Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Hitler’s own feelings had their quota of spurious elements: “Thus my heart, like that of a million others, overflowed with proud joy….” he wrote and attributed his enthusiasm to the fact that he would now have a chance to prove by deeds the strength of his nationalistic convictions. On August 3 he addressed a petition directly to the King of Bavaria requesting permission, in spite of his Austrian citizenship, to volunteer for a Bavarian regiment. The contradiction between his draft evasion and this step is not a real one. For peacetime military service would have subjected him to a coercion he regarded as pointless. The war, on the other hand, meant liberation from the conflicts and miseries of his chaotic emotions, from the aimless emptiness of his life. In his boyhood two popular books about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had fired his enthusiasm for the powerful German army. Now he was entering that army with its nimbus of childhood reading. The past few days had vouchsafed him these feelings of belonging and union with his fellow men that he had lacked for so long. Now, for the first time in his life, he saw his chance to share in the prestige of a great and feared institution.

  The very day after he had submitted the petition, the answer arrived. “With trembling hands I opened the document,” he relates. It summoned him to report to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, also known by its commander’s name as the List Regiment. There now began for Hitler “the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence.”53

  Redemption by War

  Without the army we would all not be here; all of us once came out of that school.

  Adolf Hitler

  In the second half of October, after a training period of barely ten weeks, the List Regiment was sent to the Western front. Hitler had waited impatiently for shipment; he was afraid the war might be over before he saw action. But what was then called the baptism of fire—on October 29, in the first battle of Ypres, one of the bloodiest clashes of the first phase of the war—made him aware of the realities. The British units on this section doggedly and at last successfully opposed the massive German efforts to break through to the Channel coast. The German General Staff regarded this breakthrough as vital to its war plans. For four days the fighting raged. Hitler himself, in a letter to his Munich landlord, reported that in this battle the regiment was reduced by half, from 3,500 to about 1,700 men. Shortly afterward, near the village of Becelaere, it lost its commander; it acquired, partly as the result of stupid orders, a “mournful popularity.”

  The description given by Hitler of his first war experience in Mein Kampf will not stand close examination of the details. But the unusual care he devoted to the literary shaping of this passage, his efforts at poetic elevation, show how much the experience meant to him:

  And then came a damp, cold night in Flanders, through which we marched in silence, and when the day began to emerge from the mists, suddenly an iron greeting came whizzing at us over our heads, and with a sharp report sent the little pellets flying between our ranks, ripping up the wet ground; but even before the little cloud had passed, from two hundred throats the first hurrah rose to meet the first messenger of death. Then a crackling and a roaring, a singing and a howling began, and with feverish eyes each one of us was drawn forward, faster and faster, until suddenly past turnip fields and hedges the fight began, the fight of man against man. And from the distance the strains of a song reached our ears, coming closer and closer, leaping from company to company, and just as Death plunged a busy hand into our ranks, the song reached us too and we passed it along: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, über Alles in der Welt!54

  Throughout the war Hitler served as a courier between the regimental staff and the advanced positions. This mission, in which he was dependent on no one but himself, suited his solitary temperament. One of his superiors remembered him as a “quiet, rather unmilitary looking man who appeared to differ in no way from his fellows.” He was reliable, obedient, and according to the same source, of rather sober disposition. Even in the army he was considered eccentric; the members of his company almost all agreed in calling him a “pipe-dreamer.” He often sat “helmet on his head, in a corner, lost in thought, and none of us were able to get him out of his slump.” Although impressions of Hitler the soldier are fairly plentiful and date from different periods in nearly four years, they all sound much the same. None of them really brings him to life; but their colorlessness evidently is in keeping with the subject.

  Even the eccentric qualities he displayed have an oddly impersonal character. There would be times when he would break out of his broodings into wild monologue. But this would not be the normal soldier’s griping, revolving around all the bothers of a soldier’s life. Rather, he would express his fears that victory would be lost, his suspicions of betrayal, his anxieties over invisible foes. Not a single episode brings him out as an individual. The only anecdote that was told about him—one that later found its way into German school readers—is in fact nothing but a schoolreader anecdote. While carrying dispatches, the story goes, Hitler came upon a squad of fifteen Frenchmen in a trench near Montdidier. Due to his presence of mind, his courage, and his skillful surprise tactics, he succeeded in overpowering the enemy soldiers and leading them captive back to his commander.

  His exemplary zeal concealed the man behind a picture cut out of a patriotic calendar; it was another way of escaping from the world, escaping into clichés. On a patrol, enemy machine guns suddenly began to fire; Hitler swept his commander out of the way, took up “a protective position in front of him,” and begged the officer “to preserve the regiment from losing its commander twice in so short a time.”

  Without a doubt, he was a brave soldier; the charges of cowardice raised later were politically motivated. As early as December, 1914, he received the Iron Cross Second Class; in May, 1918, he was awarded a regimental certificate for bravery in the face of the enemy; and on August 4 of the same year he received the Iron Cross First Class, seldom awarded to enlisted men.

  However, to this day it has been impossible to discover the specific grounds for these decorations. Hitler himself gives no clues, possibly because he had been proposed for the decorations by the Jewish regimental adjutant Hugo Gutmann. The history of the regiment does not mention them; the accounts that exist differ sharply. They report, apparently on the basis of the above-mentioned anecdote, that Hitler took a fifteen-man English patrol captive, or they describe the dramatic capture of ten, twelve, and even twenty Frenchmen. Some of the stories even endow Hitler with a knowledge of French that he did not have. Still another account claims that he fought his way through the heaviest fire to an artillery unit and in this way prevented the threatening shelling of his regiment’s position. But whatever he won them for, those wartime decorations proved of inestimable value for Hitler’s future. They gave him, although an Austrian, a kind of spiritual claim to citizenship in Germany. Thus they provided a prerequisite for the beginning of his career. They lent a degree of legitimacy to his claim to participate in German politics and to his demand for loyalty from his followers.

  In the field, however, among his fellow soldiers, his exalted sense of responsibility, his anxiety over the total military picture were not appreciated. “We all used to yell at him,” one of his fellows later recalled. Others said, “That fellow is bucking for stripes.” Others noted that he always looked under some sort of strain. Yet he was, apparently, not distinctly unpopular. Rather, he merely let them see the distance that separated him from them. In contrast to the others, he had no family; he scarcely received or wrote letters, and he did not share in their commonplace worries, amusements, and laughter. “I hated nothing so much as that trash,” he later recalled. Instead, he said, he meditated a great deal on the problems of life, and read Homer, the Gospels, and Schopenhauer. The war did for him what thirty years at the university might have done, he alleged. He thought he alone knew what the war was about, and from his isolation he derived a sense of being specially elect. Strictly speaking, what he was defending wa
s not his homeland but the country he was proud of. The photographs taken of Hitler as a soldier suggest something of his peculiarly alienated relationship toward his fellows. Hitler sits beside them with a fixed expression, obviously sharing not at all in their viewpoint.

  This complex incapacity for human relationships may be the reason why in four years at the front he never won promotion beyond the rank of private, first class. At the Nuremberg trial the adjutant of the List Regiment recounted that the question of promoting Hitler to the rank of noncommissioned officer had occasionally arisen but had always been decided in the negative “because we could discover no leadership qualities in him.” Moreover, the adjutant added, Hitle, himself had not wanted to be proposed for promotion.

  What Hitler found in the billets and dugouts of wartime was the kind of human relationship that suited his nature. In its impersonality it was the life style of the home for men, but with the difference that the army satisfied his cravings for prestige, his inner restiveness, and his sense of solemnity. Here was the social framework that corresponded both to his misanthropic withdrawnness and his longing for contact. On the battlefield Hitler found the native land he did not possess. In no man’s land he felt at home.

  One of his former superiors has said this very thing and in much the same language: “For Pfc. Hitler the List Regiment was his homeland.” When we understand this, we need no longer be puzzled by the contradiction between his determined desire for subordination in wartime and his lone-wolf asociality in the preceding years. Not since his mother’s death had he felt as much at home anywhere, and never afterward was his simultaneous need for adventurousness and order, for unconstraint and discipline fulfilled as it was in the command headquarters, the trenches, and the dugouts at the front. In contrast to the humiliations of the preceding years, the war was Adolf Hitler’s great affirmative educational experience, the one to which he exuberantly applied such phrases as “mighty impression,” “overwhelming,” “so happy.”

  Hitler himself declared that the war had transformed him. It hardened this touchy and sentimental young man and gave him a sense of his own worth. Caught up in the machinery of war, he learned toughness, the uses of solidarity, and self-discipline. He acquired that belief in fate which was one component of his generation’s high-flown irrationality. The coolness with which he moved in the fiercest fire earned him, among his fellows, a reputation for invulnerability. If Hitler was around, they told one another, “nothing will happen.” His luck seems to have made the deepest impression on Hitler himself and to have reinforced his faith in his special mission. Through all the years of failure and misery he had clung and continued obstinately to cling to that faith.

  But the war also magnified Hitler’s tendency to brooding. Like many of his fellow soldiers, he became convinced that the old leadership of society had failed, that the very social order he had marched to war to defend was perishing of internal exhaustion. “I would make the leaders responsible for these men who have fallen,” he once declared to an astonished comrade. Hitler’s generation, obsessed with its own idiosyncrasies and wrestling with its problems in a literary output of vast dimensions, was searching for a new meaning to life. Basically, this signified, it was searching for a meaningful social order. Hitler himself decided that he wanted “to know nothing about politics at that time.” But his need to communicate, his unquenchable craving for speculative thinking, ran counter to such resolves. Soon he was attracting attention by “philosophizing about political and ideological questions in the crude manner of ordinary folk.” From the early phase of the war we have a twelve-page letter of his to a Munich acquaintance which bears this out. After giving a detailed description of a frontal attack in which he participated, Hitler concludes the letter:55

  I think about Munich so often, and each of us has only this one wish, that the final settlement with that gang will soon come, that we’ll be able to go at them, no matter what the cost, and that those of us who have the good fortune to see our homeland again will find it purer and more purified of foreignism, so that by the sacrifices and sufferings which so many hundreds of thousands of us are undergoing daily, by the torrent of blood which is pouring out here day after day against an international world of enemies, not only Germany’s enemies outside will be shattered, but also our inner internationalism. That would be worth more than all territorial gains. With Austria it will turn out as I have always said.

  Politically, this letter carries on the ideological obsessions of Hitler’s Vienna years: the fear of overwhelming foreign elements in the nation, together with a defensive reaction against a world of enemies. There were borrowings, also, from the Pan-German teachings, which later led to his thesis of the primacy of domestic over foreign affairs. National and racial unity took precedence over territorial expansion. Greater Germany was first to be German and only subsequently great.

  At the beginning of October, 1916, at Le Barque, Hitler was lightly wounded in the left thigh and sent to Beelitz Hospital near Berlin. He stayed in Germany until March, 1917, and it would appear that this was when there arose in him the first, still unclear signs of that “awakening” which two years later prompted him to enter politics.

  August, 1914, and his experiences at the front had above all impressed upon him the inner unity of the nation. For two years he had basked in this new-found sense of togetherness, which he was sure nothing could affect. Having no family, no home address, no destination whatsoever, he had renounced his right to furloughs. His superzeal untroubled, he stayed on in his unreal world. “It was still the front of the old, glorious army of heroes,” he later nostalgically recalled.56 The shock was all the harsher when, in Beelitz and during a first visit to Berlin, he encountered the political, social, and national contradictions of the past. With deep distress he realized that the enthusiasm of the early phase of the war had drained away. Parties and factionalism had replaced that exalted sense of sharing a common destiny. It may be that his future resentment toward the city of Berlin had its origins in this experience. He saw discontent, hunger, and resignation. He was outraged at meeting slackers who boasted of their shrewdness; he noted hypocrisy, egotism, war profiteering, and, faithful to the obsession that dated back to his days in Vienna, he decided that behind all these manifestations was the work of the Jew.

  It was the same when, nearly cured, he was sent to a reserve battalion in Munich. “I thought I could no longer recognize the city.” He turned his resentment against those who had robbed him of his illusions and destroyed the lovely dream of German unity—the first positive social experience he had had since the days of his childhood. He was filled with fury against the “Hebrew corruptors of the people” on the one hand—12,000 or 15,000 of them should be held “under poison gas”—and against the politicians and journalists on the other hand. “Jabberers,” “vermin,” “perjuring criminals of the Revolution,” they deserved nothing but annihilation. “All the implements of military power should have been ruthlessly used for the extermination of this pestilence.”57 He still longed hysterically for victory; no prophetic sense or strategic instinct told him that defeat would serve him far better as a basis for his rise from namelessness.

  Returning to the front in the spring of 1917, he felt once more exalted and still more alienated from the civilian world to which he had never been able to adjust. Military documents indicate that he participated in the positional battles in French Flanders, in the spring Battle of Arras, and in the fierce autumnal conflict of Chemin des Dames. Apprehensively he noted the “senseless letters of thoughtless females” which helped infect that front with the mood of resignation that prevailed back home. At this time he frequently discussed his prospects for a future vocation with a fellow soldier, the painter Ernst Schmidt. Schmidt related that even then Hitler had begun to consider whether he ought not to try politics, but that he had never really decided. There are other indications that he still believed he could make a career as an artist. When he came to Berlin, the political hear
t of the country, in October, 1917—shortly after the Reichstag’s controversial peace resolution and shortly before the German military triumph in the East—Hitler wrote in a postcard to Schmidt: “Now at last have opportunity to study the museums somewhat better.” Later he declared that in those days he used to tell a small circle of his friends that when the war was over he meant to be active politically in addition to taking up his profession as an architect. According to his own account, he also knew what form that activity was going to take: he wanted to become a political speaker.

  Such an aspiration sprang from the notion he had cherished since his Vienna days, that all modes of human reactions are the calculable result of guidance and background influences. The idea of hidden wirepullers, so disturbing and at the same time so fascinating to him, took on new and seductive colors as soon as he imagined himself as some day being one of the wirepullers. His view of humanity excluded all spontaneity. Everything could be produced by manipulation—“tremendous, almost incomprehensible results,” as he noted with a touch of astonishment—if only the right players moved the right members at the right moment. He preposterously considered the movements of history, the rise and decline of nations, classes, or parties largely as the consequence of differing propagandists abilities. In the famous sixth chapter of Mein Kampf he expatiated upon this view, illustrating his points by the difference between German and Allied propaganda.

  According to his argument, Germany lost the war because “the form was inadequate, the substance was psychologically wrong: a careful examination of German war propaganda can lead to no other diagnosis.” Because Germany’s leaders did not recognize the true power of this weapon, they were incapable of creating propaganda worthy of the name. Instead, Germany produced only “insipid pacifistic bilge” that could never “fire men’s spirits till they were willing to die.” Although “the most brilliant psychologists would have been none too good” for this task, the Germans employed aesthetes and half-hearted failures, with the result that the country derived no advantage and sometimes actual harm from its propaganda.