On the evening of November 8, 1923, Adolf Hitler and over 600 Nazi stormtroopers burst into a crowded beer hall in Munich, Germany, firing shots in the air. Their goal: to seize power in Bavaria and launch a "national revolution" against the Weimar Republic. The result: a disastrous failure that left 16 Nazis and 4 police dead. But while Hitler‘s Beer Hall Putsch collapsed in ignominious defeat, it still marked a fateful turning point in the Nazi rise to power.
Fertile Ground for Extremism
To understand why Hitler attempted this brazen coup, it‘s essential to grasp the tumultuous context of Germany in 1923. The country was reeling from its shattering defeat in World War I and the punitive Treaty of Versailles, which required Germany to disarm, make massive reparations payments, and give up significant territory. Runaway hyperinflation was destroying the value of German currency, wiping out savings and destabilizing the economy. In this atmosphere of national humiliation and suffering, extremist ideologies on both the far left and far right gained traction.
Bavaria, and its capital Munich, proved especially fertile ground for right-wing radicalism. As a largely Catholic and conservative region, Bavaria harbored deep resentment against the democratic, progressive Weimar government based in Berlin. In 1919, Communists briefly seized power in Bavaria before being violently crushed. This short-lived "Bavarian Soviet Republic" left Bavaria‘s conservatives and many in the middle class anxious about a possible Bolshevik revolution.
It was in this roiling atmosphere that Hitler, an Austrian-born veteran embittered by Germany‘s WWI defeat, entered politics. After joining the small German Workers‘ Party in Munich in 1919, Hitler quickly became its leader and reshaped it into the National Socialist German Workers‘ Party (NSDAP), or Nazi Party. With inflammatory speeches blaming Jews, Communists, and Weimar politicians for Germany‘s ills, Hitler attracted a fervent base of thousands, many of them disaffected soldiers and ruined members of the lower middle class.
Hitler‘s Impatience for Power
By 1923, the 34-year-old Hitler was the most prominent far-right leader in Bavaria, with a private army of stormtroopers known as the SA (Sturmabteilung) under the command of Ernst Röhm. On January 1, French and Belgian troops occupied Germany‘s industrial Ruhr region after Germany defaulted on its reparations payments. This foreign incursion inflamed German nationalist sentiment. Later that year, when the Weimar government ordered the suppression of extremist groups in Bavaria, the state‘s right-wing government refused to comply.
Hitler saw this defiance as an opportunity. In early November 1923, he met secretly with Gustav von Kahr, Bavaria‘s leading conservative politician who had been appointed state commissioner with dictatorial powers. Hitler proposed that Kahr join forces with him to launch a coup against the Weimar government in Berlin, but Kahr got cold feet and backed out.
Undeterred, Hitler decided to go ahead with his "national revolution." His model was Mussolini‘s March on Rome in 1922, when the Italian fascist leader had used the threat of force to come to power. Hitler and his inner circle, including Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Röhm, planned to seize key sites in Munich and then march on Berlin, expecting the Reichswehr (German army) to fall in behind them. They set the putsch for November 11, the anniversary of the armistice that ended WWI – a date laden with resentment for German nationalists.
The Putsch Unravels
On November 8, Hitler learned that Kahr, along with Bavarian police chief Hans Ritter von Seisser and Reichswehr general Otto von Lossow, would be addressing a meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller, one of Munich‘s largest beer halls. In a desperate bid to coerce them into supporting his coup, Hitler decided to strike.
That evening, Hitler and his Nazi storm troopers surrounded the beer hall. Wielding a pistol, Hitler leapt onto a chair and fired a shot into the ceiling. "The national revolution has broken out!" he shouted. "This building is occupied by 600 heavily armed men. No one may leave." In a side room, Hitler tried to browbeat Kahr, Seisser, and Lossow into joining him, but they refused.
Meanwhile, a Nazi squad had seized the Munich city hall, taking the mayor and city council hostage. Another Nazi detachment raided the offices of Munich‘s anti-Nazi newspapers and destroyed their presses. Rampaging Nazis also occupied the city‘s telegraph office and the telephone exchange, severing communications with the outside world.
However, the Nazis had failed to secure the support of the police or military. Once released from the beer hall, Kahr and his associates quickly moved to quash the putsch. They declared a state of emergency, ordered the police and army to resist the Nazis, and called on Munich‘s citizens to stay calm.
By the next morning, November 9, the putsch was unraveling. Pro-government forces were converging on the city center. In a last gamble, Hitler and his followers, now joined by the famed WWI general Erich Ludendorff, marched toward the Bavarian Defense Ministry. Near the Feldherrnhalle monument, they confronted a cordon of police blocking the way. Shots rang out.
In the ensuing gun battle, four police and 16 Nazis were killed. Göring was badly wounded. Hitler dislocated his shoulder as he fell to the ground. Röhm and other Nazis were arrested on the spot. Hitler fled but was captured two days later at the home of his friends, the Hanfstaengls.
Courtroom as Propaganda Stage
Though charged with high treason, Hitler used his 24-day trial in February and March 1924 as a propaganda platform. The presiding judges sympathized with his nationalist, anti-Semitic views and gave him wide leeway to make lengthy speeches denouncing the Weimar Republic.
"I alone bear the responsibility," Hitler declared, portraying himself as a patriotic, selfless leader. "But I am not a criminal because of that. If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the revolution [of 1918]."
Newspapers extensively quoted Hitler‘s remarks, introducing him to a national audience. Though found guilty, Hitler received a lenient sentence of five years in prison, of which he would serve only nine months. Ludendorff was acquitted.
Other Nazis involved in the putsch also got off lightly. Hess, Schneck, Pernet, and Wagner received sentences of a little over a year. Röhm, Göring, Frick, and Brückner received suspended sentences and were released. The Bavarian judicial system, stacked with conservatives sympathetic to the Nazis‘ nationalist and anti-communist stance, had little appetite for harsh punishment.
From Failed Putschist to Fuhrer
After his release from Landsberg Prison in December 1924, Hitler faced a movement and a country much changed. With Hitler locked away, the Nazi Party had withered. At the same time, with the end of the Ruhr crisis and the stabilization of the currency, the Weimar Republic had regained its footing, sapping support for political extremism.
Hitler‘s time in prison had given him the opportunity to reflect and regroup. Dictating his rambling memoir-manifesto Mein Kampf to his obsequious deputy Rudolf Hess, Hitler laid out his delusional worldview of Aryan supremacy, virulent anti-Semitism, and dreams of a racially purified, territorially expanded German Reich. The failure of the putsch had also convinced him that trying to topple the government by force was a dead end; to succeed, the Nazis would have to build a mass movement and gain power through elections.
Over the next several years, Hitler worked to reorganize the Nazi Party into a national organization with a rigid hierarchy and intensely loyal cadres. Aided by Göring and a new manager, Philipp Bouhler, Hitler crisscrossed Germany giving impassioned speeches to crowds of thousands. With his fiery eyes, twitching mustache, and florid doomsaying about Germany‘s demise, Hitler proved a master at stoking grievance and inspiring devotion.
Even more than his words, Hitler‘s image – captured in photographs, posters, and propaganda films – lent him an almost messianic aura that set him apart from other politicians. His thousands of local organizers saturated communities with leaflets, staged marches and rallies with uniformed storm troopers, and brawled with opponents in the streets.
Playing on fears of communism after the onset of the Great Depression, Hitler presented the Nazis as saviors who would restore Germany to its rightful glory. By 1930 the Nazi Party had become the second largest party in the Reichstag. Two and a half years later, with six million Germans unemployed amid a paralyzed political system, Hitler would be appointed chancellor, setting in motion the most catastrophic events of the 20th century.
A Disastrous Triumph
While the immediate consequences of the Beer Hall Putsch were a disaster for Hitler and his movement, the long-term effects were more insidious. The putsch catapulted Hitler to national notoriety. His courtroom grandstanding and light sentence won him a mass following as a patriotic martyr.
More significantly, the putsch and subsequent trial exposed the dangerous undercurrents of nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarianism coursing through the Weimar Republic. A sizable portion of the public, including members of the traditional conservative elite, the judiciary, the police, and the military, proved surprisingly receptive to Hitler‘s toxic mix of resentment and grandiosity. In a fragile democracy, this ominous sympathy would later enable Hitler‘s rise.
At the same time, Hitler and the Nazi leadership absorbed important lessons from their failed putsch. They saw that trying to overthrow the state by force was doomed; instead, they would have to subvert democracy from within, using a combination of electoral politics, propaganda, and paramilitary intimidation.
In this sense, the Beer Hall Putsch marked a critical waystation on Germany‘s grim trajectory from struggling democracy to genocidal dictatorship. Though the Weimar Republic withstood Hitler‘s first serious challenge, its underlying weaknesses had been exposed. A decade later, in far more propitious circumstances, Hitler would not let his next chance at power slip away.
