>The “Battle of Coburg” took place in October 1922. A conservative group from that small town of 24,000 in northern Bavaria planned a patriotic two-day festival, a “German Day,” on the weekend of October 14-15. The organizer of the event reached out to Hitler, a rising but still quite minor political figure in Munich, and invited him to take part. He added the cryptic remark that Hitler might bring “some gentlemen of his company.”[1] Hitler, with superb political instincts, enlarged mightily upon this curious invitation. He instantly conceived a masterstroke. He would bring a battalion of Storm Troopers; he would rent a special train, itself a marvellous and novel propaganda stunt; and he would plaster the train with “the most gripping political symbol of the twentieth century,” the dramatic new swastika banners that he himself had recently designed.[2] He would conquer Coburg and show Germany that the Leftist terror could be broken. That he could break it.
>Over six hundred SA men boarded Hitler’s train, draped with the red, white, and black banners, at Munich’s Central Station on the morning of Saturday, October 14. The train with its electrifying banners – which few Germans had ever seen before – caused a sensation on the way to Coburg. In Nuremberg, Julius Streicher (having recently agreed to place his nationalist group under Hitler) joined their party with some followers. In the same station, a group of Jews from another train expressed their disdain for the Nazis in some manner, and Julius Schreck, factotum to the Leader, “leapt into the midst of them and started laying about him,” according to Hitler’s account.[5]
>They reached Coburg after an eight-hour journey, just before 3 PM. At the station, a group of German Day organizers (and a police captain) met them and anxiously informed Hitler of the restrictions imposed on their festivities. They earnestly begged him not to march his men through the town with flags and music, as that would be too “provocative.” They had internalized the bogus argument wielded by the Left. These organizers feared the Reds, but Hitler did not. He informed them that he had not been a party to their agreement.
>The screaming Reds, urged on by agitators, set upon them, armed with lead pipes and clubs with embedded nails, and other instruments of international brotherhood. They tore up cobblestones to hurl at them and threw tiles down from the rooftops. Hitler himself was in the midst of it. He finally gave the signal, and the whole column of his men launched a counterattack. A bloody set-to began. Rosenberg saw Hitler putting his stick to use; the band members dented their trumpets on proletarian noggins. Others used less gentlemanly tools, most often truncheons. The outnumbered police began by trying to subdue the combatants indiscriminately, but most of them soon turned to battling only the Lefties. (A policeman later said to Hitler, “You can’t imagine how we suffer under the domination of these dogs.”)[6] It took the patriots twenty minutes of hard struggle to clear the street. Scores of men on both sides were injured, some of them badly, but the nationalists had won a decisive victory.
>They returned to the Hofbräuhaus, and there a number of the workers with whom they had fought approached them seeking rapprochement. A discussion took place, and the locals were surprised to find that the National Socialists were very favorable towards the working man. Hitler’s men laid out their beliefs at some length, and more than a few of the Leftists expressed their desire to change sides and join them.[10] Hitler took great pleasure in converting, rather than repressing, the foot soldiers of the Left. The Left’s leaders, who had far greater culpability, accessed much less mercy from him.