Hitler organizing the Party

Hitler set about organizing his new political party. In 1920 it was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party -- the "Nazi" party for short. In 1928 the party won eight hundred thousand votes. Even then it was more than just a political group. Hitler had already begun turning it into a kind of military force. He trained "storm troopers" to act as militia at his command. And many leaders who remembered past German military might began to support the Nazi party and its troops.

With former army leaders on his side, Hitler felt the time had come for direct action. On November 8, 1923, he and his storm troopers surrounded a group of government officials in a beer hall in Munich. Hitler told them that he wanted to turn the government over to the military. He forced them to swear loyalty to his "revolution." To gain their release, the officials agreed. But when they were freed, they had Hitler arrested. He was tried, given a sentence of five years, and sent to prison. His "beer hall Putsch" had failed, but news of it spread and Hitler's name was heard far and wide for the first time.

Hitler’s Ideas

Hitler served only nine months of his prison term; then he was set free by the authorities, many of whom were sympathetic to his cause. While he was in prison, Hitler organized his ideas into a book. He dictated the book to his prison mate, Rudolf Hess. This was the book called Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), destined to become the Nazi bible.

Like most extremists Hitler was filled with prejudices. And the greatest prejudice of all he saved for the Jewish people. From the beginning of his book to the end, Hitler spoke of the Jewish people as the cause of the troubles and ills that Germany was suffering:

If we pass all the causes of the German collapse in review, the ultimate and most decisive remains the failure to recognize the racial problem and especially the Jewish menace. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf]

Hitler believed that the Jews were natural enemies of the "superior" Aryan race (to which the Germans belonged). It was, he felt, unnatural for Jews and Aryans to intermarry and have children:

Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium. ... Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature... [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf]

Hitler argued that the Jews were dangerous because, in his view, they controlled the German nation. He said that they controlled not only money and land, but the press as well. And the Jews, he maintained, were using the press to tell people what to think:

With all his perseverance and dexterity [the Jew] seizes possession of [the press]. With it he slowly begins to grip and ensnare, to guide and to push all public life, since he is in a position to create and direct that power which, under the name of "public opinion," is better known today than a few decades ago. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf]

But for Hitler the greatest danger was what he called the danger of the "blood." He was afraid that Jewish blood would poison the pure blood of the Aryan Germans:

[The Jew] poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own. The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is the Christian who marries a Jewess. The [children] however, take after the Jewish side. ... In order to mask his activity and lull his victims ... [the Jew] talks more and more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The fools begin to believe him. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf]

And what did Hitler conceive of as the goal of the Jews? What did the Jews wish to accomplish?

[The Jew's] ultimate goal in this stage is the victory of “democracy,” or, as he understands it: the rule of parliamentarianism. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf]

Hitler's Power Grows

Freed from prison, Hitler turned back to the work of building and expanding his party and its troopers. In the elections, of 1930 the Nazi party won six and a half million votes. They had become the second largest political party in Germany, and where before they had held only twelve seats in the Reichstag (Germany's parliament), now they held more than a hundred.