Hitler never said it.

During the Stormy Sixties, antiwar protests on American college campuses became so unruly at times that there were calls for a crackdown on student activities; and critics of the Vietnam War, like Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who sympathized with student dissidents, both used the Hitler quote to warn against the threat of repressive measures to civil liberties in the United States.

But the Hitler quote is an obvious fake. The only students who were rebelling and rioting in Germany in 1932, as philosopher Sidney Hook has pointed out, were Nazi students protesting against the presence of Jewish professors on university faculties. And the candidate for law and order in Germany in 1932 was not Hitler, but Field Marshal Paul von Hindenberg. Hitler was calling for a Nazi revolution, not for law and order.

The Hitler quote originally appeared in an obscure Communist periodical, began turning up on posters on American college campuses in the late sixties, was featured by anti-Vietnam demonstrators during the 1968 presidential campaign, and was even used in Billy Jack (1971), a movie about a “freedom school” composed of racially mixed students who were being persecuted by vicious bigots in the neighboring town.

Both Senator Muskie and Justice Douglas apologized for using the quote after learning it was a fake, and the latter removed it from the next printing of his book, Points of Rebellion (1970). — From They Never Said It by Paul Boller & John George