1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  Meanwhile, the trial was becoming an unpredictable adventure story. On Thursday of the second week, the Vossische Zeitung wrote: “The reports from the Hitler-Ludendorff trial read like installments in a serial novel.”20 Little did the newspaper know that within hours the proceedings would hit a dramatic new low when simmering emotions in the courtroom erupted. Again, the bellicose Attorney Kohl was the instigator. Complaining about arrest warrants issued by Prosecutor Stenglein’s office in another case involving a different client,21 Kohl accused Stenglein’s office of indulging in an “arrest frenzy.” That was too much for Stenglein. He jumped to his feet and, in effect, brought the trial to a standstill. “During this proceeding I have repeatedly been the subject of injurious attacks, some of them personal,” he said with barely restrained fury. “I have curbed my reaction and tried to keep the proceedings on a serious plane. I’ve avoided every pointed response. But enough is enough! Today you have gone too far.… I will no longer participate in a trial in which such attacks on my honor continuously come my way. Mr. Ehard, please take over the prosecution.”

  White with anger, Stenglein stalked out. As Stenglein passed him, Kohl taunted: “There are plenty of men to take your places as states’ attorneys.”22

  “That goes too far!” sputtered Judge Neithardt. The flustered presiding judge adjourned the trial until the next day.

  Stenglein’s drastic move made headlines. “Hitler Trial Session Blown Up,” declared the Vossische Zeitung on its front page; “You’ve Gone Too Far,” headlined its columnist. Foreign newspapers were taking notice. All regarded the prosecutor’s stormy departure as a withering indictment of Neithardt’s trial management and a scandalous day for the German justice system. Clearly the presiding judge did not have his trial under control; he lacked the confidence and competence to preside over strong personalities. The young deputy prosecutor Hans Ehard was taken aback by Stenglein’s move, which he regarded as a tactical mistake. “He should have banged on the table instead and complained loudly to the judge,” said Ehard. “But of course he would probably have lost out in that confrontation.”23

  By the next day, Attorney Kohl had apologized—sort of—and Prosecutor Stenglein was back on the job. People could return to focusing on what had become the central question of the trial: how deeply were Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser implicated in Hitler’s plot? Originally scheduled to last two weeks, Hitler’s trial would now enter a third week devoted solely to answering that question.

  Hitler’s best-defense-is-a-good-offense strategy was working. Watching from his small defense table at the front of the courtroom, reading every night the voluminous newspaper coverage of his trial in his spartan cadet’s room, Hitler could see that things were moving in his direction. The two-week drumbeat of recrimination against Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser had built a large base of credibility in the press corps and in public opinion. Pressure was building on State’s Attorney Stenglein to do something. Over the weekend, the dam of expectation finally burst; Stenglein announced an investigation of Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser on suspicion of high treason. The trial now officially had become what one Munich newspaper, retrospectively, would describe as “a competition between two forms of nationalism—the old nationalists around Kahr and the young völkisch types around the admired, God-sent Leader.”24 The three men who had played a central role in crushing Hitler’s putsch, who were expected to deliver the most incriminating evidence against him, and who represented the existing order in terms of oath, uniform, and responsibilities now faced the possibility of treason charges.

  This posed a strange dilemma for the prosecutor: he was calling as witnesses men whom he had just started investigating for a crime. But then, as one newspaper headline put it later in the week, this was “A Strange Trial.”

  On Monday, March 10—the first day of the critical third week—everyone was relieved to find Munich experiencing milder temperatures and melting snows.25 Yet even as spring beckoned, the trial threatened to darken with the confrontational testimony of the triumvirs. Whatever they said or did would reflect well or badly on the authority of government, on the reputation of Bavaria in the larger German republic, and on the men themselves. Their performance was now shaped entirely by the man who would only be sitting and watching, waiting for openings to pounce and corner them. The trial had become a high-stakes game of “gotcha” whose political import was lost on no one: the deeper the triumvirs were drawn into Hitler’s web of complicity, the higher his stock rose.

  Lossow went first. A classic, straight-backed German officer, Lossow at fifty-six had a head of thinning hair and favored a pair of rimless eyeglasses. Though a born Bavarian, he was a pure Prussian officer in style and demeanor. Shorn of his army assignments in the fallout of the putsch, the former Reichswehr commander arrived in court wearing a simple black frock coat, not the resplendent bemedaled uniform with the wide shoulder sash shown in his official army portrait.

  Although a lieutenant general, Lossow had in fact spent most of World War I far from the slaughter on the eastern and western fronts. He had been Germany’s chief military representative to Turkey, where he helped organize the successful Turkish defense against the Allied landings in Gallipoli. Unlike a rough-edged, war-hardened officer like Kriebel, Lossow had experience and skills in the world of diplomacy and negotiating. He had no fear of the witness stand. He had no fear of Hitler.

  Marching straight to the stand-up lectern he had requested—most witnesses sat at a small table in front of the judges’ bench—Lossow plopped down a thick manuscript. He had come to do battle. The embodiment of the exquisitely mannered and perfectly disciplined officer class, Lossow had more cause than most to take offense at the upstart enlisted man. Lossow was on serious business: he had to keep himself out of jail, and keep Hitler in.

  Lossow spoke for nearly six hours. “If a person had landed in the courtroom from another planet… he would have thought Lossow was Saint Michael with a gleaming sword,” wrote the Ludendorff-friendly Deutsche Presse. “He slashed left and right.… After a while we were surprised that the general’s strident tone didn’t get on the chief judge’s nerves.”26 Other members of the press noted an arrogantly martial style. “His speech is edgy, loud and sometimes forceful. His testimony is very pointed,” reported a newspaper. Plunging his left hand confidently into a pocket, turning slowly toward his audience like a skilled lecturer, he would underline a statement with a practiced wave of his right hand.27 Another newspaper wrote: “As the counter-hero to Hitler, he was masterful!”28

  Lossow hotly denied any interest in a march on Berlin—“childish stuff,” he said, that could provoke an invasion by French and Czech forces. An unprepared military horde with insufficient logistical support—food, accommodation, clothing—could soon turn into a band of thieves trying to live off the local population, he predicted.29

  Initially, Lossow said, his relationship with Hitler had been a good one. When they first met in early 1923, he recalled, the Nazi leader had “made a big impression on me.” But that soon faded. “I noticed in all his big speeches he always said the same thing. Part of it was already well understood by all nationalistic people. Part of it simply showed he had lost all contact with reality and any sense of proportion for what was doable.”30 Hitler’s “driving force was ambition,” said the general; he suffered from “overheated patriotism”; attempts to reason with him failed. “In conversations, Hitler is the only one who speaks. Objections are hard to get in, and they don’t do any good.”

  Hitler was also a liar, said Lossow, in so many words. For proof, he invoked Hitler’s comments when Lossow had in 1923 defied orders to shut down the Völkischer Beobachter for defaming General Seeckt’s wife. “Hitler told a newspaper that he saw my ‘human side’ for the first time,” said Lossow. “Hitler claimed he had assured me that he stood behind me. He said he gave me—and no one else—his word of honor that he would not [stage a putsch] and that he would support me in the fight against Berlin.” Lossow added: �
�There is not one true word in this report.” As for the notion that Hitler would suddenly feel a sentiment of kinship with Lossow, the general scoffed: “Hitler… is obsessed with the word ‘brutality.’ I’ve never once heard him use the word ‘sentimentality.’ This entire story was made up after the fact.”

  Lossow vigorously disputed Hitler’s assertion that he and the other triumvirs had broken their words of honor on the night of the putsch, claiming instead that it was “Hitler’s breach of his own promise” that led to the current proceedings. At that point, “a hush came over the courtroom,” wrote one reporter. “Even the defendants’ claque, which fills most of the audience seats, was quiet. Hitler sat there with a reddening face, and General Ludendorff lifted his horn-rimmed glasses from his eyes to his forehead for the umpteenth time.”31

  General Lossow didn’t exactly emerge victorious (he was now the subject of a criminal investigation), but his testimony dealt a blow to Hitler’s credibility. Belittling Hitler as a “swashbuckler” and “political drummer,” Lossow said that if he were to correct all the false statements of the past two weeks, “I would be speaking here for days on end.”

  Throughout, Hitler could barely contain himself. Leaping to his feet as soon as Lossow finished, at 6:15 in the evening, he said flatly that Lossow’s portrayal was “untrue and incorrect,” but that he would withhold his questioning of the witness until after Lossow’s partner in crime, Gustav von Kahr, had appeared.

  Gustav Ritter von Kahr, sixty-one, was a beaten man almost before he started. Following in the footsteps of the tall, aggressive Lossow, the short, turtlelike Kahr, with his meaty face and walrus mustache, seemed the anti-hero. Though he had been Bavaria’s strongman twice—mainly because of his bureaucratic skills and monarchical conservatism—Kahr came across as wishy-washy, uncooperative, indecisive, and defensive. He spoke in a low monotone that half the courtroom could not hear. “In contrast to Lossow’s speech in the sharp key, today was in the flat key,” wrote one musically minded observer. With his dull responses, alleged memory lapses, and tendency to duck behind the fig leaf of “official secrecy,” the stubborn if wily Kahr exasperated Hitler and his lawyers. Yet during Kahr’s three days, off and on, in the witness chair, they pounded him mercilessly. Unlike Lossow, who had gone on the counter-attack, Kahr acted like what he was: an accused man who might be guilty. “One could hardly imagine a greater contrast than that between Kahr’s speech and that of Hitler at the beginning of the trial,” wrote the München-Augsburger Abendzeitung. “Hitler was bursting with passion and temper, while Kahr was steadily quiet [with] a certain note of melancholy and resignation.”32

  After Kahr’s long opening speech, Hitler pounced. Starting like any good lawyer, he tried first to establish exactly when and through whom Kahr had first been offered his sweeping powers as state commissioner general in fall 1923. Hitler posed the question: “When did you first hear about the creation of a state commissioner general’s office?”

  KAHR: That is naturally hard to say.

  HITLER: It’s not a question of the day, but of the time.

  KAHR: I can’t answer for sure.

  HITLER: End of August? Beginning of September?

  KAHR: I can’t say with certainty.

  Taking a different tack, Hitler asked: “Did the initiative come from the Council of Ministers or from someone who later had a job in the state commissioner general’s office?”

  KAHR: I can give no information on that.

  Hitler also tried to corner Kahr on the question of the Autumn Exercises, the cover name for the proposed melding of paramilitaries with the Reichswehr in the weeks before the putsch. What did Kahr know and when did he know it? Kahr stonewalled Hitler at every turn.

  And so it went, hour after hour, until it turned dark outside the Infantry School. Kahr’s “hedgehog tactic” (as one German newspaper called it33) was compounded by his refusal to look directly at Hitler or any other questioner. He resolutely sat at the witness table facing the judges, showing the rest of the room his back.

  Slowly, the lawyers were able to squeeze out of Kahr more details on his planned directorate for Germany. Trial observers were surprised to learn that Friedrich Minoux, a leading Ruhr region businessman; Baron Wilhelm von Gayl, an East Prussian aristocrat and politician; Heinrich Class, head of the right-wing Pan-German League; and two of Germany’s most famous military men—Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and Admiral Reinhard Scheer—had been in discussions with Kahr, or with each other, about regime change. It became increasingly obvious that, if Hitler had not jumped the gun with his rushed and bumbling putsch, some other form of coup d’état would quite likely have been unleashed in Germany in fall 1923. Whether it would have been a directorate attempt by the Bavarian triumvirate or a business- and army-led conspiracy formed in Berlin by General Seeckt, the pressures for an overthrow of Germany’s parliamentary system were strong and widespread.34 “A far more serious scheme to alter the existing constitution of Germany was being planned, and presumably still meets with the approval of the extreme nationalists,” wrote the London Times.35

  On Kahr’s final day in the witness chair Hitler could not contain his frustrations with his evasive responses. He repeatedly pressed the former commissioner general on the matter of their heartfelt handshake in the beer hall on the night of the putsch, painting a moving scene of Kahr’s left hand on top of the two men’s joined right hands. “You gave me your hand for the third time!” insisted Hitler, standing only a yard away from Kahr, his voice rising. “You shook both my hands for the third time!”

  Now Hitler was shouting: “Am I a liar here or am I not?”

  JUDGE NEITHARDT: Don’t get worked up, please. The witness will answer.

  HITLER [SCREAMING, WAVING HIS HANDS IN THE AIR]: Am I now a liar or am I not one?

  KAHR: I can only say again that I absolutely do not remember putting my hand on top of Hitler’s.36

  Though Kahr had obstinately resisted Hitler’s baiting and bullying and had steadily snubbed him in the courtroom, he seemed by the end of his testimony a broken soul. The short man had sunk deeper and deeper into his chair, his head bent between his shoulders. One reporter called it a “scene of misery like one seldom sees.”37

  Before he could go after General Lossow, Hitler had to sit through the testimony of Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser, head of the military-style Bavarian State Police during the putsch. Seisser, forty-nine, was like Lossow a perfect military specimen, slim and shaven-headed, and he also stuck to the party line. Yet his testimony was refreshingly free of posturing and fireworks, and without a long political preamble. As had Lossow, Seisser said he had found Hitler a compelling person at first, but less so as he saw the Nazi “drummer” give in to his own “megalomania” and finally commit what amounted to an “outlaw gang attack”—the putsch. Like his partners in running Bavaria, Seisser said he had rejected Hitler’s idea of a march on Berlin out of hand. “We have no heavy artillery, no airplanes, no gas protection equipment, nothing but willing patriotic men who would only have been sacrificed to the enemy gas attacks,” he testified. A military march would have “immediately mobilized France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia” against Germany, he said.

  Seisser took frequent issue with the testimony of Hitler and other defendants, calling it “invented and untrue.” In a style that was sharp but not contemptuous, Seisser’s performance strengthened the triumvirate’s credibility and slowed Hitler’s juggernaut in the court of public opinion. “He speaks from the soul,” noted one commentator. Seisser directly contradicted Hitler’s version of events, but managed to do it without provoking a Hitlerian tantrum or duels with the lawyers. Again the Nazi leader had lost ground.

  On Friday, General Lossow returned for questioning. It had been a frustrating week for Hitler; he had not scored many points. Except for briefly screaming at Kahr on Thursday, he had been a background presence while the triumvirate made the news. “My whole life can be summed up as this ceaseless effort of mine
to persuade other people,” he once said.38 Now it was time to start persuading again. He needed to regain the offensive. Friday promised to be the hottest day of the week.

  From the beginning, Lossow assumed a belligerent posture and commanding tone. He paced up and down—three steps one way, three steps back—in front of the stand-up lectern, to the rising irritation of the defense lawyers. “He flung his answers out, so to speak, while taking a walk,” said one reporter. “His voice was like a megaphone.” Lossow confused the courtroom with a military parade ground, said another.39

  For more than three hours, Lossow, the retired lieutenant general, did battle with the defense attorneys. Behind every lawyer’s question he saw—and avoided—trapdoors and pitfalls.40 Each side, it seemed, was moving back and forth between the roles of accused and accuser, alternately on the attack and on the defensive.41 For a long time, Hitler only watched and listened. Finally, having heard enough, he jumped up and joined the fray. He wanted to know, who was “the father of the idea” of a directorate in Berlin?

  LOSSOW: I object to the question! I don’t even know the answer. I learned about this in confidential conversations. I have no right to violate that confidence.

  That got Hitler’s color up. He began yelling at Judge Neithardt to compel Lossow to break confidence and answer his question.

  JUDGE NEITHARDT: Mr. Hitler, may I ask you to moderate your voice, please?

  Hitler did not moderate his voice, and before long Neithardt admonished him again. Finally, Hitler turned to the ever-sensitive topic of one’s “word of honor.” Much had already been made of Hitler’s promise in January 1923 “not to make a putsch.” But nobody had raised the word-of-honor issue with reference to another incident: the Reichswehr’s refusal, despite Lossow’s earlier promise, to let Hitler’s Storm Troopers keep their weapons on May 1, 1923, for a confrontation with Communists. The stand-down had led to considerable loss of face for Hitler.