1924: The Year That Made Hitler (13 page)

As marchers and policemen closed in on one another, hand-to-hand combat began—the marchers using rifles with fixed bayonets, the police using rifle butts and nightsticks. According to Lieutenant Michael Freiherr von Godin, who commanded the police line, a shot was fired. “A Hitler man who stood one half step left of me fired a pistol at my head,” he reported. “The shot went by my head and killed Sergeant Hollweg behind me. For a fraction of a second my company stood frozen. Then, before I could give an order, my people opened fire, with the effect of a salvo. At the same time, the
Hitler people commenced firing, and for twenty or thirty seconds a regular firefight developed.”

The half-minute of violence left four policemen dead. The damage was worse in Hitler’s ranks. Next to him, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, Hitler’s bright, intellectual star, had taken a fatal shot in the chest; two feet to one side and the bullet would have struck Hitler instead. As Scheubner-Richter fell, his arm tightly linked with Hitler’s, Scheubner-Richter had jerked the Nazi leader to the hard pavement; Hitler’s shoulder was severely dislocated. In the same row, Theodor von der Pfordten, the Bavarian Supreme Court judge who carried a copy of Hitler’s new constitution in his coat pocket, was also killed. Göring took a severe wound to the thigh. Hitler’s bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, covered Hitler’s prone body and was struck multiple times by bullets that would otherwise have found Hitler. Graf survived. Besides the four policemen, thirteen of Hitler’s men and one bystander were shot to death. The putsch was over. Hitler had stormed the gates and failed.

Ludendorff, despite the hail of fire, was unscathed. When the shooting ended, he was walking directly into the arms of the police, who arrested him on the spot. Pompously outraged, the giant of the German officer corps sputtered: “I’ll never respect a German officer’s uniform again.”

With help from some of his followers and “looking deathly pale,” said Hermann Esser,
⁴⁰
the injured Hitler made it toward the back of the march, which had scattered in all directions. He was taken into a yellow car driven by Dr. Walter Schultze, a Nazi sympathizer and physician who had joined the parade for just such an eventuality.
⁴¹
Even as Schultze drove away with his newest patient—Hitler was moaning in pain—Göring was, ironically, being treated in a house near the Odeon Square by a Jewish physician who may
have saved his life. Göring was later spirited out of Munich and, after briefly being arrested and hospitalized in the Bavarian Alps, made his escape into Austria, where many of the putschists had taken refuge.

Did Hitler consider fleeing to Austria? It was the easy and obvious way to go, though slipping through some unguarded border crossing in the woods or mountains could have been difficult with his injured shoulder. But if the idea of fleeing to Austria crossed Hitler’s mind, it may just as quickly have left it. Austria was, after all, not exile for him, but his country of origin. Once back in his homeland, he might not so easily get out again. Worse, exile to the little rump republic of the former Austro-Hungarian empire could spell political oblivion to the man who thought of himself as a modern Napoleon.

It seems more likely that Hitler was considering the ultimate exile, suicide, rather than cross-border exile; suicide was always Hitler’s plan B. As his rescuer drove south toward the Alps, Hitler asked him to turn off toward the tiny town of Uffing on Lake Staffel. There, he knew, Hanfstaengl had recently bought a villa. When Dr. Schultze knocked on the door, Hanfstaengl didn’t open it—he, too, had fled to Austria—but his wife did.

Helene Hanfstaengl was one of the joys, and frustrations, of Hitler’s life. A striking beauty of German-American extraction, Helene had met Putzi Hanfstaengl while he was running the family art book business on Fifth Avenue in New York (and taking his meals at the Harvard Club, where Franklin Roosevelt also dined); Hanfstaengl had brought her back to the land of her forefathers.
⁴²
During the period that Hanfstaengl was showing Hitler around Munich’s high-society scene, he often invited him to his Munich home for meals, and Hitler developed a special affection for Helene. Hanfstaengl once walked into the living room to find Hitler laying
his head in Helene’s lap and saying, “If only I had someone like you to take care of me.” Helene gently rebuked Hitler and removed his head. She swore to her husband later that Hitler was no man for any woman: “Believe me, he is an absolute neuter.”
⁴³

Now, Helene had another chance to take care of Hitler, at least briefly. She could hardly turn away a friend in severe pain. Only dimly aware of events in Munich, she installed Hitler in an attic bedroom, where he spent the next two days and nights under two “English travelling rugs”—thick blankets—that Hanfstaengl had bought as a student. Helene warned Hitler that the police would surely come looking for him there, and he was trying to arrange for pickup by his other wealthy friends, the Bechsteins. But on Sunday evening, the police arrived. Already deeply depressed, Hitler now went into a frenzy, according to Helene. Hitler “pulled out his revolver with his good hand and shouted, ‘This is the end. I will never let those swine take me. I will shoot myself first.’” But Helene was quicker, wresting the pistol from Hitler and throwing it into a nearby flour bin. Unable to do much because of his dislocated shoulder, Hitler gave up. Accepting the fact that he was about to go away, perhaps for a long time, he began writing instructions for Helene to pass on to his confederates.
⁴⁴
One of the most surprising and, for the Nazi Party, most portentous was to Alfred Rosenberg, the unruly intellectual who was editor of the
Völkischer Beobachter:
“Dear Rosenberg, From now on you will lead the movement.”
⁴⁵

Still in his white pajamas, his painful left arm in a sling, his Iron Cross First Class medal pinned to his coat, he descended the stairs and greeted Lieutenant Rudolf Belleville of the Bavarian State Police Weilheim station. Belleville apologized to Hitler but said he had to do his duty. Hitler responded, according to some sources, with a handshake, according to another with a tongue-lashing.
⁴⁶
Either way, Belleville had to look around for a driver for his police van to
ferry Hitler forty miles away to Landsberg Prison. He finally found a local beer-truck driver willing to do Sunday afternoon service; the man was, the police report noted, “a Social Democrat.” Belleville loaded his prisoner into the van and trundled him off to the year that would change his life, his strategy, and his sense of self.

CHAPTER SIX

Hitting Bottom

“It’s over! Let them see how well they do without me. I’m giving up.”

—
ADOLF HITLER, 1923
¹

“There was something in the air,” wrote prison guard Otto Lurker about the cold autumn night on which Adolf Hitler arrived in Landsberg Prison. “A storm ripped over the rooftops and watchtowers of the prison, shaking the gates and bars as though it were angrily trying to force its way in. Down in the cell blocks, all was dead silent except the occasional pacing of the night watchman.”

If ever a chapter in history called for a dark-and-stormy-night opener, the night of Hitler’s arrest and delivery into prison, November 11, 1923, would seem to be it. Another prison guard, Franz Hemmrich, wrote in his memoir: “It was a starless night, and a feeling of tense uncertainty had come over the wardens and guards.” Into this fraught atmosphere, around 11 p.m., walked a pale, distraught, and silent figure with his left arm in a sling and a shopworn
gray trench coat over his shoulders.
²
“A strand of dark hair fell across his washed-out visage, weakened by overstimulation and sleepless nights,” wrote Hemmrich. This down-and-out character was incongruously dressed in a formal frock coat—with an Iron Cross still pinned on its front
³
—the same outfit he’d worn for the putsch, for his failed march to Odeon Square, and during his escape to Ernst Hanfstaengl’s villa. Beside him, “their shadows flickering and dancing in the darkness before them,” walked Landsberg Prison warden Otto Leybold and two police officers, one of them leading a “strong dog” on a chain. The prison was still, except for the slamming of iron doors behind the men. In the dead of night, Adolf Hitler had arrived at what would be his home for most of the next thirteen months.

Located thirty-eight miles west of Munich, Landsberg Prison was a modern penal institution in a charming, small municipality on a meandering Alpine river called the Lech. The medieval town had the requisite cobblestoned streets and bubbling fountain, once the source of village drinking water, along with several bakeries and pubs on the main square; it could have been any of the rustic Bavarian market towns that dotted the region. What made Landsberg-on-Lech special was that it had a state prison on the edge of town and, nearby, a Reichswehr garrison. In years to come, Landsberg would become a hotbed of Nazism, a place of pilgrimage and—to its shame—the center of a collection of World War II slave labor camps.

But on this wind-lashed night, Landsberg was just a sleepy burg of no special renown. Its prison, a state-of-the-art penitentiary that housed five hundred convicts, had been opened in 1909. Though it had a brownish, faux-fortress main gate—two fat onion-domed towers with an arched entryway—the prison’s interior was thoroughly modern, consciously modeled on the latest American
“panopticon” design: four large wings, four stories high, joined in the middle by a central watch station with easy access to all cells in all four directions.

Yet there was one difference: Landsberg Prison had a special wing for special prisoners. It was called
die Festung
—the fortress. The so-called fortress was, however, nothing of the sort; it was simply a contemporary (in 1909) two-story, rectangular, whitewashed building with an orange tile roof connected by a corridor to the main prison.
^*
The building originally had been designed for small prison industries,
⁴
then became a prison wing for political inmates. The name,
Festung
(fortress), derived from Germany’s nineteenth-century tradition of putting political offenders, prisoners of conscience, and members of nobility, such as duelists, into a local fortress tower for an “honorable” imprisonment under relaxed conditions (dueling was a semi-tolerated crime of honor). In modern times, the name had remained, codified in law, but the fortress towers had not. Adolf Hitler, like many other political prisoners during the 1920s, would serve his time under “fortress arrest”—better translated as “honorable imprisonment” in a minimum-security facility (also called
custodia honesta
in some countries).
⁵
Hitler’s “fortress” looked more like a dormitory than a castle, though the dorm had two-foot-thick walls and bars on the windows. “Anyone who expected to find a romantic whiff of mossy castles with damp vaults… was bitterly disappointed,” wrote one prisoner.
⁶

A striking political irony awaited Hitler in Landsberg. The only prisoner in the fortress
^†
at this time was Count Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. The nationalist nobleman, in a fit of what he considered
patriotism, had shot dead Bavaria’s governor, Kurt Eisner, on a Munich street in 1919. By killing the Socialist governor, Arco-Valley (as he was generally called) helped unleash the political tumult that led to a three-week Communist takeover of Bavaria in April 1919 by a council republic. That short-lived republic ended in an appalling bloodbath, stirring up a far-right backlash that nurtured, among other groups, the Nazis. For murdering Eisner, the nationalistic Arco-Valley had been sentenced to death, only to have his term commuted to life under fortress (honorable) arrest. He occupied the only cell in Landsberg’s fortress building that was considered suitable for incarceration of a “notable figure”—“with space for a guard in the anteroom,” wrote Hemmrich, the prison guard.

On the notability scale, Hitler now outranked the near-forgotten count. With his name splashed across Munich’s and Germany’s front pages, the pale man with the stubby mustache was clearly more prominent than the nobleman lying in fortress cell number five.
⁷
Like a garden-variety rich person being evicted from a hotel’s best suite to admit a suddenly arrived movie star, Arco-Valley was “unceremoniously dragged out of his sleep and installed in a cell in the prison hospital,” remembered Lurker. The awakened assassin “swore a blue streak” over his eviction and shouted that “if he had the chance he would kill this Hitler exactly as [he had Eisner] because this ‘painter’s apprentice’ was Germany’s greatest disaster!” wrote Hemmrich.
⁸
Still, Adolf Hitler got the best room.
⁹

But the best room was still spartan. Only about nine feet wide and twelve feet deep, cell number five contained a simple white metal bunk with mattress and blankets, a nightstand with a lamp, a small wooden writing table, two wooden chairs, and a wardrobe. Although he was locked in at night, Hitler’s cell had a real door that afforded more privacy than simple cell bars.
¹⁰
The room’s best features were two five-foot-high windows that opened inward and
admitted a great deal of light. From these windows, Hitler could see the twenty-foot-high stone wall surrounding the prison, standing about seventy-five feet away. Over the wall, from his second-floor vantage point, Hitler saw farm fields and the gently rolling countryside beyond; he liked to watch cars on a distant highway and dreamed of once again owning a luxury automobile like those he saw passing.
¹¹
No doubt the bars on the windows often served to bring him out of such reveries. One sunny-day photograph showed the barred double-casement windows casting a gridlike shadow on the wall above Hitler’s bed and reflecting off a large picture frame on the opposite wall, giving his cell the hemmed-in appearance of having barred windows on three sides.
¹²
It may have been better than a standard-issue cell, but it was no hotel room.