It seems difficult to deny that Hitler was a conscientious and, when it mattered, courageous soldier, even if many accounts by former comrades and superiors are contradictory or seem to have been influenced by the Nazi Party.191 What is crucial, however, is the fact that as a runner he had a special role, which meant that his ‘war experiences’ were markedly different from those of the majority of German soldiers. Unlike millions of others, he did not have to spend years putting up with living in trenches, which in winter filled up with mud and water, where illnesses such as dysentery and typhus were rampant, and where soldiers were plagued with lice and rats and in summer with huge numbers of flies.
In Mein Kampf Hitler is quite frank about his anxieties and inner conflicts during the first phase of the war: the ‘romance of the battlefield’ was soon replaced by ‘horror’, the initial exuberant joy was ‘stifled by mortal fear’. Like everybody else, he too had had to cope with ‘the struggle between the instinct for self-preservation and the admonitions of duty’. He describes in striking images how always when ‘death was on the hunt’ ‘a vague something’ inside him had tried to revolt, tried ‘to represent itself to my weak body as reason’, an inner voice, which he had nevertheless been able to identify as nothing but cowardice. It was only after lengthy inner struggle, ‘a strong tugging and warning’, he wrote, that he was able to overcome these temptations. But ‘the more this voice urged me to take heed, the louder and the more insistently it tempted me, the tougher was my resistance, until finally, after a long inner struggle my sense of duty triumphed.’ ‘Already in winter 1915/16’, in other words after more than a year’s experience of war, this inner struggle had ended: ‘At last my will was undisputed master.’192
Even though this passage is clearly shaped by Hitler’s desire to project himself as a ‘man of will’, it nevertheless reveals something about the inner conflicts he was going through at the time: he was not totally unaffected by the horrors of war. The extreme stress he felt during the first months also left its mark on his letters. In January 1915 he wrote that he was hoping that the attack would soon be launched: ‘otherwise, one’s nerves are liable to go to pieces’. A fortnight later he confessed to being ‘very stressed’; ‘in the end’ heavy artillery fire ‘ruins the strongest nerves’.193 Two and a half decades later he had evidently completely rationalized this experience, using it to provide a justification, based on his life experience, for his ideological maxims. In September 1941, in one of his Table Talks, he declared that, in view of the massive suffering and death on the battlefields of the First World War, he had become aware that ‘life is a continuous cruel struggle, serving in the final analysis to maintain the species’.194 Both of these statements – his comments in Mein Kampf and the remarks in the Table Talk – show how concerned Hitler was after the event to master the shock of his wartime experience and to use his success in overcoming those anxieties to form part of his self-image.
In the memoirs of his former comrades and superiors Hitler remains a colourless figure, accepted by the group, but a somewhat eccentric loner. During the trips he made with his comrades to the nearby city of Lille, he usually kept to himself and avoided the usual pleasures available behind the front line such as alcohol binges or amorous adventures.195 In fact, it seems that throughout the war years he had no relationship of any kind with a woman.196 And, when conversation among his comrades turned to ‘Topic No.1’, he brushed it aside, according to Brandmayer, saying he did not have a girlfriend and ‘I’ll never get round to having one’.197
His sergeant-major, Amann, recalled that Hitler was the only one of the men under him who never received a parcel from home: ‘He didn’t have anyone; he was modest and undemanding. But he was a bit odd.’ When, on one occasion, there was a surplus in the canteen funds, he had offered Hitler, as the ‘poorest man’, a small sum of money. But he had rejected the gift.198
Despite spending years living together with a relatively small and unchanging group of soldiers and NCOs, Hitler did not to try to establish closer contacts or become friends with his comrades. After the end of the war he evidently did not feel the need to maintain personal contacts or cultivate ‘war comradeship’ with his fellow soldiers. He kept his distance from Amann, whom he employed in the Nazi Party from 1921 onwards, and the same was true of Wiedemann, who became his adjutant in 1933. It is true that after 1933 he was generous in providing jobs or sums of money for any former comrades who turned to him with a request for support; he received them when they visited him and, in 1940, even allowed one of them, Fritz Schmidt, to accompany him on a tour of their old battlefields in Flanders. However, these were the condescending gestures of a powerful patron and had nothing to do with friendship.199 Significantly, when speaking of his wartime experiences in later years Hitler referred to only one relationship that had affected him emotionally, the one with his dog, Foxl, to which he had become closely attached and which he allowed to sleep with him.200
Politics do not seem to have played a significant part in his conversations with his comrades. However, Hitler became annoyed when anyone cast doubt on a German victory and invariably allowed himself to be provoked by such talk.201 One of the other regimental runners, who published his war memoirs in 1932, recalled that Hitler had criticized the munitions workers’ strike of January 1918 (a mass protest against the war organized by the Left) and, in particular, attacked the leadership of the Social Democrats. However, Hitler’s wartime comrade, Brandmayer, made no mention of endless anti-Semitic tirades, which were to figure so prominently in Hitler’s standard repertoire in later years when the question of the ‘betrayal’ of the front by the homeland came up for discussion.202 Thus, although he writes in another section of his book that Hitler was ‘the only one of us . . . who recognized what has now become a certainty, namely that the war [was] started by Freemasons and Jews’, Hitler does not seem to have bothered his comrades with this ‘insight’.203
As far as his political comments at the time were concerned, Hitler expressed himself in Mein Kampf in remarkably general terms. He wrote that although, in principle, he had not wanted ‘to have anything to do with politics’, he had been unable to avoid defining his attitude towards ‘certain phenomena that affected the nation as a whole, but most of all us soldiers’. In other words, even he himself did not claim to have tried to inform his comrades at the time about his purported insights concerning the Jews.204
In a letter he wrote at the beginning of February 1915 to an acquaintance, Ernst Hepp, a Munich lawyer, Hitler remarked that he and his comrades were hoping after the war to find the homeland cleansed ‘from foreign influence’; they were fighting at the front against an ‘international world of enemies’ and wanted ‘our internal internationalism to be eliminated as well’.205 This comment exactly reflected the extreme hostility to foreigners and aggressive nationalism that dominated Germany after the outbreak of war; his criticism of ‘internal internationalism’ no doubt referred to the Social Democrats.
The fact that, even within the army, Hitler remained an outsider and through his role as a runner managed to secure a special position for himself outside the routine of trench warfare206 is a key to his personality. His time in the army is the only period in his life in which, as a thoroughly unorganized person, someone who enjoyed sleeping in, a daydreamer and loner, he was compelled to conform to an organization with fixed rules, structures, and roles; and yet he succeeded relatively quickly in evading these demands as far as he possibly could. He very wisely omitted to mention his role as runner in Mein Kampf. In praising the ‘iron front of grey helmets’, which he had joined out of a sense of duty and without complaint, he did so in order to provide as little detail as possible about his four years of military service.207 And, in fact, when, in the early 1930s, it looked as though Hitler might be about to take over power in Germany, a number of former comrades emerged to accuse him of having led a privileged and less dangerous life in comparison with that of the normal front-line soldier.20
8
In the last week of August 1918 Hitler was sent to Nuremberg on a short course for couriers, while his regiment had to face further major and costly defensive engagements.209 Shortly afterwards, Hitler was given a second two and a half weeks’ leave, which he once again spent in Berlin. He does not mention this stay in Mein Kampf, giving the impression that he had spent the whole summer involved in the defensive battles in Flanders. In fact, he only returned to his unit at the end of September.210
A few days later, on 3 October, a newly-formed German government, which, for the first time, was responsible to parliament, approached the American president, Woodrow Wilson, with the request for an armistice. This was in response to the ‘advice’, in effect an ultimatum, from General Ludendorff, who had reached the conclusion that Germany was in immediate danger of losing the war. The request for an armistice – in effect an admission of defeat – came as a complete surprise to the German population and the army, and must have shocked Hitler, who had always been confident of victory. Later, in Mein Kampf, he blamed the defeat on the ‘poison in the home front’, which had increasingly affected the troops.211 According to his later interpretation of events, the disaster had been planned by a coalition of Socialists and Jews. However, it is highly doubtful that he was already thinking along these lines in the autumn of 1918.
Two weeks after his return – in the meantime, the regiment had been transferred to Ypres, in other words the section of the front where it had begun the war four years earlier – Hitler, together with other members of the regimental staff, were caught up in a British gas attack, from which he suffered an eye injury and temporary damage to his sight (according to Hitler, temporary blindness). From 21 October onwards, he was hospitalized in Pasewalk in the Prussian province of Pomerania; while he was there, revolution broke out and the war came to an end.212
With a good deal of self-pity and exaggerated emotion Hitler described in Mein Kampf the moment when news reached him in hospital of the fall of the Kaiser’s Reich and the conclusion of the armistice, which sealed Germany’s defeat. According to his account, he was sunk in the deepest despair, had wept for the first time since the death of his mother, and had felt a deep shame, which had had an immediate physical effect. ‘While everything began to go black again before my eyes, stumbling, I groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk and buried my burning head in the blankets and pillows.’ The more he tried ‘to take in this terrible event, the more the shame, indignation and disgrace were branded on my brow’. We do not know what Hitler really thought in Pasewalk. The quotations are evidence from 1924, in which Hitler was trying subsequently to convey to readers how defeat had affected him at the time. But these quotations also have much to say about him.
This picture of a man who was almost thirty years old, throwing himself onto his bed and burying his face in the pillows, wanting to hide because he could not face reality, suggests someone who is reverting to childish behaviour in the face of a situation with which he simply cannot cope. The proof of Hitler’s assertion that his shame was so great that he lost his sight can no longer be tested; it can, however, be read as a metaphor for his refusal to face facts. Shattered by news of the defeat, he responded to this ‘disgrace’ and ‘humiliation’ as an individual who was isolated, in despair, and unable to explain or process these alarming developments.
In November 1918 millions of German soldiers had to get used to the fact that the years of bloody struggle had been for nothing. But for the majority this was a collective experience and not primarily a personal catastrophe. For most soldiers German defeat meant at the same time the longed-for end to mass slaughter, their return to their families and civilian jobs, and the beginning of a new stage in their lives. Hitler, however, a loner and a loser, could not share the shock of defeat with others and this was primarily the result of his psychological make-up rather than the objective circumstances, nor did he have another life to which he could return. On the contrary: while the outbreak of war in 1914 had given him the chance to get his aimless life back on track, now, after four years of military service, this prospect had been suddenly removed.
According to Hitler’s description of his state of mind at the time, during the following days his depression had turned into fury and hatred – hatred of the forces he blamed for the defeat, primarily the ‘leaders of Marxism’ and ‘the Jews’. And, while still in Pasewalk, he claimed he had reached a decision that was to give his life a completely new direction: ‘I decided to become a politician’.213
This ‘decision’ is undoubtedly part of the subsequent self-image that Hitler was creating. Everything points to the fact that, after his release from Pasewalk, far from laying the foundations for a political career, he was simply swept along in the stream of millions of returning soldiers, waiting to see how things would develop after the defeat. It took several months before he emerged from this state of passivity and lethargy, and he only began to become politically active in the summer of 1919 following the initiative and under the auspices of the Reichswehr [German army]. The Pasewalk epiphany – the ‘recognition’ that ‘Jewish Marxism’ was responsible for the fatherland’s misery – and the resultant decision to ‘become a politician’ was an attempt by Hitler to conceal his uncertain behaviour during the immediate post-war period. His account is nevertheless highly significant because, if we read between the lines, Hitler is actually describing quite frankly how he succeeded in overcoming his deep shame about the defeat, which had initially plunged him into a state of helplessness. He refused to undertake a sober analysis of the causes of the catastrophe; he was not prepared to admit weaknesses and failure, but instead tried to explain the revolutionary events as the result of a gigantic manipulation. This stoked his anger and his desire for revenge, thereby providing him with the destructive energy necessary to punish those whom he blamed for the deepest humiliation of his life and to overcome his shame.
* Translators’ note: Friedrich Ludwig (Father) Jahn (1778–1852) established a nationalist gymnastic movement in 1811 to encourage and prepare young men to resist French occupation. Banned during the period of Reaction, the movement was revived in the 1860s as part of the campaign for German unification and over the following century became widespread throughout the German-speaking world.
Part I
The Public Self
1
Back in Munich
Politicization
Following his release from Pasewalk hospital, Hitler arrived in Munich on 21 November 1918. As the 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment, to which he had belonged during the previous four years, was still on its way back from the western front, he was assigned to the 7th Company of the 1st Replacement Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment.1
On 4 November 1918, a sailors’ uprising in the naval base of Kiel sparked off a revolution in Germany; five days later, the Reich government in Berlin was taken over by a Council of People’s Representatives, composed of members of the two Socialist parties. Meanwhile, on 7 November the revolution had triumphed in Munich. The uprising under Kurt Eisner, the leader of the Munich branch of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany [USPD], had quickly forced King Ludwig III to flee from his palace, enabling Eisner, who had met with no resistance, to proclaim Bavaria, the second largest German state, a ‘free state’. The war-weariness felt by broad sections of the population and the widespread discontent with the monarchical regime had resulted in major political change. On the following day, 8 November, a ‘National Council’, made up of representatives of peasants’ and soldiers’ councils, the parliamentary groups of the SPD and the Bavarian Peasant League, as well as three Liberal deputies, took over the government and declared Eisner Prime Minister.2 Soldiers’ councils were established in the city’s barracks with the 2nd Infantry Regiment council dominated by moderate Social Democrats.3
At the beginning of December, Hitler was assigned to guard duties with the main task of guarding prisoners of war in the Traunstein prisoner-of-w
ar camp, approximately 100 kilometres east of Munich. Surviving reports on conditions in the camp indicate that the discipline of the troops there was deteriorating fast, of which Hitler must have been fully aware.4 At the beginning of February, the camp was closed. Hitler had presumably already returned to Munich in January,5 where he was assigned to the regiment’s demobilization battalion.6 His demobilization was thus only a matter of time.7
He had, however, been chosen as his company’s soldiers’ council representative, a fact that he understandably kept quiet about throughout his life.8 The role of these representatives – they were not really soldiers’ councillors – was primarily to facilitate the supply of soldiers for farm work.9 A special department of the Munich soldiers’ council did try to use the representatives to influence soldiers, although it is difficult to estimate the effect of these efforts and there is no evidence for Hitler’s involvement.10 There is, however, no doubt that the Munich troops were under strong left-wing revolutionary influence at this time. On Sunday 16 February, for example, the off-duty soldiers of the demobilization battalion were ordered by the battalion to take part, along with the whole of the Munich garrison, in a demonstration of the revolutionary workers’ council to demand the establishment of a Räterepublik (republic based on the councils).11 However, in the state elections of 12 January Eisner’s left-wing Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany suffered a crushing defeat, winning only three seats, whereas the moderate Majority Social Democrats [MSPD] won 61 and the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party [BVP] 66 seats, each representing about a third of the electorate. Eisner, therefore, decided to resign.
Hitler Page 7