The book Hitler's Secret Conversations 1941-1944 published by Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc. first edition, 1953, contains definitive proof of Hitler's real views. The book was published in Britain under the title, _Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944, which title was used for the Oxford University Press paperback edition in the United States.[...]
Great book! An Amazon reviewer summarized its credibility rather succinctly:
Beware, this is a discredited source (at the very best, widely disputed), and no serious historian relies on this information. After WW2, there was much embarrassment over Hitler being a Christian and supported by the Christians and the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Lo and behold, we have this book of "secret" conversations, which is where we get all the these anti-Christian quotes. Its usually published as "Hitler's Table Talk", and is an exclusively hearsay compilation of "private" conversations in which Hitler was supposedly warned beforehand that everything he said would be recorded for posterity, yet he lowered his guard and supposedly revealed his true feelings anyway. Naturally, these feelings contrast violently with other public and private speeches or conversations, and mysteriously enough, no original documents or recordings can be found.
Another over-used source is Hermann Rauschning's "The Voice of Destruction: Hitler Speaks", which was already so heavily quoted by 1945 that it was explicitly mentioned and dismissed in OSS documents because of its unreliable nature. In fact, May 1983, Swiss historian Wolfgang Haenel formally gathered together all of the criticisms of Rauschning's book and resoundingly debunked it at a presentation at the annual conference of the Ingolstadt Contemporary History Research Center, showing
(among other things) that Hitler was not physically present at the times and places indicated, and that the financially desperate Rauschning was paid a staggering sum of money to produce the book by French and American sources who wished to use it as propaganda.
More reading on
Table Talk.
And
here's some relevant information about
Hitler Speaks.
Authenticity of Hitler Speaks
The authenticity of the discussions Rauschning claims to have had with Hitler between 1932 and 1934, which form the basis of his book Hitler Speaks,[18] was challenged shortly after Rauschning's death by Swiss researcher Wolfgang Hänel. Hänel investigated the memoir and announced his findings at a conference of the revisionist association Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt[19] in 1983.[citation needed]
Hänel declared that Gespräche mit Hitler (the German title of Hitler Speaks) was a fraud and that the book has no value "except as a document of Allied war propaganda"[page needed] and concluded that:
Rauschning's claim to have met with Hitler "more than a hundred times" was a lie[page needed]
that the two actually met only four times, and never alone[page needed]
words attributed to Hitler were simply invented or plagiarized from many different sources, including the writings of Ernst Jünger and Friedrich Nietzsche; and an
account of Hitler hearing voices, waking at night with convulsive shrieks and pointing in terror at an empty corner while shouting "There, there, in the corner!" was taken from a short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant (Le Horla).[page needed]
Hänel based his book upon a tape-recorded interview that he had led in 1981 with Emery Reves, Jewish publisher of the original French edition of Hitler speaks (which had been entitled Hitler m'a dit) who had commissioned the book from Rauschning in 1939. In this interview, Reves contended that penniless Rauschning's main reason for agreeing to write Hitler speaks was the 125,000 francs advance, and, referring to preliminary talks with Rauschning in 1939 where he had agreed with the author on what themes and personality traits to apply to Hitler, considered it as largely fabrication.
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich also considers that "The research of the Swiss educator Wolfgang Hänel has made it clear that the 'conversations' were mostly free inventions."[20]
The non-revisionist historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's initial view that the conversations recorded in Hitler Speaks were authentic[21] also wavered as a result of the Hänel research. For example, in the introductory essay[22] he wrote for Hitler's Table Talk in 1953[23] he had said:
"Hitler's own table talk in the crucial years of the Machtergreifung (1932–34), as briefly recorded by Hermann Rauschning, so startled the world (which could not even in 1939 credit him with either such ruthlessness or such ambitions) that it was for long regarded as spurious. It is now, I think, accepted. If any still doubt its genuineness, they will hardly do so after reading the volume now published. For here is the official, authentic record of Hitler's Table-Talk almost exactly ten years after the conversations recorded by Rauschning".[24]
in the third edition, published in 2000,[25] he wrote a new preface in which he did revise, though not reverse, his opinion of the authenticity of Hitler Speaks:
"I would not now endorse so cheerfully the authority of Hermann Rauschning which has been dented by Wolfgang Hanel, but I would not reject it altogether. Rauschning may have yielded at times to journalistic temptations, but he had opportunities to record Hitler's conversations and the general tenor of his record too exactly foretells Hitler's later utterances to be dismissed as fabrication."[26]
In writing his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw has written "I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether."[27][28]
Richard Steigmann-Gall, in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, is another historian contending Hitler speaks an overall fake.[29]
The Hänel research was reviewed in the West German newspapers Der Spiegel[30] and Die Zeit in 1985.[31][...]
While I don't blame Westwall entirely for the cut-and-paste job from answers.com, he or she has demonstrated a common failing of the willfully ignorant: namely the complete lack of effort in verifying the credibility of a source.
Fine, here's some more. I was being quick because I had to leave, but as you made the claim, here you go. There is loads more. This will get you started. I find it amusing that you guys will buy Nazi propaganda hook, line, and sinker and claim to be critical thinkers when you are anything but.
Instead of trying to bury the fact that Hitler was an atheist you should simply acknowledge it and state that while he was indeed an atheist his views in now are reflected in the views of atheists around the world.
It is too easy to show what Hitler was. A egomaniacle, amoral, vegetarian atheist. Who also happened to be a mass murderer. His beliefs didn't make him a mass murderer. His amorality did that.
A major part of what Hitler saw as his forthcoming struggle was targeting, isolating and destroying a number of enemies who were perceived as inherently hostile to his dream of the 'Volksgemeinschaft' or 'Racial Community'. Chief among these were Jews, Communists, the Social Democrats with their loyal electoral support, the Catholic Centre Party and the Christian Churches. All were threats, each to be dealt with as quickly as circumstances would allow.
Though Hitler felt a particular urgency — and hatred — when dealing with Jews and Communists, he viewed the Catholic Church as a pernicious opponent, a deeply-entrenched threat that must be controlled and eventually uprooted from German life in order to establish his promised Thousand-Year-Reich. To help eliminate Catholic influence, he turned to Alfred Rosenberg, arch-ideologue, anti-Semite, and despiser of Christianity. In his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg had formulated a "scientific" theory of racism. For him, the supreme human value was that of race: individual races possessed their own collective soul, a mystical "power of the blood and soil." Each race also possessed a religious impulse (in the case of the Aryan Germans, this was the pagan cult of Wotan, king of the gods). Christianity, for Rosenberg, was the distorted product of Semitic tribes who had tricked the Aryans into jettisoning their pagan truth. The Catholic Church, prime mover in this spiritual swindle, was singled out for sustained attack as the promoter of "prodigious, conscious and unconscious falsifications." Rosenberg claimed that Jesus Christ had been an unwitting tool of Jewish world conspirators, active as early as the first century AD. In some writings, he would go further and argue that Christ was possibly not a Jew at all, but a prototype Aryan, son of a Roman soldier stationed in Palestine.
In February 1933 Hermann Goering banned all Catholic newspapers in Cologne, citing that 'political' Catholicism — ie commenting on government policy — would not be tolerated. Responding to protests, he denied this was part of a deliberate campaign against Catholics; the government, he claimed, would "seal its own doom with such a policy." Though the ban was lifted, it sent a warning tremor through the largely Catholic Rhineland, and gave an accurate indication of possible future government moves. A further straw in the wind was apparent when Storm troopers (SA) broke up meetings of Christian trade unions and the Catholic Centre Party. The Manchester Guardian reported one such incident on February 23, 1933 — a prominent politician, Adam Stegerwald, was attacked while speaking at a meeting in Krefeld, and a number of priests were hurt in the fracas.
Nazi Policy and the Catholic Church
From the very beginning the Nazis had mixed attitudes toward the Catholic
Church. Adolf Hitler, a nominal Catholic, was tolerant of Catholicism. Many other
Nazis were practising Catholics. A staunch Catholic and early Nazi patron who
will appear later in this study was General Franz Ritter von Epp. He commanded
one of the military groups which liberated Munich from Soviet rule in May, 1919.
Immediately afterward he ordered a Mass of thanksgiving, for which act of piety he
was dubbed by the impious as the “ Virgin Mary General” (Muttergottesgeneral).
Besides being opposed to what they called the red international of socialism
and the golden international od Judaism, many Nazis were also opposed to the
black international of Catholicism. Anti-Catholics among the early Nazis included
the leading Nazi philosopher and writer, Alfred Rosenberg, and Hermann Esser,
who before he was of age became one of HitlerÂ’s most effective speakers.3 Heinrich
Himmler, who joined the National Socialist Part y in 1925, was another
anti-Catholic who was to become a leading Nazi.
Because of this anti-Catholic aspect of National Socialism, because it made
race a kind of religion, because it stressed German nationalism while Catholics
were often separatists, and because Nazis attacked the specifically Catholic
political parties, there were important religious and political differences between
Nazism and Catholicism in the 1920's. After the spectacular success of the
National Socialist Party in the elections to the Reichstag in the summer of 1930,
Catholic bishops in Germany began forbidding Catholics to be members of the
National Socialist Party. By March of 19 31 all the German bishops had condemned
National Socialism, and some bishops instructed Catholics not to vote for
the National Socialist Party in the crucial elections during 1932 and on March 5,
1933.4
http://www.umanitoba.ca/colleges/st_pauls/ccha/Back Issues/CCHA1967/Cahill.pdf
12 Aug 1935 - CATHOLICS REPLY TO NAZI ATTACKS "Will Not Be Int...
"But there was a dilemma for Hitler. While conservatives, the Christian churches ''could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.'' Given that these were the fundamental underpinnings of the Nazi regime, ''conflict was inevitable,'' the summary states. It came, as Nazi power surged in the late 1920's toward national domination in the early 30's.
According to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi leader of the German youth corps that would later be known as the Hitler Youth, ''the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement'' from the beginning, though ''considerations of expedience made it impossible'' for the movement to adopt this radical stance officially until it had consolidated power, the outline says."
Word for Word/The Case Against the Nazis; How Hitler's Forces Planned To Destroy German Christianity - New York Times
