(40) HITLER AND WORLD WAR I

On May 25, 1913, Adolf Hitler arrived in Munich, Germany, intending to study art and architecture . Though he had failed twice to be accepted as a student at Vienna’s most prestigious fine arts academy, he still had aspirations to be an artist. At 24, and in another country, he was just as determined to make his living as a painter. However, Hitler’s dream was never realized, and when he was not “peddling his pictures door to door and in beer halls”, he was reinventing himself as a Pan-German idealist. Hitler’s admiration for Prussia and the new Germany was fueled and complicated not only by their 1871 defeat of France, Europe’s strongest military power, but by an enthusiastic misinterpretation of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the science of Charles Darwin. Nietzsche’s philosophy had been popularized and then reduced as two tenets: Conflict is the source of human progress, and great men are not bound by conventional ideas of good and evil. Darwin’s science, undoubtedly drawn from the Spencerian eugenics of late-Victorian England, rather than from Darwin, held that humanity could be classified into superior and inferior types. The superior or Herrenmenschen (Master Race) were represented by the tall, blonde, blue-eyed Prussians who Hitler would later imagine as both his army and his Reich. Hitler mistakenly believed the Prussians were “Aryans.” Aryans, however, were an ancient race that lived in what is now Iran and Pakistan, not the Nordic types Hitler had romanticized them to be. Thus, Hitler’s re-invention of self was more a manifestation of existing “right-wing” radical ideas than anything original. As Ian Westwell suggests in In the Path of Hitler’s Third Reich, Hitler’s unique talent was for “making the lie both popular and credible”. And only in a “new” Germany could Hitler develop such a talent and construct such a persona. Where Austria had turned its back to Hitler the artist, Germany would welcome the politician.

Though Hitler was initially judged to be physically unfit for the military, he volunteered for the German army soon after World War I began. From the moment he had received the news of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s and his wife’s assassination by a Serb terrorist, he was a sworn enemy of “all things Slavic” and was fully committed to the war effort. His personal petition to join the army, sent directly to Ludwig III of Bavaria, succeeded, and after several departmental transfers, he was given a permanent position in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. His role in the reserve would provide him with the financial stability he had been missing, as well as a sense of purpose. Hitler proved to be a good soldier.

On October 7, 1914, Hitler and his regiment were ushered into Ludwig’s own elite barracks and asked to swear allegiance to the king, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. The next morning, the regiment marched out of Munich to Camp Lechfeld some forty miles to the west.

Hitler’s first days at Lechfeld were the most difficult of his life. His regiment engaged in “lengthy practice sessions” and extra night marches involving brigade maneuvers so that they could successfully be united with another regiment and form the 12th Brigade. This arduous introduction to the military would have certainly discouraged many new soldiers, yet Hitler was “terribly happy”. He would later write, “I sank down upon my knees and thanked heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favor of having been permitted to live at such a time.”

Hitler served as a company runner on the Western Front throughout the war, taking messages back and forth from the command staff in the rear to the fighting units near the battlefield. Generally, the life expectancy for a runner was only a month, but Hitler ran up and down the trenches for years without so much as a scratch. When there were lulls in the slaughter, he returned to painting. His first battle experience was near Ypres, Belgium, where ninety percent of the 16th Regiment was killed, including the regimental commander and his deputy. By mid-November there remained only thirty officers and less than seven hundred men. The unsuccessful attempts to take Ypres ended the German offensive, and the battle degenerated into static trench warfare. At the Battle of Somme, the British used little Welsh coal miners to crawl under the German lines. In one effort they successfully planted the largest bomb of its time wounding hundreds of Germans. Hitler was among the casualties after a shell exploded sending shrapnel splinters into his thigh. As he was carried away, the British advanced smartly across open land toward the dazed Germans. The British lost 15,000 troops within four hours and gained only one hundred yards.

Unlike his fellow soldiers, Hitler never complained about bad food or the horrible living conditions and preferred to talk about art and history than to talk about women. His comrades regarded him as too eager to please his superiors, but generally a brave, likable loner, who typically escaped injury. There were, however, less popular moments of aloofness, restlessness, and brooding that manifested in strange activities such as wandering around late at night shooting rats. Although he rose only to the rank of corporal, he was awarded two Iron Crosses, one of them the Iron Cross First Class which was usually given only to officers.

Hitler’s dedication and heroics while undertaking dangerous daily missions could not be ignored. Still, with all his good fortune, Hitler’s superiors believed he lacked leadership qualities; his odd personality and unkempt military appearance kept him from becoming a sergeant.

After his release from the hospital, Hitler had the opportunity to spend a weekend in Berlin. There, much to his dismay, he found conditions deplorable; amid the hunger and misery was a movement for peace that Hitler found intolerable. He later recorded in Mein Kampf (My Struggle) that from what he witnessed in Berlin, and then two months later in Munich, it was clear the Jews were responsible for the decline in morale and enthusiasm. “Nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk,” he noted. “I was amazed at this plethora of warriors from the chosen people and could not help but compare them with their rare representatives at the front.” His comrades at the front were surprised to hear Hitler speak this way; until then, he had sounded no more anti-Semitic than the next soldier.

Hitler became disgusted with Munich and dissatisfied with his replacement battalion. When he finally returned to the the 16th Regiment, he was thankful to be back where he felt he belonged. That summer the regiment returned to Belgium for the third battle for Ypres. At one point they were bombarded for ten days and nights. All the while there were planes overhead and enemy soldiers digging tunnels from beneath. The constant threat of poisonous gas often required the men to wear gas masks for twenty-four hours at a time. By August 16 the Regiment was sent to Alsace for rest, and for the remainder of the year Hitler saw little action.

Conditions along the western front had become so poor that the troops, much like the civilians at home, were forced to eat cats and dogs. When he could not get his hands on any of the large crates of zwieback and honey or marmalade scattered throughout the front, he would opt for cats over dogs. Strikes erupted in Vienna and Budapest due to the starving conditions, as well as Germany’s inadequate attempt at peace with the Bolshevik government in Russia.

When the war ended with Germany’s defeat in 1918, Hitler lay in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by poison gas, more humiliated and devastated by his country’s loss than by his own personal injuries. The convalescence was an important moment in Hitler’s self-affirmation, and some time during his stay he “resolved to become a politician.” The loss of sight led to frequent episodes of hysteria; alone in a world of darkness, his bitterness towards the enemy and the cowards who had lost the war transformed into an intense sense of brotherhood for his new country. He would, in fact, “hear voices and see a vision.” Those long years of “dehumanizing” trench warfare fed into Hitler’s growing megalomania and engendered in him, as in so
many other German patriots,

an abiding hatred of the pacifists and slackers back home who were
“stabbing the Fatherland in the back.” He and those like him burned
with a zeal to avenge such treachery, and out of all this would come
the politics of the future. . . . Having fought for Germany, he was truly German;and having conducted himself honorably under duress, he
had pride in his manhood. He had entered the army a raw youth,
remarkably underdeveloped for all his twenty-four years and hardships
in Vienna; now he was a man, ready to take a man’s place in the world.

Indeed, Hitler’s naive embrace of the “heroism of the warrior” and the “technological gimmick” afforded no room for defeat, especially a defeat — as Hitler and others saw it — due to the “collapse of political will . . . aided . . . by Jewish financiers, left-wing revolutionaries, and traitors.” Ultimately, he believed Germany lost the war because its leaders had not been harsh enough with the enemy and its own people. After all, the Marxists and Jews on the inside were as threatening as the allies on the outside. By the time Hitler left the hospital he was determined to eradicate both problems.

I’m continually amazed by the number of vicious mentally ill morons who have ascended to the throne by promoting false and unfortunate myths. Where is the benevolent God when we need him?