won’t do it until my little notebook tells me we’ve got at least a
fifty-one percent chance of pulling it off.”
One week before, Hitler had threatened not to tolerate any
further procrastination by the triumvirate. Now, on the evening
of November , he called his men together and set the ball roll-
ing. They would march on Sunday the eleventh. The next
morning, meeting with Göring and Kriebel, Hitler sketched out
the broad outline of the planned coup: Their “troops” would
seize the major towns, railroad stations, telecommunications
buildings, and city halls throughout Bavaria. It sounded so easy
that they brought forward the zero hour. Why not strike the
very next day, November , ?
The odor of revolution, faint but unmistakable, drifted
into Lossow’s office at the Army Headquarters building in
Schönfeld Strasse that afternoon, November . There were tele-
phone intercepts and police agents’ reports too.
The general’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Baron von
Berchem, told his assembled officers that Kahr was talking of
acting in fourteen days’ time, but that Lossow believed Hitler no
longer intended to wait, in which case they, the army, would
have to stop him. “He has yet to prove,” interrupted Lossow,
“that he is the German Mussolini he seems to think he is.”
The Nazi coup began to roll. That evening Kahr received
an unscheduled invitation. “On the night of November ,” he
would testify:
I learned to my surprise that the right-wing patri-
otic organizations were planning a major demonstra-
tion at the Bürgerbräu beer cellar on the eighth, and
that they were expecting me to come and make a
speech.
I was a bit queasy about this and made some in-
quiries. They told me that demand had been enor-