His utterly logical way of thought is Hitler's strength. There seems to be no other German politician of the present day who has the moral courage that he possesses to draw the inevitable conclusions from any given situation, to announce them despite the mockery of those who think they know better, and above all, to act on them. It is this gift of logic which makes Hitler's speeches so convincing.

Hitler had sent word to his hostess that he had to attend an important meeting and would not arrive until late: I think it was about eleven o'clock. He came, none the less, in a very decent blue suit and with an extravagantly large bouquet of roses, which he presented to his hostess as he kissed her hand. While he was being introduced, he wore the expression of a public prosecutor at an execution. I remember being struck by his voice when he thanked the lady of the house for tea or cakes, of which, incidentally, he ate an amazing quantity. It was a remarkably emotional voice, and yet it made no impression of conviviality or intimacy but rather of harshness. However, he said hardly anything but sat there in silence for about an hour; apparently he was tired. Not until the hostess was so incautious as to let fall a remark about the Jews, whom she defended in a jesting tone, did he begin to speak and then he spoke without ceasing. After a while he thrust back his chair and stood up, still speaking, or rather yelling, in such a powerful penetrating voice as I have never heard from anyone else. In the next room a child woke up and began to cry. After he had for more than half an hour delivered a quite witty but very one-sided oration on the Jews, he suddenly broke off, went up to his hostess, begged to be excused and kissed her hand as he took his leave. The rest of the company, who apparently had not pleased him, were only vouchsafed a curt bow from the doorway.

Suddenly this man, who looked awkward while he was standing around, has begun to speak, filling the room with his voice, riding over interruptions or contradictions by his domineering manner, sending cold shudders down the backs of everyone present by the savagery of his manner.... Awed, the listener feels that something new has come into the room. This thundering demon was not there earlier; this is not the same shy man with contracted shoulders.

The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study, the masses. The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration. In forever setting new and contradictory assertions before his audience, Hitler is tapping the outwardly shapeless substance of public opinion with instruments of varying metals and varying weights. When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them.

Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind but a sail to catch the wind. The mass, however, is a phenomenon of deepest world importance - this levelled conglomeration of fools and wise men, heroes and cowards, proud and humble, the unusual and the average. This mass, with its anonymous intellectual pressure, its unexpected moods and unconscious desires, mirrors and echoes the commanding force of prevailing conditions; it embodies and personifies the necessities and resistances of the objective world; it expresses the silent command of Fate in a mysterious murmur. It is the art of the great propagandist to detect this murmur and translate it into intelligible utterance and convincing action. If he can do this, his utterances and actions may be full of contradictions - because the contradictions lie in the things themselves; they may be deceptive and misleading. The lies of propaganda reveal the deeper truth of the whole world's cynicism and dishonesty. By his lies the great propagandist involuntarily shows himself to be an honest, self-revealing prophet of the Devil.

Hitler's profound, rapacious, avid eye for the weakness of this intellectual age, awaiting only the man who can master it, is revealed in the natural affinity between a depersonalized soul and a depersonalized world. The more passionately Hitler harps on the value of personality, the more clearly he reveals his nostalgia for something that is lacking. Yes, he knows this mass world, he knows how to guide it by "compliance". He is like the crafty dope addict who manages to get his poison despite all efforts of his physicians and guards to prevent him. Hitler's mind directs a personality without centre, a restlessly pulsating force without constancy and firmness, oscillating like the needle of a magnet, trembling and dancing, but always finding the - momentary - north.

Konrad Heiden, the highly respected though somewhat Suetonian biographer of Hitler who had contacts within Hitler's Brown House demimonde, will only go so far as to say that Hitler entertained perverse fantasies about Geli: only Otto Strasser goes so far as to suggest they were consummated, although he claims he heard the details from Geli herself.

Heiden places the moment of change in the relationship at a point sometime before Hitler moved into his princely new residence with Geli. Indeed, Heiden believes Hitler's approach to Geli led to an elaborate hushed-up scandal that became "one of the reasons for Hitler's change of lodgings."

Here, then, in Heiden's words is the locus classicus of the Hitler perversion legend. The story Heiden tells has had a remarkable longevity and influence; it echoes in the subcurrent of Hitler rumor and gossip that was picked up by the OSS's Walter Langer, who gave it the imprimatur of official intelligence. It's a story gloated over "like some gardener with a rare and lovely bloom" (as it was said Hitler gloated over Geli) by psychohistorians and psychoanalysts who have felt that here must be the dark, hidden, repressed truth about Hitler's psyche. It's been picked up and mythologized in the fictions of Thomas Pynchon (his Geli-like figure in Gravity's Rainbow) and Steve Erickson (Geli, the veiled central figure in Tours of the Black Clock, is a kind of Scheherazade of pornography for Hitler).

One day parental relations to his niece Geli ceased to be parental. Geli was a beauty on the majestic side ... simple in her thoughts and emotions, fascinating to many men, well aware of her electric effect and delighting in it. She looked forward to a brilliant career as a singer and expected "Uncle Alf" to make things easy for her. Her uncle's affection, which in the end assumed the most serious form, seems like an echo of the many marriages among relatives in Hitler's ancestry in its borderline incestuousness.

At the beginning of 1929, Hitler wrote the young girl a letter couched in the most unmistakable terms. It was a letter in which the uncle and lover gave himself completely away: it expressed feelings which could be expected from a man with masochistic coprophilic inclinations bordering on what Havelock Ellis calls "undinism" (the desire to be urinated upon for sexual gratification)... The letter probably would have been repulsive to Geli if she had received it. But she never did. Hitler left the letter lying around, and it fell into the hands of his landlady's son, a certain Doctor Rudolph; perhaps this was one of the reasons for Hitler's change of lodgings. The letter was in no way suited for publication: it was bound to debase Hitler and make him ridiculous in the eyes of anyone who might see it. For some reason. Hitler seems to have feared that it was Rudolph's intention to make it public.

Until other scholars began their work on Nazi documents after World War II Mr. Heiden was the best-known authority outside Germany on the party and its leaders....

To the leaders of the Third Reich. Heiden was a hated and sought-after enemy. One ofthe Nazis' acts upon taking over a country was always to ban and burn his books.

Mr. Heiden is sometimes given credit for popularizing the word "Nazi." The National Socialists were known in their earliest days by the conventional abbreviation "Naso" until Mr. Heiden, it was said. began using "Nazi"-Bavarian slang for "bumpkin" or "simpleton" in his articles....

The writer was a propagandist of a special kind-one who used objectivity and documents to destroy the object of his derision....

As a writer for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung ... his special assignment was the Nazi party. It was said that Hitler sometimes refused to start meetings until Mr. Heiden arrived.

In 1930 he left the paper to manage an anti-Nazi newspaper syndicate in Berlin. In 1932 his first book, History of National Socialism was publicly burned by the Nazis, who were then on the brink of gaining power. When they took over... In 1933, he fled.