Hitler

number of occasions when Hitler, faced with an unfriendly audience, would abruptly lose the thread, break off his speech, and turning on his heel sulkily leave the room.

His whole being needed the mass acclaim. For this sort of cheering had once aroused him; now it maintained his states of tension and propelled him onward. He himself said that in the midst of the tumult he became “another person.” The historian Karl Alexander von Muller had long ago observed that Hitler communicated to his listeners an excitement that in turn provided fresh impetus to his voice. Certainly Hitler was a superior tactician, a capable organizer, a canny psychologist, and, despite all his deficiencies, one of the most remarkable phenomena of the period. But his invincible genius came to him only in the course of mass meetings, when he exalted platitudes into the resounding words of a prophet and seemed truly to transform himself into the leader; for in his everyday state he seemed only to be posing as der Fuhrer with considerable effort. His basic condition was lethargy punctuated by “Austrian” spells of weariness. Left to himself, he seemed ready to fall back on dull movies, endless performances of the Meistersinger, the Carlton Tearoom’s luscious chocolate confections called Mohrenkopfe, or going on and on about architecture. He needed hubbub around him to be fired for action. He drew his dynamism from the crowd. Its worship also gave him the stamina to carry out those terribly strenuous campaigns and flights over Germany; it was the drug his strained, driven existence constantly needed. When in October, 1931, he met Bruning for his first private talk with the Chancellor, he launched into a one-hour speech, in the course of which he worked himself up to a frenzy—lashed on by the singing of his SA unit, which he had ordered to march up and down past the windows. Obviously he had done this partly to intimidate Bruning, partly to recharge himself.³⁷

It was this deep pathological link with the masses that made Hitler more than an effective demagogue and gave him his undeniable advantage over Goebbels, whose speeches were more pointed and clever. Hitler lifted the crowds out of their apathy and despair to, as he himself called it, “forward-driving hysteria.” Goebbels called these demonstrations “the divine services of our political work,” and a Hamburg schoolmistress wrote in April, 1932, after an election meeting attended by 120,000 persons, that she had witnessed scenes of “moving faith” which showed Hitler “as the helper, rescuer, redeemer from overwhelming need.” Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, drew similar conclusions after Hitler paid a visit to her in Weimar. He “struck her as a religious rather than political leader.”³⁸

In this phase of his career Hitler operated more on the metaphysical than on the ideological plane. His success with the masses was above all a phenomenon of the psychology of religion. He spoke less to people’s political convictions than to their spiritual state. Of course Hitler could link up with an extensive system of traditional thought and conduct: with the German bent for authoritarianism and unrealistic intellectual constructs; with profound needs to follow a leader, and with a peculiar disorientation in politics. But, beyond this, agreement for the most part ended. His anti-Jewish slogans derived their force not so much from any especially violent German anti-Semitism as from the old demagogic trick of presenting people with a visible enemy. Nor was it the unique bellicose character of the Germans that Hitler mobilized; rather, he appealed to their long-ignored feelings of self-respect and national pride. The masses were not seduced by his images of land in the Ukraine; rather, they followed Hitler for the sake of their lost dignity, because they wanted once more to be participants in history. While Mein Kampf was issued in numerous editions, it was read by hardly anyone; this testifies to the general lack of interest all along in Hitler’s specific programs.

Hence, the rise of the National Socialist Party and its coming to power was not—as has often been argued in hindsight—a great conspiracy of the Germans against the world aimed at carrying out imperialistic and anti- Semitic ends. Hitler’s speeches during the years he was attracting mass audiences in the greatest numbers contain very little in the way of specific statements of intentions, and even scant his ideological obsessions, anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. Their salient characteristic, in fact, is their vague, general subject matter and the frequent resort to philosophical metaphors acceptable to all. As for spelling out aims, they are a far cry from the candor of Mein Kampf. A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, in the midst of one of the crises he had unleashed, Hitler himself admitted that for years he had put on a show of harmlessness. Circumstances, he declared, had forced him to masquerade as peaceable.

With the bravura of a great orator, however, he was freeing himself more and more from specific content and concrete ideas. His continuous triumphs were proof that Nazism was a charismatic rather than an ideological movement, not looking to a progam but looking up to a leader. His personality gave outline and consistency to the loose jumble of ideas in the foreground. What people followed was merely the tone, a hypnotic voice; and although Hitler could draw upon unfulfilled nostalgias and dreams of hegemony, most of those who wildly cheered him were longing to forget, beneath his speaker’s platform, their exhaustion and their panic. They were certainly not thinking of Minsk or Kiev, or of Auschwitz, either. They wanted, above all, things to change. Their political faith scarcely went beyond blind negation of the status quo.

Hitler recognized what could be done with these negativistic complexes more keenly than did any of his rivals on the Left or the Right. His agitational technique really consisted in defamation and vision, in indicting the present and promising a potent future. All he did was ring the changes on his praise of a strong state, his glorification of the nation, his call for racial and national rebirth and for a free hand on the domestic and the foreign fronts. He appealed to the German longing for unity, decried the nation’s “self-laceration,” called class struggle the “religion of the inferior,” hailed the movement as the “bridge building of the nation,” and conjured up the fear that the Germans might once more become the world’s “cultural manure.”

But his major theme, which he found as harrowing as did the masses, was the “ruin of the Reich.” He cited the vast numbers who were reduced to wretchedness, the danger of Marxism, the “unnatural incest of party government,” the “tragedy of the small savers,” hunger, unemployment, suicides. His descriptions were deliberately generalized, first, because that assured him the maximum following, and secondly because he had recognized that within parties the precise statements of policy led to dissension and the impetus of a movement increased with the vagueness of its goals. Whoever succeeded in combining the most thorough negation of the present with the most indefinite promises for the future would capture the masses and ultimately win power. Thus, in one of his typical dualities of image and counterimage, of damnation and utopia, he demanded: “Is it by any chance German when our people is torn apart into thirty parties, when not one can get along with the others? But I tell all these sorry politicians: ‘Germany will become one single party, the party of a heroic great nation!’ ”

By turning all his propaganda against the status quo, he achieved the simplicity that he himself saw as one of the requirements for success. “All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.” To illustrate his approach, here is a passage from a speech of March, 1932, in which he upbraids the government for having had thirteen years to prove its worth yet having produced nothing but a “series of disasters”:

Starting with the day of the Revolution up to the epoch of subjugation and enslavement, up to the time of treaties and emergency decrees, we see failure upon failure, collapse upon collapse, misery upon misery. Timidity, lethargy and hopelessness are everywhere the milestones of these disasters…. The peasantry today is ground down, industry is collapsing, millions have lost their saved pennies, millions of others are unemployed. Everything that formerly stood firm has changed, everything that formerly seemed great has been overthrown. Only one thing has remained preserved for us: The men and the parties who are responsible for the misfortunes. They are still here to this day.³⁹

With such accusatory formulas, varied and repeated a thousand times over, with vague invocations of fatherland, honor, greatness, power, and revenge, he mobilized the masses. He saw to it that their stormy emotions furthered the chaos he so scathingly described. He placed his hope in everything that could destroy existing conditions, or could at least create disturbance, because any movement would have to be movement away from the existing system and would ultimately accrue to his profit. For nobody else was formulating in so credible, decisive, and mass-effective a manner the agonizing craving for change. People in Germany were so desperate, Harold Nicolson noted in his diary during his visit to Berlin at the beginning of 1932, that they would “accept, anything that looks like an alternative.”⁴⁰

The vagueness of his terms also enabled him to brush aside social conflicts and veil social contradictions in a cloud of verbosity. After one midnight speech by Hitler in the Berlin Friedrichshain district, Goebbels noted: “That