How Germany excused Hitler's Coup
Why it's a bad idea to let psychopaths escape consequences
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) was published in 1925 and conceived at something of a writer’s retreat. As Ian Fleming used the tranquility of his Jamaican Goldeneye estate to put James Bond to page, and as George Orwell would seek out the solitary Scottish island of Jura to complete 1984, Hitler hatched Mein Kampf at Landsberg’s Art Nouveau fortress, 40 miles west of Munich. He hadn’t chosen the location, however.
In 1923, the budding Austrian-born dictator had made himself into both a cult hero and a convicted criminal after the Beer Hall Putsch, a colorful and clownish attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government during which Hitler and 3,000 members of his new paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung ⎼ “Assault Division” in English, also known as the SA, or the “Stormtroopers,” or the “Brownshirts” ⎼ hijacked a public meeting being held in a Munich beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, to announce the start of a national revolution and the formation of a new government. The coup lasted 24 hours.
Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years inside the Art Nouveau Landsberg fortress. Like Lenin and Stalin, whose Siberian prison exiles were more like unplanned vacations, Hitler did not do hard time. He was allowed gifts and visitors and, generally at leisure, was able to dictate the first volume of Mein Kampf to fellow inmate Rudolph Hess, a Hitler loyalist and core member of the German Nationalist Socialist Party, which, to save time, would come to be known simply as the Nazis (in German, “Nazi” is the short term for Nationalsozialist).
Just as neither Lenin nor Stalin were really communists, Hitler wasn’t at all a committed socialist. Politics was beside the point. The three men were, more accurately, homicidal psychopathic megalomaniacs.
Mein Kampf is a disturbing rant which was destined to become the conventional wisdom of millions of Germans and laid the groundwork for Germany’s forthcoming and ultimately disastrous preemptive war in Europe and, as well, the rationalization for, and execution of, the genocide known as the Holocaust.
In his unhinged manifesto, Hitler warns ⎼ sans evidence ⎼ that France is plotting to carve up Germany. Proposes eastward expansion into Russia to acquire the necessary lebensraum (“living space”). Supports the Prussian ideal of absolute authoritarian rule. Theorizes that racial purity is the secret to uplifting Germany. Blames the Jewish people for the worldwide Communist Revolution, and for fouling the German race.
Hitler also refutes the view that peace and plenty can be achieved through scientific progress, claiming that the study of science is a Jewish plot to distract Germans from the necessity of war.
“It is always the Jew,” Hitler argued, “who seeks and succeeds in implanting such lethal ways of thinking.”
At the time, Jews were only .75 percent of the German population, about 500,000 in a country of nearly 70 million.
Hitler only served nine months of his five-year prison sentence for instigating a coup. He was pardoned by the Bavarian Supreme Court in spite of an objection by the state prosecutor. The Bavarians did attempt to deport Hitler to Austria, but the Austrian chancellor rejected the proposal.
In 1928, Hitler wrote another book, his thoughts on foreign policy, but the Zweites Buch (“Second Book”) was not published until after his death. Hitler's publisher, Franz-Eher-Verlag, told him a new, second book would further hinder the already lackluster sales of Mein Kampf, which had reached about 10,000 copies.
In the posthumous “Second Book,” the future Fuhrer predicted that hunger would outstrip crop improvements and that all “the scientific methods of land management” had already failed. In The New York Times, Yale history professor Tim Snyder examined the book’s dubious mash-up of imperialism, paranoia, and agriculture:
The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum. Germany needed an Eastern European empire because only conquest, and not agricultural technology, offered the hope of feeding the German people … No conceivable improvement would allow Germans to be fed ‘from their own land and territory,’ he claimed. Hitler specifically ⎼ and wrongly ⎼ denied that irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers could change the relationship between people and land.
By the early 1930s, there were an estimated 500,000 Stormtroopers. Hitler had also created an elite wing of the SA called the Schutzstaffel (“Protection Squadron”), better known as the SS, which was initially a group of 300 personal bodyguards and grew into a private army of 50,000. These SA and SS bullyboys were typically ex-soldiers holding anti-leftist and anti-democratic views. Communists and Jews became their top targets.
Ultimately, every major German party recruited their own private armies, and any public political expression had a reasonable chance to result in some kind of furniture-smashing, head-cracking brawl.
In Berlin, a Communist stronghold, the Nazis sought to win a “conquest of the street” with the Roter Frontkampferbund (“Alliance of the Red Front Fighters”), the paramilitary arm of the German Communists. During this urban clash of ideas and skulls, the most visible Nazi figure was Horst Wessel, the son of a Protestant minister who excelled as an orator and campaigner with Berlin’s SA-Sturm 5.
Wessel’s relatively “cultured” klatch was known for bringing shawms, oboe-like instruments, to Nazi events. Attempting to make the case for a “true socialism” free of Marxism, Wessel successfully wooed Communists in dark courtyards, noisy taverns, and unemployment offices. Ultimately, the surreptitious recruiting got him killed in a tabloid-worthy slaying.
Wessel, who lived with a former prostitute, was shot in the mouth by a Communist pimp named Albrecht Hohler. During Wessel’s funeral, Communists attacked the procession and tried to seize the coffin.
Wessel became a martyr to the cause. Across Berlin, there were more than 100 so-called “storm bars,” where the brown-shirted Hitler supporters became known for singing a song Wessel had supposedly written:
The flag on high!
The ranks tightly closed!
The SA marches with quiet, steady step.
In Modern Times, Paul Johnson wrote of how Hitler positioned himself as the “anti-establishment” answer for a country heading toward civil war:
The great theme of his speeches … was that politicians had ruined the Reich. Now he would use politics to wage war on politicians … What he was proposing was a revolution for stability, a revolt against chaos, a legal putsch for unity … The Nazis posed as defender of the ‘Aryan order’ … and as the only force in Germany capable of exorcising the Red Terror and giving innocent citizens the peace of real authority.
Hitler’s spiel appealed to desperate German workers susceptible to blaming scapegoats and seeking a savior. German unemployment was 33.7 percent in 1931 and a catastrophic 43.7 percent at one point in 1932 ⎼ meaning six million people were out of work.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, Hitler’s rabid anti-Communism attracted the support of business owners and industrialists frightened of Bolshevism, which was a far more plausible threat than it ever was in the United States. On November 6, 1932, the German business community shit a brick when, in Federal elections, the German Communist Party increased its representation in the Reichstag by almost 20 percent, to 100 seats, and the capitalist-friendly Nazis lost 34 seats, down to 196. It would be the last free and fair German elections until after World War II.
Many in the German establishment assumed that, even if fully empowered, Hitler and the Nazis would play nice and maintain Germany’s representative, coalition government. This was a ghastly miscalculation.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Joseph Goebbels had previously said: “If we have the power, we’ll never give it up again unless we’re carried out of our offices as corpses.” His prophecy would be fully fulfilled.
Hitler’s first act was a mass six-hour torchlight parade of his uniformed followers from the Brandenburg Gate to the front of the Chancellery. Next, Herman Goering cleansed, militarized and expanded the state police, the Geheime Staats Politzei ⎼ the Gestapo.
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire by a Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, who had acted alone and was captured the same night. The Nazis chose to blame the fire on all the Communists in Germany. Said Goering: “The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night.”
The following day, civil liberties were suspended. Within weeks, the Parliament ejected Communist members, and passed the so-called Enabling Act, legislation which effectively delivered total power to Hitler.
A jail-inspired manifesto was also reborn. In 1933, sales of Mein Kampf jumped to one million. Soon, it became a ritual to give a copy to every newly married couple.