The Beer Hall Putsch of 1923

On the evening of 8 November, Adolf Hitler burst into the Bürgerbräukeller brandishing a revolver, and declared the start of the national revolution. This revolution came to a swift end at noon the following day in a hail of bullets at the Feldherrnhalle. The man standing beside Hitler was killed, and Hitler himself fled and was later imprisoned. The putsch had failed. Nazi propaganda claimed that the National Socialist Party had been responsible for the putsch, and portrayed it as the sacrifice that had made the Third Reich possible. But at the time, the goal of the putsch had actually been quite different. Bavaria’s political and military leaders had been planning the fall of the Republic, the ‘march on Berlin’. With the ingenuity of a detective, Wolfgang Niess reveals a network of conspiracists and shows how Hitler actually ruined the whole endeavour. Poorly informed and mindful only of his own advantage, he pressed ahead and thwarted the plans of the Bavarian leaders and their co-conspirators in Berlin. Unintentionally, Hitler had given the democrats the opportunity to save the Weimar Republic when it had already seemed lost.

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*How Bavarian leaders planned the ‘march on Berlin’