Activity 6: Rallies - Eye Witness Accounts
Kurt Ludecke, who went on to become a leading member of the Nazi Party, compared the experience of attending his first meeting to a “religious conversion”.
Individuals who attended one of these meetings (often out of curiosity) found themselves carried away by the experience with so many other people. They felt swept along by the crowd’s response of almost mass hysteria to the carefully staged rally.
Read the sources below then discuss the questions that follow.
Source 1
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“The mass meeting is also necessary for the reason that in it the individual who at first, while becoming a supporter of a young movement, feels lonely and easily succumbs to the fear of being alone, for the first time gets the picture of a larger community, which in most people has a strengthening, encouraging effect…When from his little workshop or big factory, in which he feels very small, he steps for the first time into a mass meeting and has thousands and thousands of people of the same opinions around him, when, as a seeker, he is swept away by three or four thousand others into the mighty effect of suggesting intoxication and enthusiasm, when the visible success and agreement of thousands confirm him to the righteousness of the new doctrine…then he himself has succumbed to the magic influence of what we designate as ‘mass suggestion’.” |
- Look closely at the words underlined above.
- Why do you think Hitler uses the language of religion in places here?
- What do you think are the dangers of this?
