1924: The Year That Made Hitler

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For

Christopher and Shannon

The Germans have been liberated from Hitler but they will never be able to get rid of him.

—E
BERHARD
J
ÄCKEL, HISTORIAN, 1979

How it happened that Hitler came to power is still the most important question of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history, if not of all German history.

—H
EINRICH
A
UGUST
W
INKLER, HISTORIAN, 2000

Auschwitz is a German wound that never heals.

—G
ABOR
S
TEINGART, JOURNALIST AND PUBLISHER, 2015

PROLOGUE

The Unfathomable Ascent

“The failure of the putsch was perhaps the greatest good fortune of my life.”
¹

—
ADOLF HITLER

On the evening of November 8, 1923, with a coming snowfall in the air, Adolf Hitler, a thirty-four-year-old politician known for his hot rhetoric, forced his way into a crowded beer hall on the southeast side of Munich. Surrounded by three bodyguards, two of them in military gear, Hitler held a pistol in one hand. With “his eyes opened wide and looking like a drunken fanatic,” the unimposing, five-foot nine-inch Hitler tried to interrupt a speech by the head of the Bavarian government.
²
But he could not make himself heard. Climbing onto a chair, he raised his arm and fired a shot into the high coffered ceiling. “Silence!” he shouted. The three thousand audience members fell “dead still,” one witness recalled. Then the man on the chair made a shocking announcement.

“The national revolution has begun! The building is surrounded by six hundred heavily armed men! No one is allowed to leave.” Behind Hitler, a platoon of steel-helmeted men under the command of Captain Hermann Göring dragged a heavy machine gun into the beer hall entrance.

Thus began Adolf Hitler’s infamous beer hall coup d’état of 1923. Called a
putsch
in German, the attempted overthrow had crumbled within seventeen hours. Fifteen of Hitler’s men, four police troops, and one bystander had been killed. Two days later, Hitler was caught and carried off to Landsberg Prison, thirty-eight miles west of Munich. He was imprisoned for the next thirteen months, from November 11, 1923, to December 20, 1924.

The failed putsch—an effort to unseat both the Bavarian and German governments—was a high-profile defeat for the budding Nazi leader and his small but radical movement. Hitler’s year in prison—virtually all of 1924—was the price he paid for his premature lunge for power. He not only had botched the biggest gamble a politician can make, but also had lost face: he was dismissed by some as an extremist clown who had led his followers into disaster and death.

Yet, by the time he was released from prison, Hitler had converted his plunge into disgrace and obscurity into a springboard for success. The aborted coup d’état, it turned out, was the best thing that could have happened to him, and to his undisguised plans to become Germany’s dictator. Had Hitler not spent 1924 in Landsberg Prison, he might never have emerged as the redefined and recharged politician who ultimately gained control of Germany, inflicted war on the world, and perpetrated the Holocaust. The year that brought Hitler down—late 1923 through late 1924—and that by rights should have ended his career, was in fact
the hinge moment in Hitler’s transformation from impetuous revolutionary to patient political player with a long view of gaining power.

How did this transformation occur? How did Hitler make strategic use of his failure? For one thing, the man knew a good publicity opportunity when he saw it; he brazenly turned his monthlong, widely watched trial for treason into a political soapbox, catapulting himself from Munich beer-hall rabble-rouser to nationally known political figure. A prosecution for high treason that could have put Hitler out of political circulation long enough for his movement and his charisma to disappear instead became what many jurists regarded as an embarrassment to the German justice system—and that historians see as a turnaround moment in Hitler’s climb to power.

Soon after recovering from his initial dark moments in Landsberg, Hitler turned his long months out of the political fray into a time of learning, self-reflection, and clarification of his views. In prison, he had a captive audience of forty men, his fellow culprits in the unsuccessful putsch, and he often treated them to long lectures from his writings and busy mind. But he needed to speak to the world. He was bursting with the urge to write, to capture his political philosophy for his followers, to cast into the permanence of print his beliefs and increasingly certain dogmas.

For long days and late into the night, he banged away on a small portable typewriter to produce what became the bible of Nazism, an autobiographical and political manifesto called
Mein Kampf.
Published after his release from prison, the book soon became Hitler’s ticket to intellectual respectability within his own movement. He called his time in prison “my university education at state expense.”
³

His year of “education” changed Hitler’s strategic vision, and it
changed him. From a frustrated and depressed man stricken with self-doubt (suicide and death were repeated refrains during and after the putsch attempt), Hitler became, during his time behind bars, a man of overweening self-assurance and radically fixed beliefs on how to save Germany from its assorted ills. He recast the fatal march he had led on November 9, 1923, into heroic martyrdom. At a safe remove from everyday politics, Hitler cunningly allowed the Nazi Party to squabble and self-destruct so he could later call it back to life on his own terms, remade in his own image and decisively under his thumb. Reenergized and obsessively messianic, the post-prison Hitler was ready for the march to high office. The brutal ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, one of Hitler’s closest cronies at the time of the putsch who later became Hitler’s state minister for the occupied eastern territories, said simply: “November ninth, 1923, gave birth to January thirtieth, 1933”—the day Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
⁴

In the voluminous study of Adolf Hitler, the emphasis has understandably been on the twelve harrowing years of the Third Reich, 1933 to 1945. Yet the preceding fourteen years, 1919 to 1933, are critical for comprehending Hitler’s political rise and the Nazi nightmare. “How it happened that Hitler came to power is still the most important question of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history, if not of all German history,” wrote historian Heinrich August Winkler.
⁵
It’s a question that continues to baffle and haunt the world. Even Hans Frank, one of Hitler’s closest confidants, writing his mea culpa memoir during the Nuremberg trial in 1946, called Hitler’s climb “the unfathomable ascent.”
⁶
But we keep trying to fathom it. How did the unschooled former army private, with only a coruscating voice and an extraordinary belief in his calling as Germany’s savior, turn himself into the leader of millions? And
what did the millions find so compelling about the loud little man with the quick mind and convenient certainties regarding history and destiny? How did Hitler, fairly driven from the field in 1923 by his delusions of grandeur and overreach, reinvent himself in a prison cell as fated for greatness and leadership? For answers, we continue to turn the Rubik’s Cube of history, looking again for clues and insights.

Hitler’s fourteen developmental years fall into two main periods. The first is Hitler’s “apprentice” years, 1919 to 1923, when the newly self-discovered politician was finding his feet and learning the polemical game, using fists, elbows, and words to reach for power through incendiary rhetoric and violent revolution. “From 1919 to 1923, I thought of nothing else but revolution,” said Hitler.
⁷

The second period, 1925 to 1933, often called the “fighting” years, begins with Hitler’s relaunch of the Nazi Party in the same beer hall where his putsch had failed. It ends after eight years of fierce political combat, with Hitler’s 1933 takeover of the chancellery in Berlin.

Between those two key developmental periods lies 1924, Hitler’s year in prison. Despite its obvious historical significance, this is one of the least written about and least understood moments in Nazi history. It’s also the point when the arc of Hitler’s political trajectory bends, the pivotal moment that forms the connective tissue between two distinctly different phases, the revolutionary and the electoral. Nineteen twenty-four shifted Hitler’s focus, hardened his beliefs, and set the stage for his remarkable comeback after a seemingly insurmountable defeat. That period is the subject of this book.

To make sense of Hitler’s transformational year in prison, we must first understand the putsch that put him there. To understand
the putsch requires a look at the crazed Bavarian political scene in the first ten feverish months of 1923. To grasp Bavarian politics means pulling back the curtain on the strange political carnival of the 1920s Weimar Republic.

These forces set the scene for the year that made Hitler.

CHAPTER ONE

Discovering the Mission

“The First World War made Hitler possible.”

—
SIR IAN KERSHAW, 1998
¹

For months, Munich had swirled with rumors of a coming putsch. In autumn 1923, the magic word in the crowded beer halls and leafy outdoor cafés of the Bavarian capital was
losschlagen.
²
In German,
losschlagen
means to attack, to strike out, to let loose—to make it happen. When, everyone wanted to know, would Adolf Hitler and his Nazis
losschlagen
? Or, for that matter, when would the established powers in Bavaria—a strange mix of civilian-military leadership embodied in an unofficial ruling triumvirate—
losschlagen
? Somebody had to do something. Hitler’s hope was to stage a march on “that den of iniquity,” Berlin, to unseat the government of the Weimar Republic; it seemed like a fine idea to most Bavarians at the time, reported Wilhelm Hoegner, a Social Democratic member of the Bavarian parliament. In a time of turmoil and uncertainty, the probability of a putsch had “become an idée fixe”
in the Bavarian capital, he wrote.
³
Hitler noted: “People were shouting it from the rooftops.”
⁴

Five years after the end of World War I, Germany was experiencing upheaval, social disorder, and steady descent. The war had shifted the political planet on its axis. Centuries-old monarchies had fallen. A world not significantly altered since the 1815 Congress of Vienna had split and fissured. Boundaries were redrawn, populations shifted under new sovereignty. Germany had lost its overseas possessions and was thrown out of the great game of colonization. In Russia, a Communist revolution had seized the country. And the Weimar Republic—Germany’s first attempt at full democracy—was on constantly shaky legs. It had already gone through seven chancellors (prime ministers) and nine government cabinets.
⁵
The sudden 1918 postwar shift from Berlin’s four-hundred-year-old Hohenzollern monarchy to an untried parliamentary system—a revolution from the top—had never been fully accepted by the far-right nationalists, by many in the military, and by parts of the political elite. Even the republic’s first head of state, President Friedrich Ebert, had been ambivalent: the Social Democratic Party leader had wanted a constitutional monarchy in the British style to follow Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication in November 1918; he opposed a simple republic with no unifying hereditary figure at the top. “You have no right to proclaim the republic!” he raged at Philipp Scheidemann, the politician who did just that from a window of the Reichstag (the German parliament) on November 9, 1918.
⁶