Yet not everyone was mesmerized by Hitler’s speaking. A serious and idealistic young middle-class Nazi like Melita Maschmann, for example, admired him as a ‘man of the people’ who had risen from obscurity, but even at the annual Party rally she was so busy, as she wrote later, that ‘I could not permit myself the “debauchery” of ecstatic rapture’. Parades and shows she found boring and pointless. For her, Nazism was more a patriotic ideal than a cult of the individual leader.
