Hitler did say 'Who now remembers the Armenians?'

Genocide is, alas, alas, extremely much in the news.

I discovered by chance today that the “Lochner Version” of the secret address by Hitler to ministers, generals, admirals at Obersalzberg on 22 August 1939 is genuine, according to German historian Norman Domeier.

This means that Hitler used the well known words 'Who now remembers the Armenians?' and ordered a genocide of Poles. (He said nothing in the speech about Jews.)

American Louis Lochner, the Berlin AP correspondent, received the document through back channels from Admiral Canaris, chief of German military counterintelligence, who was present when the speech was made.

Canaris's confidant Hans Bernd Gisevius said

“By the next day, after Hitler’s speech, Canaris read the most important parts to us. He was still full of horror. His voice shook. He felt he was a witness of something monstrous."

The reluctance of some German historians to accept that the Lochner version is genuine may be related to the fact that it means the German generals and admirals were complicit in genocide from even before the war started. 

“Decision to attack Poland was arrived at in spring. Originally there was fear that because of the political constellation we would have to strike at the same time against England, France, Russia and Poland. This risk too we should have had to take. Göring had demonstrated to us that his Four-Year Plan is a failure and that we are at the end of our strength, if we do not achieve victory in a coming war.

Since the autumn of 1938 and since I have realised that Japan will not go with us unconditionally and that Mussolini is endangered by that nitwit of a King and the treacherous scoundrel of a Crown Prince, I decided to go with Stalin. After all there are only three great statesmen in the world, Stalin, I and Mussolini. Mussolini is the weakest, for he has been able to break the power neither of the crown nor of the Church. Stalin and I are the only ones who visualise the future. So in a few weeks hence I shall stretch out my hand to Stalin at the common German-Russian frontier and with him undertake to re-distribute the world.

Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality; Genghis Khan has sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the weak Western European civilisation asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I shall shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so for the present only in the East I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus we can gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?

Colonel-General von Brauchitsch has promised me to bring the war against Poland to a close within a few weeks. Had he reported to me that he needs two years or even only one year, I should not have given the command to march and should have allied myself temporarily with England instead of Russia for we cannot conduct a long war. To be sure a new situation has arisen. I experienced those poor worms Daladier and Chamberlain in Munich. They will be too cowardly to attack. They won’t go beyond a blockade. Against that we have our autarchy and the Russian raw materials.

Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans. My pact with the Poles was merely conceived of as a gaining of time. As for the rest, gentlemen, the fate of Russia will be exactly the same as I am now going through with in the case of Poland. After Stalin’s death—he is a very sick man—we will break the Soviet Union. Then there will begin the dawn of the German rule of the earth.

The little States cannot scare me. After Kemal’s death Turkey is governed by ‘cretins’ and half idiots. Carol of Roumania is through and through the corrupt slave of his sexual instincts. The King of Belgium and the Nordic kings are soft jumping jacks who are dependent upon the good digestions of their over-eating and tired peoples.

We shall have to take into the bargain the defection of Japan. I gave Japan a full year’s time. The Emperor is a counterpart to the last Czar—weak, cowardly, undecided. May he become a victim of the revolution. My going together with Japan never was popular. We shall continue to create disturbances in the Far East and in Arabia. Let us think as ‘gentlemen’ and let us see in these peoples at best lacquered half maniacs who are anxious to experience the whip.

The opportunity is as favourable as never before. I have but one worry, namely that Chamberlain or some other such pig of a fellow (“Saukerl”) will come at the last moment with proposals or with ratting (“Umfall”). He will fly down the stairs, even if I shall personally have to trample on his belly in the eyes of the photographers.

No, it is too late for this. The attack upon and the destruction of Poland begins Saturday early. I shall let a few companies in Polish uniform attack in Upper Silesia or in the Protectorate. Whether the world believes it is quite indifferent (‘Scheissegal’). The world believes only in success.

For you, gentlemen, fame and honour are beginning as they have not since centuries. Be hard, be without mercy, act more quickly and brutally than the others. The citizens of Western Europe must tremble with horror. That is the most human way of conducting a war. For it scares the others off.

The new method of conducting war corresponds to the new drawing of the frontiers. A war extending from Reval, Lublin, Kaschau to the mouth of the Danube. The rest will be given to the Russians. Ribbentrop has orders to make every offer and to accept every demand. In the West I reserve the right to determine the strategically best line. Here one will be able to work with Protectorate regions, such as Holland, Belgium, and French Lorraine.

And now, on to the enemy, in Warsaw we will celebrate our reunion.

[From What About Germany? by Louis P. Lochner]

The next day, the 23rd, the British ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson brought a personal letter from Neville Chamberlain to Hitler. It proposed a cooling-off period. 

In a second meeting with Hitler on the 23rd Henderson argued that it was proof of Chamberlain’s good intentions that he had not taken Churchill into his Cabinet. Henderson said that the anti-German faction in Britain was not representative of public opinion and mainly consisted of Jews and anti-Nazis. 

After he left, Baron von Weizsäcker, number two to Ribbentrop at the Foreign Ministry (his son was President from 1984 to 1994), warned Hitler 

‘Britain and France are bound to declare war. They aren’t people you can deal with logically or systematically – they’re labouring under a psychosis, a kind of whisky intoxication…Tomorrow Chamberlain will rally the whole Parliament behind him the moment he talks of war.’

 Weizsäcker noted that day:

‘He still thinks he can localise the war, but he’s also talking – today at any rate – of being able to fight a general war as well. Until recently, his view on this was very different.’

Henderson believed that the Poles on August 30 could have stopped the invasion. Could they? By then Hitler wanted 'a small war' against Poland and what we now call genocide, a word coined because of him. 

In any case, Polish Foreign Minister Beck greatly overestimated Polish strength and trusted the British guarantee. Had he not done so and had there been no guarantee, Poland might have escaped the horrors she was to endure.

Dr Domeier tells his audience that

'in his first address as Reichs chancellor before, the heads of the Reichswehr as it was still called then, on February the third, 1933, Hitler stated that he would work towards the conquest of new living space in the East and its ruthless Germanisation.'

Dr. Domeier thinks the speech of 23 August 1939 proves Hitler wanted world domination. It certainly means he intended, when he spoke, to attack France, but I think Soviet territory was always what he really wanted. He amusingly thought England was powerful because she possessed Canada. 

By August 22 1939 he wanted eastward expansion, but knew this might mean war with England and France, though he gambled that it would not. 

Hitler was highly intelligent but it was very stupid of him to invade Poland and provoke a declaration of war from the one country he admired, wanted as an ally and knew he could not defeat, England. 

But he was in a hurry and wanted war (and, I suppose to conquer Russia) while he was in his fifties.

After leaving Berlin Henderson hoped for another ambassadorship, but was disappointed. Instead he wrote Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–1939, which was published in 1940. In it he says,

'Atatürk built a new Turkey on the ruins of the old; and his expulsion of the Greeks, which perhaps suggested to Hitler that he should do the same in Germany with the Jews, has already been forgotten and forgiven.'