The War Path Quotes

“Because there is only one salvation left for Germany, and that is Hitler.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“There is an aphorism about Prussian militarism, coined by Mirabeau, which aptly fits the pre-Hitler Reichswehr: ‘Prussia isn't a country with an army – it's an army with a country!”
― David Irving, The War Path

“The terrible thing is that Hitler's enemies know him better than anybody, and the press – which is of course wholly in Jewish hands – has defamed and ridiculed the man. An old trick: first a deathly silence, then scorn, then all-out war – and then annexation. (There are Jewish firms that manufacture swastikas.)”
― David Irving, The War Path

“By early 1937, the Nazi state could be likened to an atomic structure. The nucleus was Hitler, surrounded by successive rings of henchmen. The innermost ring was Göring, Himmler and Goebbels, privy to his less secret ambitions and the means he was proposing to employ to realize them. In the outer rings were the ministers, commanders-in-chief and diplomats, each aware of only a small sector of the plans radiating from the nucleus. Beyond them was the German people. The whole structure was bound by the forces of the police state – by the fear of the wiretap, the letter censors, the Gestapo and ultimately the short, sharp corrective spells provided by Himmler's renowned establishments at Dachau and elsewhere.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“We need a dictator who is a genius, if we are to arise again.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“(Hitler had a constitutional duty to consider each appeal for clemency and sign the execution warrant.) In bygone times the condemned criminal had had the traditional right to see the Kaiser's signature on the warrant before being led to the scaffold. In Hitler's era, the usages were less picturesque. A telephone call went from Schaub to Lammers in Berlin: ‘The Führer has turned down the appeal for clemency’ – this sufficed to rubber-stamp a facsimile of the Führer's signature on the execution warrant. On one occasion the file laid before Hitler stated simply that the Berlin Chancellery would ‘take the necessary steps’ if they had heard no decision from him by ten P.M. that night. Human life was becoming cheaper in the new Germany. When it was at its cheapest, at the time of Stalingrad, Walther Hewel was to explain to an OKW staff officer, ‘If you want to understand the way the Führer's mind works, you must look upon the human race as being just a swarm of ants.’ However,”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Hitler had built the National Socialist movement in Germany not on capricious electoral votes, but on people, and they gave him – in the vast majority – their unconditional support to the end.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“As Robespierre once said of Marat, ‘The man was dangerous: he believed in what he said.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“In September 1936, Britain's former prime minister, David Lloyd George, spent two weeks in Germany as his guest. He admiringly wrote in the Daily Express how Hitler had united Catholic and Protestant, employer and artisan, rich and poor into one people – Ein Volk, in fact. (The British press magnate Cecil King wrote in his diary four years later, ‘Lloyd George mentioned meeting Hitler and spoke of him as the greatest figure in Europe since Napoleon and possibly greater than him. He said we had not had to deal with an austere ascetic like Hitler since the days of Attila and his Huns.’)”
― David Irving, The War Path

“But for all this Fritsch was a fervent nationalist, and he shared with Hitler a hatred of the Jews, the ‘Jewish press,’ and a belief that ‘the pacifists, Jews, democrats, black-red-and-gold and the French are all one and the same, namely people bent on Germany's perdition.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“The brave will fight whatever the odds,’ Hitler said on January 18. ‘But give the craven whatever weapons you will, they will always find reason enough to lay them down!”
― David Irving, The War Path

“And in a major speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler uttered an unmistakable threat to any Jews who did choose to remain behind in his Germany:    I have very often been a prophet in my lifetime and I have usually been laughed at for it. During my struggle for power, it was primarily the Jewish people who just laughed when they heard me prophesy that one day I would become head of state and thereby assume the leadership of the entire people, and that I would then among other things subject the Jewish problem to a solution. I expect that the howls of laughter that rose then from the throats of German Jewry have by now died to a croak.      Today I'm going to turn prophet yet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging our peoples into a world war, then the outcome will not be a Bolshevization of the world and therewith the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe! When”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Here at the palace, Hitler encountered suffocating palace etiquette for the first time. The noble Italian chief of protocol bowed before him and then led his guests up the long, shallow flight of stairs, striking every plush red-carpeted tread solemnly with a gold-encrusted staff. He was accustomed to this measured tread, but Hitler was not: the nervous foreign visitor fell out of step, found himself gaining on the uniformed nobleman ahead, stopped abruptly, causing confusion and clatter on the steps behind, then started again, walking more quickly until he was soon alongside the Italian again. The latter affected not to notice, but perceptibly quickened his own pace, his lacquered slippers and silken stockings flashing, until the whole throng was trotting up the last few stairs in an undignified Charlie Chaplin gallop. There”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Many a Hitler decision – decisions that infuriated his generals by their seeming lack of logic at the time – can probably be explained by the work of Göring's Forschungsamt, Ribbentrop's ministry and the naval staff's cryptanalysis branch.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“At the conference, Hitler mapped out plans for a vote to be held throughout Germany and Austria on April 10, to confirm the Anschluss. The question on the ballot paper was: ‘Do you accept Adolf Hitler as our Führer, and do you thus accept the reunification of Austria with the German Reich as effected on March 13, 1938?’ Unlike Schuschnigg's phoney plebiscite, it was a genuinely secret ballot. The result staggered even Hitler: of 49,493,028 entitled to vote, 49,279,104 had cast votes, and of these 99.08 percent had voted ‘Yes’ – altogether 48,751,587 adults had stated their support of Hitler's action. This was a unanimity of almost embarrassing dimensions. His”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Christianity is the revenge of the wandering Jew. Where would we be today if only we had not had Christianity – we would have the same brains, but we would have avoided a hiatus of one and a half thousand years. . .”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Christianity has been one long act of deceit and self-contradiction. It preaches goodness, humility and love thy neighbour, but under this slogan it has burned and butchered millions to the accompaniment of pious proverbs. The ancients openly admitted that they killed for self-protection, in revenge or as a punishment. The Christians do so only out of love! . . . Only Christianity has created a vengeful God, one who commits man to Hell the moment he starts using the brains that God gave him. The Classical was an age of enlightenment. With the onset of Christianity scientific research was halted and there began instead a research into the visions of saints, instead of the things that God gave us. Research into nature became a sin.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“In their second conversation Henderson argued that it was proof of Chamberlain's good intentions that he still refused to take Churchill into his cabinet: the anti-German faction was not representative of the British public – it was mainly Jews and anti-Nazis, said Henderson. Henderson later told the Italian ambassador that his talk with Hitler had been ‘absolutely unfavourable’: the Führer seemed dead set on war – even a general war.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Baron von Weizsäcker assessed in his private diary, ‘The Führer has no desire to pick a fight with the western powers but – so I'm assured – he cannot yet be sure if a war can be confined to Poland. So my own bet is unchanged, that we'll settle for a peaceful general approach.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“He authorized Goebbels to deliver a powerful and provocative speech in Danzig on June 17, denouncing Polish ‘ill treatment’ and demanding the city's return to the Reich. Nazi editors were confidentially briefed: ‘This is to be a first trial balloon to test the international atmosphere on the settlement of the Danzig question.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“It was the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Germany that gave Hitler his biggest headaches. His early years of power were marked by futile attempts to reconcile the thirty warring Protestant factions and bring them under one overriding authority, some loosely constituted council of churches that would unquestioningly accept the primacy of the state and the Nazi policies it enforced.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Excerpts from unpublished records like these show that Hitler was inspired by purely Darwinian beliefs – the survival of the fittest, with no use for the moral comfort that sound religious teaching can purvey. ‘Liberty, equality and fraternity are the grandest nonsense,’ he had said that evening. ‘Because liberty automatically precludes equality – as liberty leads automatically to the advancement of the healthier, the better, and the more proficient, and thus there is no more equality.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“In private, he justified his stiffer attitude to Britain by the secret documents now found in Prague archives. ‘One day we'll publish them to all the world, to prove Britain's dishonesty,’ Bodenschatz told a French diplomat. ‘All we're asking for is our right to live, and we're not going to let a country that owns three-fifths of the earth deny us this elementary right.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Encouraged by these ugly means, the mass exodus grew throughout 1939: 78,000 German and Austrian Jews (compared with 40,000 in 1938) left during 1939, and 38,000 Czech Jews too. With the outbreak of war the exodus still briefly continued, to stop only in October 1940, by which time Heydrich had successfully evicted about two-thirds of the Jews from the Reich – about 300,000 from Germany, 130,000 from Austria, 30,000 from Bohemia and Moravia. Some 70,000 of them reached Palestine, through the unholy alliance of aims that had briefly existed between Heydrich's SD and the Zionists.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“In their beaver-like work to enforce the Reich's emigration policies on the Jewish community, the SS had hitherto tried hard to keep a low profile, and to avoid any kind of spectacular outrage to international opinion. Göring thus found himself on the side of the SS, in alliance against the radical Goebbels, and on January 24 he formally instructed the ministry of the interior to set up a central emigration office under Heydrich to regulate and organize the deportation of the Jews. Hitler's personal part in this anti-Jewish programme was one of passive observation. Talking with Colonel Jósef Beck, the Polish foreign minister, on January 5 he rather speciously regretted that the western powers had not entertained Germany's colonial demands: ‘If they had, I might have helped solve the Jewish problem by making a territory available in Africa for resettlement of not only the German but the Polish Jews as well.’ On the twenty-first, he uttered to the Czech foreign minister Chvalkovský these ominous words: ‘The Jews here are going to be destroyed.’ The Czech replied sympathetically, and Hitler continued: ‘Help can only come from the others, like Britain and the United States, who have unlimited areas that they could make available for the Jews.’ And in a major speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler uttered an unmistakable threat to any Jews who did choose to remain behind in his Germany: I have very often been a prophet in my lifetime and I have usually been laughed at for it. During my struggle for power, it was primarily the Jewish people who just laughed when they heard me prophesy that one day I would become head of state and thereby assume the leadership of the entire people, and that I would then among other things subject the Jewish problem to a solution. I expect that the howls of laughter that rose then from the throats of German Jewry have by now died to a croak. Today I'm going to turn prophet yet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging our peoples into a world war, then the outcome will not be a Bolshevization of the world and therewith the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe!”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Telephone calls began coming from private citizens reporting fresh outbreaks of fire and the looting of Jewish businesses all over Munich. Hitler angrily sent for SS General Friedrich Karl von Eberstein, the city's police chief, and told him to restore order at once. He telephoned Goebbels and furiously demanded: ‘What's the game?’ He sent out Schaub and other members of his staff to stop the looting and arson. He ordered special protection for the famous antique dealers, Bernheimer's. At 2:56 A.M. a telex was issued by Rudolf Hess's staff as deputy of the Führer – and was repeated to all gauleiters as Party Ordinance No. 174 – forbidding all such demonstrations: ‘On express orders issued at the highest level of all there is to be no arson or the like, whatever, under any circumstances, against Jewish businesses.’ The Gestapo followed suit – thus at 3:45 A.M. the Berlin Gestapo repeated this prohibition.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Himmler's personal chief of staff, Karl Wolff, arrived with an indignant message from Heydrich at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten: the local Gestapo HQ had just telephoned that Goebbels's district offices everywhere were whipping up anti-Jewish demonstrations and ordering the police not to intervene. Himmler turned to Hitler for guidance. Hitler replied that the Gestapo were to protect Jewish property and lives, and that SS units were not to be called in unless things got out of hand.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Poland's attitude was hardly more sympathetic. Hitler had confided to ambassador Josef Lipski on September 20 that he was toying with the idea of solving the Jewish problem in unison with Poland, Hungary and perhaps Romania too by emigration ‘to the colonies.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Today, after the Holocaust, it is seldom recalled how anti-Semitic the Europe of 1938 tended to be. When Ribbentrop journeyed to Paris with much pomp in December to sign the joint declaration first suggested by Hitler to François-Poncet, Bonnet begged him not to flood France with more German Jews as they already had enough of their own. (‘In fact,’ Ribbentrop informed Hitler, ‘they are considering Madagascar for this purpose.’)”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Chamberlain was goaded into announcing major British rearmament. Now at Saarbrücken, Hitler bellowed that he did not intend to drop his guard since, in democracies, statesmen who worked sincerely for peace could always be replaced overnight by warmongers: ‘It only needs for Mr. Duff Cooper or Mr. Eden or Mr. Churchill to come to power in place of Chamberlain, and you can be quite sure that their aim would be to start a new world war. They make no bones about it, they admit it quite openly.”
― David Irving, The War Path