Anti Communists

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Lenin is the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith is very slight."

"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!"

"Los Hitler, los Mussolini.../¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas!/Las dos víboras de Europa/que con la muerte se pactan."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The only religion I respect is Islam. The only prophet I admire is the Prophet Muhammad."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"I do not see why man should not be as cruel as nature."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish, we shall be in a position to achieve."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"All major decisions were taken by Hitler, without any consultation..."

"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..."

"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 completely lacked what is a common human trait—a sense of shame."

"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... 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..."

"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.""

"...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..."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"[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."

"[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."

"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."

"Hitler had genuine admiration for the decisive manner in which the President had taken over the reins of government."

"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."

"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."

"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"."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."