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In truth I do not particularly like signing my name. You never know what people will do with a signature. You can sign a piece of paper in all innocence, but the next day someone else will paste a declaration above it, and suddenly you find you have given away Transylvania to some corrupt Balkan entity. Or surrendered unconditionally, even though your bunkers are still full of weapons of retaliation with which you could turn around the war whenever you fancied. In the end, however, my signature on a newspaper seemed harmless enough. I was delighted, moreover, that for the first time nobody was
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A small girl was pushed to the front with her newspaper, and I took deliberate care to sign it slowly. Let them photograph this; young people trust the Führer as much now as they did in the past. And not only the young. An ancient woman approached me with one of those modern walking frames on wheels and a twinkle in her eye. She held out her newspaper and said in a quivering voice, “Do you remember? 1935, in Nuremberg. I was in the window, watching you march by! I always thought you were looking at me. We were so proud of you! And now – well, you haven’t changed one bit!”
It is an old refrain – everybody agrees that the rats must be exterminated, but when it comes down to it, sympathy for the individual rat is huge. Only sympathy, mind you; there is no desire to keep the rat. The two must not be confused.
We concluded the conference. Noticing a light still burning in my office as I left the room, I went to turn it off. Until the Reich has converted fully to regenerative energies, one must be sparing with one’s resources. One seldom thinks of it at the time, but imagine the misery thirty years later when just outside El Alamein one’s tank lacks that very last drop of fuel to achieve the final victory.
I was deeply moved by the sight of this poor creature. “I’m terribly sorry, Fräulein Krömeier,” I said. “I can easily stomach this sort of thing; I’m used to enduring such hostility when standing up for the future of Germany. I bear full responsibility – it is unforgivable when one’s political opponents choose to attack lesser employees.”
Being unable to make a decision is not a pleasant feeling. If Blondi had still been alive, at least I would have been able to stroke her; in such moments an animal, particularly a dog, is always good for relieving some of the tension.
I shook my head energetically. “Sawatzki, Sawatzki, what do you know about the Führer? This uptight Germanness is the worst attitude one can have. You must not confuse racial purity with cultural isolation. Don’t be ridiculous; a homepage is a homepage! One doesn’t call R.A.D.A.R. Funkortung undabstandsmessung just because the English invented it.”
Dear Herr Hitler, I read with interest your theory about the relative values of different races. I have been breeding dogs for many years and now I’m worried that I might be breeding an inferior strain. So my question is: Which is the best breed of dogs and which is the worst? And what is the Jew of the dog world? Yours, Helmut Bertzel, Offenburg
Press work is a tiresome affair when the newspapers have not been “brought into line”. Not only for politicians like me, whose mission it is to save the German Volk – no, I find it absolutely incomprehensible that such a thing should be foisted on the people.
She sat and carefully placed her handbag on a vacant seat. This handbag culture, this positioning of the object immediately after sitting down, as if they were taking their assigned place with luggage in a train compartment, I bet that will not change for another sixty-five years.
Ask any parliamentarian these days and he will tell you bluntly that wars are no longer necessary. That is the argument people were peddling back then, too, and it was as nonsensical as it is today. Our planet is not growing, that is incontestable. But the number of people living on it is. And if the world’s natural resources become too scarce for the global population, which race will get hold of them? The nicest one? No, the strongest. And for this reason I did my utmost to strengthen the German race.
reconciliation with our closest ally, England, so that some day in the future we can act as one. It remains a mystery to me why that relationship never worked out. How many more bombs would we have had to drop on their cities before they realised that they were our friend?
I looked this bizarre figure up and down. Bombed-out Berlin had not presented a sorrier picture. His voice sounded as if he were permanently chewing on a salami roll, and he looked like it too.
If the Volk elects a Führer who is twenty, let’s say, and he displays no interest in women, people will start talking right away. What a queer Führer, they’ll soon be saying, why doesn’t he take a wife? Has he no wish to? Isn’t he able? But if, like me, the Führer is forty-four and does not choose a wife immediately, the Volk will say, “Well, he doesn’t have to, maybe he’s got one already.” And, “How nice that he’s thinking only of us.” And so it continues. The older one becomes, the more one assumes the role of the wise man, without, incidentally, having to do anything oneself.
If the editor wants well-informed opinions he ought to seek out the organ grinder rather than the monkey.”
The intellectual gobbledygook of this writing had not changed in sixty years, suggesting that readers still regarded as highbrow only material which they themselves found incomprehensible, and surmised the basic substance of these articles from the discernibly positive tone.
“It’s fine, I’ll be O.K.”s. Fräulein Krömeier cast me a look of such shock, as if the Russians were suddenly back at the Seelow Heights, but I gave her a reassuring nod.
“Shouldn’t you be on your way, love?” “That’s what they all said in winter 1941,” I told her, and then finally headed with measured step in the right direction. I didn’t want to give the impression that I was trying to avoid the conference.
Sensenbrink reeled off a list of names and functions, a colourful array of Senior and Vice Account Managing Executives and whatever else they have these days. The titles and faces were all so interchangeable that I knew at once that the only name worthy of note was Kärrner’s.
To my quiet amusement, I even saw an absent-minded and exhausted-looking smoker raise the bag to her mouth, while the hand holding her cigarette reached down to the stools deposited by her dog, a tiny creature. She shook her head, rubbed her eyes and corrected her mistake.
I’m like, ‘But Nan, it’s satire? He’s doing it so it doesn’t happen again?’ But she’s like, ‘That’s not satire. He’s just the same as Hitler always was. And people laughed then, too.’
It’s been a long time since the Führer was rebuked, even unjustly so; the Führer should be far too high up in the national hierarchy to be rebuked. Moreover, one ought never to rebuke the Führer; one must have trust in him. In this respect any and all rebuking of one’s superiors is unjustified, and of me especially so,
“What kind of argument is that?” Fräulein Krömeier asked. “Are you telling me that if they were killed by mistake then everything’s O.K.? No, the real mistake is that someone came up with the idea that all the Jews had to be killed! And the Gypsies! And the gays! And everyone else whose face he didn’t like the look of. Let me tell you something. The answer is, if you don’t kill everyone you don’t kill the wrong ones either, do you? It’s that simple!”
In 1933 the Volk was not overwhelmed by a massive propaganda campaign. A Führer was elected in a manner which must be regarded as democratic, even in today’s understanding of the word. A Führer was elected who had laid bare his plans with irrefutable clarity.
“Either there was a whole Volk full of bastards. Or what happened was not the act of bastards, but the will of the Volk.”
Either you follow the line of the N.S.D.A.P., and that means the man responsible is precisely the one who bears responsibility in the Führer state – i.e. the Führer and no-one else. Or you must condemn those who elected this Führer, but failed to remove him. They were very normal people who decided to elect an extraordinary man and entrust him with the destiny of their country. Would you outlaw elections, Fräulein Krömeier?”
Mistakes are not there to be regretted; they exist so that they are not repeated.
“That, precisely that must be our goal,” I lauded her. “And we will attain it. If the German Volk prevails, then in one hundred, two hundred, in three hundred years you and I shall find only hymns of praise in our history books!”
I was nervous, but only slightly. I find there is something comforting about a mild flutter of nerves; it shows that I am focused.
Waiting for a number of these characters were women in a similarly precarious state; it was quite evident that they would have liked to do the same, but dared not due to some subconscious residue of decency.
Youth was poorly represented here, and yet most people seemed to be behaving as if they were not a day older than twenty.
This type of woman is not a new phenomenon; she existed seventy years ago too, although she was not then as prominent. Her craving for recognition knows no bounds and her self-esteem is low. She endeavours to assuage this by trying to conceal each one of her supposed deficiencies. For unfathomable reasons this type of woman considers only one method to be suitable: turning everything into ridicule. She is the most dangerous type of woman a politician can meet.
The basest human instincts are the most reliable of allies, especially if one lacks any others.
The benefits were crystal clear. I made a swift estimate that by introducing this principle across the board, 100,000 to 200,000 troops could be freed up for immediate deployment at the front.
And autobahns were still being built by Poles, White Russians, Ukrainians and other foreign workers, for wages that were more cost-effective for the Reich than any war. Had I known back then just how cheap it was to employ Poles, I might as well have leapfrogged their country. One lives and learns.
An army of millions of angry jobless men was fertile ground for any radical party, and I was fortunate enough to have led the most radical of them all.
Using the money of the poor, the even poorer were placated to the benefit of the rich in such a way that their businesses could happily continue to profit from the crisis.
A White Russian woman on the computer, a warm, dry apartment and sufficient food – did all these not represent redistribution in the socialist sense?
The truth could only be understood by the man who knows the Jews, the man who knows that with them there is no left and no right, and that both sides work hand in hand in perpetuity. And only the perspicacious spirit who sees through all the disguises could recognise that in their aim to eliminate the Aryan race, nothing had changed.
I know you should turn the other cheek, but that doesn’t give people the right to administer beatings like that.”
Meanwhile, a strange foreigners’ party by the name of B.I.G. assured me that in a country where the beating up of foreigners was outlawed, the beating up of Germans was, of course, outlawed too, to which I gave the emphatic response that I should not wish to live in a country where the beating up of foreigners was outlawed.
