The high treason trial began on the morning of 26 February 1924 in the main reading room of the
Infantry School. Present were 368 witnesses, correspondents from around the world, and hundreds of spectators with reserved seats. Two battalions of the state police cordoned off Mars and Blutenburg streets with barbed wire and
Spanish riders. The ten defendants were Adolf Hitler,
Erich Ludendorff,
Heinz Pernet,
Friedrich Weber,
Hermann Kriebel,
Ernst Röhm,
Ernst Pöhner,
Wilhelm Frick,
Wilhelm Brückner and
Robert Wagner.
Rudolf Hess had initially gone into hiding and later surrendered to the court;
Hermann Göring had fled abroad. The prosecutor was
Ludwig Stenglein, assisted by
Hans Ehard and second prosecutor
Martin Dresse. The court presidency was held by the right-wing nationalist
Georg Neithardt, with judges
August Leyendecker and the lay judges (
Schöffen) Philipp Herrmann, Christian Zimmermann, and Leonhard Beck. Hitler's defense attorney was lawyer
Lorenz Roder. The indictment described Hitler as "the soul of the whole enterprise". Neithardt arbitrarily replaced an incriminating record of Ludendorff's interrogation with another stating that Ludendorff had known nothing about the coup preparations; accordingly, Ludendorff was not held in custody. Neithardt only swore in the witnesses for the defense, not those for the prosecution. The defendants pleaded "not guilty". Although the indictment was formally "against Ludendorff et al.", Hitler, who appeared wearing his
Iron Cross First Class on his lapel, assumed sole responsibility for the putsch. With applause from spectators, he declared there could be no high treason against the "traitors of 1918". He accused Kahr, Lossow, and Seißer of betrayal, claiming they had planned the coup with him for weeks but then turned against him and the German people. The witnesses Kahr (an aspiring dictator), Lossow (commander of the Bavarian civil war army), both by then dismissed, and Seißer were harshly attacked by Hitler. The presiding judge mostly allowed Hitler to interrogate them repeatedly in the manner of a prosecutor and discredit their statements, forcing the prosecutor to defend them. Seißer accused Hitler of sole responsibility for the enterprise, thereby confirming Hitler's own claim. Philipp Hermann, and Christian Zimmermann. According to research by Andreas Stenglein, these three men played the "most absurd role" by informing the presiding judge at the trial's outset that they would only agree to convict Hitler if the sentence were suspended. Since the court required a four-vote majority for decisions, the presiding judge was compelled to compromise to avoid the trial's collapse. Otherwise, the case would have been transferred to the competent Leipzig Reich Court, which the Bavarian government desperately wanted to avoid. Consequently, Hitler received, as the lay judges desired, only the minimum sentence of five years with a promise of probation, not the eight years requested by the prosecutor. Thus, the three lay judges, "like no one else," according to Stenglein, acted as "key figures" in paving Hitler's path to power nine years later.
Lothar Gruchmann similarly judged: "Decisive for the court's decision to grant probation along with the verdict was the attitude of the lay judges." Lay judges Philipp Hermann and Leonhard Beck confirmed this in a letter of 6 July 1924 to the Munich I Public Prosecutor's Office: "Only on the general condition that probation was granted, and specifically promised for Hitler [...] could the lay judges bring themselves to the extraordinarily difficult decision to agree to the guilty verdict." All three lay judges never joined the NSDAP and were not subjected to
denazification proceedings after 1945. == The verdict ==