Free Thinking Small by Andrea Hiott Page B

When he joined, the party was small, an amalgam of other organizations that had drifted into one. Hitler became its leader and christened himself “the Führer” in 1921, and he brought with him the fire of propaganda that he had been patching together over the years. A symbol of good fortune and fecundity in many ancient
     cultures, the swastika had been adopted by German nationalists at the beginning of the 19th century. Now Hitler adopted and adapted the swastika to become the symbol of the NSDAP. He also began to think of colors in connection to the emotions they inspired, using red as the background to the black swastika in a white circle. And he took the Roman salute used by Benito Mussolini and copied the gesture, creating the Nazi salute that so many in the world now associate with the word
     “heil.” None of the characteristics of the Nazi party were original ideas of Hitler: His one devasting act was to combine all these things into one.
    As head of the NSDAP 5 , Hitler traveled by car as much as he could through Germany, meeting and speaking to people about his party’s goals. He studied the German people and asked himselfwhat it was they wanted to hear, what would give them that spark of power he knew they wanted to feel. He was careful in how he timed and planned his
     words, gestures, and speech. “The art of propaganda 6 lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses,” he would write in
Mein Kampf,
“and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the intention of the broad masses, and thus also to their heart.” These years of speeches were like prolonged practices before a
     big game. He nearly always had pictures taken of himself from all angles and sides as he spoke, then afterward he would sit and study these pictures and tally them with the responses of the crowd. He listened to his own voice. He studied his own gestures. He practiced his facial expressions. He came to know his movements very well. He did this for years, noticing and watching the reactions, learning how to control himself, learning what worked.
    Even so, in 1923 Adolf Hitler still did not look like much of a threat. He was an extremely busy, almost manic, man who was cobbling together an ideology, but there was a very large gap between the reality of his life and the fantasy he had of it. Certainly he had come a long way. He was the leader of a small but dedicated party; he had some attention, he had colleagues, he had support. But in the wider picture, he was not well-respected or feared. His newfound
     confidence was rather shaky too. When he pulled off his big “Beer Hall Putsch,” for instance—the extreme event that he imagined would change the country overnight—he was met with a disturbing wake-up call. Even with war hero General Ludendorff by his side, the whole thing resulted in a disaster and he came off looking naïve and weak.
    Hitler had wanted a coup that night, a putsch. He’d planned to take over the government by force, but in the end, his brazen declarations fell flat. The coup didn’t work. Embarrassed, he fled the scene. He was eventually captured and placed in jail for his stunt. Once there, he fell into a deep depression, forced to confront the fact that his fantasy had not become reality, as he’d been so sure that it would. Once again, he thought about takinghis own life. In the prison where he was being held until the trial, he reportedly told the psychologist on hand, “I’m finished. If I had a revolver, I would take it.” 7
    But then, an unlikely thing happened: The court decided to try him for treason. And just that one word—“treason”—was (in his eyes) the best thing that could have happened to him. The government was taking his attempted coup seriously. He had a voice. Many in the country, alongside Hitler, would now reinterpret the putsch: With the public’s help, he could rewrite the story exactly as he wished. And, in another unexpected twist,