The Rest Is History - 296: The Nazis: The Beer Hall Putsch

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

German hyperinflation. The Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler’s trial. Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the Nazis in the early 1920s as the Weimar Republic is in crisis and Hitler tries to grow the party beyond Bavaria. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. The judges of this state may tranquilly condemn us for our conduct at that time, but history, the goddess of a higher truth and a better legal code, will smile as she tears up this verdict and will acquit us all of the crime for which this verdict demands punishment. But history will then also summon before its own tribunal those who, invested with power today, have trampled on law and justice, condemning our people to misery and ruin, and who,

in the hour of their country's misfortune, took more account of their own egos than of the life of the community. That was failed postcard artist, former corporal in the Bavarian army and leader of the Nazi party, Adolf Hitler, defending himself at his trial in the spring of 1924, attempting to overthrow the Weimar Republic. And Dominic, in the first part of our epic sweep through the rise of the Nazis, we looked at the background to the emergence of the Nazi party. And the Beer Hall Putsch is a kind of famous way marker in that story. And we'll come to that. But before we do that, let's look at the background to the Beer Hall Putsch and to Hitler's contempt for the legal and political structure that are

governing Germany at this time. And those structures are kind of basically summed up by that phrase, Weimar Republic. So what is the Weimar Republic? Where's Weimar? What's going on? Okay. Big questions, Tom. So yes. Hello, everybody. We left Hitler last time, didn't we? At the beginning of the 1920s, the head of this very small, frankly, quite cranky political party in Munich, not a major national force by any means. I mean, Hitler, a former nobody who has found his voice. And I suppose, Tom, it would be fair to say that without the weakness of the Weimar Republic, there is no Third Reich, there is no national socialist tyranny,

there's nothing of that kind. And the question that therefore hangs over this episode of the podcast is, is the failure of the Weimar Republic inevitable? Is it doomed from the very beginning? I mean, one issue is that nobody really had sort of set out to create it or wanted to set it up. So last time we talked about the end of the First World War in Germany, how it all happened so suddenly in the early days of November 1918. You know, in a matter of a handful of days, there are mutinies and rebellions and uprisings. The Kaiser disappears off into exile. Their governing structures seem to fall apart.

And amid all this chaos, the man who's really emblematic of the Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, who is the leader of the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, he basically seizes the moment to try and create a new structure. And he does that actually not because he desperately wants to, but because he was a monarchist. He famously said to Prince Max of Baden, he hated the idea of a social and political revolution. He said, I hate it like sin. But also, Dominic, isn't the reason why it's in Weimar, which is the hometown of Go48. So this liberal tradition. Ebert is leader of the Social Democrats,

but he is not a sort of hardcore Marxist or a hardcore revolutionary or anything of the kind. Not in any way a Fuhrer. No, you could almost see him as a kind of German Clement Attlee for our British listeners. So he's very patriotic. He's very sort of pragmatic. He makes an alliance with the Centre Party,

which is the Catholic Party, and with the Liberals in 1918-19, and with the army, and with the army high command. They all agree, listen, the threat of revolution amid the shock of defeat is so great. We have to get this thing together,

stabilize it. So they meet in Weimar, which, as you say, is identified with the greatest German writer, Goethe. And they put together a constitution for this republic. And the constitution, it's against the backdrop of all that fighting and the Spartacist uprising, as you mentioned, Rosa Luxemburg and Marxists being shot out of hand and stuff. So Dominic, Michael Burley, another of the great British

historians of this, he has a brilliant description for the mood in Germany. He describes it as a dreadful mass sentimentality compounded of anger, fear, resentment, and self-pity. And that's a brilliant way of summing up the background against which the founders of the Weimar Republic are working and the kind of headwinds that they're moving into. Yes. And actually, would those headwinds have been different in France or Britain had we lost the First World War? I don't think they would, actually. I think if it had been a similarly shattering experience that we would have had exactly the same blend or at least a similar blend in London or in Paris. So the constitution

they come up with is a little bit like Bismarck's Reich. The army and the president are sort of set slightly apart from democratic politics. The president has this power. He has these emergency powers under what's called Article 48 of the constitution. If necessary, he can rule by decree and use the army to enforce his will. But in normal times, it will be the Reichstag,

the Assembly, the Parliament, who've been the majority in the Reichstag, who basically control the government. Now, even at this point, because it's born in such chaos, Ebert uses this emergency power a lot. He uses it 136 times, in fact, always saying there's so much disorder. I have to use it. I have to step in. I have to use the army, which I think often he does, actually, to be quite frank, because there's so much chaos. The problem, of course, is that that establishes a precedent, which is that basically the Reichstag and the president are set against each other. And if necessary, the president will always intervene against the wishes of democratic politicians.

But again, that's very much an inheritance from before the war. It is indeed. It is indeed. But the difference is that everybody thought that the Wilhelmine state was legitimate. Nobody ever questioned whether the Kaiser's Reich was a legitimate expression of German politics. But the Weimar Republic is absolutely tainted from the very beginning because, of course, it's associated with defeat. It's a product of defeat. So Germany has not just been defeated

in the First World War, it's lost 13% of its national territory. So Alsace-Lorraine, the Saarland becomes sort of French protectorate, the Rhineland is demilitarized. It's lost Western Poland, which is now part of the new Polish Republic. The Germans feel outraged at that. They're outraged because they say the Allies are a load of hypocrites and liars because the Allies go around talking about self-determination, but they won't let the Austrian Germans join with the other Germans in Germany. So everybody, both in Austria and in Germany, is very upset at that.

Because the problem for France and Britain and the Allies generally is that Germany remains potentially the richest and therefore the most militarily significant power in Central Europe. And so to allow a defeated Germany to end up with an even larger population would obviously totally go against, but of course it's hypocrisy. It's pure hypocrisy. Agreed. I mean, that's why Austria exists to this day. Austria wouldn't otherwise exist.

They also, as you said, that terror of German power. So there are strict limits on the German army and navy. They can't have tanks. They can't have artillery. They can only have 100,000 men. The Germans are very offended by this. They think it's sort of unsporting. They're not being allowed to compete, as it were.

And, of course, the Germans have to pay reparations. They have to accept that they were guilty for the First World War, and they have to pay 132 billion gold marks, as well as loads of coal and hand over loads of railway engines and ships. Now, some people listening to this podcast will say, well, the Germans were guilty of the First World War. Not all historians would say that. And you can bet your bottom dollar, very, very few Germans would have said that at the end of the First World War.

And so the only explanation, therefore, for lots of Germans, patriotic Germans, to explain what's happening is that the people who have signed up to this, the Weimar politicians, are traitors, that they are complicit in the stab in the back. Exactly right. Because as we said last time, a lot of Germans just didn't see the defeat coming. They had been told right up to the end that they were winning the war. And they thought when their army had launched that great offensive in 1918, this is going to win us the war. Then when it doesn't work out, they are shocked and surprised, and the only explanation seems to be betrayal.

A key problem in this, by the way, is that the army commanders, particularly General Ludendorff, went around telling everybody that they'd been stabbed in the back, which Ludendorff must have known was a lie, you know, to cover themselves, because they don't want to admit we were just beaten, plain and square. So that's a huge issue for Weimar. In fact, the army generally is never very reliable in supporting us. So the army still keeps its old sort of Kaiser's colors of black, red, and white.

It doesn't have the colors that we associate with Germany today, which are the Weimar colors, which are black, red, and gold. The army is still very monarchist. The army is ignoring the Versailles Treaty. There are a lot of people in the army who basically can't wait to get rid of this new Weimar Republic. They think it's completely illegitimate. And what about the civil service? Same thing. Because of course, a lot of civil servants are former military people. So if you were in the army under the Kaiser, you got preference for state jobs. So even postmen, you know, state-employed, I don't know, janitors or whatever, they're often former military men. So all these people, you know, the people, the bureaucrats who are basically carrying out the Weimar Republic's instructions. A lot of them think this is a load of dodgy lefty traitors who sold us down the river, and the whole thing is illegitimate, and I can't wait for it to go away.

So the Weimar has lots of governments rising and falling because it has endless coalitions. I think it has 20 different cabinets between 1919 and 1933. So there's constant coalition building. But some of the biggest parties in Germany never accept the Weimar Republic. An obvious example is the communists. So the communists in the mid-1920s are getting three to four million votes. They're absolutely explicit about it. They think it's a bourgeois capitalist construct.

Yeah, a racket, exactly. Running dogs of capitalism. Can't wait to sweep it away. But, rackets, exactly. Running dogs of capitalism. Can't wait to sweep it away. But the nationalists, so that's the biggest sort of right-wing group, bigger than any other group except for the Social Democrats,

they, again, are absolutely explicit. They say, bring back the Second Reich, bring back the Kaiser. They wave the old flags. The biggest cheese in nationalist politics, who was a press parent called alfred hugenberg he's drunk very deeply of all this stuff in the 1880s and 1890s pan-germanism

social darwinism nietzsche laban's realm anti-semitism he's very very extreme he's always shouting about judom all of this business so in other words from the start so left and right there are loads of people who want weimar to fail and i think most historians would say even with a fair wind this was a pretty fragile construction with an awful lot of people who ought to have been able to rely on, who regard it as an affront, as tainted, and they want it to fall apart. And of course, as we'll see, it never does get a fair wind. There is actually another element I thought which would interest you, Tom, because you're interested in ideas and ideology, which is the ideas and the sort of ideological and cultural swirl of the 1920s, I think, plays a part in discrediting Weimar.

Because this is an age, I mean, we talk about culture wars. I mean, it seems ludicrous to talk about culture wars in 21st century Britain. When you think about the kind of culture wars in the 20s Germany, everything from expressionist films and nightclubs and jazz. Yeah. So it's cabaret, isn't it? I mean, for English speakers, that's the image of it. Or have you ever seen, there's a TV series called Babylon Berlin? Yeah.

Big fan. I've mentioned this before on the podcast. Absolutely brilliant. So it's all that sort of image that you have of kind of- Decadence. Cross-dressing decadence in Berlin nightclubs, in cellars, people listening to jazz and swing and all getting off with each other and drinking cocktails and talking to Bertolt Brecht.

Although apparently the favourite drink among Weimar politicians, it wasn't cocktails, it was liquid yoghurt. I read it in Michael Burley's's book so it must be i didn't realize he was so strong on yogurt yeah apparently this this was the the taste of feimar but the other the other thing that is happening though is incredible street violence yeah and that presumably is an inheritance from, the kind of the militarized society that Germany was during the First World War, but also this kind of, you know, the way that you have street battles raging in Berlin, in Munich, across most of the German cities. And the way in which it's not just the communists and the far right parties have kind of paramilitary wings. I mean, even the major, you know, the social Democrats do. Yeah, everybody has a paramilitary wing. Absolutely.

So they've all, we talked a tiny bit in the first episode about the army came back, brutalized, I suppose you would say, inured to violence after the trenches. Of course, the war doesn't, the fighting doesn't actually end for all the Germans in November 1918. So there are still German units fighting in the utter chaos of the East, in the Baltic and so on, where everything has completely fallen apart. All borders have been erased and it's sort of everything's up for grabs. So this is the Freikorps, these sort of, they're kind of freebooter units. They're wearing German army uniforms, but they're kind of going off and

doing their own thing. They all come back in the 1920s and there are hundreds of thousands of men who actually enjoyed fighting, who liked the camaraderie, the sense of belonging. Well, that's what the far right is all about, isn't it? It's the idea that men should get out there and fight. And that's what Darwinism tells you. That's what nature is. So I suppose you could you could trace trace it back couldn't you to the sort of social darwinism the emphasis on struggle i think that plays a part obviously the experience of the first world war plays a massive part and and those two things flow together with the experiences of all these young men into this

sort of culture in the 1920s of war there's no other way of putting it. Everybody, lots of people wearing uniforms, constant talk of smashing, crushing, you know, all of that sort of stuff, that rhetoric. But also the fact that on the left as well, you have the prospect of violent revolution is absolutely seen as a good. So on both sides of the extremes of both, there is an appetite for violence, not as something, you know, regrettable necessity, but as something absolutely to be celebrated and stoked.

Yeah, I suppose the paramilitary leagues are the kind of institutionalization of that. And as you said, each party has one. So there's a veterans group called the Steel Helmets. This is massive. I mean, hundreds of thousands of members. They join the Steel Helmets. And the Steel Helmets are the kind of the helmets that the Germans wore in the First World War. Yeah, the First World War. So they're the helmets we associate with World War II, but they are wearing them at the end of the First World War. The steel helmets are, I suppose, vaguely nominally neutral, but they're not. They end up being drawn to the far right. The nationalists have their fighting leagues. The communists have what's called the Red Front Fighting League.

The Nazis, of course, have the stormtroopers, so they're wearing their brown shirts, the Sturmabteilung. I mean, initially they were called something like the gymnastics and sports section because that was an attempt to get around the law. But, you know, as you said, the Social Democrats. So this is the party of Weimar, the party that was the biggest party in Germany, that has created this new republic, that is kind of the left-wing party, the Labour Party, if you like. They have their own paramilitary group, the Reichsbanner

Schwarz-Rot-Gold. So paramilitary politics is part of Weimar from the very beginning. So that's not good, is it? No. That's not contributing to the stability of the system. And then you have the economy. Yes. So if you'd had all that, could you still have survived? Maybe.

I mean, maybe. Because it's the economy, stupid. If people are rich and stable, they don't have a stake in pulling things down, do they? Right. Yeah. The less people care about politics, the better. 1920s Germany is a very, very intensely politicized society. When people are moaning about apathy in politics, I always think, you know, be careful what you

wish for, because they definitely weren't apathetic in Weimar Germany. And of course, one reason they're not apathetic is because their living standards are being destroyed. So as you said in the first podcast, the Germans had been borrowing a lot of money to pay for World War I. So prices had doubled between 1914- And the plan was that they would recoup this from reparations from their enemies when they won. Yeah. Unfortunately, they don't win. So inflation is now absolutely through the roof. They have borrowed and printed so much money that they haven't basically earned to pay for the war.

And now they're having to borrow it and to print it to pay for the reparations. Because, of course, no sane government wants to raise taxes on Germans to give to the French and the British. Because then you really are, you do look like a terrible traitor and November criminal and stuff. So to give you a sense of, I mean, inflation, it can sound so abstract. Of course, these days, to a lot of people listening to this podcast,

it won't seem abstract without we're living with inflation at 10%. But in August 1922, to buy one US dollar, it took you 1,000 marks. By December 1922, it took you 7,000 marks. Then something terrible happens to Germany. Because they're slow in repaying their reparations, the French, because they haven't been handing over all the coal they should have done, occupy the main industrial region of Germany, the Ruhr. They send in troops. Some of them are black colonial troops, aren't they? Right.

Some of them are Senegalese and whatnot, African troops. So that doesn't go down well with the far right. No, the Germans are extremely, extremely displeased with this. This is a great boost, actually, for the Nazi party and for other far right nationalist parties. But the French intervention in the Ruhr coincides with basically the total implosion of the German economy and inflation becoming hyperinflation.

And it's actually so vast, it's impossible to comprehend. So I said a dollar had been 1,000 marks in August 1922. By July 1923, to buy $1, it takes you 353,000 marks. And just to go through the numbers, it's laughable. August, it's a million and a half marks. To buy $1 in September 1923, 98 million marks. October, I think that's 25 billion, is it, Tom? The numbers are... Lots of noughts. So many noughts, you can't count them up. Well, let's count. So 42, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 noughts. Yeah. So this is all the famous stuff that everyone knows about. Big wheelbarrows full of money. In Richard Evans' book, he says, basically, you would go into a cafe and you'd order a cup of coffee for 5,000 marks. And if you stay there for an hour

for too long, you might ask for the bill and it's gone up to 8,000 marks in the intervening period. And the other is the price of bread. So to buy some bread at the beginning of the year would cost you 163 marks. But by the end of the year, it costs you 233 billion marks. And so as people will know from the much less severe manifestations of inflation at the moment, this tends to pauperize people. If you've got savings. It eliminates them. But it's also kind of like hemlock rising up the body. So the working classes get pauperized and then the middle classes start to get pauperized Michael Burley, he makes this brilliant point that this is a society where your occupation and your title

are listed in the telephone directory. So it is a very status-obsessed society. So when you have to start enduring humiliations of someone who's not used to them, that's going to radicalize you. Oh, absolutely. I always think, Tom, we were talking before about what it would have been like to be a German before the First World War.

I always think about Thomas Mann, the writer. I mean, the sort of people he writes about in his great book, Buddenbrooks, which is set a bit earlier, set in Lubeck. These sort of incredibly respectable… Solid. Solid. Yeah. Good burglary. Yeah, exactly.

These people who are incredibly serious, sober, sort of Protestant virtues, they take their respectability so seriously. Imagine you've had a brother or a son or a father killed in the trenches in the Great War, in a war that you thought was just. You've lost the war. The Kaiser is gone. Everything you believed in. Now you're losing your savings. You've got a family member who, as you said, you know, has turned to dodgy methods to make ends meet.

You're terrified about crime. And this is a society obsessed with crime. All those great German expressionist films of the 1920s. Dr. Caligari and all that. Dr. Caligari, M, serial killers, speculators, fraudsters, all of those kinds of things. There is, I mean, we talked in the first episode about the obsession with medicalization,

with pests, with plagues, with germs. with germs rats so that's on your mind the whole time and so you are asking who's to blame where are these you know where has where has this disease this plague come from who's responsible for it yeah so the anti-semitism that we talked about in episode one so it was on the fringinges then. It had seeped into some aspects of mainstream politics, you know, the Kaiser and the Chancellor Bethman-Holweg, where they had read anti-Semitic tracts. But anti-Semitism is not yet this sort of commanding motif of political life, but definitely by the mid-1920s. The idea of the November traitors, a Jewish conspiracy, Jewish speculators. So the Jews are simultaneously in this world, Bolshevik subversives and rich financial speculators.

And again, you can see elements of that in other cultures, can't you? I always think about those very first Agatha Christie books from the 1920s. John Buchan or Bulldog Drummond, that kind of weird paranoia. But I mean, also just to repeat though, it's not just the Jews who are being blamed. It's the whole political establishment. And again, I suppose there's a kind of echo of that in the way that people today don't necessarily blame one or either of the parties for it. They blame Westminster. They blame the whole crew of politicians. They're all frauds. Americans blaming Washington.

Yes, Washington. I think that instinct is always there in any democracy, no matter how healthy. And in fact, you could argue, it can be quite a healthy sign, the kind of the country distrust of the Whigs in the 18th century. You know, their corrupt cabal with their fricassees and their ragus, Tom, as you remember from the podcast we did about Beef and Liberty. You know, there's always a distrust of the centre and of the political elite. With their yoghurts. Their yoghurt drinks, exactly. But of course, in 1920s Weimar Germany, it is turbocharged beyond anything that anybody had ever seen in Britain.

So the inflation actually does come to an end. One of the other great politicians of the Weimar Republic, say Friedrich Ebert, is one, a chap called Gustav Stresemann. He's not a social democrat. He's a liberal. He takes over in August 1993. He introduces a new currency called the rent and mark to stabilize things. He also says, listen, we can't have this situation, the shambles where we're not paying our reparations to the allies. And so they are just punishing us and making life impossible. He basically does a deal. He says he will get the French, he gets the French to withdraw from the Ruhr,

and in return, Germany will fulfill its obligations. But he says, we all agree these are completely unfair. If we show the Allies in good faith that we will make the payment, that will give us the kind of political capital, if you like, to renegotiate. And actually, it works, because the allies do amend the terms in something called the Dawes Plan. But it's a sophisticated argument, isn't it, in an age when people aren't necessarily up for taking on board

sophisticated arguments? Well, imagine you think you've been wronged and somebody says, listen, the way to deal with this is to continue paying the people you think have wronged you and eventually they'll be kind to you. I mean, you're maybe not going to listen to that. Now, I think Streisand obviously was completely right to do what he did. But if you're a right-wing German nationalist,

you are outraged. Specifically, if you're a Mr. A. Hitler, you're not going to buy it, are you? So Hitler's been in Munich all this time. His party is getting bigger, and he is getting more and more impatient. So let's have a break. And when we come back, let's look at how that impatience is manifesting itself.

What happens? We'll see you in a few minutes. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early

access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is history a part two of episode two of our uh account of the rise of the nazis but dominic we're in let's say late summer 1923 uh you've been setting the scene in the broader context of Weimar Germany. But with the Nazis, we're still very much in Munich, right? I mean, they haven't really kind of spread beyond that. And even in the context of Munich, they're a faction. So how large are they? What's Hitler's position vis-a-vis the other Nazis?

What's going on with them? So the Nazis now are very much Hitler's party. Since 1921, Hitler's been the embodiment of the Nazi message. He is the leader of the party. Because that's the thing, isn't it? He's not a representative politician in his own lights. He's the embodiment. He is, but he's still only the drummer. Remember, we ended the last podcast by talking about how Hitler sees himself as the drummer, as John the Baptist. One day there will be a national revolution and Germany will be great again. And is he thinking this because the year before, Benito Mussolini has led the march on Rome. And so Hitler has the example of what a national leader could be.

Is that a big influence on him? I think it's massive. Mussolini is an enormous influence on Hitler. So Hitler, it's probable, I would say, reading the biographies of Hitler, I mean, we can't, how can we tell what's going on in Hitler's head? But it is probable that the March on Rome in October 1922 begins to change Hitler's sense of what is possible for him to do.

So actually, if you were a betting man, in 1922, you would have said the most likely standard bearer for the far right will be General Ludendorff. So one of the two men who had run Germany at the end of the First World War, he's briefly gone into exile. He'd come back. He's the architect of the stab in the back, November criminals kind of lie. And he has since moved to the far right, and he's ended up in Munich. So Ludendorff is this sort of wartime leader. He seems the obvious person.

But as you say, Mussolini is a former journalist. He's a former nobody, really. A bit like Hitler. Also kind of from the left. Has come from the left and moved to the right. Fascism, Italian fascism and Nazism have lots of similarities. Emphasis on violence, distrust of parliamentarianism, sense of victimhood, salutes, nationalism.

Well, I mean, the Nazis are copying, deliberately copying the salutes, the goose stepping all these kinds of things from the italians uh the eagles the standards also the idea of seizing power um so mussolini i mean the march on rome in october 1922 is much mythologized but at the end of it mussolini is the duce the. And so the idea of a march on Berlin? I mean, that kind of idea is floating around far right circles as you get into 1923. So in October 1923, Hitler actually gives an interview with, of all papers, he gives an interview to the Daily Mail in which he says, if a German Mussolini were given to Germany,

the people would kneel down and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped. At this stage, does Hitler think of himself as the German Mussolini? It's not clear. The idea must be taking shape in his mind. I don't think you'd say that without at least the kind of glimmering of a kind of hunch that it might be. Agreed. So the road to his attempted seizure of power, such a strange and complicated story. Munich is basically being run by a triumvirate, a right-wing triumvirate. There's a guy called Gustav Ritter von Kahr

who runs the government. Colonel von Saiser runs the police. General von Lossow runs the army. And they're running Munich. And they, it seems, by the end of 1923 or the second half of 1923, they have their own plan to topple the Weimar Republic and General Ludendorff on the other. And each of these three parties, I think, thinks they're using the others and that they're the people who will basically- Well, this will be a running theme of Nazi history.

Everybody thinks they're using everybody else. Exactly. The terrible mistake that people keep making with the Nazis. They talk to the army in Berlin and the head of the army in Berlin says, no, I'm not really up for this. So at that point, the guys in Munich, the Munich authority people, they say, well, you know, we're not going to do this either then. You know, no point. Hitler is sort of conscious that he stoked everything up for the last year or so. And there's always outrage about the hyperinflation

and about the French and the Ruhr and reparations. That if he doesn't act, if he doesn't make the great gesture, then his support people will say, well, he's all talk. Yeah. You know, no action. And so he and Ludendorff decide what will force the issue. They know that on the 9th of November, which is the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the German revolution in 1918,

they know that Carr, the boss of the German revolution in 1918, they know that Kahr, the boss of the Munich government, basically, he's going to be addressing a meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, which is this sort of citizens brewery cellar. And he'll be shouting about November traders and all this sort of stuff, which he is doing. Kara's doing that, the triumvirate are there. That evening, Hitler bursts in with a load of guys in brown shirts. It's just this stormtrooper. It's his kind of paramilitary wing, little paramilitary wing, and General Ludendorff.

It's complete chaos in the room. Hitler takes out his revolver, which is a Browning, and he shoots a bullet into the ceiling. He says, the building is surrounded. My brown shirts are here. This is the moment. He takes the triumvirate away, and he says to them, listen, I'm forcing the issue.

We're marching on Berlin. I'll be the head of the cabinet, the head of government. Ludendorff will be the head of the army, and von Kahr, the guy who's been running Bavaria, you can be the head of state as a regent for the Kaiser. You see, there's still a lot of monarchism around, actually. It's very interesting how long that lingers. They all say, fine, all right, whatever.

They go back in, talk to the crowd. Hitler gives a great speech, shouts about the Berlin Jew government, says, you know, this is the end of it. This very sort of, stirring is not the right word for that, I'll fit it there. Well, but in a sense it is, isn't it? I mean, he does stir people up. He does rouse people. He does make people feel that, you know, he makes their blood race faster.

Yes. All that kind of stuff. Fair enough. He says, let's say stirring. He says, I can say this to you. Either the German revolution begins tonight or we'll all be dead by dawn. You know, it's quite sort of people are all cheering and shouting. Then an absolute shambles unfolds.

Hitler and the Nazis go off into the city determined to capture the barracks and the police headquarters and all this. And it's a complete disaster. They don't actually capture any of them. None of the army, none of the police join them at all. Meanwhile, back in the beer joined them at all. Meanwhile, back in the beer cellar, total ludicrous scenes.

Ludendorff, who's a military man, says to the Munich triumvirate, they say, can we go? You know, we give you our word, we'll still support the coup.

Scout's honor. And he says, oh, well, if you give me your word, of course. They go and immediately repudiate the coup completely and say we have nothing to do with this it's completely against our will they send all orders to all the army

units do not listen to hitler and the nazis and ludendorff at all so basically by by dawn hitler is not dead nobody is dead hitler and co have trooped back rather miserably and forlornly to the beer cellar where ludendorff looking like a fool, is waiting for them. And they say, well, this hasn't gone well at all. Do they have a drink? I assume the drink's half. You'd assume. He'd be demented not to.

He'd be mad not to, wouldn't he? So Hitler, at this stage, I think, is still drinking. I don't think he becomes a teetotaler after he's been in prison. I might be wrong. People who know more about Hitler than I do can correct me if so. So they're back in the beer cellar. Their supporters, you know, as dawn breaks, their supporters are kind of drifting away.

It's like a party that has run out of steam. Ludendorff says, well, we have to force the issue. Let's march on the city centre. So they do. There are about 2,000 of them by this point. They set off at midday, and they're met by lines of policemen. What follows is, you know, there's a sort of confrontation, a lot of shouting, and then eventually someone starts shooting.

Of the leading Nazis, Goering is hit in the leg, and Hitler falls and dislocates his shoulder. He's quite lucky. Fourteen of the marchers were killed. So Hitler could have been killed and four policemen are killed of the leading nazis goering who'd been wounded he goes off to exile he's married to a swedish baroness or something so he goes off to sweden and becomes a morphine addict that is such goring behavior it's very goring behavior swedish baroness is morphine

yeah yeah absolutely um hitler goes off to his friend. He's got a friend called Putzi Hanfstengel, who is a sort of a useless right-wing socialite. He goes off to his house and he's arrested on the 11th of November. And as every biographer of Hitler says, that absolutely should have been that for Hitler. That should have been the end of his career, this ludicrous, shambolic, failed putsch. However, there is another way of framing it, isn't there? That he had to do something like that if he was to make a successful fist of trying

to gain power through legitimate democratic means. Because he had to have demonstrated that he had the courage, the balls, the Führerprinzip that would enable him to make a bold strike. And it's only having done that that he can, you know, having demonstrated his balls, as it were, or his ball. Great historical punditry there, Tom. Well done. That he can then adopt the democratic approach. Do you think? I think it's actually a very astute point.

I think it means no one will ever see him as a sellout. Yeah. I mean, he's put his life on the line. Exactly. He's done what he's, you know, he has, he's risked his life for Germany. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right, actually.

I think that, I hadn't thought of it that way, but that's a very astute point that because he's done that and the beer hall is even the beer hall itself, that becomes, dare I say, a sacral space for the Nazis. Because it's shambolic, it's tawdry, you know, it's pathetic in so many ways, but it provides scope for the mythologization that will happen. And of course, the other thing that happens, am I not right, is that basically his trial provides him with a soapbox because the presiding judge is a sympathizer. Hitler agrees to carry the can for Ludendorff, who kind of sidles off.

And he's given this, you know, he takes the stand and just has it, you know, has a rant and makes himself into a public figure. I mean, actually, I'm thinking about your point. You know, he takes the stand and just has a rant and makes himself into a public figure. Absolutely right. I mean, actually, I'm thinking about your point. Mussolini himself didn't do the march on Rome. He stayed behind, you know, in a cowardly way to see if it would work, and then went by train. Hitler actually did do this march. And presumably that then also, I mean, all his followers know this.

Of course. Of course. of course. He's the corporal who fought in the trenches, who then once again put his body on the line. Absolutely right. The trial, you make a really good point about the trial. The trial should have been held in Leipzig. The Bavarian authorities persuade the government to set up a special court in Munich because basically the Bavarian authorities want to cover up

their own sort of half-hearted involvement in the coup. They make sure there's a judge who's a reactionary nationalist who's called Georg Neithart. There's probably, we don't know, but there's probably a deal being done where Hitler says, I'll take all, as you said, I'll carry the can completely. He goes in wearing a suit. So he looks not a uniform, but he wears his iron cross to remind everybody he's a decorated war veteran. And that quotation that you read out at the beginning,

I mean, he's all talking about the court of history will judge. And he talks about it like that for four hours. I know, four hours. Imagine listening to all that for four hours. But Hitler's speeches were incredible. They'd be like two hour speeches normally.

Yeah. Hitler would not stop. And if you've ever read, we'll get onto Mein Kampf in a second, but if you've ever read Mein Kampf, it just goes on and on. I mean, I know I'm not one to talk in my books. It's like the worst kind of podcast. It's like, yeah, a podcast without our sort of enormous self-discipline. Exactly, and without any breaks.

Exactly. No ads. And without any breaks. Exactly. No ads. No ads. Yeah. So anyway, at the end of all this, Hitler is given a five-year sentence. And he is sent off to a place called Landsberg am Lech, which is an ancient kind of fortress. And this, Ian Kershaw says, basically, it's less a prison, more a hotel, which gives you a sort of sense. It's quite posh, isn't it?

It's where people have been done for fighting duels in the 90th century. Exactly. Yeah, if you're a duelist, you get sent to Landsberg, I believe. So Hitler has a big apartment there. I mean, it really is like a hotel. In the course of his time, so he's there for basically, what is it, a year or so?

So the rest of it is... So he's reading, he's reading lots of racists, all that kind of stuff reading racists, what a hobby what's your hobbies so he's reading Nietzsche, Tom, like you, you've read Nietzsche I have read Nietzsche, yes

well I think we should do an episode on Nietzsche and discuss how Nietzsche tends to get a clear pass from people as an influence on the Nazis but I think there is slightly more to it than that but we'll come to that maybe in another episode

but for the purpose of this he's reading books and then he writes one. Yes so a Nazi supporter who's a publisher called Max Amann he says why don't you write a book and Hitler basically dictates his life story to two other prisoners. So one of them is his chauffeur, a guy called Emil Morris,

and the other is his sort of, his poodle, his Rudolf Hess. I mean, Hess is an absolutely slavish devotee of Hitler's. I mean, Hitler has assembled this sort of group of cronies who think he's brilliant. They love listening to his speeches and they will do anything for him. That's why he even has a chauffeur. I mean, he's living off the largesse. In the 1920s, he's been living off the largesse

of wealthy donors. Yeah, but it's also a kind of martyrdom, isn't it? He's suffering this for the cause of Germany, for the cause of history, for all these abstract nouns with capital letters. And so the fact that he is in prison, he is a, you know, this is paradigmatic suffering, even though he's surrounded by flowers and got all these books and visitors

and things. So hence his struggle. My struggle. Yeah, absolutely. And so the two themes of Mein Kampf, which is the book that he writes now, one of them is the classic old Hitler theme, and it's the hatred of the Jews. And he is absolutely, no one, as his biographers say, no one who read Mein Kampf could be in the slightest doubt about his intentions.

He says, you know, we will only succeed when the international poisons are exterminated. And he refers to them again and again as a virus, as maggots, as a pestilence, as a plague. He talks of annihilating, expelling, all of these kinds of things. The other thing that is more new, however, is the obsession now with Russia. So you don't see that at the beginning, the obsession with Marxism and with Russia. But now he's talking about the end of Russia as a state, about Russia being given over to the German plow. So this sort of Laban's Ram idea.

And as Richard Evans says, no one who reads this can think that Hitler is just about revising the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler is also about building a new empire in the East, about killing Jews, about turning Slavs into helots and slaves, and giving Germans living space in the steppes. And before he goes in, you described him as John the Baptist, and he was obviously playing second fiddle to Ludendorff. But does his experience in prison, his process of self-reflection, the idolization he's getting from all his various followers. Is this when he starts to think that perhaps he is the man destined to be the leader, the Fuhrer? I think absolutely. I think when he comes out of Landsberg am Lech,

he undoubtedly thinks of himself as the leader now. There's something about that experience of maybe the putsch, but then the experience of being on trial and being the martyr, and then having these 500 guests with flowers and racist books that has puffed him up. And he thinks, I'm the man of destiny. And so this is why when he comes out, he gets everyone to, he basically refans the Nazi party, doesn't he? And he gets everyone to sign, you know,

to swear an unconditional oath to him they do it's extraordinary scene um in kershaw says like medieval vassals swearing undying loyalty to the leader i mean they pledge themselves they pledge fealty to him so this is when you start getting the harl hitler and all that kind of stuff yeah so much more of that of course that's slightly copied on the sort of he's inherited it fromenera, who we talked about in the first podcast. But it's also all to do with that stuff about knights and a brotherhood. And of course, it's also to do with Mussolini and fascism and all the rituals of fascism. All these things, these influences flow together to create this Führer cult. And actually the Führer cult,

which seems ludicrous to us and sinister, Ian Kershaw says it's really important because the Nazis had always been slightly, you know, they'd all been different factions. Yeah, well, because it's inherently vociferous, isn't it? I mean, everyone knows this about kind of eccentric political sects on the fringes, but they're always splitting up. I mean, that's the whole Judean people's front joke exactly exactly but now that they've basically sworn their loyalty to the fuhrer to the leader factionalism it doesn't come to an end of course there'll be

more fascism to come but there's a kind of coherence there this is the message this is the guy end of story but isn't isn't there also walking with destiny something else that hitler has got from this is this idea that there can be no march on berlin because it hasn't worked it won't work and therefore there's this idea that he will destroy democracy through democratic means yeah you're absolutely right which is a chilling thing and has been a chilling thing ever since. Well, that's what makes him so unsettling for people living in a democracy to this day. All democracies have to contend with that. What happens when you have somebody who doesn't play by the rules? Yeah.

And so what is the state of the Weimar democracy by this point? So what kind of 19, early 1925? Yeah. So now we have a series of steps. We're going to have them in the last few minutes of this podcast and then particularly in the next episode. A series of steps

whereby the guardians of the Weimar Republic, the very people who should be protecting it, start to dismantle it, start to sign, in some cases, to sign their own death warrants. The first moment, it's bad luck. It's really bad luck.

Friedrich Ebert, the president, the guy who was synonymous with Weimar. So the Clement Attlee of Weimar. Exactly. The Clement Attlee as I described him. He dies of appendicitis. He's neglected it too long. He's under tremendous pressure, horrendous abuse in the newspapers. He neglects it. He dies of appendicitis um this is a disaster for weimar they then have a presidential election ludendorff actually runs he gets one percent um that's the end of him but his partner in the first world war his sort of dictatorial partner

paul von hindenburg who is this sort of he looks like he's been chiseled out of a massive Prussian... Kind of Prussian walrus. Yeah, Prussian walrus. Massive moustache, giant head. I imagine he wears a helmet with a spike in the bath. Yeah, he's like a square man who's been cut out

of wood. Very reactionary, very, you know, monarchist, doesn't really believe in Weimar. He actually seeks permission from the Kaiser before he throws his hat in the presidential ring. He doesn't even run the first round. He's co-opted, runs in the second round. He's 78 years old.

He becomes the president of Germany. And he and his circle, so he's surrounded by kind of cronies, particularly army advisors. None of them are keen on democracy. None of them are keen on Weimar. They're basically itching to destroy it. That is a disaster for Weimar. Meanwhile, the Nazis, so these are supposedly the golden years

of the Weimar Republic, the last years, because the inflation is over. The economy is doing a little bit better. The Nazi party is actually although it's very small it's beginning to grow and and the key thing that it does is that it it moves out so it's been in munich in bavaria which is very very as you all know tom very very catholic and where institutionally there's a lot of kind of there's an obvious resistance to hitler's message because the Catholic Church is very strong. Well, because Munich is a kind of,

it's an island of political turbulence surrounded by Catholic peasantry, basically. Yes. But what they start to do is to build support in the Protestant north of Germany. Which they have to do, don't they, if they're going to become national because there are far more Protestants in Germany than

Catholics. Agreed. There's a key figure here, there's a man called Gregor Strasser. He's sort of Hitler's ideological rival, if you like, in the Nazi party. He's the other guy who's clever. He's certainly cleverer than... But not in the long

run a good thing to be an ideological rival to Hitler in the Nazi party. Not at all. He's a brilliant organizer. He's a brilliant administrator. He's been sort of building it up while Hitler was in prison. And when he goes around North Germany, Strasse, he emphasizes the socialism as well as the national.

Yeah. So he talks to industrial workers, because it's very industrial in North Germany, and he talks to people there and he says, you know, you'll have higher wages, you'll have better living standards we'll protect your working conditions all this stuff so he he's the guy really who brings in goebbels joseph goebbels goebbels is from the industrial rhineland he's a catholic he is a catholic yeah he has a phd from heidelberg on romantic drama yeah what do you believe i didn't know what goebbels was a doctor of and

it seems very implausible but he's quite bohemian goebbels and he had actually been drawn to the far left and the far right he'd read marx um he gets in with strasser he's a real propagandist so so i mean people say two things about goebbels sense of theatrical yeah and you say a romantic drama firstly that he's catholic so there's the sense of the you know the uh the church display and all that kind of stuff but secondly precisely that he is he he comes from this theatrical milieu that he in a sense he the nazis end up making germany a stage for incredible pageantry and swagger and that is obviously part of the appeal of the Nazis is that they're not boring in terms of their projection. And Goebbels is brilliant at that.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Of course, you really need to watch Triumph of the Will, Lenny Riefenstahl's film, to know that they're not boring. But what Strauss and Goebbels do, they're very good at broadening its appeal to actually quite boring people. So particularly farmers, the sort of people in the countryside in North Germany, there's an agricultural depression. But Goebbels goes to Berlin though, doesn't he?

So he becomes the Gauleiter in Berlin. Yeah, but much later on. That's later, is it? Right. Yeah. At the moment, he's sort of torn between Strasser and Hitler a little bit. But what they're doing, they're launching recruiting drives in these sort of rural places, Schleswig-Holstein, Oldenburg. So even though they do really badly, generally, the Nazis,

in the 1928 Reichstag elections, they win less than 3% of the vote. They only get 12 deputies. Strasser is one. Goebbels is one. Goering is one. They're actually doing better and better in these kind of protestant agriculture what are they offering what's the pitch so the pitch is we will the pitch is we will listen to you nobody else is listening i mean the social democrats are city party um the nationalists the right- party. They are a bigwigs establishment, rich people's party, middle-class party.

The Nazis are saying they're rebranding themselves as a genuinely national party with something for everybody, and particularly for those who've been left behind. And the sort of Protestant countryside feels like it has been left behind. They say we'll set up farmers cooperatives. We'll take farmers seriously. So they are reaching out to farmers and people like them, craftsmen, artisans, shopkeepers, the self-employed. And they're saying, we'll make Germany great again. We'll listen to you. We'll put the economy on an even keel. You'll be better paid, but you'll feel proud to be German

again. No one feels proud to be German anymore. They particularly have a strong appeal, by the way, to young people. Because, of course, if you're young, if you didn't live through, if you didn't fight in the First World War, you have a slight sense of guilt and you wish you'd done it, you missed out on it. But you've also been through crisis after crisis. A good example of that is a young man, a bright young man, who was born in Munich.

His father was a Catholic schoolteacher, who was born in 1900, never got to see action in the First World War, clever, studied after the First World War, sucked into the far right scene. And he's Heinrich Himmler. So Himmler, I mean, who most of us would regard as one of the most sinister men who's ever lived, he joined the Nazi party in 1925. He hero worships Hitler. I mean, Himmler brings to the table all of these enthusiasms, doesn't he? All the kind of mad occult stuff and everything. Yeah. Herbalism. The Thule society.

Runes, all of that. And also very, very radical racism. I mean, it seems weird to say this is such a wicked man there is an idealism to himmler i mean he worships hitler he thinks as a young man he thinks this is the the root to the utopia this is everything is rubbish and tawdry of course because the nazis don't see themselves as evil. The Nazis see themselves doing what is right for Germany and for their race. And you have to make that leap of trying to see them as they see themselves, or else you won't understand the nature of their appeal. Yeah. I mean, they don't see themselves as wicked.

No, they don't even see that. I mean, certainly they don't see their antisemitism as wicked. No, because they see it as being for the good of the German people. Yeah. But of course, at this point, they are small. They're still a fringe party. They are growing in these sort of Protestant rural areas, but they're still a long way from being a major party. I mean, the big parties are in a grand coalition, actually, the Social Democrats, the Catholic Centre Party, and the Liberal Democrats Party.

And there's no reason at that point, nobody in sort of 1928 or so, seriously thinks that within five years, the Nazis will be the masters. Okay, well, shall we leave today's episode with a passage from Richard Evans? Yeah, go for it, Tom. Okay. It would need a catastrophe of major dimensions if an extremist party like the Nazis was to gain mass support.

In 1929, with the sudden collapse of the economy in the wake of the stock exchange crash in New York, it came. Goodbye. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early