History
Bruce's HIstory Lessons: From Germany’s ashes Hitler rises
In early November of 1918, Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler was recuperating from war wounds in a military hospital in the town of Pasewalk, located in German Pomerania. Specifically he was suffering from blindness in both eyes, caused by poison gas fired by the British at the German trenches in Flanders a month earlier. For Hitler, a twice decorated “runner” — or military message carrier — with the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, World War I was over. A month later, on November 11, the war was over for everyone else as Germany agreed to surrender and the Armistice was established on “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918.
But the news that Germany was about to surrender reached Corporal Hitler a day earlier, on November 10, in the aforementioned military hospital. A hospital chaplain, sobbing uncontrollably, told Corporal Hitler and his recuperating comrades that a revolution had broken out in Berlin, Germany’s leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had abdicated and fled Germany, and the civilian leaders of the new German “republic” had sued for peace.
The news stunned Hitler, all the more so because he knew that the German army had not been defeated militarily. Indeed, while it was outnumbered, lacking sufficient military equipment, and its soldiers half starved, it was still intact, still in the field, and still prepared to defend the Fatherland.
By his own account, upon learning of Germany’s surrender, Hitler, still half blind, stumbled back to his hospital bed and wept. “So it had all been in vain,” he later wrote. All the sacrifice and the many millions of Germans dead and wounded had been for naught.
And then Corporal Hitler had another thought. If the German army had not been defeated, then those who had begun the revolution in Berlin, deposed the Kaiser, and surrendered to the Allied powers had “stabbed Germany in the back.” What’s more, the traitors were obviously the Bolsheviks and the criminal Jewish element that had caused Germany so many problems for so long. Their treason and treachery must be avenged.
And who would be the avenger? “In the next few days I became conscious of my own fate,” Hitler would write. He personally would lead Germany back to greatness and wipe Germany clean of the stain of Bolshevism and Jewry.
The rest is history. Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers — or Nazi — Party, discovered he had a talent for demagoguery, gathered a loyal following that was both unscrupulous and violent in carrying out his orders, and finally took total dictatorial power in Germany in 1934. There was trouble ahead for Germany’s Bolsheviks, and even more so for its Jews.
Bruce G. Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net.
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