Hitler's Table Talk

THE NIGHT OF THE REICHSTAG FIRE 649
despaired of humanity, and his contempt for mankind was only
increased when he found that the more he lowered the intellectual
level of the journal, the more sales increased! He ought
really to have called the paper: "Münchner Beobachter—Baltic
Edition"! 1
At the beginning, the Völkischer Beobachter sailed on so high an
intellectual plane that I myself had difficulty in understanding it,
and I certainly know no woman who could make head or tail of
it ! Rosenberg insisted on this extremely high level ; at that time,
where the leading article now appears, he gave us deeply
philosophical treatises written by Professors, and mostly on
Central Asia and the Far East.
During the Reichstag fire, I went in the middle of the night to
the offices of the Völkischer Beobachter. It took half an hour before
I could find anyone to let me in. Inside there were a few
compositors sitting around, and eventually some sub-editor
appeared heavy with sleep. He was quite incapable of grasping
what I was telling him, and kept on repeating: "But really!
there's no one here at this time of night; I must ask you to come
back during business hours!" "Are you mad!" I cried. "Don't
you realise that an event of incalculable importance is actually
now taking place!" In the end I got hold of Göbbels, and we
worked till dawn preparing the next day's edition.
I often find it difficult to get on with our Baltic families ; they
seem to possess some negative sort of quality, and at the same
time to assume an air of superiority, of being masters of everything,
that I have encountered nowhere else. Nevertheless, I
was very relieved, in 1941, when we received the lists of German
families in the Baltic States, to find included in them all our
old friends of the nineteen-twenties. One very lovable trait is
their marvellous spirit of solidarity. As they have for centuries
been the rulers among an inferior race, they are not unnaturally
inclined to behave as if the rest of humanity were composed
exclusively of Latvians. Constituting as they do a
minority, they were all intimately acquainted with each other
and kept themselves rigorously apart.
For my own part, I know nothing at all about family
histories. There were relations of mine, of whose existence I was
1 Rosenberg himself was a Bait, as were several of his collaborators.—Tr.