Young Hitler Read online

  About the Book

  When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just twenty-five years old. It was a time he would later call the ‘most stupendous experience of my life’.

  That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world on which he opened his newly healed eyes was different and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled and the army had been resolutely humbled.

  Hitler never accepted these facts. Out of his fury rose a white-hot hatred, an unquenchable thirst for revenge against the ‘criminals’ who had signed the armistice, against the socialists whom he accused of stabbing the army in the back and, most violently, against the Jews – a direct threat to the master race of his imagination – on whose shoulders he would pile all of Germany’s woes. But this was not all about the war: the seeds of that hatred lay in Hitler’s youth.

  By peeling back the layers of Hitler’s childhood, his war record and his early political career, Paul Ham’s Young Hitler: The Making Of the Führer seeks the man behind the myth. How did the defining years of Hitler’s life affect his rise to power?

  More broadly, Paul Ham seeks to answer the question: was Hitler a freak accident? Or was he an extreme example of a recurring type of demagogue, who will do and say anything to seize power; who thrives on chaos; and who personifies, in his words and in his actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue: A little context …

  1 ‘At the time I thought everything should be blown up’

  2 ‘At home I do not remember having heard the word Jew’

  3 ‘I had honoured my father, but my mother I had loved’

  4 ‘The whole academy should be dynamited’

  5 ‘Is this a German?’

  6 ‘I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven’

  7 ‘I passionately loved soldiering’

  8 ‘Louvain was a heap of rubble’

  9 ‘I was right out in front, ahead of everyone’

  10 ‘You will hear much more about me’

  11 ‘At last my will was undisputed master’

  12 ‘For the last time the Lord’s grace smiled on His ungrateful children’

  13 ‘Since the day I stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept’

  14 ‘What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery?’

  15 ‘I could speak!’

  16 ‘The movement was on the march’

  17 ‘The world of the woman is the man’

  18 ‘You must fight with me – or die with me!’

  19 ‘If fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters had been held under poison gas …’

  Epilogue: The making of the Führer

  Appendix: The German National Socialist ‘25-point Programme’

  Notes and References

  Select Bibliography

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index of Searchable Terms

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Paul Ham

  Copyright Notice

  ‘What good fortune for governments that the people do not think’

  Adolf Hitler

  ‘Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sheer ignorance and conscientious stupidity’

  Martin Luther King

  PROLOGUE

  A little context …

  No other leader or political movement has relied so heavily on catastrophic events for their rise to power as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

  Hitler could not have travelled from ‘Viennese bum’ (as his once trusted colleague Hermann Göring later damned him) to ‘Führer’ without the apocalyptic conditions created by the First World War (1914–18) and its aftermath. Dismissed as a homeless crank before the war, Hitler was hailed as a messiah-like figure after it. ‘What happened under Hitler,’ writes the historian Ian Kershaw, ‘is unimaginable without the experience of the First World War and what followed it.’1

  Far less clear is how the experiences of Hitler’s youth, especially during the First World War, wrought the conqueror of Europe out of this unpromising human clay. What mysterious alignment of nature, nurture, accident and opportunity created one of the most murderous dictators of the twentieth century? What, in short, made the Führer?

  Every individual is powerfully shaped by extreme experiences in their childhood and youth, and Hitler was no exception. His memory of the Western Front was a constant companion in his life, a brooding passenger on the path to power, shaping his every thought and action. And he had a formidable recollection of it. Unlike most of his fellow soldiers, who were relieved when it was over and longed to go home, Hitler thrilled to battle, refused to accept defeat and fell into the darkest slough of despond at the Armistice. The war was a red-hot brand on his personality, a scorching reverie, an unforgettable dance with death.

  Yet Hitler’s Great War hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Biographers tend to consign it to the sidelines, as a rite of passage, a youthful diversion; or they describe how he performed as a soldier. Yet, as Hitler himself often stated, that war and its immediate consequences were the most formative personal experiences of his life, with an immense impact on everything that followed.2 Indeed, Hitler’s ‘first war’ cries out for reassessment as the causative factor in his rise to power. But for most people, his role in it, and its aftermath, remains curiously obscure.

  Nazi censors and myth-makers haven’t helped. After he was elected chancellor, Hitler went to extraordinary lengths to suppress the facts about his youth – even ordering the execution of an ‘art dealer’ who had befriended him as a young man and who threatened to reveal un savoury details of his early life in Vienna. So extreme were the measures Hitler and the Nazi propagandists took to preserve the myth of the ‘Führer’, that they beg the question: how much were they hiding, and why?

  A little context may help to set the scene for the story that follows. The world Hitler was born into, in 1889, was at the flood tide of a period of immense economic development, colonial expansion and social upheaval. The 1890s were the fag ends of the ‘Gilded Age’, and for a few people it was exceptionally gilded. In Europe, in 1890, the wealthiest decile (top tenth) owned almost 90 per cent of total wealth (and would do so up until 1914), as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown.3 Most of the rest lived in a state of grinding poverty, short life expectancy and constant anxiety.

  The European powers were animated less by the social injustices at home than by the lure of the ‘New Imperialism’ abroad, chiefly the race to possess the world’s remaining resource-rich territories in Africa. The ‘Scramble for Africa’, which took place between 1870 and 1913, resulted in a virtual free-for-all as European nations raced to seize and carve up this ancient patchwork of tribal lands. As The Scramble for Africa, the classic work by Thomas Pakenham, has shown, ‘Africa was sliced up like a cake, and the pieces swallowed by five rival nations. By the end of the century the passions generated by the Scramble had helped to poison the political climate in Europe, brought Britain to the brink of war with France, and precipitated a struggle with the Boers, the costliest, longest and bloodiest war since 1815.’4

  The Scramble left the two leading imperialists, France and Britain, feuding over the richest spoils, with Germany holding a few scraps, the dangerously embittered loser. These fresh colonial seizures would not reverse the slow decline of the chief imperial powers. The British and French were already feeling premonitions of eclipse. The German and American economies were growing at a faster rate, and would soon be strong enough to challenge the dominance of Britain and France over a world swaddled
in the bright pink and blue of their colonial rule.

  Workers, too, wanted a share in the wealth of the world. Rumblings from within were threatening to check the greed and power of the capital-owning classes. Throughout Europe, workers’ movements were in full-throated roar, with new socialist or ‘labour’ parties forming: the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAPD) in Germany in 1875; the Labour Party in Britain in 1900; and the Parti socialiste de France in 1902. The American Populist (or People’s) Party, an agrarian workers’ party, enjoyed its greatest success during the financial panic of the mid-1890s (before it folded into the Democrats).

  In tandem, rising economic nationalism spawned a mood of aggressive patriotism and racial rivalry. Whole peoples – nations, religions, tribes – were deemed ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ according to the widely accepted theory of ‘Social Darwinism’. Put simply, this bastardized application of the science of evolution to human society decreed that the ‘fittest race’ would one day rule the earth.

  As the world spilled into the twentieth century, a new social conservatism arose among European youth, characterized by a resurgent faith in God, King (or Kaiser or Tsar) and Country. Many French and German students in particular shunned the decadence of their parents’ generation and yearned for a return to the Old Certainties.5 Militant nationalism inflamed European prejudice against ethnic minorities. The Jews, in particular, were widely reviled and routinely persecuted. In the late nineteenth century, the Russians launched massive ‘pogroms’, or violent attacks, against Jewish communities. In response, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews fled to Western Europe, with many settling in Germany and Austria–Hungary, chiefly Vienna.

  The French demonstrated a less bloody but no less pernicious brand of Jewish vilification. The Dreyfus Affair of 1894–1906, in which an innocent Jewish officer was wrongly accused of treason, split the nation and exposed the depths of French anti-Semitism.

  The masses were less interested in the cruelty played out in a distant colony or the state of a persecuted minority than in the dazzling inventions of the Machine Age, which reached its height between 1890 and 1920: soaring buildings, fabulous flying machines, sparkling automobiles and weapons of unprecedented destructive power, alongside tinned soup, radioactivity, the cinematograph (forerunner of the movie projector) and the first scientific evidence that CO2 produces global warming. The astonishing array of discoveries prefigured the way people would live for the next hundred years.

  Bliss it was to be alive at the dawn of the twentieth century, for those with the power and wealth to enjoy it. And one of the brightest suns on the horizon was a young political entity, recently unified and bursting with self-confidence: ‘Deutschland’.

  Hitler’s life cannot be understood without comprehending his devotion to the German state, the ‘Fatherland’ of his youthful dreams. This went beyond mere patriotism. It was a visceral longing for a future ruled by a Greater Germany, a ‘Pan-Germany’. In the years before the First World War, this seemed realizable, even inevitable, in the eyes of the few German supremacists and Prussian militarists Hitler so admired.

  The historical roots of Hitler’s passion lay in the creation of Imperial Germany in 1871 – the result of the unification of twenty-six kingdoms, duchies and principalities that had dominated Central Europe since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The stern hand of Otto von Bismarck, the ‘Iron Chancellor’, moulded these constituents into a unified state, over which the Prussians and the Hohenzollern Kaisers assumed leader ship after their emphatic victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

  The new German Reich stood to benefit from political unity and an internal free trade zone (the Zollverein), which would spread the harvest of economic success from Prussia to Bavaria. And yet ‘race’ and ‘culture’ were equally powerful incentives towards unification. Deutschland drew on Pan-Germanism – the recognition of a shared polity, bound by a common language (92 per cent spoke German); religion (most called themselves Lutheran); and a palpable sense of national destiny, borne on a belief in the supremacy of German culture and an acute consciousness of what it meant to be ‘German’: a sensation or spirit rather than a nationality, traceable to the distant past – beyond the Holy Roman Empire to the ancient world of the Teutonic tribes and Wagnerian mythology.

  Four decades (1871–1913) of awesome economic growth followed German unification, fuelled by a surging population that rose from 41 million to 68 million in that time. By 1900 Germany had outgrown Britain as the largest economy in Europe, with the second largest rail network in the world after the United States.6 By 1913, Germany had replaced Britain as Europe’s biggest exporter of steel. The new Germany also offered the most progressive social policies in Europe. Bismarck had introduced, in the 1880s, Europe’s first welfare system, and enacted laws that gave workers health and accident insurance, maternity benefits and a national pension scheme, well ahead of any other developed nation.7 From 1871 every German man was eligible to vote, a freedom not extended to all British men until 1918 (German women were granted universal suffrage in 1918, ten years ahead of British women).

  In short, in contrast to what Britain, France and Russia (known as the Triple Entente) deceitfully portrayed as a menacing tyranny in the decade before the outbreak of the First World War – some historians still compare pre-1914 Germany with the Nazi regime8 – Germany was in fact the most liberal state in Europe, with a vibrant Social Democratic Party.

  In Prussia, however, lurked the authoritarian underbelly to this state of progressive liberalism. The Prussian military class hankered to expand Germany’s borders, to secure the Reich from the threat of Russia and acquire a colonial empire in the British and French mould. In the early 1900s, their pickelhaubed commanders lacked the political clout to realize this goal. Yet the Prussians looked and sounded aggressive enough to inflame the Triple Entente’s war-mongering, which had the perverse effect of weakening Berlin’s civilian government and reinforcing the Prussian generals, hastening the march to war.

  Feeling squeezed in a three-way vice by Russia, France and Britain, Germany’s military rulers drew up a fantastic plan for a ‘preventative’ war, a ‘charge out of the fortress’, to pre-empt an attack by their perceived enemies and secure the young Reich.

  In July 1914, Berlin activated it. After Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg effectively ceded control of the nation to the military, the Prussian warlords manufactured a case for war out of a manageable crisis in the Balkans. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand did not, in itself, cause the First World War any more than the flutter of butterfly wings: the murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne merely provided the tinder to those in Berlin and Vienna who were already determined to start one.9

  No group was keener on war with the Serbs than the German-speaking minority in Austria, the fiercely loyal ‘Pan-Germans’, including the Hitler family, who found themselves part of a restless minority in the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, a curious ethnic relic of the historical convulsions of the nineteenth century.

  A brief summary of those upheavals will help us to understand why young Hitler, an Austrian, grew up in thrall to the German nation and felt contempt for the Austro-Hungarian regime. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna, convened to negotiate the peaceful reconstruction of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, created a loose association of thirty-nine German states, or principalities, known as the German Confederation, the majority of which would later be unified by Bismarck (see above). It was conceived as the prelude to a modern state that would replace the ailing Holy Roman Empire.

  Riven by internal disputes and competing power claims, the Confederation failed to consolidate, ruptured under the democratic revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, and was eventually torn apart when its two most powerful members, Prussia and Austria, and their allies, went to war in 1866. This climax of old hostilities, traceable to the invasion of Austrian-controlled Silesia in 1740 by Prussia’s Frederick the Great, ended with Austria’
s defeat.

  Excluded from the new German sphere, Vienna’s ruling Habsburg dynasty scrabbled together a ‘dual monarchy’ with Hungary, under the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Meanwhile Prussia, under the firm guidance of Bismarck, confirmed its ascendancy over the German principalities and, with the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, forged ahead with the creation of the unified German state.

  A pervasive feature of Bismarck’s Germany, as we have seen, was the citizens’ rich conception of themselves as ‘German’, in the sense of sharing a national – and racial – affinity. Hitler’s family, along with millions of fellow German-speaking Austrians, shared this palpable German identity, regardless of the fact that they lived in a different country. It was a near-mystical connection that transcended politics and geography.10 And yet, they were excluded from the newly formed German Reich and felt like outcasts, exiled from the land of their origins.

  Of the eleven different nationalities in Austria–Hungary, the German Austrians formed the most powerful ethnic bloc, numbering 12.7 million, almost a quarter of the empire’s 52.8 million total, followed by Hungarians (20 per cent), Czechs (13 per cent) and Poles (10 per cent). The ethnic Germans would never cease to yearn for a return to the Fatherland, dreaming of the day that a Greater Germany would subsume all Austria (a dream Hitler would fulfil with the Anschluss of March 1938, when he annexed Austria to the Third Reich). The flip-side of their Germanophilia was their contempt for the multi-racial composition of the Austrian realm, chiefly its multi-tongued Parliament in Vienna – feelings the young Hitler would fully absorb.