New German film to shed light on Hitler's trial (Reuters)

By Dave Graham 20 minutes ago BERLIN (Reuters) - How could a German court find a man guilty of high treason yet impose such a mild sentence that he later seized power and laid waste to Europe? A new German film seeks to find out. "Hitler vor Gericht" (Hitler on Trial) explores the 1924 trial of Adolf Hitler in Munich for his part in an abortive coup d'etat that could have earned him the death penalty. Instead, he served just nine months in prison and was able to rebuild the shattered Nazi party soon after his release. Had Hitler been given a long sentence, the history of Europe might have been very different, said Ian Kershaw from the University of Sheffield in England. "The Fuehrer cult would have had no opportunity to expand," Kershaw, a leading biographer of Hitler, told Reuters on Friday. "The radical right would have... [read full story]