Ben Wilson

He's already in a kind of a favorable setting.

He's got a judge who wants us all to go away, who is a nationalist, who wants him to succeed.

And so in the end, he is still convicted.

How could you not be?

Like, it's very clear that he admits to the thing.

So he is convicted, but he's sentenced to only five years and, you know, less on good behavior, which of course he gets.

He ends up only serving 13 months in prison.

And Hitler now understands something very clearly.

This would become a pivot to a new strategy because now he understood very clearly that violent revolution was not his path, that the path to power ran through the ballot box.

He would use the democratic system to dismantle it from within.

As Goebbels later put it, we will use any legal means to revolutionize the current state of affairs.

Any legal means.

And that would be the strategy going forward.

They were going to play by the rules until they were in a position to change the rules.

So I want to quickly insert my second takeaway here, which is the main character theory.

which is that you always want to be the main character of the story that's being told.

And the other co-defendants didn't realize this.

And so they are the ones saying, yeah, it was all Hitler.

It was all Hitler.

And Hitler is the one saying, yeah, it was all me.