Night of 15-16 January 1942

It’s claimed that women have no creative genius. But there’s one extraordinary woman, and it irritates me that men don’t do her justice. Angelica Kauffmann was a very great painter. The most illustrious of her own contemporaries admired her.

12 April 1942, midday

When these people [schoolteachers] had the effrontery to complain that they were not being sufficiently well paid by the State, the only possible answer was that any ordinary corporal in the Wehrmacht was doing a better job, from the point of view of education, than they were. It really is no great accomplishment to teach the alphabet to a lot of little boys and girls. I must say I find it astonishing that these primary schoolteachers can bear it all their lives, condemned as they are year after year to teach the same dull rudiments to a never-ending succession of new classes. Physically and psychologically a woman is more fitted for this type of work. A mother accepts quite naturally the burden of bringing a succession of infants into the world, and of occupying herself with the upbringing of each one in turn. The shorthand-typist has a purely mechanical task, which she repeats day after day. By nature, a woman is better fitted than a man to teach the alphabet to young children, and I think therefore we should do well to consider whether we could not profitably employ some of the surplus two million women who, in the nature of things, are condemned to celibacy. Such employment would certainly provide them with an outlet for their maternal instincts.

20 May 1942, at dinner

Of primary importance were the measures we took to ensure a living wage for working women, such as secretaries, shop-girls, artistes and the like. By insisting that they receive a regular wage in accordance with their qualifications – instead of the sort of pocket-money they formerly received – we have delivered them from the doleful necessity of being dependent on an ami for their existence.

What formerly infuriated me more than anything else was the way in which dancers were treated. While so-called comedians – mostly Jews – earned three or four thousand marks a month in theatres like the Berliner Metropol for fifteen minutes of smut, the dancers were paid as little as seventy or eighty marks; and that, mind you, in return not for fifteen minutes, but – if they were keep themselves up to the mark – for practically a whole day’s work of training, practice and so on. Such discrepancies are contemptible. They left these poor creatures no alternative but to go on the streets, and turned the theatre into a euphemism for brothels. Without making any fuss about it, I made sure that the pay of these dancers was raised to a hundred and eighty or two hundred marks, and thus gave them the chance of devoting themselves entirely to their art. This also had considerable effect on the theatre itself; firstly, it allowed them to engage really good-looking girls for the stage; secondly, it enabled the theatre to retain them and train them in the further perfection of their art; and thirdly, it meant that the theatre could foster their general education and thus fit them, at the latest at the age of thirty-five or so, to leave the stage, marry and settle down.

2 July 1942, at dinner

The Fuehrer next addressed Bormann on the subject of some books which the latter had given him to read. The Fuehrer said:

The passages you have marked interest me very much indeed. It would really be most valuable if these books could be made available to all Germans, and particularly to leading men, such as Generals and Admirals. For they do show that, far from being the only one possessed of heretical ideas, I am on the contrary in the excellent company of many of the best of Germans.

When one reads books on the subject of the State and the Church, it is regrettable to see how often Governments are only too ready to sacrifice the true interests of a people to those of some ideology or clique of vested interests. This is the only possible explanation for the fate of so great a heroine in the cause of freedom as Joan of Arc (portrayed, incidentally, much more faithfully by Shaw than by Schiller), who was betrayed, mark you, by the really influential French circles of the time and was burned as a witch.