and nobody would ever have thought of it,” says

Bruno Hähnel who was active in the party in the

1920s. “Hitler hadn’t moved to centre stage
so much then, the way it happened later. He was
simply the chairman of theNSDAP.”29 It was also
obvious, from the beginning of Hitler’s involvement
with the German Workers’ Party, that much of the
strength and certainty that flowed through him when he
was speaking to a crowd seemed to desert him
when he was talking to two or three other people.
As he later said to the photographer, Heinrich
Hoffmann, “In a small intimate circle I never know what
to say … as a speaker at a small family
gathering or a funeral, I’m no use at all.”30 Others
also noticed this odd inconsistency in Hitler—this
yawning gap between the public performance and
the private reality. Captain Mayr, who had
“discovered” Hitler as a speaker in the first
place, remarked how Hitler was “shy and self
conscious”31 amongst other soldiers in the barracks
and yet was able to inspire large audiences in the
beer hall. Mayr later argued that this allowed
subsequent, more intelligent, figures on the extreme Right
to manipulate Hitler for their own ends. “As a leader,” wrote
Mayr,“Hitler is probably the greatest hoax ever
played on the world.”32 But whilstit is true that
more obviously politically astute figures like Hermann
Göring and Ernst Röhm, who had been a captain
in the German army during the war, did attach
themselvesto the Nazi party in these early days, it
simply isn’t the case that somehow Hitler was subordinate
to them.Clearly, Hitler did take most of his ideas from
others—like Gottfried Feder, the political economist who
called for an end to “interest slavery”—but by
the summer of 1921 he was the undisputed leader
of the Nazi party.In a way, Hitler’s very weirdness
— in particular, the fact that he found“normal” socialintercourse
 difficult andyet could inspire a crowd—contributed to
the growing sense that here was a very different
type of political leader. “There was always a
certain element in his personality into whichhe would
allow nobody to penetrate,” remembered an early
acquaintance. “He had his inscrutable secrets, and in
many respects always remained a riddle to me.”33 It
was this extraordinary combination—Hitler’s abilityto
connect with a large audience of supporters, often by
reinforcing and then heightening their existing beliefs,
together with his inability to interact in a
normal
everyday way with individuals—that was at the centre of
the creation of Hitler’s “charisma” as an orator.
Hitler, almost incredibly, could be both intimate with
an audience and distant with an individual. The need
for a political leader to create “distance” is
something which Charles de Gaulle, a contemporary
of Hitler’s, recognised as of vital importance. “First and
foremost,” wrote de Gaulle, “there can be no prestige
without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt. All
religions have their holy of holies, and no man is
a hero to his valet. In the designs, the demeanor,
and the mental operations of a leader there must
always be a ‘something’whichothers cannot altogether
fathom, which puzzles them,stirs them,and rivets their
attention … 34 Aloofness, character and the
personification of quietness, it is these qualities that
surround with prestige those who are prepared to carry a
burden that is too heavy for lesser mortals …
He [the leader] must accept the loneliness which,
according to Faguet, is the ‘wretchedness of
superior beings.’ ”35 But one of the many differences
between de Gaulle and Hitler—who were born withina
few months of each other—is that de Gaulle
recognised the value of creating “distance” from those he led
and consciously acted to create it. Hitler was not
acting in this way out of choice. He had always
foundit hard to connect with other individual human
beings—a “normal” friendship was impossible for him. It
was just that now this characteristic worked to his
advantage. Many of Hitler’s followers witnessed his apparent
lack of need for personal intimacy and thought it
the mark of a man of charisma. Indeed, the mark
of a hero.