text:
Tischegesprache (Excerpted)
Hitler's Table Talk Also published as The Borman Notes
1 Saturday, 5th July 1941
Aryans and Russians—Necessity of the mailed fist in Russia—Deterioration of soil.
What we need is a collective view of people's wish to live and manner of living.
We must distinguish between the Fascist popular movement and the popular movement in Russia. The Fascist movement is a spontaneous return to the traditions of ancient Rome. The Russian movement has an essential tendency towards anarchy.
By instinct, the Russian does not incline towards a higher form of society. Certain peoples can live in such a way that with them a collection of family units does not make a whole; and although Russia has set up a social system which, judged by Western standards, qualifies for the designation, "State"' it is not, in fact, a system which is either congenial of natural to her. It is true that, in a sense, every product of human culture, every work gifted with beauty can be born only of the effect of the constraint which we call education.
The Aryan people are people who are particularly active. A man like Krumel works from morning to night; such-and-such another person never stops thinking. In the the same way, the Italian is as diligent as an ant (bienenfleissig). In the eyes of the Russian, the principal support of civilization is vodka. His ideal consists in never doing anything but the indispensable. Our conception of work (work, and then more of it!) is one that he submits to as if it were a real curse.
It is doubtful whether anything at all can be done in Russia without the help of the Orthodox priest. It's the priest who has been able to reconcile the Russian to the fatal necessity of work—by promising him more happiness in another world.
The Russian will never make up his mind to work except under compulsion from outside, for he is incapable of organizing himself. And if, despite everything, he is apt to have organization thrust upon him, that is thanks to the drop of Aryan blood in his veins. It's only because of this drop that the Russian people has created something and possesses an organized State.
It takes energy to rule Russia. The corollary is that, the tougher a country's regime, the more appropriate it is that equity and justice should be practiced there. The Horse that is not kept constantly under forgets in the wink of an eye the rudiments or training that have been inculcated into it. In the same way, with the Russians, there is an instinctive force that invariably leads him back to the state of nature. People sometimes quote the case of the horses that escaped from a ranch in America, and by some ten years later had formed huge herds of wild horses. It is so easy for an animal to go back to its origins! For the Russians, the return to the state of nature is a return to primitive forms of life. The family exists, the female looks after her children, like the female of the hare, with all the feelings of a mother. But the Russian doesn't want anything more. His reaction against the constraint of the organized State (which is always a constraint, since it limits the liberty of the individual) is brutal and savage, like all feminine reactions. When he collapses and should yield, the Russian bursts into lamentations. This will to return to the state of nature is exhibited in his revolutions. For the Russian, the typical form of revolution is nihilism.
I think there's still petroleum in thousands of places. As for coal, we know we're reducing the natural reserves, and that in so doing we are creating gaps in the sub-soil. But as for petroleum, it may be that the lakes from which we are drawing are constantly renewed from invisible reservoirs.
Without doubt, man is the most dangerous microbe imaginable. He exploits the ground beneath his feet without ever asking whether he is disposing thus of products that would perhaps be indispensable to the life of other regions. If one examined the problem closely, one would probably find here the origin of the catastrophes that occur periodically in the earth's surface.
2 Night of 5th-6th July 1941, 11.30 p.m.-1.50 a.m.
The shortening of space by roads—The frontier of the Urals—Moscow must disappear—The treasures of the Hermitage.
The beauties of the Crimea, which we shall make accessible by means of an autobahn—for us Germans, that will be our Riviera. Crete is scorching and dry. Cyprus would be lovely, but we can reach Crimea by road. Along that road lies Kiev! And Croatia, too, a tourists' paradise for us. I expect that after the war there will be a great usurge of rejoicing.
Better than the railway, which ha something impersonal about it, it's the road that will bring peoples together. What progress in the direction of the New Europe! Just as the autobahn has caused the inner frontiers of Germany to disappear, so it will abolish the frontiers of the countries of Europe.
To those who ask me whether it will be enough to reach the Urals as a frontier, I reply that for the present it is enough for the frontier to be drawn back as far as that. What matters is that Bolshevism must be exterminated. In case of necessity, we shall renew our advance wherever a new centre of resistance is formed. Moscow, as the centre of the doctrine, must disappear from the earth's surface, as soon as its riches have been brought to shelter. There's no question of our collaborating with the Muscovite proletariat. Anyhow, St. Petersburg, as a city is incomparably more beautiful than Moscow.
Probably the treasures of the Hermitage have not been stored at the Kremlin, as they were during the first World War, but in the country-houses-unless they've been shifted to the cities east of Moscow, or still further by river.
3 Night of 11th-12 th July 1941
The natural piety of man—Russian atheists know how to die—No atheistical education.
I think the man who contemplates the universe with his eyes wide open is the man with the greatest amount of natural piety: not in the religious sense, but in the sense of an intimate harmony with things.
At the end of the last century the progress of science and technics led liberalism astray into proclaiming man's mastery of nature, and announcing that he would soon have dominion over space. But a simple storm is enough — and everything collapses like a pack of cards!
In any case, we shall learn to become familiar with the laws by which life is governed, and acquaintance with the laws of nature will guide us on the path of progress. As for the 'why' of these laws, we shall never know anything about it. A thing is so, and our understanding cannot conceive of other schemes.
Man has discovered in nature the wonderful notion of that almighty being whose law he worships.
Fundamentally in everyone there is the feeling for this almighty, which we call 'God' (that is to say, the dominion of natural laws throughout the whole universe). The priests, who have always succeeded in exploiting this feeling, threaten punishments for the man who refuses to accept the creed they impose.
When one provokes in a child a fear of the dark, one awakens in him a feeling of atavistic dread. Thus this child will be ruled all his life by this dread, whereas another child, who has been intelligently brought up, will be free of it.
It is said that every man needs a refuge where he can find consolation and help in unhappiness. I do not believe it! If humanity follows that path, it is solely a matter of tradition and habit. That is a lesson, by the way, that can be drawn from the Bolshevik front. The Russians have no God, and that does not prevent them from being able to face death. We don't want to educate anyone in atheism.
4 Night of 11th-12th July 1941
National Socialism and religion cannot exist together—No persecution of religions, let them wither of themselves—Bolshevism, the illegitimate child of Christianity—Origin of the Spartan gruel—The Latvian morons—Stalin, one of history's most remarkable figures.
When National Socialism has ruled long enough, it will no longer be possible to conceive of a form of life different from ours.
On a question from C. S., whether this antagonism might mean a war, the Fuhrer continued:
No, it does not mean a war. The ideal solution would be to leave the religions to devour themselves, without persecutions. But in that case we must not replace the Church by something equivalent. That would be terrifying! It goes without saying that the whole thing needs a lot of thought. Everything will occur in due time. It is a simple question of honesty, that's what it will finally boil down to.
In England, the status of the individual in relation to the Church is governed by considerations of State. In America, it's all purely a matter of conformism.
The German Folk's especial quality is patience; and it's the only one of the peoples capable of undertaking a revolution in this sphere. It could do it, if only for the reason that only the German Folk has made moral law the governing principle of action.
The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.
Without Christianity, we should not have had Islam. The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of world-domination, and humanity would not have extinguished fifteen centuries of civilization at a single stroke. Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.
The result of the collapse of the Roman Empire was a night that lasted for centuries.
The Romans had no dislike of the Germans. This is shown by the mere fact that blond hair was fashionable with them. Amongst the Goths there were many men with dark hair.
The Italian, Spanish, French and English dialects were created by mixtures of local languages with the linguistic elements imported by the migrant peoples. At first they were mere vernaculars, until a poet was found who forged the nation's language. It takes five or six centuries for a language to be born.
The conqueror of a country is forced to adapt himself to the local language. That is why language is not the immovable monument on which a people's characteristics are inscribed. A people's way of eating, for example, is racially more typical – for every man remains persuaded in his heart that his mother is the best cook. When I tasted the soup of the people of Schleswig-Holstein, it occurred to me that the gruel of the Spartans cannot have been very different. In the time of the great migrations, the tribes were the product of ceaseless mixtures. The men who arrived in the South were not the same as those who went away. One can imagine two hundred young Friesians setting out for the South, like a tank setting out across country, and carrying with them men belonging to other tribes. The Croats are certainly more Germanic than Slav. The Estonians, too, have a lot of Germanic blood.
The Estonians are elite of the Baltic people. Then come the Lithuanians, and lastly the Latvians. Stalin used Latvians for the executions which the Russians found disgusting. They're the same people who used to have the job of executioners in the old empire of the Tsars.
Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. HE governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture.
Its's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there and reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire
Luther had the merit of rising against the Pope and the organization of the Church. It was the first of the great revolutions. And thanks to his translation of the Bible, Luther replaced our dialects by the great German language! [p 9]
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 wastepaper 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 Stürmer's revelation provoked an inquiry. 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 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.[31-32]
10th of October 1941 Midday
Originally war was nothing but a struggle for pasture grounds. To-day war is nothing but a struggle for the riches of nature. By virtue of an inherent law, these riches belong to him who conquers them. The great migrations set out from the East. With us begins the ebb, from West to East. That's in accordance with the laws of nature. By means of the struggle, the elites are continually renewed.
The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure. [p 51]
14th of October 1941 Midday
It may be asked whether concluding a concordat with the churches wouldn't facilitate our exercise of power.
On this subject one may make the following remarks:
Firstly, in this way the authority of the State would be vitiated by the fact of the intervention of a third power concerning which it is impossible to say how long it would remain reliable. In the case of the Anglican Church, this objection does not arise, for England knows she can depend on her Church. But what about the Catholic Church? Wouldn't we be running the risk of her one day going into reverse after having put herself at the service of the State solely in order to safeguard her power? If one day the State's policy ceased to suit Rome or the clergy, the priests would turn against the State, as they are doing now. History provides examples that should make us careful.
Secondly, there is also a question of principle. Trying to take a long view of things, is it conceivable that one could found anything durable on falsehood? When I think of our Folks future, I must look further than immediate advantages, even if these advantages were to last three hundred, five hundred years or more. I'm convinced that any pact with the Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse.
Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse. An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as he perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science.
That's why I've always kept the Party aloof from religious questions. I've thus prevented my Catholic and Protestant supporters from forming groups against one another, and inadvertently knocking each other out with the Bible and the Sprinkler. So we never became involved with these Churches' forms of worship. And if that has momentarily made my task a little more difficult, at least I've never run the risk of carrying grist to my opponents' mill. The help we would have provisionally obtained from a concordat would have quickly become a burden on us. In any case, the main thing is to be clever in this matter and not to look for a struggle where it can be avoided.
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. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.
Originally, religion was merely a prop for human communities. It was a means, not an end in itself. It's only gradually that it became transformed in this direction, with the object of maintaining the rule of the priests, who can live only to the detriment of Society collectively.
The instructions of an hygienic nature that most religions gave, contributed to the foundation of organized communities. The precepts ordering people to wash, to avoid certain drinks, to fast at appointed dates, to take exercise, to rise with the sun, to climb to the top of the minaret-all these were obligations invented by intelligent people. The exhortation to fight courageously is also self-explanatory. Observe, by the way, that, as a corollary, the Moslems was promised a paradise peopled with sensual girls, where wine flowed in streams-a real earthly paradise. The Christians, on the other hand, declare themselves satisfied if after their death they are allowed to sing Hallelujahs! All these elements contributed to form human communities. It is to these private customs that Folks owe their present characters.
Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And that's why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline.
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. But it would serve no purpose to replace an old belief by a new one that would merely fill the place left vacant by its predecessor.
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 metaphysical 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 10 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 puts 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!
If at this moment we were to eliminate the religions by force, the folk would unanimously beseech us for a new form of worship. You can imagine our Gauleiters giving up their pranks to play at being saints! As for our Minister for Religion, according to his own co-religionists, God himself would turn away from his family!
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. [pp 58 - 62]
The precept that it's men's duty to love one another is theory the Christians are the last to practice it! A negro baby - has the misfortune to die before a missionary gets his clutches on him, goes to Hell! If that were true, one might well lament that sorrowful destiny: to have lived only three years, to burn for all eternity with Lucifer! [p 69]
19th of October 1941 Night
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. [p 75]
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. [pp 75-76]
2nd of October 1941 Midday
Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism the destroyer. Nevertheless, the Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up His position against Jewry. Galilee was a colony where the Romans had probably installed Gallic legionaries, and items certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way, regarded Him as the son a whore and a Roman soldier. The decisive falsification of Jesus's doctrine was the work of St. Paul. He gave himself to this work with subtlety and for purposes of personal exploitation. For the Galilean's object was to liberate His country from Jewish oppression. He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that's why the Jews liquidated Him.
Paul of Tarsus (his name was Saul, before the road to Damascus) was one of those who persecuted Jesus most savagely. When he learnt that Jesus's supporters let their throats be cut for His ideas, he realised that, by making intelligent use of the Galilean's teaching, it would be possible to overthrow this Roman State which the Jews hated. It's in this context that we must understand the famous "illumination". Think of it, the Romans were daring to confiscate the most sacred thing the Jews possessed, the gold piled up in their temples! At that time, as now, money was their god."
On the road to Damascus, St. Paul discovered that he could succeed in ruining the Roman State by causing the principle to triumph of the equality of all men before a single God and by putting beyond the reach of the laws his private notions, which he alleged to be divinely inspired. If, into the bargain, one succeeded in imposing one man as the representative on earth of the only God, that man would possess boundless power.
[pp 76-77]
When one thinks of the opinions held concerning Christianity by our best minds an hundred, two hundred years ago, one is ashamed to realise how little we have since evolved. I didn't know that Julian the Apostate had passed judgment with such clear sightedness on Christianity and Christians. You should read what he says on the subject.
Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism the destroyer. Nevertheless, the Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up His position against Jewry. Galilee was a colony where the Romans had probably installed Gallic legionaries, and it's certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way, regarded Him as the son of a whore-of a whore and a Roman soldier.
The decisive falsification of Jesus's doctrine was the work of St. Paul. He gave himself to this work with subtlety and for purposes of personal exploitation. For the Galilean's object was to liberate His country from Jewish oppression. He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that's why the Jews liquidated Him.
Paul of Tarsus (his name was Saul, before the road to Damascus) was one of those who persecuted Jesus most savagely. When he learnt that Jesus's supporters let their throats be cut for His ideas, he realised that, by making intelligent use of the Galilean's teaching, it would be possible to overthrow this Roman State which the Jews hated. It's in this context that we must understand the famous "illumination". Think of it, the Romans were daring to confiscate the most sacred thing the Jews possessed, the gold piled up in their temples! At that time, as now, money was their god.
On the road to Damascus, St. Paul discovered that he could succeed in ruining the Roman State by causing the principle to triumph of the equality of all men before a single God--and by putting beyond the reach of the laws his private notions, which he alleged to be divinely inspired. If; into the bargain, one succeeded in imposing one man as the representative on earth of the only God, that man would possess boundless power.
The ancient world had its gods and served them. But the priests interposed between the gods and men were servants of the State, for the gods protected the City. In short, they were the emanation of a power that the people had created. For that society, the idea of an only god was unthinkable. In this sphere, the Romans were tolerance itself. The idea of a universal god could seem to them only a mild form of madness--for, if three peoples fight one another, each invoking the same god, this means that, at any rate, two of them are praying in vain.
Nobody was more tolerant than the Romans. Every man could pray to the god of his choice, and a place was even reserved in the temples for the unknown god. Moreover, every man prayed as he chose, and had the right to proclaim his preferences.
St. Paul knew how to exploit this state of affairs in order to conduct his struggle against the Roman State. Nothing has changed; the method has remained sound. Under cover of a pretended religious instruction, the priests continue to incite the faithful against the State.
The religious ideas of the Romans are common to all Aryan peoples. The Jew, on the other hand, worshipped and continues to worship, then and now, nothing but the golden cal£ The Jewish religion is devoid of all metaphysics and has no foundation but the most' repulsive materialism. That's proved even in the concrete representation they have of the Beyond-which for them is identified with Abraham's bosom.
It's since St. Paul's time that the Jews have manifested themselves as a religious community, for until then they were only a racial community. St. Paul was the first man to take account of the possible advantages of using a religion as a means of propaganda. If the Jew has succeeded in destroying the Roman Empire, that's because St. Paul transformed a local movement of Aryan opposition to Jewry into a supra-temporal religion, which postulates the equality of all men amongst themselves, and their obedience to an only god. This is what caused the death of the Roman Empire.
It's striking to observe that Christian ideas, despite all St. Paul's efforts, had no success in Athens. The philosophy of the Greeks was so much superior to this poverty-stricken rubbish that the Athenians burst out laughing when they listened to the apostle's teaching. But in Rome St. Paul found the ground prepared for him. His egalitarian theories had what was needed to win over a mass composed of innumerable uprooted people.
Nevertheless, the Roman slave was not at all what the expression encourages us to imagine to-day. In actual fact, the people concerned were prisoners of war (as we understand the term nowadays), of whom many had been freed and had the possibility of becoming Citizens-and it was St. Paul who introduced this degrading overtone into the modern idea of Roman slaves.
Think of the numerous Germanic Folk whom Rome welcomed. Arminius himself; the first architect of our liberty, wasn't he a Roman knight, and his brother a dignitary of the State? By reason of these contacts, renewed throughout the centuries, the population of Rome had ended by acquiring a great esteem for the Germanic Folk. It's clear that there was a preference in Rome for fair-haired women, to such a point that many Roman women dyed their hair. Thus Germanic blood constantly regenerated Roman society.
The Jew, on the other hand, was despised in Rome.
Whilst Roman society proved hostile to the new doctrine, Christianity in its pure state stirred the population to revolt. Rome was Bolshevised, and Bolshevism produced exactly the same results in Rome as later in Russia.
It was only later, under the influence of the Germanic spirit, that Christianity gradually lost its openly Bolslievistic character. It became, to a certain degree, tolerable. To-day, when Christianity is tottering, the Jew restores to pride of place Christianity in its Bolshevistic form.
The Jew believed he could renew the experiment. To-day as once before, the object is to destroy nations by vitiating their racial integrity. It's not by chance that the Jews, in Russia, have systematically deported hundreds of thousands of men, delivering the women, whom the men were compelled to leave behind, to males imported from other regions. They practiced on a vast scale the mixture of races.
In the old days, as now, destruction of art and civilization. The Bolsheviks of their day, what didn't they destroy in Rome, in Greece and elsewhere? They've behaved in the same way amongst us and in Russia.
One must compare the art and civilization of the Romans-their temples, their houses-with the art and civilization represented at the same period by the abject rabble of the catacombs.
In the old days, the destruction of the libraries. Isn't that what happened in Russia? The result: a frightful leveling-down.
Didn't the world see, carried on right into the Middle Ages, the same old system of martyrs, tortures, faggots? Of old, it was in the name of Christianity. To-day, it's in the name of Bolshevism.
Yesterday, the instigator was Saul: the instigator to-day, Mardochai.
Saul has changed into St. Paul, and Mardochai into Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea. [pp 76 - 79]
On the whole earth there's no being, no substance, and probably no human institution that doesn't end by growing old. But it's in the logic of things that every human institution should be convinced of its everlastingness-unless it already carries the seed of its downfall. The hardest steel grows weary. Just as it is certain that one day the earth will disappear, so it is certain that the works of men will be overthrown.
All these manifestations are cyclical. Religion is in perpetual conflict with the spirit of free research. The Church's opposition to science was sometimes so violent that it struck off sparks. The Church, with a clear awareness of her interests, has made a strategic retreat, with the result that science has lost some of its aggressiveness.
The present system of teaching in schools permits the the following absurdity: at 10 a.m. the pupils attend a lesson in the catechism, at which the creation of the world is presented to them in accordance with the teachings of the Bible; and at 11 a.m. they attend a lesson in natural science, at which they are taught the theory of evolution. Yet the two doctrines are in complete contradiction. As a child, I suffered from this contradiction, and ran my head against a wall. Often I complained to one or another of my teachers against what I had been taught an hour before-and I remember that I drove them to despair.
The Christian religion tries to get out of it by explaining that one must attach a symbolic value to the images of Holy Writ. Any man who made the same claim four hundred years ago would have ended his career at the stake, with an accompaniment of Hosannas. By joining in the game of tolerance, religion has won back ground by comparison with bygone centuries.
Religion draws all the profit that can be drawn from the fact that science postulates the search for, and not the certain knowledge of; the truth. Let's compare science to a ladder. On every rung, one beholds a wider landscape. But science does not claim to know the essence of things. When science finds that it has to revise one or another notion that it had believed to be definitive, at once religion gloats and declares: "We told you so!" To say that is to forget that it's in the nature of science to behave itself thus. For if it decided to assume a dogmatic air, it would itself become a church.
When one says that God provokes the lightning, that's true in a sense; but what is certain is that God does not direct the thunderbolt, as the Church claims. The Church's explanation of natural phenomena is an abuse, for the Church has ulterior interests. True piety is the characteristic of the being who is aware of his weakness and ignorance. Whoever sees God only in an oak or in a tabernacle, instead of seeing Him everywhere, is not truly pious. He remains attached to appearances-and when the sky thunders and the lightning strikes, he trembles simply from fear of being struck as a punishment for the sin he's just committed.
A reading of the polemical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or of the conversations between Frederick II and Voltaire, inspires one with shame at our low intellectual level, especially amongst the military.
From now on, one may consider that there is no gap between the organic and inorganic worlds. Recent experiments make it possible for one to wonder what distinguishes live bodies from inanimate matter. In the face of this discovery, the Church will begin by rising in revolt, then it will continue to teach its "truths". One day finally, under the battering-ram of science, dogma will collapse. It is logical that it should be so, for the human spirit cannot remorselessly apply itself to raising the veil of mystery without peoples' one day drawing the conclusions
The Ten Commandments are a code of living to which there's no refutation. These precepts correspond to irrefragable needs of the human soul; they're inspired by the best religious spirit, and the Churches here support themselves on a solid foundation.
The Churches are born of the need to give a structure to the religious spirit. Only the forms in which the religious instinct expresses itself can vary. So-and-so doesn't become aware of human littleness unless he is seized by the scruff of the neck, but so-and-so does not need even an unchaining of the elements to teach him the same thing. In the depths of his heart, each man is aware of his puniness.
The microscope has taught us that we are hemmed in not only by the infinitely great, but also by the infinitely small-macrocosm and microcosm. To such large considerations are added particular things that are brought to our attention by natural observation: that certain hygienic practices are good for a man-fasting, for example. lt.'s by no means a result of chance that amongst the ancient Egyptians no distinction was drawn between medicine and religion.
If modern science were to ignore such data, it would be doing harm. On the other hand, superstitions must not be allowed to hamper human progress. That would be so intolerable as to justify the disappearance of religions.
When a man grows old, his tissues lose their elasticity. The normal man feels a revulsion at the sight of death-this to such a point that it is usually regarded as a sign of bad taste to speak of it lightly. A man who asks you if you have made your will is lacking in tact. The younger one is, the less one cares about such matters. But old people cling madly to life. So it's amongst them that the Church recruits her best customers. She entices them with the prospect that death interrupts nothing, that beyond our human term everything continues, in much more agreeable conditions. And you'd refuse to leave your little pile of savings to the Church? Grosso modo, that's more or less how it goes.
Is there a single religion that can exist without a dogma? No, for in that case it would belong to the order of science. Science cannot explain why natural objects are what they are. And that's where religion comes in, with its comforting certainties. When incarnated in the Churches, religion always finds itself in opposition to life. So the Churches would be heading for disaster, and they know it, if they didn't cling to a rigid truth.
What is contrary to the visible truth must change or disappear -that's the law of life.
We have this advantage over our ancestors of a thousand years ago, that we can see the past in depth, which they couldn't. We have this other advantage, that we can see it in breadth-an ability that likewise escaped them.
For a world population of two thousand two hundred and fifty millions, one can count on the earth a hundred and seventy religions of a certain importance-each of them claiming, of course, to be the repository of the truth. At least a hundred and sixty-nine of them, therefore, are mistaken! Amongst the religions practiced to-day, there is none that goes back further than two thousand five hundred years. But there have been human beings, in the baboon category, for at least three hundred thousand years. There is less distance between the man-ape and the ordinary modern man than there is between the ordinary modern man and a man like Schopenhauer. In comparison with this millenary past, what does a period of two thousand years signify?
The universe, in its material elements, has the same composition whether we ' re speaking of the earth, the sun or any other planet. It is impossible to suppose nowadays that organic life exists only on our planet.
Does the knowledge brought by science make men happy? That I don't know. But I observe that man can be happy by deluding himself with false knowledge. I grant one must cultivate tolerance.
It's senseless to encourage man in the idea that he's a king of creation, as the scientist of the past century tried to make him believe. That same man who, in order to get about quicker, has to straddle a horse-that mammiferous, brainless being! I don't know a more ridiculous claim. [pp 83 - 87]
25th of October 1941 at Dinner Guests Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich
From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesied to Jewry that m the event of war's proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody tell me that all the same we can't park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who s worrying about our troops? It's not a bad idea, by the way that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews Terror is a salutary thing.
The attempt to create a Jewish State will be a failure.
The book that contains the reflections of the Emperor Julian should be circulated in millions. What wonderful intelligence, what discernment, all the wisdom of antiquity! It's extraordinary.
With what clairvoyance the authors of the eighteenth, and especially those of the past, century criticized Christianity and passed judgment on the evolution of the Churches!
People only retain from the past what they want to find there. As seen by the Bolshevik, the history of the Tsars seems like a blood-bath. But what is that, compared with the crimes of Bolshevism?
There exists a history of the world, compiled by Rotteck, a liberal of the 'forties, in which facts are considered from the point of view of the period; antiquity is resolutely neglected. We, too, shall re-write history, from the racial point of view. Starting with isolated examples, we shall proceed to a complete revision. It will be a question, not only of studying the sources, but of giving facts a logical link. There are certain facts that can't be satisfactorily explained by the usual methods. So we must take another attitude as our point of departure. As long as students of biology believed in spontaneous generation, it was impossible to explain the presence of microbes.
What a certificate of mental poverty it was for Christianity that it destroyed the libraries of the ancient world! GrecoRoman thought was made to seem like the teachings of the Devil. "If thou desirest to live, thou shalt not expose thyself unto temptation."
Bolshevism sets about its task in the same way as Christianity, so that the faithful may not know what is happening in the rest of the world. The object is to persuade them that the system they enjoy is unique in the world in point of technical and social organisation. Somebody told me of a liftman in Moscow who sincerely believed that there were no lifts anywhere else. I never saw anybody so amazed as that Russian ambassador, the engineer, who came to me one evening to thank me for not having put any obstacles in the way of a visit he paid to some German factories. At first I asked myself if the man was mad! I supposed it was the first time he saw things as they are, and I imagine he sent his Government an indiscreet note on the subject. He was recalled to Moscow a few days later, and we learnt he'd been shot.
Christianity set itself systematically to destroy ancient culture. What came to us was passed down by chance, or else it was a product of Roman liberal writers. Perhaps we are entirely ignorant of humanity's most precious spiritual treasures. Who can know what was there?
The Papacy was faithful to these tactics even during recorded history. How did people behave, during the age of the great explorations, towards the spiritual riches of Central America?
In our parts of the world, the Jews would have immediately eliminated Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kant. If the Bolsheviks had dominion over us for two hundred years, what works of our past would be handed on to posterity? Our great men would fall into oblivion, or else they'd be presented to future generations as criminals and bandits.
I don't believe at all in the truth of certain mental pictures that many people have of the Roman emperors. I'm sure that Nero didn't set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that, just as the Commune set fire to Paris in 1871 and the Communists set fire to the Reichstag in 1932.
There is a form of hypocrisy, typically Protestant, that is impudence itself. Catholicism has this much good about it, that it ignores the moral strictness of the Evangelicals. In Catholic regions life is more endurable, for the priest himself succumbs more easily to human weaknesses. So he permits his flock not to dramatise sin. How would the Church earn her living, if not by the sins of the faithful? She declares herself satisfied if one goes to confession. Indulgence, at a tariff, supplies the Church with her daily bread. As for the fruits of um, the soul that fears limbo is a candidate for baptism, that is to say, another customer, and so business goes on! It is a fact that in Catholic parts of the world there are many more illegitimate births than in Protestant parts.
In Austria, Protestantism was free of all bigotry. It was truly a movement of protest against Catholicism. Moreover, these Protestants were entirely devoted to the German cause.
A scandal is that, when a believer leaves a particular faith, be is compelled to pay the ecclesiastical tax for another year. A simple statement should be enough to free him at once from owing anything further. We'll put all that right as soon as we have peace again.
Take Gobbels, for example. He married a Protestant. At once he was put under the Church's ban. Very naturally, he declared that he would stop paying the ecclesiastical tax. But the Church doesn't see things that way. Exclusion is a punishment, which does not remove the obligation to pay the tax!
For my part, the Church held it against me that I was a witness to this marriage. They would certainly have put me under the ban, too, if they had not calculated that it might have won me new sympathies.
Every marriage concluded as the result of a divorce is regarded by the Church as living-in-sin. The result is that, in Austria, for example, nobody cares about the commandments of the Church. From this point of view, Austria was in advance of Germany.
The most extraordinary divorce story I know is that of Starhemberg. The Church allowed him to obtain a divorce for a payment of two hundred and fifty thousand schillings. The reason advanced, by agreement between the parties, was that the marriage was null and void since the contracting parties had come together with the firm intention of not performing their marital duties. Since Starhemberg had no money, the sum was paid by the Heimwehr. What hasn't the Church discovered as a source of revenue, in the course of these fifteen hundred years? It's an unending circle.
I have numerous accounts to settle, about which I cannot think to-day. But that doesn't mean I forget them. I write them down. The time will come to bring out the big book!
Even with regard to the Jews, I've found myself remaining inactive. There's no sense in adding uselessly to the difficulties of the moment. One acts more shrewdly when one bides one's time. . . When I read of the speeches of a man like Galen, I tell myself that there's no point in administering pin-pricks, and that for the moment it's preferable to be silent. Why should anyone have room to doubt the durability of our movement? And if I reflect that it will last several centuries, then I can offer myself the luxury of waiting. I would not have reached my final reckoning with Marxism if I hadn't had the strength on my side
Methods of persuasion of a moral order are not an effective weapon against those who despise the truth-when we have to do with priests, for example, of a Church who know that everything about it is based on lies, and who live by it. They think me a spoil-sport when I rise up in their midst; indeed, I am going to spoil their little games.
In 1905 to 1906, when the modernist movement broke out, there were such excesses that some priests, in reaction, over-ran the reformers' objectives and became real revolutionaries. They were at once expelled, of course. The power of the Church was so great that they were ruined. Men like the Abbot Schachleiter suffered a lot. Nowadays, a priest who's unfrocked can build a new career for himself. What gave the power of the Church such a handle was the fact that the civil power didn't want to interfere in these matters at any price. Things have changed a great deal since then. Nowadays great numbers of priests are forsaking the Church. Obviously, there's a hard core, and I shall never get them all. You don't imagine I can convert the Holy Father. One does not persuade a man who's at the head of such a gigantic concern to give it up. It's his livelihood! I grant, moreover, that, having grown up in it, he can't conceive of the possibility of anything else.
As for the nuns, I'm opposed to the use of force. They'd be incapable of leading any other life. They'd be without support, literally ruined. In this respect, the Catholic Church has taken over the institution of the Vestal Virgins. As soon as a girl becomes a woman, she's faced with the problem of getting a man. If she doesn't find a fiancée', or if she loses him, it 5 possible that she may refuse to have anything more to do with life, and may prefer to retire to a convent. It can also happen that parents may promise their children to the Church. When a human being has spent ten years in a monastery or convent, he or she loses the exact idea of reality. For a woman, a part is played by the sense of belonging to a community that takes care of her. When she lacks the support of a man, she quite naturally looks for this support elsewhere.
In Germany we have, unfortunately, two million more women than men. A girl's object is, and should be, to get married. [pp 87 - 91]
5th of November 1941
…respectable families…living communally with creatures who are utterly rotten [112-113]
11th of November 1941
I've always defended the point of view that the Party should hold itself aloof from religion. We never organized 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.
One can even say that the reactionary and clerical circles helped on this triumph, by eliminating Rasputin. They thus eliminated a force that was capable of stimulating the healthy elements in the Slav soul.
But for the Nationalist volunteers of 1919-20, the clergy would have fallen victim to Bolshevism just as much in Germany as they did in Russia.
The skull-cap is a danger to the State when things go badly. 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!
I would gladly have recourse to the shavelings, if they could help us to intercept English or Russian aircraft. But, for the present, the men who serve our anti-aircraft guns are more useful than the fellows who handle the sprinkler.
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 practiced 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.
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!
I know nothing of the Other World, and I have the honesty to admit it. Other people know more about it than I do, and I'm incapable of proving that they're mistaken. I don't dream of imposing my philosophy on a village girl. Although religion does not aim at seeking for the truth, it is a kind of philosophy which can satisfy simple minds, and that does no harm to any-one. Everything is finally a matter of the feeling man has of his own impotence. In itself, this philosophy has nothing pernicious about it. The essential thing, really, is that man should know that salvation consists in the effort that each person makes to understand Providence and accept the laws of nature.
Since all violent upheavals are a calamity, I would prefer the adaptation to be made without shocks. What could be longest left undisturbed are women's convents. The sense of the inner life brings people great enrichment. 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 marginal notes, in his handwriting, which one finds on the pleas addressed to him by the pastors, have the value of judgments of Solomon. They're definitive. Our generals should make a practice of reading them daily. One is humiliated to see how slowly humanity progresses.
The house of Habsburg produced, in Joseph II, a pale imitator of Frederick the Great. A dynasty that can produce even one intellect in the class of Frederick the Great's has justified itself in the eyes of history. We had experience of it during the First World War: the only one of the belligerents that was truly religious was Germany. That didn't prevent her from losing the war. What repulsive hypocrisy that arrant Freemason, Roosevelt, displays when he speaks of Christianity! All the Churches should rise up against him-for he acts on principles diametrically opposed to those of the religion of which he boasts.
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! [pp 122-125]
If the mental picture that Christians form of God were Correct, the god of the ants would be an ant, and similarly for the other animals. [p 135]
The catastrophe, for us, is that of being tied to a religion that rebels against all the joys of the senses. Apropos of that, the hypocrisy of the Protestants is worse than that of the Catholics. Protestantism has the warmth of the iceberg. The Catholic Church, that still has its thousand years of experience and has not lost contact with its Jewish origins, is obviously more adroit. She permits the orgies of Carnival, firstly because she is powerless to prevent them, and secondly because she recaptures the sinner on Ash Wednesday. By picturing to him the sufferings of Hell, she succeeds in inciting him to be properly generous. After periods of repentance, there's room for relaxation! [p 142]
13th December 1941 Midnight
The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life's final task will be to solve the religious problem. Only then Will the life of the German native be guaranteed once and for all.
I don't interfere in matters of belief. Therefore I can't allow churchmen to interfere with temporal affairs. The organized lie must be smashed. The State must remain the absolute master.
When I was younger, I thought it was necessary to set about matters with dynamite. I've since realised that there' S room for a little subtlety. The rotten branch falls of itself. The final state must be: in St. Peter's Chair, a senile officiant; facing him, a few sinister old women, as gaga and as poor in spirit as anyone could wish. The young and healthy are on our side. Against a Church that identifies itself with the State, as in England, I have nothing to say. But, even so, it's impossible eternally to hold humanity in bondage with lies. After all, it was only between the sixth and eighth centuries that Christianity was imposed on our peoples by princes who had an alliance of interests with the shavelings. Our peoples had previously succeeded in living all right without this religion. I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. It doesn't prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.
Christ was an Aryan, and St. Paul used his doctrine to mobilise the criminal underworld and thus organize a protoBolshevism. This intrusion upon the world marks the end of a long reign, that of the clear Greco-Latin genius.
What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing men grovel before Him? Try to picture to yourselves the meaning of the following, quite simple story. God creates the conditions for sin. Later on He succeeds, with the help of the Devil, in causing man to sin. Then He employs a virgin to bring into the world a son who, by His death, will redeem humanity!
I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mohammed, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians! In your lifetime, you used to hear the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs, the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding bottle, and hoary old men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A nigger with his taboos is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in transubstantiation.
I begin to lose all respect for humanity when I think that some people on our side, Ministers or generals, are capable of believing that we cannot triumph without the blessing of the Church. Such a notion is excusable in little children who have learnt nothing else.
For thirty years the Germans tore each other to pieces simply in order to know whether or not they should take Communion in both kinds. There's nothing lower than religious notions like that. From that point of view, one can envy the Japanese. They have a religion which is very simple and brings them into contact with nature. They've succeeded even in taking Christianity and turning it into a religion that's less shocking to the intellect.
By what would you have me replace the Christians' picture of the Beyond? What comes naturally to mankind is the sense of eternity and that sense is at the bottom of every man. The soul and the mind migrate, just as the body returns to nature. Thus life is eternally reborn from life. As for the "why?" of all that, I feel no need to rack my brains on the subject. The soul is unplumbable.
If there is a God, at the same time as He gives man life He gives him intelligence. By regulating my life according to the understanding that is granted me, I may be mistaken, but I act in good faith. The concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination. Think of those who look down from on high upon what happens on earth: what a martyrdom for them, to see human beings indefatigably repeating the same gestures, and inevitably the same errors! In my view,
H. S. Chamberlain was mistaken in regarding Christianity as a reality upon the spiritual level.
Man judges everything in relation to himself. What is bigger than himself is big, what is smaller is small. Only one thing is certain, that one is part of the spectacle. Everyone finds his own role. Joy exists for everybody. I dream of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species. It's our duty to encourage that idea: let the man who distinguishes himself in the service of the Species be thought worthy of the highest honours.
What a happy inspiration, to have kept the clergy out of the Party! On the 21st March 1933, at Potsdam, the question was raised: with the Church, or without the Church? I conquered the St ate despite the malediction pronounced on us by both creeds. On that day, we went directly to the tomb of the kings whilst the others were visiting religious services. Supposing that at that period I'd made a pact with the Churches, I'd today be sharing the lot of the Duce. By nature the Duce is a freethinker, but he decided to choose the path of concessions. For my part, in his place I'd have taken the path of revolution. I'd have entered the Vatican and thrown everybody out-reserving the right to apologise later: "Excuse me, it was a mistake." But the result would have been, they'd have been outside!
When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves. from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only Folk who are immunized against the disease. [pp 143-145]
December 1941
I do not know what the Jews are complaining about. All I ask of them is that they go and do some good hard labour somewhere. I do not know even ask of them to go and serve in the armed forces
14th December 1941 Midday
Kerrl, with the noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity. I don't believe the thing's possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself.
I think I could have come to an understanding with the Popes of the Renaissance. Obviously, their Christianity was a danger on the practical level and, on the propaganda level, it continued to be a lie. But a Pope, even a criminal one, who protects great artists and spreads beauty around him, is nevertheless more sympathetic to me than the Protestant minister who drinks from the poisoned spring.
Pure Christianity-the Christianity of the catacombs-is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics. [p. 145-146]
81 28th of December 1941
If I offer a child the choice between a pear and a piece of meat, he'll quickly choose the pear. That's his atavistic instinct speaking.
1st of January – 5th of February 1942
105 12th of January 1942
The only thing of which I shall be incapable is to share the sheiks' mutton with them. I'm a vegetarian, and they must spare me from their meat.
117 22nd of January 1942
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. … When I became a vegetarian, a mouthful of water 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…Above all, don't go believing that I'll issue a decree forbidding the Navy to eat meat! Supposing the prohibition of meat had been an article of faith for National Socialism, it's certain our movement wouldn't have succeeded.
125 25th of January 1942.
I love animals, and especially dogs.
Mark my words, Bormann, I'm going to become very religious
Bormann: "You've always been very religious."
I'm going to become a religious figure. Soon I'll be the great chief of the Tartars. Already Arabs and Moroccans are mingling my name with their prayers. Amongst the Tartars I all become Khan. The only thing of which I shall be incapable is to share the sheiks' mutton with them. I'm a vegetarian, and they must spare me from their meat. If they don't wait too long, I'll fall back on their harems! [P 203-204]
27th of January 1942
But for the coming of Christianity, who knows how the history of Europe would have developed? Rome would have conquered all Europe, and the onrush of the Huns would have been broken on the legions. It was Christianity that brought about the fall of Rome and not the Germans or the Huns. [p 253]
1942 6th of February – 7th of September
9th of February 1942
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 maneuvers 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. [p 304]
The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world—in order to ruin it—re-opened the same breach in modern times, taking as his pretext the social question. Just as Saul became St. Paul, Mardochai has become Karl Marx. [p 314]
discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world, the battle in which we are engaged today is one of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jews. We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew. Everything has a cause, nothing comes by chance. [p 332]
In virtue of what law, divine or otherwise, should the rich alone have the right to govern? The world is passing at this moment through one of the most important revolutions in human history. We are witnessing the final somersaults of Christianity. It began with the Lutheran revolution. The revolutionary nature of that rebellion lies in the fact that until then there had been only one authority, on both the spiritual and the temporal level, that of the Pope-for it was he who delegated temporal power. Dogma cannot resist the ceaselessly renewed attacks of the spirit of free enquiry. One cannot teach at ten o'clock in the morning truths which one destroys in the eleven o'clock lesson.
What is ruining Christianity to-day is what once ruined the ancient world. The pantheistic mythology would no longer suit the social conditions of the period. As soon as the idea was introduced that all men were equal before God, that world was bound to collapse.
[p. 336]
18th of February 1942 Dinner General Rommel is dinner guest
Churchill is the very type of a corrupt journalist. There is not a worse prostitute in politics. He himself has written that it's unimaginable what can be done in war with the help of lies. He's an utterly amoral repulsive creature. I'm convinced that he has his place of refuge ready beyond the Atlantic. He obviously won't seek sanctuary in Canada. In Canada he'd be beaten up. He'll go to his friends the Yankees. As soon as this damnable winter is over, we'll remedy all that.
27th of February 1942 Midday
I believe that Providence gives the victory to the man who knows how to use the brains nature has given him. The notions of law invented by the jurists have little to do with natural laws. The wisdom of nations sometimes expresses truths as old as the world, that perfectly reproduce nature's intentions. "God helps him who helps himself!" It's obvious that man forgets his own destiny.
One day I explained to Eltz that what is conventionally called creation is probably an immovable thing, that only man's conception of it is subject to variations. Why doesn't God give everybody the possibility of understanding truth? Every man of average culture knows that at this precise moment the catholic religion is of interest to just one tenth of the population of the globe. He's astonished, too, that Providence, which has willed all that, can allow so many religions, all true from the point of view of those who practice them, to compete for the faith of the faithful. He knows, too, thanks to the view in depth that history enables him to take, that the Christian religion interests only those living in a tiny period of the life of mankind.
God made men. But thanks to original sin we are men in the age of our world, earning our bread in the sweat of our brow.
For five hundred thousand years, God impassively contemplated the spectacle of which He is the author. Then one day he decided to send upon earth His only son. You remember the tails of that complicated story!
Those who don't believe should, it seems, have faith imposed on them by force. If God is truly interested in men being enlightened, one wonders why He resorts to torture for that purpose.
While we're on the subject, let's add that, even amongst those who claim to be good Catholics, very few really believe in this humbug. Only old women, who have given up everything because life has already withdrawn from them, go regularly to church. All that's dead wood-and one shouldn't waste one's time in concerning oneself with such brains.
In the trade union formed by the Church, many of the members have tangible interests to defend, and see no further. A given set of grimaces, certain folk identify them with true religion. After that, let's express surprise that these cynical exploiters of God are the true purveyors of atheism.
Why should men fight to make their point of view triumph, if prayer should be enough? In the Spanish struggle, the clergy, should have said: "We defend ourselves by the power of prayer." But they deemed it safer to finance a lot of heathens, so that Holy Church could save her skin.
If I'm a poor devil and die without having had time to repent, I'm all right. But if; as a preliminary, I can dispose of ten marks to the Church's benefit, my affairs appear in a more favourable light. And is that what God would have wanted?
That little country girls and simple working men should be set dancing to that tune, that's a thing that can be explained. But that intelligent men should make themselves accomplices to such superstitions, and that it's because of these superstitions, and in the name of love, that hundreds of thousands of human beings have been exterminated in the course of history-that is something I cannot admit.
I shall never believe that what is founded on lies can endure for ever. I believe in truth. I'm sure that, in the long run, truth must be victorious.
It's probable that, as regards religion, we are about to enter an era of tolerance. Everybody will be allowed to seek his own salvation in the way that suits him best. The ancient world knew this climate of tolerance. Nobody took to proselytising.
If I enter a church, it's not with the idea of overturning idols. It's to look for, and perhaps to find, beauties in which I'm interested.
It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field. I realise that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors-but to devote myself deliberately to error, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. In acting as I do, I'm very far from the wish to scandalize. But I rebel when I see the very idea of Providence flouted in this fashion.
It's a great satisfaction for me to feel myself totally foreign to that world. But I shall feel I'm in my proper place if; after my death, I find myself, together with folk like me, on some sort of Olympus. I shall be in the company of the most enlightened spirits of all times.
I adopted a definite attitude on the 21st March 1933 when I refused to take part in the religious services, organized at Potsdam by the two Churches, for the inauguration of the new Reichstag.
I've never concerned myself, in the Party, with learning to which Church the men around me belonged, or did not belong. But if I were to die to-day, it would shock me to know that there's a single " sky-pilot " within a radius of ten kilometres around me. The idea that one of these fellows could bring me slightest help would by itself make me despair of Providence.
As far as I'm concerned, I act according to my convictions. I don't prevent anyone from praying silently, but I rebel against all blasphemy. So let nobody waste prayers on me that I shall not have asked for.
If my presence on earth is providential, I owe it to a superior will. But I owe nothing to the Church that trafficks in the salvation of souls, and I find it really too cruel. I admit that one cannot impose one's will by force, but I have a horror of people who enjoy inflicting sufferings on others' bodies and tyranny upon others' souls.
Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn't, like whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar. We are entering into a conception of the world that will be a sunny era, an era of tolerance. Man must be put in a position to develop freely the talents that God has given him.
What is important above all is that we should prevent a greater lie from replacing the lie that is disappearing. The world of Judeo-Bolshevism must collapse. [p 341-344]
11th of March 1942 Night
I had the same thing put up at my home. I said to the Reichsmarshal quite recently: 'Goering, do you think that it makes a good impression when people see you smoking a pipe? What would you think of a statue that represented you with a cigar in your mouth?' I am convinced that if I had been a smoker, I would never have been able to bear the cares and anxieties which have been a burden for me for so long. Perhaps the German Folk owes its salvation to the fact. So many outstanding men have been lost to me through tobacco poisoning. [p 360-361]
4th of April 1942
The fact that the Japanese have retained their political philosophy, which one of the essential reasons of their success, is due to having been saved in time from the views of Christianity. Just as in Islam, there is no kind of terrorism in the Japanese State religion, but on the contrary, a promise of happiness This terrorism in religion is the product, to put it briefly, of a Jewish dogma, which Christianity has universalised and whose effect is to sow trouble and confusion in men's minds. [p 393]
If it's possible to buy the high dignitaries of the Church with money, let's do it. And if one of them wanted to enjoy his life, and for this purpose put his hand into the till, for the love of Heaven let him be left in peace. The ones we have to fear are the ascetics, with rings under their eyes, and the fanatics. [p 411]
I intend...to have one suspension bridge at Linz. On the opposite bank I shall construct, as a counter to the pseudo-science of the Catholic Church, an observatory in which will be represented the three great cosmological conceptions of history--those of Ptolemy, of Copernicus and of Hörbiger. [p 445]
9th of April 1942 at Dinner
There is something very unhealthy about Christianity.
11th of April 1942
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.
#198 –25 April 1942
One has only to keep one's eyes open to notice what an extraordinary antipathy young children have to meat.
215 12th of May 1942 at dinner:
My long-term policy aims at having eventually a hundred million Germans settled in these territories. It is therefore essential to set up machinery which will ensure constant progression, and will see to it that million by million German penetration expands. In ten years' time we must be in a position to announce that twenty million Germans have been settled in the territories already incorporated in the Reich and in those which our troops are at present occupying.
5th of June 1942
It is a great pity that this tendency towards religious thought can find no better outlet than the Jewish pettifoggery of the Old Testament. For religious people who, in the solitude of winder, continually seek ultimate light on their religious problems with the assistance of the Bible, must eventually become spiritually deformed. The wretched people strive to extract truths from these Jewish chicaneries, where in fact no truths exist. As a result they become embedded in some rut of thought or other and, unless they possess an exceptionally commonsense mind, degenerate into religious maniacs.
It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and that the whole of the German Folk should have thus become exposed to the whole of this Jewish mumbo-jumbo. So long as the wisdom, particularly of the Old Testament, remained exclusively in the Latin of the Church, there was little danger that sensible people would become the victims of illusions as the result of the studying the Bible. But since the Bible became common property, a whole heap of folk have found opened to them lines of religious thought which--particularly in conjunction with the German characteristic of persistent and somewhat melancholy meditation--as often as not turned them into religious maniacs. When one recollects further that the Catholic Church has elevated to the status of Saints a whole number of madmen, one realises why movements such as that of the Flagellants came inevitably into existence in the Middle Ages in Germany.
As a sane German, one is flabbergasted to think that German human beings could have let themselves be brought to such a pass by Jewish filth and priestly twaddle, that they were little different from the howling dervish of the Turks and the negroes, at whom we laugh so scornfully. It angers one to think that, while in other parts of the globe religious teaching like that of Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed offers an undeniably broad basis for the religious-minded, Germans should have been duped by a theological exposition devoid of all honest depth.
...The essential conclusion to which these considerations leads me is that we must do everything humanly possible to protect for all time any further sections of the German Folk from the danger of mental deformity, regardless of whether it be religious mania or any other type of cerebral derangement. For this reason I have directed that every town of any importance shall have an observatory, for astronomy has been shown by experience to be one of the best means at man's disposal for increasing his knowledge of the universe, and thus saving from any tendency towards mental aberration. [pp 513-514]
Families... produce…at least one pure Jew. [p 545]
The ex tempore remarks excerpted following are from July 1941 to June 1942, most late at night or in early morning
The Earth continues to go around, whether it's the man who kills the tiger or the tiger who eats the man. The stronger asserts his will, it's the law of nature. The world doesn't change; its laws are eternal.
There are some who say the world is evil, and that they wish to depart from this life. For my part, I like the world! Unless the desire to die is due to a lover's quarrel, I advise the desperate man to have patience for a year. The consolations will come. But if a human being has any other reason to wish to die than this, then let him die, I'm not stopping him. I merely call attention to the fact that one cannot escape this world entirely. The elements of which our body is made belong to the cycle of nature; and as for our soul, it's possible that it might return to limbo, until it gets an opportunity to reincarnate itself. But it would vex me if everybody wanted to have done with life.
To make death easier for people, the Church holds out to them the bait of a better world. We, for our part, confine ourselves to asking man to fashion his life worthily. For this, it is sufficient for him to conform to the laws of nature. Let's seek inspiration in these principles, and in the long run we'll triumph over religion.
But there will never be any possibility of National Socialism's setting out to ape religion by establishing a form of worship. Its one ambition must be scientifically to construct a doctrine that is nothing more than a homage to reason.
Our duty is to teach men to see whatever is lovely and truly wonderful in life, and not to become prematurely ill tempered and spiteful. We wish fully to enjoy what is beautiful, to cling to it — and to avoid, as far as possible, anything that might do harm to people like ourselves.
If today 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.
Man has been given his brain to think with. But if he has the misfortune to make use of it, he finds a swarm of black bugs [i.e. priests] on his heels. The mind is doomed to the auto-da-fé.
The observatory I'll have built at Linz, on the Pöstlingberg, I can see it in my mind ... In future, thousands of excursionists will make a pilgrimage there every Sunday. They'll thus have access to the greatness of our universe. The pediment will bear this motto: 'The heavens proclaim the glory of the everlasting.' It will be our way of giving men a religious spirit, of teaching them humility — but without the priests.
Man seizes hold, here and there, of a few scraps of truth, but he couldn't rule nature. He must know that, on the contrary, he is dependent on Creation. And this attitude leads further than the superstitions maintained by the Church. 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 15 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 grayness 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 ...
For Ptolemy, the Earth was the center of the world. That changed with Copernicus. Today we know that our solar system is merely a solar system amongst many others. What could we do better than allow the greatest possible number of people like us to become aware of these marvels?
In any case, we can be grateful to Providence, which causes us to live today rather than 300 years ago. At every street corner, in those days, there was a blazing stake. What a debt we owe to the men who had the courage — the first to do so — to rebel against lies and intolerance. The admirable thing is that amongst them were Jesuit Fathers.
In their fight against the Church, the Russians are purely negative. We, on the other hand, should practice 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.
To open the eyes of simple people, there's no better method of instruction than the picture. Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions. One must destroy the priest's argument that science is changeable because faith does not change, since, when presented in this form, the statement is dishonest.
Research must remain free and unfettered by any State restriction. The facts which it establishes represent Truth, and Truth is never evil.
...decisive for our people whether they have the Judeo-Christian faith and its flabby morality of sympathy, or a strong, heroic faith in god in nature, in god in one's own people, in god in one's own fate, in one's own blood.… One is either a Christian or a German. One can't be both.
I don't see much future for the Americans.... Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it's half Judaized, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together? pt2
people like von Papen and many others are establishing good relations with the Vatican.
4th of July 1942
Should we decide to recall our present representative from the Vatican, I can see no adequate reason for sending any fresh incombent to this Embassy. The relations between Germany and the Vatican are based on the Concordat. But this same Concordat is no more than the survival of agreements reached between the Vatican and the different German States, and, with the disappearance of the latter and their incorporation into the German Reich, it has become obsolete. It is true that it has as basis these various agreements, but it is a conformation of past agreements rather than a current agreement in force. I am therefore of the considered opinion that the juridical consequence of the disappearance of the sovereignty of the individual German States and its incorporation in the sovereignty of the Reich render the continuation of diplomatic relations with the Vatican redundant.
From military reasons connected with the war I have so far refrained from translating this conception into fact. Equally, however, I have shown myself unresponsive to the attempts of the Vatican towards extension of the provisions of the Concordat to embrace the newly acquired territories of the Reich. The Saar, Sudetenland, Bohemia and Moravia, the Reichsgau Danzig-East Prussia, the Warthegau, a large part of Silesia and Alsace-Lorraine have, in fact, no relations with the Roman Catholic Church which are supported by formal international agreement. In these territories, therefore, Church affairs must be settled locally.
If the Papal Nuncio seeks audience of the Foreign Office and tries through this channel to gain some say in religious developments in the new territories, his advances must be rejected. . He must be told clearly that, in the absence of any particular Concordat, the settlement of Church affairs in these territories is a matter to be settled exclusively between the relevant State representative-that is, the Reichsstatthalter-and the head of the local ecclesiastical body.
I should, of course, have preferred Minister Lammers to impart this information to the Papal Nuncio. Unfortunately the Wilhelmstrasse, with its usual greed for fields of fresh authority, has allowed itself to be imposed upon by the Papal Legate. Well, I shall be interested to see how these gentlemen get themselves out of the tangle!
Regulations framed to cover the whole Reich cannot be make more difficult the clarification of relations between State and Church, at which we are aiming; for the Catholic Church strives always to seek advantage where we are weakest b demanding the application to the whole Reich of those of t various Concordats which conform most closely to aspirations.
Therefore, as regards future relations between State a Church, it is very satisfactory from our point of view that nearly half the Reich negotiations can now be conducted by appropriate Reichsstatthalter, unfettered by the clauses of central Concordat. For this means that in each district Gauleiter can, according to the degree of emancipation acquired by the population of his Gau, lead the Folk forward step by step in the sense that we desire.
[Note by translator. The diatribe which occupies the next few paragraphs is couched in most bitter and often vulgar terms. Throughout Hitler uses opprobrious term "Pfaffe" (in one case "Piaffengeschmeiss"), of which is no direct English equivalent. The translator has tried to reproduce atmosphere of the passage.]
Although, in general, I hold no brief for the Americans, I must in this respect take off my hat to them. The American statesmen, by subjecting the Church to the same regulations governing all other associations and institutions, have limited its field of activity to reasonable proportions; and, as the State does not contribute from State Funds one single cent to the church, the whole clergy cringes and sings hymns in praise of Government. This is not to be wondered at! The parson, like everyone else, has got to live; what he makes out of the public offertory doesn't amount to much, and so he is more or less dependent on State charity. As he has no legal claim whatever on the State, he therefore takes very good care that his demeanour is always pleasing in the eyes of the State and therefore deserving of the crumbs it cares to toss to him.
Once we cease handing out milliards of marks a year to the church, our damn parsons will very quickly change their tune and instead of having the impudence to revile us and attack us the most shameful manner, will very soon be eating out of our hands. We can make this clerical gang go the way we want, quite easily-and at far less cost than at present.
Contributions should be made to selected individual parsons. If we give some Bishop--for himself and his subordinates--a round million, he will pocket the first three hundred thousand for his own use--otherwise he's no true parson! The distribution the meagre rest among the parsons of his whole diocese will cause a pretty little uproar among the whole brood-and leave us laughing like hell!
In one respect, however, we must remain absolutely obdurate. Any petitions for State intervention must be rejected out of hand. Justification for such rejection is obvious. On its own Eli owing the Church knows full well that no profane spirits could possibly succeed in mediating in Church affairs as well as the clergy itself. How can you expect some wretched little Government jack-in-office like myself, to whom the light has not been vouchsafed, to tackle so vital and intricate a problem!
Agreement as to distribution of funds must, as in other agreements, be left in the hands of the Reichsstatthalter. I don't think we need fear that they will enter upon any commitments which are directed against either the State or its interests. For one thing, the Gauleiters are under firm control, and for another, most of the Reichsstatthalters are much stricter in these affaires than I am.
Once the war is over we will put a swift end to the Concordat. It will give me the greatest personal pleasure to point out to the Church all those occasions on which it has broken the terms of it. One need only recall the close cooperation between the Church and the murderers of Heydrich. Catholic priests not only allowed them to hide in a church on the outskirts of Prague, but even allowed them to entrench themselves in the sanctuary of the altar.
The development of relations between State and Church affords a very instructive example of how the carelessness of a single statesman can have after-effects which last for centuries. When Charlemagne was kneeling at prayer in St. Peter's, Rome, at Christmas in the year 8oo, the Pope, giving him no time to work out the possible effects of so symbolic an action, suddenly bent down and presto! popped a golden crown on his head! By permitting it, the Emperor delivered himself and his successors into the hands of a power which subjected the German Government and the German Folk to five hundred years of martyrdom.
To-day, as always, there are responsible people to be found who are careless enough to allow a crown of gold to be popped on to their heads, and one cannot exaggerate the enormous effects which such an action, seemingly trifling at the time, can later produce.
Much in the same class and equally stupid is the idea of the Wilhelmstrasse that every note from the Vatican must be answered. The very act of answering is tantamount to an admission of the right of the Vatican to interfere in German domestic issues--if only in ecclesiastical issues--and to maintain official correspondence with us.
Not only the history of the past, but also present times afford numberless examples of the very hard-boiled diplomats to be found in the service of the Catholic Church, and of how extremely cautious one must be in dealing with them.
Just after my entry into Vienna I heard a tremendous whistling and cheering under my window and was told that it was for Cardinal Archbishop Innitzer, who was on his way to visit me. I expected to see a wretched little parson, downcast and oppressed with the burden of his sins. Instead of which there appeared a man who addressed me with self-assurance and a beaming countenance, just as if; throughout the while period of the Austrian republic, he had never even touched a single hair of the head of any National Socialist! Let me add, however, that once one has come into contact with gentlemen of this type, one soon learns to recognise them on sight.
The Papal Nuncio, on whom, as doyen of the diplomatic corps, falls the duty of delivering the congratulatory address at the New Year's ceremony, invariably tries to use the occasion to turn the conversation to the position of the Catholics in Germany. But I always manage to side-step him, asking him in a most amiable and pressing manner for news of the health of his Holiness and, when this engrossing subject has been dealt with, turning hastily to greet the remainder of the diplomatic corps. Except at this reception, I have on principle always refused to meet the Papal Nuncio, and fob him off on to Lammers instead. I have thus succeeded in withdrawing myself from all personal contact with the Vatican.
During the years of our struggle Rosenberg once submitted to me the draft. of a leading article he proposed publishing in reply to the attacks of the Catholic Church. I forbade him to publish it; and I still think it was a great mistake that Rosenberg ever let himself be drawn into a battle of words with the Church. He had absolutely nothing to gain from it; the hesitant Catholics of their own free will regarded the Church with a critical eye, and from the truly devout not only could he expect no fair hearing for his "heretical outpourings", but he must also have realised that the opposition propaganda would condemn him for his meddling in matters of faith and successfully point to him as a man guilty of mortal sin.
The fact that I remain silent in public over Church affairs is not in the least misunderstood by the sly foxes of the Catholic Church, and I am quite sure that a man like the Bishop von Galen knows full well that after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing. And, if he does not succeed in getting himself transferred in the meanwhile to the Collegium Germanium in Rome, he rest assured that in the balancing of our accounts, no "T" will remain uncrossed, no "I" undotted!
The attitude of the Bishop von Galen affords just one more argument in favour of terminating the Concordat after the war, substituting for it regional regulations and immediately withholding from the Church the financial support at present guaranteed to it by that treaty.
I am sure it will give my Reichsstatthalters great pleasure to inform some Bishop, who, from the State's point of view, has strayed from the straight and narrow path, that the Reichsgau, owing to a temporary lack of funds, is, unfortunately and to his own personal deep regret, compelled temporarily to stop such contributions as it was in the habit of making from time to time!
When once the Concordat and its financial obligations have been repudiated, and the Church becomes dependent on the offertory, it will pocket a bare 3 per cent of the money it at present gets from the State, and all the Bishops will come creeping and begging to the Reichsstatthalter.
It will be the duty of the Reichsstatthalter to make it quite clear after the war that he will deal with the Church in exactly; the same way as he deals with any other national association, and that he will not tolerate the intervention of any foreign influence. The Papal Nuncio can then return happily to Rome, we shall be saved the expense of an embassy at the Vatican, and the only people who will weep tears over the jobs that have been lost will be the Foreign Office! [pp 551-556]
256 8th of July 1942
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.
24th of July 1942
After this war is over I am going to stand rigorously on the standpoint
that I am going to knock these cities' heads together…if the Jews don't come out and we get rid of them to Madagascar or some other Jewish national state
August 1942
People sometimes say to me: 'Be careful! You will have 20 years of guerrilla warfare on your hands!' I am delighted at the prospect! . . . Germany will remain in a state of perpetual alertness.
1st of August 1942
The Church of to-day is nothing more than a hereditary joint stock company for the exploitation of human stupidity. [p 607]
I'll make these damned parsons feel the power of the state in a way they would never have believed possible. For the moment I am just keeping my eye upon them: if I ever have the slightest suspicion that they are getting dangerous, I will shoot the lot of them. This filthy reptile raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on. We have no sort of use for a fairy story invented by the Jews. The fate of a few filthy lousy Jews and epileptics is not worth bothering about.
[p 625]
293 20th of August 1942
I am no admirer of the poacher, particularly as I am a vegetarian.
308 2nd of September 1942
Personally, I cannot see what possible pleasure can be derived from shooting. … I have never fired at a hare in my life. I am neither poacher nor sportsman. …[But] if I excluded poachers from the Party, we should lose the support of entire districts.
September 1942
Our gains in the west may add a measure of charm to our possessions and constitute a contribution to our general security, but our Eastern conquests are infinitely more precious, for they are the foundation of our very existence. [p 667]
Have things changed much to-day, 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 sterilize. At least three-quarters of the questions asked would have defeated by 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! [P 674-675]
1943 13th of June – 24th of June
1944 13 March – 29th-30th of November
29th -30th of November 1944 Night
Jesus was most certainly not a Jew. The Jews would never have handed one of their own people to the Roman courts; they would have condemned Him themselves. It is quite probable that a large number of the descendants of the Roman legionaries, mostly Gauls, were living in Galilee, and Jesus was probably one of them. His mother may well have been a Jewess. Jesus fought against the materialism of His age, and, therefore, against the Jews.
Paul of Tarsus, who was originally one of the most stubborn enemies of the Christians, suddenly realized the immense possibilities of using, intelligently and for other ends, an idea which was exercising such great powers of fascination. He realized that the judicious exploitation of this idea among non-Jews would give him far greater power in the world than would the promise of material profit to the Jews themselves. It was then that the future St. Paul distorted with diabolical cunning the Christian idea. Out of this idea, which was a declaration of war on the golden calf, on the egotism and the materialism of the Jews, he created a rallying point for slaves of all kinds against the elite, the masters and those in dominant authority. The religion fabricated by Paul of Tarsus, which was later called Christianity, is nothing but the Communism of to-day. [P 721-722]