There was no note of hysteria, the American journalist observed; indeed the Führer’s voice was pitched slightly deeper than usual, the movement of his hands and body almost as expressive as his words. ‘The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight’, Shirer noted down a few hours later, ‘was the conqueror, and conscious of it, and yet so wonderful an actor, so magnificent a handler of the German mind, that he mixed superbly the full confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness which always goes down so well with the masses when they know a man is on top.
