Professor Karl Alexander con Müller wrote this retrospective account of the Munich Putsch in 1932.
Description of the Munich Putsch
On the 28th, 6,000 SA men instead of 5,000 lined up on the Marsfeld. The previous evening Hitler had dashed in his car from one meeting to another. In the ‘Löwenbräu’ I heard him speak in public for the first time. How often I had attended public meetings in this hall! But neither during the war nor during the revolution had I been met on entering by so hot a breath of hypnotic mass excitement. It was not only the special tension of these weeks, of this day. ‘Their own battle songs, their own flags, their own symbols, their own salute’, I noted down, ‘military-like stewards, a forest of bright red flags with black swastika on white ground, a strange mixture of the military and the revolutionary, of nationalist and socialist—in the audience also: mainly of the depressed middle class of every level—will it be welded together again here?’ For hours, endless booming military music; for hours, short speeches by subordinate leaders. When was he coming? Had something unexpected happened? Nobody can describe the fever that spread in this atmosphere. Suddenly there was a movement at the back entrance. Words of command. The speaker on the platform stopped in mid-sentence. Everybody jumped up, saluting. And right through the shouting crowds and the streaming flags the one they were waiting for came with his followers, walking quickly to the platform, his right arm raised stiffly. He passed by me quite close and I saw. This was a different person from the one I had met now and then in private houses; his gaunt, pale features contorted as if by inward rage, cold flames darting from his protruding eyes, which seemed to be searching out foes to be conquered. Did the crowd give him this mysterious power? Did it emanate from him to them? ‘Fanatical, hysterical romanticism with a brutal core of willpower’, I noted down. ‘The declining middle class may be carrying this man, but he is not of them; he assuredly comes from totally different depths of darkness. Is he simply using them as a jumping-off point? [ . . . ]
Source of original German text: Karl Alexander von Müller, Im Wandel einer Welt. Erinnerungen, Band Drei 1919-1932
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Weimar and Nazi Germany – Rise of the Nazi Party – Appeasement: Source Material – Source Analysis Lesson: Nazi Methods of Control – Revision Guide, Weimar and Nazi Germany