Hitler's violent youth : how trench warfare and street fighting moulded hitler

307 Pages·2015·7.6 MB·English

by  Carruthers

This edition published in 2015 by
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
FROM SCHICKLGRUBER TO HITLER
CHAPTER 2
HITLER AND GERMAN NATIONALISM
CHAPTER 3
LINZ AND STEYR
CHAPTER 4
HARDSHIP IN VIENNA
CHAPTER 5
THE JEWISH QUESTION
CHAPTER 6
THE DRIFTER IN VIENNA AND MUNICH
CHAPTER 7
HITLER AND THE LIST REGIMENT
CHAPTER 8
THE BATTLE FOR GHELUVELT
CHAPTER 9
GEFREITER HITLER
CHAPTER 10
FOXL
CHAPTER 11
HITLER RUNS OUT OF LUCK
CHAPTER 12
THE KAISERSCHLACHT
CHAPTER 13
HITLER - THE POLITICIAN
CHAPTER 14
THE GROWTH OF THE NSDAP
CHAPTER 15
THE EXPANSION OF THE SA
CHAPTER 16
THE BEER HALL PUTSCH
INTRODUCTION
A
S A RESULT of the terrible tragedy which befell the Jewish people of
Europe, the name Adolf Hitler will forever be synonymous with the creed
of extreme anti-Semitism. Due to the inhuman scale of the suffering endured by
the Jewish population, genocide is commonly assumed to have been his primary
goal and the overriding concern of Adolf Hitler. However, the sobering truth is
that, although anti-Semitism was a potent factor in the mix of ideas that shaped
Hitler’s weltanschauung (or world view), it was not the key to his life’s work.
From his own account as published in the pages of ‘Mein Kampf’ we can be
certain that, in his own eyes at least, Hitler’s life’s work was in fact the
accomplishment of his pan-German nationalist vision. From a surprisingly early
age this political goal was his overwhelming priority and we can be certain that
nationalism was the key stimulus on the formation of Hitler’s political outlook.
Nonetheless, it is the terrible human cost of the Hitlerian regime which continues
to demand an explanation today. How did a civilised nation, so much like our
own in so many respects, allow itself to be dragged into such an abyss of
barbarism?
The answer lies with this peculiar and enigmatic individual. Hitler was a mass
of paradoxical contrasts. He was an extremist in every sense of the word and
there is no doubt he was extremely gifted in the art of oratory and could
command the adoration of a nation; yet he was also naive, boorish, nervous and
gauche. He possessed a genius when it came to grand concepts and presentation,
and he knew how to excite the passions of an entire nation and to galvanise
organisations into action, yet he was utterly incapable of empathising with his
fellow human beings. Human rights were an alien concept for Adolf Hitler, yet
ironically he was a genuine aesthete who, within his own narrow bounds, lived
for opera, music, art and architecture. However, it is notable that none of the
liberal values, which colour the arts, were allowed to permeate his world. He
espoused only the most conservative and radical solutions to political and social
issues.
The most marked trait of Hitler in power was his belief that every strategic or
political issue could only be settled by precipitate military action. Hitler had
developed this mind-set in the trenches of the Great War and the vicious rough
and tumble of the beer halls, and the street fighting of the twenties and thirties
added the finishing touch. Despite the fact that these early experiences are
absolutely essential to understanding the motivations which led Adolf Hitler to
do what he did, historians all too often overlook these vital formative
experiences. During the early part of the twentieth century millions of young
men had been exposed to a world of violence in the trenches of France and
Belgium. However, the Great War marked the young Adolf Hitler in a
fundamental and far-reaching manner that is all too readily disregarded. Hitler
was an extraordinarily driven individual who was already an ideologue before he
reached the trenches, and his embryonic political aspirations were further
nurtured in the mud of Flanders. It was here that his life-long love of militarism
and his instinctive willingness to take risks was matched by an inherent joy in
the process of violence. Hitler perceived the dismal business of making war not
as a destructive activity, but as an instrument of social progress and his
experience in the trenches did nothing to persuade him away from that view.
From his involvement in the Great War Hitler emerged more convinced than
ever that every problem, regardless of the odds to be overcome, could be solved
by a sudden and decisive act. In his fledgling political career he fully embraced
that philosophy and as a result, he was to come unstuck in the Munich Beer Hall
Putsch of November 1923, being imprisoned in a fortress for his pains. However
Hitler remained undaunted and, from the night of the long knives onwards, he
achieved a string of political and military victories created by a cocktail of
brinkmanship, surprise, treachery and violence. His gambler’s instinct was
rewarded by such an unbroken string of success stretching from the Sudetenland
to the gates of Moscow that he came to believe that, no matter how
disproportionate the odds stacked against Germany, they could always be
overcome by unexpected and decisive action backed by an iron resolve. This
unshakable belief was to lead Germany down the path to ruin, dishonour and
ignominy.
Despite the fact that Hitler could produce immense energy he was also
extremely lazy and unfocused. This trait manifested itself in the fact that he was
generally willing to abrogate responsibility for large areas of government policy.
He also had the unfortunate habit of delegating the same responsibility to
multiple and competing functionaries. In this haphazard way he would let
matters take care of themselves. Hitler viewed the apparatus of the state and its
functionaries (for which he used the catch-all term the ‘Reich’) as an organic
mechanism which would deliver solutions to many of the issues of the day. For
Adolf Hitler the ‘Reich’ was indeed a machine which needed no operator. It is
shocking to realise that the awful human catastrophe inflicted upon the Jews was
not even his paramount concern, but unhappily this is indeed the case.
This new book revisits this important area of study by combining the revised
and updated findings of two earlier books which were previously published as
separate volumes. Those volumes were ‘Private Hitler’s War’ which dealt with
his military experiences in the Great War and ‘Hitler’s Demons’ which dealt
with the social and political factors influencing his development. In retrospect it
was a mistake to separate the military experience from the civilian social
influences operating on Adolf Hitler. In order to produce a more coherent
portrait of the disparate factors at work on Hitler, I have revised and combined
those two separate strands into one work. This single volume hopefully
encapsulates all of the most important issues affecting Hitler’s formative years
and brings them together in a single volume. In order to let the historical record
speak I have relied extensively on lengthy quotations from Hitler’s own version
of events as published by him in the pages of ‘Mein Kampf’. I have used the
1937 translation by James Murphy as this edition was published in the UK by
Hutchison and Co Ltd. and as such was the only officially sanctioned version
which was widely available during the Nazi era.
‘Mein Kampf’ is routinely dismissed as unreadable and this was certainly the
case in contemporary circles where many Nazi functionaries, including Göring,
privately joked that they had never read the thing. Italian Fascist dictator and
Nazi ally, Benito Mussolini, was famously critical, stating that the book was ‘…
a boring tome that I have never been able to read’. He also remarked that Hitler’s
beliefs, as expressed in the book, were ‘…little more than commonplace
clichés’. For students of history, politics and general readers with an interest in
the period that is certainly not the case. While it is true that large sections of
political exposition are rambling and turgid, they do nonetheless repay the reader
with an insight into the workings of the mind of Adolf Hitler. The book also
contains highly accessible elements of autobiography which are intriguing as
they afford us the ultimate primary source glimpse into the private world of
Adolf Hitler. On balance I’m sure most readers would side with Winston
Churchill who stated, shortly after Hitler’s ascension to power, that no other
book deserved more intensive scrutiny.
I still believe that Churchill was right. ‘Mein Kampf’ should not be dismissed
as readily as is so often the case. With Hitler in power Germany and its
dominions became the grim powerhouse which, in the pages of ‘Mein Kampf’,
he had promised it would be. From 1933 onwards Germany was a place where a
social and economic revolution was being built upon injustice, oppression,
racism, arbitrary imprisonment, forced labour and extra-judicial death sentences.
The warnings of the horrors to come had been plain for all to see since 1924.
Hitler ruled over a world in which cruel and unjust excesses were commonplace
and all of this had been foretold and clearly elucidated in the pages of ‘Mein
Kampf’.
We should never lose sight of the fact that Hitler was a masterful politician
writing for political purposes. We should obviously approach his words with
extreme caution, but they should nonetheless be studied and carefully
considered, and where there is no reason to do otherwise, we should be prepared
to give the autobiographical sections some weight. This is especially the case
where Hitler’s account can be cross referenced with other accounts by the likes
of Kubizek and Hanisch.
‘Mein Kampf’, if taken at face value, certainly seems to back up the point of
view that pan-German nationalism was at the very heart of Hitler’s thinking. As
such it forms a key part of the functionalist versus intentionalist debate. The
Intentionalists insist, with considerable force behind their argument, that the
infamous passage stating that if 12,000-15,000 Jews were gassed, then ‘the
sacrifice of millions of soldiers would not have been in vain’ proves quite clearly
that Hitler had a master plan for the genocide of the Jewish people from the
outset. Functionalist historians reject this assertion, noting that the passage does
not call for the destruction of the entire Jewish people and they also stress that,
although ‘Mein Kampf’ is suffused with an extreme anti-Semitism, it is the only
time in the entire book that Hitler ever explicitly refers to the murder of Jews. It
should be noted that he also advocated the murder of journalists who didn’t
conform exactly to Hitler’s perception of the national interest. Given that ‘Mein
Kampf’ is 720 pages long, Functionalist historians caution that it may be placing
too much stress on that one sentence. Regardless of which school of thought we
fall into, what certainly comes over loud and clear from the pages of ‘Mein
Kampf’ is Hitler’s willingness to advocate violent and inhumane solutions to
political issues and to publicly articulate mass murder as an answer. Promoting
the idea of murdering 15,000 perceived troublemakers may not amount to
advocating the murder of an entire race, but it is sufficiently deluded to merit the
conclusion that the writer may have engineered and sanctioned the subsequent
events.
My own view hesitantly accords with the Functionalist historians, the
evidence points towards the fact that Hitler had, with the introduction of the
Nuremberg laws in 1935, effectively overcome his Jewish enemies; and from
that point onwards his expansionist agenda was his main focus. The other
deciding factor, for me, is the fact that the actual programme of mass murder did
not begin until 1941. At that point Hitler was no longer Hitler the politician, as
from then on he was completely absorbed by his role as Commander in Chief of
the Armed Forces. However, I am certainly open to persuasion, and it is
certainly problematic for me, and I suspect many others, to credit the notion that
the absence of any documentation fully supports the idea that Hitler had no
detailed knowledge of the genocidal programme. Nonetheless, that is the
situation we are faced with and unbelievably there is not a shred of hard
evidence of the existence of a coherent master plan, there are no directives, no
orders, no budgets and no records. Many Functionalists have supported the view
that the memorandum written by Heinrich Himmler to Hitler, on 25 May 1940,
containing proposals regarding the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question,’
(proposals which Hitler accepted) proves that there was no master plan for
genocide stemming back to the 1920s. In the memorandum, Himmler famously
rejected a programme of state sanctioned murder on the grounds that one must
reject ‘the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner
conviction as un-German and impossible’. Himmler went on to state that
something similar to the ‘Madagascar Plan’ should be the preferred ‘territorial
solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’. However, owing to the declining military
situation, the strength of the Royal Navy and the power struggles being waged
within the unwieldy German bureaucracy, the policy of expulsion was no longer
viable. By January 1942, the Wansee conference, attended by senior members of
the bureaucracy, under the direction of Heydrich took the first step on the road
which was to lead to systematic mass murder of the Jews. The idea that millions
would be worked to death was overtly sanctioned and formed the thin edge of
the wedge.
In support of their arguments that the bureaucracy was the driving force
behind the programme of genocide, Functionalist historians have also noted that
in ‘Mein Kampf’ the only anti-Semitic policies are the Twenty-Five Point
Platform of the Nazi Party (adopted in February 1920). This manifesto