The Power Of A Slogan: Hitler's Secret Messaging | Hitler's Propaganda Machine | Timeline

One of the great privileges of working at History Hit and making films together with our team at Timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one, Stonehenge. I'm right in the middle of the stone circle now. It is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit. If you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here, go to History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history and if you use the code TIMELINE when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer. See you there. In the 1920s, Hitler used these skills to build the Nazi brand, relying heavily on words, images and symbolism to define the struggle of the German people against unjust foreign oppressors and the traitors and enemies within their own country, endlessly repeating the same simple messages until they took hold. Soldiers marching in unison under the swastika. Crowds of party members and supporters in perfect rows saluting their Führer. Symmetry and symbolism and flags, buildings, people, weapons, all communicating a single message. Discipline, order, power. These are the images we associate with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party at the peak of their control over Germany, but this was born out of a carefully constructed narrative developed for over 10 years before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. A pervasive manipulative propaganda campaign that wrapped the truth of Germany's dire circumstances in the 1920s in a mythology of a new Germany that only Hitler could deliver. The term propaganda always has these two lines. On the one hand it is seen as a decidedly negative term that involves manipulation, brainwashing, fake news and so on. On the other hand it's a shaping, strategizing, communicating a political message with a view to persuading people, a particular kind of audience, to act in a particular way and then looking at how they are responding to this in order to take the feedback and recalibrate that system of communication. The place propaganda had in the Nazi party's rise and regime remains infamous, but it was not the first time it had been used for mass manipulation and mobilization. Hitler's long relationship with the power of propaganda began in the trenches of World War I. There was a popular view in Germany, one that Hitler believed and perpetuated, that the Allied forces had won the First World War through their superior use of propaganda. He could not believe that the great German army could have been defeated by licit means. There had to be some kind of magic which the British and Americans latterly used to destroy that great invincible army. It could not be by military means and the particular necromancy he identified was propaganda. Suddenly it was the new thing. It was the happy pill, it was the hypodermic syringe which would transform everything and he had limitless faith in the power of propaganda because he blamed it for Germany's defeat. Propaganda had emerged as a powerful tool of psychological warfare, viewed as so virulent and manipulative that it would spark decades of debate about its power, its dangers and its place in a democratic society. To Hitler it was power and he identified in Allied propaganda a superiority of style and substance that he would later emulate. He noted that British propaganda was fundamentally believable. It did not diminish the fighting power of the Germans whereas German propaganda portrayed the British as bumbling incompetence and Adolf Hitler picked up on this idea that the sophistication of propaganda had to have a small element of realism in. If it was completely devoid from reality then it ceased to be effective. The new reality for Germany in the aftermath of the First World War was the humiliation of defeat, a reality that Hitler would use to fuel his propaganda. On the 28th of June 1919 the German government agreed to a treaty at Versailles that was grossly unpopular with the German people. Under the treaty Germany had to disarm, relinquish territories that effectively broke up their colonial empire, pay billions of dollars in war reparations and accept fault for all losses and damage suffered by the Allies. Versailles was a terrible shock to the German people. They had been told that really they weren't to blame, that they were encircled by Britain and the other powers. Hitler personally took it as a great humiliation. He identified himself with Germany. So he exploited it very quickly and made a great use of it in his early propaganda. Before Hitler could exploit the treaty and the sentiment of the German people he would need to find a platform for his rhetoric. In September 1919 Hitler attended a meeting of the German Workers' Party, a small right-wing nationalist group with only a few dozen members. And he saw in this nascent German Workers' Party an opportunity for his racial ideas, his national ideas to find a home and he saw opportunity too because of the personnel he met that he could become a leading figure in this. By November that year Hitler was one of the party's most important figures, the man responsible for their propaganda and recruitment. He was originally their PR man and what he did essentially was emphasize posters, the meeting on the poster. But the posters he produced were incredibly vivid and striking with powerful colors, rich representations of various enemies, powerful images like dragons and so forth. And so this got them audience and this was the first building block. The second building block was words. Hitler believed in the power of speech to persuade an audience above all other methods. His particular brand of rhetoric and delivery, crafted in these early years, would remain a fixture of his propaganda methodology. In the party's first mass meeting in February 1920, they renamed themselves the Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party or Nazi Party. Here Hitler presented the party's 25-point plan. What could have been a dull reading of political ideology, Hitler turned into a rousing speech. Hitler had two particular advantages when it came to public speaking. The first was his unusual voice which was actually a result of him being gassed in the First World War. If you listen to Hitler's speeches now there's a certain rasp to his speech and that gives him an air of authenticity. He's also an Austrian by birth although he's picked up a Bavarian accent during his time in Germany and this sets him aside from the other politicians in the 20s and 30s who are almost uniformly Prussians and speak with a very received form of German. He has a genuine voice not merely from the army but from the streets, from the provinces. In his first year with the party, Hitler delivered speeches at over 30 meetings to crowds ranging from 800 to 2,500 people, quickly gaining a reputation as a masterful speaker. It's extraordinary that before 1918 he had never really appeared in public in this way. He'd never tried to address groups. He'd been a very shadowy figure in the army and with no really strong opinions. It's not until the humiliation of 1918 that he arouses himself to think there's a way out of this, there's a way I can make Germany great again and I have the means by which to put the idea over. Hitler would begin his speeches quietly, gauging the mood of the audience and then build slowly, working in stronger language and more dramatic gestures, raising his volume and pace until his excitement caught on with the crowd. He found that the short sentence, the rhetorical question, he realized worked very well with an audience that didn't want deep intellectual arguments. They wanted slogans, they wanted punchy statements they could relate to and of course he played upon that. In every speech, Hitler spoke to the German people's discontent. Defeat in the First World War and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles was viewed by many Germans as their national shame. What we have is a very modern thing, the politics of grievance. A lot of what the Nazis and he did comes across as a kind of protracted British why. They were actually planting this idea of grievance and betrayal in the German people and they did it very effectively and there were good grounds for grievance. This was not irrational, there was substance to them. Hitler gave the people enemies. An external threat to the German ideal. The Jews and Bolshevists that he accused of stabbing Germany in the back during the war. An idea that was fed by a long history of anti-Semitism in Europe. If a propaganda message is aligned to popular perceptions, then it has already gained the attention of the people and then it can start shaping popular perception, perhaps even in a different direction. A lot of the anti-Semitic propaganda that was put forward by the Nazi regime in the 1930s and during the war built on pervasive anti-Semitic stereotypical images amongst German society. The stab in the back became a central notion of Hitler's rhetoric and a common motif in right-wing political commentary and Nazi propaganda posters. It was this stab in the back that Hitler argued had weakened Germany's position and allowed the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, who he called the November Criminals, to betray the German people. The first thing was the leaders. Those who had been prepared to compromise with the allies in their demands and allowed Germany to be humiliated at a time when it should have shown resource and strength and resolution. And that was the idea he punched over in the beer halls and it came across very well. As Hitler's ability to draw large crowds grew, he began to expand the party's reach beyond meetings, buying the newspaper Volker Schabirbacher or People's Observer in December 1920. Filling the paper was short, exaggerated pieces that repeated the same Nazi party rhetoric that So propaganda, visual particularly, is the means by which you arouse people's attention. And Hitler said that people will believe what you tell them if you tell them in a strong enough way. He introduced the idea of the big lie. If you tell a small one, they might not, they might dismiss it. Tell a big lie, people believe it. And tell the lie in a big way. Announce it. Promulgate it. They went around with loud hailers, the Nazis, chanting slogans. And all this encouraged attention. It may have been negative in the sense that some people don't know that they're troubled, we don't want that. But they made themselves heard, they made themselves known. And it gets around. After little more than a year as a member, Hitler was party leader. His influence and power as a propagandist were undeniable. This was not just because he was a charismatic speaker. He was also adept at drawing on everything from art and music to the activities of his political adversaries to construct a cohesive, compelling Nazi mythology. Hitler was known to love German myths and theater. In particular, Wagner's operas and their use of staging, lighting and music to amplify the emotional power of the mythological storytelling. Staging techniques that he would later use in his own events, rallies and films. Despite being ideologically at odds with Germany's communists, the Nazi party borrowed heavily from their propaganda methods in the 1920s. The Bolsheviks had been great partners of propaganda and they influenced the Nazis, partly because, of course, a lot of German soldiers had been prisoners of war in Russia. They'd had direct experience of the Russian Revolution. Secondly, the German army and specifically the air force trained in Russia after the First World War, the Bolsheviks allowed that in the 20s and early 30s for a protracted tutorial in the art of propaganda for both wings of the political spectrum. Nazi propaganda repeatedly capitalized on their opponents' activities and brand recognition to draw attention to their own cause. Hitler would use the communists' trademark red on Nazi posters and flags in a bid to attract German workers to their cause. He would send the Nazi party's paramilitary stormtroopers, the SA, to opponent's meetings. There, they would beat people up to get the party mentioned in rival newspapers. The staging of the Nazi party's rise in the early 1920s was also heavily influenced by events in Italy. There, Mussolini and his fascisti were gaining ground, fueled by social discontent and fear among the middle class of a socialist uprising. From Hitler's point of view, Mussolini was the absolute blueprint of how to contest the power of mainstream politics and how to get there. As their influence grew, Mussolini and his blackshirts prepared to march on Rome. But in October 1922, Mussolini was instead offered the role of prime minister and accepted. While Mussolini was handed power, he didn't pass up the opportunity for spectacle. Marching his blackshirt through the streets of Rome in a highly orchestrated publicity stunt, a manufactured revolution. In the march on Rome was one of the great propaganda inventions of all time. Mussolini had to make it appear that it was a great populist outpouring of rage which just took control of the state in a good attire. The march on Rome had a number of different significances for Hitler. First of all, it was a spectacle. It was something that looked good on celluloid, on newsreel. Put this together, the theatricality, the novelty and the brutal effectiveness of this and you have a winning recipe for this new era of mass politics. After Mussolini became il Duce, Hitler would be more commonly known by his own version, Führer. Both simply meant leader. He even modeled the uniforms worn by the Nazi party's paramilitary arm, the SA, on Mussolini's blackshirts, except in brown. A year after the march on Rome, Hitler would attempt his own similar revolution, only to discover the disconnect between romanticized propaganda and reality. Conditions in 1923 Germany seemed ripe for uprising. Two big things happen outside the political control really. One is inflation, huge rapid inflation which destroys the German currency. The other is the occupation by the French of the Ruhr region, occupation of factories, etc. Because Germany hadn't met its reparations commitments, the claim was, this aroused fierce indignation among the German people. Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff, a national hero of the First World War, led roughly 2,000 Nazi party members in a march into the center of Munich. There they were confronted by police with heavy machine guns. The revolution, or Putsch, ended in a hail of bullets. He underestimated the eaglism of the German people and also the willingness of the German army to come over to him. But it was pure opportunism and really self-delusion that he misread not only German people, but not for the first time German culture. In other words, Germany had a very strong civic state ethos. A coup is something you do in South America, not Germany. Hitler was arrested two days later and put on trial for treason. German constitutionalism and rationalism had prevailed. The failure of the Putsch, named after the beer hall where the revolution began, was an important lesson for Hitler. You had to stick by the book. You had to follow the law. You couldn't actually fight the law or delegitimize it because it would get you. You couldn't undermine the state militarily. You could do it in other ways, but those means had to be legal, and they included, of course, propaganda. At his trial, Hitler turned the courtroom into his stage, using it to speak directly to the German people and position his actions as those of a true patriot. He returned to the Nazi party's core messages, giving an impassioned criticism of the Treaty of Versailles, the November criminals, and the unfair terms of peace inflicted upon Germany. And these speeches were reported in the national press. You'd be reading about this guy Hitler, and you'd think, hmm, you know, Hitler's the man who really did the job. He failed, but, you know, he tried. And that was a huge boost. And Goebbels was one of many people away from Munich and Bavaria who first heard of Hitler. And we can trace this very clearly in a series of entries in March and April 1924, where Goebbels describes in his diary how he starts reading Hitler's speeches. He is immediately taken by the content and the tone of them. Bizarrely, he compares Hitler to Christ. He says there's something almost Christ-like about this figure, his passion, his enthusiasm, his nobility, his German feeling. These are the kind of words he used. The trial turned Hitler into a national celebrity, both martyr and victim, a perception that was reinforced by Hitler's imprisonment and by the ban on him speaking publicly after he was released in December 1924. Later, the Beer Hall Putsch would form a founding element of Nazi Party mythology. In prison, Hitler would begin to confer his ideology into his book Mein Kampf, or My Struggle. Hitler's book is really unusual as a kind of political manifesto. It starts with lots of personal stories about his childhood, his relationship with his mom and dad, but before he says anything at all about politics. And then he later explains how his political worldview arises from these kind of personal experiences, emotions, personal dramas and stories. I think it's a moment where he's trying to establish himself as a serious politician and not just the leader of a protest movement. He's trying to root himself in the respectable cultural canon. And through that, of course, he's also trying to woo a new audience, not just the disaffected, but also, if you like, the cultural mainstream, the middle classes. Mein Kampf functions both as a work of propaganda and a blueprint for Hitler's understanding of how to use propaganda as a tool for mass manipulation. He talked about Hammerschläger, hits of the hammer, repeating, repeating, repeating your message until you have no resistance left in your audience. You have to develop an image of your enemy as dangerous, almost subhuman, and you exaggerate your message massively in order to bring people on side without them even realizing that they're being brought on side. Through Mein Kampf, Hitler also detailed his notion of the racial state, the superiority of the Aryan and the role that society plays in supporting the superior race. Hitler argued that the state is a vessel and the race was its content, that the vessel has meaning only if it can preserve and protect the content. He positioned the Nazis as revolutionaries for their role in fighting for his idea. He didn't know he was doing so, but he picked up on a very well-worn and well-used group of metaphors, which are referred to as the great chain of being. And according to the principles of the great chain of being, you have living entities who are innately superior to others on a scale, and obviously humans are at the top. And then as he works down through the populations that he's interested in, he is much more effective talking about the people he considered to be his enemies. The book was released in two parts in 1925 and 1927. By 1933, it had sold around 1.5 million copies. Hitler understood that his role was to sell an idea, to convince the audience that he and the Nazi party was their best and only choice, and he used every tool at his disposal to package and sell Nazi ideology. Words were important to Hitler, but symbols also formed an essential part of Nazi propaganda, a visual communication of what they stood for and what they reviled, symbols of power and national pride. One of Hitler's first acts when he became head of party propaganda was to design the party's flag, black swastika on a white circle in the center of a sea of red. As with many elements of Nazi imagery, this was symbolism with existing meaning. Hitler spent hours in Munich Public Library looking at ancient symbols and refining them and refashioning them. The swastika flag, it had been used for years as a symbol on the German Reich. Hitler didn't invent it. It's emerged in many cultures over time. But Hitler stylized it. He stylized the flag and all these symbol structures were his own design. He didn't have them delegated to some copywriter. He stylized them himself. Hitler believed the National Socialist Program could be read in the party's flag. In Mein Kampf, he wrote, in red we see the social idea of the movement, in white we see the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man. For over 15 years, it would be present on flags, armbands, banners, posters. As Nazi influence, power and control spread, so too did the visibility of the symbol. It was a simple, visceral advertisement of the movement that spoke to their audience without a word being uttered. Hitler's salute, used by him for the first time in 1926 while surveying a parade of SA troops, was also derived from other sources. An ancient Roman gesture, it was already being used by Mussolini's fascisti. The whole of fascism, the whole of Nazism, really contains a sort of pastiche reminisce of the glory of Rome and the symbols of Rome. And so it's really Heil Caesar. The salute would become an important symbol, not only of Nazism, but of the suggestive and coercive power Hitler had over his audience. Made a mandatory gesture for all party members as an acknowledgement of Hitler's supreme leadership. Hitler was also aware how important images were to instantly communicate an idea. There was this notion of the world of masses, and the masses are moved by images, not so much by intellect and by argument and reason, but by emotion. And key to emotion is creating images. The Nazi regime was incredibly adept at using the new mass media, that this is something that is completely transformed through technological innovation, cheaper printing, especially of photographic images. Now everything is suddenly illustrated that wasn't before, flooding the market, saturating the market, so it becomes a much more kind of visual sphere of politics. And the Nazis kind of jump onto that bandwagon very early on, and I think images are absolutely key to how they transport their message. In Hitler's early years as a party member, he avoided being photographed at all. Later, he would create carefully planned and composed images with his official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. It was Hoffmann who came to meet Hitler when he was released from jail, taking his photo outside the gates before they left. An image that was propagated across the covers of many German newspapers. Hitler was convinced that image was everything. He needed to set himself up as a strong man, and in opposition to all those elements that were working to bring down Germany. But to achieve all of this, he had to project his own personal image as a man who was almost predestined to take Germany back to its former greatness. Before Hitler wore any new outfit in public, he would commission a photograph from Hoffmann. And he never allowed himself to be photographed wearing a bathing suit, in case it could be used as a source of ridicule by the press. He was very wary of appearing absurd, in some context, and being ridiculous. He was a very sensitive man, I mean, very sort of sensitive to his own dignity. And so, you know, his personal image, I think, was very important. Hitler trusted Hoffmann enough that the two collaborated on a series of photos of Hitler practicing poses for his speeches. The images reveal the extent of Hitler's carefully practiced physicality, his focus on the importance of body language in communicating with his audience. His posture often stiff, his hands raised or fisted, his face always expressive, brow furrowed, resolute and serious. Poses designed to convey power and decisiveness. Hitler spent hours rehearsing in front of a mirror to look good, to get all the kind of hand gestures right for the photographs. Hoffmann and his increasingly large staff were the official photographers of Hitler. They produced somewhere between one and two million pictures of Hitler in this relatively short time span, and nothing was published that Hitler hadn't personally cleared for publication. After his release from jail, Hitler would have to rely on more than his skill as a public speaker to revive the Nazi movement. Banned by the government from public speaking until as late as 1927 in some parts of the country, Hitler turned to writing editorials for the newly relaunched Nazi party newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter. On the 26th of February 1925, Hitler used the paper to publish his directives for rebuilding the party, a new beginning. Joseph Goebbels also used the paper to perpetuate the notion of Hitler as a larger-than-life figure of the nationalist movement. He wrote in July 1926 that insiders knew what Adolf Hitler's personality had meant for the solidarity of the movement in the past few years of struggle. The party also expanded their propaganda network, strengthening their grassroots movement. New chief of propaganda, Gregor Strasser, worked with a young Heinrich Himmler to organize party recruitment and strengthen ties with local groups across Germany, enabling them to in turn develop and use their own local propaganda specialists. And we have to allow here, I think, for something that Hitler wasn't responsible for personally, and that is the spread of Nazism in the north. The Nazis were strong under him in the south, around Bavaria for example, but Strasser and Goebbels went north and they spread the message there. So the identification of Nazism as a national movement is really down to people like Goebbels and Strasser, not simply to Hitler in the south, and that's an important phase in the development of the party. Hitler revived the party rally at Weimar in 1926 and then moved the event to the new location at Nuremberg from 1927. Though in these early years, the event wasn't the polished ceremonial construct it would later become. It took a long time to refine the act, but they really were a way of solidifying the internal relationships within the party. When you got people to Nuremberg, you'd got them forever, and this really was the point. They were a great big combine of boot camp, summer camp, holiday camp, evangelical revival rally. By 1927, they had also started making films of their rallies, allowing more Germans to bear witness to this orchestrated projection of Nazi supremacy. Goebbels in particular was enamored with the power of film to captivate and persuade. His inspiration drawn from the most unlikely source, Soviet cinema. After he saw Battleship Potemkin, he was so impressed with the skill expressed in the film that he declared, I wish we had one like it. Goebbels had been interested in the cinema on a theoretical basis. He was somebody who seriously thought about for a long time about the cinema. In a period when the cinema was going through its most extensive development, all the way from German expressionism, from the change from silent to sound and so on. Early rally films were almost amateurish, standard documentary style newsreel products, not the highly stylized ode to the power of Hitler and the Nazi movement that they would be in later years. You've got to bear in mind, at the time, this was an entirely new thing. The whole notion of news reporting or documentary cinema was entirely new. So how one went about this, how you filmed, where you filmed from, what made for a reasonable film, how you created a narrative, all of these things were entirely experimental. And so the first Nazi films were, I think, pretty crude, naive productions. Not only were the Nazi party novices in this medium, their resources were too limited to produce anything significant. They understood the power of compelling visuals, though, and these early experiences in filmmaking would ultimately build to a mastery of mass media propaganda tactics. Despite the advances Hitler and the Nazi party were making, they were still considered to be a regional fringe party. The results of the country's 1928 elections confirmed this. The Nazi party only attracted around 2.5 percent of the vote and won 12 seats in the Reichstag, Germany's parliament. Ultimately, their fortunes would be turned by a series of events that shifted national sentiment once again, creating a crucible in which Hitler could light the fire of right-wing nationalism. American economist Owen Young proposed a new rigorous plan for Germany to pay their war reparations. Signed in June 1929, it was an incredibly unpopular proposal that aligned the agenda of the Nazi party with corporate Germany. Among Hitler's powerful new allies was media mogul Alfred Hugenberg. Hugenberg's media empire would drastically expand the Nazi party's influence. Hitler realized that he needed the support not merely of workers and the lower order of people, as it were, as he would call them. It wanted people of influence and finance, and Hugenberg had many contacts with industrialists, with people of note in society. Hugenberg called industrialists together, and Hitler meets them, and he gets money from them. He puts his ideas over to them, and he tells them, industry's safe in Nazi hands. If ever we come to power, it'll be a partnership. It won't be a Bolshevik takeover. You won't lose your position. You won't lose your ownership. We'll work together. No one could compete with the force of Nazi rhetoric when combined with the reach and influence of their newfound resources. Hitler seized this opportunity to put himself and the Nazi movement into the center of German politics, eclipsing Hugenberg's own more conservative nationalist party. He later regretted it, Hugenberg, obviously, because he didn't see quite where it was going, but it's a useful technique, using someone to get support from the established classes. The personality cult of Hitler, supreme leader and messianic figure, was growing stronger, fueled by Hitler and his increasingly powerful propaganda machine. The building blocks for Nazi Germany, propaganda state, were in place. Then the American stock market crashed on the 29th of October 1929, and the ripples were felt around the world, including in Germany. The number of people without a job in Germany rose to astronomical numbers. By February 1930, the unemployment rate had skyrocketed to 3.4 million people. By 1932, six million people were out of work. Faith in the system was crumbling. When people ask me, you know, how on earth did the Nazis come to power? I would say, well, you have to understand that Germany, in the late 20s, early 30s, was in a massive crisis, a political crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis. The system was breaking down. Demonstrations and at times violent street protests were rife, instigated by both the Nazis and their leftist adversaries. People felt, well, in a sense democracy has been imposed on us by the Allies, you know, with the Versailles peace settlement and so on, and it hasn't delivered the goods. It's just not working, and we have no real respect for it. The majority didn't feel, in a sense, it was part of a strong German tradition. Hitler capitalized on this crisis by presenting himself as the savior, the only one to bring Germany back from the brink. The Nazis very cleverly appealed to the nation and said, you know, we are a party in favor of the national community. That was the slogan they used, the Volksgemeinschaft. So they were appealing and saying we are the national party and we are going to save the nation and look at all these other parties. They're just interested in their own selfish, their particular interest. It worked. When Germany went back to the polls in late 1930, the Nazi party vote increased to 6.4 million, winning them 107 seats and making them the second largest party in parliament. By 1930, Nazi propaganda efforts were not only focused on how Germans consumed information. This was as much about preventing access to other ideas as it was about what Hitler and the party were saying themselves. When the anti-war film All Choir on the Western Front was released in late 1930, Goebbels organized the Nazi party's efforts to disrupt the film's premiere. Goebbels at this point believed very strongly that the party in Berlin needed publicity. So in his view, any publicity was good publicity and anything which therefore could generate a sensation in the newspapers was an ideal opportunity for them. He later described the moment they succeeded in turning the crowd who were yelling Jews out and Hitler is at the gates. To avoid more protests, the film was banned from being shown in Germany. Goebbels and the Nazi party had won an important battle. As he put it, the National Socialist Street is dictating behavior to the government. 1932 began with Hitler challenging Hindenburg, the incumbent president and old ally of Hitler and the Nazi party, for the presidency. The Nazi party campaign had Hitler as its star and Goebbels as its architect. Goebbels threw himself into that cause and he discovered that he was actually very good at electioneering and his particular brand of electioneering, which was focused around public speaking, around the use of political posters, cartoons, public demonstrations. He found he was absolutely brilliant at this. Between April and November 1932, Hitler conducted four airborne campaigns across Germany, reaching an incredible number of people, targeting rural Germany as well as the big cities. And here you actually see the Nazis at their stage managing best, a moment of pure theater that Hitler is in an aircraft flying over Germany, a tremendously modern thing to do in the late 1920s. It emphasizes the fact that Hitler is something different, he's something modern, he's a force of energy who can change things. This was a campaign where Hitler could make full use of one of his greatest weapons, his skill as an orator. Hitler spoke at over 150 rallies to audiences of up to 30,000 people, getting in front of as many people as possible to engender a personal connection. In every speech, he positioned himself as the agent of change, ready to save Germany. By contrast, Hindenburg was positioned as representing the status quo that they needed to win. It was strategically difficult for Hitler to deal with the phenomenon of Hindenburg, the great general of the First World War, the great symbol of German patriotism and Prussian integrity and discipline. So he had a positioning strategy, he said. He is our great leader, but the time has come for a younger man. The Nazis' campaign was also significantly boosted by Hugenberg's media empire. He gave Hitler and his party message exposure through newspapers and weekly newsreels. The reach of the Nazi party campaign was also achieved through Goebbels' clever poster marketing. Many designed entirely around Hitler's persona as savior of Germany. They made no specific promises and explained no policies. One showed nothing but Hitler's face appearing from darkness, his name spelled out in bold letters beneath his head. The idea of presenting the man and that bold full frontal straight look at the camera, his face alone becomes identifiable, and no politician was identifiable in that same way. Very clever piece of psychology, very basic, very simple, but people would look and say, this is a pre-television age, people get their ideas either from the cinema, newspapers, or the public place. And the public place is skillfully used by posters. Common symbols of Nazi ideology also pervaded their campaign posters. In one, the strong, physically powerful Aryan towering over the figures that the Nazis blamed for Germany's problems. The Marxist in his red cap, the Jew whispering in his ear, behind him another figure wields a bloody knife, evoking the popular Nazi narrative of the stab in the back. The poster declares, we workers have awakened. Using bold colors, strong imagery, and simple slogans, they captured the attention of the people. If you look at the posters of the other parties, they're really dull. They've got numbers on them, they've got very boring slogans, they still live in a rational world, whereas what the Nazis offered was vividness and color. And remember, this is a world where the entertainment distractions we have today were far, far fewer. Their campaign methodology may have been radical, but it still wasn't enough to gain Hitler power. The Nazis were not elected into power. The most they got before Hitler was in a vote was 37 percent in July 1932. In November 1932, their vote dropped to 30 percent. And in January 33, the newspapers in Berlin were writing him off. They were saying, you know, the whole Nazi thing's kind of ground to a halt. It's on its way out. Despite the Nazi party's faltering trajectory, President Hindenburg still viewed Hitler as a threat that he was desperate to control. And to many in the right, the threat of communism seemed greater. They were frightened that if Hitler was not appointed, then the left would take over. And the only support which the right might be able to have was the Nazis. They felt, right, okay, we'll have to do a deal with the Nazis. Of course, you know, Hitler's an amateur, you know, he's somebody who has no education, really hasn't been to university. We'll be able to control him. I think Papen at one point said, don't worry, we've hired him. Von Papen and the conservatives, Hugenberg and so forth, thought that they could tame Hitler. This was a common delusion that somehow the possession of power, his treatment as a great dignified statesman and so on, would draw out his fangs. And the Nazis would be nothing more than rather rambunctious conservatives, thigh-slapping, beer-drinking conservatives, but still conservatives. They were nothing of the kind. There is a huge difference between a right-wing conservative and a revolutionary. A fascist Nazi is a revolutionary. They don't believe in the things the others believe in. Hitler was sworn in as chancellor on the 30th of January, 1933. Just under 10 years after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler had finally completed the first great leap to ultimate power. That night, the Nazi party and their paramilitary arm, the SA, marched through the streets in the thousands, celebrating the rise of their leader as Hitler stood illuminated in the window of his chancellery office. On that night, Hitler succeeded in delivering the brand he'd spent 10 years building. He had become both statesman and savior. The highly orchestrated celebrations were a display of nationalistic fervor that foreshadowed the country that Germany would now quickly become.