Hitler's First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War »

Thomas Weber is Lecturer in Modern European, International, and Global Political History at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His first book, The Lodz Ghetto Album, won the Infinity Award of the International Center of Photography and the Golden Light Award. His second book, Our Friend "The Enemy", won the Duc d'Arenberg History Prize.

"Hitler claimed that his years as a soldier in the First World War were the most formative years of his life. However, for the six decades since his death in the ruins of Berlin, Hitler's time as a soldier on the Western Front has, remarkably, remained a blank spot. Until now, all that we knew about Hitler's life in these years and the regiment in which he served came from his own account in Mein Kampf and the equally mythical accounts of his comrades." "Hitler's First War for the first time looks at what really happened to Private Hitler and the men of the Bavarian List Regiment of which he was a member. It is a radical revision of the period of hitler's life that is said to have made him. Looking at the stories of his fellow regimental veterans---an officer who became Hitler's personal adjutant in the 1930s but then offered himself to British intelligence, a soldier-turned-Concentration Camp Commander, Jewish veterans who fell victim to the Holocaust, and others who simply returned to their lives in Bavaria---Thomas Weber presents a Private Hitler very different from the one portrayed in his own self-mythologizing account. Instead, we find a man who was shunned by the frontline soldiers of his regiment as a árear area pig' and who was still unsure of his political ideology even at the end of the war in 1918." In looking at the post-war lives of Hitler's fellow veterans back in Bavaria, Thomas Weber also challenges the commonly accepted notion that the First World War was somehow a áseminal catastrophe' in twentieth century German history---and even questions just how deep-seated Nazi ideology really was in its home state.

Library Journal

Weber (modern European, international & global political history, Univ. of Aberdeen, Scotland) challenges Hitler's claim, mostly expressed in Mein Kampf (1924) and generally accepted by later historians, that his experiences in World War I shaped both his ideology and subsequent Nazi policy. While little specific information about Hitler's wartime experiences is available, it is possible to reconstruct the history of his unit, the List Regiment, in some detail. Weber by necessity focuses on the men who served with Hitler, but he uses their experiences to assess the impact of the war on the postwar radicalization of German soldiers. His conclusion: it radicalized relatively few soldiers of the List Regiment, and Hitler's postwar claims about his wartime service are largely false. Weber is strongest in re-creating the actual experiences of List Regiment members and in challenging some of the conventional wisdom about the war's long-term impact. His argument that Hitler did not develop his radical ideas until after the war is less convincing, however, as the fact that Hitler's comrades were not radicalized en masse does not necessarily prove that Hitler fit into the same mold. VERDICT Recommended for all general and specialist readers seeking further study of Hitler.—Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll., OH

List of Plates

Abbreviations

Prelude 1

PART I

1 A Crowd in Odeonsplatz: 1 August---20 October 1914 11

2 Baptism of Fire: 21 October---Early November 1914 28

3 Two Tales of One Christmas: Early November 1914-31 December 1914 51

4 Dreams of a New World: 1 January---May 1915 68

5 Of Front-Line Soldiers and áRear Area Pigs': May 1915-31 December 1915 91

6 Occupation: January---July 1916 122

7 Collapse: July---October 1916 145

8 In the Shadow of the Somme: October 1916-31 July 1917 160

9 Blinded: August 1917-11 November 1918 199

PART II

10 Revolution: 11 November 1918---Early 1919 227

11 Hitler's Kampf against the List Veterans: Early 1919-1933 255

12 Private Hitler's Reich: 1933-1939 288

13 Hitler's Second War: 1939-1945 315

Epilogue 340

Postscript: Hugo Gutmann's Story 348

Notes 354

Bibliography 413

Index 435