Thomas Weber Quotes

The new regime was headed by Ernst Niekisch, a left-wing Social Democrat and teacher from Augsburg in Swabia. His ascendancy to power in Bavaria signaled a clear move away from a process of democratization compatible with Western-style parliamentary democracy. He was a supporter of National Bolshevism, a political movement that rejected the internationalism of Bolshevism but, other than that, believed in Bolshevism.

In theory, all Munich-based military units and thus Hitler’s regiment, too, were part of the Red Army. In that sense, Hitler served in the Red Army. In reality, however, most regiments neither actively supported the Soviet regime nor opposed it.

Hitler himself would imply that he had had Social Democratic leanings in the past when he told some of his fellow National Socialists in 1921, ‘Everybody was a Social Democrat once.’

[O]n surviving film footage of Eisner’s funeral we see Hitler with a few men from his unit walking behind Eisner’s coffin in the funeral procession of the Bavarian leader. We clearly see Hitler wearing two armbands: one black band to mourn the death of Eisner and the other a red armband in the colour of the Socialists revolution. Similarly, Hitler appears on one of Heinrich Hoffman’s photographs of the funeral process for Eisner.

Soldiers in Munich had been oscillating between supporting the moderate left, that is, the SPD, and the radical left in its different incarnations, not between left-wing and right-wing ideology. After all, more than 90 percent of soldiers in Hitler’s unit had voted for either the moderate or the radical left in the Bavarian elections in January .

Rudolf Hess, Hitler's future deputy, who recently had moved to Munich and now lived in Elisabethstraße, close to the barracks in which Hitler resided at the time, did not think that the Soviet Republic was something worth getting upset about... Hess wrote to his parents on April 23. 'I have not experienced any unrest at all. Yesterday we had an orderly march with red flags, nothing else out of the ordinary.'

Hitler was picked as the representative of the men in his company. He now held a position that existed to serve, support, and sustain the left-wing revolutionary regime. Hitler’s task was to help facilitate the smooth running of the regiment. If we can believe an article published in March 1923 in the Münchener Post—a partisan Social Democratic newspaper but one that was generally well informed about the nascent National Socialist movement—his responsibilities eventually went further than that. According to the article, he also acted as a go-between with the propaganda department of this regiment and the revolutionary regime. The article claimed that Hitler took an active role in the work of the department, giving talks and made the case for the republic.

[Hitler] now informed on his own regimental peers. In testimony given to the board, Hitler implicated, for instance Josef Seihs, his predecessor as Vertrauensmann of his company, as well as Georg Duffer, the former chair of the Battalion Council of the Demobilization Battalion, for having recruited members of the regiment into joining the Red Army: ‘Duffer was the regiment’s worst and most radical rabble-rouser,’ Hitler would state when giving testimony on May 23 in a court case that had been triggered by the investigation of the board on which he, himself, had serviced.

Exploiting the fears among Munich’s new rulers about a repeat of the Munich Soviet Republic, [Hitler] volunteered to become an informant for the new masters of the city. By becoming a turncoat, he managed against all odds, not only to escape decommissioning and thus to escape an uncertain future, but also to emerge strengthened from a situation that otherwise might have resulted in deportation to his native Austria, imprisonment, or even death.

The dividing line in military units based in Munch during the time of the Soviet Republic ran not between the left and the right, but between the radical left and the moderate left, which puts Hitler on the moderate left.

At his military HQ [Hitler] would be recorded as saying on February 1, 1942, ‘The only problem for the Social Democrats at the time was that they did not have a leader.’

In the late 1918 and early 1919, the primary challenge to the establishment of liberal democracy in Germany did not emanate from the right. It came from the left.

The Freikorps movement was surprisingly heterogeneous... The 158 Jews members of Bavarian Freikorps amounted to about 0.5 percent of the members of the Bavarian Freikorps movement. This was a figure not out of proportion with the overall ratio of Jews among the Bavarian population,…

Rather than withdraw, as many others did, Hitler decided to continue his involvement with the Communist regime and run for election again. Having proven himself since his election as Vertrauensmann, he now ran to become Bataillons-Rat—the representative of his company, the Second Demobilization Company, on the council of his battalion. When the election results were published the following day, he learned that he had secured the second-highest number of votes, 19, compared to the 39 of the winner, meaning he had been elected to being the Erstaz-Bataillons-Rat (deputy battalion councilor) of his unit.

Whatever his inner thoughts and intentions, Hitler now had to serve as a representative of his unit within the new Soviet regime. By his willingness to run for office as Bataillons-Rat, he had become even more significant cog in the machine of Socialism than previously had been the case. Hitler’s actions helped sustain the Soviet Republic.