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July 30th, 2004
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#1 |
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Banned
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 5,392
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Hitler's final statement
The Political Statement*
First Part More than thirty years have now passed since I in 1914 made my modest contribution as a volunteer in the first world war that was forced upon the Reich. In these three decades I have been actuated solely by love and loyalty to my people in all my thoughts, acts, and life. They gave me the strength to make the most difficult decisions which have ever confronted mortal man. I have spent my time, my working strength, and my health in these three decades. It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted the war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests. I have made too many offers for the control and limitation of armaments, which posterity will not for all time be able to disregard for the responsibility for the outbreak of this war to be laid on me. I have further never wished that after the first fatal world war a second against England, or even against America, should break out. Centuries will pass away, but out of the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred against those finally responsible whom we have to thank for everything, International Jewry and its helpers, will grow. Three days before the outbreak of the German-Polish war I again proposed to the British ambassador in Berlin a solution to the German-Polish problem - similar to that in the case of the Saar district, under international control. This offer also cannot be denied. It was only rejected because the leading circles in English politics wanted the war, partly on account of the business hoped for and partly under influence of propaganda organized by International Jewry. I have also made it quite plain that, if the nations of Europe are again to be regarded as mere shares to be bought and sold by these international conspirators in money and finance, then that race, Jewry, which is the real criminal of this murderous struggle, will be saddled with the responsibility. I further left no one in doubt that this time not only would millions of children of Europe's Aryan people die of hunger, not only would millions of grown men suffer death, and not only hundreds of thousands of women and children be burnt and bombed to death in the towns, without the real criminal having to atone for this guilt, even if by more humane means. After six years of war, which in spite of all setbacks, will go down one day in history as the most glorious and valiant demonstration of a nation's life purpose, I cannot forsake the city which is the capital of this Reich. As the forces are too small to make any further stand against the enemy attack at this place and our resistance is gradually being weakened by men who are as deluded as they are lacking in initiative, I should like, by remaining in this town, to share my fate with those, the millions of others, who have also taken upon themselves to do so. Moreover I do not wish to fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle organized by the Jews for the amusement of their hysterical masses. I have decided therefore to remain in Berlin and there of my own free will to choose death at the moment when I believe the position of the Führer and Chancellor itself can no longer be held. I die with a happy heart, aware of the immeasurable deeds and achievements of our soldiers at the front, our women at home, the achievements of our farmers and workers and the work, unique in history, of our youth who bear my name. That from the bottom of my heart I express my thanks to you all, is just as self-evident as my wish that you should, because of that, on no account give up the struggle, but rather continue it against the enemies of the Fatherland, no matter where, true to the creed of a great Clausewitz. From the sacrifice of our soldiers and from my own unity with them unto death, will in any case spring up in the history of Germany, the seed of a radiant renaissance of the National Socialist movement and thus of the realization of a true community of nations. Many of the most courageous men and women have decided to unite their lives with mine until the very last. I have begged and finally ordered them not to do this, but to take part in the further battle of the Nation. I beg the heads of the Armies, the Navy and the Air Force to strengthen by all possible means the spirit of resistance of our soldiers in the National Socialist sense, with special reference to the fact that also I myself, as founder and creator of this movement, have preferred death to cowardly abdication or even capitulation. May it, at some future time, become part of the code of honor of the German officer - as is already the case in our Navy - that the surrender of a district or of a town is impossible, and that above all the leaders here must march ahead as shining examples, faithfully fulfilling their duty unto death. Second Part Before my death I expel the former Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring from the party and deprive him of all rights which he may enjoy by virtue of the decree of June 29th, 1941; and also by virtue of my statement in the Reichstag on September 1st, 1939, I appoint in his place Grossadmiral Dönitz, President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. Before my death I expel the former Reichsführer-SS and Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler, from the party and from all offices of State. In his stead I appoint Gauleiter Karl Hanke as Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police, and Gauleiter Paul Giesler as Reich Minister of the Interior. Göring and Himmler, quite apart from their disloyalty to my person, have done immeasurable harm to the country and the whole nation by secret negotiations with the enemy, which they have conducted without my knowledge and against my wishes, and by illegally attempting to seize power in the State for themselves. . . . Although a number of men, such as Martin Bormann, Dr. Goebbels, etc., together with their wives, have joined me of their own free will and did not wish to leave the capital of the Reich under any circumstances, but were willing to perish with me here, I must nevertheless ask them to obey my request, and in this case set the interests of the nation above their own feelings. By their work and loyalty as comrades they will be just as close to me after death, as I hope that my spirit will linger among them and always go with them. Let them be hard but never unjust, but above all let them never allow fear to influence their actions, and set the honor of the nation above everything in the world. Finally, let them be conscious of the fact that our task, that of continuing the building of a National Socialist State, represents the work of the coming centuries, which places every single person under an obligation always to serve the common interest and to subordinate his own advantage to this end. I demand of all Germans, all National Socialists, men, women and all the men of the Armed Forces, that they be faithful and obedient unto death to the new government and its President. Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, International Jewry. Given in Berlin, this 29th day of April 1945, 4:00 A.M. Adolf Hitler [Witnesses] Dr. Joseph Goebbels Wilhelm Burgdorf Martin Bormannhttp://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/aa022100a.htm Hans Krebs |
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July 31st, 2004
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Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: S.E.PA
Posts: 1,626
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Quite obviously not the rantings of an insane despot. His thoughts were very clear. Who amongst us would have the steel left to write this, when it was written? How can you not admire such a man? 88!
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July 31st, 2004
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#3 | |
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Banned
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Central Europe
Posts: 1,703
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On Hitler's accession to Power he is recorded as stating 'Give me ten years in power and you will not recognise Germany !'. About ten years after Hitler got power, Germany watched defeated and in ruins as the Russians marched in to what was left of Berlin and Germany. Hitler had prophesied correctly after all then? 
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July 31st, 2004
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#4 |
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Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: S.E.PA
Posts: 1,626
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Seems presidents here only need tenures of 4 years to knock off big hunks. I know the source of the original article. Care to share the lineage on yours? I doubt people will be quoting you in 60 years, even incorrectly.
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August 1st, 2004
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Guest
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August 1st, 2004
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#6 | |
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Banned
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Central Europe
Posts: 1,703
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Unlike the ordinary German soldier, and I add that my father was a Gefreiter in the Wehrmacht in WW2 so I declare an interest: the three 'Golden Pheasants' as the German people called Hitler Himmler and Goering didnt have the balls to fight hand to hand with the 'Red Beast'. All three of them eventually killed themselves, rather than having the courage to go down in hand to hand fighting - the option that others chose. So much for being Ubermensch or Supermen. Little Heinrich (Himmler) couldnt even shoot a water pistol properly. The German people lost out as a result of Hitler and its country is a fragment of what it was. Ask the German people if Hitler is the embodiment of Germany - I know what the clear response will be. Last edited by Dasyurus Maculatus; August 1st, 2004 at 02:02 AM. |
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August 1st, 2004
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#7 | |
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Guest
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I tend to agree with You about Himmler. But then again I was not there. Goering dropped the drugs and weight and mounted a spirited defence during the Nuremberg Trails (Also known as Victors Justice). He told his fellow defendants that they should limit their defence to three words: "Lick My Ass!" He then cheated the hangman (Sgt. John Smith.......a jew) by taking his own life. I happen to know a couple of old Germans....And they still think Onkle Wolf is the shit. So take that to the bank and smoke it.............or something. |
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August 1st, 2004
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#8 | |
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The war was a long and complex thing. There is no time to discuss it's intricacies here. I like to boil things down anyway. So I must say, only the jew won WW2. Countless millions of dead whites and Israel the result, plus a big fat guilt trip/extortion racket known as the Holocaust. Question: what's the first thing people think if you bring up WW2? Answer: 6 million harmless, friendly, lovable neighborhood jews exterminated by a proud, thriving, successful Germany gone totally insane for no reason whatsoever. What was the unholy alliance of Red Communism with Blue Capitalism else a jewish conspiracy to utterly destroy Germany. Immediately, literally speaking, after crushing German, the US and the Soviets, two very white nations of racial brothers, go into a 50 year long "cold war" of hatred, suspicion, and pointless antagonism. Why? The jews is why. |
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August 1st, 2004
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Sexist Bastard
Join Date: Jan 2004
Posts: 2,123
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August 10th, 2004
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#10 | |
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Banned
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Germany? Germany died in 1945
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You obviously think it would be funny for the Allies to put Hitler on trial and for the Jews to gain the pleasure of hanging him. You are clearly not a White Nationalist. Germany? I couldn't care less about today's sell-out Germany. The REAL Germany died in 1945. |
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August 11th, 2004
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#11 | |
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Ἀντίοχος Ἐπιφανὴς
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: flyover
Posts: 13,175
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As for Himmler, not the same story and yes he punked out at the end by many accounts. Now back to Hitler. Elsewhere we have discussed his dedication to Germany and the NS ideal. He was the incarnation of that ideal matter of fact and his totat committment showed right up until the fight was lost and the Red army had over run the positions in Berlin. Hanna Ritsch and Ernst Rudel both offered to evacuate him via emergency landing on Berlin streets and he refused. As a commander he directed defensive positions until the very end. He requited the loyalty of the German soldier not be acting the fool and trying to make a bayonet charge into the arms of the drooling sadists of the NKVD but instead fell on his sword like a Roman of old. I normally dont approve of suicide but in this case his deeds were exceptional and you puking forth of that kosher vomit about him here will not be appreciated. As for Goering I to was ignorant of his own last deeds prior to his suicide. Please obtain a copy of David Irving's book Nuremberg and read up on this. Goering stood for the trial that Himmler was afraid of; Goering denounced the non-existent "jurisdiction" of this "trial" which was little more than a drumhead courtmartial and execution of a foreign diplomat in violation of the settled laws of war and diplomancy. Say that again: NUREMBERG WAS NOT A TRIAL IT WAS A VIOLATION OF THE EXISTING LAWS OF WAR IN 1945. It was nothing more than the victor executing the foreign chief. It was a setback to a barbaric age of war that threw out centuries of European conventions and customs and even Christian theology and existing conventions such as the Geneva accords and was no better than the Romans marching Vercingetorix through the streets in chains. But Goering stood up against this illegal humiliation and denounced it and defended his actions as Reichsmarshall and the NS government. Thankfully David Irving for all his faults has told the true story of this. Goering overcame his addiction to morphine and dropped many pounds at Nuremberg and at them time shined again like the hero of old. It's amusing to contrast the true record with the whining of the abjectly apologizing Speer who blamed this that and the next thing on Goering who stood up like a man and refused apologies. Finally when the whole charade was more or less done, Goering deprived them of the Jewish opportunity to gloat over his hanging by suicide. One wonders where and how he was able to obtain the cyanide capsule and successfully keep it hidden throughtout the trial. Perhaps he had the aid of a merciful US gaurd. WHo knows, that is a mystery. But in spite of our normal disapproval of suicide, in my view his actions were gallant and noble and his suicide excusable. In a subtle irony, after forty some years of captivity, the unarguably innocent Rudolph Hess also "committed suicide" even though it would seem more likely he was murdered. Another mystery. Daisy if you cant get Irving's book in Germany, if you live there, you can still read his website. free download available here: http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Nuremberg/index.html Real History conference in Cinci in three weeks: http://focal.org/speaks/ |
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August 1st, 2004
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#12 | |
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Banned
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 5,392
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August 1st, 2004
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#13 |
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Banned
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 5,392
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ZOG has sown the seeds of its own destruction and only the valuable will be left standing after the storm.
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August 10th, 2004
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#14 |
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Guest
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JUDEA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY
That's the headline the antis pretend was never published. But it was, in 1933, and it blows their lies sky-high. Jews around Rosenvelt the part-Jew, the Churchill lackey whose debts were bought by a Jewish millionaire when he was about to lose his mansion, Jews in the KGB and everywhere else in the Soviet leadership, Jews in American media, Jews in the French socialist and communist parties -- these were the enemies of Europe who declared war on Germany, and declared it openly. Adolf Hitler fought as best he could to defend his country, trying to make it strong through colonies in the east so that it could be independent and a haven for White resistance. The lackeys in the West attacked him on the pretext of "defending Poland"; the same Poland that had taken German land after WWI; the same Poland that was ruled by a madman who forced the occupied Germans to fight in his army; the same Poland that had invaded and taken land in Czechoslovakia, hardly a fluffy, peace-loving nation; the same Poland that was invaded by the USSR from the east while Germany attacked from the west, with, curiously, no war declaration against the USSR following from France and Britain; the same Poland that was after the war robbed of large parts of its territory by the USSR, and forced to suffer under a communist puppet state with Jews in the upper echelons. Oh yes, Britain and France were "defending Poland" all right. Certainly not following up with a military attack where the economic attack on Germany had failed, an economic attack the purpose of which was to wreck the German economy through their blockades. Oh yes, Germany was the aggressor. Oh yes, Germany was the danger to Europe, not the Soviet Jews or the Jews in British and French politics and media. Oh yes, the Hollywood corporations run by Jews are certainly telling us the truth about the Jewish role in history. Why wouldn't they? What reason could Jews possibly have to cover up their roles in European wars? Doesn't make sense that Hollywood would be distorting the Jewish story, does it? Hitler knew the truth, and his message lives on. Next time the world. Heil Hitler. Last edited by Fredrik Haerne; August 10th, 2004 at 05:42 PM. |
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August 10th, 2004
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Banned
Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 997
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Points 2,3, and 4 are correct.
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As for point 1 which you raise: Hitlers fight against Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Holland, Wales , Scotland and England was the type of 'defence' for his country that only a nutcase would make. Hitlers declaration ofWar on the USA, you will argue was attacking the jews in America ? - but most Americans who do not give a stuff about the interests of the jew were targetted too by Hitler with his grandiose declarations. I blame it on his physician Dr Morel and his haemorrhoid physician Dr Brandt for pumping Hitler too full of dope and Heroin. Hitler's socialist Ally Russia (until the two 'socialist love birds' Adolf and Stalin fell out in 1941 and had a tiff when the disastrous Operation Barbarossa was initiated) - initially only succeeded in jointly destroying the White nation of Poland - due to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. In 1939 in trying to carve Poland up in the name of Socialism; Half of Poland for Hitlers rightwing Socialist Empire, Half of Poland for Stalins leftwing Socialist Empire - both the Soviets and the Nazis underestimated the fighting skill of the Polish people. 2. Oh yes Britain did defend Poland and at least Britain had the balls to do so; unlike the American Ambassador to the UK who advised Britain to surrender to Hitler, an asshole called Kennedy from that same disastrous Boston clan who was so far up Hitler's Niebelungen or 'Ringpiece', he could probably see the Fuehrers tonsils vibrating up ahead of him?. Hitler's planned liquidation of the Poles would have been supplemented by planned liquidation of every other poor bugger who was not German. Churchill had the prescience to understand that and did a great job for the people of Britain and with the help of the RAF , postponed Hitler's 'Operation SeeLowe' and prevented the enslavement or liquidation of the English, Scottish and Welsh in the UK. 3.Germany proved it was the aggressor - in Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Crete, Holland, Wales , Scotland and England all got a taste of it, as did Russia Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and other eastern states. 4.Germany (or at least the moustachioed mono-orchidal Morphine addict in charge at the time), proved it was indeed a danger to Europe as the captured Max-Planck Institute research into the German Atom bomb tended to show also. With potential 'leaders' like the squirty myopic 'little Heinrich' Himmler (whom Hitler himself had stripped of his rank for spinelessness and treason), and fatboy Goering - the whole of Europe sure had a near miss . One disaster created by Hitler was to enable Communism to enter the heart of Europe, and today we see his indirect legacy - the Paki'isation of Europe. In all the revolutions from 1917 to 1922,. Communism had only taken a bare toehold in Russia. After Hitlers alliance with Stalin with the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the disaster of what you say was Hitlers 'defence' of Germany; Communism by late 1945 had swept into control in East Germany, the Balkan States, Poland, Czechoslovakia and other European countries. Hitler fucked up big time and lead to the loss of millions of white lives (and nope they werent all jews who took the bullet).5. If Hitler knew the truth, wouldnt he have had had the balls to go down in a fight hand-to-hand versus the 'Red Beast' invading Berlin, a soldier's death or at least fought to have resisted capture until the last bullet was spent (instead of the Prima Donna's death appropriate for a Morphine addict, of using a bullet on himself instead). Dont fall into the trap of thinking Hitler was God. He wasnt. Last edited by TheGreenMan; August 10th, 2004 at 11:27 PM. |
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August 10th, 2004
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Banned
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August 11th, 2004
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Guest
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Green Man, your grasp of this part of history is incomplete. Let's set the record straight.
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In case you didn't know, Britain and France declared war on Germany and attacked its borders many times, while waiting for British troops to arrive from the colonies so they could launch a full invasion. If only a "nutcase" would defend himself against Britain and France, what should you do instead when you are attacked by them? As for Belgium, it had to be taken to get around the Maginot Line, the well-fortified line of cannon France had set up against Germany. Would you prefer to attack such a wall from up front or from the rear? The cannon could not be turned around 180 degrees. And Belgium, by the way, was a de facto British and French ally as everyone knew. As for Denmark, it was the only route to Norway. And Norway was where Britain was going to launch attacks at Germany from. His fight against "Wales, Scotland"? Should he only fight England and not its provinces? That'd be hard. Or did you just want more names of places to lengthen your list with? Here's another tidbit of information: all of France was not taken. Marshal Pétain, the hero from WWI, made peace with Germany, ending France's attack, when the crooked politicians had fled the country. Therefore, the Germans only occupied the northern part, which had industries they desperately needed to defend themselves against Britain, and the coastline in the West, which they had to defend against British invasions. The southern third of the country remained governed by what was called the French State or Vichy France under Pétain. The French State controlled the French empire, ten times larger than European France. French troops and ships fought on Germany's side against the Brits, and against French traitors in the colonies. As soon as Britain had ended its attacks all French territory would be returned to the French State, except of course for Elsass and Lothringen which belonged to Germany. Meanwhile, British airplanes bombed French towns and cities to bits. As for the attack on Russia, Russia had attacked Germany's ally Romania and cut off the oil imports. An attack on a German ally was definitely cause for a German response. Not to mention that Russia was ruled by a tyranny the likes of which the world had never seen, in case anyone had forgotten. Would it have been better to wait until Russia had nuclear weapons in the fifties? As for the United States, American ships had repeatedly attacked German ships, a clear act of war. Hitler gave the order to not respond to the attacks, wanting to hold off war, but eventually he had to face the fact that the U.S. was attacking his country's defenses. Perhaps you didn't know the U.S. was attacking Germany. Last edited by Fredrik Haerne; August 11th, 2004 at 10:34 AM. |
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August 10th, 2004
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Rational Realistic Racist
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 1,269
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Brought a tear to my eye. |
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December 16th, 2008
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#19 |
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Administrator
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Hitler's Books
Mein Buch
Anthony Grafton, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, December 24, 2008 Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life By Timothy W. Ryback ( Knopf, 304 pp., $24.95) Few buildings on Capitol Hill are grander than the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, with its great stairway, pillared façade, and magnificent domed reading room. And few rooms in that building seem more ordinary, even banal, than the rare book storage area where 1,200 books from the collection of Adolf Hitler stand tightly packed on steel shelves. Along with another eighty items in the Brown University Library and scattered texts elsewhere, these are the modest remains of the more than sixteen thousand books that Hitler assembled in his residence in Munich, in the Reichskanzlei in Berlin, and in his villa on the Obersalzberg in Bavaria, near Berchtesgaden. Like the Thousand-Year Empire, Hitler's imposing collections proved considerably more fragile than he expected. Even before the Führer died, American and Russian soldiers were packing his library and taking it home, bit by bit. Some came as single spies, like the young lieutenant who brought a much-thumbed copy of Henry Ford's My Life and Work back from Munich to New York, where he sold it at Scribner's. Others came in battalions, especially the Soviet "trophy brigade" that took the entire ten-thousand-volume collection from Berlin to Moscow, where it has not been seen since the early 1990s. Only one large segment of the collection--three thousand books hidden in beer crates in a Bavarian salt mine--remained intact after the war ended. Members of the U.S. Army's Twenty-First Counterintelligence Corps concluded, after what they called a "hasty inspection of the scattered books," that the collection "was noticeably lacking in literature and almost totally devoid of drama and poetry." Worse still, "none of the books examined gave the appearance of extensive use. They had no marginal notes or underlinings." Hans Beilhack, reporting on the collection in November 1946 for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, noted contemptuously that the "library itself, seen as a whole, is only interesting because it is the library of a 'great' statesman and yet so uninteresting. It is the typical library of a dilettante." Once the books reached Washington, Arnold Jacobius, then an intern and later an expert on the Weimar journalist Kurt Tucholsky, made a more detailed report to Frederick Goff, the head of rare books at the Library of Congress. Even he detected "little in the way of marginal notes, autographs or other similar features of interest," and at his suggestion most of the books, the ones that bore no signs of direct use, were merged into the library's general collection or sold as duplicates. Safely stored in Washington, even the books that the library kept and set apart attracted little attention. Many years ago, a librarian pointed them out to me as we hurried from one collection of incunabula to another: so far as he knew, no one had yet studied them. (In fact, some scholars had--notably Gerhard Weinberg and Robert Waite; but more than half of them remained uncatalogued as late as 2001.) In the last twenty years or so, scholars in many fields of the humanities have realized that books, when studied as material objects as well as texts, can tell many stories about their owners. Like travelers in the woods, those who buy and read books leave tracks for scholars to read. Substantive (and legible) marginal notes and scrawled underlinings in pencil, fine bindings and tattered paper wrappers--all have something to tell us about those who saw them as appropriate ways of personalizing and responding to a particular book. Historians of the book--many of whom do their research at the Library of Congress and the Folger Library around the corner--have traced the development of such devices as the "manicule," the little pointing hand which, when drawn in a margin, indicated that a reader found a passage important, and which, as William H. Sherman has shown in his absorbing Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, was one of many readers' practices that survived the transition from script to print. This material turn in the realm of the intellect has brought great benefits. In particular, it has provided a forum in which literary scholars, art historians, and historians can all work together, something that seemed to have disappeared in the age of theory. The close study of how books were made and marketed, catalogued and read, as these scholars have shown, provides us with a new method for tracing the ways in which the thought of a philosopher or the work of a writer took shape, and how in turn important books were used, appropriated, and rejected by readers. And in this new climate, the interest of Hitler's once-neglected books became clear, and scholars began to look at the collection. In 2001, Philipp Gassert and Daniel S. Mattern published a catalogue of Hitler's books in American collections, and a book-length study of the books in Washington by the Hungarian historian Ambrus Miskolczy appeared in 2003. Timothy Ryback's dramatic book takes us not just into Hitler's library, but also into the gritty material details of the books themselves. At one point he even recalls discovering in a particular book, "tucked in the crease between pages 160 and 161, a wiry inch-long black hair that appears to be from a moustache." Thanks to his imaginative research--and his willingness to investigate a very creepy subject--we come closer to one of the most elusive men ever to shape world history. Walter Benjamin, who hovers over this book as a melancholy Jewish guardian angel, believed that a collection revealed something profound about the collector's mind and life: "ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting." Hitler's dwelling in Washington, however, is a ruin. A lot of the books that probably mattered most to him are not there; and he neither bought nor, in many cases, even saw a good many of the books preserved there. Sometimes precise connections emerge from the details. At one point Ryback finds Hitler using one of his books on magic to annotate another. We realize that both books must have been on Hitler's desk, and in his hands, at the same time. But historians' gold of this kind turns up very rarely here. Instead Ryback's reconstruction is accomplished mostly by weaving back and forth among individual books and other records, from Hitler's own writings to contemporaries' memoirs, as he seeks to show us how books shaped one of the twentieth century's most terrible minds. His effort is worthwhile: one finishes this short, packed book with a firmer take on the sort of intellectual--or pseudo-intellectual--who persuaded the best-educated nation in Europe to make war on civilization and try to exterminate the Jews. But deep insights remain elusive. Hitler admitted that he was "no writer." But he insisted, again and again, that he was a reader. As a young man he claimed, with an autodidact's exaggeration, that he had read widely in German literature and philosophy--even though he still misspelled Schopenhauer as "Schoppenhauer." These claims represented, at least in part, a defensive response to bourgeois politicians such as Otto Dickel, whom Hitler confronted and defeated early in his career--men who had enjoyed, if that is the right word, the rigors of the German Gymnasium and university, and who felt at home in the highly abstract world of German philosophy and social science. Hitler never climbed these heights himself. His copies of the German classics show few signs of use, and his writings show little evidence of acquaintance with them. The annotated draft typescript of Mein Kampf that Ryback examines, with its misspellings and its vague, awkward prose, shows just how little literary culture Hitler had--a point that impressed itself even on the loyalists who tried to edit the book, as well as on those who tried to read it once it was published. Still, Hitler read a great deal during the years when he rose to power. Walking the crowded, lively streets of Munich, he regularly stopped and shopped in his favorite used-book stores--so often, in fact, that he spent much of his income there. When Hitler became head of the Nazi Party, he had a list of recommended reading printed on party membership cards. While serving his time in prison after the Beer Hall Putsch, he withdrew from politics far more wholeheartedly than the soft conditions of his sentence required so that he could read and write. And the books and information that he amassed in the 1920s and 1930s served him directly in later years. A passionate collector of all sorts of texts on warfare, from strategic theories, military histories, and memoirs to handbooks of ships and tanks, Hitler read them with close attention. He amassed a detailed knowledge of everything from the doctrines of Clausewitz to the calibers of specific weapons, which came in handy again and again when he argued with the obdurate members of the German General Staff during World War II. As head of state, Hitler continued to collect. Friends and admirers, such as Leni Riefenstahl and Sven Hedin, sent him their publications with flattering inscriptions. So did cities, companies, and publishers. More remarkable, he continued to read much--though hardly all--of what came in. Late at night on the Obersalzberg, Hitler read for hours a time, sometimes until dawn. He worked in his study, outside of which hung a sign that demanded ABSOLUTE SILENCE, reading with intense concentration--so intense that he became furious one night when Eva Braun interrupted him, and sent her packing, red-faced, with a "tirade. " At breakfast, as Traudl Junge, his last surviving secretary, recalled to Ryback, he "would reprise his previous night's reading in extensive, often tedious detail." Even at the end, as a photograph of the Berlin bunker shows, unidentified thick books took up some of the scarce space in his tiny bedroom. What could reading do--what did it do--for Hitler? The mere fact that he marked many of his books, Ryback points out, is striking. After all, Hitler was "a man who famously seemed never to listen to anyone, for whom conversation was a relentless tirade, a ceaseless monologue." Yet as a reader he would stop "to engage with the text, to underline words and sentences, to mark entire paragraphs, to place an exclamation point beside one passage, a question mark beside another, and quite frequently an emphatic series of parallel lines in the margin alongside a particular passage." Hard though they are to interpret--the fuller annotations found in some of the volumes do not seem to come from Hitler himself--these traces show a man listening and responding. Could they offer a path to that mysterious mind, more concealed than revealed by the thousands of volumes of memoirs and commentary that never seem to penetrate Hitler's shell? Hitler's own words make clear--clearer, in fact, than the surviving volumes--just how much some writers meant to him. His lifelong favorites--leatherbound copies of which he kept in the study of his alpine villa--ranged from the Western adventure novels of Karl May to the plays of Shakespeare. May's novels, from The Ride Across the Desert on, "overwhelmed" Hitler as a boy, claiming his attention so powerfully that his grades suffered "a noticeable decline." During the war, Hitler told his generals to study May's books, and even had a special edition issued for soldiers at the front. He considered Winnetou, the Indian chief of May's tales, a master of "tactical finesse and circumspection," and a model for his own love of cunning tactics and surprises. Reading at night, he told Albert Speer, "when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for these stories," because "they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people." Shakespeare seemed to him much greater than the classic German writers of the eighteenth century. After all, Shakespeare had brought the imperishable character of Shylock to the stage, whereas Lessing had created Nathan the Wise, the Jew who taught Christians, Muslims, and Jews a lesson of tolerance. Hitler quoted Shakespeare as more highly educated Germans quoted Goethe, threatening opponents: "We will meet again at Philippi." This material, fascinating as it is, comes not from the books preserved in Washington, but from records of Hitler's speeches and conversations. Though the handsome morocco-bound set of Shakespeare from Obersalzberg is now in Washington, it was printed in 1925--too late to be the German edition that imprinted "To be or not to be" and "We will meet again at Philippi" on Hitler's mind. In some cases, Ryback derives fascinating and suggestive material from the books that he examines. On November 22, 1915, while serving as a message runner on the Western Front, Hitler bought a guide to the architecture of Berlin by the critic Max Osborn, a Jewish intellectual who covered the Western Front for the prestigious Vossische Zeitung while Hitler was stationed there, vividly recording the horror, and the increasing savagery, of the war. Ryback observes that "in November 1915, for a frontline corporal to pay four marks for a book on cultural treasures of Berlin, when cigarettes, schnapps, and women were readily available for more immediate and palpable distraction, can be seen as an act of aesthetic transcendence." This impression is confirmed by the thumbprints that appear beside Osborn's reproductions of works of art by Rubens and Botticelli, and which suggest that Hitler, who practiced drawing when he had the chance, still hoped for a career as a painter. More striking are the passages in which Osborn condemns the wild eclecticism of much Berlin architecture, the "orgies of an unspeakable debasement in taste, " and singles out for praise certain clear exceptions. Osborn admired the martial, Prussian qualities of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Neue Wache on Unter den Linden, a monument to those who died for Prussia in the wars of liberation against France, and the brilliance with which Karl Gotthard Langhans had crowned the Brandenburg Gate, at the other end of Berlin's great ceremonial boulevard, with the goddess of Victory. Evidently Hitler took a special interest in the long chapter, its margins smudged, bent, and spotted with paraffin, in which Osborn denounced the second-rate artistic tastes of the Prussian hero Frederick the Great. Ryback notes that Hitler, who explored Berlin while on leave during the war, agreed with Osborn in condemning the city's architecture. In later life, of course, Hitler planned to transform the city into a monumental, stylistically coherent capital to be called Germania, and he and Speer realized parts of the plan in the Olympic Stadium and Chancery. Osborn, whose work was banned and who emigrated to America, presumably did not admire the direction in which Hitler took his rather conventional aesthetic nationalism. But the case seems clear: reading Osborn sharpened Hitler's sense of how to read Berlin--and very likely inspired him to abandon his earlier taste for architectural eclecticism. To the young Hitler, Vienna's Ringstrasse, with its Baroque Opera and Greek Houses of Parliament, Renaissance Burgtheater, and neo-Gothic Rathaus, seemed "like an enchantment out of the Thousand and One Nights." Hitler the veteran of war and reader of Osborn wanted something different: pure "Germanic-northern Ur-forms" that still, somehow, derived from ancient Greece. Equally fascinating is Ryback's account of the short book on Alfred Graf von Schlieffen (famous for his plan for victory over France), written by the count's personal physician, that was given to Hitler in 1940 by Artur "Willy" Kannenberg, a member of his inner circle. From the Fraktur type used on its cover to its anecdotes of Schlieffen's kindness to defeated French generals, the book was clearly designed to showcase the Prussian virtues: courage, austerity, tradition, and the willingness to retreat for strategic purposes. But Kannenberg, whom Hitler first met at a restaurant and treated as a sort of court jester, transformed the book, as Ryback shows, with his presentation note on the front cover: "Dedicated to my Führer. Motto: 'one way or another.' Sieg Heil, Kannenberg, 19.5.1940." Celebrating ruthlessness, treating Hitler with adulation, Kannenberg quoted Hitler to Hitler: "one way or another," "so oder so," was one of his master's favorite sayings, like "wenn schon, denn schon"--"if you're going to do it, do it." Hitler read the book as aggressively as Kannenberg's note suggested he should. As he went through the fourth chapter, on Schlieffen's campaign in France, he pondered and marked the passages in which Schlieffen warned against waging a two-front war against France and England to the west and Russia to the east. In the end, to be sure, Germany would have to conquer all of its enemies. But Schlieffen argued that along the way, "as the Great King [Frederick] has taught us, we must be ready to sacrifice even so rich a province as East Prussia, in order to concentrate all our forces where we seek a decision"--that is, in the west. As Hitler went through these passages, he may well have entertained his first thoughts, as Ryback suggests, about the invasion of Russia, which he would begin to discuss in July 1940. The pencil lines in this brochure, less than a hundred pages long, seem to reveal the origins of that arcanum imperii which would, in the end, destroy Hitler's own empire. For the most part, the marked books show that Hitler read not to discover but to confirm what he already knew. In a famous passage in Mein Kampf, Hitler made clear that he rejected the scholar's deferential approach to texts. Intellectuals read supinely, allowing books to lead them: "Naturally, I understand by 'reading' something other than that which the average member of the so-called 'intelligentsia' understands," he wrote. "I know people who 'read' an endless amount, who go from book to book, from letter to letter, yet I would not want to call them 'well-read.' They possess an abundance of 'knowledge,' only their brain does not understand how to process and organize the material it has taken on board." Such readers "lack the art of being able to divide the valuable from the valueless in a book." In the end, Hitler explained, "reading is not something we carry out for its own sake, but an instrument used for a purpose," a "tool and a building material that one needs for one's calling in life." Rather than simply storing materials "according to the structure of the book or the chronology of one's memory," one should fit each important passage, Hitler wrote, "like a piece in a mosaic into its orderly place in the general worldview: it is precisely in this way that it will help the reader to form a picture in his head." The reader who fails to follow this rule "thinks he really knows all that is serious, thinks he understands something from life, and is in possession of knowledge. Yet with each new addition he becomes increasingly alienated from the world, until he ends up either in a sanatorium, or in parliament as a 'politician.'" By contrast, the reader who follows Hitler's ruthless, pragmatic hermeneutics will use texts as quarries, finding in them exactly the stones to fill particular gaps or the tools to do particular jobs. Hitler read, in other words, as he talked: not to uncover new facts or ideas but to validate what he already thought. That explains why he carefully went through an edition of the scholarly anti-Semite Paul Lagarde's German Essays, printed as late as 1934 by J.F. Lehmann, as well as several of the famous works on racial types by Hans F.K. Günther, known as "Rassengünther," a professor at Jena and one of the founders of German racial science and legislation, also published by Lehmann. These texts told Hitler nothing that he did not already know. Hitler did not need Rassengünther to show him what Jews looked like, or Lagarde to tell him that Germany could never assimilate its Jews, or to recommend that they be transplanted to Palestine, or to caution him that the Jews, formed by the Talmud, were too tough for Germans to oppose--or to condemn the particular offenses that Jews committed against German identity, as when they "lay claim to the honorable German name while constructing the most sacred sites one has in a Moorish style in order not to forget that one is a Semite, an Asian, a foreigner." He had long since drawn his own conclusions about the New Synagogue in the Oranienburgerstrasse and its congregation. Still, the bent pages and the flexible spines of these books indicate that Hitler read them often. In them, Ryback shows, "we can observe the application of Hitler's reading technique in all its selective intensity"--watch his pencil, following his eye across the page, underlining passages, entering occasional exclamation points and question marks, above all drawing the lines that marked stones useable for his mosaics. The new position of the reader made his books yield something they had not provided before. In 1934-1935, Hitler was head of state and possessed dictatorial powers. Reading as a leader, a ruler, he found in Günther's familiar images and Lagarde's familiar sentiments not the elements of a political program but the beginnings of a public policy. "A penciled mark can become state doctrine": Hitler's penciled marks became part of the Nuremberg Laws, promulgated in September 1935. Ryback's useful book brings us a little closer to the mind of the monster. But it could have revealed more than it does. Far too often Ryback interrupts his analysis of the books and their contents, printed and handwritten, to tell us about his own adventures in researching them: only a few of these peeps into his workshop clarify the material. Too seldom does he take the opportunities this material offers to penetrate more deeply into Hitler's psyche. In a long chapter, Ryback describes the surviving esoteric and spiritualist volumes that formed a substantial part of Hitler's collection: works by thinkers now forgotten, such as Ernst Schertel and Maximilian Riedel. They offered elaborate analyses and complex charts of the relation between mind and spirit. More striking, they celebrated those individuals of "imaginative power," who could concentrate their spirits and conceive "explosive, dynamite-like" ideas that had the impact of an avalanche: ideas so powerful that they were beyond such soft, old-fashioned categories as good and evil, true and false, and could transform the world. Ryback shows that Hitler called special attention to these passages in his books. They underpinned his own sense of himself as a new man, spiritually able to call down destruction on Europe's corrupt civilization. This was the vision that Hitler revealed in part to the very civilized League of Nations high commissioner to the free city of Danzig, Carl J. Burckhardt, during the critical days of August 1939, and in whole to his generals when he ordered them, two weeks later, to invade Poland. At the core of Hitler's understanding of himself and his mission, the historian finds "less a distillation of the philosophies of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche than a dime-store theory cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers." True enough--and yet, as Corinna Treitel showed in her excellent book A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the German Modern, it is wrong to dismiss the esoteric strains in German thought in the early decades of the twentieth century simply because they now seem laughable. In a time when all values--from the objective ones of natural science to the traditional ones of the established churches--came into question, many Germans, some of them very well-born and educated, found more than cheap potato soup for the soul in these pursuits. Occultism offered new spiritual revelations to replace the old, and new scientific revelations that made for dazzling séances, and new insight (or so many serious artists thought) into the nature of the creative unconscious. The rise of occultism in all its forms, from good old-fashioned astrology to the spiritualism nourished by the war's vast toll of death, marked a distinctive part of Germany's strange path to modernity. Yet esoteric thinkers differed on many points, and Nazi officials took a wide range of positions on them before they finally decided, late in the war, to crush them. By confronting the thinkers Hitler used with close attention to detail, as Treitel did--and by drawing on Treitel's own rich book--Ryback could have done more than condemn Hitler's esoteric interests as cheap and silly. He could have traced them to their precise roots, and told us, as he does not, whether Hitler's response to them was distinctive, and if so how. Hitler was far from the only twentieth century Big Man who claimed to be a Big Thinker and a Big Reader. Every good research library has the forty-four-volume Opera Omnia of Benito Mussolini, whose beautiful, eloquent Italian Hitler admired, but felt unable to emulate--not to mention the collected works of Joseph Stalin, some fourteen volumes in the Red Star Press edition published at London in the 1970s, or the lucubrations of Mao Zedong and Enver Hoxha or Kim Il Sung. How, one wonders, did Hitler's ways of reading, citing, and using texts resemble, or differ from, those of the other Great Dictators of his time? Or those of the other Nazi leaders? Ryback does not ask--much less answer--these intriguing questions. This book sticks too close to Hitler, in the end, to tell us as much as it could have. Still, Hitler's Private Library offers clear proof, if any was needed, that Hitler's worldview did not represent, as American propaganda claimed, the culmination of centuries of German thought. It is in narrower, more crooked corridors of the great edifice of the German intellect--the intellectual Sonderweg that Fritz Stern explored so well half a century ago, and to which Corinna Treitel and others have more recently returned--that historians will capture the secrets of Hitler's mind. Timothy Ryback has not taken the grim trip himself: but others will, and his work will help to guide them. Anthony Grafton is a contributing editor at The New Republic. http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?...5-f72087238c07 |
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December 16th, 2008
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#20 |
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Banned
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Belgian Fascist Leon Degrelle said Hitler read much more than that article suggests:
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n3p22_Degrelle.html Hitler was self-taught and made no attempt to hide the fact. The smug conceit of intellectuals, their shiny ideas packaged like so many flashlight batteries, irritated him at times. His own knowledge he had acquired through selective and unremitting study, and he knew far more than thousands of diploma-decorated academics. I don't think anyone ever read as much as he did. He normally read one book every day, always first reading the conclusion and the index in order to gauge the work's interest for him. He had the power to extract the essence of each book and then store it in his computer-like mind. I have heard him talk about complicated scientific books with faultless precision, even at the height of the war. His intellectual curiosity was limitless. He was readily familiar with the writings of the most diverse authors, and nothing was too complex for his comprehension. He had a deep knowledge and understanding of Buddha, Confucius and Jesus Christ, as well as Luther, Calvin, and Savonarola; of literary giants such as Dante, Schiller, Shakespeare and Goethe; and analytical writers such as Renan and Gobineau, Chamberlain and Sorel. He had trained himself in philosophy by studying Aristotle and Plato. He could quote entire paragraphs of Schopenhauer from memory, and for a long time carried a pocked edition of Schopenhauer with him. Nietzsche taught him much about the willpower. His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. He spend hundreds of hours studying the works of Tacitus and Mommsen, military strategists such as Clausewitz, and empire builders such as Bismark. Nothing escaped him: world history or the history of civilizations, the study of the Bible and the Talmud, Thomistic philosophy and all the masterpieces of Homer, Sophocles, Horace, Ovid, Titus Livius and Cicero. He knew Julian the Apostate as if he had been his contemporary. His knowledge also extended to mechanics. He knew how engines worked; he understood the ballistics of various weapons; and he astonished the best medical scientists with his knowledge of medicine and biology. |
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