"The image of a man without a face." That is how author Thomas Weber describes the historical record of Adolf Hitler's first war, one of the most elusive pieces of the 20th century jigsaw. How was it that a listless postcard painter from Vienna became a fascist, a virulent anti-Semite, a charismatic politician, and a man who would lead millions of Germans into a cataclysmic and genocidal second war?
That "Hitler's First War" ends with an image of the young gefreiter that is still rather politically faceless is no criticism of the book. The truth is that Hitler was an ordinary soldier in the First World War, and apart from a few posed photographs and a small handful of letters to acquaintances back home, his war record is a fairly blank spot.
The greatness of the book is Weber's method of coloring in all the spaces around this blank spot, and putting what we do know of Hitler in the context of his regiment, RIR 16 (better known as the List Regiment). The result is a devastating critique of decades of carefully constructed Nazi propaganda (much of which has survived to become part of the historical understanding of Hitler's life), Sonderweg theory, and other half-truths about Bavaria and its most famous resident of the early 20th century.
So what DO we know about Hitler between 1914 and 1918? We know that he spent one week fighting as a regular combat soldier and the remaining four years as a dispatch runner (messenger) for regimental headquarters, a couple of miles behind the front. We know that he was fiercely loyal - some might say toadyish - to the officers at regimental headquarters, often volunteering for jobs no one else wanted and sometimes putting himself in harm's way as a result. This devotion eventually earned him an Iron Cross 1st Class, the highest (and rarest) military honor available to a man of his rank.
Supposedly this unblemished military record - along with two separate woundings from artillery fire - uniquely positioned Hitler as the Unknown Soldier in the flesh, a living embodiment of "Kameradschaft," that mythical spirit of self-sacrificial Great War comradeship that was celebrated and venerated by post-war Germans of all political persuasions (and which the Nazis co-opted and mutated to great effect). It allegedly gave Hitler special authority to identify the "November criminals"; the Jews and war profiteers who had stabbed him and his fellow soldiers in the back in their hour of need.
In fact, as Weber illustrates, the German army was stabbed in the front, repeatedly and fatally, between 1916 and 1918. Fortunately for Hitler, he was not in a position to know this. His wounding on the Somme took place only four (relatively quiet) days after the List Regiment entered the battle. In the following nine days, while Hitler was being transported back to Germany for treatment, the List Regiment was decimated. All told, about 40% of the regiment became casualties once Hitler had been taken to safety. The battle raged on afterwards, but the List Regiment had been cut to ribbons and was hurriedly taken out of the line. It is similarly telling that Hitler only spent about two weeks in the line during the Hundred Days Offensive, during which his regiment was crumbling under the weight of the British and Dominion armies of 1918. Hitler spent the remainder of that autumn in training, on leave, and suffering the effects of hysterical blindness brought on by his second wounding, a gassing by British artillery.
Although his woundings illustrate that life as a dispatch runner was not without its perils, the fact that Hitler had a warm bed to sleep in, free of not only lice and rats but also machine gun and sniper fire, meant that he and his cohorts earned the moniker "Ettappenschweine" (rear-area pigs) from the front line soldiers. Weber recounts an unintentionally humorous story previously told by an erstwhile Hitler memoirist, in which Hitler was carrying a message to the living quarters of some front line soldiers (a rare event for regimental dispatch runners) several hundred yards behind the first line of trenches. Hitler, cautiously, had rolled up the epaulettes on his uniform to hide his rank from enemy soldiers, despite the fact he was only a private. The front line soldiers he encountered displayed their rank openly and heedlessly. For Hitler, this place was the edge of No Man's Land. For the others, it was behind the lines.
This divide was further exacerbated by the distribution of Iron Crosses. Whereas even very quiet months at the front meant that a front line soldier was being killed every other day, the eight regimental dispatch runners in the "class" of 1915 could boast a 100% Western front survival rate at war's end (the only one who perished in the war died in Romania under unknown circumstances). The (justified) perception of front line soldiers was that Ettappenschweine were decorated at a rate incommensurate with the hazards they faced. The fact that Hitler personally knew and worked with the very officers who were in a position to nominate men for Iron Crosses, and the fact that he was eager to please them and anticipate their every need, made Hitler's decorations less unlikely than they would otherwise appear. None of this was especially palatable to the vast majority of the men in the regiment, the evidence of which can be seen years later in the rather tepid response to the Nazi party by front line soldiers of the List Regiment (veterans of regimental headquarters joined the party much more enthusiastically).
If the myth of Hitler's wartime "man-of-the-people" image was a challenge for Nazi propagandists to construct years later, his politics and racial anti-Semitism were less tricky, due to an utter lack of fixity in his wartime views. In the only known foray into politics of his wartime correspondence, he wrote to an acquaintance in 1915 of his abiding wish for a "purer fatherland," "less riddled with foreign influences." It is tempting to see Hitler's political coming-of-age in this letter, and yet three years later he was nominated for his Iron Cross 1st Class by regimental headquarters' highest serving Jewish officer, Hugo Gutmann. After the war, in the midst of political splintering and the formation of numerous associated militias, Hitler elected to remain in the army, and consequently served the Bavarian Soviet Republic for a time (a period he is strangely silent on in "Mein Kampf").
What can we make of all this? What seems clear is that Hitler's greatest loyalty during the First World War was not a political one, but a regimental one. He adored his adopted family at regimental headquarters, to the point that he was anxious to return during times of leave, and probably eschewed opportunities to serve elsewhere during the war. Apart from some personal lifestyle choices (namely avoiding prostitutes and alcohol), his worldview was closely in tune with the atheistic and politically conservative officer class of regimental headquarters. He apparently coexisted comfortably with a Jewish officer that had been decorated and deeply respected by the higher-ups in the regiment. An eagerness to please and the desire for a sense belonging meant that Adolf Hitler was a politically malleable man both in 1914 and 1918.
Despite the title of the book (unfortunately shorn of its subtitle on the cover of recent editions) and the content of this review, the biggest strength of Weber's book is the understanding it provides us not of Hitler's war, but that of the other soldiers who served in the List Regiment. That the regiment has been understood to be "Hitler's University" does a great disservice to the vast majority of the men who served in it; largely Catholic, religiously tolerant Bavarians who were comfortable in a slowly democratizing Germany, who supported politically centrist parties before and after the war, and who could not have imagined a Germany in which 12 of their fellow veterans of the List Regiment would be murdered in the Holocaust. Their story deserved to be told, and we owe Weber a debt of gratitude for telling it.
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