Did Hitler's public speeches spark violent incidents in Weimar Germany? In light of a surge in extreme-right violent attacks and rising ethno-nationalist sentiment by politicians in the US and in Europe, it is important to understand how elite rhetoric can influence individual actions. Public speeches in particular remain an influential channel to spread divisive messages to like-minded audiences, and through mass media and social media, they spread to an even larger number of people. This paper takes a historical view to investigate plausible differences in exposure to elite messaging. I focus on the prominent case of Adolf Hitler during the later years of Weimar Germany from 1927 to 1933, a time of political turbulences that ultimately led to the demise of the young German democracy. I analyze a newly constructed data set of geocoded violent events in the Weimar Republic, retrieved from a corpus of historical newspapers and supplemented by additional contemporary sources and qualitative work by historians. Following work by Selb and Munzert (2018), I use a difference-in-differences design to estimate the effect of public appearances of Hitler on the likelihood of violent incidents. The empirical results indicate a limited effect of Hitler's speeches and underline the importance of dynamics within violent groups and social movements.