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radiated an aura of veracity and authenticity. “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,”
someone who was so inseparable from his words “that a measure of authenticity flowed over the audience even when he was telling obvious lies.”
Democracy was to be replaced with “a government of power and authority” that would “ruthlessly clean out the pigsty.”
But perhaps it was the monotonous repetition of his accusations, vows of revenge and promises for the future that was the key to his success.
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.
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.
Conversely, despite the fact that their propaganda was explicitly directed at blue-collar workers, the Nazis did not do well with that demographic group.
At the end of one of Hitler’s appearances, a woman who had been taking notes of his speech was subjected to a humiliating body search by the SA security men in the venue.
Hitler was only able to launch his second political career because his adversaries criminally underestimated him.
In his speech, Hitler used vulgar comparisons, tailor-made to the intellectual capacities of his listeners, and he did not shy away from even the cheapest allusions…His words and opinions were simply hurled out with dictatorial certainty as if they were unquestionable principles and facts. All this manifests itself in his language as well, which is like something merely expulsed.68
Hitler stodgily ignored all signs of economic recovery. “The German collapse continues,” he asserted in December 1925, declaring a few months later: “Today we are a pitiable people, plagued by misery and poverty…Seven years on from 1918, we can say that we have sunk lower and lower.”
“There they have a flourishing economy, while here we have a decrepit industrial sector with twelve million unemployed,” he declared at a rally in Stuttgart in April 1926.71 In reality, an average of only two million Germans were unemployed that year.
Between 1925 and 1928, the NSDAP was irrevocably transformed into a “Führer party,” focused around a single leader at its head.
Indeed, his leadership style encouraged rivalries between his subordinates. In his crudely Darwinist world view, such feuds were part of a process of natural selection that would favour the strongest and most capable of his followers.
Faith in democratic institutions and democratic political parties dissolved, and anti-parliamentary sentiment, already rife in the Weimar Republic, was given a huge boost. Those in power appeared to have no solutions to the crisis, and the more helpless they seemed to be, the greater the demand became for a “strong man,” a political messiah who would lead Germany out of economic misery and point the way towards renewed national greatness.
Veteran, highly skilled civil servants suspected of sympathising with the SPD were fired and replaced with Nazi stooges.
When Hitler opened the campaign in Munich on 18 July, he complained that “the Jew in Germany can get away with anything…and is pretty much above the law.” He promised that he would unmask “the lies of the Marxist party,” which had been fashioned “with true Jewish dexterity.”
People had turned away from the fundamental principles of a civil society—“liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress”—and faith in reason to embrace “the forces of the unconscious, of unthinking dynamism and of pernicious creativity,” which rejected everything intellectual. Fed by those tendencies and carried by a “gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking,” National Socialism pursued “a politics of the grotesque…replete with Salvation Army allures, reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement-park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like
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But attempts to depict the NSDAP leader as ridiculous could not combat the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler. Nor did they undermine the tendency of his supporters to see him as the national saviour.
The conciliatory attitude of legal authorities towards the National Socialists stood in stark contrast to the rigour with which they went after the political Left.
Hitler’s campaign stops in the spring of 1932 were mass spectacles. For many Germans, even those who had not yet become party members, seeing Hitler was a must. They projected their desires onto him as their national saviour, someone who would release the country from misery and lead it to new prosperity. Hitler knew how to exploit these desires, denouncing the thirteen years of the Weimar Republic in ever-darker terms as a time of unmitigated decay and contrasting it with the bright future of a unified German “ethnic community.”
The police did nothing to stop them. It was an indication that the National Socialists already felt like the masters of Germany, entitled to take the law into their own hands.
In his speeches, Hitler repeated his never-ending complaints about thirteen years of alleged financial mismanagement in Germany, combined with promises to clean up the “party gang” as soon as he came to power.
In a letter to Papen, the outgoing Prussian government officials complained and announced that they would challenge the decision in Germany’s highest court.113 That made it clear that resistance to the coup d’état would be restricted to legal means—which was tantamount to capitulation.
“It sickens me to think that we will once again be ruled by this infamous oaf and reckless gambler…The whole thing is a mix of corruption, back-room dealings and nepotism that recalls the worst days of the absolutist monarchy.”
The KPD did call for a general strike to protest “the fascist dictatorship of Hitler, Hugenberg and Papen,” but Communist appeals to form a common front fell on deaf ears among Social Democrats, who remembered all too well being defamed by the Communists as “social fascists.”
Among Hitler’s skills was his ability to mimic people’s gestures and speech. He enjoyed entertaining his entourage by imitating Max Amann, who had lost his left arm and who spoke quickly and repetitively in Bavarian dialect.
As a parvenu, Hitler lived in constant fear of not being taken seriously or, even worse, making himself look ridiculous.
The most important criteria were absolute loyalty, discretion and obedience.
The Führer was very mindful of his health. Indeed, his fear of illness betrayed unmistakable signs of hypochondria.
Hitler could not have expressed any more clearly that his emphasis on “legality” had been mere lip service and that his government was going to do away with all norms of separation of powers and the rule of law. Nonetheless, that did not prevent the spokesmen of the Centre Party, the Bavarian People’s Party, the German State Party, the German People’s Party and Christian People’s Service from voting for the Enabling Act on behalf of their factions—“in the expectation of an orderly development,” as Reinhold Maier from the State Party put it.135 In the final roll call 441 deputies voted yes,
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In his memoirs, François-Poncet insightfully characterised Hitler’s modus operandi as “hitting his opponent in the face while at the same time saying ‘What I suggest is peace.’
A lively trade in Hitler busts developed, and the image of the Führer adorned beer steins, porcelain tiles, ashtrays, playing cards, fountain pens and other banal everyday objects.
On the contrary, “ethnic comrades,” male and female, fell over themselves to exalt Hitler, projecting all their hopes and desires onto the figure of the Führer and thereby divorcing their image of him even further from reality.
“They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail,” wrote Shirer. “They looked up at him as if he were a messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman.”
Before long, he was addicted to the thrill of popular admiration. It reinforced Hitler’s belief that he had been chosen by Providence to carry out a historic mission.
That would be in keeping with his tendency to postpone taking major decisions, only to then make up his mind in a flash without considering any arguments to the contrary.
Misunderstandings and misinterpretations were an inevitable part of this oral leadership style.
On the other hand, it also opened up considerable room for those around Hitler to exert an influence. Here, too, Goebbels achieved a certain mastery.
Hitler’s non-bureaucratic, personalised style of rule encouraged underlings to push ahead with initiatives of their own in the hopes of anticipating the Führer’s will.
Speer’s mother, who was invited to the Berghof a number of times in 1939, scoffed: “How nouveau riche it all is. Even how the meals are served is impossible, and the table decorations are coarse. Hitler was terribly nice, but it’s a world for parvenus.”120
Various reports registered remarks such as “The Führer surely did not intend this.”
“Except for him there was no one now or in the near future…who could perform the tasks facing the German people,” Below quoted him saying.
his visit to Italy revealed that he still lived in fear of looking laughable.
