Hitler

Ludendorff, who had emerged from the shoot-out totally unscathed, gave himself up and was released on his officer’s word.
    Hitler himself was attended to by Dr Walter Schultze, chief of the Munich SA medical corps, pushed into his car, stationed nearby, and driven at speed from the scene of the action. He ended up at Hanfstaengl’s home in Uffing, near the Staffelsee, south of Munich, where the police, on the evening of 11 November, found and arrested him. While at Hanfstaengl’s – Putzi himself had taken flight to Austria –he composed the first of his ‘political testaments’, placing the party chairmanship in Rosenberg’s hands, with Amann as his deputy. Hitler, according to Hanfstaengl’s later account, based on his wife’s testimony, was desolate on arrival in Uffing. But later stories that he had to be restrained from suicide have no firm backing. He was depressed but calm, dressed in a white nightgown, his injured left arm in a sling, when the police arrived to escort him to prison in the old fortress at Landsberg am Lech, a picturesque little town some forty miles west of Munich. Thirty-nine guards were on hand to greet him in his new place of residence. Graf Arco, the killer of Kurt Eisner, the Bavarian premier murdered in February 1919, was evicted from his spacious Cell no. 7 to make room for the new, high-ranking prisoner.
    In Munich and other parts of Bavaria, the putsch fizzled out as rapidly as it had started. Hitler was finished. At least, he should have been.
    V
    Like the high-point of a dangerous fever, the crisis had passed, then rapidly subsided. The following months brought currency stabilization with the introduction of the Rentenmark, regulation of the reparations issue through the Dawes Plan (named after the American banker Charles G. Dawes, head of the committee which established in 1924 a provisional framework for the phased payment of reparations, commencing at a low level and linked to foreign loans for Germany), and the beginning of the political stabilization that marked the end of the post-war turbulence and was to last until the new economic shock-waves of the late 1920s. With Hitler in jail, the NSDAP banned, and the
völkisch
movement split into its component factions, the threat from the extreme Right lost its immediate potency.
    Sympathies with the radical Right by no means disappeared. With 33 per cent of the votes in Munich, the Völkischer Block (the largest grouping in the now fractured
völkisch
movement) was the strongest party in the city at the Landtag elections on 6 April 1924, gaining more votes than both the Socialists and Communists put together. At the Reichstag election on 4 May, the result was little different. The Völkischer Block won 28.5 per cent of the vote in Munich, 17 per cent overall in the electoral region of Upper Bavaria and Swabia, and 20.8 per cent inFranconia. But the bubble had burst. As Germany recovered and the Right remained in disarray, voters deserted the
völkisch
movement. By the second Reichstag elections of 1924, a fortnight before Hitler’s release from Landsberg, the vote for the Völkischer Block had dwindled to residual limits of 7.5 per cent in Franconia, 4.8 per cent in Upper Bavaria/Swabia, and 3.0 per cent in Lower Bavaria (compared with 10.2 per cent there eight months earlier).
    Bavaria, for all its continuing ingrained oddities, was no longer the boiling cauldron of radical Right insurgency it had been between 1920 and 1923. The paramilitary organizations had had their teeth drawn in the confrontation with the legal forces of the state. Without the support of the army, they were shown to be little more than a paper tiger. In the aftermath of the putsch, the Kampfbund organizations were dissolved, and the ‘patriotic associations’ in general had their weaponry confiscated, a ban imposed on their military exercises, and their activities greatly curtailed. The triumvirate installed by the Bavarian government as a force on the Right to contain the wilder and even more extreme nationalist paramilitaries lost power and credibility through the putsch. Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer were all ousted by early 1924. With the General Commissariat terminated, conventional cabinet government under a new Minister President, Dr Heinrich Held – the leading figure in the Catholic establishment party in Bavaria, the BVP – and with it a degree of calm, returned to Bavarian politics.
    Even now, however, the forces which had given Hitler