by Ian Kershaw
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.129 Perhaps 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.134 Such 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 subsequ
ently 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.159 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.
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.164 Shortages 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.