The bandages on Hitler’s face were removed. Slowly, the gassed corporal’s eyes came blinking into the light. He looked out on a new world: a defeated Germany, a humiliated people, his beloved army surrendered and broken.
As he lay in his bunk in Pasewalk, in the winter of 1918, helpless and wretched, Hitler received further news: of the army’s mass capitulation, the flight of the Kaiser and a Marxist revolution at home. It disgusted him. He shook with rage. He refused to accept defeat. He swore bloody revenge.
Later, Hitler would portray that moment in Pasewalk hospital as a terrible awakening, in which his entire life coalesced around a single, urgent idea: to avenge the German Army against its enemies at home, the ‘November Criminals’, as they became known – chiefly communists, socialists and Jews – whom he blamed for Germany’s defeat. From the depths of his being he believed in the idea of a monstrous and treacherous conspiracy, the famous ‘stab in the back’ of the German Army. The phrase, first used by the British general Sir Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin in autumn 1919, was seized upon by Ludendorff when he first heard it at the time.1 A few years later, Hitler’s party would adopt it as one of their defining political motifs.
Winston Churchill did much to cement Hitler’s ‘Pasewalk moment’. In the first volume of his history of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm, the British leader anchors Hitler’s transformation from ‘little soldier’ into political hater to the bedridden recovery of his eyesight:
As he lay sightless and helpless … his own personal failure seemed merged in the disaster of the whole German people. The shock of defeat, the collapse of law and order, the triumph of the French, caused this convalescent regimental orderly an agony which consumed his being, and generated those portentous and measureless forces of the spirit which may spell the rescue or the doom of mankind. The downfall of Germany seemed to him inexplicable by ordinary processes. Somewhere there had been a gigantic and monstrous betrayal. Lonely and pent within himself, the little soldier pondered and speculated upon the possible causes of the catastrophe, guided only by his narrow personal experiences. He had mingled in Vienna with extreme German Nationalist groups, and here he had heard stories of sinister, undermining activities of another race, foes and exploiters of the Nordic world – the Jews. His patriotic anger fused with his envy of the rich and successful into one overpowering hate.2
In Mein Kampf, Hitler would portray Pasewalk as a religious experience, in which divine intervention chose him as the saviour of the German people, destined to lead the nation, like Rienzi, out of the darkness and into the light. A new life danced before his sightless eyes, and in the swirling shadows he felt the first, sharp impulse to enter politics – or so he later claimed.
In a passage of rising despair and blistering hatred, Hitler relived his blinded days as a tremendous epiphany, in which he rises as the avenger of Germany, the Übermensch incarnate. Note the repeated reference to his war experiences as the driving factor – chiefly the battles at Ypres in 1914 and the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ at Langemarck:
And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations … in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty; and in vain the death of two millions …
Would not the graves of all the hundreds of thousands open … and send the silent mud- and blood-covered heroes back as spirits of vengeance to the homeland which had cheated them with such mockery of the highest sacrifice which a man can make to his people in the world?
Had they died for this, the soldiers of August and September, 1914? Was it for this that in the Autumn of the same year the volunteer regiments marched after their old comrades? Was it for this that these boys of seventeen sank into the earth of Flanders? Was this the meaning of the sacrifice which the German mother made to the fatherland when with sore heart she let her best-loved boys march off, never to be seen again? Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland? …
Miserable and degenerate criminals!
The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery?
The following terrible days [after Germany’s surrender] and even worse nights I knew all was lost. Only fools, liars, and criminals could hope in the mercy of the enemy. In those nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.
In the days that followed, my own Fate became known to me … Kaiser William II was the first German Emperor to hold out a conciliatory hand to the leaders of Marxism, without suspecting that scoundrels have no honor. While they still held the imperial hand in theirs, their other hand was reaching for the dagger.
There is no making pacts with the Jews; there can only be the hard: ‘either-or’.
I, for my part, decided to go into politics.3
No doubt Hitler sincerely felt the humiliation of defeat and rage on behalf of his fellow men expressed here. Yet the rest of this passage from Mein Kampf, written six years after the events at Pasewalk, is a gross distortion to further his political ends. In 1918 he had not resolved on political action or vengeance; he was a wounded soldier with no future. In Mein Kampf he retroactively infused his convalescence with transformative power, casting a magician’s wand over the genesis of ‘the Führer’. This is Hitler the politician projecting back on to his bedridden blindness a moment of ‘self-realization’ that fed his growing legend and the Nazis’ political ambitions. It is the voice, as we shall see, of the self-aggrandizing leader of the failed Munich coup, imprisoned for ‘treason’ and desperately trying to rebuild his political career.
The coincidence of his sightlessness at the instant of Germany’s defeat was, as Kershaw writes, ‘a crucial step on the way to Hitler’s rationalization of his prejudices’.4 More than that, Hitler would later characterize the Nazi Party’s struggle for power as a response to the ‘revelations’ that came to him in Pasewalk – many of which were yet to emerge. In Mein Kampf, in short, he retrospectively dreamed up a ‘messiah’ moment in order to unify them.
The timing of Hitler’s ‘conversion’ to a political revolution governed by brutal anti-Semitism may for ever baffle the world, but Pasewalk was not it. A few weeks on an army bunk did not create ‘the Führer’, whatever myths Hitler and the Nazi legend-factory would like us to think. Germany’s newly minted leader did not step out of a gaseous haze to rule the world. The Führer emerged incrementally, as we shall see, from a series of bumbling failures, stunning successes and the application of political skills he had not yet realized he possessed.
That’s not to deny that something happened to Hitler in the hospital at Pasewalk: news of Germany’s defeat focused his memory on thousands of fellow soldiers killed and wounded – at Ypres and the Somme and other battles. His rage hurtled around for the names of those responsible, crying out for vengeance on an as yet undefined group of enemies – those who had surrendered the Fatherland.
Discharged from hospital on 21 November 1918, Hitler returned to Munich via a month in Traunstein, in south-eastern Bavaria, where he served as a guard in a prison camp. Contrary to his sickbed ‘conversion’ to politics, he did not seek a political role or even consider politics a viable career at the time, and would not do so for more than a year. Instead, he remained in the army, partly for financial reasons. He joined a replacement battalion, with the hope of staying in the forces as long as possible. There he met several old comrades, some of whom would become prominent Nazis.
He came home to a broken society, wrenched apart by war and destitution: soldiers versus civilians; the extreme right versus the extreme left; militias prowling the streets; and a virulent anti-Semitism rife in the cities. On 7 November, Kaiser Wilhelm had fled into exile in Holland, ending 700 years of Hohenzollern rule; and in Bavaria King Ludwig III had been forced to abdicate. The next day, the Marxist wing of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), led by the journalist Kurt Eisner, had stormed the military garrisons in Munich and seized power, declaring Bavaria a ‘free state’ and a republic.
Before plunging into Bavarian politics and Hitler’s place in it, let’s briefly step back and survey the state of the post-war Reich as a whole. Germany was a fraught land, in utter political, economic and social turmoil. We’ve already seen the impact of the war on the food supply and economy. Now the apparatus and symbols of the German state were to crumble and fall: the flag and coat of arms were removed and replaced; the Imperial Army, Navy and Air Force dissolved after the sailors’ mutiny at Kiel Barracks in late October and early November; and the imperial government collapsed.
The so-called November Revolution of 1918 convulsed the land, in which two parties of the newly empowered left vied for supremacy: the hard-line Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or USPD), who wanted a Soviet-style command economy; and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), also known as the Majority SPD (Mehrheits-SPD, or MSPD), committed to a parliamentary democracy.
On 9 November 1918 a leading figure in the MSPD, Philipp Scheidemann, declared the formation of the ‘German Republic’ at the Reichstag building in Berlin, but within hours his moment of glory was convulsed by the rival proclamation of a ‘Free Socialist Republic’ at the Berlin Stadtschloss (City Palace) by Karl Liebknecht, co-leader with Rosa Luxemburg of the communist Spartakusbund (Spartacist League), which amounted to the few hundred supporters of the Russian Revolution who had allied themselves with the USPD in 1917.
In the wings of this theatre of chaos lurked the moderate Friedrich Ebert, leader of the MSPD, who, furious at Scheidemann’s peremptory declaration of power in the name of the party he (Ebert) led, insisted that the future of the country be decided by a national assembly, which, if the people so desired, might even restore another monarch. The Kaiser would abdicate until 28 November 1918, leaving the country without a head of state.
In the event, Ebert was compelled to take power at the head of a government called the Council of the People’s Deputies (Rat der Volksbeauftragten), in which the MSPD was forced to share power with their Spartacist and independent enemies on the hard left, and to absorb hundreds of Soviet-style workers’ and soldiers’ councils set up during the revolution to pursue socialism and dismantle the old regime.
Ebert did so in an atmosphere of extreme peril, brutally expressed in the assassination of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, effectively on his orders, by the Freikorps – the new national paramilitary, mainly comprising hardened war veterans – which Ebert deployed to destroy the communist revolution. Captured in Berlin on 15 January 1919 by the Rifle Division of the Freikorps Cavalry Guards, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were interrogated under torture and separately shot. Luxemburg’s body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal.
The revolutionary tremors from Berlin swiftly reached other German cities. In Munich, having overthrown the Bavarian king, Kurt Eisner became the first republican premier of the socialist state of Bavaria. By Bolshevik standards, Eisner’s would be a moderate ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. He offered liberal reforms, such as an eight-hour working day. Nor was it initially violent: Bavaria’s Marxist-backed ‘revolution’ rose against a backdrop of exuberant parties, hysteria, street dancing, sexual indulgence – all the bohemian pleasures that would be beloved of post-war German society and loathed by the abstinent war veteran and social conservative Adolf Hitler. But Eisner’s revolution was short-lived. A German Jew, he had few friends and many violent enemies. On 23 November he made the error of admitting German war guilt, leaking evidence of Germany’s hand in Austria–Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia, proving, he believed, that ‘a small horde of mad Prussian military’ men in alliance with industrialists, capitalists, politicians and princes had started the war.5
From that moment, in the eyes of the German patriots on the right, Eisner was a marked man and a ‘traitor’ to Germany. He was murdered on 21 February 1919 by a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant and German nationalist, Count Anton Arco auf Valley, who defended his actions thus: ‘Eisner is a Bolshevist and a Jew. He’s not German … He is a traitor to the country.’6 The murder inflamed the left: the soldiers who supported the revolution rallied around the creation of a Bavarian soviet (or council), ruled by a Soviet-style provisional government.
The spectre of a Russian-style takeover of Bavaria briefly horrified the conservative rump and sent shockwaves back to Berlin, from where the Council of Deputies dispatched immediate funds to help moderate parties resist the communist uprising that followed Eisner’s murder. The mainstream Catholic Bavarian People’s Party and a smattering of extreme right-wing groups moved to crush the Marxist bogeyman that had briefly risen to seize control of the state.
In ‘liberating’ Munich from the Marxists, the Bavarian authorities also relied largely on the Freikorps. If initially at the disposal of leaders on both left and right, the Freikorps rapidly acquired a reputation for hard-right vigilantism under such early commanders as Ernst Röhm, soon to lead the Sturmabteilung (SA) or Brownshirts, Hitler’s private army. While destroying Bavaria’s brief communist government, the Freikorps resorted to savage overkill – revenge for the left’s murder of ten hostages (including several members of the extreme right-wing Thule Society) on 30 April 1919. In the aftermath, some 600 left-wing leaders (and many ordinary civilians) were rounded up and slaughtered in a frenzy of domestic bloodletting unprecedented in modern German history.
Hitler did not participate in the crushing of the Bavarian Revolution. In the soldiers’ barracks, he spent much of his time subjecting his fellow veterans to angry, indiscriminate tirades against a gallery of ‘shirkers’ and cowards whom he listed, in no precise order of villainy: parliamentarians, socialists, Jews, Slavs, Catholics, Marxists, internationalists, capitalists. He tossed them all into the pot marked ‘November Criminals’.
He blamed the left-wing press and socialist leaders for inciting strikes at munitions plants throughout Germany, which he later branded an ‘enormous betrayal of the country’. He blamed capitalists for parasitically preying on the war effort. If he could be war minister for a day, ‘within 24 hours the criminals would be put up against the wall’.7 In this vein, in early 1919, Hitler was merely another angry young veteran, jobless, rootless, venting his fury and frustration at indistinct targets.
At the time, in the minds of a rising minority of extremists, the labels ‘socialist’ and ‘Marxist’ tended to be synonymous with ‘Jew’, simply because Jews had risen to the leadership of the left. Both Kurt Eisner and Rosa Luxemburg had been Jewish Marxist leaders who had strongly opposed the war and led the revolution, making them among the most hated figures in the sights of the far right. Hitler passes over Eisner as ‘an international Jew’ and doesn’t even mention Luxemburg in Mein Kampf, an extraordinary omission given their prominence in the revolution and the hatred they engendered on the right.
Yet Hitler’s initial targets were not Jewish, partly because the politicians who settled the Armistice and now controlled what was to become (for him) the hated Weimar Republic were not Jewish. The people he most detested at the time, as he identified in Mein Kampf, were non-Jews at the less radical end of the social democratic movement: Ebert, for example, who in February 1919 became president of the Weimar Republic and who, in fact, bought into the ‘stab-in-the-back’ theory when it was politically expedient to do so, telling homecoming veterans ‘no enemy has vanquished you’; Scheidemann, from February 1919 chancellor of the new republic; and Emil Barth, an independent Social Democrat and union leader, who played a key part in the German Revolution. All these men were ‘ripe for hanging’, Hitler would later say: ‘I hated the whole gang of miserable party scoundrels and betrayers of the people in the extreme … this whole gang was not really concerned with the welfare of the nation, but with filling empty pockets. For this they were ready to sacrifice the whole nation, and if necessary to let Germany be destroyed.’8
Also high on Hitler’s black list of ‘November Criminals’ were prominent Catholics such as Matthias Erzberger, leader of the moderate Catholic Centre Party, who had accused the German High Command on 6 July of leading Germany to disaster. Erzberger and Scheidemann had committed the unforgivable crime, in Hitler’s mind, of driving a ‘peace initiative’ of 18 July 1918, which received majority support from Parliament and most German people. Hitler and extreme right-wing cells would brand Erzberger a traitor for signing the Armistice of 11 November. He died of an assassin’s bullet on 26 August 1921 while out walking in the Black Forest.
Hitler’s own ‘conversion’ to politics was a messy blend of opportunism, hypocrisy, skill and sheer desperation. In early 1919, he pursued a course in stark contrast to his later account in Mein Kampf. Elected his battalion’s representative on a ‘Soldiers’ Council’, a kind of military-style soviet that had backed the revolution, his first political role was to speak on behalf of soldiers on a socialist committee.
So despite all his later bluster against the SPD and the Marxists, at the time Hitler declined to join the Freikorps, the militia that set forth to destroy them. Nor did he publicly oppose those he later damned in Mein Kampf. His role on the Soldiers’ Council meant he briefly swam with the anti-war left, not against them. His flirtation with the revolution even extended to walking behind the coffin of Eisner, the assassinated Jewish revolutionary. Hitler would excise these episodes from his autobiography, of course, because they tainted the purity of the Nazi legend and gave the lie to his claim that he became a violent anti-Semite in Vienna or Pasewalk.
That Hitler briefly cosied up to revolutionary communists in 1919 should not baffle us. We demand linear correctness in the lives of politicians and leaders even as we ourselves act in inconsistent or contrarian ways. At the time, Hitler wanted a job, influence and a voice. His election to the Soldiers’ Council gave him all three. His allegiances at the start of his political ‘career’ – he had not yet dignified it as such – were confused and chaotic, like those of any political neophyte jostling to find a home in the lower circles of power.
In this sense, Hitler was putting a toe in the water, experimenting. He was a pure political animal, willing to wear whichever suit fitted him best. ‘He was like a stray dog looking for a master,’ noted Captain Karl Mayr, the closest thing Hitler had to a mentor at the time, ‘ready to throw in his lot with anyone who would show him kindness.’9
And he soon changed his spots. On 9 May 1919, after the Bavarian Soviet fell, he suddenly joined the counter-revolutionary extreme right, chiefly because they offered him a home. Upon hearing Hitler speak to veterans, in his position on the Soldiers’ Council of the 1st Demobilization Company, to which he’d been re-elected on 15 April, Captain Mayr sensed the young man’s true vocation and set about inducting him into politics – the politics of the far right. At the time Mayr was an intelligence officer in the Reichswehr, the newly formed and much reduced Weimar Army, a mob of unruly soldiers and a sad shadow of Germany’s former military strength. Part of Mayr’s job was to weed out Bolshevik sympathies in the forces, and he decided to use Hitler as a kind of ‘sniffer dog’. Hitler brought two things to the job: he had been involved in the soldiers’ soviets and knew their members; and he had the hunger of the turncoat, a willingness to change his colours to suit his master. Like any political novice looking for a break, a particle of power, he would take any offer going. He was still a political nobody, with nothing to lose. Later, when his flirtation with communists and changing loyalties would have been seen as a blot on his record, he simply glossed over or erased it from Mein Kampf – written when he had a lot to lose.