Hitler's Charisma (2 page)

In 1913, when Adolf Hitler was twenty-four years old, nothing about his life marked him out as a future charismatic leader of Germany. Not his profession; he eked out a living as a painter of pictures for tourists in Munich. Not his home; he lived in a small room, rented from Josef Popp, a tailor, on the third floor of a house at 34 Schleissheimer Strasse, north of Munich’s main station. Not the clothes he wore; he dressed conservatively, if shabbily, in the conventional bourgeois apparel of the day—black coat and trousers. Not his physical appearance; he was distinctly unprepossessing in looks, with sunken cheeks, discoloured teeth, a straggly moustache, and black hair lying limply across his forehead. Not his emotional life; he found it impossible to sustain any lasting friendship and had never had a girl friend.

His chief distinguishing characteristic was his capacity to hate. “He was at odds with the world,” wrote August Kubizek who had lodged with him in Austria several years before. “Wherever he looked, he saw injustice, hate and enmity. Nothing was free from his criticism, nothing found favour in his eyes … Choking with his catalogue of hates, he would pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general who
did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted.”
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How was it possible for this man, so undistinguished at the age of twenty-four, to become one of the most powerful and infamous figures in the history of the world—a leader, moreover, known for his “charisma”?

Circumstances, of course, would play a large part in this transformation. But one of the many remarkable aspects of this story is how a number of the key personality traits which Hitler possessed as an oddball painter, trudging the streets of Munich in 1913—aspects of his character which contributed to his lack of professional and personal success at the time—would not only remain consistently with him for the rest of his life, but subsequently be perceived not as weaknesses but as strengths. Hitler’s monumental intolerance, for instance, meant that he found it impossible to debate any issue. He would state his views and then lose his temper if he was systematically questioned or criticised. But what was perceived as ignorant slogan shouting in 1913 would later be seen as certainty of vision. Then there was his massive over-confidence in his own abilities. Back in Vienna, a few years before, he had announced to his mystified roommate that he had decided to write an opera—and the fact he could neither read nor write music properly was no handicap. In years to come, this over-confidence would be perceived as a mark of genius.

By the time he arrived in Munich, Hitler had already experienced years of disappointment. Born on 20 April 1889, at Braunau am Inn in Austria, on the border with Germany, Hitler did not get on with his elderly father, a customs official, who beat him. His father died in January 1903 at the age of sixty-five and his mother succumbed to cancer four years later in December 1907 when she was just forty-seven years old. An orphan at the age of eighteen, Hitler drifted between Linz in Austria and the capital, Vienna, and for some months in 1909 he experienced real destitution before a small financial gift from an aunt allowed him to set up as a painter. He disliked Vienna, believing it to be a seedy, impure city awash with prostitution and corruption. It wasn’t until his twenty-fourth birthday, when he received a delayed legacy of just over 800 Kronen from his father’s will, that he was able to leave Austria and seek lodgings in Munich, this “German” city, a place which he later said he was “more attached” to “than to any other spot of earth in this world.”
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But even though he was living, at last, in a city he loved, Hitler seemed en route to absolute obscurity. Despite the impression he later wanted the world to have—in his autobiography,
Mein Kampf
, written eleven years later, Hitler tried to convince his readers that during this time he had functioned almost as an embryonic politician
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—in 1913 Hitler was a socially and emotionally inadequate individual drifting through life without direction. Crucially, what he lacked at twenty-four—and what many other historical figures perceived as charismatic leaders already possessed by this age—was a sense of personal mission. He only discovered what he passionately believed was his “mission” in life as a result of the First World War and the manner in which it ended. Without these epic events he would almost certainly have remained in Munich and be unknown to history.

Instead, he began his journey into the consciousness of the world on 3 August 1914 when he petitioned—as an Austrian—to join the Bavarian Army. Just two days before, on the first of August, Germany had declared war on Russia. Hitler now passionately wanted to serve the German state he so admired, and his wish was granted when in September 1914 he was sent as an ordinary soldier to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment (also known as the “List” Regiment). The following month he saw action for the first time close to Ypres. He wrote to an acquaintance back in Munich describing the scene, “To the left and right the shrapnel were bursting, and in between the English bullets sang. But we paid no attention … Over us the shells were howling and whistling, splintered tree-trunks and branches flew around us. And then again grenades crashed into the wood, hurling up clouds of stones, earth, and stifling everything in a yellowish-green, stinking, sickening vapour … I often think of Munich, and every man of us has the single wish that the gang out here will have their hash settled once and for all. We want an all-out fight, at any cost …”
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These are the words of a man who has found something. Not just—for the first time—a sense of purpose in a communal enterprise with other human beings, but a real insight into the dramatic possibilities of existence. And this conflict would have a similar effect not just on Hitler, but also on many others. “War, the father of all things, is also our father,” wrote Ernst Jünger, another veteran of the war. “He hammered us and chiselled us, hardened us into that which we now are. And forever,
as long as the wheel of life still turns in us, war will be the axis on which it revolves. He trained us for war, and warriors we will remain as long as we draw the breath of life.”
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What Hitler, Jünger, and millions of others experienced on the Western Front was a war unlike any other before. A war in which the power of defensive weapons like the machine gun and barbed wire confined the conflict to narrow, bloody killing grounds. A war in which flamethrowers, high explosives and poison gas wreaked havoc. As a result, for Hitler, the “romance” of battle was soon “replaced by horror.”
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It’s not surprising that Hitler formed the view that life was a constant and brutal struggle. Life for an ordinary soldier in the First World War was exactly that. But it was not only that. There was also—especially for Adolf Hitler—a sense in which the experience of this war was also a test, offering the possibility of acts of heroism. And still, despite recent scholarly work that confirms that Hitler did not live in the trenches but served as dispatch runner based at regimental headquarters just behind the front line,
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there is no disputing that Adolf Hitler was a courageous soldier. He was wounded in October 1916 at the Battle of the Somme and then, two years later, won the Iron Cross, First Class. He was put forward for this award by a Jewish officer, Hugo Gutmann, and the official recommendation, by the commander of the regiment, Emmerich von Godin, stated that “as a dispatch runner he [i.e., Hitler] was a model in sangfroid and grit both in static and mobile warfare,” and that he was “always prepared to volunteer to deliver messages in the most difficult of situations under great risk to his own life.”
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However, despite his bravery, Hitler remained just as unusual a character to his regimental comrades as he had to his acquaintances before the war. As one of his fellow soldiers, Balthasar Brandmayer, later recalled, “there was something peculiar about Hitler.”
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Hitler’s comrades thought it odd that he never wanted to get drunk or have sex with a prostitute; that he spent what leisure time he had reading or drawing, or occasionally haranguing those around him about any subject that took his fancy; that he seemed to have no friends or family and, as a consequence, was a man resolutely alone.
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As for “charisma”—Hitler seemed to possess none whatsoever.

But he was absolutely committed to the war, and he extrapolated from his own bravery and commitment the belief that almost everyone
else at the front line felt the same. It was behind the lines, back in Germany, he wrote in
Mein Kampf
, that the troops were “betrayed” by those who wanted to profit from the sacrifice of the soldiers in combat. This idea of a
Frontgemeinschaft
, a united comradeship of front-line soldiers let down by others away from the battlefield, is a myth—but it was a popular one. By the time Hitler was injured for the last time in battle, in October 1918 close to Ypres, Germany had lost the war for a variety of reasons, none of which was “betrayal” behind the lines. The reality was that the Germans were crushed by the sheer weight of forces ranged against them—not least the Americans whose entry into the war in April 1917 guaranteed the arrival of hundreds of thousands of fresh troops. In addition, a blockade of Germany by Allied naval vessels had caused widespread food shortages—a bad situation that was made worse by a mass outbreak of influenza in spring 1918.

By that autumn there were plenty of members of the German armed forces who had decided the war was lost. In October, Admiral Franz von Hipper’s sailors refused to leave port to fight in one last doomed action against the Allies. A mutiny soon followed in the naval city of Kiel, and spread to Lübeck, Bremen and eventually Hamburg. A widespread German revolution seemed a possibility—one inspired by the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia the previous year. It was obvious to leading German politicians that an end needed to be made to the war as quickly as possible, and just as obvious—given the demands of the Allies—that whatever Germany’s future was, it did not include one in which the Kaiser, the man most closely associated with the decision to go to war in the first place, remained as head of state. General Wilhelm Groener gave the Kaiser this unwelcome news, and on 9 November 1918 Germany became a Republic.

This sudden departure of the head of state caused immense dismay to many German officers. “At the worst moment of the war we have been stabbed in the back,” wrote Ludwig Beck, then serving with the Army High Command, and later to be Chief of Staff of the German Army. “Never in my life have I been so upset about something I have personally witnessed as I was on the 9 and 10 November. Such an abyss of meanness, cowardice, lack of character, all of which I had until then considered impossible. In a few hours 500 years of history have been shattered; like a thief the Emperor was deported to Dutch territory. It could not happen
fast enough—this to a distinguished, noble and morally upstanding man.”
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Among a number of the ordinary soldiers at the front, who were unaware that Germany could scarcely continue to wage this war, there was a similar sense of bewilderment, not only at the swift removal of the Kaiser but at the immediate declaration of an armistice, which came into effect on 11 November 1918. “The front-line troops didn’t feel themselves beaten,” says Herbert Richter, who fought on the Western Front, “and we were wondering why the armistice was happening so quickly, and why we had to vacate all our positions in such a hurry, because we were still standing on enemy territory, and we thought all this was strange … we were angry, because we did not feel that we had come to the end of our strength.”
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Germany seemed to be splitting apart—between those like Beck and Richter who believed that the army had somehow been betrayed and those like the mutinous German sailors who had accepted defeat and now wanted the whole social order to be overturned. In Berlin, in January 1919, a General Strike developed into a socialist uprising. Fridolin von Spaun, then a teenager from Bavaria, travelled to the capital to witness these historic events. “I was so excited by what was taking place. Because I read in the papers about the revolution in Berlin. And I just had to see for myself how such a revolution is done. I was driven to Berlin by curiosity. And once there I threw myself into the tumult, the city was absolutely mad. Hundreds of thousands of people ran through the streets and were shouting: first on one side, then on the other. There was a very Left-wing faction. And this very Left-wing faction was decisively influenced by one man, called Karl Liebknecht. And fortune, which sometimes does smile on me, granted me seeing him in the flesh … I was in the crowd. And suddenly I heard a shout. And then a truck arrived, the people had left some space for it, like an alley. It drove up, and everyone shouted, ‘Liebknecht, Liebknecht!’ They cheered. I hadn’t even seen him. Because he was so surrounded by a mass of people, by a bodyguard with loaded rifles, all kinds … And [then] this legendary man, Karl Liebknecht, appeared at the upstairs window and made a rousing speech. It wasn’t very long, a quarter of an hour or half an hour, I can’t remember any longer. And this speech made such an impression on me, that from that hour onward I was a sworn anti-Bolshevist. Because all the silly phrases which
he chucked to the people, and the inflammatory, incredibly inflammatory statements … I noticed that he is not at all interested in creating a paradise for the workers. In fact, it’s only a lust for power. And so, completely immune to all temptations from the Left, I left the square an anti-Bolshevist. Fourteen days later this Mr. Liebknecht was no longer alive. His opponents had caught him and his accomplice—a woman from Poland, Rosa Luxemburg. They simply killed the both of them. Perhaps it sounds very callous, but I couldn’t shed any tears for them. They got their just deserts.”
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