Hitler's Table Talk

• Main
• YMMV
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
• Create New

"Hitler's Table Talk" (Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier in German) is the title given to a series of World War II monologues delivered by Adolf Hitler, which were transcribed from 1941 to 1944. Hitler's remarks were recorded by Heinrich Heim, Henry Picker and Martin Bormann and later published by different editors under different titles in four languages.

Martin Bormann, who was serving as Hitler's private secretary, persuaded Hitler to allow a team of specially picked officers to record in shorthand his private conversations for posterity. The first notes were taken by the lawyer Heinrich Heim, starting from 5 July 1941 to mid-March 1942. Taking his place, Henry Picker took notes from 21 March 1942 until 2 August 1942, after which Heinrich Heim and Martin Bormann continued appending material off and on until 1944.

The talks were recorded at the Führer Headquarters in the company of Hitler's inner circle. The talks dwell on war and foreign affairs but also Hitler's attitudes on religion, culture, philosophy, his personal aspirations and feelings towards his enemies and friends.

Tropes used in Hitler's Table Talk include:

• Author Appeal: Given it was basically Hitler monologuing at the dinner table about whatever was on his mind, that's the motive of the entire collection of discussion in the book.
• Author Tract: The whole point. It's Hitler's dinner ramblings about whatever he wanted to go on at length about and often did collected in book format.
• Author Filibuster: Even the people invited to listen to the actual talks noted Hitler just wanted them to listen, not comment, and he could just go on for hours on a long-winded spiel about whatever was on his mind.
• Continuity Porn: To ad nauseum levels. Hitler would bring up practically everything he ever believed in or once said and reference it during the table talks.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: All this was literally a dictation of Hitler's dinner table rants.
• Doorstopper: Given the sheer length of the material clocks in towards up to nearly a thousand pages, depending on edition.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: The Romans, Italians, and basically anyone Hitler deemed to be Aryan or Aryan-adjacent.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: Christianity and, of course, the Jews. England and France got a similar treatment in his remarks on them.
• Just Between You and Me: Technically speaking, the table talks were only supposed to be shared with Hitler's close friends at the time of their dictation, and were only posthumously released for the benefit of posterity. However, everyone nearby, including house servants, were the audience whether they wanted to be or not.
  • Had Hitler lived, they would have served as the basis of future books by him.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Albert Speer put it best, commenting on the Table Talks:

[Hitler] was that classic German type known as Besserwisser, the know-it-all. His mind was cluttered with minor information and misinformation, about everything. I believe that one of the reasons he gathered so many flunkies around him was that his instinct told him that first-rate people couldn't possibly stomach the outpourings.

• It's All About Me: These talks were Hitler's special time to vent his spleen about whatever was on his mind. He specifically demanded no interruptions, comments, or questions during the talks. He wanted all that time to say whatever he wanted and further wanted his audience to sit through all the talks, without exception, until he decided he was finished.
• Mood Whiplash: All the entries after the failure of Stalingrad tend much more negative and cynical.
• Motive Rant: Quite a few things he talked about were one of these.
• Protection From Editors: One of his few works which did have editors, but it still comes off as a mass of stream-of-consciousness thoughts even in it's edited form like the works where he had no editor.
• Rant-Inducing Slight: One of the talks is a rant about a rant. Specifically, he recalls how he discovered the German navy forced men of different ranks to eat in different accommodations and it set him off so badly he set about fixing it because that set his nose out of joint.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Hitler does this a lot. Those who were witnesses to the talks, like Albert Speer, believed Hitler was prone to this simply because he liked to hear himself talk and sound smart.