Politicians From Austria

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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, 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe."

"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. ""

"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."

"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'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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"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..."

"Hitler is a prodigious genius."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"(pg 59) [Hitler] was profoundly imbued with German paganism, more so, perhaps, than Ludendorff or Rosenberg himself. (pg 93) Hitler is an atheist."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."