The Essential Hitler
Max Domarus, ed. Patrick Romane
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Buy *The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary* by Max Domarus, ed. Patrick Romane online

The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary
Max Domarus, ed. Patrick Romane
Bolchazy-Carducci
Paperback
862 pages
March 2007
rated 5 of 5 possible stars

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Author Max Domarus was born in Germany in 1911. He was a history scholar who immediately saw the significance of Hitler's rise to power, so began collecting Hitler's speeches and writings in 1932.

Hitler was a monster, and this can be verified by the lack of any serious attempt to forgive his perfidies based on psychological factors, early influences and the like. By his deeds, Hitler relinquished his right to our retrospective sympathy. And, as Domarus so plainly demonstrates, he convicted himself by his own words over and over again.

Helpfully arranged by topic, this book includes materials painstakingly selected to highlight Hitler's relationship with the press, his oppression of his own people, his vitriol towards the Jews, and his final hours on earth. The words are definitely those of the Fuehrer, because Hitler never allowed anyone to edit his writings. Throughout his public life Hitler dominated everyone around him, so that even his own generals would not speak out against him. Nor did the German people question their leader, constituting one of history's most tragic and mysterious failures of national will.

It was Hitler's obsessive belief that Germany had to be avenged for the humiliating loss it suffered in the First World War. He never paid any attention to the facts when they inconveniently got in the way of his obsession. Wars are won not with mere pride and patriotism but with enough men and superior force of armaments, and that Germany did not have. The average German did not long for lebensraum, nor for the expulsion of the Jews; those were creations of Hitler's private myopia. His people wanted to recover from one war, not start a new one, so to fuel their zeal he invented the scourge of international Jewry and made it responsible for all his evil deeds. History records no eulogies for Hitler.

At the inception of a new art museum which he had designed, Hitler, egotistical as always, announced, "Had I accomplished nothing else in my life but this one building here, I would already have done more for German art than all the ludicrous scribblers in our former Jewish newspapers of the petty art-dabblers who, anticipating their own transience, have nothing to recommend themselves but their own praise..."

In a letter to Roosevelt, he defended the annexation of the Sudetenland by once more recalling Germany's humiliating betrayal following the first World War: "The peace conditions imposed on the conquered nations by the treaties concluded in the suburbs of Paris...have created in Europe a political regime that made of the conquered nations world pariahs without rights."

Of the Jews Hitler expounded coldly, "If the Jews do not want to work (in the camps) then they will be shot...they must be treated like a tuberculosis bacillus that can infect a healthy body...nations that do not fight off the Jews go to seed."

Hitler had his own press called Racial Observer to counter the lies of the "Jewish controlled" papers (in other words, newspapers that took exception to Hitler's mad antics). According to the author, in interviews with the press, Hitler "was charming, moderate, and always reasonable. He never told the truth."

In his bunker at the end of the war, Hitler married his mistress so that she would have the privilege of being his wife when she died with him. He wrote several wills, passed out cyanide pills to his staff in his final hours, and ended his life with a cowardly act of suicide, ordering that his body be cremated so as to avoid any chance that the corpse would be tampered with; in death as in life Hitler refused to be humiliated.

Domarus's book makes the study of Hitler for a modern reader clear and simple. Certainly not the book Hitler would have wanted to see in wide circulation. To read it is to repudiate the man and his nefarious works, and for that reason if none other it is highly recommended.



Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Barbara Bamberger Scott, 2007

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