THE LAST WEEK - THE ROAD TO WAR
Chapter 3
August 30, 1939

His use of the German language is earthy and at times ungrammatical and ill-educated, and often threatening. He regularly talks about personally shooting his enemies.

Adolf Hitler's life has become the subject of intense mythmaking by his wartime enemies and postwar apologists. He has been accused of homosexuality, drug abuse, syphilis, sexual deviance, and of chewing carpets when in a towering rage. Volumes have been written on him, and yet decades after his death, the creator of World War II and butcher of more than 46 million people defies explanation.

The ancestry of Adolf Hitler is a subject of mystery and will be a subject of debate for decades, perhaps centuries. In variants, the family name dates back to 1430 in the hilly, wooded country of Waldviertel, Austria.

Hitler's father Alois Hitler is the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, creating the suggestion that Alois's father is a wealthy Jew. The evidence for this contention remains thin. But Adolf Hitler never answered to the name of Schicklgruber, despite propagandists' taunts. When Alois is five, his mother Maria marries millworker Johann Georg Hiedler, who becomes Alois's stepfather. In 1877, Alois's name officially becomes Hitler either through carelessness, misspellings, or a desire to erase the stain of illegitimacy." Alois becomes a customs official, and goes through three marriages, all ended by death. Alois's second marriage takes place soon after the first wife dies of consumption, and their son Alois Jr. is born two months after the wedding.

The third marriage, at age 42, as the cliché has it, is the lucky one. This wife is Klara Pölzl, 25, Alois's niece, a housemaid at the Pommer Inn in Braunau. Alois starts romancing her while his second wife, Franziska Matzelsberger, is dying of tuberculosis, and Klara is pregnant with their son Gustav before Fanni dies. At that point, Alois is a widower with two children, son Alois Jr. and daughter Angela, whose own daughter Geli Raubal will be one of two women to commit suicide over Adolf.

With special permission from the Vatican, Alois marries his niece on January 7, 1885, at the Pommer Inn. Gustav is born on May 15, and he dies in 1887. Their second child, Ida, is born in 1886, and dies in 1888, and their third, Otto, dies a few days after his birth in the autumn of 1887. Their fifth child, Edmund is born in 1894, and dies in 1900 of the measles, leaving only the fourth and sixth children to survive this union. The sixth child, Paula Hitler, is born on January 21, 1896, and dies in the 1950s.

Her life is that of a footnote. When Adolf sets out on his political career, Paula tells her older brother that he is crazy and will wind up being hanged. Adolf proceeds to ignore her.

Paula works as a stenographer for an insurance company. When Adolf becomes Chancellor, he puts her on an anonymous allowance, with the proviso that she refer to herself as Paula Wolf, using the name he uses when traveling incognito. Despite this, Paula and her brother quarrel frequently, and they are estranged by 1936.

Regarded as a dull person, she has one historical claim…she occasionally successfully intercedes with her brother to save the lives of people scheduled for execution for anti-Nazi charges.

The fourth child of Alois and Klara Hitler is born on April 20, 1889, at the Pommer Inn in Braunau-am-Linz, Austria. The family moves to Passau across the German border, then to Hafeld near Linz when Alois retires from the Customs Service.

In an Austrian working-class rural house where children die and a hard-drinking father demands obedience, domestic violence is routine. Alois' illegitimate son Alois Jr. is the main target, and he runs away from home at age 14, making Adolf the new one. When not enduring beatings, young Adolf sings in a Benedictine monastery's choir, regularly walking past the monastery's coat of arms, which includes a prominent swastika.

In 1899, Alois buys a house in Leonding, a village on the outskirts of Linz. When Adolf is caught trying to run away from home, Alois gives his son a massive beating. Adolf later claims that he refuses to show emotion, and this early triumph of the will stops the beatings.

The early and now well-known photograph of Adolf Hitler in his school at age 11 shows a young man taller than the rest, glinting with cocky rebellion. He is the leader on the schoolyard and a top student, busy drawing landscapes and reading Western novels by the German writer Karl May, who has never visited America. And he also reads with fascination accounts of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and magazine reports of the Boer War in South Africa, where a young English officer named Winston Churchill is making a dramatic escape from enemy captivity.

Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler battles with his father over his education. Alois wants the son to attend the Realschule for technical training as a civil servant, while Adolf wants to attend the Gymnasium and prepare for university as an artist. Alois wins. Hitler hikes three miles a day to the Realschule in Linz.

In this larger institution, Adolf is no longer the leader. The teachers have no time for him and the other students view him as a country bumpkin. The rebellion and cockiness is gone from the new class picture…the face is now lost and forlorn.

So are his grades. In his first year, they are low. Decades later scholars argue whether his obtuseness is deliberate or he is simply overwhelmed. But in his second year, his grades go up, and so does his standing among his pals, as they play cowboys and Indians on the Danube and sing German nationalistic songs. At age 12, Hitler sees his first Wagnerian opera, Lohengrin, and is fascinated.

On January 3, 1903, Alois Hitler leaves home in the morning for brunch at the Gasthaus Stiefler. He sits down at the table for regular patrons with his pals, says he is not feeling well - and dies moments later, of a pleural hemorrhage. Adolf is 14.

Alois Hitler is buried two days later in the church cemetery near the family house, beneath a gravestone bearing an oblong picture of the Fuhrer's father. He leaves his widow the house and a pension plan that provides each child with 240 kronen annually until their 24th birthday.

With the intense and hard-drinking Alois gone, Klara grants her son his wish to room in Linz with five schoolboys and study art. It doesn't improve his grades, which suffer after Alois's death. He fails mathematics and has to take a make-up exam, which he passes.

In the Third Form, he does poorly in French, and loses all interest in his work. His teachers note that he cannot withstand "advice or reproof," and demands subservience from his schoolmates. His personality is already becoming rigid. Only the history teacher, Leopold Pötsch, can reach the "gaunt, pale-faced" Adolf, illustrating lectures on the ancient Germans with colored slides. "Even today," Hitler writes in Mein Kampf, "I think back with gentle emotion on this gray-haired man, who by the fire of his narratives, sometimes made us forget the present; who, as if by enchantment, carried us into past times and, out of the millennial veils of mist, molded dry historical memories into living reality. On such occasions we sat there, often aflame with enthusiasm, and sometimes even moved to tears."

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt wins election to the US presidency in his own right, the General Slocum sinks in New York's East River, and the Japanese open the Russo-Japanese War with a surprise attack on Russian ships moored in Port Arthur. Adolf Hitler sulks through his confirmation, fails French, and is transferred to the Steyr Realschule.

He lives with another family, hates the town, and spends his time reading, drawing, and shooting rats. He gains an "excellent" in gymnastics and a "good" in freehand drawing, but only "adequate" in history and geography, failing mathematics and German. Yet he passes his make-up examinations again. He passes that on September 16, 1905, and then goes out to celebrate, getting drunk for the only time in his life. Next morning, he is awakened at dawn on a highway by a milkwoman.

Unable to face his final examination for a diploma, the Abitur, Hitler uses his lung condition as an excuse to give up his studies. At age 16, Hitler lives free of scholastic or parental control, spending his days at museums and the opera, filling notebooks with drawings, alone except for August Kubizek, an upholsterer's son who dreams of world fame as a musician. They meet at the opera.

Together, Hitler and "Gustl" spend their evenings at the opera, with Hitler meticulously dressed, sporting a cane. Kubizek admires his new friend's determination, while being unnerved by his high-strung nature and violence. Hitler is an eager talker, Kubizek the born listener. Days on end, Kubizek sits enthralled as Hitler practices his oratory as they perch on a rock overlooking the Danube.

Hitler lives with Paula and Klara in a small apartment in Linz. The doting mother ignores suggestions that Adolf gain an education or get a job. Adolf is a great artist. He must be allowed to live his bohemian life and develop his art.

In 1906, Hitler visits Vienna, and is enthralled by opera and architecture. He returns home, determined to live a life of art and architecture. He stakes these hopes on a 10-kronen lottery ticket, and endlessly talks about how the winnings will support a large house on the Danube, where he and Gustl will have studios, where they will create music and art that will dazzle the Austro-Hungarian capital.

Nightly, Hitler tells Gustl, they will entertain Vienna's cultural elite, with a "lady of exquisite culture" to preside.

Reality destroys Hitler's plans when his state lottery numbers do not match the winner. In a café, reading the newspaper agate giving the results, Hitler's cheer and bonhomie disintegrate into fury, as he launches into the first of what will be a familiar theme of speeches: the hypocrisy of the government, the betrayal of the German people, and the evil of the rapacious and scheming Jews.

In October 1906, Paul Cezanne dies, Hannah Arendt is born, and Hitler and Kubizek attend the Wagner opera Rienzi, the story of a hero's rise and fall as Roman tribune. Normally Hitler follows up performances with lengthy criticism. This time he leaves the theater silent, pale, and takes Kubizek to the top of a steep hill. There Hitler talks in a hoarse voice about how the Rienzi character is a model or example, with "visionary power to the plane of his own ambitions." It is probably the first recorded instance of Hitler's desire to seize any form of supreme power.

He follows it up with something mundane: piano lessons, and they stop two weeks after January 14, 1907. On that day, Klara Hitler goes to see a Jewish physician named Dr. Edward Bloch, known as the "poor people's doctor." Her complaint: pain in her chest. His diagnosis: a tumor in the breast. His prognosis: the slight hope of surgery. She has a breast removed on January 17. She tells Kubizek after the surgery: "Go on being a good friend to my son when I'm no longer here. He has no one else."

While Klara recovers, Hitler goes through a crush on a neighboring woman, Stephanie Jansten, writing all kinds of love poems. He reads them to Kubizek. He urges Adolf to introduce himself to Stephanie. He refuses. He would have to tell her his profession and he is not yet an accredited academic painter. He talks of kidnapping Stephanie instead. He never talks to her. When she gets engaged to an army lieutenant, Hitler plots a giant suicide pact for him and Stephanie from a Linz bridge.

Instead Hitler shifts from art to architecture, designing immense marble and Greco-Roman buildings to replace Linz's structures: a new city hall, a new train station, a cog railway to the top of the Lichtenberg, which will have a 100-foot steel observation tower.

These plans are nurtured in isolation. Except for Kubizek and his ailing mother, he has no friends, no company, and no job. Klara's neighbor suggests Adolf join the postal service and another friend finds a baker to take Adolf on as an apprentice, but Hitler will not hear of it. He is unknown now, but he will be a great artist soon.

Klara lets Adolf take his inheritance, 700 kronen, and go to Vienna in September 1907, to apply to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. The Academy's Classification List of his test is grim: "Few heads. Test drawing unsatisfactory." Hitler is devastated. The rector says that if Hitler takes a few high school courses to get his diploma, he could attend the Academy's school of architecture.

It seems irrelevant, though. Klara's condition worsens, and Hitler rushes back to Linz. Surgery may save her. She gets it, but it doesn't help. Klara's agony tortures Adolf. On December 20, the day after Theodore Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet" departs Norfolk to sail around the world, Klara tells Kubizek to "go on being a good friend to my son when I'm no longer here. He has no one else." She dies the next morning. Dr. Bloch tries to ease Hitler's grief by saying "Death had been a savior." Bloch later says of Klara's deathbed scene, "I never saw anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler."

Later scholars will suggest that Hitler's war on the Jews of Europe will be based on the death of his mother. However, Hitler never blames Bloch personally, thanking him repeatedly for his efforts. "I shall be grateful to you forever," Hitler tells Bloch. When Hitler takes over Austria, the Nazi machine lets Bloch flee to the United States.

But Hitler does blame the Jews for his failure to get into the Vienna Fine Arts Academy. And he acts on that blame the following year, by joining Vienna's Anti-Semite Union.

Klara Hitler is buried on December 23, 1907, next to her husband, her name inscribed on his marker. Then Hitler and Kubizek head back to Vienna, with 3,000 kronen left from his mother's estate. He gives most to his half-brother and sister, and moves to a second-floor room at Stumpergasse 29, living on milk, sausage, and bread, drawing buildings, attending opera. Gustl joins him there, and easily passes the examination for the Academy of Music. Adolf's reaction: "I had no idea I had such a clever friend."

After that, Hitler loses interest in Kubizek's progress, and starts flying into a rage at small slights. "He was at odds with the world," Kubizek says later. "Wherever he looked he saw injustice, hate, and enmity."

Most of Hitler's denunciations are for the Academy of Fine Arts and its Jewish leadership. He demands that the building be burned down.

Living on his father's pension of 25 kronen a month, Hitler still refuses to work, eats milk and bread and butter, spending his limited money on Wagner operas, no matter how poor the production. Italian opera bores him. "What would these Italians do if they had no daggers?" he barks. "Can you imagine Lohengrin's narration on a barrel organ?"

They also use Kubizek's free tickets from the Academy to attend concerts of Weber, Schubert, Beethoven, Grieg, Bruckner, and an odd choice: Mendelssohn.

When not listening to music, Hitler is busy with his pen, writing plays based on German mythology, which he reads to Kubizek. The musician suggests that the settings are too expensive for a theater to carry out and Adolf should try light comedy. Hitler is annoyed, but tries turning his plays into opera, with no success.

Kubizek chases women, while Hitler insists that a man should be chaste in body until marriage. Kubizek also chases grades, and they are excellent, winning congratulations from the academy. When Kubizek returns to Linz, Hitler stays in Vienna, giving Kubizek a cold and unemotional farewell, with one oddity: he grasps both of Kubizek's hands, presses them firmly, and walks away quickly without looking back. It foreshadows Hitler's chilly 1945 farewell in the Berlin bunker to Albert Speer.

Hitler stays in the bug-infested room, re-applying to the Academy of Art. His new material is so poor he is not even allowed to take the test in September. Out of money, he moves to a cheaper room without telling Kubizek or anyone else. Then to a smaller room, living off his 25 kronen a month pension, in a tiny building. 25 kronen a month buys him bread and two pints of milk a day. He registers with the police (a requirement for people who move in Germany or Austria-Hungary) as a "writer."

But in September, he moves again and lives as a tramp. A decade later, Hitler will paint this time of his life as surviving for years in penury, beating carpets, shoveling snow, and living in hostels and soup kitchens, while being rejected by Jewish-run Vienna art schools for shoddy work.

In actuality, Hitler only lives as a homeless person for three months, sleeping in parks, doorways, and a bench on the Prater. In October 1908, an early winter sends Hitler fleeing to bars, cheap flophouses, a coffee house, and a workers' barracks, where fetid air and the noise of a drunk beating his wife keeps him awake. In charity halls, Hitler eats thin soup and a slice of bread. He grows a beard, loses weight, and his clothes turn filthy.

The experience has one impact on him - an utter hatred for Vienna and what he perceives as the ruling capitalist and Jewish elites who seemingly allow the misery to continue. Never does he consider advancing his education, taking a job, or simply returning to Linz.

By Christmas 1908, three weeks after Aisin-Gioro P'u-Yi becomes China's last emperor at age three, Hitler has sold most of his clothes, and has to spend the holiday in the Asyl fur Obdachlose, a shelter for the destitute run by a philanthropic Jewish family. Every physically able occupant must help tend the grounds or do housework in the large modern building with its spacious, spotlessly clean, military-style dormitories. There Hitler stands in line, gets his ticket, endures a public shower, and has his ragged clothes disinfected and himself deloused.

Now at the bottom rank of the destitute, Hitler in his threadbare jacket earns the few kreuzer he needs to pay his rent by shoveling snow and carrying bags in the train stations. He works on a construction site, but talks so much, the other workers tell him to get cracking of they'll throw him off the scaffold. Hitler quits instead.

A fellow lodger, Reinhold Hanisch, amazed that such an intelligent and talented man like Hitler is living in poverty, asks why this is so. "I don't know myself," Hitler says listlessly.

But Hanisch, a wandering servant, is an alert man with a keen eye for a chance. He suggests that Adolf hit up relatives for a little money to buy art supplies, and then go door to door and sell painted postcards, and split the profits. Hitler writes to his Aunt Johanna and she sends a 50-kronen bank note. Hitler is in business.

In February 1909, Hanisch and Hitler move to the Mannerheim, a men's hostel across the Danube, in the industrial neighborhood of Brigittenau, with a substantial Jewish population. The food is better, the rooms well-lit, and each person gets a cubicle complete with weekly changed sheets. The hostel looks like, and still is as late as the 1960s, one of the few remaining men's flophouses on New York's Bowery, replete with cubicles and rows of lockers. Unlike Bowery flophouses, the director enforces stern rules on his half a crown-a-day occupants.

Here Hitler finds a writing room and Hanisch has his protégé get to work, copying photographs or paintings of city scenes into postcards. Hanisch goes out to bars and taverns, selling the works. Soon Hitler is turning out water-colors of Vienna scenes, again copying photographs, doing one a day. Hanisch takes the pictures to bars and restaurants, saying they are the work of a sick and starving artist. The patrons pay for the postcards just to get rid of the coughing Hanisch.

Within weeks, Hitler loses his tattered clothing, filthy beard, and growling stomach. He even finds time to read anti-Semitic pamphlets in coffeehouses, and develops the central core theory of his life: that the Jews, as a race, are destroying the German people. To Hitler, all calamity, ranging modern architecture to the perversion of the culture of Lapland, is the fault of the Jewish conspiracy.

He sees the Jews as a unified body that threatens German life in three ways: the poor Jews of Europe spread street crime, pornography, and diseases like syphilis, a subject that obsesses Hitler. He sees Jewish Socialists as the vanguard of Bolshevism, and the rest of Jewry, be they millionaires or merely ordinary businessmen, as being the owners of the world's wealth. And all of these Jews, Hitler says, are conspiring together.

Hitler roars that the Jew is the "cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director" of prostitution, that music and art are controlled by Jews, and so is the Social Democratic press.

The rhetoric is nonsense by modern standards or period standards. Yet millions of people believe it. So does most of Gentile Vienna in 1911. The city is rife with anti-Semitic literature, and Hitler devours the pamphlets and regurgitates the material for the rest of his life.

He points out to an acquaintance that propaganda can make believers out of doubters. With good propaganda, one can sell any lie, pointing out the con games and schemes dreamed up by his fellow lodgers in the Mannerheim to bilk the wealthy, the middle-class, and each other. "Only propaganda is necessary," Hitler says. "There is no end of stupid people."

Hitler will sit quietly for hours in a café or his hostel, suddenly leaping up to issue a tirade. One moment he denounces Catholic priests as despoiling people. The next, he is assailing the Hapsburg monarch as unfit to rule Germans. Then he shouts of how to improve aircraft designs or new ways to find underground sources of water. His listeners laugh or ask for the porter to shut him up.

Hitler holds forth on these varied ideas in Skid Row bars, arguing with workers and unemployed people. Soon he turns the Mannerheim Hotel drawing room into continuous political debate, brandishing his T-Square to accent his points. When not reading newspapers or eating cream cakes, he cranks out posters for soap ads or Teddy's Perspiration Powder.

Oddly enough, Hitler's favorite performers - he can once again attend the opera - are Jewish, and so is one of his closest friends, a Hungarian part-time art dealer, Josef Neumann, who gives Hitler a coat and buys some of his work. So do other Jewish art dealers.

By June, the Hanisch-Hitler partnership is over. Hitler isn't producing enough art to satisfy Hanisch's orders, and Hanisch gives up, pocketing some of Hitler's profits. Later Hitler has to sue Hanisch for embezzlement, and wins the case, collecting seven-and-a-half crowns.

Hitler makes one more try to enter the Academy of Art, but his work does not impress Professor Ritschel at the Hofsmuseum. Hitler returns to the Mannerheim, but without Hanisch, he can't sell his work. But before Hitler returns to the streets, his aunt Johanna Wolf withdraws her life savings of 3,800 kronen from her bank in December 1911, and gives the bulk of it to Adolf.

For 1911 and 1912, Hitler works hard at his art, developing a great ability to reproduce buildings and structures, but not human beings. People are out of proportion and poorly drawn. But his structures, done in pencil, oil, and watercolors, attract the attention of art dealers, and the respect of other hotel lodgers. Nobody takes his seat by the Mannerheim's window.

During this time, Hitler's hatred of the Jews and the Austro-Hungarian Empire gains weight. He reads books on ancient Rome, Eastern religions, Yoga, Occultism, hypnotism, Astrology, and mythology. He devours the notorious Russian anti-Semitic forgery, Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Hitler neither smokes nor drinks, but he eats cream cakes en masse. Everyone he meets is impressed by Hitler's combination of ambition, energy, and indolence.

"One day, when passing through the (Vienna) Inner City," Hitler writes later in Mein Kampf, "I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black sidelocks. My first thought was: is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz. I watched the man stealthily and cautiously, but the longer I gazed at this strange countenance and examined it section by section, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: is this a German? I turned to books for help in removing my doubts. For the first time in my life, I bought myself some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few pence." Yet this theory does not stand up: his description is based on anti-Semitic pamphlets he has already seen in Linz, where he has also seen Jews.

Hitler's philosophy is based on his experiences of living in homeless shelters and hostels…that life is a struggle. "The idea of struggle is as old as life itself, for life is only preserved because other living things perish through struggle. In this struggle, the stronger, the more able win, while the less able, the weak lose. Struggle is the father of all things…It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle…If you do not fight for life, then life will never be won."

These ideas are formed in the unbelievably crude environment of a homeless shelter, filled with society's failures, rejects, con men, and desperate people. It is an environment and a population recognizable in Munich in 1910 or London or New York in 2003, awash in petty criminals, psychotic brutes, drug addicts, alcoholics, confidence men, and the mentally ill, all scheming against each other in a battle for the tiniest edge: money, clothes, drugs, sex, sleeping arrangements.

Hitler develops a view of the world he will never drop, even at the height of his mastery of Europe. In many ways, Nazi Germany will resemble a flophouse, ruled by its inmates, a constant struggle for power and profit, a charnel house of routine horror, brutality, and murder. "Whatever goal man has reached is due to his originality plus brutality," Hitler will say later.

Hitler also develops a hatred and contempt for nearly every level of organized society. He has no support for trade unions and workers' organizations, regarding them as a rabble. He bitterly hates the middle class, the bourgeois, and the managers and administrators of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He hates parliamentary democracy. He believes it reduces government to political jobbery, putting a premium on mediocrity and the avoidance of responsibility in favor of party compromises. "The majority represents not only ignorance but cowardice…the majority cannot replace the man." He opposes discussion and discourse, whether in his hostel or in the Reich Chancellery.

Above all, he hates the Jews.

"Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate?" Hitler fulminates later. "On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light."

In Hitler's mind, his speeches, and later writings, Jews become a fantasy figure, a leering, hideous devil, seducing little German girls, flooding the world with pornography and prostitution (which Hitler says includes modern art), controlling the press, capitalism, and socialism…and preventing Hitler from advancing in life. "Thus I finally discovered who were the evil spirits leading our people astray…My love for my own people increased correspondingly. Considering the satanic skill which these evil counsellors displayed, how could their unfortunate victims be blamed? The more I came to know the Jew, the easier it was to excuse the workers."

He also hates the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He regards it as overrun by Slavs, Jews, Bolsheviks, and Socialists. Because of this, he ignores repeated summonses from the government to serve in the Imperial Army as a conscript. He will not fight alongside the Slavs and Jews he hates. But even the cumbersome machinery of the Austro-Hungarian state closes in on him.

On May 24, 1913, Hitler puts all of his possessions in a battered bag and leaves "the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life," moving to Munich, determined to join his German fatherland. Registering at 34 Schleissheimerstrasse, an apartment owned by the tailoring family Popp below, he signs the form, "Adolf Hitler, Architectural painter from Vienna."

He gets straight to work with a second-hand easel and starts painting pictures of the city. Hitler makes no effort to make contact with the city's art community, whose members include people like Paul Klee. Hitler is still a bohemian, and he has no use for modern art. He's more interested in borrowing thick books from the library on German history and books on mass psychology. "I came to love that city more than any other place known to me. A German city. How different from Vienna," he writes later.

There are fewer customers for Hitler's pictures, but he has more time to go to beer halls and argue politics with the other drinkers. He still reads pamphlets that fit his pre-conceived notions: "Otherwise, only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will result from all this reading…Such a person never succeeds in turning his knowledge to practical account when the opportune moment arrives; for his mental equipment is not ordered with a view to meeting the demands of everyday life," Hitler writes. Since his days in Vienna, "I have extended that foundation very little and I have changed nothing in it." Nor will he change, through years of politics and war.

Hitler is able to make a modest living, selling posters, advertisements, and sketches for dealers. Living in Germany, he feels happy, unfettered by society.

The fetters re-appear on January 18, 1914, on the day Kaiser Wihelm II sends the first German wireless message to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Munich Police Officer Herle knocks on Hitler's door to present a different official message, a draft notice from the Austro-Hungarian Army. Emperor Franz Josef wants Adolf. The paper warns that if Hitler does not serve, he can spend a year in the Munich chokey for having left Austria "with the object of evading military service."

Hitler, shaken, signs the form, and Officer Herle takes Hitler to police headquarters, then to the Austrian Consulate General. The diplomats take pity on the ragged 24-year-old artist, with his thin frame and shabby clothes, and let him send a telegram to Linz asking for a postponement to February. Linz retorts, "Must report January 20." It is January 20 when Hitler reads the telegram.

The consul-general lets Hitler write a letter of explanation to Linz. Hitler's excuses are flimsy. He has no time to settle his affairs. He has no income, no support. He is an artist by right, and has only known poverty and starvation for five years. He offers to pay a fine instead.

The Austrians are moved. They give him until February 5 to report, and to Salzburg instead of Linz. Hitler does so, and the draft board finds him "unfit for combatant and auxiliary duties, too weak. Unable to bear arms." Thus declared 4-F, Hitler returns to Munich to design posters and sell pictures. He earns a decent living, mixes with crackpots and intellectuals, reads anti-Semitic pamphlets, and earns the income of a provincial lawyer.

This existence ends on August 1, 1914, when Kaiser Wilhelm II orders Germany's general mobilization against Russia. Hitler joins a vast crowd in front of Munich's Felderrnhalle to cheer the news. A decade later, Hitler picks his own face out of the photograph of the crowd.

For Hitler, this war "is not a case of Austria fighting to gain satisfaction from Austria, but rather a case of Germany fighting for her own - existence the German nation for its own to be or not to be, for its freedom and for its future…For me, as for every other German, the most memorable period of my life now began. Face to face with that mighty struggle, all the past fell away into oblivion."

Hitler writes Bavaria's King Ludwig Wittelsbach III to enlist in the Bavarian Army and on August 16, as German troops in felddgrau march into Belgium, Hitler reports to his second choice, the 1st Bavarian Regiment. One of the young volunteers in 1st Bavarian is Rudolf Hess, son of a wealthy merchant. Hess will show reckless bravery and be wounded twice. But Hitler and Hess do not serve together. Hitler is transferred a few days later to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment as the army expands. For the first time in his life, Hitler has a purpose. He is a soldier in the great cause.

On October 8, while the spasms of the First Battle of the Marne die away, the regiment swears allegiance to King Ludwig III in a public ceremony. A smaller one follows in which Hitler and other Austrians in the outfit swear allegiance to Franz Josef. Hitler's only reaction is how pleased to get double rations as well as a special lunch of roast pork and potato salad. For the first time since leaving home, Hitler is eating well. Next day, German troops take Antwerp. Its defenders, led by Winston Churchill and Royal Marines, have been forced to withdraw.

From Munich the company marches and then entrains for what is now being called the Western Front. The 16th Reserve Regiment is hardly the model of German militarism now racing across Picardy and Flanders against the British Expeditionary Force to reach the English Channel. Known as the List Regiment for its colonel, the 16th Reserve Regiment's officers are reservists, its men sketchily trained. The regiment lacks machine-guns, spiked helmets, and its field telephones come from a Nuremberg firm, originally made for a British army order. But as the men ride out of Munich, towards the Rhine and its statue of Germania, they burst into traditional songs, as if heading for a party.

In some ways, the List Regiment is similar to the Volksgrenadiers Hitler will send into futile battle 30 years later, short on military ability but filled with patriotism. "I felt as though my heart would burst," Hitler recalls. So do many of his fellow frontsoldaten. Their idealism will be crushed into the Flanders mud.

Like the Volksgrenadiers of 1944, the List Regiment of 1914 will have a harsh indoctrination to battle. They are sent into the "Kindermord," the First Battle of Ypres in Flanders, to reinforce failed attacks against the British Expeditionary Force.

The defending British troops are the last stand of Europe's finest army, a tight-knit band of professionals in khaki, whose rate of fire on their Lee-Enfield rifles - the same their sons will use in 1944 - is so high that the attacking Germans believe they are wading into machine-gun fire.

The shilling-a-day professional defenders include the 2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, a battalion that will give Hitler enormous trouble on June 6, 1944. Another defender is Lt. Bernard Montgomery of the 2nd Warwickshires, who is seriously wounded in battle.

At the height of the battle, another subaltern and future general, Lt. Brian Horrocks of the 1st Middlesex suffers a thigh wound that leads to him being captured by the Germans. Horrocks sits out World War I behind German barbed wire, spared the fate of many of his colleagues, and survives to lead powerful British forces against Hitler in World War II.

At villages named Poperhinge, Bailleul, and Wytschaete, British troops, some manning the exact same artillery pieces their sons will fire in a retreat through those same towns to Dunkirk in 1940, stop the List Regiment cold. Four List Regiment advances dissolve into a forest being turned into mud. After three days, the regimental commander is killed, his deputy, Captain Hoffmann, wounded. Regimental dispatch rider Hitler and a medic drag the wounded Hoffman back to the dressing station under heavy fire.

By mid-November, the List Regiment is down to 30 officers and less than 700 men. Entire graduating classes of German schools have been annihilated.