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The Attraction of Hitler
Documentary transcript
Dr Christopher Andrew, Cambridge University:
“After the propaganda triumph of his trial, Hitler set out to write the bible of National Socialism, Mein Kampf (My Struggle).
Mein Kampf details the obsessions which accompanied Hitler’s political thought – the Jews, racism, living space for the German people, the evils of Communism and parliamentary democracy, but it also includes Hitler’s views on a variety of other topics from boxing to syphilis. Though Hitler was great speaker he was an indifferent writer:
Voiceover: The amazing appeal Hitler was later to exercise was based, not on the turgid prose of Mein Kampf, but on his mastery of the spoken word
After prison, the leader or Fuhrer, as he now called himself now had a new political strategy. Instead of planning another coup he aimed to win power at the polls. Hitler’s obsession with the Jews and living space in Eastern Europe would never have given him mass support. What was to win him millions of votes was instead his vision of a great national revival. Hitler’s election opportunity came with the onset of the depression, in a few years, one in three of the labour force was out of work. The Nazis claimed to have the answer.
Else Wendel, a church social worker during the depression, working with the unemployed in the Berlin slums:
By 1932, German industrial production had fallen by almost half, among the unemployed she found a pervading sense of hopelessness about the future.
“The houses were so neat to each other that the women would talk to each other through the windows. The despair was so terrible that I can’t describe it – wherever you went in Berlin there were beggars everywhere – people came onto the courtyard and were singing and singing just for a penny.”
The democratic political parties offered no solution. To millions of Germans the only hope was Adolph Hitler.
“ I supported Hitler because, after having seen all that depravity all that poverty, he was the only one who could do social justice to the people here. They were in terrible misery.”
Using the slogan “the Fuhrer over Germany”, Hitler was the first politician to use the aeroplane to campaign in several different cities in the same day. His message was simple, only he could save Germany. By 1932, at the depth of the depression, the Nazis with a third of the vote were easily the largest political party and easily their largest asset was Hitler’s oratory.
Egon Hanstaelngl: Son of Hitler’s foreign press officer
“He had such ability which he needed to make people stop thinking critically and just emote. The ability derived form his readiness to throw himself totally open, to appear as it were bare and naked before his audience. To tear open his heart and display it.
Before the audience hear the messianic message of the National Revivial, Hitler built up a suspense by keeping them waiting often for an hour or more. At the speakers’ platform Hitler adds to the tension by keeping them waiting again. He does what no politician today would dare to do, for a full minute he stays silent.
“When he feels he has gauged the mood of the audience he starts but slowly and quietly.
He had an actors’ ability to throw on a few extra generators and suddenly become charged with energy.”
Hitler: “We don’t want to lie and we don’t want to cheat. I have therefore always refused to make cheap promises. Nobody here can get up and prove that I have ever said that the revival of Germany is just a matter of a few days. Again and again I have preached that the renewal of the nation depends on the German people recovering their inner strength and health.”
It wasn’t as though he was using words, it was the emotions came direct without words, there was a rawness about his power.
Hitler speaks:
“In us alone lies the future of the German people. When we ourselves lead German people out of the abyss though our own hard work, our own industry, our own determination, our own stubbornness, our own perseverance then we will rise again just as our fathers built up Germany not through outside help but by their own efforts.”
Nobody has ever had this power to move audiences and this is not just the men in the street this is many Germany intellectuals who are moved by this appeal and stirred by this extraordinary self-confidence in this man and it is not what he says but how he says it.”
Hitler Biographer
