by Ian Kershaw
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 a second 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.83 The ‘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.110 Three 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