1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  But not everyone was so impressed with Hitler’s political behavior and his political intentions. Outside the prison a drumbeat to thwart Hitler’s parole was rising. On September 23, the Munich deputy police chief submitted to the court a scathing warning that, if released, Hitler could be expected soon to be up to his old tricks. His very presence on the political playing field could save the now foundering, still-banned Nazi Party and the völkisch groups. “He represents a permanent danger to the internal and external security of the state,” read the statement. “There should be no discussion of releasing [Hitler].” In the unfortunate event that the Nazi leader were paroled, argued the police, “then it is essential that Hitler, as the soul of the völkisch movement, be deported.”

  With the police report on the table, and with Hitler’s possible parole only one week away, there came another blast against releasing Hitler. This one came from State’s Attorney Stenglein, the man who had prosecuted Hitler at his trial. Stenglein ominously objected to parole not only for Hitler but also for Weber and Kriebel. “There can be no discussion of the defendants turning away from criminal intentions,” Stenglein wrote. He cited violence, kidnapping, and theft during their putsch attempt. The prosecutor’s statement even revisited Hitler’s 1922 conviction for assaulting political leader Otto Ballerstedt; paroled after serving only one month of a three-month sentence, Hitler had clearly violated his probation by staging a coup attempt. In addition, argued the prosecutor, Hitler was linked to recent illegal efforts by Captain Röhm to reestablish his outlawed paramilitary under a new name, the Frontbann.

  In the midst of this barrage, Stenglein learned about Hitler’s smuggled letter and others by Weber and Kriebel. He indignantly demanded an explanation from Warden Leybold, who quickly investigated and produced a report showing a history of letter-smuggling by Kriebel and Weber over recent months but only one violation by Hitler. Despite the unsettled state of their case, the court on September 25 ignored both the police and the prosecutor, approving parole for Hitler, Kriebel, and Weber, effective October 1.

  Stenglein’s office flew into action to try to block the parole. Working over the weekend, Stenglein’s lawyers—almost certainly led by Deputy Prosecutor Hans Ehard—generated a long appeal to the court. It began with the smuggled letters (nine examples in all)3 but also seized on Hitler’s clandestine participation in efforts to restart Röhm’s new Frontbann. Documents seized in his apartment showed Röhm to be acting in his outside political activities “on assignment from Adolf Hitler,” and that Hitler had helped draft the new organization’s charter. Even Leybold, madly scrambling to get out of the hole he had dug for himself, began backing and filling. “If my office had been made aware… of the police department’s suspicions about efforts by our prisoners to promote a banned organization, our oversight of the letters would have been much stricter,” he stated.4 Yet Stenglein’s appeal had its intended effect: it stopped Hitler’s hoped-for release on October 1 while the Bavarian Supreme Court pondered the matter.

  Meanwhile, the plot surrounding Hitler’s possible deportation had thickened. A Bavarian envoy was sent to Vienna to request that Austria agree to Hitler’s repatriation. But Austrian chancellor Ignaz Seipel said no; he would not accept Hitler even if he were shoved across the border. Since Hitler had fought in the German army, went the chancellor’s reasoning, he was no longer an Austrian. Legally dubious though this argument was, it brought to a halt any hopes of deporting Hitler. The canny Austrians had stolen a march on the Bavarians, effectively deporting Hitler from his native land before their Bavarian cousins could deport him back into it. When this news reached Landsberg Prison, Hitler was “overjoyed,” wrote Hess. The two men celebrated that night with a glass of wine.

  On October 6, the Bavarian Supreme Court denied Stenglein’s appeal, remanding Hitler’s case to the lower court. Summarily dismissing the chilling (and subsequently vindicated) warnings of the police and the prosecutors, the Supreme Court tossed the ball back to the court that had once already ruled in Hitler’s favor. It would take another two months for the judicial wheels to turn. Hitler was left temporarily in limbo.

  A funk had fallen over the prison. Early autumn rain and fog had blanketed Landsberg, turning the cells and hallways cold, damp, and drafty. Gone were the outdoor walks and gardening adventures, the rowdy spirit of brothers in arms, the hopes of some of the men for an early release, and the renewal of the holy Nazi mission. Hitler’s mostly young Shock Troops were finally confronting reality: Landsberg had walls and bars that couldn’t be moved, even though some of the men occasionally tried rattling the iron staves that kept them penned up. “Gray melancholy, nerve-wracking boredom and a dull tedium set in among us and pressed on the hearts of the inmates,” wrote Kallenbach.

  A kind of “prison psychosis” was taking hold, Kallenbach reported. “We began to feel empty and burned out.” Some men fell into long silences; others argued loudly and got into near-fights until they were separated by other inmates. Hemmrich, the prison guard, also wrote of “a noticeable and edgy stillness” among the prisoners. An inmate named Frosch—which means frog, so his nickname was Fröschl, or Froggie—began behaving oddly, sleepwalking and splashing like a child in the bathtub; there was speculation that he was going crazy.

  Even gung-ho troopers began wondering about the purpose of their whole undertaking. Many were receiving bad news from home, since their families had lost their breadwinners to prison; in some cases, they also suffered from the men’s now-sullied reputations as foolish radicals who had been thrown in jail. Some wives had been forced to take jobs as housemaids to make ends meet. They could hardly afford train fare to visit their husbands in Landsberg. A few of Hitler’s foot soldiers perhaps shared the feelings of one inmate who had written upon arriving at Landsberg Prison: “‘Hitler this, Hitler that,’ and ‘I got this for us,’ and ‘I got that’—that’s what I hear all day from some of the comrades here.… I’m fed up.… That’s the last time I’ll ever have anything to do with politics. Those on the outside who shout ‘Heil!’ all day can run their heads against the wall, for all I care. When I get out of here, it’s just going to be job and wife and family for me.” Other inmates began expressing misgivings even about the grand man himself. “I don’t have any doubts,” protested one prisoner in a story told by Kallenbach. “But hey, even the Boss could make mistakes, couldn’t he? What then?” To these young men, the future looked decidedly bleak and uncertain.

  Even Hess’s letters no longer rang with admiration for Hitler or mentioned any private readings from the book manuscript. Something had gone sour between the two men. Hess reported “terrible scenes” with Hitler, made worse by the fact that “Maurice naturally takes the side of the lord and master. And W[eber] and K[riebel] don’t have a clue about the issue, but that doesn’t stop them from jumping to the defense of the ‘practitioner’ (he may be a good architect and builder but doesn’t know squat about technology, even though he’s always throwing it into my face).” These were tough words from the man who up until recently had fawned over Hitler more than anyone, and who would later become Hitler’s virtual alter ego in running the Third Reich. It is not clear what had caused the rift between the two men, but it was apparently more than momentary. Hess wrote: “It’s getting worse and worse between us.”

  While awaiting further judicial action on his parole, Hitler faced another uncertainty: the publishing status of his book. By October 16, Hitler had written and “signed” the book’s dedication to his sixteen followers who had died during the putsch on November 9, 1923. They were all listed by name, including the sole bystander who had been killed but was appropriated by Hitler into a list of “martyrs” and would go down in history as a Nazi supporter. Signing the dedication page suggests that Hitler had completed his manuscript of about 370 pages, and he was already planning a second volume. Parts of the manuscript had made their way to Max Amann, Hitler’s publisher. But Amann was in a bind: he had no money.

  “It app
eared impossible to raise the necessary funds” to publish the book, wrote Amann later.5 The book market had collapsed during the hyperinflation and had not yet fully recovered. In addition, politically tendentious publishers, especially on the right wing, were heavily dependent on mass meetings to move their products and highlight their writings. Since the putsch, the Nazis and other völkisch groups had been banned; there were no mass meetings. “Countless publishing businesses [and] a large number of newspapers went out of business and völkisch literature fizzled out because there were no gatherings where these books could be sold,” wrote publisher Julius Lehmann.6

  On the second floor of the fortress building, the only relief from the autumnal blues was once again provided by Hitler’s watchful angel, Helene Bechstein. This time it was a gramophone that she provided, along with what appears to be a broad selection of records. “Something soft, then military marches to wake you up!” Hess wrote to Pröhl. “Waltzes that go round and round, a delightful voice singing Schubert’s ‘Du bist die Ruh,’ and Richard Wagner’s ‘Schmerzen.’ If you close your eyes, you can forget for a few minutes where you are.”7

  As everyone in Landsberg eagerly waited for the court’s parole decision, word of the inmates’ easy lifestyle and possible illegal political activities in the prison leaked out to the socialist Münchener Post. The newspaper blasted the prison and its warden for a “scandalous scene” of the “state-owned Landsberg Prison being run as an outright political stronghold of Nazi desperados.”8 The newspaper attack threw Leybold into a defensive crouch; he responded with yet another panegyric to Hitler’s good behavior. The prosecutors, Stenglein and Ehard, quickly fought back with another statement, citing Hitler’s smuggled letter to car dealer Werlin as proof that his supposed “good behavior” was a hollow pose. Again, Leybold attested to Hitler’s “good self-control and comportment,” calling him a “model for his fellow inmates.”9

  Then, suddenly, Hitler’s political violations and his risky act of letter-smuggling were brushed aside. On December 19, the Bavarian Supreme Court made a final ruling: Hitler was to receive parole immediately; he was getting a free pass back into political life. The court’s decision was transmitted to State’s Attorney Stenglein, whose job it was to execute the order. No doubt with great chagrin, Stenglein composed a telegram to Leybold in Landsberg: “Supreme Court threw out the objection of the State’s Attorney.… Request Hitler… be notified and immediately released.”10

  It was nearly ten o’clock in the evening when Leybold showed up at room number seven in the fortress building. Hitler recalled later: “After some beating around the bush and hesitation, he told me, ‘You are free!’ I could hardly believe it.”11 He was to be released the next day, December 20, 1924, five days before Christmas. Hitler’s year in prison was over.

  By morning, word of his release had not only shot through the fortress but had reached Hitler’s supporters in Munich. Before he could do anything about it, Gregor Strasser and Anton Drexler had driven to the prison to pick Hitler up, arriving mid-morning. Meeting Hitler in the visitors’ room, they announced their plan to take their leader straight to visit Ludendorff to begin discussing political business. Hitler blew them off. Hitler “wouldn’t even consider going,” Hess related in a letter. “He was very angry! He wants first his rest and nothing else.”

  Despite his ire, Hitler must have taken wicked pleasure in seeing that his followers, and even a potential leadership rival like Ludendorff, were pushing and shoving to be the first to greet the returning hero. “The competition for him is beginning sooner than I expected,” noted Hess.12 Hitler wanted nothing of it. As for Ludendorff, he had told Hess, “I would like his name to disappear if possible from the movement because he makes it harder for me to win the workers.”13

  Instead of falling into the arms of his self-appointed drivers, Strasser and Drexler, Hitler called upon a non-political friend, Adolf Müller, to pick him up. Müller was the printer who produced the Völkischer Beobachter; his shop was also in the Schellingstrasse. Along with Müller came the one man who now always seemed welcome around Hitler, photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. His long-ago clash with Hitler’s bodyguards a distant memory, Hoffmann was fast becoming the Boss’s court photographer.

  At noon, Hitler made his farewells among his men, all deeply moved in Kallenbach’s telling, of course. Hitler even made the claim that much of the prison staff lined up with tears in their eyes to bid him good-bye at the castle-like front gate of the prison. “When I left, everybody wept, including the Mufti, the doctor, the guards—but not me!” said Hitler. “We had won them all to our cause!”14

  In the prison records, Leybold had noted the remainder of Hitler’s sentence: “3 years, 333 days, 21 hours and 50 minutes. Paroled until October 1, 1928.” Had Hitler been forced to serve those remaining days in prison, he would have returned in 1928 to a Germany that was on far firmer political and economic footing.

  Hitler was officially free at 12:15 p.m. While it is not known if he ever received a discount offer from dealer Jakob Werlin for the sleek Benz automobile he had craved in his smuggled letter, Hitler was picked up on this day by something almost as good. Müller and Hoffmann had arrived in a shiny black car with a convertible top, spoked wheels, and white sidewall tires—the very kind of vehicle Hitler had been hoping to buy (except that he wanted it in gray). As they climbed into the comfortable touring car, Hoffmann insisted on finding an appropriate spot for a departure photo (Leybold had forbidden pictures in front of the prison). The three men stopped just outside an old Landsberg city gate with a massive archway that looked like the entrance to a castle—or even to a prison. Hitler stood on the street beside the shiny black car with one hand on its door frame. His face serious and purposeful-looking, Hitler must have known this was the moment that his life was beginning again. Having dodged a barrage of bullets—including at least one real one—over thirteen months, he was now getting a second chance.

  Even in this historic moment, however, Hitler looked a touch odd. From beneath his belted trench coat, his legs protruded like sticks. On the day of his release from a year in exile, Adolf Hitler was not wearing pants but kneesocks. Under his trench coat, he must have been wearing his Bavarian lederhosen, even in December. The photo session did not last long.

  “Get a move on, Hoffmann,” said Hitler. “It’s bloody cold.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Starting Over

  “No one can say I am unknown now, and that gives us a basis to start on again.”

  —ADOLF HITLER, CHRISTMAS EVE, 19241

  Munich was plastered with fire-red posters announcing Hitler’s Friday night speech at the Bürgerbräukeller—the same beer hall where he had staged his putsch sixteen months earlier. For the first time since his release from prison, Hitler was ready to speak to the faithful. He had kept them waiting for two months after leaving Landsberg, refusing to be drawn into party quarrels or conjecture about his intentions. Finally, he was staging his coming-out, his return to the political lists. People were burning to know what Hitler would be like after more than a year behind bars. Was he, as the New York Times headline had claimed when he departed Landsberg, “Tamed by Prison”? Or was he the old firebrand who could rouse the crowds and hurl thunderbolts at his tormentors, at the Communists, and at “the system,” as he called it? Most of all, they wanted to know, what was Hitler going to do about the fractured Nazi Party and the völkisch movement? How would he lead a wounded cause?

  It had taken Hitler weeks to answer those questions in his own mind. After being greeted with garlands and wreaths on December 20 at his Thierschstrasse apartment by a small welcoming committee—and nearly knocked down the stairs by his exuberant German shepherd2—Hitler had kept his profile low and quiet. Speculation bubbled all about him. Whom had Hitler called on first—Ludendorff or someone else? Had Hitler disappeared to a rural retreat on the Baltic Sea coast for rest and restoration—Erholung? Hermann Esser’s newspaper, Nationalsozialist, responded angri
ly that when asked about this claim, Hitler said: “I have neither time nor money for Erholung.”3 What Hitler was up to and why he refused to speak in public was the lingering mystery. “Hitler’s apparent passivity is sowing confusion and unrest in the völkisch movement,” noted a police intelligence report.

  Only on Christmas Eve did Hitler return briefly to his familiar world—the home of Putzi and Helene Hanfstaengl. The wealthy couple had moved into a gracious villa in the leafy Herzog Park neighborhood. “You’re back, Uncle Dolf!” said four-year-old Egon Hanfstaengl at the door. Putzi, pleased to show off his new home, led Hitler into the spacious main salon, dominated by a Blüthner grand piano. At the sight of the fine instrument, Hitler turned and said, “Hanfstaengl, please play me the ‘Liebestod.’” He was requesting the tragic final moment in Tristan und Isolde. Within minutes, the two men had renewed their musical bond and Hitler was in a Wagnerian reverie.

  Hitler’s evening with the Hanfstaengls was a felicitous reentry into his Munich life. For little Egon, Hitler did his World War I artillery-sound imitations. During a late-evening discussion, he touched on politics. “Politics is not about proposals and programs, but about long, tough work until people are ready to equate some unknown person with a political idea. I think I’ve reached that point. And that’s why the putsch was in some ways useful for our movement. No one can say I am unknown now, and that gives us a basis to start on again.”4