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The city of Sarajevo lies at the heart of the Balkans, in southeastern Europe. In the 1910s, this part of the continent is a tinderbox. It may be 500 miles from the Austrian capital, but for the ruling imperial family, the Habsburgs, maintaining control of Sarajevo is high on their priority list. Today, on June 28th, 1914, the city is preparing to host a state visit from the emperor-in-waiting, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
It will go down as one of the most significant days in global history. My name is Paul McGann, and welcome to Real Dictators, the series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants. You'll be right there in their meeting rooms and private quarters, on the battlefields and in their bunkers, up close and personal with some of history's most evil leaders. In this episode, we continue the story of Adolf Hitler's early years, the period that saw him rise from a childhood of obscurity
to a young adulthood of rebellion and treason. From Noisa Podcasts, this is Real Dictators. In 1914, Sarajevo has been part of Austria-Hungary for less than half a century, and its integration into the empire has been far from smooth. Many who live here, chiefly the Bosnian Serbs, are not content to submit to imperial rule. Instead, they want to join with the neighboring state of Serbia. Dialogue has gotten them nowhere.
A radical band of students called Young Bosnia decide to take matters into their own hands. Their plan is to lie in wait for the Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he parades through the city and murder him in cold blood. They're boys, or barely men, but this group of teenagers is about to upend the world order. On the morning of June 28th, the Archduke and his wife, the Duchess Sophie, take to the streets of Sarajevo in an open-top touring car.
The Archduke sports an impressive handlebar moustache. His tall ceremonial shako hat is perched precariously on his head. Duchess Sophie wears a plumed bonnet attached with a headscarf so it doesn't blow off in the drag. She clutches a bouquet of flowers, a gift from a respectful dignitary. The roads are lined with well-wishers and locals straining for a sight of their future emperor. The Archduke's car turns into Franz Joseph Street.
The car grinds to a halt right in front of a deli. A 19-year-old called Gavrilo Princip steps forward out of the shadow of the deli's awning. He takes out a gun. He fires two shots. Sophie, the Duchess, is the first to die. Franz Ferdinand will succumb to his wounds soon after. This assassination is the spark that ignites World War I. The delicate balance of power in Europe is broken.
On the 28th of July, Austria-Hungary, backed up by Germany, declares war on Serbia. Other countries soon follow with their own declarations. The Allied powers line up against the Central Powers. This scene is set for one of the largest and deadliest conflicts the world has ever seen. 600 miles north of Sarajevo, in the German city of Munich, men and women take to the street to celebrate the declaration of war. Many feel that war is long overdue,
Germany should be, deserves to be, a global power. It's high time the Kaiser fulfilled the promise of the unified nation. No longer will the German Empire be held back by its enemies. Among those flocking to Odeonsplatz, Munich's central square, is a 25-year-old watercolor painter, an occasional laborer. His dark hair is combed neatly to the side. In one hand he clutches a hat. His neat mustache sits above a mouth that cracks into a grin.
Adolf Hitler may be an Austrian citizen by birth, but in his mind he belongs wholly to Germany. Munich is his home now, and he relishes the prospect of Germany at war. But how did Hitler end up here, in Munich? Last we heard, he was a struggling artist in Vienna. It's been one year since the young man from the borderlands moved to Germany for good. Hitler had been living in Vienna in the hope of establishing himself as an artist.
But come 1913, it's clear that mission has ended in failure. Hitler has been rejected twice from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. When he sought to reapply as an architecture major, he was turned down again. He's failed to wean himself off the allowance he received from his late parents' estate. His watercolour landscapes barely pay the bills. He makes up the rest, working construction shifts and doing odd jobs. He decides he's had enough of Vienna and enough of Austria.
He's grown up idolizing the German Empire. For a time, as a child, his family lived in Bavaria. He speaks the German language with a Bavarian accent. It makes total sense that he should make Munich, the largest city in the state, his home. Like so much of Hitler's early life, the precise circumstances of his crossing into Germany are shrouded in mystery.
But reading between the lines, historians believe turmoil in Hitler's personal life may play a part in his decision to leave Vienna when he does. Professor Thomas Weber
We don't really even know what Hitler was up to during his last year in Vienna. Hitler moved from Vienna to Germany, from Vienna to Munich, in 1913. But he consistently and repeatedly lied about when he arrived. He would claim time and time again to have arrived in Germany in 1912, when in reality he only arrived there in 1913. Why?
I think it's reasonable to assume that something fundamental happened during those years and that Hitler, for whatever reason, really, really didn't want people to know about what had happened. Even in the early to mid-1920s, when he was talking to people very close to him, she would later say that it was really weird how Hitler would happily talk about his childhood years, but
that he was always kind of blocking off once they would get to the Vienna years. And she always felt that something personal and quite possibly something relating to encounters with Jews happened during that time. So again, I have to stress, we don't know what happened, but we do know that Hitler didn't want us to know about it. Whatever this mysterious event may be,
Whether it's a falling out with a Jewish acquaintance, or some other kind of upheaval in Hitler's personal life, there's an additional explanation for his sudden departure from Vienna. This one is rather less ambiguous. He's dodging the draft. Young men in Austria are required to register for army service. This is all the more important, as the Habsburg Empire gears up for the war to end all wars. Adolf Hitler, however, has no intention of serving in the Austrian army. Professor Frank McDonagh
So he should have actually been called up into the Austrian army. He says it's not because he's a coward. It's because he hates the Habsburg Empire. He doesn't want to fight for them, he says. But he disappears because he's going to get caught up with the authorities that are trying to find him. Hitler views Austria-Hungary as a mongrel empire and its army as a mongrel army. The ranks of Habsburg forces contain faces and voices from all over Europe. Hitler loathes it.
He can't stand the thought of fighting for a multicultural nation. The Austrian recruitment officers have been on his case for a while. They've been tracing his movements, following up on all the addresses he's had over the years. And the noose is tightening. Professor Claudia Kunz,
He was registered living in Linz, which is in Austria, and Hitler had not registered for the draft. He was living a feckless life on the streets of Vienna. So rather than going home to Linz and registering for the draft, he hopped on a train and went to Munich. Once again, Adolf Hitler's parents lend him a hand from beyond the grave. As the final part of his late father's estate passes into his hands, Hitler has the means to set himself up in Germany.
In Munich, the young man picks up pretty much where he left off in Vienna. And for the next year or so in Munich, he lived pretty much like he did in Vienna. Shiftless, hanging around in coffee houses. He had enough money to stay in a rooming house. Hitler has swerved military service. But as a child of the borderlands, he should know better than to think he's gotten away with it. The border between the two empires is fairly porous. People pass to and fro all the time.
The Austrian recruiters are more than capable of tracing Hitler to Munich.
They catch up with him once again. Fate caught up with him. Hitler, in 1913, was found out. The Linz authorities contacted the consulate. They discovered Hitler. They brought him in. They said, OK, you've got to register for the draft or face prison. Hitler pulled wires. He did everything he could. Finally, the day came when he had to report to the Austrian consulate in Munich. And they said, no, you have to be drafted immediately.
They insist that he travels back over the border to the Austrian city of Salzburg to be assessed by the recruiting officer there.
Hitler finally did agree on presenting himself for a military medical exam across the border in Salzburg, so back in Austria, and that resulted him receiving a military exemption on medical grounds. To be drafted and to be actually taken into the army, you have to pass a physical, and Hitler flunked his physical. So he escaped the draft. He gets off with a doctor's note saying that his chest is too bad, he's got a chest complaint.
So the great rabble-rousing dictator actually serves as unfit to become a soldier. Whether or not he, objectively speaking, was too sick is difficult to say, but it's unlikely. It's more likely that even though this is just a few months before the First World War, I think in a way they could see he was a guy who was extremely unwilling to serve and it was just easier to give him a medical exemption than to do anything else.
Adolf Hitler is free to resume his carefree Munich lifestyle. A year later, in 1914, the declaration of war finally comes.
And everywhere in Europe, people sensed that a war was going to come. After the Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in June of 1914, tensions ran high. How could the successor to the Austrian Empire throne be murdered without something happening? The end of July, war was declared. Hitler rushed to the center of Munich, joined the throngs of people.
cheering that the war began because it came as a relief. This is a generation that had never known war. All they had was the glorious pictures that they learned in their history book. One fateful photograph captures this moment. The crowd gathers in Odeonsplatz in Munich, celebrating the declaration of war. In their midst, Adolf Hitler. In later years, this photo will become central to Nazi mythology. Hitler will track down the photo and have it published far and wide.
claiming it as proof of his unshakable commitment to the German military cause. And years later, Hitler asked his private photographer to look over all the pictures of the crowd in the Munich, in downtown Munich, cheering when the war came and finally with a magnifying glass, his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, found a picture of Hitler with a big sort of handlebar mustache cheering in the crowd.
This photograph started to be used by Nazi propaganda in the late 1920s. And the reason why they used this is because it kind of personified or epitomized this idea that Hitler was just a man in the crowd. He was just an ordinary German. And it was the experiences of those four years that brought this man from the crowd into being the leader of Germany. Hitler may have dodged the draft, but that's not to say that he's a coward.
Despite his maneuverings, he's not actually opposed to the idea of joining off as a soldier. In fact, he relishes the prospect of taking up arms. It's just that for him, it's crucial who he fights for. Germany and Austria may be on the same side, but as far as Hitler is concerned, there is only one empire to which he'll attach his colors. The German Empire. All day long.
Adolf Hitler served in the German armed forces during the First World War, which is extremely strange because Hitler was, in fact, until 1932, no German citizen. So why would this Austrian citizen serve in the German armed forces?
He sees himself as German and he also sees Austria as German. He thinks Austria should be united with Germany, something that he achieves later on. So it's kind of like natural for him not to want to fight for the Habsburg Empire. And so he says he far prefers to fight for Germany. Munich's conscripts are part of the Bavarian Army. The Bavarian Army is a subsidiary of the German forces. So it's the Bavarian Army Hitler wants to be part of.
He wanted to fight for Bavaria, he wanted to fight for his country, and he wanted to live out the heroic life he'd read about when he was a boy, reading about history. As a kid or as a teenager, as someone growing up in the borderlands of Germany and Austria, he genuinely thinks that all Germans belong under one roof, that Austria-Hungary as this multi-ethnic dynastic empire is just a kind of weird...
thing and that he definitely does not want to serve them, but he wants to serve the fatherland. He wants to serve the country that would hopefully, if victorious, help to bring all Germans together under one roof. So he volunteers. Among circumstances that have never been quite resolved, he's being accepted
into the Bavarian army because, I mean, of course, technically they shouldn't have really allowed a foreigner to serve, but they did accept him. We don't quite know whether they just didn't look at whether he did have German citizenship, whether Hitler's claim that he had received special dispensation from the office of the Bavarian king is true, or whether just the ex
Like many boys at the time, Hitler was raised on tales of military heroism and German greatness. But it's one thing to read romantic accounts of war. It's another thing entirely to become a soldier yourself.
He of course has never been trained at this point, so he is trained over the next few weeks, both in Munich and in a military training ground outside of Munich. And then in late October, he's being sent together with this newly established unit, the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. He's being sent to Belgium, and it is then there that his regiment would serve throughout the war.
For 400 miles, the Western Front stretches all the way from the North Sea down to the Swiss border. This will be the decisive arena of conflict. Young German soldiers, like their Allied counterparts, arrive in Flanders with their heads full of glory. The war has been marketed to them as a great adventure, a chance to see the world, to play their part in Germany's coming of age. Soldiers on both sides of no man's land dig their positions into the earth.
The scales soon fall from their eyes. The reality of war is quite different from what the old tales would have you believe. Trench life was very, very hard. The trenches were deep. They were muddy. The soldiers had to dig their own trenches. Sometimes they would spend days, nothing would happen, all quiet on the Western Front. And then they would get the order to go over the top into the enemy fire and risk their lives, often lose their lives.
And then the battle would be over, they'd dig new trenches, they would return. So there were sometimes days when nothing would happen at all and there they would be stuck in their trenches, deep in mud. At 25, Hitler is slightly older than many of the recruits. He is happy to serve. Hitler never achieved his goals as an artist. His adopted fatherland means everything to him.
In later years Hitler will encourage the notion that he spends the war right at the front line, charging around the trenches with his comrades, or hunkering down under heavy fire before heading over the top to vanquish the hated enemy. But in reality, his career as a soldier is quite different from that.
Hitler does not spend the war shooting it out in no man's land.
For most of the conflict, he's a messenger, a courier. Well, Hitler was not a foot soldier. Hitler was a messenger. He started off on a bicycle and he ended up on a motorcycle. Hitler's job was to go from the trenches and take messages to the officers who were further back in the line. And later on in Mein Kampf, he talked about his hard four years as a front soldier, living in the trenches,
That's not quite right. In the days before reliable electronic communications via wire, it was always important to send human couriers from a general to the officers in the field. There were always two couriers dispatched, taking separate routes, because the likelihood was fairly strong one of them would be shot and killed or wounded. And Hitler performed that task. Hitler may go on to exaggerate his war service.
But he is undoubtedly brave. In the course of four years' service in France and Belgium, he will receive the Iron Cross, both first and second class. In 1916, the Battle of the Somme claims over one million casualties. Among the endless list of injured Germans is one Adolf Hitler. Standing in the dispatch runner's dugout, he takes a piece of shrapnel to the leg when an enemy shell explodes nearby. Hitler's superior officer in the regiment,
A Jewish lieutenant, incidentally, called Hugo Gutmann, is the man who recommends him for military honors. Recovered from the blast, Hitler is glad to return to his unit and assimilate back into the soldierly life. And Hitler spent a lot of his time then painting watercolors. And then suddenly there would be periods of intense activity where Hitler would risk his life running a vital message from headquarters to the second in command. It was an odd life because it was
quiet, punctuated by intense engagement and activity. And that seems to be a pattern that Hitler adapted to over the years. Hitler in coffee houses would spend days listlessly sleeping late in the morning, going in to have some coffee and tea, and then that he would speak and he would come to life speaking. And then he would relapse into kind of boredom.
and reading. He lived according to an erratic pattern, which made the life of a soldier probably very compatible with him. And in fact, between the time he was a teenager and the time he was first served as Chancellor, Hitler had no regular employment at all, except as a soldier. The military is giving Hitler the solidity and the sense of purpose that his life has largely lacked up to now. Hitler loves the Bavarian army.
But at this stage, there is no inkling of the leadership roles he will go on to embrace.
His first and his only promotion during the war, he was promoted to being a Gefreiter. Gefreiter means a kind of private first class military rank. The rank implies that during the entirety of the war, Hitler never had any command, any saying over anyone else. And in fact, his commanding officers did not see any kind of leadership quality in Hitler.
Many other dictators come to power through the military. They ascend through the ranks, then take control of the government. But Hitler is no charismatic general. He is miles off that. His commanding officers respect him. But in the ranks, amongst the privates and infantrymen,
Hitler's reputation is rather less positive. Hitler's buddies from those days always thought he was odd. First of all, he didn't smile. He was very, very serious. He read a lot. And they also noticed that Hitler never got letters from home, even at Christmas. He didn't go on leave to visit his family. He's an outsider. He keeps his distance from the others. During lulls in the fighting, the troops are sometimes allowed to visit the nearby towns.
If Hitler does go along, he avoids drink and refuses prostitutes to the bemusement of some of his peers. Hitler even then presented himself as the model of virtue. He didn't drink, not even beer. He didn't smoke. He absolutely remained pure. He said, "I am only devoted to my fatherland. I am married to my fatherland."
As a vegetarian, a non-smoker, a sexual abstinent, he was this image of virtue, of self-discipline, which of course doesn't match his actual lack of self-discipline. He never kept a schedule, he couldn't keep his record straight, but he emphasized over and over again, he was so uncorruptible that he never even had a bank account. He presented himself as the epitome of high morality.
Within a few months of Hitler's having become a soldier, it was Christmas time. And that first Christmas in 1914 was famous because without any particular coordination, there was silence up and down the front, a couple of thousand miles up front.
and the soldiers from both sides declared an informal Christmas truce. They didn't fire, they put up white flags, and they got together in a kind of soldierly way to celebrate their common Christian holiday. Hitler thought that was treason. He said he would not go near such a sign of weakness, and Hitler hated it. But in that, he was almost alone.
Most of the soldiers still felt some kind of camaraderie, even with the enemy soldiers, not for Hitler. The story Nazi propaganda would tell of the relationship of Hitler and the men of his regiment was that he was extremely well liked. The story is being told as a kind of band of brothers where everyone saw him as one of their brothers.
and where everyone developed politically like him. The reality was very, very different. The reality was that the men in the trenches, or at least a lot of them, saw him as an "Etappenschwein," literally as a rear area pig. - Rear area pig, "Etappenschwein" in German. That means someone who takes it easy, away from the real fighting. Those consigned to the trenches at the front think Hitler has got it easy.
What the fellow soldiers say is that he sits around all day, you know, waiting to take a message because there weren't messages all day. He's about 27. They call him Uncle Dolph because they say he seems to be a man who's in his mid-40s, in his outlook on life. So he's a very unusual soldier, really. He's not one of the lads, if you know what I mean.
Being a dispatch runner is no free pass, but it's a damn sight better than spending day after day, week after week, sinking into blood-stained mud. At least Hitler has a bed. At least he sleeps with a roof over his head.
The man in the trenches thought that Hitler had a cushy job. Here are all these kind of lazy guys behind the trenches to have a cushy life, but because they schmooze with the officers, they get all the honors, while none of us who are in trenches and who are far more courageous get any of that. And it was because of that that they saw in Hitler a Tappenschwein,
Indeed, Hitler's wartime comrades will continue to cold-shoulder the Austrian Gefreiter long after the end of World War I.
So after the war, when Hitler first attended a veterans meeting of the regiment in high hope of being able to recruit men to his political party, he quickly realized that he was kind of still cold-shouldered by the majority of them and that, for instance, Jewish officers were not. The 20th anniversary of the establishment of the regiment of the outbreak of the First World War
Nazi propaganda put up this huge reunion and march through Munich of this regiment. But one man who is missing is Adolf Hitler. I first thought when I found out about that, that well, Hitler probably had some important business of state to attend to. But then I found evidence that that wasn't the reason. I found a postcard. The wife of one of his closest peers wrote to another close peer of his where he was saying, "Well, it's such a pity
Hitler couldn't attend the meeting, but as long as so many people in the regiment have no support and understanding for Hitler, she understands quite well why he can't do so. Hitler will demonstrate an extraordinary ability to spin the truth of his war years. His jazzed-up war record will become a key part of his political identity.
The story that we're telling here is that it was in the trenches of the First World War that National Socialism was born and that Hitler was just an ordinary man who, like all other Germans, were radicalized and politicized by the war, that it was really only his extraordinary talents
It's a genius as a leader that mocked him out and allowed him to become a leader in the aftermath of the First World War. So the point is not whether Hitler was a coward. He was not. In the position he was asked to serve, he was an extremely good soldier. He was extremely conscientious.
in what he was doing, and he seems to have been quite daring. But the crucial point is that this kind of image of Nazi propaganda, of Hitler whizzing from trench to trench to machine gun fire, is wrong. With few, if any, human friends, in some ways Hitler the soldier is more comfortable around animals than humans. One day at the front, a small white terrier from the British line finds its way into the German trenches.
When Hitler arrives with the day's dispatches and is greeted by the dog, he's instantly smitten. He takes the beast under his wing. He calls it Fussel, little fox. The only close tie he seems to have developed then was with a stray fox terrier, a little dog, to whom Hitler spoke and seemed to understand Hitler and obey Hitler and was devoted to Hitler. Those were all traits that Hitler certainly appreciated.
Twenty years later, he'll write: "I used to watch him as if he'd been a man. It was crazy how fond I was of the beast."
Hitler was a dog lover. He had dogs all of his life. I mean, the last dog he had was called Blondie, not the pop singer. But he had this dog called Blondie who was with him in the bunker right at the end. People said he loved dogs more than he loved people. And it's largely true. His colleagues said that, you know, he cared about his dog more than he cared about them. One day, as his unit relocates to a different section of the line, a railroad official offers Hitler 200 marks for Fuxil.
He refuses. No amount of money could prize his beloved pet away. But when he leaves the station with his fellow troops, he realizes little Fuxil has been stolen. He is devastated. The war drags on and on. By 1918, four grinding years are finally approaching something of a conclusion.
Hitler served unusually long in the war, right from the start to the end. So many people were broken by the war, but not Hitler. He continued to function and to function well right until the summer of 1918. But it seems that even then, finally, it broke Hitler as well. On October the 14th, as on many other days, Hitler is dispatched to the line with his usual messages.
A gas shell arced through the air above the German soldiers. Those troops lucky enough to be knocked unconscious by the blast, are unaware of the mustard gas filling the air. As the yellow haze clears enough to make out the scene, the wounded cover the floor. Adolf Hitler is among them.
Hitler was subjected to a mustard gas attack late in the war. We don't even know exactly how this happened. It seems reasonable to argue that when he and a few men from his unit were close to the front line, that they were poisoned by German mustard gas, that the wind was coming from the wrong direction, so it was blown away.
back into their faces. Hitler, as well as a number of other men, were exposed to mustard gas. They were taken back by medical orderlies to their own lines. And from there, they were taken straight to Field Rest Station and from there back to Germany. Hitler declared later he was blinded. He passed out. He woke up in a field hospital and he couldn't see. Several days later,
Far from the battlefield, over 600 miles away, in the small town of Passau in northern Germany, a cold salt breeze blows in off the Baltic Sea, rattling the doors and windows of a German military hospital. Inside, on one of the wards, Adolf Hitler sits propped up in bed. Around him, the bustle of nurses and doctors treating the wounded. The effects of mustard gas can be debilitating. It can cause permanent damage to the eyes. It's very painful.
It makes the skin burn and itch. Hitler will later describe this moment as his lowest ebb. Blind and in agony, he is a victim of war. Hitler is undoubtedly incapacitated, but it may well be that his injuries are psychological rather than physical.
We should ask ourselves, so what really did happen? Yes, Hitler was exposed to mustard gas. There are strong indications that Hitler was treated for psychosomatic blindness. So in other words, yes, for a loss of eyesight, but not one at that point anymore resulting from the mustard gas, but from the impact of war, from this being a kind of psychological condition. And here the indication is that
Even Hitler, the man who had served in the war for four years, finally had been broken by the war, that he was suffering from psychosomatic blindness. Hitler will spend the rest of his life policing the historical record of what exactly went on at the Pasewalk Hospital. He will go to extreme lengths to suppress the truth.
And Hitler would do his best throughout his life to police the story of what was happening during that time. In fact, he also made sure that his medical file from that time, that that would be removed from the archives after 1933. And it seems that it was burned by one of his aides in 1945, so we no longer have the original. Almost everyone, or everyone really, who was treating him or close to him during that short period
either mysteriously died or committed suicide under unknown circumstances, including the doctor who treated him.
After my book on Hitler: The First World War came out, the son or grandson of an American doctor in California approached me, who amongst the records of his father or grandfather had notes he had taken in a meeting with a senior German doctor who claimed that he had seen the medical file and that supposedly confirmed that Hitler had served from psychosomatic blindness.
in the German doctor was the brother of the guy who was running the archive in which the medical file was held. So the story is certainly highly plausible. Whatever the precise nature of his injuries, Adolf Hitler is well and truly out of action. He's hundreds of miles from the front, bedridden in hospital, helpless. At this point, it's hard, nigh on impossible, to believe he will become one of the most malevolent dictators in all of history.
But Hitler will recover from his physical injuries and from his nervous breakdown. Soon he will take his first steps into the world of politics. It's a world he will come to rule with terrifying surety. In the next episode of Real Dictators, Hitler gets the news he's been dreading as he learns that the war has ended. Revolutions break out across Germany as the Kaiser's regime is swept away. Back home in Munich, disenchanted and disillusioned,
Hitler drinks in far-right conspiracy theories. Soon he'll meet a man who will change his life. This middle-aged morphine addict and newspaper editor will, perhaps more than anyone else, shape Adolf Hitler into a tyrant in waiting. That's next time on Real Dictators. Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The show was created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Dodal.
Editing and music by Oliver Baines, with strings recorded by Dory McCauley. Sound design and mix by Tom Pink, with edit assembly by George Tapp. Follow Noiser Podcasts on Twitter for news about upcoming series. If you haven't already, follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows or check us out at wheeledictators.com.
