Despite his unspectacular rank, for Adolf Hitler, his service in the Great War was a matter of pride which occupied a place of towering significance in his life. By his own account in Mein Kampf it defined him as a man. It was in Flanders that Hitler had won the Iron Cross 2nd Class, an event which he described as the happiest day of his life. It was against this background that, despite all of the more pressing demands on his time, in June 1940, Hitler twice seized the opportunity to come back to Flanders and recapture the years he treasured. In the process he would, of course, make valuable political capital and shore up the myth that he was entitled to unconditional acceptance and pride of place in the informal ranks of the frontgemeinschaft.
On the first of those trips, on 1 June 1940, while the battle for France was still unfolding, Hitler and his entourage took a short flight to the Luftwaffe advance airfield at Evere. From here they mounted a fleet of six-wheeled Mercedes and drove in triumph through the deserted streets of Brussels. They then travelled on via Ghent to Ypres where they stopped in Kauwekijnstraat to view the Menin Gate.
The Menin Gate is the imposing monument to the 52,000 British war dead from this sector of the front who have no known grave. To this day the missing British soldiers are commemorated by a moving ceremony which takes place daily. When Hitler came to the town on 1 June 1940 the monument had been damaged by the recent fighting and there was, of course, no question of a ceremony in honour of the men of the British army. Hitler did pause respectfully to study the monument and was no doubt conscious of the fact that some of those men may well have been killed by the Bavarians of Hitler’s own Regiment, but the visit to Ypres was brief as the real object of his visit was calling him northwards.
From Ypres Hitler and his entourage moved on to the German War Cemetery at Langemark which was the main stop on his tour. Today the cemetery is very much the same as it was in 1940, an oasis of sombre and dignified tranquillity. However on the day Hitler made his heavily escorted trip to view the graves of his fallen comrades the Wehrmacht had laid on a guard of honour and as word went round every off-duty soldier in the area swarmed to the site in the hope of grabbing a glimpse of the Führer. The presence of a film crew and Hoffmann’s clicking cameras along with the jostling mob of sight-seeing landsers snapping away on their own cameras robbed the occasion of every shred of sombre dignity, but the publicity goals were achieved and the visit featured heavily in the June edition of Deutsche Wochenschau. In print the visit was prominently featured in the 13 June edition of the Nazi propaganda magazine Illustreiter Beobachter.
Escaping from the crush at Langemark Hitler and his entourage re-boarded their fleet of Mercedes armoured limousines and travelled south via Poperinge to Kemmel and ascended the local highpoint known as Kemmelberg (Kemmel Mountain). Here Hitler viewed the battlefields where his regiment had witnessed tough fighting on numerous occasions between 1914 and 1918 and map in hand was able to point out to his entourage the places where he had seen service.
Next day Hitler’s entourage came south to Vimy near Arras where the List regiment had fought in 1916 and into 1917. For the genuine members of the frontgemeinschaft the collective memory was that the fighting in the German frontline during the battle was relentless and bloody. Their Canadian opponents suffered terribly and today those losses are commemorated by the preserved trenches and memorials.
However on 2 June 1940 it was the German Führer who strutted in triumph through Vimy Ridge. Hitler was accompanied throughout his tour by Willhelm Keitel, Germany’s most senior Field Marshal. The irony can’t have been lost on Keitel that he was now subordinate to a man who had only ever held the rank of Gefreiter.