—
During his first days of imprisonment at Landsberg, Hitler was completely demoralised and toyed with the idea of suicide. He went on hunger strike, probably in an attempt to end his life, but that just landed him in the infirmary. “He sat there before me in his chair like a lump of misery, badly shaven, exhausted, and listened to my simple words with a tired smile and complete indifference,” prison guard Franz Hemmrich recalled.105 Hitler revealed to prison psychologist Alois Maria Ott that “I’ve had enough. I’m done. If I had a revolver, I’d use it.” Ott succeeded in calming his patient down, and with the help of Hitler’s lawyer, they convinced him to end his hunger strike.106 Visitors, however, remained shocked by Hitler’s condition. He was pale, haggard and, as Hess learned by letter, “emotionally very down.”107 Nonetheless, little by little, he recovered. When his half-sister Angela Raubal spoke with him for half an hour in mid-December, he was back in good mental and psychological form. “Physically he is quite well,” she told her brother Alois. “His arm still gives him trouble, but they think it is almost healed. How moving is the loyalty he is accorded these days.”108
Among those who still had complete faith in Hitler were the Wagners. They had happened to be in Munich on 9 November for the scheduled premiere of Siegfried Wagner’s symphonic poem Happiness. The concert was cancelled after the putsch was put down, and the Wagners returned to Bayreuth embittered. “There has never been such a scandalous betrayal!” the outraged Siegfried proclaimed. “Even people as pure as Hitler and Ludendorff aren’t immune from such dirty tricks being played on them…How much easier the Jews and the clerics have it.” His wife Winifred tried to bolster the spirits of disappointed NSDAP followers in Bayreuth: “Believe me, despite everything, Adolf Hitler is the man of the future. He’ll draw the sword from the German oak.” In early December 1923, Winifred wrote a letter to her “dear esteemed friend Hitler,” in which she sent him the libretto for Siegfried’s The Blacksmith of Marienburg. “Perhaps this little book will help you pass a long hour or two,” she wrote. She told Hitler that she and Siegfried would be visiting their mutual friends the Bechsteins and assured him he would be there in spirit. On 6 December, Winifred told a friend that she had sent her idol in Landsberg “a care package with a woollen blanket, jacket, socks, warm linings and books.” In the run-up to Christmas she turned Villa Wahnfried into a veritable collection point for packages of affection ultimately bound for Landsberg. Siegfried was delighted: “My wife is fighting like a lioness for Hitler! Wonderful!”109
On 13 December 1923, the deputy state prosecutor Hans Ehard travelled to Landsberg to interrogate Hitler. He initially refused to make any statement at all. “He wasn’t a criminal, and he refused to be interrogated like a criminal,” the protocol recorded Hitler saying. When Ehard pointed out that such recalcitrance only meant that he would spend longer in investigative custody, Hitler responded that he was solely interested in justifying his actions and his mission before history and that he rejected any authority the court might claim to pass judgement upon him. He would only play “his best trumps…in the courtroom.” Then one would see whether “certain gentlemen” would dare to “raise their hand in perjury”—a reference to Kahr, Lossow and Seisser.
Realising that he was getting nowhere with the stubborn inmate, Ehard sent his stenographer out of the room and talked with Hitler off the record for five hours. Hitler was initially mistrustful, but he thawed out and was soon drowning the state prosecutor in wave after wave of words. It became immediately clear what Hitler’s defence strategy would be. He would dispute the accusation of high treason by claiming that not only had the representatives of legal state power in Bavaria participated in the coup but that they had planned everything that had been decided in the Bürgerbräukeller together months in advance. “In their hearts they stood by the cause and only changed their minds later,” Ehard reported Hitler saying.110
One open question was where the trial should take place. Despite his opposition to the 1922 Law on the Defence of the Republic, Hitler preferred the State Court in Leipzig because he hoped judges there would be less favourably disposed towards the triumvirate than those in Munich. “In Leipzig, various gentlemen might well enter the court as witnesses and leave it as prisoners,” he told Ehard. “That of course wouldn’t be the case in Munich. Here that wouldn’t be allowed.”111 In fact, the powers that be in Bavaria had no interest in revealing to the public how entwined Kahr and Lossow, who both resigned before the start of the trial, had been in the plans for the coup d’état. It was decided to hold the main trial in Munich’s First District Court; the venue was the former war academy on Blutenburgstrasse 3. On 26 February 1924, under the scrutiny of the German and international press, proceedings were opened against Hitler, Ludendorff, Röhm, Pöhner, Frick, Kriebel, Weber and the SA leaders Wilhelm Brückner, Robert Wagner and Heinz Pernet. The building was protected with barbed wire and guards, and anyone entering was thoroughly frisked. The courtroom was full to the very last seat.112
Hitler, who was transferred to the court’s holding cells on 22 February, seemed confident about the outcome of the trial. “What can they do to me?” he bragged to Hanfstaengl, who had hastened back to Munich after a warrant had been issued for his arrest. “I only need to say a few things, especially about Lossow, and there will be a big scandal.”113 Shortly before 9 a.m. on 26 February, the defendants and their counsel entered the courtroom. Ludendorff took the lead in a simple blue suit, followed by Pöhner and then Hitler in a dark jacket bearing his Iron Cross, First Class. “He looks good,” a court reporter remarked. “Imprisonment has not left any marks on him.” While the other defendants immediately took their seats, Hitler remained standing for a minute and surveyed the courtroom audience.114
The prosecutor named Hitler “the soul of the whole undertaking,”115 and right from the initial days of the trial there was no question who was the focus of attention. In his four-hour self-defence, Hitler took the entire responsibility for the putsch: “Ultimately, I was the one who wanted it. In the end, the other gentlemen only took action with me.” On the other hand, he disputed the state’s charges, claiming that there was no such thing as “high treason against the national traitors of 1918.” Moreover, if this were a case of high treason, he was surprised that “the gentlemen who wanted the same things we did and held talks to prepare them” were not sitting beside him on the defendants’ bench. He was talking about Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, and Hitler promised to make revelations about them in the closed segment of the trial.116
The leading judge was Georg Neidhardt, who had already revealed his political colours at Count Anton Arco’s trial when he had attributed “the most fervent love of his people and his fatherland” to Eisner’s murderer.117 At Hitler’s trial, too, Neidhardt did not conceal his sympathies and allowed Hitler to use the tribunal as a pulpit. Occasionally, when Hitler launched attacks against government representatives or raised his voice to volumes he was accustomed to use at party meetings, the judge did order him to be more moderate. Otherwise, Neidhardt gave Hitler every licence, even the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses, including the members of the triumvirate. Swapping the role of the defendant for that of the prosecutor, Hitler used all of the rhetorical skills at his disposal to direct blame at those he felt had abandoned him on 9 November.
Lossow was the only one to put up any effective resistance, showing how transparent Hitler’s pretence of selflessness really was. The Führer of the National Socialists, Lossow countered, considered himself “the German Mussolini,” and his followers celebrated him as “the German messiah.” Lossow denied ever supporting a national dictatorship under Hitler and Ludendorff. “I wasn’t some unemployed Chetnik who thought that the only way of gaining honour and dignity was to launch another putsch,” Lossow huffed.118 The barb stung, and Hitler showered Lossow with crass insults. Neidhardt deemed him to be out of order, but there were no consequences. The general decided to leave the courtroom and never returned.
119
The journalist Hans von Hülsen wrote of an “unworthy piece of theatre,” adding: “What was unfolding there was Munich’s version of political carnival.”120 To the very end of the trial, Hitler was allowed to play the master of ceremonies. In his concluding speech, a paradigm of calculating rhetoric, he invoked the hour “when the masses who wander the streets today with our cross [i.e. the swastika] will unite with those who lined up against them on 8 November.” Turning directly to the judges, he announced:
Not you will render the final verdict, but the goddess of the Last Judgement who will rise from our graves as “history”…And while you may find us “guilty,” this eternal goddess of the eternal court will tear up the prosecutor’s petition and the court’s verdict with a smile, for she will acquit us.
When asked by Neidhardt if he had anything to add, Röhm replied, “After the statements of my friend and Führer Adolf Hitler, I eschew any further words.” The other defendants followed suit.121
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The verdicts were announced on 1 April. The court was unusually jam-packed, and many in the gallery had brought flowers for the defendants. Given the course of the trial, it was no great surprise that Ludendorff, who appeared in full general’s regalia with all his medals, was acquitted. Much to the court’s dismay, Ludendorff remarked that the ruling was “a shame this uniform and these medals do not deserve.” The court stenographer noted: “Feverish cries of ‘Heil!’ ”122 Hitler, Weber, Kriebel and Pöhner were found guilty of the “crime of high treason” with a minimum sentence of five years’ imprisonment, although their sentences could be suspended for good behaviour after only six months. The court also ruled that Hitler, who “is so German in his thinking and feeling,” was exempt from possible deportation to Austria under the Law for the Defence of the Republic. That drew “bravos” from the gallery. Brückner, Röhm, Pernet, Wagner and Frick were given suspended sentences of one year and three months.123 The sentences were scandalously mild, and the press rushed out of the courtroom to pass them along via telephone. The Münchener Neueste Nachrichten reported: “Shortly after 11:15 a.m., Ludendorff drove off in a car to vigorous cries of ‘Heil…’ Hitler, Kriebel and the other convicted defendants appeared in the window of the court building and were also greeted by the masses…with boisterous cries of ‘Hooray’ and ‘Heil.’ ”124
“Munich is chuckling over the verdict, which is regarded as an excellent joke for All Fools Day,” commented The Times in London,125 but the court’s ruling came in for sharp criticism among adherents of the Weimar Republic. “Judicial murder has been carried out against the republic in Munich,” wrote the left-wing journal Die Weltbühne.126 In fact, the court’s verdict praised the defendants as “having acted in a purely patriotic spirit, led by the most noble, selfless will.”127 It was the moral equivalent of an acquittal. The court failed to mention that the putsch had cost four policemen their lives, and that SA commandos had terrorised the Munich populace during the night of the attempted coup and that the draft constitution found on the dead rebel Pfordten had contained an outline for a system of concentration camps. The verdict was a travesty of justice, and as such it foreshadowed what would happen to Germany’s judicial system in the Third Reich. Hitler knew he had reason to be grateful to Neidhardt. In September 1933, he named the judge president of the Bavarian Supreme Court in Munich.128
The putsch and subsequent trial established Hitler’s notoriety well beyond Bavaria. For months, the media were fascinated by the man who had been able to turn a fiasco into a propaganda triumph. Most observers were convinced that Hitler would return to prominence once his time in Landsberg was served. For Hitler, a five-year apprenticeship was over. He had gone from being the “drummer” for a movement to becoming the “Führer” of an anticipated “national revolution.”129 The most important lesson he learned from the failed enterprise of 8 and 9 November was that he was going to have to take another path if he wanted to come to power. Instead of a putsch, he needed to ensure at least the pretence of legality in cooperation with the Reichswehr. It was while imprisoned in Landsberg, Hitler recollected in February 1942, that he “became convinced that violence would not work since the state is too established and has all the weapons in its possession.”130
Several of Hitler’s main characteristics and behavioural patterns came to the fore even more clearly during the critical days of November 1923. Among them were the extreme vacillations between euphoria, apathy and depression. Hitler had repeatedly announced that he would kill himself if the putsch failed, and this latent tendency towards self-annihilation would accompany him throughout his political career. In his 1940 book Germany: Jekyll & Hyde, Sebastian Haffner rightly called Hitler “a potential suicide par excellence.”131
Another constant was the all-or-nothing attitude of the political gambler. Consciously or not, he seemed to be imitating the Prussian king Friedrich the Great, whom he much admired and whose biography he knew from Franz Kugler’s 1840 History of Friedrich the Great. In 1740, Friedrich had bet everything on a single card by launching a surprise attack against Silesia, and he had repeatedly demonstrated a near-suicidal proclivity for risk-taking during the Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763.132 Forced to act, Hitler had similarly gone all out when he detained and blackmailed the triumvirate.133 Once he had decided to strike what he hoped would be a decisive blow, Hitler had no more time for counter-arguments. “Herr Hitler does not engage with objections,” Lossow said at the trial by way of explaining Hitler’s missionary convictions and immunity to criticism. “He is the Chosen One and everyone else has to accept whatever he says.”134
As far as we know, however, none of Hitler’s entourage ever made any attempts to restrain him. Although they were only initiated at a late stage into the plans for the putsch, they followed his call without hesitation.135 That is another indication of how unquestioned his authority as Führer had become within the party. The failed putsch would do nothing to undermine this status. On the contrary, it reinforced Hitler’s image as a man who not only talked, but acted in critical situations—and who was willing to take great personal risks. He would continue to feed off this aura even after he became Germany’s chancellor.
7
Landsberg Prison and Mein Kampf
“Landsberg was my state-paid university,” Hitler once remarked to his legal adviser Hans Frank.1 After years of frenetic political activity and weeks of a trial that had demanded his entire attention, incarceration in Landsberg prison offered Hitler a not necessarily unwelcome break. “Among the many lucky aspects of Hitler’s political career, these nine months of non-interruption were one of the most valuable gifts,” his biographer Konrad Heiden concluded.2 As an inmate, Hitler had time to reflect on the debacle of 8–9 November and learn his lessons. He also used his involuntary stay behind bars to continue his autodidactic studies. He once again had the chance “to read and to learn,” he wrote to Siegfried Wagner in early May 1924, whereas previously he had barely had time to acquaint himself with the “newly published works on the ethnic-nationalist book market.”3 All his reading now was going to serve the book he had decided to write. Without Landsberg, there would have been no Mein Kampf, Hitler recalled in 1942, since it was only there that he had achieved conceptual clarity about things “he had largely intuited” before.4 It had been stupid of the government, he claimed, to imprison him: “They would have been better off letting me speak and speak again and never find my peace of mind.”5
Imprisonment only encouraged Hitler’s belief in himself and his historic mission. In Landsberg, he recalled, “he had gained the level of confidence, optimism and faith that could no longer be shaken by anything.”6 His sense of being the Chosen One, which he had vaguely felt already in his youth, was now set in stone. And his fellow inmates, first and foremost Hess, did everything they could to strengthen his conviction that he was meant to play the role of the tribune as in Wagner’s Rienzi. In mid-June 1924 Hess wrote to his later wife Ilse Pröhl: “Hitler is t
he ‘man of the future’ in Germany, the ‘dictator’ whose flag will fly sooner or later over public buildings in Berlin. He himself has faith enough to move mountains.”7 Nowhere does that peculiar symbiotic relationship between the messianic hopes and expectations projected by Hitler’s disciples and Hitler’s own self-image as national saviour emerge more clearly than in Hess’s letters from Landsberg.
“Hitler’s punishment is the sort handed out for a gentleman’s indiscretion—a holiday disguised by some legalese,” the journalist Carl von Ossietzky protested in late April 1924.8 And indeed, the conditions at Landsberg were more like a spa than a prison, and Hitler enjoyed a wide variety of privileges. His “cell” was a large, airy, comfortably furnished room with an expansive view. In addition to the hearty food cooked by the prison kitchen, Hitler constantly received care packages; his quarters reminded some visitors of a “delicatessen.”9 For his thirty-fifth birthday on 20 April, Hitler was showered with gifts, letters and telegrams. “His quarters and the common room looked like a forest of flowers,” commented one of the prison guards. “It smelled like a greenhouse.”10 In Munich, supporters of the NSDAP, which had been banned, and former front-line soldiers held an event to honour the man who, in their words, “sparked the current flame behind the idea of liberty and the ethnic consciousness of the German people.”11
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