young hitler the story of our friendship august kubizek

He had never displayed symptoms of psychological breakdown before. Or had he actually lost his sight temporarily? Hitler had performed steadily as a dispatch runner, often under fire and shelling, for all four years of the war. Since the day I had stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept.’ĭid Hitler mean that he had been figuratively ‘blinded’ by the news of Germany’s defeat. I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow. ‘Again everything went black before my eyes.

‘I could stand it no longer,’ Hitler later wrote. The war was lost, and an armistice would be signed the following morning. A pastor had informed them the Kaiser was gone, and Germany was now a republic. The day before, on November 10, he and the other patients who could walk were asked to step into the hospital’s yard. Though his vision had darkened and blurred, and his eyes stung painfully and ran, his sight had been returning. Four weeks earlier, Hitler and several other members of his regiment had been gassed, at Comines, south of Ypres. Meanwhile, a slender 29-year-old German dispatch runner named Adolf Hitler lay in a military hospital in Pomerania, in East Prussia. Almost before the last stroke of the clock had died away the strict, war-straitened, regulated streets of London had become a triumphant pandemonium.’ They mingled with torrents pouring down the Strand. Flags appeared as if by magic, streams of men and women flowed from the embankment. The street was now a seething mass of humanity. The tumult grew, it grew like a gale, but from all sides simultaneously. ‘Around me, in our very headquarters, disorder had broken out – doors banged feet clattered down corridors everyone rose from the desk all bounds were broken. At the first stroke of the chime, ‘from all sides men and women came scurrying into the street’ as the bells of London pealed. When World War One ended at 11 in the morning of November 11, 1918, Winston Churchill was in his ministerial office near Trafalgar Square.

Young hitler the story of our friendship august kubizek