Karl Mayr

Karl Mayr was a Bavarian general staff officer who, for more than a year in 1919–1920, was the superior of Adolf Hitler. As head of the propaganda department of the Reichswehr command in Bavaria, he sent Hitler on anti-Bolshevik courses, made him an army agitator and dispatched him to a meeting of the small German Workers’ Party, from which the NSDAP grew. This is why historians call him one of the “midwives” of Hitler’s political career. The rest of his life took a surprising turn, however: Mayr broke with the far right, joined the Social Democrats, helped to found the republican Reichsbanner organisation and fought the Nazis with his pen. After Hitler came to power he fled to France; in 1940 he fell into the hands of the Gestapo, and he died in Buchenwald concentration camp three months before the end of the war.

An officer of the Bavarian army

He was born on 5 January 1883 in Mindelheim in Bavarian Swabia, the son of Albert Mayr, a judge of the higher regional court. In 1901 he passed his school-leaving examinations at the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich and on 14 July that year joined the 1st Infantry Regiment “King” of the Bavarian army as an officer cadet. After war school he was commissioned Leutnant in 1903, and in 1909 became regimental adjutant. In 1913 he began studying at the Bavarian War Academy, which trained general staff officers, but the outbreak of war in 1914 cut his studies short after the first year.

During the war he fought first in Lorraine and in France. In 1915 he moved to the staff of the 1st Jäger Brigade and on 1 June 1915 was promoted to Hauptmann (captain). From September 1916 to January 1918 he was a staff officer in the Alpine Corps, an elite formation that fought in Romania and Italy, among other places. In March 1918 he took command of the 1st Jäger Battalion, and in July he was sent to the German military mission in the Ottoman Empire. From 20 July to 15 October 1918 he served with the Ottoman Army Group East, which was fighting in the Caucasus.

Revolution and the Soviet Republic

On his return to Munich he found Bavaria in revolution. From December 1918 he served briefly in the Bavarian war ministry and as a company commander in his old regiment, and in February 1919 he was placed on leave. After the assassination of the premier Kurt Eisner and the proclamation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919, he worked, according to his German biographers, for the nationalist Thule Society: he recruited volunteers for the Freikorps and gathered intelligence on the situation in Red Munich. At the turn of April and May government troops and the Freikorps took the city, and on 10 May 1919 a provisional Reichswehr was formed in Bavaria.

From 30 May 1919 Mayr headed the Ib/P propaganda department at the headquarters of Gruppenkommando 4 under Generalmajor Arnold von Möhl (PL). His task was to “immunise” against Bolshevism soldiers many of whom had only recently been electing soldiers’ councils. The department appointed “men of confidence” in the units, ran courses for officers and men, kept watch on the activities of political parties in Munich and supported – financially as well – groups, publishers and organisations it considered useful. Mayr kept in touch with people of wildly differing views, from antisemitic nationalists to Bavarian separatists, and was an influential figure in these circles.

Hitler’s superior

Mayr met Hitler in May 1919. The Gefreiter (lance corporal) of the 2nd Infantry Regiment, who wanted to stay in the army as long as possible, was just then testifying against his comrades from the soldiers’ council of the Soviet Republic period and was regarded by the new authorities as a man who could be trusted. Mayr put him on the list of men who were to carry out propaganda work in the army. Older studies say that he immediately recruited him as an informer. More recent research, however, indicates that the secret network of agents was run by another section of the command, and that Hitler was an agitator rather than a spy.

Mayr’s department organised “anti-Bolshevik courses” in the buildings of Munich University. The first began on 5 June 1919. The lecturers were nationalist academics and writers, among them the historian Karl Alexander von Müller, Mayr’s school friend, and the engineer Gottfried Feder, who preached the struggle against “interest slavery”. Mayr enabled Hitler to attend the third course, from 10 to 19 July 1919. On 22 July he assigned him to a 26-man team of agitators that gave talks at the Lechfeld army camp near Augsburg on 20–24 August. There Hitler proved the most gifted speaker of the team, and Mayr began to treat him as a trusted associate. In September he told him to answer a letter from one of the course participants, Adolf Gemlich, who had asked about the “Jewish question”. The reply of 16 September 1919, in which Hitler called for an “antisemitism of reason” and the “removal of the Jews altogether”, is his first surviving political text. In a covering letter of 17 September Mayr assured Gemlich that he fully agreed with Hitler’s arguments. His only reservation concerned Hitler’s treatment of the question of interest, on which he referred Gemlich to Feder’s writings, since – as he wrote – he supported Feder against the resistance of very influential circles.

Mayr’s department sent its men to the meetings of the many new parties in Munich. It was in this capacity that on 12 September 1919 Hitler went to a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in the Sterneckerbräu beer hall, and a few days later he joined it. Mayr later claimed that it was he who had ordered Hitler to join the party and help it grow, and even that the order had come from General Erich Ludendorff. No documents confirm the latter version, and Hitler’s reports on the DAP have never been found. What is certain is that Hitler was active in the party with the knowledge and consent of his superiors, even though soldiers were not allowed to belong to political parties, and that Mayr’s department helped the party financially. In March 1920, during the Kapp–Lüttwitz Putsch, Mayr sent Hitler, the writer Dietrich Eckart and the airman Robert von Greim to Berlin to observe events at close quarters. By the time they arrived, the putsch was already collapsing.

From nationalist to republican

On 8 July 1920 Mayr left the army at his own request with the rank of Major. According to his German biographers, he was at the time entangled in the plans of Bavarian separatists gathered around the Bavarian People’s Party politician Georg Heim and Count Karl von Bothmer, but in the course of 1920 he turned away from them and disclosed material about their activities. He briefly joined the NSDAP and wrote on foreign policy for the party daily, the Völkischer Beobachter, but left the party in March 1921. In the autumn of that year he broke with the nationalist “patriotic associations” and Ludendorff’s circle, and began passing material compromising them to the authorities and to the Social Democratic newspaper Münchener Post. In 1923 he testified as a prosecution witness in the trial of Bavarian separatists who had maintained contacts with a French officer. From then on the right regarded him as a traitor.

In the mid-1920s Mayr joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (German studies give the year as 1925, some sources as 1923). As early as 1923 he was among the founders of the Munich “Auergarde”, one of the forerunners of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, a mass organisation of defenders of the republic that brought together supporters of the Social Democrats, the Catholic Centre and the liberals. In the second half of the 1920s he was one of the Reichsbanner’s most active speakers and writers and worked with the editors of its newspaper. He assisted the historian Hans Delbrück in preparing an expert opinion for the celebrated “stab-in-the-back” trial of 1925, which turned on responsibility for the defeat of 1918. In 1928 he sat on the SPD’s military committee and opposed the construction of Panzerschiff A, the first of the so-called pocket battleships.

At the same time Mayr was a determined opponent of the radical pacifists who wanted the Reichsbanner to support refusal of military service. He believed that the republic needed an army loyal to democracy. His dispute with the pacifist Fritz Küster ended in a libel trial in 1929–1930. People from the circle of Carl von Ossietzky saw him as a closet militarist, while the communists accused him by turns of having remained a Nazi at heart and of spying for France. The historian Benjamin Ziemann considers these views exaggerated, but notes that Mayr liked to operate behind the scenes to the very end.

In the last years of the republic he collected material against the Nazis and published it in the Social Democratic press. In the autumn of 1932 he found himself at the centre of a notorious affair. The SA chief of staff Ernst Röhm, whom he had known since 1919, feared an attack by rivals in the NSDAP leadership and met Mayr in Berlin, passing him information about his opponents in the party. When the matter came to light, newspapers hostile to the Nazis wrote with satisfaction that Hitler’s chief of staff had sought refuge with a Social Democrat.

Exile and death

After Hitler took power, Mayr fled to France in the spring of 1933. The Gestapo confiscated his papers, which have been lost. In 1941 the American magazine Current History published an article entitled “I Was Hitler’s Boss”, attributed to Mayr, in which the author described the Hitler of 1919 as “a tired stray dog looking for a master”. The circumstances in which the text was written are unclear: at the time of publication Mayr was already in a German prison, so he must either have written it earlier, or someone compiled it from his account.

After the fall of France in 1940 the Gestapo arrested him in Paris and took him to Germany. He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and in 1941 to Buchenwald. He does not appear in the camp’s numbered card index or on the list of prominent prisoners, which is why some researchers suppose he was a special prisoner, held on Hitler’s personal orders. He died on 9 February 1945. The circumstances of his death have never been fully explained. According to one version he was killed in an Allied air raid while working outside the camp in an armaments plant; according to another he was murdered on special orders.

Significance

Mayr is one of those figures without whom the beginnings of Hitler’s career are hard to understand. It was in his department that a demobilised soldier with no trade and no future received his first political training, discovered that he could carry an audience with him, and found his way into the party he would soon take over. The army Mayr represented did not create Hitler, but it gave him protection, a living and his first stage at a moment when he was nobody. For the history of the Weimar Republic, Mayr’s life is also an example of how fluid many people’s views were in the first years after the war: an officer who in 1919 taught soldiers to hate Bolshevism and tolerated antisemitic agitation was, ten years later, defending the republic against the very people he had once supported. He paid for it with his life in a camp built by the regime of his former subordinate.