https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iayj21/did_germans_think_that_hitler_was_stupid/
created by nolabrew on 27/01/2025 at 03:25 UTC
1526 upvotes, 9 top-level comments (showing 9)
I know a lot of people who think that Donald Trump is stupid. It's certainly a popular opinion on Reddit. Also, a lot of people think that Donald Trump is going to try to take over in a way that is similar to what Hitler did. Did German people, before (or maybe secretly after) Hitler took power think that he was stupid?
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Comment by Georgy_K_Zhukov at 28/01/2025 at 01:18 UTC*
686 upvotes, 8 direct replies
So I'm going to be purposefully a little obtuse here, I should be up front about. "Stupid" is a bit amorphous as to what it can precisely mean, and it can be fairly context dependent. So I'm first going to reask the question in the form of "Did Germans *underestimate* Hitler?" In this sense, I don't mean "Did Germans think that Hitler was incapable of intelligent thought?" which is perhaps the most literal way to read your question, but I do mean "Did [a segment of] Germans think that Hitler was a loud clown rambling incoherently and didn't need to be taken seriously?" which I think *does* fit a possible way to read your question, and to which the answer is "Ja!"
Because before Hitler came to power, there absolutely was a segment of the German population who *did* view him that way. During the 1920s he was seen as a vulgar rabble-rouser, on the fringe of politics. A 1927 report by a police observer at a Nazi rally is *not* charitable, nothing that Hitler:
speaks without notes, initially in drawn-out fashion for emphasis. Later on, the words come tumbling out, and in overly dramatic passages, his voice is strained and barely understandable. He waves his hands and arms around, jumps back and forth excitably, and always seems to be trying to captivate his attentive, thousand-strong audience. When he’s interrupted by applause, he theatrically stretches out his hands. The word no, which occurs repeatedly toward the end of his speech, is stagy and pointedly emphasized. In and of itself, his talent as a speaker was … for this reporter nothing special.
It is hardly charitable to Hitler, and it is hardly unique either. The next year, the Nazis would pull less than 3% of the vote in the Federal elections, which speaks decently well to the lack of appeal. For most Germans of the 1920s, especially those less politically active, if they even really knew much about the Nazis at all it was probably of SA Brownshirt thugs brawling in the streets. hardly a perception inclined to a picture of intellectualism, nor flattering to Hitler as their leader. Hitler himself would often be seen in similar, if not more slighting, than those of the observer above. In modern parlance, his speeches could be easily dismissed as mere psychobabble, not taken seriously and the intention ignored.
One of my favorite pithy descriptions of Hitler comes from Kershaw's introduction to the biography he wrote, where he calls Hitler "an autodidact whose only indisputable talent was one for stirring up the base emotions of the masses." And I think that gets to what was in play here. To those who *weren't* in Hitler's target audience, it was so easy to dismiss Hitler's goals as rants without substance, and from a man so far removed from the chance of power that there was no need to really consider what he *meant*. For those to whom he *was* appealing though, all of the factors which might have made others dismiss his speeches as psychobabble didn't really matter because he *was* quite capable of appealing to raw emotion. The target audience would get it, and if you weren't the target, it was going to be just completely incomprehensible how anyone could find it appealing.
Even his early followers, even they were somewhat admitting of this in how they described the appeal of Hitler to them. Kurt Lüdecke, an early Nazi party member and one of the men behind the Beer Hall Putsch, recalled the first time he saw Hitler speak, in 1922, and described how "My critical faculty was swept away", as well as describing Hitler's appeal as an "hypnotic spell by the sheer force of his conviction". If you were already in the target demographic - an antisemitic German nationalist, maybe with a dash of concerns about the vitality of German Manhood - it would work and if you weren't you'd likely be left scratching your head and wondering "What is this shit?" Or, to get to the heart of your question and quote Oswald Spengler, "A dreamer, a numbskull, a man without idea, without strength of purpose, in a word: stupid" (although it should be noted Spengler was not completely anti-*Nazi*. He thought well of Gregor Strasser).
Even those who might have taken the time to learn a little bit more about Hitler out of morbid curiosity in the 1920s would probably have found little to change their mind. His autobiography-cum-political manifesto *Mein Kampf* was anything *but* a best-seller prior to the 1930s, but for the brave soul who did actually open it up only the most committed of them would likely come away with anything close to a positive impression. And to be sure, I don't mean offense at his stated *plans*, but merely the awful writing! It is an offense to the eyes simply in terms of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and Erika Mann (a German anti-Nazi of the era) was quite understated even when she noted that *"There is not a page of Mein Kampf whose errors do not hit you in the eye"*. I won't go into too much detail on how bad it is, so you can fine more on that here[1], but I will note the irony that reading it in English doesn't do the book justice because the translation doesn't capture just how *badly written* it is in German! It is often said that Hitler put much of what he intended to do on the pages, and that few took him seriously, but indeed I'm only slightly joking when I say that it isn't hard to understand as one might finish the book (or more likely throw is away soon after starting) questioning whether the author was even literate, which only added to how ludicrous it all could seem.
That also played into how some opponents of Hitler portrayed him. Karl Mayr - who was fairly uniquely placed in being the German intelligence officer who ordered Hitler to attend his first Nazi meeting - would become a member of the SPD in the 1920s, where he shared his quite dismissive impression of his former subordinate, although Laurence Rees is of course quite doubtful of Mayr's allegation that "Hitler was so stupid he could not write his own speeches".
It should also be noted though that 1928 was something of a pivot point. As said, their electoral success was minimal, but then a mere two years later, in 1930 would see them jump to being the second largest party in the Reichstag with just over 18%. It wasn't simply that one day Hitler suddenly appealed to people. To be sure, the worldwide impact of the Great Depression was one of a number of factors, but the Nazis - and Hitler - also specifically shifted who they were trying to appeal to by the late 1920s. This included the reinterpretation of the 1920 Party Program (they couldn't *rewrite it* as that would seem weak) and in turn explicit attempts at broader appeal, what Kershaw calls the "catch-all approach". Hitler had by that point of course spent nearly a decade working on his skills as a speaker, on his ability to *stir the 'base emotions'* and there was considerable dampening down of rhetoric - not only from Hitler but from the Nazi propaganda arm in general - to try and grow their umbrella. For many people there was a compartmentalizing, and much of the middle class appeal and growth that the party saw after 1928 reflected latching onto the Nazis promises of economic good times, and for many either ignoring or even disbelieving some of the extreme aspects of the platform.
To be sure though, such changes only go so far. After all, even when they took power the Nazis, while the largest party in Germany, still only enjoyed 33% of the votes in the last Reichstag election, and that was a several point drop from the one previous (closely mirrored with the improvements of the economy eroding the Nazi appeal). It must of course be said that at that point it certainly was harder to simply dismiss Hitler casually as unimportant, but those not aligned with the Nazis still did try at times! Even as late as 1933, *when the party came to power*, some publications were calling him a clown, which might not speak to broad German perception by that point, but certainly could speak to the writer being gobsmacked that a man once seen as a mere buffoonish by many Germans was now Chancellor. Of course, even Von Papen was somewhat surprised by the turn of events, since while he had made the offer of Chancellorship, he and his fellow conservatives had underestimated Hitler even then in assuming they could control him.
At this point, I would return briefly to the original point I made though, and to your question. I'd again emphasize that I'm not sure I've even necessarily answered it, per se, but I do hope it offers food for thought into one possible way. Through most of the 1920s, Hitler's appeal was fairly contained, and those who were outside of those circles, but were aware of him, absolutely did underestimate him. Would they have dismissed him in such simple terms as "stupid"? Well, some certainly did literally (see Spengler above), but as I said early on, I see "stupid" as having some fairly broad definitions, and I think that the dismissiveness, the underestimating, and the disbelieving Hitler's intentions *do* fit under some of that umbrella. And even as the Nazis did finally begin to grow their voter base in the wake of the 1928 election, even a good number of their supports chose to focus solely on promises of economic good times to come, and *continued* to underestimate just how serious Hitler was in his more gross and violent rhetoric. Whether, in the end, you want to call that "Germans thinking he was stupid" I leave to you, the reader.
Comment by [deleted] at 27/01/2025 at 21:30 UTC*
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Comment by [deleted] at 27/01/2025 at 22:24 UTC
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Comment by Horror_Pay7895 at 28/01/2025 at 20:46 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
One way to judge “stupidity” in a public figure is to look at their success in other fields. And Trump is a wildly successful businessman. The so-called deep state seems to dislike that about him. On the bad side, perhaps, he DOES have a tendency to weaponize everything. And he comes across as bumptious, which is a political negative. Unlike Hitler, he does genuinely seem to buy into the political system, whereas Hitler was a revolutionary who took his cues from the political left. Hitler was, in emotional terms, a better orator. Trump just isn’t the thug Hitler was, either.
Comment by [deleted] at 28/01/2025 at 13:29 UTC
-4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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