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Moscow

The Führer’s monologues, 2

For the context of these translations click here,
for this monologue in German, here.

Führer Headquarters 5/6 July 1941, 11.30 a.m. – 1.50 a.m.

Conversation with [Nicolaus] v. Below[1] about whether we wouldn’t do well to publish pictures of the large-calibre gun, which had not yet been shown, now for once, for the moral shaking of the enemy. Long general discussion about car engines: the Führer’s first and later cars. [Hitler also said:]

The beauty of Crimea is made accessible to us by a motorway: the German south. Crete is hot and forestless. Cyprus would be nice, but we reach Crimea by road—Kiev. And our destination: Croatia. ‘I think there will be great joy after the war’.

Better than the railway, which is somewhat impersonal, the motor car will connect the peoples. What a factor on the way to the new Europe! Just as the autobahn [federal controlled-access highway system in Germany] made the inner-German borders disappear, the borders of the European countries will be abolished.

When asked whether it would be enough to have advanced as far as the Urals as a frontier, [I reply that] it will be enough to have advanced the frontier as far as there. Bolshevism must be eradicated; if necessary, to this end we would advance from there to wherever a new centre of resistance is forming. Moscow as the seat of this doctrine will disappear from the face of the earth as soon as the valuable goods are taken away. It won’t be possible for us to work with the Russians in the factories there. St. Petersburg [Leningrad] as a city is incomparably more beautiful than Moscow. This time, the art treasures of The Hermitage [Museum] would probably not have been transferred to the Kremlin—as in the [First] World War—but to houses in the countryside, unless they’ve been taken to the cities east of Moscow or by sea.

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[1] Nicolaus von Below was Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, last in the rank of Major General.