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The experience of being forced to toughen up while growing ever more indifferent to human suffering was one of the main lessons Hitler would take from the First World War.
Without Hitler, the rise of National Socialism would have been unthinkable. In his absence, the party would have remained one of many ethnic-chauvinist groups on the right of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, the special conditions of the immediate post-war years in both Bavaria and the German Reich were also crucial: without the explosive mixture of economic misery, social instability and collective trauma, the populist agitator Hitler would never have been able to work his way out of anonymity to become a famous politician.
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.61
Ironically, therefore, 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.
