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World War I to World War II

Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, life in Munich became very difficult, as the Allied blockade of Germany led to food and fuel shortages. During French air raids in 1916, three bombs fell on Munich.

In 1916, the 'Bayerische Motoren Werke' (BMW) produced its first aircraft engine in Munich. The stock cooperation BMW AG was founded in 1918, with Camillo Castiglioni owning one third of the share capital. In 1922 BMW relocated its headquarters to a factory in Munich.

After World War I, the city was at the centre of substantial political unrest. In November 1918, on the eve of the German revolution, Ludwig III of Bavaria and his family fled the city. After the murder of the first republican premier of Bavaria Kurt Eisner in February 1919 by Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. The November 1918 revolution ended the reign of the Wittelsbach in Bavaria. In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler described his political activism in Munich after November 1918 as the "Beginning of My Political Activity". Hitler called the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic "the rule of the Jews". In 1919 Bavaria Film was founded and in the 1920s Munich offered film makers an alternative to Germany's largest film studio, Babelsberg Studio.

In 1923 Gustav von Kahr was appointed Bavarian prime minister and immediately planned for the expulsion of all Jews who did not hold German citizenship. Chief of Police Ernst Pöhner and Wilhelm Frick openly indulged in antisemitism, while Bavarian judges praised people on the political right as patriotic for their crimes and handed down mild sentences. In 1923, Adolf Hitler and his supporters, who were concentrated in Munich, staged the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic and seize power. The revolt failed, resulting in Hitler's arrest and the temporary crippling of the Nazi Party (NSDAP).

Munich was chosen as capital for the Free State of Bavaria and acquired increased responsibility for administering the city itself and the surrounding districts. Offices needed to be built for bureaucracy, so a 12-story office building was erected in the southern part of the historic city centre in the late 1920s.

Munich again became important to the Nazis when they took power in Germany in 1933. The party created its first concentration camp at Dachau, 16 km (10 mi) north-west of the city. Because of its importance to the rise of National Socialism, Munich was referred to as the Hauptstadt der Bewegung ("Capital of the Movement").

The NSDAP headquarters and the documentation apparatus for controlling all aspects of life were located in Munich. Nazi organizations, such as the National Socialist Women's League and the Gestapo, had their offices along Brienner Straße and around the Königsplatz. The party acquired 68 buildings in the area and many Führerbauten (" Führer buildings") were built to reflect a new aesthetic of power. Construction work for the Führerbau and the party headquarters (known as the Brown House) started in September 1933. The Haus der Kunst (House of German Art) was the first building to be commissioned by Hitler. The architect Paul Troost was asked to start work shortly after the Nazis had seized power because "the most German of all German cities" was left with no exhibition building when in 1931 the Glass Palace was destroyed in an arson attack. The Red Terror that supposedly preceded Nazi control in Munich was detailed in Nazi publications; seminal accounts are that of Rudolf Schricker Rotmord über München published in 1934, and Die Blutchronik des Marxismus in Deutschland by Adolf Ehrt and Hans Roden.

In 1930 Feinkost Käfer was founded in Munich, the Käfer catering business is now a world leading party service.

The city was the site where the 1938 Munich Agreement signed between the United Kingdom and the Third French Republic with Nazi Germany as part of the Franco-British policy of appeasement. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain assented to the German annexation of Czechoslovakia 's Sudetenland in the hopes of satisfying Hitler's territorial expansion.

The Munich-Riem Airport was completed in October 1939.

On 8 November 1939, shortly after the Second World War had begun, Georg Elser planted a bomb in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, who held a political party speech. Hitler, however, had left the building minutes before the bomb went off. By mid 1942 the majority of Jews living in Munich and the suburbs had been deported.

During the war, Munich was the location of multiple forced labour camps, including two Polenlager camps for Polish youth, and 40 subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp, in which men and women of various nationalities were held. With up to 17,000 prisoners in 1945, the largest subcamp of Dachau was the Munich-Allach concentration camp.

Munich was the base of the White Rose, a student resistance movement. The group had distributed leaflets in several cities and following the 1943 Battle of Stalingrad members of the group stenciled slogans such as "Down with Hitler" and "Hitler the Mass Murderer" on public buildings in Munich. The core members were arrested and executed after Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans Scholl were caught distributing leaflets on Munich University campus calling upon the youth to rise against Hitler.

The city was heavily damaged by the bombing of Munich in World War II, with 71 air raids over five years. US troops liberated Munich on 30 April 1945.