1924: The Year That Made Hitler (21 page)

The trial had its share of odd moments. During the first week, several defense lawyers began a round of symbolic fisticuffs with the outside world, as represented by the press. The first attorney complained to Judge Neithardt that the
München-Augsburger Abendzeitung
had misstated the attorneys’ position on holding secret sessions. While the defendants seemed eager to avoid endangering state secrets through open sessions, wrote the newspaper, “the same cannot be said of the defense lawyers” since they had strongly resisted the idea of holding the entire trial in camera. “I object in the name of all the lawyers here,” huffed the attorney. He also cited a report in the Nazi-friendly
Völkischer Kurier
based on an unnamed source. The article read:

Someone told us the following story: “I was by chance sitting in a streetcar next to two sketch artists whom I had noticed in the courtroom because of their sneering grins. They were showing each other their drawings. One of them, apparently a Bulgarian or Hungarian, in any case a typical Slav, showed a triangular caricature of one of the lay judges. The other one, a Jew, triumphantly showed a really nasty cartoon of Ludendorff, looking crushed, gaunt and staring fearfully ahead like a shrew.”

The attorney asked Judge Neithardt to ban “such people” from covering the trial, to which the judge readily agreed. “Necessary measures have already been taken to remove these kind of people,” said the judge.

But the lawyer wasn’t finished. He needed to have a go at the foreign press as well. One foreign newspaper reported that the defendants didn’t seem to be taking the charges against them very seriously and were “putting on an act,” said the attorney. He continued: “The accused are real German men who represent a holy idea with the purest of motives. Of course they don’t come into court tearing their hair and rending their garments. In a German courtroom we should strictly prohibit such rough treatment by a foreign
publication.” Ludendorff’s attorney took great exception to an article in the
New York Herald,
which had called the general in its headline the “Leader of the Beer Revolution.” This lawyer, too, asked the judge to prevent “such misuse of visitor’s rights.”

State’s Attorney Stenglein couldn’t stand it; he had to get his say, too. “One newspaper claimed that during Herr Hitler’s defense statement, everyone was quite serious except the state’s attorney, who had a smile of condescension on his face the whole time. That is completely untrue! I reject any suggestion that the state’s attorney behaved inappropriately during Hitler’s speech.”
¹²

Such lawyerly ravings highlighted the politicized nature of the Hitler trial as well as the crucial role of newspapers in the public and national life of the 1920s.

Hitler’s co-putschists offered varying versions of the same events, but all fit neatly into the script Hitler had laid out on the first day. Each emphasized the coup attempt’s high-flung goals and struck patriotic notes that echoed Hitler’s claim of salvationist purpose. They also picked up on Hitler’s occasional dark hints at conducting politics “with a sword.” Wilhelm Brückner, leader of the Hitler Shock Troop that had played a key role during the putsch, ranted on the witness stand that “Germany needs men who have a burning love of the fatherland and a sense of fanatical hate,” including a willingness to commit violence, like saboteurs in the Ruhr region who had switched from passive to active resistance.
¹³

The prosecution was outgunned. Hitler’s side had ten defendants and eleven lawyers.
¹⁴
It also had the big names—Hitler and, in theory, Ludendorff. The prosecution, by contrast, had exactly two people, Stenglein and Ehard. Even though they had the power of the state behind them, the two attorneys seemed singularly unaggressive, politically neutralized, and tame in their tactics. At no
point, for example, had Stenglein objected to either the length or the content of the tendentious testimony by the accused.

Having nine co-defendants and a roomful of mouthy lawyers was a considerable advantage for Hitler; he did not have to carry all the water. It was neither Hitler nor his attorney, Lorenz Roder, who threw down the first legal gauntlet in the trial—an official request for the arrest of Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. Instead, it was Attorney Kohl, Brückner’s lawyer, who struck first. Adding to growing tension over the triumvirate’s role in fomenting a coup attempt, Kohl called for the “immediate arrest” of the trio. Kohl was one of the most aggressive figures in the trial and, given a newspaper’s reference to his
embonpoint,
one of its weightiest.
^*
Short and stolid, with drooping eyes and a drooping mustache, Kohl looked like a small cannon. “The defense brought its heavy guns into position,” noted the
Münchener Post,
tongue only slightly in cheek.
¹⁵

That Hitler and his Nazis had been working closely with the Bavarian State Police and Reichswehr was by now well established. That they were also being sheltered by the Munich City Police Department—the so-called blue police because of the color of their uniforms—was less well known until defendant Wilhelm Frick, Pöhner’s former chief political adviser and now a defendant, stood to testify. Frick and Pöhner had run the police from 1919 to 1922. With its powerful political section, the police department had played a secret role in nurturing the infant Nazi movement. “We could have easily suppressed it in 1919 and 1920,” said Frick. “But we realized that this little National Socialist movement should not be crushed” because they saw in the Nazis “the germ of a rebirth of Germany,” said Frick, sounding like Hitler’s speechwriter, if he had had one. Just like Hitler, the two bosses of the Munich police
wanted to roll back the Marxist tide they saw washing over the labor movement, luring workers back into the nationalist camp. “We held a protective hand over the National Socialist German Workers’ Party [Nazi Party] and Herr Hitler,” confessed Frick.
¹⁶

As the coup attempt unfolded, Frick and Pöhner had been assigned to seize control of the Munich police apparatus. Instead, they ended up being arrested at the police headquarters. Frick put on a pitiful display of ducking and dodging as Judge Neithardt confronted him with a stream of evidence about his prior knowledge and central role in the putsch. None of that seems to have bothered Hitler; he later appointed Frick the Third Reich’s interior minister, where he played a central role in the crimes of the regime.

By the trial’s second week, the mood in the converted Infantry School courtroom was turning tense. Judge Neithardt’s unwillingness to cap the loose language and sometimes toxic insinuations was beginning to irritate. “One feels a thunderstorm brewing,” noted a column in the
München-Augsburger Abendzeitung.
Even a Paris newspaper,
Le Temps,
described the courtroom temper as
“orageuse”
(stormy).
¹⁷
Supporters of the Weimar Republic “declare that the trial is the most scandalous ever conducted in Germany,” wrote the
New York Times.
¹⁸

The political establishment was also beginning to feel uneasy. After Hitler’s opening blast put them on the defensive, there was considerable wringing of hands on March 4 at a meeting of Bavaria’s Council of Ministers—effectively the government cabinet. The chief target of their dismay was Neithardt’s behavior on the bench; he became the object of derision and complaints. Dr. Franz Schweyer, the interior (police) minister, said he had received steady complaints from the Reichswehr and Bavarian State Police that courtroom slanders against them had gone unchallenged by the judge. One minister noted that Neithardt had said Ludendorff was
the best thing Germany had—leading to the assumption that the judge wanted Ludendorff acquitted. It is obvious, said one minister, “that the judge is one-sided.” The accused, it was noted, were being allowed excessive freedoms. Their rooms were always open, they dined in style, they had two hours per day in the courtyard, and they received visitors whenever they wished. Weber had even been granted a “Sunday vacation” and given the run of Munich for a day. Finally, the justice minister, Dr. Franz Gürtner, admitted that he had met several times with Neithardt and let him know people were uneasy about his allowing Hitler “to speak for four hours.”
¹⁹
(Despite his reservations about the trial, Gürtner went on to become Hitler’s justice minister in the Third Reich.)

Meanwhile, the trial was becoming an unpredictable adventure story. On Thursday of the second week, the
Vossische Zeitung
wrote: “The reports from the Hitler-Ludendorff trial read like installments in a serial novel.”
²⁰
Little did the newspaper know that within hours the proceedings would hit a dramatic new low when simmering emotions in the courtroom erupted. Again, the bellicose Attorney Kohl was the instigator. Complaining about arrest warrants issued by Prosecutor Stenglein’s office in another case involving a different client,
²¹
Kohl accused Stenglein’s office of indulging in an “arrest frenzy.” That was too much for Stenglein. He jumped to his feet and, in effect, brought the trial to a standstill. “During this proceeding I have repeatedly been the subject of injurious attacks, some of them personal,” he said with barely restrained fury. “I have curbed my reaction and tried to keep the proceedings on a serious plane. I’ve avoided every pointed response. But enough is enough! Today you have gone too far.… I will no longer participate in a trial in which such attacks on my honor continuously come my way. Mr. Ehard, please take over the prosecution.”

White with anger, Stenglein stalked out. As Stenglein passed
him, Kohl taunted: “There are plenty of men to take your places as states’ attorneys.”
²²

“That goes too far!” sputtered Judge Neithardt. The flustered presiding judge adjourned the trial until the next day.

Stenglein’s drastic move made headlines. “Hitler Trial Session Blown Up,” declared the
Vossische Zeitung
on its front page; “You’ve Gone Too Far,” headlined its columnist. Foreign newspapers were taking notice. All regarded the prosecutor’s stormy departure as a withering indictment of Neithardt’s trial management and a scandalous day for the German justice system. Clearly the presiding judge did not have his trial under control; he lacked the confidence and competence to preside over strong personalities. The young deputy prosecutor Hans Ehard was taken aback by Stenglein’s move, which he regarded as a tactical mistake. “He should have banged on the table instead and complained loudly to the judge,” said Ehard. “But of course he would probably have lost out in that confrontation.”
²³

By the next day, Attorney Kohl had apologized—sort of—and Prosecutor Stenglein was back on the job. People could return to focusing on what had become the central question of the trial: how deeply were Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser implicated in Hitler’s plot? Originally scheduled to last two weeks, Hitler’s trial would now enter a third week devoted solely to answering that question.

Hitler’s best-defense-is-a-good-offense strategy was working. Watching from his small defense table at the front of the courtroom, reading every night the voluminous newspaper coverage of his trial in his spartan cadet’s room, Hitler could see that things were moving in his direction. The two-week drumbeat of recrimination against Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser had built a large base of credibility in the press corps and in public opinion. Pressure was building on State’s Attorney Stenglein to do something. Over the
weekend, the dam of expectation finally burst; Stenglein announced an investigation of Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser on suspicion of high treason. The trial now officially had become what one Munich newspaper, retrospectively, would describe as “a competition between two forms of nationalism—the old nationalists around Kahr and the young
völkisch
types around the admired, God-sent Leader.”
²⁴
The three men who had played a central role in crushing Hitler’s putsch, who were expected to deliver the most incriminating evidence against him, and who represented the existing order in terms of oath, uniform, and responsibilities now faced the possibility of treason charges.

This posed a strange dilemma for the prosecutor: he was calling as witnesses men whom he had just started investigating for a crime. But then, as one newspaper headline put it later in the week, this was “A Strange Trial.”

On Monday, March 10—the first day of the critical third week—everyone was relieved to find Munich experiencing milder temperatures and melting snows.
²⁵
Yet even as spring beckoned, the trial threatened to darken with the confrontational testimony of the triumvirs. Whatever they said or did would reflect well or badly on the authority of government, on the reputation of Bavaria in the larger German republic, and on the men themselves. Their performance was now shaped entirely by the man who would only be sitting and watching, waiting for openings to pounce and corner them. The trial had become a high-stakes game of “gotcha” whose political import was lost on no one: the deeper the triumvirs were drawn into Hitler’s web of complicity, the higher his stock rose.

Lossow went first. A classic, straight-backed German officer, Lossow at fifty-six had a head of thinning hair and favored a pair of rimless eyeglasses. Though a born Bavarian, he was a pure Prussian officer in style and demeanor. Shorn of his army assignments in the fallout of
the putsch, the former Reichswehr commander arrived in court wearing a simple black frock coat, not the resplendent bemedaled uniform with the wide shoulder sash shown in his official army portrait.