Chapter 12
Hitler: Actor and Orator
Some maintain that Hitler never came up with a new idea and that everything he did and said was imitative of things he’d already seen, heard, or read. This may also be true of his adoption and adaptation of mass marketing a politically imbued idea, a practice commonly known as propaganda.
A Hidden Talent
The first time Hitler realized he could speak and lead occurred shortly after the end of World War I while working in the army’s propaganda office. At this time, as early as 1919, Hitler knew how to define political questions and, more importantly, how to seek their answers. He was becoming a man of ideas and would emerge as a political orator who possessed a remarkable grasp of political processes. The next step was to translate these ideas into policy and to learn the art of connivance and manipulation. Once he had acquired these abilities, as well as having studied German and enemy propaganda, he could weave narratives for his ideas—even if these were blatant lies or exaggerations.1
Hitler’s very first speech for the DAP was a huge success. A leading Munich paper reported that Hitler had spoken with “rousing words” and had made a case for “the necessity to rally against the common enemy of nations”—the Jews. In these early speeches, bashing the Jews was not Hitler’s only theme. He frequently expressed Pan-German views, called for the unification of Germany and Austria, and condemned the Versailles Treaty. Gradually, he shifted the DAP from purely a German workers’ party to a movement promoting National Socialism.2
Unlike other politicians, it was Hitler’s speeches that paved his way to power. Once he held the reigns, it was also his oratory that would hold the German people in his grip. During the many years and opportunities of Hitler’s rabble-rousing speeches, he refined his art into producing “not a mere speech but a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork. Hitler ravished his audiences, sensed what his listeners felt—not what they thought, but what they felt—such as frustration, anger, paranoia, xenophobia. Then he told them what to think.”3
Hitler’s longtime secretary Christa Schroeder said of her boss that he possessed the “gift of a rare magnetic power to reach people . . . a sixth sense and a clairvoyant intuition.”4 During the first six years of Hitler’s stint in power, André François-Poncet, the French ambassador to Germany, had plenty of opportunities to observe him in action. He found that Hitler seemed to possess an almost psychic ability to read precisely what the crowds wanted or feared, approved or hated, believed or disbelieved, and that he knew how to play on these emotions to perfection.5
Early in his campaigning years, Hitler practiced gestures and expressions while standing in front of a mirror. One of his early sycophants, Ernst Hanfstaengl, likened Hitler’s public mimicry to “the thrusts and parries of a fencer,” “the perfect balance of a tightrope-walker,” “a skilled violinist,” “a really great orchestral conductor who, instead of just hammering out the downbeat, suggests the existence of hidden rhythms and meaning with the upward flick of his baton.”6
Goebbels maintained that Hitler rehearsed entire passages as if he were an actor going on stage and that his gestures were calculated with absolute precision. Hitler ordered equipment to be installed in the speaker’s podium that enabled him to adjust the lighting and indicate the perfect time for him to be photographed. So as not to have to wear glasses on stage, his speeches were typed up in large print. The size of the venues was planned in such a way that they would be overfilled.7
The secret lay simply in knowing how to stir up passion among the public. George Orwell aptly observed, “[Hitler] knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working hours . . . they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades.”8 Uprooting the basic precepts of Western democracy, Hitler appealed not to the mind but to the senses, to emotion rather than to reason, and he applied psychological manipulation rather than political logic.9 This proved to be Hitler’s most effective technique in mesmerizing a nation.
Germanizing the Führer
When he was but a toddler, Adolf’s family moved from his birthplace, the Austrian border town of Braunau am Inn, to the Lower Bavarian town of Passau, where Adolf spent two-and-a-half years during a determinative phase of language acquisition.10 The family then returned to Austria when Adolf was five, and he subsequently attended school near Linz.11 In Mein Kampf, Hitler states, “The German of my youth was the dialect spoken in Lower Bavaria; I did not wish to forget it nor to learn Viennese slang.”12 Though Hitler may have been exposed to one of the Bavarian dialects at a young age, there is a strong likelihood that, despite his later claim, the dialect he spoke at home was also fashioned by his Austrian parents’ native parlance as much as by the Upper Austrian vernacular of his peers during the course of his school years. The fact is that, during World War I, Lieutenant Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s superior, noted of him, “What I noticed first was his unmilitary manner and his slight Austrian accent.”13
From April to November 1932, during his airplane electoral campaign Hitler über Deutschland (Hitler over Germany), it appears that Hitler sought to define and refine the way he sounded to his audience. In secret, he took diction classes from a well-known opera singer, Paul Stieber-Walter, also known as Paul Devrient. The reason for the tuition was not only to seek help with his overstrained vocal cords but, more importantly, to be viewed as a transregional statesman who could be clearly understood by all Germans. Hitler never achieved a consistency in his staged accent: his enunciation altered depending on factors such as stress or excitement, and it also changed over a period of time. Experts’ research has proven that Hitler purposely integrated his contrived manner of speech into his theatrical stage play of deception and manipulation.14
Early Models for the Reich
In Hitler’s own words, during his five and a half years as a struggling artist in Vienna, two antisemitic politicians, Vienna’s mayor Karl Lueger and Georg von Schönerer, leader of the Pan-German Party in Austria, used certain tools of political indoctrination to consolidate their views and goals. Hitler later employed these same tools through his own party members. One of these tools was the use of von Schönerer’s posters, which were extensively displayed in shop windows. Von Schönerer was referred to as the “Führer” or leader, members used the “Heil” greeting, and the party’s newspapers were distributed to the public at taverns.15
Mass meetings, military-style wear, and pseudoreligious trappings, along with affiliated groups for women, teachers, and youth as well as the distribution of antisemitic children’s books to schools, were the models for what Hitler would later implement in his Third Reich. In addition, these Austrian politicians’ policy of violence and oppression toward Jews was later adopted into Hitler’s noxious mix.16
Hitler’s next model came from the political left: he noted the tactics of the powerful Social Democratic parties in both Austria and Germany. He grudgingly admired their skills in successfully appealing to large segments of the population through populous festivals, mass meetings and demonstrations, as well as parades—all with the effect of stimulating workers’ pride and intimidating political opponents. Hitler believed that “to destroy Marxism” the National Socialist Party would have to create a propaganda machine and its own terror organization.17
But it was, above all, his participation in World War I that helped to shape Hitler’s ideas on propaganda. In Mein Kampf, he notes the expertise of the enemy’s propagandists. In contrast to Germany’s propaganda, he felt that U.S. and British propagandists had successfully made their point, making use of simple and emotional content. Hitler admired the Allies’ skill in demonizing the Germans as terrifying invaders whose goal was to destroy civilization (the Allies’ use of the term “Hun” to designate the German enemy conjured up images of the “barbarian hordes” that emerged out of Central Asia to threaten Christianity and western civilization during the late Roman Empire).18
The Master Orator
In Mein Kampf, Hitler ascertained that, as a means of exploiting the dynamics of crowd psychology, mass meetings were “the only way to exert a truly effective . . . influence on large sections of the people.” However, to reiterate what was suggested earlier, Hitler did not produce anything new: the ideas he put forth were not his own but borrowed from several other right-wing groups. The originality resided solely in the way Hitler presented these ideas: “how he said something rather than what he said.”19
In order to set the National Socialist Party apart from the myriad political parties struggling for notice in Berlin, the party determined to market Hitler as a person rather than to simply promote its party name. Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, took numerous photographs of Hitler in his studio, practicing countless poses and facial expressions, to help the politician prepare for his public appearances. Posters of Hitler and his personal public speeches greatly helped to promote this new image.
The speaker presented himself before his large audiences in carefully staged and choreographed performances. Martial music would begin the ceremony and then a warm-up speaker would build up the anticipation for Hitler’s appearance. Once on stage, Hitler began slowly and evenly, gradually working up to an impassioned crescendo, accompanied by theatrical gestures. After the speech, he immediately left the stage to the sound of music. His exit was geared to preserving the magic of the performer and his work. Hitler did not believe in remaining in the room after the speech was over because this would only lead to a sense of anticlimax.20
Through countless speeches delivered to the most diverse audiences, Hitler increased his oratory proficiencies, aiming to tailor his discourses to listeners’ particular backgrounds and interests. Whether he chose to wear a business suit or the party uniform and armband, or whether he spoke in a conversational or more strident tone of voice, depended on his assessment of the audience.21
Hitler often arrived at a meeting armed with a prewritten text or notes that he could refer to. However, more often than not, after appraising the crowd, he abandoned the context of the prepared speech and launched into a tirade that, according to his listeners, wholly captured their attention. People would comment later that Hitler had read their minds, had expressed their personal views or concerns or had spoken directly to them. The Führer had plenty of opportunity to hone his oratory skills long before he seized power. By the time he held complete control of the government, he would aim his rhetoric at enchanting and deceiving the German nation. Hitler eventually made show of an astonishing ability in being able to “read” an audience and in manipulating a crowd. The world of politics had found Hitler, not the other way around.22
Notes
1. Weber, Becoming Hitler, 96.
2. Ibid., 157.
3. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 45.
4. Schroeder, Er war mein Chef, 283.
5. André François-Poncet, Souvenirs d’une Ambassade à Berlin 1931–1938 (Paris: Flammarion, 1946), 354.
6. Toland, Adolf Hitler, 129.
7. Karlheinz Schmeer, Die Regie des Öffentlichen Lebens im Dritten Reich (Munich: Pohl, 1956), 123.
8. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1968), 2:29.
9. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 44.
10. Gustav Keller, Der Schüler Adolf Hitler: die Geschichte eines lebenslangen Amoklaufs (Berline: Lit, 2010), 15.
11. Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Manheim, 6.
12. Peter Ernst, “Adolf Hitlers ‘österreichisches Deutsch,’” Zeitschrift für Mitteleuropäische Germanistik 3, no. 1 (2013): 29–44.
13. Toland, Adolf Hitler, 61.
14. Ernst, “Adolf Hitlers ‘österreichisches Deutsch.’”
15. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Penguin, 1999), 34–35.
16. John Weiss, Ideology of Death (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 168, 187.
17. Luckert and Bachrach, State of Deception, 14.
18. Ibid.
19. Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936, 133.
20. Ernst Hanfstaengl, The Unknown Hitler (London: Gibson Square, 2005), 75.
21. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 44.
22. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 7.