Hitler's Table Talk | 
 enlarge | Authors: Adolf Hitler, Norman Cameron
Creators: R. H. Stevens, Hugh Redwald Trevor-roper
Publisher: Enigma Books
Category: Book
Buy New: $49.99
New (2) Used (6) from $49.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 548150
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 3
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 800
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.8
ISBN: 1929631057
Dewey Decimal Number: 943.086
EAN: 9781929631056
ASIN: 1929631057
Publication Date: October 1, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: new copy in dust jacket, NOT THE CHEAP BOOKCLUB EDITION, dust jacket covered with protective mylar, we pack all books carefully to insure they arrive in perfect condition.
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Product Description
Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 records the private, off the record, informal conversations of a man who, more than anyone else, came close to destroying the western world. On Martin Bormann's instructions, the secret conversations at Hitler's headquarters from July 1941 to November 1944 were all recorded. This is the real companion volume to Hitler's Mein Kampf, whereby what had been a project suddenly was reality, almost to the disbelief of its author. Here is a startling account of Hitler freely talking about his enemies, his friends, his ambitions, his failures, his secret dreams voicing his thoughts to his intimate associates as the sun set at the end of each day of the war. We see here a conversational Hitler letting down his guard to his trusted henchmen. Miraculously, Martin Bormann persuaded Hitler to let these talks be taken down by a team of specially picked shorthand writers. Hitler had intended, after his famous tyranny, to use these notes as source material for the books he planned to write about the glory of the Thousand-Year Reich. Now they have come to us, indisputably authentic, a raw, fascinating, unretouched look at the inner recesses of the mind of Adolf Hitler. Der Fuhrer's mind was crude and narrow; he had little education and, as we see here, no humanity; but we can also see that he was (as he himself knew) a political genius, a terrible simplifier, a man who, with no equipment except his own will power, personality and ideas, attempted to bring mankind into a terrible darkness. As Trevor-Roper says in his brilliant introduction if we are to discover the mind of Hitler, we must penetrate behind the thick curtains of superficial evidence which conceal it the repellant character which formed its expression, and for which no power of thought can compensate, and the unreliable intermediaries who have commented upon it. We must go directly to Hitler's personal utterances: not indeed to his letters and speeches these, so valuable, are too public, too formalized for such purposes to his secret conversations, his table talk.
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Insight into the warped iron will of Hitler June 9, 2007
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations is an invaluable resource on one of the century's most repellent-yet representative-figures. Hitler's acolyte Martin Bormann had note-takers present at some of the Fuhrer's relaxed conversations, and as a result we can listen to the unguarded reflections of the dictator when he was at the height of his power.
Contemporaries puzzled over Hitler: Did private ideological obsessions drive his lust for power-or was he a gangster who cynically exploited those crank ideologies to win power? His private comments show him to have been quite committed to his crankery, which was of the village-atheist variety. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of this long book is how often Hitler would return to questions of religion, specifically to express his contempt for Christianity, most especially in its Catholic form. He repeatedly refers to priests as "shavelings" and mocks their rituals: "I would gladly have recourse to the shavelings, if they could help us to intercept English or Russian aircraft. But, for the present, the men who serve our anti-aircraft guns are more useful than the fellows who handle the sprinkler." More ominously, on July 4, 1942, he told his friends: "The fact that I remain silent in public over Church affairs is not in the least misunderstood by the sly foxes of the Catholic Church, and I am quite sure that a man like the Bishop von Galen knows full well that after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing."
If you are interested in the "published" thoughts and conversations of a man responsible for reshaping the twentieth century, then I suggest you give this book a look.
 Hitler More Outspokenly Anti-Christian than Anti-Semitic January 22, 2007
28 out of 29 found this review helpful
Perhaps surprisingly, Hitler's diatribes against Christianity are more common in this volume than those against Jews. In fact, his scurrilous attacks are reminiscent of those of prominent infidels such as Voltaire and Paine. "What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing men grovel before Him?" (p. 143). "While we're on this subject, let's add that, even amongst those who claim to be good Catholics, very few really believe in this humbug. Only old women, who have given up everything because life has already withdrawn from them, go regularly to church." (p. 342). "The catastrophe, for us, is that of being tied to a religion that rebels against all the joys of the senses." (p. 142). "A negro baby who has the misfortune to die before a missionary gets his clutches on him, goes to Hell!" (p. 69). "And what nonsense it is to aspire to a Heaven to which, according to the Church's own teaching, only those have entry who have made a complete failure of life on earth!" (p. 419). "What hasn't the Church discovered as a source of revenue, in the course of these fifteen hundred years?" (p. 90). "One cannot succeed in conceiving how much cruelty, ignominy and falsehood the intrusion of Christianity has spelt for this world of ours." (p. 288). "Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can every have undergone..." (p. 322). "Pure Christianity--the Christianity of the catacombs--is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics." (p. 146). "Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity." (p. 343).
Hitler even said: "Here Christianity sets the example. What could be more fanatical, more exclusive and more intolerant than this religion which bases everything on the love of the one and only God whom it reveals?" (p. 397). Look who's talking! And my, how modern that sounds!
The Fuhrer opposed the revival of Wotan (Odin, Woden) worship (p. 61). It is easy to see that Hitler was a consummate rationalist: "Religion is in perpetual conflict with the spirit of free research..." (p. 83). "But there will never be any possibility of National Socialism's setting out to ape religion by establishing a form of worship. Its one ambition must be scientifically to construct a doctrine that is nothing more than a homage to reason." (p. 39). Of course, open opposition to Christianity would have to await the end of the war (e. g., p. 411, 555).
Some modern feminists have used Hitler's presumed views on women as a weapon against those who disagree with them. Interestingly, although Hitler did oppose women in the rough-and-tumble worlds of combat and politics, he actually went far beyond kuchen kinder kirche: "It has therefore often been said that we are a party of misogynists, who regarded a women only as a machine for making children, or else as a plaything. That's far from being the case." (p. 252). He praised creative women in non-traditional roles, notably interior-decorator Frau Troost and film-maker Leni Riefenstahl. Otherwise, the Fuhrer commented: "Of primary importance were the measures we took to ensure a living wage for working women...By insisting that they receive a regular wage in accordance with their qualifications--instead of the sort of pocket-money they formerly received--we have delivered them from the doleful necessity of being dependent on an ami for their existence." (pp. 494-495).
Holocaust-uniqueness advocates have insisted that the Nazis intended to exterminate ALL Jews, first in Europe and then in the rest of the world. Hitler's comments don't support their contentions. Just two weeks before the Wannsee Conference, the Fuhrer said that the English must "settle that between themselves", adding that: "It's not our mission to settle the Jewish question in other people's countries!" (p. 185). Days after Wannsee, Hitler spoke of Jews either leaving Europe or being exterminated (p. 235), or perhaps moving to Russia (p. 260). Evidently, Hitler was still open to a Final Solution that would include the mass emigration of Europe's remaining Jews. Finally, Hitler did NOT envision a Judenrein (Jewish-free) world in the distant future. Four days after Wannsee, he wrote: "A good three hundred or four hundred years will go by before the Jews set foot again in Europe. They'll return first of all as commercial travelers..." (p. 236).
Much current thinking has attempted to blame Christianity for the Holocaust, and Hitler's endorsement of the Passion Play has been misrepresented as a blame-Jews-for-Crucifixion ploy. In actuality, Hitler's motives had been primarily racist in nature: "There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry. The preservation of our racial purity can be assured...not only against Jewish, but also against any and every racial infection." (p. 563).
Apropos to this, Hitler opined that all successful Poles are of German descent (p. 405), yet excessively-broad attempts to re-Germanize such Poles ran the risk of contaminating German blood with Slavic blood (p. 473). Finally, Hitler didn't see the Slavs themselves as having any more inherent right to live than the Jews: "Jodl is quite right when he says that notices in the Ukrainian language `Beware of the Trains' are superfluous; what on earth does it matter if one or two more locals get run over by the trains?" (p. 589).
What the Man truly thinks January 3, 2007
14 out of 21 found this review helpful
This book presents the record on what Hitler truly thought about Christ-insanity and other issues. Hitler was a Deist, not a Christian. In Mein Kampf he's playing politician to the Christians.
I'm not going to go into all the mindless moralizing and such here. I'm only going to tell you this is his uncensored thoughts and what the man was REALLY thinking. You don't get to be one of the most powerful men in the world and the leader of a country the size of Texas, taking on most of the world - almost winning in the process - by being a crazy half-wit. The man was a politial genius and Machiavellian in his approach when needs be. That's it! Beyond that you decide.
The book gives you what HE thinks without the dingbat commentaries by others which only serves to obfuscate things in the end. It gets 5 stars for that reason alone. I like unvarnished information without tampering and without pod people commentary.
It is my personal opinion that, one day, Hitler shall be remembered on the lines of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Peter the Great, and Josef Stalin et al. All who were opportunistic, Machiavellian and beyond good & evil. These are the people who change things suddenly and completely, either for good or ill (usually ill at first, good later). They are the agents of chaos.
Let me ask you this. Do you think Hitler came about for no reason? How does a indigent, homeless, dreaming loser & loner come to be leader and conquerer of Europe? He was a dark horse, a nobody, less than nothing. Less than zero. Alexander was a prince but from a backward uppity locale whom the Greeks mocked incessantly (until he conquered them). Stalin a shoemaker's son who came in from the cold and rose up in power with everyone totally oblivious until it was too late. See what I mean? They are beyond our petty labels. Agents of chaos, tools of the Gods. Maybe that dude asking you for a dollar to buy a cup of Joe near the Starbucks will be your leader someday. Because there is precedence, that being the Fuhrer and Reich's Chancellor Adolf Hitler. The agent of Divine Providence? That will forevermore remain an unanswered question.
Read what the man says, think, learn, and shake out those cow webs called "thoughts" that probably and most assuredly aren't yours anyway (programming from society). Hitler, et al, were forces in human form. Nobody ever said change was pretty. And history obviously shows this.
Like I say, be cold and dispassionate towards the book. The man was brilliant and it shows. Don't judge, just read and reflect.
Good Resource January 12, 2006
4 out of 17 found this review helpful
Into the twisted mind of der fuhrer. This work provides insight into the irrational thoughts of a mad man as he conducted a war of annhilation. Great resource for the student of World War II.
The most insightful Hitler book January 23, 2005
25 out of 27 found this review helpful
Mein Kampf, and to a lesser extent Hitler's Second Book, were declared obsolete and terrible by the author himself (see Hans Frank's memoirs, or Speer's, among others). For insight into Hitler's personality and thoughts, this is by very, very far the best book available. The conversations were surreptitiously recorded by a notetaker during Hitler's conversation sessions with various visitors and his staff. Some entries are verbatim, while others are summaries of Hitler's comments. Obviously Hitler said many things to many people, which means one has to be extra careful in determining what he really believed. His thinking also changed over time, and, like most people, was not always consistent, which makes the task of understanding his thought all-the-more difficult. But this book is by far the most useful source for any understanding of Hitler. The comments were in private conversations, (Hitler usually did not know Bormann was having them recorded), and they are often unguarded ruminations. Of course to those without a real interest in history, the book might seem long and tedious. Hitler had a tendency to say brilliant things one minute, and then trail off into rantings about nonsense the next, so the book is not for everyone. Anyone interested in Hitler for any reason should read this book, and anyone who hasn't read it can't have much of value to say.
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