Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (13 page)

Hitler felt more comfortable in the exclusively male world of the regiment than in civilian society, and his experience of war would determine his views on military hierarchies and greatly influence the organisational structure of the NSDAP. In the army he did not have to earn his daily bread, and life was governed by discipline and order. He seems not to have had much difficulty integrating into the system of command and obedience. Hitler behaved obediently, even subserviently towards his superiors.
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He took no part in the crude amusements and coarse jokes of his comrades, and he remained an outsider among them. In the photographs that survive from this period, he appears on the margins, an extremely thin figure with a fixed, almost stony stare. When he does put his arm around one of his comrades, the gesture feels artificial and alien.
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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.
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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
.
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In Nuremberg in 1947, when asked whether Hitler gave political speeches during the war, Amann also answered with a definite “No.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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
.
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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.”
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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 primarily 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Wiedemann fulfilled Hitler’s wish. On 5 March 1917, Hitler celebrated his return to the front.