Volker Ullrich > Quotes

“Hitler was “someone seduced by himself,” someone who was so inseparable from his words “that a measure of authenticity flowed over the audience even when he was telling obvious lies.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“If there is one thing we admire about National Socialism it’s the fact that it has succeeded, for the first time in German politics, in the complete mobilisation of human stupidity.”30”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Kershaw did not minimise the historical role played by his insane, ideological fixations, but he did illustrate that without the readiness of many people to work for the man in charge, there would have been no way he could have achieved his murderous aims.”
― Volker Ullrich, Adolf Hitler: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889 - 1939 Biographie

“In his book Defying Hitler, written in British exile in 1939, Sebastian Haffner recalled the “icy fright” that had been his first reaction to the news that Hitler had been named chancellor: “For a moment I almost physically sensed the odour of blood and filth surrounding this man Hitler. It was a bit like being approached by a threatening and disgusting predator—it felt like a dirty paw with sharp claws in my face.” But”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Hitler's unusually improvisational and personal style of leadership, which created constant responsibility conflicts and an anarchic tangle of offices and portfolios, was anything but an expression of political incompetence. On the contrary, it served to make Hitler's own supremacy essentially unassailable.”
― Volker Ullrich, Adolf Hitler: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889 - 1939 Biographie

“Thea Sternheim, who learned of Hitler’s appointment while in Paris, wrote in her diary: “Hitler as chancellor. On top of everything else, now this intellectual humiliation. The last straw. I’m going home. To vomit.”133 Klaus Mann noted: “News that Hitler has become Reich chancellor. Horror. Never thought it possible. (The land of unlimited possibilities…)”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Victor Klemperer, who had escaped the February inferno in Dresden with his wife by fleeing to Bavaria, noted: “Now everyone here was always an enemy of the party. If only they really had always been that…The Third Reich has been practically forgotten.”16 Twelve years previously, the opposite had been the case, as Friedrich Kellner recalled all too well. When Hitler had come to power in early 1933, he wrote, many Germans had tried to prove “with the most threadbare arguments” that they had “always been National Socialists.”17”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“Count Harry Kessler noted laconically: “It’s a sad New Year, the end of a catastrophic year and the beginning of what looks to be an even more catastrophic one.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“The best thing is to let Christianity gradually fade out,” he said in October of that year. “A long phase-out has something conciliatory. The dogma of Christianity will collapse in the face of science.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“But he also wrote in that same letter that he believed Hitler was a man of his word—a grievous error, as he would soon discover.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“One of Hitler’s most prominent traits had been his constant mistrust of others. Towards the end of the war it turned into paranoia, especially in his relationships with his military commanders.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“Richard Walther Darré made in his testimony at Nuremberg about the general law that governed the development of National Socialism: “When one looks at the basics of things, the force driving this rotating stage is always Hitler himself. He causes…the motion that is transferred to figures whose dynamics release other dynamics, but the central figure Hitler with his surprising impetuses always remains the actual motor of the rotating stage.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“After 1945, the myth of the Führer as saviour flipped into its absolute negative. Hitler was declared a monster, a demon in human guise whose infernal powers of seduction the German people had been helpless to resist.23 It was a convenient way of evading accountability or having to take stock of one’s own complicity in National Socialism.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“He wasn’t even honest towards his most intimate confidants,” Krosigk recalled. “In my opinion, he was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognise the difference between lies and truth.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“This is the best day of my life…I will go down in history as the greatest German ever.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“The course of the Second World War directly reflected the man who started it. Hitler’s hostile personality and conviction that Germany needed additional “living space” made war inevitable, and at the start of the conflict, his tendency to go for broke and act in surprising and outrageous ways worked astonishingly well on the battlefield. Those same qualities, however, also proved his undoing because they led him to overstretch himself—there is no way to understand the key moments in the conflict, Operation Barbarossa and declaring war on the United States, except as consequences of Hitler’s personality. Meanwhile, his role as field commander gradually overwhelmed him so that he could no longer call upon useful traits such as strategic flexibility or ruthless realism. And once things began going wrong, they rapidly spiralled out of control, as Hitler’s alternately hot-headed and intransigent responses—constantly dismissing his military professionals, ruling out tactical retreats—only made the situation worse. By the conclusion of the war, the catastrophe he wreaked on Germany, with the support of the German people, was mirrored by the physical and psychological catastrophe he wreaked on himself. Germany ended up in ruins, just as its Führer ended his life as a complete wreck.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“In 1939 “removal” still meant social exclusion and displacement, not physical annihilation. Only after Germany’s occupation of Poland and its invasion of the Soviet Union did genocide become an option. The search for a written command by Hitler ordering the Holocaust is a pointless exercise. As we have seen, it was his style of leadership to express decisions of fundamental scope in terms of general wishes, which were then to be translated into concrete instructions by the executors of his policies. We should not forget that this abominable crime against humanity could not have been carried out without the participation of hundreds of thousands of ready helpers.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“But not everyone was taken in by Hitler’s act. In Germany, too, there were warning voices. To many people’s surprise, on 17 October, Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann issued an impassioned “Appeal to Reason” in Berlin’s Beethoven-Saal auditorium. The call was combined with a complex analysis of the intellectual and social preconditions for National Socialism. The Hitler movement would never have reached such a level of “mass emotional conviction,” Mann asserted, if it had not been preceded by “the sense of the beginning of a new epoch and…a new spiritual situation for humanity.” People had turned away from the fundamental principles of a civil society—“liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress”—and faith in reason to embrace “the forces of the unconscious, of unthinking dynamism and of pernicious creativity,” which rejected everything intellectual. Fed by those tendencies and carried by a “gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking,” National Socialism pursued “a politics of the grotesque…replete with Salvation Army allures, reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement-park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetition of monotonous slogans until everyone foamed at the mouth.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“No historical topic has been more thoroughly researched in all its nooks and crannies—today the literature on the subject fills whole libraries.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“The failure of the Weimar Republic remains a lesson of how fragile democracy is and how quickly freedom can be squandered, if democratic institutions cease to function and civil society is too weak to keep the anti-democratic wolves from the door.”
― Volker Ullrich, Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic

“Deep knowledge in all areas of the life of the state and its history, the ability to learn lessons from them, belief in the purity of his own cause and in ultimate victory, and an untamable strength of will give him the power of captivating oration that make the masses celebrate him…Thus we have a picture of the dictator: sharp in intellect, clear and honest, passionate yet under control, cool and bold, daring, decisive and goal-oriented, without qualms about the immediate execution of his plans, unforgiving towards himself and others, mercilessly hard yet tender in his love for his people, tireless in his work, with an iron fist clothed in a velvet glove, capable of triumphing over himself. We still don’t know when he will intervene to save us all, this “man.” But he is coming. Millions sense that.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“If the war was lost, Hitler declared, the German people “will also be lost,” and there was no reason to consider “the basics which the people need for their continued existence” since they would have proven themselves to be “weaker” than their opponents. “Only the inferior ones will be left anyway,” Hitler raged. “The good ones will have fallen!”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“One participant at situation meetings described the atmosphere as a “miasma of servility, nervousness and dishonesty” that occasionally made him even “feel physically unwell.” The officer continued: “There was nothing there but fear: fear in all of its shades, from the anxiety of attracting the Führer’s displeasure or angering him with some ill-considered remark to the naked terror about how to survive the imminent end of the drama.”31”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“Faith in democratic institutions and democratic political parties dissolved, and anti-parliamentary sentiment, already rife in the Weimar Republic, was given a huge boost. Those in power appeared to have no solutions to the crisis, and the more helpless they seemed to be, the greater the demand became for a “strong man,” a political messiah who would lead Germany out of economic misery and point the way towards renewed national greatness. More than any other German politician, Hitler presented himself as the answer to these hopes for salvation.4 The hour was at hand for the man who already enjoyed the quasi-religious worship of his supporters and who had long identified with the role of the charismatic Führer.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Those who uttered doubts about Germany’s ultimate victory, who hung a white flag from their window, who opposed senseless acts of destruction or who tried to get their hometown to surrender without a fight had to fear for their life if they fell into the clutches of the SS, the Gestapo or fanatical Nazi supporters. The terror the regime had exported to the occupied countries of Europe was now being turned against the German populace.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“Sebastian Haffner wrote in 1940 that it was a tragic coincidence that Hitler’s “personal plight coincided so much with the German plight in 1919.”43 Indeed, the frustration of the young failed individual dovetailed with the traumas of the wartime and post-war generations, and when they came together they released tremendous destructive energy, without which it is impossible to understand the later crimes of National Socialism.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“He knows what he wants and is taking a direct route towards his goal. At the slightest provocation, he intends to solve the Czech question…The whole thing will have to be rolled out as quickly as possible. You always have to take a large risk, if you want to make a large gain.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

“Yet despite all the efforts of the Nazi leadership, exhaustion and war fatigue were clearly taking hold of the German people. On the third anniversary of the start of the war in early September 1942, Security Service reports recorded an alarming phenomenon: “The increasing shortages of necessities; three years of constraints in all areas of daily life; more and more fierce, large-scale enemy attacks from the air; and fear for the lives of relatives at the front…are all factors exerting an increasing influence on the mood of broad sections of the population and causing increasingly frequent wishes that the war would end.”119 After the Stalingrad catastrophe at the latest, fewer and fewer Germans believed in slogans about imminent “final victory.”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945

“The Führer’s verdict on the Poles is devastating,” the propaganda minister wrote. “More animal than human, completely coarse and undistinguished…They should be squeezed into their own little state and left to their own devices.”54 By now Hitler was no longer entertaining the notion of a rump Polish state with its own government, but rather a residual territory under German rule—a kind of reservation for Poles.55”
― Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945