Adolf Hitler. Clemens von Lengsfeld

former ruler of Bavaria, the General State Commissioner Gustav Ritter von Kahr, withdrew his consent to taking part in the putsch, which had only half-heartedly been given. Hitler was stunned when he heard von Kahr on the radio saying that the “declarations extracted with a brandished pistol” were null and void. Von Kahr declared the NSDAP dissolved. Nevertheless, the small troup, led by von Ludendorff, Hitler and Göring, set off at noon the next day in a march in the direction of the Feldherrnhalle. In the meantime the commander of the state police had been instructed to put a wide cordon around the area in the vicinity of the Odeonsplatz. Accompanied by the applause of thousands of sightseers, the troop approached belting out “The Watch on the Rhine”.

      They broke through the cordon. Even today it is still not clear who was the first to lose their nerve, the putschists or the police armed with machine guns. The firefight only lasted for a minute but claimed numerous victims, amongst whom were 18 dead. One of the wounded was Göring, who had sustained a deep flesh wound on his hip. The Jewish owners of the house into whose yard he had been driven back, brought him to safety, enabling him to flee to Austria. Hitler dislocated his arm when he fell down and thereupon allowed himself to be taken away in an ambulance belonging to the SA. Ludendorff remained unscathed and marched on ramrod straight as if it were a matter of once again forcing the fortress of Liège to surrender. After they were arrested, the putschists were taken to the fortress of Landsberg, where they awaited their trial for high treason. Hitler romanticised this event in one of his later speeches held in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich in 1939: “Our movement came into being from this complete emergency, and so it also had to take difficult decisions from the outset. And one of these decisions was the decision to revolt of 8/9 November 1923. This decision seemed to have misfired at the time, but it is only as a result of the victims that the Germany’s salvation has really come about.”⁵⁴

      On the morning of 26 February 1924 the trial for high treason against the ten putschists began, amongst them were the main accused Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff. The press despatched representatives from home and abroad. A total of 368 witnesses were summoned. The state police sent two battalions and a wide area around the venue for the proceedings, the Central Infantry School in Munich, was secured with barbed wire and wooden barriers.

      The judge chairing the proceedings against Adolf Hitler was the right-wing conservative Georg Neithardt. General Ludendorff ret. had not been detained. On the days of the proceedings he had himself driven there in a luxury automobile. He was acquitted on the basis of his service in the First World War. Judge Neithardt justified his judgement on 1 April 1924 of only the minimum punishment for Adolf Hitler with the following words: “The court too is of the opinion that in their actions the accused were led by the spirit of the pure love of fatherland and the most noble selfless will. All the accused, who had an accurate view of the matters – and the rest of them let themselves be guided by the co-accused as their leaders and national representatives –, believed to the best of their ability that they would have to act to rescue the fatherland and that they would be doing the very same thing that had shortly before been the intention of leading Bavarian men. This did not justify what they intended to do but it provided the key to understanding their actions. For months, years even, they were of the view that the high treason of 1918 had to be made good again by a liberating action.”⁵⁵

      The judgement was passed on “Hitler, Adolf, born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau (Upper Austria), writer in Munich, on remand in this matter since 14 November 1923 due to the crime of high treason (the accused is sentenced to) five years imprisonment as well as a fine of two hundred gold marks, alternatively to a further twenty days prison for each”.

      In his prison cell Landsberg am Lech he now had enough free time to think about his future tactics. He devoted every free minute to his magnum opus, a work in several volumes, which he called “Mein Kampf”.

       Mein Kampf

      The book made its author well-known as it revealed his plans in detail, but it was rarely entirely read.⁵⁶ The book contained Hitler’s guiding principles such as his demand for lebensraum in the East, which he promised himself through the conquering of Eastern European states and Soviet Russia. In his writings he also revealed his in the meantime unashamed anti-Semitism, whereby he no longer demanded just the expulsion of the Jews from Germany but also their extermination. Thus he maintained that the defeat in the First World War would never happened if the German government had not failed to “wipe out the Jews without mercy by holding 12,000 or 15,000 of them under poison gas”.⁵⁷ Later he would romanticise his time as a “Drummer” as “his period of struggle” and declare Munich, where he had been involved in the putsch against the government, to be the “capital of the movement”.

      Even during his trial he had explained his world view with the following words: “I left Vienna as an absolute anti-Semite, as the bitter enemy of the entire Marxist world view, as completely German in my outlook.”⁵⁸ At this point in time his – then by the way still acceptable in polite society – anti-Semitism was precisely what it was for most of his contemporaries: not a racist but a political conviction, a mixture of an anti-stance and an unreflecting demonstration of wild combat readiness. His aim was a chimera of neo-Germanic wider area thinking, anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism.

      When the failed artist arrived in the German Kaiserreich in 1913, he hated much and variously: his homeland Austria, the multi-ethnic state, the Jews, Social democracy, the trade unions and the parliament, the masses and people in general. He probably hated himself too at times. And back then those around him must have noticed that there was something particular about the way he hated. Hitler did not harbour a hot-headed hate but a cold hate. He also revealed a lack of feeling, which made clear that he could neither put himself in the place of others nor himself so that an observational distance to himself was impossible. Today this is the very thing that is regarded as making someone human: knowing oneself and understanding others, even in their otherness and difference. The ability to empathise with others was completely lacking in Adolf Hitler. His “inner coldness” was coupled with a particular ability, the designation of which derives from the ancient Greek word for picture – “eidos”. Eidetic people⁵⁹ – as stated by the political psychologist Manfred Koch-Hillebrecht in his analysis of Hitler – can store away their surroundings to the last detail internally and preserve them forever. As with certain high-functioning kinds of autism, a so-called filter is missing, which protects the brain from being overwhelmed by impressions. Everything the eidetic person perceives, he has “made his own”. This applies to all sensory perceptions: visual and acoustic, but also olfactory stimuli.

      Hitler’s photographic memory also repeatedly stunned those around him. He was able to remember everything: figures, faces, complete details of weapons systems such as calibres and ranges, even the fleet calendar.⁶⁰ He would again and again quote entire pages of books off by heart or whistle overtures from Wagner operas from memory. This particular faculty was said to be coupled with a fundamental disinterest in what others thought of him. But even the “threatening stare” typical of him, a striking insensitivity to pain, his ability to shed tears at will, his messianic zeal for his mission and his selective perception of reality, which was restricted only to himself and his preconceived, clichéd world view, is attributed by Koch-Hillebrecht to Hitler’s eidetic nature. What, at first glance looked like a defect, proved to be the possibility for the later politician of exerting his will ruthlessly regardless of any limitations of empathy, existing values and customary morals.

      This thesis, to attribute certain properties by retrospective analysis to Hitler’s photographic memory, has been criticised as speculative. Associated with this criticism came the warning not to attribute the dictator, supposedly suffering from a personality disorder, with all responsibility for the wrongs. This is because this would then exonerate not only the masses hailing him but also the elite working for him from their guilt. Now as before one should bear in mind Hannah Arendt’s words from the “Banality of Evil”: in 1963 with regard to Eichmann she had adjudged that psychological normality and the ability to commit mass murder, as they were found hand in hand amongst the national socialist perpetrators, did not exclude each other. That, with