The Proud Shall Stumble Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are represented fictitiously.

  © 2017 GNL Enterprises, LP

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, ­Deseret Book Company, at ­permissions@deseretbook

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lund, Gerald N., author. | Lund, Gerald N. Fire and steel ; v. 4.

  Title: The proud shall stumble / Gerald N. Lund.

  Description: Salt Lake City, Utah : Shadow Mountain, [2017] | Series: Fire and steel ; volume 4 | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017003863 | ISBN 9781629723167 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Families—Germany—Munich—Fiction. | Families—Utah—Monticello—Fiction. | Mormon families—Fiction. | Germany—History—Beer Hall Putsch, 1923—Fiction. | Germany—History—1918–1933—Fiction. | Nineteen twenties, setting. | Munich (Germany), setting. | Monticello (Utah), setting. | LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.U485 P76 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003863

  Printed in the United States of America

  Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City, UT

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  And the most proud

  shall stumble and fall,

  and none shall raise

  him up: and I will kindle a fire

  in his cities, and it shall

  devour all round about him.

  —Jeremiah 50:32

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part II

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part III

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part IV

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Part V

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Bibliography

  A few weeks after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia in June of 1914, the German Empire, led by a man called Kaiser Wilhelm, declared war on Russia, Belgium, France, England, and their allied powers. This began what was then called the “Great War” and the “War to End all Wars.” Later, when Europe plunged the world into another global conflict, its name was changed to World War I.

  For the most part, the German people were ecstatic that summer of 1914. Tens of thousands of them came out to send their troops off to battle. They lined the streets, smothering the soldiers with hugs and kisses and festooning their rifles, cannons, and tank guns with garlands of flowers.

  Four years later, Kaiser Wilhelm fled the country in fear for his life, and the Second German Reich came to an abrupt end. A new German Republic was quickly formed when the country signed an armistice with the victors and agreed to humiliating terms in what would be called the Versailles Treaty. The German people naively believed that Germany had not actually lost the war but only agreed to end hostilities, and therefore they expected a voice at the negotiating table and concessions in the new peace agreement. They got neither.

  Instead they got revolution and chaos. Britain, France, and Belgium led the movement to make Germany repay them for the costs of the war and put the nation in a position where it could never wage another one. In spite of America’s entreaties not to set conditions so harsh that they would lead to future wars, the Central Powers, with France and England in the lead, insisted on getting their “pound of flesh” from the Fatherland. They seized billions of dollars’ worth of war equipment, railroad rolling stock, and key industries. In addition, they demanded a hundred and fifty billion marks in war reparations. Severe food shortages quickly resulted. Thousands died of starvation. Thousands more died of the cold, because there weren’t enough trains to bring sufficient coal to heat the populations of the big cities. For a country that had already lost almost two million of its young men in the war, this was a devastating new burden.

  The German leaders who signed the armistice and later the Versailles Treaty came to be hated almost as much as their wartime enemies. As all of these conditions came together, left-wing Communist, Bolshevik, and Socialist groups saw an opportunity too good to pass up. Almost overnight, they toppled state and city governments all across the Fatherland, expecting the people to flock to the new red flags flying from flagpoles in too many places to count. The already shaky government fled to Weimar, a city about 160 miles southeast of Berlin, and set up interim headquarters there. They were quickly dubbed the Weimar Government, a title that was spoken with great contempt by many Germans.

  But for all that the German Republic was bitterly resented and hated, Russia was considered even worse, and it was only two hundred miles from Germany’s eastern borders. Germany was looking for a change, but not in that direction. Bloody battles broke out everywhere with Freikorps troops—recently released, unemployed soldiers from the war—who chose the hated government over the feared one. When the dust settled, the Weimar Government was brought back to Berlin and the revolutionists who were not killed in battle were run out of power.

  As things began to marginally improve and the country moved toward some degree of normalcy, the first war reparation payments came due in the summer of 1921. For a nation barely recovering from the costs of four years of war, the effect of these demands was catastrophic. Berlin petitioned—almost outright begged—the conquerors to allow Germany to postpone payments until things stabilized further, but there was to be no mercy. The French and British put it in the starkest of terms: “Start payments now, or the war resumes.” So Germany capitulated and went to the only alternative they could see to make it happen. They immediately cranked up the government printing presses and began printing more money.

  It was not a bad plan—for the government. In the first place, they could use this cheap money
to pay off their enormous war debts. Second, it won enthusiastic support from the power elites of the nation. Cheap money allowed the nobility, the big industrialists, and the great landowners to make enormous profits. They could not only pay off their own debts with cheap money, but they could purchase raw materials and pay their workers with dirt cheap money as well, thus protecting their vast assets.

  At first, the common people did not know about this “under-­the-table” arrangement, but the results of this new, secret policy were immediate, inevitable, and apocalyptic. The people were already reeling from an inflationary spiral that had seen prices rise by about 400% between January 1919 and January 1921. Now, it exploded exponentially. Later, economists would coin a new term for it. They would call it hyperinflation. The rate of inflation started doubling every month! Then it tripled and quadrupled and quintupled. From July to September 1923, the exchange with the U.S. dollar went from 4.6 million marks per dollar to 98.9 million, a rise of 2,100%. That meant inflation was doubling almost every day! A month later, one dollar could buy 25.3 billion marks. And six weeks after that, the mark had fallen to 4.2 trillion to the dollar!

  One American traveler later wrote that he had paid 4 billion marks for breakfast in the summer of 1923—the equivalent of about fifteen cents in American money.

  The effects of this financial disaster were, in their own way, as devastating as the war had been. Money was literally not worth the paper it was printed on. Starvation once again stalked the land as millions of families took their wheelbarrows and carts full of money to buy a few eggs or a single bunch of carrots. Even those who were gainfully employed were in crisis. If they didn’t spend their paycheck on the day they received it, they would lose virtually all of its value by the next morning.

  As the anger, resentment, and frustration toward the government skyrocketed into a seething rage, two groups in Germany saw a ripe opportunity in the growing unrest. The radicalized Left—Communists, Bolsheviks, Soviet revolutionaries, and hard-core Socialists—once again saw this social chaos as a chance to seize power, just as they had in November 1918. But they misread the mood of the people. When “October Revolutions,” patterned after what had happened in Russia in 1917, sprang up in Saxony and Thuringia in late 1922 and early 1923, the army moved in swiftly, opening fire when demonstrators refused to disperse. In Hamburg, a Communist uprising was quickly quashed by the police, leaving more than forty dead. And the people made it clear that these harsh responses were in accordance with their will. Almost as swiftly as it had come, the threat from the Left melted away.

  But that didn’t dampen the rage. Word began to leak out of the enormous profits the upper-class cronies of the government leaders were receiving from the runaway inflation. That was enough to send the people looking for a solution, and if it took blood to buy one, then so be it. In southern Germany especially, they looked to the radicalized Right. Right-wing, super-nationalistic political parties, with their own substantial paramilitary groups, were springing up like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

  One particular party was especially appealing to the people because it promised not to reform the government but to overthrow it. That party was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or Nazi Party for short. Led by Adolf Hitler, a firebrand politician with an uncanny sense of what appealed to the people, the party had risen rapidly from a small, six-member group that was more of a farce than a force to a powerful political machine. Hitler too had his own paramilitary group. He called them his Sturmabteilung, literally the “Storm Department.” That name was chosen because formal army troops violated the terms of the Versailles Treaty. But everyone, including Hitler, called them the “stormtroopers.”

  As the fall of 1923 came with no end to the inflationary spiral in sight, Hitler began seeking coalitions with other parties similar to his own in philosophy. Soon a Kampfbund, or “Battle League,” was formed. Discussions began. Plans were laid. And on the night of November 8, 1923, that coalition marched on the Bürgerbräukeller, a large beer hall in Munich, where the three men appointed to lead Bavaria during the “state of emergency” were speaking to a large crowd. Hitler’s plan was quite simple: convince the triumvirate to join in the revolution, bringing the army and the state police with them, or be tossed out on their ears. Either way, once that was done, the league would march on Berlin and pull down the hated Weimar leaders, tear up the despised Versailles Treaty, and create a new German Reich.

  Hitler asked for only one thing. In the new government, he would be chancellor, the head of state, for the new order.

  November 8, 1923, 7:22 p.m.—Kindle Keller, Wiener Platz, Munich, Germany

  Hans Eckhardt watched the leader of the National Socialist party pacing back and forth and gritted his teeth. It was all he could do not to scream. Do something, Adolf! Anything besides this damnable pacing. Give us the signal to march. Pick up a beer mug and hurl it at the wall. Scream at us. Otherwise, tell us to go home. Or let me go call my wife and tell her that nothing’s going to happen, because right now she’s sitting by the phone worrying herself sick.

  Of course, Hans said nothing. He knew what this was. After months of living in a combat zone, you developed a curious sixth sense about when the fighting was imminent. And once that feeling came, as it had now, even combat was preferable to the hellish waiting.

  Hans was standing away from the others, leaning against the wall, just watching. So he did what he had always done on the eve of battle. He turned and studied the men in the room with him. You did that before you went into battle because you wanted to know who you could rely on. There were about two dozen men in the room. More than half of them, Hans barely knew. They were the leaders and commanders of the other militia groups that had recently joined with the Nazi Party in a Kampfbund, or “Battle League,” whose purpose was to seize power from the current government.

  Adolf had made these alliances in the last few weeks to bolster their political strength. With everything else that had been going on in Hans’s life—a new baby, trying to cope with the catastrophic inflation, and keeping his truck repair business afloat—he hadn’t been able to attend many of those meetings. Then about a week ago, his father, who was growing increasingly more senile, had signed over the Eckhardt dairy farm to a slimy, smooth-talking real estate broker. What he received in payment had barely paid for a used suit and a couple of loaves of bread.

  As Hans and his family scrambled to look for ways to undo the contract, his father had realized to at least some degree what he had done. That night, brokenhearted and weary of life, he passed away peacefully, leaving his wife and children to cope with the loss. So these last few days, when Adolf and the other leaders of the party were scrambling to cobble together a coalition capable of overthrowing the government, Hans had not been around at all. It was only this morning that they had buried Hans Sr. in the church cemetery in Graswang. So now Hans ignored the men he didn’t know and sized up the ones he did.

  Seated at the head table, where Adolf had been seated before he got up and started pacing, were three men that Hans knew well. They, along with Hans, constituted Hitler’s inner circle of leadership.

  Next to Adolf’s empty chair was Hermann Goering. Though he had only joined the party about a year ago after hearing Adolf speak at a political party, Goering was informally considered by most to be Adolf’s right-hand man—second in command, as it were. He was a big man, broad of shoulder and stout of frame, with thick blond-brown hair and the darting blue eyes of a fighter pilot. Next to the Führer, Hermann was the most well-known and widely recognized figure in the party. A flying ace in the war, he was credited with some twenty-two enemy aircraft kills during the war and had won Germany’s highest wartime medal for his efforts in the skies over France and Belgium. When he had joined the party early this year, his picture had been plastered on papers all across the country. It was a public relations coup for the rapidly rising party. Hitler trusted him implicitl
y.

  Seated to Goering’s left was Ernst Roehm, another decorated war veteran. He had joined the Bavarian Army early and risen to the rank of captain during the war. He too was a big man, but no one would call him handsome. People who didn’t know him almost recoiled when they saw his scarred visage. It gave him a brutish look that cowed most people. He had been hit in the face by a shell fragment during a battle in France. It had ripped through his right cheek and blown away a portion of the bridge of his nose. Astonishingly, he had recovered, but the scars were deep and disfiguring. He had only recently resigned his commission in the Bavarian Army because Adolf had given him command of the Sturmabteilung, or the S.A. for short—the Nazi Party’s paramilitary group that Adolf had dubbed his “stormtroopers.”

  Roehm had been one of the founding members of the ragtag little group that called itself the German Workers’ Party. He had been there that night when Adolf and Hans had attended one of their meetings. Adolf had been serving as a political officer for the army at that time, and his superiors had assigned him to look into this particular group because they seemed different from other workers’ parties, which were typically Communists. Hans and Adolf were just developing their friendship at that time, so Hans agreed when Adolf begged him to go with him on this assignment.

  It had turned out to be more of a bad joke than anything. Six official members. Maybe half a dozen others in attendance. The treasurer announced that they didn’t have enough funds to print membership cards, so new members would have to be patient. As they left that night, Adolf said he thought an elementary school book club might hold more promise.

  But as they had left, another one of the party’s founders had pressed a pamphlet into Adolf’s hand and begged him to read it. It outlined what it would take to make Germany great again. A couple days later, Hans had been stunned when Hitler said he was joining the party. And Hans almost said no when Adolf asked him to become a member too.

  That had been in 1919. Now, four years later, the party’s name had been changed to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter­partei, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler was president. They now had 25,000 members and their own private army. And they were about to launch an attempted coup against the Bavarian government.