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

THE ARMED INTELLECTUALS 23set aside from the very first to be spared. His position was only tooclear. When the high officers of the Munich Reichswehr fled before theradical uprising, they had left this man behind, to observe and report. Adangerous commission, requiring courage — but ugly. A few monthsprevious, this man had attracted the attention of his officers in a strangeway. 'They all noticed him,' one of them later recollected, 'because hissalutes were so punctilious as to be provocative' in those revolutionarymonths when most of the soldiers defiantly refrained from saluting atall. When the government troops stormed Munich, his comrades wantedto help defend the city; he made a speech dissuading them. Hiscomrades had suspected him of being a spy, and during the sovietregime he barely escaped arrest. Now he became the executioner. AfterMay 2 an examining commission sent hundreds of men to theslaughterhouse wall. This man soon came to the attention of thecommission, which used him as an informer. He delivered his reports inwriting and later boasted of them. 'When he was ordered before theexamining commission,' wrote one of his friends, 'his indictments cast amerciless clarity upon the unspeakable disgrace of the military treasonpracticed by the Jewish dictatorship of Munich's soviet period.' By rankthis stool-pigeon was a gefreiter (private first class); by nationality,strange to say, an Austrian. His stated profession was painter andarchitect. His name was Adolf Hitler.For these men the World War was not at an end. They did notrecognize defeat. In any case, they said, we were stabbed in the back.But we do not accept this peace, we shall not reconcile ourselves to thisrevolution. The German army fights on in Germany. Every period hasits methods. The thing for you to do is to sit down at an inn, watch thepeople, listen to them, get acquainted with them and win theirconfidence. It is a strange period of silent civil war. Two armies arefighting one another, almost unseen by the public; they are building upsecret arsenals, and the problem in this war of position is to steal theenemy's arms by bold forays. The greatest danger is that the Alliedvictors of Versailles should find out what is going on, for then theweapons will inevitably fall into their hands. Hence we must sound thepeople out, find out if they know anything about hidden arms; and ifthey do know, whether