H E R M A N N     R A U S C H N I N G

 

 

THE VOICE OF

DESTRUCTION

 

 

 

 

G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COPYRIGHT, 1940, BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

 

 

 

 

 


 

CONTENTS

 

 

FOREWORD                                                                                                             vii

 

PART I—1932

 

CONTEMPORARY EVENTS                                                                          1

I           THE NEXT WAR                                                                                3

II          A MORNING AND EVENING ON THE OBERSALZBERG               12

III        EASTERN POLICY AND THE NEW GERMAN ARIS-

TOCRACY                                                                                           30

 

PART II— 1933

 

CONTEMPORARY EVENTS                                                              45

IV        ANTICHRIST                                                                                      47

V         AT THE DINNER TABLE                                                                   58

VI        "YES! WE ARE BARBARIANS!"                                                         77

VII       COFFEE AND CAKES                                                                                   85

VIII      ENRICH YOURSELVES                                                                      91

IX        AFTER LEAVING THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS                               104

 

PART III—1934

 

CONTEMPORARY EVENTS                                                              113

X         HITLER'S FOREIGN POLICY                                                                        115

XI        HITLER'S FOREIGN POLICY—Continued                                         135

XII       A DANGEROUS GAME                                                                      150

XIII      PAST THE CIVIL WAR                                                                       166

XIV      A NEW SOCIAL ORDER, A NEW ECONOMY                                     177

 

 

v

 

vi

 

XV       IS HITLER A DICTATOR?                                                                  194

XVI      MAGIC, BLACK AND WHITE                                                                        215

XVII    THE HUMAN SOLSTICE                                                                    243

XVIII   HITLER HIMSELF                                                                              255

XIX      THE EAGLE'S EYRIE                                                                         267


 

FOREWORD

THESE CONVERSATIONS with Hitler took place in the last year before his seizure of power and the first two years (1933 and '34) of the National Socialist regime. The writer jotted them down under the immediate influence of what he had heard. Much may be regarded as practically a verbatim report. Here, in the circle of his intimates, Hitler speaks openly about his innermost ideas—ideas which have been kept secret from the masses.

Only in exclusive circles is it known what Hitler really intends and what National Socialism is. Only among close friends has Hitler given free expression to his political and social aims. It is in such exclusive circles that I myself have heard them from his own lips.

To have published these conversations only six months ago, would have earned me at that time an accusation of malicious invention and defamation. Even hints which left the essentials unspoken aroused surprise and suspicion. As the author of The Revolution of Nihilism, I was repeatedly criticized because my statements contradicted the clear statement of National Socialist aims in Mein Kampf, for example, with regard to an alliance between National Socialism and Soviet Russia. As long as National Socialism was seen as nothing more than a German nationalist movement aiming at the removal of some of the worst features of the Versailles Peace

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viii   FOREWORD

Treaty, no one took seriously my frank revelation of the real aims of Hitler. Not until today is the world prepared to accept the truth: that Hitler and his movement are the apocalyptic riders of world annihilation.


 

Part 1—1932

CONTEMPORARY EVENTS

Jan. 7.             Chancellor (Dr. Brüning) discussed presidential election with Hitler and proposed extension of von Hindenburg's term.

Jan. 11.           Hitler rejected the proposed extension without an election.

Mar. 13.          Von Hindenburg obtained large majority with Hitler second on the poll.

April 13.          President ordered forcible dissolution of Hitler's army.

April 24.          In the Prussian State elections Hitlerites headed the poll, but not sufficiently to place them in power without allies.

May 25.           Fight in Prussian Diet between Hitlerites and Communists.

May 30.           Dr. Brüning and his Cabinet resigned.

May 31.           Von Papen nominated as Chancellor.

June 3.            President dissolved Reichstag.

June 9.            Hitler fined £50 for contempt of court and unseemly behavior as witness in a Munich Court.

June 15.          President raised ban on Hitler's private army.

July 17.           Hitler opened his electoral campaign.

July 31.           Hitler gained an increased representation in elections for Reichstag, but failed to secure majority.

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Aug. 1.             Raids by Nazi troops.

Aug. 13.           President rejected Hitler's claim to be Chancellor.

Aug. 22.           Riots in Beuthen, Silesia, after death sentence on five Hitlerites for murder of a Communist.

Sept. 2.            Death sentence on five Hitlerites commuted to imprisonment for life.

Nov. 6.             General Election in Germany.

Nov. 17.           Resignation of von Papen Cabinet.

Nov. 21.           President invited Hitler to explore possibilities of forming Cabinet under certain conditions.

Nov. 22.           Hitler declined to meet President's desires.

Dec. 2.             General von Schleicher became Chancellor and Baron von Neurath Foreign Minister.

 

CHAPTER I

THE NEXT WAR

 

"THE NEXT WAR will be quite different from the last world war. Infantry attacks and mass formations are obsolete. Interlocked frontal struggles lasting for years on petrified fronts will not return. I guarantee that. They were a degenerate form of war."

Hitler gazed fixedly across from the little glass veranda of his mountain eyrie to the precipitous wall opposite.

"We shall regain the superiority of free operations."

"Is it true, Herr Hitler, that Germany has prepared secret inventions which will break down every resistance, inventions against which even the French Maginot Line will be defenseless?" The Danzig Gauleiter (district leader) Albert Forster indicated by a sign to me that he had now led Hitler into his favorite subject.

"All armies have secret inventions. I am skeptical as to their value," Hitler returned.

"But the penetrative power of our new S-munitions. Isn't it true that electrical warfare yields entirely new possibilities of attack?" Forster persisted. "And the new poison gases and bacterial warfare? Will bacteria be used as a weapon in the next war?"

"A nation denied its rights may use any weapon, even bacterial warfare." Hitler's voice rose. "I have no scruples, and

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I will use whatever weapon I require. The new poison gases are horrible. But there is no difference between a slow death in barbed-wire entanglements and the agonized death of a gassed man or one poisoned by bacteria. In the future, whole nations will stand against each other, not merely hostile armies. We shall undermine the physical health of our enemies as we shall break down their moral resistance. I can well imagine that there is a future for bacterial warfare. We have not quite perfected it yet, but experiments are being made. I hear that they are very promising. But the use of this weapon is limited. Its significance lies in wearing down the enemy before the war. Our real wars will in fact all be fought before military operations begin. I can quite imagine that we might control Britain in this way. Or America."

"Do you believe, my Führer, that America will again interfere in European affairs?" asked the third of the company, the young leader of the then Danzig S.A.

"Certainly we shall prevent it from trying again," was the reply. "There are new weapons which are effective in such cases. America is permanently on the brink of revolution. It will be a simple matter for me to produce unrest and revolts in the United States, so that these gentry will have their hands full with their own affairs. We have no use for them in Europe."

"You said that we should poison the enemy with bacteria even before the war starts. How can that be done in peace-time?" Forster asked.

"Through agents, harmless commercial travelers. That is the surest method—at the moment the only effective one," Hitler replied. "The results would not be immediate. It would take several weeks, if not longer, for an epidemic to appear. Perhaps we shall introduce bacteria at the height of the war,

THE NEXT WAR   5

at the moment when the powers of resistance of the enemy are beginning to fail."

Our conversation then dealt with some details of a future gas and bacterial war. We sat in the rather narrow veranda of Wachenfeld House in the Obersalzberg. Hitler's magnificent Alsatian sheep dog lay at his feet. The mountains on the opposite side of the valley glowed above a pleasant meadow. It was a magical August morning of that austere, autumnal clarity which is so refreshing in the Bavarian highlands. Hitler hummed motifs from Wagnerian operas. He seemed to me preoccupied and moody. From having been communicative, he fell suddenly into a dry silence. The political moment was full of danger. National Socialism was approaching one of its crises. The Party was in a well-nigh desperate position. But Hitler's every word rang with the firm conviction that he would soon be in power, and able to lead the German people to a new destiny. We spoke of the result of the war, and the tragical turn of all German victories.

"We shall not capitulate—no, never," Hitler exclaimed. "We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us—a world in flames."

He hummed a characteristic motif from the Götterdämmerung. Our young friend of the S.A. broke the silence by saying that it was the superior armament of our enemies that had brought about the unhappy conclusion of the last war.

"It is not arms that decide, but the men behind them—always," Hitler rebuked him.

"But surely new inventions and superior weapons do decide the fate of nations and social classes? Is not that what you meant, my Führer, when you said the next war would be quite different from the last one? The new weapons, the technical inventions will change the whole course of the war.

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They make strategy completely superfluous. Today Germany is supreme in weapons and technical inventions."

"No, strategy does not change, at least not through technical inventions. That is quite wrong." Hitler's manner became lively. "Has anything changed since the battle of Cannae? Did the invention of gunpowder in the Middle Ages change the laws of strategy? I am skeptical as to the value of technical inventions. No technical novelty has ever permanently revolutionized warfare. Each technical advance is followed by another which cancels out its effects. Certainly the technique of warfare advances, and it will create many more novelties until the maximum of destruction is reached. But all this can only produce a temporary superiority."

Hess, at that time Hitler's private secretary, who had retired at the opening of the conversation, here intervened.

"The gentlemen do not seem to understand," he explained, "how Germany, in view of the limited value of technical inventions for warfare, will be able to escape getting bogged again for years in a war of position."

"Who says I'm going to start a war like those fools in 1914?" cried Hitler. "Are not all our efforts bent towards preventing this? Most people have no imagination." Here his face twisted into an expression of contempt. "They can imagine the future only in terms of their own petty experience. They are blind to the new, the surprising things. Even the generals are sterile. They are imprisoned in the coils of their technical knowledge. The creative genius stands always outside the circle of the experts.

"I," he went on, "have the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations. War has been erected into a secret science and surrounded with momentous solemnity. But war is the most natural, the most everyday matter. War is eternal,

THE NEXT WAR   7

war is universal. There is no beginning and there is no peace. War is life. Any struggle is war. War is the origin of all things. Let us go back to primitive life, the life of the savages. What is war but cunning, deception, delusion, attack and surprise? People have killed only when they could not achieve their aim in other ways. Merchants, robbers, warriors—at one time, all these were one. There is a broadened strategy, a war with intellectual weapons. What is the object of war, Forster? To make the enemy capitulate. If he does, I have the prospect of wiping him out. Why should I demoralize him by military means if I can do so better and more cheaply in other ways?"

Hitler went on to develop the outlines of his war as he has since widely tested it. At that time it seemed a novel and not very convincing doctrine. It was evident, however, that he had given much thought to these matters. He looked upon himself as a great strategist of a new kind, a future war-lord in a sense and to a degree hitherto unknown.

"When I wage war, Forster," he declared, "in the midst of peace, troops will suddenly appear, let us say, in Paris. They will wear French uniforms. They will march through the streets in broad daylight. No one will stop them. Everything has been thought out, prepared to the last detail. They will march to the headquarters of the General Staff. They will occupy the ministries, the Chamber of Deputies. Within a few minutes, France, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, will be robbed of their leading men. An army without a general staff! All political leaders out of the way! The confusion will be beyond belief. But I shall long have had relations with the men who will form a new government—a government to suit me.

"We shall find such men, we shall find them in every country. We shall not need to bribe them. They will come of their

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own accord. Ambition and delusion, party squabbles and self-seeking arrogance will drive them. Peace will be negotiated before the war has begun. I promise you, gentlemen, that the impossible is always successful. The most unlikely thing is the surest. We shall have enough volunteers, men like our S.A., trustworthy and ready for any sacrifice. We shall send them across the border in peace-time. Gradually. No one shall see in them anything but peaceful travelers. Today you don't believe me, gentlemen. But I will accomplish it, move by move. Perhaps we shall land at their flying-fields. We shall be capable of transporting, not only men, but arms, by air. No Maginot Line will stop us. Our strategy, Forster, is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself."

"Do you know," whispered the awestruck Forster, "a few weeks ago he laid a new plan before the East Prussian generals, a plan of defense against Polish aggression. They accepted the plan. Hitler is a genius, he is an expert in every field!"

Linsmayer, our S.A. leader, now asked to be allowed to photograph Hitler in a group with the rest of us. We went outside and took up our position beneath a steep cliff. Hess took the picture with Hitler in the center. We then walked a few steps down the road, which at that time was still narrow, and led from the back of the house into the woods. I looked across to the inn on the opposite side, Zum Türken. Summer visitors were standing outside training their field-glasses on us. Hess pointed to the green slope rising to a rounded summit that offered a good landing-field for 'planes, thus avoiding the inconvenient car-drive down to the valley. Hess had just been a successful competitor in a flying competition. Forster spoke to him about it.

"You must give that sort of thing up in future," Hitler told

THE NEXT WAR   9

him. "There are better things in store for you. I need you, Hess."

Hitler resumed the conversation.

"In the air we shall of course be supreme. The air offers many possibilities. We shall surpass all competitors. We have only one serious rival in this field: the English. The Slays will never learn to fight in the air. It is a manly weapon, a Germanic art of battle. I shall build the largest air fleet in the world. We shall have the most daring pilots. Of course we shall have a great army as well."

"Will you introduce universal conscription again?" Linsmayer asked.

"Not only that, but a universal conscription of labor to which Hindenburg's auxiliary conscription will seem a petty half-measure. We need armies, not only highly qualified special formations, but mass armies as well. But we shall not use them as in 1914. The place of artillery preparation for frontal attack by the infantry in trench warfare will in future be taken by revolutionary propaganda, to break down the enemy psychologically before the armies begin to function at all. The enemy people must be demoralized and ready to capitulate, driven into moral passivity, before military action can even be thought of."

He went on with growing enthusiasm: "How to achieve the moral break-down of the enemy before the war has started —that is the problem that interests me. Whoever has experienced war at the front will want to refrain from all avoidable bloodshed. Anything that helps preserve the precious German blood is good. We shall not shrink from the plotting of revolutions. Remember Sir Roger Casement and the Irish in the last war. We shall have friends who will help us in all the enemy countries. We shall know how to obtain such friends.

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Mental confusion, contradiction of feeling, indecisiveness, panic: these are our weapons. Of course you know," here Hitler turned to me, "the history of revolutions. It is always the same: the ruling classes capitulate. Why? Defeatism; they have no longer the will to conquer. The lessons of revolution, these are the secret of the new strategy. I have learnt from the Bolsheviks. I do not hesitate to say so. One always learns most from one's enemies. Do you know the doctrine of the coup d'etat? Study it. Then you will know our task."

We listened, none of us guessing how close we were to the realization of these ideas. I thought of the experiments of the highest commanders of the German Army during the last war with the Bolshevik leaders. What had seemed mere improvisations to disable the enemy were here reduced to a system, a universal law.

"I shall never start a war without the certainty that a demoralized enemy will succumb to the first stroke of a single gigantic attack." Hitler's eyes took on a fixed stare, and he began to shout. "When the enemy is demoralized from within, when he stands on the brink of revolution, when social unrest threatens—that is the right moment. A single blow must destroy him. Aerial attacks, stupendous in their mass effect, surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination from within, the murder of leading men, overwhelming attacks on all weak points in the enemy's defense, sudden attacks, all in the same second, without regard for reserves or losses: that is the war of the future. A gigantic, all-destroying blow. I do not consider consequences; I think only of this one thing."

He paused as if to give us time to take in this terrific pro-gram and some at least of its fearful implications. His next words were spoken with impressive calmness:

"I do not play at war. I shall not allow myself to be ordered

THE NEXT WAR   11

about by 'commanders-in-chief.' I shall make war. I shall determine the correct moment for attack. There is only one most favorable moment. I shall await it—with iron determination. I shall not miss it. I shall bend all my energies towards bringing it about. That is my mission. If I succeed in that, then I have the right to send youth to its death. I shall have saved as many lives then as could be saved. Gentlemen, let us not play at being heroes, but let us destroy the enemy. Generals, in spite of the lessons of the war, want to behave like chivalrous knights. They think war should be waged like the tourneys of the Middle Ages. I have no use for knights. I need revolutions. I have made the doctrines of revolution the basis of my policy."

Hitler paused again. His next words came like a peroration:

"I shall shrink from nothing. No so-called international law, no agreements will prevent me from making use of any advantage that offers. The next war will be unbelievably bloody and grim. But the most inhuman war, one which makes no distinction between military and civilian combatants, will at the same time be the kindest, because it will be the shortest. And together with the fullest use of our arms, we shall grind down our enemy with a war of nerves. We shall provoke a revolution in France as certainly as we shall not have one in Germany. Take my word for it. The French will hail me as their deliverer. The little man of the middle class will acclaim us as the bearers of a just social order and eternal peace. None of these people any longer want war and greatness. But I want war. To me all means will be right. My motto is not: 'Don't, whatever you do, annoy the enemy!' My motto is: 'Destroy him by all and any means.' I am the one who will wage the war!"

 

CHAPTER II

A MORNING AND EVENING ON THE
OBERSALZBERG

 

WE HAD COME down from Danzig— Forster, Linsmayer and I. Our train ran into Berchtesgaden shortly before midnight, and Hitler had sent his car to fetch us. It was a good twenty minutes' drive up a steep road to the Obersalzberg, but Hitler wanted to receive us there in spite of the lateness of the hour. It was a breakneck journey.

Hitler came forward to receive us. He had visitors, ladies. The house was a small, agreeably modest one. A lounge ex-tending through the whole width of the house was furnished in the style of a Bavarian peasant cottage. A plain bench surrounded the great fireplace. From a shrouded bird-cage came the frightened chirping of songbirds awakened by the bustle. Hess greeted us, and we were introduced to the other guests. Hitler offered us some cherry brandy, though he himself is a teetotaler. It was quite cold up there—the air of the mountains was harsh after a hot train journey.

That August of 1932 was not the first time I met Hitler. I had looked into his famous eyes before this. But now for the first time I saw him in his private home, which combined good middle-class taste with highland scenery and refined peasant style, as was customary in our pre-war middle class. Dimity curtains, and what is known as rustic furniture, everything

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ON THE OBERSALZBERG   13

small and dainty. Not really the right background for the future liberator of Germany.

What impression does Hitler himself make on one? This is a question I have been asked many times, and I must admit that as far as I personally am concerned, it was with mixed feelings that I made his acquaintance. The great popular orator in these surroundings was reduced to the insignificance of the petit bourgeois. There was a general atmosphere of geniality, but there was something impersonal in the furnishings. I myself was rather taken aback at the midnight company of decidedly over-blown ladies. Did he really crave the credulous devotion of women to retain his belief in himself? Hitler is not physically attractive. Everyone knows that today. But at that time stories were circulated in the party and among sympathizers about his deep blue eyes. They are neither deep nor blue. His look is staring or dead, and lacks the brilliance and sparkle of genuine animation. The timbre of his harsh, uncommon voice is repellent to the North German. The tone is full, but forced, as though his nose were blocked. Since then this voice, guttural and threatening, has become familiar to the whole world. It embodies the torment of these years.

There is something peculiar about the magic of a personality. I have found in myself and others that one succumbs to such magic only if one wishes to succumb to it. I have noticed that Hitler made the strongest impression on such people as were either highly suggestible or somewhat effeminate or accustomed by their education and social background to formalism and hero-worship. Hitler's physical appearance certainly does not heighten the impression made by his personality. A receding forehead, with the lank hair falling over it; a short, unimposing stature, with limbs somehow ill-fitting and awkward; an expressionless mouth beneath the little brush of a

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mustache—such are the traits of the outer man. His only charm lies perhaps in his hands, which are strikingly well-shaped and expressive. What a difference to the strikingly youthful, intelligent countenance shown in Napoleon's death-mask!

Hitler greeted us cheerfully. It was shortly after the perpetration of a certain bestial murder in Upper Silesia. The National Socialists had dragged a political opponent out of his bed in the middle of the night and trampled him to death. Von Papen, then the Reich Chancellor, the man who was later to implement Hitler's summoning to power, had issued sharp decrees against these political criminals. The murderers of Potempa were condemned to death. Hitler, in a sensational telegram, had publicly announced his solidarity with the murderers. He justified their deed and called them his comrades. This cost him many sympathies at that time, and his star began to fade.

Our conversation dealt with the latest events. Hitler was indignant at the opposition shown him by the nationalist middle class. He stigmatized them as the real enemies of Germany.

"I shall have the Stahlhelm dissolved," he declared with the firmness of a man who is sure of his case. (The Stahlhelm was a union of national soldiers of the front, the real defense corps of the German Nationalists.) Then he castigated what he considered the dishonest and criminal policy of Papen. He attacked the death sentence of the court, calling it a mockery of justice. The violence of his tone showed how much he felt he had exposed himself by his telegram.

"Such savage judgments," he said, "are never forgotten by a people. In such critical times as these, a nation will suffer and forget anything done openly in the political struggle. If I were to allow the S.A. a free hand, or if twenty or thirty

ON THE OBERSALZBERG   15

thousand Germans were to lose their lives in street fighting, the nation would be able to forget it. The nation would console itself. Such things are like the incidents of the open battlefield. But a miscarriage of justice, a cold and considered judgment, a death sentence that outrages the unfailing moral sense of the people, the branding as common murderers and the execution of men who have acted from purely patriotic motives—that is something that the nation will not forget or forgive."

I must confess that at the time I was influenced by this passionate pleading, though, like most people, I saw in the abominable Potempa murder only a foul stain on the brown shirt, which was at that time still regarded as an honorable uniform. How many brutal murders and tortures have been done since then by S.A. and S.S. alike, not in the heat of national passion, but in the lust of cruelty or with sober calculation! I do not know whether Hitler ever recalled, in all his many death sentences on alleged traitors to their country, his own comment on Papen's judgment in the open court. Probably not. Hitler, like most of his hysterical Gauleiter, like the Danziger Forster, for instance, can change his opinions completely without even knowing that he is doing so.

"Papen will have to answer for this one day," Hitler said. "I guarantee that. And the Stahlhelm will get its accounts settled. I will have it dissolved for its treacherous attacks on my S.A. It has lowered itself to the level of the Red Front."

It was late, and the ladies intervened. Hitler had allowed himself to be carried away in spite of the late hour. A sleep-less night was before him. We exchanged only a few further unimportant remarks. Hitler denounced the monotony of travel by air as compared with the ever-changing and delightful glimpses of the landscape, and of country and city life,

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obtained from a motor car. He advised us to return home by car. He himself, after his first amazement at the view from above, had long since ceased to enjoy air travel.

Hess indicated that we were to retire, consoling us with the prospect of the following morning. He would indicate to us when we might bring up our own problems. He accompanied us to the door. It was long past midnight, but fresh and clear. Already the gray of dawn was beginning to show. Linsmayer and I walked the short distance across to the Türken. Forster was stopping at another house.


"WE MUST BE RUTHLESS"

I slept badly, partly, perhaps, owing to the unaccustomed air of the mountains, which affects us plain-dwellers, but also because I couldn't get out of my mind what I had heard. I shared a room with Linsmayer. This young S.A. leader was one of the many charming, honest and genuinely patriotic young men who joined the movement from the purest and noblest motives. It is particularly necessary to recall this today for the benefit of those who paint everything in black and white, and do not understand that countless Germans allowed themselves to be carried away on a strident current, firmly believing in the necessity of their sacrifice. Young fellows like Linsmayer felt genuinely that they were making the sacrifice of their youth in a great cause.

It was already late when we received a message that Hitler was up and wished to speak to us. Our conversation opened on the theme of the previous evening.

"We must be ruthless," said Hitler. "We must regain our clear conscience as to ruthlessness. Only thus shall we purge our people of their softness and sentimental philistinism,

ON THE OBERSALZBERG   17

'Gemütlichkeit' and their degenerate delight in beer-swilling. We have no more time for fine sentiments. We must compel our people to greatness if they are to fulfill their historic mission.

"I know," he resumed after a pause, "that I must be a harsh master. I must demand harshness from myself. My task is more difficult than Bismarck's or any other German's. I must first create the nation before even beginning to tackle the national tasks before us."

Everyone who knew Hitler during the early years of struggle knows that he has by nature an easily moved and unmistakably sentimental temperament, with a tendency towards emotionalism and romanticism. His convulsions of weeping in all emotional crises are by no means merely a matter of nerves. The maudlin, sobbing tone in which, for example, he appealed to the Berlin S.A. when the Stennes conflict threatened to split the party was genuine. For this very reason, there lies behind Hitler's emphasis on brutality and ruthlessness the desolation of a forced and artificial inhumanity, not the amorality of the genuine brute, which has after all something of the power of a natural force. Nevertheless, in the harshness and unexampled cynicism of Hitler there is something more than the repressed effect of a hypersensitiveness which has handicapped its bearer. It is the urge to reprisal and vengeance, a truly Russian-nihilistic feeling.

Hitler's thoughts at this time were wrestling with the temptation to break his own resolve to reach power by legitimate means only. He was being tempted to place himself in possession of the supreme power by a bloody revolution, a "march on Berlin." Hitler was continually being implored by his closest confederates to drop his restraint and take up the revolutionary struggle. He himself was torn between his own

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revolutionary temperament, which impelled him to passionate action, and his political astuteness, which warned him to take the safe road of political combinations and postpone his "revenge" till later.

There is not the slightest doubt that an open outbreak of the National Socialist revolution was imminent at the time of, the autumn elections of 1932. It would have meant the end of the party. The rising would have been ruthlessly suppressed by the Reichswehr. Over and over again in conversation this sentence cropped up: "Clear the streets for the brown battalions!" For himself and his friends, Hitler painted the chances of a surprise occupation of the key points of political and economic power, and he lingered with special interest over the chances of a bloody destruction of Marxist resistance in the streets. Events of the summer revealed the extent to which plans for a coup were already elaborated. They were not the sporadic enterprises of local party leaders, but came from Hitler himself. They suited his temperament, the needs of his imagination and his conception of historical greatness as not to be achieved without the spilling of blood.

We can see here the same conflict of feeling as that which recently caused the Führer of the Third Reich to vacillate between his desire to be "the greatest general of all times" and the devious road of "combinations," the art of maneuvering himself into power, of gaining his world empire by cunning. Incidentally, Hitler's followers reproached him with the charge that he had missed the most favorable moment to strike. And in truth the economic crisis began in 1932 to ease a little. The influx into the party fell off. Hitler's opponents began to draw together, and seemed well in the running. Driven to the wall, outflanked in all his chances of action, Hitler saw his plans to capture power melting away.

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The Reich presidential election was a heavy defeat for his party. After Papen's accession to power, he saw the hated rival, with the ease and nonchalance of the young cavalry officer, clearing many of the political hurdles that Hitler had reserved as his own objectives, such as, for instance, the direction of the Prussian police and the removal of the basis of Marxist influence in Prussia. Urged to action by his fiery impatience and passion, he had nevertheless to play the part of an idle summer visitor to the Bavarian mountains, while time passed and Papen anticipated his plans.


THE PLAN IN THE DRAWER

Hitler's questions as to the position in Danzig led us directly to the economic problems. I mentioned Hitler's insistence that the party must compose a program for the creation of employment. The highly amateur fashion in which ambitious experts in all varieties of labor problems had collated their plans, so as to form some sort of joint program for ending unemployment, had awakened great doubts as to whether the party was to be taken seriously. Such doubts were not re-moved by the party's two economic and technical experts, the civil engineers Feder and Lawaczek, whose curious theories, propounded in "intellectual gatherings," invited the ridicule of economists and caused acute embarrassment to all intelligent party members. I therefore asked Hitler, whose relations with Feder were not at the time known to me, about the possibility of financing the economic program. I could not see, I remarked, that Feder's theory was anything but financing by means of an inflation.

"How do you mean?" said Hitler, eyeing me with displeasure. "I am not worrying about financing our program.

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You may safely leave that to me. As long as speculators are kept out, there are no difficulties."

"But," I ventured to interpose, "it will not be possible to keep prices stable if the creation of employment is financed thus. Feder's money theory will also have an inflationary effect."

"You get inflation if you want inflation," Hitler retorted angrily. "Inflation is lack of discipline—lack of discipline in the buyers, and lack of discipline in the sellers. I will see to it that prices remain stable. That is what my S.A. is for. Woe to the men who raise prices! We need no legal instruments for that. It will be done by the party alone. You shall see—if our S.A. once clean up a shop, such things will not happen a second time."

Forster nodded contentedly. This type of economic discipline appealed to him.

"Besides," Hitler continued, "I do not worry about the theories of Feder and Lawaczek. I have a gift for tracing back all theories to their roots in reality. I have nothing to do with pipe-dreams. You need not take this man Feder and his associates literally, even though officially the party does so. Let them talk as they please. When I am in power, I shall see to it that they do no mischief. If these men cause confusion, Forster, you will no longer allow them to speak. These people cannot think simply. Everything has got to be complicated. I have the gift of simplification, and then everything works itself out. Difficulties exist only in the imagination!"

Hitler's repudiation of Feder was at that time new to me. It was interesting as an indication of Hitler's supremacy over his entourage. There is no doubt that he did possess this gift of simplification, even in a creative sense, up to a point. He has the gift, like many self-taught men, of breaking through the

ON THE OBERSALZBERG   21

wall of prejudices and conventional theories of the experts, and in so doing, he has frequently discovered amazing truths. Hitler continued to fulminate:

"I shall not be deceived by these captains of industry either! Captains indeed! I should like to know what ships they navigate! They are stupid fools who cannot see beyond the wares they peddle! The better one gets to know them, the less one respects them."

Hitler made a disdainful gesture with his hand. Forster began to wax enthusiastic over the plans for employment that had been collected by a so-called "technical engineering division" in his district against the time when they should seize power. I observed Hitler's impatience and suggested that this was merely a rough draft; elaboration was still lacking. It seemed to me that a guiding principle would have to classify the various projects for financing.

"It all depends on the initial spark," Hitler returned. "How I shall bring that about is of no interest. The economic life of the country must be set in motion, and we must close the circle so that our economic strength is not drained out of the country. I can accomplish just as much by rearmament as by housing or colonization. I can also put more money in the hands of the unemployed, so that they may cover their needs. In this way I create purchasing power and additional trade. But these are simple, uncomplicated processes which we shall master by sheer determination not to shrink from unavoidable difficulties. None of this is a secret science, as the professors pretend, but a matter of sound sense and will-power."

Hitler did not appear to attach much importance to the employment plans. Evidently they were to him more a mental distraction in this period of complete inactivity, a means of occupying his mind with town planning, colonization, agri-

22   THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION

cultural improvement and technical progress. The whole "plan in the drawer" was, like so much else, merely a means to an end. It was a scintillating soap-bubble, not serious labor. The party leader himself set no store by these efforts. He allowed them to be made public for propaganda purposes, for pedagogical reasons, but was entirely indifferent as to the results. In other words, looked at in the light of day, there was nothing in the famous drawer. The sum of the expert equipment with which Hitler seized power consisted in his unlimited belief in himself, his faith that he could deal with things, in accordance with the primitive, but effective maxim: orders will be carried out. Haphazard, perhaps, but it worked for a time, and later he would see.

Nevertheless, Hitler's attitude showed both an open-mindedness and a peasant cunning that one is tempted to describe as sublime. The empty drawer, even later, was most effective in Hitler's view. The difficulties that arose were due to the hostility of the reactionaries who would have liked to sabotage his purposes. Hitler did not recognize any difficulties as inherent in a problem. He saw only human incompetence and human ill-will.

Incidentally he was fortunate in his empty drawer. Herr Schacht filled the yawning void with his ingenious projects. It is pretty certain that without this "magician" Hitler's self-assurance would soon have suffered a number of heavy blows. A pity! It thus became possible for Hitler, shortly before Schacht's dismissal, to refuse the latter's demands for a sterner control of expenses. Hitler was always able to point to his own past financial successes. Whenever, in the "struggle for power," he had demanded money from Schwarz, the party treasurer, Schwarz had regularly replied:

"Herr Hitler, there are no funds."

ON THE OBERSALZBERG   23

Then Hitler had pounded his fist on the table and shouted: "Tomorrow morning, Schwarz, I must have a thousand marks!"

And lo! and behold, next morning the thousand marks were there.

"Where he got them doesn't interest me!" Hitler would say.

The question of finance, indeed, has never troubled him much. For a time, perhaps, that was an added strength. At any rate, all the Gauleiter imitated him in it.

"There is money, unlimited money," Forster, our Danzig leader, replied to my doubts as to the financing of his ambitious building plans. At the time of our visit to Hitler he was chiefly interested in the problem of technical inventions.

"Herr Hitler," he resumed the conversation, after the Führer had been for some time lost in a brown study, "what is your opinion of new, revolutionary inventions? Can we count on any such? Is it not a fact that only such inventions compel industrialists to make really big investments, and that it is in this way that industry flourishes again, and a permanent prosperity is created? I mean"—apparently the implications were not entirely clear to Forster—"a further technical improvement of the whole of existence, as after the invention of the steam engine—an improvement of the electrical industry, and then of machines and chemicals?"

I pointed out that Lawaczek himself believed that the day of the great, revolutionizing inventions were past. This was the very reason why he had formulated his unconvincing theory as to the cheap storage of electrical power by means of the electrolytic production of hydrogen and his systematic development of graded falls as a means of producing cheap electric current.

24   THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION

"Engineers are fools," Hitler cut in rudely. "They have an occasional idea that might be useful, but it becomes madness if it is generalized. Let Lawaczek build his turbines, and not try to invent industrial booms. Don't get mixed up with him. I know his hobby-horse. This is all nonsense, gentlemen. History does not repeat itself. What was valid in the nineteenth century is no longer so in the twentieth. Inventions no longer appear of their own accord as a piece of unprecedented good fortune. Today we control them. We can foretell when and where inventions are to be expected. But the crucial point is this: we do not develop them. We allow the possibilities to molder. It is all a question of the will. One can no longer allow things to work themselves out. The wealthy countries that have everything no longer need inventions. What should they do with them? They are merely an embarrassment. They want to get rich in the old way. They want to sleep, these rich countries—Britain, France, America."

He paused; and then went on excitedly, gesticulating with his hands and pounding the table, his voice rising in crescendo:

"In one respect Lawaczek is right: what was once accident must become planned. We must do away with accident. We can! This is the meaning of the 'great works' that states undertake today—not the speculators and the bank Jews, in whose interests it is that nothing should go forward. For this reason we must liberate Germany from all such connections. We must stand on our own feet.

"But Germany, as it is today, is not a biological unit. It will be Germany only when it is Europe as well. Without power over Europe we must perish. Germany is Europe. I give you my guarantee that there will be no more unemployment in Europe. An unequaled renaissance will come. We shall awaken the world from its sleep. We shall undertake tasks of which

ON THE OBERSALZBERG   25

the world does not dream today. And we shall perform them successfully. But we must have Europe and its colonies. Germany is only a beginning. No European country today is a complete whole. But Europe is for us. Whoever conquers it will press his seal on the coming age. We are the chosen. If we fail, we shall die out, as all Europe's nations will degenerate. The stake is life, or death. Lawaczek, Feder—they're old women! I have no use for their bourgeois wisdom!"

Hitler broke off. It was the first time I had heard anything of his real aims.


DANZIG, FREE CITY AND SANCTUARY

But our immediate business was Danzig. From these great plans we had to return to the ugly reality. The National Socialist Party in Danzig was at that time in a difficult position. Unlike its position in the Reich, the party was not in the op-position but, as the strongest party since 1930, supported a minority government in which German nationalists were the leading influence. Since the latter were more or less openly working against the National Socialists, Forster desired a new election; this was being resisted by the Danzig Senate. He therefore wished now to withdraw his support from the government in order to undermine it. The question was: did Hitler approve of the overthrow of the government, and was the opposition of the National Socialists in Danzig in his interests politically? It might have seemed an irrelevant question, but it gained significance in the light of the general position of the entire party at that time.

The first question Hitler put to us was this:

"Has Danzig got an extradition agreement with Germany?" I did not at once understand, and replied that we had at

26   THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION

any rate an agreement arranging for mutual legal aid. Hitler elucidated his meaning:

"If the German Reich demands it, is Danzig compelled to hand over political personalities of German citizenship residing in Danzig?"

I still failed to see what Hitler was driving at, but I gave him a negative reply. It was not the custom to hand over political personalities if they had committed no criminal act.

"It might," Hitler explained, "be necessary for me to transfer my party headquarters outside German territory. Conditions may become more difficult for our party very soon. It might, therefore, be my intention to carry on the leadership temporarily from abroad. In Germany itself we might be subjected to such great pressure as to prevent our free functioning. I must be prepared for any eventuality, and possibly even leave Germany overnight. Danzig would be a supremely suitable spot, in the immediate vicinity of the German frontier. I might make my decision about an election in Danzig dependent on whether Danzig could offer me the guarantees I require."

I replied that certainly the present government of Danzig would not be likely to offer sufficient guarantees for the security of the party's political work if this should be prohibited in the Reich, even though we probably need not fear any actual extradition for political reasons.

He turned to Forster:

"Forster, we must consider whether it would not be wiser to make friends with the present government of Danzig, rather than precipitate an election which may not make it possible for us to challenge the new government alone."

Forster did not reply at once.

ON THE OBERSALZBERG   27

"What is the earliest date at which you could have an election?" Hitler asked.

"The late autumn," Forster replied.

Hitler shrugged his shoulders.

"That's too late."

We had an extended discussion of the possibilities of an election and the chances of persuading the present government to permit the setting up of Hitler's headquarters in Danzig. I could not overlook the probability that if the party and the S.A. were to be prohibited in Germany, Danzig would follow suit, as this would offer the present minority government the most favorable opportunity of getting rid of its guardian. For the rest, Hitler's estimate of the position was a complete surprise to me. I did not hear until later that the German government had in fact considered the possibility of a general dissolution of the National Socialist party, and had shelved it temporarily only under pressure from the Reichswehr. The work of an underground party interested Hitler—fascinated him, in fact, since he expected to receive fresh stimulation from an illegal status. He could then carry on the struggle more ruthlessly, more treacherously, as it were. Hitler gave us to understand that his will was "ungovernable," that he was determined to succeed all the more, that such proscription would only end very soon in the triumph of the party. But he must have a free hand. He must not be under police supervision.

We came to no conclusion. Danzig, the free city, as a sanctuary for the once more persecuted, once more illegal National Socialist party, remained an unsettled project, and remained so largely because the Papen government preferred not to outlaw the party. In view, however, of Danzig's subsequent position as the storm-center of a world crisis, it is not

28   THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION

without irony that Hitler was at one time strongly in favor of Danzig as an independent state, and that he intended to exploit this independence for his own safety.

We began next to discuss the dangerous position in East Prussia, and the rumors of a Polish attack on it. Hitler spoke of the worsening of relations with Poland with undisguised satisfaction. This, incidentally, was quite in line with his attitude soon afterwards towards Pomerania, where the local party pronounced that it was not interested in the possibility of an attack by Poland on East Prussia, Danzig or Pomerania. In any case the party would await developments. Not for the first or the last time Hitler proved that his party interests far outweighed the common national interests.

We then began to discuss the coming war, and the secret armament and defense measures of the Reich. Even at that time, Hitler thought the chances of an isolated war against Poland very favorable. He had a very poor opinion of the Polish soldier, whom he classed with the Rumanian and Italian, as the worst in Europe. But he denied that he would initiate his coming to power with a war, even against the Poles. On the contrary, he would avoid anything that might increase tension. For his part, he was even prepared to make a treaty with the Poles.

"We must be strong first. Everything else will follow in due course. I shall advance step by step. Never two steps at once. Remember that, Forster," he added to his acolyte.

Then followed the conversation on war which I have already reported.

The hour was late. Hess had come in more than once. For a moment Hitler left us to ourselves. He looked down into the valley. Hess explained the surroundings, and pointed in the direction of Salzburg. He told us that Hitler looked with

ON THE OBERSALZBERG   29

unrelenting hatred at the frontier which closed to him the country of his birth. We sensed that something more than political and national feelings were involved here. This was something deeply personal.

Hitler bade us farewell. We took with us some reflections on our Danzig policy. Danzig was a place with a great future. In a German Europe it would have a special mission. It would become a city of teeming millions in the center of natural lines of strength. That was Hitler's opinion. I found the basis of this belief, which ran counter to the current conception of a dying Danzig, a mere city of curios, in the ideas of a former adviser of Hitler's, a civil engineer named Plaichinger, who has remained unknown because of his early death. I visited him in Munich, and he expressed similar opinions of a future Great Danzig, the Antwerp of the Baltic.

We took our leave of Hess. A car was waiting for us which drove us down to Munich. As we left the Obersalzberg, Goebbels was just getting out of his car. He stumped heavily on his club-foot up the narrow path from the road leading to Hitler's mountain abode. He was spinning the web in which one day the fly, Germany, would be caught.

 

CHAPTER III

EASTERN POLICY AND THE NEW
GERMAN ARISTOCRACY

 

THE FIRST BROWN House in Munich was a characteristic blend of unadorned modern office building and garish extravagance. Steel furniture, archives, complicated card-index systems: that was one side of it. The hall of senators, flags, color symbolism and other kinds of symbolism, bad paintings: that was the other. I had occasion to sit opposite such a painting once for a few hours while listening to a confidential discussion between Hitler and some of his advisers. The picture was called "Triumph of the Movement," or words to that effect. On a tremendous plain, a huge crowd was thronging, as though on the Day of Judgment, through storms and massed clouds towards a brightly shining swastika in the sky. An incredible piece of vulgarity, a kind of Wagnerized National Socialism, this picture hung in what is known as the small conference hall in the second story.

Only a very small circle had been invited here at Darré's instance in the summer of 1932 to discuss the main lines of an "Eastern policy." Darré, the youngest party member among the later "Reich leaders," Hitler's immediate entourage, was specially eager to clarify the future Eastern policy of Germany. It is true that its main outlines were already sketched in Mein Kampf. But the political consequences of the agri-

30

EASTERN POLICY AND NEW ARISTOCRACY 31

cultural and population policy were not enumerated in that vague and romantically utopian picture. Rosenberg, too, had left all the details undecided.

Darré, as a trained agriculturist, had also accepted responsibility for the practical and scientific accomplishment of the National Socialist principle of race and racial hygiene. He was engaged in the elaboration of a huge and detailed register of the biological heritage of the National Socialist élite, above all the S.S. Commissioned by Himmler, he was working on the pedigree of the new aristocracy—a pedigree for the planned breeding of a race of Herren, on the tested principles employed by all cattle-breeders' associations. Darré showed me his filing-cabinets and the register. At that time Himmler had just decreed that members of the S.S. might only marry by special permission, which was not granted until the couple had undergone searching biological tests.

"The new aristocracy will arise in this way. 'We shall gather in the best blood only," said Darré, pointing to his iron filing-cabinets. "Just as we have again produced the old Hanover type of horse from sires and dams who had little of the old purity left, so we shall again, in the course of generations, breed the pure type of the Nordic German by means of recessive crossing. Perhaps we shall not be able to purify the whole of the German nation again. But the new German aristocracy will be a pure breed in the literal sense of the term."

I looked at the great quarto sheets of the register.

"I want all my peasant leaders to enter the S.S.," Darré said. "We shall breed the new aristocracy from the human reserves of the S.S. We shall do systematically and on the basis of scientific, biological knowledge what the old blood aristocracy of former days did by instinct. In this transitional

32   THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION

era we must replace instinct by rational measures. We shall in the first instance make use of the peasantry, insofar as it has the sense to join the movement. We shall also make use of the good heritage of all the old blood aristocracy that has remained pure. I can visualize the formation of 'halls of nobility,' where the new aristocracy, deeply rooted in the soil, will at the same time assume the mission of leadership among alien races. In other words, these halls of nobility will be situated in the foreign-language districts of our future empire."

Darré, whose second wife was a member of an old German-Baltic noble family, was thoroughly revolutionizing the petty-bourgeois socialist conceptions of the party, replacing them by plans for an entirely different type of German agrarian policy. Hitler, who was at that time trying to win over to his views the great landowners east of the Elbe, regarded Darré's ideas with the greatest sympathy. The discussion to which Darré had been invited, with Hitler's approval, dealt in fact with the future Eastern policy as the basis of a new German agrarian and an anti-liberal population plan.

A member of Darré's staff now proceeded to lecture on the problems of space involved in an "Eastern space policy," as Darré called the German Eastern policy. There would have to be, said the lecturer, an alliance of states, such as had in fact begun to develop in the last war. A core of iron, a central great power; Bohemia, Moravia, Austria as integral parts of it; then a circle of smaller, dependent titular states: this, the lecturer explained, was the skeleton of the German empire. The Baltic states, a central Poland, severely cut back to strictly ethnographical lines and without an outlet onto the Baltic, a larger Hungary, Serbia and Croatia cut up into their component parts, a diminished Rumania, a Ukraine divided into a

EASTERN POLICY AND NEW ARISTOCRACY 33

number of independent districts, South Russian and Caucasian states: this was the future Reich alliance that was to give Germany the basis of her might. In the northeast, the wedge of Finland, in the southeast, Georgia or Gruziya. But they would all be held together by a common army, a common trade and currency, a common foreign policy.

All this, however, the lecturer continued, would remain an idle dream, unless a planned policy of colonization and depopulation were carried out. Yes, a depopulation policy. The great danger for the great white Nordic race was the tremendous biological fertility of the East Baltic races, which, like everything inferior, made up for poor quality by greater quantity, that is to say, by the fecundity of their women. Through the agrarian bolshevism of the post-war period, namely, the splitting up of the large estates among small peasant settlers, this fertility had been increased to an alarming extent. It was necessary to detach the small Slav peasant from the land, and transform him into a landless laborer in order to reduce his fruitfulness. It was necessary to bring agricultural lands predominantly into the hands of the German Herren (squire) class. "The large-scale farmer in the Eastern area must always be a German." The alien peasant must again become a laborer, even an agricultural casual laborer for the Reich itself, or an unskilled industrial worker.

Another speaker further elaborated the political aspect of the agricultural problem. It was important that there should be no colonization within Germany. This was a typically liberal method of evading the real problem. Colonization always meant settlement in racially alien space, it meant the conquest of new land.

"The settlement notions of a Brüning and company are criminal!" cried the speaker, excitedly. "They seduce the

34   THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION

German people to the Chinese ideal. No internal colonization; only genuine colonization by conquest! No small peasantry; only large-scale farming, the creation of a new squirearchy!"

Even the East Prussian policy of pre-war days had been a total misunderstanding of this great problem, due of course to the spirit of the Kaiser-Wilhelm epoch, which was polluted with liberalism. And this was the result, diametrically opposed to the desired one: an increase in the Slav population and not of the German one. The agrarian bolshevism of systematically destroying the great estates would have to be firmly suppressed. It was necessary to re-create from the dwarfed West German farms large agricultural estates capable of employing horses and machinery. It was necessary to re-create in the states resulting from the Versailles Treaty the ruined German property, above all to transfer the large estates in the whole of the Eastern territory to German hands. An entail law would have to be introduced in Germany which would force the non-inheriting issue to emigrate to the east and themselves becoming large-scale farmers there. The small farms in Germany would be combined and the agricultural population thus dislodged.

This return to agriculture would never take place in Germany itself, but only in a great, German-ruled area in the east conquered by National Socialism. With the exception of a certain race, the German agricultural laborer would become a farmer himself, or a skilled industrial worker. Casual laborers of alien races would carry out agricultural labor at low wages. With the creation of a modern form of serfdom or, if you wished, slavery, human culture could not be further developed. At the same time, this was the only way in which an agricultural price policy could be followed which would permit German agricultural prices to approach those of the inter-

EASTERN POLICY AND NEW ARISTOCRACY 35

national markets, a thing which would sooner or later be indispensable.

Darré then addressed the meeting himself. Slav fertility must be broken, that was one task. The second was to create and firmly establish a German Herren-class. That was the ultimate meaning of the "Eastern space" policy. Instead of a horizontal classification of European races, there must be a vertical one. This meant that a German élite was destined to be the Herren-class of Europe, and ultimately of the world. He would give this élite the true Germanic name of Adel (aristocracy). But to be called to this position they must not only be trained mentally, physically and politically, but also nurtured biologically, that is, gradually and systematically pure-bred. Unless this were done, there was a danger that this class, in alien racial surroundings, open to the temptations of its special social privileges, would rapidly deteriorate.

A new social structure was therefore necessary in the Germany and the Europe of the future. It was necessary to re-constitute a class society, or, more accurately, a hierarchy. But this could no longer be done within such limited confines as Germany, but must be applied to a whole continent, a whole universe. The whole gigantic problem must be logically planned. In the building-up of a new, healthy social organism, it was at the same time necessary to hasten by every means the disintegration of the old, dying one. The middle class was to be uprooted as well as the working class. But the mental consequences must also be faced. It was necessary to have the courage for illiteracy and heathendom alike. Education and knowledge held definite dangers for the Herren-class. But in another sense they also endangered the maintenance of a slave class. The ideal of universal education had long been obsolete. It was not until knowledge recovered its character of a secret

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science, and was no longer universally available, that it would again exercise its normal function, which was to be a means of ruling human, as well as extrahuman, nature. But this brought us back once more to the importance of reconstituting a European blood aristocracy, which National Socialism opposed to the international, liberal, money aristocracy.

Just as the German peasantry was the eternal blood source of the German people, and must as such be specially fostered, so must the new aristocracy be secured for all time and protected against the dangers of degeneration by being subjected to the most stringent demands of biological selection, and bound in very special ways to agriculture and the soil. It was the special function of aristocracy beyond the borders of German soil to maintain itself as the outpost of German supremacy. The importance of the East German Junker class had been just this, that they were the masters, the rulers, of a subject population. This had developed their Herren-qualities, and this was why the Prussian Junker had been the finest of German types as long as he had remained untainted by liberalism and Jewish blood relationship. The "new aristocracy of blood and soil" must now take a similar mission upon itself, not only in the interest of its class, but quite consciously in the service of the whole nation. Even those of the National Socialist leaders who had no relations with agriculture would one day have to take over a landed estate, an odal* held in fee tail for their kin. Similarly, the political recruits of the movement would in the more distant future be drawn exclusively from these aristocratic families, whose function it was to rule in the German mastery of the world. Gigantic

* "Among the early and medieval Teutonic peoples, especially Scandinavians, the heritable land held by various odalmen constituting a family or kindred of freeborn tribesmen."—Webster.

EASTERN POLICY AND NEW ARISTOCRACY 37

tasks were before us. It would be difficult to perfect their technique in the time left before the ultimate total breakdown.

"My party comrades," Hitler replied to this, "what we have discussed here must remain confidential. I think some of our party comrades might grievously misunderstand it. But Darré is right. We must strike off the egg-shell of liberalism, which unconsciously we still carry on our backs. This is difficult for many of us. We have gathered our ideas from every branch and twig by the wayside of life, and no longer know their origin.

"In the main I approve what has been said about our eastern, or 'Eastern space' policy. Only one thing, my party comrades, you must always remember. We shall never be great statesmen unless we have a nucleus of might at the center as hard and firm as steel. A nucleus of eighty to one hundred million colonizing Germans! My first task will therefore be to create this nucleus which will not only make us invincible, but will assure to us once and for all time the decisive ascendancy over all the European nations. Once we have succeeded in this, we shall find everything else comparatively simple.

"Part of this nucleus is Austria. That goes without saying. But Bohemia and Moravia also belong to it, as well as the western regions of Poland as far as certain natural strategical frontiers. Moreover—and this you must not overlook—the Baltic states, too, are part of it—those states which for centuries have had a thin upper crust of Germanhood. Today in all these regions, alien races predominate. It will be our duty, if we wish to found our greater Reich for all time, to remove these races. There is no excuse for neglecting this. Our age provides us with the technical possibilities for carrying through such transfers of population comparatively easily.

38   THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION

Besides, the post-war period brought with it an internal migration of many millions of people, compared to which our enter-prise will seem a trifle.

"The Bohemian-Moravian basin and the eastern districts bordering on Germany will be colonized with German peasants. The Czechs and the Bohemians we shall transplant to Siberia or the Volhynian regions, and we shall set up reserves for them in the new allied states. The Czechs must get out of Central Europe. As long as they remain, they will always be a center of Hussite-Bolshevik disintegration. Only when we are able and willing to achieve this shall I be prepared to answer for the blood-sacrifice of another young German generation. But at this price I shall not hesitate for a moment to take the deaths of two or three million Germans on my conscience, fully aware of the heaviness of the sacrifice.

"In the Baltic countries," Hitler went on, "the case is different. We shall easily Germanize the population. They are peoples who are racially closely related to us and would have been German long since, had not the prejudices and social arrogance of the German Baltic barons artificially prevented it. For the rest, frontier problems as such interest me very little. If I were to dissipate my energies on them, we should soon be at the end of our rope, and the German people would be little benefited. I shall put an end, too, to the absurdly sentimental views about the South Tyrol. I have no intention of allowing this problem at any time to deflect me from the basic line of our policy, namely, an alliance with Italy. The German people have in their unhappy history proliferated in every direction like a cancer. I shall not be persuaded by any memories of our past, however venerable, to commit a political blunder. Alsace and Lorraine are in a different class. We shall never give them up—not because Ger-

EASTERN POLICY AND NEW ARISTOCRACY 39

mans live there, but because we require these and other parts to round off our central regions in the west, just as we require Bohemia in the south and Posen, West Prussia, Silesia and the Baltic countries in the east and north."

Hitler continued:

"Thus far there are no doubts. In the east and southeast, I do not follow General Ludendorff nor anyone else; I follow only the iron law of our historical development. When Germany has rearmed, all these small states will offer us their alliance of their own accord. But we have no intention of manufacturing a peaceful Pan-Europe in miniature, with the good Uncle Germany in the center, pleasantly shortening the time of his nephews' studies. We shall not breed our own usurpers. We must once and for all time create the politically and biologically eternally valid foundations of a German Europe.

"My party comrades, I am not thinking in the first instance of economical matters. Certainly we need the wheat, the oil and the ores of these countries. But our true object is to set up our rule for all time, and to anchor it so firmly that it will stand firm for a thousand years. No political or economic agreements, such as Papen and Hugenberg dream of, will achieve this. These are liberal games, which end in the bankruptcy of a nation. Today we are faced with the iron necessity of creating a new social order. Only if we succeed in this shall we solve the great historical task which has been set our people."

The classless society of the Marxists, he contended, was madness. Order always meant class order. But the democratic notion of a class order based on the moneybag was equally mad. A genuine aristocracy was not born out of the accidentally successful speculations of bright businessmen. The secret of our success lay in the fact that we had once more

40   THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION

placed the vital law of genuine aristocracy at the heart of the political struggle. True aristocracy existed only where there was also true subjection. We did not intend to abolish the inequality of man; on the contrary, we would deepen it and, as in ancient great civilizations, create insurmountable barriers which would turn it into law. There was no equal right for all. We would have the courage to make this denial the basis of all our actions, and to acknowledge it openly. Never would he concede to other nations equal rights with the German. It was our task to place other nations in subjection. The German people was called to give the world the new aristocracy.

Hitler then went on to show how this new aristocracy was to be created.

"The part played by the bourgeoisie is finished—permanently, my party comrades," he said. "Do not be deceived by any galvanic currents that may for a moment cause their dead muscles to jerk again. But even these 'upper classes justified by history,' this paper aristocracy, these degenerate shoots of ancient noble families, have still one thing left, 'to die in beauty.' The Herrenklub members and their associates will not be able by the preposterous methods of their clubs and cliques to halt the march of history. I shall certainly destroy no aristocracy which today is still genuine. But where is there any such? If there is any, it will give its support to me. No, my party comrades, we shall not discuss the growth of a new upper class. We shall create it, and there is only one way of creating it: battle. The selection of the new Führer class is my struggle for power. Whoever proclaims his allegiance to me is, by this very proclamation and by the manner in which it is made, one of the chosen. This is the great revolutionary significance of our long, dogged struggle for power, that in it will be born a new Herren-class, chosen to guide the

EASTERN POLICY AND NEW ARISTOCRACY 41

fortunes not only of the German people, but of the world.

"Not by hair-splitting and experimentation, but in a single historical occurrence, with the rise of a new Herren-class, a new social order will arise as well. We are in the midst of such a process. We stand in the midst of such a revolutionary cataclysm, produced by the abdication of old social powers and the rise of new ones. But the Marxist gentry are mistaken if they think it is the workers who will take the place of the Junkers as the new, leading social power. It is the preposterous mark of the cowardice of the surrendering bourgeoisie that it sees in the industrial worker the mystic savior in accordance with a kind of social doctrine of healing. The worker today, from the political aspect, is as much a temporary symptom of a dying social order as the nobility and the bourgeoisie."

He would tell us what the society of the future would look like.

"There will be a Herren-class," he said, "an historical class tempered by battle, and welded from the most varied elements. There will be a great hierarchy of party members. They will be the new middle class. And there will be the great mass of the anonymous, the serving collective, the eternally disfranchised, no matter whether they were once members of the old bourgeoisie, the big land-owning class, the working-class or the artisans. Nor will their financial or previous social position be of the slightest importance. These preposterous differences will have been liquidated in a single revolutionary process. But beneath them there will still be the class of subject alien races; we need not hesitate to call them the modern slave class. And over all of these will stand the new high aristocracy, the most deserving and the most responsible Führer-personalities. In this way, in the struggle for power and mastery both within a nation and outside it, new

42   THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION

classes emerge; never, as the professors and bookworms would have us believe, through a makeshift constitution, a government decree.

"I fully approve of what our party comrade Darré has said. Our great experimental field is in the east. There the new European social order will arise, and this is the great significance of our eastern policy."

In this connection he wanted to say a final word:

"Certainly we shall admit to our new ruling class members of other nations who have been worthy in our cause. On this point I entirely agree with Darré and Himmler. The racial and biological aspect is only one side of the total process. In fact, we shall very soon have overstepped the bounds of the narrow nationalism of today. My party comrades, it is true that world empires arise on a national basis, but very quickly they leave it far behind.

"And this brings me," Hitler said in conclusion, "to the point we call education or upbringing. As surely as everything we have discussed here today must be kept from burdening the mind of the ordinary party member, equally surely must we put an end to what is known as universal education. Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction."

Here Hitler paused deliberately as if to give us a chance of digesting his astonishing definition of universal education. He then brought his remarks to a close as follows:

"There must be only one possible education for each class, for each subdivision of a class. Complete freedom of choice in education is the privilege of the élite and of those whom they have specially admitted. The whole of science must be subject to continual control and selection. Knowledge is an

EASTERN POLICY AND NEW ARISTOCRACY 43

aid to life, not its central aim. We must therefore be consistent, and allow the great mass of the lowest order the blessings of illiteracy. We ourselves, on the other hand, shall shake off all humane and scientific prejudices. This is why, in the Junker schools I shall found for the future members of our Herren-class, I shall allow the gospel of the free man to be preached—the man who is master of life and death, of human fear and superstition, who has learnt to control his body, his muscles and his nerves but remains at the same time impervious to the temptations of the mind and of sciences alleged to be free."