Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

22 DER FUEHRERthe Spanish civil war (1936) has been called a fifth column. Theconspiracy was discovered, a number of Thulists arrested; according tomartial law, they were liable to the death penalty, but the Redgovernment could not make up its mind to sentence them. In the lasthours of the collapsing regime, news came that the White troops wereshooting prisoners. Munich was embittered. In vain the armycommander, the poet Ernst Toller, intervened. A fanatical subordinate,to whom the prisoners were entrusted, had a number of them shot,among them a woman; with them a few others who had nothing to dowith the Thule Society and who had been arrested for tearing downgovernment posters and other trifling offenses. Those shot included —in view of the subsequent legend, this is not unimportant — a Jew; all inall, ten persons. It remains a hideous deed, but the fifth-columnists ofThule were only bearing the consequences of their conspiracy; it is nottrue, as Rightist propaganda later claimed, that any hostages weremurdered. In the courtyard of the Munich slaughterhouse hundreds ofvictims paid with their lives for the shooting of the Thulists. Many, ifnot most of them, were innocent. The drunken soldiery arrested, bymistake, Catholic workers, loyalists, enemies of the revolution and therepublic; they murdered twenty-one persons in a cellar by order, or atleast with the connivance, of their captain. 'The soldiers,' an eye-witnesssaid later in court, 'many in a drunken condition, tramped around on theprisoners, struck them down indiscriminately with their side-arms, andthrust about so wildly that one of the bayonets bent and the victim'sbrain splattered all over. In this way they killed fourteen more peopleand then looted the corpses. Five prisoners were severely wounded. Thecorpses looked ghastly. The nose of one had been bashed into his face,half of another's skull was missing. If one of the wounded still showedsign of life, the soldiers beat him and stabbed him. Two soldiers graspedone another around the waist and carried on an Indian dance beside thecorpses, screaming and howling.'When the White troops entered Munich, they went to the NineteenthInfantry barracks and found a body of soldiers which an eye-witnesslater called 'a wild Red rabble.' Every tenth man, chosen at random, wasstood up against the wall and shot. Only one was