The Nuremberg Interviews by Leon Goldensohn Read Free Book Online

like about Goering’s defense is his statement that he is not innocent. He has not been innocent. I like that. But I think the prosecution could have been more effective than it has been up to now. If Goering had spent more time on the air force and less time on his bacchanals and looting of art treasures, perhaps Germany would be better off today and I would not be sitting here in this cell.
    “My own defense is small. In fact, my defense counsel is small and reminds me of Goebbels. I hope Dr. Seidl has a mouth like Goebbels, although I doubt if it will help me very much.
    “The most difficult thing in Goering’s defense was his weaknesses regarding art collections, et cetera. Your Justice Jackson is completely equipped with a whole collection of books and documents. Trial psychology is very interesting. I sit in the dock there like a spectator. It is difficult to remember that while we sit in here, the outside world goes on, and now I ruminate on how Hitler started and how the whole bloody movement resulted from hunger in Germany.
    “All these things are still apparent today. You Americans can see for yourselves how impossible it is to feed the German people from the German soil itself. From the viewpoint of an historian one can say that Hitler never would have arisen if the Allies had not treated Germany so poorly. Justice Jackson said so himself. Today things are more impossible than ever. The East has been taken away from Germany — in other words, hunger created Hitler, and paradoxically, Hitler created still greater hunger.
    “These are the facts of life and one can’t disregard them. Germans are being thrown out by the Poles and Russians, and a big catastrophe is occurring. It becomes worse and worse daily.
    “This does not explain or justify the crimes which Hitler committed. An astrologist once visited me and read a horoscope of Adolf Hitler in which he called him a criminal. That was about four years ago. I don’t believe in astrology, but I do believe implicitly in the power of fate — that all of us mortals are included in the cosmic laws of the universe. We sit in the world, and the world is part of the universe. I believe in what Christ said, that no sparrow falls from a roof unless it is God’s will.
    “I don’t believe this war was the end of controversies. The struggle will go on until all existing cultures are destroyed. The same thing happened in the fall of the Roman Empire. Germany is always the first nation to be built up and the first to collapse completely. The collapse of Europe will eventually take place.
    “Europe is nothing — it is merely a question of what Russians and Americans decide to do with it. A complete change will occur. Three hundred years ago, Europe was the dominant part of the world. The next thing that is highly endangered is the British Empire. Forty million Englishmen are not sufficient to govern an empire of four to five hundred million people.
    “I was a good friend of Oswald Spengler, 8 and together with Spengler’s niece I saved his library during an air raid. Spengler’s niece was in charge of the University of Munich library. Spengler was the last great man of Germany. In 1933 he prophesied that the Reich under Hitler would perish. I didn’t want to believe it. Now, in my cell, I often think of the letter Spengler wrote to me in 1936, shortly before his death. In it he said that within ten years the German Reich would probably cease to exist. He died in December 1936. He told me that when Hitler screamed, ‘Out with the Jews,’ he proved that he was no statesman. Spengler felt that if Hitler had been a statesman, he would have said that Germany consisted of more than just Germans or Jews and that anyone of use to Germany should be kept. He quoted the example of Lord Beaconsfield under Queen Victoria, on the Indian question, and he told me of the great deeds of the Jew Cecil Rhodes in South Africa.
    “Spengler said that Hitler is doing a good job for