Fake Quotes – National-Socialist Worldview

Another Fake Hitler Quote from a Novel

Hadding — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last July I exposed a speech ostensibly composed entirely of Hitler quotes as being composed mostly, in fact, of fake Hitler quotes.

The debunking of fake Hitler quotes seems to be a never-ending task, because people are inventing new ones. One of the fake quotes that I debunked was this:

“It’s not the truth that matters, but victory.”

That fake Hitler quote is from a novel, Mist of Love, Fog of War by Alain J. Zgheib, published only in 2016. From the same novel, we have this:

“And the victor will never be asked if he told the truth.”

The fake quotes from that novel spread very quickly. I have encountered them several times.

According to Snopes, this is also from a novel:

It is from a slightly older novel, Pat Miller’s Willfully Ignorant from 2014.

The propagation of a fake quote like this raises some questions.

One could ask about the thought-processes of the person who decided to take a sentence from a novel and to misrepresent it as a quote from Adolf Hitler. Obviously such a person has no scruples.

More important, however, is what it says about the people who readily embrace such a misrepresentation.

In the first place, it shows that, despite the obsession with Adolf Hitler in popular culture, much of the general public knows practically nothing about him. They never perused Mein Kampf to get a general idea of what Hitler said — which is rather the opposite of what is attributed to him here. The whole spirit of Mein Kampf is blunt and honest.

Furthermore, it suggests that they are still under the influence of old war-propaganda alleging that Hitler presented in Mein Kampf theories about how to deceive the public. Anyone who investigates what Hitler wrote will find that he warned against the Big Lie as a tactic of the Jews. But the vast majority of people will never check, and the few who have checked either could not or would not obliterate the false belief.

Dinesh D’Souza, in his public presentations about his idiotic book The Big Lie, speaks as if Hitler had advocated the Big Lie. D’Souza indicates in his book that he knows better, but for whatever reason he chooses in his public presentations to conform to the old, false propaganda. The fact that he can do this in presentations at universities without suffering embarrassment is remarkable. Perhaps the people who recognize the deception just don’t want to be seen defending Hitler. (Many of Dinesh D’Souza’s followers however are simply stupid.)

The belief that Hitler would have written such statements in a book for publication also shows an utter lack of critical thinking.

The statement shown here resembles something from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which was alleged to be a secret document that ended up being published only because it was leaked.* There is no similar background story to explain how similar admissions from Hitler could become public. We are supposed to believe that Hitler deliberately wrote down his evil intentions and had them published. People are just not thinking.

__________

* Incidentally, Protocols is clearly not an authentic document either, although, unlike this statement attributed to Hitler, it at least has some resemblance to the truth.

Two Know-It-Alls debate National-Socialism’s Place in the Alt Right

Hadding — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 08:53:00 +0000

On 17 August 2017 at 7PM EST there is supposed to be on Youtube a “debate” about national-socialism between two Internet entities, Vox Day and Greg Johnson, neither of whom, it seems to me, can claim to be very knowledgeable about national-socialism.

One of the first things that anyone who would claim to be knowledgeable about national-socialism should know, is that there has been enormous misrepresentation and even forgery that has to be circumvented in order to arrive at a true picture of national-socialism. Neither Greg Johnson nor Vox Day seems to know this, as I shall explain.

Know-It-All Greg Johnson

A few years ago there was an essay by Johnson published on Hitler’s birthday on The Occidental Observer, wherein Johnson used just one alleged quote from Adolf Hitler. It happened to be from the fraudulent Hitler-Bormann Documents.

I spotted this right away and pointed out the mistake in the comments section.

The fake quote was removed from the essay for a short time, but then reinserted. Johnson then tried to argue for the quote’s authenticity by citing the authority of Dr. William Pierce. Why Johnson would cite Dr. Pierce on such a matter is a mystery to me, but that’s what he did. It was a bad move, because unlike Johnson, I did not just meet Dr. Pierce once, but actually knew him and worked for him at various times over the course of several years before Johnson met him, and knew with certainty that Dr. Pierce did not regard the Hitler-Bormann Documents as authentic. National Vanguard Books did not sell that book, specifically because it was known to be a fraud. Johnson was lying.

Johnson is also no friend of national-socialism. In an essay for TOO wherein he was pushing his brandname, “North American New Right,” he defined his “new right” as distinct and utterly separate from the stinky poopoo of Fascism and National-Socialism, and even from William Pierce, all of which were tainted by association with a Holocaust that Greg Johnson dares not question and advises others not to question, because questioning the Holocaust is just heartless and mean, Johnson says (G. Johnson, “Dealing with the Holocaust,” TOO, 20 July 2012).

And now Greg Johnson is going to speak on national-socialism’s behalf? If this were a legal matter I would ask for a different attorney, because this one seems none too fond of his client.

Know-It-All Vox Day

I am almost completely unfamiliar with Vox Day although I have heard the name a few times. From the little that I have seen, he seems to be a know-it-all more or less of the libertarian variety. He is on his moral high horse against “socialism,” and is determined that national-socialism should be excluded from the Alt Right because, as socialism, it is leftist and therefore not rightist.

As a national-socialist, I have stated in the past that I do not call myself Alt Right and do not care about participating in the fad of being called Alt Right. National-Socialism is something fairly definite, whereas the Alt Right is something nebulous.

Let us bear in mind that the Alt Right brand more or less belongs to Richard Spencer, who once famously declared, in response to libertarian hectoring: “Big government forever!” Certainly any pro-White creed that embraces “Big government forever!” is big enough for national-socialism.

In that light, the real argument would seem to be about whether Richard Spencer’s Alt Right is correctly named. Instead, these two guys, Vox Day and Greg Johnson, will argue about whether national-socialism can be part of the Alt Right.

Vox Day’s argument is that, because what is now — since World War II — called the right is always for less government and against socialism, it is impossible to be rightist and at the same time in any way socialist.

I spent a good part of a recent What Would Hitler Do? segment explaining that before the Second World War conservatism and socialism were not considered antithetical. There was in Britain, since the 1840s, the concept of Tory Socialism, which is another way of saying conservative socialism. It was Bismarck, with the backing of the Conservatives, who established the welfare state in Germany. There is a long history of conservative, or one might say right-wing, socialism.

This was possible because the older conservatism was not about free markets and individual liberty. Conservatism was about preserving traditions and morality and, eventually, about preserving the race.

It is only when liberalism calls itself conservatism, as has happened since the Second World War, that conservative socialism no longer seems possible.

Vox Day tries to demonstrate that national-socialism is no different than any other socialism, and presents on his blog seven alleged quotes that are supposed to prove this. Vox Day says that they are “direct quotes from Mr. Hitler himself.”

In fact, only two of the seven statements are direct quotes from Hitler.

The first and third quotes are from the fraudster Hermann Rauschning, p. 131 and p. 186 of his book The Voice of Destruction.

The fifth quote is from Ernst Roehm, from the period (1934) when Roehm was complaining that the National-Socialist Revolution had turned out to be less socialist than he had hoped. (Wikiquotes mistakenly attributes the statement to Hitler, alleging Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, p. 87, as the source. If you carefully read what Churchill wrote, you can see that he in fact attributes the statement to Roehm.)

The second and fourth quotes are from the memoir of Otto Wagener, supposedly written in 1946 based on recollections of conversations from 13+ years earlier. Postwar memoirs of the vanquished are in general dubious, but a memoir written after so many years had passed is definitely not trustworthy. Furthermore, this memoir, for whatever reason, was not published until 1978 — seven years after Wagener’s death — which raises a question of authenticity.

I personally do not believe that Wagener’s memoir, or the alleged memoir attributed to Wagener, is accurate. The statement that has Hitler seeming to support “international socialism” as a final consequence of the spread of national-socialism is not consistent with other statements. Hitler is recorded in the Table Talk as having said that national-socialism was not for export, because if other nations adopted national-socialism they would become stronger in competition against Germany.

I am firmly opposed to any attempt to export National-Socialism. If other countries are determined to preserve their democratic systems and thus rush to their ruin, so much the better for us. [Table Talk, entry for 20 May 1942]

It should be plain that Hitler’s attitude toward foreign relations as a great competition for survival did not favor such a concept as “international socialism,” and that the words attributed to Hitler in the alleged Wagener memoir do not sound like Hitler.

And even if Wagener did write it, a memoir written so many years later cannot be considered reliably as “direct quotes from Mr. Hitler himself.”

Only the sixth and seventh sentences in Vox Day’s list are “direct quotes from Mr. Hitler himself.” The sixth is from a speech that Hitler gave for the beginning of the Winter Aid Program (5 October 1937), and the seventh is from Hitler’s address to the German people upon commencement of Operation Barbarossa (22 June 1941). In that speech, when Hitler refers to the “new socialist order in Germany,” it is by contrast with the Soviet system, which Hitler characterizes as “chaos, misery, and starvation.” The speech emphasized that the Soviet and National-Socialist systems were different, not that they were the same, as Vox Day would have it.

The conclusion is, Vox Day doesn’t know what the hell he’s on about.

Neither of these guys, neither Greg Johnson nor Vox Day, is well equipped to discuss national-socialism and its relationship to the Alt Right.

That is a moot point anyway.

The real question is whether libertarianism (what used to be called liberalism) can save the White race. I maintain that it obviously cannot and will not, because unlike national-socialism it was never designed for that.

A Speech Composed of Fake Hitler-Quotes

Hadding — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 19:37:00 +0000

Some conservative prankster thought that he would embarrass the leftist audience at an “Impeach Trump March” in Chicago by addressing to them a speech consisting of alleged Hitler-quotes.

I can tell that he is a conservative because (1) he knows nothing about Hitler, and (2) he still thinks that responding positively to anything said by Hitler should be a source of shame.

The shame is his. It is bad enough to adopt such a cowardly and self-crippling form of rhetoric as The leftists are the real Nazis or The Democrats are the real racists, but beyond that, the alleged Hitler-quotes that he used are mostly fake.

Here is the text of that short speech, with footnotes and color-code indicating the real sources, where I could determine them. Only the green text represents authentic Hitler-quotes.

Ladies, Gentleman, and non-binary members of this congregation:

I would like to thank everyone for coming out today to support the constitutional rule of law, I stand here today, a veteran of these United States armed forces, and a proud 21st century patriot. I would like to take this opportunity to talk about this oppressive regime, and the repressive regime that constitutes capitalism as a whole.

We are Socialists, we are enemies of the capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with it’s unfair salaries, rights it’s unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.^[1]

Benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual… The state should retain supervision and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the state. It is his duty not to use his property against the interests of others among his own people. This is the crucial matter. This American Nation will always retain its right to control the owners of property…^[2] A policy of laissez faire in this sphere is not only cruelty to the individual guiltless victims but also to the nation as a whole.^[3]

For there is one thing we must never forget… the majority can never replace the man.^[4]

Life is like a mirror, if you frown at it, it frowns back, if you smile it returns the greeting.^[5]

Donald Trump seems to think that if you tell a big enough lie, and tell it frequently enough, that it will be believed.^[6] It’s not the truth that matters, but victory.^[7]

The doom of a nation can be averted only by a storm of flowing passion, but only those who are passionate themselves can arouse passion in others.^[4]

LIST OF SOURCES

[1] Gregor Strasser, Thoughts about the Task of the Future, speech delivered on 15 June 1926. Strasser was a member of the NSDAP but distinctly to the left of Hitler. Hitler would not have expressed himself in such terms.

[2] This is from an alleged interview that Hitler supposedly gave to Richard Breiting in 1931, which did not however surface until the 1960s. This interview is now generally regarded as a hoax.

[3] Distortion of a statement from Hitler’s speech of 30 January 1934. The original sentence was not about economic policy, much less about “laissez faire,” but about prevention of birth-defects through eugenic sterilization. Hitler’s words were: “Im übrigen ist das Geschehenlassen auf diesem Gebiet nicht nur eine Grausamkeit gegen die einzelnen unschuldigen Opfer, sondern auch eine Grausamkeit gegen die Gesamtheit des Volkes.” Geschehenlassen could be rendered quite literally as laisser-faire in French, but laissez faire in English refers to an economic doctrine. This is clearly what our conservative prankster intended, but it is not at all what Hitler meant.

[4] Genuine, from Mein Kampf.

[5] William Makepeace Thakeray. If Hitler ever said this, he was quoting Thackeray.

[6] Misleading paraphrase of something said in Mein Kampf. Hitler was warning against the big lie, not advocating it.

[7] From a novel, Mist of Love, Fog of War, by Alain J. Zgheib (2016). This novel is also the source of a more widely circulated formulation of the same sentiment: “And the victor will never be asked if he told the truth.” It is remarkable that a piece of dialog from a novel could become widely disseminated in a very short time as an alleged quote.

Thus, in the entire 299-word screed, supposed to consist entirely of Hitler-quotes, there are only two sentences that Hitler actually uttered.

None of the big-name media that ran with the story caught that. Neither Salon nor World Net Daily, nor the Gateway Pundit. This shows once again how easy it is to lie to the media when the lie is about Hitler.

The Ahmed Chalabi of Germany

Hadding — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 18:55:00 +0000

Highly Rewarded Liar Hermann Rauschning

Hermann Rauschning was a disgruntled former member of the NSDAP who wrote a book, marketed variously as Conversations with Hitler or The Voice of Destruction, that revealed what were supposed to have been private conversations in which Hitler had made many shocking statements. This book was highly influential and heavily utilized in Anglo-American war-propaganda. Most of the “quotes” of Adolf Hitler found in the U.S. War Department’s Why We Fight series of propaganda-films, for example, are derived from Rauschning.

Among the astounding statements attributed to Hitler by Rauschning are the following:

“Terror is the most effective political instrument.”

“I am willing to sign anything. I will do anything to facilitate the success of my policy.”

“Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear.”

“Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians, it is an honored title to us. We shall rejuvenate the world. This world is near its end.”

“The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention, it is a blemish like circumcision.”

This is just a sample, but you get the idea. The picture of Adolf Hitler that Rauschning presented was of an amoral megalomaniac with whom any attempt to have peaceful dealings would be foolhardy and futile.

As for Rauschning himself, he achieved fame and fortune, selling many books and writing a syndicated weekly newspaper-column in the United States during the war. He was even called as an expert witness in the Mass-Sedition Trial of 1944.

In early 1939, before war had broken out, Rauschning was declaring that Hitler was bent on war and would launch a surprise attack on Britain and France. This is not what happened, but the fact that Rauschning was saying such things — and being widely quoted in news-media — tended to increase paranoia and make war more likely.

More generally, once one accepts Rauschning’s representation of Hitler as a madman, one can more easily accept other bizarre claims about him. In that way, Rauschning’s fiction served as a foundation that established credibility for the rest of Anglo-American war-propaganda.

In effect, Hermann Rauschning was to Adolf Hitler and Germany what Ahmed Chalabi was to Saddam Hussein and Iraq — a disgruntled defector willing to profit from lying. (The CIA considers defectors to be untrustworthy as sources of information, but they have been nonetheless effective as propagandists.)

The worst part is that many mainstream historians, apparently reluctant to let go of the old notions that were originally instilled as war-propaganda, still use Rauschning as a source. But even in works about Hitler and National-Socialist Germany where Rauschning is not cited as a source, his influence seems to persist in the form of a general presumption about Hitler’s character.

A Swiss researcher named Wolfgang Haenel — in no way a friend to Adolf Hitler — determined in 1983 that Rauschning’s supposed conversations with Hitler were not authentic for the following reasons, summarized by Hanns Neuerbourg:

Haenel says his research established that:

— Rauschning, who headed the government of the Free City of Danzing (now Gdansk, Poland) after the Nazi party won local elections there in 1933, never belonged to the “innermost circle” of Hitler confidants.

— Records show that Rauschning, an honorary colonel in the SS elite guard, had only a very few meetings with Hitler, and none in private.

— Rauschning admitted he kept only “scanty jottings” of his meetings with Hitler. His “confidential” quotes include excerpts from later speeches by the Fuehrer and paraphrased comments from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

— Numerous distortions and fabrications in the book were designed to strengthen Allied resolve and to encourage the United States and other nations to join the war-effort.

— A chapter on “Hitler Himself” in which Rauschning tells of the Fuehrer hearing voices, waking at night with convulsive shrieks, and uttering unintelligible phrases, was inspired by a novel by French writer Guy de Maupassant. [Hanns Neuerbourg, AP, 2 November 1985]

If we had paid attention to Haenel in the 1980s, instead of remaining naive about lying defectors and their demonization-propaganda, perhaps we would have recognized in 2003 that Ahmed Chalabi was really the Hermann Rauschning of Iraq.

Fake Hitler Quote about Slavery

Hadding — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 08:36:00 +0000

This fake quote appears in the third installment of the U.S. Army’s Why We Fight series, titled “Divide and Conquer.” It appears, bizarrely enough, in the context of a description of how the French were treated following the armistice in 1940. The French were certainly not enslaved; the peace-conditions that Hitler gave the French were in fact rather generous: they were allowed to retain colonies and some of their army and their navy, and to remain neutral in the war.

Mein Kampf is sometimes alleged as the source of the statement, but in fact it is slightly modified from the usual source of fake Hitler quotes, the utterly discredited Hermann Rauschning:

“There will be a Herren-class, he said, “an historical class tempered by battle, and welded from the most varied elements. There will be a great hierarchy of party members. They will be the new middle class. And there will be the great mass of the anonymous, the serving collective, the eternally disfranchised, no matter whether they were once members of the old bourgeoisie, the big land-owning class, the working class, or the artisans. Nor will their financial or previous social position be of the slightest importance. These preposterous differences will have been liquidated in a single revolutionary process. But beneath them there will still be the class of subject alien races; we need not hesitate to call them the modern slave class. And over all of these will stand the new high aristocracy, the most deserving and the most responsible Führer-personalities. [Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp.50-51]

The fact that the statement comes from Rauschning already means that it is spurious. But let us look at how even Rauschning’s false testimony underwent further distortion by a Hollywood screenwriter.

Why Hollywood Tweaked an Already-Fake Quote

The omission of still in the propaganda-film is significant. While the statement in the film is presented in reference to the treatment of the French after their defeat in 1940, there is no indication of this in Rauschning. On the contrary, in Rauschning the statement seems to be about a class of subject alien races that already existed, such as Indians and Black Africans. Elsewhere in The Voice of Destruction, Rauschning portrays Hitler as saying that Germany would take over the colonies of other European powers. Since it would have made no sense to refer to the French as belonging to some pre-existing class of “subject alien races,” the word “still” had to be excised.

Furthermore, as the fictional speech continues, Rauschning represents Hitler as saying:

“Certainly we shall admit to our new ruling class members of other nations who have been worthy in our cause. On this point I entirely agree with Darré and Himmler. The racial and biological aspect is only one side of the total process. In fact, we shall very soon have overstepped the bounds of the narrow nationalism of today. My party comrades, it is true that world empires arise on a national basis, but very quickly they leave it far behind.”

Evidently that new aristocracy would include some French people, since a leading National-Socialist with a French name is mentioned.

The meaning that Rauschning attributed to Hitler, that Blacks for example were a “subject alien race” and de facto slaves, would not have seemed nearly so shocking to an American audience of the 1940s as the same idea applied to the White people of France. At that time there were still considerable numbers of people that could remember when de jure Negro slavery existed.

Thus the statement from Rauschning, already a falsification, was deprived of its original context and altered to make it consistent with the purport of Why We Fight, that Hitler was treating the White people of France as slaves.

Brute Force and the Idea

Hadding — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:25:00 +0000

The following appears in the U.S. Army’s 1943 series of propaganda-films, Why We Fight, at 13:52 in the episode titled Prelude to War.

It says:

“Only the application of brute force used continuously and ruthlessly can bring about the decision in favor of the side it supports”

Mein Kampf – Page 189 – German Edition

The purport of the alleged quote is that Adolf Hitler trusted only in brute force. Therewith it also implies a low regard for the importance of ideas and truth, and no inclination to abide by any principle. This alleged quote implies the entire portrait of Adolf Hitler that Why We Fight presents: that he is a brutal and opportunistic criminal, that he cannot be trusted, that he must therefore be destroyed through violent means.

It is curious that in this instance it was decided to reference the “German edition” of Mein Kampf, even though the sentence is not in German but in English. There was no obvious reason to do that, since two unexpurgated English translations were available as of 1941, one of them distinctly hostile to Hitler. The implication of presenting a sentence in English but referencing it to the German edition is that the information could not be found in an English edition, but that is on its face extremely unlikely.

We can find something resembling this alleged quote in the English translation published in 1941 by Reynal and Hitchcock. Words used in the alleged quote appear in red:

Every attempt at fighting a view of life by means of force will finally fail, unless the fight against it represents the form of an attack for the sake of a new spiritual direction. Only in the struggle of two views of life with each other can the weapon of brute force, used continuously and ruthlessly, bring about the decision in favor of the side it supports. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr. New School for Social Research, p. 223]

Notice what was left out: where Hitler used the qualifier, “in the struggle of two views of life with each other,” the film entirely omits this.

In the German edition of 1943, the corresponding passage does indeed appear on page 189:

Jeder Versuch, eine Weltanschauung mit Machtmitteln zu bekämpfen, scheitert am Ende, solange nicht der Kampf die Form des Angriffes für eine neue geistige Einstellung erhält. Nur im Ringen zweier Weltanschauungen miteinander vermag die Waffe der brutalen Gewalt, beharrlich und rücksichtslos eingesetzt, die Entscheidung für die von ihr unterstützte Seite herbeizuführen.[Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, ed. 1943, p. 189]

The Reynal and Hitchcock edition represents the meaning of this German passage accurately, so that referencing the German edition was unnecessary. Furthermore, the words in the film match the words in that translation closely enough that it is obvious that the Reynal and Hitchcock edition was in fact the source, here as elsewhere in Why We Fight.

Why, then, does Why We Fight in this instance reference a page number in the German edition when a widely available English translation says the same? Most likely this was done so that it would be very difficult for Americans having seen the film to check the accuracy of the quote. It is not even close to being accurate.

Through selective omission of words Hitler is represented as saying very nearly the opposite of what he did say. Adolf Hitler was not saying that ruthless use of force was the key to everything. What he said — read it for yourself — was that force by itself was ultimately impotent, that force could only prevail if it were employed in service to an idea (or geistliche Einstellung, spiritual orientation). The lack of any such idea was, he said, the reason why attempts to combat Marxism with force alone had failed. Far from being contemptuous of the idea, Hitler insists on it.*

_________________________

* The false view of Adolf Hitler as contemptuous of thinking and ideas was so successfully propagated that Friedrich Hayek, an ideological enemy of National-Socialism, felt compelled to begin chapter 12 of his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom with these words: “It is a common mistake to regard National Socialism as a mere revolt against reason, an irrational movement without intellectual background.” (Hayek, The Road to Serfdom) This view of National-Socialism was not some random “common mistake”; it was a lie deliberately propagated, and unfortunately still widely believed today.

What was that thing about “a noble and unique race”?

Hadding — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:19:00 +0000

I was reviewing Frank Capra’s terrible 1943 war-propaganda series, Why We Fight, made by Frank Capra working for the United States Army (and often shown on television since then), and came across this alleged quote from Adolf Hitler:

That’s from 28:52 in the episode subtitled War Comes to America. It says:

The Germans are a noble and unique race to whom the earth was given by the grace of God.

Hitler

MEIN KAMPF

The key words there are “to whom the earth was given.” Obviously, this statement was supposed to lend credence to the claim that Adolf Hitler and Germany were intent on conquering the entire world (a persistent theme of Why We Fight). It is however not an accurate quote but an adaptation of a sentence from the translation of Mein Kampf published by Reynal and Hitchcock in 1941:

Both, yes, both Christian denominations regard with indifference this desecration and annihilation of a noble and unique race to whom the earth was given by the grace of God.[Mein Kampf, tr.New School for Social Research, p. 728]

This Reynal and Hitchcock edition boasted of being “unexpurgated,” so that readers might expect to find some statements offensive to non-Germans that were omitted in the authorized translation. Voilà! A shocking statement of intention to conquer the world, straight from Hitler himself!

But there is a problem. The translators of the Reynal and Hitchcock edition were a committee assembled at the New School for Social Research, a leftist institution that had received a large number of refugees from Germany and where there was presumably very little sympathy for Hitler’s ideas. It seems therefore a good idea to verify the accuracy of the translation.

When you go to the German text of Mein Kampf, you find this:

Beide, jawohl, beide christliche Konfessionen sehen dieser Entweihung und Zerstörung eines durch Gottes Gnade der Erde gegebenen edlen und einzigartigen Lebewesens gleichgültig zu.

The word for earth there is in the dative case, der Erde, which would normally be translated as to the earth or for the earth. It is impossible for a competent translator to make out of this “to whom the Earth was given,” since that would require die Erde, nominative case. The Reynal and Hitchcock translation has inverted the relationship between the thing given and the recipient of the thing. James Murphy’s translation, published in March 1939, rendered the sentence as follows:

The two Christian denominations look on with indifference at the profanation and destruction of a noble and unique creature who was given to the world as a gift of God’s grace. [Mein Kampf, tr. Murphy, p. 429]

But really, Edgar Dugdale’s abridgement, the first English rendering of Mein Kampf, the authorized translation from 1933, was already perfectly good on this point:

The two Christian churches are looking on this pollution and destruction of a noble and unique existence, granted by God’s grace to this earth, with indifferent eyes. [Adolf Hitler, My Struggle, tr. Dugdale, p. 225]

The notion (which I have seen propagated on television) that the New School’s committee of translators was somehow more honest and more accurate in representing what Adolf Hitler said turns out to have been quite wrong, even compared to Edgar Dugdale’s authorized translation.

I found a sentence with a similar concatenation of words in F. G. Klopstock’s prose summary of his Messiah, which Hitler probably read:

Jetzt blickt der Versöhner auf die Schaaren der Heiligen umher, die das Kreuz umgeben. Er verweilt am längsten bei den Seelen des zukünftigen menschlichen Geschlechts. Es war jetzt einer der großen Zeitpunkten gekommen, in welchen viel edlere Seelen der Erde gegeben werden. [Klopstock, Messias (zehnter Gesang)]

(Now the Conciliator glances around at the throngs of the holy that surround the cross. He dwells longest on the souls of the future human kind. One of the great moments in time had now arrived in which much nobler souls are given to the earth.)

While using a similar construction and some of the same words, Hitler replaces “much nobler souls” with “noble and unique life-essence” to describe the German folk, avoiding comparisons to other peoples in this context. The resonance between Hitler’s phrasing and Klopstock’s is very strong, and the meaning of der Erde gegeben is the same in both. The resonance is confirmed with Hitler’s use of “by the grace of God.” He seems to be implying, perhaps subconsciously, an identification of the German people with the perpetuators of Jesus’ mission in the world — but he avoids saying that.*

To summarize, when we track down this alleged quote used in Why We Fight about how Hitler supposedly regards the Germans as entitled to rule the world, we find that it is a misrepresentation compounded (which is typical of alleged quotes appearing in Why We Fight), and that the original statement by Adolf Hitler, correctly understood, did not in any way support the notion that the film was trying to convey.

___________________________

* According to the Table Talk, Hitler did not believe that Jesus was a Jew, although possibly a mischling. For his idealism Hitler regarded Jesus as most likely a son of one of the Gaulish veterans of the Roman Army settled by the Romans in Galilee. “Jesus fought against the materialism of his age, and, therefore, against the Jews.” Hitler makes the interesting, and seemingly valid, point that the Jews would not have turned over one of their own to be tried by a Roman court.

“The Political Testament of Adolf Hitler,” a.k.a. “The Hitler-Bormann Documents”: a well known Fraud

Hadding — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 09:33:00 +0000

I am posting this in response to a well known blogger, a philosophiae doctor, who has undertaken to write an apologia for Adolf Hitler in response to one section of Anders Breivik’s “Manifesto.” In so doing he has ventured into a field that seems to be my focus much more than his. He seems to be unaware of the minefield of questionable sources in this subject-area and has unfortunately stepped onto one of them, the so-called Hitler-Bormann Documents.

This information comes from David Irving and is dated 2 December 1983:

… [M]ay I warn modern historians against this source? These “bunker conversations” alleged to be by Martin Bormann are as spurious as the Hitler Diaries*.

Several years ago their Swiss owner [the late François Genoud] gave me a complete copy and they turned out to be largely in his handwriting, amplifying, he told me, the rather thin typescript which existed only in French!

Bormann’s own diary published by the Soviet author Lev Bezymenski establishes that he was not even present on some of the evenings concerned.

Hardly a serious source for historians.

This “political testament,” a collection of fictitious conversations, is not to be confused with Hitler’s last will and testament, dictated to Traudl Junge on 29 April 1945.

The forger of the Hitler-Bormann Documents, François Genoud, was also the promulgator of Hitler’s Table Talk (Hitlers Tischgespräche), which seems to be genuine, although I understand that there are some distortions in the French and English translations, particularly where Hitler expresses views on Christianity.**

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* David Irving’s most famous exploit was the debunking of an alleged set of diaries written by Adolf Hitler.

** If anybody would be so generous as to supply me with a German edition of Hitlers Tischgespräche, it would be most helpful!

The Goebbels Diaries are Fake

Hadding — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 07:21:00 +0000

Today I was looking at Wikipedia’s entry on Joseph Goebbels and I was startled at the unequivocal claim there that Goebbels had ordered the anti-Jewish violence of “Kristallnacht.” I knew that there had been a rumor or surmise of that nature (still taken seriously, for example, by Heinrich Haertle in 1965), but I was surprised to see it presented even today as unquestionable fact, for a couple of reasons.

In the first place, the story is incredible on its face. Are we supposed to believe that Goebbels instigated widespread domestic disorder on his own initiative and that Hitler, when he found out, was enraged but let him stay in the government? It really is hard to believe.

Secondly, Ingrid Weckert, who has written a book about the matter and is not a stupid person, argues that Goebbels had nothing to do with it. I could not believe that she would take that position if there were strong evidence that he was involved. If I am not to believe that Ingrid Weckert is insane, then I must assume that there is disagreement about some crucial piece of evidence.

As it turns out, there is such a disagreement.

The source upon which the claim in the Wikipedia article relies is a quotation from Goebbels’ diaries that is reproduced in a book by Martin Gilbert. I had a look at the chapter on Kristallnacht in David Irving’s Goebbels. Although Irving’s book has the reputation of being hostile to Goebbels — indeed it got Irving a lot of criticism when it appeared in the mid-90s, because he seemed to be trying to make amends to the Jews for having dismissed the Auschwitz gas-chamber story a few years earlier — I thought it might offer some hint of conflicting information.

What I learned from Irving’s book is that Goebbels’ diary for November 1938, pertaining to Kristallnacht, correlates poorly with events in Goebbels’ life:

Goebbels had not anticipated either Hitler’s fury or, probably, such an uncontrollable, chaotic orgy of destruction. Not surprisingly [?] he made no reference to this unwelcome turn of events in his diary. [Irving, Goebbels, p. 497]

We are even supposed to believe that Goebbels, who insisted on accurate reports about the progress of the war¹, for his own private consumption wrote statements that he knew to be false:

He … was careful to record this — perhaps slanted — note in his diary, which stands alone, and in direct contradiction to the evidence of Hitler’s entire immediate entourage: ‘He is in agreement with everything. His views are quite radical and aggressive. The Aktion itself went off without a hitch. A hundred dead. But no German property damaged.’ Each of these ﬁve sentences was untrue, as will be seen. [p.498]

Instead of making the obvious observation that a diary in which a man appears to lie to himself might not be authentic, Irving accepts that Goebbels lied to himself in his own diary, justifying that position with the innuendo that Goebbels was not quite sane. Either way it is admitted that the so-called Goebbels diaries are an unreliable source.

The clear intention behind those untruthful statements in the “Goebbels diaries” is to expand responsibility for Kristallnacht to Hitler and his government, instead of letting Goebbels appear as a rogue instigator as rumored in 1938. It serves the victors’ agenda of criminalizing the defeated German government.

We know that the conquering powers of World War II had no scruples about falsifying evidence. I have demonstrated this in other posts on this blog, especially in regard to the content of some of the films that Frank Capra made for the U.S. Army, which go so far as to use altered documentary footage. Hermann Rauschning’s Conversations with Hitler, a staple of anti-Hitler propaganda, are completely fake. So is The Testament of Adolf Hitler (a.k.a. The Hitler-Bormann Documents). David Irving himself made worldwide news by debunking a really ridiculous set of “Hitler diaries,” but that was back before the Jews broke his will. The Goebbels diaries could easily be fraudulent, because we do not have the original documents, only photographic images: “No one knows now where his original notebooks are, or what happened to them,” says David Irving.²

I was going to ask Professor Robert Faurisson if he had ever inquired about the authenticity of the alleged Goebbels diaries. But first I searched his blog, and found some relevant quotes about the “Goebbels diaries” from Mark Weber, given under oath in a Canadian courtroom in 1988³:

The later entry, which I think is the 27th of March [1942], is widely quoted to uphold or support the extermination thesis. It is not consistent with entries in the diary like this one of March 7th, and it is not consistent with entries at a later date from the Goebbels diaries, and it is not consistent with German documents from a later date.

[…] there is a great doubt about the authenticity of the entire Goebbels diaries because they are written on typewriter. We have no real way of verifying if they are accurate, and the U.S. Government certified, in the beginning of the publication, […] that it can take no responsibility for the accuracy of the diaries as a whole.

[…] I think again it is worth mentioning that the passage of the 27th of March is inconsistent with the passage of the 7th of March and the one from April, and I don’t remember the date exact (Transcript, p. 5820-5821).

Goebbels had no responsibility for Jewish policy. He wasn’t involved in that. He was the Propaganda Minister. He was involved only to the extent that there were Jews in Berlin and he was responsible for Berlin (p. 5822-5823).

At the time when Weber testified in 1988, all the alleged Goebbels Diaries that had been published were from typed pages, and therefore, as he testified, unverifiable as to authenticity.

In fact, all alleged Goebbels Diaries dated later than July 1941 — which means all that could be used as evidence for the Holocaust, since this is not supposed to have begun until months later — come from typed pages or images of typed pages, and are, as Weber testified, unverifiable as to authorship.

The photographic images of handwritten diaries dated earlier than July 1941 are also unverifiable as to authorship, because images of handwriting can be rearranged to make the writer say things that he did not. These alleged documents come from Soviet state archives, from a government that is well known to have produced false documentary evidence relating to the so-called Holocaust (e.g. the documents framing John Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible”).

Most likely there were some real Goebbels diaries that were altered to create what the world has been shown as “the Goebbels Diaries” since 1945. That would explain why, as Weber testified, there are internal contradictions and contradictions with known fact in the diaries.

If the “Goebbels diaries” are fake, then there is little evidence to support the claim that Goebbels was the instigator of anti-Jewish violence on Kristallnacht. In that case everything else about Goebbels’ behavior, and Hitler’s behavior toward him, makes a lot more sense.

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1. “Even Goebbels always insisted that the Wehrmacht communiqués be as accurate as possible.” –Konrad Kellen (Rand Corporation), Introduction to Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda (1965).

2. David Irving, “Revelations from Joseph Goebbels’ Diary,” The Journal of Historical Review, January-February 1995 (Vol. 15, No. 1), pages 2-17

3. These quotes of Weber’s testimony came from Robert Faurisson, “Mark Weber Must Resign from the Institute for Historical Review,” 3 April 2009, posted on The Unofficial Blog of Robert Faurisson. You can get more of the context by reading a summary of Weber’s testimony and the responses in Barbara Kulaszka, Did Six Million Really Die? — Report of the Evidence in the Canadian “False News Trial of Ernst Zündel, Samisdat Publishing, Toronto (1992).

A Fake Hitler Quote about “Terrorism”

Hadding — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:43:00 +0000

From the leftist Nation magazine, April 1933

Vic Fury referred me to an article on Buchanan.org titled, “Given Everything That’s Happened.” This was originally posted on Washington’s Blog.

The subject of the essay is false-flag operations. The author uses the ludicrous example of the Reichstag Fire, well known not to have been a false-flag operation, and “Operation Himmler,” which was a far-fetched story told at Nuremberg to put all war-guilt on Germany. Conspicuously not mentioned is the Lavon Affair. The fact that Mossad was caught setting up a fake al-Qaeda cell in Gaza is also not mentioned, nor the fact that Mossad engineered the Achille Lauro incident. These omissions are particularly striking given that the probable motive for any false-flag operation involving the U.S. these days is the interest of the State of Israel.

For some reason, it often happens that the aversion to blaming the State of Israel is coupled with a tendency toward uncritical repetition of World War II propaganda.

After misspelling Adolf Hitler’s name the essay’s unnamed author attributes to him the following statement:

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.”

This alleged Hitler quote can be found on a number of conspiracy sites but it is completely fake.

There is another, probably pre-911 version of this fake quote, that is identical except that it uses the word Terror instead instead of Terrorism.

The alleged quote is cobbled together from two sentences in Hermann Rauschning’s The Voice of Destruction, a collection of alleged conversations with Hitler that never really occurred. Rauschning’s fiction is quoted very often in anti-Hitler propaganda, and often brazenly misquoted. The alleged Hitler quote on Washington’s Blog is a highly distorted version of the fake quote on page 84 of Rauschning’s The Voice of Destruction. I have underlined the words that were cobbled together from the old false quote to create a new false quote.

“Terror is the most effective political instrument. I shall not permit myself to be robbed of it simply because a lot of stupid, bourgeois molly-coddles choose to be offended by it. It is my duty to make use of every means of training the German people to severity, and to prepare them for war.”

Hitler paced the room excitedly.

“My behavior in wartime will be no different. The most horrible warfare is the kindest. I shall spread terror by the surprise employment of all my measures. The important thing is the sudden shock of an overwhelming fear of death.“

The word instrument was changed to weapon, and the words “for nothing drives people harder than” were inserted, plus a couple of other changes. Whoever cobbled together those words from Rauschning and called it a quote knew that he was committing a fraud.

This is very much like some fake quotes from Frank Capra’s Why We Fight that I exposed in an earlier entry here. Capra’s screenwriters used Hermann Rauschning as a convenient (fraudulent) source of ugly Hitler quotes, but couldn’t even present Rauschning’s text accurately. They took the already fake quotes and altered them to suit their needs, which is obviously how this alleged Hitler quote was produced as well, although I do not know that it was Capra’s people who did this one.

Somebody named “Mr. RJ Huggins,” who seems to be involved in “Holocaust education” in Britain and Hong Kong, made a Powerpoint presentation (posted on the site of the King George V School in Hong Kong) featuring this fraud as his “key quote” to support his view that “everyone” in Germany was “scared of being arrested by the Gestapo and being put in a concentration camp.”

The fake quote was central in this presentation for schoolchildren.

I informed Mr. Huggins by e-mail that I believed the quote to be bogus, expecting that he might reveal from what seemingly credible source he had derived his spurious “key quote,” but got no response.