Did Hitler say: “We will defeat Russia when the Ukrainians and Belarusians believe that they are not Russians”?

On the Internet you can find a statement that talks about the importance of influencing the self-awareness of the East Slavic peoples. We checked whether its author is indeed the German Fuhrer.

In 2010, the Perm Magistrate's Court, after a prosecutor's inspection fined two local residents who, as part of the “Wisdom of the World” campaign coordinated with the city mayor’s office, placed stickers in city transport with the aphorism “We will defeat Russia when Ukrainians and Belarusians believe that they are not Russians.” The prosecutor's office argued that the author of the saying was Adolf Hitler.

In 2016, the focus of Russian media attention was on the Ausweis, an identity card that allegedly belonged to Hauptsturmführer of the SS Galicia Division Roman Koliy and fell into the hands of Russian journalists. On the double page it was decorated with the same quote in German and Ukrainian signed by the Fuhrer. About this in the program “News of the Week” told presenter Dmitry Kiselev.

In 2023 video with quote posted on the official page of the Irkutsk city administration, accompanied by the hashtags #NoFascism and #IDidN'TKnowWhat.

Over the years, these cases have been reported "Channel One", "Russian newspaper", "BBC Russian Service", "Kommersant" And RBC. The quote can be found in "LiveJournal» and various online collections aphorisms.

First, about the case with Ausweiss. The authenticity of the document presented by Kiselyov immediately raised big questions. As it turned out, the photo on it really belongs SS Hauptsturmführer, but not Roman Koliy, but Walter Schmidt, and the document itself can be bought as a souvenir at online auction. In one of the next issues of "News of the Week" Dmitry Kiselev admittedthat Ausweis turned out to be a fake.

Now about the quote. The text that is presented in the document as its German original, as shown publications in the German-language press, has little in common with Hitler’s native language and the spelling of that time. Journalists Nikolai Klimenyuk and Alexey Kovalev came to the conclusionthat the compilers of the fake Ausweiss combined the results of the work of two online translators - Yandex and Google. This at a minimum means that the authors of the document were unable or unwilling to find the original of a quote that was already popular by 2016 on the RuNet. “Verified” also did not find a German-language quote from Ausweiss or at least a competent version of its translation from Russian into German in other sources - not in the project “Google Books", nor in "Internet Archive”, nor in individual editions of Hitler’s books in German.

Moreover, the Russian-language version of the quote “We will defeat Russia when Ukrainians and Belarusians believe that they are not Russians” is not found on the websites earlier 2008, and first appeared in the Google Books project in 1994 - in the work of Vladimir Zakharenkov and Mikhail Shutov “Russian redistribution: essays on the modern history of Russia" At the same time, the book does not say anything about the source of the phrase, nor about the circumstances when it was uttered - it is simply cited as a quotation that is appropriate in the context. Magazine "Light" ("Nature and Man"), whose employees were authors, is known as an educational publication “for public reading” and has not gained any authority in the scientific community.

IN publications on the website of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, dedicated to the Perm action of 2010, the original source of the quotation seems to be indicated: the book by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Hitler's Table Talks 1941–1944,” first published in 1953. It is a compilation monologues the Fuhrer, recorded by his associates. To the content of these publications, today's scientists have big questions, but it is impossible to refute or confirm the authenticity of these texts today due to the absence of other witnesses to the Fuhrer’s conversations cited by the historian.

However, the point here is not even the authenticity of the books. “Verified” did not find anything similar to the sought quote in Trevor-Roper’s book - not even Russian language, neither in original. It’s not in the main source of Trevor-Roper’s book of the same name. work Henry Picker, Hitler's stenographer (both editions in Russia are included in Federal list of extremist materials). There is no similar phrase in another publication Hitler's monologues recorded by ministerial adviser Heinrich Heim. Moreover, the idea of ​​Belarusians as an ethnic group that, in order to defeat Nazism, supposedly must believe in its own separate national identity, somewhat contradicts the quote “due to their lack of national feeling, they could soon, at least in the next generation, be completely Germanized.”

The phrase closest in meaning can be meet in the appendix to one of the editions of Picker’s book, namely in the “Remarks and Suggestions on the General Plan “Ost” of the Reichsführer of the SS Troops.” But it does not belong to Hitler, but to Erhard Wetzel, an expert at the Ministry of Occupied Eastern Territories: “The Russian from the Gorky General Commissariat should be instilled with the feeling that he is somehow different from the Russian from the Tula General Commissariat. There is no doubt that such administrative fragmentation of Russian territory and the systematic isolation of individual regions will be one of the means of combating the strengthening of the Russian people.”

Nevertheless, it is difficult to call this quote a complete equivalent of the sought one. In all likelihood, the mistake by Russian prosecutors in citing the work of Hugh Trevor-Roper as the source of the quote comes from a book by Russian journalist and political activist Maxim Kalashnikov.War with Golem"(2006). The journalist provides several genuine and verbatim quotes from Trevor-Roper and one missing, despite mentioning a specific period (summer 1941).

Thus, for the first time, the sought-after quotation was found only in Russian in the 1990s, and in non-authoritative sources, which makes Hitler’s authorship of it extremely unlikely.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons

Not true

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