“The Führer explained one more time the Tukhachevsky case and stated that we erred completely at the time when we thought that Stalin had ruined the Red Army. The opposite is true: Stalin got rid of all the opposition circles within the army and thereby succeeded in making sure that there would no longer be any defeatist currents within that army…
With respect to us, Stalin also has the advantage of not having any social opposition, since Bolshevism has eliminated it through the purges of the last twenty-five years…Bolshevism has eliminated this danger in time and can henceforth focus all of its strength on its enemy.”
– Joseph Göbbels, Tagebücher aus den Jahren 1942–1943, (Zurich, 1948), p. 322. Quoted in Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, La seconde guerre mondiale: caractères fondamentaux de la politique et de la stratégie, vol. 1, pp. 213–214.
“Who would have thought during the crimes of the Great Terror during the French Revolution that soon after a Bonaparte would come out and raise France up from the abyss with an iron fist? A few years later, and Bonaparte almost created the United Europe.
A Russian Bonaparte could also rise up. The young Marshal Tukhachevsky executed by Stalin on Benes’ advice, was of the right stature in 1937.”
– Léon Degrelle, quoted in Degrelle m’a dit by Louise Narvaez, Postface by Degrelle (Brussels: Éditions du Baucens, 1977), page 360-361.
The Espresso Stalinist 