Hitler's Table Talk

566 CULTURAL DEGENERATION
German Stadium which has been constructed at Nuremberg,
and of which Horth has drawn two magnificent pictures,
accommodates four hundred thousand people and is on a scale
which has no comparison anywhere on earth.
253 7th July 1942, midday
Our dreamy archaeologists—Deforestation is the precursor
of decadence—The antiquity of our towns.
People make a tremendous fuss about the excavations carried
out in districts inhabited by our forebears of the pre-Christian
era. I am afraid I cannot share their enthusiasm, for I cannot
help remembering that, while our ancestors were making these
vessels of stone and clay, over which our archaeologists rave, the
Greeks had already built an Acropolis.
One must be cautious also with any detailed assertions as
regards the standard of culture attained by our ancestors
during the first Christian millennium. If, for example, some
most ancient school primer is discovered in East Prussia, one
must not immediately leap to the conclusion that it originated
there. In all probability it had come from the south in exchange
for a piece of amber.
The real protagonists of culture, both in the thousand years
before Christ and in the thousand years after Him, were the
peoples of the Mediterranean. This may appear improbable
to us to-day, because we are apt to judge these people from
present-day appearances. But that is a great mistake.
North Africa was once a heavily wooded territory, and
Greece, Italy and Spain, too, at the time of the Grasco-Roman
era also had many vast forests. In passing judgment on Egyptian
history, too, let me advise caution. Like Greece and Italy,
Egypt also during the period of her glory was a most habitable
country with a most equable climate. So when a people begin
to cut down their trees without making any provision for reafforestation—and
thus rob nature's wise irrigation system
of its most essential pre-requisite—you may be sure that it is a
sign of the beginning of their cultural degeneration.
The many false ideas prevalent among our people as regards
the cultural development of our ancestors have been en-