On April 12, 1919, Ernst Schmidt decided it was time to leave the army. His friend Hitler, by contrast, chose to stay. This was an active decision on… - Thomas Weber

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.

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?’

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.’