1924: The Year That Made Hitler (20 page)

Hitler could now move into the role of cross-examiner, declaimer, and one-man Greek chorus. Without objection from Judge Neithardt, he behaved more like a lawyer than a defendant, hopping up with questions or interjecting statements when he wanted to augment someone else’s testimony. Under the German procedural code, defendants were allowed to question witnesses almost at will, but with the questions controlled by the judge, who could rule anything out of bounds. Neithardt ruled very little out of bounds, except when Hitler used personal insults, and even then his admonitions were routinely ignored.

Over the next two days, Hitler and everyone in the court again relived the run-up to the events of November 8 and 9, 1923, as seen through the eyes of three key defendants: Dr. Weber, head of the well-armed Bund Oberland paramilitary; Ernst Pöhner, the former Munich police chief; and Colonel Kriebel, the military commander of the Kampfbund. In closed-door sessions, Weber and Kriebel for the first time explained the secret training and hand-in-glove cooperation among the Reichswehr, the Bavarian State Police, and the paramilitaries—in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. As an example, Weber cited “high priority” exercises for younger recruits “who had never before faced enemy fire.” Live-ammunition and
“sharpshooting” drills had been held at least three times per week “under the leadership of Reichswehr officers,” he noted. Hitler joined in, neatly implying government involvement in his putsch by underlining the Reichswehr’s and the Bavarian State Police’s training of his Nazi Storm Troopers, thus implicating Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. Since the previous October, Hitler said, “our troops were trained in the [Reichswehr] barracks at an intensified pace… not for the purpose of border defense but… absolutely only for
offensive
purposes, including… all the technical necessities for mobile warfare to the north.” His men, who usually did their training at night or in their off hours from their jobs, often wore Reichswehr or Bavarian State Police uniforms, said Hitler. All this activity was in the context of the so-called Autumn Exercise that Lossow had ordered with a demand for the “highest state of readiness.” That kind of pressure, Hitler said, was one of the key reasons he felt he had to stage the putsch: “It was no longer possible to hold back people who, day after day, night after night, had been coming to the barracks with only thoughts of war.”
¹

Weber, Pöhner, and Kriebel each added a fillip of invective to the sometimes venomous atmosphere of the trial. Weber said he had ordered a detachment of his paramilitary to seize Munich’s main train station once the putsch began “to prevent the racially foreign Eastern Jewish
vermin
from fleeing head over heels with all their foreign currency.” That this order was never carried out—and nobody was reported trying to flee during the night of the putsch—was irrelevant. The order’s very existence, like the putsch-night dragnet to round up hostages with Jewish-sounding names, revealed again the Nazis’ and Kampfbunders’ eagerness to implement their fanatical anti-Semitism.

Pöhner, a severe man with a fuzz haircut and rimless glasses, came on even stronger. In his testimony, he denounced the 1918
revolution as “an act of treason against the whole German people” that had been committed by “racially foreign people driven by international Jewish Freemasonry”—with the shameful result that high German officials were “suddenly crawling on their bellies before Jews and calling them ‘Excellency.’” Pöhner’s raw style was shocking and, to some, refreshing. He unhesitatingly admitted that the top political leadership, including himself, had long been plotting to overthrow Berlin. “If what you’re accusing me of is high treason, then we’ve been in that business for the last five years,” he said to an outburst of courtroom laughter.

Kriebel, too, the sharp-elbowed Kampfbund military leader, related his role in the putsch but also recalled the 1918 capitulation in World War I that started him down the nationalistic, right-wing path. As one of the German officers who had to serve at war’s end in the Armistice Commission in Spa, Belgium, Kriebel was the object of the “most uncouth, lowest humiliations” imaginable, he said. Describing the German military delegation’s final departure by train after the armistice was settled, he said a “drunken, worked-up crowd threw stones and cursed us without mercy.” Kriebel, in response, leaned out of the train’s window and shook his fist at his tormentors. Not knowing how prophetic his words would be, he shouted: “
Auf Wiedersehen!
We’ll see you again in a few years.”

Kriebel’s feisty testimony became more emotionally laden as he recalled the events of the long night and morning of the putsch, especially the final march to Odeon Square. Kriebel had marched in the first row with Hitler, as well as with Scheubner-Richter, who had been killed. “There was deep breathing in the courtroom as Colonel Kriebel haltingly described the details,” wrote one observer. “Nobody, not even the presiding judge or the prosecutor, made an objection when one of the defense attorneys rose and spoke the fearsome word, ‘Murder!’”

The seemingly limitless range of Hitler’s testimony, coupled with Kriebel’s angry statements, had by the trial’s third day led some observers to wonder what the whole affair was really all about, since nobody was boring in on the defendants’ allegedly treasonous actions. “If the public sessions are to be merely devoted to anti-French and anti-Belgian speeches, as was the case today, there must be little reason why the proceeding should be continued at all,” complained the London
Times.
²

Kriebel had, surprisingly, supplied one of the trial’s most memorable emotional moments. Yet it was Hitler who once again seized an opening he could exploit to even greater advantage. Deputy Prosecutor Ehard asked him to “briefly explain” how he had planned to pull off a big march on Berlin. What about the logistics of food, accommodation, clothing, “and such things”? And what about a march’s foreign policy implications?

In reply, the star defendant rose from his chair and launched into a classic Hitlerian disquisition on foreign policy, world history, and high treason. His “answer,” which lasted for twenty-two minutes without interruption, began with a slash at England’s historical balance-of-power politics and France’s ambitions to dominate Europe. “France desires only the dismemberment of Germany so it can achieve hegemony for itself,” he said. To Hitler, France was Germany’s ultimate blood enemy.
³
In his opening-day rant, he had said, “I’d rather hang from a lamppost in a Bolshevized Germany than live happily under French domination.”
⁴

And his swipe at France was merely a springboard for a tour through national uprisings in Spain, Italy, Turkey, and the greatness of the Bismarckian “revolution” in late-nineteenth-century Germany. He painted a glorious vision of the “national uprising” that was supposed to flow from his planned march on Berlin. “In Munich, Nuremberg and Bayreuth there would have been
indescribable joy, a wave of enthusiasm would have swept the Reich,” he declaimed. People would have seen “that German suffering is coming to an end, that salvation comes through uprising.” And again a derogation of majority rule: “I was asked if I thought I had a majority behind me.… Germany wasn’t founded by the decisions of majorities, but through the willpower and resolution of individual personalities, often enough against the will of the majority. Germany is the product of a hero [Bismarck], not of a majority.”

Hewing to his cardinal belief in the power of repetition, repetition, and repetition, Hitler pivoted to treason, reprising his earlier statement that “high treason is the only crime that is punished for failing.” As a counter-example he took, once again, Bismarck. “In the opinion of people on the left wing, Bismarck committed treason and staged a coup,” said Hitler. “The
Frankfurter Zeitung
called it high treason when Bismarck dissolved the Prussian parliament.… Bismarck’s treason was later legalized because the German Reich was created from it. The [1918] act of high treason has never been legalized because all that’s left of the German Reich is German suffering.”

These assertions might not withstand careful historical scrutiny, but they made great polemics. Hitler was on his usual roll. He evoked his sense of the near-miss grandeur of his putsch attempt; he even began putting a positive spin on the coup’s failure, seeding a legend he would later nurture. “I am convinced that we were on the verge of changing Germany’s destiny, but then our effort foundered.… Sometimes fate intervenes in unexpected ways. When I look at today’s developments, I conclude that it’s perhaps a good thing that more time has passed.” This was also an early hint of Hitler’s shifting view of whether to pursue power in Germany by revolution or by politics.

But Hitler could not pass up the chance, during this impromptu speech, to invoke the judgment of the ages. “You should not think that this trial will destroy us,” Hitler told the court. “You can certainly lock us up. But the German people will not destroy us. Our prisons will open and there will come a time when the accused become the accusers.… Future generations will acquit us and say that we were the only ones with the courage to stand up against the ongoing high treason [of 1918].” Closer to earth, Hitler for good measure lashed out at his nemesis, Kahr. “If he is in charge, it is a catastrophe,” he concluded.

Hitler was ranting and perhaps even panting by now. When he finished, Deputy Prosecutor Ehard said: “I simply wanted to ask Mr. Hitler a calm and sober question.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” said Hitler.

EHARD:
Excuse me—I don’t even think of being offended. I just mean that it might not have been necessary to reply in such a polemical way.

HITLER:
Nothing of the sort. But my temperament is somewhat different from that of a state’s attorney.

EHARD:
Probably a good thing in this case.
⁵

Not a word about clothing, food, accommodation, or any of the logistics to which the question referred. Not a peep of objection from the chief prosecutor, Stenglein. Not a hint of a reprimand from the judge on the relevance of the testimony. Not a moment of doubt as to who was on stage and in charge. The trial had effectively become Hitler’s political showcase. “Hitler presented his calling card as the next Bismarck,” noted a German news service, “and gave Herr Kahr a few kicks.”
⁶

The defense attorneys, meanwhile, were not above using the proceedings for some lawyerly grandstanding that aroused prickly feelings among the trial’s participants. Karl Kohl, a blustery lawyer,
gratuitously insulted Stenglein, suggesting that the chief prosecutor was not “a respectable person” if he did not believe in the complicity of Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. As mild as those words might sound to modern ears, such language came close to a serious personal offense in the Munich of the 1920s. Kohl was forced to retract, but Stenglein did not forget the slight.

Besides Hitler’s testimony, no appearance was more keenly anticipated than General Ludendorff’s. Until Prosecutor Ehard had declared Hitler the “soul” of the putsch, Ludendorff had been regarded in some quarters as equal to Hitler in political and symbolic importance. Ludendorff was, after all, the former commanding general (with Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg) of all German forces in World War I. Though he had a nervous collapse and fled from the field at the war’s end, Ludendorff was still widely regarded as the embodiment of Germany’s onetime military greatness. Some newspapers, like the
New York Times
and
Berliner Tageblatt,
had often headlined the event as the “Ludendorff-Hitler trial.” But Ludendorff’s standing in the drama was already on shaky legs. Rumors circulated that a deal might have been cut at the highest levels to make sure the war hero was acquitted. Hitler had clearly established himself as the celebrity defendant and chief orchestrator of the offense in question. Now came the aging general’s chance to show where he stood in the firmament of nationalist coup-makers. Though only fifty-eight, Ludendorff looked and seemed older.

Ludendorff’s chauffeured car had gotten stuck in the snow on Thursday, so his testimony was moved to Friday—and took all afternoon. For nearly three hours, he spoke in the stern style of the soldier that he was.
⁷
But he was all over the map, reading from letters, quoting Bismarck, talking about separatist tendencies in the Rhineland, dwelling on his longed-for restoration of the monarchy,
and becoming fixated on what he considered the near-betrayal of Germany by the Catholic Church. Ludendorff managed gratuitously to offend Catholic-dominated Bavaria and to prove himself the loosest of cannons on the witness stand. Bavarians who had always suspected Ludendorff of not having South Germany’s interests at heart—he was a Prussian transplant from the North—felt confirmed in their doubts.
⁸

Worse, some people wondered if Ludendorff was losing touch with reality; his ramblings seemed nearly senile. He denied any prior knowledge of the putsch on the night it happened, assigning himself an exceptionally passive role in the whole business, though most historians believe he was well informed.
⁹
(Later Ludendorff even claimed, “Hitler misled me and lied to me,” and called the Nazi leader “only a sloganeer and an adventurer.”
¹⁰
) “Ludendorff seemed like a man from another planet,” wrote the
New York Times.
“Never did Ludendorff prove his political incompetence so conclusively.… [He is] an old man not only physically but mentally.”
Vorwärts,
the Social Democratic Berlin newspaper, took the opportunity to excoriate the general as “totally lacking in political judgment” and “no better than what clear-sighted subordinates knew him to be during the war, an ‘insane cadet.’”
¹¹
Despite politically calculated warm words about Ludendorff in his opening oration (“I worshipped him”), Hitler would not have been bothered by these cutting remarks about the man. The “firebrand” was already trying to figure out how to distance himself from the unpredictable old general.