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“how such a narrow-minded, unpleasant fellow could found and carry a movement of such immense dimensions and consequences.”32 Kershaw rephrased the question as: “How do we explain how someone with so few intellectual gifts and social attributes…could nevertheless have such an immense historical impact, could make the entire world hold its breath?”
About Trump or Hitler?
“In my opinion, he was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognise the difference between lies and truth.”37 Krosigk’s moral condemnation reveals that Hitler—the consummate role player who had repeatedly got the better of his conservative allies—continued to fool them even after his death.
Hitler’s unusually improvisational and personal style of leadership, which created constant responsibility conflicts and an anarchic tangle of offices and portfolios, was anything but an expression of political incompetence. On the contrary, it served to make Hitler’s own supremacy essentially unassailable.
this massive immigration gave rise to fears of “foreignisation,” of losing the cultural and political hegemony that German Austrians considered their birthright.
Everything was dragged through the dirt—the nation, the fatherland, the authority of law, religion and morality.
it was Hitler’s “manifest uninterest in the members of the opposite sex” that had made women “want to test this male source of resistance.”
In 1948, Wiedemann amused everyone in the courtroom in Nuremberg by stating that Hitler “lacked leadership qualities”—the German word he used was Führerqualitäten.
“but when you see thousands get injured and killed, you become aware that life is a constant, terrible struggle, which serves to preserve the species—someone has to die so that others may survive.”
He had felt comfortable as a soldier and had grown fond of his regiment, and suddenly everything he identified with was simply wiped out.
the search for scapegoats had begun—and what could have been easier than to look where the Pan-Germanic League and the far right had already identified them?
Military leaders and their supporters used such fairy tales in an attempt to avoid responsibility for the demise of the empire.
Lack of responsibility and scapegoating.
Had everything happened only so that a band of criminals could get their hands on our fatherland?…In the nights that followed, my hatred grew, my hatred for those responsible for this deed. Hitler closed this passage with the oft-cited sentence: “I decided to become a politician.”
Hatred motivates to become a politician.
He was more dismayed that soldiers’ soviets now had their say in the garrisons, which offended his sense of order and discipline.
“The gallery of famous men from the time of the soviet republics is a picture album full of criminals. Foreign riff-raff, mostly from the district office of Jerusalem, have targeted the innocent Bavarian people as an object of exploitation and have filled their pockets.”
“Everything that inspires people to strive for something higher—be it religion, socialism or democracy—is for a Jew just a means serving the end of satisfying monetary greed and the desire to rule.
Hitler attended his first meeting of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP).
The beginning of Hitler's takeover of the to become Nazi party
“How and by what means can we get rid of capitalism?”
In its origins, Nazism was socialist.
Drexler followed Hitler and gave him a copy of his pamphlet “My Political Awakening.”
Red pill
What seems to have impressed him most, though, was the idea of fusing nationalism and socialism, of freeing the working classes from the “false teachings” of Marxism and winning them over for the nationalist cause.
In other words, the DAP offered Hitler the opportunity to get ahead quickly and shape the party according to his own ideas.
“I talked for thirty minutes, and what I used to sense internally without really knowing it was now confirmed by reality: I could speak well.”
Nothing like shedding your impostor syndrome.
Any intimation that Hitler moderated his anti-Semitism at the beginning of his political career is completely mistaken. From the very start, he appeared as a radical anti-Semite—and this was precisely why he seems to have appealed to his audience.
“the eradication of work-free, effortless income”
nationalisation of big business, for profit-sharing and for an expansion of the pension system
communalise large department stores
“communal welfare comes before selfishness”
Tolerated by the authorities, countless paramilitary organisations were permitted to lead their shady existences in the southern German state, including the citizens’ militias that had been founded after the demise of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and soon numbered 300,000 men. The presence of this counter-revolutionary private army had enormous influence on everyday life and political culture in Munich in the early 1920s. “They institutionalised Bavaria’s rejection of the Versailles settlement and its hatred for the Weimar Republic,”
“Above all, they despised Berlin as Germany’s new mecca of left-wing politics, multiethnic society, and avant-garde culture.”
“Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.”
“The first thing you felt was that here was someone who meant what he said, who didn’t want to convince you of anything he didn’t believe entirely himself,”
“that a measure of authenticity flowed over the audience even when he was telling obvious lies.”
went so far as to compare himself with Jesus Christ: “We may be small, but there was once a man who stood up for himself in Galilee, and today his teachings rule the entire world.”
“I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to a religious conversion,”
“the spectacular elements of the circus and the grand opera with the uplifting ceremony of the church’s liturgical ritual.”
The National Socialists also had no qualms about adopting leftist propaganda techniques.
His speeches typically began with a look back at “wonderful, flourishing Germany before the war,” in which “orderliness, cleanliness and precision” had ruled and civil servants had gone about their work “honestly and dutifully.”35 Again and again, Hitler directed his audience’s attention to the “great heroic time of 1914,”
Make Germany great again.
Those primarily responsible were Jews and leftists whom he described as “revolutionary” or “November criminals.”
radical leftists and antifa
By turns he excoriated Germany’s new democratic order as a “republic of scoundrels,” a “Berlin Jew government” and a “criminal republic.”
The Deep State
Weimar Germany’s elected representatives were tools of “international stock-market and interest capital,” which held Germany in its clutches and was sucking the lifeblood out of the country.
Hatred of international efforts.
And to do that, we can’t have any classes any more, no bourgeois and no workers. We need to become a people of brothers, who are prepared to make sacrifices for the national cause…There should be no drivel about classes and no preferment of one segment of the people in national questions…People who work with their heads and those who work with their hands need to realise that they belong together and that only together can we get our people back on their feet again.53 That, Hitler said again and again, was the path “to genuine, German socialism in contrast to the class-warfare socialism
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class warfare socialism versus German socialism.
“a government of power and authority” that would “ruthlessly clean out the pigsty.”
The receptivity of large masses is very limited. Their capacity to understand things is slight whereas their forgetfulness is great. Given this, effective propaganda must restrict itself to a handful of points, which it repeats as slogans as long as it takes for the dumbest member of the audience to get an idea of what they mean.
the beer-cellar rabble-rouser, who liked to depict himself as a man of the people, in fact despised the masses, which he regarded as nothing more than a tool to be manipulated to achieve his political ambitions.
“In upper-middle-class circles, one looked on with delight as Hitler achieved what we could not: winning over the circles of the little people and undermining Social Democracy. We overlooked the dangers his demagoguery presented, were it ever to be successful. The cure was worse than the disease.”
conspiracy theory had become a stock element of ethnic-chauvinistic German propaganda.
even in the early 1920s, no resident of Munich who had attended a Hitler speech or read about one in the newspapers could have been in any doubt about what Hitler intended to do with the Jews. But hardly anyone seems to have disapproved. On the contrary, storms of applause greeted precisely the most anti-Semitic passages of Hitler’s speeches, strongly suggesting that they were the source of much of the speaker’s appeal. When he demanded that Jews be “removed” from Germany by some unspecified means, therefore, Hitler and his audience were on the same wavelength. Both were carried away by the
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the fact that the conservative elites often failed to appreciate Hitler’s ability to influence people and get his way was a major factor in his success.
The beginnings of the National Socialist storm troopers lie in 1920, when the DAP/NSDAP began to organise security for their meetings to prevent them from being disrupted by “Marxist hecklers.”
he supplied the citizens’ militias with weapons, ammunition and military hardware, and after the militias were disbanded, he ensured that these were not turned over to the Allies.
scary
On 4 November, a pitched battle took place in the Hofbräuhaus, with the SA brutally throwing protestors, largely left-wing workers, out of the beer hall.
Blaming left-wingers for starting it
