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The Dictator: Adolf Hitler

I

For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody. He was born into obscurity in Braunau, Austria, on 20 April 1889, the son of a minor Austrian civil servant. The absence of information has been filled by speculation, most of it without any firm basis in the evidence, much of it driven by a misguided desire to find explanations for his later career in a supposedly warped individual pathology rooted in the experiences of his early years. Nor can Hitler's own account in his autobiographical political tract Mein Kampf be relied on. He did not, as he suggested, grow up in poverty; nor does his father Alois seem to have been an alcoholic. Nevertheless, the use of corporal punishment by his father to keep him in line does appear to have been greater than was normal in late nineteenth-century Austria, and no doubt Hitler was telling the truth when he said he feared his father more than he loved him. Still, his father was supportive of his desire to be an artist, contrary to the impression left in Mein Kampf. In 1900, recognizing his talent for drawing, his father enrolled him, not in the humanistic high school which would have qualified him for a career in the professions, but in a technical high school (Realschule). Noticeably undisciplined at his school in Linz, the young Hitler spent much of his time drawing and painting, but when, in 1907, he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he was rejected on the grounds that he could not draw the human head. The Director told him to study architecture instead, but Hitler lacked the qualifications for entry. Still, he continued to think of himself as an artist above anything else.

By this time, Hitler's parents had died, his father in 1903 and his mother, Klara, to whom he was much closer, in 1907. In February 1908 he moved to Vienna, where he stayed for the next five years. Living off his mother's modest legacy, an orphan's pension and subsidies from his wider family, he did not feel it necessary to find a job. Instead he frittered his time away, drawing and sketching, reading - particularly Germanic legends, along with the Wild West stories of Karl May, with their curious atmosphere of doom, decline and redemption through violence - and going to the opera, above all to the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, based largely on medieval myth and sagas of knightly heroism, love and death. His later assertion that he became a follower of the extreme nationalist and antisemite Austrian politician Georg Ritter von Schönerer must be treated with scepticism. Similarly, his claim in Mein Kampf to have become a radical antisemite in Vienna was belied by the fact that he was on good terms with a number of Jews during his years there. There is, in fact, no reliable evidence for his having been interested in politics or imbued with a hatred of Jews at this time. Hitler's best friend during his teenage years, the music student August Kubizek, who later became a professional violinist and theatre conductor, left a vivid impression of his character. Passionate, articulate and energetic, Hitler, he remembered, loved to talk, his conversation ranging across many subjects. What he required, however, was not an interlocutor but a listener. The two teenagers became friends because they were regular visitors to the Linz opera, and shared lodgings for a time. A serious young man, Hitler, remembered Kubizek, had little sense of humour, though he was fond of mocking people he knew. He kept his innermost feelings to himself, though Kubizek reported that he fell in love with a girl called Stefanie, but was too shy to do anything about it. Still, Kubizek gave it as his opinion that Hitler's sexuality was 'absolutely normal'. His strict bourgeois moral opinions, however, kept him away from the brothels and street-walkers that were so attractive to so many of his young male contemporaries. Obsessed with art and architecture, he spent a good deal of time in the imaginary redesigning of towns and cities, above all Linz, an occupation that stayed with him until the end of his life.

By September 1909 Hitler had spent his savings and was getting into serious financial difficulties, not least because he was spending so much on going to the opera. He was forced to live in a men's asylum for the homeless for many months, and a second attempt to gain entry to the Academy of Fine Arts was brusquely rejected. Firmly convinced that he would become a great artist, he refused to compromise or settle for an ordinary life. At the suggestion of a friend in the asylum he prepared and sold paintings copied from picture postcards, earning him a small income, but it was not until his twenty-fourth birthday in April 1913 that he was able to come into a solid inheritance from a relative. With a modest but sufficient income assured, he moved to Munich, on 25 May 1913, abandoning the multicultural milieu in which he had recently been living in Vienna for a Germany that he clearly admired and to which he must have thought German-speakers such as himself truly belonged. He remained an Austrian citizen, however, and was ordered by the Bavarian police to return to Austria in order to begin his obligatory military service. When he turned up for enrolment, his medical examination certified him as physically 'too weak', and he was able to return to Munich. Here he continued his aimless existence for the next several months, sitting in the coffee houses in Schwabing, a district known as the haunt of artists and bohemians, selling his copies of postcards. Nothing about his life up to this point indicated a future career in politics. His life had been a failure, his ambitions unfulfilled, and his early social position, growing up in a solidly bourgeois family, had sunk about as low as it could get. Of all the Nazi leaders, he was the most déclassé, his social decline the most precipitous.

The outbreak of World War I at the end of July 1914 seemed to solve all Hitler's problems. He claimed in Mein Kampf that it was the greatest time of his life, and there is no reason to disbelieve him. Filled with the overwhelming German patriotism shown on his face in the famous photograph that caught him in the crowds gathering on Munich's Odeonsplatz on 2 August 1914 to cheer Germany's entry into the war, he enlisted in the Bavarian army on 16 August, following an initial rejection. In the chaotic rush of mass recruitment, no one seems to have noticed that he was still an Austrian citizen, or that he was physically not really fitted for combat. After undergoing some rudimentary training, he was sent with his regiment to the Western Front. He survived his baptism of fire in a fierce encounter with British troops, was promoted to the rank known as Gefreiter, and assigned duties as a messenger taking orders from field headquarters to the front. His promotion did not entitle him to order other soldiers about, like a real corporal did; he would best be described as a 'senior private'. The award to him of an Iron Cross, First Class, is often taken as evidence of exceptional bravery, but while his actual position as dispatch-runner for regimental headquarters did involve some exposure to danger, it mainly involved activities behind the front line. Serving at HQ brought soldiers like Hitler into close contact with officers who had the power to award medals, and such soldiers were greatly over-represented among those who won the Iron Cross.

His fellow soldiers remembered him as neither outstandingly brave nor notably cowardly: he was said to have performed his duties calmly and efficiently. Something of a loner, he was regarded by his comrades as an oddity, 'the artist' as they called him. While they chatted and joked, smoked, drank, or visited brothels, Hitler did none of these things, but sat on his own, reading. Where they were cynical about the war, Hitler repeatedly reaffirmed his commitment to total victory, though he generally did this in private, as his surviving correspondence testifies. When members of his regiment took part in the spontaneous, football-playing 'Christmas truce' of December 1914, Hitler refused to join in. Like other soldiers, he was quickly disabused of the romantic, heroic illusions that had inspired him to enlist. In their place, Hitler learned to be hard and ruthless and to be indifferent to suffering and death. Military hierarchy and discipline gave a sense of order and structure to his life, though he did not seek promotion, nor was he considered suitable for a higher rank by his superiors. On 5 October 1916 he sustained a shrapnel wound in his thigh, but it turned out not to be life-threatening. He took part in the ultimately unsuccessful 1918 Spring offensive on the Western Front. A few months later, he was temporarily blinded in a mustard-gas attack and sent for treatment and recovery to a hospital behind the lines, in the Pomeranian town of Pasewalk. It was here that he learned on 10 November 1918 of the final German defeat, the overthrow of the Kaiser, and the outbreak of revolution, spearheaded by left-wing workers' and soldiers' councils.

II

The workers' and soldiers' councils soon yielded to the established opposition to the Kaiser, the Social Democratic Party, which took over the leadership of the country and, backed by the liberals and the Catholic Centre Party, established a new political order, far more progressive than the authoritarian polity of Bismarck and the Kaiser. The republican constitution voted through at a constitutive National Assembly held in the cultural centre of Weimar, the city of the classical German poets Goethe and Schiller in the late eighteenth century, was a thoroughly democratic one, giving women the vote for the first time, and making governments answerable to the legislature and the electorate. The Weimar Republic, as it came to be called, had to contend with many difficulties. The Treaty of Versailles, which sealed the Allied victory in the war, took away around 13 per cent of German territory and population on the eastern and western borders, removed overseas colonies from German control, and restricted Germany's army to 100,000 men while also banning combat aircraft and ships. Germany had to pay large financial reparations, in gold, for the damage caused by its forces' occupation of Belgium and north-east France. Political stability was made very difficult by the fact that there were no fewer than six major political parties, reflecting deep-seated and long-standing divisions of class, region and religion in the electorate - the Social Democrats, the Communists, the Catholic Centre, the Nationalists, the right-wing Liberals and the left-wing Liberals. Many conservative, nationalist and far-right political groups refused to accept the legitimacy of the new Republic and yearned for the Kaiser's return. On the left, the Communists damned the Republic as 'capitalist' and worked for a revolution that would bring in a regime along Soviet lines. Under the new constitution, the proportion of the vote won by any given party translated directly into the proportion of seats it won in the legislature. All governments had perforce to be coalitions of different parties, but this was less the consequence of proportional representation than of the multi-party system the Republic had inherited from the Kaiser's reign.

Hitler's later claim that it was the 1918 revolution that made him decide to enter politics was a drastic oversimplification. His entry into the political world was a more gradual process. There is no reason to doubt his shock at learning of Germany's defeat and the terms of the Armistice, but it was many months before he began to take political action. Initially he rejoined the army, in the absence of any other kind of employment. He remained inactive after the Bavarian revolutionary workers' and soldiers' council leader Kurt Eisner was assassinated in Munich by a nationalist fanatic in 1919, to be succeeded by a short-lived anarchist regime and then a council of hard-line Communists, whose rule in Munich, the Bavarian capital, was ended in a bloodbath by volunteer 'Free Corps' troops sent by the elected, moderate Social Democratic government of Bavaria led by Johannes Hoffmann. Like many right-wingers in Bavaria, Hitler probably saw in Hoffmann the only immediate hope for the restoration of order; hence his willingness initially to support the Social Democrats. Elected by his fellow soldiers to represent them, he was chosen by the officers to investigate the conduct of the troops during the revolutionary events, and then to assist in counter-revolutionary 'education' courses for soldiers. Soon he was attracting attention with what one listener called his 'fanaticism' and his obvious popularity with his audiences. He had probably taken on these roles as a way of staying in the army, since he lacked any viable alternative way of supporting himself, but the result was that his identity as a soldier was giving way to a new self-consciousness as a politician. However, in many ways he continued to carry his military persona with him: for Hitler, politics was warfare by other means. In his self-presentation for the rest of his life, he always laid emphasis on his years as an ordinary front-line soldier, a man of the people in military uniform.

Central to the thirty-one-year-old Hitler's emerging political world view after the war was a rabid antisemitism. The extreme right-wing nationalists who triumphed with the entry of the Free Corps into Munich regarded the revolution as the work of a Jewish conspiracy and the council regimes as the creation of Jewish subversives. Several of the revolutionaries, from Kurt Eisner to Ernst Toller and Eugen Leviné, were of Jewish origin, though almost all of them, as radical socialists, had repudiated their Jewish identity. But this gave a superficial plausibility to claims that the city had been living under 'Jewish rule' until the Free Corps arrived. Hitler's first expression of his newly extreme and obsessive hatred of Jews, in a letter to one of the students on his course, Adolf Gemlich, gave vent to his belief that for thousands of years the Jewish race had by its inner nature been characterized by subversion, cultural destruction and materialist greed. Rather than respond with violent pogroms, however, Hitler declared that a 'rational' antisemitism was more effective, meaning the removal of the Jews from the country by one means or another. It was important to realize, he told Gemlich, that 'Jewry [is] definitely a community of race and not religion.' The Jews were carriers of a 'racial tuberculosis of peoples'. All they wanted was money and power. Their ultimate aim was 'to rule the world': that was why they alone were 'international' in character. The governments that replaced the Kaiser and the German princes were mere tools of the Jews. So was the press. So were the banks. In speech after speech in the early 1920s, Hitler obsessively repeated these fantastical claims. There was nothing particularly original about them. They were a more extreme version of a generalized feeling among German nationalists and conservatives that Germany had somehow been cheated of victory in World War I, and that malign forces, mainly located on the left, were responsible. What was unusual was the vehemence and effectiveness with which Hitler now began to propagate these views.