100 Quotes by William L. Shirer

Much of what is going on and will go on could be learned by the outside world from Mein Kampf, the Bible and Koran together of the Third Reich. But – amazingly – there is no decent translation of it in English or French, and Hitler will not allow one to be made, which is understandable, for it would shock many in the West. How many visiting butter-and-egg men have I told that the Nazi goal is domination! They laughed.

Hitler delivered petulant speeches that fall warning the outside world and particularly the British to mind their own business and to quit concerning themselves “with the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich.

Hassell noted down in his diary “the substance of his views”: “This man – Hitler – is Germany’s destiny for good and for evil. If he now goes over the abyss – which Fritsch believes he will – he will drag us all down with him. There is nothing we can do.”13.

The republican regime, as well as the Marxists and the Jews, was “the enemy.” And in his peroration he had shouted, “To this struggle of ours there are only two possible issues: either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs!

A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fancy? An irresponsible egoism? A megalomania? It was all of these in part. But it was something more. For the mind and the passion of Hitler – all the aberrations that possessed his feverish brain – had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German history.

The Reichstag would be asked to pass an “enabling act” conferring on Hitler’s cabinet exclusive legislative powers for four years. Put even more simply, the German Parliament would be requested to turn over its constitutional functions to Hitler and take a long vacation. But.

Hitler had never made any secret of, was that if the party ever took over Germany it would stamp out a German’s personal freedom, including that of Dr. Schacht and his business friends.

The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich.

The consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of the extreme Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good many antirepublicans took notice of it.