Say what you will about Adolf Hitler, but he knew how to make an entrance. Exactly 100 years ago, flanked by machine gun-carrying goons, the wild-eyed 34-year-old climbed on to a chair in a packed Munich beer hall and fired a shot into the ceiling. Once he had the shocked drinkers’ full attention, he put away his Browning pistol and announced a national revolution.
It was a brazen act of wishful thinking – his poorly-planned coup d’etat soon failed – but it was amazing PR. A decade later the Nazi fascist state was reality, the 1923 Munich putsch its founding myth.
Its beer hall backdrop is long gone – the Bürgerbräu was bulldozed in 1979 for a concert hall – but the legacy of Munich 1923 is not forgotten. Even the unfolding disaster in the Middle East has added a further layer of meaning to its century-old ghosts.
Hitler’s nascent Nazi movement was founded in Munich just two years after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, on another November 9th, in 1918. Like few others, the fascist Nazi movement exploited public anger over postwar reparations payments and their contribution to humiliating starvation in the wider population.
Hitler’s infamous beer hall putsch was actually a hijack: he crashed a gathering of other Munich political extremists and demanded – at gunpoint – their support for his uprising against “the Berlin Jew government and the November criminals of 1918″, a swipe at the capitulation that ended the first World War.
His white-faced rivals agreed to back him, then backed out of the deal as running street battles continued through the night between Nazi supporters and German armed forces. By midmorning on November 9th, just as Hitler realised the putsch was collapsing into chaos, his key military ally Erich Ludendorff announced a march of 2,000 putschists on Munich’s Feldherrnhalle.
This striking military monument, flanked with two lions, still stands on the city’s Odeonsplatz. A century ago police, expecting trouble, cordoned off the monument.
In the scuffles and two-minute shoot-out that followed, at least 12 putschists died, along with four policemen and a waiter who stepped out to see what was going on.
In 1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup, his gripping account of a dramatic year in Germany, UCD historian Mark Jones relates how Hitler almost didn’t survive his own putsch. During the Odeonsplatz shootout he dived for cover alongside a former diplomat, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. The future dictator dislocated his shoulder. Scheubner-Richter was shot dead.
“Had the bullet that killed him veered just inches to the right,” writes Jones, “Hitler’s name would today be as little known as Scheubner-Richter’s.”
A century on, he and other historians are unsettled that today’s focus on Hitler distracts from the wider picture: he was just one of post-imperial Germany’s many anti-democratic, anti-Semitic politicians.
Similarly, few in Germany today like to recall how strong support remained for Hitler during and after his trial. Though he faced charges of treason, he was not deported to his native Austria. Instead he was put before a sympathetic far-right judge who handed down the minimum five-year sentence, of which he served just 264 days.
The well-wishers were out in force in the 1924 election: though the Hitler party was banned, a Nazi-allied political bloc attracted 30 per cent of the vote in Munich – and 17 per cent across the state. Such tangible public support is uncomfortable for many Germans who still refer to Hitler’s democratic rise to power as a “Machtergreifung” – or power grab. Equally uncomfortable, how close those century-old results mirror poll numbers now enjoyed by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in some eastern states and at national level.
Just 15 years after the failed Hitler putsch, the now-ruling Nazis unleashed an unprecedented pogrom across the country. On Germany’s third fateful November 9th night, synagogues, Jewish stores and other businesses were smashed and burned. Some 91 Jewish people were murdered and about 30,000 interned. The Nazis made sure to bill shocked Jewish communities for the clean-up.
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This Thursday evening, ceremonies marking the 85th anniversary of that shameful evening have a new layer of shame: a surge in anti-Semitic attacks on German Jews, their homes and institutions since the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel.
A poll this week showed that while 62 per cent of Germans understand Israel’s Gaza retaliation, 31 per cent do not - rising to 42 per cent in eastern regions.
Adopting an us-and-them narrative on the Hitler past, historians suggest, has allowed many ordinary Germans insist their relatives were neither bystanders nor perpetrators - and the real Nazis always lived next door.
For Wolfgang Niess, a historian and author of a book on the 1923 putsch, such exculpatory narratives cloud a key fact: those behind the cheering, smashing and beating 85 years ago were not just Nazi thugs.
“Participating ... in one way or another, were around 10 per cent of Germans,” he said. “Anti-Semitism ... existed here before Hitler and after him. And once more it is now showing itself very clearly.”
