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Adolf Hitler

dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945

Adolf Hitler (adɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ; 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer ("Leader") in 1934. During his dictatorship, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust: the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.

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See also: Mein Kampf, Religious views of Adolf Hitler
[A]t the head of this people is someone who has never known anything but struggle, and who has always known but one principle: "Strike, strike and strike again."
The judgment whether a people is virtuous or not virtuous can hardly be passed by a human being. That should be left to God.

Quotes

1919

 
Antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will always find its ultimate expression in the form of pogroms. A rational antisemitism, however, must lead to the systematic legal fight against and the elimination of the prerogatives of the Jew. ... Its ultimate goal, however, must unalterably be the elimination of the Jews altogether.
  • Antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will always find its ultimate expression in the form of pogroms. A rational antisemitism, however, must lead to the systematic legal fight against and the elimination of the prerogatives of the Jew. ... Its ultimate goal, however, must unalterably be the elimination of the Jews altogether.
    • Letter (16 September 1919), quoted in Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler's World View: A Blueprint for Power (Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 48
  • Our fight is with money. Work alone will help us, not money. We must smash interest slavery. Our fight is with the races that represent money.
    • Speech at the hall of Zum Deutschen Reich (December 18, 1919), quoted in Thomas Weber, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (Basic Books, 2017), p. 138. Police report of DAP meeting, SAM, DPM/6697

1920

  • The common good before the individual good. (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz)
    • "The Nazi 25-point Programme," Hitler's speech on party's program (February 24, 1920) in Munich, Germany. Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Documentation, Barbara Miller Lane, ‎Leila J. Rupp, introduction and translation, Manchester University Press (1978) p. 43.
  • Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one's fellow man's sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income. And we were aware that in this fight we can rely on no one but our own people. We are convinced that socialism in the right sense will only be possible in nations and races that are Aryan, and there in the first place we hope for our own people and are convinced that socialism is inseparable from nationalism.
    • "Why We Are Anti-Semites" (August 15, 1920 speech in Munich at the Hofbräuhaus). Translated from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 16. Jahrg., 4. H. (October 1968), pp. 390-420. Edited by Carolyn Yeager. [1]
  • There comes a time when it will be obvious that socialism can only be carried out accompanied by nationalism and antisemitism.
    • "Why We Are Anti-Semites" (August 15, 1920) Translated from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 16. Jahrg., 4. H. (October 1968), pp. 390-420. Edited by Carolyn Yeager. [2]
  • If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-semites - and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism, which we seek to oppose... How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?
    • "Why We Are Anti-Semites," August 15, 1920 speech in Munich at the Hofbräuhaus. Translated from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 16. Jahrg., 4. H. (Oct., 1968), pp. 390-420. Edited by Carolyn Yeager. [3]
  • For if the Jew has a racial determination, so have we, and we are also obliged to act accordingly. Because it seems inseparable from the social idea and we do not believe that there could ever exist a state with lasting inner health if it is not built on internal social justice, and so we have joined forces with this knowledge.
    • "Why We Are Anti-Semites," August 15, 1920 speech in Munich at the Hofbräuhaus. Translated from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 16. Jahrg., 4. H. (Oct., 1968), pp. 390-420. Edited by Carolyn Yeager. [4]

1921

  • Everyone was at one time a Social Democrat.
    • As quoted in Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924, Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn, (editors) Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980, p. 448 (quote from 1921)

1922

  • The Jews have shown real genius in profiting by politics. This capitalistic people, which was brought into existence by the unscrupulous exploitation of men, has understood how to get the leadership of the Fourth Estate into its own hands; and by acting both on the Right and on the Left it has its apostles in both camps. On the Right the Jew does his best to encourage all the evils there are to such an extent that the man of the people, poor devil, will be exasperated as much as possible— greed of money, unscrupulousness, hard- heartedness, abominable snobbishness. More and more Jews have wormed their way into our upper-class families; and the consequence has been that the ruling class has been alienated from its own people.
    • As quoted in A History of National Socialism, Konrad Heiden, Methuen & Company, LTD, London: UK, 1934, p. 58. Speech in April, 1922
  • There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction - to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power - that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago. Here, too, there can be no compromise - there are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.
    ..
    And if we ask who was responsible for our misfortune, then we must inquire who profited by our collapse. And the answer to that question is that 'Banks and Stock Exchanges are more flourishing than ever before.' We were told that capitalism would be destroyed, and when we ventured to remind one or the other of these famous statesmen and said 'Don't forget that Jews too have capital,' then the answer was: 'What are you worrying about? Capitalism as a whole will now be destroyed, the whole people will now be free. We are not fighting Jewish or Christian capitalism, we are fighting very capitalism: we are making the people completely free.' ... It is only the international Stock Exchange and loan- capital, the so-called 'supra-state capital,' which has profited from the collapse of our economic life, the capital which receives its character from the single supra-state nation which is itself national to the core, which fancies itself to be above all other nations, which places itself above other nations and which already rules over them. The international Stock Exchange capital would be unthinkable, it would never have come, without its founders the supra-national, because intensely national, Jews.
    ..
    We must on principle free ourselves from any class standpoint.
    ..
    'NATIONAL' AND 'SOCIAL' ARE TWO IDENTICAL CONCEPTIONS. It was only the Jew who succeeded, through falsifying the social idea and turning it into Marxism, not only in divorcing the social idea from the national, but in actually representing them as utterly contradictory.
    ..
    I am perhaps more capable than anyone else of understanding and realizing the nature and the whole life of the various German castes.
    ..
    THERE ARE NO SUCH THINGS AS CLASSES: THEY CANNOT BE. Class means caste and caste means race. If there are castes in India, well and good; there it is possible, for there there were formerly Aryans and dark aborigines. So it was in Egypt and in Rome. But with us in Germany where everyone who is a German at all has the same blood, has the same eyes, and speaks the same language, here there can be no class, here there can be only a single people and beyond that nothing else.
    ..
    At the founding of this Movement we formed the decision that we would give expression to this idea of ours of the identity of the two conceptions: despite all warnings, on the basis of what we had come to believe, on the basis of the sincerity of our will, we christened it "National Socialist.' We said to ourselves that to be 'national' means above everything to act with a boundless and all-embracing love for the people and, if necessary, even to die for it. And similarly to be 'social' means so to build up the state and the community of the people that every individual acts in the interest of the community of the people and must be to such an extent convinced of the goodness, of the honorable straightforwardness of this community of the people as to be ready to die for it.
  • Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.

1923

  • The Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of St Germain are kept alive by Bolshevism in Germany. The Peace Treaty and Bolshevism are two heads of one monster. We must decapitate both.
    ..
    In my scheme of the German state, there will be no room for the alien, no use for the wastrel, for the usurer or speculator, or anyone incapable of productive work.
    ..
    Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic. We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.
  • Wenn deine Mutter alt geworden,
    und älter du geworden bist,
    wenn ihr, was früher leicht und mühlos,
    nunmehr zur Last geworden ist,
    wenn ihre lieben, treuen Augen,
    nicht mehr wie einst ins Leben seh'n,
    wenn ihre Füße, kraftgebrochen,
    sie nicht mehr tragen woll'n mein Geh'n,
    dann reich ihr deinen Arm zur Stütze,
    geleite sie mit froher Lust,
    die Stunde kommt, da du sie weinend
    zum letzten Gang begleiten musst.
    Und fragt sie dich, so gib ihr Antwort,
    und fragt sie wieder, - sprich auch du,
    und fragt sie nochmals, - steh' ihr Rede,
    nicht ungestüm, in sanfter Ruh!
    Und kann sie dich nicht recht verstehen,
    erklär ihr alles frohbewegt,
    die Stunde kommt, die bitt're Stunde,
    da dich ihr Mund nach nichts mehr frägt.
    • When your mother has grown old
      and with her so have you,
      When that which once came easy
      has at last become a burden,
      When her loving, true eyes
      no longer see life as once they did
      When her weary feet
      no longer want to wear her as she stands,
      then reach an arm to her shoulder,
      escort her gently, with happiness and passion
      The hour will come, when you, crying,
      must take her on her final walk.
      And if she asks you, then give her an answer
      And if she asks you again, listen!
      And if she asks you again, take in her words
      not impetuously, but gently and in peace!
      And if she cannot quite understand you,
      explain all to her gladly
      For the hour will come, the bitter hour
      when her mouth will ask for nothing more.
    • Adolf Hitler, "Denk' es!" (Be Reminded!) 1923, first published in Sonntag-Morgenpost (14 May 1933).

1924

1926

  • If the National Socialist Movement should fail to understand the fundamental importance of this essential principle [race], if it should merely varnish the external appearance of the present State and adopt the majority principle, it would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground.
    • Mein Kampf, Volume 2, Chapter IV, "Personality and the Ideal of the People's State," Trans. Marco Roberto, MVR, 2015, p. 33, first published 1926
  • As long as the Jew has not succeeded in mastering other peoples he is forced to speak their language whether he likes it or not. But the moment that the world would become the slave of the Jew it would have to learn some other language so that by this means the Jew could dominate all the more easily.
    • Mein Kampf, Chapter "Nation and Race"
  • His [the Jewish person's] life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties — and this against their own nation.
    • Mein Kampf, p. 307, first published 1926
 
I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.
  • Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.
    • Mein Kampf, Chapter "The World War"

1927

  • We reject the political aims of the industrialists.
    • Speech at the May 1927 NSDAP provincial congress in Stuttgart, quoted in Dietrich Orlow, The Nazi Party 1919-1945: A Complete History, Enigma Books (2010), p. 61
  • It is impossible that a non-Jew would be able in the long run to compete with the Jews in a Jewish area (of business). At least for the Aryan it is impossible. There are peoples who are able to do so, like the Greeks and the Armenians. Sure, these peoples have come so far that they are able to economically even defeat the Jew. However, by doing this they have become Jews themselves. They have these specific, disgraceful characteristics we condemn in the Jews.
    • "Rede auf Generalmitgliederversammlung der NSDAP/NSDAV e.V. in München," doc. no. 159 (July 30, 1927), in Institut für Zeitgeschichte, ed., Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, vol. 2, pt. 2 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992), 429.

1928

  • I believe that I have enough energy to lead our people whither it must shed its blood [zum blutigen Einsatz], not for an adjustment of its boundaries, but to save it into the most distant future by securing so much land and space that the future will receive back many times the blood shed.
    • Speech (23 May 1928), quoted in Gerhard L. Weinberg, 'The world through Hitler's eyes', in Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 51

Zweites Buch (1928)

Online at the Internet Archive
  • I am a German nationalist. This means that I proclaim my nationality. My whole thought and action belongs to it. I am a socialist. I see no class and no social estate before me, but that community of the Folk, made up of people who are linked by blood, united by a language, and subject to a same general fate. I love this Folk and hate only its majority of the moment, because I view the latter to be just as little representative of the greatness of my Folk as it is of its happiness.
  • The National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk. It knows no Germanising or Teutonising, as in the case of the national bourgeoisie, but only the spread of its own Folk. It will never see in the subjugated, so called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone Folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk.
  • The Folkish State, conversely, must under no conditions annex Poles with the intention of wanting to make Germans out of them some day. On the contrary, it must muster the determination either to seal off these alien racial elements, so that the blood of its own Folk will not be corrupted again, or it must without further ado remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own National Comrades.
  • Jewry is a Folk with a racial core that is not wholly unitary. Nevertheless, as a Folk, it has special intrinsic characteristics which separate it from all other Folks living on the globe. Jewry is not a religious community, but the religious bond between Jews; rather is in reality the momentary governmental system of the Jewish Folk. The Jew has never had a territorially bounded State of his own in the manner of Aryan States. Nevertheless, his religious community is a real State, since it guarantees the preservation, the increase and the future of the Jewish Folk. But this is solely the task of the State. That the Jewish State is subject to no territorial limitation, as is the case with Aryan States, is connected with the character of the Jewish Folk, which is lacking in the productive forces for the construction and preservation of its own territorial State.
  • Because of the lack of productive capacities of its own, the Jewish Folk cannot carry out the construction of a State, viewed in a territorial sense, but as a support of its own existence it needs the work and creative activities of other nations. Thus the existence of the Jew himself becomes a parasitical one within the lives of other Folks. Hence the ultimate goal of the Jewish struggle for existence is the enslavement of productively active Folks. In order to achieve this goal, which in reality has represented Jewry's struggle for existence at all times, the Jew makes use of all weapons that are in keeping with the whole complex of his character. Therefore in domestic politics within the individual nations he fights first for equal rights and later for superior rights. The characteristics of cunning, intelligence, astuteness, knavery, dissimulation, and so on, rooted in the character of his Folkdom, serve him as weapons thereto. They are as much stratagems in his war of survival as those of other Folks in combat. In foreign policy, he tries to bring nations into a state of unrest, to divert them from their true interests, and to plunge them into reciprocal wars, and in this way gradually rise to mastery over them with the help of the power of money and propaganda. His ultimate goal is the denationalisation, the promiscuous bastardisation of other Folks, the lowering of the racial levy of the highest Folks, as well as the domination of this racial mishmash through the extirpation of the Folkish intelligentsia and its replacement by the members of his own Folk.
  • Politics is history in the making.
  • Zu einer solchen weisen Maßnahme waren einst Spart[j]aken [sie] fähig, aber nicht unser heutiges, verlogen sentimentales, bürgerlich-patriotisches Zeug. Die Herrschaft der 6000 Spartaner über 3 1/2 Hunderttausend Heloten war nur denkbar infolge des rassischen Hochwertes der Spartaner. Dieser aber war das Ergebnis einer planmäßigen Rasseerhaltung, so daß wir im spartanischen Staat den ersten völkischen zu sehen haben. Die Aussetzung kranker, schwächlicher, mißgestalteter Kinder, d. h. also deren Vernichtung, war menschenwürdiger und in Wirklichkeit tausendmal humaner als der erbärmliche Irrsinn unserer heutigen Zeit, die krankhaftesten Subjekte zu erhalten, und zwar um jeden Preis zu erhalten, und hunderttausend gesunden Kindern infolge der Geburtenbeschränkung oder durch Abtreibungsmittel das Leben zu nehmen, in der Folgezeit aber ein Geschlecht von mit Krankheiten belasteten Degeneraten heranzuzüchten. [5]
  • At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.
    • As translated in Hitler's Secret Book (1961) Grove Press edition, pp. 8-9, 17-18

1930

1931

  • To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. ... the basic principle of my Party's economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority... the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me?... Today's bourgeoisie is rotten to the core; it has no ideals any more; all it wants to do is earn money and so it does me what damage it can. The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil.
    ..
    I will tolerate no opposition. We recognize only subordination – authority downwards and responsibility upwards. You just tell the German bourgeoisie that I shall be finished with them far quicker than I shall with Marxism... When once the conservative forces in Germany realize that only I and my party can win the German proletariat over to the State and that no parliamentary games can be played with Marxist parties, then Germany will be saved for all time, then we can found a German Peoples State.
    ..
    Over the last forty years the German bourgeoisie has been a lamentable failure; it has not given the German people a single leader; it will have to bow without gainsaying to the totality of my ideology... The bourgeoisie rules by intrigue, but it can have no foothold in my movement because we accept no Jews or Jewish accomplices into our Party.
  • What matters is to emphasize the fundamental idea in my party's economic program clearly; the idea of authority. I want the authority; I want everyone to keep the property he has acquired for himself according to the principle: ‍'‍Benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual.‍'‍ But the state should retain supervision and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the state. It is his duty not to use his property against the interests of others among his own people. This is the crucial matter. The Third Reich will always retain its right to control the owners of property.

1932

  • This whole edifice of civilization is in its foundations and in all its stones nothing else than the result of the creative capacity, the achievement, the intelligence, the industry, of individuals: in its greatest triumphs it represents the great crowning achievement of individual God-favored geniuses, in its average accomplishment the achievement of men of average capacity, and in its sum doubtless the result of the use of human labor-force in order to turn to account the creations of genius and of talent. So it is only natural that when the capable intelligences of a nation, which are always in a minority, are regarded only as of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly subjected to the majority and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy.
    ..
    Thus it must be admitted that in the economic sphere, from the start, in all branches men are not of equal value or of equal importance. And once this is admitted it is madness to say: in the economic sphere there are undoubtedly differences in value, but that is not true in the political sphere. It is absurd to build up economic life on the conceptions of achievement, of the value of personality, and therefore in practice the authority of personality, but in the political sphere to deny the authority of personality and to thrust into this place the law of the greater number — democracy.
  • I am a socialist because it seems incomprehensible to me to care for and treat a machine with care, but to allow the noblest representative of work, man himself, to degenerate.
    • Mein Programm, April 2, 1932. Quoted in Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, vol. 11, (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992), p. 12.
  • ...lift up your hearts and draw new faith from the resurrection of our people... Ultimately we shall live to see the kingdom of freedom, honour and social justice. Long live Germany!
    • Speech at the Lustgarten in Berlin, April 4, 1932. As quoted in Hitler's Berlin: Abused City, Thomas Friedrich, Yale University Press, 2012, p. 272.

1933

  • The November parties have ruined the German peasantry in fourteen years.
    In fourteen years they have created an army of millions of unemployed. The National Government will, with iron determination and unshakable steadfastness of purpose, put through the following plan:
    Within four years the German peasant must be rescued from the quagmire into which he has fallen.
    Within four years unemployment must be finally overcome. At the same time the conditions necessary for a revival in trade and commerce are provided.
    ..
    The Marxist parties and their lackeys have had fourteen years to show what they can do. The result is a heap of ruins.
    ..
    Now, people of Germany, give us four years and then pass judgment upon us. In accordance with Field Marshal von Hindenburg's command we shall begin now. May God Almighty give our work His blessing, strengthen our purpose, and endow us with wisdom and the trust of our people, for we are fighting not for ourselves but for Germany.
  • And now Staatsprasident Bolz says that Christianity and the Catholic faith are threatened by us. And to that charge I can answer: In the first place it is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany. I do not merely talk of Christianity, no, I also profess that I will never ally myself with the parties which destroy Christianity. If many wish today to take threatened Christianity under their protection, where, I would ask, was Christianity for them in these fourteen years when they went arm in arm with atheism? No, never and at no time was greater internal damage done to Christianity than in these fourteen years when a party, theoretically Christian, sat with those who denied God in one and the same Government.
  • I am for force, because in force I see strength, and in strength the eternal mother of rights, and in rights the root of life itself.
    • Speech (11 March 1933), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold: Portrait of a Diplomat, 1869–1941 (1973), p. 171 and The Times (22 March 1933), p. 15
  • Weighing the sacrifices of the last war, we want to be true friends of a peace which will at last heal the wounds from which all have suffered.
    • Speech in Potsdam (21 March 1933), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • Late you come, yet you do come!... You should have recognized the beneficial power of criticism when we were in the opposition. Back then, you had not yet been confronted with these words; back then our press was verboten and verboten and again verboten; our assemblies were banned; we were not allowed to speak, and I was not allowed to speak -- and that went on for years! And now you say criticism is beneficial!
    • Speech in the Reichstag (23 March 1933) on the passing of the Enabling Act of 1933. Hitler is responding to Otto Wels, leader of the Social Democrats, who had made a speech in favour of "criticism", i.e. freedom of political opposition.[1][2]
    • Hitler opens his response with a quotation from Schiller, "Spät kommt ihr, doch ihr kommt!"
  • In a most generous and humane manner you, Mr. Field Marshal, plead the cause of those members of the Jewish people who were once compelled, by the requirements of universal military service, to serve in the war.
    I entirely understand these lofty sentiments, Mr. Field Marshal. But, with the greatest respect, may I point out that members and supporters of my movement, who are Germans, for years were driven from all government positions, without consideration for their wives and children or their war service... Those responsible for this cruelty were the same Jewish [political] parties which today complain when their supporters are denied the right to official positions, with a thousand times more justification, because they are of little use in these positions but can do limitless harm...
  • In general, the primary aim of this cleansing process is only to restore a certain sound and natural balance, and, secondly, to remove from official positions of national significance those elements to which one cannot entrust Germany's survival or destruction. For it will not be possible to avoid, in the next few years, [the need] to make sure that certain processes which must not be communicated to the rest of the world for reasons of the highest national interest, will indeed remain secret. This can only be guaranteed by the inner homogeneity of the administrative bodies concerned.
  • We want to earn the renewed ascent of the nation by honest means, through our industry, our persistence, our unshakable will! We are not asking of the Almighty, “Lord, make us free!” We want to take an active part, to work, to accept one another as brothers and unite in a common struggle so that one day the hour will come when we can step before the Lord and have the right to ask of Him, “Lord, You can see that we have changed. The German Volk is no longer a Volk of infamy, shame, self-reproach, faintheartedness, and little faith.
    No, Lord, the German Volk is once again strong in its will, strong in its persistence, strong in bearing any sacrifice. Lord, we will not give You up! Now bless our fight for our freedom and thus our German Volk und Vaterland!”
  • No fresh European war is capable of putting something better in the place of unsatisfactory conditions which exist to-day. ... The outbreak of such madness without end would lead to the collapse of existing social order in Europe. ... The German Government are convinced that to-day there can be only one great task, and that it to assure the peace of the world. ... The German Government wish to settle all difficult questions with other Governments by peaceful methods. ... The German people have no thought of invading any country.
    • Speech in Berlin (17 May 1933), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • We do not want a war merely for the purpose of bringing to Germany people who simply do not want to be, or cannot be, Germans.
    • Broadcast (27 May 1933), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • I have sympathy for Mr. Roosevelt, because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, lobbies and bureaucracy." Hitler went on to note that he was the sole leader in Europe who expressed "understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt."
    • The New York Times (July 1933), as quoted from: Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography New York, NY, Anchor Books, Doubleday (1992) p. 312n
  • There is no better guarantee for the peace of the world than the fanatical unity of the German people.
    • Speech in Kelheim (22 October 1933), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • There are Germans and Poles in Europe, and they ought to live together in agreement. The Poles cannot think of Europe without the Germans and the Germans cannot think of Europe without the Poles.
    • Speech in Berlin (24 October 1933), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side, and you will not get me on your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to me already. A people lives forever. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants however now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'
    • Statement by Hitler at Elbing, Germany, Voelkischer Beobachter Berlin edition, (6 November 1933) Vol. V p. 198, and William L. Shirer, The Rise of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 249
  • I am not crazy enough to want a war. ... The German people have but one wish—to be happy in their own way and to be left in peace. They do not interfere in other people's business, and others should not interfere in theirs. ... When has the German people ever broken its word?
    • Speech in Berlin (10 November 1933), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • The struggle between the people and the hatred amongst them is being nurtured by very specific interested parties. It is a small, rootless, international clique that is turning the people against each other, that does not want them to have peace. It is the people who are at home both nowhere and everywhere, who do not have anywhere a soil on which they have grown up, but who live in Berlin today, in Brussels tomorrow, Paris the day after that, and then again in Prague or Vienna or London, and who feel at home everywhere. [Man in audience shouts 'Jews!'] They are the only ones who can be addressed as international elements, because they conduct their business everywhere, but the people cannot follow them. The people are bounded to their soil, bounded to its fatherland, bounded to the possibilities of life that the state, the nation, offers.

1934

  • The National Socialist racial idea and the science underlying it do not lead to the underrating or disparagement of other nations but rather to the recognition of the duty to preserve and maintain the life of our own people. Hence it leads inevitably to a natural respect for the life and character of other peoples. It thus frees foreign political activities from those attempts to subjugate other peoples in order to rule them or to incorporate them as a mere numerical mass in one's own nation by imposing a foreign language upon them. This new idea entails equally great and fanatical devotion to the life and hence to the honour and freedom of one's own people as it does respect for the honour and freedom of others. This idea can therefore provide an essentially better basis to the effort for a true pacification of the world than the sorting of the nations into groups of victors and vanquished, of those with rights and of those subjugated without rights, from mere considerations of strength.
    • Speech to the Reichstag, January 30, 1934 [Source: 'Hitler's Speeches (The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922 - August 1939): An English translation of representative passages arranged under subjects and edited by Norman H. Baynes', Oxford University Press, issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1942. Foreign Policy, vol. II, p. 1158.
  • We do not wish to interfere with the rights of others, to restrict the lives of other peoples, to oppress or subjugate other people.
    • Speech in Lippe (14 January 1934), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • National Socialism derives from each of the two camps the pure idea that characterizes it, national resolution from bourgeois tradition; vital, creative socialism from the teaching of Marxism.
    • Interview by Hanns Johst in Frankforter Volksblatt (January 27, 1934), quoted in David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (New York: NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), p. 57
  • If we want a strong Germany, you must one day be strong, too. If we want a powerful Germany, you, too, must one day be powerful. If we want an honorable Germany, you must one day uphold this honor. If we want order in Germany, you must maintain this order. If we want to once again create a loyal Germany, you yourselves must learn to be loyal. You are the Germany of the future, and thus we want you to be what this Germany of the future must and will be.
  • The hammer will once more become the symbol of the German worker and the sickle the sign of the German peasant,...
  • We have a great aim before us; a mighty work of reform of ourselves and our lives, of our life in common, of our economy, of our culture. This work does not disturb the rest of the world. We have enough to do in our own house.
    • Speech in Gera (17 June 1934), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • Mutinies are crushed in accordance with eternal and unchanging iron laws.
    • Speech in the Reichstag (13 July 1934) on the Night of the Long Knives, quoted in Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1945), p. 115
 
And it was no earthly superior who gave us that command; that was given us by the God Who created our people (...).
  • And so long as but a single one of us can draw breath he will devote to this Movement his powers and will champion its cause just as in the years which lie behind us. One cannot become disloyal to that which has given to the whole of life its content, its meaning, and its purpose. It was a great distress and a mighty behest which seized upon us. A thing like this would never have been created out of nothing if a great command had not lain at the foundation of this work. And it was no earthly superior who gave us that command; that was given us by the God Who created our people and Who cannot will that His work should go to ruin only because a single generation had grown feeble.
    • Speech from the Sixth Nazi Party Congress, Nuremberg (7 September 1934), quoted in Norman H. Baynes (ed.), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922 – August 1939, vol. 1, pt. 3 (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 662
  • It shall always be only a fraction of the people who stand out as truly active fighters, and more is expected from them than from the millions of their fellow countrymen. For them, the mere pledge of "I believe" is not enough, but rather the oath: "I fight!"
    • Speech from the Sixth Nazi Party Congress, Nuremberg (8 September 1934) [6].
      Video footage of this quotation can be found in the film Triumph of the Will
  • What a man sacrifices in struggling for his Volk, a woman sacrifices in struggling to preserve this Volk in individual cases. What a man gives in heroic courage on the battlefield, woman gives in eternally patient devotion, in eternally patient suffering and endurance. Every child to which she gives birth is a battle which she wages in her Volk's fateful question of to be or not to be.

1935

  • Germany will on her side never break the peace. Germany wishes to be on an honourable footing with the neighbour peoples.
    • Interview with George Ward Price of the Daily Mail (17 January 1935), quoted in Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle (1959), p. 67
  • That was not always the case. In 1813 the German Army was prohibited by treaty. Yet I do not recollect that at Waterloo Wellington said to Blücher: "Your army is illegal; kindly leave the field."
    • Reply to the British Foreign Secretary, John Simon, who told Hitler that the British liked to see treaties observed (c. 24–27 March 1935), quoted in Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle (1959), p. 68
  • The Germany of today is a National Socialist State. The ideology that dominates us is in diametrical contradiction to that of Soviet Russia. National Socialism is a doctrine that has reference exclusively to the German people. Bolshevism lays stress on international mission. We National Socialists believe a man can, in the long run, be happy only among his own people. We are convinced the happiness and achievements of Europe are indissolubly tied up with the continuation of the system of independent and free national States. Bolshevism preaches the establishment of a world empire and recognizes only section of a central international. We National Socialists grant each people the right to its own inner life according to its needs and its own nature. Bolshevism, on the other hand, establishes doctrinal theories that are to be accepted by all peoples, regardless of their particular essence, their special nature, traditions, etc. National Socialism speaks up for the solution of social problems, issues and tensions in their own nation, with methods that are consistent with our common human, spiritual, cultural and economic beliefs, traditions and conditions. Bolshevism preaches the international class struggle, the international world revolution with the weapons of the terror and the violence. National Socialism fights for the reconciliation and consequent adjustment of the differences in life and the union of all for common benefits. Bolshevism teaches the overcoming of an alleged class rule by the dictatorship of the power of a different class. National Socialism does not attach importance to a only theoretical rule of the working class, but especially on the practical improvement of their living conditions and standard of living. Bolshevism fights for a theory and, for it, sacrifices millions of people, immense values of traditional culture and traditions, and achieves, compared with us, only a very low standard of living for all. As National Socialists, our hearts are full with admiration and respect for the great achievements of the past, not only in our own people but also far beyond. We are happy to belong to an European cultural community that has so tremendously embossed today's world with a stamp of its mind. Bolshevism rejects this cultural achievement of mankind, claiming that has found the beginning of the real cultural and human history in the year of birth of Marxism. We, National Socialists, do not want to be of the same opinion as our church organizations in this or that organizational question. But we never want a lack of belief in religion or any faith, and do not wish that our churches become club-houses or cinemas. Bolshevism teaches the godlessness and acts accordingly. We National Socialists see in private property a higher level of human economic development that according to the differences in performance controls the management of what has been accomplished enabling and guaranteeing the advantage of a higher standard of living for everyone. Bolshevism destroys not only private property but also private initiative and the readiness to shoulder responsibility. It has not been able to save millions of human beings from starvation in Russia, the greatest Agrarian State in the world. It would be unthinkable to transfer such a catastrophe into Germany, because, at the end of the day, in Russia there are 10 city dwellers for every 90 country dwellers, but in Germany for only 25 farmers there are 75 city dwellers. National Socialists and Bolshevists both are convinced they are a world apart from each other and their differences can never be bridged. Apart from that, there were thousands of our people slain and maimed in the fight against Bolshevism. If Russia likes Bolshevism it is not our affair, but if Bolshevism casts its nets over to Germany, then we will fight it tooth and nail.
  • Germany has nothing to win in any European war. What we want is freedom and independence. Because of this desire we were ready to conclude pacts of non-aggression with all our neighbours.
    • Speech in the Reichstag (21 May 1935), quoted in The Times (22 May 1935), p. 18
  • Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss.
    • Speech in the Reichstag (21 May 1935), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. Instead Himmler makes a great fuss about it all. The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these revelations.
    • Expounding his view on Himmler's heritage projects, formally pursued by the Ahnenerbe movement launched in July 1935, as quoted in Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer, translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 94-95
  • Today women’s battalions were being formed in Marxist countries, and to that one could only reply, “That will never happen here! There are things a man does, and he alone is responsible for them. I would be ashamed to be a German man if ever, in the event of war, but a single woman were made to go to the front.” The woman had her own battlefield. With every child to which she gave birth for the nation, she was waging her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk just as woman stands up for the family. A woman’s equal rights lie in the fact that she is treated with the high regard she deserves in those areas of life assigned to her by nature.
  • We want this people to be faithful, and you must learn fidelity. We want this people to be obedient, and you must practice obedience. We want this people to be peace-loving but also courageous, and you must therefore be peace-loving and at the same time courageous. We do not want this people to grow soft, but we want it to be hard so that it will be able to withstand the hardships of life. And for this you have to harden yourselves in your youth. You must learn to be hard, to stand privations without breaking down. We want this people to love honor and you already in the days of your youth must live up to this concept of honor.
    • Speech (14 September 1935), quoted in Gordon W. Prange (1945). Hitler's Words. New York: American Council on Public Affairs, p. 124.
  • We have undertaken to give the German people an education that begins already in youth and will never come to an end. It starts with the child and will end with the 'old fighter'. Nobody will be able to say that he has a time in which he is left entirely alone to himself.
    • Nuremberg Party Rally (14 Sept. 1935) Quoted in Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1931-1945, Chronicle of a Dictatorship, Max Domarus (ed.), Vol. 2, London, p. 701.
  • Germany is the bulwark of the West against Bolshevism, and, in combating it, will meet terror with terror and violence with violence.
    • Speech in Berlin (29 November 1935), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9

From the film Triumph of the Will (1935)

  • It is our will that this state shall endure for a thousand years. We are happy to know that the future is ours entirely!
  • We want this people to be hard, not soft, and you must steel yourselves for it in your youth!
  • We want a society with neither castes nor ranks and you must not allow these ideas to grow within you!
  • Our party remains as firm as this rock and will not be divided by any force in Germany.
  • When our party had only seven men, it already had two principles. First, it wanted to be a party with a true ideology. And second, it wanted to be the one and only power in Germany.
  • All upright Germans will be National Socialists, but only the best National Socialists will be party members!
  • It is not the state which commands us, but we who command the state.

1936

  • We want to be a peace-loving element among the nations. We cannot repeat that often enough.
    • Speech in Berlin (30 January 1936), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
  • The German people do not wish to continue waging war to readjust frontiers. Each readjustment is bought by sacrifices out of proportion to what is to be gained.
    • Speech in Berlin (15 March 1936), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
  • I have been guided always by the principle that German freedom has nothing to do with injury to others. ... It is one of the most elementary principles that nations should allow each other to live within their own territories as they wish to live.
    • Speech in Berlin (22 March 1936), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
  • Whenever I stand up for the German peasant, it is for the sake of the Volk. I have neither ancestral estate nor manor... I believe I am the only statesman in the world who does not have a bank account. I hold no stock, I have no shares in any companies. I do not draw any dividends.
    • Speech to the Krupp Locomotive factory workers in Essen (27 March 1936), quoted in Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (Hill and Wang), 2001, p. 246
  • Germany has no claims to make against the European nations except to live exactly like the others. ... What we have in mind is a legal order of European national states with equal rights.
    • Speech in Cologne (28 March 1936), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
  • The lie goes forth again that Germany to-morrow or the other day will fall upon Austria or Czecho-Slovakia.
    • Speech in Berlin (1 May 1936), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
  • The menace was Bolshevism. It was difficult to make people realize this, they think it is a fanatical obsession, but it was a real danger of which people should take account. It was as great a phenomenon in history and its menace to the national states of Europe as great as the migration of peoples, e.g. Mohammedan. It was necessary for Western Europe to stand together as a block against this danger.
    • Remarks to David Lloyd George (4 September 1936), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 245

1937

 
The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute therefore the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood.
  • The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute therefore the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood.
  • Is there a nobler or more excellent kind of Socialism and is there a truer form of Democracy than this National Socialism which is so organized that through it each one among the millions of German boys is given the possibility of finding his way to the highest office in the nation, should it please Providence to come to his aid.
  • And numerous people whose families belong to the peasantry and working classes are now filling prominent positions in this National Socialist State. Some of them actually hold the highest offices in the leadership of the nation, as Cabinet Ministers, Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter. But National Socialism always bears in mind the interests of the people as a whole and not the interests of one class or another. The National Socialist Revolution has not aimed at turning a privileged class into a class which will have no rights in the future. Its aim has been to grant equal rights to those social strata that hitherto were denied such rights.
  • After four years from that date I now face the German people and you, gentlemen and members of the Reichstag, to give an account of what has been accomplished. On this occasion I do not think you will withhold your sanction from what the National Socialist Government has done and you will agree that I have fulfilled the promises I made four years ago.
  • There can be but one German Youth Movement, because there is but one way in which German youth can be educated and trained... This Reich stands, and is building itself up anew, upon its youth. And this Reich will hand over its youth to no one, but will take its education and its formation upon itself.
    • Speech on May 1, 1937, quoted in John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-45 (New York, NY, Basic Books, 1968), p. 178
  • We have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth ... at a very early age. ... This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.
    • As quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, William L. Shirer, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York, 1990, p. 249 (May 1, 1937)
  • "Works of art" which cannot be understood in themselves but, for the justification of their existence, need those bombastic instructions for their use, finally reaching that intimidated soul, who is patiently willing to accept such stupid or impertinent nonsense—these works of art from now on will no longer find their way to the German people.
  • I have observed among the pictures submitted here, quite a few paintings which make one actually come to the conclusion that the eye shows things differently to certain human beings than the way they really are, that is, that there really are men who see the present population of our nation only as rotten cretins; who, on principle, see meadows blue, skies green, clouds sulphur yellow, and so on, or, as they say, experience them as such. I do not want to enter into an argument here about the question of whether the persons concerned really do or do not see or feel in such a way; but, in the name of the German people, I want to forbid these pitiful misfortunates who quite obviously suffer from an eye disease, to try vehemently to foist these products of their misinterpretation upon the age we live in, or even to wish to present them as "Art."
  • There is a difference between the theoretical knowledge of socialism and the practical life of socialism. People are not born socialists, but must first be taught how to become them.
  • Shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established. You will see how quickly they will collapse as soon as you make it clear that you mean business.
    • Remarks to British government minister Lord Halifax at Berchtesgaden (19 November 1937), quoted in Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle (1959), p. 97 and Andrew Roberts, 'The Holy Fox': The Life of Lord Halifax (1997), p. 72

1938

  • There are more than ten million Germans in two states, and in the Great War they fought side by side with German soldiers. Against their will they have been prevented from union with the Reich. Political separation, however, does not justify the disregard of national self-determination. Just as Britain stands up for her interests all over the globe, so Germany will know how to guard her more restricted interests. To these interests of the German Reich belongs the protection of those German peoples along our frontiers who are not in a position to secure their general human, political, and Weltanschauliche freedom by their own efforts.
    • Speech in the Reichstag (20 February 1938), quoted in Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1945), p. 375
  • The German people is no warlike nation. It is a soldierly one which means it does not want a war but does not fear it. It loves peace, but it also loves its honor and freedom.
    The new Reich shall belong to no class, no profession, but to the German people. It shall help the people find an easier road in this world. It shall help them in making their lot a happier one. Party, state, armed forces, economics are institutions and functions which can only be estimated as a means toward an end. They will be judged by history according to the services they render toward this goal. Their purpose, however, is to serve the people.
    I now pray to God that he will bless in the years to come our work, our deeds, our foresight, our resolve; that the almighty may protect us from both arrogance and cowardly servility, that he may help us find the right way which he has laid down for the German people and that he may always give us courage to do the right thing and never to falter or weaken before any power or any danger.
    Long live Germany and the German people!
  • Does anyone believe that there is an international conscience?
    • Speech in Leipzig (27 March 1938), quoted in Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1945), p. 383
  • Atatürk was the first to show that it is possible to mobilize and regenerate the resources that a country has lost. In this respect Atatürk was a teacher; Mussolini was his first and I his second student.
  • The motto must be, "Never war again."
    • Speech in Berlin (1 May 1938), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
  • We are not interested in suppressing other nations. We do not want to see other nations among us. We want to live our own life. ... Germany and Poland are two nations, and these nations will live, and neither of them will be able to do away with the other. ... We have assured all our immediate neighbours of the integrity of their territory as far as Germany is concerned. That is no hollow phrase: it is our sacred will. ... The Sudetenland is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe. ... I have assured Mr. Chamberlain, and I emphasize it now, that when this problem is solved Germany has no more territorial problems in Europe.
    • Speech in Berlin (26 September 1938), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
  • Now, as a strong State, we can be ready to pursue a policy of understanding with surrounding States. We want nothing from them. We have no wishes or demands; we desire peace. ... No other people can need peace more than we.
    • Speech in Saarbrücken (9 October 1938), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
  • God helps only those who are prepared and determined to help themselves.
  • As a peace-loving man, I have made every effort to give the German nation the defence and the weapons which are appropriate to persuade others also for peace. A hedgehog never attacks another animal except when it is attacked. No one should come near us. We want only our quiet and the right to live.
    • Speech in Weimar (6 November 1938), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
  • 'Socialist' I define from the word 'social; meaning in the main 'social equity'. A Socialist is one who serves the common good without giving up his individuality or personality or the product of his personal efficiency. Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not. Marxism places no value on the individual, or individual effort, of efficiency; true Socialism values the individual and encourages him in individual efficiency, at the same time holding that his interests as an individual must be in consonance with those of the community. All great inventions, discoveries, achievements were first the product of an individual brain. It is charged against me that I am against property, that I am an atheist. Both charges are false.
    • Speech given on December 4, 1938, quoted in The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922-August 1939, translator and editor Norman Hepburn Baynes, vol. one, Oxford University Press, (1942) pg. 93 at [8]
  • There are people who have a true talent to spoil my every joy.
    • regarding Martin Bormann according to Heinrich Hoffman in his book "Hitler as I Saw Him", after Bormann forbid Bernile Nienau from appearing in Hoffman's magazine Berghof and Hoffman complained about it to Hitler

1939

January 1939

  • When the statesmen of other countries threaten us with all kinds of economic counter measures I can only give the assurance that in such a case a desperate economic struggle would ensue which would be easy for us to carry out, easier for us than for the over-satisfied nations, because our leading idea would be a very simple one: The German nation must live—that means export or die.
    • Speech to the Reichstag (30 January 1939), quoted in The Times (31 January 1939), p. 14
  • In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

April 1939

  • We are rearming, but do not dream of attacking other nations, providing they leave us alone. ... We have given Central Europe a great fortune—namely, peace, which is protected by the German might.
    • Speech in Wilhelmshaven (1 April 1939), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
  • The judgment whether a people is virtuous or not virtuous can hardly be passed by a human being. That should be left to God.
    • Speech delivered at Wilhelmshaven 1 April 1939; My New Order. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. p. 621.

May 1939

  • The liberty of the individual ends where it starts to harm the interests of the collective.
    • Speech in the Lustgarten, Berlin (1 May 1939)
  • What is important is that our Volk overcomes the aggressor and hence wins a future for itself. In a few weeks, the National Socialist combat readiness must have transformed itself into a unity sworn unto life and death. And then the capitalist war agitators in England and its satellite states shall shortly realize what it means to have attacked Europe's greatest Volk state without proper cause.

August 1939

  • England, unlike in 1914, will not allow herself to blunder into a war lasting for years... Such is the fate of rich countries... Not even England has the money nowadays to fight a world war. What should England fight for? You don't get yourself killed for an ally.
    • 14 August 1939, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
  • Our enemies are men below average, not men of action, not masters. They are little worms. I saw them at Munich.
    • Speech to his generals at the Berghof (22 August 1939), quoted in John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics 1918-1945 (London: Macmillan, 1964), p. 447
  • In view of the gravity of the situation, I wish to make a statement which I would like you to forward to M. Daladier.
    As I have already told him, I bear no enmity whatever towards France.
    I have personally renounced all claims to Alsace-Lorraine and recognized the Franco-German frontier.
    I do not want war with your country; my one desire is to maintain good relations with it.
    I find indeed the idea that I might have to fight France on account of Poland a very painful one.
    The Polish provocation, however, has placed the Reich in a position which cannot be allowed to continue.
    Several months ago I made extremely fair proposals to Poland, demanding the return of Danzig to the Reich and of a narrow strip of territory leading from this German city to East Prussia.
    But the guarantee given by the British Government has encouraged the Poles to be obstinate.
    Not only has the Warsaw Government rejected my proposals, but it has subjected the German minority, our blood-brothers, to the worst possible treatment, and has begun mobilization.
    At first, I forbade the Press of the Reich to publish accounts of the cruelties suffered by the Germans in Poland.
    But the situation has now become intolerable.
    Are you aware, that there have been cases of castration?
    That already there are more than 70,000 refugees in our camps?
    Yesterday seven Germans were killed by the police in Bielitz, and thirty German reservists were machine-gunned at Lodz.
    Our aeroplanes can no longer fly between Germany and East Prussia without being shot at; their route had been changed, but they are now even attacked over the sea.
    Thus, the plane which was carrying State Secretary Stuckart was fired at by Polish warships, a fresh incident which I was not yet in a position to bring to the notice of Sir Nevile Henderson this morning.
    No nation worthy of the name can put up with such unbearable insults.
    France would not tolerate it any more than Germany.
    These things have gone on long enough, and I will reply by force to any further provocations.
    I want to state once again: I wish to avoid war with your country.
    I will not attack France, but if she joins in the conflict, I will see it through to the bitter end.
    As you are aware, I have just concluded a pact with Moscow that is not only theoretical, but, I may say, practical.
    I believe I shall win, and you believe you will win: what is certain is that above all French and German blood will flow, the blood of two equally courageous peoples.
    I say again, it is painful to me to think we might come to that. Please tell this to President Daladier on my behalf.

September 1939

  • To the defense forces: The Polish nation has refused my efforts for a peaceful regulation of neighborly relationsl instead it has appealed to weapons.
    • reported 1 September 1939 (the full proclamation available via the TimesMachine) in The New York Times "Hitler Gives Word" special cable from Otto D. Tolischus who was later awarded the Pulitzer prize in 1940 "for his dispatches from Berlin" (referenced in page 28 of 2021 book The Gray Lady Winked)
  • We know that the English people in their entirety cannot be held responsible for all this. Rather it is the aforesaid Jewish-plutocratic and democratic upper class who would like to conceive of the rest of the world as obedient slaves; who hate our new Reich because it sees it as a pioneer of social work which it fears might infect their countries as well.
Reichstag speech declaring war against Poland (1 September 1939)
 
I am determined ... to see to it that a change is made in the relationship between Germany and Poland that shall ensure a peaceful co-existence.
 
... I will not war against women and children. I have ordered my air force to restrict itself to attacks on military objectives.
 
Whoever departs from the rules of humane warfare can only expect that we shall do the same. I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.
Declaration of war against Poland at the start of the Invasion of Poland, and what became World War II · Full English translation online
  • I am determined to solve (1) the Danzig question; (2) the question of the Corridor; and (3) to see to it that a change is made in the relationship between Germany and Poland that shall ensure a peaceful co-existence. In this I am resolved to continue to fight until either the present Polish government is willing to continue to bring about this change or until another Polish Government is ready to do so. I am resolved to remove from the German frontiers the element of uncertainty, the everlasting atmosphere of conditions resembling civil war. I will see to it that in the East there is, on the frontier, a peace precisely similar to that on our other frontiers.
    In this I will take the necessary measures to se that they do not contradict the proposals I have already made known in the Reichstag itself to the rest of the world, that is to say, I will not war against women and children. I have ordered my air force to restrict itself to attacks on military objectives. If, however, the enemy thinks he can form that draw carte blanche on his side to fight by the other methods he will receive an answer that will deprive him of hearing and sight.
  • This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5.45 A.M. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met by bombs. Whoever fight with poison gas will be fought with poison gas. Whoever departs from the rules of humane warfare can only expect that we shall do the same. I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.

November 1939

  • What they hate is the Germany which sets a dangerous example for them, this social Germany. It is the Germany of a social labor legislation which they already hated before the World War and which they still hate today. It is the Germany of social welfare, of social equality, of the elimination of class differences—this is what they hate! They hate this Germany which in the course of seven years has labored to afford its Volksgenossen a decent life. They hate this Germany which has eliminated unemployment, which, in spite of all their wealth, they have not been able to eliminate. This Germany which grants its laborers decent housing—this is what they hate because they have a feeling their own peoples could be "infected" thereby. They hate this Germany of social legislation, this Germany which celebrates the first of May as the day of honest labor.

1940

  • The Non-Aggression and Mutual Assistance Pact with the Soviet Union constituted the most outstanding feature of the year now past. From the outset, the attempt of the plutocratic statesmen of the West to pit Germany and Russia against each other was foiled;... [T]he reactionary Jewish warmongers in the capitalist democracies were not willing to let this opportunity to destroy Germany pass: too long had they prepared for this. For years they had waited for this hour. These Herren warmongers wanted war: they were to get it.
  • Then the spirits of our fallen comrades shall rise from their graves to thank all those whose courage and loyalty have now once more atoned for the sins committed in an hour of weakness against them and against our Volk. Let our avowal of faith on this day be a solemn oath: the war forced upon the Greater German Reich by the capitalist rulers of France and England must be transformed into the most glorious victory in German history!
  • The blood of every single Englishman is too valuable to shed. Our two peoples belong together racially and traditionally. That is and always has been my aim, even if our generals can't grasp it.
    • Said when the Dunkirk halt order was given, quoted in Hitler, Germans, and the "Jewish Question" by Sarah Ann Gordon, May 1940[page needed]
  • The National Socialist Movement has, besides its delivery from the Jewish capitalist shackles imposed by a plutocratic-democratic, dwindling class of exploiters at home, pronounced its resolve to free the Reich from the shackles of the Diktat of Versailles abroad. The German demands for a revision were an absolute necessity, a matter of course for the existence and the honor of any great people. Posterity will some day come to regard them as exceedingly modest.
    ..
    I was scolded for my peace proposal, even personally insulted. Mr. Chamberlain virtually spat in my face before the world public and declined to even talk of peace... And it was thus that the big capitalist clique of war profiteers cried for a continuation of the war. And this continuation has now begun.
  • We want to build up a new state! That is why the others hate us so much today. They have often said as much. They said: "Yes, their social experiment is very dangerous! If it takes hold, and our own workers come to see this too, then this will be highly disquieting. It costs billions and does not bring any results. It cannot be expressed in terms of profit, nor of dividends. What is the point?! We are not interested in such a development. We welcome everything which serves the material progress of mankind insofar as this progress translates into economic profit. But social experiments, all they are doing there, this can only lead to the awakening of greed in the masses. Then we will have to descend from our pedestal. They cannot expect this of us." And we were seen as setting a bad example. Any institution we conceived was rejected, as it served social purposes. They already regarded this as a concession on the way to social legislation and thereby to the type of social development these states loathe. They are, after all, plutocracies in which a tiny clique of capitalists dominate the masses, and this, naturally, in close cooperation with international Jews and Freemasons.
  • After mastering its internal divisions, National Socialist Germany has proceeded step by step to cast off its enslavement.... Nevertheless, the Jewish-internationalist capitalists in connection with socially reactionary classes in the Western States have successfully roused the world democracies against Germany.
  • After the conquest of England, the British Empire would be apportioned as a gigantic world-wide estate in bankruptcy of forty million square kilometres. In this bankrupt estate there would be for Russia access to the ice-free and really open ocean. Thus far, a minority of forty-five million Englishmen had ruled six hundred million inhabitants of the British Empire. He was about to crush this minority.... Under these circumstances there arose world-wide perspectives.... All the countries which could possibly be interested in the bankrupt estate would have to stop all controversies among themselves and concern themselves exclusively with the partition of the British Empire. This applied to Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan.
    • To Vyacheslav Molotov, 13 November 1940, quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
  • After all, there are two worlds which confront each other. And they are right when they say: 'We can never reconcile ourselves to the National Socialist world.' For how could a narrow-minded capitalist possibly declare his agreement with my principles? It would be easier for the devil to go to church and take holy water.
  • The creation of a socially just state, a model society that would continue to eradicate all social barriers.
    • Speech to workers at Berlin's Rheinmetall-Borsig factory, Oct. 10, 1940. As quoted in, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Götz Aly, New York: NY, Metropolitan Books (2007) p. 13. [10]
  • In those countries, it is actually capital that rules; that is, nothing more than a clique of a few hundred men who possess untold wealth and, as a consequence of the peculiar structure of their national life, are more or less independent and free. They say: 'Here we have liberty.' By this they mean, above all, an uncontrolled economy, and by an uncontrolled economy, the freedom not only to acquire capital but to make absolutely free use of it. That means freedom from national control or control by the people both in the acquisition of capital and in its employment. This is really what they mean when they speak of liberty. These capitalists create their own press and then speak of the 'freedom of the press.' In reality, every one of the newspapers has a master, and in every case this master is the capitalist, the owner. This master, not the editor, is the one who directs the policy of the paper. If the editor tries to write other than what suits the master, he is ousted the next day. This press, which is the absolutely submissive and characterless slave of the owners, molds public opinion.
    ..
    Yes, certainly, we jeopardize the liberty to profiteer at the expense of the community, and, if necessary, we even abolish it.
    ..
    All my life I have been a 'have-not.' At home I was a 'have-not.' I regard myself as belonging to them and have always fought exclusively for them. I defended them and, therefore, I stand before the world as their representative.
    • Speech to the Workers of Berlin (10 December 1940) (Wikisource)
  • Truly, this earth is a trophy cup for the industrious man. And this rightly so, in the service of natural selection. He who does not possess the force to secure his Lebensraum in this world, and, if necessary, to enlarge it, does not deserve to possess the necessities of life. He must step aside and allow stronger peoples to pass him by.
    • Speech to officer cadets at the Berlin Sportpalast, 18 December 1940. Domarus, Max (1997). Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945 (English Volume III: 1939-1940). Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. p. 2162. ISBN 0865166277. 

Hitler and I (1940)

quotes from unspecified earlier dates per Otto Strasser, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company (1940)
  • I am a socialist, and a very different kind of socialist from your rich friend Reventlow. I was once an ordinary workingman... But your kind of socialism is nothing but Marxism.
    • p. 106
  • A strong State will see that production is carried on in the national interests, and, if these interests are contravened, can proceed to expropriate the enterprise concerned and take over its administration.
    • pp. 113-114

1941

  • The German world, as well as the Italian world, has overcome the age of the privileges of a few plutocratic capitalists and has replaced it with the age of the people. If Mr. Churchill and his appendage now declare that they cannot live in such a world, then they will not destroy the German world as a result, but instead, sooner or later, their own leaders will fall and thus give the people their freedom. In the struggle of plutocratic privilege against the National Socialist people's rights (Volksrechte), the latter will succeed! With this belief, we enter the year 1941.
  • And justice is on the side of those nations that fight for their threatened existence. And this struggle for existence will spur these nations on to the most tremendous accomplishments in world history. If profit is the driving force for production in the democracies—a profit that industrialists, bankers, and corrupt politicians pocket—then the driving force in National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy is the realization by millions of laborers that, in this war, it is they who are being fought against. They realize that the democracies, if they should ever win, would rage with the full capitalist cruelty, that cruelty of which only those are capable whose only god is gold, who know no human sentiments other than their obsession with profit, and who are ready to sacrifice all noble thought to this profit instinct without hesitation... This struggle is not an attack on the rights of other nations, but on the arrogance and avarice of a narrow capitalist upper class, one which refuses to acknowledge that the days are over when gold ruled the world, and that, by contrast, a future is dawning when the people will be the determining force in the life of a nation.
  • I purchase the necessities of life with the productive power of German workmen. The results of our economic policy speak for us, not for the gold standard people. For we, the poor have abolished unemployment because we no longer pay homage to this madness, because we regard our entire economic existence as a production problem and no longer as a capitalistic problem. We placed the whole organized strength of the nation, the discipline of the entire nation, behind our economic policy. We explained to the nation that it was madness to wage internal economic wars between the various classes, in which they all perish together.
  • What the world did not deem possible the German people have achieved.... It is already war history how the German Armies defeated the legions of capitalism and plutocracy. After forty-five days this campaign in the West was equally and emphatically terminated.
    • "Adolf Hitler's Order of the Day Calling for Invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece," Berlin, (April 6, 1941), The New York Times, April 7, 1941
  • My party at the time consisted of ninety per cent of people from the left.
    • Monologue on Nov. 30, 1941, Rainer Zitelmann, “The role of anti-capitalism in Hitler's world view,” Wiley Online Library, Nov. 13, 2022, Hitler, A. (1980b), p. 146, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941–1944 (ed. W. Jochmann). Albrecht Knaus Verlag.
  • For over five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something he could set on fire. Unfortunately he again and again finds hirelings who open the gates of their country to this international incendiary.
  • Turkey had been our ally in the World War. Its unfortunate result was as heavy a burden for Turkey as it was for us. The great and ingenious reconstructor of the new Turkey gave his Allies, beaten by fate, the first example of resurrection. While Turkey, thanks to the realistic attitude of her State leadership, preserved her independent attitude Yugoslavia fell a victim to British intrigues.
  • The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but . . . I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction.
    • Speaking about the invasion of Russia [12].
  • I, on the other hand, have tried for two decades to build a new socialist order in Germany, with a minimum of interference and without harming our productive capacity.
    • Hitler's "Barbarossa" Proclamation, (June 22, 1941) [13]
  • German people, in this very hour a movement of troops is taking place which in its extent and magnitude is the greatest that the world has ever seen. ... The task of this front is no longer the protection of individual countries but the safety of Europe and the salvation of us all. I have therefore decided to-day once again to entrust the fate and the future of the German Reich and of our nation to the hands of our soldiers. May our Lord God aid us in this greatest of all struggles.
    • Proclamation (22 June 1941), quoted in The Times (23 June 1941), p. 3
  • When National Socialism has ruled long enough, it will no longer be possible to conceive of a form of life different from ours.
    In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.
    • 11-12 July 1941, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.
    Without Christianity, we should not have had Islam. The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of world-domination, and humanity would not have extinguished fifteen centuries of civilisation at a single stroke.
    Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.
    • 11-12 July 1941, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • If I had known that the figures for Russian tank strength which you gave in your book were in fact the true ones, I would not—I believe—ever have started this war.
    • Said to General Heinz Guderian, 4 August 1941, as quoted Panzer Leader (1952) by Heinz Guderian
  • [T]he raw materials and agriculture of the Ukraine were vitally necessary for the future prosecution of the war. ... [the Crimea is] that Soviet aircraft carrier for attacking the Rumanian oilfields. ... My generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war.
    • Remarks to General Guderian (23 August 1941), quoted in Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (1952), p. 200
  • I did not want this struggle. Since January, 1933, when Providence entrusted me with the leadership of the German Reich, I had an aim before my eyes which was essentially incorporated in the program of our National Socialist party. I have never been disloyal to this aim and have never abandoned my program... Only when the entire German people become a single community of sacrifice can we expect and hope that Almighty God will help us. The Almighty has never helped a lazy man. He does not help the coward. He does not help a people that cannot help itself. The principle applies here, help yourselves and Almighty God will not deny you his assistance.
    • Radio broadcast from Berlin, 3 October 1941. [14]
  • By virtue of an inherent law, these riches belong to him who conquers them. The great migrations set out from the East. With us begins the ebb, from West to East. That's in accordance with the laws of nature. By means of struggle, the élites are continually renewed. The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.
    • 10 October 1941, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society. Thus one understands that the healthy elements of the Roman world were proof against this doctrine. Yet Rome to-day allows itself to reproach Bolshevism with having destroyed the Christian churches! As if Christianity hadn't behaved in the same way towards the pagan temples.
    • 19 October 1941, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • But Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the godhead into a mockery.
    • 13 December 1941, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • Pure Christianity—the Christianity of the catacombs—is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics.
    • 14 December 1941, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944

Reichstag speech declaring war against the United States (11 December 1941)

"Speech Declaring War Against the United States" at Jewish Virtual Library
  • National-Socialism came to power in Germany in the same year as Roosevelt was elected President. . . Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the Democracies. I am only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry. When the Great War came, Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know only its pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while others bleed. . . I shared the fate of millions, and Franklin Roosevelt only the fate of the so-called Upper Ten Thousand. . . he made profits out of the inflation, out of the misery of others, while I, together with many hundreds of thousands more, lay in hospital.
  • When Churchill and Roosevelt state that they want to build up a new social order, later on, it is like a hairdresser with a bald head recommending an unfortunate hair-restorer. These men, who live in the most socially backward states, have misery and distress enough in their own countries to occupy themselves with the distribution of foodstuffs.... We are allied with strong peoples, who in the same need are faced with the same enemies. The American President and his Plutocratic clique have mocked us as the Have-nots-that is true, but the Have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.
  • [A]ll that which America did not get from Europe may seem worthy of admiration to a Jewified mixed race, but Europe regards that merely as symptomatic of decay in artistic and cultural life, the product of Jewish or Negroid blood mixture.
  • We National Socialists are not at all surprised that the Anglo-American, Jewish and capitalist world is united together with Bolshevism. In our country we have always found them in the same community. Alone we successfully fought against them here in Germany, and after 14 years of struggle for power we were finally able to annihilate our enemies.

1942

  • Thus the home-front need not be warned, and the prayer of this priest of the devil, the wish that Europe may be punished with Bolshevism, will not be fulfilled, but rather that the prayer may be fulfilled: "Lord God, give us the strength that we may retain our liberty for our children and our children's children, not only for ourselves but also for the other peoples of Europe, for this is a war which we all wage, this time, not for our German people alone, it is a war for all of Europe and with it, in the long run, for all of mankind."
  • Churchill is the very type of a corrupt journalist. There's not a worse prostitute in politics. He himself has written that it's unimaginable what can be done in war with the help of lies. He's an utterly amoral, repulsive creature. I'm convinced that he has his place of refuge ready beyond the Atlantic. He obviously won't seek sanctuary in Canada. In Canada he'd be beaten up. He'll go to his friends the Yankees. As soon as this damnable winter is over, we'll remedy all that.
    • 18 February 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can ever have undergone, and it's the Jew who, thanks to this diabolic invention, has thrown him back fifteen centuries. The only thing that would be still worse would be victory for the Jew through Bolshevism. If Bolshevism triumphed, mankind would lose the gift of laughter and joy. It would become merely a shapeless mass, doomed to grayness and despair.
    • 20-21 February 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field. I realise that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors— but to devote myself deliberately to error, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. In acting as I do, I'm very far from the wish to scandalise. But I rebel when I see the very idea of Providence flouted in this fashion.
    • 27 February 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn't, like whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar.
    • 27 February 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • The English language lacks the ability to express thoughts that surpass the order of concrete things. It’s because the German language has this ability that Germany is the country of thinkers.
    • 7 March 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • One may regret living at a period when it's impossible to form an idea of the shape the world of the future will assume. But there's one thing I can predict to eaters of meat: the world of the future will be vegetarian.
    • Stenographic transcripts translated by Hugh Trevor-Roper Bullock, 11 November 1941, Alan (1993). Hitler and Stalin : Parallel Lives. Vintage. p. 679. ISBN 0-679-72994-1.
  • For many people the causes of this terrible war into which we were forced in 1939, began to be more clearly recognized, for this war did not bear the characteristics of the previous conflicts among the European nations to which we were accustomed. To an ever increasing degree it began to be generally realized that the reasons for this conflict were no longer to be sought in the usual interests even if plausible of the various nations, but that in reality it was one of those elementary struggles which shaking the foundations of the world but once in a thousand years, introduce a new millennium.
  • The Jews were the carriers of that Bolshevist infection which once threatened to destroy Europe. It was also they who incited the ranks of the plutocracies to war, and it is the Jews who have driven America to war against all her own interests, simply and solely from the Jewish capitalistic point of view.
  • If I don't get the oil of Maykop and Grozny, then I must finish (liquidieren) this war.
    • Remark to Friedrich Paulus (1 June 1942), quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (2001), p. 514 and N. Polmar and T. B. Allen, World War II: the Encyclopedia of the War Years, 1941-1945 (2012), p. 194
  • Had I finished off France in '39, then world history would have taken another course. But then I had to wait until 1940. Then a two-front war, that was bad luck. After that, even we were broken.
  • The rapidity with which Mustapha Kemal Ataturk rid himself of his parsons makes one of the most remarkable chapters in history. He hanged thirty-nine of them out of hand, the rest he flung out, and St. Sophia in Constantinople is now a museum!
    • 1 August 1942, quoted in Gerhard L. Weinberg (ed.), Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944 (2008), p. 458
  • A state like Switzerland, which is nothing but a pimple on the face of Europe, cannot be allowed to continue.
    • 26 August 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
  • In my eyes, the year 1942 already has behind it the most fateful trial of our people. That was the winter of '41 to '42. I may be permitted to say that in that winter the German people, and in particular its Wehrmacht, were weighed in the balance by Providence. Nothing worse can or will happen. That we conquered that winter, that "General Winter," that at last the German fronts stood, and that this spring, that is, early this summer, we were able to proceed again, that, I believe, is the proof that Providence was content with the German people... You do not realize what is hidden beneath these words in the way of human heroism, and also of human pain, and suffering, and we may say, often anxiety too, naturally, deathly anxiety on the part of all those who, especially for the first time, are placed before the trial of God in this highest court.
Speech on the 19th anniversary of the "Beer Hall Putsch" (8 November 1942)
"Speech on the 19th Anniversary of the 'Beer Hall Putsch' " at Jewish Virtual Library
  • And today I stand by this same view. Fate, or Providence, will give the victory to those who most deserve it. (...) And when now, after 10 years, I again survey this period, I can say that upon no people has Providence ever bestowed more successes than upon us. The miracles we have achieved in the last three years in the face of a whole world of enemies are unique in history, especially the crises we very naturally often had in these years.
  • That which distinguishes our period from the last one is the fact that at that time the people did not stand behind the Kaiser while behind me stands one of the most splendid organizations that has ever been built up on this earth, and that organization represents the German people.
    Vice versa, however, what distinguishes the present time from then is the fact that at the head of this people there is no one who would ever, in critical times, go to a foreign land, but that at the head of this people is someone who has never known anything but struggle, and who has always known but one principle: "Strike, strike and strike again."

1943

  • You know my opinion of Franco... We ought to keep these Red Spaniards on the back burner... They're lost to democracy, and to that reactionary crew round Franco too... I believe you to the letter, Speer, that they were impressive people. I must say, in general, that during the civil war the idealism was not on Franco's side; it was to be found among the Reds ... one of these days we'll be able to make use of them... The whole thing will start all over again. But with us on the opposite side.
    • As quoted in Albert Speer's diary entry for 26 December 1950 recalling a conversation with Hitler in January 1943, published in Spandau: The Secret Diary (2000), p. 167
  • Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution toward the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world.
  • Instead, it will increasingly strive to realize, in the service of the national interest everywhere, a true Volksgemeinschaft as the highest ideal. All the more so after the war, the German National Socialist state, which pursued this goal from the beginning, will tirelessly work for the realization of a program that will ultimately lead to a complete elimination of class differences and to the creation of a true socialist community.
    Thus, the five hundred forty-two thousand dead that this Second World War has up to now claimed will not have fallen in vain. Instead, they will live on eternally in our ranks as the undying heroes and pioneers of a better age.
    May the Almighty, who has not denied us His blessings throughout these trials and Who has thereby reinforced our inherent strength, also grant us His assistance in the fulfillment of what we must do for our Volk, what we owe it, until the victory. We again bow reverently before our dead comrades, their family members in mourning, the murdered men, women, and children in the homeland, and all the sacrifices of our allies.
  • Soldiers of the Reich! This day, you are to take part in an offensive of such importance that the whole future of the war may depend on its outcome. More than anything else, your victory will show the whole world that resistance to the power of the German Army is hopeless.
    • In a message to German soldiers at the start of the Battle of Kursk, 5 July 1943, as quoted in Kursk by Rupert Matthews

1944

 
I am a pious man, and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive the blessings of Providence.
  • Additionally, on special petition men should be able to enter into a binding martial relationship not only with one woman, but also with another, who would then get his name without complications, and the children automatically getting the father's name
    • 27-28 January 1944 according to point 28.(2) of a 29 January 1944 memo from Martin Bormann recounting a conversation about "Safeguarding the future of the German People", according to pages 83-84 of "A History of the Münster Anabaptists: Inner Emigration and the Third Reich", a critical 2008-edition translation by George von der Lippe and Viktoria Reck-Malleczewen of "Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Bockelson: A Tale of Mass Insanity" referencing Lang 478
  • I am a pious man, and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive the blessings of Providence.
    • Speech delivered on 5 July 1944; in Charles Bracelen Flood's Hitler: The Path to Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989, p. 208.

1945

  • Providence shows no mercy to weak nations, but recognizes the right of existence-only of sound and strong nations...

    This Jewish bolshevist annihilation of nations and its western European and American procurers can be met only in one way: by using every ounce of strength with the extreme fanaticism and stubborn steadfastness that merciful God gives to men in hard times for the defense of their own lives...

    We have suffered so much that it only steels us to fanatical resolve to hate Our enemies a thousand times more and to regard them for what they are destroyers of an eternal culture and annihilators of humanity. Out of this hate a holy will is born to oppose these destroyers of our existence with all the strength that God has given us and to crush them in the end. During its 2,000-year history our people has survived so many terrible times that we have no doubt that we will also master our present plight.

  • If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue even a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy these things ourselves, because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one and the future will belong solely to the stronger eastern nation (Russia). Besides, those who will remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good ones have all been killed.
  • The soldiers on the Eastern Front fight far better. The reason they give in so easily in the West is simply the fault of that stupid Geneva convention which promises them good treatment as prisoners. We must scrap the idiotic thing.
    • Remarks to General Guderian (March 1945), quoted in Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (1952), p. 427
  • The Palace of Justice in Brussels lies like a cyclops above the city, building a court of justice above a city, that is really something special.

be/gSE-FRtJwvQ?t=367 Histories - Hitler in Belgium, Part 1- The humiliation. (2 Part documentary about Hitlers victory tour in Belgium on July 1, 1940.) Hitler was a Big fan of Leopold II's architect Joseph Poelaert, so much so that Hitler will send his own Architect Albert speer who at that moment is in charcge of the embellishment works of Berlin to Brussels later that year to make a study of the Palace of Justice of Brussels.

dates unknown

pub 1935

  • We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.
    • As quoted in A History of National Socialism, Konrad Heiden, A. A. Knopf (1935) p. 100

pub 1936

  • In a hundred years time, perhaps, a great man will appear who may offer them (the Germans) a chance at salvation. He'll take me as a model, use my ideas, and follow the course I have charted.
    • As quoted in "Der Führer als Redner," Adolf Hitler. Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers" (The Fuhrer as a speaker) by Joseph Goebbels in 1936

pub 1944

  • We shall banish want. We shall banish fear. The essence of National Socialism is human welfare. There must be cheap Volkswagen for workers to ride in, broad Reich Autobahns for the Volkswagen. National Socialism is the Revolution of the Common Man. Rooted in a fuller life for every German from childhood to old age, National Socialism means a new day of abundance at home and a Better World Order abroad.
    • As quoted in Men in Motion, Henry J. Taylor, Doubleday, Doran & Co., New York: NY, (1944) p. 59.
      Also quoted in As We Go Marching, John T. Flynn, New York: NY, Free Life Edition (1973) p. 154, first published 1944 [15]
  • In our movement the two extremes come together: the Communists from the Left and the officers and students from the Right. These two have always been the most active elements, and it was the greatest crime that they used to oppose each other in street fights... Our party has already succeeded in uniting these two utter extremes within the ranks of our storm troops. They will form the core of the great German liberation movement, in which all without distinction will stand together when the day comes to say: 'The Nation arises, the storm is breaking!'
    • As quoted in Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power, Konrad Heiden, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1969, p. 147, first published 1944.
      Part of Hitler's quote also cited in Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, A Harvest Book, 1985, footnote, p. 7
  • 5. Now, it is a fact that women who find themselves without a man after this war cannot have children by the Holy Spirit but only by men who have survived. Increased propagation by the individual man is - obviously from the standpoint of the good of the people - only desired in the case of a portion of these men. Good men with strong character, physically and psychically healthy, are the ones who should reproduce extra generously, not the ones warped in body and mind.
    6. If the dead of the past world war and the present are not to have died in vain, we must secure the victory with all means at hand. Every woman whose husband or brother or father or other relative was killed in one of these struggles must wish that! This means that every woman must wish that every healthy woman capable of doing so after the war's end will have as many children as possible, to secure the victory and to secure the future of our people and the future of her own grandchildren.
    7. Now government regulations alone, particularly in this ticklish area, serve no purpose whatsoever. Here only a very serious conviction born along by the Movement can lead to the required attitude. The question is too serious for wisecracks and cheap jokes; here what is truly at stake is the safeguarding of the future of our people.
    8. After this war we cannot command women and girls to have babies. What is called for is the most intelligent enlightenment possible - and here the much overused superlative is used advisedly.
    9. This [enlightenment] must in my opinion not be carried out by men who might too easily be considered personally interested parties, [sexual] profiteers. In my opinion only older men should be allowed to speak on this theme, and above all, our women's organizations must perform the necessary job of enlightenment.
    10. These needful actions involve not only convincing the women who have lost husbands or will never get one, but what is needed first of all is the enlightenment of the old folks, the mothers and fathers, who grew up among quite different attitudes in the past.
    11. Still more necessary is the enlightenment of the wives, who in many cases turn into fanatical [advocates] of respectability only after their marriage.
    12. When we reflect on what is necessary to bring this so vitally important problem for our people to a successful solution, then we must make the situation clear for the individual case. At first many women - want of logic is something women are born with - will affirm the appropriateness [of the new order of things], but in the individual case, applied to their personal lives, they will fanatically reject it.
    13. The public, i.e., general, enlightenment [campaign] can, for obvious reasons, only get under way after the war. To mention only one reason: we cannot yet appeal today to the women whose husbands might become casualties in the future, and also out of consideration for our soldiers we cannot begin our enlightenment campaign; that would assume that we would have to get this line of thinking across to our men now serving as soldiers, but not every soldier will accept the prospect of his wide or bride bearing children by another man after his own death.
    14. Meanwhile we must be fully cognizant of the steps that can be taken while the war is still on, and of those to be introduced immediately after the war's end.
    15. We must begin immediately to remove all impediments to the attainment of our objective; in particular, the point is to orientate contemporary poets and writers. New novels, short stories and stage plays based on marriage and divorce are no longer to be permitted, and by the same token [we will allow] no poems, writings, motion pictures that treat the child born out of wedlock [unehelich] as of diminished worth, as a bastard.
    (The word "unchelich" must, as I pointed out long ago, be expunged [right ouf of the language]. The prefix "un" generally denotes something to be rejected.
    • as quoted on page 835 of "The Third Reich Sourcebook" by Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman, published 10 July 2013 by University of California Press.
      From chapter "397. Martin Bormann, Safeguarding the Future of the German People (1944)" (pg 834) under section "29. Total War: 1939-1945" (pg 815), under "PART TEN. WAR, CONQUEST, AND THE ANNIHILATION OF THE JEWS" (pg 720)

pub 1954

  • I know that some Man capable of giving our problems a final solution must appear. I have sought such a Man. I could nowhere discover Him. And that is why I have set myself to do the preparatory work; only the most urgent preparatory work, for I know that I am myself not, the One. And I know also what is missing in me. But the other One still remains aloof, and nobody comes forward, and there is no more time to be lost.
    • As quoted in Warum? Woher? Aber Wohin? (published 1 January 1954) by Hans Grimm, p. 14

pub 1968

pub 1970

  • I am certain through him (Edward VIII) permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.
    • As quoted by Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich (1970) New York: Macmillan

pub 1971

  • I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich and anyone who supports me in this battle is a fellow-fighter for a unique spiritual—I would say divine—creation... Rudolf Hess, my assistant of many years standing, would tell you: If we have such a leader, God is with us.
    • As quoted in Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews (1971) by Richard Breiting, p. 68

pub 1972

  • Genius is a will-o'-the-wisp if it lacks a solid foundation of perseverance and fanatical tenacity. This is the most important thing in all of human life...
    • As quoted in How the Allies Won (1995) by Richard Overy, citing Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader (1972) by P.E. Schramm

pub 1974

  • National socialism is the determination to create a new man. There will no longer exist any individual arbitrary will, nor realms in which the individual belongs to himself. The time of happiness as a private matter is over.
    • As quoted in Hitler (1974) by Joachim C. Fest, p. 533

pub 1977

  • They bring in high earnings without work. One of these days I'll sweep away this outrage and nationalize all corporations.
    • As quoted in Spandau: The Secret Diaries, Albert Speer, New York, NY, Pocket Books (1977) p. 84

pub 1979

 
The god of war has gone over to the other side.

pub 1987

  • This German Volksgemeinschaft is truly practical socialism and therefore National Socialism in the best sense of the word. Here everyone is obligated to carry his load.
    • As quoted in Stagnation and Renewal in Social Policy: The Rise and Fall of Policy Regimes, editors: Martin Rein, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, and Lee Rainwater (1987) p. 63
  • If the Italians hadn't attacked Greece and needed our help, the war would have taken a different course. We could have anticipated the Russian cold by weeks and conquered Leningrad and Moscow. There would have been no Stalingrad.
    • Quoted in Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir by Leni Riefenstahl

pub 1993

pub 1999

 
I regard Ford as my inspiration.
  • I regard Ford as my inspiration.
    • Attributed in Bill McGraw, "Forced Labor and Ford: History of Nazi Labor Stares Ford in the Face", Detroit Free Press, 21 December 1999, p. B1; as cited in Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, p. 71 & footnote p. 275.

pub 2000

  • The broad mass is feminine."
    • As quoted in Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw, Page iii (published 4 April 2000)

pub 2001

  • (p.1884) I never lost my belief, in the midst of setbacks which were not spared me during my period of struggle. Providence has had the last word and brought me success.
    (p.2842) Not long ago, an American magazine wrote that what was worst about National Socialism was its women. They said that National Socialism did more for women than any other nation. It improved their social position. It began to bring them together in tremendous organizations. It sent the women of the educated classes into the factories so that female workers could go on vacation, and so on. The paper concluded that the democracies could not imitate this.

pub 2009

 
I never loved my father, [he used to say,] but feared him. He was prone to rages and would resort to violence.
  • I never loved my father, [he used to say,] but feared him. He was prone to rages and would resort to violence. My poor mother would then always be afraid for me. When I read Karl May once that it was a sign of bravery to hide one's pain, I decided that when he beat me the next time I would make no sound. When it happened – I knew my mother was standing anxiously at the door – I counted every stroke out loud. Mother thought I had gone mad when I reported to her with a beaming smile, 'Thirty-two strokes father gave me!' From that day I never needed to repeat the experiment, for my father never beat me again.
    • Statement about his parents Alois and Klara Hitler, quoted in Christa Schroeder, He Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Secretary (Frontline Books, 2009), translated by Geoffrey Brooks, p. 40–41


Disputed

 
I have placed my death's-head formation in readiness, for the present only in the east, with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need.
 
Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
  • Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter, with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command, and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad, that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death's-head formation in readiness, for the present only in the East, with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
  • I want war. To me all means will be right. My motto is not "Don't, whatever you do, annoy the enemy." My motto is "Destroy him by all and any means." I am the one who will wage the war!
  • We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike.
    • "I cannot speak to the authenticity of the quotation ... attributed to Hitler in the very many Web postings at which it is found, and without devoting far more research time than it warrants." - Ken Leford.
  • The Revolution we have made is not a national revolution, but a National-Socialist Revolution. We would even underline this last word, "Socialist."
  • That is the great thing about our movement--that these members are uniform not only in ideas, but even, the facial expression is almost the same!
  • How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.

Hitler Speaks (1940)

Attributed by Hermann Rauschning in Hitler Speaks (1940) also known as The Voice of Destruction, the book's authenticity is disputed.
  • It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will. ... Our spirit is so strong, and the power of our magnificent movement to transform souls so elemental, that men are remodeled against their will. ... A social revolution would lend me new, unsuspected powers. I do not fear permeation with revolutionary Communist propaganda.
    • pp. 131-132.
  • We are obligated to depopulate as part of our mission of preserving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out... Nature is cruel, therefore we, too, may be cruel.... I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!
    • p. 89.
  • The party is all-embracing. It rules our lives in all their breadth and depth... There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is Socialism... Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers.
    • p. 191.
  • I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit... The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it... National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.
    • p. 186

Hitler's Table Talk (1941-1944) (published 1953)

Die Bormann Vermerke: Transcripts of Hitler's conversations (5 July 1941 - 30 November 1944), made under the supervision of Martin Bormann, published in the UK as Hitler's Table Talks (1953). The source material is generally accepted as reliable; the accuracy and reliability of the English translation is often disputed.
 
I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses.
  • Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture. It's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there to reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire.
    • Night of 18-19 July 1941.
  • I'm sure that Nero didn't set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that, just as the Commune set fire to Paris in 1871 and the Communists set fire to the Reichstag in 1932.
    • 25 October 1941.
  • The Jew can take the credit for having corrupted the Graeco-Roman world. Previously words were used to express thoughts; he used words to invent the art of disguising thoughts. Lies are his strength, his weapon in the struggle. The Jew is said to be gifted. His only gift is that of juggling with other people's property and swindling each and everyone. Suppose I find by chance a picture that I believe to be a Titian. I tell the owner what I think of it, and I offer him a price. In a similar case, the Jew begins by declaring that the picture is valueless, he buys it for a song and sells it at a profit of 5000 per cent. To persuade people that a thing which has value, has none, and vice versa—that's not a sign of intelligence. They can't even overcome the smallest economic crisis!
    • 5 November 1941.
  • I don't see much future for the Americans... it's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities... It goes without saying that we have no affinities with the Japanese. They’re too foreign to us, by their way of living, by their culture. But my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. I feel myself more akin to any European country, no matter which. Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a State where 80 percent of the revenue is drained away for the public purse—a country where everything is built on the dollar? From this point of view, I consider the British State very much superior.
    • 7 January 1942, evening
  • We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.
    • 22 February 1942, evening
  • I was so poor, during the Viennese period of my life, that I had to restrict myself to seeing only the finest spectacles. Thus I heard Tristan thirty or forty times, and always from the best companies.
    • Night of the 22–23 February 1942
  • I absolutely insist on protecting private property. It is natural and salutary that the individual should be inspired by the wish to devote a part of the income from his work to building up and expanding a family estate. Suppose the estate consists of a factory. I regard it as axiomatic, in the ordinary way, that this factory will be better run by one of the members of the family that it would be by a State functionary—providing, of course, that the family remains healthy. In this sense, we must encourage private initiative.
    • A private statement made on March 24, 1942.
  • The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.
    • 11 April 1942.
  • The American statesmen, by subjecting the Church to the same regulations governing all other associations and institutions, have limited its field of activity to reasonable proportions; and, as the State does not contribute from State Funds one single cent to the church, the whole clergy cringes and sings hymns in praise of Government. This is not to be wondered at! The parson, like everyone else, has got to live; what he makes out of the public offertory doesn't amount to much, and so he is more or less dependent on State charity. As he has no legal claim whatever on the State, he therefore takes very good care that his demeanour is always pleasing in the eyes of the State and therefore deserving of the crumbs it cares to toss to him.
    • 4 July 1942.
  • The development of relations between State and Church affords a very instructive example of how the carelessness of a single statesman can have after-effects which last for centuries. When Charlemagne was kneeling at prayer in St. Peter's, Rome, at Christmas in the year 800, the Pope, giving him no time to work out the possible effects of so symbolic an action, suddenly bent down and presto! popped a golden crown on his head! By permitting it, the Emperor delivered himself and his successors into the hands of a power which subjected the German Government and the German people to five hundred years of martyrdom.
    • 4 July 1942.
  • One of our most important tasks will be to save future generations from a similar political fate and to maintain for ever watchful in them a knowledge of the menace of Jewry. For this reason alone it is vital that the Passion play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.
  • In the Spanish people there is a mixture of Gothic, Frankish and Moorish blood. One can speak of the Spaniard as one would speak of a brave anarchist. The Arabian epoch—the Arabs look down on the Turks as they do on dogs—was the most cultured, the most intellectual and in every way best and happiest epoch in Spanish history. It was followed by the period of the persecutions with its unceasing atrocities.
    • 1 August 1942.
  • As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them as we see fit, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitants and civilising them, goes straight off into a concentration camp!
    • 6 August 1942.

The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)

Genoud, François, ed. (1961). The Testament of Adolf Hitler: the Hitler-Bormann documents, February-April 1945. London: Cassell. Historian Ian Kershaw cautions "This English version contains a very loose and untrustworthy translation of the German text—itself not guaranteed to be identical with any long-lost original or the lost copy of that original—which was eventually published only in 1981... The available German text is, therefore, at best a construct; neither the original nor the copy of that original exists. [Eduard] Baumgarten tended, since the content was consonant with Hitler's thinking and expression, to accept the authenticity of the text. There is, however, no proof and, therefore, no reliable German text whose authenticity can be placed beyond question." (Hitler, 1936-45: Nemesis, 2001, p. 1025.)
 
The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality.
  • This is the last disgusting death-rattle of a corrupt and outworn system which is a blot on the history of this people. Since the civil war, in which the southern states were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the American people have been in a condition of political and popular decay. In that war, it was not the Southern States, but the American people themselves who were conquered. In this spurious blossoming of economic progress and power politics, America has ever since been drawn deeper into the mire of progressive self-destruction. The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality.
  • Under the guidance of the Reich, Europe would speedily have become unified. Once the Jewish poison had been eradicated, unification would have been an easy matter. France and Italy, each defeated in turn at an interval of a few months by the two Germanic Powers, would have been well out of it. Both would have had to renounce their inappropriate aspirations to greatness. At the same time they would have had to renounce their pretensions in North Africa and the Near East; and that would have allowed Europe to pursue a bold policy of friendship towards Islam.
    • 4 February 1945.
  • We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island.
    • 4 February 1945.
  • It is eastwards, only and always eastwards, that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which Nature herself has decreed for the expansion of the German peoples.
    • 7 February 1945.
  • The white races did, of course, give some things to the natives, and they were the worst gifts that they could possibly have made, those plagues of our own modern world-materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism and syphilis. For the rest, since these peoples possessed qualities of their own which were superior to anything we could offer them, they have remained essentially unchanged. Where imposition by force was attempted, the results were even more disastrous, and common sense, realizing the futility of such measures, should preclude any recourse to their introduction. One solitary success must be conceded to the colonizers: everywhere they have succeeded in arousing hatred, a hatred that urges these peoples, awakened from their slumbers by us, to rise and drive us out. Indeed, it looks almost as though they had awakened solely and simply for that purpose! Can anyone assert that colonization has increased the number of Christians in the world? Where are those conversions en masse which mark the success of Islam? Here and there one finds isolated islets of Christians, Christians in name, that is, rather than by conviction; and that is the sum total of the successes of this magnificent Christian religion, the guardian of supreme Truth! Taking everything into consideration, Europe's policy of colonization has ended in a complete failure.
    • 7 February 1945.
  • I am quite sure that very few of the so-called Reds in Spain were really Communists. We were badly deceived, for, had I known the real state of affairs, I would never have allowed our aircraft to bombard and destroy a starving population and at the same time re-establish the Spanish clergy in all their horrible privileges.
    • 10 February 1945.
  • There is, then, no danger in the circumstances that anti-semitism will disappear, for it is the Jews themselves who add fuel to its flames and see that it is kept well stoked. Before the opposition to it can disappear, the malady itself must disappear. And from that point of view, you can rely on the Jews: as long as they survive, anti-semitism will never fade.
    • 13 February 1945.
  • In saying this, I promise you I am quite free of all racial hatred. It is, in any case, undesirable that one race should mix with other races. Except for a few gratuitous successes, which I am prepared to admit, systematic cross-breeding has never produced good results. Its desire to remain racially pure is a proof of the vitality and good health of a race. Pride in one's own race—and that does not imply contempt for other races—is also a normal and healthy sentiment. I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilisations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilisation to which we belong. Indeed, I believe the more steadfast the Chinese and the Japanese remain in their pride of race, the easier I shall find it to get on with them.
    • 13 February 1945.
  • This pride of race is a quality which the German, fundamentally, does not possess. The reason for this is that for these last three centuries the country has been torn by internal dissension and religious wars and has been subjected to a variety of foreign influences, to the influence, for example, of Christianity—for Christianity is not a natural religion for the Germans, but a religion that has been imported and which strikes no responsive chord in their hearts and is foreign to the inherent genius of the race.
    • 13 February 1945.
  • Our racial pride is not aggressive except in so far as the Jewish race is concerned. We use the term Jewish race as a matter of convenience, for in reality and from the genetic point of view there is no such thing as the Jewish race. There does, however, exist a community, to which, in fact, the term can be applied and the existence of which is admitted by the Jews themselves. It is the spiritually homogeneous group, to membership of which all Jews throughout the world deliberately adhere, regardless of their whereabouts and of their country of domicile; and it is this group of human beings to which we give the title Jewish race.
    • 13 February 1945.
  • I ought to have seized the initiative in 1938 instead of allowing myself to be forced into war in 1939; for war was, in any case, unavoidable. However, you can hardly blame me if the British and the French accepted at Munich every demand I made of them!
    • 14 February 1945.
  • Never, at any price, should we have put our money on France and against the peoples subjected to her yoke. On the contrary, we should have helped them to achieve their liberty and, if necessary, should have goaded them into doing so. There was nothing to stop us in 1940 from making a gesture of this sort in the Near East and in North Africa. In actual fact our diplomats instead set about the task of consolidating French power, not only in Syria, but in Tunis, in Algeria and Morocco as well. Our 'gentlemen' obviously preferred to maintain cordial relations with distinguished Frenchmen, rather than with a lot of hirsute revolutionaries, with a chorus of musical comedy officers, whose one idea was to cheat us, rather than with the Arabs, who would have been loyal partners for us.
    • 14 February 1945.
  • In order to persuade Britain to pack up, to compel her to make peace, it was essential to rob her of her hope of being able still to confront us, on the continent itself, with an adversary of a stature equal to our own.
    • 15 February 1945 — discussing the reasons for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
  • I have never liked France or the French, and I have never stopped saying so.
    • 15 February 1945.
  • Our Italian ally has been a source of embarrassment to us everywhere. It was this alliance, for instance, which prevented us from pursuing a revolutionary policy in North Africa. In the nature of things, this territory was becoming an Italian preserve and it was as such that the Duce laid claim to it. Had we been on our own, we could have emancipated the Moslem countries dominated by France; and that would have had enormous repercussions in the Near East, dominated by Britain, and in Egypt. But with our fortunes linked to those of the Italians, the pursuit of such a policy was not possible. All Islam vibrated at the news of our victories. The Egyptians, the Irakis and the whole of the Near East were all ready to rise in revolt. Just think what we could have done to help them, even to incite them, as would have been both our duty and in our own interest! But the presence of the Italians at our side paralysed us; it created a feeling of malaise among our Islamic friends, who inevitably saw in us accomplices, willing or unwilling, of their oppressors. For the Italians in these parts of the world are more bitterly hated, of course, than either the British or the French. The memories of the barbarous, reprisals taken against the Senussi are still vivid. Then again the ridiculous pretensions of the Duce to be regarded as The Sword of Islam evokes the same sneering chuckle now as it did before the war. This title, which is fitting for Mahomed and a great conqueror like Omar, Mussolini caused to be conferred on himself by a few wretched brutes whom he had either bribed or terrorized into doing so. We had a great chance of pursuing a splendid policy with regard to Islam. But we missed the bus, as we missed it on several other occasions, thanks to our loyalty to the Italian alliance! In this theatre of operations, then, the Italians prevented us from playing our best card, the emancipation of the French subjects and the raising of the standard of revolt in the countries oppressed by the British. Such a policy would have aroused the enthusiasm of the whole of Islam. It is a characteristic of the Moslem world, from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific, that what affects one, for good or for evil, affects all.
    • 17 February 1945.
  • Life does not forgive weakness.
    • 17 February 1945.
  • The universalists, the idealists, the Utopians all aim too high. They give promises of an unattainable paradise, and by doing so they deceive mankind. Whatever label they wear, whether they call themselves Christians, Communists, humanitarians, whether they are merely sincere but stupid or wire-pullers and cynics, they are all makers of slaves. I myself have always kept my eye fixed on a paradise which, in the nature of things, lies well within our reach. I mean an improvement in the lot of the German people.
    • 21 February 1945.
  • Furthermore, thanks to the Marxist religion, they (the Russians) have everything required to make them patient. They have been promised happiness on earth (a feature which distinguishes Marxism from the Christian religion)—but in the future. The Jew, Mardochee Marx, like the good Jew that he was, was awaiting the coming of the Messiah. He has placed the Messiah conception in a setting of historic materialism by asserting that terrestrial happiness is a factor in an almost endless process of evolution. "Happiness is within your reach," he says, "that I promise you. But you must let evolution take its course and not try to hurry matters." Mankind always falls for a specious trick of that sort... Lenin did not have the time, but Stalin will carry on the good work, and so on and so on... Marxism is a very powerful force. But how shall we assess Christianity, that other child of Judaism, which will not commit itself further than to promise the faithful happiness in another world? Believe me, it is incomparably stronger!
    • 25 February 1945.
  • I have been Europe's last hope. She proved incapable of refashioning herself by means of voluntary reform. She showed herself impervious to charm and persuasion. To take her I had to use violence.
    • 26 February.
  • The peoples of Islam will always be closer to us than, for example, France.
    • 2 April 1945.
  • With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African and, perhaps, the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other—the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology.
    • 2 April 1945.

Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant (1978)

Attributed by Otto Wagener in Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985)

  • In the past—that is, for most people it is still the present-the individual is everything, everything is directed at maintaining his life and improving his existence, everything focuses on him. ... In socialism of the future, on the other hand, what counts is the whole, the community of the Volk. The individual and his life play only a subsidiary role. He can be sacrificed—he is prepared to sacrifice himself should the whole demand it.
    • p. 16
  • Aren't these liberals, those reprobate defenders of individualism, ashamed to see the tears of the mothers and wives, or don't these cold-blooded accountants even notice? Have they already grown so inhuman that they are no longer capable of feeling? It is understandable why bolshevism simply removed such creatures. They were worthless to humanity, nothing but an encumbrance to their Volk. Even the bees get rid of the drones when they can no longer be of service to the hive. The Bolshevik procedures are thus quite natural.
    • pp.16-17
  • But first, there will have to be national socialism. Otherwise the people and their governments are not ready for the socialism of nations. It is not possible to be liberal to one's own country and demand socialism among nations.
    • p. 170
  • What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish, we shall be in a position to achieve.
    • p. 149
  • After all, that's exactly why we call ourselves National Socialists! We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism.
    • p. 288
  • But we National Socialists wish precisely to attract all socialists, even the Communists; we wish to win them over from their international camp to the national one.
    • p. 26


Misattributed

  • The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. Especially if it is repeated again and again.
    • Variant: The bigger/more blatant a lie, the more people will believe it.
  • I do not see why man should not be as cruel as nature.
    • While the source of this misattribution is unknown, it is cited frequently across the internet, with no source.[3][4]
  • We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.
    • This misattribution is sourced from John Toland. In Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (1976), it is attributed to Hitler in a speech of May 1, 1927. It is recorded in Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future by Gregor Strasser on June 15, 1926.
  • The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and from without. We need law and order. Yes, without law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall restore law and order.
    • Reported as refuted in the Congressional Record: Lou Hiner, Jr., "Hitler's Phony Quotation on Law and Order", May 21, 1970, vol. 116, pp. 1676–77, reprinted from the Indianapolis News; and M. Stanton Evans, "The Hitler Quote", August 11, 1970, vol. 116, p. 28349, reprinted from the National Review Bulletin (August 18, 1970).
  • This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
  • Bernard Harcourt of the University of Chicago Law School said this is "probably a fraud and was likely never uttered" in Bernard E. Harcourt: "On gun registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi gun laws: Exploding the gun culture wars", June 2004, University of Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 67, pp. 9–10.
  • I am beginning with the young. We older ones are used up. Yes, we are old already. We are rotten to the marrow. We have no unrestrained instincts left. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them, I can make a new world.
    • Adolf Hitler c. 1933; as quoted in Hitler Speaks (1939), by Hermann Rauschning, London: Thornton Butterworth, p. 247.
  • The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode their rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which those changes can be reversed.
  • The only religion I respect is Islam. The only prophet I admire is the Prophet Muhammad.
  • Only one thing could have stopped our movement – if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.
    • Only partially true. The full quote:
      • Only one danger could have jeopardised this development – if our adversaries had understood its principle, established a clear understanding of these ideas, and not offered any resistance. Or, alternatively, if they had from the first day annihilated with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.
    • He thought that if his adversaries had ignored the 'weakest' elements of his movement, they would harm the party. See zuriz for more.

Quotes about Hitler

Quotes before the end of World War II

(Note: many of the worst atrocities of Hitler's regime did not begin to become widely known until the final months of the war)
Sorted chronologically
  • He is credibly credited with being actuated by lofty, unselfish patriotism. He probably does not know himself just what he wants to accomplish. The keynote of his propaganda in speaking and writing is violent anti-Semitism. His followers are nicknamed the "Hakenkreuzler." So violent are Hitler's fulminations against the Jews that a number of prominent Jewish citizens are reported to have sought safe asylums in the Bavarian highlands, easily reached by fast motor cars, whence they could hurry their women and children when forewarned of an anti-Semitic St. Bartholomew's night.
  • But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
  • A sophisticated politician credited Hitler with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on anti-Semitism, saying: "You can't expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them."
    • Cyril Brown writing in The New York Times (November 21, 1922)[17]
  • Los Hitler, los Mussolini.../¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas!/Las dos víboras de Europa/que con la muerte se pactan.
    • The Hitlers, the Mussolinis.../Bullets! Bullets! Bullets! Bullets!/The two vipers of Europe/who pact with death.
    • Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (1982)
  • Most respected and dear Hitler, ... It is hardly surprising that a man like that can give peace to a poor suffering spirit! Especially when he is dedicated to the service of the fatherland. My faith in Germandom has not wavered for a moment, though my hopes were—I confess—at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler—that is proof of her vitality ... that the magnificent Ludendorff openly supports you and your movement: What wonderful confirmation! I can now go untroubled to sleep ... May God protect you!
    • Houston Stewart Chamberlain, quoted in The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts by Roderick Stackelberg and Sally Anne Winkle, 7 October 1923
  • Lenin is the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith is very slight.
    • Joseph Goebbels, The New York Times, "Hitlerite Riot in Berlin: Beer Glasses Fly When Speaker Compares Hitler to Lenin," November 28, 1925 (Goebbels' speech Nov. 27, 1925)
  • The final objective of the National-Socialist Party, Hitler makes clear, is to set up an organic people's state which will concentrate all of its energies upon promoting the interests of the Germans as a race apart. To this end Germany must work unceasingly for the acquisition of more land in Europe. This is one of Hitler's favorite theses and he returns to it at every opportunity. Before the war, he says, Germany was not a world power, and never will be a world power until she acquires more territory. The expansion of the race demands it.
  • But where is Germany to find the new territory she needs? From Russia, asserts Hitler. For centuries the German race pushed irresistibly to the south and west; now it must turn its gaze to the east. The fringe of small border states which now stand between Germany and Russia must not be allowed to block her path; in the affairs of a great people there is no place for altruism.
  • Of course France will never stand idly by and see Germany strengthen herself at Russia's expense, so France must be crushed first. France, says Hitler, will never be happy until Germany is destroyed; there is no defense against her, therefore, except to attack her. France is the mortal enemy, who must be broken before Germany can expand elsewhere. All this is to be accomplished, presumably, indeed, Hitler says as much, — through the help of alliances with England and Italy. That such a programme of conquest would again arouse the world against Germany, Hitler fails to see; or, if the possibility occurs to him, he waves it aside, drunk with his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, and his faith that the fittest of all are the Germans.
  • You have delivered up our holy German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring inconceivable misery upon our nation. Future generations will curse you in your grave for your action.
  • [Mein Kampf makes clear beyond doubt] the principles which have guided him during the last fourteen years. He starts with the assertions that man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity for ridding it of foreign impurities. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist. Pacifism is the deadliest sin, for pacifism means the surrender of the race in the right for existence. The first duty of every country is, therefore, to nationalise the masses; intelligence is of secondary importance in the case of the individual; will and determination are of higher importance. The individual who is born to command is more valuable than countless thousands of subordinate natures. Only brute force can ensure the survival of the race. Hence the necessity for military forms. The German race, had it been united in time, would now be master of the globe today. The new Reich must gather within its fold all the scattered German elements in Europe. A race which has suffered defeat can be rescued by restoring its self-confidence. Above all things, the army must be taught to believe in its own invincibility. To restore the German nation again "it is only necessary to convince the people that the recovery of freedom by force of arms is a possibility"...
    I fear that it would be misleading to base any hope for a return to sanity or a serious modification of the views of the Chancellor or his entourage.
    • Horace Rumbold, despatch to the British Foreign Secretary, John Simon (26 April 1933), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold: Portrait of a Diplomat, 1869–1941 (1973), pp. 377-378
  • Among the higher leadership [in the Nazi Party], while there is still a certain unity, personalities are beginning to play a constantly greater part. Hitler is perhaps more powerful than before, but he becomes more and more a figure separated from actualities. He depends a great deal on Hess, who is really his confidential man now and whom it is likely he may make Foreign Minister. Goering and Goebbels still remain good comrades of Hitler and are undoubtedly attached to him, but the difference between Goering and Goebbels are becoming more evident. Goering is more moderate, while Goebbels, sensing the feeling of the masses and being above all an opportunist is becoming more radical. If it would come to a show-down between the radical and moderate elements, Goering would, however, undoubtedly be likely to be on the radical side as the one having the more chances. [...] If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come.
    This is a very disjointed and incoherent letter. I am dictating it under pressure as I wish to catch the courier pouch. What I do want to say really is that for the present this country is headed in directions which can only carry ruin to it and will create a situation here dangerous to world peace. With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country.
  • For what is healthy and what is sick, every people and age gives itself its own law, according to the inner greatness and extension of its existence. Now the German people are in the process of rediscovering their own essence and making themselves worthy of their great destiny. Adolf Hitler, our great Führer and chancellor, created, through the National Socialist revolution, a new state by which the people will assure itself anew of the duration and continuity of its history.... For every people, the first warranty of is authenticity and greatness is in its blood, its soil, and its physical growth. If it loses this good or even only allows it to become considerably weakened, all effort at state politics, all economic and technical ability, all spiritual action will remain in the end null and void.
    • Martin Heidegger, lecture at Freiburg University, August 1933; as quoted by Emmanuel Faye (2009), Heidegger, The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, Yale University Press, transl. Michael B. Smith, p. 68
  • Are we still dealing with the Hitler of Mein Kampf, lulling his opponents to sleep with fair words in order to gain time to arm his own people? Or is it a new Hitler, who has discovered the burden of responsible office? ... That is the riddle that has to be solved.
    • Maurice Hankey, 'Notes on Hitler's External Policy in Theory and in Practice', memorandum to the British government (24 October 1933), quoted in Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Man of Secrets: Volume III 1931–1963 (1974), p. 85
  • With exemplary bravery and with dreadful sacrifices, the German Volk held the onslaught of an entire world at bay for four years. But the political leadership failed woefully in this struggle against the poisoning of the German Volk and the undermining of the German law and its sense of honor. To this very day we still atone for the hesitations and paralyzed state of the German governments during the World War. All moral outrage over the shame of such a collapse has coalesced in Adolf Hitler and has become in him the driving force of a political act. The experiences and warnings of the history of the German misfortune are alive in him. Most people are frightened by the severity of such warnings and would rather flee into an evasive and compensatory superficiality. The Führer, however, takes the warnings of German history quite seriously. This gives him the right and the power to found a new state and a new order.
    • Carl Schmitt, “Der Führer schützt das Recht: zur Reichstagsrede Adolf Hitlers vom 13. Juli 1934,” in his Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar—Genf—Versailles 1923–1939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940), 198–201
  • I don't like the look of him.
    • Benito Mussolini, to his aide after his first encounter with Hitler (1934), as quoted in The Gathering Storm (1946) by Winston Churchill
  • You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought...
  • To be sure the Mussolinis and Hitlers are guilty of the same crime. They and their propaganda machines mow down every political opponent in their way. They also have added character assassination to the butchery of their victims.
    • Emma Goldman "The Tragedy of the Political Exiles" (1934) in The Nation
  • You [Hitler] may successfully resist any and all men, but you cannot successfully resist Jehovah God. ... In the name of Jehovah God and His anointed King, Christ Jesus, I demand that you give order to all officials and servants of your government that Jehovah's witnesses in Germany be permitted to peaceably assemble and without hindrance worship God.
    • Joseph Franklin Rutherford, cited in Awake! magazine, 1995, 8/22, article: The Evils of Nazism Exposed
    • On February 9, 1934, J. F. Rutherford, the president of the Watch Tower Society, sent a letter of protest to Hitler stating these words. As the Nazi rage against Jehovah's Witnesses reached new heights, the Witnesses' denunciations became ever more scathing. The May 15, 1940, issue of Consolation stated: "Hitler is such a perfect child of the Devil that these speeches and decisions flow through him like water through a well-built sewer".
  • Internationally the outlook is more disturbing. Despite the united front against war among the plain people of the earth, as expressed through conferences not only of pacifists, but of college faculty and students, of labor bodies, of women's associations, of radical and temperate organizations, the cloud of war darkens the horizon and the German influence cannot be ignored. Many people regard the Chancellor as insane or neurotic, perhaps in part because through all his denunciations and illogical conclusions he has shown no gleam of humor; nevertheless his leadership seems for the moment to sway the German nation.
  • What is absolutely certain is that Germany intends to attack somewhere. Hitler's assurances are not to be believed, not even when he says that he has resigned Alsace-Lorraine. Germany is bent first upon revenge, then upon domination.
    • Maxim Litvinov, remarks to Anthony Eden (28 March 1935), quoted in Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (1962), p. 148
  • [W]hen Hitler says that "the State dominates the nation because it alone represents it," he is only putting into loose popular language the formula of Hegel, that "the State is the general substance, whereof individuals are but accidents."
    • Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, The State, Caldwell, ID, The Caxton Printers (1950) pp. 21-22, first published in 1935
  • One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.
 
We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilisation will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation (1935). ~ Winston Churchill
  • We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilisation will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation.
  • Hitherto, Hitler's triumphant career has been borne onwards, not only by a passionate love of Germany, but by currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them.
    • Winston Churchill, "Hitler and His Choice", The Strand Magazine (November 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (1976), p. 680
  • The recent speech of Herr Hitler in Munich gives the essence of Nazi philosophy … The new racial philosophy which has very weak foundation stands for the glorification of the white races in general and the German race in particular. Herr Hitler has talked of the destiny of the white races to rule over the rest of the world … Apart from this new racial philosophy and selfish nationalism, there is another factor which affects us even more. Germany, in her desire to curry favour with Great Britain, finds it convenient to attack India and the Indian people.
    • Subhas Chandra Bose, letter written in March 1936, in Sitanshu Das, Subhas: A Political Biography, Rupa Publications India, 2001. quoted from Sanjeev Sanyal - Revolutionaries, The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom-HarperCollins India (2023)
  • If I read the future aright Hitler's government will confront Europe with a series of outrageous events and ever-growing military might. It is events which will show our dangers, though for some the lesson will come too late.
    • Winston Churchill to Lord Londonderry (6 May 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (1976), p. 733
  • You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist.
  • Hitler is a very great man, like an inspired religious leader, and as such rather fanatical, but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country.
  • He is a very great man. "Führer" is the proper name for him, for he is a born leader, yes, and statesman.
    • David Lloyd George, A. J. Sylvester's diary entry (4 September 1936), Colin Cross (ed.), Life with Lloyd George. The Diary of A. J. Sylvester 1931-45 (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 148.
  • I have never met a happier people than the Germans and Hitler is one of the greatest men. The old trust him; the young idolise him. It is the worship of a national hero who has saved his country.
  • I have just returned from a visit to Germany. ... I have now seen the famous German leader and also something of the great change he has effected. Whatever one may think of his methods — and they are certainly not those of a Parliamentary country — there can be no doubt that he has achieved a marvellous transformation in the spirit of the people, in their attitude towards each other, and in their social and economic outlook.
    One man has accomplished this miracle. He is a born leader of men. A magnetic dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will, and a dauntless heart. He is the national Leader. He is also securing them against that constant dread of starvation which is one of the most poignant memories of the last years of the war and the first years of the Peace. The establishment of a German hegemony in Europe which was the aim and dream of the old prewar militarism, is not even on the horizon of Nazism.
  • As I talked to him, I could not but think of Joan of Arc. He is distinctly a mystic. Hewel was telling me that the German people, many of them, begin to feel that he was a mission from God, and some of them would seek to reverence him almost as a God. He said Hitler himself tries to avoid that kind of thing. He dislikes any of them thinking of him as anything but a humble citizen who is trying to serve his country well. He is a teetotaler and also a vegetarian. Is unmarried, abstemist in all his habits and ways. Indeed his life as one gathers it from those who are closest to him would appear to be that very much of a recluse, excepting that he comes in contact with youth and large number of people from time to time.
  • [The Fuehrer] is one of those lonely men of the ages on whom history is not tested, but who themselves are the makers of history.
    • Benito Mussolini, as quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, 28 September 1937
 
I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap. ~ Edward VIII
  • I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap.
  • Hitler was on the whole quiet and restrained, except now and again when he got excited; over Russia or the Press. I can quite see why he is a popular speaker; very much alive, eyes, which I was surprised were blue, moving about all the time, points in the argument reinforced by sharp gestures of the hands. And the play of emotion—sardonic humour, scorn, something almost wistful—is rapid.
    • Lord Halifax, diary entry (19 November 1937), quoted in Lord Halifax, Fulness of Days (1957), p. 188
  • One had a feeling all the time that we had a totally different set of values and were speaking in a different language. It was not only the difference between a totalitarian and democratic state. He gave me the impression of feeling that, whilst he had attained power only after a hard struggle with present-day realities, the British Government was still living comfortably in a world of its own making, a fairy-land of strange, if respectable, illusions. It clung to shibboleths—‘collective security,’ ‘general settlement,’ ‘disarmament,’ ‘non-aggression pacts’—which offered no practical prospect of a solution of Europe's difficulties. He regards the whole conception embodied in a League of States equal in their rights of sovereignty as unreal, based on no foundation of fact; and consequently does not believe that discussions between large numbers of nations, with varying interests and of quite unequal value, can lead anywhere. Hence his preference for dealing with particular problems in isolation. With this goes the distrust of the democratic method, to him inefficient, blundering, paralysed by its love of talk, and totally unsuited to the rough world, constantly changing, in which we had to live.
    • Lord Halifax, diary entry (19 November 1937), quoted in Lord Halifax, Fulness of Days (1957), p. 189
  • For Hitler first hatred was not Communism, but Austria-Hungary... And he loathed it for what? For its tolerance! He wanted eighty million Germans to rule with an iron hand an empire of eighty million 'inferiors'—Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Jews, Serbs, Poles and Croats.
    • Dorothy Thompson, "Let the Record Speak", Boston: MA, Houghton Mifflin Company (1939) p. 136 (newspaper column: "Write it Down," February 18, 1938)
  • Hitler was right in one thing. He calls the Jewish people a race and we are a race.
    • Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, (1938). "Dr. Wise Urges Jews To Declare Selves As Such." New York Herald Tribune, 13 June 1938. p. 12
  • I doubt whether Chamberlain or the Government yet realise the nature of the man with whom they are dealing, or his ultimate ambitions. Hitler is devoid of all honour and scruples. He has no regard for pledges, conventions or life. He is, in fact, evil.
    • Horace Rumbold to his son (22 September 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold: Portrait of a Diplomat, 1869–1941 (1973), p. 437
  • [T]he fact remains that since Hitler's ascendancy to power all Jews without exception have been subjected to the most fiendish persecution and the most horrible indignities, besides being robbed of all of the possessions
  • In Germany the common people are peace-loving, ... The Devil has put his representative Hitler in control, a man who is of unsound mind, cruel, malicious and ruthless . . . He cruelly persecutes the Jews because they were once Jehovah's covenant people and bore the name of Jehovah, and because Christ Jesus was a Jew.
    • Joseph Franklin Rutherford, cited in Awake! magazine, 1995, 8/22, article: The Evils of Nazism Exposed
    • On October 2, 1938, he delivered the address "Fascism or Freedom," in which he denounced Hitler in no uncertain terms. Rutherford regularly took to the airwaves, delivering powerful lectures on the satanic nature of Nazism. The lectures were rebroadcast globally and were printed for distribution by the millions.
  • Adolf Hitler never considered the domination of Europe as an end in itself. European conquest was but a step toward ultimate goals in all the other continents. It is unmistakably apparent to all of us that, unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.
  • The belief that Hitler is homosexual has probably developed (a) from the fact that he does show so many feminine characteristics and (b) from the fact that there were so many homosexuals in the Party during the early days and many continue to occupy important positions. ... There is a possibility that Hitler has participated in a homosexual relationship at some time in his life.
  • The Chancellor of the Exchequer said it was the first time Herr Hitler had been made to retract – I think that was the word – in any degree. We really must not waste time after all this long Debate upon the difference between the positions reached at Berchtesgaden, at Godesberg and at Munich. They can be very simply epitomised, if the House will permit me to vary the metaphor. £1 was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given, £2 were demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally, the dictator consented to take £1 17s. 6d. and the rest in promises of goodwill for the future.
  • I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations. I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success that has attended him. The whole world would rejoice to see the Hitler of peace and tolerance, and nothing would adorn his name in world history so much as acts of magnanimity and of mercy and of pity to the forlorn and friendless, to the weak and poor... Let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses anyone of being a warmonger.
    • Winston Churchill, "Mr. Churchill's Reply" in The Times (7 November 1938) This was in response to Hitler denouncing Churchill as a "warmonger".
  • Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on others what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for foodstuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism.
    • "Adolf Hitler: Man of the Year, 1938", Time; January 2, 1939.
  • There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the last Nürnberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. His body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler's is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, and unreasonable. ... So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better, a myth.
    • Carl Jung, During an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker, first published in Hearst's International Cosmopolitan (January 1939), in which Jung was asked to diagnose Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin, later published in Is Tomorrow Hitler's? (1941), by H. R. Knickerbocker, also published in The Seduction of Unreason : The Intellectual Romance with Fascism (2004) by Richard Wolin, Ch. 2 : Prometheus Unhinged : C. G. Jung and the Temptations of Aryan Religion, p. 75.
  • No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep. ... Hitler is himself the nation. That incidentally is why Hitler always has to talk so loud, even in private conversation — because he is speaking with 78 million voices.
    • Carl Jung, During an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker (1939), quoted in A Life of Jung (2002) by Ronald Hayman, p. 360
  • We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.
  • It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?
    • Mahatma Gandhi. Letter addressed to Hitler. 23 July 1939 (Collected Works, vol. 70, pp. 20–21). Quoted from Koenraad Elst: Return of the Swastika (2007). (Also in [18])
  • Kirkpatrick...says...that once one begins to work with him, or sees him dealing with great affairs, one has such a sense of evil arrogance that one is almost nauseated. He confesses that he has been rendered physically sick by some of the interviews that he has witnessed. Evil and treachery and malice dart into Hitler's mystic eyes. ... We asked Kirkpatrick what gave him his sense of actual evil. He said that after Hitler had flown from Godesberg to Munich to murder Roehm, he returned in the very highest spirits, mimicking to his secretary the gestures of fear which Roehm had made.
    • Harold Nicolson's diary (30 August 1939), quoted in Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1930–1939, ed. Nigel Nicolson (1966), pp. 414–415
  • He failed to realise why his military-cum-police tyranny should be repugnant to British ideals of individual and national freedom and liberty, or why he should not be allowed a free hand in Central and Eastern Europe to subjugate smaller and, as he regards them, inferior peoples to superior German rule and culture. He believed he could buy British acquiescence in his own far-reaching schemes by offers of alliance with and guarantees for the British Empire. Such acquiescence was indispensable to the success of his ambitions and he worked unceasingly to secure it. His great mistake was his complete failure to understand the inherent British sense of morality, humanity and freedom.
    • Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador to Germany, final report to the British Foreign Secretary (20 September 1939), quoted in The Times (18 October 1939), p. 7
  • Burckhardt ... says that Hitler has a dual personality, the first being that of the rather gentle artist, and the second that of the homicidal maniac. He is convinced that Hitler has no complete confidence in himself and that his actions are really governed by somnambulist certainty. He says that the main energy in Hitler is an energy of hatred, and that he has never met any human being capable of generating so terrific a condensation of envy, vituperation and malice.
    • Harold Nicolson's diary (3 October 1939), quoted in Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1939–1945, ed. Nigel Nicolson (1967), p. 39
  • The "Conqueror from Berlin," as he has named himself, has completely conquered Germany. And not only that. Unfortunately, many, all too many Germans living abroad, also have fallen for the cunning propaganda.
  • (pg 59) [Hitler] was profoundly imbued with German paganism, more so, perhaps, than Ludendorff or Rosenberg himself.
    (pg 93) Hitler is an atheist.
    • Otto Strasser, Hitler and I, Boston: MA, Houghton Mifflin Company (1940)
  • Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches. I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett's edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is there. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.
    Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won't do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin's militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation "Greatest happiness of the greatest number" is a good slogan, but at this moment "Better an end with horror than a horror without end" is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
  • Hitler is a prodigious genius.
    • David Lloyd George, A. J. Sylvester's diary entry (7 July 1940), Colin Cross (ed.), Life with Lloyd George. The Diary of A. J. Sylvester 1931-45 (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 275.
  • That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind, irrespective of race, colour or creed. ... But your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the estimation of men like me who believe in human friendliness. Such are your humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and the swallowing of Denmark. I am aware that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts. But we have been taught from childhood to regard them as acts degrading humanity... No spoliator can compass his end without a certain degree of co-operation, willing or unwilling, of the victim.... The rulers may have our land and bodies but not our souls... You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud.
  • I felt, that in the mind of Hitler there was much of spiritual matters, transcending material plans. When I met the Führer he said that since boyhood he had been attracted by Japan. He read carefully reports of Japan's victory over Russia when he was only 17 years old and was impressed by Japan's astonishing strength.
  • Both anti-fascism and anti-communism have utterly lost their meaning since Hitler and Stalin have ceased to conceal their alliance from the world. [...] I predicted the cooperation between the Nazis and Bolsheviks as early as 1925 in my article "Anti-Marxism."
    • Ludwig von Mises ([1940], 1998). Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, trans. Thomas Francis McManus and Heinrich Bund, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. ISBN 1-57246-071-7 p. xiv.
  • Hitler does not have a new secret weapon at his disposal. He does not owe his victory to an excellent intelligence service which informs him of the plans of his opponents. Even the much-talked-of "fifth column" was not decisive. He won because the supposed opponents were already quite sympathetic to the ideas for which he stood. [...]
    An ideological struggle cannot be fought successfully with constant concessions to the principles of the enemy. Those who refute capitalism because it supposedly is inimical to the interest of the masses, those who proclaim "as a matter of course" that after the victory over Hitler the market economy will have to be replaced by a better system and, therefore, everything should be done now to make the government control of business as complete as possible, are actually fighting for totalitarianism.
    The "progressives" who today masquerade as "liberals" may rant against "fascism"; yet it is their policy that paves the way for Hitlerism.
    Nothing could have been more helpful to the success of the National-Socialist (Nazi) movement than the methods used by the "progressives," denouncing Nazism as a party serving the interests of "capital."
    • Ludwig von Mises ([1940], 1998). Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, trans. Thomas Francis McManus and Heinrich Bund, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. ISBN 1-57246-071-7 p. 88.
  • German workers are the most reliable supporters of the Hitler regime. Nazism has won them over completely by eliminating unemployment and by reducing the entrepreneurs to the status of shop managers (Betriebsführer). Big business, shopkeepers, and peasants are disappointed. Labor is well satisfied and will stand by Hitler, unless the war takes a turn which would destroy their hope for a better life after the peace treaty. Only military reverses can deprive Hitler of the backing of the German workers.
    The fact that the capitalists and entrepreneurs, faced with the alternative of Communism or Nazism, chose the latter, does not require any further explanation. They preferred to live as shop managers under Hitler than to be "liquidated" as "bourgeois" by Stalin. Capitalists don't like to be killed any more than other people do. What pernicious effects may be produced by believing that the German workers are opposed to Hitler was proved by the English tactics during the first year of the war. The government of Neville Chamberlain firmly believed that the war would be brought to an end by a revolution of the German workers. Instead of concentrating on vigorous arming and fighting, they had their planes drop leaflets over Germany telling the German workers that England was not fighting this war against them, but against their oppressor, Hitler. The English government knew very well, they said, that the German people, particularly labor, were against war and were only forced into it by their self-imposed dictator.
    • Ludwig von Mises ([1940], 1998). Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, trans. Thomas Francis McManus and Heinrich Bund, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. ISBN 1-57246-071-7 p. 89.
  • ...we find an article in Harper's describing with a good deal of gusto the financial operations of the Hitler regime. We are told that we must not let the brutality of German political policy "divert our attention from the German financial program. It is revolutionary and it is successful." The author then tells us that if we will look behind the dictatorship we may possibly find "clues to the nature of our own recent financial ills, indicating what has been wrong and what can be done to strengthen economic democracy now and in the future." The men who built this German system are called men of unquestioned genius. It is becoming clear that "Germany's internal financial program is removing the limitations of her financial environment on rates of productive activity. For years prior to the present war German industry operated at capacity. To do these things she is changing capitalism but she is not destroying it."
    Of course there is nothing new about Hitler's financial operation, as anyone who has read the German chapter of this volume will remember. It is merely the adoption by Hitler of the spending and borrowing tactics of his predecessors, whom he so roundly denounced. Hitler was doing little more than Mussolini was doing, than the republicans and Social Democrats did before him in Germany, and what the old Italian and German Ministers did before the last war.
    • John T. Flynn (1944) As We Go Marching Doubleday and Company, pp. 183-184, quoting "The German Financial Revolution," by Dal Hitchcock, Harper's Magazine, Vol. 182, February 1941. Italics as in original
  • At the outset of the German Government's movement against the Jews, an American visitor asked Herr Hitler why he was making it so ruthless. The Reichskanzler replied that he had got the idea from us. Americans, he said, are the great rope and lamppost artists [i.e., lynching] of the world, known of all men as such. He was using the same methods against the Jews that we used against the loyalists of '76, the Indians, the Chinese on the Western coast, the Negroes, the Mexicans, the Filipinos — every helpless people in fact whom we had ever chanced to find underfoot.
    • Albert Jay Nock, "The Jewish Problem in America," Atlantic Monthly, June, 1941.
  • If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
    • Winston Churchill, To his personal secretary John Colville the evening before Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941). As quoted by Andrew Nagorski in The Greatest Battle (2007), Simon & Schuster, pp. 150-151 ISBN 0743281101.
  • Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorised into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine - which we and the rest of the civilised world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing - cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. ... So now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanized armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation.
    • Winston Churchill, Radio broadcast on the German invasion of Russia, June 22, 1941. In The Churchill War Papers : 1941 (1993), W.W. Norton, pp. 835-836 ISBN 0393019594.
 
Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe. ~ Alfred Kazin
  • Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe.
    • Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds : An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1941), p. 231.
  • I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
  • Is it really true that German fascist troops are invincible, as is ceaselessly trumpeted by the boastful fascist propagandists? Of course not! History shows that there are no invincible armies and never have been. Napoleon's army was considered invincible but it was beaten successively by Russian, English and German armies. Kaiser Wilhelm's German Army in the period of the first imperialist war was also considered invincible, but it was beaten several times by the Russian and Anglo-French forces and was finally smashed by the Anglo-French forces. The same must be said of Hitler's German fascist army today. This army had not yet met with serious resistance on the continent of Europe. Only on our territory has it met serious resistance. And if, as a result of this resistance, the finest divisions of Hitler's German fascist army have been defeated by our Red Army, it means that this army too can be smashed and will be smashed as were the armies of Napoleon and Wilhelm.
  • "Progress" is for the convinced ochlocrats a consoling Utopia of madly increased comfort and technicism. This charming but dull vision was always the pseudoreligious consolation of millions of ecstatic believers in ochlocracy and in the relative perfection and wisdom of Mr. and Mrs. Averageman. Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise. Communism works in a similar way. Its millennium is almost the same as that of ochlocracy. The Millennium of Lenin, the Millennium of Bellamy, the Millennium as represented in H. G. Wells's, "Of Things to Come," the Millennium of Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford — they are all basically the same; they often differ in their means to attain it but they all agree in the point of technical perfection and the classless or at least totally homogeneous society without grudge or envy.
    • Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, writing under the pen name Francis Stewart Campbell (1943), Menace of the Herd, or, Procrustes at Large, Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, pp. 35-36.
  • [Hitler is] a veritable reductio ad absurdum of "progressive" thought.
    • Francis Stuart Campbell, pen name of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1943), Menace of the Herd, or, Procrustes at Large, Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, p. 159.
  • It must be emphasized that an intensive study of national socialistic "prehistory" reveals a curious lack of original thought in Hitler's concepts; Hitler's strength consists solely in the clever use of already existing trends, ideas, and situations. It lies in the very nature of mass leaders that they cannot be "original"; the mass leader is necessarily a virtuoso of commonplaces which he may or may not repeat in the guise of a "new discovery." The modern dictator is not out to contradict but to confirm already existing views (and prejudices).
    • Francis Stuart Campbell, pen name of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1943), Menace of the Herd, or, Procrustes at Large, Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, p. 201.
  • An extended chapter of our talk was devoted by the Führer to the vegetarian question. He believes more than ever that meat-eating is harmful to humanity. Of course he knows that during the war we cannot completely upset our food system. After the war, however, he intends to tackle this problem also. Maybe he is right. Certainly the arguments that he adduces in favor of his standpoint are very compelling.
  • The Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race.”
    • Joseph Goebbels The Goebbels Diaries 1939-1941, ed. and trans, Fred Taylor (New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983, p. 77, Entry: Dec. 29, 1939)
  • Do you know that your Führer is a vegetarian, and that he does not eat meat because of his general attitude toward life and his love for the world of animals? Do you know that your Führer is an exemplary friend of animals, and even as a chancellor, he is not separated from the animals he has kept for years?...The Führer is an ardent opponent of any torture of animals, in particular vivisection, and has declared to terminate those conditions...thus fulfilling his role as the savior of animals, from continuous and nameless torments and pain. "
    • Neugeist/Die Weisse Fahne (contemporaneous pro-Nazi children's magazine)
  • Adolf Hitler
    I'm not worthy to speak up for Adolf Hitler, and to any sentimental rousing his life and deeds do not invite.
    Hitler was a warrior, a warrior for humankind and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations. He was a reforming character of the highest order, and his historical fate was that he functioned in a time of exampleless [i.e., unequalled] brutality, which in the end felled him.
    Thus may the ordinary Western European look at Adolf Hitler. And we, his close followers, bow our heads at his death.
    • Knut Hamsun, Norwegian author and Nobel Prize-winner, obituary of Hitler published in the May 7, 1945 evening edition of Aftenposten[7]
  • Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the National Socialist terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.
  • Freedom and honour! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honour. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German—it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of "freedom and honour of the German nation" throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew.
  • Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Führer, we thank you!
  • He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.

The House That Hitler Built (1937; rev. edn., September 1938)

by Stephen H. Roberts, New York: Harper & Brothers
  • I think that he is primarily a dreamer, a visionary... He is so transparently honest when he is weaving visions of his own creation that nobody can doubt him. He is ready, like a medieval saint, to go through fire and water for his beliefs. I am not certain that he would not actually like being tortured; he would love playing the martyr, if only for his own mental delectation. He sees himself as a crusader; he thinks the whole time of saving mankind. That is why he reaches such a stage of mystical exaltation when he talks about saving the world from Bolshevism. It is the old Siegfried complex once again. Just as the young German knight of old went out into the dim, dark forests to kill dragons, so he goes out to exterminate Bolshevism. He is simply living again the romantic frescoes which mad King Ludwig painted round his castles to express the Wagnerian operas, and Hitler's spectacles are nothing more than an enlargement of this Wagnerian drop-scene, with the improvements offered by modern science.
    That accounts for his popular appeal, and it also makes him dangerous.
    • pp. 7-9
  • Nobody would claim that Hitler is of outstanding mental stature. If he really expresses the Romantic Ideal carried to the point of absurdity, and if romanticism is the liberation of the less conscious levels of the mind...extreme mental clarity would not be expected from him. His life, as I see it, can be expressed as an attempt at escaping from reality and a more or less constant intoxication of his imagination by a free indulgence in fantasy. He has none of that "great measuring virtue" without which Ruskin asserts true greatness is impossible. The psycho-analysts have a marvellous subject for discussion in Herr Hitler. Some of them say that he shows the salient features of schizophrenia (split personality) because of his overwhelming ambition and conceit, his favourite role of himself as the saviour of mankind and his habit of speaking as if he received personal revelations from the Deity. Others hold that he is a manic-depressive; others again a paranoiac... The typical paranoid is terrified of imaginary persecutors, and defends himself against this fear by the annihilation in fantasy of his persecutors. Sometimes, as in the case of Hitler, the annihilation can to some extent be translated from fantasy into fact. Hitler's persecution of the Jews and Communists, for instance, can be explained from this point of view. This is all a matter for the experts, of course, but some of the facts certainly appear as evidence for the psycho-analyst's stress on Hitler's persecution mania, his ways of escape from reality, his great anxieties, his over-keen but distorted observation of realities, his alternating moods of melancholy and elation, his recurring doubts of himself—and contrasting sense of omnipotence.
    • p. 11
  • Abstract intelligence and logic are not necessary in his scheme of things. He seems to have a single-track mind. Always a simplist, he cannot understand the complexities of most problems. He cannot, for instance, recognize the importance of diplomatic forms or the element of safety provided by the tortuous methods of conventional diplomacy. He simplifies every problem, even the most vital questions of domestic and foreign policy. He applies a general principle of an intuitive solution to a question complicated by centuries of history and arrives at some delusively simple outcome. Mein Kampf gives him away in this. After its publication he could never again claim subtlety of analysis or breadth of vision.
    • p. 12
  • His strength, then, is the unduly assertive characteristic of a man not certain of himself and shunning a real analysis of the problems confronting him. It is a mixture of brazenness and empiricism, and above all, a form of escape from his own introspectiveness. He is harassed, tormented, tortured by imaginings and confused thoughts; and the only way out of the tangle is to take some act that is seemingly decisive, or, more often, to find refuge in the endless reiteration of stock arguments, such as those against Semitism or Bolshevism.
    • pp. 13-14
  • [H]e certainly succeeds in winning his audiences. After all, he is appealing to their feelings, not their intellect, and he captures them in an ecstasy of emotion, whipping them hither and thither by the castigations of his rather harsh, and frequently breaking, voice. He always uses the same methods, the same tricks of oratory, the same half-dozen gestures (especially the outpointed finger and the curious corkscrew movement of his hand), the same appeal to the crudest emotions, the same exploitation of common hatreds, even the same words. Goebbels is an infinitely finer and more polished orator from our point of view, but it is always Hitler who grips the meetings.
    No display of emotionalism is too crude for him. He frequently weeps.
    • pp. 16-17
  • He lives in an unnatural detachment that makes his disease of being a godhead batten on itself: the most balanced of human beings could not stand this kind of life without losing a sense of realities, and nobody would call Hitler emotionally balanced at the best of times. Most commentators make a great fuss about his diet or his celibacy: what seems to me far more important is his lack of ordinary human contacts. Abnormal himself, the constant adulation makes him pathological. He receives only the thrice-distilled views of the fanatics, intriguers and genuine patriots around him. Nobody can tell him anything or speak frankly, still less criticize his policy or himself. He lives in a mental world of his own, more aloof than any Sun-King, and he has only the narrow mental equipment and experience of an agitator to guide him. Unless one accepts the prevalent German view that he gets his inspiration direct from God (one of the most powerful Nazis once said he had a private line to heaven!), one must conclude that the future of Germany and the peace of the world rest on the tangled working of the mind of one man whom not even his friends would call normal. It is the most extraordinary comment on human evolution that, in this age of science and progress, the fate of mankind rests on the whimsy of an abnormal mind, infinitely more so than in the days of the old despots whom we criticize so much.
    • p. 22
  • Hitler may achieve his avowed goal; he may consolidate the entire nation along the lines he wants. If this is so, the outlook for peace would still be clouded, because Hitler's consolidation is contingent upon ideas—such as economic Autarky, military aggressiveness, a dashing foreign policy, and a general Imperialistic ideology—which, of necessity, would lead to war. He cannot achieve some of these without war, and if he does not achieve them, the people will feel deluded, and in that case Hitler's consolidation will not be successful. That is his basic dilemma. If he persists in the policies he has enunciated, he plunges Europe into war; if he abandons them, he can no longer maintain his position within Germany.
    Logically, then, the success or the failure of Hitlerism brings war in its train.
    • p. 362

Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)

by Emil Ludwig, New York & Toronto: Alliance Book Corporation, Longmans, Green and Company
  • Hitler's technique of oratory is largely the result of... mass psychology... He declared to his small, new party that everything depended on fascinating the crowd. Above all, he realized... restore to the German people, deprived of an army, their flags, bands and songs. ...He invented every emblem himself, except the swastika, designed his own flag, and prescribed every collar and button for the slowly-growing party troops.
  • Hitler's aim was to attract attention to himself. ...[H]e personally arranged all the lighting effects and spotlights, as well as his entry into a hall with fanfares. He trained crowds to salute with the right arm, taught them his songs, and transformed the audience from an apathetic mass into active collaborators in his festivities.
  • As a stage manager and advertiser, he gave proof as real genius. In his book... "The Entente," he writes, "won the war simply and solely by its propaganda." A crowd is ready to believe anything, "true or false," provided it is constantly reiterated; one only has to say the same thing often enough.
  • He is past-master in the technique of platform speaking, and he can be humorous, grave, witty, tragic and cynical as the occasion requires.
  • His effect, in complete contrast to Mussolini's... he juggles with mystical notions such as Honor, Blood, and Soil, and thus wraps his audience in that cloud of mysticism which the Germans love far more than mere prosaic logic.
  • [H]e works to create the single great impression that here is a prophet whose heart is bleeding for the fate of his people. ...[H]e is sly enough to use an arrangement on his speaker's desk through which, by pressing a button, the spotlights are switched on to him so that the ecstasies can be properly filmed for the news reels. A similar combination of ecstasy and artifice can be observed in other actors.
  • [H]e commanded over a hundred of his armed adherents to make an open attack on the armed police force. The latter met the rebel's attack... Shots were fired. Fourteen men lay dead on the Munich pavement. ...Hitler vanished ...The fourteen heroes of the Nazi movement were later eulogized... by the leader who had abandoned them in danger.
  • He realized that he could rise only through the support of the discontented and utterly disillusioned middle class. All he did later was to subjugate it. Rauschning describes in detail Hitler's intense hatred of Germany's laboring masses.
  • The pyramid familiar to the Germans... in which each individual carries another on his back but makes up for it by standing on somebody else, was set up anew by Hitler.
  • The Germans, who love order more than freedom, and whose ruling passion is obedience, rejoiced in their release from an uncomfortable equality into new ranks of superiors and inferiors. This is the second source of Hitler's success.
  • As a man without religion, without philosophy, without principles, he balked at nothing. ...[H]e concealed... his desire for self-aggrandizement, and... believes in his own idealism.
  • Since the banks and the big industrialists wished to rid themselves of the Socialists, with their wage demands and strikes, they contributed generously to this popular party. ...Hitler's speeches constantly promised the masses a renewal of the soldier-spirit, a new army and new victories.
  • Hitler, who had made his way to power by his great gifts as a stage manager and speaker, introduced into the Reichschancellory all that browbeating noise which the Germans are so prone to take for greatness. ...Immediately after his appointment as chancellor, Hitler resolved to prove to the world that he had come, a new Saint George, to slay the dragon of communism. While the German Reichstag was burning, he accused the Communists of the guilt... This trial he lost... for its sole result was to expose the guilt of the Nazis.
  • The Germans were wretched so long as they had no sword. ...Only a world once more trembling before the gigantic juggernaut of a German army could do... [A] genuine idealism ...inspires the German Nazi youth. It is bellicose... and looks forward to a hero's death... they believe in the superiority of the German race and its right to rule the world.
    Their new leader did not merely promise all this; he began to turn it into reality... The technique of government by advertisement... has enabled a ruler... to attain his aims by sheer propaganda and bluff...
  • That is the language of a gambler—of a man who stakes his all in one card... when the other players simply refuse to call a bluff, he may safely risk his stake.
    And yet, with the great triumphs Hitler has flaunted, with the increase in power and population... how are we to explain the apathy shared by... Germans, with exceptions of the few thousand commandeered to function at processions? They do not revolt, yet they are neither happy nor content... the enthusiasm wanes... as it has been since the third year of the Hitler régime...
  • The appointment of ignorant young men by the Party to high places in the German universities and clinics... has caused profound depression in the country... A country which no longer recognizes a written constitution, a country in which the Minister of Justice proclaims as his guiding principle, "Right is what is useful to Germany," a country in which the police force... watches with sympathetic interest any crime which is committed to the Party's advantage—is a country where none can feel safe. Even the free can hardly take much pleasure... where more than 100,000 souls are imprisoned... Any German who has not risen to wealth and position through the Party feels less free... Millions are ashamed because they are no longer citizens of a constitutional State.
    Meanwhile their Führer sits in his villa... and here he entertains his friends. ...As he talks ceaselessly and seldom listens... business cannot be settled.

Quotes after the end of World War II

Sorted by Author

A–L

  • By exploiting material wealth confiscated and plundered in a racial war, Hitler's National Socialism achieved an unprecedented level of economic equality and created vast new opportunities for upward mobility for the German people.
    • Götz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, New York: NY, Metropolitan Books (2007) pp. 7-8
  • "I was born in 1933 in Vienna, Austria, the year Hitler came to power; his shadow shadowed me." So Evelyn Torton Beck began the narrative of her life as a Jewish lesbian feminist at the NYU "Women's Liberation and Jewish Identity" conference."
    • Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2018)
  • The only man for whom Hitler had 'unqualified respect' was Stalin the genius', and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not... have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev's speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler.
    • Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of the Origins of Totalitarianism, A Harvest Book, 1985, pp. 7-8
  • The tragedy for Germany’s subsequent victims was that a critical mass of the population, desperate for order and respect, was eager to follow the most reckless criminal in history. Hitler managed to appeal to their worst instincts: resentment, intolerance, arrogance and, most dangerous of all, a sense of racial superiority. Any remaining belief in a Rechtsstaat, a nation based on respect for the rule of law, crumpled in the face of Hitler’s insistence that the judicial system must be the servant of the new order. Public institutions–the courts, the universities, the general staff and the press–kowtowed to the new regime. Opponents found themselves helplessly isolated and insulted as traitors to the new definition of the Fatherland, not only by the regime itself, but also by all those who supported it. The Gestapo, unlike Stalin’s own secret police, the NKVD, was surprisingly idle. Most of its arrests were purely in response to denunciations of people by their fellow Germans.
Brooks: Yes, absolutely. Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths. In doing so, we should remember that Hitler did have some talents. He was able to fool an entire population into letting him be their leader. However, this role was basically a few numbers too great for him –- but he simply covered over this deficiency.
Spiegel: Was he a good actor?
Brooks: Yes, as he convinced many millions of Germans. It's not without good reason that comedies about Hitler often concern actors who should play him. Just think about Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) or Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or not To Be (1942). There's no doubt about it, Hitler worked in the same branch as we do: he created illusions.
Spiegel: In a documentary film about the downfall of the German battleship the Bismarck, US director James Cameron referred to Hitler as the "greatest pop star of his time."
Brooks: There's something in that. Hitler must have had a magnetic attractive force, like a rock star he used his voice to spellbind umpteen thousands of listeners. So it's only fitting when comic actors make him the limelight hog of world history. We take away from him the holy seriousness that always surrounded him and protected him like a cordon.
  • In Hitler's eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.
    • Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny; Harper Perennial Edition (1991) p. 218. First published 1952
  • [Hitler] himself saw Christianity as a temporary ally, for in his opinion 'one is either a Christian or a German'. To be both was impossible. Nazism itself was a religion, a pagan religion, and Hitler was its high priest... Its high altar [was] Germany itself and the German people, their soil and forests and language and traditions.
  • "Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that's partially true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words, on the right words at the right time."
"I was just thinking of of comparing you to him."
  • Try explaining Hitler to a kid.
  • Men of action, when they are without faith, have never believed in anything but action. Hitler's untenable paradox lay precisely in wanting to found a stable order on perpetual change and no negation.
  • But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?
    • Richard Dawkins, From the Afterword, The Herald Scotland, (November 20, 2006)
  • This man, compounded of mystic and megalomaniac, orator and self-hypnotist, faithless and merciless in pursuit of his aims, was to bring upon his own country, upon Europe and more distant lands, suffering, destruction and death. He was to do worse. In the name of racial purity, he inspired a surge of beastliness unparalleled for centuries.
    Hitler was a failure, for he transformed the world in the sense in which he least wished. When the struggle was over, Europe lay prostrate and power had passed to Russia in the East and the United States in the West, countries he dreaded or despised. His opportunity came at a climacteric in history and he made terrible use of it.
    • Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (1962), p. 27
  • It would assist us if the Chancellor could state his position about...Locarno. Hitler declared that the German Government would "scrupulously and faithfully observe every treaty into which they had entered of their own free will, including Locarno." The world must not expect to obtain Germany's signature on all occasions, but Germany's signature, once given, would be honoured. No assurance could have been firmer or more specific, if it could be believed.
    The argument was also clear enough. Hitler did not regard the Versailles Treaty as binding, because it had been signed under duress, but I thought at the time that Hitler might be genuine in this distinction and that he could intend to observe treaties "freely" signed by Germany. This possibility remained in my mind until the occupation of the Rhineland destroyed any further confidence I might have had in Hitler's statements.
    • Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (1962), p. 62
  • I was most unfavourably impressed by Hitler's personality. Unlike Stalin as I was to know him, or Mussolini, he appeared negative to me, certainly not compelling; he was also rather shifty. Stalin and Mussolini were, in their separate ways, men whose personality would be felt in any company. Hitler was essentially the man who would pass in the crowd.
    • Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (1962), p. 133
  • Two things made the German experience unique. The first was Hitler himself, who was in many ways more bizarre than Chaplin knew. An art-school reject who had once scraped a living by selling kitschy picture postcards; an Austrian draft-dodger who had ended up a decorated Bavarian corporal; a lazy mediocrity who rose late and enjoyed both Wagner's operas and Karl May's cowboy yarns - here indeed was an unlikely heir to the legacy of Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck. In Munich in the early 1920s he could be seen attending the soirées of a Romanian princess 'in his gangster hat and trenchcoat over his dinner jacket, touting a pistol and carrying as usual his dog-whip'. It is not altogether surprising that President Hindenburg assumed he was Bohemian. Others thought he looked more like 'a man trying to seduce the cook', or perhaps a renegade tram conductor. If it had not been for the advice of his publisher Max Amann, he would have called his first book Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice instead of the distinctly catchier My Struggle. The longer title captures something of Hitler's shrill and vituperative personality. As for his sexuality, about which there has long been speculation on the basis of circumstantial or tainted evidence, he may have had none. Hitler hated. He did not love.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 232-233 
  • Superficially, Hitler's appeal to German voters is easy to understand. He simply offered more radical remedies to the Depression than his political rivals. Others might offer piecemeal solutions to unemployment; Hitler was willing to contemplate a bold programme of public works. Others might worry that financing public works with deficits would trigger a new inflation; Hitler bluntly stated that the hoodlums of his Sturmabteilung would deal with any profiteers who charged excessive prices. Others might argue, as Rathenau and Stresemann had, that Germany must try to pay reparations, if only to prove the impossibility of doing so, or must borrow to the hilt in New York so as to drive a rift between the Western creditors; Hitler essentially argued for default. It helped, of course, that the reparations system had itself collapsed by 1932; Germany had already defaulted, albeit with American consent, by the time Hitler came to power. It helped, too, that the Nazis were able to recruit the widely respected former Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned his post in 1930 after effectively endorsing Hitler's campaign against the revised reparations schedule known as the Young Plan. Yet even with his imprimatur on them, it took real political skill to sell such unorthodox economic solutions to a relatively sophisticated and highly variegated electorate. The Nazis' success without doubt owed much to Joseph Goebbels, the evil genius of twentieth-century marketing, who sold Hitler to the German public as if he were the miraculous offspring of the Messiah and Marlene Dietrich. The Nazi election campaigns of 1930, 1932. and 1933 were unprecedented assaults on public opinion, involving standardized mass meetings and eye-catching posters, as well as rousing songs (like the Horst-Wessel Lied) and calculated physical intimidation of opponents. Though much of this owed its inspiration to Mussolini - not least the snazzy uniforms for supporters, and the Roman salutes - Goebbels understood the need for finesse as well as bombast. For one thing, he saw more clearly than the star himself the need to adjust Hitler's message according to which of the German electorate's many segments was being addressed.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 238-239 
  • Hitler is probably the world's most notorious tyrant. His name is virtually synonymous with evil. Rising from obscurity and failure, he found inspiration in the German army and entered politics after World War I. His Nazi Party became the largest in Germany, leading to his appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Within a year, he had turned Germany into a dictatorship. He built up the economy while establishing a police state based on terror. He pushed his country into World War II where his aggressive leadership produced spectacular vicotories until he was opposed by the Soviet Union and the United States. During the war, he ordered the murder of six million Jews and other minorities. With his country collapsing around him, he committed suicide.
    • Clive Foss, The Tyrants: 2,500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption (2006), p. 140
  • Hitler had no superior, and there was no appeal against him. The only alternative to obedience was imprisonment or death. He ruled Germany through the regular government and the increasingly powerful Nazi Party whose organizations reached every level of the population. The regime looked simple and streamlined, but Hitler, who believed in the survival of the fittest, encouraged competition among his subordinates, often appointing two people to very similar jobs, so that they would have to come to him for resolution. He rarely consulted his cabinet but relied on a loyal coterie headed by Heinrich Himmler, chief of the elite SS troops, and the Gestapo (secret police), Hermann Goring, commander of the air force and Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda. Hitler was the ultimate amateur, a skilled politician with no education but a photographic memory that enabled him to intimidate his officers. He distrusted educated specialists and believed he was right about everything. He met with his cronies over tea where he would endulge in endless monologues - tea, because he was a vegetarian and teetotaller who also firmly discouraged smoking.
    • Clive Foss, The Tyrants: 2,500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption (2006), p. 141
  • Hitler did a better job than Stalin of accomplishing Lenin's totalitarian promises—better, too, than Mussolini,...
    • François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, University of Chicago Press (1999) p. 205
  • In many thundering discourses, Hitler expressed his respect, if not admiration for Stalinist Communism and its leader.
    • François Furet, Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, Chicago, Illinois; London, England, University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 191
  • The names of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler will forever be linked to the tragic course of European history in the first half of the twentieth century. Only weeks after the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks created secret police forces far more brutal than any that had existed under the tsar. The Nazis followed suit and were no sooner in power than they instituted the dreaded Gestapo. Under both regimes millions of people were incarcerated in concentration camps where they were tortured and frequently worked to death.
    • Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler : The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Random House, Knopf, 2007).
 
He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were. Even Mao and Stalin were killing their "class enemies." Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing. ~ Nancy Gibbs
  • If all Hitler had done was kill people in vast numbers more efficiently than anyone else ever did, the debate over his lasting importance might end there. But Hitler's impact went beyond his willingness to kill without mercy. He did something civilization had not seen before. Genghis Khan operated in the context of the nomadic steppe, where pillaging villages was the norm. Hitler came out of the most civilized society on Earth, the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller. He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were. Even Mao and Stalin were killing their "class enemies." Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing.
  • Check out Hitler, what did Hitler say to the German people in the middle of depression? What did he say were the causes of the problem in German? He said it was the Jews, he said it was the communists, and he said it was the people who sold out in the World War 1. Those were the three forces responsible for the downfall of Germany. What are Nixon and the other neo-fascists saying nowadays? What is the cause of the crisis that we have in our country and the United States and Puerto Rico and Hawaii? What are the causes? Well, it's the communists, it's the Third World people instead of the Jews this time, and it's the peace people. Same lines. Fascism always has the same lines. Fascism is a dictatorship, a capitalistic dictatorship. When things fall apart they started a dictatorship.
  • To me there are two Hitlers: one who existed until the end of the French war; the other begins with the Russian campaign. In the beginning he was genial and pleasant. He would have extraordinary willpower and unheard-of influence on people. The important thing to remember is that the first Hitler, the man who I knew until the end of the French war, had much charm and goodwill. He was always frank. The second Hitler, who existed from the beginning of the Russian campaign until his suicide, was always suspicious, easily upset, and tense. He was distrustful to an extreme degree.
  • Hitler was dead by his own hand and the Allies quickly went about gathering up officials of the Nazi regime. Germany was prostrated, its cities in rubble, its manufactories smashed, its people dispirited and unable even to feed themselves. They crawled out of their cellars and hiding places and looked around into a profound silence enveloping the entire nation. Many- probably most of them- were terribly embarrassed and ashamed at what their leaders had put them through but, after all, they had voted Hitler and the Nazis into power. It was one of the most horrid mistakes a democracy had ever made and a powerful lesson for today and tomorrow. The Third Reich that Hitler predicted would "last a thousand years" was abolished in little more than a decade, though at terrible cost.
    • Winston Groom, The Generals: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the Winning of World War II (2015), p. 395
  • [Hitler] was to all intents and purposes an atheist by the time I got to know him, although he still paid lip-service to religious beliefs and certainly acknowledged them as the basis for the thinking of others.
    • Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler: The Memoir of a Nazi Insider Who Turned Against the Führer [1957], New York: NY, Arcade Publishing, 2011, p. 69
  • [Hitler] would attack the former ruling classes for their surrender of the nation, their class prejudices and feudal economic system to applause from the Left-Wingers, and then riddle those who were prepared to decry the true traditions of German greatness to the applause of the Right-Wingers.
    • Ernst Hanfstaengl Hitler: The Memoir of a Nazi Insider Who Turned Against the Führer [1957], New York: NY, Arcade Publishing, 2011, p. 69
  • Hitler, who was so wound up in his theory of the Aryan race, was himself the antithesis of the Aryan type: dark, not very tall, narrow-shouldered, hysterical, nervous; had he met himself, who knows where he would have sent such a suspicious character.
    • Shulamith Hareven "Against Charisma" in The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
  • Hitler's triumph made terribly clear the danger of our earlier notions, as well as the very stark differences between a fascist regime and "bourgeois democracy" as represented by someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By the mid-1930s the issue of anti-fascism permeated all our mass work.
  • Had Hitler died in middle of the 1930's, Nazism would probably have shown, under the leadership of a Goering, a fundamental change in its course, and the Second World War might have been averted. Yet the sepulcher of Hitler, the founder of a Nazi religion, might perhaps have been a greater evil than all the atrocities, bloodshed and destruction of Hitler's war.
    • Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951) Ch.18 Good and Bad Mass Movements, §122
  • The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.
    • Eric Hoffer (1976). In Our Time. New York: Harper & Row. .
  • I would have preferred it if he'd followed his original ambition and become an architect.
    • Paula Hitler, his much younger sister, during an interview with a U.S. intelligence operative in late 1945.
  • I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend.
  • Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.
  • After visiting these two places you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country, which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.
    • The Post-War diary of John F. Kennedy, as quoted in Prelude to Leadership (pages 73–74, last two paragraphs).
  • We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.
  • Hitler was a wonderful actor. At times when he was beating his breast and assuring his visitor of his own devotion to peace, I was almost overwhelmed by the performance; and I was tempted to believe that my judgement must have gone to pieces in ever doubting the man's sincerity. But he was also so fundamentally wicked, and this appeared so clearly in his conversation that one's reason eventually got the upper hand. As the years passed, power visibly corrupted him. He became more intolerant of any opposition, more convinced of his mission and more openly ruthless. There was less need to dissemble and he almost gloried in his wickedness.
  • Hitler was never interested in legitimate ambitions. Mr. Churchill was right when he called him "that wicked man", for he was a logical and ruthless criminal.
  • My reliable informants in the German camp had already made it clear to me that Hitler regarded the Prime Minister [Neville Chamberlain] as an impertinent busybody who spoke the ridiculous jargon of an out-moded democracy. The umbrella, which to the ordinary German was the symbol of peace, was in Hitler's view only a subject of derision.
  • By this time [September 1938] it was clear to me that Hitler was bent on having his little war. I felt that the interview could have little result and Hitler's behaviour was so offensive that I wanted never to see him again. He seemed to be enveloped in an aura of such ruthless wickedness that it was oppressive and almost nightmarish to sit in the same room. I therefore asked Wilson if I might be excused from attending. This was very pusillanimous since the interviews were certainly interesting and exciting enough for the most blasé of officials. I can only say that Hitler had inspired me with such a physical repugnance that I could not bring myself to go.

M–Z

  • If he (Hitler) does not eat meat, drink alcoholic beverages, or smoke, it is not due to the fact that he has some kind of inhibition or does it because he believes it will improve his health. He abstains from these because he is following the example of the great German, Richard Wagner, or because he has discovered that it increases his energy and endurance to such a degree that he can give much more of himself to the creation of the new German Reich.
    • Walter C. Langer, "The Mind of Adolf Hitler", Walter C. Langer, New York 1972 p.54-55
  • [T]he British people found it difficult, when they first heard of him, to take Hitler too seriously, with his Charlie Chaplin moustache and his everlasting raincoat. Naturally, nobody had bothered to read Mein Kampf. Nor could anybody see below the apparent insignificance of his appearance the deep, cunning, malignant brain. Here was concealed a combination of deceit and wickedness under a certain guise of plausibility, which can only now be fully grasped, when all the documents have been published and the whole evil story fully displayed to the world.
  • Beneš made one further concession. On 4 September [1938], in the hope of reaching a settlement, he offered to accept the demands of the Sudeten Germans; that is to say, complete local autonomy... What would happen now? Hitler's speech at Nuremberg, due to take place on 12 September, would perhaps give us the answer... We had in 1938 some kind of radio set... [N]o listener could fail to grasp the import of the venomous insulting sentences hissed out by the orator—raucous, maniacal, almost inhuman—and of the roars of "Sieg Heil!" from the frenzied audience, bawled out like the battle-cry of a horde of savages.
  • [T]he very decency of ordinary men and women in Britain was a handicap. In our insularity, we neither read Hitler's gospel, Mein Kampf, nor understood the nature of his movement, or the scale of his ambitions. We shut our eyes to the character of his internal régime and comforted ourselves that if Germany had become a police State, it was no worse than Russia. We did not realise the difference. One country was slowly emerging from, the other relapsing into, barbarism. In any event, Germany was then the immediate threat to Britain and to Europe. Hitler had, or so it would appear, an almost mesmeric effect upon many of his visitors of very different types and backgrounds. Chamberlain was only the last of a long series of dupes who, having made the pilgrimage to Berchtesgaden, unexpectedly fell under his spell for varying periods of time. After his first meeting at Berchtesgaden, Chamberlain got the impression "that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word". All failed to realise his extraordinary methods as a negotiator; the depths of deceit which he would practise; and the infamies to which he would sink... Hitler was notoriously guilty of dishonest breaches of faith time after time; yet, for some strange reason, he continued to be believed.
  • In its turn Germany longed for vengeance after its defeat in 1918. The Treaty of Versailles, the ‘Dictated’, was widely seen by Germans of all political persuasions as vindictive and unjust and it was held to blame for much that went wrong in Germany in the 1920s. An English journalist met two elderly sisters who said they could no longer send their laundry out once a week, all because of the treaty. Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in large part because they promised to break its ‘chains’. And break them Hitler did, declaring reparations payments at an end, openly breaching the disarmament clauses, moving troops into the demilitarised Rhineland and incorporating Austria into Germany. His aim was always much greater than destroying the treaty or making Germany the most powerful nation on the Continent. It was to give the German people – the Aryan race, as he thought of them – a huge territory befitting their status as the master race and, ultimately, ensure them domination of the world. Ideologies, whether idealistic, messianic, wicked or simply crackpot, lie at the heart of some of the greatest conflicts in history. Nationalists – and that covers a wide range, from the racists at one extreme to the patriots who value a shared culture and history at the other – have fought and killed and still do today in the name of the nation. ‘I regret,’ said the American revolutionary soldier Nathan Hale, ‘that I have but one life to lose for my country.’
  • Hitler ... was a hero, the hero-as-monster, embodying what had become the monstrous fantasy of a people, but the horror upon which the radical mind and liberal temperament foundered was that he gave outlet to the energies of the Germans and so presented the twentieth century with an index of how horrible had become the secret heart of its desire.
  • The man governed by license is prepared to destroy everything and everybody that stands in his way-himself first and foremost. Destruction and self-destruction are the inevitable consequences of license. The suicide of Hitler and his holocaust is the supreme example of self-destruction as the final stage of license. Hitler believed that the whole of Germany would gather around the fire he had lighted. I have read that he spent his last days issuing a constant stream of orders to armies that no longer existed or had disintegrated. He was indignant at these vanished armies for failing to carry out his instructions. His behavior is an excellent illustration of Sergei Bulgakov's observation that license always leads to loss of touch with reality. Bulgakov understood this at a time when license had still not taken on the extreme forms we have seen in our days.
  • Five hundred years from now, it won't be Hitler we remember. Hitler may have set the century's agenda; he was a sort of vortex of negative energy that sucked everything else in. But I think God takes fallible human beings like Roosevelt or Churchill and carves them for his purposes. In five centuries, we'll look back and say the story of the century was not Hitler or Stalin; it was the survival of the human spirit in the face of genocide.
  • Rauschning, at the end of 1939, denounced Hitler and his movement as 'the apocalyptic riders of world annihilation', and as an eruption of 'the beast from the abyss'. National Socialism, he added, was 'the Saint Vitus's dance of the twentieth century'; if Hitler won the war, it would mean the end of everything that made life worth living.
    • Meir Michaelis, 'World Power Status or World Dominion? A Survey of the Literature on Hitler's 'Plan of World Dominion' (1937-1970)', The Historical Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jun., 1972), p. 335
  • As far as Hitler is concerned, we regarded him as a true man. He was only a corporal when he earned the Iron Cross First Class in World War I. In those days that was quite an achievement. When he spoke at meetings or rallies he managed to captivate his audience. He was able to get us in a mood where we believed everything he said and we left fired with enthusiasms. Everyone I met respected and trusted Hitler and I myself shared these feelings and opinions.
  • People ask me who my heroes are. I admire Hitler because he pulled his country together when it was in a terrible state in the early thirties. But the situation here [Vietnam] is so desperate now that one man would not be enough. We need four or five Hitlers in Vietnam.
  • When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn't ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted. I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the president, either.
  • When I passed the chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.
  • My generation really grew up at a very scary time. This time is probably twice as scary, but since we didn't know this time was coming-the Second World War was coming, the Spanish Civil War was happening when I was in high school. Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia and made all those idiotic statements that are famous to this day. Like how beautiful it was to bomb the Ethiopians. The Italian kids in my school were in heaven, they were so delighted and proud they were fainting with joy. It was a scary time. Hitler was coming inch by inch by inch. I remember my parents talking about it.
  • I met Hitler for the first time on June 9, 1932. ... I found him curiously unimpressive. ... I could detect no inner quality which might explain his extraordinary hold on the masses. He was wearing a dark blue suit and seemed the complete petit-bourgeois. He had an unhealthy complexion, and with his little moustache and curious hair style had an indefinable bohemian quality. His demeanour was modest and polite, and although I had heard much about the magnetic quality of his eyes, I do not remember being impressed by them. ... [A]s he talked about his party's aims I was struck by the fanatical insistence with which he presented his arguments. I realized that the fate of my Government would depend to a large extent on the willingness of this man and his followers to back me up, and that this would be the most difficult problem with which I should have to deal.
  • Nazism and Fascism are thoroughly beaten, but I must admit that their defeat does not mean that barbarism and brutality have been defeated. On the contrary, it is no use closing our eyes to the fact that these hateful ideas achieved something like a victory in defeat. I have to admit that Hitler succeeded in degrading the moral standards of our Western world, and that in the world of today there is more violence and brutal force than would have been tolerated even in the decade after the first World war. And we must face the possibility that our civilization may ultimately be destroyed by those new weapons which Hitlerism wished upon us, perhaps even within the first decade after the second World war; for no doubt the spirit of Hitlerism won its greatest victory over us when, after its defeat, we used the weapons which the threat of Nazism had induced us to develop.
  • Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature. He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us but whether there is worse to come.
  • Hitler was able to announce his lies and offer them to us, like a bullfighter offering the cape. But we are not that furious beast of compulsive habit and compulsive thrust. We are a group of individuals; it was our own lies and wishes we were believing. Many of these lies had taken root then, and now they flourish.
  • Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau.
    • Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945, p. 685.
  • In his infamous memoir, Adolf Hitler regretted that, early in life, he’d seen anti-Semitism as persecution of a people on the basis of religious belief, which he thought wrong. He later came to think of this as a Jewish lie to hide the reality that the Jewish people were a separate “race” whose goal was to enslave the rest of mankind. It should not be lost that enslaving all of mankind is a concise summary of Hitler’s own political project.
  • But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and – until the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself – an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich.
  • Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, should it come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.
  • In retrospect, it is easy to see that the horrors inflicted upon the Jews of Germany on November 9 and the harsh and brutal measures taken against them afterward were portents of a fatal weakening which in the end would bring the dictator, his regime and his nation down in utter ruin. The evidences of Hitler's megalomania we have seen permeating hundreds of pages of this narrative. But until now he had usually been able to hold it in check at critical stages in his rise and in that of his country. At such moments his genius for acting not only boldly, but usually only after a careful calculation of the consequences, had won him one crashing success after another. But now, as November 9 and its aftermath clearly showed, Hitler was losing his self-control. His megalomania was getting the upper hand. The stenographic record of the Goering meeting on November 12 reveals that it was Hitler who, in the final analysis, was responsible for the holocaust of that November evening; it was he who gave the necessary approval to launch it; he who pressed Goering to go ahead with the elimination of Jews from German life. From now on the absolute master of the Third Reich would show little of that restraint which had saved him so often before. And though his genius and that of his country would lead to further startling conquests, the poisonous seeds of eventual self-destruction for the dictator and his land had now been sown. Hitler's sickness was contagious; the nation was catching it, as if it were a virus.
  • It was 3:30PM on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after Adolf Hitler's sixty-fifth birthday and twelve years and three months to a day since he had become Chancellor of Germany and instituted the Third Reich. It would survive him but a week.
  • In Hitler’s world, the law of the jungle was the only law. People were to suppress any inclination to be merciful and be as rapacious as they could. Hitler thus broke with the traditions of political thought that presented human beings as distinct from nature in their capacity to imagine and create new forms of association. Beginning from that assumption, political thinkers tried to describe not only the possible but the most just forms of society. For Hitler, however, nature was the singular, brutal, and overwhelming truth, and the whole history of attempting to think otherwise was an illusion. Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi legal theorist, explained that politics arose not from history or concepts but from our sense of enmity. Our racial enemies were chosen by nature, and our task was to struggle and kill and die.
  • In contrast to the ultimate realization that he was dealing with a formidable enemy in the east, Hitler clung to the end to his preconceived opinion that the troops of the Western countries were poor fighting material. Even the Allied successes in Africa and Italy could not shake his belief that these soldiers would run away at the first serious onslaught. He was convinced that these soldiers would run away from the first serious onslaught. He was convinced that democracy enfeebled a nation. As late as the summer of 1944 he held to his theory that all the ground that had been lost in the West would be quickly reconquered. His opinions on the Western statesmen had a similar bias. He considered Churchill, as he often stated during the situation conferences, an incompetent, alcoholic demagogue. And he asserted in all seriousness that Roosevelt was not a victim of infantile paralysis but of syphilitic paralysis and was therefore mentally unsound. These opinions, too, were indications, of his flight from reality in the last years of his life.
    • Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), p. 306-307
  • Hitler preached "superior and inferior races." Stalin challenged him in one of the most sweeping statements ever made of human equality: "Neither language nor color of skin nor cultural back-wardeness nor the stage of political development can justify national and race inequality".
  • At the beginning of the twentieth century, few people would have suspected that a nation considered by many to be the most cultured, advanced and civilized would elect to power a homicidal maniac and allow him to seize total control of every institution in the country and every facet of the community. A man who maltreated, gassed and otherwise murdered millions of people based on their racial and ethnic background.
  • The ruling elites in Britain and France failed to realize in time that they were not dealing with a slightly more excitable version of Weimar’s Gustav Stresemann or Heinrich Brüning. Hitler was a new phenomenon: an ideologically driven leader who sought not reasonable national satisfaction but absolute power. How did so many people miss seeing this catastrophe in the making until it was (almost) too late? Professional property and industrial developers use (when they can get away with it) a clever but none-too-moral method of gaining permission from the planning authorities for dubious projects. This entails applying for – and being granted – a succession of minor, apparently reasonable, and not necessarily dangerous-looking permissions until, in effect, these accumulate into a permitted project that would not have been allowed had the authorities been presented with the overall plan from the start. This is known in the business as ‘salami slicing’. With hindsight, we can see that Hitler was adept at the ‘salami-slicing’ technique in his relations with the British, French, Czechoslovaks, Poles and other interested parties during the later 1930s. By 1939, showing his characteristic mixture of boldness and guile, the Führer had accumulated what he needed, in territory, diplomatic clout and military strength, in order to dominate Europe – not to mention, potentially, the Eurasian lands to the east. During this same year, the democratic powers began to realize the true extent of his aims. Of course, by then it was far too late to thwart him without resorting to massive force.
    • Frederick Taylor, 1939: A People's History (2020)
  • Hitler had genuine admiration for the decisive manner in which the President had taken over the reins of government.
    • John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, New York, NY, Anchor Books, Doubleday (1992) p. 312n
  • Hitler's socialism was his own and subordinate to his secret aims. His concept of organized economy was close to genuine socialism but he would be a socialist only so long as it served the greater goal.
    • John Toland Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography New York: NY, Anchor Books—Doubleday (1976) p. 314
  • [H]e never abandoned his hopes of transforming the country's economic life so as to facilitate the rise of a new meritocratic elite. Hitler merely adjourned the whole subject of the economy's future shape until the day when he would realize his grandiose plans for conquest of vast territories. He thus demonstrated sufficient realism to recognize that he could not prepare Germany for a great war while undertaking a fundamental reorganization of its economy. Accordingly, he left in place the economic elite he had inherited and harnessed its talents for his purposes. Some observers have taken this as proof that he never seriously intended to tamper with the existing social order. But if one reads the monologues to which Hitler subjected his private entourage during the early phases of World War II, when his armies seemed invincible and victory appeared within his grasp, one must come to a different conclusion. For in those monologues Hitler affirmed his intention to alter Germany's economic life after the war so as to do away with what he condemned as the flaws that permitted too much wealth to accumulate in the hands of too few, and too often in what he regarded as undeserving hands. To the end Adolf Hitler held to his quest for a "third way" between capitalism and socialism.
  • [T]he erstwhile corporal and his 'ridiculously dangerous' Nazis, as I described them in a report. After the [Munich] Putsch he qualified as a topic, pennilessly raging against trade unions, Marxists, Masons, the Treaty of Versailles. Physically insecure he embodied frustration, and rang the bells of nationalism, which felt impotent too. Released from prison as negligible, he produced a rambling book cribbed from Houston Chamberlain. Few guessed that this was the new German Bible. Nobody in Britain read it, though statesmen must keep abreast of nonsense if they are to appraise our prospects. He also pinched Roman salute and blood-bath from Musso, and compounded a Welthanschauung of racialism. He had moustached disciples, a crackpot economist, Feder, a flair for hustings and 25 points. One of them made sense, but not good sense.
  • It seems likely that more will be written about Adolf Hitler than about anyone else in history with the exception of Jesus Christ. ... As long as people are fascinated by the range and depth of evil, Hitler will find readers, for he was the Molech who devoured human beings in a regime that was "the negation of God erected into a system of Government."
  • When [Friedrich] Krohn and Hitler first met around the time that Hitler first attended a meeting of what was to become the Nazi Party, Hitler told him that he favored a 'socialism' that took the form of a 'national Social Democracy' that was loyal to the state, not dissimilar to that of Scandinavia, England, and prewar Bavaria.
    • Thomas Weber, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi, New York, NY, Basic Books, 2017, pp. 66-67
  • In theory, all Munich-based military units and thus Hitler's regiment, too, were part of the Red Army. In that sense, Hitler served in the Red Army. In reality, however, most regiments neither actively supported the Soviet [Bavarian] regime nor opposed it.
    • Thomas Weber, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi, New York, NY, Basic Books, 2017, p. 52
  • For genius he had, genius on the grandest scale, a genius which finally found expression in works beside which those of Wagner sink to the timid maunderings of a church organist. The Nazi party was his brush, the German nation his palette, Europe – the world – his canvas.
    With these he created out of his sick imagination, out of all the anger, bitterness, frustration and contempt which boiled within him, one stupendous, horrible and tragic masterpiece. It was not in Ireland that Yeats's "terrible beauty" was born: but in Germany.
    In Hitler the romantic movement reaches a conclusion at once logical and grotesque. The artist, having established his independence of the world, now returns upon it as conqueror. The unacknowledged legislator is at last acknowledged, and lays down the law. The arch-romantic bends the world to his will, and expresses himself at the world's expense. He makes a picture out of our reality.
    • Colin Welch, "Hitler the Arch-Romantic – and His Masterpiece", The Daily Telegraph (8 November 1960), quoted in Colin Welch, The Odd Thing About the Colonel & Other Pieces, eds. Craig Brown and Frances Welch (1997), p. 72
  • Was there no resistance to his disastrous projects? There was. But it was too feeble, too weak and too late to succeed... The fact is that Hitler was beloved by his people—not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by the average Germans who pledged to him an affection, a tenderness and a fidelity that bordered on the irrational... Winston Churchill was the only man of state who unmasked Hitler immediately and refused to let himself be duped by Hitler's repeated promises that this time he was making his "last territorial demand." ... In his own "logic," Hitler was persuaded for a fairly long time that the German and British people had every reason to get along and divide up spheres of influence throughout the world. He did not understand British obstinacy in its resistance to his racial philosophy and to the practical ends it engendered... After Rommel's defeat in North Africa, after the debacle at Stalingrad and even when the landings in Normandy were imminent, Hitler and his entourage still had the mind to come up with the Final Solution. In his testament, drafted in a underground bunker just hours before his suicide in Berlin, Hitler returns again to this hatred of the Jewish people that had never left him. But in the same testament, he settles his score with the German people. He wants them to be sacked, destroyed, reduced to misery and shame for having failed him by denying him his glory. The former corporal become commander in chief of all his armies and convinced of his strategic and political genius was not prepared to recognize his own responsibility for the defeat of his Reich.
  • Unlike Mussolini [Hitler] spurned the 'proletariat' and its Marxism, which was as bad as Christianity in his eyes, for it, too, was the faith of the downtrodden and the weak. In Vienna perhaps, certainly later in Munich, Hitler picked up, with a smattering of Nietzsche, the opposite religion of the strong.
  • ...crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not 'essential' enough...
    • Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), as quoted by Adam Kirsch, "The Deadly Jester", The New Republic, December 2, 2008

The War Aims and Strategies of Adolf Hitler (2005)

by Oscar Pinkus, Jefferson, NC: McFarland
  • Adolf Hitler was... a slightly stooped man... with drooping shoulders and a pallid face. ...His voice was shrill and raucus. His... plebian face and general resemblance to a clerk contrasted sharply with his speech... Sulky, morbid and slightly unkept... Because of his rather frail physical frame, he was rejected by the Austrians for military service... When later in the war his eyesight deteriorated he avoided wearing spectacles... He feared flying and distrusted the sea. He refused to indulge in any sport or competition, saying "A leader cannot afford to be beaten in games."
  • Hitler... ate no meat, drank no alcohol, and did not smoke, nor would he allow others to smoke in his presence. Instead, he was fond of sweets. He was not interested in wealth... Of the six women with whom he was involved... five attempted or committed suicide...
  • Hitler's education was rudimentary. The grades he received in school were poor and he failed to finish high school. For this he hated his teachers. ...Except for newspapers and books on military tactics he had no interest in reading for, said he, "Only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will result from all this reading."
  • Hitler completely lacked what is a common human trait—a sense of shame.
  • Vague, wary, secretive, he preferred endless talk. He had a remarkable memory... employed false data and false facts and when discovered never flinched, arguing "The New Testament is full of contradictions but did not prevent spread the spread of Christianity."
  • Hitler can be described as a possessed psycopath... Whatever he... formulated remained unaltered throughout his life and no... facts ever altered it. He bent and slanted reality to suit his conceptions...
  • All major decisions were taken by Hitler, without any consultation...
  • He exterminated by class, by nationality, by race; everyone with a university degree, all retarded people, all gypsies, all Jews, all Russian POWs—slaughtering entire populations according to his private demons.
  • Hitler must be classed as a nihilist because he possessed not one positive idea or objective. ...He had no love or loyalty to anyone or anything.
  • Before he committed suicide he ordered the destruction of... the Reich, pronouncing... the German people had no right to exist, for they had proved inferior to the "Eastern Peoples."

Sources

  • Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–August 1939, Vols. 1 and 2, Oxford University Press, 1942.
  • John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, Viking, 1999.
  • Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi conception of Christianity, 1919–1945, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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References

  1. ↑ http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Reports2013/hitlerenablingact.htm
  2. ↑ https://www.zum.de/psm/ns/hitler11_macht.php
  3. ↑ Hebrew Nations
  4. ↑ Why Man Should Not Be As Cruel As Nature, bartleby.com.
  5. ↑ 1
  6. ↑ "the+only+religion+i+respect+is+islam" 2
  7. ↑ Gibbs, Walter (27 February 2009). "Norwegian Nobel Laureate, Once Shunned, Is Now Celebrated". The New York Times. Retrieved on 16 May 2011. 
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