Hermann Rauschning Quotes

When the enemy is demoralized from within… A single blow must destroy him. Aerial attacks, stupendous in their mass effect, surprise, terror, sabotage, assassinations from within, the murder of leading men… that is the war of the future.

We are obligated to depopulate as part of our mission of preserving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out…Nature is cruel, therefore we, too, may be cruel…. I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!

Catholic priests know where the shoe pinches. But their day is done, and they know it. They are far too intelligent not to see that, and to enter upon a hopeless battle. But if they do, I shall certainly not make martyrs of them. We shall brand them as ordinary criminals. I shall tear the mask of honesty from their faces. And if that is not enough, I shall make them appear ridiculous and contemptible. I shall order films to be made about them. We shall show the history of the monks on the cinema. Let the whole mass of nonsense, selfishness, repression and deceit be revealed: how they drained the money out of the country, how they haggled with the Jews for the world, how they committed incest.

And above all, we shall then maintain our passionate desire to revolutionize the world to an extent unparalleled in history… Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.

Goebbels belongs to a widespread type of revolutionary; he is the intellectual revolutionary, mentally alert, inventive in destructive ideas, and a master of inflammatory speech.

At its climaxes this Nazi revolution was always half a Wagner opera. The other half was cunning conspiracy.

One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both... We don’t want people who keep one eye on the life in the hereafter. We need free men who feel and know that God is in themselves... Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense! Never again. That tale is finished… They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.

We see then that National Socialism, like the Marxist Socialist parties, has a sort of religious element that demands the sacrifice of the intellect and of individual opinions.

The revolutionary elements within the middle class came together in the youth movement and its Bünde, and began to destroy the middle class from within… It is doubtful whether the anti-capitalist youth of the middle class origin could have entered into a fruitful association with the proletarian youth.

The peasant will be told what the Church has destroyed for them: the whole of the secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the shapeless, the daemonic. The peasant will learn to hate the Church on that basis… We shall wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion particular to our race.

The idea of free and unfettered science, unfettered by hypotheses, could only occur in the age of Liberalism. It is absurd.

The radical dynamism into which National Socialism has developed is a dangerous, destructive fever, which spreads at an uncanny rate.

Hitler went on to say that there must, of course, come a time where there would be nothing left to take from the Jews. But then he would still hold their lives in the palm of his hand: their precious Jewish lives. The company burst out laughing again. ‘Streicher,’ Hitler continued, laughing himself, ‘has suggested that in the next war they should be driven ahead of our attacking defense line. They would be the best protection for our soldiers. I shall consider that suggestion.’

Nothing was more remote from the future of the Reich in 1932-33 than a Bolshevik revolution or even a political revolt from the Left.

It took three attempts in Germany to enable a coup d'état of nationalist forces to achieve such success that it could be given the character of an irresistible mass movement, a national revolution. All three attempts used the same tactics of ‘grafting revolutionary violence on constitutional legality.’