by A. N. Wilson
We see, from the very first page of My Struggle, how Hitler made his own childhood part of the whole political German story. It was Fate (Schicksal) which determined where he was born. And the fact that he was the son of a customs officer, an official who by definition stood at the border, was made to have mystic significance.
His father had been born Alois Schicklgruber in 1837. He had risen from the peasantry. Much has been made of Alois’s violence. Most fathers in history have beaten their children, not a few have had fiery tempers. None has had a son like Adolf Hitler. Alois Schicklgruber was the illegitimate son of a woman named Maria Anna Schicklgruber. All sorts of fantasies have been spun about the possible father, including the untenable view that he might have been Jewish. Five years after Alois was born, his mother married a fifty-year-old miller’s journeyman named Johann Georg Hiedler. His mother died when he was five, and Alois was then taken to live on Johann Georg’s brother’s farm. The brother was Johann Nepomuk, the grandfather of Hitler’s mother, Klara. (Hence her calling Alois ‘uncle’ when she married him.) Alois worked hard and rose in status. By 1876, he had managed to persuade a notary in Weitra that he should be legitimized. The overwhelming likelihood is that his father was in fact Johann Georg Hiedler and in the legitimization papers, this name is spelt Hitler. Thus the name entered history. Hiedler/Hüttler/Hitler all are variations of the same name, which means a smallholder or one who lives in a hut. Either way, Fate/Schicksal was kind to the future Adolf in giving him a snappy two-syllabled name. Somehow the great Nuremberg rallies would not have seemed so impressive if the serried ranks of tens of thousands of enthusiastic Germans had all been chanting ‘Heil Schicklgruber!’
Alois’s first marriage was childless. His second produced a son, also called Alois, who married an Irish girl called Bridget Dowling, who lived for a while in Liverpool, England, and whose child, William Patrick Hitler, was born in 1911 and later lived in New York. The other child was Angela, who for a while kept house for Adolf Hitler, and whose daughter by Leo Raubal – also called Angela (Geli) – was Hitler’s beloved niece.
It was as his third wife that Alois Hitler took Klara Pölzl. There were five children – Gustav, who died aged two in 1887; Ida who also died in infancy; Otto who died as a baby; Edmund who died aged sixteen in 1900, Paula who lived until 1960 and Adolf, who was born on 20 April 1889.
Given the high mortality rate of his siblings, and the fact that both parents were dead by the time he was eighteen, it was not surprising that Hitler was a hypochondriac who always feared illness and imagined his own life would be a short one.
By the time he was living with his widowed mother, the family had settled in the somewhat dingy provincial town of Linz. There was real tension in the town between the German nationalist population – numbering about 60,000 – and the Czechs. Alois Hitler was a passionate German nationalist. Adolf absorbed and inherited these feelings: they may be said to have determined his entire foreign policy, and all the expansionism of 1936–9 which brought the world to the war. What he did not inherit, as has already been said, was any of his father’s desire to work hard and better himself.
He was a moody, idle, and not especially talented child. When Alois died in 1903, he left the family reasonably comfortable. The three women of the family – mother Klara, aunt Johanna and little sister Paula – did all the work of running the apartment. His mother bought Adolf a grand piano and for four months he took lessons. He was a competent pianist, and had a good ear. He was a lonely, withdrawn boy. His only known emotional excitement was having a painful crush on a girl called Stefanie, a beautiful young lady he saw in the streets of Linz. There is no evidence that they even so much as spoke to one another. His best friend was a musician named August Kubizek – Gustl. It was he who told us, in his largely adulatory memoir of his friendship with Hitler, of his friend’s life in those days. It was with Gustl that Hitler first sampled the opera – Hitler clad on these occasions in a black coat and opera hat, and carrying a cane with an ivory handle. It was with Gustl that Hitler, aged twelve, first attended Lohengrin. On one evening the two friends saw a production of Wagner’s Rienzi, an early opera (more like Weber musically than it is like the later, developed Wagner). The opera tells the story of a young demagogue in fourteenth-century Rome who led his people to rebellion, and was finally rejected by them. Doubts have been cast by historians upon Kubizek’s recollection of this evening in which, after the performance, Hitler is supposed to have climbed the Freinberg, the mountain outside Linz, and been in a sort of prophetic trance. As Kubizek reconstructed the scene in 1939 for Winifred Wagner at the Bayreuth Opera House, Hitler is supposed to have added, mysteriously, ‘In that hour it began.’
In jener Stunde begann es.
In fact what happened to Hitler in the next few years was about as far from any Rienzi-like political awakening as it is possible to imagine. He and Kubizek went to Vienna and shared a flat together. Kubizek studied music at the Conservatoire. Hitler was supposed to be at the Academy of Fine Arts, but had in fact failed the entry exams twice.
It has been plausibly conjectured that Hitler broke with his friend because he could not stand the shame of this failure.
Hitler’s mother died of breast cancer in 1907. The doctor attending her said that he had never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as was Hitler when his mother died. Eduard Bloch, the doctor, was Jewish, and neither Hitler nor his sister seem to have felt, or demonstrated, any anti-Semitic feeling towards him, still less blamed him for Klara’s death. The anti-Semitic mania appears to have developed later, perhaps during Hitler’s mysterious years as a drop-out student in Vienna.
For he soon got through the money his mother had left him, and he never appears to have taken employment. Some more money was due to him from his father’s will when he reached – on 20 April 1913 – the age of twenty-four. Much of his time was spent simply waiting in idleness for this date to arrive. In May 1913, wanted by the Austrian police because he had failed to register for military service, he escaped over the German border and went to live in Munich.
There then occurred the event which, as Ian Kershaw, the great British Hitler scholar, has said ‘made Hitler possible’:3 the outbreak of the First World War. Having persuaded the Austrian authorities that he was medically unfit for service, he had returned to Munich. But, like so very many young men in 1914, Hitler was caught up in war fever when the great European powers – Russia, Austro-Hungary, Germany and Britain, together with France – found themselves edging towards war after the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a young Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo. Although serious politicians and diplomats saw the outbreak of war as a calamity, and the more far-sighted were able to see that it could destroy Western civilization, the public mood was buoyant. With the declaration of hostilities, there were happy, cheering crowds in all the major cities of Europe. In one of these cheering crowds, in the Odeonsplatz in Munich, a camera by extraordinary chance captured the young, exultant face of Adolf Hitler, a nonentity unknown to anyone, just as he was about to enlist with the Bavarian army. Although in 1870, with the creation of the German nation under Bismarck’s Prussia, it had come into political union, Bavaria was traditionally separate from the rest of Germany until 1918. Hitler had to write a personal application to old King Ludwig III to join his army. He was turned down by the first regiment to which he applied – the Bavarian King’s Own – but he was accepted by the 1st Bavarian Infantry Regiment.
It used to be believed by historians that Hitler was, if not a war hero, then at least a conspicuously brave front-line soldier. New research by Dr Thomas Weber of Aberdeen University has uncovered a confusion about what was meant by a regimental runner, which was Hitler’s job in the army. Battalion or company runners did indeed have a dangerous job, running between different trenches in the front line of battle under heavy machine-gun fire. Hitler, however, was something rather different – a regimental runner. The regimen
tal runners worked several miles from the front in regimental headquarters. They were office boys in military uniform. One man who did the same job, Alois Schnelldorfer, wrote to his parents that his job was no more dangerous than to sit in an armchair and make calls to their postmistress. ‘I can drink a litre of beer and sit down under a walnut tree’, he wrote home.
The men among whom Hitler served considered him a strange bird. They noted his teetotalism, and his aloofness from their jokes and conversation. He would sit apart from them, reading history (perhaps in fact Karl May novels?), writing letters (to his mother-substitute, the Munich landlady Frau Popp) and sketching. They nicknamed him ‘the artist’ or ‘the painter’. They mocked his physical incompetence. He could not open cans of meat with a bayonet as they all could, and they ribbed him that if he worked in a canning factory he would starve to death.4
One thing they noticed was his slavishness to superiors. And it paid off. Dr Weber’s new research has shown that it was comparatively easy for an infantryman to win an Iron Cross, First Class, if he was in constant touch with the officers. Hitler was lucky enough to be recommended for this honour by Hugo Gutmann, a Jewish adjutant, who, in 1937, was to be put in prison by the Gestapo. Luckily for Gutmann, his old comrades in the regiment petitioned for his release and he was able to escape to the United States, but not thanks to Hitler. The best friend he made in the army was a white terrier dog who had escaped from an English trench. Hitler called him ‘little Fox’ or Fuchsl. ‘With exemplary patience (he did not understand a word of German) I got him used to me,’ he wrote back to Frau Popp in Munich.
It is not surprising, therefore, given Hitler’s comparatively safe job well behind enemy lines, that he was able to survive so well on the Western Front, in spite of his regiment taking part in some of the worst battles of the war, such as the Somme in 1916 in which over 600,000 young men were killed. It is also revealing that when he did suffer injury, it was not because he was running an errand, but sitting in a tunnel close to regimental HQ when a shell hit the roof. Hitler’s plea to his Lieutenant, Wiedemann, when he was put on a stretcher, ‘But I can still stay with you? Stay with the regiment? Can’t I?’, has often been taken as evidence that he was still anxious, even in his injuries, to be fighting for the Fatherland; but it could just as well be seen as a sign that for the first time in his life, in the regiment, and surrounded by men in uniform, he had found an environment in which he felt comfortable and at home. This is not to say that he was homosexual. Very many lonely men, or men whose lives had been humdrum or unsatisfactory in civilian life, felt the same, during both world wars, when they enlisted in the services.
He was invalided out of the regiment and was taken first to a field hospital, then to a military hospital just south of Berlin before being transferred to a replacement battalion in Munich. It is here that we begin to see the signs of that virulent anti-Semitism which in the next few years became a trademark mania. He noticed that all the clerks were Jews, and began to hatch the view that the Jews had somehow sapped national morale, or were responsible for the failure of the German army to make headway on the Western Front.
He was eventually allowed to return to his old regiment in the line, and there was a glad reunion with little Fuchsl, who was by now in Ypres, Belgium. The first night they were together, Hitler took Fuchsl ratting and stabbed many a rat with his bayonet. The regiment took part in the Third Battle of Ypres, but for the rest of 1917 saw no action. There was plenty more time for playing with the dog and reading Karl May novels. In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution took place, and throughout all the armies of Europe – German, French and British – the spectre of Communism began to haunt the officer classes.
In 1918, the regiment was ordered back to Flanders. In March the men heard that the German Government had made peace with the Soviet Government of Russia at Brest-Litovsk. Early in September 1918 the regiment was again moved back to Flanders, but Hitler had a period of leave and with a comrade named Arendt he spent it in Berlin, where the mood of revolution was palpable.
Hitler returned to his regiment for what was to be the last month of the war. It was in the area below Ypres that they dug into the fields and hills near Comines. Near the village of Wervick, on 14 October, there was a gas attack. Hitler felt scalding in his eyes, and was taken off, temporarily blinded, to hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania. He had survived the war. At the Nuremberg trials, following the Second World War, the adjutant of the regiment gave evidence. He said that there had sometimes arisen a question of promoting Hitler from the ranks and making him a non-commissioned officer. Whenever the matter was discussed, however, it was always decided in the negative, ‘because we could discover no leadership qualities in him’. Furthermore, Otfrid Förster, a renowned neurosurgeon who saw Hitler’s medical file in 1932, gave it as his opinion that Hitler’s blindness was a case of ‘hysterical amblyopia’.5 If this were the case, and it seems highly likely, then we can discount the gas attack altogether and lose the last shred of a claim that Hitler the messenger boy had an ‘heroic’ war.
In My Struggle, needless to say, the end of the war, and Hitler’s part in it, had to be given a quality of apocalypse. On 10 November, the hospital chaplain brought the patients news that a revolution had broken out in Berlin and that the Imperial Royal House, the Hohenzollerns, had gone into exile in Holland. The Kaiser was no more. Germany was a socialist republic. The revolution had been achieved by ‘a few Jewish youths … who had not been at the Front’.6
Saint Paul, although in Hitler’s eyes a dangerous Jewish Bolshevik, had been struck blind by God before going into Damascus and beginning his great mission to convert the world. It would seem that a comparable miracle was performed by Providence upon Adolf Hitler. When the chaplain broke the news of Germany’s defeat, it was sad, naturally, for all Germans. But for the author of My Struggle, this was a personal thing. ‘While everything became black before my eyes, I teetered and groped my way back towards the ward, threw myself on my bunk, and buried my burning head into my blanket and pillow. I had not shed a tear since the day that I stood beside my mother’s grave. When, in my youth, Fate grabbed me without mercy, my defiant resolve only quickened. When in the long years of war, death took so many comrades and friends from among our ranks, it would have seemed a sin to me to bewail their fate – they died for Germany!’7
He bore all these sorrows. He endured blindness and pain without a murmur, it would seem. But what drew forth his tears was the left-wing revolution. For ever afterwards, the ‘November criminals’, the socialists who concluded the Armistice on 11 November 1918, were the villains of the story which Hitler told – first to himself, then to his small gang of political cronies, then to larger groups, and finally to Germany and to the world. My Struggle asks us to believe that it was while he lay weeping on his hospital bed that he decided to go into politics. Whether or not such a decision was made, there would have been no hope, in the old world, that a man of Hitler’s background, with no obvious qualifications, could enter the political sphere. But the world had changed. With the coming of the peace, the world was ready for the arrival of this dreamer. Unheeding, Germany moved into the humiliations, poverty and chaos of its post-war life. It was to be some years before Germany woke up to the fact that its Lohengrin had arrived, though not by swan; that its Rienzi had arisen, though not from Rome. When he was discharged from hospital, with his sight fully recovered, and ordered to report to the replacement battalion of his old regiment, he was the reverse of ‘demob happy’, since it was by no means clear what possible avocation in civilian life this failed art student who had never done a job might follow. As for his little friend, Fuchsl, history does not relate what happened to him, but he presumably ended his war in Belgium.
TWO
‘Our Leader’
When Hitler left the army he had no prospects, no money, no professional skill, no social contacts. Yet within a mere fourteen years he would become Chancellor of the German Reich, a man before whom
generals and admirals sycophantically cringed, before whom foreign heads of state bowed, a hero of the masses who had become not so much a popular hero as a divinity on the pattern of the old Roman emperors. We will come nowhere close to understanding this mystery if we attempt to endow Hitler with too many qualities, either of good or of evil. He rose fast because he had so little weight to carry. He had been an obedient soldier – though his commanding officers believed he possessed no leadership qualities, and history, broadly speaking, proved them right unless you believe that such qualities include the ability to lead vast masses to total disaster. He had a good ear and with the skill of a good conductor he could pick out the different instrument parts in an orchestra. But he was only an averagely good pianist. He had aspirations to be a great artist or architect but his drawings were pedestrian. He had no competence in foreign tongues. He made clever use of his reading but that reading was extremely limited. Indeed, it was the very fact of his limitations which gave him such strength. He had few abilities and it was these which carried him along.
Chief and greatest of his gifts was the capacity to speak in public, a gift which had lain dormant throughout his tongue-tied youth. The gift first manifested itself when he was a young soldier, on the verge of demobilization in 1919, and was quickly seized on by his commanding officers and used to combat Communism among the troops. Germany had been declared a republic. The Kaiser, the grandson of Queen Victoria, had gone into exile in Holland – one of his first requests being for a ‘good strong cup of English tea’. The Social Democrat Republican Government in Berlin was left with the ignominious task of agreeing the peace on the victors’ terms. The German army had never been defeated in any major land battle throughout the war. In the end, the entry of the Americans into the European war at a very late stage, with their huge resources of men and weapons, simply exhausted the German leadership, and the generals, including General Erich Ludendorff (who would emerge as the natural political leader of the post-war German Right), agreed to the surrender. But the Right never acknowledged this messy circumstance. Immediately they invented the myth that the ‘November criminals’, the Social Democrats, egged on by Communists and Jews, had drawn Germany into a humiliation from which radical right-wing despotism could alone save it.