The Munich Hofbrauhaus reminded me of my school dining hall. Rows and rows of wooden tables and benches, each big enough to accommodate 8 to 10 people. On entering the place there were no empty tables so Chris and I spotted a couple of vacant seats at the end of a bench and politely asked those already sat there if we might join them.
The chap opposite was on his own and eventually he introduced himself as Martin, a travelling salesman from Manchester whose work took him all over the world.
We chatted for a while about the usual topics - what we were doing in Munich and football. Then Martin introduced a topic I had not been expecting.
'This is where it all began' he said. 'Hitler and his cronies planned the Third Reich in this place. They drank beer at these very tables.'
Up to this point I had not given much thought to the rise of Nazism and I was totally unaware of the pivotal role that the City of Munich had played in the rise of the Third Reich.
Over the course of the weekend I realised that it was impossible to ignore the events that had taken place in Munich as my feeble knowledge of history was improved by the tour guide Sonja on the free walking tour of the city and later during our visit to the former concentration camp at Dachau.
A series of political rallies and meetings in the beer halls of Munich in 1920 led to the creation of the German Workers Party, later changed by Hitler to the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), or Nazi for short. In April 1921 in Munich Hitler became the leader (Führer) of the Nazi Party.
April 1921 was also the time when the victorious nations of World War One, notably England and France, presented Germany with the bill for war reparations as agreed under The Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The cost was assessed as $33.5 billion.
The German government responded by printing more money and consequently created an unprecedented level of hyper-inflation. Before the war reparations were announced 1 US Dollar was the equivalent of 4 German Marks. By November 1923 it took an astonishing 4,000,000,000 marks to buy 1 dollar.
Hitler's first grab for power came on the evening of November 8th and the morning of November 9th, 1923 in Munich. A mesmeric speaker he brought hope and a promise of change to a country in chaos. Of course, he did not openly disclose his true intentions and manifesto.
Growing support gave him the confidence to kidnap leaders of the Bavarian government in what became known as The Beer Hall Putsch. His plan was to get these leaders to support him and become part of his new government. Threatened at gunpoint, the three kidnapped leaders feigned support for Hitler and he made the fatal error of leaving them whilst he organised his storm troopers elsewhere in Munich. The three leaders managed to slip away and next day Hitler, Göring, Himmler and a World War I military hero called Ludendorf marched with 3,000 Nazis on the centre of Munich.
The march eventually reached a police blockade and shots rang out. 16 Nazis and 3 police officers were killed (the original spin-doctor, Goebbels, later re-wrote history to say that the 3 police officers were martyrs who had died whilst trying to flee the police lines to join the Nazis). Hitler's body guard saved his life by shielding him with his body and taking 14 bullets (he lived). Hitler withdrew from the melee and ran away.
Thus ended Hitler's first attempt at seizing power. It would be 10 years before he finally achieved his ambition.
On the walking tour Sonja showed us where the fighting had taken place, near the Odeonplatz. When the Nazis came to power they erected a plaque to the 19 (including the 3 police officers) martyrs of the failed take over. Everyone who passed had to give a Nazi salute. Naturally, people sought to avoid the place and a nearby street now has golden paving to commemorate the fact that people would duck down it to avoid the Nazi memorial.
When the Nazis eventually came to power they secured only 37% of the vote. Hitler became the German Chancellor on 30th January 1933. Just 27 days later he had the excuse he needed to launch his dictatorship.
On February 27th the Reichstag Building in Berlin was the subject of an arson attack. To this day it is not clear exactly what happened but the communists were blamed. In response Hitler immediately had legislation passed that took away all civil liberties.
Hitler's storm troopers began to round up the communists. The dissidents had to be housed somewhere. In March 1933 Dachau, the concentration camp on the outskirts of Munich opened its gates for the first time.
By coincidence, luck or serendipity it was Sonja, our guide from the free tour, who was in Marienplatz on our last day in Munich to take us on the tour of Dachau.
In her early 30's, this blonde, attractive and intelligent student from Florida once more passed on her historical knowledge with a passion. Not surprising, given that her father was born in Germany in 1942 and sees himself as American, ashamed to be classed as German.
A train journey and a bus ride took us out to Dachau where Sonja explained that this was never a death camp, not like Auschwitz. Dachau was a work camp and between 1933 and 1938 it housed political prisoners.
On November 9th 1938 another event that centred on Munich took place that as to swell the numbers detained in Dachau and set the scene for one of the darkest events in history.
On this night Hitler was in Munich celebrating the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. Whilst there he received news of the murder by shooting of Ernest vom Rath, a German Embassy official, by a young Jew named Herschel Grynszpan. Hitler and his cohorts seized this event as an opportunity to begin their wholesale persecution of the Jewish People and the Kristallnacht, or night of the broken glass began. This involved the mass arrests of Jews and destruction of their property and synagogues. 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, 11,911 of them being sent to Dachau.
We passed into the concentration camp through the iron gates that bear the words 'Arbeit Macht Frei' - 'Work will set you free'. Someone once asked Sonja if that was some kind of ironic joke. The answer is it wasn't. Dachau was originally built to re-educate people and turn them into useful members of the Reich. During its early years some of the political prisoners were actually released when their sentences were deemed to have been served.
From 1938 Dachau became a model for the other concentration camps, more than 1500 of them. Dachau had a sizeable training wing to allow German officers to learn how to control and break the spirit of the inmates.
Touring the camp two things became apparent to me. The first was Sonja's passion for enabling those on her tour to understand what went on here. The two most chilling areas were the cell block where prisoners were tortured and murdered and the gas chamber and crematorium. No one knows for sure how many died here. It is estimated at about 48,000 people. When the American liberators arrived they found bodies stacked up in the room adjacent to the incinerators - too numerous for the crematorium to deal with.
Sonja refused to enter either of these areas for fear of becoming de-sensitised to the horror of it all.
By contrast, what also became apparent to me was my own lack of emotion. I don't mean I didn't feel sad or was unmoved by what I saw and learned, but I wasn't moved to tears. I think that after the poverty of Africa and the horrors of the genocide memorial in Kigali maybe I have started to become slightly de-sensitised myself.
The final part of the tour was where Sonja became really passionate about her subject. This was the memorial to the dead and the epic words 'Never again'.
It is those words that so enrage Sonja. She turned to the group and said:
'This isn't just about the history of Germany, this is about the history of mankind. It's wrong to think that it stopped in 1945. Since then there have been genocides, including Cambodia in the 1970's and in 1994 in Rwanda. The United Nations introduced the term 'ethnic cleansing' to describe what happened in Bosnia so they could claim that there had been no more genocides in Europe since 1945.
'My own government detains people without trial and tortures them in Guantanamo Bay. It is wrong to believe we have learned from our mistakes, we haven't.'
By coincidence the book I am reading at the moment is Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by that inveterate traveller, Paul Theroux. Speaking about his visit to the killing fields of Cambodia he clearly shares Sonja's sentiment. I'll leave you with his words:
'The traveller's conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign to be encountered on some pinched and parochial backwater. The traveller journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And then, to his shame, he realises that they are identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by his own government. As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to he fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere - the truer shout is not 'Never again' but 'Again and again.'
Acknowledgements:
www.thehistoryplace.com
