Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (19 page)

—

Contrary to what many people still believe, Hitler did not speak extemporaneously: he diligently prepared for all his public appearances. He would fill a dozen pages with catchwords and slogans to keep him focused during his two- to three-hour performances. Right before the start of events, he would pace his room and run through the fundamental points of his speech, repeatedly interrupted by telephone calls from followers reporting on the atmosphere in the venue. Hitler usually arrived half an hour late to ratchet up the excitement. He would then place his notes to his right and occasionally glance down at them to reassure himself.
¹⁸

His speeches followed a set pattern. As a rule, Hitler began calmly, almost hesitantly. As the historian John Toland put it, Hitler spent the first ten minutes or so gauging the mood of his audience with the fine sense of an actor.
¹⁹
Only when he was convinced of their approval did he begin to relax. He then started to punctuate his remarks with dramatic gestures—throwing his head back, extending his right arm and underlining particularly vivid sentences with his finger or hammering on the lectern with his fists. At the same time his tone and choice of words became more aggressive. The more clearly an audience signalled with applause and calls of approval that the spark had caught, the more Hitler increased his volume and tempo. His own excitement was infectious. By the end of his speeches, after a furious crescendo, the entire venue would be in a state of intoxicated fervour, and the orator himself, covered in sweat, would accept the congratulations of his entourage.
²⁰

A variety of factors contributed to Hitler’s power as a speaker, starting with his full-bodied and flexible voice—“his best weapon,” as it has been called
²¹
—which he used like an instrument. “If one minute there was a vibrato to lament the undeserved fate of an aggrieved and repeatedly betrayed people, the next there would be the approach of a cleansing thunderstorm, only for Hitler’s voice to erupt suddenly in emotional displays that swept his audience irresistibly into mass ecstasy,” Hitler’s friend Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl wrote.
²²
Prior to 1928, Hitler spoke without the help of microphones or loudspeakers: his earliest followers heard the natural power of his baritone voice without any of the distortion of technological amplification.

Hitler was skilled at choosing his words to appeal to an audience. As Hanfstaengl put it, he had mastered the “language of the post-war little guy,” peppering his speeches not only with the coarse phrases of a former military man, but also with irony and sarcasm.
²³
He was good at responding to hecklers so he mostly kept the laughter on his side. Moreover, Hitler’s speeches clearly touched a nerve. Like no one else, he was able to express what his audience thought and felt: he exploited their fears, prejudices and resentments, but also their hopes and desires. “A virtuoso playing the soul of the masses like a keyboard” was how Hanfstaengl put it, adding: “Well beyond the measure of his inspiring rhetoric, this person seemed to have a gift for coupling the gnostic desire of the time for a strong leader with his own sense of personal mission. This conflation made every conceivable hope and expectation seem realistic.”
²⁴

That effect Hitler derived not just from
what
he said, but
how
he said it. He had become the Unknown Soldier from the world war who shared the problems and desires of his audience, and thus 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,” observed Hans Frank, who first heard one of Hitler’s speeches in January 1920 at the age of 19. “He spoke from the bottom of his own soul and all of our souls.”
²⁵
This was the “unity of the word and the man” that Hitler’s first biographer, Konrad Heiden, identified as the secret to the agitator’s success. During the high points of his speeches, Heiden wrote, Hitler was “someone seduced by 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.”
²⁶

From his very earliest speeches, Hitler liked using religious imagery and motifs. When he referenced the Bible, he sometimes went so far as to compare himself with Jesus Christ: “We may be small, but there was once a man who stood up for himself in Galilee, and today his teachings rule the entire world.”
²⁷
Conversely, many people who had been disoriented by the war and were looking for a political messiah attached their hopes and desires to Hitler, the man who propagated his ethnic gospel with such missionary fervour. Hitler seemed like “a second Luther” to the merchant Kurt Lüdecke, who was part of the demagogue’s inner circle for a time. “I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to a religious conversion,” he wrote in 1938.
²⁸
Such experiences were typical of many people who attended Hitler’s speeches; even those who were initially sceptical about the NSDAP were surprised to find themselves part of a community that got emotionally carried away.

Some of the appeal of Hitler’s appearances was the increasing cleverness with which they were staged. They combined, as Joachim Fest put it, “the spectacular elements of the circus and the grand opera with the uplifting ceremony of the church’s liturgical ritual.”
²⁹
Parades with flags and marching-band music prepared the crowd. Anticipation rose, all the more so the longer the speaker kept his audience waiting. Karl Alexander von Müller described the entrance of the local matador in the following terms: “Suddenly, at the back entrance, there was movement. Commands barked out. The speaker at the podium fell silent in mid-sentence. Everyone jumped up to shout ‘Heil!’ The man everyone had been waiting for strode to the stage with his entourage, his right arm raised rigidly in the air.”
³⁰
Even those who were not caught up in the feverish atmosphere were entertained by Nazi events, not least because beer flowed freely.
³¹

Hitler possessed an extraordinary sense of political symbolism. The swastika flag became the party emblem very early on, in 1921, combining the colours of the German Reich—black, white and red—with a symbol which had long been in use among ethnic-chauvinist circles; Ehrhardt’s navy brigade, for instance, had worn it on their steel helmets during the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch.
³²
There were also the pennant that became the sign of the SA, and the “Heil” greeting, which was made mandatory within the movement in 1926.
³³
The National Socialists also had no qualms about adopting leftist propaganda techniques. They announced their meetings on garish red posters, and they distributed flyers from trucks to the general populace. One goal was to seduce workers away from leftist parties, although in the beginning it was worried members of the lower middle classes, uprooted former soldiers and impoverished university graduates who flocked to Hitler’s events.
³⁴

Hitler adapted the content of his speeches to suit the tastes of his lower-middle-class, nationalist-conservative, ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic listeners, even though his repertoire of topics was quite limited. His speeches typically began with a look back at “wonderful, flourishing Germany before the war,” in which “orderliness, cleanliness and precision” had ruled and civil servants had gone about their work “honestly and dutifully.”
³⁵
Again and again, Hitler directed his audience’s attention to the “great heroic time of 1914,”
³⁶
when the German people, unified as seldom before, had been dragged into a war forced upon them by the Entente powers. This idealised vision of the past allowed Hitler to paint the present day in hues that were all the darker. Everywhere you looked now, there was only decline and decay. “Why do we stand today amidst the ruins of the Reich Bismarck created so brilliantly?” Hitler asked in a speech in January 1921, on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the German Reich.
³⁷
His answer was always the same: the revolution of 1918–19 had been Germany’s downfall, casting it into slavery.
³⁸
Those primarily responsible were Jews and leftists whom he described as “revolutionary” or “November criminals.”
³⁹
They had undermined Germany’s armed forces, cheating the country of the victory it had earned and delivering it up helplessly to its enemies. “The ‘utterly fearless’ army was ‘stabbed from behind’ by ‘Jew-socialists’ bribed with Jewish money,” was how a USPD pamphlet cited a statement by Hitler at a meeting in the Hofbräuhaus in April 1920.
⁴⁰
Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, the former heads of the Third Supreme Command, had launched the stab-in-the-back legend during an effectively staged appearance before the investigations committee of the German National Assembly in November 1919. This myth then became a constant component within the propaganda arsenal of right-wing nationalists.
⁴¹

Polemical attacks on the Treaty of Versailles occupied a central position in Hitler’s campaigns, playing upon widespread bitterness about what was perceived as a shameful and humiliating peace. The conditions of the treaty, Hitler repeatedly hammered into his listeners’ heads, were “unfulfillable,” since they stripped Germany down to its “last shirt” and condemned it to “serfdom” for the foreseeable future. A peace had been dictated to the German people, Hitler raged, such as had “never been seen before in 6,000 years of human history.” Compared with Versailles, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which Imperial Germany had dictated to revolutionary Russia in March 1918, had been “child’s play.”
⁴²
That was a crass reversal of actual fact: the terms of the Treaty of Versailles had been relatively mild compared with those that the Soviet government had been forced to accept.

Hitler combined his agitation against the Versailles Treaty with hateful attacks on the Weimar Republic and its leading representatives. By turns he excoriated Germany’s new democratic order as a “republic of scoundrels,” a “Berlin Jew government” and a “criminal republic.”
⁴³
In his eyes all democratic politicians, including Reich President Friedrich Ebert, were incompetent and corrupt. Playing upon Ebert’s training as a saddler, a profession that included mattress-making, Hitler said of Germany: “Ripped and torn, full of holes and defective in every sense, with coils sticking out and ruptured knots, it is in extreme need of restoration. But one particular aspect of our Reich mattress stands out above all, Herr Ebert. It’s full of lice, completely full of lice.”
⁴⁴
Hitler defamed former Reich Finance Minister Erzberger as “a typical new-fangled German state criminal.”
⁴⁵
In early 1922, he turned his hateful sights on Foreign Minister Rathenau, whom he accused of “betraying and selling out the German people” by making concessions to the victorious Allies.
⁴⁶
This was very much in the spirit of the nationalist campaign of defamation against “fulfilment politicians”—those leaders who thought Germany should live up to its commitments in the Treaty of Versailles; Hitler’s tirades further contributed to the poisonous atmosphere in which both Erzberger and Rathenau were murdered. According to Hitler, Weimar Germany’s elected representatives were tools of “international stock-market and interest capital,” which held Germany in its clutches and was sucking the lifeblood out of the country.
⁴⁷
The once-so-successful Reich had thereby been reduced, he claimed, to “a colony of global capital and its henchmen…and hopelessly condemned to slavery.”
⁴⁸

But the political demagogue did not just adopt and magnify the worries and resentments of his audience. In the Nazi Party’s twenty-five-point manifesto Hitler also offered hope for the future. “Our most effective criticism is our programme,” he noted before a speech in August 1920. “Its brevity. Our will.”
⁴⁹
Even in his earliest speeches, Hitler vowed to annul the Treaty of Versailles: “As soon as we have the power, we’ll rip up this scrap of paper.”
⁵⁰
He made no bones of his view that economic recovery depended upon “smashing interest slavery.”
⁵¹
The goal of “national rebirth” meant, externally, the creation of a “greater Germany” and, internally, the foundation of an “ethnic community” (
Volksgemeinschaft
) that abolished the chasm between the bourgeoisie and the working class.
⁵²
“We must become a people of honest hard workers,” Hitler proclaimed.