Over the next few years, Hitler would give hundreds of similar speeches, perfecting his performance method. Over time, he developed a winning and invariant structure. He always stood in the same, upright, and serious way, and made the same gestures. His speeches began with a long silence, broken by a soft, almost intimate tone of great personal pain and vulnerability, in which he described his difficult upbringing, service in the war, and despair at Germany’s defeat. In a bridge section, he would, with rising fury, begin to assign blame, and denounce all that was wrong in the present. In an
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