Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (14 page)

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In early August 1917, having suffered heavy casualties, Hitler’s regiment was withdrawn from the battle in Flanders and redeployed to a quieter stretch of front in Alsace.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 with 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.

—

Hitler was no longer at the front when these events took place. On 21 August he had gone to Nuremberg to take part in a course for radio and telephone operators, and after that, from 10 to 27 September, he spent his second home furlough in Berlin. With the exception of a brief remark he made in his headquarters in October 1941, we have no accounts of this time. Hitler seems to have spent most of it on Berlin’s Museum Island, looking at the various art collections, and we do not know whether he saw the signs of impending revolutionary crisis or ignored them.
¹⁰⁶
After he returned to the front, his regiment took up position near Comines, where it had first been stationed in the autumn of 1914, although now it was charged with repulsing British attacks, not going on the offensive. In the night of 13–14 October, Hitler and several of his comrades became the victims of a mustard gas attack. “As morning dawned, the pain was increasing by the quarter of an hour, and around seven, I stumbled back with burning eyes, clutching my last message of the war,” Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
. “A few hours later, my eyes had turned into burning coals, and everything had grown dark around me.”
¹⁰⁷
He was given emergency treatment in a Bavarian army field hospital near Oudenaarde and then taken to the reserve military hospital in Pasewalk near Stettin (today the city of Szeczin in Poland). He arrived on 21 October. This is where Hitler experienced the beginning of the German revolution of 1918–19.

Scholars today still disagree on how close Hitler came to going blind and what sort of treatment he received in Pasewalk.
¹⁰⁸
His patient file went missing but it seems fairly certain that the poison gas attack had left him with inflammation of the conjunctiva and the eyelids, and that, at least temporarily, he could hardly see. In a letter from 1921, Hitler himself reported that in the Pasewalk hospital his blindness had receded relatively quickly and his vision gradually returned.
¹⁰⁹
The supposition that Hitler was never seriously poisoned by mustard gas and that his “blindness” was caused by hysteria is far less likely. And there is no truth whatsoever to the wild theory that one of the doctors who treated him, psychiatrist Edmund Forster, cured his hysterical blindness using hypnosis but forgot to wake Hitler from his trance, thus turning the later dictator into a victim of medical negligence.
¹¹⁰

No doubt the news of Germany’s military collapse and the revolutionary unrest of early November 1918 shook Hitler greatly. He had felt comfortable as a soldier and had grown fond of his regiment, and suddenly everything he identified with was simply wiped out. For Hitler and many others who blindly hoped for a positive outcome to the war, the search for scapegoats had begun—and what could have been easier than to look where the Pan-Germanic League and the far right had already identified them? In the autumn of 1918, as Germany acknowledged military defeat, right-wing propaganda intensified. Defamation of Jewish “shirkers” and “wartime profiteers” was now combined with the stab-in-the-back legend, which held that the German army at the front had been undermined and cheated of victory by traitorous Jews and Social Democrats at home. Military leaders and their supporters used such fairy tales in an attempt to avoid responsibility for the demise of the empire. In late October 1918, the deputy chairman of the Pan-Germanic League, Lord Konstantin von Gebsattel, was already calling for the “situation to be used for fanfares against the Jews who should be made into lightning rods for all the injustice.”
¹¹¹

In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler tried to represent his shock at German defeat and revolution as a political epiphany. In early November 1918, he claimed, revolutionary sailors had already appeared in Pasewalk. A few days later, Hitler wrote, an “abominable intimation” became reality. On 10 November, the hospital chaplain told the patients that the Hohenzollern dynasty had been deposed and that Germany was now a republic. When the aged clergyman added that the war was lost and Germany was dependent on the “mercy of the victors,” Hitler was overcome:

Everything went black again, and I felt and stumbled my way back to my sickbed and buried my burning head in my blanket and pillow…Everything had been in vain…Must not now the graves open of all the hundreds of thousands who had once marched out, believing in the fatherland, never to return?…Had everything happened only so that a band of criminals could get their hands on our fatherland?…In the nights that followed, my hatred grew, my hatred for those responsible for this deed.

Hitler closed this passage with the oft-cited sentence: “I decided to become a politician.”
¹¹²

But Hitler did not make any such sudden determination. His decision to put his artistic and architectural ambitions on the back burner and devote himself to politics seems to have gradually coalesced during 1919. The historian Ernst Deuerlein was right when he wrote: “Hitler did not come to politics—politics came to Hitler.”
¹¹³
As far as his ideological development was concerned, the Pasewalk episode marks the transition between the defining experience of war and the equally defining experience of revolution and counter-revolution in Munich. Hitler’s hatred for the “November criminals” combined phobia of the Left with resentment of Jews. But he would have to go through further life-changing experiences before the
bête noire
of “Jewish Bolshevism” would become the focus of his world view.