Word: hitler
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Before long Hitler was dragged before a court. He and his fellow Nazis had attempted an armed coup in Munich; when it failed, the instigators were imprisoned. Here at last was the longed-for martyrdom, and Hitler seized it. Up to now, events had formed the leader: Germany's humiliating loss of the Great War, the Allies' insistence on reparations, the monstrous inflation, the centuries-old distrust of Jewish professionals and merchants. From here on, the leader would create the events...
Initially, Hitler attracted those like himself, unappeased outsiders, misfits, losers. Joseph Goebbels was an unsuccessful novelist and playwright. Julius Streicher was a blackmailer. Ernst Rohm was a sadistic homosexual who advocated violence and murder. Hermann Goring was an air-force veteran without a scruple to his name. "I have no conscience," he liked to declare. "My conscience is Adolf Hitler." But then, Hitler was the conscience of all his cadre. Pan-Germanism was their creed, Adolf their Messiah. When criticized, Hitler would say, "Two thousand years ago, a man was similarly denounced . . . That man was dragged before a court...
During his months behind bars, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf, the Nazi bible. The terrible arithmetic of the war and the Holocaust was prefigured on every page. Propaganda: "The German . . . people must be misled, if the support of the masses is required." Morality: "Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong." Tactics: "The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force." Genetics: "All who are not of good race in this world are chaff...
Paroled on Dec. 19, 1924, Hitler spent the next five years reinvigorating the Nazi Party, exploiting Weimar democracy to bring down the Republic. The party's members were tireless, cajoling, exhorting, running for local offices, gathering about them a brutal elite guard called the Schutzstaffel, or SS. During this period an American journalist, Louis Lochner, watched the Nazi leader addressing students at Berlin University. "I came away from that meeting," he reported, "wondering how a man . . . who ranted and fumed and stamped could so impress young intellectuals. Of all people, I thought, they should have detected the palpable flaws...
...flaws were in Hitler's overconfident detractors. The Nazi Party received strong support not only from the lower middle class but also from university students and professors. The existentialist Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. Psychologist Carl Jung grew intoxicated with "the mighty phenomenon of National Socialism, at which the whole world gazes in astonishment." A young architect named Albert Speer found that Hitler's oratory "swept away any skepticism, any reservations...