what was the impact of his country's defeat on him
Answers
. AnswerThe First World War has often been described as the defining event of the twentieth
century. Most of the men who later went on to shape Europe’s destinies either
served in the war in some capacity or other, military or civilian, or were shaped
by it: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harold Macmillan, Anthony
Eden, Leon Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin—the list is endless. Its most famous graduate,
however, was surely Adolf Hitler. It is not surprising, therefore, that his biogra-
phers have particularly emphasized this period in the life of the later German
dictator. Joachim Fest speaks of ‘salvation through the war’, and ‘the war as a
formative experience’.1
Ian Kershaw writes that ‘The First World War made Hitler
possible’, not just by ultimately creating the domestic political constellation which
brought the Nazis to power, but also by providing, especially in the last two years
of the conflict, ‘a vital staging-post in Hitler’s ideological development’.2
Hitler’s
most recent biographer, Volker Ullrich, entitles the relevant chapter ‘The key
experience of the war’. ‘Without the experience of the First World War and its
consequences’, writes Ullrich, ‘Hitler would not have become that which he was to
become; it made his whole career possible in the first place.’3
Gerhard Hirschfeld,
who studied some of Hitler’s later speeches on the First World War, saw the
conflict as ‘an experience which shaped him personally in profound ways and
was also educational’.4
John Williams, the first historian to take a detailed look at
Hitler’s experience of the Great War, speaks of ‘a university of the trenches’ which
educated him politically and militarily. ‘It hardly exaggerates to say’, Williams
claims, ‘that every military decision made by Hitler between 1939 and 1945 was
in some way influenced or coloured by his experiences with the List Regiment.’5
* I thank Thomas Weber, Wolfram Pyta, James Carleton Paget, William Mulligan, Holger Afflerbach,
Christopher Clark and Gerhard Weinberg for their very helpful arguments on the first draft of this piece. I
am also grateful for comments from a robust referee, some of whose objections have been addressed in the
revised article. 1 Joachim C. Fest, Hitler. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt and Berlin: Prophylaen, 1973), pp. 101, 105. 2 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), pp. 73, 101. 3 Volker Ullrich, Adolf Hitler. Biographie, vol. 1: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2013), pp. 64–89 at
p. 64. 4 Gerhard Hirschfeld, ‘Der Führer spricht vom Krieg: der Erste Weltkrieg in den Reden Adolf Hitlers’, in Gerd
Krumeich, Anke Hoffstadt und Arndt Weinrich, eds, Nationalsozialismus und Erster Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext,
2010), pp. 35–51 at p. 35. 5 John Williams, Corporal Hitler and the Great War, 1914–1918: the List Regiment (London and New York: Cass,
2005), pp. 4–1
Answer:Devastated by the loss, Hitler would consider Geli the only true love affair of his life. He soon began a long relationship with Eva Braun, a shop assistant from Munich, but refused to marry her. The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 again threatened the stability of the Weimar Republic.
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