On the whole, German language material has been newly translated for the purposes of this book, even when the reference is to an original English publication (such as Alan Bullock’s Hitler). Mein Kampf, however, is uniformly quoted in Ralph Manheim’s translation (with some emendations approved by him), currently available in paperback (Sentry Edition), published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. Short references, consisting of author’s name and page number only, are fully listed in the bibliography.
The notes are not restricted solely to sources but frequently develop various subjects discussed in the text; therefore, proper names of people appearing in expository sections of the notes will be found in the index.
Where English translations of foreign works have been published, they are mentioned in the bibliography following the entry for the original work.
For this edition the author has cut the notes by about half; readers interested in the full apparatus are referred to the German edition.
PROLOGUE
1. This Ranke quotation is cited in one of Konrad Heiden’s books. The author is aware of his indebtedness to Heiden in many respects. His was the earliest historical study of the phenomena of Hitler and National Socialism, and in the boldness of its inquiry and the freedom of its judgment it remains exemplary to the present day.
2. Speech of February 24, 1937, in the Munich Hofbräuhaus; see Kotze and Krausnick, p. 107.
3. Trevor-Roper, ed., Foreword to Le Testament politique de Hitler, p. 13.
4. Speech of May 20, 1937; see Kotze and Krausnick, p. 223.
5. Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History, pp. 313 ff. With Hitler in mind, Gottfried Benn in a famous letter to Klaus Mann specifically referred to Burckhardt’s observation. Benn wrote: “But here and now you may constantly hear the question: did Hitler create the Movement or did the Movement create him? This question is significant; the two cannot be distinguished because they are both identical. What is really involved here is that mysterious coincidence of the individual and the communal that Burckhardt speaks of in his Reflections on History, when he describes the great men who have moved history. Great men—it is all there: the dangers of the beginning, their appearance almost always in times of terror, the enormous perseverance, the abnormal facility in all things, especially in organic functions; but then also the premonition of all thinking persons that he is the one to accomplish things that are essential and that only he can accomplish.” Gottfried Benn, Gesammelte Werke IV, pp. 246 f.
7. Thomas Mann, “Bruder Hitler,” in: Gesammelte Werke XII, p. 778.
8. Kühnl, “Der deutsche Faschismus,” in: Neue politische Literatur, 1970:1, p. 13.
10. Hitler speaking to the chiefs of the Wehrmacht in the chancellery on May 23, 1939; see Domarus, p. 1197.
BOOK I
1. Cf. Dietrich, Zwölf Jahre, p. 149. See also Heiden, Geschichte, p. 75.
3. Maser, Hitler, p. 34. For Frank’s story see Frank, Im Angesicht des Galgens, pp. 320 f.; also Maser, Hitler, pp. 26 f. Maser cannot, of course, prove his thesis. Nevertheless, he advances his argument as if it were conclusive. Even the fact that Hitler waited until after his wife’s death to legitimize Alois is, to Maser, in favor of his argument, although that fact suggests just the opposite of his conclusion. It is reasonable to assume that Hitler would have been prompted to such an act of consideration only if he wished to admit that he himself was the father and had legitimized Alois as his own son. All the other arguments are equally dubious. In general, Maser cannot suggest any plausible motive for Hüttler’s conduct. It is a very old assumption that Hitler insisted on the change of name as a condition for appointing Alois Schicklgruber his heir; cf., for instance, Kubizek, p. 59. We must add that the question of who Hitler’s grandfather was is really of secondary importance. Only Hans Frank’s version could have given it a new psychological dimension; aside from that, it is merely a matter of minor interest.
7. Mein Kampf, p. 18. Hitler alleged a “serious lung ailment,” but the assertion will not hold water. Cf. Jetzinger, p. 148; also Heiden, Hitler I, p. 28. The episode is also reported in Zoller, p. 49, where Hitler traces his dislike for alcohol back to it. On the incident of the discarded report card cf. Maser, Hitler, pp. 68 ff.
8. Kubizek repeatedly stresses Hitler’s striking tendency to confound dream and reality. See, for example, pp. 100 f. For the episode of the lottery ticket (which follows here), see pp. 127 ff.
10. Ibid., pp. 140 ff. However, the scene appears to have been exaggerated and retouched. On the whole, Kubizek’s credibility is suspect. His memoirs were conceived with the intention of glorifying Hitler. The value of the book consists less in demonstrable facts than in the descriptions and character judgments that quite often emerge against the author’s will.
11. Mein Kampf, p. 5. Hitler speaks of the “lovely dream” on p. 18. Cf. the letter to Kubizek dated August 4, 1933, in which Hitler speaks of the “best years of my life”; facsimile in Kubizek, p. 32.
12. Oral communication from Albert Speer. On Hitler’s fantasy of withdrawing from politics see Tischgespräche, pp. 167 f.
13. Cf. Andies, p. 192. Also, for this and the previously mentioned facts and statistics: Jenks, pp. 113 ff. In 1913, 29 per cent of the students in the Faculty of Medicine were Jews, 20.5 per cent in the Faculty of Law, and 16.3 per cent in the Faculty of Philosophy. By contrast, the Jewish proportion among criminals was 6.3 per cent, considerably lower than the Jewish proportion in the population at large. Cf. Jenks, pp. 121 f.
14. Mein Kampf, p. 19. The following “classification list” is printed in Heiden, Hitler I, p. 30 (Der Führer, p. 52).
17. Quoted in Maser, Hitler, pp. 82 ff. Cf. also the report of the Vienna Gestapo dated December 30, 1941, quoted in Smith, p. 113.
19. We owe the precise calculation of Hitler’s monthly income to Franz Jetzinger, who with pedantic ingenuity has tracked down all the sources of such income. The comparison to the earnings of a junior magistrate is also his. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that at this time Mussolini was employed in Austrian Trent as editor-in-chief of L’Avvenire del Lavoratore and secretary of the socialist Labor Bureau. For these two jobs he received a total income of 120 crowns—not much more than Hitler’s income as one of the unemployed. See Kirkpatrick, Mussolini.
20. Kubizek, pp. 126, 210–20, 256 f., 307. Also Jetzinger, pp. 194 ff. For Hitler’s remark that he heard Tristan in Vienna thirty or forty times, see Cameron and Stevens, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, pp. 270 f. Jenks, p. 202, has shown that during Hitler’s years in Vienna Richard Wagner was incontestably the most popular operatic composer; at the Hofoper alone Wagner operas were given on at least 426 evenings during that period.
21. Tischgespräche, pp. 275, 323, 422. Also Kubizek, p. 199, describes Hitler venting his anger upon the Academy. This must refer to his first rejection, since Kubizek was not in Vienna at the time of the second rejection and saw nothing of Hitler again after he returned.
22. Mein Kampf, p. 23. In much the same sense Stefan Zweig notes in Die Welt von gestern, p. 50, “the worst threat that existed in the bourgeois world was falling back into the proletariat.” See also Heiden, Geschichte, p. 16.
23. Greiner, p. 25. Greiner’s memories of Hitler raise many questions. In contrast to Kubizek he has no proof of the close acquaintanceship that he claims to have had with Hitler. Nevertheless, his work does contain a number of hints that increase our knowledge. His evidence can be used, however, only to the extent that it is supported by other accounts, or by other examples of similar behavior on Hitler’s part.
25. Cf. Wilfried Daim, Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab. Lanz considered Hitler his disciple; he named, among other disciples who had early seen the importance of his doctrines, Lord Kitchener and Lenin! This fact sheds considerable light on Lanz himself and the pathological structure of his thought. His principal work, published in 1905, bore the illuminating title: Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-ûfflingen und dem GötterElektron. Eine Einführung in die älteste und neueste Weltanschauung und eine Rechtfertigung des Fürstentumes und des Adels (“Theo-zoology or the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods. An Introduction into the Oldest and Newest Philosophy and a Justification of Royalty and Nobility”). The blue-blond “Arioheroicans” were in his view “masterpieces of the gods,” equipped with electric organs and even transmitters. By eugenic concentration and breeding for purity the Arioheroic race was to be redeveloped and once again provided with the divine electromagnetic-radiological organs and powers it had lost. The age’s anxiety feelings, elitist leanings toward secret societies, fashionable idolization of Science by dabblers in the sciences, all tied together by a considerable dose of intellectual and personal fraud, combined to shape this doctrine.
Daim surely overestimates Lanz’s influence on Hitler; it seems certain that this influence did not extend beyond the limits described in the text. The situation is obviously different in regard to several other Nazi leaders, such as Darre and above all Heinrich Himmler. Directly or indirectly, in both the breeding catalogues of the SS Race and Settlement Bureau and in the practice of exterminating “unfit” lives, or Jews, Slavs, and gypsies, the weird and murderous notions of Lanz von Liebenfels in a way persisted.
27. Greiner, p. 110. Cf. Bullock, Hitler, p. 39; but see also Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 26.
28. Mein Kampf, p. 325. The assurance, urged as “a certainty,” that Hitler had no relations with women in Linz or Vienna, comes from Kubizek and of course applies only to the time Kubizek spent with Hitler (Kubizek, p. 276).
31. Maser, Frühgeschichte, p. 92, has a different opinion; he maintains that Kubizek was in the right as against Hitler, but adduces no evidence to justify his view. For the cited phrases from Hitler see Mein Kampf, pp. 39 f., where Hitler also admits that his knowledge of union organization at the time he began work at the building site was still “practically nonexistent.” There is no reason to doubt this assertion. Hitler’s anti-Semitism at this time was not yet thoroughgoing or consistent. As late as 1936 Hanisch, his companion from the home for men, insisted that Hitler in Vienna had not been an anti-Semite. Hanisch presented an extensive list of Jews with whom Hitler had allegedly maintained cordial relations. Cf. Smith, p. 149.
32. Cf. Jahrbuch der KK Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie, 1909, pp. A 108, A 118, cited in Smith, p. 127. Werner Maser (Frühgeschichte, p. 77) has challenged Konrad Heiden and the historians deriving from him. Making downright assertions on a flimsy foundation, Maser argues that financial reasons would “with certainty” not have forced Hitler to seek shelter in a doss-house. But in calculating Hitler’s financial situation Maser has assumed that Hitler’s inheritance from his father was available to him as a permanent annuity. In reality it amounted to about 700 crowns and, depending on how quickly Hitler spent it, was bound to be used up sooner or later. Maser is so bent on showing that Hitler had financial security that he even suggests the possibility (and in a later passage terms it a probability) that Hitler lived in the doss-house “because he wanted to study the conditions there.”
33. Heiden, Hitler I, p. 43. Some interesting details on the home for men are to be found in Jenks, pp. 26 ff. According to Jenks, the home was restricted to persons with an income of under 1,500 crowns per year. It had 544 beds and was the fourth project of this type built by a foundation committed to alleviating the housing shortage. From 1860 to 1900 the population of Vienna had risen by 259 per cent; after Berlin (281 per cent) this was the steepest increase in Europe. Paris, for example, showed a population increase of only 60 per cent during the same period. The statistics obtained by Jenks show that in the eight predominantly proletarian districts of Vienna there was an average of 4.0 to 5.2 persons per room.
35. Thomas Mann, “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,” in; Essays of Three Decades.
36. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 215 f. Also Albert Speer in a note to the author dated September 15, 1969.
37. Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke 12, pp. 775 f.
38. Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, p. 24.
39. Mein Kampf, p. 41; also Kubizek, p. 220.
41. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts, I, p. 352.
42. Bullock, p. 36; for this whole context cf. also Hans-Günter Zmarzlik, “Social Darwinism as a Historical Problem,” in: Hajo Holborn, ed., Republic to Reich.
43. Tischgespräche, pp. 179, 226, 245, 361, 447; many other similar phrases may be found in the table talk and in the wartime speeches.
44. Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner, p. 309.
46. Thomas Mann; Gesammelte Werke 9, p. 176.
48. For the complex of motives governing his departure from Vienna cf. Mein Kampf, p. 123.
49. The description of this affair of the call-up follows the conclusions of Jetzinger, pp. 253 if. He also deserves the credit for having uncovered the circumstances.
51. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, p. 461.
52. Around the turn of the century Georges Sorel popularized this remark of Proudhon’s. The quotation reads in full: “War is the orgasm of universal life which fructifies and moves chaos, the prelude for all creations, and which like Christ the Saviour triumphs beyond death through death itself.” Quoted in Freund, Abendglanz Europas, p. 9. “Sacred Hymns” was the title Gabriele d’Annunzio gave to the collection of his poems pleading for Italy’s entry into the war (Gli inni sacri della guerra giusta).
55. Hitler’s letter to lustizassessor Hepp in February, 1915; photocopy in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich. The previous remark is quoted from Fritz Wiedemann, Der Mann der Feldherr werden wollte, p. 29. The cited letter indicates that it deserves credence even in this somewhat deprecatory phrasing; it is the more credible because it trenchantly characterizes Hitler’s general manner of expressing his ideas, right down to the table talk of later years. Cf. also Wiedemann, p. 24, and Mein Kampf, pp. 166 f.
58. All these quotations ibid., pp. 182 ff.
60. Regrettably, Hitler’s medical file disappeared even before 1933, and has not been recovered. Hitler’s military papers merely note tersely that he was “gassed.” The chemical in question was mustard gas, the effects of which generally did not blind, but greatly reduced sight and sometimes occasioned temporary blindness.
63. Communication from Speer to the author. The remark was made on the occasion of Hitler’s visit to Speer’s sickbed in Klessheim Palace. See Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 335. The above-mentioned speech is that of February 15, 1942. In context the passage reads: “How important is a world that I myself can see if it is repressive, if my own people are enslaved? In that case, what can I see worth seeing?” The text is cited from Kotze and Krausnick, p. 322. See also Maser, Frühgeschichte, p. 127. Maser quotes a personal communication from General Vincenz Müller, who allegedly informed General von Bredow, on orders from Schleicher, that Hitler’s blindness had been solely “hysterical in nature.” But on the wartime personnel roster Hitler was recorded as wounded, “gassed.”
66. Kessler, Tagebücher 1918–1937, p. 173.
67. Preiss, p. 38 (speech of March 23, 1927).
69. Winston Churchill, as quoted in Deuerlein, Aufstieg, p. 23 (without source).
70. Mein Kampf, p. 207. On the question of the red armband see Maser, Frühgeschichte, p. 132. Ernst Deuerlein has even argued that in the winter of 1918–19 Hitler entertained the notion of joining the Social Democratic Party. See Deuerlein, A ufstieg, p. 80.
INTERPOLATION I
1. Ernest Niekisch in: Widerstand III, 11, issue of November, 1928. See also Hitler in the special issue of the VB (Völkischer Beobachter) of January 3, 1921, and in the speech of September 22, 1920, also of April 12, 1922, which show broad variations on the same theme. The VB of July 19, 1922, for example, called Germany the “ideological training ground for international finance,” a “colony” of the victorious powers. Hitler sometimes denounced the Reich government as a “bailiff for the Allies” and the Weimar Constitution as the “law for enforcing the Treaty of Versailles”; cf. also Hitler’s speech of November 30, 1922 (this speech, as well as those mentioned in the following notes for which no other source is given, will be found in the corresponding issue of the VB).
2. Münchener Beobachter, October 4, 1919. This is the sheet from which the Völkische Beobachter later emerged; the quoted article purports to be a missive from an unnamed Catholic clergyman of Basel.
3. “Krasnij Terror,” October 1, 1918, quoted by Nolte, Faschismus, p. 24.
4. Hitler’s memorandum on the expansion of the NSDAP of October 22, 1922, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. I, 1509. The proclamation of the National Socialist Party headquarters cited earlier is printed in VB, July 19, 1922.
5. See the speech of April 12, 1922. For Hitler’s other assertions see the speeches of July 28, 1922; April 27, 1920; September 22, 1920; April 21, 1922; and the article in VB for January 1, 1921. Rosenberg, who obviously helped to shape the notions about atrocities in Russia, wrote in the VB of April 15, 1922, that Russia had “during Lenin’s ‘government’ become a battlefield strewn with corpses, an inferno in which millions upon millions of persons wander about famished, where millions are diseased, starved, and have died a miserable death on deserted roads.” The following quotation is taken from Hitler’s Reichstag speech of March 7, 1936. See Domarus, p. 587.
6. Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, p. 10.
8. Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Frankfurt am Main, 1967, pp. 561 ff.
9. Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, p. 86.
10. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, p. 135.
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Dawn,” in: Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans., The Portable Nietzsche, p. 84.
12. Hermann Bahr, Der Antisemitismus. Ein internationales Interview. Bahr’s publication was based on conversations with many German and European writers and people in public life.
13. Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, pp. 140 f. See also the thoughtful comments on it in Eva G. Reichmann, Flucht in den Hass, pp. 82 ff. But cf. also Franz Neumann, Behemoth, p. 121. Neumann argued that anti-Semitism in Germany was extremely feeble and that the German people were “the least anti-Semitic”; this very fact, he held, was what made anti-Semitism a suitable weapon for Hitler.
14. VB, April 6, 1920. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck spoke of the “German mania for taking over all the ideas of the Westerners,” as though it were an honor to be received into the circle of the liberal nations.
15. Libres propos, p. 225. After eating, Hitler regularly rinsed his mouth; out of doors he almost always wore gloves, at least in his later years. Cf. also Kubizek, p. 286. The fear of venereal infection was, it is true, the prevailing anxiety of that whole generation. Zweig, Die Welt von gestern, pp. 105 ff., speaks of the extent to which it dominated people’s minds in Vienna.
16. The quotations and references are taken from, in order, VB of March 3, 1920, September 12, 1920, January 10, 1923, Mein Kampf, pp. 233 ff. and 257 ff. For this whole context cf. Nolte, Epoche, pp. 480 ff., where the central importance of anxiety as a factor in Hitler’s conduct as a whole is discussed. Similarly, Franz Neumann in his “Notizen zur Theorie der Diktatur” has pointed out the function of anxiety in the totalitarian state. See his Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat, pp. 242 ff. and 261 ff., where the verdict is rendered that Germany in that phase of its history was “the land of alienation and anxiety.”
18. Preiss, p. 152; also VB of January 1, 1921, and March 10, 1920—which, incidentally, appeared under the banner headline of: “Clean Out the Jews!” The article demanded immediate expulsion of all Jews who had immigrated after August 1, 1914, and the removal of all others from “all government posts, newspapers, theaters, and motion picture houses.” Special “collection camps” were to be set up to receive them.
19. Mein Kampf, pp. 65, 247, 249.
20. Stefan George, “Das Neue Reich,” in: Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9.
21. George L. Mosse, “Die Entstehung des Faschismus,” in: Internationaler Faschismus 1920–1945, p. 29.
BOOK II
1. In the proclamations of the Bavarian People’s Party (April 9, 1919), of the Bavarian Landtag (April 19), and in a report of the Bavarian Gruppenkommando on “The Bolshevist Danger and Ways of Fighting It” (July 15, 1919), the new men were indiscriminately equated with “elements alien to country and race,” “foreign, politicizing Jews,” “unscrupulous alien scoundrels” from the prisons and penitentiaries, “Jewish rascals,” and “misleaders of labor.” See Franz-Willing, Die Hitlerbewegung, pp. 32 ff. This crude propaganda always put Eisner on a par with the Communist leaders Lewien, Levine, and Axelrod, all of whom were in fact Russian emigres. The influence of that association has persisted to this day.
2. Josef Hofmiller, “Revolutionstagebuch 1918/1919,” in Schriften 2, Leipzig, 1938, p. 211. As for the number of victims, the extremely bitter fighting between April 30 and May 8, 1919, took a total of 557 lives, according to the police inquiry. In a report of the army’s Military History Research Institute on “The Repression of Soviet Rule in Bavaria in 1919,” published in 1939, the total is subjected to analysis. Of these 557 persons “38 White and 93 Red soldiers, 7 citizens and 7 Russians, fell in battle. In summary executions under martial law 42 members of the Red Army and 144 civilians were shot. No fewer than 184 innocent persons were killed either because of their own foolishness or unfortunate mischance. In forty-two cases the cause of death could not be ascertained. Three hundred and three wounded persons were reported.” Different figures are given by Maser, Frühgeschichte, pp. 40 f. Cf. also Emil Gumbel, Verräter verfallen der Feme, p. 36 passim.
3. Mein Kampf, p. 208. The reference is to Feder’s crackpot idea of “smashing interest slavery”; as one of the lecturers he was trying to popularize this notion in his talks.
4. See Ernst Deuerlein, “Hitlers Eintritt in die Politik und die Reichswehr,” in VJHfZ 1959: 2, p. 179. Incidentally, Hitler was not, as he puts it in Mein Kampf, p. 215, appointed as an “educational officer,” but was carried on the roster as a “liaison man.” It is a moot question whether his motive in covering up his real activity was a desire to share in the prestige of bourgeois education or in that of officer’s rank, or whether he merely wanted to avoid the dubious repute of liaison man, which implied “informer.”
5. The full text of Hitler’s letter, which is dated September 16, 1919, is printed by Deuerlein, “Hitlers Eintritt in die Politik und die Reichswehr,” pp. 201 ff.
6. In order to lessen Drexler’s importance, Hitler does not give his name (“I had not quite understood his name”). Instead, he repeatedly speaks of him as “that worker,” or uses similar phrases. When at last he has to mention Drexler as the chairman, he does so without indicating that it was Drexler who pressed the pamphlet on him. See Mein Kampf, pp. 219 ff.
7. Mein Kampf, p. 224. Also Adolf Hitler, “10 Jahre Kampf,” in: Illustrierter Beobachter, IV:31 (August 3, 1929).
10. Cf. the record of the Munich Political Intelligence Service in Reginald H. Phelps, “Hitler als Parteiredner im Jahre 1920,” in: VJHfZ 1963:3, pp. 292 ff. Phelps also relates the story of the finding of the documents he reproduces. Hitler’s romanticizing, exaggerated account of the meeting may be found in Mein Kampf, pp. 365 ff.
11. The importance of the program was long underestimated, and it was often dismissed as a mere opportunistic propaganda trick. That opinion overlooks the seriousness and the anxious sincerity of those who drafted the program. Hitler himself, moreover, was at that time not playing the kind of part that this interpretation assumes. Recently, more balanced evaluations of the party program have begun to appear; cf., for example, Jacobsen and Jochmann, Ausgewählte Dokumente, p. 24, or Nolte, Epoche, p. 392. A different view is taken by Bracher, Diktatur, p. 98.
12. On the “Protocols” see Günter Schubert, Anfänge nationalsozialistischer Aussenpolitik, pp. 33 ff. In the first Hitler speech for which the full text is available, the speech of August 13, 1920, Hitler used many themes from the “Protocols.” Cf. Phelps, “Hitlers grundlegende Rede über den Antisemitismus,” VJHfZ, 1968:4, p. 398.
13. Cf. Mein Kampf, p. 170, where Hitler states that “movements with a definite spiritual foundation . . . can . . . only be broken with technical instruments of power if these physical weapons are at the same time the support of a new thought, idea or philosophy.” Two pages further on he writes: “Any attempt to combat a philosophy with methods of violence will fail in the end, unless the fight takes the form of attack for a new spiritual attitude.” Similar statements may be found in Hitler’s speech of August 13, 1920, VJHfZ, 1968:4, pp. 415, 417.
14. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 174 f.
16. Deuerlein, “Eintritt,” p. 211 (Doc. 19) and p. 215 (Doc. 24).
17. Dietrich Eckart admitted in VB, July 15, 1922, that he had personally received 60,000 marks from General von Epp. The newspaper cost 120.000 marks, and in addition had debts amounting to 250,000 marks. This liability was also assumed by the NSDAP. Hitler himself declared that he “paid a heavy price” for his foolishness at the time; and it appears that the party had to bear the burden of these debts until 1933. As one method of supporting the newspaper, every party member undertook to subscribe to the VB; from January, 1921, on the membership dues of.50 mark were supplemented by an equal sum for the support of the party newspaper. The circulation remained static at first, then dropped to almost 8.000 before rising, in the spring of 1922, to 17,500 subscribers. Cf. Dietrich Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party 1919–1933, p. 22.
18. Report by Heinrich Derbacher of a meeting with Dietrich Eckart in January, 1920. From the posthumous papers of Anton Drexler, quoted in Deuerlein, Aufstieg, p. 104; also, with further quotations, Nolte, Epoche, p. 403.
19. Konrad Heiden, Hitler, a Biography, cited by Bullock, p. 81.
20. Karl Alexander von Müller, Im Wandel einer Welt, p. 129.
22. Cf. especially the speeches in VJHfZ 1963:3, pp. 289 ff. and VJHfZ 1968:4, pp. 412 ff.
23. Ibid., pp. 107 ff. The party committee’s reply is also printed here.
24. Quoted in: Rudolf Hess, der Stellvertreter des Führers, no author indicated; published in the series Zeitgeschichte, Berlin, 1933, pp. 9 ff.
25. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 81.
27. Speech of August 1, 1923, quoted in Boepple, p. 72.
28. Hitler in VB, August 30, 1922; also Mein Kampf, p. 100. In the party of the early period small craftsmen and small businessmen were distinctly overrepresented—187 per cent in proportion to their numbers in the general population. On this subject cf. Iring Fetcher, “Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus,” p. 53.
30. Tischgespräche, pp. 261 f.; here Hitler mentions a whole list of his tactics and tricks; cf. also Mein Kampf, pp. 504 f., and Heiden, Geschichte, p. 28.
31. K. A. v. Müller, pp. 144 f.
32. Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, vol. I, p. 107; also R. H. Phelps in: VJFfZ 1963:3, p. 299.
33. Tischgespräche, p. 451; also Heiden, Geschichte, p. 109. For the following remark of Hitler, see Mein Kampf, p. 467.
34. Kurt G. W. Luedecke, I Knew Hitler, pp. 22 f.; also Ernst Hanfstaengl, Zwischen Weissem und Braunem Haus, p. 43.
35. Cf. Tischgespräche, p. 224.
36. Communicated to the author by Albert Speer. Speer was present at this scene; “Wolfsburg” was the name of an estate in the vicinity.
37. According to Hitler’s statement; cf. Görlitz and Quint, Adolf Hitler, p. 185.
39. Cf. Maser, Hitler, p. 405, for many details. Further references in Heiden, Geschichte, pp. 143 ff.; Franz-Willing, p. 177, and Bullock, pp. 84 f. Bullock underestimates the importance of foreign financial backers, probably because the sources of support have been only recently uncovered.
40. Franz-Willing, p. 182. Cf. also Luedecke, p. 99. Luedecke speaks of a woman of some fifty-odd years who called at the business office after a Hitler speech and spontaneously gave the party an inheritance she had just received. On this and related matters see also Orlow, pp. 108 ff., which contains further references.
41. According to a speech in the Reichstag by Helmut von Mücke, a former naval officer who originally counted among the leaders of the NSDAP. In July, 1929, he had discussed the party’s methods of financing itself in an open letter. See Verhandlungen des Reichstags, vol. 444, pp. 138 f.
42. Cf. Maser, Frühgeschichte, pp. 410 f.; also Heiden, Geschichte, p. 46, and Walter Laqueur, Deutschland und Russland, pp. 76 f.
45. Hitler spoke these words as early as September 12, 1923; see Boepple, p. 91.
46. Quoted in Heiden, Geschichte, p. 143.
47. The letter is printed in Illustrierter Beobachter, 1926:2, p. 6.
48. As the meeting was breaking up, Interior Minister Schweyer stepped up to Hitler, who was feeling himself the victor of the evening, tapped him on the chest “like an angry schoolmaster,” and said that this victory had been “nothing but a breach of faith.” This is the incident referred to in the quoted remark by Heiden in Hitler I, p. 181.
49. Statement by Julius Streicher at the Nuremberg trial, IMT VII, p. 340.
50. Cf., for example, Maser, Frühgeschichte, pp. 453 f.; Maser even charges Hitler with having sued for the favor of the monarchist generals. See also Heiden, Geschichte, pp. 162 f. Bullock, pp. 113 f., straddles the fence; on the one hand he charges Hitler with incompetence as a revolutionary and on the other hand denies that Hitler intended a revolutionary uprising.
51. Der Hitlerprozess, p. 28. The previous quotation, in which Hitler contrasts his conduct with that of the Kapp putschists, is taken from his speech of November 8, 1934. Hans von Hülsen characterized the trial as a “political carnival”; quoted in Deuerlein, A ufstieg, p. 205.
52. This reprimand to the court was pronounced by Minister of State von Meinel; cf. Deuerlein, Hitler-Putsch, p. 216; ibid., pp. 221 f. for the remarks of Pöhner.
BOOK III
1. Bracher, Diktatur, p. 139, Hitler’s assertion that he first developed the idea of the autobahnen and of a cheap “people’s car” is reported by Frank, p. 47. Hanfstaengl, p. 114, declares that Hitler’s cell looked like a delicatessen store. He says that Hitler found the surplus useful for inducing the guards to be even more favorably inclined to him than they already were. On the horde of visitors, their requests, concerns, and intentions, cf. the report of the prison director dated September 18, 1924, BHStA I, p. 1501.
2. Hitler on February 3, 1942, to a group of Old Fighters; cf. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 90n.
6. Olden, Hitler, p. 140, and Mein Kampf, pp. 24, 31, 493. According to various sources, among those who worked on correcting and editing the manuscript were Stolzing-Cerny, the music critic of the Völkische Beobachter; Bernhard Stempfle, the former monk and priest as well as editor of the anti-Semitic Miesbacher Anzeiger; and, though with limited success, Ernst Hanfstaengl. However, Ilse Hess, Rudolf Hess’s wife, has disputed all allegations of editorial assistance by others and also denied that Hitler dictated the book to her husband. Instead, she maintained, Hitler “himself typed the manuscript with two fingers on an ancient typewriter during his imprisonment in Landsberg.” Cf. Maser, Hitlers “Mein Kampf,” p. 20; also Frank, p. 39.
7. Mein Kampf, pp. 325, 412, 562; also Hitlers Zweites Buch, p. 221.
8. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 5; also his Revolution des Nihilismus, p. 53.
9. Trevor-Roper, “The Mind of Adolf Hitler.” Preface to Hitler’s Table Talk, p. xxxv. Heiden, Geschichte, p. 11, spoke of Hitler’s having a “distinct talent for combination.” Cf. also R. H. Phelps, “Hitlers grundlegende Rede über den Antisemitismus,” in: VJHfZ, 1968:4, pp. 395 ff.
10. Preiss, pp. 39 f. It may be pointed out here that this attempt to present Hitler’s Weltanschauung coherently cannot be based exclusively upon Mein Kampf; earlier and later utterances must be taken into account. There is all the more justification for this approach because Hitler’s ideology in essentials did not change after 1924.
12. Tischgespräche, p. 346; also p. 321 and Domarus, p. 647.
15. Cf. Ernst Nolte, Eine frühe Quelle, p. 590. Nolte deserves much credit for having unearthed this half-forgotten and at any rate largely ignored publication, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin. Zwiegespräche zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir, and subjecting it to analysis. Cf. also Nolte, Epoche, pp. 404 ff. The identity of Christianity and Bolshevism, he comments, was also “the central thesis of the table talk,” although Hitler even at the height of his power would never have dared to say so bluntly. On the 30 million victims, cf. Hitler’s speech of July 28, 1922, quoted in Boepple, p. 30.
16. Printed in: Der Nationalsozialist, 1:29 (August 17, 1924), quoted from Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, p. 73.
17. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p. xxv, n. 9.
18. Ibid.; for the preceding quotation cf. Libres propos, p. 321.
20. Our approach here owes a good deal to the summing-up presented by H. R. Trevor-Roper in his fundamental lecture on “Hitler’s War Aims,” given at the 1959 congress of historians in Munich; cf. VJHfZ 1960:2, pp. 121 ff.
24. Nolte, Faschismus, pp. 135 f.
25. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 440: Speer’s letter to Hitler of March 29, 1945. Also IMT XLI, pp. 425 ff. Hitler’s speech at Erlangen is printed in Preiss, p. 171.
26. VB of March 7, 1925; also Heiden, Geschichte, p. 190.
28. Otto Strasser, Hitler und Ich, p. 113. According to this account, Goebbels made the demand in a speech that he delivered standing on a chair. With good reason doubts have been expressed about this scene; all the same, Gregor Strasser, who is more credible than his brother, confirmed it. Helmut Heiber may therefore be right in his conjecture that Goebbels actually uttered the words in dispute, but not under the dramatic circumstances described by Otto Strasser; rather, that he spoke in these terms to a small group, in conversation. Cf. Goebbels-Tagebuch 1925–26, p. 56.
29. These drawings cannot be definitely dated. According to Albert Speer, who bases his opinion on remarks by Hitler, the sketches date from this period. On the other hand, Speer’s office manager, Apel, who drew up a list of the Hitler sketches in the architect’s possession, assigns the date “about 1924” to the drawing of the “Grand Triumphal Arch,” the “Great Hall,” the “Berlin South Station,” and the “Berlin State Library.” Some of the sketches are reproduced in Speer’s Inside the Third Reich.
30. Cf. Goebbels-Tagebuch 1925–26, p. 60; also Hinrich Lohse, Der Fall Strasser, p. 5.
31. Sir Nevile Henderson, The Failure of a Mission, Berlin 1937—1939, p. 282.
32. Goebbels-Tagebuch, pp. 92 ff.
33. The report also states: “Violently firing their revolvers and employing iron flagpoles like lances, the National Socialists penetrated the ranks of the Communists. Nine lightly injured and five gravely injured persons were removed from the scene of the battle.” A month before, a battle in the Pharus Halls in Berlin’s North End had ended with ninety-eight serious casualties. After it Goebbels wrote triumphantly: “Since this day they know us in Berlin. We are not so naive as to believe that now everything has been done. Pharus is only a beginning.” See GoebbelsTagebuch, p. 119n.
34. Quoted in Heiden, Hitler, I, p. 242; see also Goebbels, “Der Führer als Staatsmann,” p. 51.
35. Sales began to rise significantly only after the NSDAP made its breakthrough and became a mass party. Wider distribution was helped by the issuance of a cheap edition costing eight marks for both volumes. In 1930, 54,086 copies were sold, in 1931, 50,808, and in 1932, 90,351; the following year the annual sale passed the 200,000 mark, and thereafter repeatedly exceeded it. In 1943, total sales of the book were alleged to be 9,840,000; cf. Hermann Hammer, “Die deutschen Ausgaben von Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” in: VJHfZ 1956:2, pp. 161 ff.
36. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 134; Shirer refers to a study by Professor Oron James Hale in The American Historical Review, July, 1955.
37. Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Munich, quoted in Tyreil, Führer befiehl. . ., pp. 269 ff. In this speech, also, Hitler referred, by way of comparison, to primitive Christianity.
38. Quoted in Tyrell, pp. 211 ff., also p. 196; see also Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Was My Friend, pp. 151 ff.
BOOK IV
1. Bracher, Auflösung, p. 291.
3. Quoted from Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 136.
4. A study by S. M. Lipset defines the typical Nazi voter as follows: “An independent Protestant member of the middle class who lived either on a farm or in a very small town and who formerly had voted for a centrist party or a regional party that opposed the power and influence of big industry and the unions”; cf. Nolte, Theorien, p. 463.
6. Quoted in Heiden, Hitler I, p. 275, and in Kühnl, Die nationalsozialistische Linke, p. 374.
7. Cf. Albert Krebs, Tendenzen und Gestalten der NSDAP, pp. 138 f.
8. The Daily Mail of September 24, 1930, quoted according to the VB of September 25. Lord Rothermere’s article began significantly by calling on Englishmen to change their conception of Germany which, he said, they remembered chiefly as prisoners of war. He pointed out that Germany was not free as other nations were; that the Allies had made the regaining of her full national freedom dependent upon payments and conditions imposed upon her against her will. And he asked whether it was wise to insist upon the ultimate letter of the law. It would be best for the welfare of Western civilization, he concluded, if there came to the helm in Germany a government permeated by the same healthy principles with which Mussolini had renewed Italy in the last eight years.
9. Quoted from Bullock, p. 163, and Frankfurter Zeitung, September 26, 1930. Cf. also Mein Kampf, p. 345: “The movement is anti-parliamentarian, and even its participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the gravest symptoms of mankind’s decay.”
10. Hitler’s statement is not complete and not recorded in the transcript of the trial; the quotations given here sum up the substance of different texts. See the attempt to reconstruct the exact wording on the basis of press reports in Peter Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozess, pp. 237 ff.
11. Willi Veller’s letter of August 16, 1930, abridged, quoted from Tyrell, pp. 297 f.
12. A. Fran?ois-Poncet, The Fateful Years, pp. 5 ff.
13. J. Curtius, Sechs Jahre Minister der deutschen Republik, p. 217.
14. Report of the British ambassador for July 16, 1931, cited from Bullock, pp. 177 f.
15. The meeting was continued in Berlin shortly afterward. According to the testimony of Ernst Poensgen, Hitler pleaded with the captains of industry to withdraw their support for Brüning, but without success. See Poensgen’s Erinnerungen, p. 4; also Dietrich, Mit Hitler in die Macht, p. 45.
16. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Erinnerungen, p. 103, adds to the remark on the postmaster generalship the anecdotal phrase: “Then he can lick my ass on the stamps.” Hindenburg habitually called Hitler the “Bohemian corporal” because he mistakenly assumed that Hitler came from Braunau in Bohemia. But it is also possible that he intended simultaneously to stress a certain foreignness and un-Germanness in Hitler, who struck him as “bohemian” in both senses of the word.
17. Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission, pp. 340, 346. Hitler made it clear that he could not be considered bourgeois in an interview with Hanns Johst published in Frankfurter Volksblatt, January 26, 1934. Cf. also Tischgespräche, p. 170.
18. Cf. G. W. F. Hallgarten, Hitler, Reichswehr und Industrie, p. 120. Hallgarten gives details on the expenses of the NSDAP and the amount of support contributed by industry. See also Heiden, Hitler, vol. I, pp. 313 f. Some emendations may be found in Henry A. Turner, “Fritz Thyssen und ‘I Paid Hitler’ ” in: Faschismus und Kapitalismus in Deutschland, pp. 87 ff. The magnitude of the sums and the difficulties involved are illuminated by Thyssen’s unsuccessful attempt to withdraw 100,000 marks for the benefit of the NSDAP from the strike fund of the Northwest Group of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists. When Ludwig Grauert, then business manager of the association, undertook the transaction without obtaining Chairman Ernst Poensgen’s consent, Poensgen rebuked him sharply. Krupp actually demanded Grauert’s dismissal, and Grauert was saved only when Thyssen came forward asserting that the 100,000 marks had merely been a loan—which he promptly paid back out of his own pocket. Cf. Turner, “Thyssen,” pp. 101 ff.
According to partially supported testimony given in court by Friedrich Flick, the Nazis received only 2.8 per cent of the money he spent for political purposes; cf. ibid., p. 20. Partly because of the altogether inadequate source materials, the question of how much financial support Hitler received from industry has become a broad field for speculation colored by ideology. Franz Xaver Schwarz, treasurer of the NSDAP, by his own testimony burned in the spring of 1945 all the documents in the Brown House in order to save them from confiscation by the advancing American troops. In addition, the source most frequently cited—Fritz Thyssen’s I Paid Hitler—has proved to be highly unreliable. Thyssen himself has contested the book’s authenticity. In Monte Carlo, where he was living in exile, he had granted several interviews to the editor, Emery Reves, in the spring of 1940. These interviews were to provide material for a volume of memoirs. The rapid advance of the German armies in France put an abrupt end to the undertaking. Reves fled to England with the documents and later published the interviews, considerably expanded. Reves tells another story which, however, seems a good deal less credible since it was not even accepted by the denazification tribunal in Königstein/Taunus.
In the above-mentioned study H. A. Turner has demonstrated that the very passages historians have hitherto regarded as especially relevant are among those parts of the book that Fritz Thyssen, the putative author, never saw, a fact Reves himself has confirmed. It further reduces the book’s value as a source that, for example, the passage in which Thyssen speaks of the “deep impression” Hitler’s Düsseldorf speech made upon the industrialists present does not appear in the stenographic record of the interview; thus it is obviously a later addition; moreover, Thyssen explicitly objected to it after the war. The other so frequently cited passage, in which Thyssen gives a figure of 2 million marks as the size of the Nazi party’s annual subsidy, was likewise more or less pulled out of a hat, as Turner convincingly demonstrates. Concerning the size of the actual payments, cf. Turner’s conclusions: “After weighing all the facts we must recognize that the financial subsidies from industry were overwhelmingly directed against the Nazis” (p. 25). We are still justified in assuming that the greater part of the funds available to the NSDAP came from membership dues. According to a police report, these were so high that they kept a good many persons from joining the party; see F. J. Heyen, NationalSozialismus im Alltag, pp. 22 and 63.
19. Thus Eberhard Czichon, Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht? as one example among many similar writers on the subject; see also the review by Eike Henning, “Industrie und Faschismus,” in: Neue politische Literatur, 1970:4, pp. 432 ff., with many other citations and references. Czichon tends to prefer general references and unpublished documents, so that his sources in many cases can scarcely be checked. Frequently, too, he indulges in apparently deliberate deceptions, inaccuracies, and faulty references. Ernst Nolte has shown that Czichon reports a payment from IG Farben to the NSDAP in such a way that the reader would think the payment had been made before the seizure of power, whereas the document itself shows that the money was paid in 1944 (Ernst Nolte, Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 190). Czichon also asserts, referring to Bracher, Auflösung, p. 695, that after talking with Papen in Cologne on January 4, 1933, Hitler met with Kirdorf and Thyssen; but this passage is not to be found in Bracher. There is a similar misleading reference on Czichon’s part to Die Machtergreifung by H. O. Meissner and H. Wilde. More examples are given by Eike Henning, op. cit., p. 439.
20. The speech was given on January 26, not, as is usually stated, on January 27. Cf. Otto Dietrich, Mit Hitler in die Macht, pp. 44, 46. G. W. F. Hallgarten also stresses the differing attitudes among various branches of industry; see his Hitler; also his Dämonen oder Retter, pp. 215 f.; also Fetcher, “Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus: Zur Kritik des sowjet-marxistischen Faschismusbegriffs,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 1962:1, p. 55.
21. R. Dahrendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland, p. 424. Dahrendorf argues—and he is surely right about the motives—that the big businessmen supported Hitler in the same way that they granted financial aid to every right-wing party that had prospects of coming to power, not at all as part of a plot. Their attitude, that is, was largely defensive; they were thinking only of reinsurance or, to quote a famous remark by Hugo Stinnes in 1919, they were paying “a social-insurance premium against uprisings.” Hallgarten, too, concludes that although Hitler was vigorously supported by industry’s funds, this by no means signified that he was “made” by industry; Hallgarten, cf. Dämonen, p. 113. We might say, then, that although “industry” did not put Hitler in power, he would scarcely have attained power against its declared will.
22. The full text of the speech is given in Domarus, pp. 68 If.
23. Speech to the Hamburg Nationalist Club in the ballroom of the Hotel Atlantic, February 28, 1926. The transcript notes at this point “tempestuous applause”; cf. Werner Jochmann, Im Kampf um die Macht, pp. 103, 114.
24. Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, 2nd series, vol. I, p. 512, n. 2.
25. Arnold Brecht, Vorspiel zum Schweigen, p. 180, points out that the authors of the Constitution deliberately renounced taking over the provision in the American Constitution that only native-born citizens can become candidates for the highest office in the land. Ironically, they did so in order not to exclude their Austrian brothers. Incidentally, the efforts to obtain citizenship for Hitler began as early as the autumn of 1929. At that time Frick unsuccessfully attempted to have him naturalized in Munich. Six months later, by which time Frick had advanced to the position of a Minister in Thuringia, Frick tried to obtain German citizenship for Hitler by appointing him to a civil-service post. The post Frick had in mind was that of a police inspector in Hildburghausen, which happened to be vacant. But the situation seemed a bit ludicrous, and Hitler called off the effort. Next Klagges tried to have Hitler appointed to a teaching post at the technical college in Brunswick, but this too failed. A solution was finally found: Hitler was appointed Regierungsrat with the Berlin delegation from Brunswick.
26. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 22 ff.
28. On this whole subject cf. Frank, pp. 90 f.; Hanfstaengl, pp. 231 ff. The reference to the unwritten law that no one must mention his niece’s name in Hitler’s presence is based on information from Albert Speer.
29. For the different versions cf. Hansfstaengl, pp. 231 ff.; Heiden, Hitler I, p. 371; Görlitz and Quint, pp. 32211: Frank, p. 90. The complaints by Gauleiter Munder of Württemberg that Hitler was being excessively diverted by the company of his niece from his political duties were certainly a significant factor in Munder’s removal.
30. Cf. on this and what followed: Frank, p. 90. Ernst Hanfstaengl (p. 242) relates a story that he alleges was bandied about in the Hitler family, to the effect that Geli had been made pregnant by a Jewish drawing master from Linz. Hanfstaengl also reports that Geli’s body was found with a broken nose, but he gives no supporting evidence. In response to an inquiry Hanfstaengl informed the author that this had been generally known at the time, but so far as I know the fact appears nowhere in the scholarly literature.
31. The Dual State is the title of a study by Ernst Fraenkel (London and New York, 1941).
34. Krebs, Tendenzen, p. 154; also Preiss, pp. 45 f.
36. H. R. Knickerbocker, The German Crisis, p. 227.
37. Heinrich Brüning, Memoiren 1918–1934, p. 195.
38. Harry Graf Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 426; also Werner Jochmann, Nationalsozialismus und Revolution, p. 405; and Helmut Heiber, Joseph Goebbels, p. 65.
39. Preiss, p. 179 (speech of March 7, 1932).
40. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930–1939, English ed., entry for January 24, 1932.
41. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, p. 87. The make-up of the Nazi Reichstag faction after the July elections is quite interesting. There were 230 Nazi deputies altogether. Of these, fifty-five were blue-collar and white-collar workers, fifty peasants, forty-three independent representatives of commerce, the crafts and industry, twenty-nine functionaries, twenty civil servants, twelve teachers, and nine former army officers. Cf. Reichstags-Handbuch, 6. Wahlperiode, Berlin 1932, p. 270.
42. For details cf. Bracher, Auflösung, pp. 522 ff.; also W. Conze, “Zum Sturz Brünings,” in VJHfZ 1952:3, pp. 261 ff.; also H. Brüning, Memoiren, pp. 273 and 597 ff. The importance of the information on the favorable turn in the disarmament negotiations has been challenged by historians; there are indications that Brüning overestimated it. For a characterization of the pressures on Hindenburg at Gut Neudeck cf. Theodor Eschenburg, “The Role of the Personality in the Crisis of the German Republic” in Holborn, ed., Republic to Reich, pp. 43 f.
43. The statistics on the dead and wounded in the bloody weeks after the lifting of the ban on the SA differ greatly. Cf., for example, Wilhelm Hoegner, Die verratene Republik, pp. 312 f.; also Friedrich Stampfer, Die vierzehn Jahre der ersten deutschen Republik, p. 629, and Bullock, pp. 213 f., who refers to the account given by Albert Grzesinski. Reliable figures on the victims have not been drawn up to this day. The “Roll of Honor of Those Killed for the Movement,” which was later published by H. Volz, gives the following figures for the Nazis: 1929, eleven dead; 1930, seventeen; 1931, forty-three; 1932, eighty-seven.
45. Völkischer Beobachter, August 21—22, 1932. Hitler’s scornful reference to Hindenburg’s age was made in the speech of September 4, 1932. In context it went: “When today the President of the Reich is presented to me as an opponent, it makes me laugh. I will endure the struggle longer than the President.” Preiss, p. 189.
46. Cf. the statistics in Bracher, Auflösung, pp. 645 ff.; also the evidence bearing chiefly on the social situation (unemployment) in H. Bennecke, Wirtschaftliche Depression, pp. 158 ff. Bennecke’s statistics likewise bring to light the remarkable fact that there was no direct, at best an indirect connection between unemployment and voting for the NSDAP. The percentage of votes netted by Hitler’s party was much greater in the rural areas, which did not suffer nearly so severely from the effects of the Depression, than in, say, the Ruhr district or even Berlin, where the Nazi percentage of the vote did not reach as much as 25 per cent—approximately half that of the NSDAP vote in Schleswig-Holstein.
47. According to Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power, p. 256. For the provisions of the planned constitutional reform, cf. Bracher, Auflösung, pp. 537 ff. and 658 f.
48. Cited in Bernhard Schwertfeger, Rätsel um Deutschland, p. 173. Hitler’s letter, mentioned in the next paragraph, was called a “masterpiece” by Goebbels and is in fact a good example of Hitler’s tactics, psychology, and faculty for hair-splitting; it is printed in Domarus, pp. 154 if. According to Brüning, Memoiren, p. 634, however, the letter was ghosted in the Hotel Kaiserhof by Hjalmar Schacht.
49. Franz von Papen, Der Wahrheit eine Gasse, p. 250. Here, too, on page 249, are details about the war-games study as given by then Lieutenant Colonel Ott.
50. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 254. The following remark of Hitler’s may be found in the Tischgespräche, p. 364. On the resigned attitude of his antagonists, see also Eschenburg, in Holborn, Republic to Reich, pp. 47 ff.
51. Harold Laski, in the Daily Herald, November 21, 1931, as quoted in Viscount Templewood, Nine Troubled Years, p. 121.
53. Bracher, Auflösung, p. 691. Hitler himself conceded that the Cologne meeting had been a turning point; at the time, he commented, he had “gathered the impression that his affairs stood very well.” Cf. Tischgespräche, p. 365.
The version of the meeting presented here has, incidentally, not gone unchallenged. Papen, in particular, has vigorously denounced it (see his letter to Das Parlament, 111:14, April 8, 1953). However, the account given in his self-justificatory Memoirs makes considerable demands upon the reader’s credulity. Among other things, he tries to make the meeting appear quite accidental and casual; he repeatedly stresses that its sole purpose was to obtain information. This version contradicts Schroeder’s declaration, in a sworn affidavit, that only a few weeks before Hitler had refused to negotiate with Papen. Even if Papen’s later assertion is correct, that no offer was made, the fact remains that Hitler felt himself to have been directly addressed by Hindenburg through Papen. At the very least the offer existed in the person of Papen; as a diplomat he should have known this, and undoubtedly did know it. Furthermore, Papen alleges that he conducted the conversation in the interests of Schleicher, and for the sake of supporting Schleicher. Moreover, Papen further alleges, the plan for a duumvirate referred not to Hitler and himself, but to Hitler and Schleicher. If nothing else, then, the anxious secrecy surrounding the meeting reveals the absurdity of this version.
54. The estate, purchased principally with funds supplied by industry, was not given formally to Hindenburg, but to his son, in order to evade the inheritance tax. Hindenburg also worried a good deal about Papen’s coup of July 20, 1932. Brüning has recorded: “Erwin Planck, who visited me in the hospital one evening four days before Schleicher’s resignation from the chancellorship, told me about the difficulties the administration was encountering because of Hindenburg’s fear of indictment, and I have been told that this was one reason for Hindenburg’s finally consenting to appoint Hitler Chancellor.” Cf. H. Brüning, “Ein Brief,” in: Deutsche Rundschau, 1947, p. 15. In the summer of 1935 Brüning added, in conversation with Count Kessler, that Oskar von Hindenburg “slithered into all sorts of murky stock exchange dealings and consequently found himself in a position where he was constantly afraid of ‘revelations.’ ” Count Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 469.
55. According to Brüning, Memoiren, p. 645, who had his information from Schleicher, Hindenburg allegedly said: “Thank you, Herr General, for everything you have done for the Fatherland. Now, with God’s help, let us see how the cat jumps.”
56. Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 443.
57. Thomas Mann, “Bruder Hitler,” in: Gesammelte Werke 12, p. 774.
58. Report of Police Detective Feil, HStA Munich, Allgemeine Sonderausgabe I, No. 1475.
59. Hitler to Schleicher, beginning of February, 1933. Cf. Brüning, Memoiren, p. 648.
60. Cf. Frank, pp. 121 f. In the published version of his book, however, Frank does not quote the eschatological passage cited here; cf. on this Görlitz and Quint, p. 367.
INTERPOLATION II
1. Gottfried Benn, “Doppelleben,” Gesammelte Werke IV, p. 89.
2. G. A. Borgese, Goliath: The March of Fascism, p. 361.
3. Friedrich Franz von Unruh in a series of articles, “Nationalsozialismus,” which was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung between February 22 and March 3, 1931.
4. E. Vermeil, “The Origin, Nature and Development of German Nationalist Ideology in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” in: The Third Reich, p. 6. Cf. also Rohan D’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism, W. M. Govern, From Luther to Hitler, and W. Steed, “From Frederick the Great to Hitler. The Consistency of German Aims,” in: International Affairs, 1938:17.
5. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe.
In spite of many accurate observations on single items, all historians who have tried to assess Hitler as the focal point of centuries of history run one great risk: they come dangerously close to the Nazis’ own interpretations of their movement. For that is what the Nazis were claiming when they usurped the Hansa, mysticism, Prussianism and Romanticism, and hailed their Third Reich as the fulfillment of German history. But there is something equally dubious about the opposing school, which seeks to represent National Socialism, and totalitarianism in general, as aspects of the crisis of the democratic era, flowing out of its rebellion against tradition and its petrified systems, its social antagonisms and economic weaknesses. For this school Nazism is the consequence of the modern rather than the German character; it is the negative utopia of the total state, such as was evoked in many pessimistic prophecies of the nineteenth century. For National Socialism viewed itself precisely as the world-historical corrective of that crisis. In the German accounts that posit this interpretation, Hitler frequently appears as an overwhelming foreign influence, a “counterpoise to tradition, especially to the Prusso-German and Bismarckian tradition,” as Gerhard Ritter puts it in his contribution to the collection of essays in The Third Reich (pp. 381 ff.), in which he consistently takes a stand diametrically opposite to that of E. Vermeil. Ritter argues that even the wrongheaded attitudes of which the Germans have been accused were on the whole characteristic of the age: “It is astonishing how many expressions of nationalistic ambition, militaristic principles, racist pride and antidemocratic criticism can be found in the intellectual and political literature of all European countries.”
None of these excessively one-sided interpretations can possibly grasp the nature of the phenomenon; the standard Marxist interpretation makes that crystal clear. Constantly hampered by their own actions and by piety toward their comrades who went down to defeat, the Marxist spokesmen have basically never been able to free themselves from the well-known, officially proclaimed definition of National Socialism as a manifestation of the “open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic elements of finance capital.” Consequently, if this thought is followed to its logical conclusion, the key personalities of National Socialism must have been not Hitler, Goebbels, and Streicher, but Hugenberg, Krupp, and Thyssen. Such a view is in fact actually taken by, for example, Czichon, in Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht? and by many others. Cf. for this whole subject the instructive survey in Bracher, Diktatur, pp. 6 ff.
6. Cf. Note 13 to Interpolation I. During a stay in Germany in the early twenties the Rumanian Fascist leader Codreanu complained, significantly, that there was no visceral, consistent anti-Semitism in that country; cf. Nolte, Krise, p. 263.
7. Rudolf Höss, at one time commandant of Auschwitz; see Gustave Mark Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship, p. 250.
8. Harold J. Laski, “The Meaning of Fascism” in: Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, p. 106.
9. Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen was the title of an embittered criticism of democracy by Edgar J. Jung, who later became Papen’s assistant and was killed during the purge of June 30, 1934.
10. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, p. 113.
11. Pierre Vienot, Is Germany Finished?, p. 97.
13. Albert Speer, in a memo to the author; for Hitler’s rejection of Hess or Himmler as his successor, cf. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, pp. 137, 276.
14. G. Ritter asserts in Carl Goerdeler, p. 109, that the idea of having fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer would have seemed absolutely grotesque to the majority of the German bourgeoisie. Rudolf Breitscheid’s reaction is reported by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler, p. 12; Julius Leber’s comment on the lack of an intellectual foundation comes from a diary entry; see his Ein Mann geht seinen Weg, pp. 123 f. Many Social Democrats secretly expected that Hitler would quickly tangle with Papen and Hugenberg, and they would reap the benefit. “Then there will be a settlement of accounts, and very different it will be from 1918,” Prussian ex-State Secretary Abegg threatened in conversation with Count Kessler; see Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 447.
BOOK V
1. What went on at this meeting and how important it proved to be was first revealed during the Nuremberg trial; see IMT XXXV, pp. 42 ff.; also IMT V, pp. 177 ff., XII, pp. 497 ff., and XXXVI, pp. 520 ff.
2. See Domarus, pp. 207, 209, 211, 214; also Baynes, I, pp. 238, 252.
3. Hans Mommsen, “The Reichstag Fire and Its Political Consequences,” in Holborn, ed., Republic to Reich, pp. 129 ff.
4. Cf. IMT IX, pp. 481 f. and PS-3593. To the very end, incidentally, Göring vigorously denied having participated in any way in setting the fire. He remarked—quite believably—he would not have needed any pretexts to strike against the Communists. “Their debt was so heavy, their crime so tremendous, that without any further prompting I was determined to begin the most ruthless war of extermination with all the instruments of power at my command against this plague. On the contrary, as I testified at the Reichstag Fire trial, the fire which forced me to take measures so rapidly was actually extremely awkward for me, since it forced me to act faster than I intended and to strike before I had made all my thorough preparations.” Hermann Göring, Aufbau einer Nation, pp. 93 f.
5. Brecht, Vorspiel, pp. 125 f. The emergency decree of February 28, 1933, read: “Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are for the time being nullified. Consequently, curbs on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, of association, and of assembly, surveillance over letters, telegrams and telephone communications, searches of homes and confiscations of as well as restrictions on property, are hereby permissible beyond the limits hitherto established by law.”
6. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, p. 271, and Bullock, p. 264.
7. Proclamation by Hitler of March 10, 1933, cited in Domarus, p. 219. On the other hand cf. Hitler’s anger when faced with a complaint by von Winterfeld, Deputy Chairman of the German National People’s Party, of March 10, 1933, in: BAK Reel 43 II, 1263. Concerning Hitler’s letter to Papen, copies of which were sent to Hindenburg and to the Defense Minister, see Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, p. 111. From January 31 to August 23, 1933, the German newspapers reported the following violent deaths: 196 enemies of National Socialism and 24 followers of Hitler. During the period up to the March elections 51 opponents and 18 Nazis were killed.
8. Bracher, Sauer, Schulz, Machtergreifung, p. 158. As early as March 17, the VB triumphantly calculated that merely by excluding the eighty-one Communist deputies the NSDAP would have ten seats over an absolute majority.
9. Berliner Börsenzeitung of March 22, 1933, quoted from Horkenbach, p. 127.
10. The speech is printed in Domarus, pp. 229 ff.
11. Quoted from Philipp W. Fabry, Mutmassungen über Hitler, p. 91; for the following quotation, which evidently reproduces the sense of remarks made in the President’s entourage, see Brüning, Memoiren, p. 650.
12. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 78 ff. For Carl Goerdeler’s assertion see Edouard Calic, Ohne Maske, p. 171.
13. Speech to the Reichsstatthalters of July 6; cf. VB of July 8, 1933.
15. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 96; also Luedecke, I Knew Hitler, p. 518.
16. Thus in the above-mentioned speech to the Reichsstatthalters on July 6.
17. Heyen, Alltag, p. 134; report of the district magistrate of Bad Kreuznach.
18. François-Poncet, The Fateful Years, pp. 67 f.
19. Golo Mann, Deutsche Geschichte, p. 804.
20. Gottfried Benn, “Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten,” Gesammelte Werke IV, p. 245.
21. Bracher, Diktatur, p. 271.
22. Edgar J. Jung, “Neubelebung von Weimar?” in: Deutsche Rundschau, June, 1932. For the remark of Paul Valéry, see Thomas Mann, Nachlese. Prosa 1951–55, p. 196.
23. Gottfried Benn, in the letter mentioned in note 20.
24. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 151, 179 f.
25. David Schoenbaum, Die braune Revolution, p. 150; also T. Eschenburg, “Dokumentation,” in: VJHfZ 1955:3, pp. 314 ff; also Historikus, Der Faschismus als Massenbewegung, p. 7.
26. Thus to Mayor Krogmann of Hamburg on March 15, 1933; cf. Jacobsen, Aussenpolitik, p. 395; here, too, on p. 25, illuminating information on the shifts in personnel that took place in the course of the seizure of power. In the Foreign Service, for example, “at most six per cent were replaced for political reasons,” and only a single diplomat, von Prittwitz-Gaffron, the German ambassador to Washington, quit the service because he had political reservations. For Hitler’s opinion of the Foreign Office see Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 250.
27. See Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 210, for the foreign reaction.
30. Thus the British journalist G. Ward Price in the course of an interview with Hitler on October 18, 1933. See VB of October 20, 1933; also Horkenbach, p. 479.
31. Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 101 ff.
32. Cf. report of the British ambassador of November 15, 1933, in Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919—1939, 2nd Series, vol. VI (1933–34), London, 1957, pp. 38 ff. Cf. also the telegram that Martin Niemöller and other clergymen addressed to Hitler on this occasion: “In this hour of decision for the people and the Fatherland we salute our Führer. We thank him for the valiant action and the clear speech that have preserved Germany’s honor. In the name of more than 2,500 Protestant pastors who do not belong to the German Christian religious movement we pledge loyal obedience and intercessory remembrances.” Quoted from Fabry, Mutmassungen, p. 123.
33. Documents on British Foreign Policy, 2nd series, vol. IV, report of January 30, 1934.
34. Thus Arnold Toynbee in 1937; quoted in M. Gilbert and R. Gott, The Appeasers, p. 82. See also Karl Lange, Hitlers unbeachtete Maximen, pp. 113 f. Similarly, Sumner Welles remarked that American attention concentrated chiefly on Hitler’s idiosyncrasies and on the resemblance of his mustache to Charlie Chaplin’s; Gilbert and Gott, pp. 125 f.
35. Many further references in Jacobsen, Aussenpolitik, pp. 369 ff. The episode with Sir John Simon is reported by Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle, p. 68.
36. Cf. Anton M. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit, p. 458. On Hitler’s reading of Karl May, see Libres propos, p. 306; also Otto Dietrich, Zwölf Jahre, p. 164.
37. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 143 f. There are, however, two differing versions of Röhm’s intentions. According to one, he wanted to organize the SA as a kind of militia alongside the army; according to the other, he wanted to see the SA declared the official armed force, and the army incorporated into it. The documents, and a number of different indications, suggest strongly that Röhm advocated both ideas, depending on whom he was talking to, and conceived of the first version as a transition to the second.
38. Görlitz and Quint, p. 440.
39. Rudolf Diels, Lucifer ante portas, p. 278. On von Blomberg’s and von Reichenau’s personalities see also Hermann Foertsch, Schuld und Verhängnis, pp. 30 ff.; also Friedrich Hossbach, Zwischen Wehrmacht und Hitler 1934–1938, p. 76, and VJHfZ 1959:4, pp. 429 ff.
40. Conference of commanders of February 2–3, 1934, quoted from the notes of General Liebmann in the IfZ, Munich, Blatt 76 ff. The “Aryan clause” was a provision in the law for the restoration of the civil service dated April 7, 1933; it stated that all Jews who had not been employed in the civil service before the First World War, or who could not prove that they had fought at the front, must be dismissed from the civil service.
41. NSDAP principal archives, Hoover Institute, Reel 54, Folder 1290; cf. also Jacobsen and Jochmann, under date of February 2, 1934.
42. The Brutal Friendship is the title of F. W. Deakin’s book on Mussolini, Hitler, and the fall of Italian Fascism, taken from a remark made by Hitler in April, 1945.
43. Cf. Helmut Krausnick, Der 30. Juni 1934. Bedeutung, Hintergründe, Verlauf, supplement to Das Parlament, June 30, 1954, p. 321. In this case the managers in the background fumbled the ball and for a moment permitted a glimpse of what the strategy really was. For Kleist and Heines met to have a candid confrontation, in the course of which, as Kleist later remarked, they came to the joint suspicion “that we . . . were being incited against one another by a third party—I thought of Himmler—and that many of the reports came from him.” Kleist made this statement before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg; it is quoted here from Heinrich Bennecke, Die Reichswehr und der “Rdhm-Putsch,” p. 85.
44. The question of the individual who initiated the Munich “mutiny” remains somewhat obscure to this day. In addition to Himmler some evidence points to Gauleiter Wagner of Munich, who, however, probably would not have taken any action without prompting from Himmler.
45. Hans Bernd Gisevius, To the Bitter End, p. 160.
46. Heyen, Alltag, p. 129. The total number of victims during those two days has not been established to this day. The official figures spoke of seventy-seven, but probably twice that number would be more realistic. The estimates that ranged from 400 to as many as 1,000 dead were unquestionably exaggerated. In this connection cf. the “Official List of the Dead of June 30, 1934,” IfZ, Munich, Sign. MA-131, Bl. 103458–64.
47. Cf., for example, Otto Strasser, Mein Kampf, p. 98; according to this account Hitler waxed enthusiastic over Cesare Borgia and occasionally related with pleasure how Cesare had invited his condottieri to a reconciliation feast: “They all arrived, those lords of the leading noble families, and sat down at the table to celebrate their reconciliation. At twelve Cesare Borgia rose and declared that now all contention was over. Whereupon two black-clad men stepped behind each of the guests and tied the condottieri leaders to their chairs. Then Borgia, going from one of the bound men to the next, killed them all one by one.” Thus Strasser concludes his account of Hitler’s remarks; but this bit of sensationalism scarcely deserves credence. At best it may be imagined as a tale told in a particular mood, on a special occasion. But in that case it would not have the value as characterization that Strasser wishes to ascribe to it.
48. Cf. Hermann Mau, “The Second Revolution,” in: Holborn, ed., Republic to Reich, pp. 223 ff.
49. W. Sauer, in: Bracher, Sauer, Schulz, Machtergreifung, pp. 934 f.; Sauer also argues that Hitler, given his premises, had no choice but to kill Röhm.
50. Bracher, Diktatur, p. 268. In context von Blomberg’s ghastly remark was to the effect that the Prussian officer’s honor had consisted in being stringently proper; henceforth the German officer’s honor must consist in being cunning. Cf. Gorlitz, ed., Der deutsche Generalstab, p. 348.
51. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 161 ff.
53. Thus David Schoenbaum, op. cit., who has contributed a mass of evidence to support this thesis; see especially pp. 196 ff. and 226 ff. On the revolutionary nature of National Socialism and of the Third Reich as a whole cf. also Dahrendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie, pp. 431 ff. and H. A. Turner, Jr., “Faschismus und Antimodernismus in Deutschland,” in: Faschismus und Kapitalismus in Deutschland, pp. 157 ff.
54. Jacobsen and Jochmann, under date of January 25, 1939, p. 9. Cf. also Hitler’s speech of June 27, 1937, in Würzburg, in which he said that never in history had “this painful process been completed more prudently, sensibly, cautiously and with greater sensitivity than in Germany”; see Domarus, p. 703.
55. The Jewish emigration from Germany amounted to:
|
1933 |
63,400 |
|
1934 |
45,000 |
|
1935 |
35,000 |
|
1936 |
34,000 |
|
1937 |
25,000 |
|
1938 |
49,000 |
|
1939 |
68,000 |
Cf. the documents of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, Deutsches Zentralarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 97.
BOOK VI
1. Mein Kampf, p. 682; similarly, pp. 334 f.
2. Speech of January 30, 1941; see My New Order, pp. 912 f.
3. Nolte, Faschismus, pp. 189 f.
4. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 255.
5. Paul Valéry, cited in Ignazio Silone, The School for Dictators. For Hitler’s statements on the “crisis of democracy” cf. the speech (remarkable in other respects also) at the Vogelsang Ordensburg of April 29, 1937, in Kotze and Krausnick, pp. 111 ff.
6. Arnold Spencer Leese, quoted in Nolte, Krise, p. 332.
7. Wing Commander Archie Boyle to Navy Lieutenant Obermüller; cf. letter from Rosenberg to Hitler dated March 15, 1935, quoted in Jacobsen, Aussenpolitik, p. 78. For the Times quotation from Lord Lothian cf. Robert Ingrim, Von Talleyrand zu Molotov, p. 153.
8. Speech of March 22, 1936, quoted in Domarus, p. 610.
9. Thomas Mann, “Dieser Friede.”
10. Robert Ingrim, Hitlers glücklichster Tag, p. 107.
12. Paul Schmidt, Statist, p. 292.
13. Ibid., p. 301. However, Phipps changed his view of Hitler during his spell of duty. Soon afterward, he told the American ambassador in Paris that he regarded Hitler as a fanatic who would be content with nothing less than ruling all Europe. He informed his American colleague in Berlin that Germany would not wage war before 1938 but that war was the goal; cf. Gilbert and Gott, pp. 26 ff.
14. Quoted in Ingrim, Hitlers glücklichster Tag, p. 133; see also Erich Raeder, Mein Leben, 1, pp. 298 if.
15. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Zwischen London und Moskau, p. 64.
16. Bracher, Diktatur, p. 323. The following remark of Hitler’s is quoted in Erich Kordt, Nicht aus den Akten, p. 109.
For the British justification of appeasement, cf., for example, the speech in the House of Commons given by Sir Samuel Hoare on July 11, 1935, quoted in Winston Churchill, The Second World War, I, p. 141. At the time Churchill objected to the government’s policy, but voted for it with the majority of 247 to 44.
19. Schmidt, Statist, p. 320. The probably exaggerated statement that Hitler was for a time close to a nervous breakdown comes from Kordt, Nicht aus den Akten, p. 134; it is supported by no other source.
20. Bracher, Diktatur, p. 325. In the Tischgespräche, p. 169, Hitler admitted that he had “called an election after every coup; that is enormously effective at home and abroad.”
21. Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Was My Friend, p. 82; also Tischgespräche, pp. 155, 169. Ciano spoke in the same sense of the “fascistic rule” of accomplished facts: Cosa fatta capo ha. See Ciano’s Hidden Diary 1937—1938, p. 9.
22. Anthony Eden, Facing the Dictators, p. 407.
23. Frank, Im Angesicht des Galgens, pp. 204 f.
24. Cf. ADAP, Series D, vol. III. The Italian fighting forces in Spain amounted to more than 50,000 men, whereas the Germans had approximately 6,000—who, however, were constantly rotated. Hitler forbade official recruiting of volunteers for Spain. In keeping with this policy, the German commitment was not publicized, but kept strictly secret.
25. Fritz Wiedemann, Der Mann, der Feldherr werden wollte, p. 150. For the episode of the nocturnal conversation with Baldwin, see Gilbert and Gott, p. 34.
26. T. Jones, A Diary with Letters 1931–1950, p. 251. On Ribbentrop’s assignment cf. his remark to Premier Kiosseiwanoff of Bulgaria on July 5, 1939, in ADAP VI, p. 714; see also C. J. Burckhardt, pp. 285, 295.
27. Cf. on this Axel Kuhn, Hitlers aussenpolitisches Programm, pp. 198 ff. But remarkably, for the time being, military planning remained largely uninfluenced by the new attitude.
28. Cf. James R. M. Butler, Lord Lothian, p. 337.
31. Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle, p. 81.
32. Letter of May 23, 1936, BAK, Reel 43 II, 1495.
33. Quoted in Bullock, p. 379.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, p. 155. This cult of death can be found in all Fascist movements; it was most elaborated in the Rumanian Iron Guard and would surely be worth a detailed study.
35. Karlheinz Schmeer, Die Regie des öffentlichen Lebens im Dritten Reich, p. 113; here, too, are to be found elaborate descriptions and analyses of the staging of party rallies.
36. Cf. Robert Coulondre, De Staline à Hitler, p. 246, and Paul Stehlin, Auftrag in Berlin, p. 56. The remark about “mystical ecstasy” was made by François-Poncet, Coulondre’s predecessor in Berlin, who continues: “Seven days yearly Nuremberg was a city devoted to revelry and madness, almost a city of convulsionaries, Holy Rollers, and the like. The surroundings, the beauty of the spectacles presented, and the luxury of the hospitality offered exerted a strong influence upon the foreigners whom the Nazi Government was careful to invite annually. Many visitors, dazzled by Nazi display, were infected by the virus of Nazism. They returned home convinced by the doctrine and filled with admiration for the performance.” (The Fateful Years, p. 209.)
37. January 30 was followed in the year’s calendar of ceremonies by Memorial Day (middle of March), then the Führer’s Birthday (April 20), Labor Day (May 1), Mother’s Day (beginning of May), Reich Party Day (beginning of September), Harvest Thanksgiving (end of September, beginning of October), and finally November 9.
38. Thus, for example, Paul Stehlin, p. 53, and François-Poncet, p. 205, who even provides a description of this salute (which had never been used before and was never used again). Incidentally, most of the teams offered this salute as they marched in; the British and Japanese were the exceptions that attracted the most attention.
39. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 58.
40. Tischgespräche, p. 433 f.; also Heinrich Hoffmann, pp. 196 f. On Hitler’s constant fear of a faux pas, cf. Albert Zoller, Hitler privat, p. 126. Hitler once expressed his dismay that Mussolini let himself be photographed in bathing trunks: “A really great statesman would not do that.”
42. Krebs, Tendenzen, pp. 128 f.
43. Cf. for example Hans Severus Ziegler, Hitler aus dem Erleben dar gestellt, pp. 54, 57, 58, 64, 67, 70, etc. All the remarks and behavior noted in these pages have also been heard or observed by Albert Speer, as he has informed the author.
44. Communication from Albert Speer, who usually sat on the other side of Frau Wagner and so could not miss observing this little scene.
46. Tischgespräche, p. 227. The reference to the symbolic meaning of the Untersberg for Hitler is based on information from Speer; cf. also Inside the Third Reich, p. 86.
47. Domarus, p. 704 (speech of June 27, 1937, in Würzburg).
48. Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction, p. 255. Chapter XVIII (“Hitler Himself”) from which this passage is taken was omitted in the German edition of the Gespräche; it has now been printed in Theodor Schieder, Hermann Rauschnings “Gespräche mit Hitler” als Geschichtsquelle, p. 80. The passage is here retranslated from the original German text.
49. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 162. Elsewhere (p. 104) Rauschning comments that Hitler’s eloquence seemed like a “physical excess.”
50. Speer, p. 92; there, too, further references to the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun. See also p. 130.
51. Speer, p. 94; similarly, Zoller, p. 21. The characterizations of the entourage come from Hitler’s personal physician, Professor Karl Brandt; cf. Tischgespräche, p. 47.
52. Zoller, p. 21; for the remark cited above see Luedecke, p. 459. The reference to the films Hitler preferred I owe to Regierungsrat Barkhausen, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, who was charged with providing the films for Hitler during the thirties. The catalogue containing some 2,000 titles which could not be shown publicly in Germany can be seen at the Bundesarchiv.
54. Speer in a communication to the author; Hitler, Speer says, considered Pericles “a kind of parallel” to himself.
55. Speer in a communication to the author; Speer adds that Hitler’s rejection of the works of Lucas Cranach, for example, was due to the fact that Cranach’s female figures did not correspond to his own plumper ideal. Cranach’s women were “unaesthetic,” Hitler said to Speer.
56. See the illustration between pages 144 and 145.
57. For this whole subject see Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus, especially the chapter headed “Der Führerauftrag Linz,” pp. 154 ff.
59. Cf. Nolte, Epoche, p. 500.
60. Tischgespräche, p. 186; the following remark ibid., p. 171.
62. Ibid., pp. 159, 173; see also Speer, pp. 94 ff.
63. Libres propos, p. 253. In Mein Kampf he commented: Blood purity “is a thing that the Jew preserves better than any other people on earth. And so he advances on his fatal road until another force comes forth to oppose him, and in a mighty struggle hurls the heaven-stormer back to Lucifer.” Mein Kampf, p. 662.
64. Klaus Dörner, “Nationalsozialismus und Lebensvernichtung,” in: VJHfZ 1967:2, p. 131; also Domarus, p. 717, where Hitler declares in the course of a party rally proclamation: “But Germany has experienced her greatest revolution as a consequence of the first policy of racial hygiene ever systematically undertaken in this country. The results of this German racial policy will be more decisive for the future of our nation than the effects of all other laws. For they create the new man.”
65. Mein Kampf, p. 688. The speech to the officers is printed in Jacobsen and Jochmann, under the date of January 25, 1939.
68. Cf. Jacobsen, Aussenpolitik, p. 435. For Hitler’s attacks on the intellectuals cf. the speeches of April 29, 1937, and May 20, 1937, prinfed in Kotze and Krausnick, pp. 149 f. and 241 f.
69. Nolte, Faschismus, p. 325.
70. Situation report by the district magistrate of Bad Kreuznach, quoted in Heyen, pp. 290 f., with further such references.
71. Heiden, Hitler II, pp. 215, 251.
72. Italian Ambassador Attolico in conversation with Carl Jacob Burckhardt. See C. J. Burckhardt, p. 307. Cf. also Hitler’s remark in Tischgespräche, p. 341, that the Foreign Office was “a hodgepodge of nobodies.” For the remark on the generals cf. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler, p. 60; for the remark on the diplomats, H. Rauschning, Gespräche, pp. 249 ff.
73. IMT XXXI, 2949-PS, pp. 368 ff.
74. Seyss-Inquart’s memorandum of September 9, 1945, IMT XXXII, 3254-PS, p. 70.
75. Neue Basler Zeitung, March 16, 1938, quoted in M. Domarus, p. 822.
76. Cf. Bracher, Diktatur, p. 338.
77. Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von gestern, pp. 446 f.
79. C. J. Burckhardt, p. 157; for Chamberlain’s remark see Bernd-Jürgen Wandt, München 1938, p. 26.
80. Ciano’s Hidden Diary 1937–1938, p. 114. See also Kirkpatrick, Mussolini.
81. Henderson to Ribbentrop on May 21, 1938, ADAP II, No. 184. Similarly, on April 22, Undersecretary Butler told a representative of the German Embassy in London that England was aware that Germany would reach her next goal (he mentioned the Czechoslovak question); ibid., I, No. 750.
82. IMT XXV, 388-PS, pp. 422, 434.
83. Cf. Gilbert and Gott, p. 99, also p. 89. Chamberlain made his remark in his radio address of September 27, 1938; London Times of September 28, 1938. At this time the Czech ambassador in Rome, F. K. Chvalkovsky, commented to Mussolini that “Bohemia is completely unknown in England. Once, when he was a student in London, he was given a violin to play at a party, simply because it was known that he was a Czech. There was a confusion of thought between Bohemians and gypsies.” Ciano’s Hidden Diary 1937–1938, p. 174.
84. Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget, p. 229. The account of the meeting is based upon Paul Schmidt, Statist, pp. 395 ff., on the minutes of the meeting, and on a letter of Chamberlain’s, both reprinted in Freund, Weltgeschichte I, pp. 133 ff.
85. Notes by Ivone Kirkpatrick, quoted in Bullock, p. 461.
86. Cf. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 398. Hitler’s speech is printed in My New Order, pp. 517 ff.
87. Kirkpatrick’s notes, quoted by Bullock, p. 461; see also Paul Schmidt, Statist, p. 409.
88. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 399. The same behavior has been recorded by many other observers; cf., for example, P. Schmidt, Statist, p. 410; Fritz Wiedemann, pp. 176 f.; Kordt, Nicht aus den Akten, pp. 259 f., 265 ff. C. J. Burckhardt wrote to a friend at the end of August that it was impossible to imagine “the horror, the despair of the masses when the talk of war began again. . . . Never have I so keenly felt that the peoples are not responsible for the crimes of their leaders.” Meine Danziger Mission, p. 155.
89. Cf. Peter Hoffmann, Widerstand, Staatsstreich, Attentat, p. 79. In Paris, in the course of his visits there that spring, Goerdeler met chiefly with Pierre Bertaux and Alexis Léger (who as a poet uses the pseudonym of St.-John Perse), then the highest-ranking official at the Quai d’Orsay.
90. Ibid., p. 83. Beck would have considered a public statement of readiness to aid Czechoslovakia and a demonstration of military firmness “certain proof.”
91. On Halder’s relationship to Hitler cf. Helmut Krausnick, “Vorgeschichte und Beginn des militärischen Widerstandes gegen Hitler,” in: Die Vollmacht des Gewissens, p. 338, and H. B. Gisevius, To the Bitter End, pp. 288 f. Gisevius’s account carries special weight since he was among the sharpest critics of Halder. Also Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler, p. 184.
92. It appears that Canaris and Oster were informed of this plan and approved it—in large part on the grounds that only in this way could the problem of the oath of loyalty to Hitler personally be abruptly eliminated—that problem which had so fateful an effect right up to the twentieth of July.
93. Hans Rothfels, Opposition gegen Hitler, p. 68; also Helmuth K. G. Rönne-farth, Die Sudetenkrise I, p. 506.
94. Ritter, Goerdeler, pp. 198 f. Shortly after the Munich conference Nevile Henderson wrote to the same effect: “As things stand, by preserving peace we have saved Hitler and his regime.” Klaus-Jürgen Müller, Das Heer und Hitler, p. 378. Here once again, incidentally, Hitler followed up on his success by promptly dismissing a number of army officers, such as Gênerai Adam, who had emerged as oppositionists, thus snatching important key positions from the Opposition.
95. Ciano’s Hidden Diary 1937—1938, p. 166.
96. Ibid., pp. 166–68. All the concomitant circumstances make it plain that the only question at issue was how to set forth in a treaty the actual existing agreement. Of course, in the eyes of the two Western government heads, the conference also aimed at pinning Hitler down and thus making further expansion more difficult for him; but it is significant that all guarantees were merely set forth in supplementary agreements not signed by all the participants.
97. Ibid., p. 167. For the course of the Munich conference cf. Stehlin, pp. 125 f.; Schmidt, Statist, pp. 415 f.; and François-Poncet, pp. 269 ff.
98. Ciano’s Hidden Diary 1937–1938, p. 168.
99. Nolte, Faschismus, p. 281.
100. Le Testament politique de Hitler, pp. 118 f. The original text of the notes (the “Bormann Vermerke”) published in this book have not yet been made available. This, in part, may be the reason that the language and thought have a pithiness hardly characteristic of Hitler. We must also consider that the manuscript undoubtedly was revised and that the passages cited here represent a concentrate from a long-winded text full of outbursts and digressions. Albert Speer, in conversation with the author, has argued that Goebbels must have edited the text extensively, and perhaps written some of it himself; the diction on the whole, Speer points out, is much more in keeping with the Propaganda Minister’s style than with Hitler’s. For Schacht’s testimony cf. IMT XIII, p. 4. A similar remark of Hitler’s is recorded for September, 1938, in the diaries of Helmuth Groscurth: “He [Hitler] said he had been forced to draw back in September and had not reached his goal. He would have to wage war during his lifetime, he went on, for never again would a German enjoy such unlimited trust; he alone could do it. War aims: a) Dominion in Europe b) Domination of the world for centuries to come. The war would have to be launched soon because the others were rearming.” Helmuth Groscurth, Tagebücher eines Abwehroffiziers 1938–1940, p. 166.
101. Cf. the speech of August 22, 1939, Domarus, pp. 1234 f.
102. IMT XX, p. 397. Keitel declared in Nuremberg that the German offensive capacity would not even have sufficed to break through Czechoslovakia’s border fortifications; IMT X, p. 582.
103. Cf. Gilbert and Gott, pp. 144 ff.
104. See, for example, the report of the British chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 2nd Series III, p. 277. For the quotation from Das Schwarze Korps, see Bracher, Diktatur, p. 399. Details on reactions to the pogrom in various parts of the Reich in Marlis Steinert, Hitlers Krieg, p. 75.
105. The speech, a key document to the understanding of Hitler’s mentality, is printed in: VJHfZ 1958:2, pp. 181 ff.
106. Notes by Legation Councillor Hewel, ADAP IV, No. 228.
107. Zoller, p. 84; the following quotation is taken from the Proclamation to the German People of March 15, which had evidently been framed before the conversation with Hácha; cf. Domarus, p. 1095.
108. Quoted in Nolte, Faschismus, p. 330; on Chamberlain’s speech in Birmingham cf. Michaelis and Schraepler, XIII, pp. 95 ff.; also Gilbert and Gott, p. 164; and Shirer, p. 454.
109. Erich Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, p. 153. For Hitler’s later criticism of the operation against Prague, cf. Le Testament politique de Hitler, pp. 119 f. For the instructions to the press of March 16, 1939, cf. Hillgruber, Strategie, p. 15.
110. Sebastian Haffner, Der Teufelspakt (p. 92), a very stimulating, sharply expressed study, which also contains the reference to the three possible courses open to Hitler.
111. C. J. Burckhardt, p. 157.
112. Thus the record of the conversation among Beck, Chamberlain, and Halifax on April 4, 1939, quoted in Freund, Weltgeschichte II, p. 122.
117. Cf., for example, François-Poncet, p. 282; also Grigore Gafencu, Derniers Jours de l’Europe, pp. 98 ff. For the following cf. Michaelis and Schraepler, XIII, pp. 211 f., 214 f.
118. IMTXXXIV, pp. 380 ff. (120-C).
119. Shirer, p. 471; Bullock (p. 504) expresses a similar opinion.
121. Quoted in Freund, Weltgeschichte II, pp. 373 f.
122. Notes of Embassy secretary Julius Schnurre on a conversation with Georgi Astachov, the Soviet charge d’affaires in Berlin, on May 5, 1939; cf. ADAP VI, p. 355; also notes of von Weizsäcker on a conversation with Soviet Ambassador Merekalov on April 17,1939; ibid., No. 215.
123. C. J. Burckhardt, p. 348. On Hitler’s hesitation and his wavering attitude, cf. p. 325 f.; also Bullock, pp. 515 f. The remark on the “pact with Satan” was made in a conference on August 28; cf. Halder, Kriegstagebuch I, p. 38.
126. C. J. Burckhardt, pp. 341 ff.
128. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Erinnerungen, p. 235.
129. Georges Bonnet, Avant la catastrophe.
130. Freund, Weltgeschichte III, p. 124; here, too, p. 123, the Polish Foreign Minister’s declaration of August 23, 1939, and, p. 165, the exchange of telegrams between Ribbentrop and Hitler.
131. The Soviet judges succeeded, however, in preventing the admission of the supplementary protocol as evidence, so that it played no further part in the trial.
133. Hans-Günther Seraphim, ed., Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs, p. 82. “That is,” Rosenberg commented indignantly, “about the most brazen insult that can be inflicted upon National Socialism.”
134. Report of the secretary, Hencke, dated August 24, 1939, cited in Freund, Weltgeschichte III, pp. 166 ff.
135. Hoffmann, Hitler Was My Friend, p. 103. For the remark on unused historic moments cf. Hillgruber, Staatsmänner I, p. 122.
136. Six separate versions of this address have been preserved, each differing from the others in its stresses. Cf. the comparative analysis by Winfried Baumgart in VJHfZ 1968:2, pp. 120 ff. The version cited here is to be found in: IMT XXVI, 798-PS (first part) and 1014-PS (second part). Concerning the impression the speech made on its audience cf. Erich Raeder, Mein Leben II, pp. 165 ff. and Erich von Manstein, Verlorene Siege, pp. 19 f.
137. W. L. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 545.
138. From notes by Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, Sir Orme Sargent, and Lord Halifax, cited in Gilbert and Gott, pp. 320 ff.
139. Birger Dahlerus, The Last Attempt, pp. 104–05; also notes by Sir Nevile Henderson dated August 31, 1939, quoted in Freund, Weltgeschichte III, pp. 372 f.
140. Note by Paul Schmidt concerning a conversation between Hitler and Attolico on August 31, 1939, 7 P.M., cited in Freund, Weltgeschichte III, p. 391. For Directive Number 1 see ADAP VII, pp. 397 ff.
141. In the negotiations with England France expressed the desire not to begin military operations until September 4: to be precise, as Bonnet stressed to Halifax, on Monday evening; cf. M. Freund, Weltgeschichte III, pp. 412 f.
142. Speech of September 1, 1939, The New York Times, September 3, 1939, p. 3.
143. Schmidt, Statist, pp. 463 f.
144. Stehlin, Auftrag, p. 234; also ADAP VII, p. 445. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 617, points out this noteworthy difference.
145. Gilbert and Gott, pp. 284 f.; see also p. 274 for the following episode.
148. C. J. Burckhardt, p. 351.
149. Karl Dönitz, Zehrt Jahre und zwanzig Tage, p. 45.
INTERPOLATION III
1. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 661; also Hillgruber, Staatsmänner I, p. 388.
2. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 12; also Tischgespräche, p. 172.
3. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 16.
4. Hillgruber, Staatsmänner I, pp. 102 f. In the same conversation Hitler remarked that he would wait until the fall of 1940 before committing the U-boats “with full energy,” but that he hoped “by then to have finished with his enemies” (pp. 92 f.).
5. Thus in a strategy conference of July 31, 1944; cf. Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, p. 587; also Ernst von Weizsäcker, Erinnerungen, p. 258.
6. Thus to the members of the Bulgarian regency council during a conversation at Klessheim Palace on March 16, 1944, cited by Hillgruber, Staatsmänner II, p. 377. In the same conversation Hitler remarked that “this war can be waged all the more resolutely the less we imagine that there are any other ways to end it”; ibid., p. 376.
7. The order was couched in the form of a letter that read as follows: “Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility of extending the authorization of physicians to be specified by name so that patients reasonably considered to be incurably ill may, after the most serious consideration of the state of their sickness, be granted a mercy death. Adolf Hitler.” Cf. IMT XXVI, p. 169. However, the euthanasia program could not be carried out to the extent intended, chiefly because of the protests from the churches that soon began.
8. Report of the Security Service (SD) for Domestic Questions dated January 8, 1940, cited in Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich, pp. 34 f.
9. Address to the divisional commanders, December 12, 1944; cf. Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, p. 718. Also Hitlers zweites Buch, p. 138. Hitler’s various efforts before the outbreak of the war to provide himself with an alibi against the charge of war guilt were so transparent that they proved worthless. Later, explaining his offers for a solution to the questions of Danzig and the Polish Corridor during the last days of August, Hitler himself said bluntly: “I needed an alibi, especially for the German people, to show them that I had done everything possible to preserve peace.” Cf. Schmidt, Statist, p. 469.
10. According to Statistisches Handbuch des Deutschen Reiches the expenditures for armaments during the years of Nazi rule in peacetime were as follows:
|
Arms Budget |
Total Budget | |
|
Fiscal Year |
(billions of marks) |
(billions of marks) |
|
1933–34 |
1.9 |
8.1 |
|
1935–35 |
1.9 |
10.4 |
|
1936–36 |
4.0 |
12.8 |
|
1937–37 |
5.8 |
15.8 |
|
1938–38 |
8.2 |
20.1 |
|
1939–39 |
18.4 |
31.8 |
11. Cf. IMT XV, pp. 385 f. (General Jodi’s testimony, with the remark about the “ridiculous’’ reserves; in the same context Jodi also stated that “actual rearmament had to be carried out after the war began.”) Also Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Fall Gelb, pp. 4 ff. On the munitions situation cf. i.a. Halder, Kriegstagebuch I, p. 99. On September 1, 1939, the strength of the Luftwaffe was: 1,180 bomber planes, 771 single-engine fighter planes, 336 dive bombers, 408 twin-engine fighters, 40 ground attack planes, 552 transport planes, 379 reconnaissance planes, and 240 naval aircraft. By the end of 1939 an additional 2,518 aircraft were built; in 1940, 10,392; in 1941, 12,392; in 1942, 15,497; in 1943, 24,795; in 1944, 40,953; and even in 1945, 7,541 planes were produced. See Hillgruber, Strategie, p. 38n.
12. Alan S. Milward, in his German Economy at War, was the first to show that the concept of blitzkrieg arose out of more than merely tactical considerations, that it was a method of waging modern war that took account of Germany’s specific situation. Cf. also Le Testament politique de Hitler, pp. 106 ff.
13. This is the explicit or implicit thesis of Fritz Fischer and his school; see particularly Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht and Krieg der Illusionen; Helmut Böhme, Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht; Klaus Wernecke, Der Wille zur Weltgeltung. But see also, for in some cases highly controversial views: Egmont Zechlin, “Die Illusion vom begrenzten Krieg,” in: Die Zeit, September 17, 1965; Fritz Stern, “Bethmann Hollweg und der Krieg,” in: Recht und Staat, Heft 351/352; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Die deutsche Kriegszielpolitik 1914–1918,” in Juli 1914, the German edition of the Journal of Contemporary History, Munich, 1967; and, above all, Karl Dietrich Erdmann in the introduction to: Kurt Riezler, Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente, pp. 17 ff.
14. Heinrich Himmler in one of his speeches in Posen (October 4, 1943); Himmler was unquestionably reflecting Hitler’s view as it emerged around this time in, for example, the table talk, and was expressing it in concentrated form; IMT XXIX, p. 172 (1919-PS).
15. Otto Hintze to Friedrich Meinecke; cf. Die deutsche Katastrophe, p. 89.
BOOK VII
1. IMT XXXVII, pp. 466 if. (052-L).
2. Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch I, p. 98; cf. also pp. 93 ff. General von Leeb, commander of an army group, spoke of the “insanity of an attack.” See Jacobsen, Fall Gelb, pp. 50 f. Von Leeb also commented on Hitler’s “appeal for peace”: “So the Führer’s speech in the Reichstag was only lying to the German people.” For the alternative of “putting the war to sleep,” cf. the sketch that General Jodi wrote in Nuremberg on “Hitler as a Strategist,” printed in: Kriegstagebuch des OKW (KTB/OKW) IV, 2, p. 1717. For the officers’ opposition during this period as a whole cf. Harold C. Deutsch, Verschwörung gegen den Krieg, pp. 71 ff.
3. Heinz Guderian, Erinnerungen eines Soldaten, p. 76. The Hitler speech cited here has been preserved in several largely consonant versions. One of the two versions used here is Nuremberg Document PS-789 (IMT XXVI, pp. 327 ff.); the other is N 104/3 in the Freiburg im Breisgau military archives; its probable author is Helmuth Groscurth.
4. Churchill, The Second World War II, p. 74.
5. F. Halder, Kriegstagebuch I, p. 302.
6. Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, quoted in Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, p. 147.
7. Cf. Gibson, The Ciano Diaries, pp. 191, 192, 225, 332. For the following letter from Mussolini to Hitler see Hitler e Mussolini, Lettere e Documenti, p. 35.
8. Gibson, The Ciano Diaries, pp. 235–36.
9. Ibid., p. 267. The preceding remark is cited in Raymond Cartier, La seconde guerre mondiale I, p. 137; cf. also Michaelis and Schraepler, XV, p. 150.
10. So Albert Speer has informed the author; cf. also the above-mentioned sketch by Jodi in KTB/OKW IV, 2, pp. 1718 f., who also, incidentally, credits Hitler with the timely development of a 7.5-centimeter antitank gun.
11. Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, p, 30.
12. Gibson, The Ciano Diaries, p. 266.
13. Cf. the description in Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. 331.
15. Meinecke, Briefwechsel, pp. 363 f. The Opposition went into a deep depression. Ulrich von Hassell’s diary (Vom anderen Deutschland, pp. 156ff.) speaks of “badly shaken minds” among Oster, Dohnanyi, Guttenberg, and also Goerdeler. Von Kessel, he says, was “wholly resigned and would like to study archaeology.” An anonymous acquaintance in the Opposition camp proved to be representative of a widespread mood: he was “inclined to believe that a man who achieved such successes must be walking with God.” Von Hassell himself summed up the inner conflict of many conservative Oppositionists in the phrase: “One might feel desperate under the tragic burden of being unable to rejoice in such successes.” For the following episode at Bruly-le-Pêche see Speer, Inside the Third Reich, pp. 170 f.
16. This was Article 8 of the agreement, stating: “The German government solemnly declares to the French government that it does not intend to employ for its purposes those vessels of the French navy now in ports under German control.”
17. Winston Churchill, speech in House of Commons, May 13, 1940.
18. Winston Churchill, Blood, Sweat and Tears, p. 334 (speech of July 14, 1940).
19. Hitler, My New Order, pp. 836 ff.
20. Karl Klee, Dokumente zum Unternehmen ‘Seelöwe,’ pp. 441 f. For Admiral Raeder’s report—which, however, gave the navy a chance for a successful landing “only on the assumption that command of the air is achieved”—see KTB/OKW I, p. 63.
21. Speaking on June 6, 1940, to Sir Edward Spears; quoted in Michaelis and Schraepler XV, p. 261. On November 28, 1940, in a speech to the French Chamber of Deputies, Alfred Rosenberg attempted to. interpret what had happened in the same light: “The decadent successors of the French Revolution have clashed with the first troops of the great German Revolution. With that . . . this era of 1789 is now approaching its end. In a triumphal victory it has been . . . crushed when, already rotten, it still arrogantly attempted to go on dominating the destiny of Europe in the twentieth century as well.” Rosenberg, Gold und Blut, p. 7.
22. This fear of American intervention, always present, had been given renewed impetus by Roosevelt’s tough speech of July 19, 1940, which could only be interpreted as a resolute challenge; cf. the notes of Dieckhoff, the German ambassador in Washington, of July 21, 1940, in: ADAP X, pp. 213 f.; also Halder, KTB II, p. 30 (July 22, 1940). From that moment on this fear affected almost all discussions on strategy; cf., for example, Raeder, Mein Leben II, pp. 246 f.; also KTB/OKW I, pp. 88 ff. For an overall view see Friedländer, Prelude to Downfall.
23. Tagebuch Engel, November 4, 1940, quoted in Hillgruber, Strategie, p. 354n.
24. Thus at the headquarters of Army Group A (von Rundstedt’s) in Charle-ville; cf. Klee, Das Unternehmen “Seelöwe,” pp. 189 f.
25. KTB/ OKW I, p. 996. There is a great deal of controversy on the question of when Hitler definitively decided to attack the Soviet Union; cf. particularly Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Der deutsche Entschluss zum Angriff auf die Sovjetunion,” in: VJHfZ 1953:2, pp. 301 ff., and the replies of H. G. Seraphim and A. Hillgruber, ibid., 1954:2, pp. 240 ff.
26. Le Testament politique de Hitler, pp. 93 ff. In conclusion Hitler also cited Germany’s dependence on deliveries of Russian goods, which Stalin could at any time use for purposes of blackmail, especially in regard to Finland, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Hitler then continued: “It would not have been fitting for the Third Reich, as the representative and protector of Europe, to sacrifice these friendly countries on the altar of Communism. That would have dishonored us, and moreover we would have been punished for it. From the moral as well as from the strategic point of view it would therefore have been a wrong decision.” Ibid., p. 96. On June 12, 1941, Hitler gave a similar justification in speaking to Marshal Antonescu, the Rumanian Chief of State; cf. Hillgruber, Staatsmänner I, pp. 588 ff. Another indication that the war against the Soviet Union was Hitler’s “real” war may be found in his remark of July, 1940, that he must fight the war in the East before finishing the war in the West because he could “hardly ask the people to undertake a new war against Russia, given the mood that would prevail after a victory over England.” Cf. Bernhard von Lossberg, Im Wehrmachtsführungsstab.
27. The men involved were chiefly Admiral Raeder, General Rommel, Baron von Weizsäcker, Count von der Schulenburg, the German Ambassador in Moscow, and General Köstring, the military attaché at the Embassy in Moscow. On the idea of the offensive in the Near East cf. Bullock, p. 639. Bullock believes that barely a fourth of the forces provided for the attack on the Soviet Union would probably have sufficed to deliver a fateful blow to British rule in the Near East.
29. Gisevius, Adolf Hitler, p. 471. On Hitler’s depressed mood during the period before the beginning of the campaign, which was in such striking contrast to the optimism of the military leaders, see, for example, Walter Schellenberg, Memoiren, pp. 179 f.
30. Thus to the British ambassador, cited in Jacobsen, Aussenpolitik, p. 377.
32. Halder, Kriegstagebuch II, pp. 335 ff.
33. Cf. Krausnick, “Judenverfolgung,” in: Anatomie des SS-Staates II, pp. 363 ff., with further references to sources. Hitler personally edited the text of the assignment for Himmler and ordered it included in the High Command of the armed forces directive for March 13, 1941; cf. KTB/ OKW I, pp. 340 ff. Further to that assignment see Walter Warlimont, Im Hauptquartier der Wehrmacht, pp. 167 ff.
34. Cf. Nuremberg Document NOKW-1692, reprinted in Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, “Kommissarbefehl und Massenexekutionen sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener,” in: Anatomie des SS-Staates II, pp. 223 f. The “commissar order” is printed ibid., pp. 225 ff. See also the testimonies of the generals at Nuremberg, IMT XX, pp. 635, 663; IMT XXVI, pp. 406 ff., and XXXIV, pp. 252 ff., 191 ff.
35. IMT XXXVIII, pp. 86 ff. (221-L). Along the same lines Rosenberg informed the “most intimate participants in the Eastern problem” on June 20, 1941: “From today on we are not waging a crusade against Bolshevism solely to save the poor Russians from this Bolshevism for all time to come, but rather we are doing so in order to further German world policy and to secure the German Reich.” Cf. IMT XXVI, p. 614 (1058-PS).
36. Affidavit of Otto Ohlendorf, Nuremberg Documents IV, pp. 312 if.; further data in Helmut Krausnick, “Judenverfolgung,” pp. 367 f.
37. Thus to Japanese Ambassador Oshima on July 15, 1941; cited in Hillgruber, Staatsmänner I, pp. 600 ff. For Halder’s note see his Kriegstagebuch III, p. 38.
38. See Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941–1945, p. 62. For the shift in emphasis in the armaments program and for the planning of the return march from the Soviet Union, cf. Directive 32 b of July 14, 1941, printed in Walther Hubatsch, Hitlers Weisungen, pp. 136 ff., and KTB/ OKW I, pp. 1022 ff.
39. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 44. For the intended fate of Leningrad and Moscow, see Halder, Kriegstagebuch III, p. 53; Tischgespräche, p. 251; Hillgruber, Staatsmänner I, p. 643; KTB/OKW I, pp. 1021, 1070; Zoller, Hitler privat, p. 143. In his speech of November 8, 1941, Hitler also declared that Leningrad would not be captured, but starved out; see Domarus, p. 1775. A detailed prognosis for the annihilation of the city was elaborated in an order issued by Admiral Kurt Fricke, naval chief of staff, dated September 29, 1941: “It is planned to surround the city in a close encirclement and level it to the ground by bombardment with artillery of all calibers and by continual bombing from the air. Pleas for surrender resulting from the city’s predicament will be rejected, since the problem of sheltering and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our existence we can have no interest in preserving even a part of this urban population.” Cited in: Michaelis and Schraepler XVII, pp. 380 ff.
40. Cf., for example, the references in various conversations in Hillgruber, Staatsmänner I, pp. 64, 594, 619, 628. According to Halder, Marshal Coulaincourt’s memoirs of the campaign of 1812 were withdrawn from circulation in the winter of 1941–42. See Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945.
41. Halder, Kriegstagebuch III, p. 295; also Hillgruber, Strategie, pp. 551 f. The following spring Hitler once more declared that he would have “gladly waged this war against Bolshevism with the British navy and air force as partners.” See Tischgespräche, p. 244.
43. In conversations with Swedish Foreign Minister ScaVenius and with Croatian Foreign Minister Lorkoviĉ. Cited in Hillgruber, Staatsmänner I, pp. 657, 661.
44. To Ambassador Oshima on July 15, 1941, cited in ibid., p. 605. For the opinion of Brauchitsch see Goebbels, Tagebücher 1942–43, p. 132. Hitler did commute General von Sponeck’s death sentence to imprisonment, but two and a half years later, after the attempted assassination of July 20, 1944, the Gestapo turned up at Germersheim Fortress and made short work of shooting the general.
45. Goebbels, Tagebücher 1942–43, p. 133.
46. Franz Halder, Hitler als Feldherr, pp. 50, 52. As Speer (p. 239) reports, the ascent of Mount Elbrus was one cause of Hitler’s vexation. He took a characteristically exaggerated view: “For hours he raged as if his entire plan of campaign had been ruined by this bit of sport.”
47. See Speer, p. 287. In a personal communication Speer has informed the author: “As I have now learned from a member of the RAF staff, there were technical obstacles to carrying out the concept of paralyzing vital segments of industry. There was, for example, the impossibility of finding the target at night, over great distances, by electronic means, and of course there was the inadequate range of the fighter escorts for the American daylight bombers. These bombers had tried to attack Schweinfurt by day without escort, but had to take excessively heavy losses. All that changed in 1944.” About one-third of the German capacity to wage war was dependent on the production of synthetic gasoline; the air force relied on that source for all its fuel. See Hillgruber, Strategie, pp. 420 f.
48. Churchill, speech at the Mansion House, November 10, 1942.
49. See Domarus, pp. 1935, 1937 f., 1941.
51. Speer, pp. 245 f.; also Warlimont, pp. 284 f.
52. Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, pp. 126 ff.
53. Gibson, The Ciano Diaries, p. 556; also Goebbels, Tagebücher 1942—43, p. 126, and Speer, p. 302.
54. Goebbels, Tagebücher 1942–43, p. 241. For the preceding remark see Speer, p. 249.
55. These phrases may be found, in the order given, in Tischgespräche, pp. 210, 212, 303, 348, 171, 181.
56. See, in the order given, Tischgespräche, pp. 355, 351, 361, 468, 258, and Zoller, p. 174.
57. Tischgespräche, p. 465. The parallel to the “period of struggle” first comes up in the speech of November 8, 1942, where it is promptly used several times; see Domarus, pp. 1935, 1936, 1937, 1941, 1943, 2085; also Tischgespräche, p. 364, i.a.
58. Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, pp. 779 f.; cf. also Henry Picker in: Tischgespräche, pp. 128, 130; also Speer, p. 243.
59. Ribbentrop to the Nuremberg tribunal psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley, cited from Hans-Dietrich Röhrs, Hitler. Die Zerstörung einer Persönlichkeit, pp. 53 f.
60. See the extensive references to Hitler’s health in Maser, Hitler, pp. 332 f.
61. Morell log, cited ibid, p. 339; the drug was prostacrinum, an extract of seminal vesicles and prostate glands. On Morell and his methods of treatment, cf. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, pp. 59 ff.
62. Report of Dr. Erwin Giesing of June 12, 1945, cited in Maser, Hitler, p. 429.
63. This is Röhrs’s (Hitler, p. 121) wholly erroneous view. On the question of whether Hitler was suffering from one of the forms of Parkinson’s disease, or only from what is called the Parkinson syndrome, see ibid., pp. 43 if. and 101 f.; also the study by Johann Recktenwald, Woran hat Adolf Hitler gelitten? which assumes a Parkinson syndrome caused by encephalitis. See also Maser, Hitler, pp. 326 ff. and Bullock, pp. 717 f. Probably the exact nature of Hitler’s illness can no longer be determined, since no examination with a specific investigatory aim was ever undertaken. Because of the extremely inadequate documentation, none of the various diagnoses can be persuasively supported or rejected; the principal symptom of both Parkinson’s disease and the Parkinson syndrome, namely the shaking arm or leg, can also be caused by many other diseases.
64. See Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, p. 608, and the speech of November 8, 1942, Domarus, p. 1944.
65. A variety of interpretations has been offered for the motives and the background of this speech. Some see it in connection with the demand for “unconditional surrender” formulated in Casablanca a good three weeks earlier (see, for example, Werner Stephan, Joseph Goebbels, pp. 256 f.), some as an attempt by the Propaganda Minister to enhance his personal position and announce his claims to the position of second in command, for with the disintegration of Hitler’s personality and Göring’s simultaneous loss of prestige, that position had become crucial. Cf. Rudolf Semler, Goebbels—the Man Next to Hitler, pp. 68 f., also Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Doctor Goebbels, pp. 245 f., Heiber, Joseph Goebbels, pp. 328 ff., and the balanced summing-up by Günter Moltmann, “Goebbels’ Speech on Total War, Feb. 18, 1943,” Republic to Reich, pp. 298 ff. On thie initiative of the Goebbels-Speer-Ley-Funk combination see also Speer, pp. 254 ff.
66. In England, for example, the number of servants in private households was reduced to one-third of what it had been before the war, whereas in Germany the figure actually increased; cf. Speer, pp. 220, 540. The number of women employed in industry rose only slightly during the war, from 2,620,000 on July 31, 1939, to 2,808,000 on July 31, 1943; a year later it had dropped again to 2,678,000. See USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German Economy. Also confidential report of the Economic Conference of February 26, 1943, BAK 115/1942; see also BAK NS 19/1963. For the preceding remark of Hitler, see Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 22.
67. This was a visit to Army Group South (von Manstein). Earlier that year there had been a total of two visits to front-line headquarters: on February 17 to Army Group South and on March 13 to Army Group Center (von Kluge). A visit was planned for June 19, 1944, to the invasion front, that is, to Rommel’s headquarters in Roche-Guyon Palace, but this plan was canceled at short notice. See Hans Speidel, invasion 1944, pp. 112 ff.
68. Speer, pp. 245, 295 f., 299 f.
69. Krebs, Tendenzen und Gestalten, pp. 124 ff.
70. Hans Buchheim, “Befehl und Gehorsam,” in: Anatomie des SS-Staates I, pp. 338 f.
72. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 129. For the remark of Goebbels see Tagebücher 1942—43, date of March 27, 1942.
74. IMT XXVI, p. 266 (710-PS). Rosenberg’s remark is cited from Robert M. W. Kempner, Eichmann und Komplicen, p. 97. On the question of the specific decision for the “final solution” see Krausnick, “Judenverfolgung,” pp. 360 ff. The concept “final solution” first appeared around the same time, in a decree of the Reichssicherheitshauptumt dated May 20, 1941; see IMT NG-3104.
75. See the report of SS Obergruppenführer Erich v.d. Bach-Zelewski, ND, NO-2653.
76. Part of the statement of the engineer Hermann Friedrich Gräbe on the mass shooting of some 5,000 Jews in Dubno (Ukraine) on October 5, 1942, by SS and Ukrainian militiamen; see IMT XXXI, pp. 446 ff. (2992-PS).
77. Cited from Bracher, Diktatur, p. 463. On fhe number of Jews killed in the big extermination camps of the East, see Heinz Höhne, Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf, p. 349. The remark of Rudolf Höss is quoted in his autobiographical account, Kommandant in Auschwitz, p. 120—where, incidentally, in a curious perversion of ambition he claims some 3 million victims for Auschwitz alone.
78. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 426.
79. Tischgespräche, pp. 190, 271 f., 469. In the same spirit Himmler, in a memorandum on the General Plan for the East dated April 27, 1942, suggested retraining the midwives in the Eastern territories as abortionists. See Heiber, “Der Generalplan Ost,” in: VJHfZ 1958:3, p. 292.
80. Cf. the document in VJHfZ 1958:3, p. 299. For Otto Hofmann’s statement see ND, NO-4113.
81. IMT XXXVII, p. 517; also Tischgespräche, p. 253.
83. Tischgespräche, p. 288, and Zoller, p. 105.
84. A statement by Kaltenbrunner, who was echoing similar ideas in the top leadership of the SS; cf. IMT XXXII, p. 297 (3462-PS). For this context cf. Martin Bormann’s memorandum of January 29, 1944, cited in Jacobsen and Jochmann, Ausgewählte Dokumente, under that date.
85. Hitler’s Table Talk, pp. 110, 621. See also the note on Rosenberg’s conversation with Hitler of December 14, 1941, in: IMT XXVII, p. 272 (1517-PS). The name “Tauria” was Rosenberg’s idea; Hitler preferred “Gotenland.”
87. Tischgespräche, p. 320. The metaphor of the “trophy cup” bobbed up elsewhere, for example, in the course of Hitler’s nocturnal monologue on January 30, 1933. See Görlitz and Quint, Adolf Hitler, p. 367.
88. From the draft by State Secretary Stuckart; see the records of the interrogation of Stuckart’s associate H. Globke on September 25, 1945, RF-602, IMT IV, pp. 472 ff.; also ND, NG-3572, NG-3455, and the file notation on the predatory discussion in Göring’s headquarters on June 19, 1940, printed in IMT XXVII, pp. 29 ff. (1155-PS). According to Erich Kordt, Nicht aus den Akten, p. 393, Calais and Boulogne were to remain in German possession as bases. For Hitler’s comment on the Channel positions see Tischgespräche, p. 336.
89. Ever since 1940 a National Planning Commission for the Design of German Soldiers’ Cemeteries had been at work under the direction of Professor Wilhelm Kreis. The Commission’s assignment was defined as follows: “Facing westward on the cliffs of the Atlantic coast magnificent structures will rise as an eternal memorial to the liberation of the Continent from dependency on the British and to the unification of Europe under the leadership of her German heartland nation. The austere, noble beauty of the soldiers’ cemetery at Thermopylae serves as symbol for the German inheritance of the spirit of Hellas’s classical culture. Towers soaring massively over the plains of the East will rise as symbols of the taming of the chaotic powers of the eastern steppes by the disciplined might of Teutonic forces for order—surrounded by the graves of the warrior generation of German blood who, as so often for the past two thousand years, saved the existence of Occidental civilization from the destructive tidal waves out of Central Asia.” Cited in Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 128 f.
90. These examples are taken from the collection of Himmler’s letters by Helmut Heiber, Reichsführer! . . . and in order of quotation may be found on pp. 194, 222 f., 251, 145, 95. See also Heiber’s foreword, especially pp. 22 f.
91. Zoller, p. 73, and Libres propos, p. 123. On Hitler’s superstitiousness see Tischgespräche, pp. 166 f. and 333.
92. Hitler e Mussolini, pp. 165 f., cited from Bullock, p. 706. Schmidt, Statist, relates that Hitler gave Mussolini “a regular tongue-lashing.” Mussolini, Schmidt wrote, had been “so excited by the news of the air raid on Rome that after his return from Rome he urgently requested my notes on the conversations. He had not been able to follow them, we were told.”
93. Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, p. 231 (on May 20, 1943).
95. Goebbels, Tagebücher 1942–43, pp. 392 ff. For Hitler’s remark to Ribbentrop see Zwischen London und Moskau, p. 265.
BOOK VIII
1. Himmler, referring to Hitler’s orders. What must be achieved, he stated in a letter to SS leader and Police Chief Prützmann dated September 7, 1943, was a situation in which “no human being, no cattle, not a bag of grain, not a railroad track remains behind; not a house remains standing, not a mine exists that has not been wrecked for years to come, not a well that has not been poisoned. The enemy must really find a totally scorched and destroyed country. . . . Do everything that is humanly possible.” Quoted from Heiber, ReichsFührer!. . . p. 233.
2. For example, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke and the majority of his friends belonging to the Kreisau Circle. George F. Kennan called Count von Moltke “the greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts, that I met on either side of the battle lines”; George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950, p. 121.
3. See Schellenberg, pp. 279 ff. On Himmler’s affidavit, see Felix Kersten, Totenkopf und Treue, pp. 209 ff. After reading this medical report (which, however, was prepared without an examination of the patient), Kersten concluded that Hitler belonged in a mental hospital, not in the Führer’s headquarters. For the entire subject of the “resistance” within the SS, its motives and its various initiatives, see Höhne, pp. 448 ff.
4. Cited in Dietrich Ehlers, Technik und Moral einer Verschwörung, p. 102. It is a common misunderstanding, probably first voiced by Bullock, p. 736 f., that the Kreisau Circle consisted merely of thinkers and that its members were even proud of their contempt for all action; cf. especially Ger van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand, where ample evidence is presented to refute this notion.
5. See Ehlers, p. 93. For the principle arguments against the German nationalist conspirators see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 98 ff.
6. Inquiries among the workers, inspired by the Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, who belonged to the Kreisau Circle, yielded rather discouraging results. Von Trott’s memoranda also speak of widespread passivity in the working class; cf. Hans Mommsen, “Gesellschaftsbild und Verfassungspläne des deutschen Widerstands,” in Schmitthenner and Buchheim, ed., Der Deutsche Widerstand gegen Hitler, p. 75. A Social Democratic opinion poll taken in 1942 came to the conclusion: “We will not be able to bring the masses out into the streets”; see Emil Henk, Die Tragödie des 20. Juli 1944, pp. 21 ff., and Allen Welsh Dulles, Germany’s Underground, p. 108. During the war significant resistance by the radical Left existed only after the beginning of the attack on the Soviet Union. That resistance came to a focus in the “Rote Kapelle” headed by Lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen and Administrative Secretary (Oberregierungsrat) Arvid Harnack; some of the members engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. In August, 1942, some one hundred persons were arrested in connection with these activities; many of them were executed shortly afterward. Another group around Anton Saefkow was caught early in July, 1944; its fate, as we shall see below, played a part in precipitating Stauffenberg’s decision to act.
7. Ehlers, p. 143. For the biography of Stauffenberg see now Christian Müller, Oberst i.G. Stauffenberg. Incidentally, when Stefan George died in Minusio near Locarno on December 4, 1933, Stauffenberg with his two brothers and eight other friends of George were at his bedside.
8. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler, p. 138.
9. Speidel, pp. 113 ff. Characteristically, Hitler had waited until a few hours before the meeting to inform the two field marshals that it would take place, and where.
10. A specific motive for Hitler’s sudden departure has been occasionally mentioned. It is said that shortly after Rundstedt and Rommel left, a V-1 that had veered off course struck in the vicinity of the Führer’s headquarters. Actually, we can regard this only as the pretext that Hitler used to avoid the confrontation; for why should a rocket accidentally striking in Margival have made a meeting in distant Roche-Guyon any more dangerous. On the incident itself see Speidel, p. 119.
12. Communication to the author from Baroness von Below.
13. Zoller, p. 184. Hitler requested that the clothes “be sent to Fräulein Braun at the Berghof with instructions that she is to preserve them carefully.”
16. Operation Thunderstorm was initiated abruptly on August 22, 1944, and resulted in the arrest of some 5,000 deputies and functionaries of the former political parties, including such persons as Konrad Adenauer and Kurt Schumacher. See Walter Hammer, “Die Gewitteraktion vom 22. 8. 1944,” in Freiheit und Recht, 1959:8–9, pp. 15 ff.
17. W. Scheidt, Gespräche mit Hitler, cited from Eberhard Zeller, Geist der Freiheit, p. 588; also Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, p. 588.
18. Quoted in Ehlers, p. 113; see also Zeller, p. 461.
19. The speech is printed in: VJHfZ 1953:4, pp. 357 ff.; the passage quoted is on pp. 384 f.
21. Sebastian Haffner in a review in the magazine Konkret, 1964:2 of Kunrat von Hammerstein’s book Spähtrupp.
22. Adolf Heusinger, Befehl im Widerstreit, p. 367.
24. Cited in Bullock, p. 757, n. 1.
26. Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, pp. 615, 620 (August 31, 1944).
27. Radio address of January 30, cited in Domarus, p. 2083.
28. Tischgespräche, p. 468; see also p. 376.
29. General Bayerlein, cited in Cartier, Vol. II, p. 274. The description of Hitler is General von Manteuffel’s, cited from Shirer, p. 1091.
30. Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, pp. 721 ff.
33. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 115.
34. Le Testament politique de Hitler, p. 67. The preceding quotation is based on a memo to the author from Otto Remer. Remer, in conversation, had reminded Hitler that a few weeks earlier he had called the Ardennes offensive the last chance in this war, and had said that if it failed the whole war was lost.
35. “Lagebesprechung” of April 27, 1945, printed in Der Spiegel 1966:3, p. 42. On planning destruction see Speer, p. 403.
36. Cited in Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, p. 72.
37. Cf. Speer, p. 425. On July 20, 1944, Hitler had told Mussolini that he was “determined to level London completely” by bombardment with V-2 rockets. They would “keep firing at London until the entire city is destroyed.” See Hillgruber, Staatsmänner II, pp. 470 f. The order to defend Paris or reduce it to ashes was issued on August 23, 1944, but was disobeyed by General von Choltitz; see the account by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? The order itself is printed in Jacobsen, 1939–1945, pp. 587 f.
38. Goebbels, cited in Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, p. 51.
39. Printed in KTB/OKW IV, 2, pp. 1701 ff. Cf. the description in Gerhard Boldt, Die letzten Tage, p. 15.
41. Guderian, p. 376; also Boldt, pp. 26 f. The doctor mentioned was Dr. Giesing; cf. the account in Maser, Hitler, pp. 350 f.
42. Zoller, p. 230. “From time to time,” the report continues, “he raised his eyes to the portrait of Frederick the Great that hung above his desk and repeated his saying: ‘Ever since I have come to know men, I love dogs.’ ”
45. Zoller, pp. 29 f. During a military conference in January Hitler wondered “whether a new shell ought not to be made now, after all” (Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, p. 867), and when General Karl Wolff visited him on April 18, Hitler elaborated on his “plans for the near future.” See Eugen Dollmann, Dolmetscher der Diktatoren, p. 235.
46. Cited in Görlitz and Quint, p. 616; see also Domarus, pp. 2202 ff.
48. The “flag order” is printed in Jacobsen, 1939–1945, pp. 591 f. The so-called Nero Command is printed in KTB/OKW IV, 2, pp. 1580 f.
49. Trevor-Roper, ed., The Bormann Letters, p. 198.
53. Statement by Frau Inge Haberzettel, one of the Propaganda Minister’s secretaries. Cf. the description in Trevor-Roper, Last Days, p. 100. For Ley’s death rays see Speer, p. 464.
54. Speer, p. 463. For the following description of Hitler, see p. 464.
55. Ibid., p. 474. There are many witnesses to the attitude of Goebbels; the remark quoted here is taken from the “Lagebesprechung” of April 23, 1945; see Der Spiegel, 1966:3, p. 34.
58. Karl Koller, Der letzte Monat, pp. 19 ff.
59. The witnesses to the course of events are chiefly: Keitel, Jodi, General Christian, Colonel von Freytag-Loringhoven, Lorenz, Colonel von Below, and Fräulein Krüger, who was Bormann’s secretary. Our account largely follows that of Trevor-Roper, who checked the statements of these witnesses and extracted the points of essential agreement; see Last Days, pp. 118 f.; also the statement of Gerhard Herrgesell, one of the stenographers, in: KTB/OKW IV, 2, pp. 1696 f.
60. See the transcript of this account in Koller, p. 31.
61. Quoted by Trevor-Roper, Last Days, p. 127.
62. Speer, p. 480; but see also p. 485.
63. Quoted in Trevor-Roper, Last Days, p. 128.
65. Le Testament politique de Hitler, p. 61 (February 4, 1945).
66. Ibid., pp. 57 ff. (February 4, 1945).
67. Ibid., pp. 87 ff.; 129 if. (February 14 and 25, 1945). Hitler made very similar remarks in a military conference of March 5, 1943; see Heiber, Lagebesprechungen, p. 171; see also the comparable early comment in Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 115.
68. Ibid., pp. 101 ff. (February 17, 1945). The opening of the campaign in the East actually was postponed for a few weeks, but this decision was not due solely to Mussolini’s invasion of Greece. Questions of weather, of time for the deployment of allies, and so on, played a part. Cf. the study “Hat das britische Eingreifen in Griechenland den deutschen Angriff auf Russland verzögert oder nicht?” (on file at the Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt Freiburg im Breisgau). See also Hillgruber, Strategie, p. 506. Hitler himself, moreover, sometimes said just the opposite, at least to Mussolini; cf. the reference in Nolte, Epoche, p. 586.
69. Le Testament politique de Hitler, p. 78.
70. Ibid., p. 108 (February 17, 1945). For Trevor-Roper’s comment see pp. 46 f. Hitler’s opinion agrees amazingly with a remark of the French writer Drieu la Rochelle, who toward the end of 1944, shortly before his suicide, explained the defeat as follows: “The reason for the collapse of German policy lies not in its lack of moderation, but in its lack of decisiveness. In no field was the German revolution pushed ahead far enough. . . . The German revolution dealt far too circumspectly with the old men in business and in the army; it spared too much of the old bureaucracy. This double mistake was exposed on July 20. Hitler should have struck harshly at the disloyal Left, but also shown no mercy to the disloyal Right. Because he did not strike, or did not strike hard enough, the irreparable consequences emerged, with an increasingly dire effect, in the course of the war. In all the occupied countries of Europe German policy proved to be burdened by all the prejudices of superannuated rules of warfare and outmoded diplomacy; it was unable to exploit the novelty and breadth of the magnificent mission that had been offered to it; it proved incapable of transforming an old-fashioned war of conquest into a revolutionary war. It believed it would be able to reduce the violence of warfare to a minimum in order to win over European public opinion—and was forced to see this opinion turning against itself because it was offering the European public nothing new and compelling.” Cited in Nolte, Faschismus, p. 380.
71. Cf. Trevor-Roper, Last Days, p. 175.
72. Hitler’s political and personal testaments are both printed in: N.B. 3569-PS.
73. The original text of this document was destroyed; it is given here in von Below’s reconstruction as cited by Trevor-Roper, Last Days, pp. 194 f.
74. See Lev Bezymenski, The Death of Adolf Hitler, p. 72; cf. also Trevor-Roper, Last Days, p. 196.
75. Trevor-Roper, Last Days, p. 198.
76. The Russian commission’s autopsy report, Document 12, claims that remains of a crushed ampoule of poison were found in the mouth of the corpse, which it believed to be Hitler. But the report does not mention the distinct odor of bitter almonds given off by cyanide compounds, which was observed in the other bodies. German participants have denied that any fragments of skull could have been found, given the degree to which the flames consumed the body; cf. Maser, Hitler, pp. 432 f. Given Hitler’s fear that his suicide might be unsuccessful, it is not out of the question that he may have bitten a poison capsule and simultaneously pressed the trigger of his gun. Bezymenski’s effort (p. 72) to exclude this possibility by referring to the “foremost Soviet forensic scientist” is not convincing, not even in the manner of presentation. For the statements of eyewitnesses see Trevor-Roper, Last Days, p. 201.
77. Statement of Otto Günsche, cited in Maser, Hitler, p. 432. The previous statement was made by the guard Hermann Karnau; see the detailed quotation in Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, p. 324, n. 40.
78. Bezymenski alleges (pp. 66 f.) as the motive for Soviet secrecy that the results of the medical investigation were being withheld in case “someone might try to slip into the role of the Führer saved by a miracle.” Also, the aim was to exclude all possibility of error. There is no need to comment on the first argument, since silence could only give support to the claim that the Führer was still alive, and in fact did. The second argument is also scarcely convincing, since the credibility of the autopsy record could not increase in the course of years. For the various rumors see Trevor-Roper, Last Days, Preface; he also gives an illuminating account of his vain efforts to obtain information or co-operation from the Russians.
CONCLUSION
1. Trevor-Roper, Last Days, p. 45.
2. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 212.
3. Photo in the author’s possession.
4. Hitlers Zweites Buch, p. 174, and Mein Kampf, p. 646. Cf. also Le Testament politique de Hitler, pp. 62 f. (February 4, 1945): “Germany had no choice. . . . We could not rest content with a sham independence. That might be enough for Swedes or the Swiss, who are always willing to be put off with empty promises so long as their pockets are filled. The Weimar Republic asked for nothing more. But the Third Reich could not be content with such a modest claim. We were condemned to wage war.”
5. Tischgespräche, p. 273; also Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 105.
6. Best known, and frequently cited in German apologetic works, is Winston Churchill’s statement in Great Contemporaries, p. 226: “Whatever else may be thought about these exploits, they are certainly among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world.”
7. Le Testament politique de Hitler, p. 139 (February 26, 1945).
9. Hitler to the Munich court during his trial, February 26, 1924. See Boepple, p. 110.
10. Cf. Minutes of the Conference of the Expanded Executive Committee of the Communist International, Moscow, June 12–13, 1923, cited in Nolte, Theorien, p. 92. The speech is highly interesting because, contrary to all the conspiratorial theories that circulated later, it takes seriously the idea of Fascism as a catch-all for the masses disappointed with socialism.
11. Nietzsche, The Dawn (Morgenröte), aphorism 534.
12. Speech of January 25, 1939, cited in Jacobsen and Jochmann, Ausgewählte Dokumente, p. 9. For the remark on German Social Democracy, cf. Libres propos, p. 36. American social scientists, in order to avoid the peculiar moral problems of terminology, have introduced the concept of “modernization” into the discussion. The Fascist systems in Italy or Germany, it is argued, represent above all stages in the process of repressing traditional social structures. Much of this argument fails to consider adequately that “modernization” can be only one interpretative aspect and that Fascism cannot be defined exclusively by its attitude toward the process of industrialization, urbanization, and rationalization. A detailed and satisfying study remains to be published. Cf. David Apter, The Politics of Modernization; H. A. Turner, Jr., “Faschismus und Anti-Modernismus,” in: Faschismus und Kapitalismus in Deutschland, pp. 157 ff., with further references.
13. At the beginning was the celebrated article in the New York Post of December 20,1941, on the gassing of a thousand Warsaw Jews.
14. Bertolt Brecht, “An die Nachgeborenen” (“To Posterity”), in: Selected Poems, trans. H. R. Hays, New York, 1947, p. 173.
15. Carlo Sforza, European Dictatorships, pp. 138 f.
16. Cf. Nolte, Theorien, p. 71.