Was Hitler a coward in World War I? This is the job that embarrassed him

2023-08-24 08:19:54

October 13, 1918 was a day that could have changed the history of humanity. That day, a young German army corporal screamed in terror when the British attacked the bunker where he was resting with poison gas. Many of his companions were killed, but he managed to escape and, as he explained shortly afterwards, was able to head “for the rear with burning eyes.” After several months of blindness he recovered and devoted himself to his great passion, politics. That boy was Adolf Hitler, and he has repeated himself a thousand times that he did not fight bravely during the First World War. Reality or fiction?

The mystery is hard to unravel. The little that Hitler commented on the Great War is found in his memoirs, the ‘Mein Kampf’. In them he explained that, after learning about the start of hostilities, he joined the army. «On August 3, 1914 I presented a direct request to King Ludwig III of Bavaria, with the request to be incorporated into a Bavarian regiment». His request was granted and he joined the List Regiment, with which he fought on the Rhine and in Flanders.

And from there, to the battles. Hitler fought on the Somme in late 1916 until he was wounded. He was then sent to the rear until “late 1917,” when he rejoined his old unit. His testimony is always general and does not focus on the details of life at the front.

There is only one moment in which he does narrate an event in detail, and that is the gas attack he suffered in 1918, when he was in a bunker located on a hill near Ypres. While he was resting, the English troops threw mustard gas inside the fortification. «At dawn, I was seized with terrible pains that […] They got more intense.” The toxins caused him to go blind for several months.

This version of his participation in the conflict is real, although incomplete. It is true that Hitler was assigned to the 1st Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment (known, in effect, as List Regiment), but the truth is that, for most of the time, he was a corporal’cyclist‘ or cyclist messenger.

The soldier ignored this information and let it be seen that he had fought in the trenches as just another soldier. Big mistake, because the work of the post office at the time was very dangerous and respected by the commanders. In fact, he always volunteered for the most difficult missions.

An example of this is that he was wounded twice while guarding a message and that he obtained two decorations for it: the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Iron Cross 1st Class. He, on the contrary, let Nazi propaganda spread that the last medal had been won after capturing seven French soldiers alone. In return, he also did not write that the blindness of which he was so proud was not the fault of the gas, but was “hysterical” or psychological.

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