April 1, the verdict came down.
Ludendorff was found not guilty and released on the spot.
I was sentenced to five years in prison. As soon as the sentence was read, the gallery rose in an uproar, shouting their protest.
But when Judge Neithardt spoke next, the protests flipped to cheers.
“Parole will be possible in nine months.”
Röhm, the Strassers, Hess—my friends all received short terms.
Hess, Maurice, and I were sent back to Landsberg, but the treatment was night-and-day different from before.
Instead of a cold cell welcomed by mold and cobwebs, I was lodged in a heated VIP room with a bed and a desk.
After shivering in a dingy solitary with dark stains on the walls, moving into a cell with clean wallpaper and framed pictures felt like checking into a hotel.
On top of that, I was granted unlimited visits and outside food, allowed to wear civilian clothes, and free to wander the prison during work hours.
The guards treated me with crisp courtesy, and I ate the same quality meals they did.
So this is that emperor-level prison life you only ever see on the news about big corporate chairmen. Not bad at all.
Every work period I took Hess and Maurice for walks. And at the same time, I wrote.
Strictly speaking, I dictated, and Hess did the actual writing.
That’s how Mein Kampf was completed.
***
The autobiography known to the world as Hitler’s Mein Kampf is, in truth, such a godawful mess that even Hitler himself treated it as an embarrassment.
The narrative contradicts itself, and the content is trashy claptrap about a Jewish conspiracy. It didn’t get good reviews in the 21st century—hell, it didn’t even get them at the time.
There’s even an anecdote that Hitler said, “If I’d known I’d become Führer, I’d never have written that book,” and begged his armaments minister and confidant Speer not to read it because it would kill him of shame. That about says it all.
But the Mein Kampf I wrote shares only the title; the contents are flipped 180 degrees.
No “it’s all because of the Jews” conspiracy. No “Lebensraum” fantasies that can’t be realized.
Instead, I packed it with “forecasts of world affairs to come,” drawing on all my knowledge of the future.
Well? Starting to get curious?
Naturally, Hess and Schreck had a hard time swallowing my “prophecies.”
Can’t blame them; with the knowledge and assumptions they have now, most of it is unimaginable.
“Um, Chief. Do you really believe the world economy will collapse in five years?”
Even Hess—who never argued and moved the second I spoke—sounded doubtful.
I chuckled and answered lightly.
“Yes. Hard to picture now, but I’m sure of it. And the crash starts in America.”
In 1929, the Great Depression hits—something even people who don’t care about history or economics have heard of.
There are so many factors that even in the 21st century you can’t pin it on a single cause. And since my economics knowledge is nothing special, I couldn’t lay out a rigorous causal chain. What mattered was the prophecy itself: the Depression happens.
Did Nostradamus explain, “for this and that reason X will happen”?
He just said, “This will happen in the future,” and got famous anyway.
Of course, I wasn’t going to write “A depression happens” with zero explanation, so I dredged up everything I knew and stuffed in whatever I could recall. A little effort, at least.
Maybe for now people treat it like nonsense—but in ten years I’ll skyrocket into a global prophet. Heh-heh.
“The Depression will collapse the existing world order. At the same time, countries will each look for their own way out.
Great powers like Britain and France, with many colonies, will try to use them to escape the crisis. Nations without many colonies will turn to other methods.”
“What methods?”
“War, obviously. Start wars to seize other countries’ colonies—or make new ones—so you can strip their resources and secure markets for your goods.
And my prediction is that the country that does this will be Japan.”
“Japan?”
“Yes, Japan.”
Once the Depression hits hard, the military rides it to seize power and invades Manchuria. Everyone knows this story.
I wrote that after taking Manchuria, Japan gets cocky and eyes all of China, and that this leads to armed clashes with the Western powers—Britain and the United States—who move to stop them.
“Um, Chief. There’s something I don’t quite understand...”
“Go on.”
“You said Japan will attack Britain and America in order to keep fighting the war with China. I’m not sure people will think that makes any sense.”
“I feel the same,” Schreck added.
I get their doubt. You’re already at war, and to keep that war going, you suddenly attack other countries? It sounds implausible.
But Japan did that insane thing.
To continue the war in China, Japan needed more oil.
When the United States, its main supplier, slapped on an oil embargo, Japan decided to secure oil by waging war.
It makes no sense. It’s normal for it to make no sense.
Japan wasn’t normal; they did the opposite.
As for Britain and France, they’re top dogs now, but the colonies that made them strong will later drag them down.
I wrote that to fix this, they’ll have to let their colonies go and cut out their own contradictions.
Britain, comparatively well-behaved, backs off and sheds colonies. France, living up to its nickname as Europe’s thug, keeps disgracing itself to the bitter end.
The prime examples are Vietnam and Algeria—France poured in money and men and still lost both.
“And the claim that China will become a great power commanding the world economy—it’s just too strange. You know what China is right now.”
In the 1920s, China is as backward as 21st-century people think Afghanistan is.
Think about it. If someone told you that an also-ran like Afghanistan or Somalia would, in 70 years, stand alongside the United States or Russia, would you believe it? You’d tell them to stop talking crap.
“I know exactly what it is. That’s why I said it.”
“Sir?”
“Today’s China is a backward country—warlords running wild, a majority illiterate, barely any real factories, an army that at best matches Europe’s from thirty years ago.
But China also has Asia’s widest territory and the world’s largest population. In other words: infinite growth potential.
Give a country with vast labor, land, and resources real peace, let it start to grow—can you imagine the result?”
In Mein Kampf I stated flatly: Germany’s present adversaries are Britain, France, and neighboring states like Poland, but in the future, the United States and China will be bigger opponents than any of them.
Like Hess and Schreck, people won’t get it now—but time will change minds.
That said, I didn’t go too far into the future. No internet, smartphones, AI, or drones.
Predictions need a veneer of plausibility to be accepted.
Throw in robots and Mars missions and all that sci-fi stuff and see what happens.
No one reads you seriously. “This guy’s a lunatic,” and into the trash you go.
Instead, I wrote in concrete terms about things people of this era can imagine: the future of tanks and aircraft.
These two weapons will dominate future battlefields.
And of course, I couldn’t skip battleships. In this era, battleships are treated like the 21st century treats nuclear weapons.
Why?
What other weapon can roam every ocean under heavy armor and sink enemy warships in one blow? Anything besides the battleship?
There’s a reason the Allies wrote into Versailles that Germany could never again possess battleships.
But through the Second World War, battleships lose their shine.
Britain used carriers to raid Taranto and half-cripple the Italian Navy; Japan, inspired, leaned hard into carriers and pulled off Pearl Harbor.
After losing most of its battleships at Pearl, the United States had no choice but to fight Japan with carriers instead.
In doing so, America discovered carriers are far more useful than expected—and later prioritized them over battleships, smashed a Japan mired in out-of-date big-gun battleship doctrine, and forced its surrender.
Knowing the future, I argued the age of the battleship is over. The carrier is the new king.
It doesn’t have the raw firepower of a battleship, but it can launch aircraft from beyond the reach of battleship guns. In future naval war, that’s far more useful than a big gun barrel.
Lastly, I didn’t forget to tack on Germany’s current realities, the path we must take, the pitfalls to avoid, and a good thrashing of our useless politicians.
When Mein Kampf finally came out, it stirred exactly the hornet’s nest I wanted.
***
When Mein Kampf first hit the world, sales were underwhelming.
They only started to spike in the 1930s, when support for Hitler and the Nazi Party rose. Before that, far more people had never heard of it than had.
But in this world where history has been bent by me, Mein Kampf rose straight into the hot seat.
The attacks on Germany’s elite and the big vision—other books like that existed, and people shrugged along.
What grabbed eyes was my geopolitical forecast.
“For some roundabout reason the entire world economy suddenly collapses? In America? Ridiculous.”
Most people flat-out rejected my Great Depression prophecy.
Outside Germany, the global economy was sailing with the wind—talk of a crisis out of nowhere sounded like crap.
Especially the part about China’s rise—people snickered that I was writing science fiction.
“China? China? Those uncivilized savages running the world economy? Has Hitler lost his mind?”
“Maybe his ancestors were Chinese?”
But a few scholars who had already noticed China’s potential published papers and strongly backed my claims.
A minority, yes—but once some academics sided with me, public reaction began to split.
And the response to Japan’s expansionist ambitions in Asia was different from the two predictions above.
Foremost because Germany, defeated in the Great War, had lost its Asia-Pacific holdings—Qingdao among them—to Japan.
Japan’s gentlemanly POW treatment meant German views of Japan weren’t all bad, but they weren’t good either, and my warning found traction.
The biggest boost, though, came when Chinese students studying in Germany carried Mein Kampf home.
“Have you read Mein Kampf?”
“Mein Kampf? What’s that?”
“A book by a German named Adolf Hitler—explosive stuff. Read it.”
“But I don’t read German.”
“I figured. I brought my translation.”
Chinese in this era bottled up their resentment over being treated as third-rate by the Western powers—because it was true. They could only stew.
Then along comes some German “revolutionary,” and in his autobiography he writes that China, despised for now, has enormous potential and will grow into a world power. Of course they took a shine to it.
Even in the 21st century, patriotic puff pieces sell. In the 20th? And from a foreigner with no ties to China, talking China up?
Once the illegal Chinese translation spread, the reaction was explosive.
It was mostly the educated who read it—literacy being what it was—but they preached the book’s existence to the masses, and even foreigners in China heard about it. Mein Kampf became globally famous.
“For the Chinese, Mein Kampf is a ray of hope. I earnestly wish this book to be read widely—not only by the Chinese people but by all the peoples of Asia and the world.”
At last, when Sun Yat-sen—China’s national father—mentioned the book, Mein Kampf’s popularity peaked.
“A success—a roaring success! A colossal success!”
So said Max Amann when he met me after my release from Landsberg.
Max Amann, head of the publisher Franz Eher, was the friend who shepherded Mein Kampf into print.
In real history, he’s also the one who gave Hitler’s autobiography the name Mein Kampf.
What was the original title? “Four Years Against Lies, Cowardice, and Stupidity.” Reads like a modern light-novel title.
At any rate, Mein Kampf went wild in China, then reached Japan, and from Japan spread to the rest of the world—selling like crazy.
Copyright awareness was thin back then, so a lot of the editions in circulation—especially in Asia—were illegal translations. Even accounting for that, sales were off the charts.
Thanks to that, the Nazi Party’s finances got fat for years. Naturally, my standing in the party grew even more solid.
Drexler, who’d been acting party head while I was imprisoned, ended up acknowledging me and stepped back to honorary chairman.
Friend, you may not realize it, but this is a much happier ending.
In the original timeline, you crossed Hitler and got slapped with a libel suit—retired from the stage. That was even before the Beer Hall Putsch.
In this loop I treated Drexler as party figurehead—window dressing, yes, but with real respect—and he seemed satisfied enough not to clash with me.
Win-win, as they say.
As Mein Kampf’s popularity exploded, the party’s once-wilting name recognition bloomed again.
Naturally, applications to join rose—and among them was:
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Paul Joseph Goebbels.”
The greatest propagandist and agitator in human history—Goebbels.