Tapping Hitler's Generals

?: Yes, and above all it will… as a step back into the darkest ages…

?: Yes–barbarity.

?: There has never been anything like it except the Thirty Years’ War. In the Thirty Years’ War it wasn’t so conspicuous because conditions were different then, but nowadays it is damned conspicuous.

?: We have shown clearly that we are completely incapable of ruling other people.

?: Yes, such a ‘ruling class’…

?: How could a thing like that last? And quite apart from states further away, just think of BOHEMIA and MORAVIA alone–do you think that could have gone on for a few more years?

?: POLAND–they would continually have killed off our local leaders.

?: We can’t compare ourselves with ENGLAND in the slightest degree. Ask the people in South-West (AFRICA). They think they’re very well off under English rule.

?: I mean, at the beginning ENGLAND used quite different means when establishing her world empire, from those she uses now.

?: Yes, we wanted to establish a world empire only four years after we had introduced general conscription!

?: No, this is how I look at it. Owing to the war there is no doubt that measures have become more severe–but they had to.

?: Well, nobody objects to the fact that everybody plays his part in the war and so on, but I am convinced that no educated, thinking person considers it right the way we have behaved towards the Jews, the Poles and the Czechs and towards the people of opposite views in the concentration camps.

?: But that German-speaking Germans at DANZIG should be forbidden to join GERMANY simply because some arrogant English government forbids it–that they feel unhappy there and–

?: Quite right, but that is very different from trying to exterminate whole peoples.

?: Well, I don’t think that was our intention.

?: Well, perhaps we didn’t intend it, but we have done it. When somebody tells me that at LODZ or the devil knows where, eighteen thousand Jews have been killed in one morning–

?: Well, say its eighteen hundred. Do you think that’s right–or even one-hundred-and-eighty? Even if it’s eighteen, if they haven’t committed any crime! What right have we to indignation about the massacres of KATYN? Heaven forbid, if the Russians ever open these mass-graves! They are now claiming–of course it can’t be checked up–that we killed seventeen thousand at KIEV alone.[226] The Russians are thirsting for revenge.

?: Well, at any rate the Russians who are in our service consider themselves well off, because they are treated decently, as human beings.[227]

?: The Germans are decent fellows; that’s the tragic part of it. The unfortunate thing is that the Germans show themselves to others in quite a different light and not as they really are. Quite the contrary, make enquiries in the former occupied territories that we held in the years 1914–18. The people there still hold the German soldiers in high esteem, as I was able to prove time and time again when we were there this time. But I shouldn’t like to go twenty years hence to the districts which have been… by the SS and the SA. These press-gangs–oh, no! A tragedy to live to see such things!

BOES: On the other hand you only need to ask our people in the RHINELAND how they were treated.

?: But that’s quite different! I admit they shot SCHLAGETER, because he carried out sabotage on the railway but he’s the only one we can produce.[228]

?: Yes, but there are sure to have been others who weren’t executed but… in prisons.

?: Good God, but we’ve massacred people in their thousands. There’s no comparison. At least there were proper courts, before which they appeared. In my opinion, if hundreds or thousands had been shot, we should certainly know about it, they would be… as martyrs. Those six or seven or twelve martyrs of the movement![229]

BOES: The point is that one is the struggle for a new order in EUROPE–opposing it stands a world empire, that won this world empire for itself perhaps hundreds of years ago. The one has still to win its empire; that costs sacrifices; while the other one has already passed that stage.