An Irish ambassador on Adolf Hitler’s astonishing appeal

His speech was greeted with “hysterical enthusiasm which baffles description”

Daniel, sometimes D. A., Binchy served as the Irish minister to Germany from 1929 to 1932. He was, his biographer Tom Garvin wrote, “a medieval scholar, a diplomat, an Irish public intellectual, a Catholic liberal democrat, a polyglot, a historian, a political scientist avant la lettre, an anti-Communist and, possibly most importantly for nationalist Ireland, a fervent anti-Nazi.” He “was always demanding evidence when faced with truth claims of any kind, and he was possessed of a deep dislike of mythological or magical thinking, and the grip such thinking had on the political mentalities of certain kinds of people. . . . He often acted as a stiff dose of sceptical salts in human form.” His observations appeared in “Adolf Hitler,” published in the Irish Jesuit journal Studies in 1933.

I first saw Hitler on a murky November evening in 1921. A Bavarian fellow-student in the University of Munich had induced me to accompany him to a meeting of what he described as “a new freak party” in the Bürgerbraukeller.

The hall was not quite full, the audience seemed to be drawn from the poorest of the poor — the “down and outs” of the city: indeed, except for a sprinkling of obvious ex-soldiers, I might well have believed myself assisting at a continuation of a Communist meeting which I had attended in a neighbouring hall a few nights previously. Hitler was the principal speaker, and as he sat on a platform waiting for the very prosy chairman to conclude, I remember wondering idly if it would be possible to find a more commonplace-looking man.

His countenance was opaque, his complexion pasty, his hair plastered down with some glistening unguent, and — as if to accentuate the impression of insignificance — he wore a carefully docked “toothbrush” moustache. I felt willing to bet that in private life he was a plumber: a whispered query to my friend brought the information that he was a housepainter.

He rose to speak, and after a few minutes I had for gotten all about his insignificant exterior. Here was a born natural orator. He began slowly, almost hesitatingly, stumbling over the construction of his sentences, correcting his dialect pronunciation.

Then all at once he seemed to take fire. His voice rose victorious over falterings, his eyes blazed with conviction, his whole body became an instrument of rude eloquence. As his exaltation increased, his voice rose almost to a scream, his gesticulation became a wild pantomime, and I noticed traces of foam corners of his mouth.

He spoke so quickly and in such a pronounced dialect that I had great difficulty in following him, but the same phrases kept recurring all through his address like motifs in a symphony: the Marxist traitors, the criminals who had caused the Revolution, the German army which was stabbed in the back, and — most insistent of all — the Jews.

There were some interruptions, and I gathered from Hitler’s attempts to deal with them that he was utterly devoid of humour.*

His footnote reads “I have since learned that not even his warmest admirers claim for him a sense of humour.”

But there could be no doubt of his ascendancy over the vast majority of the audience. His purple passages were greeted with roars of applause, and when finally he sank back exhausted into his chair, there was a scene of hysterical enthusiasm which baffles description.

As we left the meeting my friend asked me what I thought of this new party leader. With all the arrogance of twenty-one I replied: “A harmless lunatic with the gift of oratory. I can still her his retort: “ No lunatic with gift of oratory is harmless.”

He next saw Hitler in September 1930 at a rally in Berlin celebrating the Nazi Party’s success in the general election, when it became the country’s second largest party. He gave essentially the same address. “There were the same digressions — and the same enthusiasm. At the conclusion of his speech the vast throng cheered itself hoarse.”

Binchy then describes Mein Kampf, the work of “a self-educated man of very limited intelligence.”

Written in a maddeningly wooden style, in which hackneyed clichés alternate with windy rhetoric, full of rambling digressions and hysterical denunciations, it affords no insight whatever into Hitler’s own life and development.

Anything he tells us about himself is merely introduced, as a peg on which to hang some political or ethnological dissertation. Commonplaces of history, politics and sociology are paraded as new and epoch-making discoveries; long-discarded theories are rescued from the lumber rooms of science and enunciated with all the pompous omniscience of a village schoolmaster.

At times one is almost disarmed by the author’s naiveté; occasionally, too, one meets a gem of entirely unconscious humour. But for the most part the book makes sad reading, and anyone who has even attempted the task will understand why Hitler exalts the spoken over the written word.

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