No, Hitler didn’t say this about World War III

Here are some things Adolf Hitler didn’t say: that the best way to control people is "to take a little of their freedom at a time," or that under a national gun registration "our streets will be safer."

We know because we fact-checked both statements attributed to the Nazi leader. 

Another apocryphal quote that we haven’t checked — but it certainly isn’t new — has recently been spreading on social media. It tells the story of what it describes as Hitler telling his soldiers that "even in his death" he would start World War III.

"One of his soldiers asked ‘how?’" the grammatically problematic April 12 Facebook post says. "Hitler replied, ‘The day mankind finds out what I was trying to defend this nation, Germany from then thats the day World War 3 will start.’" 

What follows is an exchange between Hitler and the soldier. Hitler says that "mankind will learn that I was trying to save my Nation from The Free Masons, the Illuminati, the Jews" and that "if the Americans win the war, then they will conquer the world and forever be a slave to the Jews and they will try to conquer God." 

He later tells the soldier that "America has stolen the Jews. The Jews of God. His jewelry. The Negroes. They are the True Hebrews." 

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

No source is given for the quote, but citations have surfaced in other places. Both Snopes, which looked into this in 2017, and Reuters, which did in 2020, found they weren’t accurate. 

We found no evidence that Hitler said this. 

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According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Nazis persecuted Black people in Africa "depite their relatively small presence in Germany." 

They "forcibly sterilized a group of Afro-German children whom they derogatorily called ‘the Rhineland Bastards,’" the museum says. And after the the Nazi regime came to power, Black Germans were marginalized, socially and economically isolated, and discriminated against. 

In "Mein Kampf," Hitler’s 1925 manifesto, he mentions "negroes" three times, but not in the context that appears in the Facebook quote. 

"The Jews were responsible for bringing negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate," he wrote at one point. 

We rate this post False.