Hitler's Charisma (5 page)

Intrigued by Hitler, Göring went to hear him speak a few days later. “Hitler spoke about Versailles. He said that … a protest is successful only if backed by power to give it weight. The conviction was spoken word for word as if from my own soul.” As a result, Göring sought a personal encounter with Hitler. “I just wanted to speak to him at first to see if I could assist him in any way. He received me at once and after I had introduced myself he said it was an extraordinary turn of fate that we should meet. We spoke at once about the things which were close to our hearts—the defeat of our Fatherland … Versailles. I told him that I myself, to the fullest extent, and all I was and possessed were completely at his disposal for this, in my opinion, most essential and decisive matter: the fight against the Treaty of Versailles.”

What Göring’s testimony reveals, above all else, is that Hitler did not need to convince him of anything—they both already shared the same sense of what was wrong with Germany. This is a vital insight into the nature of how Hitler’s “charisma” functioned in those early days, because what Hitler chiefly offered Göring (and many others) was a profound sense of re-enforcement—a confirmation that what he already thought about the world was correct.
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In this respect Hitler was helped by one other important quality that he exuded in his speeches—a sense of absolute certainty. Hitler’s analysis left no room for any doubt. He never appeared remotely undecided between possible options. Hitler had used this technique in his monologues for years. He would read a book, for example, and then declaim loudly what the “correct” conclusion about it should be. “He was not interested in ‘another opinion,’ ” said August Kubizek, “nor in any discussion of the book.”
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Hitler also specialised in presenting life as “either—or” by which he meant that either “the enemy” (by which he most often meant “the Jews”) “or” everyone else would be destroyed. The world was profoundly black or white in Hitler’s mind. Life was a perpetual struggle—and to opt out of the struggle was not an option. “They [people who didn’t play an active
part in politics] have never yet understood that it is not necessary to be an enemy of the Jew for him to drag you one day on the Russian model to the scaffold,” he said in April 1922.
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“They do not see that it is quite enough to have a head on your shoulders and not to be a Jew: that will secure the scaffold for you.”

For his early supporters Hitler demonstrably possessed “charisma,” but these supporters had to be predisposed by virtue of their own existing personality and political outlook to believe in this “charisma” in the first place.
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“One scarcely need ask with what arts he conquered the masses,” wrote Konrad Heiden, who heard Hitler speak many times. “His speeches are day dreams of this mass soul … The speeches begin always with deep pessimism and end in overjoyed redemption, a triumphant happy ending; often they can be refuted by reason, but they follow the far mightier logic of the subconscious, which no refutation can touch … Hitler has given speech to the speechless terror of the modern mass …”
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This was a view shared by Otto Strasser, brother of the early Nazi supporter Gregor Strasser: “I can only attribute it [the success of Hitler as a speaker] to his uncanny intuition, which infallibly diagnosed the ills from which his audience is suffering … speaking as the spirit moves him … he is promptly transformed into one of the greatest speakers of the century … His words go like an arrow to their target, he touches each private wound on the raw, liberating the mass unconscious, expressing its innermost aspirations, telling it what it most wants to hear.”
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It was an analysis that Sir Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador to Germany in the late 1930s, also endorsed, “He [i.e., Hitler] owed his success in the struggle for power to the fact that he was the reflection of their [i.e., his supporters’] subconscious mind, and his ability to express in words what that subconscious mind felt that it wanted.”
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If those who encountered Hitler were not already predisposed to have their “innermost aspirations” touched by his words then they detected no “charisma” in him at all. Josef Felder, for example, was completely unconvinced by Hitler when he heard him speak at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich in the early 1920s. As a committed supporter of the Social Democratic Party, he found Hitler’s arguments repulsive. “I listened very carefully to that speech of Hitler’s and noticed that he was working in an extraordinarily demagogic fashion. He always used to sort of throw sentences at the audience. The speech was partly devoted to talking about the Social
Democrats’ betrayal in 1919, signing the Treaty of Versailles. He started by talking about the November Revolution and the November humiliation. And then, of course, he brought out his theories against Versailles. And then he emphasised further, with a number of particularly aggressive statements, about all of that only being possible as a result of the activities of the Jews. And this is where he made the anti-Semitic problem the basis of his speech … He put forward certain claims that were in no way valid. When I left that meeting, we would get together and talk in groups. And I said to my friend, ‘After that speech, my impression is that this man, Hitler, will hopefully never come to political power.’ We were agreed on that then.”
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Herbert Richter, a veteran of the First World War, felt an even greater antipathy to Hitler when he came across him in a Munich café in 1921. He “immediately disliked him,” because of his “scratchy voice” and his tendency to “shout” out “really, really simple” political ideas. Richter also found Hitler’s appearance “rather comical, with his funny little moustache” and came to the conclusion that he was “creepy” and “wasn’t quite normal.”
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The testimony of people like Herbert Richter and Josef Felder reminds us that Hitler’s appearance on the Munich political scene did not, at the time, mark a watershed moment. Even though he gradually attracted a following, it represented only a small proportion of potential voters. Indeed, a recent study
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has revealed that in 1919 the vast majority (more than 70 per cent) of soldiers still in military accommodation in Munich voted not for Right-wing groups but for the Social Democratic party.

But within the splinter parties on the right—the so-called “völkisch” groups—Hitler undoubtedly made an impression. He quickly dominated the tiny German Workers’ Party and became not just its star speaker but also the propaganda chief. He worked with Anton Drexler on a “party programme” and then presented the resulting “twenty-five points” to a meeting on 24 February 1920. Shortly afterwards the name of the party was changed to “National Socialist German Workers Party” (NSDAP)—hence their opponents using “Nazis” as a shorthand form.

The “twenty-five points” of the party programme reflected the familiar themes which Hitler repeatedly focused on in his speeches: a demand that the peace treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain be set aside; that Jews
be stripped of German citizenship; that no more foreigners be allowed to immigrate into Germany; that only those of “German blood” should be considered true citizens. There were also a number of measures directed against capitalism—a call for profit sharing and the destruction of large department stores so that small traders could flourish.

How any future Nazi government might be able in practical terms to implement these “twenty-five points” was not mentioned. The whole “programme” was deliberately vague on detail. This vagueness was to prove advantageous to Hitler in a number of ways. It offered maximum flexibility for him to interpret Nazi policy as he liked once he became leader, and it allowed the Nazis to position themselves as a “movement” rather than a run-of-the-mill political party tied down in formulating and agreeing detailed policy. It also permitted a broad range of people to profess support for the Nazis, since the proposal, for example, to “remove the Jews” could be interpreted in a large number of different ways—from legislation to prevent Jews entering certain professions to the forced expulsion of Jews from Germany to something worse altogether.

This idea that the Nazis should stand for a “vision” of Germany rather than a collection of detailed policies was not unique. The
Freikorps Oberland
, for example, also wanted to see the establishment of a “Third Reich” in Germany (in succession to the “first” Reich of the Holy Roman Empire and the “second” German Reich established by Bismarck in 1871 which ended in 1918). And its members despised detailed definitions. “Nothing is more characteristic of the associative spirit of the
Oberlander
than their Idea of the Third Reich,” said one supporter, “… the men dreamed deep dreams of this Mystery—a mystery which would have been debased in a concreted political programme as soon as one attempted to define it precisely.”
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And, just like the Nazis, the
Oberland
called for “the subordination of the individual … to the needs of the whole nation.”
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By August 1921, Hitler had gained dictatorial power over the fledgling Nazi party. The old days of Anton Drexler’s committee meetings and discussion papers were gone for good. But Hitler was still not claiming that he himself was the saviour of Germany—merely that Germany needed a saviour.

“In the very early years we didn’t say ‘
Heil Hitler
,’ that was never said, and nobody would ever have thought of it,” says Bruno Hähnel who was
active in the party in the 1920s. “Hitler hadn’t moved to centre stage so much then, the way it happened later. He was simply the chairman of the NSDAP.”
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It was also obvious, from the beginning of Hitler’s involvement with the German Workers’ Party, that much of the strength and certainty that flowed through him when he was speaking to a crowd seemed to desert him when he was talking to two or three other people. As he later said to the photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, “In a small intimate circle I never know what to say … as a speaker at a small family gathering or a funeral, I’m no use at all.”
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Others also noticed this odd inconsistency in Hitler—this yawning gap between the public performance and the private reality. Captain Mayr, who had “discovered” Hitler as a speaker in the first place, remarked how Hitler was “shy and self conscious”
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amongst other soldiers in the barracks and yet was able to inspire large audiences in the beer hall. Mayr later argued that this allowed subsequent, more intelligent, figures on the extreme Right to manipulate Hitler for their own ends. “As a leader,” wrote Mayr, “Hitler is probably the greatest hoax ever played on the world.”
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But whilst it is true that more obviously politically astute figures like Hermann Göring and Ernst Röhm, who had been a captain in the German army during the war, did attach themselves to the Nazi party in these early days, it simply isn’t the case that somehow Hitler was subordinate to them. Clearly, Hitler did take most of his ideas from others—like Gottfried Feder, the political economist who called for an end to “interest slavery”—but by the summer of 1921 he was the undisputed leader of the Nazi party. In a way, Hitler’s very weirdness—in particular, the fact that he found “normal” social intercourse difficult and yet could inspire a crowd—contributed to the growing sense that here was a very different type of political leader. “There was always a certain element in his personality into which he would allow nobody to penetrate,” remembered an early acquaintance. “He had his inscrutable secrets, and in many respects always remained a riddle to me.”
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It was this extraordinary combination—Hitler’s ability to connect with a large audience of supporters, often by reinforcing and then heightening their existing beliefs, together with his inability to interact in a normal
everyday way with individuals—that was at the centre of the creation of Hitler’s “charisma” as an orator. Hitler, almost incredibly, could be both intimate with an audience and distant with an individual.

The need for a political leader to create “distance” is something which Charles de Gaulle, a contemporary of Hitler’s, recognised as of vital importance. “First and foremost,” wrote de Gaulle, “there can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt. All religions have their holy of holies, and no man is a hero to his valet. In the designs, the demeanor, and the mental operations of a leader there must always be a ‘something’ which others cannot altogether fathom, which puzzles them, stirs them, and rivets their attention … 
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Aloofness, character and the personification of quietness, it is these qualities that surround with prestige those who are prepared to carry a burden that is too heavy for lesser mortals … He [the leader] must accept the loneliness which, according to Faguet, is the ‘wretchedness of superior beings.’ ”
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But one of the many differences between de Gaulle and Hitler—who were born within a few months of each other—is that de Gaulle recognised the value of creating “distance” from those he led and consciously acted to create it. Hitler was not acting in this way out of choice. He had always found it hard to connect with other individual human beings—a “normal” friendship was impossible for him. It was just that now this characteristic worked to his advantage. Many of Hitler’s followers witnessed his apparent lack of need for personal intimacy and thought it the mark of a man of charisma. Indeed, the mark of a hero.

Heroism and charisma are intertwined. So much so that Max Weber maintained that “personal heroism” was one of the most important indicators of “genuine charisma.”
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It was therefore no accident that Adolf Hitler claimed that his leadership of the Nazi party was justified, to a large extent, because of his “heroic” past.

In Germany after the First World War, there were many who longed for a hero to emerge—a “strong man”
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as Nazi supporter Emil Klein puts it—to lead them into a new and brighter world. Steadily, between 1919 and 1923, Adolf Hitler evolved into that heroic leader for them, and in doing so he was able to build on a powerful tradition of individual heroism—one that had been fanned by the creation of the modern German state in the nineteenth century. More than two hundred
Bismarcktürme
(Bismarck towers), for example, had been erected throughout Germany to commemorate the “heroic” leadership of Bismarck, the Chancellor who had united the country. German philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer also revered the rule of individuals rather than governments, whilst Friedrich Nietzsche was a passionate advocate of the importance of the hero
in what he announced was a Godless world. Nietzsche hero-worshipped Napoleon as the “embodiment of the noble ideal.”
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