”Hitler began with a long harangue which he had often given before, but never tires of repeating, about the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and the peacefulness of Germans,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “Then his voice, which had been low and hoarse at the beginning, rose to a shrill, hysterical scream as he raged against Bolshevism.”
Shirer watched six hundred deputies –
personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bodies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, like a college yell. Hitler raises his hand for silence. It comes slowly. Slowly the automatons sit down. Hitler now has them in his claws. He appears to sense it. He says in a deep, resonant voice: “Men of the German Reichstag!” The silence is utter.
”In this historic hour, when in the Reich’s western provinces German troops are at this minute marching into their future peace-time garrisons, we all unite in two sacred vows.” He can go no further. It is news to this hysterical “parliamentary” mob that German soldiers are already on the move into the Rhineland. All the militarism in their German blood surges to their heads. They spring, yelling and crying, to their feet. The audience in the galleries does the same, all except a few diplomats and about fifty of us correspondents. Their hands are raised in slavish salute, their faces now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes, burning with fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah.
Source:
Wick, Steve. “Parading Down the Wilhelmstrasse.” The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 88-9. Print.
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