Even though Landsberg is much smaller than Munich and Nuremberg, the Nazi Party considered Landsberg one of their three most important cities in Germany. The town derived its Nazi fame from its prison which contains the cell where their Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf after he was jailed following his Munich coup attempt in 1923.
While Munich was called "the city of the movement" and Nuremberg "The city of the party congresses", Landsberg was given the name "the city of youth". Landsberg was given this name because following the the Nazi Party Congresses of 1937 and 1938, delegations of the Hitler Youth organizations from all over Germany staged loyalty marches -- also called " Adolf Hitler Marches" --to Landsberg. In Landsberg, the boys of the Hitler Youth delegations were given tours of the "Hitler Cell" in the prison, were handed a copy of Mein Kampf , and were made to participate in loyalty demonstrations in the central square of Landsberg which was decked out with acres of swastika flags and Hitler Youth banners. The head of the Hitler Youth organization, Baldur von Schirach, called Landsberg the "place of pilgrimage for German youth" and a "stage in national-socialist education." There were plans to turn the prison with its "Hitler cell" into the largest youth hostel in Germany and to build a gigantic stadium for mass demonstrations, a stadium whose dimensions would have exceeded those of the historic city core of Landsberg. However, the "Adolf Hitler marches" to Landsberg came to an end with the beginning of World War II. When German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, this stopped the last "Adolf Hitler march" which had begun at the conclusion of the ironically named 1939 "party congress of peace" in Nuremberg.
The fame that the city of Landsberg achieved in Nazi Germnay was not thrust upon it from outside as city officials still claim. As early as 1933, the little town on the river Lech began to market itself with all its might as "the city of Hitler" or "the city of the Führer", as a "national-socialist place of pilgrimage" and as "the birthplace of the Ideas of National-Socialism". These marketing strategies were effective because they created a phenomenon called "Hitler tourism", and this resulted in an economic boom. In 1938, for instance, 100,000 German compatriots visited Landsberg and the "Hitler cell".
