Hitler Quotes

“Hitler was “someone seduced by himself,” someone who was so inseparable from his words “that a measure of authenticity flowed over the audience even when he was telling obvious lies.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“If there is one thing we admire about National Socialism it’s the fact that it has succeeded, for the first time in German politics, in the complete mobilisation of human stupidity.”30”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“In his book Defying Hitler, written in British exile in 1939, Sebastian Haffner recalled the “icy fright” that had been his first reaction to the news that Hitler had been named chancellor: “For a moment I almost physically sensed the odour of blood and filth surrounding this man Hitler. It was a bit like being approached by a threatening and disgusting predator—it felt like a dirty paw with sharp claws in my face.” But”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Kershaw did not minimise the historical role played by his insane, ideological fixations, but he did illustrate that without the readiness of many people to work for the man in charge, there would have been no way he could have achieved his murderous aims.”
― Volker Ullrich, Adolf Hitler: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889 - 1939 Biographie

“Thea Sternheim, who learned of Hitler’s appointment while in Paris, wrote in her diary: “Hitler as chancellor. On top of everything else, now this intellectual humiliation. The last straw. I’m going home. To vomit.”133 Klaus Mann noted: “News that Hitler has become Reich chancellor. Horror. Never thought it possible. (The land of unlimited possibilities…)”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Hitler's unusually improvisational and personal style of leadership, which created constant responsibility conflicts and an anarchic tangle of offices and portfolios, was anything but an expression of political incompetence. On the contrary, it served to make Hitler's own supremacy essentially unassailable.”
― Volker Ullrich, Adolf Hitler: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889 - 1939 Biographie

“He wasn’t even honest towards his most intimate confidants,” Krosigk recalled. “In my opinion, he was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognise the difference between lies and truth.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“This is the best day of my life…I will go down in history as the greatest German ever.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“But he also wrote in that same letter that he believed Hitler was a man of his word—a grievous error, as he would soon discover.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“The best thing is to let Christianity gradually fade out,” he said in October of that year. “A long phase-out has something conciliatory. The dogma of Christianity will collapse in the face of science.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Count Harry Kessler noted laconically: “It’s a sad New Year, the end of a catastrophic year and the beginning of what looks to be an even more catastrophic one.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“All these balls are a pure waste of time, and what’s more the waltz is much too effeminate for a man.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“If there is one thing we admire about National Socialism it’s the fact that it has succeeded, for the first time in German politics, in the complete mobilisation of human stupidity.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“According to the sociologist Max Weber, the power of a charismatic politician depends on his having a community of followers who are convinced that he possesses extraordinary abilities and has been called by destiny.176”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Deep knowledge in all areas of the life of the state and its history, the ability to learn lessons from them, belief in the purity of his own cause and in ultimate victory, and an untamable strength of will give him the power of captivating oration that make the masses celebrate him…Thus we have a picture of the dictator: sharp in intellect, clear and honest, passionate yet under control, cool and bold, daring, decisive and goal-oriented, without qualms about the immediate execution of his plans, unforgiving towards himself and others, mercilessly hard yet tender in his love for his people, tireless in his work, with an iron fist clothed in a velvet glove, capable of triumphing over himself. We still don’t know when he will intervene to save us all, this “man.” But he is coming. Millions sense that.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Hitler never offered an opinion about television, whose development was encouraged after 1933, but as a gadget enthusiast, he is likely to have been interested in it. ‘I openly admit that I’m a fool for technology’, he said in February 1933. ‘Anyone who comes to me with some surprising technological innovation will have an advantage.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939

“He knows what he wants and is taking a direct route towards his goal. At the slightest provocation, he intends to solve the Czech question…The whole thing will have to be rolled out as quickly as possible. You always have to take a large risk, if you want to make a large gain.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Yet although they so eagerly placed themselves at his disposal, Hitler thoroughly mistrusted the elites at the Foreign Ministry. He still felt the inferiority complex of an arriviste when confronted by experienced and usually very worldly civil servants.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“A French premier,” Goebbels admitted, “should have said in 1933, as I certainly would have, had I been French premier: ‘The author of Mein Kampf, which contains this and that, has become German chancellor. This man cannot be tolerated as a neighbour. Either he will have to disappear, or we will start marching.” That would have been completely logical, but it was not done. They let us be, and we were able to proceed unhindered through the zone of risk.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“On 30 June 1934, the true criminal nature of the Nazi regime was revealed, but only a few observers inside and outside Germany were able to see it. “The horrible thing is that a European people has delivered itself up to such a band of lunatics and criminals and continues to tolerate them,” Victor Klemperer complained in his diary.304 Thomas Mann, who had left Germany in February for initial exile in Switzerland, saw all his dark premonitions confirmed. In comparison with the “dirty swindler and murderous charlatan” Hitler, Mann wrote, Robespierre was positively honourable. The circles around Hitler were little better than “gangsters of the lowest sort.” The Nobel laureate went on: “In any case, after little more than a year, Hitlerism is proving to be what we always saw, recognised and deeply felt it to be: the absolute nadir of baseness, decadent stupidity and bloodthirsty humiliation—it is becoming clear that Hitlerism will continue, certainly and unerringly, to prove itself as precisely that.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“But not everyone was taken in by Hitler’s act. In Germany, too, there were warning voices. To many people’s surprise, on 17 October, Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann issued an impassioned “Appeal to Reason” in Berlin’s Beethoven-Saal auditorium. The call was combined with a complex analysis of the intellectual and social preconditions for National Socialism. The Hitler movement would never have reached such a level of “mass emotional conviction,” Mann asserted, if it had not been preceded by “the sense of the beginning of a new epoch and…a new spiritual situation for humanity.” People had turned away from the fundamental principles of a civil society—“liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress”—and faith in reason to embrace “the forces of the unconscious, of unthinking dynamism and of pernicious creativity,” which rejected everything intellectual. Fed by those tendencies and carried by a “gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking,” National Socialism pursued “a politics of the grotesque…replete with Salvation Army allures, reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement-park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetition of monotonous slogans until everyone foamed at the mouth.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Faith in democratic institutions and democratic political parties dissolved, and anti-parliamentary sentiment, already rife in the Weimar Republic, was given a huge boost. Those in power appeared to have no solutions to the crisis, and the more helpless they seemed to be, the greater the demand became for a “strong man,” a political messiah who would lead Germany out of economic misery and point the way towards renewed national greatness. More than any other German politician, Hitler presented himself as the answer to these hopes for salvation.4 The hour was at hand for the man who already enjoyed the quasi-religious worship of his supporters and who had long identified with the role of the charismatic Führer.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939