The reasons Hitler gave for his sudden move to Munich, on 25 May 1913, bore little relation to the truth. He later blamed Vienna’s racial diversity and degradation for his flight. ‘I was repelled,’ he wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘… by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere, the eternal mushroom of humanity – Jews and more Jews. To me the giant city seemed the embodiment of racial desecration … For all these reasons a longing rose stronger and stronger in me, to go at last whither since my childhood secret desires and secret love had drawn me.’1
In truth, none of this drove Hitler from Vienna. He was in fact fleeing an order to fulfil his military service to Austria, an obligation under Austrian law. He was a ‘draft dodger’ on the run. But this was no ordinary conscientious objector, motivated by fear or religious constraints: Hitler had decided he would not join the Austrian Army, which in the event of a war would have sent him to Galicia or somewhere on the Eastern Front with Russia. He was determined to fight, if war came, in a German uniform.
There were also ‘pull’ factors. The Bavarian capital appealed to the young artist, partly because he still harboured dreams of becoming one, of using his skill as a draughtsman in a useful job: ‘I hoped some day to make a name for myself as an architect and thus … to dedicate my sincere services to the nation.’2 Elsewhere he wrote: ‘I went to Munich with joy in my heart. I intended to keep learning for three more years and then, when I turned 28, to become a draughtsman at [a local construction firm].’3
He would do nothing to fulfil these ambitions. In truth, he went to Munich to submerge himself in his childhood dream: ‘… I want[ed] to enjoy the happiness of living and working in the place which some day would inevitably bring about the fulfillment of my most ardent and heartfelt wish: the union of my beloved homeland with the common fatherland, the German Reich.’4
Hitler would remember his first year or so in Munich, May 1913–August 1914, as ‘by far the happiest and most contented time of my life’. The city was the throbbing heart of his beloved Fatherland:
[T]here was this heartfelt love which seized me for this city more than for any other place that I knew, almost from the first hour of my sojourn there. A German city! What a difference from Vienna! I grew sick to my stomach when I even thought back on this Babylon of races. In addition, the dialect, much closer to me, which particularly in my contacts with Lower Bavarians, reminded me of my former childhood.5
To young Hitler, Bavaria felt like a home away from home. ‘But most of all,’ he would say, ‘I was attracted by this wonderful marriage of primordial power and fine artistic mood, this single line from the Hofbräuhaus to the Odeon, from the October Festival to the Pinakothek …’6
He arrived in Munich, aged twenty-four, in the company of Rudolf Häusler, a twenty-year-old comrade from the Vienna doss house, who had been ejected from his wealthy family’s home for a misdemeanour and was also now heading to Munich to start a new life. They shared a small flat in an apartment block at Schleissheimerstrasse 34, owned by Joseph Popp, a master tailor.
Hitler admired the city’s neat beauty, with its broad, crowded squares and tree-lined streets, its cathedrals and palaces. At night he joined the flow of lederhosen and feathered caps going into the beer halls, whose raucous atmosphere offered a sweaty, shouting contrast to the restrained and upright society outside.
Munich was, before the war, one of the more culturally confident and innovative cities in Europe, belying the conservatism of the Bavarian state of which it was the capital. It was a transit point between the ancient and modern, radical and traditional, safe and experimental. So Hitler encountered a city that was indeed pulsing with artistic spirit, but not quite in the direction he approved of: at the time, Munich was the centre of various strands of Modernism and Expressionism, radical artistic movements that Hitler swiftly dismissed as degenerate. Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky and August Macke were among the artistic luminaries who lived in or were associated with the city. Richard Strauss and Thomas Mann also lived there around this time, though Vladimir Ilych Lenin had recently departed. None of them left much trace on Hitler’s mind, except to repel it.
In this line-up, his pastel postcards were but the faintest ephemera. Not that he intended to exhibit his work; his passing exposure to Munich’s artistic efflorescence simply reinforced his general loathing of ‘degenerate art’, which he would later ban. His own taste remained resolutely ‘locked in the 19th century’.7 He loved the Old Masters at the Alte Pinakothek. He was a great admirer of Anselm Feuerbach, Arnold Böcklin and the German realist painter Adolph von Menzel, whose work the Nazis would later use in their propaganda.
And so this searching, angry young man once again fell among the idlers, wastrels and revolutionaries who inhabited the beer halls, cabarets and cafés, chiefly in the fashionable bohemian district of Schwabing, where he would sit sipping coffee and eating sugary desserts, poring over his newspapers and loudly disburdening himself of his opinions to anyone who’d listen – an activity he later dignified as a ‘political awakening’. His favourite tavern was Café Stefanie, reminding him of his childhood sweetheart; it was also nicknamed the Café Megalomania, on account of its radical student clientele. At other times, he spent his days turning out pictures of tourist landmarks, copied from postcards – the Theatinerkirche, the Hofbräuhaus, the Altes Rathaus, the Sendlinger Tor and many others – which he peddled in the cafés and beer gardens. They sold well, and he later estimated his annual income was around 1,200 marks a year (about £4,500 or US$6,100 in absolute terms today).
He painted, and ‘studied’ – his chief interest, he later claimed, being ‘the relations between Marxism and Jewry’, although there is no evidence he spent much time reading Marx’s works. He made few friends and, according to his landlady, Frau Anna Popp, received not a single visitor to his apartment in his two-year tenancy.8
On 18 January 1914, the Linz police finally tracked Hitler down to Schleissheimerstrasse 34. The receipt of a summons to appear in Linz two days later alarmed him: evading military service carried a possible jail term and heavy fine. On the 19th the police escorted him to the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Munich, where he realized the seriousness of the situation.
The fear of disgrace energized Hitler to try to explain himself to the Linz magistracy and so justify his absence. He hired a lawyer, Ernst Hepp, who advised him to apologize to the magistracy for neglecting to register for military service, and to explain that he had been living in Vienna and his papers had not arrived. Hepp further urged his young client to plead for the court’s sympathy: he was an orphan in a dire financial situation and ‘worthy of special consideration’.9 His letter to the military authorities, which he sent on 21 January, is an astonishing record of his early years, awash with ingratiating self-importance, traces of self-pity and the cunning turn of phrase of an emerging master manipulator:
In the summons I am called an artist. Although I am rightly accorded this title, it is nevertheless only conditionally correct. It is true that I earn my living as a free-lance painter, but only, since I am entirely without property (my father was a government official), in order to further my education. I am able to devote only a fraction of my time to earning a living, since I am still training myself as an architectural painter. Therefore my income is a very modest one, just large enough for me to get along.
I submit as evidence of this my tax statement and request you kindly to return this document to me. My income is estimated as 1200 marks, rather too much than too little, and does not mean that I make exactly 100 marks a month. Oh no. My monthly income is extremely variable, but certainly very bad right now, since the art trade sort of goes into its winter sleep around this time in Munich …
As far as my sin of omission in the autumn of 1909 [i.e. his failure to register for military service in Austria] is concerned, this was a terribly bitter time for me. I was an inexperienced young man, without any financial aid and also too proud to accept any from anyone, let alone to ask for it. Without any support, dependent on myself alone, the few crowns or often coppers I earned from my works were scarcely sufficient to provide me with a bed. For two years I had no other friend but care and need, no other companion but eternally gnawing hunger. I never knew the beautiful word youth. Today, even after five years, I have the mementos in the form of chilblain sores on my fingers, hands and feet. And yet I cannot recall this period without a certain rejoicing, now that I am after all over the worst. In spite of the greatest misery, in the midst of often more than dubious surroundings, I have always preserved my name unsullied, am altogether blameless before the law, and pure before my own conscience …10
After a fortnight of delays and mistimed telegrams, on 5 February 1914 Hitler appeared before the Salzburg draft board and pleaded various excuses – poverty, absence and the fact that he had belatedly registered. The court lent a sympathetic ear. The army examined him on 23 February and declared him medically ‘unfit for military service’ – the result of five years of privation – ‘unsuitable for combat and support duty, too weak, incapable of firing weapons’.11 The case was closed.
Hitler would later seek to hide the truth, for obvious reasons: a record of avoiding military service, whatever the cause, hardly chimed with the martial note of the Nazi regime and would be a career-stunting gift to his enemies. Not until 1950 would the evidence emerge that he had lied about the reasons for and timing of his move to Munich.
No example better illustrates Hitler’s re-creation of himself as Führer and prophet than what he wrote about the outbreak of the First World War. In Mein Kampf, written a decade after the war began, he would retrospectively endow himself with the prescience of a political seer. In Munich in 1913, he would claim, he had sniffed war in the air ‘better than the so-called official “diplomats”, who blindly, as almost always, rushed headlong toward catastrophe’.12
The young prophet had seen the future more clearly than any politician or ‘expert’. In describing the coming struggle, he would deploy the usual meteorological imagery indulged in by self-aggrandizing politicians and secular seers:
As early as my Vienna period, the Balkans were immersed in that livid sultriness which customarily announces the hurricane, and from time to time a beam of brighter light flared up, only to vanish again in the spectral darkness. But then came the Balkan War and with it the first gust of wind swept across a Europe grown nervous. The time which now followed lay on the chests of men like a heavy nightmare, sultry as feverish tropic heat, so that due to constant anxiety the sense of an approaching catastrophe turned at last to longing: let Heaven at last give free rein to the Fate which could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed and with the thunder of Heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries.13
That lightning flash was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia–Herzegovina, on 28 June 1914. Austria–Hungary sought to pin the assassination on Serbia, whom they held responsible for orchestrating the murder. The Austrian government, with Germany’s open-ended support, used the murder to contrive a case for swift retribution, turning a crisis that could have been contained into a casus belli. In other words, the decision to go to war in 1914 was another human – all too human – case of paranoia, incompetence and the disastrous misuse of power; it was not, as Hitler’s mind conceived it, Heaven-sent or willed by the masses, most of whom, with the exception of a shrieking minority, did not want war.
There was nothing inevitable or accidental about it: by this point, Germany and Austria had decided to go to war, at least in the Balkans. They seized upon the death of poor old Franz Ferdinand, whom nobody in the Austrian court much cared for, as the perfect catalyst. Any other trigger might have set the process rolling – Russian mobilization, French colonial provocation – given the political enthusiasm for war. In those delirious July days, the one wildcard, the face of which nobody knew, was Britain: would she remain neutral or join France and Russia, her Triple Entente partners, in a war against Germany?
Despite his later claim that he saw it coming, in truth when Austria–Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, young Adolf was as stunned and enthralled as thousands of other young men. He knew little of the deeper causes. Having read about it in the press in a café, he later projected back on to his youthful ignorance his insights into the national mood: ‘People wanted at length to put an end to the general un certainty. Only thus can it be understood that more than two million German men and boys thronged to the colours, prepared to defend the flag with the last drop of their blood.’14
All his dreams of a greater Germany coalesced around that moment, all his youthful fantasies seemed to be realized at last:
To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, 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.
A fight for freedom had begun, mightier than the earth had ever seen; for once Destiny had begun its course, the conviction dawned on even the broad masses that this time not the Fate of Serbia or Austria was involved, but whether the German nation was to be or not to be.15
The ‘stormy enthusiasm’ for war was not a fleeting phenomenon, he later insisted. It contained a ‘necessary grave undertone’, which made the ‘national uprising more than a mere blaze of straw’. He rejoiced in the certainty of a ‘gigantic struggle’: ‘at last war would be inevitable’.16 A talent for boiling down profound historical upheavals into the simplest message – e.g. that ‘popular spirit’ drove the world to war – would define Hitler’s thought and political style throughout his career.
Were European leaders so impressionable? Had the ‘popular spirit’ compelled the German, French, Russian and British governments to declare war, as Hitler claimed? In fact, a few thousand extreme nationalists and a complicit media made a big noise but were hardly representative of the general mood in Europe. Most German, French, British and Russian people did not want war, but they were powerless to stop it. ‘Militarism was far from being the dominant force in European politics on the eve of the Great War,’ observed historian Niall Ferguson. ‘On the contrary, it was in political decline … The evidence is unequivocal: Europeans were not marching to war, but turning their backs on militarism.’17 The warmongering on display that July in Munich, Berlin, Vienna and Paris did not reflect the feelings of millions of quiet, unasked families, who dreaded the loss of their sons, brothers and husbands in the coming conflagration.
War fever certainly gripped the jingoistic minority in Bavaria in July 1914. Distempered, marginalized characters like Hitler were in thrall to the greatest excitement of their time. War put meaning into their meaning less lives. And few were bathed so completely in the exuberance of those warm July days as this solitary young man, just twenty-four years old, friendless, orphaned and unemployed, for whom the declaration of war gave his life a sacred new direction. War would rescue Hitler from the pattern of serial failure, rejection and loneliness.
In the days before and after Germany declared war on Russia – which had mobilized in support of Serbia – on 1 August (it would declare war on France two days later), crowds formed in Munich’s main square, the Odeonsplatz. Hitler appears in the famous Heinrich Hoffmann photo of the Odeonsplatz, wedged in among the people, delighted, open-mouthed, wild with anticipation. He sang the German nationalist hymn ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ (‘The Watch on the Rhine’, the unofficial patriotic anthem) until he was hoarse. The jubilant scene belied the fact that only a fraction of Munich’s 600,000 people had turned out, and they tended to cheer on cue when they knew the camera was on them.18 Otherwise, the mood was sombre, anxious, contrary to the popular notion that most ordinary Germans rushed to support the war.
Hitler’s case for war was ‘simple and clear’, he later wrote. Germany faced an existential threat:
[F]or me, it was not that Austria was fighting for some Serbian satisfaction, but that Germany was fighting for her existence, the German nation for life or death, freedom and future. The time had come for Bismarck’s work to fight; what the fathers had once won in the battles from Weissenburg to Sedan and Paris [all battles in the Franco-Prussian War], young Germany now had to earn once more. If the struggle were carried through to victory, our nation would enter the circle of great nations …19