62 THE METEOROLOGICAL SER

62 THE METEOROLOGICAL SERVICE If at this moment we were to eliminate the religions by force, the people would unanimously beseech us for a new form of worship. You can imagine our Gauleiters giving up their pranks to play at being saints ! As for our Minister for Religion, according to his own co-religionists, God himself would turn away from his family! I envisage the future, therefore, as follows : First of all, to each man his private creed. Superstition shall not lose its rights. The Party is sheltered from the danger of competing with the religions. These latter must simply be forbidden from interfering in future with temporal matters. From the tenderest age, education will be imparted in such a way that each child will know all that is important to the maintenance of the State. As for the men close to me, who, like me, have escaped from the clutches of dogma, I've no reason to fear that the Church will get its hooks on them. We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth. 40 Night of 14th-15th October 1941 Meteorological forecasts—Reorganisation of the service. One can't put any trust in the met. forecasts. The meteorological services ought to be separated from the Army. Lufthansa had a first-class meteorological service. I was terribly sorry when that service was broken up. The present organisation is not nearly as good as the old one. Moreover, there are various improvements that could be made to meteorology generally. Weather prediction is not a science that can be learnt mechanically. What we need are men gifted with a sixth sense, who live in nature and with nature—whether or not they know anything about isotherms and isobars. As a rule, obviously, these men are not particularly suited to the wearing of uniforms. One of them will have a humped back, another will be bandy-legged, a third paralytic. Similarly, one doesn't expect them to live like bureaucrats. They won't run the risk of being

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.