Interview with Hitler

APACHERAT · Apr 21, 2015

'No room for the alien, no use for the wastrel'
This edited interview of Adolf Hitler by George Sylvester Viereck took place in 1923. It was republished in Liberty magazine in July 1932

This is the only interview that took place between Hitler and an American.

Enjoy.

Just an excerpt from the interview.

I met Hitler not in his headquarters, the Brown House in Munich, but in a private home - the dwelling of a former admiral of the German Navy. We discussed the fate of Germany over the teacups.

"Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"

"Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

"Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

"We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."

Hitler himself is not a purely Germanic type. His dark hair betrays some alpine ancestor. For years he refused to be photographed. That was part of his strategy - to be known only to his friends so that, in the hour of crisis, he could appear here, there, and everywhere without detection. Today he could no longer pass unrecognised through the obscurest hamlet in Germany. His appearance contrasts strangely with the aggressiveness of his opinions. No milder mannered reformer ever scuttled ship of state or cut political throat.

"What," I continued my cross-examination, "are the fundamental planks of your platform?"

"We believe in a healthy mind in a healthy body. The body politic must be sound if the soul is to be healthy. Moral and physical health are synonymous." "Mussolini," I interjected, "said the same to me." Hitler beamed.

"The slums," he added, "are responsible for nine-tenths, alcohol for one-tenth, of all human depravity. No healthy man is a Marxian. Healthy men recognise the value of personality. We contend against the forces of disaster and degeneration. Bavaria is comparatively healthy because it is not completely industrialised. However, all Germany, including Bavaria, is condemned to intensive industrialism by the smallness of our territory. If we wish to save Germany we must see to it that our farmers remain faithful to the land. To do so, they must have room to breathe and room to work."

"Where will you find the room to work?"

"We must retain our colonies and we must expand eastward. There was a time when we could have shared world dominion with England. Now we can stretch our cramped limbs only toward the east. The Baltic is necessarily a German lake."

"Is it not," I asked, "possible for Germany to reconquer the world economically without extending her territory?"

Hitler shook his head earnestly.

"Economic imperialism, like military imperialism, depends upon power. There can be no world trade on a large scale without world power. Our people have not learned to think in terms of world power and world trade. However, Germany cannot extend commercially or territorially until she regains what she has lost and until she finds herself.

"We are in the position of a man whose house has been burned down. He must have a roof over his head before he can indulge in more ambitious plans. We had succeeded in creating an emergency shelter that keeps out the rain. We were not prepared for hailstones. However, misfortunes hailed down upon us. Germany has been living in a veritable blizzard of national, moral, and economic catastrophes.

"Our demoralised party system is a symptom of our disaster. Parliamentary majorities fluctuate with the mood of the moment. Parliamentary government unbars the gate to Bolshevism."

"Unlike some German militarists, you do not favour an alliance with Soviet Russia?"

Hitler evaded a direct reply to this question. He evaded it again recently when Liberty asked him to reply to Trotsky's statement that his assumption of power in Germany would involve a life-and-death struggle between Europe, led by Germany, and Soviet Russia...

Read it all. -> http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/17/greatinterviews1
Click to expand...

APACHERAT · Jun 1, 2015

I should have posted the link below to when I first posted this thread.

The interview above of Hitler was heavily edited from the 1923 version that was first published, to read the entire interview you have to find it at a good public library or university research library. As see from above and going to the link it's not all of a 60 minute interview that took place. It's worth going to the library and reading the entire interview, all 60 minutes of it.

For some reason, some don't want the entire interview to be accessible on the internet. A few years ago not even the edited version of the above interview was on the internet.

Excerpt:

A distorted report on the true Hitler

The political climate that autumn of 1923, as the German government ended its policy of "passive resistance" to the French occupation of the industrial Ruhr district - catastrophic hyperinflation neared its peak, paramilitary violence intensified, and the likelihood of a right-wing putsch increased - was very different to that of the election campaign of July 1932. Then, too, the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia two years earlier were still recent memory. Hitler - as in his public speeches and other interviews at the time - was markedly less guarded in 1923 than in 1932 about his ideological aims. His comment, for instance, about eastward expansion reflects Hitler's conviction, first expounded in late 1922, then included in Mein Kampf, and thereafter a mainstay of his speeches in the mid- and later 1920s, that Germany's future could only be secured through the acquisition of "living space" to be attained "by the sword"' at the expense of Russia. (The reference in the 1932 interview to a possible future alliance with the Soviet Union if Hitler "is in danger of losing the game" is no more than a prophetic guess.) In 1932, expansion to win "living space" was hardly a votewinner. With the disastrous failings of democratic government amid comprehensive economic and social crisis as the central theme, the idea of eastward expansion was not mentioned in Hitler's speeches and interviews that year.

Similarly, in 1932 Hitler placed remarkably little emphasis on race issues, except to highlight the strength which would come from an ethnically united nation, and did not resort to the levels of vitriolic anti-semitism of his speeches in the 1920s. The original Viereck interview of 1923 included statements by Hitler indicating that, "like a consumptive who does not realise that he is doomed unless he expels the microbes from his lungs", he would disenfranchise Jews, the "ferment of decomposition". They would have to be purged from German society. Hitler attacked "false humanitarianism", and spoke of isolating syphilitics, alcoholics and criminals as a "cancer that corrodes our life". Such sentiments find their way into the 1932 interview only in diluted form in Hitler's last quoted sentence (also in the 1923 version).

Whether the cuts from the original interview were made voluntarily by Liberty, or under pressure from Hitler, is not known. What remains, as in the remarks about "national" socialism, the condemnation of Marxism, and the repudiation of parliamentarism is certainly authentic Hitler. So Liberty was giving its readers a true flavour of what Hitler stood for that went beyond his public statements at the time. But a straight reprint of the 1923 interview would have given a clearer - and more alarming - insight.
· Sir Ian Kershaw is a leading historian of Hitler and the Third Reich.

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/17/greatinterviews
Click to expand...

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Interview with Hitler

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Interview with Hitler

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