A century after Adolf Hitler's first attempt to seize power in Germany by force, it is worth remembering the economic and political conditions that gave the Nazis their impetus in the first place. In an age of aggressive nationalism and chauvinism, such historical lessons have taken on new urgency.
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This month marks a teaching centenary. On the morning of November 9, 1923, a 34-year-old Adolf Hitler led a battalion of 2,000 men into the center of Munich. The aim was to seize power by force in the Bavarian capital before marching on Berlin. There, they would destroy the Weimar Republic – the democratic political system established in Germany in the winter of 1918-1919 – and replace it with an authoritarian regime devoted to violence.
Marching alongside Hitler was a 50-year-old Bavarian district judge, Baron Theodor von der Pfordten, who carried a legal document that would become the basis for the establishment of the new state. It included provisions that justified the mass executions of political opponents of the Nazis, as well as particularly drastic measures targeting Germany's Jews, who accounted for about 1% of the population. Jewish civil servants were to be fired immediately and any non-Jewish German who tried to help them would be punished by death.
The march was led by men carrying Swastika flags and included at least one truck with a machine gun mounted on its back. At the front stood Hitler, who was wearing civilian clothes, while everyone else was wearing military or paramilitary uniforms.
Inspired by Benito Mussolini, who had been appointed Prime Minister of Italy after “March to Rome” of the Italian Fascists in October 1922, the Nazi coup had actually begun the night before. At about 8 pm on November 8, Hitler and his armed supporters had broken into a political gathering in a large Munich beer hall. As they entered, one of them fired a pistol into the air, while others pointed their guns at the crowd to prevent them from leaving. Then Hermann Göring, commander of the Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers), telling the raging crowd to calm down, because at least everyone still had their beer.
The disorderly gathering had been organized by Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the key figure in a triumvirate with Otto von Lossow and Hans Ritter von Seißer, the heads of the Reichswehr (armed forces) and the police in Bavaria, respectively. This trio had ruled Bavaria since late September, having come to power in response to the multiple crises that had engulfed Germany since early 1923.
By the fall of that year, many feared that Germany was on the brink of civil war. Soldiers and paramilitaries from the conservative anti-democratic south took up arms against working-class militias and pro-democratic forces from the more liberal north. Germany was on a knife edge and everyone knew it.
Fuel to the fire
The political spiral had begun on January 11, 1923, when France and Belgium sent troops to occupy Germany's coal-producing region of the Ruhr, which was the engine of the German economy. French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré had ordered the occupation as a means of ensuring France's future security and economic prosperity. By the summer of 1922, he had become so frustrated with Germany's refusal to pay its World War I reparations at the rate the victors demanded that he decided to take matters into his own hands.
With the support of Belgium, Poincaré sent French engineers and technicians to seize German coal and coke so that they could be forced to receive "reparations in kind". To accomplish this initial mission, the occupation consisted of approximately 100,000 soldiers, who took up residence in local schools, government buildings, and homes.
While France's wartime ally, Great Britain, was left out of the picture, Poincaré had widespread support at home. World War I had, after all, devastated an area of France the size of the Netherlands, and the reality of peace did not live up to French expectations. Poincaré promised that the French soldiers would give what the peace treaties had not.
The occupation faced the Weimar Republic with an existential crisis. Without a functioning army capable of standing up to the French and Belgians, German Chancellor Wilhelm Kuhn – a non-partisan businessman appointed by Germany's Social Democratic President Friedrich Ebert the previous winter – declared that Germany would respond with “passive resistance ». Plans to occupy France would fail because German miners would stop going into the pits to extract coal and German railways would cease to function. It was the first nationalist strike of any significance in modern German history.
To pay for the economic consequences of ending the Ruhr economy, the German central bank began printing money, an economic tool it had used since 1914, first to finance its war effort and then in response to various crises during the first years of the Weimar Republic. Reichsbank President Rudolf Havenstein estimated that Germany had enough financial reserves – including the precious metals it had hoarded during World War I – to support the value of the Deutsche Mark in foreign exchange markets.
But Havenstein had assumed the occupation would last only a few weeks. In this case, the prospect of de-escalation soon faded as French and Belgian soldiers committed atrocities – including an unknown number of mass rapes – against German civilians. In one incident on March 31, 1923, 13 protesting workers were shot and killed at the Krupp factory. Under such circumstances, there could be no cessation of hostilities.
Tensions were further heightened by German "active resistance", most of which was carried out by small groups of ex-spies and explosives specialists, with the covert support of the military and political leadership. They initially engaged in what we would today call economic terrorism, bombing railway lines at critical points on the network.
But when secret agents went beyond the state's goal of hitting economic targets and began killing civilians and targeting French soldiers, the campaign ended in the summer of 1923, angering right-wing German political activists. Germany, they complained, had been "stabbed in the back" as it was supposed to have done to its armed forces in November 1918.
Meanwhile, the occupiers countered German resistance by depriving the Ruhr of food imports from unoccupied Germany and forcing German civilians to travel on trains as human shields. Children suffered especially because the border closures reduced the supply of milk to sustain newborns and infants. The fear that many would starve to death became so great that the German state organized mass transports of children from the occupied zone (which was already home to some of the country's poorest working-class neighborhoods).
Nor were the children the only ones who left the occupied territory. As relations between occupiers and occupied deteriorated, the French military expelled hundreds of thousands of German civil servants and their families from the Ruhr, often at gunpoint. Although the original intention was to help pacify the region, these expulsions also served France's later goal of partial annexation of the region.
France's behavior caused international shock. Even in Britain, there was growing sympathy for the plight of German civilians. By summer, Poincaré knew that the occupation was not having the results he wanted. In late May 1923, he ordered his soldiers in the Ruhr to execute a German prisoner, Albert Leo Schlageter, who had been captured during the campaign of active resistance. The Germans were outraged. In Munich, Hitler was among the leaders who stood before the grieving crowds in condemnation of Poincaré. For the rest of the summer, he urged Germans to become a nation of Schlageters – resistance fighters.
Catalytic inflation
For his part, Havenstein decided to continue printing money to pay for the campaign of passive resistance. In the first half, this policy cost the Weimar state an extra trillion marks a month, on average. Then, on April 18, 1923, the central bank's efforts to support the mark exchange rate ended after a sudden surge in demand for sterling in Berlin made further intervention impossible.
A furious Havenstein accused special interests of putting their profits above Germany's national survival, but there was little he could do. From that point on, the value of the coin plummeted. The Germans spent the summer of 1923 adding zeros to all prices. By mid-August, the American Consul in Cologne estimated that an average family of four would need 21 million marks a week to survive. It was the first case of hyperinflation in a modern industrial state.
Cuno was the first to leave. On 12 August 1923, he lost a vote of no confidence and resigned, to be replaced by Gustav Stresemann, who would later be described by his biographer as her "greatest statesman" Weimar. However, although Stresemann knew he had to end passive resistance and restore stability to the economy, his first critical decision as chancellor was to maintain the status quo.
Since the summer, Britain has looked set to turn to Germany. In early August, British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon told the French directly that the occupation of the Ruhr was illegal. As Stresemann saw it, a change in British policy could open the door to a German-British alliance, and that prospect was reason enough to wait.
But it was not to be. On September 19, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin met with Poincaré in Paris, where the two declared themselves in complete unity. Only then did Stresemann finally decide to raise the white flag. Passive resistance would cease. Poincare had his victory. Stresemann's decision pushed Weimar Germany closer to the edge of the abyss. For the opponents of the Republic, the time had come to act. The Communists were the first to move against him and the first to fail. With workers rising up over hyperinflation, the German far left hoped it could follow in the footsteps of Lenin's Bolsheviks and seize power. But even at home, working-class Germans were against them. Most workers wanted stability, not revolution. Communist plans for a German "October" were soon abandoned.
It is true that one exception was Hamburg, where a workers' uprising on October 23 resulted in about 100 deaths. But the absence of similar mobilizations across Germany meant that the uprising could be quickly put down. There were also separatist uprisings in the Rhineland, where armed militias supported by France and Belgium, seeking to establish a breakaway republic, fought German nationalists. On September 30, at least ten people were killed in clashes between separatists and police in the center of Düsseldorf.
Like the violence in Hamburg, these battles were fought openly. Far more threatening to the survival of the Weimar democracy was the methodology behind closed doors. For example, a clique around Reichswehr General Hans von Zecht conspired to overthrow the Republic, but ultimately failed, due to the strength of the military factions that still supported the republic.
Hitler was associated with this group, but was not one of its important figures. And, unlike the other conspirators, he could not back down. At the start of the year, his party had around 8,000 members, mostly in Bavaria. By November, that number had risen to around 50,000. This political success was largely due to his promise to use violence to destroy the Republic. One of his allies even publicly stated that killing 50,000 Jews would be enough to solve the Ruhr crisis.
Street Fighting Man
By October 1923, Hitler was determined that the time had come to fight the state. In the first week of November, he set November 11 (the anniversary of the armistice) as the date for what became the Munich coup, before moving it to November 8 when he learned of Kahr's plans for a beer hall assembly.
Within minutes of entering the beer hall, Hitler and his supporters had forced Kahr, Lossow and Seißer into a side room. Threatening them, he promised that they would either aid in the rebirth of Germany or ensure their own deaths. Soon after, he led the three men back into the hall, where they declared that they had joined forces. This news was greeted with wild joy by the largely pro-nationalist, anti-republican crowd, many of whom believed they were witnessing the rebirth of the nation after five years of suffering.
But then Hitler miscalculated. Leaving Kahr, Lossow and Seißer in the hands of Erich Ludendorff, the former wartime general who had joined the coup plotters, the Nazi leader marched his men into central Munich, where he intended to seize control of the levers of power . This was the turning point: while Hitler's men tried, but failed, to capture the center of Munich, Ludendorff agreed to let the trio go. Freed from captivity, they switched sides again.
By the early hours of November 9, it was known that all forces associated with the Bavarian state were to resist the coup plotters. Contrary to Hitler's wishes, the Bavarian soldiers did not switch sides and the coup plotters soon realized that they had lost momentum. To regain it, they decided to pass through the center of Munich, in the hope that a critical mass of people would join their ranks.
They met their first test of strength at the Ludwig Bridge, where a Bavarian Army patrol had rushed to set up a checkpoint during the night. Its commander probably had enough firepower to defeat the coup plotters militarily. But he was upset and his men were overwhelmed. Witnesses on a nearby tram later described how the first coup plotters – members of Hitler's “Surge Troops”, a precursor to the SS – overpowered the soldiers and took their weapons.
The next challenge was not so easily overcome. In the Odeonsplatz (a large public square), Hitler and his supporters exchanged fire with the police and the army. Although no one has ever been certain which side fired first, there has never been any doubt about the outcome. After just two minutes, four policemen and 14 coup plotters lay dead (another two coup plotters were shot dead soon after in a nearby barracks).
One of the dead was Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who was at the front of the march, his arm linked to Hitler's. When the first shots rang out, the two men fell to the ground together. If the bullet that killed Scheubner-Richter was just a few inches to the right, historian Ian Kershaw pointed out , Hitler's name today would be unknown. But the future Führer survived.
Unholy ground
Ten years later, Hitler returned to the same spot as Chancellor of Germany. Surrounded by adoring crowds, there was complete silence as he bowed his head in a moment of remembrance. It was the first time the Third Reich commemorated the coup, an event the Nazis later celebrated as the first "blood sacrifice" of their movement. The ceremony became an annual event. In 1935, the Nazi authorities in Munich even exhumed the bodies of the dead coup plotters to be reburied in a purpose-built church in Munich's Königsplatz, following a spectacular all-night ceremony. The temple was blown up by the Americans in 1947.
In late 1923, few liberal supporters of German democracy could foresee Hitler's return. Marking the new year, the liberal journalist Erich Dombrowski even predicted that "our descendants will shrug and grimace when they think of the nationalism and chauvinism of our time." Others were openly thinking about the future of European integration.
The contrast between their expectations and subsequent history should weigh heavily on understanding the coup's significance a century later. When it did, it lasted only 20 hours and Hitler's forces were easily defeated. But it was an illusory victory for supporters of Weimar democracy. The most destructive political movement in European history was just beginning. If the institutions of liberal democracy are shaken and weakened, even a Savlavic insurgency may not remain unsuccessful for long.
*Cover photo: Keystone/Getty Images
Of Mark Jones
Source: project-syndicate
