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ONE ‘In that Hour it Began’

As the German Chancellor, Hitler instigated the mass-murder of as many as 6 million Jews. He forced Western Europe, and eventually the whole world, into a calamitous war in which over 50 million Europeans were killed. When he committed suicide in 1945, he left his country a burning heap of ruins, financially bankrupt, militarily abject, physically wrecked. It is not surprising, then, that his reputation in history is demonic. Even though Mao Tse-tung and Stalin killed more people, and history since 1945 has thrown up such monsters as Pol Pot, Hitler has retained his place as the Demon King of history, the ultimate horror-tyrant. For this reason alone, we feel compelled to revisit the story of his life. In so doing, we perhaps want to pretend that his repellent life-views, which drove him to his acts of mayhem and murder, were somehow unique to himself, or if not quite unique, then at least special to the Nazi movement he led. To some degree – if we are thinking of the crazier theories relating to blood purity, or the quasi-religious cult of violence based on a return to the mythologies of the pagan north – then we should be right to think that Hitler had nothing in common with the decent bourgeois majority of Europeans of his generation. He was a freak, a satanic oddity, a demon.

But this picture of him is not completely tenable. In general, Hitler embodied the views of any popular newspaper, any bar-parlour bore, from England to Russia, from Finland to Sicily, during his lifetime: that is, that science had replaced religion; that Darwin had mysteriously ‘explained’ everything about the struggles of history, that the fittest would survive, and that among the differing peoples of the earth, it was the ‘Aryan’ or Eurasian race who were superior to the ‘savages’ found in Africa and South America, or to the Jews. His view, ranted aloud through microphones to rallies of thousands, that the Jews were both the sinister powers at work behind the banks and the stock markets, contriving the world’s ruin, and at the same time they were the ‘disease’ eating away at your savings with anti-capitalist, Bolshevist plots, was a fear which did not vanish even when his whole regime had been ground to rubble by his enemies.

A spectre was haunting Europe. It was not Communism, as Marx and Engels had proclaimed in 1848, though Communism was a part of the spectre. It was bankruptcy. And that spectre had haunted Europe ever since the prodigy of modern industrial capitalism began in England in the eighteenth century. When things went well, the system produced comfort and leisure of a kind unimagined by the human race at any previous period of history. But there always existed, like some curse in a fairy tale, the possibility that things would go wrong, and that the safe, comfortable world created by capitalism could, through no fault of the families or individuals concerned, plunge the working classes into starvation and the middle classes into the disgrace of debt and penury. The prosperous parfumeur César Birotteau in Balzac’s novel of that name suddenly becomes an abject pauper. He did not realize that in expanding his business he was taking on debts with a scurrilous banker. Like so many of the characters in Balzac’s great Human Comedy, that series of books which defined the nineteenth century to itself much more vividly than did Karl Marx, Birotteau is one minute prosperous, and the next up to his neck in debt. That swoop, from prosperity to absolute degradation, is the single greatest dread among the middle classes created by nineteenth-century capitalism. You see it in the novels of Dickens and Balzac over and over again. You see it in the genre paintings, of a middle-class family having to sell up their last belongings. Whether you are upper middle class, like the Sedleys in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, or lower middle class like Adolf Hitler, the spectre is haunting you all the time. Something might happen in the world’s stock markets which suddenly ruins you.

‘Old John Sedley was ruined’ … and Thackeray shows us all his belongings being picked over and sold off at auction. ‘The Hebrew aide de camp in the service of the officer at the table bid against the Hebrew gentleman employed by the elephant purchasers and a brisk battle ensued over this little piano.’¹ Part of the mythos of capitalism was that mysteriously it was controlled and exploited by the Jews. When there is a lurch in the stock market or when there is a run on the banks, the Jews will somehow emerge from the crisis unscathed – having made their profit out of your misfortune.

The basic self-contradiction of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory – that Jews control both the capitalist system and the Communism which sought to overthrow it – did not die with Nazism. It resurfaces even now, either implicitly or explicitly, in journalism and commentary in any country in the world. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was a mania of advanced degree but it was very far from being unusual, and although few like to admit it, his hatred of the Jews was one important element in his easy rise to power. Hitler and the Nazis expressed themselves with a crudity you may not think would have gone down well in, say, a London publishing house. Yet his prejudice was one shared with the poetry editor of Faber and Faber, T. S. Eliot – ‘The Jew is underneath the lot.’

Adolf Hitler – remarkably, in a man whose father was the son of an illegitimate housemaid – had grown up with the middle-class confidence that he need never earn a living. When he first emerged so astonishingly onto the European stage, he might have appeared provincial and uncouth. But he belonged to a class which had savings. He belonged to the shabby-genteel class, the class which perhaps more than any other feels the shame of social descent through poverty. Aspirant members of this class, throughout Europe and America, have traditionally struggled to ‘better’ themselves, fearing idleness, bohemianism, any of the eccentricities or cultivations which might lead grander social classes to an amusing decadence, but which lead the petits bourgeois back to the working classes from which they struggled.

Had his father, a customs official in various border towns between Austria-Hungary and Germany, lived to see the publication of Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), he might well have asked, ‘What Struggle?’ Alois Hitler had indeed known struggle, and so had his third wife, Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl. Alois, whose early life had marked a real struggle to leave poverty behind, and to acquire respectability and savings through boring government service in customs offices, had urged young Adolf to find paid employment. The boy had preferred to lounge about, to wear dandified clothes, to attend the opera and to imagine that one day he would become a famous artist, or maybe a composer of operas, like his hero Richard Wagner. When his father died in 1903, and his mother followed him to the grave four years later, Hitler had never in his life looked for paid work. He had assumed that he would be able to live on savings. He would study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and maybe become a great architectural artist, perhaps an architect who would rebuild Linz, the provincial city where he had attended the Realschule and not done especially well. A fellow pupil was another oddball, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but there is no evidence that they even spoke to one another at school. Wittgenstein was not noted, at any period of life, for his easy manners, and Hitler, until he had completed military service, appears to have been paralysed with shyness and silence in most circumstances.

Wittgenstein at different times of his life had paid work – as a village schoolmaster, as a lab assistant in a London hospital, and as a don at Cambridge. Hitler never had any paid employment, so far as one can make out, except when manual work was forced upon him as a temporary necessity when he was living in men’s hostels and dosshouses on the outskirts of Vienna. In fact, he had not done well enough at school to get a good job. He failed to get into the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and gradually slithered downhill from the position of comfort and prosperity into which he had been born to one of penniless indigence. He lived among the homeless in men’s hostels, tried to sell his (usually postcard-size) architectural paintings. When this was happening, Europe was not going through a phase of unemployment, such as plagued the 1920s and 1930s. He could have taken a job as a waiter or a clerk or done something in exchange for pay, the way that almost everyone in the world is expected to do. Never once did he do so. Nor, as far as history throws any light on the matter, did he ever consider it necessary to pay his own way. The flats he lived in when he became successful, the cars he drove, the clothes he wore were all supplied by other people. Even his beloved dogs, Prinz, Muckl, Wolf and Blondi, were gifts. He was a domestic incompetent. When his niece killed herself he needed to import housemaids immediately into his Munich apartment.

Hitler’s indolence was to remain one of his most mysterious characteristics. Many would assume that a man who, in his heyday, strutted about in uniforms, and who presided over a militaristic dictatorship, who expected not merely his intimates but everyone in the country to click their heels and salute at the mere mention of his name, would have been up in the morning early, taking cold baths and performing Swedish exercises. By contrast, like many depressives, he kept strange hours, and spent most of his days on this planet sitting around doing nothing much, dreaming his terrible dreams, and talking interminable nonsense. In this he was extraordinarily unlike the archetypical Germans who looked to him in the 1920s and 1930s as their saviour. They were hard-working, home-loving people who, by the end of the 1920s, had received two catastrophic buffets from fate. The first was their country’s defeat in the First World War, and the second – a direct consequence of the first calamity – was financial ruin. Hitler’s own ‘struggle’ had in fact been entirely of his own making, and was due to simple laziness. There had been nothing to stop him, as a young man, giving up his unrealistic plans to become an artist and taking a job in an office. But he could not bring himself to get out of bed in the mornings. Hence his own slide into poverty. But he made his ruin into a personal myth with which a whole bankrupted nation was able to identify. All those hard-worked clerks and small businessmen and waiters and factory workers who voted for Hitler – while they were still allowed to vote – and who saw him as their national saviour, were quite, quite different from Hitler. Their ruin had not been as a result of idleness, or dreaminess. It had been caused by their militaristic Kaiser and his right-wing government leading them into a disastrous and costly war. For this war, the German people were made, by international treaty, quite literally to pay. Whenever there was a chance of economic recovery in the 1920s, Germany had to face the reparations demanded by France. Had the Germans been able to mine the coal in the Ruhr or exploit the great steelworks of that industrial region, there would have been some chance of a post-war economic recovery. But this industrial heartland had been occupied by the French in 1923. So in this impossible situation, the German people found themselves seduced by a political movement which appeared to offer them a solution, led by a man whose own life-journey, as set to the weird opera which must have played itself continually inside his head, matched their own national crisis.

Many books not written in German playfully use the German word for Leader – Führer – to refer to him. It has become a sort of nickname: the Führer. But although the Leader appeared quite literally as a saviour to the unemployed Germans whom he restored to labour, to the homeowners and rentiers whose lifetime investments he appeared to make safe, he was far from being a typical German. He was indeed not a German at all and only received German citizenship in 1932, shortly before becoming Chancellor. The fact that he found himself in Munich in May 1913, as an indigent, penniless artist and layabout, was owing to the fact that he was a draft dodger from the Austro-Hungarian army.

From 1910 – when Hitler was twenty to twenty-one – the Austrian authorities had been pursuing him to do his national service in the Imperial army. When they came after him, he denied that he had left Vienna to avoid the army. It was poverty, he claimed, which prevented him from coming to Salzburg in order to plead ill health. After a long exchange of letters he did eventually go to Salzburg, a comparatively short journey by train from Munich, and submit to a medical examination, and it was agreed that the underfed, gloomy young man was too weak to bear arms and should be pronounced unfit for military service.

And herein lies the peculiar mystery of the Hitler phenomenon. Hitler was almost without any skills at all. He had very little energy, a modest education, no obvious ‘leadership’ qualities, and in many respects almost no interest in politics. In party politics he had no interest whatsoever. Nor, when in power, was he a ‘micromanager’. He was a peculiar combination of absolute controller and idler. There was scarcely any area of government business or military organization over which he did not wish to exercise personal control; but the day-to-day business either of civil or military administration was often something to which he appeared to demonstrate airy indifference. The tantrum was used as a workable substitute for practical common sense. Presumably he had known since childhood that most people will do anything to avoid a scene, so that a willingness to make scenes, explosive scenes, over the most trivial of upsets, or for no observable reason at all, would give him power over almost anyone with whom he came into contact – party apparatchiks, generals, foreign heads of state.

For twelve years, this man who had no obvious talent for anything except public speaking, the manipulation of crowds, and the manipulation of individuals through emotional bullying, dominated European history. For the first six of those years, he performed what appeared to be an economic miracle: he led his country out of the gravest economic crisis ever to face a developed economy in the Western world, and he gave it full employment and apparent prosperity. He then proceeded to invade, annex or conquer Austria, the greater part of Czechoslovakia and the disputed German lands which had been appropriated by the French. All this was accomplished with astonishingly little loss of life. No wonder he was regarded, in the period 1933–9, as a hero. The British Prime Minister who had presided over victory in the First World War, the Liberal leader David Lloyd George, was overwhelmed when he visited Hitler’s Germany in 1936. Lloyd George’s daughter mockingly exclaimed ‘Heil Hitler!’ ‘Certainly Heil Hitler!’ replied Lloyd George in all seriousness, ‘I say it because he is a really great man.’ On his return to England, Lloyd George wrote an article for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express (then a newspaper which was taken seriously), describing Hitler as a born leader of men, trusted by the old, idolized by the young, who had lifted his country from the depths.

Anyone meeting Hitler twenty years before, however, and staring into the face of that pale, lonely youth, would have agreed that he was not fit either for military life or for anything else of a very practical bent. His Munich landlady in 1913–14, Frau Popp, a tailor’s wife, afterwards described her lodger as quiet, who spent much of his time painting his postcards – characterless little architectural studies which leave no impression at all. He was also, she remembered, a voracious reader. She does not tell us what he was reading. Hitler’s later conversation suggests retentive, rather than wide, reading. He could quote whole pages of the gloomy philosopher Schopenhauer, who had been of such profound influence over Hitler’s hero, Richard Wagner. He probably read Wagner’s libretti as poetry. He read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote. His favourite author, however, was Karl May. Even as Reich Chancellor Hitler would still be urging his generals to try May’s novels – upbraiding them for their lack of imagination when they failed to see the point of them. May is not a popular author in the English-speaking world but he still has his following in Germany. He modelled himself on Fenimore Cooper and his best-known stories are set among the American Indians. The American Indian Winnetou and the cowboy Surehand are the best known of his heroes. As a devoted pacifist, May was in many ways a surprising choice of literary hero for a future war leader. His stories, both those set in the American West and those which deal with the Near East, such as In the Land of the Mahdi and From Baghdad to Istambul, are stories set in exotic landscapes in which heroes battle against impossible odds and triumph through an exercise of the will.

Hitler’s childhood and family background have been endlessly studied for clues which would explain his later development. At the beginning of My Struggle, he himself emphasized the geographical importance of having been born in Braunau am Inn, a town in a provincial part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in 1923–4, he saw the unification of the two great German states as desirable. ‘German-Austria must once more be reunited with the great German Motherland: and not just for economic reasons. No, no! Even if reunification had no economic advantages one way or another, even if it were positively disadvantageous, it must still take place. One Blood belongs together in One Reich.’² It was one of the fundamental planks of his foreign policy, and it could clearly be seen with hindsight that the expansionism which lay behind this idea would lead inevitably to the European war which followed in the year after the Anschluss (literally, the ‘Connexion’; it is the word used for the annexation of Austria by Germany).

We see, from the very first page of My Struggle, how Hitler made his own childhood part of the whole political German story. It was Fate (Schicksal) which determined where he was born. And the fact that he was the son of a customs officer, an official who by definition stood at the border, was made to have mystic significance.

His father had been born Alois Schicklgruber in 1837. He had risen from the peasantry. Much has been made of Alois’s violence. Most fathers in history have beaten their children, not a few have had fiery tempers. None has had a son like Adolf Hitler. Alois Schicklgruber was the illegitimate son of a woman named Maria Anna Schicklgruber. All sorts of fantasies have been spun about the possible father, including the untenable view that he might have been Jewish. Five years after Alois was born, his mother married a fifty-year-old miller’s journeyman named Johann Georg Hiedler. His mother died when he was five, and Alois was then taken to live on Johann Georg’s brother’s farm. The brother was Johann Nepomuk, the grandfather of Hitler’s mother, Klara. (Hence her calling Alois ‘uncle’ when she married him.) Alois worked hard and rose in status. By 1876, he had managed to persuade a notary in Weitra that he should be legitimized. The overwhelming likelihood is that his father was in fact Johann Georg Hiedler and in the legitimization papers, this name is spelt Hitler. Thus the name entered history. Hiedler/Hüttler/Hitler all are variations of the same name, which means a smallholder or one who lives in a hut. Either way, Fate/Schicksal was kind to the future Adolf in giving him a snappy two-syllabled name. Somehow the great Nuremberg rallies would not have seemed so impressive if the serried ranks of tens of thousands of enthusiastic Germans had all been chanting ‘Heil Schicklgruber!’

Alois’s first marriage was childless. His second produced a son, also called Alois, who married an Irish girl called Bridget Dowling, who lived for a while in Liverpool, England, and whose child, William Patrick Hitler, was born in 1911 and later lived in New York. The other child was Angela, who for a while kept house for Adolf Hitler, and whose daughter by Leo Raubal – also called Angela (Geli) – was Hitler’s beloved niece.

It was as his third wife that Alois Hitler took Klara Pölzl. There were five children – Gustav, who died aged two in 1887; Ida who also died in infancy; Otto who died as a baby; Edmund who died aged sixteen in 1900, Paula who lived until 1960 and Adolf, who was born on 20 April 1889.

Given the high mortality rate of his siblings, and the fact that both parents were dead by the time he was eighteen, it was not surprising that Hitler was a hypochondriac who always feared illness and imagined his own life would be a short one.

By the time he was living with his widowed mother, the family had settled in the somewhat dingy provincial town of Linz. There was real tension in the town between the German nationalist population – numbering about 60,000 – and the Czechs. Alois Hitler was a passionate German nationalist. Adolf absorbed and inherited these feelings: they may be said to have determined his entire foreign policy, and all the expansionism of 1936–9 which brought the world to the war. What he did not inherit, as has already been said, was any of his father’s desire to work hard and better himself.

He was a moody, idle, and not especially talented child. When Alois died in 1903, he left the family reasonably comfortable. The three women of the family – mother Klara, aunt Johanna and little sister Paula – did all the work of running the apartment. His mother bought Adolf a grand piano and for four months he took lessons. He was a competent pianist, and had a good ear. He was a lonely, withdrawn boy. His only known emotional excitement was having a painful crush on a girl called Stefanie, a beautiful young lady he saw in the streets of Linz. There is no evidence that they even so much as spoke to one another. His best friend was a musician named August Kubizek – Gustl. It was he who told us, in his largely adulatory memoir of his friendship with Hitler, of his friend’s life in those days. It was with Gustl that Hitler first sampled the opera – Hitler clad on these occasions in a black coat and opera hat, and carrying a cane with an ivory handle. It was with Gustl that Hitler, aged twelve, first attended Lohengrin. On one evening the two friends saw a production of Wagner’s Rienzi, an early opera (more like Weber musically than it is like the later, developed Wagner). The opera tells the story of a young demagogue in fourteenth-century Rome who led his people to rebellion, and was finally rejected by them. Doubts have been cast by historians upon Kubizek’s recollection of this evening in which, after the performance, Hitler is supposed to have climbed the Freinberg, the mountain outside Linz, and been in a sort of prophetic trance. As Kubizek reconstructed the scene in 1939 for Winifred Wagner at the Bayreuth Opera House, Hitler is supposed to have added, mysteriously, ‘In that hour it began.’

In jener Stunde begann es.

In fact what happened to Hitler in the next few years was about as far from any Rienzi-like political awakening as it is possible to imagine. He and Kubizek went to Vienna and shared a flat together. Kubizek studied music at the Conservatoire. Hitler was supposed to be at the Academy of Fine Arts, but had in fact failed the entry exams twice.

It has been plausibly conjectured that Hitler broke with his friend because he could not stand the shame of this failure.

Hitler’s mother died of breast cancer in 1907. The doctor attending her said that he had never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as was Hitler when his mother died. Eduard Bloch, the doctor, was Jewish, and neither Hitler nor his sister seem to have felt, or demonstrated, any anti-Semitic feeling towards him, still less blamed him for Klara’s death. The anti-Semitic mania appears to have developed later, perhaps during Hitler’s mysterious years as a drop-out student in Vienna.

For he soon got through the money his mother had left him, and he never appears to have taken employment. Some more money was due to him from his father’s will when he reached – on 20 April 1913 – the age of twenty-four. Much of his time was spent simply waiting in idleness for this date to arrive. In May 1913, wanted by the Austrian police because he had failed to register for military service, he escaped over the German border and went to live in Munich.

There then occurred the event which, as Ian Kershaw, the great British Hitler scholar, has said ‘made Hitler possible’:³ the outbreak of the First World War. Having persuaded the Austrian authorities that he was medically unfit for service, he had returned to Munich. But, like so very many young men in 1914, Hitler was caught up in war fever when the great European powers – Russia, Austro-Hungary, Germany and Britain, together with France – found themselves edging towards war after the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a young Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo. Although serious politicians and diplomats saw the outbreak of war as a calamity, and the more far-sighted were able to see that it could destroy Western civilization, the public mood was buoyant. With the declaration of hostilities, there were happy, cheering crowds in all the major cities of Europe. In one of these cheering crowds, in the Odeonsplatz in Munich, a camera by extraordinary chance captured the young, exultant face of Adolf Hitler, a nonentity unknown to anyone, just as he was about to enlist with the Bavarian army. Although in 1870, with the creation of the German nation under Bismarck’s Prussia, it had come into political union, Bavaria was traditionally separate from the rest of Germany until 1918. Hitler had to write a personal application to old King Ludwig III to join his army. He was turned down by the first regiment to which he applied – the Bavarian King’s Own – but he was accepted by the 1st Bavarian Infantry Regiment.

It used to be believed by historians that Hitler was, if not a war hero, then at least a conspicuously brave front-line soldier. New research by Dr Thomas Weber of Aberdeen University has uncovered a confusion about what was meant by a regimental runner, which was Hitler’s job in the army. Battalion or company runners did indeed have a dangerous job, running between different trenches in the front line of battle under heavy machine-gun fire. Hitler, however, was something rather different – a regimental runner. The regimental runners worked several miles from the front in regimental headquarters. They were office boys in military uniform. One man who did the same job, Alois Schnelldorfer, wrote to his parents that his job was no more dangerous than to sit in an armchair and make calls to their postmistress. ‘I can drink a litre of beer and sit down under a walnut tree’, he wrote home.

The men among whom Hitler served considered him a strange bird. They noted his teetotalism, and his aloofness from their jokes and conversation. He would sit apart from them, reading history (perhaps in fact Karl May novels?), writing letters (to his mother-substitute, the Munich landlady Frau Popp) and sketching. They nicknamed him ‘the artist’ or ‘the painter’. They mocked his physical incompetence. He could not open cans of meat with a bayonet as they all could, and they ribbed him that if he worked in a canning factory he would starve to death.⁴

One thing they noticed was his slavishness to superiors. And it paid off. Dr Weber’s new research has shown that it was comparatively easy for an infantryman to win an Iron Cross, First Class, if he was in constant touch with the officers. Hitler was lucky enough to be recommended for this honour by Hugo Gutmann, a Jewish adjutant, who, in 1937, was to be put in prison by the Gestapo. Luckily for Gutmann, his old comrades in the regiment petitioned for his release and he was able to escape to the United States, but not thanks to Hitler. The best friend he made in the army was a white terrier dog who had escaped from an English trench. Hitler called him ‘little Fox’ or Fuchsl. ‘With exemplary patience (he did not understand a word of German) I got him used to me,’ he wrote back to Frau Popp in Munich.

It is not surprising, therefore, given Hitler’s comparatively safe job well behind enemy lines, that he was able to survive so well on the Western Front, in spite of his regiment taking part in some of the worst battles of the war, such as the Somme in 1916 in which over 600,000 young men were killed. It is also revealing that when he did suffer injury, it was not because he was running an errand, but sitting in a tunnel close to regimental HQ when a shell hit the roof. Hitler’s plea to his Lieutenant, Wiedemann, when he was put on a stretcher, ‘But I can still stay with you? Stay with the regiment? Can’t I?’, has often been taken as evidence that he was still anxious, even in his injuries, to be fighting for the Fatherland; but it could just as well be seen as a sign that for the first time in his life, in the regiment, and surrounded by men in uniform, he had found an environment in which he felt comfortable and at home. This is not to say that he was homosexual. Very many lonely men, or men whose lives had been humdrum or unsatisfactory in civilian life, felt the same, during both world wars, when they enlisted in the services.

He was invalided out of the regiment and was taken first to a field hospital, then to a military hospital just south of Berlin before being transferred to a replacement battalion in Munich. It is here that we begin to see the signs of that virulent anti-Semitism which in the next few years became a trademark mania. He noticed that all the clerks were Jews, and began to hatch the view that the Jews had somehow sapped national morale, or were responsible for the failure of the German army to make headway on the Western Front.

He was eventually allowed to return to his old regiment in the line, and there was a glad reunion with little Fuchsl, who was by now in Ypres, Belgium. The first night they were together, Hitler took Fuchsl ratting and stabbed many a rat with his bayonet. The regiment took part in the Third Battle of Ypres, but for the rest of 1917 saw no action. There was plenty more time for playing with the dog and reading Karl May novels. In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution took place, and throughout all the armies of Europe – German, French and British – the spectre of Communism began to haunt the officer classes.

In 1918, the regiment was ordered back to Flanders. In March the men heard that the German Government had made peace with the Soviet Government of Russia at Brest-Litovsk. Early in September 1918 the regiment was again moved back to Flanders, but Hitler had a period of leave and with a comrade named Arendt he spent it in Berlin, where the mood of revolution was palpable.

Hitler returned to his regiment for what was to be the last month of the war. It was in the area below Ypres that they dug into the fields and hills near Comines. Near the village of Wervick, on 14 October, there was a gas attack. Hitler felt scalding in his eyes, and was taken off, temporarily blinded, to hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania. He had survived the war. At the Nuremberg trials, following the Second World War, the adjutant of the regiment gave evidence. He said that there had sometimes arisen a question of promoting Hitler from the ranks and making him a non-commissioned officer. Whenever the matter was discussed, however, it was always decided in the negative, ‘because we could discover no leadership qualities in him’. Furthermore, Otfrid Förster, a renowned neurosurgeon who saw Hitler’s medical file in 1932, gave it as his opinion that Hitler’s blindness was a case of ‘hysterical amblyopia’.⁵ If this were the case, and it seems highly likely, then we can discount the gas attack altogether and lose the last shred of a claim that Hitler the messenger boy had an ‘heroic’ war.

In My Struggle, needless to say, the end of the war, and Hitler’s part in it, had to be given a quality of apocalypse. On 10 November, the hospital chaplain brought the patients news that a revolution had broken out in Berlin and that the Imperial Royal House, the Hohenzollerns, had gone into exile in Holland. The Kaiser was no more. Germany was a socialist republic. The revolution had been achieved by ‘a few Jewish youths … who had not been at the Front’.⁶

Saint Paul, although in Hitler’s eyes a dangerous Jewish Bolshevik, had been struck blind by God before going into Damascus and beginning his great mission to convert the world. It would seem that a comparable miracle was performed by Providence upon Adolf Hitler. When the chaplain broke the news of Germany’s defeat, it was sad, naturally, for all Germans. But for the author of My Struggle, this was a personal thing. ‘While everything became black before my eyes, I teetered and groped my way back towards the ward, threw myself on my bunk, and buried my burning head into my blanket and pillow. I had not shed a tear since the day that I stood beside my mother’s grave. When, in my youth, Fate grabbed me without mercy, my defiant resolve only quickened. When in the long years of war, death took so many comrades and friends from among our ranks, it would have seemed a sin to me to bewail their fate – they died for Germany!’⁷

He bore all these sorrows. He endured blindness and pain without a murmur, it would seem. But what drew forth his tears was the left-wing revolution. For ever afterwards, the ‘November criminals’, the socialists who concluded the Armistice on 11 November 1918, were the villains of the story which Hitler told – first to himself, then to his small gang of political cronies, then to larger groups, and finally to Germany and to the world. My Struggle asks us to believe that it was while he lay weeping on his hospital bed that he decided to go into politics. Whether or not such a decision was made, there would have been no hope, in the old world, that a man of Hitler’s background, with no obvious qualifications, could enter the political sphere. But the world had changed. With the coming of the peace, the world was ready for the arrival of this dreamer. Unheeding, Germany moved into the humiliations, poverty and chaos of its post-war life. It was to be some years before Germany woke up to the fact that its Lohengrin had arrived, though not by swan; that its Rienzi had arisen, though not from Rome. When he was discharged from hospital, with his sight fully recovered, and ordered to report to the replacement battalion of his old regiment, he was the reverse of ‘demob happy’, since it was by no means clear what possible avocation in civilian life this failed art student who had never done a job might follow. As for his little friend, Fuchsl, history does not relate what happened to him, but he presumably ended his war in Belgium.