With Hitler’s arrival on the scene, a new phase of Rudolf Hess’s existence began. Over the next two decades the lives of Hess and Hitler would become inexorably entwined as the Nazi Party struggled to find its feet, fought for the hearts and minds of the German people, strove for success at the ballot box, and ultimately took and held power. The first and most serious hiccup to Hitler’s progression came a mere two years after Hess’s first encounter with his Führer, or the Tribune, as Hess at first called him.
In 1923 Hitler mistakenly concluded that Germany’s fragility as a democratic state led by a weak government made it ripe for a coup d’état, and he believed he could take a short-cut to power by instigating a Putsch. That Hitler, with the backing of only a small nationalist movement, took this enormous step might with hindsight seem to have been total folly. However, Hitler was a great digester of newspapers. He had developed a passion for news, for reading about politics and foreign affairs, and he could see the other strong men of Europe successfully taking power whilst Germany crumbled into economic ruin. Indeed, only the year before the man Hitler most admired, Benito Mussolini, had led his Fascists on Rome where, aged only thirty-nine, he had been placed in power by King Victor Emmanuel III.
At the beginning of 1923 Germany had defaulted on her reparations payments to France, as set down in the Versailles Treaty, and the French had invaded the Ruhr to enforce payment. Instantly Germany’s inflation rocketed out of control – soon a single postage stamp would cost ten thousand marks. Hitler must have thought the time was ripe to do away with the old order, and took the bold step of attempting to usurp power before events took the initiative away from him.
Hitler’s second-in-command for the Putsch was a powerful force within the Nazi Party, former flying ace Hermann Göring, who led the Sturmabteilung (SA) or Storm Troopers.* Hess too had an important role, for whilst he officially led only the student wing of the SA, Hitler by now relied heavily on him, giving him ‘special orders’ to capture key members of Bavaria’s government, who would be attending a political gathering at Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller. Hess would later recall that his meeting with Hitler just prior to the coup attempt had ended with ‘a solemn handclasp … and we parted until evening’.14
That evening, Thursday, 8 November 1923, saw an extraordinary scene, even by German standards of the 1920s, as a sedate political meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller was interrupted by machine-gun-toting, steel-helmeted SA men, led by a fanatical individual in a long black overcoat – Adolf Hitler.
After bursting in, Hitler leapt up onto a chair, fired his pistol into the air, and as the speaker on the platform subsided into shocked silence, brazenly declared: A ‘national revolution in Munich has just broken out.’ To which he added untruthfully, ‘the whole city is at this moment occupied by our troops. This hall is surrounded by six hundred men.’15
At this point Hess began picking out the politicians he wished to take into custody, taking them from their seats and ushering them from the hall to be sent away under armed guard to the home of a Nazi sympathiser, where they were to be held overnight.
In 1923, however, the thirty-four-year-old Adolf Hitler was still a novice at the taking and holding of power, and he quickly lost control of the situation. Within the Bürgerbräukeller a wave of patriotic anthem-singing, Nazi saluting and volatile speeches on everything from the incompetence of the Social Democrats to the evils of Communism took the initiative away from Hitler, and he failed to consolidate his position by sending his men to take over the key buildings and services of the city. By the following morning Hitler’s Putsch lay in disarray, and it was at the Bürgerbräukeller that the Times correspondent in Munich found him still: ‘a little man … unshaven with disorderly hair, and so hoarse that he could hardly speak’.16
During the course of the night, Hitler’s failure to consolidate his position had been surpassed in naïveté by Göring, who, after eliciting promises from the captured Ministers (as officers and gentlemen) that they would not act against the Putsch, released all his leading prisoners. However, much to Göring’s surprised consternation, and Hitler’s absolute fury, they discovered that as soon as the politicians had been released, they promptly summoned the army to aid them in putting down the attempted coup. The final act of this fiasco was a gun-battle in central Munich that would soon enter Nazi folklore: fourteen Nazis died, Goring was wounded, and Hitler dislocated his shoulder when he tripped over and someone fell on top of him.
In the hours following the shoot-out, Hitler’s sense of self-preservation led him to find sanctuary with Karl and Martha Haushofer in their flat on Kolbergerstrasse, where he hid out for some hours. During this time Hitler and Karl Haushofer undoubtedly discussed what had occurred, what had gone wrong, and what would now ensue, for by 1923 Karl Haushofer had become important to both Hess and Hitler – the sage old expert on politics, nationalism and German ethnicity regularly gave the two up-and-coming politicians private lectures and political tutoring.
One of the significant facts about the 1923 Munich Putsch is that it marked a watershed in the Hess-Hitler relationship. Hess would come to prominence as the loyal Nazi who followed his Führer to Landsberg prison, near Munich, for a year of confinement after the failed Putsch,* during which time he acted as Hitler’s secretary whilst he wrote his vitriolic book on political ideology, Mein Kampf.
While they were incarcerated at Landsberg, Hitler and Hess were extensively tutored by Professor Karl Haushofer. Indeed, many of Haushofer’s geopolitical theories on Lebensraum, German ethnicity and nationhood, became adopted as Hitlerisms in Mein Kampf. In effect, Hitler was quite literally a captive audience to Hess and his political guru Karl Haushofer, receiving tutorials on the European balance of power, the distribution of peoples, ethnicity, colonies and nationalism.
Hess’s importance to Hitler at this time should not be underestimated. Their long conversations were not between Führer and obedient disciple, but rather between two close friends and political colleagues, and set the tone for Hitler’s future reliance on his loyal friend. In private they were not ‘Mein Führer’ and ‘Hess’, but ‘Wolf’ (Hitler) and ‘Rudi’ (Hess); often seated with them in their enforced seclusion – a tight-knit political commune in a sea of criminality – was Karl Haushofer.
At the end of the Second World War Haushofer would resolutely deny that he had made any contributions to Mein Kampf. However, during the 1930s he was not nearly so reticent. Deep within the microfilmed records of America’s National Archive in Washington DC are numerous Haushofer letters from the 1920s and thirties, in which the extent to which his theories influenced Mein Kampf is not concealed. Indeed, even in 1939, between a letter to the head of the Volksdeutsche Mitelstelle (German Racial Assistance Office), or VOMI, and a report on the exploitable resources of Poland, reposes a nine-point statement by Haushofer enumerating his credentials and his importance to the Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland (the Committee for Germanism Abroad), known as the VDA, and listing amongst the accomplishments he was proud of his contributions to Hitler’s thinking, which appeared in Mein Kampf.17
Rudolf Hess’s input into Mein Kampf was not insubstantial either. During Professor Haushofer’s interrogation by American Intelligence in 1945, he was asked: ‘Isn’t it true that Hess collaborated with Hitler in writing Mein Kampf?’ The by now very elderly Haushofer replied unhesitatingly: ‘As far as I know Hess actually dictated many chapters in that book.’18
Hess was very much Professor Haushofer’s protégé, and as such had a keen understanding of the theories behind Lebensraum, the distribution of ethnic Germanic peoples across central Europe, and how this ethnicity could be mobilised in the future to create a Greater Germany and Reich.
Haushofer’s original position had been that Germany’s living space should stretch from the Baltic to the Pacific. Hitler, however, was more circumspect, and advanced the view that if Germany were to conquer the east, it should initially aim to occupy only western Russia, using the Ural Mountains as a natural buffer between the Reich and Asia. This territory, Hitler proposed, would take Germany a century to exploit. In the summer