100 years on, Germany looks back at Hitler's coup attempt
This week marks the 100th anniversary of a major turning point in the rise of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. The events that took place in Munich on November 8 and 9, 1923, while unsuccessful in the immediate sense, went on to shape German history — and, with it, the course of the 20th century.
At the time, Hitler was just one of several extremist leaders in Germany, or the Weimar Republic as it was known then. Few could foresee that, within a decade, he and the Nazi party he led would take over the country. They would lead Europe into another world war that included Germany's extermination of millions of Jews and members of other groups in the Holocaust.
Hitler had at least some of those ambitions in mind in 1923. On the evening of November 8, he led around 2,000 supporters to the Bürgerbräukeller, a beer hall in central Munich. Members of the Bavarian government and other prominent public figures had gathered there to mark the anniversary of the 1918 revolution, which ended the German empire under the Kaiser and led to the Weimar Republic.
Hitler hoped to pressure the leaders there into fulfilling their own coup desires. Bavaria was already at odds with national authorities. A state of emergency was in place and the state leader, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, acted with absolute power. If Hitler succeeded, he could have mustered the support to march on Berlin and replace the fledgling parliamentary democracy with a far-right dictatorship.
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