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

88 DER FUEHRERthe Upper Bavarian town of Traunstein, and later in the Munich infantrybarracks, where on May 2, 1919, every tenth man was stood up againstthe wall. He lived, struggled, killed, with these soldiers simply becausehe had no other place to go; no other job to do.Meanwhile, that other remnant of the vanished army, spared by fatefrom the blood-letting of the List Regiment, tried to find his way back.In the fall of 1918, Hess had passed his aviator's examination. Just as heseemed to have reached the climax of his military career, peace brokeout. Hess was neither a professional soldier like Rohm nor a manwithout home and family like Hitler, but he felt the downfall. He wasjust twenty-two years old.The consequence: Thule Society. Conspiracy. Plans for murder.Remember the club which had planned to shoot Premier Eisner, andCount Arco who had fired the shot. One day leaflets were handed out,the next day grenades were thrown. A young officer in the civil war, hetook part in the punitive expedition which overthrew the Red regime inMunich on May 2, 1919. While Tubeuf's old orderly, the gray agentprovocateur,was sending his victims to the slaughterhouse wall, Hesslay in the hospital with a bullet in his leg. They must have met in thesmall circle of armed conspirators in Munich, for everyone kneweveryone else. But an unknown in his own circle, Hitler was soinconspicuous that Hess retained no memory of him from those days.No, the war had not perished completely. There was an army that wasstill carrying it on at home, and to this army Hitler belonged. He wasnow a so-called civilian employee with the District Army Command inMunich, the authority governing all troops stationed in Bavaria. It was amilitary authority, but also far more; it was a center of that armedpolitical grouping which had turned against their own people the warlost on the battlefield, with the aim of overthrowing the new state towhich they had just pledged loyalty. We are looking for the mysteriouscircumstances that transformed the unknown prince of art, theinconspicuous gray soldier into the best known and most conspicuousfigure of this disloyal army. After the experience of poison and defeat,here is another reason: the very disloyalty of this army; an army theloftiest aim of which it was to disobey. This at last was the kind ofworld in