Beer Hall Putsch

Beer Hall Putsch, abortive attempt by Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff to start an insurrection in Germany against the Weimar Republic on November 8–9, 1923.

Prelude to the putsch

The regime of the Weimar Republic was challenged from both right and left in Germany throughout the early 1920s, and there was widespread fear of upheaval on the model of the Russian Revolution. A workers’ uprising led by the Communists took place in the Ruhr in the spring of 1920. Fierce fighting with the army and the volunteer Freikorps was not suppressed until the beginning of April. The miners of the Mansfeld district of central Germany took up arms against the police in March 1921, and the Communists called for a general strike, but without success. The greater danger to the republic came from the right, however. In March 1920 a coup d’etat was attempted by Gen. Walther von Lüttwitz, who commanded the troops in the Berlin area, and Wolfgang Kapp, an East Prussian official. With the help of the Ehrhardt Brigade, one of the Freikorps formations, Lüttwitz and Kapp assumed power in Berlin. The Kapp Putsch, however, failed to receive the support anticipated from the army or from the parties of the right (who regarded it as premature). It was also met by solid resistance from working-class organizations, led by the trade unions, and a successful general strike forced Lüttwitz and Kapp to abandon their attempt after just four days.

In Bavaria the government collapsed in the wake of the Kapp Putsch. As the strongest bloc in the state parliament, the Bavarian People’s Party proposed as prime minister a nonparliamentarian, Gustav, Ritter von (knight of) Kahr, the appointed governor of Upper Bavaria. Kahr proceeded to provoke several conflicts with the central government in Berlin. He refused to disband the paramilitary Home Guards (Einwohnerwehren)—on whom he was politically dependent—in violation of a post-World War I agreement between the Reich government in Berlin and the victorious Allied powers. He only complied in June 1921 following an Allied ultimatum. In his eyes, the danger to the Reich came from the left and not from the right. Thus, following the murder of Centre Party leader Matthias Erzberger by right-wing extremists in August 1921, Kahr refused to carry out the Reich’s Decree for the Protection of the Republic and to lift the Bavarian state of emergency, which had been applied principally against the left. The Bavarian People’s Party responded by withdrawing its support from Kahr and replacing him with the more conciliatory Hugo, Graf (count) von Lerchenfeld, who arranged a compromise with the Reich.

Bavaria again tried to evade the application of Reich security measures after the assassination of the German foreign minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922. The dispute between Bavaria and the central government was, however, settled by a compromise between Lerchenfeld and the Reich president, Friedrich Ebert. The Bavarian government succeeded in retaining its people’s courts (Volksgerichte), which operated outside normal court procedure and without the right of appeal. This concession would have enormous significance in the aftermath of the Beer Hall Putsch to come. The centrist Democrats abandoned Lerchenfeld’s government, and his alliance with the German National People’s Party was short-lived. He was soon thrown over by them and the other right-wing groups as being too conciliatory in his attitude to the Reich authorities. The new premier, Eugen von Knilling, was much more supportive of populist and nationalist sentiment than Lerchenfeld.

The occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops in January 1923 soon led to what was virtually a state of undeclared war between the French and the Germans in the Rhineland. The Reich government ordered passive resistance to French and Belgian attempts to get the mines and factories working and a ban on all reparations deliveries. The occupation forces responded with mass arrests, deportations, and an economic blockade, which cut off not only the Ruhr but the greater part of the occupied Rhineland from the rest of Germany. This was a most serious blow to the German economy in view of the economic dependence of the rest of the country on western Germany, especially after the loss of Upper Silesia. On the German side there was resort to sabotage and guerrilla warfare. The blockade enforced by the French dislocated the whole economic life of the country and provided the final impetus for the depreciation of the currency. The mark fell to 160,000 to the dollar on July 1, 242 million to the dollar on October 1, and 4.2 trillion to the dollar on November 20, 1923. Barter replaced other commercial transactions, food riots broke out, and despair seized hold of large sections of the population. The heaviest losers were the middle classes and pensioners, who saw their savings completely wiped out. Moreover, the drop in real wages hit the working classes hard. On the other hand, many businessmen and industrialists made large profits, speculation was rife, and everyone with debts to pay off—such as farmers and landowners with mortgages on their land—gained immensely.