Saw this in a book [Churchill’s Deception, Louis Kilzer, 1994]. Either Hitler was dissembling, which of course he never did, or he really felt similar to the way normal people do when they read about people clamoring for war:
On October 6 [1939], Hitler slowly walked to the podium at the Kroll Opera House to address the Reichstag. For a time the hushed audience saw a side of Hitler they never knew existed, if in fact it ever did. …
Of the European conflict, Hitler said simply: “It would be more sensible to tackle the solution before millions of men are first uselessly sent to their death . . . Long-range guns will then be set up, and from both sides destruction will strike deeper and deeper, and whatever cannot be reached by the long-distance guns will be destroyed from the air. And that will be very interesting for certain international journalists, and very profitable for the aeroplane, arms, and munition manufacturers, etc., but appalling for the victims.”
Sounds a little like today.
Also sounding a little like today, in 1940, Ulrich von Hassell, a German ambassador (who, incidentally, was in on a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler), sounds Nostradamus-like in his predictions:
Europe had changed in ways that were fundamental. It would never again be as it was. … There would come, Hassell prophesied, the “ascendency of Hitler’s brand of socialism, the destruction of the upper class, the transformation of the churches into meaningless sects. … We shall get a godless nature, a dehumanized, cultureless Germany, and perhaps a Europe, conscienceless and brutal.”
