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Manfred Schön of Australia asks, Tuesday, May 31, 2005, if Hitler really blamed the German people for the defeat of his Reich.  What did Hitler really say? I HAVE seen "Der Untergang" in Germany and noticed that Adolf Hitler shortly before his end blamed the German people for the downfall of the Third Reich. I heard the same argument from a friend in Germany. Is there any proof, that Adolf has said so, or is that all a propaganda trick, a personal attack on the person for the purpose of "Entnazifizierung" (Denazification)? I would be grateful for a hint of what's right.
YOU are absolutely right, it is unlikely that Adolf Hitler ever said those words; I have a half-memory that Albert Speer's "memoirs" were a source of the remark, but his memoirs were written by three politically correct Germans for him -- including Joachim Fest, who provide the screenplay for the film, but confessed he never set foot in an archives in his life. If I put this on my website somebody may correct me, but I do not think they will. It was out of keeping with other things that Hitler said. For instance, his staff told me that when discussing the Allied saturation bombing campaign against German cities, he said that he cared little or nothing about the destruction of the architecture or buildings, but he wept for the lives of the people within them. He even said the Allies were doing him a favour by flattening city centres that would have taken decades of litigation in peacetime to tear down and rebuild. All his waking hours were dedicated to Dem Wohl des deutschen Volkes -- the wellbeing of the German people. It is clever, if transparent, propaganda to put those other words into his mouth, and thoughts into his mind, subsequently. It is rather like those Germans who have repeatedly pressed me over the years for the source of Churchill's alleged postwar remark, Wir haben das falsche Schwein geschlachtet. We've killed the wrong pig. That was never said either.
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Mr Irving replied: 
David Irving