{"id":1334,"date":"2023-11-09T01:01:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-09T01:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jailingopinions.com\/realhistory\/?p=1334"},"modified":"2023-11-09T04:38:57","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T04:38:57","slug":"remembering-the-martyrs-of-the-feldherrnhalle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jailingopinions.com\/realhistory\/remembering-the-martyrs-of-the-feldherrnhalle\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the Martyrs of the Feldherrnhalle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand what became known as the Munich Beer Hall putsch<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Adolf Hitler with the Blutfahne, the blood-stained party banner carried when he and his followers braved a hail of bullets on 9th November 1923.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the crisis worsened, on 31st March French troops opened fire on German workers at a steel factory in Essen, killing fourteen.<\/p>\n\n\n

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French soldiers confronting a German civilian after they occupied the Ruhr in January 1923<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For several months during 1923, Hitler believed that “democratic” Germany might get up from its knees \u2013 that this previously craven Weimar government was at last prepared to stand up to the French and begin the process of rebuilding the Reich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> magazine<\/a>, 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.”<\/p>\n\n\n

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British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon (above left) at his daughter Cynthia’s wedding to Oswald Mosley in 1920. Curzon was strongly opposed to French attempts to extract humiliating and unaffordable reparations from Germany.<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A year later the new British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald advised his French counterpart, the rabidly anti-German Raymond Poincar\u00e9, 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 \u00a330 million per year in interest on loans taken out to finance the First World War.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Former Prime Minister Lloyd George meeting the F\u00fchrer in 1936. Fourteen years earlier (at a time when he would scarcely have heard of Hitler) Lloyd George strongly opposed the rabidly anti-German policy of his French counterpart Poincar\u00e9.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

So it was perhaps unsurprising that Adolf Hitler \u2013 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<\/em> \u2013 was at first prepared to believe that National Socialists could work alongside conservative leaders to resist the French.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But by 8th November, Hitler’s patience was exhausted. At the head of an alliance of patriots \u2013 the newly formed Kampfbund<\/em> uniting National Socialists with two other militant groups \u2013 Hitler took over a meeting at Munich’s B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4ukeller<\/em> 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).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Gustav Ritter von Kahr, effectively the dictator of Bavaria at the head of a conservative triumvirate in 1923, reneged on a pact with Adolf Hitler and ordered the suppression of the Munich putsch<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As soon as they left the B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4ukeller<\/em> these supposed fellow patriots began plotting to undermine the putsch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 9th November it was clear that Hitler’s National Socialists and their allies in the Kampfbund<\/em> would have to risk everything and seize control of Munich themselves, before the reactionary traitors could be fully mobilised. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They marched towards the Bavarian Defence Ministry, but were ruthlessly cut down outside the Feldherrnhalle<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sixteen martyrs died that day marching alongside Adolf Hitler:<\/p>\n\n\n\n