Hitler as Rhetorician
HERE we have the mind of the author of Mein Kampf unfolded before us at intervals over a period of seventeen years through the medium of the spoken word. The speeches reveal under a great variety of circumstances the same set purpose, the same political preoccupations, the same stratagems and arrogant self-confidence. The orator adapts his technique to the audiences he is addressing. " Voyez-vous," he said to Philippe Barres, "ii taut -savoir parler aux gens." "I always know the audience I have before me, and it is to that audience I speak." To make an effect—that is the whole purpose of every speech—to thrust into the minds of his listeners the idea he wants them to entertain, repeating it again and again, in the same speech and in a succession of speeches, till they welcome it as their own. Always he has the appearance of great frankness, and when he is being least frank he disarms suspicion by his restate- ments of the well-known views which are so essentially his own ; thus deception achieves its end by being skilfully mixed with
candour. In the first speech recorded in this book, delivered in 1922, he is already saying, "A Government needs power, it needs strength. It must . . . with brutal ruthlessness press through the ideas it has recognised to be right!' 'And again, a little later, " Always before God and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills." It is in this spirit that we find him justifying the assassinations of the Roehm Purge, steering at first slowly towards his conclusion, caressing, as it were, his victim, dilating on his friend- ship for the man whose head he was to have delivered to him on a charger ; and then plunging as with a dagger thrust to his denoue- ment: "I gave the order to shoot those who were the ringleaders in this treason. . . . I further gave the order to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life."
In speech after speech he builds up the key ideas and prejudices on which National Socialism and German totalitarianism are to rest. The iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles were denounced in the earliest stages of the "Movement," as they still are. There is no vileness which is not to be associated with the name of Yew, a term of abuse which he associates with another—democrat (" Democracy is fundamentally not German ; it is Jewish "), and both connote "that house of lies, 'Internationalism." He points out how wonderfully "the Stock Exchange, Jews and the leaders of the workers . . . co-operate." He is the skilled rhetorician who under- stands and plays upon the susceptibilities of his German audience— their inferiority grievance, their sentimentality, self-love, vanity, racial prejudice, fears and superstitions—till the pulped mental mass takes the shape he desires. The dominant note is harsh, rasping, bitter ; the only humour that of sarcasm.
Mr. Norman Baynes is regponsible for the editing and the arrange- ment as well as the translation, which is always his own except When authorised English versions have been published in Germany ; and he has added copious bibliographies. He has been successful in turning the speeches into forceful idiomatic English which appears to do justice to Hitler's rhetorical style. R. A. SCOTT-JAMES.
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