Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

  Ehard rapidly gave up the idea of taking an official statement. The typewriter that had been brought in was taken away. In five hours of patient questioning and listening to lengthy political speeches in reply, the subtle lawyer gradually prompted Hitler to open up to a degree, even if remaining cautious and reserved. When he spoke, Hitler added – acknowledging his major strength – he would find the right words, whereas he could not do so by writing it down. His responses to Ehard gave plain clues to the way he would behave before the court.

  He denied that he had committed high treason, since ‘the crime of November 1918’ had not been expunged and the constitution based on this ‘crime’ could have no validity. But if the constitution were taken to have legal force, then acts such as the deposition of the Bavarian government of Hoffmann in 1920 or the creation in 1923 of the General State Commissariat of Kahr with near dictatorial powers ought also to be considered high treason. Ultimately, however, there was a natural right of a people, higher than the formal right of a constitution, to self-defence against the wishes of an incapable parliament.

  Hitler now turned to the role played by Kahr, Lossow and Seißer in the putsch, and hinted strongly at damaging revelations. The triumvirate had, he claimed, willingly cooperated in ‘his’ high treason. He would prove that they had not been feigning consent in the Bürgerbräukeller, but had had the full intention of implementing the agreement reached, and had only broken the agreement through persuasion and, in part, compulsion once they had left the beerhall. He had foreseen the possibility of this, which is why he had given the order that they should not be permitted to leave. Ludendorff’s trust in an officer’s word, during his own temporary absence from the Bürgerbräukeller, had then seen them released – something he himself would never have allowed. This had dismayed him on his return to the beerhall, and he had in that moment had the feeling that the cause was lost. But the triumvirate had not only gone along with his action on the evening of 8 November. What they had agreed with him that evening had been prepared together with him for months. They had discussed at length the ‘march to Berlin’, down to points of fine detail. There was full agreement. They and he had wanted and worked for identical aims. ‘Hitler offers the prospect,’ noted Ehard, ‘of opening up the entire question of the “secret mobilization”’ – the support and training of the paramilitary forces by the Bavarian Reichswehr in preparation for the planned coup d’état. 298

  This was a telling point. The ruling forces in Bavaria did what they could to limit potential damage. The first priority was to make sure that the trial was held under Bavarian jurisdiction. In strict legality, the trial ought not to have taken place in Munich at all, but at the Reich Court in Leipzig. Hitler even initially favoured this, since he thought the Bavarian court would be biased in favour of the triumvirate. ‘In Leipzig,’ he told Ehard, ‘various gentlemen would enter the court-room perhaps still as witnesses, but would certainly leave it as prisoners. In Munich that will naturally not happen.’299 However, the Reich government gave way to pressure from the Bavarian government. The trial was set for the People’s Court in Munich.300 And Hitler’s early apprehension turned out to be entirely misconceived.

  Kahr had hoped to avoid any trial, or at least have no more than a perfunctory one where the indicted would plead guilty but claim mitigating grounds of patriotism. Since some at least of the putschists would not agree, this course of action had to be dropped. But it seems highly probable that the accused were offered leniency for such a proposal even to have been considered.301 Hitler had, at any rate, become confident about the outcome. He still held a trump card in his hand. When Hanfstaengl visited him in his cell in the courthouse, during the trial, he showed no fear of the verdict. ‘What can they do to me?’ he asked. ‘I only need to come out with a bit more, especially about Lossow, and there’s the big scandal. Those in the know are well aware of that.’302 This, and the attitude of the presiding judge and his fellow judges, explains Hitler’s self-confident appearance at the trial.

  Among those indicted alongside Hitler were Ludendorff, Pöhner, Frick, Weber (of Bund Oberland), Röhm and Kriebel. But the indictment itself was emphatic that ‘Hitler was the soul of the entire enterprise’.303 Judge Neithardt, the president of the court, had reputedly stated before the trial that Ludendorff – ‘still the only plus’ that Germany possessed – would be acquitted. The judge replaced a damaging record of Ludendoff’s first interrogation by one which indicated his ignorance about the putsch preparations.304 Hitler, meanwhile, was given the freedom of the court-room. One journalist attending the trial described it as a ‘political carnival’. He compared the deference shown to the defendants with the brusque way those arraigned for their actions in the Räterepublik had been handled. He heard one of the judges, after Hitler’s first speech, remark: ‘What a tremendous chap, this Hitler!’ Hitler was allowed to appear in his suit, not prison garb, sporting his Iron Cross, First Class. Ludendorff, not held in prison, arrived in a luxury limousine.305 Dr Weber, though under arrest, was allowed to take a Sunday afternoon walk round Munich. The extraordinary bias of the presiding judge was later most severely criticized both in Berlin and by the Bavarian government, irritated at the way attacks on the Reichswehr and state police had been allowed without contradiction. Judge Neithardt was informed in no uncertain terms during the trial of the ‘embarrassing impression’ left by allowing Hitler to speak for four hours. His only response was that it was impossible to interrupt his torrent of words. Hitler was also allowed the freedom to interrogate witnesses – above all Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer – at length, frequently deviating into politically loaded statements.306

  When the verdicts were read out, on 1 April 1924, Ludendorff was duly acquitted – which he took as an insult. Hitler, along with Weber, Kriebel and Pöhner, was sentenced to a mere five years’ imprisonment for high treason (less the four months and two weeks he had already been in custody), and a fine of 200 Gold Marks (or a further twenty days’ imprisonment). The others indicted received even milder sentences.307 The lay judges, as Hitler later hinted, had only been prepared to accept a verdict of ‘guilty’ on condition that he received the mildest sentence, with the prospect of early release.308 The court explained why it rejected the deportation of Hitler under the terms of the ‘Protection of the Republic Act’: ‘Hitler is a German-Austrian. He considers himself to be a German. In the opinion of the court, the meaning and intention of the terms of section 9, para II of the Law for the Protection of the Republic cannot apply to a man who thinks and feels as German as Hitler, who voluntarily served for four and a half years in the German army at war, who attained high military honours through outstanding bravery in the face of the enemy, was wounded, suffered other damage to his health, and was released from the military into the control of the District Command Munich I.’309

  Even on the conservative Right in Bavaria, the conduct of the trial and sentences prompted amazement and disgust.310 In legal terms, the sentence was nothing short of scandalous. No mention was made in the verdict of the four policemen shot by the putschists; the robbery of 14,605 billion paper Marks (the equivalent of around 28,000 Gold Marks) was entirely played down; the destruction of the offices of the SPD newspaper Münchener Post and the taking of a number of Social Democratic city councillors as hostages were not blamed on Hitler; and no word was made of the text of a new constitution, found in the pocket of the dead putschist von der Pfordten.311 Nor did the judge’s reasons for the sentence make any reference to the fact that Hitler was still technically within the probationary period for good behaviour imposed on him in the sentence for breach of the peace in January 1922. Legally, he was not eligible for any further probation.312

  The judge in that first Hitler trial was the same person as the judge presiding over his trial for high treason in 1924: the nationalist sympathizer Georg Neithardt.313

  Hitler returned to Landsberg to begin his light sentence in conditions more akin to those of a hotel than a penitentiary. The wi
ndows of his large, comfortably furnished room on the first floor afforded an expansive view over the attractive countryside. Dressed in lederhosen, he could relax with a newspaper in an easy wickerchair, his back to a laurel wreath provided by admirers, or sit at a large desk sifting through the mounds of correspondence he received. He was treated with great respect by his jailers, some of whom secretly greeted him with ‘Heil Hitler’, and accorded every possible privilege. Gifts, flowers, letters of support, encomiums of praise, all poured in. He received more visitors than he could cope with – over 500 of them before he eventually felt compelled to restrict access. Around forty fellow-prisoners, some of them volunteer internees, able to enjoy almost all the comforts of normal daily life, fawned on him.314 He read of the demonstration on 23 April, to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday three days earlier, of 3,000 National Socialists, former front soldiers, and supporters of the völkisch movement in the Bürgerbräukeller ‘in honour of the man who had lit the present flame of liberation and völkisch consciousness in the German people’.315 Under the impact of the star-status that the trial had brought him, and the Führer cult that his supporters had begun to form around him, he began to reflect on his political ideas, his ‘mission’, his ‘restart’ in politics once his short sentence was over, and pondered the lessons to be learnt from the putsch.

  The débâcle at the Bürgerbräukeller and its denouement next day at the Feldherrnhalle taught Hitler once and for all that an attempt to seize power in the face of opposition from the armed forces was doomed. He felt justified in his belief that propaganda and mass mobilization, not paramilitary putschism, would open the path to the ‘national revolution’. Consequently, he distanced himself from Röhm’s attempts to revitalize in new guise the Kampfbund and to build a type of people’s militia.316 Ultimately, the different approaches, as well as power-ambitions, of Hitler and Röhm would lead to the murderous split in 1934. It would be going too far, however, to presume that Hitler had renounced the idea of a takeover of the state by force in favour of the ‘legal path’. Certainly, he subsequently had to profess a commitment to legality in order to involve himself in politics again. And later, electoral success appeared in any case to offer the best strategy to win power. But the putschist approach was never given up. It continued, as the lingering problems with the SA would indicate, to coexist alongside the proclaimed ‘legal’ way. But, Hitler was adamant, on any future occasion it could only be with, not against, the Reichswehr.

  Hitler’s experience was to lead to the last, and not least, of the lessons he would draw from his ‘apprenticeship years’: that to be the ‘drummer’ was not enough; and that to be more than that meant he needed not only complete mastery in his own movement but, above all, greater freedom from external dependencies, from competing groupings on the Right, from paramilitary organizations he could not fully control, from the bourgeois politicians and army figures who had smoothed his political rise, used him, then dropped him when it suited them.317

  The ambivalence about his intended role after the ‘national revolution’ was still present in his comments during his trial. He insisted that he saw Ludendorff as the ‘military leader of the coming Germany’ and ‘leader of the coming great showdown’. But he claimed that he himself was ‘the political leader of this young Germany’. The precise division of labour had, he said, not been determined.318 In his closing address to the court, Hitler returned to the leadership question – though still in somewhat vague and indeterminate fashion. He referred to Lossow’s remarks to the court that during discussions in spring 1923 he had thought Hitler had merely wanted ‘as propagandist and awakener (Weckrufer) to arouse the people’. ‘How petty do small men think,’ went on Hitler. He did not see the attainment of a ministerial post as worthy of a great man. What he wanted, he said, was to be the destroyer of Marxism. That was his task. ‘Not from modesty did I want at that time to be the drummer. That is the highest there is (das Höchste). The rest is unimportant (eine Kleinigkeit)’319 When it came to it, he had demanded two things: that he should be given the leadership of the political struggle; and that the organizational leadership should go to ‘the hero… who in the eyes of the entire young Germany is called to it’. Hitler hinted – though did not state explicitly – that this was to have been Ludendorff.320 On the other hand, in his address to Kampfbund leaders a fortnight before the putsch, he had seemed to envisage Ludendorff as no more than the reorganizer of the future national army.321 Then again, the proclamation put up during the putsch itself over Hitler’s name as Reich Chancellor appeared to indicate that the headship of government was the position he foresaw for himself, sharing dictatorial power with Ludendorff as head of state (Reichsverweser, or regent).322

  Whatever the ambivalence, real or simply tactical, still present in Hitler’s remarks at the trial, it soon gave way to clarity about his self-image. For in Landsberg the realization dawned on Hitler: he was not the ‘drummer’ after all; he was the predestined Leader himself.

  7

  EMERGENCE OF THE LEADER

  ‘The secret of this personality resides in the fact that in it the deepest of what lies dormant in the soul of the German people has taken shape in full living features… That has appeared in Adolf Hitler: the living incarnation of the nation’s yearning.’

  Georg Schott, Das Volksbuch vom Hitler, 1924

  ‘The combination of theoretician, organizer, and leader in one person is the rarest thing that can be found on this earth; this combination makes the great man.’

  Hitler, in Mein Kampf

  The year that ought to have seen the spectre of Hitler banished for good brought instead – though this could scarcely be clearly seen at the time – the genesis of his later absolute preeminence in the völkisch movement and his ascendancy to supreme leadership. In retrospect, the year 1924 can be seen as the time when, like a phoenix arising from the ashes, Hitler could begin his emergence from the ruins of the broken and fragmented völkisch movement to become eventually the absolute leader with total mastery over a reformed, organizationally far stronger, and internally more cohesive Nazi Party. The months of his imprisonment saw his rivals for the leadership on the radical völkisch Right attempt, and fail, to assert their dominance. Without him, any semblance of unity collapsed. As the Reichstag elections of December 1924 just before his release showed, the völkisch Right had by then been all but obliterated as a serious factor in German politics.

  Within some fractions of the splintered völkisch movement, however, Hitler became almost deified after his trial in the spring. Admiration for him in völkisch circles stretched, indeed, far beyond the effusions of the hard-core fanatics. But it was such effusions that were ceaselessly at work on Hitler’s egomania, which, as the trial itself had demonstrated, had only temporarily been dented by the putsch failure. The fan-mail that teemed daily into Landsberg; the fawning disciples who hung on his every word; the sycophancy of his guards; the non-stop flow of admiring visitors: such adulation could not fail to affect someone with self-belief transcending all normal bounds, someone already looking for ‘historical greatness’ and by no means averse to hearing from his adoring following that he possessed it.

  The public projection of greatness on to Hitler at this time by his followers and admirers met with no more unconstrained expression than in Georg Schott’s Das Volksbuch vom Hitler, published in 1924. Schott’s eulogy included sub-headings such as: ‘The Prophetic Person’, ‘The Genius’, ‘The Religious Person’, ‘The Humble One’, ‘The Loyal One’, ‘The Man of Will’, ‘The Political Leader’, ‘The Educator’, ‘The Awakener’, and ‘The Liberator’. In a dense text full of literary and religious allusions, Hitler was turned into nothing short of a demi-god. ‘There are words,’ wrote Schott, ‘which a person does not draw from within himself, which a god gave him to declare. To these words belongs this confession of Adolf Hitler… “I am the political leader of the young Germany”.’ Just as mystically, Schott rhapsodized in equally pseudo-religious termi
nology about the person of Hitler: ‘The secret of this personality resides in the fact that in it the deepest of what lies dormant in the soul of the German people has taken shape in full living features… That has appeared in Adolf Hitler: the living incarnation of the nation’s yearning.’1

  As his movement was dissolving into the myriad of rival factions that offered apparent proof of his indispensability, the enforced idleness in Landsberg and his inability to direct events outside led Hitler to the writing of Mein Kampf and the ‘rationalization’ and partial modification of his political ideas. The process of writing the first volume of his book cemented and rounded off his ‘world-view’. It also reinforced his unbounded, narcissistic self-belief. It gave him absolute conviction in his own near-messianic qualities and mission, the feeling of certainty that he was destined to become the ‘Great Leader’ the nation awaited, who would expunge the ‘criminal betrayal’ of 1918, restore Germany’s might and power, and create a reborn ‘Germanic State of the German nation’.2 By the time he left Landsberg, the transition – in his own mind, as in that of his followers – from ‘drummer’ to ‘leader’ was complete.