1924: The Year That Made Hitler (32 page)

By the end of August, Hitler thought he was moving into the final stages of his book. “He formally asked me to help him with proofing and corrections,” Hess wrote at the beginning of the month.
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As Hitler was becoming excited about the look of a book with his name on it, he told Hess the pages would have gilt edges and he even asked Hess to help him examine leather samples for the book’s spine and colors for its covers. Hitler was seeing the finished product before his eyes.

In early September, Hitler was looking a month ahead. On October 1, he would be eligible for parole. He was hoping for release from prison and worried about legal complications, especially the danger that he might be deported to Austria. For his book, he wanted immediate publication. Hitler knew he would need money right away, and not just for his lawyer. He already had his heart set on something else.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A Second Chance

“It is essential that Hitler, as the soul of the
völkisch
movement, be deported.”

—
MUNICH DEPUTY POLICE CHIEF

If Adolf Hitler had a personal weakness for worldly pleasures—besides his Austrian sweet tooth—it was his love of luxury cars. From his earliest days in politics, he had craved fine automobiles to drive him around Munich, giving him comfort and prestige at a time when both were in short supply. Status derived from the newly arrived monster machines with their bulging headlights and fold-back cabriolet roofs. For all of his sometimes backward-looking politics and anti-modernist attitudes—Hitler denounced the “financial tyranny” of big cities and loathed contemporary art—the Nazi leader was a high-tech junkie who loved the smooth calibration of a sumptuous touring car.
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His fascination with automobiles inspired his interest in building grand
Autobahnen
and, someday, a “people’s car” that would be called a Volkswagen.

Hitler did not drive. He said he had learned but never put the skill into practice for fear that his enemies would stage a street accident to embarrass him. But Hitler was a happy passenger who loved being chauffeured around the city or into his beloved Alps. He was, by his own accounts, a pesky backseat driver, constantly telling his drivers to speed up or slow down, constantly showing off his knowledge of technical details. Hitler was especially fond of well-engineered machines produced by entrepreneurs like Karl Benz, who called his cars Benz, and Gottlieb Daimler, who named his cars after a rich customer’s daughter—Mercedes. (In 1927, Benz and Daimler would join forces to build Mercedes-Benz.) On the biggest night of his political career—the 1923 putsch—Hitler had arrived in a big red Mercedes at the Bürgerbräukeller. But since the day the putsch failed, and he was driven to Putzi Hanfstaengl’s villa outside Munich in a doctor’s car, Hitler had not even sat in an automobile—only in police vans.

In mid-September 1924 Hitler was still languishing in Landsberg Prison, hoping for parole on October 1. But his release was by no means certain. Pressures were building to hold him behind bars—or to deport him to Austria. Both police and prosecutors were keenly aware of Hitler’s potential for repeat mischief, and wanted to keep him off the streets and out of the beer halls. They would soon mount a campaign to annul his parole chances. Knowing his situation could be precarious, Hitler had for months fastidiously maintained good relations with Warden Leybold and his guards, hoping for a perfect “good behavior” report. Yet his lust for a new car led him to a rare lapse that could derail his hopes and plans.

On Friday, September 12, Hitler summoned to the prison Jakob Werlin, the Benz dealer in Munich. Werlin’s Benz Garages, as his dealership was called, was conveniently situated near the
Völkischer Beobachter
office in the Schellingstrasse. One can only imagine the
sight of Hitler and Werlin in the Landsberg Prison visitors’ room, the slick Benz car brochure spread out before them. It is a scene straight out of all the car showrooms in the modern world—with the slight difference that the windows had bars and the customer had no money. What Hitler did have was a book manuscript, a reservoir of hope, and a lot of chutzpah. His only problem, he told car salesman Werlin, was deciding between the forty-horsepower and the fifty-horsepower models. In his wavering, Hitler made a decision that would soon come to haunt him.

Werlin was barely out of the prison when Hitler sat down and banged out a letter to him. The typewriter that wrote
Mein Kampf
now wrote a customer’s plea for a better deal on a luxury car. Hitler was haggling by mail with a car salesman. The Benz that had become the car of Hitler’s dreams was priced at twenty-six thousand marks.
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Hitler began by mulling the choices: “Actually I think the 11/40 would meet my needs at the moment. The only thing that concerns me… is the fact that it runs 300 rpm’s faster than the 16/50.” Hitler feared that the lower-powered vehicle might run hot and need replacing too often. “I won’t be able to afford a new car every two or three years,” he whined. Like car buyers everywhere, Hitler tried to poor-mouth his way into a lower price: “Even if I am released on October 1, I can’t expect significant income from my work [book] until the middle of December. I’ll be forced to get a loan or an advance from somewhere. That’s why a couple thousand marks make a big difference. In addition I have to pay my court and trial expenses which already make my hair stand on end.… I would be grateful if… you could inquire as to whether I could get a discount.”

Hitler wanted Werlin to go to the top—the Benz headquarters in Mannheim, an industrial city on the Rhine. Hitler knew that Werlin had plans to call or to travel there on Monday. A cut rate for Hitler, the famous Nazi, could be granted or denied only by the
main office. Hitler wanted to get his supplicating plea into Werlin’s hands before that Monday meeting. In his mad rush to procure a car, he took an expedient step: he passed his letter to a prison visitor, Wolfram Kriebel, the young son of Colonel Kriebel. If mailed in Munich on Monday morning, Hitler’s letter would reach Werlin on the same day.

It was a reckless error. Giving a letter to a departing prison visitor was blatant smuggling. The act violated censorship rules that required every piece of mail entering or leaving the prison to be examined and read (many letters
to
Hitler had already been confiscated by the censors, including one that contained a poem with the line, “We will break down the slammer’s bars”). By skirting the rules, Hitler was jeopardizing a year’s worth of model behavior and months of hard labor at his typewriter. If forced to stay at Landsberg and serve his full five-year sentence, Hitler as a political force could dissipate, remembered only as a spasm of extremism in a country still finding its way out of the disaster of world war. With the Nazi movement outside the prison already in a whorl of self-destruction, Hitler’s continued absence would almost certainly have doomed his party’s players to walk-on, walk-off roles in a Germany that, at that very moment, was beginning to halt inflation and find its political legs.

At first, Hitler’s letter traveled under the radar. On the very day that it was mailed—September 15—Warden Leybold was sending the Bavarian court a status report on his star inmate’s time in Landsberg Prison. “He is a man of order and discipline,” Leybold wrote, who “makes every effort to adhere to the rules of the institution.” With Hitler’s earlier hunger strike and shouting matches in mind, Leybold noted that Hitler had “without doubt become more mature and calm than he was.” And not only that: Hitler could be expected to behave peaceably upon his release because he had no “ideas of
revenge towards officials from the opposite [political] camp who foiled his plans in November 1923.” Hitler’s face-to-face meetings with the warden over the months had obviously paid off; Leybold, like so many others before him, had been swept off his feet by the Hitlerian force field.

But not everyone was so impressed with Hitler’s political behavior and his political intentions. Outside the prison a drumbeat to thwart Hitler’s parole was rising. On September 23, the Munich deputy police chief submitted to the court a scathing warning that, if released, Hitler could be expected soon to be up to his old tricks. His very presence on the political playing field could save the now foundering, still-banned Nazi Party and the
völkisch
groups. “He represents a permanent danger to the internal and external security of the state,” read the statement. “There should be no discussion of releasing [Hitler].” In the unfortunate event that the Nazi leader were paroled, argued the police, “then it is essential that Hitler, as the soul of the
völkisch
movement, be deported.”

With the police report on the table, and with Hitler’s possible parole only one week away, there came another blast against releasing Hitler. This one came from State’s Attorney Stenglein, the man who had prosecuted Hitler at his trial. Stenglein ominously objected to parole not only for Hitler but also for Weber and Kriebel. “There can be no discussion of the defendants turning away from criminal intentions,” Stenglein wrote. He cited violence, kidnapping, and theft during their putsch attempt. The prosecutor’s statement even revisited Hitler’s 1922 conviction for assaulting political leader Otto Ballerstedt; paroled after serving only one month of a three-month sentence, Hitler had clearly violated his probation by staging a coup attempt. In addition, argued the prosecutor, Hitler was linked to recent illegal efforts by Captain Röhm to reestablish his outlawed paramilitary under a new name, the Frontbann.

In the midst of this barrage, Stenglein learned about Hitler’s smuggled letter and others by Weber and Kriebel. He indignantly demanded an explanation from Warden Leybold, who quickly investigated and produced a report showing a history of letter-smuggling by Kriebel and Weber over recent months but only one violation by Hitler. Despite the unsettled state of their case, the court on September 25 ignored both the police and the prosecutor, approving parole for Hitler, Kriebel, and Weber, effective October 1.

Stenglein’s office flew into action to try to block the parole. Working over the weekend, Stenglein’s lawyers—almost certainly led by Deputy Prosecutor Hans Ehard—generated a long appeal to the court. It began with the smuggled letters (nine examples in all)
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but also seized on Hitler’s clandestine participation in efforts to restart Röhm’s new Frontbann. Documents seized in his apartment showed Röhm to be acting in his outside political activities “on assignment from Adolf Hitler,” and that Hitler had helped draft the new organization’s charter. Even Leybold, madly scrambling to get out of the hole he had dug for himself, began backing and filling. “If my office had been made aware… of the police department’s suspicions about efforts by our prisoners to promote a banned organization, our oversight of the letters would have been much stricter,” he stated.
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Yet Stenglein’s appeal had its intended effect: it stopped Hitler’s hoped-for release on October 1 while the Bavarian Supreme Court pondered the matter.

Meanwhile, the plot surrounding Hitler’s possible deportation had thickened. A Bavarian envoy was sent to Vienna to request that Austria agree to Hitler’s repatriation. But Austrian chancellor Ignaz Seipel said no; he would not accept Hitler even if he were shoved across the border. Since Hitler had fought in the German army, went the chancellor’s reasoning, he was no longer an Austrian. Legally dubious though this argument was, it brought to a halt any
hopes of deporting Hitler. The canny Austrians had stolen a march on the Bavarians, effectively deporting Hitler from his native land before their Bavarian cousins could deport him back into it. When this news reached Landsberg Prison, Hitler was “overjoyed,” wrote Hess. The two men celebrated that night with a glass of wine.

On October 6, the Bavarian Supreme Court denied Stenglein’s appeal, remanding Hitler’s case to the lower court. Summarily dismissing the chilling (and subsequently vindicated) warnings of the police and the prosecutors, the Supreme Court tossed the ball back to the court that had once already ruled in Hitler’s favor. It would take another two months for the judicial wheels to turn. Hitler was left temporarily in limbo.

A funk had fallen over the prison. Early autumn rain and fog had blanketed Landsberg, turning the cells and hallways cold, damp, and drafty. Gone were the outdoor walks and gardening adventures, the rowdy spirit of brothers in arms, the hopes of some of the men for an early release, and the renewal of the holy Nazi mission. Hitler’s mostly young Shock Troops were finally confronting reality: Landsberg had walls and bars that couldn’t be moved, even though some of the men occasionally tried rattling the iron staves that kept them penned up. “Gray melancholy, nerve-wracking boredom and a dull tedium set in among us and pressed on the hearts of the inmates,” wrote Kallenbach.

A kind of “prison psychosis” was taking hold, Kallenbach reported. “We began to feel empty and burned out.” Some men fell into long silences; others argued loudly and got into near-fights until they were separated by other inmates. Hemmrich, the prison guard, also wrote of “a noticeable and edgy stillness” among the prisoners. An inmate named Frosch—which means frog, so his nickname was Fröschl, or Froggie—began behaving oddly, sleepwalking
and splashing like a child in the bathtub; there was speculation that he was going crazy.

Even gung-ho troopers began wondering about the purpose of their whole undertaking. Many were receiving bad news from home, since their families had lost their breadwinners to prison; in some cases, they also suffered from the men’s now-sullied reputations as foolish radicals who had been thrown in jail. Some wives had been forced to take jobs as housemaids to make ends meet. They could hardly afford train fare to visit their husbands in Landsberg. A few of Hitler’s foot soldiers perhaps shared the feelings of one inmate who had written upon arriving at Landsberg Prison: “‘Hitler this, Hitler that,’ and ‘I got this for us,’ and ‘I got that’—that’s what I hear all day from some of the comrades here.… I’m fed up.… That’s the last time I’ll ever have anything to do with politics. Those on the outside who shout ‘Heil!’ all day can run their heads against the wall, for all I care. When I get out of here, it’s just going to be job and wife and family for me.” Other inmates began expressing misgivings even about the grand man himself. “I don’t have any doubts,” protested one prisoner in a story told by Kallenbach. “But hey, even the Boss could make mistakes, couldn’t he? What then?” To these young men, the future looked decidedly bleak and uncertain.