Hitler and his God

Like a Worn Out Stray Dog

This was the Munich corporal Hitler arrived in on 21 December 1918, discharged from the hospital at Pasewalk. He was assigned to the Reserve Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment, a battalion marked for immediate demobilization. But demobilization was what Hitler tried to prevent by any means for, as we have seen, he really “stood before the Void”. 11 He managed to be detailed to a prisoners of war camp in Traunstein, between Munich and Salzburg, to guard the last Russian and French soldiers there before they were sent home. Towards the end of January 1919 Hitler was back in Munich, where he joined a military guard unit at the Central Railway Station.

He was also elected Vertrauensmann, i.e. representative, of the lower ranks of his battalion. This is not surprising considering his war record and the impression made by his occasional outbursts of oratory, when provoked, which testified to a certain level of intellectual capability. But his election is startling because the whole army garrison in Munich was governed by Eisner’s socialists, which means that Hitler went along with the leftists, something diametrically opposed to his later beliefs. He even became a member of the propaganda section of the Soldiers Council. And when Kurt Eisner had been murdered, on 21 February, Vertrauensmann Hitler was one of the hundred thousand mourners following the remains of the Jewish prime minister to the burial ground. 12

“With a probability bordering on certainty Hitler has, till May 1919, chosen the side of the people [i.e. the socialists] of whom he later untruthfully said ‘that already in November 1918 he had found out that they possessed no honour’.” 13 Many students of Hitler’s life have been surprised by these recently discovered facts because they took for granted Hitler’s statement in Mein Kampf that “the granite foundation” of his world view had already been laid in his years in Vienna (from 1907 till 1913). But Brigitte Hamann and others in her tracks have shown “how much Mein Kampf is political propaganda and how little a biography”. 14 In the beginning of 1919 corporal Hitler would have done anything to stay another day in the army, for he had nowhere else to go.

“He was after the First World War one of the many thousands of ex-soldiers who roamed the streets looking for work … At that time Hitler was willing to accept a job from anybody who was kind towards him. He would have worked as eagerly for a Jewish or French employer as for an Aryan”, a certain ex-captain Mayr remembered later on. And he added: “When I first met him he resembled a worn out stray dog looking for a master” 15 – words he would come to regret.

The Russian Revolution had been a two-phase event: in February 1917 the socialist, humane Menshevik revolution with Alexander Kerensky as its leader; in October of the same year the Marxist, ruthless, Bolshevik takeover led by Lenin. A similar evolvement was tried out in Berlin, where the radical Spartacists led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg tried to take over from the socialist government. But the Spartacist coup was put down by the socialist government with the help of Freikorps, independent and ultra rightist armed units mainly consisting of war veterans and commanded by charismatic officers with condottiere allures. In Munich, though, the communist follow-up to Eisner’s socialist government succeeded, albeit only for a short time. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was proclaimed on 7 April 1919 and a government of army and workers councils installed, after the Russian example of the “soviets”. A “Red Army”, under a twenty-three year old sailor, would be this government’s power base to change German society into a proletarian paradise.

It should be kept in mind that Germany in those early post-war months was in complete distress. The shock of the unexpected defeat, the thousands of jobless, aimless military men hanging about everywhere, the new social-democratic regime, called “The System”, felt as foreign to the body of the “real” Germany and resented from the very beginning, and above all the food shortage undiminished because of the continuing Allied blockade – all this contributed to the mental and physical disarray. Like Eisner and his political amateurs the young communist leaders proved too small for their boots. At first it was an enjoyable game for them to scare and steal from the clergy, the rich, the petty bourgeois and all those who were considered enemies of the people. But soon the blundering councils succeeded in causing such confusion that the Reichswehr (the national Army), supported by several Free Corps units, had little trouble defeating them. By 3 May the last Red resistance was crushed, often brutally.

This object lesson in “dictatorship of the proletariat” so much increased the fear and passionate rejection of Communism, and of leftism in general, that Catholic Bavaria now became a haven for all factions, ideologies, groupings and individuals of the Right. Moreover, and no less important: Bavaria would never forget that, like Eisner, several of the most active leaders of the Red Councils had been Jews, and that at the command of those Jews German nationalist hostages had been murdered. This was at a time that the leadership of the Russian Revolution, including Lenin, was generally (but incorrectly) supposed to be entirely Jewish, that the Jew Bela Kun had started a short-lived Marxist revolution in Hungary, that the Jews Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogisches and others had sparked off the Spartacist revolt, and that Marxist revolts were brewing throughout Germany. The more the stomachs hungered, the more the ingrained German anti-Semitism found abundant nourishment.