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 Mü… - Thomas Weber

Hitler stayed on even when, on April 13, Palm Sunday, the revolution devoured its children, as the most radical regime yet, a new and more hard-core Soviet Republic headed by Communists, was established in Munich. Its government, the Vollzugsrat, had a direct line of communication to the Soviet leadership in Moscow and in Budapest. Encoded telegrams went back and forth between Russia’s capital and Munich. In fact, in the person of Towia Axelrod, Lenin and his fellow Bolshevik leaders in Moscow even had one of their own men on the Vollzugsrat, through whom they could directly influence the decisions made by the Munich Soviet Republic.

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.

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.