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... 398, 408. 519 In Joachim Fest: Hitler, pp. 244, 256. 520 Rüdiger Sünner: Schwarze Sonne, p. 16. 521 Oswald Spengler: Der Untergang des Abendlandes, p. 778. 522 Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, p. 50. 523 Joachim Fest: The Face of the Third Reich, p. 386. 524 In Ralf Schnell: Dichtung in finsteren Zeiten – Literatur und Faschismus, p. 176. 525 Joachim Fest, op. cit., pp. 377... Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, p. 45. 854 Joachim Fest, op. cit., p. 519. 855 Joachim Fest: The Face of the Third Reich, pp. 312-13. 856 Gitta Sereny, op. cit., pp. 136-37. 857 Id., p. 137. 858 Hermann Rauschning, op. cit., pp. 178, 275. 859 Albert Speer, op. cit., p. 144. 860 Guido Knopp: Hitlers Krieger, p. 30. 861 Joachim Fest: Hitler, p. 453. 862 Walter Kempowski:... Munich. 4 J.P Stern: Hitler – The Führer and the People , p. 4. 5 Joachim Fest: Hitler (1974 ed.), p. 754. 6 Id., p. 9. 7 Christian von Krockow: Hitler und seine Deutschen , p. 7. 8 Ron Rosenbaum: Explaining Hitler – The Search for the Origins of His Evil , pp. xv and 68. 9 Id., p. xv. 10 In Joachim Köhler: Wagners Hitler – Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker , p. 418. 11 ...

... Adolf Hitler – The Birth and Rise of Nazism Dawidowicz, Lucy: The War against the Jews 1933-45 Delpla, François: Hitler Fest, Joachim: Der Untergang Fest, Joachim: Hitler (1974 ed.) Fest, Joachim: Speer – The Final Verdict Fest, Joachim: The Face of the Third Reich Fischer, Fritz: Griff nach der Weltmacht Fischer, Fritz: Hitler war kein Betriebsunfall Fischer... Nietzsche, Hitler und die Deutschen Klemperer, Viktor: Tagebücher 1937-1939 Knopp, Guido: Hitler – Eine Bilanz Knopp, Guido: Hitlers Helfer Knopp, Guido: Hitlers Krieger Köhler, Joachim: Wagners Hitler – Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker Korsthorst, Erich: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist des Gehorsams Krockow, Christian von: Hitler und seine Deutschen Kubizek ...

... of study. 633 Werner Maser confesses: “The cause of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, despite the knowledge of so many details, is not completely explainable”, 634 which is a historians’ understatement. And Joachim Fest puts is as follows: “We can probably no longer plumb the cause of this ever-growing hatred [of the Jews], which lasted literally to the last hour of Hitler’s life.” “He admired the Jews”, says... Goebbels diaries, showing that even the proud propaganda-tsar of the Reich was informed about some important events only post factum. “Hitler has never revealed the secret of his mission”, writes Joachim Köhler in Hitlers Wagner, p. 21. “The core of his message was not decoded” (p. 22) … The struggle against the Jews was indeed Hitler’s totally personal and therefore not further explainable or d ...

... structures. It was with a false inwardness that it meditated upon essentials behind shuttered windows: the plough, the sword, and then in the evening happiness under the linden tree.” 523 That Joachim Fest, who wrote this, was not exaggerating one jot may be shown by a paragraph from the German author Ernst Wiechert, written in 1949 (four years after World War II): “It has appeared to seers and... no intelligence can reach, no mathematical or chemical formula, no philosophical theory, no human questioning”. 524 This mentality, the essence of the völkisch movement, is strongly denounced by Joachim Fest: “National Socialism laid bare phenomena of which the movement itself was in turn only a symptom: the most consistent expression in the field of political power groupings of a multiplicity of ...

... corporal, as Sehr verehrter Herr Hitler . This is usually translated as “Dear Sir”. But the tone of the German formula is much more reverential, for it says literally: “Very respected Mister Hitler”. Joachim Fest, a German, finds this “an unusual salutation from a captain to a corporal”, 22 and so does Werner Maser, also a German, who writes that it is “unusually respectful”. Hitler’s answer not only... Ian Kershaw writes that “without Captain Mayr’s ‘talent spotting’ Hitler might never have been heard of”. 28 “In this period in Munich lies the key of Hitler’s entrance into politics”, 29 confirms Joachim Fest. Finally, there is Hitler’s own confirmation in 1941, in the course of a conversation in which he unwittingly contradicted several untruthful statements in Mein Kampf : “My programme originated ...

... and John Toland asserts that “National Socialism was a religion and Hitler was its Christ.” 766 This is much more than a simile. Hitler took his role of saviour “with the utmost seriousness”, writes Joachim Fest, and attached a special significance to the fact that he had begun his public life at the age of thirty, as Christ had done. “We are admittedly small in number”, he said in the early years of ...

... Hitler’s speeches as being ‘like sex murders’. And many other contemporary observers have tried to describe the sensually charged liquescence of these demonstrations in the language of diabolism.” (Joachim Fest 892) The historian Karl Alexander von Müller had been one of the lecturers when candidate army propagandist Corporal Adolf Hitler attended the initiatory course at Munich University in 1919 ...

... than the war of the Aryans to conquer the world, which in Hitler’s mind was only possible by slaying the enemy, “international Jewry”. “Of what Hitler’s inner truth consisted, nobody knew”, writes Joachim Köhler, but the apocalyptic battle with the Jews was certainly part of it. “He clearly kept a secret in which he believed with ‘granite’ infallibility … Hitler has never revealed with a single word ...

... ‘In Churchill Hitler found something more than an antagonist. To a panic-stricken Europe the German dictator had appeared almost like invincible Fate. Churchill reduced him to a conquerable power.’ (Joachim Fest) “Before the invasion of France Sri Aurobindo had already said in passing: ‘England is quite unreliable under her present leadership,’ and that he and the Mother were looking for a suitable ...

... finances and the economy with the resulting riots and unemployment, it is no wonder that Sebastian Haffner writes: “In the autumn of 1923 the German Reich was on the verge of political extinction.” 211 Joachim Fest is of the same opinion: “The harassed [central] government might well see the events in Munich as the signal for total collapse.” 212 ...

... the failed attempt of 1914-18 a fresh attempt was made to carry it out, with new and greater resolution, in the Second World War. An imperialistic drive nearly a century old culminated in Hitler.” (Joachim Fest 407) ...

... and chapters of books endeavour to analyze and explain the Holocaust, or at least give due consideration to the monstrous event, but its victims remain practically unknown to the common reader. Even Joachim Fest, most insightful where Hitler’s character and the war are concerned, hardly touches this subject. Only a few recent writers like Michael Burleigh and John Weiss make the effort to find out who ...

... world. His ideal of a “sacred” and unified Italy bordered on the sublime, for he seems to have wanted to initiate the third period in humanity’s history, the Realm of the Spirit, as envisioned by Joachim of Fiore. At first the populace followed Rienzi (as he became known), who saw himself as a tribune like the leaders of the people in ancient Rome had been and consciously behaved like one. But when ...

... force by 11 am the next day, or that their countries would be at war with Germany. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s official interpreter, was present when the Führer received this news in the company of Joachim von Ribbentrop, his Foreign Minister. “When I entered the room Hitler was sitting at his desk and Ribbentrop stood by the window. Both looked up expectantly as I came in. [Schmidt had been handed the ...

... face of Judaism, which already rules everything.” 582 From him is also: “That the human race would perish, would not be a pity; but that it would perish because of the Jews would be an ignominy.” 583 Joachim Köhler puts it trenchantly: “Nobody will take from [Wagner] the merit of having been the first in German history to contribute with his writings to the advent of the ‘disappearance’ of the Jews.” 584 ...

... intended to conquer more, kill more and enslave more. How had this come to pass? How had the former Austrian corporal, once compared to a worn out stray dog, reached such a pinnacle of power that Joachim Fest could write: “If Hitler had succumbed to an assassination or an accident at the end of 1938, few would hesitate to call him one of the greatest German statesmen, the consummator of Germany’s history” ...

... A “mentor”, according to the dictionaries, is “a wise and trusted adviser and guide”, “a wise and trusted counsellor or teacher”. One obtains a somewhat different impression about Eckart from Joachim Fest: “A roughhewn and comical figure, with his thick round head, his partiality for good wine and crude talk, Eckart had missed the great success he hoped for as a poet and a dramatist … In compensation ...

... it was merely useful, and ‘the art of correct reading’ of which he spoke was nothing more than the hunt for formulations to borrow and authorities to cite in support of his own preconceptions …” (Joachim Fest 127) “Ideas held no interest for Hitler as abstractions. They were important as tools of mobilization.” (Ian Kershaw 128) “Books, always books! I cannot think of Adolf Hitler without books ...

... like General Arnold von Möhl and Captain Karl Mayr. “There was a personal and ideological relationship between the Reichswehr and the Thule”, 81 according to Orzechowski. This is corroborated by Joachim Köhler: “Mayr was a confident of the Order.” 82 There was, in fact, a close interaction between all rightist activists to whatever organization they belonged, be it the Germanenorden or the Reichswehr ...

... material for the national-socialist leadership stratum must already have been available in such a way that it was only to be brought to the surface from the amorphous mass of German people.” 355 And Joachim Fest observes: “Ultimately everything terminated in Hitler; he was by no means a ‘German catastrophe’, as the title of a well-known book asserted, but a product of German consistency.” 356 Among ...

... undisguised threats to Western civilization and disdain for the human being and human values in general – and much more of this sort. And there is that “curiously nasty, obscene odour” perceived by Joachim Fest as emanating from the book’s pages. But behind all that there is a vision by which Adolf Hitler had been and would continue to be driven, which was unprecedented and revolutionary, and which aimed ...

... alert for weeks, had taken part in the ‘fall manoeuvres’ of the [Bavarian] Reichswehr, but now all their funds had been used up. Hitler’s treasury was also exhausted, and the men were going hungry.” (Joachim Fest 216) The Hitler Putsch on 8 and 9 November 1923 was one of the worst prepared, most amateurish and even comical events (except for the shooting) in German history. Hitler and his cronies tried ...

... commonplace metaphysics, ego-assertion and pseudo-military spirit, find for itself a more apt formula than in the ‘German trinity’ proclaimed by one of its members: ‘God, myself and my weapons’.” (Joachim Fest 509) One of the works of art most popular with the völkisch movement was Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “The Knight, Death and the Devil”, of which an imitation in the form of a cartouche hung ...

... balance. In nature, in the mountains and the river valleys, the harmony of creation could still be felt. The more virginal the mountains, the lovelier the river valleys, the more they drew us.” 479 Joachim Fest, the biographer of Speer as well as of Hitler, comments: “His love of nature was even more formative, and probably also more typical [than his love for the great romanticist literature]. The mountain ...

... source of the future pure Aryan state. But it was soon forgotten that behind Gobineau’s popularity, as well as behind the popularity of Chamberlain, stood the Master of Bayreuth.” 431 According to Joachim Köhler, Schemann’s Gobineau Society was started with the blessings of Cosima, one of whose friends was Heinrich Class, chairman of the Pan-German League, of which Schemann was a member. So we meet ...