“To many, Hitler was no longer the buffoon who had botched a coup, but a true patriot who could deliver Germany from chaos”
A century on from the Munich beer hall putsch, Frank McDonough explains how Adolf Hitler turned a bloody fiasco into a political triumph
On 8 November 1923, Adolf Hitler strode into a beer hall, jumped on to a chair, and fired a single bullet into the ceiling. “The National Revolution has begun,” he bellowed to his startled audience. “The hall is under the control of 600 heavily armed men. No one is allowed to leave.” It was the most dramatic of entrances, and one that would signal the start of a defining episode in Hitler’s early life: the Munich beer hall putsch. Hitler’s aim that autumn night was to seize Munich and use the city as a base from which to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Yet little did he know as he stood on top of the table that his ‘national revolution’ was about to fall flat on its face.
Hitler had chosen the location of his coup – the Bürgerbräukeller, a large beer hall in the centre of Munich – for a good reason. For it was here, on that November evening, that Gustav von Kahr, state commissioner of Bavaria, was due to deliver a speech to Munich government officials.
Hitler, who had been leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (better known to history as the Nazis) since July 1921, decided to hijack this meeting to announce a ‘March on Berlin’, where he planned to have himself installed as German leader. He had already won over the First World War leader General Erich Ludendorff – and assumed that Kahr and the Bavarian establishment would support him, too.
What Hitler did not know was that, on 6 November, Kahr had met leading paramilitary organisations in Munich, telling them the Bavarian government would not support any revolutionary action designed to bring down the Weimar Republic. General Otto von Lossow, head of the Bavarian Reichswehr, and Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser, the head of the Bavarian State Police, also opposed Hitler’s proposed coup.
However, in the minutes following Hitler’s entrance into the beer hall, Kahr was barely in a position to oppose the Nazis swarming into the building. Standing at the speaker’s podium, he was led at gunpoint to an adjoining room, accompanied by Seisser, Lo
