1924: The Year That Made Hitler (17 page)

Hitler was beginning to see his trial appearance as another beer hall performance—but the beer hall performance of a lifetime. As he read and reflected and wrote, Hitler realized he had two tasks: One was to implicate Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser in the putsch conspiracy. The other was to sell his anti-Marxist, anti-Semitic politics and Nazi Party brand by laying out his grand design for solving the problems Germany faced. In this boldly aggressive fighting style, he would also be selling himself. For that he needed a courtroom version of his beer hall stump speech.

Hitler also began conceiving his defense in personal terms, framed by his own biography, conflating his own fate with Germany’s. His life, with its odd twists, chance intellectual discoveries, and self-taught insights, he decided, was the perfect metaphor for his movement, his plans, his understanding of the great questions facing the nation. His personal awakening and leadership of the Nazi Party would become the story of the putsch—and the proof of his innocence. Or it would become his swan song.

Done right, the stump speech would redeem Hitler even if his attempt to implicate the triumvirate failed. He would establish himself, at least rhetorically, as a committed soldier in the cause of saving Germany from the Marxist scourge. If convicted of treason for the putsch, Hitler would go down in a blaze of his own glory in the eyes of Germany’s nationalist-minded community; he would become a
martyr. He would write his own epitaph and it would be a glorious one. For the courtroom stage, he had an almost fail-proof strategy.

On February 22, 1924, Hitler was piled into a police van and trundled, for the first time in nearly four months, back to the town he loved, the platform of all his greatest successes and his worst failure: Munich. There he was housed in the Infantry School, which had been converted into a court.

The trial was set to begin in four days.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Trial for Treason

“Why isn’t Hitler’s trial listed among the most important trials in history?”

—
OTTO GRITSCHNEDER, MUNICH, 2001
¹

Adolf Hitler’s trial for high treason began in Munich on a snowy Tuesday, February 26, 1924.

Lawyers, journalists, and jurists arrived at the Reichswehr’s former Infantry School to find a scene like a military siege. For fear of violence by nationalistic paramilitaries or demonstrations by Hitler’s fanatical supporters, a detachment of steel-helmeted Reichswehr soldiers and Bavarian State Police had been deployed around the building. The hulking, dark-brick pile was temporarily serving as a Bavarian People’s Court and as a provisional jailhouse for Hitler and several other defendants.
²
Stamping their feet and puffing into their gloves on a day described by one trial attendee as “ice cold,” the soldiers patrolled behind a cordon of concertina wire and tank traps (
cheval-de-frise
). The militarized aspect of the block caused some
Munich wags to call the area “occupied territory”—a play on the French invasion of the Ruhr region.
³
Another observer compared the Infantry School to an armed “Roman
castello.
”

In front of the old building—it had been Bavaria’s nineteenth-century War School before becoming the Reichswehr’s academy—checkpoints forced every attendee to show identification twice and to undergo a weapons check. A special room was set aside for frisking females. “Women who have been looking forward to daily thrills in connection with the trial got one wholly unexpected when they were compelled to undergo a personal search for arms before entering the court,” reported the
New York Times.
“Their hair, hats, purses, muffs and even stockings were inspected for daggers, hand grenades and bombs [and] hatpins exceeding the limit allowed.”
⁴

The
New York Times
wasn’t the only foreign newspaper covering the trial. Besides the London
Times
and Paris’s
Le Temps,
nearly fifty foreign journalists were present, a Swiss newspaper reported. “The eyes of the world are on Munich during these days,” noted the paper. For the Germans, this could only mean bad news. “Doubtless the foreigners who read about and study this trial will find plenty of material with which to attack the whole of Germany,” lamented a Munich columnist.
⁵

Of course, German reporters outnumbered all others. The journalists were crammed into sixty of the one hundred twenty spectator seats in the refurbished formal officers’ mess, now a courtroom. But that wasn’t enough; an overflow press room was created down the hall. The place was crawling with reporters “along with their relief colleagues, their secretaries and messengers.” One German journalist complained that court officials had installed only five telephone lines, then claimed them all for themselves. “There is nothing for the newspapers and the public they serve,” he groused. In the weeks to come, messengers would rush newspaper copy from
courtroom to press room with alacrity and zeal; stories on events at the trial appeared
on the same day
they occurred in multiple editions of fast-moving newspapers in Munich, Berlin, and elsewhere.

Located on the Blutenburgstrasse, the military academy had been chosen for Munich’s most sensational trial in many years partly because it was away from the crowded courthouse in downtown Munich, thus easier to surround and defend. But there was another reason: the school was empty. Because the school’s five-hundred-man cadet corps had enthusiastically joined Hitler’s insurrection, General von Seeckt, high commander of the Reichswehr,
⁶
had shut down the Munich school and moved the academy to a small town in Thuringia where the cadets could make less mischief.
⁷
Now the school that had been so gladly in Hitler’s pocket during the abortive coup had him in its own pocket. He was imprisoned in a former cadet’s room, awaiting the judgment that would shape the rest of his life.

He was being tried with nine fellow putschists, including the war hero, Ludendorff. Some, like Colonel Kriebel and Dr. Weber, were imprisoned with him on the second floor of the Infantry School. They lived well, each in a simple single room, their meals served “on white tablecloths” at a table in the hall. They even had two hours of outdoor time per day in the school’s inner courtyard if they wanted it. Along with Hitler, Ludendorff, Kriebel, and Weber, the other defendants included Captain Röhm, Ernst Pöhner, Wilhelm Frick, Wilhelm Brückner, Robert Wagner, and Ludendorff’s stepson, Heinz Pernet. One defendant, Pöhner, Munich’s former police chief, suffered a recurring illness and had just barely made it to the trial. Hitler, as usual, was flooded with gifts. When his old walk-around buddy, Ernst Hanfstaengl, paid a visit, bringing along his four-year-old son, Egon, Hitler allowed the delighted boy to have his pick of the “sweets and cakes” that cluttered the room.
⁸

It had been nearly four months since the spectacular failure of Hitler’s putsch, and he faced, in theory, a simple trial for treason; he had already practically confessed to the deed. But the proceeding in the People’s Court was to be about much more than the discovery of guilt or innocence. The chief defendant would do everything in his power to recast his trial as a morality play about Germany’s future and “the salvation of the fatherland,” with himself in the role of savior. He would use a courtroom packed with journalists to sell himself, still unknown in most parts of Germany, to the largest audience he had ever had.

Already that audience was eager to hear from him. “The [leftist] democratic press is bubbling with anticipation,”
^*
wrote Stuttgart’s nationalistic
Süddeutsche Zeitung,
^†
“hoping for a self-destruction drama among the nationalist forces to beef up the republicans’ notoriously weak platform in the days before the next election.” Word had been leaked that Hitler would make a multi-hour opening speech. “All the preparations to satisfy a hunger for sensation, like press, film and photography, have been made,” wrote the newspaper. “Now it can begin.”
⁹

It began with a long march down the second-floor hall of the Infantry School. Housed in “cosy”
¹⁰
rooms on the western end of the building, Hitler and his fellow defendants, with Ludendorff in the lead, walked nearly three hundred feet “in a ceremonial procession” to the building’s eastern end, where the converted officers’ mess was located.
¹¹
Ludendorff, journeying to the trial every day from his villa on the outskirts of Munich, had arrived by
chauffeured car and was cheered as his vehicle turned into the Infantry School courtyard. Journalists in the press overflow room were on lockdown as the procession passed.
¹²
Every door of the long hallway was closed and guarded by a soldier in a steel helmet or in the classic German spiked headgear commonly called a
Pickelhaube,
or “pick bonnet.”
¹³
Hitler was again decked out—as on the day of the putsch, as on the moment of his arrival in Landsberg Prison—in what had become his revolutionary outfit, a frock coat with his World War I medals pinned on. Ridiculed on the night of the putsch for his formal attire that made him look like “a forlorn little waiter” in a beer hall, Hitler now appeared to be arriving as a star performer—which he was.

The converted courtroom looked the part of a judicial chamber. Fifty-two feet long and thirty-eight feet wide,
¹⁴
the refitted dining hall had simple chandeliers hanging from the heavy-beamed ceiling. A newly installed judicial bench skirted with dark baize stood at one end. Natural light from the high windows augmented the new electric fixtures. The courtroom “glowed red” from the weak February sun, noted one observer.
¹⁵
The only complaint was that the chairs were packed in too tightly and the room was sometimes overheated.

Hitler entered the courtroom like a hungry animal. His eyes darted “back and forth, looking all around,”
¹⁶
taking in the scene: lawyers, journalists, spectators. One journalist noted that “he is shorter than his photographs make him look.”
¹⁷
Ludendorff, the picture of calm reserve, strode silently to his place at a defense table. For other defendants, it was like old home week; friends hailed, greetings exchanged, handshakes and smiles all around. The spectator seats seemed mostly filled with Hitler supporters.
¹⁸
The relaxed treatment of the Nazis and their allies was in stark contrast to the much rougher handling meted out to trial defendants from Communist or Socialist groups who were prosecuted in the People’s
Courts around Bavaria. The Socialist
Münchener Post
bitterly noted that in Hitler’s trial “the accused carried on animated conversations with one another until they were asked with great tact if they wouldn’t mind taking their seats. No sign of guards.” Only two months earlier, wrote the newspaper, sixteen Socialists had been brought into a People’s Court where “they arrived manacled and departed manacled… each had a guard on either side… they were not allowed to speak with one another… even those whose sentences were already covered by time served were led away afterwards in chains… that’s the kind of tact the court shows to Socialists.”

The trial’s opening day was the political event of the season for those in public life. The two dozen seats reserved for witnesses had been designated on this day for Munich’s elite, including members of parliament, high government officials, and prominent members of the judiciary.
¹⁹
Clearly everyone wanted to be there for the showdown at the Infantry School and, most important, to hear Hitler’s speech. Many expected the courtroom to be a perfect setting for one of his bravura performances.

The show started with the arrival of the judges. Three jurors, called “lay judges” (plus one alternate), and two professional judges (plus one alternate) were led into the courtroom by the chief judge, Georg Neithardt.
²⁰
A bald man with a pointed gray goatee who arrived at the Infantry School in a high fedora and black overcoat, Neithardt was a decidedly nationalist member of the Bavarian judiciary. Later a beneficiary of Hitler’s office-giving powers, the judge had a track record in the People’s Court for coming down hard on leftists but going easy on rightists. It was Neithardt, for example, who had commuted Count Arco-Valley’s sentence (for his back-of-the-head assassination of Kurt Eisner in 1919) from death to life in prison under the easy conditions of “fortress arrest.” The commutation was justified, stated Neithardt, because of the
murderer’s “glowing love of his people and fatherland”
²¹
and, incredibly, because of “the widely felt antipathy for Eisner” in Bavaria. A political murder, Neithardt signaled, was not quite a real murder, especially if the victim was performing poorly at the polls (Eisner had received less than 3 percent in the most recent election). Providentially for Hitler, Neithardt was also the judge who in 1922 had given Hitler early parole after he served only one month of a three-month breach-of-the-peace term (“too hard,”
²²
Neithardt called it) for the brutal bludgeoning of Bavaria League leader Otto Ballerstedt. In Neithardt, Hitler and his lawyer, Lorenz Roder, knew they had a friendly face on the bench. Despite the presence of the other judges, Neithardt—wearing the traditional chief judge’s high beret and judicial robe—was the man in charge. (Before the trial ended, many would say that Hitler was in charge.)