There was a general atmosphere of geniality, but there,was something impersonal In the furnishings. I myself was rather taken aback at the midnight company of decidedly over-blown ladies. Did he really crave the credulous devotion of women to retain his belief in himself ? Hitler is not physically attractive. Everyone knows that to-day. But at that time stories were circulated in the party and among sympathizers about his deep blue eyes. They are neither deep nor blue. His look is staring or dead, and lacks the brilliance and sparkle of genuine animation. The timbre of his harsh, uncommon voice is repellent to the North German. The tone is full, but forced as though his nose were blocked Since then this voice, guttural and threatening, has become familiar to the whole world. It embodies the torment of these years.

There is something peculiar about the magic of a personality. I have found in myself and others that one succumbs to such magic only if one wishes to succumb to it. I have noticed that Hitler made the strongest impression on such people as were either highly suggestible or somewhat - effeminate or accustomed by their education and social background to formalism and hero-worship. Hitler's physical appearance certainly does not heighten the impression made by his personality. A receding forehead, with the lank hair falling over it; a short, unimposing stature, with limbs somehow ill-fitting and awkward; an expressionless mouth beneath the little brush of a moustache - such are the traits of the outer man. His only charm lies perhaps in his hands. which are strikingly well-shaped and expressive.

Whenever Hitler was in Berlin, he asked people to dine with him. It was considered a high honour to eat at Hitler's table, and there were usually ten to twenty people, at most. The food was simple. In this, too, the party Führer liked to give an impression of modest living on proletarian lines. He frequently expressed his intention of changing none of his previous habits, either in his clothing or in his style of living. As a matter of fact, this did form an agreeable contrast to the extravagant behaviour of some of the new bosses. Hitler retained his old habit of sitting beside the chauffeur in his car; his clothes consisted of his familiar raincoat seldom surmounted by a hat, while under it he usually wore a civilian jacket with the party uniform trousers, or an ordinary lounge suit.

At dinner, there was soup, followed by a meat course, vegetables and a sweet. Hitler himself ate no meat, but he devoured astonishing portions of the sweet, and his personal cook, an old party member, prepared special vegetable dishes for him. But Hitler placed no vegetarian compulsion on his guests, nor did he refuse them alcohol in the shape of beer. There was a choice between beer and lemonade, and it was amusing to watch newcomers, especially enthusiastic party members, choosing lemonade, with a side-glance at the temperate Führer, in order to make a good impression.

There was always a mixed and varied company at the table. Invariably some outstanding person was present, a film star, an artist or a leading member of the party. There were ladies, too, but usually in the minority. On one occasion I met two strikingly pretty blondes ; Hitler asked one of them to sit beside him, and kept putting his hand on her arm. Sometimes, too, society women were among the guests. It was at one of these gatherings that I made the acquaintance of Hess's sister. She was a handicrafts expert, and had bound Hitler's books for him. A frequent visitor at that time was Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia. Though an enthusiastic Nazi, he shone far more brightly in private conversation than in public speaking or in politics. His behaviour was natural, yet he seemed out of place. In my youth I had often seen him and his younger brother Oskar in the Prussian cadet corps at Potsdam. The princes used to visit us sometimes to play tennis or football. Hitler treated the prince with great courtesy at this time, and there were hopes in conservative quarters that the Führer would make "Auwi" Kaiser.

Then there was that constant visitor, Puzzi Hanfstangel, whose linguistic abilities and knowledge of the world were in great demand; but his curiously shaped head was more striking than what he had inside it. Goebbels, too, was there quite frequently. He visited Hitler whenever he could, remembering, perhaps, the adage, "Out of sight, out of mind." Bruckner, Hitler's tall adjutant, was another frequent visitor, and so was Sepp Dietrich. Everybody of note in the party who visited Berlin was included by Hitler in these dinner-parties.

The tone was informal. Often Hitler was silent, or made only desultory remarks. Again, he would pontificate in a booming voice, and everyone would listen in silence. It was interesting to watch Hitler talking himself into a fury, and to note how necessary to his eloquence were shouting and a feverish tempo. A quiet conversation with him was impossible. Either he was silent or he took complete charge of the discussion. Hitler's eloquence is plainly no natural gift, but the result of a conquest of certain inhibitions which, in intimate conversation, still make him awkward. The convulsive artificiality of his character is specially noticeable in such intimate circles; particularly notable is his lack of any sense of humour. Hitler's laugh is hardly more than an expression of scorn and contempt. There is no relaxation about it. His pleasures have no repose.

At one of these dinners I had, in fact, the opportunity of hearing his views on humour. I was sitting opposite Goebbels, who was on Hitler's left. The two were discussing the National Socialist humorous papers and the significance of wit as a weapon. In humour, too, or what he called humour, Hitler saw only a weapon. It was at this time that, in connection with the Sturmer and its Jewish caricatures, he gave utterance to the remark later much quoted in the party, that this was "the form of pornography permitted in the Third Reich." Evidently Hitler took pleasure in these filthy stories.

Adolf Hitler: A German Church, a German Christianity, is distortion. One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both... We need free men who feel and know that God is in themselves... Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense! Never again. That tale is finished. They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes... I'm a Catholic. Certainly that was fated from the beginning, for only a Catholic knows the weaknesses of the Church...

The Catholic Church is a really big thing. Why, what an organization ! It's something to have lasted nearly two thousand years ! We must learn from it. Astuteness and knowledge of human nature are behind it. Catholic priests know where the shoe pinches. But their day is done, and they know it. They are far too intelligent not to see that, and to enter upon a hopeless battle. But if they do, I shall certainly not make martyrs of them. We shall brand them as ordinary criminals. I shall tear the mask of honesty from their faces. And if that is not enough, I shall make them appear ridiculous and contemptible. I shall order films to be made about them. We shall show the history of the monks on the cinema. Let the whole mass of nonsense, selfishness, repression and deceit be revealed: how they drained the money out of the country, how they haggled with the Jews for the world, how they committed incest. We shall make it so thrilling that everyone will want to see it. There will be queues outside the cinemas. And if the pious burghers find the hair rising on their heads in horror, so much the better. The young people will accept it - the young people and the masses. I can do without the others.

I promise you that if I wished to, I could destroy the Church in a few years; it is hollow and rotten and false through and through. One push and the whole structure would collapse. We should trap the priests by their notorious greed and self-indulgence. We shall thus be able to settle everything with them in perfect peace and harmony. I shall give them a few years' reprieve. Why should we quarrel? They will swallow anything in order to keep their material advantages. Matters will never come to a head. They will recognize a firm will, and we need only show them once or twice who is the master. Then they will know which way the wind blows. They are no fools. The Church was something really big. Now we're its heirs. We, too, are a Church. Its day has gone. It will not fight. I'm quite satisfied. As long as youth follows me, I don't mind if the old people limp to the confessional. But the young ones-they will be different. I guarantee that.

About the United States, Hitler had his firm, preconceived opinion which no argument could shake. This opinion was that North America would never take part in a European war again, and that, with her millions of unemployed, the United States was on the brink of a revolution from the outbreak of which only Hitler could save her.

In June, 1933, I was present at a dinner-table conversation in Hitler's flat in which he gave expression to this view. Later, however, I had frequent occasions to hear the same view expressed. One of the guests suggested that it might be of decisive importance for Germany to win the friendship of North America. Certain members of the German government at that time had publicly emphasis ed the unique value of friendly relations with the United States, and for this reason had some misgivings about the anti Semitic policy of the Reich.

"Whose friendship ?" Hitler brusquely interposed. "The friendship of the Jewish jobbers and moneybags or that of the American people?"

He expressed his contempt of the present government of the United States.

"This is the last disgusting death-rattle of a corrupt and outworn system which is a blot on the history of this people. Since the Civil War, in which the Southern States were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the Americans have been in a condition of political and popular decay. In that war, it was not the Southern States, but the American people themselves who were conquered. In the spurious blossoming of economic progress and power politics, America has ever since been drawn deeper into the mire of progressive self-destruction. A moneyed clique, which presumes to be good society and to represent the old families, rules the country under the fiction of a democracy which has never before been so nakedly exposed as a mass of corruption and legal venality. The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality."

That word " equality " seemed to lash him into a fury. "Equality of whom ?" he shouted. "Of the descendants of old Spanish ruling families and of Swedish settlers with the degenerate masses from Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, with all the scum of East Baltic and Balkan Jewry? But I am firmly convinced that in a certain section of the American middle class and the farmers, the sound fighting spirit of colonial days has not been extinguished. We must awaken that spirit. It has not yet been destroyed. The wholesome aversion for the negroes and the coloured races in general, including the Jews, the existence of popular justice, the naivety of the average American, but also the scepticism of certain intellectual circles who have found their wisdom vain; scholars who have studied immigration and gained an insight, by means of intelligence tests, into the inequality of the races - all these strains are an assurance that the sound elements of the United States will one day awaken as they have awakened in Germany. National Socialism alone is destined to liberate the American people from their ruling clique and give them back the means of becoming a great nation."

Hitler had grown animated. All other conversation died away.

"I shall," he continued," undertake this task simultaneously with the restoration of Germany to her leading position in America."

"In what sense, my Führer ?" asked Goebbels.

"Have you forgotten that the declaration of German as the national language was lost by only one voice in Congress?

The German component of the American people will be the source of its political and mental resurrection. The American people is not yet a nation in the ethnographical sense ; it is a conglomerate of disparate elements. But it is the raw material of a nation. And the Yankees have failed to create a nation from it! They have instead kept their noses in their moneybags. To-day this is being avenged. Their difficulties will become insuperable."

"Do you mean," I asked, "that the German-American, rejuvenated by National Socialism, will be called to lead a new America?"

"That is exactly what I mean," Hitler returned. " We shall soon have an S.A. in America. We shall train our youth. And we shall have men whom degenerate Yankeedom will not be able to challenge. Into the hands of our youth will be given the great statesmanlike mission of Washington which this corrupt democracy has trodden under foot."

The most difficult thing to understand was the attitude of the army. They had got their wish: Röhm was removed. The independence of the Reichswehr was assured. That was enough for them. They had no use for civil unrest. They reserved the right to make a special investigation into the shooting of the two generals, von Schleicher, the former Reich Chancellor, and von Bredow. They allowed their one opportunity of shaking off the National Socialist yoke to go by. Without political insight, uncertain and vacillating in everything except their military calling, they were anxious to return as quickly as possible to ordered and regular activities. This failure of the high officials and officers, and also of the big industrial and agricultural interests, was symptomatic of their further attitude. They were no longer capable of any statesmanlike action. In every crisis, they would again be in the opposition, but would always recoil before the final step, the overthrow of the regime.

Have I not emphasized time and time again that only the inviolable unity of our will can lead our venture to success? Anyone who gets out of step will be shot. Have I not implored these people ten, a hundred, times to follow me? At a moment when everything depends on the party's being a single, close entity, I must listen to the reactionaries taunting me with the inability to keep order and discipline in my own house! I must accept the accusation that the party is a hotbed of insubordination, worse than the Communists! I must hear them say that matters are at a worse pass than they were under Bruning and Papen! I must listen to their ultimatum - these cowards and poltroons.

But they're mistaken. I am by no means at the end, as they think. They're all mistaken. They underestimate me because I have risen from below, from the "lower depths"; because I haven't had an education, because I haven't the manners that their sparrow brains think right! If I were one of them, I suppose I should be a great man, even now. But I don't need them to assure me of my historical greatness.

The insubordination of my S.A, has deprived me of a great many trump cards. But I hold plenty of others. I am in no embarrassment because of an occasional stroke of bad luck. The foul plan of these men will not succeed. They can't pass over me when the old gentleman dies. They can't put up anyone as vice-regent without my consent. And I will not give it to them. The people don't want a Hohenzollern monarchy. Only I could induce them to accept it. Only I could make them believe that a monarchy is necessary. But I will not do it. They're at their wits' end, these miserable busybodies, these second-rate clerks. Have you noticed how they tremble before me, how anxiously they try to please?

I have spoiled their plans. They thought I would not dare; they thought I was afraid. They saw me already wriggling in their net. They thought I was their tool. And behind my back they laughed at me and said I had no power now, that I had lost my party. I saw through all that long ago. I've given them a cuff on the ear that they'll long remember. What I have lost in the trial of the S.A. I shall regain by the verdict on these feudal gamblers and professional card-sharpers, the Schleichers and company.

If I call on the people to-day, they will follow me. If I appeal to the party, it will respond, more closely knit than ever. They will not succeed in splitting my party. I have destroyed the ringleaders, as well as the potential ringleaders that have been lying in ambush. They have tried to estrange me from the party in order to make me a weak-willed willed tool in their hands. But I stand here stronger than ever before...

The S.A. must prepare for a period of purgatory. But the time is coming when I shall fully recompense it and restore it to the highest honours. Because they too, they too have died for the greatness of our movement. They wanted everything for the best, but in their own stubborn way. Therefore they were doomed to err, and succumbed to the verdict under which all those must fall who do not learn to obey.

"I am not only the conqueror, but also the executor of Marxism - of that part of it that is essential and justified, stripped of its Jewish-Talmudic dogma."

I had asked Hitler whether the crux of the whole economic problem was not the extent to which private economic interests might continue to be the motive force of the national economy. There were party members who passionately denied the possibility of this, and expected a more radical social revolution than moderate Marxism, at any rate, had ever intended.

"I have learnt a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit," Hitler went on. "I don't mean their tiresome social doctrine or the materialist conception of history, or their absurd marginal utility theories and so on. But I have learnt from their methods. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it. Look at the workers' sports clubs, the industrial cells, the mass demonstrations, the propaganda leaflets written specially for the comprehension of the masses; all these new methods of political struggle are essentially Marxist in origin. All I had to do was to take over these methods and adapt them to our purpose. I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic-order."

"But surely," I objected," what you are describing is not distinct from the Bolshevism and Communism of Russia."

"Not at all!" Hitler cried. "You are making the usual mistake. What remains is a revolutionary creative will that needs no ideological crutches, but grows into a ruthless instrument of might invincible in both the nation and the world. A doctrine of redemption based on science thus becomes a genuine revolutionary movement possessing all the requisites of power."

"And what is the aim of this revolutionary will?" I inquired.

"It has no fixed aim. Do you find that so difficult to understand? " Hitler asked me.

I replied that such a viewpoint certainly seemed to me rather novel and unusual.

"We are a movement," the Führer replied. "Nothing could express our nature better. Marxism teaches that a vast upheaval quite suddenly changes the world. The millennium falls from the skies like a seventh heaven. After that world history ceases. There is no further development. Everything is in order. The shepherd tends his flocks. The end of the world has come. But we know there is never a final stage, there is no permanency, only eternal change. Only death is unchanging. The past is eternal. But the future is an inexhaustible fount of possibilities of further development."
I had not, I admitted, seen matters from such a lofty point of view.

"It is the only point of view from which it is possible to see them at all," Hitler retorted. "In my youth, and even in the first years of my Munich period after the war, I never shunned the company of Marxists of any shade. I was of the opinion that one or other of them showed promise. Certainly they had every freedom to unfold their potentialities. But they were and remained small men. They wanted no giants who towered above the multitude, though they had plenty of pedants who split dogmatic hairs. So I made up my mind to start something new. But it would have been possible at that time to transform the German working-class movement into what we are today. Perhaps it would have been wholesomer for Germany if there had been no split over this matter. Really, there was not much to prevent the German workers from throwing off their mistaken conception of a democracy, within the framework of which their revolution could be fulfilled. But of course that was the decisive, world-historical step reserved for us."

After reflecting for a moment, Hitler resumed:

"You ask whether private economic interests will have to be eliminated. Certainly not. I have never said anything of the kind, nor have I deputed any of my subordinates to say so. That would be as mad as an attempt to abolish sexual intercourse by decree. The instinct to earn and the instinct to possess cannot be eliminated. Natural instincts remain. We should be the last to deny that. But the problem is how to adjust and satisfy these natural instincts. The proper limits to private profit and private enterprise must be drawn through the state and general public according to their vital needs. And on this point I can tell you, regardless of all the professors' theories and trades-union wisdom, that there is no principle on which you can draw any universally valid limits. The needs of a state, varying according to time and circumstances, are the sole determining factor. What may be necessary today need not be so tomorrow. This is not a question of theoretical suppositions, but of practical decisions dictated by existing circumstances. Therefore I may - nay, must - change or repudiate under changed conditions to-morrow what I consider correct today.

I am no dictator, and never will be a dictator.... Being a dictator' is a catch-phrase with no reality behind it. My way of taking an average of the innumerable observations, judgments and desires in the party is an eminently difficult and continually fresh problem. It is my foremost problem - never to find myself in opposition to my party. If I am of a different opinion, then it is my duty to change either my own, or the party's view. But no one can give you what you ask for. You want to operate in a vacuum, instead of reaching some agreement between the opposing forces-forces without which there can be no life...

What is, in fact, the meaning of our party? Why have we eliminated all the other parties, and fought against the whole of the parliamentary, democratic system ? Did you think it was because we wanted to destroy all contact with the people? On the contrary: we have destroyed outworn institutions just because they no longer served to produce a fruitful relationship with the body of the nation, but led only to gossip and brazen deceit. We have eliminated parasites who insinuated themselves between the people and their leaders. Of course the part played by the masses is thereby also cut out. There is no longer a voting herd periodically intoxicated with words. In place of the mass, there is now the people's community, developed from the masses, the incorporated nation awakened to self-consciousness: our party.

Hitler's anti-Semitism is an essential element in his general policy, but it is also part of his mental make-up. To him the Jew represents the very principle of evil. His feeling about the Jews has much in common with that of the pornographer Julius Streicher and with that of the ordinary storm-trooper or SS man, but there are also elements of difference. To the great majority of the Nazi clique of leaders the whole racial doctrine is "Adolf's bunkum." They regard the ousting of the Jews as an exercise in revolutionary activity. They are able to do with the Jews as they would have been glad to do with the whole middle class, which is not so defenceless. To Streicher and his following anti-Semitism is a splendid stroke of business and, at the same time, a satisfaction of their vile instincts. Among the mass of the Germans there is no deep-rooted anti-Semitism; they have their grudges against the Jews, but these are no great matter.

I had in my own experience a practical demonstration of the fact that the majority of the party members did not take the anti-Semitic shouting of the Nazis seriously, and certainly had no expectation that anything drastic was really intended. On April 1st, 1933, when the first systematic persecution of the Jews began in Germany, I was rung up on my estate by a number of old party members in Danzig, where, of course, nothing of the sort was attempted. If, they said, these disgusting outrages continued, or were introduced in Danzig, they would not dream of remaining in the party. This was not their idea of the struggle for the New Germany.

In the pogrom of the autumn of 1938 the general attitude showed the extent of the degradation into which Hitler has
plunged the German people. "What does it matter to us? Look away if it makes you sick. It is not our trouble." That was the general reaction to the chasing of thinly-clothed men and women, and old and sick people, through the streets. Natural feelings of indignation had been overcome by the growth of callousness and of fear of the all-powerful tyranny. Still, the scenes did not increase the popularity of anti-Semitism.

Hitler, however, believes in the natural wickedness of the Jew. For him the Jew is evil incarnate. He has made a myth out of the Jew, and has made capital out of it; but behind this is a manifestly genuine personal feeling of primitive hatred and vengefulness.

Explanations of this may be sought in his personal experience, and, incidentally, it may be that under the Nuremberg racial legislation Hitler himself is not entitled to be classed as "Aryan"; but the intensity of his anti-Semitism can only be explained by his inflation of the Jew into a mythical prototype of humanity. It cannot be said, indeed, that he is illogical in this. His own esoteric doctrine implies an almost metaphysical antagonism to the Jew. Israel, the historic people of the spiritual God, cannot but be the irreconcilable enemy of the new, the German, Chosen People. One god excludes the other. At the back of Hitler's anti-Semitism there is revealed an actual war of the gods. This was so, of course, only for Hitler himself. His party comrades had no notion of the fantastic perspectives in which their master saw their concrete struggle.

Was not this degenerate race the protagonist of the independence of the spirit, and thus the mortal enemy of the coming age? Were not its members among the most eminent in science, that insubordinate outsider which, in Hitler's view, destroys life instead of promoting it? And was not the whole hated doctrine of Christianity, with its faith in redemption, its moral code; its conscience, its conception of original sin, the outcome of Judaism? Was not the Jew in political life always on the side of analysis and criticism ? Hitler had plenty of arguments to bring forward in justification of his loathing.

The extent to which he was obsessed by his hatred of the Jews was shown by the way he could scarcely speak without bringing in sooner or later at least one scathing reference to them. On one occasion he gave me a fairly full account of his ideas on this subject. It was perfectly true, he said, that anti-Semitism is a useful revolutionary expedient. He had often made effective use of it, and would do in the future. It was valuable both as an implicit threat to the whole middle class in Germany, a class with a greatly exaggerated faith in itself, and as a warning to the shortsighted democracies.

"My Jews are a valuable hostage given to me by the democracies. Anti-Semitic propaganda in all countries is an almost indispensable medium for the extension of our political campaign. You will see how little time we shall need in order to upset the ideas and the criteria of the whole world, simply and purely by attacking Judaism. The Jews themselves are our best helpers in this. In spite of their dangerous situation, the poor Jews continually associate with the enemies of the established order, and the rich Jews are envied because they are much in view as possessors of great fortunes. Thus it is easy to justify ourselves by quoting concrete instances from close around. And, once the principle of race has been established by the exposure of the particular case of the Jews, the rest is easy. It logically follows step by step that the existing political and economic order has to be ended and attention paid to the new ideas of biological politics."

Anti-Semitism, continued Hitler, was beyond question the most important weapon in his propagandist arsenal, and almost everywhere it was of deadly efficiency. That was why he had allowed Streicher, for instance, a free hand. The man's stuff, too, was amusing, and very cleverly done. Wherever, he wondered, did Streicher get his constant supply of new material! He, Hitler, was simply on thorns to see each new issue of the Sturmer. It was the one periodical that he always read with pleasure, from the first page to the last.

But, he said, we cannot rest content with that: it is only the beginning of a merciless struggle for world domination.

"The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between us, between Germans and Jews. All else is facade and illusion. Behind England stands Israel, and behind France, and behind the United States. Even when we have driven the Jew out of Germany, he remains our world enemy."

I asked whether that amounted to saying that the Jew must be destroyed.

"No," he replied. "We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one."

Hitler instanced the Catholic Church: it did not content itself, he said, with the Devil ; it had to have visible enemies in order not to relax in the struggle.

"The Jew," he said, " is always with us. But it is easier to combat him in the flesh than an invisible demon The Jew was the enemy of the Roman Empire, even of Egypt and Babylon; but I have been the first to go all out against him.

"Jews have been ready to help me in my political struggle. At the outset of our movement some Jews actually gave me financial assistance. If I had but held out my little finger I should have had the whole lot of them crowding round me. They knew well enough where there was a new thing on, with life in it. It was the Jews, of course, who invented the economic system of constant fluctuation and expansion that we call Capitalism - that invention of genius, with its subtle and yet simple self acting mechanism. Let us make no mistake about it - it is an invention of genius, of the Devil's own ingenuity.

"The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews. It is under their exclusive control. It is their super state, planted by them above all the states of the world in all their glory. But now we have challenged them, with the system of unending revolution. Has it not struck you how the Jew is the exact opposite of the German in every single respect, and yet is as closely akin to him as a blood brother?

"I have read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - it simply appalled me. The stealthiness of the enemy, and his ubiquity! I saw at once that we must copy it - in our own way, of course. Think of it - these people constantly on the move, and we with our new faith in unceasing activity, two groups so closely allied and yet so utterly dissimilar. It is in truth the critical battle for the fate of the world!"

"Don't you think," I objected, "that you are attributing rather too much importance to the Jews?"

"No, no, no!" exclaimed Hitler." It is impossible to exaggerate the formidable quality of the Jew as an enemy."

"But," I said, " the Protocols are a manifest forgery. I saw the book in 1920, through a certain Muller von Hausen. It was evident to me that it can't possibly be genuine."

"Why not?" grunted Hitler. He did not care two straws, he said, whether the story was historically true. If it was not, its intrinsic truth was all the more convincing to him." We must beat the Jew with his own weapon," he continued. "I saw that the moment I had read the book."

"So you derived inspiration for your struggle from the Protocols?" I asked.

"Yes, certainly, down to the veriest detail," he replied.

"I found these Protocols enormously instructive. I have always learnt a great deal from my opponents. I studied revolutionary technique in the works of Lenin and Trotsky and other Marxists. And I got illumination and ideas from the Catholic Church, and from the Freemasons, that I could never have obtained from other sources. The man who is not ready to learn from his enemies, and from them above all, is a fool. Only a weakling will be afraid of losing his own inspiration by studying the enemy."

"Even the Freemasons and the Catholic Church ? Is not that going rather far?"

"Not a bit of it," retorted Hitler. "Nothing could be more natural. I learned above all from the Jesuits. So did Lenin, for that matter, if I remember rightly. There has been nothing more impressive in the world than the hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church. I have taken over many elements of it in the organization of my party. To have lasted almost two thousand years, under changing fortunes, is an achievement."

"I remember hearing you say something of the sort once," I ventured. Hitler ignored the remark, and pursued his theme:

"The Catholic Church is a model above all in its uncommonly clever tactics and its knowledge of human nature, and in its wise policy of taking account of human weaknesses in its guidance of the faithful. I have followed it in giving our party programme the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it."

The author shares the view of Professor Trevor-Roper that Rauschning's account of his conversations with Hitler in this book (Hitler Speaks) has been vindicated by the evidence of Hitler's views which has been discovered since its publication and that it is an important source for any biography of Hitler.

Virtually every major biography of Adolf Hitler or history of the Third Reich quotes from the memoir of Hermann Rauschning, a former National Socialist Senate President of Danzig. In the book published in Britain as Hitler Speaks (London, 1939) and in America as The Voice of Destruction (New York, 1940) Rauschning presents page after page of what are purported to be Hitler's most intimate views and plans for the future. They are allegedly based on a hundred or so private conversations between the two men.

Now, after more than forty years, a Swiss historian has thoroughly exposed this supposed document of Hitler's madness as completely fraudulent. Wolfgang Haenel presented the results of his research to the annual conference in May 1983 of the Ingolstadt Contemporary History Research Center in West Germany.

Rauschning's Hitler is nothing more than a nihilistic revolutionary utterly lacking in ideas, goals, principles or systematic ideology who demagogically exploited words and men to accumulate power for its own sake. He was a clever but completely unscrupulous opportunist who believed nothing of what he said. His National Socialism, according to Rauschning, was just a "Revolution of Nihilism." He was allegedly preoccupied with war. His numerous disarmament proposals and peace offers were just hypocritical rhetoric designed to mislead his future victims.

Of the man who unified Germany, Hitler is supposed to have said: "Bismarck was stupid. He was just a Protestant." He allegedly rebuked Rauschning for his qualms: "Why do you babble about brutality and get upset over suffering. The masses want that. They need some cruelty." "I want a violent, masterful, fearless, cruel youth," he is quoted as saying. On another occasion, Hitler reportedly declared: "Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title."

Wolfgang Haenel spent many years in detailed research, text comparison and interviewing contemporary witnesses. He found that instead of "about a hundred conversations" with Hitler, Rauschning actually met with the German leader only four or five times. And these few meetings were neither private nor lengthy, but always in the company of high ranking officials while visiting Hitler in Berlin or Obersalzberg. Rauschning never had the opportunity to hear Hitler's intimate views or secret plans for the future, as he boasted in his spurious "memoir."

Haenel shows that some of the words attributed to Hitler by Rauschning were actually lifted from the works of Ernst Juenger and Friedrich Nietzsche. Hitler is quoted as making statements which could not possibly have been made at the times alleged. Some quotes supposedly made in private were in fact taken from speeches made by Hitler after 1935, the year Rauschning left for France. Haenel also exposes serious contradictions between events as presented by Rauschning and the way they actually occurred, as in the case of an alleged conversation following the Reichstag fire of March 1933.

Haenel shows that the spurious memoir was commissioned by some French journalists and New York publishing firms as a literary weapon in the propaganda war against National Socialist Germany. For many years the amount paid to the financially strapped Rauschning for his work remained a record in France for a political book.