Hitler, After the Great War

Taken from:

HITLER AND THE NAZI DICTATORSHIP

A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism
by FREDERICK L. SCHUMAN, PH.D. pp.3-9

ON NOVEMBER 11, 1918, a pale young man lay weeping on a sick-bed in the Lazarett at Pasewalk, a small Prussian town on the Ucker, northeast of Berlin. He was indistinguishable from hundreds of other war casualties lying on identical beds, save that he was of Austrian birth and had won an Iron Cross and the rank of corporal. Four years before, he had volunteered for service in Munich and had become a private in the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Regiment. The enthusiasm of those remote August days he always recalled with excitement and nostalgia. He had been twenty-five then: an intense, dissatisfied, neurotic youth, frustrated in all his ambitions without parents, without wife or mistress, without friends, without hope, save the frustrated hopes of war-dreams and hero-fantasies nurtured from childhood and never outgrown.

Sarajevo, the spark of death for ten million men, had come to him as to most of the others as the spark of life and the herald of high adventure. Fantasy promised to become reality. Upon the news of the outbreak of war he had felt a great weight lifted from his chest. Here was release from the storm and stress of an unhappy young manhood. He had fallen on his knees, overcome with rejoicing and vivid anticipations, and out of the fullness of his heart had thanked Heaven for vouchsafing him the privilege of living in an age which was about to show, after years of humdrum dullness, that it, too, could be "heroic." (Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf) "What man wills, that he hopes and believes." So wrote the pale young man ten years later about the inspiring fever of 1914 patriotism. "Deutschland, Deutschland ubcr allcs!" rang always in his ears as he moved toward the front, fearful, he said later, lest the victory be won and the war be over before he saw battle. If other fears possessed him, they were conveniently forgotten later. This fear at least proved groundless, for he soon saw destruction and blood in Flanders. Like millions of others, he rejoiced and recoiled simultaneously, exalted by merging himself into a vast armed host engaged in grim and heroic deeds, but shocked no doubt by the hideous sights of death. He soon learned to enjoy death. Killing and escaping being killed were noble. Civilized men in arms, unlike barbarians and savages, cannot enjoy bestiality for its own sake. They must justify murder and arson and disguise their guilty joy in the slogans and symbols of patriotic sacrifice. The greater their joy and the greater their guilt at their joy, the more ardent their patriotism.

The pale young man was an ardently patriotic soldier who fought wisely and well. Months and years of slaughter on the western front became his life. He relished danger and became a dispatch-bearer. On October 7, 1916, during the British offensive on the Somme, he was wounded. He convalesced at Beelitz and later in Berlin. There he found time to denounce cowards and defeatists and, above all, the Jews and Marxists, who were to him the pests and parasites of the Fatherland. By March of 1917 he was again at the front. Glorious hopes of victory waxed strong as the year wore on. Then in the summer of 1918 they waned with the failure of the great drives and the inexorable pressure of French, British, American, and Belgian armies pushing the grey flood back toward the frontier. But the pale young man was undaunted till the end. In the autumn of the dark year he found himself again, for the third time since 1914, at Comines, in Flanders. On October 13 the British at Ypres launched a mustard-gas attack against his regiment. He fell choking, burned, and almost blinded and eventually found himself in the Lazarett at Pasewalk with doctors and nurses uncertain as to whether he would recover his sight. At last he saw again, but his eyes opened on a world in dissolution.

One day rebellious sailors, perhaps from Stettin, came by the hospital, driving armored cars and shouting: "Revolution!" They were led, so an embittered memory told him later, by a few Jews. Detestable swine! They had never been at the front. And now they waved red flags and cried: "Revolution!" Only a naval mutiny, the young man on the sick-bed reassured himself. That the Germans as a whole, his Germans, could yield to despair was inconceivable. But gradually he learned the appalling truth. On November 10 the hospital pastor announced the abdication of the Hohenzollerns to the sobbing and cursing veterans.

When, on the next day, the final news of the armistice came and he realized its import, he stumbled to his bed and wept for the first time, he wrote later, since the death of his mother. All that he had worshipped, all that he had made the most cherished part of himself, was destroyed. Grief and misery at this catastrophe were soon transmuted into hate, as horror at the front had been transmuted into heroism. All that night his hate raged within him hate against the authors of defeat. In his simple philosophy, all blacks and whites with no nuances of grey, the authors stood clearly revealed: Marxists, pacifists, democrats; above all, the pestiferous Jews. He laughed now at his dreams of becoming once more an architect. A great passion swept through him. He must destroy the authors of defeat as they had destroyed all that had meaning in his life. He must regenerate his countrymen, lead them back to the light, restore their will to what is warlike and heroic. He must, in short, enter politics and thereby fulfill his "mission."

Sixteen years later, on April 20, 1934, his forty-fifth birthday, the Bavarian barracks where he first served would be named after him. In Bavaria all mothers of sixty-five would be officially feasted in honor of the mother who gave Adolf Hitler to Germany. Her son, in the chancellery of the Reich, would receive hundreds of enormous birthday cakes from all parts of the nation. And he would receive thanks and congratulations, with comradely greetings, from his erstwhile commander, Paul von Beneckendorf und von Hindenburg.

In the dreary autumn of 1918 the pale young man returned to his regimental headquarters in Munich. His "mission" burned within him, but his immediate future was dark. To return to dull civilian life was unthinkable. No position awaited him. No family hearth would welcome him in his despair. No relatives or friends cared whether he lived or died, for he had always been lonely and apart. No Frau or Fraulein awaited his homecoming. He had no home. He had never experienced love, nor was he ever to know the exaltation and peace which it brought to other men. He returned to his barracks. And in the general demobilization he managed to remain with his regiment. But even this was dull and dispiriting in the black winter which followed the armistice. He lived listlessly, seeking but not finding the opportunity for which he sought. Heroism was of the past once more and perhaps of some dim, remote future. The present was drab and full of the antics of the cursed Jews, Marxists, labor leaders, liberals, a swinish lot whom he despised and detested with all his soul. They represented something broader than his little world of petty-bourgeois provincialism and something therefore alien and menacing. He withdrew into his memories and his anticipations.

His childhood and youth had been in no way remarkable. Indeed, they epitomized most perfectly the aspirations and frustrations of millions of little men throughout central Europe. He was born April 20, 1889, in the small border town of Braunau-am-Inn, near the Bavarian frontier. He was the only son by a third marriage of a petty Austrian customs official. The town later came to be for him a symbol of a mission: that of effacing the frontier, of uniting all Germans in a great German Reich. His early years were uneventful. His family was poor, though his father put on the airs appropriate to a Beamier and was apparently disliked by his neighbors, for Austrians did not worship authority and uniforms, as did Prussians. Frau Hitler (nee Klara Ploetzl) was of uncertain ancestry, possibly Czechish. Herr Hitler had been christened Alois. His surname, a contraction of Hitler, suggested the origins of the family in the small peasantry.

Adolf's relations with his parents were unhappy, even in his early childhood. He resented his father's authoritarian attitude, and his resentment was soon transferred to that which his father's uniform symbolized the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Neither the school nor the Catholic Church which he attended broke down this transferred father-hatred. He hated his "Fatherland" with a childish hate and soon found reasons for his feelings. He pored over the cheap books in his father's small library, especially over a popular account of the Franco-Prussian War. He wondered why all Germans had not fought France. He was a German too, and like all boys he thrilled with vicarious joy at accounts of wars and of deeds soldierly and warlike. His motherland, he felt, was the Germany across the river, over there at Simbach and beyond. Only it wasn't the land of his mother. She spoke German with a Czechish accent. This was humiliating. As a German among the other Germans of the dual monarchy, he looked down upon the lesser alien peoples: Italians, South Slavs, Magyars, Poles, Czechs. But when his family went for a time to Passau, along the river on the German side, they were looked down upon as Austrians. And later, when the family went to Lambach, the Austrians treated them almost as foreigners. These subtle distinctions between in-group and out-group, and his own anomalous position in which he seemed to "belong" nowhere, deeply affected the boy. He disliked his father and was alienated from his mother. Like a small, rudderless boat without anchor or sail, he drifted through his too complex little world, bound for no certain destination save some mystic land of dreams.

After the turn of the century, when he attained to the dignity of twelve years, he decided that he would become an artist. He liked color and form and romantic fantasy. The second opera which he witnessed, Lohengrin (Wilhelm Tell was the first), impressed him deeply and made him a devotee of Wagner. His father was horrified at his decision. "A painter no, so long as I live, never!" He must become a respectable Beamier like his father. Painter, indeed! His son to become a Bohemian, a metropolitan good-for-nothing! But Adolf was stubborn and his quarrel with his father became chronic. The boy's mother brought him little comfort, and he looked elsewhere for inspiration. He found it to some degree in the Realschule at Linz, where his history-teacher, Dr. Leopold Poetsch, made him a good German, aware at a tender age of the distinction between unworthy dynastic patriotism toward the Habsburgs and pan-German racial nationalism.

When he was thirteen his father died. His mother felt bound to carry out her husband's wishes and to make young Adolf a Beamter. But in the face of her insistence he fell ill, and, to his relief, the doctor diagnosed his malady as a lung trouble which would make office work highly inadvisable. His mother then agreed reluctantly to send him to the art academy in Vienna. But her intention was never carried out. After a lingering, painful illness, she followed her husband to the grave. Adolf was an orphan at fifteen. Relatives took him temporarily under their protection. They were poor and doubtless begrudged him his keep. None of them made any permanent impression on the unhappy boy.  

When he was seventeen he went to Vienna. He was poor and friendless but resolved to study painting. Full of confidence, he took the entrance examinations in the academy, only to fail and to be advised that his talents seemed to lie in architecture rather than painting. But entrance into the architectural school of the academy required preparatory work in the Bauschule der Technik and this in turn required the completion of a course in a Mittelschitle. Adolf had never completed his secondary education, nor was he able to do so on his slender resources. Somehow he must earn a living. He did odd jobs. He borrowed a few schillings from his sister Paula. He painted picture postcards. All he could find in the way of a permanent post was a menial job as a building-trades helper. He carried bricks and mortar and mingled resentfully with common working men, his social inferiors. He lived in tenements and felt at home nowhere. Poverty, insecurity, and frustration did not lead him toward acquiescence in his lot. He rebelled and viewed the scene about him always through the small eyes of a half-peasant, half-bourgeois provincial who had known better days and who knew he was worthy of better things. Girls paid no heed to this surly, morose youth, and he ignored them. He hungered for beauty, but found none in this narrow, cramped life of the builders' scaffolding and the workers' quarters. His inner conflicts found expression in the development of the curiously warped social philosophy of an outcast. "In this period," he wrote long afterwards, "there was formed in me an outlook and a world philosophy which became for me the granite foundations of my behavior at that time. I had to learn only a little in addition to that which I thus created in myself, to change it I had no need."  

This Weltanschauung (blessed word!) was, as he himself dimly recognized, the reflection of the resentments and fears of a petty- bourgeois youth at the prospect of being pushed down permanently into the ranks of the proletariat by the vast impersonal forces of a society of which he had little comprehension and no control. His fellow workers irritated him insufferably. They were Social Democrats. He sympathized with their hatred of the monarchy, but only because he desired the break-up of a State which was "Slavering" its Germans. He hated Slavs and yet he probably had no realization that he was here giving expression to his contempt for his mother and for something deep in himself. The workers urged him to join the union. He refused. They threatened him with violence. He hated them and perceived suddenly that Marxism and trade unionism constituted "a fearful instrument of terror against the security and independence of the national economy, the safety of the State, and the freedom of the individual."

He studied this enemy of his "freedom” and finally found the "key" to all social problems. It was supplied by Karl Lueger, Mayor of the city, and by the bourgeois and aristocratic anti-Semitic groups which were so prominent a feature of pre-war Vienna life. "Only the knowledge of Jewry offers the key to the understanding of the inner and actual purpose of Social Democracy." Before Vienna he had seen few Jews. They had been rare in Linz and these had been so "Europeanized" and "human" that he had mistaken them for Germans. In Vienna he had at first resented the anti-Semitism of a section of the press and of Dr. Karl Lueger's Christian-Social Party. But finally he saw the light. Once he met a Jew with long hair and a caftan and wondered at these sinister figures come out of the East. He began buying anti-Semitic pamphlets and learned that the Jews were a pestilential race, worse than the Black Death, poisoning all they touched. The completeness of the revelation was startling. Here was the road to self-righteous hatred of that world of cosmopolitan culture, of sophistication, of release from provincial inhibitions which he had tried in vain to enter. This was, after all, a world of literary filth, of artistic dross, of theatrical dirt all produced by Jews! And his "Weltpresse" was run by Jews and was full of a thousand lies. Prostitution, the white-slave traffic, a hundred evils were devised by the Jews to debauch the people on whom they preyed. And the Social Democratic Party and its press were dominated by Jews. Lies, lies! "Gradually I began to hate them. ... I was transformed from a weakly world-citizen [!] to a fanatic anti-Semite." (Mein Kampf)

This ferment continued to grow within the man during his five years in Vienna. By 1909 he was working independently, doing drawings and watercolors. He was even poorer than before, but at least his time was his own and he was free from distasteful contacts with grimy workers. Karl Lueger remained his guide to Jewish wickedness. His pan-Germanism found inspiration in Georg von Schonerer, leader of the Austrian pan-Germans. Later, in retrospect, he perceived that Schonerer was mistaken in building merely a parliamentary party and in failing to win the masses to his cause by linking pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism with "social problems." Schonerer talked and negotiated, but failed to fight. He failed to develop a Weltanschauung championed by fighters and heroes. Here was needed force and fanaticism and Wagnerian mythology. Schonerer's end was good, but his means were inadequate. Lueger's means were excellent, but he had no clear goal He was, after all, only a sham anti-Semite. He fought the Jews only on religious grounds and failed to perceive the racial implications of his cause.

In 1912 Hitler went to Munich. Why he went is unclear. In February 1914 he returned to Linz to do his military service, only to be rejected as "too weak" and "waffenunfahig." About his two years in the Bavarian capital he says little in his autobiography, save that they were the happiest and most contented years of his life. His existence remained precarious, however. He worked at odd jobs as a carpenter and handy-man. He made drawings for newspapers. He painted a bit unsuccessfully. He toyed with architecture, also unsuccessfully. His frustrations remained always with him. His fantasies remained unrealized and seemingly unrealizable. And then with dramatic suddenness war! He was accepted as a volunteer in the Bavarian army. Adventure! And the fierce, joyful years of slaughter, mud, and slime. And the trappings of a “heroism" in which his faith never wavered, even in the darkest hours of the final tragedy. Here was salvation and release from drabness. Here was glory and exaltation and victory and then the bitter sting once more of defeat.