56. Mein Kampf, p. 190.
57. Ibid., p. 169.
58. All these quotations ibid., pp. 182 ff.
59. Ibid., p. 172.
60. Regrettably, Hitler’s medical file disappeared even before 1933, and has not been recovered. Hitler’s military papers merely note tersely that he was “gassed.” The chemical in question was mustard gas, the effects of which generally did not blind, but greatly reduced sight and sometimes occasioned temporary blindness.
61. Mein Kampf, pp. 202 f.
62. Ibid., p. 204.
63. Communication from Speer to the author. The remark was made on the occasion of Hitler’s visit to Speer’s sickbed in Klessheim Palace. See Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 335. The above-mentioned speech is that of February 15, 1942. In context the passage reads: “How important is a world that I myself can see if it is repressive, if my own people are enslaved? In that case, what can I see worth seeing?” The text is cited from Kotze and Krausnick, p. 322. See also Maser, Frühgeschichte, p. 127. Maser quotes a personal communication from General Vincenz Müller, who allegedly informed General von Bredow, on orders from Schleicher, that Hitler’s blindness had been solely “hysterical in nature.” But on the wartime personnel roster Hitler was recorded as wounded, “gassed.”
64. Mein Kampf, p. 293.
65. Ibid., pp. 204 f.
66. Kessler, Tagebücher 1918–1937, p. 173.
67. Preiss, p. 38 (speech of March 23, 1927).
68. Kessler, p. 206.
69. Winston Churchill, as quoted in Deuerlein, Aufstieg, p. 23 (without source).
70. Mein Kampf, p. 207. On the question of the red armband see Maser, Frühgeschichte, p. 132. Ernst Deuerlein has even argued that in the winter of 1918–19 Hitler entertained the notion of joining the Social Democratic Party. See Deuerlein, A ufstieg, p. 80.
71. Mein Kampf, p. 208.
72. Mein Kampf, p. 206.
INTERPOLATION I
1. Ernest Niekisch in: Widerstand III, 11, issue of November, 1928. See also Hitler in the special issue of the VB (Völkischer Beobachter) of January 3, 1921, and in the speech of September 22, 1920, also of April 12, 1922, which show broad variations on the same theme. The VB of July 19, 1922, for example, called Germany the “ideological training ground for international finance,” a “colony” of the victorious powers. Hitler sometimes denounced the Reich government as a “bailiff for the Allies” and the Weimar Constitution as the “law for enforcing the Treaty of Versailles”; cf. also Hitler’s speech of November 30, 1922 (this speech, as well as those mentioned in the following notes for which no other source is given, will be found in the corresponding issue of the VB).
2. Münchener Beobachter, October 4, 1919. This is the sheet from which the Völkische Beobachter later emerged; the quoted article purports to be a missive from an unnamed Catholic clergyman of Basel.
3. “Krasnij Terror,” October 1, 1918, quoted by Nolte, Faschismus, p. 24.
4. Hitler’s memorandum on the expansion of the NSDAP of October 22, 1922, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. I, 1509. The proclamation of the National Socialist Party headquarters cited earlier is printed in VB, July 19, 1922.
5. See the speech of April 12, 1922. For Hitler’s other assertions see the speeches of July 28, 1922; April 27, 1920; September 22, 1920; April 21, 1922; and the article in VB for January 1, 1921. Rosenberg, who obviously helped to shape the notions about atrocities in Russia, wrote in the VB of April 15, 1922, that Russia had “during Lenin’s ‘government’ become a battlefield strewn with corpses, an inferno in which millions upon millions of persons wander about famished, where millions are diseased, starved, and have died a miserable death on deserted roads.” The following quotation is taken from Hitler’s Reichstag speech of March 7, 1936. See Domarus, p. 587.
6. Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, p. 10.
7. Ibid., p. 63.
8. Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Frankfurt am Main, 1967, pp. 561 ff.
9. Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, p. 86.
10. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, p. 135.
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Dawn,” in: Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans., The Portable Nietzsche, p. 84.
12. Hermann Bahr, Der Antisemitismus. Ein internationales Interview. Bahr’s publication was based on conversations with many German and European writers and people in public life.
13. Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, pp. 140 f. See also the thoughtful comments on it in Eva G. Reichmann, Flucht in den Hass, pp. 82 ff. But cf. also Franz Neumann, Behemoth, p. 121. Neumann argued that anti-Semitism in Germany was extremely feeble and that the German people were “the least anti-Semitic”; this very fact, he held, was what made anti-Semitism a suitable weapon for Hitler.
14. VB, April 6, 1920. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck spoke of the “German mania for taking over all the ideas of the Westerners,” as though it were an honor to be received into the circle of the liberal nations.
15. Libres propos, p. 225. After eating, Hitler regularly rinsed his mouth; out of doors he almost always wore gloves, at least in his later years. Cf. also Kubizek, p. 286. The fear of venereal infection was, it is true, the prevailing anxiety of that whole generation. Zweig, Die Welt von gestern, pp. 105 ff., speaks of the extent to which it dominated people’s minds in Vienna.
16. The quotations and references are taken from, in order, VB of March 3, 1920, September 12, 1920, January 10, 1923, Mein Kampf, pp. 233 ff. and 257 ff. For this whole context cf. Nolte, Epoche, pp. 480 ff., where the central importance of anxiety as a factor in Hitler’s conduct as a whole is discussed. Similarly, Franz Neumann in his “Notizen zur Theorie der Diktatur” has pointed out the function of anxiety in the totalitarian state. See his Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat, pp. 242 ff. and 261 ff., where the verdict is rendered that Germany in that phase of its history was “the land of alienation and anxiety.”
17. Tischgespräche, p. 471.
18. Preiss, p. 152; also VB of January 1, 1921, and March 10, 1920—which, incidentally, appeared under the banner headline of: “Clean Out the Jews!” The article demanded immediate expulsion of all Jews who had immigrated after August 1, 1914, and the removal of all others from “all government posts, newspapers, theaters, and motion picture houses.” Special “collection camps” were to be set up to receive them.
19. Mein Kampf, pp. 65, 247, 249.
20. Stefan George, “Das Neue Reich,” in: Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9.
21. George L. Mosse, “Die Entstehung des Faschismus,” in: Internationaler Faschismus 1920–1945, p. 29.