On 8 November 1923, Adolf Hitler strode into a beer hall, jumped on to a chair, and fired a single bullet into the ceiling. “The National Revolution has begun,” he bellowed to his startled audience. “The hall is under the control of 600 heavily armed men. No one is allowed to leave.” It was the most dramatic of entrances, and one that would signal the start of a defining episode in Hitler's early life: the Munich beer hall putsch. Hitler's aim that autumn night was to seize Munich and use the city as a base from which to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Yet little did he know as he stood on top of the table that his ‘national revolution’ was about to fall flat on its face.
Hitler had chosen the location of his coup – the , a large beer hall in the centre of Munich – for a good reason. For it was here, on that November evening, that Gustav von Kahr, state commissioner of Bavaria, was due to
