Hitler Quotes

“Hitler swallowed the boundless adulation. He became the foremost believer in his own Führer cult. Hubris – that overweening arrogance which courts disaster – was inevitable”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Hitler threatened ‘that the fight against the inner enemies of the nation’ would ‘never fail because of the formal state bureaucracy or its inadequacy’.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“The reordering of German cultural life along Nazi lines was far-reaching indeed. But the most striking feature of the ‘coordination’ of culture was the alacrity and eagerness with which intellectuals, writers, artists, performers and publicists actively collaborated in moves which not only impoverished and straitjacketed German culture for the next twelve years, but banned and outlawed some of its most glittering exponents – fellow intellectuals, writers, artists, performers and publicists.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“The violence and repression were widely popular. The ‘emergency decree’ that took away all personal liberties and established the platform for dictatorship was warmly welcomed.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Bans, too, on organs of the SPD and restrictions on reporting imposed on other newspapers effectively muzzled the press, even when the bans were successfully challenged in the courts as illegal, and the newspapers reinstated.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Disdain and detestation for a parliamentary system generally perceived to have failed miserably had resulted in willingness to entrust monopoly control over the state to a leader claiming a unique sense of mission and invested by his mass following with heroic, almost messianic, qualities.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“almost all organizations, institutions, professional and representative bodies, clubs, and societies had long since rushed to align themselves with the new regime. ‘Tainted’ remnants of pluralism and democracy were rapidly removed, nazified structures and mentalities adopted. This process of ‘coordination’ (Gleichschaltung) was for the most part undertaken voluntarily and with alacrity.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“It was the blindness of the conservative Right to the dangers which had been so evident, arising from their determination to eliminate democracy and destroy socialism and the consequent governmental stalemate they had allowed to develop, that delivered the power of a nation-state containing all the pent-up aggression of a wounded giant into the hands of the dangerous leader of a political gangster-mob.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Hitler showed remarkably little human interest in his followers.147 Even one of his leading supporters accused him of ‘contempt for mankind’ (Menschenverachtung) in 1928.148 His egocentrism was of monumental proportions. The propaganda image of ‘fatherliness’ concealed inner emptiness. Other individuals were of interest to him only in so far as they were useful.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Hitler was finished. At least, he should have been. The American consular representative in Munich, Robert Murphy, presumed Hitler would serve his sentence then be deported from Germany.288 The author Stefan Zweig later remarked: ‘In this year 1923, the swastikas and stormtroops disappeared, and the name of Adolf Hitler fell back almost into oblivion. Nobody thought of him any longer as a possible in terms of power.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Simplicity and repetition were two key ingredients in his speaking armoury. These revolved around the unvarying essential driving-points of his message: the nationalization of the masses, the reversal of the great ‘betrayal’ of 1918, the destruction of Germany’s internal enemies (above all the ‘removal’ of the Jews), and material and psychological rebuilding as the prerequisite for external struggle and the attainment of a position of world power.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“The First World War made Hitler possible. Without the experience of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution the failed artist and social drop-out would not have discovered what to do with his life by entering politics and finding his métier as a propagandist and beerhall demagogue.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Geli turning Hitler away from his deeper, less personal, obsession with power.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Hitler received the Iron Cross, First Class – a rare achievement for a corporal – from the regimental commander, Major von Tubeuf. By a stroke of irony, he had a Jewish officer, Leutnant Hugo Gutmann, to thank for the nomination.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“He was struck too, so he said, by the number of Jews in clerical positions – ‘nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk’ – compared with how few of them were serving at the front.139 (In fact, this was a base calumny: there was as good as no difference between the proportion of Jews and non-Jews in the German army, relative to their numbers in the total population, and many served – some in the List Regiment – with great distinction.140)”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Yet none of those who later recounted anecdotes of Hitler at the time refers to it”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“In all the millions of recorded words of Hitler, however, there is nothing to indicate that he ever pored over the theoretical writings of Marxism, that he had studied Marx, or Engels, or Lenin (who had been in Munich not long before him), or Trotsky (his contemporary in Vienna). Reading for Hitler, in Munich as in Vienna, was not for enlightenment or learning, but to confirm prejudice.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Few at this point had the foresight to realize that the path laid out by Providence led into the abyss.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“He was interrupted by a deafening tumult from the assembled deputies. ‘They spring, yelling and crying, to their feet,’ William Shirer recorded. ‘The audience in the galleries does the same, all except a few diplomats and about fifty of us correspondents. Their hands are raised in slavish salute, their faces now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes, burning with fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah. The Messiah plays his role superbly.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“William Shirer, witnessing the scene, the 600 Reichstag deputies, ‘little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream “Heil’s”.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“You have delivered up our holy German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time,’ wrote Ludendorff – who had experience of what he was writing about – to his former wartime colleague Hindenburg. ‘I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Democracy was surrendered without a fight. This was most notably the case in the collapse of the grand coalition in 1930. It was again the case – however vain the opposition might have proved – in the lack of resistance to the Papen coup against Prussia in July 1932. Both events revealed the flimsiness of democracy’s base. This was not least because powerful groups had never reconciled themselves to democracy, and were by this time actively seeking to bring it down. During the Depression, democracy was less surrendered than deliberately undermined by élite groups serving their own ends. These were no pre-industrial leftovers, but – however reactionary their political aims – modern lobbies working to further their vested interests in an authoritarian system.255 In the final drama, the agrarians and the army were more influential than big business in engineering Hitler’s takeover.256 But big business, also, politically myopic and self-serving, had significantly contributed to the undermining of democracy which was the necessary prelude to Hitler’s success. The masses, too, had played their part in democracy’s downfall. Never had circumstances been less propitious for the establishment of successful democracy than they were in Germany after the First World War. Already by 1920, the parties most supportive of democracy held only a minority of the vote. Democracy narrowly survived its early travails, though great swathes of the electorate opposed it root and branch. Who is to say that, had not the great Depression blown it completely off course, democracy might not have settled down and consolidated itself? But democracy was in a far from healthy state when the Depression struck Germany. And in the course of the Depression, the masses deserted democracy in their droves. By 1932, the only supporters of democracy were the weakened Social Democrats (and even many of these were by this time lukewarm), some sections of the Zentrum (which had itself moved sharply to the Right), and a handful of liberals. The Republic was dead. Still open was what sort of authoritarian system would replace it.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“The anxiety to destroy democracy rather than the keenness to bring the Nazis to power was what triggered the complex developments that led to Hitler’s Chancellorship.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“There are times – they mark the danger point for a political system – when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“The assertiveness of German nationalism at the turn of the century was in no small measure aggression born of fear – not just the traditional antagonism towards the French and the growing rivalry with Great Britain, but also the presumed threat seen in the Slavic east, and, internally, the perceived looming menace of Social Democracy, and culturally pessimistic worries about national degeneration and decline.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Plutarch’s remark: ‘When destiny raises a base character by acts of great importance, it reveals his lack of substance’,”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Karl Marx’s dictum that ‘men do make their own history, but . . . under given and imposed conditions’.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Charismatic rule has long been neglected and ridiculed, but apparently it has deep roots and becomes a powerful stimulus once the proper psychological and social conditions are set. The Leader’s charismatic power is not a mere phantasm – none can doubt that millions believe in it.’ Franz Neumann, 1942”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Only through history can we learn for the future.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“That murder on the orders of the head of government was the basis of the ‘restoration of order’ passed people by, was ignored, or – most generally – met with their approval.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 1: 1889-1936 Hubris