Hitler

  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. 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 and by 2 October was engaged on the Somme. 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. 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, saw 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. (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 Jews served – some in the List Regiment – with great distinction.) 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. 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 did refer to his negative comments about the Jews. 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.

  Hitler wanted to get back to the front as soon as possible, and above all to rejoin his old regiment. He eventually returned to it on 5 March 1917 in its new position a few miles to the north of Vimy. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The story was later to be found in all school books that the Führer had received the EK I for single-handedly capturing fifteen French soldiers. 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 EK 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.

  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 EK 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. 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. 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. 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. 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’.

  III

  In reality, of course, there had been no treachery, no stab-in-the-back. This was 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. Desertions and ‘shirking’ – deliberately ducking duty (estimated at close on a million men in the last months of the war) – rose dramatically. At 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.

  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. 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 daily li
fe, 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. Heinrich Claß, the leader of the arch-nationalist Pan-Germans, could report in October 1917 that antisemitism had ‘already reached enormous proportions’ and that ‘the struggle for survival was now beginning for the Jews’. 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. 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!’

  IV

  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. 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. 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).

  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 – the first cause in his life to which 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 soon clear – ‘the most terrible certainty of my life’ – that a general revolution had taken place. 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. At this, Hitler later 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.’

  Hitler referred to his Pasewalk experience on a number of occasions in the early 1920s, sometimes even with embellishments. Some have been tempted to read into Hitler’s colourful accounts 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. The balance of probabilities suggests a less dramatic process of ideological development and political awareness.

  Without question, Hitler was more than just deeply outraged by the news of the revolution. 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.

  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 during the composition of Mein Kampf between 1924 and 1926. 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. In none of his speeches before the putsch in November 1923 did Hitler say a word about deciding in autumn 1918 to enter politics. 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. 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 to return, via Berlin, to Munich, he had savings totalling only 15 Marks 30 Pfennige in his Munich account. 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.

  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.