Munich Putsch and Nazis in the Wilderness

• November 1923 - Beerhall Putsch aka Munich Putsch

  • Hitler tried to take advantage of the hyperinflation crisis to launch his revolution in Munich
  • perfect opportunity to take power - poor planning and misjudgement resulted in failure and imprisonment
• Causes to the Munich Putsch

  • 1923 - Nazi Party had 55,000 members and was stronger than ever
  • Weimar Republic in crisis bcs of hyperinflation
  • September 1923 - Weimar govt called off strike & nationalists were furious with the govt
  • Hitler though he would be helped by important nationalist politicians in Bavaria bcs of their opinions on the stop of the strike
  • Hitler had a huge army of SA (storm troopers, brown shits) members so he knew he would lose control of them if he didn’t give them something to do
  • Hitler wanted to copy Mussolini who gained his power by marching on Rome in 1922
• Collapse of economy in 1923 helped create extremist parties

  • Hitler saw an opportunity
• Believed it was time for a revolution - govt was busy solving economic crisis
• Hitler planned to coerce several of Bavaria's leading politicians to join with him and then march on Berlin

  • individual states had different identities that affected how politics was run in that area
  • In Bavaria, the majority of the population were Catholic and things were quite traditional - intensely disliked the new Weimar government and saw them as weak
• Planned to coerce the Bavarian triumvirate as they all had nationalist sympathies and weren’t afriad to ignore commands from the central govt - Gustav von Kahr, Otto Von Musel, and Colonel Hans Ritter Von Sisa
• November 8th - Hitler and his supporters stormed a beer hall in Munich, where a meeting of Bavarian officials was taking place

  • Collected the SA and told them to be ready to rebel
  • Hitler managed to rally support from the crowd, appealing to their sense of nationalism and revolutionary spirit
  • Hitler forced the leaders to agree to rebel - and then let them go home
  • 9 November 1923 - Hitler and the SA went into Munich but Kahr had called in police and army reinforcements
  • His attempt to coerce the Bavarian leaders into joining his cause ultimately failed
• Hitler was arrested and tried for treason - provided him with a platform through newspapers to promote his agenda and become a national celebrity

  • The leniency of his sentence showed he had sympathy and support from important figures in the legal system
  • Pivotal moment in Hitler's rise to power - taught him the importance of using legal means to achieve his goals and served as effective propaganda for the Nazi Party's agenda
• Failure in the short term:

  • nazi party was banned
  • Hitler was prevented from speaking in public until 1927
  • tried for high treason (betraying his country) and sentenced to five years in prison
• Success in the long term:

  • stayed in prison for 9 months
  • his time in prison was comfortable
  • he wrote his propaganda book the 'Mein Kampf' which millions of Germans read and made his ideas become very well-known
  • the judge had been so lenient with the sentence suggesting that some people in authority had sympathy with Hitler and what he had tried to do
• Used prison sentence to write the Mein Kampf (My Struggle)

  • presented his ideas about Germany’s future
  • dictated to secretary
  • helped him realised he had to use the democratic system to help him seize power and then destroy that system
• Mein Kampf laid out the main Nazi beliefs

  • National Socialism - loyalty to Germany, racial purity, equality, state control of economy
  • Race - Aryans (white Europeans) were the master race and all other races, especially Jews, were inferior
  • Armed forces - war and struggle should be an essential part of developing a healthy Aryan race
  • Living space (Lebensraum) - Germany needed to expand its territory to accommodate its population, mainly at the expense of Poland and nearby countries
  • Führer - democracy was considered weak and in total loyalty to the leader (Führer) was strength
• 20th December 1924 - when released, he started rebuilding the Nazi party again to take power democratically

  • spent 9 months in prison
  • campaigned for elections
  • copied the communists in building up their strength through youth organisations and recruiment drives
  • May 1924 - won 32 seats and 1.9 million votes during the Reichstag elections
  • Set up the Hitler Youth, Nazi Students’ league and similar organisations
• December 1924 - 0.9 million votes
• 1927 - Nazis attempted to appeal to workers as they had tried when the party was first founded

  • 1928 election results showed they had to look for support from other people
• 1928 election results - Nazis gained only 12 Reichstag seats, 0.8 million votes and 1/4 of the communist vote

  • anti-semitic policies gained them some support
  • needed to appeal to a larger group
  • most workers had voted for Communist Party, or Social Democratic Party (SDP), not NSDAP
  • a great majority supported the socialist Social Democratic Party (SPD) as they had done in every election since 1919
  • workers w/ radical political views were more likely to support the communists
  • failed to win over the workers
• Nazis argued the workers were exploited but many urban industrial workers thought they were doing well in Weimar Germany in the years up to 1929

  • Other groups in society were doing less well - these groups thought they weren’t sharing in Weimar Germany’s economic prosperity
• Nazis found they gained more support from groups such as peasant farmers from North Germany, middle-class shopkeepers, and small business people in country towns (1)

  • Germany still had a large rural population who lived and worked on land - 35% of the entire population
  • Nazis highlighted the importance of peasants in their plans for germany, promising to help w/ agriculture if they came into power - promoted agricultural policies if they got power
  • Praised peasants as racially pure Germans
• Nazis found they gained more support from groups such as peasant farmers from North Germany, middle-class shopkeepers, and small business people in country towns (2)

  • nazi propaganda contrasted the clean and simple life of the peasants w/ the allegedly corrupt, immoral and crime-ridden cities - they blamed the Jews
  • Nazis despised Weimar culture which gained them support among conservative people in tows who saw the Weimar’s flourishing art, literature and film as immoral
• 1925 - Hitler enalarged the SA

  • 55% of the SA came from the ranks of the unemployed
  • many were ex-servicemen from the war
• 1925 - Hitler set up a new group called the SS

  • Schutzstaffel (protection squad)
  • SS was similar to the SA but were a lot more loyal to Hitler personally
  • Membership rose to over 100,000 by 1928
• Hitler appointed Joseph Goebbels to take charge of Nazi propaganda

  • efficient at spreading the Nazi message
  • him and Hitler believed the best way to reach the masses was by appealing to their feelings rather than by argument
  • produced posters, leaflets, films and radio broadcasts
  • organised rallies and set up ‘photo opportunities’
  • local Nazi parties set up (branches) - Hitler Youth, Nazi Students’ League etc.
• Although they were having shifting policies and priorities, there was no electoral breakthrough for the Nazis

  • 1928 - still a fringe minority party who had the support of less than 3% of the population
  • smallest party w/ fewer seats than the communists
  • prosperity of the Stresemann years made germans uninterested in extreme politics
• As German prosperity goes up, support for NSDAP goes down and as conditions in Germany get worse, support for NSDAP gets better
• Who was the chief of the SS?

  Himmler
• What time did the Munich putsch take place?

  November, 1923
• Nazi Party got stronger through the violence

  of the Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment), known as the SA.
• When did the Munich Putsch happened and what happened?

  On the 8th November 1923, Hitler and 600 SA troops entered a meeting of the Bavarian government in Munich.
• Between 1930 and 1934, how much did the SA grow?

  from 400,000 to 3 million.