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Old December 5th, 2008 #21
MikeTodd
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Quote:
Quote:
'Sorry to trouble you, but could you make me some coffee and bring some gingerbread biscuits to my study?'

-Adolf Hitler
He must've got tired of chewing on the carpet.
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Old December 5th, 2008 #22
Alex Linder
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Hitler's life should be contrasted with Churchill's, and his words should be contrasted with Orwell's, and his actions contrasted with both.

German: preciser, braver, better.

English: showier, profile-ier, inferior.
 
Old December 5th, 2008 #23
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
Hitler's life should be contrasted with Churchill's, and his words should be contrasted with Orwell's, and his actions contrasted with both.

German: preciser, braver, better.

English: showier, profile-ier, inferior.
German superiority comes from striving to be the best.
English superiority comes from trying to hamstring everyone else.
 
Old December 11th, 2008 #24
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Lightbulb Hitler's bodyguard Otto Gunsche

http://www.meaus.com/gunsche-birthday85.htm

Article is written in 2002, Gunsche died a few years ago.

Hitler's Adjutant Otto Günsche turns 85

The officer lives a very private life--old friends congratulate him

SS-Obersturmführer Otto Günsche.

Berlin (bpb) One of the greatest eyewitnesses of the Third Reich celebrated his 85th birthday: Otto Günsche. He was born on September 24, 1917. Günsche was the officer in the Reich Chancellory, who received from Hitler himself the order to burn his body one day. This actually happened on April 30, 1945. Among other things discussed, Günsche confirmed to the writer Joe F. Bodenstein in an interview that he did actually did set afire the "body of the Führer". At first Hitler's secretary Bormann tried to start the fire with a sheet of paper. Finally Günsche threw a burning bunch of clothes on the body, which was previously soaked in gasoline.

Günsche left the Reich Chancellory on the same day. To the people in his group leaving the bunker also belonged Adolf Hitler's private secretary Gerda Christian. As she reported to the writer, the breakout from the Chancellory succeeded through a tunnel of the Berlin underground metro from the Voss-Strasse to the Station on Friedrichstrasse. There the two long-time companions in Hitler's service said good-bye to one another. Otto Günsche finally fell into Soviet captivity and survived years of captivity in Russian concentration camps.

After 1945 Günsche survived Soviet concentration camps in Siberia. During the government of Konrad Adenauer he was released to return to West Germany.

Gerda Christian escaped from Berlin into the western American zone. There she was captured by the CIA and interrogated for several days. The freeing of Günsche happened thanks to the initiative of the first post-war German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. After hard negotiations Chancellor Adenauer finally succeeded to bring back home to Germany thousands of German soldiers from captivity in the Soviet Union.

Günsche was known as a blameless young officer. There were no accusations against him personally. After regaining his freedom, Günsche became emplyed in the industry in West Germany. In business dealings, he was highly respected. He was known as a man of honor. Gerda Christian belonged up to her death to the circle of his friends. The formed adjutant of the Führer has refused, in spite of greatest financial offers from Germany and abroad, all offers to write his own memoires that would be critical of the National Socialist times or Hitler.

Copyright 2002 Prometheus, 84/2002
 
Old December 28th, 2008 #25
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Hitler was good, dedicated man, full of love to his nation...my grandfather was in Wermacht army during 2ww in Dresden, he said to me: that was futuristic, rich, tollerant country, that was good times, Hitler was true leader, one thing that he wasnt tollerate was stealing, cheeting, homosexuals, layers...
 
Old December 30th, 2008 #26
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Originally Posted by Adolf Croata View Post
Hitler was good, dedicated man, full of love to his nation...my grandfather was in Wermacht army during 2ww in Dresden, he said to me: that was futuristic, rich, tollerant country, that was good times, Hitler was true leader, one thing that he wasnt tollerate was stealing, cheeting, homosexuals, layers...

I imagine your grandfather's service in the Wermacht would be a great source of pride and honor Adolf Croata. I know it would be for me. I am American of German descent and know friends who's relatives served in the Wermacht during the war and I find it all to be richly fascinating. I agree Hitler was a strong true leader with vision genius and principles. I was really thrilled to find this article and read this amazing great-grandmother's personal story.

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Old February 5th, 2009 #27
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Get the 1937 book I Knew Hitler by Kurt Ludecke, he was imprisoned in America during WWII considered a Nazi loyalist by the FBI because although he had felt betrayed by Hitler over the 1934 Roehm purge, he remained loyal to the National Socialist ideology. He was in prison in the U.S. until 1948.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...758376,00.html

I KNEW HITLER—Kurt G. W. Ludecke —Scribner ($3.75).

In the harassed early days when Kurt Ludecke was about the only Nazi who had plenty of spending money, his good cronies Hitler and other future Nazi big shots called him "Der Amerikaner." This nickname came from his familiarity with the U. S., his smart clothes, wrist watch, nervy wit. He was, said Hitler, half-facetiously refusing him permission to make soapbox speeches, ''too much of a swell.'' Later, when Nazi officials had limousines and champagne, the nickname still stuck—but with a shadier meaning, derived partly from Ludecke's too thoughtful awareness of U. S. anti-Nazi opinion. "A strange bird," Hitler now said, "a good head, but a dangerous brother!"

As Hitler's confidential agent. Kurt Ludecke managed the first meeting between Hitler and Mussolini, headed the first Nazi propaganda missions abroad, the Nazi press bureau in Washington, and in I Knew Hitler now recalls the late and living Nazi leaders from the days when they could barely afford paste for posters. Into his 814-page confessions Author Ludecke dumps an amazing store of uncloseted skeletons and dirty Nazi linen. He writes in English, easily, with no accent, frequent wit. His story is the most amende and grimly absorbing Nazi confession that has yet appeared in English.

Like Trotsky (also a U. S. resident in his day). Ludecke still believes in the Idea; his disillusionment is with the Leader. "Surrendering my being" to Hitler in 1922, Author Ludecke (who had just cleaned up on smart business deals with Soviet Russia) for some time could not find anything about Hitler to criticize except his sloppiness. his frightful hard collars, his heavy dandruff, a habit of munching a sausage during important conferences, for which he was always late. A first hint that his hero possessed deeper faults was when Ludecke found out. by painful experience, that Hitler abandoned comrades who got themselves in jail. When Hitler was imprisoned after the 1923 ''Beer Hall Putsch," Ludecke was sent on a begging tour of the U. S., where he negotiated — unsuccessfully — with Henry Ford, the Ku Klux Klan, small fry from coast to coast. On a second trip—this time to escape the still more savage intrigues of his comrades— he hit on the idea of an "American folkic program," to be headed by Flyer Lindbergh, spread the good word about Hitler but got little money. In Detroit he married a plain, sensible librarian.

Back in Germany, Ludecke did his aggressive best to keep Hitler out of bad company (Goring, Goebbels, Hindenburg, the industrialists), thought Roehm and Strasser the likely ones to help him. This proved a bad guess, and in 1933 Ludecke found himself in disfavor. On the day that Ludecke reached Manhattan, having escaped after eight months in a concentration camp as "Hitler's personal prisoner." he read the headlines announcing the Blood Purge. The shock left him rocking precariously on the pavement. But he had salvaged his life and a profitable store of Hitlerian anecdotes.

On the public criticism of his stormtroopers' sex life said the Realmleader: ''I'd a lot rather my good SA men took the pretty women than that some fat-bellied moneybag should have them." On Roehm's noisome notoriety: "Ridiculous! I love Richard Wagner's music — must I close my ears to it because he was a pederast?" On Ludecke: "You'd make a good ambassador—you have the equipment for it. and you know how to take the women." On the rest of the world: "I don't care what they think and write about me abroad."

Last edited by Mike Jahn; February 5th, 2009 at 06:21 PM.
 
Old February 5th, 2009 #28
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...763285,00.html

The New Ludecke

Monday, Jan. 01, 1940

A confidant of Hitler in the early Munich days of Naziism was young, smartly dressed, nervy Kurt Ludecke. In 1924 he came to the U. S. as a Nazi newspaper correspondent. When he returned to Germany nine years later, found things no longer to his liking and expressed his opinions, he was thrown into a concentration camp by Adolf. There he even thought of suicide, but escaped instead and fled to the U. S., where he proclaimed. "The old Ludecke is dead."

"Reborn," he applied for U. S. citizenship and wrote a book called I Knew Adolf Hitler. In it he renounced the new course of Naziism, though he retained his belief in Nazi racial doctrines.

Last week he appeared in a Detroit Federal Court to hear a decision on his citizenship application, postponed until Judge Arthur J. Tuttle found time to read his book.

"The old Ludecke is dead," said Ludecke, with by now well-rehearsed emphasis. "The new Ludecke stands before you. He is Ludecke the ex-Nazi, the man who has changed in heart, mind and spirit."

Said Judge Tuttle last week, eying the breast-beating new Ludecke: "I believe I can still see signs of him [the old Ludecke] popping up again," thereupon denied his application "with prejudice." Ludecke will have to wait five years before he can try again.
 
Old February 5th, 2009 #29
Mike Jahn
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The book is hard to find so you may have to go to your local university and read it there. Here's a link that shows what the book looks like

http://www.wfu.edu/~chesner/bc-conla...es/Ludecke.rtf

Last edited by Mike Jahn; February 6th, 2009 at 01:44 AM.
 
Old July 9th, 2009 #30
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Australian professor Stephen H. Roberts visited Germany from 1935-1937 and he interviewed Hitler and then wrote of his impressions of the German leader in his 1937 book The House That Hitler Built.

II. The Man Hitler

It is almost impossible to give any idea of Hitler's personality, because every interpretation of necessity reflects the viewpoint of the interpreter. There can be no finality. All that one can do is to set down the attributes that one has noticed in listening and speaking to Hitler oneself.

Hitler undoubtedly has a very complex personality. People like Stalin and Mussolini are much simpler--easier to analyse and understand; but there is something elusive about Hitler, and one feels that the simplest solutions fall short of the whole truth. The two most popular views picture him either as a mere ranting stump-orator, or as a victim of demoniacal possession, driven hither and thither by some occult force that makes him a power of evil. But these are as unsatisfactory as the view of his believers that he is a demigod, revealing the path Germany is to follow by some divine power of intuitively knowing what to do.

I think that he is primarily a dreamer, a visionary. His mind, nurtured by the other-worldness of the Alpine scenery round his mountain retreat of Berchtesgaden, runs to visions; and I have heard his intimates say that, even in cabinet meetings when vital questions of policy are being discussed, he is dreaming--thinking of the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet's dream.

South Germany has always produced dreamers and romantics, like the Swan-king Ludwig of Bavaria. The romantic side of medievalism is always with them. They live in an impracticable world of unbelievable mountains; their fields and houses are like stage settings; they dream of treasure-trove and speak of masses of emeralds on the peaks illuminated by the moon at her full; they accept the fairy-tale castles of Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwengau as part of normal existence; they live, as it were, in a typical Wagnerian opera.

Hitler is one of them--a peasant's son with little more than a peasant's education, but now holding a position that outrivals the most magical transformation in their wildest fairy tale. Indeed, he always has the air of being faintly surprised.

Of course it is his dreaminess that hard-bitten advisers like Goebbels and Goering have capitalized. He is so transparently honest when he is weaving visions of his own creation that nobody can doubt him. He is ready, like a medieval saint, to go through fire and water for his beliefs. I am not certain that he would not actually like being tortured; he would love playing the martyr, if only for his own mental delectation. He sees himself as a crusader; he thinks the whole time of saving mankind. That is why he reaches such a stage of mystical exaltation when he talks about saving the world from Bolshevism. It is the old Siegfried complex once again. Just as the young German knight of old went out into the dim, dark forests to kill dragons, so he goes out to exterminate Bolshevism.


pp. 7-9
 
Old March 7th, 2013 #31
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An Interview With General Otto Ernst Remer
Conducted by Stephanie Schoeman
Translated by Mark Weber

...

Q: What was Hitler like socially?

A: He was a perfect host. When I was at Hitler's headquarters in the Wolfsschanze, I often observed that he would always pay special attention whenever anyone was scheduled to arrive as a guest.

And before he would meet a guest at the train station, he would always make sure that everything was just right in the headquarters.

He would check to see if the carpet did not match the silverware, or whatever, and he would drive everyone crazy making sure that everything was tastefully done in preparation for the guest. He had a real personal concern for his guests.

Hermann Geisler, Hitler's architect, wrote a book about Hitler. [This is Ein anderer Hitler, a memoir]. It's a fantastic book that you ought to read. He [the author] was a really great guy, and he could imitate very well, especially Robert Ley [head of the Reich Labor Serviced And Hitler knew this. Hitler would urge him to imitate Ley's way of speaking. And he would [humorously] say: "My Führer, I can't do that, he'll put me in a concentration camp." "Ah, go ahead," Hitler would jokingly say, "I'll get you back out again." And that's what Hitler was like. And he would imitate Ley. [Remer imitates the imitation of Ley.] And Hitler would laugh so hard that tears came to his eyes.

Q: What about Hitler's love life?

A: Hitler had no time for that. He always said that he didn't have time for a wife. And Eva Braun played her part very well. No one knew about their relationship, which was kept private. She handled herself well when there were many guests around.

I don't think he was a great lover. I don't think so. He had a cousin, Geli Raubal, during the period of struggle before he became Chancellor. Hitler wasn't able to pay enough attention to her, but she loved him, and she took her own life. I think she was the only woman that Hitler really loved.

Q: Did Hitler father any children?

A: Nonsense. He didn't want any children.

Hitler thought of himself as a representative of the nation, and he rejected anything in his personal life that was inconsistent with that image. He always thought of himself as a statesman and he accordingly made very sure that his image was completely consistent with what the people expected of him.

Q: And didn't the people want their F�hrer to have children?

A: Yes, but for that he would have had to marry and become a husband. But he always said that he didn't have time for that.

I was with Hitler when he was just moving into his new headquarters, which was protected with concrete seven meters thick. And he entered his new bedroom where there was an ordinary soldier's bed there for him, except that it had two mattresses on it. And when he saw that, he curtly asked: Since when does a soldier sleep on two mattresses?" An adjutant present looked embarrassed, and then Hitler said: "You can take away one of them." And that's what Hitler was like. He did not ask for any special consideration for himself.

He paid for the entire defense perimeter around his general staff headquarters with his own money. He never received a penny of salary from the government. And until the end of the war, he paid for the defense perimeter himself, including the six kilometers of roadway, which cost a lot.

Hitler was a wealthy man, particularly from royalties from the sale of his book, Mein Kampf, which sold more than a hundred million copies. But he never took a penny of government money.
...
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v10/v10p108_Schoeman.html
 
Old March 7th, 2013 #32
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For a first-hand, unbiased view of Hitler and Mussolini, as well as numerous interesting anecdotes about European politics circa 1933-1938 that you won't find in any history books, I would highly recommend two books by British reporter G. Ward Price: "I Know These Dictators" and "Year of Reckoning". Price was so scrupulously fair in his reporting from Germany that Hitler said he was his favorite reporter.
 
Old March 9th, 2013 #33
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Hermann Goering's wife Emmy said that Hitler didn't believe in horoscopes, this is contrary to what has been reported numerous times on the History channel. The History channel always portrays Hitler as obsessed with Astrology. I read this information in Emmy Goering's 1972 book My Life With Goering
 
Old February 19th, 2017 #34
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The Enigma of Hitler

By Léon Degrelle

Hitler, You knew him, what was he like?

I have been asked that question a thousand times since 1945, and nothing is more difficult to answer.

Approximately two hundred thousand books have dealt with the Second World War and with its central figure, Adolf Hitler.

But has the real Hitler been discovered by any of them? "The enigma of Hitler is beyond all human comprehension" the left-wing German weekly 'Die Zeit' once put it.

Salvador Dali, art's unique genius, sought to penetrate the mystery in one of his most intensely dramatic paintings. Towering mountain landscapes all but fill the canvas, leaving ony a few luminous meters of seashore dotted with delicately miniaturized human figures: the last witness to a dying peace. A huge telephone receiver dripping tears of blood hangs from the branch of a dead tree; and here and there hang umbrellas and bats whose portent is visibly the same. As Dali tells it, "Chamberlain's umbrella appeared in this painting in a sinister light, made evident by the bat, and it struck me when I painted it as a thing of enormous anguish."

He then confided: "I felt this painting to be deeply prophetic. But I confess that I haven't yet figured out the Hitler enigma either. He attracted me only as an object of my mad imaginings and because I saw him as a man uniquely capable of turning things completely upside down."

What a lesson in humility for the braying critics who have rushed into print since 1945 with their thousands of 'definitive' books, most of them scornful, about this man who so troubled the introspective Dali that forty years later he still felt anguished and uncertain in the presence of his own hallucinatory painting. Apart from Dali, who else has ever tried to present an objective portrayal of this extraordinary man who Dali labeled the most explosive figure in human history?


LIKE PAVLOV'S BELL

The mountains of Hitler books based on blink hatred and ignorance do little to describe or explain the most powerful man the world has ever seen. How, I ponder, do these thousands of disparate portraits of Hitler in any way resemble the man I knew? The Hitler seated beside me, standing up, talking, listening. It has become impossible to explain to people fed fantastic tales for decades that what they have read or heard on television just does not correspond to the truth.

People have come to accept fiction, repeated a thousand times over, as reality. Yet they have never seen Hitler, never spoken to him, never heard a word from his mouth. The very name of Hitler immediately conjures up a grimacing devil, the fount of all of one's negative emotions. Like Pavlov's bell, the mention of Hitler is meant to dispense with substance and reality. In time, however, history will demand more than these summary judgements.


STRANGELY ATTRACTIVE

Hitler is always present before my eyes: as a man of peace in 1936, as a man of war in 1944. It is not possible to have been a personal witness to the life of such an extraordinary man without being marked by it forever. Not a day goes by but Hitler rises again in my memory, not as a man long dead, but as a real being who paces his office floor, seats himself in his chair, pokes the burning logs in the fireplace.

The first thing anyone noticed when he came into view was his small mustache. Countless times he had been advised to shave it off, but he always refused: people were used to him the way he was.

He was not tall -- no more than was Napoleon or Alexander the Great.

Hitler had deep blue eyes that many found bewitching, although I did not find them so. Nor did I detect the electric current his hands were said to give off. I gripped them quite a few times and was never struck by his lightening.

His face showed emotion or indifference according to the passion or apathy of the moment. At times he was as though benumbed, saying not a word, while his jaws moved in the meanwhile as if they were grinding an obstacle to smithereens in the void. Then he would come suddenly alive and launch into a speech directed at you alone, as though he were addressing a crowd of hundreds of thousands at Berlin's Tempelhof airfield. Then he became as if transfigured. Even his complexion, otherwise dull, lit up as he spoke. And at such times, to be sure, Hitler was strangely attractive and as if possessed of magic powers.


EXCEPTIONAL VIGOR


Anything that might have seemed too solemn in his remarks, he quickly tempered with a touch of humour. The picturesque world, the biting phrase were at his command. In a flash he would paint a word-picture that brought a smile, or come up with an unexpected and disarming comparison. He could be harsh and even implacable in his judgements and yet almost at the same time be surprisingly conciliatory, sensitive and warm.

After 1945 Hitler was accused of every cruelty, but it was not in his nature to be cruel. He loved children. It was an entirely natural thing for him to stop his car and share his food with young cyclists along the road. Once he gave his raincoat to a derelict plodding in the rain. At midnight he would interrupt his work and prepare the food for his dog Blondi.

He could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a living creature. He refused to have so much as a rabbit or a trout sacrificed to provide his food. He would allow only eggs on his table, because egg-laying meant that the hen had been spared rather than killed.

Hitler's eating habits were a constant source of amazement to me. How could someone on such a rigorous schedule, who had taken part in tens of thousands of exhausting mass meetings from which he emerged bathed with sweat, often losing two to four pounds in the process; who slept only three to four hours a night; and who, from 1940 to 1945, carried the whole world on his shoulders while ruling over 380 million Europeans: how, I wondered, could he physically survive on just a boiled egg, a few tomatoes, two or three pancakes, and a plate of noodles? But he actually gained weight!

He drank only water. He did not smoke and would not tolerate smoking in his presence. At one or two o'clock in the morning he would still be talking, untroubled, close to his fireplace, lively, often amusing. He never showed any sign of weariness. Dead tired his audience might be, but not Hitler.

He was depicted as a tired old man. Nothing was further from the truth. In September 1944, when he was reported to be fairly doddering, I spent a week with him. His mental and physical vigor were still exceptional. The attempt made on his life on July 20th had, if anything, recharged him. He took tea in his quarters as tranquilly as if we had been in his small private apartment at the chancellery before the war, or enjoying the view of snow and bright blue sky through his great bay window at Berchtesgaden.


IRON SELF-CONTROL

At the very end of his life, to be sure, his back had become bent, but his mind remained as clear as a flash of lightening. The testament he dictated with extraordinary composure on the eve of his death, at three in the morning of April 29, 1945, provides us a lasting testimony. Napoleon at Fontainebleau was not without his moments of panic before his abdication. Hitler simply shook hands with his associates in silence, breakfasted as on any other day, then went to his death as if he were going on a stroll. When has history ever witnessed so enormous a tragedy brought to its end with such iron self control?

Hitler's most notable characteristic was ever his simplicity. The most complex of problems resolved itself in his mind into a few basic principles. His actions were geared to ideas and decisions that could be understood by anyone. The laborer from Essen, the isolated farmer, the Ruhr industrialist, and the university professor could all easily follow his line of thought. The very clarity of his reasoning made everything obvious.

His behaviour and his life style never changed even when he became the ruler of Germany. He dressed and lived frugally. During his early days in Munich, he spent no more than a mark per day for food. At no stage in his life did he spend anything on himself. Throughout his 13 years in the chancellery he never carried a wallet or ever had money of his own.


COMPUTER-LIKE MIND

Hitler was self-taught and made not attempt to hide the fact. The smug conceit of intellectuals, their shiny ideas packaged like so many flashlight batteries, irritated him at times. His own knowledge he had acquired through selective and unremitting study, and he knew far more than thousands of diploma-decorated academics.

I don't think anyone ever read as much as he did. He normally read one book every day, always first reading the conclusion and the index in order to gauge the work's interest for him. He had the power to extract the essence of each book and then store it in his computer-like mind. I have heard him talk about complicated scientific books with faultless precision, even at the height of the war.

His intellectual curiosity was limitless. He was readily familiar with the writings of the most diverse authors, and nothing was too complex for his comprehension. He had a deep knowledge and understanding of Buddha, Confucius and Jesus Christ, as well as Luther, Calvin, and Savonarola; of literary giants such as Dante, Schiller, Shakespeare and Goethe; and analytical writers such as Renan and Gobineau, Chamberlain and Sorel.

He had trained himself in philosophy by studying Aristotle and Plato. He could quote entire paragraphs of Schopenhauer from memory, and for a long time carried a pocked edition of Schopenhauer with him. Nietzsche taught him much about the willpower.

His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. He spend hundreds of hours studying the works of Tacitus and Mommsen, military strategists such as Clausewitz, and empire builders such as Bismark. Nothing escaped him: world history or the history of civilizations, the study of the Bible and the Talmud, Thomistic philosophy and all the masterpieces of Homer, Sophocles, Horace, Ovid, Titus Livius and Cicero. He knew Julian the Apostate as if he had been his contemporary.

His knowledge also extended to mechanics. He knew how engines worked; he understood the ballistics of various weapons; and he astonished the best medical scientists with his knowledge of medicine and biology.

The universality of Hitler's knowledge may surprise or displease those unaware of it, but it is nonetheless a historical fact: Hitler was one of the most cultivated men of this century. Many times more so than Churchill, an intellectual mediocrity; or than Pierre Lavaal, with him mere cursory knowledge of history; of than Roosevelt; or Eisenhower, who never got beyond detective novels.


THE YOUNG ARCHITECT.

Even during his earliest years, Hitler was different than other children. He had an inner strength and was guided by his spirit and his instincts.

He could draw skillfully when he was only eleven years old. His sketches made at that age show a remarkable firmness and liveliness. He first paintings and watercolors, created at age 15, are full of poetry and sensitivity. One of his most striking early works, 'Fortress Utopia,' also shows him to have been an artist of rare imagination. His artistic orientation took many forms. He wrote poetry from the time he was a lad. He dictated a complete play to his sister Paula who was amazed at his presumption. At the age of 16, in Vienna, he launched into the creation of an opera. He even designed the stage settings, as well as all the costumes; and, of course, the characters were Wagnerian heroes.

More than just an artist, Hitler was above all an architect. Hundreds of his works were notable as much for the architecture as for the painting. From memory alone he could reproduce in every detail the onion dome of a church or the intricate curves of wrought iron. Indeed, it was to fulfill his dream of becoming an architect that Hitler went to Vienna at the beginning of the century.

When one sees the hundreds of paintings, sketches and drawings he created at the time, which reveal his mastery of three dimensional figures, it is astounding that his examiners at the Fine Arts Academy failed him in two successive examinations. German historian Werner Maser, no friend of Hitler, castigated these examiners: "All of his works revealed extraordinary architectural gifts and knowledge. The builder of the Third Reich gives the former Fine Arts Academy of Vienna cause for shame."

In his room, Hitler always displayed an old photograph of his mother. The memory of the mother he loved was with him until the day he died. Before leaving this earth, on April 30, 1945, he placed his mother's photograph in front of him. She had blue eyes like his and a similar face. Her maternal intuition told her that her son was different from other children. She acted almost as if she knew her son's destiny. When she died, she felt anguished by the immense mystery surrounding her son.


HUMBLE ORIGINS

Throughout the years of his youth, Hitler lived the life of a virtual recluse. He greatest wish was to withdraw from the world. At heart a loner, he wandered about, ate meager meals, but devoured the books of three public libraries. He abstained from conversations and had few friends.

It is almost impossible to imagine another such destiny where a man started with so little and reached such heights. Alexander the great was the son of a king. Napoleon, from a well-to-do family, was a general at 24. Fifteen years after Vienna, Hitler would still be an unknown corporal. Thousands of others had a thousand times more opportunity to leave their mark on the world.

Hitler was not much concerned with his private life. In Vienna he had lived in shabby, cramped lodgings. But for all that he rented a piano that took up half his room, and concentrated on composing his opera. He lived on bread, milk, and vegetable soup. His poverty was real. He did not even own an over-coat. He shoveled streets on snowy days. He carried luggage at the railway station. He spent many weeks in shelters for the homeless. But he never stopped painting or reading.

Despite his dire poverty, Hitler somehow managed to maintain a clean appearance. Landlords and landladies in Vienna and Munich all remembered him for his civility and pleasant disposition. His behavior was impeccable. His room was always spotless, his meager belongings meticulously arranged, and his clothes neatly hung or folded. He washed and ironed his own clothes, something which in those days few men did. He needed almost nothing to survive, and money from the sale of a few paintings was sufficient to provide for all his needs.


SEARCH FOR DESTINY

Impressed by the beauty of the church in a Benedictine monastery where he was part of the choir and served as an altar boy, Hitler dreamt fleetingly of becoming a Benedictine monk. And it was at that time, too, interestingly enough, that whenever he attended mass, he always had to pass beneath the first swastika he had ever seen: it was graven in the stone escutcheon of the abbey portal.

Hitler's father, a customs officer, hoped the boy would follow in his footsteps and become a civil servant. His tutor encouraged him to become a monk. Instead the young Hitler went, or rather fled, to Vienna. And there, thwarted in his artistic aspirations by the bureaucratic mediocrities of academia, he turned to isolation and meditation. Lost in the great capital of Austria-Hungary, he searched for his destiny.

During the first 30 years of Hitler's life, the date April 20, 1889, meant nothing to anyone. He was born on that day in Braunau, a small town in the Inn valley. During his exile in Vienna, he often thought of his modest home, and particularly of his mother. When she fell ill, he returned home from Vienna to look after her. For weeks he nursed her, did all the household chores, and supported her as the most loving of sons. When she finally died, on Christmas eve, his pain was immense. Wracked with grief, he buried his mother in the little country cemetery. "I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief," said his mother's doctor, who happened to be Jewish.


A STRONG SOUL

Hitler had not yet focused on politics, but without his rightly knowing, that was the career to which he was most strongly called. Politics would ultimately blend with his passion for art. People, the masses, would be the clay the sculptor shapes into an immortal form. The human clay would become for him a beautiful work of art like one of Myron's marble sculptures, a Hans Makart painting, or Wagner's Ring Trilogy.

His love of music, art and architecture had not removed him from the political life and social concerns of Vienna. In order to survive, he worked as a common laborer sided by side with other workers. He was a silent spectator, but nothing escaped him: not the vanity and egoism of the bourgeoisie, not the moral and material misery of the people, nor yet the hundreds of thousands of workers who surged down the wide avenues of Vienna with anger in their hearts.

He had also been taken aback by the growing presence in Vienna of bearded Jews wearing caftans, a sight unknown in Linz. "How can they be Germans?" he asked himself. He read the statistics: in 1860 there were 69 Jewish families in Vienna; 40 years later there were 200,000. They were everywhere. He observed their invasion of the universities and the legal and medical professions, and their takeover of the newspapers.

Hitler was exposed to the passionate reactions of the workers to this influx, but the workers were not alone in their unhappiness. There were many prominent persons in Austria and Hungary who did not hide their resentment at what they believed was an alien invasion of their country. The mayor of Vienna, a Christian-Democrat and a powerful orator, was eagerly listened to by Hitler.

Hitler was also concerned with the fate of the eight million Austrian Germans kept apart from Germany, and thus deprived of their rightful German nationhood. He saw Emperor Franz Josef as a bitter and petty old man unable to cope with the problems of the day and the aspirations of the future.

Quietly, the young Hitler was summing things up in his mind.

First: Austrians were part of Germany, the common fatherland.

Second: The Jews were aliens within the German community.

Third: Patriotism was only valid if it was shared by all classes. The common people with whom Hitler had shared grief and humiliation were just as much a part of the fatherland as the millionaires of high society.

Fourth: Class war would sooner or later condemn both workers and bosses to ruin in any country. No country could survive class war; only cooperation between workers and bosses can benefit the country. Workers must be respected and live with decency and honor. Creativity must never be stifled.

When Hitler later said that he had formed his social and political doctrine in Vienna, he told the truth. Ten years later his observations made in Vienna would become the order of the day.

Thus Hitler was to live for several years in the crowded city of Vienna as a virtual outcast, yet quietly observing everything around him. His strength came from within. He did not rely on anyone to do his thinking for him. Exceptional human beings always feel lonely amid the vast human throng. Hitler saw his solitude as a wonderful opportunity to meditate and not to be submerged in a mindless sea. In order not to be lost in the wastes of a sterile desert, a strong soul seeks refuge within himself. Hitler was such a soul.

THE WORD

The lightning in Hitler's life would come from the word.

All his artistic talent would be channeled into his mastery of communication and eloquence. Hitler would never conceive of popular conquests without the power of the word. He would enchant and be enchanted by it. He would find total fulfillment when the magic of his words inspired the hearts and minds of the masses with whom he communed.

He would feel reborn each time he conveyed with mystical beauty the knowledge he had acquired in his lifetime.

Hitler's incantory eloquence will remain, for a very long time, a vast field of study for the psychoanalyst. The power of Hitler's word is the key. Without it, there would never have been a Hitler era.

TRANSCENDANT FAITH

Did Hitler believe in God? He believed deeply in God. He called God the Almighty, master of all that is known and unknown.

Propagandists portrayed Hitler as an atheist. He was not. He had contempt for hypocritical and materialistic clerics, but he was not alone in that. He believed in the necessity of standards and theological dogmas, without which, he repeatedly said, the great institution of the Christian church would collapse. These dogmas clashed with his intelligence, but he also recognized that it was hard for the human mind to encompass all the problems of creation, its limitless scope and breathtaking beauty. He acknowledged that every human being has spiritual needs.

The song of the nightingale, the pattern and color of a flower, continually brought him back to the great problems of creation. No one in the world has spoken to me so eloquently about the existence of God. He held this view not because he was brought up as a Christian, but because his analytical mind bound him to the concept of God.

Hitler's faith transcended formulas and contingencies. God was for him the basis of everything, the ordainer of all things, of his Destiny and that of all others.

Léon Degrelle

https://www.radioislam.org/degrelle/...ler-enigma.htm
 
Old February 23rd, 2018 #35
Robbie Key
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What I learned about Adolf Hitler from Hermann Giesler
Published by carolyn on Wed, 2018-02-21 12:51



By Carolyn Yeager

THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING ADOLF HITLER'S BEHAVIOR AS A PEACE AND WAR LEADER lies in this sentence, quoted by Hermann Giesler from August 1943, after the devastating air attack on Hamburg. Hitler said, recalling his decision not to attack the remaining British troops at Dunkirk in 1940:

Quote:
It didn't agree with my character to step on the one who lays on the ground.
He saw the British as essentially defeated, and that they must themselves recognize that fact. He followed up with this: “After awhile I had to rethink. I was mistaken—magnanimity will not be recognized. What you see there [in photos of the Hamburg victims] is destructive brutality. Again and again one tries not to believe this, now I know—no mercy.” (p50)

But character is not changed by events. Decisions may be made against one's own character, but it is not easy or natural. Adolf Hitler was resolute, firm in his opinions and beliefs; he could be hard when necessary, but he was not ruthless, as were his adversaries. There were lines he would or could not cross.

Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were all prepared to carry out whatever acts they thought would get them closer to their goal—unconditional victory. They brought into play the darkest of black ops, and had no regard for their own soldiers apart from public opinion – the perception the public had of them as leaders.

Adolf Hitler never intended to utterly destroy anything, except for Bolshevism. He wanted to negotiate with other nations, to make deals that freed Germany from the Versailles Dictate and gave her respect and a high standing in the world again. He seems to have genuinely believed others were reasonable because war was such an unthinkable prospect after the recent Great War in which he had been a participant. But if reason was not followed, then he was prepared to use the greater persuasive power of strength and even limited force of arms. But from everything he says according to Hermann Giesler's memoir, ruthlessness was not among his attributes or his options.

There are plenty out there who find that lack of ruthlessness a grave failing in Hitler, and the reason Germany was ultimately decimated. They may be right. They probably are right. All the winners were ruthless and they have gotten away with it in the official history so far because they won. They were devious, dirty and without scruples or conscience. Do we really wish Hitler had been the same because our A-W-W cover 240 race realist and nationalist views coincide with his? After consideration, I for one don't, but in any case, wishing doesn't change anything. I want to understand Hitler, not try to prop up a false idol. So I am going to share in this essay what I've discovered about the personality of Adolf Hitler as revealed by Giesler in his book Ein Anderer Hitler (Another Hitler), that also shines through in our translation from that book, titled The Artist Within the Warlord.

The Hitler-Giesler Connection

The relationship between the two men in itself tells us a lot. I don't have any sense at all that Giesler is not recounting his conversations just as he remembers them—that he is not trying to convey a faithful account of his interactions with this powerful man. At the very beginning of his own book Ein Anderer Hitler, Giesler writes that in the Landsberg war crimes prison yard in 1948, his friend Prof. Franz Alfred Six once asked him:

Quote:
Giesler, you were his architect - what impressed you most about Hitler?

– The compelling fascination! There was a radiation from him that I could not escape. How often have I seen this happen to others as well, when he spoke to soldiers he distinguished with medals, generals and field marshals to whom he gave orders. This charisma was extraordinary. Perhaps this explains why no one was able to face him openly with their weapon, to look at him and then to shoot.
Perhaps it also explains why all those who fear or hate what Adolf Hitler represents must denigrate him as a boring, bumbling failure who kept his position in Germany only because of pure police power and terror – two concepts that cannot possibly live together in one man.

Hitler looked to a future without war, or at least not being waged by him. He did not see himself as a permanent warlord. He gave Giesler the task of designing a retirement home for him and Eva Braun, who he said he intended to marry after he retired. Giesler quotes Hitler speaking about it:

Quote:
The great hall with the terrace, it's sides framed by the bays, is the proper room for an 'Artus Runde' (King Arthur's Round Table). I like having it that way. You, as my architect, will be a member. (p123)
When Martin Bormann invited Giesler to accompany him on an inspection trip to the Obersalzberg farm that supplied the Fuehrer compound, he led him to a spot off the road and asked Giesler how he liked the view. [Chapter Eight, p 143-44] Giesler said “magnificent” and Bormann told him,

Quote:
You are going to be settled here after the war so you are present for the Fuehrer at any time.
Whether this was only Bormann's idea at that time because he knew how beneficial Giesler's company was for his Chief, I don't know. But it is another indication of how comfortable Adolf Hitler was with Giesler around, and everyone knew it.

Hitler wanted peace so he could build

After winning the battle of France in June 1940, Hitler hoped to avoid further war. In Chapter One, page 21, he said, as if to himself in Giesler's presence, as though setting a task for himself:

Quote:
I want peace – I know of better things than waging war – I do not need to make a name by warmongering like Churchill—I want to make my name as a steward of the German people, to secure its unity and Lebensraum, to achieve National Socialism and shape the environment—the rebuilding of the German cities according to modern knowledge.
These were Hitler's goals; war got in the way of accomplishing them. In Chapter Two, page 27, Giesler relays to us Hitler's attitude in the ongoing negotiations with Poland:
Quote:
Until the last massive snub by the Polish leadership at the end of August 1939, he couldn't imagine that they would let it come to a fight.
Hitler thought he was negotiating in good faith with a stubborn Poland, who must realize the only sensible thing they could do in the circumstances was to accept a narrow corridor for Germany to East Prussia and release their claim on a totally German city, Danzig. For that, they got many assurances from Germany for years into the future. It was unthinkable that they would choose to go to war over it. But they did, disregarding common sense, which Adolf Hitler didn't expect. It was a trap set up by the British Foreign Office, with Roosevelt in the background, and not only Hitler, but Hermann Goering and Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Polish leaders too, were fooled by it.

In Chapter Three, page 51, Giesler recalls in Fall 1942 that Hitler was still bound to what he called “peace tasks:”

Quote:
During [our] hours of mutual planning, he saw himself bound to peace, and his real mission as forming a new social order of the German people and their environment. He found the answer to the challenge of the time, the challenge of (architectural) technique, and the challenge of the new social order. In those hours, he was lifted up.
In Chapter 5, page 87, speaking of his decision to invade Russia, Hitler says:

Quote:
My only alternative was the defense by a preventive stroke. Not only Germany was at stake, but the very existence of Europe. Still the decision wasn't an easy one. Regardless of all other matters, it meant the postponement of the realization of the social part of the tasks I set for myself and which required a secure time of peace. To [that] belonged the reconstruction of German cities.
Now we learn why Adolf Hitler took on these wartime roles that he actually did not want. It was because his sense of responsibility to Germany and Europe gave him no choice. After the July 20th assassination attempt, he commented to Giesler (p 179-180):

Quote:
Those were the worst days of my life. […] What is my life? – only struggle and worry and grinding responsibility. Fate and providence assigned those tasks and burdens to me—and doesn't the last assassination attempt just demand more steadfastness than ever, to continue the struggle with trust and confidence?
Many times, Hitler spoke of steadfastness as the most important trait for leadership. Isn't this why Will and Faithfulness were so important to him? Giesler quotes him at this time saying:

Quote:
We have to create a new aristocracy, a value and rank order based on character, courage and steadiness. One sentence of Nietzsche's I identify with: “What today can prove if one be of value or not?—that he is steadfast.” (p 180)
Adolf Hitler admits his mistake

In chapter two, page 33, Hitler is quoted as saying in Fall 1944 (after 'Valkyrie') that at the time of his decision to invade the Soviet Union he thought the struggle to exist or not to exist could only be fought by a solid unity and with the hard will of the entire German Volk:

Quote:
If we acquire that solidarity, then our strong will, our unity should overcome any peril. But in that, the solidarity, I misjudged. I underestimated the reactionaries.
On another occasion in 1944 (p 180), after the full extent of the treason was revealed, Hitler uses the word “misjudged” three times:

Quote:
I misjudged the reactionaries. I misjudged their vain ambitions, their need for admiration and their intellectual shortcomings … all that I misjudged! I forgot that I am a revolutionary.
He chides himself for holding the German General Staff in too high regard:

Quote:
I never believed it possible that a General Staff officer was able to commit such a characterless crime—even though due to my experiences since 1938 I ought to have expected it.
But it was not only Hitler who saw the Field Marshals and Generals as honorable men who would never knowingly do anything to harm their own soldiers. Giesler also said that he “could never have imagined that a German officer would agree to form a “National Committee for a Free Germany” when in Soviet captivity, as did Seydlitz-Kurzbach. (p 190) And the security officers who briefed Giesler about the bomb plot—Hoegl of the SD said, “It is pretty hard to believe that such a contemptible infamy is at all possible—for us they were sacred cows.” (p 150) Major General Rattenhuber, head of Hitler's Security detail, remarked: "Just the thought than an officer, even a general, could commit treason or assassinate the Fuehrer was, until now--how do you call it--a sacrilege." (p 154) This is how the Germans were—they held their fighting men and especially commanders in the highest esteem. That they would commit the treason of passing top-secret information to the enemy during wartime was unthinkable.

But still, as Hitler said himself, he should have known better. And he did know that treason was occurring at various times, but he did not, or could not, or would not, investigate the incredible extent of it. If he did do something (he questioned people, fired a few), it wasn't enough. He knew many opposed him, even in the military, but I believe he took it as something he must endure and work to change. Contrarily Stalin, when he became suspicious of anyone he had them “disappeared” or arrested and put into prison. Hitler operated differently; he believed it was his job to persuade top-staff, not to order, which he thought was counter-productive. And he did have a lot of success with that. For Churchill and Roosevelt, they were not in control of their governments in the same way, but were controlled by forces behind the scenes who made many of the decisions for them.

Was Hitler too soft?

Hitler was an ethical man who was trying to guide his nation through an immoral time when Germany was surrounded, both within and without, by conspiring enemies who indulged in lies and hypocrisy. He had to make existential decisions based on whether Germany would continue to exist or not. If he had exhibited the same disregard for life and property as did his enemies, would the outcome have changed at all? The resources available to that group enemy were far greater than those available to him. In the end, the one with the greater resources wins.

What I do know is that Hitler
  • was an artist and innovative thinker = Creativity
  • had a powerful desire to lift up his people = Compassion
  • exhibited natural bravery that was apparent in WWI and during his political career = Courage

This is the man who took on the immense responsibility to defend all of Western Europe (against it's own will) since that was part and parcel of defending Germany.

Did he fail? I say no, because Western Europe did remain free of Bolshevism and Soviet domination. Perhaps the limited nature of his success was the most that could ever have been hoped for, considering the circumstances prevailing at the time (the pendulum was swinging toward the left) and the weakness and rot in the Western ruling classes. As Adolf Hitler said before he took his own life to deprive the Russians from taking it from him, his ideas would live on and we who follow him must not give up, but continue the struggle.

Hitler taught us that life is struggle, but it is also sublime. He personified and lived both extremes. I am glad that Adolf Hitler was exactly who he was: a principled man, a self-sacrificing man, a steadfast man, a man of the West who left us an amazing legacy—not one of those inferior ruthless men.

https://carolynyeager.net/what-i-lea...ermann-giesler
 
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