Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

With Italy this was the case from the very beginning.
If people in Germany had only studied history a little more clearly, and gone into the
psycholog of nations, they would not have been able to suppose even for an hour that the
Quirinal and the Vienna Hofburg would ever stand together n a common fighting front.
Sooner would Italy have turned into a volcano than a government have dared to send even a
single Italian to the battlefield for the fanatically hated Habsburg state, except as an enemy.
More than once in Vienna I saw outbursts of the passionate contempt and bottomless hatred
with which the Italian was ' devoted ' to the Austrian state. The sins of the House of
Habsburg against Italian freedom and independence in the course of the centuries was too
great to be forgotten, even if the will to forget them had been present. And it was not present;
neither in the people nor in the Italian government. For Italy there were therefore two
possibilities for relations with Austna: either alliance or war.
By choosing the first, the Italians were able to prepare, undisturbed, for the second.
Especially since the relation of Austria to Russia had begun to drive closer and closer to a
military clash, the German alliance policy was as senseless as it was dangerous.
This was a classic case, bearing witness to the absence of any broad and correct line of
thinking.
Why, then, was an alliance concluded? Only in order better to guard the future of the Reich
than, reduced to her own resources, she would have been in a position to do. And this future
of the Reich was nothing other than the question of preserving the German people's
possibility of existence.
Therefore the question could be formulated only as follows:
What form must the life of the German nation assume in the tangible future, and how can
this development be provided with the necessary foundations and the required security
within the framework of general European relation of forces?
A clear examination of the premises for foreign activity on the part of German statecraft
inevitably led to the following conviction:
Germany has an annual increase in population of nearly nine hundred thousand souls. The
difficulty of feeding this army of new citizens must grow greater from year to year and
ultimately end in catastrophe, unless ways and means are found to forestall the danger of
starvation and misery in time.
There were four ways of avoiding so terrible a development for the future:
1. Following the French example, the increase of births could be artificially restricted, thus
meeting the problem of overpopulation
Nature herself in times of great poverty or bad climactic conditions, as well as poor harvest,
intervenes to restrict the increase of population of certain countries or races; this, to be sure,
by a method as wise as it is ruthless. She diminishes, not the power of procreation as such,
but the conservation of the procreated, by exposing them to hard trials and deprivations with
the result that all those who are less strong and less healthy are forced back into the womb
of the eternal unknown. Those whom she permits to survive the inclemency of existence are a
thousandfold tested hardened, and well adapted to procreate-in turn, in order that the
process of thoroughgoing selection may begin again from the beginning. By thus brutally
proceeding against the individual and immediately calling him back to herself as soon as he
shows himself unequal to the storm of life, she keeps the race and species strong, in fact,
raises them to the highest accomplishments.
At the same time the diminution of number strengthens the individual and thus in the last
analysis fortifies the species.
It is different, however, when man undertakes the limitation of his number. He is not carved
of the same wood, he is ' humane.' He knows better than the cruel queen of wisdom. He
limits not the conservation of the individual, but procreation itself. This seems to him, who
always sees himself and never the race, more human and more justified than the opposite
way. Unfortunately, however, the consequences are the reverse: