Krieg ist Krieg und Schnaps ist Schnaps, isn’t that right, and that’s the way of the world. And maybe even in the end our efforts would have been applauded, as the Führer often predicted, or maybe not, in any case many would have applauded, who in the meantime have fallen silent, for we lost, harsh reality. And even if a certain tension had persisted on this subject, for ten or fifteen years, it would have dissipated sooner or later, when for example our diplomats would have firmly condemned, while still reserving the possibility of showing a certain degree of comprehension, the harsh measures, liable to impinge on human rights, that someday or other Great Britain or France would have had to apply in order to restore order in their restive colonies, or, in the case of the United States, to ensure the stability of world commerce and fight the communist hotbeds of revolt, as they indeed ended up doing, with the results we all remember. For it would be a mistake, a serious one, in my opinion, to think that the moral sense of the Western powers differs so fundamentally from our own: after all, a great power is a great power, it doesn’t become one by chance, and doesn’t remain one by chance, either. The people of Monaco, or the inhabitants of Luxembourg, can afford the luxury of a certain political uprightness; it’s a little different for the English. Wasn’t it a British administrator, educated at Oxford or Cambridge, who in 1922 advocated administrative massacres to ensure the security of the colonies, and bitterly regretted that the political situation in the Home Islands rendered these salutary measures impossible? Or, if like some people, you want to charge all our sins to the account of anti-Semitism alone—a gross mistake, in my opinion, but a seductive one for many—wouldn’t you have to acknowledge that France, on the eve of the Great War, went much further in this domain than us (not to mention the Russia of the pogroms!)? I hope, by the way, that you won’t be too surprised that I thus discount anti-Semitism as a fundamental cause of the massacre of the Jews: that would be forgetting that our extermination policies went much further. By the time of our defeat—and far from wanting to rewrite History, I would be the first to acknowledge it—we had already, aside from the Jews, completed the destruction of all the German incurable physically and mentally handicapped, of most of the Gypsies, and of millions of Russians and Poles. And the projects, as you know, were even more ambitious: for the Russians, the necessary natural diminution, according to the experts of the Four-Year Plan and the RSHA, was to reach thirty million, or even forty-six to fifty-one million, according to the dissident opinion of a somewhat zealous Dezernent in the Ostministerium. If the war had lasted a few more years, we would certainly have begun a massive reduction of the Poles. The idea had already been in the air for some time: viz the voluminous correspondence between Gauleiter Greiser in Warthegau and the Reichsführer, where Greiser asks, in May 1942, for permission to use the Kulmhof gassing installations to destroy thirty-five thousand tubercular Poles, who constituted, he said, a grave health menace for his Gau; after seven months, the Reichsführer finally let him understand that his proposition was interesting, but premature. You must think I’m explaining all this to you rather coldly: that’s simply in order to demonstrate to you that the destruction by our deeds of the people of Moses did not stem solely from an irrational hatred of the Jews—I think I’ve already shown how poorly the emotional type of anti-Semite was regarded by the SD and the SS in general—but above all from a firm, well-reasoned acceptance of the recourse to violence to resolve the most varied social problems, in which, moreover, we differed from the Bolsheviks only by our respective evaluations of the categories of problems to be resolved: their approach being based on a horizontal reading of social identity (class), ours on a vertical one (race), but both equally deterministic (as I think I’ve already stressed) and reaching similar conclusions in terms of the remedy to be employed. And if you think carefully about it, you could deduce from this that this will, or at least this capacity, to accept the necessity of a much more radical approach to the problems afflicting all societies, can have been born only from our defeats during the Great War. Every country (except perhaps the United States) suffered; but victory, and the arrogance and moral smugness born of victory, probably allowed the English and the French and even the Italians more readily to forget their sufferings and their losses, and to settle down again, sometimes even to wallow in their self-satisfaction, and thus to grow frightened again more easily, from fear of seeing this oh so fragile compromise fall apart. As for us, we had nothing more to lose. We had fought just as honorably as our enemies; we had been treated like criminals, humiliated and dismembered, and our dead were scorned. The fate of the Russians, objectively, was scarcely any better. What could be more logical, then, than to say: Well, then, if that’s the way it is, if it’s just to sacrifice the best of the nation, to send to their deaths the most patriotic, the most intelligent, the most devoted men, those most loyal to our race, and all in the name of the salvation of the nation—and if that was all for naught—and if their sacrifice is spat upon—then, what right to life should the worst elements have, the criminals, the insane, the retarded, the asocials, the Jews, not to mention our external enemies? The Bolsheviks, I am convinced, reasoned in the same way. Since respecting the rules of so-called humanity was useless to us, why stubbornly persist in a respect for which no one was even grateful? Hence, inevitably, a much harsher, stiffer, more radical approach to our problems. In every society, in every age, social problems have been subject to arbitration between the needs of the group and the rights of the individual, and thus have given rise to a number of responses that are ultimately quite limited: roughly, death, charity, or exclusion (especially, historically, in the form of exile). The Greeks exposed their deformed children; the Arabs, acknowledging that they constituted, economically speaking, a burden that was too heavy for their families, but not wanting to kill them, put them in the care of the community, thanks to the zakat, that obligatory religious charity (a tax for good works); even in our days, in our countries, there exist specialized establishments for such cases, so that their misfortune need not spoil the view of those in good health. Now, if you adopt such an overall vision, you can see that in Europe at least, from the eighteenth century onward, all the distinct solutions to the various problems—public torture for criminals, exile for the contagiously ill (leprosariums), Christian charity for imbeciles—converged, under the influence of the Enlightenment, toward a single type of solution, applicable to all cases and infinitely variable: institutionalized imprisonment, financed by the State, a form of inner exile, if you like, sometimes with pedagogical pretensions, but above all with a practical finality: the criminals to prison, the sick to the hospital, the crazy to the asylum. And who cannot see that these humane solutions, too, resulted from compromise, were made possible by wealth, and remained, in the end, contingent? After the Great War many understood that they were no longer adapted, that they no longer sufficed to address the new amplitude of the problems, because of restricted economic means and also because of the hitherto unthinkable level of the stakes (the millions of dead of the war). New solutions were necessary, and they were found, as man always finds the solutions he needs, as the so-called democratic countries too would have found them, if they had needed them. But then why, you might ask today, the Jews? What do the Jews have in common with your lunatics, your criminals, your contagious? Yet it’s not hard to see that, historically, the Jews constituted themselves as a “problem,” by wanting to remain apart at all costs. Didn’t the first writings against the Jews, those of the Greeks of Alexandria, long before Christ and theological anti-Semitism, accuse them of being an asocial people, of violating the laws of hospitality, the main foundation and political principle of the ancient world, in the name of their food prohibitions, which prevented them from eating at other people’s houses or from receiving them as guests, from being hosts? Then, of course, there was the religious question. I am not seeking here, as some might think, to make the Jews responsible for their catastrophe; I’m simply trying to say that a certain aspect of European history, unfortunate according to some, inevitable according to others, has made it so that even in our days, in times of crisis, it is natural to turn against the Jews, and that if you become involved in a reshaping of society through violence, sooner or later the Jews will end up on the receiving end—sooner, in our case, later, in the Soviets’—and that this is not entirely by chance. Some Jews too, with the threat of anti-Semitism averted, succumb to hubris.