By late 1923, hyperinflation was in full swing. To explain simply, hyperinflation was caused when Germany continued to fail to make war payments, leading to the French occupied the heavily industrialised Ruhr province, where much of the industry of the Weimar Republic was, and decided to reclaim payments through more materials. In order to pay them back as soon as possible, the government began printing more money. This led to more cash in people’s pockets, so business owners increased the prices of their products. When the government noticed this, they began to print more money, which led to people having more money, which led to prices increasing, which ultimately led to people hauling around wheelbarrows full of money in order to buy a loaf of bread. And, as I’m sure you’re aware, the more of something you have, the less valuable it becomes. By the end of 1923, 1 US Dollar was worth 4.23 trillion marks.
Many who had savings found them to be worthless and were thus left destitute and penniless, despising the political establishment as it was. Unemployment was through the roof and many Germans began to turn to extreme alternatives to the established government. High ranking members of the Bavarian government organised a meeting at the Bürgerbräu Keller, a beer hall in Munich, to discuss the establishment of an authoritarian regime in Bavaria, that would not adhere to the rules of other Weimar German States, despising the central government’s passive action against the French Occupation of the Ruhr. Hitler, fearing that the Minister-President of Bavaria, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, would pose a threat to his nationalist revolution, he decided to act.
A photo of Hitler in 1923
At around 8:30 in the evening of November 8th, 1923, where Bavarian officials, including von Kahr as well as General Otto von Lossow and Chief of Bavarian Police Hans Ritter von Seisser, were having their meeting, Hitler stormed into the beer hall with his personal body guard, firing his pistol into the air. “National revolution is underway!” he cried. He then proceeded to state that the Bavarian government had been deposed and that it was now simply a matter of the central government, which was a massive lie. Hitler’s plan was to mimic Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, taking Berlin by force.
He organised Kahr, Lossow and Seisser into a backroom and forced them to cooperate at gun point. Meanwhile, the SA was tasked with securing communications lines and seizing local government authorities. However, this is when things began to go down hill very quickly. The SA only managed to seize a handful of government buildings. In addition, Hitler left the trio in the hands of Erich Ludendorff, a former World War 1 General and fervent German Nationalist, who let them go, under the pretense that they would go and assist in the revolution. They did not, instead ordering the military and police to suppress the Nazis.
Bavarian Police in Weimar Germany
Agitated, Hitler paced around the beer hall for hours, thinking on what to do next now that his three points of leverage had gone, enabling the military and police to set up blockades around the city. Eventually, Hitler rallied some 2,000 men to march on the Feldherrnhalle, a Bavarian Army war memorial from the 19th Century. After marching for some distance, the group encountered an armed police presence. After pausing for a moment, they continued to march, and the police opened fire.
With over a dozen Nazis dead and four police officers killed in a shootout, Hitler had fled and went into hiding. He was eventually captured two days later and put on trial for high treason in February 1924. High treason carried a sentence of life imprisonment. Despite the multiple other crimes perpetrated during the putsch, such as the murder of the police officers and the assault of Jewish citizens of Munich, Hitler, as well as other Nazis were only tried for treason. The right leaning judge, Georg Niendhart was incredibly lenient on Hitler.
The defendants at the trial (L-R: Heinz Pernet, Friedrich Weber, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann Kriebel, Erich Ludendorff, Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Brückner, Ernst Röhm & Adolf Wagner)
Whilst the Bavarian government wanted to keep the trial on the down low as much as possible, Hitler wanted to make a scene, often erupting into fiery speeches, interrupting court procedure and telling his entire life story, interjections that the judge actively enabled. Because of this, Hitler’s public profile grew over the course of the trial. Whilst he was found guilty, Niendhart only sentenced him to 5 years at Landsberg Prison, of which he only served nine months. His cell was incredibly luxurious and he was treated incredibly well, often having meetings with party members.
Hitler and other party members, including Rudolf Hess, meeting at Landsberg Prison
He also began to work on Mein Kampf, his autobiography and political manifesto. Much of the book contained antisemitic and racist talking points.
Races which are culturally superior but less ruthless would be forced to restrict their increase, because of insufficient territory to support the population, while less civilized races could increase indefinitely, owing to the vast territories at their disposal. In other words: should that state of affairs continue, then the world will one day be possessed by that portion of mankind which is culturally inferior but more active and energetic. A time will come, even though in the distant future, when there can be only two alternatives: Either the world will be ruled according to our modern concept of democracy, and then every decision will be in favour of the numerically stronger races; or the world will be governed by the law of natural distribution of power, and then those nations will be victorious who are of more brutal will and are not the nations who have practised self-denial.
Hitler’s writings in Mein Kampf
Eventually, Hitler was released from prison. It was then that he realised that the Nazis could not take over a nation by force. In order to create a “racial state” he could not do it from the outside in but from the inside out.
Unlike most other soldiers that returned to civilian life, Hitler elected to remain a part of the military, eventually being recruited to the Information Office under Captain Karl Mayr. He excelled in this line of work, and impressed Mayr with his oration skills, to such a point where Mayr asked him to respond to a letter from a soldier about the Jewish Question. This became one of Hitler’s first, and most notable, antisemitic writings.
[T]he Jews are unquestionably a race, not a religious community. And the Jew himself never describes himself as a Jewish German, a Jewish Pole or a Jewish American, but always as a German, Polish or American Jew. Never has the Jew absorbed more from the alien people in whose midst he lives than their language. […] There is hardly a race in the world whose members all belong to a single religion. Through inbreeding for thousands of years, often in very small circles, the Jew has been able to preserve his race and his racial characteristics much more successfully than most of the numerous people among whom he lives. As a result we have living in our midst a non-German, alien race, unwilling and indeed unable to shed its racial characteristics, its particular feelings, thoughts and ambitions, and nevertheless enjoying the same political rights as we ourselves do. [A Jews] activities produce a racial tuberculosis among nations. And this has the following result: Antisemitism stemming from purely emotive reasons will always find its expression in the form of pogroms. But antisemitism based on reason must lead to the systematic legal combating and removal of the rights of the Jew […]. [A governments] final aim, however, must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether.
Hitler’s letter to the soldier
As a part of his job in the Information Office, he’d often infiltrate parties suspected of communist sentiments. In September of 1919, he attended a meeting at the German Workers Party, also known as the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in German or DAP for short. However, he found that the party did support Marxism, like the title of the party suggested, but instead was incredibly nationalist and antisemitic, both of which Hitler agreed with.
He eventually formally joined the party and resigned from his position at the information office. He’d often speak at party meetings, impressing Party Chairman, Anton Drexler, with his oration skills. Drexler allowed Hitler to publicly speak at rallies, and became a mentor to him. However, Hitler was less than impressed by the disorganisation of the party, asking Drexler if he could enact vast changes within the party. Drexler agreed and Hitler quickly got to work. He became the head of recruitment propaganda and organised massive rallies, where he would often speak. His oratory skills made him a vital asset to the party.
Hitler speaking early on in his career.
One of his most notable changes was the rebranding of the party to the National Socialist German Workers Party, which in German translates to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and was commonly abbreviated to the NSDAP or the Nazi Party. He also created a party logo, which consisted of a black swastika, a Hindu symbol meaning prosperity, in a white circle with a red background, the colours of the former Imperial German Flag.
Eventually, Hitler announced a massive reworking of power inside the party, which would remove a democratically elected chairman and replace them with a “Führer” with absolute power. If his demands were not met, Hitler would resign from the party. Fearing the loss of the party’s greatest speaker, Drexler conceded, stepping down from the role of Chairman and allowing Hitler to ascend to the title of Führer of the Party. This is the first example of Hitler assuming absolute power, by any means necessary.
During these early years of the Nazi Party, many men, who would soon become high ranking members of the party, joined, inspired greatly by Hitler’s words. Ernst Röhm joined around the same time as Hitler and the two became fast friends. Röhm became the only person who would refer to Hitler by his first name, often referring to him as “Adi”. As the party developed and rose in popularity in the 1930s, Röhm would become the head of the Stormtroopers, also known as the SA, a violent paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party.
Ernst Röhm in 1924
Through Röhm another notorious figure within the ranks of the party would enter, a man named Heinrich Himmler. Known for his cunning, loyalty and brutality, he would later become the head of the Schutzstaffel, more commonly known as the SS, another paramilitary group of the Nazis, who differed from the SA in their brutality and loyalty.
Heinrich Himmler in 1929
Finally of note was Hermann Göring. Having met Hitler in 1921, he was appointed as Supreme Leader of the SA in March 1923, and later became a key figure in the political rise of the Nazis throughout the 1930s via the democracy of the Weimar Republic.
Herman Göring during his service in the First World War
In June 1921, there was a mutiny in the party, which kicked out Drexler and Hitler became the party chairman, where he spoke at beer halls, a type of large German pub. Early followers included Hermann Goering, a former flying ace, Ernst Rohm, a WW1 veteran and was later found out to be homosexual, and Rudolf Hess, another WW1 veteran and met Hitler at one of his speeches in 1920. Rohm later became the head of the Nazi’s Paramilitary force, the Stormtroopers or SA.
By the autumn of 1918, Germany was collapsing both militarily and politically. The Spring Offensive had failed, Allied counterattacks were steadily forcing the German armies back towards their own borders, and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of fresh American troops made it increasingly clear that Germany could not win the war. The situation at home was equally severe. The Allied blockade had contributed to severe shortages of food and fuel, while years of war had exhausted the German population. Strikes and demonstrations were becoming increasingly common, and support for the imperial government was weakening.
The German military leadership itself had begun to recognise that the war could not be won. In late September, senior commanders Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff informed the government that Germany should seek an immediate armistice. Their recommendation was partly intended to secure the best possible peace terms before the military situation deteriorated further. It also transferred responsibility for ending the war from the military leadership to the civilian government, a decision that would later contribute to the damaging “stab-in-the-back” myth that Germany’s defeat had been caused by politicians rather than military failure.
(L-R) Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm and Ludendorff discussing military strategy
Germany’s allies fell one after another. Bulgaria surrendered in September, the Ottoman Empire signed an armistice in October, and Austria-Hungary began to disintegrate as its many nationalities declared independence. Germany now stood alone. Prince Maximilian of Baden became Chancellor in October and began introducing constitutional reforms intended to transform Germany from an authoritarian imperial system into a parliamentary democracy. The Kaiser remained head of state, but responsibility for government was increasingly transferred to the Reichstag. These reforms, however, came too late to prevent the revolutionary movement that was already developing. The immediate trigger came from the German navy.
On October 24th 1918, the German naval command ordered the High Seas Fleet to prepare for one final operation against the British Royal Navy. The plan was effectively a last gamble: the fleet would sail out and engage the much larger British fleet in what many sailors believed would be a suicidal battle. After four years of war, the sailors had little interest in dying for a war that was already effectively lost. On October 29th, sailors at Wilhelmshaven began refusing orders. The mutiny spread to Kiel, where thousands of sailors refused to participate in the operation. The authorities attempted to suppress the rebellion by arresting some of the mutineers, but this had the opposite effect. Workers joined the sailors, demonstrations broke out and workers’ and soldiers’ councils began forming.
A group of soldiers holding a sign stating “”Soldiers’ council […] long live the socialist republic”
These councils were inspired partly by the soviets of the Russian Revolution, although the German movement was not simply a copy of Bolshevism. They generally demanded an end to the war, political democracy, improved conditions for workers and the removal of the old imperial political establishment. Germany’s existing political parties were themselves divided over how far the revolution should go. The rebellion spread rapidly across the country. Councils emerged in cities including Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Hanover, Cologne and Munich. In Bavaria, the monarchy was overthrown and a socialist-led republic was proclaimed under Kurt Eisner. Germany was now experiencing a political crisis alongside its military defeat.
The largest socialist party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), wanted to prevent the country from descending into the kind of revolutionary civil war that had devastated Russia. Its leaders supported parliamentary democracy and believed that Germany should become a democratic republic rather than a socialist state governed through workers’ councils. More radical socialists disagreed. The Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) wanted a much more extensive transformation of German society, while the revolutionary Spartacus League, associated with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, advocated a socialist revolution inspired by the Russian Bolsheviks. The possibility of a Bolshevik-style revolution terrified Germany’s conservative establishment. The SPD therefore found itself in an unusual position: it was leading the movement towards democracy while simultaneously attempting to prevent the revolutionary left from overthrowing the parliamentary system.
A group of socialists declaring the Bremen Soviet Republic
The crisis reached its climax in Berlin. On November 9th 1918, Chancellor Prince Maximilian of Baden announced that Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated, although the precise constitutional circumstances of his departure were complicated and the announcement was made before Wilhelm had formally signed an abdication document. Wilhelm had lost the support of much of the military and political establishment and eventually fled across the border into the neutral Netherlands. Germany’s monarchy had effectively collapsed. On the same day, two competing visions for Germany’s future were publicly proclaimed. Philipp Scheidemann, an SPD politician, announced from a window of the Reichstag that Germany was a republic. Only a few hours later, Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a “free socialist republic” from the Berlin Palace.
The distinction was significant. The German Revolution had not produced a single unified revolutionary movement. Republicans, parliamentary social democrats, revolutionary socialists, conservatives and military leaders all had different visions for what should replace the Kaiser. Friedrich Ebert, leader of the SPD, became the dominant figure in the provisional government. His priority was to end the war and establish order. He reached an agreement with the army’s senior commander, Wilhelm Groener, in which the military leadership agreed to support the new republican government in return for the government’s commitment to preserving the army and preventing a communist revolution. The new government requested an immediate armistice. To negotiate it, a German delegation led by politician Matthias Erzberger travelled through the devastated battlefields of northern France before arriving in the Forest of Compiègne. There, deep in the woods, stood the private railway carriage of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander. It was an intentionally symbolic setting. Germany, which had dictated harsh peace terms to defeated Russia just months earlier, now found itself on the receiving end.
A carriage of the same design on display in a museum. The original carriage was destroyed by the SS in 1940
When the German delegation entered Foch’s railway carriage during the early hours of 8 November, they hoped that President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points might provide the basis for a relatively moderate peace. Instead, Foch bluntly asked what they wanted before presenting them with a lengthy list of Allied demands. There would be virtually no negotiation. Germany was ordered to evacuate Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine, withdraw all forces east of the Rhine, and allow Allied occupation of bridgeheads on the river. Thousands of artillery pieces, machine guns, aircraft, locomotives and railway wagons were to be handed over, while the powerful German High Seas Fleet was to be interned. The Allied naval blockade would remain in place until a permanent peace treaty had been signed.
The German delegates considered refusing the terms. They knew they were severe and feared the reaction at home. Yet the alternative was equally bleak. The German Army was exhausted, revolution was spreading through the country, and the Allies were preparing to continue their offensive if negotiations failed. With no realistic prospect of improving their position, Erzberger signed the armistice shortly after 5 a.m. on 11 November 1918.
An illustration of the French and German delegations discussing the terms of surrender
Although the agreement had been signed, the fighting did not stop immediately. The ceasefire would not take effect until 11 a.m., giving armies six more hours of combat. Across the Western Front, artillery continued to fire, patrols continued to clash, and commanders launched attacks to improve their positions before the deadline. More than 10,000 men became casualties during those final hours, including around 2,700 killed. Among the last was the American soldier Henry Gunther, who charged a German machine-gun position just one minute before the armistice came into force and was shot dead at approximately 10:59 a.m.
Then, at exactly 11 o’clock on the morning of 11 November 1918 – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – the guns fell silent. After more than four years of industrialised warfare, the First World War had finally come to an end. The armistice did not bring lasting peace, however. It merely paused the fighting while diplomats prepared the Treaty of Versailles, whose controversial terms would reshape Europe and sow many of the grievances that contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War just two decades later.
I was in a fever of excitement as I listened to the address. The reverend old gentleman seemed to be trembling when he informed us that the House of Hohen-zollern should no longer wear the Imperial Crown, that the Fatherland had become a ‘Republic’, that we should pray to the Almighty not to withhold His blessing from the new order of things and not to abandon our people in the days to come. […] A feeling of profound dismay fell on the people in that assembly, and I do not think there was a single eye that withheld its tears. As for myself, I broke down completely when the old gentleman tried to resume his story by informing us that we must now end this long war, because the war was lost, he said, and we were at the mercy of the victor. […] It was impossible for me to stay and listen any longer. Darkness surrounded me as I staggered and stumbled back to my ward and buried my aching head between the blankets and pillow. I had not cried since the day that I stood beside my mother’s grave.
Adolf Hitler, Corporal in the German Army, Mein Kampf
Well, I thought the same as everybody else. Everybody said ‘It’ll be over by Christmas and you’ve got to get out soon, otherwise you won’t see anything’. But I don’t know if it was my opinion, or if everybody was saying it. One certainly changed one’s mind when we found how well-organised Jerry was compared with us for instance.
Bill Haine, a British Soldier in WW1
Despite what many claimed at home, the war was not over by Christmas. Winter was setting in and the fighting had slowed even more than before. Whilst the Christmas Truce of 1914 is seen as a unique one, ceasefires had been occurring all over the Western Front. A “turn a blind eye” attitude was becoming common place, despite orders from command. The harsh winter was also getting to the soldiers. The feeling of the first Christmas away from home was beginning to set in so gifts were sent. Kaiser Wilhelm sent cigars for the officers and pipes for the ranks while Princess Mary of Harewood sent out cigarettes, sweets and cards.
On Christmas Eve, the rain that had been flooding trenches for weeks had finally stopped, and the ice froze the floor of the trenches over, reducing the risk of trench foot significantly. Soon, snow fell upon No Mans Land and the gun fire slowly but surely dwindled into silence. Filled with merriment and joy, the German’s began to sing Silent Night in their trenches. The British officers, hearing this, believed it to be a challenge and began singing their own carols back at the Germans. However, what began as a competition eventually turned into a harmonisation of English and German voices. Many officers met by the wire, agreeing not to exchange gunfire the next day. However, such friendliness was not shared with the French or Belgian troops, as they were under occupation by the Germans at the time. However, they did agree to stop shooting in order to bury their dead.
Christmas Day came. Many British soldiers looked over the parapet to see German Soldiers standing upright in No Mans Land. The two sides got out and buried their dead. The two sides found they shared a communal experience, of having had their friends die and being sick of the war. Extra gifts given to them by their wives and families were exchanged. One notable exchange was between Captain Edward Hulse of the Scots Guard and Lieutenant Thomas of the 15th Westphalians. Thomas gave Hulse a Victoria Cross and a series of letters belonging to an officer who had been killed in a German trench in a previous attack, hoping to have them returned to his family. Touched by his empathy, Hulse gave Thomas his scarf he had received the night prior. Not having anything to give back, Thomas ordered a German troop to find the gloves given to him by his family in order to give them to Hulse. Unfortunately, Hulse ended up being killed in action the following April at the Battle of Neuve-Chappelle while trying to help his commanding officer. Thomas’ fate remains unknown
German and British troops playing football together on the battlefield
The most famous part of this truce were the football matches played between the two sides. Both sides brought out their own footballs, playing kick-about between the two trenches. However, not all was done with best intentions. This time of peace was used to repair dugouts and spy on the enemy. Some were cautious, with incidents of people spotting daggers being drawn and British soldiers not wanting to smoke German cigarettes for fear of poisoning.
Eventually, high command stepped in, fearing that the war would not go on if their troops knew their enemy as people. For some, the armistice was swift and done with by Boxing Day. Others carried on, pushing until New Years Eve. German command dispatched snipers whilst the French ordered artillery barrages. For high command, they believed the war machine had to go on and all human connection must be stamped out. There was never another ceasefire like this, not just in this war but any war since then.
For much of the nineteenth century, war still retained an element of glamour in the European imagination. Military service could be portrayed as an adventure, a test of courage and a path to honour. Paintings, newspapers and patriotic literature often presented battles as dramatic clashes between soldiers and their commanders, with cavalry charges, colourful uniforms and heroic acts of individual bravery. This did not mean that nineteenth-century people were unaware of the horrors of war. The Napoleonic Wars had killed hundreds of thousands, whilst conflicts such as the Crimean War and the American Civil War demonstrated just how destructive modern weapons could be. However, the image of the soldier as a heroic figure remained powerful. The First World War would fundamentally challenge that image.
A notoriously glorified painting of Napoleon Bonaparte crossing the Alps during the War of the Second Coalition
The nineteenth century inherited much of its image of warfare from an earlier age. Battles were often depicted as grand spectacles in which generals directed armies from horseback whilst soldiers demonstrated courage and discipline on the battlefield. The Napoleonic Wars had helped create this mythology. Napoleon Bonaparte became one of the most celebrated military figures in European history, whilst paintings of battles emphasised movement, colour and heroic leadership. Military uniforms themselves were often deliberately striking, helping commanders distinguish units and contributing to the ceremonial character of armies. Nationalism strengthened this romantic view. As European nation-states developed, military service increasingly became associated with patriotism and citizenship. Soldiers were portrayed as men willing to sacrifice themselves for their country, whilst military victories became symbols of national greatness. By the late nineteenth century, this image could still be seen in popular culture. Young men were encouraged to view military service as an opportunity for adventure, friendship and honour. Yet warfare was already changing.
The technology of warfare was developing much faster than the romantic image surrounding it. The invention and improvement of the machine gun, modern artillery, smokeless powder, rapid-fire rifles and increasingly accurate ammunition meant that crossing an open battlefield was becoming extraordinarily dangerous. The American Civil War had already demonstrated some of these dangers. Rifled muskets increased the range and accuracy of infantry fire, whilst railways and telegraphs allowed armies to mobilise and coordinate on an unprecedented scale. The Crimean War had also demonstrated the consequences of industrial-age logistics and weaponry. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 provided another warning. Modern artillery and mass armies could produce enormous casualties in a relatively short period of time.
A painting of the declaration of the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War
Yet military thinking did not always keep pace with technological change. Many European armies continued to place considerable emphasis on offensive spirit, discipline and morale. The belief that determined soldiers could overcome defensive positions remained powerful. When the First World War began in 1914, millions of men marched to war believing that the conflict would be relatively short. Few understood what industrial warfare was about to become.
The first trenches of the First World War were relatively simple defensive positions. Soldiers dug into the ground for protection from enemy fire, often creating little more than elongated foxholes. As the war on the Western Front settled into stalemate, however, these temporary positions developed into enormous defensive systems. A typical trench system was not simply one trench facing another. There could be several lines of trenches, connected by communication trenches and supported by dugouts, machine-gun positions, artillery batteries, supply areas, command posts and medical facilities. Reserve units could be stationed behind the front line, ready to reinforce troops during an attack. The front itself stretched for hundreds of miles from the Belgian coast to the Swiss frontier. What had initially been expected to be a war of movement had become a war in which armies could remain within the same general positions for months or even years.
An image of early trenches on the Western Front
Life in the trenches was rarely glamorous. Rain could turn the ground into mud, whilst poor drainage created an environment in which soldiers were constantly wet and cold. One of the most notorious consequences was trench foot, a condition caused by prolonged exposure to cold and damp conditions which could result in severe swelling, tissue damage and, in extreme cases, amputation. Rats became common around trench systems, attracted by food waste and the bodies of dead soldiers. Lice spread rapidly and contributed to the misery of daily life. Soldiers were also constantly exposed to the possibility of death. Artillery shells could strike without warning. Snipers targeted exposed soldiers. Machine guns could sweep exposed areas of the battlefield, whilst mines and grenades created additional dangers. Even when there was no major attack, the psychological pressure could be enormous. Soldiers could spend days or weeks waiting for an enemy bombardment or attack, knowing that they might be ordered over the parapet at any moment.
Between opposing trench systems was the area that became known as No Man’s Land. It was rarely the completely empty space suggested by the name. It was often covered in shell craters, barbed wire, broken equipment, destroyed trees and the remains of buildings. In some sectors, the landscape had been so heavily bombarded that it bore little resemblance to the countryside that had existed before the war. Crossing it was extraordinarily dangerous.
An image of No Man’s Land
A typical attack might begin with an artillery bombardment intended to destroy enemy positions, cut barbed wire and suppress defending troops. Once the barrage lifted or moved forward, infantry would leave their trenches and attempt to cross No Man’s Land. Defenders could respond with machine-gun and rifle fire, artillery and grenades. The resulting casualties could be enormous. However, the popular image of commanders simply ordering soldiers to walk slowly in straight lines into machine-gun fire is misleading. Tactics evolved throughout the war. Armies experimented with creeping barrages, infiltration tactics, improved communications, grenades, mortars, tanks and coordinated infantry-artillery attacks. The problem was that military technology was developing so quickly that armies were constantly trying to adapt to it.
The quality of trenches varied enormously depending on the location, the soil, the length of time a position had been occupied and the resources available. German forces generally had an advantage in the construction of defensive positions, particularly in sectors where they had time to establish permanent fortifications. Their trenches were often deeper and more elaborate, with substantial dugouts beneath the ground. Some German dugouts could contain sleeping quarters, command rooms, medical facilities and storage areas. Certain positions were remarkably sophisticated by the standards of the battlefield. Allied trenches varied considerably. British and French forces also constructed extensive defensive systems, and their positions became increasingly sophisticated as the war continued. The difference was partly a consequence of strategy. After the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line in 1917, German forces deliberately constructed deeply fortified defensive positions designed to absorb artillery bombardments and resist infantry attacks. The idea that British trenches were universally shallow while German trenches were universally deep therefore oversimplifies the reality. Conditions varied substantially across the Western Front.
Although machine guns became one of the defining symbols of trench warfare, artillery was responsible for the majority of battlefield casualties. Artillery could destroy trenches, bury soldiers alive and turn entire landscapes into craters. Soldiers could be exposed to bombardments lasting hours or even days. The psychological consequences could be devastating. Men subjected to prolonged bombardment sometimes experienced uncontrollable shaking, paralysis, blindness, nightmares, panic and emotional collapse. During the war this was often called shell shock. At first, many military authorities believed that men suffering from shell shock were cowards or were attempting to avoid combat. As the scale of the problem became apparent, however, medical understanding gradually changed.
An image often used to demonstrate shell shock
What we now recognise as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is not exactly synonymous with shell shock, and historians and psychologists debate how closely the two conditions correspond. Nevertheless, the experience of shell shock demonstrated something that the romantic image of warfare had largely ignored: modern warfare could inflict psychological injuries as profound as its physical ones.
In 1915, another terrifying weapon appeared on the Western Front. Germany used chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915. The gas was released from cylinders and carried towards Allied positions by the wind. The attack demonstrated the terrifying potential of chemical warfare. Chlorine damaged the lungs and could cause suffocation. Other chemical agents, including phosgene and mustard gas, were introduced later. Chemical weapons had been restricted by international agreements before the war, including the 1899 Hague Declaration concerning the use of projectiles intended to diffuse asphyxiating or deleterious gases. The First World War nevertheless saw their widespread use by both sides. Gas did not become the dominant killer of the war – the vast majority of casualties were still caused by conventional weapons – but it became one of its most feared symbols. Protective equipment also evolved. Soldiers were issued increasingly effective gas masks, and armies developed warning systems and procedures for responding to attacks. The image of soldiers choking beneath clouds of poisonous gas became another powerful reminder that warfare had entered a new technological age.
An image of German Soldiers releasing some chemical gas
The greatest shock of trench warfare was perhaps not any individual weapon, but its duration. The soldiers who went to war in 1914 had often expected a short conflict. Instead, the Western Front became a largely static battlefield lasting for more than four years. The Battle of the Somme in 1916 became one of the clearest demonstrations of the scale of industrial warfare. On the first day alone, the British Army suffered tens of thousands of casualties. The offensive ultimately produced enormous losses on both sides for relatively limited territorial gains. Verdun, Passchendaele and numerous other battles produced similar experiences. This did not mean that every attack achieved nothing. Armies learned, adapted and sometimes captured strategically important territory. But the enormous cost of attempting to break through heavily defended positions demonstrated how difficult it was to achieve decisive results against a prepared industrial defence. The battlefield had become a machine in which enormous quantities of ammunition, equipment and human lives could be consumed.
The First World War therefore transformed the popular image of warfare. The cavalry charge remained a powerful symbol of military heroism, but tanks, aircraft, machine guns, heavy artillery and poison gas increasingly defined the battlefield. Individual bravery still mattered, but courage could not protect a soldier from an artillery shell exploding hundreds of metres away. This was perhaps the most important change in the perception of war. The nineteenth-century image of war had often focused on the individual soldier’s courage. The First World War increasingly demonstrated the power of impersonal forces: industrial production, artillery, logistics, communications and mass mobilisation. A soldier could perform an extraordinary act of bravery and still be killed moments later by an artillery barrage whose source he could not even see. Artists and writers increasingly reflected this change. The patriotic literature of the early war years gradually gave way to a much darker cultural memory. Poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon described the mud, exhaustion, fear and destruction of the trenches rather than the glory of battle. Owen’s poetry in particular challenged the idea that dying in war was inherently noble, famously describing the experience of soldiers dying from gas and the suffering of men exposed to industrial warfare. Photography and newspapers also brought the war closer to civilians, although censorship meant that the public did not see the full reality of the front. For millions of families, however, the absence of a son, husband or brother made the cost of war impossible to ignore. The war had not simply changed warfare. It had changed the way Europeans understood it.
Stormtroopers Advance Under a Gas Attack, an anti-war piece of art by Otto Dix
The First World War did not completely destroy the romantic image of military service. Heroism, patriotism and sacrifice remained important ideas throughout the twentieth century. Governments continued to use them to encourage recruitment and maintain morale. But the experience of industrialised warfare made it increasingly difficult to portray war simply as an exciting adventure. The trenches became a symbol of something fundamentally different: a war in which ordinary soldiers endured prolonged fear, disease, exhaustion and bombardment, often for objectives they could barely understand from the front line. The transformation was not instantaneous, nor was it entirely caused by the trenches. The nineteenth century had already seen devastating industrial wars, and people had long understood that warfare could be brutal. What the First World War did was bring the consequences of modern technology, mass armies and industrial production together on an unprecedented scale. By 1918, the old image of the glorious battlefield had been profoundly damaged. War could still be presented as heroic. But it could no longer so easily be presented as glamorous. The trenches had become one of the defining symbols of the twentieth century: a reminder that modern warfare was no longer primarily a contest between individual warriors seeking glory, but an industrial struggle capable of consuming entire generations.
While the German advance in France ground to a halt on the Western Front, events in the east were unfolding much faster than Berlin had anticipated. German planners had assumed that Russia, with its enormous territory and comparatively underdeveloped railway network, would require at least six weeks to mobilise its vast army. Instead, Russian mobilisation progressed far more rapidly than expected. Although it was still incomplete, two Russian armies crossed the border into the German province of East Prussia before Germany had defeated France, forcing Berlin to divert troops away from the west far earlier than planned.
A photo of Russian soldiers marching on the Eastern Front
The invasion was led by Generals Paul von Rennenkampf and Alexander Samsonov, who commanded the Russian First and Second Armies respectively. Their objective was straightforward: overrun East Prussia, force Germany to defend its homeland, and relieve pressure on France before the war in the west could be decided. Initially, the strategy appeared to be working. German commanders feared losing East Prussia altogether, and panic spread among the civilian population as thousands fled westward.
The situation changed dramatically with the appointment of Paul von Hindenburg and his chief of staff Erich Ludendorff to command the German Eighth Army. Making use of intercepted Russian radio messages – which, astonishingly, had often been transmitted without encryption – and Germany’s excellent railway network, the Germans realised that the two Russian armies had become dangerously separated. Rather than retreat, they decided to destroy them one at a time.
A painting of Hindenburg (left) and Ludendorff discussing battle strategy
Between 26 and 30 August 1914, the Germans surrounded Samsonov’s Second Army near the town of Tannenberg. The battle became one of the most decisive victories of the entire war. Nearly 100,000 Russian soldiers were captured, tens of thousands more were killed or wounded, and the Second Army effectively ceased to exist. Unable to bear responsibility for the catastrophe, General Samsonov reportedly walked into a nearby forest and took his own life.
With Samsonov defeated, Hindenburg and Ludendorff turned their attention to Rennenkampf’s First Army. A few weeks later, during the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes, the Russians were driven out of East Prussia altogether. Although much of the Russian Army remained intact, the immediate threat to German territory had been eliminated, transforming Hindenburg and Ludendorff into national heroes almost overnight.
A phot of the General staff of the German 8th Army during the battle
Further south, Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary was faring far less successfully. Vienna had expected a swift victory over Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but Serbian forces proved far more resilient than anticipated. In August 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Army suffered a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Cer, marking the first Allied victory of the war. At the same time, Russian armies surged into the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, inflicting a series of defeats and forcing the Habsburg armies into a chaotic retreat. By September, the strategically important fortress of Przemyśl had been surrounded, beginning one of the longest sieges of the First World War.
Germany was now forced to support its struggling ally. Throughout the autumn of 1914, German and Russian forces fought a series of major engagements across modern-day Poland, including the Battle of Łódź. Although neither side achieved a decisive breakthrough, the fighting prevented the Russians from exploiting their earlier successes against Austria-Hungary and helped stabilise the Central Powers’ eastern front.
A photo of the German army entering Łódź
The conflict expanded still further in late October 1914 when the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Once one of the world’s greatest empires, Ottoman territory still stretched across much of the Middle East, including modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine. German military advisers had spent years modernising the Ottoman Army, and its government increasingly viewed Russia as its principal rival. On 29 October, Ottoman warships launched surprise attacks against the Russian ports of Odessa, Sevastopol and several other Black Sea harbours. Russia declared war soon afterwards, followed within days by Britain and France. A new front had opened in the Caucasus Mountains, while the Middle East itself would soon become another major theatre of the war.
Unlike the Western Front, however, the Eastern Front never became dominated by an unbroken network of trenches stretching from one end of the battlefield to the other. The distances involved were simply too vast. From the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea stretched a front of well over a thousand miles, much of it crossing forests, marshes and open plains. Neither side possessed enough men to fortify every mile of the line, meaning battles remained far more mobile. Armies frequently advanced or retreated by hundreds of miles, and sweeping manoeuvres, encirclements and rapid offensives remained common throughout much of the war.
Following Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia, Europe’s intricate alliance system rapidly transformed a regional conflict into a continental one. Russia began mobilising its vast army on 30 July 1914 in support of Serbia. Germany, honouring its alliance with Austria-Hungary, viewed Russian mobilisation as an act of war and issued an ultimatum demanding that it cease. When the ultimatum expired, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August. Two days later it declared war on Russia’s ally, France.
A newspaper announcing the outbreak of war
For German military planners, this was the nightmare they had long feared: a two-front war. France lay to the west, Russia to the east. Fighting both simultaneously would stretch Germany’s resources to breaking point. Although Russia possessed an enormous army, its mobilisation was expected to take several weeks because of its vast territory and comparatively underdeveloped railway network. Germany therefore believed it had a short window of opportunity to defeat France before turning its full attention eastward.
The strategy had been devised almost a decade earlier by Field Marshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff until 1906. Schlieffen argued that France’s eastern frontier was protected by an extensive chain of modern fortresses stretching from Switzerland to Luxembourg. A direct assault would likely become bogged down in costly siege warfare. Instead, he proposed an enormous sweeping manoeuvre through the neutral countries of Luxembourg, Belgium and, in his original plan, much of the Netherlands. The bulk of the German Army would advance around the French fortifications, swing south-west of Paris before wheeling east, trapping the French Army against the German border in one gigantic encirclement. If everything went according to plan, France would be defeated in little more than six weeks, allowing Germany to transfer hundreds of thousands of soldiers by rail to face the slowly mobilising Russians.
A photo of Schlieffen, 1906
By the time war broke out in 1914, however, Schlieffen was dead. His successor, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, believed the original plan was too ambitious. He modified it by reducing the strength of the powerful right wing that was meant to sweep through Belgium and abandoned the invasion of the Netherlands altogether, hoping to preserve Dutch neutrality and keep valuable trade routes open. Historians still debate whether these changes fatally weakened the plan or whether Schlieffen’s original design had always been unrealistic.
On 2 August German forces occupied Luxembourg before crossing into neutral Belgium the following day. Belgium had refused German demands to allow its army free passage, and Britain – one of the guarantors of Belgian neutrality under the Treaty of London of 1839 – issued an ultimatum demanding Germany withdraw. When Germany ignored it, Britain declared war on 4 August 1914.
A newspaper announcing the British declaration of war on Germany
The invasion did not unfold as German commanders had hoped. The heavily fortified city of Liège offered unexpectedly fierce resistance, delaying the German advance for almost two weeks. Although enormous siege guns eventually reduced the Belgian forts, the delay disrupted Germany’s carefully planned timetable and allowed both France and Britain additional time to mobilise their forces. As German troops advanced through Belgium, reports emerged of civilians being executed and entire towns, most famously Leuven, being burned in retaliation for suspected resistance. Whether every allegation was accurate or not, these events became known collectively as the Rape of Belgium and were widely used in Allied propaganda, severely damaging Germany’s international reputation.
Meanwhile, the French launched Plan XVII, an ambitious offensive into Alsace and Lorraine in the belief that aggressive attacks would overwhelm the Germans. Instead, French armies were met by devastating machine-gun and artillery fire during the Battle of the Frontiers. Within weeks, the offensive collapsed with enormous casualties, forcing the French into a general retreat towards Paris.
An illustration of the French attack in the Lorraine offensive
To the north, the small but highly professional British Expeditionary Force (BEF) entered the war alongside France. On 23 August it fought its first major engagement against the Germans at the Battle of Mons. Although heavily outnumbered, British rifle fire inflicted surprising casualties and briefly slowed the German advance. Nevertheless, the BEF was eventually forced to retreat alongside the French, beginning what became known as the Great Retreat. By early September, German armies had advanced to within forty miles of Paris, and it appeared that the Schlieffen Plan was on the verge of delivering the rapid victory Germany had expected.
Instead, the offensive reached its breaking point. Exhausted soldiers had marched hundreds of miles in little over a month, supply lines stretched ever longer, and communication between German armies became increasingly difficult. Crucially, General Alexander von Kluck, commanding Germany’s powerful right wing, altered his line of advance by turning east of Paris rather than sweeping around the city as Schlieffen had envisaged. This exposed a dangerous gap between the German First and Second Armies.
The original intended direction of attack of the Schieffen plan
Recognising the opportunity, the French commander Joseph Joffre ordered a massive counterattack. Reinforced by troops famously transported to the front in hundreds of Parisian taxis, French and British forces struck the exposed German flank during the First Battle of the Marne in early September 1914. Facing encirclement themselves, the Germans withdrew to the River Aisne. The Schlieffen Plan had failed.
Neither side was willing to accept defeat. Instead, both armies repeatedly attempted to outflank one another in a series of manoeuvres known as the Race to the Sea, extending the front further and further north until it reached the Belgian coast. The final major engagement of this race took place at the First Battle of Ypres, where repeated German attacks failed to break the Allied line.
An illustration of Germans surrendering to British Highlander Divisions at Ypres
Unable to outmanoeuvre one another, both sides began digging defensive trenches. Within weeks, a continuous line of earthworks, barbed wire and fortified positions stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. What many had expected to be a short, decisive war had instead become a brutal war of attrition that would last more than four years and claim millions of lives.
On 28th of July 1914, Gavrilo Princip, member of the Serbian organisation “The Black Hand” shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife in Bosnia, killing them both. Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination, so declared war. Russia had an alliance with Serbia, so declared war on Austria-Hungary. Germany had an alliance with Austria-Hungary, so declared war on Russia, thus bringing both Germany and Hitler into World War 1.
He was attached to the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 and was a runner on the Western Front in East Belgium. He was awarded an Iron Cross (2nd class) for his bravery, one of the highest awards given to soldiers in the German Army, similar to the Victoria Cross or Medal of Honour.
Hitler in a dugout in the war. He is furthest left.
During the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he suffered an injury from an artillery shell which wounded his left thigh. He was sent to hospital and returned in March 1917.
In September 1918, Hitler claimed that in a battle was unarmed and a rifle was pointed at him by Private Henry Tandey, one of the most highly decorated privates of the war, having gained a Victoria cross for his bravery at the fifth Battle of Ypres. He held his gun on Hitler but then told him to go. Hitler told this tale to Former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he visited his house in Bavaria, saying “That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again,”. When first hearing this Tandey denied all claims but later on he says he remembers doing something like this and if it was Hitler he should’ve pulled the trigger, saying, “If only I had known what he would turn out to be […] When I saw all the people and women and children he had killed and wounded I was sorry to God I let him go.” when an interviewer went to his house in Coventry. The paper wrote “Nothing Henry did that night could ease his sickening sense of guilt. […] It was a stigma that Tandey lived with until his death […] He could have stopped this. He could have changed the course of history.” Tandey passed away in 1977 at his home in Coventry.
This is a painting at Hitler’s home in Bavaria which he showed to Prime Minister Chamberlain. Hitler claimed that the injured man being carried at the front of the line is him and the man carrying him is Tandey.
A month after he was nearly killed, Hitler was partially blinded by a mustard gas attack and was sent to hospital. It was during this time when he learnt of Germany’s defeat. Hitler said that when he learnt this he had a second wave of blindness. Hitler and many others believed that Germany had been stabbed in the back from the home front and Hitler blamed it on the Jews and Marxists. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles didn’t help matters, making the German people hate the countries that made them sign the Treaty even more than they already did.
Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, a northern area in modern day Austria, which was formerly a part of the vast but fragile Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1889. His father, Alois Hitler, was abusive to the young boy, often exacting punishments via physical abuse, whilst his mother, Klara Polz, who was also his Father’s cousin, was very doting and the young Hitler grew very fond of his mother.
Hitler as a baby
Whilst he was often described as a confident young man in his early youth, his personality changed when his younger brother, Edmund, passed away from the measles when Hitler was 11, turning him into a more detached and depressed young teen, who’d often argue with his father and teachers. Only three years later, his father would pass away from a lung hemorrhage. Not long afterwards, his grades started to decline, with him barely passing his final exams.
At the age of 18, he had a sad goodbye to his mother, before moving to Vienna to take an entrance exam to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. After being rejected not once but twice, he had to return home to Linz, after learning that his mother was dying of breast cancer. She passed away at the age of 47, when Hitler was 18. The family doctor, Eduard Bloch, said that he had never seen someone so distraught as Hitler was at his mother’s death.
One of Hitler’s paintings
Aimless, Hitler slept on the streets of Vienna, selling paintings of Vienna’s sights in order to pay for food and alike. Whilst his former roommate in Vienna, August Kubisek, often described Hitler as rather outgoing, despite a general disinterest in pursuing women romantically, passionate in politics and the arts, a fan of the opera and somewhat Catholic in his beliefs, Hitler abruptly left the apartment they lived in shortly after his mother died and left no note indicating where he was going to. Likely because he was going nowhere.
Whilst he was often friendly towards Jewish individuals who expressed their religion in a more subtle way, that attitude began to slowly change over his time on the streets. The Vienna into which Hitler arrived was a city in which antisemitism had become increasingly prominent, although it was very different from the antisemitism that would later define Nazi Germany. For centuries, hostility towards Jews had largely been rooted in religious prejudice. Jews had been accused of rejecting Christianity, blamed for the death of Christ and subjected to restrictions and persecution across Europe. During the nineteenth century, however, these older prejudices increasingly took on a new political and racial character. The development of nationalism and the emergence of new theories about human evolution and heredity encouraged some thinkers to divide humanity into supposedly distinct and hierarchical races. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection did not itself teach racial hierarchy or antisemitism, but ideas derived from or falsely presented as extensions of Darwinism were increasingly applied to human society. So-called Social Darwinists argued that competition between individuals, nations and races was a natural struggle in which supposedly superior groups would prevail over inferior ones.
Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race.
Friedrich Nietzche writing on the nature of Social Darwinism
This provided antisemites with a new argument. Jews were increasingly portrayed not simply as followers of another religion who could convert to Christianity, but as members of an allegedly distinct and biologically defined race. This distinction was important because it meant that conversion could no longer supposedly make someone ‘less Jewish’. Antisemitism therefore became increasingly associated with theories of blood, heredity and racial nationalism. These ideas were never scientifically valid, but they gave existing prejudices the appearance of modern intellectual legitimacy.
Vienna was particularly fertile ground for this new political antisemitism. The city was the capital of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire and contained a large and increasingly visible Jewish population. Jewish communities had played an important role in Vienna’s commercial, professional, cultural and intellectual life, whilst the rapid growth of the city had also produced social tensions and resentment towards the established political and economic order. Antisemitism could therefore be combined with opposition to liberalism, capitalism, socialism and the multinational character of the Habsburg Empire.
A map of the ethnicities occupying the Austro-Hungarian Empire
One of the most successful politicians to exploit these tensions was Karl Lueger, leader of the Christian Social Party and mayor of Vienna from 1897 until his death in 1910. Lueger openly used antisemitic rhetoric, blaming Jews for many of the problems facing ordinary Austrians. Yet his politics were more complicated than the racial ideology that would later emerge under Hitler. Lueger was a Catholic conservative and populist who combined antisemitism with support for municipal welfare, public services and the interests of Vienna’s lower middle classes. His antisemitism was therefore both ideological and political: it provided a convenient way of identifying an enemy whilst appealing to voters who felt threatened by economic and social change.
Austrian antisemitism also differed from that found in Germany. Germany certainly had powerful antisemitic movements and organisations, particularly from the 1870s onwards, but antisemitism did not achieve the same level of electoral success there before the First World War. In Austria, and especially in Vienna, it became much more deeply integrated into mainstream populist politics. Lueger was an especially important example. He was so successful that Emperor Franz Joseph repeatedly refused to confirm his election as mayor before eventually accepting the political reality of his popularity. Lueger himself once famously remarked that he decided who was a Jew, reflecting the opportunistic nature of his politics: antisemitism was central to his political appeal, but it was also a flexible tool rather than the consistently racial doctrine that the Nazis would later develop.
A portrait of Lueger
For the young Hitler, this political environment was formative. Vienna exposed him to an antisemitism that was not confined to extremist pamphlets or fringe organisations but could be used successfully by a major political movement. Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf that his years in Vienna had transformed his understanding of Jews, claiming that he had gradually come to see them as a political and racial threat. These later recollections must be treated cautiously. Hitler was writing Mein Kampf after the First World War, when he was already a committed antisemite and Nazi politician, and he had an obvious interest in presenting his hatred of Jews as an inevitable discovery rather than a later development.
Once, when passing through the inner City, I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz. I watched the man stealthily and cautiously; but the longer I gazed at the strange countenance and examined it feature by feature, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German?
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
There is evidence that Hitler encountered antisemitic ideas in Vienna, but it is difficult to establish precisely when he personally adopted them. His earlier life included relationships with Jewish acquaintances and no clear evidence that he entered Vienna already committed to the extreme racial antisemitism that would later characterise Nazism. His transformation was gradual and was influenced by the wider political culture around him. Lueger was particularly significant because Hitler later praised him as a master of mass politics. He admired the way Lueger could take popular grievances, identify political enemies and communicate his message directly to ordinary voters.
Hitler also encountered the German nationalist movement in Austria, particularly the ideas of Georg von Schönerer, whose Pan-Germanism was considerably more radical than Lueger’s Catholic populism. Schönerer combined German nationalism with virulent antisemitism and hostility towards the Habsburg monarchy. Hitler would eventually draw from both traditions: from Lueger, the use of populism, propaganda and mass political mobilisation; from Schönerer, a more explicitly racial antisemitism, German nationalism and hostility towards Austria’s multinational political structure.
A picture of Schönerer
Vienna therefore did not simply ‘make’ Hitler antisemitic. Rather, it provided him with a political laboratory in which he encountered several ideas that would later become central to Nazism. Older religious hostility towards Jews was being transformed into racial nationalism, antisemitism could be used as a populist political weapon, and politicians such as Lueger demonstrated how successfully such ideas could be incorporated into mass politics. Hitler would later take these influences much further, combining them with German nationalism, Social Darwinist racial theory, conspiracy theories and his own increasingly radical worldview. Having developed these racist sentiments, he came to despise the multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire, so moved to Germany by late 1913. Accused of draft dodging, Hitler wrote a letter to the Austro-Hungarian police, fearing arrest if he didn’t. Admiring his tone, the police let him go and the matter was largely dropped altogether. Only a few months later, war broke out.
