BBC News - Viewpoint: His dark charisma
12 November 2012 Last updated at 00:30 GMT
Viewpoint: His dark charisma
Adolf Hitler was an unlikely leader but he still formed a connection with millions of German people, generating a level of charismatic attraction that was almost without parallel. It is a stark warning for the modern day, says historian Laurence Rees.
The answer to this vital question is to be found not just in the historical circumstances of the time - in particular the defeat of Germany in World War I and the depression of the early 1930s - but in the nature of Hitler's leadership.
It's this aspect of the story that makes this history particularly relevant to our lives today.
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About Adolf Hitler
- Hitler was born 20 April 1889 in Braunau-am-Inn
- Left school at 16 with no qualifications and struggled to make a living as a painter in Vienna
- Enlisted in the German army during WWI, where he was wounded and decorated
- Joined the fascist German Workers' Party in 1919
- By 1921 was the leader of what was now the Nazi Party
- In the 1932 elections the Nazis became the largest party in the German parliament
- Invasion of Poland in September 1939 began WWII
- Committed suicide in Berlin on 30 April 1945
Hitler was the archetypal "charismatic leader". He was not a "normal" politician - someone who promises policies like lower taxes and better health care - but a quasi-religious leader who offered almost spiritual goals of redemption and salvation. He was driven forward by a sense of personal destiny he called "providence".
But when Hitler spoke in the Munich beer halls in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in WWI, suddenly his weaknesses were perceived as strengths.
His hatred chimed with the feelings of thousands of Germans who felt humiliated by the terms of the Versailles treaty and sought a scapegoat for the loss of the war. His inability to debate was taken as strength of character and his refusal to make small talk was considered the mark of a "great man" who lived apart from the crowd.
More than anything, it was the fact that Hitler found that he could make a connection with his audience that was the basis of all his future success. And many called this connection "charisma".
"The man gave off such a charisma that people believed whatever he said," says Emil Klein, who heard Hitler speak in the 1920s.
But Hitler did not "hypnotise" his audience. Not everyone felt this charismatic connection, you had to be predisposed to believe what Hitler was saying to experience it. Many people who heard Hitler speak at this time thought he was an idiot.
"I immediately disliked him because of his scratchy voice," says Herbert Richter, a German veteran of WWI who encountered Hitler in Munich in the early 1920s.
"He shouted out really, really simple political ideas. I thought he wasn't quite normal."
In the good economic times, during the mid-to-late twenties in Germany, Hitler was thought charismatic by only a bunch of fanatics. So much so that in the 1928 election the Nazis polled only 2.6% of the vote.
Yet less than five years later Hitler was chancellor of Germany and leader of the most popular political party in the country.
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Find out more
- Laurence Rees' The Dark Charisma Of Adolf Hitler begins on Monday 12 November on BBC Two at 21:00 GMT
What changed was the economic situation. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 there was mass unemployment in Germany and banks crashed.
She looked at Hitler and suddenly felt a connection with him.
"I myself had the feeling that here was a man who did not think about himself and his own advantage, but solely about the good of the German people."
Hitler told millions of Germans that they were Aryans and therefore "special" and racially "better" people than everyone else, something that helped cement the charismatic connection between leader and led.
He did not hide his hatred, his contempt for democracy or his belief in the use of violence to further political ends from the electorate. But, crucially, he spoke out only against carefully defined enemies like Communists and Jews.
Since the majority of ordinary Germans were not in these groups, as long as they embraced the new world of Nazism, they were relatively free from persecution - at least until the war started to go badly for the Germans.
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Paul Mason Economics editor, Newsnight“Start Quote - Unemployment was 30% in Germany when Hitler took power, it is 25.1% and rising in Greece”
This history matters to us today. Not because history offers "lessons" - how can it since the past can never repeat itself exactly? But because history can contain warnings.
It's bleakly ironic that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was greeted in Athens recently with swastika banners carried by angry Greeks protesting at what they see as German interference in their country.
Ironic because it is in Greece itself - amid terrible economic crisis - that we see the sudden rise of a political movement like the Golden Dawn that glories in its intolerance and desire to persecute minorities.
And it is led by a man who has claimed there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. Can there be a bigger warning than that?
Laurence Rees is a former creative director of history programmes for the BBC and the author of six books on World War II.
