Monday July 10th 1939

First of a series by SEFTON DELMER telling the inside story of the Fuehrer's rise, Delmer knew Hitler well during his struggle for power. In this series he outlines the life of the man whose decisions effect the whole world; tells how and why those decisions are made.

JUNE 1919. The lance-corporal looked ill, hungry, and apathetic as he sat on his chair, moodily pulling at the ends of his drooping moustache. (Once it had been a Kaiser moustache. The ends of it had turned up with martial ferocity. Now it was an ex-Kaiser moustache, its ends turned down.)
Around him in the barrack room of the 2nd infantry Regiment in Munich sat other soldiers, all dressed as he was in shabby, outworn field-grey uniforms showing signs of front-line wear. There was no cloth for new uniforms in the Munich of June 1919.

The war was over. But revolution and disorder were still sweeping Germany. Communists had attempted to seize the Government power from their Social Democrat allies together with whom in 1918 they had over thrown the Kaiser.
The socialists in order to fight the Communists had called in the help of the returning army under their monarchist officers. These soldiers in the barrack room had themselves only a month ago been fighting communists in the streets of Munich. The blockade was still in force and there was no cloth for uniforms.

At the blackboard at the end of the room stood a sergeant major, speech making on Germany’s future. It was part of a debate. The sergeant was putting in a word for the Jews. “We might as well blame the bicyclists for having lost the war”. He said “ Why the bicyclist’s? you ask. Well, why the Jews? There was a snigger. The joke was still new just then.
The lance corporal stopped pulling at his moustache. His cold grey eyes went black and hot with fury. Standing to attention he asked the officer-in-charge for leave to speak. Then glaring at the sergeant, he began in a low rough voice. Slowly and deliberately he spoke. " While we soldiers were at the front we were stabbed in the back by traitors at home who made the revolution. That's why we lost the war. Who were these traitors? who made the revolution? Who reaped the profit?. " Around us we see a whole nation suffering but among us some are thriving and prosperous. Who are these people who are getting fat while we starve? Comrades the Jews, The Jewish bankers, the Jewish stockbrokers are the real profiteers of our misfortune.

The soldiers in the barrack room cried, "Sehr Richtig" which is a German way of saying "Hear hear." The lance corporal didn't stop for another twenty minutes, and when he sat down his hair was disheveled, perspiration streamed down his face, his voice almost gone. Even the officer was impressed. Captain Mayer was his name. I met him in 1932 when he was one of the members of the Reichsbanner, the republican ant-nazi storm troops. He did not like to be reminded of what he did now. Captain Mayer took the lance-corporal aside and asked him whether he would care to become one of the army's political instructors,a job which until then had been reserved for officers.

He would first be put through an instructors training course, he said and then be sent out to spread the gospel of patriotism and nationalism among German soldiers and civilians, to win them away from the Marxists, pacifists and internationalists, who had got hold of them. " what do you say. Lance-Corporal Hitler?" he asked, when he had finished explaining. The Lance-Corporal brought his heels sharply together, "Zu Befel Herr Captain" he said, Adolf Hitler had accepted.

And thus was born, at the age of thirty, the Adolf Hitler we know today, Adolf Hitler the political soldier for whom, as for his Reichswehr chiefs, the war had never ended. For whom the peace when it was signed was just an armistice in which to liquidate the new regime established by the revolution of 1918. rearm Germany and take up once more the fight for German world domination. Don't forget this Reichswehr origin of Hitler. It is the real key to his career. All along he has been the Reichswehr's man.

The Reichswehr gave him men, they gave him advise, they trained his storm troopers, they gave him money, they helped him get more money from the industrialists. But above all they gave him their influential protection, the protection of those who within a few weeks of the downfall of the Kaiser and the end of the old regime had once more become the real rulers of Germany.

For that is what they were from the moment that socialist President Friedrich Ebert had a secret telephone line plugged through from his office to Field-Marshall von Hindenburg's G.H.Q. and Socialist War Minister Gustav Noske reorganized the army under its's old officers to help fight the Communists.

Hitler's remarkable personal achievement is that starting from scratch as one among many political agitators operating for the Reichwehr, starting in the lowest rank of them all, he quickly worked his way up to leadership of one of the Reichswehr's most important political instruments, the National Socialist party.

Then he proceeded to make that party so strong that when, in the autumn of 1932, the Reichswehr chiefs wanted to drop him, they found he was to powerful to ignore. They had to let him in on the Government racket.

Guess what was the first effect on Hitler of his new found dignity as a political instructor? he shaved off the ends of that ex-Kaiser moustache; he clipped it short. The lance- corporal wanted to look like an officer.

It was a historic moment that morning in the Munich barbers. The beginning of a new era when, with a clip of the scissors and a stroke of the razor. The Kaiser moustache became a Hitler moustache.

The odd thing is that during the previous thirty years of his life Hitler had never really been a success.

At school - the Realschule in Linz - his master reported: "The boy Adolf is quick enough in the uptake, but has no application or powers of concentration." As a matter of fact he is still not very good at concentrated reading. I have watched him skipping through books, just taking a glance at a page here and there. He cant be bothered with heavy stuff, prefers reading little snippets from newspapers. "Let me lay down the general line," he says to his Cabinet colleagues when they press him for closer instructions. ' I can't be bothered with the details.'

Hitler himself says in "Mein Kampf" that at school he was only interested in history and drawing. He claims rather grandly that at the age of twelve he already had an understanding of the menace of the Hapsburg dynasticicism in Austria to the cause of Pan-Germanism, the union of all german - speaking men in one great German Empire.

He did not stay at school for long. Soon after the death of his father ( a minor customs official who in 1879, ten years before Adolf's birth in the little border town of Braunau had changed his name from Alois Schickelgruber to Alois Hitler) he gave up going to school altogether. And he cannot have been more than thirteen or fourteen at the time.

Then his Mother died and Adolf with a basket full of clothes and a few shillings in his pocket went of to Vienna determined to become a great painter. But again he failed. He ploughed the entrance examination for the Vienna Art Academy, and they would not have him at the Architect's School because he did not have the necessary grounding in mathematics.

So young Adolf began drifting about among Vienna cafe and beerhouse Bohemians - on the police books he was registered as an art student - doing a spot of drawing or painting now and then, visiting museums, listening to debates in the Austrian Parliament, picking up an odd job of work here and there as a builders laborer.

His money gave out and one time he found himself in the streets begging for bread.

A man called Hanisch - he has disappeared mysteriously following the annexation of Austria - tells how, in a shelter for down-and-outs at the Vienna south railway station, he met Adolf Hitler and became his partner in selling hand painted postcards Hitler did the painting Hanisch the hawking.

As works of art they were not terrific. Mostly they were photographs which Hitler diligently copied and then coloured. But as genuine Hitlers they command a high price today.

Hanisch tells that Hitler was only able to start on this water-colourist's career, which kept him in bread and lodging for the rest of his stay in Vienna, by having a few shillings sent to him by his elder sister Angela Raubel, in whose favour at their mother's death he had generously renounced his share of their father's pension.

This sister by the way, is the only one of his brother's and sister's whom Hitler liked. Many years later he introduced me to her up in at his mountain chalet in Berchtesgaden. I remember her as a simple, comfortable frau, in an apron and black housekeepers dress.

I watched her looking at her brother. She worshipped him in terror and awe as a divine miracle.

In 1913 Hitler went to Munich, were he continued his Bohemian life, reading newspapers, talking politics, selling occasional watercolours to the frame makers who wanted something to fill up there space. After five years of hell in Vienna, he says this was the happiest time of his life.

There is a record of his having been rejected by the Austrian Army doctor's in Salzburg, where he went in the summer of 1913 to report for military service. They pronounced him physically unfit. And that is probably the real reason why on August 3, 1914 he applied for permission to join the Bavarian army.

Four years he spent at the front, but he never got beyond the rank of lance-corporal.

I once asked him why that was," I did not want promotion. I wanted to remain among the common soldiers." said Hitler.

There is something in that. Even today Hitler does not feel at home among officers and generals. He prefers the company of simple folk like Schaub, his valet-adjutant, Henrich Hoffman, his photographer, and Sepp Dietrich, the ex-cavalry sergeant captain of his bodyguard.

But that would not have prevented him becoming a sergeant.

No, there must have been some other reason.

Tuesday July 11th 1939

Hitler's first bluff saved his life - and won him the Iron Cross

It was not because he lacked courage or initiative that his commanders failed to Promote Adolf Hitler beyond the rank of lance - corporal during the war.

They made him a regimental runner, a job which requires courage and intelligence.

He was mentioned in dispatches for conspicuous bravery, given several medals, among them the Iron Cross First Class.

His Biographers say that it is not clear how he got it. I can tell you, because Hitler himself told me the story one day.

The Nazi newspapers had said during the election campaign that Hitler had got his Iron Cross by capturing sixteen British Tommies single handed. So one evening over over a cup of coffee at the house in Hanover of Lutze, the present chief of staff of the Storm Troops, I asked Hitler how he had done this. He raoared with laughter. "My dear Delmer" he said, "no one knows better than I do that I couldn't capture sixteen British soldiers single - handed. Those sixteen prisoners of mine were Frenchmen."

And then sipping his coffee and munching a cream puff - he is very fond of cakes, a taste he got in his cafe days, perhaps, when he could not afford them - he told me his story.

"It was the 1st or 2nd of June, 1918" he said, " I cant remember the exact date. Our troops had just taken by storm the little village of Vezponin in the line between Annecy and Soissons. I had orders to establish contact with the right wing of our advancing troops. To the right of me there were was a ridge which was being heavily shelled by our own guns and by the enemy. ' That is where our boys will be' I decided ' behind that ridge.'

I had just got there when a shell burst. When the smoke cleared away I found myself looking down into a shell crater. All about me seemed to be hundreds of tin hats dotted about like mushrooms 'My God,' I said to myself, ' they are Frenchmen. This is the end of Corporal Hitler.' " without a thought I roared at them in rotten french, 'Vous etes prisonniers." (you are prisoners)

( This is the only time I ever heard Hitler try to pronounce a foreign language.)

"At the same time I pretended to give orders to German troops behind me. Of course there were none, but the bluff came off."

Hitler chuckled with pleasure. There is nothing he likes so well as a successful bluff.

"Those Frenchies" he went on, " came scuttling out of the dug-out, first one, then another, then a third, then a fourth, then a fifth. Still they came, I covered them with my revolver. My heart sank as more and more came.

" When they were all out, I found I was up against sixteen of them; fourteen men, an officer,and a sergeant. I had ten rounds in my revolver, no bombs. Four of my prisoners had revolvers, the rest had dropped their arms. I wanted to tell the armed men to throw away their guns, but my French wasn't equal to it, so I just roared and screamed at them and made them march to the village.

" Every step I was afraid they would turn on me. I kept my eyes on the four fellows armed with revolvers, determined to shoot the moment they made a false move. All the time I kept my eyes peeled for any German soldiers who might come to my help. But the village seemed deserted. " at last I caught sight of two telegraph mechanics. I hailed them. Actually they were unarmed, but between the three of us we shepherded the sixteen Frenchmen into safe keeping. On August 4 1918, they gave me the Iron Cross First Class, for this.

No, I don't think it was for lack of courage or lack of initiative that Hitler remained a mere lance-corporal. His fellow -soldier Mend, who was in Hitler's regiment and also joined the Nazi Party, wrote a book about his experiences with Hitler at the front. He describes him as a bad mixer, a morose, moody kind of fellow. Hitler he says, ever received any letters from home, never wrote a letter. Hitler had no girl friends. If he made a joke, which was rare, it would be a sarcasm.

He never groused about the food or the sergeant. He had none of the ordinary grouses of a common soldier. His grouses were of a higher order As, for instance, when he objected that too much fuss was being made over the funerals of fallen enemy officers.

He went through all the correct hero motions; covered his officer with his own body under fire, begging him pathetically to "preserve the regiment from losing its beloved commander"; wrote to the regiment when he was wounded asking to be allowed back to the front...." I can't bear to be in Munich when my comrades are opposite the enemy."

Yes, I can well see that this un-earthly hero-soldier Hitler would be difficult company in a trench, not suitable as a leader in close contact with his men. But it is just this hero stuff that has put him over big with the German masses and has given him his Messianic appeal.

When the sailors mutinied in the German warships at Kiel in November 1918 they sent their emissaries all over the country proclaiming the revolution. Some of these sailors came to the little Pomeranian town of Pasewalk, where Hitler was lying in hospital, his eyes just beginning to recover their sight after the gassing in France. ( A British gas shell had blinded him on October 13 1918, on a hill just south of Wervick near Ypres.)

When the chaplain of the hospital, on November 10 broke the news to the wounded of Germany's defeat, Hitler left the hospital and equipped with a soldiers railway pass, made his way down to Munich to join the home battalion of his regiment.

But things were not better in Munich. The Jewish Communist Kurt Eisner had seized power there and established a Bravarian Free State. The reserve battalion was being run, not by its officers, but by a Communist soldiers council.

Hitler's sense of authority was outraged. " I found the goings on here so loathsome," he says, "that I decided to get away if I could."

He had himself sent to Traunstein, where there was a camp for British and Russian prisoners of war. He stayed there as a guard. He did not join any of the volunteer corps being formed on the frontier of Bravaria by General Von Epp and other officers ready to put the Reds out of Bravaria.

But Hitler finally had to leave Traunstein, for the prisoners were sent home and the camp was disbanded. He got back to Munich at the worst possible moment Kurt Eisner had held an election which revealed that there was a backing for him of only three per cent of the voters. Nevertheless, he had not resigned. A Young monarchist, Count Arco-Valley - the same Arco-Valley who was in 1933 put in prison because he said he would shoot Hitler if he got a chance - had then shot down Kurt Eisner as he was on the way to Munich Parliament.

Chaos followed. And it was at this moment, in April 1919, when the soldiers, peasants, and workers' councils, who had made themselves masters of the city, were murdering prisoners, arresting and killing anyone whom, through birth, property, or education, they suspected of being an enemy, that Hitler arrived in the city.

He found everything topsy-turvy. Ernst Toller, the socialist dramatist (who was found hanged in New York a few weeks ago). was Minister of Defense

A Lunatic named Dr. Lipp who had been in an asylum for the insane, was Foreign Minister. Even while Epp and his troops were marching down on the City Dr. Lipp in paranoiac magnificence announced that he had declared war on Switzerland and Wurtemburg in the name of the Pope.

Hitler moved about Munich, acting as a kind of spy for the Reichswehr. A Fifth Column man he would be called today.

The communist suspected him. They sent three men to arrest him on April 27 just before Epp and his men entered the town. But Hitler was not arrested. He had kept his rifle by him, and when the Communists came he pointed it at them. They went away.

On May 3, the day after the Reichswehr had captured Munich. Hitler made his report on the activities of the German soldiers to the investigating military commission. A number of the men whom he had denounced were caught and shot. Others were imprisoned.

Shortly after he was invited to become a Reichswehr political instructor.

It didn't take Hitler long to satisfy his superiors at the Reichswehr course for political preachers that he was right man to be sent out evangelising among the soldiers and civilians.

They sent him first to address soldiers in their barracks.

Then one day Captain Mayr handed him a piece of paper. "German Workers Party Stenecker Brewery," it said, giving the date and hour of a political meeting. " Lance-Corporal Hitler," said the captain, "go and find out what kind of show this Workers Party is. let me have a report on it for the political intelligence."

Hitler went. He found the German Worker Party unimpressive , just one of the many debating clubs springing out of the political tension of Germany's defeat.

twenty five persons were present in the beer hall, sitting at the tables with their beer in front of them, simple, lower middle-class folk. Their chairman was a plumber, their secretary a journalist, their only significance was that they were not reds.

Hitler made a short speech slamming a professor who had spoken advocating that Bravaria should Secede from the reich and join Austria in hopes of getting better peace terms.

Hitler did not sit down when he had spoken, but made straight for the door. He was almost out of the building when the chairman caught up with him, pressed on hi a pamphlet, "My Political Awakening," and asked him for his name and address, Reluctantly, political instructor Hitler gave them.

A week later a postcard arrived for him at the barracks of the Second Infantry Regiment, where he was still quartered, requesting him to attend a committee meeting of the German Workers Party. Without asking him the plumber had made Adolf Hitler Member No. 7of the party and put him on the committee.

Political Instructor Lance-Corporal Hitler decided that he could use the party for Reichswehr purposes. He began to work for it. From October 1919, when he first began to speak for them to February24, 1920, thanks to Hitler's able reorganisation of the party's propaganda machinery, and above all thanks to the help of his chiefs in the political department of the Reichswehr, Hitler had worked up the attendances at meetings from twenty five to to 2,000.

And the party continued to grow. And with it Hitler.

The applause and devotion of the hundreds and thousands, and later millions, who hailed Hitler as the savior of the Fatherland, had a profound effect on the lance-corporal.

The sincere adulation of the crowds mesmerised him. It made him what they believed him to be - a leader without thought for himself, who was prepared to sacrifice his life, his comfort, his friends for the cause of the Fatherland's redemption; whose one interest in life was to lead the German people into a position of world domination.

But for a start he was just the corporal out to make good and please his superiors. Pleasing them he was.

Wednesday July 12th 1939

Hitler lost his first "war of nerves"

Are you watching Hitler's war of nerves for the conquest of Danzig and Poland.? Then let me tell you about the war of nerves he fought in 1923 for the conquest of Munich and Germany.

And how in the end he himself lost his nerve -and the war.

The four years of peace from 1919 to 1923 had seen a very different rate of advancement for the man who in four years of war had risen only from private to lance-corporal.

by the spring of 1923 he had become the general of a great army called the National Socialist German Worker's Party, with several hundred thousands of fanatical followers and 10,000 well trained soldiers organised in his private Storm troops.

The timid lance-corporal had become the confident confederate of generals and Ministers. Vienna's down at heel Bohemian cafe politician had become the owner of a Munich daily -- the Voelkischer Beobachter ( bought for him with the money of the army).

Not that it had been an easy progress. He had had to work hard to get his followers, thumping the tub in beer halls and circus. (an anti jewish thump mostly), waving the new swastika flag that he had designed himself, splashing aggressive posters all over the city, fighting interrupters at his meetings with beer mugs and revolvers, breaking up Socialist meetings with his own gang.

Once he had to do a month in prison for beating up a Socialist named Ballerstedt.

Twice he had to purge his party to assert his own leadership. On the first occasion he expelled its president, Scharrer, the man who had founded it. On the second occasion he defeated Julius Streicher - yes Julius Streicher, the Jew - baiter - who had challenged him for its control.

All through he had had the support of the Reichswehr. But the Reichswehr only looked on him as a drummer boy, a propagandist whom they thought they would drop once he had accomplished his mission of drumming the German millions into line behind the military dictatorship which they hoped to establish> Hitler thought differently of his prospects.

The break comes in 1923. Until then the big idea of both the Reichswehr officers and of the Right-Wing politicians had been to use army ruled Bavaria as the base for a march on Berlin, at the end of which the Reich Government was to be deposed and a military dictatorship established instead.

But on January 1 the French march into the Ruhr. The Reich Government reply by ordering passive resistance, a strike of all the mines, factories, railways, and other services of the district. Sabotage squads get to work harassing the French and down in Munich the Reichswehr officers hopefully prepare for war.

Ernst Roehm, a young army captain, as long ago as 1919 had put at Hitler's disposal his own gang of bullies from the "Iron Fist" organisation and had then built up from them the S.A., the Hitler Storm Troops.

Now he takes the Storm troops out of Hitler's hands, arms them with the guns he had hidden from the entente officers, drills them under Reichswehr officers.

They temporarily become a division in the so-called "Black" Reichswehr, the illegal army with which Germany secretly defied the Versailles Treaty.

Hitler himself is dead against the idea of opposing the French by force of arms. He argues that it is no use attempting to fight the foreign enemy until the foe within has been conquered.

First the Communists then the Jews then the French is his programme. And he says so at his meetings. "Not down with France must be our slogan" he roars "It must be down with the November criminals."

Hitler plans a coup for May 1. On the pretext that he must break up the Socialist May Day rally he demands that the Reichswehr, in return for his having lent them his Storm troops, shall let him parade them in Munich with the arms in which they have been trained.