Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  On Sunday night, Tröbst attended a séance at the house of his sister-in-law Dorothee, who in a darkened room attempted to summon the spirits and tell the future. Yet ultimately he decided not to leave the future to the spirits, and spent the next few days urging his associates to strike as soon as possible, particularly as the economic situation was taking a dramatic turn for the worse. The 138 million marks that had bought him a train ticket from northern Germany to Munich the previous week were worthless now, with the price of a pound of bread now standing at 36 billion marks. Even well-dressed women were seen begging in the streets of Munich. As Tröbst recalled, some of the Oberland leaders told Weber, “Unless they soon sprang into action, it would no longer be possible to tell the difference between Communists and people going hungry.”21

  On Wednesday, November 7, Weber handed Tröbst a train ticket as well as a trillion marks and asked, on Ludendorff’s behalf, that he immediately make his way to Berlin, or “Neu-Jerusalem” (New Jerusalem), as Tröbst dismissively called Germany’s capital, due to the purported power of Jews there. His task was to co-opt the city’s nationalist circles into the putsch in Munich and thus facilitate the spread of the coup to Berlin. Yet, once in Germany’s capital, only one of the right-wing figures with whom Tröbst met was willing to come with him to Munich.22 As the episode reveals, Ludendorff, Hitler, and their coconspirators were deluded about the levels of support they enjoyed nationally.

  On November 8, Hitler believed the time had come to strike immediately and begin his putsch. Around a quarter to nine, without having sufficiently liaised with other groups he expected to participate in it, Hitler and his followers stormed into a fully packed event at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall at which Kahr was speaking and that featured almost the entire Bavarian political establishment. Hitler fired his revolver into the ceiling and declared that the national revolution had started.23

  He had imagined that Kahr would support a National Socialist–led national revolution if presented with it as a fait accompli. And indeed, under the impact of the events that were unfolding, Kahr and his top aides Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser and General Otto von Lossow initially expressed support for the revolution. But within hours, they withdrew their support and instructed Bavarian state authorities to take measures to put down the putsch. From within the Bürgerbräukeller, Munich police chief Karl Mantel had already tried in vain to alert the Bavarian State Police about the coup so that it could take immediate action against Hitler. The authorities acted quickly to outlaw the NSDAP that very night. The putsch had failed.24

  As was to be expected, Kahr and others had wanted to use Hitler to further their own goals, not to be used by an upstart like him. At that time, Hitler was hardly anyone’s messiah among the political and social establishment of Munich. Melanie Lehmann, the wife of publisher Lehmann, would write to Erich Ludendorff that it had been “Hitler’s mistake to have misjudged how closely tied Kahr was to the Center Party [i.e., the Bavarian People’s Party] and how powerful he was.”25

  Even prior to Kahr’s decision to withdraw support for the putsch, General Friedrich Kreß von Kressenstein, who during the First World War had saved the Jewish community of Jerusalem by intervening against an Ottoman deportation order and who now was the deputy commander of Reichswehr units based in Bavaria, had sprung into action. He issued an edict that any orders originating from his superior, Otto von Lossow, should be treated as being void and having been issued under duress.26

  Even though the putsch had been a colossal failure, Hitler, Ludendorff, and their supporters would not accept defeat. Not wanting to bow out without embarking on a last-ditch attempt to reverse their fortunes, they decided to march the following day through central Munich to the building of the former Ministry of War, in the hope of thereby triggering Bavaria’s Reichswehr leadership into participating in the putsch. Many nationalists in Munich joined Hitler that day. Even Paul Oestreicher, a pediatrician, Jewish convert to Protestantism, and veteran of the Freikorps Bamberg, intended to join the march in the apparent belief that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not really racially motivated. It was only at the urging of one of his colleagues, who was concerned how National Socialists would respond to the presence of someone of Jewish birth among their numbers, that he abandoned his plan at the last minute.27 It might well have been safe for Oestreicher to join the events of the day, for the march featured Erich Bleser, who according to Nazi criteria of the 1930s was a “half-Jew,” and yet he was a member of both the NSDAP and the SA. Despite his receiving a Blood Order medal as a veteran of the putsch, the Gestapo would target his mother, Rosa, in 1938, as a result of which she would commit suicide.28

  Despite the influx of new supporters, Hitler, Ludendorff, and their followers never made it to the Ministry of War. As they marched along Residenzstraße and were about to step out onto Odeonsplatz, they suddenly saw in front of them a Bavarian State Police unit under the leadership of Michael von Godin. Just as in the case of his peer from the Leib-Regiment, Anton von Arco—the assassin of the slain leader of the Bavarian revolution, Kurt Eisner—Godin was equally prepared to take action against Hitler and Eisner alike. It has never been resolved who shot first, but a firefight ensued that left fifteen putschists and four policemen dead. Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who was marching right next to Hitler, was among those killed. Hitler was pulled to the ground by the dying Scheubner-Richter, dislocating Hitler’s arm but saving his life. His bodyguard Ulrich Graf then shielded him with his body from the gunfire. Riddled by bullets, Graf miraculously lived to tell the tale, but for the rest of his life would have to live with bullets in his head that could not be removed. When finally the firefight died down, two of Hitler’s men, a young physician and a medical orderly, picked up the injured National Socialist leader from the street, quickly carried him to the rear, put him on one of the open cars that had followed their march, and drove off as quickly as they could.29

  Almost a century later, due to its long-term consequences, the putsch looks like a monumental event. Yet, in reality, what took place on Odeonsplatz was quite localized. Around the same time that shots were exchanged between State Police and the putschists, Hitler’s friend Helene Hanfstaengl took a tram along Barerstraße, just three blocks to the west of Odeonsplatz, totally oblivious to what was happening. She spent twenty minutes waiting at Munich’s train station and then left by rail for Uffing without realizing what had been happening elsewhere in central Munich or knowing what would shortly follow.30

  The physician and the medical orderly who had taken Hitler to safety tried to flee with him to Austria. Yet, just before reaching the Alps, their car broke down, an event of world historical consequences.31 Had Hitler reached the Austrian border, there would have been no trial and no incarceration in Landsberg, and more likely than not, he would be today nothing but a footnote of history.

  When Hitler realized that they were in the vicinity of Uffing am Staffelsee, he suggested that they hide in a nearby forest until nightfall and then make their way to the Hanfstaengls’ house under the cover of darkness. When they finally arrived at the house and Helene Hanfstaengl opened her door for them, she let in a pale and mud-covered Hitler.32

  Hitler spent the evening and night in feverish excitement but finally managed to get some rest. On awakening the following day, Saturday, November 10, he decided that he had to continue his flight to Austria. He therefore requested that the medical orderly return by train to Munich and ask the Bechsteins—the Berlin-based owners of a piano factory and close supporters of Hitler, who were staying in Bavaria at the time—to hand their car over to Max Amann, the managing director of the NSDAP, so that he could come and fetch him and take him across the border to Austria.33 In his hour of greatest need, Hitler thus decided to rely on the two Helenes, the “German girl from New York” and his closest supporter from Berlin, rather than on his Munich associates. For the next day and a half, he waited impatiently for the arrival of Bechstein’s car. Unbeknownst to him, the Bechsteins we
re out in the countryside, which is why Hitler’s request reached them with much delay. By Sunday afternoon, Amann finally left Munich by car—but so did an arrest squad charged with seizing Hitler.

  Hitler, meanwhile, paced up and down Helene Hanfstaengl’s living room, wearing her husband’s dark blue bathrobe, as he no longer could don the jacket of his suit due to his dislocated arm. He alternated between moving around silently and moodily, and expressing his concern about the fate of his comrades in the putsch, telling Helene that, next time, he would do everything differently. He grew increasingly concerned that there had been no word about the whereabouts of Bechstein’s car, growing ever more worried that it might not get to Uffing in time for him to flee across the mountains to Austria.

  Just after 5:00 p.m., the telephone rang. It was Helene’s mother-in-law, calling from her nearby house. She told Helene that her home was at that moment being searched for Hitler and that the arrest squad would proceed to Helene’s house any minute. Helene broke the bad news to Hitler, whereupon he lost his nerve completely. Throwing up his hands and exclaiming, “Now all is lost—no use going on!,” he turned with a quick movement to the cabinet upon which he had laid his revolver earlier in the afternoon. He seized the weapon and held it to his head. Yet, unlike him, Helene kept her cool. She stepped forward calmly and took the weapon from him without using any force, asking him what he thought he was doing. How could he give up at his first reversal? She told him to think of all his followers who believed in him and in his idea of saving the country, and who would lose all faith if he deserted them now, whereupon Hitler sank into a chair. He buried his head in his hands, sitting motionless, while Helene quickly hid the revolver in a flour canister.34

  Irrespective of whether Hitler seriously contemplated committing suicide, his behavior reveals in how dark a state of mind he was in the aftermath of the failed coup. Once Helene had managed to calm him down, she told him that he should instruct her what should be done after his inevitable arrest. She scribbled down into a notebook what he wanted his followers and his lawyer to do. Thinking fast, he had to come up with who was likely to be unharmed and not arrested, as well as to devise a plan off-the-cuff for how his party could avoid deflating like a balloon in the wake of the failed putsch.

  He told Helene that he wanted Max Amann to make sure that the finances and business matters of the party would be kept in order. Alfred Rosenberg was supposed to look after the NSDAP’s organ, the Völkischer Beobachter; her husband was to use his foreign connections to build up the newspaper. Rudolf Buttmann—the nationalist who had toyed with overthrowing Bavaria’s revolutionary leadership in the winter of 1918/19 and who since then had moved closer and closer to Hitler—and Hitler’s longtime collaborator Hermann Esser, meanwhile, were tasked with carrying on the political operations of the party, while Helene Bechstein was to be asked to continue her generous help for the party. Hitler then quickly signed the orders, whereupon Helene slipped the notebook into the flour canister too.35

  At around 6:00 p.m., the arrest squad arrived at Helene Hanfstaengl’s house. Soldiers, policemen, and police dogs surrounded the house, and Hitler was arrested and taken to a prison in nearby Weilheim, still wearing Ernst Hanfstaengl’s dark blue robe. One hour later, and one hour too late, Amann, deeply worried about the fate of der Chef, arrived at the Hanfstaengls’ house in the Bechstein car. Even though he did not come in time, he was relieved and overjoyed to hear that Hitler was “safe.” Amann told Helene that, as Hitler had threatened more than once to kill himself in the presence of his fellow National Socialist leaders, he had feared his boss might have taken his life.36

  Soon Hitler was transferred to Landsberg fortress, a modern prison approximately forty miles to the west of Munich. It was not a military fortress, as the term fortress in this context simply denotes a prison for people convicted of high treason. At Landsberg, he was first put under protective custody and subsequently awaited his trial. Soon after his arrival, a physician examined him, noting details about Hitler’s dislocated arm and also a birth defect, a “cryptorchidism on the right-hand side”—that is, an undescended right testicle.37 Hitler’s birth defect would become the subject of a popular mocking song in Britain, “Hitler has only got one ball.” (It remains unresolved to the present day how the news of it had made its way to Britain.) It is possible that the birth defect explains why, for the rest of his life, Hitler was reluctant to undress even in front of a physician38 and why for many years he was unwilling to enter into intimate relationships with women. For instance, in the early 1920s he spent so much time with Jenny Haug, an Austrian émigré in Munich like him, that everybody thought that the two were romantically involved. Behind Hitler’s back, people referred to Jenny as his bride. They even celebrated Christmas 1922 with each other. And yet their relationship is unlikely to have taken more than an innocent romantic form.39

  For Hitler, all seemed lost in Landsberg. At first, he refused to give testimony and went on a hunger strike, during which he lost 11 pounds. He seems to have feared returning to being a nobody. Despite his national campaign earlier in the year to boost his national profile, for most Germans Hitler had remained faceless.

  Furthermore, in the eyes of the public, a “Ludendorff putsch,” rather than a “Hitler putsch,” had just taken place. For instance, in the faraway Rhineland, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary the day after the event: “In Bavaria, a coup by nationalists. Ludendorff again ‘happened to go on a stroll.’”40 The way people talked or wrote about Hitler between November 9 and the beginning of his trial in late February also demonstrates that despite his efforts to transition in the public eye from being a drummer to a leader, he was not seen as the driving force behind the putsch, let alone as Germany’s future leader.

  For instance, in December 1923, Melanie Lehmann came to the conclusion that had the putsch been successful, a position would have been created for Hitler, “which would have given him the opportunity to prove that he was capable of achieving something outstanding.” Her husband had made a similar point in a letter to Gustav von Kahr: “In Hitler, I saw a man who through his brilliant talents in certain fields was destined to be that ‘drummer’ that Lloyd George once claimed Germany did not possess. For that reason, I should have liked to give him a post that would have enabled him to put his outstanding gifts to the service of the Fatherland.”41

  In the winter of 1923/1924, hardly anyone believed that Hitler, if he were to have any political future, would be Germany’s leader. As Melanie Lehmann wrote in her diary on November 25, 1923, she hoped that Hitler would eventually return and work “under the leadership of someone greater than him.” Hans Tröbst, too, saw Hitler, in February 1923, as not “a leader but a wonderful agitator” who would pave the way “for someone even greater than him.”42

  Hitler was depressed for weeks, but in the new year he started to see light at the end of the tunnel. As a psychological report on him, dated January 8, 1924, concluded, “Hitler is full of enthusiasm about the thought of a greater, united Germany and is of a lively temperament.” In particular, the death of the Russian Bolshevik leader Lenin, on February 21, lifted his spirits. He now expected the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union.43 Finally, the political goal about which he so often had spoken with Erwin von Scheubner-Richter seemed to be in reach: a permanent alliance between a völkisch Germany and a monarchist Russia. As Scheubner-Richter had written in an article published on November 9, 1923, the day he was shot dead, “The national Germany and the national Russia must find a common path for the future, and [… ] it is therefore necessary that the völkisch circles of both countries meet today.”44

  Five days after Lenin’s death, Hitler’s trial started at the People’s Court in Munich, which met in the building of the Central Infantry School on Blutenburg Street in central Munich. During the trial, which would last until March 27, Hitler was one of ten defendants, only one of whom had been born in Munich. Of the remaining nine, none was native to southern Bavaria.45 During
the court proceedings, things started to turn in his favor. In the five weeks that his trial lasted, the failed coup retrospectively metamorphosed from a Ludendorff putsch into a Hitler putsch. In fact, his trial was far more transformative for Hitler than would be the publication of Mein Kampf, as it provided him with a national stage from which he could voice his political ideas. Up to the time of the failed putsch, he had stood, particularly outside Munich, very much in the shadow of Ludendorff, however hard Hitler had attempted to boost his national profile through the publication of his book and the reversal of his ban on being photographed. People who had been advocating a putsch in the autumn of 1923 had viewed Ludendorff as their future leader, Hitler as only the general’s aide. Through the trial, Hitler was transformed from that aide46 and local tribune into the person he had wanted to be all along, a figure with a national profile (see Images 26 and 27).

  How did he accomplish this? Hitler cleverly used his courtroom appearances to put himself in the tradition of Kemal Pasha and Mussolini, arguing that just as they had done in Turkey and Italy, he had committed high treason so as to bring “freedom” to Germany.47 It seems that only once his trial started did it dawn upon him what an opportunity the trial provided him.

  Initially, he had attempted to use his courtroom appearances to bring attention to the involvement of the Bavarian establishment and of his coconspirators in plans to overthrow the government. However, everyone else had a self-interest to minimize his own involvement and to scapegoat Hitler by exaggerating the role the NSDAP leader supposedly had played. Eventually, Hitler embraced the version of events that everyone else was trying to tell, as it allowed him to present himself as a far more central figure than he really had been. This is why today the events of November 9, 1923, are known as the “Hitler putsch” rather than the “Ludendorff putsch,” as contemporaries had initially called the coup. As Hitler brilliantly exploited the stage that was offered to him in the trial, he became a household name all over Germany. People all around the country were taken by Hitler’s courtroom statement that, following his inevitable conviction and prison term, he would take off exactly from where he had been forced to stop on November 9.48 He added, “The army which we have formed grows from day to day; it grows more rapidly from hour to hour. Even now I have the proud hope that one day the hour will come when these untrained [wild] bands will grow to battalions, the battalions to regiments and the regiments to divisions, [… ]: and the reconciliation will come in that eternal last Court of Judgment, the Court of God, before which we are ready to take our stand. Then from our bones, from our graves, will sound the voice of that tribunal which alone has the right to sit in judgment upon us.” Hitler told the judges, “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times, but the Goddess who presides over the Eternal Court of History will with a smile tear in pieces the charge of the Public Prosecutor and the verdict of this court. For she acquits us.”49