---
title: Before the state:the NSDAP's propaganda in its fringe years, 1920-1923
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923/
description: Between February 1920, when a Munich beer-hall crowd heard a fringe party read out 25 demands and rename itself, and April 1924, when a Bavarian court…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: an interwar radio-and-newsreel intelligence collage with a 1930s map of Europe and propaganda poster proofs.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-interwar.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# Before the state:the NSDAP's propaganda in its fringe years, 1920-1923

At a glance

Between February 1920, when a Munich beer-hall crowd heard a fringe party read out 25 demands and rename itself, and April 1924, when a Bavarian court let its defeated leader turn a treason trial into a national stage…

- **When:** February 24, 1920
- **Actor:** The German Workers' Party…
- **Target:** Munich beer-hall audiences, ex-soldiers and the unemployed as recruits…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/) [Plain folks](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/plain-folks/)
- **Regime:** [Nazi Germany](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/nazi-germany/)

Full details

- **Actor:** The German Workers' Party (DAP), renamed National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) on 24 February 1920, under founding chairman Anton Drexler and, from 29 July 1921, Adolf Hitler with dictatorial powers as party chairman; the Voelkischer Beobachter (acquired December 1920) and Julius Streicher's Nuremberg press, including Der Stuermer (founded April 1923)
- **Target:** Munich beer-hall audiences, ex-soldiers and the unemployed as recruits; the Versailles settlement, the Weimar Republic's parties and press, Marxists and the November 1918 armistice signatories, and Jews, held out collectively as responsible for Germany's defeat and postwar crisis

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This page quotes the NSDAP's 1920 program, including its exclusion of Jews from citizenship, and antisemitic and anti-Marxist slogans from party speeches and press of 1920-23, because the wording is the evidence for how the movement built itself. The quotations are not this archive's description of anyone.

**In one line:** Between February 1920, when a Munich beer-hall crowd heard a fringe party read out 25 demands and rename itself, and April 1924, when a Bavarian court let its defeated leader turn a treason trial into a national stage, the NSDAP built a flag, a hall-guard militia, a daily newspaper and an absolute internal chain of command years before it held any share of state power.

![Diagram: the 25 Points launch at the Hofbraeuhaus, then the flag, hall guards and party paper of 1920-21, the July 1921 leadership crisis, membership growth to 55,000 by November 1923, the failed 8-9 November 1923 putsch, and the 1924 trial that turned defeat into a stage](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923-diagram.svg)

## What happened

**Building a party, 1919-20**

- **5 January 1919.** Anton Drexler, a Munich toolmaker, and the sports journalist Karl Harrer found the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP), a small nationalist discussion circle.
- **12 September 1919.** Adolf Hitler, then a Reichswehr army education officer sent to observe the DAP as a possible subversive group, attends a meeting, speaks up in a dispute, and is invited back. He is enrolled within weeks as the party's 55th member (its cards, numbered from 501 to make the party look larger, gave him the number 555).
- **16 October 1919.** Hitler gives his first public speech for the party, at the Hofbraeukeller in Munich, before roughly 100 people.
- **24 February 1920.** At a mass meeting in the Festsaal of the Hofbraeuhaus, attended by about 2,000 people, Drexler and Hitler read out a 25-point program and rename the party the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). The program, drafted chiefly by Drexler with economic theorist Gottfried Feder, mixes nationalist, social and racial demands:
- Point 1: "We demand the union of all Germans, on the basis of the right of self-determination of peoples, to form a Great Germany."
- Point 2: "We demand equality of rights for the German people in respect to the other nations; abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain."
- Point 3: "We demand land and territory (colonies) for the nourishment of our people and for settling our surplus population."
- Point 4: "Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race." Points 5-8 go on to bar non-citizens from public office and press ownership and call for the "immediate deportation" of anyone who entered Germany after 2 August 1914.
- Point 24 calls for "positive Christianity" and says the party "combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and without us" and stands "on the basis... of the common good before individual good" ("Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz"). (Translations follow the standard English rendering used by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's "Nazi Party Platform" page, with minor wording variants in other translations.)

**Symbol and organization, 1920-21**

- **Summer 1920.** Hitler designs the party's flag: a red field, a white disc, a black swastika. In *Mein Kampf* (1925) he later writes that he chose red deliberately to draw the same psychological attention as the socialist and communist banners it was meant to compete against, while the white and black evoked the old imperial colors.
- **December 1920.** The party buys a struggling Munich paper, the Muenchener Beobachter, with funds raised partly through the "Thule Society" network and a loan later guaranteed with Reichswehr backing (accounts of the exact financing differ); it is renamed the Voelkischer Beobachter ("People's Observer") and becomes the NSDAP's official organ, edited first by Dietrich Eckart.
- **August 1921.** Hitler formalizes the party's hall-guard squad, used to eject hecklers from meetings, as the "Gymnastic and Sports Division" (Turn- und Sportabteilung); by autumn the informal name Sturmabteilung (SA, "storm section") is in use.
- **4 November 1921.** At a Hofbraeuhaus meeting, opponents try to break up the gathering; a few dozen SA men beat them back in a brawl the party calls the "Saalschlacht" (hall battle) and later commemorates as the SA's "baptism of fire."

**The July 1921 leadership crisis**

- **June-July 1921.** While Hitler is in Berlin on a fundraising trip, other party leaders, with Drexler's tentative support, explore folding the NSDAP into a wider nationalist coalition alongside Julius Streicher's Nuremberg-based German Socialist Party (Deutsche Sozialistische Partei, DSP) — a merger Hitler opposes because it would dilute his personal control of the Munich organization.
- **11 July 1921.** Hitler resigns from the party in protest and announces he will rejoin only as chairman with dictatorial powers over its program, organization and finances, and only if all merger talk stops.
- **26 and 29 July 1921.** The committee, dependent on Hitler as its main speaker and fundraiser, agrees. Revised statutes adopted at a special party meeting on 29 July 1921 give Hitler, as Parteivorsitzender (party chairman), those powers by an overwhelmingly one-sided vote (sources give different exact tallies, but agree it was close to unanimous). Drexler is shifted to an honorary chairmanship. Historians use this episode, retrospectively, as the model for the wider "Fuehrerprinzip" (leader principle) the NSDAP later applied to the German state after 1933.

**Growth on paper, 1922-23**

- Party membership, as tabulated from surviving membership lists (Kater 1983), grows from 2,352 (December 1920) to 4,302 (December 1921) to 8,202 (December 1922) to 55,287 (November 1923) — roughly a twenty-fourfold increase in three years, from a Munich club to a movement with a national newspaper and a paramilitary wing, though still a small fraction of any major Weimar party's vote base.
- **20 October 1922.** After his own DSP dissolves, Streicher brings his Nuremberg followers into the NSDAP en masse, founding its Nuremberg branch in Hitler's presence; Franconia becomes an early party stronghold.
- **20 April 1923.** Streicher launches Der Stuermer ("The Attacker"; first published under the fuller title *Nuernberger Wochenblatt zum Kampfe um die Wahrheit*, "Nuremberg weekly for the struggle for the truth") in Nuremberg as his own antisemitic weekly; it is not yet an official NSDAP organ but is edited by a sitting party Gauleiter and reprints party material.
- **February 1923.** The Voelkischer Beobachter becomes a daily paper.
- **27-29 January 1923.** The NSDAP holds its first Party Congress (Parteitag) in Munich, with an SA standard-consecration ceremony and a march of several thousand members past Hitler — a small precursor of the Nuremberg rallies of 1927-1938 (see [Before Triumph of the Will: staging scale for a fringe party at Nuremberg, 1923-1933](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/nuremberg-rallies-origins-1927-1933/)).

**Content note:** Photograph of Adolf Hitler and NSDAP members on a 1923 propaganda drive. This object is shown as it was published. [Why](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/#as-it-was) ![Photograph of Adolf Hitler in a cloth cap and coat, marked with a white cross, seated in a decorated open touring car with men in uniform and civilian dress](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923-hitler-propaganda-drive-1923.jpg)

*Adolf Hitler (marked with a white cross on the print) in an open touring car decked with foliage and flowers, among men in uniform and civilian dress, on a propaganda drive in Bavaria, 1923 (Bundesarchiv catalogue date). Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00204, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE; a 1923 photograph, public domain in the U.S.*

**The putsch, 8-9 November 1923**

- **8 November 1923, evening.** Bavarian State Commissioner Gustav von Kahr is addressing about 3,000 people at the Buergerbraeukeller in Munich when Hitler and armed SA men burst in. Hitler fires a pistol shot into the ceiling and declares "die nationale Revolution ist ausgebrochen" ("the national revolution has broken out"). He takes Kahr, and the Reichswehr and police commanders present, General Otto von Lossow and Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser, into a side room at gunpoint and announces a new national government with himself at its head and the retired World War I commander Erich Ludendorff, who arrives shortly after, as head of the German army. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser appear to agree under duress; all three repudiate the arrangement overnight.
- **9 November 1923.** About 2,000 armed NSDAP and allied paramilitary marchers, with Hitler and Ludendorff at their head, set out from the Buergerbraeukeller toward the Bavarian War Ministry. At the Feldherrnhalle on the Odeonsplatz, state police block the narrow Residenzstrasse; shots are fired (accounts differ on which side fired first). Sixteen marchers and four police officers are killed; many more are wounded. Hitler dislocates his shoulder and flees; he is arrested two days later at a friend's house in Uffing am Staffelsee. Ludendorff walks directly into the police line and is arrested on the spot. The NSDAP, and its press, are banned across Germany the same day.
- The party later commemorates its sixteen dead as "blood witnesses" (Blutzeugen) and treats a banner reportedly carried and blood-stained that day, the "Blutfahne" (blood flag), as a relic; from the later 1920s it is brought out to be touched against new local-branch standards at party rallies, an early instance of the ritual the party used throughout its history to fuse individual membership with a shared, sacralized history.

**Content note:** Photograph of armed men with swastika armbands at the 1923 Munich putsch. This object is shown as it was published. [Why](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/#as-it-was) ![Photograph of armed men in steel helmets with swastika armbands standing on a vehicle at Munich's Marienplatz, with a dense crowd in hats in the foreground and the Rathaus tower behind](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923-putsch-marienplatz-1923.jpg)

*Armed men in steel helmets wearing swastika armbands on a vehicle at the Marienplatz, Munich, before a crowd, 9 November 1923, the day of the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch. Bundesarchiv, Bild 119-1486, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE; a 1923 photograph, public domain in the U.S.*

**The trial, February-April 1924**

- **26 February - 1 April 1924.** Hitler, Ludendorff and eight co-defendants are tried for high treason before the Bavarian People's Court (Volksgericht Muenchen I). The presiding judge, Georg Neithardt, a nationalist sympathizer, allows Hitler to speak at length, uninterrupted, and to cross-examine witnesses, including Kahr, over the four-week trial. National and international newspapers cover the proceedings daily, turning a regional criminal case into weeks of free, sustained publicity for Hitler and his movement.
- In his closing statement, widely quoted from the trial record (see Sources), Hitler tells the court, in substance: the man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled to it, but wills it himself; he does not wait to be summoned, but steps forward. He argues the putsch was not treason but a patriotic act, since he set out to march *with*, not against, the men who governed Bavaria.
- **1 April 1924.** The court convicts Hitler of high treason but hands down the legal minimum sentence, five years' Festungshaft (fortress confinement, a lenient category historically reserved for "honourable" political offenses), with eligibility for parole after six months; Ludendorff is acquitted outright. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, whom Hitler had named as fellow conspirators in his own proclamation two nights before, are never charged.
- **April-20 December 1924.** Hitler serves his sentence at Landsberg am Lech, where conditions are comfortable enough that he receives visitors and fan mail and dictates the first volume of *Mein Kampf* (published 18 July 1925) to Rudolf Hess. He is released on parole after roughly eight months, having spent about thirteen months in custody counting pre-trial detention. The party itself remains formally banned in most German states into 1925; Hitler refounds it on 27 February 1925, outside the scope of this page.

![Photograph of nine men in uniform and civilian dress, including Erich Ludendorff in a spiked helmet and Adolf Hitler in a trench coat, standing in front of a courthouse door](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/nsdap-early-propaganda-1920-1923-trial-defendants-1924.jpg)

*The defendants in the Hitler-Ludendorff trial after the verdict, Munich, 1 April 1924; left to right, per the Bundesarchiv: Heinz Pernet, Friedrich Weber, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann Kriebel, Erich Ludendorff, Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Brückner, Ernst Röhm, Robert Wagner. Photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann, Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00344, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE; a 1924 photograph, public domain in the U.S.*

## How it works

- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): the 25 Points and Hitler's early speeches attach labels — "November criminals" (Novemberverbrecher) for the politicians who signed the 1918 armistice, "system parties" (Systemparteien) for the Weimar coalition — that mark a target's belonging rather than describe an act. Point 4's flat racial bar ("no Jew can be a member of the race") is the clearest instance: it does not accuse individual Jewish Germans of anything; it defines a category and excludes it by definition.
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/): the program and Hitler's speeches place blame for military defeat, the Versailles settlement and postwar economic hardship on named, bounded groups — "Marxism," internal "traitors," and Jews, whom Point 24 accuses of a "Jewish-materialistic spirit" corroding the nation from "within and without." This is the early form of what became known as the Dolchstosslegende (stab-in-the-back myth): the German army's actual battlefield exhaustion in 1918 goes unmentioned.
- [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/): the deliberately designed flag, the hall-guard militia that became the SA, and, above all, the July 1921 crisis that made the party's chairman a single man with dictatorial authority, bind membership to loyalty toward one leader and one symbol rather than to a set of arguable ideas. The Blutfahne ritual, touching a relic banner to new local flags, later extends the same fusion to every new branch that joined.
- [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): undefined virtue phrases carry weight the specific demands do not. "The common good before individual good" (Point 24) and "positive Christianity" name no policy and commit the party to nothing measurable; Hitler's proclamation on 8 November 1923 announces a "national revolution" without specifying what would change for anyone hearing it.
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): Ludendorff, Germany's best-known surviving military commander from the First World War, lends the putsch instant national-military prestige by marching at Hitler's side; the party's flag deliberately mixes the old imperial black-white-red with the new party symbol, borrowing the authority of a defeated but still-respected national tradition for a movement that had none of its own.
- [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/): the program's Point 2 and Point 3 cast the Versailles Treaty and land shortage as threats to national survival ("land and territory for the nourishment of our people"), and Hitler's speeches through 1920-23 repeatedly warn of Bolshevism spreading from Russia and Bavaria's own 1919 Soviet Republic episode as an imminent danger, not a settled historical event.
- [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/): the jump in reported membership, from roughly 2,000 in 1920 to more than 55,000 by November 1923, is cited by the party itself, in its own press, as proof the movement was unstoppable, even though the figure was still a small fraction of the vote any established Weimar party could claim.
- [Plain folks](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/plain-folks/): the party's own name pairs "Workers'" with "National Socialist" to compete for the same working-class audience the SPD and KPD addressed; Hitler, a former corporal and frontline soldier with no formal education past secondary school, presented himself in beer-hall speeches, and later at trial, as an ordinary man who had "worked his way up," in explicit contrast to the professional politicians he called "November criminals."

## Then and now

A later, larger and far more violent example of a fringe armed movement deliberately building ritual, symbol and a media organ around itself before, or instead of, holding territory is the Islamic State's 2014 "caliphate" declaration ([The Islamic State's media machine: Dabiq, Rumiyah, Amaq and the 'virtual caliphate'](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/islamic-state-media-dabiq/)): a single black flag, a personal oath of allegiance (bay'ah) sworn to one leader, and an official magazine (*Dabiq*, later *Rumiyah*) built the same fusion of symbol, oath and organ that the NSDAP built with its flag, the SA and the Voelkischer Beobachter.

The differences are large and should not be minimized. The Islamic State held territory, ran courts and taxed populations from the outset, and its media operation coordinated mass killing on a scale the 1920-23 NSDAP, a Bavarian party with no state power and a few dozen armed men, never approached. The NSDAP's early violence in this period was street brawling and one failed putsch that killed 20 people; the historical trajectory from a fringe party's ritual-building phase to organized mass violence took the NSDAP another decade and control of a state, a path that is neither inevitable nor foreclosed for any movement that adopts the same early techniques. This page scores the 1920-23 method, not a prediction about where it leads.

## Positions on the record

- **The NSDAP's own stated position, 1920-24.** The 25 Points present the party's demands as a program of national restoration and social justice: undoing Versailles, uniting Germans, and putting "the common good before individual good," alongside the explicit racial exclusion of Point 4. At trial, Hitler argued the 8-9 November action was not treason but a patriotic "national revolution" undertaken with, not against, Bavaria's own government, since he had set out to march alongside Kahr, Lossow and Seisser rather than to overthrow them; his closing statement frames his ambitions as a personal destiny rather than an unlawful seizure of power.
- **The prosecution's and the state's position at the time.** Bavarian and Reich authorities charged Hitler, Ludendorff and eight others with high treason under the German penal code's Article 81, banned the NSDAP and its press nationwide the day after the putsch, and prosecuted the case as an armed attempt to overthrow the constitutional government of Bavaria and, through it, the Reich.
- **What is documented.** The texts and date of the 25 Points; the December 1920 purchase and 1923 dailyfication of the Voelkischer Beobachter; the July 1921 statute change and Hitler's resulting powers; the party's own membership tallies for 1920-23; the events of 8-9 November 1923 and the ban that followed; the trial's dates, verdict and sentence; Hitler's imprisonment and parole dates.
- **What is contested.** The exact financing of the Voelkischer Beobachter's 1920 purchase (sources differ on how much came from the Thule Society, from Reichswehr channels and from other donors). The precise vote tally at the 29 July 1921 party meeting (accounts agree it was close to unanimous but differ on the exact count). The exact breakdown of the 20 dead at the Feldherrnhalle (most accounts give 16 marchers and 4 police officers, but some tallies place one or more of the putschist dead elsewhere in that day's fighting rather than at the Feldherrnhalle itself, and identify one of the sixteen as a bystander rather than a marcher). How much Kahr's triumvinate had privately sympathized with some kind of nationalist move against Berlin before Hitler forced their hand on 8 November, a question historians (Gordon 1972; Kershaw 1998) treat as unresolved.
- **Not ruled on here.** Whether Bavarian separatism or the broader nationalist politics of the early Weimar Republic were justified. This page scores how the NSDAP built its symbols, its chain of command and its public narrative in 1920-23, not the merits of the political program it was building them for.

## Same-method test

The same tags apply, without regard to politics, to other movements that built themselves the same way.

- **United States, 1920s.** The refounded Ku Klux Klan ([The second Ku Klux Klan: selling membership as '100% Americanism'](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/second-klan-1920s/)) is tagged for nearly the same set of techniques used here: [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) ("100% Americanism"), [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) (robes, cross-burning ritual, an "Invisible Empire" borrowing older fraternal-lodge forms), [Plain folks](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/plain-folks/) (recruiting through small-town Protestant social networks), [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) and [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) (naming Black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants as threats), and [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/) (reported membership claims reaching into the millions by 1924-25). **Differences:** the Klan operated inside a functioning democracy, never attempted an armed seizure of government, and its harm took the form of a nationwide campaign of terror, intimidation and lynching over decades rather than one failed putsch; it also, unlike the NSDAP, never converted its movement into control of a national state.
- **United States, 1969-70.** The trial of the "Chicago Seven" (originally eight, after Bobby Seale's case was severed), anti-Vietnam War and countercultural defendants charged with conspiracy over protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, shows the same [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/)-adjacent tactic of turning a courtroom into a media stage: defendants gave speeches, wore judicial robes as a mocking costume, and used contempt citations and daily national press coverage to build their movement's profile, on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the NSDAP and in a functioning constitutional court rather than one run by a sympathetic nationalist judge. **Differences:** no one on trial had attempted an armed putsch, none was convicted of conspiracy (five of seven were convicted only of individual counts of crossing state lines to incite riot, and even those convictions were later overturned on appeal), and the theatrics were aimed at criticizing state power rather than seizing it.

Same techniques, applied by movements at opposite ends of the political spectrum and to very different ends; none of this implies the outcomes were, or would have been, comparable.

## How to spot it

- Watch for a launch that pairs a list of undefined virtue words ("the common good," "national community," "positive Christianity") with a list of clearly named enemies. The vagueness of the first tends to legitimize the sharpness of the second.
- Notice when a movement designs a flag, a salute, a uniform or an oath before it has any share of power or any policy record to point to. Ritual built early is usually meant to bind members to a leader or symbol before ideas are tested.
- Ask who is allowed to turn a courtroom, or any other forum meant to judge an accusation, into an uninterrupted platform, and how much free press coverage that produces.
- Check a leadership dispute for what it actually settles. A vote that ends internal debate for good, and hands one person control of the program, organization and money, is a different event from a vote that resolves one disagreement.
- Track growth claims against independently verifiable numbers. A movement citing its own membership count as proof it is right is using bandwagon, whatever side it is on.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from this page's sourced facts (`make_diagrams_rtp_nsdap.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Bayern, Adolf Hitler auf einer Propagandafahrt im Auto (1923) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00204,_Bayern,_Hitler_auf_Propagandafahrt.jpg); Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00204 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 | Public domain (U.S., published before 1931); Bundesarchiv also offers CC BY-SA 3.0 DE |
| Hitler-Putsch, München, Marienplatz (November 9, 1923) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_119-1486,_Hitler-Putsch,_M%C3%BCnchen,_Marienplatz.jpg); Bundesarchiv, Bild 119-1486 / o.Ang. / CC-BY-SA 3.0 | Public domain (U.S., published before 1931); Bundesarchiv also offers CC BY-SA 3.0 DE |
| München, nach Hitler-Ludendorff-Prozess (April 1, 1924) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00344,_M%C3%BCnchen,_nach_Hitler-Ludendorff_Prozess.jpg); Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00344 / Hoffmann, Heinrich / CC-BY-SA 3.0 | Public domain (U.S., published before 1931); Bundesarchiv also offers CC BY-SA 3.0 DE |

### Image gaps

- **The Hofbraeuhaus Festsaal, 24 February 1920.** No photograph of the meeting itself is known to survive; a modern photograph of the Hofbraeuhaus building would show only the present-day venue, not the 1920 event, so none is included here.
- **The 1920 NSDAP flag design and any 1920-23 party flag, banner or "Blutfahne" photographs.** Not hosted on this page: this archive's rule for this case study excludes German/Nazi-era posters, flags and photographs where the licence or U.S. copyright status is unclear, even where a Wikimedia Commons upload is marked public domain in Germany, because German works from this period can carry U.S. copyright restored under the URAA. See the flag files at [Wikimedia Commons, Category: Nazi flags](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nazi_flags) (a modern vector reconstruction, not a period photograph) and cite, do not host.
- **Library of Congress press photographs of Hitler and NSDAP events, 1920-1923.** The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division holds contemporary wire-service images from this period, including a portrait dated 30 October 1923 (George Grantham Bain Collection, [loc.gov/item/89714102](https://www.loc.gov/item/89714102)), Hitler speaking at the Zirkus Krone on 20 June 1923 ([loc.gov/item/2003678220](https://www.loc.gov/item/2003678220/)), Hitler speaking near Munich on 15 April 1923 ([loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b22094](http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b22094/)), Hitler at the "Deutscher Tag" in Hof on 15-16 September 1923 ([loc.gov/item/2003678219](https://www.loc.gov/item/2003678219/)), and an armored car from the 9 November 1923 putsch ([loc.gov/item/2005691623](https://www.loc.gov/item/2005691623)). These are cited, not hosted, because their individual rights and restriction statements were not verified for this page.
- **The Buergerbraeukeller and Feldherrnhalle, 8-9 November 1923.** A Marienplatz photograph of 9 November 1923 is shown above (Bundesarchiv Bild 119-1486). No photograph of the Buergerbraeukeller entry or the Feldherrnhalle shooting itself was found with a clear licence. A Library of Congress item shows the Buergerbraeukeller's bomb-damaged interior after a later, unrelated 1939 assassination attempt on Hitler ([loc.gov/pictures/item/2006679290](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006679290/)), outside this page's scope and not used.
- **Courtroom photographs of the 1924 trial and Landsberg Prison.** The defendants after the verdict are shown above (Bundesarchiv Bild 102-00344, Heinrich Hoffmann, 1 April 1924). No courtroom photograph or image of Hitler at Landsberg was verified as PD/CC for this page.
- **Front pages of the Voelkischer Beobachter and Der Stuermer, 1920-23.** Randall Bytwerk's German Propaganda Archive (Calvin University) reproduces later Voelkischer Beobachter and Der Stuermer material with permission for that site; it is not an openly licensed archive this project can rehost from, so it is cited, not hosted.

## Sources

**Full text in this archive:** [*Mein Kampf* (German, 1943 printing of the 1925/26 text)](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/hitler-mein-kampf-german/), with a content note and the edition caveat on its page.

- U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia: ["Nazi Party Platform"](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-party-platform) (the 25 Points, English translation); ["Beer Hall Putsch (Munich Putsch)"](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/beer-hall-putsch-munich-putsch).
- German History in Documents and Images (GHDI): ["The Beer Hall Putsch (1923)"](https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/weimar-germany-1918-1933/the-beer-hall-putsch-1923).
- National Socialist Program (25 Points), 24 February 1920: full English translation from Gottfried Feder's 1927/1930 pamphlet edition, [archive.org](https://archive.org/stream/25PointsOfTheNSDAP/25%20Points%20of%20the%20NSDAP_djvu.txt).
- Ian Kershaw, *Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris* (W. W. Norton, 1998).
- Richard J. Evans, *The Coming of the Third Reich* (Penguin Press, 2003).
- Harold J. Gordon Jr., *Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch* (Princeton University Press, 1972).
- David King, *The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany* (W. W. Norton, 2017).
- Michael H. Kater, *The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919-1945* (Harvard University Press, 1983), for the 1920-23 membership tallies.
- Douglas O. Linder, "The Trial of Adolf Hitler," *Famous Trials*, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law: [famous-trials.com/hitler](https://famous-trials.com/hitler) (trial chronology and translated speech excerpts, including Hitler's closing statement).
- Randall L. Bytwerk, *Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Antisemitic Newspaper "Der Stuermer"* (Cooper Square Publishers, 1983; revised as *Julius Streicher: The Man Who Persuaded a Nation to Hate Jews*, Cooper Square Press, 2001); German Propaganda Archive, Calvin University: [Der Stuermer material](https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/Der-Stuermer.htm).
- Adolf Hitler, *Mein Kampf*, vol. 1 (Eher Verlag, 1925), for Hitler's own account of designing the party flag; cited for the historical record of his stated intent, not endorsed.
- Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, ["Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), 1920-1923/1925-1945"](https://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/EN:Nationalsozialistische_Deutsche_Arbeiterpartei_(NSDAP-National_Socialist_German_Workers%E2%80%98_Party),_1920-1923/1925-1945).
- Douglas O. Linder, "Trial of the Chicago 7," *Famous Trials*, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, for the same-method test.
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, for the press photographs listed under Image gaps.