Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  On 23 October, Hitler and his comrades arrived in Lille, where the din from the battlefields of Flanders could be easily heard. Falkenhayn had stuck with the general staff’s offensive tactics. By strengthening the German army’s right flank he hoped to surround the French and British armies. This was the beginning of the famous “Race to the Sea,” a series of battles leading ever closer to the English Channel. The attacking Germans suffered heavy casualties, particularly among young volunteers who naively ran into enemy machine-gun fire. The 6th Bavarian Reserve Division, of which the List Regiment was part, was deployed in the middle of the First Battle of Ypres. On 27 October, after three days of rest to recover from the journey, the regiment was ordered to march to the front. There, in the early hours of 29 October, as part of an assault on the Flemish village of Gheluvelt, Hitler received his “baptism of fire” in a forest along the road to Becelaere. It was a life-changing experience about which he reported in detail in a letter to the Munich court assessor Ernst Hepp, who before the war had purchased two of his watercolours and occasionally invited him out for a meal.28

  The letter, which Hitler wrote on 5 February 1915, three months after the events described, is an astonishing document.29 It showed that Hitler was not only a keen observer, but had a talent for putting his experiences into words—even if he had not quite overcome his poor spelling and punctuation. “Around 6 a.m. we met up with the other companies at an inn,” Hitler wrote.

  At 7 our day began. We marched in columns through a forest to our right and emerged with our ranks intact in an elevated field. Four marksmen were dug in ahead of us. We took up positions behind them in large trenches and waited…Finally came the command “Forwards.” We climbed out of our holes and sprinted across the field…towards a small farmstead. Left and right shells were exploding, and in the middle English bullets were humming, but we paid them no mind. For ten minutes we took cover and then again came the command “Forwards’…Now the first of our numbers were falling. The English had trained their machine guns on us. We threw ourselves on the ground and slowly crawled forward in a furrow. Sometimes we had to stop because someone had got shot and could no longer move, and we had to lift him out of the furrow.

  The decimated attackers sought shelter in a stretch of forest. “Overhead there was whining and rushing, and shredded tree trunks and branches were flying all around us,” Hitler continued. “Shells would hit the underbrush and throw clouds of stones, soil and sand in the air. They uprooted the mightiest of trees and covered everything in a horrible, stinking yellow-green mist. We couldn’t stay there for ever, and if we were going to fall, it was better to do so out in the open.” The soldiers sprinted across the fields of the farmstead and jumped into the first British trench. “By my side were men from Württemberg, and under me were dead and wounded Englishmen,” Hitler wrote. “I suddenly realised why my landing had been so soft.” They were soon engaged in bitter hand-to-hand combat.

  Anyone who didn’t surrender got cut down. We cleaned out trench after trench in this fashion. Finally we reached the main road…To the left were several farmsteads that were still occupied, and we came under heavy fire. One after another of our number crumpled…We charged four times and were beaten back every time. There was only one soldier left from my group besides me, and in the end he fell too. A bullet tore its way through my right sleeve, but miraculously, I remained without a scratch…We fought like this for three days until finally the English were taken care of.

  The List Regiment was first withdrawn from battle on 1 November and the survivors marched back to the village of Werwick. They had suffered enormous casualties: “In four days, our regiment had shrunk from 3,500 to 600 men. There were only three officers left in the entire regiment.”30 Among the dead was their commander, Colonel List.

  Without doubt, Hitler’s first encounter with the bloody realities of war was a traumatic experience, which seared the images of battle into his memory. He could still recall them vividly when he wrote Mein Kampf during his Landsberg incarceration, and in late July 1924 read the most recently written passages to his fellow inmate Rudolf Hess.31 In a letter to his future wife Ilse Pröhl, Hess described the scene: “The champion of the people read ever more slowly and hesitantly…He took longer and longer pauses. Then he suddenly lowered the manuscript, put his head in his hands—and sobbed.”32

  The terrible price paid by the List Regiment had brought only insignificant territorial gains. After Germany’s second attempt to decide matters in the west had failed, the front lines hardened in November 1914. Exhausted soldiers hunkered down in their trenches along an 800-kilometre-long line from Nieuport on the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. “A web of dugouts, trenches with embrasures, saps, wire entanglements and landmines—in short, an almost impregnable position,” was how Hitler described the trench-warfare system in a letter from January 1915.33 Hitler himself, however, did not have to stay at the very front line. A few days after being promoted to private first class on 3 November 1914, he was transferred to the regimental staff, where until the end of the war he served as one of several dispatch runners. These runners were responsible for bringing the regimental commander’s orders to the front lines during battle, if other lines of communication to the battalion and company leaders no longer functioned. It was a dangerous job.34 In early December 1914, Hitler himself wrote that since he had been made a runner, he had “risked his life every day and looked death in the eye.”35

  In mid-November 1914, the new regimental commander, Philipp Engelhardt, recommended Private Hitler for the Iron Cross, Second Class, but soon afterwards a shell hit the tent where Engelhardt was conferring with several company leaders. The commander was seriously wounded, and several members of his staff were killed. Hitler had left the tent five minutes previously—as so often would be the case later in his life, luck was on his side.36 On 2 December, he received his Iron Cross from the regimental adjutant, Lieutenant Georg Eichelsdörfer. “It was the happiest day of my life,” he wrote in a letter to Joseph Popp. “Of course almost all of my comrades, who deserved one too, are dead.” Hitler asked Popp to save the newspaper announcement of his award. “If the good Lord keeps me alive, I’d like it as a memento.”37

  Since late November 1914, the regimental staff had been pinned down by heavy fire in the totally destroyed town of Messines, not far from the front. “Day after day for the past two months, the air and ground have shaken with the howling and cracking of shells and the explosions of shrapnel,” Hitler wrote in late January 1915.

  The hellish concert starts early at 9 a.m. and ends at 1 p.m., only to reach its crescendo in the afternoon between 3 and 5. At 5 it’s over. It’s eerie when the cannons begin to thunder in the night. They start in the distance and get closer and closer. Gradually rifle fire is added, and after half an hour things calm again. Only the flares still gleam, and in the distance to the west you can see the searchlights and hear the constant artillery fire of the heavy armoured ships. But we won’t leave this place, come hell or high water.38

  In his letters to Munich, Hitler complained that the constant fighting was making him “dulled” and what he missed most was regular sleep. He felt very nervous, admitting that uninterrupted heavy artillery fire “ruined even the strongest of nerves in time.”39 But on 24 December 1914, something very unusual happened on the battlefields of Flanders. Almost everywhere, the weapons went silent. German and British soldiers crawled from their trenches, first alone and then in groups. They met one another in no man’s land, exchanged gifts and agreed a ceasefire for the following day. It seemed like a miracle. The same men who had only the day before tried their best to kill one another stood together, laughing, chatting, smoking and toasting each other’s health. “We were as happy as children,” an officer from Saxony noted in his diary.40

  The 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment (RIR 16) was also involved in the fraternisation. In a letter to his parents dated 28 December 1914, one member of the regiment wrote: “It was very moving.
Between the trenches, the most hateful and bitter enemies stood around a Christmas tree singing carols. I’ll never forget the sight as long as I live.”41 Hitler did not record his reaction to the “Christmas miracle on the front,” but according to one of the other runners, he had remarked disapprovingly: “Something like this should be out of the question in wartime.”42

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  In his later monologues, Hitler repeatedly returned to his experiences during the First World War. If he were twenty or twenty-five years younger, he remarked in July 1941, a few weeks after Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, he would volunteer for the front. “I was a passionate soldier,” he said.43 But was Hitler really the brave front-line fighter sharing “the misery of millions of Germans who squatted in their trenches for weeks at a time, permanently subject to mortal fear,” as he claimed at an NSDAP meeting in Munich in September 1930?44 In the 1920s and increasingly in the 1930s, doubts arose as to Hitler’s depiction of his military past. In the spring of 1932, two veterans of the List Regiment published articles in left-wing newspapers, the Braunschweiger Volksfreund and the weekend edition of the Hamburger Echo, in which they accused Hitler of spending the war in the safety of the regiment’s main headquarters, and not at the front as he claimed.45 Runners did indeed enjoy easier conditions than the soldiers in the trenches: they had dry quarters and were given better food, and they were not permanently exposed to machine-gun fire and sharpshooters’ bullets. “Every soldier in the trenches thought that the regimental staff members were lucky bastards,” another former comrade wrote to Hitler in March 1932. “It’s true, and no one can deny it, that things were much better in the staff than they were in the company.”46 But that does not mean that the runners’ job was without risk. For them the biggest danger came from artillery shells striking behind the front lines.

  After 1933, the NSDAP party archive began to collect statements from former comrades at the front who testified that Hitler had shown “constant engagement” and not shied away from any “dangerous route.” One of them reported that he had always been surprised that Hitler came back from his deliveries unwounded.47 These statements must be treated sceptically since they obviously served to support Hitler’s own version of his wartime experiences. The reports of Hitler’s military superiors are more believable. Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Petz, who succeeded Engelhardt and commanded the regiment until March 1916, wrote in February 1922:

  Hitler was an extremely hard-working, willing, conscientious and dutiful soldier, who was also completely reliable and obedient towards his superiors…Particularly worth stressing are his personal daring and the heedless courage he displayed when confronting dangerous situations and all the dangers of battle. His iron calm and cold-bloodedness never deserted him. When the situation was at its most dangerous, he always volunteered to make deliveries to the front and carried them out successfully.48

  It is possible that Petz sympathised with the ambitious young right-wing matador in Munich, which may explain why his assessment was so positive. But Fritz Wiedemann, the adjutant in the List Regiment from January 1916 to April 1917, offered a similar, if less upbeat, assessment after 1945. Hitler, he said, had been the “paradigm of the unknown soldier carrying out his duty silently and calmly.”49 This assessment carries all the more weight because Wiedemann had every reason to be critical of the former private. After being named Reich chancellor, Hitler had appointed Wiedemann his personal adjutant, but in early 1939 he had stripped him of that post and banished him as a consul general, first to San Francisco and then to Tianjin, China. Wiedemann subsequently distanced himself from Hitler and after the war voluntarily testified against other Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials.50

  When we weigh up all the sources, we can conclude that Hitler did not stand out as particularly brave but neither did he occupy a “shirker’s job” guaranteed to keep him out of harm’s way. Attempts to cast Hitler as a coward are misleading.51 Even an outspoken critic of Hitler like the writer Alexander Moritz Frey, who also served in the List Regiment and was forced to emigrate from Germany after 1933, stated in 1946: “If people say he was cowardly, that’s not accurate. He wasn’t brave either. He lacked the coolness for that.”52

  Yet if Private Hitler was such a dutiful soldier, why was he never promoted? In 1948, Wiedemann amused everyone in the courtroom in Nuremberg by stating that Hitler “lacked leadership qualities”—the German word he used was Führerqualitäten. In his 1964 memoirs, Wiedemann reiterated that in his opinion Hitler did not have what it took to become a superior officer. His posture was “sloppy…with his head usually sloping towards his left shoulder” and his answers, when asked questions, were “anything but militarily brief.”53 Max Amann—a sergeant major in RIR 16 and later NSDAP chairman and party publisher—testified after the war that Hitler had not wanted to be put up for promotion. When Amann informed him one day that he was being considered for promotion to junior officer, Hitler supposedly reacted with “horror” saying: “Please don’t do that—I have more authority without an officer’s bars than with them.”54 We cannot be sure whether this story is true, or whether Hitler feared that he could be transferred to another regiment and given a more dangerous job, if promoted.

  Hitler did not deny that he, like many other volunteers, quickly lost the idealism of August 1914 when confronted with the shocking reality of the war: the mass, machine-like killing on the battlefield. “The romance of battle had been replaced by horror,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. “My enthusiasm cooled, and fear of death strangled my exaggerated jubilations.”55 Hitler also made no secret of the fact that he was afraid of dying, and that his self-preservation instincts worked against his sense of duty. “He admits quite openly, and without any sense of shame, that his nerves were more sensitive than other people’s,” Rudolf Hess reported in June 1924. “In any case, almost everyone felt that way, more or less strongly. Anyone who denies that either didn’t see battle or is a liar.”56 In the end, though, Hitler assured the readers of Mein Kampf, his sense of duty won out: “My will finally regained complete control.”57

  The experience of being forced to toughen up while growing ever more indifferent to human suffering was one of the main lessons Hitler would take from the First World War. At the front, he asserted during a night-time round of tea in his headquarters in October 1941, “people were often subjected to demands on their nerves that the military leadership could not imagine…The key was to stay hard…You can only defeat death with death.”58 He summarised his experience even more vividly in February 1942: “Either the fire at the front sweeps you away because you succumb to cowardice or you overcome your inner weakling and become hard.”59 For Hitler, the war seemed to confirm what he had read in pan-Germanic pamphlets and newspapers in Vienna, namely that in human society, as in nature, only the strong would survive, while the weak would drop dead in their tracks. More than once in his monologues, Hitler confirmed that such social Darwinist beliefs, which he would maintain until the end of his life, originated in his experience of the war. “I went to the battlefield with the purest idealism,” Hitler said, “but when you see thousands get injured and killed, you become aware that life is a constant, terrible struggle, which serves to preserve the species—someone has to die so that others may survive.”60

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  Hitler was respected by his comrades in the regimental staff, yet, as was the case in the men’s home in Vienna, here too a distance remained that could scarcely be bridged. His comrades sensed that Hitler was different—“a little bit eccentric” was how Amann later put it.61 Hitler still neither drank nor smoked. From early 1915 he no longer received any letters, and he did not seek contact with French women or join the others on their brothel visits. A fellow runner named Balthasar Brandmayer described how Hitler had responded to the suggestion that they reward themselves for a job well done with a visit to a French mademoiselle: “ ‘I’d die of shame if I made love to a French woman’ interjected Hitler in his provincial Bavarian dialect. The o
thers laughed their heads off. ‘If it isn’t the friar,’ someone joked. Hitler’s expression grew serious. ‘Do you not have any German sense of honour in you?’ Hitler countered.”62 There is no reliable evidence for the contention that in 1916 and 1917 Hitler had an affair with a French woman named Charlotte Lobjoie and that she gave birth to an illegitimate son in March 1918.63 Nor is there any trustworthy indication that Hitler had a homosexual relationship with another regimental runner named Ernst Schmidt.64 Given the riskiness of their job, runners had to depend on one another: they got to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and formed a community aimed at mutual survival. But as far as we know, Hitler’s friendship with Schmidt never went beyond camaraderie. And it would be hard to square a homosexual relationship with the fact that even after he was named Reich chancellor and had reason to fear scandals, Hitler kept in contact with Schmidt, even visiting their old battlegrounds with him and Amann after Germany defeated France in 1940.65

  Hitler felt more comfortable in the exclusively male world of the regiment than in civilian society, and his experience of war would determine his views on military hierarchies and greatly influence the organisational structure of the NSDAP. In the army he did not have to earn his daily bread, and life was governed by discipline and order. He seems not to have had much difficulty integrating into the system of command and obedience. Hitler behaved obediently, even subserviently towards his superiors.66 He took no part in the crude amusements and coarse jokes of his comrades, and he remained an outsider among them. In the photographs that survive from this period, he appears on the margins, an extremely thin figure with a fixed, almost stony stare. When he does put his arm around one of his comrades, the gesture feels artificial and alien.67