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The photo is from February 26, 1919. You can see one and a half dozen uniformed men, a soldier on the left edge of the picture carries a portrait of the Prime Minister of Bavaria, Kurt Eisner, who was murdered a few days earlier.

The recording documents the funeral procession for the socialist politician who was shot by a nationalist assassin.

In the center of the picture and something in the background, a man can be seen whose face was to be known and feared worldwide just a few years later: Adolf Hitler.

His mustache no longer has the tips that the corporal and reporting runner had twirled so carefully during his service in the rear front area in France and Belgium.

Instead, the pages have just been shaved off - although not quite as much as a little later, when he was already on the road as an agitator.

The photo, which was apparently virtually unknown during the Third Reich, documents at first glance the interest of the later right-wing extremist in the funeral march for Eisner, a staunch leftist.

The episode does not appear in Hitler's confession book “Mein Kampf”.

There he claims, obviously untruthful, not to have been back to Munich at the end of February 1919, but to a camp in Traunstein, which he only left in March.

Even if it's only a matter of a few days, that's not just a question for experts and Hitler biographers.

Anti-semitism and anti-capitalism

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Because at some point in the course of 1919 the murderous ideology of the almost 30-year-old developed, a confused, often contradicting mixture of anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism, folkish visions and racial madness.

Without a doubt, the time immediately after the First World War shaped Hitler's worldview.

Because the NSDAP at the end of the 1920s determined the fastest growing party in Germany and thus determined politics to a large extent, the circumstances surrounding its intellectual formation are of great importance for German and European history as a whole.

Just a few years ago, the journalist and Goebbels biographer Ralf-Georg Reuth presented an important book in which he brushed against the grain of the known sources on Hitler's 1919/20 and came to remarkable new insights.

The core of his interpretation was that Hitler had become an anti-Semite during the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic in the spring of 1919.

During this time, motifs circulated in the bourgeois-ethnic milieu of the Bavarian capital that Hitler adopted almost perfectly into his “worldview”.

So it was probably only in Munich in April and May 1919 that the fantasy could arise that Bolshevism and capitalism were equally dominated by “Jews”, in a sense two sides of the same coin.

Where did the hatred come from?

In the notorious “historians' dispute” of the 1980s, Ernst Nolte derived Hitler's delusion of annihilation primarily from the crimes of the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war.

That was always an overly complex explanation.

Reuth countered that it was the perception of the Soviet republic that turned the uprooted 30-year-old Hitler into a mad hater of Jews in 1919.

This development was exacerbated by the renegade's zeal, who overcompensated for what he thought was wrong in retrospect for his commitment to the leftist councils.

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However, this thesis triggered different reactions.

The Salzburg historian Othmar Plöckinger has submitted a study that explicitly argues against Reuth.

Plöckinger has already presented an important, albeit not easy to read study on the history of the impact of “Mein Kampf”.

An interpretation from his pen has professional weight, although a reliable decision for or against one of the two interpretations is impossible due to the complex source complaint and the inevitable blurring of every history of ideas.

Plöckinger contradicts Reuth in his two main results: On the one hand, Hitler was not a “leftist” in the spring of 1919, despite his function as deputy soldier's representative.

On the other hand, Bolshevism in its Munich form played no role in the emergence of its radical anti-Semitism.

Such clear alternative interpretations would be desired more often in controversies in the humanities.

No sympathy for the SPD

In the first part of his book, Plöckinger reconstructs the personal development of Hitler between the end of 1918 and March 1920, his discharge from the army as part of demobilization.

He formulated his research results unequivocally: "The conditions in Munich in the last weeks of the Soviet Republic in no way allow any support for the Council system or sympathy for the Social Democrats to be derived from Hitler's election to the Barracks Council." sources that have not been evaluated, add: "Rather, the further developments clearly point to the opposite."

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Nevertheless, he and his competitor Reuth agree on one perception: The later radicalism could have had something to do with Hitler's renegade.

But Plöckinger does not see in this the overcompensation of his supposed or actual involvement as a leftist, but his passivity.

Because there is evidence that Hitler did not report to a right-wing volunteer corps during this time, but stayed in the barracks in Munich.

In the second part of his book, Plöckinger reconstructs the attitudes that circulated among soldiers in Munich in 1919.

He explicitly avoids the mistake of many Hitler biographers either to rely on Hitler's own statements in “Mein Kampf” and in his speeches or to look retrospectively for possible sources of delusional ideas from the Nazi ideology.

Instead, he relies on the writings, leaflets and similar material actually circulating at the time.

Decision impossible

In perhaps the most exciting chapter, “Set pieces of a worldview”, the book reconstructs the intellectually undemanding environment in which Hitler's ideology developed.

Plöckinger takes a contrary position to Reuth, but both arguments have and keep a lot to themselves.

A firm decision as to which of the two authors is “more” right can hardly be made.