The army we have trained is growing from day to day, from hour to hour. At this very time I hold to the proud hope that the hour will come when these wild bands will be formed into battalions, the battalions into regiments, the regiments into divisions, that the old cockade will be rescued from the mud, that the old banners will wave on ahead, that reconciliation will be achieved before the eternal judgment seat of God which we are ready to face. Then from our bones and our graves will speak the voice of that court which alone is empowered to sit in judgment upon us all. For not you, gentlemen, will deliver judgment on us; that judgment will be pronounced by the eternal court of history, which will arbitrate the charge that has been made against us. I already know what verdict you will hand down. But that other court will not ask us: did you or did you not commit high treason? That court will judge us, will judge the Quartermaster-general of the former army, will judge his officers and soldiers, as Germans who wanted the best for their people and their Fatherland, who were willing to fight and to die. May you declare us guilty a thousand times; the goddess of the Eternal Court will smile and gently tear in two the brief of the State Prosecutor and the verdict of the court; for she acquits us.
The verdict handed down by the Munich Volksgericht was not so far removed from the verdict of “the eternal court of history” that Hitler had invoked. The presiding judge had a hard time cajoling the three lay judges into passing any guilty verdict at all; he had to assure them that Hitler would certainly be pardoned before serving his full sentence. The reading of the verdict was a real event for Munich society. The courtroom was crowded with spectators ready to applaud this troublemaker with so many friends in high places. The verdict once more laid stress on the “pure patriotic motives and honorable intentions” of the defendant, but sentenced him to a minimum of five years in prison. However, he would become eligible for parole after six months. Ludendorff was acquitted. The law called for the deportation of any troublesome foreigner, but the court decided to waive this in the case of a man “who thinks and feels in such German terms as Hitler.” This decision called forth a storm of approving bravos from the audience. When the judges had filed out, Brückner raised the cry: “It’s up to us now!” Hitler appeared at a window of the court building to show himself to the cheering crowd. Bouquets of flowers were piling up in the room behind him. The state had once again lost the match.
Nevertheless, it seemed as though Hitler’s period of ascent was over. To be sure, immediately after November 9, there had been mass demonstrations in Munich in his favor. The elections to the Bavarian Landtag as well as to the Reichstag brought sizable gains for the völkisch forces. Yet the party, or the front that had taken its place after it was banned, began to show the effects of Hitler’s absence. It would seem that only his personal magic and Machiavellian gifts held it together. It broke down into jealous, bitterly hostile factions of little significance. Drexler was already accusing Hitler of “destroying the party for good with his insane putsch.” The party had drawn its strength principally from general discontent; toward the end of 1923 this element was in somewhat shorter supply. Conditions in the country began to stabilize. The inflation was overcome, and the “happy years” of the so far ill-fated republic commenced. The events of November 9, though local in character, in a way represented the turning point in the larger drama of the Weimar Republic; they marked the end of the postwar period. The shots fired in front of the Feldherrnhalle seemed to introduce a new sobriety and draw the gaze of the nation away from dreams and delusions and back to reality.
For Hitler himself and the history of his party the debacle also proved a turning point, for the tactical and personal lessons he drew from it were to guide his entire future course. Later on, he would stage a memorial procession year after year, marching to the Königsplatz, where he called on the victims of that grim November day to rise from their bronze caskets and come to the last reveille. This may be explained not merely in terms of his love for theater, his penchant for turning historical event into political spectacle. It may also be seen as the act of a successful politician paying tribute to one of his most instructive experiences, indeed to “perhaps the greatest stroke of good luck” in his life, the “real birthday” of the party. For the first time the name of Hitler reached far beyond the boundaries of Bavaria. The party acquired martyrs, a legend, the romantic aura of persecuted loyalty, and the nimbus of stern resolve. “Let there be no mistake about it,” Hitler would stress in a later memorial address, “had we not acted then, I would never have been able… to found a revolutionary movement. People would have justifiably told me: you talk like all the others and you act as little as they.”
At the same time, Hitler’s dropping to the ground before the guns of the police at the Feldherrnhalle had clarified once and for all his relationship to government. The events of November 23 taught him that it was hopeless to attempt to conquer a modern state by violent means. His struggle for power would succeed only if he based it on the Constitution, he concluded. Of course, this did not mean any real deference to the Constitution on Hitler’s part; rather, it meant cloaking his illegal acts in the guise of legality. In subsequent years he left no doubt that all his protestations of loyalty to the Constitution were valid only for this interim period; he spoke openly of the time of reckoning that would follow. As early as September 24, 1923, Scheubner-Richter had stated in a memorandum: “The nationalist revolution must not precede the acquisition of political power; rather, control over the nation’s police constitutes the prerequisite to the nationalist revolution.” Hitler transformed himself into a man of strict law and order. Thus he won the good opinion of dignitaries and powerful institutions, and veiled his revolutionary intentions with untiring protestations of how well he was determined to behave and how dearly he cherished tradition. He muted his earlier aggressive tone, only now and then dropping into it for the shock effect. For he purported to seek not the defeat but the co-operation of the state. This pose deceived many observers and interpreters, and continued to deceive them. “Adolphe Légalité,” as some of his witty contemporaries dubbed him, could well be taken for a boring, reactionary petty bourgeois.
Hitler’s new strategy called for a changed relationship to the Reichswehr. He attributed his defeat on November 9 in no small part to his inability to win over the leaders of the army and the police. In his concluding words before the Munich court he already intimates the goal of his future tactics : “The hour will come,” he cried to the courtroom, “when the Reichswehr will be on our side.” With this goal in mind, he firmly consigned his own party army to a secondary role. But at the same time he freed his storm troops from their dependency on the army; the SA was to be neither a part nor a rival of the Reichswehr.
Hitler emerged from the defeat at the Feldherrnhalle, therefore, with a good deal more than a clearly formulated tactical recipe. His relationship to politics in general had changed. Up to this time he had distinguished himself by his categorical refusal to compromise, by his radical alternatives. He had behaved “like a force of nature,” had thought of politics—drawing his model from the battle fronts—as storming the enemy positions, breaking through the lines, fighting at close quarters, and coming out in the end either victorious or dead. Only now did Hitler seem to grasp the meaning and the opportunities of the political game, the tactical dodges, the sham compromises and maneuvers by which one played for time. Only now did he progress beyond his emotionally overcharged, naively demagogic, “artistic” relationship to politics. The image of the agitator carried away by events and by his own impulsive reactions was replaced by that of the cool and methodical technician of power. The unsuccessful putsch of November 9 marks an important caesura: it concludes Hitler’s political apprenticeship. In fact, strictly speaking, it marks Hitler’s first real entry into politics.