Top 15 Thomas Weber Quotes

As Hitler sat down in the Leiberzimmer to listen to the proceedings, he was surrounded by memorabilia for veterans… Yet on the evening of September 12, the room was not filled with veterans of the regiment but with some forty to eighty DAP sympathizers who came to listen to the guest speaker of the evening. The speaker was Gottfried Feder, who—just as he had done during Hitler’s propaganda course—gave a talk on his signature topic, the ills of capitalism. This was Feder’s sixteenth talk of the year but the first time that he addressed the DAP. The title of his talk was ‘How and By What Means Can Capitalism Be Eliminated?’

On May 3, 1919, 6 months after the revolution, Hitler said he was in favor of majoritarian democracy at a meeting of members of the 2nd Infantry Regiment in the regimental canteen on Oberwiesenfeld. The testimony states that the meeting had been called to discuss who should become the new commander of the regiment, adding that Hitler identified himself 'as a supporter of Social Democracy [Mehrheitssozialdemokratie; i.e. the SPD], albeit with some reservations.'

In becoming a turncoat, Hitler was far from unique. In fact, at the time Munich was full of turncoats. For example, some former members of the Red Army joined the Freikorps.

[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.

Yet Hitler managed not to get caught up in the violence directed against real and imagined supporters of the Munich Soviet Republic. According to his friend Ernst Schmidt, he was released again from captivity through the intervention of an officer, who encountered him in the wake of his arrest and who knew him from the front.

It is certainly true that Hitler returned from the war as a man without a compass and embarked on a path of self-discovery. Yet opportunism and expediency and vague political idea coexisted and at times competed with each other, within Hitler.

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.

When [Friedrich] Krohn and Hitler first met around the time that Hitler first attended a meeting of what was to become the Nazi Party, Hitler told him that he favored a ‘socialism’ that took the form of a ‘national Social Democracy’ that was loyal to the state, not dissimilar to that of Scandinavia, England, and prewar Bavaria.

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.’

Konrad Heiden, a Social Democrat writer with a Jewish mother who came to Munich as a student in 1920 and after graduation started to work as a Munich correspondent of the liberal Frankurter Zeitung would report in 1930 that Hitler had supported the SPD and had even talked about joining the party.

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.’

Auer, himself, also claimed that Hitler had held sympathies for the SPD during the winter and spring of 1919. In a 1923 article Auer wrote for the Münchener Post , he stated that Hitler ‘due to his beliefs was regarded as a Majority Socialist [Mehrheitssozialist] in the circles of the Propaganda Department and claimed to be one, like so many others; but he was never politically active or a member of a trade union.

Being that soldiers, who overwhelmingly had voted for the SPD in the Bavarian elections in January 1919, had elected Hitler as their representative, that Hitler’s closest companion during the revolution had been a member of an SPD-affiliated union; and that the SPD under Erhard Auer had stood against international socialism and cooperated on many an occasion with conservative and centrist groups, one thing is quite clear: Hitler had stood close to the SPD but either had missed the opportunity or lacked the willpower to jump ship after the establishment of the second Soviet Republic.

The question is not whether Hitler supported the left during the revolution, which he clearly did, but what kind of left-wing ideas and groups he supported or at least accepted. As Hitler served all left-wing regimes during all phases of the revolution until the end, he obviously accepted all of them or at least acquiesced to them for reasons of expediency.