# 1924

## Metadata
- Author: [[Peter Ross Range]]
- Full Title: 1924
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- Had Hitler not spent 1924 in Landsberg Prison, he might never have emerged as the redefined and recharged politician who ultimately gained control of Germany, inflicted war on the world, and perpetrated the Holocaust. ([Location 42](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=42))
- The year that brought Hitler down—late 1923 through late 1924—and that by rights should have ended his career, was in fact the hinge moment in Hitler’s transformation from impetuous revolutionary to patient political player with a long view of gaining power. ([Location 43](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=43))
- year that brought Hitler down—late 1923 through late 1924—and that by rights should have ended his career, was in fact the hinge moment in Hitler’s transformation from impetuous revolutionary to patient political player with a long view of gaining power. ([Location 43](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=43))
- Hitler turned his long months out of the political fray into a time of learning, self-reflection, and clarification of his views. ([Location 50](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=50))
- At a safe remove from everyday politics, Hitler cunningly allowed the Nazi Party to squabble and self-destruct so he could later call it back to life on his own terms, remade in his own image and decisively under his thumb. ([Location 60](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=60))
- The brutal ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, one of Hitler’s closest cronies at the time of the putsch who later became Hitler’s state minister for the occupied eastern territories, said simply: “November ninth, 1923, gave birth to January thirtieth, 1933”—the day Hitler became chancellor of Germany. ([Location 62](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=62))
- “How it happened that Hitler came to power is still the most important question of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history, if not of all German history,” wrote historian Heinrich August Winkler.5 ([Location 67](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=67))
- Hitler’s fourteen developmental years fall into two main periods. The first is Hitler’s “apprentice” years, 1919 to 1923, when the newly self-discovered politician was finding his feet and learning the polemical game, using fists, elbows, and words to reach for power through incendiary rhetoric and violent revolution. “From 1919 to 1923, I thought of nothing else but revolution,” said Hitler.7 ([Location 75](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=75))
- The second period, 1925 to 1933, often called the “fighting” years, begins with Hitler’s relaunch of the Nazi Party in the same beer hall where his putsch had failed. It ends after eight years of fierce political combat, with Hitler’s 1933 takeover of the chancellery in Berlin. ([Location 78](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=78))
- Between those two key developmental periods lies 1924, Hitler’s year in prison. ([Location 80](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=80))
- Nineteen twenty-four shifted Hitler’s focus, hardened his beliefs, and set the stage for his remarkable comeback after a seemingly insurmountable defeat. That period is the subject of this book. ([Location 83](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=83))
- To grasp Bavarian politics means pulling back the curtain on the strange political carnival of the 1920s Weimar Republic. ([Location 86](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=86))
- He began to fetishize the newly adopted raised-arm Nazi salute copied from Mussolini, who got it from the Romans. In ([Location 633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=633))
- Among Hitler’s favorite resources for his anti-Semitism were the works of American automobile magnate Henry Ford (The International Jew) and the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. ([Location 671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=671))
- When faced with high-risk situations, Hitler’s instinct was almost always to take the leap. Action was his aphrodisiac, his catnip, his default. His impetuosity often overwhelmed all other considerations, as the world would later learn, to its horror and sorrow. ([Location 868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=868))
- But, like so much Hitler would do in his political career, he painted the dream first, then tried to fill in the facts. ([Location 1005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1005))
- Politics, and life, was an all-or-nothing game for Hitler. He thought only in terms of monumental success or dismal failure. With this Manichean worldview, Hitler frequently spoke in either-or terms, always outlining “only two possibilities.” ([Location 1206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1206))
- suicide was always Hitler’s plan B. ([Location 1292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1292))
- In the end, Ott concluded that Hitler’s hatred for “those who think differently” could not be attenuated: “I could feel his demonic obsession with an ideology that unleashed the psychopath in him.” Hitler was filled with “vanity and brutal dogmatism,” wrote Ott. ([Location 1467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1467))
- the “race problem” (by which he meant Jews, whom he always described as a race, not as a religion or an ethnic group); ([Location 1869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1869))
- The antidote to this “racial poison” (read: Judaism) is not “calm analysis,” he said, but a politics of “hot, merciless, brutal fanaticism… to bring the [German] people back from slavery.” ([Location 1880](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1880))
- To make his radical solutions acceptable, Hitler had to make the problem radical. ([Location 1918](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1918))
- “Majority decisions are always weak decisions,” he claimed.33 That’s why, he stated, he was determined to remove the existing system and replace it with “a nationalistic, absolutely antiparliamentarian national government”—about as clear an admission of treasonous intent as one could ask for. ([Location 1927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1927))
- Though disorganized and laced with inconsistencies and non sequiturs, Hitler’s argument sounded compelling to many by its very conviction. ([Location 1973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1973))
- As had been true in assessments of Hitler before his putsch, the sachems of the high bourgeoisie—columnists for the most sophisticated newspapers—tended to dismiss Hitler after his speech as an untutored rustic. ([Location 1984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=1984))
- “high treason is the only crime that is punished for failing.” ([Location 2065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2065))
- (“Hitler has the secret of the common touch, an instinctive feel for what people want who don’t think much,” wrote the Vossische Zeitung, revealing again the condescension that, in years to come, would cause many in the intelligentsia to underestimate Hitler.) ([Location 2415](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2415))
- The disaster of the Odeon Square would become a unifying Nazi Party narrative in the future. ([Location 2420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2420))
- Hitler had hung two pictures of Frederick the Great on the wall (Hitler would still have Frederick the Great on his wall in the Berlin bunker at the moment of his demise in 1945). ([Location 2552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2552))
- the Führer principle of infallible leadership, ([Location 2570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2570))
- “Why Did November 8th Have to Happen?” ran in the April 1924 issue of Deutschlands Erneuerung.8 This often overlooked essay, which contained numerous passages and concepts that would later appear in Mein Kampf, openly presented Hitler’s aggressive expansionist dreams and his utterly race-driven view of the world. Though he had written numerous editorials for the Völkischer Beobachter, Hitler’s five-thousand-word article for Lehmann’s journal was an unusually detailed and concentrated summation of his thinking, especially on foreign policy. To read it now is to encounter a preview of the Third Reich. ([Location 2595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2595))
- Marxism was the “mortal enemy,” and Marxism was a Jewish creation. ([Location 2609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2609))
- Hitler posited that France was Germany’s implacable “hereditary enemy” and was single-mindedly focused on the “Balkanization” of Germany into its weak component parts (Germany had consisted of three hundred independent states, municipalities, and principalities before Bismarck united them in 1870). Therefore, Germany had to choose Russia or England as its ally. ([Location 2613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2613))
- “In structure, language and themes, and taken as a whole, the article can be seen as precursor to Mein Kampf,” wrote historian Plöckinger. ([Location 2626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2626))
- he was writing his version of a bible (though he never called it that), an ideological guide for the sum of life, the catechism for a new secular religion. His new creed was National Socialism, and Mein Kampf (My Struggle) would be its scripture. ([Location 2967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2967))
- He would also carefully craft an image of himself, through an autobiographical structure, as a man uniquely endowed to remake the world in Germany’s favor—a politician-philosopher chosen by fate to lead the nation (and eventually the world) in its darkest hour. ([Location 2973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2973))
- Even as he was hammering it out in his room at Landsberg, Hitler’s writing had, to him, the gravitas of a holy book. Like a divine voice from on high delivering final wisdom to his messenger—God to Moses—Hitler was channeling his chaotic years of reading and speaking onto the written page. He was both god and messenger. ([Location 2978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2978))
- In biblical terms, Hitler’s four months at the typewriter were his forty days in the wilderness. Just as Jesus (according to the Gospels) came out of the desert and its satanic temptations with a clarified sense of self and dedication, Hitler came out of his moment of internal exile—and the trials of failure and scorn—with a heightened and hardened sense of his destiny and of his capability to lift Germany out of the valley of misery. ([Location 2981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2981))
- Much of the crystallizing took place in Hitler’s room in the fortress building as he poured forth the pages of Mein Kampf (then still known only as “my book” or “my work”). “I gained clarity about a lot of things that I had previously understood only instinctively,” said Hitler. ([Location 2989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2989))
- This is the period that can be said to have made Hitler into the man who would not rest until he had Germany in his grip. This was the final step toward self-legitimization, the intellectual certification that was missing from Hitler’s résumé. ([Location 2994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2994))
- “Personality cannot be replaced,” he wrote. “It is not mechanically trained, but inborn by God’s grace.” The right personality was required for what Hitler called “Germanic democracy” in which “the leader is elected but then enjoys unconditional authority.” This is the Führerprinzip—the Führer principle that would lead to Hitler’s unchallenged control once he achieved power. ([Location 2997](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=2997))
- Historian Kershaw noted, “His almost mystical faith in himself as walking with destiny… dates from this time.”10 ([Location 3009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=3009))
- As he explained in Mein Kampf, “the magical power of the spoken word” has its greatest impact when kept simple: one enemy, one idea, one solution (Hitler’s enemy was the Jews and his solution was their removal.)16 Likewise in a book: offering complex explanations or comparative versions of one’s ideas would only undermine them and distract readers. ([Location 3038](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=3038))
- The book was dismissed for decades by postwar critics as a mishmash of “grubby jargon,”17 a “chaos of banalities,”18 and “superficial and triumphalist accounts”19 of his life story, and it was all of these things. Yet Hitler’s work presented, for those willing to put together its scattered pieces, a worldview that gave meaning and understanding to all that followed later. ([Location 3042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=3042))
- And fighting the Jews, for Hitler, was a veritable religious calling. “In resisting the Jew, I am doing the work of the Lord,” he wrote.25 ([Location 3070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=3070))
- Still, the basics of Hitler’s worldview added up to a political system that would justify three massive undertakings: war on the West, war on Russia, and the Holocaust. He stuck with this scheme until the very end. ([Location 3075](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=3075))
- the new Herrenvolk, or master race. ([Location 3195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011J4H47W&location=3195))