A quote attributed to Adolf Hitler that occasionally does the rounds – and is usually repeated by evangelical Christians – is:
‘I would have killed all the Jews of the world, but I kept some to show the world why I killed them.’ (1)
This quote typically does not link back to a particular Hitler speech but the first mention of it comes from Wikipedia’s Talk page on 7th September 2004 where an editor stated:
‘i heard about a quote sayiing : “i would have killed all the jews of the world, but i kept some to show the world why i killed them”, any one know the source of this ? [sic]
I thought he said that openly in the w:Reichstag_(institution). Andries 17:31, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)’ (2)
No such statement is to be found in Hitler’s actual Reichstag speeches (3) and the tenor of the alleged remark by Hitler is clearly out of character given that it implicitly references Christian eschatology about the ‘End Times’ and the hypothesized need for a ‘jewish remnant’ to ‘witness Christ’s return’ – who will then all ‘convert to Christianity’ – in order to trigger them in the first place.
Hitler is often unjustly portrayed as ardently anti-Christian – he was in fact opposed to organized Christianity because it was a heavily political institution in Imperial and then Weimar Germany that caused Germans to fight each other rather than uniting but also was not in any meaningful sense a theologically orthodox Christian although this wasn’t remotely uncommon at the time – (4) but he certainly didn’t talk like an American Evangelical trying to anticipate the ‘End Times’.
So no: this is simply a made-up quote falsely attributed to Hitler in order to push a presumably evangelical Christian agenda sometime before September 2004 that has simply made its way onto the internet and been repeated by both the credulous as well as the malicious as if it were true without any checks as to its authenticity having been performed.
References
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/yarkus/is_this_hitler_quote_true/?rdt=49115
(2) https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22334/did-hitler-say-i-would-have-killed-all-the-jews-of-the-world-but-i-kept-some?rq=1
(3) These can be found in English and the original German here: https://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Hitler%20Speeches/Hitler%20Key%20Speeches%20Index.htm
(4) On this cf. Mikael Nilsson, 2024, ‘Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology: The Role of Jesus in National Socialism’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York; also see Todd Weir’s 2018 article ‘Hitler’s Worldview and the Interwar Kulturkampf’ (available here: https://pure.rug.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/64596161/0022009417747045.pdf)
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