On February 26, 1924, the trial for the so-called Brewery Putsch took place in Munich, an attempted coup carried out months before by Adolf Hitler and hundreds of members of the German National Socialist Party. Inspired by Benito Mussolini's March on Rome, Hitler prepared to take power in Bavaria and then go after Berlin. The coup failed and left around twenty dead.
The Bavarian government wanted a trial almost behind closed doors. Hitler's strategy was the opposite: 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 indignation that facilitated their plans.
Hitler entered the trial as a minor politician, a tiny being dressed in black and a verb that the journalists who had attended the brewery described as mediocre and a lover of coarse salt. But the process, which lasted thirty days, was the platform that propelled the politician to stardom. He pleaded guilty to the charge of high treason, but used the trial to defend his ideas with the connivance of a court that sympathized with him. “Our prisons will be opened, and the day will come when today's accused 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 the 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 the accuser and the use of the trial as a platform to spread his ideas. Also the same threat of chaos if convicted.
History never repeats itself. But as journalist Peter Ross Hanger - who has written extensively about this trial - explains, there is also nothing to ensure that it cannot be repeated.
