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Review Notices : Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch. By Harold J. Gordon, Jr. Princeton, New Jersey and London: Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press. 1972. xii + 666 pp. £9.75 (paperback £4.50)

Gordon’s book is a detailed study of the events leading up to, and the main actors involved in, the ’Beer Hall’ putsch of 1923. The preface makes explicit the major questions which the author proposes to answer concerning the reasons why Hitler and his party rose from a minor position in the Racist Movement, one group among several, to become after the putsch the unchallenged leaders of the radical right-wing; and the significance which the putsch had, as an event, for a general analysis of power in the Weimar Republic. Though, except in the relatively brief final chapter, most of these questions are answered more by implication than otherwise, they do lend coherence and an analytic significance to an extremely detailed narrative which, because of its detail, would otherwise necessarily have been far less comprehensible to the reader. The book is divided into three parts: the political context in which the putsch was planned; the putsch itself; and the consequential ’New Political Milieu’ which resulted from its failure. The opening discussion of post-war Bavarian politics and the multiplicity of contending factions is especially well-written, and is the more useful for not overemphasizing the pre-putsch status of the NSDAP: ’It was important less because of its size and power than because of it, nature and potential. Most of all, it was important because it was a catalyst....’ In the second section, Gordon focuses on the appointment of Kahr as Commissioner as the precipitating factor which, combined with the economic situation, led Hitler from political sniping at the Bavarian government to an outright attempt at its replacement by force. The blunders and ineptitudes of the NSDAP and its allies (as well as those of its enemies) are clearly revealed. Given this lack of political and tactical finesse, the putsch was doomed to failure from the beginning, but it had taken place, and the third section of the book assesses the effects of the events of November