“The soil on which we now live was not a gift bestowed by Heaven on our forefathers. But they had to conquer it by risking their lives. So also in the future our people will not obtain territory and therewith the means of existence as a favor from any other people, but will have to win it by the power of a triumphant sword.”
On Page 145 Hitler revealed his own personal attitude to war. Of the years of peace before 1914 he wrote:
“Thus I used to think it an ill-deserved stroke of bad luck that I had arrived too late on this terrestrial globe, and I felt chagrined at the idea that my life would have to run its course along peaceful and orderly lines. As a boy I was anything but a pacifist and all attempts to make me so proved futile.”
Generally, Hitler wrote of war in this way. On Page 162 we find:
“In regard to the part played by humane feeling, Moltke stated that in time of war the essential thing is to get a decision as quickly as possible and that the most ruthless methods of fighting are at the same time the most humane. When people attempt to answer this reasoning by ‘highfalutin’ talk about aesthetics, et cetera, only one answer can be given. It is that the vital questions involved in the struggle of a nation for its existence must not be subordinated to any aesthetic consideration.”
How faithfully these precepts of ruthlessness were followed by the defendants the Prosecution will prove in the course of this Trial.
Hitler’s assumption of an inevitable law of struggle for survival linked up in Chapter 11 of Book I of Mein Kampf, with the doctrine of Aryan superiority over other races and the right of Germans, in virtue of this superiority, to dominate and use other peoples as instruments for their own ends. The whole of Chapter 11 of Mein Kampf is dedicated to this master race theory, and, indeed, many of the later speeches of Hitler, his addresses to his generals and so forth, were mainly repetitive of Chapter 11.
If the Court will look at the extract from Page 256, it reads as follows:
“Had it not been possible for them to employ members of the inferior race which they conquered, the Aryans would never have been in a position to take the first steps on the road which led them to a later type of culture; just as, without the help of certain suitable animals which they were able to tame, they would never have come to the invention of mechanical power, which has subsequently enabled them to do without these beasts. . . .