Hitler (15 page)

Throwing their last remaining forces into the fight, determined after so many fruitless successes and vain exertions to win victory at last by breaking through on a broad front, the German units went over to the attack. Hitler participated in these battles as a soldier in the List Regiment; he was in the pursuit after the breakthrough at Montdidier-Nyons and later took part in the battles of Soissons and Reims. During the early part of the summer the German formations actually succeeded in throwing the British and French armies back to within nearly forty miles of Paris.

But then the offensive ground to a halt. Once again the German armies had displayed that fatefully limited power which enabled them to win only sham victories. The toll of lives that their gains had cost, the desperate shortage of reserves, the effectiveness of the enemy in stabilizing the front after each of the German breakthroughs—all this was in part concealed from the German public, in part repressed by that public as it exulted over the good news from the front. The German operations came to a standstill, and the Allies passed over to counterattack on a broad front. Yet Hindenburg and Ludendorff continued their policy of systematic deception. A Privy Council meeting was held at army headquarters on August 14, long after the German lines had broken. The army leaders presented such an illusory picture of the military situation to Chancellor Hertling and Foreign Minister Hintze that both men went away completely unaware of the gravity of the military collapse. To be sure, Hertling himself was largely responsible for the policy of bowing to the military authorities. But since the High Command itself had staked everything on the radical alternative of victory or defeat, it was obliged by its own premise to admit defeat, since victory had not been won. Instead, it continued its deceptions into September—purportedly in order not to dishearten the people. It took into account the obvious hopelessness of the situation only by sounding its claims of German invulnerability in a somewhat more muted key.

The consequence was that the German public regarded victory and the longed-for end of the war as closer than ever before—in this summer of 1918 when the country was on the verge of defeat. This state of affairs completely refutes Hitler's arguments about the weakness of German propaganda—although he drew accurate conclusions from his inaccurate premises. Even responsible politicians, even high army officers with a broad view of conditions, were prone to the most amazing delusions. Very few among those who should have known better were able to find their way in the fog of misguided hopes.

The majority were therefore all the more stunned by the sudden plunge into reality. On September 29, 1918, Ludendorff hastily summoned the political leaders and demanded that they immediately ask for an armistice. His nerves were at breaking point; he would not hear of any tactical safeguards. Significantly, in spite of his talk about victory or doom he had launched the new offensive without giving any thought to the possible consequences of its failure. He does not seem to have even developed a clear strategic goal. At any rate, when the Crown Prince questioned him on that, he replied, with characteristic irritability: “We're going to chop a hole. Then we'll see what comes next.” And when the new Chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, wanted to know what would happen in case of failure, Ludendorff snarled: “Then Germany is done for, that's all.”

As things stood, the last card had actually been played with the great offensive in the spring of 1918. The increasingly vigorous Allied counterattack had had a daunting effect on German troops everywhere. The men were exhausted, “dull and apathetic,” as an army commander reported.

For the operations of the spring months, with their heavy casualties, had used up the soldiers' last physical strength. Failure had consumed their remaining psychological reserves. There is much truth in Winston Churchill's remark that it was the Germans' own offensive, not that of the Allies, that devoured the forces of the army on the Western front. Ludendorff, that is, not Joffre or Haig, brought defeat to the Germans. Nevertheless, the troops held their ground on the whole in an amazing fashion. The defensive battles of that final phase were, in both military and human terms, among the most impressive achievements of the war, and paradoxically they added to the myth of the German army. Once again Ludendorff, who had daily expected a vast catastrophic breakthrough by the Allies, found that he was mistaken.

Unprepared politically and psychologically, the nation, which in a contemporary phrase had believed in the superiority of its arms “as in a gospel,” was plunged into an abyss. An illuminating although almost unbelievable remark of Hindenburg's shows how hard the national illusion died. Immediately after Ludendorff's admission that the war was lost, old Hindenburg in all seriousness asked the Foreign Minister to do everything possible in the impending negotiations to obtain annexation of the mines of Lorraine. Here was a first example of that peculiar trick of denying reality to which growing numbers of Germans resorted throughout the postwar years to help them through the misery of the times. They continued to do so right up to the intoxicating days of Spring, 1933. The shock effect of this alternation “from the fanfare of victory to the dirge of defeat” strongly colored the history of the period—so much so that we may say the period can scarcely be understood without taking that disenchantment into consideration.

It was a particular shock to the brooding, overtense private, first class of the List Regiment who had surveyed the war in the sweeping terms of a general. His regiment had been thrown into the defensive battle in Flanders in October, 1918. On the night of October 13, south of Ypres, the British launched a gas attack. On a hill near Wervick, Hitler came into several hours of drumfire with gas shells. Toward morning he felt violent pain, and when he arrived at the regimental command post around seven o'clock, he could barely see. A few hours later he went blind: “My eyes had turned into glowing coals,” he afterward wrote. He was shipped back to the Pasewalk hospital in Pomerania.”
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In the hospital a curious excitement prevailed. Confusing rumors went the rounds—that the monarchy was about to fall, that the war would soon be over. Hitler—characteristically as if he bore larger responsibilities—feared local unrest, strikes, insubordination, even though these rumors seemed to him “more the product of the imagination of individual scoundrels”; strangely, he noticed nothing of the discontent and exhaustion so widespread among the people. At the beginning of November the condition of his eyes began to improve, but he still could not read newspapers and expressed his fears to fellow patients that he would never be able to draw again. The revolution came, for him, “suddenly and unexpectedly”; it was led, he thought, by “a few Jewish youths” who had “not been at the front” but had come “by way of a so-called ‘clap hospital' and ‘raised the red rag.' ” Hitler believed that what he was seeing was “a more or less local affair.”
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On November 10, 1918, however, the truth was brought home to him, “the most terrible certainty of my life.” Summoned to a meeting by the hospital pastor, the patients learned that a revolution had broken out, that the House of Hohenzollern had fallen and a republic had been proclaimed in Germany. Sobbing gently to himself—thus Hitler described the “old gentleman”—the pastor recalled the merits of the ruling house, and “not an eye was able to restrain its tears.” But when the pastor began to tell them that the war was now lost and that the Reich was throwing itself unconditionally upon the mercy of its previous enemies—“I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow. Since the day I had stood at my mother's grave, I had not wept.... But now I could not help it.”
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To Hitler the disillusionment was as sudden and incomprehensible as had been his failure to win acceptance into the Academy. He magnified it into a legend and made it one of the basic themes of his career. Later he ascribed his resolve to enter politics to this moment. In virtually every major speech Hitler would ritualistically refer to the November revolution. He would speak of it as if his whole life dated from that event. This obsession has led some analysts to suggest that the revolution triggered the great political awakening of his life. It has also been suggested that his going blind in October, 1918, was to some extent a hysterical symptom, precipitated by the shock he felt at the abrupt change in the course of the war. Hitler himself occasionally furnished some support for such theories. In a speech to army officers and officer candidates in February, 1942, for example, he referred to the danger he had faced of going completely blind, and declared that eyesight meant nothing if all one could see was a world in which the nation was enslaved. “In that case what can I see worth seeing?” And at the end of 1944, faced with approaching defeat, he gloomily told Albert Speer that he had reason to fear that once again, as toward the end of the First World War, he would go blind.
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Similarly, there is a passage in
Mein Kampf
confirming the idea that Hitler had been roused from his inconspicuous existence by an inexorable summons resounding in his ears:

 

In daily life the so-called genius requires a special cause, indeed, often a positive impetus, to make him shine.... In the monotony of everyday life even significant men often seem insignificant, hardly rising above the average of their environment; as soon, however, as they are approached by a situation in which others lose hope or go astray, the genius rises manifestly from the inconspicuous average child, not seldom to the amazement of all those who had hitherto seen him in the pettiness of bourgeois life.... If this hour of trial had not come, hardly anyone would ever have guessed that a young hero was hidden in this beardless boy.... The hammer-stroke of Fate which throws one man to the ground suddenly strikes steel in another.
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We may assume, however, that such remarks were merely meant to explain the transition between the preceding years of bohemianism, apathy, and vague reveries and the phase of revealed genius. In reality, the November days had numbed him and left him in a quandary. “I knew that everything was lost.” The requirements imposed by the hated bourgeois world, those requirements that four years of war had set aside, were confronting him once more. He was no further along in meeting the problems of vocation and earning his livelihood. He had no training, no work, no goal, no place to stay, no friends. In that outburst of despair, when he wept into his pillow at the news of the defeat and the revolution, he was expressing more of a personal than a national sense of loss.

For the end of the war deprived the sergeant Hitler of a role he had found at the front, and he lost his homeland at the moment he was dismissed for home. In shocked surprise he noted that at the home front the much-vaunted discipline of the German army collapsed as if on cue. Increasing numbers of soldiers had only one remaining desire: to throw off the suddenly unbearable burden of four years, to make an end of it and go home. They could no longer conceal the fears and humiliations of existence at the front behind patriotic formulas or warrior poses. An overwhelming sense of the vanity of it all became the general sentiment: “And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty; and in vain the death of two millions who died.”
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It was the defeat rather than the revolutionary events that so deeply affected him, for his attachment to the ruling house was as slight as his respect for the leadership of the Reich.

 

The force of this unrevolutionary revolution was spent chiefly in gestures that suggest a curiously helpless perplexity. From the early days of November on, deserters marched through the streets all over Germany, hunting down officers. Groups of enlisted men lay in wait for the officers, seized them, and with scornful and insulting comments ripped off their decorations, epaulets, and cockades. This was an act of revolt after the fact against the overthrown regime and was as pointless as it was understandable. In the case of the officers, it bred a permanent ire that was to have far-reaching consequences, a deep-seated antipathy for the revolution and hence for the regime which had begun under such circumstances. That antipathy was shared by all the advocates of law and order.

The whim of history had robbed the revolution of that emotional verve which might otherwise have made it memorable in the mind of the nation. As early as October, 1918, the Chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, had met the demands both of President Wilson and his own public by instituting a number of domestic political reforms. Germany was given a parliamentary government. Finally, on the morning of November 9, the Chancellor, acting to a considerable extent on his own initiative, had announced the Kaiser's abdication. The revolution had reached its goal before it had even broken out; it had at any rate missed the chance to define itself by any concrete act. Abruptly, it had been cheated of its storming of the Bastille and its Boston Tea Party.

Given these discouraging circumstances, there was only one way the quasi revolution might have become a real one—by exploiting the attraction of novelty. But the new holders of power, Friedrich Ébert and the Social Democrats, were hard-working, sobersided men. They thought they had done pretty well to eliminate right at the start a whole slew of honorary titles, decorations, and medals. The peculiar pedantry and lack of psychological flair that marked all their behavior explain why they could not fire the masses or draft any major social changes. Theirs was “a revolution entirely lacking in ideas,” as one man who lived through it recognized.
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Certainly they had no answer to the emotional needs of a defeated and disillusioned nation. The Constitution, which was discussed during the first half of 1919 and went into force in Weimar on August 11, fell far short of what was needed. It was intended, strictly speaking, merely as a technical instrument for installing a democratic power system, but it revealed scarcely any understanding of the ends of power.