Beer Hall Putsch

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beer Hall Putsch unfolded on the night of the 8th of November 1923, inside one of Munich's most popular gathering places, the Bürgerbräukeller. Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the Minister-President of Bavaria, was mid-speech before an audience of three thousand people when Adolf Hitler pushed through the crowded auditorium, unable to make himself heard above the noise. He fired a pistol shot into the ceiling, climbed onto a chair, and shouted that the national revolution had begun. The hall, he declared, was surrounded by six hundred men. Nobody was allowed to leave.

  What followed over the next twenty-four hours was a chaotic attempt to seize control of the German state, inspired by Benito Mussolini's recent march on Rome. It would end with sixteen Nazis and four police officers dead in the street in front of the Feldherrnhalle. Hitler would be arrested, tried for treason, and sent to prison. And yet the failure would give him something a successful coup might not have: a national stage, a propaganda victory, and the time to write a book that would shape the next decade of German history.

• 2. The World Hitler Entered

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  Adolf Hitler had joined the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the German Workers' Party, on the 12th of September 1919, not as a believer but as a spy. Captain Karl Mayr of the Bavarian Army's Education and Propaganda Department had ordered the army Gefreiter to infiltrate the tiny organisation. Hitler held the Iron Cross, First Class, and Austrian citizenship, but he had fought in the German army and shared its fury over the Treaty of Versailles. He believed Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by its own government, and he blamed civilian leaders, Jews, and Marxists, whom he would later call the "November Criminals."

  He rose quickly within the party's ranks, and by agreement assumed political leadership of a coalition of Bavarian revanchist associations called the Kampfbund, whose paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung, numbered about fifteen thousand members. Munich in those years was a city primed for agitation. Its large beer halls hosted political rallies alongside ordinary drinking, and audiences of hundreds or thousands were routine. It was in these halls that Hitler first discovered the power of his voice over a crowd.

  On the 26th of September 1923, after a period of political violence, Bavarian Prime Minister Eugen von Knilling declared a state of emergency and appointed Kahr as state commissioner with dictatorial powers. Kahr, the police chief Hans Ritter von Seisser, and the Reichswehr general Otto von Lossow formed a ruling triumvirate. When Kahr banned the fourteen mass meetings Hitler had announced, the pressure on Hitler to act became acute. His rivals in the Kampfbund feared that delay would push their followers toward the communists.

• 3. The Night of the Putsch

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  On the evening of the 8th of November 1923, 603 SA men surrounded the Bürgerbräukeller and set up a machine gun inside the auditorium. Hitler advanced through the hall accompanied by roughly twenty associates, including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Ernst Hanfstaengl, and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. After firing his shot into the ceiling, he declared the Bavarian government deposed and announced the formation of a new government with General Erich Ludendorff at its head.

  Hitler ordered Kahr, Seisser, and Lossow into an adjoining room at gunpoint and pressed them to support the putsch. He wanted Kahr to accept the position of Regent of Bavaria. Kahr replied coldly that he could hardly be expected to collaborate, given that he had been brought there under heavy guard. Hitler had promised Lossow only days earlier that he would not attempt a coup.

  Meanwhile, Ernst Röhm, waiting at another beer hall, the Löwenbräukeller, was ordered by telephone to seize key buildings across the city. Co-conspirators under Gerhard Rossbach mobilised students from a nearby infantry officers' school to take other objectives. The night dissolved into confusion as Kampfbund units armed themselves from secret caches and government officials decided where their loyalties lay.

  Hitler returned to the main auditorium and addressed the crowd. A professor of modern history who was present, Dr. Karl Alexander von Mueller of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, later described what he witnessed: "I cannot remember in my entire life such a change in the attitude of a crowd in a few minutes, almost a few seconds. Hitler had turned them inside out, as one turns a glove inside out, with a few sentences." Hitler ended with a warning: "Either the German revolution begins tonight, or we will all be dead by dawn."

  His fatal tactical mistake came shortly after: Hitler left the Bürgerbräukeller to deal with a crisis elsewhere. Around 22:30, Ludendorff released Kahr and the other members of the triumvirate. Once free, Kahr repudiated the putsch.

• 4. The Counterattack

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  Three police detectives stationed at the Löwenbräukeller were the first to alert the authorities. Their reports reached Major Sigmund von Imhoff of the state police, who called his Grüne Polizei units and secured the central telegraph office and telephone exchange. His most consequential act was notifying Major-General Jakob von Danner, the Reichswehr city commandant.

  Danner despised Hitler, describing him privately as a "little corporal" leading "Freikorps bands of rowdies." He was equally contemptuous of his own superior, Generalleutnant Otto von Lossow, whom he called "a sorry figure of a man." Danner set up a command post at the 19th Infantry Regiment barracks and put all military units on alert, determined to crush the putsch with or without Lossow's blessing.

  One cabinet member had not been at the Bürgerbräukeller that night: Franz Matt, the vice-premier and minister of education and culture, was dining with Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the Archbishop of Munich, and the Nuncio to Bavaria, Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII. When Matt learned of the putsch, he telephoned Kahr, found him wavering, and immediately drew up plans for a government-in-exile in Regensburg. His proclamation called on all police officers, soldiers, and civil servants to remain loyal.

  At around 03:00, the first casualties of the night occurred when Reichswehr troops ambushed Röhm's men as they moved toward the barracks. Shots were exchanged but no one died. By mid-morning on the 9th of November, Hitler realised the putsch had stalled. It was Ludendorff who refused to accept failure. He cried out, "Wir marschieren!" ("We will march!") and led a column of approximately two thousand men into the city centre.

• 5. The Feldherrnhalle

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  At the Odeonsplatz, in front of the Feldherrnhalle, the column met a force of 130 soldiers under the command of a state police senior lieutenant. When the two groups exchanged fire, sixteen Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander died. Scheubner-Richter, who had been walking arm-in-arm with Hitler, was shot in the lungs and died instantly. As he fell, he pulled Hitler down and dislocated Hitler's shoulder. Hitler later called Scheubner-Richter the only "irreplaceable loss" among the dead.

  Andreas Bauriedl, a hatter and World War I veteran born in Aschaffenburg, was hit in the abdomen and fell onto the Nazi flag after its bearer, Heinrich Trambauer, was severely wounded. The blood-soaked flag became an object of veneration within the Nazi movement, eventually known as the Blutfahne.

  The youngest person to die in the putsch was an engineering student born on the 28th of October 1904. Also counted among the dead was Karl Kuhn, listed in Mein Kampf as a martyr of the Freikorps Oberland. In reality, Kuhn was a head waiter from Heilbronn who had stepped outside the restaurant where he worked to watch the march and was killed in the crossfire.

  Göring escaped after being shot in the leg. The wound led to a growing dependence on morphine and other painkillers that continued throughout his life. Hitler was driven by Ernst Hanfstaengl to Uffing in the countryside. Two days later, police arrested him. It was at the Hanfstaengl family residence, to which Hitler had fled, that Helene Hanfstaengl intervened to prevent him from taking his own life when police arrived.

• 6. The Trial

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  Hitler's trial opened on the 26th of February 1924 and ran until the 1st of April 1924. The presiding judge was Georg Neithardt, who had also presided over an earlier Hitler case stemming from an SA disruption of an October 1921 meeting of the Bayernbund. The defendants included Ludendorff, Hermann Kriebel, Wilhelm Frick, Ernst Pöhner, Ernst Röhm, Friedrich Weber, Wilhelm Brückner, and Robert Wagner, with Heinz Pernet charged as an accessory.

  Hitler opened with a nearly four-hour speech that moved from his personal history to his political vision, concentrating his fire on racial minorities, communism, the Weimar Republic, and the Bavarian leaders who had turned against him. He claimed sole responsibility for the putsch. The lay judges were, by the source's account, fanatically sympathetic to the Nazi position and had to be actively dissuaded by Neithardt from acquitting Hitler outright.

  Ernst Röhm testified: "I still cannot comprehend that I should have to defend myself for a deed that seemed so natural to me." Lossow, acting as chief witness for the prosecution, criticised Hitler for not pursuing change through legal and constitutional channels. Kahr called the putsch a potential catastrophe. Seisser dismissed Hitler as "a young man who let the applause of crowds get to his head" and said the episode had set back the nationalist cause by years.

  Hitler's closing statement on the 27th of March brought people in the courtroom to tears. He declared: "It is not you, gentlemen, who pronounce judgment upon us. Instead, the judgment of the eternal court of history will pronounce against this prosecution which has been raised against us."

  Hitler, Kriebel, Pöhner, and Weber each received five years in Festungshaft, fortress confinement, the mildest category of imprisonment under German law, which excluded forced labour, permitted comfortable quarters, and allowed daily visits for many hours. Parole eligibility was set at six months. Ludendorff, who claimed he had been present by accident, an explanation he had also used after an earlier failed coup, the Kapp Putsch, was acquitted entirely. Neithardt privately held that the laws of the Weimar Republic could not be applied to a man who "thinks and feels like a German, as Hitler does," a judgment that kept Hitler from being deported to Austria.

• 7. Landsberg and After

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  At Landsberg Prison, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. The book's foreword was dedicated to the sixteen who had died in the putsch, and the bystander Karl Kuhn was honoured alongside them as a martyr. On the 20th of December 1924, having served only nine months of his five-year sentence, Hitler was released.

  The putsch had shifted something in Hitler's thinking about how power was won. His previous willingness to force change through violence gave way to a calculated embrace of legality. He would do everything, he said, "strictly legal." The pattern the source describes would repeat itself ten years later, in 1933, when Franz von Papen invited Hitler to form a coalition government, believing that conservative nationalists could use and then contain the Nazi movement.

  The Nazi flag stained at the Feldherrnhalle, the Blutfahne, was brought out at the swearing-in of new SA and SS recruits once Hitler held power. A memorial placed at the south side of the Feldherrnhalle bore the inscription Und ihr habt doch gesiegt! meaning "And you triumphed nevertheless." Passers-by were required to offer the Nazi salute.

  The 9th of November, the date of the march and the shootings, became Der neunte Elfte on the Nazi calendar, one of the regime's most important annual commemorations. Each year until the end of Nazi Germany, Hitler addressed the Alte Kämpfer, the "Old Fighters," in the Bürgerbräukeller, and the following day a re-enactment of the march moved through the streets of Munich. On the 9th of November 1935, the dead were disinterred and reburied in two newly built Ehrentempel, honour temples, on the Königsplatz. In June 1945, Allied authorities removed the remains and offered families the choice of unmarked graves in Munich cemeteries or cremation. On the 9th of January 1947, the upper structures of the Ehrentempel were demolished. Since 1994, a plaque set into the pavement in front of the Feldherrnhalle names the four police officers who died opposing the putsch, the counterweight to decades of Nazi commemoration on the same ground.