Bob Schwartz

Recommending this book is not meant to compare Trump to Hitler. It is to view the upcoming trials of a contemporary demagogue in light of what may been the most consequential trial in modern history.

In 1924 Hitler was tried on charges of high treason for leading the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed coup d’état by the Nazi Party on November 8-9 1923. Before the trial, Hitler was a minor character with sympathizers, supporters and believers, but he was not yet the leader he would become. During his brief prison stay after conviction, he built his role and wrote Mein Kampf. Everything changed for him and Germany. The rest is history.

From The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany by David King:

On November 8, 1923, a slight young man in an oversized trench coat had crashed a beer hall rally and declared the overthrow of the government. The night, he vowed, would end in victory or death. Seventeen hours later, however, it had ended in neither. Hitler had fled the scene of an ignominious defeat. Many astute observers, from the New York Times to Frankfurter Zeitung, believed that this fiasco meant the end of his career, and it might well have been too, had it not been for his trial in Munich….

A large crowd gathered on the usually quiet Blutenburgstrasse west of Munich’s city center. Mounted guards, plainclothes detectives, and two battalions of state police troops patrolled outside the redbrick building. Nobody was allowed to enter without the proper stamped pass and accompanying photo identification. Once inside, in a small room down the long corridor, security personnel checked for hand grenades in purses or daggers in stockings.

It was February 26, 1924, the first day of the anticipated high-treason trial that would mesmerize the country. According to tips picked up by the Munich police, thugs and hooligans planned to swarm into town, disrupt the proceedings, free the accused, and perhaps even stage another insurrection….

On the eve of the trial, Adolf Hitler was a minor, if ambitious, local party leader idolized by a relatively small number of supporters. His name was still sometimes misspelled in the international press, and his background bungled—if he was mentioned at all, that is, besides in jest at leading his followers in what the New York Times dubbed a “Bavarian Opera Bouffe.” Once the trial began, those days would be numbered.

As the judges prepared to make their entrance, the two sets of doors on the side of the room were shut as a safety precaution. The foreign correspondent of the Associated Press watched Hitler and Ludendorff shake hands and chat amicably beforehand. Ludendorff looked cool. Hitler, on the other hand, appeared agitated and showed signs of emotional strain. There was good reason for his concern….

On November 8, 1923, a slight young man in an oversized trench coat had crashed a beer hall rally and declared the overthrow of the government. The night, he vowed, would end in victory or death. Seventeen hours later, however, it had ended in neither. Hitler had fled the scene of an ignominious defeat. Many astute observers, from the New York Times to Frankfurter Zeitung, believed that this fiasco meant the end of his career, and it might well have been too, had it not been for his trial in Munich….

Hitler was not prosecuted as the law demanded. The court slapped him with the absolute minimum penalty and then, instead of deporting him, ruled in favor of parole. Hitler was out of prison by the end of the year. He returned, just as the prosecutors Stenglein and Ehard had warned, to work where he had left off, though by that time he was much more dangerous to the republic. He had a clearer vision for the future, a more detailed plan on how to get there, and a much more confident perception of himself as a leader with the rarest of talents.

Hitler would later credit his experience in prison with giving him “that fearless faith, that optimism, that confidence in our destiny, which nothing could shake thereafter.” Landsberg was clearly an important period in his life, but had Hitler paused a moment from his triumphalist and self-serving legend-building, he might have considered another factor that contributed to his renewed sense of mission….

The trial of Adolf Hitler is not the story of his rise to power, but rather an episode that helped make that rise possible. It was this trial that catapulted this relatively minor local leader onto the national stage. Hitler’s speeches and testimony in Neithardt’s courtroom form his earliest major autobiography, defining himself before a public beyond the beer halls of Munich that previously neither knew nor cared that much about him. Hitler quickly turned the dock into a platform for himself and his party while putting the young republic on trial.

For twenty-four days, Hitler had hammered the government and its leaders with verve, his shrill, guttural voice rising and falling, choking on emotion, clipping his syllables, sometimes spitting on his toothbrush mustache as he barked a relentless stream of attacks against his accusers. All his rhetorical and stagecraft talents were on full display. Hitler’s performance in the former dining hall of the infantry academy included some of his most impressive and arguably most influential speeches of his career.

Reporters from Germany, the rest of Europe, and as far away as Argentina and Australia described his antics in detail. This was publicity that a local agitator could not have purchased, nor at this stage of his career even dreamed of achieving.

In the process, Hitler had transformed the beer hall fiasco into a personal and political triumph. He was no longer the buffoon who botched the putsch; he had become, in the eyes of his growing number of supporters, a patriot who had stood up for the German people against the treasonous oppression of Berlin, the cowardice of Bavaria, and the humiliations at the hands of the Allied powers. He was, in their view, a martyr taking the fall for his people, while his more distinguished allies sought cover, or, like Ludendorff, blamed everyone else for his own mistakes.