Just as night follows
day Hitler left no doubt that he viewed the physical manifestation of democracy--parliament--as
an entity only worthy of maximum scorn and total destruction.
There
is no principle looked at objectively that is as wrong as the parliamentary
principle.
MEIN KAMPF, Adolf
Hitler, New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939, page 107
In a 4 May 1923 speech
in Munich:
German parliamentarianism is... the decline and the end of the German nation.
ADOLPH HITLER QUOTATIONS,
by Karl Hammer,1990, Page 34
In Munich on 22 September
1928:
Second,
insofar as we educate the people to fight against the delirium of democracy
and bring it again to the recognition of the necessity of authority and
of leadership, we tear it away from the nonsense of parliamentarianism;
thereby we deliver it from the atmosphere of irresponsibility and lead
it to responsibility and to a recognition of duty on the part of the individual
person.
HITLER'S WORDS, by
Adolf Hitler, Edited by Gordon Prange, 1944, page 39
Hitler believed that
working through parliaments was a waste of time, and hopefully no American
administration ever arrives at the same determination through following
the Bushite mentality.
In a speech in Munich on
10 April 1923 he stated:
The
Movement must not rust away in Parliament, it must not spend itself in
superfluous battles of words, but the banner with the white circle and
the black Swastika will be hoisted over the whole of Germany on the day
which shall mark the liberation of our whole people.
MY NEW ORDER
by Adolf Hitler, Edited by de Sales, 1941, page 49
According to Hitler
Parliament can’t express the people’s will, but he never offered a practical
alternative; an alternative, yes, a practical alternative, no.
In Nuremberg on 1 September
1933 he stated:
In that we deny the principal of parliamentary democracy we strike the
strongest blow for the right of the nation to the self-determination of
its own life. For in the parliamentary system we see no genuine expression
of the nation's will--a will which cannot logically be anything else than
a will to the maintenance of the nation--but we do see a distortion, if
not a perversion, of that will. The will of a nation to the self-determination
of its being manifests itself most clearly and is of most use when its
most capable minds are brought forth. They form the representative
leaders of a nation, they alone can be the pride of a nation--certainly
never the parliamentary politician who is the product of the ballot box
and thinks only in terms of votes.
HITLER'S WORDS, by
Adolf Hitler, Edited by Gordon Prange, 1944, page 43
MY NEW ORDER
by Adolf Hitler, Edited by de Sales, 1941, page 196
He claimed the youth
opposed parliamentarianism:
The
young movement, according to its structure and its inner organization,
is anti-parliamentarian; that means in general, and in its inner construction,
it rejects a principle of a decision by the majority, by which the leader
is degraded to the position of the executive of the will and the opinion
of the others.
MEIN KAMPF, Adolf
Hitler, New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939, page 478
In a speech in Nuremberg
on 10 September 1934:
A
young generation is growing up and it has never experienced the infection
of our poisonous party politics, it has never experienced the corruption
of our parliamentary-democratic system: all this is alien to our youth,
is from the outset incomprehensible.
MY NEW ORDER
by Adolf Hitler, Edited by de Sales, 1941, page 294
He denied elections
can discover great men:
On
the whole, one cannot contradict too sharply the absurd opinion that men
of genius are born out of general elections. First, there is only
one real "statesman" once in a blue moon in one nation and not a hundred
or more at a time; and second, the masses' aversion to every superior genius
is an instinctive one. It is easier for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle than that a great man is "discovered" in an election.
MEIN KAMPF, Adolf
Hitler, New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939, page 113
And he labeled political
leaders as worthless:
Half
our political figures are rather cunning but equally characterless elements,
who are on the whole inimically disposed towards our people, while the
other half is composed of kind-hearted, harmless, and easy-going nitwits.
MEIN KAMPF, Adolf
Hitler, New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939, page 946
With the current frame
of mind of millions in the United States, one can easily see how these
tenets could delude, draw, and ultimately engulf many people. They
are demagogic and dangerous to the extreme.
If Hitler viewed parliaments
with such aversion and revulsion, why did the Nazi party behave incongruously
by participating therein. Hitler sought to reconcile this contradiction
by saying in Munich after the election in September 1930:
It is not for seats in Parliament that we fight, but we win seats in Parliament
in order that one day we may be able to liberate the German people.
HITLER'S SPEECHES
by Norman Baynes, 1942, VOLUME 1, Page 190
In a speech in Munich
on 1 August 1923:
Our
Movement was not formed with any election in view, but in order to spring
in to the rescue of this people as its last help in the hour of greatest
need, at the moment when in fear and despair it sees the approach of the
Red Monster. The task of our Movement is still today not to prepare
ourselves for any coming election but to prepare for the coming collapse
of the Reich,...
MY NEW ORDER
by Adolf Hitler, Edited by de Sales, 1941, page 66
In Munich on 18 July
1930:
We
National Socialists know that no election can conclusively decide the fate
of a nation. It is not parliamentary majorities that mold the fate
of nations. At best they can only ruin the fate of nations.
HITLER'S WORDS, by
Adolf Hitler, Edited by Gordon Prange, 1944, page 42
These justifications
are all but worthless since virtually any party in Germany at the time
could say “Our Movement was formed in order to spring to the rescue of
this people as its last help in the hour of greatest need....”
Hitler went so far
as to claim Nazi delegates were in parliament under duress as if they had
no option, which is an even more bizarre declaration.
In a speech on 16 September
1930 at Munich he said:
For
us Parliament is not an end in itself, but merely a means to an end:...
we are not on principle a parliamentary party--that would be a contradiction
of our whole outlook--we are a parliamentary party by compulsion, under
constraint, and that compulsion is the Constitution. The Constitution
compels us to use this means. It does not compel us to wish for a
particular goal, it only prescribes a way, a method, and, I repeat, we
follow this way legally, in accordance with the Constitution: by the way
laid down through the Constitution we advance towards the purposes which
we have set before us.
MY NEW ORDER by Hitler,
Edited by Raoul de Roussy de Sales, 1941, Page 82
Interestingly enough,
he concedes a degree of hypocrisy by admitting that his party’s meetings
were conducted according to parliamentary procedures. Yet, he provided
no answer to the logical question: If the parliamentary path is so
anathema then why is your party taking it at all:
The
committee meetings [of the Nazi party], of which minutes were kept, and
where votes were carried and decisions were made by majority, represented
in reality a diminutive parliament. Here, too, any personal responsibility
was lacking. Here, too, dominated the same absurdity and the same
folly as in our great representative bodies of the State.... That
means that the man who was appointed for propaganda voted on a matter which
concerned the man of the finances, and the latter in turn voted on a matter
concerning the organization, and he in turn on a matter which should have
concerned the secretaries, etc.
MEIN KAMPF, Adolf
Hitler, New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939, page 857
Apparently Nazis participated
in parliament with the ultimate intent of destroying the organization itself
which resembles the utterance by some that they will create peace even
if they have to go to war to get it:
With
this, however, the movement is anti-parliamentarian, and even its share
in such an institution can only have the meaning of an activity for the
smashing of the latter, for the abolition of an institution in which we
see one of the most serious symptoms of mankind's decay.
MEIN KAMPF, Adolf
Hitler, New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939, page 479
Eliminating parliament
will supposedly enable “natural” German intellectuals to replace Jewish
intellectuals and mass rule of parliament.
In a speech in Stuttgart
on 15 February 1933 Hitler stated:
We
want, too, to restore to the German intelligentsia the freedom of which
it has been robbed by the system which has hitherto ruled. In parliamentarianism
they did not possess this freedom. We want to liberate Germany from
the fetters of an impossible parliamentary democracy--not because we are
terrorists, not because we intend to gag the free spirit. On the
contrary, the spirit has never had more violence done to it than when mere
numbers made themselves its master.
MY NEW ORDER
by Adolf Hitler, Edited by de Sales, 1941, page 149
Ultimately parliament
had to be destroyed according to the Fuhrer.
In a letter to Hindenburg
on 21 November 1932 Hitler stated:
For
the past 13 years, I have been combating the parliamentary system.
In it I perceive an inoperable method of forming a political will and expressing
the political will of the nation.
HITLER, SPEECHES AND
PROCLAMATIONS 1932-45, Vol. 1, by Max Domarus, page 181
During his trial in
Munich on 26 February 1924:
One
thing was certain: Lossow, Kahr, and Seisser had the same goal that we
had: to get rid of the Reich government with its present international
and parliamentary position, and to replace it by an anti-parliamentary
government.
MY NEW ORDER
by Adolf Hitler, Edited by de Sales, 1941, page 75
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?
THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION,
by Hermann Rauschnigg, 1940, page 199
And his primary reason
for destroying parliament was the same as one proffered for destroying
democracy; it fosters confusion. Speaking at Weimar on 2 July 1936
at the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Parteitag Hitler said:
If the principle of so-called "public discussion" could in fact remove
abuses, then we ought to be living in a Paradise, for never was there more
discussion than in our parliamentary period. But all this talk produced
not improvement, but only an increase in confusion, insecurity, and ineffectiveness.
It was on these methods that our whole bourgeois Marxist-democratic parliamentary
life was built up. Only for this reason were we able to destroy it,
to smash it into pieces and to extinguish it from our history. It
had to be destroyed because a clearer, far truer organization had arisen
which could be set in its place.
HITLER'S SPEECHES
by Norman Baynes, 1942, VOLUME 1, Page 204
After the election
in September 1930 at Munich:
We
wish to raise once more the value of our people:... we want to give to
this fundamental value, the value of our blood, a logical form, a form
dictated by the highest reason--that means the abolition of democracy and
of the parliamentary system.
HITLER'S SPEECHES
by Norman Baynes, 1942, VOLUME 1, Page 189
Supposedly, when parliament
is gone and the press is controlled, Marxism can be abolished:
With
the suppression of that talking shop which you call the Upper House or
the Reichstag and with the reorientation of the press, a new situation
will arise straight away. The bells of rebirth will ring out, and
at that moment we will have a ruthless reckoning with Marxism.
SECRET CONVERSATIONS
WITH HITLER, Edited by Edouard Calic, 1971. Page 37
And while lauding the
accomplishments of his regime in his Reichstag speech on 20 February 1938
Hitler stated:
One
of the greatest of these achievements is the setting up of a form of government
of the people and the State equally remote from parliamentary democracy
and military dictatorship.
HITLER'S SPEECHES
by Norman Baynes, 1942, VOLUME 1, page 455
So much for Hitler’s addiction to free speech and multiple parties!