Was Hitler a communist in 1919? Not really.

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied and poured over individuals in human history. But despite this, certain gaps within his biography remain. One of the major fissures in the historiography of Hitler’s biography is whether or not Hitler’s Weltanschauung was formed before WWI or did it come into sharper relief during the war and its aftermath. Thomas Weber, for example, tends hew to the latter position tending to depict Hitler as a somewhat directionless bellwether who gravitated towards movements. Weber’s position is not without its criticisms though. There is evidence of writings during the war where he excoriated the Christmas Truce of 1914 and one surviving wartime letter wishes that Germany were purged of its foreign influences. Ian Kershaw as well as Volker Ulrich argue instead that nationalism, antisemitism, militarism, and a hatred of socialists were present in the young Hitler during the war, but the war acted as a catalyst to preexisting ideas.

But part of the problem here is the evidence is incredibly thin for any real position. Hitler did not keep a diary or record his internal thoughts. He also did deliberately lie or obscure details about his past to better fit his myth-making narrative of a young soldier of the trenches called by destiny to save Germany from Jews and communists. He was twice elected as a representative to his soldiers’ council, but the why and how he was elected is conjecture. Even his supposed presence at Eisner’s funeral is not conclusive. Moreover, these photographs do not tell us anything about what he thought about the Bavarian Socialist Republic or its successor. Hitler left little of a paper trail for either period.

This is one of many problems with the linked video from TIK. There is an annoying degree of certaintity for someone who is not doing primary research on this topic and is riddled with errors. The SPD was not Karl Marx’s party, Marx had a relationship with LaSalle's ADAV (the precursor to the SPD) that was characterized more by political sniping by the former. The video also levels a great deal of left-wing politics in the German Revolution, conflating various political factions under all-embracing rubrics (socialist, Marxist, communist) used interchangeably. This renders the postwar period simplistic for the novice at the expense of the complex realities that faced Germans, including Hitler.

The bibliography for the video is laughably bad. Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” is irrelevant to the question at hand. It is doubtful Hitler ever read this very minor work of Marx. Moreover, the essay is notoriously difficult to understand as it was another example of Marx’s rhetorical sniping at a rival- Bruno Bauer- over Jewish emancipation. It had little development on Marx’s later works like Kapital and Marxism. It mostly retains relevance because antimarxists often use it as a rhetorical bludgeon to prove Marxism’s founder was antisemetic, and thus, by extension, so too is Marxism. Other works barely cover Hitler’s personal thoughts; Evans’s Coming of the Third Reich is a broad survey and does not go in depth on issues like Hitler’s election. Rainer Zitelmann was a German historian whose was involved in the Historikergestreit and argued that Hitler was a modernizing revolutionary. His work has not aged well; the corporate histories produced from the 1990s onward have shown that Nazi economics was less revolutionary and the dictatorship preferred to use the carrot rather than the stick with German businesses. As Ulrich notes

Hitler was by no means the social revolutionary, as the odd historian has claimed. {the endnote gives a citation to Zitelmann} Class hurdles and barriers were lowered, but they still existed, and by no means was there a full equality of opportunity in the Third Reich.

Adam Tooze is even more dismissive of Zitelmann’s contemporary relevance. In a 2020 tweet he says “Rainer Zitelmann’s trajectory from iconoclastic 1980s biographer of Hitler (as modernizing revolutionary) to defender of the entrepreneurial rich v. egalitarian “prejudice” is one for @zeithistorikerFor historiographical background see Volker Berghahn. "

But what is really galling in the video is TIK’s treatment of Ian Kershaw. Incorrectly calling Kershaw a “Marxist historian”, TIK lambasts Kershaw’s inability to see Hitler as a self-evident communist. As TIK puts it Kershaw is “a Marxist historian floundering to explain away the reality that Hitler was a communist in 1919” who “has swallowed the blue-pill” and like other historians of this ilk,

historians who can't fathom why glorious socialism and communism might not be what they dream it is also- while we're on the subject the reason why they can't define fascism - is because they are denying what's at the beating heart of socialism.

TIK claims Kershaw uses no evidence for his “speculations” and has an ideological motive for his biography.

This is a slur against Kershaw and the whole corpus of Kershaw’s work refutes TIK’s insinuations.

Let us first look at what Kershaw wrote about the Hitler’s elections. For clarity’s sake, I deleted the endnote citations