Konrad Heiden

“The Nazi party had been too hasty in incorporating the word ‘Socialist’ in its title, Hitler indeed wished it to be ‘Social Revolutionary.’”

“Hitler expressed it in a form which made it intelligible to the masses. ‘We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.’”

“At Munich, at the time of the Soviet Republic, he [Hitler] interceded with his comrades on behalf of the Social-Democratic Government and, in heated discussions, espoused the cause of Social Democracy against that of the Communists.”

“They could resign themselves to the Republic no less than the big industrialists, who did not favour the various abortive revolts and did not, for the most part, encourage National-Socialism.”

“Before the war [World War I] the anti-Semitic movement was of no political importance in Germany.”

“At length a force of three million S.A. men was pushing on behind him [Röhm], and God knew whither they were pushing. There were large numbers of Communists and Social Democrats among them; many of the storm troopers were called ‘beefsteaks—brown and red within. Jest were retailed such as the following: one S.A. man says to another: ‘In our storm troop there are three Nazis, but we shall soon have spewed them out.”

“Röhm coined the slogan that there must be ‘second revolution’, this time, not against the Left, but against the Right; in his diary Goebbels agreed with him. On April 18 he maintained that this second revolution was being discussed ‘everywhere among the people’; in reality, he said, this only meant that first one was not yet ended. ‘Now we shall soon have to settle with the reaction. The revolution must nowhere call a halt.”

“He [Hitler] had learned much from Leon Trotzky, whose slogan of the permanent revolution he now adopted: ‘The German Revolution will not be concluded until the whole of the German nation is given a new form, a new organization, and a new structure.’”

“The twenty-six-year-old Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler youth, who could boast of standing close to Hitler, declared bluntly in those revolutionary June weeks: ‘A socialist and anti-capitalist attitude is the most salient characteristic of the Young National Socialist Germany.’”