Another bound folio containing photostat copies of postcards and letters Hitler sent to Ernst Hepp, a Munich acquaintance, also suggests a severed relationship. In extended and rambling sentences, punctuated with emotional pleas that anticipate his rhetorical style in decades to come, Hitler fills page after page with vivid accounts of frontline fighting and his longing to return home. “I think so often about Munich, and each of us has only the one wish that we will have finally settled accounts with this gang, regardless of the outcome,” Hitler writes Hepp. “To get it over with, cost what it will, and that those of us who have the good fortune to see their homeland again, will find it cleaner and cleansed further of the foreign elements, that through the sacrifice and suffering that so many hundreds of thousands of us daily bring, that through the stream of blood flows here day after day against an international world of enemies.” The last missive to Hepp is dated February 5, 1915.
By the time the RIR 16 took up position in Fournes in March 1915, where it was to remain for the next eighteen months, Hitler appears to have made the front his home. His closest companion was an English terrier he snatched that spring when it strayed into the German lines while chasing a rat across no-man’s-land. He named it Foxl and taught it tricks, such as walking on its hind legs and climbing a ladder, much to the bemusement of his comrades. Foxl accompanied him on his assignments to the front until that October, when the British introduced poison gas.
We have several photographs of Hitler and Foxl in Fournes. In one, Hitler leans on a sawhorse, a gangly, awkward man with sallow cheeks, a bushy moustache, and large, protruding ears. He squints against the sunlight into the camera while Foxl, who stretches across the laps of two seated soldiers, cranes his neck back toward Hitler.
Max Amann, the company sergeant, remembered Hitler as a decidedly odd but notably selfless man. Amann recalls that when he discovered a surplus in the company budget and offered it to Hitler because the Austrian appeared to have so little money, Hitler thanked Amann and suggested he give it to someone more needy. Similarly, when Amann recommended him for a promotion, Corporal Hitler declined. He said he commanded more respect without an officer’s stripes. He appeared to be selfless in the extreme. “Even if I came in at three in the morning, there were always a few men on duty,” Amann recalled. “When I said, ‘Messenger,’ no one moved, only Hitler jumped up. When I said, ‘You again!’ he said, ‘Let the others sleep. It doesn’t matter to me.’”
While Amann’s anecdotes are to be viewed with caution given that he was to become a close Hitler associate, and most notably the publisher of Mein Kampf, once again, the Hitler library provides corroborating evidence. In a tattered war memoir, With Adolf Hitler in the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 “List,” written by fellow RIR 16 veteran Adolf Meyer and presented to Hitler in 1934, we watch the twenty-something corporal cutting a zigzag pattern across an open field—overgrown with unharvested crops from the previous summer—while fellow soldiers huddle in a trench. As the man leaps into the safety of their company, he reports crisply, “Messenger, Regimental Headquarters 16, Hitler.”
Hitler’s dedication to duty is also preserved in his personal copy of the RIR 16’s five-hundred-page regimental history, which bears a handwritten inscription to Hitler from Maximilian Baligrand, the RIR 16’s last commander: “To his brave message runner, the highly decorated former corporal Mr. Adolf Hitler in memory of serious but great times, with thanks.” Dated “Christmas 1931,” a full year before Hitler’s seizure of power, the handwritten inscription was made well before there was an obvious reason to pander to the former corporal.
Most consequential, of course, is the large folio with Hitler’s complete military service record. Compiled in July 1937 for the Nazi Party Archives, this series of eighteen photostat documents from the Central Office for War Injuries and Graves was made in duplicate for Hitler. Along with a record of Hitler’s two war injuries, his two citations for bravery—an Iron Cross Second Class in 1914 and an Iron Cross First Class in 1918, the highest military award for a noncommissioned officer—and his discharge papers from the army in March 1920, the folio also contains an assessment of his four years of service. Document 16 records: “Comportment: Very Good, Penalties: 0.”
In November 1915, for a frontline corporal to pay four marks for a book on cultural treasures of Berlin, when cigarettes, schnapps, and women were readily available for more immediate and palpable distraction, can be seen as an act of aesthetic transcendence, a vicarious escape from the ruined world of refinement and beauty that Osborn watched dissolving in the mud of the Somme, or in Hitler’s case, possible evidence of the enduring aspiration for an artist’s career, as suggested by the gritty fingerprints I found beside a reproduction of Rubens’s Diana and Her Nymphs Assaulted by Satyrs on page 282, and further smudges along the margin on page 292, beside a Botticelli illustration for Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which a despairing figure clings to an angel as he is lifted from the Inferno.
Hitler’s battered copy of Adolf Meyer’s memoir,
With Adolf Hitler in the Sixteenth
Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment List
With a rush of busy lines running through the angel’s robes and the man’s anguished face, Botticelli conveys both urgency and desperation, which he contrasts with a flawless half circle that emanates from the angel’s raised hand, enclosing the scene in a hemisphere of serenity and safety. With remarkable economy of line, Botticelli creates a powerfully emotive moment of salvation as well as a technical lesson in contrast and drama for students of the penciled line. As Hitler studied this sketch, his fingers left a series of gritty prints along the right-hand margin that showed the course of his attention.
This attention to artistic detail suggests the resilience of an obstinate artistic spirit that had survived his father’s hard-knuckled objections (“A painter? Never!”), the devastating rejection from the Royal Academy of Arts in Vienna (“It struck me as a bolt from the blue”), and the subsequent realization that even his true calling in life, architecture, was beyond his reach. “One could not attend the Academy’s architectural school without having attended the building school at the Technik, and the latter required a high-school degree,” Hitler later lamented. “I had none of all this.” Five subsequent hardscrabble years as a freelance painter in Vienna and Munich could not dampen his artistic ambitions. Yet, when Hitler enlisted in the army in early autumn 1914, he registered his profession as “artist.”
Hitler was not the only soldier to march to the front with artistic intent.1 The RIR 16 ranks were filled with professional painters who spent much of the war recording the daily life and horror at the front and whose works are preserved in the regimental history. There was Wilhelm Kuh, who penned a series of ink drawings of the ruins of Fromelles, including a farmhouse that had taken a direct hit that left a splintered roof with a gaping hole in its center; Alexander Weiss, who sketched the graves of dead soldiers along the trenches near Fromelles; and Max Martens, whose watercolor of his frontline quarters with its reinforced roof and sand-bagged entrance bears a painted sign on a high post that blends bitter irony with sweet nostalgia by using the name of the legendary beer hall of his native Munich, “Löwenbräu.”
Botticelli drawing, Osborn’s Berlin
None of Hitler’s wartime efforts are included in the regimental history. His own library preserves six of his watercolors in a folio published by his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann in 1935. The oversize hardcover, embossed with the words Hitlers Aquarelle, contains a one-page introduction, and presents reproductions of a half dozen watercolors, each with an additional onionskin overlay, that Hitler painted between autumn 1914 and summer 1917.The earliest is Sunken Road near Wytschaete from November 1914, where Hitler earned his first Iron Cross and where the RIR 16 message-running unit was decimated. “In Wytschaete alone, on the day of the first assault, three men of our eight men were shot dead, and another critically wounded,” Hitler wrote afterward to Ernst Hepp. “We four
survivors and the wounded man received medals.” His watercolor from Wytschaete shows a vacant trench running through a war-ravaged forest with butchered trees standing in for butchered men.
In another painting, he depicts a ravaged, ruined monastery at Messines, where the following month the RIR 16 was again mauled in battle. Hitler also includes a scene from Fromelles, the Dressing Station, which shows the frontline first-aid station in a shrapnel-pocked farmhouse. Most notably, Hitler includes a painting of his farmhouse billet in Fournes where he was quartered with his fellow message runners, which they facetiously dubbed “Dark-Haired Maria’s Place,” after the strong-willed farmer’s wife who attended to them. In this painting, Hitler shows us a sturdy, two-story farmhouse with an attached barn and scattered debris in the courtyard. Propped against the wall is a bicycle. For a time, Hitler served as the regimental bicyclist.
One recent observer pointed out that the reproduction of the farmhouse billet included in Hitler’s Watercolors shows significant alterations from a copy of an original that survives in the Nazi Party Archives, suggesting that Heinrich Hoffmann had the Hitler originals doctored for public consumption. Indeed, the copy reveals a much less practiced hand. The bicycle is rendered only in a vague outline, and the details of the house are crudely drawn. Nevertheless, the deception embedded in the folio and included among Hitler’s remnant books expresses an authentic emotion: Hitler’s aspiration to be a better artist than he actually was.
Berlin also preserves some of the earliest traces of Hitler’s lifelong obsession with the German capital and the militant Prussian chauvinism he shared with Max Osborn. Just as Hitler writes of his desire to see Germany “cleansed” of “foreign elements,” Osborn rails against the influences of derivative nineteenth-century architectural styles that plagued this “Sparta on the Spree” with “orgies of an unspeakable debasement in taste.” Osborn laments the “wilding” of taste (Geschmacksverwilderung) that has despoiled the Prussian purity of Berlin and burdened it with a “cornucopia of artistic curses.”
Hitler’s sketch of his farmhouse billet near Fournes. From Hitler’s personal copy of his wartime artwork compiled by his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann
Osborn has particular disdain for those architects whose slavish imitation of foreign influences, especially “dogmatic Hellenism,” have ruined the aesthetic texture of countless German cities. At the same time, he praises those architects who had retained a distinctively Teutonic vision, lauding the massive domed German Reichstag as “an artistic reflection of the multifaceted organism of the German Reich,” admiring Karl Friedrich Schinkel for the “Prussian martialness” of the New Guard House, built in honor of the Germans who died in the Napoleonic Wars, and Karl Gotthard Langhans, who graced Berlin with its signature monument, the Brandenburg Gate. Though Langhans placed six Doric columns atop Ionic bases in a nod to Mediterranean classicism, he wisely avoided, Osborn notes, the temptation of employing a “Hellenic pediment.” Instead, Langhans crowned his structure with the dramatic copper mise-en-scène, the quadriga with the four horses transporting a chariot with the sword-bearing goddess of victory.
To Osborn, the Brandenburg Gate represents “the ultimate essence of Prussianness,” a balance between the perfected beauty of the ancients and the distinctly martial style of the north German plain—“Ancient Greece on Prussian soil!”—the German Grecomania run through a Prussian boot camp, brought to order and taught to stand crisp and smart at attention. “Its columns have something singularly orderly and erect, perhaps one could say, almost like a grenadier,” Osborn writes.
Osborn’s paeans to Prussian grace and grandeur evidently spoke to the young Austrian corporal as indicated by the volume’s dog-eared pages and broken spine. The book bears evidence of careful scrutiny—smudges, bent pages, a drip of residual red paraffin still viscous after eighty years—in a thirty-page chapter on Frederick the Great, the legendary eighteenth-century warrior-king who established Prussia’s preeminence as a military power. Frederick came to serve Hitler as a late-life role model of leadership and personal comportment, though rendered with catastrophic imperfection, in his own final years as a military commander.
Osborn casts Hitler’s future idol as a meddling, cheapskate monarch who scrimped on quality and excelled at cut-rate imitation and shabby pomposity. “The king, entirely a child of the artistic mediocrity of his age when it came to taste, saw solutions only in the frivolous arbitrariness of this powder-wig era,” Osborn complains. “More than his predecessors Frederick meddled in the plans of all his artists through personal intrusions and changes. More than his father he impatiently insisted that work be performed quickly and was satisfied with outward appearances for which inferior materials like plaster and stucco seemed adequate.” Worse still, Frederick avoided “artists and geniuses in preference to dutiful and less opinionated second- and third-rate craftsmen.” The resulting architectural missteps damaged not only the city’s appearance but also the regent’s health and reputation.
When planning his private residence, Sanssouci, in Potsdam, Frederick initially engaged the respected Berlin architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, but meddled incessantly with the design. According to Osborn, Frederick forced Knobelsdorff to forgo the construction of subterranean spaces, a decision, Osborn notes, that resulted in a chronic moisture problem that plagued the king’s rheumatism to his dying day. Knobelsdorff was eventually released from the project and replaced with a more pliant architect.
Osborn takes particular pleasure in recounting the collapse of the redbrick church on the Gendarmenmarkt in 1746. Frederick rushed the builders to complete the church in half the allotted time and with a significantly reduced budget. As roof construction was nearing completion, the church walls collapsed, transforming the site into a heap of rubble and killing forty laborers. Osborn reproduces a period etching of the ruined structure with its tumbled stone, smashed beams, and broken scaffolding, along with clusters of gawking bystanders. “The Berliners were naturally unsparing in their mockery,” Osborn writes. “In a brochure with the wry title ‘Sorry About That,’ the ironic theory was advanced that the structure had been built with gingerbread rather than stone.”
On the night of October 22, 1941, a quarter century after Hitler acquired Osborn’s Berlin, he recounted his early fascination with the Prussian capital, echoing Osborn’s assessment.
“I always liked Berlin and even if it did bother me that a lot of it was not very beautiful it still meant a lot to me,” he recalled. “Twice during the war I had ten days of vacation. Both times I went to Berlin, and from that time I know Berlin’s museums and collections.” Hitler, faithful to Osborn’s assessment, called Berlin the “sandbox of the old Reich,” which had accumulated a grab bag of architectural styles determined by rulers with little sense of aesthetic judgment—“Wilhelm II did have taste, it just happened to be extremely bad”—and recalled his own architectural vision of “Germanic-northern Ur-forms” that derived from “a Greek source,” an echo of Osborn’s own architectural incantation, “Ancient Greece on Prussian soil!”
Unlike Osborn, however, who could do little more than laud, lament, or lampoon, Hitler in 1941 possessed mettle and the means to undo the past. “We want to eliminate whatever is ugly in Berlin, and whatever Berlin gets now it should represent the epitome of what we are capable of achieving with modern means,” he said. “Whoever enters the Reich Chancellery should have the feeling that he is standing before the masters of the world, and even the route along the way, through the triumphal arch on the wide streets past the Hall of the Soldier to the Square of the People should take his breath away.” He foresaw the day when Berlin would emerge as “the capital of the world.”
Hitler evidently bought Osborn’s book with touristic intent, as is suggested by a companion volume from the Seemann series, a guide to Brussels I found among his remnant books. Like Berlin, Brussels is bound in an olive-drab cover with the title embossed in crimson, and as with the Osborn volume, Hitler
’s name is scrawled in the upper right corner on the inside cover.
Though Hitler includes neither the location nor date of purchase, we can assume the book was in his possession by the first week of July 1916, when, just after the battle for the Argonne Forest, he used a one-week furlough to visit Brussels, an event preserved not only in his military service record but also in a postcard sent to an RIR 16 comrade. “This trip is the most wonderful I have ever taken, despite the eternal rain which has been falling constantly,” Hitler wrote from Brussels on July 6. Three months later, Hitler found an unanticipated opportunity to visit Berlin.
In late September 1916, after eighteen months near Fournes, the RIR 16 was ordered to bolster the defenses at the Somme. The three thousand men marched to Haubourdin and boarded a train to Iwuy. Here they exchanged their spiked Pickelhauben for steel helmets and marched to Cambrai, then on to Fremicourt and, eventually, in the first days of October, were thrown into battle between the towns of Bapaume and Le Barque. The regimental log notes 250 dead, 855 wounded, and 90 missing. Virtually the entire message-running unit was either killed or wounded, as recounted by one surviving soldier.
“The message runners were in an underground passage that was so narrow and low that two people could not pass each other,” he recalled. “You could hardly sit. We kept tripping over each other’s legs. The air was so thick and heavy you could barely breathe. A small stairway led outside. I had just sat down next to Hitler when the passage took a direct hit. The roof was demolished and torn into a thousand pieces. Shrapnel flew everywhere.” Only two men emerged unscathed.
Hitler was taken to a nearby field hospital at Hermies with a piece of shrapnel in his leg. He was treated early the following morning in the company of Ernst Schmidt, who had also been wounded and transported by train to a Red Cross military hospital in Beelitz, a small town near Potsdam, forty miles southwest of Berlin. He was to spend the next two months there. “What a change! From the mud of the Battle of the Somme, into the white beds of this miraculous building!” Hitler later recalled. A photograph dated October 26, 1916, shows Hitler in a white hospital jacket with twelve other patients. He stands in the back row, his arms crossed, the only one without a hat, his hair unkempt, his moustache overgrown and bushy, his eyes dark and intense, his expression somber. He looks older, more serious than in the photographs taken in Fournes the previous year.
Hitler's Private Library Page 3