'A born natural orator': Irish student's account of Hitler in 1921 emerges

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/06/irish-student-hitler-1921-daniel-binchy
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A young Irish student was one of the first people from outside Germany to recognise the danger of Adolf Hitler’s inflammatory oratory, a new biography reveals.

Writing in his diary about a trip in November 1921 to Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, Binchy describes seeing a man with a “carefully docked ‘toothbrush’ moustache” giving off an “impression of insignificance”.

“His purple passages were greeted with roars of applause, and when finally he sank back exhausted into his chair, there was a scene of hysterical enthusiasm which baffles description. As we left the meeting my friend asked me what I thought of this new party leader. With all the arrogance of 21 I replied: ‘A harmless lunatic with the gift of oratory.’ I can still hear his retort: ‘No lunatic with the gift of oratory is harmless.’”

“In his speech I found no change at all. Allowing for the altered place and circumstances, it was substantially the same address which I had heard in the Bürgerbräukeller. There were the same denunciations, the same digressions – and the same enthusiasm. At the conclusion of his speech the vast throng cheered itself hoarse. The obscure housepainter was now the leader of the second largest party in Germany.”