Chapter 22 – Whispers of Betrayal (1916)
The Hunger at Home
By the winter of 1916, Germany was starving. The "Turnip Winter," as it came to be known, stripped away whatever illusions of endurance the people still held. Potatoes rotted in the ground from blight, and the British blockade choked imports. In Berlin, mothers stood in endless queues only to be handed a few shriveled turnips, fit more for cattle than children.
From the trenches, Hitler read the letters: wives rationing bread, neighbors stealing coal, children with hollow eyes. He absorbed it all with mounting fury, not pity. To him, hunger was not a shared suffering but a betrayal. Why did the homeland grow weak while soldiers held the line? Why were civilians fainting in food queues while certain men in fine suits grew richer than ever?
"The Fatherland bleeds not only at the front, but also in its belly," he muttered, voice sharp with disgust.
The Enemy Within
Rumors spread quickly in the dugouts, carried with the same urgency as news of offensives. It was whispered that profiteers in Berlin, many of them Jews, were hoarding food and driving up prices. Bankers, said the gossip, thrived while soldiers gnawed on crusts of stale bread.
Hitler needed little encouragement to believe it. His contempt for Jewish comrades in the regiment had already taken root. He noticed every error, every hesitation, every stammer from a Jewish soldier and magnified it into proof of treachery.
When a Jewish private bungled a map reading, Hitler sneered, "These people cannot serve the Fatherland, they serve only themselves." When another fell ill and was evacuated, Hitler spat, "Another coward fleeing the duty of blood." And when two Jews from the regiment went missing in the chaos of shellfire, presumed dead, Hitler's verdict was harsh: "Pretenders, deserters . They vanish when courage is needed most."
In the mud, lice, and cold, such judgments hardened into conviction.
The Rothschild Connection
One night, huddled in the dugout, men spoke of London. News clippings suggested that the Rothschild banking dynasty, rich beyond imagination, was financing Britain and France in their war effort. The whispers came with venom: "German bullets are bought with German gold."
To most, it was rumor, another story to pass the time between barrages. But to Hitler, it was revelation. The Rothschilds were proof that Germany's defeat was not only fought with steel but bought with money. He brooded over it, imagining boardrooms in London where Jewish financiers counted their profits while Bavarian boys bled into Flemish soil.
Every blast above the trench seemed, in his mind, another coin dropped into Jewish coffers.
Jacob Schiff, the Banker of Revolution
From there, the whispers grew darker still. Someone mentioned a name: Jacob Schiff, a New York banker of Jewish descent. Hitler listened intently as a comrade recalled how Schiff had financed Japan in the war against Russia in 1904–05. With American dollars, Japan had armed itself, humiliated the Russian Empire, and paved the way for the fall of the Tsar.
To Hitler, this was electrifying. If one Jew could help bring down the Russian Empire, could not Jews as a whole undermine Germany as well? The connection formed instantly in his mind: Schiff had armed Japan, the Rothschilds were arming Britain and France, and Germany was caught in the middle, bled from without and betrayed from within.
Later, he would embellish the story in his mind. Schiff became, to him, the archetype of the "international Jew", financier of wars, orchestrator of collapse, enemy of nations.
Migration Routes to America
The whispers did not stop there. By 1916, news of American wealth trickled back even to the front. Rumors told of migration routes opening for Jews across Eastern Europe and Germany. They were leaving in droves, it was said, bound for New York, Philadelphia, Chicago.
The name of Schiff surfaced again. Years before, in 1907, he had launched the Jewish Immigrant Information Bureau(JIIB), pledging half a million dollars to resettle Jews in America's interior. His aim had been pragmatic, reduce overcrowding in New York's ghettos, ease tensions on the East Coast but in Hitler's mind, the meaning was twisted.
"While German mothers starve, Jews buy passage to America," he growled in the trench. "They flee their duty while we drown in mud."
The Zuckerbergs, already resettled in America, were part of the same tale whispered in dugouts. Letters told of their new life, their success, their prosperity. To some soldiers, it was a glimmer of hope that life could exist beyond hunger and war. To Hitler, it was confirmation of cowardice. Every Jew who left Germany was another deserter, another parasite abandoning the host once it weakened.
The Dugout Murmurs
Thus the dugouts became not only places of rest but breeding grounds for myth. By candlelight, with rats scurrying over boots and the stench of decay in every breath, soldiers spoke of financiers, profiteers, deserters. Where others dismissed these as idle tales, Hitler absorbed them with a fanatic's attention.
Every rumor became fact. Every whisper became evidence.
The Rothschilds were no longer simply wealthy bankers, they were, in his mind, generals of Germany's enemies. Schiff was no longer a financier of Japan but the puppet master of revolution. Jewish comrades were no longer flawed men, they were traitors in uniform. And every German hunger pang was no longer misfortune but sabotage.
Verdun and the Poison
As the battle of Verdun raged that year, its endless slaughter fed Hitler's growing paranoia. Though his regiment was spared its worst horrors, the reports were enough: hundreds of thousands of men fed into a furnace, Germany bled white.
Hitler's conclusion was simple: Germany was not defeated by courage or by strength of arms, but by betrayal.
He wrote later in Mein Kampf: "The collapse of nations is not born from defeat at the front, but from weakness at the rear." In 1916, those words were already forming in his mind, etched by the whispers that coiled in every trench.
The Birth of the Myth
By the end of that year, the "stab-in-the-back" legend had not yet been given a name, but in Hitler's imagination, it already existed in full.
Germany's wounds were not only from French artillery or British shells. They were inflicted, he believed, by the invisible hand of international Jewry; by the Rothschilds in London, by Jacob Schiff in New York, by migrants who fled the Fatherland for American comfort, by comrades who faltered at the front.
He had found his explanation. It was poisonous, but to him it was clarity.
In the years ahead, this seed of betrayal would grow into the towering tree of hatred that defined his politics. But in 1916, it began simply, in whispers, carried on the smoke of candles in dugouts, in rumors of bankers across oceans, in muttered curses about missing comrades.
And Adolf Hitler, sitting in the mud, listened with ears wide open.