The country has been burning as Muslim mobs have gone on a rampage, rioting against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Registry of Citizens. In the midst of the chaos, Prime Minister Modi addressed a massive rally in Ramlila Maidan in Delhi where he also addressed the riots against CAA and NRC. In his speech, while training his guns at all and sundry anti-India forces, PM Modi said “Hate me if you want but don’t hate India. Burn my effigy, but don’t burn a poor man’s auto-rickshaw”. PM Modi’s speech seems to have ruffled many feathers, one of them, is that of filmmaker and hobby propagandist, Anurag Kashyap. He has claimed that a sentence from PM Modi’s speech was the same as what Hitler had once said.
Anurag Kashyap, who has often been caught spreading blatant lies and shoddy propaganda took to Twitter to plug a short clip. The short clip was of a speech by Adolf Hitler, the German dictator with his speech translated.
hate me but dont hate India – बेचारे हमारे प्रधानमंत्री #UrbanNazi pic.twitter.com/TPUgmni1Hx
— Anurag Kashyap (@anuragkashyap72) December 23, 2019
In the tweet, Anurag Kashyap called the Prime Minister an ‘Urban Nazi’ insinuating that his ‘hate me but don’t hate India’ line was taken directly from a speech by Hitler.
The translation text in the video reads, “I know who is hating me. Hate me if you wish, but don’t hate Germany”.
The insinuation that Anurag Kashyap made was obvious. He alleged that Prime Minister Modi is akin to a Nazi and that his speech was inspired by the German dictator.
The truth, however, is far from it. The translation of the German speech is wildly inaccurate.
Maria Wirth, a German author with deep links to India and the Indic tradition, living in India for the past 3 decades tweeted that the translation was inaccurate and actually had nothing to do with what the translation said or what Anurag Kashyap insinuated.
Completely WRONG translation. Completely different topic. Why you @anuragkashyap72 put out lies?
It’s about GOING amidst people… help them and “immer wieder zu helfen” help them again & again.@PMOIndia@HMOIndia @narendramodi @AmitShah @rahulroushan @republic #StandwithModi https://t.co/lIGuLJ6tx2— Maria Wirth (@mariawirth1) December 23, 2019
Wirth said that the translation in the video was incorrect and pertained to a completely different topic where Hitler was not saying anything remotely similar to what PM Modi said. She said the Hitler speech was about ‘going amidst people’, ‘help them and help them again and again’.
When OpIndia spoke to Maria Wirth, she said that the translation in the video plugged by Anurag Kashyap was completely incorrect. She said that Hitler in the speech said, “…to talk of this people as brothers (volk) to go in the midst of the people of the nation, to overcome all its …. To help and to help again and again”. Since it is a short clip and starts mid-sentence, she theorised that the context in which Hitler was talking about was to say that simply to call fellow Germans as ‘brothers’ is not enough, but the need is to go amidst people and help them over and over again.
After speaking to Maria, OpIndia did its own research. While it is difficult to place which exact speech this clip has been taken from, there are several indicators that we found.
We found a website where the date and the place of this particular speech were mentioned.
The note related to the video says, “German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler addresses volunteers and officials gathered for the opening rally of the annual Winterhilfswerk (Winter relief project), held in Deutschlandhalle, in Berlin, Germany. The hall is decorated with Nazi symbols and swastikas on sidewalls. Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and Martin Bormann, are seen. Hitler gives an impassioned speech with much gesticulation. (Note: Midway through clip there is a brief 2 second shot from an unrelated speech by Hitler to the Reichstag)”.
The website claims that the speech was delivered by Hitler in Berlin, Germany on October 5th, 1937 at the Winterhilfswerk winter relief rally.
We then looked for a translation of the 1937 speech of Hitler and found an English version.
We asked Ms Maria Wirth if the speech could be from 1937 and if this translation made sense. She said though it is not an exact translation if the speech is indeed from 1937, then the portion highlighted could be the loose translation.
The highlighted portion reads, “…behind it stands not the word, but the deed! With the aid of this tremendous society, countless people are being relieved of the feeling of social abandonment and isolation. Many are thus regaining the firm belief that they are not completely lost and alone in this world, but sheltered in their Volksgemeinschaft; that they, too, are being cared for, that they, too, are being thought of and remembered”.
Essentially, both her translation and that from this book would mean that Hitler was talking about how ‘deed’ is more important than ‘words’ and how just calling Germans brothers is not sufficient but what is needed is to go amongst the people and help them.
The Winterhilfswerk des Deutschen Volkes (English: Winter Relief of the German People), commonly known by its abbreviated form Winterhilfswerk (WHW) from where this speech is, was an annual drive by the National Socialist People’s Welfare (German: Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt) to help finance charitable work. Its slogan was “None shall starve or freeze”. The drive was originally set up under the government of Heinrich Brüning in 1931, though Adolf Hitler would later claim sole credit. It ran from 1933–1945 during the months of October through March and was designed to provide food, clothing, coal and other items to less fortunate Germans during the inclement months.
In the original video, from where Anurag Kashyap took the snippet to lie about the PM Modi speech being the same as the remark by PM Modi, the Hitler speech being from the Winterhilfswerk relief camp is proved by the banner displayed prominently. The original video was from a channel called ‘British pathe’.
Now, even if assume that the speech was not from the 1937 speech, the speech is obviously from one of the speeches that were made between 1936-37. However, in none of those speeches were the words ‘hate me’ used.
In fact, we searched multiple English translations of Hitler’s speeches spanning from 1922 to 1945. The phrase ‘hate me’ appears only once in all of Hitler’s speeches and that too, in a completely different context.
One can see from searching the PDF that “hate me” occurs just once while “hate Germany” has no mention at all in any of his speeches from 1922 to 1945.
It is thus evident that the translation peddled by Anurag Kashyap is completely false.
However, it was not even the first time that this false narrative was being peddled and Kashyap is certainly not the only person to do it.
“Comedian” Aditi Mittal too had posted the same propaganda which she promptly deleted later.
The fallacious tweet by Aditi Mittal was then retweeted by Bollywood actor Sushant Singh as well.
In 2018, Prime Minister Modi had said, “Burn me alive if I am wrong”. The Leftists and Islamists, at that point of time too had claimed that the same sentence was used by Hitler in his 1935 speech as was used by PM Modi.
“Burn me alive if I am wrong”, said Hitler in 1935
But he ended up getting millions of Germans, Polls, Russians, Italians, French British & Jews killed before he killed himself.
History repeats itself either as a tragedy or comedy https://t.co/CdZ6DaFSTZ— shahid siddiqui (@shahid_siddiqui) September 8, 2018
However, that claim was wrong as well.
Turns out, Hitler, in the speech peddled by the leftists had said something completely different and not ‘burn me alive if I am wrong”, which PM Modi had said in his speech.
The Leftists, Islamists and “Liberals” have often fantasised about Prime Minister Modi being a mirror image of Hitler. However, while they run amock spewing venom and lies from the comfort of their own homes, “Hitler” Modi has not even given them the time of the day or an iota of attention, let alone throwing them in detention camps. The propaganda peddled by these elements fall flat every time they decide to peddle it, however, one cannot credit them for anything else if not for being persistent.
