In late February 1924, Hitler was brought to stand trial before the Volksgericht in Munich in the old Infantry School on the Blutenburgstrasse. He was allowed to appear in a suit rather than prison clothes and sporting his Iron Cross. Security was strict, and the press interest, including from abroad, was intense. Hitler would no doubt have been pleased to know that ‘one heard particularly many English voices’. The Reich government had wanted the trial to be held in Leipzig, but the authorities in Munich were determined to keep it local, almost certainly because they feared what might otherwise emerge about their complicity in the various plots. Berlin gave way in the context of a broader rapprochement with Bavaria. In mid February 1924, about a week before the trial began, the Bavarian Reichswehr submitted once again to command from Berlin, thus reversing Kahr and Lossow’s position in November 1923; Kahr resigned.
Hitler famously used the courtroom as a platform from which to expound his world view… The trial lasted just over a month, from 26 February to 27 March 1924… He did not deny the substance of the charges, but argued that he had acted at all times in the greater interest of Germany… Sometimes Kahr appeared so overwhelmed that his voice dropped to a whisper as the courtroom audience strained to hear him. The rampant Hitler, by contrast, was repeatedly told to lower his voice by the trial judge.
Hitler’s final speech was a triumphant reiteration of his beliefs and sense of mission. If he was a traitor, then so were Bismarck, Atatürk and Mussolini, whose treason had been ratified by success. Hitler decried that there was ‘self determination for every Negro tribe’, but that ‘Germany did not belong to the Negro tribes but stood under them’. The root of the German predicament, he continued, lay in Germany’s exposed geopolitical position in Europe. ‘The German people’, Hitler argued, ‘has perhaps the worst location of all nations in military-political terms. It is geographically extraordinarily badly located, surrounded by many rivals’. It was menaced by France’s determination to ‘Balkanize’ Germany and to reduce her population. In this context he referred to ‘Clemenceau’s [alleged] aim to exterminate 20 million Germans in Europe, to break up Germany into individual states and to prevent the emergence of another united large Reich’. It was also threatened by Britain’s supposed much broader policy of Balkanizing Europe as a whole in order to maintain the balance of power. There was no economic solution to this predicament, Hitler stressed, but only a powerful foreign policy based on the highest level of internal mobilization. Germany would need to get rid of ‘international Jewry’, which was coordinating the global forces against her. She would also need to pursue the related struggle against international capitalism. ‘The battle against international stock exchange enslavement’ and against the ‘trustification’ of the ‘entire economy’, Hitler demanded, must be taken up.
These were all familiar themes from Hitler’s previous statements, but this time he had the eyes of the German and even some of the international press upon him. His dosing speech concluded with a resounding statement that though the court might secure a conviction, posterity would surely acquit him. In an obviously choreographed sequence, the other accused said they had nothing to add, with the result that Hitler’s resonant last words were left ringing throughout the courtroom and shaped the story of the trial. He turned the defeat and humiliation of 9 November 1923 into a victorious narrative…
Hitler was now a hero not merely to the Bavarian right, but to many nationalists throughout Germany. What had begun in the public mind as the ‘Ludendorff Trial’ ended as the ‘Hitler Trial’. ‘I am occupying myself with Hitler and the National Socialist movement,’ the Rhenish student Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in early March 1923…
On his return to Landsberg to serve the rest of his sentence, Hitler was confronted with some serious strategic questions… Ernst Röhm began to revive the SA, under the cover of a front organization, and went to confer with Hitler at the very end of May 1924. Perhaps anxious not to provoke the authorities, and mindful of his inability to seize power by force, the Fuhrer insisted that the SA keep a lower profile…
Gregor Strasser and General Ludendorff strongly supported amalgamation with the DVFP to create a new National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP). Hitler reluctantly agreed in broad terms but insisted that the main base and focus of the party remain in Munich….
Gottfried Feder remarked after visiting him that Hitler was ‘depressed [and] wants to withdraw completely from the movement’ in order to ‘work’, that is, ‘write’ to earn money. Over the next two months, Hitler repeated his message publicly on a number of occasions. He was acting partly because he was disenchanted with the way in which the various mergers and collaborations were turning the party into a purely bourgeois organization, and partly because he had no real power to turn things around from prison…
One reason why Hitler wanted to lie low was fear of having his release delayed, or of being deported to Austria. The Bavarian authorities had long hoped to do the latter, and in early May 1924, the Polizeidirektion in Munich told the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior that ‘Hitler constitutes a permanent threat to the internal and external security of the state’. In late April 1924, the Austrians agreed to accept him in principle. Hitler managed to avoid deportation, but after being refused probation he failed to get out by 1 October as he originally hoped. On 16 October he made a statement that he should be allowed to stay, ‘because I never felt myself to be an Austrian citizen but only a German’. ‘My affection for my Austrian homeland is great,’ Hitler continued, ‘but so is hostility of the Austrian state’, in which—like the ‘earlier Habsburg state’—he could only see ‘an obstacle for the unification of the German people’.
3 replies on “Hitler, 47”
When I first got into white nationalist forums in 2010, many were talking about the ethnostate. Without mentioning the name of a specific forum, which is very popular these days, it started with some revolutionary articles and is now a club of bourgeois who are not even capable of probing the causes of white decline (as Hitler would do years later when talking about Christianity in his dinner table conversations).
Today’s white nationalism is precisely a purely bourgeois internet organisation. It doesn’t even reach the level of a real-world political party as racialists did in Germany a hundred years ago.
They remained chronically online, while the country gets darker and darker every year.
That’s what most americans do now, especially after having been under house arrest during COVID. Their only source of information, outside their small worlds, is their smartphones and television.
The only demonstration I see these days are only those of the palestinians and gay/me nonwhite parades.
Americans will never know, as a whole, what’s happening around them until the system collapse and the power grid fails.
As far as I know in the UK, not being a member of any of these groups, they do go out in the world, but at those times limit themselves to publicised hikes and open pub crawls. Really I think it’s a publicity thing, plus they insist on sharing their every action online, thus obliterating operational security (as if they needed any).
To think that in the space of a few years Hitler and his colleagues went from nothing to a major putsch, and the dissident right/nationalism/whatever has had literal decades, and there has been no progress whatsoever, and indeed much of a slide back, as you say, from the days of Pierce and Rockwell.
Preferably they would meet solely in real life, not bothering to broadcast themselves to a wider public as if it were a class show and tell, or a ‘what’s hot’ bulletin board, and simply find a property or quiet room to gather, and from there to discuss their plans. There are by now enough of them. They seem to achieve nothing.
I keep out of internet forums, and telegram, and social media, instead busying myself with my garden, or my writing, or my reading, then stockpiling activities, just wishing there was one or even two other people in this area who could drag themselves off cyberspace for long enough to come round my house, like my dead friend did every day, and sit all day in the back garden on the secluded decking, and talk business (he tended to come over to trade, but there was more to it, and I found out a lot locally through him).
These impotent political exhibitionists infuriate me. Past a certain point, it is ridiculous to share so much material online, leaving an unhelpful hardcopy record for all eternity of all decisions and initiatives. The internet is a learning resource, nothing more.