Perhaps surprisingly, once back in Munich, Hitler did not act in any way consistent with his later beliefs. In fact, his actions during the five mont… - Thomas Weber

More important than what I think about Hitler’s performance as a soldier during the war is what the other members of Hitler’s unit thought of him. A letter I found through serendipity in the US National Archives testifies that frontline soldiers in the trenches considered Hitler an Etappenschwein (‘rear area pig’), as they thought that, unlike them, he had landed a cushy job with regimental HQ a few miles behind the front. The reason this is so important is because it puts a lie to the orthodox view that Hitler was a typical product of his wartime unit.

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.’

On April 27, the troops that Hoffmann and Noske had amassed—a formidable force of thirty thousand men—crossed into Bavaria… On the following day, mass desertion in the Red Army set in. Hitler, however, did not defect. Furthermore a sufficiently large number of men stayed behind for Rudolf Egelhofer to organize a last stand.