Karl Eisner had actually lost an election shortly before Riley and Cornelius arrived in Munich, but he had not yet submitted his official resignation. He was assassinated on February 21, 1919, which must have been a very short time after the brawl at the Weissbräukeller.
Adolf Hitler was born in Linz, Austria on April 20, 1889. Following his service in the Great War, in which he was a soldier for the Kaiser, Hitler found many sympathetic ears in the charming Bavarian city of Munich for his racial hatreds, his authoritarian beliefs, and his fanatical embrace of Ludendorff’s “stab-in-the-back” theory. After service as a prison guard for a short time, he became fully immersed in fascist politics in Munich. He led the famous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, at a Munich establishment called the Bürgerbräukeller. His plan was to put Ludendorff in charge of an armed force that would march on Berlin and seize the government. The failure of this plot caused Hitler to be sentenced to a term in Landsberg Prison, where he began to write Mein Kampf. It is noteworthy that Ludendorff and others of the Prussian old guard were willing to work with a ruffian from the lower class like Hitler. They thought they could control him. They were not the last to make that mistake.
The true identity of the mysterious Mr. Linz in the novel is, of course, unknown.