The topic was “The Versailles Peace Treaty and the Extra-
dition of the German Army Commanders.” Göring was much
impressed by what Hitler said. Hitler explained that no
Frenchman was likely to lose much sleep over the kind of lan-
guage talked by the other speakers at the Königsplatz demon-
stration “You’ve got to have bayonets to back up any threats!”
he exclaimed. “Down with Versailles!” he shouted.
Goddammit, thought Göring, that’s the stuff. He enlisted
in Hitler’s new party the next day.
Hitler told him he needed people just like him famous,
highly decorated in the party. For Göring, Hitler also filled a
need. Meeting Hitler, he had at last found a replacement for his
dead father, his godfather, and the kaiser.
The attraction between them was mutual. Impressed by the
fiery speech that Captain Göring delivered at the Café Neu-
mann about how officers put honor first in any conflict of
interests Hitler recalled twenty years afterward, “He’d been to
those evenings of mine several times, and I found I liked him. I
made him commander of my SA.”
At that time the Sturmabteilung, or storm detachment,
was, as Hitler was the first to admit, just a “motley rabble.” These
two thousand unemployed roughnecks had the job of steward-
ing Hitler’s meetings and disrupting his rivals’ but he had
military ambitions for the SA that went far beyond this.
The SA was only one of several semi-legal private armies
that had sprung up in the aftermath of Versailles. The Bavarian
authorities not only tolerated this but colluded with them to a
degree that becomes clear only from the three thousand closely
typed pages of the Hitler trial that followed the unsuccessful
Nazi coup of November . This bloody fiasco had its origins
in January . Since Germany was unable to pay reparations,
France and Belgium sent in their armies to occupy the rich