Letter in Liberty, December 2007, p. 4
Hitler's Creed
In Stephen Cox's article "Skepticism, and Beyond" (October), he claims that
Adolf Hitler's "private conversations showed him as much an enemy of
Christianity as he was of Judaism," citing the Norman Cameron and
R.H. Stevens translation of Hitler's "Table Talk," a document
transcribed from notebooks of Hitler's secretaries Heinrich Heim and
Henry Picker and edited into multiple versions by Martin Bormann and
Henry Picker. However, as Richard Carrier points out with detailed
textual comparisons in his article "Hitler's Table Talk: Troubling Finds,"
German Studies Review[, vol. 26, no. 3] (October 2003)[, pp. 561-576],
there are significant discrepancies between the available versions and
translations of this document, with the German of Henry Picker's notes
and the German edition of Bormann's text by Werner Jochmann being the
most reliable and the version relied upon by Cox being the least
reliable. The Stevens and Cameron translation, edited by Hugh
Trevor-Roper, contains passages not found in the original German and
mistranslations of the German that appear to be derived from Francois
Genoud's French translation. In particular, many of Hitler's attacks
on Christianity appear to be based on incompetent translation and
outright fabrication by Genoud. The result is that Hitler, while not
espousing an orthodox form of Christianity, still is a believer in God
and divine providence, the authority of Jesus, and the immortality of
the soul whose views are Christian in the broadest sense.
A more popular version of Carrier's article, without the German text, was published in the November 2002 issue of Freethought Today[, which may be found online
at http://ffrf.org/fttoday/2002/nov02/carrier.php]. [Link to Internet Archive; Updated link which scrubs Carrier's name and photo: https://ffrf.org/legal/item/19430-on-the-trail-of-bogus-quotes.]
Jim Lippard
Phoenix, Ariz.
[Bracketed sections above were deleted from the published version of the letter.]