This collection of Nazi Germany quotations has been selected and compiled by Alpha History authors. It contains quotes from Nazi leaders, contemporaries or historians who specialise in the history of Nazi Germany. If you would like to suggest a quote for inclusion here, please contact Alpha History.
“All of us, who are members of the Germanic peoples, can be happy and thankful that once in thousands of years fate has given us, from among the Germanic peoples, such a genius, a leader, our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, and you should be happy to be allowed to work with us.”
Heinrich Himmler
“The Fuhrer of the Third Reich has freed the German man from his external humiliation and from the inner weakness caused by Marxism – and has returned him to the ancestral Germanic values of honour, loyalty and courage.”
Conrad Grober (Catholic archbishop)
“Hitler’s theatricality was linked to his oratorical force. He was persuasive with small groups, but he electrified large audiences.”
Sherree Owens Zalampas, historian
“Hitler’s oratory moved people and appealed to their hopes and dreams. But his speeches malevolently twisted hope into some gnarled ghastly entities, and appealed to the latent, darkest prejudices of Germans.”
Richard M. Perloff, historian
“Within the Nazi Party, the beginnings of a personality cult around Hitler go back to the year before the [Munich] putsch… Outside these small groups of fanatical Bavarian Nazis, Hitler’s image and reputation at this time – so far as the wider German public took any notice of him at all – was little more than that of a vulgar demagogue, capable of drumming up passionate opposition to the government among the Munich mob, but of little else.”
Ian Kershaw (historian)
“Hitler, who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil genius. It is true that in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had moulded them up to that time, he found a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends. But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and – until the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself – an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich.”
William Shirer (historian)
“If there had been a strong democratic sentiment in Germany, Hitler would never have come to power. [Germans] deserved what they got when they went round crying for a hero.”
AJP Taylor (historian)
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