Ham Paul - Young Hitler - the Making of the Fuhrer

When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just twenty-five years old. It was a time he would later call the most stupendous experience of my life.

That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world on which he opened his newly healed eyes was different and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled and the army had been resolutely humbled.

Hitler never accepted these facts. Out of his fury rose a white-hot hatred, an unquenchable thirst for revenge against the criminals who had signed the armistice, against the socialists whom he accused of stabbing the army in the back and, most violently, against the Jews a direct threat to the master race of his imagination on whose shoulders he would pile all of Germanys woes. But this was not all about the war: the seeds of that hatred lay in Hitlers youth.

By peeling back the layers of Hitlers childhood, his war record and his early political career, Paul Hams Young Hitler: The Making Of the Fhrer seeks the man behind the myth. How did the defining years of Hitlers life affect his rise to power?

More broadly, Paul Ham seeks to answer the question: was Hitler a freak accident? Or was he an extreme example of a recurring type of demagogue, who will do and say anything to seize power; who thrives on chaos; and who personifies, in his words and in his actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?

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 Gring later damned him) to Fhrer without the apocalyptic conditions created by the First World War (191418) 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.

Far less clear is how the experiences of Hitlers 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 Fhrer?

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 Hitlers Great War hasnt 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. Indeed, Hitlers 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 havent 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 un savoury details of his early life in Vienna. So extreme were the measures Hitler and the Nazi propagandists took to preserve the myth of the Fhrer, 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. 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 worlds 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

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 Peoples) 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 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 AustriaHungary, chiefly Vienna.