The plans of Adolf Hitler for aggression were just as secret as Mein Kampf, of which over six million copies were published in Germany. He not only openly advocated overthrowing the Treaty of Versailles, but made demands which went far beyond a mere rectification of its alleged injustices (GB-128). He avowed an intention to attack neighboring states and seize their lands, which he said would have to be won with "the power of a triumphant sword." Here, for every German to hearken to, were the "ancestral voices prophesying war."
Reference Quote
ShuffleSimilar Quotes
Quote search results. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
[Hitler] aimed to make Germany the dominant Power in Europe and maybe, more remotely, in the world. Other Powers have pursued similar aims, and still do. Other Powers seek to defend their vital interests by force of arms. In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German.
The situation changed visibly when sentimental reasons and long-term political aims gave way to a stern, ruthless nationalist ideology which would brook no compromise. Hitler had categorically demanded the Anschluss in "Mein Kampf". . . . As early as 1923 Hitler had decide that, if necessary, the National-Socialists must take over the government in Austria by force.
The first plan for an offensive campaign [in the West] was formulated in November 1939. In substance it was a repetition of the 1914 Schlieffen plan. As the start of the campaign was delayed, doubts arose as to the achievement of any surprise with this plan. The basic idea of the new plan—the breakthrough in the Ardennes, crossing of the Meuse, and the trapping of British, French and Belgian forces in the north by pushing the tank forces through to the Channel—came to several minds at once. And in justice it should be said that one of these was Hitler’s. However, General Manstein, then chief of staff to Marshal Rundstedt, deserves the greater credit. He worked out the plan and proposed its adoption. The order was given to the Operations Division in February 1940 to replan the campaign along the proposed lines. From February 1940 to May 1940 the plan was subject to the sharpest criticism. Among the critics was General Guderian, who described the plan as a ‘crime against Panzers’. General Halder deserves the credit for defending the plan against all critics and insisting upon its execution. General Bock was also opposed to it and appealed to the chief of the general staff. Halder said once that he would stick to the plan if the chances of succeeding were only ten percent.
Hitler was clear in Mein Kampf just as he was clear in "Triumph of the Will" that it was always his intent and the intention of the whole NSDAP to be the one and only source of power and authority in Germany. We intend the same here, in North America... It may sound crazy, diversionary, or impossible but it is a primary pillar of NS philosophy. It is the drive for power. It is the WILL TO POWER. If all the other "problems" around us were to disappear tomorrow, we, as National Socialist Revolutionaries, would still have this will to power to be fulfilled and would continue on our course.
The great masses, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things, but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies. Thus, such an untruth will not at all enter their heads, and therefore they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others.” Hitler’s lies spread misinformation that was favorable to Germany and unfavorable to us and our allies, and sowed dissension among the American public not just about the war effort but about our own basic system of government. His very well-funded propaganda mission in the United States was twofold: to try to keep the United States from getting into World War II, and also to soften us up, to mess with us, to make us less effective as a country, by finding and exploiting what the Germans called “kernels of disturbance” in the United States. The German propaganda operation in America, according to the first U.S. academic study on the topic, identified these kernels of disturbance as “racial controversies, economic inequalities, petty jealousies in public life,” and “differences of opinion which divide political parties and minority groups.” Even the “frustrated ambitions of discarded politicians.” Germany’s agents were tasked with finding these fissures in American society and then prying them further apart, exploiting them to make Americans hate and suspect each other, and maybe even wish for a new kind of country altogether. A partisan, bickering, demoralized America, the Nazis believed, would be incapable of mounting a successful war effort in Europe. It might even soften us up for an eventual takeover. Hitler was counting above all on racism and religious bigotry to carry the day in the United States, and to set the stage for global domination. “The wholesome aversion for the Negroes and the colored races in general, including the Jews, the
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI
Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.
Hitler was not a socialist. He was a nationalist and a racialist; and in Mein Kampf himself tells how he designed to use social services and equality for the purpose of the Reich for conquest of the world. The purposes of socialism — equality, prosperity, charity, and international peace — were not the aims of Hitler. He detested all of them. It is irrelevant altogether to quote to us, as Hayek does, a number of obscure economic professors who may have impressed him when he was a student, men who said they were socialists but who characteristically derided Great Britain because she was a nation of merchants, while Germany was a nation of heroes! The writings he refers to were written in the course of World War I and were war polemics.
Deeply as many people deplored the policy which at a critical moment in European history gave Hitler a free hand in the East to develop his ambitious schemes of domination, strongly opposed as we were to many features of the Soviet system, we had no hesitation in proclaiming that as enemies of our enemies we should do all we could to help the Russian people in their fight... It was not unlikely that Hitler hoped to be able to launch from Moscow a great peace offensive. He would like to proclaim himself the saviour of Europe from Bolshevism... He would deceive no one in the Government. The great mass of the people in this country and in the countries of the British Commonwealth and Empire would not be deceived. We would not make peace with the Nazi gang because such a peace would be no peace. It would be a betrayal of everything for which this country stood.
The book cannot be called, as some say, “a written evidence of the mind and character of Hitler and his henchmen,” for at the time of writing Hitler was seeking power, and once having gained this power it becomes the old story of the oppressed gaining power, becoming the oppressor, a fact that runs through history with a persistency of man’s claims to “natural rights.”
The real Hitler did not exist before those years of hardship in Vienna, where he simultaneously discovered the dangers of Marxism and of Jewish World-Ascendancy. His real birth as a man of action dates from the day on which he discovered ethnology. It is in this department that a Frenchman is bound to find Mein Kampf singularly inadequate, singularly elementary. If we had to judge these fighting books by the same canons as we judge works of the mind, it is certain that the National Socialist Bible would not bear a moment's examination. The most puerile absurdities mingle with the most dubious scientific hypotheses, all couched in language whose pedantry, though it take one's breath away, probably contributed in large measure to the book's success with German readers.
Hitler was a humble man and a man of the people if ever there was one. What he wanted he wanted for Germany and the German people, not for himself. He would have had Germany win the First World War - in which he risked his own life many times - so as to have been just a small part afterwards in its national life. He would have rather helped someone else in the task of resurrecting Germany after 1918 but, then just as now, everybody seemed to be waiting. So an honest man of the people did it himself.
Hitler knew weapons alone would not be decisive, he focused on molding the people’s spirit, breeding something singular in history: bravado, blind obedience, ruthlessness, and brutality. There was contempt for every noble human emotion; contemptible disregard for the thinking of others; destruction of religion and religious establishments -- and there was the extermination of the Jews because they were wiser than the German people.
Hitler's aim was to attract attention to himself. ...[H]e personally arranged all the lighting effects and spotlights, as well as his entry into a hall with fanfares. He trained crowds to salute with the right arm, taught them his songs, and transformed the audience from an apathetic mass into active collaborators in his festivities.
In Mein Kampf I found abundant 'mental sunshine' which bathed all the gray world suddenly in the clear light of reason and understanding. Word after word, sentence after sentence stabbed into the darkness like lightning bolts of revelation, tearing and ripping away the cobwebs of more than thirty years of darkness; brilliantly illuminating the heretofore obscure reasons for the world's madness. I was transfixed, hypnotized. I could not lay the book down without agonies of impatience to get back to it. I read it walking to the squadron, I took it into the air and read it, propped up on the chartboard, while I automatically gave the instructions to the other planes circling over the desert. I read it on the Coronado Ferry. I read it into the night and resumed the next morning. When I had finished, I started again and reread every word, underlining and marking especially magnificent passages. I studied it, thought about it and wondered at the utter, indescribable genius of it. How could the world not only ignore such a book, but damn it and curse it and hate it, and pretend that it was a plan for 'conquering' the world, when it was the most obvious and rational plan for saving the world which has ever been written? Had nobody read it, I wondered, that people went around saying it was the work of a mad "rug-chewer"? How could sensible people get away with such monstrous intellectual fraud? Why was it so hated and cursed? I could see why the Jews would hate and curse it, but why my own people? I reread and studied it some more. Slowly, bit by bit, I began to understand. I realized that National Socialism, the iconoclastic worldview of Adolf Hitler, was the doctrine of scientific, racial idealism, actually, a new 'religion' for our times. I saw that I was living in the age of a new worldview. Two thousand years ago there had been a similar rise of a new approach or worldview, called a 'religion'; a worldview which shook and changed the world forever.
Loading more quotes...
Loading...