THE LAST WEEK - THE ROAD TO WAR
Chapter 10 - Part 1
August 30, 1939

German and western press reaction to the verdict is harsh. The sentence of five years seems ridiculous for treason and an armed uprising that has killed four policemen. The Times of London is acidic, commenting, "The trial has at any rate proved that a plot against the Constitution of the Reich is not considered a serious crime in Bavaria."

The Times would probably be harsher if its reporters know the leniency with which Hitler is treated in prison. He and his fellow political convicts receive plenty of mail, which includes truckloads of gifts from admirers for his 35th birthday on April 20. Hitler, Hess, and the other Alte Kämpfer enjoy flowers, cakes, chocolates, books, and money. Hitler is allowed to receive delegations, hold conferences, and issue proclamations. He is incarcerated in a large room with a huge view of the countryside, and given another cell to use as his "work, conference, and visitor room." Jailers greet the prisoner with the "Hitlergruss."

Streams of visitors, many of them women bearing gifts, flock to Hitler’s prison, including Winifred Wagner, and Helen Bechstein, wife of the piano manufacturer, who secures a 45,000-mark loan from her husband to ensure that Hitler will not emerge from prison a pauper. Hitler never repays the loan, and Bechstein writes it off as a donation, deducting the debt interest on his tax return.

Hitler, Hess, and Weber can also ignore 6 a.m. reveille and 8 p.m. "lights out." They sleep late and read and work as long as they want at night. In short leather pants and knit green suspenders (a gift from Elise Bruckmann, wife of English racist theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain) and city-shirt and necktie – an incongruous combination – Hitler regales his pals with his views on everything.

One thing Hitler has learned from the Putsch and the trial: any attempt to seize power by force in the face of the armed forces is doomed. He maintains the putschist attitude, talking tough, but telling his fans and followers that the Nazis must gain power allied to the Reichswehr.

But outside, the Nazi Party, officially banned, struggles to hold together. With Hitler and Hess jailed, and Goering in Austrian exile and drug rehab, there is a leadership void that the ponderous and intellectually muddled Rosenberg can’t effectively fill. Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, their credibility badly damaged by the Beer Hall Putsch, get axed in favor of Bavarian People’s Party leader Heinrich Held. He bans the Nazi Party and the Brownshirts as illegal organizations. The fever of separatism runs its course.

As a result, the Nazi-nationalist block finishes second in the Bavarian elections in April. A month later, the National Socialist Freedom Movement, a coalition of groups that includes the Nazis, gains 2 million votes in the national election. 32 of 34 Reichstag candidates, including Strasser, Röhm, Frick, and Ludendorff, are elected. Hitler’s oratory is the factor, but Ludendorff takes the credit, being free.

Worse, Hitler’s former buddy, Anton Drexler, attacks Hitler in the Völkischer Beobachter, accusing Hitler of using Jewish tactics. And everyone beats up on the hapless Rosenberg. His book, "The Myth of the 20th Century," is one that every Nazi Party member must have, but nobody reads.

The only visible achievement of the Nazis in this period is Georg Schott publishing "Das Volkbuch vom Hitler," a hagiography of Adolf, whose sub-headings include such phrases as "The Prophetic Person," "The Genius," "The Humble One," "The Loyal One," "The Man of Will," and "The Awakener." Schott turns Hitler into a living demi-god.

Back at Landsberg, annoyed by the Nazis’ internal debate, Hitler decides to stay out of it (as if he has a choice). Instead he puts forward his agenda and philosophy to his pals and fellow inmates day after day from his rattan chair, looking like the Kaiser’s pantry chef on holiday in his lederhosen, wearing everyone out with the endless monologues. He even tells his troops that: "During the last half hour, while I was resting, I invented a new machine gun and a contrivance for bridge-building, and composed a piece of music in my mind." The rest of the gang would rather play cards.

Finally someone (both Strasser and Max Amann modestly take credit) suggests that Hitler stop wasting his alleged wisdom on the choir and instead jot them down for posterity in a book that can inspire millions of followers. The idea appeals to Hitler’s ego. After all, he’s got little else to do in the slammer but ruminate. He later says that at Landsberg: "I recognized the correctness of my views."

Borrowing the warden’s Remington, Hitler promptly tests out his two-finger typing skills to bat out his manuscript, which he tries out every evening for his cronies, interrupting their card games. When Hess arrives to start his brief jail term, the bushy-browed acolyte takes over the typewriter, smoothing Hitler’s dictation on bond and carbon paper provided by Winifred Wagner.

Hitler starts off by giving the book a pompous name, "My Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice," but his publisher, Max Amann, suggests that such a title will be a hard sell for the masses, and a pain in the neck for the printers. And Amann’s publishing house is depending on this book to keep them solvent. How about cutting the title back to that snappy line at the top of his diary: "Mein Kampf?" Done.

With Hess sorting out the material and organizing Hitler’s ideas into something coherent – and providing some geopolitical theories from his guru, the eccentric racist philosopher Albrecht Haushofer – Hitler gets down to knocking out the tome, which will take up two volumes.

It will ultimately earn him millions of dollars (from required sales to schools, businesses, and newly-married couples, at 15 percent royalties), but no literary distinction. Day after day, Hitler and Hess work on the book, with Wagner blaring on the record player to inspire them. By December the book’s first volume is finished, covering Hitler’s version of his life from birth to his announcement of the Nazi Party program in the Hofbrauhaus back on February 24, 1920. The second volume, which Hitler works on after his release, covers his alleged political theories.

Despite Amann’s best editing efforts, the book’s organization is chaotic and vile, jumping from subject to subject, expounding for 10 pages on syphilis, and rambles on about art, history, and even film. Another 56 pages discuss racial issues, wrapping up with the purity of the "Aryan race." All of history is a racial struggle.

Hitler writes, "For a racially pure people, conscious of its blood, can never be enslaved by the Jew. It will forever only be the master of bastards in this world."

The book discusses foreign policy, Esperanto, pets, and public speaking. He shows no understanding of economics, and only contempt for democracy. The book trails off without a conclusion, beyond the formation of the Nazi Party. It is very much the amateur writings of a political amateur.

Yet for those who wade through its heavy text, his program for the next quarter-century is all there. He starts off on the second sentence: "German-Austria must return to the Great German motherland, and not because of economic considerations of any sort…Common blood belongs in a common Reich." Therefore, Hitler argues, every person of German blood should live in a German dictatorship.

Democracy is a failure, Hitler writes, a Jewish conspiracy to enslave the German race. Supporters of democracy are Jews or their dupes. The Jews actually intend to impose a Marxist state upon Germany.

Germans are a superior race, and they should rule the world. And Hitler is the messiah sent to lead the German people to that end.

Unfortunately, the Aryan Germans, the highest race, are being undermined by the Jews, the lowest race. Germany must launch a war to overthrow Versailles, defeat France and her allies, and conquer most of Russia and the Slavic nations. The Russian land mass must become "lebensraum" for the Germans. The Slavic people must be enslaved.

Hitler sneers at the idea that colonizing peoples should attempt to civilize or educate the conquered, and advocates eugenic sterilization and euthanasia, then a popular idea even in democracies. American universities have Chairs of "Racial Hygiene."

According to Hitler, even civil war is a good idea, as "the bloodiest civil wars have often given rise to a steeled and healthy people, while artificially cultivated states of peace have more than once produced a rottenness that stank to high Heaven."

Hitler writes, "The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle in nature; instead of the eternal privilege of force and strength, it places the mass of numbers and its dead weight, thus denies the value of the individual in man. If with the help of the Marxian creed, the Jew conquers the nations of this world, his crown will become the funeral wreath of humanity."

To Hitler, the "Jewish question" is an existential matter for all people.

Hitler has a lot to say about the Jews, not all of it about their politics. According to Hitler, Jews are "no lovers of water." Their dress is "unclean," their appearance "generally un-heroic." Just looking at them makes Hitler "sick to his stomach." He calls Jews a "foreign people…inferior beings…yellow fists," even "vampires" with "poison fangs."

To Hitler, "the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jews." The Jew is a "garbage separator, splashing his filth in the face of humanity." Or: "a scribbler…who poisons men’s souls like germ-carriers of the worst sort." Or: "a cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic in the scum of the big city."

Marxism and the Jews are synonymous in Hitler’s mind. Oddly enough, capitalism and the Jews are also synonymous.

Hitler’s views are messianic and inflexible. There are no alternatives between his blacks and whites, goods and evils, victory or total destruction. He is God’s chosen tool to lead the German people to their destiny. There can be no argument with that. And like most fanatics and ideologues, he derides out of hand his opponents’ rational arguments.