In November 1923, Hitler believed that the Nazis were strong enough to seize power. He took his cue from the hyper-inflation that had begun earlier in the year as a consequence of the French occupation of the Ruhr, which denied Germany access to its most economically productive region. Between January and October 1923, the value of the German mark fell from 7,590 per US dollar to 4,200,000,000,000. Attempting to exploit the unrest this upheaval created, Hitler and General Ludendorff, a former head of the German army in the First World War and now a leading Nazi Party member, attempted to seize power in Munich in an armed rising. However, when the Nazis marched on the government offices, the Bavarian police fired on the marchers, who scattered in disorder. Hitler was arrested, tried for treason and sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
The authorities, embarrassed by rumours that a number of officials had been implicated in the putsch and sympathetic towards Hitler's basic nationalism, decided not to treat him too severely, as his release after less than a year made clear. Hitler had behaved arrogantly during the trial, an indication that he did not regard the putsch as a failure: it had provided the opportunity to spread Nazi propaganda and he vowed that his time would come again. The putsch quickly became a piece of Nazi lore, celebrated annually as 'Martyrs' Day' in honour of the sixteen marchers who had been killed in the rising.
Mein Kampf
Hitler used his time in prison to write Mein Kampf, a mixture of autobiography and ideology. The book was not so much a plan of action as an emotional appeal to the German people to identify their enemies and then follow the Nazis in destroying them. The text expressed his main political ideas, including:
• the conviction that politics was dialectical - a bitter struggle between irreconcilable opposites
• unshakable belief in Germany's destiny as a great Aryan nation to destroy Jewry and seize the Slav lands of the east
• a passionate hatred of communism
• belief in the power of the state as the central social organization
• the conviction that women were subordinate to men and should not engage in politics.
Excerpt from Hitler by Michael Lynch, published by Routledge, UK,
According to Source B, what were the main features of National Socialism as defined by Hitler?
According to Hitler in Source C, what new strategy had he decided to adopt?
2013, p. 62.
Many historians have come to regard it /Mein Kampf] as the nearest we have to a definitive analysis of National Socialism whose essential features were: an unshakable belief in Germany's role as a great Aryan nation destined to save itself and the world, the rejection of the crippling Versailles Treaty that had been imposed on Germany, and a burning hatred of Jews and Communists, who were joined in an enterprise to destroy German identity and culture.
World History
