ADOLF HITLER

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21041, 17 February 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

ADOLF HITLER

An Intimate Portrait :: Disgusting Personality

(London Times Book Review)

JTVERY ONE MUST HAVE hoped that one day one of Hitler’s intimate friends would reveal the demagogue in his private life, away from the crowds and meetings which give him self-confidence, expounding his innermost thoughts in floods of rhetorical monologue. This Herr Rauschning has done in his book “Hitler Speaks,” just issued. He has jotted down notes of conversations with Hitler which took place just before the Nazis captured power and during the first two years of their rule. These notes have been woven together into fairly convincingly continuous passages, which do credit to the author's capacity for exposing the confused ideas of the leader. Yet these pages, full of confused philosophy, mixed up with biology, mysticism, and peasant shrewdness, reveal a mind with an astonishing gift for simplifying political problems. About foreign policy we are told nothing new; but we are reminded that opportunism has been from the first the only principle of the Nazi foreign policy. In these conversations Hitler declares that his agents can cripple the United States by revolution, split France in two, turn Brazil into a German State, and then conquer the British Empire by way of attacks on Holland. Belgium and Sweden. Every one would do well to study Hitler's analysis of what Socialism really implies for the relation of the individual to society. His attacks on Christianity and on the whole Liberal tradition deserve more consideration than they have been

given. For his conversations reveal the full bewilderment of a semi-educated mind seeking a faith and a society which will give “the little man” significance. If Herr Rauschning brings home to us the menace of Hitlerism, he is also reassuring by his revelations of the inefficiency and corruption among the men at the top of his party. They care not a fig for Hitler’s dreams; there is none of the ties which linked Napoleon to his army. Beneath them work a Civil Service of cowards and trimmers, seeking, like their chiefs, only power and security. Above all, it is reassuring to read again of Hitler’s hesitations and lack of selfconfidence. He denied to the author that he enjoyed supreme power; “I am no dictator and never will be a dictator; what I command is not arbitrary, but the result of close understanding with my party.” The picture drawn of Hitler’s personality is frankly disgusting: “vain and sensitive as a mimosa, he is brutal and vindictive; he lives in a world of insincerity, deceiving and self-deceiving. Hatred is like wine to him, it intoxicates him.” This is the man who boasts of a mission to humanity; “Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence which has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a chimera called conscience and morality and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.”