Hitler: figurehead?

By the way, before this gets too far out of hand, and someone comes up with cheap courtroom tricks, listen to me try to cover my butt

Hitler returned from a military hospital to Munich in early 1919. There he underwent a Reichswehr sponsored course of systematic political education for demobilizing soldiers that featured Pan- German nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-socialism. These same themes were prominent in Bavarian politics following the repression of the Munich revolution of 1918-19. Because antisemitism had not played a notable part in Bavarian politics prior to the revolutionary disturbances, a Herr Adolf Gemlich was prompted to send an inquiry about the importance of the "Jewish question" to Captain Karl Mayr, the officer in charge of the Reichswehr News and Enlightenment Department in Munich. Mayr referred him to Hitler, who had distinguished himself in the above-mentioned course by the vehemence of his radical nationalist and antisemitic views, and by his oratorical talents. Hitler was already feeling his way toward a political career; four days before responding to Gemlich in the letter translated below, he had paid his first visit to the German Workers' Party (eventually renamed, the National Socialist Workers' Party) as a confidential agent of the Reichswehr. In the letter to Gemlich he appears anxious to establish his credentials as a knowledgeable and sober antisemite. Compared to the inflammatory mass-meeting oratory that he was soon to make his specialty, Hitler's rhetoric here is quite tame, stressing the need for a "rational" and "scientific" antisemitism. Some historians have interpreted the letter's call for the "irrevocable removal [Entfernung]" of the Jews from German life as a prefiguring of the Holocaust. But it is clear from the context and from later statements that, at this point, Hitler meant segregation or expulsion rather than systematic liquidation. The letter, Hitler's first explicitly political writing, impressed his Reichswehr superiors and he soon gained a reputation among radical rightist and socially respectable nationalist conservative groups as a man who could help inoculate the masses against revolution and whose antisemitic rhetoric could help discredit the democratic Weimar Republic. The letter may thus be seen as the launching of his political career. Source: Eberhard Jäckel (ed.), Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924 (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 88-90. Translated by Richard S. Levy.

The birth of the Final Solution: Hitler's earliest letter which reveals his plans to exterminate Jews goes on display for the first time

well, actually, what i meant, was, were all of his ideas his own.
my friend who watched some military channel, said that while in prison, his inmate had a tutor who visited, and may have influenced hitler into what he was doing. personally, i think its baloney. but this guy usually knows what he's talking about. im not saying he was a dumb figure head. he was, after all, a political genius, although a supremely evil one. i think that his ideas were his own. even before imprisonment, he spoke quite passionately against jews...

well, yes, i did state it incorrectly. but it doesnt make sense to me to say that his ideas werent his own,
because even before he went to prison and wrote his book, he hated jews, and sought power.