Mail-order Demagogues: The NSDAP School for Speakers, 1928–34

Abstract

Between 1928 and 1933 Fritz Reinhardt trained 6000 propaganda speakers for the Nazi Party. He made it cheaper for the Party to train a speaker than to print a poster. Reinhardt allowed the NSDAP to project an image of strength, organization and coherence that no other political party in the Weimar Republic could match. Reinhardt’s promises were heard by more members of the electorate than those of any other Nazi, even Hitler. The speakers’ training course was taught by post. The material of the course beginning February 1931 has lain untouched in the archives since. Historians (such as Dietrich Orlow and Joachim Fest) who have made reference to the existence of the school, have dismissed it as ‘primitive’ and entailing only the learning by rote of stock phrases. This is not the case. Reinhardt expressly forbade his students from learning by rote. Rather they were required to learn Reinhardt’s line of reasoning and rephrase it in their own dialect using local issues to illustrate their points. This made the Nazis the most effective propagandists in the fractured polity of the Weimar Republic. This article shows how the speakers school taught and what it taught, in order to illustrate an, as of yet, un-described facet of Nazi electoral propaganda.