Night of 19th-20th August 1941
The virtues of war—Ten to fifteen million
more Germans—War and human fecundity.
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.