Following a meeting with Hitler, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, a man who had 'courageously criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church' - went away convinced that Hitler was deeply religious.

In the election campaign of 1930, Hitler seldom spoke explicitly of Jews. The crude tirades of the early 1920s were missing altogether. 'Living-space' figured more prominently, posed against the alternative international competition for markets ... The key theme now was the collapse of Germany under parliamentary democracy and party government into a divided people with separate and conflicting interests, which only the NSDAP could overcome by creating a new unity of the nation, transcending class, estate and profession.

Within the Nazi Party, the beginnings of a personality cult around Hitler go back to the year before the [Munich] putsch... Outside these small groups of fanatical Bavarian Nazis, Hitler's image and reputation at this time - so far as the wider German public took any notice of him at all - was little more than that of a vulgar demagogue, capable of drumming up passionate opposition to the government among the Munich mob, but of little else.

Hitler frequently demonstrated diffidence and unease in dealings with individuals which contrasted diametrically with his self-confident mastery in exploiting the emotions of his listeners in the theatrical setting of a major speech.

Hitler was unapproachable and impenetrable even for those in his close company.

The repeated claim before the 'seizure of power' - that the NSDAP, as a national social-revolutionary movement, and not simply another political party... would create new bonds of unity through its elimination and transcending of the party system, was highly attractive and conveyed much of Nazism's dynamic appeal.

Following a meeting with Hitler, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, a man who had 'courageously criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church' - went away convinced that Hitler was deeply religious.