Hitler's Charisma (4 page)

Hitler’s successful rise to power—and his entire charismatic leadership—was based on his rhetorical skill. “Threatening and beseeching with pleading hands and flaming, steel-blue eyes, he had the look of a fanatic,” wrote Kurt Lüdecke, who heard Hitler speak in 1922. “His words were like a scourge. When he spoke of Germany’s disgrace I felt ready to spring on an enemy. His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another Luther. I forgot everything but the man. Glancing around, I saw that his magnetism was holding these thousands as one.”
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In the years just after the First World War there were many small extremist political groups in Munich, but none possessed a speaker who could inspire an audience like this.

Hitler had already gained a great deal of practice as a didactic speaker—though without previously convincing anyone that he was “another Luther.” Despite impressing August Kubizek in pre-war Vienna, for example, with his ability to “fluently”
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express himself, Hitler could also rant on so much that he appeared “unbalanced.”
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But times had changed, and Germany now was an altogether different place from comfortable pre-war Vienna. Germans had to deal with the trauma of a lost war, the destruction
of the old political system based on the Kaiser, the fear of a Communist Revolution, a humiliating peace treaty which called on them to accept “guilt” for starting the war in the first place, and castigatory reparations which at the January 1921 Paris conference called for over 220 thousand million gold marks to be paid to the victors.

Hitler was thus preaching to people who were desperate. So bad was the economic situation that it seemed as if the whole financial infrastructure of the nation might collapse as hyperinflation hit in 1923. “They [the Allies] wanted to keep Germany down economically, industrially, for generations,” says Bruno Hähnel who grew up during the immediate post–First World War years. “There was inflation—you paid billions [of marks] for a loaf of bread.”
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And for returning soldiers, like Herbert Richter, it was all but heartbreaking to witness the economic hardship on top of the suffering of the war. “My parents had only capital,” he says. “They didn’t own any land. And they didn’t own a house. And their fortune melted away like snow in the sunshine—it disappeared. Beforehand we had been quite wealthy. And then suddenly we were without resources—we were poor.”
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Germans were experiencing a crisis that was not just economic but also political and, in many cases, spiritual. In such circumstances it is easy to understand why Germans asked themselves: who was to blame for this horror? Why were they forced to suffer so much? And these were questions that Adolf Hitler said he could answer, telling his growing audience how they should feel about the life they were experiencing and what they could do to make things better.

Hitler structured his early speeches not only to control the mood of the audience but—most importantly—to provoke an emotional response. He would often begin, as he did in his speech on 12 April 1922, by outlining the terrible situation in which Germany found herself. “Practically,” said Hitler, “we have no longer a politically independent German Reich, we are already a colony of the outside world.”
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He would then ask who was responsible for this nightmare—and here, for the audience, there would be good news. Because it turned out, as Hitler saw it, that the bulk of the German population were not to blame for their misfortune. It was all, he claimed, the fault of the Jews: they had been responsible for the outbreak of the First World War, for the abuses of capitalism and the new revolutionary creed of Communism,
and they had been behind the “November criminals” who had signed the armistice in 1918 that had ended the war. The Jews, Hitler argued, owed no allegiance to any nation state, but only an allegiance to other Jews across national boundaries. He created a fantasy world in which Jews even pretended to be on both sides of an industrial dispute in order to disrupt society—the side of the workers and the side of the employers. “They [i.e., the Jews] both pursue one common policy and a single aim. Moses Kohn on the one side encourages his association to refuse the workers’ demands, while his brother Isaac in the factory incites the masses and shouts, ‘Look at them! They only want to oppress you! Shake off your fetters …’ His brother takes care that the fetters are well and truly forged.”
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Hitler was also conscious that he was speaking to an audience in the heart of Catholic Bavaria and so was even prepared, in the context of the fight against the Jews, to compare the nascent Nazi movement to Jesus and his disciples. “My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter,” Hitler said in April 1922. “It points me to the man who, once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognised these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who—God’s truth!—was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read the passage [in the Bible] which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders.”
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It is extremely unlikely that Hitler was, even at this stage, a Christian as he claimed. But large numbers of his audience certainly were. And it was possible for them to make other personal—and blasphemous—comparisons between Jesus and Hitler. For example, that both leaders had waited until they were thirty years old before beginning their “mission,” and that both promised redemption from the suffering of the moment. In order to support such views the Nazis—not surprisingly—ignored the historical record and claimed that Jesus was not Jewish.

Hitler was doing nothing out of the ordinary in attempting to paint the Jews as responsible for Germany’s misfortune. At the time, they were a convenient and popular scapegoat for many on the extreme Right. As Professor Christopher Browning explains, “Just about every ailment in Germany can be tied to the Jews: reparations, predatory Jews as financiers, and national humiliation. The Jews were also [portrayed as] the weakness behind the home front, the profiteers who didn’t fight in the
war. Liberalism—considered to be a Jewish product—emancipation, equality before the law, Soviets and Judeo-Bolshevism, all make viable a far more radical and far more widespread anti-Semitism that has political clout … So no warning signals go up and no alarm bells go off when Hitler becomes obsessed about the Jews, because he’s making in an extreme form arguments that are, one might say, already in a kind of form. So, Hitler’s certainly appealing to Germans to end economic distress, to end political gridlock, to make Germany strong and proud internationally and to end the disintegration of German culture, and for him this is all tied together with anti-Semitism.”
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Hitler, from the very beginning, was also contemptuous of democracy, ridiculing the notion that “the people governs.”
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What was needed, he said, was not democracy, but one determined individual who would arise and restore strong leadership to Germany. And he was explicit about the central political idea that this strong leader ought to pursue in order to rescue Germany—a national renewal based on classlessness and race. Hitler demanded that all but “Aryans” should be excluded from German citizenship. (Again, the idea that there was a distinct “Aryan” subset of Caucasian people, or that this Nordic-type group was somehow a “superior race,” was not original, but had been proselytised by a number of racial theorisers before the First World War.) Once Germany consisted only of these “Aryan” people—and the vast majority of the current population of Germany were already “Aryan,” according to Hitler—then Germany could become a nation of one “race,” and in the process, all class distinctions could be eliminated. “And then we said to ourselves: there are no such things as classes: they cannot be. Class means caste and caste means race.”
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This call for “all true Germans” to work together to make a new Germany was particularly attractive to young Bavarians like Emil Klein. “This party wanted to eradicate class differences,” he says. “[The existing order was] the working class here, the bourgeoisie here and the middle-classes here. These were deeply ingrained concepts that split the nation. So that was an important point for me, one that I liked—‘the nation has to be united!’ That was already clear to me as a young man—it was self-evident that there wasn’t a working class here and a middle class there.”
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And linked to this idea was the notion that “international high finance, the financial power of Jewry,” had to be eliminated. Believing in the fantasy
Hitler peddled, Klein was convinced that this power stemmed in part from New York. “Wall Street was always being mentioned.”

What Emil Klein and others who heard these early speeches discovered was that to listen to a Hitler speech was to be taken on a journey, from an initial sense of despair as Hitler outlined the terrible problems the country faced, through a realisation that the audience were not to blame for the current troubles, to a vision of how all this could be corrected in a better, classless world once one strong leader, who had emerged from the German people, was able to gain power at the head of a national revolution. For people who were struggling under the impact of an economic crisis, this could be enthralling.

Hitler has often been accused of being an “actor,” but a vital part of his early appeal was that his supporters in the beer halls, like Emil Klein, thought he was “genuine” through and through. “When I first saw him address a meeting at the Hofbräuhaus [a large beer hall in Munich],” says Emil Klein, “the man gave off such a charisma that people believed whatever he said. And when someone today says that he was an actor, then I have to say that the German nation must have been complete idiots to have granted a man like that such belief, to the extent that the entire German nation held out to the last day of the war … I still believe to this day that Hitler believed that he would be able to fulfil what he preached. That he believed it in all honesty, believed it himself … And ultimately all those I was together with, the many people at the party conferences everywhere, the people believed him, and they could only believe him because it was evident that he did [believe it] too, that he spoke with conviction, and that was something lacking in those days.”
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The emotional sincerity that many thought they detected in Hitler as an orator was a necessary precondition of his charismatic appeal. Hans Frank, who would later become the ruler of much of Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War, was hugely influenced by what he perceived as Hitler’s lack of artifice when he heard him speak in January 1920: “The first [thing] that one felt was: the speaker is somehow honest, he does not want to convince you of something that he himself does not fully believe in … And in the pauses of his speech his blue eyes were shining passionately, while he brushed back his hair with his right hand … Everything came from the heart, and he struck a chord with all of us … He uttered what was in the consciousness of all those present
and linked general experiences to clear understanding and the common wishes of those who were suffering and wishing for a programme … But not only that. He showed a way, the only way left to all ruined peoples in history, that of the grim new beginning from the most profound depths through courage, faith, readiness for action, hard work, and devotion, a great, shining, common goal … From this evening onwards, though not a party member, I was convinced that if one man could do it, Hitler alone would be capable of mastering Germany’s fate.”
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Hans Frank was just nineteen years old when he heard Hitler speak, and perhaps it’s not so surprising that a young, impressionable man like him was so affected by Hitler’s words during these desperate times for Germany. What’s less immediately explicable is why Hermann Göring, a much-decorated air force veteran, and commander of the famous Richthofen squadron during the First World War, pledged himself to Hitler, a former ordinary soldier, after they met for the first time in the autumn of 1922.

Göring was nearly thirty years old when he encountered Hitler, and was an individual used to impressing others himself. His daring exploits as one of the pioneering members of the German air force had gained him not only an Iron Cross but many other decorations including the Pour Le Mérite, one of the highest awards possible in the German Empire. He had been outraged by the decision to end the war on 11 November 1918, and had told the men in his squadron just eight days after the armistice, “The new fight for freedom, principles, morals and the Fatherland has begun. We have a long and difficult way to go, but the truth will be our light. We must be proud of this truth and of what we have done. We must think of this. Our time will come again.”
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By the autumn of 1922 Göring had returned to Germany after spending time working in Scandinavia, first as a stunt pilot and then as a commercial pilot for the Swedish airline, Svensk-Lufttrafik. He would shortly marry the soon-to-be divorced Baroness Carin von Kantzow. Now a mature political science student at Munich University, Göring was a worldly, hard-bitten man of immense personal confidence. Yet he was immediately impressed when he first saw Adolf Hitler. “One day, on a Sunday in November or October of 1922, I went to this protest demonstration as a spectator,” Göring said during his war crimes trial at Nuremberg in 1946. “At the end Hitler too was called for. I had heard his name
briefly mentioned once before and wanted to hear what he had to say. He declined to speak, and it was pure coincidence that I stood nearby and heard the reasons for his refusal … He considered it senseless to launch protests with no weight behind them. This made a deep impression on me. I was of the same opinion.”
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