1924: The Year That Made Hitler (24 page)

Into this unpredictable atmosphere fell a mini-bombshell: Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser had skipped town. According to semi-confirmed reports—carried in every newspaper in Munich—the triumvirate had made a speedy getaway from the scene of the recent unpleasantness. They had gone to Italy, said one story, or to the island of Corfu in Greece, said another.
⁵⁵
In any case, they had gone for
Erholung
—a German word for rest and recovery from arduous times.
⁵⁶
Of course, the trio had nothing to flee from, even though they were technically under investigation for high treason. They were free men. But their absconding from Munich heightened the appearance of their guilt and added to Hitler’s aura of victory. “Can there be any stronger guilty conscience?” asked the
Völkischer Kurier
in a breathless editorial denouncing the “flight” of the triumvirate. “What an end for the almighty [Kahr]!” wrote the newspaper. (Kahr’s real end would come ten years later. On Hitler’s orders, he would be hacked to death in a swamp near Dachau concentration camp during the 1934 Night of the Long Knives.)

On Tuesday morning, April 1, with the mounted police out in force, the Infantry School again looked like an armed camp. A crowd gathered near the barbed-wire cordon; nobody chased them away.
They were there, as usual, to greet Ludendorff when his chauffeured car arrived from his villa on the edge of Munich. Hitler and the other prisoners, in their open-door “cells” on the school’s second floor, could tell by the cheering that the war hero had arrived. For the first time during the trial, Ludendorff’s car flew a black, white, and red pennant, a sign of his loyalty to the
völkisch
cause.
⁵⁷

Today, also for the first time, General Ludendorff appeared in full uniform, wearing his
Pickelhaube
and a lifetime of medals on his chest. He was the old quartermaster general of World War I again. Except for Hitler and Frick, the other defendants wore their military raiment. Hitler wore his frock coat and Iron Cross medals; Frick wore a high collar and cutaway, as though going to a wedding. Before entering the courtroom, the entire defense team gathered at nine thirty on the back steps of the Infantry School. Heinrich Hoffmann, by now Hitler’s personal photographer, had persuaded the men to pose for a picture. The shot shows only nine defendants—Pöhner was absent. Ludendorff, his double chins neatly tucked over his high collar, holds his dress sword in front of him in a formal pose, like a cane.
⁵⁸
Hitler, in his ubiquitous brown raincoat for the outdoor photo, clutches his slouch hat in one hand and stands with one foot slightly in front of the other, a typical pose of the era. Also in the style of the times, no one is smiling, though on this day the news would be good.

The scene in the courtroom was one of anxious anticipation and barely restrained jubilation. The space was packed so tightly with spectators that journalists had to fight their way to their seats. Many women carried enormous flower bouquets for the defendants. As Ludendorff entered the old officers’ mess, the “entire assemblage rose as one in a gesture of deference,” wrote one reporter.
⁵⁹

Judge Neithardt, wearing his tall beret, led the judges to the bench and got right down to business. Adolf Hitler, he read, was
guilty of high treason. Apparently undaunted by rumblings and threats, Judge Neithardt sentenced Hitler to five years of “fortress imprisonment,” the same kind of “honorable imprisonment” that he had already experienced at Landsberg. He was also fined two hundred gold marks. Kriebel, Weber, and Pöhner received the same sentences.

The lesser malefactors—Röhm, Brückner, Pernet, Wagner, and Frick—were pronounced guilty of abetting treason, not treason itself. They received fifteen months of imprisonment, immediately paroled, plus a fine of one hundred gold marks.

“Outrageous!” shouted some members of the audience. “A scandal!” But Neithardt soon silenced them with Ludendorff’s verdict. The man who had fully supported the putsch and co-led the fatal march to the Odeon Square was acquitted. He was a free man. Among general murmurs of approval, several spectators shouted, “Long live Ludendorff!”

Judge Neithardt then added his next surprise: Hitler and his confederates would be eligible for parole in six months.

Like Prosecutor Stenglein, the judge felt the need to sing a song of praise to the men he was sending to prison for a high crime. What they did was wrong, to be sure, but they meant the best. Because they had acted out of the “most noble, unselfish motives” and “in a purely patriotic spirit,” he was issuing the minimum sentences allowed by the law for their acts.

As this amazing justification was sinking in, there was another delicate matter to address: what about Article 9 of the Law for the Protection of the Republic? It stipulated that “foreigners [who commit treason] are to be deported.”
⁶⁰
The law was so plain and so clearly applicable that in his final declamation four days earlier, Hitler the Austrian had explicitly pleaded: “Don’t apply Article 9!” He had pointedly reminded the court of his four years as a soldier on
French soil, where “with glowing love I counted the hours until I could return” to the fatherland. Hitler had argued that only “inferior peoples” would expel “an iron man” who happened to offend public opinion. Deporting him, claimed Hitler, would force future schoolboys to read “with shame burning in their cheeks” the story of this disgraceful moment in German history.

Neithardt heard and heeded Hitler’s message. “Hitler sees himself as a German,” the judge concluded. “Article Nine cannot be applied to a man who thinks and feels as German as Hitler does, who served four and a half years in the German army during the war, who won high honors for bravery in the face of the enemy, who was wounded and otherwise suffered damage to his health.”
⁶¹

No deportation for Hitler. No long prison time. And no appeal. The People’s Courts, originally founded as summary courts during the bloody chaos of 1919, had no provision for appeal. Besides, they were now going out of business.

The trial was finished. Suddenly, the courtroom fell silent as Ludendorff rose to his full military stature and, with chest out, back straight, and lips quivering with indignation, proceeded to condemn his own acquittal: “I consider this judgment a disgrace and an insult to my uniform and my medals!” The courtroom burst into cheers and
“Heils!”

News of the verdicts snapped through Munich like a whip. Some heard only the first part—five years for Hitler!—and were outraged. But as soon as the second part arrived—only six months!—the mood flipped. Extra editions of the newspapers were grabbed out of newsboys’ hands. An eleven-year-old Municher, Otto Gritschneder, noticed joy and laughter as he ran errands to the bakery and the milk store that day. “I can still hear the outbursts of joy with which people greeted Hitler’s ‘conviction,’ even though I did not understand what it was about,” he wrote many years later.
⁶²

Outside the courtroom there was pandemonium. Crowds that gathered a block away from the Infantry School were attacked by the mounted police, with several injuries. But enough people were able to send up their cheers in front of the building that they could be heard inside the school, even with all the windows closed. Hitler’s political instincts fired up and he quickly found a window that he could open and he waved, smiling to his admirers on the street. They waved back with flowers. It was a moment of triumph.

But Bavaria and Germany had lost. Except on the far right, most commentators denounced the wrist-slap verdicts of Hitler and the other leaders as a scandal—“equal to an acquittal,” argued one newspaper. Neithardt’s conduct was considered an extreme embarrassment to the German judiciary. “It was a trial in name only,” wrote the strongly pro-Bavarian and nationalist daily,
Bayerischer Kurier.
“In fact it was more like a
völkisch
mass agitation gathering.”
⁶³
The
Berliner Tageblatt
pronounced the Bavarian justice system “bankrupt.”
⁶⁴
“All Munich is chuckling over the verdict,” reported the
New York Times,
“which is regarded as an excellent joke for All Fools’ Day.”
⁶⁵
One critic, years later, called Judge Neithardt “a reverse Pontius Pilate” for having found a guilty man innocent.
⁶⁶

Ludendorff’s exoneration drew as much dismay as Hitler’s easy sentence. After all, the old general was far better known abroad, especially among former adversaries like France, where the reaction was strong.
Le Temps
suggested the acquittal was proof of Germany’s lingering revanchist longings.
⁶⁷
Even Judge Neithardt seemed to have some regrets about the Ludendorff acquittal. When a junior state’s attorney, Martin Dreese, ran into the judge in a hallway soon after the trial, he asked the judge why he freed Ludendorff. “I thought he was guilty of high treason,” Neithardt said (according to Dreese). “But the lay jurors were all for acquittal, so I joined them.”
The lay jurors, enamored of Hitler and convinced that Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser were in fact guilty, had almost blocked the Nazi leader’s conviction even to a sentence of five years. But Neithardt warned them that an acquittal of Hitler would raise such a public ruckus that Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser would be dragged before the Leipzig State Court that the Bavarians had tried so hard to avoid. To persuade the lay jurors to accept even a five-year sentence for Hitler—Neithardt needed four out of five votes for a conviction—he had to promise he would offer him parole in six months.

Throughout Germany, Hitler was now known as the man who had turned the tables in his trial, chased Bavaria’s top general out of the courtroom, rhetorically destroyed his adversaries in the Bavarian political establishment, and put the Nazi brand into nationwide circulation. Whether the party could survive Hitler’s six-month absence in prison was another question. But not many people could say they had never heard of him anymore. He had used the platform of the court like the podium of a beer hall, but with a national (and international) audience.

Thanks to Hitler’s new presence on the national political map, many formerly fence-sitting people were seeing the far-right message in a new light. His notoriety also acted as a recruitment force in the competitive swirl of
völkisch,
nationalistic, right-wing political groups—of which there were at least fifty in Bavaria. Many a German right-winger had views different from the Nazis on certain issues—such as socialism in Russia or the role of Christianity in politics. But one thing most of them shared was anti-Semitism—plus a fervent sense of Germanness.

In the Ruhr region town of Rheydt, four hundred miles northwest of Munich, one young, university-educated nationalist had been reading newspaper reports on Hitler’s trial every day. His enthusiasm fired, he began making entries into his diary: “I am
busying myself with Hitler and the national socialist movement,” he wrote. “Communism, the Jewish question, Christianity, the Germany of the future.… Hitler touches on many questions. But he makes the solution very simple.” From Hitler’s trial speeches, the young man began envisioning what the leader must be like. “What is liberating about Hitler is the involvement of a really upright and truthful personality,” he noted in his journal. “Hitler is an idealist… who is bringing new belief to the German people. I am reading his speeches, I am allowing myself to be inspired by him and carried to the stars.… Only Hitler continually concerns me. The man is indeed no intellectual. But his wonderful
élan,
his verve, his enthusiasm, his German feeling.”
⁶⁸

Thanks to the trial and the newspaper reports, this young man was swiftly moving into Hitler’s hypnotic ideological and political orbit. His name was Joseph Goebbels.

CHAPTER NINE

Rearranging the World

“From Hitler’s barely legible handwriting, we could tell it was something political.”

—
FRANZ HEMMRICH, LANDSBERG PRISON GUARD

Hitler left Munich on a high. After waving to a cheering crowd from the Infantry School window, Hitler did not mind being returned to Landsberg Prison that same day. He was on top of the world that mattered to him. The favorable outcome of the trial had given him new energy. Hemmrich noted that Hitler “seemed noticeably refreshed and relaxed” when he returned to the prison.
¹
With the prospect of parole only six months away, Hitler entered one of the most productive periods of his life.

For Hitler, life behind bars was, in many ways, a blessing. For almost the first time in his political life, he had no gatherings to attend, no speeches to give, no office to go to. “He can’t race from meeting to meeting until late at night in constant turmoil,” wrote a fellow prisoner. Now ensconced in room number seven on the
second floor of Landsberg’s fortress building, Hitler was, in a sense, a free man. “Increasingly I had the feeling that he didn’t mind the involuntary stay since it gave him the chance to think about his future in the peace and quiet of the prison,” wrote Hemmrich.

After living for five weeks in a cadet’s room in the Infantry School in Munich, returning to Landsberg may have seemed to Hitler like coming home. Prison guards Lurker and Hemmrich, Warden Leybold—the familiar faces were all waiting as the police van opened its doors beside the fortress building. And many more familiar faces, including forty members of the Hitler Shock Troop, would be coming soon, after their trial and conviction as accessories to treason in the putsch. In May and June, they too would arrive at Landsberg Prison.