Theodor Casella - Trial and Prison

Trial and Prison

Two days after the putsch, Hitler was arrested and charged with high treason in the special People's Court. Some of his fellow conspirators were arrested while others escaped to Austria (Hermann Göring, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Rudolf Hess). The Nazi Party headquarters were raided, and its newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (The People's Observer), was banned.

This, however, was not the first time Hitler had been in trouble with the law. In an incident in September 1921, he and some SA had disrupted a meeting of the Bayernbund, and the Nazis who had gone there to cause trouble were arrested as a result. Hitler had ended up serving a little over a month of a three-month jail sentence. Presiding Judge Georg Neithardt was judge in both Hitler cases.

His trial began on 26 February 1924 and would last until 1 April 1924. Von Lossow acted as chief witness for the prosecution. Hitler moderated his tone for the trial, centering his defense on his selfless devotion to the good of the Volk and the need for bold action to save them, dropping his usual anti-Semitism. He claimed the putsch had been his sole responsibility and inspiring the title Führer. Hitler and Hess were both sentenced to five years in Festungshaft (literally fortress confinement—imprisonment) for treason. Festungshaft was the mildest of the three types of jail sentence in German law at the time - it excluded forced labour, featured reasonably comfortable cells, and allowed the prisoner to receive visitors almost daily for many hours. It was the customary sentence for people whom the judge believed to have had honourable but misguided motives, and it did not carry the stigma of a sentence of Gefängnis or Zuchthaus. In the end, Hitler served only nine months of this sentence before his very early release for good behaviour.

However, Hitler used his trial as an opportunity to spread his ideas. Every word he spoke was reported in the newspaper the next day. The judges were impressed (Presiding Judge Neithardt was inclined to favouritism towards the defendants prior to the trial), and as a result Hitler only served a little over eight months and was fined 500RM(Reichmarks). Due to his story that he was there by accident, which he had also used in the Kapp Putsch along with his war service and connections, Ludendorff was acquitted. Both Röhm and Dr. Wilhelm Frick, though found guilty, were released. Göring, meanwhile, suffered bullet wounds in his leg and groin, which led him to become increasingly dependent on morphine and other painkilling drugs. This addiction continued through to the end of his life.

One of Hitler's worries after the putsch was that he risked the chance of being deported back to his native Austria by the Bavarian government. However, Judge Neithardt was very sympathetic towards Hitler and held that the relevant laws of the Weimar Republic couldn't be applied to a man "who thinks and feels like a German, as Hitler does." And so the future Nazi leader remained in Germany.

Though Hitler failed to achieve his immediate stated goal, the event did give the Nazis their first exposure to national attention and a propaganda victory. While serving his prison sentence at Landsberg am Lech, he and Rudolf Hess wrote Mein Kampf. Also, the putsch changed Hitler's outlook on violent revolution to effect change. From then on he thought that, in order to win the German heart, he must do everything by the book, strictly legal. Later on, the German people would call him Hitler Legalité or Hitler the Legal One.

The process of combination, where the conservative-nationalist-monarchist group thought that they could piggyback on to and control the National Socialist movement to garner the seats of power, was to repeat itself 10 years later in 1933 when Franz von Papen would legally ask Hitler to form a government.