One hundred years ago today, on 9th November 1923, militant activists from a small political party put their lives on the line to defend their country’s honour.
About 2,000 patriots led by Adolf Hitler attempted to seize power from treacherous reactionaries. Throughout 1923 Hitler’s National Socialists had been courted by these reactionaries: for a while Hitler set aside personal ambition and was prepared to trust conservative military and political leaders in a broad patriotic front.
To understand what became known as the Munich Beer Hall putsch, and the reasons why sixteen National Socialist martyrs were killed on the orders of reactionary conservatives on this day 100 years ago, it’s necessary to understand the scale of the humiliation that had been forced on Germany since her defeat in 1918.
The French government in particular was determined to extract its full pound of flesh from Germany in a punitive “reparations” treaty, and was unwilling to allow the slightest deviation from its draconian terms.
Hence in January 1923 (more than four years after the end of the First World War) French and Belgian troops marched into the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, to seize coal stocks and make an already impoverished Germany’s humiliation complete.
As the crisis worsened, on 31st March French troops opened fire on German workers at a steel factory in Essen, killing fourteen.
Adolf Hitler and his then small National Socialist Party had begun to attract support from those patriots who were disgusted by the craven and confused state of Weimar “democracy”. One of these new allies, Gen. Erich Ludendorff (who had been one of Germany’s most senior commanders during the First World War) at first persuaded Hitler to support the head of the Army (Gen. Hans von Seeckt) and the Catholic businessman-turned-politician Wilhelm Cuno, who as Reich Chancellor headed a coalition government of conservatives, liberals and technocrats.
For several months during 1923, Hitler believed that “democratic” Germany might get up from its knees – that this previously craven Weimar government was at last prepared to stand up to the French and begin the process of rebuilding the Reich.
In fact he was not alone in thinking that the greed and hubris of Parisian politicians and financiers would be their undoing. As I explained in a recent book review for Heritage and Destiny magazine, British statesmen during the early 1920s were strongly opposed to the French insistence on humiliating Germany. Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon told the British Empire’s leading politicians at the 1921 Imperial Conference that Britain’s policy was “the re-establishment of Germany as a stable State in Europe. She is necessary, with her great population, with her natural resources, with her prodigious strength of character, which we realised, even when we suffered from it during the war; and any idea of obliterating Germany from the comity of nations or treating her as an outcast is not only ridiculous but is insane.”
Curzon added that excessive French power over Germany was also a threat to British interests, since “with Lorraine, the Saar Valley and the Ruhr in [French] occupation, she becomes the mistress of Europe in respect of coal, iron and steel, and with those countries under her military command she would also become the military monarch.”
David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister until October 1922, similarly argued that “France was the danger to the peace of Europe”. When French troops marched into the Ruhr at the start of 1923, the British Ambassador in Berlin, Lord D’Abernon, warned that “nothing could be more foolish than the French move, nor anything more likely to bring disaster to Europe.”
A year later the new British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald advised his French counterpart, the rabidly anti-German Raymond Poincaré, that British people “regard with anxiety what appears to them to be the determination of France to ruin Germany and to dominate the Continent”. MacDonald added the important context that these aggressive French policies were being pursued at a time when UK taxpayers were still paying more than £30 million per year in interest on loans taken out to finance the First World War.
So it was perhaps unsurprising that Adolf Hitler – whose party did not contest its first Reichstag election until May 1924, and whose membership (despite nearly tripling during 1923) was still only 55,000 across the entire Reich on the eve of the putsch – was at first prepared to believe that National Socialists could work alongside conservative leaders to resist the French.
Accordingly, at the start of March 1923 the National Socialist paramilitary wing SA handed over its weapons to the German Army’s commander in Bavaria, Gen. Otto von Lossow. But after a few months of diplomatic stand-off, a new Berlin government in August 1923 capitulated to the French.
Even now, during the autumn of 1923, Hitler and his National Socialists tried to cooperate with reactionary conservatives in the Bavarian regional government, who at first promised to defy their masters in Berlin and perhaps overthrow them in favour of a military dictatorship.
But by 8th November, Hitler’s patience was exhausted. At the head of an alliance of patriots – the newly formed Kampfbund uniting National Socialists with two other militant groups – Hitler took over a meeting at Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller attended by Bavaria’s leading conservatives and confronted the triumvirate of reactionaries who controlled the Munich regional government (state commissioner Gustav Ritter von Kahr, police chief Hans von Seisser, and army commander Otto von Lossow).
Hitler’s one mistake at this point (as can be seen with hindsight, though at the time it was a risk worth taking) was again to trust the reactionaries when they agreed that they would support a coup to remove the enfeebled government in Berlin and serve in a new government alongside Hitler that would replace the failed Weimar Republic.
As soon as they left the Bürgerbräukeller these supposed fellow patriots began plotting to undermine the putsch.
By 9th November it was clear that Hitler’s National Socialists and their allies in the Kampfbund would have to risk everything and seize control of Munich themselves, before the reactionary traitors could be fully mobilised.
They marched towards the Bavarian Defence Ministry, but were ruthlessly cut down outside the Feldherrnhalle in a hail of bullets fired by their compatriots, armed police acting on the orders of the conservative “triumvirate” who only the previous evening had supposedly pledged their allegiance to coalition with Hitler’s forces.
This was to be neither the first nor the last time that the forces of “law and order” have supported a treacherous government against their own people.
Sixteen martyrs died that day marching alongside Adolf Hitler:
- Felix Allfarth, 22, born in Leipzig.
- Andreas Bauriedl, a 44-year-old veteran of the First World War, born in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria.
- Theodor Casella, 23, who had served in the last stages of the First World War, and then joined the anti-communist Freikorps before joining the NSDAP.
- Wilhelm Ehrlich, a 29-year-old bank clerk and First World War veteran, who was another of the six martyrs to have served in the Freikorps, and one of two who also participated in the Kapp Putsch.
- Martin Faust, 22, who like Casella had also been a very young soldier in the last year of the First World War.
- Anton Hechenberger, 21, one of three martyrs from the ranks of the SA.
- Oskar Körner, 48, a First World War veteran, born in Ober-Peilau, Silesia.
- Karl Kuhn, 48, head waiter in a Munich restaurant and a Freikorps member.
- Karl Laforce, 19, the youngest of the martyrs, a member of the SA and of Hitler’s personal bodyguard.
- Kurt Neubauer, 24, First World War veteran and valet to Gen. Ludendorff; born in Hopfengarten, Saxony.
- Klaus von Pape, 19, born in Oschatz, Saxony.
- Theodor von der Pfordten, 50, the oldest of the martyrs; born in Bayreuth, home of Richard Wagner’s Festival Theatre; judge and First World War veteran; member of the conservative DNVP linked to the press baron Alfred Hugenberg.
- Johann Rickmers, 42, a First World War cavalry officer and Freikorps veteran, born in Bremen.
- Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, 39, the most senior Party figure among the martyrs; born in Riga; a political ally of the leading Party intellectual Alfred Rosenberg, and an important builder of political networks between Adolf Hitler and influential business and military circles. Shot dead while marching alongside Hitler.
- Lorenz Ritter von Stransky-Griffenfeld, 34, First World War and Freikorps veteran and SA member.
- Wilhelm Wolf, 25, another First World War and Freikorps veteran.
Adolf Hitler himself was only inches away from being killed by the bullet that struck his comrade Scheubner-Richter, whose falling corpse knocked Hitler to the ground, dislocating his shoulder.
Two days later he was arrested and jailed at Landsberg prison, forty miles from Munich.
Conservatives and their liberal allies – the so-called elite of politics, the military and business – believed that they had ended this fringe extremist threat.
But the spirit of the sixteen martyrs whose blood flowed on the street outside the Feldherrnhalle, the unquenchable fanaticism of National Socialists, and the determination of their leader, brought Adolf Hitler to power less than a decade after the crushing of the putsch.
Adolf Hitler never forgot his comrades’ sacrifice, and the bloodstained banner that had been carried that day – the Blutfahne – took a place of honour representing those martyrs in the iconography of the Third Reich.
For political dissidents a century later the lesson is clear.
We can expect treachery not merely from the obvious forces of subversion, but from the conservative so-called “elite”, and even from those reactionaries who at times pretend to be taking decisive action in support of their nation and its territorial integrity.
Yet we can be assured that with courage and fortitude, with continuing dedication to honour and loyalty, our fanatical faith in our cause will carry us to victory, and will ensure a renaissance of the True Europe.
