Hitler's Table Talk

TASK FOR RETIRED SCHOOLMASTERS 63
transported from a region they know to another of which they
know nothing—as regards climatological conditions, that's to
say. They won't be answerable to superiors who necessarily
know more about the subject than they do—in virtue of their
pips and crowns—and who might be tempted to dictate to
them the truths that are vested in a man by virtue of his
superior rank.
Doubtless the best thing would be to form a civil organisation
that would take over the existing installations. This
organisation would also use the information, communicated
regularly by telephone and applicable to particular regions,
which one would owe to these human barometers. It would
cost very little. A retired school-teacher, for example, would
be happy to receive thirty marks a month as payment for his
trouble. A telephone would be installed in his home free of
charge, and he'd be flattered to have people relying on his
knowledge. The good fellow would be excused from making
written reports, and he would even be authorised to express
himself in his own dialect. He might be a man who has never
set foot outside his own village, but who understands the flight
of midges and swallows, who can read the signs> who feels the
wind, to whom the movements of the sky are familiar. Elements
are involved in that kind of thing that are imponderable and
beyond mathematics. There are bits of knowledge that are
developed in the course of an existence intimately associated
with the life of nature, which are often passed on from father to
son. It's enough to look around one. It's known that in every
region there are such beings, for whom the weather has no
secrets.
The central office will only have to compare these empirical
pieces of information with those provided by the "scientific"
methods, and make a synthesis.
In this way, I imagine, we would finally again have an
instrument on which one could depend, a meteorological service
in which one could have confidence.