Stalin

Adolf Hitler was eleven years Stalin’s junior, born in 1889 in a frontier region of Austria-Hungary. He lost his father at age fifteen and his mother at eighteen. (The Jewish physician who tended to his mother would recall that in forty years he had never seen anyone as broken with grief over a mother’s death as her son.) At age twenty, Hitler found himself on a breadline in Vienna, his inheritance and savings nearly spent. He had twice been rejected from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts (“sample drawing unsatisfactory”) and was staying in a homeless shelter behind a railway station. A vagrant on the next bed recalled that Hitler’s “clothes were being cleaned of lice, since for days he had been wandering about without a roof and in a terribly neglected condition.” The vagrant added that Hitler lived on various shelters’ bread and soup and “discussed politics.” With a small loan from an aunt, he got himself into better quarters, a men’s home, and managed to find odd jobs, such as painting picture postcards and drafting advertisements. He also frequented the city’s public libraries, where he read political tracts, newspapers, the philosopher Schopenhauer, and the fiction of Karl May set in the cowboys-and-Indians days of the American West or the exotic Near East. Hitler dodged the Austrian draft and the police. When they finally caught up with him, they judged the undernourished and gloomy youth to be unfit for service. He fled across the border to Munich, and in August 1914 he joined the German army as a private. He ended the Great War still a private, but its aftermath transformed his life prospects. He would be among the many who migrated from left to right in the chaotic wake of imperial Germany’s defeat.

During the November 1918 leftist revolution in Munich, Hitler was in a hospital in Pomerania, but he was released and marched in the funeral cortège of provincial Bavaria’s murdered leader, a Jewish Social Democrat; film footage captured Hitler wearing two armbands, one black (for mourning) and the other red. After Social Democrats and anarchists, in April 1919, formed a Bavarian Soviet Republic, the Communists quickly seized power; Hitler, who contemplated joining the Social Democrats, served as a delegate from his battalion’s soviet (council). He had no profession to speak of, but appears to have taken part in leftist indoctrination of the troops. Ten days before Hitler’s thirtieth birthday, the Bavarian Soviet was quickly crushed by the so-called Freikorps of war veterans. He remained in the military because a superior, the chief of the German army’s “information” department, had the idea of sending him to an antileftist instructional course, then using him to infiltrate leftist groups. The officer recalled that Hitler “was like a tired stray dog looking for a master,” and “ready to throw in his lot with anyone who would show him kindness.” Be that as it may, the assignment as informant led to Hitler’s involvement in a minuscule right-wing group, the German Workers’ Party, which had been established to draw workers away from Communism and which Hitler, with the assistance of rabidly anti-Semitic émigrés from the former imperial Russia, would remake into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis.