1924: The Year That Made Hitler (14 page)

Hitler’s reputation had preceded him on this blustery night, sending the prison into an uproar of preparations. Word of the putsch had filtered into the provincial newspapers; everyone knew who Hitler was, and that he and his Nazis were capable of serious mischief. “We have to be prepared for anything,” Warden Leybold had told Lurker and Hemmrich. “His followers may attempt a rescue.” Given the brazenness of the putsch attempt, the fears were not unfounded. “We had only sixty prison guards, some quite old, and a twenty-man security detail outfitted with World War I weapons,” noted Hemmrich. “If we’d been assaulted by a massive force led by former officers, our little troop would have been too weak to defend the big prison complex.”
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As they were fretting over security, Leybold got a reprieve: a phone call from Munich informed him that the Reichswehr would take over guard duty for Adolf Hitler and the fortress. The Nazi Party leader was too important to leave to the inadequate resources of the prison. Within half an hour, the prison corridors echoed with the tramp of boots and clang of military equipment. Rifles, machine
guns, steel helmets, even hand grenades were laid in by the thirty-two-man Reichswehr detachment from the Landsberg garrison. The guard unit’s commander, Lieutenant Imhoff, set up his post in the cell next to Hitler’s. A direct telephone line to the Reichswehr garrison was run out of Imhoff’s headquarters, yet it was repeatedly cut during the night, according to Lurker.

For all the excitement, the prison guards’ chief job on this historic night was helping Hitler out of his clothes. His dislocated shoulder was still causing him great pain. “He was just about all in,” reported Hemmrich. “He refused a bite or even a sip of soup, but lay down on the cot. His sole request was for a glass of water. I put a full pitcher on his table. I went away after securely locking him in.”

Hitler’s lack of appetite turned out to be more than a function of exhaustion. It was also political, and a function of depression and desperation. Hitler fully expected, he said later, to be shot for his misdeeds, just as so many revolutionaries before him had been—and just as he would have done to anyone who attempted a coup against him when he was in power.
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Given the waves of political violence since World War I, it was no idle fear. Nor was it a surprise that Hitler, buffeted by his sense of failure and physical collapse, was still contemplating suicide. His chief reason for living—the Nazi movement—seemed to be at an end.

Hitler was a man of dramatic mood swings. He had already spoken of death or suicide four times in the past three days. Now his volatile psychological state triggered turbulence and drama in the prison. Besieged by court officials trying to get testimony from him, Hitler’s temper vacillated wildly. The temperamental prisoner had at first clamored for a chance to make an official statement to investigators; he wanted to put his version of events on the record. Hitler’s goal was to exact revenge from those he believed had betrayed him: Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. But when investigators
arrived at Landsberg, Hitler repeatedly clammed up, “acted fresh, or broke out into crying fits,” reported an official.
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During attempted interrogations, Hitler’s shouts and screams “could be heard all over the building.”
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Guards standing outside the second-floor interrogation room feared that fisticuffs would break out. Both defiant and dejected, Hitler was a problem prisoner from the start. Then came the hunger strike.

At first, Hitler ate the food Hemmrich brought him—“but didn’t touch the meat.” Hitler had become a vegetarian. As part of his “honorable” incarceration, a fortress prisoner received the same food that the prison staff ate, not the plainer fare served to the five hundred inmates in the main prison. But one morning, when Hemmrich arrived with Hitler’s breakfast, the inmate’s dinner from the night before still stood untouched on his table. “Herr Hitler, what’s the matter?” asked the guard. “Why aren’t you eating? Are you sick?”

“Just leave me alone!” cried Hitler. “I’m not eating anymore.”

Prison Warden Leybold told Hemmrich to leave each meal in Hitler’s cell nonetheless, and pick it up only after bringing the next meal. But when Hemmrich delivered breakfast the following morning, Hitler flew into a rage. His dinner from the night before again stood untouched on the table. Hitler “howled like a madman at me,” said Hemmrich.

“Take it away!” shouted Hitler. “Otherwise I’m going to throw it against the wall!”

Hitler then broke into his classic political rant, yelling at Hemmrich about “liars and traitors.” A shouting match erupted; Hemmrich issued disciplinary threats. But he removed Hitler’s spurned meals.

Not eating day after day, Hitler became weak. He looked “like a heap of misery, crestfallen, poorly shaved, and listening to my
simple words with a tired little smile and no interest,” wrote Hemmrich.
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It was bad enough that his party was banned, his newspaper shuttered, and his comrades arrested, hunted, or in exile. But Hitler, who had always put great store in his personal dignity, now faced ignominy. He heard that people were calling him crazy, or drunk, or megalomaniacal on the night of the putsch.
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He was roundly denounced and derided by all but his own fanatical followers, and even by some of them. Hermann Esser later claimed that many Nazi adherents were deeply angered that their leader had not stayed with his people at the Odeon Square.
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The
New York Times
captured the consensus: “The Munich putsch definitely eliminates Hitler and his National Socialist followers.”
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U.S. diplomat Robert Murphy, based in Munich, soon wrote, “It is to be expected that Hitler, who is not a German citizen, will be deported from the country after serving his prison term.”
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As historian Othmar Plöckinger put it, “Hitler’s fall was steep; in the first days and weeks it was uncertain whether he would ever be able to return to the political stage.”
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And the stage itself was suddenly cleared of all the smoke and clamor that Hitler and his Nazis had been generating. “The swastikas and Storm Troopers disappeared, and the name of Adolf Hitler fell almost into oblivion,” noted Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who traveled often to Germany.
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With his world shrinking and his future closing down, Hitler again sought the melodramatic way out. With no gun, no defiant marches, and no rope for making a noose, Hitler chose the only weapon left to him: death by starvation. He would punish himself and die like a martyr, succumbing for his cause (
die Sache
).

Several days after he began his hunger strike, alarmed prison officials moved Hitler to the hospital wing, where he was
continuously watched and strictly isolated from other prisoners. Drinking only water, Hitler spent most of his time reading beside his barred window. He asked Hemmrich to bring him materials from the little prison library;
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he said he found peace in rereading philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. But he was increasingly pale and frail, his voice growing hoarse. Hemmrich began to notice an odd odor, a “cloyingly sweet smell that surely came from his stomach.”
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The malodor became so “penetrating” that Hemmrich had to hold his breath to avoid nausea while delivering packages to Hitler. After a week, Warden Leybold was concerned that he “might not be able to keep his most precious prisoner alive for trial.” The warden ordered hospital staff to prepare to begin force-feeding of Hitler by “synthetic nutrition.” The future ruler of Germany was about to have a tube forced down his throat.

But on that same day, November 19, the prison’s teacher and “practical psychologist,” Alois Maria Ott, decided to pay Hitler a visit.
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“It was a gray Monday morning, and I went to the hospital around 10 a.m.,” Ott later wrote. “I unlocked the door and found before me a short, darkly staring man whose appearance was, at first, rather disappointing. He looked like an ordinary person with a very mannered way of combing his dark hair over his forehead.… Most noticeable were the prominent cheekbones and strong chin with a stubbornly closed wide mouth and a broad, slightly indented nose.… His eyes betrayed his hostility, shooting daggers at me.”

Ott, a devout Catholic and firm believer in the power of goodwill,
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had made up his mind to break through Hitler’s wall of resistance. He had a plan: Ott brought the angry inmate a Munich newspaper featuring a story by one of Hitler’s former friends; it accused the Nazi leader of “falling victim to the devil of his own vanity and a prima donna complex.” Handing Hitler the
newspaper—the conservative
Bayerischer Kurier
(Bavarian Courier)—Ott said, “Herr Hitler, I give you my word that I’ve told nobody in the prison that I was coming to see you, and nobody will learn anything of this conversation. You and I are about the same age and have both lived through war and misery. I’m coming to you man to man, to be of assistance, the same way I do with every inmate. But, here, read what your old friend has written about you!”
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Hitler read while the prison psychologist paced up and down the narrow hospital room—“ten paces long by three paces wide,” he recalled. It was silent in the room.

Suddenly Hitler jumped up and smashed the crumpled-up newspaper onto the table. In a shrill voice, “with his unique guttural rolling ‘R,’” Hitler began shouting: “This [German] people are a bunch of bums! What a poor excuse of a nation! What a bunch of know-it-alls! You put your life on the line for the greatest cause and then they betray you!… It’s not worth the sacrifice. I’m tired of going on. It’s over! Let them see how well they do without me. I’m giving up. If I had a revolver, I would take it.”

Ott was stunned: “[Hitler’s] mouth was flecked with white foam, his eyes were rolling, the whites of his eyes were moist. The man was hysterical.”

Nonetheless, Ott lectured Hitler on the need for patience if he really meant to help people find jobs and security instead of just offering vague promises. Ott’s little sermon didn’t work: “He exploded again and shouted at me: ‘Germany cannot wait! I tried to help the country with an appeal to its dignity and its honor. But these cowardly fools won’t listen! They betray anyone who tries to lift them out of the slime of subservience. History has shown again and again: those who want the best [for their people] are always crucified and burned at the stake.”

Ott let Hitler rage on. Asking him if he didn’t perhaps follow the wrong role models—given Austria’s recent history with the fallen house of Hohenzollern—Ott touched another nerve. Hitler hated the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, so now he gave Ott “a long private lecture” on history, revolution, and role models “from Sparta to Frederick the Great to Nelson and Garibaldi.”

Hitler’s silence was now broken. And he was on familiar ground. He could not resist a chance to pontificate on history and politics. The prisoner and the prison teacher fell into a classic colloquy, debating issues of the day and of the past. Hitler claimed the only two institutions he ever respected were the Prussian army general staff and the College of Cardinals at the Vatican. “Then you must know,” said Ott, “how long it took the Prussian general staff to prepare for the last war, and that revolutionaries like Garibaldi and Mussolini need the will of the people behind them. Slogans, especially ideological ones like anti-Semitism and anti-clericalism, won’t bring starving people to the barricades.… Why do you and your followers spread hatred toward Jews and toward papal authority? We can be political opponents, but if you want to lead a whole nation into a better future, we need one another.”

Hitler interrupted and contradicted Ott, but stayed engaged. In the end, Ott concluded that Hitler’s hatred for “those who think differently” could not be attenuated: “I could feel his demonic obsession with an ideology that unleashed the psychopath in him.” Hitler was filled with “vanity and brutal dogmatism,” wrote Ott. The next day, however, Ott “heard that Hitler had ended his hunger strike.”

Whether he did so because of his encounter with Ott is uncertain. Anton Drexler, the Nazi Party cofounder whom Hitler had replaced, visited Hitler at around the same time and claimed that after a “one-and-three-quarter hour struggle with a man who had
given up on life,” he had talked Hitler out of dying for the sake of the movement. According to Putzi Hanfstaengl, his wife, Helene—the woman who took the pistol out of Hitler’s hand just before he was arrested—played a decisive role, too: “She sent a message through to say that she had not prevented him from committing suicide in order to let him starve himself to death.”
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One other woman may have made a difference: Frau von Scheubner-Richter, the young widow of the man shot dead beside Hitler as the putschists marched into Odeon Square. She arrived heavily veiled and dressed in mourning to visit Hitler; her presence meant forgiveness and may have convinced Hitler that his followers still supported him. Hitler’s attorney, Lorenz Roder, also visited him on November 24 and afterward told Hemmrich that Hitler had just agreed to end the strike.
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Hitler’s first meal, recalled the guard, was a bowl of rice. The prisoner had regained “his will to live,” thought Hemmrich, despite the report of one visitor just a day before that Hitler’s left arm “was still unusable.”
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But Hitler was again interested in sharing his thoughts, or at least writing them down; Attorney Roder wrote within a week to the state’s attorney, requesting permission to take to Hitler “the dictionary of the German language by Weber, five volumes of Schopenhauer, along with paper, pen, pen holder and a pencil.”
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