Night of 27th-28th July 1941
At the beginning of our movement, I acted above all by intuition. During my imprisonment I had time to provide my philosophy with a natural, historical foundation. From their own point of view, the rulers of the day made a miscalculation in locking me up. They would have been far wiser to let me make speeches all the time, without giving me any respite!
14 August 1941, midday
Plutocracy and the Saxon proletariat—An incredibly stupid bourgeoisie.
There’s nothing astonishing about the fact that Communism had its strongest bastion in Saxony, or that it took us time to win over the Saxon workers to our side. Nor is it astonishing that they are now counted amongst our most loyal supporters. The Saxon bourgeoisie was incredibly narrow-minded. These people insisted that we were mere Communists. Anyone who proclaims the right to social equality for the masses is a Bolshevik! The way in which they exploited the home worker was un- imaginable.
It’s a real crime to have turned the Saxon workers into proletarians. There was a ruling plutocracy in those parts comparable to what still exists to-day in England. Recruiting for the Wehrmacht enabled us to observe the progressive lowering of the quality of the human material in this region. I don’t blame the small man for turning Communist; but I blame the intellectual who did nothing but exploit other people’s poverty for other ends. When one thinks of that riff-raff of a bourgeoisie, even to-day one sees red.
The masses followed the only course possible. The worker took no part in national life. When a monument was unveiled to the memory of Bismarck, or when a ship was launched, no delegation of workers was ever invited—only the frock-coats and uniforms. For me, the top hat is the signature of the bourgeois. When war came, the harm had been done, and it was too late to go into reverse. Moreover, people were too cowardly to crush Social Democracy.
Our pact with Russia never implied that we might be led to adopt a different attitude towards the danger within. Taken by themselves, I find our Communists a thousand times more sympathetic than Starhemberg, say. They were sturdy fellows. Pity they didn’t stay a little longer in Russia. They would have come back completely cured.
2nd August 1941, evening
National Socialism not for export.
It’s important that we should shape Germany in such a way that whoever comes to visit us may be cured of his prejudices concerning us. I don’t want to force National Socialism on anybody.
If I’m told that some countries want to remain democrats—very well, they must remain democrats at all costs! The French, for example, ought to retain their parties. The more social-revolutionary parties they have in their midst, the better it will be for us. The way we’re behaving just now is exactly right.
From 9th to 11nth August 1941
Organisation of the Eastern Territories—Europe, a racial entity—The Swiss Innkeeper—Battles of attrition—Britain the ideal ally vs. the United States.
What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future! Colonies are a precarious possession, but this ground is safely ours. Europe is not a geographic entity, it’s a racial entity. We understand now why the Chinese shut themselves up behind a wall to protect themselves against the eternal attacks of the Mongols. One could sometimes wish that a huge wall might protect the new territories of the East against the masses of Central Asia; but that’s contrary to the teachings of history. The fact is that a too great feeling of security provokes, in the long run, a relaxation of forces. I think the best wall will always be a wall of human chests!
If any people has the right to proceed to evacuations, it is we, for we’ve often had to evacuate our own population. Eight hundred thousand men had to emigrate from East Prussia alone. How humanely sensitive we are is shown by the fact that we consider it a maximum of brutality to have liberated our country from six hundred thousand Jews. And yet we accepted, without recrimination, and as something inevitable, the evacuation of our own compatriots! We must no longer allow Germans to emigrate to America.
On the contrary, we must attract the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes and the Dutch into our Eastern territories. They’ll become members of the German Reich. Our duty is methodically to pursue a racial policy. We’re compelled to do so, if only to combat the degeneration which is beginning to threaten us by reason of unions that in a way are consanguineous.
As for the Swiss, we can use them, at the best, as hotel- keepers.
* * *
World history knows three battles of annihilation : Cannae, Sedan and Tannenberg. We can be proud that two of them were fought by German armies. To-day we can add to them our battles in Poland and the West, and those which we’re now fighting in the East. All the rest have been battles of pursuit, including Waterloo.
We have a false picture of the battle of the Teutoberg forest. The romanticism of our teachers of history has played its part in that. At that period, it was not in fact possible, any more than to-day, to fight a battle in a forest.
I shall no longer be there to see it, but I rejoice on behalf of the German people at the idea that one day we will see England and Germany marching together against America.
Germany and England will know what each of them can expect of her partner, and then we shall have found the ally whom we need. They have an unexampled cheek, these English! It doesn’t prevent me from admiring them. In this sphere, they still have a lot to teach us.
Night of 19th-20th August 1941
The virtues of war—Ten to fifteen million
more Germans—War and human fecundity.
For the good of the German people, we must wish for a war every fifteen or twenty years. An army whose sole purpose is to preserve peace leads only to playing at soldiers—compare Sweden and Switzerland. Or else it constitutes a revolutionary danger to its own country.
If I am reproached with having sacrificed a hundred or two thousand men by reason of the war, I can answer that, thanks to what I have done, the German nation has gained, up to the present, more than two million five hundred thousand human beings. If I demand a tenth of this as a sacrifice, nevertheless I have given 90 per cent. I hope that in ten years there will be from ten to fifteen millions more of us Germans in the world. Whether they are men or women, it matters little: I am creating conditions favourable to growth.
Many great men were the sixth or seventh children of their family. When such-and-such a man, whom one knows, dies, one knows what one has lost. But does one know what one loses by the limitation of births? The man killed before he is born—that remains the enigma.
Wars drive the people to proliferation, they teach us not to fall into the error of being content with a single child in each family.
It’s not tolerable that the life of the peoples of the Continent should depend upon England. The Ukraine, and then the Volga basin, will one day be the granaries of Europe. We shall reap much more than what actually grows from the soil. It must not be forgotten that, from the time of the Tsars, Russia, with her hundred and seventy million people, has never suffered from famine. We shall also keep Europe supplied with iron. If one day Sweden declines to supply any more iron, that’s all right. We’ll get it from Russia.
Night of 14th-15th September 1941
Criminals in war-time—
The habits of the Jurists.
I’ve ordered Himmler, in the event of there some day being reason to fear troubles back at home, to liquidate everything he finds in the concentration camps. Thus at a stroke the revolution would be deprived of its leaders.
The old Reich knew already how to act with firmness in the occupied areas. That’s how attempts at sabotage to the railways in Belgium were punished by Count von der Goltz. He had all the villages burnt within a radius of several kilometres, after having had all the mayors shot, the men imprisoned and the women and children evacuated. There were three or four acts of violence in all, then nothing more happened. It’s true that in 1918 the population adopted a hostile attitude towards German troops going up into the line.
Nowadays it’s the same thing. During the campaign in Poland, the lawyers tried to blame the troops because the latter had shot sixty civilians in a region where wounded soldiers had been massacred. In such a case, a lawyer opens legal proceedings against X. His enquiry leads nowhere, of course, for nobody has ever seen anything, and if anyone knows the guilty man, he’ll take good care not to inform against a “member of the Resistance”.
Lawyers cannot understand that in exceptional times new laws become valid. I shall be interested to know whether they’ll pass the death sentence on that madman who set fire to the Bremen—deliberately, it’s said, from a liking for setting things alight. I’ve given instructions for the event of the man’s not being condemned to death. He’s to be shot immediately.
17th September 1941, evening, and the night of I7th-18th
The attack against Russia—Germans must acquire a sense of Empire.
The spirit of decision does not mean acting at all costs. The spirit of decision consists simply in not hesitating when an inner conviction commands you to act. Last year I needed great spiritual strength to take the decision to attack Bolshevism.
I had to foresee that Stalin might pass over to the attack in the course of 1941. It was therefore necessary to get started without delay, in order not to be forestalled—and that wasn’t possible before June.
The Germans—this is essential—will have to constitute amongst themselves a closed society, like a fortress. The least of our stable-lads must be superior to any native. For German youth, this will be a magnificent field of experiment. We’ll attract to the Ukraine Danes, Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes.
The Germans must acquire the feeling for the great, open spaces. We must arrange things so that every German can realise for himself what they mean. We’ll take them on trips to the Crimea and the Caucasus. There’s a big difference between seeing these countries on the map and actually having visited them.
1st September 1941, midday
Pragmatic politicians vs.
meta-politic philosophers.
When one has preached in the desert for decades, it proves, when the time comes for action, that one has lost all contact with reality. These Germans of the old school were fine fellows, but their speciality was literature. Their audience was twenty thousand readers of their own stamp. None of them knew how to speak to the people.
Right from the beginning, I realised that one could not go far along that track. The man who means to act must find his support in faith, and faith is found only in the people. The great masses have no mercy, they go straight ahead with the simplicity of innocence. We have seen what a people is capable of, when it is led. All possibilities exist in it, for good as well as for evil. The duty of National Socialism inevitably boils down to this: all that is best in the people should be allowed ceaselessly to develop.
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.
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.