1924: The Year That Made Hitler (27 page)

When Hess arrived in mid-May, Hitler was drawing and sketching constantly in pencil and pen. “This afternoon he brought me really splendid designs of individual museums for the land, sea, air, and colonial wars,” noted Hess, “along with designs for theaters, a national library, and a university… plus set designs for [the operas]
Tristan, Lohengrin, Turandot, Julius Caesar,
etc. Since I had seen only the wildest caricatures by him before now, I was quite surprised to see this side.”

In early June, Hans Kallenbach arrived. Short, sandy-haired, and handsome, Kallenbach had commanded a machine-gun unit during the putsch. An army lieutenant during World War I, the twenty-six-year-old Kallenbach identified passionately with the “frontline generation” that supplied so many of Hitler’s supporters and street fighters. The young ex-soldier moved into room number eleven on the first floor, the same jammed space that housed Hermännchen (“Hermie”) Fobke, as his roommates were calling the ambitious law student. Consciously or unconsciously, new arrival Kallenbach began gathering string for what would become his post-prison memoir,
Mit Adolf Hitler auf Festung Landsberg
(With Adolf Hitler at the Landsberg Fortress).

With a large contingent of his followers on hand, Hitler was once again the master of his immediate universe, the much-worshipped leader of his little team. Just as the Nazi Party had militaristic overtones—uniforms, marching boots, flags, martial music—and included both Storm Troopers and Shock Troops, the gathering in the prison now acquired a certain military structure and feel. This appealed not only to the military-minded Hitler but to tough old officers like Colonel Kriebel and former frontline fighters like Kallenbach. Every new arrival—the convicted men began their sentences on different dates—was told to report immediately to
“der Chef”
(“the boss”), just like reporting to a commanding officer in a new military unit. (Hitler was not yet called Führer—leader—but simply, “boss,” or “chief.”
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) “My heart was pounding,” remembered Kallenbach as he marched up the stairs to Hitler’s second-floor room on the day of his arrival. “I was in such awe of his personal magnetism and the drama of the moment that I can no longer recall his exact words. [Hitler] questioned me in great detail about myself and my loved ones, about our personal and financial situations.… A strong handshake accompanied words spoken from
the heart and taken to heart.” (Kallenbach’s book is filled with hero worship.
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) Then, thoroughly enamored of Hitler and initiated into life at Landsberg, Kallenbach glided back down to room number eleven, where his new comrades were preparing grain-based ersatz coffee and slices of bread with marmalade.

The Landsberg fortress building had never held more than a handful of prisoners. Now it housed more than forty. Conditions were generally cushy. Like the inmates on the second floor, the crew on the first floor had a large dayroom for taking meals and lounging about. They could read, nap, smoke, write letters, or do nothing. They could wear their own clothes—not the usual prison garb—and were allowed to keep most personal items, including pocket knives. Only money had to be turned over to the prison guards, who deposited each man’s funds into his prison account, which was kept on a ledger updated weekly. As “honorable prisoners,” the men did not have to work or even make their own beds. Room cleaning and bed making—along with all household chores, including emptying trash, polishing shoes, and serving the food—was done by trustees. These were lucky lads from the main Landsberg Prison who had won the position of
Kalfaktor,
or special servants, in the fortress building.
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Not allowed to speak with the putsch-makers, the trustees nonetheless considered it a bonus to work in their building and, after serving meals to Hitler and his men, to eat whatever food was left over. Fortress meals were taken at the common tables in the dayrooms on the first and second floors.

Life in Landsberg Prison was good for the former putschists (who were also kidnappers, thieves, house-breakers, vandals, and—if one attributes the deaths of four policemen to them—accomplices to homicide). Their routines were comfortable and afforded enough variety to avert tedium, at least during the warm months. “I can’t complain of boredom,” wrote Hess to his father.
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“I am a ‘worker of
the brain’ until 7:30 a.m. After breakfast, from 8 until 11, I am a ‘worker of the fist [hand].’ I chop wood. A very healthy activity, since I can hack at roots. Also it earns me 20 pfennigs per hour! Hitler says he might do this when he’s finished with his book. Afterwards, a hot bath. At 11:35 a plentiful midday dinner. Then a nap, tea and more ‘work of the brain.’ After our evening meal from 7:45 to 8, we are allowed outside again, play games, or I chat with Hitler while walking up and down. After that, we gather inside again—Hitler, Colonel Kriebel, Dr. Weber, Maurice and I—for tea and pastries, which never cease to arrive.”

Life in Landsberg has been compared to hotel living or being at a spa. Given the crowded living conditions and doubling up in smaller rooms on the first floor, it might be better called a boys’ camp. Any way it was labeled, imprisonment at the Landsberg fortress was the easiest prison time any convict could do in Bavaria. Among Socialists and Communists, this was taken as further proof of the rightward bias of the Bavarian judiciary; left-wingers convicted of political crimes had almost all been sent to Niederschönenfeld Prison, a much harsher institution fifty-seven miles north of Landsberg.

The five “honorable prisoners” on the second floor—Hitler, Kriebel, Weber, Maurice, and Hess—led a near-monkish life, with reading, writing, and chatting as their chief activities. The first-floor inmates were a rowdier bunch. With few officers or professionals in their midst, they referred to themselves as
raue Landsknechte,
or rough country boys, and behaved accordingly. “It was loud and boisterous, and we always had a steady stream of men coming in and out of room number eleven,” wrote Kallenbach. They played pranks, hazed newcomers, thought up plays and poems, and reinvented songs to old rhythms. In room number eleven, Kallenbach came up with the “Ten Commandments for Decency and Order,”
including “No throwing cigarettes into the flowerpots… this is not a slum or a bar”; “Don’t throw your clothes on the chairs, that’s why you have a wardrobe”; and, with casual nastiness, “Don’t shout and scream… this is not a Jew school.”

For entertainment, they even created their own “Landsberg Prison Band” with a violin, a lute, and a homemade “Turkish crescent” with jingling bells. Josef Gerum, a Munich policeman who was secretly a Nazi and was caught during the putsch, was the violinist. The Landsberg fortress had become a downright lively place. “Our treatment here is impeccable,” Hess wrote home, “exactly as befits the term ‘honorable.’”

On special occasions—like birthdays, holidays, and many Saturday evenings—the five men on the second floor, now dubbed the Field Marshals’ Hill by those on the first floor, would descend for a common dinner with the foot soldiers. Hitler, as king of the castle, sat at the head of a long table. In keeping with the strict military mood, everyone stood at attention until Hitler arrived and shook each man’s hand. Then the group tucked in with a will. Meals tended to be eaten swiftly and in silence until, finally, Hitler issued the traditional German mealtime greeting,
“Mahlzeit!”
That ended the meal and opened the table to a period of relaxed conversation. Out came the cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. Predictably, these after-dinner klatches often turned into monologues by Hitler, who never minded the sound of his own voice. Since the men around the table represented the closest thing he could find to a beer hall audience, he often began reading from draft chapters of his book. As Hemmrich noted, at such times the men were mesmerized by his pronouncements. “We hung dumbstruck on his words and the hours passed like minutes,” recalled Kallenbach.

Sometimes, especially on rainy days when it was impossible to walk in the garden, Hitler would hold talks in the dayroom at 10
a.m., lecturing his men on politics and world history. Like a good teacher, he even used the easel-mounted school blackboard that stood conveniently in the room. According to Kallenbach, Hitler gave his rapt listeners his full journeyman’s tale of living in Viennese poverty and of drawing critical lessons from the flawed multinational parliament and the great deeds of the (deeply anti-Semitic) mayor, Karl Lueger. Hitler “hammered into our heads” the concepts of “nation and race, blood and soil… nationalism and socialism,” wrote Kallenbach. Preservation of one’s own race was the highest value in Hitler’s belief system. It was not hard to sell to Germans filled with a deep sense of grievance.

But Hitler was already moving from his fully confrontational, blow-up-the-ship politics of force to the notion of political maneuvering and reconciliation among rivals to create a new, united society in Germany—what Hitler called a
Volksgemeinschaft,
or national community. In his closing argument at his trial, Hitler had forecast the day when those who shed each other’s blood on the Odeon Square would march arm-in-arm to form “regiments” and “divisions.” In Landsberg, he said, he came to realize “that we could no longer win power by force; the state had had time to consolidate itself and it had the weapons.” The shift from a politics of force—overthrowing the state by revolution—to one of electioneering and embracing one’s former enemy was, for many a hardened Nazi, difficult to take. While he was still at Landsberg, said Hitler, “many of my supporters never understood” the transformation.

That certainly seems to have been true of the band of radicals in prison with Hitler. “For hours we debated our master teacher’s concept of a comprehensive German ‘national community,’” recalled Kallenbach. “We couldn’t grasp it.… We just wanted to replace the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ so loudly proclaimed by the other side with a ‘dictatorship of the frontline veterans’ [of World War I].
We wanted to deal with our opponents… an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We did not want to offer the hand of friendship, as our leader was advising us to do.”

Political debates and lectures were, of course, easier to take in the comfy confines of the men’s cosseted imprisonment. Food and drink, always the chief complaint of soldiers and prisoners, were both good and abundant at Landsberg. Besides the usual beverages, the men enjoyed a huge bonus at dinner time: unlike the five hundred poor souls serving time in the main prison, the fortress inmates had access to alcohol. Officially, they were allowed to purchase a half-liter of beer or a large glass (a
Schoppen
) of wine per day if they had money in their accounts. Hitler, who later quit drinking altogether, drank one beer per day, at least in April and early May. The prison records from that period show eighteen pfennigs deducted every day from his account for beer.

For many of the men a half-liter beer ration seemed stingy indeed. Born Bavarians, they were used to imbibing their region’s renowned brew like water. “We approached the Mufti [their secret nickname for Warden Leybold] with a request for more,” reported prisoner Karl Fiehler, a Shock Trooper who went on to become mayor of Munich during the Third Reich. Leybold cited regulations and turned the men down—until the next day, when he found a way. The rules allowed him, he told the inmates, to pay them up to twenty pfennigs (cents) per hour for work in the garden. In view of the summer heat, he felt justified in providing another half-liter of beer to anyone who put in six hours of work per day. The men got their extra ration and the garden began to look a lot better under the guiding hand of Colonel Kriebel, who had a green thumb and a commanding style as he directed digging, planting, and the widening of the gravel walk. In a broad straw hat against the summer sun, Kriebel looked, noted Lurker, like a “Brazilian coffee planter.”

In addition to beer and wine, hard liquor was somehow allowed in or smuggled past guards. Maurice said he had “spirits” in his nightstand and reported the schnapps holdings of the rowdies on the first floor: “A bottle of Steinhäger arrived, a bottle of Enzian arrived, a slew of bottles of schnapps and liqueur arrived… our guards’ mouths started watering when they saw what we had in our liquor cabinet.” How all this contraband slipped through security inspections is not entirely clear—except in one case: Kallenbach’s case, specifically, his case of malaria.

During World War I, Kallenbach had picked up malaria while serving in swampland in Macedonia. Even years later, he sometimes fell into a fever on hot days. Somewhere it was written that if quinine could not quell the fever, “the daily intake of the strongest possible dose of alcohol would increase its effectiveness,” claimed the patient.
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With records to prove his illness and a prison rule allowing alcohol for medicinal purposes, Kallenbach obtained permission to receive booze. If his story is to be believed, he ordered a bottle of cognac from home and it arrived quickly, to the general excitement of the fortress gang.

The rules read that the patient could receive a single glass per day of the liquor, and that a guard had to pour the liquor into the glass. Lacking a cognac snifter, Kallenbach grabbed a water glass and proceeded to the guard station, where the bottle with his name on it was now under lock and key. Kallenbach’s self-appointed legal adviser, Hermie Fobke, went along. The fast-talking law student was able to convince the guard that the water glass fell legally under the rules’ definition of “glass” and should be filled to the top, which it was. The two slipped hurriedly back into the main dayroom, where everyone awaited the outcome of the malaria gambit. All the other prisoners entreated Kallenbach to let them pass the golden liquid around so they could at least “get a close look” and maybe
even “inhale a whiff” of its heady fragrance. The end of this game is easy to predict: by the time the glass made the rounds and returned to its owner, it was empty. “Fobke and I didn’t get anything!” recalled Kallenbach. “I could barely wet my lips with what was left of the much sought-after firewater.”
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