His goal was to defeat the government, but he had to compete with other Bavarian groups and with his friend a Bavarian officer.He advocated the position of chief of the military and wanted to incorporate the party's paramilitary units, called the SA, or Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung) into his secret army, while Hitler insisted on the primacy of politics. When the French occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, German nationalist feelings ran high, and military authorities prepared for mobilization. The views of Roehm and the other right-wingers now seemed to be prevailing; Hitler thereupon tried to regain control of the movement by his Beer Hall Putsch of Nov. 8-9, 1923. The putsch was aimed at capturing, first, the government of Bavaria, and then the nation's, but the Bavarian authorities were able to suppress it.
The failure of the putsch destroyed the party organization, severed its army ties, and resulted in prison terms for Hitler and other leaders. Hitler used his trial to gain nationwide attention for his cause. He served nine months of his 5-year sentence in the fortress of Landsberg, where he wrote Mein Kampf in an effort to demonstrate that his leadership was based on intellectual as well as political superiority.
Hitler's writing in Mein Kampf is crude and disorganized, and his ideas are not original, but the book is still an important document. The most persistent theme is social Darwinism: the struggle for life governs the relationships of both individuals and nations. He argued that the German people, supposedly racially superior, were threatened by liberalism, Marxism, humanism, and bolshevism, which were directed from behind the scenes by the Jews. Relief would come from a plebiscital dictatorship that would fight a relentless war against internal and external foes, in the process conquering Lebensraum (living space) that would make Germany militarily and economically unassailable. Hitler was much more effective when writing about the techniques of power and demagoguery. He appears in the book as a man determined, and to some degree able, to implement even the maddest schemes.
