In 1923, Hitler launched an attempted coup to seize power in Munich in Bavaria. Known as the Beer Hall Putsch, it ended in disaster for the Nazis when Hitler was arrested along with other Party leaders and charged with treason. Having been found guilty after a widely publicised 24-day trial, Hitler was sent to the surprisingly comfortable conditions of Landsberg Prison as a nationally recognised figure.
Imprisonment gave Hitler time to reflect on the future direction of the Nazi Party and dictate Mein Kampf to his assistant Rudolf Hess. The book laid out the blueprint for Hitler’s future plans for Germany, although when it was first published it gained little following outside the ranks of the Nationalist Socialist faithful.
It was in Mein Kampf that Hitler clearly stated his strongly anti-Semitic views, and attempted to justify his hatred. He also outlined his intentions for a future Germany that included the destruction of the parliamentary system and the first reference to aggressive eastward expansion in order to gain Lebensraum ‘at the expense of Russia’.
Despite its initially poor reception, Mein Kampf became a popular book with hundreds of thousands of copies sold each year after Hitler became Chanceller of Germany in 1933, even though he increasingly distanced himself from it. The future British Prime Winston Churchill later stated that, if world leaders had read the book, they could have anticipated the full scale of Nazi domestic and foreign policy.
