David Irving Quotes

“Churchill is the very archetype of a corrupt journalist,” sneered the Führer. “He himself has written that it’s incredible how far you can get in war with the help of the common lie. He’s an utterly amoral, repulsive creature. I’m convinced he has a refuge prepared for himself across the Atlantic. He’ll go to his friends, the Yanks.”

“History is like a constantly changing tree.”

“As Hitler quipped to his staff, Beck was only ever able to make up his mind when his decision was against doing something!”

“As Robespierre once said of Marat: The man was dangerous: he believed in what he said.”

“At the conference, Hitler mapped out plans for a vote to be held throughout Germany and Austria on April 10, to confirm the Anschluss. The question on the ballot paper was: ‘Do you accept Adolf Hitler as our Führer, and do you thus accept the reunification of Austria with the German Reich as effected on March 13, 1938?’

Unlike Schuschnigg's phoney plebiscite, it was a genuinely secret ballot. The result staggered even Hitler: of 49,493,028 entitled to vote, 49,279,104 had cast votes, and of these 99.08 percent had voted ‘Yes’ – altogether 48,751,587 adults had stated their support of Hitler's action. This was a unanimity of almost embarrassing dimensions.”

“By early 1937, the Nazi state could be likened to an atomic structure. The nucleus was Hitler, surrounded by successive rings of henchmen. The innermost ring was Göring, Himmler and Goebbels, privy to his less secret ambitions and the means he was proposing to employ to realize them.

In the outer rings were the ministers, commanders-in-chief and diplomats, each aware of only a small sector of the plans radiating from the nucleus. Beyond them was the German people.

The whole structure was bound by the forces of the police state – by the fear of the wiretap, the letter censors, the Gestapo and ultimately the short, sharp corrective spells provided by Himmler's renowned establishments at Dachau and elsewhere.”

“Democracy is the worst of all possible evils. Only one man can and should give the orders.”

“Encouraged by these ugly means, the mass exodus grew throughout 1939: 78,000 German and Austrian Jews (compared with 40,000 in 1938) left during 1939, and 38,000 Czech Jews too.

With the outbreak of war the exodus still briefly continued, to stop only in October 1940, by which time Heydrich had successfully evicted about two-thirds of the Jews from the Reich – about 300,000 from Germany, 130,000 from Austria, 30,000 from Bohemia and Moravia.

Some 70,000 of them reached Palestine, through the unholy alliance of aims that had briefly existed between Heydrich's SD and the Zionists.”

“Excerpts from unpublished records like these show that Hitler was inspired by purely Darwinian beliefs – the survival of the fittest, with no use for the moral comfort that sound religious teaching can purvey.

‘Liberty, equality and fraternity are the grandest nonsense,’ he had said that evening. ‘Because liberty automatically precludes equality – as liberty leads automatically to the advancement of the healthier, the better, and the more proficient, and thus there is no more equality.”

“Fritsch was a fervent nationalist, and he shared with Hitler a hatred of the Jews, the ‘Jewish press,’ and a belief that ‘the pacifists, Jews, democrats, black-red-and-gold and the French are all one and the same, namely people bent on Germany's perdition.”

“Himmler was an ambitious, sinister, idealistic creature of devious ways. His ideas on human behaviour had been gleaned from animal breeding lectures at agricultural college years before.

The SS had certain affinities to the Jesuit monastic orders, an enforced mysticism which even Hitler found slightly ludicrous: in 1940, witnessing the pagan Yule celebration of the SS Leibstandarte at Christmas, he quietly commented to an adjutant that this would never take the place of ‘Silent Night.”

“Himmler's personal chief of staff, Karl Wolff, arrived with an indignant message from Heydrich at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten: the local Gestapo HQ had just telephoned that Goebbels's district offices everywhere were whipping up anti-Jewish demonstrations and ordering the police not to intervene.

Himmler turned to Hitler for guidance. Hitler replied that the Gestapo were to protect Jewish property and lives, and that SS units were not to be called in unless things got out of hand.”

“Hitler dourly remarked to Wiedemann – as the adjutant recorded a few months later – ‘I'm not here to ensure peace in Europe; I'm here to make Germany great again. If that can be done peacefully, well and good. If not, we'll have to do it differently.’”

“Hitler had a constitutional duty to consider each appeal for clemency and sign the execution warrant. In bygone times the condemned criminal had had the traditional right to see the Kaiser's signature on the warrant before being led to the scaffold. In Hitler's era, the usages were less picturesque.

A telephone call went from Schaub to Lammers in Berlin: ‘The Führer has turned down the appeal for clemency’ – this sufficed to rubber-stamp a facsimile of the Führer's signature on the execution warrant. On one occasion the file laid before Hitler stated simply that the Berlin Chancellery would ‘take the necessary steps’ if they had heard no decision from him by ten P.M. that night.

Human life was becoming cheaper in the new Germany. When it was at its cheapest, at the time of Stalingrad, Walther Hewel was to explain to an OKW staff officer, ‘If you want to understand the way the Führer's mind works, you must look upon the human race as being just a swarm of ants.’”

“Hitler had built the National Socialist movement in Germany not on capricious electoral votes, but on people, and they gave him – in the vast majority – their unconditional support to the end.”

“Hitler had certainly nailed some of his secret military ambitions to the mast: Germany must be ‘capable of waging a worthwhile war against the Soviet Union,’ because ‘a victory over Germany by Bolshevism would lead not to a new Versailles Treaty but to the final annihilation, indeed the extermination, of the German nation.’

Hitler announced that he as Führer had to resolve once and for all Germany's economic problems by enlarging her Lebensraum and thus her sources of raw materials and food.”

“Hitler saw the random bickering of the newspapers of the democratic countries as an inexcusable frittering-away of a vital national resource. He considered that the press could become a powerful instrument of national policy.”

“Hitler wanted new environs, new men and new methods. He began appointing special plenipotentiaries to perform certain tasks parallel to the fossilizing government agencies – it was less exhausting than trying to revive the latter.

The Ribbentrop bureau was one example. Cabinet meetings as such virtually ceased late in 1937. Instead Hitler dealt directly – through Lammers – with affairs of state, while he transmitted his will directly to the ministers and generals without discussion.”

“In a major speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler uttered an unmistakable threat to any Jews who did choose to remain behind in his Germany:

I have very often been a prophet in my lifetime and I have usually been laughed at for it. During my struggle for power, it was primarily the Jewish people who just laughed when they heard me prophesy that one day I would become head of state and thereby assume the leadership of the entire people, and that I would then among other things subject the Jewish problem to a solution. I expect that the howls of laughter that rose then from the throats of German Jewry have by now died to a croak.

Today I'm going to turn prophet yet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging our peoples into a world war, then the outcome will not be a Bolshevization of the world and therewith the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe!”

“In an act of ironic magnanimity that he was to repeat in 1944 after the failed Bomb Plot, Hitler ordered state pensions provided for the next-of-kin of the people murdered in the Night of the Long Knives, as June 30, 1934 came to be known.”

“It was the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Germany that gave Hitler his biggest headaches. His early years of power were marked by futile attempts to reconcile the thirty warring Protestant factions and bring them under one overriding authority, some loosely constituted council of churches that would unquestioningly accept the primacy of the state and the Nazi policies it enforced.”

“Many a Hitler decision – decisions that infuriated his generals by their seeming lack of logic at the time – can probably be explained by the work of Göring's Forschungsamt, Ribbentrop's ministry and the naval staff's cryptanalysis branch.”

“Nobody can now watch Leni Riefenstahl's chilling film of this festival, Triumph of the Will, without shuddering at the sight of the SS troops breaking into the parade-step as they stomped into sight of the Führer.”

“Poland's attitude was hardly more sympathetic. Hitler had confided to ambassador Josef Lipski on September 20 that he was toying with the idea of solving the Jewish problem in unison with Poland, Hungary and perhaps Romania too by emigration ‘to the colonies.”

“The brave will fight whatever the odds,’ Hitler said on January 18. ‘But give the craven whatever weapons you will, they will always find reason enough to lay them down!”

“The terrible thing is that Hitler's enemies know him better than anybody, and the press – which is of course wholly in Jewish hands – has defamed and ridiculed the man. An old trick: first a deathly silence, then scorn, then all-out war – and then annexation.

There are Jewish firms that manufacture swastikas.”

“There is an aphorism about Prussian militarism, coined by Mirabeau, which aptly fits the pre-Hitler Reichswehr: ‘Prussia isn't a country with an army – it's an army with a country!”

“This was the beginning of Hitler's new-style diplomacy. His victories in Central Europe were won without the sword – they were won by power politics and opportunism, by bluff, by coercion, by psychological operations and by nerve-war.

n each occasion he carefully gauged his potential enemies. He satisfied himself that the western powers would not fight, provided he made each claim sound reasonable enough. The west was weak and unready, and he was not.”

“We need a dictator who is a genius, if we are to arise again.”

“What business do the British have, poking their noses in?’ exclaimed Hitler. ‘They ought to be looking after their Jews in Palestine!’ He told Bürger the British were just playing for time to rearm. If Britain interfered when ‘Green’ began, then the Luftwaffe would deal with her.”