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Tag: Adolf Hitler

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 17

(Left, NSDAP membership book.)

The NSDAP, he [Hitler] claimed, had been established on ‘the basis of an extreme racial outlook and rejects any form of parliamentarism’, including its present-day incarnation. It was intended to be quite different from all other ‘so-called national movements’, and so constructed that it would best serve to wage ‘the battle for the crushing of the Jewish-international domination of our people’. The NSDAP was also a ‘social or rather a socialist party’, whose statutes laid down ‘that the seat of its leadership was Munich and must remain Munich, now and for ever’.

This programme, Hitler continued, had been agreed as ‘immutable and inviolable in front of an audience of a thousand people, and invoked as a granite foundation in more than a hundred mass meetings’. Now, Hitler claimed, these principles had been violated by plans to merge with another party, by the agreement at Zeitz to move the headquarters to Berlin and by the prospect that they would be abjured in favour of the programme of Otto Dickel, which he condemned as a ‘meaningless, spongy [and] stretchable entity’. Specifically, Hitler objected to Dickel’s belief that Britain was emerging from under the thumb of the Jews and to his admiration for the Jew Walther Rathenau. He was interested in propaganda, not organization, and the power of ideas, not bureaucratic power…

Hitler averred that he made these demands ‘not because I crave power’ but because he was convinced that ‘without an iron leadership’ the party would soon degenerate from a National Socialist Workers Party into a mere ‘Occidental League’. Hitler had originally wanted to control the message rather than the party, but he now realized that he could not do the former without ensuring the latter.

It is not quite clear whether Hitler resigned with the intent of forcing the leadership’s hand, or whether he left in despair and decided to lay down the law only after attempts to win him back showed the underlying strength of his position. Even then, his demands were more modest than they sounded, being subject (as the law required) to membership vote. The ‘dictatorial powers’ were not requested for the running of the party in general but limited to the sphere that Hitler was primarily concerned about, namely the re-establishment and maintenance of ideological coherence. This is what underlay his demand to purge deviators, to oversee the absorption of other groups and the retention of Munich as an ideological ‘Rome’ or ‘Mecca’. The outcome, in any case, was the same. Hitler triumphed all along the line. Drexler caved in…

Hitler’s struggle with Drexler is common to most emerging political movements: the clash between the need for growth and the maintenance of ideological purity, which was the side which he took with such vigour. In July 1921, Hitler won his first political battle. He had become a politician. Whether Hitler had sought leadership or had leadership thrust upon him, it was clear that he now was increasingly not merely the de facto but the formal chief of the NSDAP. If he had once seen himself as a mere ‘drummer’ of the movement for the new Germany, he now aspired to be its leader.

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Third Reich

Blunder

My post for next Monday, the first of January, is being written for new visitors to this site. That will be the new featured post and I will use a metaphor analogous to the one I have been using about the psychological Rubicon: a metaphor that for now can be seen in this year’s featured post, ‘The River Nymph’. The next featured post, which, I reiterate, is for new visitors who are unaware of what the transvaluation of values is, says much the same but in an even more incisive way.

There is something I will say in the forthcoming featured post about which I can advance something for the moment.

Hitler and his inner circle of National Socialists, with whom he discussed the esoteric aspect of NS (his anti-Christianity—cf. Weikart’s book), didn’t have the opportunity to read mature mythicist literature as far as the historicity of Jesus is concerned.

Mythicism only matured in the present century, for example, with the work of mythicist Richard Carrier but also with non-mythicists like Richard Miller (see what we have said about Miller’s work in 2023). With this in mind, the forthcoming featured post will show a theological difference of mine with Hitler and Rosenberg in that, only up to our times, we can already begin to conceive, with recent scholarship on early Christian writings, that Jesus is as fictional a figure as the legendary King Arthur. The relevance of this for a 21st century National Socialism is capital, though this will be the subject of another post.

As far as today’s quote from Simms’ book is concerned (‘It was probably from him that Hitler got his determination that the Germans should not become a people like the [holocausted] Armenians’), I must add something.

While this issue of not realising the fictional nature of Jesus is understandable in Hitler’s biography, the military decision to invade the Soviet Union was Hitler’s mistake that led to what we have called here the Hellstorm Holocaust, the holocaust of Germans from 1945 to 1947 (which very few have heard of). Not all the generals of the Third Reich agreed with Operation Barbarossa, precisely because of the vast expanses of Russian territory and ‘General Winter’. In fact, the same thing happened to Hitler as to Napoleon in the previous century, so the artist ought to have listened to his generals.

Hitler was first and foremost an artist aware of the history of his people, as we saw in the previous day’s post, ‘Hitler 14’, with his books on art and history being the most widely read. Savitri Devi was absolutely right in saying that Hitler was first and foremost ‘Sun’, but that he failed in his ‘Lightning’. Had the solar artist been a little more patient, he would have prepared with the atomic bomb and then he would have become Kalki: the enemies of the Reich would have been incinerated with the Lightning of an Austrian avatar of this Indo-European god, and the Third Reich would now reign from the Atlantic to the Urals.

(Left, Vasily Malinin vs. Viktor Savinov—Leningrad). Operation Barbarossa was a serious mistake: a blunder as chess players say, like gambiting the queen and then realising we just cannot checkmate our opponent with a wrong sacrifice! And it bothers me that Hitler’s fans want to rationalise it by claiming that Stalin was about to invade Germany. The truth is that the Diktat the US imposed on Europe after the Hellstorm Holocaust was, as Francis Parker Yockey saw, even worse than if Stalin had invaded Europe. This interview with Srdja Trifkovic, who as a young man suffered under Yugoslav communism, is worth watching (Trifkovic lived on Gran Canaria, the Spanish island next to Africa where I also lived for almost a year).

But what I wanted to get at here is that, while I will continue to admire Hitler for the Sun he represented, it is clear that he didn’t read Sun Tzu when it comes to the point that, if you know your enemy like the back of your hand, you won’t lose any war.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 16

During this period Hitler collaborated with a range of figures, not all of whom were party members, in an informal and often non-hierarchical way. His closest associate was Rudolf Hess, a First World War veteran who had grown up in Egypt; the date of their first encounter (which was probably in May 1920) is disputed, but we know for a fact that he joined the NSDAP in July 1920.

A key interlocutor was the Reichswehr officer Ernst Rohm, whose meetings are documented from early 1920, though the first contacts may have taken place a lot earlier.

Hitler had frequent dealings with the staff of the Völkischer Beobachter, especially its executive editor, the playwright Dietrich Eckart, and his deputy Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German refugee from the Russian Revolution, who would influence Hitler’s view of the Soviet Union; the editor was his old regimental comrade Hermann Esser. In a rare gesture, Hitler explicitly acknowledged his debt to Eckart for his help with the Völkischer Beobachter, and to Rosenberg for his ‘theoretical deepening of the party programme’.

In late 1920, Hitler met Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had witnessed and been appalled by the massacre of the Armenians as a German consul in the East Anatolian town of Erzurum during the First World War. It was probably from him that Hitler got his determination that the Germans should not become a ‘people like the Armenians’, that is, the butt of foreign oppressors.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 15

Hitler giving a speech to supporters in a beer cellar, by Hermann Hoyer.

Over the next fifteen months, Hitler engaged in an intense programme of speeches in the major Munich beer halls; he practised his poses in front of a mirror.

By the end of the year, he had made twenty-seven appearances in Munich, and twelve outside, including Bad Tolz, Rosenheim and even Stuttgart. The audiences ranged in number from 800 to about 2,000. During late September and the beginning of October 1920, Hitler made repeated trips to Austria and to support the National Socialist Party in neighbouring Wurttemberg in their election campaign. In early 1921, a speech on Versailles at the Zirkus Krone was heard by about 5,600 people. One eyewitness, his first biographer Konrad Heiden, recalled that the secret of the success of his speeches was that the audience became ‘participants’ rather than ‘listeners’.

There were some missteps. Hitler’s opportunistic attempt to address a Munich crowd of 20,000 or so uninvited at a general rally outside the Feldherrnhalle in February 1921 was drowned out by the massed bands who struck up as he began to speak. It is also worth remembering that many members had never seen or heard Hitler in person. In general, though, his profile grew steadily, and he began to overtake the best-known orators, such as Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, as the public face of the party. Despite his somewhat mysterious aura—Hitler refused to allow any photograph of him to be taken—he had become a recognizable ‘name’ in Bavarian politics . His relationship with the Reichswehr in Bavaria, which had effectively incubated him, remained good even after he had left the ranks.

In mid May 1921, Hitler met with the prime minister, Gustav von Kahr, marking his political recognition by ‘official’ Bavaria. He had ‘made it’.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Racial right

Hitler, 14

By early 1920, Hitler had found two new homes. On leaving the army, he found lodgings as a sub-tenant of Ernst and Maria Reichert in Thierschstrasse no. 41, in the inner Munich suburb of Lehel. It was a very modest berth in a working- and lower-middle-class neighbourhood. Hitler was an easy-going resident, who never locked his doors and allowed the Reicherts to use his gramophone and books during his frequent absences. We do not know what exactly he read, but the best-thumbed surviving volumes from his collection relate to history and art, whereas those on race and the occult gave the impression of being unread. [emphasis added]

As we said recently, it is the poet who creates nations, not the scientist (e.g. the scientific books on race realism published by Jared Taylor). ‘The historical course offered by myth, in contrast to the inherently passive determinism of scientific rationalism’, writes Michael O’Meara, ‘is a choice for heroes, not for bookworms or computer hobbyists’. Also, history is the most important subject in the eyes of the raven, who spends his life fused to the Weirwood looking at the past of his civilisation. Like Bran, the raven’s pupil, Hitler perfectly understood this.

His new professional and political home was the DAP, which was renamed the ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ (NSDAP) in the course of 1920. Hitler was by now a recognized quantity on the local right-wing scene…

Hitler believed political organization without propaganda was pointless. His main concern at this point was to use the party as a platform to disseminate and elaborate his ideas. He was involved in the drafting of the twenty-five point NSDAP (technically DAP) programme in February 1920, though it is unclear whether he can claim sole authorship. The first four related to national integrity, foreign policy and territorial expansion; the next four concerned race, mostly strictures against the Jews. Hitler turned Wilson’s idea of ‘self-determination’ back on the Allies with his call for ‘the unification of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of peoples to self-determination’. More than that, he demanded ‘Land and soil (colonies) to feed our people and to settle our surplus population’, the first unambiguous documented articulation of what subsequently became the Lebensraum concept. The geographic location of these future ‘colonies’ was not specified but at this time Hitler seems to have had overseas territories in mind…

Hitler paid close attention to the iconography underpinning the message. A black swastika of his design on a white circle with red background was first flown as the official party emblem at a meeting in Salzburg in August 1920. In one of his very few excursions into the occult, Hitler praised the swastika—as a ‘symbol of the sun’ which sustained a ‘cult’ of light among a ‘community based on Aryan culture’, not only in Europe, but in India… as well. The use of the old imperial black, white and red colours was a calculated affront to the black, red and gold of the Weimar flag.

‘The red is social,’ he later explained, ‘the white is national, and the swastika is anti-Semitic.’ By mounting the symbol diagonally, Hitler cleverly conveyed a sense of dynamism and movement.

Four months later, he oversaw the purchase of the Volkischer Beobachter newspaper and the Franz Eher Verlag, financed in part by a loan from a Reichswehr slush fund guaranteed by Dietrich Eckart, which gave the party a media platform with a print run of 8,000-17,000 appearing three times a week; after many ups and downs, the Volkischer Beobachter became a daily on 8 February 1923.

Here it is noticeable that the white nationalists haven’t really broken ideologically with the ethnocidal System. If they had broken away with it, they would have had the initiative to, at the very least, come up with a new flag very different from the American flag, as well as having incredibly different heroes. In my previous post, I quoted what Robert Morgan said yesterday. This is what we read on pages 175-176 of my book Daybreak: ‘Stars and Stripes? As Morgan explained to us, the personalities sculpted on Mount Rushmore represent ideals that would eventually lead to white decline’:

The Old America is dead? I don’t think so. Symbolic of the Old America, and chiseled into Mt. Rushmore, are four American ‘heroes’, whose exploits demonstrate the white man’s biggest problem: himself. First we have George Washington, who magnanimously freed his slaves, but only after his death, after which he had no further use for them. How many white Americans have been robbed, murdered, or raped by the descendants of those slaves? Quite a few, no doubt.

Thanks George!

Then comes Lincoln, who authorized the murders of hundreds of thousands of whites on his way to freeing the slaves and then turning them loose on his countrymen. His admirers say that, like Martin Luther King, he had a dream. But Abe’s dream was that all of the negroes would volunteer to leave these shores. How racist! Amazingly, and no doubt a big surprise to Abe, few wanted to do so.

Thanks a lot, ‘honest’ Abe!

Then we have Thomas Jefferson, a randy old fellow who was probably nailing his quadroon slave Sally Hemings, and likely had a child by her. His was the colonial prototype for the long American tradition of race mixing (a.k.a. white racial suicide).

Thanks Tom! You set a fine example.

Last is Teddy Roosevelt, the original progressive. He was an advocate for women’s suffrage, yet another step in the direction of the hallowed American cause of ‘equality’, and it’s painfully obvious how that turned out. Also, he favored a powerful federal government, just as do progressives today. To fund such a government he favored the income tax, a noose into which the American public eagerly thrust its neck.

The current unrest is only more of the same white racial self-destruction. So the Old America isn’t dead. Its spirit is just flying new flags, reorganized under the banners of BLM and antifa. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

An 1849 epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, it means: ‘The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing’. As long as the American racial right doesn’t produce a new flag with colours different from those chosen by Hitler, but that the new flag displays the swastika, their movement will be la même chose: the American way of white ethnocide.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Emigration / immigration

Hitler, 10

Hitler was well aware of the industrial strength of the British Empire and the United States, but in his view the struggle against the Anglo-Americans during the First World War was not decided solely by material factors. His vision of international politics was essentially human-centred. On Hitler’s reading, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been an epic demographic contest which the German Empire had spectacularly lost. She had failed to provide an outlet for her excess population either through economic or through territorial expansion, with the result that millions of Germans had emigrated. Meanwhile, her enemies built up huge empires which they could parlay into strength on the European battlefield. Hitler lamented ‘that the Entente sent alien auxiliary peoples to bleed to death on European battlefields’. He had personal experience of this, having confronted (British) Indian troops in 1915 and (French) Algerian Zouaves in 1918. Hitler’s anxiety deepened on beholding the Africans and Moroccans who formed part of the French occupation forces in the 1920s. He accused France of ‘only waiting for the warm season to throw an army of 800-900,000 blacks into [our] country to complete the work of the total subjugation and violation of Germany’. Hitler’s concern was thus not only racial, but strategic: that France would use the human reserves of Africa to oppress Germany, a weapon no longer available to Germany as she had lost her much smaller overseas empire as a result of the war.

The main threat posed by the European empires, however, was not the deployment of men from the ‘subject races’, but from the white settler colonies. Some of the most formidable British troops on the western front had come from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They were numerous, well fed, fit, highly motivated, and often extremely violent. Worse still was the fact that the Germans whom the Reich had exported in the nineteenth century for want of land to feed them had come back to fight against her as American soldiers during the war. In later speeches, as we shall see, Hitler repeatedly came back to the moment he had encountered his first American prisoners. The emigration question was the subject of his second known major speech in September 1919, and it also underlay his next disquisition, which was on the internal colonization of Germany. His thoughts on that subject so impressed his sponsor Captain Mayr that he announced his intention ‘to launch this official report abridged or in full in the press in a suitable manner’. Emigration was part of daily life in post-war Germany, so much so that a whole newspaper in Munich, Der Auswanderer (‘The Emigrant’), was devoted to the topic.

That said, although contemporary concern with the emigration issue went well beyond Hitler, it does not seem to have enjoyed a particular salience in the broader inquest into the war. It thus represents his distinctive contribution to the debate on German revival and one of the most important lessons he drew from the war. Henceforth the emigration question, and the associated American problem, lay at the very heart of Hitler’s thinking.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 9

Brendan Simms, professor of history, University of Cambridge.

Note that Simms’ volume—the hard copy in the hardcover edition I own is over 900 pages long—is replete with endnotes, so every biographical claim about Adolf Hitler’s intellectual odyssey that we see in this volume is backed up by primary sources. Although in years past I have browsed through other voluminous biographies of Hitler that have been selling in mainstream bookstores, I didn’t buy them because I wasn’t motivated by the POV of the biographer in question (e.g., Ian Kershaw’s volumes). The revisionism of another normie on the other hand, Simms, really caught my attention. Let’s continue quoting what Simms wrote in chapter 3 of Hitler: Only the World Was Enough.

Hitler put the inquest into the defeat at the heart of his world view. The alleged fractures in German society played an important role here, the ‘inner internationalism’ to which he had referred during the war itself. By this Hitler primarily meant the Social Democrats and Independent Socialists (USPD), who allegedly put loyalty to their class comrades over that to the nation; it was their internationalism, not their socialism, that he objected to. It was the same anxiety as over capitalism, which Hitler rejected in its global, but, as we shall see, not necessarily in its local ‘national’ form. He also took aim at German particularism, especially in Bavaria, which threatened the integrity of the Reich.

The principal internal enemy, however, was the Jews, who had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’, although Hitler rarely used this precise phrase. All this has given the impression that Hitler, like so many other Germans, sought to blame the defeat primarily on internal scapegoats rather than facing up to the strength of the Entente. In fact, Hitler never subscribed to a monocausal [bold & red added by Ed.!] domestic explanation for the disaster and much of his thinking, especially the later quest for Lebensraum, would be inexplicable if he had. Eliminating the Jews and healing the domestic rifts inside Germany were necessary conditions for the revival of the Reich, but not sufficient ones.

I bolded the above because I was unaware that a renowned historian had used the word I have used on this site in my dispute with white nationalists, whom I have branded as ‘monocausalists’ in the sense that they have refused to see other factors, besides Jewish subversion, that have been contributing to Aryan decline. Now it turns out that an academic, Simms, says the same thing I say about Hitler even though his POV is altogether different.

The point is to find out whether Simms is right about Hitler. And if he is, one can use his information simply from the POV of the 14 words.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) 1st World War

Hitler, 4

The third chapter of Simms’ book is entitled ‘The Colonisation of Germany’ and begins with these words:

The immediate post-war years were a period of national disgrace for Germany. Its monarchy banished, shorn of large tracts of territory by the Versailles settlement and saddled with a huge reparations bill, the Reich was plunged into profound economic, political and psychological dislocation. Foreign soldiers, some of them of colour, occupied substantial parts of the country. Germany had fought the world and lost; now many felt she was a colony of the global system.

The very biological substance of the German people seemed to be at stake, as they grappled with the continuing blockade and then the prospect of long-term immiseration. Hitler experienced these travails both personally and politically. His own situation was even more marginal than most. He found his way through the turbulent aftermath of the war with difficulty. Hitler was also even more exercised than most Germans about the state of the Reich. He looked for answers, and he soon found them.

Hitler identified the root cause of Germany’s humiliation as the power of the Anglo-American and Jewish international capitalism, which used various instruments, in particular revolutionary communism, to keep the Reich in subjection. With the help of others, but essentially under his own steam, Hitler began to develop an ideology to make sense of the world around him. By the end of this period, Hitler had undertaken a comprehensive diagnosis of the Reich’s ills, though he had yet to suggest a cure. Given the depths to which Germany had fallen, Hitler expected the national revival would take generations.

Shortly after the war ended, Hitler was discharged from hospital. Then according to Simms came three decisive events. First, Hitler was chosen by his commanders to serve in the propaganda and education section of the army, headed by Captain Karl Mayr. This indicated, according to the author of Hitler, an understanding that he had an aptitude for such work. Secondly, Hitler was elected Vertrauensmann—a person to be trusted—by the High Command, which shows that he had by then won the support of a section of his comrades. The third event was the news of the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of June 1919.

German delegate Johannes Bell signing the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of
Mirrors, with various Allied delegations sitting and standing in front of him.

 
The following month Hitler took part in a debate in his Reichswehr unit; three days later he delivered a speech on the peace terms. Simms informs us that this was Hitler’s first major political statement on record. Although the text hasn’t survived, the content can be deduced from comments on it. The next day Hitler spoke on the subject of ’emigration’. Two days later, a Reichswehr report states that Hitler had given ‘a very good, clear and spirited lecture on capitalism during which he touched, indeed he had to touch, the Jewish question’.

Simms comments that this was Hitler’s first recorded reference to Jews, adding that it was made in the context of capitalism, not Bolshevism.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) 1st World War

Hitler, 3

Adolf Hitler would look considerably different 20 years later.

In March 1917, Hitler returned with his unit to the regimental barracks. Shortly afterwards, List’s men witnessed the heavy Canadian attack on the Vimy Ridge. And then they were directly confronted by fierce British attacks during the Battle of Arras. Then, in the late summer of 1917, the List Regiment returned to Geluveld for the Third Battle of Ypres, during which it was brutally pounded by British artillery for over a week. The combination of high explosives, shrapnel and gas caused terrible casualties. Hitler was directly involved in the fighting, as his regiment’s barracks stood in the way of the British advance towards the Ypres salient.

Meanwhile, the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies in early April 1917. This decision was seen by many on both sides of the Atlantic as an act of Anglo-Saxon solidarity directed against the Teutons. Millions of Americans, many of them foreign-born, prepared to cross the Atlantic.

The List Regiment was deployed to support the major German offensive in the spring of 1918. In late March, while advancing just behind the assault troops, they encountered French soldiers from the colonies, Algerian Zouaves. Then, in mid-1918, the List Regiment encountered Americans for the first time, at the Second Battle of the Marne near Reims. Here they were forced to retreat quickly, but not without taking some prisoners. Two of them were taken by Hitler to the brigade barracks.

Colin Ross, who would later advise Hitler on the United States, and who was then serving on the western front, remembers not only the courage of the American soldiers, but also their frequent calling out to each other in German and the large number of German-speaking prisoners.

By now, the Allied blockade, control of the sky and numerical superiority were beginning irreversibly to wear down Hitler’s regiment.

The German offensive was running out of steam in the face of overwhelming Allied superiority in manpower, material and energy. General Ludendorff famously spoke at the time of ‘the black days of the German army’. Although Hitler was again decorated in August 1918, this time with the Iron Cross First Class, German morale collapsed under the heavy bombardment. One report lamented that ‘enemy aircraft completely controls the skies’.

The growing wave of American soldiers arriving throughout September exacerbated the general feeling of despondency. Since October, more than half a million rested Americans entered the war and Africa, Australia, India and Canada continued to send whole units of soldiers to Europe.

After more than four years of war, the List Regiment had had enough. In mid-October, Hitler was wounded in a gas attack during a British bombing raid. A week later, he was sent to the Prussian Reserve Hospital northeast of Berlin. There he learned of the Armistice and the German surrender on 11 November 1918. Thus ended Hitler’s four-plus years of war.

Above all, Hitler had come away from the war with a keen sense of power of the Entente, especially the British, in his eyes the most formidable of the ‘world of enemies’ against which he had battled in vain those four years…

In short, by the end of the war, Hitler had the ‘world of enemies’ firmly in his sights. The struggle against the Jews, in their capitalist or communist guises, had not yet begun, however, and nor had he explicitly targeted the United States.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) 1st World War

Hitler, 2

The second chapter of Brendan Simms’ book is entitled ‘Against a World of Enemies’. Although I will follow the prose of his abridged paragraphs closely, in order not to violate the copyright of his book I will be rephrasing it (and perhaps I will do the same with the rest of the book Hitler: Only the World Was Enough). Although my paraphrases closely follow Simms’ abbreviated paragraphs, only when I quote him verbatim will I indent the quotations.

This latest Hitler biographer, who as I said in a previous post published his book in 2019, begins his chapter by saying that the young Adolf reacted enthusiastically to the outbreak of the First World War, and although he doesn’t publish the following photograph, he mentions it:

Adolf Hitler attends a rally in the Odeonsplatz
to celebrate the declaration of war in 1914.

The enthusiastic Hitler volunteered to fight with the Bavarian army and was drafted into a regiment known as the List Regiment, the name of its commander, which included not only volunteers but also forced recruits. During weeks of training, Hitler learned to use the regulation rifle and was then sent to reinforce the German advance through Belgium and northern France.

Hitler did not, in other words, react to the outbreak of war by disappearing. Instead, he immediately volunteered for the German (technically, the Bavarian) army, an unusual choice. In August 1914, therefore, Hitler definitively turned his back not just on Austria-Hungary, but opted decisively for Germany. It was his first major documented political statement.

But the curious thing is that, at this point, Hitler’s main enemy was England. The first letter on record after enlistment announces his hope that he ‘would get to England’ apparently as a German invasion force. The target was not the Tsarist Empire, although the Russians were at that time a danger to Prussia.

The List Regiment did indeed encounter the British at Geluveld, Wytschate and Messines in the Belgian region of Flanders. Hitler took part in several frontal attacks. He himself refers to ‘heaviest battles’. Despite an initial triumph, the Bavarians were eventually driven out of Geluveld. Hitler was promoted to Gefreiter, Private First Class. Since then he claimed ‘I can say that I risked my life daily and looked death in the eye’. On 2 December Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. ‘It was’, he wrote, ‘the happiest day of my life’.

In a letter of February 1915, Hitler lamented the loss of life in a struggle against a ‘world of international enemies’ and expressed the hope not only that ‘Germany’s external enemy’ would be crushed but that her ‘inner internationalism would disintegrate’. These were times when the word globalisation wasn’t yet in use. In the following letter from mid-1915 Hitler recounted a bomb hit from which he was ‘rescued as by a miracle’, and rejoiced that Germany was ‘at last mobilising opinion against England’, further evidence of his concern about Great Britain.

Hitler’s next major battle, in March 1915, was preceded by even more massive bombardments by the British, followed by the first encounter with Imperial troops from the Indian Army. A month later Hitler had to face more Empire units, especially Canadian ones. In time, the array of exotic helmets in the enemy trenches—including turbans and beaked hats—gave the men of the List Regiment the sad impression that the world was up in arms against them (something that would be repeated in the Second World War). This truthful impression was reinforced the following year. Hitler was back in action in French Flanders in May-June 1916. This time the List Regiment had to face Australians and New Zealanders.

The Bavarians were once again discouraged to find themselves grappling with men who had travelled from the far side of the world to fight them in Flanders. Worse still, as Hitler’s comrade Adolf Meyer recalled, some of the Australians were of German descent. One of his captives ‘not only spoke excellent German, but wore my own name of Meyer into the bargain. Understandably: His father was a German, who had immigrated to Australia as a child with his parents and later married an English woman there’.

Subsequently, the List Regiment suffered the final stages of the Battle of the Somme. Hitler’s bunker was hit by a British artillery barrage, wounding him in the left upper thigh. While the wound wasn’t life-threatening, it was serious enough for him to be evacuated. Hitler was sent to the Beelitz military hospital in Berlin to recover.