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CORPORAL HITLER AND
THE GREAT WAR 1914–1918
Adolf Hitler enlisted in the Bavarian Army in August 1914 as a war volunteer.
Fanatically devoted to the German cause, between 1914 and 1918 Hitler served
with distinction and sometimes reckless bravery, winning both classes of Iron
Cross. Using memoirs, military records, regimental, divisional and official war
histories as well as (wherever possible) Hitler’s own words, this book seeks to
reconstruct a period in his life that has been neglected in the literature. As a front-
line soldier Hitler began his ‘study’ of the black art of propaganda; and, as he
himself maintained, the List Regiment provided him with his ‘university of life’.
This is not only an account of the fighting, however. Some of the most profound
influences on Hitler occurred on home leave or as a result of official wartime
propaganda, which he devoured uncritically. His conversion from passive to
pathological anti-Semitism began while he was invalided in Germany in 1916–17.
Hitler is here presented less as the product of high cultural forces than as an avid
reader and gullible consumer of state propaganda, which fed his prejudices. He
was a ‘good soldier’ but also a ‘true believer’ in fact and practice. It is no exag-
geration to say that every military decision made by Hitler between 1939 and
1945 was in some way influenced or coloured by his experiences with the List
Regiment between 1914 and 1918.
John F. Williams is a research fellow in the Department of Germanic Studies,
University of Sydney, Australia.
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(Continued)
CORPORAL HITLER
AND THE GREAT WAR
1914–1918
The List Regiment
John F. Williams
FRANK CASS
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2005
by Frank Cass
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Frank Cass
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Frank Cass is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2005 John F. Williams
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Williams, John Frank, 1933–
Corporal Hitler and the Great War 1914–1918 : the List Regiment /
John F. Williams. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–415–35854–X (hardback) —
ISBN 0–415–35855–8 (pbk.)
1. Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945. 2. Soldiers—Germany—Biography.
3. World War, 1914–1918—Regimental histories—Germany.
4. Germany. Heer. Bayerisches Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment 16—History.
5. World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Western Front. I. Title.
DD247.H5W483 2005
940.413433092—dc22
2004015482
ISBN 0–415–35854–X (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–35855–8 (pbk)
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
ISBN 0-203-00476-0 Master e-book ISBN
v
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 A university of the trenches 4
2 1913–14: The curative power of war 17
3 Cannon fodder 34
4 West Flanders 1914 50
5 Winter 1914–15 73
6 Neuve Chapelle 1915 86
7 Fromelles 1915 98
8 Nursery tales of 1915 114
9 Hugo Gutmann and the good soldier Mend 128
10 Fromelles 1916 136
11 Hell on the Somme 147
12 Declining fortune 161
13 1918 178
Epilogue: The greatest commander-in-chief of all time 198
Notes 211
Selected bibliography 226
Index 233
1
INTRODUCTION
A book dealing with the experiences and Western Front battles of a German regiment
in the Great War must, by its nature, be primarily a work of military history
primarily in this case, but not exclusively, for elements of biography are also
present. The regiment in question is, after all, the sixteenth Bavarian Reserve
Infantry, or List Regiment (so named after its first commander); a regiment
whose principal claim to fame is the fact that Adolf Hitler served in its ranks for
four years in the Great War. Although this work cannot claim (perhaps merci-
fully) to be yet another Hitler biography, it still has Hitler as its raison d’être.
Without the presence of this Austrian-born Infanterist (soon to be corporal) in its
ranks, the List Regiment merits no more attention than any one of the 800 or so
German regiments that served on the Western Front in the Great War. Yet Hitler
did serve in its ranks and that fact alone makes its story important. Between 1914
and 1918, Hitler claimed, he changed from a self-confessed ‘weak-kneed cosmo-
politan’ into an anti-Semite and ardent pan-German nationalist. Again according
to Hitler, he decided in the trenches that for Germany’s sake he must place what-
ever dreams he held of architectural or artistic glory on hold, and instead devote
his immediate post-war future to politics. As an adjunct and there is no reason
to disbelieve (in this case) his word as a front-line soldier he began his ‘study’
of the black art of propaganda. And, as Hitler himself maintained, the List
Regiment provided him with his university of life.
Much, but not all, which Hitler wrote or said about himself, his past and his
struggles can be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. As for the words of first-hand
witnesses, these too are often contradictory and sometimes driven by motives in
which truth does not always figure prominently. None more so perhaps than
some of the self-styled acquaintances from his Vienna days between 1908 and
1913. But the post-war memoirs of his former trench comrades of 1914–18 must
also be treated with circumspection, even if the Führer and his Gestapo did find
some observations revealing enough to warrant pulping editions and meting out
varying degrees of punishment to the authors. Such negative observations, it
must be said, always relate to Hitler’s eccentricities, personality and sexuality,
INTRODUCTION
2
never to his courage or soldierly virtues. Doubt no longer attaches to Hitler’s
courage under fire or his record as a Great War soldier. He was awarded both
grades of the Iron Cross and deservedly so. There can be no doubt that he was
a brave and fanatical soldier, and that his fanaticism stemmed from the (widely
held) media-inspired belief that the Reich was ringed by enemies and must fight
and win to achieve its rightful place in the sun. As for Austria-Hungary, his
nominal homeland, Hitler had only contempt. By 1914 he already saw the future of
German Austria (including much of Bohemia and Moravia) lying in an Anschluss
with Germany, with the rest of the Habsburg domains being left to fragment as
they may. The
degree
to which Hitler was an active anti-Semite in 1914, and how
much his potentially eliminationist post-1919 attitudes grew, either out of belief
or from political opportunism, will always be open to doubt. The evidence (apart
from what he himself claimed) is inconclusive.
What does seem certain is that by August 1914 he already favoured a pan-
German, anti-Marxist and anti-Socialist worldview. It is also apparent that,
during the war, he was prepared to harangue any comrade, or group of comrades,
willing to listen to his monologues. Hitler was neither a good observer nor a good
listener. His mind was fixed and he was willing to see, read or hear only what
further confirmed him in his prejudices. In the mostly volunteer List Regiment of
October 1914, his was hardly a unique case. Most of these volunteers were like-
minded, being patriotic true believers, to the point of gullibility, in the official
Reich propaganda espoused in governmental, semi-governmental or independent
right-wing newspapers of the day. Thus, we can be sure as to sources (newspapers
primarily) influencing Hitler and motivating him to become the good soldier that
he undoubtedly was. We can also be sure not only from the testimony of Hitler
himself, but through the confirmatory sources of both friend and foe that in
subsequent years he saw himself uniquely qualified by virtue of his front-line
service, self-belief in his talent for command and his dilettante’s theoretical
knowledge of the conduct of war to dismiss men he sneered at as staff college
strategists and assume the role of supreme commander of all Germany’s forces.
In Hitler’s case, his Great War knapsack contained no marshal’s baton, but the
tunic of an all-powerful warlord.
It hardly exaggerates to say that every military decision made by Hitler
between 1939 and 1945 was in some way influenced or coloured by his experiences
with the List Regiment. In 1939–40 this may have worked in his favour. His first-
hand field knowledge of French and Belgian Flanders (where the water table
always lies just below ground level and the countryside is criss-crossed with
drainage ditches and narrow lanes) must have told him that this was no country
to employ a major panzer thrust. Instead of adopting a kind of mid-century
Schlieffen Plan – using tanks and Stukas to follow the old German invasion route
of 1914 – he chose to back a panzer thrust through the allegedly impassable
Ardennes forest. Even Hitler’s enthusiastic adoption of the concept of blitzkrieg
itself can be seen to originate in his battle experiences in July 1918, when the
regiment was forced into a headlong retreat, harassed in a co-ordinated counter
INTRODUCTION
3
offensive by marauding French fighter-bombers backed up by artillery and
Renault light tanks.
The List Regiment’s greatest, in fact its only, serious successes were in defensive
actions, particularly those short, sharp, violent, almost nineteenth-century-style
battles on the Aubers Ridge in 1915–16. Given these experiences, it was easy for
Hitler to believe that the well-entrenched and well-supplied German soldier,
suitably motivated and ideologically reinforced, was invincible. What was true for
most of 1914–18 on the Western Front was inappropriate when applied to the
Eastern Front after 1943, a fact compounded by Hitler’s total ignorance of the
qualities of the Russian soldier. Hitler was surely proud that his regiment
(unlike one of his division’s sister regiments) was never sent East, for in the Great
War the Eastern Front was the soft option; a front for much of the time except
in occasional moments of dire emergency more than adequately entrusted to
3rd or 4th class divisions, many of them
Landsturm
or
Landwehr
units. Hitler never,
fully appreciated that the inadequately supplied and led ill-trained
Tsarist army
of 1914–17 bore only a nominal resemblance to the Red Army of 1941–45,
although this reality should have dawned on him well before Stalingrad. Yet his
miscalculations based on obsolete 1914–18 prejudices were not limited to gross
underestimations of an opponent’s military worth. At a more banal level, until
Stalingrad, Hitler saw no reason why the carbine that had served the German
soldier so well in the Great War would not continue to function just as adequately
in the Second World War. Until the mass manufacture of a similar weapon was
undertaken, German soldiers were always at a disadvantage
vis-à-vis
Soviet
troops abundantly equipped with light, robust, reliable and frost-resistant sub-
machine guns.
For four years the List Regiment provided Hitler with a surrogate family, a
home and a university. In these years he learnt to love soldiering and find confir-
mation for his social-Darwinist belief in war as a necessary and indispensable
racial hygiene, as much as it was the sole and rightful means available to a
German Reich bent on achieving its rightful place in the sun. The subsequent
career of Adolf Hitler the soldier – as distinct from the career of Adolf Hitler the
criminal and sociopath is thus irrevocably intertwined with the experiences of
his years serving in the List Regiment, the kinds of battles in which it fought and,
most importantly of all, his role as a dispatch runner, battlefield guide and
observer in those battles.