10 quotes
He is past-master in the technique of platform speaking, and he can be humorous, grave, witty, tragic and cynical as the occasion requires.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
Hitler resolved to prove to the world that he had come, a new Saint George, to slay the dragon of communism.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
The Germans were wretched so long as they had no sword.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
The Germans, who love order more than freedom, and whose ruling passion is obedience, rejoiced in their release from an uncomfortable equality into new ranks of superiors and inferiors. This is the second source of Hitler's success.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
As a man without religion, without philosophy, without principles, he balked at nothing. ...[H]e concealed... his desire for self-aggrandizement, and... believes in his own idealism.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
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.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
The pyramid familiar to the Germans... in which each individual carries another on his back but makes up for it by standing on somebody else, was set up anew by Hitler.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
His effect, in complete contrast to Mussolini's... he juggles with mystical notions such as Honor, Blood, and Soil, and thus wraps his audience in that cloud of mysticism which the Germans love far more than mere prosaic logic.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
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.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
He realized that he could rise only through the support of the discontented and utterly disillusioned middle class. All he did later was to subjugate it. Rauschning describes in detail Hitler's intense hatred of Germany's laboring masses.
Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)