Top 15 Fritz Thyssen Quotes

The true Germany, with its western traditions, must be separated from Prussia, which belongs to the east.

Rosenberg, the great ‘intellectual’ of National Socialism, is an importation from Russia. He has not a drop of German blood in his veins. To him and his disciples Germany owes the methods of the ‘leagues of the godless’—the methods of Bolshevik Russia.

All these questions are questions of the future; but they are of the greatest importance for German economy. For the extreme regimentation of German industry under the National Socialists has completely ruined its factories through excessive exploitation.

National Socialism has attempted to falsify Nietzsche’s work and to represent this great German philosopher as a precursor of the Nazi racial doctrine and the ‘Blood and Soil’ theory. The truth is that Nietzsche found no greater object of scorn, in many of his works, than the inflated pan-Germanic mind.

At the present time the Catholic Church is the sole organised form of resistance to the spirit of National Socialism. It is the only adversary with whom the Nazis are obliged to reckon.

The Nazis, who have no understanding of religious zeal, saw in this restlessness of the Catholic population a display of political hostility. They said that the Catholic Centre party, although it had been officially dissolved, was renewing intrigues against the National Socialists through an underground movement. Goering launched his proclamation against political Christianity. It was not religion that was under discussion, he disclosed. National Socialism is based on positive Christianity… At the same time the Gestapo was instructed to proceed rigorously against the young Catholics.

And here we find a National Socialist pedagogue who has been entrusted with the training of a so-called elite, proposing to develop, not individuals with intelligence and a sense of responsibility, but machines. The followers of Karl Marx have never preached any such materialism. The Nazis have set out to destroy the soul. A dictatorship has no use for personality. A nation of robots is easier to govern.

National Socialism is not a political system. Rather, it is intended to be a philosophy and a system of morals — a Weltanschauung—as the Nazis pretentiously call it.

No, the Nazis’ aim was quite a different one. They wished to make German Protestantism a kind of state religion, after stripping it of all Christian principles. To delude the simple-minded, they called it ‘German Christianity.’

It is, above all, in its anti-Jewish campaign, that the party has officially given free rein to the base instincts which lie at the root of its so-called philosophy. The National Socialist government had the miserable privilege of encouraging and even ordering acts which are considered to be crimes by the whole civilised world. Foreigners who were in Germany at the time were appalled at these scenes of sadism and savagery; they saw the official incendiaries of the synagogues at work. In the capital of the Reich, in the centre of the town and in full view of the embassies, the Storm Troops and the younger Hitlerites, commanded by their chiefs, gutted and plundered dwellings and shops. In tolerating—indeed, actually organising—theft, arson, pillage, and even murder in the concentration camps, the National Socialist regime, especially in that autumn of 1938, revealed itself to the whole world as a government of gangsters.

The Jewish bankers saved German economy after the war. It was thanks to these Jews that medium and small enterprises were able to obtain from the American banks the necessary credits for their re-equipment.

The persecution of the Jews reached its height in the autumn of 1938 and aroused universal protest. Up to 1933 I had not attached much importance to the anti-Semitic brawls of the National Socialist party. The inhabitants of the Catholic provinces of the Rhine are not anti-Semitic. There may be regions in Germany where the slow-wittedness of the population has enabled the Jews to play an exaggerated role. This has never been the case in the Rhineland. We have always considered the Jew Heinrich Heine as one of our national poets. The Nazis may destroy Heine’s statue in his native city of Düsseldorf, but they will never be able to prevent people from singing ‘Die Lorelei’ on the boats that sail down the Rhine.

From the moment they seized power, the Nazi leaders professed the greatest contempt for the individual. A large number of German conservatives, ignorant of the facts and appalled by the burning of the Reichstag, assented to the incarceration of the political enemies of the regime without a trial. They may have regarded this measure as purely provisional and justified by the danger of civil war, and assumed that the National Socialists would soon reinstate legal procedure. They were mistaken. The concentration camps, better called torture camps, are, to this day, a state institution.

Such are the people who to-day govern Germany. It is astonishing how they can afford the impudence of proclaiming themselves Socialists and of insulting, from amidst their corruption, the ‘western plutocracies,’ to use their phrase. The vast majority of the German people know nothing of these refined methods of growing rich at the expense of the common weal and the sweat of the working masses. Some day, when they learn how they were deceived and scorned by their leaders, their fury will be terrible.

In those days of the distant past the National Socialists presented themselves to the public as the champions of virtue and disinterestedness. As soon as they held the power, they raised graft to the status of a state institution.