"What [the historic inflation] meant was, over the previous 70 years as German families (very frugal) had accumulated savings, those savings were not worth a quarter pound of butter. And that all happened in a few months. The decimation of that. It was in the autumn of [1923] at the apogee of that inflation that a right wing military leader named Adolf Hitler tried to march on the city center in Munich, Bavaria in what became to be known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He had planned to take over the c