Thomas Weber: Hitler’s First War. Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. 450 pp. ill.
Thomas Weber has written what amounts to two books in one. In the first, he has a good story to tell: what Hitler actually did in the List Regiment during the Great War. In the second, he analyzes the myths that later grew up – or were promoted – regarding his service.
Most reviewers have concentrated on the first part, which takes more than half the book. There Weber tracks down the reality of what Hitler experienced. It’s useful to be reminded that he was a regimental runner and thus rarely at the front itself. This – along with a great deal of good fortune – explains why he survived. Weber also shows how luck played an important role in this simple soldier being awarded an iron cross first class.
The part I wish to concentrate on, though, is part two, which looks at how Hitler created and nurtured the legends surrounding his wartime service. “To date, there had been near universal consensus that the general foundations of Hitler’s world-view had been laid by the time he returned to Munich. In other words, the war had supposedly ‘made’ him. What was still unclear, as Hitler came back from the war, was not the general shape but the exact design of the edifice that he would erect on those foundations. The implication is that the world war had put in place all but the precise details of Hitler’s world-view.” (pg. 228)
Against this, Weber sets forth his position, which is that the war did not in fact radicalize most members of the List Regiment, that the surviving members of that unit did not particularly support Hitler and his party, and that Hitler spun stories that exaggerated his accomplishments and heroism. Weber argues that upon their return home, the demobilized soldiers were motivated by “apathy, not anger.” (pg. 239) Far from being hostile towards democracy, as some historians have argued, “the overwhelming majority of Germans supported the new political order, despite all their differences over how they viewed the world.” (pg. 240) He counters the legend that the war had brutalized veterans, making them susceptible to later Nazi propaganda. His analysis shows that in fact non-service in the war was more predictive of an individual’s later support for the NSDAP. All of this he supports by tracking the post-war careers of members of the regiment, which he supplements with sometimes exhaustive statistical evidence.
In the absence of hard biographical evidence regarding a key period in Hitler’s life – the first five months of 1919 – the subject of Weber’s study goes missing for pages at a time, and we read numerous phrases like “these figures strongly suggest…” which naturally make for less compelling reading than stories of “unnaturally fat rats” feeding on corpses at the front a few years earlier. (pp. 264, 164) In part two, the reader is confronted with a barrage of statistics: “while only 8.5 per cent of agricultural labourers, and 9.2 per cent of farmers joined the Nazi Party, the figure of business and property owners was 33.3 per cent, for professionals and academics 26.6 per cent. and for white-collar workers 25.5 percent.” Percentages for tradesmen and craftsmen, blue-collar workers, and non-agricultural servants and day labourers follow. (pg. 265) What these statistics ultimately show is that the List Regiment was no hotbed of future Nazis.
One reason biographical information is scarce about this period may well be that Hitler had much to hide from his own followers. Weber favors the view that after the war’s end, Hitler lacked a compass and was looking for direction – including on the political left. He notes his participation in the funeral procession for Kurt Eisner, who had declared a Bavarian Soviet government that Hitler “was later to deride as treacherous, criminal, and Jewish.” (pg. 250) What Weber never seems to consider is the possibility that Hitler’s presence can be explained without assuming he was a sincere supporter or at least someone who engaged in “apparent flirtation with left wing ideas.” (pg. 256)
Rather, he may have been an infiltrator, a stool pigeon working for the Bavarian authorities, whether police or military. This possibility is hardly far-fetched when we remember that Hitler did work in the army’s counter-revolutionary propaganda unit stationed in Munich and that he was “an informer on Communist activities for an investigation commission into the Munich Soviet Republic.” (Ibid.) Given the task of infiltrating the Reds, he did so successfully, though naturally he could not very well boast about being a spy later on. Such undercover activity would explain the lack of hard evidence about his activities in these months. But Weber seems predisposed to believe that Hitler was a drifter “driven by opportunism” with no firm political views until he happened to find a home in the DAP, the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, which he would soon re-found as the NSDAP. (pg. 258f.)
Anti-Semitism
Weber further claims, it seems to me with somewhat less justification, that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was purely a product of his Weimar years, not his wartime experience. This raises the question, when exactly Hitler did begin to hate the Jews? Weber points out that, based on available evidence, he made no anti-Semitic remarks before mid 1919. The earliest surviving expression of his views on the subject comes from a letter he wrote that year, where he speaks of the necessity of removing the Jews, by which he means their expulsion from Germany. For Hitler before 1941, “Endlösung” meant exodus, not genocide. (pg. 304)
Weber makes a bit of a leap, however, when he interprets the absence of earlier evidence of anti-Semitism as absence of anti-Semitism. Let us remember that in this letter from 1919, Hitler does not announce his views as something he has just come around to believing. It is conceivable that before then, Hitler was a latent anti-Semite, like many of his contemporaries, one who was trying to figure out why Germany had lost a war he thought should have been won, and hit on the explanation of blaming defeat on the international Jewish conspiracy.
In any event, tracing the genesis of Hitler’s anti-Semitism is not Weber’s main objective. What he wants to focus on is how the Hitler myth came to be created. And here a major role is played by Mein Kampf. “In it, he codified his war experience as the foundational myth of the Nazi movement.” (pg. 269) But the effort was of course by no means restricted to that book alone, which very few people read cover-to-cover. “Hitler’s invented war experience in the List Regiment remained centrally important to Nazi policies and propaganda throughout the 1930s.” (pg. 290)
Weber has done his homework, and the only way to challenge him will be to carry out a more extensive evaluation of the archives. This may prove problematic, as there are no surviving documents that show, for example, that Hitler was an agent provocateur in 1919. What the records do show is that, as Nazi power grew, other members of the List Regiment either doctored their memoirs or had them rewritten so that after 1933, they conformed to the party’s changing interpretation of the war on the Western front. Members of the regiment who were not willing to reinterpret the past were beaten up and forced to flee Germany, though Hitler retained sufficient feelings of solidarity that apparently he did not order any of them killed.
Weber argues that the alleged devotion of the German people to Hitler was a myth promoted by the Nazis and based on a false narrative of his wartime service. Hitler “thrived to a large degree on partial support” which was manipulated to make it look total. (pg. 307) Weber quibbles with statistical evidence of Hitler’s popularity, arguing that a majority of Germans merely went along with the prevailing tendency because they had little other choice.
In the last chapters, Weber shows how Hitler’s experiences in the first war influenced his conduct of the second. “The lesson was that nations and states were locked in a Darwinian struggle for survival, which depended on sufficient Lebensraum or living space, for its people; nations also had to eradicate any influences on them which would weaken them in their epic struggle for survival.” (pg. 328) “As Hitler listened less and less to his own generals after the German war effort had started to turn sour, he increasingly turned to his own war experience for inspiration in deciding how to direct the war.” (pg. 329)
In his summary, Weber rejects the view that the First World War was a kind of school of brutality, and that the men who graduated from it were largely responsible for the horrors of the Second World War. In his view, this “supposition… is rather dubious.” (pg. 336) He finds a “far more convincing answer” rather in “the lethal cocktail of ethnic conflict, extreme economic volatility, and empires in decline.” (pg. 337) This is an explanation that has much appeal, since it demonstrates that the phenomenon of Hitler is not something we can safely consign to the past or a foreign country. If such a man could come to power in Germany, something similar could happen elsewhere, and could happen again today.
Room for Improvement
Considering all the detail about where the List Regiment served, at least one map would have been useful. Instead we have pictures, some of them of unusual interest, since they have never been published before. One that has shows Hitler, in uniform, running down a street in Flanders; curiously enough, Weber terms it “borderline insulting.” If it is to any degree insulting, then only in retrospect, for those who realize what the future has in store for this particular messenger. It is open to question whether any disrespect was intended by the photographer who snapped it that day. (The version below is cropped.)
Particularly at the UK Amazon site, one can read many complaints from readers about typographical errors and repeated lines. Perhaps some of these problems were cleared up for the American edition, or are peculiar to the Kindle version. But not all. When it comes to style, readers on both sides of the Atlantic have noticed that while Weber may be a conscientious researcher, he tends towards repetition. In one sentence, he refers to “civil war-like combat” in the Ruhr after the war’s end “which resembled a bloody civil war.” (pg. 239) Or take a single page from the Epilogue, where he mentions the “myth that Hitler created about his own war experience” followed by references in the next two lines to “his war experience” and “his real war experience.” (pg. 345) For good measure, near the bottom of the same page we read the phrase “his war experience” three more times in successive lines, with an additional one thrown in at the end, just in case we might have lost sight of the topic in the interval.
See also: “I Was Hitler’s Boss” by Capt. Karl Mayr, described as “one of the midwives of Hitler’s political career.” (Current History, Vol. 1, No. 3, November 1941, 193ff.) Has interesting info on the period 1919-20, when he supervised Hitler’s undercover activity.
John Lukacs underlines the importance of “Churchill’s recognition that the decisive turning point in Hitler’s life came in 1918-19 and not before 1914, in Munich and not in Vienna. This is contrary to the even now accepted opinion; and contrary, too, to Hitler’s own self-serving argument in Mein Kampf, according to which the crystallization of his political ideology happened during his Vienna years, and not in Munich later.” (Confessions of an Original Sinner, 228f)
Related: Readers may also be interested in my reviews of Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler’s Private Library, and Richard Evans: The Third Reich in Power, elsewhere at this site.
© Hamilton Beck
hamiltonbeck 