Eleven Minutes

All along the line there were last-minute changes. The annual meeting of the Nazi Party Old Guard--those hard, mystic, loyal, lower-middle-class men machine-gunned on the streets of Munich on Nov. 9, 1923, in Adolf Hitler's abortive bid for power--had been scheduled at the traditional hour of 8:30. At 6, the Munich radio announced, without giving a reason, that the meeting had been set ahead half an hour.

By 8, the old hands were assembled in the Buergerbraeu Keller, a low, barnlike building on Rosenheimerstrasse beyond the Deutsches Museum, and across the Isar River from Munich proper. Old friends greeted each other in the big, oblong beer hall--sanctum sanctorum of the Nazi Party, perhaps the best guarded room frequented by the best guarded man in the world. The veterans packed the balcony; pressed around the one central pillar supporting the entire ceiling; crowded to the very foot of the speaker's white rostrum. The big men--Hitler, Goeebbels, Himmler, Frick, Hess, Ley, Rosenberg, Streicher, Brueckner--were there on time (only Goering was absent, holding the fort in Berlin); so were the small fry, like Wilhelm Weber, a radio speaker, Leonhard Reindl, an office clerk, and jolly, buxom Maria Henle, the beer hall's cashier, in the old days a gay waitress who called the boys Adolf, Rudolf, Heinrich and Hermann, and often bragged about splashing beer in the faces of the best of them.

It had been announced that the evening's speech would be delivered by Herr Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess. But at 8:04, Adolf Hitler took the rostrum. Traditionally the annual beer-hall speech has been secret; but this time it was broadcast. For 57 minutes Herr Hitler let them have it (see p. 22). At 9:01 he stepped down from the rostrum and briefly passed among his followers. Usually on these occasions he has sat down to sip beer and swap yarns until wee hours, but this time he left the hall after just nine minutes. With him went every prominent Nazi in the place.

The Fuehrer stepped into his car and drove to the station, where he boarded the safest railroad car ever built, complete with steel shutters and a padded interior, said to be strong enough to withstand a mine exploding on tracks directly underneath it. At 9:30 the train pulled out.

Voelkischer Beobachter's Munich correspondent Wilhelm Kaffl later described the scene in the beer hall at that very moment: "I stood on the ramp of the gallery overlooking the room crowded with brown and green uniforms. Groups had formed here and there, laughing, talking and exchanging greetings. . . .

"Waitresses with white aprons carried away empty beer glasses. The crowd pressed toward the cloakroom and I followed, leaving many persons still in the hall. I entered a vestibule on the right of the cloakroom and handed over my coat check.

"Then [9:21, exactly eleven minutes after Adolf Hitler left] a muffled detonation and shattering glass! There were several hysterical screams. The force of the explosion hurled me against a table. A few seconds of silence and darkness; then in the dim light of a couple of bulbs which remained intact, I saw the first persons stagger through a door. They were covered with dust.

"I ran to the hall entrance with two others, but we could not make headway against the stream of persons pouring out. Before us, filling the hall, was a yellow-grey wall of dust and smoke. . . . Several wounded faltered through the door. I broke through and . . . the way into the hall was now free. I had to adjust my eyes to the dimness. Then I saw what had happened."

Someone had apparently planted a high explosive bomb within, or in the attic above, the hall's central pillar. The explosion toppled the pillar, brought the ceiling down on the assembled Nazis' heads. Seven (including Maria Henle) were killed, 63 injured. Had the Fuehrer stayed even for one glass of his special 1.0 beer, history might have taken a new course.

Promptly police went to work. Army sappers were rushed to clear away a ten-foot mass of debris. To forestall alarm or to help the search for dynamiters, blacked-out Munich was suddenly lit up. Someone started a wildfire rumor that lights meant peace: the Netherlands-Belgium offer had taken effect. Soon Germany's second hysterical false armistice was in full celebration. Police angrily cleared the streets and killed the hope.

Police Chief Heinrich Himmler announced a reward of $320,000 for information leading to apprehension of the culprits, and a private citizen added $40,000. All the world's question: who were the plotters?

Was the job pulled off, as official Germany bitterly charged, by the British secret service? Probably not. Britain's intelligence officers are bright enough to know that assassinating Hitler would only serve to glorify him as a martyr.

Was it a hoax, as the French charged, a fake accident staged and executed by Hitler's own henchmen to bring the Fuehrer close to martyrdom and thus rally waning popular support for the regime? Was it another Reichstag fire? What about the mysterious and providential changes in plan? What about the fact that not a single big-shot Nazi remained in the beer hall even though the Fuehrer's prompt departure was unforeseen? Despite these startling coincidences, this theory was hardly more credible than the German charge that Winston Churchill sank the Athenia.

Until war's end there will probably be only clues to the Buergerbraeu bombing (such as whether Heinrich Himmler's Gestapo is purged). Everyone, especially in Germany, had a guess. Two facts were glaringly clear:

1) Someone on the inside had a hand in the affair. All was far from well in self-encircled Germany last week, and in the beer-hall gathering there were old-line Nazis, bred on anti-Communist doctrine and bitter about the Russian pact; ambitious, frustrated Party chiefs; veterans still rankling over such ruthless purges as that of Ernst Roehm.

2) Germany, both official and otherwise, was frankly puzzled. Police were unwontedly vague. No concerted, planned roundup of any suspected group ensued. Arrests in Munich were numerous but unsystematic: the police, evidently not knowing whom to arrest, clapped this & that one into jail--among them two American reporters, Chicago Tribune's Ernest Pope and John Raleigh.

There were no set speeches, no previously formulated accusations. Herr Hitler's first words about the Reichstag fire were stagy, forced, phony: "Das ist das Werk der Kommunisten." (This is the work of Communists.) This time his first statement was spontaneous, slangy, more relief than calculated vindictiveness: "Glueck muss der Mensch haben." (A fellow has got to be lucky.)

Berlin papers took no consistent, officially inspired line. Most grumbled about the work of foreigners. None admitted the possibility of internal unrest, of underground revolt.* None capitalized on the martyr angle.

Whatever the answer, one of a pair of alternatives was inescapable: Either the famed German secret police made a bad slip, or somebody fairly close to Adolf Hitler wants him dead.

As if in direct answer to Nazi hopes that the narrow escape would make Adolf Hitler better loved, some Berlin hater winged a brick through the plate-glass window of Hitler's favorite, official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Herr Hitler was all dressed up in luck last week. The brick did not touch the big portrait of the Fuehrer in the window.

* This week violence was abroad in Germany: a large barracks of Adolf Hitler's Elite Guard at Konstanz, just across the border from Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, burned; 43 were killed and 60 injured in a collision of two passenger trains on a single track line near Oppeln, Prussia.

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