At a Nuremberg rally early in September Hitler had pro-
nounced, “In a few weeks the dice will roll!” At this rally he and
the right-wing paramilitary organization had set up the “Com-
bat League” (Kampfbund): Colonel Hermann Kriebel, who had
served on the staff of the redoubtable General Erich von
Ludendorff, took military command, and Dr. Max von Scheub-
ner-Richter, a pharmacist, was secretary general. The Combat
League united the private armies in Bavaria Göring’s SA, the
Reich War Flag (Reichskriegsflagge) headed by Ernst Röhm, and
the Highland League (Bund Oberland); by the end of Septem-
ber the latter two had agreed to obey the directives of the
SA and Adolf Hitler.
On September , in the rising economic emergency, the
Bavarian prime minister had appointed a General-
Staatskommissar with dictatorial power, and, like Hitler, this
man, Dr. Gustav von Kahr, began talking of using force to in-
stall a right-wing dictatorship in Berlin. General von Lossow was
initially dubious. But neither the general nor Kahr could afford
to hold the Nazis Hitler’s National Socialists at arm’s length
for long. When Berlin ordered Lossow to prepare to send Ba-
varian battalions to quell the Communist uprising in Saxony,
Kahr instructed General von Lossow to resume his previous
fruitful contacts with the right-wing organizations to fill the
gaps in his army.
Lossow eventually went further. He updated the opera-
tional plan called Spring Training and gave it a new code name,
Autumn Training. It shortly became clear that the enemy was
neither the French occupation force in the Ruhr nor the Com-
munists in Saxony, but Stresemann’s regime in Berlin. Kahr’s
deputy made this plain in a rabble-rousing speech to right-
wingers on October : “We don’t say ‘Let’s Dump Berlin!’ ” he