1924: The Year That Made Hitler (23 page)

Lossow now reminded Hitler of the confrontation in the side room of the Bürgerbräukeller on the night of the uprising. Accused of breaking his word by staging a putsch, Hitler had replied: “Forgive me, I did it in the interest of the fatherland.”

Hitler snapped, raising his voice: “Was that the ‘brutal Hitler’ or the ‘sentimental Hitler’ who was asking for forgiveness, as you say?”

LOSSOW:
That was neither the sentimental nor the brutal Hitler! That was the Hitler with a guilty conscience!

HITLER:
Lieutenant General! I have a lot less need of a guilty conscience for breaking a word of honor… because the only one here who broke his word of honor is the lieutenant general—on May 1!
⁴²

The courtroom went into a shocked silence. The foot soldier had just accused the general, in open court, of breaking his word of honor. There was no greater insult in German life.

For seconds the courtroom was still. Knocked back as if by a blow to the face, Lossow finally gathered his papers and strode toward the door. Turning, he bowed to the court, then disappeared. He never returned.

Neithardt fumbled for words. “That’s an affront, a gross impropriety!” he gasped, but his words were mostly lost in the tumult.

HITLER:
I accept the reprimand.

NEITHARDT:
An impropriety without precedent!

HITLER:
It was a response to the statement of the witness.

The court was in an uproar. Nobody had ever seen anything like this before. Judge Neithardt adjourned for lunch.

Hitler was criticized in some media for his brusque, out-of-control tactics. Still, he had chased Lossow from the playground. He had humiliated the old general and gotten away with it. To the little man on the street looking at the newspaper headlines, Hitler was now indeed a “tremendous guy.”

Eighteen days of argumentation, hairsplitting, word-parsing, voice-raising, and mutual recriminations now seemed to have ended in a
legal draw. It was impossible to assign sole guilt for conspiring to overthrow the government. Clearly both sides had been bent on regime change. Whether or not the establishment enabled the rebels—Hitler’s putschists—was never really proven. But neither was the triumvirate’s claim that they never, ever would have considered a march on Berlin. Somewhere in all the harrumphing the accused had admitted they carried out the crime as charged. But what did that mean in terms of guilt, conviction, and punishment? The convoluted and ambivalent nature of the whole affair was adroitly captured by a caricature on the cover of
Simplicissimus,
a leading satire magazine. Sitting atop the shoulders of General Lossow is Hitler himself, holding a torch to the edifice of government. But Lossow is atop the shoulders of his own enabler, Commissioner Kahr. Kahr, while boosting the two men, is also summoning the police to take down these two malefactors who are committing the crime of revolution. Meanwhile, high in the sky, Hitler’s swastika has become a shooting star.

One week after General Lossow’s startling departure from the courtroom (for which the judge later fined him sixty marks), Prosecutor Stenglein made his final plea. It was time to quantify the crime and, if any, the punishment. If the verdict were guilty, a sentence could run from the minimum of five years to the maximum of life imprisonment—or anywhere in between.

For the crime of high treason against the “Free State of Bavaria,” as it is called, and against the German Reich, the prosecutor asked for eight years “fortress imprisonment” (honorable arrest) for Adolf Hitler, three years over the minimum. For Colonel Kriebel, Dr. Weber, and Ernst Pöhner, Stenglein asked for six years. For General Erich Ludendorff, co-leader of the putsch, Stenglein requested only two years as an accessory to treason. For other defendants, he suggested from fifteen months to two years.

In his plea, Stenglein granted Hitler his essential historical point: that high treason is considered a crime only when it fails, dryly pointing out that Hitler’s and his confederates’ undertaking manifestly fulfilled the definition: “Their act didn’t work and therefore is punishable.” For form’s sake, the state’s attorney spent an hour and a half recounting, once again, the full details of the putsch, beating the dead horse of proof. Then, suddenly, he woke everyone up.

Perhaps sensing that he might someday need to be in Hitler’s good books, Stenglein launched into an unexpected paean to the man whom he wanted to send to prison for eight years. His words stunned the courtroom. “Raised in modest circumstances, Hitler proved his German patriotism as a brave soldier in the Great War,” he began. “Filled with glowing, honest enthusiasm for his great German fatherland, he created, with tireless labor after the war and from the tiniest beginnings, a great party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Its essential program is fighting international Marxism and Judaism, settling accounts with the November criminals… and spreading German nationalism.”

As the audience listened agog, Stenglein went on to note that while it was not his place to make a judgment about Hitler’s party politics, the Nazi leader’s “honest effort to re-arouse belief in a German destiny” was, in the end, “his great service.” If Hitler’s intense point of view and the aggressive spirit of his followers sometimes turned into excesses, continued Stenglein, it would still be “unjust to call him a demagogue in the negative sense of that word.” As for Hitler’s personal virtues, Stenglein said, “he deserves respect for the way he has kept his private life pristine, given the temptations that naturally come his way as a celebrated party leader.”

Only after this song of praise did the prosecutor finally return to prosecuting the defendant, but with an almost apologetic tone. Hitler had unfortunately let himself be “drawn beyond the bounds of
his own natural inclinations” by overzealous supporters, said Stenglein. Lionized by his mass following and the toadies in his party, Hitler had developed an exaggerated understanding of himself as the savior of Germany, a view all too gladly reinforced by the men around him. And in this one cardinal error, said Stenglein, lies “his tragic guilt.”

If there were any doubt that Hitler’s was a political trial as much as a legal one, Stenglein had cleared that up. He had set a new standard for prosecutorial ambivalence.

What really counted was the final act on the final day: the closing statements of the defendants. One month and one day after the trial began, the accused could have “the last word,” as it is called in German court procedure. The minor figures among the defendants—Röhm, Brückner, Wagner, and Pernet—relinquished their right to speak in favor of their betters. For the other six—Kriebel, Pöhner, Frick, Weber, Ludendorff, and Hitler—the attorneys decided on a slowly rising crescendo, beginning with the lesser lights but ending, in a final flourish, with Ludendorff’s self-defense and then with Hitler’s oration.

As the morning session opened, the courtroom was filled to bursting. Reporters noticed more women than usual, more flowers, more gifts. “Hitler’s feminine following baked their loyalty into the cakes and snacks that form little mountains in Hitler’s open cell,” noted the
Münchener Post.
⁴³

The testimony began with an unrepentant Colonel Kriebel confessing once again “to the deed” but adding defiantly, “Given the same situation, I would do the same thing again.”
⁴⁴
Frick, when his turn came, echoed the sentiment. Former police chief Pöhner delivered another nasty jibe at Germany’s Socialist president, Friedrich Ebert, calling him “Ebert Fritze,” a derisive nickname. (“The trial
didn’t teach Pöhner any manners,” wrote a newspaper.)
⁴⁵
The tone of this day of high pleading and high whining was finally lifted by Ludendorff, who was surprisingly eloquent, dignified in manner, and “lacking in his previous laborious attempts to whitewash himself and blacken everybody else,” reported the
New York Times.
⁴⁶
He became again the Ludendorff everyone remembered—before the 1918 capitulation, before the armistice, before his departure in the war’s waning days. He invoked “the cry of the German soul for freedom.” If the
völkisch
movement—Hitler and his allies—“does not succeed, we are lost,” he said. “[Germany] will be condemned to continual slavery to France and be stricken from the roll of nations.”
⁴⁷
Tipping into grandiloquence, Ludendorff invoked the judgment of history and assigned himself a place in Valhalla, the mythic hall of the noble dead in Nordic mythology (“Ludendorff Exalts Himself with Gods,” headlined the
New York Times
the following day).

Ludendorff’s broad-brush political speech unleashed a storm of applause in the courtroom. But all the speeches were just the prelude for what everyone had come to see.

Taking the stand at mid-morning, Hitler plunged directly into his full beer hall manner. “If lung power were an argument, by God, then Hitler would have won a brilliant victory in the Infantry School,” commented one newspaper.
⁴⁸

Hitler’s putsch attempt, his months behind bars, his weeks in the courtroom—they had all crystallized on this cold Thursday morning, in this Munich courtroom, in this speech. Natively adroit at legend-building and propaganda, he now painted the putsch’s bloody failure as a long-term success. In his ninety-minute declamation, Hitler brazenly claimed that the young people who had been killed in his reckless undertaking “went joyfully to their deaths” on Odeon Square and would someday be commemorated as having “died for the liberation of the fatherland”—a prediction that came true during the Third
Reich. The success of the putsch would be evident, continued Hitler, in a “storm surge of young Germans who will rise up and express their will in massive organizations.… The hour will come when the masses who carry our flag… will join with those who fought against them. The blood that flowed then will not forever divide them.… The army that we are building grows from day to day and hour to hour.” Hitler’s aim, he insisted, was not simply taking power. “My goal was a thousand times greater than becoming a cabinet minister. I wanted to be the destroyer of Marxism. That is my task, and I will accomplish it.”

He then moved the fight out of the human court and into a higher one, donning the martyr’s mantle. “From our graves and from our bones will arise the court which will have final judgment over us,” Hitler told the judges in a typically twisted metaphor. “For it is not you who will speak that final judgment… but the goddess of the final court… called ‘history.’… She will not ask: did you commit high treason? In her eyes [we] are those who wanted the best for our country. Even if you pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, the eternal goddess of the eternal court will laughingly tear up the prosecutor’s indictment and the judgment of this court.
She
will pronounce us not guilty!”

To some it was pure kitsch. (“Hitler has the secret of the common touch, an instinctive feel for what people want who don’t think much,” wrote the
Vossische Zeitung,
revealing again the condescension that, in years to come, would cause many in the intelligentsia to underestimate Hitler.) But to others, including to some journalists, it was so moving that they had tears in their eyes. (“This speech should be publicly posted,” said one newspaperman.) In the end, the
Vossische Zeitung
reporter had it right; Hitler knew what people wanted. His speech, with its cunning invocation of “the final court,” offered his impassioned followers something to envision and strive
for. The disaster of the Odeon Square would become a unifying Nazi Party narrative in the future.

Hitler had won the political fight. It only remained to be seen if he had won the legal fight. Neithardt promised a verdict on April 1, four days hence. In the meantime, the city and the press were loudly divided. It would be “a crime against the nation to take Hitler and these men away for years [to prison] from the task they have set for themselves,” wrote the Nazi-friendly
Völkischer Kurier.
The Socialist
Münchener Post,
naturally, saw things differently, recommending a state-sponsored “vacation for this traveling troupe.”
⁴⁹
Many agreed with the
Münchener Post
that the conduct of the trial by Judge Neithardt had deeply tarnished the reputation of the Bavarian justice system. “The last remnant of respect for the Bavarian judiciary hangs on the verdict,” the paper editorialized.
⁵⁰

Munichers grabbed up newspapers as fast as they could be printed, in press runs of thirty thousand to fifty thousand, “an enormous sale for a city the size of Munich,” reported the
New York Times.
Even the banned Hitlerite publications organized a “highly efficient news and courier service,” keeping their followers up to date.
⁵¹

Tensions mounted over the weekend. Rumors swirled of possible violence. One far-right newspaper darkly hinted at nasty deeds if Hitler were convicted. “A conviction of German patriots who put their lives on the line for Germany’s honor should unleash the most terrible outrage in our people,” it thundered. Judge Neithardt received a threatening telegram from a Nazi named Karl Brassler in the nearby town of Augsburg, informing him that “the Augsburg National Socialists and
völkisch
activists offer a warning voice: they are determined to reject, with strength and passion, a guilty verdict against our leader.” (Brassler was later hauled into court for the threat.
⁵²
)

The police and the Reichswehr reverted to a siege mentality and began strengthening defenses around the Infantry School. A unit of mounted police, an effective crowd control tool, was put on standby. Troops were kept in the barracks over the weekend for possible riot duty.
⁵³
Gatherings of three or more people were prohibited in the immediate vicinity of the Infantry School. “Policemen everywhere on the alert… beer halls denouncing the German Republic—that is Munich this weekend as the turbulent Bavarian capital, its nerves strung taut with excitement, awaits the verdict,” the
New York Times
reported.
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