1924: The Year That Made Hitler (18 page)

The prosecution came prepared to wage heavy battle against Hitler and his nine co-conspirators. Hitler, like many others, may have been taken aback when Deputy State’s Attorney Hans Ehard, the man who had chatted with him in prison for five hours without a stenographer, rose to present the government’s case—with a thirty-nine-page document in his hands. Based on interviews and depositions from scores of participants and witnesses, Ehard had meticulously reconstructed the events of the attempted coup. For the next ninety minutes, Ehard led the courtroom back through the harrowing experiences of November 8 and November 9, 1923, carrying his listeners through the maze of meetings and confrontations leading up to the putsch and its botched execution, untangling a thicket of testimony and recollections that brought the misbegotten events vividly to life again: Hitler’s gunshot into the Bürgerbräukeller ceiling; his proclamation of a new government; his seizure of hostages; his assaults on military installations; his theft of billions of marks from two print shops; and, finally, his last-ditch “propaganda march” through the
center of Munich to the Odeon Square, where the procession ended bloodily. “In the end,” intoned Ehard flatly, “the Bavarian State Police stood fast and had to make use of their firearms.”
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Then came Ehard’s central point, the comment that focused the trial on Hitler. For all its complications, convolutions, and numerous participants, said the prosecutor, the putsch was essentially the work of one man. “Hitler was the soul of the whole enterprise,” said Ehard.

On the surface, Ehard’s statement was damning, to be sure, but Hitler could not have asked for a better setup for the most important speech of his career. Not only was he supposedly guilty of treason, not only had he played diabolical political games, not only had he arrogated unto himself the right to take over Germany, but he had become the
soul
—the spirit, the heart, the very intellectual marrow—of the whole undertaking. Despite the great efforts of Kriebel, Weber, and all the others, Hitler, as far as the state was concerned, was
it.
Even the vaunted Ludendorff wasn’t the soul of the enterprise—Hitler was. A politician who constantly sought to separate himself from mere
politicians,
who considered his mission more spiritual than materialistic, who felt a kinship to Napoleon and Frederick the Great and the sainted Richard Wagner, Hitler could have hoped for no higher compliment. As the man whose entire political striving until now—and again in the very near future, as we shall see—was to make himself the irreducible center of things, the beating heart of his own movement, the X factor in Germany’s future, what could be better than being called in open court, before the world’s press, the
soul
of the show? Hitler must have been ecstatic.

But before Hitler could speak, the prosecution moved that the entire trial be held in camera—behind closed doors. Secret sessions, maintained State’s Attorney Ludwig Stenglein, were necessary to prevent sensitive details about the putsch preparations, especially the Reichswehr’s complicity in preparing for a march on Berlin, from reaching the public and especially foreign ears—mainly French ears. After all, these measures were in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The defense objected; it wanted Hitler’s story and that of his co-defendants to reach the widest possible audience to generate the pressure of public support. Hitler knew that his upcoming speech was his chance to reestablish himself as a credible figure in German politics. In a secret session about the secret sessions, one defense attorney argued that the trial needed to serve as a kind of civics class for the nation. “This trial arises from the collision of two worldviews on November 8 and 9.… We will be committing a grave injustice if we don’t let these two points of view have their say in public.”
²³
(Of course, he really meant letting Hitler’s point of view have its say.) Judge Neithardt split the difference. After a long discussion, he ruled that some topics would be reserved for closed sessions, some would not. The witnesses and defendants themselves, he argued, would know when to save material for the closed-door sessions. This sounds like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop, and it was: after all, everyone was in on the deal—the putschists and the triumvirate. For Hitler, this was a nearly ideal decision. He could lay out his politics and populist style before the world while revealing the most incriminating details of the triumvirate’s involvement in coup planning behind closed doors.

Ironically, Neithardt had nearly scotched Hitler’s hope for long public sessions even before the trial began. The judge had made it known that he saw no reason to hear witnesses at all; a judgment could be reached based on the defendants’ confessions alone.
²⁴
Fortunately for Hitler, Neithardt had changed his mind. He decided to allow full and long testimony, he wrote later, because the defendants, unlike the prosecution, had not yet been allowed to have their say and “defend their honor.”
²⁵
After all, the Nazi newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter,
like the Nazi Party itself, as well as Dr. Weber’s Bund Oberland, had been banned after the putsch. Because of the prohibition on the defendants’ publications, argued Neithardt, “the accused have been unable to defend themselves in public against official and semi-official versions of events.” Since those versions, “in the opinion of the accused… do not correspond to the facts and are likely to influence public opinion against them,” Neithardt felt Hitler and his confederates deserved to have a go at swaying public opinion—as if a court of law is supposed to have anything to do with mass mood.

Stunningly, Neithardt went further, citing personal “bitterness” and political pressures as grounds for a long, open trial. “As a result [of their inability to influence public opinion], the hearts of the accused were filled with bitterness which threatened to explode,” wrote the judge. “If one were going to have a trial at all, one had to allow the accused the opportunity to vent their resentments to the fullest and in broad public view.”
²⁶

Grimly, Neithardt’s legitimization of public opinion as a trial factor reflected reality; the judge knew the supreme importance of popular emotions in 1920s Germany. And so did Hitler.

On the trial’s first day, at two thirty in the afternoon, Hitler rose from one of the ten small defense tables arrayed at the front of the crowded courtroom. After nearly four months off the speaking circuit, after many weeks without raising his voice to oratorical pitch, and no days and nights of declaiming and hectoring, Hitler had to plunge into his showcase moment from a cold start. In the press
corps and the audience, as well as among the judges on the bench, expectations were high. The man who had held half the Bavarian government hostage, who had led fifteen of his men to their deaths, who made his living by speaking (and shouting) but who had not spoken publicly since November—that man was finally ready to talk. “Herr Hitler, I call upon you to give us a statement of your position and how you got involved in this matter,” deadpanned Judge Neithardt.

In his black frock coat and war medals, Hitler drew himself up to his full five feet nine inches. “May it please the court!” he began in perfect lawyerly fashion, setting a pattern of pointed politeness toward Neithardt that he maintained throughout the trial. Hitler immediately fired his planned autobiographical opener, pointing out that he’d served “four-and-a-half years” in the German military and received a performance rating of “very good.” Why, then, he rhetorically wondered, would a man trained in “blind obedience to his superiors” find himself in the “highest possible conflict in public life, that is, with the so-called constitution”? Why was he accused of high treason?

Already taking shots at the hated Weimar government, Hitler launched into an answer that would consume the afternoon. His rambling, melodramatic peroration recalled for many one of his political speeches, except that it was even longer. According to contemporaneous reports, Hitler’s speech lasted nearly four hours, although the trial transcript suggests that it lasted about three hours.
²⁷
At the beginning, even the seasoned rabble-rouser spoke “almost nervously,” reported one observer. But soon he was on his game, pouring forth a deluge of words, gestures, anecdotes, historical allusions, and personal biography that overwhelmed the courtroom and seemed to carry his audience along on resurgent waves of outrage, passion, and self-righteousness—the familiar Hitlerian
torrent. When Judge Neithardt was later criticized for not interrupting Hitler to keep him somewhere close to the topic at hand, he threw up his hands and answered lamely, “It was impossible to block his flood of words.”
²⁸

Hitler’s flood made the story of Nazism the story of himself. It even had a classic hard-luck beginning. “As a young person of sixteen-and-a-half years of age, I had to begin earning my daily bread,” he said. The statement was a typical exaggeration (young Hitler lived on family money at that age; he was eighteen before he left home and almost twenty-one before he earned any money
²⁹
) and it contained one of Hitler’s favorite images—“daily bread.” Yet the claim gave him an easy segue into politics. “At seventeen I went to Vienna and learned three important things.” Those three things, he said, were social injustice; the “race problem” (by which he meant Jews, whom he always described as a race, not as a religion or an ethnic group); and the perfidy of Marxism. Within another sentence he had joined Judaism and Marxism into one evil force whose goal, he had concluded, was “the downfall of the entire modern state.” Jews he called “the greatest enemy… of Aryan humanity.” The result of this eye-opening youthful experience, said Hitler, was that “I had arrived in Vienna as a citizen of the world and left [after five years] as an absolute anti-Semite.”
³⁰

Hitler’s statement was blunt and bald-faced. In the first few minutes of his discourse, Hitler had laid down the key tenets of his political ideology. He planned to build a huge target on the political stage and then attack it. He had thrown down the gauntlet of race-based politics, labeling himself a card-carrying anti-Semite (as though he had earned a graduation certificate from an apprenticeship on the mean streets of Vienna). Yet calling himself an “absolute anti-Semite” conveyed little of the shock value those words would imply today. As reprehensible as the term may be, and as strongly as
many educated Germans of the period rejected it, anti-Semitism was nonetheless a widespread and openly debated political issue of the era. As “a mortal enemy of the entire Marxist
Weltanschauung
,” he had sketched his apocalyptic vision of Germany’s future and offered a path to salvation: “Either this racial poison, this mass tuberculosis prospers in our nation and Germany dies of a sick lung, or we cut [the disease] out and Germany can thrive.” The antidote to this “racial poison” (read: Judaism) is not “calm analysis,” he said, but a politics of “hot, merciless, brutal fanaticism… to bring the [German] people back from slavery.”

Those who came to see fireworks in the old Infantry School on this wintry day were not disappointed. The trial of former private first class Adolf Hitler for high treason was clearly not going to be boring. It would follow no formal or legalistic path to its uncertain outcome. The beer hall agitator would not sit back and let the biggest legal proceeding in Germany in years rest in the hands of lawyers and judges. This was a
political
event—he would see to that. Though Hitler had nine co-defendants, including General Ludendorff, this was
his
trial. “For Hitler, the trial was the continuation of political propaganda by juridical means,” wrote historian Ernst Deuerlein, echoing Clausewitz’s dictum that war was the continuation of politics by other means.
³¹

Hitler was now playing to a different audience. In the courtroom and through the Munich newspapers, he would finally reach people who would never attend one of his rowdy mass meetings. Even better, through Germany’s dense thicket of newspapers in the pre-radio age, he would reach many who might never hear his voice directly—the general German public outside Bavaria. It didn’t hurt that Berlin’s most prestigious newspaper, the
Berliner Tageblatt
—the voice of the establishment, the
New York Times
of its day in Germany—ran a banner headline across the top of page one on the first day: “The Beginning of the Munich High Treason Trial.”
³²

Despite its discursive nature, Hitler’s opening speech—and his speaking style—held his audience rapt. “He knows how to use all modulations of his sometimes raw voice,” noted the respected
Frankfurter Zeitung.
While no friend of the Nazi leader—the sophisticated newspaper was committed to a liberal-democratic order in the new Germany and had endorsed the Treaty of Versailles—the Jewish-owned daily nonetheless let its reporter give Hitler his due as a performer, and explain to an unknowing audience some of the magic of Hitler’s method. “He softens his voice, then gradually raises it to a dramatic shout, even a hoarse screech. His voice then cracks in sorrow over his fallen comrades. He scornfully mocks the trembling timidity of his enemies. Shaping his words with a lively play of his hands, Hitler rounds off his periods with both hands, emphasizes an ironic or offensive comment by shooting his left index finger towards the state’s attorney, and uses his head and even his body to undergird his speech. The rhetorical impact is strong.” It sounded as though a visitor from the world of high culture and lofty ideals had gone slumming and discovered that the sideshow was better than expected.