Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (11 page)

The public had little idea of what was going on in the governing cabinets in Berlin and Vienna as the crisis continued to escalate. Hitler, too, followed the general assumption that “ruling circles in Vienna” were the ones pushing for war and that Germany had no other option than stay unswervingly loyal to its ally.
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Hardly anyone realised how slyly Bethmann Hollweg manoeuvred Imperial Russia into the role of the aggressor in the final stage of the crisis so that the tsar could be blamed for the war. “Ruthlessly and under all circumstances, Russia must be made into the source of injustice,” the chancellor told Kaiser Wilhelm II on 26 July.
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Bethmann Hollweg’s plan worked. The German public believed that their country was defending itself from enemy attack and put aside all domestic quarrels and class enmity to come together as a nation.

By late July 1914 in Munich, as in most big German cities, public demonstrations of patriotism were sometimes ending in wild excesses. When the band leader at a café refused to play the patriotic song “Die Wacht am Rhein” (The Watch on the Rhine), for example, the premises were ransacked.
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In early August, as war became more and more certain, there were outpourings of enthusiasm. On 2 August, a crowd of many thousands assembled on Odeonsplatz in front of the Feldherrnhalle. “All the melodies, military tunes and enthusiastic words that resonated up to the heavens sounded like a song of songs about German might and German self-confidence,” reported one eyewitness.
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Among the jubilant masses was the “artistic painter” Adolf Hitler, and a picture taken by his later “court photographer” Heinrich Hoffmann shows him getting carried away by the euphoric atmosphere.
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In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler described his feelings with his characteristic bent towards exalted language: “Even today, I am not ashamed to say that I, overcome by tempestuous enthusiasm, sank to my knees and thanked heaven with an overflowing heart that I was fortunate enough to live in these times.”
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Many people felt the way Hitler did. Suddenly everything that confined and divided Germans seemed to have disappeared, leaving an intoxicating sensation of togetherness. “To be honest, I must acknowledge that there was something grand, captivating and even seductive about this eruption of the masses, which was difficult to resist,” recalled Stefan Zweig many years later.
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Even the anarchist and pacifist Erich Mühsam found himself “somehow captivated by the general uproar unleashed by angry passion.” In his diary, Mühsam wrote: “The confidence of the Germans, their pious and intense enthusiasm, is harrowing, but also grand. There’s a spiritual unity there that I hope to see some day employed for great cultural works.”
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But not everyone joined in the chorus of glee. There was little enthusiasm for war in the German countryside. “Deep concern is making the rounds among the many, often large farming families whose fathers will be going away, whose sons, horses and wagons will be commissioned by the military, and whose harvests still have to be brought in,” reported the
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten
on 4 August 1914.
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In the big cities, too, enthusiasm for the war was largely confined to the middle classes. Blue-collar workers, particularly those who were members of the SPD and the trade unions, were in a serious, almost despondent mood. “What do we care if the heir to the throne of Austria was murdered?” one worker in Hamburg was overheard remarking in a bar. “I’m glad I’m too old to go [to war],” said another. “I have no desire to get shot and killed for anyone else.”
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The attitudes in Munich’s working-class districts in late July 1914 would hardly have been much different.

Intellectuals, writers and artists were most likely to get caught up in the intoxication of the “August experience.” The reasons varied from dissatisfaction with the ossified structures of Wilhelmine society, to weariness with bourgeois complacency and the comfort of a long stretch of peace, to the longing for adventure, challenges and feelings of community. “How could the artist, the soldier in the artist, not have thanked God for the breakdown of a peaceful world of which he was so very sick?” asked Thomas Mann, who was living in Munich at the time. “War! What we experienced was cleansing, liberation and an enormous sense of hope.”
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The “artist” Adolf Hitler felt something very similar. In
Mein Kampf
he recalled that the war seemed like “liberation from the annoying sensibilities of youth” and a way out of the idle cycles of his oddball existence.
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The prospect of belonging to a community and of devoting himself to a seemingly worthy national cause enlivened Hitler. If
Mein Kampf
is to be believed, on 3 August 1914, he wrote a letter beseeching King Ludwig III of Bavaria to allow him to join a Bavarian regiment despite being an Austrian citizen. One day later Hitler received permission by special cabinet order.
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This account is very implausible, however.
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It is much more likely that in the chaos of the first days of military mobilisation, as hordes of patriotic enthusiasts were signing up for military service, no one bothered to check Hitler’s citizenship. Otherwise he would never have been allowed to serve in the Bavarian army.

Hitler first tried to volunteer on 5 August, but he was sent away, and it was not until 16 August that he was inducted into Recruit Depot VI of the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment. This replacement battalion was quartered in a school that had been hastily converted into barracks. Here Hitler was given field uniform and equipment, and he underwent basic military training.
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On 1 September, he was transferred to the reconstituted 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment. The “List Regiment,” nicknamed after its first commander, Colonel Julius List, was a rather ragtag bunch. Young volunteers served together with older men known as “replacement reserves.” Munich students and artists marched side by side with farmers, rural labourers, small entrepreneurs, artisans, workers and professionals. The regiment thus represented a cross section of ages and social classes.
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On 10 October 1914, it left Munich for combat training at Lechfeld, an outwash plain near the city of Augsburg. “The first five days at Lechfeld were the hardest of my life,” Hitler wrote in a letter to his landlady, Anna Popp. “Every day we have a long march, major exercises and a night-time march of up to forty-two kilometres, followed by major brigade manoeuvres.”
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Hitler’s biggest concern during these weeks, if we take him at his word, was that the war would be won by the time he got to the front. “This alone robbed me time and again of my peace of mind,” he claimed in
Mein Kampf
.
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Any worries proved unfounded. The German army may have advanced rapidly through Belgium and northern France, but the retreat of German troops to the Marne in early September 1914 spelled the end of the original plan of destroying the French army by squeezing it in a surprise pincer movement. Realistically, the war was already lost for Germany. The Chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke—the nephew of the great, victorious Prussian commander—suffered a nervous breakdown and was replaced on 14 September by Reich Minister of War Erich von Falkenhayn. But the scale of the military disaster was kept secret from the public. As a result, broad segments of German society, and in particular volunteers eager to get to the front, maintained dangerous illusions about the true situation.

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Early in the morning on 21 October, the List Regiment was loaded onto three trains and taken to the Western Front. “I’m immensely looking forward to it,” wrote Hitler.
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In Ulm, the first stop on the journey, Hitler sent a postcard to Joseph Popp with “best regards on my way to Antwerp.”
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The next morning the train reached the River Rhine, which had long been a bone of contention between Germany and France. Hitler still recalled this moment in March 1944: “I saw the Rhine for the first time when my regiment was sent west in 1914. I will never forget the feelings that welled up in me when I first caught sight of this historic river.”
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Via Cologne and Aachen, the train continued to Belgium. There Hitler could see the traces of war. The train station in Liège, he reported, was “badly shot up,” and the city of Louvain was a “pile of rubble.”
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Two months before, from 25 to 28 August, German troops had committed a number of war crimes in Louvain, massacring 248 Belgian civilians, destroying parts of the old city centre and setting fire to the city’s famous university library.
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On 23 October, Hitler and his comrades arrived in Lille, where the din from the battlefields of Flanders could be easily heard. Falkenhayn had stuck with the general staff’s offensive tactics. By strengthening the German army’s right flank he hoped to surround the French and British armies. This was the beginning of the famous “Race to the Sea,” a series of battles leading ever closer to the English Channel. The attacking Germans suffered heavy casualties, particularly among young volunteers who naively ran into enemy machine-gun fire. The 6th Bavarian Reserve Division, of which the List Regiment was part, was deployed in the middle of the First Battle of Ypres. On 27 October, after three days of rest to recover from the journey, the regiment was ordered to march to the front. There, in the early hours of 29 October, as part of an assault on the Flemish village of Gheluvelt, Hitler received his “baptism of fire” in a forest along the road to Becelaere. It was a life-changing experience about which he reported in detail in a letter to the Munich court assessor Ernst Hepp, who before the war had purchased two of his watercolours and occasionally invited him out for a meal.
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The letter, which Hitler wrote on 5 February 1915, three months after the events described, is an astonishing document.
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It showed that Hitler was not only a keen observer, but had a talent for putting his experiences into words—even if he had not quite overcome his poor spelling and punctuation. “Around 6 a.m. we met up with the other companies at an inn,” Hitler wrote.

At 7 our day began. We marched in columns through a forest to our right and emerged with our ranks intact in an elevated field. Four marksmen were dug in ahead of us. We took up positions behind them in large trenches and waited…Finally came the command “Forwards.” We climbed out of our holes and sprinted across the field…towards a small farmstead. Left and right shells were exploding, and in the middle English bullets were humming, but we paid them no mind. For ten minutes we took cover and then again came the command “Forwards’…Now the first of our numbers were falling. The English had trained their machine guns on us. We threw ourselves on the ground and slowly crawled forward in a furrow. Sometimes we had to stop because someone had got shot and could no longer move, and we had to lift him out of the furrow.

The decimated attackers sought shelter in a stretch of forest. “Overhead there was whining and rushing, and shredded tree trunks and branches were flying all around us,” Hitler continued. “Shells would hit the underbrush and throw clouds of stones, soil and sand in the air. They uprooted the mightiest of trees and covered everything in a horrible, stinking yellow-green mist. We couldn’t stay there for ever, and if we were going to fall, it was better to do so out in the open.” The soldiers sprinted across the fields of the farmstead and jumped into the first British trench. “By my side were men from Württemberg, and under me were dead and wounded Englishmen,” Hitler wrote. “I suddenly realised why my landing had been so soft.” They were soon engaged in bitter hand-to-hand combat.

Anyone who didn’t surrender got cut down. We cleaned out trench after trench in this fashion. Finally we reached the main road…To the left were several farmsteads that were still occupied, and we came under heavy fire. One after another of our number crumpled…We charged four times and were beaten back every time. There was only one soldier left from my group besides me, and in the end he fell too. A bullet tore its way through my right sleeve, but miraculously, I remained without a scratch…We fought like this for three days until finally the English were taken care of.

The List Regiment was first withdrawn from battle on 1 November and the survivors marched back to the village of Werwick. They had suffered enormous casualties: “In four days, our regiment had shrunk from 3,500 to 600 men. There were only three officers left in the entire regiment.”
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Among the dead was their commander, Colonel List.

Without doubt, Hitler’s first encounter with the bloody realities of war was a traumatic experience, which seared the images of battle into his memory. He could still recall them vividly when he wrote
Mein Kampf
during his Landsberg incarceration, and in late July 1924 read the most recently written passages to his fellow inmate Rudolf Hess.
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In a letter to his future wife Ilse Pröhl, Hess described the scene: “The champion of the people read ever more slowly and hesitantly…He took longer and longer pauses. Then he suddenly lowered the manuscript, put his head in his hands—and sobbed.”
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