Free Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen Page B

sympathies lie on the side of the defendants and not with the November criminals of 1918.” The jailers were said to be uncertain as to whether to watch him or wait on him. Women were bringing flowers to him. A female follower requested permission to take a bath in his tub. One of the panel of three lay judges was heard to say after a speech, “But he’s a colossal fellow, this man Hitler!”
    In accordance with German law, he was given the final word, and he told the court: “It is not you, gentlemen, who pronounce judgment on us. That judgment is spoken by the eternal court of history. What judgment you will hand down, I know. But that Court will not ask us ‘Did you commit high treason or did you not?’ That court will judge us, the Quartermaster General of the old Army, his officers and soldiers, men who, as Germans, wanted and desired only the good of their people and fatherland; who wanted to fight and die. You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state’s attorney and the sentence of this court; for she acquits us.”
    The Raubals followed the judicial proceedings in the Münchener Zeitung and were shocked that the stuffy and querulous Erich Ludendorff, who’d condemned Adolf during the trial as a foreign agitator, was acquitted of high treason, and Wilhelm Frick, a collaborating police chief, and Ernst Röhm were condemned but released, while Adolf and the other codefendants were found guilty of the charges against them, and Hitler was sentenced to four and a half years in the prison at Landsberg am Lech—precisely the length of time he’d served in the war, and the number of years between his resignation from the Reichswehr and, as it was now called, the “Beer Hall Putsch.”
    Within days of the sentencing, Angela got a letter from the presently illegal Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, signed für den Führer by Alfred Rosenberg, saying that Herr Hitler would benefit psychologically and in the court of public opinion if the Raubals were to reestablish family ties with him. While party officials thought it would be fitting for Leo and Paula to stay in Austria, they wondered if Angela and Geli would be so good as to visit Adolf soon at Landsberg am Lech. Included with the letter were two round-trip railway tickets and what seemed to Angela a generous amount of money “for miscellaneous expenses.”
    “What do you wear to a prison? ” Geli asked.
    They went in funeral dresses and black veiled hats, going to München in a first-class railway car, and then an hour west by taxi through the mists of the forests above the Lech River. The fields were still white with snow and the sky was as gray and close as a kettle lid. On a hill outside the handsome medieval village of Landsberg was a fortress of high stone walls and watchtowers that surrounded the old gray buildings of what was now a penitentiary. There common criminals were jailed in one part and those considered political prisoners in another. Adolf Hitler was being held as a traitor in cell 7.
    Walking Angela and Geli inside, a friendly prison guard named Franz Hemmrich took them past the dining hall where forty-five Nazis ate their meals at five linked tables and where Hitler would sit regally at the head in front of the hanging red flag and swastika of the party. And when they were going upstairs to cell 7, Hemmrich confided to them about Herr Hitler’s good manners and magnetism, how firmly he governed the other prisoners so there was never any fuss, how he’d given all his guards boxes of Lindt truffles to take home to their wives, how he was like Saint Paul in chains: You knew that if the jail fell down, you would still find Hitler obediently waiting in his cell. “To be frank, I hated him and his program just a few months ago,” Herr Hemmrich said, “but the warden forced me to listen in as he talked to his friends, to find