Quotes from David Irving

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.

As Hitler quipped to his staff, Beck was only ever able to make up his mind when his decision was against doing something!)

the Rommel diary records an edict that was typical of him: "While the overflowing POW cage on the airfield is being set up, South African officers demand to be segregated from the blacks. This request is turned down by the C in C. He points out that the blacks are South African soldiers too—they wear the same uniform and they have fought side by side with the whites. They are to be housed in the same POW cage.

First Germany must 'create a powerful land force,' so that foreigners took her seriously. Then, he wrote in 1928, there must be an alliance with Britain and her empire, so that 'together we may dictate the rest of world history.

It is a basic principle of Third Reich foreign policy only to tackle one thing at a time.

The prisoner was Driver A. J. Hayes, chauffeur of the commander of one of the crack field batteries attached to the Fourth Indian Division. "He says Hitler has on several occasions offered Britain good peace terms. But Churchill, inspired by malice and ruthlessness, is leading the British people toward the abyss. The prisoner's manner of speaking makes his testimony seem trustworthy.

There is to be no possibility whatever that anybody at all can even think that there is some institution or other in Germany that has a different opinion from the one expressed by the Führer.' Schacht

On April 23, therefore, he signed a secret decree confirming Göring as his deputy in Berlin, while Hess continued to manage the Party in his absence. On May 2, 1938, Hitler wrote out a private testament and handed it in a sealed envelope to Dr Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery – a rare documentary glimpse of Hitler as a human being, putting his affairs in order, arranging his own funeral and disposing of his personal effects to his family and private staff. The

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!

True soldiers are not recognized by their victories, but after their defeats.' His

It was the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Germany that gave Hitler his biggest headaches. His early years of power were marked by futile attempts to reconcile the thirty warring Protestant factions and bring them under one overriding authority, some loosely constituted council of churches that would unquestioningly accept the primacy of the state and the Nazi policies it enforced.

After showing them the blast furnaces, rolling mills and armour-plate works, Hitler and Ribbentrop took Mussolini alone into a hall where Krupp engineers took the tarpaulins off Hitler's proudest possession – a gun barrel so huge that it had to be transported on two parallel railroad tracks. Mussolini stroked it and congratulated the Führer, clearly astonished at the weapon's size.

Today, after the Holocaust, it is seldom recalled how anti-Semitic the Europe of 1938 tended to be. When Ribbentrop journeyed to Paris with much pomp in December to sign the joint declaration first suggested by Hitler to François-Poncet, Bonnet begged him not to flood France with more German Jews as they already had enough of their own. ('In fact,' Ribbentrop informed Hitler, 'they are considering Madagascar for this purpose.')

Poland's attitude was hardly more sympathetic. Hitler had confided to ambassador Josef Lipski on September 20 that he was toying with the idea of solving the Jewish problem in unison with Poland, Hungary and perhaps Romania too by emigration 'to the colonies.

Himmler's personal chief of staff, Karl Wolff, arrived with an indignant message from Heydrich at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten: the local Gestapo HQ had just telephoned that Goebbels's district offices everywhere were whipping up anti-Jewish demonstrations and ordering the police not to intervene. Himmler turned to Hitler for guidance. Hitler replied that the Gestapo were to protect Jewish property and lives, and that SS units were not to be called in unless things got out of hand.

As Robespierre once said of Marat, 'The man was dangerous: he believed in what he said.' Hitler

this minority will be the one that makes history, because the majority will always follow where there's a tough minority to lead the way. In

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.

It ended with the extraordinary words, 'The entire attitude of the Gestapo throughout this affair has proven that its sole concern was to brand me as the guilty party,' and, 'I therefore challenge you to a duel with pistols.

They must learn to respect each other and be respected again – the intellectual must respect the manual labourer and vice versa. Neither can exist without the other. From them both will emerge the new man: the man of the coming German Reich! Adolf Hitler, Landsberg, December 18, 1924

Hitler dourly remarked to Wiedemann – as the adjutant recorded a few months later – '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.' He

Hitler saw the random bickering of the newspapers of the democratic countries as an inexcusable frittering-away of a vital national resource. He considered that the press could become a powerful instrument of national policy.

One of the most important weapons in Hitler's police state was controlled however by Hermann Göring, not Himmler. This was the Forschungsamt, or 'Research Office,' set up in 1933 with a monopoly on all wiretapping operations.

With all the generals, however, Hitler had a powerful argument: he was going to put them back in business – he was going to restore to Germany her striking power, regardless of the restrictions of Versailles.