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Old December 30th, 2008 #1
Hadding
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Default Fake Hitler Quotes in a US Army Training Film

http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?swf...rld%20War%20II

If that isn't working then look here:
http://national-socialist-worldview....ropaganda.html

Why We Fight is a seven-part series of short films that was directed by Frank Capra for the U.S. Army Special Service Division in 1943. You may have seen parts of this series on some unaffiliated UHF television station that had time to fill following an afternoon movie, or maybe even on a PBS station. I am presenting this clip as an example of the brazen lying that was perpetrated by the Allies during World War II, which goes largely unchecked to this day, and also to arm you so that you may help to set people straight.

The purport of this film is that anti-war activists in the United States are serving an agenda of global conquest on the part of Adolf Hitler that includes conquest of the United States. The film takes considerable liberties to advance this thesis. Some of these liberties become glaringly obvious with just a little skepticism. For example, a narrator claims to know that global conquest was "the dream in Hitler's mind as he stood at Nuremberg" in 1934.

I find that discussions about Hitler's intentions usually come down to the interpretation of some statement attributed to him. Some of the provocative statements attributed to Hitler are things that he actually said, but many are either distortions or outright inventions. In this clip we get two alleged Hitler quotes that are demonstrably very bogus -- in fact they are outright inventions compounded with subsequent distortion -- yet they have been influential and are widely repeated, even by some people who seem to regard themselves as pro-Hitler.

First there is this:

"My motto is: Destroy by all and any means. National-Socialism will reshape the world."

Hermann Rauschning's The Voice of Destruction, later republished as Conversations with Hitler, seems to be the source for the first half of this quote. (Rauschning is not considered a trustworthy source. If you find that the source for a quote attributed to Hitler is Rauschning, that already invalidates it, but what we get in Capra's film is even worse than that.) We find a passage containing something almost identical with that sentence at the bottom of page 11. The underlined words are those that appeared in the film.

"To me all means will be right. My motto is not: 'Don't, whatever you do, annoy the enemy!' My motto is: 'Destroy him by all and any means.' I am the one who will wage the war!"

The two sentences lumped together as a Hitler quote in the film do not appear together in this, the original passage. No indication of an ellipse (such as "...") is given in the film to indicate that the two sentences did not appear together in the original source.

A Google search for the second clause of the alleged Hitler quote, "National-Socialism will reshape the world," does not turn up any citation of a primary source. I would wager that this too is derived from Rauschning, but it is not on the same page as the model for the first sentence.

The film distorts the meaning at least of the former of the two sentences. When the film omits the word "him" from the sentence as it appears in Rauschning, then places a statement about National-Socialist designs on the world after that, it thereby fabricates and places in Hitler's mouth a nihilistic declaration of war against the entire world, rather than a mere statement of intention to be ruthless in a war against some hypothetical enemy, which is all that it seems to be in Rauschning.


There is a second alleged Hitler quote at 4:32 in the video:

"Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. That is the war of the future."

This alleged quote is all over the internet but in no instance that I have seen is a source cited.

After much searching I discovered that this too comes from Hermann Rauschning, who has been the same kind of one-stop source for outrageous claims about Hitler that the Iraqi National Congress was regarding Saddam Hussein. Here is the original fake quote from Rauschning, also from The Voice of Destruction:

"When the enemy is demoralized from within, when he stands on the brink of revolution, when social unrest threatens—that is the right moment. A single blow must destroy him. Aerial attacks, stupendous in their mass effect, surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination from within, the murder of leading men, overwhelming attacks on all weak points in the enemy's defense, sudden attacks, all in the same second, without regard for reserves or losses: that is the war of the future."

I have underlined the words that were cobbled together to create the fake Hitler quote for the film. As you can see, the film-maker added a layer of misrepresentation to this fake quote just as to the other one. Nowhere in the passage do you see the concatenation, ""Demoralize the enemy from within by ..." The perfect passive participle "demoralized" appears, but the imperative "Demoralize" does not. What we get in the film is really a distorted paraphrase of this already fake quote.

Even if the Hollywood screenwriter of Why We Fight didn't know that Rauschning was a fraudulent source, he at least knew that the way he was using Rauschning was dishonest.

* * * * * * *

I found this excellent article from Mark Weber about Hermann Rauschning's lack of credibility. This is worth reading, because Rauschning is very widely employed as an anti-Hitler source.

Rauschning's Phony 'Conversations With Hitler': An Update
Mark Weber

Last edited by Alex Linder; April 22nd, 2009 at 02:30 PM. Reason: italicizing