1924: The Year That Made Hitler (16 page)

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 currency 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.

Having done the battle of the streets, and lost badly, Hitler was now preparing for the battle of the courtroom. A crisis junkie, Hitler responded best when cornered and confronted. His years of rampant reading, his reportedly excellent memory for broad concepts as well as for details, and his growing belief in his own infallibility began to flow into a thought process for legal (and political) combat that would turn his trial into something more than a judicial process. It would become a platform for his solidifying worldview as well as an ex post facto rationalization of his attempt to overthrow the German state.

To prepare the fortress for the trial, Warden Leybold quickly set carpenters and painters to work. Walls were ripped down, rooms were designed for the press and the police, and a broad wooden railing was installed as the court bar, dividing spectators from those involved in official proceedings. In the watchtower overlooking the
fortress building and courtyard, new shooting slits and a machine gun emplacement were installed. Barbed wire was added atop the barrier separating the fortress building from the prison church. Drivers bringing construction materials began calling the road inside the prison “Hitler Street.” Noted Hemmrich: “The ‘fortress’ was finally turned into a fortress in the military sense.”
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These renovations included one unusual touch: Leybold knew he might need a special space for General Ludendorff. Arrested and released after the putsch on his word of honor, Ludendorff would have to serve time if convicted and sentenced at the trial. But even if found guilty of high treason, nobody—not the prosecutor, not the judge, not any prison official—could bring himself to treat Ludendorff as a normal mortal. He would have to have something better.

Surveying his options, Leybold saw the solution right in front of him: he would give Ludendorff his own rather spacious conference room in the administration building, far from the prison hoi polloi. Workers began converting and furnishing the space as a “two-room cell” for the general: a sitting room where he could work and receive visitors, and a “bedroom” behind a newly installed archway with a heavy curtain. Leybold even designated one prison guard to be Ludendorff’s manservant, since no German general could be expected to do without one. The guard cleaned his best suit and patent-leather shoes and began preparing for the assignment of a lifetime.
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Behind the planning for Hitler’s trial, a political backstory was unfolding. Hitler and his accomplices were charged with high treason for an attempt to “violently change the constitution” not only of Bavaria but of the German Reich as well.
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At the national level, the offense fell under the 1922 Law for the Protection of the Republic—passed following the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. Strictly interpreted, the Hitler trials should therefore
have been held at the newly created State Court in Leipzig, in Saxony. At first, even Hitler favored that venue, thinking he might receive a fairer trial and—best of all—get his bitter enemies, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, charged with treason alongside him. Moving the trial to Leipzig would deprive his tormentors of their special influence in Bavaria, he thought. But Bavaria looked out for its own: Justice Minister Franz Gürtner adamantly refused to remand the defendants to the State Court in Leipzig, claiming that the Bavarians—Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser—could not be safely transported through Saxony. In the end, the Bavarians won: they kept the putsch, the imprisonment, and the trial an all-Bavarian affair. They would try the accused traitors before their own People’s Court, a special institution created to mete out swift justice during the bloody upheavals of 1918 and 1919. The People’s Court was supposed to have been dissolved by now. It was kept alive for the express purpose of holding the Hitler trial.

At Landsberg Prison, builders were debating which shade of green to paint the new courtroom walls when their exertions were brought to a sudden halt. Word had come from on high that Landsberg was too small for a proceeding that would have multiple defendants, numerous lawyers, and a large press corps from all over Germany—maybe even from foreign countries. The decision had been made to hold Hitler’s trial in Munich after all. Leybold went back to building an enlarged cell block.

As for Hitler’s preparations, the autodidact did what he had done ever since his life’s first big setback when, as an eighteen-year-old in October 1907 in Vienna, he was rejected by the arts academy: he read.

“For my friend, it was books, always books,” wrote Hitler’s boyhood friend Kubizek in his memoir. “Hitler arrived in Vienna with four cases full of books.… I could not imagine Adolf without books.
He stacked them in piles around him.… Whenever he went out there would usually be a book under his arm… he would rather abandon nature and the open sky than the book.… Books were his whole world.”
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Kubizek, who had for a time been Hitler’s roommate in Vienna, claimed that his friend read the great classics of German literature and philosophy: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, Herder, Lessing—plus German heroic legends, as well as Dante’s
Divine Comedy.
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Hitler claimed to have read “endless amounts,” including all five hundred books in a Viennese bookshop, which gave him the “granite foundation” for his worldview.

Yet because he almost never attributed his ideas or statements—in speeches or in
Mein Kampf
—to any books or persons, Hitler has forced the world to rely on secondary sources for clues about what he actually read and who influenced him. Such clues include a list of more than one hundred books—including works by Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Kant—that Hitler borrowed from the private collection of a Nazi dentist who lived in a nearby town. Then there was the list of forty-two mostly anti-Semitic books “that every National Socialist must know” that was printed on Nazi Party membership cards starting in 1922; it included six works by Alfred Rosenberg and the just-published 495-page bible of pseudo-scientific racism,
Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes
(Racial Typology of the German People), by Hans F. K. Günther, who had earned the nickname “Race-Günther.”
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In addition, Hans Frank, Hitler’s future legal adviser and governor-general of occupied Poland, wrote that, while in Landsberg, Hitler had read everything he could get hold of: Nietzsche, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx, Bismarck, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
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Further underlining the bookish legend is a rare photograph of Hitler in his Munich apartment standing before an overfilled bookshelf with numerous volumes stacked wildly on top.
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Yet, as with so many parts of the Hitler legend, there are holes, gaps, and inconsistencies in the received wisdom. Serious doubts have been cast on Hitler’s reputation for deep reading. Historian Ian Kershaw has noted that though he was “capable of conversing on the comparative merits of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche… this is no proof that he had read their works.” And Vienna-based historian Brigitte Hamann considered it “utterly doubtful” that Hitler read the books Kubizek said he read; Kubizek’s memoir was written many years after the fact, in part for Nazi consumption, and apparently with a ghostwriter. Hamann suggests Hitler picked up pithy quotes from the “famous ‘German wise men’” who were often cited in pamphlets and free literature in the cheap cafés that Hitler frequented. “Hitler did not have to read a single book to make himself appear to be an expert in literature,” she wrote.
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As for the weighty tomes that Hitler borrowed from the Nazi dentist, the dentist said, “I noticed that Hitler was rather hasty and undirected in his studies—he cannot possibly have digested all that.” Likewise, historian Sven Felix Kellerhoff questioned how a young man “who left school after the eighth grade with very poor grades” could have “actually worked his way through such demanding books and understood them.”
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Still, there appears to be no doubt that Hitler read, or at least skimmed, a great deal (especially if one also counts his pleasure-reading of the cowboys-and-Indians novels of storyteller Karl May). Hitler’s style was to cherry-pick materials for the items that suited his developing worldview and his political purposes. In
Mein Kampf
he lectured the world on “the art of proper reading.” Reading, he insisted, was “no end in itself, but only the means to an end.” That end was, in his case, the confirmation of his own prejudices and previously held beliefs.
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Hitler’s recommended method was
combing “every book, newspaper or pamphlet” for material to “increase the correctness or clarity” of one’s own point of view. In a conversation with Hans Frank, Hitler asserted that, after all his reading in Landsberg, “I recognized the correctness of my views”
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—yet another step in Hitler’s growing conviction of his infallibility.

In Landsberg, Hitler certainly had books. Visiting his friend, Hanfstaengl said Hitler’s cell, besides resembling a “delicatessen and flower shop,” also looked like “a regular little library.” Hemmrich described Hitler’s room as “a scholar’s study.” Most of Hitler’s books came as gifts from admirers. Rudolf Hess, who became Hitler’s closest prison pal and amanuensis after the trial, mentioned three books in particular: Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West,
Professor Karl Haushofer’s book on the geopolitics of Japan, and a humorous put-down of the United States melting pot called
Amerikaner
(Americans) by Erwin Rosen, a pseudonym for writer Erwin Carlé.

Whatever his reading list may have included, Hitler was getting ready to fight. He had everything at stake. Despite his faith in himself, he knew that if he missed his mark, his career really could be over, and worse: he could be convicted and receive a sentence of up to life in prison. Or Hitler could be given a medium term of, say, ten to fifteen years and fall off the political map. Still another bad option was that he might be deported to the backwater of Austria, sent there to languish into a historical footnote. (Given his still-valid parole status in the 1921 beating of Otto Ballerstedt, plus the wording of the 1922 Law for the Protection of the Republic, he should have been deported in any case.)

In the coming months, Hitler became a dervish, more productive with words than ever before in his life, reading constantly and writing a memorandum on the putsch that ran to more than sixty pages.
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“With the warden’s permission, Hitler had a typewriter sent to him,” wrote Hemmrich, who also purchased writing paper for
Hitler in the town. Hitler had clearly worked himself into a state of high dudgeon as he wrote. “I’m letting my resentments pour into my defense statement,” he said in a letter.
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Angry or not, Hitler was boosted by the adulation of his admirers. “The gushing hero-worship and even deification that has come his way has probably contributed to his getting good control of the situation,” wrote his attorney Lorenz Roder. One Nazi visitor from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia wrote a report comparing Hitler with Jesus.