As someone who's written a dissertation and book on Nazi political mobilization, including their culture of speeches, marches, and rallies, I too am skeptical of the linked article. I'm not familiar with the author, but he seems to not be a historian and instead is writing from a sort of free speech absolutist position. Leaving aside the pros and cons of his efforts in that field, in this case it tends not to make for good historical writing. It's the type of history that goes about looting the past for incidents to support a prior ideological position, rather than approach a case in a genuine effort to understand its nuances.

Take for example one of his supposedly damning points, that "Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927." That's a very limited period if you're trying to make the case that Weimar had overly strong speech restrictions. If anything it makes the opposite case: here we have a foreign citizen convicted of inciting rebellion against the legitimate government, and two years later he is allowed to tour the country rallying his followers to further actions. That is not a strong speech law.

As anyone can see, Hitler went on to speak prolifically during the ensuing and far more critical period of 1928-1933. And if we look past Hitler, and to the local level, Nazi pubs continued to host speeches throughout the period, at least weekly at any given tavern, and often more than once per week. Meeting halls rented themselves out to larger Nazi rallies with regularity. Street marches in uniform were under blanket ban for a short time (in the aftermath of the Hitler Putsch), but then allowed again. At times, specific rallies or speeches might be banned, but this was common on both sides of the political extremes, and usually linked to specific incidents of violence.

The author also cites the fact "in a two year period, they shut down 99 [Nazi newspapers] in Prussia alone". While granting that it's possible, I find this hard to believe as well. I reviewed their cited source -- Oron James Hale's "The Captive Press in the Third Reich," a fantastic work on the internal Party politics and administration of its print media -- and I have not found the 99 bans figure. I could have missed it. But the overall content of that work heavily implies that the statistic is either false or misleading. Hale has a very useful chart (p59 if you have access to the book) listing the number of Nazi daily newspapers over the years. It is far fewer than you'd think. Only one in 1926, four in 1928, then a comparatively large expansion in the next two years took place as the Party focused its efforts in print media, which brought the total to 36 by 1931. In 1933 (the year of the takeover), they still had only 86 daily newspapers. So I just don't see how it's possible to get this figure of 99 newspapers banned in alone Prussia, when they had only 86 nationally. Is he including weekly papers? Perhaps, but those are still not numerous enough to get you to 99 in Prussia itself.

And also let's note that the Prussian state government was by far the most activist and anti-fascist. As the largest state and the one most solidly under SPD control, it was Weimar's bastion until a state-level coup turned it over to the Nazi-sympathetic conservatives. So it's no coincidence that Prussia appears in this story, as the most aggressive anti-Nazi state government. But it would be misleading to think that all German states issued similar efforts. They did not.

Back to the statistic itself, perhaps he's talking about the number of bans issued, rather than the number of papers banned. This could be possible. State-level Weimar governments could and did issue bans on newspapers, but these tended to take place only after specific incidents connected to political violence. As you can imagine, the Nazis fell afoul of this frequently, as did the Communists as well. For instance, a massive and deadly riot in Hamburg's Sternschanze neighborhood in 1930 led to bans on political uniforms and some newspapers on both right and left. In 1931 in Hamburg, a Nazi policeman shot and killed a Jewish police officer, and the local Nazi paper's rhetoric was so bloodthirsty that the state banned it.... for eight days. (See Andrew Wackerfuss, "Stormtrooper Families," for both these cases.)

So as we can see here, bans were almost always for a limited period just to let tempers cool and political heat to die down, and then the papers eventually (sometimes quickly!) would resume. In the major cities, which is what I'm most familiar with in my research, you'd get a ban maybe once or twice a year for a period of a few weeks.

So that's a long way of saying that I find claims about the strength of Weimar speech bans less than credible. With both rallies and print media, the Nazi Party was left generally unmolested by the Weimar government, or more specifically by the component state level governments that had authority in this area. As with the Communists, bans took place in response to specific incidents, but rarely as a blanket or preemptive measure. If that had been the case, you would have seen bans before Nazi rallies and major events, such as the period leading up to Altona's Bloody Sunday, when the Nazi media was free to rally its members to essentially invade a town and cause another massive and fatal riot. (After which the conservatives used the deadly results to motivate the above-mentioned Prussian Coup, perhaps the Republic's fatal blow.)

Now, did the Nazis claim that they were the unique victims of the speech police? Yes. Did they publish cartoons like the muzzled Hitler? Yes. But it's hard to disentangle these propaganda efforts from the general realm of grievance politics that fascists practice. Nazis were well versed in claiming victimhood while also being the aggressors. Whether people believed it came down to whether they aligned with the Party for other reasons.