Seisser, Hans Ritter von

(1874-1973)

   military and police officer; chief of Bavaria's* State Police (Landespolizei) during the Beerhall Putsch.* A colonel at the end of World War I, he was Munich's commander after its lib-eration from the Raterepublik and then left the army to head the Landespolizei. Renowned for his actions against leftist agitators, he protected Hermann Ehr-hardt* when the latter fled to Bavaria.

   In 1923 Seisser was officially accountable to Franz Schweyer, Bavaria's In-terior Minister, but with his personal power base and the subverting of the state's normal authority via the appointment of Gustav von Kahr* as Generalstaats-kommissar, he ignored Schweyer. He thus formed part of the rightist triumvirate (with Kahr and General Otto von Lossow*) that plotted to overthrow the leftist regime in Thuringia* and toyed with ousting the Weimar regime. Such ambi-tions were foiled on 8 November 1923 by Hitler's* unforeseen putsch. In fact, Seisser and his cohorts were already wavering in their plans; at a 3 November meeting in Berlin* Hans von Seeckt,* Chief of the Heeresleitung, informed Seisser, who was seeking army support, that whereas he sympathized with his goals, the Reichswehr* would fire on rebels "whether they came from the Right or the Left." By abandoning Hitler and Erich Ludendorff* on 9 November, the triumvirate inadvertently split the right-wing movement in Bavaria.

   Seisser was the only member of the triumvirate to retain his position after the putsch. No longer able to influence politics, he retired in 1930 to become senior director of a Munich firm. He was briefly confined at Dachau in 1933.

   REFERENCES:Diehl, Paramilitary Politics; Feldman, Great Disorder; Harold Gordon, Reichswehr.