It used to be believed by historians that Hitler was, if not a war hero, then at least a conspicuously brave front-line soldier. New research by Dr Thomas Weber of Aberdeen University has uncovered a confusion about what was meant by a regimental runner, which was Hitler’s job in the army. Battalion or company runners did indeed have a dangerous job, running between different trenches in the front line of battle under heavy machine-gun fire. Hitler, however, was something rather different – a regimental runner. The regimental runners worked several miles from the front in regimental headquarters. They were office boys in military uniform. One man who did the same job, Alois Schnelldorfer, wrote to his parents that his job was no more dangerous than to sit in an armchair and make calls to their postmistress. ‘I can drink a litre of beer and sit down under a walnut tree’, he wrote home.
The men among whom Hitler served considered him a strange bird. They noted his teetotalism, and his aloofness from their jokes and conversation. He would sit apart from them, reading history (perhaps in fact Karl May novels?), writing letters (to his mother-substitute, the Munich landlady Frau Popp) and sketching. They nicknamed him ‘the artist’ or ‘the painter’. They mocked his physical incompetence. He could not open cans of meat with a bayonet as they all could, and they ribbed him that if he worked in a canning factory he would starve to death.4
One thing they noticed was his slavishness to superiors. And it paid off. Dr Weber’s new research has shown that it was comparatively easy for an infantryman to win an Iron Cross, First Class, if he was in constant touch with the officers. Hitler was lucky enough to be recommended for this honour by Hugo Gutmann, a Jewish adjutant, who, in 1937, was to be put in prison by the Gestapo. Luckily for Gutmann, his old comrades in the regiment petitioned for his release and he was able to escape to the United States, but not thanks to Hitler. The best friend he made in the army was a white terrier dog who had escaped from an English trench. Hitler called him ‘little Fox’ or Fuchsl. ‘With exemplary patience (he did not understand a word of German) I got him used to me,’ he wrote back to Frau Popp in Munich.
It is not surprising, therefore, given Hitler’s comparatively safe job well behind enemy lines, that he was able to survive so well on the Western Front, in spite of his regiment taking part in some of the worst battles of the war, such as the Somme in 1916 in which over 600,000 young men were killed. It is also revealing that when he did suffer injury, it was not because he was running an errand, but sitting in a tunnel close to regimental HQ when a shell hit the roof. Hitler’s plea to his Lieutenant, Wiedemann, when he was put on a stretcher, ‘But I can still stay with you? Stay with the regiment? Can’t I?’, has often been taken as evidence that he was still anxious, even in his injuries, to be fighting for the Fatherland; but it could just as well be seen as a sign that for the first time in his life, in the regiment, and surrounded by men in uniform, he had found an environment in which he felt comfortable and at home. This is not to say that he was homosexual. Very many lonely men, or men whose lives had been humdrum or unsatisfactory in civilian life, felt the same, during both world wars, when they enlisted in the services.
He was invalided out of the regiment and was taken first to a field hospital, then to a military hospital just south of Berlin before being transferred to a replacement battalion in Munich. It is here that we begin to see the signs of that virulent anti-Semitism which in the next few years became a trademark mania. He noticed that all the clerks were Jews, and began to hatch the view that the Jews had somehow sapped national morale, or were responsible for the failure of the German army to make headway on the Western Front.
He was eventually allowed to return to his old regiment in the line, and there was a glad reunion with little Fuchsl, who was by now in Ypres, Belgium. The first night they were together, Hitler took Fuchsl ratting and stabbed many a rat with his bayonet. The regiment took part in the Third Battle of Ypres, but for the rest of 1917 saw no action. There was plenty more time for playing with the dog and reading Karl May novels. In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution took place, and throughout all the armies of Europe – German, French and British – the spectre of Communism began to haunt the officer classes.
In 1918, the regiment was ordered back to Flanders. In March the men heard that the German Government had made peace with the Soviet Government of Russia at Brest-Litovsk. Early in September 1918 the regiment was again moved back to Flanders, but Hitler had a period of leave and with a comrade named Arendt he spent it in Berlin, where the mood of revolution was palpable.
Hitler returned to his regiment for what was to be the last month of the war. It was in the area below Ypres that they dug into the fields and hills near Comines. Near the village of Wervick, on 14 October, there was a gas attack. Hitler felt scalding in his eyes, and was taken off, temporarily blinded, to hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania. He had survived the war. At the Nuremberg trials, following the Second World War, the adjutant of the regiment gave evidence. He said that there had sometimes arisen a question of promoting Hitler from the ranks and making him a non-commissioned officer. Whenever the matter was discussed, however, it was always decided in the negative, ‘because we could discover no leadership qualities in him’. Furthermore, Otfrid Förster, a renowned neurosurgeon who saw Hitler’s medical file in 1932, gave it as his opinion that Hitler’s blindness was a case of ‘hysterical amblyopia’.5 If this were the case, and it seems highly likely, then we can discount the gas attack altogether and lose the last shred of a claim that Hitler the messenger boy had an ‘heroic’ war.
In My Struggle, needless to say, the end of the war, and Hitler’s part in it, had to be given a quality of apocalypse. On 10 November, the hospital chaplain brought the patients news that a revolution had broken out in Berlin and that the Imperial Royal House, the Hohenzollerns, had gone into exile in Holland. The Kaiser was no more. Germany was a socialist republic. The revolution had been achieved by ‘a few Jewish youths … who had not been at the Front’.6
Saint Paul, although in Hitler’s eyes a dangerous Jewish Bolshevik, had been struck blind by God before going into Damascus and beginning his great mission to convert the world. It would seem that a comparable miracle was performed by Providence upon Adolf Hitler. When the chaplain broke the news of Germany’s defeat, it was sad, naturally, for all Germans. But for the author of My Struggle, this was a personal thing. ‘While everything became black before my eyes, I teetered and groped my way back towards the ward, threw myself on my bunk, and buried my burning head into my blanket and pillow. I had not shed a tear since the day that I stood beside my mother’s grave. When, in my youth, Fate grabbed me without mercy, my defiant resolve only quickened. When in the long years of war, death took so many comrades and friends from among our ranks, it would have seemed a sin to me to bewail their fate – they died for Germany!’7
He bore all these sorrows. He endured blindness and pain without a murmur, it would seem. But what drew forth his tears was the left-wing revolution. For ever afterwards, the ‘November criminals’, the socialists who concluded the Armistice on 11 November 1918, were the villains of the story which Hitler told – first to himself, then to his small gang of political cronies, then to larger groups, and finally to Germany and to the world. My Struggle asks us to believe that it was while he lay weeping on his hospital bed that he decided to go into politics. Whether or not such a decision was made, there would have been no hope, in the old world, that a man of Hitler’s background, with no obvious qualifications, could enter the political sphere. But the world had changed. With the coming of the