Hitler's Table Talk

578 BERLIN AS AUTOBAHN CENTRE
to exist. Of what importance will the thousand-kilometre
stretch to the Crimea be, when we can cover it at eighty kilometres
an hour along the autobahn and do the whole distance
easily in two days !
I am absolutely determined to link up the whole of the
Eastern territories behind the East Wall by means of a network
of autobahnen radiating from Berlin. The normal 7-5-metre
road, will, however, be inadequate for the purpose. Instead
I shall at once construct an n-metre road, capable of taking
three lanes of continuous traffic, slow-moving lorries on the
right, normal traffic in the centre and swift-moving traffic on
the left.
When one recalls that in pre-war Germany we have built
more than two thousand kilometres of motor highway, I am
surprised that the film industry has not made a great film out of
the story. Unfortunately, however, we, unlike the British and
the French, do not make films of our great achievements. The
one exception is Vienna, and Vienna figures so often in films
that I'm sick and tired of the sight of the place!
I know of only one film which has the autobahn as its background—a
wretched slap-stick affair, in which two lovers chase
each other along the highway; and even there, not only is the
story and the handling of the film miserable in the extreme, but
they did not even select a particularly good section of autobahn
on which to make it. The film, incidentally, had a terrific
success in Upper Bavaria !
When we are able to go from Klagenfurt to Trondhjem and
from Hamburg to the Crimea along a Reichsautobahn, we
shall have a system of communications which will shorten space
to the same degree as the old carriage highways for the conception
of their time.
The autobahnen have proved immensely valuable from the
political as well as from the transportation point of view. One
of their greatest services is that they have swept away the internal
frontiers of the Reich, and now one goes from one province to
another without noticing it. In the days of the old highways,
the numerous toll-gates and the differences in surface made one
only too aware of provincial boundaries ; once over the Mecklenburg
border, for instance, the pot-holes reduced one's speed