On 13 December 1923, Hans Ehard, the public prosecutor who was conducting the prosecution of the putschists, travelled to Landsberg prison in order, as he put it in his report, ‘to attempt to interrogate Hitler’.1 However, Hitler, now a prisoner on remand, declined to make any statement; he was not, Ehard recorded, going to ‘be tricked into giving himself away’. Instead, he promised to produce a political memorandum explaining his actions in detail.2 Hitler even refused to say anything about his youth and personal development because he was not going to allow himself to be ‘interrogated like a criminal’; he did not want a ‘court report’ to be produced, which might later be ‘used against him’. Ehard also learnt that Hitler declined to provide the prison doctor with any information about his previous life on the grounds that ‘he was healthy and that they should forget about all that nonsense’. He had broken off an almost fourteen-day hunger strike at the end of November.3
It is clear from these statements that Hitler was afraid that the prosecution investigations and the impending trial would show him up. Not only would the weak points in his Führer biography, which he had hitherto been careful to conceal, be disclosed (his stay in the Viennese men’s hostel, his flight to Munich to avoid military service in Austria, his dubious role during the Räterepublik, his unrealistic plans for a professional future),4 but a careful analysis of the pre-history of the putsch would inevitably reveal how foolhardy his decision to launch it had been. For Hitler had not simply been driven to act by his supporters. In fact, unwilling to admit he had misjudged the political situation, he had taken the bull by the horns so as not to appear to his followers (and himself ) as a failure. He did not want to be seen as a muddle head whose life so far had been a dead end, and it was precisely his fear of such a blow to his self-esteem that gave him the impetus to challenge Ehard. Hitler benefited greatly from the fact that the Triumvirate had been thoroughly compromised by their own plans for a coup d’état in autumn 1923. He dropped dark hints to Ehard that, during the trial, he would call ‘numerous witnesses’ who had not been members of the Kampfbund and then they would see ‘whether “certain gentlemen”, when confronted by these witnesses in the courtroom, would actually have the courage to perjure themselves’.
Faced with Hitler’s torrent of words, Ehard gave up the attempt to take a statement; instead, he asked for the typewriter to be removed and had a five-hour conversation during which Hitler refused to allow him to take notes. As far as his general mood was concerned, he told Ehard that, after the ‘collapse of his enterprise, . . . [he had been] initially quite apathetic, then he had raged and now he had got his “Schopenhauer” and so had regained his philosophical serenity; he had also regained his energy and would now fight like a “wild cat” to save his skin and “act ruthlessly to discredit his opponents”.’
Hitler strongly denied that he had committed treason, as the current constitutional order was, after all, based on the revolution of November 1918. He would also provide proof at his trial that the existing constitution had been repeatedly contravened in recent times: for example, by the overthrow of the Hoffmann government after the Kapp putsch, for which the Reichswehr was responsible, and by the appointment of the General State Commissar [Kahr], which had only happened because the public had been misled about the political situation at the time. His ‘high treason’ of 8 November had also been ‘sanctioned and legalized by Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, who were the legal representatives of the state’. He would prove that the three ‘had not simply feigned acceptance of the proposals he had made in the Bürgerbräukeller, but seriously intended implementing the agreement that had been reached’ and that ‘afterwards they had only been persuaded to change their minds and break their word as a result of persuasion, and partly compulsion, from outside’. In fact, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser had not only participated for several hours on the 8 November, but ‘for months had been preparing with him everything that was agreed in the Bürgerbräukeller on the evening of 8.11.23’. They had discussed the ‘“march on Berlin” to be launched from Bavaria down to fine detail and had been in total agreement. Basically, he, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser had had identical aims’. Hitler then indicated that during the trial he was going to raise the whole question of the ‘secret mobilization’, in other words the collaboration between the Reichswehr and the paramilitary leagues.
Essentially, Hitler had been explaining to Ehard the strategy that he was going to adopt for his defence in the coming trial, which began in Munich on 26 February 1924, and in which, apart from him and Ludendorff, there were eight other defendants. He had made it clear that he was prepared to mount a counter-offensive against the Bavarian state and was assuming that his threat of ‘revelations’ would persuade the prosecution and the court to be lenient with him. And that is indeed precisely what happened. Hitler agreed to let the issue of the Reichswehr’s secret mobilization be dealt with in a session closed to the public, and refrained from touching on the question during his hours-long speeches in the public sessions.5 The defence also did not attempt to compromise the government or cause problems for it by calling ‘numerous witnesses’, as Hitler had threatened to do. In return, the government dealt with the matter under its own jurisdiction instead of referring it to the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig, which was officially responsible for cases of high treason. The prosecution refrained from trying the various serious crimes committed during the putsch – homicides, kidnapping, and robbery – separately, restricting itself to the charge of high treason. The judge permitted Hitler to use the court as a stage for his propaganda and, at the end, imposed a lenient sentence allowing for a generous term of suspension, and did not deport him to Austria. It is hardly conceivable that this leniency was not the result of a deal between the various parties involved in the case.
With his counter-offensive Hitler also avoided being personally exposed during the trial. Thanks to the avoidance of a full public investigation of the pre-history of the putsch, he could blame its failure mainly on intrigues that were outside his responsibility. In the court he portrayed his attempt to involve the Triumvirate in his putsch on 8 November (an enterprise that, in view of the general political situation at the end of October/beginning of November, was doomed to fail) as the heroic deed of a credulous man, who had relied on promises that had been made to him. Thus, after a relatively brief depressive phase, he had restored the overblown self-image he had developed on the eve of the putsch and of which now, in the course of the trial, he had become utterly convinced. He saw his actions as having ennobled him as a heroic leader, who had disregarded all petty considerations. He persuaded himself and his public that the collapse of the putsch merely revealed the failure of his opponents and indeed provided the proof of his qualities as a national leader.
The court gave Hitler the opportunity, right from the start of proceedings, to take the stage with a three and a half hour speech.6 He began with an account of his miserable years in Vienna: ‘I arrived in Vienna as a citizen of the world and left it as an absolute anti-Semite, as a deadly enemy of the whole Marxist world view.’7 He continued with his time in Munich, his military service and the post-war period, with his speech increasingly turning into a general attack on Marxism and the ‘November criminals’. The final section was devoted to an exhaustive account of the 1923 crisis and its culmination in the autumn. In the process he made one thing clear: ‘During this whole period, Lossow, Kahr, and Seisser had exactly the same aim as us, namely to get rid of the Reich government with its current international and parliamentary world view and replace it with a nationalist, absolutely anti-parliamentary national government, a Directorate. If some people subsequently try and make out that they wanted that too, but that it ought to have been achieved not through force but instead through pressure, pressure through force, but not by using force; that they wanted a coup but not like a normal coup as it has been historically understood hitherto, but rather as they understood it, then I can only regret that we weren’t informed at the time about this special Lossow idea of a coup.’ In other words: ‘If our whole operation was high treason then Messrs Lossow, Seisser, and Kahr have committed high treason along with us, for throughout all those months we didn’t discuss with them anything other than that for which we are now sitting in the dock.’8
With this introductory speech Hitler had taken the first step towards dominating the future court proceedings, particularly since none of the other defendants showed any desire to challenge his leading role in this case of high treason. Apart from his stress on the complicity of Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, during the trial Hitler emphasized an additional theme: the wavering and hesitation of his former conservative allies had forced him to act; he alone had shown the necessary decisiveness, while the members of the Triumvirate, a bunch of losers, were now not even prepared to stand up for what they had done. In the closed sessions Hitler repeatedly used his right to cross-examine witnesses to an excessive extent. On several occasions his torrent of words prompted the chairman to call him – gently, it must be said – to order.9
Hitler tried, for example, to drive Kahr into a corner. Together with his defence counsel and supported by Ludendorff, he interrogated him in the manner of an inquisitor as to how much he had known about the mobilization of the Bavarian army, the provision of ammunition, and its financing with Bavarian funds.10 And why had he thought that Friedrich Minoux, who had been envisaged as a member of the Directorate, was entitled ‘to put pressure on the Reich president and on the cabinet that was not legitimated by the Constitution’? Kahr ought to answer the question as to whether his actions had not ‘very seriously damaged the constitutional foundations of the Reich, in other words, basically, what Kahr is accusing us of having done’.11 When Lossow reminded him that he had broken the promise that he had given to Seisser on 8 November not to use force, Hitler responded that he did not have a guilty conscience, since ‘the only one of us two who has broken his word [is] the Herr Lieutenant-General’, a reference to the events of 1 May 1923.12 Hitler also took the liberty of referring to the ‘high treason committed by the gentlemen, Lossow, Kahr, and Seisser’, the very ones who had provided him with the instrument with which to launch his putsch.13
The judge repeatedly permitted Hitler to digress from his cross-examination of witnesses into making extensive political statements. He did not object to Hitler continually referring to ‘November criminals’ during the course of the trial, or to one of the defendants insulting the eagle in the national flag by calling it a ‘vulture’.14 He tolerated Hitler making several derogatory comments about the Social Democrat Reich President, Friedrich Ebert.15 When Lossow mentioned the fact that, on the evening of 8 November, Nazis had aimed their guns at him when he had briefly looked out of the window, Judge Neithardt tried to excuse this by remarking: ‘I can imagine that they did it out of high spirits in order to give the gentlemen a fright.’16 The reporter of the Bayerischer Kurier, a paper close to the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party, noted that the courtroom seemed to be being increasingly ‘transformed into a political meeting’ in which ‘applause and heckling’ were tolerated.17
During the trial, Hitler repeatedly mentioned his personal political ambitions; they were not exactly modest. While he referred to Ludendorff as the ‘military leader of the future Germany’ and said the general was to be the ‘leader of the great future reckoning’, he insisted, ‘I am going to be the political leader of this young Germany. Since it was I who founded this youthful völkisch movement, it’s obvious that everybody in Germany who supports this youthful völkisch trend sees me as their leader. For I started it four years ago with a huge propaganda campaign and, during these past four years, I have created a great wave, which has now become a power factor even in the case of elections.’18 However, as far as he himself was concerned, he had ‘no interest in acquiring a ministerial post. I consider it unworthy of a great man to go seeking after titles’; that was the wrong way to ‘make . . . a name for yourself in world history. . . . Thousands of people can become ministers. I resolved to be the destroyer of Marxism. That is my task. . . . It wasn’t from modesty that I wanted at that time to be the drummer, for that is the highest there is. The rest is insignificant.’19 The roles of ‘drummer’ and ‘Führer’ now merged in his mind. He wanted to be seen as historically unique, as someone who was far above the usual norms of conventional politics. This also meant that his decision to lead his supporters into a putsch, while completely ignoring the reality of the political situation, could appear entirely justified.
It was not surprising that, after twenty-four days of court proceedings, Hitler’s final statement was another speech lasting several hours, during which he gloried in his sense of superiority.20 The accused adopted the role of an accuser. Among other things, he declared: ‘The broad masses will not recover their belief and confidence in the dignity of the law until the day when a prosecutor can stand up in court and say: I accuse Ebert, Scheidemann, and comrades of treason and high treason committed in 1918 . . .’21 At the end, as the final judge in his case, he called on the ‘Goddess of history’: ‘for, gentlemen, it is not you who will pronounce the final verdict upon us, it will be the goddess of the court of the last judgment, who will rise up from our graves and from your graves as “history”. And, when we stand before her, I already know what her verdict will be. She won’t ask us: Have you committed high treason? In her eyes the Quartermaster-General of the World War and his officers will count as Germans who wanted the best, as Germans who wanted to fight for their fatherland. You may pronounce us “guilty” a thousand times, but the goddess who presides over the eternal court of history will smile and tear up the charge of the public prosecutor, and smile and tear up the judgment of the court, for she will acquit us.’22 Hitler had become so detached from the reality of the court proceedings that the inevitable verdict of guilty appeared tolerable. He had finally overcome the insecurity and shame which he had initially experienced as a result of the failure of the putsch.
On 1 April, sentence was pronounced: Hitler, like Weber, Kriebel, and Pöhner, was sentenced to five years’ ‘fortress imprisonment’; five other accused received shorter prison sentences; Ludendorff was acquitted. Since, as a result of Hitler’s new sentence, the suspension of his 1922 sentence was no longer valid, no part of his sentence should have been suspended. But, ignoring the specific legal regulations concerned, the court decreed that his sentence (along with those of Pöhner, Weber, and Kriebel) should be suspended after only six months. The court rejected his deportation to Austria on the grounds of his military service, again ignoring the specific regulations of the Law for the Protection of the Republic, which laid down that foreigners convicted of high treason were without exception to be deported.23
Except in the extreme right-wing press, the sentence was strongly criticized: the Bayerischer Kurier wrote of a ‘judicial catastrophe’, the Kölnische Volkszeitung of a ‘Munich scandal’, the Berliner Tageblatt of ‘judicial bankruptcy’, and the Münchener Post claimed this represented the ‘death of Bavarian justice’.24
Hitler returned to Landsberg, where he and the other Nazis who had been sentenced to ‘fortress imprisonment’ were exempted from the normal prison regime and enjoyed more comfortable conditions. (Because he had been elected to the Bavarian parliament or Landtag, one prisoner, Gregor Strasser, was released after a short time, while Pöhner did not need to start his sentence until January 1925.) The prisoners were permitted to spend five hours a day outside, doing sports or walking; they were able to visit each other in their spacious and comparatively comfortable rooms (they could hardly be called cells). Significantly, there was a large swastika flag hanging in the common room, which was removed only when senior officials came to inspect; the prison guards evidently had no objection to it. Hitler had two ‘secretaries’ at his personal disposal in the shape of Hermann Fobke, a law student, and Emil Maurice, to assist him with his correspondence and other writing activities.25 The prison authorities reported that, among the extremely large number of visitors Hitler received (350 between April and October 1924, 150 in the first month alone),26 were: ‘people seeking favours or jobs, creditors, friends, and some who were simply curious’; in addition, there were lawyers, businessmen who wanted to use his name, and publishers seeking to sign him up him as an author.27
In retrospect, Hitler described his time in prison as a phase that, above all, gave him time to reflect on his policies and his programme; moreover, in Landsberg he gained in ‘self-confidence, optimism, and faith’.28 While the trial had confirmed him in his self-image as a ‘Führer’ of national importance, in his Landsberg cell he became convinced that he was one of those rare personalities in world history in whom ‘the politician is combined with the political theorist capable of producing a programme’ [‘Programmatiker’]. The fact that, once again, as in October 1923, he referred in this context to the, in his eyes, great visionaries, Frederick the Great, Luther, and Wagner, indicates that, in the meantime, his self-image had reached Olympian proportions.29 But Hitler was not alone in his views.
On the occasion of his thirty-fifth birthday, his supporters arranged a ‘demonstration of homage’ in the Bürgerbräukeller attended by 3,000 people. A resolution was passed demanding the ‘immediate release’ of Hitler and his comrades and the lifting of the ban on the Party and the Völkischer Beobachter.30 The extreme right-wing press also celebrated Hitler as a hero. In The People’s Book of Hitler Georg Schott wrote a comprehensive account of Hitler ‘the man’, ‘the politician’, and the ‘liberator’.31 His personal photographer, Hoffmann, published a book of photographs with the title Germany’s Awakening in Words and Pictures, in which he celebrated Hitler as the ‘strongest political personality in the nationalist movement and as the leader of the völkisch-German freedom movement’.32 To cite another example from the plethora of such expressions of adulation: following a visit to Hitler, Rudolf Jung, a Sudeten German Nazi, compared him in a newspaper article in January 1924 with Jesus.33
The perception of Hitler as a martyr and as the future leader of the extreme Right was given a further boost by the fact that, during his imprisonment, the NSDAP disintegrated into several competing groups. Hitler kept largely aloof from these divisions and so was able to retain his aura as somebody above mundane politics; indeed, he was able to view the conflicts and the damage to his potential rivals with a certain amount of satisfaction, safe in the knowledge that, after his release, he would be able to intervene to sort things out and revive the movement under his leadership.
After the putsch, the NSDAP, the Kampfbund, Reichskriegsflagge, and Bund Oberland were all banned and their property confiscated, including the Völkischer Beobachter and its printing presses.34 Shortly before his arrest, Hitler had tasked Rosenberg with leading the banned party during his absence. On 1 January 1924, Rosenberg, together with Hans Jacob, the last deputy chairman of the NSDAP, founded the Grossdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft [Greater German National Community, GVG] as a successor organization.35 However, by the summer, Esser and Streicher had succeeded in taking over this party from Rosenberg, who was unpopular with the membership.36 Moreover, on 6 January, the Völkisch Bloc was founded in Bamberg as an umbrella organization covering former supporters of the NSDAP as well as other right-wing groups such as Oberland, Reichskriegsflagge, and Jungdeutscher Orden. This organization also operated outside Bavaria under the name Völkisch-Sozialer-Bloc [VSB].37 At the end of February, the Völkisch Bloc and the GVG agreed on a joint list of candidates for the approaching Bavarian Landtag elections.38 The Völkisch Bloc rapidly expanded into Thuringia, where it competed in the Landtag elections of 10 February under the name Vereinigte Völkische Liste, winning 9.3 per cent of the vote. This enabled it to exercise some influence on the newly elected right-wing government in Thuringia by providing it with parliamentary support. At the beginning of 1924, the VSB also took part in elections elsewhere, such as in the Rhineland and Hesse.39
However, it quickly became clear that the vacuum created by the ban on the NSDAP could not be filled simply by the GVG and the new-right wing umbrella organization, the VSB. They soon began to face competition from the Deutsch-völkische Freiheitspartei [German-Völkisch Freedom Party, DVFP], which was founded mainly by extreme right-wing former members of the conservative DNVP, and was already established in north Germany in autumn 1922. In March 1923 Hitler had been obliged to concede dominance in north Germany to this new party.40 But now the DVFP began to try to expand into south Germany as well.41 During negotiations, first in Salzburg in January and then on 24 February 1924 in Munich, the DVFP managed, despite Rosenberg’s dogged resistance, to insist on closer cooperation with the GVG. According to the agreement of 24 February, the two parties would retain their separate organizations at local level, but common structures would be created at regional level, unless one of the parties was clearly dominant.42 Hitler only accepted the agreement with the proviso that it should be limited to a period of six months.43 The main result of this agreement was to confirm the dominance of the DVFP in north Germany. On 25 February, the day before the start of his trial in Munich, Ludendorff had appointed the chairman of the DVFP, Albrecht von Graefe, to be his representative in north Germany. At the same time, the agreement gave the DVFP enough scope to compete with the GVG in south Germany.44
Despite Hitler’s objections – he had always rejected the NSDAP’s participation in elections – the Völkisch Bloc (the alliance of extreme right-wing forces in Bavaria) took part in the Bavarian Landtag elections on 6 April 1924, winning 17.1 per cent of the vote. In Munich itself, with the election taking place only a few days after Hitler had been sentenced, they even won almost 35 per cent.45 Their twenty-three deputies included the Landtag librarian Rudolf Buttmann, the Landshut pharmacist Gregor Strasser, the former Munich police chief Ernst Pöhner, the founder of the DAP Anton Drexler, and Julius Streicher (as the representative of the Grossdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft). However, as a result of disagreements within the parliamentary group and losses to other parties, the group was soon reduced to 17.46 In the Reichstag election of 4 May 1924 the combined völkisch list won 6.5 per cent of the vote and thirty-two seats, of which only ten were held by members of the banned NSDAP, the remainder by members of the DVFP.47 In Munich the combined list still gained 28.5 per cent. However, this election result did not mean that by 1924 Hitler had already succeeded in winning over a quarter of the Munich population to be solid Nazi supporters, for, at the next Reichstag election in December 1924, support for the völkisch list in the Bavarian capital was reduced to 9.1 per cent.48 Thus, the elections of April and May should rather be seen as protests against the Bavarian government, whose radical and vociferous anti-Berlin policy had clearly come to grief during autumn 1923.
Meanwhile, Ludendorff was trying to assert his authority as the dominant figure within the extreme Right. In May, during two visits to Hitler in Landsberg, he tried to gain Hitler’s support for uniting the DVFP and the supporters of the banned NSDAP in a new Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei [National Socialist Freedom Party]. Hitler reluctantly agreed, but among other things, insisted that the headquarters of the new party should be in Munich. Before the details could be agreed, at a conference in Berlin Ludendorff persuaded the Reichstag deputies of both parties to unite under the name Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei (which was dominated by the DVFP), announcing in a press release, which Hitler had not approved, that the latter was in support of a unified party.49
Opposition to the merger now grew among the Nazis in north Germany. On 25 May, leading Nazis in Hamburg committed themselves to recreating an independent Nazi Party and opposed parliamentary cooperation with the DVFP. They sent a four-man delegation to Landsberg, which discussed the situation with Hitler on 26 and 27 May.50 He explained that he was against participation in elections, that the agreement of 24 February had taken him by surprise, and his only option had been to limit it to six months. However, cooperation with the DVFP should be restricted to the parliamentary group. Within this alliance the NSDAP must assert its claim to the leadership and insist on the headquarters being in Munich.51 As a result, on 3 June, a conference of north German Nazi Party functionaries decided to create their own leadership in the form of a three-man directorate with dictatorial powers.52
Finally, on 7 July, Hitler officially announced in the press that he was withdrawing from politics. He requested that Party comrades should cease their visits to Landsberg, explaining that he needed more time to work on a ‘substantial book’.53 In fact, the main reason for this public declaration of neutrality was probably his expectation of being released early, on 1 October, which had been envisaged in his sentence.54
Two days later, both the GVG and the Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei responded to this development. The GVG decided to establish a new directorate under Streicher as first and Esser as second chairman. They considered a union with the DVFP as ‘impossible at the present time’, but sought ‘reasonable cooperation as far as possible’ at local level if there were local branches of both parties in the same place.55 The Freiheitspartei issued a press release according to which Hitler had requested Ludendorff and Graefe to take over the leadership of the whole movement in his place. After his release Hitler would then ‘rejoin them as the third member’, a formula which implied a challenge to his claim to sole leadership.56 Until this time, the press release continued, Gregor Strasser would act as his deputy in the ‘Reich leadership’.57 However, in response to their immediate enquiry, Hitler informed the north German Nazis that he had not appointed Strasser; this had been done by Ludendorff, although he had nothing against him. In any case, he was determined after his release to take on the leadership once again.58 However, the north German group of Nazis refused to merge with the DVFP and rejected any involvement in parliament. Its three-man directorate believed they were keeping Hitler’s seat warm for him or, as Adalbert Volck, a member of the directorate, wrote to Fobke, Hitler’s secretary: ‘Our programme has two words: Adolf Hitler.’59
Meanwhile, the re-establishment of the SA was making considerable progress, a development that Hitler regarded with mixed feelings. On 1 April, the day on which sentence had been pronounced, Hitler sent Röhm a handwritten note appointing him military leader of the Kampfbund.60 Appointed deputy leader of the SA by Göring, Röhm was able to secure his de facto leadership of the SA at a meeting of SA leaders from all over Germany and Austria held in Salzburg on 17 and 18 May.61
Röhm immediately initiated a national reorganization of the SA. Alongside this, however, he also attempted to construct an autonomous, Reich-wide Nazi paramilitary organization with the title ‘Frontbann’. It was intended to include other leagues apart from the SA and to be organized along hierarchical, quasi-military lines. When Röhm visited Hitler in Landsberg he was told that these plans were not viable, but was not put off.62 Established in August 1924, the Frontbann soon contained 30,000 members, with Ludendorff formally assuming the ‘overall leadership’. However, in September the Bavarian government ordered the Frontbann headquarters to be searched and some of its leaders arrested; in the end, however, legal proceedings were halted by an amnesty. Hitler’s entourage blamed Röhm and his Frontbann activities for the postponement of Hitler’s release, after the public prosecutor intervened to stop it; it had been scheduled for October.63 In the meantime, there was no sign of the various groups competing to replace the NSDAP coming together; a meeting of eighty Nazis in Weimar on 20 July ended without agreement.64
Hitler continued to adopt a neutral position in public, but made his reservations clear in comments to close associates: Ludendorff had ‘a bee in his bonnet about mergers’, ‘Esser is a rake’, ‘I’ll draw a veil over Streicher’, Strasser had become so high profile that he was not going to make him second chairman after his release as he had intended. As far as he was concerned, the question of a merger with the DFVP was over and done with.65 Volck, the representative of the north Germans, took the same line when he wrote in a letter to Fobke that they did not recognize Strasser as their representative, as he had not been appointed by Hitler. But ‘H overestimates his strength; despite the chaos, he thinks he’ll easily be able to sort things out.’ If Hitler was still thinking of Bavaria as the ‘base’, he was under a misapprehension: ‘It’s only from the north that a real völkisch storm can be unleashed.’ Volck’s main concern was that, while Hitler was in prison, a rival group could emerge within the movement and become involved in parliamentary affairs. Did Hitler know, for example, that election posters were being put up with his portrait on them? For Volck this was ‘a slap in the face for H’.66 Hitler appears to have immediately responded to this criticism, for he issued a statement, published in the Völkischer Kurier, objecting to the misuse of his name in the Völkisch-Sozialer-Bloc’s election campaign.67
Meanwhile, on 26 July, the Reichstag passed a resolution lifting bans on political parties; all the states affected by this decision obeyed, albeit Prussia and Bavaria only after a delay of several months. Nazis throughout the Reich must undoubtedly have taken courage from this resolution.68 At a second conference in Weimar from 15 to 17 August 1924 a merger of the NSDAP and the DVFP under the name Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung [National Socialist Freedom Movement, NSFB] was finally agreed ‘under the Reich leadership of Ludendorff, Hitler, and von Graefe’.69
However, the north German group of former Nazis under Volck and Ludolf Haase, a Göttingen medical student, kept their distance. Confused by Hitler sending a greetings telegram to the Weimar meeting, they now enquired about his attitude to the new combined organization and how he envisaged the Party’s future activities. Fobke once more gave an evasive answer: Hitler rejected a complete merger and a ‘parliamentarization of the movement’. However, he was not totally opposed to ‘cooperation with Graefe and the Gen. [Ludendorff] in a single organization’, and whether he would establish an anti-parliamentary movement, like the old NSDAP, or ‘order a withdrawal from parliament’ he ‘could not yet say’. However, as ‘there was now a group of [völkisch] Reichstag deputies’, he wanted ‘to use it as an instrument’. Apart from that, as a matter of principle, he was not prepared publicly to support any of the existing groups. He still believed that he would be released on 1 October and then be able ‘first of all to sort out Bavaria’. The north Germans should ‘keep going’ for the time being.
They were by no means satisfied with this reply.70 At a meeting in Harburg on 7 September the north Germans distanced themselves from the Reich leadership of the NSFB, who were giving the false impression that they were acting on Hitler’s authority. They rejected any form of participation in elections and reemphasized that their three-man directorate regarded itself as simply ‘keeping warm’ Hitler’s position as leader until he regained his freedom of action.71 Hitler, who was still expecting soon to be released, responded to a further pressing letter from Volck by indicating that he could only summon all those involved to meet him after this had happened. In any case, he was not prepared to accept a Reich leadership (a kind of ‘soldiers’ council type arrangement’) under any circumstances; it would be simply a question of ‘who would support him as the sole leader’.72 During the following weeks, Hitler continued to refuse to recognize a merged organization.73 His silence left the north German Nazis floundering. Volck, who was clearly at a loss, told a meeting in Uelzen at the beginning of November that they would try to ‘act in his spirit’; it was assumed that he would advocate a boycott of the Reichstag election that had been called for December.74
On 19 October, after much debate, the GVG decided to join the NSFB. A dispute broke out, however, because the Bavarian state organization of the NSFB, established a week later largely on the initiative of the Völkisch-Sozialer-Bloc, refused to accept the leaders of the GVG, Esser and Streicher, as members of the new organization. Thereupon, at the beginning of November, the GVG decided at a ‘Reich party conference’ to retain its independence after all.75 In the meantime, on 30 October, the NSFB had held its first mass meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller and, under the chairmanship of Anton Drexler, Gregor Strasser subjected Esser and Streicher to a vicious attack.76
In the light of these petty squabbles, it is clear that nobody was in a position to step into Hitler’s shoes and unite the Nazis, neither Ludendorff nor Strasser, nor any of those in Hitler’s old entourage such as Rosenberg or Streicher. Instead, the former party, having disintegrated into a number of feuding groups made a catastrophic impression. In the Reichstag election of 7 December 1924 the NSFB won only 3 per cent of the vote; among the fourteen deputies elected there were only three former Nazis. The result was a reflection of the fact that the Republic was beginning to stabilize both politically and economically, but also undoubtedly a consequence of the deep divisions within the Nazi movement that had become apparent during 1924. Hitler, at any rate, did not hide the fact that he was not unhappy with the result.77
The ‘substantial book’, which, according to his ‘assistant’, Fobke, Hitler began during his imprisonment, has been interpreted by historians primarily as a programme; thus Mein Kampf is seen as evidence of Hitler’s early aims, which he then, during the 1930s and 1940s, endeavoured more or less systematically – and that remains in dispute – to put into practice.78 However, his decision to write a book was in the first instance clearly prompted by his need to explain the defeat of 9 November and to underpin his projection of himself as the leader of the extreme Right.
While during his trial he had presented himself as the leader of the extreme Right, possessing superhuman abilities, now, in the process of writing Mein Kampf, he managed to invent a background story that made sense of his lack of youthful success. In the ‘mundaneness of everyday life’, he wrote in Mein Kampf, often ‘important people’ appear ‘unimportant’; it is only when confronted with exceptional challenges, by which Hitler primarily meant war, that ‘someone ordinary and unprepossessing’ emerges as ‘a genius’. In the case of these special individuals the ‘hammer blow of fate’ that fells most people ‘suddenly lands on steel’, and now, ‘to the astonishment of the onlookers, the core that has hitherto been hidden’ becomes visible. It is not difficult to see that he is referring here to 9 November, during which his heroic genius became apparent for the first time. Hitler emphasized, however, that the individual’s ‘genius’ ‘did not suddenly appear at this moment’; in the case of ‘truly creative people’ it was naturally inborn.79 In his lean Vienna years he had laid the foundations for his career as a leader of genius, and Schopenhauer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Wagner always provided him with the models for this self-image. He also borrowed from Wagner and Chamberlain the anti-Semitic line according to which true genius must succeed in defeating the Jews, the ‘destroyers of genius’.
The failure of his artistic ambitions to be a painter or architect thus became a magnificent failure. Hitler now claimed to have transferred basic elements of the heroic artist–genius to his new role as ‘Führer’; in this way he could still fulfil his alleged destiny to be an exceptional individual, albeit in another sphere. For he believed that, as an artist, he was bringing valuable abilities into politics: the strength of will and resolution with which he was following the path set out for him by ‘destiny’; a particularly marked intuition, in other words his sensitivity to the psychological weaknesses of other people, but also to the depths of the ‘soul of the masses’; the emotion he could generate in order to release the emotions of the masses. He already saw himself as the superman, predestined to be a genius in his role as ‘Führer’ and certain of success.80
When it came to his decision to write a political polemic, a mixture of autobiography and programme, his supporters would undoubtedly have preferred him to continue with the strategy pursued at his trial, namely of portraying himself as the victim of a political intrigue, who nevertheless was going to carry on the fight. Originally, in fact, the book was going to end with the 1923 putsch,81 but, surprisingly, there is no mention of 9 November and its immediate pre-history. Hitler’s ability to avoid these topics is tied up with the history of its publication. While in prison he postponed publication because of the danger of his imminent release being delayed, which was still theoretically possible.82 During the months after his release, he continued work on the manuscript, but, after being banned from speaking in March 1925, decided to include the particularly sensitive parts in a second volume. In May 1925, he finished work on the first volume, which appeared in the same year.83
The first volume mainly contains an extremely self-aggrandizing autobiography of Hitler up until his early years in the DAP/NSDAP, interspersed with chapters containing general reflections on the ‘World War’, ‘War Propaganda’, ‘Revolution’, the ‘Causes of the Collapse’, and ‘Nation and Race’. The claim contained in the subtitle, ‘A Reckoning’, is hardly realized, as his account ends in 1920.
The second volume, The National Socialist Movement, written between August 1925 and November 1926 and published at the end of 1926, continues the autobiography and the history of the Party in a rather haphazard way. The chronological account finally peters out and is replaced by (often indirect) references to and comments on all kinds of topics, including current affairs.84 The structure of this volume shows very clearly that Hitler had abandoned his plan to continue his full-scale autobiographical account of the nobody who, while making great sacrifices, set out to save the fatherland, taking it stage by stage up to the decisive point of November 1923. Nor was he able to turn his extensive reflections into a coherent manifesto. It is, therefore, difficult to distil anything like a political programme from his long-winded and confused observations. At the end of the volume he took up his autobiography once again, describing the crisis of 1923 up until the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr in September 1923. He did not want to continue with the story: ‘I do not wish to because I do not see any future benefits from it and, above all, because it is pointless to reopen wounds that are only just healing.’85 However, Hitler’s decision not to seek a further ‘reckoning’ with the right-wing establishment in Bavaria was definitely not influenced merely by such tactical considerations; the most decisive factor must have been his personal difficulty in coping with his defeat. He was simply not prepared to accept that he had miscalculated in November 1923. Instead, he attempted to obscure it with grandiose visions of his ‘mission’. During his trial, he had portrayed himself as the victim of an intrigue and, at the same time, tried to shed this victim role through his behaviour during the proceedings, in which he portrayed himself as the leader of ‘young Germany’, whose heroic deed, in historical perspective, must appear entirely justified. He maintained this line during the coming years, a reinterpretation that, after 1933, culminated in the annual ceremony associated with 8/9 November, in which he created a kind of resurrection myth of the ‘dead heroes’. The overarching message was: ‘The deed was not in vain!’
By not dealing with November 1923 in Mein Kampf, Hitler failed to give the work a clear focus. For it was supposedly intended to be a piece of confessional writing, whose plausibility depended essentially on being rooted in the autobiographical basis of the ‘programme’ that was being put forward. And yet the author had nothing to say about what had been hitherto the high point of his career or about its provisional failure. This fact and his lack of ability to give his ideas a systematic focus and his tendency to engage in monologues produced a conglomeration of flattering autobiography and political tirades that was hard to unravel. The result was confused and unreadable.
The second volume of Mein Kampf was largely written in the seclusion of Berchtesgaden.86 In it Hitler, for the moment a failed politician, adopted the role of a political visionary with a programme containing a set of ideas of world historical importance. In doing so, he was once again escaping into his typical overblown fantasies and megalomaniacal dreams, now designed to help him come to terms with the shame of November 1923. The contrast between the down-to-earth Hitler, who in 1925 was busy trying to rebuild the split NSDAP, and the theoretician [Programmatiker] speculating in world historical dimensions could hardly have been greater.
His ‘programme’, although it can be elicited only by careful analysis of the second volume, was a repetition and expansion of the ideas that he had already been putting forward before 1923. In addition to his notorious virulent anti-Semitism and his identification of Jews with Bolsheviks/Marxists, he now introduced another important theme, ‘the question of space’. During his imprisonment, Hitler had become interested in ‘geopolitics’, the study of the dependence of politics on geographical space. This was probably under the influence of his fellow-prisoner, Rudolf Hess, whose academic supervisor, Professor Karl Hofer, was an exponent of the theory.87 By combining these ideas with his anti-Semitism and racism, Hitler developed the thesis of the eternal struggle between nations for ‘living space’, in which superior racial qualities would triumph. In this ‘world view’ the Jews played the role of a ‘counter-race’ that was diametrically opposed to the superior ‘Aryan race’ and trying to undermine the ‘Aryans’ attempt to ‘gain space’. As parasites, they must, therefore, be removed from the Aryans’ ‘national body’. That had to be the prerequisite for any kind of revisionist foreign policy.
He did not make clear how in practice he envisaged the ‘removal’ of the Jews. However, a few passages reveal violent fantasies. Thus, for example, he wrote: ‘we shall only succeed in persuading our masses to become nationalists if, in addition to a positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated’.88 Elsewhere, he complained about the ‘Marxist’ workers’ leaders’ behaviour during the World War, noting: ‘If at the start and during the course of the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as was the case with hundreds of thousands of the best of our German workers from all walks of life on the battlefield, then the sacrifice of millions of those killed at the front would not have been in vain.’89 Although the mention of poison gas leaps off the page, such threats and fantasies do not mean that he already had a plan for the systematic murder of European Jews.
What emerges clearly from Mein Kampf is that the main goal of a future Nazi foreign policy was to be the conquest of living space in eastern Europe. Hitler relied on ideas that before and during the war were being put forward by the Pan-Germans. They were modelled on the ‘great Eastern solution’, which Ludendorff, among others, had planned in 1918 following the advance of German troops into the Ukraine. Up until spring 1922, Hitler had been open to the idea of an alliance with a Russia liberated from ‘Jewish Bolshevist’ rule; he even thought a combined expansion by the two powers was feasible. In a speech in October 1922 he maintained that had Germany made an alliance with Russia against Britain before the war, it would have ‘created the opportunity for an unlimited eastwards expansion’.90 However, as the Soviet regime consolidated its position during 1922/23 he changed his view. He now began to contemplate the idea of an alliance with Italy and Great Britain, transforming his previous notion of securing ‘the East’ for German settlers with the aid of Russia into its opposite: this goal was now to be achieved by destroying the Soviet Union.
The basic issues determining Hitler’s views on the relationship with Italy were the question of the South Tyrol and his old dream of an Anschluss with Austria. Hitler had initially not been prepared to accept Italy’s annexation of the South Tyrol;91 the 1920 NSDAP programme demanded the ‘unification of all Germans . . . in a greater Germany’. No exceptions were envisaged. However, Hitler altered this position at the end of 1922. No sooner had the Fascists seized power in November 1922 than Hitler claimed that it was essential that ‘Germany [should] clearly and decisively abandon the Germans of South Tyrol’. The giving up of the South Tyrol was the precondition for Italy’s agreement to the Anschluss of Austria with the Reich.92 However, since this demand was unacceptable to the majority of nationalist Germans and supporters of a ‘greater Germany’ who wanted to integrate Austria including the South Tyrol into the Reich, Hitler did not make any further public statements on this issue. At the end of 1922, he told Eduard Scharrer, co-owner of the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten and a Nazi sympathizer, in confidence, that for the time being they should play down the South Tyrol issue; it might be possible to solve it later ‘through a form of compensation’.93
As far as the western powers were concerned, in the light of the 1923 Ruhr crisis, Hitler began to bank on a clash developing between British and French interests. He was working on the assumption that, given its traditional foreign policy principles, Britain would not stand idly by and watch France finally gaining hegemony on the continent. At the end of 1922, he was already contemplating Anglo-German cooperation against France and Russia as well as the idea of ‘colonizing the East’. In December he told Scharrer they should try for ‘the destruction of Russia with the aid of England. Russia had enough land for German settlers and provided big opportunities for German industry; England would then not get in our way when we come to deal with France’.94 But Hitler did not publicly demand an alliance with Britain nor did he develop the idea of conquering ‘soil’ in Russia any further. In 1924, when he was already in prison, he published an article in which he simply criticized pre-war German foreign policy as hopelessly indecisive. There had been two alternatives: ‘. . . they should have either decided to conquer farmland, dispensing with overseas trade, colonies, and excessive industrialization, in which case the German government should have recognized that this could only be achieved in alliance with Britain against Russia; or, if they wanted sea power and overseas trade, this would only be possible in alliance with Russia against England’. But, at the time, they had been unable to decide between the two alternatives. Hitler does not let on that at this point he was already leaning towards an alliance with Britain.95
During his imprisonment Hitler had the opportunity for a more thorough consideration of this whole set of issues. In particular, he began to combine the ‘space question’ in a systematic way with the ‘race question’. Already in the first volume of Mein Kampf, which had been largely written in Landsberg, he had developed the idea of an alliance with Britain, in order ‘with our backs covered’ to be able to launch ‘the new German drive to the East’ in the direction of Russia. However, once again he expressed these ideas within a critique of pre-1914 German policy.96 It was only after his release and with his obsessive urge to communicate curbed by a speaking ban, that he wrote down the basic ideas of a future foreign policy unequivocally in the second volume of Mein Kampf. He returned to his ideas about pre-war German foreign policy, now openly advocating alliances with Britain and Italy97 and stated that abandonment of the South Tyrol was the precondition for the improvement of relations with Italy.98 He then devoted a lengthy section – typical of his linking of foreign policy issues with his racial obsessions – to the question of whether the influence of international Jewry would prevent these alliances; his response was a lengthy emotional declaration, culminating in the claim that in the end the ‘evil enemy of humanity’ would be overcome.99
The next chapter – ‘Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy’ – focused on the core of his ideology: ‘We shall stop the endless German drive to the South and West and direct our gaze towards the lands in the East. At long last we shall bring to an end the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the territorial policy of the future. . . . Neither western nor eastern orientation should be the future goal of our foreign policy but an eastern policy in the sense of acquiring the necessary soil for our German people.’100 The ‘destruction of the Soviet Union’ would, however, not only result in the acquisition of ‘soil’ but also a further vital goal would have been achieved. Since he saw in ‘Russian Bolshevism . . . the attempt by the Jews during the twentieth century to secure world domination’, the ‘end of Jewish hegemony in Russia’ would simultaneously destroy the basis of these plans for world domination, whose next target was, in his opinion, definitely Germany.101
In this way he was able to combine his imperialist and racist goals. Radical anti-Semitic aims were the link between his future domestic and foreign policy objectives. The violent ‘removal’ of the Jews from Germany was now supplemented by a war of conquest, which was intended to put an end to ‘Jewish rule in Russia’. However, on the publication of the second volume in 1926, such far-reaching views must have appeared completely unreal and utopian.
In the second volume Hitler also develops another element in his ideology for the first time in a systematic manner: his views on ‘racial hygiene’ [i.e. eugenics]. During his imprisonment he had evidently studied the relevant literature and adopted central demands of ‘racial hygiene’, which in Germany (but not only there) was, at the time, considered a science. This was noted with considerable satisfaction in a journal article published in 1931 by its leading proponent, the Munich professor, Fritz Lenz.102 Basically, it involved subjecting the population to eugenic assessment, with the hope of identifying the ‘racially valuable’ elements, on the one hand, and the ‘inferior’ and ‘hereditarily diseased’ elements, on the other. The aim was then to ‘improve the racial value’ of the German nation by introducing measures to encourage the former to reproduce and to prevent the latter from doing so. Hitler now confirmed that in a future völkisch state this would be taken care of: ‘the demand that defective people should be prevented from begetting defective offspring is a totally rational demand and its systematic implementation represents a most humane act.’103 This formulation was chosen with care and implied that ‘inferiors’ should be compulsorily sterilized, as was indeed the aim of radical exponents of racial hygiene at the time. Hitler continued: ‘The prevention of the ability and opportunity to procreate on the part of physically degenerate and mentally sick people, over a period of only six hundred years, would not only free mankind from an immeasurable misfortune, but would lead to a recovery which appears scarcely conceivable today.’104 Professor Lenz was delighted: ‘Hitler is the first politician, possessing considerable influence, who has recognized that racial hygiene is a crucial political task and is prepared actively to support it.’