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Category: Table talks

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Catholic Church Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 140

the-real-hitler

 

7th June 1942, at dinner

A procession at Barcelona—harassing the Falange—distrust of Serrano Suner—superior resistance of Italians to Church heresies—German emperors and the Church—Requiem mass for the protector of Bohemia and Moravia.

The Fuehrer was informed that on the occasion of the Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona, the Governor of the town forbade by edict the people taking part in the procession to wear the uniform either of the Falange, the Falangist Militia or any part of them. A solitary exception was made in favour of the regional Chief of the Falange and his suite. It appears from the report that this prohibition was obtained by the Nationalists through the medium of the Church authorities. In this connection it will be recalled that some weeks ago incidents occurred between the Nationalists and the members of the Falange, who nevertheless represent the official State Party. It is further significant that the Madrid newspaper Arriba attacks this ban and states roundly that the wearing of the blue shirt is a duty to which the Falangists are in honour bound, and that all those who oppose them are despicable creatures.

The Fuehrer’s opinion follows: What a pity it is that the blood shed in common by the Falangists, the Fascists and the National Socialists during the war has not brought better results! But in Spain, unfortunately, someone will always be found willing to serve the political interests of the Church. Serrano Suner, the present Minister for Foreign Affairs, is one of them. From my first meeting with him I was conscious of a feeling of revulsion, in spite of the fact that our Ambassador, with abysmal ignorance of the facts, introduced him to me as the most ardent Germanophile in Spain.

That the Fascists were spared a second civil war is due to the fact that the movement, initiated in Rome, succeeded in uniting the Italian nation in spite of the opposition of the Church. Further, Fascism clearly defined the position as regards what things fell within the sphere of the Church and what things fell within the sphere of the State. When the Church refused to recognise the law for the formation of the Fascist Youth Organisation, the Fascists retaliated by ruthlessly breaking up every religious procession from Rome right down to the South of Italy. The result was that within three days the Church had come to heel.

Speaking generally, the history of Italy shows that the Italian people adopt a very much more realistic attitude towards the Church than do the Spaniards or, alas, not a few Germans! Is it not a sad thought that each time the Italians flung out some Pope or other, there was always a German Kaiser ready and willing to restore order in the Vatican? I must be honest and confess that I myself have not been guiltless in this respect.

By creating a Bishop of the Reich I tried to bring a little clarity into the equivocal situation in the Evangelical Church. When I see what is happening to-day in Spain, I congratulate myself on the failure of my efforts. Once more Providence prevented me from committing a mistake I was on the point of making. Who, indeed, is prepared to give me a guarantee that one fine day the Protestant Bishop of the Reich will not make common cause against me with the Pope!

The established religions, and particularly the Catholic Church, are adepts at presenting an innocent mien and in flattering the man in power. I myself experienced this when, shortly after assuming power, I received a visit from the Bishop Bertram. He brought me the good wishes and the homage of the Catholic clergy with such unction that, had I not known differently from bitter personal experience, I would not have believed it possible that a single National Socialist could have been excluded from the Church on account of his convictions, or could have been persecuted, and even execrated after death.

It is with such semblance of humility that the Church has always wormed its way into power and succeeded in winning its way by flattery into the good graces of the German Emperors, from Charlemagne onwards. It is the same technique as that employed by sophisticated women, who at first exude charm in order to gain a man’s confidence, and then gradually tighten the strings, until they hold them so firmly that the man dances like a puppet to their whims. With a little diplomatic savoir faire such women manage even to persuade their husbands—exactly as in the case of the Church and the German Emperors—that it is they who rule the roost, and this in spite of the nose-ring on which they are so obviously being led!

Quite recently the Church tried to pull off a new one of this kind. The Bishop of Bohemia and Moravia begged permission to be allowed to hold a Requiem Mass with chimes for SS Obergruppen-fuehrer Heydrich. I told the gentleman bluntly that he would have been much better employed if he had previously offered prayers for the safety and welfare of the Reich Protector!

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Berlin Free speech / association Hitler Youth Otto von Bismarck Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 141

the-real-hitler 
8th June 1942, at dinner

The role of coming generations—Extension of the Germanic idea—A new name for the Reich capital—Youth should lead youth—Influence of the National Socialist youth within the family—Propaganda—The role of the Press in national education.
 

During dinner photographs were passed round, showing the Reich Youth Leader in the company of Youth Group Leaders, male and female, from Norway, Denmark, Holland, etc., the Fuehrer expressed himself as follows: It is an excellent thing that Axmann has been at the front as a soldier. The loss of an arm in battle will undoubtedly enhance his prestige with the youths, not only of Germany, but also of the other countries. I am very pleased, too, to welcome Axmann’s efforts, and to see how he strives continuously to bind the youth of the German lands with ever closer bonds to National Socialism and to the German way of thought. For once youth has been won over to an idea, an action like that of yeast sets in. Youth effervesces and goes on working and working for an idea, regardless of anything that the older generation can do to stop them. Even in Denmark, the opposition of the older generations will not prevent the youth from adopting in ever-increasing numbers the German way of thought, for they feel they spring from the same racial origins.

Following the example of Bismarck, who never ceased to preach the pan-Germanic idea to the Bavarians, the Prussians, etc., we must systematically draw all the Germanic peoples of continental Europe into the German channel of thought. I really believe that by re-naming Berlin the capital of our Reich “Germania,” we would give very considerable impetus to the movement. The name Germania for the capital of the Reich in its new representative form would be very appropriate, for it would give to every member of the German community, however far away from the capital he may be, a feeling of unity and closer membership. There would be no technical difficulty about re-naming Berlin, as we can see from the Germanisation of Gdynia into Gotenhafen and the changing of the name of Lodz into Litzmannstadt.

In the same way as the press, the school also must be used as an instrument for the education of the people, and must therefore be organised and directed without any regard for private interests. The school alone, however, as the instrument for the education of youth, does not suffice, because it is too prone to give priority of interest to purely academic achievement. It is for this reason that I have formed the supplementary organisation of the Hitlerjugend and endowed it with the bold motto “Die Jugend von Jugend gefuehrt werden soll”—Youth must be led by Youth.

In the choice of leaders for the Hitler Youth and of teachers for the Department of Education, our first principle must be to ensure that these instructors of both kinds are chosen from men who will remain as an example to youth for the rest of their lives, exactly as the instructors in the gymnasia of Ancient Greece set the example of bodily and spiritual perfection to the youth submitted to their charge. It is between the ages of ten and seventeen, that youth exhibits both the greatest enthusiasm and the greatest idealism.

It is also during these years of adolescent development that a child’s sensibility is at its strongest. How many of our leading Party members were originally brought into the National Socialist movement by the influence of their own children! Again and again young people, filled with enthusiasm for National Socialism, have succeeded first in persuading their mother, and then, with her help, in winning over the father for the NSDAP.

Conversation then turned to questions of administration, the complexities of its organisation and the duplication of effort which not infrequently ensued. The Fuehrer said: It is only by means of the concentration of the whole machinery of press and propaganda in one single organisation that a unified direction of the press can be assured. And a unified press is a prerequisite, if the press is to enjoy the confidence of the people and thus also to become effective as an instrument of popular education.

How little this was understood in the circle of the so-called national press was brought home to me in 1920 in the course of an altercation with the Reverend Traub, the editor of Eiserne Blätter. When I told the reverend gentleman as bluntly as I could that a free press must give way to a unified and controlled press, because the former was nothing more nor less than a free forum for the dissemination of Jewish impertinences, he crumpled entirely. The mentality of the so-called Nationalists of the type of the Reverend Traub was very correctly assessed by Dietrich Eckart, when he declared that the Eiserne Blätter (Pages of Iron) should more properly be called “Blecherne Blätter” (Pages of Lead).

What an enormously important instrument for the education of public opinion the press could become was never understood by the so-called Nationalists. And yet, what other instrument is so well suited to the purpose? I myself put the press on the same footing as the Department of Education, and in both cases, I maintain, private interests must play no part whatsoever, either in their organisation or in the control of them.

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Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 142

the-real-hitler 
28th June 1942, midday

The Danube is a river that runs deep into the heart of the Continent, and for this reason must, in a new Europe fashioned by us, be regarded as a German stream and be controlled by Germany. The organisation of the whole East-West traffic in this great territory depends on whether the Danube is or is not to be a German waterway. Any canal construction would be superfluous, indeed stupid, if we did not hold unrestricted control of this main channel.

The generations which follow us will no doubt accept without comment the unification of Europe which we are about to accomplish, in the same way as the majority of our contemporaries regard the foundation of the Bismarckian Empire as a simple fact of history. The immense labour involved in the welding of northern, western, central and eastern Europe into one entity will be quickly forgotten.

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Art Painting Pedagogy Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 143

the-real-hitler

 

30th June 1942, at dinner

War as an inspiration in art—
reform of the Art Academies.
 

This war is stimulating the artistic sense much more than the last war. The works of the artists whom I have recalled from the front after a year or two in the field bear the hall-mark of personal experience and are among the most valuable examples of present-day art that our exhibitions can show.

These war paintings establish beyond discussion that the real artist is ripened by his own personal experience of life and not by study in some art academy. Most of the academy professors lack both the insight and the judgment necessary to bring real talent to the fore. Recall, if you please, how the beautiful seascapes of von Bock were refused by the Prussian Academy, although in their wonderful sweep they alone of current paintings gave a true picture of the northern seas. This same Prussian Academy which rejected these pictures was, however, not ashamed to adorn its walls with absolute muck.

Even in my exhibition in the House of German Art they always try to gain acceptance for the daubs of their own protégés. But when it comes to flinging these confections out, I am exceptionally obstinate! My views on the value of the academies are well known. And under present conditions it is difficult to see how talent, other than that which in practical life is incapable of producing a real picture, can be injected into the art schools as they are now constituted.

It is a characteristic of the present-day academies that they invariably try to stifle genius. No sooner does a real genius make his appearance in the circle of these very moderate “big-wigs” of the academies, than up they rise with their whole plumage ruffled in wrath against him.

If we wish to smoothe the way for an incipient genius in the academies and ensure him a practical livelihood in spite of the academies, then we must radically alter the whole structure of the academic world. They must be split up into a series of individual studios, on the lines of the State studios. Then the greatest artists available must be approached and asked if they would care voluntarily to take over one of these studios. Those who agree must be allowed a completely free hand, themselves to chose those pupils whom they consider worthy of further tuition.

If we organise the academies along these lines, then all the nonsense, claptrap and jargon, and all the juggling with mathematical formulae—a nonsense that only the sparrow-like brain of mediocrity could have conceived—will stop. And the great task of the academy will be, first, last and always, to teach the pupil to paint.

I always get angry when I think of how in the teachers’ training colleges the future school-teachers are stuffed with an inchoate mass of material, when all they will be called upon to do later is to teach the children the rudiments of the three Rs.

What special knowledge, for goodness’ sake, is required to teach six-year-old kiddies to say a, b, c correctly! It is equally ridiculous to try to cram children at school with all sorts of things. If you ask them, two or three years after they have left school, you’ll find that they have forgotten practically all about them. The curriculum of a school should be drawn up with the object of teaching the children those things which will enable them in after-life to take their places as decent citizens. And keep the children as much as possible in the open air! We shall then have a healthy rising generation, capable of roughing it without falling on their backs.

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Miscegenation Nordicism Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 144

the-real-hitler

1st July 1942, midday

Our people therefore is only harming itself if it accepts half-castes into the Wehrmacht, and thus admits them to a position of equality with pure-blooded Germans. We cannot accept the responsibility of burdening our blood-stream with the addition of further foreign elements. Exceptions in favour of half-castes must therefore be reduced to a minimum.

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Catholic Church Charlemagne Reinhard Heydrich Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 145

the-real-hitler

4th July 1942, at dinner

German Embassy at the Vatican—The Concordat must be ended—Faulty manœuvres by the Wilhelmstrasse—I refuse open war with the Church—the Bishops will soon fawn on the State.
 

Should we decide to recall our present representative from the Vatican, I can see no adequate reason for sending any fresh incumbent to this Embassy. The relations between Germany and the Vatican are based on the Concordat. But this same Concordat is no more than the survival of agreements reached between the Vatican and the different German States, and, with the disappearance of the latter and their incorporation in the German Reich, it has become obsolete.

Once the war is over we will put a swift end to the Concordat. It will give me the greatest personal pleasure to point out to the Church all those occasions on which it has broken the terms of it. One need only recall the close cooperation between the Church and the murderers of Heydrich. Catholic priests not only allowed them to hide in a church on the outskirts of Prague, but even allowed them to entrench themselves in the sanctuary of the altar.

The development of relations between State and Church affords a very instructive example of how the carelessness of a single statesman can have after-effects which last for centuries. When Charlemagne was kneeling at prayer in St. Peter’s, Rome, at Christmas in the year 800, the Pope, giving him no time to work out the possible effects of so symbolic an action, suddenly bent down and presto popped a golden crown on his head! By permitting it, the Emperor delivered himself and his successors into the hands of a power which subjected the German Government and the German people to five hundred years of martyrdom.

Today, as always, there are responsible people to be found who are careless enough to allow a crown of gold to be popped on to their heads, and one cannot exaggerate the enormous effects which such an action, seemingly trifling at the time, can later produce.

Much in the same class and equally stupid is the idea of the Wilhelmstrasse that every note from the Vatican must be answered. The very act of answering is tantamount to an admission of the right of the Vatican to interfere in German domestic issues—if only in ecclesiastical issues—and to maintain official correspondence with us.

When once the Concordat and its financial obligations have been repudiated, and the Church becomes dependent on the offertory, it will pocket a bare 3 per cent of the money it at present gets from the State, and all the Bishops will come creeping and begging to the Reichsstatthalter.

It will be the duty of the Reichsstatthalter to make it quite clear after the war that he will deal with the Church in exactly the same way as he deals with any other national association, and that he will not tolerate the intervention of any foreign influence. The Papal Nuncio can then return happily to Rome, we shall be saved the expense of an embassy at the Vatican, and the only people who will weep tears over the jobs that have been lost will be the Foreign Office!

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Real men Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 146

the-real-hitler
 
5th July 1942, midday

The ten or fifteen thousand professional loafers who were lounging about Germany at the time of our assumption of power, and who showed no inclination to take a regular job when once German industry had started to function again, have been put into concentration camps. For it is ridiculous to try to deal by ordinary methods with muck of this kind. The fear of being put into a concentration camp has had a most salutary effect, and it greatly facilitated the gearing up of the gigantic industrial activity which our rearmament programme demanded.

That Germany has succeeded in solving this problem, as it has solved many others, is due in no small measure to the fact that the State has progressively assumed more and more control. Only in this way was it possible to defeat private interests and carry national interests triumphantly to their goal.

After the war, equally, we must not let control of the economy of the country slip from our hands. As most people are egotists at heart, any efficient functioning of a national economy is not possible without State direction and control. The Venetian Republic affords an excellent example of how successful a State directed economy can be. For five hundred years the price of bread in Venice never varied, and it was left to the Jews with their predatory motto of Free Trade to wreck this stability.

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Library of Alexandria St Paul Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 147

the-real-hitler

5th July 1942, evening

Falsification of war communiqués—Switzerland believes the Jewish lies—Britain in the hands of the Jews—Conservation of our racial integrity—Farcical success of Saint Paul.
 

Commenting on a completely false Soviet war communiqué which had been published in the Swedish and Swiss Press as well as in that of Britain and America, the Fuehrer said: These communiqués are typical Jewish fabrications. Although they do not even give names of places, they are nevertheless published by news agencies all the world over; and the explanation is, of course, that these agencies themselves are for the most part in the hands of Jews.

Unfortunately, this Jewish twaddle is being accepted without question not only in Britain and America, but also in Sweden and Switzerland.

Thanks to the development of National Socialist Germany, I firmly believe, if only on purely biological grounds, we shall succeed in surpassing the British to such an extent that, with one hundred and fifty to two hundred million Germans, we shall become the undisputed masters of the whole of Europe.

A recrudescence of the problem Rome or Carthage in the new guise of Germany or Great Britain is not, in my opinion, possible. For the result of this war will be that, whereas in Britain each additional million of population will be an additional burden on the island itself, the increasing growth of our own races will have open to them horizons of political and ethnological expansion which are limitless.

Further, any alleviation of the overcrowding of towns by a movement back to the land is not possible in Britain, for this would necessitate an immediate revolution of the whole social system of the Kingdom, which, in its turn, would lead to the disintegration of the rest of the Empire.

These very important facts have been largely overlooked in Britain because the country is ruled not by men of intelligence but by Jews, as one must realise when one sees how the intrigues of the Jews in Palestine are accepted in Britain without comment or demur.

One odour most important tasks will be to save future generations from a similar political fate and to maintain for ever watchful in them a knowledge of the menace of Jewry. For this reason alone it is vital that the Passion Play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.

The preservation of our racial purity can be assured only by an awareness of the racial issues involved; our laws, therefore, must be framed with the sole object of’ protecting our people not only against Jewish, but also against any and every racial infection.

We must do all we can to foster this racial awareness until it attains the same standard as obtained in Rome in the days of her glory. In those days the Roman protected himself subconsciously against any racial adulteration. The same thing occurred in Greece at the height of her power; according to reports handed down to us, the very market place itself in Athens shook with laughter when St. Paul spoke there in favour of the Jews. If nowadays we do not find the same splendid pride of race which distinguished the Grecian and Roman eras, it is because in the fourth century these Jewish-Christians systematically destroyed all the monuments of these ancient civilisations. It was they, too, who destroyed the library at Alexandria.

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Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 148

the-real-hitler 
6th July 1942, at dinner

In the course of our many electoral tours my companions and I have got to know and to love the Reich from Berlin to its uttermost corners. As for the most part I was invited to take my meals en famille, I also got to know intimately Germans all over Germany.

There I used to meet whole families, in which the father would be working in our political section, the mother was a member of the Women’s Association, one brother was in the SS, the other in the Hitler Youth, and the daughter was in the German Girls’ League. And so when we all meet once a year at the Party Rally at Nuremberg, it always gives me the impression of being just one huge family gathering.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Nordicism Racial studies Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 149

the-real-hitler

7th July 1942, midday
 
The real protagonists of culture, both in the thousand years before Christ and in the thousand years after him, were the peoples of the Mediterranean. This may appear improbable to us today, because we are apt to judge these people from present-day appearances. But that is a great mistake.

__________

Editor’s note: Read “The face of Classical Europe”
– Greece (here) and Rome (here).