The beer hall putsch

Following World War One, Germany was a proving ground for just about any political party or theory one might want to espouse. By early 1921, Hitler was becoming an amazingly effective speaker, and he mostly went around attacking all these dopey parties, especially the Socialists. He was very dramatic, his followers showing up in uniforms and swastikas and passing out propaganda to the disgruntled crowds. Soon his party was a force to be reckoned with.

Munich, Hitler's stomping grounds, became a hotbed of fervent German nationalism. Munich calls to mind beer and Octoberfest, and much of Hitler's speaking and rabble rousing took place in beer halls. Munich beer halls of the time held hundreds, sometimes thousands of people. Basically, the idea is to get people, who are downtrodden and dissatisfied with the government, drunk and rowdy and then scream at them over and over and over about how change was needed, change they could believe in. Then one would begin ranting at the scapegoats: socialists, traitors, inefective government, Treaty of Versailles, and, of course, Jews.

Hitler's Nazi party grew and grew. There was no end of destitute Germans looking for a messiah. Ummm... make that savior. The disgruntled teabaggers grew until they were a force to be reckoned with. Early followers included Rudolf Hess; former air force pilot Hermann Goering; future leader of the party's paramilitary "protection" organization (the SS Storm Divison) army captain Ernst Rohm. And, very importantly, former general of the German Army Erich Ludendorff. Ludendorff's presence gave Hitler the appearance of legitimacy. The crowds grew. The rhetoric escalated. The party grew larger.

By 1923, Hitler and the party leadership had determined to form their own government. With the tacit support of Bavaria's ruler, Gustav von Kahr, Hitler and his boys, and Ludendorff, along with the Bavarian police and army, waited for the right time.

On 8 November, 1923, Kahr was holding a meeting at a large Munich beer hall. Hitler and the SA stormed the meeting and demanded, at gunpoint, that Kahr and the local military establishment support a march on Berlin, for the destruction of the Berlin government. Kahr got cold feet and refused. The police and military wouldn't go against him. When Hitler and his followers marched on the Bavarian ministry the next day to take over, they were repulsed. 16 of Hitler's followers were killed. Hitler was arrested and put on trial for treason.

Unfortunately, during Hitler's trial, he was given almost limitless time to speak. His popularity soared as he reiterated his nationalist sentiments in his famous defense speech. What had been merely a thorn in the side of a local government suddenly became a national figure. Nonetheless, Hitler was convicted and sentenced to 5 years at Landsberg Prison.

While imprisoned, Hitler wrote most of volume one of Mein Kampf. He received favored treatment from the prison guards. He was a hero. He received much fan mail. In the end, he was pardoned due to public pressure and served little more than a year of his sentence. From that point forward, Hitler did everything by the book. Legal Hitler.

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The beer hall putsch.

A putsch is simply German for a coup, or governmental takeover attempt.

Beer halls in Germany were (and the tradition continues) places where political and social debates were held - even political rallies. One of the largest beer halls in Munich was the Burgerbraukeller. That is where Hitler tried his putsch.

Von Kahr, the Bavarian commissioner, was making a speech in front of 3000 people when Hitler and his brownshirts marched into the beer hall. No one was allowed to leave (a machine gun was set up pointing at the auditorium doors.)

The three Bavarian leaders, commissioner von Kahr, Bavarian state police head, colonel von Sessier, and general Otto von Lossow, were taken into a side room by Hitler and his party leaders (including Rudolf Hess) and given a chance to come out openly to their side. During this time, speeches were held in the adjoining hall, by Goering and others. No one was allowed to leave, not even to go to the bathroom. Hitler was irritated when von Kahr refused, but left the room to speak to the crowd, as he had promised them 15 minutes earlier.

Within seconds, the mood of the crowd changed over to Hitler. Dr. Karl Alexander von Mueller, professor of modern history and political science at the University of Munich, a supporter of von Kahr, was an eyewitness:

"I cannot remember in my entire life such a change in the attitude of a crowd in a few minutes, almost a few seconds. Hitler turned them inside out, as one turns a glove inside out, with a few sentences. It had almost something of hocus-pocus, or magic about it."

Hitler knew the exact buttons that needed to be pressed. He pressed them.

Adolf Hitler: Patriot? German Teabagger? Or simply your average monster?

If this gets too long, I will stop and do another post later.

I had intended to do a "time line" post on the space shuttle Columbia in this space, but that can wait until I get riled up again about it.

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There is a debate of sorts going on about Adolf Hitler, between a reader of this blog and myself, but I sincerely hope the debate is joined by other readers with an interest in history after this post; I need some fresh input.

The debate stems from two different interests. My own is mostly my deep interest in history, and her interest MAY stem from an interest in the character development of fictional villains. She can speak for herself. Either way, there is a debate regarding the motivations and circumstances of Adolf Hitler; we speculate on why he turned out like he did. If any of you would like to add to the debate, or mention things I have left out, I hope you will.

For my part, I am trying to put forward and support a theory that Adolf Hitler's rise to power, or his DESIRE to rise to power in Germany, was, originally, at least, more to restore or rescue Germany from its national humiliation from its defeat in World War One, than it was some sort of deranged megalomania or superman complex.

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This is one of those subjects that, when you try to find the root causes of this or that part of his personality, you find yourself having to go further and further back in his history. I wanted to find a starting point later than simply his birth. I would have liked to start at the beginning of WWII and simply say Hitler was a German nationalist who hated Jews, but how can you make statements like that without offering some background? After all, it was trying to come up with the backgrounds that makes a "villain" either merely a bad person or a truly evil person that started this debate in the first place.

I think there are 4 points that need to be considered if we are to understand what underlying forces and beliefs drove Hitler, and I don't think being a big man in the eyes of others had much to do with it. I don't think one can kill 6 million people - and many millions more when you count the people killed in the actual fighting - simply because one is on a power trip, or because he was beaten by his father as a child.

1. German nationalism.

2. Hatred of Jews.

3. His interest in war and things military.

4. How - no matter what his beliefs - could such an insignificant person rise to national power.

A few of the things I am going to assert in my assessment of his beliefs, motivations, and his rise to power come simply from Wikipedia articles, but mostly I relied on biographies and "expert" analyses of historians (there are dozens), both online and in my personal library. My historical facts regarding the earlier events leading up to WWI come from C. L. Sulzberger's magnificent account detailing the end of the imperial era, "The Fall of Eagles."

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I'm going to stop here at the end of my introduction.