‘Overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time… There now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence.’
‘And so it had all been in vain… Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland?… In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.’
Hitler in Mein Kampf, on his feelings at
the beginning and end of the First World War
I
The First World War made Hitler possible. Without the experience of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution the failed artist and social drop-out would not have discovered what to do with his life by entering politics and finding his métier as a propagandist and beerhall demagogue. And without the trauma of war, defeat and revolution, without the political radicalization of German society that this trauma brought about, the demagogue would have been without an audience for his raucous, hate-filled message. The legacy of the lost war provided the conditions in which the paths of Hitler and the German people began to cross. Without the war, a Hitler on the Chancellor’s seat that had been occupied by Bismarck would have been unthinkable.
Hitler, it was once commonplace to presume (at least outside Germany itself), was the logical consequence of deep-seated flaws in the German national character, the culmination of a malformed history, misshapen through a propensity for authoritarianism, militarism and racism. There was never much to be said for such a crude misreading of the past. To be taken far more seriously was the view that the failure of liberalism following the Revolution of 1848, when pressure for sweeping constitutional reform eventually collapsed in disarray, had left the forces of authoritarianism, represented above all by the pre-industrial military-landholding caste, with unshaken dominance and prepared to use any methods, however unscrupulous, to defend their position of power against the pressures for democratization. Hitler’s triumph was accordingly traced back to the legacy of Bismarck’s ‘revolution from above’ – political transformation through war and Unification that left social bases of power intact – producing continuities that linked the Second Reich with the Third, straddling the ill-fated Weimar experiment of a democracy without democrats. The explanation of Hitler was located in a society whose path to modernity had been peculiar, a ‘faulted nation’1 whose institutions, structures, power-relations and mentalities had remained pre-modern, at odds with the swift encroachment of the modern world, the rapidity of competing (and menacing) modern economic, cultural, and political forces.2
Much of this seems plausible, even persuasive. But as it stands the argument is too neat, too self-contained, ultimately too simple to be compelling. For it has become much clearer that Germany’s social and economic development in the late nineteenth century were far more similar to those of Britain and France – the countries with which it has so often been contrasted – than was once thought. Its problems, by and large, were those of a modern, highly developed, culturally advanced, industrial society. Certainly, Germany encountered tensions in coping with rapid economic and social change. Some were profound. But few were peculiar to Germany, though they did often find acute expression there.
The constitutional framework of the German Reich did, on the other hand, differ sharply in key respects from that of Britain and France, whose diversely structured but relatively flexible parliamentary democracies offered better potential to cope with the social and political demands arising from rapid economic change. In Germany, the growth of party-political pluralism, which found its representation in the Reichstag, had not been translated into parliamentary democracy. Powerful vested interests – big landholders (most of them belonging to the aristocracy), the officer corps of the army, the upper echelons of the state bureaucracy, even most of the Reichstag parties – continued to block this. The Reich Chancellor remained the appointee of the Kaiser, who could make or break him whatever the respective strength of Reichstag parties. The government itself stood above the Reichstag, independent (at least in theory) of party politics. Whole tracts of policy, especially on foreign and military matters, lay outside parliamentary control. Power was jealously guarded, in the face of mounting pressure for radical change, by the beleaguered forces of the old order. Some of these, increasingly fearful of revolution, were prepared even to contemplate war as a way of holding on to their power and fending off the threat of socialism.
It is, perhaps, less obvious than was once thought that the very real constitutional and political problems faced by Germany on the eve of the First World War would have been insurmountable without the massive gamble of a war aimed at saving the old order. The prospect, without war, of a gradualist conversion into a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy was not completely illusory.3 But a betting man would probably not have wagered too much on this as the likely outcome. It is hard to see how a gradual change to parliamentarism – something ultimately conceded by Germany’s rulers only when the war had been given up as lost – could have come about when the constitution was so inflexible and the resistance to democratization among powerful groups so entrenched. The rigidly authoritarian political system was ill-equipped to introduce the fundamental reform of its own structures.4
In short, Germany in the years before the calamity of 1914–18 was in some – though only some – ways more ‘normal’ than was once thought. The Second Reich was not the Third Reich waiting to happen. At the same time, even features common to much of Europe had a flavour or colouring shaped by the particular political culture and social fabric of the German nation-state. While it took the catastrophe of a first world war to produce conditions in which a Hitler was even thinkable, a specifically German political culture that had emerged in the Wilhelmine era (or at any rate strains of it which, however, had before 1914 by no means been dominant) provided the soil in which the seeds of the ideas that National Socialism would later harvest could germinate and then sprout rapidly. Even here, the developments were often shaded rather than clear-cut.5 It would be a mistake to present selectively a catalogue of extremist opinions and attitudes as if they were representative of a whole society. But just as it is a distortion to read into German history an inexorable pattern of development culminating in Hitler, so it would be misleading to imply that Hitler was a bolt from a clear blue sky, that nothing in Germany’s development had prepared the ground for the catastrophe of Nazism; and dangerous to presume that a single individual had so hypnotized the nation that he had driven its otherwise healthy progress off the rails.6
It was more than anything else the ways in which nationalism had developed in late nineteenth-century Germany that provided the set of ideas that, if often in distorted – even perverted – form, offered the potential for Nazism’s post-war appeal. In particular, the years between 1909 and 1914 saw a strengthening and regrouping of the radical Right that formed a bridge spanning the war to the post-war political world.7 Crucial to the character of German nationalism was the pervasive sense, present already long before the war, of incomplete unity, of persistent, even widening division and conflict within the nation. What, in the changed conditions after the war, Hitler was able most signally to exploit was the belief that pluralism was somehow unnatural or unhealthy in a society, that it was a sign of weakness, and that internal division and disharmony could be suppressed and eliminated, to be replaced by the unity of a national community. The desire for national unity to supplant internal dissension and overcome division was a hallmark of all shadings of nationalist feeling in Imperial Germany. The very superficiality of the unity that Bismarck had constitutionally forged in 1871 and superimposed upon a highly fragmented society – divided by religion, class, and region – encouraged the deliberate ‘nationalisation of the masses’,8 not least through the manufacture of a sense of nationhood which was exclusivist, ringed off against those who did not ‘belong’ to it. Leading historian Heinrich von Treitschke, a prominent spokesman of a sharpened, aggressive national consciousness, an integral nationalism excluding ‘enemies of the Reich’, was one of many well-known intellectuals who helped inordinately to strengthen such ideas among the educated bourgeoisie.9 ‘The Jews are our misfortune’ was among the influential sentiments to which Treitschke lent his weighty name.10 Poles and Jews, Catholics, and especially Social Democrats were all targeted ‘outsiders’ under Bismarck. But the discrimination and repression backfired. The Kulturkampf – Bismarck’s attack on Catholic education, institutions and clergy in Germany during the 1870s – substantially strengthened Catholicism, while the twelve years of the Socialist Law, which imposed bans on socialist associations, meetings and publications, produced a greatly enlarged Social Democratic Party committed to a Marxist programme. By the eve of the First World War, following the 1912 Reichstag election, the SPD was easily the largest party in the Reichstag, provoking alarm and deepening hatred in the upper and middle classes. By this time, the largest socialist movement in Europe, whose Marxist programme sought the demolition of the existing state, stood opposed by a highly aggressive integral nationalism aiming to destroy Marxist socialism.
That the German nation-state arose from the unification of a number of individual states further encouraged a sense of nationhood which had gained definition from culture and language rather than attaching itself to and emerging from the institutions of a pre-existing unitary state as in the case of England or France. This promoted an ethnic definition of nationhood which could easily slide over (though it by no means always did so) into forms of racism, especially when, as was the case in Germany as elsewhere in Europe, nationalism blended into imperialism and was directed aggressively outwards as well as defensively inwards, voicing shrill demands for a colonial ‘place in the sun’.
All nationalisms need their myths. In this case, a powerful one was the ‘Reich myth’.11 The very name of the new nation-state, ‘German Reich’, evoked for many the mystical claim to reinstate the first Reich of Frederick Barbarossa – sleeping, according to the saga, in his holy mountain beneath the Kyffhäuser in Thuringia until the rebirth of his medieval Reich. The new aesthetics of nationalism called for the continuity to be symbolized in the gigantic monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I, mainly funded by veterans’ associations, erected on the Kyffhäuser in 1896.12 The ‘Reich myth’ linked national unity and the ending of division to heroic deeds and individual greatness, interpreting previous German history as the prelude to the ultimate attainment of national unity. Schoolbooks glorified the exploits of a pantheon of national heroes, filled with warriors reaching back to the legendary Hermann the Cherusker, the name attached to Arminius, the Germanic leader who inflicted a crushing defeat on three Roman legions in 9 AD. His colossal monument in the Teutoburger Wald, and that of Germania on the Niederwald Monument near Rüdesheim on the Rhine, which so impressed Hitler when he saw it for the first time in 1914, en route for the battlefields of Flanders,13 gave granite expression to the ‘Reich myth’. And once the foundation of the German Reich itself passed from current politics into history, and its architect’s contentious career had been peremptorily ended by the new Kaiser, Bismarck himself became the focal point of a cult which eulogized him as the greatest hero of all, statesman and warrior combined. Hundreds of ‘Bismarck Towers’, initiated by student bodies and erected the length and breadth of the country, represented the national hero as the intended symbol of nation, state and people.14 And the more, after Bismarck’s departure, the Reichstag – initially, together with the monarchy, the embodiment of national unity – came to be seen as the barometer of national division, a house of squabbling politicians and competing parties, the more there appeared to be the need for a new Bismarck, a new national hero.
A claim to such a role was initially advanced by no less than the Kaiser himself. The caesaristic tendencies, increasingly a feature of German nationalism towards the end of the nineteenth century, were deliberately furthered after 1890 by the promotion of a Hohenzollern cult, focused on the new and ambitious Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and intended to represent in his person ‘the two images of the governing statesman and the sleeping Hero-Kaiser’.15 The new Kaiser, it was implied, would lead Germany to external greatness and eliminate divisions within. Increasingly shrill voices on the nationalist Right demanded nothing less. However, the gap between words and deeds was too great. Disappointment and disillusionment in the Kaiser both helped promote the Bismarck cult and led to increasingly vociferous nationalist opposition, its most radical voices demanding the extension of German power and greatness through expansion and conquest of inferior peoples.
The assertiveness of German nationalism at the turn of the century was in no small measure aggression born of fear – not just the traditional antagonism towards the French and the growing rivalry with Great Britain, but also the presumed threat seen in the Slavic east, and, internally, the perceived looming menace of Social Democracy, and culturally pessimistic worries about national degeneration and decline.
In a climate shaped by an often irrational fear of enemies, within and without, who allegedly threatened the future of the nation, it is not surprising that alongside extreme anti-Marxism, racial ideologies – not just antisemitism, but social Darwinism and eugenics – should increasingly gain currency. None was confined to Germany, of course. Social Darwinism was influential in Britain; the classic lands of racial antisemitism around the turn of the century were Austria-Hungary and France; the region of the most vicious physical persecution of Jews, Russia.16 But in the German context the racial ideas of the populist radical Right, taken over in good part by conservatives, acquired a level of backing that necessarily posed a substantial threat to individuals and minorities.17 The supremacy of the nation over the individual, the stress on order and authority, opposition to internationalism and equality, became increasingly pronounced features of German national feeling.18 With them grew demands for ‘racial consciousness’, and antagonism towards the tiny Jewish minority, overwhelmingly seeking assimilation, increased.19
Jews could be described, as they were in a widely-read text of the 1890s, as ‘poison for us and will have to be treated as such’, and, in increasingly common bacteriological language, as a ‘pest and a cholera’.20 Such extreme views were by no means representative. Most Jews in Imperial Germany could feel reasonably sanguine about the future, could regard antisemitism as a throwback to a more primitive era that was on the way out.21 But they underestimated both the pernicious ways in which modern racial antisemitism differed from archaic forms of persecution of Jews, however vicious, in its uncompromising emphasis upon biological distinctiveness, its links with assertive nationalism, and the ways it could be taken over and exploited in new types of political mass movements. And they were too ready to overlook the appeal of racist classics like Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the 19th Century), a bestseller since its appearance in 1900, and Theodor Fritsch’s popularizing ‘catechism for antisemites’, his Handbuch der Judenfrage (Handbook of the Jewish Question), which went through twenty-five editions within seven years of publication in 1887.22 While purely antisemitic parties proved too narrowly focused and were in decline in the late Imperial era, racial antisemitism had by then been increasingly taken over by parties, associations, pressure-groups, student unions and interest organizations, and intermingled with the rest of the package of anti-Marxist, imperialist, militaristic, radical nationalism.
The eugenics movement, originating in England and finding followers in Scandinavia and America, but gaining new levels of support in Germany, fomented the fears, bordering on paranoia, of racial degeneration resulting from a declining birthrate among the better social groups and a rise in the proportion of ‘inferiors’ within the population. There was also growing resentment at the cost of supporting those seen as a burden on society – the ‘worthless lives’ of antisocials, the handicapped, ‘inferiors’, and especially the mentally sick whose alleged uninhibited sexual drive was regarded as a further stimulus to racial degeneration. It was in this context that the idea of sterilizing certain categories of ‘degenerates’ – an idea already described by one doctor in 1889 as ‘a sacred duty of the state’ – found growing support in medical circles.23
Above all, national assertiveness derived from the sense of greatness attained through conquest and based on cultural superiority – the feeling that Germany was a great and expanding power, and that a great power needed and deserved an empire. Germany had been late on the act in the imperialist carve-up in Africa. The bits and pieces of territory it had acquired in the 1880s could by no means match its pretensions, least of all satisfy the growing clamour on the Right that the rapid growth of population had left Germany a ‘people without space’.24 The demand for colonial and commercial empire built into the slogan of ‘Weltpolitik’ was in essence little different to the claims of British and French imperialists. But alongside ‘Weltpolitik’ grew ideas of territorial expansion into eastern Europe at the expense of Slav ‘Untermenschen’ – ideas voiced ever more shrilly by some of the most important nationalist pressure-groups and increasingly entering the ideology of the German Conservative Party.25 These pressure-groups, crucial to the dissemination of nationalist, imperialist, and racist ideas of all varieties, offered new possibilities of propaganda, agitation, and extra-parliamentary opposition. The largest, the Navy League, founded in 1898 to push for the building of a large battle fleet, had over a million members and associates by 1914.26 The propaganda output – newpapers, pamphlets, even films – of such organizations was massive.27While the Navy League could be said to have been mainstream in its nationalist message, the Eastern Marches Association (Ostmarkenverein) and, especially, the Pan-German League were, if smaller, more radical and more racist. The former advocated harsh measures of legal discrimination in a racial struggle against the Poles in the Prussian border provinces.28 The Pan-Germans, influential beyond their numbers and with a high leaven of teachers and academics in their ranks, were the most radical of all in their ideology built up of völkisch nationalism and racist imperialism, embedded in a Manichaean ‘world-view’ of a struggle between good and evil – ideas which anticipated a good part of the Nazi ‘world-view’ – and an organization, though small, that formed a link to the huge Fatherland Party of 1917 and the post-war radical Right.29 The leader of the Pan-German League, Heinrich Claß, writing in 1912 under the pseudonym of Daniel Frymann, advocated in his polemical tract, Wenn ich der Kaiser wär (If I Were the Kaiser), franchise restrictions, press censorship, repressive laws against socialism, and anti-Jewish legislation as the basis of national renewal.30 Not least, given the widespread profound disappointment in the Kaiser, he demanded ‘a strong able leader’, whom ‘all who have remained unseduced by the teachings of ungerman democracy yearn for… because they know that greatness can only be brought about through the concentration of individual forces, which again can only be achieved by the subordination to a leader’.31 By the time the war began, Clatß’s book had gone through five editions – an indication that the ideas of the ‘new Right’, though still a minority, were falling increasingly on fertile ground in the years before Germany became enveloped in the European conflagration.32 This shift on the nationalist Right already before the war is important for an understanding of the radicalization that took place during the war itself, and the links with the rapid spread of völkisch politics immediately thereafter.33
On the eve of the First World War, Germany was certainly a state with some unattractive features – among them those of the unbalanced character sitting on the Imperial throne.34 But nothing in its development predetermined the path to the Third Reich. What happened under Hitler was not presaged in Imperial Germany. It is unimaginable without the experience of the First World War and what followed it.
II
Looking back just over a decade later, Hitler spoke of the fifteen months he spent in Munich before the war as ‘the happiest and by far the most contented’ of his life.35 The fanatical German nationalist exulted in his arrival in ‘a German city’, which he contrasted with the ‘Babylon of races’ that, for him, had been Vienna.36 He gave a number of reasons why he had left Vienna: bitter enmity towards the Habsburg empire for pro-Slav policies that were disadvantaging the German population; growing hatred for the ‘foreign mixture of peoples’ who were ‘corroding’ German culture in Vienna; the conviction that Austria-Hungary was living on borrowed time, and that its end could not come soon enough; and the intensified longing to go to Germany, to where his ‘childhood secret desires and secret love’ had drawn him.37 The last sentiments were plainly romanticized. Otherwise, the feelings were genuine enough. And of his determination not to fight for the Habsburg state there can be no doubt. This is what Hitler meant when he said he left Austria ‘primarily for political reasons’.38 But the implication that he had left as a form of political protest was disingenuous and deliberately misleading. As we have already noted, the prime and immediate reason he crossed the border into Germany was very tangible: the Linz authorities were hot on his trail for evasion of military service.
The city to which Hitler became ‘more attached… than to any other spot of earth in this world’39 was, in the years before the First World War, alongside Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, one of Europe’s most vibrant cultural capitals, a hotbed of creativity and artistic innovation. Schwabing, the pulsating centre of Munich’s artistic and bohemian life, drew artists, painters, and writers from all over Germany, and from other parts of Europe as well. They turned Schwabing’s cafés, pubs, and cabarets into experimental hothouses of ‘the modern’. ‘In no city in Germany did old and new clash so forcefully as in Munich,’ commented Lovis Corinth, one celebrated artist who experienced the atmosphere there at the turn of the century.40 The theme of decline and renewal, the casting off of the sterile, decaying order, contempt for bourgeois convention, for the old, the stale, the traditional, the search for new expression and aesthetic values, the evocation of feeling over reason, the glorification of youth and exuberance, linked many of the disparate strands of Munich’s modernist cultural scene. The Stefan George circle; the scourge of bourgeois morality, playwright and cabaret balladist Frank Wedekind; the great Prague lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke; and the Mann brothers – Thomas, famous since the publication in 1901 of his epic novel of bourgeois decline, Buddenbrooks, and whose vignette of bourgeois decay, Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) had been published the year that Hitler arrived, and his elder, more politically radical brother Heinrich – were but some among the galaxy of literary luminaries in pre-war Munich. In painting, too, the challenge of ‘the modern’ characterized the era. Around the very time that Hitler was in Munich, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele Müter, and August Macke were leading lights in the group Der Blaue Reiter, revolutionizing artistic composition in brilliant and exciting new forms of expressionist painting. The visual arts would never be the same again.
It was not for political reasons, but as a ‘metropolis of German art’ that Munich attracted the drop-out, failed artist, and street-scene painter Adolf Hitler.41 Once again, as a few years earlier, he made his way to an epicentre of the modernist cultural revolution. But in Munich as in Vienna, the avant-garde passed him by. His cultural taste remained locked in the nineteenth century, closed to modern art forms, hostile to the works of all those for whom Munich before the First World War is renowned. What impressed him, as they had done in Vienna, were the imposing representative buildings, the neo-classical façades, the wide boulevards, the great galleries of works of the old masters, the architecture of grandeur and power. It was the city of the Wittelsbachs, not the city of artistic innovation, that appealed to Hitler.42 He rhapsodized about the Pinakothek, a ‘most marvellous achievement’ attributable to one man alone: ‘what Munich owes to Ludwig I is unimaginable’.43 The Glyptothek and Propyläen on the Königsplatz (later the scene of the Nazi commemoration each year of the ‘heroes of the Movement’ who had been killed in the putsch fiasco of 1923), the Wittelsbach Residenz and the expansive Ludwigstraße flanked by its monumental façades were other constructions of that era that stirred the impressionable Hitler.44 He later saw similarities in the representative buildings of nineteenth-century Munich to those of Berlin in the time of Frederick the Great; in both cases they had been erected cheaply, since funding was so limited.45 His own plans for a gigantic rebuilding of Munich after a second war were not intended to encounter similar difficulties: the massive bill would have been paid by the conquered peoples of Europe.46
Hitler wrote that he came to Munich in the hope of some day making a name for himself as an architect.47 He described himself on arrival as an ‘architectural painter’.48 In the letter he wrote to the Linz authorities in 1914, defending himself against charges of evading military service, he stated that he was forced to earn his living as a self-employed artist (Kunstmaler) in order to fund his training as an architectural painter (Architekturmaler).49 In the biographical sketch he wrote in 1921, he stated that he went to Munich as an ‘architecture-designer and architecture-painter’.50 At his trial three years later, in February 1924, he implied that he had already completed his training as an ‘architecture-designer’ (Architekturzeichner) by the time he came to Munich, but wanted to train to be a master builder.51 Many years later he claimed his intention was to undertake practical training in Germany; that on coming to Munich he had hoped to study for three years before joining the major Munich construction firm Heilmann and Littmann as a designer and then showing, by entering the first architectural competition to design an important building, just what he could do.52 None of these varying and conflicting accounts was true. There is no evidence that Hitler took any practical steps during his time in Munich to improve his poor and dwindling career prospects. He was drifting no less aimlessly than he had done in Vienna.
After arriving in Munich on 25 May 1913, a bright spring Sunday, Hitler followed up an advertisement for a small room rented by the family of the tailor Joseph Popp on the third floor of 34 Schleißheimerstraße, in a poorish district to the north of the city, on the edge of Schwabing and not far from the big barracks area.53 His travelling companion, Rudolf Häusler, shared the cramped room with him until mid-February 1914. Apparently, Hitler’s habit of reading late at night by the light of a petroleum lamp prevented Häusler from sleeping, and so irritated him that he eventually moved out, returning after a few days to take the room adjacent to Hitler’s, where he stayed until May 1914.54 According to his landlady, Frau Popp, Hitler quickly set himself up with the equipment to begin painting.55 As he had done in Vienna, he developed a routine where he could complete a picture every two or three days, usually copied from postcards of well-known tourist scenes in Munich – including the Theatinerkirche, the Asamkirche, the Hofbräuhaus, the Alter Hof, the Münzhof, the Altes Rathaus, the Sendlinger Tor, the Residenz, the Propyläen – then set out to find customers in bars, cafés, and beerhalls.56 His accurate but uninspired, rather soulless watercolours were, as Hitler himself later admitted when he was German Chancellor and they were selling for massively inflated prices, of very ordinary quality.57 But they were certainly no worse than similar products touted about the beerhalls, often the work of genuine art students seeking to pay their way. Once he had found his feet, Hitler had no difficulty finding buyers. He was able to make a modest living from his painting and exist about as comfortably as he had done in his last years in Vienna. When the Linz authorities caught up with him in 1914, he acknowledged that his income – though irregular and fluctuating – could be put at around 1,200 Marks a year, and told his court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann at a much later date that he could get by on around 80 Marks a month for living costs at that time.58
As in Vienna, Hitler was polite but distant, self-contained, withdrawn, and apparently without friends (other than, in the first months, Häusler). Frau Popp could not recall Hitler having a single visitor in the entire two years of his tenancy.59 He lived simply and frugally, preparing his paintings during the day and reading at night.60 According to Hitler’s own account, ‘the study of the political events of the day’, especially foreign policy, preoccupied him during his time in Munich.61 He also claimed to have immersed himself again in the theoretical literature of Marxism and to have examined thoroughly once more the relation of Marxism to the Jews.62 There is no obvious reason to doubt his landlady’s witness to the books he brought back with him from the Königliche Hof- und Staatsbibliothek (Royal Court and State Library), not far away in Ludwigstraße.63 In all the millions of recorded words of Hitler, however, there is nothing to indicate that he ever pored over the theoretical writings of Marxism, that he had studied Marx, or Engels, or Lenin (who had been in Munich not long before him), or Trotsky (his contemporary in Vienna). Reading for Hitler, in Munich as in Vienna, was not for enlightenment or learning, but to confirm prejudice.
Most of it was probably done in cafés, where Hitler could continue his habit of devouring the newspapers available to customers. All of human kind and the whole gamut of views on politics and society, God and the universe, were represented at this time in Munich’s cafés, pubs, and beerhalls. In well-known venues like Café Stephanie in Amalienstraße, left-wing intellectuals – some of whom would several years later be involved in the revolutionary upheavals – and Schwabing’s artists and writers voiced their biting social and political critique, designing innumerable variants of the coming utopia. Hitler’s scene was less high-flying. His milieu was that of the beer-table philosophers and corner-café improvers of the world, the cranks and half-educated know-alls. This is where he kept abreast of political developments, and where, at the slightest provocation, he could flare up and treat anyone in proximity to his fiercely held views on whatever preoccupied him at the time.64 Café and beerhall ‘discussions’ were the nearest Hitler came in his Munich period to political involvement. His statement in Mein Kampf that ‘ in the years 1913 and 1914, I for the first time in various circles which today in part faithfully support the National Socialist movement, expressed the conviction that the question of the future of the German nation was the question of destroying Marxism’ elevates coffee-house confrontation into the philosophy of the political prophet.65
Hitler’s captive audiences in the cafés and beerhalls were for most part the closest he came to human contact in his months in Munich, and presumably offered some sort of outlet for his pent-up prejudice and emotions. It is likely, as an Austrian who despised the Habsburg monarchy and had arrived starry-eyed in Germany, that, as his account in Mein Kampf suggests, he was much exercised by the approving views on the German-Austrian alliance that he was hearing in Bavaria and could neither comprehend nor tolerate.66 But most of his ‘reflections’ on foreign policy in the chapter dealing with his time in Munich plainly postdate his pre-war stay in the city, and present his position in 1924. Contrary to his own depiction of the Munich months as a time of further preparation for what fate would eventually bring him, it was in reality an empty, lonely, and futile period for him. He was in love with Munich; but Munich was not in love with him. He did not belong in the avant-garde café culture of Schwabing and the ‘smart set’ of Munich’s artists and literati; he was not in tune with ‘white-blue’ Bavarian provincialism, the dominance of political Catholicism, and the strength of anti-Prussian feeling that ran from the ruddy-faced vegetable sellers on the Viktualienmarkt to the sophisticated lampooners of the Kaiser in the satirical magazine Simplicissimus; he was left to his own form of the Munich Bohème – loitering in cafés, browsing in newspapers and periodicals, and waiting for the chance to harangue those around him on the error of their political ways. As regards his own future, he had no more idea where he was going than he had done during his years in the Vienna Men’s Home.
He very nearly ended up in an Austrian prison. Already in August 1913 the Linz police had started inquiries about Hitler’s whereabouts because of his failure to register for military service. Evasion of military service was punishable by a hefty fine. And leaving Austria to avoid it was treated as desertion and carried a jail sentence. By way of his relatives in Linz, the Viennese police, and the Men’s Home in Meldemannstraße, the trail eventually led to Munich, where the police were able to inform their Linz counterparts that Hitler had been registered since 26 May 1913 as living with the Popps at 34 Schleißheimerstraße.67 Hitler was shaken to the core when an officer of the Munich criminal police turned up on Frau Popp’s doorstep on the afternoon of Sunday, 18 January 1914 with a summons for him to appear two days later in Linz under pain of fine and imprisonment to register for military service, and promptly took him under arrest prior to handing him over to the Austrian authorities.68 The Munich police had for some reason delayed delivery of the summons for several days before the Sunday, leaving Hitler as a consequence extremely short notice to comply with its demand to be in Linz by the Tuesday. That, together with Hitler’s run-down appearance, lack of ready money, apologetic demeanour, and somewhat pathetic explanation, influenced the Austrian consulate in Munich to look with some sympathy on his position. Hitler’s request by telegram on Monday, 19 January to delay the summons to the subsequent mustering in Linz on 5 February was rejected by the Linz magistracy. But the telegram from Linz arrived in Munich only much later that day, after the consulate was closed. The consulate handled it the following morning with customary bureaucratic sluggishness so that Hitler received it only at 9a.m. on Wednesday, 21 January, the day after he had been due to appear in Linz. Luck was again on Hitler’s side. But he was left in no doubt about the seriousness of the situation. In some agitation, he now wrote a three-and-a-half-page letter humbly accepting his fault in failing to register in autumn 1909, at a very bitter time for him, when he had hit rock-bottom, but claiming he had done so retrospectively in February 1910, and heard nothing thereafter even though he had been registered throughout with the police in Vienna.69 He impressed the consular officials, who thought him ‘worthy of consideration’, and the Linz magistracy now granted him permission to appear, as he had requested, on 5 February, in Salzburg instead of Linz. No fine or imprisonment was imposed; his travel expenses were paid by the consulate. And, in the event, on duly attending at Salzburg he was found to be too weak to undertake military service.70 Hitler had escaped with shock and embarrassment, but little else, from the difficulties he had created for himself. He still had to cope at a later date with the capital his political enemies would draw from the affair.71 And his frantic efforts to recover the files immediately after the Anschlß were doomed to failure: before the Gestapo could get its hands on them, they had already been removed into safe keeping, from which they could be retrieved for publication in the 1950s.72
Hitler returned to his mundane life as a small-time artist; but not for long. The storm-clouds were gathering over Europe. Hitler described, in a rare and apposite lyrical passage of Mein Kampf, an atmosphere that ‘lay on the chests of men like a heavy nightmare, sultry as feverish tropic heat’. He spoke of ‘constant anxiety’ and ‘the sense of approaching catastrophe’ turning into a longing for action, for the cleansing and freshness that the storm brings.73 His first reaction on hearing, on Sunday, 28 June 1914, the sensational news of the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife was to fear that it had been perpetrated by German students. Given Franz Ferdinand’s support for pro-Slav policies, this was a not unreasonable assumption, and a more likely eventuality than his murder at the hands of Serbian nationalists. Hitler’s relief at the identity of the perpetrators mingled with his sense ‘that a stone had been set rolling whose course could no longer be arrested’, that ‘at last war would be inevitable’.74 By the beginning of August, the countries of Europe, as Lloyd George put it, had indeed ‘slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron’.75 The continent was at war.
III
For Hitler, the war was a godsend. Since his failure in the Art Academy in 1907, he had vegetated, resigned to the fact that he would not become a great artist, now cherishing a pipe-dream that he would somehow become a notable architect – though with no plans for or realistic hope of fulfilling this ambition. Seven years after that failure, the ‘nobody of Vienna’,76 now in Munich, remained a drop-out and nonentity, futilely angry at a world which had rejected him. He was still without any career prospects, without qualifications or any expectation of gaining them, without any capacity for forging close and lasting friendships, and without real hope of coming to terms with himself – or with a society he despised for his own failure. The war offered him his way out. At the age of twenty-five, it gave him for the first time in his life a cause, a commitment, comradeship, an external discipline, a sort of regular employment, a sense of well-being, and – more than that – a sense of belonging. His regiment became home for him. When he was wounded in 1916 his first words to his superior officer were: ‘It’s not so bad, Herr Oberleutnant, eh? I can stay with you, stay with the regiment.’77 Later in the war, the prospect of leaving the regiment may well have influenced his wish not to be considered for promotion.78 And at the end of the war, he had good practical reasons for staying in the army as long as possible: the army had by then been his ‘career’ for four years, and he had no other job to go back to or look forward to. For the first time in his life – certainly the first time since the carefree childhood days as a mummy’s boy in Upper Austria – Hitler felt truly at ease with himself in the war. He referred later to the war years as ‘the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence’.79 Later still, in the midst of asecond war that he himself had done more than any other single person to unleash on Germany, Europe, and the world, he reminisced incessantly – and always in glowing terms – about his experiences in the First World War. His years in the army were ‘the one time’, he commented on one occasion, ‘when I had no worries’. Food, clothing, and accommodation were all provided.80 He had been, he said, ‘passionately glad to be a soldier’.81 The war and its aftermath made Hitler. After Vienna, it was the second formative period in decisively shaping his personality.
Germany, like other countries in Europe, had been gripped by war fever in the wake of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. On the very evening of the assassination, a riotous crowd in Munich had smashed up the well-known Café Fahrig in the city centre because the band entertaining the customers had refused to play Germany’s stirringly patriotic unofficial anthem, ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’.82 A few weeks later, an angry mob in the same part of the city set upon two women overheard speaking French who, faces bleeding and with torn clothes, had to be rescued by the police.83The ‘spirit of 1914’ was more varied in expression than often presumed, and, despite such outrages, in general probably more defensive than outrightly aggressive in tone.84 But no sector of society was immune from the heady atmosphere of patriotic fervour. Even Social Democrat internationalists and left-wing liberals could not escape it, though their defensive patriotism, weak though it was as a bulwark against belligerent chauvinism, was markedly different from the aggression and bellicosity of nationalist circles, where war-euphoria was unrestrained. Among middle-class youth, and especially in student groups, enthusiasm for war was often linked to an optimism that it would bring final release from the shackles of a decadent and sterile bourgeois order. ‘We want to glorify war, the only cure for the world,’ the Italian Futurist Manifesto had proclaimed only a few years earlier.85 The sentiment struck a chord with many – though certainly not all – of the younger generation across Europe in July and August 1914. Among Germany’s leaders, as among ruling groups elsewhere in Europe, there was a feeling that armed conflict was necessary and salutary as a liberation from the prolonged tension and repeated crises of previous years.86 Strangest of all for subsequent generations to grasp, there was, most prominent among intellectuals, a sense of war as an almost religious experience, as redemption and renewal, as a welling up of sublime national unity to overcome discord and disharmony, as the creative force of a national community. ‘What we are now, with deepest emotion, experiencing,’ ran the florid outpouring of a leading journal on social policy:
is a resurrection, a rebirth of the nation. Suddenly shocked out of the troubles and pleasures of everyday life, Germany stands united in the strength of moral duty, ready for the highest sacrifice. The Kaiser, today truly a People’s Kaiser, proclaimed: ‘I know no parties any longer, I know only Germans’… And the Reichstag, unanimous and united, a true herald of the nation, swore by its deeds to go with the Kaiser ‘through thick and thin, through suffering and death’. These first days of August are undying, incomparable days of glory. Whatever had arisen over four decades of peace by way of strife and discord of parties, confessions, classes, and races has been totally consumed by the breath of flame of national fervour.87
Many prepared to fight with a heavy heart and from a sense of duty.88 Others could hardly wait for action. Hitler was among the tens of thousands in Munich in the thrall of emotional delirium, passionately enthused by the prospect of war. As for so many others, his elation would later turn to deep embitterment. With Hitler, the emotional pendulum set moving by the onset of war swung more violently than for most. ‘Overpowered by stormy enthusiasm,’ he wrote, ‘I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.’89 That on this occasion his words were true cannot be doubted. Years later, noticing a photograph taken by Heinrich Hoffmann (who was to become his court photographer) of the huge patriotic demonstration in front of the Feldherrnhalle on Munich’s Odeonsplatz on 2 August 1914, the day after the German declaration of war on Russia, Hitler pointed out that he had been among the emotional crowd that day, carried away with nationalist fervour, hoarse with singing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Deutschland über alies’. Hoffmann immediately set to work on enlargements, and discovered the face of the twenty-five-year-old Hitler in the centre of the photograph, gripped and enraptured by the war hysteria. The subsequent mass reproduction of the photograph helped contribute to the establishment of the Führer myth – and to Hoffmann’s immense profits.90
It was doubtless under the impact of the same elation swaying tens of thousands of young men in Munich and many other cities in Europe during those days to rush to join up that, according to his own account, on 3 August, the day following the mass demonstration at the Feldherrnhalle, Hitler submitted his request – a personal petition to King Ludwig III of Bavaria – to serve as an Austrian in the Bavarian army. The granting of his request by the cabinet office, he went on, arrived, to his unbounded joy, the very next day.91 Though this version has been accepted in most accounts, it is scarcely credible. In the confusion of those days, it would have required truly remarkable bureaucratic efficiency for Hitler’s request to have been approved overnight. In any case, not the cabinet office but the war ministry was alone empowered to accept foreigners (including Austrians) as volunteers.92 In reality, Hitler owed his service in the Bavarian army not to bureaucratic efficiency, but to bureaucratic oversight.93 Detailed inquiries carried out by the Bavarian authorities in 1924 were unable to clarify precisely how, instead of being returned to Austria in August 1914 as should have happened, he came to serve in the Bavarian army. It was presumed that he was among the flood of volunteers who rushed to their nearest place of recruitment in the first days of August, leading, the report added, to not unnatural inconsistencies and breaches of the strict letter of the law. ‘In all probability,’ commented the report, ‘the question of Hitler’s nationality (Staatsangehörigkeit)was never even raised.’ Hitler, it was concluded, almost certainly entered the Bavarian army by error.94
Probably, as Hitler wrote in a brief autobiographical sketch in 1921, he volunteered on 5 August 1914 for service in the First Bavarian Infantry Regiment. Like many others in these first chaotic days, he was initially sent away again since there was no immediate use for him.95 On 16 August he was summoned to report at Recruiting Depot VI in Munich for kitting out by the Second Reserve Battalion of the Second Infantry Regiment. By the beginning of September he had been assigned to the newly formed Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 (known from the name of its first commander as the ‘List Regiment’), largely comprising raw recruits. Together with his fellow soldiers, he then underwent a period of training and drilling in Munich followed by exercises at Lechfeld near Augsburg that lasted until 20 October.96 On that day, Hitler dropped a note to the Popps, telling them his unit was about to leave for the front, probably Belgium, how much he was looking forward to it, and that he hoped they would get to England.97 In the early hours of the next morning, the troop train carrying Hitler left for the battlefields of Flanders.98
On 29 October, within six days of arriving in Lille, Hitler’s battalion had its baptism of fire on the Menin Road near Ypres. In letters from the front to Joseph Popp and to a Munich acquaintance, Ernst Hepp, Hitler wrote that after four days of fighting, the List Regiment’s fighting force had been reduced from 3,600 to 611 men.99 The initial losses have indeed been estimated at around 70 per cent, partly even incurred through ‘friendly fire’ as Württemberg and Saxon regiments mistook the Bavarians, in the gloom, for English soldiers.100 Colonel List himself was among the fallen. Hitler’s initial idealism, he said later, gave way on seeing the thousands killed and injured, to the realization ‘that life is a constant horrible struggle’.101
On 3 November 1914 (with effect from 1 November), Hitler was promoted to corporal. It was his last promotion of the war, though he could certainly have been expected to advance further, as least as far as non-commissioned officer (Unteroffizier). Later in the war, he was in fact nominated for promotion by Max Amann, then a staff sergeant, subsequently Hitler’s press baron, and the regimental staff considered making him Unteroffizier.102 Fritz Wiedemann, the regimental adjutant who in the 1930s became for a time one of the Führer’s adjutants, testified after the end of the Third Reich that Hitler’s superiors had thought him lacking in leadership qualities.103 However, both Amann and Wiedemann made clear that Hitler, probably because he would have been then transferred from the regimental staff, actually refused to be considered for promotion.104
Hitler had been assigned on 9 November to the regimental staff as an orderly (Ordonnanz) – one of a group of eight to ten dispatch runners (Meldegänger) whose task was to carry orders, on foot or sometimes by bicycle, from the regimental command post to the battalion and company leaders at the front, three kilometres away.105 Strikingly, in his Mein Kampf account, Hitler omitted to mention that he was a dispatch runner, implying that he actually spent the war in the trenches.106 But the attempts of his political enemies in the early 1930s to belittle the dangers involved in the duties of the dispatch runner and decry Hitler’s war service, accusing him of shirking and cowardice, were misplaced.107 When, as was not uncommon, the front was relatively quiet, there were certainly times when the dispatch runners could laze around at staff headquarters, where conditions were greatly better than in the trenches. It was in such conditions at regimental headquarters in Fournes en Weppe, near Fromelles in northern France, where Hitler spent nearly half of his wartime service, that he could find the time to paint pictures and read (if his own account can be believed) the works of Schopenhauer that he claimed he carried around with him.108 Even so, the dangers faced by the dispatch runners during battles, carrying messages to the front through the firing line, were real enough. The losses among dispatch runners were relatively high.109 If at all possible, two runners would be sent with a message to ensure that it would get through if one happened to be killed.110Three of the eight runners attached to the regimental staff were killed and another one wounded in a confrontation with French troops on 15 November. Hitler himself – not for the only time in his life – had luck on his side two days later when a French shell exploded in the regimental forward command post minutes after he had gone out, leaving almost the entire staff there dead or wounded.111 Among the seriously wounded was the regimental commander, Oberstleutnant Philipp Engelhardt, who had been about to propose Hitler for the Iron Cross for his part, assisted by a colleague, in protecting the commander’s life under fire a few days earlier.112 On 2 December, Hitler was finally presented with the Iron Cross, Second Class, one of four dispatch runners among the sixty men from his regiment to receive the honour.113 It was, he said, ‘the happiest day of my life’.114
From all indications, Hitler was a committed, rather than simply conscientious and dutiful, soldier, and did not lack physical courage. His superiors held him in high regard. His immediate comrades, mainly the group of dispatch runners, respected him and, it seems, even quite liked him, though he could also plainly irritate as well as puzzle them.115 His lack of a sense of fun made him an easy target for good-natured ribbing. ‘What about looking around for a Mamsell?’ suggested a telephonist one day. ‘I’d die of shame looking for sex with a French girl,’ interjected Hitler, to a burst of laughter from the others. ‘Look at the monk,’ one said. Hitler’s retort was: ‘Have you no German sense of honour left at all?’116 Though his quirkiness singled him out from the rest of his group, Hitler’s relations with his immediate comrades were generally good. Most of them later became members of the NSDAP, and, when, as usually happened, they reminded Reich Chancellor Hitler of the time that they had been his comrades in arms, he made sure they were catered for with cash donations and positions as minor functionaries.117 For all that they got on well with him, they thought ‘Adi’, as they called him, was distinctly odd. They referred to him as ‘the artist’ and were struck by the fact that he received no mail or parcels (even at Christmas) after about mid-1915, never spoke of family or friends, neither smoked nor drank, showed no interest in visits to brothels, and used to sit for hours in a corner of the dug-out, brooding or reading.118 Photographs of him during the war show a thin, gaunt face dominated by a thick, dark, bushy moustache. He was usually on the edge of his group, expressionless where others were smiling.119 One of his closest comrades, Balthasar Brandmayer, a stonemason from Bruckmühl in the Bad Aibling district of Upper Bavaria, later described his first impressions of Hitler at the end of May 1915 : almost skeletal in appearance, dark eyes hooded in a sallow complexion, untrimmed moustache, sitting in a corner buried in a newspaper, occasionally taking a sip of tea, seldom joining in the banter of the group.120 He seemed an oddity, shaking his head disapprovingly at silly, light-hearted remarks, not even joining in the usual soldiers’ moans, gripes, and jibes.121 ‘Haven’t you ever loved a girl?’ Brandmayer asked Hitler. ‘Look, Brandmoiri,’ was the straight-faced reply, ‘I’ve never had time for anything like that, and I’ll never get round to it.’122 His only real affection seems to have been for his dog, Foxl, a white terrier that had strayed across from enemy lines. Hitler taught it tricks, revelling in how attached it was to him and how glad it was to see him when he returned from duty. He was distraught late in the war when his unit had to move on and Foxl could not be found. ‘The swine who took him from me doesn’t know what he did to me,’ was his comment many years later.123 He felt as strongly about none of the thousands of humans he saw slaughtered about him. The emptiness and coldness that Hitler showed throughout his life in his dealings with human beings were absent in the feeling he had for his dog. In the Führer Headquarters during the Second World War, his alsatian, Blondi, would again offer him the nearest thing he could find to friendship.124 But with his dogs, as with every human being he came into contact with, any relationship was based upon subordination to his mastery. ‘I liked [Foxl] so much,’ he recalled; ‘he only obeyed me.’125
About the war itself, Hitler was utterly fanatical. No humanitarian feelings could be allowed to interfere with the ruthless prosecution of German interests. He vehemently disapproved of the spontaneous gestures of friendship at Christmas 1914, when German and British troops met in no man’s land, shaking hands and singing carols together. ‘There should be no question of something like that during war,’ he protested.126 His comrades knew that they could always provoke Hitler with defeatist comments, real or contrived. All they had to do was to claim the war would be lost and Hitler would go off at the deep end. ‘For us the war can’t be lost’ were invariably his last words.127 The lengthy letter he sent on 5 February 1915 to his Munich acquaintance, Assessor Ernst Hepp, concluded with an insight (written in typical Hitler prose-style) into his view of the war redolent of the prejudices that had been consuming him since his Vienna days:
I think so often of Munich, and each of us has only one wish, that it may soon come to the final reckoning with the gang, to the showdown (Daraufgehen), cost what it will, and that those of us who have the fortune to see their homeland again will find it purer and cleansed of alien influence (Fremdländerei), that through the sacrifices and suffering that so many hundred thousand of us make daily, that through the stream of blood that flows here day for day against an international world of enemies, not only will Germany’s external enemies be smashed, but that our inner internationalism will also be broken. That would be worth more to me than all territorial gains. As far as Austria is concerned, things will happen as I always said.128
Hitler evidently carried such deep-seated sentiments throughout the war. But this political outburst, tagged on to a long description of military events and wartime conditions, was unusual. He appears to have spoken little to his comrades on political matters.129Perhaps the fact that his comrades thought him peculiar hindered him from giving voice to his strong opinions. ‘I was a soldier then, and I didn’t want to talk about politics,’ he himself stated; though in direct contradiction he added that he often expressed his views on Social Democracy to his closer comrades.130 During his interrogation in Nuremberg in 1947, Max Amann was adamant that Hitler had not harangued his comrades on politics during the war.131 He appears, too, to have scarcely mentioned the Jews. Several former comrades claimed after 1945 that Hitler had at most made a few off-hand though commonplace comments about the Jews in those years, but that they had no inkling then of the unbounded hatred that was so visible after 1918.132 Balthasar Brandmayer recalled on the other hand in his reminiscences, first published in 1932, that during the war he had ‘often not understood Adolf Hitler when he called the Jew the wire-puller behind all misfortune’.133 According to Brandmayer, Hitler became more politically involved in the latter years of the war and made no secret of his feelings on what he saw as the Social Democrat instigators of growing unrest in Germany.134Such comments, like all sources that postdate Hitler’s rise to prominence and, as in this case, glorify the prescience of the future leader, have to be treated with caution. But it is difficult to dismiss them out of hand. It indeed does seem very likely, as his own account in Mein Kampf claims, that Hitler’s political prejudices sharpened in the latter part of the war, during and after his first period of leave in Germany in 1916.135
Between March 1915 and September 1916, the List Regiment fought in the trenches near Fromelles, defending a two-kilometre stretch of the stalemated front. Heavy battles with the British were fought in May 1915 and July 1916, but in one and a half years the front barely moved a few metres.136 On 27 September 1916, two months after heavy fighting in the second battle of Fromelles, when a British offensive was staved off with difficulty, the regiment moved southwards from Flanders and by 2 October was engaged on the Somme.137 Within days, Hitler was wounded in the left thigh when a shell exploded in the dispatch runners’ dug-out, killing and wounding several of them.138 After treatment in a field hospital, he spent almost two months, from 9 October until 1 December 1916, in the Red Cross hospital at Beelitz, near Berlin. He had not been in Germany for two years. He soon noticed how different the mood was from the heady days of August 1914. He was appalled to hear men in the hospital bragging about their malingering or how they had managed to inflict minor injuries on themselves to make sure they could escape from the front. He encountered much the same low morale and widespread discontent in Berlin during the period of his recuperation. It was his first time in the city, and allowed him to pay a visit to the Nationalgalerie. But Munich shocked him most of all. He scarcely recognized the city: ‘Anger, discontent, cursing, wherever you went!’ Morale was poor; people were dispirited; conditions were miserable; and, as was traditional in Bavaria, the blame was placed on the Prussians. Hitler himself, according to his own account written about eight years later, recognized in all this only the work of the Jews. He was struck too, so he said, by the number of Jews in clerical positions – ‘nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk’ – compared with how few of them were serving at the front.139 (In fact, this was a base calumny: there was as good as no difference between the proportion of Jews and non-Jews in the German army, relative to their numbers in the total population, and many served – some in the List Regiment – with great distinction.140) There is no reason to presume, as has sometimes been the case, that this account of his anti-Jewish feelings in 1916 was a backwards projection of feelings that in reality only existed from 1918 – 19 onwards.141 Though, as we have noted, Hitler did not stand out for his antisemitism in the recollections of some of his former wartime comrades, two of them, Brandmayer and Westenkirchner, did refer to his negative comments about the Jews.142 And Hitler would have been voicing sentiments that were increasingly to be heard in the streets of Munich as anti-Jewish prejudice became more widespread and more ferocious in the second half of the war.143
Hitler wanted to get back to the front as soon as possible, and above all to rejoin his old regiment.144 He eventually returned to it on 5 March 1917 in its new position a few miles to the north of Vimy.145 In the summer it was back to the same ground near Ypres that the regiment had fought over almost three years earlier, to counter the major Flanders offensive launched by the British in mid-July 1917.146 Battered by the heavy fighting, the regiment was relieved at the beginning of August and transported to Alsace. At the end of September, Hitler took normal leave for the first time. He had no wish to go back to Munich, which had dispirited him so much, and went to Berlin instead, to stay with the parents of one of his comrades.147 His postcards to friends in the regiment spoke of how much he enjoyed his eighteen-day leave, and how thrilled he was by Berlin and its museums.148 In mid-October, he returned to his regiment, which had just moved from Alsace to Champagne. Bitter fighting in April 1918 brought huge losses, and during the last two weeks of July the regiment was involved in the second battle of the Marne.149 It was the last major German offensive of the war. By early August, when it collapsed in the face of a tenacious Allied counter-offensive, German losses in the previous four months of savage combat had amounted to around 800,000 men. The failure of the offensive marked the point where, with reserves depleted and morale plummeting, Germany’s military leadership was compelled to recognize that the war was lost.
On 4 August 1918, Hitler received the Iron Cross, First Class – a rare achievement for a corporal – from the regimental commander, Major von Tubeuf. By a stroke of irony, he had a Jewish officer, Leutnant Hugo Gutmann, to thank for the nomination.150 The story was later to be found in all school books that the Führer had received the ΕΚ I for single-handedly capturing fifteen French soldiers.151 The truth, as usual, was somewhat more prosaic. From the available evidence, including the recommendation of the List Regiment’s Deputy Commander Freiherr von Godin on 31 July 1918, the award was made – as it was also to a fellow dispatch runner – for bravery shown in delivering an important dispatch, following a breakdown in telephone communications, from command headquarters to the front through heavy fire. Gutmann, from what he subsequently said, had promised both dispatch runners the Ε Κ I if they succeeded in delivering the message. But since the action was, though certainly courageous, not strikingly exceptional, it was only after several weeks of his belabouring the divisional commander that permission for the award was granted.152
By mid-August 1918, the List Regiment had moved to Cambrai to help combat a British offensive near Bapaume, and a month later was back in action once more in the vicinity of Wytschaete and Messines, where Hitler had received his ΕΚ II almost four years earlier. This time Hitler was away from the battlefields. In late August he had been sent for a week to Nuremberg for telephone communications training, and on 10 September he began his second period of eighteen days’ leave, again in Berlin.153 Immediately on his return, at the end of September, his unit was put under pressure from British assaults near Comines. Gas was now in extensive use in offensives, and protection against it was minimal and primitive. The List Regiment, like others, suffered badly. On the night of 13 – 14 October, Hitler himself fell victim to mustard gas on the heights south of Wervick, part of the southern front near Ypres.154 He and several comrades, retreating from their dug-out during a gas attack, were partially blinded by the gas and found their way to safety only by clinging on to each other and following a comrade who was slightly less badly afflicted.155 After initial treatment in Flanders, Hitler was transported on 21 October 1918 to the military hospital in Pasewalk, near Stettin, in Pomerania.
The war was over for him. And, little though he knew it, the Army High Command was already manoeuvring to extricate itself from blame for a war it accepted was lost and a peace which would soon have to be negotiated.156 It was in Pasewalk, recovering from his temporary blindness, that Hitler was to learn the shattering news of defeat and revolution – what he called ‘the greatest villainy of the century’.157
IV
In reality, of course, there had been no treachery, no stab-in-the-back. This was a pure invention of the Right, a legend the Nazis would use as a central element of their propaganda armoury. Unrest at home was a consequence, not a cause, of military failure. Germany had been militarily defeated and was close to the end of its tether – though nothing had prepared people for capitulation. In fact, triumphalist propaganda was still coming from the High Command in late October 1918. The army was by then exhausted, and in the previous four months had suffered heavier losses than at any time during the war.158 In addition, illness took its toll. Around 1.75 million German soldiers had fallen victim to an influenza epidemic between March and July, and around 750,000 were wounded in the same period. It was little wonder that the medical service could not cope, that discipline sagged drastically, and that desertions and ‘shirking’ – deliberately ducking duty (estimated at close on a million men in the last months of the war) – rose dramatically.159At home, the mood was one of mounting protest – embittered, angry, and increasingly rebellious. The revolution was not fabricated by Bolshevik sympathizers and unpatriotic troublemakers, but grew out of the profound disillusionment and rising unrest, which had set in even as early as 1915 and from 1916 onwards had flowed into what finally became a torrent of disaffection. The society which had seemingly entered the war in total patriotic unity ended it completely riven – and traumatized by the experience.
Over 13 million Germans, just below a fifth of the population, served in the army during the war, over 10.5 million of them in the field. Around 2 million were killed; almost 5 million were wounded. A third of those killed had wives; almost all had families and friends.160 Such losses could not be experienced without leaving the most searing mark on mentalities. But experiences of the war, and the impact of such experiences, were in reality far from uniform. Certainly, death, injury, and on the ‘home front’ hunger, were omnipresent. Certainly, too, for those at the fighting front, the fatalism of existence in the trenches, the dangers and suffering, the anxieties and fears, the immensity of the losses – human and material – in the man-made wasteland of industrialized warfare, the interdependence for survival of the wholly male trench ‘community’, were inescapable impressions.
But the experience that left Hitler as an arch-glorifier of war converted the expressionist playwright and writer Ernst Toller into a pacifist and left-wing revolutionary. Where, for Hitler, the defeat was betrayal, for Toller the betrayal was the war itself. ‘The war itself had turned me into an opponent of war,’ he wrote; ‘I felt that the land I loved had been betrayed and sold. It was for us to overthrow these betrayers.’161 Experience of the war divided far more than it united: the front line against the ‘shirkers’ in the rear; men against officers; the front against the ‘home front’; above all, annexationists, imperialists, ardent believers in the war effort against those who detested it, disparaged it, and condemned it. The ‘national community’ which intellectuals saw forged in the trenches was largely a myth. Even the trench cameraderie, the ‘community of fate’ of a ‘front generation’, was in some measure a later literary mythologization.162 When the soldiers returned to the turmoil of a homeland in the throes of a revolution, it was not to form a unified ‘front generation’ pitting the ‘classless community’ of the trenches against a divided society changed out of all recognition, a militaristic, disillusioned mass ready-made to enter the Freikorps, and from there the SA. Certainly, Hitler was later able to play upon such sentiments. But twice as many men entered the anti-war Reich Association of War Disabled, War Veterans, and War Dependants as joined the Freikorps.163 The soldiers took back with them divided experiences of the front that were to fuel the enormous divisions and tensions of post-war German society.
Aside from worrying about loved ones at the front, those at home had to cope as best they could with massively worsening material conditions, leading often to extreme hardship. Women, drafted into industry, driving trams, running farms, increasingly found a main occupation in queuing for food. Most Germans, certainly those living in towns and cities, knew what hunger was during the war. Though there was not starvation, there was massive malnutrition: three-quarters of a million died of it. As food-prices soared, quality deteriorated, and supplies both diminished and were badly distributed, scarcities became acute – most notoriously in the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916 – 17. By 1917, rations had fallen to a level of under 1,000 calories a day – less than half of what ought to be a minimum for a working person, and of the average calorie intake before the war.164Shortages were not confined to food. Most seriously, lack of coal meant people could not keep warm. Almost everyone, other than the very rich, was worse off during the war.165 In all walks of life, apart from those of the privileged, people were miserable, demoralized, and becoming by the day more intensely angry at a state which had taken them into war, interfered more and more in their daily lives, inflicted countless petty regulations on them, and had proved incapable of attaining victory. Food riots and strikes were only the most overt manifestation of a mood that, in the second half of the war, was ever more menacing for the authorities. Sharpened social tensions and heightened resentments were inevitable. Townspeople blamed farmers for holding back food; the rural population castigated those from the cities who descended like locusts on the countryside and ravaged it for scarce food supplies. Germans south of the Main, Bavarians naturally in the front line, attributed the war and all its ills to the Prussians, who in turn thought Bavarians to be living off the fat of the land while others starved, doing little for the war effort. Old middle-class resentments about unpatriotic workers, after the interlude of the civil truce, were drastically revivified in the later war years by strikes, demonstrations, and expressions of anti-war – and increasingly anti-Kaiser – feelings. If anything, the mood was worst of all among the lower-middle class – craftsmen and white-collar workers – who, in some parts of Germany at least, were more heavily represented than blue-collar workers in the most openly revolutionary party, the USPD.166
Amid the social division, there were certain common targets of aggression. War profiteering – a theme on which Hitler was able to play so effectively in the Munich beerhalls in 1920 – rankled deeply. The ‘big-shots’, dressed in fur-lined coats and top hats, fat cigars in their mouths, ferried around in limousines, appeared the very epitome of privilege, corruption, and exploitation at a time that most of humanity was suffering grievously. Closely related was the bitter resentment at those running the black market. Petty officialdom, with its unremitting and intensified bureaucratic intervention into every sphere of everyday life, was a further target. But the fury did not confine itself to the interference and incompetence of petty bureaucrats. These were merely the face of a state whose authority was crumbling visibly, a state in terminal disarray and disintegration.
Not least, in the search for scapegoats, Jews increasingly became the focus of intensified hatred and aggression from the middle of the war onwards. The sentiments had all been heard before. What was new was the extent to which radical antisemitism was now being propagated, and the degree to which it was evidently falling on fertile ground. Like every other sector of society, Jews had been carried away by ‘the spirit of 1914’ – at last, they thought, at one with their fellow Germans. By 1916 such presumed unity had been destroyed for ever. A new wave of vicious, increasingly radical völkisch antisemitism was blatantly fostered by the annexationist lobby, and found more ready support than at any time before the war. Jews were now attacked as racially inferior immigrants flooding Germany, as war profiteers thriving on the nation’s suffering, and as shirkers avoiding service at the front. That the numbers of Ostjuden entering Germany were insignificant, that four or five times more non-Jews than Jews were directors of armaments companies, and that the proportions of Jews and non-Jews serving at the front scarcely differed could not, of course, prevent the spread of such a slander.167 Groundless allegations were kept alive by a statistical inquiry, carried out in late 1916, into the number of Jews at the front and in the rear, followed by an investigation by the Reichstag into the numbers of Jews employed in the offices and agencies of the war economy.168 Though the results were not published, the allegations underlying the military survey were not repudiated, and Jews were thereafter not made officers (at least in the Prussian army).169 The backlash, articulated by Claß’s Pan-Germans and by the newly created, massive Fatherland Party, of the pro-war lobby to the anti-annexationist peace resolution accepted in the Reichstag on 19 July 1917 linked the Jews to defeatism. There was a proliferation of antisemitic publications, and Claß could report to the Pan-German leadership in October 1917 that antisemitism had ‘already reached enormous proportions’ and that ‘the struggle for survival was now beginning for the Jews’.170 Events in Russia in 1917 further stirred the pot of simmering hatred, adding the vital ingredient – to become thereafter the keystone of antisemitic agitation – of the Jews portrayed as running secret international organizations directed at fomenting world revolution.171 As it was realized that the war was lost, antisemitic hysteria, whipped up by the Pan-Germanists, reached fever-pitch. Claß used the notorious words of Heinrich von Kleist, aimed at the French in 1813, when a ‘Jewish Committee’ with the purpose of ‘exploiting the situation to sound the clarion call against Judaism and to use the Jews as lightning rods for all injustices’ was set up by the Pan-Germans in September 1918: ‘Kill them; the world court is not asking you for your reasons!’172
V
The atmosphere of disintegration and collapsing morale, the climate of political and ideological radicalization, in the last two war years could not but make the deepest impression on a Hitler who had welcomed the war so rapturously, had supported German aims so fanatically, and had from the outset condemned all defeatist suggestions so vehemently. He was repelled by many attitudes he encountered at the front.173 But, as we have seen, it was during the three periods, amounting in total to over three months, that he spent in Germany either on leave or recovering from injury in the last two war years that he experienced a level of disaffection at the running of the war which was new and deeply appalling to him. He had been shocked at the atmosphere in Berlin and, even more so, Munich in 1916.174 As the war dragged on, he became incensed by the talk of revolution, and incandescent at news of the munitions strike in favour of early peace without annexations which had spread briefly at the end of January 1918 from Berlin to other major industrial cities (though with little actual effect on munitions supplies).175 Brandmayer recalled Hitler’s enraged comments that if he had been war minister the strike leaders would have been stood against a wall within twenty-four hours. According to Brandmayer, he held Friedrich Ebert responsible.176 It is, of course, possible that Brandmayer was simply paraphrasing Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf.177However, there seems no obvious reason to disbelieve Hitler when he wrote that he was already associating the unrest at home with the Social Democratic leadership who, in his view, were ‘ripe for hanging’.178 As signs of demoralization and disintegration intensified at the front, as well as within Germany, the soldiers became more politicized. Hitler commented on the ‘symptoms of disintegration’ in August and September 1918 and that the troops now engaged in political arguments as the ‘poison from the homeland’ took effect.179 Brandmayer’s remark that Hitler took a keen interest in developments within Germany and involved himself in such discussions sounds plausible.180
The last two years of the war, between his convalescence in Beelitz in October 1916 and his hospitalization in Pasewalk in October 1918, can probably be seen as a vital staging-post in Hitler’s ideological development. The prejudices and phobias carried over from the Vienna years were now plainly evident in his embittered rage about the collapse of the war effort – a cause to which, for the first time in his life, he had totally bound himself, the summation of all that he had believed in. But they had not yet been fully rationalized into the component parts of a political ideology. That would only emerge fully during Hitler’s own ‘political training’ in the Reichswehr in the course of 1919.
What part the hospitalization in Pasewalk played in the shaping of Hitler’s ideology, what significance it had for the shaping of the future party leader and dictator, has been much disputed and, in truth, is not easy to evaluate. In Hitler’s own account it has a pivotal place. Recovering from his temporary blindness, but unable to read newspapers, so he wrote, Hitler heard rumours of pending revolution but did not fully comprehend them. The arrival of some mutineering sailors was the first tangible sign of serious disturbance, but Hitler and fellow-patients from Bavaria presumed the unrest would be crushed within a few days. However, it became clear – ‘the most terrible certainty of my life’ – that a general revolution had taken place.181 On 10 November, a pastor addressed the patients in sorrowful terms about the end of the monarchy and informed them that Germany was now a republic, that the war was lost and that Germans had to place themselves at the mercy of the victors, whose magnanimity could be expected.182 At this, Hitler wrote:
I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.
Since the day when I had stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept… But now I could not help it…
And so it had all been in vain… Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland?…
The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery?
There followed terrible days and even worse nights – I knew that all was lost… In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.
In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me.
I could not help but laugh at the thought of my own future which only a short time before had given me such bitter concern…
He drew, according to his own account, the conclusion that: ‘There is no making pacts with Jews; there can only be the hard: either-or.’ And he made the decision that changed his life: ‘I, for my part, decided to go into politics.’183
Hitler referred to his Pasewalk experience on a number of occasions in the early 1920s. There were even embellishments to the story which was to appear in Mein Kampf. He told a variety of associates that as he lay blinded in Pasewalk he received a type of vision, message, or inspiration to liberate the German people and make Germany great again.184 This highly unlikely, purported quasi-religious experience was part of the mystification of his own person which Hitler encouraged as a key component of the Führer myth that was already embryonically present among many of his followers in the two years leading up to the putsch attempt. At his subsequent trial, Hitler played down the vision story, which would have invited ridicule, and stated only that hearing in Pasewalk of the revolution had made him resolve to enter politics.185 A year and a half earlier, in December 1922, he had offered another gloss on his reactions in Pasewalk: ‘By his own account, he thought over all his experiences at the front and in the rear while hospitalized for a severe injury and came to the conclusion that Marxism and Jewry are the German people’s worst enemies. From personal experience it has become a certainty for him that wherever misfortune or harm befalls the German nation, a Jew is the culprit behind it.’186
Some have been tempted to read into Hitler’s colourful accounts of his Pasewalk experience an hallucination, which holds the key to his manic ideological obsessions, his ‘mission’ to save Germany, and his rapport with a German people themselves traumatized by defeat and national humiliation.187 Still recovering from being blinded by mustard gas poisoning, the traumatic shock of hearing of defeat and revolution – it has been suggested – was subliminally associated in Hitler’s mind with the idioform ‘poisoning’ of his mother at the hands of the Jewish Dr Bloch in 1907, accounting for the sudden dominance of a pathological antisemitism that had not been present before and for the ever-present drive to poison the Jews through gassing them, since he saw them as responsible for his mother’s death.188 Apart from seemingly reducing the complex developments that were to lead to the mass murder of the Jews during the Second World War to the alleged trauma of a single person in 1918, the interpretation remains speculative and lacks persuasion. The balance of probabilities suggests a less dramatic process of ideological development and political awareness.
Whatever Hitler’s state of shock and anxiety over his temporary and partial blinding (from which he was beginning to recover), it is unlikely that a second, this time hysterical or hallucinatory, blinding took place in Pasewalk. The effects of mustard gas do not damage the eye itself, and produce not actual blindness, but such a severe conjunctivitis and swelling of the eyelids that sight is for a time greatly impaired. A recurrence of the ‘Secondary blindness’ is easily caused by rubbing of the eyes which, if Hitler was, as he says, brought to tears by news of the revolution, may well have been what occurred.189
What does seem certain, even so, is that Hitler was more than just deeply outraged by the news of the revolution; that he felt it to be an absolute and unpardonable betrayal of all that he believed in, and, in pain, discomfort, and bitterness, looked for the culprits who would provide him with an explanation of how his world had collapsed. There is no need to doubt that for Hitler these intensely disturbing few days did amount to no less than a traumatic experience. From the following year onwards, his entire political activity was driven by the trauma of 1918 – aimed at expunging the defeat and revolution which had betrayed all that he had believed in, and eliminating those he held responsible.190
But if there is any strength in the suggestion we have put forward that Hitler acquired his deep-seated prejudices, including his antisemitism, in Vienna, and had them revitalized during the last two war years, if without rationalizing them into a composite ideology, then there is no need to mystify the Pasewalk experience through seeing it as a sudden, dramatic conversion to paranoid antisemitism. Rather, Pasewalk might be viewed as the time when, as Hitler lay tormented and seeking an explanation of how his world had been shattered, his own rationalization started to fall into place. Devastated by the events unfolding in Munich, Berlin, and other cities, he must have read into them outright confirmation of the views he had always held from the Vienna days on Jews and Social Democrats, on Marxism and internationalism, on pacifism and democracy. Even so, it was still only the beginning of the rationalization. The full fusion of his antisemitism and anti-Marxism was yet to come. There is no authentic evidence that Hitler, up to and including this point, had said a word about Bolshevism. Nor would he do so, even in his early public speeches in Munich, before 1920. The connection of Bolshevism with his internal hate-figures, its incorporation into and adoption of a central place in his ‘world-view’, came only during his time in the Reichswehr in the summer of 1919. And later still came the preoccupation with ‘living-space’ – only emerging into a dominant theme at the time that he dictated Mein Kampf 1924.191 Pasewalk was a crucial step on the way to Hitler’s rationalization of his prejudices. But even more important, in all probability, was the time he spent in the Reichswehr in 1919.
The last implausible point of Hitler’s Pasewalk story is that he resolved there and then to enter politics.192 In none of his speeches before the Putsch in November 1923 did Hitler say a word about deciding in autumn 1918 to enter politics.193 In fact, Hitler was in no position in Pasewalk to ‘decide’ to enter politics – or anything else. The end of the war meant that, like most other soldiers, he faced demobilization.194 The army had been his home for four years. But now once more his future was uncertain.
When he left Pasewalk on 19 November 1918, eight days after the Armistice, to return, via Berlin, to Munich, he had savings totalling only 15 Marks 30 Pfennige in his Munich account.195 No career awaited him. Nor did he make any effort to enter politics. Indeed, it is not easy to see how he could have done so. Neither family nor ‘connections’ were available to gain him some minor patronage in a political party. A ‘decision’ to enter politics, should Hitler have made one in Pasewalk, would have been empty of meaning. Only staying in the army offered him the hope of avoiding the evil day when he would once more have to face up to the fact that, four turbulent years on, he was no nearer his chosen career as an architect than he had been in 1914, and was without any prospects whatsoever. The future looked bleak. A return to the lonely existence of the pre-war small-time painter had no appeal. But little else beckoned. The army gave him his chance. He was able to stave off demobilization longer than almost all his former comrades, and to keep on the payroll, until 31 March 1920.196
It was in the army in 1919 that his ideology finally took shape. Above all, the army, in the extraordinary circumstances of 1919, turned Hitler into a propagandist – the most talented demagogue of his day. Not a deliberate choice, but making the most of the conditions in which he found himself provided Hitler with his entry into politics. Opportunism – and a good slice of luck – were more instrumental than strength of will.