A tougher sentence for Hitler in 1923 could have changed history

livemint.com:

1923. By Mark Jones. Basic Books; 432 pages; $32 and £25 The young murderers were out for more than blood.

By gunning down Walter Rathenau, the Jewish foreign minister, in June 1922, they were hoping to spark a crisis that would lead to the destruction of the Weimar Republic, the German government formed after the first world war. The heavily armed, virulently antisemitic terrorist network that Rathenau’s killers belonged to, called the Organisation Consul, wanted to rise up and destroy the republic, avenging Germany’s defeat in 1918 and subsequent humiliations. Rathenau’s death briefly became a rallying point for the republic, with people taking to the streets to oppose violence and the depleted German army demonstrating loyalty to the country’s young democratic institutions.

But the trial of 13 men who had been involved in Rathenau’s murder ended in laughably lenient sentences. As Mark Jones, a historian, argues, it was a political and judicial failure that would have profound consequences. His book, “1923", is a gripping narrative of the extraordinary year in which Weimar Germany was struck by successive blows, though it somehow survived for another ten years.

As 1923 dawned, much that could go wrong had. A bad harvest was a boon to already soaring inflation. In less than six months there had been a 24-fold drop in the value of the mark against the dollar, the result of Germany having funded its war effort almost entirely with debt.

Instead, after the war, Germany had to pay substantial reparations, with most owed to France. Germany’s unwillingness or inability to meet its liabilities led the French prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, to invade and occupy the industrial Ruhr in January. This was a calamity for almost