Ian Kershaw

"Not only, then, did Hitler do nothing to assist in the crushing of Munich’s ‘Red Republic’; he was an elected representative of his battalion during this whole period of existence. How to interpret th…"

"Probably in April of 1919, with the Munich ruled by the Communist Councils, wore, along with almost all the soldiers of the Munich garrison, the revolutionary red armband. That Hitler stood back and t…"

"On the nationalist-conservative Right… Hitler was portrayed for the most part as intransigent and irresponsible, a wild and vulgar demagogue, not a statesman, an obstacle to political recovery, the he…"

"The pronounced socialist image of the NSDAP that had come across strongly during the campaign… had plainly alienated middle-class support. The attacks of the Nazis had seemed to many little different …"

"In a pointed remark when defending Esser in 1921 against attacks from within the party, Hitler commented: ‘Everyone was at one time a Social Democrat.’"

"‘German’ socialism came to be wholly associated with the extreme anti-liberal politics of the antisemitic and völkisch movement. The appeal here was mainly to the lower-middle classes—traders, craftsm…"

"Ernst Toller reported that a fellow-prisoner also interned for involvement in the Räterepublik had met Hitler in a Munich barracks during the first months after the revolution, and that the latter had…"

"For Catholics—the other sub-culture which Nazism found greatest difficulty in penetrating, before and after 1933—Hitler was above all seen as the head of a ‘godless’, anti-Christian movement."