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When Germany declared war and even the Social Democrats voted the war credits, Hitler was transported. Since he was an Austrian, he asked for and received permission to join a Bavarian regiment. The war was wonderful. The army was more wonderful. Hitler was made a corporal, received an Iron Cross, was wounded, and later gassed. While he was recuperating in a hospital near Berlin, news came of the German Revolution of 1918, and of the Armistice that was to save Germany from Allied invasion. Hitler buried his face in his pillow and wept. Then he decided to give up art and architecture for a new profession: "I, however, resolved now to become a politician."
One more step was necessary: the newly minted politician must find a political party. Hitler found it in the German Workers' Party, a tiny group which the Bavarian Reichswehr officers had sent him to observe. He became member No. 7 of the little party which was later to become the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis). He found an impressionistic economic program in the scrambled economic theories of another member, Gottfried Feder. And he found something much more important — his voice. One night a visitor said some friendly words about Jews. Without thinking twice, Hit ler burst forth in speech. He had become an orator.
Then Hitler made one of the most valuable mistakes of his life: he and his handful of Party comrades decided to seize the Bavarian Government. Hitler had promised to kill himself if the attempt failed. Instead he went to jail in the Landsberg prison in a cozy cell (compliments of friendly officials).
In Landsberg, with the help of Rudolf Hess, he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle}. Seldom has a plotter set forth his purposes in plainer language or more explicit detail. The book was badly organized, but in it were the plans for Hitler's aggression against Germany and the rest of the world. The intellectuals contented themselves with laughing at Hitler's ideas and correcting his literary style.
Hitler had been sentenced to jail for five years. He was out in nine months.
His prestige had increased. One by one the perverse paladins of the Nazi inner circle gathered around him: ¶ Hermann Goring, the former flyer and drug addict.
¶ Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the unsuccessful novelist who became the Nazi Party's satirically clever propagandist.
¶ Joachim von Ribbentrop, the champagne salesman who became No. 1 Nazi diplomat.
¶ Julius Streicher, the obscene and sadistic Jew-baiter who became Gauleiter of Franconia.
¶ Captain Ernst Rohm, the homosexual organizer of the Brown Shirts, who was shot in the Blood Purge.
Slowly the Party extended its connections among financiers, industrialists and Government men. For Hitler had learned one lesson from the Beer Hall Putsch: legal, not violent, revolution was the strategy for Germany.
The education of Adolf Hitler was all but completed. The terrible education of the world was about to begin.
Selling Protection. It began with Germany. To Germany Hitler and his Party offered to sell protection against Marxism.