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tactics completely paralleled the ones Moscow dictated to its agents: conduct demonstrations
despite bans on such actions, provoke clashes with police forces, and seize government build-
ings. ere was a total convergence of goals, methods, place, and time down to the hour and
minute of the act.
Even stranger, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin believed in plots, coups, and the seizure of
power by a well-organized minority. is is precisely what they accomplished in Russia, and
many times over tried to repeat in other nations of the world. Hitler had a different method.
Hitler was a demagogue, an agitator. Mein Kampf is a tale of a leader of masses, who knows
how to handle the crowds, how to win their trust and affection. Mein Kampf is a book about
how to obtain power through legal means, but there is not a word in it, not a hint, about
underground methods akin to those used by Lenin and Stalin. In the sphere of legal open
struggle for power over the masses, Hitler was much stronger than Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.
But in the sphere of mutiny and plots Hitler was clearly weaker. He was not even prone to
think in this direction. Ten years later, he came to power through legal means, through agita-
tion, propaganda, and voting booths. Hitler’s way was that of loud speeches and dramatic
uplifting parades. He understood his full strength as an orator, and was proud of it.
en why was Hitler in 1923 drawn to the Lenin-Stalin methods of taking power
through armed conflict and at the same time as a coup staged by Moscow? For nearly a cen-
tury, Soviet and East German historians have been telling us that this was merely a strange
chain of coincidences. Sometimes this happened: Communists decided to stage a coup, and
Hitler decided the same thing—on the very same day. In fact, Soviet Communists made at-
tempts to use Hitler and his party for destabilizing the political situation in Germany long
before Hitler’s coming to power.