Ian Kershaw and other Hitler biographers note that while Hitler did participate in the revolutionary government in Bavaria (BSR), they also contend it really was not all that indicative of his future political course or his own ideological Weltanschauung. For one thing, the political situation inside Bavaria was highly fluid in 1919. It was often unclear where political movements were heading or which way the political winds were blowing. Hitler was not the only member of the NSDAP to get caught up in the moment. Sepp Dietrich was elected to the head of one of the soldiers' councils and Hermann Esser, one of the earliest propagandists of the NSDAP, supported the BSR in his newspaper columns. Many of the BSR's supporters were no so much advocates of the BSR's radical politics but were instead united by opposition to either the current German national government or the prewar order. One of Hitler's contemporaries Balthasar Brandmayer recalled that Hitler initially welcomed the BSR as a necessary break from monarchies and an opportunity to build a Germany more in line with what men had experienced at the front.

It also should be stressed that Hitler was himself, even by his own admission, a nobody in this period. He was not someone people in power sought out or actively enlisted in their cause. It was certainly quite easy for a man in Hitler's position to be led by events rather than participate in them. His collaboration with the BSR was often quite limited and related to his duties as a soldier in the Munich garrison. Hitler would later use his passivity in BSR to fashion a narrative in which he became disgusted with socialist rule first-hand, but the reality was that putting on the red armband or becoming elected to his unit's soldier's council was the path of least resistance for a young man adrift in the postwar period and with only half-formed political ideals.