One photograph shows a white fox terrier which ran away from the British front lines in January and which Hitler adopted in January 1915. He was very attached to the animal, teaching it a number of tricks. Once, in January 1942, when the situation at the Eastern Front took a dramatic turn for the worse, Hitler spent half the night telling stories about “Foxl.” “I was very fond of him,” he reminisced. “I shared everything with him, and he slept with me at night…I would never have given him up, not for any price.” In September 1917, when the regiment was redeployed to Alsace, Foxl suddenly disappeared. It was a major blow for Hitler. “The bastard who took him away doesn’t know what he did to me,” Hitler complained in 1942.68 In later life, Hitler’s pronounced affection for dogs stood in stark contrast to the coldness with which he treated even those people who belonged to his most intimate circle.
Unlike in the Vienna men’s home, Hitler seems to have kept his political views to himself during the war. “I was a soldier and didn’t want to make things political,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.69 In Nuremberg in 1947, when asked whether Hitler gave political speeches during the war, Amann also answered with a definite “No.”70 The only time Hitler’s anger arose against his comrades was when someone doubted that the Central Powers would win the war. “There is no way we can lose the world war,” Hitler would protest.71 In a rare moment of openness, in a letter to Ernst Hepp in early February 1915, he did give a hint as to his political views. Those soldiers who were lucky enough to see their homeland again, Hitler wrote, “will find it purer and cleansed of foreignness.” He added his hope “that the daily sacrifices and suffering of hundreds of thousands of us…will not only smash Germany’s enemies abroad but also destroy our internal internationalism—that would be worth more than any territorial gains.”72
Thus, while annexationist circles in heavy industry, conservative parties and nationalist associations may have seen the war in terms of territorial conquests, for Hitler it was a struggle in which Germany defended itself abroad against international enemies while restoring its domestic, ethnic homogeneity and shattering the power of the “internationalist” Social Democratic labour movement at home. The fact that the SPD had supported the Imperial German government and approved lines of credit for the war on 4 August 1914 apparently did nothing to alter Hitler’s negative view of the party. The prejudices and phobias acquired during his Vienna years were too deeply ingrained to be dislodged.
From March 1915 to September 1916, RIR 16 dug in near the town of Fromelles, where it was responsible for defending a 2.3-kilometre stretch of the front. In the respites between battles, Hitler had time to do a bit of painting and to read books. “I carried five volumes of Schopenhauer around with me throughout the war,” he later boasted. “I learned a lot from him.”73 We don’t know how intensely Hitler studied Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but he was certainly familiar with the basics of The World as Will and Idea, including the notion that all geniuses, and especially artistic ones, were destined to be misunderstood. Reading Schopenhauer may also have strengthened Hitler’s conviction that strength of will could help him not only lead a life of sexual asceticism, but overcome his fears of dying.
In late September 1916, Hitler’s regiment was redeployed to the south, just in time to be sent into the Battle of the Somme, which had been raging since 1 July. One of the bloodiest battles of the First World War, almost 20,000 British troops died on the first day alone, and by the time the fighting was over, 419,000 British and 204,000 French soldiers had been killed or wounded; German casualties totalled some 465,000.74 “This is not war, but a mutual annihilation using technological strength,” wrote Vice-Sergeant Hugo Frick from another regiment to his mother in October 1916. “Beyond the word horrible, there’s no describing the hardships and mortal fear we endure here.”75
Again luck was initially on Hitler’s side, but on 5 October a shell hit the entrance to the bunker where the regimental staff runners had sought cover. Hitler took some shrapnel in his left thigh. Adjutant Wiedemann wrote that as he bent down over the wounded man, Hitler said: “It’s not so bad, Lieutenant. I want to stay with you in the regiment.”76 In January 1942, Hitler recalled: “Strangely enough, in the moment when you’re wounded you hardly feel the pain. You sense a blow, and think, that’s nothing. The pain only comes when you’re transported away.”77 Hitler’s injuries proved not to be as serious as initially feared. He was given medical treatment in a field hospital near the town of Hermies and then sent to a Red Cross hospital in Beelitz, south of Berlin, where he recovered from 9 October to 1 December 1916. “What a difference!” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “From the mud of the battlefield to the gleaming white beds of that wonderful building! You hardly dared to lie down in them at first. It took a while to get used to this new world.”78
In the hospital in Beelitz, Hitler encountered soldiers who were sick of the war and had no qualms about saying so. In Mein Kampf, he expressed his outrage at those “miserable scoundrels” who had poked fun at the “beliefs of respectable soldiers with all the means of their poor eloquence.” Hitler was especially scandalised by a soldier who had inflicted an injury on himself to get away from the conflict.79 For Hitler, who apparently continued to believe in the war, such forms of rebellion indicated the demise of military morale. We do not know whether he himself ever doubted that Germany would emerge victorious, as virtually no first-hand documents—letters or anything else—of his opinions from the second half of the war survived.
On 4 November 1916, the convalescent Hitler was granted permission to travel to Berlin. It was his first time in the capital of the Reich whose chancellor he would become seventeen years later. What he saw and heard there hardly lifted his spirits. “Everywhere, people’s suffering was great,” he recalled in Mein Kampf. “This million-strong city was starving. There was great dissatisfaction.”80 Since the winter of 1915/16 it had become increasingly difficult to supply Germany’s major cities with necessities, and there were long queues in front of grocery shops. Women and children stood for hours in all kinds of weather to obtain a pound of butter, a couple of eggs or a piece of meat. People’s disgruntlement with such intolerable conditions grew the longer they went on, and eventually led to public unrest and spontaneous strikes. Such protests also became increasingly political, directly targeting the prevailing social hierarchy, the privileged and the wealthy. In April 1916, a Berlin police officer reported: “The mood in general is very downbeat. Everyone longs for an end to the war…People are dissatisfied with the measures taken by the government, which have failed to combat inflation and profiteering sufficiently. Soldiers leave for the battlefield embittered. The general view is that the war is being fought not for the fatherland, but for capitalism.”81
Nothing was left of the enthusiasm for war in August 1914. Exhaustion and longing for peace now set the tone among urban populations. Hitler would experience this when he was discharged from the hospital on 2 December 1916 and sent to Munich, where he reported to a replacement battalion of RIR 16. He no longer recognised the city. “Anger, sullenness and complaints wherever you went!” he recalled in Mein Kampf.82 People’s disgruntlement was, on the one hand, directed against “the Prussians,” who were hated equally by Bavarian soldiers and civilians. In August 1917, a policeman jotted down remarks made by Bavarian soldiers during a rail journey: “The soldiers’ main wish was for a speedy end to the war, and they mentioned that Germany was also at fault for prolonging it…As long as Bavaria was allied with Prussia, there would be war, for the big-mouthed Prussians had been involved every time there was war.”83
As social tensions increased, anti-Semitic resentment played a larger and larger role in public dissatisfaction. Jews were accused not just of shamelessly profiting from the misery of the general populace, but of trying to shirk military service by whatever means they could. Since late 1915, the Prussian War Ministry had practically been flooded with complaints about Jewish “shirking.” People of the Jewish faith, contended a campaign p
rimarily launched by the influential Pan-Germanic League, were using their wealth and resources to ride out the war in desk jobs at headquarters in the rear. The Jewish industrialist and writer Walther Rathenau was appointed director of the Raw Materials Division of the Prussian War Ministry in August 1914 but was forced to resign in March 1915 after receiving numerous threats. In 1916 he wrote about the growing waves of anti-Semitism: “The more Jews fall in this war, the more their enemies will contend that they all hid far behind the front lines and engaged in profiteering. The hatred will double and triple.”84
Rathenau’s fears were all too justified. On 11 October 1916, only a few weeks after these remarks, Prussian Minister of War Adolf Wild von Hohenborn ordered a review of the types of military service being performed by Jews. The so-called “Jewish census” was an abomination as the government was reacting to completely unfounded anti-Semitic accusations—at the very time when many Jewish Germans were sacrificing their lives for their fatherland. “Two years of absolute sacrifice for our homeland and then this!” wrote Georg Meyer, a captain in a Bavarian artillery regiment, when he heard about the census. “It’s like someone boxed my ears.”85
It is difficult to imagine that Hitler, who had been exposed to Jewish stereotypes in his years in Vienna, would have remained completely unaffected by the increasingly radical anti-Semitic defamations circulating towards the end of the war. If we believe what he wrote later on, it was in his barracks with the replacement battalion in Munich in December 1916 that he first saw the “truth” about alleged Jewish shirking: “The offices were full of Jews. Almost every clerk was a Jew, and almost every Jew a clerk.”86 In Mein Kampf, Hitler also reproduced the common stereotype of Jews as wartime profiteers: “Here [in the economy] Jews had in fact become ‘indispensable.’ The spider slowly began sucking the blood through the pores of the people.”87
We have no way of knowing for sure whether Private Hitler thought in these terms in late 1916 and early 1917. If his experiences of the home front did in fact make him more susceptible for the Jew-hatred that was going round, he concealed it from his comrades. In any case, there is no record of him making any anti-Semitic statements.88 Wiedemann was astonished when he encountered Hitler again in the 1920s as a popular anti-Semitic politician. He never discovered the origin of Hitler’s fanatical Jew-hatred: his interactions with officers and comrades in RIR 16 did not offer “the slightest indication” of anti-Semitism.89
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Interestingly, Hitler neither visited his former landlords, the Popps, nor any other pre-war acquaintances in Munich. Reminders of his civilian existence seemed to make him uncomfortable. He was bored in the barracks and longed to get back to the front. “At the moment I’m undergoing dental treatment, but I’ll report immediately and voluntarily for the front,” Hitler wrote to Karl Lanzhammer, the regiment’s bicyclist, on 19 December 1916. Two days later he told Brandmayer: “I’m sitting with swollen cheeks in my four walls thinking of you. There was a transport a few days ago to the regiment. Unfortunately I wasn’t on it.”90 The regimental staff had become Hitler’s adoptive family. In a letter to Wiedemann, in which he declared himself once again “battle ready,” he said that he greatly longed “to return to my old regiment and old comrades.”91 Wiedemann fulfilled Hitler’s wish. On 5 March 1917, Hitler celebrated his return to the front.
By that time his regiment had been redeployed to La Bassée. In late April 1917, under the leadership of regimental commander Major Anton von Tubeuf, it moved to the area of Arras in northern France. In mid-July it returned to the scene of Hitler’s first action in Flanders, where it was thrown into the Third Battle of Ypres. On 31 July, in the course of a major offensive, British forces unveiled a new weapon: tanks. “It was our misfortune that our leadership back then didn’t recognise the value of technological weaponry,” Hitler opined in August 1941. “If we’d had 400 tanks in the summer of 1918, we would have won the world war.”92 Hitler was partly right. Germany’s army commanders had in fact decided too late to build a German tank, and they could no longer make up the lost ground—although that was not what decided the war.93
In early August 1917, having suffered heavy casualties, Hitler’s regiment was withdrawn from the battle in Flanders and redeployed to a quieter stretch of front in Alsace. Here, on 17 September, Hitler was awarded the Military Merit Cross, Third Class. Later that month, for the first time, he was given an eighteen-day home furlough, which he spent in Berlin visiting the parents of a comrade named Richard Arendt, who lived in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. Unlike his quick visit in November 1916, this time around Hitler got to enjoy all of Berlin’s cultural attractions.94 “The city is grandiose,” he wrote to Ernst Schmidt on 6 October. “A true world city. The traffic is also immense. Out and about almost the whole day long. Finally have the chance to study the museums more closely. In short, I have everything I need.”95 Hitler sent three postcards to Amann alone. In one of them, he expressed his regret that his days in Berlin were passing so quickly.96 On 17 October, he returned to his regiment, which had been redeployed to the province of Champagne.
Amidst the labourers, artisans and lowly office workers who populated Prenzlauer Berg, it could not have escaped Hitler during his second Berlin visit how explosive the situation in the capital had become. In April 1917, Berlin had been hit by the first major strikes by workers in the armaments industries. As was also the case in other big German cities, the effects of the February Revolution in Russia were making themselves felt. “We have to do as they did in Russia, then everything will be different,” a police informant overheard a working-class woman in front of a Hamburg grocery shop saying, and such statements surely reflected a widespread feeling.97 The anti-war protest movement coalesced around the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had constituted itself as an alternative to the mainstream SPD in April 1917. Although military and civilian authorities took draconian action against opponents of the war, they failed to impose calm. “The populace no longer has any hopes of a favourable outcome to the war,” a Berlin police officer reported in mid-July 1917. “There is a fervent longing for an end to the war at any price.”98 In December of that year, the tension was ratcheted up even further after justified fears that negotiations over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Bolsheviks, who had come to power in Russia, could fail due to the inflexibility of the German delegation.
In late January 1918, the general dissatisfaction led to a massive strike. Hundreds of thousands of workers demonstrated in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Nuremberg and many other cities for a swift end to the carnage. “I can tell you, when I saw the procession of serious-looking workers and women move so silently and united through the streets, I felt jubilation running through me,” a Hamburg office worker wrote to her boyfriend at the front.99 As far as we can tell from soldiers’ intercepted letters, the news of the strikes drew a mixed response, with some soldiers expressing their unconditional support, while others were dumbfounded or rejected the protest. The spectrum extended from “All of my comrades rejoiced at the strike” to “Do these lunatics really think the strike will end the war more quickly?”100 Private Hitler belonged to the latter group. In Mein Kampf he dismissed the strike as “the biggest criminal act of the entire war,” which served only to strengthen “the enemy peoples’ faith in their ultimate victory.”101 Hitler blamed the leadership of the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD) for the protests, even though, unlike the USPD, the MSPD had not been involved in declaring the strike and only cooperated with it in Berlin and other places to ensure the popular movement ended as soon as possible. “Once the unrest had broken out,” Berlin Police President Heinrich von Oppen noted on 29 January 1918, “the respectable SPD joined the movement against their will so as not to be shunted completely into the background.”102
In March 1918, after dictating terms of peace to Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the German Army Supreme Command made one last attempt to decide the war in Germany’s favour w
ith a massive military offensive in the west. Initial triumphs seemed to justify the wildest of hopes. On 21 March, German forces attacked along a broad line from Cambrai in northern France to St. Quentin in the south, advancing as many as sixty kilometres. But after a few days the advance stalled, and none of the three subsequent offensives in April, May and July 1918 could turn the tide. By late May, the vanguard of the German army had reached the Marne and was once again only a few days’ march from Paris, but the strategic position of the German forces had worsened as the bulging front lines were vulnerable to counter-offensives. The Army Supreme Command had pushed things too far and exhausted Germany’s offensive capabilities. On 18 July, the French counter-attacked and achieved a major breakthrough of German lines. The Allies had regained the initiative and could count on reinforcements in the form of fresh American troops.
The List Regiment took part in all the offensives—on the Somme, the Aisne and the Marne—resulting in further heavy casualties. Half of the regiment’s men were killed or wounded in April 1918 alone.103 Hitler remained unharmed, and on 4 August 1918, after the regiment was withdrawn from the defensive battle on the Marne and redeployed in a recovery position in La Cateau, he received the Iron Cross, First Class—an accolade not usually given to privates. The Jewish lieutenant Hugo Gutmann, who had replaced Wiedemann as regiment adjutant, may have put Hitler forward for that distinction, although we cannot be sure. If he had been nominated by Gutmann, Hitler never thanked him. Instead, he later remarked: “We had a Jew in our regiment, Gutmann, a coward beyond compare. He was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. It was an outrage and a disgrace.”104
On 8 August 1918, four days after Hitler received his decoration, British tanks broke through German lines near Amiens. This “black day” for the German army was the final turning point of the war. Exhaustion and war fatigue were more evident than ever before, and at the front there were reports of breached discipline and disobedience. Things were also boiling over in garrisons on the home front, with increasing numbers of soldiers trying to avoid the transports to the front lines. “The letters contain hardly a trace of patriotism,” reported a military censor in early September 1918. “Individual interest in the war has been pushed to the background. Almost to a man, the soldiers take the view: ‘I’m going to avoid the front as best I can!’ ”105 Nonetheless, it was a good four weeks until the Supreme Command, which since August 1916 had been led by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, acknowledged their military bankruptcy. On 29 September in the Belgian town of Spa, the two commanders declared to Imperial Germany’s entire military leadership that the war was lost and Germany would have to sue for a ceasefire. A parliamentary government under Prince Max von Baden would be formed to this end, and the mainstream Social Democrats, as the largest party in the Reichstag, would be part of the new regime.
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