13th October 1941
I’ve been wondering lately whether it wouldn’t be best to collect the men responsible for the control of the economics of the following countries: Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Sweden and Finland.
We’d give them a notion of the vistas that present themselves nowadays. The majority of them are not at all aware of the immense field that opens up before us.
13th October 1941, night
A war commander must have imagination and foresight. So it’s not extraordinary that our people is at once a people of soldiers and of artists.
14th October 1941, midday
SPECIAL GUEST: REICHSFUEHRER HIMMLER
The Churches—Difficulty of compromising with a lie—No truck with religion for the Party—Antagonism of dogma and science— Let Christianity die slowly—The metaphysical needs of the soul—No State religion—Freedom of belief.
Being weighed down by a superstitious past, men are afraid of things that can’t, or can’t yet, be explained—that is to say, of the unknown. If anyone has needs of a metaphysical nature, I can’t satisfy them with the Party’s programme. Time will go by until the moment when science can answer all the questions.
So it’s not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And that’s why one day its structure will collapse.
But one must continue to pay attention to another aspect of the problem. It’s possible to satisfy the needs of the inner life by an intimate communion with nature, or by knowledge of the past. Only a minority, however, at the present stage of the mind’s development, can feel the respect inspired by the unknown, and thus satisfy the metaphysical needs of the soul.
The average human being has the same needs, but can satisfy them only by elementary means. That’s particularly true of women, as also of peasants who impotently watch the destruction of their crops. The person whose life tends to simplification is thirsty for belief, and he dimly clings to it with all his strength.
Nobody has the right to deprive simple people of their childish certainties until they’ve acquired others that are more reasonable. Indeed, it’s most important that the higher belief should be well established in them before the lower belief has been removed. We must finally achieve this.
It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology had ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund. At that period the ancient world was divided between the systems of philosophy and the worship of idols. It’s not desirable that the whole of humanity should be stultified—and the only way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.
A movement like ours mustn’t let itself be drawn into meta-physical digressions. It must stick to the spirit of exact science. It’s not the Party’s function to be a counterfeit for religion.
If, in the course of a thousand or two thousand years, science arrives at the necessity of renewing its points of view, that will not mean that science is a liar. Science cannot lie, for it’s always striving, according to the momentary state of knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake, it does so in good faith. It’s Christianity that’s the liar. It’s in perpetual conflict with itself.
One may ask whether the disappearance of Christianity would entail the disappearance of belief in God. That’s not to be desired. The notion of divinity gives most men the opportunity to concretise the feeling they have of supernatural realities. Why should we destroy this wonderful power they have of incarnating the feeling for the divine that is within them?
The man who lives in communion with nature necessarily finds himself in opposition to the Churches. And that’s why they’re heading for ruin—for science is bound to win. I especially wouldn’t want our movement to acquire a religious character and institute a form of worship. It would be appalling for me, and I would wish I’d never lived, if I were to end up in the skin of a Buddha!
I envisage the future, therefore, as follows: First of all, to each man his private creed. Superstition shall not lose its rights. The Party is sheltered from the danger of competing with the religions. These latter must simply be forbidden from interfering in future with temporal matters. From the tenderest age, education will be imparted in such a way that each child will know all that is important to the maintenance of the State. As for the men close to me, who, like me, have escaped from the clutches of dogma, I’ve no reason to fear that the Church will get its hooks on them.
We’ll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth.
15th October 1941, evening
Remedies against inflation—The example of Frederick the Great—The economists make a mess of everything.
In 1933, the Reich had eighty-three million marks’ worth of foreign currency. The day after the seizure of power, I was called upon to deliver immediately sixty-four millions. I pleaded that I knew nothing about the whole business, and asked time to reflect.
At that point, one must intervene. Even to Schacht, I had to begin by explaining this elementary truth: that the essential cause of the stability of our currency was to be sought for in our concentration camps. The currency remains stable when the speculators are put under lock and key. I also had to make Schacht understand that excess profits must be removed from economic circulation.
I do not entertain the illusion that I can pay for everything out of my available funds. Simply, I’ve read a lot, and I’ve known how to profit by the experience of events in the past. Frederick the Great, already, had gradually withdrawn his devaluated thalers from circulation, and had thus re-established the value of his currency.
All these things are simple and natural. The only thing is, one mustn’t let the Jew stick his nose in. The basis of Jewish commercial policy is to make matters incomprehensible for a normal brain. People go into ecstasies of confidence before the science of the great economists. Anyone who doesn’t understand is taxed with ignorance! At bottom, the only object of all these notions is to throw everything into confusion.
The very simple ideas that happen to be mine have nowadays penetrated into the flesh and blood of millions. Only the professors don’t understand that the value of money depends on the goods behind that money.
One day I received some workers in the great hall at Obersalzberg, to give them an informal lecture on money. The good chaps understood me very well, and rewarded me with a storm of applause.
To give people money is solely a problem of making paper. The whole question is to know whether the workers are producing goods to match the paper that’s made. If work does not increase, so that production remains at the same level, the extra money they get won’t enable them to buy more things than they bought before with less money.
Obviously, that theory couldn’t have provided the material for a learned dissertation. For a distinguished economist, the thing is, no matter what you’re talking about, to pour out ideas in complicated meanderings and to use terms of Sibylline incomprehensibility.
17th October 1941, midday
Antonescu’s rôle—Necessary reforms in Rumania—Elimination of the Jew.
Apart from the Duce, amongst our allies Antonescu is the man who makes the strongest impression. He’s a man on a big scale, who never lets anything throw him out of his stride, and he’s incorruptible, what’s more—a man such as Rumania has never had before.
To bring decency into civil life, the first condition is to have an integral State: an incorruptible army, a police and administration reduced to a minimum.
But the first thing, above all, is to get rid of the Jew. Without that, it will be useless to clean the Augean stables.
If Antonescu sets about the job in this manner, he’ll be the head of a thriving country, inwardly healthy and strong. For this purpose he has a good peasantry (Hungary has nothing like it) and natural riches. Moreover, Rumania is a country with a thinly scattered population.
17th October 1941, evening
Expectations as regards the Eastern Territories—The Ukraine in twenty years’ time—Bread is won by the sword.
In comparison with the beauties accumulated in Central Germany, the new territories in the East seem to us like a desert. Flanders, too, is only a plain—but of what beauty! This Russian desert, we shall populate it. The immense spaces of the Eastern Front will have been the field of the greatest battles in history. We’ll give this country a past.
We’ll take away its character of an Asiatic steppe, we’ll Européanise it. With this object, we have undertaken the construction of roads that will lead to the southernmost point of the Crimea and to the Caucasus. These roads will be studded along their whole length with German towns, and around these towns our colonists will settle.
As for the two or three million men whom we need to accomplish this task, we’ll find them quicker than we think. They’ll come from Germany, Scandinavia, the Western countries and America. I shall no longer be here to see all that, but in twenty years the Ukraine will already be a home for twenty million inhabitants besides the natives. In three hundred years, the country will be one of the loveliest gardens in the world.
As for the natives, we’ll have to screen them carefully. The Jew, that destroyer, we shall drive out. As far as the population is concerned, I get a better impression in White Russia than in the Ukraine.
We shan’t settle in the Russian towns, and we’ll let them fall to pieces without intervening. And, above all, no remorse on this subject! We’re not going to play at children’s nurses; we’re absolutely without obligations as far as these people are concerned.
There’s only one duty: to Germanise this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Red-skins.
If these people had defeated us, Heaven have mercy! But we don’t hate them. That sentiment is unknown to us. We are guided only by reason. They, on the other hand, have an inferiority complex. They have a real hatred towards a conqueror whose crushing superiority they can feel. The intelligentsia? We have too many of them at home.
All those who have the feeling for Europe can join in our work. In this business I shall go straight ahead, cold-bloodedly. What they may think about me, at this juncture, is to me a matter of complete indifference. I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.
The precept that it’s men’s duty to love one another is theory—and the Christians are the last to practise it! We’ve given the German people what it needed to assert its position in the world. I’m glad that this call to the East has taken our attention off the Mediterranean. The South, for us, is the Crimea. To go further would be nonsense. Let us stay Nordic.
How I regret not being ten years younger! Todt, you will have to extend your programme. As for the necessary labour, you shall have it. Let’s finish the road network, and the rail network. We shall have to settle down to the task of rebuilding the Russian track, to restore it to the normal gauge.
Night of 17th-18th October 1941
Kiev, Moscow, St. Petersburg
must be destroyed.
Everything that resembles civilisation, the Bolsheviks have suppressed it, and I have no feelings about the idea of wiping out Kiev, Moscow or St. Petersburg.
What our troops are doing is positively unimaginable.
Not knowing the great news, how will our soldiers—who are at present on the way home—feel when they’re once more on German soil? In comparison with Russia, even Poland looked like a civilised country. If time were to blot out our soldiers’ deeds, the monuments I shall have set up in Berlin will continue to proclaim their glory a thousand years from to-day. The Arc de Triomphe, the Pantheon of the Army, the Pantheon of the German people…
18th October 1941, evening
It’s a queer business, how England slipped into the war. The man who managed it was Churchill, that puppet of the Jewry that pulls the strings. Next to him, the bumptious Eden, a money-grubbing clown; the Jew who was Minister for War, Hore-Belisha; then the Eminence grise of the Foreign Office—and after that some other Jews and business men.
19th October 1941
Above all, large families.
The essential thing for the future is to have lots of children. Everybody should be persuaded that a family’s life is assured only when it has upwards of four children—I should even say, four sons. That’s a principle that should never be forgotten.
When I learn that a family has lost two sons at the front, I intervene immediately.
If we had practised the system of two-children families in the old days, Germany would have been deprived of her greatest geniuses. How does it come about that the exceptional being in a family is often the fifth, seventh, tenth or twelfth in the row?
19th October 1941, night
Two scourges of the modern world—
Christianity the shadow of coming Bolshevism.
The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.
Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society. Thus one understands that the healthy elements of the Roman world were proof against this doctrine.
Yet Rome to-day allows itself to reproach Bolshevism with having destroyed the Christian churches! As if Christianity hadn’t behaved in the same way towards the pagan temples.