1924: The Year That Made Hitler (47 page)

11.
  Hitler,
Monologe,
259–60.

12.
  Plöckinger,
Geschichte,
62; Hess,
Briefe,
359.

13.
  Plöckinger,
Geschichte,
62.

14.
  Weinberg,
Hitler’s Table Talk,
217.

Chapter 13. Starting Over

1.
  Hanfstaengl,
Hitler,
125.

2.
  Weinberg,
Hitler’s Table Talk,
217.

3.
  Plöckinger,
Geschichte,
63.

4.
  Hanfstaengl,
Hitler,
125.

5.
  Plöckinger,
Geschichte,
67–68.

6.
  Large,
Where Ghosts Walked,
203.

Epilogue. What Finally Happened

1.
  Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
772.

2.
  Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
772.

3.
  Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
741.

4.
  Kellerhoff,
Mein Kampf,
title page.

5.
  Plöckinger,
Geschichte,
175.

6.
  “Erledigung Hitlers,”
Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt (Erstes Morgenblatt),
70, no. 841 (November 11, 1925).

7.
  Plöckinger,
Geschichte,
183.

8.
  Plöckinger,
Geschichte,
184–86.

9.
  Plöckinger,
Geschichte,
419ff.

10.
  Plöckinger,
Geschichte,
154–55.

11.
  Interview with the author, June 12, 2014.

12.
  Sven Felix Kellerhoff, “‘Mein Kampf’zeigt Hitler als systematischen Denker,”
Die Welt
(interview with Barbara Zehnpfennig), January 17, 2012. http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article13819610.

13.
  Claus Christian Malzahn,
Deutschland, Deutschland: Kurze Geschichte einer geteilten Nation
(Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005), 7.

*
Völkisch
is very hard to define and almost untranslatable into English. The word has been rendered as popular, populist, people’s, racial, racist, ethnic-chauvinist, nationalistic, communitarian (for Germans only), conservative, traditional, Nordic, romantic—and it means, in fact, all of those. The
völkisch
political ideology ranged from a sense of German superiority to a spiritual resistance to “the evils of industrialization and the atomization of modern man,” wrote scholar David Jablonsky. But its central component, as Harold J. Gordon, Jr., noted, was always racism.

*
Pour le Mérite
was created in 1740 by Frederick the Great. He named it in French, the preferred language at his court.

*
By national standards, the party was weak, with only a small membership outside Bavaria. The Communists, by contrast, were a national party with more than three hundred thousand members and more than one million votes in federal elections.

*
Numerous books have mistakenly referred to an old fortress at Landsberg, but there was none there.

†
“Fortress” will be used from now on without quotation marks to denote the modern square building described above.

*
Democratic in this context is code for Socialist or left-leaning.

†
Not to be confused with the highly respected postwar Munich newspaper by the same name. Today’s
Süddeutsche Zeitung
is Germany’s leading center-left daily.

*
Ehard did not mention the fifteen dead Nazis, the four dead policemen, and the one dead bystander. Everyone already knew. Besides, there had been no indictments for homicide; it was impossible to know who shot whom in the melee.

*
Embonpoint
is generally translated from the French as “corpulent.”

*
Even Hitler’s title for his Vienna chapter, “
Wiener Lehr-und Leidensjahre
” (“Apprenticeship Years and Suffering in Vienna”), echoes the title of the original
bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
), written by Germany’s greatest man of letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Hitler’s chapter title also neatly brings in Goethe’s most popular novel,
Die Leiden des jungen Werther
(
The Sorrows of Young Werther
). If intentional, this subtle choice of words was a clever piece of self-marketing.

*
One school of thought, the intentionalists, has argued that Hitler foretold and directly ordered the Holocaust—the top-down theory. The other, called functionalists, has contended that the killing began at much lower levels through local officials or small-unit military commanders and expanded into mass murder—the bottom-up theory. Today there is growing consensus that ideology drove action and that
Mein Kampf
was the blueprint.

*
The frightful day came on June 30, 1934, when Hitler used the excuse of a purported putsch attempt by Ernst Röhm to unleash a bloodbath that saw more than one hundred of his presumed enemies, including former chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher, Gustav von Kahr, and Röhm himself cold-bloodedly murdered in the Night of the Long Knives.

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Contents

1. Cover
   
2. Title Page
   
3. Welcome
   
4. Dedication
   
5. Epigraph
   
6. Prologue: The Unfathomable Ascent
   
7. Chapter One: Discovering the Mission
   
8. Chapter Two: The Charmed Circle
   
9. Chapter Three: The Mounting Pressure
   
10. Chapter Four: A Hot Autumn
    
11. Chapter Five: The Putsch
    
12. Chapter Six: Hitting Bottom
    
13. Chapter Seven: A Trial for Treason
    
14. Chapter Eight: The Judgment of History
    
15. Chapter Nine: Rearranging the World
    
16. Chapter Ten: The Boss
    
17. Chapter Eleven: The Holy Book
    
18. Chapter Twelve: A Second Chance
    
19. Chapter Thirteen: Starting Over
    
20. Epilogue: What Finally Happened
    
21. Photographs
    
22. Acknowledgments
    
23. About the Author
    
24. Bibliography
    
25. Notes
    
26. Newsletters
    
27. Copyright
    

Copyright

Copyright © 2016 by Peter Ross Range

Cover design by Susan Zucker

Cover photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann. Keystone-France, Getty Images

Cover copyright © 2016 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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The photograph on the cover, which shows Hitler practicing rhetorical poses in 1926 or 1927, captures the bombastic speaking style he had developed by 1923.

ISBN 978-0-316-38399-8

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