TREASON TRIAL OF GENERAL LUDENDORFF.

SCENES AT MUNICH. COURT LIKE A FORTRESS. FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT. MUNICH, TUESDAY.

Entering the hall where Ludendorff is being tried for treason is like penetrating a powder magazine in war time. A couple of hundred yards from the main portal of the War School the street is spanned by a formidable entanglement of barbed wire. The narrow gangway in the centre is jealously guarded by a dozen soldiers. The Bavarians call them police, but they wear shrapnel helmets, carry rifles, and are heavily hung round with hand grenades and other instruments of death. Your ticket and yourself are suspiciously scrutinised. At the entrance to the building you are again mustered by a warlike group. Once inside it, you must thread your way through long narrow corridors crowded with troops, gendarmes, and Munich police in their old-fashioned blue uniforms and spiked helmets. Strewn among them are sinister figures which by the clumsiness of their bearing, the heaviness of their movements, and the self-conscious rigidity of their stare at once betray themselves to be official detectives. Their special office is to search one’s face for evil intentions and one’s pockets for arms. It would all be rather alarming if courtesy were not general. Try as he may, the South German policeman never acquires the inexorable gruffness of his Prussian congener. Nothing could be less suggestive of a powder magazine than the first impression of the court-room. But on reflection its very limitations enforce the lessons of the barbed wire, rifles and hand grenades. It cannot have been that this provincial lecture hall or overgrown board-room was the best theatre available for a drama of which all the world is an intent spectator. Indeed a German colleague whispers into my ear that Munich own a properly equipped court house with twice the accommodation there is here. But it stands in the centre of the town, and is surrounded on all sides by a network of narrow winding streets, and therefore would not have lent itself so readily to insulation from outside influences, which might have troubled the smooth course of the judicial investigation. The refectory of the War School may be inferior as a tribunal, but it is undoubtedly better as a fortress.

LUDENDORFF’S ARRIVAL.

The heavy carved beams which divide the ceiling into twenty panels make the room seem lower than it is. One end is cut off by a barricade of desks, behind which the judges sit on a raised platform. That is the only structural feature in the hall itself. What else it has of a judicial character is achieved by plain deal tables and chairs. There is no dock or witness box or other subdivision. About a third of the hall is occupied by three lines of tables at which the defendants sit with their counsel. Behind these are three rows of plain chairs for the witnesses. Then come tables for the Press, and all the space left over only suffices for three more rows of chairs for the public. In their simple black robes, the chairman of the bench, Judge Neidhart, and his two professional colleagues are not particularly impressive figures. Still less so are the three “lay judges,” who were chosen by lot from a roster. One of them is a merchant and the other two are middle-aged clerks.

Ludendorff appropriately headed the defendants as they streamed into the hall at half-past eight. His car had been the only vehicle to be allowed to drive up to the entrance of the building. All others, whatsoever their qualifications, were compelled to leave their conveyances at the wire barrier at the end of the street. When the guard recognised the former real chief of all the German armies they stood to attention, saluted, and allowed him to drive past. Half a dozen of his admirers who had gathered beyond the wire raised a faint cheer when they saw him. That was the only public demonstration that marked the opening of the trial. Ludendorff was dressed in a blue civilian suit. In the court room he exchanged greetings with Hitler, who clicked his heels audibly together and gave the military salute. These two looked grave, but their companions seemed to treat the whole affair very lightly. Most of them are harmless-looking young men. Lieutenant Wagner alone was in uniform.

ASTONISHING INDICTMENT.

The reading of the indictment, which lasted an hour and a half, was listened to in silence, though it contained much which must have been both novel and astonishing to the great majority of those present. Through this document the public hears for the first time how deeply the Hitler-ludendorff movement had eaten into the body of the German army. It appears that from the beginning of October the notorious Lieutenant Rossbach, who acted as go-between, was able, in the very building in which the trial is taking place, to carry on a systematic and highly successful agitation among the neophyte officers for the whole of the German infantry. Later he was supported by Ludendorff ’s stepson, Lieutenant Peret. Their chief ally within the school itself was Lieutenant Wagner. On Nov. 4 several of the young officers were brought together to hear a private lecture by Ludendorff. He told them that his ideas would soon be victorious. During the past three years Hitler, he said, had succeeded in averting the “blue-white peril,” that Bavaria would become a monarchy again, and either separate from the Reich or take the leadership in it over the head of Prussia. Asked when the time for the rising would come, Ludendorff said the first favourable opportunity, which was the conflict between General von Seeckt and General von Lossow, had been missed. Now weeks, or even months, might elapse before the great masses of the population were forced by distress on to their side. These statements were disseminated among the officers of the infantry school, who, according to the words of the indictment, could only conclude that “Ludendorff was absolutely at one with Hitler and Rossbach, and shared their views on all points.”

YOUNG OFFICERS CORRUPTED.

At noon on Nov. 8 Wagner was called to the headquarters of the Fighting League, informed of the plan decided upon for the same evening, and furnished with instructions for the co-operation of the Infantry School in carrying it out. On the same evening at half-past eight the young officers were called together on some pretext and informed by Wagner that a new Government had been proclaimed in the Brewery Hall, that simultaneously a revolution had broken out all over Germany, and that Hitlerite bands were already marching on Berlin from every direction. Ludendorff declared that Wagner had given orders that the Infantry School was to be employed immediately as a storming unit under Rossbach’s command. For the present the permanent staff were to be “eliminated,” but Ludendorff himself would talk to them on the morrow. Eventually the Infantry School was to be developed by the addition of other units into “Ludendorff regiments.” Wagner told the young officers that Ludendorff wished to inspect them immediately at the Brewery Hall, and gave instructions for their division into companies. Nearly all of them promptly gathered in the courtyard, with rifles and ammunition. Meanwhile Rossbach had arrived, and, after he had confirmed Wagner’s statements and distributed flags and brassards with the anti-semitic symbol Swastika, he marched at their head to the Brewery Hall.

In the early hours of Nov. 9 Ludendorff gave orders that the Infantry School at all costs was to capture the Government building, where the dictator von Kahr resided, though he was not at that moment there, and was still believed to be a party to the Nationalist revolution. A detachment of the Oberland League had already been charged with this task, but had returned without accomplishing it, apparently not liking to tackle the guard of troops. Fortunately, before the young officers reached the building they learned that Kahr and Lossow had declared themselves against Ludendorff, and they abandoned the enterprise. Their ranks also began to thin, but Rossbach succeeded in marching most of them back to Ludendorff ’s headquarters. The evidence of the indictment that Ludendorff was personally actively engaged in seditious tampering with the army institutions was the most striking featured of to-day’s proceedings. In general the indictment allots him a larger share of responsibility for the events of Nov. 8-9 than the broader public believed him to have incurred. Thus it is stated that when he reached the Brewery Hall on the evening of the former day he addressed no questions whatever to Von Kahr and General von Lossow, and did not even give them time to say anything, but greeted them hurriedly with the words: “I have been taken by surprise no less than you, but the step has been made, the Fatherland and the Great Folk (Voelkisch) idea are at stake, and I can only advise you to go with us and do as we do.” It is also significant that among Ludendorff ’s first dispositions as military dictator of all Germany was an order for the “protection of the frontier against General von Seeckt.”