I must confess that he did not, at that time, strike me as a significant, much less a brilliant, man.
—HANS EHARD, DEPUTY PROSECUTOR, AFTER HIS FIRST INTERROGATION OF HITLER
General Ludendorff was indeed allowed to return to his villa at Sollen-Ludwigshöhe for house arrest. Barricading himself in his study, Ludendorff worked hard on his defense. His wife, Margarethe, said he worked harder now than he had on the eve of the putsch. He also entertained freely, receiving supporters and strangers alike, clearing off space from the coffee table piled high with books, magazines, and newspapers. “He attached importance to every story they [the guests] told or any comment they made,” she said, adding that he viewed it all as “parts of a mosaic.”
Surprise, disgust, amusement, and amazement vied for primacy in public discussions of Ludendorff’s poor judgment in joining this half-baked putsch. The general might commit suicide out of shame, his critics speculated, rather than face the further indignity of a trial for treason. Ludendorff’s epitaph was already being written: “A good soldier wrecked on the reefs of fantastic politics.”
Göring, meanwhile, had crossed into Austria and now lay recuperating in a private clinic in Innsbruck. Weak from loss of blood and lack of sleep, he endured the excruciating pain from the gunshot wound, which had become infected, perhaps from the grime picked up when the bullets ricocheted off the muddy stones near the royal palace. He drifted in and out of consciousness, imagining he was again fighting a street battle and biting his pillow in between unnerving cries and groans.
It was at this time that Göring received his first morphine shots. They would soon become a daily habit, launching an addiction that would persist for years. It would soon send him to the Långbro insane asylum in Sweden, and, in his many attempts at treatment for his expensive craving, he would turn to binge eating and gargantuan meals for which he later became notorious.
On December 24, Göring left the clinic on crutches strung out on morphine, shaking, and “white as snow,” as Carin put it. The Görings still could not return to Munich, where their villa was being watched, their mail being read, and their bank accounts frozen. They moved into the hotel Tiroler Hof, where Storm Troopers gave them a Christmas tree, every candle adorned with white, black, and red ribbons. The Tiroler Hof afforded them their accustomed luxury, thanks to the generosity of the proprietor and other supporters.
Most of the other Nazi exiles, by contrast, roamed about “like tramps,” as Putzi put it. Putzi was then using a false passport, along with a disguise of dark glasses and a new set of “Franz-Josef mutton-chop whiskers.” He had been helped across the border into Austria by a group of railway workers, many of whom had moved to the right politically during the economic chaos. One of these men put him up in a small flower-shop in Kufstein, where he slept on the floor underneath rows of chrysanthemums.
Among other things, Putzi used his time in Austria to visit Hitler’s forty-year-old half-sister, Angela Raubal, who lived in poverty on an upper-floor apartment on Schönburgstrasse in Vienna. At the age of twenty, she had married Leo Raubal, a tax official in Linz, though the marriage was cut short by his premature death seven years later. Angela was now raising her three young children.
Putzi was surprised by their living conditions. Inside, behind the door she barely opened, which he attributed to embarrassment, was a place of squalor. Putzi invited her and her eldest daughter to a café, where he found Angela shy and her daughter, by contrast, graceful and uninhibited. This was the sixteen-year-old Geli, the future mistress of Adolf Hitler.
That December, Angela crossed into Germany and visited Hitler in prison. She found her half-brother in a better state than she had expected. His arm was healing, given his regular program of massage, although he still could not raise it higher than shoulder-level or move it without pain. He had been eating again; his first meal after his hunger strike had been a bowl of rice.
Gifts had been piling up in his cell. There was a five-volume edition of the writings of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1920), a German dictionary, an unidentified book in a “foreign language,” as well as paper, two quill pens, and a penholder. All of these had been sent on December 4 by Hitler’s lawyer, Lorenz Roder, a forty-one-year-old Munich public defender whom Hitler had met in 1922. Roder had then represented Hitler’s colleagues who had attacked a rival speaker at a beer hall.
Just before Angela’s arrival at Landsberg, someone had brought a Christmas package from Winifred Wagner, the English wife of composer Richard Wagner’s son, Siegfried. It included a wool blanket, a jacket, long underwear, socks, sausages, zwieback crisp bread, and a copy of her husband’s libretto for Schmied von Marienburg. Hitler’s high spirits, several visitors noted, were returning.
The New York Times ran a piece on his detention at Landsberg. “[It] is by no means an unpleasant place of confinement,” the story began, noting the privileges the incarcerated enjoyed, such as books, exercise, and a progressive approach that placed few onerous restrictions on its prisoners. Hitler was taking full advantage of this leniency, except for exercise, which he refused to do at that time on account of his shoulder. The trial, it reported, would not take place anytime soon because Bavarian authorities were waiting for Hitler’s popularity to subside.
But Hitler’s popularity showed no signs of significant decline, at least in many right-wing and nationalist circles. Some of these supporters were urging the government to grant a pardon, or offer some kind of amnesty. Dr. Richard Graf du Moulin Eckart, a professor in the German philology and history department at Munich’s Technische Universität, put the question directly to Gustav von Kahr in a private meeting. The Bavarian leader rejected the proposal.
An internal government memorandum had a more insightful plan for addressing the problems raised by Hitler and the putsch. The note recommended a three-pronged strategy that emphasized an aggressive prosecution of the plot’s ringleaders, a complete disarming of the private paramilitary bands, and a concentrated effort to discover and then block the flow of funds that sustained their newspaper, pamphlets, office of twenty employees, and their wide range of propagandistic activities. To what extent this advice would be heeded remained to be seen.
That Christmas, Blute Café in Munich’s bohemian quarter of Schwabing staged a tableau vivant entitled Adolf Hitler in Prison. As the curtain rose, the audience glimpsed a man sitting alone at a desk, his head in his hands, and his back turned to the audience. Snow fell outside his window. An angel flew into the lonely cell bringing an illuminated Christmas tree. Offstage, a men’s choir sang “Silent Night.”
At the climax of the performance, the man slowly turned around to face the audience. Many in the café thought for a second that this might be Hitler himself. The photographer Heinrich Hoffmann was proud of his success in choosing a suitable actor for this role. The lights were switched on and several people, with teary eyes and muffled sobs, Hoffmann said, quickly put away their handkerchiefs.
THE TRIAL, IT was announced in December, would be not by jury, but by a tribunal of judges. “It is generally felt,” the New York Tribune reported, “that [Hitler] will be executed.” Other observers, like the American vice consul in Munich, Robert Murphy, predicted a long imprisonment and then deportation.
Hitler was still not cooperating with authorities. After threatening suicide and launching a short-lived hunger strike, he now refused to talk. The prosecutor, Ludwig Stenglein, a conservative Bavarian in his fifty-fourth year, was getting nowhere with the recalcitrant prisoner until he handed over the questioning to his deputy. This was Hans Ehard, a young lawyer from a Bamberg Catholic family who looked much younger than his thirty-six years of age. Ehard had just been promoted to the position the previous month. In fact, he had only served in this capacity for seven days when Hitler stormed the beer hall.
Ehard, however, would prove to be an inspired choice. As a boy, a son of a local government official, Ehard had wanted to be a judge. At law school in Munich and Würzberg, he had shown his potential, graduating magna cum laude. He had served during the war as a clerk for the military court, moving with his regiment to Russia, Serbia, and France, and earning an Iron Cross Second Class among other medals.
Since then, he had moved to Munich with his wife, Anna Eleonore, or Annelore, the daughter of a brewery owner, and their three-and-half-year-old son, Carlhans. Ehard loved to read and play the cello in a string quartet, though he would have less time for these pursuits. He had just been handed the most high-profile case of his career.
The young prosecutor was a thinker. People often criticized him, he later said, for not being energetic enough, or hesitating too long before a major decision, and he understood those criticisms. That was his temperament. It was deliberate, reflective, and methodical. “Know yourself and always control yourself” was one of his mottos. Another was to “recognize what is important, hope for the best, and do what is possible.” Ehard would, of course, need every advantage that hard-earned perspective could provide given the ordeal that lay ahead.
On December 13, 1923, the young prosecutor took the train to Landsberg to see if he could, as Stenglein put it, “get something out of Hitler.” It would be a long day. Ehard sat across a small table from Hitler, who took his seat in a wicker chair, his arm still in a sling.
Ehard asked if Hitler was still in pain.
There was no answer.
Was he prepared for the talk? Ehard next asked.
Hitler just stared at him, his pale-blue eyes “hard and repellent,” shooting daggers of hate. Ehard felt that Hitler, as he later put it, “was going to eat me.”
Ehard advised him of his right to hire a lawyer.
There was still no response.
He was only here to do his job, Ehard continued, still speaking calmly as possible and treading carefully as if he were handling “a raw egg.”
“I have nothing to say,” Hitler eventually declared, turning toward the wall. He would not be deceived by any lawyer tricks, he added, and everything that he had to say was going in a memoir that he planned to write.
When Ehard pressed further, asking about his actions, accomplices, and background, Hitler did not budge, claiming that he would not “jeopardize [his] political career by giving you a statement.”
Cooperation was in his own interests, Ehard countered, as well as those of his fellow accused. Hitler shrugged. He had his own role in history to consider and the verdict of this court meant nothing to him.
Ehard then had an idea. He asked the stenographer to pack up the typewriter and leave the room. He put away pen and paper. Claiming to be intrigued by his politics, Ehard said he wanted to talk. “There’ll be no record, no protocol,” he said. “We’ll just talk.”
As Ehard later put it, this simple ruse worked “like a charm.”
Hitler launched into a long political harangue as if he were addressing a beer hall full of fanatical supporters rather than a single prosecutor in the prison’s visiting room. He could not answer a simple question with a clear, concise response, spewing invective and sometimes also spraying saliva around the room. Ehard later joked that he could have used an umbrella.
The torrent ran on for five hours. At the end, the prosecutor thanked Hitler for “the illuminating interview” and went to type up every point he could remember. It would be a document fifteen pages in length. This was an important start, providing insight into Hitler’s upcoming strategy, but Ehard feared that Hitler would, as he threatened, save his best arguments for the trial.
BY JANUARY 1924, the prosecution had narrowed the number of main defendants to ten. In addition to Adolf Hitler, there would be Gen. Erich Ludendorff, still under house arrest; Lt. Col. Hermann Kriebel, the commander of the Kampfbund and alleged military planner of the putsch; Ernst Pöhner, the judge and former police chief; Dr. Wilhelm Frick, his close ally in the police department.
The leaders of three prominent paramilitary societies that comprised the Kampfbund were also included: Capt. Ernst Röhm of the Reichskriegsflagge; Friedrich Weber of the Bund Oberland; and Wilhelm Brückner, leader of the Munich Storm Troopers. The last two defendants were young, minor figures in the plot: Ludendorff’s stepson Heinz Pernet and Robert Wagner, a student accused of helping rally cadets at Munich’s infantry officer training academy to the putsch.
Each of the defendants was going to be charged with the crime of high treason. This was defined by Article 80 of the law code as the attempt to change the constitution of Germany or of its federal states with the use of violence. (Treason, by contrast, was the divulging of state secrets to a foreign power.) The penalty for a conviction of high treason would be life in prison or fortress confinement.
But what about the death of four policemen, the kidnapping of government ministers, the assault on Jewish citizens, the theft of trillions of marks, and attacks on the Munich Post? Significantly, there were no charges for any of these crimes. This strategy of focusing the case solely on the question of high treason would generate considerable criticism.
What’s more, why was the trial taking place in Munich?
Technically, the trial of Adolf Hitler should never have been held there. A special state court, the Staatsgerichtshof, had been established in Leipzig on July 21, 1922, with the passage of the Law for the Protection of the Republic, to try cases of high treason. The Social Democratic–controlled parliament had pushed for this legislation to counter the wave of political upheaval and murder that culminated with the assassination of Germany’s Jewish foreign minister, Walther Rathenau.
Bavaria, however, had refused to recognize this law. It was a matter of principle, its advocates argued, emphasizing the necessity of clinging to state’s rights, or what remained of them, against the encroachments of the central government. Besides, it already had its own institution for punishing crimes against the state: the so-called People’s Court, which had been set up in Bavaria in November 1918 as an emergency measure to prosecute defendants caught in the act of committing a nonpolitical crime, such as murder, manslaughter, rape, burglary, arson, or looting. This institution had since then expanded its jurisdiction to other offences, including cases of high treason.
The People’s Court, reestablished in July 1919, had another unusual feature. It circumvented the traditional legal system with its emphasis on quick verdicts without the right of appeal. The name of the institution derived from the fact that this court operated as a tribunal of five judges: two professionals and three laymen selected from the male population. In practice, however, the presiding judge had a large say in the appointment of the men on the bench. This influence, coupled with the total absence of any judicial review, made the presiding judges of the People’s Court, as one Munich lawyer put it, virtual “judicial kings.”
It was this institution that the Bavarian Ministry of Justice now insisted had jurisdiction in this case. But the problem with the People’s Court was that, since the Weimar Constitution had gone into effect in August 1919, local judicial organs like this had become unconstitutional and illegal. Many people suspected that Bavaria’s stubborn refusal to comply with the constitution was because its authorities hoped to protect the defendants or, more likely, hide some secrets of their own.
Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser had certainly seemed tainted by their complicity in the plot, no matter how much they emphasized that they had suppressed the revolt. With a nudge from authorities, eager to distance themselves from the fiasco, they cast the events of November 8–9, 1923, in official statements as the “Hitler putsch.” Hitler, for his part, was only glad to oblige, claiming responsibility, no matter how much this inflated his own role in the affair.
But why did Berlin, clearly in the right legally, not press the matter? For one thing, insisting on federal jurisdiction would probably have required the use of force, which authorities, in the aftermath of the putsch, wanted to avoid. Stresemann’s government had also lost a vote of confidence on November 23, 1923, and the chancellor had resigned. New elections were imminent. Politicians in Berlin were in the meantime reluctant to enter the Munich hornet’s nest and force a measure that would be enormously unpopular with many voters in Bavaria.
For Berlin, then, allowing the trial to proceed in Munich seemed to offer the path of least resistance. For Munich, however, the problems were only beginning.
To start with, there was no courtroom large or secure enough for such a monumental trial. Authorities ignored Munich wits who suggested that they hold it in the Bürgerbräu. They also dismissed other proposals as impractical, such as holding the trial in a small town outside the city such as Straubing, or even at Landsberg Prison. The rejection of the latter, however, had come after the warden, in a burst of enthusiasm, had started renovating the second floor of the fortress in preparation of the proceedings. He had already selected a double cell for Ludendorff’s use and handpicked a guard to serve as his valet.
By February 1924, the Bavarian Ministry of Justice had settled on the Reichswehr Infantry School as the location for the trial. Once the site of the Bavarian Army’s war academy and later a prestigious officer-training academy, this institution had been shut down after the beer hall putsch because the vast majority of its cadets had joined Hitler and marched under the swastika banner to overthrow the government.
Rumors circulated that the trial would last only a few days before the compromised Bavarian authorities would put an end to what would surely be an embarrassing spectacle. Others predicted that the trial would never make it that far, most likely postponed or canceled at the last minute. Gustav von Kahr was said to be the Machiavellian power behind the scenes, the Dr. Frankenstein of Munich, or the tinkerer who had created a monster that would crush him.
Clearly Bavaria preferred a quick, quiet trial out of the spotlight. The less attention, the better. Hitler, on the other hand, wanted quite the opposite. Putzi remembered one conversation with Hitler on a visit to his cell before the trial. “What can they do to me?” Hitler asked, with little Egon sitting in his lap and munching on sweets. He only needed to reveal the collaboration of the Bavarian authorities and the entire basis for the prosecution would shatter.
The People’s Court had scheduled the trial to open on the morning of February 18, 1924. But a few days before, the proceedings were abruptly postponed, just as several skeptics had predicted. Then, on the day the trial was supposed to begin, there was some other dramatic news: Both Gustav von Kahr and General von Lossow had resigned from office.
Berlin had long been exerting pressure on Bavaria to remove its highest-ranking military commander for his “mutinous” actions. By this point, the Bavarian cabinet no longer supported him, nor did it wish to retain Kahr, who, in turn, had grown weary of the office. It had, in his opinion, brought responsibility for difficult problems without granting him enough power to solve them.
But if these moves were somehow supposed to silence rumors of a high-placed scandal and cover-up, they did not succeed. Munich was now a cauldron of speculation and rumor-mongering. All of this was, of course, made worse by the lack of forthright communication from the government.
Various patriotic societies rallied support to stop the trial, which they predicted would cause national disgrace. One prominent group of war veterans appealed to no less than Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. The famous leader, however, declined to intervene on the grounds that he knew his wartime colleague, General Ludendorff, would not want any special treatment.
As the new opening day of February 26 approached, many people questioned if the trial would in fact begin. If so, would it be held entirely behind closed doors? Other people wondered if the witnesses would dare to show up. Kahr, for one, was receiving death threats. He changed offices, hired bodyguards, and refused to appear at the opera or theatre unless he remained backstage surrounded by detectives. One story said the subpoena for the trial had reached him in his latest hiding place: an insane asylum.
Several defendants were, likewise, reported to be in poor health and unable to testify. Hitler needed surgery for his shoulder injury, and his supporters were trying to seek another postponement. Others said he needed mental help to treat his depression. Frick was complaining of insomnia, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and thoughts of suicide. Pöhner had been rushed to the hospital for an undisclosed gastrointestinal disorder, prompting wild speculation that he had been poisoned. According to Völkischer Kurier, three or four of the defendants had launched another hunger strike.
Of the many rumors in the cafés and beer halls of Munich on the eve of the trial, one of the most fantastic—and feared—was the threat that diehard Nazi thugs and hooligans would swarm into town, infiltrate the courtroom, overpower security, and whisk away the defendants in preparation for a planned second putsch. This time, the Hitlerites warned, they would not fail.
Bavaria called in reinforcements in military and state police, and promised to be ready.