“Hatred of the Jews was Hitler's motor and central point perhaps even the very element which motivated him. The German people, the German greatness, the Empire, they all meant nothing to him in the last analysis. For this reason, he wished in the final sentence of his testament, to fixate us Germans, even after the apocalyptic downfall in a miserable hatred of the Jews…When speaking of the victims of the bomb raids, particularly after the massive attacks on Hamburg in Summer 1943, he again and again reiterated that he would avenge these victims on the Jews; just as if the air-terror against the civilian population actually suited him in that it furnished him with a belated substitute motivation for a crime decided upon long ago and emanating from quite different layers of his personality. Just as if he wanted to justify his own mass murders with these remarks.”

—  Albert Speer

Testimony of Albert Speer, Munich, (15 June 1977)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update March 13, 2025. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Hatred of the Jews was Hitler's motor and central point perhaps even the very element which motivated him. The German p…" by Albert Speer?
Albert Speer photo
Albert Speer 21
German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production … 1905–1981

Related quotes

Dorothy Thompson photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainländer, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize).”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 357
The Gay Science (1882)

Joachim von Ribbentrop photo
Alfred Rosenberg photo

“Germany will regard the Jewish question as solved only after the very last Jew has left the greater German living space… Europe will have its Jewish question solved only after the very last Jew has left the continent.”

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) German architect and politician

Quoted in "World Politics in Our Time" - Page 375 - by David C. Jordan - 1970.

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainländer, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

all Jews become mawkish when they moralize
Sec. 357
The Gay Science (1882)

Ramsay MacDonald photo

“Mr. Lloyd George will not resign on anything anti-German. He is anti-German, and the trust which the reasonable Peace people place in him is altogether misplaced.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

'From Green Benches', Leicester Pioneer (20 July 1911)
1910s

Mark Twain photo
Walther von der Vogelweide photo

“He has no equal in medieval German lyric poetry and perhaps not even in European lyric poetry of the Middle Ages.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Ingeborg Glier, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 184.
Praise

Rudolf Höss photo

“Not justified - but Himmler told me that if the Jews were not exterminated at that time, then the German people would be exterminated for all time by the Jews.”

Rudolf Höss (1901–1947) German war criminal, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp

To Leon Goldensohn, April 8, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Related topics