All along the line there were last-minute changes. The annual meeting of the Nazi Party Old Guard—those hard, mystic, loyal, lower-middle-class men machine-gunned on the streets of Munich on Nov. 9, 1923, in Adolf Hitler's abortive bid for power—had been scheduled at the traditional hour of 8:30. At 6, the Munich radio announced, without giving a reason, that the meeting had been set ahead half an hour.
By 8, the old hands were assembled in the Bürgerbräu Keller, a low, barnlike building on Rosenheimerstrasse beyond the Deutsches Museum, and across the Isar River from Munich proper. Old friends greeted each other in the big, oblong beer hall—sanctum sanctorum of the Nazi Party, perhaps the best guarded room frequented by the best guarded man in the world. The veterans packed the balcony; pressed around the one central pillar supporting the entire ceiling; crowded to the very foot of the speaker's white rostrum. The big men—Hitler, Göebbels, Himmler, Frick, Hess, Ley, Rosenberg, Streicher, Brückner—were there on time (only Göring was absent, holding the fort in Berlin); so were the small fry, like Wilhelm Weber, a radio speaker, Leonhard Reindl, an office clerk, and jolly, buxom Maria Henle, the beer hall's cashier, in the old days a gay waitress who called the boys Adolf, Rudolf, Heinrich and Hermann, and often bragged about splashing beer in the faces of the best of them.
It had been announced that the evening's speech would be delivered by Herr Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess. But at 8:04, Adolf Hitler took the rostrum. Traditionally the annual beer-hall speech has been secret; but this time it was broadcast. For 57 minutes Herr Hitler let them have it (see p. 22). At 9:01 he stepped down from the rostrum and briefly passed among his followers. Usually on these occasions he has sat down to sip beer and swap yarns until wee hours, but this time he left the hall after just nine minutes. With him went every prominent Nazi in the place.
The Führer stepped into his car and drove to the station, where he boarded the safest railroad car ever built, complete with steel shutters and a padded interior, said to be strong enough to withstand a mine exploding on tracks directly underneath it. At 9:30 the train pulled out.
Völkischer Beobachter's Munich correspondent Wilhelm Kaffl later described the scene in the beer hall at that very moment: "I stood on the ramp of the gallery overlooking the room crowded with brown and green uniforms. Groups had formed here and there, laughing, talking and exchanging greetings. . . .
"Waitresses with white aprons carried away empty beer glasses. The crowd pressed toward the cloakroom and I followed, leaving many persons still in the hall. I entered a vestibule on the right of the cloakroom and handed over my coat check.
"Then [9:21, exactly eleven minutes after Adolf Hitler left] a muffled detonation and shattering glass! There were several hysterical screams. The force of the explosion hurled me against a table. A few seconds of silence and darkness; then in the dim light of a couple of bulbs which remained intact, I saw the first persons stagger through a door. They were covered with dust.