Evil, Part 7: Hitler to the First World War

Perhaps the fundamental argument in psychology is the one between nature and nurture. That is, what is the greatest predictor of our actions and histories. Are we defined more by the environment than by the genetic legacy handed down through our parents. The consensus now is that they are both equal patners, that genetic heritage, such as predisiposition of disease, physical attributes and defects, or mental issues passed on through generations are equally important at diet, the world, politics, war, geography and economic environment one is born to. In the last part, we looked at Hitler's childhood. For accuracy it must be pointed out that the record on his early years is incomplete and contradictory. Equally important, there is a bias in assuming any anecdote or recollection is a predictor of the horror of the Second World War and the Holocaust. His rage as a youth might have been benign and normal, but through the prism of history takes on a whole new perspective. The incident of abuse with a goat might also be dismissed as peer pressure, or terribly foolish and ignorant acts many boys make and later regret terribly. Understanding Hitler is less an effort to identify individuals yaesr before they commit terrible acts, as it is an attempt to tempering broader extremes of behavior, and understanding the need for intervention on a wider social level.

It is a fantasy to believe you would murder Hitler as a child to prevent the future. History is only certain when seen as past. It is never certain in the present. Hitler as a child was innocent of all his future crimes. As with the enabling Act, and all those who later supported and protected him, as well as those who later followed him-numbering in the millions-they are as culpable, and as much a part of his so-called evil as he was. Like nature versus nurture, with an evil act on the scale of the Nazis, or the Japanese Rape of Nanking, the slaughter of Srebrenica in Bosnia, or the Rwandan Genocide, intent and process are equal agents. That is the social, political and historical context that drives events, communities, impressions and nations is as important as the desire to cause pain and harm to a group or individual.

It is through those prisms that we must consider Hitler as a young man; nature vs nurture, intent vs process. The record becomes more detailed here, particularly after his move to Vienna. Friends decribed him as serious and intense, even brooding.  The boyhood hints at bouts of rage are supported as he grows older. Those bouts could be sudden and intense. Hilter was not a liar, per se, but throughout his life there was a penchant for omission and manipulation of facts. He held obsessive passions for woman. A friend described a young Viennese woman whom he floowed and watched, wrote long passioante letters to but could never apprach or deliver the correspondance. He grew intensely jealous when seeing her on the street in the company of other men.

Hitler was not overtly anti-semitic. His fathr did not tolerate it in the house, but that must be viewed through European and American sensibilities of the period.  At the time European society as a whole was very anti-semitic. An environment that can be compared to White America's attitude towards blacks at the turn of the 20th century when lynching and other abuses were widespread. It was a social envirnment, and being against such atrocities did not make one pro-black.

In 1907 Hitler's mother succumbed to a long illness. The physician was a Jew. Though her death was aterrible blow to Hitler, he seemed to understand the inevitability of the outcome. He painted a card for the doctor out of gratitude, and made no mention, including blame, when recalling the incident in Mein Kampf. What was of greater disappointment was not getting into the Art Academy in Vienna. Hitler had always held a greater purpose for himself, and had scoffed at menial jobs, as he saw them, like postal clerk or baker. He dreamed of life as a great artist. One night, at a performance of the opera Rienzi, by Wagner, an inspired Hitler bragged he would perform like Rienzi, who dies in the flames of a ruined Rome.

Now living in a squalid flat, Hitler's fall in society, his depression of failing in his art and living on the lowest rungs of Vienna were likely formative for his particular psychosis. Forced now to take menial jobs to survive, his view of society and his bigotry. Living in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian empire he expressed more and more discontent over the influence of Slavs and non-Germans. He avoided mandatory service in the Austro-Hungarian army, likely for that very reason, growing more ardent in his German nationalism.

He was not a so-called coward, however. Hitler fled to Munich, saved from poverty and military service by an unexpected inheritence. He considered himself an anarchist, and neighbors considered him a loner and withdrawn. Earning a meager living from selling paintings, some of that could be ascribed to a fear of arrest for dodging the draft in neighboring Austria. His luck ran out the winter of 1914. Arrested, he claimed it was all a misunderstanding, but for some reason the Austrian draft board found him unfit for duty. Here the record is vague once more. After Germany moved into Austria in 1938, all of his military records were seiezed and destroyed.

With the first shots of the First World War in July 1914, Hitler volunteered to join a Bavarian regiment. By all accounts he was thrilled with the war. It would give him purpose, ending a life of miserable existence. Hitler was a good, but prgmatic soldier. He volunteered as a runner, a dangerous job, but allowed him access to the rear, an occasional warm bed and hot meals. Still, he showed careless regard for his own safety, a trait he would display through the first successful years, for Germany, of the Second World War. Comrades here too described him as brooding and self-righeous. He had a prudish manner, perticularly concerning sex, and delighted at shooting rats-a common practice in trenches because they fed on the dead and carried lice and disease.

What is most significant about the war, in which he was wounded and nearly blinded in a gas attack, was the way it solidified and focused his German nationalism. Like many Germans he was crushed by Germany's surrender, and felt as immasculated by the Versailles Treaty as the nation was. The Great Depression only exacerbated that feeling. The new invention of Communism and Bolshevism seemed a further assault o German national identity. Coupled with latent Jewish bigotry, it all mixed into a caustic stew of which Hitler was still an inconsequential part.

That would change in the years to come. His rise would be slow and precipitous, and by no means secure. It would require a network of supporters, each acting on their own behalf, and for their own interests, by exploiting the ego of a man whose grandiose personal perception had been ravaged in Vienna, only to be resurrected in the trenches of the First World war. Nature, nurture, process and intent came together in the perfect storm.

Next: The Holocaust Machine