Winston Churchill quote

by caphesuadaa

"This war is not against Hitler or National Socialism but against the strength of the German people, which is to be smashed once and for all, regardless whether it is in the hands of Hitler or a Jesuit priest."

Somebody posted that quote in a discussion and I find it weird, but can't find any credible source for it. Does someone know the context for this or can confirm that Churchill indeed said this?

Jan_van_Bergen

So neat trick, if you search for a quotation in Google, it will bring back pages in which that entire quotation is found. So I did that, and got this page.

Looking through the results, I see a Google Books result that sources the quotation to a work entitled Winston Churchill: British bulldog: his career in war and peace by Emrys Hughes. Unfortunately, when you use Google books to search that work for the quote, nothing shows (the word Jesuit, for example, comes up nill on the search).

But here is where I need to mention the problems I've encountered. The work that sources the quote to Hughes is by a man named Benton Bradberry, and reading the jacket of his book, it appears he's a Holocaust denier and Nazi apologist, so I can't say I trust anything he says without verification. Further, the fact that he's using the quote, attributing it to another work in which it does not appear to exist, suggests that there are real problems with the quotation.

I obviously haven't spent too much time searching, but the only "evidence" I can find supporting it comes from sources that are not trustworthy in the slightest (seriously, the number two search result is friggin' Stormfont). So I would error on the side of it being apocryphal until proven otherwise.