20. Our approach here owes a good deal to the summing-up presented by H. R. Trevor-Roper in his fundamental lecture on “Hitler’s War Aims,” given at the 1959 congress of historians in Munich; cf. VJHfZ 1960:2, pp. 121 ff.
21. Mein Kampf, p. 649, 652.
22. Ibid., p. 654.
23. Ibid., pp. 654 f.
24. Nolte, Faschismus, pp. 135 f.
25. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 440: Speer’s letter to Hitler of March 29, 1945. Also IMT XLI, pp. 425 ff. Hitler’s speech at Erlangen is printed in Preiss, p. 171.
26. VB of March 7, 1925; also Heiden, Geschichte, p. 190.
27. Luedecke, p. 234.
28. Otto Strasser, Hitler und Ich, p. 113. According to this account, Goebbels made the demand in a speech that he delivered standing on a chair. With good reason doubts have been expressed about this scene; all the same, Gregor Strasser, who is more credible than his brother, confirmed it. Helmut Heiber may therefore be right in his conjecture that Goebbels actually uttered the words in dispute, but not under the dramatic circumstances described by Otto Strasser; rather, that he spoke in these terms to a small group, in conversation. Cf. Goebbels-Tagebuch 1925–26, p. 56.
29. These drawings cannot be definitely dated. According to Albert Speer, who bases his opinion on remarks by Hitler, the sketches date from this period. On the other hand, Speer’s office manager, Apel, who drew up a list of the Hitler sketches in the architect’s possession, assigns the date “about 1924” to the drawing of the “Grand Triumphal Arch,” the “Great Hall,” the “Berlin South Station,” and the “Berlin State Library.” Some of the sketches are reproduced in Speer’s Inside the Third Reich.
30. Cf. Goebbels-Tagebuch 1925–26, p. 60; also Hinrich Lohse, Der Fall Strasser, p. 5.
31. Sir Nevile Henderson, The Failure of a Mission, Berlin 1937—1939, p. 282.
32. Goebbels-Tagebuch, pp. 92 ff.
33. The report also states: “Violently firing their revolvers and employing iron flagpoles like lances, the National Socialists penetrated the ranks of the Communists. Nine lightly injured and five gravely injured persons were removed from the scene of the battle.” A month before, a battle in the Pharus Halls in Berlin’s North End had ended with ninety-eight serious casualties. After it Goebbels wrote triumphantly: “Since this day they know us in Berlin. We are not so naive as to believe that now everything has been done. Pharus is only a beginning.” See GoebbelsTagebuch, p. 119n.
34. Quoted in Heiden, Hitler, I, p. 242; see also Goebbels, “Der Führer als Staatsmann,” p. 51.
35. Sales began to rise significantly only after the NSDAP made its breakthrough and became a mass party. Wider distribution was helped by the issuance of a cheap edition costing eight marks for both volumes. In 1930, 54,086 copies were sold, in 1931, 50,808, and in 1932, 90,351; the following year the annual sale passed the 200,000 mark, and thereafter repeatedly exceeded it. In 1943, total sales of the book were alleged to be 9,840,000; cf. Hermann Hammer, “Die deutschen Ausgaben von Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” in: VJHfZ 1956:2, pp. 161 ff.
36. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 134; Shirer refers to a study by Professor Oron James Hale in The American Historical Review, July, 1955.
37. Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Munich, quoted in Tyreil, Führer befiehl…, pp. 269 ff. In this speech, also, Hitler referred, by way of comparison, to primitive Christianity.
38. Quoted in Tyrell, pp. 211 ff., also p. 196; see also Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Was My Friend, pp. 151 ff.
39. Preiss, p. 81.
BOOK IV
1. Bracher, Auflösung, p. 291.
2. Heiden, Hitler I, p. 268.
3. Quoted from Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 136.
4. A study by S. M. Lipset defines the typical Nazi voter as follows: “An independent Protestant member of the middle class who lived either on a farm or in a very small town and who formerly had voted for a centrist party or a regional party that opposed the power and influence of big industry and the unions”; cf. Nolte, Theorien, p. 463.
5. Frank, p. 58.
6. Quoted in Heiden, Hitler I, p. 275, and in Kühnl, Die nationalsozialistische Linke, p. 374.
7. Cf. Albert Krebs, Tendenzen und Gestalten der NSDAP, pp. 138 f.
8. The Daily Mail of September 24, 1930, quoted according to the VB of September 25. Lord Rothermere’s article began significantly by calling on Englishmen to change their conception of Germany which, he said, they remembered chiefly as prisoners of war. He pointed out that Germany was not free as other nations were; that the Allies had made the regaining of her full national freedom dependent upon payments and conditions imposed upon her against her will. And he asked whether it was wise to insist upon the ultimate letter of the law. It would be best for the welfare of Western civilization, he concluded, if there came to the helm in Germany a government permeated by the same healthy principles with which Mussolini had renewed Italy in the last eight years.
9. Quoted from Bullock, p. 163, and Frankfurter Zeitung, September 26, 1930. Cf. also Mein Kampf, p. 345: “The movement is anti-parliamentarian, and even its participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the gravest symptoms of mankind’s decay.”
10. Hitler’s statement is not complete and not recorded in the transcript of the trial; the quotations given here sum up the substance of different texts. See the attempt to reconstruct the exact wording on the basis of press reports in Peter Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozess, pp. 237 ff.
11. Willi Veller’s letter of August 16, 1930, abridged, quoted from Tyrell, pp. 297 f.
12. A. Fran?ois-Poncet, The Fateful Years, pp. 5 ff.
13. J. Curtius, Sechs Jahre Minister der deutschen Republik, p. 217.
14. Report of the British ambassador for July 16, 1931, cited from Bullock, pp. 177 f.
15. The meeting was continued in Berlin shortly afterward. According to the testimony of Ernst Poensgen, Hitler pleaded with the captains of industry to withdraw their support for Brüning, but without success. See Poensgen’s Erinnerungen, p. 4; also Dietrich, Mit Hitler in die Macht, p. 45.
16. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Erinnerungen, p. 103, adds to the remark on the postmaster generalship the anecdotal phrase: “Then he can lick my ass on the stamps.” Hindenburg habitually called Hitler the “Bohemian corporal” because he mistakenly assumed that Hitler came from Braunau in Bohemia. But it is also possible that he intended simultaneously to stress a certain foreignness and un-Germanness in Hitler, who struck him as “bohemian” in both senses of the word.
17. Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission, pp. 340, 346. Hitler made it clear that he could not be considered bourgeois in an interview with Hanns Johst published in Frankfurter Volksblatt, January 26, 1934. Cf. also Tischgespräche, p. 170.