Politicians From Austria

"[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, 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'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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"National self-interest...leads no wise man into war. War has often been the resort of fools like Mussolini or knaves like Hitler. They shared a common fate."

"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."

"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."

"In prison for his part in the 1923 putsch, Hitler rethought the Italian example in the light of his own failure and concluded that he could only win power through the ballot box. Electoral propaganda was at first directed primarily at industrial workers, in the hope of detaching them from the KDP. But in the 1928 elections showed unexpected gains amongst the Protestant peasantry, who had suffered badly from the agricultural crisis. From then on was more targeted at conservative voters, and this paid off with electoral breakthrough in 1930."

"For want of alternatives, the conservatives made Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933. Like Mussolini, Hitler alone bridged the gap between parliamentary and street politics."

"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."

"The Motorisierung [i.e. expanding motor transportation] was for Hitler the most important contribution to solving the social question, more important even than private housebuilding."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."