Ben Wilson

To this day, historians dispute who shot first.

Hitler was adamant ever after that it was the police, in fact, who fired first.

However it went, in the exchange of gunfire that lasted only seconds, 14 National Socialists were killed and four police officers were killed.

The column broke apart in chaos and panic.

Most people fled through the streets.

Hitler was walking arm in arm with a man named Max Schubner Richter, a guy who was kind of in the inner circle of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

And when shots rang out, Richter was one of the first to fall.

Hitler felt a tug and pain shoot through his arm, and he believed that he also had been shot by the police.

So he lays on the cobblestones for a moment, nursing this wound, and he's just looking around, seeing people bleeding out around him, smoke in the air, people are screaming, people are running.

And he takes a second to compose himself, and then he gets up and runs away.

He manages to get himself to a car, which speeds away towards safety.

In this car, he's inspected by some of the people who are fleeing with him.

And they look at his arm.

He tells them, I'm shot, you know, I'm shot.

And they take off his coat.

They look at his shoulder and there's no blood.

And he realizes that he hasn't been shot after all.

When Richter was struck by a bullet and fell, as he's falling, he had been holding the arm of Hitler and he pulls it down and he dislocates Hitler's shoulder, which is a nasty injury.

But in the chaos, Hitler assumed that he had been shot, but actually he's just got a dislocated shoulder.

Goering had also been marching with the column, and he had been shot in the thigh.