It’s always said that Hitler was an amazing public speaker, that his ability to rile up and incite an audience was his greatest skill. I think history does reflect that his public speaking abilities were, if nothing else, extremely effective.
However, the few videos i’ve seen of him speaking to a huge, overly-enthusiastic german audience doesn’t impress me at all. To be clear i’m not talking about the content of the message, just the ability to convey it. He looks and sounds like an ugly, crazy, raving lunatic, yelling and screaming, his arms flailing around, with that stupid little mustache and the worst haircut in human history. I’m sure we’ve all seen many interviews with Germans who said once they saw Hitler speak, they were immediately sucked in and enraptured by him.
Nobody who looked so unattractive, speaking to a crowd in that manner, would ever have success these days. There’s even that one famous clip where Hitler gets up to the podium and just stands there silently for well over a minute, building up excitement and tension among the audience. If a speaker got up to a podium today, and waited even 10-15 seconds before saying anything, people would be confused and annoyed, not enthralled and enraptured.
So, why was an Adolf Hitler speech so effective in front of a 1930s-40s crowd of Germans?
If you looked at close-shot photography of a stage actor’s performance, his gestures, expressions and vocal features would look pretty overblown.
Hitler didn’t, for the most part, give speeches for the camera; he gave them for live audiences, often in highly-staged settings. And by all accounts he was a compelling speaker. Film footage of the events doesn’t capture what it was like to be there. Plus, of course, watching the film footage we can’t filter out what we know about Hitler and about what happened afterwards; the live audience has none of that.
My father, as a boy, frequently heard speeches of Hitler on the radio. He said they made for absolutely compelling listening. And my father didn’t even speak German.
Two things:
[ol]
[li]You only get to see old, short clips of him speaking today. There’s a huge difference between that and seeing him speak live in person, and for an hour or so.[/li][li]Unless you speak German you can’t truly experience or evaluate his speaking abilities.[/li][/ol]
Also, I wouldn’t consider him particularly ‘unattractive’. He’s certainly not Brad Pitt, but he’s a stern, strong, serious, forceful looking individual. So much so that it made up for his short stature. These things were admired in public speakers & political leaders back then.
See the contradiction here? How could he both sound crazy and wave his arms around *and *stand their silently doing nothing?
That’s a major part of why people fail to get Hitler as a speaker. They mostly only see the extremes, Most of Hitler’s speaking did not consist of crazy rantings. Hitler mostly spoke in the calm, measured manner of orators of his day. He would present his message using various arguments and rhetorical techniques. Only right at the end, when the crowd was convinced of what he said and was totally behind him, did he dive into the emotional displays to build that emotional rapport with the crowd.
It seems off t modern audiences because to us normal is electronic broadcast, not public speaking. But you can still see these elements at play at political rallies, where politicians start out speaking calmly and try to build up to a big table thumping finale that sets the crowd on fire. The difference is that Hitler not only tried to do it, he did do it, consistently.
This form of speechmaking is more like a sermon than a modern political address. The formula was to present the facts first, then make forge emotional connection to your conclusions. It’s a form of speechmaking that has all but died.
The whole “standing silent” thing is part of the show. You can see still see this used today, mostly at rock concerts. Where an artist has an audience who know they are going to see something amazing, doing nothing works really well to build up tension and get people focused.
As for you comments about stupid mustached and haircuts, well, fashions change. Somebody in 2100 is hardly going to think that the plastic hair of many US politicians is anything but ludicrous. And of course in 1930 the world was a lot less fashion conscious. Fashion’s for middle aged men were expected to be neat and functional and little more. Any politician who looked like he spent hours on his grooming, as most modern politicians do would likely be a laughingstock. I’m not sure the world is abetter place for that change.
This. And not only speak German, but be part of the culture of Germany in the 20s and 30s. You’d have to have lived through the First World War and the Weimar Republic and everything.
Being a “great orator” isn’t just speaking well. It’s knowing your audience and their circumstances and their fears.
Hitler apparently put a lot of time and effort into his speechmaking; for him, it was a practiced art.
Here is an example of him practicing his public oratory skills. The pictures show him gesticulating wildly, but as part of a performance. He was very studied in how he presented himself.
Others have summarized this style well. When Hitler spoke, he started off softly, so as to draw the audience in. Then, over the course of the speech, he would build up to a thundering conclusion. The audience, by then enraptured with his message, would connect with his emotional flourish and leave feeling inspired. There are many hell and brimstone preachers who act similarly.
(None of this, by the way, is an endorsement of Adolf Hitler or Nazi rhetoric, and I don’t intend to flatter the memory of that horrible man in any way. But he was a successful speaker).
As a point of reference I’d suggest taking a listen to Winston Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” speech in 1940. For the record, this was a speech to Parliament, not to a mass rally. It’s only 12 minutes long but the condensed version is. . .
For the first six minutes Churchill gives a rather mournful recap of the losses suffered at Dunkirk.
Then comes two minutes of what the Germans didn’t accomplish (destroying the British army.)
He takes three minutes to recall the challenges the British Empire has faced and overcome, starting with King Arthur.
In the final two minutes he begins the litany.
Pretty effective by itself, but in the context of a humiliating defeat, it’s 10x as powerful.
In the wake of Germany’s defeat in WWI and economic destitution of the times people were pissed off, Hitler’s skill was knowing exactly how they felt and who to blame. Kershaw in his biography talks about one of his early speeches and how he worked the mob mentality; “The atmosphere suddenly livened when Hitler came to speak. His tone was harsher, more aggressive, less academic, than Dingfelder’s. The language he used was expressive, direct, coarse, earthy – that used and understood by most of his audience – his sentences short and punchy. He heaped insults on target-figures.”
He was also a publicity whore, keeping things quiet, academic, boring would not have served his purpose - he wanted as much attention as possible. He wrote later “It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us, whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again…”
One of my best friends growing up had a German war bride mother. She would tell us it was unbelievable difficult times in Germany in the post WW1 years, and the German people were looking for a a strong leader to bring them out of those very hard times. She was at some of those rallies. Per her saying he mesmerized everyone there.
Many of these statements about Hitler’s oratory seem designed to remove the burden of guilt for Nazi Germany’s crimes from the millions of Germans who enabled them, as they were “hypnotized” and “mesmerized”.
I think there’s also an issue of modern audiences being different from audiences back in the twenties and thirties. Our primary means of seeing speeches is on television which is a much more intimate medium which encourages a different speaking style.
I don’t think that’s true at all. The Germans who heard him weren’t saying they were literally hypnotized/mesmerized. The words are used figuratively to express the power of his speeches. I’m sure none of them would claim they were robbed of free will by his speaking.