Hitler

and pondered the lessons to be learnt from the putsch.
    The debacle at the Bürgerbräukeller and its denouement next day at the Feldherrnhalle taught Hitler once and for all that an attempt to seize power in the face of opposition from the armed forces was doomed. He felt justified in his belief that propaganda and mass mobilization, not paramilitary putschism, would open the path to the ‘national revolution’. Consequently, he distanced himself from Röhm’s attempts to revitalize in new guise the Kampfbund and to build a type of people’s militia. Ultimately, the different approaches, as well as power-ambitions, of Hitler and Röhm, would lead to the murderous split in 1934. It would be going too far, however, to presume that Hitler had renounced the idea of a takeover of the state by force in favour of the ‘legal path’. Certainly, he subsequently had to profess a commitment to legality in order to involve himself in politics again. And later, electoral success appeared in any case the best strategy to win power. But the putschist approach was never given up. It continued, as the lingering problems with the SA would indicate, to coexist alongside the proclaimed ‘legal’ way. Hitler was adamant, however, that on any future occasion it could only be with, not against, the Reichswehr.
    Hitler’s experience was to lead to the last, and not least, of the lessons he would draw from his ‘apprenticeship years’: that to be the ‘drummer’ was not enough; and that to be more than that meant he needed not only complete mastery in his own movement but, above all, greater freedom from external dependencies, from competing groupings on the Right, from paramilitary organizations he could not fully control, from the bourgeois politicians and army figures who had smoothed his political rise, used him, then dropped him when it suited them.
    The ambivalence about his intended role after the ‘national revolution’ was still present in his comments during his trial. He insisted that he saw Ludendorff as the ‘military leader of the coming Germany’ and ‘leader of the coming great showdown’. But he claimed that he himself was ‘the political leader of this young Germany’. The precise division of labour had, he said, not been determined. In his closing address to the court, Hitler returned to the leadership question – though still in somewhat vague and indeterminate fashion. He referred to Lossow’s remarks to the court that during discussions in spring 1923 he had thought Hitler had merely wanted ‘as propagandist and awakener toarouse the people’. ‘How petty do small men think,’ went on Hitler. He did not see the attainment of a ministerial post as worthy of a great man. What he wanted, he said, was to be the destroyer of Marxism. That was his task. ‘Not from modesty did I want at that time to be the drummer. That is the highest there is. The rest is unimportant.’ When it came to it, he had demanded two things: that he should be given the leadership of the political struggle; and that the organizational leadership should go to ‘the hero … who in the eyes of the entire young Germany is called to it’. Hitler hinted – though did not state explicitly – that this was to have been Ludendorff. On the other hand, in his address to Kampfbund leaders a fortnight before the putsch, he had seemed to envisage Ludendorff as no more than the reorganizer of the future national army. Then again, the proclamation put up during the putsch itself over Hitler’s name as Reich Chancellor appeared to indicate that the headship of government was the position he foresaw for himself, sharing dictatorial power with Ludendorff as head of state (
Reichsverweser
, or regent).
    Whatever the ambivalence, real or simply tactical, still present in Hitler’s remarks at the trial, it soon gave way to clarity about his self-image. For in Landsberg the realization dawned on Hitler: he was not the ‘drummer’ after all; he was the predestined Leader himself.

6
Emergence of the Leader
    I
    The year that ought to have seen the spectre of Hitler banished for good brought instead – though this could scarcely be clearly seen at the time – the genesis of his later absolute pre-eminence in the
völkisch
movement and his ascendancy to supreme leadership. In retrospect, the year 1924 can be seen as the time when, like a phoenix arising from the ashes, Hitler could begin his emergence from the ruins of the broken and