1924: The Year That Made Hitler (3 page)

Ironically, it was another chance to join an army that changed Hitler’s life in the opposite way. In June 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the streets of Sarajevo, Bosnia, set the stage for war. In August 2014,
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Hitler appears to have joined the war-fevered crowd of thousands gathered on Munich’s Odeon Square—his joyful face was later identified in a mass photograph of the scene, though some believe his visage may have been doctored into the picture after the fact for political and propaganda purposes.
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In any case, Hitler followed millions of young Germans into the military, leaving behind his life as a penniless drifter for that of a soldier. Hitler’s enlistment took an extra day because, as an Austrian, he needed special permission from the Bavarian royal house to enlist. He said he wrote the king a letter and had a positive response from the royal chancellery within twenty-four hours. “His Majesty’s cabinet office works fast,” Hitler noted.
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Doubts have been cast on this anecdote, too, but in any case, Hitler was quickly enlisted in the Bavarian army, part of the German armed forces then girding for war. This time, no one found him unfit for service. Once again, Hitler’s life was changed by a single event, and a single letter, that would shape the course of history. “The First World War made Hitler possible,” wrote historian Ian Kershaw.
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As part of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, Hitler
spent four harsh years in the muddy trenches of the western front as a foot messenger, running orders from headquarters to the front lines, participating in numerous engagements, including the brutal battles at Ypres, Belgium, and on the Marne in France. Running to and from the trenches was extremely dangerous duty punctuated by relaxed moments at the rear headquarters units (frontline soldiers cursed the messengers as “rear area pigs”). During those lulls, Hitler read voraciously—he said he kept a small copy of Arthur Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Representation
in his knapsack—and was often seen perusing books on history or memorizing historical dates.
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He also occasionally sketched nearby farmhouses; his fellow messengers sometimes called him “the artist,” said his sergeant, Max Amann (later Hitler’s publisher). He also was considered a bit of a klutz; one fellow soldier joked that Hitler would starve to death in a food-canning factory because he, alone among the messengers, never figured out how to open a can of army rations with his bayonet.
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Photographs from the war show Hitler as a nice-looking but unsmiling young man; he sported a full, sometimes twirled mustache, not the stubby and easily mocked Charlie Chaplin smudge of later years.
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But, as historian Thomas Weber has noted, in all six extant wartime group pictures, Hitler is standing or sitting at the edge of the group—a metaphor for his self-imposed outsider status. Except for a pet dog named Foxl that he had caught and adopted when it jumped into a trench chasing a rat, Hitler had few close comrades.
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Other soldiers recalled him as a loner and “an oddball” who sent and received very little mail. “He had no one who would send him a care package,” said Amann.
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Yet Hitler was considered a brave and willing soldier. He was twice wounded and twice decorated with the Iron Cross First and Second Class. Still, he was never promoted beyond private first class—partly because he did not want to leave the cocoon of his
dispatch unit, one comrade claimed, and partly because he displayed none of the leadership qualities that would be required of a noncommissioned officer.
³⁵
(After an early battle, with huge losses, many soldiers were promoted; Hitler was made a
Gefreiter,
which has been erroneously translated for decades as corporal. Yet
Gefreiter
includes none of the command responsibilities of a noncommissioned officer like a corporal. It was only a step up within the rank of private—from “buck” private to private first class, just as in the American military.)
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According to army records, Private Hitler spent the last days of the war, October to November 1918, in an army hospital for “gas sickness” after a British mustard gas attack. He later reported that he suffered temporary blindness but bawled openly (“for the first time since my mother died”
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) when news of Germany’s capitulation reached the infirmary. “So it was all in vain!” he howled.
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Less credibly, Hitler also purported to have made the decision, as he still lay wounded and filled with hatred for “the gang of miserable criminals” who caused the war’s loss, to “become a politician.”
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Though doubted by some historians, this claim sounded good and later became part of Hitler’s carefully constructed leadership legend. In late November 1918, Hitler ended up back in Munich, still in the army,
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and still without much purpose. He had no outside job and no marketable skills. He was not even a pretend artist or postcard sketcher. Hitler opted to stay in the secure embrace of the military, the only real home he had known since he was eighteen, a place that guaranteed him a roof and his meals, even as millions of other soldiers were demobilized. He lingered at the barracks, pulled guard duty at the main train station, and went on temporary assignment to a fast-emptying prisoner-of-war camp at Traunstein, near the Austrian border. Back in his Munich garrison, Hitler was elected in spring 1919 as an alternate representative to the “soldier’s council”
that theoretically took over his unit during Bavaria’s brief, brutal experiment with a Soviet republic. In June 1919, Hitler’s idle days took a decisive turn, once again driven by outside fortune rather than inner conviction. The underutilized private was recruited by Captain Karl Mayr, the commander of a newly created intelligence and propaganda unit, to become a political education operative and an internal army spy (
Vertrauensmann,
or
V-mann
). Mayr’s unit had been formed because army leadership was concerned about the growing “virus” of Marxism among the rank-and-file in the unstable postwar political environment. The army—now called the Reichswehr—wanted to “immunize soldiers against revolutionary ideas.”
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To prepare his new operatives for the task of attacking Marxism and promoting German nationalism in the army, Captain Mayr sent Hitler and several other soldiers to a one-week course in history and politics
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at the University of Munich. One of the university speakers was Gottfried Feder, a self-styled economics expert who already spoke the language that appealed to Hitler, blaming Germany’s woes on “rapacious capital,” a code for “Jewish finance capital.” Feder denounced “capital slavery,” claiming that Germany was enslaved to international (Jewish) “stock market capitalism.” This notion appealed to both the populist and the anti-Semite in Hitler. Another speaker was conservative historian Professor Karl Alexander von Müller, who, after class, noticed Hitler lecturing other students in his animated, sharp-voiced manner. Müller told Mayr he thought Hitler had a talent for speaking.
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And indeed, Hitler’s singular gift for oratory soon showed itself in a dramatic way, leading to the epiphany that Hitler claimed altered his life. If true—and most historians believe it is—this is the moment that turned the aimless war veteran from a soldier into a budding public speaker. This is the moment that gave Hitler a
vision of his future vocation. This is the moment that created Adolf Hitler, the politician.

The life-changing experience occurred in August 1919, two months after Hitler’s political lectures at the university. Hitler and several other graduates of the course were sent to inject nationalistic and anti-Bolshevist thinking into a Reichswehr barracks called Camp Lechfeld, located forty miles from Munich. There they gave five days of talks styled as “citizenship training” to the troops. Hitler threw himself into the task and, along with the course leader, carried a large share of the lecturing burden. His subjects ranged from Germany’s alleged war guilt to “Social, Economic and Political Catchphrases.” His lectures were rife with anti-Semitism. “I ‘nationalized’ the troops,” he later wrote.
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Hitler’s passion, joined with his sweeping—if dilettantish and self-taught—grasp of history, made him a hit. “Herr Hitler is, if I may say so, a born popular speaker,” wrote one participant in his after-course evaluation. “His fanaticism and popular style… commands the attention and cooperation of the audience.” Another soldier noted that Hitler was “an excellent and spirited speaker.… Once, when a long lecture wasn’t finished on time, he asked [us] if he should stop or if [we] would agree to hear the rest of his talk after hours. Everyone immediately agreed.”
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At Lechfeld, Hitler was the star.

Hitler’s skill and success were apparently a surprise even to him. He had always been prone to bossiness, insisting that he run all the childhood games with his playmates while growing up in Austria. “I was a little ringleader and did well in school at first, but I was a bit hard to handle,” he recalled.
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Hitler was a nonstop chatterbox and domineering conversation partner, said August Kubizek, his teenaged boyhood friend. Hitler “liked to talk, and talked without pause,” but conversations with him, especially after their visits to Hitler’s beloved Richard Wagner operas, were always one-way
affairs, Kubizek recalled.
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That these personality traits could be translated into a professional asset had not yet occurred to the ex–dispatch runner. Now, at Camp Lechfeld, Hitler became aware of his power over people. He uncovered what would become the defining force of his political life, his voice. “I could speak!” he wrote, as though describing a Damascus Road experience. Though he claimed to have intuited this skill earlier without having recognized it for what it was, he now saw his ability to influence others. He had been a nobody on the roiling Munich political scene. He was about to become a somebody.
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A month later, another serendipitous experience brought Hitler a step closer to finding his calling. Captain Mayr sent Hitler, in his job as
V-mann,
or army spy, to report on a fledgling political group called the German Workers’ Party (
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
). Founded with encouragement from the well-heeled, right-wing, cultish Thule Society, the little “party” was really more of a discussion group with a handful of members. Its first leaders were a disgruntled, anti-Marxist, anti-Semitic railroad machinist
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named Anton Drexler and a politically active sports journalist named Karl Harrer.

Meeting on a September night in an unimposing pub called the Sterneckerbräu in the old part of Munich, the German Workers’ Party drew only four dozen attendees.
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Hitler’s initial impression, in his secret role as petty intelligence agent (wearing civilian clothes, not his Reichswehr uniform), was “neither good nor bad—it was just another newly founded group in a time when everyone felt called upon to start a party,” he wrote.
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Near the meeting’s end, however, when one participant stood to argue in favor of Bavarian secession from the German federation, Hitler’s ire was aroused; his impetuous instincts took over, as they would so often in the future, and he left the role of incognito observer to become an impassioned
debater. Rolling out his acerbic style and now-practiced arguments, Hitler launched into a fiery attack on separatism and a defense of the concept of Greater Germany, a union of Germany and Austria. In short order, he destroyed the other man’s position and—according to his own telling—drove the poor fellow from the meeting “like a wet poodle.”
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Hitler not only had proved that he could speak, but also had revealed that he could be a fast-on-his-feet demagogue.
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His plain looks and modest stature, along with his exceptionally pale skin and what many remember as “luminous,” piercing blue eyes, may have lent special intensity to Hitler’s impassioned arguments.
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In any case, the German Workers’ Party cofounder, Drexler, was so impressed that he grabbed Hitler afterward and pressed upon him a copy of his own forty-page manifesto, “My Political Awakening.” Drexler invited Hitler to return. To another attendee, Drexler said: “That guy has a mouth on him! We could really use him!”

After Hitler’s confrontational evening at the Sterneckerbräu, events moved quickly. Unable to sleep early the next morning in his army barracks because of some noisy mice, Hitler had nothing better to do than to read Drexler’s little pamphlet. With its anti-Semitic denunciation of “destructive Jewish influence” on German life, its attacks on “Big Capital,” and its belief in closing the class divide between workers and the middle class, the short screed immediately resonated with Hitler. “I saw my own development come to life again before my eyes” while reading the pamphlet, he recalled.
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But before he could decide whether or not to accept Drexler’s invitation to return, Hitler received a postcard informing him that he was now a member of the German Workers’ Party.
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Hitler spent two “tortured” days thinking about the “ridiculous” little club, as he called it, before deciding to accept. “It was the most momentous decision of my life,” he wrote. “Now there was no turning back.” Hitler now
had a party affiliation, a speaking platform, and a political base that he would turn, for a few years, into the most powerful political force in twentieth-century Europe.