Munich, Germany, February 24, 1920.

A Tuesday night in the dead of a Bavarian winter, and 2,000 people packed the fesssal of the Hofbroi House on the plattel,

the oldest and most famous beer hall in a city full of them.

They came for politics.

They stayed for the fight.

The man at the podium was 30 years old, thin, pale, and largely unknown outside this room.

His name was Adolf Hitler.

He held no title of consequence.

He was not the leader of the German Workers' Party.

He was not even the evenings featured speaker. His official role was chief of propaganda, a position he had held for less than two

months. What he had was a voice. And 25 points he intended to read aloud whether the crowd

liked it or not. They did not all like it, but the story of that night.

The night the Nazi party announced itself to the world begins not in the Hofbroi House,

but in the mud of Flanders and in the wreckage of an empire that had bet everything on a war and lost.

Fourteen months earlier, on November 11, 1918, Germany had signed the armistice that ended the Great War.

Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated and fled to the Netherlands.

The proud German military, undefeated in its own mythology, was ordered to lay down its arms.

The new Weimar Republic, fragile, democratic, despised by the right and the left

alike, was handed the bill. That bill arrived in June of 1919 in the form of the Treaty of Versailles.

Germany would accept sole blame for the war. Germany would surrender 13% of its territory, including regions that accounted

for nearly half its iron ore production, and a sixth of its coal.

Germany would dismantle its military to a skeleton force of 100,000 men, and Germany would

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