Not long after, the List Regiment duly encountered the British at Gheluvelt, and then at Wytschaete and Messines in Belgian Flanders.8 The story of the BEF in 1914 is traditionally seen as an unequal struggle with the German juggernaut. This is true enough in the broad sense, but it is important to remember that at the tactical level the picture was much more differentiated. The List Regiment’s clash with men from the Yorkshire Regiment, the legendary Coldstream Guards, Black Watch, Grenadier Guards and Gordon Highlanders was a battle between amateurs and professionals. Some of the Listers, among them Hitler himself, had had no military background at all prior to the war. With the exception of some of the officers, none were regulars. The BEF, by contrast, were experienced soldiers, many of whom had seen action before, and most of them were better and quicker shots than their German adversaries. Gheluvelt was thus a profoundly unequal battle.
In the circumstances, the List Regiment acquitted itself well, but it suffered horrendous casualties. Hitler himself participated in several frontal attacks, three if his own account is to be believed. He spoke of ‘heaviest battles’ in the ranks, but said that eventually ‘the English [sic] were beaten’. The ‘defeat’ inflicted on the British proved to be shortlived, however, as the Bavarians were ejected from Gheluvelt soon after by the Worcesters. Hitler was promoted Gefreiter–private first class–and assigned as an orderly–dispatch runner–to the regimental staff. Since then, he claimed, ‘I can say that I risked my life daily and looked death in the eye’, probably not an exaggeration for this period of his military service. On 2 December, Hitler was rewarded for his service with the Iron Cross Second Class. ‘It was,’ he wrote, ‘the happiest day of my life.’ He asked his landlord to keep the newspaper recording his decoration as a memento ‘if the Lord our God lets me live’.9
At the end of a lengthy letter describing his experiences at the front, Hitler reflected in early February 1915 on the domestic and strategic situation of Germany.10 He lamented the loss of life in a struggle against an ‘international world of enemies’, and expressed the hope not only that ‘Germany’s external enemy’ would be crushed but also that her ‘inner internationalism’ would disintegrate. It is possible that the latter phrase was inspired by anti-Semitism, or it may have been a swipe against the transnational loyalties of German Catholics and Social Democrats. Hitler also prophesied that ‘Austria will suffer the fate I have always predicted’, by which he presumably meant its ultimate collapse.11 His surviving letters tell us virtually nothing about the eastern front, and nothing at all about how he reacted to the sinking of the Lusitania, the allied propaganda campaign and many other important aspects of the war.
Hitler served out the rest of the conflict as a regimental dispatch runner, rather than in the front line, strictly speaking. It was still a pretty hazardous posting. For example, Hitler’s next letter, in mid February 1915, described the impact of a shell on his position, from which he was ‘rescued as by a miracle’, but conceded that he was being ‘made nervous by the constant artillery fire’. He also welcomed the fact that Germany was ‘at last mobilizing opinion against England’, further evidence of his preoccupation with Britain.12 Eight days later, Hitler wrote of another ‘terrible cannonade’, and further battles with the British. Indeed, the List Regiment was forced on the defensive as more and more British troops arrived on the western front. Hitler’s next major battle, in March 1915 at Neuve Chapelle, was preceded by even more massive British artillery bombardments. This was followed by the first encounter with imperial troops, men from the Indian army. A month later, at Fromelles and Aubers Ridge, Hitler faced more units from the Empire, especially Canadians. In time, the variety of exotic headgear in the enemy trenches–including ‘turbans [and] peaky-pointed hats’13–gave the men of the List Regiment a depressing sense of the world arrayed in arms against them.
This impression was reinforced the following year. After a long quiet spell in regimental headquarters at Fournes–during which he seemed to spend a lot of time painting, sketching and reading–Hitler was back in action at Fromelles in French Flanders in May–June 1916. This time, the List Regiment was confronted with Australians and New Zealanders, many of them hardened veterans of Gallipoli. The Bavarians were once again discouraged to find themselves grappling with men who had travelled from the far side of the world to fight them in Flanders. Worse still, as Hitler’s comrade Adolf Meyer recalled, some of the Australians were of German descent. One of his captives ‘not only spoke excellent German, but bore my own name of Meyer into the bargain. Understandably: His father was a German, who had immigrated to Australia as a child with his parents and had later married an English woman there.’14 What Hitler himself made at the time of his regiment’s encounters with British imperial troops is not recorded.
Not long after, the List Regiment was sucked into the later stages of the Battle of the Somme, during which many German soldiers developed a healthy respect for British fighting qualities.15 Hitler was lucky enough not to be right in the front line, exposed to machine-gun and small arms fire, but he was well within the range of enemy guns.16 His dugout was soon hit by a British artillery round, injuring him in the left upper thigh. The wound was not life-threatening, but sufficiently serious for him to be evacuated. Hitler was sent to the army hospital in Beelitz, south-west of Berlin, to recuperate. Here he would have been confronted for the first time with the debilitating results of the allied blockade, which was the subject of an impassioned discourse in Germany. This alleged a British desire to ‘exterminate’ Germans, condemned the blockade’s devastating effect on children and thus on the racial health of the nation, and stressed the need to preserve ‘the next generation’.17 Again, there is no surviving evidence of what Hitler made of these developments as they unfolded.
Subsequently, he was detailed to the Replacement Battalion of the List Regiment in Munich. There he fretted about his inability to rejoin his unit. ‘A transport left a few days ago for the regiment,’ he wrote to his fellow dispatch runner Balthasar Brandmayer in late December 1916, ‘[but] unfortunately I can’t join it. They are only taking old babblers.’18 In January 1917, Hitler wrote to the adjutant of the List Regiment, Fritz Wiedemann, that ‘I am combat ready once again’ and expressed his ‘urgent wish… to return to [his] old regiment and old comrades’.19 Max Unold, who served with him in the Replacement Battalion headquarters in the Luisenschule in Munich in early 1917, later confirmed that Hitler ‘reported back [for duty] in the field’.20 Unold was unusual company for Hitler, in that he was an expressionist painter and a founder of the Münchener Neue Secession in 1913.
In March 1917, Hitler was back with his unit in regimental headquarters. Shortly after, the Listers witnessed, though they were not directly involved in, the stupendous Canadian assault on Vimy Ridge. Before long, however, they were faced by ferocious British attacks during the Battle of Arras. Then, in the late summer of 1917, the List Regiment was back around Gheluvelt at the Third Battle of Ypres, during which it was brutally hammered by British artillery for more than a week. A combination of high explosive, shrapnel and gas caused fearful casualties. Hitler was directly caught up in the fighting, as the regimental headquarters was in the line of the British advance on the Ypres salient.21 What he made of these experiences at the time is not known, as no contemporary records survive. When the shattered List Regiment was finally pulled out of the line, it was dispatched to near Mulhouse in Alsace to recuperate. It was there that, after nearly three years of primarily battling British, Indian, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand troops, Hitler first faced a mainly French foe.
In the meantime, the United States had entered the war on the Allied side in early April 1917, albeit as an ‘associated’ rather than an Entente power. The move was seen by many on both sides of the Atlantic as an act of Anglo-Saxon solidarity with Britain directed against the ‘Teutons’.22 Millions of Americans, many of them foreign-born, prepared to cross the Atlantic.23 A very substantial number of them were of German descent
. The German-American community, which was already under pressure after the sinking of the Lusitania, was now plunged into crisis. In what was in many ways a dry-run for the later ‘red scare’, it was comprehensively ‘othered’ by American propaganda and civil society. Part of the animus underlying the campaign for the prohibition of alcohol was anti-German. In order to escape the stigma of being ‘hyphenated Americans’, many people of German descent embraced the hegemonic ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture.24 Once again, there is no surviving contemporary evidence of how Hitler reacted to these events, though he would have a lot to say about them later.
After its relatively uneventful posting in Alsace, the List Regiment was deployed in support of the great German spring offensive of 1918.25 Moving up behind the assault troops, they encountered French colonial troops, Algerian Zouaves, in late March.26 Then, in mid July 1918, the List Regiment ran into their first Americans at the Second Battle of the Marne, near Rheims. They were forced to beat a hasty retreat,27 but not before taking some prisoners. Two of them were dropped off by Hitler at Brigade Headquarters.28 The men of List Regiment were certainly under no doubt about the qualities of the Americans, and indeed Germany’s other adversaries. A report of the II Battalion on the Second Battle of the Marne written a month later noted that ‘The enemy (French, British, American) showed themselves tough in defence, [and] brave in attack.’29 Colin Ross, who would later advise Hitler on the United States, and who was then serving on the western front, remembers not only the courage of the American soldiers, but also their frequent calling out to each other in German and the large number of German-speaking prisoners.30
By now, the Allied blockade, control of the skies and numerical superiority were beginning irreversibly to wear down Hitler’s regiment. ‘[The] health and morale of the men,’ the commander of the Third Battalion RIR 16 wrote that same month, ‘suffers from the continuing lack of provisions’; similar sentiments were recorded in the other battalions. The war diary of the Second Battalion lamented the ‘pressure from the far superior enemy who constantly deploys new troops (English)’.31 All this was of a piece with the general picture along the line, which was of the offensive running out of steam in the face of a crushing allied superiority in men, material and sheer energy. General Ludendorff famously spoke of these times as the ‘black day[s] of the German army’. Again, we do not know what Hitler made of these developments at the time. The only established fact is that he was once again decorated in early August 1918, this time with the Iron Cross First Class. It was awarded on the recommendation of his Jewish commanding officer, Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann from Nuremberg, even if he was not the man who actually pinned the decoration on Hitler’s chest.32
At this moment, the height of the Allied counter-offensive, Hitler was sent for a week’s training to Nuremberg in signalling, followed by a fortnight’s leave in Berlin. While he was away, the Allies advanced relentlessly.33 The Listers faced a variety of enemies, sometimes the French but more usually the British. As in many German formations, morale plummeted under the weight of heavy Allied artillery bombardment and air attack. One report bewailed that ‘enemy aircraft completely control the skies’. Another noted with alarm that ‘The desire for rest increases among the officers and men after each engagement. Only at least 4 weeks of quiet in good quarters with proper nourishment could revitalize the physically and morally exhausted [‘used up’] fighters. The unit is currently at best suited for static warfare on a quiet sector of the front.’ By the end of the month, there was no holding the British. ‘Everybody has bolted,’ one company commander lamented, ‘we are hanging in the air.’34 He could not even send back men to fetch ammunition, for fear they would not return. The rising flood of Americans arriving at the front in the course of September 1918 aggravated the widespread sense of depression.35
By early October 1918, the gloom in the unit had deepened still further. Fridolin Solleder, an officer with the List Regiment, remembered an ‘unequal struggle’. ‘One man always fights against three or four. For how long?’ He lamented that ‘since October 1918 more than one and a half million fresh and aggressive Americans are in action on the other side of the lines. Africa, Australia, India and Canada still send their youthful cohorts to Europe.’ ‘Munitions, material, opinions [sic] and masses of men face the German frontline soldier. The size of his struggle becomes hopeless.’36 The prevailing sense of being at war with the whole world, of being outnumbered, outgunned and ‘out-opinioned’, could not have been more clearly expressed. After more than four years of war, the List Regiment, like most of the German army, had had enough.
The returning Hitler was pitched into this crisis. In mid October, he was injured in a gas attack by a British shell. Hitler was first treated in the nearby Bavarian field casualty station at Oudenarde, site of the Duke of Marlborough’s famous victory over the French more than two hundred years earlier. A week later, he was sent to convalesce in the Prussian Reserve Hospital at Pasewalk north-east of Berlin. There Hitler heard of the conclusion of the Armistice, and the German surrender, on 11 November 1918. It seems to have induced some sort of hysterical seizure. Most of the German army kept fighting to the last, and only stopped when ordered to do so,37 but of the fact that it had been morally and militarily beaten in open battle there could be no doubt.
Thus ended Hitler’s slightly more than four years of war. His record was in some senses unusual. After an intense spell in the front line at the beginning, he spent the rest of the conflict at Regimental Headquarters, some distance behind. This was unquestionably a safer posting than that of an ordinary infantryman or even of a battalion or company runner.38 It was certainly more comfortable, giving him some time for reading and drawing; so far as we know, he mainly consulted books on architectural rather than political subjects.39 Some Listers later claimed to regard him with suspicion on that account, and it is likely that Hitler’s chances of being decorated were higher than average due to the fact that he was a familiar face among the officers making and deciding upon the recommendations.40 It may be that Hitler refused promotion in order to remain with the regimental staff. There is no doubt, in any case, that Hitler exaggerated and embellished his account of the war, and was careful to conceal the fact that he was not actually in the front line for most of the war.41
That said, Hitler’s record is less distinctive than it might seem. It was not uncommon for private soldiers to refuse commissions in order to remain with their friends. Moreover, though Hitler by all accounts completed his missions efficiently, he showed none of the initiative expected of a potential officer. It is also worth stressing that Hitler saw combat, death and destruction on numerous occasions. He was injured twice, not in accidents but by enemy fire. The regimental HQ was thus not really a ‘rear area’ in any meaningful sense. In short, there can be no doubt–even if later embellishments are stripped away–that Hitler was a courageous and effective,42 if somewhat limited, soldier during his first war.
The impact of the war on Hitler’s personality is unclear. For example, there is no evidence of any homosexual preferences,43 or indeed of sexual activity of any kind. Nor did he seem to form any very close personal connections to his comrades similar to the homo-social bonds with, say, Goebbels and Speer in later life, though in both cases we should remember that the evidence comes largely from the two attention-seekers themselves, rather than from Hitler. He was the marginal figure in the surviving group photographs, making a somewhat semi-detached impression.44 That said, the surviving letters and postcards do not suggest anything other than normal comradely relations with a range of fellow soldiers, such as congratulations on decorations and complaints about food. One way or the other, what is striking–and has often been remarked on–is that during the four years of Germany’s greatest peril, the subsequent Führer showed no sign whatever of any leadership qualities.
As we shall see, the impact of the war on Hitler’s world view over the long term was considerable.45 That said, his claim that the news of the Armistice
in November 1918 prompted him to ‘become a politician’ there and then needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt; there is no contemporary evidence for it. His political formation was not open, however. His hostility to the Habsburg Empire and allegiance to Germany were by now well established. He was conscious of the importance of propaganda, and the need to ‘mobilize opinion’ against the British. He saw the war as a struggle against not merely the external enemy, but also the ‘inner’ internationalism of German society, by which he might have meant socialist (the most probable target), clericalist, particularist or capitalist tendencies or a combination of all four. Above all, Hitler had come away from the war with a keen sense of the power of the Entente, especially the British, in his eyes the most formidable of the ‘world of enemies’ against which he had battled in vain those four years. France, the country in which he had been stationed for so long, had made much less of an impression.46 Due to his injury, Hitler had missed the final collapse in late October and early November, but he witnessed the series of catastrophes from early August to the middle of October 1918, so he cannot have been in any doubt that the German army had ultimately succumbed to a massively superior enemy.
The main contours of his political thinking were not yet visible, however. There was as yet no engagement with the major forces of the age: Anglo-American capitalist democracy and Soviet Bolshevism. Most importantly, despite his later assertions in Mein Kampf and elsewhere, there was no sign whatever of anti-Semitism. There were nearly sixty identifiable Jews in his regiment, a higher number than their proportion of the population would have warranted, and some of them, such as Georg Dehn, were decorated.47 There is no contemporary evidence of any clashes between these men and Hitler. More to the point, his subsequent (‘relatively’) benevolent treatment of Bloch and the Jews he had served with in the war–including Gutmann himself, once he was aware of the situation–suggests a lack of personal animus against them.48 Indeed, his erstwhile superior officer, Major Fritz Wiedemann, who later became Hitler’s adjutant, wrote shortly after the start of the Second World War that he had ‘with agreement of the Führer helped some Jewish frontline fighters of the Bavarian Infantry Regiment 16 and enabled their emigration’.49 In short, by the end of the war, Hitler had the ‘world of enemies’ firmly in his sights. The struggle against the Jews, in their capitalist or communist guises, had not yet begun, however, and nor had he explicitly targeted the United States.
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