The Third Reich

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by Thomas Childers


  Although he was an Austrian citizen, Hitler immediately enlisted in the German army (no questions were asked) and he was assigned to the 16th Reserve Regiment of the 1st Bavarian Infantry Division, called the List Regiment after its commander Julius von List. The unit received rudimentary training in Munich and was promptly dispatched to Flanders, where it was thrown into the heavy fighting near Ypres. It was a disaster. In the regiment’s first few months of combat, it suffered roughly 70 percent casualties, including the death of its commanding officer. For four brutal years, Hitler served on the Western Front as a dispatch runner, carrying messages from regimental headquarters to the front lines. Although he was never a soldier in the trenches, as he subsequently implied, his was a dangerous job, and he performed it with distinction. Twice wounded, he was awarded the Iron Cross second class in 1916, and two years later the Iron Cross first class for bravery, a rare achievement for an enlisted man, especially a dispatch runner. Later the Nazi propaganda machine would greatly embellish Hitler’s war record, claiming among other fictions that he had won his Iron Cross first class by singlehandedly capturing seven French soldiers. Still, his war was dangerous enough. In September 1916 he was hit in the thigh by a shard of English shrapnel when an artillery shell slammed into regimental messengers’ dugout two kilometers behind the front, killing and severely wounding almost everyone there.

  Hitler spent nearly two months recuperating in Germany, where he was allowed a brief visit to Berlin before being transferred to a replacement battalion in Munich. He had not been in Germany since the outbreak of the war, and he found the mood drastically changed. He was appalled by the widespread disaffection and defeatism he found among both the soldiers and the hard-strapped civilian population. In Berlin “there was dire misery everywhere. The big city was suffering from hunger. Discontent was great.” Defeatism was rampant among the troops he encountered in the hospital and elsewhere, as “shirkers” ridiculed the army and bragged about their ruses to avoid combat. “But,” he added, “Munich was much worse.” He hardly recognized the city. There he found “anger, discontent, cursing” wherever he went. “The general mood was miserable: to be a slacker passed almost as a sign of higher wisdom, while loyal steadfastness was considered a symptom of inner weakness and narrow-mindedness.”

  The patriotic unity of 1914 had long since dissolved, worn away by the remorselessly mounting casualties and the dreary hardships on the home front. For roughly two years the political truce had held, but by 1916 domestic solidarity, already frayed by mounting labor unrest, began to unravel. Frustrated by its party’s continued support of “an imperialist war,” the SPD’s left wing bolted to form a new party (the USPD or Independent Social Democratic Party). In an effort to avert a further radicalization of the left, the Kaiser announced his intention of granting universal suffrage and other electoral changes long demanded by the Social Democrats, but, he added, any democratizing reforms would come only after the successful conclusion of hostilities.

  The Kaiser’s Easter message of 1917 satisfied no one, either on the right or the left. That was underscored in July when a disillusioned Reichstag, almost forgotten since 1914, passed a resolution calling for a negotiated end to the war and rejecting the expansionist war aims demanded by the government and the right. Inspired by Matthias Erzberger of the Catholic Zentrum Party, the resolution was supported by a broad coalition of Social Democrats, Zentrum, and the left-liberal Progressives. After the patriotic summer of 1914 the Reichstag and even the Kaiser had faded from view, and since 1916 army commanders Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff ruled the country from behind the scenes in a “silent dictatorship.” The army simply ignored the resolution, removed the presiding chancellor from office, installed a pliant figurehead, and tightened its grip on the state. The Reichstag Peace Resolution, as it came to be called, infuriated the right, which accused the Reichstag of being under the thumb of the “internationalist” Social Democrats and their fellow travelers in the Zentrum and among the democratic liberals.

  In response, the Fatherland Party, founded by a coalition of right-wing organizations in December 1916, howled against the left, the liberals, and the Jews, all of whom, they claimed, were undermining the war effort. The Fatherland Party was particularly savage in its attacks on Jews. Jewish financial interests, they insisted, dominated the German war economy, reaping enormous profits while true Germans were fighting and dying for the fatherland. Amid a growing mood of fear and mounting paranoia, a tidal wave of anti-Semitic agitation washed over the country. Right-wing groups such as the Pan-German League, the Colonial Society, and the small but aggressively anti-Semitic Thule Society—in fact, all those groups that vigorously supported Germany’s expansionist war aims—shared these anti-Jewish views and aggressively pressed them on the public.

  Before the war, anti-Semitism had not played a major role in German political life. In the early 1890s a number of small regional parties had made anti-Semitism the central focus of their appeal, and in 1893 the German Conservative Party, in an effort to revive its sagging popularity, drafted an anti-Semitic plank in its Tivoli Program. By 1914 these small anti-Semitic parties had evaporated into well-deserved oblivion, and the Tivoli Program signally failed to boost the electoral fortunes of the Conservatives, whose vote continued to plummet. And yet, while it was not enough to rally any significant popular support, anti-Semitism percolated through German political culture during the prewar years. By 1914, though hardly mainstream, it had become respectable, an undeniable element of political discourse.

  In 1916–17, amid signs of deepening social and economic tensions, groups on the right charged that Jews controlled the war economy and were dodging military service. Even those Jews who were in the army, they claimed, were not serving on the front lines. These spurious charges became so intense that in 1916 the Reichstag launched an investigation into the role of Jews in Germany’s war industries, and the Ministry of War undertook a survey to determine the number of Jews serving in the army, and especially in frontline outfits. These investigations indicated that Jews were neither overrepresented in the war economy nor underrepresented in the armed forces—not at the front or in the casualty reports. One hundred thousand Jews served in the military during the war; 12,000 were killed in action; and 35,000 were decorated for bravery. But the results of the army’s Judenzählung were never made public, and the vicious accusations from the right continued unabated.

  Contributing to the atmosphere of mounting suspicion and discord, Germany was beginning to experience the full force of the very effective English blockade, leading to severe shortages of food and fuel for heating. The country was slowly starving—a condition that would reach catastrophic proportions in the frigid “Turnip Winter” of 1916–17 when 250,000 civilians died of starvation or maladies resulting from malnutrition. Food riots broke out in several cities, and the first signs of labor unrest burst onto the surface. In 1915 Germany had experienced 137 strikes; in 1916, 240; in 1917, the number soared to 561. Then in January 1918, 400,000 strikers appeared on the streets of Berlin, and similar, though smaller, strikes followed in Düsseldorf, Kiel, Cologne, and Hamburg. By the end of the year, revolution would engulf the country.

  The dramatic surge of labor unrest, especially in the vital munitions industry, spiked Hitler’s loathing of the Social Democrats and labor unions. A comrade recalled, “Hitler became furious and shouted in a terrible voice that the pacifists and shirkers were losing the war.” “What was the army fighting for if the homeland itself no longer wanted victory?” Hitler fumed. “For whom the immense sacrifices and privations? The soldier is expected to fight for victory and the homeland goes on strike against it.” Hitler, one fellow soldier remembered, would sit “in a corner of our mess holding his head between his hands, in deep contemplation. Suddenly he would leap up, and, running about excitedly, say that in spite of our big guns victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of the German people were a greater danger than th
e biggest cannon of the enemy.” Already in 1915 he had written to an acquaintance in Munich that at war’s end he hoped to find the German homeland “purer and cleansed from foreign influence,” so that “not only will Germany’s enemies from the outside be smashed but also our domestic internationalism will be broken up.” His hatred of the Reds steadily escalated during the last two years of the war, and on his rare visits back to Germany he felt himself adrift in alien territory, surrounded by cynics, shirkers, socialists, and Jews. He was always eager to return to the front.

  Hitler had found a home in the army. The war gave his life discipline and direction, and the army offered the perpetual outsider a sense of belonging that he had never before experienced. And yet, even among his closest comrades, he remained something of an oddity, “a white crow,” as one put it, “that didn’t go along with us when we damned the war to hell.” While other soldiers had families or lovers or jobs waiting for them at home, Hitler did not. He received few letters or packages, even at Christmas, and he chose not to visit his family in Austria on any of his rare leaves. The men respected his bravery and reliability but found him peculiar—too quiet, too humorless, too much the prude. He didn’t drink or smoke and would not join their banter about their sexual exploits and fantasies. He refused to visit the French prostitutes with his comrades—that was a betrayal of Germany’s honor, he piously intoned, and besides, he was obsessed by a morbid fear of syphilis. The other men also found him a bit too zealous in his duties, too much devoted to the army, too much the idealist, the single-minded nationalist. He never indulged in the usual bellyaching about the tedious demands and discomforts of army life, and he grew irate at any stray remark that smacked of war weariness.

  As the war dragged on, Hitler’s identification with his adopted country became complete. Germany had to win the war; defeat—failure—was terrifying, a calamity too appalling, too shameful, to contemplate. Except for a few offhand comments, politics were off-limits in the early years of the war. “I was a soldier then,” Hitler later explained, “and I didn’t want to talk about politics. And really it was not the time for it.” That began to change as Germany’s military position deteriorated in 1917–18 and demoralization spread like a contagion through the troops. During those final years of the war the men close to him were startled at Hitler’s furious outbursts against the Reds and the slackers, a theme that would soon grow into a pathological obsession by war’s end. The Social Democrats and labor unions remained the primary targets of Hitler’s vitriol, and, ironically given later developments, his comrades could not recall Hitler expressing anything other than mild, commonplace comments about Jews. One recalled that even when Hitler spoke of his bitter Vienna period and the strong Jewish presence there, it was “without spitefulness.” Citing Hitler’s good relations with the Jewish officers and men of the regiment, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, his immediate superior, simply could not believe that Hitler’s “hatred of Jews dated back to that time.” It was a Jewish officer, Hugo Gutmann, who had recommended Hitler for the Iron Cross first class. Even after Hitler rose to political prominence and they were badgered by the press and the party for their recollections of the Führer, his wartime comrades were hard-pressed to remember anything notable about his views on Jews or anti-Semitism—or about him at all.

  There was, however, one striking feature of his military experience that deserves comment. Despite his lengthy service at the front and his two Iron Crosses, Hitler was repeatedly passed over for promotion and remained a lance corporal for the duration of the war. It could be that he was not eager for promotion since that would most likely have meant leaving his comfortable home in the regiment, but there were other, more troubling concerns. One of his superiors believed that Hitler was unsuited for command on account of “his mental instability,” and, as Captain Wiedemann later reported, it was felt that Corporal Hitler simply lacked “the capacity for leadership.”

  In early October 1918, Hitler was blinded by mustard gas in a British attack near Ypres. After initial treatment in Flanders, he was transferred to a military hospital in Pasewalk, northeast of Berlin. The initial blindness passed, as was common in mild mustard gas cases, and Hitler’s condition was not considered serious. The doctors concluded that his lingering blindness was largely psychosomatic, a psychological reaction to shock. He was being treated not in the ophthalmic but in the psychiatric section of the hospital. It was there, on November 10, that he heard the stunning news that the war was over, that Germany had signed an armistice—in effect, surrendered—the Kaiser had abdicated, and revolutionaries were on the streets of Berlin. On hearing this devastating report, Hitler suffered a sudden and highly unusual second onset of blindness, which the doctors were convinced was not the result of mustard gas poisoning but of hysteria. One examining psychiatrist is reported to have diagnosed Hitler as a “psychopath suffering from hysteria.”

  Hitler’s deep shock at this shattering turn of events was shared by most Germans. Ignorant of the true military situation and misled by relentlessly upbeat bulletins from the Supreme Military Command that confidently announced that there was light at the end of the tunnel, that victory lay just around the bend, after the next offensive or the next or the next, the public was wholly unprepared for this utterly devastating news. It was simply inconceivable. After all, no enemy troops stood on German soil; German forces were still inside France and occupied virtually all of Belgium; Russia was defeated and in the throes of revolution; mutinies threatened the French army; and England was at the breaking point. But the position of the German army, the High Command understood, was desperate. Ludendorff’s much vaunted spring offensive had failed, though the full extent of the catastrophe had been withheld not only from the people but also from the civilian government, such as it was. The final straw came in September when the Western Allies, buoyed by the arrival of American troops, launched a major offensive that threatened to break through German lines at any moment. If such a breach occurred, and the High Command feared that it was inevitable, Allied troops would steamroll into Germany. The situation was hopeless. To the great surprise of the parties in the Reichstag, Ludendorff, who operated virtually as a military dictator during the last two years of the war, demanded that the German government seek an immediate armistice. He now desperately sought not only to prevent an Allied breakthrough, which would reveal the utter failure of the army’s High Command, but, equally important, to shift the responsibility for the defeat—and defeat it certainly was—onto the Reichstag.

  News that Germany was seeking an armistice sent shockwaves across the country. The war-weary public, which had endured four years of suffering and sacrifice, desperately wanted peace, and the exhausted troops were in a state of near rebellion. Discipline broke down; soldiers defied their commanders, and many simply disappeared, deserting their units to make their way home. No one wanted to die in the last days of a lost war. Matters came to a head on November 4 at the naval station in Kiel when rebellious sailors mutinied, refusing orders to steam out of port to engage the British fleet in what would clearly have been a suicide mission. The mutiny at Kiel ignited a wildfire of uprising that quickly swept across the country. Workers surged into the streets, and workers’ and soldiers’ councils (Räte), following the Bolshevik example, sprang up spontaneously in almost every town and city. Revolutionary workers tore the insignia from the uniforms of returning soldiers. Red flags fluttered from city halls.

  On November 9, with no viable options left to him and the situation deteriorating by the hour, Kaiser Wilhelm II passed into exile, and with him the proud German Empire of Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns was gone. Proceeding in uncharted constitutional waters, the last chancellor of Imperial Germany, Max von Baden, turned to the Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert to form a government. Ebert quickly formed a provisional government dominated by the two Socialist parties (the SPD, divided now into two parties—the majority Social Democrats and the more radical USPD, the Independent Social Democrats) and cal
led a national congress of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants Councils to convene in Berlin in December. With the country descending into violence, its task was to determine the form and future of a new German state. That congress, dominated by the moderate socialists, called for national elections to a constitutional convention that would draft a constitution for a democratic republic. Before those elections, the first in which women could vote, could take place, elements of the far left rose in revolt, hoping to derail the election and move the revolution onto a more radical course.

  In a desperate move that would produce a fatal rift between the forces of the left, the provisional government enlisted Reichswehr troops and irregular formations of returning veterans (Free Corps) to suppress the Communist uprising. In a week of vicious street fighting in Berlin, radical leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered. Despite lingering violence, the national election went forward, resulting in a sweeping victory for the democratic center and moderate left. The parties of the Peace Resolution carried three quarters of the vote and assembled a national constitutional convention in the small Thuringian city of Weimar, safely away from the sporadic street fighting and revolutionary tumult that continued to rock Berlin. The choice of venue also carried a symbolic message: Weimar was the city of Goethe and Schiller, the home of German humanism, and its selection was intended to demonstrate not only to the German public but to the Allies that the new Germany had turned away from Prussian authoritarianism and militarism.

  For Hitler, these developments were much more than a bitter shock. Germany’s defeat was his failure; Germany’s humiliation, his disgrace, another degrading rejection of his innermost self. The German army, he believed—had to believe—had not lost the war. With victory virtually within its grasp, it had been stabbed in the back by the “pacifists and internationalists” at home. That, for Hitler, was the only explanation he could allow himself to believe, and with Germany’s stunning collapse, a linkage, long on the cusp of his consciousness, now crystallized before him: the nation had been betrayed by an invidious conspiracy of Marxists and Jews. And with that appalling realization, all that he had absorbed in Vienna, all that he had internalized in the cafés and homeless shelters, came boiling to the surface in a blistering eruption of rage and hate. As he lay in his hospital bed in Pasewalk, “the shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow . . . and hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.”

 

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