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The growth in Nazi power between 1920 ? 1933

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Some time after the meeting of February 1920, Hitler's party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The new party grew slowly and principally in Bavaria. Convinced of the necessity, indeed, the value, of violence to achieve its ends, the party soon organised the Sturmabteilungen (Storm Troops), or SA, to defend its meetings; to disrupt the meetings of liberal democrats, socialists, Communists, and trade unionists; and to persecute Jews, especially Jewish merchants. Some disaffected army officers, notably Ernst Röhm, aided it in these activities.
In 1921 Hitler was elected “unlimited chairman” of the party, which in the same year adopted as its official emblem a flag consisting of a red field in the centre of which was a large white circle containing a black swastika. In 1923 Hitler established the newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (Racial Observer) as the official daily party organ. As the German Communist Party, founded in 1919, grew in strength, the National Socialists concentrated much of their propaganda on denunciations of Bolshevism, which they characterised as a conspiracy of international Jewish financiers. They also proclaimed their contempt for parliamentary democracy and agitated for a dictatorship.
On November 8, 1923, with 600-armed storm troopers, Hitler marched on a beer hall in Munich, at which Gustav von Kahr, head of the provincial Bavarian government, was addressing a public meeting. Hitler took von Kahr and his associates prisoner and, abetted by General Erich Ludendorff, declared in von Kahr's name the formation of a new national government. Immediately thereafter von Kahr was released, and he turned against Hitler and Ludendorff. Following a brief skirmish with the Munich police on November 9, Hitler and his associates fled, and the so-called “beer hall putsch” (revolt) failed. Hitler and Ludendorff were subsequently arrested. The latter went unpunished, but Hitler was tried and received a five-year prison sentence, and the party was outlawed. In prison Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess. As later expanded by Hitler, this was a frank statement of National Socialist doctrines, propaganda techniques, and plans for the conquest first of Germany, and then of Europe. In later years Mein Kampf became the bible of National Socialism.
Hitler was released from prison in little less than a year. The National Socialist Party was then in a state of virtual dissolution, in large part because improvement in the country's economic conditions had created an atmosphere more favourable to moderate political organisations.
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