Hitler

Feldherrnhalle demonstration, Hitler submitted a personal petition to King Ludwig III of Bavaria to serve as an Austrian in the Bavarian army. The granting of his request by the cabinet office, he went on, arrived, to his unbounded joy, the very next day. Though this version has been accepted in most accounts, it is scarcely credible. In the confusion of those days, it would have required truly remarkable bureaucratic efficiency for Hitler’s request to have been approved overnight. In any case, not the cabinet office but the warministry was alone empowered to accept foreigners (including Austrians) as volunteers. In reality, Hitler owed his service in the Bavarian army not to bureaucratic efficiency, but to bureaucratic oversight. Detailed inquiries carried out by the Bavarian authorities in 1924 were unable to clarify precisely how, instead of being returned to Austria in August 1914 as should have happened, he came to serve in the Bavarian army. It was presumed that he was among the flood of volunteers who rushed to their nearest place of recruitment in the first days of August, leading, the report added, to not unnatural inconsistencies and breaches of the strict letter of the law. ‘In all probability,’ commented the report, ‘the question of Hitler’s nationality was never even raised.’ Hitler, it was concluded, almost certainly entered the Bavarian army by error.
    Probably, as Hitler wrote in a brief autobiographical sketch in 1921, he volunteered on 5 August 1914 for service in the First Bavarian Infantry Regiment. Like many others in these first chaotic days, he was initially sent away again since there was no immediate use for him. On 16 August he was summoned to report at Recruiting Depot VI in Munich for kitting out by the Second Reserve Battalion of the Second Infantry Regiment. By the beginning of September he had been assigned to the newly formed Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 (known from the name of its first commander as the ‘List Regiment’), largely comprising raw recruits. After a few weeks of hurried training, they were ready for the front. In the early hours of 21 October, the troop train carrying Hitler left for the battlefields of Flanders.
    On 29 October, within six days of arriving in Lille, Hitler’s battalion had its baptism of fire on the Menin Road near Ypres. In letters from the front to Joseph Popp and to a Munich acquaintance, Ernst Hepp, Hitler wrote that after four days of fighting, the List Regiment’s fighting force had been reduced from 3,600 to 611 men. The initial losses were indeed a staggering 70 per cent. Hitler’s initial idealism, he said later, gave way on seeing the thousands killed and injured, to the realization ‘that life is a constant horrible struggle’. From now on, death was a daily companion. It immunized him completely against any sensitivity to human suffering. Even more than in the Viennese doss-house, he closed his eyes to sorrow and pity. Struggle, survival, victory: these were all that counted.
    On 3 November 1914 (with effect from 1 November), Hitler was promoted to corporal. It was his last promotion of the war, though hecould certainly have been expected to advance further, as least as far as non-commissioned officer (
Unteroffizier
). Later in the war, he was in fact nominated for promotion by Max Amann, then a staff sergeant, subsequently Hitler’s press baron, and the regimental staff considered making him
Unteroffizier
. Fritz Wiedemann, the regimental adjutant who in the 1930s became for a time one of the Führer’s adjutants, testified after the end of the Third Reich that Hitler’s superiors had thought him lacking in leadership qualities. However, both Amann and Wiedemann made clear that Hitler, probably because he would have been then transferred from the regimental staff, actually refused to be considered for promotion.
    Hitler had been assigned on 9 November to the regimental staff as an orderly – one of a group of eight to ten dispatch runners, whose task was to carry orders, on foot or sometimes by bicycle, from the regimental command post to the battalion and company leaders at the front, three kilometres away. Strikingly, in his
Mein Kampf
account, Hitler omitted to mention that he was a dispatch runner, implying that he actually spent the war in the trenches. But the attempts of his political enemies in the early 1930s to belittle the dangers involved in the duties of the dispatch runner and decry Hitler’s