Hitler's party called it the Poison Kitchen. That was the preferred epithet for his newspaper nemesis, the persistent poisoned thorn in his side, the Munich Post. The running battle between Hitler and the courageous reporters and editors of the Post is one of the great unreported dramas in the history of journalism – and a long-erased opening chapter in the chronology of attempts to explain Adolf Hitler.

The Munich Post journalists were the first to focus sustained critical attention on Hitler, from the very first moment this strange specter emerged from the beer-hall back rooms to take to the streets of Munich in the early 1920s. They were the first to tangle with him, the first to ridicule him, the first to investigate him, the first to expose the seamy underside of his party, the murderous criminal behavior masked by its pretensions to being a political movement. They were the first to attempt to alert the world to the nature of the rough beast slouching toward Berlin.

But the drama of their struggle has largely been lost to history. The exposés they published are remembered, if at all, only in obscure footnotes; the names of those who risked their lives to report and publish those exposés rarely appear even there. Their full story has never really been told, even in Germany, or perhaps especially in Germany, where it's more comforting for the national self-image to believe that nobody really knew who Hitler was until it was too late, until after 1933, when he had too much power (so it's said) for anyone to resist.

But the writers of the Munich Post knew, and they published the truth for those who cared to see it. While their opposition to Hitler grew initially out of ideology (the Post was founded and sponsored by the Bavarian Social Democratic party), their struggle with Hitler became extremely personal. They came to know Hitler in a way few others have known him; they knew him and his circle as intimate enemies, grappling at close range with them in the streets, in the courtrooms, in the beer halls, attacking Hitler with a combination of Washington Post-like investigative zeal and New York Post-like tabloid glee – and a peculiar streetwise, wised-up Munich Post edge all their own.

Their duel with Hitler lasted a dozen years and produced some of the sharpest, most penetrating insights into his character, his mind and method, then or since. Much of their work has been forgotten, but not much has been surpassed. And, as the name Poison Kitchen suggests, they succeeded in getting under Hitler's skin . . . .

On March 9, 1933, the Nazis turned the Munich Post offices over to an SA squad to pillage.

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