(...) Such was the weird assortment of misfits who founded National Socialism, who unknowingly began to shape a movement which in thirteen years would sweep the country, the strongest in Europe, and bring to Germany its Third Reich. The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel, the drunken poet Eckart [of whom Shirer jots down: "[had] been confined to a mental institution, where he was finally able to stage his dramas, using the inmates as actors"] some of the "spiritual" foundation, the economic crank Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm [a bit politically incorrect, isn't it, Mr. Shirer?] the support of the Army and the war veterans, but it was now the former tramp [in the British sense of the word, of course] Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one and utterly unknown, who took the lead in building up what had been no more than a back-room debating society into what would soon become a formidable political party.

W. L. Shirer. Rise and fall. Págs. 65-66.