6th February 1942, evening
For the first time, we have on our side a first-rate military power, Japan. We must therefore never abandon the Japanese alliance, for Japan is a power upon which one can rely.
There’s one thing that Japan and Germany have absolutely in common—that both of us need fifty to a hundred years for purposes of digestion: we for Russia, they for the Far East.
8th February 1942, midday
The solution of the religious problem.
The evil that’s gnawing our vitals is our priests, of both creeds. I can’t at present give them the answer they’ve been asking for, but it will cost them nothing to wait. It’s all written down in my big book. The time will come when I’ll settle my account with them, and I’ll go straight to the point.
I don’t know which should be considered the more dangerous: the minister of religion who play-acts at patriotism, or the man who openly opposes the State. The fact remains that it’s their manœuvres that have led me to my decision. They’ve only got to keep at it, they’ll hear from me, all right. I shan’t let myself be hampered by juridical scruples. Only necessity has legal force. In less than ten years from now, things will have quite another look, I can promise them.
We shan’t be able to go on evading the religious problem much longer. If anyone thinks it’s really essential to build the life of human society on a foundation of lies, well, in my estimation, such a society is not worth preserving. If, on the other hand, one believes that truth is the indispensable foundation, then conscience bids one intervene in the name of truth, and exterminate the lie.
Periods that have endured such affronts without protesting will be condemned by people of the coming generations. Just as the pyres for heretics have been suppressed, so all these by- products of ignorance and bad faith will have to be eliminated in their turn.
17th February 1942, evening
The birthplaces of great men.
It’s my view that, simply for the sake of their beauty, the great noblemen’s estates should be preserved. But they must retain their size, otherwise only the State would be capable of maintaining them as private country-houses. And the ideal thing is that they should remain not only in private hands, but also in the family that has traditionally lived in them—else they lose their character. Thus these great monuments of the past, which have retained their character as living organisms, are also centres of culture. But when the country-house is occupied by a caretaker acting as a guide, a little State official with a Bavarian or Saxon accent, who ingenuously recites his unvarying piece of claptrap, things no longer have a soul—the soul is gone.
Wahnfried, as in Wagner’s lifetime, is a lived-in house. It still has all its brilliance, and continues to give the effect of a lover. Goethe’s house gives the impression of a dead thing.
And how one understands that in the room where he died he should have asked for light—always more light! Schiller’s house can still move one by the picture it gives of the penury in which the poet lived.
7th February 1942, evening
Books for young people.
I’ve just been reading a very fine article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would be nice if his work were re-published. I owe him my first notions of geography, and the fact that he opened my eyes on the world. I used to read him by candle-light, or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying-glass. The first thing I read of that kind was The Last of the Mohicans. But Fritz Seidl told me at once: “Fenimore Cooper is nothing; you must read Karl May.” The first book of his I read was The Ride through the Desert. I was carried away by it. And I went on to devour at once the other books by the same author. The immediate result was a falling-off in my school reports.
Apart from the Bible, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe are the two most often read books in the world. Cervantes’ book is the world’s most brilliant parody of a society that was in process of becoming extinct. At bottom, the Spaniards’ habits of life have scarcely changed since then. Daniel Defoe’s book gathers together in one man the history of all mankind. It has often been imitated, but none of these desert-island stories can compete with the original. One Christmas I was given a beautiful illustrated edition. Cervantes’ book has been illustrated by Gustave Doré in a style of real genius.
Night of 19th-20th February 1942
The perversity of education—Regrets for the help given to Spain.
No sooner do we land in a colony than we install children’s crèches, hospitals for the natives. All that fills me with rage. White women degrading themselves in the service of the blacks. On top of that we have the shavelings shoving their oar in, with their mania for making angels! Instead of making the natives love us, all that inappropriate care makes them hate us.
From their point of view, all these manifestations are the peak of indiscretion. They don’t understand the reasons for our behaviour, and regard us as intolerable pedants who enjoy
wielding the policeman’s truncheon.
In Rome there are priests who spend their time in measuring the length of women’s sleeves and skirts and in checking whether these women have head-dresses. If God cared about such trifles, he’d have created man already dressed! The idea of nakedness torments only the priests, for the education they undergo makes them perverts.
If there hadn’t been the danger of the Red peril’s overwhelming Europe, I’d not have intervened in the revolution in Spain. The clergy would have been exterminated. If these people regained power in Germany, Europe would founder again in the darkness of the Middle Ages.
Night of 20th-2ist February 1942
The spirit in peril—The observatory at Linz—
The fight against falsehood, superstition and intolerance.
Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can ever have undergone, and it’s the Jew who, thanks to this diabolic invention, has thrown him back fifteen centuries. The only thing that would be still worse would be victory for the Jew through Bolshevism. If Bolshevism triumphed, mankind would lose the gift of laughter and joy. It would become merely a shapeless mass, doomed to greyness and despair.
The priests of antiquity were closer to nature, and they sought modestly for the meaning of things. Instead of that, Christianity promulgates its inconsistent dogmas and imposes them by force. Such a religion carries within it intolerance and persecution. It’s the bloodiest conceivable.
In their fight against the Church, the Russians are purely negative. We, on the other hand, should practise the cult of the heroes who enabled humanity to pull itself out of the rut of error. Kepler lived at Linz, and that’s why I chose Linz as the place for our observatory. His mother was accused of witchcraft and was tortured several times by the Inquisition.
There’s no greater privilege, in my view, than to play the part of a patron of the arts or the sciences. Men would certainly have regarded it as a vast honour to be allowed to encourage the career of a man like Richard Wagner. Well, it’s already a great deal gained that people like him are no longer burned alive!
I shall not cease to think that the most precious possession a country can have is its great men. If I think of Bismarck, I realise that only those who have lived through 1918 could fully appreciate his worth. One sees by such examples how much it would mean if we could make the road smooth for men of talent.
It’s only in the realm of music that I can find no satisfaction. The same thing is happening to music as is happening to beauty in a world dominated by the shavelings—the Christian religion is an enemy to beauty. The Jew has brought off the same trick upon music. He has created a new inversion of values and replaced the loveliness of music by noises. Surely the Athenian, when he entered the Parthenon to contemplate the image of Zeus, must have had another impression than the Christian who must resign himself to contemplating the grimacing face of a man crucified.
Since my fourteenth year I have felt liberated from the superstition that the priests used to teach. Apart from a few Holy Joes, I can say that none of my comrades went on believing in the miracle of the eucharist.
The only difference between then and now is that in those days I was convinced one must blow up the whole show with dynamite.
22nd February 1942, evening
Defence of the European peninsula—The Russian masses against the individual—Nations must fuse.
Not long ago, at a time when there were still a few acres of land to be shared out in the Far East, everybody went rushing there. Nowadays, we have the Russian spaces. They’re less attractive and rougher, but they’re worth more to us. We’ll get our hands on the finest land, and we’ll guarantee for ourselves the control of the vital points. We’ll know how to keep the population in order. There won’t be any question of our arriving there with kid gloves and dancing-masters.
Asia didn’t succeed, in the course of the centuries, in dislodging us from our peninsula—and all they now have in the way of civilisation, they’ve got from us. Now we’re going to see which side has the real strength. The Russian, as an individual fighting man, has always been our inferior. Russians exist only en masse, and that explains their brutality. I’ve always rebelled against the idea that Europe had reached the end of its mission, and that the hour of Russia or the United States had come. It was the Continent that civilised Great Britain, and this is what enabled her to colonise vast spaces in the rest of the world. Without Europe, America is not conceivable.
Why shouldn’t we have the strength necessary to become one of the world’s centres of attraction? A hundred and twenty million people of Germanic stock, when they’ve consolidated their positions—that’s a force against which nobody in the world will be able to do anything. The countries that make up the Germanic world will stand only to gain.
I see it in my own case. My native land is one of the most beautiful countries in the Reich, but what can it do when left to itself? What could I undertake as an Austrian? There’s no way of developing one’s talents in countries like Austria or Saxony, Denmark or Switzerland. The foundation is missing. So it’s lucky that once again potential new spaces are opening up before the Germanic peoples.
I understand that it may be hard for a young Dutchman or a young Norwegian to find himself called upon to form a common unit, within the framework of the Reich, together with men of other Germanic connections. But what is asked of them is no harder than what was asked of the Germanic tribes at the time of the great migrations.
Confronted with the innumerable populations of the East, we cannot exist except on condition that all Germanics are united. They must compose the nucleus around which Europe will federate. On the day when we’ve solidly organised Europe, we shall be able to look towards Africa. And, who knows? perhaps one day we shall be able to entertain other ambitions.
22nd February 1942, evening
The National Socialist press
—Diverting the Jewish virus.
One must never forget the services rendered by the Stürmer. Without it the affair of the Jew Hirsch’s perjury, at Nuremberg, would never have come out. And how many other scandals he exposed! One day a Nazi saw a Jew, in Nuremberg station, impatiently throw a letter into the waste-paper basket. He recovered the letter and, after having read it, took it to the Stürmer. It was a blackmailer’s letter in which the recipient, the Jew Hirsch, was threatened that the game would be given away if he stopped coughing up. The Stürmers revelation provoked an enquiry.
It thus became known that a country girl, who had a place in Nuremberg in the household of Herr Hirsch, had brought an action against him for rape. Hirsch got the girl to swear in court that she had never had relations with other men—then he produced numerous witnesses who all claimed to have had relations with her.
The German judges did not understand that Jews have no scruples when it’s a question of saving one of their compatriots. They therefore condemned the servant to one and a half years in prison. The letter thrown impatiently away by Hirsch was written by one of the false witnesses suborned by him—which witness considered that he could conveniently add blackmail to perjury.
To-day everyone’s eyes are opened, but at the time people found it difficult to believe that such things could happen. Poor girls who worked in big shops were handed over defenceless to their employers. In such a state of affairs, Streicher rendered immense services. Now that Jews are known for what they are, nobody any longer thinks that Streicher libelled them.
The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged to-day is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! Japan would have been contaminated, too, if it had stayed open to the Jews.
We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew. Everything has a cause, nothing comes by chance.
Night of the 22nd-
23rd February 1942
The principal newspapers of the Party
The organisation of our press has truly been a success. Our law concerning the press is such that divergences of opinion between members of the Government are no longer an occasion for public exhibitions, which are not the newspapers’ business. We’ve eliminated that conception of political freedom according to which everybody has the right to say whatever comes into his head. Amann controls more than half of the German press.
Our illustrated newspapers have greatly improved. But, to compete abroad with the Anglo-Saxon weeklies, the Leipziger Illustrierte should be more eye-catching. The Berliner, the Münchener and the Wiener are well-made illustrated papers—the JB still better. The Kölner gained the limelight some years ago thanks to the documents it published. On the other hand, we could easily do without the Deutsche Illustrierte. Das Reich is a great success.
When peace has returned, we shall need, as a pendant to Das Reich, a Sunday weekly for people in the country. It should be easy to read, should have a serialised novel—so that young girls should likewise get their share—and should be copiously illustrated.
The English newspapers are in a privileged position as regards both the text and the photographic documentation. From all parts of the world, their material reaches them in floods. We ourselves shall be enabled by our new conquests to make progress in that field.
24th February 1942, midday
How great artists can serve their country.
I’ve learnt that young Roller has just fallen at the front. If I’d known that he’d gone out! But nobody told me. There are hundreds of thousands of men who could serve their country in no better way than by risking their lives for her, but a great artist should find another way. Can fate allow it that the most idiotic Russian should strike down men like that? We have so many men seconded for special duties!
What harm could it do to add to their number the five or six hundred gifted men whom it would be important to save? Roller is irreplaceable. We had only Sievert, Arent and Praetorius—Austria had given us the young Roller. Why didn’t Schirach warn me? I saw his Friedenstag. What a lovely thing! The young Roller was a brave man. Before the Anschluss he would have had to leave Austria. I’m convinced he went out as a volunteer.
I could have sent him anywhere at all, for personal reasons, if he hadn’t insisted on staying in Vienna.