12 May 1942, at dinner

These people [moral hypocrites and the pretentious upper ten thousand] are shocked at the idea that a Turk may have four legitimate wives, but they admit that the Prussian Princes had forty, and often more, mistresses in the course of their lives. Such hypocrisy drives me to fury. The Prussian Prince, as he gets bored with his successive mistresses, can pack them off like bits of refuse of no importance, and we have here among us blackguards who regard them as men of honour. And these same renegades heap sarcasm on the honest German citizen who, with complete disregard of caste, marries the girl by whom he has had a child! It is these hypocrites who are responsible for mass abortions and for the existence of all those healthy women deprived of a man, simply as the result of reigning prejudice. Is there a more lovely consecration of love, pray, than the birth of a handsome babe, glowing with health? Although it is obvious to the eyes of any reasonable person that nature blesses the love of two beings by giving them a child, these sinister degenerates claim, if you please, that the status of man or a woman depends on a sealed document given by the State – as if that were of any importance in comparison with the ties which unite two people in love!

To my way of thinking, the real ideal is that two beings should unite for life and that their love should be sanctified by the presence of children. If our farms have remained often for centuries, in some cases for as long as seven hundred years, in the possession of the same family, it is for the most part because marriages were arranged only when an infant was on the way. And for centuries the Catholic Church bowed to this custom and tolerated what was called “the trial.” When the birth of the infant was imminent, the priest would remind the future father of his duty to marry. Unfortunately the Protestant Church has broken with these healthy customs and has prepared the way, with the aid of laws written or unwritten, for the hypocrisy whose object it is to stigmatise as something shameful a marriage which has been provoked by the arrival of a child. And don’t let us forget, if we are going to be completely truthful, that a large part of the Prussian nobility owes its existence to a faux-pas on the part of one of the girls of the bourgeoisie.

Moreover, these prejudices only operate in reverse, and logic has no bearing on the trend of our desires – for the admissibility of the dissolution of marriage on account of incompatibility is legally recognised. It is contrary to the law of nature to insist on the maintenance of a union in which the partners are unable to agree, it is no less wrong to put obstacles in the way of a marriage justifiable on the grounds of perfect reciprocal unity. My age saves me from the suspicion that I am perhaps pleading pro domo, and so I am able to invite attention to the importance of this problem.

I shall have no peace of mind until I have succeeded in planting a seed of Nordic blood wherever the population stand in need of regeneration.

12 August 1942, midday

I have never attended a wedding which was conducted with becoming solemnity. Marriage is a holy act, the binding into one of two human beings of different sex; less moving, perhaps, for a man than for a woman, but still a most solemn occasion. And what do most of the guests do but make pointed jokes at the expense of the bride and bridegroom! I attended one wedding – that of Thiersch – at which every guest made a short and suggestive speech; and this was regarded as the height of wit! I wonder why it is?