APRIL FOOLS - A DAY THAT COULD HAVE CHANGED THE WORLD

Apart from spaghetti harvests in 1957, there was a 1st of April in 1924 when in a special courtroom in Munich, three Judges, adjudicating on a trial of treason, found the main defendant guilty. The maximum sentence they could have imposed at the time was life imprisonment; instead, they imposed a sentence of five years imprisonment eligible for parole in 6 months. The three judges in the trial had become so sympathetic that the presiding judge had to persuade them to find him guilty at all. They agreed only after being assured he would get early parole. The man was Adolph Hitler.

The defiant defendant, Adolf Hitler, with fellow defendants in the Putsch trial, including Gen. Ludendorff (left) and Ernst Röhm (right front) who would soon loom large in the Nazi movement. 

He was taken to Landsberg Prison, a penal facility located in the town of Landsberg am Lech in the southwest of the German state of Bavaria, about 65 kilometres (40 mi) west of Munich and 35 kilometres (22 mi) south of Augsburg. Landsberg is now maintained by the Prison Service of the Bavarian Ministry of Justice.

The prisoner Adolf Hitler looking comfortable in Landsberg with fellow Nazis, Hermann Kriebel (left) and Emil Maurice (rear).

At Landsberg Hitler was given a spacious private cell with a fine view. He got gifts, was allowed to receive visitors whenever he liked and had his own private secretary, Rudolf Hess.

On 8 November 1923, Hitler and his Sturm Abteilung (SA) stormed a public meeting headed by Gustav Ritter von Kahr in a Munich beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller. He declared that he had set up a new government with General Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff and demanded, at gunpoint, the support of Kahr and the local military establishment for the destruction of the Berlin government. Kahr withdrew his support and fled to join the opposition to Hitler at the first opportunity. The next day, when Hitler and his followers marched from the beer hall to the Bavarian War Ministry to overthrow the Bavarian government as a start to their "March on Berlin", the police dispersed them. sixteen NSDAP members were killed.

Hitler fled to the home of Ernst Hanfstaengl and contemplated suicide; Hanfstaengl's wife Helene talked him out of it. He was soon arrested for high treason. During Hitler's trial, he was given almost unlimited time to speak, and his popularity soared as he voiced nationalistic sentiments in his defence speech. A Munich personality thus became a nationally known figure. Hitler received favoured treatment from the guards and had much fan mail from admirers. He was pardoned and released from jail on 20 December 1924, by order of the Bavarian Supreme Court on 19 December, which issued its final rejection of the state prosecutor's objections to Hitler's early release.

Had Helen Hanfstaengl been less successful there would have been no trial for Hitler or indeed no Hitler. Had the prosecution been more successful, Hitler might have received a much longer sentence, might never been allowed the 24 days of platform from which to speak, might never have had the comfortable treatment in prison and might never have come to power.

While at Landsberg, he dictated most of the first volume of Mein Kampf (My Struggle, originally entitled Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice) to his deputy Rudolph Hess.The book, dedicated to Thule Society member Dietrich Eckart, was an autobiography and an exposition of his ideology. Mein Kampf was influenced by The passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, which Hitler called "my Bible." It was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, selling about 240,000 copies between 1925 and 1934. By the end of the war, about 10 million copies had been sold or distributed (newlyweds and soldiers received free copies). The copyright of Mein Kampf in Europe is claimed by the Free State of Bavaria and scheduled to end on 31 December 2015. Reproductions in Germany are authorized only for scholarly purposes and in heavily commented form. It's nice to know the Bavarian State still has a bit of an income. One of Bavaria's native sons, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. He was in the SA as a youth although was not yet born in 1924.

So if there was ever an April Fool that shaped the world it was that joke sentence handed out in Munich on 1st April 1924.

As it turns out, Hitler's greatest adversary, the Royal Air Force was founded on the 1st April 1919 by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the oldest independent air force in the world.

After the First World War, the service was drastically cut and its inter-war years were relatively quiet, with the RAF taking responsibility for the control of Iraq and executing a number of minor actions in other parts of the then British Empire. The RAF developed its doctrine of Strategic bombing which led to the construction of long-range bombers and became the basic philosophy in the Second World War.

Interesting to note that the RAF was already taking responsibility for Iraq, which was relatively quiet, back in the 1920's, but that's another story.