Göring had armed and enlarged the SA far beyond the
boundaries of Munich. Four years younger than Hitler, he was
still more of a drifter and adventurer than political agitator. He
would later recall the first pitched battle with the Communists
in Munich (on March , ) only for the beerhall bruises given
and received. “Boy, how those beer mugs flew!” he reminisced
twenty years later to American historian George Shuster, with-
out a trace of apology. “One nearly laid me out!”
A few days previously Berlin had advised General von
Lossow that in May the army would begin operations against the
French occupying the Ruhr. Lossow made preparations under
the code name Spring Training and informed Göring that the
SA and other “patriotic bodies” would be recruited for the cam-
paign.
Hitler was uneasy. He argued that this sequence was
wrong. “There’s no point,” he told the general, “in staging an
attack on the external enemy before the domestic political issue
has been dealt with” by which he meant disposing of the fee-
ble, “Jew-ridden” central government in Berlin.
Von Lossow paid no heed. To the aristocrats who ruled Ba-
varia, Hitler cut an unimpressive figure at this time. He was so
poor that during one Easter outing Göring was seen giving him
pocket money in fact, Göring and his new wife sank much of
their own money into the party. The two men were inseparable,
however; on April , when Hitler took the salute at the big re-
view of his troops, he stood in Göring’s new car, a twenty-five-
horsepower Mercedes-Benz , with his arm outstretched for an
hour as the thousands of SA men trooped past in uniform
(field-gray ski caps and windbreakers with swastika armbands).
“Today,” wrote Carin proudly to little Thomas von Kant-
zow in Stockholm after watching this thrilling, ominous specta-
cle: