Fra Angelico
Entombment ~ 1438
Alte Pinakothek of Munich
Categories
Author: C .T.
Categories
Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 18
22 Night of the 22nd-23rd September 1941
In the East, on the railway, all Germans will have to travel first or second class, so as to distinguish themselves from the natives. The difference between first and second will be that one will have three places on each side, and the other four.
Categories
Story of St Nicholas
Fra Angelico
Story of St Nicholas ~ 1437
Pinacoteca Vaticana
Categories
Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 19
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.
Categories
St Anthony and St Paul
Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo (“Sassetta”)
The Meeting of St Anthony and St Paul ~ 1440
National Gallery of Art
Categories
Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 20
25th September 1941, midday
The perpetual menace of Asia—
A living wall—Justifiable claims.
Asia, what a disquieting reservoir of men! The safety of Europe will not be assured until we have driven Asia back behind the Urals. No organised Russian State must be allowed to exist west of that line. They are brutes, and neither Bolshevism nor Tsarism makes any difference—they are brutes in a state of nature. The danger would be still greater if this space were to be Mongolised. Suddenly a wave comes foaming down from Asia and surprises a Europe benumbed by civilisation and deceived by the illusion of collective security!
Since there is no natural protection against such a flood, we must meet it with a living wall. A permanent state of war on the Eastern front will help to form a sound race of men, and will prevent us from relapsing into the softness of a Europe thrown back upon itself.
The points we have reached are dotted along areas that have retained the memory of Germanic expansion. We’ve been before at the Iron Gates, at Belgrade, in the Russian space.
As regards myself, I shall never live to see it, but one day my successors must be in a position to bring out from a drawer every historical date that justifies a German claim.
Fra Filippo Lippi
Saint Benedict Orders Saint Maurus
to the Rescue of Saint Placidius ~ 1445-50
National Gallery of Art
Night of 25th-26th September 1941
Preservation of the Germanic peoples.
The revelation that her encounter with her first man is for a young woman, can be compared with the revelation that a soldier knows when he faces war for the first time. In a few days, a youth becomes a man. If I weren’t myself hardened by this experience, I would have been incapable of undertaking this Cyclopean task which the building of an Empire means for a single man.
It was with feelings of pure idealism that I set out for the front in 1914. Then I saw men falling around me in thousands. Thus I learnt that life is a cruel struggle, and has no other object but the preservation of the species. The individual can disappear, provided there are other men to replace him.
I suppose that some people are clutching their heads with both hands to find an answer to this question: “How can the Fuehrer destroy a city like St. Petersburg?” Plainly I belong by nature to quite another species. I would prefer not to see anyone suffer, not to do harm to anyone. But when I realise that the species is in danger, then in my case sentiment gives way to the coldest reason. I become uniquely aware of the sacrifices that the future will demand, to make up for the sacrifices that one hesitates to allow to-day.
Matthias Grunewald
The Small Crucifixion ~ 1511-1520
National Gallery of Art
Night of 27th-28th September 1941
Misery—Social discrimination
—Organisation of study.
If my parents had been sufficiently well-to-do to send me to a School of Art, I should not have made the acquaintance of poverty, as I did. Whoever lives outside poverty cannot really become aware of it, unless by over-throwing a wall. The years of experience I owe to poverty—a poverty that I knew in my own flesh—are a blessing for the German nation.
We must pay attention to two things: 1. That all gifted adolescents are educated at the State’s expense. 2. That no door is closed to them.
Since I hadn’t been able to finish my secondary studies, an officer’s career would have been closed to me, even if by working I had learnt more about it than is proper for a boy who has matriculated to know. Only an officer could win the Pour le Mérite. And at that, it was quite exceptional for an officer of middle-class origin to receive it.
In that closed society, every man existed only by virtue of his origin. The man who lacked this origin, and university degrees into the bargain, could not dream of becoming a Minister, for example, except by the short-cut of Social Democracy.
The view that suppression of these discriminations would be harmful to authority proved to be without foundation. A competent man always has the authority he needs. A man who is not superior by his talent invariably lacks authority, whatever his job may be.