This Day in World History
February 26, 1924
Adolf Hitler’s Treason Trial Begins in Munich
On February 26, 1924, Adolf Hitler and nine associates stood trial in a Munich courtroom. The charge was treason — they were accused of trying to overthrow the German republic. That day, Hitler turned the tables to accuse the German leaders who had surrendered in 1918, ending World War I, and created the republican government he so despised: “There is no such thing as high treason against the traitors of 1918,” he proclaimed.
Germany in the early 1920s was deeply divided. Right-wing nationalists like Hitler bitterly opposed both the republican government and the leftists and Communists who struggled with them for power. These nationalists were also inspired by the example of fascist Benito Mussolini, who had seized power in Italy. Perhaps, they thought, they too could gain power with forceful action.
Hitler’s hopes to launch a national revolt were buttressed by the apparent support of three Bavarian officials. Hoping to force them to join his cause, he staged a putsch, or coup, at a political meeting in a Munich beer garden. Declaring “The revolution has begun,” he had armed thugs from his National Socialist (Nazi) party use the threat of force to convince the three to join him. The next day, however, the three had police fire on a Nazi march, and had Hitler and others arrested.
The trial received coverage across Germany, which Hitler used to his advantage. He denounced the republican government. He denounced the three Bavarian leaders for cowardice. He remained defiant down to the guilty verdict. In his closing speech, Hitler offered a prophetic call: “The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled: he wills it.”
Sympathetic judges gave Hitler a sentence of only five years. He served only eight months of it. He spent his time in prison writing the first half of Mein Kampf¸ his political manifesto, which detailed his anger at “the traitors of 1918” and set forth his extreme racial views. He also used his time in prison to plan a second — and more successful — takeover of Germany’s government.
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Malibu, California, 1920s. via Flickr user dcwooten.
By Erik N. Jensen
Summer officially arrived on June 21, and as Americans anticipate lounging by pools and vacationing on beaches, they also look in the mirror and worry about how that midriff will look, once it’s squeezed into a swimsuit. Despite the country’s rising obesity rates, our society has not grown more accepting of different body types and sizes. We seem, if anything, to have become less accepting of them. Women in the 1950s and 1960s, a recent New York Times article noted, didn’t mind a muffin top here or a bulging thigh there, but “Today, it’s assumed that only the lean, muscular, hairless and ab-defined will feel comfortable in a bikini.”
That lean, muscular, and ab-defined standard would have looked completely familiar to women (and men) living in the 1920s, however, and there are some remarkable similarities between the physical ideals of that post-WWI decade and those of today. Then as now, society placed a premium on achieving streamlined, athletic bodies in men and women alike, and this was perhaps nowhere so true as in interwar Germany. A 1925 essay in a German magazine foreshadowed the spirit, if not the phraseology, of later Elle and Seventeen articles when it decried the “flabbiness and muscular atrophy” of the unexercised body and instead promoted “slender… taut-breasted girls” as the new ideals.
Photo by Vern C. Gorst. c. 1929-32. via UW Digital Collections.
In an episode that would strike terror in the hearts of every self-conscious beachgoer today, Germany’s very first democratically elected president of the new Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, suffered the humiliation of having an unflattering photograph of himself in a swimsuit published on the cover of Berlin’s leading illustrated weekly on the day of his inauguration in August 1919. Political wags compared him to a walrus, and, within weeks, satirists from across the spectrum had spliced his image into a slew of mocking (and widely circulated) postcards, posters, and cartoons. They presented Ebert’s slightly sagging body (the man was 48 years old, after all) as a metaphor for his incapacity to govern the country, portraying him as literally unfit to lead. The relentlessly mocking tone of those media criticisms makes Us Weekly’s contemporary ridicule of celebrity cellulite seem gentle by comparison.
The quest for a toned body in 1920s Germany, though, was not just about looking hot in a bikini (which, in any event, wasn’t even invented until after World War II). It was also about counteracting the negative consequences of an increasingly mechanized and sedentary lifestyle. At the same time, as the economy sped up, business leaders insisted that their workers needed to keep pace. A modern society, in short, demanded modern bodies.
Here, too, a comparison of the body cultures of Weimar Germany and of our own society reveals striking parallels. When Business Owner magazine
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