Media: That's not quite what Hitler said

There is an interesting article in Haaretz written by Tom Segev, that demonstrates how "myth" can become "fact" - especially if the press are involved.

Quote: On August 22, 1939, just days before the outbreak of World War II, Adolf Hitler met with his army generals. When he explained why he had decided to attack Poland, he assured them that the world would keep silent: "Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?," Hitler reasoned. This sentence has been quoted countless times as ostensible proof that the Armenian genocide served as a kind of "general rehearsal" for the annihilation of European Jewry. At the Holocaust Museum in Washington, these words are etched on one of the walls.

However, the quote attributed to Hitler is of dubious provenance. It originated with a well-known American journalist, Louis Lochner, an AP reporter in Nazi Germany and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Lochner reported on Hitler's speech in a book he published in 1942. After the war, Lochner gave a version of the speech to the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. The prosecutor was not satisfied, because he didn't know the source of the speech, nor under what circumstances it was leaked to the reporter. He dispatched his people to search for the official version.

It turned out that on that day, Hitler gave two speeches. The Americans managed to locate the official version of both; the line about the slaughter of the Armenians does not appear in either. The version Lochner got hold of was apparently a mix of the two. The prosecution in Nuremberg decided not to submit the reporter's version to the court, but did leak it to the press; the prosecutor apologized in court for the leak and claimed it occurred by mistake. At any rate, this is how the citation entered the heritage of the Armenian holocaust.

Full article: Mozart and the Armenian genocide