One June morning in 1919, a Bavarian professor stopped to watch a 30-year- old corporal haranguing a group of students. "I had the peculiar feeling," the professor recalled, "that the man was feeding on the excitement that he himself had whipped up. I saw a pale, thin face and hair hanging down the forehead in unmilitary fashion. He had a close-cropped mustache, and his strikingly large, pale blue eyes shone with a cold fanatical light."
In the next 25 years the world was to grow fatally familiar with that sight: the forelock vibrating, the voice agitated, the stare fixed on destiny....
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