Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The Kaiser on Hitler

What did Kaiser Wilhelm think of Hitler? To quote the Emperor:
There is a man alone, without family, without children, without God....He builds legions but he doesn’t build a nation. A nation is created by families, a religion, tradition: it is made up out of the hearts of mothers, the wisdom of fathers, the joy and the exuberance of children. [Of Germany under Hitler he says]....an all-swallowing State, disdainful of human dignities and the ancient structure of our race, sets itself up in place of everything else. And the man who, alone, incorporates in himself this whole State, has neither a God to honour nor a dynasty to conserve, nor a past to consult....

For a few months I was inclined to believe in National Socialism. I thought of it as a necessary fever. And I was gratified to see that there were, associated with it for a time, some of the wisest and most outstanding Germans. But these, one by one, he has got rid of or even killed....He has left nothing but a bunch of shirted gangsters....


This man could bring home victories to our people each year without bringing them...glory....But of our Germany, which was a nation of poets and musicians and artists and soldiers, he has made a nation of hysterics and hermits, engulfed in a mob and led by a thousand liars or fanatics....”
(Read More.)
Share

5 comments:

anothertwocents said...

Kaiser Wilhelm certainly had every opportunity to work with Kaiser Karl, blessed Charles of Hungary, to stop the insane bloodbath that was WW1. Instead, the German army threatened blessed Charles with arrest and bodily harm if he continued to work for peace. And there also was that German genocide in Namibia in which up to 24% of all the members of a unruly tribe was wiped out, driven into the desert to die of thirst. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_Genocide

It's somewhat bizarre to find Kaiser Wilhelm talking about gangsters and an all-swallowing state given his own history.

elena maria vidal said...

The Kaiser certainly laid the groundwork for what happened later. Let's hope that he acknowledged it at least to himself.

tubbs said...

The anglo-american take on the kaiser is still soooo much bull and propaganda. Clemenceau, Lloyd-George, and especially Wilson were the real villians of this era.

R J Stove said...

So that's what Kaiser Wilhelm looked like in old age! I suddenly realized that until seeing this post I'd never seen a picture of his post-1918 self.

Is it true that he greeted the news of Kristallnacht with the words "For the first time in my life I am ashamed to be a German"? I remember being told this quotation in my childhood but I've never succeeded in finding a source for it.

lara77 said...

Though Kaiser Wilhelm is not one of my favorite royals his observations about Hitler were simply amazing!! It is as if he had a crystal ball in front of him and was simply reading the future. Though steeped in his Prussian military heritage I believe even the Kaiser could never have predicted the Holocaust. When I was a child our family doctor was a refugee from Nazi Germany. As he said to me,"We thought of ourselves as Germans first,not Jews. My family had fought for Germany and the Kaiser." How true and how very sad.