David Irving > Quotes

“History is like a constantly changing tree.”
― David Irving

“Because there is only one salvation left for Germany, and that is Hitler.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“There is an aphorism about Prussian militarism, coined by Mirabeau, which aptly fits the pre-Hitler Reichswehr: ‘Prussia isn't a country with an army – it's an army with a country!”
― David Irving, The War Path

“We need a dictator who is a genius, if we are to arise again.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“The terrible thing is that Hitler's enemies know him better than anybody, and the press – which is of course wholly in Jewish hands – has defamed and ridiculed the man. An old trick: first a deathly silence, then scorn, then all-out war – and then annexation. (There are Jewish firms that manufacture swastikas.)”
― David Irving, The War Path

“By early 1937, the Nazi state could be likened to an atomic structure. The nucleus was Hitler, surrounded by successive rings of henchmen. The innermost ring was Göring, Himmler and Goebbels, privy to his less secret ambitions and the means he was proposing to employ to realize them. In the outer rings were the ministers, commanders-in-chief and diplomats, each aware of only a small sector of the plans radiating from the nucleus. Beyond them was the German people. The whole structure was bound by the forces of the police state – by the fear of the wiretap, the letter censors, the Gestapo and ultimately the short, sharp corrective spells provided by Himmler's renowned establishments at Dachau and elsewhere.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“History judges you by your success or failure,” he pontificated. “That’s what counts. Nobody asks the victor whether he was in the right or wrong.” Before”
― David Irving, THE TRAIL OF THE FOX The Search for the True Field Marshall

“As Robespierre once said of Marat, ‘The man was dangerous: he believed in what he said.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“In September 1936, Britain's former prime minister, David Lloyd George, spent two weeks in Germany as his guest. He admiringly wrote in the Daily Express how Hitler had united Catholic and Protestant, employer and artisan, rich and poor into one people – Ein Volk, in fact. (The British press magnate Cecil King wrote in his diary four years later, ‘Lloyd George mentioned meeting Hitler and spoke of him as the greatest figure in Europe since Napoleon and possibly greater than him. He said we had not had to deal with an austere ascetic like Hitler since the days of Attila and his Huns.’)”
― David Irving, The War Path

“But for all this Fritsch was a fervent nationalist, and he shared with Hitler a hatred of the Jews, the ‘Jewish press,’ and a belief that ‘the pacifists, Jews, democrats, black-red-and-gold and the French are all one and the same, namely people bent on Germany's perdition.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Democracy is the worst of all possible evils. Only one man can and should give the orders.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“(Hitler had a constitutional duty to consider each appeal for clemency and sign the execution warrant.) In bygone times the condemned criminal had had the traditional right to see the Kaiser's signature on the warrant before being led to the scaffold. In Hitler's era, the usages were less picturesque. A telephone call went from Schaub to Lammers in Berlin: ‘The Führer has turned down the appeal for clemency’ – this sufficed to rubber-stamp a facsimile of the Führer's signature on the execution warrant. On one occasion the file laid before Hitler stated simply that the Berlin Chancellery would ‘take the necessary steps’ if they had heard no decision from him by ten P.M. that night. Human life was becoming cheaper in the new Germany. When it was at its cheapest, at the time of Stalingrad, Walther Hewel was to explain to an OKW staff officer, ‘If you want to understand the way the Führer's mind works, you must look upon the human race as being just a swarm of ants.’ However,”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Hitler had built the National Socialist movement in Germany not on capricious electoral votes, but on people, and they gave him – in the vast majority – their unconditional support to the end.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Many a Hitler decision – decisions that infuriated his generals by their seeming lack of logic at the time – can probably be explained by the work of Göring's Forschungsamt, Ribbentrop's ministry and the naval staff's cryptanalysis branch.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Hitler wanted new environs, new men and new methods. He began appointing special plenipotentiaries to perform certain tasks parallel to the fossilizing government agencies – it was less exhausting than trying to revive the latter. The Ribbentrop bureau was one example. Cabinet meetings as such virtually ceased late in 1937. Instead Hitler dealt directly – through Lammers – with affairs of state, while he transmitted his will directly to the ministers and generals without discussion.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Here at the palace, Hitler encountered suffocating palace etiquette for the first time. The noble Italian chief of protocol bowed before him and then led his guests up the long, shallow flight of stairs, striking every plush red-carpeted tread solemnly with a gold-encrusted staff. He was accustomed to this measured tread, but Hitler was not: the nervous foreign visitor fell out of step, found himself gaining on the uniformed nobleman ahead, stopped abruptly, causing confusion and clatter on the steps behind, then started again, walking more quickly until he was soon alongside the Italian again. The latter affected not to notice, but perceptibly quickened his own pace, his lacquered slippers and silken stockings flashing, until the whole throng was trotting up the last few stairs in an undignified Charlie Chaplin gallop. There”
― David Irving, The War Path

“And in a major speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler uttered an unmistakable threat to any Jews who did choose to remain behind in his Germany:    I have very often been a prophet in my lifetime and I have usually been laughed at for it. During my struggle for power, it was primarily the Jewish people who just laughed when they heard me prophesy that one day I would become head of state and thereby assume the leadership of the entire people, and that I would then among other things subject the Jewish problem to a solution. I expect that the howls of laughter that rose then from the throats of German Jewry have by now died to a croak.      Today I'm going to turn prophet yet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging our peoples into a world war, then the outcome will not be a Bolshevization of the world and therewith the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe! When”
― David Irving, The War Path

“At the conference, Hitler mapped out plans for a vote to be held throughout Germany and Austria on April 10, to confirm the Anschluss. The question on the ballot paper was: ‘Do you accept Adolf Hitler as our Führer, and do you thus accept the reunification of Austria with the German Reich as effected on March 13, 1938?’ Unlike Schuschnigg's phoney plebiscite, it was a genuinely secret ballot. The result staggered even Hitler: of 49,493,028 entitled to vote, 49,279,104 had cast votes, and of these 99.08 percent had voted ‘Yes’ – altogether 48,751,587 adults had stated their support of Hitler's action. This was a unanimity of almost embarrassing dimensions. His”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Excerpts from unpublished records like these show that Hitler was inspired by purely Darwinian beliefs – the survival of the fittest, with no use for the moral comfort that sound religious teaching can purvey. ‘Liberty, equality and fraternity are the grandest nonsense,’ he had said that evening. ‘Because liberty automatically precludes equality – as liberty leads automatically to the advancement of the healthier, the better, and the more proficient, and thus there is no more equality.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“As his special train hauled into Rome's suburbs the next afternoon, May 3, he marshalled his private staff and warned them sternly not to burst out laughing at the sight of a diminutive figure kneeling on the platform, weighed down with gold braid: for that was the King of Italy, and he was not kneeling – that was his full height.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“I'm not here to ensure peace in Europe; I'm here to make Germany great again. If that can be done peacefully, well and good. If not, we'll have to do it differently.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“This was the beginning of Hitler's new-style diplomacy. His victories in Central Europe were won without the sword – they were won by power politics and opportunism, by bluff, by coercion, by psychological operations and by nerve-war. On each occasion he carefully gauged his potential enemies. He satisfied himself that the western powers would not fight, provided he made each claim sound reasonable enough. The west was weak and unready, and he was not.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“At the conference, Hitler mapped out plans for a vote to be held throughout Germany and Austria on April 10, to confirm the Anschluss. The question on the ballot paper was: ‘Do you accept Adolf Hitler as our Führer, and do you thus accept the reunification of Austria with the German Reich as effected on March 13, 1938?’ Unlike Schuschnigg's phoney plebiscite, it was a genuinely secret ballot. The result staggered even Hitler: of 49,493,028 entitled to vote, 49,279,104 had cast votes, and of these 99.08 percent had voted ‘Yes’ – altogether 48,751,587 adults had stated their support of Hitler's action. This was a unanimity of almost embarrassing dimensions.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“History judges you by your success or failure,” he pontificated. “That’s what counts. Nobody asks the victor whether he was in the right or wrong.”
― David Irving, THE TRAIL OF THE FOX The Search for the True Field Marshall

“In 1941, Ribbentrop explained to the Turkish diplomat Acikalin: ‘I know I'm regarded in many quarters as the Führer's “evil genius’ in regard to foreign affairs. But the fact is I always advised the Führer to do his utmost to bring about Britain's friendship. . . . I warned the Führer in 1935 that in my view Britain was steering toward war.’ Now, as ambassador in London, Ribbentrop secretly offered Baldwin an ‘offensive and defensive alliance’: he told his staff two years later it had been refused.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Baron von Weizsäcker assessed in his private diary, ‘The Führer has no desire to pick a fight with the western powers but – so I'm assured – he cannot yet be sure if a war can be confined to Poland. So my own bet is unchanged, that we'll settle for a peaceful general approach.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“The brave will fight whatever the odds,’ Hitler said on January 18. ‘But give the craven whatever weapons you will, they will always find reason enough to lay them down!”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Marxism must be eliminated root and branch. . . What matters above all is our defence policy, as one thing's certain: that our last battles will have to be fought by force. The [Nazi Party] organization was not created by me to bear arms, but for the moral education of the individual; this I achieve by combatting Marxism. . . National Socialism will not emulate Fascism: in Italy a militia had to be created as they were on the very threshold of a Bolshevik menace. My organization will solely confine itself to the ideological education of the masses, in order to satisfy the army's domestic and foreign policy needs. I am committed to the introduction of conscription”
― David Irving, The War Path

“He authorized Goebbels to deliver a powerful and provocative speech in Danzig on June 17, denouncing Polish ‘ill treatment’ and demanding the city's return to the Reich. Nazi editors were confidentially briefed: ‘This is to be a first trial balloon to test the international atmosphere on the settlement of the Danzig question.”
― David Irving, The War Path

“Today,’ he wrote to the Führer, ‘I no longer believe in a rapprochement. Britain does not want a Germany of superior strength in the offing as a permanent threat to her islands. That is why she will fight.”
― David Irving, The War Path