20th August 1942, midday
The morale of a people depends to a large extent on the activity of their judges. Every war gives rise to a species of selectivity in reverse; the finest and fittest perish by the thousand. In time, then, there remains only the rascal living in peace and security. If I fail to exterminate the vermin as a counter-balance, a dangerous situation would arise. I am certainly not a brutal man by nature, and consequently it is cold reason that guides my actions.
20th August 1942, evening
A ’plane is a ’plane, and I detest those people who suddenly go all sporting! I hate all that type of bravado; the Duce is very foolish in this respect—he’s not the type for bravado! People sometimes ask me why I play no games? The answer is simple—I’m no good at games, and I refuse to make a fool of myself!
Bismarck, when asked to go swimming, said: “I think I can swim, but from me people would expect something of which I know I am not capable. I’d rather not!” The Duce might well take this to heart. It always makes me nervous when he pilots a ’plane; his job is to steer the Italian ship of State. When I think of the numbers who have lost their lives in this fortuitous fashion…!
1st August 1942, midday
Events have shown that journalism demands a style of its own. Real journalistic jargon came into being, I think, in the Völkischer Beobachter during our electoral campaign in 1932. Rosenberg feared a landslide. I am quite sure that at the time he despaired of humanity, and his contempt for mankind was only increased when he found that the more he lowered the intellectual level of the journal, the more sales increased! He ought really to have called the paper “Münchner Beobachter—Baltic Edition”!
At the beginning, the Völkischer Beobachter sailed on so high an intellectual plane that I myself had difficulty in understanding it, and I certainly know no woman who could make head or tail of it! Rosenberg insisted on this extremely high level.
22nd August 1942, evening
The Mexicans, indeed, indulged in extensive human sacrifice, and, when the spirit moved them, would sacrifice as many as twenty thousand human beings at a time! In comparison, Cortés was a moderate man. There is no need whatever to go rushing round the world making the native more healthy than the white man.
22nd August 1942, evening
Had he been given the time, Stalin would have made of Russia a super-industrialised monster, completely contrary to the interests of the masses, but justified by demagogic pedantry and designed to raise the standard of life for his own particular partisans. His final objective would have been the absorbing of the whole of Europe into the Bolshevik ring. He is a beast, but he’s a beast on the grand scale. He made use of the Jews to eliminate the intelligentsia of the Ukraine, and then exported the Jews by trainloads to Siberia.
26th August 1942, evening
A State like Switzerland, which is nothing but a pimple on the face of Europe, cannot be allowed to continue. It is to be hoped that one day we shall achieve complete hegemony in Europe. As for the Swedish vermin, they must be swept away like the Danish vermin in 1848!
28th August 1942, midday
Budapest and Vienna
—The new capital of the Reich.
The Hungarian aristocracy has predominantly German blood in its veins; all the original aristocracies of Europe belong, fundamentally, to one single international community.
The Reich must get a worthy capital. At the moment Budapest is the most beautiful town in the world, and there is no town in the whole German Reich that can even compare with it. The Houses of Parliament, the Citadel, the Cathedral and the bridges, seen in the shimmer of the setting sun, present a spectacle of beauty unsurpassed in the world. Vienna, too, is impressive, but it is not on a river. And all these beauties have been built by German architects.
It shows one how important the construction of a capital city can be. In olden days, Buda and Pest were both a conglomeration of peasant hovels. In a single century, Budapest rose from a city of forty thousand inhabitants to a great capital with a million and a quarter citizens. With the exception of the Town Hall, all the buildings in Budapest are twice the size of their equivalents in Vienna.
Berlin must follow suit, and I know we shall make a magnificent city of it. Once we have got rid of the hideous expanse of water which defaces the north side of the city, we shall have a magnificent perspective, stretching from the Sudbahnhof to the Triumphal Arch, with the cupola of the People’s Palace in the distance.
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28th August 1942, evening
Some German towns must be protected at all costs—Weimar, Nuremberg, Stuttgart. Factories can always be rebuilt, but works of art are irreplaceable.
29th August 1942, evening
Do we keep Belgium, France and Norway?—We must adopt the arrogance of Britain—Education and stuffed heads—The safety valve of military service—Once we were a people of energy.
Fundamentally speaking, Belgium, France and Norway are not our natural enemies. I have no desire to incorporate all Frenchmen in the Reich; those who dwell on our borders and with whom we have contact were all Germans four hundred years ago.
With our eighty-five million Germans, we have in the Reich itself a major part of the population of the Germanic races.
No other nation possesses so strong a proportion of these elements. It would then be a sorry business if, with such strength at our disposal, we failed to bring law and order to ancient Europe. We may have a hundred years of struggle before us; if so, all the better—it will prevent us from going to sleep! People sometimes say to me: “Be careful! You will have twenty years of guerrilla warfare on your hands!” I am delighted at the prospect! With a number of small armies we can continue to dominate a large number of peoples. In the future our divisions will not be in dull garrison towns like Lechfeld and Hommerburg, but will be sent to the Caucasus! Our lads have always shouted with joy at the prospect of service abroad, and I shall see to it that in the future they range the four corners of the world. Germany will remain in a state of perpetual alertness.
We will adopt the British attitude of arrogance. In the time of the old German Emperors, let it not be forgotten, the Kings of England were of little more account than the King of Denmark today. In the first war, we found, on going through the paybooks of prisoners of war, that many of them had served in the South African War, They had been all over the world, and for them the fatherland was their Regiment! With men like that, nothing is impossible!
For the future it will, I think, be essential to introduce a three-year period of military service; only by so doing can we ensure efficiency in the handling of new technical weapons. A three-year period will be a great advantage to those who later propose to adopt a learned profession, for it will give them ample time to forget all the muck that was jammed into their heads at school; they will have time to discard everything which will not be of future use to them, and that, in itself, is most valuable.
Everybody, for example, learns two or three foreign languages, which is a complete waste of time. The little one learns is not of the slightest use when one goes abroad. Everybody, I agree, should receive a basic education. But the whole method of instruction in secondary and higher schools is just so much nonsense. Instead of receiving a sound basic education, the student finds his head crammed with a mass of useless learning, and in the end is still ill-equipped to face life.
Lucky are those who have the happy knack of being able to forget most of what they have been taught. Those who cannot forget are ripe to become professors—a race apart. And that is not intended as a compliment! In 1933 things were still being taught in the higher educational establishments which had been proven by science to be false as long ago as 1899.
When I was a schoolboy, I did all I could to get out into the open air as much as possible—my school reports bear witness to that! In spite of this, I grew up into a reasonably intelligent young man, I developed along very normal lines, and I learnt a lot of things of which my schoolfellows learnt nothing. In short, our system of education is the exact opposite of that practised in the gymnasia of ancient days. The Greek of the golden age sought a harmonious education; we succeed only in producing intellectual monsters.
The primary task of education is to train the brain of the young. It is quite impossible to recognise the potential aspirations of a child of ten. In old days teachers strove always to seek out each pupil’s weak point, and by exposing and dwelling on it, they successfully killed the child’s self-confidence. Had they, on the contrary, striven to find the direction in which each pupil’s talents lay, and then concentrated on the development of those talents, they would have furthered education in its true sense. Instead, they sought mass-production by means of endless generalisations.
A child who could not solve a mathematical equation, they said, would do no good in life. It is a wonder that they did not prophesy that he would come to a bad and shameful end! Have things changed much today, I wonder? I am not sure, and many of the things I see around me incline me to the opinion that they have not. I was shown a questionnaire drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior, which it was proposed to put to people whom it was deemed desirable to sterilise. At least three-quarters of the questions asked would have defeated my own good mother. One I recall was: “Why does a ship made of steel float in the water?”
If this system had been introduced before my birth, I am pretty sure I should never have been born at all! Let us, for God’s sake, throw upon the windows and let the fresh air blow away nonsense of this nature! Put the young men into the Army, whence they will return refreshed and cleansed of eight years of scholastic slime!
In the olden days we were an energetic people; but gradually we developed into a people of poets and thinkers. Poets do not matter, for no one takes them seriously; but the world is greatly overburdened with “thinkers.” I keep a bust of Scharnhorst on my table; it is he who started our people back on the road to sanity. The world at large welcomed this Germany of poets and thinkers, because it knew how they sapped our virility.
Still, we have made progress in the field of education, in spite of having a pedant at the head of the Educational Department. With another in control, progress would have been more rapid.
Just think how in the old days a bit of paper could alter the course of one’s whole life! Look at my school reports—I got bad marks in German! My disgusting teacher had succeeded in giving me an intense dislike for my mother tongue! He asserted that I would never be capable of writing a decent letter! If this blundering little fool had given me a grade five, I should have been precluded from becoming a technician! Now, thank God, we have the Hitler Youth, where the child is judged on all his qualities, and not solely on his scholastic attainments; character is taken into consideration, the talent of leadership is encouraged, and every child has the legal right to show what he can do.
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30th August 1942, evening
It is here in Russia that Communism shows its true face. We must undertake a campaign of cleaning-up, square metre by square metre, and this will compel us to have recourse to summary justice. The struggle with the terrorists will be savage warfare in the real sense. In Estonia and Latvia these bands have all but ceased to be active; but until Jewry, which is the bandits’ Intelligence Service, is exterminated, we shall not have accomplished our task.
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