Young Hitler, page 14
By the time Hitler’s unit arrived in the battle area, around 25 July, Haig’s bombardment was well into its final, crushing phase. A hail of shellfire, ‘far worse than anything we had experienced on the Somme’, fell on the German lines, recalled Sergeant Wellhausen. ‘Shells, shrapnel balls and their pots rained down around our heads.’6 The ‘softening up’ ranged across the German positions, shattering, cutting down, fragmenting every obstacle, village, house, tree, human, animal caught within 2,000–3,000 yards of the British front. Blankets of British gas interspersed the hail of explosives, smothering the German soldiers’ movements and stifling the delivery of relief, rations and ammunition in lethal white and yellow vapour.
The air war roared to life during gaps in the shell and gas storm. Dozens of low-flying British aircraft ‘circled our positions’, recalled Fusilier Guard Häbel:
Wherever an individual was seen, British airmen were on hand to direct the fire of their guns onto him. A sentry stood stock still, hidden by a groundsheet so that he could not be seen from the air in front of each dugout. Every few moments someone called to him to see if he was still alive … The British were trying to extinguish all signs of life.7
The Germans had too few guns to sustain a counter-bombardment. Instead, they directed harassing fire at British troop concentrations: bridges, supply sections, railway lines, billets and munitions depots, unleashing 533,000 rounds during the week beginning 13 July and 870,000 the following week. British firepower was about four times that.8 The German gunners depended heavily on mustard gas, which brought them some ‘relief’: between 12 and 27 July, the British lost 13,284 dead, wounded and missing to enemy gas, artillery and aircraft attack.9
On the eve of zero hour – when the infantry would go over the top – the bombardment rose to a shrieking, crashing, whizzing pitch. Incendiary grenades, gas, smoke projectiles, heavy mortars, heavy explosives and shrapnel were flung at the German lines in what survivors would recall as ‘a hurricane from hell’.10 It was ‘beyond anyone’s experience’, witnessed General Hermann von Kuhl:
The entire earth of Flanders rocked and seemed to be on fire. It was not just drumfire; it was as though Hell itself had slipped its bonds. What were the terrors of Verdun and the Somme compared to this grotesquely huge outpouring of raw power? The violent thunder of battle could be heard in the furthest corner of Belgium. It was as though the enemy was announcing to the world: Here we come and we are going to prevail!11
The British ground attack started hopefully, on 31 July 1917. Haig’s gunners had perfected the creeping barrage, in which thousands of heavy guns fired at once, sweeping the enemy lines with a slowly advancing wall of exploding shells. Clutching the inside arc of this diabolical configuration, tens of thousands of Allied troops swarmed across the field, a technique the Canadians had used to devastating effect during the capture of Vimy Ridge.
On the first day, it started to rain, and the rain kept falling for much of the next two and a half months, in torrential sheets, interrupted by a couple of dry weeks in late September. The heaviest deluge in seventy years reduced the battlefield to a stinking quagmire, in which liquid mud filled the shell craters, creating death traps. The rain turned the battle in Germany’s favour: their lines, entrenched along the ridges and huddled inside concrete pillboxes, were free to fire down on an army literally bogged in the mud, helpless without well-grounded artillery.
What followed really went beyond anything hitherto understood as a ‘battle’. Harrowing scenes ensued, of men and horses drowning in mud-filled shell craters; of thousands being mown down by German machine guns; of Haig’s armies literally shot to a standstill beneath the ridges east of Ypres. It went on and on, for three months. Haig sent wave after wave of young lives into the meat-grinder, to certain death or mutilation, in the name of his attritional strategy of ‘wearing down’ the enemy.
October was the cruellest month. Haig’s decision not to give the Anzacs the time they needed to bring up their artillery enabled nests of German machine guns to mow down thousands of Australian and New Zealand troops in a sea of mud and wire, many blown apart, shot up several times, on a bloody, swamp-like field that was later found to contain a body or body part every square yard.12
On 10 November a few surviving Canadians staggered in to claim Passchendaele Ridge, at the cost of almost half a million men – Allied and German – killed, wounded and missing. The ridge held no strategic value in its own right, and a small British force held the village for a few weeks before it fell back into German hands.
In the end, the 1917 Flanders offensive would be remembered as the densest killing field in history, pitching 77–83 German divisions against 50 Commonwealth and six French divisions. In almost four months of carnage, Haig had gained 5 miles (8 km) of front and a strategically worthless ridge, infuriating Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who had sworn at the end of 1916 that there would be no more Sommes.
Estimates of total casualties vary, but the most accurate tallies 271,000 Allied losses (killed and wounded) against 217,000 German.13 The Germans’ defensive strength thus halted the Flanders offensive, forcing an end to Haig’s campaign by utterly exhausting his men. They won the war of attrition at Third Ypres, as measured by body count – the capacity to bleed the enemy and crush his morale – the very criteria with which Haig would later try to justify four years of carnage as though it had all been pre-planned.14
The List Regiment experienced only the opening blows of Passchendaele. Yet they saw the results. The terrific British cannon barrage preceded their first engagement, followed by the deeply demoralizing appearance of British tanks – the first time Hitler and his fellows had witnessed these primitive monsters in battle. ‘Tank fright’ seems likely to have caused, in part, the complete collapse of his regiment at Passchendaele.15
Hitler’s rear position at regimental HQ had no direct exposure to these fat, misshapen vehicles, with their huge tracks, but the sight left an imprint on him. In 1941 he would remark that ‘only the heaviest and most thickly armoured tanks had any value’, and on other occasions he bemoaned the lack of German tanks at Flanders in 1917, a shortage that would continue into the following year: ‘If we’d had 400 tanks in the summer of 1918 we’d have won the war,’ he remarked – a rare admission that Germany had been defeated on the battlefield.16
The Listers were relieved in early August; further participation in Passchendaele would surely have annihilated them. Despite these trials, the regiment’s casualties were relatively light. In the whole of 1917 they lost 478 men dead, or 13.6 per cent of their total number; between 13 and 23 July, they sustained 800 casualties, killed, wounded or captured, according to Tubeuf. Of the 3,754 Listers who lost their lives over four years of war, most were killed in the few weeks at First Ypres in 1914 and on the Somme in 1916 – bombed, gassed and cut down without even setting eyes on an Englishman.
From Passchendaele, Hitler’s regiment was relegated to the inactive sector of German Alsace, in the company of enfeebled reserve units deemed unfit for combat, where they would recuperate until September 1917. For Hitler, it was a humiliation; for his comrades, a relief. He was also depressed at the loss of Foxl, his pet dog, which had miraculously survived the Somme and Flanders battles and then gone missing. ‘The swine who took him from me doesn’t know what he did to me,’ Hitler would say during his ‘Table Talks’ in January 1941.17
In late September 1917 Hitler went on voluntary leave, together with a fellow soldier, Ernst Schmidt. It was the first time in the war that he had applied for a period of rest. The pair visited Brussels, Cologne, Dresden and Leipzig, Hitler pointedly refusing to return to Munich, before he travelled on alone to Berlin, where he stayed until 17 October. For the second time in the war, he found himself wandering the German capital, by now a city in the throes of absolute despair. The grief and hunger on the faces in the Tiergarten, the barefoot children on the streets and the sullen mood in the beer halls revealed the utter breakdown in civilian morale during this, the fag end of the German Empire.
By now, the British blockade had reduced Germany, the economic locomotive of Europe four years earlier, into a beggar nation. Her foreign trade had collapsed, from US$5.9 billion in 1913 to US$800 million in 1917.18 The Treasury was technically bankrupt: tax receipts barely covered the interest on the soaring debt. By the end of 1917, the worst year, the cost of the war topped 52 billion marks, while tax and other receipts were a mere 7.8 billion, creating a deficit of about 44 billion marks.19
The Germans could not rely on their main ally, Austria–Hungary: the Dual Monarchy had made no provision for a long, protracted war, and by the autumn of 1917 was on its knees. Supplies of butter, fat, flour, potatoes and grains were exhausted or very low. The available potatoes were ‘not fit for human consumption’.20 As in Germany and Russia, inflation skyrocketed, accompanied by food riots and destitution. On a typical day in Vienna, according to police, 250,000 hungry people could be seen forming some 800 queues outside the food markets and 54,000 people visited the soup kitchens.21 Members of the bourgeoisie (such as Sigmund Freud) were reduced to buying their cigars and liquor on the black market at huge prices.
From both Vienna and Berlin, many residents flocked to the countryside on so-called ‘hamster tours’ to steal extra food, provoking a police crackdown. In the face of such shortages, Berlin and other German cities appropriated food and resources from the occupied territories: Romania supplied oil; Serbia cattle, sheep and hogs; Poland grain, potatoes, coal, eggs, horses and wood; and Albania some 50,000 turtles – the bulk of which found their way to the black market or on to the tables of the rich.
By the end of Third Ypres, most surviving German and Austrian civilians were living below the subsistence level and suffering acute hunger or severe illnesses related to malnutrition. Hoarding and ransacking of the rural food supplies were commonplace. German housewives engaged in ferocious rows in queues and often ‘brutally snatched’ potatoes and fruits from farmers’ stalls. Mothers lashed out at an obvious target, the owners of expensive, well-stocked Berlin department stores, many of whom were wealthy Jews. Such German women ‘of little means’ were indeed ‘a potential time bomb’ for the Prussian authorities.22
Thousands were dying. After the war, British and German official figures estimated the number of German civilian deaths resulting from the Hunger Blockade (and associated diseases) to have been at least 424,000 and possibly as many as 762,796.23 These figures exclude a further 150,000 German victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which ‘caused disproportionate suffering among those already weakened by malnutrition and related disease’. By the war’s end, the loss of one million foetuses would also be directly attributable to medical conditions resulting from or exacerbated by the British blockade, making it one of the first war atrocities of the twentieth century.24
With their sons and husbands dead, wounded or fighting, and their children malnourished and sick, millions of Germans at home were ripe for exploitation by extremists and demagogues. And yet, had they met him then, none would have seen their saviour in the skinny, sick Austrian soldier who passed through Berlin with eyes of scorn for the pathos of the home front, all the while brooding on who should be held responsible.
As before, Hitler looked on this suffering without a shred of compassion. To the twenty-eight-year-old soldier, the complaints of German civilians revealed a weak and coddled people, unable to endure what the troops were going through every day. The distress of others simply failed to move him. He was bereft of any capacity for ordinary empathy. His views were hardening, meshing with the strands of Social Darwinism to which he’d been exposed in Vienna: his fellow human beings were either weak, and as such dispensable; or strong, and therefore exploitable.
And he was enjoying himself, as much as he might, taking himself off to the museums and galleries, riding on the yellow street cars on Unter den Linden, and sending postcards to friends. We know of three to Max Amann, his staff sergeant, and one to Schmidt, in which his tone is upbeat and happy like a tourist on holiday. ‘The city is magnificent, a real metropolis,’ he told Schmidt. ‘The traffic is tremendous, even now. I am out and about almost the whole day. At last I have the chance of getting to know the museums a bit better. In brief: I am short of nothing.’25
On his return from leave, in late October, Hitler rejoined his regiment in Picardy, where they returned to brief active duty in the Aisne Valley, soon to be another scene of senseless carnage. The war had come full circle. Back in September 1914, the Germans had dug their first trench lines here, on the north bank of the River Aisne. Now the haggard List Regiment stood guard over the Oise–Aisne Canal, where they would spend a quiet Christmas in readiness for 1918.
While Hitler’s unit were rested, and enjoying slightly better morale, the same could not be said for the reinforcements arriving from the Eastern Front, whose spirits were so bad High Command took note. ‘Out of two train loads of Prussian replacement troops from the east,’ Crown Prince Rupprecht noted in his diary on 3 November 1917, ‘ten per cent went absent without leave during the journey.’26 Many of the arrivals would join Hitler’s division, disgruntled older men with little or no battle experience; others were bitter relics of the freezing Eastern Front, relieved to be heading west. All had heard horror stories of the Somme and Flanders, and many believed they were travelling towards certain death or severe wounding. It is understandable that they grabbed a last snatch of life while they felt they had the chance.
Trainload after trainload of such troops whistled and jeered when they arrived at Valenciennes, near the French border with Belgium. A sense of local mutiny was in the air, but no sign, yet, of a complete collapse in morale and mass desertion on the Russian or French scale. Towards the end of November 1917 most of the German Army was ordered to rest and recuperate, to prepare for the first massed German attack in three years, Ludendorff’s Spring Offensive, set to begin in March 1918.
By early 1918, more than a million German troops had made the journey from the Eastern theatre to the Western Front, to join the fresh offensive planned by Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. Their sheer numbers boosted waning spirits: here, at last, was the German Army in full, massed in one place for the final onslaught. The two commanders were determined to inflict a final, crushing blow on the Allies, which they hoped would win the war. For the bullet-headed Ludendorff, this had become a question of national (and personal) pride: had millions of German men died for nothing? Would there be nothing to show for so complete a sacrifice?
Heroes of the Eastern Front, neither Hindenburg nor Ludendorff had adequately taken into account Allied superiority in the West – in aircraft, tanks and, with the imminent arrival of the Americans and recovery of the French, a seemingly unlimited reserve of fresh, better-supplied men. Despite these weaknesses, the German commanders saw the chance of a breakthrough, between the demoralization of the British and Dominion forces after Passchendaele and the expected arrival of French and American reinforcements in early summer 1918. It was a window, no more, but a window through which the German commanders hoped to hurl their entire force and crush their enemies. Mars had aligned in Berlin’s favour in early 1918, or so it seemed, encouraging Ludendorff to stake all on a massive counter-blow that would grind Haig’s men to dust before the Americans and French could tip the scales.
And so, at a meeting on 11 November 1917, the day after the end of Third Ypres, Ludendorff, Hindenburg and their generals had begun planning the first major German offensive since 1915. The Spring Offensive – dubbed the Kaiserschlacht, or Emperor’s Battle – promised to throw every last man into the mouth of the war. It was scheduled to start in March 1918, by which time Germany would have amassed 192 divisions on the Western Front, opposing 156 Allied divisions. For the first time since October 1914, the Allies would be forced to fight a defensive battle, with far fewer men and guns than Germany – a complete reversal of the situation at the start of 1917.
When Hitler got wind of the plan, in the obscurity of his regimental headquarters, hopes of a German victory spread through him like an intoxicating drug. He was exhilarated, he later wrote. He would bracket his war experience – from his involvement in the first offensives of 1914 to the last in 1918 – as ‘the most tremendous impressions of my life’, amongst which the launch of Ludendorff’s final blow was the most enthralling. For the first time in three years, his beloved German Army was on the offensive, poised to fling everything at the Western Front. Hitler later described a mood of joyful, Heaven-sent deliverance:
A sigh of relief passed through the trenches and the dugouts of the German army when at length, after more than three years’ endurance in the enemy hell, the day of retribution came. Once again the victorious battalions cheered and hung the last wreaths of immortal laurel on their banners … Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the endless mortal columns, and for the last time the Lord’s grace smiled on His ungrateful children.27
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘Since the day I stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept’
On 21 March, in the opening phase of the Spring Offensive, Operation Michael, Ludendorff’s mighty arsenal rolled across France in a spectacular reprise of August 1914. The Allied gains of the past two years, on the Somme and at Arras, yielded to the German juggernaut as, initially, the Germans drove the Allies deep into French territory, regaining positions they had not seen since 1914.
