He propped himself up slightly in bed, a gleam of joy in his eyes. He looked like a little boy again. “I’ll tell you something about my thousand years. Himmler invests it with the mysticism you’d expect. Ever notice how Jews, Muslims, Christians, and our very own pagans have a predilection for millennia? The number works a magic spell on them.”
“Pundits in America observe that also. They say the number is merely good psychology, and point to the longevity of the ancient empires of China, Rome, and Egypt for similar numerical records. They say that Germany will never hold out that long.”
“It won’t,” said Hitler, matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean?” I asked, suddenly not sure of the direction he was moving. I suspected it had something to do with the cultural theories, but of his grandest dreams for the future Hitler had always been reticent… even with me.
“It will take at least that long,” he said, “for the New Culture to take root on earth. For the New Europe to be what I have foreseen.”
“If Von Braun has his way, we’ll be long gone from earth by then! At least he seems to plan passages for many Germans on his spaceships.”
“Germans!” spat out Hitler. “What care I for Germans or Von Braun’s space armada? Let the technical side of Europe spread out its power in any direction it chooses. Speer will be their god. He is the best of that collection. But let the other side determine the values, man. The values, the spiritual essence. Let them move through the galaxy for all I care, so long as they look homeward to me for the guiding cultural principles. And Europe will be the eternal monument to that vision. I speak of a Reich lasting a thousand years? It will take that long to finish the job, to build something that will then last for the rest of eternity.”
The old fire was returning. His voice was its old, strong hypnotic self. His body quivered with the glory of his personal vision, externalized for the whole of mankind to touch, to worship… or to fear. I bowed my head in the presence of the greatest man in history.
He fell back for a minute, exhausted, lost in the phantasms behind his occluded eyes. Looking at the weary remains of this once-human dynamo, I was sympathetic, almost sentimental. I said: “Remember when we first met through our anti-Semitic activities? It was an immediate bond between us.”
He chuckled. “Oh, for the early days of the Party again. At the beginning you thought me too bourgeois.”
He was dying in front of me, but his mind was as alert as ever. “Few people understand why we singled out the Jew, even with all the Nazi literature available,” I continued.
He took a deep breath. “I was going to turn all of Europe into a canvas on which I’d paint the future of humanity. The Jew would have been my severest and most obstinate critic.” The Führer always had a gift for the apt metaphor. “Your propaganda helped keep the populace inflamed. That anger was only fuel for the task at hand.”
We had discussed on previous occasions the fundamental nature of the Judeo-Christian ethic, and how the Christian was a spiritual Semite (as any pope would observe). The Jew had made an easy scapegoat. There was such a fine old tradition behind it. But once the Jew was for all practical purposes removed from Europe, there remained the vast mass of Christians, many Germans among them. Hitler had promised strong measures in confidential statements to high officials of the SS. Martin Bormann had been the most ardent advocate of the Kirchenkampf, the campaign against the churches. In the ensuing years of peace and the nuclear stalemate with the United States little had come of it. I brought up the subject again.
“It will take generations,” he answered. “The Jew is only the first step. And please remember that Christianity will by no means be the last obstacle, either. Our ultimate enemy is an idea dominant in the United States in theory, if not in practice. Their love of the individual is more dangerous to us than even mystical egalitarianism. In the end the decadent idea of complete freedom will be more difficult to handle than all the religions and other imperial governments put together.” He lapsed back into silence, but only for a moment. “We are the last bastion of true Western civilization. America is always a few steps from anarchy. They would sacrifice the state to the individual! But Soviet communism—despite an ideology—was little better. Its state was all muscles and no brain. It forbade them to get the optimum use out of their best people. Ah, only in the German Empire, and especially here in New Berlin, do we see the ideal at work. The state uses most individuals as the sheep they were meant to be. More important is that the superior individual is allowed to use the state.”
“Like most of the Gauleiters?” I asked, again in a puckish mood.
He laughed in a loud and healthy voice. “Good God,” he said. “Nothing’s perfect… except the SS, and the work you did in Berlin.”
I did not have the heart to tell him that I thought he had been proved soundly mistaken on one of his predictions for the United States. With the nuclear stalemate and the end of the war—America having used its atomic bombs in the Orient, and riveting the world’s attention in the same fashion as we—the isolationist forces in that country had had a resurgence. In a few years they had moved the country back to the foreign policy it held before the Spanish-American War. Hitler had predicted grim consequences for that country’s economy. The reverse unobligingly came true. This was in part because the new isolationists didn’t believe in economic isolation by any means; they freed American corporations to protect their own interests.
The latest reports I had seen demonstrated that the American Republic was thriving, even as our economy was badly suffering from numerous entanglements that go hand-in-gauntlet with an imperial foreign policy. We had quite simply overextended ourselves. New Berlin, after all, was modeled on the old Rome… and like the Roman Empire we were having trouble financing the operation and keeping the population amused. There are times I miss our old slogan: Gold or Blood?
I’m as dedicated a National Socialist as ever, but I must admit that America does not have our problems. What it has is a lot of goods, a willingness to do business in gold (our stockpile of which increased markedly after the war), and paper guarantees that we would not interfere in their hemisphere. We keep our part of the bargain fairly welclass="underline" all adults understand that Latin America is fair game.
There is, of course, no censorship for the upper strata of Nazi Germany. The friends and families of high Reich officialdom can openly read or see anything they want. I still have trouble with this modification in our policy. At least I keep cherished memories of 1933, when I personally gave the order to burn the books at the Franz Joseph Platz outside Berlin University. I have never enjoyed myself more than in the period when I perfected an acid rhetoric as editor of Der Angriff, which more often than not inspired the destruction of writings inimical to our point of view. It was a pleasure putting troublesome editors in the camps. Those days seem far away now. Many enjoy All Quiet on the Western Front!
Hitler would not have minded a hearty exchange on the subject of censorship. He likes any topic that relates at some point to the arts. He would have certainly preferred such a discussion to arguing about capitalist policy in America. I didn’t pursue either. I am satisfied to leave to these diary pages my conclusion that running an empire is a lot more expensive than having a fat republic, sitting back, and collecting profits. The British used to understand. If they hadn’t forgotten, we probably wouldn’t be where we are today.