Night of 1st-2nd August 1941
I am often urged to say something in praise of bureaucracy—I can't do it. It's certain that we have a clean, incorruptible administration, but it's also too punctilious. It's over-organised, and, at least in certain sectors, it's overloaded. Its principal fault is that nobody in it is seeking for success, and that it includes too many people without responsibility. Our functionaries fear initiative worse than anything else—and what a way they have of behaving as if they were nailed to their office chairs ! We have much more elasticity in the army, with the exception of one sector of the Wehrmacht, than in these civilian sectors. And that although the salaries are often inadequate ! Their fixed idea is that legislation should be the same for the whole Reich. Why not a different regulation for each part of the Reich? They imagine that it's better to have a regulation which is bad, but uniform, rather than a good regulation that would take account of particular circumstances. What matters for them is simply that the higher bosses should have a comprehensive view of the activity of the administration, and should pull all the strings. The Wehrmacht gives its highest distinction to the man who, acting against orders, saves a situation by his discernment and decisiveness. In the administration, the fact of not carrying out an order makes a man liable to the most severe penalty. The administration ignores the exception. That is why it lacks the courage which is indispensable to those who are to assume responsibilities. One favourable circumstance, in view of the changes of method that are called for, is that we are going to have a continent to rule. When that happens, the different positions of the sun will bar us from uniformity ! In many places, we shall have to control immense regions with a handful of men. Thus the police there will have to be constantly on the alert. What a chance for men from the Party ! We must pay the price for our experiences, of course. Mistakes are inevitable, but what difference do they make if in ten years I can be told that Danzig, Alsace and Lorraine are now German ! What will it matter then if it can be added that three or four mistakes have been made at Golmar, and five or six in other places? Let's take the responsibilities for these mistakes, and save the provinces ! In ten years we'll have formed an élite, of whom we'll know that we can count on them whenever there are new difficulties to master. We'll produce from it all a new type of man, a race of rulers, a breed of viceroys. Of course, there'll be no question of using people like that in the West !
August 1941, midday
There's nothing astonishing about the fact that Communism had its strongest bastion in Saxony, or that it took us time to win over the Saxon workers to our side. Nor is it astonishing that they are now counted amongst our most loyal supporters. The Saxon bourgeoisie was incredibly narrow-minded. These people insisted that we were mere Communists. Anyone who proclaims the right to social equality for the masses is a Bolshevik ! The way in which they exploited the home worker was unimaginable. It's a real crime to have turned the Saxon workers into proletarians. There was a ruling plutocracy in those parts comparable to what still exists to-day in England. Recruiting for the Wehrmacht enabled us to observe the progressive lowering of the quality of the human material in this region. I don't blame the small man for turning Communist; but I blame the intellectual who did nothing but exploit other people's poverty for other ends. When one thinks ofthat riff-raff of a bourgeoisie, even to-day one sees red. The masses followed the only course possible. The worker took no part in national life. When a monument was unveiled to the memory of Bismarck, or when a ship was launched, no delegation of workers was ever invited—only the frock-coats and uniforms. For me, the top hat is the signature of the bourgeois. I sometimes entertain myself by rummaging through old backnumbers of the Woche. I have a collection of them. It's truly instructive to plunge one's nose in them. At the launching of a ship, nothing but top-hats, even after the revolution! The people were invited to such festivities only as stage extras. The Kaiser received a delegation of workers just once. He gave them a fine scolding, threatening simply to withdraw the Imperial favour from them! At their local meetings, I suppose the delegates had plenty of time in which to draw their conclusions from the Imperial speech. When war came, the harm had been done, and it was too late to go into reverse. Moreover, people were too cowardly to crush Social Democracy. It's what Bismarck wanted to do, but with the corollary of good social legislation. If they'd followed that path systematically, it would have led us to our goal in less than twenty years. Thaelmann is the very type of those mediocrities who can't act otherwise than as they have acted. He's not as intelligent as Torgler, for example. He's a narrow-minded man. That's why I let Torgler go free, whilst I had to keep Thaelmann locked up, not in revenge, but to prevent him from being a nuisance. As soon as the danger in Russia has been removed, I'll let him go, too. I don't need to lock up the Social Democrats. Indeed, all I ever had to fear from them was that they might find some base abroad to support their attacks on us. Our pact with Russia never implied that we might be led to adopt a different attitude towards the danger within. Taken by themselves, I find our Communists a thousand times more sympathetic than Starhemberg, say. They were sturdy fellows. Pity they didn't stay a little longer in Russia. They would have come back completely cured.
August 1941, during dinner
In the same way as owners of moors take care, a long time in advance, of the game they'll kill in the shooting-season, so lawyers take care of the criminal class. The greatest vice of our penal system is the exaggerated importance attached to a first sentence. Corporal punishment would often be much better than a term of imprisonment. In prison and in penitentiary establishments, the delinquent is at too good a school. The old lags he meets there teach him, first that he was stupid to be caught, and secondly to do better next time. All that his stay in prison amounts to in the end is only an uninterrupted course of instruction in the art of doing wrong. (A murder had just been committed in Berlin. There was much talk of it in the Press, and Schaub asked the Fuehrer how long it would take f or the case to come up for trial.) In such a case, I see no sense in a long trial, with all its formalities, to study the question of responsibility or irresponsibility. In my view, whether responsible or not, the author of that crime should disappear.
2nd August 1941, evening
When Russia barricades herself within her frontiers, it's to prevent people from leaving the country and making certain 22 GOAL AND POWER IN EUROPE comparisons. That's why Stalin was obliged to introduce Bolshevism into the Baltic countries, so that his army of occupation should be deprived of all means of comparison with another system. At the beginning that wasn't Stalin's idea at all. It's important that we should shape Germany in such a way that whoever comes to visit us may be cured of his prejudices concerning us. I don't want to force National Socialism on anybody. If I'm told that some countries want to remain democrats—very well, they must remain democrats at all costs ! The French, for example, ought to retain their parties. The more social-revolutionary parties they have in their midst, the better it will be for us. The way we're behaving just now is exactly right. Many Frenchmen won't want us to leave Paris, since their relations with us have made them suspect in the eyes of the Vichy French. Similarly, Vichy perhaps does not take too dim a view of our being installed in Paris, since, if we weren't there, they would have to beware of revolutionary movements. Once the economy has been definitely organised, we shall have to see to increasing our livestock. We shall also have to devote 100,000 acres to the cultivation of rubber. Because of the fault of capitalism, which considers only private interests, the exploitation of electricity generated by water-power is in Germany only in its infancy. The most important hydro-electric installations will have to be reserved, in the first place, for the most important consumers —for the chemical industry, for example. We shall have to use every method of encouraging whatever might ensure us the gain of a single kilowatt. Let's not forget the old-style mills. If water flows, it's enough to build a dam to obtain energy. Coal will disappear one day, but there will always be water. It can all be exploited more rationally. One can build dams upon dams, and make use of the slightest slopes : thus one has a steady yield, and one can build beyond the reach of bombing. The new Fischer process is one of the finest inventions ever discovered. One day Norway will have to be the electrical centre of Northern Europe. In that way the Norwegians will at last find a European mission to fulfil. I haven't studied the problem as regards Sweden. In Finland, unfortunately, there is nothing to be done. If all our cities adopted the method used in Munich for producing lighting-gas by recovering it, that would be an enormous gain. In Munich 12 per cent of the gas for lighting is obtained in this fashion. In the Weiserheide the gas comes out of the earth. The town of Wels is heated in this way. I should not be surprised if petroleum were discovered there one day. But the future belongs, surely, to water—to the wind and the tides. As a means of heating, it's probably hydrogen that will be chosen.
August 1941
The basic reason for English pride is India. Four hundred years ago the English didn't have this pride. The vast spaces over which they spread their rule obliged them to govern millions of people—and they kept these multitudes in order by granting a few men unlimited power. It would obviously have been impossible for them to keep great European areas supplied with foodstuffs and other articles of prime necessity. There was therefore no question for them, with a handful of men, to regulate life on these new continents. In any case, the Anglicans never sustained the slightest effort of a missionary description. Thus it was that the Indians never suffered any attack of this sort upon their spiritual integrity. The German made himself detested everywhere in the world, because wherever he showed himself he began to play the teacher. It's not a good method of conquest. Every people has its customs, to which it clings, and nobody wants lessons from us. The sense of duty, as we understand it, is not known amongst the Russians. Why should we try to inculcate this notion into them? The German colonist ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. The German services will be lodged in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces. Beneath the shelter of the administrative services, we shall gradually organise all that is indispensable to the maintenance of a certain standard of living. Around the city, to a depth of thirty to forty kilometres, we shall have a belt of handsome villages connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like. It is merely necessary that we should rule them. In the event of a revolution, we shall only have to drop a few bombs on their cities, and the affair will be liquidated. Once a year we shall lead a troop of Kirghizes through the capital of the Reich, in order to strike their imaginations with the size of our monuments. What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future! Colonies are a precarious possession, but this ground is safely ours. Europe is not a geographic entity, it's a racial entity. We understand now why the Chinese shut themselves up behind a wall to protect themselves against the eternal attacks of theMongols. One could sometimes wish that a huge wall might protect the new territories of the East against the masses of Central Asia; but that's contrary to the teachings of history. The fact is that a too great feeling of security provokes, in the long run, a relaxation of forces. I think the best wall will always be a wall of human breasts ! If any people has the right to proceed to evacuations, it is we, for we've often had to evacuate our own population. Eight hundred thousand men had to emigrate from East Prussia alone. How humanely sensitive we are is shown by the fact that we consider it a maximum of brutality to have liberated our country from six hundred thousand Jews. And yet we accepted, without recrimination, and as something inevitable, the evacuation of our own compatriots ! We must no longer allow Germans to emigrate to America. On the contrary, we must attract the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes and the Dutch into our Eastern territories. They'll become members of the German Reich. Our duty is methodically to pursue a racial policy. We're compelled to do so, if only to combat the degeneration which is beginning to threaten us by reason of unions that in a way are consanguineous. As for the Swiss, we can use them, at the best, as hotel keepers. We have no reason to dry up the marshes. We shall take only the best land, the best sites. In the marshy region, we shall in stall a gigantic plain for manouvres, three hundred and fifty kilometres by four hundred, making use of the rivers and the obstacles nature supplies. It goes without saying that it would be a small thing for our war-trained divisions to get the upper hand over an English army. England is already in a state of inferiority by reason of the fact that she cannot train her troops on her own territory. If the English wanted to open up wide spaces within their own frontiers, they'd have to sacrifice too many country-houses. World history knows three battles of annihilation : Cannae, Sedan and Tannenberg. We can be proud that two of them were fought by German armies. To-day we can add to them our battles in Poland and the West, and those which we're now fighting in the East. All the rest have been battles of pursuit, including Waterloo. We have a false picture of the battle of the Teutoberg forest. The romanticism of our teachers of history has played its part in that. At that period, it was not in fact possible, any more than to-day, to fight a battle in a forest. As regards the campaign in Russia, there were two conflicting views : one was that Stalin would choose the tactics of retreat, as in 1812; the other, that we must expect a desperate resistance. I was practically alone in believing this second eventuality. I told myself that to give up the industrial centres of St. Petersburg and Kharkov would be tantamount to a surrender, that retreat in these conditions meant annihilation,and that for these reasons Russia would endeavour to hold these positions at all costs. It was on this theory that we began the campaign, and the ensuing events have proved me right. America, even if she were to set furiously to work for four years, would not succeed in replacing the material that the Russian army has lost up to the present. If America lends her help to England, it is with the secret thought of bringing the moment nearer when she will reap her inheritance. I shall no longer be there to see it, but I rejoice on behalf of the German people at the idea that one day we will see England and Germany marching together against America. Germany and England will know what each of them can expect of her partner, and then we shall have found the ally whom we need. They have an unexampled cheek, these English! It doesn't prevent me from admiring them. In this sphere, they still have a lot to teach us. If there is anyone who is praying for the success of our arms, it must be the Shah of Persia. As soon as we drop in on him, he'll have nothing more to fear from England. The first thing to do is to conclude a treaty of friendship with Turkey, and to leave it to her to guard the Dardanelles. No foreign power has any business in that part of the world. As regards economic organisation, we are still only at the first fruits, and I can imagine how wonderful it will be to have the task of organising the economy of Europe. To give only one example, what couldn't we gain by successfully recovering the vapours produced by the manufacture of gas for lighting— vapours that at present are wasted? We could use them for warming green-houses, and all winter long we could keep our cities supplied with vegetables and fresh fruit. Nothing is lovelier than horticulture. I believed until now that our army could not exist without meat. I've just learnt that the armies of ancient times had recourse to meat only in times of scarcity, that the feeding of the Roman armies was almost entirely based on cereals. If one considers all the creative forces dormant in the European space (Germany, England, the Nordic countries, Italy), what are the American potentialities by comparison? England is proud of the will shown by the Dominions to stand by the Empire. Doubtless there is something fine about such an attitude, but this will holds good only in so far as the central power is capable of imposing it. The fact that in the new Reich there will be only one army, one SS, one administration, will produce an extraordinary effect of power. In the same way as an old city, enclosed in its ancient walls, necessarily has a different structure from that of the new districts on the periphery, so we shall have to govern the new spaces by other methods than those current in the present Reich. It goes without saying that there should be no uniformity except in the essential matters. As regards Austria, it was the proper solution to destroy the centralised State, to the detriment of Vienna, and re-establish the provinces. In this way innumerable points of friction were removed. Each of the Gaue is happy to be its own master. The arms of the future? In the first place, the land army, then aviation and, in the third place only, the navy. Aviation is the youngest arm. In a few years it has made remarkable progress, but one can't yet say it has reached the apogee of its possibilities. The navy, on the contrary, has not changed, so to speak, since the first World War. There is something tragic in the fact that the battleship, that monument of human ingenuity, has lost its entire raison d'être because of the development of aviation. It reminds one of that marvel of technique and art which the armament of a knight and his horse—the cuirass and the caparison—used to be at the end of the Middle Ages. What's more, the construction of a battleship represents the value of a thousand bombers—and what a huge amount of time! When the silent torpedo has been invented, a hundred aircraft will mean the death of a cruiser. Now already, no big warship can any longer remain in one harbour.
Night of 19th August 1941
For the good of the German people, we must wish for a war every fifteen or twenty years. An army whose sole purpose is to preserve peace leads only to playing at soldiers—compare Sweden and Switzerland. Or else it constitutes a revolutionary danger to its own country. If I am reproached with having sacrificed a hundred or two thousand men by reason of the war, I can answer that, thanks to what I have done, the German nation has gained, up to the present, more than two million five hundred thousand human beings. If I demand a tenth of this as a sacrifice, nevertheless I have given 90 per cent. I hope that in ten years there will be from ten to fifteen millions more of us Germans in the world. Whether they are men or women, it matters little : I am creating conditions favourable to growth. Many great men were the sixth or seventh children of their family. When such-and-such a man, whom one knows, dies, one knows what one has lost. But does one know what one loses by the limitation of births? The man killed before he is born—that remains the enigma. Wars drive the people to proliferation, they teach us not to fall into the error of being content with a single child in each family. It's not tolerable that the life of the peoples of the Continent should depend upon England. The Ukraine, and then the Volga basin, will one day be the granaries of Europe. We shall reap much more than what actually grows from the soil. It must not be forgotten that, from the time of the Tsars, Russia, with her hundred and seventy million people, has never suffered from famine. We shall also keep Europe supplied with iron. If one day Sweden declines to supply any more iron, that's all right. We'll get it from Russia. The industry of Belgium will be able to exchange its products—cheap articles of current consumption—against the grain from those parts. As for the poor working-class families of Thuringia and the Harz mountains, for example, they'll find vast possibilities there. In the regions we occupy in the Ukraine, the population is crowding into the churches. I'd see no harm in that if, as is the case at present, the Masses were held by old Russian peasants. It would be different if they had priests, and as for those, we shall have to deliberate whether to let them come back. According to a report I've been reading, the Russian opposition thinks it can use the clergy as a base of departure for Pan-Slav activities.
I am often urged to say something in praise of bureaucracy—I can't do it. It's certain that we have a clean, incorruptible administration, but it's also too punctilious. It's over-organised, and, at least in certain sectors, it's overloaded. Its principal fault is that nobody in it is seeking for success, and that it includes too many people without responsibility. Our functionaries fear initiative worse than anything else—and what a way they have of behaving as if they were nailed to their office chairs ! We have much more elasticity in the army, with the exception of one sector of the Wehrmacht, than in these civilian sectors. And that although the salaries are often inadequate ! Their fixed idea is that legislation should be the same for the whole Reich. Why not a different regulation for each part of the Reich? They imagine that it's better to have a regulation which is bad, but uniform, rather than a good regulation that would take account of particular circumstances. What matters for them is simply that the higher bosses should have a comprehensive view of the activity of the administration, and should pull all the strings. The Wehrmacht gives its highest distinction to the man who, acting against orders, saves a situation by his discernment and decisiveness. In the administration, the fact of not carrying out an order makes a man liable to the most severe penalty. The administration ignores the exception. That is why it lacks the courage which is indispensable to those who are to assume responsibilities. One favourable circumstance, in view of the changes of method that are called for, is that we are going to have a continent to rule. When that happens, the different positions of the sun will bar us from uniformity ! In many places, we shall have to control immense regions with a handful of men. Thus the police there will have to be constantly on the alert. What a chance for men from the Party ! We must pay the price for our experiences, of course. Mistakes are inevitable, but what difference do they make if in ten years I can be told that Danzig, Alsace and Lorraine are now German ! What will it matter then if it can be added that three or four mistakes have been made at Golmar, and five or six in other places? Let's take the responsibilities for these mistakes, and save the provinces ! In ten years we'll have formed an élite, of whom we'll know that we can count on them whenever there are new difficulties to master. We'll produce from it all a new type of man, a race of rulers, a breed of viceroys. Of course, there'll be no question of using people like that in the West !
August 1941, midday
There's nothing astonishing about the fact that Communism had its strongest bastion in Saxony, or that it took us time to win over the Saxon workers to our side. Nor is it astonishing that they are now counted amongst our most loyal supporters. The Saxon bourgeoisie was incredibly narrow-minded. These people insisted that we were mere Communists. Anyone who proclaims the right to social equality for the masses is a Bolshevik ! The way in which they exploited the home worker was unimaginable. It's a real crime to have turned the Saxon workers into proletarians. There was a ruling plutocracy in those parts comparable to what still exists to-day in England. Recruiting for the Wehrmacht enabled us to observe the progressive lowering of the quality of the human material in this region. I don't blame the small man for turning Communist; but I blame the intellectual who did nothing but exploit other people's poverty for other ends. When one thinks ofthat riff-raff of a bourgeoisie, even to-day one sees red. The masses followed the only course possible. The worker took no part in national life. When a monument was unveiled to the memory of Bismarck, or when a ship was launched, no delegation of workers was ever invited—only the frock-coats and uniforms. For me, the top hat is the signature of the bourgeois. I sometimes entertain myself by rummaging through old backnumbers of the Woche. I have a collection of them. It's truly instructive to plunge one's nose in them. At the launching of a ship, nothing but top-hats, even after the revolution! The people were invited to such festivities only as stage extras. The Kaiser received a delegation of workers just once. He gave them a fine scolding, threatening simply to withdraw the Imperial favour from them! At their local meetings, I suppose the delegates had plenty of time in which to draw their conclusions from the Imperial speech. When war came, the harm had been done, and it was too late to go into reverse. Moreover, people were too cowardly to crush Social Democracy. It's what Bismarck wanted to do, but with the corollary of good social legislation. If they'd followed that path systematically, it would have led us to our goal in less than twenty years. Thaelmann is the very type of those mediocrities who can't act otherwise than as they have acted. He's not as intelligent as Torgler, for example. He's a narrow-minded man. That's why I let Torgler go free, whilst I had to keep Thaelmann locked up, not in revenge, but to prevent him from being a nuisance. As soon as the danger in Russia has been removed, I'll let him go, too. I don't need to lock up the Social Democrats. Indeed, all I ever had to fear from them was that they might find some base abroad to support their attacks on us. Our pact with Russia never implied that we might be led to adopt a different attitude towards the danger within. Taken by themselves, I find our Communists a thousand times more sympathetic than Starhemberg, say. They were sturdy fellows. Pity they didn't stay a little longer in Russia. They would have come back completely cured.
August 1941, during dinner
In the same way as owners of moors take care, a long time in advance, of the game they'll kill in the shooting-season, so lawyers take care of the criminal class. The greatest vice of our penal system is the exaggerated importance attached to a first sentence. Corporal punishment would often be much better than a term of imprisonment. In prison and in penitentiary establishments, the delinquent is at too good a school. The old lags he meets there teach him, first that he was stupid to be caught, and secondly to do better next time. All that his stay in prison amounts to in the end is only an uninterrupted course of instruction in the art of doing wrong. (A murder had just been committed in Berlin. There was much talk of it in the Press, and Schaub asked the Fuehrer how long it would take f or the case to come up for trial.) In such a case, I see no sense in a long trial, with all its formalities, to study the question of responsibility or irresponsibility. In my view, whether responsible or not, the author of that crime should disappear.
2nd August 1941, evening
When Russia barricades herself within her frontiers, it's to prevent people from leaving the country and making certain 22 GOAL AND POWER IN EUROPE comparisons. That's why Stalin was obliged to introduce Bolshevism into the Baltic countries, so that his army of occupation should be deprived of all means of comparison with another system. At the beginning that wasn't Stalin's idea at all. It's important that we should shape Germany in such a way that whoever comes to visit us may be cured of his prejudices concerning us. I don't want to force National Socialism on anybody. If I'm told that some countries want to remain democrats—very well, they must remain democrats at all costs ! The French, for example, ought to retain their parties. The more social-revolutionary parties they have in their midst, the better it will be for us. The way we're behaving just now is exactly right. Many Frenchmen won't want us to leave Paris, since their relations with us have made them suspect in the eyes of the Vichy French. Similarly, Vichy perhaps does not take too dim a view of our being installed in Paris, since, if we weren't there, they would have to beware of revolutionary movements. Once the economy has been definitely organised, we shall have to see to increasing our livestock. We shall also have to devote 100,000 acres to the cultivation of rubber. Because of the fault of capitalism, which considers only private interests, the exploitation of electricity generated by water-power is in Germany only in its infancy. The most important hydro-electric installations will have to be reserved, in the first place, for the most important consumers —for the chemical industry, for example. We shall have to use every method of encouraging whatever might ensure us the gain of a single kilowatt. Let's not forget the old-style mills. If water flows, it's enough to build a dam to obtain energy. Coal will disappear one day, but there will always be water. It can all be exploited more rationally. One can build dams upon dams, and make use of the slightest slopes : thus one has a steady yield, and one can build beyond the reach of bombing. The new Fischer process is one of the finest inventions ever discovered. One day Norway will have to be the electrical centre of Northern Europe. In that way the Norwegians will at last find a European mission to fulfil. I haven't studied the problem as regards Sweden. In Finland, unfortunately, there is nothing to be done. If all our cities adopted the method used in Munich for producing lighting-gas by recovering it, that would be an enormous gain. In Munich 12 per cent of the gas for lighting is obtained in this fashion. In the Weiserheide the gas comes out of the earth. The town of Wels is heated in this way. I should not be surprised if petroleum were discovered there one day. But the future belongs, surely, to water—to the wind and the tides. As a means of heating, it's probably hydrogen that will be chosen.
August 1941
The basic reason for English pride is India. Four hundred years ago the English didn't have this pride. The vast spaces over which they spread their rule obliged them to govern millions of people—and they kept these multitudes in order by granting a few men unlimited power. It would obviously have been impossible for them to keep great European areas supplied with foodstuffs and other articles of prime necessity. There was therefore no question for them, with a handful of men, to regulate life on these new continents. In any case, the Anglicans never sustained the slightest effort of a missionary description. Thus it was that the Indians never suffered any attack of this sort upon their spiritual integrity. The German made himself detested everywhere in the world, because wherever he showed himself he began to play the teacher. It's not a good method of conquest. Every people has its customs, to which it clings, and nobody wants lessons from us. The sense of duty, as we understand it, is not known amongst the Russians. Why should we try to inculcate this notion into them? The German colonist ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. The German services will be lodged in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces. Beneath the shelter of the administrative services, we shall gradually organise all that is indispensable to the maintenance of a certain standard of living. Around the city, to a depth of thirty to forty kilometres, we shall have a belt of handsome villages connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like. It is merely necessary that we should rule them. In the event of a revolution, we shall only have to drop a few bombs on their cities, and the affair will be liquidated. Once a year we shall lead a troop of Kirghizes through the capital of the Reich, in order to strike their imaginations with the size of our monuments. What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future! Colonies are a precarious possession, but this ground is safely ours. Europe is not a geographic entity, it's a racial entity. We understand now why the Chinese shut themselves up behind a wall to protect themselves against the eternal attacks of theMongols. One could sometimes wish that a huge wall might protect the new territories of the East against the masses of Central Asia; but that's contrary to the teachings of history. The fact is that a too great feeling of security provokes, in the long run, a relaxation of forces. I think the best wall will always be a wall of human breasts ! If any people has the right to proceed to evacuations, it is we, for we've often had to evacuate our own population. Eight hundred thousand men had to emigrate from East Prussia alone. How humanely sensitive we are is shown by the fact that we consider it a maximum of brutality to have liberated our country from six hundred thousand Jews. And yet we accepted, without recrimination, and as something inevitable, the evacuation of our own compatriots ! We must no longer allow Germans to emigrate to America. On the contrary, we must attract the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes and the Dutch into our Eastern territories. They'll become members of the German Reich. Our duty is methodically to pursue a racial policy. We're compelled to do so, if only to combat the degeneration which is beginning to threaten us by reason of unions that in a way are consanguineous. As for the Swiss, we can use them, at the best, as hotel keepers. We have no reason to dry up the marshes. We shall take only the best land, the best sites. In the marshy region, we shall in stall a gigantic plain for manouvres, three hundred and fifty kilometres by four hundred, making use of the rivers and the obstacles nature supplies. It goes without saying that it would be a small thing for our war-trained divisions to get the upper hand over an English army. England is already in a state of inferiority by reason of the fact that she cannot train her troops on her own territory. If the English wanted to open up wide spaces within their own frontiers, they'd have to sacrifice too many country-houses. World history knows three battles of annihilation : Cannae, Sedan and Tannenberg. We can be proud that two of them were fought by German armies. To-day we can add to them our battles in Poland and the West, and those which we're now fighting in the East. All the rest have been battles of pursuit, including Waterloo. We have a false picture of the battle of the Teutoberg forest. The romanticism of our teachers of history has played its part in that. At that period, it was not in fact possible, any more than to-day, to fight a battle in a forest. As regards the campaign in Russia, there were two conflicting views : one was that Stalin would choose the tactics of retreat, as in 1812; the other, that we must expect a desperate resistance. I was practically alone in believing this second eventuality. I told myself that to give up the industrial centres of St. Petersburg and Kharkov would be tantamount to a surrender, that retreat in these conditions meant annihilation,and that for these reasons Russia would endeavour to hold these positions at all costs. It was on this theory that we began the campaign, and the ensuing events have proved me right. America, even if she were to set furiously to work for four years, would not succeed in replacing the material that the Russian army has lost up to the present. If America lends her help to England, it is with the secret thought of bringing the moment nearer when she will reap her inheritance. I shall no longer be there to see it, but I rejoice on behalf of the German people at the idea that one day we will see England and Germany marching together against America. Germany and England will know what each of them can expect of her partner, and then we shall have found the ally whom we need. They have an unexampled cheek, these English! It doesn't prevent me from admiring them. In this sphere, they still have a lot to teach us. If there is anyone who is praying for the success of our arms, it must be the Shah of Persia. As soon as we drop in on him, he'll have nothing more to fear from England. The first thing to do is to conclude a treaty of friendship with Turkey, and to leave it to her to guard the Dardanelles. No foreign power has any business in that part of the world. As regards economic organisation, we are still only at the first fruits, and I can imagine how wonderful it will be to have the task of organising the economy of Europe. To give only one example, what couldn't we gain by successfully recovering the vapours produced by the manufacture of gas for lighting— vapours that at present are wasted? We could use them for warming green-houses, and all winter long we could keep our cities supplied with vegetables and fresh fruit. Nothing is lovelier than horticulture. I believed until now that our army could not exist without meat. I've just learnt that the armies of ancient times had recourse to meat only in times of scarcity, that the feeding of the Roman armies was almost entirely based on cereals. If one considers all the creative forces dormant in the European space (Germany, England, the Nordic countries, Italy), what are the American potentialities by comparison? England is proud of the will shown by the Dominions to stand by the Empire. Doubtless there is something fine about such an attitude, but this will holds good only in so far as the central power is capable of imposing it. The fact that in the new Reich there will be only one army, one SS, one administration, will produce an extraordinary effect of power. In the same way as an old city, enclosed in its ancient walls, necessarily has a different structure from that of the new districts on the periphery, so we shall have to govern the new spaces by other methods than those current in the present Reich. It goes without saying that there should be no uniformity except in the essential matters. As regards Austria, it was the proper solution to destroy the centralised State, to the detriment of Vienna, and re-establish the provinces. In this way innumerable points of friction were removed. Each of the Gaue is happy to be its own master. The arms of the future? In the first place, the land army, then aviation and, in the third place only, the navy. Aviation is the youngest arm. In a few years it has made remarkable progress, but one can't yet say it has reached the apogee of its possibilities. The navy, on the contrary, has not changed, so to speak, since the first World War. There is something tragic in the fact that the battleship, that monument of human ingenuity, has lost its entire raison d'être because of the development of aviation. It reminds one of that marvel of technique and art which the armament of a knight and his horse—the cuirass and the caparison—used to be at the end of the Middle Ages. What's more, the construction of a battleship represents the value of a thousand bombers—and what a huge amount of time! When the silent torpedo has been invented, a hundred aircraft will mean the death of a cruiser. Now already, no big warship can any longer remain in one harbour.
Night of 19th August 1941
For the good of the German people, we must wish for a war every fifteen or twenty years. An army whose sole purpose is to preserve peace leads only to playing at soldiers—compare Sweden and Switzerland. Or else it constitutes a revolutionary danger to its own country. If I am reproached with having sacrificed a hundred or two thousand men by reason of the war, I can answer that, thanks to what I have done, the German nation has gained, up to the present, more than two million five hundred thousand human beings. If I demand a tenth of this as a sacrifice, nevertheless I have given 90 per cent. I hope that in ten years there will be from ten to fifteen millions more of us Germans in the world. Whether they are men or women, it matters little : I am creating conditions favourable to growth. Many great men were the sixth or seventh children of their family. When such-and-such a man, whom one knows, dies, one knows what one has lost. But does one know what one loses by the limitation of births? The man killed before he is born—that remains the enigma. Wars drive the people to proliferation, they teach us not to fall into the error of being content with a single child in each family. It's not tolerable that the life of the peoples of the Continent should depend upon England. The Ukraine, and then the Volga basin, will one day be the granaries of Europe. We shall reap much more than what actually grows from the soil. It must not be forgotten that, from the time of the Tsars, Russia, with her hundred and seventy million people, has never suffered from famine. We shall also keep Europe supplied with iron. If one day Sweden declines to supply any more iron, that's all right. We'll get it from Russia. The industry of Belgium will be able to exchange its products—cheap articles of current consumption—against the grain from those parts. As for the poor working-class families of Thuringia and the Harz mountains, for example, they'll find vast possibilities there. In the regions we occupy in the Ukraine, the population is crowding into the churches. I'd see no harm in that if, as is the case at present, the Masses were held by old Russian peasants. It would be different if they had priests, and as for those, we shall have to deliberate whether to let them come back. According to a report I've been reading, the Russian opposition thinks it can use the clergy as a base of departure for Pan-Slav activities.
