Hotel Hitler: A 9-month stint in a genial little prison helped to make Adolf Hitler into a dictator
by DAVID AXE
On April 1, 1924, 34-year-old Adolf Hitler a socially awkward painter and former soldier from Austria arrived at Landsberg prison in Bavaria to serve a five-year sentence for organizing a failed coup that got 18 men killed, including four policemen. Hitler stepped into Landsberg as the occasionally self-doubting head of a tiny, impoverished and amateurish anti-semitic political movement the National Socialist German Workers Party. He would walk out nine months later a more self-assured figure steadily gaining prominence and power.
And arguably more importantly, Hitler left prison as the author of Mein Kampf, a two-volume memoir and political screed that, in the words of biographer Volker Ullrich, connected Hitlers biography and his political program. In doing so, Mein Kampf published between July and December 1925 did the initial work of creating a cult of personality around its author and subject. Hitler was the Nazi Party. And Landsberg was his, and Nazisms, laboratory.
There is no shortage of books about Hitler. But Ullrichs new biography Hitler: Ascent, 18891939, recently translated from German to English, stands out for its thorough research and aversion to myth-making. The global entertainment industry has long since appropriated and transformed Hitler into a sensationalist, pop-cultural icon of horror, Ullrich writes. Equally troubling, studies of Hitler tend to skew toward one of two extremes structuralism and intentionalism. That is, did larger political and cultural forces create Hitler the leader? Or did Hitler create himself? Ullrichs mission, he writes, is bringing it all together and synthesizing it. This balance is evident as Ullrich explores Hitlers time in Landsberg. Imprisonment only encouraged Hitlers belief in himself and his historic mission.
Helpfully for the budding dictator, Bavarian authorities had imprisoned Hitler and his fellow coup plotters most notably, Rudolf Hess, Hitlers future deputy together. Hitlers fellow inmates, first and foremost Hess, did everything they could to strengthen his conviction. The Austrian and his imprisoned compatriots met daily for lunch. Hitlers fellow inmates would wait, standing silently behind their chairs, for the cry, Attention! The Fuehrer would then walk, accompanied by his inner circle, through the rows of his faithful followers and sit down at the top end of the table. Hitler gave a little speech. Sieg heil! his followers cried.
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marybourg
(12,650 posts)Be sure to keep tRump out of jail, no matter what he may eventually be convicted of?
TygrBright
(20,780 posts)Wolf Frankula
(3,605 posts)Dolf and all his fellow plotters would have dangled from ropes. The Nazi party would have been crushed. What would have happened then? I don't know.
Wolf