Hitler's beer hall putsch
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Adolf Hitler made his first attempt to overthrow democracy in Germany in Munich in 1923. It started at a beer hall called the Bürgerbräu in Munich, so it has become known as the "beer hall putsch" or the "Munich putsch". It ended with 16 Nazis and four policemen dead. Although the coup failed, Hitler's trial allowed him to raise his profile on the national stage, and within ten years he became chancellor of Germany.
PHOTO: Nazi members during the Beer Hall Putsch, Munich, Germany 1923 (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. Hi and thanks for downloading witness history from the BBC World Service with me Lucy Burns. |
| 0:46.0 | Today we're going back to 1923 and a failed attempt at overturning democracy in Germany |
| 0:52.0 | which paved the way for Adolf Hitler's rise to power. |
| 0:59.4 | It would become known as the Beer Hall Putch or the Munich Putch because it all started in a |
| 1:04.9 | beer hall in Munich in southern Germany. Egon Larson was a journalist in the |
| 1:09.6 | city at the time. He spoke to the BBC years later. |
| 1:13.0 | We had been used to all kinds of surprises in Munich in those post-war years. |
| 1:19.0 | We had had putches. We had had rebellions, revolutions, we had shootings, but I think November 9th, |
| 1:28.7 | 1923, probably brought the greatest surprise of them all. |
| 1:33.0 | Germany was still reeling from losing the First World War five years earlier. |
| 1:37.0 | The German currency had collapsed after the country had failed to make a reparations payment to France, |
| 1:42.0 | and hyper-inflation meant people were paying |
| 1:45.0 | for goods with huge stacks of trillion marked banknotes. |
| 1:50.5 | And the political situation was extremely unstable, with the federal government in Berlin under attack from all sides. In Munich, a young Austrian war veteran called Adolf Hitler had recently become the leader of an extreme nationalist political party |
| 2:05.6 | called the National Socialist German Workers Party. |
| 2:08.7 | By 1923 the party had 20,000 members, including German-American businessman Ernst Hanssteinle, who spoke |
| 2:16.8 | to the BBC in the 1960s, and remembered when Hitler arrived suddenly on the 8th of November. |
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