts of the Allied landing that they even forgot at times to applaud the Führer’s most rousing proclamations." In fact, the opening lines of this speech were used at the beginning of the film Downfall when Hitler is made to dictate them for Traudl to type out for the qualification test:
On November 9, 1943, the Führer celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Burgerbraukeller Putsch with a speech here. Besides the dead of 1923, Hitler added the commemoration of the casualties of the war from thus far. As Kershaw described this,My German Volksgenossen! Party Comrades! I believe it is quite rare when a man can appear before his supporters after almost 20 years and, in these 20 years, did not need to make any changes whatsoever in his programme.
With colleagues on the anniversary
When (for the last time, as it turned out) Hitler addressed the party’s Old Guard in Munich’s Löwenbräukeller on the putsch anniversary, 8 November, he was as defiant as ever. There would be no capitulation, no repeat of 1918, he declared once again – the nightmare of that year indelibly imprinted on his psyche – and no undermining of the front by subversion at home. Any overheard subversive or defeatist remark, it was clear, would cost the person making it his or her head.
Nazi Party Headquarters, November 1921 to July 1925
The dismal back room at the Sterneckerbrau which had served as a committee-room was abandoned for new and larger offices at 12 Corneliusstrasse. Bit by bit they accumulated office furniture, files, a typewriter, and a telephone.
Bullock (76-77) Hitler: A Study in Tyranny
After eighteen months our business quarters had become too small, so we moved to a new place in the Cornelius Strasse. Again our office was in a restaurant, but instead of one room we now had three smaller rooms and one large room with great windows. At that time this appeared a wonderful thing to us. We remained there until the end of November 1923.As related by Philipp Bouhler in his 1938 textbook on the history of the Nazi Party (Kampf um Deutschland. Ein Lesebuch für die deutsche Jugen):
[Max] Amann thought that the small dark corner of the Sterneckergasse was not suited to attract members, and soon found a new business office in a former restaurant at Corneliusstraße 12. There was a large room at the front, later divided by a counter. The party’s business took place there. Membership dues were collected, propaganda materials distributed, information given. The membership records were later kept in a large iron safe. Julius Schreck and others ran the counter, as well as the telephone switchboard. During the winter months, the room was a shelter for unemployed party members and supporters who made a lot of noise playing cards. At times the din was so loud that one could not talk, and Christian Weber who ran the office had to come out and clear the area with his long “riding whip.”
There was a “meeting room” in the rear, in which an old billiards table served as the conference table. Later, the growing number of typists was housed here. There was another small and hidden room for the “party leadership” and business office, in which letters were dictated and visitors received. Another room was later the office of Lieutenant Brückner, leader of the Munich S.A. Göring, the S.A.’s national leader, had his office in 1923 in the editorial building of the [Völkischer Beobachter] Schellingstraße 39/41.
Vincent (137) An Historical Dictionary of Germany’s Weimar Republic
Although the emblems were removed as symbols of militarism prior to January 1 1947 in accordance with Allied denazification regulations, the martial male figure itself remained standing. To be sure, little sentimental feeling existed within the local population toward the figure which already during the Third Reich had been derisively referred to as "der nackerte Lackel" or "the naked oaf. For a time however city officials seemed to consider preserving the figure for 'artistic reasons.' Nevertheless, in December 1946, the surfacing of complaints by local citizens and the energetic lobbying of the Communist city council faction (KPD) to demolish the entire structure ultimately proved decisive. Shortly thereafter, the remaining figure was torn down and the accompanying wall reduced in height to the level of the surrounding retaining walls.
The White force had in it hardened desperadoes and they shot down without cause some twenty medical orderlies and eight surrendered Red soldiers. Most infamously, the Reds executed ten people by firing squad, including the Countess Westarp. This killing was the direct result of the White atrocities at Dachau which had caused Red soldiers to ask superiors if they could take revenge. Permission was granted and the victims were rounded up and brought to courtyard of the Luitpold gymnasium. In pairs, they were placed against a wall and shot. The news of this horrific event spread quickly and, by midday of 1 May, the killings had become public knowledge. There were protest meetings all over the city, and firefights erupted.Hofbräukeller
The Whites had decided to move on 2 May. They now advanced the attack to May Day. It was held to be just and proper that they were moving into the capital on the traditional workers’ holiday. As the Whites took Munich, atrocities appeared seemingly everywhere. All White killings were said to be justified by the Luitpold executions. The Luitpold killings had also had a demoralizing impact on Red troops not involved but who had heard of them. They began throwing down their arms, as the Whites entered the city to encounter scant opposition.
The Munich political scene, immediately after the demise of the Red Republics, was profoundly altered. The disappearance of the two republics resulted in an atmosphere changed lastingly... This was the heritage which carried over into the scene after the war.
Here on Innere Wiener Straße 19 was where Hitler publicly spoke for the first time:
On 16 October he was one of 111 people to attend a meeting at the Hofbrauhauskeller, at which Dr Erich Kühn, editor of the radical nationalist journal Deutschlands Emeuerung (Germany’s Renewal), spoke about the Jewish Question. Hitler spoke too. A reporter from the Munich Observer reported that he ‘used inflammatory words’ and incited those present against especially the Jewish press. Three days later, and notwithstanding Drexler’s prior offer, Hitler wrote requesting membership of the [German Workers'] party.Housden (45) Hitler Study of a Revolutionary?
A hundred and eleven people turned up, and Hitler rose to address his first public meeting as the second speaker of the evening. In a bitter stream of words the dammed-up emotions, the lonely man’s suffocated feelings of hatred and impotence, burst out; like an explosion after the restriction and apathy of the past years, hallucinatory images and accusations came pouring out; abandoning restraint, he talked till he was sweating and exhausted. ‘I spoke for thirty minutes,’ he writes, ‘and what I had always felt deep down in my heart, without being able to put it to the test, proved to be true.’ Jubilantly he made the overwhelming, liberating discovery. ‘I could make a good speech!On the wall outside is a plaque dedicated to the victims of the Freikorps during the smashing of the Räterepublik:
Joachim C. Fest The Face Of The Third Reich: Portraits Of The Nazi Leadership
IN MEMORY OF THE CITIZENS from Perlach:Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten
JOSEPH LUDWIG ARTUR KOCH JOHANN KEIL SEBASTIAN HUFNAGEL ALBERT DENGLER ALBERT CANCER GEORG JAKOB JOSEPH JAKOB GEORG EICHNER KONRAD ZELLER AUGUST STÖBER JOHANN SPRUCEFollowing the military defeat of the Munich Soviet Republic, these workers and craftsmen were denounced and without legal judicial proceedings were taken by the Freikorps Lützow on 5 May 1919 to the garden of the Hofbräuhaus Keller and murdered.
Members of the Thule Society, a right-wing, völkisch, anti-Semitic organisation, had got hold of the stamp of the Communist military chief of Munich, the twenty-one-year-old deserter from the navy Rudolf Eglhofer, and used it to forge orders and requisitions. Ten of the members of the Thule Society were taken as hostages from a meeting at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and then, as the government forces converged on Munich, they were executed in the courtyard of the Luitpold gymnasium as a reprisal for the deaths of eight members of the Red Guard who had been killed at Dachau.
The Making of Adolf Hitler: The Birth and Rise of Nazis, Eugene Davidson (128)
The ceremonial foundation of the Thule Society took place on 17 August 1918. The society met at the fashionable Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Munich, in rooms decorated with the Thule emblem: a long dagger, its blade surrounded by oak leaves, superimposed on a shining, curved- armed swastika.
Richard Evans destroys David Irving's credibility when the latter referred to the hotel in Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich during the events of Reichskristallnacht in his attempts to absolve Hitler from all blame of the violence:Lieutenant-Colonel Hoßbach, Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant, was ordered to present himself the next morning in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich. When he arrived, Hitler was still in bed. Only shortly before midday was the military adjutant summoned to be told that the Führer had decided to reintroduce conscription in the immediate future – a move which would in the eyes of the entire world graphically demonstrate Germany’s newly regained autonomy and cast aside the military restrictions of Versailles.Kershaw Hitler
WHAT of Himmler and Hitler? Both were totally unaware of what Goebbels had done until the synagogue next to Munich’s Four Seasons Hotel was set on fire around one a.m. Heydrich, Himmler’s national chief of police, was relaxing down in the hotel bar; he hurried up to Himmler’s room, then telexed instructions to all police authorities to restore law and order, protect Jews and Jewish property, and halt any on- going incidents. The hotel management telephoned Hitler’s apartment at Prinz- Regenten-Platz, and thus he too learned that something was going on. He sent for the local police chief, Friedrich von Eberstein. Eberstein found him livid with rage.
The only historical truth in this account was the assertion that Heydrich sent a telex to the German police authorities. Everything else was a blatant manipulation of the historical record. Even a cursory glance at the telex showed that it ordered the opposite of what Irving claimed it did. What Heydrich was telling the police was not to prevent the destruction of Jewish property or get in the way of violent acts against German Jews.(57) Lying About Hitler
She got up briskly. 'I suppose I've got to get used to doing what you say. I'll drive to Munich. To the Vier Jahreszeiten. It's my favourite hotel in the world. I'll wait for you there. They know me. They'll take me in without any luggage. Everything's at Samaden. I'll just have to send out for a toothbrush and stay in bed for two days until I can go out and get some things. You'll telephone me? Talk to me? When can we get married? I must tell Papa. He'll be terribly excited.'
'Let's get married in Munich. At the Consulate. I've got a kind of diplomatic immunity. I can get the papers through quickly. Then we can be married again in an English church, or Scottish rather. That's where I come from. I'll call you up tonight and tomorrow. I'll get to you just as soon as I can. I've got to finish this business first.'
Recently Harry Kane racked up a £1 million tab at his £10,000-a-night hotel suite here....
Who, other than Göring, would have ordered the pickax murder of seventy-one- year-old ex-dictator Gustav von Kahr and Munich journalist Fritz Gerlich? Kahr had betrayed the 1923 beer hall putsch. Gerlich had claimed that Göring broke his word of honour to escape; Göring had sued him for libel and lost. Now both those old scores were settled, permanently.
Göring (209)
'the lost safe-deposit box. A place where allegedly revelatory documents - ones that might provide the missing link, the lost key to the Hitler psyche, the true source of his metamorphosis - seem to disappear beyond recovery." This mythology was inspired by real events in Munich in 1933, when Fritz Gerlich, the last anti- Hitler journalist in that city, made a desperate attempt to alert the world to the true nature of Hitler by means of a report of an unspecified scandal. On 9 March, just as Gerlich's newspaper, Der Gerade Weg, was about to go to press, SA storm troopers entered the premises and ripped it from the presses.
Although no copy of the Gerlich report has ever been found, rumours have been circulating for many years about the ultimate fate of the information with which Gerlich hoped to warn the world of the danger of Hitler, one of which involves a secret copy of the report that was smuggled out of the premises (along with supporting documentary material) by one Count Waldburg-Zeil. Waldburg-Zeil allegedly took the report and its supporting documents to his estate north of Munich, where he buried them somewhere in the grounds. According to Gerlich's biographer Erwin von Aretin, however, Waldburg-Zeil destroyed them during the war, fearful of what might happen should they be discovered by the Nazi authorities.
Rosenbaum informs us of an alternative version of these events, involving documents proving that Geli Raubal was indeed killed on the orders of Adolf Hitler. According to von Aretin's son, the historian Professor Karl-Ottmar Freiherr von Aretin, his father gave the documents to his cousin, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Guttenberg, co-owner of the Munchener Neueste Nachrichten, who put them in a safe-deposit box in Switzerland. Guttenberg was killed following his involvement in the attempted coup against Hitler on 20 July 1944. For the sake of security, he had not told anyone the number of the safe- deposit-box account.Baker Invisible Eagle
Built as the home of a gifted students' foundation and has also housed the Bavarian Landtag (state parliament) since 1949 by leading architect Friedrich Bürklein, the building is situated on the bank of river Isar before the Maximilian Bridge and marks the eastern end of the Maximilianstrasse, one of Munich's royal avenues which is framed by neo-Gothic palaces influenced by the English Perpendicular style. Due to statical problems the construction was only completed in 1874 and the façade of the Maximilianeum which was originally planned also in neo-Gothic style had to be altered in renaissance style under the influence of Gottfried Semper. The façade was decorated with arches, columns, mosaics and niches filled with busts. The building was extended on its back for new parliament offices, several modern wings were added in 1958, 1964, 1992 and again in 2012.
Research on eugenics was done primarily at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem (directed by Eugen Fischer from 1927, its founding, to 1942, and by Otmar von Verschuer from 1942 to 1945) and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt (directed by Ernst Riidin) in Munich.
SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Franz Hippler was the most eager and unscrupulous among Goebbels's film experts who knew how to arrange the most disparate clips and most antagonistic arguments into a triumph of dialectical destructiveness. It was he who put together the morally most perfidious, intellectually most under handed, and ideologically most perverse mishmash that has ever been produced. This was Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), made in 1940. Only human scum could bring out such a diabolical work. Together with Jud Süß (1940) and Die Rothschilds (1940), as well as the book by Hans Dieboro with the same title. Der ewige Jude raised the pogrom mood against the Jews to boiling point. These films and a number of other books were calculated to justify in advance the mass murder of the European Jews.
Der ewige Jude is certainly the "hate" picture of all time, and one of the great examples of the way in which the film medium can be used as a propaganda tool far greater than the printed or spoken word alone. Fortunately, the film is inaccessible beyond a few film archives where it is kept in the restricted division usually re- served for pornography, which is exactly the genre to which this film belongs.
The Nazi-era eagle and arms of Munich remain on the façade below the astronomical clock. In the post-war period, these conflicts were stylised into a confrontation with National Socialism in general. Those areas in which the Deutsches Museum had sought to work with the regime were forgotten and repressed. Following the war the museum had to be closed for repairs and temporary tenants, such as the College of Technology and the Post Office used museum space as their own buildings were being reconstructed. The Museum was also home to the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews, representing Jewish displaced persons in the American Zone of Germany after the war.
Of the museum itself, Hitler had remarked June 13, 1943 that
One of the great attractions of the Deutsches Museum in Munich is the presence of a large number of perfectly constructed working models, which visitors can manipulate themselves. It is not just by chance that so many of the young people of the inland town of Munich have answered the call of the sea.(318) Hitler's Table Talk
The eagles that are allowed to continue to adorn the building were designed by Munich artist Kurt Schmid Ehmen who had specialised in reichsadlers and swastikas (such as those found at the "Ehrenmal" der Feldherrnhalle and Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg and the Reich Chancellery in Berlin).
Nazi representatives in full regalia on April 17, 1944 to mark the funeral of Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria. The funeral, held in the cavernous Kongresssaal of Munich's Deutsches Museum, featured the trappings and symbols of the party: the swastika draped over the coffin, the standards emblazoned with Deutschland Erwache, and the Nazi eagle and the site today during MUNOM 2017.
that the many sad events which this bridge had been made to suffer in the past would not be repeated in future and that the train twelve years before would hopefully be the last dismal incident on this bridge.At the site before the Ludwigsbrücke where Julius Streicher is shown leading the Blutfahne held by Jakob Grimminger.
It was here where Gregor Strasser’s SA unit held the bridge as Hitler continued on towards the town centre until the news of the fiasco reached them, informing them that Ludendorff was dead and Hitler wounded and captured. Strasser displayed some of the experience he had gained in the war. Not wishing to become a martyr of a failed cause, he ordered his men into a tactical retreat as his column marched into the direction of the Eastern railway station, when, passing a stretch of woodland, they met a Munich SA detachment smashing their rifles against the trees. Strasser immediately ordered them to stop, telling them the guns would find their use another day. When the station came into sight, they closed ranks, seized a train, and vanished.
Here, for the first time, the Putschists were coming into contact with a large government force with a clear mission that it was in a position to execute. However, having gained false confidence at the Ludwigsbrücke, they had no intention of halting for anyone. Dr. Weber, the leader of Oberland, said flatly at the Hitler Trial:Looking the other way towards the Congress Hall. According to William Shirer in Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich (67),
Naturally we intended to march through the city and after the encounter at the Ludwigsbrücke we did not even consider (the possibility) of being halted by the Landespolizei. There the Landespolizei had given way after the merest pretence of resistance in that they stepped aside. We assumed that this would hap pen elsewhere. Aside from the distortion of what had happened at the bridge, Weber's statement indicates clearly the readiness of the Putschists to defy the authorities and their continued confidence that this could be done with impunity.
Harold J. Gordon (359-360) Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch
it was here on the Ludwig Bridge, which leads over the River Isar toward the centre of the city, stood a detachment of armed police barring the route. Goering sprang forward and, addressing the police commander, threatened to shoot a number of hostages he said he had in the rear of his column if the police fired on his men. During the night Hess and others had rounded up a number of hostages, including two cabinet members, for just such a contingency. Whether Goering was bluffing or not, the police commander apparently believed he was not and let the column file over the bridge unmolested.
According to William Shirer in Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich (67),
it was here on the Ludwig Bridge, which leads over the River Isar toward the centre of the city, stood a detachment of armed police barring the route. Goering sprang forward and, addressing the police commander, threatened to shoot a number of hostages he said he had in the rear of his column if the police fired on his men. During the night Hess and others had rounded up a number of hostages, including two cabinet members, for just such a contingency. Whether Goering was bluffing or not, the police commander apparently believed he was not and let the column file over the bridge unmolested.According to Hitler himself at his trial in 1924,
On Ludendorff’s right side Dr. Weber marched, on his left, I and [Max von] Scheubner-Richter and the other gentlemen. We were permitted to pass by the cordon of troops blocking the Ludwig Bridge. They were deeply moved; among them were men who wept bitter tears. People who had attached themselves to the columns yelled from the rear that the men should be knocked down. We yelled that there was no reason to harm these people. We marched on to the Marienplatz. The rifles were not loaded. The enthusiasm was indescribable. I had to tell myself: The people are behind us, they no longer can be consoled by ridiculous resolutions. The Volk want a reckoning with the November criminals, as far as it still has a sense of honour and human dignity and not for slavery. In front of the Royal Residence a weak police cordon let us pass through. Then there was a short hesitation in front, and a shot was fired. I had the impression that it was no pistol shot but a rifle or carbine bullet. Shortly afterwards a volley was fired. I had the feeling that a bullet struck in my left side. Scheubner-Richter fell, I with him. At this occasion my arm was dislocated and I suffered another injury while falling. I only was down for a few seconds and tried at once to get up.
Stackelberg & Winkle (86) The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts
Miller was the target of public polemic accusations by the Nazi faction and especially from Hermann Esser, Nazi propaganda leader. After the above-mentioned City Council meeting, the National Socialists published newspaper articles in which they accused Miller of lacking patriotism; the fact that not a few Bismarck was considered a symbol against the republican order, was downplayed. In particular, the Miller opponents tried to intervene on the Munich City Council, as the city co-financed the museum. Due to the carefully balanced organizational structure, however, these efforts were unsuccessful. The city council just passed a resolution that the monument should be placed in front of the museum. Since March 1931, the question has been discussed in public. The subject received additional explosive force when the sculptor Fritz Behn, who had designed the statue, set it up in surreptitiously on the morning of September 12, 1933, and laid a wreath.
Theresienwiese, this was the site of one of Hitler's early showdowns against the ruling powers which
came on May 1, 1923, the traditional International Workers' Day. Informed that Communists and Socialists planned big rallies for May Day, Hitler and the Nazis decided to thwart and attack them. Drawing their weapons out of the Reichswehr arsenal-where they had been stored under special arrangement with the army-Hitler's men assembled on Theresa's Meadow, the massive field where the Octoberfest is held every year. But the Nazis were kept a great distance from their leftist adversaries and were eventually surrounded by police and the Reichswehr. Along with their right-wing allies, Hitler's men were forced to stand down and return their weapons to the Reichswehr armoury. This was ... a nasty propaganda defeat for Hitler- the only one he would suffer in the months leading up to his putsch. Nursing his wounds, Hitler withdrew for several weeks to his preferred Alpine retreat, Berchtesgaden, near the Austrian border.This is of course has traditionally been the site of Munich's Oktoberfest which during the Third Reich became thoroughly Nazified. From the beginning in 1933, the Nazis set the price for beer to ninety pfennigs. In addition, the Nazi-dominated city council waived the previously mandatory opening meal of the councillors. Instead there was an "unemployment benefit" every year with fried meat and Oktoberfest measure. Hitler, who is said to have been a strict teetotaler, never showed up at Oktoberfest. However, the fact that the dictator also knew about the Oktoberfest's propagandistic value is evidenced by a "Führer" order from 1938 in which he swarned against any possible redesign of the Theresienwiese, rejecting earlier plans by Nazi architects who planned to demolish the Hall of Fame and Bavaria. According to the dictator, the Oktoberfest was "something sacred for the people of Munich, an old tradition is associated with it and it must not be touched". Other top Nazis did use Oktoberfest to show their alleged closeness to the people; after first publicly having the fish, Hermann Göring laid siege to the crowd and distributed pretzels and chocolate hearts to cheering children in a beer tent. Goebbels too attended as one of the invited guests.Peter Ross Range, 1924: The Year That Made Hitler
After the first Oktoberfest Sunday in 1935, when a huge pageant meandered through Munich city centre on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the Oktoberfest, the Völkische Beobachter remaked on a "pageant that became the triumphal procession of the fraternization of peasants and townspeople" in which the Hitler Youth marched "welcomed by lively calls". The motto that year, "Proud City - Happy Country," demonstrated the alleged overcoming of the classes.
The site directly after the war and today |
Souvenirs added swastikas to their depictions of the Münchner Kindl (Munich Child), the festival’s trademark. By 1936, swastika flags had replaced the traditional Bavarian blue and white banners. In 1938, even the festival’s name had changed. It was now called the Greater German Folk Festival in honour of Austria’s recent ‘return’ to the Reich. Throughout Germany, Fasching (Mardi Gras) parades were similarly infused with Nazism, nowhere more so than in Cologne, home of the renowned Karneval. While the regime dictated that carnival organizers had to make sure a ‘happy mood’ reigned, the most menacing face of Nazism was readily apparent: floats carrying anti-Semitic slogans and stereotypical representations of Jews, such as ‘Deviserich’, the Jewish banker, joined the parade from 1935 onwards.
Semmens (65) Seeing Hitler's Germany- Tourism in the Third Reich
More recently, Oktoberfest was the target for a right-wing terrorist attack when, on September 26, 1980, twelve people were killed and 211 injured by the explosion of an improvised explosive device at the main entrance. The attack remains the second-deadliest in Germany since the war and was attributed to the right-wing extremist and geology student Gundolf Köhler who was killed while placing the bomb; however, doubts remain as to whether he acted alone by many, including local politicians, victims and various journalists and attorneys given the known connections between Köhler and the Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, a known neo-Nazi militia, which were all but ignored in the final report. Additionally, numerous accounts of the attack itself mentioned Köhler speaking to two individuals wearing olive parkas immediately prior to the explosion as well as statements that a second individual was seen with Köhler looking into the plastic bag that the IED was believed to be in.The last remaining pieces of evidence from the attack such as shrapnel from the IED were disposed of in 1997, causing further controversy due to the political background of the attack and the lingering questions surrounding the official investigation.
NSDAP Publishing House
an anti-Semitic gossip sheet which appeared twice a week. Exactly where the sixty thousand marks for its purchase came from was a secret which Hitler kept well, but it is known that Eckart and Roehm persuaded Major General Ritter von Epp, Roehm’s commanding officer in the Reichswehr and himself a member of the party, to raise the sum. Most likely it came from Army secret funds. At the beginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus giving Hitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper in which to preach the party’s gospels.The headquarters of the publishing house was a poorly representative, three-story building at Thierschstrasse 11 near Munich's Isartorplatz. In 1918 the sheet became the property of the Thule Society. The “ völkisch ” anti-Semite Rudolf von Sebottendorfacquired the publisher's license for the newspaper from his widow Friederike Eher for 5,000 Reichsmarks and from July 1918 also took over the editing. On September 14, 1918, Sebottendorff's wealthy friend Käthe Bierbaumer from Freiburg im Breisgau was entered in the commercial register as the owner of the Franz Eher Nachf publishing house and on September 30, 1919, it became the "Franz Eher Successor GmbH". In August 1919, the name was changed to Völkischer Beobachter. With a print run of around 7,000 copies, the paper accumulated debts of 250,000 marks by the end of 1920 and was facing bankruptcy. On December 17, 1920, the Nazis acquired the then ailing paper for 120,000 marks. The following day, the VB publicly operated as the Nazis' party newspaper, financed through the mediation of the anti-Semitic writer Dietrich Eckart by Major General Franz Ritter von Epp , who provided a loan of 60,000 marks, apparently from a secret fund of the Reichswehr to support right-wing extremist organizations.
Shirer (42) Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
At the site of the building today. Hitler himself wrote numerous articles up to 1922, but was later only rarely active as an author. He remained editor until April 30, 1933. The circulation increased enormously with the success of the National Socialist movement, in 1931 it reached over 120,000, exceeded the million mark in 1941 and is said to have amounted to 1.7 million copies in 1944. From February 1941, the paper gave up the Fraktur typeface that had been generally used in Germany up to that point and was set entirely in the modern antiqua, which the Nazis described as "tasteful and clear" and which should correspond to the "world status of the Reich" claimed by the propaganda. A few days before the German surrender , the Völkischer Beobachter ceased its publication at the end of April 1945. The last edition of April 30, 1945 was no longer delivered. Its assets were transferred after the war to the Bavarian State and the publishing house was liquidated in 1952.
1933 edition of Mein Kampf lent me by a student's mother. Her own grandfather had actually read the first book and I'd love to know what the exclamation marks and underlined passages refer to. He had been denied a promotion in a letter I saw due to his un-national socialist beliefs.
Bergverlag Rudolf Rother
Atelier Josef Thorak
In 1937, Hitler commissioned the leading Nazi architect Albert Speer to plan the construction of a studio for the sculptor Josef Thorak, who was considered one of the most important sculptors of National Socialism. The construction costs were borne by the Bavarian financial administration. The building was built in Baldham between 1938 and 1941 and its executive architect was Josef Schatz. The building always remained the property of the state, which is why it was also called the state studio. Here, Thorak worked on monumental, often larger-than-life sculptures which included, among other things, work for the Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally Grounds, the Monument to Work (a stone-turning group dedicated to the Reichsautobahn), a larger-than-life bust of Hitler, as well as statues of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Matthias Grünewald, Nicholas Copernicus and Frederick the Great. Horses were kept as models for his horse sculptures in an outbuilding. In March 1942, Goebbels and the Italian Minister of Popular Culture Alessandro Pavolini visited the sculptor here in his studio. In 1943, Leni Riefenstahl produced the short documentary Josef Thorak, Workshop and Work , directed by Arnold Fanck and Hans Cürlis, which shows Thorak's studio and some of his works. There are various sources that discuss the use of forced labor in and at the Thorak studio. The Dutch journalist Nico Rost reported in his diary Goethe in Dachau from the Dachau concentration camp in October 1944 about two fellow prisoners whom Thorak had requested as forced labourers for "his studio near Garmisch-Partenkirchen " ("They'll send me immediately, at the cheapest price , two skilled sculptors!”). However, the two prisoners were ultimately not sent to Thorak, but were transferred to other concentration camps. According to the historian Johannes Hofinger, Thorak's request meant the studio in Baldham. In response to Thorak's acquittal before the Munich tribunal in 1949, the tribunal received a submission from Max R., according to whose statement he "had to work as a political prisoner with others from the Dachau concentration camp in Thorak's Park in front of the studio." There was also a railway siding on the site for transporting sculptures, which was built by forced labourers. The building, which allowed for sculptures up to 17 metres in height to be produced from one piece, was was created by Albert Speer and now serves as a branch of the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection. Speer would later write how Thorak was "more or less my sculptor, who frequently designed statues and reliefs for my buildings" and "who created the group of figures for the German pavilion at the Paris World's Fair." In fact, Breker only used the atelier sporadically or for a short period of time as increasing bombings and associated damage to the building made its use impossible. Instead, Breker’s main workplace was Schloss Jäckelsbruch, a manor Hitler personally presented to him on the occasion of his fortieth birthday in 1940.
Located just behind a children's playground today. The area is now completely fenced in and generally not freely accessible. Whilst today the entrance is from Fichtenstraße to the south, in Thorak's time it was from the Waldstraße to the north. Massive stone pillars on the forest road, which delimit a gate entrance, are still a reminder of this. The building is not open to the public, but the opening of a museum or permanent exhibition has been discussed several times.
Hitler visited Thorak’s Berlin studio in 1936 and the two men discussed “great projects.” In January 1937, Thorak wrote Adolf Wagner—a Gauleiter and the Bavarian minister of interior, education, and culture—and requested a new studio, reporting, of course, on his recent meeting with Hitler.This initiative paid off, and in October, Wagner accompanied the recently appointed professor at the Munich Academy to the lake region fifteen kilometres southeast of Munich to inspect potential sites. This led to the construction of (the first) studio at Baldham, which was paid for with state funds—a sum in excess of RM 215,000.298 The initial structure, however, was soon perceived as too small, and the following year, Hitler commissioned Albert Speer, a good friend of Thorak’s, to design another. The new atelier was so large—over four stories high—that it easily accommodated figures with heights in excess of fifty feet, as was the case for the Autobahn monument. The massive stone atelier, which postwar experts considered razing but deemed “virtually indestructible,” cost around RM 1,500,000.300 This structure reflected the usual grand patronage of the Nazi leaders, but also their typical means of proceeding: after the war, the man who owned the land used for the Thorak structures claimed that it was “earlier his family property which he had sold only under pressure.” Such considerations were of slight importance at the time, however, and amidst the construction of Speer’s building in February 1939, Thorak held a huge party (ein Richtfest) which attracted a throng of Nazi Germany’s political and cultural luminaries.
Petropoulos (265-266) The Faustian Bargain - The Art World in Nazi Germany