Hitler

various Munich jails were Dr. Weber, Pohner, Dr. Frick, Rohm, and others. The government had not dared to arrest Ludendorff. Hitler himself apparently felt he was in the wrong simply because he had survived. In any case, he considered his cause lost. For a few days he considered—how seriously it is impossible to say—cheating the firing squad by starving himself to death in a hunger strike. Anton Drexler later claimed credit for talking him out of this plan. The widow of his slain friend, Frau von Scheubner-Richter, also helped him come through the depression of this period. For the shots fired in front of the Feldherrnhalle meant not only the sudden end of three years of progress that had verged on the miraculous; it also meant a terrible collision with reality. Hitler’s whole system of tactics had been demolished.

Characteristically enough, he regained his spirits when it became apparent that an ordinary court trial was in the offing. He instantly saw his chance for playing a dramatic role. Later he referred to the defeat of November 9, 1923, as “perhaps the greatest stroke of luck in my life.” As part of the good fortune he must have included the opportunity offered by this trial, which shook him out of his despondency and cast him in his favorite role, that of gambler. Once more he could stake everything on a single card. The disaster of the bungled putsch could be converted into a demogogic triumph.

The trial for high treason opened on February 24, 1924, in the former Infantry School on Blutenburgstrasse. Throughout the proceedings, all parties were tacitly agreed “on no account to bring up the ‘central facts’ of the events under discussion.” The defendants were Hitler, Ludendorff, Rohm, Frick, Pohner, Kriebel, and four other participants, while Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser appeared as witnesses. Hitler made maximum capital of this strange confrontation, which corresponded so little to the complicated alliances of the recent past. He did not want to follow the example of the perpetrators of the Kapp putsch, who had all pleaded innocent: “Thereupon every man raised his hand to swear that he had known nothing. He had had no plans and no intentions. This was what destroyed the bourgeois world: the fact that they did not have the courage to affirm their deed, to stand before the judge and say, ‘Yes, this is what we did, we wanted to overthrow this state.’ ” Hitler, on the contrary, openly acknowledged his intentions, but rejected the charge of high treason:

I cannot declare myself guilty. True, I confess to the deed, but I do not confess to the crime of high treason. There can be no question of treason in an action which aims to undo the betrayal of this country in 1918. Besides, by no definition can the deed of November 8 and 9 be called treason; the word can at most apply to the alliances and activities of the previous weeks and months. And if we were committing treason, I am surprised that those who at the time had the same aims as I are not sitting beside me now. At any event, I must reject the charge until I am joined by those gentlemen who wanted the same action as we, who discussed it with us and helped prepare it down to the smallest details. I consider myself not a traitor but a German, who desired what was best for his people.⁵¹

None of those under attack knew how to answer these arguments. Hitler managed not only to turn the trial into a “political carnival,” in the phrase of one journalist, but also to reverse the roles of accuser and accused, so that the state prosecutor found himself forced to defend the former triumvirate. The presiding judge did not seem exactly displeased at these developments. He did not object to any of the denunciations and challenges hurled at the “November criminals,” and only when the applause from the audience became too stormy did he issue a mild rebuke. Even when Pohner referred to Germany’s President as “Ebert Fritze” and maintained that he was in no way bound by the laws of the Weimar Republic, the judge did not demur. As one of the Bavarian ministers stated at the cabinet meeting of March 4, the court had “never yet shown itself to be on any side but that of the defendants.”⁵²

Under these circumstances Kahr and Seisser soon lost hope. The former state commissioner looked fixedly before him and ascribed the responsibility for everything to Hitler. He kept falling into contradictions and did not seem to realize that he was playing into Hitler’s hands. Only Lossow resisted energetically. Time and again he accused his antagonist of lying: “No matter how often Herr Hitler says so, it is not true.” Speaking with the full arrogance of his class he described the Fuhrer of the NSDAP as “tactless, limited, boring, sometimes brutal, sometimes sentimental, and unquestionably inferior.” He had a psychiatrist certify that Hitler “considers himself the German Mussolini, the German Gambetta, and his following, which has inherited the Byzantine manners of the monarchy, speaks of him as the German messiah.” Hitler occasionally shouted Seisser down. For this he received no “penalty for contempt of court,” which, the presiding judge declared, would have only “slight practical value.” Instead, he was simply asked to control himself. Even the chief prosecutor interspersed his charges with tributes to Hitler, remarking on his “unique gifts as an orator,” and holding that it would be “unjust to describe him as a demagogue.” Benevolently the prosecutor stated: “He has always kept his private life impeccable, something which merits particular note, given the temptations to which he, as the celebrated leader of the party, was naturally subject…. Hitler is a highly gifted man, who has risen from humble beginnings to achieve a respected position in public life, the result of much hard work and dedication. He has devoted himself to the ideas he cherishes, to the point of self-sacrifice. As a soldier he did his duty to the utmost. He cannot be accused of having used the position he created for himself in any self-serving way.”

All of this helped Hitler turn the trial to his own purposes. Still, one should not fail to mark the boldness with which Hitler faced the proceedings, even after so recent a defeat. He assumed responsibility for the whole sorry operation and thus contrived to justify his actions in the name of higher patriotic and historic duty. Unquestionably, this was one of his “most impressive political accomplishments.” In his concluding speech, which is of a piece with his self-confident tone throughout the trial, he referred to a remark by Lossow, who described him as a mad “propagandist and rabble-rouser”:

In what small terms small minds think! I want you to come away from here with the clear understanding that I do not covet the post of a minister. I consider it unworthy of a great man to want to make his name go down in history by becoming a minister…. What I had in mind from the very first day was a thousand times more important than becoming a minister. I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I shall carry through this task, and when I do, the title of minister would be utterly ridiculous. When I first stood at Wagner’s grave, my heart overflowed with pride that here was a man who had forbidden his family to write on his stone, “Here lies Privy- councillor, Music Director, his Excellency Baron Richard von Wagner.” I was proud that this man and so many men in German history have been content to transmit their names to posterity, not their titles. It was not out of modesty that I wanted to be a “drummer” [i.e., rabble-rouser]; that is what counts, and everything else is a mere triviality.

The assumption being, of course, that he had every right to call himself a great man. Such unabashed self-aggrandizement did not fail to have its effect, and made Hitler from the very outset the central figure of the trial. True, the official transcript followed the “proper” order of rank to the bitter end, listing Ludendorff before Hitler; but the desire of all parties to avert any blame from the distinguished general again redounded to Hitler’s advantage. He was quick to recognize this. With his claim to sole responsibility he thrust himself past Ludendorff into the vacant position of leader of the entire volkisch movement. And as the trial went on, he managed to wipe out the desperado character of the undertaking. Similarly, he was unable to gloss over his own passive and confused behavior on the morning of the demonstration. More and more the events took on the’ semblance of a cleverly planned and daringly executed masterstroke. “The operation of November 8 did not fail,” he told the court, thus laying the ground for the future legend. As he came to the end of his statement, he prophesied his ultimate victory in politics and history in visionary terms:

The army we have trained is growing from day to day, from hour to hour. At this very time I hold to the proud hope that the hour will come when these wild bands will be formed into battalions, the battalions into regiments, the regiments into divisions, that the old cockade will be rescued from the mud, that the old banners will wave on ahead, that reconciliation will be achieved before the eternal judgment seat of God which we are ready to face. Then from our bones and our graves will speak the voice of that court which alone is empowered to sit in judgment upon us all. For not you, gentlemen, will deliver judgment on us; that judgment will be pronounced by the eternal court of history, which will arbitrate the charge that has been made against us. I already know what verdict you will hand down. But that other court will not ask us: did you or did you not commit high treason? That