>> booktv continues with peter ross range. in his book "1924: the year that made hitler" he takes a look at the year that defined adolf hitler's ideas and led to his political rise in germany. >> hello, thanks to everybody for coming indoors on a beautiful winter day. you probably had to stop for the girl scout cookie stand on the way and but at least you are here. thanks for coming. i handed out a timeline to give you a sense of why i chose to write about 1924. i don't know if there are enough to go around, maybe you can share them. you can see we are talking about the early period of hitler's political life, not the third reich or the holocaust but the first 14 years leading up to his seizure of power in 1933. this period was 14 years long and coincident with the myanmar

republic, started one year later, it breaks more or less into two big parts, the first is the revolutionary part, the first we 4 years leading up to 1923 and the second big parties eight years starting in 1925, the long march to power, the electoral period. and also referred to the legal period, the first we 4 years trying to gain power illegally through revolution, the last eight years through legal means not counting street money. between these periods, 1924, in my research before i decided to do this i noticed 1924 seemed to me to be a neglected period of the hitler story. it seemed to be an important period when hitler's political

arc shifted from being an impetuous revolutionary to be a political player, he had time in prison to reflect on the error of his ways and the fact that he was probably not going to be able to persuade the military to join him in a coup and he had to figure out another way to gain power. he said to one of his friends in prison, out voting them will take longer than outshooting them but at least the result will be guaranteed by their constitution. he was clear about using the democratic process to arrive at an undemocratic end. at another point we will participate in parliament for the purpose of taking it and destroying it, these things were not secrets. when i began this research, i was surprised by the things i came across. i had no idea for instance the attempted beer hall push in 1923 was a close run thing.

this was not a drunken brawl in a beer hall, they were used for political meetings all the time in bavaria especially at that time. but for a few technical areas hitler might have succeeded a lot more than he did. he might have taken bavaria whether he took berlin or not is uncertain. a few things went wrong and it ended in gunfire the following day. hitler was almost killed. another one of the many what ifs along the way of hitler biography that could have changed hit history but the man next to him was killed, another surprise to me was hitler threatened suicide three times during the night of the push. another surprise was he tried suicide even though he was captured two days later. when he got into prison 38 miles west, he went into a suicidal

depression, his only recourse at that point was suicide by starvation, staged a hunger strike until he was talked out of it and then he began a period of contemplation and reflection and 40 days and nights in the wilderness period as i like to think of it during which he wrote a 60 page document which was lost to history, and was a run-up of his trial >> and the writing of college. and in the time of working on this document. and he was the only one to save germany and began to regain the confidence that made him a dictatorial leader of an upstart party in the first place.

i was surprised to learn in his trial which came in the fourth month he had been allowed to make a four our speech which riveted the courtroom, the judge felt he had to let hitler have the run of the courtroom for complicated visions which i will explain in the book. at the end of the trial another two our speech and in between was up and down quite a bit in german court procedure, defendants are allowed to question witnesses and hitler did so to the point of driving the most important witnesses out of the courtroom, a lieutenant general. i was also surprised to learn that hitler had written "mein kampf," not dictated as legend has it and he wrote it on a remington portable typewriter made one month earlier in new

york, given to him by a wealthy patron in berlin, the wife of a piano manufacturer. he had so many patrons and patronesses it is hard to keep up sometimes. i was also surprised to learn he wrote "mein kampf" in 41/2 month. you usually buy it is a one volume book and i will show you one in a few minutes. another big surprise was hitler almost blue his early release from prison which was crucial to his later career because he lusted so much after a new shiny touring car. it was a benz because mercedes-benz had not combined. there were a lot of interesting surprises for me in the early stages of research and that

convinced me as the timeline shows you that there was a book to be written here. let's talk about how it came to pass that hitler staged the beer hall push. 1923, the whole 14 year period no word was in that year. in january, the french and belgians invaded the area in germany's industrial heartland. hyperinflation began to take off, followed by active resistance led to executions of germans, and inflation, people were not getting food, went on hunger strikes, german police shooting at hungry germans, things were going to hell in a hand basket in the worst way. the political turmoil followed

from that, political instability to the point bavaria was almost in a state of mutiny, the division in bavaria was in a state of mutiny in berlin, looking down gun barrel that each other by fall of 1923. are complex content nation of political forces were in play. i will explain in chapters 3 and 4 that led to the point that hitler felt he had to act or more likely would be outflanked. in bavaria might stage a coup and steal a march on him. an unexpected opportunity just when he decided to act and had a

complex plan for doing it saturday and sunday because the cops were off and it would all work out just great when he heard thursday night there was a major speech being held in this big beer hall on the east side of munich which hosts 3000 people and the speech would be by the civilian head of government who was a dictator at that point, along with him was the two military heads at the time, the triumvirate would be under one roof, one time, and that is what he did. that is what started in a beer hall, rather than originally planned in the traditional way of taking over the police stations and radio stations and stuff like that in the middle of the night. fires the histone into the ceiling, and takes the place by

storm, convinces after a while these three men that they have to join him in his coup and his plan for a march in berlin. the idea of a march on berlin comes from the mussolini model of the march on rome a year earlier. it is connected to the revolutionary style known as ataturk who staged his revolution in turkey from outside the capital, declared a new government in ankara, the ottoman government in constantinople and it worked. it was part of his model and openly copied but in the course of the night his comrade in arms, the hero of world war i

goofed and he let the triumvirate go, and the middle of the night the words of officers, very much a man of the old school, counted for everything and these guys as soon as they got out turned code again and hitler's coup failed. in the middle of the next day, decided to play their last card would to attempt to attract popular support by marching through the center of munich, the uprising going turned the tide the other way. as they marched through the city they got a lot of support, people were cheering and they were during the police, state forces trying to control them. in the end they came just to the other side of the center of the

square besides the field marshal's home memorial. and there was a cordon of bavarian state police, and they didn't, the police fired. and four policeman and a bystander, that led to hitler's capture two days later and his time in prison. his time in prison is not mentioned, the whole business of making prisoners hardening beliefs in prison under hard time. in this case hitler hardened his beliefs under soft time. germany had been a form of imprisonment call honorable imprisonment except they call it fortress arrests, the word fortress is very confusing, you best forget it, a picture in the book shows you it was by no means a fortress where he was imprisoned but that was the actual name in german. prisoners had rooms that were

more like dorm rooms, junior-college dorm rooms maybe, they had open doors all day, four to six hours of outdoor time every day, they can grow their own clothes and make better food been arrested prisoners in prison, 500 other regular criminal inmates. it was during this time that hitler had a lot of time to read and talk and walk around in the garden. you will see a picture of him walking the garden with one of his pals looking a little quirky in his shorts, this is because hitler got a lot of visitors, 350 during 15 months in prison, many of them women, all of them bearing gifts and the gifts were not a play for hitler's famous sweet to and baked goods. and he put on ten pounds.

in any case he used this time for reflection, and when he regained his mojo keep in mind this is an extremist, what we regard as a crazy guy, in his case that meant conquering the world, a messianic complex, he began making grand speeches and after the trial decided it was time to write this down. several accounts, the fellow prisoners got sick and tired of hillary dominating conversations and dinnertime conversations with his monologues hitler knew one kind of conversation, him talking in monologues. and later in the 30s and 40s,

that may be apocryphal, the reasonable speculation that he needed the money. if he needed the money he wrote one letter saying my lawyer's bill, like many prisoners in history, were written, no doubt, the main reason was he needed to talk and had an audience of 40 other guys, and in the push, that is not the only thing about a guy named hitler, he wanted to write this book. in addition, he wanted to legitimize himself, he dropped out of high school. got any kind of degree for the arts academy in vienna. and widely read and very smart,

and in most rooms and widely eclectic command of data information and famously strong memory, and he unloaded it all in this book which he wrote for numfour-halfmac -- 41/2 months, there are other reports for him and me and hitler is banging away, i queried that a little bit, how would the other guys put up with that? the answer i got back was remember, most of these guys were soldiers from world war i, that is a huge shaping element, world war i, there is no hitler, most historians would tell you, certainly kershaw has said that.

early morning noise, ask soldiers, and worked until midnight, paid an extra fee, and the curfew at 10:00. and from time to time would read parts of this, and dictated the book ahead, the fabulous research has been done by scholar who showed it was impossible for him to have dictated this, the whole legend started with one prison guard citing one moment he heard hitler's centurion voice coming through the closed door, maybe it was hitler's cell but they were both in that room. hitler dictating to harris, that stuck with us for 65 years before it was knocked down by

better research. what he was doing was reading to harris if you examine the letters, hitler made a habit of reading to him. he became his sounding board. by comparison with most of the guys in prison he was an educated man from an upper bourgeois family in egypt, his father was a big merchant, so they had this back and forth and it gets complicated and he and hess had a falling out in chapter 10, hitler finished this book by september, starting in late april and looking for a publisher, a bidding war, he goes to the nazi publisher who had no money at the time, turned out to be a good decision, he turned down the other offers he had and by keeping it in the family so to speak he became a very rich man, the book sold 12 million copies before he died. in any case hitler will be

looking at your window a lot, he was on the second floor, i was there a year ago this month, the bars are the same. nothing has changed this way, the inner walls are gone, it was a big open room, the outer walls and windows are the same and from this window you can see over the prison wall on the second floor, you can see cars going back and forth, 200 yards away an important road to the next town, he was a sucker for beautiful cars. even though he was anti-modernist in many ways he did have a weakness for technology and particularly cars so got his heart set on getting a new car, probably a chauffeur, by the time he got out and started haggling, even though he had no money, the local been

dealer whose garage, dealership was in the same street as the nazi newspaper in munich, came to visit him in prison in september and they talked about whether the 40 hp or 50 hp and all this stuff and the guy left and hitler wrote him a letter saying take this to the top where the headquarters was and see if you can get me a discount. his lawyer's bill is too much, and any dealership, the future of the nazi party, he is haggling for a deal. he needs to get this letter into the guy's hands monday or saturday or friday, wrote the letter saturday, the only way to

make it fit was to smuggle the letter out. many of you know, it was often delivered the same day in those days, if he got it into the mail munich monday morning the guy would have it by monday night. that was the only way to catch him before. this letter made it but other things happened that exposed this. because of that, hitler's planned release at the end of september was stopped, there ensued a dramatic 21/2 month court struggle with the prosecutor trying to do everything he could to keep hitler behind bars. another one of the great what ifs. the prosecutor and munich police put forward all sorts of arguments about why hitler should not be released or at the very least reported to austria which under the law should have been anyplace for having staged

a coup attempt even if he hadn't been convicted he should have been deployed. after a three month back and forth, they let him out. that then was one more steppingstone that propelled hitler quickly into the political stream of things at a critical time and he could then restart the nazi party remade in his own image very much under his own phone. going to one other thing many of you heard about the republication of "mein kampf" in germany. that was a month ago. a week ago stories circulated that all of a sudden it had become a bestseller in germany. this happens to be true. a very unexpected bestseller.

my dear wife is passing out documents, not enough to go around, every other person keep one which will help you understand, the book was published by an academic institution in germany for the first time in 70 years because the copyright finally ran out and the bavarian government could no longer block the publication of "mein kampf". the fact that it has become a bestseller took by many to be a good sign, there are nazi tendencies again. what about the rise of anti-immigrant feeling in the last couple months, the backlash against the immigrant wave and the refugee wave? i see it just the opposite. i think it is a good thing and i will explain it in a second. should have gotten this out

before. bear with me a second. okay. this is "mein kampf". this is two volumes and one book, 782 pages and a fairly typical book jacket that was used at the time. more than 1000 printers and a lot of things changed but this is a typical looking version of it that i use from 1943, people's addition. this is what i call the old "mein kampf". this is the new "mein kampf". when ronald reagan did that to

the budget many years ago 12 pounds, 6 pounds each, this is volume 1, that is volume 2, the other way around. this is totally academically annotated version of "mein kampf," 1966 pages long. it outnumbered hitler's words by a long shot. the way it is organized, dan nickman brought it to my attention a year and a half ago, outside this volume there is a picture and as you see from highlighted sections, those are hitler's words and the rest is

the commentary, posted online, an example that has more footnoting and in some cases footnoting goes over to another full spread so you have 31/2 pages of footnotes to go with this much text. if you look at the example as far as this book you will see it is very much like an old bible. to wrap up quickly, in my opinion they destroyed "mein kampf". i say this having spent quite a bit of time with this diversion. you can't read the damn thing because you are always being interrupted. one page had seven footnotes which takes 20 minutes just to reach the footnotes, all in german but english translation, in a while.

the first two pages of nation and race, notorious first chapter in the volume of "mein kampf" have 15 footnotes and the footnotes went up numb 250 words so this is serious stuff. this is the real deal and footnotes have footnotes, don't want to be overdoing it. this is scholarly work. the question still remains, first of all no self-respect, you can get the real thing, for free on the internet. as a download. when you try meeting hitler with all these interruptions and footnotes you don't get hitler. you get this broken up thing which is totally deconstructed because they show the context, lies and half-truths and all these things that make it impossible to get the flow of hitler. my time has run out but i want

to thank you for listening and happy to take some questions. [applause] >> it is show time. we are on c-span. hope we have some curious voices. >> i was reading your acknowledgment and i am always amazed by these hitler world war ii books, the incredible amount of research that has to go into it and i noticed you mentioned a graduate student who was your research assistance. can you talk to me about the role of your research assistant, how you found this graduate student, what they actually did for you? >> i started by querying the institute for contemporary history in munich which published "mein kampf," recommendations for an intern

which can help me, this grad student had been working for them for a while. she was a canadian, not a german. she was finishing her masters in german and was a grapevine and she reached out through her network to a historian who told us about a book, turned out to be a 500 page two volumes scrap book from hitler's trial. this came as a stunning surprise, no one has written a book about this trial, one of the most important trials of history considering the consequences. plenty of people said that at the time, no book in german, no book in english, and two maine sources of this information, one is the trial transcript which thank god somebody put together 20 or 30 years ago, the other is

these clippings, it is very hard. a lot of stuff is lost but somebody made a scrapbook so i have 500 actual clippings day by day, a press corps, 60 reporters every day, german reporters, the trial is over five weeks, 25 trial days, the amount of reporting was lovely reporting, lively writing, the transcript is not giving and in munich, great thanks. >> did you write this book as a cautionary tale not to mention any names? >> started two years ago, i did not quite foresee what was happening at this stage in the political campaign.

if anyone does research on hitler and the third reich in this period is writing a cautionary tale. >> i have read "mein kampf" a couple times over the years and one thing that sticks in my mind is he came up saying no political leader reached a height of his career except for the spoken word, and in switzerland i heard him speak, mesmerizing delivery he had, where did he come up, did he teach him? >> i would say instinctively, that is the reason he was a huge success, no revolution has ever been brought about by writing, he said this in writing, he put it down even as he was doing it,

he called his time in prison my education at state expense. that was his dissertation, he had been making speeches in prison, trying to remember if that was in "mein kampf" or not but he goes on at great length about speaking and propaganda. and state groups, the spoken word is what makes a difference, had several rules on the importance of propaganda, searching pretty well. >> two questions, why was the

sentence so short, what were the considerations that play their and if the sentence had been a reasonable length considering what he was trying to do, would either have been deported or kept in jail for ten years, the hitler we knew never would have materialized. >> it is speculative but most people, the question was how did he get such a short sentence after being convicted of treason, he almost didn't get even that, the trial was skewed by the choice of the judge, and the guy who assassinated the former bavarian government sentenced to death and the judge pardoned him and gave him soft

time and honorable imprisonment and given hitler parole for a crime hitler committed for a breach of peace, for bashing of the head of an opponent in a beer hall one time, hitler should have been convicted of violating his parole but wasn't. the fix was sort of in by the beginning by the choice of this judge. at the same time the bavarian authorities were wringing their hands about how lenient he was being during the trial. it is a complicated thing, the people's court still in operation, next to the last trial they did before they went out of business which included lay judges, the judge needed four votes to convict, taken from hitler and speeches, and the right-winger had to convince

them you got to do this, basically admitted to the deed but denied the crime. it is no crime because those guys are criminals anyway and he called them the november criminals, the declaration, proclamation of the republic by the social democrats in november 1918 as germany was going down the rules and the kaiser was already gone. they agree to the five year sentence which was the minimum, five years to life which he could have gotten and the minimum he was able to get the minimum by guaranteeing hitler, almost guaranteeing parole in six months, hitler lost the trial and won the war, won the political battle. he emerged from the trial a

hero, the other question was had he gotten ten years, 20 years, might he have disappeared from the political landscape, my guess is yes. what many others have written. can you come up? >> seven years, historians trying to determine -- >> attempting to determine for some time when hitler's anti-semitism -- anti-semitism became exterminations. if you were determined in 1924 and had bought "mein kampf," could you see what was going to happen? >> the answer is no blues not the extermination part. that is a highly debated element of the hitler saga, after the

bonsai meeting how much did hitler control things, what we can say in 1925 when it was published, all you would have seen would be anti-semitism. the line that is often quoted to give a sense how extreme hitler was with the second volume talking about world war i, wyatt was won wrongly by the existing german government and the kaiser and is blaming it on stab in the back people in jewish profiteers and says if only 12 to 15,000 of these hebrew corrupters of the people had been held at a gas at the beginning, 1 million good german lives would have been saved. a lot of people leapt from that to the conclusion he was going to do gas change -- chambers but the experts don't believe that.

you can't make that connection. when he became extermination, i don't have the answer to that. it is way beyond the time i studied for sure. yes? [inaudible question] >> is there a list of books he read and did he have favorite authors that motivated him thinking? >> this is another disputed issue in the history -- hitler history, all these names, schopenhauer, nietzsche, the classics, there are scholars that knocked that down. i address this in several paragraphs in the book, i

recommend the book called vienna, the vienna years and there is a claim that one of his sidekicks that hitler read certain things in prison that is subject to serious scrutiny, hitler claimed to have read everything in a certain bookshop in vienna, we don't know, we do know he budged a lot in "mein kampf". this is what you learn from 12 years of annotations here, how convincing sounding stuff was way off or a little off, style lysing, making it fit the picture, i hate to say it but we don't have a clear answer, this book becomes the footnoted

graphic version of "mein kampf" that hitler never wrote. it contains zero footnotes, no bibliography, and only a few attributions in the whole 800 pages of where he got the idea. the english version of this becomes available, you will see a lot of his statements and ideas can be traced to certain writers like h kf and the classics, the middle of the 19th century. a long way of saying a small hitler cannon you can point to but take some effort to put it together. >> i have to ask, is there any similarity between the extreme things hitler said and the ones trump is saying now?

>> i knew i could count on you to bring that up. i am trying to duck and dodge as much as i can. i am not covering the campaign. i know as much as any of the rest of you know. i will say one thing on this. much has been written, i recommend peter bergen's piece on the cnn website and i was looking at my file on this topic, it is this thick. a month and a half ago there were a flurry of comparisons of trump to hitler. i had resisted getting into that fray because it can be so dangerous to make comparisons to hitler but the things that strikes me the most about similarities between the two guys is their own self belief. hitler absolution for germany was hitler. trump absolution seems to be trump. there is other stuff, mainly it is me me me, only i can do it. if you look at peter bergen's

piece you see a more scientific psychology, science on the great man theory and a messianic complex includes that. anymore? thank you very much. [applause] >> all right, we welcome everyone to come to the front, at the back in the register. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> you are watching booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here is a look at what is on prime time tonight. we kick off the evening at 6:45 eastern. how to defeat isis. after that, charles whelen on banking and monetary system is. at 8:45, why we fail to recognize and act on various dangers. on afterwards at 10:00 pm eastern, america online cofounder steve case speculates on the future of the internet. we finish prime time programming at 11:00 with a look at ali baba, the chinese e-commerce site that rivals amazon. that happens tonight on c-span2's booktv.

>> here is a look at books being published this week.

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