Right at the end of October 1923, the Völkisch and paramilitary leaders assembled in Röhm’s Reichswehr office in Munich and began preparations for armed action.65 Their concern was at least as much to head off any separatist tendencies in the Bavarian leadership as it was to support them in joint action against Berlin. It was expected that Kahr would announce his plans for a coup against the Berlin government at a meeting scheduled for 8 November at the Bürgerbräukeller. If Hitler and his co-conspirators were going to forestall Kahr, and his suspected separatist agenda, or co-opt him for their own plans, this would be an excellent opportunity to catch all the major protagonists in one place.66
Hitler struck in an evening of high drama. He burst into the Bürgerbräukeller, fired his pistol into the ceiling and announced to general applause that the Bavarian government of Knilling and the Reich government in Berlin were deposed. Hitler ‘suggested’ Kahr as regent for Bavaria and Pöhner as minister president thereof. He promised that a ‘German national government’ would be announced in Munich that same evening. He ‘recommended’ that he himself should take over the ‘leadership’ until accounts had been settled with the ‘criminals’ in Berlin. Ludendorff was to be commander of a new national army; Lossow Reichswehr minister, and Seisser German minister of police. Attempting to marry Bavarian local pride and the pan-German mission, Hitler said that it was the task of the provisional government to march on the ‘den of iniquity in Berlin’. In a considerable concession to Bavarian sensibilities he vowed ‘to build up a cooperative federal state in which Bavaria gets what it deserves’.67 Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were held captive and prevailed upon to support the coup.
The putschists now swung into action. Their ‘Proclamation to all Germans’ announced that the nation would no longer be treated like a ‘Negro tribe’.68 Hanfstaengl was detailed to inform and influence the foreign press; he tipped off Larry Rue of the Chicago Tribune that the coup was about to begin and appeared in the Bürgerbräukeller with a group of journalists from other countries.69 The offices of the pro-SPD Münchener Post were smashed up by the SA, but there was no ‘white terror’ on the streets of Munich; Hitler’s main anxiety was the Bavarian right, not the left. One of the few detentions was that of Count Soden-Fraunhofen, a staunch Wittelsbach loyalist who was accused of being a ‘hireling of the Vatican’.70 Winifred and Siegfried Wagner, who were almost certainly aware of the plot in advance, were due at the Odeon Theatre immediately after the coup, where Siegfried was to direct a Wagner concert, intended perhaps as a celebration.71 Hitler announced melodramatically that ‘the morning will see either a national government in Germany or our own deaths’.72
The morning brought the sobering realization that the putschists were on their own. There was no general national rising across the Reich. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, who had given their ‘word of honour’ under duress to support the coup, slipped away and began to mobilize forces to restore order. Hitler’s worst fears were confirmed: he was now fighting not merely red Berlin, but reactionary separatist forces in Munich. A bitter Nazi pamphlet rushed out that day announced that ‘today the [November revolution] was to have been extinguished from Munich and the honour of the fatherland restored’. ‘This,’ the pamphlet added, invoking Hitler’s rhetoric, ‘would have been the Bavarian mission.’ Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, alas, had betrayed the cause. Behind them, the pamphlet continued, stood ‘the same trust of separatists and Jews’ who had been responsible for the treasonous Armistice in 1918, the ‘slave treaty of Versailles and the despicable stock-exchange speculation’ and all other miseries.73 It concluded with a call to make one last effort to save the situation. What was striking about this document was the far greater stress laid on the separatist-clerical and capitalist danger than on the threat of Bolshevism.
Hitler and his co-conspirators set out mid morning 9 November for central Munich in a column numbering about 2,000 men, many of them armed. Strasser, who had turned up from Nuremberg with a contingent of followers, was particularly belligerent. Their plan was unclear, but it seems to have been to wrest the initiative back from Kahr; Hitler may also have intended to go down fighting as he had vowed the night before. Outside the Feldherrenhalle at the Odeonsplatz, they encountered a police cordon. Hitler linked arms with Scheubner-Richter and the column marched straight at the police lines, weapons at the ready. It is not clear whether he was seeking death as a blood sacrifice to inspire future generations or whether he was trying to imitate Napoleon’s famous confrontation with Marshal Ney, when the emperor marched slowly towards his old comrades, who refused to shoot. Shots were exchanged, leading to fatalities on both sides. Hitler himself escaped death only narrowly, injured his arm and fled the scene. Before the day was out, Kahr issued a proclamation announcing the failure of the ‘Hitler-Putsch’.74 The great drama had ended in complete fiasco.
A pamphlet published immediately after the failed coup, penned by either Hitler himself or someone briefed by him, traced the collapse of relations between Munich and Berlin throughout October 1923. It quoted from a conversation which allegedly took place between Hitler and Lossow, in which the latter ‘repeatedly spoke of an Ankara-government’, on the lines of the Turkish national revival under Atatürk, which would take on Berlin. The pamphlet went on to attack Kahr, who was allegedly ‘completely dependent on the Roman Jesuits’. ‘Because Hitler knew,’ it continued, ‘that the “black [i.e. clerical] danger” in Bavaria was even bigger than the red one’, Hitler had been compelled to pre-empt the machinations of the Jesuits, the Wittelsbach dynasty, the French, the papacy and the Habsburgs.75 The main lines of Hitler’s rather contradictory interpretation of the Putsch were thus clear: it had been carried out both with the collusion of the Bavarian conservatives and in order to forestall their plans for a clerical, monarchist and separatist coup at the expense of the Reich as a whole.
On 11 November, Hitler was arrested at the home of Hanfstaengl at Uffing am Staffelsee, south of Munich. Just before his capture, Hitler managed to get off a short message to Alfred Rosenberg, asking him to lead the movement in his absence. He was imprisoned at Landsberg, awaiting trial.76 Hitler seems at first to have undergone some kind of personal crisis, appearing depressed and even suicidal. Hess, not yet in Landsberg, spoke of him being ‘emotionally very down’.77 Following stormy interrogations, Hitler went on a ten-day hunger strike.78 According to the recollection of the resident psychologist, Alois Maria Ott, Hitler was distraught at the death of his comrades and announced that ‘I have had enough, I am done, if I had a revolver I would take it.’ Ott succeeded in calming Hitler and persuaded him to call off his protest; the planned forcible feeding proved unnecessary.79 In early December 1923, Winifred Wagner sent him blankets, books and other items to cheer him up; she also wrote frequently.80 Hitler’s spirits revived, and within a fortnight he was beginning to prepare his defence.
In mid December 1923, Hitler was questioned at Landsberg by the state prosecutor, Dr Hans Ehard. Still struggling with his injured arm, Hitler vowed ‘to play his best trump-cards in the court room itself’, and wondered aloud whether ‘certain gentlemen’ would have the courage to perjure themselves under oath in court. This was clearly directed at Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. Ehard reported that Hitler, having initially steadfastly refused to make any sort of statements on the record, to avoid ‘having words put into his mouth’, soon began to hold ‘interminable political lectures’. He explained that he had struck because the men of the Kampfbund had been impatient for action, and could not be held back any longer. Ehard, probably acting on instructions from superiors who feared dirty linen being washed in public, asked Hitler directly whether he planned ‘to bring the question of the alleged Bavarian separatist plans into [his] defence strategy’. Hitler pointedly declined to answer, but he soon launched into a lengthy attack on ‘well-known, influential, one-sidedly religiously inclined circles, which pursued solely separatist aims and to this end pushed forward Kahr as a straw man’. ‘These circles,’ he added, ‘sought
the restoration of the monarchy.’ In the context of what he called ‘French plans to break up’, these tendencies would lead to ‘the separation of Bavaria’ and the ‘disintegration of the Reich’.81 It is striking that Hitler again spent far more time on these dangers to the Reich than those from the left.
Hitler soon made himself comfortable in Landsberg.82 Conditions were remarkably good, as both the warders and the other prisoners treated him as a celebrity, even after his sentencing. The terms of his incarceration did not involve compulsory labour, a regimented diet, prison clothes or restrictions on visitors. His main companions behind bars were his chauffeur and bodyguard Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess; his authority was unquestioned. The young Nazi Hermann Fobke related that it was not so much a question of ‘presenting to the boss’ as being ‘lectured to by the boss’.83 Admirers brought him books, food and flowers and news. Helene Bechstein provided cheese. In all, more than 500 people, including Elsa Bruckmann, visited him in the first few months alone. Hanfstaengl later remarked that the cell looked like a ‘delicatessen’. For all that, Hitler found captivity irksome, as he was kept cooped up and powerless to intervene in outside affairs. His surroundings were far from luxurious–Landsberg remained a prison, not a hotel. Music and hatred kept him going. ‘I let out my annoyance in my apologia,’ he wrote in January 1924, ‘whose first part, at least, I hope will survive the court case and me. For the rest I am dreaming of Tristan and similar matters.’84
The NSDAP, meanwhile, was in disarray.85 President Ebert announced that Hitler’s followers would be prosecuted for treason. The party itself was declared illegal and went underground; its press was banned, including the Völkischer Beobachter and Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer. The party premises were raided, with seven bags of potatoes being carried off by police along with all records and valuables. In Hesse and Württemberg the authorities moved quickly to stamp out any threatened copycat attempts. The Nazi leadership was now largely on the run, hiding among sympathizers in and around Munich. Hitler’s choice of Rosenberg to head the party in his absence took everybody by surprise and caused general consternation. Rosenberg was aloof and cerebral and had no personal following in the movement. By contrast, the three deputies also appointed by Hitler–Julius Streicher, Max Amann and Hermann Esser–were powerful in their own right. Hitler did not explain his decision. It is possible that he saw Rosenberg as a straw man who would simply keep the seat warm for him for his release, but it may also be that he saw the main priority in his absence as the maintenance not of organizational coherence, but of ideological purity,86 and for that Rosenberg was the perfect fit.
The world did not stand still while Hitler was in Landsberg. Rosenberg was confronted not simply with the practical question of how to pay for salaries, publications and other expenses, but also had to take a view on crucial political questions. The most pressing was whether the party should contest elections. Hitler was sceptical, but allowed Rosenberg to go ahead. Temporarily renamed the Grossdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft (GVG), because the party was banned under its old name, the Nazis joined a raft of other parties to contest the Bavarian Landtag elections under the banner of the Völkischer Block (VB); in Thuringia, they joined with Albrecht von Gräfe’s Deutsch-Völkische Freiheitspartei (DVFP), a breakaway from the DNVP. Hitler tried to put a strict time limit on all agreements–for example that with the DVFP in late February 1924–probably in order to leave his hands free after his release. One way or the other, the movement was still completely oriented towards Hitler, even while he languished in Landsberg. As the Munich leadership announced in mid March 1924, ‘It is our responsibility to place in his hands not an unserviceable but a living instrument.’87
In late February 1924, Hitler was brought to stand trial before the Volksgericht in Munich in the old Infantry School on the Blutenburgstrasse. He was allowed to appear in a suit rather than prison clothes and sporting his Iron Cross. Security was strict, and the press interest, including from abroad, was intense. Hitler would no doubt have been pleased to know that ‘one heard particularly many English voices’.88 The Reich government had wanted the trial to be held in Leipzig, but the authorities in Munich were determined to keep it local, almost certainly because they feared what might otherwise emerge about their complicity in the various plots.89 Berlin gave way in the context of a broader rapprochement with Bavaria. In mid February 1924, about a week before the trial began, the Bavarian Reichswehr submitted once again to command from Berlin, thus reversing Kahr and Lossow’s position in November 1923; Kahr resigned.
Hitler famously used the courtroom as a platform from which to expound his world view, to refine his biography90 and to slander his many enemies. What is much less well understood is that his main target throughout was Bavarian separatism, the charge which more than any other he levelled at Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. Picking up his pre-Putsch rhetoric, Hitler explained to the court on the very first day of proceedings that it was ‘very difficult’ to distinguish between ‘disguised federalism’ and a force which was ‘publicly’ espousing a course of action with ‘separatist effects’. He reminded his listeners that the BVP ‘Bamberg Programme contains the sentence that every [German federal] state has the right in future to conclude treaties with other [that is foreign] states–a sentence whose logical conclusion means the dissolution of the Reich’. His concern, he claimed, was that Kahr would either fail to march on Berlin, or do so without success, and then take the separatist option, probably with ‘foreign help’, that is, from France. More generally, Hitler was unhappy with the pervasive idea ‘that one dresses up the struggle in the defence of purely Bavarian rights’, a stance which would alienate the rest of Germany.91 This rhetoric enabled him to outflank the triumvirate on the right, and to embarrass them on the wider German stage, as separatism was a clear violation of the Weimar constitution. It was no doubt for this reason that the Munich authorities were keen to hold the trial in Bavaria, and why they gave Hitler such an easy ride. He in turn colluded, reserving his most specific charges for the closed sessions, with the implicit threat that he could let rip in public if he wanted to.
The trial lasted just over a month, from 26 February to 27 March 1924. Hitler was not at the centre of proceedings at all times, and was a spectator for long stretches when his co-conspirators were in the dock. It did not matter. Hitler succeeded in asserting the leadership of the political struggle against the Weimar Republic, putting such luminaries as General Ludendorff in the shade. ‘The political struggle,’ he announced unambiguously, ‘that is the confrontation and the settlement of accounts with the November criminals’ is ‘led by me and will remain my preserve.’92 He did not deny the substance of the charges, but argued that he had acted at all times in the greater interest of Germany. His apparently forthright performance was favourably compared to the evident shiftiness of the ‘triumvirate’, who vigorously disputed any separatist intent and, even more implausibly, any conspiracy against the Reich government in Berlin. Even the chief state prosecutor Ludwig Stenglein attested to ‘the purity of [Hitler’s] convictions and his unselfish devotion to his life work’.93 The credibility of Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, by contrast, was completely shredded under cross-examination, and by the testimony of the defendants and witnesses. Sometimes Kahr appeared so overwhelmed that his voice dropped to a whisper as the courtroom audience strained to hear him. The rampant Hitler, by contrast, was repeatedly told to lower his voice by the trial judge.94
Hitler’s final speech was a triumphant reiteration of his beliefs and sense of mission. If he was a traitor, then so were Bismarck, Atatürk and Mussolini, whose treason had been ratified by success. Hitler decried that there was ‘self-determination for every Negro tribe’, but that ‘Germany did not belong to the Negro tribes but stood under them’. The root of the German predicament, he continued, lay in Germany’s exposed geopolitical position in Europe. ‘The German people’, Hitler argued, ‘has perhaps the worst location of all nations in military-political terms. It is geogr
aphically extraordinarily badly located, surrounded by many rivals’. It was menaced by France’s determination to ‘Balkanize’ Germany and to reduce her population. In this context he referred to ‘Clemenceau’s [alleged] aim to exterminate 20 million Germans in Europe, to break up Germany into individual states and to prevent the emergence of another united large Reich’. It was also threatened by Britain’s supposed much broader policy of Balkanizing Europe as a whole in order to maintain the balance of power. There was no economic solution to this predicament, Hitler stressed, but only a powerful foreign policy based on the highest level of internal mobilization. Germany would need to get rid of ‘international Jewry’, which was coordinating the global forces against her. She would also need to pursue the related struggle against international capitalism. ‘The battle against international stock exchange enslavement’ and against the ‘trustification’ of the ‘entire economy’, Hitler demanded, must be taken up.95
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