Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (31 page)

The putsch and subsequent trial established Hitler’s notoriety well beyond Bavaria. For months, the media were fascinated by the man who had been able to turn a fiasco into a propaganda triumph. Most observers were convinced that Hitler would return to prominence once his time in Landsberg was served. For Hitler, a five-year apprenticeship was over. He had gone from being the “drummer” for a movement to becoming the “Führer” of an anticipated “national revolution.”
¹²⁹
The most important lesson he learned from the failed enterprise of 8 and 9 November was that he was going to have to take another path if he wanted to come to power. Instead of a putsch, he needed to ensure at least the pretence of legality in cooperation with the Reichswehr. It was while imprisoned in Landsberg, Hitler recollected in February 1942, that he “became convinced that violence would not work since the state is too established and has all the weapons in its possession.”
¹³⁰

Several of Hitler’s main characteristics and behavioural patterns came to the fore even more clearly during the critical days of November 1923. Among them were the extreme vacillations between euphoria, apathy and depression. Hitler had repeatedly announced that he would kill himself if the putsch failed, and this latent tendency towards self-annihilation would accompany him throughout his political career. In his 1940 book
Germany: Jekyll & Hyde
, Sebastian Haffner rightly called Hitler “a potential suicide par excellence.”
¹³¹

Another constant was the all-or-nothing attitude of the political gambler. Consciously or not, he seemed to be imitating the Prussian king Friedrich the Great, whom he much admired and whose biography he knew from Franz Kugler’s 1840
History of Friedrich the Great
. In 1740, Friedrich had bet everything on a single card by launching a surprise attack against Silesia, and he had repeatedly demonstrated a near-suicidal proclivity for risk-taking during the Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763.
¹³²
Forced to act, Hitler had similarly gone all out when he detained and blackmailed the triumvirate.
¹³³
Once he had decided to strike what he hoped would be a decisive blow, Hitler had no more time for counter-arguments. “Herr Hitler does not engage with objections,” Lossow said at the trial by way of explaining Hitler’s missionary convictions and immunity to criticism. “He is the Chosen One and everyone else has to accept whatever he says.”
¹³⁴

As far as we know, however, none of Hitler’s entourage ever made any attempts to restrain him. Although they were only initiated at a late stage into the plans for the putsch, they followed his call without hesitation.
¹³⁵
That is another indication of how unquestioned his authority as Führer had become within the party. The failed putsch would do nothing to undermine this status. On the contrary, it reinforced Hitler’s image as a man who not only talked, but acted in critical situations—and who was willing to take great personal risks. He would continue to feed off this aura even after he became Germany’s chancellor.

7

Landsberg Prison and
Mein Kampf

“Landsberg was my state-paid university,” Hitler once remarked to his legal adviser Hans Frank.
¹
After years of frenetic political activity and weeks of a trial that had demanded his entire attention, incarceration in Landsberg prison offered Hitler a not necessarily unwelcome break. “Among the many lucky aspects of Hitler’s political career, these nine months of non-interruption were one of the most valuable gifts,” his biographer Konrad Heiden concluded.
²
As an inmate, Hitler had time to reflect on the debacle of 8–9 November and learn his lessons. He also used his involuntary stay behind bars to continue his autodidactic studies. He once again had the chance “to read and to learn,” he wrote to Siegfried Wagner in early May 1924, whereas previously he had barely had time to acquaint himself with the “newly published works on the ethnic-nationalist book market.”
³
All his reading now was going to serve the book he had decided to write. Without Landsberg, there would have been no
Mein Kampf
, Hitler recalled in 1942, since it was only there that he had achieved conceptual clarity about things “he had largely intuited” before.
⁴
It had been stupid of the government, he claimed, to imprison him: “They would have been better off letting me speak and speak again and never find my peace of mind.”
⁵

Imprisonment only encouraged Hitler’s belief in himself and his historic mission. In Landsberg, he recalled, “he had gained the level of confidence, optimism and faith that could no longer be shaken by anything.”
⁶
His sense of being the Chosen One, which he had vaguely felt already in his youth, was now set in stone. And his fellow inmates, first and foremost Hess, did everything they could to strengthen his conviction that he was meant to play the role of the tribune as in Wagner’s
Rienzi
. In mid-June 1924 Hess wrote to his later wife Ilse Pröhl: “Hitler is the ‘man of the future’ in Germany, the ‘dictator’ whose flag will fly sooner or later over public buildings in Berlin. He himself has faith enough to move mountains.”
⁷
Nowhere does that peculiar symbiotic relationship between the messianic hopes and expectations projected by Hitler’s disciples and Hitler’s own self-image as national saviour emerge more clearly than in Hess’s letters from Landsberg.

“Hitler’s punishment is the sort handed out for a gentleman’s indiscretion—a holiday disguised by some legalese,” the journalist Carl von Ossietzky protested in late April 1924.
⁸
And indeed, the conditions at Landsberg were more like a spa than a prison, and Hitler enjoyed a wide variety of privileges. His “cell” was a large, airy, comfortably furnished room with an expansive view. In addition to the hearty food cooked by the prison kitchen, Hitler constantly received care packages; his quarters reminded some visitors of a “delicatessen.”
⁹
For his thirty-fifth birthday on 20 April, Hitler was showered with gifts, letters and telegrams. “His quarters and the common room looked like a forest of flowers,” commented one of the prison guards. “It smelled like a greenhouse.”
¹⁰
In Munich, supporters of the NSDAP, which had been banned, and former front-line soldiers held an event to honour the man who, in their words, “sparked the current flame behind the idea of liberty and the ethnic consciousness of the German people.”
¹¹

Hitler’s admirers and his political followers kept up a continuous pilgrimage to Landsberg. In April and May, Hitler was receiving upwards of five visitors per day from all over Germany. “Every social class and age was represented,” recalled one of the guards.

There were bearded guys in lederhosen and crudely nailed shoes, cosmopolitan gentlemen from industry and high society, clergymen of both Christian confessions, rural lower-middle-class folks, lawyers, former military officers, professors, farmers, artists, day labourers, aristocrats, booksellers, publishers and newspaper editors. All of them came—sometimes for the strangest of reasons.
¹²

Among the flood of visitors were older ladies who enjoyed mothering Hitler. Hermine Hoffmann spoiled him with sweets and whipped cream, Helene Bechstein brought a gramophone, and Elsa Bruckmann waited two hours to speak to him. In her essay “My First Trip to the Führer,” written in 1933, Bruckmann described her first encounter with Hitler as though she had met a saint:

Finally, someone came and got me. I was led through a number of long corridors and approached Hitler, who was dressed in Bavarian lederhosen and a yellow linen jacket. He looked simple and chivalrous, and his eyes were bright. The moment of our encounter was so important for me because I perceived the same simple greatness, the same mature and genuine nature and the same life flowing from the roots, in the
person
who stood across from me as I had previously experienced at a distance in the great Führer and orator within the total spectacle of mass events…I brought him best regards from a great man who was still alive then and who had foreseen the Führer’s destiny: Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was also our friend.
¹³

Bruckmann’s account of their meeting is extremely stylised. Nonetheless, it does reveal Hitler’s talent for slipping into the roles he assumed would most impress the people he met. In the presence of this upper-class salon lady, Hitler presented himself as a humble man of the people in traditional Bavarian dress. Hitler also wore lederhosen with suspenders and a white linen shirt with a tie when he took his daily walk through the prison yard, often accompanied by one of his disciples.
¹⁴
Well fed and enjoying the fresh air, he quickly recovered from the physical demands of the preceding years. “The Tribune looks splendid,” Hess wrote to Ilse Pröhl on 18 May. “His face is no longer so drawn. The involuntary break is good for him.”
¹⁵

Hess first arrived at Landsberg in mid-May. Initially, he was housed on the first floor, in the so-called “commanders’ wing,” which also contained Hitler, Kriebel, Weber and Hitler’s chauffeur Emil Maurice. Maurice, who was brought to Landsberg in April, served as the group’s connection to the “lansquenet” contingent in the prison: some forty members of the Stosstrupp Hitler, who had been sentenced to imprisonment at a subsequent trial.
¹⁶
Hitler also assumed the role of Führer vis-à-vis other prisoners. Each new arrival had to report to him for inspection. “I hardly had time to look around in my cell,” recalled inmate Hans Kallenbach, “when Emil Maurice appeared and ordered me to report to the Führer immediately. The old Nazi drive was present even here!”
¹⁷

Despite the physical proximity to his underlings, Hitler was careful to maintain a sense of distance from them, refusing, for instance, to participate in sporting activities. When Ernst Hanfstaengl advised the 35-year-old, who was putting on weight, to join in, Hitler shot back: “No, no. That’s out of the question. It would be bad for discipline. A Führer can’t afford to be beaten by his followers, even at gymnastics or games.”
¹⁸

Communal lunch in the prison’s large common room always followed a set ritual. Hitler’s fellow inmates would wait, standing silently behind their chairs, for the cry “Attention!” The Führer would then walk, accompanied by his inner circle, through the rows of his faithful followers and sit down at the top end of the table.
¹⁹
A similar ceremony was maintained at the social evenings every Saturday. “When the Führer arrived, the house band would strike up a welcome march and then segue into a lansquenet or military song everyone could sing along to,” Hans Kallenbach wrote. As a rule Hitler would give a short speech that concluded with his followers crying “Never say die! Sieg heil!” “On those evenings,” Kallenbach recalled, “the leader and those he led kept alive the true spirit of front-line soldiers.”
²⁰

Not only did the guards do nothing to disrupt these activities: many of them sympathised with the aims of National Socialism, treating Hitler with great respect and greeting him under their breath with “Heil!”
²¹
Rudolf Belleville, the officer who arrested Hitler and who served as a guard for several weeks in the summer of 1924, greeted Hess with the words: “Hello, I know you. I’m a National Socialist too.” Belleville, Hess recorded, told him that it still brought “tears to his eyes” when he remembered taking Hitler into custody.
²²
Whenever Hitler gave his speeches, the guards would gather in the hallway and listen in.
²³
Inmates were also allowed to publish a prison newspaper, “The Landsberg Honorary Citizen,” to which Hitler occasionally contributed articles and caricatures.
²⁴
Thus life in this unusual jail was varied and entertaining, and the all-male inmates pleasantly whiled away their time there. None of them felt that they had done anything wrong—let alone harboured moral qualms.

Hitler instructed his fellow inmates, he later claimed, to behave in a way that “no one in the facility could fail to become a committed National Socialist by the time he was released.”
²⁵
But no huge amount of persuasion was necessary. Hitler scrupulously avoided any conflict with the prison authorities, preferring to achieve “peacefully and amicably what was possible.” He said he had no desire to play the role of the “wild man” and strictly forbade his followers from disobeying the prison rules.
²⁶
His true concern was no doubt his parole. By being openly cooperative, Hitler wanted to ensure he would be released after six months, on 1 October 1924.