Hitler and his God

A Corporal Watching Mice

The corporal woke up rather early in the morning, before the start of his daily routine. As he had nothing else to do, he amused himself by throwing bread crumbs at the mice which were the regular visitors of his small room, and watched them playing with the crumbs or fighting for them. The First World War – the so-called “Great War” – was over, and the future of the corporal, who had no ties with relatives or friends, looked very bleak indeed.

He had not come back marching among the endless grey, weary throngs of soldiers carrying the smell of mud, gun powder and rotten human flesh in the folds of their uniforms. For shortly before the armistice he had been blinded by gas near Wervik, on the French-Belgian border, and transported far northwards to a military hospital at Pasewalk, in Pommerania. There he had touched the depths of his ordeal when hearing the announcement that the fighting had stopped on 11 November, that Germany had lost the war, that the Kaiser and all German princes had abdicated, and that a German republic had been proclaimed. Now he was waiting in Munich, in the barracks of what remained of his regiment, to be demobilized.

Although Austrian by birth and still by nationality, Adolf Hitler had in August 1914 been allowed to enlist in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, the “List Regiment”. He had served most honourably from the first weeks of the war until the last days, a full four years. As a battle dispatch runner (Gefechtsmeldegänger, to use his own designation) in the regimental headquarters he had participated in a great number of murderous battles in France and Belgium; he had escaped death narrowly on several occasions, and was awarded the Iron Cross Second and First Class for bravery. “Nobody who has known [Hitler] from nearby will doubt his courage”, testified the Adjutant of the Regiment later on. “In the field he has proved himself to be a brave, exceptionally reliable dispatch runner who really deserved the Iron Cross First Class, and who several times had been mentioned for it before he was awarded with it. He was the example of the unknown soldier who quietly and unassumingly performed his duty.” 1

The war had been “the most unforgettable and greatest time of his earthly life” 2; as Hitler himself would write, he had been “passionately happy to be a soldier”. He was now twenty-nine years old. What would become of him? He had no prospects, no future. Therefore he did everything possible to postpone his demobilization, for the army still gave him a bunk to sleep and a chunk of bread to eat. Once on his own, he could only slide back into his dreams of becoming a great architect, while having to earn a living selling water colour paintings of picturesque buildings and monuments. For that was what he had done in Munich before the outbreak of the war, as it was what he had done in Vienna, where he had led the life of a tramp. “He always looked so starved”, remembered people who had known him at the time.

He might have to change into civilian clothes any day now. War heroes there were aplenty. Nobody cared for the columns of bedraggled soldiers, ill-fed and shabbily clothed, still carrying their weapons, with the reflection of unspeakable horrors and death in their eyes, moving through a civilian world they no longer recognized and deeply despised. The food situation in Germany remained so bad that nobody cared about the starvation of others. A few crumbs could be spared for the mice, though. “Since I regularly woke up before five o’ clock in the morning”, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf, “I had got into the habit of putting a few left-overs or crusts of bread on the floor for the mice which amused themselves in my little room, and watching the droll little beasts chasing around after these choice morsels. I had known so much poverty in my life that I was well able to imagine the hunger, and hence also the pleasure, of the little creatures.” 3

But, lo and behold … not that many years later there stood that selfsame Adolf Hitler, triumphantly, as the new Chancellor of Germany on the balcony of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, acclaimed by thousands of enthusiastic German citizens! And then he stood, all by himself and with the Iron Cross First Class on his chest, high above huge, neatly drawn up columns of uniformed Germans on the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg. They hailed and revered him as their Leader, their Führer, even as their Messiah, who had come to make them great again, greater than they had ever been before in their history, rulers of the earth. Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt. The one-time desperate corporal-without-a-future had become “Leader of the nation, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Head of Government and Supreme Executive Chief, Supreme Judiciar and Leader of the [NSDAP] Party”. 4

Not only had he become master of life and death in the country he ruled, where his will was law and his word gospel truth, he also “changed the map of Europe, destroyed empires, and promoted the rise of new powers, evoked revolutions, and brought the colonial age to an end.” 5 The “man from nowhere” united Austria with Germany and entered as conqueror into Prague, Warsaw and Paris. He conquered, enslaved and killed – and intended to conquer more, kill more and enslave more.

How had this come to pass? How had the former Austrian corporal, once compared to a worn out stray dog, reached such a pinnacle of power that Joachim Fest could write: “If Hitler had succumbed to an assassination or an accident at the end of 1938, few would hesitate to call him one of the greatest German statesmen, the consummator of Germany’s history”? 6

Libraries have been written about Hitler and Nazi Germany, yet several of the best-known and most widely read historians agree that he remains enigmatic. “The more extensive the material at our disposal and the greater the historical distance, the more puzzling Hitler seems to become”, writes Christian von Krockow. 7 Alan Bullock, author of such essays like Hitler – A Study in Tyranny and Hitler and Stalin – Parallel Lives, admits in a conversation: “The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain … I can’t explain Hitler. I don’t believe anybody can.” 8 And to H.R. Trevor-Roper “after fifty years Adolf Hitler remains a frightening mystery.” 9

“At one time I have within myself chosen my way in spite of totally inimical surroundings”, said Adolf Hitler, “and I, an unknown and nameless man, have kept walking until the final success. Often declared no longer existent and always wished to be non-existent, in the end I was the victor.” 10

There must have been a time “when Hitler became Hitler”, when the nonentity turned into a seer and a politician who, in a very short time, accomplished feats deemed impossible: wipe out the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, build up a prostrate and despondent Germany, and unify the country into an efficient war machine for his megalomaniac and criminal overt and covert goals. There must have been a source of the power supporting this rootless, often ridiculed and always underestimated man to build up a powerful and ruthless political party, inspiring him to overcome the most critical situations, and impelling him to take his stand above all those superior to him inside and outside Germany. There must have been a fountainhead of the evil that through this man tried to ravage humanity and make it regress into a state of barbarism supposed to belong definitively to the past.