The images and the entire text used on this and all other USMBOOKS web pages are the copyrighted property of USM Inc.  Those images and the text may be used by others ONLY AFTER completion of a formal international licensing agreement and payment of a licensing fee! It is therefore, illegal for anyone to take any of the material found on USMBOOKS.com and use it for their own purposes without our written permission, irrespective of any excuse they may feel they have for doing so.

The photo above shows an identical newspaper in the well-illustrated 1939 Third Reich book Dokumente der Zeitgeschichte which features the Rehse Collection, the ephemeral archive of the Nazi Party.

Many readers will know that the Völkischer Beobachter or VB was among the first commercial acquisitions of the Nazi Party (1920) and was nicknamed the oldest Kampfblatt Adolf Hitlers or Adolf Hitler’s Oldest Battle Paper. In those early days it was printed by Buchgewerbehaus M. Müller & Sohn in Munich using letter-press (moveable type) printing technology and the impressions of the type letters can still be seen in the paper under the laminating on this nearly 100 year old example. Please note that below the date in the upper right hand corner of the front page, that the price of this newspaper on the newsstand in Munich was eight billion German Marks (ten billion Marks everywhere else)!

It is a full-size, four-page authentic letter-press printed 98 year old example of the very newspaper in which the Nazis proclaimed their ill-fated take-over of the government of Germany, and was the specific reason the police shut down the Völkischer Beobachter printing plant and seized every issue of this newspaper they could find. This specific example of the newspaper escaped all efforts of the police, was folded up and hidden away in Munich until it was discovered and bought there many decades later, in the early 1990s. This is NOT an offset printing replica or modern reprint of the rare 1923 issue! It is an 98 year old original from which the masthead eagle and swastika was cut out by the person or entity that saved it to prevent its being seized by the police. We had this newspaper laminated shortly after we bought it decades ago or it would no longer exist at all!

As mentioned above, this original 4-page example of the 9 November 1923 Völkischer Beobachter was professionally laminated to preserve it (no creases or folds under the lamination). It is worth mentioning again that an early Third Reich owner cut out the illegal Nazi eagle and swastika logo from the masthead, leaving a tell-tale hole between the masthead words Völkischer and Beobachter. That in itself adds very substantially to the great historical value of this newspaper. You may never see another example offered for sale.

This item was certified authentic decades ago by authors and Third Reich ephemera experts Ray Cowdery and Josephine Cowdery, with their authentication stamp in the lower right margin of the back page beneath the laminating film.

This is the issue published for Friday 9 November 1923, the very day of the Nazi Putsch in Munich. When the attempt to take over the government on that day failed, the Nazi Party was banned, many of its members arrested, the swastika emblem was forbidden, and publication of the Völkischer Beobachter was shut down. On 26 February 1925, after Adolf Hitler’s release from Landsberg Prison and the Neugründung or ‘re-founding’ of the NSDAP, publication of the Völkischer Beobachter resumed in Bavaria. Later, National and Berlin editions were added, and after the reunification of Austria with Nazi Germany, a fourth edition, the Vienna edition followed.

This is a 100% original example of the Friday 9 November 1923 Munich edition of the official Nazi Party daily newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (National Observer), the historic day of the Hitler Putsch in Munich.

There is interesting advertising on the back page for typewriters, jewelry, books and magazines, swastika flags, car pennants and enamel Hakenkreuz pins and badges, men and women looking for jobs, and even an ‘independent and children loving woman” looking for a position as a maid after she lost her previous position due to her National Socialist beliefs. She emphasized those beliefs in this ad by placing bold swastikas at both ends of the word Dame (lady). Note there is also a very rare ad by watchmaker Emil Maurice, the very same early SS member who went on to become Adolf Hitler's first personal driver and a very controversial member of the Nazi Party.

At the top of the front page (of four pages) of this 17-½ x 21-¼ inch newspaper the headline proclaims the new National German Government in Munich, and explains the plans of Adolf Hitler and General Ludendorff to take over the entire German government elsewhere. Article headlines include “Victory of the Swastika”, “The Revolution of the People”, “The First Decrees of the National Government”. The “Proclamation to the German People” identifies the members of the new Nazi provisional national government replacing the German national government in Berlin. Another shocking but important announcement by the head of the New Finance Committee, Gottfried Feder, states that all privately owned banks would be nationalized and would be under government ownership and supervision going forward.

Other articles cover negotiations about the possible return of the German Crown Prince to Germany, British “war criminals”, Henry Ford battling the “Jewish world finance” in the US, gypsies in America, reparations to Yugoslavia, etc. In the advertising section on the back page there is even a Theater-Spielplan with paid advertising and the schedule for theater performances all over Munich.