Journalists, eye-witnesses, and scholars have long regarded Adolf Hitler as one of the most powerful orators and propagandists in history. He is the archetype of an evil demagogue. For more than a century, however, even Hitler’s most perceptive critics have misunderstood his persuasive powers, reducing them to a simple list of nasty tricks or chalking them up to “the magic power of the spoken word.” But Hitler’s persuasive talents were neither simplistic nor magical. They were rhetorical.

Hitler’s Rhetorical Playbook: Persuasive Strategies for Tyranny and Genocide examines how Hitler used rhetoric to persuade millions of people to support, or at least acquiesce to, Nazism. Drawing on original research, primary documents, and scholarship across more than a dozen disciplines, Dr. Ryan Skinnell explains how Hitler learned rhetoric, how he used it to attract and radicalize supporters, and how he turned good rhetoric to the evilest ends. Hitler was unquestionably a gifted theorist and practitioner of persuasion, but as it turns out, he was working from a deeply-rooted, decipherable rhetorical playbook. Deciphering Hitler’s rhetoric helps us make sense of his rise and reign, and it can help us recognize how his rhetoric remains malignantly effective nearly a century after his death.

Forthcoming in Spring 2027 from the University of Tennessee Press.

Contents

Preface: How the Twentieth Century’s Most Notorious Tyrant Used Rhetoric to Take Over a Country and Start a World War, and Why It Still Matters

Introduction: Magical Hitler

Part I: The Making of a Magician

This section provides background about Hitler learned, trained, and practiced as a populist orator and what effects it had on his early development as a political agitator.

Chapter 1: Hitler’s Paideia
Chapter 2: Ausbildung vom Trommler, or Hitler’s Goes to Drum School
Chapter 3: Weimar’s Culture of Demagoguery
Chapter 4: The Führer’s Finishing School

Part II: The Playbook

Chs. 5-12 survey some of Hitler’s most consistent rhetorical strategies and tactics, including figures of speech, performative habits, and argumentative strategies.

Chapter 5: Common Sense in the People’s Community
Chapter 6: Sincere Deception
Chapter 7: Identifying (with) the Führer
Chapter 8: The Subtle Art of Re-forming Attitudes
Chapter 9: “Deutschland Erwache!“
Chapter 10: Credibility of a Certain Magnitude
Chapter 11: “The Basic Aristocratic Idea of Nature”
Chapter 12: He Can’t Be Believed

Conclusion: Legacy

Endorsements (under construction)