Ben Wilson

The first stroke of good luck was that he was tried in a Bavarian court rather than a federal one.

This already told you something about the sympathies of the authorities.

Bavarian conservatives had some fellow feeling for the nationalist right, as I explained in the last episode.

The National Socialist Movement and the conservative movement are distinct and don't always see eye to eye, but they're both right wing movements.

And so they're kind of cousins.

And so there is, yeah, there's some fellow feeling.

So the conservatives, you know, they have no appetite for coups.

They're conservatives.

They kind of want things to go the way they always have.

But they also don't want to see Hitler and his co-conspirators punished too, too harshly.

The presiding judge, George Neidhart, is also a nationalist and so has some sympathies for Hitler.

And so he allows him extraordinary latitude.

He and his co-defendants were permitted to speak at length.

So for like 20, 30 minutes at a time, he isn't put in prison garb.

He's allowed to wear his iron cross.

The jury is friendly.

Like there's just all this stuff that makes this a favorable setting for Hitler and his defendants.

Any decision that can be made that favors the defense is made in favor of the defense.

So the proceedings become a platform for expounding the rationales for this coup and the beliefs of national socialism to the entire nation.

So Hitler's speeches are supposed to be just a narrow legal argument.