by Ian Kershaw
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.177 However, 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.
4
DISCOVERING A TALENT
‘I was offered an opportunity of speaking before a larger audience; and the thing that I had always presumed from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated; I could “speak”.’
Hitler, in Mein Kampf
‘Herr Hitler especially is, I might say, a born popular speaker who, through his fanaticism and his populist style in a meeting, absolutely compels his audience to take note and share his views.’
One of the soldiers addressed by Hitler
at Lechfeld in August 1919
‘Goodness, he’s got a gob. We could use him.’
Anton Drexler, leader of the DAP,
hearing Hitler speak for the first time, in September 1919
On 21 November 1918, two days after leaving hospital in Pasewalk, Hitler was back in Munich. Approaching thirty years of age, without education, career or prospects, his only plans were to stay in the army, which had been his home and had provided for him since 1914, as long as possible. He came back to a Munich he scarcely recognized. The barracks to which he returned were run by soldiers’ councils. The revolutionary Bavarian government, in the shape of a provisional National Council, was in the hands of the Social Democrats and the more radical Independent Social Democrats. The Minister President, Kurt Eisner, was a radical; and he was a Jew. By spring, Eisner was to be assassinated, Bavarian politics to come close to chaos, and Munich for a month in April to be ruled by Soviet-style councils – for the last two weeks of April by Communists looking directly to Moscow for their model. The bloody repression accompanying the ‘liberation’
of Munich by Reichswehr troops and Freikorps (volunteer freebooter formations) was to lead to Hitler’s first involvement in counter-revolutionary activity. In turn this was to mark the beginning of the process which would see him employed by the army as an informant, ‘talent-spotted’ as a ‘born popular speaker’1 by his superior officer in the Reichswehr, and entering politics, still in army service, as a populist agitator in the tiny German Workers’ Party.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the biographical parts of Mein Kampf is how quickly Hitler passed over his own experience of the traumatic revolutionary period in Bavaria. After all, he witnessed for the most part at close quarters the turmoil which so deeply scarred his psyche. He was based in Munich, at the epicentre of events, for the whole period that saw the descent into political chaos following the assassination of Eisner and culminated in the violent end of the ‘councils’ republic’. Yet his entire treatment of the months between the November revolution and the suppression of the Räterepublik covers a mere page of his otherwise expansive book. Finding the soldiers’ councils in charge of his regiment so repelled him, he wrote, that he decided to leave again as soon as possible. He was sent – after volunteering for service is the clear implication – with his closest wartime comrade Ernst Schmidt (whose name he misspells as ‘Schmiedt’) to Traunstein in the east of Bavaria, not far from the Austrian border, where he remained until the camp (which held prisoners of war) was disbanded, returning to Munich in March 1919. During the Räterepublik – the ‘passing rule of the Jews’ as he dubbed it – Hitler claimed he pondered what could be done, but repeatedly realized that, since he was ‘nameless’, he ‘did not possess the least basis for any useful action’. In other words, he did nothing; before, that is, allegedly acting in some way – though he does not describe it, and the whole story has the air of a fabrication – that aroused the disapproval of the Central Council. Accordingly, in his account, he was to have been arrested on 27 April, but drove away with a loaded rifle the three men who had come to take him into custody.2 Finally, he adds that, a few days after the ‘liberation’ of Munich, he was summoned to report to the commission examining the ‘revolutionary occurrences’ within his regiment – his ‘first more or less purely political activity’.3