Beer Hall Putsch

The Beer Hall Putsch was a failed coup d'état which occurred in the evening of Thursday, November 8 to the early afternoon of Friday, November 9 1923, when the nascent Nazi party's Führer Adolf Hitler, the popular World War I General Erich Ludendorff, and other leaders of the Kampfbund, unsuccessfully tried to gain power in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. (A putsch is the German equivalent of a coup d'état, or the revolt of a small number of people, e.g. a military coup.)

Background

Beer halls are huge taverns that exist in most larger South German towns, where hundreds or even thousands of people gather during the evenings, drink beer out of stone jugs and sing rousing drinking songs. They were also places where political rallies would be held. One of the largest in Munich was the Bürgerbräu Keller, where the putsch was launched.

German power and prestige were destroyed in the aftermath of World War I, another "betrayal" by the central government, as Hitler saw it. The former corporal and rabble-rousing speaker, who in the chaotic political atmosphere of postwar Munich had risen rapidly to head the small National Socialist party, could call on about 15,000 stormtroopers representing several right-wing Bavarian political groups -- the Kampfbund. Hitler announced that starting on September 27 1923, he would be holding 14 mass meetings. This prompted the Bavarian Prime Minister Eugen Ritter von Knilling to declare a state of emergency and named Gustav von Kahr as Bavarian Commissar, Bavarian State Police head Col. Hans von Seisser, and Reichswehr General Otto von Lossow as dictators (they were called the "triumvirs") to keep order.

Hitler, with other leaders in the Kampfbund, searched out the triumvirs, the leaders of the conservative-nationalist-monarchist groups to convince them to march upon Berlin and seize power. In April, before the establishment of the triumvir, Hitler would call von Kahr almost every day. Each thought to use the other to propel himself into power. Von Kahr sought to restore the monarchy; Hitler wanted to be a dictator.

The Putsch

The attempted putsch was influenced by Mussolini's successful March on Rome. Further, when Hitler realized von Kahr either sought to control him or was losing heart (history is unclear), Hitler decided to take matters into his own hands. He planned to use Munich as a base against Germany's Weimar Republic government in Berlin. Hitler, along with a large detachment of SA, marched on the Bürgerbräukeller, a Munich beer hall where von Kahr was making a speech in front of 3,000 people. In the darkness, 600 stormtroopers surrounded the beer hall and a machine gun was set up pointing at the front door. Hitler, surrounded by his associates Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Heß, and Ulrich Graf, burst through the front door at 8:30 pm, fired a shot into the ceiling and jumped on a chair yelling,

"The national revolution has broken out! The hall is filled with six hundred men. Nobody is allowed to leave. The Bavarian government and the government at Berlin are deposed. A new government will be formed at once. The barracks of the Reichswehr and those of the police are occupied. Both have rallied to the swastika."

At gunpoint, Hitler forced von Kahr, von Seisser, and von Lossow into a room and told them to support his march on Berlin, or they would be shot. Hitler thought that he would get an immediate response of affirmation from them. When that did not occur, things began to unravel and Hitler and Ernst Röhm began to entreat and badger their captives. During this stalemate, speeches were held, no one was allowed to leave and others of Hitler's entourage collected Prime Minister von Knilling and his cabinet as hostages from the audience (which would later include a prominent Jewish banker, Mr. Ludwig Wassermann).

In the meantime, two men were assigned to pick up General Ludendorff, whose personal prestige was being harnessed to give the Nazis credibility. Ludendorff showed up as planned around 20:40. Once Ludendorff arrived at the beer hall, Hitler phoned Ernst Röhm, who was waiting with the bulk of the SA in the Löwenbräukeller, another beer hall, and ordered him to seize key buildings throughout the city. At the same time, co-conspirators mobilized the students of a nearby Officers Infantry school to seize other objectives.

Upon arrival, Ludendorff was ushered into a side room where the intransigent triumvirs were being kept, joining Hitler and others to persuade the triumvirs to change their minds. Between the chanting in the beer hall and pressure from Ludendorff, one by one the triumvirs submitted. They moved back into the hall, gave speeches, shook hands, and then the people were allowed to leave. In a tactical mistake, Hitler decided to leave the Bürgerbräu Keller shortly thereafter to deal with a crisis elsewhere. Around 22:30, Ludendorff released von Kahr and his associates.

The night was marked by confusion and unrest among government officials, armed forces and police units, and individuals deciding where their loyalties lay. Units of the Kampfbund were scurrying around to arm themselves from secret caches, seizing buildings. Around 3 in the morning, the first casualties of the putsch occurred when the local garrison of the Reichswehr spotted Röhm's men coming out of the beer hall. They were ambushed while trying to reach the Reichswehr barracks and had to fall back. In the meantime, the Reichswehr officers put the whole garrison on alert and called for reinforcements. In a prefiguration of things to come, a list of prominent Jews was made up and squads of SA were sent around to arrest them. Acts of great vandalism and terror were perpetrated upon these Jews. Some were taken into custody while others escaped. The foreign attaches were also seized in their hotel rooms and put under house arrest.

In the early morning, Hitler ordered the seizure of the Munich city council as hostages. He further sent the communications officer of the Kampfbund, Max Neunzert, to enlist the aid of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria to mediate between von Kahr and the putschists. Neunzert failed in the mission.

By midmorning on the 9th, the realization hit that the putsch was going nowhere and Hitler was desperate. They didn't know what to do and were about to give up. At this moment, Ludendorff cried out "Wir marschieren!" (We will march!) and Röhm's force together with Hitler's (a total of approx. 2000 men) marched out with no plan of where to go. At the spur of the moment, Ludendorff led them to the Bavarian Defense Ministry. However, at the Odeonsplatz in front of the Feldherrenhalle, they met with a force of 100 soldiers blocking the way under the command of State Police Senior Lieutenant Baron Michael von Godin. The two groups exchanged fire, killing four state police officers and fourteen insurgents. It was here that the Blutfahne came to be. Hitler and Hermann Göring were both injured, the latter managing to escape while the former was captured shortly thereafter.

Counterattack

Police and State Police units were first notified of trouble by two police detectives stationed at the Löwenbräukeller. These reports reached Major Sigmund von Imhoff of the State police. He immediately called all his "green" police units and had them seize the central telegraph office and the telephone exchange, though his most important act was to notify Major General Jakob von Danner, the Reichswehr city commandant of Munich. As a staunch aristocrat, he loathed the "little corporal" and those "freikorps bands of rowdies." He also didn't much like his commanding officer, von Lossow, "a sorry figure of a man." He was determined to put down the putsch with or without von Lossow. General Danner set up a command post at the 19th Infantry Regiment barracks and alerted all military units.

Meanwhile Captain Karl Wild, learning of the putsch from marchers, mobilized his command to guard von Kahr's government building, the "Commissariat," with orders to shoot.

Around 23:00, von Danner, along with fellow officers General Adolf von Ruith and General Baron Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, compelled von Lossow to repudiate the putsch.

There was one member of the cabinet who was not at the Bürgerbräu Keller: Franz Matt, the vice-premier and minister of education and culture. A staunchly conservative Catholic, he was having dinner with Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber and the Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli (who would later become Pope Pius XII), when he learned of the putsch. He immediately phoned von Kahr. When he found the man vacillitating and unsure, Matt decisively began plans to set up a rump government-in-exile in Regensburg and composed a proclamation calling upon all police, armed forces, and civil servants to remain loyal to the government.

The action of these few men spelled doom for the putschists.

On Saturday, 4,000 students from Munich University rioted and marched to the Feldherrnhalle to lay wreaths. (They continued to riot through Monday until learning of Hitler's arrest.) Von Kahr and von Lossow were called "Judases" and "Traitors."

Three days after the putsch, Hitler was arrested and charged with treason. Some of his co-conspirators were arrested while others escaped to Austria. The Nazi party headquarters were raided, and its newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter ("The People's Watchman") was banned.

This, however, was not the first time Hitler had been in trouble with the law. In an incident in September 1921, he and some SA had disrupted a meeting of the Bayernbund, and the Nazis who had gone there to cause trouble were arrested as a result. Hitler ended up serving a little over a month of a three-month jail sentence.

His trial began on February 26 1924 and Hitler, along with Heß was sentenced to five years in Festungshaft (literally, "fortress confinement") for treason. "Festungshaft" was a type of jail that excluded forced labor, featured reasonably comfortable cells, and allowed the prisoner to receive visitors almost daily for many hours. It was the customary sentence for people whom the judge believed to have had honourable but misguided motives.

Even of this rather preferential sentence, Hitler only served a little over eight months. Due to his war service and connections, Ludendorff was acquitted. Both Röhm and Dr. Wilhelm Frick, though found guilty, were released. Göring, meanwhile, suffered bullet wounds in his leg, which led him to become increasingly dependent on morphine and other painkilling drugs.

Though Hitler failed to achieve his immediate stated goal—and in fact there seems to be no turn of events which could have caused this rather poorly organized coup not to fail—the event did give the Nazis their first exposure to national attention and a propaganda victory. It was while serving his prison sentence at Landsberg am Lech that he and Rudolf Heß wrote Mein Kampf. Also, the putsch changed Hitler's outlook on violent revolution to effect change. From then on he thought that, in order to win the German heart, he must do everything by the book, strictly legal, since Germans obviously frowned on not following the rules. He decided to maneuver it so that the German Volk would choose him as dictator. Later on, the German people were calling him "Adolf Legalité" or "Adolf the Legal One."

The process of combination, where the conservative-nationalist-monarchist group thought that they could piggyback onto and control the National Socialist movement to garner the seats of power, was to dangerously repeat itself ten years later in 1933 when Franz von Papen would "legally" ask Hitler to form a government.

Nazi supporters who died in the putsch

These persons were regarded as the first to die in the act of supporting the Nazi Party, and were remembered by Hitler in the foreword of Mein Kampf as martyrs. In 1935, they were interred at an ornate mausoleum in Munich. In 1947, the Allied Control Commission demolished the mausoleum and scattered the remains.

Miscellany

On November 8 1939, Hitler narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while celebrating the 16th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.

American newspaper reporters are partly responsible for transferring the originally Italian application "Fascists" to the Nazis.
- "FASCISTI MOBILIZE IN BAVARIAN HILLS," The New York Times, Nov 3, 1923.
- "BAVARIAN FASCISTI IMPATIENT," "...the Bavarian military dictator Dr. von Kahr is experiencing difficulty in his efforts to hold the Bavarian Fascisti in leash..." The New York Times, Nov 7, 1923.

The political disparity of von Kahr and Adolf Hitler is elucidated when the editor of the staunchly royalist newspaper and speech writer for Von Kahr, Paul Egenter, questions Pöhner while locked in the beer hall: "Isn't there a basic contradiction between von Kahr's monarchistic and Hitler's republican-dictatorial aims?" Munich 1923, pg 168.
- The gloss over of this discrepancy shows itself in NY Times headlines: "MONARCHIST FORCES REPORTED MARCHING ON BERLIN," "LUDENDORFF LEADS ROYALIST ARMY."

In Popular Culture

The Beer Hall Putsch and the subsequent arrest and trial of Adolf Hitler was portrayed in the anime movie Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conquer of Shamballa.

Bibliography

John Dornberg, Munich 1923, The Story of Hitler's First Grab for Power, Harper & Row Publishers, NY, 1982.
Louis Leo Snyder, Hitler and Nazism, Franklin Watts, Inc., NY, 1961.
David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked, Munich's Road to the Third Reich, W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.

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