4th February 1942, evening
SPECIAL GUEST: HIMMLER
Improving living conditions—For the Reich no sacrifice is too great.
We’ll transform the spaces of the East into a country in which human beings will be able to live. We must not forget that over there are found iron, coal, grain and timber. We’ll build there welcoming farms, handsome roads. And those of our people who thrust as far as that will end by loving their country and loving its landscapes—as the Germans on the Volga used to do.
You’ll understand, Himmler, that if I want to establish a genuine civilisation to the North and East, I’ll have to make use of men from the South. If I were to take official architects of the Prussian Government to beautify Berlin, for example, I’d do better to abandon the project!
In our ambition to play a rôle on the world level, we must constantly consult Imperial history. All the rest is so new, so uncertain, so imperfect. But Imperial history is the greatest epic that’s been known since the Roman Empire. What boldness! What grandeur! These giants thought no more of crossing the Alps than crossing a street.
The misfortune is that none of our great writers took his subjects from German Imperial history. Our Schiller found nothing better to do than to glorify a Swiss cross-bowman! The English, for their part, had a Shakespeare—but the history of his country has supplied Shakespeare, as far as heroes are concerned, only with imbeciles and madmen.
Immense vistas open up to the German cinema. It will find in the history of the Empire—five centuries of world domination—themes big enough for it.
When I meet the heads of other Germanic peoples, I’m particularly well placed—by reason of my origin—to discuss with them. I can remind them, in fact, that my country was for five centuries a mighty empire, with a capital like Vienna, and that nevertheless I did not hesitate to sacrifice my country to the idea of the Reich.
I’ve always been convinced of the necessity of welcoming into the Party only truly sturdy fellows, without taking heed of numbers, and excluding the lukewarm. In the same way as regards the new Reich, wherever there are wholesome Germanic elements in the world, we shall try to recover them. And this Reich will be so sturdy that nobody will ever be able to attempt anything against it.