Adolf Hitler E-Book

Clemens von Lengsfeld

• Herausgeber: GRIOT HÖRBUCH
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: People, Myths, Power
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 331

Beschreibung

Clemens von Lengsfeld is the pseudonym of the artist Irene von Neuendorff. Born 1959, she studied art at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe under professors Rainer Küchenmeister, Albrecht von Hancke and Peter Dreher. She also concluded her degree in German Studies and History at the University of Karlsruhe. In 1985 she received a bursary enabling her to continue her studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts Supérieure, Paris. Irene von Neuendorff comes from a family in which not only perpetrators but also victims occur. Her grandfather on her father’s side, from an East Prussian aristocratic family, was a high ranking officer in a position of responsibility. Her grandfather on her mother’s side was a prisoner in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp due to his Jewish origins until it was liberated. Ms von Neuendorff has been occupied with National Socialism for more than twenty years and is thus dealing with the dichotomy in her own origins. From this examination there has also resulted a series of outsize portraits of Adolf Hitler, which show him in all possible facets, poses and disguises. Hitler is never ostensibly identifiable as a monster, mass murderer or madman. On the contrary, von Neuendorff vehemently carries on his de-mythisation and makes him into a friendly honest citizen. Softly and becomingly the materials cling to his body. A blossom background of soft pink ironically detracts from the well-known and long hackneyed picture and shows him, amongst other things, as a lascivious erotic “ladies’ man”, which Hitler was by the way. She always shows his harmlessness turned to the outside, with which he tendered to those without direction, the enraged and the despondent. Von Neuendorff also lets her Hitler express his unabashed directness, with which he ridiculed representatives of the government as “betrayers of the nation”, the parliament as a “talking shop” or the press as “Jew press” and “hacks”, in a superior pose. And yet, through the ironic refraction he is more the seduced than seducer – a reflection of the interests, belief systems and deep-seated anxieties and emotions of the German people. The connection to current affairs is evident. Evil only betrays itself through a menetekel, which von Neuendorff draws on her flowery wallpaper: a skull – symbol for the death of millions, the deaths on the battlefields and the organised mass murder in the extermination camps. From this original preoccupation with Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “Banality of Evil” ultimately a book came into being based on extensive research, and which is now available for the first time as an audio book and e-

Leseprobe

ADOLF HITLER (1889-1945)

Biography

by Clemens von Lengsfeld

Translated by Maureen Millington-Brodie

Impressum

Volume 7 and 8 from the People, Myths, Power series

Copyright: © 1st edition 2016 Griot Hörbuch Verlag GmbH, Stuttgart

Cover design Diana Enoiu, Martin Lohr

Proofreading and academic consultant: Dr. Mario Faust-Scalisi

Picture editing and further proofreading: Elke Bader

Layout and typesetting e-book: Swift Prosys Pvt Ltd

Chennai, India

Cover picture: Irene von Neuendorff: Adolf Hitler. Portrait,

Painting 1999. Oil on canvas (120 x 90 cm).

All further illustrations with the kind permission of akg images Berlin. www.akg-images.de

More about our audio books, books, speakers and authors at www.griot-verlag.de

This work in all its parts is protected by copyright. The reproduction, even of individual parts, is prohibited. The copyright and all further rights remain the property of the author as well as the publisher. Translation, storage, duplication and circulation, including transfer to electronic data carriers such as CD-ROM, photo disc etc., as well as storage on electronic media such as on-screen text, internet etc. is not permitted without the prior written consent of the publisher. Furthermore, it is not permitted to scan illustrations of this e-book, into PCDDs or onto CDs or alter them on PCs/Computers or to manipulate them singly or together with other images.

ISBN Mobi-Pocket (without audio) 978-3-959980-21-0

Impressum

Provincial childhood

Black pedagogy

Diversions, entanglements and laziness

Bohemian

Glory in victory and catastrophe

Town of the movement

Front-line hogs and base wallahs

The Versailles treaty

Pact and putsch: in November I was a red but now it’s January

The muffled furore

The informant

The drummer

NSDAP

Weeping clown

Putsch

Mein Kampf

Weimar Republic

The puppet masters

The sjambok

30 January 1933…

The Reichstag fire

Adulation and betrayal

The wolf in the Kroll Opera House

The profiteers

Germany’s intellect burns

The night of the long knives

Statesman and seducer

Führer and Reichskanzler

Ladies’ man

“Brother Hitler”

Threatening gestures and breaches of treaty obligations

Humiliation and threat

Hácha’s difficult course

The writing on the wall

The admonisher

Deception and lying

Grandmother died

Elser

Bürgerbräukeller

The archenemy

One song, two, three

Compiègne

Operation Barbarossa, the world blitzkrieg

Juggler of the moment

Extermination behind the front

The battle for Lebensraum

Крысиная война – rat war

Stalingrad – mass grave

Pearl Harbor

Final solution

Janusz Korczak

20 July 1944

Wolf’s Lair

Bendlerblock

Revenge and retribution

The sky is on fire

Limbo

Forget-me-not

The big trek

Twilight of the gods

The coward’s way out

Chronology

Music recordings for the audio book

About the author

Bibliography

Provincial childhood

“My idea of education is tough. Weakness has to be beaten out. My elite academies (Ordensburgen) will produce young men to intimidate the world. A violent, masterful, bold and terrible youth is my wish. The young people must be all of this. They will have to endure pain. There can be no weakness and tenderness with them. The free, magnificent beast of prey must glint in their eyes once again. Strong and handsome is how I want my young people. This is how I can create something new.”1

The birth had been long drawn out. The young mother lies as if dead amongst the piled up pillows, which only barely conceal the blood on the sheet. She is drenched in sweat and with loose strands of dark hair plastered to her cheeks. They have tucked the infant in next to her. He presses his tiny fists to his mouth. The soft down of his hair gleams dark and wet. Now he lifts his chin and turns his small squashed little head in the direction of his exhausted mother. His tiny nostrils seem to snuffle and sniff the air. His paper-thin lips open slightly and close again, then his pink tongue can be seen. With some effort the infant opens his right eyelid and, underneath it, the iris shimmers a clear blue. Gleaming, with no hint of any green or grey and without a slate-coloured border so that the colour around the pupil seems almost to be without a border. The iris displays the same startling colour as the mother’s. Later this child would deliberately deploy his piercing blue eyes: when he looked into his interlocutor’s eyes for a long time and, in so doing, sink his eyelids very slowly, this gave him subliminal power. Women in his vicinity, above all his admirers, would then swoon.

Klara Hitler, née Pölzl (1860-1907), the mother of Adolf Hitler.

“Poppet,” whispers the mother, or rather breathes in the direction of the child: “my little love, my angel.” Then she sinks into a deep sleep.

The child, who was born on this stormy afternoon in Braunau on the Inn in Upper Austria – it was the twentieth of April in 1889 – had been pushed into the world with much effort, and was christened with the name “Adolf”. Adolf was the fourth child of the customs official Alois Hitler and his wife Klara and the first that was to survive2.

No one could have guessed that this Adolf would one day become a symbol of unrestrained enthusiasm and terror without limit.

Adolf Hitler himself was later to apply himself diligently to the legend of his origins. He said his father had worked his way up from very modest beginnings into the senior civil service of the imperial and royal monarchy of Austria through his talent and iron ambition. The disreputable fact that his father was an illegitimate child who, afflicted with the stigma of “father unknown”, bore his mother’s maiden name “Schicklgruber” for many years, was carefully not mentioned by Hitler. And even less his uncertain origins. Thus it was that Alois was perhaps not, as long assumed, the child of the impoverished and vagrant miller journeyman Johann Georg Hiedler, but that of his married brother Johann Nepomuk Hüttler. These discrepancies were best concealed. Since, if Johann Georg were Adolf Hitler’s grandfather, in Klara Pölzl his father would have married his second cousin. The degree of relationship would be even closer with Johann Nepomuk as the father: then Alois would namely be the uncle of his wife Klara. This is because Johann Nepomuk was Klara’s grandfather, possibly however, at one and the same time, the father of Alois as well. Whichever of the two brothers may have been the father: Adolf Hitler was the result of close in-breeding within a society. Hitler’s family came from localities close to each other in the Austrian Waldviertel (lower Austria), an area which was reviled amongst fellow countrymen as being particularly backward. Due to the facts left shrouded in mystery, any chatter about his origins Hitler inflamed involuntarily. There was even a rumour about Jewish blood, which was supposed to be a quarter of that which flowed in his veins. It could even be described as an irony of history that the very person who, decades later, was to demand watertight proof of Aryan origins from every German, could3 himself never provide such proof.

The Jewish version was prompted by a photograph of a gravestone on a cemetery in Bucharest: under Hebrew letters the name Adolf Hitler was emblazoned in Latin script, died aged 60 years in 18924. There is also the story about the life of his grandmother Anna Maria Schicklgruber. As an employee in the Jewish household belonging to the Frankenbergers, she was made pregnant by her employer. She is even said to have received maintenance payments from old Mr. Frankenberger. The stereotype of the hard and resilient man from the Austrian Waldviertel (Forest Quarter in lower Austria) was laid down over this subliminal gossip. Years later the weekly magazine “Das Reich” depicted it as follows5: “From the 15th century onwards, there is evidence of the Hitler (also Hüttler, Hidler or Hiedler) clans in the north-western, original part of the Waldviertel (Forest Quarter in lower Austria). All from solid material, a tough strain: collected strength, perseveringly loyal, bold and robust, and thereby also full of spiritual ardour.”

Adolf Hitler as a small child.

However, neither toughness nor collected strength featured in little Adolf as he was from the outset a “Mummy’s boy”, worshipped and petted by a woman, who experienced little joy and fulfilment in her marriage with the very much older customs officer, whom she called “Uncle Alois”. Her relationship with the humourless, strict civil servant was marked by subservience and silent refusal on her part, whilst spoiling her first born beyond all measure. She did this all the more when she also had to lay Edmund, her youngest son, in his child’s coffin at the age of only six years.6

That the little Adolf got caught up in an ongoing conflict between his parents, that is to say, caught between the fronts, was not something of which either he or his mother were conscious. She believed she had to support him to the best of her ability, whereby she rendered him unsuitable for the upbringing at that time based as it was on violence and intimidation. This was definitive for the times and is today known as “black pedagogy”7. He could perhaps have learned to put up with the brutality of this by bringing a certain obtuseness to bear some of the time, if he had not been continually seduced by the sweet opposite world. Very early on he was fated not to do anything right in his father’s eyes. The latter even suspected deceit and impudence, and punished him for it with even more unrelenting harshness.

Black Pedagogy

Alois Hitler, the “Senior Customs Officer“, this form of address was highly prized all his life by the pedantic state official in the Austria in thrall to titles, was an authoritarian and irascible man, who took advantage of those deemed below him in rank.

Alois Hitler (formerly Schicklgruber, 1837-1903), customs officer. Adolf Hitler’s father.

And these were first and foremost his wife and children. His excessive punishments also included the family dog, which was then chastised even further when he urinated on the floor out of fear and held his legs in the air in submission. Alois is said to have used a whip covered in hippopotamus leather when punishing his eldest sons8. This whip was to play a major role in the career of the boy thus chastised.

It was the harshness against himself that the boy thus tortured drew as a lesson from these punishments and which he was later to demand unrelentingly from the entire German youth:

»But when this struggle is fought out between the parents, and is so every day, in forms which often really leave nothing to the imagination as regards inner brutalness then ultimately the results of such an object lesson, however slowly, will show themselves in the little ones. What their nature may be, when this reciprocal strife takes the form of brutal excesses of the father against the mother, leading to abuse in a drunken state, one who is not acquainted with such a milieu will find difficult to imagine. At six years the little boy, who is to be pitied, perceives things, at which even a grown up can only feel horror.«9

Harshness and brutality belonged to Hitler’s view of humanity. He was convinced that the human being was “by nature not a pack animal“ and was only made “to submit through the most brutal of laws… The civil state can only be maintained through iron brutality.”10

Diversions, entanglements and laziness

Hitler, who already radiated a certain self-confidence as a child, was initially validated by his good scholastic achievements in primary school: “The ridiculously easy lessons at school gave me so much free time that I saw more sun than the classroom.”11 There is an out-of-focus photograph that shows the ten-year-old primary school pupil, as he stands with arms boldly folded in the middle of the top row of pupils, his chin slightly raised and his eyelids slightly pressed together, in a pose surprising for a boy of this age.

Class photograph of the 4th. grade in Leonding. In the top row, centre, the ten-year-old Adolf Hitler.

This pose is recognisable from the well-known photographs, which show him as a statesman and ambitious leader of a coming thousand-year Reich. But he was also a sensitive child who could identify people by their footfall. Furthermore, everything he saw just once was engraved in his photographic memory, which gave him a certain advantage over his milieu. Decades later the supreme commander of the army was to astound others with his ostensible knowledge of different types of weapons. In primary school he always harvested top marks all round, which however then changed drastically upon moving up to secondary school. For now began the time of poor harvests. Poor marks spoiled the pupil’s mood, above all in natural sciences, mathematics and French. And it got even worse, the inattentive and, in part, lazy pupil had to repeat the very first year of secondary school: a bitter blow for a child, who had been used to success up until then. Torn back and forth between the extremes of an extremely strict father and a mother, who continually spoiled him, he had never learned to work systematically. His then German teacher reported that, although the schoolboy Hitler undoubtedly had a gift, even if a one-sided one, his desire to work would however also quickly evaporate. In this case too, decades later Hitler would concoct a matching story, whereby he found convincing explanations for his failure as a scholar: “What I liked I learned, above all everything that in my view I would be needing later as a painter. What seemed to be pointless in this regard or did not attract me at all, I sabotaged completely.”12

One can also speak of a selective perception of a boy. Namely, he only learned what interested him and what served his preconceptions and backed them up. Quite early on, in this attitude to learning and way of looking at the world, the rigid features of a thought process become apparent, a thought process that was only activated in relation to his own ego. Thus the schoolboy Adolf was already susceptible to clichés and prejudices from an early age. Later he would maintain that it was above all the history lessons at the Linz high school that shaped his view of the world and thinking. Hitler would later paint a sentimental portrait of his teacher there, a Dr. Leopold Pötsch, in his magnum opus. The latter’s method of teaching the material can be completely described as modern. Each time he addressed a problem of the day in order to consider this in the light of history and thus to illustrate its influence on the present. The teacher thus depicted with so much praise however later vehemently refused to accept responsibility for the endorsements and conclusions made by his pupil in their simplifications. He probably would have regarded it as more than a doubtful honour that he should be the very one who, with his method of teaching, was supposed to have contributed to forming a young revolutionary out of Hitler.

The feared father died before Hitler’s fourteenth birthday in his 65th year. Time to discard the hated chains and control. In his mother he first of all found an ally for his plans to become an artist. Her later appeals for him to learn something sensible after all fell on deaf ears. Another class photograph shows him four years later in the same pose. Only the self-confident gaze is now missing and has given way to a certain discontent and suspicious sullenness. His mother, who had spent her whole life treating her husband with a solicitous subservience, was impotent vis-à-vis this rebellious youth, who was capable of having fits of rage similar to those of his father. His achievements at school continued to be poor, his promotion to the next school year once again in danger and he only managed to move up due to a re-sit. However, he was advised to change schools for the fourth year. Hitler now had to attend the high school in Steyr 80 kilometres away and was boarded with foster parents. Here too his school report was correspondingly mediocre: for mathematics, French and German he received a “sufficient”, in gymnastics however an “excellent”. The man, who later went on to confess that his lifelong dream was to become a great architect13, received only a meagre “sufficient” in his weakest subject, descriptive geometry. Once again he was required to re-sit and finally passed the school-leaving examination in 1905. However, to accede to his mother’s wishes now and attend the higher vocational school, which would lead to further qualifications, was a step too far for him. An illness, which Hitler would later dramatise as severe lung disease in „Mein Kampf”, was to relieve him finally of hated school. His then family doctor, Dr. Eduard Bloch, did not support Hitler’s story of a severe illness preventing him from continuing with school. In his records he noted only a case of tonsillitis accompanied by a flu-like infection. However, with his gift for playacting, the patient managed to exaggerate the symptoms for those around him impressively. After leaving school, he led the life of a ne’er-do-well at his mother’s expense, who was also financing the family in Linz, to which his younger sister Paula also belonged, with her widow’s pension. Neither the mother nor the sister objected to this layabout existence, on the contrary, they spoiled him near enough and even viewed his role as man of the house with a certain pride. Hitler thoroughly exploited this goodwill, dressed up like a dandy, was never seen without a walking stick and was often a guest in coffee shops and the theatre. In later years he was by the way to dispense with his vanity in relation to his clothing for image reasons.

Bohemian

He combined the life of the layabout with that of an artist by devoting himself to painting and the pen and ink drawing of architectural designs. One of these was a future view of the city of Linz with a new theatre and a modern bridge over the Danube. 35 years later he actually had the bridge erected there. At this time his tendency to prefer monumental constructions in the style of previous centuries was striking.

One example of Hitler’s inclination to monumental buildings is provided by this model of the Reich’s capital Berlin from 1938/39 designed by Albert Speer.

At this time he had little contact with those of a similar age. He actually just had one friend, the son of a decorator and upholsterer, August “Gustl” Kubizek. Together with him he forged fantastic plans and dwelled in a world, in which reality and fantasy were fluent. With a rare gift, he was able to present his utopian plans with such exactitude and clarity, with such fervour and persuasive force as would later come to be useful in rousing whole masses of people. But first it was Gustl Kubizek, who hung on Hitler’s every word and patiently listened to the long-winded monologues of his friend because he was filled with uncritical and undivided admiration. Richard Wagner’s music united the two men. In this context Kubizek portrays a visit to the early Wagner opera “Rienzi” particularly vividly, which deals with the rise and fall of a Roman tribune. Hitler, in his typical manner of relating everything that happens to himself, naturally identifies himself with the main character and, after the performance, drags his friend up a hill as if in a trance. There he revealed to him, in a hoarse and excited voice, that he was chosen by fate “to unite the German Empire and make it great”.14 Only 33 years later he would acknowledge to Kubizek in person: “That was the moment it began.”15

9th. Party Conference of the Nazi Party, “Party Conference for Work”, Nuremberg 7th to 13th September 1937. Appeal by political leaders on the Zeppelin field on 10th September. View over the Zeppelin field with Albert Speer’s “cathedral of light”.

The Nuremberg party rallies, gigantic media spectaculars with enormous publicity impact, organised by the Nazi Party, were from then on always16 to be opened with the overture from “Rienzi”. Hitler, who designated Wagner as “his forerunner”, which without doubt contributed significantly to the misunderstanding of the composer and his voluminous oeuvre, was convinced that the latter was the greatest “prophet” the German people had ever had. Hitler, who saw in Wagner a kind of soulmate, considered politics to be an art form. Convinced at heart that he was an artist, politics to him was less to do with content and more to do with the aesthetics with which this content is mediated. Thus this meant that politics for him also became a means of self-presentation.

In the winter of 1906/07 Klara Hitler became very ill and her son’s nicely ordered world with its comfortable way of life abruptly collapsed. The diagnosis of breast cancer made an immediate operation necessary. A risky procedure in that era. After a stay in hospital and convalescence at home during which she was cared for by her sister Johanna, the hunchback Aunt “Hanni”, at first her condition improved a little, only to deteriorate drastically again in the spring. She concealed her condition from her son as best she could. Every day she would go to see her Jewish family doctor, Dr. Bloch, in order to have her wound seen to. He was moved by her son’s pain and his care. 34 years later in his US exile, he would confide in a reporter: “No one at that time would have had even the slightest inkling that he would become the embodiment of all evil.”17

Senior Medical Officer Eduard Bloch. Family doctor to the Hitler family, in his surgery at the house at Landstraße 12. Photograph, circa 1930.

The tumour, an ulcer, had eaten into the skin such that the inflamed layers of flesh underneath could be seen. Hidden away in her innards, metastases were completing their destructive work. The changing of the dressings must have caused the patient unbearable pain. She tried to appear brave and refrain from making any noise. Every day the gauze soaked with wound secretion and pus had to be ripped away from the tissue. The iodoform contained in the dressing material, which was supposed to serve as an antiseptic, burned like fire on the skin. An unimaginable torture for both doctor and patient. In the end the morphine administered could scarcely provide any relief.

In November 1907 Adolf Hitler arrived from Vienna in order to look after his mother and his little sister, Paula. As well as his mother’s illness he had to cope with a quite specific setback: his project to become an artist had failed for the time being. Self-confident and more than convinced of his own capabilities, he had set off in September for the Austrian capital with a bundle of drawings in order to apply to the general painting school of the “Akademie der Bildenden Künste” [Academy of Fine Arts]. The admission examination was notorious and feared due to its exacting requirements; with 112 candidates, who shared the same dream, the competition was very great. In the end, out of 112 examination candidates only 2818 passed. Hitler initially got through the first round but then in the second one failed a test drawing. Upon viewing the works he had submitted, the examiner attested to him that from these “his unsuitability as a painter was obvious” but his “ability evidentlylay in the field of architecture.”19 Thereupon he applied for a place to study at the Academy’s school for architects. A pointless undertaking: Hitler now received the payback for his lackadaisicalness and aimlessness. An important detail was missing for his admission: a valid matriculation certificate.

It was shortly before Christmas on 21 December 1907 at around two o’clock in the morning when Klara Hitler closed her eyes forever. She was only 47 years old.

Hitler described the period between 1907 and 1913 as his “Viennese years of apprenticeship and suffering”. In his work “Mein Kampf” he describes them thus: “I have that time to thank for the fact that I became tough and can be tough. And, more than that, I appreciate them for having torn me away from the hollowness of the comfortable life.”20

Glory in victory and catastrophe

On a warm sunny June day, it was the 28th and the year 1914, an assassination took place in the Balkan city of Sarajevo. The victims were high-ranking personalities, the heir presumptive to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie von Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg. This bloody deed brought about further bloody deeds and was regarded as the trigger of the First World War. It would be going into too much depth to mention all the political events in detail. Events characterised by high-handedness and errors of judgment and by the fated colliding of the most varied of interests, fuelled by the burning ambition of the military elites and carried by the naive enthusiasm of the population.

The alliance already forged by the Iron Reich Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, between the empires of Austria and Germany, now had to prove itself in the imminent military conflict. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, assured his “loyal friend and dear cousin” in Austria, Franz Joseph I, of his loyalty in his now famous address on the balcony of the Berlin Stadtschloss [= City Palace]: “If it comes to a fight then all parties will come to an end! [...] I will no longer know any parties or denominations; today we are all German brothers and only German brothers. If our neighbour does not want it any other way, if he is not granting us peace, then I hope to God that our good German sword will emerge victorious from this difficult battle.”21

Double portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiser Franz Joseph I of Austria.

Production by German arms manufacturers had been running at maximum capacity for a long time. The heads of German heavy industry, Krupp and Thyssen, thereby saw their hopes fulfilled of finally profiting from their expensive investments in advanced weapons of mass destruction. But the young men in field grey uniforms did not have the slightest inkling of this as they marched through the Brandenburg Gate in a column without end. Nor did the women and children who lined the streets and gave those marching by buttonholes and cheered them on. Such scenes were taking place throughout the German Reich and in Austria. Whereby the soldiers looked serious and full of confidence into the crowds standing around them, filled with their own self-importance and the diffuse expectation of whatever it was they were unacquainted with, but which was promised to be something that would forge them into a man just like a steel bath. They climbed aboard goods wagons inscribed with the slogan “For breakfast in Paris” and headed off into an uncertain future.

August 1914 in Berlin: a troop transport with gaily waving soldiers shortly before departing for the front.

They had obeyed the summons of their Kaiser, which had been published in the extra editions of all major newspapers on 7 August 1914. In gigantic letters there stood: “To the GermanPeople!” His words were also transmitted as a radio address:

“And now the sword must decide. In the midst of peace the enemy attacks us. And so to arms! Any wavering or hesitation would be treason against the Fatherland! It is about the existence or non-existence of our Reich, which our fathers founded afresh, about the existence or non-existence of German might and German existence.We will defend ourselves until the last breath of man and steed.”22

The Germans and the French, the sworn and hereditary enemies, now stood facing each other, filled with an uncertain hatred and a glowing furore, which discharged itself in a long held back explosion. They stormed and stabbed each other with their bayonets and during the whole time did not have an idea why and how everything had started...

German soldiers and mule with gas masks during the 1st World War on the Western Front.

But there was also bitter fighting on other fronts as well. The alliance partners Germany and Austria were surrounded on all sides in the end.

City of the movement

Hitler too must have heard the Kaiser’s addresses in Munich. The 25-year old had been there since 1913. His time in Vienna, glorified by him and which he had described as years of apprenticeship and suffering, were at first not as marked by material need as he himself and, for a long time, the writers of history had depicted. He had an inheritance from his mother and had been loaned not inconsiderable sums by his aunt “Hanni”, Johanna Pölzl. He was also in receipt of a monthly orphan’s pension from his father’s side. He lived on this quite comfortably for the first one and a half years.

Once back in Vienna after the death of his mother, he wanted to work hard and in a focused manner in order to realise his dream of “becoming an architect”. In autumn 1908, he once again faced the admission procedure at the Vienna Academy of Arts. The professors knew him from the examination the previous year and this went against him: this time he failed the examination in the subject of composition. He was not even allowed to submit the studies he had prepared under the guidance of the sculptor, Panholzer, who lived in Vienna. One year later even his inheritance was used up. His accommodation became more and more miserable due to his material situation until he finally ended up in a home for the homeless in Meidling, a district on Vienna’s south-western periphery. In February 1910 he changed male hostels once again, moving to one where he was accommodated in a cell-like room. In the communal rooms, however, there was also a reading room, in which Hitler took up residence with his painting and drawing things. At this point in time the unappreciated artist’s existence was the cliché that he manipulated for the outside world. In his last Viennese residence he met a man by the name of Reinhold Hanisch and became friends with him. The latter led a somewhat questionable existence and had already served time in prison and used false documents. The division of labour between the two however functioned perfectly, probably because they were such complete opposites. Next to the shy and awkward Hitler, whose provincial origins were all too obvious still, Hanisch came across as a really smooth customer. Whilst Hitler produced quite respectable copies from postcards and old engravings, his companion offered to make the sales and sold them. It was mainly Jewish businessmen, who liked the little pictures. The watercolours of well-known historical monuments were in the most demand.

Auersperg Palace in Vienna, watercolour by Adolf Hitler, after 1907.

Later Hitler also went on to design advertising posters for, amongst other things, cosmetics and ladies underwear23. A start to a career that seems almost stereotypical.

When did Adolf Hitler become the person he later was? Turning into a radical anti-Semite? Into a fanatical seeker of Lebensraum in the East for his German people? A human being and his career are not the sum of their parts. One cannot calculate the origin back from the end point. Just as little as one can foresee how an individual will develop and what course his life will take. Many outstanding personalities both in the positive and negative sense were quite unremarkable in childhood and neither bore the stigmata of being the chosen one nor signs of evil.

What finally prompted Hitler to leave Vienna, the city to which not much more than a few acquaintances from the men’s hostel connected him, was his fear of the military authorities. He had namely not reported within the deadline set to do his national service. And, as a result, first of all nothing happened for three years. But he did not trust this quiet and in spring 1913 he absconded to Munich in neighbouring Bavaria and thus set foot in the country, which he was always to maintain was his: Germany. He fraudulently told his future landlord, the master tailor Joseph Popp, that he was an academic architectural painter. Initially, he maintained the lifestyle in Munich he had already been accustomed to in Vienna: he painted watercolours and oil paintings in his room, using postcards as a reference. He never painted the original in real life. He was now able to sell his work through an art dealer; this signified a certain step-up in society. His uneventful life as a hermit was however rudely interrupted by a summons from the Munich police. The Austrian authorities had succeeded in finding out Hitler’s place of abode. Thereupon they requested their Bavarian colleagues for help. It was a star performance Hitler, undoubtedly gifted in this department, could be proud of when he managed to convince the police officer that he was a sick and poor fellow. At the subsequent call-up on 5 February 1914 in Salzburg, this performance was confirmed by the result: exempted from military service due to a weak constitution.

After the assassination of the Austrian crown prince, on 2 August 1914 Hitler found himself in the crowd waiting on the Munich Odeonsplatz and heard the Kaiser’s proclamation. The young painter, who had not wanted to fight for the Habsburg state, was now prepared to die for the German Reich: “Those hours seemed to me like a redemption from the annoying feelings of youth. I am not ashamed to say that, overwhelmed by a fervent enthusiasm, I sank to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart for giving me the luck of living at this time.”24 He shared this pathetic ardour by the way with many people, above all writers and artists: Thomas Mann, Ludwig Thoma, Franz Marc, Gerhard Hauptmann and many more.

Hitler (circle and cutout) in the war-crazed crowd in front of the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. Photograph dated 2 August 1914.

Adolf Hitler reported as a volunteer. The Bavarians overlooked the fact that he was actually an Austrian citizen in the general hubbub. After his basic military training, he was deployed on 1 September 191425 to the Royal Bavarian 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment. His commanding officer, Colonel Julius von List fell right at the outset in October 1914 in the First Battle of Flanders, which is why the Regiment bore the name “List” in his honour from then on.

The rookie soldier wrote about his first experience of the front, the taking of the village of Gheluvelt at the end of October, in his manifesto “Mein Kampf” stating that his regiment had rushed forward singing “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt”. He went into more detail on this operation, which he designated his “baptism of fire”: “After four days we returned. (...) The volunteers of the List Regiment had perhaps not learned to fight, but just to die, that’s what they knew how to do, like old soldiers.”26 The author of these lines drives self-glorification and mystification of his person roughshod over the truth when he writes: “Of my entire gang there was only one other left apart from myself, then finally he too fell.”27 In actual fact about 10 percent - 13 men out of about 140 to 160 men – had fallen from the 1st. company, to which Hitler’s platoon belonged. Nevertheless, this passage illuminates Hitler’s idea of a social Darwinism, according to which only the strong can survive, he being the strongest of all. His war experiences stamped his thinking in this regard. In total, however, this searing experience was just worth 25 lines in his magnum opus “Mein Kampf”. He sums it up: “That was the beginning. And that’s how it went on year after year; horror had however taken the place of the romance of battle.”28 With another author of this sentence one would assume a certain recognition. A comprehension of the senselessness that played out day after day around the combatants, the suffering and the dying, extermination and extinguishing.

Trench warfare in Ville-sur-Tourbe (Dép. Marne): “Avant l’assaut”- French infantry waits in the trench for the order to attack.

Hogs of war and base wallahs

In actual fact the assault on the Flanders village was the only action at the Front in which Hitler took part. After that began his deployment as a despatch rider, when he was transferred to the staff of the 16th reserve infantry regiment on 9 November 1914. His place of deployment, the base, was situated some kilometres behind the main front line. Although the staff headquarters located there were hit now and then by artillery shells, this was however nothing in comparison to the continual danger of death, in which the so-called hogs of war found themselves. They were under continual fire from the enemy’s machine guns. His deployment as a messenger greatly suited his nature as an eccentric loner: safe amongst comrades and yet alone. Corporal Adolf Hitler, to which he was soon promoted, gave the impression of being a little self-important, but harmlessly so, and slightly mad to the other soldiers. His comrades made out with a wink that his head lice had clouded his mind and regarded him as a windbag and a laughable big mouth. For even then he used to deliver convoluted speeches, taking his information from reading the little Reclam books.29 His speeches spoke of victory and changes to the structure of society and of the establishing of a free people’s state. In his writings he undertook propagandistic embellishment: “I am now working for the Staff Headquarters as a battle dispatch runner. With regard to the dirt, it’s somewhat better there but in turn more dangerous. In Wytschaete alone, on the day of the first assault 3 men, out of the 8 of us, were shot and killed, and one was seriously wounded. We four survivors and the wounded man have now been decorated.”30 Hitler meant the Iron Cross 2nd class, which was awarded to him on 2 December 1914. He was to receive the Iron Cross 1st class for bravery in the face of the enemy and personal services four years later, on 4 August 1918, at the suggestion of the Jewish adjutant of the regiment, Hugo Gutmann.

However, Corporal Adolf Hitler, to whom his rank stuck long afterwards in scorn even during his political ascent, was not one of the ones at the very front, who risked their lives every day, every hour and every minute and who looked directly down the rifle barrels of the enemy. Sometimes the no man’s land between one’s own trench and that of the enemy only measured twenty-five metres.

A messenger dog brings the troops news during a gas attack. Western Front 1917.