Hitler volunteered for several perilous missions between March and May 1915, and witnessed the mutilating impact of new weapons – heavy artillery and machine guns – on lines of advancing soldiers. Near the end of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, in March, he ran a shocking artillery gauntlet through a rain of shells between the regimental HQ at Halpegarbe and his battalion HQ in the Bois du Biez. His commanding officer expressed amazement that the dispatch runners had survived the onslaught. Hitler later wrote that he had leaped from shell hole to shell hole under hellish fire to deliver his messages.1
And on 18 March, he put himself up for another treacherous run, which found him crawling through open country, exposed to English sniper fire. According to the regimental history, the List Regiment’s dispatch runners were similarly exposed to open fire during the Battle of Aubers Ridge that May.2
Balthasar Brandmayer, then a twenty-three-year-old mason’s apprentice from Götting, near Rosenheim, joined Hitler’s dispatch unit that month. Brandmayer would never forget his first encounter with Hitler: ‘He had come back fatigued after a delivery … He was like a skeleton, his face pale and colourless. Two piercingly dark eyes, which struck me especially, stared out of deep sockets. His prominent moustache was unkempt. Forehead and facial expression suggested high intelligence …’3
The pair got along well, and Brandmayer’s memoir, Meldegänger Hitler (Hitler the Messenger), published in 1933, admires Hitler’s ‘iron nature’ and unnerving willingness to volunteer for every mission. While the memoir reeks of supplication – Brandmayer had every reason to try to impress his politically empowered old comrade – it holds true in part, when aligned with other witness statements. After one mission, Hitler seemed to be a ‘man without nerves’, Brandmayer observed:
Paralysing tiredness weighed like lead on my burning limbs. I threw off my helmet and webbing and sank, dead-tired, into my bunk. I expected Adolf to do the same but how wrong I was! As I turned around I found him sitting near the bed, helmet on head, buckled up, and waiting for the next order. ‘You’re crazy!’ I cried out angrily. ‘How would you know?’ was his prompt reply. There was no man under his uniform, only a skeleton … He had an iron nature.4
Other soldiers attested to this scene. Hitler would pace about, weapon in hand, like a wild beast, impatient for action. His reckless courage, his eagerness for another mission, they found unnerving. ‘The Austrian never relaxes,’ one said of him. ‘He always acts as if we’d lose the war if he weren’t on the job every minute.’5
Hitler did not participate in the Battle of Loos (25 September–13 October 1915). But he heard all about the fate of the British Army in one of its most disastrous offensives of the war. Loos was an Anglo-French attempt to smash the German trenches at Artois and Champagne and break out into mobile warfare. The unspeakable scenes that resulted might have shelved for ever the idea that huge frontal attacks could break the German lines. What happened at Loos revealed a breed of man, the British Tommy, whose courage, unquestioning sense of duty and fear of failure persuaded him to march head-on into enemy machine guns. A German witness, the historian of the 26th Infantry Regiment, famously described the result:
Never had the machine guns had such straightforward work to do … with barrels burning hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the [British] ranks unceasingly; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The effect was devastating. The enemy could be seen literally falling in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption. The extended lines of men began to get confused by this terrific punishment, but they went doggedly on, some even reaching the wire entanglement in front of the reserve line … Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle, the survivors turned and began to retire.6
Field Marshal Sir John French, the BEF’s serially inept commander, and the then Lieutenant General Sir Douglas Haig were jointly responsible for this debacle.7 Sir John bore the brunt of the blame for failing to send up reserves in time to hold the British gains, exposing his forward troops to devastating German counter-attacks. The toll was 59,247 British soldiers killed, wounded or missing in the two attacks, including three major generals and eighteen-year-old John Kipling, the only son of the poet Rudyard Kipling. Many of the British inhaled their own poison gas, blown back on to their trenches when the wind changed, killing or incapacitating them. (This was their first use of the gas, which the Germans had used on 22 April that year at Second Ypres.) Sir John was sacked, and he returned to Britain to command the Home Forces, a bitter and resentful man. Haig replaced him. The lessons were clear: something more than artillery, gas and massed ranks of men would be needed to break through the German lines.
Safe in the rear, Hitler and his fellow dispatch runners were enjoying a relatively peaceful year. In the second half of October they followed a leisurely routine of three days on duty and three days off. Hitler, billeted in a warm farmhouse in the tranquil village of Fournes-en-Weppes, spent his spare time reading and drawing dreary scenes of dugouts and French villages. Some days he took a stroll to Fromelles, the ruins of which then contained the German front-line command post and dressing station, where he saw at first hand the effects of modern artillery on the human body: mutilated flesh, multiple amputations, soldiers with their faces and skulls blown off.
He would spend more than a year in Fournes and the surrounding region. He had a lot of time to read, and bought himself a copy of Berlin, an architectural guide to the city written by the leading German art critic Max Osborn, a Jew who would later flee Nazi persecution.8 Hitler greatly admired the book and would carry it with him throughout the war.9 His respect for Osborn mirrored his admiration for Mahler: striking examples of his capacity – at this point – to admire individual Jewish achievements even as he gradually came to revile the Jewish ‘race’.
The arrival of winter rains brought plagues of rats and sickness. Hitler, who had never taken a day’s leave, fell ill with a severe bronchial condition, but refused to report to the doctor. He spent Christmas 1915 in a ‘surly’ mood, alone again and without a word from anyone back home. He neither sent nor received any Christmas cards.
Even in this frigid atmosphere, with his health failing, his conception of himself as the ‘man of destiny’ had not deserted him. ‘By the winter of 1915–16,’ he would write in Mein Kampf, ‘this struggle had for me been decided. At last my will was undisputed master. If in the first days I went over the top with rejoicing and laughter, I was now calm and determined. And this was enduring. Now Fate could bring on the ultimate tests without my nerves shattering or my reason failing. The young volunteer had become an old soldier. And this transformation had occurred in the whole army.’10
Whether he actually experienced this internal struggle at the time, as described, is unknowable. But the fact that with hindsight he was determined to anchor to the war years these decisive moments of his life – the mastery of the will, his overcoming of self in the face of hardship – is in itself recognition of the power of the experience.
Around this time he got to know Max Amann, his bullying staff sergeant, who would become the closest thing to a ‘friend’ that Hitler had. Amann would later head the Nazi publishing house Eher Verlag, publisher of Mein Kampf, and take charge of press censorship, closing down newspapers and amassing a fortune through concentrating owner ship of the press in his own hands. Amann had a clear interest in flattering his old comrade-in-arms at the 1932 inquiry into Hitler’s war record. Yet his remarks bear out Hitler’s continuing, extraordinary devotion to the war effort that others had seen. The Führer, Amann said, ‘never hesitated in the least in carrying out even the most difficult order, and very often took on the most dangerous duties of his comrades.’11 Hitler was an isolated, unselfish soldier, he added, who refused extra pay and always seemed to be among the first to volunteer.12
The year 1916 would see the List Regiment’s greatest triumph – at Fromelles, against the Australian (Anzac) forces; and its worst defeat – on the Somme, the experience of which crushed morale and would ultimately destroy the unit’s combat readiness.
With the spring thaw, the List Regiment rallied and the Bavarians and their lucky Linz runner prepared to resume hostilities. A spirit of brutal realism now moved among the ranks. The youthful eagerness to go over the top, so brash and innocent a year earlier, had now yielded in most soldiers to a cold, bestial determination to kill and survive.
At Fromelles, 43 miles (70 km) north of the Somme, on 19 and 20 July, the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division faced an enemy largely made up of the 5th Australian Division, the least experienced of the Dominion units then in France. In the ensuing struggle the Australians stormed the German trenches several times, in reckless displays of bravado that utterly failed. They were driven back, with staggering losses: 5,553 Australians were killed, wounded or taken prisoner, the greatest loss of Australian lives in a twenty-four-hour period.
Hitler took an active part in the battle, delivering orders, ‘fleeing grenades’ and leaping from crater to crater, according to Brandmayer’s exaggerated account.13 Fromelles was the List Regiment’s most decisive victory – and one of Australia’s most punishing losses – of the war. Years later, on learning that Hitler had been among the Germans opposing them, Australian veterans of the battle would rue their failure to kill him.
Then came the Somme. The Battle of the Somme began on 1 July, a day that proved the bloodiest in British military history, with 57,470 British casualties by nightfall, of whom more than 19,000 were killed; the Germans lost 40,000 over the first ten days. The ensuing battles, of Albert, Delville Wood, Pozières, Thiepval Ridge, Ancre Heights and many more, surged and flowed over the plains of Picardy, killing or wounding the Allies at the rate of 2,943 men per day.14
The Bavarian reserves soon got their turn in hell. On 2–3 October, with their morale high, Hitler’s unit moved up to the gently inclining pastures of the Somme valley. By now, the battle had degenerated into one of pure attrition, bleeding hundreds of thousands of lives and involving every available unit in the opposing armies. Rumours of the carnage spread terror in the hearts of soldiers as they headed for the front.
Flung into the Battle of Le Transloy in the sector of Le Barque–Bapaume on the pointless orders of Lieutenant Colonel Emil Spatny, their ineffectual, often drunken, new commander, the Listers were promptly cut down. Within ten days Hitler’s regiment had lost 300 dead, 844 wounded and 88 missing. Severely demoralized, the survivors sat in the sodden mud under daily bombardment until ‘otherwise peaceful and rational men became irrational’, wrote Fritz Wiedemann, the regimental adjutant, who would recommend Hitler for an Iron Cross (First Class) on several occasions and later served as the Führer’s personal adjutant in the Nazi Party:
Despair dug deep furrows in their faces, and also crept into the hearts of brave men. Daily they saw comrades dying to the left and right of them, they stumbled over their bodies in the fighting and could count on the fingers of two hands how many days would be needed until the last man in the company would be devoured by the battle and death.15
Brandmayer lost his nerve during an attack, and later attributed his survival to Hitler’s encouragement: ‘My nerve failed. I just wanted to lie where I was. I sank hopelessly into an insupportable apathy. – Then Hitler spoke kindly to me, gave me words of encouragement, said that someday all our heroism would be rewarded a thousand fold in the Fatherland … We returned … uninjured. Our faces were no longer recognisable.’16
Hitler escaped the worst of the Somme thanks to a shell splinter that struck him in the groin or upper left thigh while on a mission on 12 October near the town of Bapaume. ‘It’s not so bad captain, right?’ he is said to have appealed to Wiedemann. ‘I’ll stay with you, stay with the regiment?’ Wiedemann later recalled the incident:
There he lay, the man who so badly wanted to be an artist, who loved all newspapers, who philosophized about political and ideological questions in the primitive manner of ordinary people. There he lay, wounded, and had no other wish than to be allowed to stay with his regiment. He had no family and also, if one might say, no homeland. For Gefreiter Hitler, the List Regiment was home.17
Hitler was sent to a field clinic at Hermies for immediate treatment of the wound, then to a German military hospital in Beelitz-Heilstätten, in Brandenburg, not far from Berlin. There he encountered, to his disgust, a few ‘wretched scoundrels’, one of whom boasted ‘that he himself had pulled his hand through a barbed wire entanglement in order to be sent to the hospital’. Others ranted against the war, ‘with all the means of their contemptible eloquence to make the conceptions of the decent soldiers ridiculous and hold up the spineless coward as an example’. Hitler scorned them all as ‘poisonous fellows’ who condemned the war and dismissed Germany’s hopes of victory.18
On the path to recovery and determined to escape his defeatist, bedridden companions, he obtained permission to remain in Berlin for a few weeks, before being transferred to Munich in December. In both cities he witnessed the ravages of the war and winter on the civilian population, whose struggle against poverty and hunger he dismissed as weakness. In Mein Kampf he later wrote of this sharp juxtaposition of his battlefield experiences with the ‘malingerers’ on the home front and, as we shall now see, retroactively apportioned the blame for the ailing German spirit to Jewish ‘shirkers’.
Germany’s Kohlrübenwinter, or ‘Turnip Winter’, was the harshest in thirty years. The early frost and heavy rains had halved the country’s potato harvest. Ordinary Germans were relying on turnips, or swedes, the loathed ‘Prussian pineapple’. By late 1916, food was scarce, malnutrition endemic. Food stocks were 40 per cent of pre-war levels, a result of impassable roads and Britain’s naval blockade, which had been imposed in 1914 as soon as war broke out and was described in Berlin as the British ‘Hunger Blockade’. Food prices soared on the black market. Riots and wholesale theft overrode German loyalty to the war effort. Malnutrition and related diseases – dysentery, scurvy and tuberculosis – were ravaging the cities. Hunger oedema, characterized by gross swelling of the limbs, proliferated among the poor, and long lines of starving women and children were a daily occurrence at soup kitchens. The author Ernst Glaeser witnessed children stealing each other’s rations and heard women in food queues talking ‘more about their children’s hunger than the death of their husbands’.19 Mobile field kitchens, nicknamed ‘goulash guns’, rushed to feed the hungriest but did little to assuage the fury of German mothers, who formed a ‘new front’ against the authorities: in 1916, women committed 1,224 acts of violence against the German police.20 Thousands were dying, reported an American correspondent in Berlin near the end of 1916:
Once I set out for the purpose of finding in these food-lines a face that did not show the ravages of hunger. Four long lines were inspected with the closest scrutiny. But among the 300 applicants for food there was not one who had had enough to eat for weeks. In the case of the youngest women and children the skin was drawn hard to the bones and bloodless. Eyes had fallen deeper into the sockets. From the lips all color was gone, and the tufts of hair which fell over the parchmented faces seemed dull and famished – a sign that the nervous vigor of the body was departing with the physical strength.21
Most food necessarily went to the armed forces. A single corps of infantry, according to a study by the historian Holger Herwig, devoured 1,000,000 lb (453,592 kg) of meat and 660,000 loaves of bread per month, while their horses needed 7,000,000 lb (3,175,147 kg) of oats and 4,000,000 lb (1,814,369 kg) of hay.22
Yet it was never enough. To preserve the food supply, the German government imposed ‘meatless’ and ‘fatless’ days. An ingenious array of ingredients replaced the staple diet of bread, milk, sausage and sugar. Black bread, fatless sausage, one egg and a few potatoes and turnips constituted the average weekly diet. Many German people even consumed ground beetles. These measures, however, merely delayed the encroachment of hunger-related diseases. Since the start of the war, the daily calorie intake had fallen by a third, to 1,000, and the civilian mortality rate had increased by 37 per cent. The hardest hit were the weakest – young children, the sick and the elderly – whose mortality rates rose by as much as 50 per cent.
As spring approached, food shortages and soaring inflation led to the breakdown of civic order. Annual domestic wheat production had almost halved, to about 2.5 million tons, and the meat ration was cut to 8 oz (225 g) per week, accompanied by the destruction of a million cows. Starving and exhausted with war, the German people took to industrial action and mass protest against the soaring prices. In April, hunger strikes erupted in about 300 German factories, while around 150,000 Berlin employees in key war industries struck over the lack of food,23 and thousands of workers in several German cities demanded an end to the war. To offset the wave of strikes, the Berlin government subjected all industries and factories to military law. Anyone capable of working was forced to do so. Social misfits, homosexuals, prostitutes, the mentally ill were pressed into service in factories, hospitals and farms.
Hitler witnessed all this up close, but the miserable scenes of women and children going hungry elicited not a shred of compassion in him, nor any sense of a shared struggle. He felt only contempt for what he saw as spineless civilians on the home front, whose lot was as nothing compared with that of the men at the front. As he wrote in Mein Kampf, in Berlin ‘there was dire misery everywhere. The big city was suffering from hunger … In various soldiers’ homes the tone was like that in the hospital. It gave you the impression that these scoundrels were intentionally frequenting such places in order to spread their views.’24
Hitler’s revulsion at what he saw as defeatism and cowardice on the home front deepened in Munich, where conditions were ‘much, much worse … Anger, discontent, cursing wherever you went!’ Munich was nothing like the place of his happiest memories: ‘I thought I could no longer recognise the city.’ Among the civilian population, ‘the general mood was miserable: to be a slacker passed almost as a sign of higher wisdom, while loyal steadfastness was considered a symptom of inner weakness and narrow-mindedness.’25 And the idea of a monstrous injustice began to grow in his mind, blending with images of piles of soldiers’ corpses … and the question, always simmering inside him, of who was to blame.
He would spend most of the 1916/17 winter in Munich, in a reserve battalion, as he recuperated. In December he sent a postcard (unearthed in 2012) to a fellow soldier called Karl Lanzhammer, writing: ‘I am now in Munich at the Ersatz Btl. Currently I am under dental treatment … Kind regards A. Hitler.’26
If the city’s poverty elicited no sympathy in him, the collapse in morale and the sight of the wealthy partying in their salons provoked his rage. At the same time, a savage strain of anti-Semitism was at large in Bavaria: Jews were being blamed for profiting from the war, for neglecting their duty to the war effort. And not only there, but all over the country. Wartime anti-Semitism rose to a cacophony in 1916–17, ‘when voices blaming the food shortages on Jewish profiteers were on the rise in Germany’s urban centres’.27
In a notorious passage of Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that feelings of violent anti-Semitism seized him during this period in Munich:
The offices were filled with Jews. Nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk. I was amazed at this plethora of warriors of the chosen people and could not help but compare them with their rare representatives at the front. As regards economic life, things were even worse. Here the Jewish people had really become ‘indispensable’. The spider was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the people’s pores.28
These tirades, written almost a decade later, grossly misrepresented both the commitment of German Jews to the war effort and Hitler’s own attitude to the Jews during the war. In both cases he was projecting backwards the extreme hatred of the Jews that he felt after the war, in the interests of his new political career. Hitler’s actual mood in Munich at the time was that of a recovering soldier, exhausted and disillusioned, wandering the city in dismay. Indeed, no such statements of furious anti-Semitism appear in his war letters; nor would his comrades remember him singling out Jews for special hatred in 1916–17.
In any case, the accusation that Jews were shirkers and under-represented in the German Army was a grotesque lie: a special report of 1916 showed that Munich’s small Jewish population was more than fairly represented at the front.29 After the war, it was revealed that 12,000 German Jewish soldiers had died defending the Fatherland.
By early 1917, aged twenty-eight, Hitler had moved a little closer in spirit to the individual that emerges in Mein Kampf. But he had not yet even contemplated a career in politics, far less developed policies or programmes of oppression. He was merely a dispatch runner whose ‘wildly articulated ideas’ and fulminations against a ragbag collection of enemies (the ‘internal threat’ in Germany, the Marxists, Jews, Slavs, the ruling classes, English and French, etc.) were mere gusts of rage. The formation of a political movement founded on violent racism, as proposed in Mein Kampf, was still six years away.30
For now, this strange soldier, with no obvious leadership skills, could only sit and stew in his anger. If he felt the far call of a greater destiny, in which he would realize his Pan-German dream, he still had no idea how he would achieve it or what role he would play.