Hermann Rauschning Quotes

Goebbels is and always has been surrounded by mistrust and deep dissimulation. It was this mistrust that accounted for his being set down as a Bolshevist in disguise, though he cares no more for Socialism and Communism than for patriotism and nationalism. Germany? The testing ground for revolution. Socialism? Nothing but a means to an end a means to revolution, but never the goal of one.

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

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!

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.

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.’

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

When [Nazi] power had been attained there was not only no unity in regard to future policy but no united group of leaders. The party included a sort of sample collection of all political outlooks in Germany, from crass reactionaries to doctrinaire pacifists and the extremist Left-wing Socialists.

Today, after six years, there are… still many respectable people associated with German ‘dynamism’ who have not yet realized that their imagined national and racial rebirth amounts to nothing more than the adoption of the revolutionary system of ‘direct action’ as the fundamental principle of the carrying of the ‘mass revolt’ to completion. Direct action is defined as ‘direct integration by means of corporativism, militarism and myth;’ this is to replace democracy and parliamentarism.

The nihilist foreign policy of the National Socialism of today uses ideas as a mask, and has no philosophical basis.

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.

But Hess is not a man of strong character. He may be capable of a great sacrifice. But simple, straightforward opposition, when he considers that something wrong is being done, is not for him… He often acted as he did in my conflict with the party against his own better judgment. He kept silence. He capitulated to the demands of the party.

Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew.

At that time the issue was between the groups loyal to Hitler and those who regarded Gregor Strasser as the coming man. The opposing groups were fighting so furiously that they were continually on the verge of blood-shed. Similar violent hostilities were frequent between Nazi magnates. The tension was not as extreme as in 1934 when Hitler resolved to have several thousand party comrades shot.

Nobody took it [Mein Kampf] seriously, nobody could, for nobody could make head or tail out of it.

I promise you that if I wished to, I could destroy the Church in a few years; it is hollow and rotten and false through and through. One push and the whole structure would collapse. We should trap the priests by their notorious greed and self-indulgence.