Amazing what a crap, boring speech it was. If it wasn't for the noise, I'm sure most people would nod off listening to such meaningless recycle of crap clichés and tired old tropes.

Sure, he knows how to work the crowd, what with Hess as warm up man and on again at the end to propose the Seig Heil but it was still a bloody awful speech. How he rose to the top while spewing stuff like that makes the whole thing even more astonishing. Maybe there is a Devil after all.

Boring to you perhaps, but to millions of Germans, it was the right message at the right time.

We would be no less susceptible to it today, perhaps more so when things ripen a bit more.

I like this translation of the same video better: http://youtu.be/J3YRWhg4YaA

To pdwalker:

Meh. Remember, the Germans were the punching-bag of Europe until unification got rolling in the 1850s and '60s, culminating in the establishment of the German Empire in 1871. Had Bismarck's policies of not making waves been continued by his successors, there may not have been a World War I. As it was, after Kaiser Wilhelm II dumped Bismarck in 1890, he embarked on policies that rocked the European boat pretty badly, and along the way made the German people feel entitled to the leading role in European affairs.

The upshot is that the German people felt that they lost something that was rightfully theirs when Germany was defeated in 1918. Worse still (for the rest of us), they felt that it was the liberal forces in the country (the centrist and center-left political factions) that had let the country down. In truth, the Army was exhausted and crumbling, but it was never decisively defeated in the field, allowing the militarist factions to play up the idea of the "stab in the back", painting their political opponents as traitors.

Hitler and his supporters were able to play on that myth of the "stab in the back" to get attention, and then promised to get Germany moving again in the elections of December 1932. The Nazis won enough seats in the German parliament to be asked to form a government, and the rest is history.

Their government was not very adept at getting the country moving again, at least at first, but with re-armament kicking in after 1935, the economy improved and the speechifying (such as the one we see here)-- evoking themes and ideas peddled by the militarists and the fans of the ancien regime-- helped keep the fence-sitters on the fence and allowed the whole god-awful project to move forward into Hell.

We've got our problems, pdwalker, but frustrated royalism and revenge-fantasies aren't on the menu. Orwell's Animal Farm comes to mind when I listen to the Obamatrons sing the praises of the the current Administration, but most of us have the good sense to laugh at them, and put sticks in the spokes of their bicycle-wheels. If they persist, THEN we'll have to start using monkey-wrenches. But I don't think it will get that bad-- I think the mockery will bring them down first.

"He was railing against a group of people, labeling them as enemies of the state (and enemies of the people who mattered), mocking them, de-legitimizing them, blaming them for the country's problems, tacitly endorsing any actions taken against them.

Oh yes; it can happen here."

Yes. Conservatives, Catpitalists & Christians.

Its a shame that Vladimir Lenin's rants against the Kulaks, Klergy & Kapitalist's were before the video era as that more closely resembles the socialist slime we are fighting today (class warfare)

Socialism is stealing.