Is there evidence that Hitler ever said: “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”? The simple answer to this question is: no, there is currently no evidence that Hitler ever said this. The attribution of the quotation to Hitler is almost certainly apocryphal, and it probably originated in English language anti-German wartime propaganda. No major modern historian specialising in the National Socialist era ever repeats this quote, and it seems that the universal dismissal of this alleged quote by modern professional historians appears to be fully justified.
For example, none of the major biographies of Hitler by Allan Bullock, Sir Ian Kershaw (volume I and II), Joachim Fest, Peter Longerich, Michael Lynch, John Toland and Volker Ullrich have felt fit to include this “quote”, since it carries neither a date nor place of utterance let alone a verifiable primary source. Other major historiographies of the Dritte Reich that fail to repeat the quote include the four-volume Third Reich series by Sir Richard J. Evans, the two-volume series by Zara Steiner (The Lights that Failed and Triumph of the Dark) and studies of the Holocaust by Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich, Hans Mommsen, Raul Hilberg (three volumes), Saul Friedländer (Nazi Germany and the Jews, volumes I and II), David Cesarani. Either the alleged “quote” is apocryphal and inauthentic, or the entirety of the modern academic literature on the Dritte Reich and Holocaust is wrong, and needs to be promptly thrown out and rewritten.
I will go into the authenticity of this quote in some detail, as we attempt to track down the elusive primary source for this oft-repeated quote.
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| The quote “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” was made up by the Allied war propaganda machine as an unquestionably witty satirical parody ridiculing Hitler by suggesting that his nation was now being run on operatic principles. However, this has not stopped humourless speculators actually taking it seriously |
It is, however, plausible that the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote is a misquotation from what Hitler said in a 1923 speech:
The reason we perceive the artist Richard Wagner as being great is because he represented heroic folklore, Germanness, in all his works. The Heroic is the Great. That is what our people long for.Den Künstler Richard Wagner empfinden wir deshalb so groß, weil er in allen seinen Werken das heldenhafte Volkstum, das Deutschtum darstellte. Das Heldenhafte ist das Große. Das ersehnt unser Volk.
Adolf Hitler: speech during NSDAP meeting in Nuremberg, 3rd November, 1923. From Sämtliche Aufzeichnung 1905-1924. Edited by von Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn. Stuttgart 1980, p. 1034
What Hitler says in this public speech is more consistent with the view found in Sir Ian Kershaw’s landmark bibliography of Hitler:
Hitler, the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure, wanted to live like a Wagnerian hero. He wanted to become himself a new Wagner—the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist. In Hitler’s mounting identity crisis following his rejection at the Academy of Arts, Wagner was for Hitler the artistic giant he had dreamed of becoming but knew he could never emulate, the incarnation of the triumph of aesthetics and the supremacy of art.
Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936
However, once the misquotation in the form of “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” has been let out of the bag, innumerable non-historians have continued to quote it repeatedly without ever once producing a primary source for it. The following are examples of the use of this alleged “quote”.
Shirer
Written by a journalist, William Shirer’s populist book, universally dismissed by historians, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), is infamous for its “Luther to Hitler” theory footing the blame for World War II and the Holocaust on Martin Luther. Shirer writes in the chapter of his book entitled The Intellectual Roots of the Third Reich:
“Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”, Hitler used to say.* This may have been based on a partial misconception of the great composer, for though Richard Wagner harbored a fanatical hatred [no supportive citation], as Hitler did, for the Jews [no supportive citation], who he was convinced were out to dominate the world with their money [no supportive citations], and though he scorned parliaments and democracy [no supportive citations] and the materialism and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie, he also fervently hoped that the Germans, “with their special gifts”, would “become not rulers, but ennoblers of the world” [no citation, but this comes from “Wollen Wir Hoffen?”].
Shirer: p.101If you look up the citation* Shirer has substituted a “recollection” for a primary bibliographic source citation:
* My own recollection [sic] is confirmed by Otto Tolischus in his They Wanted War, p. 11.
It is surprising that this is all that Shirer has to say for himself—that it is little more than some casual “recollection”. He does not say where and where he “recollected” first encountering this quotation. For all we know it could be just a recollection of rumour and hearsay. He fails to mention whether he recollected hearing Hitler say this to him in person (Shirer was never granted an interview with Hitler), whether he heard Hitler say this in a public broadcast or during one of the public rallies at which Shirer was present as a reporter, whether he might have read it somewhere without recollecting where, or whether he recollected hearing some rumour about Hitler saying it. Hitler’s public speeches have all been published and can be referenced, but there is no evidence that he publicly uttered the quote in question. The most likely scenario is that Shirer “recollected” this quote from a reading Otto Tolischus decades before.
Shirer repeats the alleged quotation again a couple of pages later:
But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.
Again, there is no citation as attest to the authenticity of the source of the alleged “recollection”. It seems he operates on the principle that “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself”.
This pattern is fairly typical. You look for a primary source citation, only to find you are referred to another dubious secondary source, which often refers to another secondary source, and so on until you hit a complete dead end, although all roads end up pointing back to Otto Tolischus. It is highly probable that the quotation originated from Otto Tolischus.
Of further interest is the fact that in Shirer’s 1961 book, The Rise and Fall of Hitler, he omits the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” recollection. Although a Hitler biography would have been the perfect place to use the quote, the fact that even Shirer starts to disregard it is highly suggestive that even he may have started to be troubled by gnawing doubt as to its authenticity.
Tolischus
I decided I would try to hunt down the citation given by Shirer to Otto D. Tolischus and his book They Wanted War (1940) and put this book on order. Here it is:
Tolischus was a journalist for the New York Times and worked in Berlin until his expulsion in 1940. It appears that his 1940 book is the first publication to carry this quotation that reduces the whole of WWII down to nothing more than a “super-Wagnerian opera” production enacted on the world’s stage. The source of our quote is probably Tolischus himself, who almost certainly made it up. The date of publication strongly suggests that it was a piece of Allied war propagandist satire concocted to make the National Socialists look utterly ridiculous by suggesting that a whole nation was now being governed solely according to the histrionic principles of nineteenth-century operatic theory. Wagner has always been a favourite target of comedians and satirists depicting fat ladies in horned helmets cavalcading around on tiny toy horses:
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| Wagner has always been a favourite target of comedians and satirists |
There is also a popular legend linking Wagnerianism with madness:
Not only does [Wagner’s] music seem to have a particular appeal to the isolated and the odd; there is actually a long-standing belief that some people are unhinged by it. As long ago as 1891 The Musical Times quoted The Boston Home Journal as saying: ‘Marie Wilt, the soprano who lately committed suicide, once learned the part of Brünnhilde in three weeks’. “That finished me’’, she said shortly before her death. ... Ander went mad studying Tristan, and Scaria after Parsifal died insane. ... Wagner himself feared that something of the sort might be true. He once began a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck with the words:
... ‘I’m afraid the opera [Tristan] will be forbidden—unless the whole thing is turned into a parody by bad production—: only mediocre performances can save me! Completely good ones are bound to drive people mad,—I cannot imagine what else could happen.’
Bryan Magee: Aspects of Wagner, p43
There is also the example of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, another Wagner enthusiast who had gone mad. So it was only logical to suggest that Hitler was a twentieth century King Ludwig who had become “unhinged” by listening to too much opera, causing him to lead an opera company thinly disguised as a political party to stage World War II as a “super-Wagnerian opera turned into grim reality”. One would have to be a bore indeed not to concede that it is a delightfully witty and cute piece of period political satire. It is entirely understandable that this witticism remains so popular.
Historically, such colourful anecdotes belong firmly amongst the stories propagated by Allied propaganda about Hitler’s real name being Schicklgruber (Heil Schicklgruber!), that he suffered mental instability caused by latent homosexuality (an accusation which was based on the astonishing fact that it was historically considered a shameful mental illness and a “sexual perversion”), had gone berserk after losing a testicle from a shrapnel wound (“Hitler has only got one ball”), or that he had gone stark raving mad from quaternary neurosyphilis contracted from sex with a Jewish rentboy.
I tracked down a used copy of the book by Tolischus, and precisely as predicted, the book lacks anything resembling a credible bibliographic citation for the primary source of our mythical quote:
“Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”, Adolf Hitler has often told his friends; and the whole National Socialist regime, which finds its foundation in the Germanic mythos and the cult of the heroic, is in fact unthinkable without Wagner and all he represents. In that sense the whole present war resolves itself into a super-Wagnerian opera turned into grim reality.
Tolischus: They Wanted War, p11, New York 1940
The speculative nature of the book is attested to by the lack of any bibliography throughout the book. There are no footnotes or endnotes anywhere in the book that might reveal the primary source of the so-called “quote”.
The word that arouses suspicion is “often”. If Hitler did indeed “often” say this, why is it that the primary source for this quotation is almost impossible to track down? Did Hitler even have any real “friends” in the conventional sense of the word? And if so, who are all of these “friends” that Hitler reportedly said this to so “often”? How did Tolischus gain access to them when even German journalists were never granted access to Hitler’s personal life? If several of these “friends” could testify to Hitler saying this, it might be convincing, but we aren’t given any names to chase up. When and where did Hitler say this? Did he state it in a public speech where we could track the statement down easily? In which decade of his political career did he make this statement? If Hitler did “often” say this, you would think you would easily be able to find multiple corroborative sources confirming the veracity of this quote as being a genuine utterance by Hitler. Yet absolutely not a single corroborative source has emerged in the 75 years since Tolischus published his wonderfully cutesy witticism. Many of Hitler’s personal entourage (his valet, cook, chauffeur, interpreter, pilot, secretaries, press photographer, a bodyguard) left memoirs and none of them corroborates the veracity of the quote. General Heinz Guderian and Albert Speer also left extensive memoirs, and despite having spent a great many hours with Hitler, yet neither of them corroborates the veracity of the quote.
The appearance of the quote in Tolischus (1940) is the earliest example of its appearance in print in any language. This shows that the original version of the quote was in English rather than German. In other words, the quote originated from outside of National Socialist Germany and did not come from Hitler at all. Since every attempt to trace the origin of this quote inevitably lead back to Tolischus, it is almost certain that Tolischus himself made it up, and that it is a bit like writing that:
“Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must understand that the moon is made of cheese”, Adolf Hitler often told his friends... In that sense the whole present war resolves into a lunar-cheese factory turned into grim reality.
However, like the frightfully homophobic allegations about Hitler being gay etc, this sort of war propaganda cum political satire has long outlived its usefulness, and can no longer be taken seriously today by anyone who wishes to study history. That would be taking the joke too seriously and to write history as a farce. Unfortunately for many humourless bores, the Nazi opera conspiracy theory remains a highly seductive piece of Allied propaganda inciting anti-German hatred, with Wagner turned into a satirical caricature of the original Hun of German history. Unfortunately, merely repeating the same piece of satirical distortion over and over until it becomes “The Truth” is simply unhelpful in gaining serious insight into the history of this seminal epoch. It is hardly any more a pro-Nazi position to debunk the Nazi opera myth than it is to debunk the frightfully dated homophobic myth about Hitler’s genocidal tendencies being caused by his alleged latent homosexuality.
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| Allied war propaganda blamed Hitler’s alleged latent homosexuality for the war. |
Sherratt
Despite the dubiousness of the authenticity of the source, Shirer continues to be quoted as though he were a credible primary source citation. For example, in her 2014 book Hitler’s Philosophers, Yvonne Sherratt states that:
In Mein Kampf, Hitler also wrote of Wagner as one of the intellectual precursors of National Socialism for not only his music but his anti-Semitism struck a chord. Hitler’s identification with Wagner was so profound that Hitler declared “to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner”.
Their life and work will be pursued in touchingly grateful admiration, and especially uplift broken hearts and despairing souls again on gloomy days.
To these belong also the great fighters of this world, who, though not understood at present, nonetheless have carried out the fight for their ideas and ideals. They are those who some day will stand close to the heart of the people. To these belong not only the great statesmen but also the great reformers. Alongside Frederick the Great stands also Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
Ihr Leben und Wirken wird in rührend dankbarer Bewunderung verfolgt und vermag besonders in trüben Tagen gebrochene Herzen und verzweifelnde Seelen wieder zu erheben.
Zu ihnen aber sind zu rechnen die großen Kämpfer auf dieser Welt, die, von der Gegenwart nicht verstanden, dennoch den Streit um ihre Idee und Ideale durchzufechten bereit sind. Sie sind diejenigen, die einst am meisten dem Herzen des Volkes nahestehen werden . . . Hierzu gehören aber nicht nur die wirklich großen Staatsmänner, sondern auch alle sonstigen großen Reformatoren. Neben Friedrich dem Großen stehen hier Martin Luther sowie Richard Wagner.
It is hardly any more permissible to use this to claim that Martin Luther was the primary source of Hitler’s anti-Semitism as it is to claim he got it off Frederick the Great or Richard Wagner.Mein Kampf, p.232 (Die Marathonläufer der Geschichte—The Marathon Runners of History). My translation. Edition: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Verlag Franz Eher Nachf.,G.m.b.H.; Munich, 1943.
This is one of two brief sections of Mein Kampf where Wagner is actually discussed. The second mention is a couple of sentences in which he speaks of his youthful enthusiasm for Wagner as a twelve-year-old boy. In particular, Hitler never states, either in Mein Kampf, or anywhere else, that Wagner (or for that matter Martin Luther) was the source of his anti-Semitism or political ideology. Or to quote Sir Richard J. Evans:
[Wagner’s] influence on Hitler has often been exaggerated. Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism, and there is no evidence that he actually read any of Wagner’s writings.
Evans: The Third Reich in Power (my emphasis)
If Sherratt wishes to disagree with leading historians as to the origins of National Socialist anti-Semitic ideology, and argue that either Wagner, Martin Luther, or Frederick the Great were the source of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, she needs to provide at least a scrap of primary supportive evidence before drastically rewriting the history of the Holocaust as it is currently understood by academics specialising in this field. Nor do historians today think that Hitler developed into a committed fascist before the 1920s, let alone in 1901 upon becoming infatuated with Wagner as a twelve-year-old boy, in the manner of a twentieth-century twelve-year-old boy’s infatuation with a rock star.
Sherratt also gives us the misleading impression that the quote “to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner” also comes from Mein Kampf. In fact, the citation she gives for that “quotation” turns out to be William Shirer, but then she oddly adds a footnote in which she quotes Shirer saying that “My recollection is confirmed by Otto Tolischus in his They Wanted War, p.11”. Yet if Tolischus is correct in saying that Hitler “often” said this, then it should be easy for Sherratt to corroborate the veracity of this quote from these other sources by coming up with a primary source citation. Unfortunately, after over seventy years, not a single primary corroborative source has ever come to light, so in the absence of a credible primary source, all authors can do is quote secondary sources until they end up going around in circles quoting each other’s dubious secondary references like a dog chasing its own tail.
On the other hand, Hitler does say in Mein Kampf that:
If the Jew gains victory over the people of this world with the help of his Marxist Confession of Faith, then his crown will become the Dance of Death [Totentanz] over the human race . . . That is why I believe that I am acting as the agent of the Almighty Creator. In that I warding off the Jews, I am fighting to do the Lord’s work.
Siegt der Jude mit Hilfe seines marxistischen Glaubens-bekenntnisses über die Völker dieser Welt, dann wird seine Krone der Totentanz der Menschheit sein . . . So glaube ich heute im Sinne des allmächtigen Schöpfers zu handeln: Indem ich mich des Juden erwehre, kämpfe ich für das Werk des Herrn.
Mein Kampf: p.69. Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1943 edition, Munich
The implication is that he is doing his job as a good Christian to avenge the “murder of God” by the Jews. Clearly, Sherratt’s dubious attempt to shift blame away from Luther onto Wagner as the source of Hitler’s exterminatory anti-Semitism in popular opinion is an underhand attempt by the Christian right to protect the German churches, indeed Christianity itself, from being implicated in complicity with the regime.
Viereck
It appears that another one of the earliest published appearances of the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote was in right-wing writer Peter Viereck’s 1941 book (originally his PhD thesis), Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler.
This is an entirely dated wartime propaganda book which relies heavily on largely discredited sources, particularly Rauschning, but also to some degree Kubizek. For a detailed discussion of the reliability of sources please see this post critiquing Köhler’s use of Rauschning and Kubizek.
In both the original and later editions of the book, Viereck places great weight on our alleged Hitler quotation to the point that he repeats it three times. As a result of his heavy reliance on it, Viereck’s own credibility stands or falls by the credibility of the quote in question. In the final 2006 edition, as in its first appearance in the 1940s, it appears accompanied by claims that Viereck knew Hitler’s deepest emotions:
Though he knew much of Wagner’s prose by heart [no supportive citation], it is the operas that were the main source of emotion throughout Hitler’s life [no supportive citation], a deeper emotion than with any man or woman [no supportive citation]. Already in the 1941 edition I quoted Hitler’s statement that “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” [no supportive citation]... And what must you know to understand Hitler? I leave that to the biographer...
Come 2006, Viereck had had plenty of time to come up with a credible source for the quotation, but even after 65 years, we are left empty-handed. Viereck’s book shows pervasive signs of having been heavily influenced by Tolischus, virtually to the point of outright plagiarism. At least Shirer admitted that he “recollected” the quote from Tolischus, but Viereck is not even honest enough to admit that, although at the end of his life, the 89-year-old Viereck did turn against the Nazi opera conspiracy literature complaining of the rampant proliferation of “countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler”.
It should be noted once again that Sir Richard J. Evans states no credible evidence has come to light showing that Hitler was familiar with Wagner’s theoretical prose writings:
[Wagner’s] influence on Hitler has often been exaggerated. Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism, and there is no evidence that he actually read any of Wagner’s writings.
Evans: The Third Reich in Power (my emphasis)
How Viereck managed in 1941—a time when Hitler’s personal life was kept so shrouded in mystery that the existence of Eva Braun was not even known to the world—to penetrate so deeply into the “main source of emotion throughout Hitler’s life” other than by psychic powers of mindreading is left to the reader’s imagination. Even more remarkable is that Viereck managed this all from the safety of Harvard University campus where he was a student. Not even approved German journalists were given such intimate access to Hitler’s personal life of the sort Viereck implied he might have obtained, to the point of knowing what the “the main source of emotion throughout Hitler’s life” might have been. It seems we are to believe that Germany’s humiliating defeat in WWI had not the slightest emotional impact on him and that everything he stood for could be reduced down to little more than a hysterical reaction to nineteenth-century opera instead. Viereck then repeats this “quotation” a second time:
CHAPTER VI. HITLER AND WAGNER
Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner [no supportive citation]
— CHANCELLOR ADOLF HITLER
Viereck repeats it for the third time:
Hitler has said: “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”. [no supportive citation] According to Goebbels, Hitler has seen Die Meistersinger more than one hundred times! [no supportive citation]
Here is a scan of the original text:
I have done an extensive search of the bibliography section of the book and once again have ended up completely empty handed as to what the primary source of the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quotation might have been. We are left feeling that if Viereck thinks that if he says “Hitler said that the moon is made of cheese” several times over, it then becomes the truth.
It should also be mentioned that the quote “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself” is often attributed to Goebbels, and alleged to be the central guiding principle by which he ran his propaganda ministry. However, this quote, too, is apocryphal, and there is no evidence that he ever articulated such a principal. It is high irony indeed that the apocryphal quote has been falsely attributed to Goebbels so many times thousands of time that people have come to believe it. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Goebbels did, however, accuse Churchill of using this technique:
The astonishing thing is that Mr. Churchill, a genuine John Bull, holds to his lies, and in fact repeats them until he himself believes them. That is an old English trick. Mr. Churchill does not need to perfect it, as it is one of the familiar tactics of British politics, known to the entire world. They made good use of the trick during the World War, with the difference that world opinion believed it then, which cannot be said today.
In Churchill’s Lie Factory by Joseph Goebbels. “Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik,” Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1941), pp. 364-369.
This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!Once again no credible primary source has ever been found for this fictitious quote. In fact, the National Socialists loved guns and even had a militia armed to the teeth known as the Sturmabteilung (SA) or Storm Troopers. Or perhaps the NRA want to argue that if only the Communist Party militia had been better armed, they might have successfully resisted the SA.
Even whole books full of “conversations” with Hitler, such as those published by Hermann Rauschning, have proven to be completely fictitious. All of this means authors have to be meticulous in checking the authenticity of primary sources before citing them.
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| The Hitler diaries turned out to be another spectacular forgery. The forger managed to get them “authenticated” by right-wing historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and sold exclusive rights to Stern for 9 million Deutsche Marks. |
According to one internet rumour, Viereck reputedly gave the source of the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” Hitler quotation as Joseph Goebbels - Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlerei (1941):
You can see that the citation number 10 seen at the bottom of p.133 of Viereck’s book is not to the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote in question, but for the statements that follow that quote about some ‘mystic “destiny”’ that it is claimed that Goebbels allegedly links to Wagner. Viereck’s citation to Goebbels’s book refers to page 4 of the 22nd edition of the book. In case Goebbels was the elusive source of our Hitler quotation, I have carefully looked through each page of Goebbels’s book, and even then I cannot for all the world find the alleged Hitler quote anywhere in the book. If you look at the beginning of Goebbels’s book, there is mention of Schicksal (destiny):
Page 4 of both the 4th and 33rd editions are blank. The written text in both the 4th and 33rd editions begins on page 7, and the only passage mentioning “destiny” (Schicksal) at the start of the book is this. Wagner’s name only makes its first appearance on page 90. There is no mention of Wagner around the start of the book and Viereck’s assumption that when Goebbels mentions “the poet’s words” he must be talking about Wagner here is entirely baseless.
The edition of Goebbels’s book which has been painstakingly searched for a source for our quote, from beginning to end, is the later 33rd edition (rather than the 22nd edition that Viereck cites). You can also easily download the 4th edition of this book. Once again, the quote where Hitler is supposed to have said “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” is absent in the earlier 4th edition of Goebbels's book. While it is possible that the quotation appeared after the 4th edition in the 22nd edition, only to disappear again in later editions, I remain deeply sceptical. In any case, as you can see from the scan of the text above, Viereck does not directly cite Goebbels’s book as the source for the particular quotation “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” anyway. To exclude the possibility that a credible source citation was published in the original 1941 edition of Viereck’s Metapolitics only to be deleted in later editions, I obtained a used 1941 original pressing of Viereck’s book. I can confirm that a primary source citation to our mythical “quote’ is equally absent in the earlier edition.
In conclusion, Viereck’s use of Goebbels’s book fails to provide a primary source citation for the elusive source of the quotation “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”. Nor does Viereck’s use of Goebbels’s text support his claim that Hitler spoke about a ‘mystic “destiny”’ linking himself to Wagner. You would surely think that if an author quoted a statement three times, he would have the basic academic decency to at least give us the primary source citation once, preferably on its first appearance. It is utterly ridiculous that I have to spend years hunting through multiple editions of entire books and archives searching for the primary source for mythical citations as elusive as unicorns. The onus to cite credible source citations always lies squarely on the shoulders of the author, and the reader must not be sent out on a wild-goose chase searching for it. Unfortunately for Viereck, who is now dead and unable to tell us where he sourced his quote, we must conclude that unless a credible primary source citation for this quotation can be found, we will have to declare it apocryphal.
You can see that the citation number 10 seen at the bottom of p.133 of Viereck’s book is not to the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote in question, but for the statements that follow that quote about some ‘mystic “destiny”’ that it is claimed that Goebbels allegedly links to Wagner. Viereck’s citation to Goebbels’s book refers to page 4 of the 22nd edition of the book. In case Goebbels was the elusive source of our Hitler quotation, I have carefully looked through each page of Goebbels’s book, and even then I cannot for all the world find the alleged Hitler quote anywhere in the book. If you look at the beginning of Goebbels’s book, there is mention of Schicksal (destiny):
We have every reason to be grateful to destiny [Schicksal] that it made us witness to this time. ... Here, too, again as with all historical processes, be they wars or revolutions, the truth of the poet’s words are confirmed, that only he wins in life who is prepared and determined to live it.
Wir haben allen Grund dem Schicksal dankbar zu sein, daß es uns dieser Zeit miterleben ließ. ... Auch hier hat sich wieder wie bei aller geschichtlichen Prozeßen, seien es nun Kriege oder Revolutionen, die Wahrheit des Dichterwortes bestätigt, das nur der das Leben gewinnt, der es auch einzusetzen bereit und entschlossen ist.
Goebbels Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlerei, 33rd Ed., p10
Page 4 of both the 4th and 33rd editions are blank. The written text in both the 4th and 33rd editions begins on page 7, and the only passage mentioning “destiny” (Schicksal) at the start of the book is this. Wagner’s name only makes its first appearance on page 90. There is no mention of Wagner around the start of the book and Viereck’s assumption that when Goebbels mentions “the poet’s words” he must be talking about Wagner here is entirely baseless.
The edition of Goebbels’s book which has been painstakingly searched for a source for our quote, from beginning to end, is the later 33rd edition (rather than the 22nd edition that Viereck cites). You can also easily download the 4th edition of this book. Once again, the quote where Hitler is supposed to have said “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” is absent in the earlier 4th edition of Goebbels's book. While it is possible that the quotation appeared after the 4th edition in the 22nd edition, only to disappear again in later editions, I remain deeply sceptical. In any case, as you can see from the scan of the text above, Viereck does not directly cite Goebbels’s book as the source for the particular quotation “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” anyway. To exclude the possibility that a credible source citation was published in the original 1941 edition of Viereck’s Metapolitics only to be deleted in later editions, I obtained a used 1941 original pressing of Viereck’s book. I can confirm that a primary source citation to our mythical “quote’ is equally absent in the earlier edition.
In conclusion, Viereck’s use of Goebbels’s book fails to provide a primary source citation for the elusive source of the quotation “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”. Nor does Viereck’s use of Goebbels’s text support his claim that Hitler spoke about a ‘mystic “destiny”’ linking himself to Wagner. You would surely think that if an author quoted a statement three times, he would have the basic academic decency to at least give us the primary source citation once, preferably on its first appearance. It is utterly ridiculous that I have to spend years hunting through multiple editions of entire books and archives searching for the primary source for mythical citations as elusive as unicorns. The onus to cite credible source citations always lies squarely on the shoulders of the author, and the reader must not be sent out on a wild-goose chase searching for it. Unfortunately for Viereck, who is now dead and unable to tell us where he sourced his quote, we must conclude that unless a credible primary source citation for this quotation can be found, we will have to declare it apocryphal.
As a curious aside, there are other juicy quotes in Goebbels’s book such as:
Above all, the richness of Puccini’s melody is always gripping and delightful. He is a musician of flesh and blood.
Vor allem die Melodienfülle Puccinis ist immer wieder ergreifend und entzückend. Er ist ein Musiker von Fleisch und Blut.
Goebbels: 17th February, 1932.
I look forward to reading about Puccini’s Hitler—The Prophet and his Disciple soon, where the whole of Italian and German fascism is reduced to nothing but the attempt to “transform the world into a Puccini opera”.
In Goebbels’s whole book there is only one direct quotation of the actual words spoken by Hitler, and it has nothing to do with Wagner:
“If the Party is ever eliminated, then I will end it all in 3 minutes with a pistol”
„Wenn die Partei einmal entfällt, dann mache ich in 3 Minuten mit der Pistole Schluß”
Goebbels: 8 December 1932, p220
Readers keen enough may want to pay large sums of money to spend hours hunting through the online archives of the diaries of Joseph Goebbels. There are pages of hits to a search of the word “Wagner” (not necessarily Richard Wagner either, as there are several other unrelated figures from the era with the same surname). Viereck would not have had access to these archives when he first quoted Hitler as allegedly saying that “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”. However, it is beginning to sound like a complete wild-goose chase.
Zalampas
Sherree Zalampas in her book Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of His Views on Architecture Art and Music also quotes Hitler as saying “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” with a supportive bibliographic citation to Gilbert:
Her citation 127 of chapter 3 appears to be to p.48 of G.M. Gilbert’s The Psychology of Dictatorship, 1950, although she makes it unclear if the citation is for the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote. The other string of “quotes” she has strung together lack any citation. Zalampas claims that Hitler said that “I have the most initiates [sic] familiarity with Wagner’s mental processes”, that “at every stage of my life I come back to him”, and that he had no other “forerunner”, before reputedly becoming hysterical in realising some sort of “psychological kinship with Wagner”. These string of fake quotes come from the pen of Hermann Rauschning, who also has Hitler amusingly pointing into empty space, while shrieking “there, there, in the corner!” Unfortunately, by the time Zalampas had published her book in 1990, Rauschning’s memoirs had long been exposed as frauds, hence the reason for obfuscating the matter by systematically avoiding a bibliographic source citation.
It is now clear why Zalampas avoids inserting a bibliographic citation to Rauschning and instead makes it appear as though Gilbert is the supportive source citation. It is because Zalampas knows that she might as well have inserted a bibliographic citation to a short story by Guy de Maupassant, and is working on the assumption that nobody will track down the source citation to Gilbert that is substituted.
G.M. Gilbert was a psychologist to many of the key National Socialist figures on trial in Nuremberg. Wikipedia tells us that:
In 1945, after the end of the war, Gilbert was sent to Nuremberg, Germany, as a translator for the International Military Tribunal for the trials of the World War II German prisoners. Gilbert was appointed the Prison Psychologist of the German prisoners. During the process of the trials Gilbert became, after the Dr Douglas Kelley, the confidant of Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Frank, Oswald Pohl, Otto Ohlendorf, Rudolf Höss, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, among others.
I after obtaining a copy of Gilbert’s book, I can assure the reader that p.48 contains not a single mention of Richard Wagner. In fact, here is a scan of the complete p.48 from this reference:
I have carefully searched through the rest of this otherwise excellent book just in case there was an error, but I can find nothing of the kind anywhere. It appears Zalampas made the string of “quotations” up and then added a citation to a random unrelated book. She might as well have cited p.48 of Moby Dick as the source of her fake series of so-called “quotations”, or better still, a short story by Guy de Maupassant.
Zalampas’s statement “there can be little doubt that Richard Wagner’s views were also supremely important to the development of Hitler’s Volkish ideology” is stated in a sweepingly just-so manner without a citation to back the claim up. The brazen words “there can be little doubt” takes the form of the argument: “there can be little doubt that the moon is made of cheese”. The claim to the incontestable certainty of the statement, banishing even the faintest shadow of doubt, is necessary as a counterbalance to the startling lack of evidence to lend even an ounce of credibility to her gross speculations. The less the evidence, the greater the certainty.
Zalampas also implies that Gilbert cited Hans Frank (a lawyer who played a major political role in the National Socialist regime) as the source of the quotes. I also obtained a copy of Hans Frank’s book In Ansicht des Galgens, Munich 1955, which is listed by Zalampas in the bibliography. There is absolutely nothing in Frank’s book to support the claim that he was the source of her string of alleged “quotations”.
Likewise, the claim by Zalampas that “Hitler boasted he had read everything the master [Wagner] had written” is also completely fictitious and lacking even an attempt at a made up supportive citation to a random page of Moby Dick or Alice in Wonderland. The way Zalampas uses bibliographic citations is tantamount to writing that “there can be little doubt that Hitler believed that the moon was made of cheese” followed by random “supportive” citations to pages from the writings of Lewis Carroll, Guy de Maupassant, or Herman Melville.
Köhler
You can easily see that Joachim Köhler and Viereck’s ideas aren’t all that original and are virtually plagiarised from Tolischus:
[In] the last radio address [Hitler] gave to the country, in January 1945, he repeated: ‘Only he who gave this task can release me from it.’... The nature of this task was certainly not to pursue a set of political aims, that is, to arrange the political and social realities of the time in the interests of the nation whose Chancellor he was. Reality meant for him the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama...
Joachim Köhler: Wagner’s Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple; p270 (my emphasis)
Köhler repeats the alleged Hitler quotation, except this time it is in a slightly different form:
We find casual remarks such as: ‘Wagner’s works are the embodiment of everything to which National Socialism aspires’ (VI-50), and: ‘In order to understand what National Socialism is, one must read Wagner’. (VI-51).
Köhler, p93, Wagner’s Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple.
Citation 50 in chapter VI is to a secondary source—as usual with such quotes. Any credible author would give us a primary source citation for this. The citation is to part II, p69 of Michael Karbaum’s 1976 book on the history of the Bayreuth Festivals. I have obtained the two-volume set from Germany. Here is the relevant quote and source citation on the page:
The time period is given as July 1925 (Juli, 1925) when Hitler first attended a performance of The Ring in Bayreuth. It is stated that at that time he was still barred from delivering speeches in public (Redeverbot). One evening, in a small and private gathering of a Bayreuth local group (Bayreuther Ortsgruppe) he is reported as stating that the works of Wagner contain everything in them that National Socialism aspires to. There are no quotation marks on the words and Köhler misleadingly implies that these are a direct quotation rather than the author’s fanciful interpretation for propaganda purposes. The anonymous writer is merely quoted as paraphrasing what Hitler allegedly stated. The source is given as Bavarian Ostmark, special edition 25./26. 7. 1936. Since no transcript of the speech remains, the rather propagandist tone of the final passage raises serious questions as to what Hitler exactly said, and whether it is a fanciful and exaggerated interpolation by the author to attempt to assert Bayreuth’s institutional allegiance to Hitler.
Prawy
However, Köhler’s citation number 51 in chapter VI, which is to p.47 of Marcel Prawy’s 1985 book on Richard Wagner is another dead end. Here is what Prawy has to say (my translation from German):
Adolf Hitler had said that one must read Wagner in order to understand what National Socialism is [no primary source citation]. Could he have admitted with the word “read” that there is no relationship to National Socialist thinking in Wagner’s musico-dramatic works?
Adolf Hitler hat gesagt, man müsse Wagner lesen, um zu verstehen, was Nationalsozialismus sei. Hat er mit dem Wort lesen zugegeben, daß sich in Wagners musikdramatischen Werken keine Beziehungen zu nationalsozialistischem Gedankengut fänden?
Here is a scan of the actual text so you can see for yourself that there is no bibliographic citation as to the primary source of this quotation:
I have looked in the bibliography section at the back of Prawy’s book, and I can assure you there is nothing to help us find the primary source there either. So once again, whenever this “quote” is repeated all you find is a train of unconvincing secondary sources leading to a total dead end.
Also of interest is that this appearance of our elusive “quote” may actually be its one of its earliest appearances in the German language. Note that the German version of the quote reads rather awkwardly, as well as having mangled wording that varies each time, all of which strongly suggests that it was originally in English, and then only later translated into German. It is actually impossible to say “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” in German. In German translation, it tends to sound stylistically stilted, in such a way that it loses the jingoistic punchiness it has in the original English i.e. “wer nationalsozialistische Deutschland verstehen will, muss Wagner kennen”.
The verb “kennen” (to know, to be acquainted with) is similar to the French verb “connaître” that likewise tends to cause vast confusion amongst English speakers. The trouble is that “kennen” here means that Hitler recommends that one make one’s personal acquaintance with Richard Wagner: “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must make his personal acquaintance with Wagner”. Hence why the word “know” has to be translated into German as “one must read Wagner in order to understand what National Socialism is”. Otherwise, the direct German translation of the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote tends to demand that one make personal contact with the dead, since Wagner died in 1883, although that would hardly put off Occult Reich speculators suggesting Hitler made his personal acquaintance with Wagner by holding séances with the dead composer, and that he recommended all Party faithful to do the same. However, the German translation that runs “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must read Wagner” now makes precious little sense either given that no major Party member, including Hitler, ever read Wagner’s prose works. Hitler owned none of Wagner’s writings in his private library. No copies of books by Wagner exist in which Hitler’s marginalia survive. Nor did anything by Wagner make it onto the official Party recommended reading list:
Notice that it says “Bücher, die jeder Nationalsozialist kennen muß” or “books that every National Socialist must know [kennen]”, or in better English, “books that every National Socialist must get to know [kennen]”. If you say “Bücher kennen” then it avoids the ambiguity found in “Wagner kennen”, which tends to imply “get to know Wagner” in the sense of “make one’s personal acquaintance with Wagner”. Whereas in English “know Wagner” means a variety of things including getting to know his operas, his prose writings, his letters, or his libretti, however in German it has to be specified what exactly is meant, by saying “Bücher kennen” (to become familiar with books), “Opern kennen” (to become familiar with operas), “theoretische Schriften kennen” (to become familiar with theoretical writings), or “Wagner kennen” (to make one’s personal acquaintance with Wagner).
Given that the earliest known form of our “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote comes from Tolischus, 1940, writing in English, the immense difficulty of translating the catchy English turn of phrase into idiomatic German makes it likely that our “quote” arose in the English language Allied war propaganda, before retrospectively making its way into the German literature after the end of the war, and that Tolischus himself made up the quote.
McDonough
It should also be mentioned that there is one Hitler biography by a major modern historian who does repeat the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote, and that is Frank McDonough in his book Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party. Once again, his source citation for this quote is Shirer “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1961: 133”. McDonough does not provide a primary source citation for the quote. However, McDonough is very much out of step with his peers in using this quote, or even for uncritically relying on Shirer in the first place. As mentioned, even Shirer stops using this “quote” in his later publication The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler, which appeared a year after The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A Hitler biography would have been a far better place to use the “quote”, but Shirer clearly had lost a sufficient amount of confidence in the authenticity of the quote to the point that even he came to disregard it altogether.
The following are examples of respected modern historians who do not make use of our “quote” in their books:
Sir Ian Kershaw: a two-volume biography of Hitler, plus Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution
Sir Richard Evans: four-volume Third Reich series, and his Rereading German History
David Cesarani: Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49
David Cesarani editor: The Final Solution with essays by numerous major historians eg Jürgen Förster, Yehuda Bauer (former head of Yad Vashem), Richard Breitman, Yisrael Gutman (head of Yad Vashem), David Bankier.
Zara Steiner: two volume series: The Lights that Failed and The Triumph of the Dark
Volker Ullrich: Hitler biography (volumes I and II)
John Toland: Hitler biography
Raul Hilberg: a three-volume study of the Holocaust: The Destruction of the European Jews
Saul Friedländer: Nazi Germany and the Jews in two volumes, Den Holocaust Beschreiben, Nachdenken über den Holocaust, Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich
Henry Friedlander: The Origins of Nazi Genocide
Christopher Browning: The Origins of the Final Solution
Peter Longerich: Hitler biography, and his Holocaust
Hans Mommsen: Das NS-Regime und das Auslöschung des Judentums in Europa
Nicholas Stargardt: The German War
Karl Schleunes: The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, Legislating the Holocaust
Götz Aly: Why the Germans? Why the Jews?, Hitler’s Beneficiaries
Lucy Dawidowicz: The war against the Jews, 1933-1945, A Holocaust Reader
Joachim Fest: Hitler biography.
Thomas Weber: Becoming Hitler, Hitler’s First World War
Unsurprisingly, none of these reputable academic historians even once makes use of the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote. This is because in academic circles the use of reliable source citations is considered critical in assessing the writer’s academic credibility, and where the authenticity of a quote cannot be verified serious academic historians refrain from using the quote altogether. In fact, not even Daniel Goldhagen uses our “quote” in his much-criticised book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
Of interest, however, is that Joachim Fest’s 1973 Hitler biography does quote Hermann Rauschning in saying that:
Hitler himself, in fact, later declared that with the exception of Richard Wagner he had “no forerunners”, and by Wagner he meant not only the composer, but Wagner the personality, “the greatest prophetic figure the German people has had”. One of his favorite ideas, to which he returned frequently, concerned Wagner’s towering importance “for the development of German man”. He admired the courage and energy with which Wagner exerted political influence “without really wishing to be political”, and on one occasion admitted that a “literally hysterical excitement” overcame him when he recognized his own psychological kinship with this great man. [Citation to Rauschning’s Gespräche pp.215f].
The problem is that ten years after the publication of Fest’s biography, Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks was exposed by Wolfgang Haenel to be a fake in 1983. Sir Richard J. Evans states that “...Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks” is “a record of interviews most of which never took place outside Rauschning’s mind” [Evans: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan. 2002), p. 149]. Likewise, Sir Ian Kershaw states in the introduction of his Hitler biography that:
I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether.
Sir Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936: Nemesis
Joachim Fest’s final thoughts on Nazi opera conspiracy theories can be read in his 1997 review of Köhler for Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Contradicting Rauschning’s claim that Hitler thought he had “no other forerunners” other than Wagner is evidence of his admiration for Frederick the Great. Nicholas Stargardt tells us:
Through films like the 1942 biopic The Great King, Germans had been encouraged to see their Führer as the successor of Frederick the Great. It was also a parallel which inspired Hitler, and he sent a print of the film to Mussolini. When he returned to Berlin on 15 January from his western headquarters, he took the Prussian King’s portrait into his study in the bunker deep below the Reich Chancellery.
Stargardt: The German War
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| A poster for the 1942 biopic of Frederick the Great, The Great King depicted him as Hitler's forerunner |
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| A 1933 propaganda poster clearly depicts Frederich the Great as Hitler's forerunner. No opera composer was ever depicted as his sole forerunner as it would have made him look ridiculous: that was the concoction of Allied war propaganda |
Some might point out that evidence has recently emerged based on formerly lost records from a medical examination after imprisonment in Landsberg prison that Hitler may have had cryptorchidism, thus reviving the flagging fortunes of the “missing testicle” theory. However, in cases of cryptorchidism, the second testicle is simply hidden, being undescended rather than entirely missing, and can be visualised on CT scan. It has no known adverse psychological effects and only explains Hitler’s lack of children. It no more explains the entirety of his political career, based on quasi-satirical speculation that he went berserk due to the missing testicle than it is proof of the existence of Nazi UFOs, latent homosexuality etc.
Likewise, even if a credible primary source citation for the “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote suddenly appeared, the problem is that it would hardly be possible to use this one and only quote as the basis for rewriting the history of the Dritte Reich as a grand premeditated plot to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama” and to read National Socialist government policy a being derived in toto from nineteenth-century opera. After all, it would be impossible to tell what the phrase “know Wagner” even meant when we have no clear articulation by Hitler of how he interpreted Wagner. Even that statement about how Wagner “represented heroic folklore, Germanness, in all his works” is so vague as to be meaningless, as the same thing could be said of Carl Maria von Weber’s operas.
Così Fan Tutte
They’re all at it—così fan tutte—you might say. In other words, if they all “recollected” this quotation attributed to Hitler, surely the fact that so many people say Hitler said it must mean that Hitler really did say it. The trouble is that with anything associated with the Dritte Reich, it rapidly becomes emotionally charged, and outside of academic historiographic circles, before long rampant rumour and hearsay dominate. You get dubious speculations about Hitler’s missing testicle, Holocaust denialism, The Occult Reich involving Satanism, Nazi UFO conspiracies, and all manner of lurid and bizarre things:
The widespread proliferation of rampant speculations about the National Socialist regime emphasises the critical importance of establishing the veracity of citations. This can only be achieved by the meticulously tracing of all citations back to credible primary sources. Quality academic research must not be based on some vague “recollection” that amounts to little more than hearsay and rumour. There are many fake and apocryphal “quotes” attributed to leading party members floating around, and many of these can be found repeated hundreds of thousands of times on the internet. Unfortunately, merely because credulous millions mindlessly repeat tales about Nazi UFOs along with things about Hitler saying “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”, it does not lend any of it the least bit of credibility. “Millions can’t go wrong” is the favourite catchphrase of the charlatan:
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| Argumentum ad populum: just because an opinion is widely held, it does not mean it is correct. |
Only credible and verifiable primary sources, preferably with supportive corroboration of authenticity, should be relied on—a minimum academic standard that must not be thrown out in favour of rumour and hearsay, merely because we are discussing Richard Wagner. Both Wagner scholarship and Holocaust research deserve the same rigorous academic standards of research as any other field. Otherwise, you end up sinking to the same level as Holocaust deniers and Nazi UFO speculators who write narratives of history based on brute repetition of any perverse fairytale they wish to believe, rather than writing genuine academic research based on credible primary bibliographic sources.
There are those who nonetheless continue to violently insist that the central aim of all historiographic research on the Dritte Reich and Holocaust must be to prove that it was all caused by a nineteenth-century opera composer, and that any historian who fails to fulfil their sacred ethical duty in fulfilling this sacrosanct goal—virtually a categorical imperative—deserves to hang on the same gallows as Eichmann for gross dereliction of duty. However wildly popular this aggressively populist attitude may be, it hardly constitutes an academically or forensically credible position.
So, if right-wing authors like Viereck, Zelinsky, Sherratt, and Köhler wish to continue to pin the blame for National Socialism on Wagner by endlessly repeating this “quote” they simply must give us a credible primary source for it or desist from attributing the quote to Hitler. Unfortunately, like Holocaust deniers and Nazi UFO conspiracy theorists, they all seem far too willing to dispense with the most basic of academic standards, except in this case to blame Wagner for WWII and the Holocaust, in the hope of averting all possibility of “left-wing” historical analyses that foot the blame on socio-economic structural conditions such as World War I, the financial burden of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression. They clearly prefer monocausal explanations based on simplistic cultural historicism in which the thoughts of dead poets and philosophers drive history. There is clearly a political agenda here, namely that of shifting the blame for fascism to the political left.
Further Reading:
As always the main analysis of this subject is to be found in my in-depth critical review of Joachim Köhler’s Wagner’s Hitler. It is a bit long, I admit, and it is getting longer all the time as I fortify my argument with more and more source material and supportive citations.
A related post looking at the quote from Rauschning that claims Hitler stated that “he had no other forerunner other than Richard Wagner”. There is some content overlap with this present post.
For more on the oft-repeated quote attributed to Goebbels that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” (and other apocryphal quotes) please see Randall Bytwerk (Professor of history at LCC International University).
Ron Rosenbaum also spends time debunking colourful myths that do their rounds in pop culture. This article on the missing testicle is definitely worth reading:
Everything You Need to Know About Hitler’s “Missing” Testicle. And why we’re so obsessed with the führer’s sex life.
A related post looking at the quote from Rauschning that claims Hitler stated that “he had no other forerunner other than Richard Wagner”. There is some content overlap with this present post.
For more on the oft-repeated quote attributed to Goebbels that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” (and other apocryphal quotes) please see Randall Bytwerk (Professor of history at LCC International University).
Ron Rosenbaum also spends time debunking colourful myths that do their rounds in pop culture. This article on the missing testicle is definitely worth reading:
Everything You Need to Know About Hitler’s “Missing” Testicle. And why we’re so obsessed with the führer’s sex life.
Acknowledgements:
I am grateful to the author of the following Wagner blog for encouraging analysis of this subject:
EDITS
28/2/2014: The Tolischus book arrived today in the mail. The above section on Tolischus has been edited accordingly. Exactly as I predicted, Tolischus fails to reveal a credible primary source for the alleged Hitler quote. The sheer vagueness of the statement and the date of publication suggest that this quote is a piece of fiction invented by the Allied war propaganda machine to make Hitler look ridiculous by suggesting that official state policies were based on little more than opera.
4/3/2014: The book by Michael Karbaum has arrived and the post edited accordingly. Once again no reputable primary source has emerged.
1/4/2014: Added a whole section on Yvonne Sherratt criticising her use of Tolischus and Shirer.
17/7/2014: Added a putative original source of what may be the original form of the quote from a speech delivered in Nuremberg, 1923.
Nov/2015: tracked down a copy of Dr Hans Frank's memoirs, Im Ansicht des Galgens, 2nd edition, Munich, 1955.
Nov/2015: tracked down a copy of Dr Hans Frank's memoirs, Im Ansicht des Galgens, 2nd edition, Munich, 1955.
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