nyone.

In his brilliant review of Mein Kampf, he

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