Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

For of course the business was dangerous. Little attention as the Reds paid to one of your
bourgeois gossip clubs whose inner innocence and hence harmlessness for themselves
theyknew better than its own members, they were determined to use every means to get rid
of a movement which did seem dangerous to them. Their most effective method in such cases
has at all times been terror or violence.
In the year 1920, in many regions of Germany, a national meeting that dared to address its
appeal to the broad masses and publicly invite attendance was simply impossible. The
participants in such a meeting were dispersed and driven away with bleeding heads. Such an
accomplishment, to be sure, did not require much skill: for after all the biggest so-called
bourgeois mass meeting would scatter at the sight of a dozen Communists like hares running
from a hound.
Most loathsome to the Marxist deceivers of the people was inevitably a movement whose
explicit aim was the winning of those masses which had hitherto stood exclusively in the
service of the international Marxist Jewish stock exchange parties. The very name of '
German Workers' Party ' had the effect of goading them. Thus one could easily imagine that
on the first suitable occasion the conflict would begin with the Marxist inciters who were
then still drunk with victory.
In the small circle that the movement then was a certain fear of such a fight prevailed. The
members wanted to appear in public as little as possible, for fear of being beaten up. In their
mind's eye they already saw the first great meeting smashed and go the movement finished
for good. I had a hard time putting forward my opinion that we must not dodge this struggle,
but prepare for it, and for this reason acquire the armament which alone offers protection
against violence. Terror is not broken by the mind, but by terror. The success of the first
meeting strengthened my position in this respect. We gained courage for a second meeting on
a somewhat larger scale.
About October, 1919, the second, larger meeting took place in the Eberlbraukeller. Topic:
Brestlitovsk and Versailles. Four gentlemen appeared as speakers. I myself spoke for almost
an hour and the success was greater than at the first rally. The audience had risen to more
than one hundred and thirty. An attempted disturbance was at once nipped in the bud by
my comrades. The diturbers flew down the stairs with gashed heads.
Two weeks later another meeting took place in the same hall. The attendance had risen to
over one hundred and seventy and the room was well filled. I had spoken again, and again
the success was greater than at the previous meeting.
I pressed for a larger hall. At length we found one at the other end of town in the 'Deutsches
Reich' on Dachauer Strasse. The first meeting in the new hall was not so well attended as the
previous one: barely one hundred and forty persons. In the committee, hopes began to sink
and the eternal doubters felt that the excessive repetition of our 'demonstrations' had to be
considered the cause of the bad attendance. There were violent arguments in which I upheld
the view that a city of seven hundred thousand inhabitants could stand not one meeting
every two weeks, but ten every week, that we must not let ourselves be misled by failures,
that the road we had taken was the right
one, and that sooner or later, with steady perseverance, success was bound to come. All in
all, this whole period of winter 1919-20 was a single struggle to strengthen confidence in the
victorious might of the young movement and raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can
move mountains.
The next meeting in the same hall showed me to be right. The attendance had risen to over
two hundred; the public as well as financial success was brilliant.
I urged immediate preparations for another meeting. It took place barely two weeks later and
the audience rose to over two hundred and seventy heads.
Two weeks later, for the seventh time, we called together the supporters and friends of the
new movement and the same hall could barely hold the people who had grown to over four
hundred.