The Beer Hall Putsch: Hitler's First Attempt to Seize Power

The Weimar Republic was a stunningly complex time in German history, one in which a wide array of politicians, thinkers, writers, and ideologues waged a battle for Germany’s soul. The Republic’s leaders struggled to keep the state afloat, crippled by several years of total war and a set of blistering economic sanctions from the victorious Allied Powers. It was a time of profound social reckoning for Germany, one that saw reform and progressivism coexist with economic hardship and rising extremism. It was a system built for an inevitable collapse—and fertile ground for one Adolf Hitler, recently returned from the front lines of the Great War, who had despaired at the news of German surrender in 1918.

Hitler’s Rise Within the Weimar Republic’s Chaos

Hitler was possessed of a deep and unshakeable frustration, a resentment, a deep and malevolent animus toward a broader world order which, he believed, was intent on keeping Germany shackled. Many in the Weimar years thought similarly, and Hitler took advantage, finding not just the words to express their hatred, but a target to take it out upon. Riding a wave of virulent anti-Semitism and popular discontent, Hitler swelled the nascent Nazi Party into a growing social movement, one with its long-term goals fixed on the levers of power within Weimar society.

But this younger iteration of Adolf Hitler was a far cry from the shrewd, conniving man who would later work his way into Germany’s chancellorship, and then use his position to take total control of the German state. In the early days of the Weimar Republic, Hitler hadn’t yet realized that he could take power through strictly legal means. He had a small army of young, angry, fighting German men behind him, and with it, Hitler would attempt to take the Bavarian city of Munich by force.

If he could do this, he hoped to set off a larger revolution across Germany, one that would see his Nazi Party emerge victorious from the chaos. This attack on Munich was the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s first attempt to seize Germany for himself. World War I had absolutely wrecked Germany by the time Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated his throne, on the ninth of November, 1918.

By this time, two million German men and boys had been killed, and double that number had been wounded. On the home front, Germans were starving, blockaded and cut off from desperately needed supplies by the Allied powers.

The Treaty of Versailles and a Splintered German Nation

As the front lines collapsed and Germany’s cities, towns, and villages descended into chaos, the ruling military dictatorship passed this crisis to their successor. That successor was Chancellor Max von Baden, whose administration was responsible for both the negotiation of peace with the Allies, and for the German monarchy’s dissolution and transition to parliamentary rule. Von Baden passed his chancellery along to Friedrich Ebert, amidst a much larger German revolution that saw thousands of right-wing paramilitary groups and left-wing agitators killed on the streets.

It was Ebert who oversaw the drafting of the Weimar Constitution, as well as the new government’s first elections. But as Germany’s new government was taking shape, so was the Treaty of Versailles, signed in the summer of 1919 and enacted in 1920. This document had been presented to Germany by the heads of state of the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and Italy.

Its purpose was not reconciliation, but to gain a long list of demands designed both to deprive Germany of its ability to ever wage war against Europe again, and to humiliate the German state and its supporters. The terms of the treaty were shocking in their severity: Germany would disarm and demilitarize, it would relinquish many of its prized territorial holdings around the world, and it would accept full responsibility and guilt for the damages caused in its battles with the Allied Powers. That responsibility wasn’t just moral, it was financial, to the tune of 33 billion dollars in 1921’s money—about half a trillion dollars today—and the Allies insisted that Germany was going to pay it, one way or the other.

Germany’s payment plan involved massive, regular payments with no end date, and the Allies made it clear that if the payments fell behind, they would come take their reparations by force. If there was one commonality in how the German people responded to the Treaty of Versailles, it was in a predictably massive loss of national pride. But German national identity during this time didn’t morph into something new to match its new Republic.

Instead, it splintered into a wide range of political factions, from Communists to Social Democrats to Nationalists to Centrists and everything in between. The Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, was a proportionally representative body, and with 459 seats available, any political party that could gain at least one seat would thus have a role in parliament. This also made it exceedingly difficult to gain a majority, and in the 1920 elections, the largest party, the Social Democrats, won just under 22% of the chamber.

Forming a coalition government was extremely difficult, but gaining at least some small voice in parliament was relatively easy. This led to a wide range of fringe and extremist political parties vying for control within individual districts that might give them a small foothold in the Reichstag.

The Nazi Party’s Origins and Growth in Bavaria

One of those fringe parties was the German Workers’ Party, which would eventually evolve into the Nazi Party. Founded in 1919 by Anton Drexler of Munich, the German Workers’ Party attracted Adolf Hitler’s attention in the post-war years. Hitler had initially been sent as a military spy to infiltrate the small party, as was commonplace during these years in the army’s attempts to preserve German nationalism and root out communists.

The Party truly was small—in fact, it was tiny, with Hitler becoming only its seventh active member when he joined up. But the rhetoric of the German Workers’ Party resonated with Hitler. Before long, he was taking an active role in the party, and he found himself at the top very quickly.

In 1920, the party rebranded to the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, in a ploy to appeal to the working class and gain their interest. Around this time, Hitler wrote out the 25 major goals of the party as he saw them, including abandoning the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles and expanding Germany outward. This platform existed alongside the fervent, and often violent anti-Semitic rhetoric Hitler was known for, and when a new potential follower came to receive one part of Hitler’s message, they’d often find themselves listening closely to the other.

By 1921, Hitler had assumed full control of the Nazi Party and purged its leadership in order to concentrate his loyalists at the top. The Party was mostly constrained to Germany’s largest state, Bavaria, but within Bavaria itself, their influence grew quickly. The Party held large meetings in local beer halls, where Hitler railed against the Weimar Government’s capitulation to the Treaty of Versailles, and stoked rage on topics like Germany’s out-of-control inflation and France and Belgium’s occupation of Germany’s industrial center, the Ruhr, as a penalty for missed payments.

At the center of it all, according to Hitler, were the Jews. The Nazis were far from the only discontented group during this time; in 1920, the Communists had rebelled and fought fiercely against the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps, as well as the German army, and in that same year, military hardliners led by Wolfgang Kapp attempted an unsuccessful military coup. One member of this coup was Erich Ludendorff, a World War I general who had become well-established in Bavaria and who had made his post-war name off his efforts to spread the view that Germany should have won the war but was stabbed in the back by conniving politicians.

Although Ludendorff and Kapp’s coup would fail, the general would be critically important later. In its failure, Kapp’s coup had nonetheless caused Bavaria’s state government to collapse, and high-profile assassinations of German leaders were common not just in Bavaria, but across the nation.

Bavaria on the Brink and Hitler’s Plan for Revolution

Germany was devolving fast, and as Hitler and his lieutenants felt their own power continue to rise within Bavaria, they began to believe that now was the time to strike. By October 1923, the Communists were leading uprisings in Hamburg and collaborating with the Social Democrats to take power. The Weimar government had just called off a general strike in the occupied Ruhr region, further raising the blood pressure of German nationalists.

The Bavarian government was aware just how close their state was to going nuclear, and in order to prevent a coup, they began to operate directly in opposition to the orders coming from Berlin. The Bavarian Prime Minister, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, assumed dictatorial powers within the region, and began to rely more and more on Bavaria’s extreme-right-wing parties to bolster his authority. By now, Adolf Hitler and his beer hall rallies had earned Berlin’s ire, but when a directive came down to Bavaria to try and place restrictions on the group, Kahr was able to convince the local army commander not to act on it.

But in this complex knot of intersecting alliances, it is crucial to note one key fact: Hitler and his Nazis were not supporters of the Bavarian authorities, and certainly not to the degree that the Bavarian authorities seemed to support him. Instead, Hitler held only contempt for what he saw as a weak, ineffectual leadership, and it was from this contempt that Hitler and his top lieutenants hatched their own plan to take advantage of Germany’s chaotic state. That plan went as follows.

Since Germany as a whole was in disarray, a populist coup by forces with even the relatively low number of fifty thousand registered Nazis stood a chance at success. But Hitler and his forces wouldn’t march on Berlin directly, like Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome; instead, they would target the feckless Bavarian leadership and assume control of the region. From there, Hitler hoped to inspire a revolt across Germany, with civilians moving to control their respective population centers.

Finally, Hitler would advance on Berlin with the full backing and resources of Bavaria behind him, amidst overwhelming support from the German countryside. He would overthrow the government, create a new and race-based structure of citizenship and governance, and begin to move Germany toward what Hitler believed was its greater mission of expansion and territorial domination.

The Night of November 8: Storming the Burgerbraukeller

On November 8, 1923, Kahr, the Bavarian Prime Minister, was to meet with local General Otto von Lossow and the Bavarian state police chief, Hans Ritter von Seisser, at a beer hall in Munich. They, too, were intending to form a plan of direct action toward Berlin, a potential coup attempt that would see their own triumvirate assume power. But Hitler had identified Kahr not just as the presently ineffectual leader of Bavaria, but a potentially major rival later on.

By crashing Kahr’s meeting on the 8th, Hitler could essentially decapitate Bavarian leadership in one fell swoop, and force von Lossow and von Seisser to issue Hitler’s commands to the military and the police. At roughly 8:30 PM on November 8, Hitler’s personal bodyguard joined Nazi Stormtroopers as they lay in wait around their target. Kahr and his associates were at the Burgerbraukeller, a large beer hall in Munich, and were in the process of making a speech to a crowd of about three thousand people.

During the speech, Hitler himself slipped into the beer hall with a handful of lieutenants and bodyguards. That group included Erich Ludendorff, who Hitler had hoped to use in order to provide his coup with greater legitimacy as it progressed. Once inside, the group infiltrated the larger crowd of spectators, moving their way toward the front.

Hitler fired his pistol into the ceiling, the crowd panicked, and as Kahr’s speech ground to a halt, Hitler declared that his national revolution had begun. Hitler pushed his way to the front of the room, and made a brief statement to the crowd before ushering Kahr, von Lossow, and von Seisser into a smaller room. Hitler had promised von Lossow, just days prior, that he would not attempt a coup in Bavaria, but he now explained that his calculus had changed.

Held at gunpoint, Bavaria’s leading triumvirate had no choice but to express verbal support for Hitler’s putsch. Hitler and the triumvirate moved back to the beer hall’s main chamber, and this time, they addressed the crowd together. The triumvirate voiced support for Hitler’s movement, and Hitler explained the government roles that each member of the triumvirate was expected to fill in the new regime.

Their reception by the audience was tepid at first, but as Hitler explained his support of order in Bavaria and implicated Jews and the Weimar government as his true adversaries, the crowd began to fully support the Putsch.

The Putsch Unravels: Betrayal and the March to the Feldherrnhalle

From here, Hitler left the beer hall for the streets, as Nazi brownshirts took over a handful of municipal offices and the Munich police headquarters. It was as Hitler left that the coup began to fall apart. Kahr, von Seisser, and von Lossow had been left in the care of Erich Ludendorff, who had been supposed to keep them confined and out of Hitler’s way.

But the triumvirate argued that they should be allowed to leave in order to assume their designated roles and support the putsch. Apparently, their points were moving enough that Ludendorff saw fit to release them to the streets of Munich. Of course, as soon as the triumvirate wasn’t being held at gunpoint, they got straight to work denouncing the putsch and taking active measures to stop it.

Von Lossow and von Seisser ordered the military and the police to begin countermeasures, and called up reinforcements from the suburbs to put down the revolt. Hitler’s brownshirts had not been quick enough to secure Munich’s communication infrastructure, and could not coordinate quickly enough to stop the Bavarian forces from taking back large sections of the city. When word reached Hitler of the triumvirate’s betrayal, he was briefly paralyzed in his indecision.

Although most reasonable people would probably have assumed that promises made at gunpoint weren’t the most reliable, this appeared to genuinely surprise Hitler, and it left him out of control and out of position for his march on Berlin. Although he eventually did decide to move forward with the march on the German capitol, he took several hours to make his decision, and the Bavarian forces used this valuable time to lock down much of Munich in response. By the morning of November 9, Hitler and his lieutenants understood that if they lost Munich completely, the putsch could not succeed.

The group was again paralyzed by indecision, but it was Erich Ludendorff who broke their stupor. Ludendorff called for a march through the streets, with the hope of renewing a popular revolt and securing the help of Munich’s citizens in toppling the triumvirate’s leadership. Nearly three thousand Nazis fell into formation, with Hitler at the head of the march.

Their path eventually led them to the Feldherrnhalle, a monument to the Bavarian army. There, they were met by a group of Bavarian state police, who blocked their way. Tensions escalated quickly, and before long, both sides had opened fire.

Four officers of the state police were killed in the carnage, along with sixteen members of the Nazi Party, including Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, an early leader of the movement who had been marching arm-in-arm with Hitler. When Scheubner-Richter fell, he brought Hitler to the ground with him, dislocating Hitler’s shoulder in the process. Hitler crawled to a waiting car, which spirited him away from the violence, while Erich Ludendorff was able to de-escalate the situation somewhat by walking into the police lines of fire, and daring them to shoot such a recognizable war hero as himself.

The immediate carnage ended, and the remaining Nazis scattered into the city.

Trial, Imprisonment, and the Writing of Mein Kampf

Hitler hid out in a friend’s attic for two days before being arrested. Some reports say that Hitler nearly killed himself during this time, but regardless, he was taken into custody on November 11, 1923. This put a final end to the putsch, and the remaining Nazi holdouts quickly surrendered or melted away into the cityscape.

Hitler was held on charges of high treason, along with a handful of elite Nazis who had helped to mastermind the putsch. In March 1924, some five months after the incident, Hitler’s trial began, presided over by a panel of five Bavarian judges. The trial should have been held in Germany’s supreme court, but Bavaria was able to keep the trial under their own jurisdiction through use of emergency powers.

During this time, the German carceral system was broken into three kinds of prison: fortress confinement, common prison, and disciplinary prison. Despite its imposing name, fortress confinement was the least restrictive kind of prison; it was comfortable, allowed plenty of visitors, and did not carry the same stigmas as the other two kinds. Importantly, fortress confinement was also the preferred method of confinement for prisoners who were seen as ideologically misguided, but not necessarily in the wrong.

In Germany at the time, even violent right-wing agitators were largely seen as misguided but honorable zealots, who fought for the right objective—a strong and independent Germany—through the wrong means. This was how Hitler’s five judges appeared to see him as the trial progressed. The trial itself represented a massive stage for Hitler, as a matter of popular interest both in Germany and abroad.

Hitler took full advantage, mounting his defense while wearing his Iron Cross honors, given to him during World War I. He railed against the Weimar government and their capitulation to the Treaty of Versailles, warned of the ongoing communist threat, and hammered home his belief that Germany was being wrongfully held under the yoke of Europe’s major powers. The trial was held across 24 days, during which time Hitler effectively assumed center stage.

The coup itself could not go unpunished, and Hitler was convicted of high treason by his panel of judges. However, he was also given the minimum sentence for the offense, five years’ confinement in a minimum-security fortress prison. The verdict was widely panned in Germany and abroad, but even the most upset among the German and the Bavarian elite held back much of their most pointed criticism, in order to preserve faith in the justice system.

Prison treated Hitler particularly well, for the mere eight months of his sentence that he actually ended up serving before an early release. During this time, Hitler was free to meet with his fellow inmates, including many coup plotters and high-ranking Nazis. With little else to do, Hitler and his personal secretary, Rudolf Hess, dictated the autobiography that would later become known as Mein Kampf.

When he left prison, Mein Kampf left with him, and served as a major driver by which Hitler propagated his ideology. Just past its front cover was its foreword, in which Hitler paid tribute to the sixteen Nazis who died in the Putsch.

Lasting Impact: From Blood Martyrs to Legal Seizure of Power

The Putsch left fallout far beyond just Adolf Hitler himself. The sixteen dead Nazis became the movement’s first blood martyrs, and a bloodstained Nazi flag from the event would eventually take on symbolic significance. For his part, Erich Ludendorff was acquitted of all charges, mostly on account of his status as a popular war hero.

He would never come back around to Hitler’s side, now disdaining him for having fled during the firefight on November 9, but it wouldn’t matter. The event spread Hitler’s name and message far and wide, both within Germany and around the world, in one of the best propaganda tools that Hitler never asked for. The failure of the Putsch led Hitler and the Nazi brass to rethink their approach moving forward.

Although violent revolt had its merits, they agreed, their path to future German domination could not rely on the chaos and impracticality of a coup. Instead, they would rise to power using explicitly legal means from now on: in local municipalities, in the legislature, in the high corners of German commerce, and on the streets, where their brownshirts would assert local dominance rather than lead a national uprising. Bavaria banned the Nazi Party in the wake of the Putsch, but by 1925, the ban was lifted.

The Nazis would restructure in the following years, with Hitler and his most trusted lieutenants now firmly at the top, and with the Nazi Party itself firmly at the top of Germany’s far-right political hierarchy. By 1930, the Nazis would surge into parliamentary power, and Hitler would consolidate his rule soon afterward. For his part, the Bavarian Prime Minister Kahr would be murdered on Hitler’s orders during the Night of the Long Knives over a decade after the Putsch, on June 30, 1934.

Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch was many things: a bungled coup, a failure of understanding of the levers of power within Bavaria, and a gross underestimation of just how much it would take to overthrow the ruling government. But it was also an invaluable testing ground for Nazi leaders and planners, and a powerful means to spread the Party’s ideology throughout not just Germany, but the world. Although the Putsch was ultimately unsuccessful, it germinated seeds of discontent that would continue to grow over the coming decades.

That discontent would see Adolf Hitler eventually take power, see the world brought into a state of total war unseen before and since. That long arc of history took place as it did, directly contingent on what happened during the Beer Hall Putsch. Had the Putsch never happened, we would likely be living in a profoundly different world today.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Beer Hall Putsch and why did Hitler attempt it?

The Beer Hall Putsch was a failed coup d’état on November 8–9, 1923, in which Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party attempted to seize control of Munich and spark a nationwide revolution. Hitler believed Germany’s chaotic political climate—marked by communist uprisings, hyperinflation, and resentment over the Treaty of Versailles—offered an opening to take power by force, using Bavaria as a base before marching on Berlin.

Why did the putsch ultimately fail?

The critical mistake was Erich Ludendorff’s decision to release Bavarian leaders Kahr, von Lossow, and von Seisser after they had pledged support under duress. Once free, the triumvirate immediately issued orders for the military and police to suppress the revolt. By the morning of November 9, Bavarian forces had locked down much of Munich, and a shootout at the Feldherrnhalle ended the march, killing four police officers and sixteen Nazis.

What role did the trial play in Hitler’s subsequent rise?

Hitler’s trial in March 1924 became a massive propaganda platform. He used his 24-day courtroom appearance to rail against the Weimar government, the Treaty of Versailles, and the communist threat, receiving extensive press coverage in Germany and abroad. Despite being convicted of high treason, he was given the minimum five-year sentence and served only eight months in comfortable fortress confinement, where he dictated the ideology-defining text that became Mein Kampf.

How did the putsch change the Nazi Party’s strategy?

The failure led Hitler and the Nazi leadership to abandon direct armed revolt as their path to power. Instead, they committed to gaining control through legal means—winning seats in the Reichstag, building influence in municipalities, cultivating support in German commerce, and using their paramilitary Stormtroopers to assert local dominance rather than launch a national uprising. By 1930, this revised strategy paid off when the Nazis surged to parliamentary prominence.

What lasting symbolic significance did the putsch create for the Nazi movement?

The sixteen Nazis killed in the Feldherrnhalle confrontation became the movement’s first blood martyrs, and a bloodstained Nazi flag from the event was later given ceremonial significance within the party. The event also spread Hitler’s name internationally far beyond what any planned propaganda effort had achieved. Even Kahr, who betrayed the putsch, was eventually murdered on Hitler’s orders during the Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934.

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