Did Hitler ever say "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner"?

Is there evidence that Hitler ever said: "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner"? The simple answer to this question is: no, there is currently no evidence that Hitler ever said this. The quotation is likely to be apocryphal. I will go into the authenticity of this quotation in some detail, as we attempt to track down the elusive primary source for this quotation.




Written by a journalist, William Shirer's popular book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), is infamous for its "Luther to Hitler" theory footing the blame for the Holocaust on Martin Luther's anti-Semitism. Shirer writes in the chapter of his book entitled The Intellectual Roots of the Third Reich:

"Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner," Hitler used to say.* This may have been based on a partial misconception of the great composer, for though Richard Wagner harbored a fanatical hatred [no citation given], as Hitler did, for the Jews, who he was convinced were out to dominate the world with their money [no citation], and though he scorned parliaments and democracy [no citation given] and the materialism and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie, he also fervently hoped that the Germans, "with their special gifts," would "become not rulers, but ennoblers of the world." [no citation given but this comes from "Wollen Wir Hoffen?"]

If you look up the citation carrying the * it says this:

* My own recollection is confirmed by Otto Tolischus in his They Wanted War, p. 11.

It is astonishing that this is all that Shirer has to say for himself—that it is little more than some vague "recollection". He does not say where he "recollected" first encountering this quotation. For all we know it could be just rumour and hearsay. He fails to mention whether he recollected hearing Hitler say this to him in person, whether he heard Hitler say this in a public broadcast, whether he might have read it somewhere without recollecting where, or whether he recollected hearing some rumour about Hitler saying it.

Shirer repeats the alleged quotation again a couple of pages later:

But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.

Again, there is no citation as attest to the authenticity of the source of the alleged quote.

This pattern is fairly typical. You look for a primary source citation, only to find you are referred to another secondary source and so on until you hit a complete dead end.




I decide I would try to hunt down the citation given by Shirer to Tolischus and his book They Wanted War (1940). Unfortunately, I am unable to see enough of the book on Google Books to see the source citation. It appears that this 1940 book may have been the first publication to carry this quotation. What I can see does not look promising:


The word that worries me is "often". If Hitler did indeed "often" say this, why is it that the source for this quotation is almost impossible to track down? If Hitler did "often" say this you would think you would easily be able to find multiple corroborative sources confirming the veracity of this quotation as being a genuine utterance by Hitler.

I have managed to track down a second hand copy of the book which is on its way. Watch this space.




It appears that another one of the earliest published appearances of the "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner" quote was in right-wing writer Peter Viereck's 1941 book, Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. 



This is an entirely dated book which relies heavily on largely discredited sources, particularly Rauschning and Kubizek. For a detailed discussion of the reliability of sources please see this post critiquing Köhler's use of these authors.

In the later edition of the book Viereck repeats the alleged Hitler quotation three times. Here is its first appearance:

Though he knew much of Wagner's prose by heart [no citation given], it is the operas that were the main source of emotion throughout Hitler's life [no citation], a deeper emotion than with any man or woman [no citation]. Already in the 1941 edition I quoted Hitler's statement that "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner." [no citation]... And what must you know to understand Hitler? I leave that to the biographer...

It should be noted that Sir Richard J. Evans states that:

[Wagner's] influence on Hitler has often been exaggerated. Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism, and there is no evidence that he actually read any of Wagner's writings. 

Evans: The Third Reich in Power (my emphasis)

How Viereck manages to penetrate into Hitler's "deepest emotion" other than by psychic powers of mindreading is left unsaid. Viereck then repeats this quotation a second time:

CHAPTER VI HITLER AND WAGNER 

Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must
know Wagner [no citation] 

— CHANCELLOR ADOLF HITLER 

Then Viereck repeats it for a third time:

Hitler has said: "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner." [no citation] According to Goebbels, Hitler has seen Die Meistersinger more than one hundred times! [no citation]

Here is a scan of the original text:



I have done an extensive search of the bibliography section of the book and once again have ended up completely empty handed as to what the primary source of the "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner" quotation might have been. We are left feeling that if Viereck thinks that if he says "the moon is made of cheese" three times over, it then becomes the truth. It should also be mentioned that the quote "if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself" is often attributed to Goebbels, but this too is apocryphal and there is no evidence that he ever said it.

Readers keen enough may want pay money to spend hours hunting through the on-line archives of the diaries of Joseph Goebbels. There are pages of hits to a search of the word "Wagner" (not necessarily Richard Wagner either, as there are several other unrelated figures from the era with the same surname). Viereck would not have had access to these archives when he first quoted Hitler as allegedly saying that "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner". It is beginning to sound like a complete wild-goose chase.




Sherree Zalampas in her book Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of His Views on Architecture Art and Music. She also quotes Hitler as saying "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner".



Her citation 127 of chapter 3 appears to be to p48 of G.M. Gilbert's The Psychology of Dictatorship, 1950, although she makes it unclear if the citation is for the "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner" quote or to another in a series of quotations from diverse sources she strings together. Her statement "there can be little doubt that Richard Wagner's views were also supremely important to the development of Hitler's Volkish ideology" is stated in a just so manner without any citations to back the claim up. The words "there can be little doubt" takes the form of "there can be little doubt that the moon is made of cheese". The statement removing all doubt is necessary as a counterbalance to the complete lack of evidence to lend credibility to her unsupported speculations and assumptions. Zalampas also alleges that Gilbert cited Hans Frank (a lawyer who worked for the National Socialist regime) as the source of the statement. From what I can see of Gilbert's book on Google Books there is nothing to back her claims.

I have Gilbert's book on order and I will revise this post when it arrives. Gilbert was a psychologist to many of the key National Socialist figures on trial in Nurnberg. Wikipedia tells us that:

In 1945, after the end of the war, Gilbert was sent to Nuremberg, Germany, as a translator for the International Military Tribunal for the trials of the World War II German prisoners. Gilbert was appointed the Prison Psychologist of the German prisoners. During the process of the trials Gilbert became, after the Dr Douglas Kelley, the confidant of Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Frank, Oswald Pohl, Otto Ohlendorf, Rudolf Höss, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, among others.

If Gilbert did hear them say anything about Hitler and Wagner, it was an entirely retrospective account that post-dates the first published appearance in print of the "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner" quote around 1940.




Köhler repeats the alleged Hitler quotation, except this time it is in slightly different form:

We find casual remarks such as: 'Wagner's works are the embodiment of everything to which National Socialism aspires' (50), and: 'In order to understand what National Socialism is, one must read Wagner. (51). 

Köhler, p93, Wagner's Hitler.

Citation 50 is to a secondary source—as usual with such quotes. Any credible author would give us a primary source citation for this. The citation is to volume II, p96 of Michael Karbaum's 1976 book on the history of the Bayreuth Festivals. I have the two volume set on order from Germany, but I suspect I will end up empty handed once again, as I ended up on chasing up citation 51, which is to p47 of Marcel Prawy's book on Richard Wagner. Here is what Prawy has to say (my translation from the German):

Adolf Hitler had said that one must read Wagner in order to understand what National Socialism is. Could he have admitted with the word "read" that there is no relationship to National Socialist thinking in Wagner's musico-dramatic works?  

Adolf Hitler hat gesagt, man müsse Wagner lesen, um zu verstehen, was Nationalsozialismus sei. Hat er mit dem Wort lesen zugegeben, daß sich in Wagners musikdramatischen Werken keine Beziehungen zu nationalsozialistischem Gedankengut fänden?

As you can see there is no bibliographic citation as to the primary source of this quotation:


I  have looked in the bibliography section at the back of Prawy's book and I can assure you there is nothing to help us find the primary source there either. So once again, whenever this quotation is repeated all you find is a train of unconvincing secondary sources leading to a total dead end.



 
They're all at it, you might say. In other words, if they all "recollected" this quotation attributed to Hitler, surely the fact that so many people say Hitler said it must mean that Hitler really did say it. The trouble is that with anything associated with the Dritte Reich, it rapidly becomes emotionally charged and before long rampant rumour and hearsay dominate. You get dubious speculations about Hitler's missing testicle, Holocaust denialism, The Occult Reich involving Satanism, Nazi UFO conspiracies, and all manner of lurid and bizarre things:

This makes tracking the veracity of sources based on credible primary source citations all the more critical. Merely because credulous millions mindlessly repeat tales about Nazi UFOs along with things about Hitler saying "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner", it does not make any of it in the least bit credible. "Millions can't go wrong" is the favourite catchphrase of the charlatan:



Only credible sources, sometimes with adequate secondary corroboration of authenticity, should be relied on—a minimum academic standard that must not be thrown out in favour of rumour and hearsay, merely because we are discussing Richard Wagner. Wagner scholarship deserves the same academic standards of research as in any other field. Otherwise you end up sinking to the same level as Holocaust deniers who believe any perverse fantasy they want to.

I also looked through Sir Ian Kershaw's two volume biography of Hitler, Sir Richard Evans' three volume book on the Dritte Reich, and Saul Friedländer's two volume study of the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, none of these reputable academic historians even once make use of the "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner" quote. This is because in academic circles the use of reliable source citations is considered critical in assessing the writer's credibility.

So, if right-wing authors like Viereck, Zelinsky and Köhler wish to continue to pin the blame for National Socialism on Wagner by endlessly repeating this "quote" they must give us a credible primary source for it. Unfortunately, like Holocaust deniers, they all seem far too willing to dispense with basic academic standards, except in this case to blame Wagner for WWII and the Holocaust, in the hope of averting all possibility of "left-wing" historical analyses that foot the blame on socio-economic structural conditions such as hyperinflation, the financial burden of the Treaty of Versailles, and the Great Depression. They clearly prefer monocausal explanations based on simplistic cultural origins. There is clearly a political agenda here, namely that of shifting the blame for fascism to the political left.


I am grateful to the author of the following Wagner blog for encouraging analysis of this subject:

http://indefenseofrichardwagner.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/140/

http://indefenseofrichardwagner.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/did-he-really-say-it-and-even-if-he-did-so-what-part-two/




As always the main analysis of this subject is to be found in my in-depth critical review of Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler. It is a bit long, I admit, and it is getting longer all the time as I fortify my argument with more and more source material and supportive citations.