Hitler and his God

The Landsberg Retreat

The failure of the putsch came as a shattering blow to Hitler, in the first place because he felt covered with ridicule. On arrival in the prison at Landsberg he was given a spacious cell – some say more comfortable than his room in Munich at that time – vacated for him by Anton von Arco auf Valley, the assassin of Kurt Eisner. Hitler refused to eat for something like a fortnight. Afterwards several visitors claimed the honour of having talked their Führer into eating again, among them Anton Drexler, Hans Knirsch (a Czechoslovakian Nazi), the ever faithful and present Helene Bechstein, and Helene Hanfstängl, on whom Hitler seems to have had a crush.

From a local celebrity Hitler had become a national hero, and he was even occasionally mentioned in the foreign press, to announce his demise as a politician. “The New York Times printed his political obituary on the front page: ‘The Munich putsch definitely eliminates Hitler and his National Socialist followers’.” 240 Still, his foolhardy but courageous stunt had endeared him to many nationalists, especially in Munich, who felt nothing but contempt for verbose but impotent leaders of the kind of Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. “In Munich Hitler was still taken seriously. That Christmas a group of Schwabing artists in the movement celebrated the holiday season in the Blue Café with a living tableau, ‘Adolf Hitler in prison’. The curtain rose on a cell. Snowflakes were falling outside a small barred window. A man sat at a desk, face buried in hands, and an invisible male chorus was singing ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’. Then an angel placed an illuminated Christmas tree on the table. Slowly the man turned and revealed his face … A half-sob went through the hall”, so telling was the resemblance with Hitler of the actor on the stage. 241

Hitler feared the trial for high treason, which opened on 26 February 1924, for two reasons. One was that he might be court-martialed, that consequently the trial would not be accessible to the public and that his means of defence would be limited. The other reason, and the most important one, was that he, as an Austrian citizen, would be extradited to his country of origin.¹ But his fears were allayed when he learned that he would appear before an ordinary, civil court and that the presiding judge, appointed by the Bavarian Minister of Justice Gürtner, was to be Georg Neithardt, “an ardent nationalist”. Hitler saw at once that “the disaster of the bungled putsch could be converted into a demagogical triumph … The defendants were Hitler, Ludendorff, Röhm, Frick, Pöhner [former police chief of Munich], Kriebel [commander of the Kampfbund] and four other participants [in the putsch], while Kahr, Lossow and Seisser appeared as witnesses”. 242 This was a flagrant injustice and a compelling argument which Hitler would not fail to use, for “the three vons” too were guilty of insurrection against the legal government.

Hitler managed to use the trial as a prolonged act of theatrical propaganda. “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.” 243

His powerful peroration, quoted in all Hitler biographies, still reverberates through history. “The army we have trained is growing from day to day, from hour to hour. At this very time I hold 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 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 … I already know what verdict you will hand down. But that other court will ask us: did you or did you not commit high treason? That court will judge us … as Germans who wanted the best for their people and their Fatherland, who were willing to fight and die. May you declare us guilty a thousand times: the goddess of the Eternal Court will smile and gently tear in two the brief of the State Prosecutor and the verdict of the court: for she acquits us.” 244

It was always hazardous to let Hitler speak because of the power with which his words were charged. Now he became a star. “The reading of the verdict was a real society event in Munich. The courtroom was crowded with spectators ready to applaud this troublemaker with so many friends in high places. The verdict once more laid stress on the ‘pure patriotic motives and honourable intentions’ of the defendant, but sentenced him to a minimum of five years in prison. However, he would become eligible for parole after six months. Ludendorff was acquitted. The law called for the deportation of any troublesome foreigner, but the court decided to waive this in the case of a man ‘who thinks and feels in such German terms as Hitler’.” 245 He would leave prison before the end of the year.

Events seemed to be timed in response to Hitler’s deeds and needs. While he was in Landsberg prison the conditions in Germany took a turn for the better, so much so that the period from 1924 till 1929 would be called “the golden years” of the Weimar Republic. The two men responsible for steering their country on a more propitious course were Premier Gustav Stresemann and the “financial wizard” Hjalmar Schacht, who created a new monetary system – and who would play a similar and equally important role in the Third Reich. The Nazi Party, now without its strong-willed Führer, went adrift and split up in several factions. Hitler had foreseen this and let it happen, for it might come useful when he would take up the reins again and decide on an action plan of strict law and order – or something like it.

He put Alfred Rosenberg in charge of the NSDAP, aware how little appreciated this pale-faced intellectual was among his brown-shirted comrades. Drexler had not forgotten Adolf’s disparaging conduct towards him, the founder of the Party, when shoving him aside in July 1920. “Drexler wanted to remodel the party along his own less revolutionary lines.” 246 And then there was the Strasser faction, including a very ambitious and still very socialist-minded Dr Joseph Goebbels, which will promote the Nazi Party in northern Germany and remain the most serious challenge to Hitler till he took up the chancellorship. And there was pompous Erich Ludendorff who had slyly denied any responsibility for the putsch; who had been slighted by Hitler proclaiming himself head of state and the field marshal his commander-in-chief of the army; and who wanted now “to centre the control of the nationalist groups in his own hands and take advantage of Hitler’s absence to neutralize him permanently”. 247

Hitler had a great time in Landsberg, his “university at state expense”. He was honoured, even by the warden and the prison staff (most of whom converted to Nazism), as a king with his court of fellow Nazi-prisoners. He had plenty of free time without constantly having to make decisions, read books, received visitors, held his inevitable and dreaded endless monologues, and presided at the table. “The others waited behind their chairs until Hitler strode in, then someone called out ‘Attention!’ He stood at the head of the table until every man in turn came forward with his table-greeting.” 248 “He received favoured treatment which included freedom to accept gifts of food from outside, and this again gave him a further hold over his warders … He and Hess had not so much cells as a small suite of rooms forming an apartment. The place looked like a delicatessen store. You could have opened up a flower and fruit and a wine shop with all the stuff stacked there. People were sending presents from all over Germany and Hitler had grown visibly fatter on the proceeds.” 249

Then came the day that he decided to write a book, which would become Mein Kampf, but which at first was titled Four and a half years of struggle against lies, stupidity and cowardice. “Without the time in prison Mein Kampf would not have existed”, reflected Hitler later, “and I may say that, during that time, I reached conceptual clarity about many things which before I had propagated more from intuition.” 250 Prison presented him with the occasion of prolonged introspection.

If one has not read the book, one should discard once and for all that idea that Mein Kampf is a kind of trivial, wacko oddity, written by an illiterate maniac. Certainly, it does not belong in the class of the belles lettres, and it contains the most improbable ideas as well as “utter amorality”, and lies, and sophistry in abundance, plus undisguised threats to Western civilization and disdain for the human being and human values in general – and much more of this sort. And there is that “curiously nasty, obscene odour” perceived by Joachim Fest as emanating from the book’s pages. But behind all that there is a vision by which Adolf Hitler had been and would continue to be driven, which was unprecedented and revolutionary, and which aimed at a new world and a new man. “He who writes this sees himself in his prison cell like Johannes in his cave on Patmos and is in his solitude open for inspiration”, writes Karin Wilhelm. “While writing Hitler too follows a voice which he hears inside himself in the act of writing, and meanwhile his eyes are clairvoyant.” 251

The first pages of Mein Kampf were dictated by Hitler to his chauffeur and co-prisoner Emil Maurice. Maurice noted down the dictates and Hitler had to type them afterwards with two fingers on a Remington portable. This changed when another participant in the putsch, Rudolf Hess, gave himself up to the police and joined his adored Führer in prison. Now Hess, who was a student of Karl Haushofer, professor of “geopolitics” at Munich University, typed the dictates directly on the machine and helped with suggestions and corrections. “There was a very close bond between the two during this period, and for the first time I heard them speak to each other on ‘thou’ terms, although later in public they did not”, remembers Hanfstängl. The number of people Hitler ever addressed in the confidential manner can be counted on the fingers of one hand. “This was the period of Hess’s greatest and lasting influence”, according to Hanfstängl, who elaborates on “the emotional quality of the friendship that had developed with Hess”. 252

There may have been truth in Hanfstängl’s impressions of the homoerotic, though not homosexual, relation between Hitler and his later deputy; homoeroticism is after all a common phenomenon among persons of the same sex sharing long-term experiences, and “male bonding” was widespread at the time of our story, when a more liberal sexuality was not even imaginable, and men’s associations and groupings were rife in Germany. But there may have been another element in the Hitler-Hess connection which Hanfstängl did not perceive because there were no receptors for it in his awareness: the occult dimension. Hess was, after all, not only a Brother of Thule, he was also intensely interested in all kinds of occult phenomena, and so was Hitler.

Toland describes how the Hitler court at Landsberg was distinctly divided into two levels corresponding to two classes, the one of the inner circle around Hitler with their cells on the upper floor, the other comprising the “commoners” and lodged on the lower floor. There is no doubt that Hitler’s Landsberg experience included a profound meditation on his life’s mission and a reactivation of it, in which Hess, constantly close to him, seems to have played a part. This may have been the main reason of the intimacy between the two men, and of the fact that Hess became Hitler’s secretary and afterwards the second man in the Reich, although there was a unanimous opinion among the top Nazis that Hess was a poor politician and organizer. Behind his back fellow Nazis sometimes called him Fräulein Anna, Miss Anna, for he read poetry and listened to chamber music and was therefore held to be a sissy – although he had been a fighter pilot during the war and was always the first to jump into a beer hall fray or street brawl at the head of his SA unit. He was, moreover, the intermediary between his Führer and his teacher, Professor Karl Haushofer.