Often, when we look back on history we see sharp divides and turning points, like peaks on a mountain or clean lines in a coloring book, but if we could color the movements and events of history, the hues would blend together almost imperceptibly. Only with hindsight, do we notice the subtle shifts, the moments when an event or a person introduces a new shade into the canvas of history. Because of this, it is my opinion that when historians say, “on this day everything changed” what they really mean is “on this day it became apparent to nearly everyone that things had already changed.”
On October 21, 1918, a 29 year old Adolf Hitler was admitted to the Pasewalk military hospital after being temporarily blinded by mustard gas. From his perspective, Germany was winning the war and the Kaiser would never abandon the country. It may not have even occurred to him that Germany might lose. Yet, as he lay helpless on the hospital bed, he began to overhear the complaints of the soldiers around him that the war was lost and that they would prefer to amputate a leg then to go back into the trenches. Hitler was shocked and dismayed but he probably thought it was a small percentage, most were still loyal to Germany and the Kaiser.
But as he continued to recover, events outside continued to escalate. Kurt Eisner led a revolution in Munich that overthrew the monarchy and forced the Kaiser to abdicate, it seemed that most of the population was sick of fighting a losing war. On November 11, the armistice was signed by the new Weimar Republic and the war had ended, many celebrated but Hitler wept.
When Hitler left the hospital ten days later, he harbored feelings of resentment, humiliation, anger and a refusal to accept the reality of defeat. Instead of admitting that Germany’s military strategy had collapsed, General Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorf advanced a more palatable fiction: Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield, they claimed, but betrayed—undermined by revolutionaries, socialists, Jews, and civilians on the home front. Hitler embraced this lie wholeheartedly. It wasn’t that he was persuaded by the lie; it was that it allowed him to preserve his prior belief that Germany could not lose. By clinging to Hindenburg’s story, he avoided confronting his own delusions.
Alone, however, Hitler had little power beyond annoying fellow soldiers with his grievances. That changed nearly a year later when he was sent as an undercover informant to observe the German Workers’ Party. There he found both an outlet and an audience—people who shared his frustrations and were eager for someone to articulate them. Without that audience, Hitler might have faded into obscurity, returning to the life he’d led before the war: grumbling in hostels and sketching postcards for pennies. But within the German Workers’ Party, he began gathering and organizing those who refused to accept Germany’s defeat.
But stomping his feet and claiming that he hadn’t lost wouldn’t be enough to get the country on his side, what he really needed was an economic disaster.
Closed System 