Hugh Trevor-Roper on Thomas Carlyle

“Goebbels told Schwerin von Krosigk [in April 1945 in the Führerbunker] how he had recently been reading aloud to the Fuehrer, to solace him in his universal discomfiture. He was reading from his favourite book, Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great; and the chapter he was reading described "how the great king himself no longer saw any way out of his difficulties, no longer had any plan; how all his generals and ministers were convinced that his downfall was at hand; how the enemy was already counting Prussia as destroyed; how the future hung dark before him, and in his last letter to his minister, Count Finckenstein, he gave himself one last respite: if there was no change by February 15th, he would give it up and take poison. 'Brave king!' says Carlyle, 'wait yet a little while, and the days of your suffering will be over. Already the sun of your good fortune stands behind the clouds, and soon will rise upon you.' On February 12th the Czarina died; the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to pass." At this touching tale, said Goebbels, "tears stood in the Fuehrer's eyes."”

“Thomas Carlyle supposed that power should be entrusted unconditionally to great men, heroes who were laws to themselves, not responsible to the institutions or prejudices of inferior men. When a nation is so fortunate as to breed a great man (he thought), it should not seek to limit the expression of his greatness; it should be happy to forward his design. This doctrine rang musically in German ears, in a time of gloom and defeat, when Germans despaired of political institutions and their own capacity to use them. It was acceptable to Hitler, whom we have seen listening with egotistical relish to readings from Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great in the Bunker in Berlin. Hitler, like Carlyle, believed in "historical greatness", which to him was more important than the happiness or survival of a people; and he conceived of himself as a great man,—in which he was surely not mistaken; for it is absurd to suggest that one who made such a stir in the world was of ordinary stature. The Germans accepted him as the Messiah for whom they were waiting, and in the hours of his apparent success they sacrificed their political institutions to him; for they believed not in them, but in the man.”