Thomas Weber (3) (1974–)

Answered my questions about how those who served with him saw him. No hero, never a corporal as was later claimed, just a private who refused the responsibility of promotion because he would have to lead at the front. Most of his comrades saw him as a “rear area pig” running messages only BEHIND the lines. Interesting how many of them became victims of the Nazi rise to power, if they didn’t sanitize their memoirs of WWI and make him a mythic hero. The truth behind his Iron Cross & the Jewish officer who finally recommended him. What became of him? Turns out he immigrated and lived not far from me at the end of his life. I wish he had spoken up, written about his famous trench mate instead of blending into the background. His fate and that of many other Jews who served with Hitler are answered here.… (mer)

Thomas Weber's Hitler's First War: Adolph Hitler, the Men of the LIst Regiment, and the First World War seeks to measure the impact of the First World War on the man most responsible for starting the even more terrible Second World War. I first got interested in this book when I read a summary of Weber's findings on a blog (HNN's Clio, I think). I admit I like books that spin conventional wisdom on its head. Later I heard Marshall Poe interview Weber on his excellent "New Books in History" podcast. It sounded like good historical grunt work and a window in to the life of front line soldiers. Weber chronicles the entire regiment in order to provide context for Hitler's experience. His primary theses is that the war did not make Hitler a Nazi. There was no outstanding sense of anti-semitism or proto-fascist/authoritarian sentiment in the unit. In fact, using the area the List veterans lived in (rural Bavaria), their religion (mostly Catholic), and individual accounts they were indeed less likely to become members of the Nazi party than other Germans. There were a few notable exceptions, of course, as some of Hitler's closest comrades took advantage of his rising power.

Weber finds that Hitler's ideology at the end of the war was a fuzzy fascination with the mixture of collectivism and nationalism, but few specific ideas. He first participated in the Bavarian Soviet which quickly collapsed. After the collapse of the revolutionary left, Hitler migrated to the revolutionary right. The mixture of collectivism and nationalism provided the bridge. Mein Kampf, therefore, was an attempt to cover up this left ward experience and root his ideology closely in a national experience that fit the tenets of his new party.

Weber makes many other arguments as well. Here is a sample.

*Hitler was not a frontline runner dodging machine gun bullets, but a "rear area pig" who had a comfy billet in the regimental HQ behind the lines.
*The regiment had few volunteers, it consisted mostly of reservists and high command considered it low quality unit to be used only when no other was on hand.
*His Iron Crosses owed much to this proximity to regimental officers.
*Hitler was only mildly injured from the gas attack of 1918 and that his injuries were psychosomatic, another fact of his past that Hitler wanted to conceal.
*An oddball loner from Austria with few social skills and no leadership abilities, he was promoted only one grade during the entire war. Never a corporal, he spent the whole war a private.

From my blog: http://gregshistoryblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/private-not-corporal.html… (mer)

An interesting examination of the idea that Hitler was "made" by the First World War, which is ultimately let down by lack of material. What is reasonably clear is that Hitler, as a regimental dispatch runner, had relatively little interaction with the horrors of the front line trenches other than a 4 day "baptism of fire" at the beginning of 1 Ypres. It is possible, as Weber hypothesises, that this lack of direct experience may have led him to a rather rosy view of trench camaraderie that may well have existed in regimental HQ well behind the firing lines, but the evidence suggests did not exist in the misery of the pulverised, waterlogged, rat infested trenches. Its also clear that as a loner, Hitler certainly did value the relationships he built up with comrades at HQ , almost as an ersatz family, and romanticised that on to a wider canvas. But for most front line troops, he and his ilk were "rear area pigs".

There is also little evidence of Hitler forming any strong political views of any kind during the war - but then again there is no evidence that he didn't. We simply don't know - what we do know is that if he held strong opinions he kept them to himself. Weber is able to demonstrate that their was little anti-semiticism in Hitler's List regiment, or in the German Army generally, and that unsurprisingly most soldiers rather than being brutalised by their trench experience were happy to take the chance to fraternise with the enemy as the repeated attempts at Christmas truces would appear to show. Mostly, they just wanted to go home

But the book cannot solve the problem of what then did radicalise Hitler? In 1918 he is associated with the shortlived Bavarian Soviet wearing the red armband of the left. Something happens that turns his worldview around - but in Weber's book we don't find out what that is. This is not Mr Weber's fault - its just that the documentation doesn't exist

What we do go get is a very interesting battle by battle account of the List Regiment's World War 1 experience, and Private Hitler's general absence from the worst of it. Probably the myth that the trenches of Flanders "made" Hitler can be put to bed - but we still don't know what did make him… (mer)