Norman Stone reviews Thomas Weber’s Hitler’s First War. It sounds like an amazing piece of scholarship. How is it possible that there’s any new archival material to discover about Hitler?
I’ve already ordered the book from Amazon. But this tidbit bears highlighting now:
Mr. Weber has discovered that, briefly at the turn of 1918-19, and unmentioned in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wore a red brassard and supported the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.
Oh. My.
Well, if I ever do a new edition, that’ll have to go in there.
As I recall, Hitler was his battalion's representative to a short-lived leftist revolutionary government led by a Jew named Eisner. This has been a subject of considerable speculation. Hitler was clearly spying on radical movements for the German military during the year 1919 (which is how he became acquainted with what would become the Nazi Party) so he may have been simply spying. Then again, Nazism clearly had socialist elements so he may have been sincere. For a man who ended WWI with no education, no skills, no resources, and no prospects, socialism may have seemed attractive.
Another piece of Hitler trivia I find fascinating comes from the book Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum. A (purportedly) fictional story was written about a German soldier blinded by a gas attack. The treating doctor used hypnosis to cure the hysterical blindness by telling the soldier that he was the savior come to save the Fatherland from the Jews. The soldier then goes on to become that anti-Jewish savior. The funny thing is that the story was written by the doctor who treated Hitler for his blindness. Hitler's blindness may well have been hysterical in that he recovered both far more quickly and far more completely than most victims blinded by gas. And in Mein Kampf Hitler describes a vision he had when WWI ended and he was being treated for blindness caused by a gas attack in which his destiny to save Germany was revealed. One wonders where reality ends and fiction begins.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFinally the proof that we've all been waiting for! At long last we can answer definitively that Hitler wore a red brassard and supported the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, just like Obama! Wait, scratch that, just like Woodrow Wilson! Or maybe Hillary Clinton! From this solid foundation, its just a stones throw to Hitler was a man of the left.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAdolf Hitler touted Bavarian Soviet Republic & Swastika as S-letters for "socialism"
At the turn of 1918-19, and unmentioned in "Mein Kampf," Hitler wore a red brassard and supported the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, according to Thomas Weber in the book "Hitler's First War" (Oxford University Press, 450 pages). Perhaps that played a role in the German National Socialist leader adopting a swastika symbol that had been used by Soviet socialists on currency with the dates 1917 and 1918.
Although an ancient symbol, the swastika was used sometimes to represent crossed S-letters for "socialism" under the National Socialist German Workers Party, as shown by the historian Dr. Rex Curry, author of "Swastika Secrets."
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