1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  As this amazing justification was sinking in, there was another delicate matter to address: what about Article 9 of the Law for the Protection of the Republic? It stipulated that “foreigners [who commit treason] are to be deported.”60 The law was so plain and so clearly applicable that in his final declamation four days earlier, Hitler the Austrian had explicitly pleaded: “Don’t apply Article 9!” He had pointedly reminded the court of his four years as a soldier on French soil, where “with glowing love I counted the hours until I could return” to the fatherland. Hitler had argued that only “inferior peoples” would expel “an iron man” who happened to offend public opinion. Deporting him, claimed Hitler, would force future schoolboys to read “with shame burning in their cheeks” the story of this disgraceful moment in German history.

  Neithardt heard and heeded Hitler’s message. “Hitler sees himself as a German,” the judge concluded. “Article Nine cannot be applied to a man who thinks and feels as German as Hitler does, who served four and a half years in the German army during the war, who won high honors for bravery in the face of the enemy, who was wounded and otherwise suffered damage to his health.”61

  No deportation for Hitler. No long prison time. And no appeal. The People’s Courts, originally founded as summary courts during the bloody chaos of 1919, had no provision for appeal. Besides, they were now going out of business.

  The trial was finished. Suddenly, the courtroom fell silent as Ludendorff rose to his full military stature and, with chest out, back straight, and lips quivering with indignation, proceeded to condemn his own acquittal: “I consider this judgment a disgrace and an insult to my uniform and my medals!” The courtroom burst into cheers and “Heils!”

  News of the verdicts snapped through Munich like a whip. Some heard only the first part—five years for Hitler!—and were outraged. But as soon as the second part arrived—only six months!—the mood flipped. Extra editions of the newspapers were grabbed out of newsboys’ hands. An eleven-year-old Municher, Otto Gritschneder, noticed joy and laughter as he ran errands to the bakery and the milk store that day. “I can still hear the outbursts of joy with which people greeted Hitler’s ‘conviction,’ even though I did not understand what it was about,” he wrote many years later.62

  Outside the courtroom there was pandemonium. Crowds that gathered a block away from the Infantry School were attacked by the mounted police, with several injuries. But enough people were able to send up their cheers in front of the building that they could be heard inside the school, even with all the windows closed. Hitler’s political instincts fired up and he quickly found a window that he could open and he waved, smiling to his admirers on the street. They waved back with flowers. It was a moment of triumph.

  But Bavaria and Germany had lost. Except on the far right, most commentators denounced the wrist-slap verdicts of Hitler and the other leaders as a scandal—“equal to an acquittal,” argued one newspaper. Neithardt’s conduct was considered an extreme embarrassment to the German judiciary. “It was a trial in name only,” wrote the strongly pro-Bavarian and nationalist daily, Bayerischer Kurier. “In fact it was more like a völkisch mass agitation gathering.”63 The Berliner Tageblatt pronounced the Bavarian justice system “bankrupt.”64 “All Munich is chuckling over the verdict,” reported the New York Times, “which is regarded as an excellent joke for All Fools’ Day.”65 One critic, years later, called Judge Neithardt “a reverse Pontius Pilate” for having found a guilty man innocent.66

  Ludendorff’s exoneration drew as much dismay as Hitler’s easy sentence. After all, the old general was far better known abroad, especially among former adversaries like France, where the reaction was strong. Le Temps suggested the acquittal was proof of Germany’s lingering revanchist longings.67 Even Judge Neithardt seemed to have some regrets about the Ludendorff acquittal. When a junior state’s attorney, Martin Dreese, ran into the judge in a hallway soon after the trial, he asked the judge why he freed Ludendorff. “I thought he was guilty of high treason,” Neithardt said (according to Dreese). “But the lay jurors were all for acquittal, so I joined them.” The lay jurors, enamored of Hitler and convinced that Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser were in fact guilty, had almost blocked the Nazi leader’s conviction even to a sentence of five years. But Neithardt warned them that an acquittal of Hitler would raise such a public ruckus that Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser would be dragged before the Leipzig State Court that the Bavarians had tried so hard to avoid. To persuade the lay jurors to accept even a five-year sentence for Hitler—Neithardt needed four out of five votes for a conviction—he had to promise he would offer him parole in six months.

  Throughout Germany, Hitler was now known as the man who had turned the tables in his trial, chased Bavaria’s top general out of the courtroom, rhetorically destroyed his adversaries in the Bavarian political establishment, and put the Nazi brand into nationwide circulation. Whether the party could survive Hitler’s six-month absence in prison was another question. But not many people could say they had never heard of him anymore. He had used the platform of the court like the podium of a beer hall, but with a national (and international) audience.

  Thanks to Hitler’s new presence on the national political map, many formerly fence-sitting people were seeing the far-right message in a new light. His notoriety also acted as a recruitment force in the competitive swirl of völkisch, nationalistic, right-wing political groups—of which there were at least fifty in Bavaria. Many a German right-winger had views different from the Nazis on certain issues—such as socialism in Russia or the role of Christianity in politics. But one thing most of them shared was anti-Semitism—plus a fervent sense of Germanness.

  In the Ruhr region town of Rheydt, four hundred miles northwest of Munich, one young, university-educated nationalist had been reading newspaper reports on Hitler’s trial every day. His enthusiasm fired, he began making entries into his diary: “I am busying myself with Hitler and the national socialist movement,” he wrote. “Communism, the Jewish question, Christianity, the Germany of the future.… Hitler touches on many questions. But he makes the solution very simple.” From Hitler’s trial speeches, the young man began envisioning what the leader must be like. “What is liberating about Hitler is the involvement of a really upright and truthful personality,” he noted in his journal. “Hitler is an idealist… who is bringing new belief to the German people. I am reading his speeches, I am allowing myself to be inspired by him and carried to the stars.… Only Hitler continually concerns me. The man is indeed no intellectual. But his wonderful élan, his verve, his enthusiasm, his German feeling.”68

  Thanks to the trial and the newspaper reports, this young man was swiftly moving into Hitler’s hypnotic ideological and political orbit. His name was Joseph Goebbels.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rearranging the World

  “From Hitler’s barely legible handwriting, we could tell it was something political.”

  —FRANZ HEMMRICH, LANDSBERG PRISON GUARD

  Hitler left Munich on a high. After waving to a cheering crowd from the Infantry School window, Hitler did not mind being returned to Landsberg Prison that same day. He was on top of the world that mattered to him. The favorable outcome of the trial had given him new energy. Hemmrich noted that Hitler “seemed noticeably refreshed and relaxed” when he returned to the prison.1 With the prospect of parole only six months away, Hitler entered one of the most productive periods of his life.

  For Hitler, life behind bars was, in many ways, a blessing. For almost the first time in his political life, he had no gatherings to attend, no speeches to give, no office to go to. “He can’t race from meeting to meeting until late at night in constant turmoil,” wrote a fellow prisoner. Now ensconced in room number seven on the second floor of Landsberg’s fortress building, Hitler was, in a sense, a free man. “Increasingly I had the feeling that he didn’t mind the involuntary stay since it gave him the chance to think about his future in the peace and quiet of the prison,” wrote Hemm
rich.

  After living for five weeks in a cadet’s room in the Infantry School in Munich, returning to Landsberg may have seemed to Hitler like coming home. Prison guards Lurker and Hemmrich, Warden Leybold—the familiar faces were all waiting as the police van opened its doors beside the fortress building. And many more familiar faces, including forty members of the Hitler Shock Troop, would be coming soon, after their trial and conviction as accessories to treason in the putsch. In May and June, they too would arrive at Landsberg Prison.

  For now, however, only bumptious Colonel Kriebel and the bookish Dr. Weber were with Hitler in the thick-walled fortress building. The two fellow prisoners had moved into room numbers eight and nine, just to the right of Hitler’s. These rooms in the recently remodeled structure—“it still smelled of plaster and fresh paint,” noted Hemmrich—were nearly identical to the one Hitler had occupied during his first days at Landsberg, before his hunger strike. They were small but functional, with high windows and a pleasing view of outlying fields and the distant mountains beyond the tall prison wall (one inmate called the scene “friendly silence”2). The prisoners’ rooms all gave onto a spacious dayroom. It was furnished with a table for six, spread with a white tablecloth, and had a sitting corner with comfortable wicker chairs surrounded by flowerpots. Along with a laurel wreath sent by an admirer, Hitler had hung two pictures of Frederick the Great on the wall (Hitler would still have Frederick the Great on his wall in the Berlin bunker at the moment of his demise in 1945). Alongside another wall stood a cast-iron stove—for heat and for warming food—beside double sinks with a high mirror. Behind that lay a bathroom containing a bathtub “just for us,” marveled one inmate.

  With their doors open as much as they wanted and no obligation to labor, the “honorable” prisoners could easily congregate or take their meals together. Spring was in the air and Hitler often wore his favorite prison outfit, Bavarian lederhosen (leather shorts) with suspenders and a white shirt, sometimes with a tie and cuff links, along with the customary kneesocks. He liked to read newspapers in the wicker chairs.3 The men could spend up to six hours per day outdoors in the adjacent garden.

  But Hitler’s peace and quiet did not come immediately. He was flooded from the beginning with visitors, mail, and gifts. Landsberg Prison had never had such a celebrity on its hands. On his first day in Landsberg, Hitler received eleven callers in the visiting room of the fortress building. On the second day, thirteen came, including Hanfstaengl and Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s designee as acting head of the Nazi Party. The now-banned party, functioning under various disguises, was already showing signs of splintering or making alliances Hitler did not want. He spent much of the next two months meeting with party functionaries who were trying to hold the party to Hitler’s line.4 During his first months in prison, Hitler had visitors almost every day. Nearly everyone brought gifts of food or flowers. Knowing Hitler’s notorious sweet tooth, the edibles ran to pastries and cakes, regarded in Germany almost as a basic food group.

  Settling into prison life, Hitler was at a crossroads. At a classic midpoint in life—his thirty-fifth birthday was just days away—he faced six months of empty time and an uncertain future. Triumphant in his trial but with his political movement still banned and crumbling, Hitler confronted the challenge of whether and how to reinvent himself for a new political reality. Germany was in economic and political recovery and the Nazi Party was in disarray and disrepute. Would there be life after political death? How would Hitler position himself for a comeback? Beyond his hard-core adherents, did the Hitler idea—National Socialism, dictatorship, the Führer principle of infallible leadership, and especially anti-Semitism—have appeal? Was Adolf Hitler still a marketable brand? Hitler seemed to think so, or at least he put a good face on his prospects. “Our struggle must and will end in victory,” he wrote to an admirer.

  On April 20, Easter Sunday, Hitler also received a positive answer from those who cared the most about him. It was his thirty-fifth birthday. His stream of well-wishers at Landsberg Prison peaked at twenty-one, the most he received in a single day. His mail over this weekend, reported Hemmrich, was delivered “in laundry baskets” and took several days to get through the prison censors. His room was “overflowing with flowers like in a greenhouse.” Hitler stood among the greenery to accept birthday greetings from Kriebel and Weber.5

  In Munich, three thousand true believers gathered to celebrate his birthday at the Bürgerbräukeller, the beer hall where his disastrous coup attempt had begun. The hard core of Hitler’s following was holding strong. It did not take long for Hitler to choose his course. His trial success and the support of his devotees persuaded him of his continuing mission to save Germany. He would continue promoting his message. But since he could not mount the podium at the Circus Krone or the Hofbräuhaus, Hitler would now need to reach the masses through his pen rather than his voice. Always one to struggle more with writing than with speaking—he had said as much to Deputy Prosecutor Ehard in their first meeting—Hitler had recently undergone the longest writing exercise of his life, composing the sixty-plus-page defense memorandum, which had guided him to his courtroom speeches. That experience had increased his confidence.

  For one thing, Hitler wanted revenge; he wanted to expose “the lies and deceit” of his tormentors—Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser—who had slipped through the net he had thrown over them at the trial, then slipped out of town. He wanted to unmask the perfidy of the “November criminals,” as he labeled everyone associated with creating and running the Weimar Republic. He wanted a “reckoning,” as he called it—a settling of accounts.

  Now that he had gotten people’s attention, Hitler was ready to preach to Germany. His mountaintop pronouncements from inside the Infantry School had been a mere prelude to what would grow into his massive, 782-page statement of what he believed, what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to do it. That statement would set forth Hitler’s worldview and his “road map” to Germany’s future, as some later described it.6 It would be titled Mein Kampf.

  But the title would come later. In his first days back at Landsberg Prison, Hitler’s first challenge was simply to produce an article. The right-wing publisher, Julius Lehmann, had asked Hitler to write an essay for his magazine, Deutschlands Erneuerung (Germany’s Renewal), Germany’s leading monthly journal of völkisch thought.7 Lehmann was also the book publisher of such famous racist writers as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hans F. K. Günther, Paul de Lagarde, and Arthur de Gobineau. The publisher’s political sympathies were clearly with the Nazis; he had allowed his villa on the outskirts of Munich to be used to hold hostages during the putsch. For Deutschlands Erneuerung, Lehmann wanted not a rehash of the trial or even a score-settler, but a think piece on Hitler’s politics pegged to the November 8, 1923, putsch attempt.

  “Why Did November 8th Have to Happen?” ran in the April 1924 issue of Deutschlands Erneuerung.8 This often overlooked essay, which contained numerous passages and concepts that would later appear in Mein Kampf, openly presented Hitler’s aggressive expansionist dreams and his utterly race-driven view of the world. Though he had written numerous editorials for the Völkischer Beobachter, Hitler’s five-thousand-word article for Lehmann’s journal was an unusually detailed and concentrated summation of his thinking, especially on foreign policy. To read it now is to encounter a preview of the Third Reich.

  In his very first sentence, the always apocalyptic Hitler cast his argument in grandiose terms, evoking the existential “being or non-being” (Sein oder Nichtsein) of Germany. Playing for the highest stakes, he argued that World War I had started a process—still unfinished—that would decide the continued existence of “the German nation for centuries into the future, maybe forever.” Germany’s enemies were bent on Germany’s obliteration. Their “battle cry is not, ‘Victory!’ but rather, ‘Destruction and annihilation!’” wrote Hitler.

  The highest goal of national government was not simply “preserving the peace for its own sake,” Hi
tler claimed, but “preserving and expanding one’s own people.” Hitler was highlighting a central element of his political philosophy: the standing of one’s people, one’s Volk, is everything, and any means—including war—should be used to augment its strength. To Hitler, race was at the heart of the concept of nation; he considered not only Jews but Germans, as the perfect Aryans, to be a race. The “fundamental pillar” of the German nation, its “race and culture,” was under threat and must be protected in a “battle to the death,” he wrote. Marxism was the “mortal enemy,” and Marxism was a Jewish creation.

  Beyond the focus on “nation and race”—the title of what would become the key chapter of Mein Kampf—Hitler was preoccupied with Germany’s international alliances. His essay sketched out what would, after 1939, become his policy of conquest toward Eastern Europe and Russia. To Hitler, war was already coming; that was the natural state of relations among nations. It was just a question of who against whom. That’s why he had to work out the question of alliances. Hitler posited that France was Germany’s implacable “hereditary enemy” and was single-mindedly focused on the “Balkanization” of Germany into its weak component parts (Germany had consisted of three hundred independent states, municipalities, and principalities before Bismarck united them in 1870). Therefore, Germany had to choose Russia or England as its ally. The choice was a macroeconomic one: did Germany want “sea power and international trade,” or land power with greater “agrarian space”? If the former, then Germany should ally itself with Russia against the great colonial power, Britain. If the latter—forsaking overseas ambitions for “continental expansion” to the east—then Germany should seek an alliance with England against Russia. Though he had often talked of Germany’s need for “land and soil,” he left open for the moment the matter of which alliance he would choose.