the war was Adolf Hitler’s great affirmative educational experience, the one to which he exuberantly applied such phrases as “mighty impression,” “overwhelming,” “so happy.”
Hitler himself declared that the war had transformed him. It hardened this touchy and sentimental young man and gave him a sense of his own worth. Caught up in the machinery of war, he learned toughness, the uses of solidarity, and self-discipline. He acquired that belief in fate which was one component of his generation’s high- flown irrationality. The coolness with which he moved in the fiercest fire earned him, among his fellows, a reputation for invulnerability. If Hitler was around, they told one another, “nothing will happen.” His luck seems to have made the deepest impression on Hitler himself and to have reinforced his faith in his special mission. Through all the years of failure and misery he had clung and continued obstinately to cling to that faith.
But the war also magnified Hitler’s tendency to brooding. Like many of his fellow soldiers, he became convinced that the old leadership of society had failed, that the very social order he had marched to war to defend was perishing of internal exhaustion. “I would make the leaders responsible for these men who have fallen,” he once declared to an astonished comrade. Hitler’s generation, obsessed with its own idiosyncrasies and wrestling with its problems in a literary output of vast dimensions, was searching for a new meaning to life. Basically, this signified, it was searching for a meaningful social order. Hitler himself decided that he wanted “to know nothing about politics at that time.” But his need to communicate, his unquenchable craving for speculative thinking, ran counter to such resolves. Soon he was attracting attention by “philosophizing about political and ideological questions in the crude manner of ordinary folk.” From the early phase of the war we have a twelve-page letter of his to a Munich acquaintance which bears this out. After giving a detailed description of a frontal attack in which he participated, Hitler concludes the letter:55
I think about Munich so often, and each of us has only this one wish, that the final settlement with that gang will soon come, that we’ll be able to go at them, no matter what the cost, and that those of us who have the good fortune to see our homeland again will find it purer and more purified of foreignism, so that by the sacrifices and sufferings which so many hundreds of thousands of us are undergoing daily, by the torrent of blood which is pouring out here day after day against an international world of enemies, not only Germany’s enemies outside will be shattered, but also our inner internationalism. That would be worth more than all territorial gains. With Austria it will turn out as I have always said.
Politically, this letter carries on the ideological obsessions of Hitler’s Vienna years: the fear of overwhelming foreign elements in the nation, together with a defensive reaction against a world of enemies. There were borrowings, also, from the Pan-German teachings, which later led to his thesis of the primacy of domestic over foreign affairs. National and racial unity took precedence over territorial expansion. Greater Germany was first to be German and only subsequently great.
At the beginning of October, 1916, at Le Barque, Hitler was lightly wounded in the left thigh and sent to Beelitz Hospital near Berlin. He stayed in Germany until March, 1917, and it would appear that this was when there arose in him the first, still unclear signs of that “awakening” which two years later prompted him to enter politics.
August, 1914, and his experiences at the front had above all impressed upon him the inner unity of the nation. For two years he had basked in this new-found sense of togetherness, which he was sure nothing could affect. Having no family, no home address, no destination whatsoever, he had renounced his right to furloughs. His superzeal untroubled, he stayed on in his unreal world. “It was still the front of the old, glorious army of heroes,” he later nostalgically recalled.56 The shock was all the harsher when, in Beelitz and during a first visit to Berlin, he encountered the political, social, and national contradictions of the past. With deep distress he realized that the enthusiasm of the early phase of the war had drained away. Parties and factionalism had replaced that exalted sense of sharing a common destiny. It may be that his future resentment toward the city of Berlin had its origins in this experience. He saw discontent, hunger, and resignation. He was outraged at meeting slackers who boasted of their shrewdness; he noted hypocrisy, egotism, war profiteering, and, faithful to the obsession that dated back to his days in Vienna, he decided that behind all these manifestations was the work of the Jew.
It was the same when, nearly cured, he was sent to a reserve battalion in Munich. “I thought I could no longer recognize the city.” He turned his resentment against those who had robbed him of his illusions and destroyed the lovely dream of German unity—the first positive social experience he had had since the days of his childhood. He was filled with fury against the “Hebrew corruptors of the people” on the one hand—12,000 or 15,000 of them should be held “under poison gas”—and against the politicians and journalists on the other hand. “Jabberers,” “vermin,” “perjuring criminals of the Revolution,” they deserved nothing but annihilation. “All the implements of military power should have been ruthlessly used for the extermination of this pestilence.”57 He still longed hysterically for victory; no prophetic sense or strategic instinct told him that defeat would serve him far better as a basis for his rise from namelessness.
Returning to the front in the spring of 1917, he felt once more exalted and still more alienated from the civilian world to which he had never been able to adjust. Military documents indicate that he participated in the positional battles in French Flanders, in the spring Battle of Arras, and in the fierce autumnal conflict of Chemin des Dames. Apprehensively he noted the “senseless letters of thoughtless females” which helped infect that front with the mood of resignation that prevailed back home. At this time he frequently discussed his prospects for a future vocation with a fellow soldier, the painter Ernst Schmidt. Schmidt related that even then Hitler had begun to consider whether he ought not to try politics, but that he had never really decided. There are other indications that he still believed he could make a career as an artist. When he came to Berlin, the political heart of the country, in October, 1917—shortly after the Reichstag’s controversial peace resolution and shortly before the German military triumph in the East—Hitler wrote in a postcard to Schmidt: “Now at last have opportunity to study the museums somewhat better.” Later he declared that in those days he used to tell a small circle of his friends that when the war was over he meant to be active politically in addition to taking up his profession as an architect. According to his own account, he also knew what form that activity was going to take: he wanted to become a political speaker.
Such an aspiration sprang from the notion he had cherished since his Vienna days, that all modes of human reactions are the calculable result of guidance and background influences. The idea of hidden wirepullers, so disturbing and at the same time so fascinating to him, took on new and seductive colors as soon as he imagined himself as some day being one of the wirepullers. His view of humanity excluded all spontaneity. Everything could be produced by manipulation—“tremendous, almost incomprehensible results,” as he noted with a touch of astonishment—if only the right players moved the right members at the right moment. He preposterously considered the movements of history, the rise and decline of nations, classes, or parties largely as the consequence of differing propagandists abilities. In the famous sixth chapter of
According to his argument, Germany lost the war because “the form was inadequate, the substance was psychologically wrong: a careful examination of German war propaganda can lead to no other diagnosis.” Because Germany’s leaders did not recognize the true power of this weapon, they were incapable of creating propaganda worthy of the name. Instead, Germany produced only “insipid pacifistic bilge” that could never “fire men’s spirits till they were willing to die.” Although “the most brilliant psychologists would have been none too good” for this task, the Germans employed aesthetes and half-hearted failures, with the result that the country derived no advantage and sometimes actual harm from its propaganda.
The enemy, Hitler argued, had done it differently. Their atrocity propaganda, “as ruthless as it was brilliant,” had made a deep impression upon Hitler, and he repeatedly extolled its psychological acumen and boldness. He admired the “rabid, impudent bias” and “indefatigable persistence” of the enemy lies,58 and said that he “learned enormously” from them. In general, Hitler tended to illustrate his own ideas by pointing to what the enemy had done. There is no doubt that he drew his belief in the effectiveness of psychological influence from the example of enemy propaganda of the World War. It must be recognized, however, that a large part of the German public was convinced of the enemy’s superiority in psychological warfare. This was actually just one more of those legends with which a nation proud of its military strength attempted to explain on nonmilitary grounds what otherwise seemed inexplicable: that after so many victories on all the
