Hitler’s punishment was a mockery 100 years ago. The judges openly admired him

“Judgment in Hitler’s time” or “Hitler sentenced to five years in a fortress, Ludendorff freed”. That’s how the hundred-year-old Lidové noviny headlines read about the verdict of the Munich court on April 1, 1924 against the participants of the “beer putsch” in the Bavarian capital.

Lidovky also reports: “He was sentenced this morning in Hitler’s court. Hitler, Phöner, Kriebl and Weber were each sentenced to five years in a fortress prison. The judgment enters into force with its declaration. General Ludendorff declared that he considered his acquittal a shame because his comrades had been convicted. His military coat doesn’t deserve that. At these words the audience burst into a tumultuous cry of HEIL.’

The court verdict therefore only very mildly punished the initiators and participants of the Munich putsch. The judges obviously sympathized with the Nazis. At the same time, NSDAP leader Adolf Hitler sought a bloody coup. In November 1923, with a revolver in hand, he called for a march on Berlin modeled after Mussolini’s march on Rome. In the end, however, his plan failed. Important political figures refused to join his event and the police intervened.

Hitler was arrested two days after the failed putsch, and the trial began in Munich on February 26, 1924. The People’s Newspaper devoted a lot of space to the verdict of the then still insignificant Adolf Hitler in the “clear-eyed” commentary:

“While the German youth and German reactionaries throughout the German Empire and in all corners of the world watched with undisguised joy the growth in the process, the swelling of national prejudice, vindictiveness and hatred against all that is not German and that is human, it watched democratically and the humanely feeling European public is pained by this new wave of German errors. The Munich court deliberately kept yesterday’s verdict for April Fool’s Day, as if it wanted to laugh at common sense. For the Munich court, therefore, violence against the current German constitution is not a crime, but apparently the constitution itself is a crime. He did not even expel Hitler from Bavaria, although Hitler is an Austrian national, so Hitler could quite calmly declare that he would repeat his attempt at the next opportunity and that he would be more careful about traitors.

Hitler ended up serving nine months instead of five years in a prison in Landsberg, Bavaria. There he dictated his work “Mein Kampf” and went free with the halo of a martyr. The judgment of April 1, 1924 undoubtedly benefited him in his future unfortunate political career.