Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> After the defeat of Germany at the end of World War Iin November 1918 the government collapsed revolution swept the country and politics became a dangerous business with all sides employing strong-arm tactics. Nationalist groups sprang up all over Germany with the aim of ridding the land of the ‘November Traitors’ who had brought the disgrace of the dictated peace and of the Communists and Spartakists whose first loyalty was to Bolshevik Russia. Nationalists came from every level of society and at the lower end of the Munich social scale was Anton Drexler’s tiny German Workers’ Party one of whose meetings Adolf Hitler attended as a military observer in September 1919. He subsequently joined the party and through his powers of oratory vir- tually took it over from the outset changing its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP). The stewards for the founding meeting of the NSDAP on 24 February 1920 were a squad of Zeitfreiwilligen or temporary volunteers armed with pistols and clad in the field-gray of the Munich Reichswehr to which they were attached. Hitler’s speeches soon found a loud echo in the ranks of the Freikorps the hastily-formed units of demobilized right-wing troops who had banded to- gether on an ad hoc basis to smash riots keep order in the streets and prevent Germany from becoming a Bol- shevik regime. Such armed supporters might well have been sympathetic but they certainly had no undying loyalty to the new movement. So towards the end of 1920 a permanent and regular Nazi formation called the Saalschutz or Hall Guard was set up to protect speakers at NSDAP meetings. In November 1921 the various Saalschutz groups throughout Bavaria were consolidated by the Freikorps leader Ernst R?hm and renamed Sturmabteilungen or SA after the ?lite Ger- man Army assault detachments of World War I. In re- turn for securing the organizing abilities of R?hm and other military sponsors Hitler had to let his ‘party