Hitler's Wartime Conversations

His Personal Thoughts as Recorded by Martin Bormann

Bob Carruthers

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781473868885
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473868908
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A rare glimpse into the mind of the Nazi leader, as recorded by his personal secretary.
 
Much of the documentation surrounding Adolf Hitler was lost or deliberately destroyed in the chaos of World War II's end. Yet some records were preserved for history. After dinner at the Wolf's Lair, it was Hitler's custom to retire to his private quarters, where he and his entourage often listened to gramophone records of Beethoven symphonies or selections from Wagner as Hitler would hold forth with lengthy and rambling monologues touching on a wide variety of subjects. It was Martin Bormann who decided to commission a recording of Hitler's words for posterity.
 
Ranging from1941 to 1944, these conversations touch upon a wide range of subjects, with statements both shocking and mundane—providing a unique up-close look at the mind and personality of this still-enigmatic twentieth-century figure.
 

PART ONE

5 JULY TO 31 DECEMBER 1941

1

Saturday, 5 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 or 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 peoples are peoples who are particularly active. A man like Krümel works from morning to night; such-and-such another person never stops thinking. In the same way, the Italian is as diligent as an ant (bienenfleissig). In the eyes of the Russian, the principal support of civilisation 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 organising himself. And if, despite everything, he is apt to have organisation 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 organised state.

It takes energy to rule Russia. The corollary is that, the tougher a country’s régime, the more appropriate it is that equity and justice should be practised there. The horse that is not kept constantly under control forgets in the wink of an eye the rudiments of training that have been inculcated into it. In the same way, with the Russian, 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 Russian, 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 organised 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 subsoil. 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 5–6 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 the 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 upsurge of rejoicing.

Better than the railway, which has 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 11–12 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 technique 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 all-mighty being whose law he worships.

Fundamentally in everyone there is the feeling for this all mighty, 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’s said that every man needs a refuge where he can find consolation and help in unhappiness. I don’t believe it! If humanity follows that path, it’s solely a matter of tradition and habit. That’s a lesson, by the way, that can be drawn from the Bolshevik front. The Russians have no God, and that doesn’t prevent them from being able to face death.

We don’t want to educate anyone in atheism.

4

Night of 11–12 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.

In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.

On a question from C.S., whether this antagonism might mean a war, the Führer 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 people’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 people 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 practises 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 civilisation 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 Esthonians, too, have a lot of Germanic blood.

The Esthonians are the elite of the Baltic peoples. 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 he 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.

It’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.

5

Night of 21–22 July 1941

GRATITUDE TO THE JESUITS — PROTESTANT FANATICISM — SIMILARITIES BETWEEN GERMANY AND ITALY — DANTE AND LUTHER — THE DUCE IS ONE OF THE CAESARS — THE MARCH ON ROME — A TURNING-POINT IN HISTORY — DELIGHTFUL ITALIAN TOWNS — ROME AND PARIS

When all’s said, we should be grateful to the Jesuits. Who knows if, but for them, we might have aban...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE 5 July to 31 December 1941
• PART TWO 1 January to 5 February 1942
• PART THREE 6 February to 7 September 1942
• PART FOUR 13 June to 24 June 1943
• PART FIVE 13 March to 29—30 November 1944
• Plate section