Born into a Protestant family of pastors and civil servants in 1862, Gustav Kahr began studying law at the University of Munich in 1881. Like his father, who later went on to become President of the Administrative Court, Kahr pursued a career in the civil service. He quickly made a name for himself as a young civil servant, not least due to his organizational skills: he established a positive reputation for himself by ensuring the efficient repair of damage caused by a severe hurricane in 1894, and later organized a much-acclaimed folklore exhibition in Kaufbeuren in 1902.
He was soon appointed to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior. Now a senior civil servant, Kahr was responsible for the construction sector, but he also acted as a consultant to the emerging science museum in Munich, the Deutsches Museum, as well as being involved in the young Heimatschutz movement dedicated to the preservation of landscape and traditional culture. This was followed by a further career boost when he was appointed State Councilor in 1912, his highest position up until that point. As deputy to the Minister of the Interior and a top civil servant, he now exercised considerable political influence; this was expanded further in the course of the First World War as a result of staff shortages and new administrative responsibilities. After a change of minister in 1917, Kahr was appointed the new District President of Upper Bavaria, the position he had been striving to attain.
One year later in this role he experienced the November Revolution. As a committed monarchist, Kahr saw this as sealing the defeat of the German Reich and the fall of the kingdom of Bavaria, while as a civil servant the collapse of the constitutional order in particular was an almost traumatic experience for him. He attributed the riots of the Munich Soviet Republic to the fact that the notion of democracy had seen a breakthrough in November 1918: in his view, the introduction of the parliamentary majority principle was solely to blame for the revolutionary upheavals. “Free rein for screamers” – this is how Kahr characterized the democratic order in his memoirs (Kahr, Erinnerungen, p. 815). As such, it was an obvious step for him to unite all those groups that were in favor of “preserving the state” in a “non-partisan” organization in 1919. He vigorously promoted the emerging militias, giving rise to a constellation that ultimately helped him gain the state premiership:
when the militias were involved in bringing down the Social Democrat-led cabinet under Johannes Hoffmann in connection with the Kapp Putsch, no leading representative of the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) was prepared to take over the government. Georg Heim and Georg Escherich finally persuaded Kahr to take this step since he was a driving force in the background, thereby ushering in the era of politically inexperienced state premiers who had previously been civil servants. Kahr was initially only prepared to take on this office for a transitional period, but after the bourgeois parties won the elections in June 1920 he decided to remain.
Increasingly seizing the political initiative, Kahr now began to turn Bavaria into the Reich’s ‘cell of order’, i.e. a bulwark against “Bolshevism”. This particularly benefited right-wing extremist groups such as the emerging NSDAP: as opponents of the political left, the latter could count on broad tolerance of their activities. In this connection, there is also evidence that the State Premier actively supported attempts by prosecuted Kapp putschists to escape the justice system.
However, the key issue during Kahr’s term of office was Bavaria’s stubborn resistance to the demands of the victorious powers that the militias should be dissolved. In an effort to preserve them, the cabinet long rejected all offers of mediation from the imperial government. But when Kahr was forced to yield to pressure in May 1921 and agreed to disarmament, the coalition began to doubt him – even though the actual enforcement of disarmament was no more than a sham. In September 1921 the BVP parliamentary group was finally no longer prepared to support Kahr’s confrontational policies: when a negotiation paper on the Reich’s Republic Protection Ordinance was adopted almost unanimously, the State Premier was prompted to resign immediately.
This hardly diminished Kahr’s de facto influence, however: although moderate forces distanced themselves from him when he was back in office as District President, this was compensated for by a boost in support among those on the right-wing, who celebrated his unwillingness to compromise as strength of character. As a result, Kahr went even further in identifying himself with the role of a confidant of the patriotic movement, which he saw as bringing together Bavarian conservatives and German nationalists – as well as some of the National Socialists. From then on he made the most of every opportunity to pursue this project, which was linked to leadership ambitions: initiating the funeral ceremony for the last royal couple in November 1921 and organizing a reception for Hindenburg in August 1922, he was responsible for pompous demonstrations of “patriotic” Bavaria. But the much-vaunted united front began to crumble by the fall of 1922: several organizations withdrew their allegiance from the nationalist organizations, instead joining the emerging Fighting League (Deutscher Kampfbund) under Hitler’s leadership. Although Kahr tried to counteract this with more frequent public appearances, he was unable to put a stop to the process.
As such, the position of the former State Premier was already weakened when the government appointed him State Commissioner General on September 26, 1923. Wielding powers not provided for in the constitution, Kahr was to prevent the collapse of public order in the face of hyperinflation and the risk of upheaval – so the Bavarian government hoped. But these hopes were quickly dashed when Kahr sought to exploit his new powers to pursue more far-reaching plans: subject to certain conditions, he was even prepared to actively promote the establishment of a dictatorial imperial government, immediately causing Bavaria to become embroiled in several serious conflicts with the Reich. With Kahr reluctant to take the final “plunge” from the point of view of the combat units, Hitler decided to stage an open coup of his own – the Munich Putsch.
At a large-scale Kahr rally at the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler took the opportunity to swiftly proclaim himself the political leader of the Reich, having forced the State Commissioner General to subscribe to the enterprise prior to the meeting. But as soon as he was free again, Kahr retracted and had the uprising violently suppressed the following day.
As one of those responsible for the escalation, Kahr had now made an enemy of almost all political camps, leading to his resignation as State Commissioner General in February. His less than credible behavior at Hitler’s trial further diminished his already badly tarnished reputation. While this meant he could no longer pursue a political career, Kahr was at least able to continue working in the civil service, holding the office of President of the Administrative Court until his retirement in 1930.
The National Socialists never forgot his “betrayal of 1923”, however, and took brutal revenge after coming to power in 1933: in the course of the so-called ‘Röhm affair’, Kahr was murdered by the SS near Dachau Concentration Camp on June 30,1934.
