Politics on Trial: Hitler vs Weimar

Past Present Future

D&HR Media Ltd

Politics, News, Philosophy, Society & Culture, History

4.7 • 747 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s epic political trial is the one that should have been the end of Adolf Hitler but ended up being the making of him: his treason trial in 1924 for the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. How close did Hitler’s attempted coup come to succeeding? Why was he allowed to turn the court that tried him into a platform for his poisonous politics? What were the missed opportunities to silence him once and for all? Out now on PPF+: Part 2 of David’s conversation with Fintan O’Toole about the Easter Rising trials of 1916 – here they explore the treason trial of Sir Roger Casement and the question of what makes a traitor. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus Tickets are still available for the first screening in our autumn Films of Ideas season at the Regent Street Cinema in London on 5th September: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope followed by a live recording of PPF with special guests Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, aka the best-selling husband-and-wife crime-writing due Nicci French. Get your tickets here https://bit.ly/4fOp2xx Next Up: Lea Ypi on Dignity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas podcast.
0:16.0	Today, in politics on trial, I'm talking about one of the most consequential trials of the 20th
0:22.4	century.
0:23.4	It's usually known as the Beer-Putch trial.
0:26.7	The reason it matters is that one of the people on trial, one of the instigators of the
0:31.4	attempted coup or putch, was Adolf Hitler.
0:35.3	It's an unusual trial.
0:36.6	He was charged with high treason. He was found guilty of high
0:41.0	treason. The maximum sentence was life imprisonment. That trial was not the breaking of Adolf Hitler.
0:48.2	It was the making of Adolf Hitler. And I'm going to try and explain why.
0:56.5	An earlier series of PPF was about historical counterfactuals, what ifs.
1:03.5	In that series, we didn't do any of the Hitler counterfactuals, of which there are many.
1:10.1	Hitler is in many ways the classic subject of counterfactual
1:13.6	speculation up to the point of people being asked, if you could go back in time, what would you do?
1:18.7	And the cliched answer being, well, I'd go and kill Hitler when he was a young man. So there are
1:23.5	counterfactuals about traffic accidents, about conspiracies against him, about assassination
1:28.1	attempts that didn't quite come of. But I think the two really interesting counterfactuals
1:34.2	are the two related to the subject of today's episode, to the PUTCH and to the trial that followed.
1:41.3	One of them is a classic counterfactual because it's about a bullet. The
1:46.2	poach took place on the 8th to 9th of November 1923 overnight and then through to the morning.
1:52.3	The goal was to take over the Bavarian state and then to march on Berlin and take over Germany.
1:59.2	Didn't happen. It was in the end a fiasco. It was, in the end, a fiasco.
	...

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