Another Country
FAMILY LIFE
On 20 April 1889, an unseasonably overcast and chilly spring day, Adolf Hitler was born at the Gasthof zum Pommer at Braunau am Inn, a charming town of pastel-coloured historic houses, on the south bank of the River Inn which separates Austria and Germany. Today the house is unmarked except for a large stone of Mauthausen granite, standing by the front façade, which was erected in 1989 and bears the legend, ‘For peace, freedom and democracy, never again Fascism, millions of dead admonish’.
Adolf was the fourth child of six. His father, Alois Hitler, was a self-made man with little or no formal education who, by dint of hard work and diligence, had become a customs officer in the Austro-Hungarian civil service. He was well respected in Braunau but bore the marks of his caste. He was pompous, intensely jealous of his hard-won status, stingy, short-tempered and totally devoid of humour. His passion was bee-keeping, and it appears that the stuffy customs officer was more fond of the inhabitants of his apiary than of the members of his household. His third wife, and Hitler’s mother, was Klara Polzl, who had originally been a maid at Alois’s home during his first marriage to Anna Glassl, a woman fourteen years his senior, from whom he had been legally separated in 1880. Alois then set up house with his mistress, Franziska (Fanni) Matzelberger, who was only a year younger than Klara and saw the maid as a potential rival. At her insistence, Klara was discharged. Fanni then bore Alois a son, before Anna’s death in 1883 cleared the way for their marriage. A daughter arrived two months after the wedding, but in August 1884 Fanni, aged only twenty-three, died of tuberculosis.
Fanni had sought a temporary reprieve from her illness in the countryside outside Braunau, which enabled Alois – whose love life at least was more lively than the sedate routines of the customs house – to re-engage Klara, the previously sacked maid, to look after the children. While Fanni was on her deathbed, Klara bore Alois a son. On 7 January 1885, Alois and Klara, who was now four months pregnant, were married at the church of St Stephan in Braunau. Klara was twenty-four and her husband forty-eight. The marriage ceremony, an understandably low-key affair, took place at 6 a.m., and shortly afterwards Alois was back at work in the customs house.
None of Klara’s first three children by Alois survived infancy. Otto died a few days after his birth, and Gustav and Ida both succumbed to diphtheria. Their fourth child was Adolf, his name meaning ‘noble wolf’. In 1892 Alois was promoted to Higher Collector of Customs – the topmost rank he could achieve because of his lack of educational qualifications – and was transferred to Passau, another border town on the southern outskirts of the Bavarian Forest and at the confluence of the Danube and the Rivers Inn and Itz. It was the first move in Adolf Hitler’s peripatetic childhood.
When Alois was moved to Linz in April 1894 Klara remained with her children and stepchildren in Passau. Here, in the prolonged absences of his domineering, testy father, Adolf Hitler was lapped in the unqualified, uncritical love of his young mother. To the end of his life, even in his last days in the Berlin bunker, he kept her photograph in his pocket. Later in life he would confess that, while he respected his father, he loved his mother. Perhaps Klara was the only human being to whom Hitler could extend anything approaching deep affection. In any event, she was powerless to prevent the dyspeptic Alois from thrashing his son while she listened, horrified and helpless, on the other side of the door.
It is possible that Alois’s temper was also turned against his wife. There is a passage in Hitler’s semi-autobiographical Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in which he provides a graphic description of a working-class mother’s suffering at the hands of her abusive husband which might very well be drawn from his own personal experience. However, as with all deductions which may be drawn from the scant surviving evidence of Hitler’s early years, this possibility must be treated with great caution. One thing, however, is certain: both his mother’s love and his father’s rages had a deep and lasting effect on the development of his personality.
Linz was Alois’s final posting. He retired in the summer of 1895, and in November 1898 he purchased a small house with a plot of land in Michaels-bergstrasse in the village of Leonding on the outskirts of Linz. With a population of around fifty thousand, Linz had a distinctly German feel which won a permanent place in Adolf’s heart. To the end of his days he would extol the small-town virtues of the town in contrast to the cosmopolitan decadence of Vienna. It was in Linz, imagined as rebuilt and transformed into the cultural capital of the Third Reich, that he planned to be buried. But, as with Germania, there was precious little rebuilding achieved, although after the swallowing of Czechoslovakia in 1939, a great deal of industrial plant was moved to the Linz area. One relic of the Third Reich which does survive is the former Hermann Göring-Werke, a steel plant which operates to this day.
In the absence of his father, the young Adolf Hitler seems to have enjoyed an idyllic childhood, devouring ‘Wild West’ books written by the German author Karl May and playing Cowboys and Indians in the garden and surrounding countryside. Once the Boer War broke out in 1899, the theme of Hitler’s childhood games became the heroic struggle of the Boer settlers in South Africa against the dastardly British colonialists. Hitler recalled this period in his life as a ‘happy time’, when ‘schoolwork was ridiculously easy, leaving me so much free time that the sun saw more of me than my room’.
Hitler (top row, extreme right) in a school photograph at Leonding. The pupil in the row below him, third from the right, is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who later became a distinguished philosopher at Cambridge University and the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The economist John Maynard Keynes referred to Wittgenstein as ‘God’. It is matter of some controversy whether Hitler and Wittgenstein ever knew each other.
Also seeing more of Adolf was his retired father with whom he remained frequently at odds. Although he had performed reasonably well at elementary school, Hitler’s reports from the Linz Realschule, where he commenced his secondary education in September 1900, were generally critical of him. In a letter to Hitler’s defence counsel in December 1923, written in the wake of the failed Munich putsch, Hitler’s former class teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, described his pupil as a thin, pale youth, lacking in application and self-discipline. There were also other family strains. Hitler’s younger brother Edmund had died in February 1900 and his half-brother Alois Jnr had already left home. Alois Snr’s principal hopes for his offspring now rested on Adolf’s frail shoulders.
Understandably, perhaps, Alois was determined that his son should follow him into the civil service. When Adolf was thirteen, his father took him to the Linz customs house to introduce him to the dutiful but somewhat less than thrilling world of minor civil servants in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The excursion had precisely the opposite effect to that which was intended. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: ‘I yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time.’
However, the battle of wills was to be shortlived. On 3 January 1903, Alois collapsed and died while drinking his regular morning glass of wine at a local hostelry. He left his family relatively well off and his son Adolf, now the man of the house, was not going to be pressured by his adoring mother into becoming a pen-pusher in Linz. His progress at the Realschule nevertheless remained unsatisfactory, and he was removed to another academy in Steyr, which was some fifty miles away and forced him to take lodgings in the town.
By the end of September 1905, Hitler had passed all the exams necessary to apply for a place at the higher Realschule, or technical school, but he had no relish for further formal education and found little difficulty in persuading his mother that he needed time to consider his options.
FLIGHTS OF FANCY
For the next two years, Hitler lived a life of cosseted idleness in his mother’s comfortable new apartment in Linz’s Humboldtstrasse, to which the family had moved in June 1905. There, all his needs were met by the women of the household, his mother, his sister Paula and his aunt, Johanna. Klara even bought him a grand piano, and he took music lessons in the winter of 1906–07. His routine was one of studied idleness, staying up to the small hours and rising late in the morning – a pattern which, once established, he maintained for the rest of his life. The future Führer’s days were given over to grandiose fantasies of artistic fame, which he later remembered as having the quality of a ‘beautiful dream’.
During this period of his life Hitler acquired a Boswell in August ‘Gustl’ Kubizek. The son of an upholsterer, Kubizek also harboured extravagant dreams of artistic fame and fortune, in his case in the world of music. His memoirs of the time, originally commissioned in 1938 by the Nazi Party and later embellished by the author, throw a remarkable, albeit unreliable, light on the character of the young Adolf Hitler.
In the working-class Kubizek, Hitler found a submissive and willing audience. The two young men – Gustl was nine months older than Adolf – were a perfect double act: Hitler was the dominant partner, always forcing the pace with a ready opinion on every subject; Kubizek was the devoted listener, hanging on every word. Most evenings they would set off for the theatre or the opera, Hitler sporting a straggly moustache and cutting a dandyish figure in black coat, dark hat, and a black cane topped with an ivory handle. A pattern was set which, many years later, would become familiar to those in Hitler’s entourage who were obliged to endure uncomplainingly the Führer’s interminable monologues lasting all night and well into the small hours.
One of Hitler’s favourite topics was Wagner, whose opera Lohengrin is a vast repository of the windy Teutonic mysticism – castles, knights errant, falsely accused maidens – which entranced Hitler throughout his life. Although a practised musician, and far better qualified than Hitler to expatiate on grand opera, Gustl always took the back seat in these so-called discussions drenched by his friend’s cataracts of words. Another of Hitler’s favourite topics was architecture. The two young men would make regular tours of Linz by night – in contrast to Hitler, Kubizek laboured in his father’s workshop by day – while Hitler outlined his plans to remodel Linz and eagerly showed him sheaves of sketches and plans.
Hitler’s passion for grandiloquent architecture was further fuelled by a trip he made to Vienna in the spring of 1906, ostensibly to study the paintings in the Court Museum. At night he feasted on productions of Wagner which made the offerings of the Linz opera house seem like amateur night. He returned to his mother’s new home in Urfahr, a suburb of Linz, seized with the idea of attending Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, an ambition which his mother was happy to support.
Klara, however, was now stricken with cancer. In January 1907 she had undergone an operation and was placed under the care of the Jewish Dr Eduard Bloch. It was left to Bloch to inform Hitler that his mother was terminally ill, and he noted that Hitler wept on hearing the news. Nevertheless, the youth returned to Vienna at the beginning of September 1907 to sit the entrance exams for the Academy of Fine Art.
Here Adolf Hitler met with the first major setback in his life. He had assumed he would sail into the Academy and, indeed, succeeded in getting on to the list of candidates who were selected to sit a three-hour entrance exam in which they had to produce drawings on specified themes. The verdict on his work was ‘Test drawing unsatisfactory. Few heads,’ and he failed to make the final short list.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler described the rejection as a ‘bolt from the blue’. When he asked for an explanation, he was told by his examiners that his talents clearly lay in the field of architecture, a profession for which he lacked the formal educational qualifications. He told neither his mother nor his friend Gustl about his failure and, by the end of October, he was back in Linz to attend to his mother, who was now on her deathbed. Both his sister and Dr Bloch later testified that the care he provided was unstinting. Klara died peacefully on 21 December 1907; she was forty-seven.
Adolf Hitler was racked with grief. He had lost the only person to whom he had ever been emotionally close.
Hitler’s own account of what happened next is not to be trusted. He later claimed that poverty, and a desire to emulate his father by triumphing over adversity to qualify as an architect, compelled him to return to Vienna. In fact, there was enough left over from his mother’s estate after the funeral to enable him to return to Vienna and avoid the unpleasant necessity of working for a living for at least a year. This, together with his orphan’s pension and the remains of a loan made to him by Aunt Johanna in the summer of 1907 to fund his artistic studies, was sufficient to tide Hitler over in his new life in Vienna, to which he returned in February 1908 with his friend Gustl Kubizek. Hitler’s other travelling companion was his persistent fantasy of becoming an artist. What lay ahead in reality was five years of aimless drifting, which were to fix many of the major co-ordinates of Adolf Hitler’s personality.
INFLUENCES
Vienna was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to which the working life of Adolf Hitler’s late father had been dedicated. When Hitler returned to Vienna, that empire had become moribund, caught in the throes of a death rattle which had commenced well over half a century earlier.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was an artificial creation consisting of many nationalities, among them Germans, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and Croats. No natural frontiers or common language united the peoples of the empire, but hundreds of years of war, treaties and dynastic marriages had shaped the creaking dominion on the Danube. Now it was breaking up, but the collapse was played out in slow motion.
The Italians had already broken away in the nineteenth century, and in 1867 the Hungarians had secured an equality which was reflected in the empire’s name. By 1900 Vienna itself was the focus of the many tensions – social, political, cultural – which would sound the death knell of the nineteenth-century world. In the second half of the century the city had grown four times faster than Paris or London, and the majority of its inhabitants had been born elsewhere. On the surface, Vienna’s magnificent public buildings radiated imperial grandeur and its artistic and intellectual life boasted many of the great minds and creative artists of the age – among them Schnitzler, Mahler, Schoenberg, Otto Wagner, Klimt and Freud.
The benign, bewhiskered Hapsburg emperor, Franz Josef, who had reigned since 1848, presented a façade of stability behind which fierce currents of nationalism, vicious ethnic conflicts, fear of modern mass production, the rise of organized labour, and mass politics created a cockpit in which Vienna’s liberal bourgeoisie, its small traders and craftsmen, feared for their future. Decay and disintegration were in the air.
In Vienna, Adolf Hitler was exposed to and absorbed three seminal influences on his personal credo which, much later, formed the unchanging bedrock of his political career. The first was the philosophy of Georg Ritter von Schönerer. By the time Hitler arrived in Vienna, early in 1908, Schönerer’s career was on the wane. Seven years earlier, however, his Pan-German Party had gained twenty-one seats in the Austrian parliament, the Reichsrat. Schönerer’s programme contained embryonic elements of the Nazi philosophy, notably German nationalism with its belief in the overriding importance of all things German, and its infatuation with Kaiser Wilhelm I and the German Reich. Also high on the programme’s agenda was social reform, coupled with a mix of fiercely anti-liberal populism and violent anti-Semitism, the last the binding agent of Schönerer’s anti-Socialist, anti-Catholic and anti-Hapsburg agenda. Significantly, his followers adopted the ‘Heil’ greeting and referred to the Party boss as ‘Führer’.
Hitler later noted that Schönerer’s career had been sidetracked by sterile parliamentary debate and the failure to build a mass movement. Schönerer himself had nothing but contempt for the masses, a weakness which could never be levelled against Hitler’s second political hero, Karl Lueger, the self-styled ‘tribune of the people’ and the leader of the Christian Social Party, who became Mayor of Vienna in 1897. An inspired platform speaker and rabble-rouser, Lueger played expertly on the fears of the German-speaking lower middle class, among whose bogeymen were international capitalists, Slav nationalists and Marxist social democrats. Again, the philosophical binding agent was anti-Semitism – in the 1880s Lueger had supported Schönerer’s bill to block Jewish immigration into Vienna. However, in contrast to Schönerer, Lueger’s style was deceptively gemütlich. Challenged to explain why many of his friends were Jewish, Lueger famously replied, ‘I decide who is a Jew.’ Nevertheless, his speeches dripped with anti-Semitism. In one such he declared that wolves, leopards and tigers were more human than the Jews, who were ‘beasts of prey in human form’. On another occasion, when challenged for having said that it was a matter of indifference to him whether Jews were hanged or shot, Lueger snapped back with the correction, ‘Beheaded!’
Hitler was among the thousands who lined the streets of Vienna to watch Lueger’s funeral in March 1910. Later he would dismiss Lueger’s anti-Semitism as merely a cynical device to garner votes. Nor did he have any time for Lueger’s emphasis on Catholic piety or his support for the Hapsburg monarchy. What impressed him, however, was Lueger’s genius for painting policy on the broadest possible political canvas and his shrewd use of propaganda to articulate the prejudices of the many and channel them into a mass movement. Above all, he learnt from Lueger the political gains to be made from popularizing the widespread hatred of the Jews.
There was another mass movement gaining ground in turn-of-the-century Vienna which both impressed and alarmed the young Adolf Hitler. The Social Democratic Worker’s Party had been formed in 1888. At first it made little headway but, by 1907, in the first election held under universal male suffrage, it won eighty-seven of the five hundred and sixteen seats in the Reichsrat on a fundamentally Marxist programme which was anathema to Hitler. What made an indelible impression on him, however, was the movement’s ability to mobilize tens of thousands to achieve its aims. Watching a Social Democratic demonstration in Vienna, Hitler stood for two hours gazing at a ‘gigantic human dragon slowly winding by’. It left him feeling oppressed and anxious, but it also planted a seed in his mind which would later have a monstrous flowering at Nuremberg: politics as spectacle.
There is much that is contradictory and opaque about Hitler’s years in Vienna and their impact on his world view in the early 1920s. His own account in Mein Kampf, as well as the memoirs of the few people he knew at the time, are often fanciful, self-serving or entirely fictitious. Having resisted family pleas to find work in Linz, Hitler arrived in the city in mid-February 1908 and moved into dingy lodgings in Stumpergasse 31, near the Westbahnhof, which he had rented the previous October, probably in anticipation of studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. Shortly afterwards he was joined in his lodgings by Gustl Kubizek, who had won a place at the Vienna Conservatoire.
In Vienna, the two young men resumed the routines which had characterized their friendship in Linz. Kubizek worked hard at the Conservatoire while Hitler slept till late morning and idled away his days. He did not tell Kubizek that he had failed his entrance exam, and when the truth finally emerged it prompted Hitler to throw a tantrum in which he railed and raged at the unfairness of the world. When the dust settled, he slid back into his idler’s existence, animated intermittently by harebrained schemes – to write an opera, to invent a soft drink, to compile a report on Vienna’s housing problems – all of which fizzled out after an initial burst of manic energy. Kubizek concluded that his friend was becoming mentally unbalanced, not least because Hitler’s natural prudishness masked a revulsion at sexuality. He was repelled by homosexuality; he shuddered at the thought of contracting venereal disease from a prostitute; he physically shrank from women and talked for hours with Kubizek about preserving his virginity, ‘the flame of life’.
It is almost certain that during this period Hitler began to read a racist periodical, Ostara, edited by Adolf Lanz, a former Cistercian monk and follower of Schönerer, who styled himself Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels. In Ostara, Lanz created a fevered fantasy world in which blond, blue-eyed heroes battled with dark sub-humans who preyed on Aryan heroines. Lanz’s answer to the ills of the modern world was simple: the enslavement and enforced sterilization of inferior races and the restoration of the Aryan race to its true position as the evolutionary pinnacle. The newspaper Hitler read regularly was the Deutsches Volksblatt, which enjoyed a daily circulation of some fifty-five thousand and was virulently anti-Semitic, linking Jews to all manner of sexual and financial corruption with little or no regard to journalistic integrity.
At the beginning of July, Kubizek passed his exams at the Conservatoire and returned to Linz for the summer. Without telling his friend, Hitler moved out of their lodgings, possibly because he had failed in a second attempt to gain a place at the Academy and could not bear the thought of being branded a double failure. It would be many years before they met again.1
THE LOWER DEPTHS
In the autumn of 1909, Hitler drifted downwards until he hit rock bottom. His money ran out, and by Christmas of that year we find him, in sodden lice-ridden clothes, seeking shelter in a hostel for the homeless in Meidling. The petit-bourgeois idler with artistic pretensions had joined the dregs of Viennese society – the alcoholic, the destitute and the down-and-out.
But here Hitler had a lucky break. He met Reinhold Hanisch, a petty crook and con-man, who suggested that they earn a pittance shovelling snow, a task that rapidly proved beyond the famished Hitler, shivering in his shabby suit and with no overcoat. Then Hanisch had a better idea. In all probability, Hitler had spun him a vainglorious tale about studying at the Academy and had also mentioned the kindness of his Aunt Johanna. Doubtless Hanisch suggested that they touch her for another hand-out, ostensibly to help Hitler with his imaginary studies. The money duly arrived, enabling Hitler to buy an overcoat and the materials to set up as a jobbing artist, painting genre scenes of Vienna which Hanisch would then sell.
At about the same time, Hitler and Hanisch moved to slightly more salubrious surroundings, the Men’s Home in the north-east of Vienna, which housed some five hundred residents who were clinging to a rung or two higher on the seedy pecking order of Vienna’s lower depths. They were mostly tradesmen and minor civil servants down on their luck, the respectable poor. The Men’s Home had a dining room, laundry, and other basic facilities, and afforded a degree of privacy to its inhabitants. Hitler was coming up for air.
Thanks to the slippery salesman Hanisch,2 Hitler was able to scratch a living with his watercolours of street scenes. They were meticulous but inert studies, unenlivened by the human form. Hanisch placed many of them with Jewish dealers, whom, ironically, Hitler considered to be more straightforward and reliable conduits for his modest output than their Gentile equivalents. Another Jewish business associate was Joseph Neumann, who was on friendly terms with Hitler and valued his company. Other residents of the Men’s Home at this time later testified that Hitler considered the Jews ‘a clever people’. Indeed, his acquaintances at the Men’s Home recalled that the main subjects of his frequent tirades were Socialists and Jesuits.
In contrast, we have Augustus Kubizek’s testimony that Hitler was already a convinced anti-Semite when he was living in Linz. And there is the celebrated passage in Mein Kampf, the first volume of which was published in July 1925, in which Hitler wrote: ‘Once, as I was strolling through [Vienna’s] Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinising feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?’
Hitler, who had a morbid obsession with cleanliness, then moves on to link dirt and disease with Jews, whose malign influence lies behind all the elements which conspire to undermine and corrupt society, among them the liberal press, modern art, trades unions, and parliamentary deputies. Behind this phalanx of enemies lurks the spectre of a political force which by 1912 Hitler had indeed come to hate, Social Democracy. This, too, he asserts, had fallen under the control of the ‘Jewish doctrine of Marxism’.
Just as different acquaintances later offered differing spins on Hitler’s beliefs at this time of his life, as often as not to suit their own agendas, so physical descriptions of him around 1912–13 vary widely. One of the most convincing is that of Karl Hönisch, whose account was written in the 1930s for the National Socialist Party’s archives. While couched in terms which paint Hitler in the best possible light, it nevertheless has a plausible ring to it. Hönisch describes Hitler, at the conclusion of his time at the Men’s Home, as an unimpressive, weedy figure, shabbily dressed, undernourished and hollow-cheeked, with lank dark hair falling from his brow. Most of his days were spent in the writing room, catching the light from the window while he sketched or painted at a long oak table that the inmates acknowledged as his place – woe betide any newcomer who attempted, however, innocently, to usurp it.
One of Hitler’s watercolours, painstaking but inert. There has always been a lively trade in the relics of Hitler’s ambitions to be an artist, many of them of doubtful provenance. In April 2009, thirteen paintings, allegedly by Hitler and found by a British soldier at the end of World War II, were sold at auction for £95,859 at Ludlow, in the English county of Shropshire.
THE ‘GERMAN’ NATIONALIST
In Vienna Hitler was merely a pallid face in the crowd, yet he had not been entirely overlooked by the Austro-Hungarian bureaucrats responsible for the conscription of young men to the empire’s armed services. In the autumn of 1909, he had failed to register for military service, which he would have been obliged to serve in the following spring after he turned twenty-one. Had he been found unfit in 1910, the process would nevertheless have been repeated in 1911 and 1912. The pen-pushers in Linz were on his trail at a suitably leisurely pace.
The knowledge of his failure to register was, in part, the reason for Hitler’s move to Munich in 1913. However, his departure had been delayed so that he could collect his share of his father’s legacy on attaining the age of twenty-four. A month later Adolf Hitler, wearing a smarter suit than that described by Hönisch and accompanied by a friend from the Men’s Home, twenty-year-old Rudolf Hausler, an unemployed shop assistant, set off for Munich. It was the beginning of a new and crucial phase in his life.
He was leaving a crumbling empire for one that was virtually brand new. It was now forty-two years since the jigsaw collection of German states had coalesced into the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I. In that time Germany’s power had increased enormously, overtaking Britain in the production of coal and steel – the sinews of war. In August 1914, Germany would be capable of putting 1.75 million men, regulars and reservists, in the field. Since the beginning of the century it had been locked in a spiralling and immensely costly battleship-building race with the Royal Navy.
Britain had only a small regular army but still boasted the world’s most powerful navy, which guaranteed the security of its worldwide empire. Germany’s colonies had been acquired late in the nineteenth century and consisted of tracts of Africa and possessions in the Pacific which were of little interest to the British and the French, the other major colonial powers.
Inasmuch as Hitler had no desire to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his subsequently stated reason that he went to Munich for ‘political reasons’ is true, although highly disingenuous. It had more to do with his failure to register for military service. Nonetheless, it was as a fanatical German nationalist that Adolf Hitler arrived, on 25 May 1913, in Munich – a truly ‘German’ city in comparison to the polyglot ‘Babylon of races’ that was Vienna.
Hitler was to remain deeply attached to Munich for the rest of his life. In the days before 1914 Munich was one of the pre-eminent cultural jewels of Europe, a forcing ground for modernist literature, painting and architecture. Hitler had no interest whatosever in any of these. Just as in Vienna, his mind was locked in a mid-nineteenth-century time warp in which neoclassical façades and galleries stuffed with the work of old masters spoke to him of grandeur and power.
In Munich he picked up the threads of his latter days in Vienna. He and Hausler rented a room in a run-down area in the north of the city, not far from the military barracks. Hausler moved out in February 1914, doubtless driven to distraction by the drumbeat of Hitler’s obsessions, but returned a few days later to rent a separate room. Hitler, meanwhile, had resumed his career as a jobbing artist, copying scenes from postcards and making a modest living. As he neither smoked nor drank, he was able to save money.
He had no social life. His landlady, Frau Popp, recalled that he never had visitors. He painted by day and read by night. Frau Popp remembered him making frequent trips to the nearby Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Hitler later claimed that during the evenings he immersed himself in the great political events of the day and devoured works on Marxism in an attempt to develop a theory which linked the political theory of Karl Marx to the Jews (‘Jewish-Marxism’). This was at best a half truth. Hitler was not exploring new ground; he was simply going over old ground in order to confirm his prejudices. In Mein Kampf, he revealingly explained his reading regime from his days in Vienna:
A man who possesses the art of correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine or pamphlet, instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing. Once the knowledge he has achieved in this fashion is correctly co-ordinated within the somehow existing picture of this or that subject created by the imagination, it will function either as a corrective or a complement, thus enhancing either the correctness or the clarity of the picture … Only this kind of reading has meaning and purpose … Since my earliest youth I have endeavoured to read in the correct way, and in this endeavour I have been most happily supported by my memory and intelligence.
Those hapless German generals of World War II who were summoned to Hitler’s headquarters, and who flinched under the bombardment of facts and figures delivered by the Führer – a rage de nombre all too often utterly meaningless to his interlocutors – could doubtless have ruefully attested to his memory if not his intelligence. But it was nothing more than the eternal chant of the autodidact, the deadly drone of the saloon bar bore down the ages.
In Munich, Hitler lived a solitary life. His acquaintances were, like him, the self-opinionated improvers of the world, the cranks and know-it-alls who haunted fly-blown beer halls and small cafés and had a ready answer for everything. This was the nearest he got to politics at this stage in his life, although in Mein Kampf he gave it a familiar spin: ‘In the years 1913 and 1914, I, for the first time in various circles which today in part faithfully support the National Socialist movement, expressed the conviction that the question of the future of the German nation was the destruction of Marxism.’
While Hitler pondered the destruction of Marxism, the Linz police had finally caught up with him. The evasion of military service was considered a serious offence, punishable with a hefty fine. The Austrian authorities had tracked Hitler to Munich via the Men’s Home, and on Sunday, 18 January 1914, a policeman turned up at Frau Popp’s door to deliver a summons. Hitler was to appear in Linz within two days to register for military service and was, for the moment, under arrest.
He was saved from further humiliation by a chapter of accidents. There had been a delay in delivering the summons and the Austrian consulate in Munich, confronted with a sheepish, bedraggled Hitler, took pity on him. While telegrams pinged back and forth between Linz and Munich, and another weekend intervened, Hitler wrote a long letter, full of apologies, which attempted to explain his failure to register for military service. The authorities relented, and he was given permission to appear in Salzburg at the beginning of February. The consulate even gave him his travel expenses to get there, but on his arrival he was deemed too physically weak for military service.
THE SHOT AT SARAJEVO
Hitler resumed his aimless life in Munich, but it was soon to change for ever, along with those of millions of young men across Europe. On 28 June 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, heir to the Hapsburg throne, and his wife, the Czech Countess Sophie, made an official visit to open a museum in the city of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Bosnia, and its sister province Herzegovina, were former Turkish possessions which had been administered by Austria-Hungary since 1879 and annexed by the dual monarchy in 1908. Many of Sarajevo’s Serb inhabitants were bitterly resentful at not being allowed to become citizens of Serbia, their homeland, which had achieved formal independence in 1878. Some of them planned to give the Archduke a less than friendly welcome in Sarajevo, with the help of fellow Serbs infiltrated from the Serbian capital, Belgrade. They were members of Young Bosnia, a secret society backed by Serbian military intelligence, which was pledged to liberating Slav lands from Hapsburg rule. They had drawn up plans to assassinate the Archduke.
The man who fired the fatal shots that day was Gavrilo Princip, a consumptive nineteen-year-old terrorist and nihilist straight from the pages of a Conrad novel. Two bullets from Princip’s Belgian semi-automatic pistol, thoughtfully provided by Serbian military intelligence, mortally wounded the Archduke and his wife. Sitting bolt upright in their open-top limousine, they were already dying as they were driven to the residence of Bosnia’s governor-general, where they were both dead within fifteen minutes.
Hitler recalled that on hearing the news he realized ‘a stone had been set rolling whose course could no longer be arrested’. It took a month from the assassination for Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, a diplomatic rather than a military ploy, since it would take several weeks for the Austrians to mobilize. Then the Russians stepped in. They were not prepared to countenance the humiliation of Serbia, nor permit the Austrians and their German allies to dominate the Balkans and thus, by extension, threaten Russia’s access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles straits. Russian mobilization began on 29 July 1914.
Adolf Hitler (ringed) caught on the camera of Heinrich Hoffmann in the crowd in the Odeonsplatz on the declaration of war in August 1914, one of the defining moments in his early life. Hoffmann joined the nascent Nazi Party in 1920 and became Hitler’s official photographer – he took over two million photos of the Führer – and friend. Eva Braun was working as Hoffmann’s assistant when she first met Hitler. In the 1930s Hoffmann wrote a number of books about Hitler, including The Hitler Nobody Knows (1933). After World War II, he served a prison sentence for Nazi profiteering.
On 1 August Germany declared war on Russia and mobilized, with the aim of having millions of men ready for action within a week. Russia’s ally France also mobilized on the same day. On 3 August, at 6.45 p.m., Germany declared war on France, and invaded Belgium the following day. Belgium was a neutral country and the German invasion drew the British into the conflict. Britain despatched an ultimatum to Germany demanding an immediate withdrawal from Belgium. There was no reply, and by midnight (Berlin time) on 4 August 1914 Britain and Germany were at war. As the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, waited for the deadline, he observed, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.’
THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
At the beginning of August, Munich was gripped by war fever. Hitler later wrote, ‘I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.’ On 2 August, the day after Germany’s declaration of war on Russia, he joined a huge crowd in a massive display of patriotism in Munich’s Odeonsplatz. Years later, his court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann examined a photograph he had taken of the event and, in the process, identified the remarkable image of the young Hitler, his eyes ablaze, bellowing patriotic songs.
On 3 August Hitler submitted a personal petition to Ludwig III of Bavaria to serve as an Austrian in the Bavarian army.3 In Hitler’s account, his request was granted the next day. This seems most unlikely. He probably volunteered on 5 August, as he later attested, and was turned away in the chaotic rush to join the colours. However, on 16 August he was summoned to report to the recruiting depot, where he was kitted out, and by the beginning of September had been assigned to the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 (known as the List regiment after its commander) which was principally composed of raw recruits. At the end of October, following a period of basic training, the regiment left for the Flanders front. At the age of twenty-five Hitler found in his regiment a home and a purpose.
The war was, in his own words, ‘the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence’. It provided him with a fund of memories to which he would constantly return during World War II, the conflict which he instigated and drove. At the end of June 1940, in triumph after the humbled French had signed an armistice, Hitler, with two of his old comrades from the List Regiment, toured the battlefields on which he had served as a regimental despatch runner.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler omits to mention that he was a runner, possibly because he wanted to encourage the view that he was a front-line fighter. In fact his war service was honourable and his work as a despatch runner, carrying messages from the regimental command post to the battalion and company commanders in the front line, exposed him to considerable danger. Within two weeks of the regiment’s arrival in the Ypres sector, three of the eight runners attached to the regiment were killed in a fire-fight with French troops. Two days later, moments after Hitler had left the forward regimental command post, it was obliterated by a shell.
Hitler spent much of his wartime service in the Fromelles sector, ten miles from Lille and fifty miles north of the Somme, where on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British Army suffered its heaviest losses in a single day of fighting – sixty thousand casualties, nineteen thousand of them fatal. Hitler was almost certainly involved in the Battle of Fromelles (19–20 July), a diversionary attack launched as the Battle of the Somme raged to the south.
At the regimental headquarters in Fromelles, Hitler had time to sketch, paint and adopt a small terrier, Foxl, which had strayed across no man’s land into the German trenches. Foxl became a friend, always quick to obey, and Hitler was distraught when his unit moved and Foxl could not be found. Relations with his comrades were not so companionable. They found Hitler a queer fish, and noted that after 1915 he never received letters or parcels from home. In group photographs he invariably hovers on the edge, a painfully thin figure, sallow and self-absorbed, with a straggling moustache. He had none of the rough humour common to men at the front, and regularly exploded when anyone voiced even mild criticism of the conduct of the war. Hitler remained an implacable advocate of the ruthless prosecution of the war. He was appalled by the celebrated Christmas truce of 1914, when large numbers of British and German troops spontaneously met in no man’s land, exchanged gifts and cigarettes, and played football.4
Max Amann, then a regimental staff sergeant and later Hitler’s postwar crony and publisher, told his Allied interrogators in 1947 that Hitler often had political discussions with his comrades. At around the same time, however, several of his Great War comrades denied this; according to their testimony, Hitler almost never mentioned the Jews, and what remarks he did make on the subject passed unnoticed in the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the time. Nevertheless, one of Hitler’s fellow soldiers, Balthasar Brandmayer, claimed in a 1932 memoir that in the latter stages of the war Hitler had called the Jews ‘the wire-pullers behind our misfortune’, an observation whose significance Brandmayer only grasped later.
One experience which hardened Hitler’s attitudes was the time he spent in a military hospital near Berlin in the late autumn of 1916, after being wounded by a shell fragment during the fighting in the Fromelles sector. He was appalled by the cynicism of many of his fellow patients and also by the low morale of the civilian population when he ventured into the city. Writing some eight years later, he ascribed these phenomena to the sinister influence of the Jews, who seemed to him to be occupying all the clerical positions in the army, clearly a rationalization of the position he took after the war. In the List Regiment there were Jews, but only in proportion to their numbers in the civilian population, and they were mostly good soldiers. It was a Jewish officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Philipp Engelhardt who, in December 1915, had recommended that Hitler be awarded the Iron Cross (Second Class).
Hitler, remote and grimly unsmiling, with his fellow despatch runner Anton Bachmann and his dog Foxl, photographed at Fournes, their regimental headquarters on the Western Front, in the spring of 1915. Here Hitler found the time to paint and to read, according to his own account, the works of Schopenhauer, which he carried in his knapsack.
Hitler returned to the front in March 1917. His battalion was moved to the Vimy sector, which saw heavy fighting in April during which the Canadian Fourth Division took the highest point of Vimy Ridge, a feature against which the Allies had been battering for two years. By the time the British opened a new offensive, popularly known as the Battle of Passchendaele, Hitler’s battalion was back in the Ypres salient, where the opposing lines of trenches had been frozen since the winter of 1914. The Germans had ample warning of the offensive, and when it began on 31 July, there were nearly two million combatants crammed into the Ypres salient. The preliminary British bombardment destroyed the battlefield’s fragile drainage system and thirteen British infantry divisions advanced into a glutinous morass.
The attack ground on until the beginning of November, with progress being measured in hundreds of yards, before it was halted a mere five miles from the original start line. Each mile had been bought at the cost of fifty thousand casualties. The battle became synonymous with the seemingly futile carnage on the Western Front.
The poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote of the battle:
…I died in hell–
(They called it Passchendaele);
My wound was slight
And I was hobbling back, and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duckboards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.
Hitler’s unit, which had been involved in the heavy fighting at the beginning of the British offensive, was pulled out of the line and transferred to Alsace. In September 1917, while the blood-and-mud bath of Passchendaele dragged on, Hitler took his first leave of the war. He went to Berlin where he stayed for eighteen days with the parents of one of his comrades and spent much of his time visiting museums.
He was on the move again when he returned to the front and witnessed the last great German offensive of the war, launched by First Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, effectively the German commander-in-chief in the West. It rolled within sixty miles of Paris before being halted by the French and Americans, the latter making their first decisive intervention of the war on the Western Front.
The Allies went on the offensive on 8 August. Within twenty-four hours they had driven ten miles into the German lines. Ludendorff called it ‘the black day of the German army’, and three days later tendered his resignation to the Kaiser, who refused it but nevertheless observed, ‘I see that we must strike a balance. We have nearly reached the limits of our powers of resistance. The war must be ended.’
A week earlier, on 4 August, Adolf Hitler had been awarded his second Iron Cross, this time First Class, an exceptional achievement for a corporal, the rank he retained throughout the war.5 He was nominated by a Jewish officer, Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann. Legend later had it that Hitler had won his Iron Cross after single-handedly capturing fifteen French soldiers, but the truth is that several weeks earlier he had got through with an important despatch, an effort which was worthy of praise if not an Iron Cross. The arguments which followed Gutmann’s recommendation, and the delay in making the award, indicate that at least some of his superiors had their doubts.
At the end of the month Hitler was sent to Nuremberg for training in wireless telegraphy, and at the conclusion of his course took another spot of leave in Berlin. He then returned to the Ypres salient where he was wounded in a British mustard gas attack near Wervick on the night of 13–14 October. He and several comrades were temporarily blinded and stumbled out of harm’s way, like so many thousands of others in the Great War, by clinging on to the man in front as they were shepherded to safety by another soldier who could still see. A week later Hitler was transferred to a military hospital outside Stettin in Pomerania.
The war was over for Adolf Hitler, and the end was fast approaching for the Kaiser’s Germany.
BITTER FRUIT
In spite of the Kaiser’s prophetic words to Ludendorff, the war still had a short time to run. The final Allied assault on the Hindenburg Line, a complex defensive system established in the autumn of 1916, began at the end of September, after the Americans had cleared the St Mihiel salient, which had threatened Allied movements in Champagne since 1914. The Hindenburg Line was then breached in the decisive Allied offensive of the war. French and American troops drove along the Meuse valley towards Mézières while the British advanced along the line of the Somme.
Germany’s strategic position had been fatally undermined as, one by one, its allies had fallen by the wayside. Inside Germany, hunger and a growing influenza pandemic were taking a heavy toll. The Army, battered but still undefeated in the field, was losing more men to the pandemic than to the Allies. In the port of Kiel, forty thousand sailors mutinied. Events now followed each other with bewildering rapidity. On 27 October Austro-Hungary and Turkey, Germany’s principal allies, signed ceasefire agreements, and Ludendorff was now dismissed by the Kaiser, who abdicated on 9 November when a Socialist government took power in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s last emperor, took refuge in neutral Holland on 10 November. Since 7 November, a German delegation had been negotiating with the Allied commander-in-chief, General Foch, in his railway carriage headquarters at Compiègne. They had been instructed to agree whatever terms were offered. When they asked Foch what his terms for peace were, he replied, ‘None.’ The Germans admitted that they could not fight on. Foch replied, ‘Then you have come to surrender.’
At dawn on 11 November 1918, a message went out to all the Allied armies. The opening words were: ‘Hostilities will cease at eleven hours today, November 11th.’ The guns were to fall silent. At first the men at the front were unable to come to terms with the sudden quiet which descended on their positions. After over four years of war it was eerie not to hear gunfire somewhere. Relief came later, then jubilation.
There were very different emotions in the Pomeranian hospital where Hitler was recovering from the effects of mustard gas. He had recovered enough of his sight to glean some alarming information from the newspapers; rumours of incipient revolution were circulating and he was told of the arrival at the hospital of a delegation from the sailor mutineers. On 10 November a pastor informed the patients of the abdication of the Kaiser, the new Socialist government, and the armistice talks. It was a bombshell for Hitler:
I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow. Since the day when I had stood at my mother’s grave I had not wept … But now I could not help it … And so it had all been in vain … Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland?
However one reads it, the shattering experience at the hospital represents a key staging post in Hitler’s journey. Later, in the early 1920s, he would rearrange his account of the events of November 1918 into a neater narrative to dovetail with his burgeoning political career. But in November 1918 he did not have a political career, and nor did there seem to any likelihood that an unknown soldier, recovering from his wounds in 1918, would have the connections or contacts to launch himself on to the political stage. That lay in the future. However, the German surrender was a trauma which undoubtedly reinforced the still inchoate obsessions which formed the basis of Hitler’s perception of the world – principally his hatred of Socialism and the Jews. It was only when he began to pick up the pieces and reassemble the broken model after the war, when he worked for the German Army as an intelligence agent infiltrating extremist groups, that anything like a fully formed philosophy emerged in his mind. World War I had provided Adolf Hitler with his first real home, in the Army. In the immediate aftermath of 1918 it would provide him with the building blocks for the creation of the Nazi Party in his own image.
