1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  Having done the battle of the streets, and lost badly, Hitler was now preparing for the battle of the courtroom. A crisis junkie, Hitler responded best when cornered and confronted. His years of rampant reading, his reportedly excellent memory for broad concepts as well as for details, and his growing belief in his own infallibility began to flow into a thought process for legal (and political) combat that would turn his trial into something more than a judicial process. It would become a platform for his solidifying worldview as well as an ex post facto rationalization of his attempt to overthrow the German state.

  To prepare the fortress for the trial, Warden Leybold quickly set carpenters and painters to work. Walls were ripped down, rooms were designed for the press and the police, and a broad wooden railing was installed as the court bar, dividing spectators from those involved in official proceedings. In the watchtower overlooking the fortress building and courtyard, new shooting slits and a machine gun emplacement were installed. Barbed wire was added atop the barrier separating the fortress building from the prison church. Drivers bringing construction materials began calling the road inside the prison “Hitler Street.” Noted Hemmrich: “The ‘fortress’ was finally turned into a fortress in the military sense.”53

  These renovations included one unusual touch: Leybold knew he might need a special space for General Ludendorff. Arrested and released after the putsch on his word of honor, Ludendorff would have to serve time if convicted and sentenced at the trial. But even if found guilty of high treason, nobody—not the prosecutor, not the judge, not any prison official—could bring himself to treat Ludendorff as a normal mortal. He would have to have something better.

  Surveying his options, Leybold saw the solution right in front of him: he would give Ludendorff his own rather spacious conference room in the administration building, far from the prison hoi polloi. Workers began converting and furnishing the space as a “two-room cell” for the general: a sitting room where he could work and receive visitors, and a “bedroom” behind a newly installed archway with a heavy curtain. Leybold even designated one prison guard to be Ludendorff’s manservant, since no German general could be expected to do without one. The guard cleaned his best suit and patent-leather shoes and began preparing for the assignment of a lifetime.54

  Behind the planning for Hitler’s trial, a political backstory was unfolding. Hitler and his accomplices were charged with high treason for an attempt to “violently change the constitution” not only of Bavaria but of the German Reich as well.55 At the national level, the offense fell under the 1922 Law for the Protection of the Republic—passed following the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. Strictly interpreted, the Hitler trials should therefore have been held at the newly created State Court in Leipzig, in Saxony. At first, even Hitler favored that venue, thinking he might receive a fairer trial and—best of all—get his bitter enemies, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, charged with treason alongside him. Moving the trial to Leipzig would deprive his tormentors of their special influence in Bavaria, he thought. But Bavaria looked out for its own: Justice Minister Franz Gürtner adamantly refused to remand the defendants to the State Court in Leipzig, claiming that the Bavarians—Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser—could not be safely transported through Saxony. In the end, the Bavarians won: they kept the putsch, the imprisonment, and the trial an all-Bavarian affair. They would try the accused traitors before their own People’s Court, a special institution created to mete out swift justice during the bloody upheavals of 1918 and 1919. The People’s Court was supposed to have been dissolved by now. It was kept alive for the express purpose of holding the Hitler trial.

  At Landsberg Prison, builders were debating which shade of green to paint the new courtroom walls when their exertions were brought to a sudden halt. Word had come from on high that Landsberg was too small for a proceeding that would have multiple defendants, numerous lawyers, and a large press corps from all over Germany—maybe even from foreign countries. The decision had been made to hold Hitler’s trial in Munich after all. Leybold went back to building an enlarged cell block.

  As for Hitler’s preparations, the autodidact did what he had done ever since his life’s first big setback when, as an eighteen-year-old in October 1907 in Vienna, he was rejected by the arts academy: he read.

  “For my friend, it was books, always books,” wrote Hitler’s boyhood friend Kubizek in his memoir. “Hitler arrived in Vienna with four cases full of books.… I could not imagine Adolf without books. He stacked them in piles around him.… Whenever he went out there would usually be a book under his arm… he would rather abandon nature and the open sky than the book.… Books were his whole world.”56 Kubizek, who had for a time been Hitler’s roommate in Vienna, claimed that his friend read the great classics of German literature and philosophy: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, Herder, Lessing—plus German heroic legends, as well as Dante’s Divine Comedy.57 Hitler claimed to have read “endless amounts,” including all five hundred books in a Viennese bookshop, which gave him the “granite foundation” for his worldview.

  Yet because he almost never attributed his ideas or statements—in speeches or in Mein Kampf—to any books or persons, Hitler has forced the world to rely on secondary sources for clues about what he actually read and who influenced him. Such clues include a list of more than one hundred books—including works by Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Kant—that Hitler borrowed from the private collection of a Nazi dentist who lived in a nearby town. Then there was the list of forty-two mostly anti-Semitic books “that every National Socialist must know” that was printed on Nazi Party membership cards starting in 1922; it included six works by Alfred Rosenberg and the just-published 495-page bible of pseudo-scientific racism, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Typology of the German People), by Hans F. K. Günther, who had earned the nickname “Race-Günther.”58 In addition, Hans Frank, Hitler’s future legal adviser and governor-general of occupied Poland, wrote that, while in Landsberg, Hitler had read everything he could get hold of: Nietzsche, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx, Bismarck, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.59 Further underlining the bookish legend is a rare photograph of Hitler in his Munich apartment standing before an overfilled bookshelf with numerous volumes stacked wildly on top.60

  Yet, as with so many parts of the Hitler legend, there are holes, gaps, and inconsistencies in the received wisdom. Serious doubts have been cast on Hitler’s reputation for deep reading. Historian Ian Kershaw has noted that though he was “capable of conversing on the comparative merits of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche… this is no proof that he had read their works.” And Vienna-based historian Brigitte Hamann considered it “utterly doubtful” that Hitler read the books Kubizek said he read; Kubizek’s memoir was written many years after the fact, in part for Nazi consumption, and apparently with a ghostwriter. Hamann suggests Hitler picked up pithy quotes from the “famous ‘German wise men’” who were often cited in pamphlets and free literature in the cheap cafés that Hitler frequented. “Hitler did not have to read a single book to make himself appear to be an expert in literature,” she wrote.61

  As for the weighty tomes that Hitler borrowed from the Nazi dentist, the dentist said, “I noticed that Hitler was rather hasty and undirected in his studies—he cannot possibly have digested all that.” Likewise, historian Sven Felix Kellerhoff questioned how a young man “who left school after the eighth grade with very poor grades” could have “actually worked his way through such demanding books and understood them.”62

  Still, there appears to be no doubt that Hitler read, or at least skimmed, a great deal (especially if one also counts his pleasure-reading of the cowboys-and-Indians novels of storyteller Karl May). Hitler’s style was to cherry-pick materials for the items that suited his developing worldview and his political purposes. In Mein Kampf he lectured the world on “the art of proper reading.” Reading, he insisted, was “no end in itself, but only the means to an end.” That end was, in his case, the conf
irmation of his own prejudices and previously held beliefs.63 Hitler’s recommended method was combing “every book, newspaper or pamphlet” for material to “increase the correctness or clarity” of one’s own point of view. In a conversation with Hans Frank, Hitler asserted that, after all his reading in Landsberg, “I recognized the correctness of my views”64—yet another step in Hitler’s growing conviction of his infallibility.

  In Landsberg, Hitler certainly had books. Visiting his friend, Hanfstaengl said Hitler’s cell, besides resembling a “delicatessen and flower shop,” also looked like “a regular little library.” Hemmrich described Hitler’s room as “a scholar’s study.” Most of Hitler’s books came as gifts from admirers. Rudolf Hess, who became Hitler’s closest prison pal and amanuensis after the trial, mentioned three books in particular: Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Professor Karl Haushofer’s book on the geopolitics of Japan, and a humorous put-down of the United States melting pot called Amerikaner (Americans) by Erwin Rosen, a pseudonym for writer Erwin Carlé.

  Whatever his reading list may have included, Hitler was getting ready to fight. He had everything at stake. Despite his faith in himself, he knew that if he missed his mark, his career really could be over, and worse: he could be convicted and receive a sentence of up to life in prison. Or Hitler could be given a medium term of, say, ten to fifteen years and fall off the political map. Still another bad option was that he might be deported to the backwater of Austria, sent there to languish into a historical footnote. (Given his still-valid parole status in the 1921 beating of Otto Ballerstedt, plus the wording of the 1922 Law for the Protection of the Republic, he should have been deported in any case.)

  In the coming months, Hitler became a dervish, more productive with words than ever before in his life, reading constantly and writing a memorandum on the putsch that ran to more than sixty pages.65 “With the warden’s permission, Hitler had a typewriter sent to him,” wrote Hemmrich, who also purchased writing paper for Hitler in the town. Hitler had clearly worked himself into a state of high dudgeon as he wrote. “I’m letting my resentments pour into my defense statement,” he said in a letter.66 Angry or not, Hitler was boosted by the adulation of his admirers. “The gushing hero-worship and even deification that has come his way has probably contributed to his getting good control of the situation,” wrote his attorney Lorenz Roder. One Nazi visitor from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia wrote a report comparing Hitler with Jesus.

  Hitler was beginning to see his trial appearance as another beer hall performance—but the beer hall performance of a lifetime. As he read and reflected and wrote, Hitler realized he had two tasks: One was to implicate Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser in the putsch conspiracy. The other was to sell his anti-Marxist, anti-Semitic politics and Nazi Party brand by laying out his grand design for solving the problems Germany faced. In this boldly aggressive fighting style, he would also be selling himself. For that he needed a courtroom version of his beer hall stump speech.

  Hitler also began conceiving his defense in personal terms, framed by his own biography, conflating his own fate with Germany’s. His life, with its odd twists, chance intellectual discoveries, and self-taught insights, he decided, was the perfect metaphor for his movement, his plans, his understanding of the great questions facing the nation. His personal awakening and leadership of the Nazi Party would become the story of the putsch—and the proof of his innocence. Or it would become his swan song.

  Done right, the stump speech would redeem Hitler even if his attempt to implicate the triumvirate failed. He would establish himself, at least rhetorically, as a committed soldier in the cause of saving Germany from the Marxist scourge. If convicted of treason for the putsch, Hitler would go down in a blaze of his own glory in the eyes of Germany’s nationalist-minded community; he would become a martyr. He would write his own epitaph and it would be a glorious one. For the courtroom stage, he had an almost fail-proof strategy.

  On February 22, 1924, Hitler was piled into a police van and trundled, for the first time in nearly four months, back to the town he loved, the platform of all his greatest successes and his worst failure: Munich. There he was housed in the Infantry School, which had been converted into a court.

  The trial was set to begin in four days.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Trial for Treason

  “Why isn’t Hitler’s trial listed among the most important trials in history?”

  —OTTO GRITSCHNEDER, MUNICH, 20011

  Adolf Hitler’s trial for high treason began in Munich on a snowy Tuesday, February 26, 1924.

  Lawyers, journalists, and jurists arrived at the Reichswehr’s former Infantry School to find a scene like a military siege. For fear of violence by nationalistic paramilitaries or demonstrations by Hitler’s fanatical supporters, a detachment of steel-helmeted Reichswehr soldiers and Bavarian State Police had been deployed around the building. The hulking, dark-brick pile was temporarily serving as a Bavarian People’s Court and as a provisional jailhouse for Hitler and several other defendants.2 Stamping their feet and puffing into their gloves on a day described by one trial attendee as “ice cold,” the soldiers patrolled behind a cordon of concertina wire and tank traps (cheval-de-frise). The militarized aspect of the block caused some Munich wags to call the area “occupied territory”—a play on the French invasion of the Ruhr region.3 Another observer compared the Infantry School to an armed “Roman castello.”

  In front of the old building—it had been Bavaria’s nineteenth-century War School before becoming the Reichswehr’s academy—checkpoints forced every attendee to show identification twice and to undergo a weapons check. A special room was set aside for frisking females. “Women who have been looking forward to daily thrills in connection with the trial got one wholly unexpected when they were compelled to undergo a personal search for arms before entering the court,” reported the New York Times. “Their hair, hats, purses, muffs and even stockings were inspected for daggers, hand grenades and bombs [and] hatpins exceeding the limit allowed.”4

  The New York Times wasn’t the only foreign newspaper covering the trial. Besides the London Times and Paris’s Le Temps, nearly fifty foreign journalists were present, a Swiss newspaper reported. “The eyes of the world are on Munich during these days,” noted the paper. For the Germans, this could only mean bad news. “Doubtless the foreigners who read about and study this trial will find plenty of material with which to attack the whole of Germany,” lamented a Munich columnist.5

  Of course, German reporters outnumbered all others. The journalists were crammed into sixty of the one hundred twenty spectator seats in the refurbished formal officers’ mess, now a courtroom. But that wasn’t enough; an overflow press room was created down the hall. The place was crawling with reporters “along with their relief colleagues, their secretaries and messengers.” One German journalist complained that court officials had installed only five telephone lines, then claimed them all for themselves. “There is nothing for the newspapers and the public they serve,” he groused. In the weeks to come, messengers would rush newspaper copy from courtroom to press room with alacrity and zeal; stories on events at the trial appeared on the same day they occurred in multiple editions of fast-moving newspapers in Munich, Berlin, and elsewhere.

  Located on the Blutenburgstrasse, the military academy had been chosen for Munich’s most sensational trial in many years partly because it was away from the crowded courthouse in downtown Munich, thus easier to surround and defend. But there was another reason: the school was empty. Because the school’s five-hundred-man cadet corps had enthusiastically joined Hitler’s insurrection, General von Seeckt, high commander of the Reichswehr,6 had shut down the Munich school and moved the academy to a small town in Thuringia where the cadets could make less mischief.7 Now the school that had been so gladly in Hitler’s pocket during the abortive coup had him in its own pocket. He was imprisoned in a former cadet’s room, awaiting the judgment that would shape the rest of hi
s life.

  He was being tried with nine fellow putschists, including the war hero, Ludendorff. Some, like Colonel Kriebel and Dr. Weber, were imprisoned with him on the second floor of the Infantry School. They lived well, each in a simple single room, their meals served “on white tablecloths” at a table in the hall. They even had two hours of outdoor time per day in the school’s inner courtyard if they wanted it. Along with Hitler, Ludendorff, Kriebel, and Weber, the other defendants included Captain Röhm, Ernst Pöhner, Wilhelm Frick, Wilhelm Brückner, Robert Wagner, and Ludendorff’s stepson, Heinz Pernet. One defendant, Pöhner, Munich’s former police chief, suffered a recurring illness and had just barely made it to the trial. Hitler, as usual, was flooded with gifts. When his old walk-around buddy, Ernst Hanfstaengl, paid a visit, bringing along his four-year-old son, Egon, Hitler allowed the delighted boy to have his pick of the “sweets and cakes” that cluttered the room.8

  It had been nearly four months since the spectacular failure of Hitler’s putsch, and he faced, in theory, a simple trial for treason; he had already practically confessed to the deed. But the proceeding in the People’s Court was to be about much more than the discovery of guilt or innocence. The chief defendant would do everything in his power to recast his trial as a morality play about Germany’s future and “the salvation of the fatherland,” with himself in the role of savior. He would use a courtroom packed with journalists to sell himself, still unknown in most parts of Germany, to the largest audience he had ever had.