Hitler

was to him and how glad it was to see him when he returned from duty. He was distraught late in the war when his unit had to move on and Foxl could not be found. ‘The swine who took him from me doesn’t know what he did to me,’ was his comment many years later. He felt as strongly about none of the thousands of humans he saw slaughtered about him.
    About the war itself, Hitler was utterly fanatical. No humanitarian feelings could be allowed to interfere with the ruthless prosecution of German interests. He vehemently disapproved of the spontaneous gestures of friendship at Christmas 1914, when German and British troops met in no man’s land, shaking hands and singing carols together. ‘There should be no question of something like that during war,’ he protested. His comrades knew that they could always provoke Hitler with defeatist comments, real or contrived. All they had to do was to claim the war would be lost and Hitler would go off at the deep end. ‘For us the war can’t be lost’ were invariably his last words. The lengthy letter he sent on 5 February 1915 to his Munich acquaintance, Assessor Ernst Hepp, concluded with an insight into his view of the war redolent of the prejudices that had been consuming him since his Vienna days:
    Each of us has only one wish, that it may soon come to the final reckoning with the gang, to the showdown, cost what it will, and that those of us who have the fortune to see their homeland again will find it purer and cleansed of alien influence (
Fremdländerei
), that through the sacrifices and suffering that so many hundred thousand of us make daily, that through the stream of blood that flows here day for day against an international world of enemies, not only will Germany’s external enemies be smashed, but that our inner internationalism will also be broken. That would be worth more to me than all territorial gains.
    This was how he saw the colossal slaughter; not in terms of human suffering, but as worthwhile for the making of a better, racially cleansed, Germany. Hitler evidently carried such deep-seated sentiments throughout the war. But this political outburst, tagged on to a long descriptionof military events and wartime conditions, was unusual. He appears to have spoken little to his comrades on political matters. Perhaps the fact that his comrades thought him peculiar hindered him from giving voice to his strong opinions. He appears, too, to have scarcely mentioned the Jews. Several former comrades claimed after 1945 that Hitler had at most made a few off-hand though commonplace comments about the Jews in those years, but that they had no inkling then of the unbounded hatred that was so visible after 1918. Balthasar Brandmayer recalled on the other hand in his reminiscences, first published in 1932, that during the war he had ‘often not understood Adolf Hitler when he called the Jew the wire-puller behind all misfortune’. According to Brandmayer, Hitler became more politically involved in the latter years of the war and made no secret of his feelings on what he saw as the Social Democrat instigators of growing unrest in Germany. Such comments, like all sources that postdate Hitler’s rise to prominence and, as in this case, glorify the prescience of the future leader, have to be treated with caution. But it is difficult to dismiss them out of hand. It indeed does seem very likely, as his own account in
Mein Kampf
claims, that Hitler’s political prejudices sharpened in the latter part of the war, during and after his first period of leave in Germany in 1916.
    Between March 1915 and September 1916, the List Regiment fought in the trenches near Fromelles, defending a two-kilometre stretch of the stalemated front. Heavy battles with the British were fought in May 1915 and July 1916, but in one and a half years, the front barely moved a few metres. On 27 September 1916, two months after heavy fighting in the second battle of Fromelles, when a British offensive was staved off with difficulty, the regiment moved southwards and by 2 October was engaged on the Somme. Within days, Hitler was wounded in the left thigh when a shell exploded in the dispatch runners’ dug-out, killing and wounding several of them. After treatment in a field hospital, he spent almost two months, from 9 October until 1 December 1916, in the Red Cross hospital at Beelitz, near Berlin. He had not been in Germany for two years. He soon noticed how different the mood was from the