Ernst Hanfstaengl Quotes

Ernst Hanfstaengl's page delivers blunt, extremist commentary on politics and society, for those drawn to stark, controversial viewpoints.

19 quotes

1. The Jews who already have been ousted were put out because they were morally and politically unfit to safeguard German interests.

2. In the last 14 years Jewry has achieved positions of influence which it has grossly misused morally, financially and politically in an unheard-of manner, with the result that the German people crumbled morally, financially, and politically.

3. The same Jewry now is seeking to smirch Germany's renaissance.

4. Anti-Semitism is not based on strictly religious grounds and is not directed against the Jewish faith as such. However, all German Christians resent and denounce the fact that the Jews have been the chief advocates of atheism. They have influenced the workers' children through the Communist youth organizations, of which they are the leading spirit...

5. If we had wanted to conduct a pogrom against the Jews, it would all have been over now.

6. Tell him the Reichstag is burning.

7. The place looks like a delicatessen... You could have opened up a flower and fruit and wine shop with all the stuff stacked there. People were sending presents from all over Germany and Hitler had grown visibly fatter on the proceeds.

8. I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts.

9. Democracy has no convictions for which people would be willing to stake their lives.

10. What Hitler was able to do to a crowd in two and a half hours will never be repeated in 10,000 years. Because of his miraculous throat construction, he was able to create a rhapsody of hysteria. In time, he became the living unknown soldier of Germany.

11. An eccentric, gangling man, whose sardonic wit somewhat compensated for his shallow mind.

12. It is probably not true to say that there was a physical homosexual relationship between [Rudolf Hess and Hitler] but the attraction was there.

13. If it is not the fashion now, it will be later because I wear it.

14. Hitler wanted to hear all about the American skyscrapers ... but failed utterly to draw logical conclusions from the information. … He was passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own.

15. Hitler's historical hero had always been Frederick the Great. [Later], under Goebbels' prompting ... Napoleon emerged ... as his model. … Frederick the Great was a man who knew when to stop [and] Napoleon did not.

16. Schopenhauer had been Hitler's philosophical god in the early days. In power it was Nietzsche.

17. With Hitler it was all floating, without roots, intangible and mediumistic.

18. Hitler's mind was a deep-running river. You could never tell when something it had absorbed would bob to the surface again.

19. Most of the people near Hitler were mental breast-stroke swimmers.