Hitler

institutions, traditions, order, and property, presiding over chaos and mayhem, perpetrating terrible acts of violence, and causing anarchy of advantage only to Germany’s enemies. The real gainers from the disastrous weeks of the Räterepublik were the radical Right, which had been given the fuel to stoke the fear and hatred of Bolshevism among the Bavarian peasantry and middle classes. Not least, extreme counter-revolutionary violence had come to be accepted as a legitimate response to the perceived Bolshevik threat and now became a regular feature of the political scene.
    Its flirt with left-wing socialism over, Bavaria turned in the following years into a bastion of the conservative Right and a magnet for right-wing extremists throughout Germany. These were the conditions in which the ‘making of Adolf Hitler’ could take place.
    The history of the Bavarian revolution was almost tailor-made for Nazi propaganda. Not just the legend of the ‘stab-in-the-back’, but the notion of an international Jewish conspiracy could be made to sound plausible in the light of the Munich Räterepublik. Though right-wing extremism had no stronger traditions in Bavaria than elsewhere up to this point, the new climate provided it with unique opportunities and the favour of a sympathetic establishment. Many of Hitler’s early followers were deeply influenced by the experience of the turbulent months of post-revolutionary Bavaria. For Hitler himself, the significance of the period of revolution and Räterepublik in Munich can hardly be overrated.
    II
    On his return to Munich, Hitler had been assigned to the 7th Company of the 1st Reserve Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment, where, a few days later, he met up again with several wartime comrades. A fortnight later, he and one of these comrades, Ernst Schmidt, were among the fifteen men from his company (and 140 men in all) assigned to guard duties at the Traunstein prisoner-of-war camp. Probably, as Schmidt later recounted, Hitler suggested they let their names go forward when volunteers were called for to make up the deputation. Hitler, remarked Schmidt, did not have much to say about the revolution, ‘but it was plain enough to see how bitter he felt’. Both, according to Schmidt, were repelled by the changed conditions in the Munich barracks, now in the hands of the soldiers’ councils, where old standards of authority, discipline, and morale had collapsed. If that was indeed the reason for volunteering, Hitler and Schmidt could have found no improvement on reaching Traunstein. The camp, meant to contain 1,000 prisoners but much overcrowded, was also run by the soldiers’ councils which Hitler allegedly so detested. Discipline was poor, and the guards, according to one source, included some of the worst elements among the troops who – like Hitler – saw the army ‘as a means of maintaining a carefreeexistence at the expense of the state’. Hitler and Schmidt had an easy time of things, mainly on gate-duty, at Traunstein. They were there in all for almost two months, during which time the prisoners-of-war, mainly Russians, were transported elsewhere. By the beginning of February the camp was completely cleared and disbanded. Probably in late January, as Schmidt hinted, Hitler returned to Munich. Then, for just over two weeks, beginning on 20 February, he was assigned to guard duty at the Hauptbahnhof, where a unit of his company was responsible for maintaining order, particularly among the many soldiers travelling to and from Munich.
    A routine order of the demobilization battalion on 3 April 1919 referred to Hitler by name as the representative (
Vertrauensmann
) of his company. The strong likelihood is, in fact, that he had held this position since 15 February. The duties of the representatives included cooperation with the propaganda department of the socialist government in order to convey ‘educational’ material to the troops. Hitler’s first political duties took place, therefore, in the service of the revolutionary regime run by the SPD and USPD. It is little wonder that in
Mein Kampf
he quickly passed over his own experience of the traumatic revolutionary period in Bavaria.
    In fact, he would have had to explain away the even more embarrassing fact of his continued involvement at the very height of Munich’s ‘red dictatorship’. On 14 April, the day after the communist Räterepublik had been proclaimed, the Munich soldiers’ councils approved fresh