Hitler and Public Speaking

Hello. My name is Hank de Bergh.

I'm a cultural theorist and a professor of German at the

University of Sheffield.

This is the third of my three lectures on Adolf Hitler.

The first lecture dealt with Adolf Hitler's self staging.

The second lecture was about Hitler's ideology,

the key convictions that he had and how to

how he tried to sell them to the German people.

In this third lecture, I want to look at Hitler's oratory.

In other words, the speeches that he gave and the kind of tricks that he used.

I'll take this topic in three parts.

First of all,

I will explore the way Hitler saw public speaking,

so his own view of what makes a good public speaker and

what makes a good speech.

Then I will move on in the second lesson

by exploring Hitler's rhetorical tricks.

And then thirdly, I will explore in more detail the

concept of narrative truth,

which is really narrative untruth and which played an

absolutely central part in Hitler's origin.

So the first thing to understand about Adolf Hitler,

and this is the,

the main topic of my lecture on the Maslow Lit website

that deals with Hitler self staging is that Hitler was,

always in control of himself.

He was an incredibly cunning, calculating person.

This is not a picture that most people have of Hitler. Right?

We see him as basically a raving lunatic,

someone who bites the carpet on the slightest occasion,

a loose cannon.

Right?

But that is really a popular or the popular the most important

popular misunderstanding

As Hitler's, architect, personal architect,

Albert Speer, said after the second World War,

Hitler's most striking characteristic was his self control.

This is an aspect a key aspect of Hitler's,

personality that I explore in more detail

in my, lesson on Hitler self stage.

And it also applies to his speeches.

So Hitler was always calculating,

always planning when it came to his speeches

chance.

So if you've seen clips of Adolf Hitler speaking, usually,

I would imagine the clips you've seen are the ones where he is shouting.

Right?

And then you might get the impression

shouted if he shouted at all.

Hitler only ever shouted at the very end.

Most of his speeches, the the the larger part of his speeches

were spoken in a relatively calm tone,

and he starts off almost inaudibly.

He almost whispers.

You really have to strain to hear what he's saying.

So from the start, you're drawn into it.

You're forced to listen.

Hitler used a number of other tricks as well.

So he would always arrive late.

He was never on time for his speeches.

He could be half an hour late, an hour late, two hours late.

And, of course, by then, the audience were going crazy.

Right?

And, again, this was a very deliberate strategy that Hitler used.

Finally, Hitler very often did not start right away.

The best example of this is the first public speech, in other words,

the first speech he gave in front of a live audience after

he had been appointed chancellor.

This is a speech he gave on the tenth of February nineteen thirty three.

He's in the Berlin with thousands of people in front of

him and millions listening on the radio.

The people are going crazy.

They all want to hear Hitler speak.

And what Hitler does, he just stands there for a whole minute.

He's got his arms crossed.

He's just standing there saying nothing at all.

You may not think that a minute is a very long time,

but let me assure you.

That's ten seconds. Right? It feels like an eternity.

And Hitler is standing in front of this crowd going absolutely crazy.

And for over a minute, he says absolutely nothing.

So Hitler was one of the very few politicians,

perhaps even the best in inverted comma in inverted

commerce politician who knew about the power of silence.

Nine days earlier,

on the first of February nineteen thirty three,

Hitler had delivered another lecture called the Auftruf der

Reichsriggerung unders Deutsche Volk,

the appeal of the Reich government to the German people.

And this was a radio broadcast.

Now radio was a relatively new medium,

and Hitler wasn't accustomed to using it.

And he really needed a live audience.

So he's just standing there without a live audience,

and you can see he's not doing well.

He's sweating.

He's nervous. He speaks in a kind of monotonous voice.

He needed the interaction with an audience in order to be successful.

And that points to a really important

point to perhaps the key point about Hitler as a speaker,

which is that Hitler was a political performance artist.

And from there followed all the things,

all the key principles he applied when it came to public speaking.

So what are the key principles of Hitler's public speaking?

How did Hitler see?

How did Hitler think that public speaking should be conducted?

First of all, Hitler was very much aware of the big gap

between speaking and writing and hence between listening

and reading.

So Hitler always spoke to be heard

rather than to be read and there's a very good,

explanation of this in Ithas Mein Kampf.

Actually, this is a very interesting thing.

If you read Mein Kampf,

it's two volumes and a large part of these two volumes well,

a large part is maybe an overstatement,

but several pages are devoted to how Hitler

thinks that a public speaker should operate.

So he's basically giving away his tricks of the trade.

And one of the things, he writes is the following.

What is one of the millions of workers for Marxism is less the

literary style of the Marxist church fathers, in other words,

less the writings of Marx and Engels,

and the truly enormous propaganda work of tens of

thousands untiring agitators and the great agitator down to

the small trade union official and the shop steward

and discussion speaker.

So this is Hitler's first key conviction

that it is really only the spoken word that that rouses the masses.

Not a kind of, you know, not the great works,

not the big texts with all their intellectual arguments and so on.

It's speaking

example that Italy gives is that of the former British

prime minister David Lloyd George,

who during the first World War was,

munitions minister.

It says, you know,

lots of people have criticized Lloyd George's speeches saying

they are, you know, they were

hackneyed, cliched,

very intellectually inferior, not at all impressive.

But Hitler says that's the wrong way to look at these

speeches because as live performances,

they were incredibly effective.

As live performances, they were brilliant.

So the conclusion that Hitler draws,

this is the second point.

Read the quotation to you.

The second point that Hitler makes is this,

one must not measure the speech of a statesman to his people by the impression

which it leaves in a university professor,

but by the effect it exerts on the people.

That takes us to the third key conviction that Hitler has

which is that it's a mistake.

It's always a mistake to direct your speeches at intellectuals.

You must always address yourself to the lowest common

denominator in your audience.

Let me again give you a quotation from Mein Kampf.

In a mass meeting of all classes,

the best speaker is not the one who is intellectually closest

to the members of the intelligentsia

that are there, but he who conquers the heart of the masses.

And this then takes us straight to the fourth point that Hitler

makes, which is that in order to reach the masses,

you've got to conquer their hearts rather than their minds.

It's not about putting forward arguments.

And, when it comes to Nazi ideology,

most of it is simply wrong, racist, mendacious,

and all the rest of it.

So putting forward arguments,

a kind of a convincing coherent theory as Marxists,

tended to do, that's not going to work with National

Socialism.

You've got to appeal to people's emotions,

and this is what Hitler says about that in Mein Kampf.

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the

emotional ideas of the great masses and finding through a

psychologically correct form the way to the attention and

from there to the heart of the broad masses.

The people in the overwhelming majority are so feminine by

nature and so feminine by attitude

that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far

less than do emotion and feeling.

Here, Hitler was, above all, influenced by, a book by,

the writer Gustave Le Bon,

who in eighteen ninety five published a book called

Picologie des Fonds.

The English translation, I think, is called,

crowd psychology.

And, Le Bon stresses above all that if you want to influence the

crowd, the masses, you've got to take an emotive approach

rather than an argumentational one.

The four key elements of Hitler's view of public

speaking were all influenced by the Viennese mayor Karl Lueger.

I discuss, this in a little bit more detail in my Masalit

lecture on, Hitler self staging.

Hitler was born, in, Braune Armee in eighteen eighty nine.

He spends most most of his youth in the city of Linz, also in Austria.

But then between nineteen o seven and nineteen thirteen, he's in Vienna.

And there he sees this mayor, Carl Luegge,

and Carl Luegge had a very populist style of,

speaking that, as I say, heavily influenced Hitler.

If you want to know more about that, then have a listen,

have a look at that other video on the Masalid, website.

The fifth, pillar of Hitler's view of public speaking is that the

visual aspect of your speaking is at least as

important as the content of what you're saying.

In other words, you've got to speak not simply to be heard but also in order to be seen.

And Hitler was an incredibly visually,

expressive and in the minds of many people impressive speaker as well.

Let me read to you the testimony of one of Hitler's

early admirers, the American born,

Harvard educated Ernst Hanstinger.

Hanstinger, wrote, the following about,

Adolf Hitler.

Hanstinger compared the fewer speech body coordination to the

thrust and parries of a fencer or the perfect balance of a tightrope

walker.

Hitler's gestures, Anstanger commented admiringly,

were an integral part of his method of exposition.

It had something of the quality of a really great orchestral

conductor, who instead of just hammering

out the downward beat,

suggests the existence of hidden rhythms and meanings

with the upward flick of his baton.

This is why Hitler practiced his body language in front of

the mirror and even in the studio of his private

photographer Heinrich Hoffman.

Heinrich Hoffman would take pictures of Hitler trying out

various gestures, various facial expressions,

various attires, and so on,

and then Hitler would afterwards study these

photographs and decide which of these

gestures and expressions, and clothes would work and

which he thought, would not work.

This, by the way,

is also one of the things I explore in my Masadid lecture

on Hitler self staging, how Hitler,

when it comes to the visual aspect of, of his appearance,

was very much influenced by two things.

First of all, the, Wagner productions

of the stage designer,

and director Alfred Rohler.

Again, this was when Hitler was in Vienna between nineteen o seven

and nineteen thirteen.

And in the same period,

Hitler would also visit the Austro Hungarian parliament.

The Austro Hungarian parliament, one of the,

biggest I think the biggest parliament in the world at the

time, five hundred seats, something

like thirty parties.

And all of these people were speaking their own language.

So they could be speaking German or Russian or Italian or

Ukrainian, Croatian, and so on.

Hitler didn't understand any foreign languages.

So for him, this was just the the only thing he could see see was how

people used their body language,

their facial expressions, and so on.

And it took a lot away from Rolex

direction of Wagner's, Wagner operas,

which were focused on the visual aspect of things and not

simply on the music and on the, the the visual,

the spectacular aspect of the,

performances in the Austro Hungarian parliament.

Again, if you're interested in this kind of,

in this sort of background to Hitler's views and Hitler's speaking,

look at this other video on Hitler's self staging on the

Mesolit, website.

This is still very important, by the way, even today.

So what political consultants do nowadays very often when

they want to figure out whether,

whether a politician is going to be effective or not.

Yes.

They listen to the content as well,

but an essential part of what political consultants,

what spin doctors do nowadays, is they switch off,

they turn off the sound,

and they just watch the people that they are supervising and,

advising because they realize that a large part of the

impression that we make is not based on what we say,

perhaps not even on how we say it,

but how we come across what can be seen because after all,

human beings are visual beings.

For those of you who speak French,

there's also really interesting, really good

documentary, on this, on, YouTube.

It's called Coupe Le Sants,

which literally means turn off the sound,

and it's presented by a Belgian political scientist and body

language expert who died a few years ago.

The man is called Rene Zaillon.

He analyzes the body language and the facial expressions of a

number of famous French, politicians.

Unfortunately, videos are only available in French without subtitles.

But if you have French, then listen to that analysis,

of, Rene Saillens.

There are two further elements of Hitler's view of public

speaking that we need to

First of all, there is Hitler's idea that the superior speaker

needs a thorough knowledge of what the media is saying.

And there's a very revealing

quotation about this.

I'll read that quotation.

To you, it goes as follows.

All through the day from noon to past midnight,

Hitler insisted on having the latest radio broadcasts

and the most recent items from the foreign press.

The reports were delivered in writing to his personal servant

who always remained close by him and kept these reports

ready at hand for Hitler.

In the morning, the reports had to be at his bedroom door in case Hitler

awoke awoke early.

There's probably never been a head of government who was so

swiftly and completely informed on public opinion throughout

the world as Hitler.

He did not want summaries.

He had to have the original news items word for word.

In addition, he was kept posted on the newspaper opinion of almost every country.

Editorials would telephone to Berlin several times a day and

from Berlin transmitted to wherever Hitler happened to be

staying at the moment.

And, again, this goes a little bit against the picture that some of us

might have of Hitler,

especially when Hitler was at the Berghof, his,

his holiday retreat in the Bavarian Alps,

where we have pictures of Hitler sort of of sitting there

reading newspapers.

So it looks like he's doing nothing.

But in fact, he's basically preparing his speeches because he realizes I

need to know what the media is saying.

I need to know what they're saying about me because if they

have the wrong image of me,

then propaganda hasn't worked properly,

and they need to do I will need to do more.

Hitler needed to know, first of all,

what the domestic press was saying about him.

Now after nineteen thirty three, the press was,

of course, Nazi fight.

So they were saying the things that he wanted them to say.

But before that, when Hitler was still running for office,

he really wanted to know everything that various

important newspapers in Germany

power, he wanted to power,

he wanted to know what the public opinion in other countries was.

So it's important to understand this that when we see pictures,

photographs of Hitler at his so called holiday retreat in the

Bavarian Alps, and we see him reading a newspaper.

Well, first of all,

his holiday retreat at Berghof wasn't really in holiday,

a holiday retreat because Hitler was working there all the time.

And one of the ways in which he was working was by reading

newspaper reports, by reading newspaper,

by making sure that he knew about the cultural and

political and social narratives in his own country and in other countries

because he would use these things in his speeches.

This takes us to the final element of Hitler's view of

public speaking, which is that,

the superior speaker must always prepare his speeches

incredibly well.

Hitler had a formidably retentive memory

and yet he always had, you know, for important speeches,

he always had a manuscript in front of him,

and he spent a heck of a lot of time on on these speeches.

Hitler was not someone, you know,

Hitler was a real night owl, so he,

would not get up early, but he would work deep into the night,

two o'clock, three three o'clock, four o'clock,

and much of the time was spent on his speeches.

This is what his secretary Christa Schroder wrote about that.

After every assault on yet another draft,

the modified version had to be retyped.

More than once, I had to run to his car to hand over the last

pages to Hitler.

So this is how Hitler saw public speaking.

In the next lesson,

I want to explore what this means in practice.

So what are the, the strategies and the tricks that Hitler

used in order to be such a successful speaker or speaker

that by many people was greatly admired?