1924

As the earth completes its 2024 journey around the sun, I have found myself drawn to Peter Ross Range’s riveting book 1924: The Year that Made Hitler (all the page-number references that follow are to this book).

About 100 years ago, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, but with the possibility of parole after six months.  Hitler ended up spending nine months in Landsberg Prison before being released on December 20, 1924.

Hitler’s trial and time in prison were studies in leniency.

Range wryly observes that “perhaps sensing that he might someday need to be in Hitler’s good books, [Ludwig] Stenglein [the state attorney prosecuting the trial] launched into an unexpected paean to the man whom he wanted to send to prison for eight years. His words stunned the courtroom.”  What the prosecutor emphasized was the good intentions of the man who in due course would be responsible for the Holocaust: “Filled with glowing, honest enthusiasm for his great German fatherland, he created, with tireless labor after the war and from the tiniest beginnings, a great party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Its essential program is fighting international Marxism and Judaism, settling accounts with the November criminals… and spreading German nationalism.” The prosecutor praised Hitler as a reviver of the German spirit: “As the audience listened agog, Stenglein went on to note that while it was not his place to make a judgment about Hitler’s party politics, the Nazi leader’s ‘honest effort to re-arouse belief in a German destiny’ was, in the end, ‘his great service,’” despite his mistake of following the enthusiasm of his followers and allowing himself to be “‘drawn beyond the bounds of his own natural inclinations’” into excess (172-3).

The spirit of forgiveness toward Hitler was reflected in the sentencing: “Judge Neithardt then added his next surprise: Hitler and his confederates would be eligible for parole in six months. Like Prosecutor Stenglein, the judge felt the need to sing a song of praise to the men he was sending to prison for a high crime. What they did was wrong, to be sure, but they meant the best.  Because they had acted out of the ‘most noble, unselfish motives’ and ‘in a purely patriotic spirit,’ he was issuing the minimum sentences allowed by the law for their acts” (179).

Hitler benefited from yet another act of forgiveness: “As this amazing justification was sinking in, there was another delicate matter to address: what about Article 9 of the Law for the Protection of the Republic? It stipulated that ‘foreigners [who commit treason] are to be deported.’ The law was so plain and so clearly applicable that in his final declamation four days earlier, Hitler the Austrian had explicitly pleaded: ‘Don’t apply Article 9!’ He had pointedly reminded the court of his four years as a soldier on French soil, where ‘with glowing love I counted the hours until I could return’ to the fatherland. Hitler had argued that only ‘inferior peoples’ would expel ‘an iron man’ who happened to offend public opinion. Deporting him, claimed Hitler, would force future schoolboys to read ‘with shame burning in their cheeks’ the story of this disgraceful moment in German history” (179-180).

Judge Neithardt appeared pleased to comply: “‘Hitler sees himself as a German,’ the judge concluded. ‘Article Nine cannot be applied to a man who thinks and feels as German as Hitler does, who served four and a half years in the German army during the war, who won high honors for bravery in the face of the enemy, who was wounded and otherwise suffered damage to his health’” (180).

Hitler’s many supporters were overjoyed at the triumph of leniency for the man they perceived as their savior: “An eleven-year-old Municher, Otto Gritschneder, noticed joy and laughter as he ran errands to the bakery and the milk store that day. ‘I can still hear the outbursts of joy with which people greeted Hitler’s ‘conviction,’ even though I did not understand what it was about,” he wrote many years later” (179-180).

With adoring admirers and an accommodating legal system, it should perhaps not be surprising that Hitler’s time in prison before, during and after his trial was full of flowers and treats. During the legal proceedings, the socialist Münchener Post noted that “Hitler’s feminine following baked their loyalty into the cakes and snacks that form little mountains in Hitler’s open cell” (173).  Range recounts that “during his first months in prison, Hitler had visitors almost every day. Nearly everyone brought gifts of food or flowers. Knowing Hitler’s notorious sweet tooth, the edibles ran to pastries and cakes, regarded in Germany almost as a basic food group” (186).  Prison guard Franz Hemmrich described Hitler’s room in prison on his thirty-fifth birthday as “overflowing with flowers like in a greenhouse” (187).  Rudolf Hess, who was imprisoned together with Hitler for his role in the putsch and who later became Hitler’s Deputy Führer, wrote to his father, “After our evening meal from 7:45 to 8, we are allowed outside again, play games, or I chat with Hitler while walking up and down. After that, we gather inside again—Hitler, Colonel Kriebel, Dr. Weber, Maurice and I—for tea and pastries, which never cease to arrive” (203).  About a picture in which Hitler is walking in the prison garden and appears to be “stuffed” into his clothes, Range observes, “Steadily supplied with sweets and pastries from his admirers, Hitler gained weight” (269).

As a purveyor of treats, Hitler was popular not only with his fellow putschists but also with some outside the prison walls: “Warden Leybold initially forbade Hitler from sharing his overflow of sweets and delicatessen foods with other prisoners, so Hitler donated his extras to a nearby Dominican cloister for distribution to the poor. It became a banner year for the nuns and their flock. ‘Never has the ‘poor wayfarer’ who knocked on our doors had it better than during the time Hitler was in Landsberg Prison,’ one nun told Hemmrich” (112).  And Hitler was kind to children: “When his old walk-around buddy, Ernst Hanfstaengl, paid a visit, bringing along his four-year-old son, Egon, Hitler allowed the delighted boy to have his pick of the ‘sweets and cakes’ that cluttered the room” (127)

Range recounts how, on May 15, the wealthy Helene Bechstein, “wife of the famed Berlin piano builder” arrived with her husband and daughter to visit Hitler: “All that is known about that first visit is that the grande dame with the private suite at Munich’s Four Seasons Hotel got into a high snit with the prison guards. She was upset that her gift package for Hitler had to be inspected for security in the customary way. Angrily ripping open the package, Frau Bechstein sent ‘pralines of the finest sort’ flying all over the room, screaming: ‘There! See if you can find a machine gun in there!’”  But Helene Bechstein was the supplier of more than just treats.  Soon afterward, she became the “probably donor” of “a brand-new, American-made Remington portable typewriter, black with white keys, built just one month before in New York, according to its serial number.” This, Range notes, was to be “the machine on which Hitler wrote almost the entire first volume of Mein Kampf (in the beginning, he planned only one volume)” (195). Range characterizes Hitler’s imprisonment as “one of the most productive periods of his life,” or as Hemmrich put it: “Increasingly I had the feeling that he didn’t mind the involuntary stay since it gave him the chance to think about his future in the peace and quiet of the prison” (184-185).

Julius Schaub, another prisoner, “later claimed that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf ‘only as a propaganda piece to earn money,’” as Hitler indeed, Range notes, “needed money to pay his expensive lawyer’s bills” (191). But regardless of the reasons for putting his ideas into book form, Hitler knew that antisemitism sells.

Well before his imprisonment, Hitler “was increasingly hammering his central theme—the Jews.” Hitler had learned early in his speaking career that he could always stir up a crowd by plucking at the widespread anti-Semitic sentiments then rampant in Europe, especially in Germany.”  Range observes that “his nasty swipes at “Jewish domination” and “Jewish usurers” unleashed the greatest applause” (48).  To speak anachronistically in today’s terms, the Jews were great click bait.

On December 19, the Bavarian Supreme Court decided to grant the imprisoned Hitler parole.  Range suggests that this early release was not without consequence: “Had Hitler been forced to serve those remaining days [until October 1, 1928] in prison, he would have returned in 1928 to a Germany that was on far firmer political and economic footing” (250), and thus possibly less vulnerable to his manipulations.  Not everybody was happy about the release of the sweet-toothed agitator.  Some even tried to prevent it.  One of them, interestingly, was the aforementioned state attorney Stenglein.  Another was the Munich deputy police chief, who warned in writing about Hitler, “He represents a permanent danger to the internal and external security of the state. . . There should be no discussion of releasing [Hitler].” And if he is to be released “then it is essential that Hitler, as the soul of the völkisch movement, be deported” (243).

December 21, 1924, one day after Hitler got out of prison without being deported to his native Austria, was the first night of Chanukah.  That year, in Frankfurt am Main, Ludwig Wolpert, who would in due course flee Nazi Germany, created the menorah in the link below that today is owned by The Jewish Museum in Berlin:

https://www.jmberlin.de/en/object-hanukkah-menorah-wolpert

In Chanukah 1943, about eight months before the Nazis liquidated the Lodz ghetto and deported its inhabitants to be murdered, the German Jew Oskar Singer, who had been deported from Germany to the ghetto in Poland, recorded collective wishes: “Would that Hanukkah 1943 would be the last in wartime, the last Hanukkah in the ghetto.  That is everyone’s hope.  People share this wish with friends when parting – wordlessly, mutely, with a squeeze of the hand.  The menorah candles go out, darkness prevails once more.  We go out into the street. Ghetto life starts again.”

https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/december/1943.html

During the holiday season this year, I was enjoying delectable pastries in an elegant establishment in downtown Ottawa. When I went into the street, I was greeted by sounds of drums and the chants of an anti-Israeli protest: “brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel will fall.”  And pray tell, what will happen to the people of Israel after all these bricks and walls fall?

Range explains that in Hitler’s twisted philosophy, Jews “were parasites ‘on the body of other nations.’ Part of their problem was that they had no Lebensraum, he argued. Alleging ahistorically that Jews had never had a country of their own, he dismissed Jews as a wandering band ‘always searching for new nourishment for [their] race.’ When Jews settled, they created a state within a state. Since they lived everywhere, they had no well-defined Lebensraum anywhere” (232).

Was Hitler inspired by the abundance of treats surrounding him when he chose to type the metaphor of “searching for new nourishment” to make the false accusation of greed against the Jews? The man who passionately loved and pursued war was certainly projecting when, in his address to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, he threatened to annihilate the increasingly persecuted European Jews, “should the international Jewry of finance succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war.”

https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/extract-from-hitler-speech.html#:~:text=Today%20I%20will%20once%20more,the%20Jewish%20race%20in%20Europe!

But for today’s haters, it is precisely that well-defined Lebensraum whose absence Hitler used to justify antisemitism that seems to be a problem.  One cannot accuse hate directed against the Jews (about half of whom live in Israel and most of whom have a positive connection to Israel)  of not being able to adapt with the times.  Is “always searching for new nourishment” another projection that describes Jew haters rather than the Jews?

Range observes that, “as everyone in Landsberg eagerly waited for the court’s parole decision, word of the inmates’ easy lifestyle and possible illegal political activities in the prison leaked out to the socialist Münchener Post. The newspaper blasted the prison and its warden for a ‘scandalous scene’ of the ‘state-owned Landsberg Prison being run as an outright political stronghold of Nazi desperados’ (248).

Today, about one hundred years later, another disturbing scene might be at risk of unfolding.  Under the protection of democracy, some agitators seem to believe that they can use democratic institutions and traditions as strongholds of hate.  The drums and shouts on the street are only a secondary concern.  The more serious concern is that antisemitism will become normalized within our educational, medical, media and other civil-society institutions.  In the following article for the Alliance of Canadians Combatting Antisemitism, I express the hope that Canada is made of a strong enough material that cannot be sculpted into an antisemitic society:

https://www.alcca.ca/post/forcing-hate-on-the-raw-block-will-canada-be-sculpted-into-an-antisemitic-society

One hundred years ago, too many Germans were happy to bake treats for the future Führer—who in turn supplied them with a sugar rush of antisemitic pleasure and ultimately went on to put millions of murdered human beings into the ovens of concentration camps and into mass graves.

Today, it is important to learn to recognize and resist the craving to enjoy the pleasures of the current metamorphosis of antisemitism as it is being dished out to us as Israel hate.

I grew up in a social milieu that is highly critical of the current Israeli government, and the difference between well-informed and loving criticism on the one hand and hate on the other hand is something that I instinctively recognize.  One of the characteristics of Israel hate in the west is that it does not help the Palestinians, most of whom want to live in peace and would benefit enormously from a leadership that would not pursue the destruction of Israel.

One hundred years ago, Hitler managed to convince many that he had good intentions.  One of the lasting lessons from the disaster that unfolded is that superficial impressions of good intentions should not be allowed to mask hateful and destructive agendas.

 Reference

Range, Peter Ross. 1924: The Year That Made Hitler. Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Note that some of the quotes from Range used in my article include, in his book, notes documenting his sources, but I did not reproduce these notes.  I recommend reading Range’s informative and thought-provoking book.