Hitler's First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War [Hardcover]

Following Brigitte Hamann's fairly recent book Hitler's Vienna, Weber tells the story of Hitler's war years (1914-18) and has discovered a large archive of regimental records that were mixed in with divisional records in the German military archives. He uses soldier's letters and orders to paint a detailed picture of Hitler's life as a 'runner' in the List Regiment from Munich.

Weber paints Hitler as a warped and deceitful character who was not a natural product of his society, for example stressing that was not a front-soldier as he later claimed (though he concedes that he did see action early in the war) and suggesting that his attitude to his officers was ingratiating, hence his winning of the iron cross. He invents the disparaging moniker 'Private Hitler' on the grounds that his rank was not equivalent to the British corporal, downplays the amount he read and stresses negative views of runners by regimental comrades. As far as Weber reveals his agenda other than as a pure academic and chronicler, it is to reinstate a broadly paternalist German political class by distancing them from Hitler's campaign against Weimar Germany.

Weber claims that Hitler's views changed rapidly in Munich after the war rather than resulting from the brutality of war roughening pre-war ideological tendencies, but this is at odds with several plausible primary witnesses, such as Hitler's sometime friends August Kubizek and Ernst Hanfstaengel, as well as with the admittedly mythic 'Mein Kampf' itself.

There is a saying amongst German historians that the history of Hitler is the history of his underestimation and I suspect that this is also true of some recent biographical works, including this one. It is very informative and a good read, but should be compared with older material, much of which is still in print. Production-wise, there are a few grammatical glitches and a duplicated quotation that do not interfere with appreciation of the content.

It's hard to know what to make of this book. It is based on what was clearly an exhaustive examination of all available primary sources, including some newly discovered ones. It makes the central case (Hitler was a slightly pathetic misfit who lacked any clear sense of himself until after the Great War, the common historical view that WW1 preconditioned his subsequent ascent is thus wrong) clearly enough. The narrative aspect hums along nicely more often than not, as and when the author lets it.

And yet it fails to convince. Perhaps it's just me, but I got the impression throughout that the author was always primarily looking for ways in which to be at odds with accepted conclusions about "Private Hitler". This gives the book a forced, contrived feel, which a number of otherwise interesting and seemingly credible arguments fall victim to. Overelaboration abounds and creates a permanent air of the smirking know-it-all. This may be unfair of me, may indeed be an unintended consequence of the other main gripe I have about this book: it's technical mediocrity.

Other reviews have commented on the regular typos and grammatical errors, beyond that it is also a book in dire need of a competent editor. Someone with some sensibility of cadence, rythm and focus. The story is constantly interrupted by what initially appear to be quick asides, adding dashes of detail to reinforce a point, but which turn out to be churning, multi-page tangents full of statistics and factual detail that ram said point home with ill-considered force. The author lacks judgement of when a point has been satisfactorily made and substantiated. Or perhaps has the adademic's lack of trust in his readers' ability to grasp the point. Beyond that, the writing needs a lot of tidying. Phrases like "as we have seen" and "as we shall see" appear with what quickly becomes grating regularity.

All in all a disappointment - certainly nothing to stack up against Kershaw's two volumes (books which this author regularly quotes, alludes to and in some cases queries).

This is a useful and scholarly exploration of what Hitler, and the regiment in which he served, actually did during and after the First World War, and how the war appears to have affected Hitler's political outlook. The author convincingly demonstrates that things were not as Hitler himself later described them in 'Mein Kampf', where Hitler mythologised and omitted aspects of his war experience.

For example, despite his claims, Hitler had very slight experience as an ordinary trench soldier, because he served mostly behind the lines at regimental HQ as a dispatch-runner. Although this was frequently dangerous, the conditions in which Hitler lived and served were very different to the terrible existence for soldiers in the trenches. Hitler also happened to be absent from the crucial suffering experienced by his regiment in the Battle of the Somme, and at Vimy, and he was therefore not closely aware of the serious crises in morale which resulted: "Hitler had missed the period when his regiment was stabbed in the front on the Somme and on Vimy Ridge, and not in the back by traitors on the home front, as Nazi propaganda would have it", states the author.

Thomas Weber has some interesting information about the unusual circumstances relating to the award to Private Hitler of the Iron Cross First Class, and draws attention to a fact which Hitler later chose not to acknowledge: he was recommended for the award by a Jewish officer.

Hitler often emphatically stated that his political views had been "made by the war" and that Germany's defeat by a so-called stab in the back from "the November criminals" created his political identity. This was a retrospective simplification of how he arrived at his political position. The defeat was undoubtedly traumatic for Hitler as an individual (and the medical record states that his blindness, at Pasewalk Hospital, was actually a psychosomatic reaction to the shock). However, although some aspects of Hitler's world-view remained constant (in particular his anti-semitism), in November 1918 his political position had not yet been formed.

Hitler's political views were put together in response to a variety of new opportunities which arose in the volatile situation after the defeat and revolution. The startling truth is that after the war, before turning to the Right, he in fact turned to the Left. Like most politicians, Hitler was more of an opportunist than he later preferred to admit.

Other questions become clear in the course of the book. For instance, the unfortunate effects of President Wilson's insistence that all the German monarchies be abolished after the war, ensuring the disruption of continuity, and eventually helping to propel Germany into a political void -which had calamitous consequences. (It is interesting that the most balanced, perceptive, and compassionate comments of any war-leader quoted in this book, happen to be those of an unelected leader: Crown Prince Rupprecht, who was in line to be King of Bavaria but was soon to be ejected with his 600-year old dynasty, and replaced by political chaos.)

This is valuable research (not performed so thoroughly before) into the facts, as far as they can be determined from the limited evidence, about this significant period of Hitler's life. At times the author's style of writing can be on the opaque side, and I had difficulty sometimes with his expression of ideas. The finest writers sometimes need the advice of an editor and checkers, but at the O.U.P. they appear to have been on leave: there are constant spelling mistakes and grammatical errors ("a officer"), the same quotation is made twice in two pages to make the same point, there is at least one completely meaningless sentence, etc.etc. This aspect of a scholarly book published by the O.U.P. is surprising: their standards have dropped! Maybe this nolonger matters to the O.U.P., but it matters to quite a lot of readers.