Hitler left for Vienna, he and his sister, Paula, had learnt of their mother’s breast cancer. Towards the end of 1907, Hitler received word that his mother was dying. He rushed back to Linz and nursed her, devotedly, through her final days. She died on 21 December 1907, aged only forty-seven. According to his mother’s Jewish doctor, Edward Bloch, Hitler was with her as she died. ‘I have never seen anyone’, wrote Dr Bloch later, ‘so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.’ Later, Hitler presented the good doctor with one of his paintings. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote of his parents: ‘I had honoured my father but loved my mother.’ Hitler worshipped his mother and she was perhaps the only person he ever loved. Following her death, Hitler’s contact with his family rapidly dwindled.
Hitler returned to Vienna in February 1908, but found that he was missing his only friend, Kubizek. He wrote to Kubizek’s father to ask him allow his son to join him in the city, from where he could pursue his ambition to become a conductor. Kubizek Senior, who hoped that his son would follow him into the upholstery trade, reluctantly gave in. On 22 February, August Kubizek arrived in Vienna to be reunited with his friend.
Kubizek applied for a place at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna and was immediately successful. Kubizek assumed his friend had already started his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts – Hitler had not told anyone of his failure to gain a place. Eventually the truth came out and Hitler, beside himself with rage on telling of his lack of success, blamed everyone but himself.
While Kubizek studied, Hitler slept, daydreamt and came up with grandiose plans that came to nothing. In a fit of enthusiasm he began writing the libretto for an opera along Wagnerian lines, but the enthusiasm soon petered out. In October 1908, Hitler applied again for a place at the Academy of Fine Arts and again failed, this time at the initial stage. Again, he kept his failure to himself.
On finishing his first term, Kubizek returned home briefly to Linz. When he came back to Vienna in November 1908 Hitler had moved out. He had left no forwarding address. Kubizek would not see his friend again for another thirty years.
Suffering bouts of depression and with his aunt’s money running out, Hitler moved from one impoverished accommodation to another and spent his last three years in Vienna in a men’s hostel. For a while he struck up a deal with a fellow guest, Reinhold Hanisch; while Hitler painted Viennese street scenes, Hanisch sold them and the two would split the profit. But while Hanisch managed to sell, Hitler’s commitment to painting a picture a day faded and the agreement ended acrimoniously.
Despite having lived in Vienna for six years, Hitler had made few friends, certainly none that he talked about. Acquaintances and ex-room-mates at the hostel remembered him not simply for his anti-Semitism, which was commonplace in Vienna at the turn of the century, but for the extent of his fanaticism against Jews, religion, priests, the Habsburg monarchy, the aristocracy, the middle classes and a number of other pet hates. He preached, with alarming fervour, the cause of a pan-Germany, the unification of all German-speaking people as one state. He would frequent cafés and sermonize to whoever was unfortunate enough to be caught within his orbit. He showed no interest in women, believing that men should remain celibate until the age of twenty-five.
Hitler decided to move to Germany, but had to wait in Vienna until he received his father’s small inheritance, which was due on his twenty-fourth birthday – 20 April 1913. Once secured, he was able to leave Vienna and, in May 1913, start afresh in a ‘true German city’, the city of Munich, the capital of Bavaria, an independent federal state within Germany with its own king, King Ludwig. But Hitler’s move to Bavaria was also motivated by the desire to avoid conscription into the Habsburg army. Hitler was not a draft dodger but he despised the Habsburg monarchy so much he had no wish to serve in its army.
His life in Munich differed little from that in Vienna – lacking work, money and friends, living in hovels and wandering aimlessly around the city, admiring the architecture and striking up one-sided conversations in cafés. But Hitler looked back on his time in Munich with fondness, calling it ‘by far the happiest time of my life’. In February 1914, the Habsburg army caught up with him; put him in front of a military tribunal in Salzburg, only to declare him unfit for service.
Six months later, on 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. The news was received enthusiastically throughout the country and Hitler, especially, was ecstatic.
A photograph taken on 2 August outside the Feldherrenhalle (the Field Marshals’ Hall) in Munich shows a large, unruly crowd of happy Germans cheering the news. Amongst them, his face rapt with joy, was the 25-year-old Adolf Hitler.
News of the outbreak of war is received enthusiastically in Munich, August 1914. Among the crowd is Hitler
Hitler tried to enlist immediately, but as an Austrian was rejected. A letter to King Ludwig swearing his devotion to the German cause did the trick though, and Hitler was allowed to join the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, known as the List Regiment after its commander, Colonel List.
Hitler as a soldier, c.1914
The List Regiment fought and suffered terribly on the Western Front during the First Battle of Ypres. Hitler (pictured above, seated far right) was awarded the Iron Cross (Second Class) and promoted to the rank of lance corporal for saving a wounded officer stranded in noman’s-land. ‘It was,’ he wrote to his Munich landlord, ‘the happiest day of my life.’ Hitler’s task, as a dispatch runner, was to carry messages to and from the headquarters behind the front to the officers in the field, often under artillery fire. Having been promoted to corporal so early on in the war, the expectation would have been promotion to sergeant but his superiors denied him, believing Hitler would never command the respect of his men.
Hitler was not a typical soldier. He did not drink, smoke or seek the company of the local prostitutes, and actively voiced his disgust of these common pursuits. Although respected by his comrades, he seemed uninterested in forming friendships and preferred his own company, reading, sketching, painting watercolours, writing poetry and contemplating. (Hitler’s skill as an artist, although far from the genius he sometimes believed he was, was credible, but his poetry left much to be desired.) He received no parcels, nor letters, and when he did talk it was invariably to lecture on one of his pet subjects. His only companion was a white terrier dog he befriended and named Foxl. He was distraught when, on separate occasions, Foxl and his sketchbook were stolen. But the war gave Hitler’s life a purpose. The listless, daydreaming wanderer who had never done a day’s work had found his vocation.
In October 1916, the List Regiment joined the fray at the Battle of the Somme. Again, the regiment was decimated and Hitler, who had managed to survive unscathed for so long, had become almost a talisman for his comrades. But Hitler’s luck was about to run out and on 7 October a piece of shrapnel lodged in his left thigh – or, as later rumoured, his groin, and it was from this incident that the joke that Hitler lacked a testicle came. Despite his protestations that he was fit enough to carry on, Hitler was invalided back to Germany and to Berlin.
It was the future leader’s first visit to the capital. While impressed by the city and its architecture and history, Hitler became increasingly angered by the defeatist talk of its impoverished and hungry civilians. He said he saw Jews everywhere, equating them to spiders sucking the blood from people, and the streets were full of workers on strike, whom he despised as cowards and traitors.
Hitler as a soldier, c.1917, Picture from the Office for Emergency Management, Office of War Information
In March 1917, much to his delight,