Hitler then returned to the hall and gave a second speech announcing the composition of the new Bavarian and Reich governments.101 Shortly afterwards, Ludendorff entered the Bürgerbräukeller and he and Hitler now tried to put moral pressure on the Triumvirate. Finally, the three declared their agreement with the coup, returning to the hall to proclaim their ‘unity’. Then, in brief speeches, Kahr, Lossow, Seisser, and Pöhner all announced they had agreed to participate in the coup d’état.
Meanwhile, the putschists had been trying to occupy government buildings and army barracks in the city, although in most cases meeting resistance and failing to achieve their objectives.102 When Hitler left the Bürgerbräukeller late in the evening in order to find out why they had failed to occupy the pioneer corps barracks, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser seized the opportunity to leave the beer hall and immediately began taking steps to crush the putsch.103 In the meantime, Prime Minister von Knilling, various Bavarian ministers, and the Munich police chief, who were present in the hall, had been taken hostage by the putschists and were kept prisoner throughout the following day.104 During the night, various armed groups had also taken captive a number of mainly upper-middle-class Jews and taken them off to the Bürgerbräukeller.105 The next morning, following Göring’s orders, storm troopers forced their way into the town hall and took hostage the deputy mayor and seven city councillors belonging to the KPD, SPD, and USPD; all were freed the following day.106 In addition, the putschists ‘confiscated’ a large quantity of paper money from two printers, in order to pay the troops. Legally, this was clearly theft.107
As became clear during the night, the Reichswehr and the paramilitary state police remained loyal to the existing government, which meant that the putsch was doomed to fail.108 During the morning, the putschists assembled in the Bürgerbräukeller decided to make a final attempt to turn the tide: they began a demonstration march aiming to go through the centre of the city towards the military district headquarters, which Röhm had occupied with his Reichskriegsflagge. Shortly before reaching the building, at the Feldherrnhalle, the roughly 2,000 putschists came up against a barricade manned by the state police. Suddenly a few shots rang out – those responsible were never identified – leading to an exchange of fire during which four policemen, thirteen putschists, and a bystander were killed; two further putschists were killed as a result of an exchange of fire at the military district headquarters. Among the dead were Scheubner-Richter, who, marching arm in arm with Hitler, had pulled the latter to the ground as he fell. Hitler escaped in the fleeing crowd with a dislocated shoulder. Göring, who was also able to escape, had a bullet wound. Streicher, Frick, Pöhner, Amann, and Röhm were all arrested at the Feldherrnhalle; Ludendorff, who had marched towards the police cordon oblivious to the shooting, was also arrested.109
Hitler succeeded in making his way to Hanfstängl’s house in Uffing on the Staffelsee, where he was found by the police two days later in a desperate and depressed state and taken into custody. In Hanfstängl’s house Hitler composed a ‘political testament’, appointing Rosenberg Party chairman and making Amann his deputy.110
* Translators’ note: Karl May (1842–1912) was a popular author, known mainly for his Wild West stories, of which Hitler was a fan.
5
The Trial and the Period of the Ban
On 13 December 1923, Hans Ehard, the public prosecutor who was conducting the prosecution of the putschists, travelled to Landsberg prison in order, as he put it in his report, ‘to attempt to interrogate Hitler’.1 However, Hitler, now a prisoner on remand, declined to make any statement; he was not, Ehard recorded, going to ‘be tricked into giving himself away’. Instead, he promised to produce a political memorandum explaining his actions in detail.2 Hitler even refused to say anything about his youth and personal development because he was not going to allow himself to be ‘interrogated like a criminal’; he did not want a ‘court report’ to be produced, which might later be ‘used against him’. Ehard also learnt that Hitler declined to provide the prison doctor with any information about his previous life on the grounds that ‘he was healthy and that they should forget about all that nonsense’. He had broken off an almost fourteen-day hunger strike at the end of November.3
It is clear from these statements that Hitler was afraid that the prosecution investigations and the impending trial would show him up. Not only would the weak points in his Führer biography, which he had hitherto been careful to conceal, be disclosed (his stay in the Viennese men’s hostel, his flight to Munich to avoid military service in Austria, his dubious role during the Räterepublik, his unrealistic plans for a professional future),4 but a careful analysis of the pre-history of the putsch would inevitably reveal how foolhardy his decision to launch it had been. For Hitler had not simply been driven to act by his supporters. In fact, unwilling to admit he had misjudged the political situation, he had taken the bull by the horns so as not to appear to his followers (and himself ) as a failure. He did not want to be seen as a muddle head whose life so far had been a dead end, and it was precisely his fear of such a blow to his self-esteem that gave him the impetus to challenge Ehard. Hitler benefited greatly from the fact that the Triumvirate had been thoroughly compromised by their own plans for a coup d’état in autumn 1923. He dropped dark hints to Ehard that, during the trial, he would call ‘numerous witnesses’ who had not been members of the Kampfbund and then they would see ‘whether “certain gentlemen”, when confronted by these witnesses in the courtroom, would actually have the courage to perjure themselves’.
Faced with Hitler’s torrent of words, Ehard gave up the attempt to take a statement; instead, he asked for the typewriter to be removed and had a five-hour conversation during which Hitler refused to allow him to take notes. As far as his general mood was concerned, he told Ehard that, after the ‘collapse of his enterprise, . . . [he had been] initially quite apathetic, then he had raged and now he had got his “Schopenhauer” and so had regained his philosophical serenity; he had also regained his energy and would now fight like a “wild cat” to save his skin and “act ruthlessly to discredit his opponents”.’
Hitler strongly denied that he had committed treason, as the current constitutional order was, after all, based on the revolution of November 1918. He would also provide proof at his trial that the existing constitution had been repeatedly contravened in recent times: for example, by the overthrow of the Hoffmann government after the Kapp putsch, for which the Reichswehr was responsible, and by the appointment of the General State Commissar [Kahr], which had only happened because the public had been misled about the political situation at the time. His ‘high treason’ of 8 November had also been ‘sanctioned and legalized by Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, who were the legal representatives of the state’. He would prove that the three ‘had not simply feigned acceptance of the proposals he had made in the Bürgerbräukeller, but seriously intended implementing the agreement that had been reached’ and that ‘afterwards they had only been persuaded to change their minds and break their word as a result of persuasion, and partly compulsion, from outside’. In fact, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser had not only participated for several hours on the 8 November, but ‘for months had been preparing with him everything that was agreed in the Bürgerbräukeller on the evening of 8.11.23’. They had discussed the ‘“march on Berlin” to be launched from Bavaria down to fine detail and had been in total agreement. Basically, he, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser had had identical aims’. Hitler then indicated that during the trial he was going to raise the whole question of the ‘secret mobilization’, in other words the collaboration between the Reichswehr and the paramilitary leagues.
Essentially, Hitler had been explaining to Ehard the strategy that he was going to adopt for his defence in the coming trial, which began in Munich on 26 February 1924, and in which, apart from him and Ludendorff, there were eight other defendants. He had made it clear that he was prepared to mount a counter-offensive against the Bavarian state and was
assuming that his threat of ‘revelations’ would persuade the prosecution and the court to be lenient with him. And that is indeed precisely what happened. Hitler agreed to let the issue of the Reichswehr’s secret mobilization be dealt with in a session closed to the public, and refrained from touching on the question during his hours-long speeches in the public sessions.5 The defence also did not attempt to compromise the government or cause problems for it by calling ‘numerous witnesses’, as Hitler had threatened to do. In return, the government dealt with the matter under its own jurisdiction instead of referring it to the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig, which was officially responsible for cases of high treason. The prosecution refrained from trying the various serious crimes committed during the putsch – homicides, kidnapping, and robbery – separately, restricting itself to the charge of high treason. The judge permitted Hitler to use the court as a stage for his propaganda and, at the end, imposed a lenient sentence allowing for a generous term of suspension, and did not deport him to Austria. It is hardly conceivable that this leniency was not the result of a deal between the various parties involved in the case.
With his counter-offensive Hitler also avoided being personally exposed during the trial. Thanks to the avoidance of a full public investigation of the pre-history of the putsch, he could blame its failure mainly on intrigues that were outside his responsibility. In the court he portrayed his attempt to involve the Triumvirate in his putsch on 8 November (an enterprise that, in view of the general political situation at the end of October/beginning of November, was doomed to fail) as the heroic deed of a credulous man, who had relied on promises that had been made to him. Thus, after a relatively brief depressive phase, he had restored the overblown self-image he had developed on the eve of the putsch and of which now, in the course of the trial, he had become utterly convinced. He saw his actions as having ennobled him as a heroic leader, who had disregarded all petty considerations. He persuaded himself and his public that the collapse of the putsch merely revealed the failure of his opponents and indeed provided the proof of his qualities as a national leader.
The court gave Hitler the opportunity, right from the start of proceedings, to take the stage with a three and a half hour speech.6 He began with an account of his miserable years in Vienna: ‘I arrived in Vienna as a citizen of the world and left it as an absolute anti-Semite, as a deadly enemy of the whole Marxist world view.’7 He continued with his time in Munich, his military service and the post-war period, with his speech increasingly turning into a general attack on Marxism and the ‘November criminals’. The final section was devoted to an exhaustive account of the 1923 crisis and its culmination in the autumn. In the process he made one thing clear: ‘During this whole period, Lossow, Kahr, and Seisser had exactly the same aim as us, namely to get rid of the Reich government with its current international and parliamentary world view and replace it with a nationalist, absolutely anti-parliamentary national government, a Directorate. If some people subsequently try and make out that they wanted that too, but that it ought to have been achieved not through force but instead through pressure, pressure through force, but not by using force; that they wanted a coup but not like a normal coup as it has been historically understood hitherto, but rather as they understood it, then I can only regret that we weren’t informed at the time about this special Lossow idea of a coup.’ In other words: ‘If our whole operation was high treason then Messrs Lossow, Seisser, and Kahr have committed high treason along with us, for throughout all those months we didn’t discuss with them anything other than that for which we are now sitting in the dock.’8
With this introductory speech Hitler had taken the first step towards dominating the future court proceedings, particularly since none of the other defendants showed any desire to challenge his leading role in this case of high treason. Apart from his stress on the complicity of Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, during the trial Hitler emphasized an additional theme: the wavering and hesitation of his former conservative allies had forced him to act; he alone had shown the necessary decisiveness, while the members of the Triumvirate, a bunch of losers, were now not even prepared to stand up for what they had done. In the closed sessions Hitler repeatedly used his right to cross-examine witnesses to an excessive extent. On several occasions his torrent of words prompted the chairman to call him – gently, it must be said – to order.9
Hitler tried, for example, to drive Kahr into a corner. Together with his defence counsel and supported by Ludendorff, he interrogated him in the manner of an inquisitor as to how much he had known about the mobilization of the Bavarian army, the provision of ammunition, and its financing with Bavarian funds.10 And why had he thought that Friedrich Minoux, who had been envisaged as a member of the Directorate, was entitled ‘to put pressure on the Reich president and on the cabinet that was not legitimated by the Constitution’? Kahr ought to answer the question as to whether his actions had not ‘very seriously damaged the constitutional foundations of the Reich, in other words, basically, what Kahr is accusing us of having done’.11 When Lossow reminded him that he had broken the promise that he had given to Seisser on 8 November not to use force, Hitler responded that he did not have a guilty conscience, since ‘the only one of us two who has broken his word [is] the Herr Lieutenant-General’, a reference to the events of 1 May 1923.12 Hitler also took the liberty of referring to the ‘high treason committed by the gentlemen, Lossow, Kahr, and Seisser’, the very ones who had provided him with the instrument with which to launch his putsch.13
The judge repeatedly permitted Hitler to digress from his cross-examination of witnesses into making extensive political statements. He did not object to Hitler continually referring to ‘November criminals’ during the course of the trial, or to one of the defendants insulting the eagle in the national flag by calling it a ‘vulture’.14 He tolerated Hitler making several derogatory comments about the Social Democrat Reich President, Friedrich Ebert.15 When Lossow mentioned the fact that, on the evening of 8 November, Nazis had aimed their guns at him when he had briefly looked out of the window, Judge Neithardt tried to excuse this by remarking: ‘I can imagine that they did it out of high spirits in order to give the gentlemen a fright.’16 The reporter of the Bayerischer Kurier, a paper close to the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party, noted that the courtroom seemed to be being increasingly ‘transformed into a political meeting’ in which ‘applause and heckling’ were tolerated.17
During the trial, Hitler repeatedly mentioned his personal political ambitions; they were not exactly modest. While he referred to Ludendorff as the ‘military leader of the future Germany’ and said the general was to be the ‘leader of the great future reckoning’, he insisted, ‘I am going to be the political leader of this young Germany. Since it was I who founded this youthful völkisch movement, it’s obvious that everybody in Germany who supports this youthful völkisch trend sees me as their leader. For I started it four years ago with a huge propaganda campaign and, during these past four years, I have created a great wave, which has now become a power factor even in the case of elections.’18 However, as far as he himself was concerned, he had ‘no interest in acquiring a ministerial post. I consider it unworthy of a great man to go seeking after titles’; that was the wrong way to ‘make . . . a name for yourself in world history. . . . Thousands of people can become ministers. I resolved to be the destroyer of Marxism. That is my task. . . . It wasn’t from modesty that I wanted at that time to be the drummer, for that is the highest there is. The rest is insignificant.’19 The roles of ‘drummer’ and ‘Führer’ now merged in his mind. He wanted to be seen as historically unique, as someone who was far above the usual norms of conventional politics. This also meant that his decision to lead his supporters into a putsch, while completely ignoring the reality of the political situation, could appear entirely justified.
It was not surprising that, after twenty-four days of court proceedings, Hitler’s final statement was another speech lastin
g several hours, during which he gloried in his sense of superiority.20 The accused adopted the role of an accuser. Among other things, he declared: ‘The broad masses will not recover their belief and confidence in the dignity of the law until the day when a prosecutor can stand up in court and say: I accuse Ebert, Scheidemann, and comrades of treason and high treason committed in 1918 . . .’21 At the end, as the final judge in his case, he called on the ‘Goddess of history’: ‘for, gentlemen, it is not you who will pronounce the final verdict upon us, it will be the goddess of the court of the last judgment, who will rise up from our graves and from your graves as “history”. And, when we stand before her, I already know what her verdict will be. She won’t ask us: Have you committed high treason? In her eyes the Quartermaster-General of the World War and his officers will count as Germans who wanted the best, as Germans who wanted to fight for their fatherland. You may pronounce us “guilty” a thousand times, but the goddess who presides over the eternal court of history will smile and tear up the charge of the public prosecutor, and smile and tear up the judgment of the court, for she will acquit us.’22 Hitler had become so detached from the reality of the court proceedings that the inevitable verdict of guilty appeared tolerable. He had finally overcome the insecurity and shame which he had initially experienced as a result of the failure of the putsch.
On 1 April, sentence was pronounced: Hitler, like Weber, Kriebel, and Pöhner, was sentenced to five years’ ‘fortress imprisonment’; five other accused received shorter prison sentences; Ludendorff was acquitted. Since, as a result of Hitler’s new sentence, the suspension of his 1922 sentence was no longer valid, no part of his sentence should have been suspended. But, ignoring the specific legal regulations concerned, the court decreed that his sentence (along with those of Pöhner, Weber, and Kriebel) should be suspended after only six months. The court rejected his deportation to Austria on the grounds of his military service, again ignoring the specific regulations of the Law for the Protection of the Republic, which laid down that foreigners convicted of high treason were without exception to be deported.23
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