"The Fourth Reich shall be built on the crumbled remains of the Third Reich."

---

Notes from: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L Shirer. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1960

p11. I grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time and being compelled to force the content of my whole life into paper forms that had to be filled out. One day it became clear to me that I would become a painter, an artist.

p13. This teacher made history my favorite subject. And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I became a young revolutionary.

p14. ...for the first and last time in his life he got drunk.

p15. For four years he fancied himself deeply in love with a handsome blond maiden named Stefanie, and though he often gazed at her longingly as she strolled up and down the Landstrasse in Linz with her mother he never made the slightest effort to meet her, preferring to keep her, like so many other objects, in the shadowy world of his soaring fantasies.

p20. ...he has none of the vices of youth. He neither smoked nor drank. He had nothing to do with women - not, so far as can be learned, because of any abnormality but simply because of an ingrained shyness.

p21. In this period there took shape within me a world picture and a philosophy which became the granite foundation of all my acts. In addition to what I then created, I have had to learn little; and I have had to alter nothing.

p21. They were, with one exception, not original but picked up, raw, from the churning maelstrom of Austrian politics and life.

p27. He had no friends, no family, no job, no home. He had, however, one thing: an unquenchable confidence in himself and a deep, burning sense of mission.

p30 He was the impassioned warrior, deadly serious at all times about the war's aims and Germany's manifest destiny.

p31. The German Army had not been defeated in the field. It had been stabbed in the back by the traitors at home.

p33. ...became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sake and desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition.

p39. All the ideas which had been bubbling in his mind since the lonesome days of hunger in Vienna now found an outlet, and an inner energy which had not been observable in his make-up burst forth.

p50. Murders, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purpose.

p83. ...the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation.

p90. That one day he would build it and rule it he had no doubts whatsoever, for he was possessed of that burning sense of mission peculiar to so many geniuses who have sprouted, seemingly, from nowhere and from nothing throughout the ages.

p91. The First Reich had been the medieval Holy Roman Empire; the Second Reich had been that which was formed by Bismarck in 1871 after Prussia's defeat of France. Both had added glory to the German name.

p101. That in the end Hitler considered himself the superman of Nietzsche's prophecy can not be doubted.

p102. Often a people's myths are the highest and truest expression of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany.

p111. The fusion of the politician and the thinker - that is what produces a hero, a "world-historical figure," an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon. If there was in him, as Hitler had now come to believe, the same fusion, might he not aspire to their ranks?

p112. He was not easily discouraged. And he knew how to wait.

p112. ...the contemplation of the misfortunes of the immediate past and the eclipse of the present, served only to strengthen his resolve.

p128. Hitler spoke for three hours. Brilliantly. He can make you doubt your own views.

p133. For a brutal, cynical man who always seemed to be incapable of love of any other human being, this passion of Hitler's for the youthful Geli Raubal stands out as one of the mysteries of his strange life.

p135. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times.

p137. The suffering of his fellow Germans was not something to waste time sympathizing with, but rather to transform, cold-bloodedly and immediately, into political support for his own ambitions.

p148. Hitler's praetorian guard, the black-coated S.S.

p159. ...to attain power one must win the support of some of the existing "powerful institutions"

p229. On August 19, some 95 percent of those who had registered went to the polls, and 90 per cent, more than thirty eight million of them, voted approval of Hitler's usurpation of complete power. Only four and a quarter million Germans had the courage - or the desire - to vote "No."

p255. At the very top of the pyramid were the so-called Order Castles, the Ordensbrgen. In these, which their atmosphere of the castles of the Order of Teutonic Knights of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were trained the elite of the Naxi elite.

p272. Death's-Head units (Totenkopfverbaende) whose members were recruited from the toughest Nazi elements...

p273. ...the Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst or S.D.

p329. The behavior of men under duress differs according to their character and is often puzzling.

p350. ...the fanatical Nazis whose ranks were swelling rapidly with jobseekers and job hunters attracted by success and anxious to improve their position.

p392. Hotel Dreesen: The Nazi leader had often sought out the hotel as a place of refuge where he could collect his thoughts and resolve his hesitations.

p448. Hitler, like Alexander and Napoleon before him, could not stop.

p511. And in an angry dispatch to Rome he described the German communiqué as "Machiavellian,"

p530. "Hannibal at Cannae, Fredrick the Great at Leuthen, and Hindenburg at Ludendorff at Tannenberg," he said, "took chances. So now we also must take risks which can only be mastered by iron determination." There must be no weakening.

p532. Having thundered such Nietzschean exhortations, the Fuehrer, who had worked himself up to a find fit of Teutonic fury (Teutonic self-righteous - ed), calmed down and delivered a few directives for the campaign ahead.

p549. It was rarely easy, as readers who have got this far in this book are aware, to penetrate the strange and fantastic workings of Hitler's fevered mind.

p561. Noble in form and in intent as all these neutral appeals were, there is something unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was as if the President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the small Northern European democracies lived on a different planed from that of the Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than of what might be transpiring on Mars.

p569. Fuehrer considerably shaken... Fuehrer very calm and clear.

p625. It was symbolic of the brief Polish campaign. Horses against tanks! The cavalryman's long lance against the tank's long cannon! Brave and valiant and foolhardy though they were, the Poles were simply overwhelmed by the German onslaught.

p625. ...of the whole vast army of a million and a half men on motorized wheels, directed and co-ordinated through a maze of electronic communications consisting of intricate radio, telephone and telegraphic networks. This was a monstrous mechanized juggernaut such as the earth had never seen.

p656. The purpose of this conference [Hitler began] is to give you an idea of the world of my thoughts, which govern me in the face of future events.

p656. His mind was full of the past, the present and the future.

p656. The fate of the Reich depends only on me. I shall act accordingly.

p657. Basically I did not organize the armed forces in order not to strike. The decision to strike was always in me.

p686. ...the American diplomat, a somewhat taciturn and cynical man, must have got the impression that he had landed in a lunatic asylum - if he could believe his ears. Each of the Big Three Nazis bombarded Welles with the most grotesque perversion of history, in which facts were fantastically twisted and even the simplest of words lost all meaning.

p710. ...their demonic Leader cracked under the strain of even minor setbacks in battle. It was a weakness which would grow on him when, after a series of further astonishing military successes, the tide of was changing, and it would contribute mightily to the eventual debacle of the Third Reich.

p711. ...that victory often goes to the daring and the imaginative.

p711. ...insurmountable handicap.

p718. Hitler, always attracted by daring and even reckless solutions, was interested.

p723. Preceded by waves of Stuka dive bombers, which softened up the French defensive positions, swarming with combat engineers who launched rubber boats and threw up pontoon bridges to get across the rivers and canals, each panzer division possessed of its own self-propelled artillery and of one brigade of motorized infantry, and the armored corps closely followed by divisions of motorized infantry to hold the positions opened up by the tanks, this phalanx of steel and fire could not be stopped by any means in the hands of the bewildered defenders.

p738. The swastika was immediately hoisted on the Eiffel Tower.

p741. Hitler is now the gambler, who has made a big scoop and would like to get up from the table, risking nothing more.

p829. "I have decided," he said, "to encourage developments in the Middle East by supporting Iraq."

p789. The Germans had no long-range bombers capable of reaching the American coast from the Azores - much less getting back - and it is a sign of the warping of Hitler's mind by this time that he conjured up the nonexistent "long-range bombers."

p917. "You didn't have to have the gift of a prophet," says Halder, "to foresee what would happen when Stalin unleashed those million and a half troops against Stalingrad and the Don flank."

p933. What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation. But how can anyone be afraid of this moment of death, when which he can free himself from this misery, if his duty does't chain him to this Vale of Tears. Na!

p939. I did not come to spread bliss... We definitely did not come here to give out manna. We have come here to create the basis for victory.

p1006. On July 5, 1943, he had launched what was to prove his last great offensive of the war against the Russians. The flower of the German Army - some 500,000 men with no less than seventeen panzer divisions outfitted with the new heavy Tiger tanks - was hurled against a large Russian salient was of Kursk. This was "Operation Citadel"

p1011. ...that Britain and America would become frightened of the prospect of the Red armies overrunning Europe and in the end join Germany to protect the old Continent from Bolshevism.

p1087. Goebbles was assigned the task of organizing "total mobilization,"

p1110. But fate, Goebbels replied, "holds all sorts of possibilities."

p1118. ...as though having made up his mind to die in this place within a few days had brought a peace of mind and spirit.

p1124. It was a fitting epitaph of a power-drunk tyrant whom absolute power had corrupted absolutely and destroyed.

p1131. And then the parting valediction - the last recorded written words of this mad genius's life. The efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war have been so great that I cannot believe that they have been made in vain. The aim must still be to win territory in the East for the German people.

p1132. ...now that the Fuehrer's strict control of their live was over, they would seek pleasure where and how they could find it. The sense of relief among these people seems to have been enormous and they danced on through the night.

p1139. In a little red schoolhouse at Reims, where Eisenhower had made his headquarters, Germany surrendered unconditionally at 2:41 on the morning of May 7, 1945.
 

Conclusion.

    Adolph Hitler could have accomplished even excelled at anything in his life that he set his mind to. This is because he had vision, focus and confidence. What he choose to do with his life is not necessarily at fault, many men throughout history have set out to create a brave new world in their vision, rather the means which he employed to achieve his end are globally recognized as grotesque and wrong.

    "He was a man totally governed by his end, and whether the means he employed to gain it were good or evil meant exactly nothing to him, as long as he considered they would lead to success. His end justified his means he was the supreme Machiavellian of his age." This was written about Julius Caesar but I think applies equally well to Hitler. To be sure Caesar did not have the means at his disposal to liquidate the millions of Germanic peoples he continually warred against, but considering his limited means he did pretty well. If we switched Caesar and Hitler in time and place who is to say Caesar would not have done much as Hitler did to achieve his end, regardless of the means?

    In the final analyses all great people in history are judged by end (vision), not by their means (methods).

    In the final analysis it is our faith which determines our answers to all the questions life puts to us.