Hitler's Table Talk

PRISON NO LONGER A HARDSHIP 639
over-valuation of the lives of the less worthy elements on the
Home Front.
The morale of a people depends to a large extent on the
activity of their judges. Every war gives rise to a species of
selectivityin reverse; the finest and fittest perish by the thousand.
Even among the brave the choice of arm of the services constitutes
a sort of super-selective process, the bravest of the brave
going for Air Force and the submarine service. And then, in
all branches of the service the call is continual: "Who volunteers
for . . .?" and always gallant men come forward—and die. In
time, then, there remains only the rascal living in peace and
security. The man who is sent to prison has the certainty that
nothing further can befall him. If this process is allowed to
continue for three or four years, it will upset the whole equilibrium
of the nation.
Prison is no longer a hardship ; on the Volkhov front men lie
not on a bunk as in prison, but in the icy water, exposed to the
winds, sleepless, often without food or hope of relief.
A people, taken en masse, is neither wholly good nor wholly
bad. It possesses neither the courage to be wholly admirable
nor the wickedness to be wholly evil. It is the extremes at each
end of the scale that decide the level of the average. If the good
are decimated while the evil are preserved, then it is quite
possible, as happened in Germany in 1918, for a handful of a
few hundred evil vagabonds to do violence to a whole nation.
In Berlin itself eight Party members fall for every one non-
Party man killed; and unfortunately it is always the flower Oi
the Party—my SA leaders, my Regional and Group Leaders—
who are the first to fall. If I fail to exterminate the vermin as a
counter-balance, a dangerous situation would arise. I am
certainly not a brutal man by nature, and consequently it is cold
reason that guides my actions. I have risked my own life a
thousand times, and I owe my preservation simply to my good
fortune. I say, therefore, that sentiment must play no part in
these matters ; we must apply a rule of iron and admit of no
exceptions. This may often pain me personally, and it may well
lead to errors which one will later regretfully acknowledge. But
any other course of action is out of the question.
At the end of the first war I was far more imbued with