Thomas Weber (historian) Quotes (1974-)

“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.”

“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.’”

“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 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.’”

“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.”

“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.”

“In theory, all Munich-based military units and thus Hitler’s regiment, too, were part of the Red Army. In that sense, Hitler served in the Red Army. In reality, however, most regiments neither actively supported the Soviet regime nor opposed it.”

“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 the part of the future right-wing dictator of Germany to serve a regime that at the time pledged allegiance to Moscow.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Whatever his inner thoughts and intentions, Hitler now had to serve as a representative of his unit within the new Soviet regime. By his willingness to run for office as Bataillons-Rat, he had become even more significant cog in the machine of Socialism than previously had been the case. Hitler’s actions helped sustain the Soviet Republic.”

“The Freikorps movement was surprisingly heterogeneous... The 158 Jews members of Bavarian Freikorps amounted to about 0.5 percent of the members of the Bavarian Freikorps movement. This was a figure not out of proportion with the overall ratio of Jews among the Bavarian population,…”

“Soldiers in Munich had been oscillating between supporting the moderate left, that is, the SPD, and the radical left in its different incarnations, not between left-wing and right-wing ideology. After all, more than 90 percent of soldiers in Hitler’s unit had voted for either the moderate or the radical left in the Bavarian elections in January [1919].”

“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 months after his return to Bavaria did not show any consistency at all. They were full of contradictions and reveal a deeply disoriented man without a clear mental compass to steer him through the post-war world.”

“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.”

“We do know that Hitler spent his birthday wearing a red armband, which all soldiers in Munich were required to wear. We also know that on April 20, during the daily roll call of his unit, he had to announce, as he did every day, the latest decrees and announcements of the Soviet rulers of Munich, which had been conveyed to the regiment through its propaganda department.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Even two days after the Soviet Republic had been proclaimed, Hitler stood for election again, when the new regime conducted an election among Munich's soldier councils to ensure support for the Soviet Republic by Munich's military units. Hitler was now elected Deputy Battalion Representative and remained in the post for the entire lifespan of the Soviet Republic.”

“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.”

“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.”

“‘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.’”

“ Rudolf Hess, Hitler's future deputy, who recently had moved to Munich and now lived in Elisabethstraße, close to the barracks in which Hitler resided at the time, did not think that the Soviet Republic was something worth getting upset about... Hess wrote to his parents on April 23. 'I have not experienced any unrest at all. Yesterday we had an orderly march with red flags, nothing else out of the ordinary.'”

“[O]n surviving film footage of Eisner’s funeral we see Hitler with a few men from his unit walking behind Eisner’s coffin in the funeral procession of the Bavarian leader. We clearly see Hitler wearing two armbands: one black band to mourn the death of Eisner and the other a red armband in the colour of the Socialists revolution. Similarly, Hitler appears on one of Heinrich Hoffman’s photographs of the funeral process for Eisner.”

“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.”