Hitler sentenced

Late on the morning of 1 April 1924, Georg Neithardt, presiding judge of the Bavarian People’s Court in Munich, read out the verdict in the trial of the leaders of the Beer Hall Putsch. Adolf Hitler and his three chief accomplices were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to five years’ fortress confinement, the lowest penalty the law allowed, with the prospect of parole after only six months. General Erich Ludendorff, who had marched beside Hitler in the front rank of the column at the Feldherrnhalle, was acquitted. Cries of “Heil!” rang out in the courtroom, the convicted men were handed flowers and the crowd outside cheered. A trial that was meant to call to account an armed attempt to overthrow the state ended in triumph for the accused. Hitler had entered the court as the leader of a shattered, banned party; he left it a figure known throughout Germany.

Five years or eight months

It is usually said that Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison but served only eight months. This is broadly true but needs two qualifications. First, this was not prison in the ordinary sense but fortress confinement (Festungshaft), the mildest of the three forms of custody in the German criminal law of the day. The code of 1871 reserved it for people credited with “honourable” motives, such as duellists and political offenders. It carried neither compulsory labour nor the stigma of a common criminal. Second, although less than nine months passed between the verdict and his release on 20 December 1924, Hitler had been in custody since his arrest on 11 November 1923 – a little over thirteen months in all. His time on remand was counted towards the sentence.

A court that should not have tried the case

The case should never have come before a Munich court at all. Under the Law for the Protection of the Republic, passed in 1922 after the murder of the foreign minister Walther Rathenau, cases of high treason belonged to a special tribunal at the Reich Court in Leipzig. The Bavarian government, however, had no intention of handing the trial over to Berlin. Had it been heard in Leipzig, it would have come out that the State Commissioner-General Gustav von Kahr, General Otto von Lossow and Colonel Hans von Seißer – the men who crushed the putsch on the night of 8–9 November 1923 – had themselves spent the preceding weeks conspiring against the republic. The case was therefore taken by the Bavarian People’s Court (Volksgericht), a special court dating from the days of the revolution and the Soviet republic, which under the Weimar Constitution ought already to have ceased to exist.

The presiding judge, Neithardt, was known for his nationalist sympathies. In January 1920, at the trial of Count Anton von Arco auf Valley, the assassin of the Bavarian premier Kurt Eisner, he had credited the defendant with “the most ardent love of his people and fatherland”. In January 1922 he had himself sentenced Hitler to three months in prison for breaking up a meeting of a rival group. Hitler served a little over a month, and the rest of the sentence was suspended until 1926. A fresh offence during the probation period ought to have ruled out another suspended sentence, but in 1924 the court deliberately ignored this.

The trial

The trial opened on 26 February 1924 in a lecture hall of the infantry school on Blutenburgstraße, surrounded by police and barbed-wire entanglements. Correspondents came from all over the world. There were ten defendants: Hitler; Ludendorff; Ernst Pöhner, the former Munich police president; Wilhelm Frick, the former head of the political police; Hermann Kriebel and Friedrich Weber, leaders of the paramilitary leagues; Captain Ernst Röhm; Wilhelm Brückner, commander of an SA regiment; Lieutenant Robert Wagner; and Ludendorff’s stepson Heinz Pernet. Missing were Hermann Göring, who had fled to Austria, and Rudolf Hess, who was in hiding.

Hitler opened with a speech lasting nearly four hours. He told the story of his life and then took full responsibility for the putsch. He did not deny that he had wanted to overthrow the government, but argued that one could not commit high treason against the “traitors of 1918”. The real traitors, in his view, were the men of the November Revolution, Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann, and in Bavaria the triumvirs who had been preparing a coup together with him and had betrayed him at the decisive moment. The court let him interrupt witnesses, cross-examine them like a prosecutor and deliver long political speeches. When Kahr, Lossow and Seißer gave evidence in March, it was they, not the defendants, who had to defend themselves. Seißer described Hitler as a young man whose head had been turned by the applause of the crowds. The presiding judge swore in only the defence witnesses, and whenever testimony touched on the links between the Reichswehr and the SA or on Kahr’s plotting, he cleared the public from the courtroom. The only lawyer who seriously sought a conviction was the young assistant prosecutor Hans Ehard, after the war Minister-President of Bavaria. The court generally rejected his motions.

On 27 March the defendants made their closing statements. Hitler ended with words that the Nazis would repeat for years: the judges might pronounce them guilty a thousand times, but the goddess of the eternal court of history would smile and tear up the prosecutor’s submission and the court’s verdict, for she acquitted them. The prosecutor, Ludwig Stenglein, who had not stinted his praise of Hitler in his closing speech, asked for eight years’ fortress confinement.

The verdict

The People’s Court consisted of two professional judges and three lay assessors. According to research based on the surviving documents, the lay judges had made clear from the outset that they would agree to convict Hitler only if the sentence was suspended on probation. The presiding judge accepted this bargain to keep the case from going to Leipzig. On 1 April the court sentenced Hitler, Kriebel, Weber and Pöhner to five years’ fortress confinement and a small fine, with the prospect of release after six months. Röhm, Frick, Brückner, Wagner and Pernet were found guilty of aiding and abetting and sentenced to fifteen months. Their time on remand was counted, and they walked free at once on probation. The reasons for the verdict passed over the deaths of the four policemen killed at the Feldherrnhalle. Instead the court praised the defendants’ “purely patriotic spirit and the noblest will”.

Ludendorff was acquitted because the court believed his claim that he had known nothing of the preparations and had turned up at the Bürgerbräukeller by chance. The general, in full uniform and spiked helmet, protested that an acquittal while his comrades were convicted was an insult to him. The court also refused to deport Hitler from Germany, although the Law for the Protection of the Republic required foreigners convicted of high treason to be expelled, and Hitler was an Austrian citizen. It held that the law could not apply to a man who “thinks and feels so German” and had served in the German army for four and a half years.

Landsberg

That same day Hitler, Kriebel and Weber were taken to the prison at Landsberg am Lech, where Hitler had already been held since November. The place bore no resemblance to a fortress. The prisoners lived in a separate wing, in rooms with a shared common room, and from May they were joined by Hess, who had given himself up to the police, the watchmaker Emil Maurice and more than twenty members of the Stoßtrupp Hitler (Hitler’s Shock Troop), sentenced in a separate trial. The prison governor, Otto Leybold, regarded them as “men with a high sense of national feeling”. By December Hitler had received 330 visitors, among them Ludendorff, wealthy patrons and future deputies. He received so many letters and food parcels that his cell resembled a headquarters. It was here that he wrote the first volume of the book that appeared in 1925 as Mein Kampf.

From 1 October Hitler was eligible to apply for parole. The prosecution objected, because letters had been found being smuggled out of the prison and Hitler made no secret of his intention to return to politics. Leybold, however, wrote that the prisoner had become “more mature, calmer and more thoughtful”, and on 20 December 1924 Hitler was released. The Bavarian authorities still considered deporting him to Austria, but the Austrian authorities refused to take him. In April 1925 Hitler renounced his Austrian citizenship and remained stateless until 1932.

Significance

The verdict of 1 April 1924 is one of the most glaring examples of how the justice system of the Weimar Republic treated the republic’s enemies. Judges who punished communists harshly showed indulgence towards right-wing putschists, because they shared their hatred of the “November criminals”. The democratic press called the trial a scandal, but in Bavaria the public mood favoured the defendants. Five days after the verdict, in the Bavarian Landtag election of 6 April, the joint list of the völkisch groups standing in for the banned NSDAP won about 17 per cent of the vote, and more than a third in Munich itself. In the Reichstag election of 4 May the National Socialist Freedom Movement, an alliance of the Nazis with other völkisch groups, took 6.5 per cent of the vote and 32 seats. Among those elected to the Reichstag were Ludendorff and Röhm.

Most important of all, however, was the trial’s effect on Hitler himself. The court gave him a platform from which he addressed the whole of Germany for five weeks, and newspapers quoted his speeches on their front pages. Before, he had been a Bavarian agitator, one among many. After the trial he became the leader of the far right, the man who had taken responsibility for the putsch while others disowned it, and who had not backed down even in the dock. Landsberg gave him time to reflect on his defeat. He came out convinced that he would win power not by armed revolt but legally, through elections, propaganda and agreement with the elites. The law that had treated him so leniently in 1924 became his victim nine years later. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the justice minister in his government was Franz Gürtner, who as Bavarian justice minister in 1923 had halted the investigation against Hitler over the armed demonstration of 1 May, and his co-defendant Frick became Reich Minister of the Interior.