In Europe

early as 9 December, 1931, the paper succeeded in getting hold of a secret plan that was circulating among the SA top brass, in which the measures actually taken later against the Jews are summed up with astonishing accuracy, up to and including vague plans for a ‘definitive
Endlösung
’: ‘labour details’ in swampy areas, whereby ‘the SS in particular can play a supervisory role’.
    One month later one reads of the first plans for the sterilisation campaign. On 12 January, 1932, the paper reports a speech by a Dr Stammberg from Chemnitz, ‘Racial Hygiene in the Third Reich’, in which he proposes a scoring system. The severely handicapped, prostitutes and professional burglars receive minus one hundred points, persons belonging to a non-European race receive minus twenty-five and the non-intelligent are given a minus six. Anyone receiving more than twenty-five minus points falls within the category of ‘persons with undesirable progeny’.
    On 8 April, 1932, the
Post
reveals in considerable detail the Nazis’ plans for what they will do when they come to power: the local SA units will be given ‘free rein for a full twenty-four hours’ to round up their known opponents and ‘rid themselves of them’.
    The most fascinating thing about the
Post
was and is its editorial premise: the editors considered the Nazis not only a political phenomenon, but above all a subject for their crime reporting.
    In his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw quotes top-ranking Nazi Hans Frank, who, as a twenty-year-old boy, went to hear Hitler speak in 1920. He saw a man in a threadbare blue suit and a rather loosely knotted tie, with flashing blue eyes and slicked-back hair, a plain speaker. At that point Adolf Hitler had been in politics for less than six months, but the public – the middle class shoulder to shoulder with workers, soldiers and students – lapped up every word. ‘He expressed everything that concerned him and us most deeply.’ His speech on 13 August, 1920 – entitled ‘Why are we anti-Semites?’ – was interrupted 58 times by cheers from the crowd of 2,000. The next day, the
Post
's city page reported on ‘a new attraction that has recently added lustre to the meetings of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party … a young fellow reminiscent of Heinz Bothmer, whohas been put forward with verve and vigour … a humble writer, as he calls himself’, a ‘zealous Mr Hitler’.
    In the years that followed, the pages of the
Post
gradually revealed a glimpse of a movement closely allied with criminal circles, and with everything that went along with that: intimidation, mishandling, blackmail, forgery, even murder. On 12 July, 1931, under the headline ‘This is Hitler's Rank and File’, the paper published a prison letter from a disappointed Nazi who said his former comrades included ‘burglars, pimps, purse snatchers, cheats, blackmailers, thugs and perjurers’. Shortly afterwards one reads about a young woman who worked in a refreshment bar and was forced into prostitution by members of the SA. 27 December, 1932: ‘Yuletide sullied by bloody SA vs SS melee in Anhalter Strasse Nazi clubhouse’. 29 December: ‘Hitler Youth is Forger’. And these are only random selections.
    Nowadays, the sinister birthplace of National Socialism is covered by a bare car park beside the Hilton Hotel on Rosenheimer Strasse, skilfully dynamited, demolished and smoothed over. This was the site of the famous Bürgerbräukeller, the giant beer hall where visitors ate and drank heavily, and where Adolf Hitler further honed his showman's talents. It was here, too, that he and General Ludendorff held their unsuccessful coup on 8 November, 1923. When the whole thing fizzled out, the beer hall claimed damages from this drunkards’ revolution: 143 broken beer mugs, 80 broken glasses, 98 stools, 148 pieces of missing cutlery, to say nothing of the bullet holes in the ceiling.
    It was in that same year that Hitler began moving in more cultured circles. He may have been a beer-hall orator, but he was also a fervent lover of Wagner. That helped him to quickly make friends with the rich young publisher Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengel, who introduced him into high society as early as 1922. One year later he met Siegfried and Winifred Wagner at Bayreuth, and became a welcome friend of the family. Two fashionable Munich ladies entered into an ongoing rivalry to befriend the upand-coming young Hitler. Helene Bechstein,