Hitler's technique of oratory is largely the result of... mass psychology... He declared to his small, new party that everything depended on fascinating the crowd. Above all... restore to the German people, deprived of an army, their flags, bands and songs. ...He invented every emblem himself, except the swastika, designed his own flag, and prescribed every collar and button for the slowly-growing party troops.

Hitler knew weapons alone would not be decisive, he focused on molding the people’s spirit, breeding something singular in history: bravado, blind obedience, ruthlessness, and brutality. There was contempt for every noble human emotion; contemptible disregard for the thinking of others; destruction of religion and religious establishments -- and there was the extermination of the Jews because they were wiser than the German people.

[Hitler] aimed to make Germany the dominant Power in Europe and maybe, more remotely, in the world. Other Powers have pursued similar aims, and still do. Other Powers seek to defend their vital interests by force of arms. In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German.

Hitler, who had made his way to power by his great gifts as a stage manager and speaker, introduced into the Reichschancellory all that browbeating noise which the Germans are so prone to take for greatness. ...Immediately after his appointment as chancellor, Hitler resolved to prove to the world that he had come, a new , to slay the dragon of communism. While the German Reichstag was burning, he accused the Communists of the guilt... This trial he lost... for its sole result was to expose the guilt of the Nazis.

Hitler achieved power by engineering a political combination. The National Socialist government owes its being to no revolutionary event comparable to Mussolini’s march on Rome. Hitler swore before Field Marshal von Hindenburg a solemn oath to respect a constitution which guaranteed the rights of man and political freedom in Germany. The burning of the Reichstag is the criminal act by which he perjured himself and usurped the power to rule.

Hitler's power was of an extraordinary kind. He did not base his claim to power (except in a most formal sense) on his position as a party leader, or on any functional position. He derived it from what he saw as his historic mission to save Germany. His power, in other words, was 'charismatic', not institutional. It depended on the readiness of others to see 'heroic' qualities in him. And they did see those qualities — perhaps even before he himself came to believe in them.

Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry — that was Adolf Hitler's technique. No matter whether it was true or not — for (Hitler) meant literally his maxim that the bigger the falsehood, the easier to get it believed; people would say you wouldn't dare make up a thing like that. Imagine the worst possible about your enemies and then swear that you knew it, you had seed it, it was God's truth and you were ready to stake your life upon it — shout this, bellow this, over and over, day after day, night after night...when ten million join in it becomes history.

Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.

Hitler liked to think that he was ‘making a front against the entire public opinion’ and that national socialism must never become the bailiff of public opinion, never its slave but its ruler. But actually Hitler was forever feeling around for the pulse of the great controlling minorities. He played with them all, coddled them all, promised all, and lied to everyone. He courted the old nationalist Hugenberg while he pampered the socialist Gregor Strasser. He cajoled his old comrade Feder, the enemy of the ‘bond slavery of interest,’ while he made terms with Schacht the banker. He made ambiguous promises to labor while he dealt with Thyssen for funds. He sent Goering to Rome to assure the Vatican that national socialism was rooted in Christianity while Rosenberg attacked religion and preached his weird forms of paganism. He played every card, worked every side of every street until he was able to put his finger on what may be called the great mass pulse and say: here lies power.

Hitler was a humble man and a man of the people if ever there was one. What he wanted he wanted for Germany and the German people, not for himself. He would have had Germany win the First World War - in which he risked his own life many times - so as to have been just a small part afterwards in its national life. He would have rather helped someone else in the task of resurrecting Germany after 1918 but, then just as now, everybody seemed to be waiting. So an honest man of the people did it himself.

Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry — that was Adolf Hitler’s technique.

Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.

With Adolf Hitler everything is propaganda. National Socialist Germany has evolved entirely new methods of propaganda, and has used them with great effect and with a profound knowledge of mass psychology.

During his long career as an agitator, Hitler had studied the effects of herd-poison and had learned how to exploit them for his own purposes. He had discovered that the orator can appeal to those "hidden forces" which motivate men's actions, much more effec­tively than can the writer. Reading is a private, not a collective activity. The writer speaks only to indi­viduals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety. The orator speaks to masses of individuals, already well primed with herd-poison. They are at his mercy and, if he knows his business, he can do what he likes with them.