Lots of antifascists, leftists, and others like to quote this statement:
“Only one thing could have stopped our movement - if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.”
The supposed author of this statement was Adolf Hitler. However, a Google search (and a Google books search) only reveals instances of people quoting this single line. There is a British play that contains this line and refers to a speech from Nuremberg in 1933, but I can’t find the text of that speech anywhere.
So: is this just wishful thinking on the part of militant leftists who wish to “smash with the utmost brutality the nucleus” of modern right-wing movements? Or is this an actual quote from Hitler, referring to the very real street clashes between trade unionists, leftists, communists & Nazi supporters in the early years of the NSDAP?
[Quote Investigator | Dedicated to the Investigation and Tracing of Quotations]
(http://quoteinvestigator.com/) that will trace about one quote a week. I don’t know how it is determined if the quote is of sufficient interest to follow.
Looking through some online translations of “Mein Kampf,” he uses the word “nucleus” (whatever the German word may be) frequently and “nucleus of our organization” at one point, so it certainly seems Hitler-y enough in tone, but the phrase doesn’t appear there.
One thing is that it does sound content and language-wise quite plausibly like something he might have said. It’s not the usual implausible attribution you usually see attached to famous people.
“Issac Newton said the angle of the dangle is equal to the square of the hair!”
Closest I could get is this page that gives the quote (last paragraph) and attributes it to “Hood, 1993”. Searching for that, you get a book by a Stuart Hood published in 1993, “Introducing Fascism and Nazism”, although without reading it, there’s no telling where the author got the quote.
That’s what Esox meant - let me rephrase the sentence for you:
“The quote sounds like it came when the Nazis were in power - after Mein Kampf was written.”
One difficulty is that Hitler’s “works”, speeches, letters, articles etc. to this day have not been collected and published. So individual quotes aren’t easy to verify. I too find it irritating that a Google search (even in German) only comes up with results from websites with a left-wing agenda.
That would be David Edgar’s 1976 play Destiny, according to Google Books. As you point out, the quote seems to be most often attributed to a speech Hitler gave as part of the closing ceremony of the 1933 Nuremberg Rally. Which was filmed by Leni Riefenstahl as Der Sieg des Glaubens, so perhaps it’s in there. But according to the IMDB the film was destroyed on the orders of Hitler himself, because it has Ernst Röhm in it, who became an unperson shortly afterwards. Riefenstahl was instead asked to come back and film the next year’s rally, which became Triumph of the Will. So, in a way it’s good that Hitler and Ernst Röhm fell out, because we might not have had Triumph of the Will otherwise. It has to be said that the quote sounds like Hitler. I’ve read through Mein Kampf - not out of curiosity, but because I’m a raving Nazi - and it sounds like him. Like being relentlessly shouted at by an angry man with unswerving self-belief.
According to Wikipedia, “there were two sets of official or semi-official books covering the rallies. The “red books” were officially published by the NSDAP and contained the proceedings of the “congress” as well as full texts of every speech given in chronological order.” So you’d need to get hold of one of the 1933 Red Books. Good luck with that! Or you could buy “Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945” from Amazon, which is $795! Perhaps your local library has it.
Whilst looking this up I stumbled on this. A compilation of pre-1933 anti-Hitler cartoons published by the Nazis in order to ridicule the cartoons for being nonsense, with the twist being that the book (a) helped preserve the anti-Hitler cartoons for future generations and (b) the cartoons were, on the whole, dead right. Particularly the last one.
*
"What they wrote: The cartoon suggests that Hitler wants war.
What happened: On 15 July 1933 Germany signed the “Four Power Pact” in Rome, which guarantees peace between England, France, Italy, and Germany for the next ten years. "*
“Only one thing could have stopped our movement - if our adversaries had understood its principle” Makes it sound like Hitler was gloating about pulling one over on an unsuspecting populace, and while I’m not an expert on German/Nazi history, I don’t think he would have viewed his rise to power with such cynicism. Rather, based on their own warped view of the world, I think that Hitler and other Nazi leaders genuinely viewed their ascent to power as a moral and ideological victory.
If I were trying to rely on the “easiest rhetorical cheap shot” this quote would seem way too good to be true. To me, this quote seems like a scare tactic tailor made by someone hoping to shame his audience into opposing some law or policy by equating any complacency on their part with that of the German public during the rise of the Third Reich.
I will say, as a general rule, regardless of the authenticity of a quote, that smashing with utmost brutality the nucleus of a new movement is a good way to stop it.
By “adversaries,” Hitler was invariably referring to pacifists, democrats, parliamentarians, Socialists, Communists, and Jews. He made no secret as to how he felt about them, or how he would deal with them once he came to power.
They (and everyone else) were given fair warning in Mein Kampf, but failed to heed it.
