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| HITLER WOULD BE THINKER |
These deep "thoughts" uttered by Hitler during the long nights of the war were
recorded by his private Secretary Martin Bormann. Hitler's Table Talks are a
series of informal, private conversations among Hitler and his closest
associates that would be better called "Hitler's rantings". Hitler had decided
opinions on every subject, none of which were challenged or questioned by
those standing around him. He was, in fact, showing off again and again, night
after night, and everybody else had to listen. That is the advantage of being a
dictator, especially a talkative one.
Many of them are simply borrowed from earlier readings without bothering to
mention the source or the author and amalgamated into a "table talk à la sauce
Hitler" where everything is distorted, disconnected and stranger to clear
thinking.
The ex-tempore remarks excerpted below are from July 1941 to June 1942,
most late at night or in early morning as Hitler loved to bother his aids and
guests until the wee hours of the morning with such "banalities". Most of the
time Hitler was not expecting any answer as he was setting himself for a vain
and endless monologue. The reader will be amazed by the puerility and the
vanity of the following "table talks."
Marshall von Hindenburg, President of the Weimar Republic, said once that
Hitler was just good enough to be a Post Master. It was an insult to every Post
Master in the world. The reader will also bear in mind that, while Hitler was
boasting around until the wee hours of the day, his soldiers died by the
thousands on the Eastern Front and that he seemed to show no compassion,
not only once, for their sufferings. Hitler was a selfish arrogant little asshole
who blew all fuses after his accession to power in 1933. And now enjoy the
reading :
HITLER ON NATURE
"I think the man who contemplates the universe with his eyes wide open is the
man with the greatest amount of natural piety: not in the religious sense, but in
the sense of an intimate harmony with things.
At the end of the last century the progress of science and technics led
liberalism astray into proclaiming man's mastery of nature, and announcing
that he would soon have dominion over space. But a simple storm is enough —
and everything collapses like a pack of cards!
In any case, we shall learn to become familiar with the laws by which life is
governed, and acquaintance with the laws of nature will guide us on the path of
progress. As for the 'why' of these laws, we shall never know anything about it. A
thing is so, and our understanding cannot conceive of other schemes.
Man has discovered in nature the wonderful notion of that almighty being whose
law he worships.
Fundamentally in everyone there is the feeling for this almighty, which we call
'God' (that is to say, the dominion of natural laws throughout the whole
universe). The priests, who have always succeeded in exploiting this feeling,
threaten punishments for the man who refuses to accept the creed they impose.
When one provokes in a child a fear of the dark, one awakens in him a feeling
of atavistic dread. Thus this child will be ruled all his life by this dread, whereas
another child, who has been intelligently brought up, will be free of it.
It is said that every man needs a refuge where he can find consolation and help
in unhappiness. I do not believe it! If humanity follows that path, it is solely a
matter of tradition and habit. That is a lesson, by the way, that can be drawn
from the Bolshevik front. The Russians have no God, and that does not prevent
them from being able to face death.
We do not want to educate anyone in atheism.
HITLER ON CHRISTIANITY
The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity.
Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.
The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by
Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature, when it claims to
bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the
ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an
instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance.
Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the
name of love. Its keynote is intolerance.
Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to
its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human
failure.
HITLER ON THIS WORLD
The Earth continues to go around, whether it's the man who kills the tiger or the
tiger who eats the man. The stronger asserts his will, it's the law of nature. The
world doesn't change; its laws are eternal.
There are some who say the world is evil, and that they wish to depart from this
life. For my part, I like the world! Unless the desire to die is due to a lover's
quarrel, I advise the desperate man to have patience for a year. The
consolations will come. But if a human being has any other reason to wish to
die than this, then let him die, I'm not stopping him. I merely call attention to the
fact that one cannot escape this world entirely. The elements of which our body
is made belong to the cycle of nature; and as for our soul, it's possible that it
might return to limbo, until it gets an opportunity to reincarnate itself. But it would
vex me if everybody wanted to have done with life.
To make death easier for people, the Church holds out to them the bait of a
better world. We, for our part, confine ourselves to asking man to fashion his life
worthily. For this, it is sufficient for him to conform to the laws of nature. Let's
seek inspiration in these principles, and in the long run we'll triumph over
religion.
But there will never be any possibility of National Socialism's setting out to ape
religion by establishing a form of worship. Its one ambition must be
scientifically to construct a doctrine that is nothing more than a homage to
reason.
Our duty is to teach men to see whatever is lovely and truly wonderful in life, and
not to become prematurely ill tempered and spiteful. We wish fully to enjoy what
is beautiful, to cling to it — and to avoid, as far as possible, anything that might
do harm to people like ourselves.
If today you do harm to the Russians, it is so as to avoid giving them the
opportunity of doing harm to us.
God does not act differently. He suddenly hurls the masses of humanity on to
the Earth, and he leaves it to each one to work out his own salvation. Men
dispossess one another, and one perceives that, at the end of it all, it is always
the stronger who triumphs. Is that not the most reasonable order of things?
If it were otherwise, nothing good would ever have existed. If we did not respect
the laws of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would
come when the wild animals would once again devour us — then the insects
would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist on Earth but the
microbes.
HITLER ON CHURCH, RELIGION, THE FUTURE
Trying to take a long view of things, is it conceivable that one could found
anything durable on falsehood? When I think of our Folk's future, I must look
further than immediate advantages, even if these advantages were to last three
hundred, five hundred years or more. I'm convinced that any pact with the
Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit
will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will
have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse.
An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before
the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going
over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as he
perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in
the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science.
That's why I've always kept the Party aloof from religious questions. I've thus
prevented my Catholic and Protestant supporters from forming groups against
one another, and inadvertently knocking each other out with the bible and the
sprinkler. So we never became involved with these churches' forms of worship.
And if that has momentarily made my task a little more difficult, at least I've
never run the risk of carrying grist to my opponents' mill. The help we would
have provisionally obtained from a concordat [with the churches] would have
quickly become a burden on us. In any case, the main thing is to be clever in
this matter and not to look for a struggle where it can be avoided.
Being weighed down by a superstitious past, men are afraid of things that can't,
or can't yet, be explained — that is to say, of the unknown. If anyone has needs
of a metaphysical nature, I can't satisfy them with the Party's Program. Time will
go by until the moment when science can answer all the questions.
So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the churches.
The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has
something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away
before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more
concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in
nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When
understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of
men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited
worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.
Originally, religion was merely a prop for human communities. It was a means,
not an end in itself. It's only gradually that it became transformed in this
direction, with the object of maintaining the rule of the priests, who can live only
to the detriment of society collectively.
The instructions of a hygienic nature that most religions gave, contributed to the
foundation of organized communities. The precepts ordering people to wash, to
avoid certain drinks, to fast at appointed dates, to take exercise, to rise with the
sun, to climb to the top of the minaret — all these were obligations invented by
intelligent people. The exhortation to fight courageously is also self-explanatory.
Observe, by the way, that, as a corollary, the Moslem was promised a paradise
peopled with sensual girls, where wine flowed in streams — a real earthly
paradise. The Christians, on the other hand, declare themselves satisfied if
after their death they are allowed to sing hallelujahs! All these elements
contributed to form human communities. It is to these private customs that
Folks owe their present characters.
Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And
that's why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated
humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker
it will decline.
But one must continue to pay attention to another aspect of the problem. It's
possible to satisfy the needs of the inner life by an intimate communion with
nature, or by knowledge of the past. Only a minority, however, at the present
stage of the mind's development, can feel the respect inspired by the unknown,
and thus satisfy the metaphysical needs of the soul. The average human being
has the same needs, but can satisfy them only by elementary means. That's
particularly true of women, as also of peasants who impotently watch the
destruction of their crops. The person whose life tends to simplification is thirsty
for belief, and he dimly clings to it with all his strength.
Nobody has the right to deprive simple people of their childish certainties until
they've acquired others that are more reasonable. Indeed, it's most important
that the higher belief should be well established in them before the lower belief
has been removed. We must finally achieve this. But it would serve no purpose
to replace an old belief by a new one that would merely fill the place left vacant
by its predecessor.
It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to reestablish the
worship of Wotan. Our old mythology had ceased to be viable when Christianity
implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund. At that period the ancient
world was divided between the systems of philosophy and the worship of idols.
It's not desirable that the whole of humanity should be stultified — and the only
way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.
A Movement like ours mustn't let itself be drawn into metaphysical digressions.
It must stick to the spirit of exact science. It's not the Party's function to be a
counterfeit for religion.
If, in the course of a thousand or two thousand years, science arrives at the
necessity of renewing its points of view, that will not mean that science is a liar.
Science cannot lie, for it's always striving, according to the momentary state of
knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake, it does so in
good faith. It's Christianity that's the liar. It's in perpetual conflict with itself.
One may ask whether the disappearance of Christianity would entail the
disappearance of belief in God. That's not to be desired. The notion of divinity
gives most men the opportunity to concretize the feeling they have of
supernatural realities. Why should we destroy this wonderful power they have of
incarnating the feeling for the divine that is within them?
The man who lives in communion with nature necessarily finds himself in
opposition to the Churches. And that's why they're heading for ruin — for
science is bound to win.
I especially wouldn't want our Movement to acquire a religious character and
institute a form of worship. It would be appalling for me, and I would wish I'd
never lived, if I were to end up in the skin of a Buddha!
If at this moment we were to eliminate the religions by force, the people would
unanimously beseech us for a new form of worship. You can imagine our
District Leaders giving up their pranks to play at being saints! As for our Minister
For Religion, according to his own co-religionists, God himself would turn away
from his family!
I envisage the future, therefore, as follows: First of all, to each man his private
creed. Superstition shall not lose its rights. The Party is sheltered from the
danger of competing with the religions. These latter must simply be forbidden
from interfering in future with temporal matters. From the tenderest age,
education will be imparted in such a way that each child will know all that is
important to the maintenance of the State. As for the men close to me, who, like
me, have escaped from the clutches of dogma, I've no reason to fear that the
Church will get its hooks on them.
We'll see to it that the churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with
the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National
Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth.
HITLER ON INSTITUTIONS
On the whole Earth there's no being, no substance, and probably no human
institution that doesn't end by growing old. But it's in the logic of things that every
human institution should be convinced of its everlastingness — unless it
already carries the seed of its downfall. The hardest steel grows weary. Just as
it is certain that one day the Earth will disappear, so it is certain that the works of
men will be overthrown.
All these manifestations are cyclical. Religion is in perpetual conflict with the
spirit of free research. The Church's opposition to science was sometimes so
violent that it struck off sparks. The Church, with a clear awareness of her
interests, has made a strategic retreat, with the result that science has lost
some of its aggressiveness.
The present system of teaching in schools permits the following absurdity: at
10 a.m. the pupils attend a lesson on the catechism, at which the creation of the
world is presented to them in accordance with the teachings of the Bible; and at
11 a.m. they attend a lesson in natural science, at which they are taught the
theory of evolution. Yet the two doctrines are in complete contradiction! As a
child, I suffered from this contradiction, and ran my head against a wall. Often I
complained to one or another of my teachers against what I had been taught an
hour before — and I remember that I drove them to despair.
The Christian religion tries to get out of it by explaining that one must attach a
symbolic value to the images of Holy Writ. Any man who made the same claim
four hundred years ago would have ended his career at the stake, with an
accompaniment of Hosannas. By joining in the game of tolerance, religion has
won back ground by comparison with bygone centuries.
Religion draws all the profit that can be drawn from the fact that science
postulates the search for, and not the certain knowledge of, the truth. Let's
compare science to a ladder. On every rung, one beholds a wider landscape.
But science does not claim to know the essence of things. When science finds
that it has to revise one or another notion that it had believed to be definitive, at
once religion gloats and declares: We told you so! To say that is to forget that
it's in the nature of science to behave itself thus. For if it decided to assume a
dogmatic air, it would itself become a church.
When one says that God provokes the lightning, that's true in a sense; but what
is certain is that God does not direct the thunderbolt, as the Church claims. The
Church's explanation of natural phenomena is an abuse, for the Church has
ulterior interests. True piety is the characteristic of the being who is aware of his
weakness and ignorance. Whoever sees God only in an oak or in a tabernacle,
instead of seeing Him everywhere, is not truly pious. He remains attached to
appearances — and when the sky thunders and the lightning strikes, he
trembles simply from fear of being struck as a punishment for the sin he's just
committed.
HITLER ON POISONOUS THINGS
I know nothing of the Other World, and I have the honesty to admit it. Other
people know more about it than I do, and I'm incapable of proving that they're
mistaken. I don't dream of imposing my philosophy on a village girl. Although
religion does not aim at seeking for the truth, it is a kind of philosophy which
can satisfy simple minds, and that does no harm to anyone. Everything is finally
a matter of the feeling man has of his own impotence. In itself, this philosophy
has nothing pernicious about it. The essential thing, really, is that man should
know that salvation consists in the effort that each person makes to understand
Providence and accept the laws of nature.
Since all violent upheavals are a calamity, I would prefer the adaptation to be
made without shocks. What could be longest left undisturbed are women's
convents. The sense of the inner life brings people great enrichment. What we
must do, then, is to extract from religions the poison they contain. In this
respect, great progress has been made during recent centuries.
HITLER ON SUBTLETY
When I was younger, I thought it was necessary to set about matters with
dynamite. I've since realized that there's room for a little subtlety. The rotten
branch falls of itself. The final state must be: in St. Peter's Chair, a senile
officiant; facing him, a few sinister old women, as gaga and as poor in spirit as
anyone could wish. The young and healthy are on our side. Against a Church
that identifies itself with the State, as in England, I have nothing to say. But, even
so, it's impossible eternally to hold humanity in bondage with lies. After all, it
was only between the sixth and eighth centuries that Christianity was imposed
on our Folks by princes who had an alliance of interests with the shavelings.
Our Folks had previously succeeded in living all right without this religion. I have
six Divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of
religion. It doesn't prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their
souls.
HITLER ON HEAVENS
What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing men grovel before him? Try
to picture to yourselves the meaning of the following, quite simple story: God
creates the conditions for sin. Later on he succeeds, with the help of the Devil,
in causing man to sin. Then he employs a virgin to bring into the world a son
who, by his death, will redeem humanity!
I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mohammed, but
as for the insipid paradise of the Christians! In your lifetime, you used to hear
the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs,
the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding bottle, and hoary old
men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity
is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor
any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A
nigger with his taboos is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously
believes in transubstantiation.
I begin to lose all respect for humanity when I think that some people on our
side, ministers or generals, are capable of believing that we cannot triumph
without the blessing of the Church. Such a notion is excusable in little children
who have learned nothing else.
For thirty years [i.e. 1618-1648] the Germans tore each other to pieces simply in
order to know whether or not they should take communion in both kinds.
There's nothing lower than religious notions like that. From that point of view,
one can envy the Japanese. They have a religion which is very simple and
brings them into contact with nature. They've succeeded even in taking
Christianity and turning it into a religion that's less shocking to the intellect.
By what would you have me replace the Christians' picture of the Beyond? What
comes naturally to mankind is the sense of eternity, and that sense is at the
bottom of every man. The soul and the mind migrate, just as the body returns to
nature. Thus life is eternally reborn from life. As for the 'why' of all that, I feel no
need to rack my brains on the subject. The soul is unplumbable.
If there is a God, at the same time as he gives man life he gives him
intelligence. By regulating my life according to the understanding that is granted
me, I may be mistaken, but I act in good faith.
HITLER ON MEN'S SUBJECTIVITY
Man judges everything in relation to himself. What is bigger than himself is big,
what is smaller is small. Only one thing is certain, that one is part of the
spectacle. Everyone finds his own role. Joy exists for everybody. I dream of a
state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the
preservation of the species. It's our duty to encourage that idea: let the man who
distinguishes himself in the service of the species be thought worthy of the
highest honors. <
HITLER ON THE DUCE
What a happy inspiration, to have kept the clergy out of the Party! On the 21st
March, 1933, at Potsdam, the question was raised: with the Church, or without
the Church? I conquered the State despite the malediction pronounced on us
by both creeds. On that day, we went directly to the tomb of the kings whilst the
others were visiting religious services. Supposing that at that period I'd made a
pact with the Churches, I'd today be sharing the lot of The Duce. By nature The
Duce is a freethinker, but he decided to choose the path of concessions. For my
part, in his place I'd have taken the path of revolution. I'd have entered the
Vatican and thrown everybody out — reserving the right to apologize later:
'Excuse me, it was a mistake!' But the result would have been, they'd have been
outside!
When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards
should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only Folk who
are immunized against the disease.
HITLER ON THE ANNIHILATION OF MANKIND
Kerrl, with the noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between
National Socialism and Christianity. I don't believe the thing's possible, and I
see the obstacle in Christianity itself.
I think I could have come to an understanding with the popes of the
Renaissance. Obviously, their Christianity was a danger on the practical level —
and, on the propaganda level, it continued to be a lie.
But a pope, even a criminal one, who protects great artists and spreads beauty
around him, is nevertheless more sympathetic to me than the protestant
minister who drinks from the poisoned spring.
Pure Christianity — the Christianity of the catacombs — is concerned with
translating the Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the
annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel
of metaphysics.
HITLER ON ETERNITY
Man has been given his brain to think with. But if he has the misfortune to make
use of it, he finds a swarm of black bugs [i.e. priests] on his heels. The mind is
doomed to the auto-da-fé.
The observatory I'll have built at Linz, on the Pöstlingberg, I can see it in my
mind ... In future, thousands of excursionists will make a pilgrimage there every
Sunday. They'll thus have access to the greatness of our universe. The
pediment will bear this motto: 'The heavens proclaim the glory of the
everlasting.' It will be our way of giving men a religious spirit, of teaching them
humility — but without the priests.
Man seizes hold, here and there, of a few scraps of truth, but he couldn't rule
nature. He must know that, on the contrary, he is dependent on Creation. And
this attitude leads further than the superstitions maintained by the Church.
Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can ever have
undergone, and it's the Jew who, thanks to this diabolic invention, has thrown
him back 15 centuries. The only thing that would be still worse would be victory
for the Jew through Bolshevism. If Bolshevism triumphed, mankind would lose
the gift of laughter and joy. It would become merely a shapeless mass, doomed
to grayness and despair.
The priests of antiquity were closer to nature, and they sought modestly for the
meaning of things. Instead of that, Christianity promulgates its inconsistent
dogmas and imposes them by force. Such a religion carries within it
intolerance and persecution. It's the bloodiest conceivable ...
For Ptolemy, the Earth was the center of the world. That changed with
Copernicus. Today we know that our solar system is merely a solar system
amongst many others. What could we do better than allow the greatest
possible number of people like us to become aware of these marvels?
In any case, we can be grateful to Providence, which causes us to live today
rather than 300 years ago. At every street corner, in those days, there was a
blazing stake. What a debt we owe to the men who had the courage — the first
to do so — to rebel against lies and intolerance. The admirable thing is that
amongst them were Jesuit Fathers.
In their fight against the Church, the Russians are purely negative. We, on the
other hand, should practise the cult of the heroes who enabled humanity to pull
itself out of the rut of error. Kepler lived at Linz, and that's why I chose Linz as the
place for our observatory. His mother was accused of witchcraft and was
tortured several times by the Inquisition.
To open the eyes of simple people, there's no better method of instruction than
the picture. Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of
superstitions. One must destroy the priest's argument that science is
changeable because faith does not change, since, when presented in this
form, the statement is dishonest.
HITLER ON ROMAN EMPERORS
The book that contains the reflections of the Emperor Julian should be
circulated in millions. What wonderful intelligence! What discernment, all the
wisdom of antiquity! It's extraordinary!
It is a great pity that this tendency towards religious thought can find no better
outlet than the Jewish pettifoggery of the Old Testament, for a religious Folk
who, in the solitude of winter, continually seek ultimate light on their religious
problems with the assistance of the Bible, must eventually become spiritually
deformed. The wretched Folk strive to extract truths from these Jewish
chicaneries, where in fact no truths exist. As a result they become embedded in
some rut of thought or other and, unless they possess an exceptionally
commonsense mind, degenerate into religious maniacs.
It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and
that the whole of the German Folk should have thus become exposed to the
whole of this Jewish mumbo jumbo. So long as the wisdom, particularly of the
Old Testament, remained exclusively in the Latin of the Church, there was little
danger that sensible people would become the victims of illusions as the result
of studying the Bible. But since the Bible became common property, a whole
heap of people have found opened to them lines of religious thought which —
particularly in conjunction with the German characteristic of persistent and
somewhat melancholy meditation — as often as not turned them into religious
maniacs. When one recollects further that the Catholic Church has elevated to
the status of Saints a whole number of madmen, one realizes why movements
such as that of the Flagellants came inevitably into existence in the Middle Ages
in Germany.
HITLER ON THE BIBLE
The Ten Commandments are a code of living to which there's no refutation.
These precepts correspond to irrefragable needs of the human soul; they're
inspired by the best religious spirit; and the Churches here support themselves
on a solid foundation.
HITLER ON TRUTH
Is there a single religion that can exist without a dogma? No, for in that case it
would belong to the order of science. Science cannot explain why natural
objects are what they are. And that's where religion comes in, with its
comforting certainties. When incarnated in the Churches, religion always finds
itself in opposition to life. So the Churches would be heading for disaster, and
they know it, if they didn't cling to a rigid truth.
What is contrary to the visible truth must change or disappear — that's the law
of life.
Research must remain free and unfettered by any State restriction. The facts
which it establishes represent Truth, and Truth is never evil.
I shall never believe that what is founded on lies can endure for ever. I believe in
Truth. I'm sure that, in the long run, Truth must be victorious."
Amen. And to finish, a quotation that you would never have found in the mouth of
Herr Adolf, the artist: "I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with
a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could".
HITLER ON THIS SITE
I can't believe a Frenchman would be able to understand me so well.
or HITLER's PROPOS DE TABLE
| TABLE TALKS by HERR ADOLF SIMPLISSIMUS or Hitler's nocturnal rantings How to be convinced that Hitler was not a great thinker but a pretentious mind full of undigested readings and undigestible ideas |