Hitler's First War is an exercise in myth-busting. Painstaking archival work structures Thomas Weber's conclusion that the combat experience of Adolf Hitler and his unit, the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, indicates an alternative perspective on the career of Adolf Hitler and the genesis of the Third Reich.

Weber's first point is that Hitler's antisemitism was at best latent, certainly not significant, until after the Great War. Hitler describes himself, extensively and repeatedly, as observing Germany's increasing undermining by Jewish pacifists, profiteers, and traitors until, recovering from gas blinding in autumn 1918, he had a Pauline epiphany that set him on the path of National Socialism. In fact he was sufficiently ideologically flexible to wear briefly the red armband of the revolutionary Bavarian Soviet Republic led by Jewish radical Kurt Eisner. His next political initiative, as a political informer for the army, was a consequence of his hanging around the barracks after being demobilized. With literally no place to go and nothing better to do, Hitler joined the fringe German Workers' Party, and from there began rewriting history.

This narrative of Hitler's progress is not precisely original. Ian Kershaw, for example, traces essentially the same path in the first volume of his seminal biography of the Führer. Weber's seminal contribution is his painstaking demonstration that half of what has been understood about Hitler's wartime experiences is lies and most of the rest is untrue. This is the part of the book that attracts, and is likely to attract, the most attention. Weber uses regimental records and personal statements to make a case that Hitler's tales of comradeship and heroism in the trenches were a complete, comprehensive fabrication. The future Führer did serve as a runner, but he spent most of the war at regimental headquarters. Most of the messages he carried were to battalion and company headquarters: routine items rather than the stuff of life and death. In between times he lived a relatively comfortable, low-risk life along with the other Etappenhengsten (“rear echelon studs” in German army argot). His two Iron Crosses were real enough, but represented “presence awards” rather than recognition of specific acts of gallantry. And the “gas blindness” that ended his career near the front was in fact diagnosed and treated as “war hysteria,” the German army's version of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Weber challenges Hitler's tales of trench comradeship as even more fantastical than his accounts of heroism. He was at best a marginal member of the marginal soldiers of the regimental headquarters echelon. Even the tales of his being isolated for his patriotism and his politics are exaggerated. Adolf Hitler was most of the time simply overlooked—a tolerated appendage to whatever fatigue details or leave party he attached himself. His place in the regiment's official and unofficial hierarchies is indicated by his rank. It is to be hoped Weber finally corrects the near-universal error of translating Gefreiter as “corporal.” When the postwar Reichswehr reconfigured its noncommissioned grades to accommodate its long-service soldiers, Gefreiter indeed became the counterpart of corporal. Under the Kaiser, it was the equivalent of the World War II U.S. Army's private first class: a “sympathy stripe” carrying no authority and only a vague suggestion of possible advancement. To rise no higher after four years was an affirmation of nonentity.

Nor were Hitler's postwar relations with his fellow soldiers suggestive of wartime harmony. Weber demonstrates that Hitler was an extreme anomaly. Most of the regiment's veterans resumed their former lives or sought to create futures interrupted by the guns of August 1914. Their political involvement, when it can be ascertained, ran the Weimar Republic's broad gamut. Few embraced extreme nationalism; fewer became rabid antisemites. They showed no collective inclination to follow Hitler even after his star ascended in the elections of 1930. If anything, Hitler's connections with the men he publicly proclaimed “trench comrades” were in general characterized by the same dysfunctional hostility that shaped all of his interactions involving other than emotional subordinates.

Weber describes this evidence as challenging the familiar trope of World War II and the Holocaust as direct consequences of the brutalizing effects of 1914–1918. Hitler's First War offers an alternate case that the Great War radicalized German society, culture, and politics in ways unforeseen and unpredictable in the collapse of 1918. It thus left scars exploitable by Hitler and his like, but was not a direct harbinger of the Third Reich. For that it is necessary to look further: to vanished empires, preexisting ethnic conflict, and irremediable economic volatility.

More provocative and no less suggestive is a slightly different contextualization of Weber's account of Hitler's 1914-1918 experience.

Wartime comradeship is situational. Its primary groups are constantly changing, due to transfers as well as casualties. It involves men who may have nothing in common beyond this life-altering, life-threatening experience. As a result it survives the war in altered forms, if it endures at all. The dynamics of reunions, their central personalities, are not those of training and combat. Even the iconic “Band of Brothers” has an internal secondary story that differs significantly from the master narrative presented by Stephen Ambrose and HBO.

Adolf Hitler arguably did indeed find “a home in the army.” In evaluating his service, Weber takes too little account of the universal soldiers' pattern of defining “rear echelon” as ten yards behind where the speaker is standing. If Hitler did not beg repeatedly for a transfer to a rifle company, that did not make him a pariah. Not many took that route after the war's first months. Weber's evidence indicates that Hitler was generally considered at least an adequate soldier who knew how to do what was generally accepted as a high-risk job. He bore the tag of an oddball, but not a screwball—a subtle but significant distinction in male bonding groups. He served for four years in an infantry regiment and saw enough action to be wounded and gassed. He may have worn thin at the finish, but in the language of eighteenth-century duelists, Hitler gave his proofs.

The 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment was the first stable, nurturing environment Hitler had known since childhood. His place in it may have been on the fringe, perhaps even as a kind of mascot. But that, after all, was nothing new for him. He valued the connection on a visceral level. He clung to it after the war. And like many another veteran of many another army, Adolf Hitler constructed a version of his war experience that came closer to his vision—in time perhaps even to his memory. Hitler's First War temptingly suggests that Hitler's commitment to politics may have at least begun as part of that reconstruction: an exercise in making group dynamics what they should have been. To the familiar image of the unacknowledged artist as a trope of Hitler's rise, might we add that of a frustrated corporal?