Hitler and his God

“A Little Guy Yelled Himself into a Fit”

“The force which has ever and always set in motion great historical avalanches of religious and political movements is the magic power of the spoken word”, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. “The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than any other force. All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people.”

Who, then, was the ideal promulgator of the spoken word? “Among a hundred men who call themselves orators today there are scarcely ten who are capable of speaking with effect before an audience of street-sweepers, locksmiths and navvies, and expound the same subject with equal effect tomorrow before an audience of university professors and students. Among a thousand public speakers there may be only one who can speak before a composite audience of locksmiths and professors in the same hall, in such a way that his statements can be fully comprehended by each group while at the same time he effectively influences both and awakens enthusiasm, on the one side as well as on the other, to hearty applause.” 885 This one in a thousand was Hitler himself, of course, and however boastful his claim, it was not untrue, as we know from witnesses who had heard him talk to professors and locksmiths, and to both kinds of people in the same audience.

“Even his greatest opponents concede that Hitler is the greatest orator that Germany has ever known. This is a great concession in view of the fact that the qualities of his voice are far from pleasant – many, in fact, find it distinctly unpleasant. It has a rasping quality that often breaks into a shrill falsetto when he becomes aroused. Nor is it his diction that makes him a great orator. In the early days this was particularly bad. It was a mixture of High German with an Austrian dialect. Nor was it the structure of his speeches that made him a great orator. On the whole, his speeches were sinfully long, badly structured, and very repetitious. Some of them are positively painful to read, but, nevertheless, when he delivered them they had an extraordinary effect upon his audiences.” 886

Hitler had a refined feeling for his public, with whom he was able to enter into a kind of occult communication. Even an implacable opponent like Otto Strasser had to concede: “This man, like a sensitive membrane, has found the way, thanks to an intuition which could not be replaced by intellectual capacities, to become the mouthpiece of the most secret desires, the darkest instincts, the suffering and the inner restiveness of a people … I have been asked so often what is the secret of Hitler’s extraordinary talent as an orator. I cannot explain it in any other way than by saying that it is an indefinable intuition which provides him with the infallible diagnosis of the dissatisfaction from which his audiences are suffering. When he tries to underpin his speeches with learned theories, he hardly rises above a poor average. But when he throws away all crutches, when he storms ahead and speaks out what the spirit inspires into him, then he changes straight away into one of the greatest orators of the century.” 887

“This fiery oratory was something new to the Germans and particularly to the slow-tongued, lower-class Bavarians. In Munich his shouting and gesturing were a spectacle men paid to see. It was not his fiery oratory, however, that won the crowds to his cause. This was certainly something new, but far more important was the seriousness with which his words were spoken”, writes Langer. He quotes Kurt Lüdecke: “Every one of his words comes out charged with a powerful current of energy; at times it seems as if they are torn from the very heart of the man, causing him indescribable anguish.” And then Langer quotes Otto Strasser again: “Hitler’s tongue was like a lash that whipped up the emotions of his audience. And somehow he always managed to say what the majority of the audience were already thinking but could not verbalize. When the audience began to respond, it affected him in return. Before long, due to this reciprocal relationship, he and his audience became intoxicated with the emotional appeal of his oratory.” 888

Another talent of Hitler’s was that of the showman “with a great sense of the dramatic”, inborn in him and developed through his love and close contact with the theatre during the several hundreds of opera performances he had seen. August Kubizek, the only close friend Hitler had in Linz and Vienna, writes: “Hitler found a natural joy in the theatre and had a passion for it … There is no doubt that my friend Adolf was talented as an orator from his earliest youth. He liked to speak and did so all the time … He surely possessed great theatrical talent which, together with his oratorical talent, he knew how to use admirably.” 889 Kershaw calls Hitler “a consummate actor”; Fest asserts that “fundamentally he was a theatrical person” who had the feeling that he was always acting on a stage; and Hitler, only half in jest, proclaimed: “I am the greatest actor in Europe”, verily keeping everybody spellbound by his performance.

It was this sense for the theatrical effect which made Hitler one of the foremost stage directors, although he is seldom appreciated as such. (See e.g. Frederic Spotts recent study: Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.) What lives on in the memory and the nightmares of humanity as the outward pageantry of Nazism – the symbols, the uniforms, the rituals and mass manifestations – was all his doing. “Each detail was tremendously important to Hitler. Even in the festivals with their vast blocks of humanity he personally checked seemingly trivial points. He approved every scene, every movement, as he did the selection of flags and flowers. Significantly, Hitler’s talents as a theatrical director reached their summit when the object of celebration was death … He also had a distinct preference for nocturnal backdrops. Torches, pyres or flaming wheels were continually kindled. Though such rituals were supposed to be highly positive and inspirational, in fact they struck another note, stirring apocalyptic associations and awakening a fear of universal conflagration or doom, including each individual’s own.” 890

Hitler saw himself as a tamer and leader of masses, a tribune in the literal sense. He despised but needed the masses, for they embodied his movement. “The mass has a simple thought and experiential scheme”, he said. “What she cannot fit within [this scheme] makes her insecure. I can only dominate her if I take her laws of life into account. I have been reproached for the fact that I fanaticized the mass, that I arouse her into ecstasy. Clever heads are of the opinion that the mass should be calmed down and kept in dull apathy. No, gentlemen, exactly the contrary is true! I can only lead the mass when I awake her from her apathy. Only the fanaticized mass can be manipulated … I have fanaticized the mass to turn her into an instrument of my politics. I have awakened the mass. I have lifted her above herself, I have given her a meaning and a function. I have been reproached of stirring up the lower instincts of the mass, but what I do is something different. When I present her with intellectual arguments, she does not understand me. When, however, I rouse in her the corresponding sensations, then she follows the simple commands which I give her. In a mass manifestation thinking is switched off. And as this is the condition I need, I see to it that everybody is sent to the manifestations where they become a part of the mass, whether they want it or not, the intellectuals and bourgeois together with the workers. I mix the people. I address them as a mass.” 891

“No doubt there was a deeper meaning to Hitler’s frequent comparison of the masses to a woman. And we need only look at the corresponding pages in Mein Kampf, at the wholly erotic fervour that the idea and the image of the masses aroused in him, to see what he sought and found as he stood on the platform high above the masses filling the arena – his masses. Solitary, unable to make contact, he more and more craved such collective unions. In a revealing turn of phrase (if we may believe the source) he once called the masses ‘his only bride’. His oratorical discharges were largely instinctual, and his audience, unnerved by prolonged distress and reduced to a few elemental needs, reacted on the same instinctual wave length. The sound recordings of the period clearly convey the peculiarly obscene, copulatory character of those mass meetings … The writer René Schickele once spoke of Hitler’s speeches as being ‘like sex murders’. And many other contemporary observers have tried to describe the sensually charged liquescence of these demonstrations in the language of diabolism.” (Joachim Fest 892)

The historian Karl Alexander von Müller had been one of the lecturers when candidate army propagandist Corporal Adolf Hitler attended the initiatory course at Munich University in 1919. He had followed Hitler’s rise and sometimes met him in the Beckmann and Bechstein salons. In January 1923 he heard him speak in public for the first time. “How many public meetings had I already attended in this hall [of the Löwenbrau]. But neither during the war nor during the Revolution had I ever felt such a white-hot wave of mass excitement blast in my face the moment I entered … Para-military maintainers of the order, a forest of glaring red banners with a black swastika, military and revolutionary elements, nationalist and socialist elements. In the audience mostly the struggling middle class in all its sections. For hours continual, booming march music; for hours short speeches by subordinates. When will he come? Has anything happened to hold him up? Nobody can describe the feverish state of suspense building up within this atmosphere. Suddenly movement at the entrance of the hall. Shouted commands. The speaker on the platform breaks off in the middle of a sentence. All leap to their feet, shouting Heil! And through the howling masses and the waving banners he comes with his retinue, he for whom all have been waiting. He strides rapidly up to the platform, right arm raised rigidly. He passed quite close by me, and I saw that this was a different person from the man I had met now and then in private houses.” 893

The effect of Hitler the orator was like a bolt of lightning, striking the masses and many of the intellectuals mixed up with them. They had come to hear him out of curiosity and left totally convinced, converted, ready to dedicate their lives to that sweating man with the little moustache and the drooping forelock. After hearing Hitler for the first time Rudolf Hess sat smilingly staring into space, murmuring: “The Man! The Man!” Speer writes about Hitler’s “hypnotic power”, his “hypnotic persuasion”, his “magnetic force” which had “reached out to me the first time I heard him and had not thereafter released me”. A substantial volume could be filled with such instant conversions. Kurt Lüdecke, for one, confesses: “Presently my critical faculty was swept away. I do not know how to describe the emotion that overwhelmed me as I heard this man. His words were like a scourge. When he spoke of the disgrace of Germany, I felt ready to jump on any enemy. His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached the sacred truth. He seemed another Luther. I forgot everything but the man. Then, glancing around, I saw that this magnetism was holding these thousands as one … The intense will of the man, the passion of his sincerity seemed to flow from him into me. I experienced an exaltation that could be likened to a religious experience.” 894

And there is the testimony of Leni Riefenstahl, the renowned film maker and photographer, who died recently at the age of 101. She went to hear Hitler for the first time in 1932. To Gitta Sereny she confided: “I noticed how emotional people became when they spoke for or against Hitler, so I got interested and I went to hear him. Well, it was like being struck by lightning.” 895 Elsewhere she described that moment as follows: “That very same instant I had an apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth. I felt as if I were paralyzed. Although there was a great deal in this speech that I didn’t understand, I was still fascinated and I sensed that the audience was in bondage to this man.” 896

In his autobiographical novel Michael, Doctor Joseph Goebbels recounted his moment of illumination. “I go, no, I am impelled to go to the rostrum. There I stand for a long time and look this One in the face. This is not an orator. This is a prophet! Sweat pours down from his forehead. In the greyish, pale visage sparkle the eyes like two brilliant stars. His fists are clenched. Word after word and sentence after sentence thunder forth as on Judgment Day. I know no longer what I am doing. It is as if I have lost my senses … The man looks down at me for a moment. The gaze of his blue eyes hits me like a ray of fire … Now I know where my road is leading, the road of maturity. I don’t hear anything anymore. I am as it were intoxicated … I put my hand into the warm, pulsating hand of a man. That was a vow for life. And my eyes sank deep into two big, blue stars.” 897