"I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts."
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Quoted in "Hitler: The Missing Years" - Page 67 - by Ernst Hanfstaengl, John Toland - 1994
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernst_Hanfstaengl
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Ernst Hanfstaengl
Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl (February 2, 1887 – November 6, 1975) was a German-American businessman and intimate friend of Adolf Hitler. He eventually fell out of favour with Hitler, however, and defected from Nazi Germany to the United States. He later worked for Franklin D. Roosevelt and was once engaged to the author Djuna Barnes.
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