Odeon Square
A FATEFUL SQUARE
ON 2 AUGUST, 1914, THE ODEON SQUARE in Munich was one of the central places in the German Empire where the mobilisation for WW I was announced to the public. On this ominous day, no one was even close to anticipating that a young and penniless Austrian in the crowd, Adolf Hitler, would become the Führer of a mass movement, would be made Reich Chancellor and would finally rise to become the movement’s centre in Europe, if not the whole world. Nothing had predestined him for this role, neither his family background nor his fortune, his education or his profession. When Hitler entered into politics, he was already thirty, had no family, no close friends, and hardly any prospects for a career in any field. In November 1923, Hitler’s attempted coup against the Weimar Republic failed on Odeon Square. When he came to power in Germany in
January 1933, the Remembrance March for the sixteen »blood witnesses« of the Nazi Party led him to that place once again. On 30 April, 1945, at the same hour that Hitler took his own life in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery, US armed forces took Odeon Square in Munich. Hitler’s life came full circle – everything had originated from Odeon Square.
Werner Bräuninger, born in 1965, has worked as a freelance publicist and essay writer for many years. His publications mostly focus on the nature, goals, and principles of Nazism. He caused a stir with his book Hitler’s Adversaries in the Nazi Party about the opposition in Nazi Germany inherent in the system and with his depiction of the intellectual background of Graf Claus von Stauffenberg and of the circle surrounding the poet Stefan George.