1 The Dictator: Adolf Hitler I For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody. He was born into obscurity in Braunau, Austria, on 20 April 1889, the son of a minor Austrian civil servant. The absence of information has been filled by speculation, most of it without any firm basis in the evidence, much of it driven by a misguided desire to find explanations for his later career in a supposedly warped individual pathology rooted in the experiences of his early years. Nor can Hitler''s own account in his autobiographical political tract Mein Kampf be relied on. He did not, as he suggested, grow up in poverty; nor does his father Alois seem to have been an alcoholic. Nevertheless, the use of corporal punishment by his father to keep him in line does appear to have been greater than was normal in late nineteenth-century Austria, and no doubt Hitler was telling the truth when he said he feared his father more than he loved him. Still, his father was supportive of his desire to be an artist, contrary to the impression left in Mein Kampf . In 1900, recognizing his talent for drawing, his father enrolled him, not in the humanistic high school which would have qualified him for a career in the professions, but in a technical high school ( Realschule ).
Noticeably undisciplined at his school in Linz, the young Hitler spent much of his time drawing and painting, but when, in 1907, he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he was rejected on the grounds that he could not draw the human head. The Director told him to study architecture instead, but Hitler lacked the qualifications for entry. Still, he continued to think of himself as an artist above anything else. By this time, Hitler''s parents had died, his father in 1903 and his mother, Klara, to whom he was much closer, in 1907. In February 1908 he moved to Vienna, where he stayed for the next five years. Living off his mother''s modest legacy, an orphan''s pension and subsidies from his wider family, he did not feel it necessary to find a job. Instead he frittered his time away, drawing and sketching, reading - particularly Germanic legends, along with the Wild West stories of Karl May, with their curious atmosphere of doom, decline and redemption through violence - and going to the opera, above all to the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, based largely on medieval myth and sagas of knightly heroism, love and death. His later assertion that he became a follower of the extreme nationalist and antisemite Austrian politician Georg Ritter von Schönerer must be treated with scepticism.
Similarly, his claim in Mein Kampf to have become a radical antisemite in Vienna was belied by the fact that he was on good terms with a number of Jews during his years there. There is, in fact, no reliable evidence for his having been interested in politics or imbued with a hatred of Jews at this time. Hitler''s best friend during his teenage years, the music student August Kubizek, who later became a professional violinist and theatre conductor, left a vivid impression of his character. Passionate, articulate and energetic, Hitler, he remembered, loved to talk, his conversation ranging across many subjects. What he required, however, was not an interlocutor but a listener. The two teenagers became friends because they were regular visitors to the Linz opera, and shared lodgings for a time. A serious young man, Hitler, remembered Kubizek, had little sense of humour, though he was fond of mocking people he knew. He kept his innermost feelings to himself, though Kubizek reported that he fell in love with a girl called Stefanie, but was too shy to do anything about it.
Still, Kubizek gave it as his opinion that Hitler''s sexuality was ''absolutely normal''. His strict bourgeois moral opinions, however, kept him away from the brothels and street-walkers that were so attractive to so many of his young male contemporaries. Obsessed with art and architecture, he spent a good deal of time in the imaginary redesigning of towns and cities, above all Linz, an occupation that stayed with him until the end of his life. By September 1909 Hitler had spent his savings and was getting into serious financial difficulties, not least because he was spending so much on going to the opera. He was forced to live in a men''s asylum for the homeless for many months, and a second attempt to gain entry to the Academy of Fine Arts was brusquely rejected. Firmly convinced that he would become a great artist, he refused to compromise or settle for an ordinary life. At the suggestion of a friend in the asylum he prepared and sold paintings copied from picture postcards, earning him a small income, but it was not until his twenty-fourth birthday in April 1913 that he was able to come into a solid inheritance from a relative. With a modest but sufficient income assured, he moved to Munich, on 25 May 1913, abandoning the multicultural milieu in which he had recently been living in Vienna for a Germany that he clearly admired and to which he must have thought German-speakers such as himself truly belonged.
He remained an Austrian citizen, however, and was ordered by the Bavarian police to return to Austria in order to begin his obligatory military service. When he turned up for enrolment, his medical examination certified him as physically ''too weak'', and he was able to return to Munich. Here he continued his aimless existence for the next several months, sitting in the coffee houses in Schwabing, a district known as the haunt of artists and bohemians, selling his copies of postcards. Nothing about his life up to this point indicated a future career in politics. His life had been a failure, his ambitions unfulfilled, and his early social position, growing up in a solidly bourgeois family, had sunk about as low as it could get. Of all the Nazi leaders, he was the most déclassé, his social decline the most precipitous. The outbreak of World War I at the end of July 1914 seemed to solve all Hitler''s problems. He claimed in Mein Kampf that it was the greatest time of his life, and there is no reason to disbelieve him.
Filled with the overwhelming German patriotism shown on his face in the famous photograph that caught him in the crowds gathering on Munich''s Odeonsplatz on 2 August 1914 to cheer Germany''s entry into the war, he enlisted in the Bavarian army on 16 August, following an initial rejection. In the chaotic rush of mass recruitment, no one seems to have noticed that he was still an Austrian citizen, or that he was physically not really fitted for combat. After undergoing some rudimentary training, he was sent with his regiment to the Western Front. He survived his baptism of fire in a fierce encounter with British troops, was promoted to the rank known as Gefreiter, and assigned duties as a messenger taking orders from field headquarters to the front. His promotion did not entitle him to order other soldiers about, like a real corporal did; he would best be described as a ''senior private''. The award to him of an Iron Cross, First Class, is often taken as evidence of exceptional bravery, but while his actual position as dispatch-runner for regimental headquarters did involve some exposure to danger, it mainly involved activities behind the front line. Serving at HQ brought soldiers like Hitler into close contact with officers who had the power to award medals, and such soldiers were greatly over-represented among those who won the Iron Cross. His fellow soldiers remembered him as neither outstandingly brave nor notably cowardly: he was said to have performed his duties calmly and efficiently.
Something of a loner, he was regarded by his comrades as an oddity, ''the artist'' as they called him. While they chatted and joked, smoked, drank, or visited brothels, Hitler did none of these things, but sat on his own, reading. Where they were cynical about the war, Hitler repeatedly reaffirmed his commitment to total victory, though he generally did this in private, as his surviving correspondence testifies. When members of his regiment took part in the spontaneous, football-playing ''Christmas truce'' of December 1914, Hitler refused to join in. Like other soldiers, he was quickly disabused of the romantic, heroic illusions that had inspired him to enlist. In their place, Hitler learned to be hard and ruthless and to be indifferent to suffering and death. Military hierarchy and discipline gave a sense of order and structure to his life, though he did not seek promotion, nor was he considered suitable for a higher rank by his superiors. On 5 October 1916 he sustained a shrapnel wound in his thigh, but it turned out not to be life-threatening.
He took part in the ultimately unsuccessful 1918 Spring offensive on the Western Front. A few months later, he was temporarily blinded in a mustard-gas attack and sent for treatment and recovery to a hospital behind the lines, in the Pomeranian town of Pasewalk. It was here that he learned on 10 November 1918 of the final German defeat, the overthrow of the Kaiser, and the outbreak of revolution, spearheaded by left-wing workers'' and soldiers'' councils. II The workers'' and soldiers'' councils soon yielded to the established opposition to the Kaiser, the Social Democratic Party, which took over the leadership of the country and, backed by the liberals and the Catholic Centre Party, established a new political order, far more progressive than the authoritarian polity of Bismarck and the Kaiser. The republican constitution voted through at a constitutive National Assembly held in the cultural centre of Weimar, the city of the classical German poets Goethe and Schiller in the late eighteenth century, was a thoroughly democratic one, giving women the vote for the first time, and making governments answerabl.