23rd September 1941, evening
The frontiers of Europe and Asia—Success justifies everything—Our right to fertile lands—The Russian flood must be dammed.
It’s absurd to try to suppose that the frontier between the two separate worlds of Europe and Asia is marked by a chain of not very high mountains—and the long chain of the Urals is no more than that. One might just as well decree that the frontier is marked by one of the great Russian rivers. No, geographically Asia penetrates into Europe without any sharp break.
The real frontier is the one that separates the Germanic world from the Slav world. It’s our duty to place it where we want it to be.
If anyone asks us where we obtain the right to extend the Germanic space to the East, we reply that, for a nation, her awareness of what she represents carries this right with it.
It’s inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilisation, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world. We painfully wrest a few metres from the sea, we torment ourselves cultivating marshes—and in the Ukraine an inexhaustibly fertile soil, with a thickness, in places, often metres of humus, lies waiting for us.
We must create conditions for our people that favour its multiplication, and we must at the same time build a dike against the Russian flood. If this war had not taken place, the Reich would scarcely have increased its population during the next ten years, but the Russian population would have grown vigorously.
If to-day you do harm to the Russians, it is so as to avoid giving them the opportunity of doing harm to us. God does not act differently. He suddenly hurls the masses of humanity on to the earth, and he leaves it to each one to work out his own salvation. Men dispossess one another, and one perceives that, at the end of it all, it is always the stronger who triumphs. Is that not the most reasonable order of things?
If it were otherwise, nothing good would ever have existed. If we did not respect the laws of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would once again devour us—then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist on earth but the microbes.