1924: The Year That Made Hitler (28 page)

The next night, however, Kallenbach and his unlicensed lawyer became even more creative. They arrived at the guard station not with a water glass but with a half-liter beer mug. Fobke argued that it was not the size or measure of the container that fulfilled the legal definition of “glass,” but the basic materials of its construction. Surprisingly, the twisted logic worked and the two sly foxes walked away with all the cognac left in the bottle. According to Kallenbach, numerous other prisoners suddenly recalled deadly diseases they had contracted, and high-proof hooch began filling up the guards’ cabinets. One “insatiable inmate” had himself sent a goldfish bowl that he wanted to have legally declared a “glass.” Even Fobke balked at that.

Among their subterfuges, the Landsberg inmates also flouted the prison’s prohibition on political symbols by getting their hands on a Nazi Party flag—the swastika. When unsupervised, they hung it on the dayroom wall. How the banned banner made it into the prison is uncertain, though one suspects an inside job, especially in light of numerous claims that the guards and prison staff were gradually being won over to Hitler’s cause and even wept when he was released. But the mischievous malefactors had to avoid detection. The moment anyone heard a guard approaching—one guard had the habit of jangling his bundle of keys as he walked—the inmates swiftly rolled up their flag and stashed it beneath the claw-foot bathtub. It seems they were never caught.

In addition to importing hard drink and an illegal flag, the men of the fortress could order in everyday necessities like shoe polish or
writing paper—or even food items such as butter or a tin of herring—if they had funds in their accounts. A prison guard took orders every afternoon between 1 and 2 p.m. Hemmrich even purchased a large water glass for Hitler who said he needed it for the daily gargling of his throat, still irritated from the World War I gas attack, wrote Hemmrich.
¹²
Since there were no specific limitations on what the inmates might order, the legalistic Fobke decided once again to test the limits of the system. He ordered strawberry ice cream with whipped cream on top.

Nobody was ready for this. Fobke had already prepared a complex legal argument under which he would no longer be medically “fit for imprisonment” if he did not get his cold treat. Rather than telling Fobke to take a hike, the Bavarian judicial system—which ran not only the courts but also the prisons—convulsed. Calls, letters, and memos. The buck was passed around. Everybody knew the Hitler gang could make trouble, and nobody wanted to run afoul of its members. Finally from on high came a finding that “in the interest of the health and fitness for imprisonment of Inmate Fobke,” a one-time exception would be made. Hermie could have his ice cream. By then, of course, he had had his fun. He told them to forget about it.
¹³

One of the greatest perks of Club Landsberg was access to the long garden that ran alongside the outer wall near the fortress building. A rectangle of grass nearly two hundred yards long was lined on one side by trees and shrubs, with a small vegetable garden at the far end. By early spring crocuses and amaryllis were blossoming, and fruit trees had popped into bloom. “We were out there without watchers, at least not that we could see,” noted Maurice. (In fact, the men were well watched through slits in a small tower behind a high hedge. At one end of the garden stood a sign announcing
BORDER
! which meant what it said.)

The garden had two gravel walkways. One ran alongside a row of fruit trees, wide enough for several people to walk abreast. Here Hitler often strolled back and forth with Hess, Maurice, or other inmates, usually in animated conversation. One photo shows both Hitler and Maurice in shorts, Hitler wearing his slouch hat and looking slightly porky in his lederhosen, their heads bent in what appears to be intense discussion as they pass the blooming fruit trees.
¹⁴
Another narrow gravel strip ran hard by the outer prison wall. It became known as the “Hitler Path,” because Hitler so often walked there alone, absorbed in his own thoughts. The two paths—and a bench in the garden—became new venues for Hitler’s out-loud thinking, convenient platforms for expounding his views and working out his political convictions and rehearsing the ways he liked to say—and write—them. “Large parts of
Mein Kampf
may have been composed on these paths,” speculated Hemmrich.
¹⁵

The younger men spent much of their time in the garden playing soccer or
Schlagball
—a game similar to baseball—or doing gymnastics on equipment sent to them by the local gym club: parallel bars, a horizontal bar, a high jump, and a vaulting horse. The prisoners were allowed six hours per day in the garden. At the stroke of 8 a.m., the doors from the fortress building to the outside were unlocked, and the men hurried into the fresh air. Early mornings, Dr. Weber—commander of the Bund Oberland and a veterinarian who seemed to know a lot about human health as well—held a strict roll call and led exercises in a program of steadily increasing demands and challenges. “Only long after we were free did we grasp the absolute necessity of these early morning exercises, which seemed to us too tough at the time,” wrote Kallenbach. “They were the only effective antidote to the onset of mind-numbing indifference and ‘prison psychosis.’”
¹⁶

Hitler initially participated in gymnastics but soon dropped the
activity, focusing almost entirely on his book, wrote Hess. Kallenbach said Hitler’s still-healing dislocated shoulder excused him from physical activity. But Hanfstaengl told a slightly different story. During one of his visits to Hitler, Putzi was struck by the Nazi leader’s weight gain—Hitler had added eleven pounds since coming to prison, hitting 170 pounds.
¹⁷
After all, Hanfstaengl wrote, Hitler’s room “looked like a delicatessen” with all the fruit, wine, and gifts of food. “You really must take part in some of the gymnastic exercises and prison sports,” urged Hanfstaengl. “No,” replied Hitler. “It would be bad for discipline if I took part in physical training. A leader cannot afford to be beaten at games.”
¹⁸

During competitive sports, Hitler’s role was that of sideline spectator or referee. He refereed soccer matches among his men and, on one occasion, attended a boxing match that got out of hand. A punching bag had come with the gym equipment, and one inmate, Edmund Schneider, gave boxing lessons. “Hitler showed great interest in this especially hard, masculine sport,” Kallenbach wrote. So an exhibition match was organized. The short but game Fobke challenged the much taller Maurice to a friendly fight. The match escalated quickly, however, when both men became overeager and began whaling wildly at each other. Fobke concentrated on Maurice’s mid-section while the taller boxer let loose on Maurice’s head. Finally, other men jumped in to pull apart the bleeding fighters. Fobke’s left eye was closed and turning purple; Maurice could barely breathe. Hitler, meanwhile, loved it. “I rarely saw him laugh as heartily as he did when the two separated boxers were presented to him,” wrote Kallenbach.
¹⁹

Nonetheless, following the bloody match, boxing was dropped from the outdoor curriculum and wrestling was added, followed later by jujitsu, both leading to frequent pulled muscles and tendons.

While Hitler was clearly the most serious and studious of the fortress inmates, he still occasionally participated in the fun and games of the younger prisoners. He was drawn in to a long evening of surprise entertainment on June 17, his “name day”—an occasion celebrated in Germany with all the ceremony of a birthday. Secretly decorating the first floor dayroom, the fortress men prepared a series of sketches, songs, poems, and miming that, according to Kallenbach, had Hitler laughing and applauding for hours (one poem “sentenced” Hitler to travel throughout Germany “beating up Jews and Reds”). By the end of the evening, the men decided to stage such jolly diversions every Saturday night—and to create a house newspaper.

The
Landsberger Ehrenbürger
(Landsberg Honorary Citizen) became, for a while, the weekly newspaper of the Hitler crew. It was somehow copied by hectograph and, according to several sources, kept secret from prison officials. Typically it contained three or four pages of tongue-in-cheek commentary on the oddities of life in prison and the prospect of the Nazis someday reviving their cause. Like the entertainment on Hitler’s name day, creative doggerel and feisty jokes laced the pages. And there was usually an essay, often of a historical nature, by Hitler, sometimes including drawings by him.

Alas, all but one copy of the
Honorary Citizen
was lost. Because the newspaper was supposedly secret, copies were limited and hidden. But when one inmate carelessly referred to it in a letter home (which was of course read by the censors), the guards executed a raid. Hearing the approaching guards, the fortress rowdies quickly threw all copies of their little newspaper into the burning stove in their dayroom. All but one copy went up in smoke.

The rescued “newspaper” was issue number six; it celebrated on August 1 the tenth anniversary of the beginning of World War I. The issue, which Kallenbach reprinted in his book, contained
eighteen articles and poems filled with war remembrances. Kriebel wrote about the “Mobilization of the Second Company.” Fobke penned a poem called “The Dead.” Dr. Weber related the successful attack by the First Bavarian Snowshoe Battalion on a snowed-in French position in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace. Hess wrote a 140-line poem called “Facing Verdun,” the story of the famous battle in northern France where he had been wounded.
²⁰
He read it aloud, stirring an emotional response from the assembled Landsberg crew at a special dinner on the war’s anniversary.

But Hitler wrote nothing for this issue of the
Honorary Citizen.
He was busy preparing his longer work to share with the outside world.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Holy Book

“Without my imprisonment,
Mein Kampf
would never have been written.”

—
ADOLF HITLER, 1942
¹

“I’ve decided to withdraw from politics.”

Those stunning words came at the end of a long letter Hitler sent on June 16, 1924, to Ludolf Haase, a young Nazi in the small university town of Göttingen. Haase was a friend of Fobke’s and one of the activists in the restless northern German wing of the party. Disgusted with the backbiting and disarray in the Nazi Party, Hitler had decided to quit the whole mess, he said, until his release from prison would give him the chance to be “a
real
leader again.” From now on, wrote Hitler, “no one has the right to speak in my name.”

Hitler’s unexpected exit reverberated throughout the banned Nazi Party and the
völkisch
movement across Germany. His letter was fervently discussed in such faraway places as Hamburg and Greifswald on the Baltic coast, where splinter groups were
sprouting. Even with all the party upheaval, people asked, How could Hitler just quit politics?

Their answer came soon enough. Hitler sent a resignation statement to the
Völkischer Kurier,
²
a Munich newspaper that was partially filling the void of the Nazi Party’s now-banned
Völkischer Beobachter.
The newspaper ran a front-page box reporting Hitler’s decision to step down from Nazi Party leadership, noting that he “asks that his former followers please refrain from visiting Landsberg.… The reason for this decision is the current impossibility of exercising political leadership.… Also, Herr Hitler needs time for his work on a comprehensive book.”
³

There it was—Hitler was writing a book. He not only wanted the disputatious party squabblers out of his life, he wanted time and peace for writing. He now had something else to do besides referee quarrels among his would-be rivals and successors. “He’s showing everybody on the outside that they can’t function without him,” wrote Hess.
⁴
The party that Hitler was quitting was broken, no longer healthy. While his rivals depleted their energies with infighting, he withdrew from the field to consolidate his own strength. Staying out of the mud fights would help clear the way for an unchallenged comeback later on. “[Hitler] considers the cart hopelessly off track,” wrote Fobke in a subsequent letter to Haase. “He knows that he’s going to have to start from scratch once he’s free.”
⁵

With Nazi Party problems now someone else’s to solve, Hitler was free to write. Whether he was conscious of entering the long lineage of prison memoirists—from Marco Polo to Martin Luther to Sir Walter Raleigh—is impossible to know. Yet somehow he sensed it was time to turn himself into one, cranking out a classic of the genre, a message-driven outpouring of pent-up passions and beliefs that had been percolating for several years and needed to be channeled between two covers.

In taking over the Nazi Party in 1920, Hitler had cavalierly elbowed aside its founders and demanded unlimited executive power. In following his dream of a triple-bank-shot putsch and a Mussolini-like march on Berlin, he had stuck with his grandiose idea until it left him injured, jailed, and with a banned political party. In taking on the weight of German justice in a Bavarian courtroom, he had rolled all his dice—and won, at least symbolically. Hitler always went for the big play.

So it was with
Mein Kampf.
Hitler plunged into his writing project with the same “brutal fanaticism” that he had invoked during his trial as a necessity for his movement. He was not writing a simple political tract, or an entertaining memoir, or a typical party program: he was writing his version of a bible (though he never called it that), an ideological guide for the sum of life, the catechism for a new secular religion. His new creed was National Socialism, and
Mein Kampf
(
My Struggle
) would be its scripture.