August Haußleiter was the son of a Lutheran minister. He was born and grew up in Nuremberg. According to his own statements, he lost his parents at a young age and grew up as an orphan. He became politically aware early on, and while still at secondary school joined "national defence organisations". At the age of 15 he was arrested by police for the first time, while participating in a major political confrontation. Much later, in 1957, Haußleiter himself would write that during the quasi-civil war that persisted following the &lt;a href="German%20Revolution%20of%201918%E2%80%9319"&gt;upheavals of 1918/1919&lt;/a&gt; his own political focus remained unclear. He saw the so-called mass marches of 1920–22 in North Bavaria as a manifestation of a wider evolving nationalist mood, and he would only slowly take to heart the lessons of the 9 November 1923 confrontation, remembered in history as the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch. "You must retain a sober judgement and correctly evaluate the strengths of the enemy if you want to secure lasting results in the political struggle" (" Man muss nüchtern bleiben, und man muss die Feindstärke richtig beurteilen, wenn man dauernde Ergebnisse im politischen Kampfe erzielen will"). The commentators Martin A. Lee and Richard Stöss appear both to assume that Haußleiter was a participant in the (failed) Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch. Others, including Silke Mende, are content to infer from sources including Haußleiter's own autobiographical writings of 1957, that in 1923 Haußleiter was still "looking for nationalistic groups to join" ("...er schon früh "Anschluss an nationalistische Gruppen suchte"").