Hitler's Speeches: Revisiting a Unique Phenomenon of History

[Desert Fox]

Leni Riefenstahl's film The Triumph of the Will really boosted Hitler's support. From a neutral perspective, it's a well made revolutionary piece of film making for it's time. It's worth watching if you're interested in filming techniques and understanding the political scenario of Germany at the time.

Yeah it's a masterpiece of its time. I read she was tortured after the war by the allies.

 

[Gauss]

hitlers foreign policy was way too aggressive. that was because it was the dominant philosophy of the time to consider ones self superior to all others and others inferior to ones self. of course development of this thought was helped by breakthroughs in life sciences. the theories of selection, survival and competition and all.
but today the thought is the opposite. others are respected and even considered better. countries like pakistan that are still stuck in the outdated thought are suffering because of that.

 

[Levina]

Later at a War Cabinet meeting, Churchill blamed the Indians themselves for the famine, saying that they “breed like rabbits.”

His attitude toward Indians was made crystal clear when he told Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

 

[Spectre]

Christopher Hitchens once wrote that Churchill "was not a figure in history so much as a figure of history"

Interesting Trivia WW2 @levina

• The three crucial broadcasts were made not by Churchill but by an actor hired to impersonate him. Norman Shelley, who played Winnie-the-Pooh for the BBC's Children's Hour, ventriloquized Churchill for history and fooled millions of listeners. Perhaps Churchill was too much incapacitated by drink to deliver the speeches himself.

• Britain stood alone only if the military and economic support of Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and the rest of a gigantic empire is omitted. As late as October of 1940, furthermore, the Greeks were continuing to resist on mainland Europe and had inflicted a serious military defeat on Mussolini. Moreover, the attitude of the United States, however ostensibly neutral, was at no time neutralist as between a British versus a German victory.

• The Royal Air Force was never seriously inferior, in either men or machines, to Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe, and at times outgunned it. British pilots were mainly fighting over home territory and, unlike their German opponents, could return straight to duty if they parachuted down. The RAF had the advantage of radar and the further advantage of a key to the Nazi codes. The Royal Navy was by any measure the superior of the Kriegsmarine, and Nazi surface vessels never left port without exposing themselves to extreme hazard.

• The German High Command never got beyond the drawing-board stage of any plan for the invasion of Britain, and the Führer himself was the source of the many postponements and the eventual abandonment of the idea.
• We are a solid and united nation which would rather go down to ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis ... If the enemy does try to invade this country we will fight him in the air and on the sea; we will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have. He may manage here and there to make a breakthrough: if he does we will fight him on every road, in every village, and in every house, until he or we are utterly destroyed."
  
  That was Neville Chamberlain, who (albeit in his rather reedy tones) delivered the speech himself. And how many casualties did the RAF suffer during the entire Battle of Britain? A total of 443 pilots, according to official sources cited in Richard Overy's cool and meticulous revisiting of the story.

The Atlantic | April 2002 | The Medals of His Defeats | Hitchens

 

[Levina]

Christopher Hitchens once wrote that Churchill "was not a figure in history so much as a figure of history"

Interesting Trivia WW2 @levina

• The three crucial broadcasts were made not by Churchill but by an actor hired to impersonate him. Norman Shelley, who played Winnie-the-Pooh for the BBC's Children's Hour, ventriloquized Churchill for history and fooled millions of listeners. Perhaps Churchill was too much incapacitated by drink to deliver the speeches himself.

• Britain stood alone only if the military and economic support of Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and the rest of a gigantic empire is omitted. As late as October of 1940, furthermore, the Greeks were continuing to resist on mainland Europe and had inflicted a serious military defeat on Mussolini. Moreover, the attitude of the United States, however ostensibly neutral, was at no time neutralist as between a British versus a German victory.

• The Royal Air Force was never seriously inferior, in either men or machines, to Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe, and at times outgunned it. British pilots were mainly fighting over home territory and, unlike their German opponents, could return straight to duty if they parachuted down. The RAF had the advantage of radar and the further advantage of a key to the Nazi codes. The Royal Navy was by any measure the superior of the Kriegsmarine, and Nazi surface vessels never left port without exposing themselves to extreme hazard.

• The German High Command never got beyond the drawing-board stage of any plan for the invasion of Britain, and the Führer himself was the source of the many postponements and the eventual abandonment of the idea.
• We are a solid and united nation which would rather go down to ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis ... If the enemy does try to invade this country we will fight him in the air and on the sea; we will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have. He may manage here and there to make a breakthrough: if he does we will fight him on every road, in every village, and in every house, until he or we are utterly destroyed."
  
  That was Neville Chamberlain, who (albeit in his rather reedy tones) delivered the speech himself. And how many casualties did the RAF suffer during the entire Battle of Britain? A total of 443 pilots, according to official sources cited in Richard Overy's cool and meticulous revisiting of the story.

The Atlantic | April 2002 | The Medals of His Defeats | Hitchens

To me Hitler and Churchill are two villainous characters of history, both had committed equally heinous crimes.
Churchill (as we all know) was responsible for the artificially created famine of Bengal, which killed about 3 million Indians while Hitler scored higher by killing 6 million Jews.
Churchill was the lesser evil...but still an evil.

*****
I admire the Nazi army, for they were much ahead of their time, specially in aviation, albeit German innovations were far from becoming practical.

 

[Spectre]

I admire the Nazi army, for they were much ahead of their time, specially in aviation, albeit German innovations were far from becoming practical.

Edit: Comprehension fail, Apologies

Nazi army with exception of Allgemeine SS and Waffen SS, I agree

 

[Penguin]

You know whats a fun fact for such trolls ? Hitler is accused of killing 14-20 million people during war time, in other words Hitler wasn't killing anyone before 1939. Meanwhile Stalin brutally murdered up to 30 million of his own people before Jun 22, 1941 (the date Soviet Union was officially in WW2), and after WW2 ended, Stalin murdered millions more. That's excluding the number of people Lenin and his chums killed during the early days of the Soviet regime.

Now does that mean that Hitler was innocent because he wasn't killing before 1939??, of course not. All it means is that Hitler was killing in war time, just like all of the participants of WW2 were doing in a WAR (that is what war is, after all). Therefore, Hitler is guilty then so are Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin.

Hitler was killing way before 1939 when war broke out.

1. The German concentration camp system predates the war by some 6 years.

The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, unleashing World War II, there were six concentration camps in the so-called Greater German Reich: Dachau (founded 1933), Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg in northeastern Bavaria near the 1937 Czech border (1938), Mauthausen, near Linz, Austria (1938), and Ravensbrück, the women's camp, established in Brandenburg Province, southeast of Berlin (1939), after the dissolution of Lichtenburg.
Concentration Camps, 1933–1939
http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blchart.htm

The pre-war system was quite unlike the wartime one, with far fewer camps, prisoners and deaths; almost all inmates were German and economic exploitation still took a backseat. And yet, the prewar camps left a crucial legacy for the infernal camps of the Second World War.
Before the Holocaust: Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 | European History Primary Sources

When the Nazis launched the Second World War on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland, 21,000 men, including a small number of women, were detained in the concentration camps. This figure was seven times the number when Himmler had seized control of the camps in 1934/5.53 Prisoner numbers shot up from thousands to hundreds of thousands and murder became the norm. In September 1939, following the outbreak of the Second World War, the Nazis gradually transformed the camps from places of brutal abuse and torture into sites of mass murder. In new camps such as Auschwitz, opened in 1940, the SS could build on years of their experience abuse, murder and domination.
http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/history/History Introduction.pdf

To facilitate the"Final Solution" (the genocide or mass destruction of the Jews), the Nazis established killing centers in Poland, the country with the largest Jewish population. The killing centers were designed for efficient mass murder. Chelmno, the first killing center, opened in December 1941.
Nazi Camps

2. Child Euthanasia (German: Kinder-Euthanasie) was the name given to the organised murder of severely mentally and physically handicapped children and young people up to 16 years old during the Nazi era in over 30 so-called special children's wards. At least 5,000 children were victims of this programme, which was a precursor to the subsequent murder of children in the concentration camps.
Child euthanasia in Nazi Germany - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Euthanasia in Nazi Germany - The T4 Programme | The Life Resources Charitable Trust

3. The Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer (help·info)), sometimes called Operation Hummingbird or, in Germany, the Röhm Putsch (German spelling: Röhm-Putsch), or sometimes mockingly Reichsmordwoche,[1] was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from June 30 to July 2, 1934, when the Nazi regime carried out a series of political murders. Leading figures of the left-wing Strasserist faction of the Nazi Party, along with its figurehead, Gregor Strasser, were murdered, as were prominent conservative anti-Nazis (such as former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had suppressed Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923). Many of those killed were leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary Brownshirts.
At least 85 people died during the purge, although the final death toll may have been in the hundreds
Night of the Long Knives - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Newspaper Article - GRAVE OUTBREAK OF POLITICAL MURDERS IN GERMANY.

 

[Levina]

You seriously lost me here. German Industry is not equal to Nazi Party.

Germans had been an industrious powerhouse even before the advent of Nazi Party and even after the Nazi party was blotted out of the face of earth.

No sire,
I was talking about this
Nazi insane weaponry
That's my thread, posted almost an year ago.
Nazis had come up with awe inspiring technology, their weapons were much ahead of their time(My personal fav is Gustav).
.

Edit: Comprehension fail, Apologies

Nazi army with exception of Allgemeine SS and Waffen SS, I agree

 

[Spectre]

No sire,
I was talking about this
Nazi insane weaponry
That's my thread, posted almost an year ago.
Nazis had come up with awe inspiring technology, their weapons were much ahead of their time(My personal fav is Gustav).
.

Sorry about that - It is very difficult for me to process Nazi and Admire in the same sentence, my brain automatically filtered out the army part.

Wehrmacht or German Army would be better terminologies which one can use to do justice to thousands of Germans who didn't subscribe to Nazi ideology but all the same they did their duty.

About the weapons - German scientists were in race against the combined might of US and British Empire - and they still gave a tough competition. Though it is not verified Heisenberg could have completed A Bomb much before Manhattan Project but purposely delayed and sabotaged the project.

In his massive book Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, Thomas Powers says that Heisenberg, who never became a Nazi and balked at the immorality of building a bomb for Hitler, did what he could to guide "the German atomic bomb effort into a broom closet."

Heisenberg was one of the greatest scientists who has ever lived and a worthy peer of Einstein.

 

[Samandri]

Hitlar is called racist as if rest of Europeans were not racist. I have watched many documentaries on world war II and based on that i opine Stalin was the bigger monster, the type who fucks mostly his own people.

 

[The Sandman]

I know what 90% of the world thinks about him, but imo he was a great leader. Because what he did for his country is well what can i say... I always thought that he was a monster because that's what they tell us in school or in media. Here are a few vids that you people should see. Oh btw his speeches are the only reason i started reading about him.

^ this is the one which everyone should see
P.S i really don't want to start a flame war here so this could be my last post on this thread lol i hope i will not get banned after this

 

[Samandri]

I know what 90% of the world thinks about him, but imo he was a great leader. Because what he did for his country is well what can i say... I always thought that he was a monster because that's what they tell us in school or in media. Here are a few vids that you people should see. Oh btw his speeches are the only reason i started reading about him.

^ this is the one which everyone should see
P.S i really don't want to start a flame war here so this could be my last post on this thread lol i hope i will not get banned after this

Too much propaganda against him. On purpose his leadership skills are undermined. I get it he was racist (so were British) but not to the level as he is portrayed, he was not irrational and mad. He met with Chandra Bose , he didnt put him in gas chamber. He met Semitic Arab grand mufti of Jerusalem, he didnt put him in gas chamber or carried out forbidden scientific experiment on him. Where was his racial bigotry when he joined hands with Japanese or enlisted Bosnian and Albanian muslim volunteers.He knew how to play the game. He lifted the Germany from depths of defeat and humiliation and restored its glory, most importantly taught lesson to those who did wrong with Germany in world war one.

 

[Psychic]

Nazi army with exception of Allgemeine SS and Waffen SS, I agree

Waffen SS fought as soldiers on various fronts of the war and set examples of undaunted valor. The same Wehrmacht you admire used to call Waffen SS in difficult situations. Raised by Himmler does not make them "evil", not all of them of course.

He lifted the Germany from depths of defeat and humiliation and restored its glory

That was his crime.

 

[The Sandman]

Too much propaganda against him. On purpose his leadership skills are undermined. I get it he was racist (so were British) but not to the level as he is portrayed, he was not irrational and mad. He met with Chandra Bose , he didnt put him in gas chamber. He met Semitic Arab grand mufti of Jerusalem, he didnt put him in gas chamber or carried out forbidden scientific experiment on him. Where was his racial bigotry when he joined hands with Japanese or enlisted Bosnian and Albanian muslim volunteers.He knew how to play the game. He lifted the Germany from depths of defeat and humiliation and restored its glory, most importantly taught lesson to those who did wrong with Germany in world war one.

I think you should see those videos trust me you will love him, after that watch this one too

 

[WaLeEdK2]

I think you should see those videos trust me you will love him, after that watch this one too

I was so shocked when I first watched this video. I never knew how good of a leader he actually was. How many leaders today can do this without fear?