pieces of social Darwinism and the ideasmostly obtained second-hand and only partially understoodof Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur de Gobineau and Alfred Rosenberg as well as Paul de Lagarde, Georges Sorel, Alfred Ploetz and others. Army intelligence agent During World War I, Hitler was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack on 15 October 1918 for which he was hospitalised in Pasewalk. While there, Hitler learned of Germany's defeat, with the armistice to take effect on 11 November. By his own account—upon receiving this news, he suffered a second bout of blindness. Days after digesting this traumatic news, Hitler later stated his decision: "... my own fate became known to me ... I ... decided to go into politics." On 19 November 1918, Hitler was discharged from the Pasewalk hospital and returned to Munich, which at the time was in a state of socialist upheaval. Arriving on 21 November, he was assigned to 7th Company of the 1st Replacement Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. In December he was reassigned to a Prisoner of War camp in Traunstein as a guard. There he would stay until the camp dissolved January 1919. Returning to Munich, Hitler spent a few months in barracks waiting for reassignment. During this time Munich was a part of the People's State of Bavaria, which was still in a state of chaos with a number of assassinations occurring including that of socialist Kurt Eisner who was shot dead in Munich by a German nationalist on 21 February 1919. Other acts of violence were the killings of both Major Paul Ritter von Jahreiß and the conservative MP . In this political turmoil, Berlin sent in the military, whom the communists called the "White Guards of Capitalism". On 3 April 1919, Hitler was elected as the liaison of his military battalion and again on 15 April. During this time he urged his unit to stay out of the fighting and not join either side. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was officially crushed on 6 May 1919, when Lt. General Burghard von Oven and his military forces declared the city secure. In the aftermath of arrests and executions, Hitler denounced a fellow liaison, Georg Dufter, as a Soviet "radical rabble-rouser." Other testimony he gave to the military board of inquiry allowed them to root out other members of the military that "had been infected with revolutionary