Beer Hall Putsch

On the night of 8–9 November 1923, Adolf Hitler and his allies tried to take over the Bavarian government in Munich as the first step towards toppling the national government in Berlin. The coup collapsed within a day under police gunfire. Yet the trial that followed made Hitler a national figure, and the episode convinced him to pursue power through elections rather than force.

Many Germans, Hitler among them, saw the Treaty of Versailles as a betrayal and blamed defeat on civilian politicians, Jews and Marxists. Hitler, an army veteran who was still an Austrian citizen, had joined the small German Workers' Party in 1919 and risen to lead it as the Nazi Party. By 1923 he also led the Kampfbund, an alliance of nationalist paramilitary groups. That year the French occupation of the Ruhr and the collapse of the currency pushed the country to the brink.

On 26 September 1923 Bavaria declared a state of emergency and gave near-dictatorial powers to Gustav von Kahr, who ruled with the police chief Hans von Seisser and the army commander Otto von Lossow. They too wanted a nationalist dictatorship, but not one led by Hitler. Kahr banned Hitler's planned rallies. Inspired by Mussolini's March on Rome the year before, Hitler decided to force their hand, and recruited the wartime general Erich Ludendorff to lend him prestige.

On the evening of 8 November Kahr was speaking to some 3,000 people at the Bürgerbräukeller, one of Munich's biggest beer halls. About 600 storm troopers surrounded the building. Hitler pushed into the hall, fired a pistol into the ceiling and announced that the national revolution had begun. He took Kahr, Seisser and Lossow into a side room at gunpoint, and after a stirring speech to the crowd the three appeared on the platform and seemed to agree. Hitler then left to deal with trouble elsewhere, and Ludendorff let the triumvirs go. Within hours they had repudiated the coup, and loyal army and police units prepared to resist.

By the next morning the plotters had seized few key buildings and had no clear plan. On Ludendorff's urging, about 2,000 men marched into the city centre. Outside the Feldherrnhalle on the Odeonsplatz, roughly 130 state police barred their way, and the two sides opened fire. Fifteen or sixteen putschists, four police officers and a bystander were killed. Hermann Göring was wounded in the leg. Hitler fled to the countryside and was arrested two days later.

Hitler, Ludendorff and eight others were charged with treason. The trial ran from 26 February to 1 April 1924, and the presiding judge let Hitler deliver long political speeches that newspapers reported widely. Ludendorff was acquitted. Hitler received the minimum sentence of five years' fortress confinement, a lenient form of detention, and the court declined to deport him to Austria. In Landsberg prison he dictated Mein Kampf, and he was released on 20 December 1924 after serving about nine months.

Hitler drew the lesson that power had to be won by legal means. After he took office in 1933, the Nazi regime turned the dead putschists into martyrs: their bloodstained flag became a party relic, and 9 November was commemorated each year with a re-enactment of the march. The anniversary coincided in 1938 with Kristallnacht. Since 1994 a plaque in front of the Feldherrnhalle has honoured the four police officers who died stopping the coup.

Our 1920 and 1930 maps show Weimar Germany, the republic the putschists tried to overthrow; our 1938 map shows Nazi Germany after Hitler came to power.