The most far-reaching effects of the peace treaty were the frontiers it drew. Austria-Hungary was split into pieces by the victors. The lines scrawled across the map cared nothing about consigning large numbers of Germans to live under foreign governments. Eventually, in Czechoslovakia and Poland, these vociferous expatriate communities were orchestrated and used by Hitler as an excuse for invasion.
Soldiers go home
At the end of the Great War the armies went home, and it was the attitudes and actions of these returning soldiers which created the world that went to war in 1939. Virtually all the men returning from the battlefields were to some extent cynical and embittered as they compared what they and their comrades had suffered with what others, less worthy, had gained. Most of the veterans’ associations – from the Croix de feu in France to Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in Britain – were anti-Communist. Communists had conspicuously associated themselves with pacificism and anti-militarism. Returning soldiers despised the men who had stayed at home preaching against the war.
Despite its new democratic government, a defeated Germany was convulsed in a series of localized revolutions as left-wing and right-wing political groups fought for power. There were violent uprisings in many German cities and for a few days Bavaria had ‘a Soviet Republic’. Many German institutions – the army, big business and the labour movement – had survived the war intact; now each threw its weight behind the factions it favoured.
The government of this fragile republic saw its prime tasks as protecting the government from Communist takeover and keeping public order. To do this it came to terms with the highly organized veterans’ organizations: most notably the Freikorps, a huge patchwork of small armies, illicitly armed and ready to fight all-comers. Such units were used as an armed frontier guard against Polish incursions and as a secret supplement to the army permitted by the peace treaty. At first Freikorps men wore their old army uniforms. Later they were issued with a consignment of shirts originally intended for German soldiers in East Africa. Dressed in them, these men became the brown-shirted Sturm Abteilung – storm-troops – who eventually allied themselves to Hitler’s Nazi party to be its tough uniformed auxiliaries.16
Few of the veterans were looking for personal material gain. Life in the front line had shown them a special sort of comradeship, a world in which men literally sacrificed themselves for their fellows. The ex-servicemen were looking for such a new idealistic world in peacetime too. In Russia Lenin had not waited for an end to hostilities before harnessing the energies of the soldiers to his Communist revolution. In Italy Benito Mussolini offered such men a uniformed Fascist state. But it was Adolf Hitler, in Germany, who most skilfully designed a political party that could manipulate the ex-servicemen. The declared aims and intentions of the National Socialist German Workers’ party swept away their cynical disillusion with politics and transformed such veterans into ardent Nazis.
Adolf Hitler, ex-soldier
Unlike their counterparts in Italy and Russia the German veterans felt that their leader – Führer – was an archetypal ex-soldier. There has been a mountain of contradictory material written about Adolf Hitler’s wartime service. In fact he was a dedicated soldier who respected his officers and showed no cynicism about the war.
During the fighting Hitler was selected to be a ‘runner’ taking messages from the front line to the staff. It was a dangerous job usually given to intelligent and educated fit young soldiers. He won the coveted Iron Cross 1st Class in August 1918 when advancing German troops came under ‘friendly fire’ and his officer – Lt Hugo Gutmann – promised the award to anyone who could get a message back to the artillery. Hitler completed this ‘suicide mission’ and Lt Gutmann kept his promise. By that time Hitler had also won the Iron Cross 2nd Class, the Cross of Military Merit 3rd class with swords, and the regimental diploma. Details of Hitler winning his Iron Cross 1st Class – a notable award for a low-ranking soldier – were not widely publicized, leading to suggestions that it was never awarded at all. Probably Hitler felt his virulent anti-Jewish policies did not go well with receiving a medal from a Jewish officer.
Entering politics, Hitler’s coarse regional accent and wartime lowly rank were appealing to thousands of ex-servicemen who heard their thoughts about war-profiteers and self-serving politicians voiced by a man with natural skills as an orator. The Communists kept blaming the soldiers for the war: Hitler’s patriotic respect for the army was more to the taste of the veterans, and the relatives of those who had been killed and injured. The Nazis were fiercely xenophobic: Germany’s troubles were blamed on foreigners. Socialists and Communists owed their true allegiance to Moscow, the Nazis said. Capitalists were equally unpatriotic, for they used cheap overseas labour for their imported goods and sent their profits to foreign banks overseas. Never mind that it wasn’t true; in the harsh postwar climate it was the sort of explanation many Germans wanted to believe.
Hitler’s anti-Jewish tirades were well received in Bavaria, the Nazi party’s home, where both Lutheranism and the Catholic Church provided soil in which deep-rooted prejudice had flourished over hundreds of years. The Communists proposed a workers’ paradise from which all ‘privileged’ Germans should be excluded; while Hitler’s vision of a new Germany was designed to appeal alike to generals and tycoons, schoolteachers and physicians, as well as to workers and beggars.
Hitler and anti-Semitism
Hitler was not the first politician to foment anti-Jewish hatreds for political ends. In 1887 an International Anti-Jewish Congress had been organized in Dresden. More such gatherings had taken place in Kassel and Bochum in 1886 and 1889.17 By 1895 anti-Semites were virtually a majority in Germany’s lower house, while in Vienna, Karl Lueger’s anti-Jewish Christian Socialists had 56 seats against 71 Liberals. In France the persecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus revealed anti-Semitism no less deeply seated.18 A motion in the Senate that would have banned Jews from public service in France was defeated 268:208.
A native of Austria, Hitler centred his political activities upon Bavaria in southern Germany. Always deliberately vague about his political aims and intentions, he artfully used many local prejudices to win support. Berlin bureaucrats ruled the new unified Germany. He attacked the remoteness of the heartily detested central government. He blamed the generals – conveniently regarded as Prussian Protestants – for losing the war. In Catholic Bavaria, traditionally resentful of Prussian attitudes, these views found warm support.
Hitler’s vaguely defined anti-Semitism enabled the small farmer to hate the bank to whom he owed money, the small shopkeeper to hate the department store against which he competed. More intelligent Germans were convinced that these rabble-rousing simplifications were temporary measures. They firmly believed that once the Nazis turned their eyes away from Munich, Bavaria, to focus attention on the real seat of power in Berlin, such vicious anti-Semitism would tone down and fade away.
These hopes that Hitler and his Nazis would become moderate and statesmanlike were illusory. Hatred of Jews was Hitler’s whole motivation. His campaign against Jews became more and more murderous and demented right up to the time of his death. He fanned ancient irrational fears of Jewish international conspiracies. This gave him the excuse to put peacetime Germany into a permanent state of emergency. That ‘war footing’ was what gave the Nazi party such tight control of all aspects of the life of every German.
Albert Speer provides a revealing memory of Adolf Hitler:
He jumped from one subject to another, frequently repeating words like ‘fundamental’, ‘absolutely’, ‘unshakeable’. Then too he had a special fondness for phrases and words out of the days of the beer-hall brawls, such as ‘club down’, ‘iron perseverance’, ‘brute force’, or ‘beat up’, as well as scatological words like ‘shithead’, ‘crapper’. In moments of excitement he also tended to phrases like: ‘I’ll finish him off myself’; ‘I’ll personally put a bullet through his head’; or ‘I’ll fix him.’19