CHAPTER SIX
Hitting Bottom
“It’s over! Let them see how well they do without me. I’m giving up.”
—ADOLF HITLER, 19231
“There was something in the air,” wrote prison guard Otto Lurker about the cold autumn night on which Adolf Hitler arrived in Landsberg Prison. “A storm ripped over the rooftops and watchtowers of the prison, shaking the gates and bars as though it were angrily trying to force its way in. Down in the cell blocks, all was dead silent except the occasional pacing of the night watchman.”
If ever a chapter in history called for a dark-and-stormy-night opener, the night of Hitler’s arrest and delivery into prison, November 11, 1923, would seem to be it. Another prison guard, Franz Hemmrich, wrote in his memoir: “It was a starless night, and a feeling of tense uncertainty had come over the wardens and guards.” Into this fraught atmosphere, around 11 p.m., walked a pale, distraught, and silent figure with his left arm in a sling and a shopworn gray trench coat over his shoulders.2 “A strand of dark hair fell across his washed-out visage, weakened by overstimulation and sleepless nights,” wrote Hemmrich. This down-and-out character was incongruously dressed in a formal frock coat—with an Iron Cross still pinned on its front3—the same outfit he’d worn for the putsch, for his failed march to Odeon Square, and during his escape to Ernst Hanfstaengl’s villa. Beside him, “their shadows flickering and dancing in the darkness before them,” walked Landsberg Prison warden Otto Leybold and two police officers, one of them leading a “strong dog” on a chain. The prison was still, except for the slamming of iron doors behind the men. In the dead of night, Adolf Hitler had arrived at what would be his home for most of the next thirteen months.
Located thirty-eight miles west of Munich, Landsberg Prison was a modern penal institution in a charming, small municipality on a meandering Alpine river called the Lech. The medieval town had the requisite cobblestoned streets and bubbling fountain, once the source of village drinking water, along with several bakeries and pubs on the main square; it could have been any of the rustic Bavarian market towns that dotted the region. What made Landsberg-on-Lech special was that it had a state prison on the edge of town and, nearby, a Reichswehr garrison. In years to come, Landsberg would become a hotbed of Nazism, a place of pilgrimage and—to its shame—the center of a collection of World War II slave labor camps.
But on this wind-lashed night, Landsberg was just a sleepy burg of no special renown. Its prison, a state-of-the-art penitentiary that housed five hundred convicts, had been opened in 1909. Though it had a brownish, faux-fortress main gate—two fat onion-domed towers with an arched entryway—the prison’s interior was thoroughly modern, consciously modeled on the latest American “panopticon” design: four large wings, four stories high, joined in the middle by a central watch station with easy access to all cells in all four directions.
Yet there was one difference: Landsberg Prison had a special wing for special prisoners. It was called die Festung—the fortress. The so-called fortress was, however, nothing of the sort; it was simply a contemporary (in 1909) two-story, rectangular, whitewashed building with an orange tile roof connected by a corridor to the main prison.* The building originally had been designed for small prison industries,4 then became a prison wing for political inmates. The name, Festung (fortress), derived from Germany’s nineteenth-century tradition of putting political offenders, prisoners of conscience, and members of nobility, such as duelists, into a local fortress tower for an “honorable” imprisonment under relaxed conditions (dueling was a semi-tolerated crime of honor). In modern times, the name had remained, codified in law, but the fortress towers had not. Adolf Hitler, like many other political prisoners during the 1920s, would serve his time under “fortress arrest”—better translated as “honorable imprisonment” in a minimum-security facility (also called custodia honesta in some countries).5 Hitler’s “fortress” looked more like a dormitory than a castle, though the dorm had two-foot-thick walls and bars on the windows. “Anyone who expected to find a romantic whiff of mossy castles with damp vaults… was bitterly disappointed,” wrote one prisoner.6
A striking political irony awaited Hitler in Landsberg. The only prisoner in the fortress† at this time was Count Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. The nationalist nobleman, in a fit of what he considered patriotism, had shot dead Bavaria’s governor, Kurt Eisner, on a Munich street in 1919. By killing the Socialist governor, Arco-Valley (as he was generally called) helped unleash the political tumult that led to a three-week Communist takeover of Bavaria in April 1919 by a council republic. That short-lived republic ended in an appalling bloodbath, stirring up a far-right backlash that nurtured, among other groups, the Nazis. For murdering Eisner, the nationalistic Arco-Valley had been sentenced to death, only to have his term commuted to life under fortress (honorable) arrest. He occupied the only cell in Landsberg’s fortress building that was considered suitable for incarceration of a “notable figure”—“with space for a guard in the anteroom,” wrote Hemmrich, the prison guard.
On the notability scale, Hitler now outranked the near-forgotten count. With his name splashed across Munich’s and Germany’s front pages, the pale man with the stubby mustache was clearly more prominent than the nobleman lying in fortress cell number five.7 Like a garden-variety rich person being evicted from a hotel’s best suite to admit a suddenly arrived movie star, Arco-Valley was “unceremoniously dragged out of his sleep and installed in a cell in the prison hospital,” remembered Lurker. The awakened assassin “swore a blue streak” over his eviction and shouted that “if he had the chance he would kill this Hitler exactly as [he had Eisner] because this ‘painter’s apprentice’ was Germany’s greatest disaster!” wrote Hemmrich.8 Still, Adolf Hitler got the best room.9
But the best room was still spartan. Only about nine feet wide and twelve feet deep, cell number five contained a simple white metal bunk with mattress and blankets, a nightstand with a lamp, a small wooden writing table, two wooden chairs, and a wardrobe. Although he was locked in at night, Hitler’s cell had a real door that afforded more privacy than simple cell bars.10 The room’s best features were two five-foot-high windows that opened inward and admitted a great deal of light. From these windows, Hitler could see the twenty-foot-high stone wall surrounding the prison, standing about seventy-five feet away. Over the wall, from his second-floor vantage point, Hitler saw farm fields and the gently rolling countryside beyond; he liked to watch cars on a distant highway and dreamed of once again owning a luxury automobile like those he saw passing.11 No doubt the bars on the windows often served to bring him out of such reveries. One sunny-day photograph showed the barred double-casement windows casting a gridlike shadow on the wall above Hitler’s bed and reflecting off a large picture frame on the opposite wall, giving his cell the hemmed-in appearance of having barred windows on three sides.12 It may have been better than a standard-issue cell, but it was no hotel room.
Hitler’s reputation had preceded him on this blustery night, sending the prison into an uproar of preparations. Word of the putsch had filtered into the provincial newspapers; everyone knew who Hitler was, and that he and his Nazis were capable of serious mischief. “We have to be prepared for anything,” Warden Leybold had told Lurker and Hemmrich. “His followers may attempt a rescue.” Given the brazenness of the putsch attempt, the fears were not unfounded. “We had only sixty prison guards, some quite old, and a twenty-man security detail outfitted with World War I weapons,” noted Hemmrich. “If we’d been assaulted by a massive force led by former officers, our little troop would have been too weak to defend the big prison complex.”13
As they were fretting over security, Leybold got a reprieve: a phone call from Munich informed him that the Reichswehr would take over guard duty for Adolf Hitler and the fortress. The Nazi Party leader was too important to leave to the inadequate resources of the prison. Within half an hour, the prison corridors echoed with the tramp of boots and clang of military equipment
. Rifles, machine guns, steel helmets, even hand grenades were laid in by the thirty-two-man Reichswehr detachment from the Landsberg garrison. The guard unit’s commander, Lieutenant Imhoff, set up his post in the cell next to Hitler’s. A direct telephone line to the Reichswehr garrison was run out of Imhoff’s headquarters, yet it was repeatedly cut during the night, according to Lurker.
For all the excitement, the prison guards’ chief job on this historic night was helping Hitler out of his clothes. His dislocated shoulder was still causing him great pain. “He was just about all in,” reported Hemmrich. “He refused a bite or even a sip of soup, but lay down on the cot. His sole request was for a glass of water. I put a full pitcher on his table. I went away after securely locking him in.”
Hitler’s lack of appetite turned out to be more than a function of exhaustion. It was also political, and a function of depression and desperation. Hitler fully expected, he said later, to be shot for his misdeeds, just as so many revolutionaries before him had been—and just as he would have done to anyone who attempted a coup against him when he was in power.14 Given the waves of political violence since World War I, it was no idle fear. Nor was it a surprise that Hitler, buffeted by his sense of failure and physical collapse, was still contemplating suicide. His chief reason for living—the Nazi movement—seemed to be at an end.
Hitler was a man of dramatic mood swings. He had already spoken of death or suicide four times in the past three days. Now his volatile psychological state triggered turbulence and drama in the prison. Besieged by court officials trying to get testimony from him, Hitler’s temper vacillated wildly. The temperamental prisoner had at first clamored for a chance to make an official statement to investigators; he wanted to put his version of events on the record. Hitler’s goal was to exact revenge from those he believed had betrayed him: Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. But when investigators arrived at Landsberg, Hitler repeatedly clammed up, “acted fresh, or broke out into crying fits,” reported an official.15 During attempted interrogations, Hitler’s shouts and screams “could be heard all over the building.”16 Guards standing outside the second-floor interrogation room feared that fisticuffs would break out. Both defiant and dejected, Hitler was a problem prisoner from the start. Then came the hunger strike.
At first, Hitler ate the food Hemmrich brought him—“but didn’t touch the meat.” Hitler had become a vegetarian. As part of his “honorable” incarceration, a fortress prisoner received the same food that the prison staff ate, not the plainer fare served to the five hundred inmates in the main prison. But one morning, when Hemmrich arrived with Hitler’s breakfast, the inmate’s dinner from the night before still stood untouched on his table. “Herr Hitler, what’s the matter?” asked the guard. “Why aren’t you eating? Are you sick?”
“Just leave me alone!” cried Hitler. “I’m not eating anymore.”
Prison Warden Leybold told Hemmrich to leave each meal in Hitler’s cell nonetheless, and pick it up only after bringing the next meal. But when Hemmrich delivered breakfast the following morning, Hitler flew into a rage. His dinner from the night before again stood untouched on the table. Hitler “howled like a madman at me,” said Hemmrich.
“Take it away!” shouted Hitler. “Otherwise I’m going to throw it against the wall!”
Hitler then broke into his classic political rant, yelling at Hemmrich about “liars and traitors.” A shouting match erupted; Hemmrich issued disciplinary threats. But he removed Hitler’s spurned meals.
Not eating day after day, Hitler became weak. He looked “like a heap of misery, crestfallen, poorly shaved, and listening to my simple words with a tired little smile and no interest,” wrote Hemmrich.17
It was bad enough that his party was banned, his newspaper shuttered, and his comrades arrested, hunted, or in exile. But Hitler, who had always put great store in his personal dignity, now faced ignominy. He heard that people were calling him crazy, or drunk, or megalomaniacal on the night of the putsch.18 He was roundly denounced and derided by all but his own fanatical followers, and even by some of them. Hermann Esser later claimed that many Nazi adherents were deeply angered that their leader had not stayed with his people at the Odeon Square.19 The New York Times captured the consensus: “The Munich putsch definitely eliminates Hitler and his National Socialist followers.”20 U.S. diplomat Robert Murphy, based in Munich, soon wrote, “It is to be expected that Hitler, who is not a German citizen, will be deported from the country after serving his prison term.”21 As historian Othmar Plöckinger put it, “Hitler’s fall was steep; in the first days and weeks it was uncertain whether he would ever be able to return to the political stage.”22 And the stage itself was suddenly cleared of all the smoke and clamor that Hitler and his Nazis had been generating. “The swastikas and Storm Troopers disappeared, and the name of Adolf Hitler fell almost into oblivion,” noted Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who traveled often to Germany.23
With his world shrinking and his future closing down, Hitler again sought the melodramatic way out. With no gun, no defiant marches, and no rope for making a noose, Hitler chose the only weapon left to him: death by starvation. He would punish himself and die like a martyr, succumbing for his cause (die Sache).
Several days after he began his hunger strike, alarmed prison officials moved Hitler to the hospital wing, where he was continuously watched and strictly isolated from other prisoners. Drinking only water, Hitler spent most of his time reading beside his barred window. He asked Hemmrich to bring him materials from the little prison library;24 he said he found peace in rereading philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. But he was increasingly pale and frail, his voice growing hoarse. Hemmrich began to notice an odd odor, a “cloyingly sweet smell that surely came from his stomach.”25 The malodor became so “penetrating” that Hemmrich had to hold his breath to avoid nausea while delivering packages to Hitler. After a week, Warden Leybold was concerned that he “might not be able to keep his most precious prisoner alive for trial.” The warden ordered hospital staff to prepare to begin force-feeding of Hitler by “synthetic nutrition.” The future ruler of Germany was about to have a tube forced down his throat.
But on that same day, November 19, the prison’s teacher and “practical psychologist,” Alois Maria Ott, decided to pay Hitler a visit.26 “It was a gray Monday morning, and I went to the hospital around 10 a.m.,” Ott later wrote. “I unlocked the door and found before me a short, darkly staring man whose appearance was, at first, rather disappointing. He looked like an ordinary person with a very mannered way of combing his dark hair over his forehead.… Most noticeable were the prominent cheekbones and strong chin with a stubbornly closed wide mouth and a broad, slightly indented nose.… His eyes betrayed his hostility, shooting daggers at me.”
Ott, a devout Catholic and firm believer in the power of goodwill,27 had made up his mind to break through Hitler’s wall of resistance. He had a plan: Ott brought the angry inmate a Munich newspaper featuring a story by one of Hitler’s former friends; it accused the Nazi leader of “falling victim to the devil of his own vanity and a prima donna complex.” Handing Hitler the newspaper—the conservative Bayerischer Kurier (Bavarian Courier)—Ott said, “Herr Hitler, I give you my word that I’ve told nobody in the prison that I was coming to see you, and nobody will learn anything of this conversation. You and I are about the same age and have both lived through war and misery. I’m coming to you man to man, to be of assistance, the same way I do with every inmate. But, here, read what your old friend has written about you!”28
Hitler read while the prison psychologist paced up and down the narrow hospital room—“ten paces long by three paces wide,” he recalled. It was silent in the room.
Suddenly Hitler jumped up and smashed the crumpled-up newspaper onto the table. In a shrill voice, “with his unique guttural rolling ‘R,’” Hitler began shouting: “This [German] people are a bunch of bums! What a poor excuse of a nation! What a bunch of know-it-alls! You put your life on the line for the greatest
cause and then they betray you!… It’s not worth the sacrifice. I’m tired of going on. It’s over! Let them see how well they do without me. I’m giving up. If I had a revolver, I would take it.”
Ott was stunned: “[Hitler’s] mouth was flecked with white foam, his eyes were rolling, the whites of his eyes were moist. The man was hysterical.”
Nonetheless, Ott lectured Hitler on the need for patience if he really meant to help people find jobs and security instead of just offering vague promises. Ott’s little sermon didn’t work: “He exploded again and shouted at me: ‘Germany cannot wait! I tried to help the country with an appeal to its dignity and its honor. But these cowardly fools won’t listen! They betray anyone who tries to lift them out of the slime of subservience. History has shown again and again: those who want the best [for their people] are always crucified and burned at the stake.”
Ott let Hitler rage on. Asking him if he didn’t perhaps follow the wrong role models—given Austria’s recent history with the fallen house of Hohenzollern—Ott touched another nerve. Hitler hated the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, so now he gave Ott “a long private lecture” on history, revolution, and role models “from Sparta to Frederick the Great to Nelson and Garibaldi.”
Hitler’s silence was now broken. And he was on familiar ground. He could not resist a chance to pontificate on history and politics. The prisoner and the prison teacher fell into a classic colloquy, debating issues of the day and of the past. Hitler claimed the only two institutions he ever respected were the Prussian army general staff and the College of Cardinals at the Vatican. “Then you must know,” said Ott, “how long it took the Prussian general staff to prepare for the last war, and that revolutionaries like Garibaldi and Mussolini need the will of the people behind them. Slogans, especially ideological ones like anti-Semitism and anti-clericalism, won’t bring starving people to the barricades.… Why do you and your followers spread hatred toward Jews and toward papal authority? We can be political opponents, but if you want to lead a whole nation into a better future, we need one another.”
1924: The Year that Made Hitler Page 10