The Trial of Adolf Hitler

The rulers of the day made a miscalculation in locking me up. They would have been far wiser to let me make speeches all the time, without giving me any respite!

—ADOLF HITLER, JULY 27–28, 1941

The Nazis were operating clandestinely in the guise of various hunting, hiking, sporting, and singing clubs. Yet it was not the pursuit of authorities that challenged the party the most. It was instead the tensions and divisions within the underground organization itself.

There was a split between old party members who had remained in Munich under Rosenberg and those who had fled abroad—many of them, like Esser and Hanfstaengl, to Salzburg. There were those who wanted to merge with other legal right-wing parties and those who wanted to break away into splinter groups; those who wanted more nationalism, those more socialism; those who pressed to achieve their goals with revolutionary violence and those who wanted to wage a campaign for parliamentary elections as a political party; those who wanted to destroy the republic and those who sought to preserve the social status quo against a threat from the left that, in their eyes, seemed more dangerous. And on it went.

As these disputes festered, Hitler remained vague and aloof, refusing to take sides. By the middle of June 1924, Hitler was telling his supporters that, until he could participate fully in the realm of politics, he was going to withdraw. He forbade the use of his name by any faction.

Nor, for that matter, were they to visit him in prison or forward along any political communications. He spread the news of this request in letters written by himself and his new “secretary,” Hermann Fobke. “I have decided to withdraw from overt politics,” Hitler wrote on June 16, 1924, until he could regain his freedom and become again what he called “a real leader.” He stressed the word real.

Three weeks later, on July 7, Hitler confirmed this stance in public. He had, as the Völkischer Kurier reported, “resigned the leadership of the National Socialist movement.” He was being overwhelmed, he said, and he was, frustratingly, limited by what he could accomplish as long as he remained behind prison walls. He also claimed to suffer from a “general overwork,” and needed to concentrate on his latest project, which was going to be a “comprehensive book” outlining his autobiography and politics. He asked for privacy.

According to Landsberg records, Hitler had had at least one visitor every day in May and nearly every day in June. The number had slowed from April’s nearly 200 visits (from 160 people) to only 92 visits (62 people) in June. By July, the number of visits had dwindled to 26, or less than one a day. Still, this was too many for Hitler. On July 29, he repeated his request to be left alone.

Hitler was also worried about fellow defendant Ernst Röhm, who, since his release at the trial, had been busy uniting the members of the banned Storm Troopers and their banned Kampfbund allies into a new organization called the Frontbann. He would soon have 30,000 members. Hitler opposed this development for many reasons, not least the leverage such a centralized and potentially powerful body would give to its leader, who was already showing more independence and even an unwillingness to affiliate with any single political party.

When Röhm visited Landsberg on June 17, 1924, Hitler told him to stop this work immediately. Röhm ignored him and went on building up his Frontbann. He also recruited a new leader: General Ludendorff.

BY THE EARLY SUMMER, Hitler had received access to a second room at Landsberg, which was strewn with stacks of books, magazines, newspapers, and papers, scattered helter-skelter. Most of these items had been gifts. Other works had been borrowed from fellow prisoner Hermann Fobke, who was using his time of incarceration to finish his law thesis. Hitler was taking the opportunity, as he wrote in a letter of May 1924, to “read and also learn.”

By this time, Hitler was already deep in his writing project. On May 12, 1924, when a delegation of Nazis visited from Salzburg, Hitler was at work on his planned political manifesto. One of the visitors, Hans Prodinger, spoke of the project as offering “a thorough reckoning” against his opponents—the words “A Reckoning” would later serve as the book’s subtitle. By the end of the month, Hitler had a title: Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice.

A promotional brochure appeared in June 1924 announcing Hitler’s upcoming work of an estimated four hundred pages. Its contents were supposed to include an autobiographical discourse on his entrance into politics, the rise of the Nazi movement, and the inside account of the beer hall putsch. It also promised to treat various issues, such as “The Middle Class and the Social Question,” “Judaism and Marxism,” “Who started the Revolution?” “Crime or Stupidity?” “The Bolshevikization of Europe,” and a plan for how this could be stopped. In time, as he worked on the draft, the ideological rants would come to overshadow the settling of accounts with his enemies of the putsch, which had probably most attracted the publisher.

Many people would later claim credit for suggesting that Hitler write what would eventually become the Nazi Party’s canonical ideological treatise. Otto Strasser said that it was his brother Gregor, a veteran of the Landshut Storm Troopers, who first encouraged Hitler to put his thoughts on paper, because he was tired of being subjected to endless, repetitive speeches and he wanted to return to his card games. This is pure fiction. Strasser was not interned at Landsberg until February 4, 1924, and he remained there at the same time as Hitler for only twelve days, when the latter was transported to Munich for his trial. This short period was also two months after Hitler had already told the assistant state prosecutor, Hans Ehard, about his plans to write a memoir.

No more credible is the view that Hitler turned to the project as a way to avoid the squabbles among his subordinates and the necessity to take a stand. But Hitler had started writing well before he had withdrawn. The original plan for publication, after all, was July 1924.

A third view, however, has more plausibility. According to this theory, Hitler had turned to writing a book because he wanted to cash in on his newfound celebrity from the trial. Hitler could, no doubt, use any profits from the project to offset the court fines and legal fees, which were not small. (According to Lorenz Roder, the bill of 5,000 Reichsmarks would not be paid until 1934). But monetary compensation was clearly not the only, or even the main, reason.

As early as 1922, Hitler had thought of writing a book. The Völkischer Beobachter reported of such a plan, but at that time, Hitler had been too busy with his speeches and work with the party to make any progress. The confined space of the cell, by contrast, was ideal for focusing his energy, and the range of grievances from the putsch and trial left him with many grudges to settle.

“He occupies himself every day for many hours with the draft of his book,” the warden of Landsberg, Otto Leybold, wrote in autumn 1924. The style of the manuscript resembled a speech—no surprise, perhaps, given that this was Hitler’s preferred means of communication. His oratorical skills, however, did not transfer well from the beer hall onto the page.

Verbose, repetitive, and mired in long-winded digressions, filled with venomous hatred, Hitler’s clumsy, bombastic text abounds in artificially constructed terms formed by piling nouns upon nouns and meanders through a thicket of dependent clauses. The journalist Dorothy Thompson described an overwrought style that read like “one long speech” bogged down with ghastly rants about people and races, and written in “inaccurate German and [with] unlimited self-satisfaction.”

When Hitler discussed his hardships in Habsburg Vienna, for instance, he wrote: “He who has not himself been gripped in the clutches of this strangulating viper will never come to know its poisoned fangs.” This single sentence, early biographer Rudolf Olden observed from exile in the 1930s, “contains more mistakes than one could correct in an entire essay. A viper has no clutches, and a snake which can coil itself around a human being has no poison fangs. Moreover, if a person is strangled by a snake, he never comes to know its fangs.”

But there is another reason for the resemblance of Hitler’s manuscript to a speech. Several key passages in Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle”—as the manuscript would be retitled in February 1925—were in fact derived from Hitler’s speeches in Neithardt’s courtroom. This was particularly the case for the autobiographical section. The three basic points Hitler made about his life in Vienna and the lessons he claimed to have learned there all appear in strikingly similar structure and style to his first speech at the trial.

This is also the case for some other comments about Marxism (chapter 7) as well as foreign policy in a closed session on February 28 and then again in his final speech. His rants on the British and French schemes for the “Balkanization” of Germany would anchor chapters 13 and 14 of the second volume of Mein Kampf.

For years, historians believed that Hitler had dictated the text to fellow inmates, first to Emil Maurice and then Rudolf Hess. Hess’s then- fiancée and future wife, Ilse Pröhl, however, had long insisted that this was incorrect, and German historian Othmar Plöckinger has confirmed that in his pioneering studies of the text. After first writing out the manuscript by hand, Hitler switched, by early June 1924, to a typewriter, pecking it out himself with two fingers on a brand-new Remington portable, believed to have been a gift from Helene Bechstein.

The warden had provided a small varnished typewriter table and a large supply of paper. Winifred Wagner also sent Hitler paper, along with a package of pens, ink, erasers, and carbon paper. Someone else later brought him paper with the swastika—perhaps Nazi Party stationery that had survived the raid by the police. Additional privileges granted by the prison warden allowed Hitler, for a small fee, to keep his lights on for two extra hours. He was also up early in the morning, though this was not a habit for him, either before the putsch or later. Several prisoners recall hearing him type around five a.m.

After Hitler wrote a section of his manuscript, he sometimes took it to Rudolf Hess in Cell 5, and they discussed it over tea. On June 29, 1924, Hess wrote to his fiancée, Ilse, about Hitler’s progress, which, by this point, had reached his accounts of the First World War, or chapter 5. Hitler, or “the tribune,” as Hess called him, had read out the passage, slowing down and increasingly faltering, as he “made ever longer pauses” until finally dropping the page and sobbing.

By the end of the following month, Hitler had just finished writing his chapter on Vienna and his arrival to Munich. Hitler sat in the wicker chair in his corner of Hess’s cell, reading what would become chapters 3 and 4 of Mein Kampf. Hess felt the blood rush through his veins—he felt enraptured and breathless, he said. Surprisingly, he thought the language was exquisite. He predicted that he was listening to Germany’s “coming man.”

With the stream of visitors slowing, Hitler progressed rapidly with his manuscript. By the first week of August, Hitler had asked Hess to proofread the expanding text. Then, after the private reading sessions, Hitler started repeating his performances on Saturday evenings to a larger group in the common room. These were the sessions that the prison guards remembered hearing from the staircase. The sounds of Hitler reading to his captive audience may have also inspired the legend that he dictated the text.

By August, Hitler believed he was only a week or two away from completing the manuscript. He had already asked Hess to help choose the most fitting color combinations for the cover and spine to adorn his planned luxury edition. August, however, came and went. Hitler then thought the book might be done in October, as did the Landsberg warden. Indeed the dedication at the front of the published book to the sixteen “martyrs of the putsch” is dated October 16, 1924.

But this autumn publication date would also prove to be premature. Worse than Hitler’s underestimation of the amount of work ahead were the financial problems of the publisher, Franz Eher-Verlag, and the legal questions. As Hitler believed his release on parole was imminent, he did not want to jeopardize this fact. The hate-filled manuscript, outlining his plans for the future, contradicted on virtually every page his claim that he had withdrawn from politics.

Mein Kampf would not in fact be finished in the autumn of 1924, or even in prison at all. According to Emil Maurice, the manuscript was smuggled out of Landsberg hidden inside the wooden case of a gramophone player that had been donated by Helene Bechstein. For her services, Bechstein is believed to have received the original manuscript, or at least one of the typewritten versions. As for Maurice, he would receive the typewriter and one of the earliest printed luxury copies of the book, number 10, signed by the author, “To my loyal and brave shield bearer.”

Hitler would finish writing the manuscript in April 1925 at Obersalzburg, where the 782-page tome was restructured and divided into two volumes. The music critic for Völkischer Beobachter, Josef Stolzing-Cerny, and Rudolf Hess’s fiancée, Ilse Pröhl, did the lion’s share of the editorial work. The first volume of Mein Kampf was published on July 18, 1925, by the party’s Franz Eher-Verlag. The second volume appeared on December 11, 1926. By the end of the Second World War, the book had sold 12 million copies in eighteen languages.