Gustav von Kahr

Gustav von Kahr was an old-school Bavarian civil servant, a monarchist and a conservative who twice took charge of Bavaria after the revolution of 1918 and turned it into a bastion of the Weimar Republic’s enemies. As premier in 1920–1921 he gave refuge to the extreme right from all over Germany, and it was in this climate that the party of Adolf Hitler grew up. In the autumn of 1923, as General State Commissioner with dictatorial powers, he openly rebelled against Berlin and contemplated a coup across the whole Reich. But when on 8 November 1923 Hitler tried to pre-empt him and force him at gunpoint to join the Munich Putsch, Kahr broke with the putschists during the night, and the next day the Bavarian police scattered their march. The Nazis never forgave him. On 30 June 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, SS men murdered the seventy-one-year-old pensioner in the Dachau concentration camp. His life is the story of a conservative who helped to cultivate Nazism and then fell victim to it.

Civil servant and guardian of heritage

He was born on 29 November 1862 in Weißenburg in Middle Franconia, the son of Gustav Kahr, a senior civil servant and later President of the Bavarian Administrative Court. The family was Protestant, which in Catholic Bavaria made him something of an outsider. He went to school in Landshut and Munich, did a year’s volunteer military service and in 1882–1885 studied law at the University of Munich. In 1889 he entered the Bavarian administration. He worked in district offices and at the Interior Ministry, where he rose quickly, reaching the rank of State Councillor and ministerial director in 1912. In 1890 he married Ella Schübeck. They had four daughters.

Throughout his years as an official Kahr devoted himself above all to the protection of historic monuments, vernacular architecture and folk art. He was a co-founder of the Bavarian Association for the Protection of the Homeland Heritage (Bayerischer Landesverein für Heimatpflege) and organised exhibitions of folk art. For these services he received the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown in 1911, and with it personal nobility and the title “Ritter von”. The University and the Technical University of Munich awarded him honorary doctorates. He was the kind of official who loved old, rural, monarchical Bavaria and distrusted the modern, metropolitan world, whose symbol for him was Berlin. During the First World War his minister would not let him go to the front because he was needed for the country’s food supply. In 1917 King Ludwig III appointed him President of the Government of Upper Bavaria.

Revolution and the Soviet Republic

The revolution of 7 November 1918, which broke out in Munich two days before Berlin and overthrew the Wittelsbach monarchy, was a catastrophe for Kahr. The socialist Kurt Eisner, the first premier of republican Bavaria, embodied everything he hated. Kahr attached himself to the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), a conservative Catholic party opposed to Berlin’s centralism. When a Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Munich in April 1919, Kahr fled to Bamberg with the legitimate government of the Social Democrat Johannes Hoffmann. The rule of the councils, their bloody suppression by the army and the Freikorps at the turn of April and May, and the fear of a new left-wing coup confirmed his conviction that parliamentary democracy led to chaos. He supported the creation of armed citizens’ militias (Einwohnerwehren), which under the leadership of the forester Georg Escherich soon numbered several hundred thousand men and served as the armed wing of the Bavarian right.

Premier of the “cell of order”

In March 1920, while the Kapp Putsch was under way in Berlin, the Reichswehr commander in Bavaria, General Arnold von Möhl (PL), the leaders of the citizens’ militias and the police president Ernst Pöhner demanded that Hoffmann hand power to the army. Hoffmann stepped down, and on 16 March 1920 the Landtag, on the BVP’s motion, elected Kahr premier. His right-wing government sought to restore to Bavaria the autonomy it had enjoyed under the empire and to make it a “cell of order” (Ordnungszelle) in a sea of republican chaos. He dissolved what remained of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, relied on the citizens’ militias and took in men wanted in other German states: participants in the Kapp Putsch, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt and his secret Organisation Consul, and General Erich Ludendorff, who settled near Munich. Pöhner’s police and its head of the political department, Wilhelm Frick, turned a blind eye to the activities of nationalist paramilitary groups, including the growing NSDAP and its Storm Detachments. In 1920, at the prompting of Crown Prince Rupprecht, Kahr’s government began expelling from Bavaria Jews from Eastern Europe, who were accused of usury and profiteering, although many of them had lived there for a long time.

Kahr came into conflict with Berlin and with the Allies. He opposed the disbandment of the citizens’ militias, which the Inter-Allied Control Commission demanded as a condition of carrying out the Treaty of Versailles. He gave way only in June 1921, under pressure from the Reich government and the Allies. When members of Organisation Consul murdered Matthias Erzberger on 26 August 1921 and President Friedrich Ebert issued a decree for the protection of the republic, Kahr refused to enforce it in Bavaria. As a result he lost the support of his own party, and on 12 September 1921 he resigned. He returned to his post as President of the Government of Upper Bavaria.

General State Commissioner

In the autumn of 1923 Kahr returned to high politics at the moment of the republic’s gravest crisis. A year of the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation had brought Germany to the brink of disintegration. When Chancellor Gustav Stresemann announced the end of passive resistance on 26 September, the Bavarian government of Premier Eugen von Knilling declared a state of emergency and appointed Kahr General State Commissioner with dictatorial powers. Kahr suspended in Bavaria the Law for the Protection of the Republic, passed after the murder of Walther Rathenau, banned public meetings and, from mid-October, again ordered the expulsion of Eastern European Jews in order to win over the extreme right. When the Reichswehr Minister, Otto Geßler, ordered the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter to be closed for an attack on Stresemann and General Hans von Seeckt, and the commander of the Bavarian division, General Otto von Lossow, refused to carry out the order and was dismissed, Kahr kept him in his post and on 22 October had the Bavarian soldiers of the Reichswehr swear allegiance to the Bavarian government. At the beginning of November he banned the Social Democratic Münchener Post and several liberal newspapers.

Together with Lossow and the commander of the state police, Colonel Hans von Seißer, Kahr formed a “triumvirate” that aimed to overthrow the government in Berlin and establish a “national dictatorship”. Historians disagree on how far these plans went. Kahr was thinking more of putting pressure on Berlin, winning the backing of the army and setting up a directorate with emergency powers than of a bloody coup, and he also linked his ideas to the restoration of the Wittelsbach monarchy. He needed the paramilitary leagues, including the German Fighting League (Deutscher Kampfbund) under Hitler’s political leadership, as a power base, but he had no intention of handing power to them. Hitler and Kahr were rivals for the leadership of the entire Bavarian right, and on 6 November Kahr warned the leaders of the leagues against acting on their own.

The night of 8 November

On the evening of 8 November 1923 Kahr was speaking to some three thousand people in the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall when Hitler burst into the hall with armed men and proclaimed a “national revolution”. In a side room, pistol in hand, he demanded that Kahr, Lossow and Seißer join the coup. Only when Ludendorff was brought in did the triumvirs go out onto the platform with Hitler and announce their cooperation. Kahr was to become “regent” of Bavaria on behalf of the monarchy. He later testified that he had agreed under duress and only for appearances. Documents from Kahr’s previously unknown papers, published in 2023, suggest, however, that he had been opposed to Hitler’s action from the outset but acted cautiously for several hours in order to regain his freedom of movement.

Late in the evening Ludendorff, trusting their word as officers, allowed the triumvirs to leave the beer hall. Lossow and Seißer immediately began organising resistance. Kahr hesitated longer, but at 2.55 a.m. the triumvirate announced that the declarations “extorted at gunpoint” were void and dissolved the NSDAP and the Bund Oberland and Reichskriegsflagge leagues. On the morning of 9 November Seißer’s state police stopped the putschists’ march with gunfire at the Feldherrnhalle. Four policemen, fifteen putschists and a passer-by were killed. Hitler held Kahr chiefly to blame for the defeat and from then on called him a traitor.

After the putsch

The putsch destroyed Kahr politically. The right regarded him as a traitor, the left and the democrats as an accomplice, and Berlin as a rebel. On 17 February 1924 he resigned as General State Commissioner. In March he gave evidence as a witness at the trial of the putschists, which ended in a lenient sentence. Hitler, aided by an indulgent judge, turned it into an indictment of the triumvirs, arguing that they had prepared the coup together with him and had backed out at the last moment. He was partly right, and the Bavarian authorities did everything they could to keep their involvement in the conspiracies of autumn 1923 from coming to light. A Landtag commission of inquiry, set up in July 1924 on the initiative of the Social Democrats, presented its findings only in 1928.

On 16 October 1924 Kahr became President of the Bavarian Administrative Court, as his father had once been. He held the office until the end of 1930, then retired and withdrew from politics altogether. When Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, Kahr was seventy and played no part in public life.

Death at Dachau

The Nazis, however, remembered 9 November. On the evening of 30 June 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler had Ernst Röhm and the SA leaders murdered along with many old opponents, including the former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, an SS detachment arrested Kahr at his flat in Munich. On the way to the Dachau concentration camp the SS men beat him. When the car drove onto the square in front of the camp headquarters, it was surrounded by a crowd of more than a hundred SS men chanting his name. On the orders of the commandant, Theodor Eicke, he was taken to the camp prison, where he was shot soon afterwards. The most likely killer is thought to be the prison supervisor, Johann Kantschuster. A legend quickly arose that Kahr’s body had been found hacked to pieces with pickaxes in the marshes near Dachau, and it even found its way into the scholarly literature. In reality his body, like those of others murdered in the camp, was cremated in Munich, and the urn was buried in the Nordfriedhof (Northern Cemetery).

It is not known whether Eicke acted on Hitler’s explicit order. Werner Best, head of the Munich office of the SS Security Service, claimed after the war that he had been ordered only to arrest Kahr and that the SS men at Dachau had killed him on their own initiative. The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg wrote in his diary that atonement for 9 November 1923 had come at last and that Kahr had met a “long-deserved fate”. On 3 July the government declared the killings of those days to be “lawful self-defence of the state”, and the Munich public prosecutor’s office closed the investigation into Kahr’s death because “no criminal offence had been committed”. The German press passed over his death in silence. Abroad, the killing of an old man who had been out of politics for years was seen as a particularly repugnant act of revenge.

Significance

Kahr was not a Nazi, and his vision of the future – monarchical, Bavarian and Catholic-conservative – had little in common with Hitler’s. That is precisely why he illustrates so well the mechanism that brought Hitler to power and then led to war. As premier and as commissioner, Kahr made Bavaria a refuge for the republic’s enemies, tolerated paramilitary gangs, expelled Jews and ignored laws that protected the state. He believed that the radicals could be used against the left and against Berlin and then kept in check. When Hitler slipped out of his control, Kahr stopped him, but neither he nor the Bavarian courts could bring themselves to punish the putschists with full severity. Ten years later the conservatives in Berlin made a similar calculation, convinced that Hitler in government would be their tool. Kahr, murdered at Dachau, was among the first of such conservatives to discover how badly they had been mistaken.