Dorten, the �Rhenisch Republic� was proclaimed in the north of the occupation zone. Starting in November 1923, separatists occupied several towns in the Palatinate and also raised the green, white and red flag. On 10 November the rebels stormed the government building in Speyer.
The leader of the separatists was Franz Josef Heinz (1884�1924) from Orbis near Kirchheimbolanden, member of the district council for the Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP). He proclaimed the �Autonomous Republic of the Palatinate.� While the new government was getting itself established, resistance was already being organised on the opposite side of the Rhine. On the evening of 9 January 1924, 20 men who had crossed over the frozen Rhine stormed the �Wittelsbach Court,� a hotel-restaurant in Speyer, where Heinz was dining and shot him, an aide and an uninvolved third person. A monument still exists in the Speyer cemetery to two of the paid murderers who died in a shoot-out after the assassination. In 1929 and still under French occupation the town celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Protestation. The following year Speyer celebrated the 900th anniversary of the founding of the cathedral under Bavarian suzerainty.
The seizure of power and the "Gleichschaltung" (forcing into line) by the Nazis in 1933 also took place in Speyer. The Speyer Synagogue was burnt down 9 November 1938 (on the night known as Kristallnacht) and totally removed soon after. With the beginning of the �Thousand Year Reich�, once again the Jewish population was expelled from Speyer and most of them were killed. Speyer escaped the great bombing raids of World War II; one of the few bombs falling on the town destroyed the train station. Speyer was taken by the American army, but not before the bridge over the Rhine was blown up by the retreating German army. Until the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, Speyer was in the French occupation zone and once again became a garrison town of the French
