On
this date, 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler and
Eva Braun commit suicide after being
married for one day. Soviet soldiers raise the Victory Banner over the
Reichstag building.
I
will post an article from Wikipedia together with other links, call, ‘Hitler’s
Table Talk’.
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Hitler’s
Table Talk [PHOTO SOURCE: http://eyeforknowledge.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/hitlers-table-talks-1941-1944-part-1/]
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Hitler's Table Talk (German: Tischgespräche) is the title given to a
series of World War II conversations and monologues delivered by Adolf Hitler,
which were transcribed from 1941 to 1944. Hitler's remarks were recorded by Heinrich Heim, Henry Picker, and Martin Bormann, and later published by
different editors, under different titles, in three different languages.
Martin
Bormann, who was serving as Hitler's private secretary, persuaded Hitler to
allow a team of specially picked officers to record in shorthand his private
conversations for posterity. The first notes were taken by the lawyer Heinrich
Heim, starting from 5 July 1941 to mid March 1942. Taking his place, Henry
Picker took notes from 21 March 1942 until 2 August 1942, after which Heinrich
Heim and Martin Bormann continued appending material off and on until 1944.
The
talks were recorded at the Führer Headquarters
in the company of Hitler's inner circle. The talks not only dwell on war and
foreign affairs, but also Hitler's characteristic attitudes on religion,
culture, philosophy, personal aspirations, and his feelings towards his enemies
and friends.
History
of the Table Talk
The
history of the document is relatively complex, as numerous individuals were
involved, working at different times, collating different parts of the work.
This effort spawned two distinct notebooks, which were translated into multiple
languages, and covered, in some instances, non-overlapping time-frames due to
ongoing legal and copyright issues.
All
editions and translations are based on the two original German notebooks, one
by Henry Picker, and another based on a more complete notebook by Martin
Bormann (which is often called the Bormann-Vermerke, or "Bormann
Notes"). Henry Picker was the first to publish the Table Talk,
doing so in 1951 in the original German. This was followed by the French
translation in 1952 by François
Genoud, a Swiss financier. The English edition came in 1953, which was
translated by R. H. Stevens and Norman Cameron and published under the
editorial hand of historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper. Both the French and English translations were based on the Bormann-Vermerke
manuscript, while Picker's volume was based on his original notes, as well as
the notes he directly acquired from Heinrich Heim spanning from 5 July 1941 to
March 1942. The original German content of the Bormann-Vermerke was not
published until 1980 by historian Werner Jochmann. However Jochmann's edition
is not complete, as it lacks the 100 entries made by Picker between 12 March
and 1 September 1942.
Albert
Speer, who was the Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi
Germany, confirmed the authenticity of Henry Picker's Table Talk in his
1976 memoirs. Speer stated that Hitler often spoke long-windedly about his
favorite subjects, while dinner guests were reduced to silent listeners. In the
presence of his "superiors by birth and education" Hitler made a
sincere effort to "present his thoughts in as impressive manner as
possible." It is important to remember, Speer noted, "this collection
includes only those passages in Hitler's monologues—they took up one to two
hours every day—which struck Picker as significant. Complete transcripts would
reinforce the sense of stifling boredom."
According
to historian Max Domarus, Hitler insisted on absolute silence when he delivered
his monologues. No one was allowed to interrupt or contradict him. Magda
Goebbels reported to Galeazzo Ciano that, "It is always Hitler who
talks! He can be Führer as much as he likes, but he always repeats himself and
bores his guests."
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Hitler’s
Table Talk 1941 to 1944 [PHOTO SOURCE: http://eyeforknowledge.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/hitlers-table-talks-1941-1944-part-1/]
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Controversies
Although
considered authentic, contentious issues remain over particular aspects of the
work, including the reliability of particular translated statements within the
French and English editions, the questionable manner in which Martin Bormann
may have edited his notes, and disputes over which edition is most reliable. As
a result, a high level of critical awareness of its potential drawbacks as a
source is advisable when using Table Talk.
Hitler's comments on religion
Between
1941 and 1944, the period in which the Table Talk was being transcribed,
a number of Hitler's intimates cite him expressing negative views of
Christianity, including Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann.
However Nazi General Gerhard Engel reports that in 1941 Hitler asserted,
"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." Similarly
Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber reported that Hitler
"undoubtedly lives in belief in God ... He recognizes Christianity as
the builder of western culture." Ian Kershaw
concluded that Hitler had deceived Faulhaber, noting his "evident ability
to simulate, even to potentially critical church leaders, an image of a leader
keen to uphold and protect Christianity". The Table Talk indicates
Hitler continued to wish for a united Christian Church of Germany for some time
after 1937, in line with his earlier policy of uniting all the churches to
bring them more firmly under Nazi control, so they would support Nazi policy
and act as a unifying rather than divisive force in Germany, that had largely
proven unsuccessful. By 1940, however, it was public knowledge that Hitler had
abandoned even the syncretist idea of a positive Christianity. Instead, after
1938 Hitler began to publicly support a Nazified version of science,
particularly social Darwinism, at the core of Nazi ideology in
place of a religious one - a development that is reflected in private in his
increasingly hostile remarks towards religion in Table Talk.
In
the Table Talk, Hitler praised Julian the Apostate's Three Books Against the Galilaeans,
an anti-Christian tract from AD 362. In the entry dated 21 October 1941 Hitler
stated, "When one thinks of the opinions held concerning Christianity by
our best minds a hundred, two hundred years ago, one is ashamed to realise how
little we have since evolved. I didn't know that Julian the Apostate had passed
judgment with such clear-sightedness on Christianity and Christians ...
the Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite
different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up His position
against Jewry ... and it's certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by
the way, regarded Him as the son of a whore—of a whore and a Roman soldier. The
decisive falsification of Jesus's doctrine was the work of St. Paul ...
Paul of Tarsus (his name was Saul, before the road to Damascus) was one of
those who persecuted Jesus most savagely." And author Konrad Heiden has
quoted Hitler as stating, "We do not want any other god than Germany
itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for
Germany."
This
led to a widespread consensus among historians, sustained over a long period of
time following the initial work of William
Shirer in the 1960s, that Hitler was anti-clerical.
This continues to be the mainstream position on Hitler's religious views, and
these views continue to be supported by quotations from the English translation
of Table Talk. The remarks that continue to be widely accepted as genuine
include such quotes as 'Christianity is the prototype of Bolshevism: the
mobillization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining
society.' Table Talk also attributes to Hitler a confidence in science
over religion: "Science cannot lie ... It's Christianity that's the
liar". Michael Burleigh contrasted Hitler's public pronouncements on
Christianity with those in Table Talk, suggesting that Hitler's real
religious views were 'a mixture of materialist biology, a faux-Nietzschean
contempt for core, as distinct from secondary, Christian values, and a visceral
anti-clericalism.' Richard Evans also reiterated the view that Nazism was
secular, scientific and anti-religious in outlook in the last volume of his
trilogy on Nazi Germany, writing, 'Hitler's hostility to Christianity reached
new heights, or depths, during the war;' his source for this was the 1953
English translation of Table Talk. Ian Kershaw notes, however, that they
are imperfect translations, with a tendency to miss words and leave out lines.
He uses the original German sources for preference, advising 'due caution' in
using the English translations.
In
2003 two challenges appeared to this consensus view. One was from Richard Steigmann-Gall. As part of a wider
thesis that portrayed Hitler as at least a cultural Christian, he argued that several
passages in Table Talk revealed Hitler to be a great admirer of the
cultural aspects of Christianity, and somebody who held Jesus in high esteem.
He also suggested that the conversations do not reveal Hitler as an atheist or
an agnostic, a worldview Hitler continued to denigrate the Soviet Union for
promoting. However, he admitted that they showed an 'unmistakable rupture' with
Hitler's earlier religious views, which Steigmann-Gall characterised as
Christian. He attributes this to Hitler's anger at his failure to exert control
over the German churches, and suggests it was not anger at Christianity itself.
Steigmann-Gall's views proved highly controversial, although as John S. Conway
pointed out, the differences between his thesis and the earlier consensus were
mostly about the 'degree and timing' of Nazi anti-clericalism.
In
the same year, the historical validity of remarks in the English and French
translations of Table Talk dating from the 1950s was challenged in a new
partial translation by Richard Carrier and Reinhold Mittschang, who went
so far as to call them 'entirely untrustworthy', suggesting they had been
altered by Francois Genoud as part of a deliberate forgery to
enhance Hitler's views. They put forward a new translation of twelve quotations
from the text preserved at the Library of Congress which portrayed Hitler as a
committed Christian, leading Carrier to the conclusion Hitler was 'a candid
(and bigoted) Protestant.' Genoud (who died in 1996) had specifically denied
earlier claims that he had inserted words in the manuscript, pointing out that
it was close-typed apart from handwritten additions by Bormann and therefore
such insertions would not have been possible. Carrier's thesis has never been
accepted by historians, including Steigmann-Gall, who despite seeing a
pre-publication copy of Carrier's article accepted Kershaw's warning to use
'due caution' and elected to treat Table Talk as a viable source.
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