People, Places, and Events Behind the Headlines in History
Early Assassination Attempts on the Life of Adolf Hitler
The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, head of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and second-in-command of the SS in 1942, was, to put it mildly, shocking, not because it was attempted but because it succeeded. (Heydrich’s assassination and its aftermath are subjects of this author’s historical novel The Pear Tree.)
The attack on Heydrich certainly was not the first attempt to assassinate a high-ranking member of the Third Reich, to be sure. Adolf Hitler had been a target of assassination from the very beginning of his rise to power. Months after he became leader of the then-fledgling Nazi Party in 1921, shots were fired at Hitler as he spoke to a crowd in a Munich beer hall. Several more attempts were made before the formation of the Third Reich with Hitler at its helm in 1933. This Historka post describes assassination attempts in the early 1920s and the historical and political setting in which they occurred.
The First Attack
Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers Party, an organization said at the time to have “no assets except a cigar box in which to put contributions,” in 1919. (Ailsby: The Third Reich Day by Day, page 9) As member of the steering committee for the group, Hitler sought to multiply the party’s membership by adopting military garb and pageantry and the swastika emblem, which he considered to be “something akin to a blazing torch.” (Ailsby, page 10)
Feeling the need to attract more attention, he relished the chance to confront his political enemies when social democrats and communists crashed a Nazi Party meeting in the Munich Hoffbräuhaus on November 4, 1921 (6 Assassination Attempts on Adolf Hitler | HISTORY). “The dance had not yet begun when my Stormtroopers, for so they were called from this day on, attacked like wolves. They flung themselves in packs of eight or 10 again and again on their enemies, and little by little actually began to thrash them out of the hall. After five minutes, I hardly saw one of them who was not covered with blood.” (Ailsby, page 10, Grehan, The Hitler Assassination Attempts, 2022, page 20)
After Hitler had spoken for an hour and a half, a man jumped up on a chair and shouted, “Freedom,” setting off a melee as beer mugs crashed to the floor, chairs were overturned, and fistfights broke out. Twenty minutes later, two pistol shots were fired at the podium where Hitler had been standing. Members of the assembled Nazis and outsiders exchanged more shots while Hitler continued speaking. (Grehan, The Hitler Assassination Attempts, 2022, page 20).
Hitler later wrote that he welcomed the attack. “Then two pistol shots rang out and now a wild din of shouting broke out from all sides. One’s heart almost rejoiced at this spectacle which recalled memories of the war.” (Ailsby, page 10)
1922-1923
As a result of high-profile events, three attempts were made on Hitler’s life in 1923, all by persons unknown. (Grehan, page 20). In Thuringia shots were fired at the man as he was speaking in front of a crowd. In Leipzig and Tübingen, shots were fired at the auto that was transporting him. (Adolf Hitler Assassination Attempts Timeline 1921-1945, Grehan, page 20)
Three major events in 1922 and 1923 kept Hitler in the eye of the public and potential assassins.
The Coburg Folk Festival
The city of Coburg, 120 miles east of Frankfurt, invited Hitler and the Nazi Party to attend a folk festival on 14 October, 1922. When city officials learned that more than 700 party members, plus a 42-piece band, were arriving on a “special train,” they sent a police captain to stop the Nazis’ planned parade into city center, but the men brushed the policeman aside and marched into town. After a 15-minute fight between Nazis and Marxist members of the crowd, the procession proceeded unimpeded.
Hitler’s fiery speech in the town hall that evening attracted the duke and duchess of Coburg, who later became active Nazi Party supporters. Marxist threats to confront the Nazis and stop the “special train” from leaving the next morning came to naught as only a few hundred Marxists even showed up. ( (hitler-archive.com), Ailsby, page 12-13)
The First Nazi Party Day
The first Nazi Party Day, the Parteitage, brought 5000 Brownshirts to Munich to hold 12 mass meetings on January 27-29, 1923. An initial ban and declaration of a state of emergency by city officials was lifted after Bavarian General Otto von Lossow declared “suppression of the National Socialist organization [was] unfortunate for security reasons (Ailsby, page 13). At this meeting Hitler declared the swastika would become the symbol of a new Germany and proclaimed that “Germany is awakening, the German freedom movement is on the march” (Ailsby, page 13-14).
The Beer Hall Putsch
The most prominent and remembered event in 1923 was the so-called Beer Hall Putsch.
Impressed by Benito Mussolini’s ability to seize power in October, 1922, by means of the March on Rome, (see this author’s Time Stamp blog October, 2022), Hitler believed the Nazi Party could take over the German government by force in early 1923.
Deteriorating economic conditions did threaten the stability of the Weimar Republic at the time. The government had defaulted on reparations as required by the Treaty of Versailles, leading French forces to occupy Germany’s industrial center, the Ruhr; hyperinflation and other effects of the Great Depression were rampant. Blame fell at the feet of government leaders who had signed the treaty as well as groups that had “stabbed the country in the back” during WW I, including Communists, Jews, social democrats, and war profiteers.
Hitler’s plan to overthrow the Bavarian government, set for November 9, 1923, began in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller the day before while the appointed governor of Upper Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr, was making a speech. In the audience Adolf Hitler waited for 20 minutes until 25 of his armed Brownshirts burst into the hall. He then climbed onto a chair, first a shot into the ceiling, and claimed the national revolution had begun. “This hall is occupied by 600 armed men…. The Bavarian and Reich Governments have been removed and a provisional National Government formed. The army and police barracks have been occupied, troops and police are marching on the city under the swastika banner.” (Ailsby, page 15)
Kahr and other leaders of the Bavarian government, military and police were taken by gunpoint to a side room where Hitler tried to convince them to accept his leadership. The men refused to accede to the demands but were released when they agreed they would not stand in his way (Grehan, page 34). While fighting outside the building distracted Hitler and other leaders of the rebellion, German Army generals fled the hall and mobilized troops from outlying garrisons, and Kahr denounced the episode.
Nevertheless, on the morning of November 9, Hitler led 2000 men in a march toward the center of the city. By then, Brownshirts at the War Ministry were already surrounded, and police blocked streets. When police began firing, Hitler was pulled to the street and protected by his body guard and others until he could make his escape. Members of the crowd gave up their weapons and identified themselves to the police; coup plotters still on the scene were singled out and arrested; and 14 lay dead on the streets. The wounded included Hitler himself (a wrenched shoulder) and Hermann Göring (bullet wound to the groin). (Beer Hall Putsch | Facts, Summary, & Outcome | Britannica)
The German General State Commissar immediately disbanded the Brownshirts as well as the Nazi Party and imposed heavy fines on anyone working for the party. Leaders of the coup were arrested for treason, arraigned, and imprisoned. (Ailsby, page 20)
Following the failed putsch, the Nazi Party entered what has been called the Kampfzeit or time of struggle when party members dropped from nearly 70,000 to less than 1,000. Nevertheless, some “old fighters” remained, and their message gained a wide audience. To Hitler, the putsch was major propaganda. “As though by an explosion, our ideas were hurled over the whole of Germany,” he said. (Ailsby, page 19)
1932 Assassination Attempts
In the months leading up to the July, 1932 elections, four attempts were made on Hitler’s life. In January, Hitler and others became ill within an hour after dining at Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin. Though poisoning was suspected, no arrests were made.
A month later, Ludwig Assner, a member of the Bavarian State Parliament, sent a poisoned letter to Hitler from France. The letter was intercepted before it reached Hitler.
In March, shots were fired at the train that was carrying Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Wilhelm Frick (who later became Minister of the Interior in the Third Reich) from Munich to Weimar. No one was hurt.
While traveling to Stralsund, Hitler’s car was nearly ambushed by a group of men waiting at the corner of a sharp turn in the road. (List of assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler, Wikipedia, Adolf Hitler Assassination Attempts Timeline 1921-1945)
Sources:
Christopher Ailsby, The Third Reich Day by Day, Chartwell Books, 2001. This post relies heavily on this book. For more information and purchase, see: The Third Reich Day By Day: Ailsby, Christopher: 9780785826651: Amazon.com: Books.
John Grehan, The Hitler Assassination Attempts. The Plots, Places and People that Almost Changed History, Pen & Sword Books, 2022. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hitler-assassination-attempts-john-grehan/1140132976
(6 Assassination Attempts on Adolf Hitler | HISTORY)
Beer Hall Putsch | Facts, Summary, & Outcome | Britannica
July 1932 German federal election - Wikipedia).
July 1932 German federal election - Wikipedia, Nazi Party - Rise to Power, Ideology, Germany | Britannica