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1924. Barbed wire entanglements thrown up around Munich's former Military Academy to keep back a mob which roars, "Hail Ludendorff! Hail Hitler!" Stiffly in full uniform & medals, Prisoner Ludendorff poses with Prisoner Hitler who wears his raincoat with an air of defiance. Together ex-General Ludendorff and ex-Corporal Hitler, tried on charges of high treason for having led together the .famed Munich Beer Hall putsch which failed, cost 18 lives. Prisoner Hitler, as leader of the party of seven men which by this time has become the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of 30,000, shouts at his judges: "I know your sentence! But that high court above will not ask us, 'have you committed high treason?' That court will judge us all: the Quartermaster General [Ludendorff] of the old Army, his officers and soldiers, who have wanted to do their duty as Germans for the people and the Fatherland, who wanted to fight and die! You may doom us a thousand times and yet the Goddess of the Eternal Court of History will tear to pieces the indictment of the State prosecutor and the sentence of this Court! Her verdict will be acquittal!"
When Herr Hitler has been convicted, the crowd cheers him so fiercely that he has to be shown on a balcony, take several bows. When General Ludendorff is acquitted (obviously in tribute to his War-time service), he sneers at his judges: "My acquittal is a humiliation which this uniform and these decorations have not deserved!"
Convict Hitler and eight others receive the light sentence of detention in a fortress where they have connecting rooms. During his ten-month sojourn there, Prisoner Hitler pens the 800 bombastic pages of Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). Says the warden as they part: "I too, Herr Hitler, am now a Nazi."
1932. In his presidential study 85-year-old Paul von Hindenburg disdainfully refuses 43-year-old Adolf Hitler's plea that he, as leader of the Nazi Party (largest in the Reichstag) be made Chancellor with "precisely the powers" of Benito Mussolini (TIME, Aug. 22). Less than six months after this rebuff, the Goddess of the Eternal Court of History—as Orator Hitler so fetchingly calls her—makes him Chancellor of the Reich by assent of Old Paul von Hindenburg (TIME, Feb. 6).
Last week his Goddess seemed to fling all Germany prostrate before Conqueror Hitler's triumphal car.
Hitlerism, In what sign does the pudgy little vegetarian with the Charlie Chaplin mustache conquer?
Today most Germans are agreed that Hitlerism, with its bombastic counsels of violence, treaty-breaking and Jew-baiting, would have swept their country years ago had not Germans been lulled by a false, post-War prosperity induced in the Fatherland by a flood of U. S. loans. These loans enabled Germany to pay Reparations with borrowed money, turned the shackles riveted on her by the Treaty of Versailles almost into golden bracelets. When Depression showed the bracelets to be iron, Germany-in-chains was ready to break them by turning to the doctrines of Messiah Hitler who had been preaching repudiation from the first.