1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  Hitler’s putsch, trial, and time in prison had brought together a murky swirl of characters and circumstances that would later play a role in the Third Reich. Hermann Göring, who was badly wounded in the putsch, would become number two in Hitler’s homicidal regime and be sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trial; he cheated the hangman with a hidden cyanide pill. Heinrich Himmler, the bespectacled agronomist who carried Captain Ernst Röhm’s flag on the night of the putsch, went on to head the SS, the most lethal part of the Hitlerian killing machine; he swallowed a poison pill shortly after his capture, cheating even the Nuremberg court. Röhm himself died much earlier; he was liquidated on Hitler’s orders during the 1934 Night of the Long Knives.

  Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s most loyal and toadying acolyte, became deputy Führer of the Nazi Party and had a cabinet post. But the former Boswell of Landsberg Prison turned on his boss in 1941, flying a small plane to Scotland to make peace with the British. Regarded as unstable, he was immediately penned up, and at Nuremberg he received a life sentence. Hess spent the next forty-one years in Berlin’s Spandau Prison, where he died by suicide in 1987.

  Other putschists who rose high, then finally met their end on the Nuremberg gallows, were Alfred Rosenberg, the Baltic ideologue and writer who became Hitler’s minister for the occupied eastern territories, including Ukraine; Wilhelm Frick, the former Munich police official who became Hitler’s interior minister, drafting most of the Third Reich’s laws against Jews; and Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal legal adviser who had then served the Führer with great energy and brutality as governor-general of occupied Poland. While awaiting execution in a cell near the gymnasium where a gallows was to be built, Frank penned a one-thousand-page handwritten memoir that included insights from his frequent conversations and trips with Hitler. Frank’s book was called, appropriately, Im Angesicht des Galgens (In the Shadow of the Gallows).

  Otto Lurker, one of Hitler’s Landsberg Prison guards, also ended his life on the gallows. Moving from penitentiary work into Hitler’s SS, Lurker was posted in the war to Austria, where he oversaw the executions of at least a thousand Slovenian prisoners in the Maribor concentration camp. In 1949, he was tried in Ljubljana and hanged.

  A member of Hitler’s 1923 inner circle who escaped both the Führer’s wrath and a trial at Nuremberg was the gangly German-American Ernst Hanfstaengl. Hanfstaengl had wanted to have it both ways, riding Hitler’s bandwagon to a high-profile position as his international press spokesman, while trying, occasionally, to moderate the excesses of Nazi rule after 1933. But by 1937, Hanfstaengl realized he had been targeted by his detractors, mainly Göring; he had to flee. He wrote that he was almost eliminated by being forced to parachute into the teeth of the Spanish Civil War before making his way to Switzerland and, finally, to Britain. He was interned as an enemy alien, later shipped to Canada, then to the United States, where he became a secret adviser to President Roosevelt’s staff from imprisonment in a run-down plantation in Virginia. After the war, Hanfstaengl lived out his days near Munich, where he wrote his memoir. While predictably self-serving, Hanf-staengl’s book nonetheless opened a useful window on Hitler’s life in Munich leading up to the 1923 putsch. Hanfstaengl died in 1975 at age eighty-eight.

  Some players in the events of 1923 and 1924 profited handsomely from their association with Hitler. Max Amann, the former army sergeant who took over the Eher publishing company, built a business empire on the soaring sales of Mein Kampf and the soaring circulation of the Völkischer Beobachter. Hitler appointed him head of the Reich Press Association and the Association of Newspaper Publishers, giving him enormous power over all publications in Germany, which he could force out of business if they did not toe the official line. Judge Georg Neithardt, the goateed jurist who had allowed Hitler the run of the proceedings at his treason trial and given him the cushy “honorary” sentence of “fortress imprisonment” (with parole in six months), also fared well when Hitler took power. Hitler rewarded Neithardt with the chief judgeship at the Bavarian Supreme Court. Upon the judge’s death in 1941, Hitler personally had a large wreath laid in the Führer’s name at the funeral.

  The man who most insistently opposed Hitler and his ambitions during his treason trial, Gustav von Kahr, suffered a brutal fate. During the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, the former commissioner general—now a retired civil servant—was dragged from his apartment, tortured by members of the SS, and, finally, killed. Kahr’s mutilated body was found in a swamp near the Dachau concentration camp. Hitler’s co-conspirator and co-defendant in the trial, General Erich Ludendorff, rapidly fell from Hitler’s favor and moved into a mystical brand of politics that slammed Christians as much as Jews, turning himself into a political eccentric. He and Hitler became estranged and even enemies. Ludendorff died in 1937.

  The Bürgerbräukeller beer hall that was trashed by Hitler’s men on the night of his putsch profited mightily from its association with the Nazis. By the time Hitler took power in 1933, the failed putsch had become heroic legend. Its Nazi victims were officially treated as revered martyrs, memorialized by a large plaque and a perpetual honor guard at Odeon Square. The sixteen killed were entombed nearby in a Greek-style “temple of honor.” Each year on the anniversary of the putsch—November 8—Hitler led a ritual march from Odeon Square to the Bürgerbräukeller, where he gave a speech.

  But the regularity of this ceremonial pomp nearly brought Hitler down. In 1939, just two months after Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II, the Bürgerbräukeller became the scene of an assassination attempt that nearly ended the Hitler nightmare. Over a two-month period, working at night after the beer hall was closed, a clever carpenter named Georg Elser, who wanted to “improve the conditions of the workers and avoid a war,” had installed a time-delayed explosive into a support column right behind the Bürgerbräukeller speaker’s podium. Elser knew that Hitler always spoke for at least one hour, beginning at 8:30 p.m. The bombmaker set his device to detonate at 9:20 p.m. But, because the Munich airport that night was socked in by fog, Hitler began his speech early, at 8 p.m. After speaking for an hour and seven minutes, he left the Bürgerbräukeller at 9:07 p.m. to catch a train back to Berlin. Thirteen minutes later, Elser’s bomb ripped through the beer hall, killing eight people and wounding sixty. The spot where Hitler had been standing thirteen minutes earlier was devastated. “Those thirteen minutes were the most costly in the history of the twentieth century,” wrote German author Claus Christian Malzahn.13 The Bürgerbräukeller is now gone, a victim of wartime bombing, neglect, and urban development. All that remains is a plaque on the spot where the support column stood, commemorating Georg Elser.

  Today, Landsberg Prison remains a Bavarian state penal institution, housing more than five hundred inmates. Hitler’s room, along with all the other “cells” in the fortress building, was demolished following World War II. The internal walls were removed and the large, open room reverted to the function it had when the prison first opened—a space for small prison industries. But the outer walls of the building still stand. Unchanged are the high windows with their slightly corroded bars—the same ones Hitler looked through every day that he was in Landsberg Prison. When, in 2015, the author climbed the stairs to the second floor and approached Hitler’s windows, he could see through those rough bars the same simple green landscape that extended daily across Hitler’s vision. Standing where Hitler lived, slept, and worked conveyed an eerie feeling of being in Hitler’s space, on the very spot where many of the future dictator’s distorted and diabolical ideas were committed to paper. Hitler had been gone for ninety years, but his spirit somehow lingered in the old fortress building, then 106 years old. From this place, and from that man, had emanated the single greatest human-made disaster in history. Much of it had been conceived in this small room.

  There was nothing grand about the gallows. It was a plain wooden box with a stair leading up one side and a closed-in room below, so that the dangling body would not be visible. This was no e
xecution stage like the great public hangings in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London or the tumbrels and guillotines on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. This was an ignoble ending. The condemned man was always dressed in plain clothes, as though going to work in a factory. He always looked grim. His hands were tied. He was walked silently up the stairs. At the top stood a man in a suit holding a noose. There was also a priest, fully draped in the tradition of Catholic Bavaria, with a lace-fringed white surplice and the full sleeves of his calling, holding a black book. At the corners of the gallows stood the men whose uniforms gave away the proceedings: U.S. Army soldiers, wearing their dress helmets with military-police markings.

  Landsberg Prison, the Bavarian penitentiary where Hitler had been held for a year, had been turned into U.S. Army War Criminal Prison No. 1. Its purpose was meting out punishment to some of the worst malefactors of World War II. One of its jobs was ending the lives of Germans convicted of crimes against humanity—usually mass murder in concentration camps—during the war. From 1946 through 1951, 259 men were hanged on the simple gallows built only fifty feet from the fortress building where Hitler and his followers had lived (another twenty-seven men were executed by firing squad). The men who climbed the gallows on these drab German mornings were paying the final price for the evil project Hitler had set in motion two decades earlier in cell number seven. Launching the long drama had taken months of effort—Hitler’s twenty-five-day treason trial, his long weeks of writing, his lectures to his fellow prisoners, his thirteen months behind bars. But for these men who had followed his path into the abyss, it took only seconds: a sentence read, a benediction spoken, a black hood over the head, then the noose. For them the war ended right where it had begun, as visions of grandeur in the mind of the man who unleashed his vision of racial purity and territorial conquest on the world.

  Hitler at his window in “cell” number seven of Landsberg Prison. (National Archives)

  This famous photograph shows Hitler in a pro-war crowd at Odeon Square in Munich on August 2, 1914. The photograph may have been doctored years later for propaganda purposes. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  Hitler, far left, with other German army field messengers in World War I. He usually positioned himself on the edge of the group. (National Archives)

  Hitler at Munich’s Café Heck, on the edge of the Royal Gardens, with his walkaround buddy, Ernst Hanfstaengl. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  Hitler practicing his speaking poses for photographer Heinrich Hoffmann’s camera. (Bundesarchiv)

  A Nazi rally at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall, where Hitler staged his 1923 putsch—and his 1925 comeback rally. In 1939, he barely escaped an assassination attempt in the hall. (Bundesarchiv)

  Hitler and Gen. Erich Ludendorff, the hero of World War I. They led the putsch’s final march together but later became bitterly estranged. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  Putschists patrolling Munich by truck. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  Putschists plastered proclamations around Munich declaring a new provisional government. (Historisches Lexikon Bayerns)

  Putschists kidnapped Socialist and Communist city councilmen. Hans Kallenbach is on the far right. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  During the putsch, a Nazi speaker exhorts a dense crowd in front of Munich City Hall. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  Heinrich Himmler, a new convert to the Nazi cause and future head of the SS killing machine, holds a flag as putschists take over a district military headquarters—their only success. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  Hitler and his fellow defendants on the last day of their treason trial at the Infantry School. (Pöhner is absent.) (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  A secret photograph taken at Hitler’s treason trial. Judge Neithardt, wearing a judicial beret, sits at the center of the bench. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  Hitler’s argument before the court depicted by a sketch artist. (Otto D. Franz, Library of Congress)

  During Hitler’s trial, a leading satire magazine showed Hitler torching a government edifice while sitting atop the shoulders of General Lossow, who is sitting atop Commissioner Kahr, who is summoning the police. Nazi fortunes soar as the swastika becomes a shooting star. (Library of Congress)

  Behind its faux-fortress entrance, Landsberg Prison was a thoroughly modern facility in 1923. (Landsberg Prison)

  Hitler’s sunny cell in Landsberg Prison. The upright typewriter was added for effect in the 1930s when the Nazis turned the cell into a shrine. (Archiv Manfred Deiler)

  Hitler wrote Mein Kampf on this small Remington portable typewriter. (Hermann Historica)

  Festooned with a plaque and laurel leaves, Hitler’s cell became a place of pilgrimage in the 1930s. “Hitler tourism” boomed as 100,000 visitors passed by the room in 1938. (Archiv Manfred Deiler)

  The “fortress” at Landsberg Prison was a modern building, not an old castle. After Hitler’s cell became a shrine, the Nazi banner was hung from his windows on holidays. (Archiv Manfred Deiler)

  Hitler lived well in Landsberg Prison, where he had a wicker chair for drinking tea while he read the newspapers. The wreath was a gift from an admirer. (Yad Vashem)

  Hitler bought a beer for 18 pfennigs every day from April 20 to May 5, 1924. His signature is in the middle of the page. (Archiv Manfred Deiler)

  In prison Hitler lived with four other putsch participants on the second floor of the “fortress” building. Left to right: Hitler, Emil Maurice, Col. Hermann Kriebel, Rudolf Hess, Dr. Friedrich Weber. (Landsberg Prison)

  Hitler and Emil Maurice walk and talk in the prison garden. Steadily supplied with sweets and pastries from his admirers, Hitler gained weight. He looks stuffed into his lederhosen. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  After leaving prison, Hitler poses at the Landsberg city gate. He loved fancy touring cars like the one that took him back to Munich. (Yad Vashem)

  “Hitler Free!” proclaims a Nazi newspaper on Hitler’s release. (Fotoarchiv Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)

  An early edition of Mein Kampf, first published in 1925, had a simple look and included on its cover the subtitle Eine Abrechnung (A Reckoning). (Hermann Historica)

  Later editions of Mein Kampf had a dramatic book jacket and no subtitle. (Author’s copy)

  Hitler revisits his cell in Landsberg Prison in 1934, ten years after he lived there and wrote Mein Kampf. He was now dictator of Germany. (Yad Vashem)

  After World War II, Landsberg Prison became U.S. Army War Criminal Prison No. 1. Two hundred fifty-nine Germans convicted of crimes against humanity were hanged just fifty feet from the building where Hitler lived in 1924. (National Archives)

  Acknowledgments

  The special joy of writing a research-based book lies in contact with the impressive scholars who have devoted much of their professional lives to the subject. Again and again, I was the lucky recipient of generous advice and guidance from Othmar Plöckinger in Salzburg; Paul Hoser and Christian Hartmann in Munich; Jeffrey Herf in Maryland; and Alan E. Steinweis in both Vermont and Munich. At the same time, I benefited from the contribution to my understanding of German politics and history over many years from Robert Gerald Livingston, Jackson Janes, and Jeremiah Riemer. Other scholars and experts who willingly gave of their time and experience were Roman Töppel, Reinhard Weber, David Clay Large, Christoph Safferling, Dan Michman, and Jakob Zollmann.

  Laurence Latourette and Jonathan M. Weisgall, exceptionally thoughtful men with writerly minds, read my manuscript and were more than generous with counsel and encouragement.

  Underlying it all are my rich friendships with some of Germany’s best writers and journalists: Claus Christian Malzahn, Gabor Steingart, Clemens Werg
in, Gregor Peter Schmitz, and Henryk Broder. Thanks to Schmitz, I also had the benefit of research talent at Der Spiegel in the hot pursuit of elusive documents, including Hauke Janssen and Conny Neumann. Munich photographer Wolfgang Weber added useful details to the sought-after story.

  A special case among these supportive colleagues is Michael S. Cullen, an American author in Berlin who is uniquely qualified to guide anyone writing about Germany. Cullen writes serious history and essays in German, and has been my close friend for nearly fifty years.