Beer Hall Putsch

The Beer Hall Putsch occurred in the evening of Thursday, November 8 to 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 what Germans call a coup d'etat or a revolt of a small number of people, e.g. a military coup.)

Aftermath

Upon learning the success of the reactionary elements and the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of Hitler, ferocious rioting and bedlam broke out throughout Munich. 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".

Related Topics:
Munich University - Feldherrnhalle

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Three days after the putsch, Hitler was arrested and charged with treason. His other co-conspirators were arrested while others escaped by going to Austria. The Nazi party headquarters was raided, and its newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter ("The Peoples' Watchman") was banned.

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

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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 (though misguided) motives.

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

Related Topics:
Wilhelm Frick - Goering

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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. While serving his prison sentence at Landsberg am Lech, 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, 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".

Related Topics:
Propaganda - Landsberg am Lech - Rudolf Heß - Mein Kampf

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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 10 years later in 1933 when Franz von Papen would "legally" ask Hitler to form a government.

Related Topics:
1933 - Franz von Papen

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