Ben Wilson
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And in retaliation, France and Belgium had occupied the Ruhr Valley, Germany's industrial heartland.
The German government responded by telling workers to go on strike, passive resistance, and simply printed money to pay them while they weren't working.
The result was the most catastrophic hyperinflation in modern economic history.
By the time of the Beer Hall Putsch, November 1923, a single US dollar, one US dollar, was worth 4.2 trillion German marks.
People were literally wheelbarrowing cash to the bakery to buy a single loaf of bread.
Total economic devastation.
Pensions are wiped out.
The middle class is annihilated.
The country is in chaos.
And Adolf Hitler, who is now the head of the fledgling National Socialist German Workers Party, the NSDAP,
You don't know how long this is going to last, but the country is in real crisis and people are looking for new solutions to this terrible crisis.
They're in a mood of, well, whatever got us here is not working.
We're open to new things.
And so he believed that he had a message that could rescue Germany from this national humiliation.
And his model for this moment was Benito Mussolini, the Italian soon to be dictator, who had marched on Rome just a year before and had taken power.
Hitler believed he could do something similar.
He believed the moment had arrived.