Surprising as it sounds, the situation in Yugoslavia, Serbia included, was not too different either. First, we helped the Croats under Ante Pavelič to realize their dream of setting up an independent republic. It was independent within the limits of our supervision, needless to say. Their paramilitary forces, known as the Ustasha, were a great help in fighting Tito’s bandits and an even greater one in cleansing the country of its Jews. Next, we set up a government in Belgrade. Its head was General Milan Nedič, a former chief of staff. His subordinates in the civil service proved no more, but also no less, trustworthy than their colleagues in, say, Paris. After the war, those of them who had not succeeded in getting away were executed.
The most difficult problem was Russia. Officially, Rosenberg and his Ministry for the Occupied Territories in the East were in charge. Rosenberg’s greatest asset was his loyalty. But he still remained much more of a dreamer than a doer. His written work was often incomprehensible; it was said that no one sold so many books that no one read. Goebbels, Rosenberg’s rival as the party’s intellectual in chief, called him Herr Almost. He almost managed to become a schoolmaster, journalist, and politician, but only “almost.” He proved utterly ineffective in dealing with the Wehrmacht, the SS, and various Reich Commissars whom I had given the task of ruling this province or that so as to better exploit its resources. In fact, he was so ineffective that some subsequent historians suspected I had deliberately set out to create disorder! Let me say, once and for all, that such was not the case. It is true that, in the Third Reich, there was a great deal of infighting among various personages and organizations. Including, as I wrote earlier, the various branches of the armed forces. But there was no more than in other states, democratic ones included.
To resume, nor could there be any question of harnessing the Russian bureaucracy to our cart. One and all, they were Bolshevik subhumans. Following my orders, our men killed as many of them as they could catch. The outcome was that, throughout the vast territories we were holding, almost the only government left consisted of our security forces. I am told that the absence of a government or governments was one reason why we only got a small fraction of the products the territories in question did yield or could have yielded. There may be some truth in that. But what other choice did we have? One cannot treat such people as one would Westerners. The reason is that, to them, any attempt to do so simply looks like a sign of weakness. Give them a finger, as Ludendorff had tried to do when he encouraged some Ukrainian nationalist movements in 1917-18, and they will demand not just your hand but your entire arm, too. This was an error I was not going to repeat.
There were other reasons why our economic policy in the east was not, by and large, a success. First, the appropriate infrastructure was lacking. Second, the Russians evacuated what industrial plants they could and destroyed the rest. Trust me on this: when it comes to destruction, no one is a match for the Jewish-Russian-Bolsheviks. As late as German reunification in 1989, even many windows broken during the last days of the war had not yet been repaired. Basically, all we could do, especially in the countryside where our forces were spread very thin, was to take what we needed without bothering with formalities of any kind even if it meant, as if often did, burning entire villages pour encourager les autres. Such methods helped feed our troops on the spot. However, they also meant that few supplies were left to send home to the Reich. And even fewer we available for the millions of Russian prisoners we took.
In both Yugoslavia and Russia we faced guerrilla warfare and what, today, would be called terrorism. As in the case of the West, though, its true significance has been exaggerated by the post-war literature. It is not true, as Tito, his lackeys, and some other historians later claimed, that it was his “Partisans” who made us retreat from Yugoslavia. We departed because Hungary was being overrun by the Red Army, which threatened to cut our lines of communication and leave our forces stranded. And for every one of our soldiers who was killed by Russian bandits, many more died in battle with the Red Army. To be sure there were some, mainly old-fashioned generals, needless to say, on my staff who worried that the war in Russia would never really end. They claimed that we would have to engage at what, today, is known as counterinsurgency. I for my part answered that, far from fearing such a scenario, I would welcome it. It would provide our troops with the best training there is.
Those were short- and medium-term problems. Determined to leave my mark on history in the long run, I had very different plans. They were enough to keep our people, the Party, and all sorts of government organizations busy for generations on end! First, I was going to exploit the spaces in question to the hilt, economically speaking, even if doing so meant that as many as 30 million Slavs would have to starve or be expelled eastward across the Urals. After all, no less a luminary than Herbert Hoover, the former U.S. president and five-time Nobel Peace Prize candidate, at one point called ethnic cleansing a “heroic remedy;” so, referring to the “German problem” immediately after the war, did many other Allied leading figures. Next, I was going to bring in new settlers, including not just Germans but Danes, Norwegians, Dutchmen, Belgians, Swedes, and Finns as well. There would be no need for coercion; given to understand the vast prospects we were opening, they would come over, banners flying and drums beating.
My vision was rooted in the practice of the Greeks and the Romans who set up colonies in every country they occupied. For all their attempts to distance themselves from me, moreover, the Israelis in the West Bank are doing exactly the same. The details I left for Himmler and his staff to work out. I planned to establish large numbers of fortified farming homesteads (Wehrdörfer) grouped around newly built towns. They would be populated by former soldiers who, in case of need, would also be able to defend themselves and the large families they would have. Our links to the east would consist of an excellent new railway system. It was to use a royal gauge of four meters, not the miserable 1.435 meters which nineteenth-century technicians copied from the days of horse-drawn carriages and remains in use today. To enable our people to really experience the meaning of space, thus mentally preparing them for their imperial mission, we would build thousands of kilometers of Autobahnen, the modern equivalent of the famous Roman roads. So excellent would their construction be as to enable our people to drive their Volkswagens all the way to the Crimea at a steady 80 kilometers an hour. What is more, they would not encounter a single pothole on the journey. The Crimea itself would be renamed Gothenland. We’d set aside 100,000 acres of its territory for rubber plantations. The rest would be turned into a vast vacation resort, perhaps similar to the one we built on the Baltic.
As to the remaining natives, I intended to treat them as the American colonists treated the Indians. We would kill as many as necessary and deport most of the rest, thereby rendering them harmless. In doing so, our Mississippi would be the Volga. Note that the Russians are utterly without the sense of duty that motivates us Germans. Left to themselves, they would live like animals, multiplying and wallowing in their own filth. No German doctors, no German health system, to look after them! Above all, we would never unleash the German schoolmaster on them. All they would need would be a. reading (no need for any writing) skills just sufficient to understand the signs on our Autobahnen to avoid being killed in road accidents, b. the ability to count to 500 or so, and c. the certainty that the Germans, like the Boer baas in South Africa, are masters and have a God-mandated right to be obeyed. To help instill the last-named quality we would take, year by year, a troupe of these Untermenschen and show them the glories of Berlin. Returning to their hovels, they could spread the news.
This brings me to my plans for Berlin. Like so many European towns, Berlin began its days as an obscure fishing village. In 1701 it became the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia. Located in the poor lands east of the Elbe far from the sea and therefore from world commerce, in terms of size, economic development, and cultural achievement it lagged far behind the great cities of the West. Some of the Hohe
nzollern, especially Friedrich Wilhelm II, did what they could to make it prosper and flourish. But real change only got under way during the years after 1871, when the billions paid by the French as war reparations came in. Here, I must hand it to Wilhelm II. His artistic taste was pompous, and he lacked any sense of proportion. But he really put his heart into the business. Even so, the city remained unworthy of the vast empire I was going to build.
Some of my projects, including the Olympiastadion, the new Reichskanzlei, and the East-West Axis, were completed before the war. To this day, the lanterns on both sides are the ones Speer designed and installed for me. Other projects only reached the planning stages or, at best, had some preliminary work done on them. One was the North-South Axis. 120 meters wide, no less, it would be even larger than the East-West one. To make it possible, 50,000 homes would have to be demolished and 150,000 people resettled. Compared to this, what Louis Napoleon had done in Paris and Mussolini in Rome was mere peanuts. The crowning glory was to consist of three enormous projects: a giant people’s square, a huge victory arch several times as big as the Brandenburger Tor, and an even larger congress hall. It was going to be nine times as big as St. Peter’s and capable of holding 180,000 people. To make sure it would last, everything would be built of granite.
Watching my vision being realized, if only in the form of models, could move me to tears. It’s no wonder, as some of my earliest sketches for them went back as far as 1925. Who would have thought I, an aspiring politician just out of jail, would ever be in a position to realize them? As so often in my career, people came up with all sorts of objections. In particular, the engineers’ experiments showed that the muddy, waterlogged terrain around the River Spree might not support the weight of the stones we were going to put on it. I did not share their worries. First, weighed down by cares as I was, I looked at our discussions of such matters as much-needed relaxation. They took my attention away from the war, if only for a moment. Second and more important, experience had taught me that the only thing “experts” are really good at is dreaming up reasons why things will not work. I had no doubt that some kind of solutions could be found. Had we won the war, they surely would have been.
I played with the idea of renaming Berlin, which some experts believe got its name from a Slavic word meaning “swamp,” Germania. Both at the time and later—especially later, of course—my plans were subject to fierce criticism. Even Speer, the man in charge of the whole thing, who shared as much of my vision as anyone did, was not totally convinced. In his memoirs he says, half-apologetically but half-approvingly, that when his father, who was also an architect, saw some of our plans, he exclaimed that we had all gone stark raving mad! Others thought my ideas were megalomaniac, pompous, and even inhuman.
How typical of the small minds which most people possess, and by which, unfortunately, even I was so often surrounded! But such is the fate of great men. Presumably, when the Pharaohs built their pyramids, they had to cope with similar objections. Ludwig II, who, thanks to his erecting of several magnificent palaces, is the only King of Bavaria anyone remembers, certainly did. But let them spout their nonsense to their hearts’ contents. To be sure, most of my projects were left incomplete. Others, such as the great parade ground Speer had built for me in Nuremberg, were destroyed by Allied bombing or demolished after the war. What a pity. Still, even today, whoever comes to Berlin can choose among several “Nazi Berlin” tours on offer. Quite a few visitors do exactly that, taking the tours or buying one of the many guidebooks on sale. The same applies to other cities in which I spent time. Better proof that my plans were indeed worthy of eternity would be hard to find, wouldn’t it?
In conclusion, let me note that, in the wake of our victories of 1940, Churchill gave his “Minister for Economic Warfare,” Hugh Dalton, the task of “setting Europe ablaze.” In that he did not succeed. The parts of the Continent for which Dalton and his colleagues in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) were responsible, i.e. the west, remained as quiescent as one could expect under the circumstances. The parts with which they had nothing to do, i.e. the occupied Russian territories, gave us more trouble in a week than he did over five years. The only important exception was the Yugoslav coup of March 1941, which was conceived and coordinated partly in London. But even that did not affect the course of the war nearly as much as some historians have claimed.
25. The Final Solution
The war, and even more so its outcome, prevented me from reshaping Europe as I had planned to do. At the same time, its outbreak allowed me to do certain things which, but for it, would not have been possible. By far the most important one was my attempt to rid the Continent of the Jews. I desired to do the same to the gypsies, of course, but compared to the Jews they were small potatoes.
Both during my life and later, many people have wondered why I devoted as much time and effort to the Jewish problem as I did. Eager to add his own little piece of wisdom, the French “philosopher” Jean Paul Sartre even claimed that, in reality, anti-Semites, me presumably included, were afflicted by self-hatred! But that is rubbish of the sort, indeed, that only a French degenerate can produce. Suffice it to say that the Bible itself provides the best explanation why, starting as early as Greek and Roman antiquity, the Jews have often been detested as much as they were. “A stiff-necked Volk, leading its own life and refusing to mix with others,” As the Talmud says. And they were a professedly racist one as well, or how else could they have kept themselves pure during a period of some thirty centuries?
My original plan, as written down in our Twenty-Five Point Program, was to rid Germany of its 600,000 or so Jews. This was to be done by forcing them out of all the public positions they were occupying, denying them the rights and duties of citizenship, and making their lives in general difficult so as to make them leave. I intended to boot them in the behinds, in other words. The first organization to which we applied this policy was the Party. Applied, I say, because there were quite a number of Jews who would have been only too happy to become members. When we refused, they were actually offended! Having taken power in 1933, we did what we could to segregate the Jews and to make them depart for the few countries that were willing to take them in. Minus their property, of course.
Note that I say emigration, not extermination. To recall what I wrote in Mein Kampf, personally I would have liked nothing better than to put a few tens of thousands of Hebrews into the gas chambers. I didn’t feel that way because I have a sadistic nature; far from it. I did not go hunting as so many of my predecessors, associates, and successors did. Rumor notwithstanding, never in my life did I attend an execution or a torture session. Nor did I delight in bloodshed as some of my men, notably SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky, did. As you can see from my so-called Secret Conversations, during the war I expressly told my associates that, had I been up to me, I would rather not have hurt a fly. However, when the vital interests of the nation were at stake, I immediately became Eiskalt (ice cold). I forced myself to put aside any feelings I may have had, allowing no one and nothing to divert me from my purpose. That, and nothing else, is the real clue to my personality. Mobilizing all my willpower, I did what had to be done by whatever methods were the most effective. This included poison gas, of course. Depending on the size of the chamber used, carbon monoxide and Zyklon B enabled us to dispose of hundreds of people within a matter of minutes. One cannot shoot rats or bacteria one by one, can one?
But there are certain things which just could not be implemented in peacetime. The reason why they could not be implemented was that the German people would not have stood for them. Not, at any rate, in their own well-tended, well-ordered land, where even revolutionaries don’t step on the grass! The reason why they would not have stood for them is that, when you get down to it, they have always been, and still remain, a rather soft-hearted lot. How else could they have produced a Goethe, a Hölderin, a Beethoven, or a Schubert? That even applied to true henchmen, such as Heydrich and Eichmann. As I knew
, the former was an excellent violinist. As I learned later on, the latter also liked to play the violin, albeit he did not do so nearly as well as his superior did. Their commander, Himmler, was an incurable romantic. He even tried his hand at designing porcelain. To execute his designs and those of others, he set up a company by the name of Allach and provided it with labor from the nearby Dachau concentration camp. Full of pride, he showed me the figurines it produced: shepherd dogs, kings, knights, soldiers, Hitler Jugend, and similar “authentically Germanic” stuff. It was to counter these romantic tendencies that, in my speeches and writings, I so often used terms such as fanatisch (fanatical), unwiderruflich (unalterable), rücksichtloss (ruthless), and brutal. I kept telling people that, in certain matters, there was no room for sentimentality. But I only partly succeeded.
I am not saying that there was no anti-Semitism in Germany. Thank God there was, and plenty of it, too. But there was not nearly enough. Most people, including even some Party members, were content to grumble about the “Jewish problem” and to leave it more or less at that. The great Wagner himself set the example. To be sure, he did pen a famous piece on “The Jews in Music.” But this did not prevent him from working closely with Jewish directors, conductors, and singers. Thousands of others did the same. How else can we account for figures such as the “impressionist” painter Max Lieberman and the group of popular “musicians” who called themselves the Harmony Comedians making the heaps of money they did? That’s to say nothing about Gerson Bleichröder, the plutocrat who, for bankrolling Bismarck, had a “von” attached to his name. Or Walter Rathenau. Or Albert Ballin, the German equivalent of the Thomas Cook family of travel agency fame. Or the circle of Jews who surrounded the German Crown Prince, Frederick Wilhelm, even as late as 1941. And many others like them.
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