1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  Hitler’s goal, as he talked his way through the afternoon, was to establish himself and his movement as the last bulwark against Germany’s descent into chaos—what he called, in a typically classical reference, a “Carthaginian end” (Carthage, on the North African coast, was brutally leveled by the Romans in 146 BC). “We are lost unless Germany awakens from its lethargy and recognizes that politics… is not done on this earth with a palm frond but rather with a sword.” The Nazi Party, he pointed out, was founded “for the specific aim of saving Germany” in its “eleventh-hour struggle.” The Nazi movement offered the two essential requirements for Germany’s salvation: “the brain and the fist.” The brain, in Hitler’s dream palace, was propaganda—an all-purpose concept that, for him, included everything from speeches to posters on the wall to marches through cities to music, slogans, and the very uniforms he and his supporters wore (it also included Hitler’s trick of entering a hall from behind the audience, not from behind the podium). Propaganda was, in effect, all the trappings of politics and was the proper job of all who wanted to work with their brains.

  The fist was another thing—force, might, muscle, the work of the hands. Waving his arms before the attentive court, he described “our Storm Troopers” as “the men of the fist.” Their purpose, Hitler insisted, was not military but rather to protect Nazis and their gatherings from attacks by similar “hall protection units” organized by the Communists and the Socialists. “Every German should have the right to stand up for the ideals he believes in and to use his fists to strike down others who use their fists to block him or prevent the truth from getting through.” A mouthful, but an unashamed endorsement of the violent mayhem of 1920s politics and, in fact, an accurate prediction of years of street fighting to come. Reveling in his combative rhetoric, Hitler declared that the “race problem” was the “hardest and most profound issue” facing Germany and that solving “the Jewish question,” which he conflated with “the Marxist problem,” could be done “not by a government bureaucrat but only by a firebrand [Feuerkopf] who can ignite national passions.” That hot-blooded character would, of course, be Hitler himself. “I refuse to be modest about something I know I am capable of,” he said.

  To make his radical solutions acceptable, Hitler had to make the problem radical. The problem was the illegitimacy of the existing German government, the “November criminals” who staged the “stab-in-the-back” 1918 revolution—and their current successors. The revolution itself, by Hitler’s lights, was “an unspeakable crime”—mainly because it was Socialist-led. Though it had been affirmed in summer 1919, in a constitutional convention that wrote and adopted the Weimar constitution, and though it had been through numerous parliamentary elections in the past five years, the Weimar Republic, in Hitler’s eyes, had never been legitimized by a simple up-or-down plebiscite on its right to exist. “To me,” Hitler told the court, “the 1918 revolution does not exist.” The current government, he said, had taken Germany “farther backwards in its development and greatness than the Thirty Years’ War”—a harrowing image to Germans who all learned in school that one-third of their population was slaughtered (or killed by war-borne disease) during the period between 1618 and 1648. As proof of the illicit nature of the current regime, said Hitler, one only had to look at the failure of parliamentarianism—majority rule—to solve the country’s many ills, from inflation to foreign occupation to hunger (“people were crying for bread!”). “Majority decisions are always weak decisions,” he claimed.33 That’s why, he stated, he was determined to remove the existing system and replace it with “a nationalistic, absolutely antiparliamentarian national government”—about as clear an admission of treasonous intent as one could ask for.

  Nonetheless, Hitler rejected the charge of high treason. For defense against it, he went on offense. Hitler accused his accusers, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, the state’s crown witnesses, of being themselves guilty of treason. “If our whole undertaking was an act of high treason, then Kahr, Lossow and Seisser must have committed high treason with us. For months on end, we talked with them about nothing else, the very same thing for which we are now sitting in the dock.”

  Rather than deny his role in the putsch, Hitler embraced it and seized the opportunity to ridicule those who had been tentative. He mercilessly pummeled Kahr as a man “with no iron fist” who “will start a fight but never finish it.… The minute a fight begins, he will collapse in fright.” The putsch was, Hitler argued, a joint exercise but with half the team ready to leap (Hitler and friends) and the other half paralyzed by qualms (Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser). “They were like a horse that loses heart just before the jump,” argued Hitler. “We had to give them the will to make the leap.”

  Hitler ridiculed the triumvirate’s hairsplitting on the question of using force as opposed to just applying political pressure as they attempted to impose a directorate in Berlin. “Some people try to explain [this situation]… by saying, ‘Sure, [a takeover] was our intention but we didn’t want to achieve it through force but rather through pressure, although through pressure that included some force, but not really applying force.… It was a coup d’état, to be sure, but not a usual coup d’état, as it has been historically understood up until now, but rather the way we mean it.’”

  By now Hitler had everyone in the courtroom grinning; they could see where he was going. The triumvirate was well hoist and looking foolish. Hitler wrapped up: “Well, then I have only one regret: nobody told us at the time about this special Lossowian idea of a coup.… We took it for granted that if Seeckt or Lossow went today to see Mr. [President] Ebert and told him nicely: Mr. Ebert, here are our divisions. We won’t use force, but the divisions will no longer obey you. The door is right over there. Then you could say: no force was used.”

  When the courtroom burst into laughter, Neithardt, in a rare moment of disciplinary zeal, shouted: “This is not a theater!” Oh, but it was, and Hitler was the chief protagonist in his own drama. He was turning his prosecution for treason into a political show trial, but with all the roles reversed.

  Hitler also deployed a they-made-me-do-it defense. “Kahr, Lossow and Seisser had me believe they were ready to strike,” he said. “They discussed even the smallest details with us. Baron Aufsess [Kahr’s representative] said to a small group that Kahr was sitting on a powder keg holding the fuse.” Besides, added Hitler, everybody under the sun was expecting a coup. “People were shouting it from the rooftops.… The general mood was: a savior must finally appear.” Hitler addressed the bench: “Esteemed Gentlemen, I ask you to put yourselves psychologically in our shoes. An incident was inevitable. [Our people] were asking, ‘When do we move? When do we start throwing out that gang in Berlin?’” Hitler also asked rhetorically why, if the triumvirate had such clean hands, Kahr had not arrested Hitler on his first day in office as unofficial dictator (Hitler had posed exactly the same question during his five-hour conversation with Ehard in Landsberg Prison). “Of course he should have come to me, or sent a policeman, and said, ‘Mr. Hitler, you are under arrest.’ It would have been his bounden duty… to put all such people [who were planning a putsch] under lock and key.”

  Had Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser been playacting during the putsch when they shook Hitler’s hand in the Bürgerbräukeller and joined in his “revolution”? Hitler painted a persuasive picture of sincere conviction on the part of his newly recruited co-conspirators. “Kahr held both my hands,” he recalled. “I trusted him like a brother.… I would be as loyal as a dog to him.” Lossow and Seisser “had tears in their eyes” when they pledged loyalty to Ludendorff, he said.

  In his rambling rhetoric, Hitler sought to undermine the very legitimacy of the charge against him. “High treason is the only crime that is punishable only if it fails,” he noted, stating a truism as though it somehow annulled the law. In a self-conscious display of manly courage, Hitler took “sole responsibility” for the putsch—thus emphasizing his role as the soul of the enterprise—but at the
same time he denied the commission of a crime. Flatly rejecting his accomplice Colonel Kriebel’s right to take any responsibility for events, Hitler hogged the self-sacrifice halo for himself, saying, in a typical twist of logic, “I confess to the deed but not to high treason, because there’s no charge of high treason against the traitors of 1918.”

  With his histrionic style and careful forward spin, Hitler was laying the groundwork for his future martyrdom and that of his movement, should it come to that. “Our jail cells will become the beacon for the spirit of young Germany,” he said.34 In short, you may send us away, but we will be back. We’re young. (Hitler was thirty-four.)

  Finally, Hitler hedged carefully against the ever-worrisome threat of deportation. Having opened with his brief biography and a reference to his wartime years on the western front, he closed by returning to his youth and wrapping himself in the German flag, despite his Austrian nationality. “From my early years onwards, I’ve never felt myself to be Austrian.… I do not consider myself a traitor, but rather simply a German who only wanted the best for his people.” Hitler sat down.

  It had been a long, intense afternoon, and now evening was setting in. Nobody had left the jammed courtroom except journalistic messengers. No doubt tired but elated, Hitler could take satisfaction in his virtuoso performance. He had quickly found his rhythm, his pious certainties, his passion, and, where appropriate, his sarcastic tone. Though disorganized and laced with inconsistencies and non sequiturs, Hitler’s argument sounded compelling to many by its very conviction. His relentless pounding of the complicity theme had its desired effect. “Much of what Hitler says about the lead-up to the coup… sounds at least subjectively convincing,” wrote the Frankfurter Zeitung. “One sees clearly how Hitler’s plan grew out of the behavior of the men then ruling in Bavaria. The only thing dividing them were some personnel questions… and the courage to act.”35

  Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser had already lost their positions as ruling triumvirate in Bavaria, and now rumors circulated that they might, in fact, be arrested.36 Within a day, a workman on a Munich street asked in a thick Bavarian accent, “Well, have they grabbed ol’ Kahr yet?” After the sound courtroom thrashing by the brash Nazi, the hapless trio also had become the butt of more scorn and ridicule. In the Augustiner-Keller, one of Munich’s downtown beer halls, students swayed with their beer mugs to a newly adapted tune, “Kahr is a li-ar, a li-ar, a liiii-aaaar!” A local comic named Weiss Ferdl entertained overflow crowds night after night in a little theater across from the Hofbräuhaus with a ditty praising the “German men” who only “want to save their German fatherland.”37

  Of course, not everyone was charmed by Hitler’s performance. As had been true in assessments of Hitler before his putsch, the sachems of the high bourgeoisie—columnists for the most sophisticated newspapers—tended to dismiss Hitler after his speech as an untutored rustic. “Hitler is a proletarian natural—no doubt about it,” wrote Dr. Carl Misch in Berlin’s high-toned Vossische Zeitung. “He is an autodidact who has assembled elements of a modern education and knows how to deploy them with a certain god-given slyness and skill.… For him, everything is thesis and antithesis. His speech works in contrasts, pairs and triplets.… there are only two possibilities, or only three, sometimes more.… His vocabulary is minimal. Everything is fundamental, exclusive, without exception, in principle or absolute.… He is a political natural… but a man of character he is not.”38

  To less critical eyes, however, Hitler was a man with a vision and the willingness to act on it, a man of both fists and brains, with rapier language for his opponents’ weak spots. He was thus perfectly suited to serve as the average suffering German’s convenient alter ego. “What a tremendous guy, this Hitler!” one of the lay judges in the trial said within earshot of journalist Hans von Hülsen.39 That was exactly the impression Hitler had wanted to make. He was back.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Judgment of History

  “The eternal court will… pronounce us not guilty.”

  —ADOLF HITLER, MARCH 27, 1924

  Hitler’s trial had lasted but one day and already it had reached a turning point. The chief defendant had turned the proceedings upside down, making the triumvirate his co-defendants in spirit if not in fact. Before a spellbound audience, he had already found them guilty—of co-thinking, co-planning, co-wishing.

  He had scorched his enemies, trashed the parliamentary basis of the Weimar Republic, and made the case that his putsch practically had to happen. On the trial’s first day, Hitler had set the parameters where he wanted them, establishing the purity of his movement’s motives and casting himself as a selfless leader trying to be a hero, not a traitor. For the first time since his brief hour of triumph on that November night in the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler must have felt the heady rush of performing on the high wire of public speaking. This was a resurrection; he had shown the world—and especially himself—that he still had his chops.

  Now the question of the triumvirate’s culpability in the putsch began to dominate the trial. The proceeding also opened a window into the ambiguous military mission of the confused postwar Reichswehr and the bitter contempt in which far-right nationalists held the Weimar Republic, its leaders, and its parliament. In the coming weeks, the testimony would unmask a larger plot to overthrow Germany’s democracy than had previously been known.

  Hitler could now move into the role of cross-examiner, declaimer, and one-man Greek chorus. Without objection from Judge Neithardt, he behaved more like a lawyer than a defendant, hopping up with questions or interjecting statements when he wanted to augment someone else’s testimony. Under the German procedural code, defendants were allowed to question witnesses almost at will, but with the questions controlled by the judge, who could rule anything out of bounds. Neithardt ruled very little out of bounds, except when Hitler used personal insults, and even then his admonitions were routinely ignored.

  Over the next two days, Hitler and everyone in the court again relived the run-up to the events of November 8 and 9, 1923, as seen through the eyes of three key defendants: Dr. Weber, head of the well-armed Bund Oberland paramilitary; Ernst Pöhner, the former Munich police chief; and Colonel Kriebel, the military commander of the Kampfbund. In closed-door sessions, Weber and Kriebel for the first time explained the secret training and hand-in-glove cooperation among the Reichswehr, the Bavarian State Police, and the paramilitaries—in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. As an example, Weber cited “high priority” exercises for younger recruits “who had never before faced enemy fire.” Live-ammunition and “sharpshooting” drills had been held at least three times per week “under the leadership of Reichswehr officers,” he noted. Hitler joined in, neatly implying government involvement in his putsch by underlining the Reichswehr’s and the Bavarian State Police’s training of his Nazi Storm Troopers, thus implicating Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. Since the previous October, Hitler said, “our troops were trained in the [Reichswehr] barracks at an intensified pace… not for the purpose of border defense but… absolutely only for offensive purposes, including… all the technical necessities for mobile warfare to the north.” His men, who usually did their training at night or in their off hours from their jobs, often wore Reichswehr or Bavarian State Police uniforms, said Hitler. All this activity was in the context of the so-called Autumn Exercise that Lossow had ordered with a demand for the “highest state of readiness.” That kind of pressure, Hitler said, was one of the key reasons he felt he had to stage the putsch: “It was no longer possible to hold back people who, day after day, night after night, had been coming to the barracks with only thoughts of war.”1

  Weber, Pöhner, and Kriebel each added a fillip of invective to the sometimes venomous atmosphere of the trial. Weber said he had ordered a detachment of his paramilitary to seize Munich’s main train station once the putsch began “to prevent the racially foreign Eastern Jewish vermin from fleeing head over heels with all their foreign currency.” That
this order was never carried out—and nobody was reported trying to flee during the night of the putsch—was irrelevant. The order’s very existence, like the putsch-night dragnet to round up hostages with Jewish-sounding names, revealed again the Nazis’ and Kampfbunders’ eagerness to implement their fanatical anti-Semitism.

  Pöhner, a severe man with a fuzz haircut and rimless glasses, came on even stronger. In his testimony, he denounced the 1918 revolution as “an act of treason against the whole German people” that had been committed by “racially foreign people driven by international Jewish Freemasonry”—with the shameful result that high German officials were “suddenly crawling on their bellies before Jews and calling them ‘Excellency.’” Pöhner’s raw style was shocking and, to some, refreshing. He unhesitatingly admitted that the top political leadership, including himself, had long been plotting to overthrow Berlin. “If what you’re accusing me of is high treason, then we’ve been in that business for the last five years,” he said to an outburst of courtroom laughter.