Leader Personality Assessments in Support of Government PolicyHitler was convinced of his own greatness, a conviction bolstered by
the response to his fiery rhetoric.
Hitler was described as attuned to his audience in a remarkable
fashion. "Hitler responds to the vibration of the human heart with
the delicacy of a seismograph... enabling him with a certainty with
which no conscious gift could endow him to act as a loudspeaker pro-
claiming the most secret desires, the least permissible instinct, the
sufferings and personal revolts of the whole nation" (Strasser, quoted
in langer 1972, 46). In Mein Kampf, Langer observed, Hitler focused
on mass psychology, emphasizing that "the mass prefers to submit to
the strong rather than to the weakling; the mass, too, prefers the
ruler to a pleader" (47).
His fiery oratory stirred the masses into a frenzy. "His oratory used
to wilt his collar, unglue his forelock, glaze his eyes; he was like a
man hypnotized, repeating himself into a frenzy." He was, another
observer declared, "in the presence of a miracle. He was a man trans-
formed and possessed." His hypnotic self-presentation was echoed in
the German propaganda machine, which depicted him as "the acme
of German honor and purity; the Resurrection of the German family
and home. He is the greatest architect of all time; the greatest mili-
tary genius in all history. He has an inexhaustible fount of knowl-
edge. He is a man of action and the creator of new social values. He
is ... the paragon of all virtues" (Langer 1972, 53).
In this longitudinal psychobiographic study, Langer was to exam-
ine the psychological underpinnings of Hitler's conviction of his
own greatness. Langer persuasively depicts the inner emptiness that
underlay and drove the messianic self-concept and public role. In
describing the illegitimacy of Hitler's father, Alois, Langer noted the
data suggesting that the real father of Alois may have been one of the
Rothchilds, a Jewish family for which Hitler's grandmother was a
maid. Langer observed that the salient question was, What did
Hitler believe and fear? (This theme was later to be stressed in
Waite's The Psychopathic God.}
Langer then describes the bleak early years and the extended
period during Hitler's adolescence when he was lost psychologically
and was in a period of identity diffusion, the equivalent of a street
person, unemployed, moving from flophouse to flophouse. World
War I provided the exit pass from this extended period, and Hitler