ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some detail the Nazi movement’s main conceptual, tactical, and organizational characteristics and the challenges it faced in the Bavarian political culture. It presents a series of personal and group case studies of Bavarian royalists in the party in an effort to help explain the appeal of National Socialism to its strikingly diverse constituency. Adolf Hitler’s pronouncement on “monarchy or republic” at a Munich beer-hall party rally in 1929 reflected the National Socialist leadership’s usually noncommittal public position on this issue throughout the Weimar era. The national Center Party and the Bavarian People’s Party, its Bavarian regional counterpart, drew votes and support from nearly every segment of the Catholic population. In attempting to tack across some of the most powerful currents in the Bavarian political culture—federalism, Catholic conservatism, Wittelsbach monarchism—it remained merely a significant fringe movement centered in Munich until 1929–1930.
