Anti Communists

"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."

"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.’"

"[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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"As a non-geneticist, if he was presented with his own DNA, he would probably have sent himself to the gas chamber."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend."

"I would have preferred it if he'd followed his original ambition and become an architect."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In many thundering discourses, Hitler expressed his respect, if not admiration for Stalinist Communism and its leader."

"What was new about Hitler and Stalin was what Friedrich Meinecke, in an attempt shortly after World War II to express his horror at Hitler's moral nihilism, called a 'Machiavellianism of the masses'."

"Hitler did a better job than Stalin of accomplishing Lenin's totalitarian promises—better, too, than Mussolini,..."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"What's to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn't right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question."

"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?"

"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."

"Try explaining Hitler to a kid."

"In the introduction to his edition of Hitler's Table Talk, Hugh Trevor-Roper maintains that Hitler's ideas on culture were "trivial, half-baked and disgusting". This seems questionable. At least, there are marked similarities between the cultural ideals promulgated in the Führer's writings and conversation and those of the intellectuals we have been looking at... The contention, then, that Hitler's ideas on culture were trivial, half-baked and disgusting can be allowed only if the same epithets are applied to numerous cultural ideas prevalent among English intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, some of which are still espoused today. The superiority of "high" art, the eternal glory of Greek sculpture and architecture, the transcendent value of the old masters and of classical music, the supremacy of Shakespeare, Goethe and other authors acknowledged by intellectuals as great, the divine spark that animates all productions of genius and distinguishes them from the low amusements of the mass — these were among Hitler's most dearly held beliefs. His contempt for "gutter journalism", advertising and "cinema bilge", his espousal of the aristocratic principle, and his comparison of the "dunderheaded multitude" with women and children, are other features that readers of this book will have no difficulty matching in intellectual discourse. To such readers, his various rewritings of the mass — as exterminable subhumans, as an inhibited bourgeois herd, as noble workers, as peasant pastoral — will also be familiar intellectual devices. The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."