Masters of Death (6 page)

Hitler himself had been imprisoned at Landsberg in 1924 for high treason for his part in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, which included firing into the air to take command of a crowd and holding hostages at gunpoint. Before that, in 1921, he and two other party leaders had rushed a speaking platform and assaulted a Bavarian monarchist speaker with clubs and chairs. Since the three men’s bodyguards had joined in the assault—a total of six men surrounding the victim, Otto Ballerstedt— the extent of Hitler’s personal participation is unclear. Neither incident can be characterized as a successful violent performance, and there is no other evidence that Hitler was personally violent, however many millions he would later order killed. He served for four years as a courier in the German army in the First World War, but “despite his habits of exaggeration and self-inflation,” writes biographer George Victor, “despite being in fifty battles, he took no personal credit for any killing.” Hitler apparently never moved past the violent performances stage of violent socialization, and continued to exhibit features of belligerency, including psychological disorganization, remembered humiliation, contempt for traditional institutions and fantasies of violent revenge. Throughout his life he remained locked in a personal struggle with his previous brutalization, a trauma that ordering others to kill could temporarily assuage but never resolve. He claimed to be inhibited from using violence himself by his middle-class morality. Danzig politician Hermann Rauschning, who knew Hitler personally, sensed his unresolved belligerency and understood that it made him more dangerous than he might have been had he been personally violent:

Everyone who knew Hitler during the early years of struggle knows that he has by nature an easily moved and unmistakably sentimental temperament, with a tendency towards emotionalism and romanticism. His convulsions of weeping in all emotional crises are by no means merely a matter of nerves. . . . For this very reason, there lies behind Hitler’s emphasis on brutality and ruthlessness the desolation of a forced and artificial inhumanity, not the amorality of the genuine brute, which has after all something of the power of a natural force. Nevertheless, in the harshness and unexampled cynicism of Hitler there is something more than the repressed effect of a hypersensitiveness which has handicapped its bearer. It is the urge to reprisal and vengeance, a truly Russian nihilistic feeling. [Emphases added.]

Hitler’s childhood brutalization is incontrovertible, although his biographers have been curiously reluctant to acknowledge it. Their reluctance may stem from unwillingness to be seen “psychoanalyzing” so large and destructive a historical figure. Psychoanalysis may be left to the analysts, but reporting a subject’s well-authenticated social experiences is a biographer’s first responsibility.

Adolf Hitler’s father Alois was an Austrian customs official who had worked his way up from the peasantry. Adolf’s mother Klara, twenty-three years younger than her husband, had been a servant in Alois’s house during his second wife’s last illness. The three children she bore Alois prior to Adolf had died of diphtheria within days of each other in the summer of 1887; Adolf was born on 20 April 1889. A fellow customs official and neighbors characterized Hitler’s father as harsh, “unsympathetic,” “inaccessible,” “hard to work with”; even one of Alois’s friends commented that “his wife had nothing to smile about.”

Adolf’s older stepbrother Alois Jr., who left home at fourteen to escape his father’s violent subjugation, never forgot the severe beatings he received. His son William Patrick Hitler told American investigators that “Alois Sr. frequently beat [Alois Jr.] unmercifully with a hippopotamus whip. He demanded the utmost obedience . . . every transgression was another excuse for a whipping.” Alois Jr.’s first wife Brigid added that Adolf’s father had been a man of “a very violent temper” who “often beat the dog until the dog would . . . wet the floor. He often beat the children, and on occasion . . . his wife Klara.” Adolf’s younger sister Paula (born in 1896) told the biographer John Toland, “It was my brother Adolf who especially provoked my father to extreme harshness and who got his due measure of beatings every day.”

Hitler himself bragged to one of his secretaries that after reading about Indian stoicism in the Wild West novels he consumed as a boy, he had “resolved not to make a sound the next time my father whipped me. And when the time came — I still can remember my frightened mother standing outside the door—I silently counted the blows. My mother thought I had gone crazy when I beamed proudly and said, ‘Father hit me thirty-two times!’ ”To dinner guests in Berlin, Albert Speer reports, “Hitler repeatedly talked about his youth, emphasizing the strictness of his upbringing. ‘My father often dealt me hard blows. Moreover, I think that was necessary and helped me.’ ” Both Alois Jr. and Adolf were choked or beaten unconscious by their father for major truancies: in Alois Jr.’s case, for skipping school for three days to build a toy boat; in Adolf’s, for running away from home at the age of ten or eleven to escape his brutal father.

Hitler moved into rebellious belligerency when he was eleven, after his attempt to run away from home. His excellent schoolwork abruptly deteriorated. He began reading his Wild West books in school, carried a Bowie knife and a hatchet and earned from his teachers such labels as “solitary,” “resentful,” “sullen” and “uncooperative.” Nor did his father’s abrupt death early in 1903 relieve his conflict. His principal teacher in middle school corroborated his belligerency in testimony at his 1924 putsch trial:

Hitler was gifted, one-sided, uncontrolled, and was known to be stubborn, inconsiderate, righteous and irate; it was difficult for him to fit into the school milieu. He also was not diligent, because otherwise, with his talent, he would have been more successful. . . . Instructions and admonitions were received with undisguised irritation; from his schoolmates he demanded unconditional submission, like the Führer role, and was inclined to pranks.

But without success at violent performances, Adolf was stuck in transition between identities. His fantasies settled on military glory after he read an account of the Franco-Prussian War. “It was not long before the great historic struggle had become my greatest inner experience,” he wrote in
Mein Kampf.
“From then on I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or, for that matter, with soldiering.” He was already practicing public speaking, however—improvising orations for his close friend August Kubizek “accompanied by vivid gestures”—and at fifteen, Kubizek reports, he was already “a pronounced anti-Semite.”

After his mother died of breast cancer late in 1907, Adolf, now eighteen, moved to Vienna, where he hoped to study architecture but was rejected for admission to the Academy of Arts. He blamed that rejection on the Jews. “In Vienna I learnt to hate the Jews,” he told newspaper editor Richard Breitling in 1931. “. . . I really wanted to be an architect. The Vienna Jews knew how to stop that. They were wrong because now they have a politician on their hands.” Failing to resolve the conflicts of brutalization leads to breakdown, and Hitler sank into depression and disorder in Vienna, where for six years he lived a life of impoverished semi-homelessness. “This pathological, evil-smelling world of envy, spite and egotism,” writes Joachim Fest, “where everyone was on edge for a chance to scramble upwards and only ruthlessness guaranteed escape, became for the next few years Hitler’s home and formative background. Here his idea of mankind and his picture of society were molded; here he received his first political impressions and asked his first political questions, to which he responded with the growing resentment, the hate and impotence of the outcast.” Hitler acknowledged the importance of his Vienna years: “At that time I formed an image of the world and a
Weltanschauung,
” he wrote in
Mein Kampf,
“which became the granite foundation for my actions. I have had to add but little to that which I learned then and I have had to change nothing. . . . [Vienna] was and remained for me the hardest, but also the most thorough, school of my life.”

The Great War spared him further humiliation, and when he joined the Bavarian infantry in August 1914, he greeted it ecstatically: “To me, those hours seemed like release from the painful feelings of youth. I am not ashamed to admit even today that, gripped by wild enthusiasm, I fell to my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being allowed to live at this time. . . . I knew that my place would then be where my inner voice directed me.” Hitler’s socialization had been excruciatingly prolonged by his failure either to succeed at violent performances or to find some nonviolent alternative. In fantasy he had identified military service as a way forward, and now suddenly a great world war intervened to allow him to test that possibility.

Between 1914 and 1916 he served at Ypres, Flanders, Neuve Chapelle, Flanders, La Bassée, Arras and Flanders again. As a courier, he carried messages from regimental headquarters back and forth to the front lines. “The orders he carried set battalions in motion,” observes Nuremberg Trial psychiatrist G. M. Gilbert, “started artillery barrages, or sent further orders down the line to hold ground regardless of losses.” Gilbert suspects these experiences provided Hitler with “a vicarious identification with authority.” Hitler’s identification was more than vicarious; his experiences as a courier revealed to him both the power and the refuge of delegated violence, of which he was the channel. He saw plain soldiers killed by the hundreds and thousands, and officers too, but the senior officers at regimental headquarters who ordered the violence directed and surveyed the carnage from safety, just as he would do as Führer from his safe bunkers dug in well behind the lines.

He loved soldiering and thought of himself as indestructible, but by 1915 what he called in a postcard home “the everlasting artillery fire” had traumatized him as it traumatized everyone else. In
Mein Kampf
he claimed he pulled himself together:

Thus it went on, year after year, but the romance of battle had made way for horror. The enthusiasm gradually cooled off, and exuberant joy was stifled by mortal fear. The time had come when every one of us had to struggle between the instinct of self-preservation and the call of duty. I, too, was not spared by this struggle. Whenever Death was on the hunt, a vague something tried to revolt, and strove to represent itself to the weak body as reason, yet it was only cowardice which in such disguise tried to ensnare the individual. A grave tugging and warning then set in and often it was only the last remnant of conscience which decided the issue. Yet the more this admonished one to caution, the louder and more insistent its lures, the sharper resistance to it grew, until finally, after a long inner struggle, the sense of duty carried the day. In my case, this issue had been decided by the winter of 1915–16. At last my will was undisputed master. If in the first days I went over the top with rejoicing and laughter, I was now calm and determined. And this was enduring. Now Fate could bring on the ultimate tests without my nerves shattering or my reason failing.

Ever after, he could produce a five-minute running imitation of an artillery barrage, reproducing all the different sounds the deadly shells made as they tumbled through the air. But his nerves did finally shatter. He was wounded in the left thigh by shrapnel on the Somme in October 1916, recuperated in a hospital, returned to duty, served in Flanders, on the Marne, in Champagne and back in Flanders in 1917 and 1918. In October 1918 he was gassed at La Montagne — Fest confirms the injury from Hitler’s war record—and may also have suffered combat trauma after being buried by a shell blast. The mustard gas temporarily blinded him and he was sent to a hospital in Pasewalk, north of Berlin, for treatment. Several weeks later he was beginning to see again —“distinguishing the broad outlines of the things about me,” he says in
Mein
Kampf—
when “the monstrous thing happened.” The monstrous thing was the collapse of Germany, army and navy mutinies, Socialist coups and the declaration of the Weimar Republic, for Hitler “the greatest villainy of the century.” The war had ended in defeat. When a chaplain came to the hospital and explained what that defeat would mean, Hitler took it personally. He could hardly take defeat otherwise, since soldiering had given him a chance to try on a stable identity:

The old gentleman . . . began to tell us that we must now end the long War, yes, that now that it was lost and we were throwing ourselves upon the mercy of the victors, our fatherland would for the future be exposed to dire oppression, that the armistice should be accepted with confidence in the magnanimity of our previous enemies — I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes.

“Do you know that I once was blind?” Hitler shouted at Richard Breitling during his 1931 interview. “In November 1918,” he went on, “when the Reds were laying Germany waste, I was in a military hospital, blinded. That was when I began to see.” Some biographers have interpreted these ambiguous statements to mean that Hitler suffered a second, hysterical blindness at Pasewalk when he heard of the German collapse. Of more significance is a claim he repeatedly made later — most credibly in a conversation with Hearst journalist Karl von Wiegand three or four years after the war — that he conceived his political calling at Pasewalk. Von Wiegand said Hitler told him about his gas injury in 1921 or 1922 and added, “As I lay there, it came over me that I would liberate the German people and make Germany great.” Ordering others to commit acts of heinous violence on his behalf became for Adolf Hitler a substitute for using personal violence himself.

None of this personal history would be relevant if Hitler had gone on to live a minor life, but his personal struggle colored and shaped the political party he founded and the subsequent Nazi state. “At its roots,” Fest confirms, “National Socialist ideology contained only one tangible idea: the idea of struggle. This determined the classifications, the values and the terminology both of the early movement and of the Third Reich. It not only gave Hitler’s written confession of faith [i.e.,
Mein Kampf
] its purposeful title but also so deeply marked the content and tone of the book that at times even the idea of race, the other cornerstone of National Socialist ideology, had to take second place.”