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Isabel Wilkerson
Adolf Hitler was a German dictator and the leader of the Nazi Party. He rose to power as Führer (“Leader”) in 1934. He initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland in September of 1939 and engineered the Holocaust. Hitler was a fascist despot responsible for the deaths of millions—including six million European Jews who were murdered in concentration camps across Germany, Poland, France, Latvia, Austria, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. Hitler’s racially motivated ideology—designed to preserve the “purity” of the manufactured Aryan race—led to the large-scale extermination of Jews, Slavs, Sinti, Roma, people with disabilities, gay men and lesbians. Hitler and his followers also targeted members of numerous other political, religious, and social minorities whom they deemed Untermenschen, or subhuman. Hitler committed suicide on April 30th, 1945 as Soviet troops advanced on his residence. He is widely regarded as one of history’s most murderous, immoral figures.
Adolf Hitler Quotes in Caste
The Caste quotes below are all either spoken by Adolf Hitler or refer to Adolf Hitler . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 8 Quotes
The Nazis needed no outsiders to plant the seeds of hatred within them. But in the early years of the regime, when they still had a stake in the appearance of legitimacy and the hope of foreign investment, they were seeking legal prototypes for the caste system they were building. They were looking to move quickly with their plans for racial separation and purity, and knew that the United States was centuries ahead of them with its anti-miscegenation statutes and race-based immigration bans.
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Chapter 9 Quotes
The villagers were not all Nazis, in fact, many Germans were not Nazis. But they followed the Nazi leaders on the radio, waited to hear the latest from Hitler and Goebbels, the Nazis having seized the advantage of this new technology, the chance to reach Germans live and direct in their homes anytime they chose, an intravenous drip to the mind. The people had ingested the lies of an inherent Untermenschen, that these prisoners—Jews, Sinti, homosexuals, opponents of the Reich—were not humans like themselves, and thus the townspeople swept the ash from their steps and carried on with their days.
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Adolf Hitler Character Timeline in Caste
The timeline below shows where the character Adolf Hitler appears in Caste. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Prologue: The Man in the Crowd
...about a famous black-and-white photograph taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, at the height of Hitler’s Third Reich. In the picture, there’s a lone man in a sea of shipyard workers...
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Chapter Eight: The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste
Hitler had long studied the U.S. from afar—and he believed it was a successful nation because...
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Hitler rose to power as an “outside agitator,” and by the time he and his party...
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By September of 1935, Hitler would announce the Blood Laws—laws that defined what “counted” a person as a Jew. From...
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Chapter Nineteen: The Euphoria of Hate
...a Berlin museum, looping footage of Saturday, July 6, 1940 plays constantly. The footage shows Hitler returning to Berlin after the Germans seized Paris, with a deafening parade of citizens packed...
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