It was cited as a source for Robert Evans to discuss the impact of Kurt Eisner's assassination on Bavaria's political landscape and the subsequent rise of right-wing forces.
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The assassination of Eisner had worked as a solvent upon political consensus such as it was in Bavaria. The Hoffman government found itself caught between the advance of radicalism on both the right and the left.
No longer able to maintain itself in Munich. The Hoffman government decamped on April 7th, eventually coming to rest in the northern Bavarian city of Bomberg.
Authority in Munich was assumed successively by two councils, the first led by an ill assorted collection of independent socialists and anarchists, and the second by the communists.
By the end of April, the feeble Red Forces had been pressed back into the environs of Munich itself.
At this moment, with their backs to the wall, elements of the Red Army executed 10 hostages. Some of the hostages were members of the right radical Thule Society. Others appeared to have been selected almost at random. None of the 10, however, had done anything to earn so terrible a retribution.
With one gratuitous act, the leftist defenders of Munich had opened the floodgates of violence. The aroused white forces poured into the city on May 1st, bent upon the eradication of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and its supporters in the most literal sense imaginable.
The hardened Free Corps and Army troops coursed through the streets of the city, shooting anyone who appeared even remotely suspicious.
The orgy of execution did not stop until May 7th, when it was discovered that the white forces had mistakenly murdered a group of 21 Catholic schoolboys.
These schoolboys were by no means the only innocents who fell before the guns. Before this first wave of killing had come to an end, over 600 individuals had been slain, many of them individuals with no connection to the Red Army or the Soviet Republic.
The revolution which had begun so peacefully six months before had ended in a bloodbath. Order had returned to Bavaria.
The debt with which the Nazi movement owed Pohner was real. As police president, Pohner extended a sheltering hand to protect the activities of the nascent Nazi movement.
In doing so, he ensured its survival and gave it an opportunity for future growth.
This passive image, however, does little to convey the full dimensions of Pohner's commitment to both the radical right in general and Nazis in particular.