On 21 March, in the opening phase of the Spring Offensive, Operation Michael, Ludendorff’s mighty arsenal rolled across France in a spectacular reprise of August 1914. The Allied gains of the past two years, on the Somme and at Arras, yielded to the German juggernaut as, initially, the Germans drove the Allies deep into French territory, regaining positions they had not seen since 1914.
Denied the manpower needed to resist this typhoon, the British and Dominion forces fell back, sustaining casualties that ‘dwarfed the “butcher’s bill” of Passchendaele’, as one account claimed.1 Not quite: some 254,740 British and French soldiers were killed or wounded or missing in Operation Michael, almost 20,000 fewer than the Allied casualties of Third Ypres.2 German losses amounted to almost the same as those of the Allies.
General Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army nearly cracked: in the greatest mass capitulation in British history, 21,000 of his 90,882 casualties were taken prisoner. Gough was sacked, in the richest irony of his career: of all the sackable offences that fastened to his name, March 1918 should not have been one. The Fifth Army’s surviving formations bravely held. Had they broken, ‘the Germans would probably have won the First World War’, notes one historian.3
By April, the Allies had retreated as far as Amiens. In Operation Georgette, the next phase of the Kaiserschlacht, Passchendaele fell within three days. Yet remarkably, the British held Ypres – at the Fourth Battle of Ypres. Paris trembled under the threat of German occupation for the second time in four years. The British, Dominion and French armies, now fighting under Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s supreme command, were staring at the prospect of defeat.
On 11 April, in an emotional departure from his usual granite calm, Haig issued his famous ‘backs to the wall’ order:
SPECIAL ORDER OF THE DAY
By FIELD-MARSHAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
K.T., G.C.B., G.C.V.O., K.C.I.E.
Commander-in-Chief, British Armies in France
To ALL RANKS OF THE BRITISH ARMY IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS
Three weeks ago to-day the enemy began his terrific attacks against us on a fifty-mile front. His objects are to separate us from the French, to take the Channel Ports and destroy the British Army …
There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.4
Drawing on all their reserves of strength, the British and Dominion forces rallied – and then struck back, with everything they had. The German offensive died hard, over a tortuous retreat lasting several months. Failed tactics, rushed training, demoralization, lack of food and ammunition, and overstretched supply lines caused their eventual collapse – aggravated by the astonishing return to form of the British, Anzac and French forces and the arrival of the first units of the 500,000-strong American Army. The tactical sequence that had frustrated the British, Anzacs and Canadians for almost three years – attack, brief success, resistance, counter-attack, then stalemate or defeat – now dragged down and destroyed Ludendorff’s counter-blow.
In March and April, Hitler’s regiment was involved in numerous battles in Picardy and Champagne, chiefly as a support unit, fighting mostly in defence of new ground taken. Yet they sustained huge casualties, most heavily at the town of Montdidier. By the end of April 1918, the regiment had lost half its strength (with the division sustaining similar losses) – killed, wounded or sick (many from Spanish flu). As usual, it was the poor bloody infantry who bore the brunt of it. On the night of 16 April, eighteen-year-old Justin Fleischmann, a new (and, as it happened, Jewish) recruit, had recorded ‘terrible artillery’ and ‘heavy gas bombardment’ with ‘severe losses’: ‘In the evening we marched to the most forward line with only 40 men …’, during which they got lost and encountered severe shellfire. Fleischmann himself, a brave soldier, was hit in the head by shrapnel.5 Food was scarce, morale sank again to rock bottom and casualties soared.
Yet still they fought on, joining Ludendorff’s desperate last stand at Chemin des Dames in the Aisne Valley – the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. By the first week of June, the Listers were reduced to a quarter of their usual strength, with about 20–25 men per company.6
In one of the bitterest struggles of these final months of the war, the Second Battle of the Marne – a humiliating re-run of September 1914 – the Germans were literally fought to a standstill in what was to be their final offensive of the war. The Allies fielded hundreds of tanks and aircraft; fresh American troops poured into the lines. Staring at the impossible, many German infantrymen simply turned and fled. Hitler would later express his rage and disgust at the mass capitulation of his beloved army, refusing to accept the truth of what he was witnessing.
By now the German Army was exhausted. Its Spring Offensive had seen it regain a lot of territory, but at the cost of many thousands of men it could not replace. On 8 August the Allies launched what was to be their final offensive, known now as the Hundred Days Offensive (8 August–11 November 1918), a series of lightning victories that dealt a death blow to the German war. At last, the Americans were pouring into France: thirty-nine divisions would arrive by the end of September. And a battle-hardened Commonwealth phoenix had risen out of the ashes of Flanders: the Australians were now fighting as part of a stand-alone national army, injecting fresh patriotic zeal into their ranks. The newly formed Australian Corps under General Sir John Monash was about to exceed what anyone could have imagined possible a year earlier, when they lay immobilized in the swamps beneath Passchendaele. (A glimpse of their return to form had been the capture of the village of Hamel on 4 July, a prelude to what lay ahead of great symbolic value.)
On 8 August 1918, the British, Anzacs and Canadians burst out of Amiens, and, along with the French just to the south, broke the German lines, captured 12,000 prisoners and 450 guns, inflicted 15,000 further casualties and advanced 8 miles (13 km), the furthest achieved on the Western Front in a single day (Third Ypres had taken three and a half months to conquer a shorter distance – 5 miles/8 km). Over the next five days, the Canadian Corps defeated or put to flight ten full German divisions, capturing 9,131 prisoners and 190 artillery pieces, advancing 14 miles (22 km) and liberating more than 67 square miles (173 sq. km).
Hitler and his fellow runners were relatively idle during these tumultuous last months, notwithstanding a few moments of terrific action and an instance of personal distinction. He had spent most of 1918 in regimental headquarters, in the rear, awaiting instructions. Earlier in the year his regiment had withdrawn to Comines, for another rest. At the time, Hitler happened to see a letter from his comrade Balthasar Brandmayer’s girlfriend and asked, good-humouredly:
‘Brandmoari [sic], has Trutschnelda written again?’
‘Good guess,’ Brandmayer replied. ‘Have you never wanted a girl?’
‘Look,’ Hitler replied, ‘I’ve never found time for such a thing. And I don’t want to.’
‘You’re a strange one, Adi! I’ll never understand you! There’s no hope for you.’
A soldier interjected: ‘How would it be if I found a mam’selle for us?’
At which Hitler leapt excitedly up and exclaimed: ‘I’d kill myself from shame rather than make love to a French woman.’
Raucous laughter met this remark: ‘Listen to the monk!’ cried one soldier.
Hitler’s face grew serious, as he asked his comrades: ‘Don’t any of you feel your honour as a German anymore?’7
Hitler remained as high-minded as ever, even with the war about to end. His comrades, meanwhile, felt they could afford to relax: they were out of danger, well removed from the ongoing trials of the front-line soldiers.
The German infantrymen returning from the front, however, had been reduced to insensate husks, marked by a ‘deadening indifference’ to suffering, as one German historian described them: ‘Death has lost its terror, since it has been standing next to you as a constant companion every hour of the day and night. The front instinct finds its best breeding ground in that state of “couldn’t care less” …’8
Four years of war had created this ‘new type of German soldier’, who came staggering back to the rear – one who, resigned or indifferent to his fate, placed little or no value on life, medals or words of praise. Such foot soldiers were affectionately known as Frontschweine (front-line pigs). To start with, they had scorned military discipline, hobnobbed with their platoon and company commanders who lay in the mud beside them, and viewed every rear-area soldier with contempt. Hitler felt the sting in their attitude. He shared the comforts of the rear-area pigs, yet his regular appearances as a runner helped to dampen the Frontschweine’s criticism: he still served, after all, as a lifeline to the front when the phone lines broke.
By mid-1918, the average ‘front-line pig’ was in a state of ‘mental shock’, merely going through the motions of combat. Most had abandoned all hope, epitomized by a wounded German prisoner who sat beside British journalist Philip Gibbs. ‘We are lost,’ he told Gibbs. ‘My division is finished. My friends are all killed.’ When Gibbs asked the prisoner what his officers thought, the latter made a gesture of derision with a finger under his nose: ‘They think we are “kaput” too; they only look to the end of the war.’9
In late July, Hitler’s regiment moved to Le Cateau, on the Somme, the scene of nearly four years of bloodshed. Here, his lucky star was about to shine on an action that would greatly assist his later rise to power and cement his reputation as a war hero. Through exceptionally heavy fire, Hitler and another runner delivered messages at great risk to their lives. For this action, both were awarded the Iron Cross (First Class), dated 31 July 1918. Hitler’s citation read:
As a dispatch runner, [Hitler] has shown cold-blooded courage and exemplary boldness both in positional warfare and in the war of movement, and he has always volunteered to carry messages in the most difficult situations and at the risk of his life. Under conditions of great peril, when all the communication lines were cut, the untiring and fearless activity of Hitler made it possible for important messages to go through.10
Later in his career, Hitler’s political enemies would dismiss the award as the favouritism of top brass towards a ‘rear-area pig’, and more recently Thomas Weber’s book Hitler’s First War is dedicated to making the case that he was a rank coward.11 It is time to nail the controversy over whether Hitler was a brave soldier or not. The truth is muddied by Nazi propagandists’ later claims of the Führer’s superhuman battle exploits, of single-handedly capturing prisoners and leading attacks (he did neither).
His officers, however, gave the clearest assessment of Hitler’s combat performance and, even though some were biased by their later political beliefs, soldiers tend to stick to an unwritten code: speak honestly about each other or keep quiet. So Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Petz, who succeeded Engelhardt as commander of Hitler’s regiment until March 1916, would describe him in February 1922 as a soldier of ‘personal daring’ and ‘heedless courage’, whose ‘iron calm and cold-bloodedness never deserted him’: ‘When the situation was at its most dangerous, he always volunteered to make deliveries to the front and carried them out successfully.’12 More credibly, given his later falling out with the Führer, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, his regimental adjutant, would recall in 1945 that Hitler had been the ‘paradigm of the unknown soldier’.13
The fact is, Hitler ranked among those blazing exceptions, on both sides, of soldiers who simply never gave in, who relished war, combat, conquest, action. Such men saw war as the sublimation of the spirit, the highest and most noble sacrifice. In constant affirmation of that conviction, theirs was a form of reckless, insistent courage. Hitler was one such man; so too was the highly decorated future novelist Ernst Jünger. The comparison is intriguing: both men were wounded (Jünger several times; Hitler twice); both returned twice to battles in Flanders, one of the worst sectors of the Western Front; and both received the Iron Cross twice (First and Second Class). Jünger would also receive Pour le Mérite, the highest award to German soldiers of his rank. There the comparison ended: after the war, Jünger repeatedly refused to join or endorse the Nazi Party or put his name to any of their works, to Hitler’s and the Nazis’ fury.
To return to Hitler’s new decoration: few Iron Crosses went to ordinary soldiers and very rarely two. So Hitler either enjoyed the patronage of friends in high places (for which there is no evidence) or he’d acted with great courage.
The answer rested with the officer who had first recommended him for the award, First Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann. Gutmann was anything but a pen-pushing staffer prone to minting medals for his mates. He was a brave and highly decorated officer, with long experience of leading his unit in combat. In January 1916 Gutmann himself had received the Iron Cross (First Class) for, as stated in his citation, ‘energetic and fearless action’ and ‘exceptional discretion and great courage’ at the Battle of the Somme.14 For these and other distinctions, Gutmann’s fellow soldiers greatly admired him.
Gutmann had promised to recommend the Iron Cross (First Class) for Hitler and another dispatch runner if they succeeded in performing a very difficult mission, which they duly did. Yet, while brave, the action was not ‘strikingly exceptional’, and Gutmann spent several weeks persuading the regimental commander to confirm the award.15 Despite this, there can be little doubt that the decoration recognized Hitler’s courage.
There was another reason why Hitler’s second Iron Cross has drawn close scrutiny: Gutmann happened to be the List Regiment’s most highly ranked Jew. The episode shows just how far Hitler had yet to travel before becoming the author of Mein Kampf. Had he been a fully formed, vicious anti-Semite during his war years, as he later claimed, Gutmann would surely have known about it and would hardly have fought to secure such a high decoration for the regiment’s most notorious anti-Semite.
The truth is, at the time of the award Hitler displayed no outward antagonism towards Gutmann, either on account of his Jewishness or on any other ground, for the simple reason that Hitler was not then an outspoken hater of the Jews. It seems that whatever growing rancour he felt, he kept largely to himself.
The story forms a chilling footnote to his rise to power. As chancellor and Führer, Hitler claimed that he only ever wore his Iron Cross (Second Class), his greatest source of personal pride and political self-confidence; he mysteriously refused to wear the First Class decoration. He later explained, in a ‘Table Talk’ conversation on 15 May 1942, how he wore the lesser award ‘in defiance’ of the process that had also decorated the Jew: ‘During the First World War, I didn’t wear my Iron Cross First Class, because I saw how it was awarded. We had in my regiment a Jew named Guttmann [sic], who was the most terrible coward. He had the Iron Cross, First Class. It was revolting …’16
Hitler was, of course, lying: Gutmann had been an exceptionally brave soldier. Nor was Hitler consistent about why he wore the lesser award. Before he rose to power, he often proudly wore the Iron Cross (First Class) – for example, during the Munich Putsch – when Gutmann’s role was unknown and the higher award served Hitler’s political ambitions.
Nazi propagandists later erased Gutmann’s name from the record: a Jew could not be permitted such a pivotal role in the Führer’s ascendancy. Nor would Hitler’s citation remain intact. The Nazis twisted his war record into something superhuman: for example, among the ridiculous stories that, in the party’s retelling, appeared in Nazi-era school textbooks was one in which Hitler had single-handedly captured a whole group of British soldiers (or sometimes French poilus) at the point of his pistol.
In August the Canadians and Anzacs pulverized the German Army at Albert and Arras. Hitler’s Bavarian division took part in the defence, doggedly holding their ground under ferocious attack until forced to retire. They were eventually relieved and sent to the Belgian–Dutch border, where they rested and visited Ostend. Hitler accepted an invitation to take a tour in a U-boat. At the end of September, the Bavarians were ordered back into the fray, to experience some of the final fighting – at the Fifth Battle of Ypres. Private Ignaz Westenkirchner, Hitler’s fellow dispatch runner, described the events that led to Hitler’s last, terrible action of the war – one that would weigh so heavily on posterity:
For the third time we were back on the old ground, fought over in 1914. Now we had to defend it, inch by inch, all over again … On the night of 13–14 October 1918 the crashing and howling and roaring of the guns was accompanied by something still more deadly than usual … All of a sudden the bombardment slackened off and in place of shells came a queer pungent smell.
Word flew through the trenches that the English were attacking with chlorine gas. Hitherto the List hadn’t experienced this sort of gas, but now we got a thorough dose of it. As I stuck my head outside the dugout for a quick look round I found myself confronted by a hideous lot of bogies. In the place of men were creatures with visages of sheer horror. At that I shot into my own gas mask! For hours we lay there with this foul stuff poisoning every gulp of air outside.
Suddenly one of the chaps could stand it no longer. He sprang up, wrenched the mask from his head and face, gasping, only to encounter a waft of the white-green poison. It caught him by the throat and flung him back choking, gurgling, suffocating, dying …
The gas bombardment continued until dawn, interspersed with heavy explosive, Westenkirchner recalled:
We chaps just hugged the ravaged and shattered ground, lying, indistinguishable lumps of filth and earth ourselves, within the sheltering lip of the water-filled craters torn up by previous shelling. We were practically finished. Only a handful of us yet remained. Most of us lay there, black bundles, never to move again …
About seven in the morning Hitler was despatched with an order to our rear. Dropping with exhaustion, he staggered off … His eyes were burning, sore, and smarting – gas, he supposed, or dog weariness. Anyhow, they rapidly got worse. The pain was hideous, presently he could see nothing but a fog. Stumbling, and falling over and over again, he made what feeble progress he could. Every time he went down crash, it was harder and harder to drag him to his feet again. The last time, all his failing strength was exhausted in freeing himself from the mask … he could struggle up no more … his eyes were searing coals … Hitler collapsed. Goodness knows how long it was before the stretchers found him.17
That was the morning of 14 October, a day after Hitler returned from leave. The Listers had come under a sustained British attack near Comines, south-east of the Ypres salient. Hitler and two of his fellow dispatch runners were gassed with mustard, not the deadlier chlorine. His eyes were ‘burning’, he recalled in Mein Kampf, ‘… and at seven in the morning I stumbled and tottered back … taking with me my last report of the war. A few hours later my eyes were like glowing coals; it had grown dark around me.’18
He suffered from mild exposure to mustard gas, the symptoms of which can emerge several hours later: blistering of the skin and painful swelling and tearing of the eyes, accompanied by temporary blindness that can last up to ten days.19 In other words, Hitler knew he would soon succumb to the gas’s effects, so he used the few hours between being poisoned and the onset of the symptoms to fulfil his last duties.
According to a US intelligence report, Hitler was initially suspected of suffering from ‘war hysteria’ and transferred at first to a psychiatric ward.20 If so, the doctors had clearly misdiagnosed his condition. The vast majority of historians and contemporary records concur that Hitler was gassed; Hitler himself recounts it, with no reason to lie. Yet even if we accept that some kind of hysteria had simultaneously gripped him (the sources for which are ‘speculative’21), is it possible that a kind of psychosomatically induced blindness had bizarrely coincided with, or replaced, the symptoms of his exposure to mustard gas?
A crazier story concerns the treatment Hitler supposedly received for ‘hysteria-induced blindness’. According to a theory concocted by Rudolph Binion, the late ‘father of psycho-history’, Hitler underwent a profound personality change in hospital under the care of a surgeon called Professor Edmund Forster. Forster’s treatment reportedly involved placing the patient in a hypnotic trance from which Hitler apparently failed to emerge. The notion of a hypnotized Hitler, eternally spellbound, left to wander the earth to wreak havoc, has been safely dismissed.22 The truth is less colourful: Hitler suffered the classic symptoms of a mild attack of mustard gas. He was sent by hospital train to a clinic at Pasewalk, in Pomerania, north of Berlin. Highly agitated, if not hysterical, he nevertheless knew his condition was temporary.
Meanwhile, by October 1918 the Allies had forced the Germans back to where their Spring Offensive had begun. Later that month, British forces occupied the Belgian coast and seized the U-boat bases, fulfilling the original goal of Third Ypres the previous year. Blow by blow, the Germans were heaved out of France and Belgium. By November, with terrific losses to both sides, the Allies had regained all the ground lost to the Germans since the start of the year.
Ludendorff would never recover from the nightmare. The opening day of the Battle of Amiens, 8 August, he had labelled ‘the Black Day of the German Army’, but there had by now been many other black days in the ensuing Hundred Days, during which some of his finest units had been destroyed or utterly broken, the final humiliating blow that ended his war. The German forces surrendered en masse or were annihilated. The German Army had been soundly defeated where it hurt most: on the killing field.
On the home front, the socialists, communists and other opposition groups were leading an outcry against the war. In Berlin, left-wing politicians demanded that peace negotiations begin. They variously accused the military commanders of committing national suicide: some 880,000 German soldiers had been killed, wounded or captured between March and July 191823 and it would later emerge that 1,621,035 German soldiers had lost their lives that year.24 The protests were the cries of despair of a battered country.
By the hundredth day Haig’s men – the British and Dominion armies – had triumphed, capturing 188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns, just shy of the combined total of the much larger American and French armies. By this measure, the great Allied counter-offensive of 1918 ‘was, by far, the greatest military victory in British history’, concludes the historian Gary Sheffield.25
The crushing impact of the Allied conquests persuaded Hindenburg and Ludendorff to sue for peace. Germany signed the Armistice on 11 November 1918.
As he lay there in the darkness, temporarily blinded by gas, Hitler received the news. On 12 November the hospital’s chaplain gathered the patients together: yesterday, he said, Germany had surrendered.
The psychological blow intensified Hitler’s anguish. For him, it was a day of infamy. Germany had not been defeated! Germany would never surrender! The home front had killed the army! Such thoughts fed into a river of denial on the part of a humiliated people who refused to accept Germany’s military defeat and hungered for an alternative account that would restore national pride.
The great weight of these thoughts, the horror of defeat, the immense repercussions for his beloved Fatherland, racked the mind of the young lance corporal writhing on his bed at Pasewalk. Overwhelmed with grief, Hitler collapsed:
I … 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 … When in the long war years Death had snatched so many a dear comrade and friend from our ranks, it would have seemed to me almost a sin to complain – after all, were they not dying for Germany? And when at length the creeping gas in the last days of the dreadful struggle attacked me, too, and began to gnaw at my eyes, and beneath the fear of going blind forever, I nearly lost heart for a moment, the voice of my conscience thundered at me: Miserable wretch, are you going to cry when thousands are a hundred times worse off than you! But now I could not help it.26