With that clarity of vision that only hindsight confers, we see all the ingredients of the great tragedy coming together. This highly disciplined nation—by 1900 the greatest industrial power in Europe— was now disintegrating.
The Ebert government, forced to obey the orders of the conquerors, was described throughout the land as a bunch of treacherous collaborators. The bitter revolutionary violence of the Left clashed with the organized violence of the paramilitary Freikorps. Instability and the threat of communism frightened investors, kept factories idle and men unemployed. Violence in the streets made the middle classes search for new political solutions. And the men of the General Staff bided their time and looked for new allies.
Into this unstable mixture one more ingredient had still to be stirred. A blinded Austrian corporal who spent the Armistice in a military hospital at Pasewalk, Pomerania, heard the news of final defeat and wept for the first time since he had stood at his mother’s grave. Later Adolf Hitler was to say that this was the moment when he decided to enter politics.
Descended from a family of Austrian peasants, Adolfs father had distinguished himself by becoming a uniformed customs official. Adolf was the third child of his fifty-year-old father’s third marriage. He was born on 20 April 1889 in a Gasthof, or tavern, in Braunau am Inn, an Austrian border town, 31 miles north of Salzburg.
At Linz High School his academic record was poor. Up until his final days in the Chancellery bunker. Hitler continued to complain of his early teachers and the way they tried to crush his individuality and mold his thinking. One teacher remembered him as a gifted and intelligent pupil who lacked industry. Perhaps it was the hope of escaping school discipline that helped form his ambition to be an artist or architect. Those ambitions were dashed when the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts rejected his entrance application.
Hitler’s homeland was not the Austria of today but Austria-Hungary, a nation larger than Germany, in which Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Poles, and Ukrainians clamored and agitated for more power. It was Hitler’s dislike of these “foreigners”—and perhaps his rejection by the Vienna Academy—that prompted him to cross the border to Munich, in Germany, rather than be drafted into the Austrian Army.
To prevent the Austrians finding him. Hitler registered with the German police in Munich as a “stateless person.” But eventually the Austrian authorities tracked him down. On 18 January 1914 a Munich police official arrested him and took him to the Austrian Consulate. From there he was sent to Salzburg, in Austria, to enter the army, but military doctors rejected him as too weak and unfit even for service with an auxiliary unit.1 Hitler went back to Munich.
In these months, immediately prior to the outbreak of the First World War, Hitler lived in Munich’s bohemian world. He sold his sketches and paintings, mixed with intellectuals and crackpots, and sometimes spent a night in a doss house, but he was by no means penniless, as his tax records reveal. His income has been described as equal to that of a provincial lawyer.
War for Germany began on 1 August and Hitler was swept along in the hysteria that all Europe shared. Bavaria was still a kingdom within the German Empire. By 3 August, Hitler had written to the King of Bavaria requesting permission for himself, an Austrian, to join the Bavarian Army. He was assigned to the List Regiment. It took its name from its first commander and was composed mostly of volunteers, many of them students and intellectuals.
After only ten weeks’ training the regiment was put into the ferocious first battle of Ypres and suffered terrible casualties. By December J914 Hitler had been awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class. Later he got a regimental award for courage in the face of the enemy, and in August 1918 he was awarded the Iron Cross, 1 st Class, a medal seldom given to men below officer rank.
Corporal—or more precisely. Private First Class—Hitler was employed as a runner, taking messages from regimental HQ to frontline positions. It was a dangerous job. Other soldiers believed Hitler enjoyed a charmed life. It was a belief many shared after the Fiihrer had survived the attempts on his life that were to come.
Hitler kept apart from his fellows but was not unpopular. He read books whenever the circumstances permitted and claimed to have carried a volume of Schopenhauer during his front-line service.
Temporarily blinded, by a British gas attack south of Ypres in October 1918, Hitler ended the war in the Pasewalk military hospital.
By the time he got back to Munich the Kingdom of Bavaria was no more. This dynasty that had survived 1,000 years was toppled by the theater critic of the Muncher Post, who proclaimed in its place a people’s state. This new ruler was assassinated and soon a “soviet republic” emerged, dominated by a handful of hard-boiled revolutionaries who kept control by means of brutal repression. This shortlived period of extreme Left power became more and more unpopular, so that when the Freikorps, together with local army units, gained power by force of arms, most Bavarians welcomed the change. There remained a legacy of anti-Communist feeling that would provide Hitler and the Nazis with sympathizers in the time to come.
But at this time Hitler, thirty years old, was uncommonly apolitical. In Munich he had willingly served the short-lived Communist military command and even wore a red band on his arm. When the army and the Freikorps overthrew the Communists in May 1919, Hitler was equally cooperative. He willingly gave evidence against them before the board of inquiry that the victorious army held. So well did he do this that the army employed him as a low-grade political agent. He was recruited as part of a scheme to prevent political agitators infiltrating the Reichsheer (the 100,000-man army that Germany was permitted under the terms of the Versailles Treaty signed in June 1919).2
Hitler and his fellow agents were given a short indoctrination course at Munich University. Lectures in political theory, banking, economics, and other subjects gave Hitler a chance to formulate his own ideas. Until now his opinions had been an incoherent mixture of hatred of Jews, Communists, and foreigners; pride and respect for the German Army; and lofty ideas about the role of the artist in society. Now he was able to dress up his bigotry in the jargon of the college lecturer, and a natural orator emerged. So obvious was his skill at speechmaking that the army assigned him to talk to returning soldiers—mostly ex-prisoners of war—about the dangers of communism, as well as to report on local political groups.
One such group was the German Workers’ Party. It had been formed by men of the local railway workshops. It was typical of many such organizations in that it was more a drinking club than a political movement. Like all secret societies it had a generous measure of mysticism and folklore and there was much talk about the purity of the German blood. Its members grumbled to each other about the
Jews, about big business, about Communist atrocities, the cost of living, and the moral decline of the country. The members wanted to be a part of a classless society (which perhaps meant only that they aspired to be accepted in middle-class circles) and believed in a vague sort of socialism but could not accept the sort of Russian-led internationalism that the Left wanted. It was a common enough point of view, and it was the reconciliation of nationalism with Socialism that was later to make the Nazi (National Socialist German Workers’) Party so appealing to German voters.
After some hesitation. Hitler became member No. 555 and had no difficulty in becoming committee member No. 7 immediately. He was put in charge of propaganda and recruiting. Using the typewriter provided at his barracks, he gave his new task all of his immense energies and dedication. He wrote hundreds of letters, reactivated old memberships, and made personal approaches to likely recruits. None of his fellow members had either time or inclination for such feverish activity. But his role of political spy gave Hitler almost unlimited time to work for the German Workers’ Party. It was this, as much as his ideas and energy, that enabled him to become the most dynamic member of one of the very organizations he was being paid to spy on.
Not only was Hitler the organizer of the weekly meetings, which soon were drawing crowds of some 3,000, but more often than not the principal speaker too.
It was through the German Workers’ Party that Hitler came to meet Dietrich Eckart, a wealthy man who was to have an immense effect upon his life. Much older than Hitler, he was a mediocre poet, dramatist, and journalist. Obsessed with an all-pervading hatred of Jews, Eckart saw in Hitler a man who could spread his perverted philosophy. Hitler was exactly right for the task. A fighting man and medal winner, he did not have the speech or the appearance of an officer. On the contrary. Hitler’s accent was that of the working-class ex-soldier, not frightened to voice the crowd’s bigotry, fears, and hatreds. Eckart provided coaching and encouragement, influencing Hitler’s reading and improving his diction. Then he used the wide circle of people he had met as a journalist to publicize Hitler and through him the Party and its need for funds. It was Eckart (together with Ernst Rohm) who in December 1920 raised the money to buy a newspaper—the Volkische Beobachter—for the Party. And it was Eckart who suggested “Germany Awake!” as the Party slogan.
Eckart also introduced Hitler to the Obersalzberg in the Bavarian Alps, where Hitler went for physical and spiritual refreshment and eventually built his magnificent villa at Berchtesgaden.
In order to appeal both to the Germans who voted Nationalist and those who voted Socialist (by far the majority), the German Workers’ Party was, in that same year, renamed Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party). Conveniently, this could be shortened to Nazi (from NAtional and soZIalist).
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