On February 26, 1924, the trial for the so-called Brewery Putsch took place in Munich, a coup d’état attempted months earlier by Adolf Hitler and hundreds of members of the German National Socialist Party. Inspired by Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, Hitler prepared to seize power in Bavaria and then go to Berlin. The coup failed and left twenty dead.
The Bavarian government wanted an almost closed-door trial. Hitler’s strategy was the reverse: to use it to get headlines in the German press. The financial conditions imposed by the victors of World War I in the Treaty of Versailles, with hyperinflation that eroded the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, kept public opinion in a state of outrage that facilitated their plans.
Hitler entered the trial as a minor politician, a diminutive being dressed in black and a rhetorician who journalists who had attended the beer hall described as mediocre and fond of coarse salt. But the process, which lasted thirty days, was the platform that propelled the politician to fame. He pleaded guilty to the charge of high treason, but used the trial to defend his ideas with the connivance of an audience that sympathized with him. “Our prisons will be opened, and the day will come when the accused of today will be our accusers!” he bellowed. For democracy it was a catastrophe.
This Monday marks one hundred years since the opening of the trial. Historical comparisons are very effective in the media, but they always ignore the context and conditions of each situation.
But whoever wants to look for parallels between what happened in 1924 and the trial of Donald Trump for inciting insurrection in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, with five deaths, will find them. There is the same delegitimization of democracy, the conversion of the accused into an accuser and the same use of the trial as a platform to spread their ideas. Also the same threat of chaos if convicted.
History never repeats itself. But as the journalist Peter Ross Hanger explains – who has written a lot about that trial – there is also nothing to ensure that it cannot be repeated at some point.
