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Adolf Hitler
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Adolf Hitler (1976) (edit title/settings)

The Definitive Biography

by John Toland (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

A national bestseller with more than 370,000 copies in print, this is "the first book that anyone who wants to learn about Hitler or the war in Europe must read... a marvel of fact."-- Newsweek

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “From such words one would never guess at the true relationship between ordinary Reds and Nazis. While they fought each other relentlessly, they felt a unique comradeship, and it was no rarity for them to unite if one of their brawls in a bar or beer hall was interrupted by the police. Both groups were driven by fervor for a cause, both believed that the end justified the means. They shared similar socialist goals and had the same contempt for parliamentary procedure. On the previous May Day they had paraded down the streets of Berlin arm in arm, in joint protest against suppression of marching demonstrations, shouting their common slogan: ‘Freedom, Work and Bread’. Moreover, they both hated the Jewish police commissioner, Bernard Weiss (renamed ‘Isador’ by Goebbels), and alike regarded the police as ‘Isador’s’ army, a brutal enemy of all revolutionaries.”
  • “Berlin is in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer mugs, chair-legs or leaden clubs; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster-columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines.”
    Christopher Isherwood
  • “Hate scourged the land as the victims of the depression turned on those more fortunate than themselves. Shopkeepers driven out of business cursed the great department stores; the millions of unemployed envied those with jobs and hated the ‘bosses’; thousands of university graduates found the future barred to them and turned their despair on the establishment. The depression had hit almost every level. Peasants, burdened with taxes and faced with low prices, despised city people while the masses of white-collar unemployed envied the peasants their crops. Those without work camped in hordes on the outskirts of the larger cities. Beggars haunted every street corner and by the time of the election campaign there were six million registered unemployed in the land—with millions of others working part time or too proud to register as jobless.”
  • “A new wave of violence swept over Germany. In July <1932> alone eighty-six died in the fighting, including thirty Reds and thirty-eight Nazis. Both sides were equally belligerent. Skirmishes turned into battles in the summer heat. On Sunday, July 10, eighteen police were killed and the following Sunday a Nazi march under police escort through the working-class district of Altona was broken up by a volley of shots from roofs and windows. The marchers fell back. Nineteen people were reported killed and 285 wounded.”
  • “On his own, Goebbels joined the Reds in a wildcat strike of Berlin transit workers asking for a pfennig or so an hour increase in pay. It was not the first time that the two parties, with many goals in common, had fought together; and for the next few wet, raw days the Communists and National Socialists ate communally on the picket line. Side by side they pelted rocks at strikebreakers, tore up streetcar tracks and built barricades. Hitler could not publicly disavow the actions of his impetuous disciple but he was privately angry at alienating so many middle-class voters and sent orders to end the strike.”
  • “Hitler's achievements in the first four years had truly been considerable and impressive. Like Roosevelt, he had paved the way to social security and old-age benefits. And like Roosevelt, he had intuitvely divined that the professional economists, whose thinking was hobbled by accepted theory, had little understanding of the depression. Both leaders, consequently, had defied tradition to expand production and curb unemployment. Hitler also was changing the face of the land with a network of Autobahnen that would help unite the nation in peace and mobilize it in war. To put the population on wheels, he was developing a 'People's Car' so compact and inexpensive that the average German could afford it. He asked Ferdinand Porsche to design a vehicle that would get some forty miles per gallon, accomodate four passengers and have an air-cooled engine that would not freeze up in winter.”
  • “He envisaged other innovations for the future. In large cities there would be automated underground parking, traffic-free centers, numerous parks and green areas, and strict pollution control. In line with his personal obsession with cleanliness (perhaps in connection with his recurring poison-cancer phobia), the problem of pollution so concerned him that he encouraged industry to work toward the complete elimination of noxious gases. Anti-pollution contrivances were already installed in some factories in the Ruhr basin, and new plants were required to construct preventive devices to avoid pollution of the waters.”
  • “Hitler also anticipated modern economic theory... by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hilter as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.... But in economics it is a great thing not to understand what causes you to insist on the right course.”
    John Kenneth Galbraith
  • “The goal of our education is formation of character. We don't intend to educate our children into becoming miniature scholars. ... Therefore, I say: Let us have, rather, ten pounds less knowledge and ten calories more character.”
    Hans Schemm
  • “The character-building process was accompanied by semi-deification of Hitler. Before lunch the children of Cologne <German: Koln> were required to recite this invocation: Fuhrer, my Fuhrer, bequeathed to me by the Lord,/ Protect and preserve me as long as I live!/ Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress,/ I thank thee today for my daily bread./ Abide thou long with me, forsake me not,/ Fuhrer, my Fuhrer, my faith and my light!/ Heil, my Fuhrer!”

First Sentence edit see section history

Hitler rarely talked about his family but to a few confidants he did confess an inability to get along with his father, a dictatorial man.

Errata edit see section history

p. 353: Dr. Kurt Rieth's name is spelled both correctly as "Rieth" and incorrectly as "Reith" on the same page.

p. 377: final quotation marks are omitted after the words "...during a speech."

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. John Toland (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Doubleday
Country: USA
Publication Date: 1976
ISBN: 0385037244
Page Count: 1035

Classification edit see section history

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