1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  Hitler interrupted and contradicted Ott, but stayed engaged. In the end, Ott concluded that Hitler’s hatred for “those who think differently” could not be attenuated: “I could feel his demonic obsession with an ideology that unleashed the psychopath in him.” Hitler was filled with “vanity and brutal dogmatism,” wrote Ott. The next day, however, Ott “heard that Hitler had ended his hunger strike.”

  Whether he did so because of his encounter with Ott is uncertain. Anton Drexler, the Nazi Party cofounder whom Hitler had replaced, visited Hitler at around the same time and claimed that after a “one-and-three-quarter hour struggle with a man who had given up on life,” he had talked Hitler out of dying for the sake of the movement. According to Putzi Hanfstaengl, his wife, Helene—the woman who took the pistol out of Hitler’s hand just before he was arrested—played a decisive role, too: “She sent a message through to say that she had not prevented him from committing suicide in order to let him starve himself to death.”29 One other woman may have made a difference: Frau von Scheubner-Richter, the young widow of the man shot dead beside Hitler as the putschists marched into Odeon Square. She arrived heavily veiled and dressed in mourning to visit Hitler; her presence meant forgiveness and may have convinced Hitler that his followers still supported him. Hitler’s attorney, Lorenz Roder, also visited him on November 24 and afterward told Hemmrich that Hitler had just agreed to end the strike.30

  Hitler’s first meal, recalled the guard, was a bowl of rice. The prisoner had regained “his will to live,” thought Hemmrich, despite the report of one visitor just a day before that Hitler’s left arm “was still unusable.”31 But Hitler was again interested in sharing his thoughts, or at least writing them down; Attorney Roder wrote within a week to the state’s attorney, requesting permission to take to Hitler “the dictionary of the German language by Weber, five volumes of Schopenhauer, along with paper, pen, pen holder and a pencil.”32

  Hitler soon received yet another confidence boost from yet another female admirer. Winifred Wagner, the English-born daughter-in-law of composer Richard Wagner (deceased 1883), had taken a shine to Hitler a few months earlier when he paid a reverential visit to the Wagner home and gravesite in Bayreuth. Along with her brother-in-law, the English-born racist writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain,33 Wagner went out of her way to signal support for Hitler and his cause. After the putsch failed and Hitler landed in prison, Wagner organized a gushing letter that attracted one thousand signatures. “We cherish more keenly than ever our love for you,” it began. Wagner appended a personal note, delivered on December 1, to “Honorable Dear Herr Hitler,” a more endearing form of address than usual. She enclosed as a gift an opera libretto written by her husband, Siegfried Wagner, who, like his father, had become a composer. It was called The Smith of Marienburg. “If this little book can help you through some long hours, then it will have done its duty,” wrote Winifred.34

  Hitler’s hunger strike was over, but his resistance to questioning was not. Among the officials rudely rebuffed by Hitler was Ludwig Stenglein, the state’s attorney responsible for prosecuting Hitler and the other putschists on charges of high treason for their attempt “to overthrow the government by force.” As a last-ditch effort, Stenglein decided to send his much younger deputy, Hans Ehard, to try to interview the mulish Nazi. Only thirty-six, two years older than Hitler, Ehard reckoned he might be able to break Hitler’s wall of silence. But when the deputy prosecutor arrived on December 13 with his stenographer and a typewriter, Hitler was just as willful as before. “I’m not a criminal, and I won’t let myself be questioned like a criminal,” he snorted.

  Warming to his own indignation, Hitler challenged the very legitimacy of the official’s presence and rejected the jurisdiction of the court, reported Ehard. He had no need to tell Ehard any details about the putsch, he said, because he intended to “play his trump cards… only in the courtroom.” But the sensitive Ehard wisely played his own little trump card: he sent the stenographer and typewriter out of the interview room on the second floor of the fortress. Having shed the aura of officialdom and criminal investigation, the young prosecutor settled down face-to-face with Hitler, two men in a small room, with no other listeners. Now they were brain-to-brain—the kind of setting in which Hitler could not resist running his mouth. And he did.35

  For five hours, during the morning and part of the afternoon, Adolf Hitler and Hans Ehard had a rambling open discussion. In their long chat, Hitler spilled his guts, at least on the matter of the putsch, on the entanglements of the Bavarian triumvirate, on his role in history, and on his plans for his upcoming trial. “I never pulled out a pencil or a piece of paper,” remembered Ehard. “Hitler gradually came out of himself. ‘When I talk, I can find the right word, but not when I write,’ he said. Dictation didn’t work for him either, [Hitler] said. Yet I could never get him to give a simple, short, clear answer to a clear, unambiguous question. He held endless political lectures.”

  Hitler “talked a blue streak, and with so much spittle flying that I almost needed an umbrella,” said Ehard. Out of all the verbiage, Ehard was able to distill the arguments Hitler would likely use in what was sure to be a sensational trial.36 Hitler laid out his full defense for Ehard. First, he said, one could not commit high treason against a state such as the Weimar Republic that was itself, in Hitler’s view, founded on high treason. Hitler considered the Socialist-led 1918 November revolution a betrayal of the German people. None of the subsequent elections, he argued, had legitimized the republic because they had not posed the question: was the revolution legal?

  But the core of Hitler’s argument wasn’t about his own alleged treason; it was about the treason of his “mortal enemies,” Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. After all, they had been colluding for months with Hitler and his Kampfbund allies about a putsch and a march to Berlin; they were fully complicit. If they had been truly against his undertaking, asked Hitler, why hadn’t they—as the governing authorities—arrested this “dangerous Hitler” before anything had happened? To the contrary, he continued, the triumvirate had been part of the putsch “in their hearts” (innerlich bei der Sache).37 Hitler also threatened to reveal previously confidential details about secret Reichswehr plans to mobilize not only for a march on Berlin but also for a possible attack on French forces in the Ruhr region. The chatty Hitler was showing his hand: he would turn the trial on its head, putting his adversaries—Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser—into the dock. As it stood, they were scheduled to appear as prosecution witnesses.

  As for the timing of the putsch, Hitler told Ehard, he had felt pressure from his men; he had known Kahr and Lossow could never make a firm decision to losschlagen, and he worried that one of the other nationalistic groups might upstage him with some spectacular action—“like grabbing a dozen Jews and hanging them.”38 This jaw-dropper put Hitler’s casual cold-bloodedness on full display.

  Hitler seemed ready to fight. Even though his left shoulder was still bothering him—it was too painful to hold down a sheet of paper with his left hand while writing with his right hand, he said—the injured leader claimed he was feeling vigorous and “tough as a wildcat” when it came to saving his own skin and making his enemies’ lives “sour.” His trial presentation—probably in the form of a memorandum, said Hitler, despite his aversion to writing—would “rip the masks off the faces of his mortal enemies… and force them to end up where he was, namely in prison.” As soon as he could escape Hitler, Ehard reconstructed the entire conversation on paper. The result, a nine-page, six-section, single-spaced document when it was later printed in a book, became a seminal text on Hitler’s trial, state of mind, and political framework.

  By mid-December, five weeks after entering Landsberg, Hitler was coming out of his post-putsch depression and preparing for his trial, bolstered by the expressions of support that continued to flow into the prison from his admirers. Although the Nazi Party was now officially banned and operating underground behind thinly veiled cover, the committed Nazis we
re fanatical in their devotion. Hitler received piles of mail, packages, gifts, and flowers. A flood of Christmas “love gifts,”39 mostly fine foods, came from people like Winifred Wagner. In early December, one visitor had noticed a package from Bayreuth that included a “wool jacket, woolen long underwear, socks, liqueur, zwieback, sausage, books.…”40

  Warden Leybold initially forbade Hitler from sharing his overflow of sweets and delicatessen foods with other prisoners, so Hitler donated his extras to a nearby Dominican cloister for distribution to the poor. It became a banner year for the nuns and their flock. “Never has the ‘poor wayfarer’ who knocked on our doors had it better than during the time Hitler was in Landsberg Prison,” one nun told Hemmrich.41

  Hitler also began receiving a stream of visitors. The demand to see the Nazi Party leader was so great that prison officials conferred with Hitler in advance of every visit to determine how long the caller would be allowed to stay. Sometimes, if the visitor was simply a passerby claiming to be an admirer of Hitler’s, a three-to-five-minute visit was allowed. If the visitor was someone like General Ludendorff, Hitler’s comrade in (failed) arms and co-defendant in the upcoming trial, a visit might last four or five hours. Unlike the poor devils in the main prison, who were given only fifteen minutes of visiting time every three months, fortress inmates were allowed six hours of visiting time every week—a limit that Hitler apparently often exceeded.

  Hitler’s most invigorating visit came not from a general or any other two-legged devotee, but from his German shepherd, Wolf. Attorney Roder had made special application to the state’s attorney’s office, asking if he might take Hitler’s beloved pet on a visit to the prison. When they arrived, the dog leapt onto Hitler as only a large animal can, triggering the “first full laugh” that Hemmrich had heard since Hitler had arrived in prison.

  Though Hitler maintained distance from his family, and rarely spoke of them even when talking of his youth, he was visited around Christmastime by his half-sister, Angela. She spent a half hour with him “that I will never forget,” she wrote afterward. She described a man clearly on the mend. “He was intellectually and spiritually (geistig und seelisch) on top again. Physically, he’s in good shape. His left arm caused him a lot of trouble, but should be healed by now. The support being shown him these days is touching.”42 (Hitler, on the other hand, showed “every sign of horror” when Rudolf Hess suggested that Hitler’s younger sister, Paula, ought to move from Vienna to Munich to be nearer and safer. “He suddenly became nervous, squirmed in his chair, ran his hand through his hair,” wrote Hess. “For God’s sake, no! Even though he loved her, she could become a burden and cramp his style.”)43

  Things were busy in Landsberg Prison. Told to expect more arrestees from the putsch fiasco, Warden Leybold began renovations to create more cells in the fortress building. Meanwhile, he housed the new group of putschists in a special section of the main prison; it had a makeshift wall and a ceiling over the corridor in front of their cells to shield them from contact with the regular convict population. In splendid isolation, they could still enjoy their special privileges, such as having their cell doors open all day. The covered corridor became their dayroom and eating area, but since the ceiling blocked natural light from the skylights of the four-story cell wing, their space was always in semi-darkness.44

  The new prison arrivals included Dietrich Eckart, Julius Streicher, Fürst Karl Philipp von Wrede,45 former Bavarian justice minister Dr. Roth, and even German Workers’ Party cofounder Anton Drexler, the man who had first invited Hitler to join his movement.46 Hitler continued to live in his hospital cell apart from the other putschists, who constantly pestered Hemmrich for information about their leader. Hemmrich was under strict orders from Leybold to share nothing about Hitler; the new arrivals felt stiffed and pelted the luckless guard with niggling insults.47 Still, life behind bars was quite bearable for the inmates. Their daily privileges included several hours in the prison courtyard and garden, where they could walk up and down a five-hundred-foot-long gravel path. On December 22, Baron von Wrede wrote home to one of his children: “There are seven other gentlemen here with me. We can spend the whole day together if we want to. Our rooms are nice and clean.… They give onto a hall-like room where we can spend our days and take our meals. There’s already a Christmas tree in the room.… The food is supposedly good and plentiful, say my mates, so that, as you can see, things are not bad here.”48

  Landsberg Prison became the last place where Hitler and Eckart were together, though they never met while there. Arguably Hitler’s most important intellectual and political mentor, Eckart had, more than anyone, shown Hitler the power of anti-Semitism as a political tool. Often called the spiritual father of Nazism, the hard-drinking, morphine-addicted Eckart was still cranking out his political vitriol; when arrested, he was working on an anti-Semitic tract called “Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: Dialogues Between Hitler and Me.” Probably reconstructed from multiple discussions with Hitler, Eckart referred to the work as his “Hitler pamphlet.”49 Yet in the months before the putsch, the two men had drifted apart. The Nazi leader no longer treated the star of the Munich bohemian-völkisch scene as his better, or even as his equal; Eckart had been ejected from Hitler’s brain trust. Eckart spent the night of the putsch in one of his watering holes, the Fledermausbar (Bat Bar), and slept late the next morning. Hearing of the march to the Odeon Square, Eckart joined in—but only by car.50 It was enough to get him arrested and now imprisoned in Landsberg, but he did not stay for long. Within ten days of his incarceration Dietrich’s already declining health led to his premature release. Several weeks later, on the day after Christmas, in the small alpine town of Berchtesgaden that he and Hitler loved so well, Eckart died at age fifty-five.51 Hitler later dedicated the second volume of Mein Kampf to him.

  Spending Christmas 1923 behind bars must have impressed upon Hitler the gravity of his situation. Yet given his unsentimental personality, it seems unlikely to have been an especially difficult season for him. Hitler had no close family that he would miss; he was an utterly political animal. To an old boyhood friend who wrote to him three weeks before the putsch, Hitler had replied: “As far as a family is concerned, mine consists so far only of my wonderful German shepherd dog. I haven’t been able to carry it any farther than that. The old ringleader of yesterday is still the ringleader of today and not refined enough yet for the gentler bonds of life.”52

  The most exciting moment of the holidays came a week later on New Year’s Eve. Just past the stroke of midnight, the loud pealing of the prison’s church bell was overwhelmed by a “hellish crackling,” Hemmrich recalled, the sound of explosions from outside the prison walls. The Bavarian State Police jumped into action and doubled the guard around the prison—but it was a false alarm. Exuberant soldiers at the Reichswehr barracks were just firing off their “excess ammunition,” wrote Hemmrich.

  The Reichswehr fireworks may have been a false alarm, but there was indeed reason to celebrate the coming of 1924 and, especially, the going of 1923. The fifth year in the life of the new German republic had been its most disturbing and unstable. The annus horribilis of 1923 had begun with the Franco-Belgian invasion of the Ruhr region and gone downhill from there, reaching its nadir in autumn with the spiking of the inflationary spiral and with an assault on the state and its constitution—Hitler’s putsch. And there the descent had stopped. Hitler’s botched coup d’état marked the finale of a turbulent political era in Germany—uncertainty, extreme violence, near civil war, revolutionary activities, and runaway inflation. Just as Hitler was entering prison, Germany began a period of both exhaustion and calm that eventually led to renewal and stability.

  Germany’s comeback had begun with the introduction, in mid-October 1923, of a new currency called the Rentenmark, based on a new institution called the Rentenbank. The new mark was exchanged for the devastated Reichsmark at the rate of one Rentenmark for one billion Reichsmarks. Soon after Hitler’s putsch, the curren
cy began to regain the buyers’ and sellers’ confidence, and brought inflation to a standstill. The new stability was soon supported by the Dawes Plan, an American-led restructuring of Germany’s reparations debt signed later in 1924. With the currency stabilized, unemployment began to ease. The French even hinted that they might be prepared to evacuate the Ruhr region, and there was talk of Germany being admitted into the League of Nations. The quashing of the putsch had lanced the boil of revolution and insurrection in Bavaria, averting the Berlin-Munich collision that had seemed inevitable in fall 1923. Even Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, the other players in the 1923 conflict, were soon on their way out. A corner had been turned; Germany seemed to be on the upswing.

  The new year also brought changes inside Landsberg Prison. Warden Leybold had been given a new project; he was to renovate the fortress building into a cell block for an expectedly large number of putschist prisoners, far more than could be held in his small special facility in the main prison. More challenging was another order: he was to turn the fortress’s second floor into a courtroom. The much-anticipated “Hitler-Ludendorff trial,” as it was often called, would take place within the walls of Landsberg Prison. Along with Hitler and Ludendorff, eight other putsch leaders—including Colonel Kriebel, Captain Röhm, and Dr. Weber—would be tried together in February. Their trial would be followed in a few weeks’ time by a second trial for the smaller fry, the forty foot soldiers from the Storm Troopers and Kampfbunders who were charged as accessories to high treason and for sundry offenses such as vandalizing the Münchener Post offices, taking hostages, and mishandling people like the wife of the Münchener Post editor. Because it was impossible to know who among Hitler’s many marchers had fired the shots that killed four police troops, no one was charged in their deaths.