Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant

Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant are the published memoirs written by Otto Wagener about Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP’s early history. A German major general and, for a period, Adolf Hitler's economic advisor and confidant, Wagener wrote his memoirs in 1946 while Wagener was being held by the British. His work was not published until seven years after his death, in 1978 in German. The English edition was published in 1985 by Yale University Press. His memoirs are used, to some degree, by Third Reich historians

Quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler in Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, (1978)

New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1985

• Only then will it be possible to work jointly to find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution, without the destruction of the most precious treasures, without annihilation of irreplaceable lives, and without regression to a lower level of civilization and culture as well as a lower standard of living and life in general.
  • p. 14

• Then the highbrows appear on the scene and appeal to the law and the authority of tradition. These legitimists do not see that this law and this tradition were born in individualist thinking and are the pillars of a past time. What counts is to establish new laws and new authority in place of old traditions. If this is not done, they will find that the road to socialist reconstruction will not be traveled according to plan and peaceably, but that the revolution will topple these pillars, bringing down the structure of individualism. But most of them have never even read Marx, and they view Bolshevik revolution as a private Russian affair.
  • p. 14

• Here you see the difference between the former age of individualism and the socialism that is on the horizon.
  • p. 16

• In socialism of the future…what counts is the whole, the community of the Volk. The individual and his life play only a subsidiary role. He can be sacrificed—he is prepared to sacrifice himself should the whole demand it, should the commonwealth call for it.
  • p. 16

• Aren’t these liberals, those reprobate defenders of individualism, ashamed to see the tears of the mothers and wives, or don’t these cold-blooded accountants even notice? Have they already grown so inhuman that they are no longer capable of feeling? It is understandable why bolshevism simply removed such creatures. They were worthless to humanity, nothing but an encumbrance to their Volk. Even the bees get rid of the drones when they can no longer be of service to the hive. The Bolshevik procedures are thus quite natural.
  • pp. 16-17

• But that's precisely the problem we have set out to solve: to convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists, without destruction of property and values,…
  • p. 17

• We are living in an age of great radical change, as I have said before—an evolution from individualism to socialism, from self-interest to the public interest, from the ‘I’ to the ‘we.’
  • p. 23

• But we National Socialists wish precisely to attract all socialists, even the Communists; we wish to win them over from their international camp to the national one.
  • p. 26

• Once the ruling power is in our grasp, we must seize the evil in Germany by the root and tear it out, to make way for true socialism, for the new faith, for the new religion.
  • pp. 58-59

• I also admit that we must not completely bury our heads in the sand in the face of those forces in the world which will try to defend liberalism and individualism. For they, too, have made a religion of those concepts. As long as only those with a vested interest in economic liberalism are at the helm in the authoritarian democracies—which are really not democracies at all—and in nations dominated by capitalism—where the word democracy is derived, not from demos, the people, but from daemon, the devil: until then they will wage war against socialism; and when there is no other choice, they will drive their peoples and their youth to the slaughtering block for the sake of their economic power, for their money bags, for base mammon. And the people will be stupid enough, and will be kept stupid enough, to go to war in the belief that they are fighting for their fatherland. But they are fighting only to maintain the domination of capital over labor and for the interest paid on that capital.
  • p. 59

• Public need before private greed.
  • p. 115

• But perhaps it is easier to preach and find prophets for a socialism that corresponds to Marxist ideas or present-day communism than for the synthesis of reason that has the goal of putting the given traits of humanity in the service of the people.
  • p. 115

• Communism results in a welfare state where the standards are averaged downward. We want a state that allows for free development of the personality, but in the last analysis, this must also be for the needs of the people—that is, in the service of the community, where the standard is to be raised as high as possible, and then higher yet.
  • p. 115

• I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.
  • pp. 145-146

• Individualism, which is in the process of being replaced by socialism—and we’re determined to lend a helping hand to abolish and replace it—is actually already being buried by industrialization… For thanks to growing industrialism, with all its consequences—associations, corporations, trusts, and monopolies—actually only a very few people are left who might imagine themselves to be living their individual lives.
  • p. 148

• And our synthesis is not a compromise… it is, instead, the radical removal of all the false results of industrialization and unrestrained economic liberalism, and the redirection of this line of development to the service of humanity and the individual.
  • p. 149

• There also exists a constructive international socialist idea. But it is altogether different. For, look here, once nations have begun to carry out a socialist and socio-economic reorganization within their own borders, the time is ripe for totality of nations—that is, all the peoples and states—to give up fighting each other for power and supremacy, enslavement and exploitation,…
  • p. 169

• But first, there will have to be national socialism. Otherwise the people and their governments are not ready for the socialism of nations. It is not possible to be liberal to one’s own country and demand socialism among nations.
  • p. 170

• After all, that’s exactly why we call ourselves National Socialists! We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism.
  • p. 288

• For we [National Socialists] too are considered ‘upstarts’ and ‘leftists’ by those same reactionaries. They are only too eager to apply such terms as ‘enemies of the fatherland,’ ‘Bolsheviks,’ and ‘inferiors.’”
  • p. 288