wrote of the “attraction” of Hitler’s personality,whichhe felt was “no doubt overwhelming when one hearshis speeches.”45 Orwell maintained, “The fact is that there is something deeply appealing abouthim. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—it is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering underintolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubtthat that is how Hitler sees himself.” Orwell rightly emphasised this aspect of the “suffering” Hitler portrayed, for an important part of Hitler’s appeal was his claim that Germany had “suffered” and that he was destined to right this terrible wrong. Moreover, rallies like the one at Nuremberg in 1934 appealed to large numbers of Germans because they went against many of the comfortable assumptions of the time, as Orwell explains: “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth- control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.”46 Above all, what Hitler offered to his audience was redemption. In his speeches he talked less about policyand more aboutdestiny. It was a privilege, he said, to live at such a decisive time in history. The Nazis were on a “splendid crusade” that would “go down as one of the most miraculous and remarkable phenomena in world history.”47 There might be a toughroad ahead, Hitler implied, but the forthcoming journey offered every German a chance to find meaning in their lives. Thus, Hitlersuggested, Germans were special not just because they were racially superior but because they had been born at such a time and had great tasks before them. “Howdeeply we feel once more in this hour the miracle that has brought us together!”48 Hitler said to a gathering of National Socialist leaders in Nuremberg in September 1936.“You have come to this city from your small village, from your market towns, from your cities,from mines and factories, from behind the plough. You have come from your daily routine and from your labours for Germany to share this feeling: We are together … and we are now Germany!” Earlier that day, in an extraordinary speech to a gathering of women of the NS Frauenschaft (the Nazis’ “Women’s League”), Hitler had claimed that not only did German children “belong to their mothers” they also belonged “to me.” There was an almost mystical connection,implied Hitler, between him and these German children. Jutta Rüdiger, who was to become ReichLeader of the League of German Girls just a year after Hitler gave this speech, says that she is “still utterly amazed” by Hitler’s achievement in drawing Germans (or at least those Germans the Nazisconsidered “Aryan”) into one community: “If you look at the German people throughout the ages —how they quarrelled with one another and are quarrelling again—the fact is that Hitler managed to get all of them,almost all of them,underthe one roof, so to speak, to pull them together. People said that Hitler had the effect of a magnet that was being passed over the heads of the German people.” And that “magnet” seemed to have a particular effect on women, as William Shirer observed in Nuremberg in 1934 when he came across a groupof women outside Hitler’s hotel. He thought that, “They looked up at him as if he were a messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman.”49 Hitler had always used religious termsin his speeches, talking of the “resurrection” of the German people and, as we have seen, emphasising his commitment to the Christian church in Germany to the Centre party in 1933.He had also ensured that the original Nazi programmeof 1920, in point 24, stated that the party “representsthe standpoint of positive Christianity.” And, as discussed earlier, he had madepositive comments about Jesus as a “fighter” against the Jews.50 But the most persuasive explanationof these statements is that Hitler, as a politician, simply recognised the practical reality of the world he inhabited. In conversation with Ludendorff years before he had said, “I need Bavarian Catholics as well as Prussian Protestants to build up a great political movement. The rest comes later.”51 Had Hitler distanced himself or his movement too much from Christianity it is all but impossible to see how he could ever have been successful in a free election. Thus his relationship in public to Christianity—indeed his relationship