,” he cried, “has begun!” At that point, informed that fighting had broken out in another part of the city, Hitler rushed to that scene. His prisoners were allowed to leave, and they talked about organizing defenses against the Nazi coup. Hitler was of course furious. And he was far from finished. At about 11 o’clock on the morning of November 9--the anniversary of the founding of the German Republic in 1919--3,000 Hitler partisans again gathered outside the Brgerbrukeller. To this day, no one knows who fired the first shot. But a shot rang out, and it was followed by fusillades from both sides. Hermann Gring fell wounded in the thigh and both legs. Hitler flattened himself against the pavement; he was unhurt. General Ludenorff continued to march stolidly toward the police line, which parted to let him pass through (he was later arrested, tried and acquitted). Behind him, 16 Nazis and three policemen lay sprawled dead among the many wounded. The next year, Rhm and his band joined forces with the fledgling National Socialist Party in Adolf Hitler’s Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Himmler took part in that uprising, but he played such a minor role that he escaped arrest. The Rhm-Hitler alliance survived the Putsch, and hm’s 1,500-man band grew into the Sturmabteilung, the SA, Hitler’s brown-shirted private army, that bullied the Communists and Democrats. Hitler recruited a handful of men to act as his bodyguards and protect him from Communist toughs, other rivals, and even the S.A. if it got out of hand. This tiny group was the embryonic SS. In 1933, after the Nazi Party had taken power in Germany, increasing trouble with t...
