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Month: September 2015

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Heinrich Himmler Justice / revenge Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 15

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 14th-15th September 1941

Criminals in war-time—
The habits of the Jurists.
 
 
I’ve ordered Himmler, in the event of there some day being reason to fear troubles back at home, to liquidate everything he finds in the concentration camps. Thus at a stroke the revolution would be deprived of its leaders.

The old Reich knew already how to act with firmness in the occupied areas. That’s how attempts at sabotage to the railways in Belgium were punished by Count von der Goltz. He had all the villages burnt within a radius of several kilometres, after having had all the mayors shot, the men imprisoned and the women and children evacuated. There were three or four acts of violence in all, then nothing more happened. It’s true that in 1918 the population adopted a hostile attitude towards German troops going up into the line.

Nowadays it’s the same thing. During the campaign in Poland, the lawyers tried to blame the troops because the latter had shot sixty civilians in a region where wounded soldiers had been massacred. In such a case, a lawyer opens legal proceedings against X. His enquiry leads nowhere, of course, for nobody has ever seen anything, and if anyone knows the guilty man, he’ll take good care not to inform against a “member of the Resistance”.

Lawyers cannot understand that in exceptional times new laws become valid. I shall be interested to know whether they’ll pass the death sentence on that madman who set fire to the Bremen—deliberately, it’s said, from a liking for setting things alight. I’ve given instructions for the event of the man’s not being condemned to death. He’s to be shot immediately.

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Art Christian art My pinacoteca

The conversion of Augustine

Fra_angelico_-_conversion_de_saint_augustin

Fra Angelico
The Conversion of St. Augustine ~ 1430-35
Musee d’Art Thomas Henry

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2nd World War Joseph Stalin Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 16

the-real-hitler

 

17th September 1941, evening, and the night of I7th-18th

The attack against Russia—Germans must acquire a sense of Empire.
 
 
The spirit of decision does not mean acting at all costs. The spirit of decision consists simply in not hesitating when an inner conviction commands you to act. Last year I needed great spiritual strength to take the decision to attack Bolshevism.

I had to foresee that Stalin might pass over to the attack in the course of 1941. It was therefore necessary to get started without delay, in order not to be forestalled—and that wasn’t possible before June.

The Germans—this is essential—will have to constitute amongst themselves a closed society, like a fortress. The least of our stable-lads must be superior to any native. For German youth, this will be a magnificent field of experiment. We’ll attract to the Ukraine Danes, Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes.

The Germans must acquire the feeling for the great, open spaces. We must arrange things so that every German can realise for himself what they mean. We’ll take them on trips to the Crimea and the Caucasus. There’s a big difference between seeing these countries on the map and actually having visited them.

Categories
Art Christian art My pinacoteca

Before Lycias

Fra Angelico
Cosmas and Damian before Lycias ~ 1447-49
Alte Pinakothek of Munich

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Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 17

the-real-hitler

 

1st September 1941, midday

Pragmatic politicians vs.
meta-politic philosophers.
 
 
When one has preached in the desert for decades, it proves, when the time comes for action, that one has lost all contact with reality. These Germans of the old school were fine fellows, but their speciality was literature. Their audience was twenty thousand readers of their own stamp. None of them knew how to speak to the people.

Right from the beginning, I realised that one could not go far along that track. The man who means to act must find his support in faith, and faith is found only in the people. The great masses have no mercy, they go straight ahead with the simplicity of innocence. We have seen what a people is capable of, when it is led. All possibilities exist in it, for good as well as for evil. The duty of National Socialism inevitably boils down to this: all that is best in the people should be allowed ceaselessly to develop.

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Art Christian art My pinacoteca

Entombment

Fra Angelico
Entombment ~ 1438
Alte Pinakothek of Munich

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Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 18

the-real-hitler

 

22 Night of the 22nd-23rd September 1941

In the East, on the railway, all Germans will have to travel first or second class, so as to distinguish themselves from the natives. The difference between first and second will be that one will have three places on each side, and the other four.

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Art Christian art My pinacoteca

Story of St Nicholas

Fra Angelico
Story of St Nicholas ~ 1437
Pinacoteca Vaticana

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Asia Europe Geography Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 19

the-real-hitler

 

23rd September 1941, evening

The frontiers of Europe and Asia—Success justifies everything—Our right to fertile lands—The Russian flood must be dammed.
 
 
It’s absurd to try to suppose that the frontier between the two separate worlds of Europe and Asia is marked by a chain of not very high mountains—and the long chain of the Urals is no more than that. One might just as well decree that the frontier is marked by one of the great Russian rivers. No, geographically Asia penetrates into Europe without any sharp break.

The real frontier is the one that separates the Germanic world from the Slav world. It’s our duty to place it where we want it to be.

If anyone asks us where we obtain the right to extend the Germanic space to the East, we reply that, for a nation, her awareness of what she represents carries this right with it.

It’s inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilisation, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world. We painfully wrest a few metres from the sea, we torment ourselves cultivating marshes—and in the Ukraine an inexhaustibly fertile soil, with a thickness, in places, often metres of humus, lies waiting for us.

We must create conditions for our people that favour its multiplication, and we must at the same time build a dike against the Russian flood. If this war had not taken place, the Reich would scarcely have increased its population during the next ten years, but the Russian population would have grown vigorously.

If to-day you do harm to the Russians, it is so as to avoid giving them the opportunity of doing harm to us. God does not act differently. He suddenly hurls the masses of humanity on to the earth, and he leaves it to each one to work out his own salvation. Men dispossess one another, and one perceives that, at the end of it all, it is always the stronger who triumphs. Is that not the most reasonable order of things?

If it were otherwise, nothing good would ever have existed. If we did not respect the laws of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would once again devour us—then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist on earth but the microbes.

Categories
Art Christian art My pinacoteca

St Anthony and St Paul

Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo (“Sassetta”)
The Meeting of St Anthony and St Paul ~ 1440
National Gallery of Art