Heydrich wrote:that inaccurate Table Talk garbage from Picker written after the war.
The Enigma edition of HITLER'S TABLE TALK is a very authentic-sounding document. Unfortunately, it cuts both ways (like much else). On the one hand, it clearly lacks any references to gas chambers. There is a passage which at first glance might sound as if Hitler were describing an extermination of Jews, but later in the text he refers again to dumping Jews somewhere in a swamp in eastern Europe in a way which contradicts any earlier inference of systematic extermination. This text was obviously not put together by anyone trying to sell the standard message of Holocaustomania. On the other hand, there's no escaping the fact that Hitler comes through in this text as a fairly old-fashioned racist imperialist who derided Slavs in a very bad fashion. He doesn't sound like the devil of the century, but he comes off as a fairly typical kind of chauvinist such as was once quite common. He envisioned the conquest of Russia to be the key to solving all of Germany's economic problems and never had any other solution apart from that. The Soviet Union as a military force was dismissed by him as late as the start of 1942. His comments make clear that Russians are to be no more than a source of cheap labor whose literacy level is to be restricted down to the minimum necessary for them to follow directions from the German colonial settlers. His tone here only began to shift when it started becoming clear that actual Soviet military capability was much more than he had allowed for in his early expectations of a 6-week campaign. The myth that all of this was done without incurring debt is just that. Hitler himself makes it clear in his own statements that he regards debts as something which will be paid for through expansion, but not that he has any plan of what to do with the German economy apart from such expansion:
I have already said that the payment of the debts contracted during the war presents no problem. In the first place, the territories which we have conquered by force of arms represent an increase in national wealth which far exceeds the cost of the war; in the second place, the integration of twenty million foreign workers at cheap rates into the German industrial system represents a saving which, again, is greatly in excess of the debts contracted by the State. A simple calculation, which curiously enough seems to have escaped the notice of the majority of our economic experts, will show the correctness of this contention; the foreign worker earns approximately a thousand marks a year, in comparison with the average yearly earning of two thousand marks by German workers. Work out what this comes to in toto, and you will see that the final gain is enormous.
In the assessment of the national wealth I had to explain even to Funk, who, after all, is Economic Minister of the Reich, how the standard of living of the German people had been very considerably raised by the system of employing foreign labor which we had introduced. One has only to compare the cost of local labor with that of German labor abroad to see that this must be so.
History shows that no country has ever been ruined on account of its debts. You may take it from me that our economists can sleep comfortably and regard the problem of war costs and debts with the utmost optimism.
-- Hitler's Table Talk, May 4, 1942.
