Jennifer’s Reviews > Weimar Germany: The Death of a Democracy > Status Update

Monday, 5 November 1923, the price of a loaf of rye bread rose overnight from 25 billion marks to a reported 140 billion. The rumor… spread quickly that the price rise was caused by the Ostjuden…At around noon, encouraged by anti-Semitic agitators, dozens of young men began looting Jewish-owned shops and houses in the Scheunenviertel district around Alexanderplatz

Following a riot in Hamburg in October, after a friend of his was beaten up, the banker Max Warburg fled the city and went into hiding because his name was being shouted out, along with slogans likeStrike down the Jews' and 'Blood must flow, Jewish blood'.

There had been many pogroms and anti-Jewish riots across Germany as the economy crashed through inflation. In Bremen at the start of 1923, scores of Jews were attacked and seriously injured. A Jewish shopkeeper in the small East Prussian town of Neidenburg (now Polish Nidzica) was murdered openly on the streets by a gang of youths, and passers-by did nothing.

First their synagogues or churches should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it. Secondly their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed.
Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies (1543)

One engineering company in East Prussia printed 500,000-mark 'notes' with the helpful instruction: 'If a briquette of coal costs more than my face... stick me in the stove in its place.'

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace
(1919)

During the first six months of passive resistance, the Reich government was spending around a trillion marks a month funding unemployed workers and otherwise bankrupt businesses. In July 1923 the figure went up to around 11.8 trillion marks on wages in the Ruhr and 3.7 trillion more on guarantees to industrial companies.

Nearly 700,000 government and regional state employees were laid off between 1923 and 1924
- a huge shock to the Mittelstand, who thought they had jobs for life. Around 100,000 white-collar jobs in banking disappeared. Tax revenues fell alarmingly. Six months into the occupation, taxes amounted to just 1 per cent of total government spending.

Economists at the Reichsbank and at the Bank of England later calculated that at least half the inflation in 1923 was caused by maintaining passive resistance for seven months. The policy as outlined by Chancellor Cuno was that nobody in the Ruhr should perform any work that would help the French.

There was one voice from the Far Right that came out against unity. Adolf Hitler, who by then was the confirmed leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), mocked the idea of a
'unified national front' in response to the occupation.