reading

Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Paul Ham has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

19 ‘If fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters had been held under poison gas …’

Also by Paul Ham

‘What good fortune for governments that the people do not think’

Adolf Hitler

‘Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sheer ignorance and conscientious stupidity’

Martin Luther King

PROLOGUE

A little context …

No other leader or political movement has relied so heavily on catastrophic events for their rise to power as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Hitler could not have travelled from ‘Viennese bum’ (as his once trusted colleague Hermann Göring later damned him) to ‘Führer’ without the apocalyptic conditions created by the First World War (1914–18) and its aftermath. Dismissed as a homeless crank before the war, Hitler was hailed as a messiah-like figure after it. ‘What happened under Hitler,’ writes the historian Ian Kershaw, ‘is unimaginable without the experience of the First World War and what followed it.’¹

Far less clear is how the experiences of Hitler’s youth, especially during the First World War, wrought the conqueror of Europe out of this unpromising human clay. What mysterious alignment of nature, nurture, accident and opportunity created one of the most murderous dictators of the twentieth century? What, in short, made the Führer?

Every individual is powerfully shaped by extreme experiences in their childhood and youth, and Hitler was no exception. His memory of the Western Front was a constant companion in his life, a brooding passenger on the path to power, shaping his every thought and action. And he had a formidable recollection of it. Unlike most of his fellow soldiers, who were relieved when it was over and longed to go home, Hitler thrilled to battle, refused to accept defeat and fell into the darkest slough of despond at the Armistice. The war was a red-hot brand on his personality, a scorching reverie, an unforgettable dance with death.

Yet Hitler’s Great War hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Biographers tend to consign it to the sidelines, as a rite of passage, a youthful diversion; or they describe how he performed as a soldier. Yet, as Hitler himself often stated, that war and its immediate consequences were the most formative personal experiences of his life, with an immense impact on everything that followed.² Indeed, Hitler’s ‘first war’ cries out for reassessment as the causative factor in his rise to power. But for most people, his role in it, and its aftermath, remains curiously obscure.

Nazi censors and myth-makers haven’t helped. After he was elected chancellor, Hitler went to extraordinary lengths to suppress the facts about his youth – even ordering the execution of an ‘art dealer’ who had befriended him as a young man and who threatened to reveal unsavoury details of his early life in Vienna. So extreme were the measures Hitler and the Nazi propagandists took to preserve the myth of the ‘Führer’, that they beg the question: how much were they hiding, and why?

A little context may help to set the scene for the story that follows. The world Hitler was born into, in 1889, was at the flood tide of a period of immense economic development, colonial expansion and social upheaval. The 1890s were the fag ends of the ‘Gilded Age’, and for a few people it was exceptionally gilded. In Europe, in 1890, the wealthiest decile (top tenth) owned almost 90 per cent of total wealth (and would do so up until 1914), as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown.³ Most of the rest lived in a state of grinding poverty, short life expectancy and constant anxiety.

The European powers were animated less by the social injustices at home than by the lure of the ‘New Imperialism’ abroad, chiefly the race to possess the world’s remaining resource-rich territories in Africa. The ‘Scramble for Africa’, which took place between 1870 and 1913, resulted in a virtual free-for-all as European nations raced to seize and carve up this ancient patchwork of tribal lands. As The Scramble for Africa, the classic work by Thomas Pakenham, has shown, ‘Africa was sliced up like a cake, and the pieces swallowed by five rival nations. By the end of the century the passions generated by the Scramble had helped to poison the political climate in Europe, brought Britain to the brink of war with France, and precipitated a struggle with the Boers, the costliest, longest and bloodiest war since 1815.’⁴

The Scramble left the two leading imperialists, France and Britain, feuding over the richest spoils, with Germany holding a few scraps, the dangerously embittered loser. These fresh colonial seizures would not reverse the slow decline of the chief imperial powers. The British and French were already feeling premonitions of eclipse. The German and American economies were growing at a faster rate, and would soon be strong enough to challenge the dominance of Britain and France over a world swaddled in the bright pink and blue of their colonial rule.

Workers, too, wanted a share in the wealth of the world. Rumblings from within were threatening to check the greed and power of the capital-owning classes. Throughout Europe, workers’ movements were in full-throated roar, with new socialist or ‘labour’ parties forming: the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAPD) in Germany in 1875; the Labour Party in Britain in 1900; and the Parti socialiste de France in 1902. The American Populist (or People’s) Party, an agrarian workers’ party, enjoyed its greatest success during the financial panic of the mid-1890s (before it folded into the Democrats).

In tandem, rising economic nationalism spawned a mood of aggressive patriotism and racial rivalry. Whole peoples – nations, religions, tribes – were deemed ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ according to the widely accepted theory of ‘Social Darwinism’. Put simply, this bastardized application of the science of evolution to human society decreed that the ‘fittest race’ would one day rule the earth.

As the world spilled into the twentieth century, a new social conservatism arose among European youth, characterized by a resurgent faith in God, King (or Kaiser or Tsar) and Country. Many French and German students in particular shunned the decadence of their parents’ generation and yearned for a return to the Old Certainties.⁵ Militant nationalism inflamed European prejudice against ethnic minorities. The Jews, in particular, were widely reviled and routinely persecuted. In the late nineteenth century, the Russians launched massive ‘pogroms’, or violent attacks, against Jewish communities. In response, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews fled to Western Europe, with many settling in Germany and Austria–Hungary, chiefly Vienna.

The French demonstrated a less bloody but no less pernicious brand of Jewish vilification. The Dreyfus Affair of 1894–1906, in which an innocent Jewish officer was wrongly accused of treason, split the nation and exposed the depths of French anti-Semitism.

The masses were less interested in the cruelty played out in a distant colony or the state of a persecuted minority than in the dazzling inventions of the Machine Age, which reached its height between 1890 and 1920: soaring buildings, fabulous flying machines, sparkling automobiles and weapons of unprecedented destructive power, alongside tinned soup, radioactivity, the cinematograph (forerunner of the movie projector) and the first scientific evidence that CO₂ produces global warming. The astonishing array of discoveries prefigured the way people would live for the next hundred years.

Bliss it was to be alive at the dawn of the twentieth century, for those with the power and wealth to enjoy it. And one of the brightest suns on the horizon was a young political entity, recently unified and bursting with self-confidence: ‘Deutschland’.

Hitler’s life cannot be understood without comprehending his devotion to the German state, the ‘Fatherland’ of his youthful dreams. This went beyond mere patriotism. It was a visceral longing for a future ruled by a Greater Germany, a ‘Pan-Germany’. In the years before the First World War, this seemed realizable, even inevitable, in the eyes of the few German supremacists and Prussian militarists Hitler so admired.

The historical roots of Hitler’s passion lay in the creation of Imperial Germany in 1871 – the result of the unification of twenty-six kingdoms, duchies and principalities that had dominated Central Europe since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The stern hand of Otto von Bismarck, the ‘Iron Chancellor’, moulded these constituents into a unified state, over which the Prussians and the Hohenzollern Kaisers assumed leadership after their emphatic victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

The new German Reich stood to benefit from political unity and an internal free trade zone (the Zollverein), which would spread the harvest of economic success from Prussia to Bavaria. And yet ‘race’ and ‘culture’ were equally powerful incentives towards unification. Deutschland drew on Pan-Germanism – the recognition of a shared polity, bound by a common language (92 per cent spoke German); religion (most called themselves Lutheran); and a palpable sense of national destiny, borne on a belief in the supremacy of German culture and an acute consciousness of what it meant to be ‘German’: a sensation or spirit rather than a nationality, traceable to the distant past – beyond the Holy Roman Empire to the ancient world of the Teutonic tribes and Wagnerian mythology.

Four decades (1871–1913) of awesome economic growth followed German unification, fuelled by a surging population that rose from 41 million to 68 million in that time. By 1900 Germany had outgrown Britain as the largest economy in Europe, with the second largest rail network in the world after the United States.⁶ By 1913, Germany had replaced Britain as Europe’s biggest exporter of steel. The new Germany also offered the most progressive social policies in Europe. Bismarck had introduced, in the 1880s, Europe’s first welfare system, and enacted laws that gave workers health and accident insurance, maternity benefits and a national pension scheme, well ahead of any other developed nation.⁷ From 1871 every German man was eligible to vote, a freedom not extended to all British men until 1918 (German women were granted universal suffrage in 1918, ten years ahead of British women).

In short, in contrast to what Britain, France and Russia (known as the Triple Entente) deceitfully portrayed as a menacing tyranny in the decade before the outbreak of the First World War – some historians still compare pre-1914 Germany with the Nazi regime⁸ – Germany was in fact the most liberal state in Europe, with a vibrant Social Democratic Party.

In Prussia, however, lurked the authoritarian underbelly to this state of progressive liberalism. The Prussian military class hankered to expand Germany’s borders, to secure the Reich from the threat of Russia and acquire a colonial empire in the British and French mould. In the early 1900s, their pickelhaubed commanders lacked the political clout to realize this goal. Yet the Prussians looked and sounded aggressive enough to inflame the Triple Entente’s war-mongering, which had the perverse effect of weakening Berlin’s civilian government and reinforcing the Prussian generals, hastening the march to war.

Feeling squeezed in a three-way vice by Russia, France and Britain, Germany’s military rulers drew up a fantastic plan for a ‘preventative’ war, a ‘charge out of the fortress’, to pre-empt an attack by their perceived enemies and secure the young Reich.

In July 1914, Berlin activated it. After Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg effectively ceded control of the nation to the military, the Prussian warlords manufactured a case for war out of a manageable crisis in the Balkans. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand did not, in itself, cause the First World War any more than the flutter of butterfly wings: the murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne merely provided the tinder to those in Berlin and Vienna who were already determined to start one.⁹

No group was keener on war with the Serbs than the German-speaking minority in Austria, the fiercely loyal ‘Pan-Germans’, including the Hitler family, who found themselves part of a restless minority in the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, a curious ethnic relic of the historical convulsions of the nineteenth century.

A brief summary of those upheavals will help us to understand why young Hitler, an Austrian, grew up in thrall to the German nation and felt contempt for the Austro-Hungarian regime. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna, convened to negotiate the peaceful reconstruction of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, created a loose association of thirty-nine German states, or principalities, known as the German Confederation, the majority of which would later be unified by Bismarck (see above). It was conceived as the prelude to a modern state that would replace the ailing Holy Roman Empire.

Riven by internal disputes and competing power claims, the Confederation failed to consolidate, ruptured under the democratic revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, and was eventually torn apart when its two most powerful members, Prussia and Austria, and their allies, went to war in 1866. This climax of old hostilities, traceable to the invasion of Austrian-controlled Silesia in 1740 by Prussia’s Frederick the Great, ended with Austria’s defeat.

Excluded from the new German sphere, Vienna’s ruling Habsburg dynasty scrabbled together a ‘dual monarchy’ with Hungary, under the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Meanwhile Prussia, under the firm guidance of Bismarck, confirmed its ascendancy over the German principalities and, with the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, forged ahead with the creation of the unified German state.

A pervasive feature of Bismarck’s Germany, as we have seen, was the citizens’ rich conception of themselves as ‘German’, in the sense of sharing a national – and racial – affinity. Hitler’s family, along with millions of fellow German-speaking Austrians, shared this palpable German identity, regardless of the fact that they lived in a different country. It was a near-mystical connection that transcended politics and geography.¹⁰ And yet, they were excluded from the newly formed German Reich and felt like outcasts, exiled from the land of their origins.

Of the eleven different nationalities in Austria–Hungary, the German Austrians formed the most powerful ethnic bloc, numbering 12.7 million, almost a quarter of the empire’s 52.8 million total, followed by Hungarians (20 per cent), Czechs (13 per cent) and Poles (10 per cent). The ethnic Germans would never cease to yearn for a return to the Fatherland, dreaming of the day that a Greater Germany would subsume all Austria (a dream Hitler would fulfil with the Anschluss of March 1938, when he annexed Austria to the Third Reich). The flip-side of their Germanophilia was their contempt for the multi-racial composition of the Austrian realm, chiefly its multi-tongued Parliament in Vienna – feelings the young Hitler would fully absorb.

In the 1880s and 1890s, these Pan-Germans were solidly represented in the Linz area where Hitler grew up. Indeed, the Linz Programme, a political manifesto published in 1882 and named after the capital of Upper Austria, called for the ‘Germanicization’ of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the occupation of the Slavic lands.¹¹ But it was in Vienna that, as we shall see, they found their most emphatic voice, among a group of far-right politicians, hack journalists and soap-box preachers seized by a vision of the German people rising up to take control of the senescent Habsburg Empire.

On 11 November 1918, after four years of a world war in which 37 million people were killed or wounded, Germany surrendered.

With their currency worthless, their nation humiliated, their monarchy finished and their lives touched by the death of their fathers, sons and husbands, the German people turned in despair to an unlikely ‘saviour’: an unknown Austrian war hero with unusual charisma, a voice like a bludgeon and a will of iron, whose refusal to accept the peace settlement and thunderous pledge to make Germany great again seized the imagination of a nation broken by the bloodiest conflict the world had known.

Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer is more than the story of his early years. It aims to show how his personal experiences of war wrenched an already disturbed mind in the direction of a programme of genocidal revenge. It seeks to demonstrate how the ‘Führer’ – in the sense of what Hitler would personally become – could not have been possible without his immersion in the First World War and its aftermath, experiences he would remember as the most formative of his life. In a broader sense, Young Hitler describes how the brutalized society of post-war Germany performed the role of Dr Frankenstein to any number of cranks, extremists and criminals, and gave a man like Adolf Hitler a launch pad and a breeding ground.

A word of caution: writing about this man is notoriously difficult because Hitler and the Nazis tried to erase or amend his past in order to remake his life as legend. The biographer is thus drawn into a net cast by the subject to preserve a myth. To survive entrapment we must unpick the net. Hindsight threatens to overwhelm the task, because everything written about Hitler is, consciously or not, conditioned by the fact of the Holocaust. Aspects of his early life that would humanize him – his love for his mother, his friendships with Jews in Vienna – only seem unusual or surprising in light of what followed.

Should one attempt to humanize him? Some people think it morally obscene to try to imagine Hitler as a boy, a youth, a soldier, with thoughts and feelings; for them, he will always be the monster who ordered the Holocaust (witness their reaction to the perceived ‘humanizing’ of the Führer in the film Downfall). We learn nothing from this kind of thinking. As the resurgent neo-Nazism in our own time makes painfully clear, Hitler was not unusual: his baggage of hatred weighs down many people today. His mind was an extreme manifestation of how many people thought – then and now.

To brand Hitler a monster, a psychotic killer, the incarnation of evil, and then walk away as if our job is done, suggests that he was a rare and inexplicable phenomenon, a freak of history whom we’re unlikely to meet again. No doubt he had freakish abilities: exceptional skills as a public speaker, a formidable memory and a frigid charm. The unsettling truth, however, is that Hitler was all too human: he personified the feelings of millions, and still does.

And yet, Hitler’s murderous hatred of, and determination to destroy, the Jewish people, as well as his racial theories that condemned other defenceless minorities (homosexuals, the Roma and Sinti, the mentally and physically disabled) to the death camps continue to defy conventional understanding.

Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer seeks the answers in his youth, by retracing the events that compelled him to flee his family and the country of his birth, and fling himself on to the battlefield, only to find his life’s dream in ruins on his return to war-ravaged Germany.

Note: The chapter titles that follow are Hitler’s own words, taken from Mein Kampf or his later Table Talk.

CHAPTER ONE

‘At the time I thought everything should be blown up’

On Easter Saturday, 20 April 1889, in the small Upper Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, where they lived in a rented apartment above a tavern, a child whom they named Adolf was born to Alois and Klara Hitler. The couple had already had two children, a boy, Gustav, and a girl, Ida, both of whom had died very young, bringing their parents immeasurable grief. And so, on her surviving son Klara resolved to devote all her love and maternal care.

It is impossible to imagine Hitler’s rise to power had he retained his father’s original surname of Schicklgruber. The image of hundreds of thousands of Germans raising their right arms and shouting ‘Heil Schicklgruber!’ is not only laughable, it is impossible. Such is the power of a name.

Alois was born in Döllersheim, Lower Austria, in 1837 to an unmarried farmer’s daughter called Maria (or Marie) Anna Schicklgruber; the identity of his father remains unknown. Five years after Alois’s mysterious birth, Maria Anna married a poor, fifty-year-old miller’s assistant called Johann Georg Hiedler. After her untimely death in 1847, the care of Alois was entrusted to Georg’s wealthy younger brother, a farmer in the nearby village of Spital called Johann Nepomuk, who spelled his surname Hüttler (it was commonplace at the time to find different spellings of the same family name).

In 1876, when Alois was thirty-nine, and with his family’s support, he discarded his unfortunate surname and replaced it with a variant of his foster father’s. He would henceforth be known as Alois ‘Hitler’, a name of fourteenth-century Germanic-Czech origins meaning ‘small-holder’. Alois’s decision had little to do with his career ambitions: to that point, ‘Schicklgruber’ had not hindered his progress as a respected customs official. More likely, he adopted the surname to secure his legitimacy – and thus his inheritance – and to distance himself and his family from their impoverished past. The Schicklgrubers had been poor farmers and his mother and Georg so short of money that they were forced, at times, to sleep in a cattle trough.

In early 1879 Nepomuk and three other witnesses made official the lie that Alois Hitler was the legitimate son of ‘Georg Hitler’, as inscribed in the entry in the parish registry at Döllersheim. And so the greatest impediment to Adolf’s future prospects as a politician was struck from the record and the boy’s father pronounced ‘legitimate’.

The identity of Alois’s true father (and Adolf’s paternal grandfather) remains a mystery. Some believe Alois was the product of a love affair between Maria Anna and Johann Nepomuk, who, just to complicate matters, happened to be Klara’s grandfather. If true, that would have made Hitler’s mother a blood relation to Alois, and Hitler the offspring of an incestuous relationship. Another widespread belief is that Alois’s father was an itinerant Jew who had slept with Maria Anna on his way through town. Despite there being no evidence, Hitler’s ‘Jewish grandfather’ remains a popular myth, wrongly believed to this day.

Alois Hitler, a dutiful government functionary, was among those German-speaking Austrians who tended to feel ‘more German than the Germans’ in the ethnic chaos of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its eleven nationalities, nine different languages and several religions. He was respectable, even charming, in public, but in private he turned into a humourless boor, absorbed in ruling his domestic dictatorship when he wasn’t visiting the local tavern. He was ‘an authoritarian, domineering, overbearing husband,’ writes Kershaw, ‘and a stern, distant, masterful and often irritable father.’¹ If he seems a domestic tyrant by today’s standards, however, back then he was fairly typical of his time. He was also a responsible, status-proud provider, with a passion for beekeeping.

Restless and itinerant, Alois was often on the move, changing homes and villages and dragging his family with him. In 1892, when Adolf was three years old, Alois was promoted to Higher Collector of Customs, a position of some prestige, and the family moved to Passau in Bavaria, on the German side of the border, imbuing Adolf’s speech with a German accent. In the same year, the family suffered a further tragedy: another son, Otto, was born, and died after only seven days. Klara, a devoted mother, felt the blow especially hard.

Klara Hitler (née Pölzl) was twenty-three years younger than Alois and his third wife. He had two children from his second marriage, Alois Jr and Angela, who lived with the family in the 1890s after the death of their mother. While Klara did her best to involve them, they felt excluded and neglected as young Adolf received the lion’s share of her affection. In 1943, Alois Jr’s son Patrick complained that Adolf had been ‘spoiled from early in the morning until late at night, and the stepchildren had to listen to endless stories about how wonderful Adolf was.’² Alois Jr left the family home at fourteen, and Angela married when she was twenty.

Alois and Klara had met when she worked as his housemaid. A modest village girl, she was a soft, put-upon woman, with neatly plaited brown hair, ‘beautifully expressive grey-blue eyes’,³ and a quiet, if ineffectual, persistence. She would try to defend her son from her husband’s rages, and took Adolf’s side when he disobeyed Alois’s edicts, as he would increasingly do as he grew older, provoking occasional beatings and stormy scenes. Much has been made of Hitler’s father’s violence, but there is no evidence that his beatings were any harsher than most little boys received at the time.

In this atmosphere, the mother’s protective love offered a warm and smothering refuge for her son. Hitler himself would recall, in Mein Kampf, being his ‘mother’s darling’ and living in a ‘soft downy bed’.⁴ He more than reciprocated her love, according to the family’s Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch. ‘Outwardly his love for his mother was his most striking feature,’ Dr Bloch later wrote. ‘I have never witnessed a closer attachment.’⁵ August Kubizek, the only friend of Hitler’s youth, would similarly observe: ‘Adolf really loved his mother … I remember many occasions when he showed this love for his mother, most deeply and movingly during her last illness; he never spoke of his mother but with deep affection … When we lived together in Vienna he always carried his mother’s portrait with him.’⁶

In 1894, when Adolf was five, Klara gave birth to another son, Edmund, and in 1896 to a girl, Paula. Deprived of his status as his mother’s favourite, young Adolf grew sullen and resentful. He absorbed himself in the western novels of Karl May. He adored Old Shatterhand, May’s greatest hero, and the American Indian leader Winnetou. He flung himself into games of cowboys and Indians, an activity that he kept up well into adolescence, long after his peers had turned their minds to sport or girls. Bereft of friends his own age, Adolf would recruit younger boys into his ‘tribe’ and impel them to play.

Hitler would invoke the memory of May throughout his life. The popular storyteller was a kind of mentor: ‘[W]hen faced by seemingly hopeless situations,’ Albert Speer later wrote, ‘[the adult Hitler] would still reach for these stories [because] they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.’⁷

In late 1898 the family moved into a small house next to the cemetery in the village of Leonding, just outside Linz (destined to be a Nazi shrine in years to come). One of his earliest sketches, ‘Our Bedroom’, suggests in its title that the entire family crowded into two single beds. In fact, this was Adolf and Paula’s room, where each morning he dreaded the prospect of his sister kissing him, as their mother had urged her to do. His brother, Edmund, slept with his parents. The boy died of measles in 1900, aged six, restoring Adolf’s status as his mother’s only son.

By the age of twelve Hitler had grown into an emotionally indulged, self-absorbed boy with a marked contempt for authority and the temper of a bully. One witness remembered an ‘imperious’ child, ‘quick to anger’, who ‘wouldn’t listen’ to anyone: ‘He would get the craziest notions and get away with it. If he didn’t have his way he got very angry … [H]e had no friends, took to no one and could be very heartless. He could fly into a rage over any triviality.’⁸

Hitler’s high-schooling involved two institutions, neither of which was able to help this stubbornly indolent lad who seemed determined to remain impervious to instruction. While he had done well at his Volkschule, or elementary school, in the village of Fischlham near Linz, his happy days there had ended abruptly in 1900 when his father decided to send him to the Realschule in the city, which emphasized technical subjects, rather than to the classically orientated Gymnasium, or grammar school. Here, Hitler failed to perform adequately in any discipline except drawing. Mocked as a country yokel, he neither made friends nor sought any. He dragged himself sullenly to classes. He ridiculed authority. He failed mathematics and natural history, and in 1901–2 had to repeat Year 1.

Hitler admired only one teacher, Dr Leopold Poetsch, a German who taught history and filled the boy’s head with stirring tales of Germany’s heroic past: ‘[Poetsch] penetrated through the dim mist of thousands of years,’ Hitler later wrote. ‘When we listened to him we became afire with enthusiasm and we were sometimes moved even to tears.’⁹ Hitler would later attribute his transformation into a young nationalist ‘revolutionary’ to Poetsch’s lessons, a classic example of retroactively imbuing a past relationship with fateful power. Hitler loaded up Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the then popular leader of the Pan-German movement, with similar influence over his juvenile mind. Yet Schönerer’s thundering German supremacism and anti-Semitism were in far-away Vienna.

Here in Linz, it was Hitler’s schoolboy impressionability and intimacy with Poetsch, whom he fondly recalled as a ‘gray haired, eloquent old gentleman’ and father-figure, that activated his nascent pride in a Greater Germany and seeded the idea of Jews and Slavs as not only undesirable aliens but also as inferior races. Poetsch came from the southern German-language region bordering the South Slavs, where his experience of the racial struggle ‘made him a fanatical German nationalist’, writes William Shirer.¹⁰ Certainly Hitler never forgot his favourite teacher. Many years later, on a tour of occupied Austria as Führer in 1938, he visited Poetsch in Klagenfurt and was delighted to find that his childhood mentor had been a member of the underground Nazi SS in Austria, which had been banned in the years before the country capitulated to German occupation.

At school, Hitler’s only real interest was ‘art’, not history as he later claimed, despite failing to achieve ‘Excellent’ for any of his drawings; ‘Good’ was his highest grade in the subject in four years at the Realschule. One of his surviving sketches (presumably not a piece of course work) depicts his then art teacher masturbating, an image that psycho-historians would probably do well to ignore: how many schoolboys, none of them future dictators, have similarly mocked their teachers?¹¹

Despite his inauspicious sallies with a pencil, from a young age Adolf declared that he wanted to be a ‘great artist’. Alois took it as a personal affront, dismissing his son’s dream as preposterous. Furious at the boy’s indolence, he urged Adolf to follow his example and enter the civil service, and in this dispute over his future the threads of Hitler’s tense relationship with his father snapped. ‘It was simply inconceivable to him,’ he would later say of Alois, ‘that I might reject what had become the content of his whole life … Then barely eleven years old, I was forced into opposition for the first time in my life.’ He concluded: ‘I did not want to become a civil servant.’¹²

When, aged thirteen, Hitler again informed his father of his ambitions, Alois was ‘struck speechless’: ‘Painter? Artist?’ he cried scornfully, Hitler later related. ‘He doubted my sanity, or perhaps he thought he had heard wrong or misunderstood me.’¹³ The boy’s dreams conjured everything Alois most loathed and feared: the worthless future and chronic poverty of a lazy bohemian – the very opposite of the provincial, respectable civil servant Alois had striven to be. ‘Artist, no, never as long as I live!’ Hitler would remember his father shouting. Father and son would never be reconciled on the point. ‘And thus the situation remained on both sides,’ Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. ‘My father did not depart from his “Never!” And I intensified my “Oh, yes!”’¹⁴

Adolf’s defiance was ‘a rejection of everything that his father stood for, and hence a rejection of his father himself.’¹⁵ ‘To become a painter would have been the worst possible insult to his father,’ August Kubizek, Hitler’s teenage friend, would recall.¹⁶ From that point on, the boy received a ‘sound thrashing every day’, his sister Paula would remember, though in fact the beatings were probably less frequent than that.

In trying to protect her son, Klara hoped to ‘obtain with her kindness’ what his father had failed to achieve with cruelty.¹⁷ Hitler’s childhood henceforth oscillated between feelings of deep affection for his mother and fear of, and often hatred for, his father, which helps to explain the insufferable tantrums that began around this time, recurring with terrifying intensity into adulthood.

On the morning of 3 January 1903, sixty-five-year-old Alois collapsed in his chair at his local café in Leonding and was soon pronounced dead, of internal bleeding. Hitler’s immediate reactions were grief and tears at the loss of the father he had probably feared more than hated; certainly Kubizek believed that Hitler grudgingly respected Alois and, much later, in Mein Kampf Hitler himself would write of his respect for his father. However, a measure of relief tempered the family’s mourning. They were now well cared for financially, with Klara’s widow’s pension, and freed from the stifling presence of a man who had exhausted any capacity for love his son might once have felt.

Some boys feel inspired to honour through imitation their father’s memory. Not young Hitler, who, as if in defiance of his late father, continued to fulfil his family’s low expectations of him. If he had hidden talents, as some of his teachers believed, he kept them well disguised under an affectation of careless indifference. Young Adolf was irremediably lazy when it suited him. His sliding academic performance accentuated his moroseness and strong temper, and dulled his self-esteem. In 1903–4, so bad were his Year 3 reports that he was allowed to advance to the fourth form only by leaving the Realschule in Linz and continuing his education at one of the outlying provincial schools. He was being effectively expelled. ‘For the moment only one thing was certain: my obvious lack of success at school,’ Hitler later admitted. ‘What gave me pleasure I learned, especially everything which, in my opinion, I should later need as a painter. What seemed to me unimportant … or was otherwise unattractive to me, I sabotaged completely.’¹⁸ A former teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, would remember him as stubborn, high-handed, dogmatic and hot-tempered, prone to playing pranks on other boys.¹⁹

At his new school in Steyr, near Linz, his grades plummeted further, perhaps partly a result of his leaving home for the first time to lodge with a foster family. He missed his mother’s quiet affection, and later admitted that he felt acute homesickness: ‘… he had been filled with yearning and resentment when his mother sent him to Steyr,’ Dr Josef Goebbels would later note.²⁰ In 1904–5 he failed German language and mathematics, subjects that were critical to his advancement.

This time, he avoided the humiliation of the school rejecting him by deciding to abandon formal education altogether. In the summer of 1905, at the age of sixteen, he dropped out. On his last day at Steyr, Hitler went out to celebrate, apparently alone. He later claimed to have lost his final school report, telling his mother that it had blown out of the window of his train. In fact, the school director later discovered it, soiled and crumpled: young Adolf had used his report as toilet paper.

Hitler left the Realschule feeling nothing but hatred for the school, his schoolmates and his teachers. They were to blame for his failure, not him. His loathing of authority also embraced the Catholic Church in which he was raised, probably the result of the fury he felt towards a school priest who had offended him. Of Hitler’s confirmation in Linz Cathedral in 1904, his godfather, Johann Prinz, would recall the most ‘gruff and obstinate’ of boys: ‘I had the impression that he found the whole confirmation disgusting.’²¹ In 1942 Hitler reflected on his adolescence: ‘At thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, I no longer believed in anything, certainly none of my friends believed in the so-called communion … [A]t the time I thought everything should be blown up.’²²

Whence arose his juvenile rage at the world? Hitler had not had a ‘difficult childhood’. He was not born into poverty, or a loveless or broken family. The answer has eluded the powers of psychiatrists. ‘For all we know,’ Volker Ullrich, Hitler’s most recent biographer, concludes, ‘Hitler seems to have had a fairly normal childhood … [T]here are no obvious indications of an abnormal personality development to which Hitler’s later crimes may be attributed. If Hitler had a problem it was an over-abundance rather than a paucity of motherly love.’²³

Hitler justified the decision to end his education by claiming he was sick. He persuaded his mother to hope that, as the only ‘man’ in the family, he would be able to help her around the house. Klara relented, but in both respects he deceived her: he was not ill enough to terminate his education; and in the ensuing two years he would prove a useless ‘man about the house’, given to loafing, drawing, long walks and little housework. Household tasks he thought beneath the dignity of the radical bohemian he aspired to be, and he simply refused to do any.

At this time, the Hitlers were living in a small apartment on the third floor of a tenement building at Humboldtstrasse 31 in Linz. To augment her pension, Klara let out the main bedroom to lodgers, so she and Paula slept in the living room while Adolf occupied the spare room (or closet). His late father’s grim portrait stared down from the walls and several of Alois’s pipes were carefully laid out on the shelves. The ghost of the petty tyrant lived on, distilling a drip of defiance in the mind of his son. Hitler continued to pursue a ‘life of leisure’, as he called it, with painting, writing and reading – chiefly stories from German mythology about the heroic feats of Teutonic tribes – and affecting a dandyish indifference to his future prospects.

Everyone who knew him at the time would recall how the sixteen-year-old threw himself at drawing, usually buildings, museums or bridges, with a manic fervour, late into the night, to the exclusion of any other person or concern. During these creative bursts, Hitler would retreat into a fantasy in which he would redesign Linz and fashion new cities, imagining himself a genius with the power to change the world (thirty-five years later, he would in fact order a new bridge over the Danube based on his youthful designs).²⁴ The slightest knock to this dream-made-real threw him into fits of rage and despair, such as when he failed to win a lottery in which he had convinced himself he was destined to triumph. His winnings were supposed to finance his design of a grand house on the Danube. In Hitler’s mind, bad luck had nothing to do with it. Dark forces were to blame. He denounced the lottery organizers and the government, whom he accused of rigging the outcome against him.²⁵ He raged at the credulity of the poor lottery players, doomed forever to lose their savings. Everyone was to blame for Hitler’s failure to win the jackpot except the angry adolescent whose numbers had not come up.

CHAPTER TWO

‘At home I do not remember having heard the word Jew’

In 1904, behind the colonnades inside the Linz opera house, from where it was possible to watch the performance with a cheap ‘standing-room’ ticket, Hitler, then aged fifteen and still at the Realschule in Steyr, first met August Kubizek (‘Gustl’), who was nine months older and destined to become his only boyhood friend. Gustl was a shy, thoughtful young man and a talented musician. His first impression of Adolf was of ‘a remarkably pale, skinny youth … who was following the performance with glistening eyes. I surmised that he came from a better-class home, for he was always dressed with meticulous care and was very reserved.’¹

Thus began their odd friendship, as described in Kubizek’s 1951 recollections The Young Hitler I Knew, an authentic memoir of Hitler’s boyhood.² No doubt it contains errors of emphasis and fact, skewed by distance and hindsight, yet it accurately portrays this strangely lopsided relationship, in which Hitler always ran the show, berating Gustl for his lack of punctuality, shouting down his friend’s conventional middle-class ideas, and generally dominating the quiet and inoffensive music-lover, who patiently acceded to the will of his overbearing companion.

The relationship worked because each young man found his role and stuck to it: Hitler the braggart and poseur; Kubizek the self-effacing acolyte and patient listener. Gustl’s passivity and wry sense of humour proved perfect foils to Hitler’s bossiness, self-importance and aggression. They performed a sort of double act. And while Hitler’s braggadocio compensated for his academic inadequacy, Kubizek’s quiet confidence reflected a genuine ability; when they met he was working in his father’s upholstery business and studying music, and he would later become an accomplished musician and minor conductor.

Kubizek saw Hitler as a curiosity, a character to be studied, as well as a friend; Hitler revelled in Kubizek’s deference and admiration. Neither youth showed much interest in girls, though Hitler’s swagger seems to have drawn the eyes of some of the opera-going ladies. Their relationship was not homosexual, as has been suggested. They shared a love of opera, chiefly the works of Richard Wagner, and regularly attended performances.

At the time, Hitler was of average height, skinny, with sunken cheeks. He already wore his black hair straight down over his forehead. He dressed in the pointedly bohemian style his father would have loathed: a broad-brimmed hat, black kid gloves, white shirts and black, silk-lined overcoats. He neither played nor took any interest in sport (though he occasionally skied). He roamed the streets of Linz dreaming of how he would rebuild the city.

Those who met him often remarked on Hitler’s extraordinary eyes. They were ‘shining’, ‘blank’ and ‘cruel’, Kubizek’s mother would recall.³ ‘Never in my life,’ Kubizek wrote, ‘have I seen any other person whose appearance was so completely dominated by the eyes … In fact, Adolf spoke with his eyes, and even when his lips were silent one knew what he wanted to say.’⁴ Sharp and defiant, Hitler’s eyes outshone his unappealing facial features – a thin-lipped mouth, straight nose with fleshy nostrils, and faint suggestions of facial hair (his toothbrush moustache would not appear until after the war).

Communication between Hitler and Kubizek was entirely one-sided. Hitler showed little interest in anyone but himself and his own ambitions, and furiously attacked those who, he believed, failed to understand him or obstructed his plans. In fact, he had an audience ⁵

YOUNG HITLER

The Making of the Führer

Paul Ham