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Category: Vegetarianism

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Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 46

the-real-hitler

 

11nth November 1941, evening

Friendship of the Church costs too much—The Church is the enemy of the State—The monuments of Christian civilisation.
 
 
I’ve always defended the point of view that the Party should hold itself aloof from religion. We never organised religious services for our supporters. I preferred to run the risk of being put under the ban of the Church or excommunicated. The Church’s friendship costs too dear. In case of success, I can hear myself being told that it’s thanks to her. I’d rather she had nothing to do with it, and that I shouldn’t be presented with the bill!

Russia used to be the most bigoted State of all. Nothing happened there without the participation of the Orthodox priests. That didn’t prevent the Russians from getting beaten.

It seems that the prayers of a hundred and forty million Russians were less convincing, before God, than those of a smaller number of Japanese. It was the same thing in the First World War. Russian prayers had less weight than ours. Even on the home front, the cowls proved incapable of ensuring the maintenance of the established order. They permitted the triumph of Bolshevism.

The clergy takes a sly pleasure in rallying the enemies of the established order, and thus shares the responsibility for the disorders that arise. Think of the difficulties the Popes continually caused the German emperors!

In the Latin countries, we’ve often been within a hair’s breadth of seeing Bolshevism triumph, and thus administer the death-blow to a society that was always on the point of collapse.

When, in ancient Rome, the plebs were mobilised by Christianity, the intelligentsia had lost contact with the ancient forms of worship. The man of to-day, who is formed by the disciplines of science, has likewise ceased taking the teaching of religion very seriously. What is in opposition to the laws of nature cannot come from God. Moreover, thunderbolts do not spare churches. A system of metaphysics that is drawn from Christianity and founded on outmoded notions does not correspond to the level of modern knowledge. In Italy and in Spain, that will all end badly. They’ll cut each other’s throats.

I don’t want anything of that sort amongst us.

We can be glad that the Parthenon is still standing upright, the Roman Pantheon and the other temples. It matters little that the forms of worship that were practised there no longer mean anything to us. It is truly regrettable that so little is left of these temples. The result is, we are in no risk of worshipping Zeus.

Cathedral_Hereford

Amongst us, the only witnesses of our greatness in the Middle Ages are the cathedrals. It would be enough to permit a movement of religious persecution to cause the disappearance of all the monuments that our country built from the fifth to the seventeenth century. What a void, and how greatly the world would be impoverished!

What we must do, then, is to extract from religions the poison they contain. In this respect, great progress has been made during recent centuries.

The Church must be made to understand that her kingdom is not of this world. What an example Frederick the Great set when he reacted against the Church’s claim to be allowed to interfere in matters of State!

The religions have passed the climacteric; they’re now decadent. They can remain like that for a few centuries yet. What revolutions won’t do, will be done by evolution. One may regret living at a period when it’s impossible to form an idea of the shape the world of the future will assume.

But there’s one thing I can predict to eaters of meat, that the world of the future will be vegetarian!

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Table talks Vegetarianism

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 70

the-real-hitler

 

22nd January 1942, evening

Meat-eaters and vegetarians—Alcohol and smoking.
 
 

At the time when I ate meat, I used to sweat a lot. I used to drink four pots of beer and six bottles of water during a meeting, and I’d succeed in losing nine pounds! When I became a vegetarian, a mouthful of water from time to time was enough.

When you offer a child the choice of a piece of meat, an apple or a cake, it’s never the meat that he chooses. There’s an ancestral instinct there. In the same way, the child would never begin to drink or smoke if it weren’t to imitate others.

The consumption of meat is reduced the moment the market presents a greater choice of vegetables, and in proportion as each man can afford the luxury of the first fruits. I suppose man became carnivorous because, during the Ice Age, circumstances compelled him. They also prompted him to have his food cooked, a habit which, as one knows to-day, has harmful consequences. Our peasants never eat any food that hasn’t been cooked and re-cooked, and thus deprived of all its virtues. The southern peoples are not acquainted either with a meat diet or with cooking. I lived marvellously in Italy. I don’t know any country that enlivens one more. Roman food, how delicious it is!

When I go into an inn where people are smoking, within an hour I feel I’ve caught a cold. The microbes hurl themselves upon me! They find a favourable climate in the smoke and heat.

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Table talks Vegetarianism

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 123

the-real-hitler

 

Reich Chancellery, 25th April 1942, midday

Meat and the vegetarian diet—Importance of raw food.
 

Dr. Göbbels asked whether a pound of potatoes had the same nutritive value as a pound of meat. The Fuehrer replied: As far as we know, the food of the soldiers of ancient Rome consisted principally of fruit and cereals. The Roman soldier had a horror of meat, and meat, apparently, was included in the normal rations only when the difficulty of obtaining other supplies made it inevitable.

One has only to keep one’s eyes open to notice what an extraordinary antipathy young children have to meat. Those who adopt a vegetarian diet must remember that it is in their raw state that vegetables have their greatest nutritive value. Our children to-day are much healthier than those of the Imperial and Weimar Republic periods because mothers now realise that they contribute far more to the health of their children if they give them raw vegetables and roots to chew than if they give them boiled milk.

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Table talks Vegetarianism

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 151

the-real-hitler

 

8th July 1942, at dinner

Whenever I have to make a speech of great importance I am always soaking wet at the end, and I find I have lost four or six pounds in weight. And in Bavaria, where, in addition to my usual mineral water, local custom insists that I drink two or three bottles of beer, I lose as much as eight pounds. This loss of weight is not, I think, injurious to health. The only thing that always worried me was the fact that my only uniform was a blue one, and it invariably stained my underclothes!

When I later gave up eating meat, I immediately began to perspire much less, and within a fortnight to perspire hardly at all. My thirst, too, decreased considerably, and an occasional sip of water was all I required. Vegetarian diet, therefore, has some obvious advantages.