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… - Thomas Weber

[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.

Hitler’s undetermined political future becomes even less surprising if we bear in mind that the intellectual origins of Fascism share central tenets with the non-Marxist Left. According to one argument, despite its eventual collision with the conservative Right once Fascism tried to come to power, early Fascism had been in its promise, rather than in its eventual application, more socialist than capitalist, more plebeian than bourgeois.

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.