Уильямс Джон. Ефрейтор Гитлер и Великая война 1914-1918

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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

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

940.4′13433′092—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

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

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

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

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

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.