UNSPEAKABLE HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Post-war Germany was in a mess. The government, centered in Berlin, was an ineffective republic. It had failed to stabilize the economy or to maintain peace and security. France had invaded German territory to guarantee payment of German war debt. The Deutchmark had gone into freefall and become the most worthless currency in history. A loaf of bread reached the price of a billion Deutchmarks by the autumn of 1923. Austrian-born Adolph Hitler had found a place for himself in all of this. He had fought courageously for Germany during the war and had stayed in the army after the armistice. In his early thirties, he was sent by the German government to spy on the Nationalist Socialist party. Instead, he joined it and took over its presidency. The party was headquartered in Munich, principal city of Bavaria, an unstable region on the edge of secession from Germany. Here the thirty-four-year-old Adolph Hitler saw an opportunity for real power. Three men (the regional president, the head of the army, and the head of the police) had formed a sort of governing triumvirate, but they lacked sufficient support to maintain order, much less form a breakaway political region. Hitler saw himself as the extra power they needed, and he intended to insert himself into the leadership group and lead it to separation from the national government in Berlin. While the triumvirate did not want to include Hitler in power, they knew that they just might need him. His Nazi party had tens of thousands of members and a private army of its own. The result was that the Nazis assumed some police powers that were not officially theirs, but no one stopped them. In fact, some high-ranking officers in both the army and the police were Nazis. Historians agree that Hitler had no reasonable chance of success as he planned this takeover of Bavaria – and yet he nearly succeeded. It is at this moment in German history that Unspeakable takes place. It's story offers a fictional reason for Hitler's bold confidence – a secret and undetectable weapon. But let's get back to the real history. As the end of 1923 drew near, Hitler was convinced that he could coerce the leaders of Bavaria to include him in government and to lead all of Bavaria into secession. He prepared secret plans to force the other leaders to cooperate with him and with his ultimate goal of a separate Bavaria with him as its primary leader. Even then, his plans also included the building of concentration camps for Jews. Then he actually mounted a military takeover of Munich, captured and confined its key leaders, and forced them to announce publicly that they supported him in formation of a new Bavarian government. This moment in history is called the Beer Hall Putsch because he accomplished its early success at a beer hall where a large public rally had brought all of his targets together. Over the next twenty-four hours, the putsch failed. A brief, but bloody, confrontation on the streets of Munich defeated the Nazis – at least for the moment. The young Hitler was captured, tried and convicted of treasonous acts. He was confined in prison, where he wrote Mein Kampf. This imprisonment was also where Hitler began to lay out his more careful plans for the ultimate takeover of all of Germany, something he accomplished less than ten years later. Read an excerpt.