"I suggest anyone interested in the provenance of Table Talk, and in particular the English translation produced by Trevor-Roper, consult this link, which appears to be well-substantiated and thoughtful."
You mean the Freedom From Religion Foundation? LOL
You are a preposterous blowhard.
Do you realize how many people are listed throughout as being present during these discussions?
Generals, the "Mountain People" (secretaries, etc.), diplomats, et al. And again, many of these people subsequently wrote books or gave interviews or worked with historians.
No one. NOT ONE PERSON has ever suggested that these remarks were inaccurate.
There would be no reason on Earth for Heim or Picker to allow their notes to be misrepresented or twisted. In fact, they could have gotten some lucrative book contracts, if they had taken this stance.
YOU are the revisionist. And you are a true pig to keep trying to somehow tar my position with David Irving's revisionism. Irving and the rest of the Neo-Nazis do contend that Hitler was a good Christian. So you are taking the Neo-Nazis position, you asshole.
You are poisoned by your hatred of Christianity. Maybe you've inhaled too many chemicals. But you are clearly insane on this subject, and probably others.
I may regret jumping in at this point, but here goes.
No one is saying he was a "good" Christian. No one denies Adolph Hitler was a madman. However, he would not have been able to orchestrate the Holocaust without being able to capitalize on centuries of Christian anti-semitism. Christian anti-semitism has deep roots in Europe -- sentiments that still exist to this day. It exists on this side of the ocean, as well. In any discussion of this sort, one cannot exonerate Christianity from culpability in the Holocaust. To attempt to do so is a whitewash of history. Hitler's personal beliefs, whatever they might have been, are irrelevant to the issue.
It's easy to want to dismiss Hitler from Christianity because of the scale of his crimes. This is a natural defense mechanism. However, Adolph Hitler was not alone in responsibility for the Holocaust. A significant fraction of the population of Germany followed him. Are we to excommunicate (to borrow the word) them from Christianity, as well? How far must we go to erase Christianity's culpability in the Holocaust? Was Germany not a Christian nation? Was Italy? Of course they were.
We must, instead, recognize that just because people were Christian does not mean they are incapable of doing horrible things. We must understand that just because the U.S. is a predominantly Christian nation, it doesn't mean that it can't happen here.
So you claim to be an atheist, and yet you've now denigrated two atheist sites, and one book critical of the religous right's influence. Your claim of atheism is as credible as much of the rest you've posted.
The citations that follow will be from Carrier, Richard C., German Studies Review, October 2003, pp 561-576, a peer-reviewed scholarly publication from the US German Studies Association.
No one. NOT ONE PERSON has ever suggested that these remarks were inaccurate. There would be no reason on Earth for Heim or Picker to allow their notes to be misrepresented or twisted. In fact, they could have gotten some lucrative book contracts, if they had taken this stance.
This is ridiculous and ignorant. Picker did publish his original version of the Table Talk, in 1951. Subsequent editions carried "several testimonials to the text's accuracy and authenticity by fellow bunker officers" (Carrier, p 563). Jochmann published the original German of Bormann's notebook, in 1980. The two independent texts have been checked against each other, and are consistent. What they are not consistent with are Genoud's French and Trevor-Roper's English text, from which you quote. I'll let Carrier take it from here.
Given certain blatant distortions in Genoud's French, it appears some shameful mischief has been done by Genoud, while Stevens and Cameron are equally guilty of some incompetence or dishonesty-at least, if they claimed to have translated the Bormann-Vermerke but in fact merely translated Genoud's French. In the preface to his third edition, Trevor-Roper describes the bitter copyright battle between Picker and Genoud, which is supposed to explain why Genoud didn't allow the actual Bormann- Vermerke to be published until 1980, and then only after decades of insistent cajoling by academics. One might wonder if Genoud was also trying to conceal his crime.There may be a clue on the website of the controversial historian David Irving. He relates how Genoud attempted to hoax him in the 1970s with what appeared to be a forgery of 'Hitler' s Last Testament' which Genoud published earlier. Irving even claims he got him to confess to forging this "testament," Genoud declaring in his defense "But it's just what Hitler would have said, isn't it?" Irving's story throws a lot of suspicion on Genoud as a man willing to perpetrate a hoax, thinking it permissible to fabricate the words of Hitler if it was what he believed Hitler "would have said." Such a man would likely have no scruple against altering and inserting words and remarks into the Table Talk.
Further study of Genoud's history and motives, and the nature of the distortions he introduced into the record, would be worthwhile. He appears to have been a very strange man with a colorful history: a Swiss banker and Nazi spy who laundered money for the Third Reich, a self-professed neo-Nazi right up to his suicide in 1996 (though never an open supporter of the holocaust), a voracious purchaser and profiteer of Nazi archives, and an admitted financer of terrorists....
Whatever Genoud's motivation for doctoring the text, the fact that Stevens and Cameron's English translation matches Genoud's falsified French (as we shall see), and not the actual Bormann- Vermerke published by Jochmann, leaves many questions unanswered. Were they lazy? Duped? Accomplices in crime? Whatever the case, the Trevor- Roper edition is to be discarded as worthless....
Case Study: The Glover Quotes
At the conclusion of a two-page entry for the afternoon of 27 February 1942, the Trevor-Roper text reads as follows:
If my presence on earth is providential, I owe it to a superior will. But I owe nothing to the Church that trafficks in the salvation of souls, and I find it really too cruel. I admit that one cannot impose one's will by force, but I have a horror of people who enjoy inflicting sufferings on others' bodies and tyranny upon others' souls.Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn't, like whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar. We are entering into a conception of the world that will be a sunny era, an era of tolerance. Man must be put in a position to develop freely the talents that God has given him.
What is important above all is that we should prevent a greater lie from replacing the lie that is disappearing. The world of Judeo-Bolshevism must collapse.
But Jochmann and Picker both have a very different text here:
Ich bin auf Grund höherer Gewalt da, wenn ich zu etwas notig bin. Abgesehen davon, dass sie mir zu grausam ist, die seligmachende Kirche! Ich habe noch nie Gefallen gefunden daran, andere zu schinden, wenn ich auch weiB, dass es ohne Gewalt nicht moglich ist, sich in der Welt zu behaupten. Es wird nur dem das Leben gegeben, der am starksten darum ficht. Das Gesetz des Lebens heiBt: Verteidige dich!Die Zeit, in der wir leben, ist die Erscheinung des Zusammenbruchs dieser Sache. Es kann 100 oder 200 Jahre noch dauem. Es tpt mir leid, dass ich wie Moses das gelobte Land nur aus der Feme sehen kann.
Wir wachsen in eine sonnige, wirklich tolerante Weltanschauung hinein: Der Mensch solI in der Lage sein, die ihm von Gott gegebenen Fähigkeiten zu entwickeln. Wir müssen nur verhindem, dass eine neue, noch grössere Lüge entsteht: die Jüdisch-Bolschewistische Welt. Sie muss ich zerbrechen.
My translation (here and hereafter with the assistance of Reinhold Mitschang):
I am here due to a higher power, if I am necessary for anything. Leave aside that she is too cruel for me, the beatifying Church! I have never found pleasure in maltreating others, even if I know it isn't possible to stand your ground in the world without force. Life is only given to those who fight for it the hardest. It is the law of life: Defend yourself!The time in which we live indicates the collapse of this idea. It can still take 100 or 200 years. I am sorry that, like Moses, I can only see the Promised Land from a distance.
We are growing into a sunny, really tolerant worldview: Man shall be able to develop his God-given talents. We must only prevent a new, even greater lie from arising: that of the Jewish-Bolshevist world. That's what I [must] destroy.
So it appears your argument is based on a discredited source, which was not merely just a third hand report of Hitler's words, but which was altered by the Nazi forger Genoud, and reproduced without question by Trevor Roper and his translators.
So you can't defend your claims about the April 12, 2002 speech, and you're source for Table Talk is hopelessly compromised. How embarrassing that must be for you!