Editor’s note: I am relocating this August 5, 2015 comment by Jack Frost to this day so that it is the first post that a visitor hits when clicking the category on Hitler’s table talks. I won’t delete the old August thread but I have disabled comments on this specific article. Reason: I don’t have time to discuss with those Christian neonazis who cannot tolerate even the possibility that the talks may be genuine.
David Irving has considerable expertise in this matter, and he says they’re genuine.
Likewise Albert Speer, who was present at some of these dinner talks, attests to them in his memoirs. But also, perhaps even more convincing, the talks are the blindingly original insights of a true master.
These views of Christianity* are not derivative of anyone else’s opinions, certainly not Schopenhauer’s, and while at odds with certain of his public statements, are quite consistent with other things known about Hitler, particularly his anti-Semitism. Surely a forger wouldn’t have gone this route.
In the first place, he would have had to do original thinking that is quite uncharacteristic of forgers, and in the second place an ordinary forger would have been careful not to make any statements that were inconsistent with other things known to have been said or written by Hitler.
Their very originality speaks to their veracity. Of course, this can be turned around. People who want to believe Hitler was actually a Christian disingenuously ask why, if this was his real opinion, didn’t he put it in Mein Kampf or mention it in any of his public speeches?
But the answer is obvious. Hitler was a politician, and had to be all things to all people. No politician with such views could have been open about them in a Christian nation.
Accordingly, to Christians of his day, he appeared to be a Christian. Such hypocrisy was more or less built into the task he had set for himself.
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(*) These were Frost’s August 4, 2015, 5:15 PM quotes on the same thread. Alas, as usual Dr MacDonald has now deleted the whole comments thread!
8 replies on “Are the table talks genuine?”
That’s only part of the story though. Hitler also had strong problems with atheists, which led to him genuinely taking the side of the Christians in most of their disagreements.
For example, he suppressed Jewish-leftist blasphemy (stuff like America’s “Piss Christ”) because it degraded a man who was revered among ordinary Germans. Liberals, even when nominally Christian, consider this a horror.
Had Hitler explained his full religious views to the public, most people simply wouldn’t know what to make of them. I myself had to double-back when reading the Table Talks to try and figure out what he was saying.
Hitler was going to device a new morality, this is inline what Nietzsche had in mind, the Overman decides the rules.
Hitler read Nietzsche a lot, as it is a natural step after he read Schopenhauer, I think.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Carolyn Yeager is still struggling to make her mind about whether our hero’s table talks are genuine.
I guess that among his Christian readers the possibility that they are not forgeries is quite disturbing. Christian WNsts simply believe what they want to believe.
Some of the Talks may be genuine, some may be exaggerations or outright fabrications by the Allies. It’s tough to tell.
If the Talks are genuine then I can definitely see Hitler doing some of the things he’s accused of. However, the more I learn of German conduct during the war, the more irresolute they seem to me. They didn’t even bother deporting Jews from Berlin until October of 1941.
The Germans totally lacked the viciousness of the allies, and the Table Talks seems to mirror the Allied caricature of Hitler to me. If Hitler had been as ruthless as he’s portrayed, he would’ve won the war.
If you are condemning him for the above, this is Christian axiology and I’m fed up of it.
I doubt the German version was fabricated (except for the “1945 Table Talks” or whatever, which are confirmed fake and not included in modern publishings). Speer verified them and many of Hitler’s associates (Rosenberg, Himmler, Eckart) confirmed that at least the religious views were consistent.
A more reasonable objection would be to the English translation, which at times takes significant liberties with the text. However, some of Hitler’s harshest language is also the most literal (such as “the ancient world was so carefree because it knew neither syphilis nor Christianity”, or the comparisons to communism also made in B:FMtL).
The ruthlessness in the Table Talks seems consistent with the Reich’s actions. Hitler says the Jews will be exterminated (“rooted out”) to Siberia, where he also intends to push back Stalin. This looks to have been his policy. He also said the prisoners in the concentration camps would be executed if there was a revolution in Germany that threatened his position; this would be to ensure that the leftists would be unable to open the jails and recruit criminals as their shock troops. This contingency self-evidently wasn’t fully triggered during the war; everyone agrees that the Germans released the concentration camps to the Allies, whatever the number of prisoners previously executed.
Hitler’s hard on the Slavs but not to excess; he mostly intends to work around them and avoid changing their lifestyle when possible. He considers the Slavs completely unreliable as a “gatekeeper” to Europe against Asia, and demands the natural resources of Eastern Europe be given to him to counter the American and British empires. To that effect, they must become vassals of the Germans.
He’s more hopeful towards the British and French, and frequently restates his desire for peace with the former, which would be strange if the Talks were meant to discredit him to the Western Allies. Conversely, Hitler remains adamant about Stalin attacking him during Icebreaker, which would have been the #1 propaganda point in the USSR. I certainly don’t think he comes off as a caricature. Hell, Mein Kampf was closer to Allied propaganda than the Table Talks were.
Hitler should have simply put the Jews in camps and not feed them the way Eisenhower did to 1.5 million German POWs after the war. Any solution to the Jewish problem that doesn’t involve their ultimate vanquishing is not a solution.
“le Juif est l’ennemi du genre humain. Il faut renvoyer cette race en Asie ou l’exterminer… Par le fer, par le feu ou par l’expulsion il faut que le Juif disparaisse.”—Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Sometimes I wonder if Hitler wasn’t so pissed by the end of the war he thought Europe deserved the Jews.