Chapter XI: Nation and Race
THERE are some truths which are so obvious that for this very reason
they are not seen or at least not recognized by ordinary people. They sometimes
pass by such truisms as though blind and are most astonished when someone
suddenly discovers what everyone really ought to know. Columbus's eggs lie
around by the hundreds of thousands, but Columbuses are met with less
frequently.
Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of
Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few
exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature's rule:
the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this
earth.
Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature's restricted
form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the
innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with
a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the
finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the
dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf, etc.
Only unusual circumstances can change this, primarily the
compulsion of captivity or any other cause that makes it impossible to mate
within the same species. But then Nature begins to resist this with all
possible means, and her most visible protest consists either in refusing
further capacity for propagation to bastards or in limiting the fertility of
later offspring; in most cases, however, she takes away the power of resistance
to disease or hostile attacks.
This is only too natural.
Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level
produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the
offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as
high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle
against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a
higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in
associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The
stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own
greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is
only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable
higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.
The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid
in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but
their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a
goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the
varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc.,
of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner
attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as
similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice.
Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises
less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks
on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all
those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of
the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to
the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health
and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher
development.
If the process were different, all further and higher
development would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior
always predominates numerically over the best, if both had the same possibility
of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more
rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the
background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken.
Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living
conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the
remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice
according to strength and health.
No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with
stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a
lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps
hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow.
Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It
shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that
of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America,
whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who
mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and
culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin
immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one
example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture.
The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially
pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master
as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood.
The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief
always the following:
but to sin against the will of the eternal creator.
And as a sin this act is rewarded.
When man attempts to rebel against the iron logic of
Nature, he comes into struggle with the principles to which he himself owes his
existence as a man. And this attack I must lead to his own doom.
Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern
pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! 'Man's role is to
overcome Nature!'
Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and
end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror
of Nature; though in this they dispose of no other weapon than an idea, and at
that such a miserable one, that if it were true no world at all would be
conceivable
But quite aside from the fact that man has never yet
conquered Nature in anything, but at most has caught hold of and tried to lift
one or another corner of her immense gigantic veil of eternal riddles and
secrets, that in reality he invents nothing but only discovers everything, that
he does not dominate Nature, but has only risen on the basis of his knowledge
of various laws and secrets of Nature to be lord over those other living
creatures who lack this knowledge-quite aside from all this, an idea cannot
overcome the preconditions for the development and being of humanity, since the
idea itself depends only on man. Without human beings there is no human idea in
this world, therefore the idea as such is always conditioned by the presence of
human beings and hence of all the laws which created the precondition for their
existence.
And not only that! Certain ideas are even tied up with
certain men. This applies most of all to those ideas whose content originates,
not in an exact scientific truth, but in the world of emotion, or, as it is so
beautifully and clearly expressed today, reflects an 'inner experience.' All
these ideas, which have nothing to do with cold logic as such, but represent
only pure expressions of feeling, ethical conceptions, etc., are chained to the
existence of men, to whose intellectual imagination and creative power they owe
their existence. Precisely in this case the preservation of these definite
races and men is the precondition for the existence of these ideas. Anyone, for
example, who really desired the victory of the pacifistic idea in this world
with all his heart would have to fight with all the means at his disposal for
the conquest of the world by the Germans; for, if the opposite should occur,
the last pacifist would die out with the last German, since the rest of the
world has never fallen so deeply as our own people, unfortunately, has for this
nonsense so contrary to Nature and reason. Then, if we were serious, whether we
liked it or not, we would have to wage wars in order to arrive at pacifism.
This and nothing else was what Wilson, the American world savior, intended, or
so at least our German visionaries believed-and thereby his purpose was
fulfilled.
In actual fact the pacifistic-humane idea is perfectly
all right perhaps when the highest type of man has previously conquered and
subjected the world to an extent that makes him the sole ruler of this earth.
Then this idea lacks the power of producing evil effects in exact proportion as
its practical application becomes rare and finally impossible. Therefore, first
struggle and then we shall see what can be done.l Otherwise mankind has passed
the high point of its development and the end is not the domination of any
ethical idea but barbarism and consequently chaos. At this point someone or
other may laugh, but this planet once moved through the ether for millions of
years without human beings and it can do so again some day if men forget that
they owe their higher existence, not to the ideas of a few crazy ideologists,
but to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature's stern and rigid
laws.
Everything we admire on this earth today-science and art, technology
and inventions-is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally
perhaps of one race. On them depends the existence of this whole culture. If
they perish, the beauty of this earth will sink into the grave with
them.
However much the soil, for example, can influence men, the result of
the influence will always be different depending on the races in question. The
low fertility of a living space may spur the one race to the highest
achievements; in others it will only be the cause of bitterest poverty and
final undernourishment with all its consequences. The inner nature of peoples
is always determining for the manner in which outward influences will be
effective. What leads the one to starvation trains the other to hard
work.
All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally
creative race died out from blood poisoning.
The ultimate cause of such a decline was their forgetting
that all culture depends on men and not conversely; hence that to preserve a
certain culture the man who creates it must be preserved. This preservation is
bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best
and stronger in this world.
Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do
not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to
live.
Even if this were hard-that is how it is ! Assuredly, however by far
the harder fate is that which strikes the man who thinks he can overcome
Nature, but in the last analysis only mocks her. Distress, misfortune, and
diseases are her answer.
The man who misjudges and disregards the racial laws
actually forfeits the happiness that seems destined to be his. He thwarts the
triumphal march of the best race and hence also the precondition for all human
progress, and remains, in consequence burdened with all the sensibility of man,
in the animal realm of helpless misery.
It is idle to argue which race or races were the original
representative of human culture and hence the real founders of all that we sum
up under the word 'humanity.' It is simpler to raise this question with regard
to the present, and here an easy, clear answer results. All the human culture,
all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today,
are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits
of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher
humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the
word 'man.' He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the
divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire
of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man
to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth. Exclude
him-and perhaps after a few thousand years darkness will again descend on the
earth, human culture will pass, and the world turn to a desert.
If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the
founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture, only
the Aryan could be considered as the representative of the first group. From
him originate the foundations and walls of all human creation, and only the
outward form and color are determined by the changing traits of character of
the various peoples. He provides the mightiest building stones and plans for
all human progress and only the execution corresponds to the nature of the
varying men and races. In a few decades, for example, the entire east of Asia
will possess a culture whose ultimate foundation will be Hellenic spirit and
Germanic technology, just as much as in Europe. Only the outward form-in part
at least-will bear the features of Asiatic character. It is not true, as some
people think, that Japan adds European technology to its culture; no, European
science and technology are trimmed with Japanese characteristics. The
foundation of actual life is no longer the special Japanese culture, although
it determines the color of life-because outwardly, in consequence of its inner
difference, it is more conspicuous to the European-but the gigantic
scientific-technical achievements of Europe and America; that is, of Aryan
peoples. Only on the basis of these achievements can the Orient follow general
human progress. They furnish the basis of the struggle for daily bread, create
weapons and implements for it, and only the outward form is gradually adapted
to Japanese character.
If beginning today all further Aryan influence on Japan
should stop, assuming that Europe and America should perish, Japan's present
rise in science and technology might continue for a short time; but even in a
few years the well would dry up, the Japanese special character would gain, but
the present culture would freeze and sink back into the slumber from which it
was awakened seven decades ago by the wave of Aryan culture. Therefore, just as
the present Japanese development owes its life to Aryan origin, long ago in the
gray past foreign influence and foreign spirit awakened the Japanese culture of
that time. The best proof of this is furnished by the fact of its subsequent
sclerosis and total petrifaction. This can occur in a people only when the
original creative racial nucleus has been lost, or if the external influence
which furnished the impetus and the material for the first development in the
cultural field was later lacking. But if it iS established that a people
receives the most essential basic materials of its culture from foreign races,
that it assimilates and adapts them, and that then, if further external
influence is lacking, it rigidifies again and again, such a race may be
designated as culture-bearing,' but never as 'culture-creating.' An examination
of the various peoples from this standpoint points to the fact that practically
none of them were originally culture-founding, but almost always
culture-bearing.
Approximately the following picture of their development
always results:
Aryan races-often absurdly small numerically-subject
foreign peoples, and then, stimulated by the special living conditions of the
new territory (fertility, climatic conditions, etc.) and assisted by the
multitude of lower-type beings standing at their disposal as helpers, develop
the intellectual and organizational capacities dormant within them. Often in a
few millenniums or even centuries they create cultures which originally bear
all the inner characteristics of their nature, adapted to the above-indicated
special qualities of the soil and subjected beings. In the end, however, the
conquerors transgress against the principle of blood purity, to which they had
first adhered; they begin to mix with the subjugated inhabitants and thus end
their own existence; for the fall of man in paradise has always been followed
by his expulsion.
After a thousand years and more, the last visible trace
of the former master people is often seen in the lighter skin color which its
blood left behind in the subjugated race, and in a petrified culture which it
had originally created. For, once the actual and spiritual conqueror lost
himself in the blood of the subjected people, the fuel for the torch of human
progress was lost! Just as, through the blood of the former masters, the color
preserved a feeble gleam in their memory, likewise the night of cultural life
is gently illumined by the remaining creations of the former light-bringers.
They shine through all the returned barbarism and too often inspire the
thoughtless observer of the moment with the opinion that he beholds the picture
of the present people before him, whereas he is only gazing into the mirror of
the past.
It is then possible that such a people will a second time, or even
more often in the course of its history, come into contact with the race of
those who once brought it culture, and the memory of former encounters will not
necessarily be present. Unconsciously the remnant of the former master blood
will turn toward. the new arrival, and what was first possible only by
compulsion can now succeed through the people's own will. A new cultural wave
makes its entrance and continues until those who have brought it are again
submerged in the blood of foreign peoples.
It will be the task of a future
cultural and world history to carry on researches in this light and not to
stifle in the rendition of external facts, as is so often, unfortunately, the
case with our present historical science.
This mere sketch of the development of 'culture-bearing'
nations gives a picture of the growth, of the activity, and-the decline-of the
true culture-founders of this earth, the Aryans themselves.
As in daily life the so-called genius requires a special
cause, indeed, often a positive impetus, to make him shine, likewise the
genius-race in the life of peoples. In the monotony of everyday life even
significant men often seem insignificant, hardly rising above the average of
their environment; as soon, however, as they are approached by a situation in
which others lose hope or go astray, the genius rises manifestly from the
inconspicuous average child, not seldom to the amazement of all those who had
hitherto seen him in the pettiness of bourgeois life-and that is why the
prophet seldom has any honor in his own country. Nowhere have we better
occasion to observe this than in war. From apparently harmless children, in
difficult hours when others lose hope, suddenly heroes shoot up with
death-defying determination and an icy cool presence of minds If this hour of
trial had not come, hardly anyone would ever have guessed that a young hero was
hidden in this beardless boy. It nearly always takes some stimulus to bring the
genius on the scene. The hammer-stroke of Fate which throws one man to the
ground suddenly strikes steel in another, and when the shell of everyday life
is broken, the previously hidden kernel lies open before the eyes of the
astonished world. The world then resists and does not want to believe that the
type which is apparently identical with it is suddenly a very different being;
a process which is repeated with every eminent son of man.
Though an inventor, for example, establishes his fame only
on the day of his invention, it is a mistake to think that genius as such
entered into the man only at this hour-the spark of genius exists in the brain
of the truly creative man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always
inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned.
As already emphasized, this applies not only to the
individual man but also to the race. Creatively active peoples always have a
fundamental creative gift, even if it should not be recognizable to the eyes of
superficial observers. Here, too, outward recognition is possible only in
consequence of accomplished deeds, since the rest of the world is not capable
of recognizing genius in itself, but sees only its visible manifestations in
the form of inventions, discoveries, buildings, pictures, etc.; here again it
often takes a long time before the world can fight its way through to this
knowledge. Just as in the life of the outstanding individual, genius or
extraordinary ability strives for practical realization only when spurred on by
special occasions, likewise in the life of nations the creative forces and
capacities which are present can often be exploited only when definite
preconditions invite.
We see this most distinctly in connection with the race
which has been and is the bearer of human cultural development-the Aryans. As
soon as Fate leads them toward special conditions, their latent abilities begin
to develop in a more and more rapid sequence and to mold themselves into
tangible forms. The cultures which they found in such cases are nearly always
decisively determined by the existing soil, the given climate, and-the
subjected people. This last item, to be sure, is almost the most decisive. The
more primitive the technical foundations for a cultural activity, the more
necessary is the presence of human helpers who, organizationally assembled and
employed, must replace the force of the machine. Without this possibility of
using lower human beings, the Aryan would never have been able to take his
first steps toward his future culture; just as without the help of various
suitable beasts which he knew how to tame, he would not have arrived at a
technology which is now gradually permitting him to do without these beasts.
The saying, 'The Moor has worked off his debt, the Moor can go,' unfortunately
has only too deep a meaning. For thousands of years the horse had to serve man
and help him lay the foundations of a development which now, in consequence of
the motor car, is making the horse superfluous. In a few years his activity
trill have ceased, but without his previous collaboration man might have had a
hard time getting where he is today.
Thus, for the formation of higher cultures the existence
of lower human types was one of the most essential preconditions, since they
alone were able to compensate for the lack of technical aids without which a
higher development is not conceivable. It is certain that the first culture of
humanity was based less on the tamed animal than on the use of lower human
beings.
Only after the enslavement of subjected races did the same fate
strike beasts, and not the other way around, as some people would like to
think. For first the conquered warrior drew the plow-and only after him the
horse. Only pacifistic fools can regard this as a sign of human depravity,
failing to realize that this development had to take place in order to reach
the point where today these sky-pilots could force their drivel on the
world.
The progress of humanity is like climbing an endless ladder; it is
impossible to climb higher without first taking the lower steps. Thus, the
Aryan had to take the road to which reality directed him and not the one that
would appeal to the imagination of a modern pacifist. The road of reality is
hard and difficult, but in the end it leads where our friend would like to
bring humanity by dreaming, but unfortunately removes more than bringing
it
Hence it is no accident that the first cultures arose in places
where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjugated them and bent
them to his will. They then became the first technical instrument in the
service of a developing culture.
Thus, the road which the Aryan had to take was clearly
marked out As a conqueror he subjected the lower beings and regulated their
practical activity under his command, according to his will and for his aims.
But in directing them to a useful, though arduous activity, he not only spared
the life of those he subjected; perhaps he gave them a fate that was better
than their previous so-called 'freedom.' As long as he ruthlessly upheld the
master attitude, not only did he really remain master, but also the preserver
and increaser of culture. For culture was based exclusively on his abilities
and hence on his actual survival. As soon as the subjected people began to
raise themselves up and probably approached the conqueror in language, the
sharp dividing wall between master and servant fell. The Aryan gave up the
purity of his blood and, therefore, lost his sojourn in the paradise which he
had made for himself. He became submerged in the racial mixture, and gradually,
more and more, lost his cultural capacity, until at last, not only mentally but
also physically, he began to resemble the subjected aborigines more than his
own ancestors. For a time he could live on the existing cultural benefits, but
then petrifaction set in and he fell a prey to oblivion.
Thus cultures and empires collapsed to make place for new
formations.
Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level
is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a
result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is
contained only in pure blood.
All who are not of good race in this world are
chaff.
And all occurrences in world history are only the expression of the
races' instinct of self-preservation, in the good or bad sense.
The question of the inner causes of the Aryan's
importance can be answered to the effect that they are to be sought less in a
natural instinct of self-preservation than in the special type of its
expression. The will to live, subjectively viewed, is everywhere equal and
different only in the form of its actual expression. In the most primitive
living creatures the instinct of self-preservation does not go beyond concern
for their own ego. Egoism, as we designate this urge, goes so far that it even
embraces time; the moment itself claims everything, granting nothing to the
coming hours. In this condition the animal lives only for himself, seeks food
only for his present hunger, and fights only for his own life. As long as the
instinct of self-preservation expresses itself in this way, every basis is
lacking for the formation of a group, even the most primitive form of family.
Even a community between male and female beyond pure mating, demands an
extension of the instinct of self-preservation, since concern and struggle for
the ego are now directed toward the second party; the male sometimes seeks food
for the female, too, but for the most part both seek nourishment for the young.
Nearly always one comes to the defense of the other, and thus the first, though
infinitely simple, forms of a sense of sacrifice result. As soon as this sense
extends beyond the narrow limits of the family, the basis for the formation of
larger organisms and finally formal states is created.
In the lowest peoples of the earth this quality is
present only to a very slight extent, so that often they do not go beyond the
formation of the family. The greater the readiness to subordinate purely
personal interests, the higher rises the ability to establish comprehensive
communities.
This self-sacrificing will to give one's personal labor
and if necessary one's own life for others is most strongly developed in the
Aryan. The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the
extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the
community. In him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest
form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to-the life of the community
and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.
Not in his intellectual gifts lies the source of the
Aryan's capacity for creating and building culture. If he had just this alone,
he could only act destructively, in no case could he organize; for the
innermost essence of all organization requires that the individual renounce
putting forward his personal opinion and interests and sacrifice both in favor
of a larger group. Only byway of this general community does he again recover
his share. Now, for example, he no longer works directly for himself, but with
his activity articulates himself with the community, not only for his own
advantage, but for the advantage of all. The most wonderful elucidation of this
attitude is provided by his word 'work,' by which he does not mean an activity
for maintaining life in itself, but exclusively a creative effort that does not
conflict with the interests of the community. Otherwise he designates human
activity, in so far as it serves the instinct of self-preservation without
consideration for his fellow men, as theft, usury, robbery, burglary,
etc.
This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to
the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly
human culture. From it alone can arise all the great works of mankind, which
bring the founder little reward, but the richest blessings to posterity. Yes
from it alone can we understand how so many are able to bear up faithfully
under a scanty life which imposes on them nothing but poverty and frugality,
but gives the community the foundations of its existence. Every worker, every
peasant, every inventor, official, etc., who works without ever being able to
achieve any happiness or prosperity for himself, is a representative of this
lofty idea, even if the deeper meaning of his activity remains hidden in
him.
What applies to work as the foundation of human sustenance and all
human progress is true to an even greater degree for the defense of man and his
culture. In giving one's own life for the existence of the community lies the
crown of all sense of sacrifice. It is this alone that prevents what human
hands have built from being overthrown by human hands or destroyed bat Nature.
Our own German language possesses a word which magnificently
designates this kind of activity: Pflichterfullung (fulfillment of duty); it
means not to be self-sufficient but to serve the community.
The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we
call-to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness-idealism. By this we
understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community,
for his fellow men.
How necessary it is to keep realizing that idealism does
not represent a superfluous expression of emotion, but that in truth it has
been, is, and will be, the premise for what we designate as human culture, yes,
that it alone created the concept of 'man' It is to this inner attitude that
the Aryan owes his position in this world, and to it the world owes man; for it
alone formed from pure spirit the creative force which, by a unique pairing of
the brutal fist and the intellectual genius, created the monuments of human
culture.
Without his idealistic attitude all, even the most dazzling
faculties of the intellect, would remain mere intellect as such
outward
appearance without inner value, and never creative force.
But, since true idealism is nothing but the subordination
of the interests and life of the individual to the community, and this in turn
is the precondition for the creation of organizational forms of all kinds, it
corresponds in its innermost depths to the ultimate will of Nature. It alone
leads men to voluntary recognition of the privilege of force and strength, and
thus makes them into a dust particle of that order which shapes and forms the
whole universe.
The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the
deepest knowledge.
How correct this is, and how little true idealism has to
do with playful flights of the imagination, can be seen at once if we let the
unspoiled child, a healthy boy, for example, judge. The same boy who feels like
throwing up I when he hears the tirades of a pacifist 'idealist' is ready to
give his young life for the ideal of his nationality.
Here the instinct of knowledge unconsciously obeys the
deeper necessity of the preservation of the species, if necessary at the cost
of the individual, and protests against the visions of the pacifist windbag who
in reality is nothing but a cowardly, though camouflaged, egoist, transgressing
the laws of development; for development requires willingness on the part of
the individual to sacrifice himself for the community, and not the sickly
imaginings of cowardly know-it-alls and critics of Nature.
Especially, therefore, at times when the ideal attitude
threatens to disappear, we can at once recognize a diminution of that force
which forms the community and thus creates the premises of culture. As soon as
egoism becomes the ruler of a people, the bands of order are loosened and in
the chase after their own happiness men fall from heaven into a real
hell.
Yes, even posterity forgets the men who have only served their own
advantage and praises the heroes who have renounced their own
happiness.
The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by
the Jew. In hardly any people in the world is the instinct of self-preservation
developed more strongly than in the so-called 'chosen.' Of this, the mere fact
of the survival of this race may be considered the best proof. Where is the
people which in the last two thousand years has been exposed to so slight
changes of inner disposition, character, etc., as the Jewish people? What
people, finally, has gone through greater upheavals than this one-and
nevertheless issued from the mightiest catastrophes of mankind unchanged? What
an infinitely tough will to live and preserve the species speaks from these
facts !
The mental qualities of the Jew have been schooled in the course of
many centuries. Today he passes as 'smart,' and this in a certain sense he has
been at all times. But his intelligence is not the result of his own
development, but of visual instruction through foreigners. For the human mind
cannot climb to the top without steps; for every step upward he needs the
foundation of the past, and this in the comprehensive sense in which it can be
revealed only in general culture. All thinking is based only in small part on
man's own knowledge, and mostly on the experience of the -time that has
preceded. The general cultural level provides the individual man, without his
noticing it as a rule, with such a profusion of preliminary knowledge that,
thus armed, he can more easily take further steps of his own. The boy of today,
for example, grows up among a truly vast number of technical acquisitions of
the last centuries, so that he takes for granted and no longer pays attention
to much that a hundred years ago was a riddle to even the greatest minds,
although for following and understanding our progress in the field in question
it is of decisive importance to him. If a very genius from the twenties of the
past century should suddenly leave his grave today, it would be harder for him
even intellectually to find his way in the present era than for an average boy
of fifteen today. For he would lack all the infinite preliminary education
which our present contemporary unconsciously, so to speak, assimilates while
growing up amidst the manifestations of our present general
civilization.
Since the Jew-for reasons which will at once become
apparent-was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of
his intellectual work were always provided by others. His intellect at all
times developed through the cultural world surrounding him.
The reverse process never took place.
For if the Jewish people's instinct of self-preservation
is not smaller but larger than that of other peoples, if his intellectual
faculties can easily arouse the impression that they are equal to the
intellectual gifts of other races, he lacks completely the most essential
requirement for a cultured people, the idealistic attitude.
In the Jewish people the will to self-sacrifice does not
go beyond the individual's naked instinct of self-preservation. Their
apparently great sense of solidarity is based on the very primitive herd
instinct that is seen in many other living creatures in this world. It is a
noteworthy fact that the herd instinct leads to mutual support only as long as
a common danger makes this seem useful or inevitable. The same pack of wolves
which has just fallen on its prey together disintegrates when hunger abates
into its individual beasts. The same is true of horses which try to defend
themselves against an assailant in a body, but scatter again as soon as the
danger is past.
It is similar with the Jew. His sense of sacrifice is
only apparent. It exists only as long as the existence of the individual makes
it absolutely necessary. However, as soon as the common enemy is conquered, the
danger threatening all averted and the booty hidden, the apparent harmony of
the Jews among themselves ceases, again making way for their old causal
tendencies. The Jew is only united when a common danger forces him to be or a
common booty entices him; if these two grounds are lacking, the qualities of
the crassest egoism come into their own, and in the twinkling of an eye the
united people turns into a horde of rats, fighting bloodily among
themselves.
If the Jews were alone in this world, they would stifle
in filth and offal; they would try to get ahead of one another in hate-filled
struggle and exterminate one another, in so far as the absolute absence of all
sense of self-sacrifice, expressing itself in their cowardice, did not turn
battle into comedy here too.
So it is absolutely wrong to infer any ideal sense of
sacrifice in the Jews from the fact that they stand together in struggle, or,
better expressed, in the plundering of their fellow men.
Here again the Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism
of the individual.
That is why the Jewish state-which should be the living
organism for preserving and increasing a race-is completely unlimited as to
territory. For a state formation to have a definite spatial setting always
presupposes an idealistic attitude on the part of the state-race, and
especially a correct interpretation of the concept of work. In the exact
measure in which this attitude is lacking, any attempt at forming, even of
preserving, a spatially delimited state fails. And thus the basis on which
alone culture can arise is lacking.
Hence the Jewish people, despite all apparent intellectual
qualities, is without any true culture, and especially without any culture of
its own. For what sham culture the Jew today possesses is the property of other
peoples, and for the most part it is ruined in his hands.
In judging the Jewish people's attitude on the question of
human culture, the most essential characteristic we must always bear in mind is
that there has never been a Jewish art and accordingly there is none today
either; that above all the two queens of all the arts, architecture and music,
owe nothing original to the Jews. What they do accomplish in the field of art
is either patchwork or intellectual theft. Thus, the Jew lacks those qualities
which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally
blessed.
To what an extent the Jew takes over foreign culture, imitating or
rather ruining it, can be seen from the fact that he is mostly found in the art
which seems to require least original invention, the art of acting. But even
here, in reality, he is only a ' juggler,' or rather an ape; for even here he
lacks the last touch that is required for real greatness; even here he is not
the creative genius, but a superficial imitator, and all the twists and tricks
that he uses are powerless to conceal the inner lifelessness of his creative
gift. Here the Jewish press most lovingly helps him along by raising such a
roar of hosannahs about even the most mediocre bungler, just so long as he is a
Jew, that the rest of the world actually ends up by thinking that they have an
artist before them, while in truth it is only a pitiful comedian.
No, the Jew possesses no culture-creating force of any
sort, since the idealism, without which there is no true higher development of
man, is not present in him and never was present. Hence his intellect will
never have a constructive effect, but will be destructive, and in very rare
cases perhaps will at most be stimulating, but then as the prototype of the '
force which always wants evil and nevertheless creates good.' Not through him
does any progress of mankind occur, but in spite of him.
Since the Jew never possessed a state with definite
territorial limits and therefore never called a culture his own, the conception
arose that this was a people which should be reckoned among the ranks of the
nomads. This is a fallacy as great as it is dangerous. The nomad does possess a
definitely limited living space, only he does not cultivate it like a sedentary
peasant, but lives from the yield of his herds with which he wanders about in
his territory. The outward reason for this is to be found in the small
fertility of a soil which simply does not permit of settlement. The deeper
cause, however, lies in the disparity between the technical culture of an age
or people and the natural poverty of a living space. There are territories in
which even the Aryan is enabled only by his technology, developed in the course
of more than a thousand years, to live in regular settlements, to master broad
stretches of soil and obtain from it the requirements of life. If he did not
possess this technology, either he would have to avoid these territories or
likewise have to struggle along as a nomad in perpetual wandering, provided
that his thousand-year-old education and habit of settled residence did not
make this seem simply unbearable to him. We must bear in mind that in the time
when the American continent was being opened up, numerous Aryans fought for
their livelihood as trappers, hunters, etc., and often in larger troops with
wife and children, always on the move, so that their existence was completely
like that of the nomads. But as soon as their increasing number and better
implements permitted them to clear the wild soil and make a stand against the
natives, more and more settlements sprang up in the land.
Probably the Aryan was also first a nomad, settling in
the course of time, but for that very reason he was never a Jew! No, the Jew is
no nomad; for the nomad had also a definite attitude toward the concept of work
which could serve as a basis for his later development in so far as the
necessary intellectual premises were present. In him the basic idealistic view
is present, even if in infinite dilution, hence in his whole being he may seem
strange to the Aryan peoples, but not unattractive. In the Jew, however, this
attitude is not at all present; for that reason he was never a nomad, but only
and always a parasite in the body of other peoples. That he sometimes left his
previous living space has nothing to do with his own purpose, but results from
the fact that from time to time he was thrown out by the host nations he had
misused. His spreading is a typical phenomenon for all parasites; he always
seeks a new feeding ground for his race.
This, however, has nothing to do with nomadism, for the
reason that a Jew never thinks of leaving a territory ·hat he has occupied, but
remains where he is, and he sits so fast that even by force it is very hard to
drive him out. His extension to ever-new countries occurs only in the moment in
which certain conditions for his existence are there present, without which-
unlike the nomad-he would not change his residence. He is and remains the
typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon
as a favorable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is also like
that of spongers: wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter
or longer period.
Thus, the Jew of all times has lived in the states of
other peoples, and there formed his own state, which, to be sure, habitually
sailed under the disguise of 'religious community' as long as outward
circumstances made a complete revelation of his nature seem inadvisable. But as
soon as he felt strong enough to do without the protective cloak, he always
dropped the veil and suddenly became what so many of the others previously did
not want to believe and see: the Jew.
The Jew's life as a parasite in the body of other nations
and states explains a characteristic which once caused Schopenhauer, as has
already been mentioned, to call him the 'great master in lying.' Existence
impels the Jew to lies and to lie perpetually, just as it compels the
inhabitants of the northern countries to wear warm clothing.
His life within other peoples can only endure for any
length of time if he succeeds in arousing the opinion that he is not a.people
but a 'religious community,' though of a special sort.
And this is the first great lie.
In order to carry on his existence as a parasite on other
peoples, he is forced to deny his inner nature. The more intelligent the
individual Jew is, the more he will succeed in this deception. Indeed, things
can go so far that large parts of the host people will end by seriously
believing that the Jew is really a Frenchman or an Englishman, a German or an
Italian, though of a special religious faith. Especially state authorities,
which always seem animated by the historical fraction of wisdom, most easily
fall a victim to this infinite deception. Independent thinking sometimes seems
to these circles a true sin against holy advancement, so that we may not be
surprised if even today a Bavarian state ministry, for example, still has not
the faintest idea that the Jews are members of a people and not of a '
religion' though a glance at the Jew's own newspapers should indicate this even
to the most modest mind. The Jewish Echo is not yet an official organ, of
course, and consequently is unauthoritative as far as the intelligence of one
of these government potentates is concerned.
The Jew has always been a people with definite racial
characteristics and never a religion; only in order to get ahead he early
sought for a means which could distract unpleasant attention from his person.
And what would have been more expedient and at the same time more innocent than
the 'embezzled' concept of a religious community? For here, too, everything is
borrowed or rather stolen. Due to his own original special nature, the Jew
cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks
idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to
him. And a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the
conviction of survival after death in some form. Indeed, the Talmud is not a
book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and
profitable life in this world.
The Jewish religious doctrine consists primarily in
prescriptions for keeping the blood of Jewry pure and for regulating the
relation of Jews among themselves, but even more with the rest of the world; in
other words, with non-Jews. But even here it is by no means ethical problems
that are involved, but extremely modest economic ones. Concerning the moral
value of Jewish religious instruction, there are today and have been at all
times rather exhaustive studies (not by Jews; the drivel of the Jews themselves
on the subject is, of course, adapted to its purpose) which make this kind of
religion seem positively monstrous according to Aryan conceptions. The best
characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the
Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as
alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the
great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his
attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip
to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then
as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence.
In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party
Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later
try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties-and this
against their own nation.
On this first and greatest lie, that the Jews are not a
race but a religion, more and more lies are based in necessary consequence.
Among them is the lie with regard to the language of the Jew. For him it is not
a means for expressing his thoughts, but a means for concealing them. When he
speaks French, he thinks Jewish, and while he turns out German verses, in his
life he only expresses the nature of his nationality. As long as the Jew has
not become the master of the other peoples, he must speak their languages
whether he likes it or not, but as soon as they became his slaves, they would
all have to learn a universal language (Esperanto, for instance!), so that by
this additional means the Jews could more easily dominate them!
To what an extent the whole existence of this people is
based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise
Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the
Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they
are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed.
And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain
these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively
terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people
and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. The best
criticism applied to them, however, is reality. Anyone who examines the
historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this
book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this
book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be
considered as broken.
The best way to know the Jew is to study the road which
he has taken within the body of other peoples in the course of the centuries.
It suffices to follow this up in only one example, to arrive at the necessary
realizations. As his development has always and at all times been the same,
just as that of the peoples corroded by him has also been the same, it is
advisable in such an examination to divide his development into definite
sections which in this case for the sake of simplicity I designate
alphabetically. The first Jews came to ancient Germany in the course of the
advance of the Romans, and as always they came as merchants. In the storms of
the migrations, however, they seem to have disappeared again, and thus the time
of the first Germanic state formation may be viewed as the beginning of a new
and this time lasting Jewification of Central and Northern Europe. A
development set in which has always been the same or similar wherever the Jews
encountered Aryan peoples.
(a) With the appearance of the first fixed settlement,
the Jew is suddenly 'at hand.' He comes as a merchant and at first attaches
little importance to the concealment of his nationality. He is still a Jew,
partly perhaps among other reasons because the outward racial difference
between himself and the host people is too great, his linguistic knowledge
still too small, and the cohesion of the host people too sharp for him to dare
to try to appear as anything else than a foreign merchant. With his dexterity
and the inexperience of his host people, the retention of his character as a
Jew represents no disadvantage for him, but rather an advantage; the stranger
is given a friendly reception.
(b) Gradually he begins slowly to become active in
economic life, not as a producer, but exclusively as a middleman. With his
thousand-year-old mercantile dexterity he is far superior to the still
helpless, and above all boundlessly honest, Aryans, so that in a short time
commerce threatens to become his monopoly. He begins to lend money and as
always at usurious interest. As a matter of fact, he thereby introduces
interest. The danger of this new institution is not recognized at first, but
because of its momentary advantages is even welcomed.
(c) The Jew has now become a steady resident; that is, he
settles special sections of the cities and villages and more and more
constitutes a state within a state. He regards commerce as well as all
financial transactions as his own special privilege which he ruthlessly
exploits.
(d) Finance and commerce have become his complete monopoly. His
usurious rates of interest finally arouse resistance, the rest of his
increasing effrontery indignation, his wealth envy. The cup is full to
overflowing when he draws the soil into the sphere of his commercial objects
and degrades it to the level of a commodity to be sold or rather traded. Since
he himself never cultivates the soil, but regards it only as a property to be
exploited on which the peasant can well remain, though amid the most miserable
extortions on the part of his new master, the aversion against him gradually
increases to open hatred. His blood-sucking tyranny becomes so great that
excesses against him occur. People begin to look at the foreigner more and more
closely and discover more and more repulsive traits and characteristics in him
until the cleft becomes unbridgeable.
At times of the bitterest distress, fury against him
finally breaks out, and the plundered and ruined masses begin to defend
themselves against the scourge of God. In the course of a few centuries they
have come to know him, and now they feel that the mere fact of his existence is
as bad as the plague.
(e) Now the Jew begins to reveal his true qualities. With
repulsive flattery he approaches the governments, puts his money to work, and
in this way always manages to secure new license to plunder his victims. Even
though the rage of the people sometimes flares high against the eternal
blood-sucker, it does not in the least prevent him from reappearing in a few
years in the place he had hardly left and beginning the old life all over
again. No persecution can deter him from his type of human exploitation, none
can drive him away; after every persecution he is back again in a short time,
and just the same as before.
To prevent the very worst, at least, the people begin to
withdraw the soil from his usurious hands by making it legally impossible for
him to acquire soil.
(f) Proportionately as the power of the princes begins to
mount, he pushes closer and closer to them. He begs for ' patents ' and
'privileges,' which the lords, always in financial straits, are glad to give
him for suitable payment. However much this may cost him, he recovers the money
he has spent in a few years through interest and compound interest. A true
blood-sucker that attaches himself to the body of the unhappy people and cannot
be picked off until the princes themselves again need money and with their own
exalted hand tap off the blood he has sucked from them.
This game is repeated again and again, and in it the role
of the so-called 'German princes' is just as miserable as that of the Jews
themselves. These lords were really God's punishment for their beloved peoples
and find their parallels only in the various ministers of the present
time.
It is thanks to the German princes that the German nation was unable
to redeem itself for good from the Jewish menace. In this, too, unfortunately,
nothing changed as time went on; all they obtained from the Jew was the
thousandfold reward for the sins they had once committed against their peoples.
They made a pact with the devil and landed in hell.
(g) And so, his ensnarement of the princes leads to their
ruin. Slowly but surely their relation to the peoples loosens in the measure in
which they cease to serve the people's interests and instead become mere
exploiters of their subjects. The Jew well knows what their end will be and
tries to hasten it as much as possible. He himself adds to their financial
straits by alienating them more and more from their true tasks, by crawling
around them with the vilest flattery, by encouraging them in vices, and thus
making himself more and more indispensable to them. With his deftness, or
rather unscrupulousness, in all money matters he is able to squeeze, yes, to
grind, more and more money out of the plundered subjects, who in shorter and
shorter intervals go the way of all flesh. Thus every court has its 'court
Jew'-as the monsters are called who torment the 'beloved people' to despair and
prepare eternal pleasures for the princes. Who then can be surprised that these
ornaments of the human race ended up by being ornamented, or rather decorated,
in the literal sense, and rose to the hereditary nobility, helping not only to
make this institution ridiculous, but even to poison it?
Now, it goes without saying, he can really make use of his
position for his own advancement.
Finally he needs only to have himself baptized to possess
himself of all the possibilities and rights of the natives of the country. Not
seldom he concludes this deal to the joy of the churches over the son they have
won and of Israel over the successful swindle.
(h) Within Jewry a change now begins to take place. Up
till now they have been Jews; that is, they attach no importance to appearing
to be something else, which they were unable to do, anyway, because of the very
distinct racial characteristics on both sides. At the time of Frederick the
Great it still entered no one's head to regard the Jew as anything else but a
'foreign' people, and Goethe was still horrified at the thought that in future
marriage between Christians and Jews would no longer be forbidden by law. And
Goethe, by God, was no reactionary, let alone a helot; I what spoke out of him
was only the voice of the blood and of reason. Thus-despite all the shameful
actions of the courts-the people instinctively saw in the Jew a foreign element
and took a corresponding attitude toward him.
But now all this was to change. In the course of more
than a thousand years he has learned the language of the host people to such an
extent that he now thinks he can venture in future to emphasize his Judaism
less and place his 'Germanism' more in the foreground; for ridiculous, nay,
insane, as it may seem at first, he nevertheless has the effrontery to turn
'Germanic,' in this case a 'German.' With this begins one of the most infamous
deceptions that anyone could conceive of. Since of Germanism he possesses
really nothing but the art of stammering its language -and in the most
frightful way-but apart from this has never mixed with the Germans, his whole
Germanism rests on the language alone. Race, however, does not lie in the
language, but exclusively in the blood, which no one knows better than the Jew,
who attaches very little importance to the preservation of his language, but
all importance to keeping his blood pure. A man can change his language without
any trouble-that is, he can use another language; but in his new language he
will express the old ideas; his inner nature is not changed. This is best shown
by the Jew who can speak a thousand languages and nevertheless remains a Jew.
His traits of character have remained the same, whether two thousand years ago
as a grain dealer in Ostia, speaking Roman, or whether as a flour profiteer of
today, jabbering German with a Jewish accent. It is always the same Jew. That
this obvious fact is not understood by a ministerial secretary or higher police
official is also self-evident, for there is scarcely any creature with less
instinct and intelligence running around in the world today than these servants
of our present model state authority.
The reason why the Jew decides suddenly to become a
'German ' is obvious. He feels that the power of the princes is slowly
tottering and therefore tries at an early time to get a platform beneath his
feet. Furthermore, his financial domination of the whole economy has advanced
so far that without possession of all 'civil' rights he can no longer support
the gigantic edifice, or at any rate, no further increase of his influence is
possible. And he desires both of these; for the higher he climbs, the more
alluring his old goal that was once promised him rises from the veil of the
past, and with feverish avidity his keenest minds see the dream of world
domination tangibly approaching. And so his sole effort is directed toward
obtaining full possession of 'civil' rights.
This is the reason for his emancipation from the
ghetto.
(i) So from the court Jew there-gradually develops the people's Jew,
which means, of course: the Jew remains as before in the entourage of the high
lords; in fact,-he tries to push his way even more into their circle; but at
the same time another part of his race makes friends with the ' beloved people.
' If we consider how greatly he has sinned against the masses in the course of
the centuries, how he has squeezed and sucked their blood again and again; if
furthermore, we consider how the people gradually learned to hate him for this,
and ended up by regarding his existence as nothing but a punishment of Heaven
for the other peoples, we can understand how hard this shift must be for the
Jew. Yes, it is an arduous task suddenly to present himself to his flayed
victims as a 'friend of mankind.'
First, therefore, he goes.about making up to the people
for his previous sins against them. He begins his career as the 'benefactor' of
mankind. Since his new benevolence has a practical foundation, he cannot very
well adhere to the old Biblical recommendation, that the left hand should not
know what the right hand giveth; no, whether he likes it or not, he must
reconcile himself to letting as many people as possible know how deeply he
feels the sufferings of the masses and all the sacrifices that he himself is
making to combat them. With this 'modesty ' which is inborn in him, he blares
out his merits to the rest of the world until people really begin to believe in
them. Anyone who does not believe in them is doing him a bitter injustice. In a
short time he begins to twist things around to make it look as if all the
injustice in the world had always been done to him and not the other way
around. The very stupid believe this and then they just can't help but pity the
poor 'unfortunate.'
In addition, it should be remarked here that the Jew,
despite all his love of sacrifice, naturally never becomes personally
impoverished. He knows how to manage; sometimes, indeed, his charity is really
comparable to fertilizer, which is not strewn on the field for love of the
field, but with a view to the farmer's own future benefit. In any case,
everyone knows in a comparatively short time that the Jew has become a
'benefactor and friend of mankind.' What a strange transformation!
But what is more or less taken for granted in others
arouses the greatest astonishment and in many distinct admiration for this very
reason. So it happens that he gets much more credit for every such action than
the rest of mankind, in whom it is taken for granted.
But even more: all at once the Jew also becomes liberal
and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.
Slowly he makes
himself the spokesman of a new era.
Also, of course, he destroys more and more thoroughly the
foundations of any economy that will really benefit the people. By way of stock
shares he pushes his way into the circuit of national production which he turns
into a purchasable or rather tradable object, thus robbing the enterprises of
the foundations of a personal ownership. Between employer and employee there
arises that inner estrangement which later leads to political class
division.
Finally, the Jewish influence on economic affairs grows with
terrifying speed through the stock exchange. He becomes the owner, or at least
the controller, of the national labor force.
To strengthen his political position he tries to tear
down the racial and civil barriers which for a time continue to restrain him at
every step. To this end he fights with all the tenacity innate in him for
religious tolerance-and in Freemasonry, which has succumbed to him completely,
he has an excellent instrument with which to fight for his aims and put them
across. The governing circles and the higher strata of the political and
economic bourgeoisie are brought into his nets by the strings of Freemasonry,
and never need to suspect what is happening
Only the deeper and broader strata of the people as such,
or rather that class which is beginning to wake up and fight for its rights and
freedom, cannot yet be sufficiently taken in by these methods. But this is more
necessary than anything else; for the Jew feels that the possibility of his
rising to a dominant role exists only if there is someone ahead of him to dear
the way; and this someone he thinks he can recognize in the bourgeoisie, in
their broadest strata in fact. The glovemakers and linen weavers, however,
cannot be caught in the fine net of Freemasonry; no, for them coarser but no
less drastic means must be employed. Thus Freemasonry is joined by a second
weapon in the service of the Jews: the press. With all his perseverance and
dexterity he seizes possession of it. With it he slowly begins to grip and
ensnare, to guide and to push all public life, since he is in a position to
create and direct that power which, under the name of 'public opinion,' IS
better known today than a few decades ago.
In this he always represents himself personally as having
an infinite thirst for knowledge, praises all progress, mostly, to be sure, the
progress that leads to the ruin of others; for he judges all knowledge and all
development only according to its possibilities for advancing his nation, and
where this is lacking, he is the inexorable mortal enemy of all light, a hater
of all true culture. He uses all the knowledge he acquires in the schools of
other peoples, exclusively for the benefit of his race.
And this nationality he guards as never before. While he
seems to overflow with 'enlightenment,' 'progress,' 'freedom,' 'humanity,'
etc., he himself practices the severest segregation of his race. To be sure, he
sometimes palms off his women on influential Christians, but as a matter of
principle he always keeps his male line pure. He poisons the blood of others,
but preserves his own. The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is
the Christian who marries a Jewess. The bastards, however, take after the
Jewish side. Especially a part of the high nobility degenerates completely. The
Jew is perfectly aware of this, and therefore systematically carries on this
mode of ' disarming ' the intellectual leader class of his racial adversaries.
In order to mask his activity and lull his victims, however, he talks more and
more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The fools
begin to believe him.
Since, however, his whole being still has too strong a
smell of the foreign for the broad masses of the people in particular to fall
readily into his nets, he has his press give a picture of him which is as
little in keeping with reality as conversely it serves his desired purpose. His
comic papers especially strive to represent the Jews as a harmless little
people, with their own peculiarities, of course-like other peoples as well-but
even in their gestures, which seem a little strange, perhaps, giving signs of a
possibly ludicrous, but always thoroughly honest and benevolent, soul. And the
constant effort is to make him seem almost more 'insignificant' than
dangerous.
His ultimate goal in this stage is the victory of '
democracy,' or, as he understands it: the rule of parliamentarianism. It is
most compatible with his requirements; for it excludes the personality-and puts
in its place the majority characterized by stupidity, incompetence, and last
but not least, cowardice.
The final result will be the overthrow of the monarchy,
which is now sooner or later bound to occur.
(j) The tremendous economic development leads to a change
in the social stratification of the people. The small craftsman slowly dies
out, and as a result the worker's possibility of achieving an independent
existence becomes rarer and rarer; in consequence the worker becomes visibly
proletarianized. There arises the industrial ' factory worker ' whose most
essential characteristic is to be sought in the fact that he hardly ever is in
a position to found an existence of his own in later life. He is propertyless
in the truest sense of the word. His old age is a torment and can scarcely be
designated as living.
Once before, a similar situation was created, which
pressed urgently for a solution and also found one. The peasants and artisans
had slowly been joined by the officials and salaried workers-particularly of
the state-as a new class. They, too, were propertyless in the truest sense of
the word. The state finally found a way out of this unhealthy condition by
assuming the care of the state employee who could not himself provide for his
old age; it introduced the pension. Slowly, more and more enterprises followed
this example, so that nearly every regularly employed brain-worker draws a
pension in later life, provided the concern he works in has achieved or
surpassed a certain size. Only by safeguarding the state official in his old
age could he be taught the selfless devotion to duty which in the pre-War
period was the most eminent quality of German officialdom.
In this way a whole class that had remained propertyless
was wisely snatched away from social misery and articulated with the body of
the people.
Now this question again, and this time on a much larger
scale, faced the state and the nation. More and more masses of people,
numbering millions, moved from peasant villages to the larger cities to earn
their bread as factory workers in the newly established industries. The working
and living conditions of the new class were more than dismal. If nothing else,
the more or less mechanical transference of the old artisan's or even peasant's
working methods to the new form was by no means suitable. The work done by
these men could not be compared with the exertions which the industrial factory
worker has to perform. In the old handicraft, this may not have been very
important, but in the new working methods it was all the more so. The formal
transference of the old working hours to the industrial large-scale enterprise
was positively catastrophic, for the actual work done before was but little in
view of the absence of our present intensive working methods. Thus, though
previously the fourteen-or even fifteen-hour working day had been bearable, it
certainly ceased to be bearable at a time when every minute was exploited to
the fullest. The result of this senseless transference of the old working hours
to the new industrial activity was really unfortunate in two respects: the
worker's health was undermined and his faith in a higher justice destroyed. To
this finally was added the miserable wages on the one hand and the employer's
correspondingly and obviously so vastly superior position on the other.
In
the country there could be no social question, since master and hired hand did
the same work and above all ate out of the same bowls. But this, too,
changed.
The separation of worker and employer now seems complete in all
fields of life. How far the inner Judaization of our people has progressed can
be seen from the small respect, if not contempt, that is accorded to manual
labor. This is not German. It took the foreignization of our life, which was in
truth a Jewification, to transform the old respect for manual work into a
certain contempt for all physical labor.
Thus, there actually comes into being a new class
enjoying very little respect, and one day the question must arise whether the
nation would possess the strength to articulate the new class into general
society, or whether the social difference would broaden into a classlike
cleavage.
But one thing is certain: the new class did not count the worst
elements in its ranks, but on the contrary definitely the most
energetic
elements. The overrefinements of so-called culture had not yet exerted their
disintegrating and destructive effects. The broad mass of the new class was not
yet infected with the poison of pacifist weakness; it was robust and if
necessary even brutal.
While the bourgeoisie is not at all concerned about this
all-important question, but indifferently lets things slide, the Jew seizes the
unlimited opportunity it offers for the future; while on the one hand he
organizes capitalistic methods of human exploitation to their ultimate
consequence, he approaches the very victims of his spirit and his activity and
in a short time becomes the leader of their struggle against himself. 'Against
himself' is only figuratively speaking; for the great master of lies
understands as always how to make himself appear to be the pure one and to load
the blame on others. Since he has th gall to lead the masses, it never even
enters their heads that this might be the most in
famous betrayal of all
times.
And yet it was.
Scarcely has the new class grown out of the general
economic shift than the Jew, clearly and distinctly, realizes that it can open
the way for his own further advancement. First, he used the bourgeoisie as a
battering-ram against the feudal world, then the worker against the bourgeois
world. If formerly he knew how to swindle his way to civil rights in the shadow
of the bourgeoisie, now he hopes to find the road to his own domination in the
worker's struggle for existence.
From now on the worker has no other task
but to fight for the future of the Jewish people. Unconsciously he is harnessed
to the service of the power which he thinks he is combating. He is seemingly
allowed to attack capital, and this is the easiest way of making him fight for
it. In this the Jew keeps up an outcry against international capital and in
truth he means the national economy which must be demolished in order that the
international stock exchange can triumph over its dead body.
Here the Jew's procedure is as follows:
He approaches the worker, simulates pity with his fate, or
even indignation at his lot of misery and poverty, thus gaining his confidence.
He takes pains to study all the various real or imaginary hardships of his
life-and to arouse his longing for a change in such an existence. With infinite
shrewdness he fans the need for social justice, somehow slumbering in every
Aryan man, into hatred against those who have been better favored by fortune,
and thus gives the struggle for the elimination of social evils a very definite
philosophical stamp. He establishes the Marxist doctrine.
By presenting it as inseparably bound up with a number of
socially just demands, he promotes its spread and conversely the aversion of
decent people to fulfill demands which, advanced in such form and company, seem
from the outset unjust and impossible to fulfill. For under this cloak of
purely social ideas truly diabolic purposes are hidden, yes, they are publicly
proclaimed with the most insolent frankness. This theory represents an
inseparable mixture of reason and human madness, but always in such a way that
only the lunacy can become reality and never the reason. By the categorical
rejection of the personality and hence of the nation and its racial content, it
destroys the elementary foundations of all human culture which is dependent on
just these factors. This is the true inner kernel of the Marxist philosophy in
so far as this figment of a criminal brain can be designated as a 'philosophy.'
With the shattering of the personality and the race, the essential obstacle is
removed to the domination of the inferior being-and this is the Jew.
Precisely in political and economic madness lies the sense of this
doctrine. For this prevents all truly intelligent people from entering its
service, while those who are intellectually less active and poorly educated in
economics hasten to it with flying colors. The intellectuals for this
movement-for even this movement needs intellectuals for its existence-are '
sacrificed ' by the Jew from his own ranks.
Thus there arises a pure movement entirely of manual
workers under Jewish leadership, apparently aiming to improve the situation of
the worker, but in truth planning the enslavement and with it the destruction
of all non-Jewish peoples.
The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct
of selfpreservation begun by Freemasonry in the circles of the so-called
intelligentsia is transmitted to the broad masses and above all to the
bourgeoisie by the activity of the big papers which today are always Jewish.
Added to these two weapons of disintegration comes a third and by far the most
terrible, the organization of brute force. As a shock and storm troop, Marxism
is intended to finish off what the preparatory softening up with the first two
weapons has made ripe for collapse.
Here we have teamwork that is positively brilliant-and we
need really not be surprised if in confronting it those very institutions which
always like to represent themselves as the pillars of a more or less legendary
state authority hold up least. It is in our high and highest state officialdom
that the Jew has at all times (aside from a few exceptions) found the most
compliant abettor of his work of disintegration. Cringing submissiveness to
superiors and high-handed arrogance to inferiors distinguish this class to the
same degree as a narrow-mindedness that often cries to high Heaven and is only
exceeded by a self-conceit that is sometimes positively amazing.
And these are qualities that the Jew needs in our
authorities and loves accordingly.
The practical struggle which now begins, sketched in broad
outlines, takes the following course:
In keeping with the ultimate aims of the Jewish struggle,
which are not exhausted in the mere economic conquest of the world, but also
demand its political subjugation, the Jew divides the organization of his
Marxist world doctrine into two halves which, apparently separate from one
another, in truth form an inseparable whole: the political and the trade-union
movement.
The trade-union movement does the recruiting. In the hard struggle
for existence which the worker must carry on, thanks to the greed and
shortsightedness of many employers, it offers him aid and protection, and thus
the possibility of winning better living conditions. If, at a time when the
organized national community, the state, concerns itself with him little or not
at all, the worker does not want to hand over the defense of his vital human
rights to the blind caprice of people who in part have little sense of
responsibility and are often heartless to boot, he must take their defense into
his own hands. In exact proportion as the so-called national bourgeoisie,
blinded by financial interests, sets the heaviest obstacles in the path of this
struggle for existence and not only resists all attempts at shortening the
inhumanly long working day, abolishing child labor, safeguarding and protecting
the woman, improving sanitary conditions in the workshops and homes, but often
actually sabotages them, the shrewder Jew takes the oppressed people under his
wing. Gradually he be comes the leader of the trade-union movement, all the
more easily as he is not interested in really eliminating social evils in an
honest sense, but only in training an economic storm troop, blindly devoted to
him, with which to destroy the national economic independence. For while the
conduct of a healthy social policy will consistently move between the aims of
preserving the national health on the one hand and safeguarding an independent
national economy on the other, for the Jew in his struggle these two criteria
not only cease to exist, but their elimination, among other things, is his life
goal. He desires, not the preservation of an independent national economy, but
its destruction. Consequently, no pangs of conscience can prevent him as a
leader of the trade-union movement from raising demands which not only
overshoot the goal, but whose fulfillment is either impossible for practical
purposes or means the ruin of the national economy. Moreover, he does not want
to have a healthy, sturdy race before him, but a rickety herd capable of being
subjugated. This desire again permits him to raise demands of the most
senseless kind whose practical fulfillment he himself knows to be impossible
and which, therefore, could not lead to any change in things, but at most to a
wild incitement of the masses. And that is what he is interested in and not a
true and honest improvement of social conditions.
Hence the Jewish leadership in trade-union affairs
remains uncontested until an enormous work of enlightenment influences the
broad masses and sets them right about their never-ending misery, or else the
state disposes of the Jew and his work. For as long as the insight of the
masses remains as slight as now and the state as indifferent as today, these
masses will always be first to follow the man who in economic matters offers
the most shameless promises. And in this the Jew is a master. For in his entire
activity he is restrained by no moral scruples!
And so he inevitably drives every competitor in this
sphere from the field in a short time. In keeping with all his inner rapacious
brutality, he at once teaches the trade-union movement the most brutal use of
violence. If anyone by his intelligence resists the Jewish lures, his defiance
and understanding are broken by terror. The success of such an activity is
enormous.
Actually the Jew by means of the trade union, which could be a
blessing for the nation, shatters the foundations of the national
economy.
Parallel with this, the political organization advances.
It
plays hand in glove with the trade-union movement, for the latter prepares the
masses for political organization, in fact, lashes them into it with violence
and coercion. Furthermore, it is the permanent financial source from which the
political organization feeds its enormous apparatus. It is the organ
controlling the political activity of the individual and does the pandering in
all big demonstrations of a political nature. In the end it no longer comes out
for political interests at all, but places its chief instrument of struggle,
the cessation of work in the form of a mass and general strike, in the service
of the political idea.
By the creation of a press whose content is adapted to
the intellectual horizon of the least educated people, the political and
trade-union organization finally obtains the agitational institution by which
the lowest strata of the nation are made ripe for the most reckless acts. Its
function is not to lead people out of the swamp of a base mentality to a higher
stage, but to cater to their lowest instincts. Since the masses are as mentally
lazy as they are sometimes presumptuous, this is a business as speculative as
it is profitable.
It is this press, above all, which wages a positively
fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be
regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the
economic independence of the nation.
Above all, it hammers away at the characters of all those
who will not bow down to the Jewish presumption to dominate, or whose ability
and genius in themselves seem a danger to the Jew. For to be hated by the Jew
it is not necessary to combat him; no, it suffices if he suspects that someone
might even conceive the idea of combating him some time or that on the strength
of his superior genius he is an augmenter of the power and greatness of a
nationality hostile to the Jew.
His unfailing instinct in such things scents the original
soul l in everyone, and his hostility is assured to anyone who is not spirit of
his spirit. Since the Jew is not the attacked but the attacker, not only anyone
who attacks passes as his enemy, but also anyone who resists him. But the means
with which he seeks to break such reckless but upright souls is not honest
warfare, but lies and slander.
Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes
so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the
personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape
of the Jew.
The ignorance of the broad masses about the inner nature
of the Jew, the lack of instinct and narrow-mindedness of our upper classes,
make the people an easy victim for this Jewish campaign of lies.
While from innate cowardice the upper classes turn away
from a man whom the Jew attacks with lies and slander, the broad masses from
stupidity or simplicity believe everything. The state authorities either cloak
themselves in silence or, what usually happens, in order to put an end to the
Jewish press campaign, they persecute the unjustly attacked, which, in the eyes
of such an official ass, passes as the preservation of state authority and the
safeguarding of law and order.
Slowly fear of the Marxist weapon of Jewry descends like
a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent people.
They begin to tremble before the terrible enemy and thus
have become his final victim.
The Jew's domination in the state seems so assured that
now not only can he call himself a Jew again, but he ruthlessly admits his
ultimate national and political designs. A section of his race openly owns
itself to be a foreign people, yet even here they lie. For while the Zionists
try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of
the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews
again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up
a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a
central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its
own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven
for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of
security that at a time when one section is still playing the German,
Frenchman, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the
Jewish race.
How close they see approaching victory can be seen by the
hideous aspect which their relations with the members of
other peoples takes
on.
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in
wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing
her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial
foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself
systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down
the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who
bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and
clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting
bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and
himself rising to be its master.
For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood
can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world he will forever be master over
bastards and bastards alone.
And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level
by a continuous poisoning of individuals.
And in politics he begins to replace the idea of
democracy by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the organized mass of Marxism he has found the weapon
which lets him dispense with democracy and in its stead allows him to subjugate
and govern the peoples with a dictatorial and brutal fist.
He works systematically for revolutionization in a
twofold sense: economic and political.
Around peoples who offer too violent a resistance to
attack from within he weaves a net of enemies, thanks to his international
influence, incites them to war, and finally, if necessary, plants the flag of
revolution on the very battlefields.
In economics he undermines the states until the social
enterprises which have become unprofitable are taken from the state and
subjected to his financial control.
In the political field he refuses the state the means for
its selfpreservation, destroys the foundations of all national self-maintenance
and defense, destroys faith in the leadership, scoffs at its history and past,
and drags everything that is truly great into the gutter.
Culturally he contaminates art, literature, the theater,
makes a mockery of natural feeling, overthrows all concepts of beauty and
sublimity, of the noble and the good, and instead drags men down into the
sphere of his own base nature.
Religion is ridiculed, ethics and morality
represented as outmoded, until the last props of a nation in its struggle for
existence in this world have fallen.
(e) Now begins the great last revolution. In gaining
political power the Jew casts off the few cloaks that he still wears. The
democratic people's Jew becomes the blood-Jew and tyrant over peoples. In a few
years he tries to exterminate the national intelligentsia and by robbing the
peoples of their natural intellectual leadership makes them ripe for the
slave's lot of permanent subjugation.
The most frightful example of this kind is offered by
Russia, where he killed or starved about thirty million people with positively
fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman tortures, in order to give a gang of
Jewish journalists and stock exchange bandits domination over a great
people.
The end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed
by the Jew, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations. After the death
of his victim, the vampire sooner or later dies too.
If we pass all the causes of the German collapse in
review, the ultimate and most decisive remains the failure to recognize the
racial problem and especially the Jewish menace.
The defeats on the battlefield in August, 1918, would
have been child's play to bear. They stood in no proportion to the victories of
our people. It was not they that caused our downfall; no, it was brought about
by that power which prepared these defeats by systematically over many decades
robbing our people of the political and moral instincts and forces which alone
make nations capable and hence worthy of existence.
In heedlessly ignoring -the question of the preservation
of the racial foundations of our nation, the old Reich disregarded the sole
right which gives life in this world. Peoples which bastardize themselves, or
let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence, and
when their ruin is encompassed by a stronger enemy it is not an injustice done
to them, but only the restoration of justice. If a people no longer wants to
respect the Nature-given qualities of its being which root in its blood, it has
no further right to complain over the loss of its earthly existence.
Everything on this earth is capable of improvement. Every defeat can
become the father of a subsequent victory, every lost war the cause of a later
resurgence, every hardship the fertilization of human energy, and from every
oppression the forces for a new spiritual rebirth can comes as long as the
blood is preserved pure.
The lost purity of the blood alone destroys inner
happiness forever, plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the
consequences can never more be eliminated from body and spirit.
Only by examining and comparing all other problems of
life in the light of this one question shall we see how absurdly petty they are
by this standard. They are all limited in time-but the question of preserving
or not preserving the purity of the blood will endure as long as there are
men.
All really significant symptoms of decay of the pre-War period can
in the last analysis be reduced to racial causes.
Whether we consider questions of general justice or
cankers of economic life, symptoms of cultural decline or processes of
political degeneration, questions of faulty schooling or the bad influence
exerted on grown-ups by the press, etc., everywhere and always it is
fundamentally the disregard of the racial needs of our own people or failure to
see a foreign racial menace.
And that is why all attempts at reform, all
works for social relief and political exertions, all economic expansion and
every apparent increase of intellectual knowledge were futile as far as their
results were concerned. The nation, and the organism which enables l and
preserves its life on this earth, the state, did not grow inwardly healthier,
but obviously languished more and more. All the illusory prosperity of the old
Reich could not hide its inner weakness, and every attempt really to strengthen
the Reich failed again and again, due to disregarding the most important
question.
It would be a mistake to believe that the adherents of the various
political tendencies which were tinkering around on the German national
body-yes, even a certain section of the leaders-were bad or malevolent men in
themselves. Their activity was condemned to sterility only because the best of
them saw at most the forms of our general disease and tried to combat them, but
blindly ignored the virus. Anyone who systematically follows the old Reich's
line of political development is bound to arrive, upon calm examination, at the
realization that even at the time of the unification, hence the rise of the
German nation, the inner decay was already in full swing, and that despite all
apparent political successes and despite increasing economic wealth, the
general situation was deteriorating from year to year. If nothing else, the
elections for the Reichstag announced, with their outward swelling of the
Marxist vote, the steadily approaching inward and hence also outward collapse.
All the successes of the so-called bourgeois parties were worthless, not only
because even with so-called bourgeois electoral victories they were unable to
halt the numerical growth of the Marxist flood, but because they themselves
above all now bore the ferments of decay in their own bodies. Without
suspecting it, the bourgeois world itself was inwardly infected with the deadly
poison of Marxist ideas and its resistance often sprang more from the
competitor's envy of ambitious leaders than from a fundamental rejection of
adversaries determined to fight to the utmost. In these long years there was
only one who kept up an imperturbable, unflagging fight, and this was the Jean
His Star of David I rose higher and higher in proportion as our people's will
for selfpreservation vanished.
Therefore, in August, 1914, it was not a people resolved
to attack which rushed to the battlefield; no, it was only the last flicker of
the national instinct of self-preservation in face of the progressing
pacifist-Marxist paralysis of our national body. Since even in these days of
destiny, our people did not recognize the inner enemy, all outward resistance
was in vain and Providence did not bestow her reward on the victorious sword,
but followed the law of eternal retribution.
On the basis of this inner realization, there took form in
our new movement the leading principles as well as the tendency, which in our
conviction were alone capable, not only of halting the decline of the German
people, but of creating the granite foundation upon which some day a state will
rest which represents, not an alien mechanism of economic concerns and
interests, but a national organism:
THERE are some truths which are so obvious that for this very reason
they are not seen or at least not recognized by ordinary people. They sometimes
pass by such truisms as though blind and are most astonished when someone
suddenly discovers what everyone really ought to know. Columbus's eggs lie
around by the hundreds of thousands, but Columbuses are met with less
frequently.
Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of
Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few
exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature's rule:
the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this
earth.
Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature's restricted
form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the
innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with
a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the
finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the
dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf, etc.
Only unusual circumstances can change this, primarily the
compulsion of captivity or any other cause that makes it impossible to mate
within the same species. But then Nature begins to resist this with all
possible means, and her most visible protest consists either in refusing
further capacity for propagation to bastards or in limiting the fertility of
later offspring; in most cases, however, she takes away the power of resistance
to disease or hostile attacks.
This is only too natural.
Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level
produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the
offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as
high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle
against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a
higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in
associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The
stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own
greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is
only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable
higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.
The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid
in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but
their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a
goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the
varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc.,
of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner
attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as
similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice.
Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises
less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks
on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all
those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of
the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to
the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health
and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher
development.
If the process were different, all further and higher
development would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior
always predominates numerically over the best, if both had the same possibility
of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more
rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the
background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken.
Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living
conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the
remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice
according to strength and health.
No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with
stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a
lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps
hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow.
Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It
shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that
of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America,
whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who
mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and
culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin
immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one
example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture.
The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially
pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master
as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood.
The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief
always the following:
- Lowering of the level of the higher race;
- Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but
surely progressing sickness.
but to sin against the will of the eternal creator.
And as a sin this act is rewarded.
When man attempts to rebel against the iron logic of
Nature, he comes into struggle with the principles to which he himself owes his
existence as a man. And this attack I must lead to his own doom.
Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern
pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! 'Man's role is to
overcome Nature!'
Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and
end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror
of Nature; though in this they dispose of no other weapon than an idea, and at
that such a miserable one, that if it were true no world at all would be
conceivable
But quite aside from the fact that man has never yet
conquered Nature in anything, but at most has caught hold of and tried to lift
one or another corner of her immense gigantic veil of eternal riddles and
secrets, that in reality he invents nothing but only discovers everything, that
he does not dominate Nature, but has only risen on the basis of his knowledge
of various laws and secrets of Nature to be lord over those other living
creatures who lack this knowledge-quite aside from all this, an idea cannot
overcome the preconditions for the development and being of humanity, since the
idea itself depends only on man. Without human beings there is no human idea in
this world, therefore the idea as such is always conditioned by the presence of
human beings and hence of all the laws which created the precondition for their
existence.
And not only that! Certain ideas are even tied up with
certain men. This applies most of all to those ideas whose content originates,
not in an exact scientific truth, but in the world of emotion, or, as it is so
beautifully and clearly expressed today, reflects an 'inner experience.' All
these ideas, which have nothing to do with cold logic as such, but represent
only pure expressions of feeling, ethical conceptions, etc., are chained to the
existence of men, to whose intellectual imagination and creative power they owe
their existence. Precisely in this case the preservation of these definite
races and men is the precondition for the existence of these ideas. Anyone, for
example, who really desired the victory of the pacifistic idea in this world
with all his heart would have to fight with all the means at his disposal for
the conquest of the world by the Germans; for, if the opposite should occur,
the last pacifist would die out with the last German, since the rest of the
world has never fallen so deeply as our own people, unfortunately, has for this
nonsense so contrary to Nature and reason. Then, if we were serious, whether we
liked it or not, we would have to wage wars in order to arrive at pacifism.
This and nothing else was what Wilson, the American world savior, intended, or
so at least our German visionaries believed-and thereby his purpose was
fulfilled.
In actual fact the pacifistic-humane idea is perfectly
all right perhaps when the highest type of man has previously conquered and
subjected the world to an extent that makes him the sole ruler of this earth.
Then this idea lacks the power of producing evil effects in exact proportion as
its practical application becomes rare and finally impossible. Therefore, first
struggle and then we shall see what can be done.l Otherwise mankind has passed
the high point of its development and the end is not the domination of any
ethical idea but barbarism and consequently chaos. At this point someone or
other may laugh, but this planet once moved through the ether for millions of
years without human beings and it can do so again some day if men forget that
they owe their higher existence, not to the ideas of a few crazy ideologists,
but to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature's stern and rigid
laws.
Everything we admire on this earth today-science and art, technology
and inventions-is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally
perhaps of one race. On them depends the existence of this whole culture. If
they perish, the beauty of this earth will sink into the grave with
them.
However much the soil, for example, can influence men, the result of
the influence will always be different depending on the races in question. The
low fertility of a living space may spur the one race to the highest
achievements; in others it will only be the cause of bitterest poverty and
final undernourishment with all its consequences. The inner nature of peoples
is always determining for the manner in which outward influences will be
effective. What leads the one to starvation trains the other to hard
work.
All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally
creative race died out from blood poisoning.
The ultimate cause of such a decline was their forgetting
that all culture depends on men and not conversely; hence that to preserve a
certain culture the man who creates it must be preserved. This preservation is
bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best
and stronger in this world.
Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do
not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to
live.
Even if this were hard-that is how it is ! Assuredly, however by far
the harder fate is that which strikes the man who thinks he can overcome
Nature, but in the last analysis only mocks her. Distress, misfortune, and
diseases are her answer.
The man who misjudges and disregards the racial laws
actually forfeits the happiness that seems destined to be his. He thwarts the
triumphal march of the best race and hence also the precondition for all human
progress, and remains, in consequence burdened with all the sensibility of man,
in the animal realm of helpless misery.
It is idle to argue which race or races were the original
representative of human culture and hence the real founders of all that we sum
up under the word 'humanity.' It is simpler to raise this question with regard
to the present, and here an easy, clear answer results. All the human culture,
all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today,
are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits
of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher
humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the
word 'man.' He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the
divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire
of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man
to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth. Exclude
him-and perhaps after a few thousand years darkness will again descend on the
earth, human culture will pass, and the world turn to a desert.
If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the
founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture, only
the Aryan could be considered as the representative of the first group. From
him originate the foundations and walls of all human creation, and only the
outward form and color are determined by the changing traits of character of
the various peoples. He provides the mightiest building stones and plans for
all human progress and only the execution corresponds to the nature of the
varying men and races. In a few decades, for example, the entire east of Asia
will possess a culture whose ultimate foundation will be Hellenic spirit and
Germanic technology, just as much as in Europe. Only the outward form-in part
at least-will bear the features of Asiatic character. It is not true, as some
people think, that Japan adds European technology to its culture; no, European
science and technology are trimmed with Japanese characteristics. The
foundation of actual life is no longer the special Japanese culture, although
it determines the color of life-because outwardly, in consequence of its inner
difference, it is more conspicuous to the European-but the gigantic
scientific-technical achievements of Europe and America; that is, of Aryan
peoples. Only on the basis of these achievements can the Orient follow general
human progress. They furnish the basis of the struggle for daily bread, create
weapons and implements for it, and only the outward form is gradually adapted
to Japanese character.
If beginning today all further Aryan influence on Japan
should stop, assuming that Europe and America should perish, Japan's present
rise in science and technology might continue for a short time; but even in a
few years the well would dry up, the Japanese special character would gain, but
the present culture would freeze and sink back into the slumber from which it
was awakened seven decades ago by the wave of Aryan culture. Therefore, just as
the present Japanese development owes its life to Aryan origin, long ago in the
gray past foreign influence and foreign spirit awakened the Japanese culture of
that time. The best proof of this is furnished by the fact of its subsequent
sclerosis and total petrifaction. This can occur in a people only when the
original creative racial nucleus has been lost, or if the external influence
which furnished the impetus and the material for the first development in the
cultural field was later lacking. But if it iS established that a people
receives the most essential basic materials of its culture from foreign races,
that it assimilates and adapts them, and that then, if further external
influence is lacking, it rigidifies again and again, such a race may be
designated as culture-bearing,' but never as 'culture-creating.' An examination
of the various peoples from this standpoint points to the fact that practically
none of them were originally culture-founding, but almost always
culture-bearing.
Approximately the following picture of their development
always results:
Aryan races-often absurdly small numerically-subject
foreign peoples, and then, stimulated by the special living conditions of the
new territory (fertility, climatic conditions, etc.) and assisted by the
multitude of lower-type beings standing at their disposal as helpers, develop
the intellectual and organizational capacities dormant within them. Often in a
few millenniums or even centuries they create cultures which originally bear
all the inner characteristics of their nature, adapted to the above-indicated
special qualities of the soil and subjected beings. In the end, however, the
conquerors transgress against the principle of blood purity, to which they had
first adhered; they begin to mix with the subjugated inhabitants and thus end
their own existence; for the fall of man in paradise has always been followed
by his expulsion.
After a thousand years and more, the last visible trace
of the former master people is often seen in the lighter skin color which its
blood left behind in the subjugated race, and in a petrified culture which it
had originally created. For, once the actual and spiritual conqueror lost
himself in the blood of the subjected people, the fuel for the torch of human
progress was lost! Just as, through the blood of the former masters, the color
preserved a feeble gleam in their memory, likewise the night of cultural life
is gently illumined by the remaining creations of the former light-bringers.
They shine through all the returned barbarism and too often inspire the
thoughtless observer of the moment with the opinion that he beholds the picture
of the present people before him, whereas he is only gazing into the mirror of
the past.
It is then possible that such a people will a second time, or even
more often in the course of its history, come into contact with the race of
those who once brought it culture, and the memory of former encounters will not
necessarily be present. Unconsciously the remnant of the former master blood
will turn toward. the new arrival, and what was first possible only by
compulsion can now succeed through the people's own will. A new cultural wave
makes its entrance and continues until those who have brought it are again
submerged in the blood of foreign peoples.
It will be the task of a future
cultural and world history to carry on researches in this light and not to
stifle in the rendition of external facts, as is so often, unfortunately, the
case with our present historical science.
This mere sketch of the development of 'culture-bearing'
nations gives a picture of the growth, of the activity, and-the decline-of the
true culture-founders of this earth, the Aryans themselves.
As in daily life the so-called genius requires a special
cause, indeed, often a positive impetus, to make him shine, likewise the
genius-race in the life of peoples. In the monotony of everyday life even
significant men often seem insignificant, hardly rising above the average of
their environment; as soon, however, as they are approached by a situation in
which others lose hope or go astray, the genius rises manifestly from the
inconspicuous average child, not seldom to the amazement of all those who had
hitherto seen him in the pettiness of bourgeois life-and that is why the
prophet seldom has any honor in his own country. Nowhere have we better
occasion to observe this than in war. From apparently harmless children, in
difficult hours when others lose hope, suddenly heroes shoot up with
death-defying determination and an icy cool presence of minds If this hour of
trial had not come, hardly anyone would ever have guessed that a young hero was
hidden in this beardless boy. It nearly always takes some stimulus to bring the
genius on the scene. The hammer-stroke of Fate which throws one man to the
ground suddenly strikes steel in another, and when the shell of everyday life
is broken, the previously hidden kernel lies open before the eyes of the
astonished world. The world then resists and does not want to believe that the
type which is apparently identical with it is suddenly a very different being;
a process which is repeated with every eminent son of man.
Though an inventor, for example, establishes his fame only
on the day of his invention, it is a mistake to think that genius as such
entered into the man only at this hour-the spark of genius exists in the brain
of the truly creative man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always
inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned.
As already emphasized, this applies not only to the
individual man but also to the race. Creatively active peoples always have a
fundamental creative gift, even if it should not be recognizable to the eyes of
superficial observers. Here, too, outward recognition is possible only in
consequence of accomplished deeds, since the rest of the world is not capable
of recognizing genius in itself, but sees only its visible manifestations in
the form of inventions, discoveries, buildings, pictures, etc.; here again it
often takes a long time before the world can fight its way through to this
knowledge. Just as in the life of the outstanding individual, genius or
extraordinary ability strives for practical realization only when spurred on by
special occasions, likewise in the life of nations the creative forces and
capacities which are present can often be exploited only when definite
preconditions invite.
We see this most distinctly in connection with the race
which has been and is the bearer of human cultural development-the Aryans. As
soon as Fate leads them toward special conditions, their latent abilities begin
to develop in a more and more rapid sequence and to mold themselves into
tangible forms. The cultures which they found in such cases are nearly always
decisively determined by the existing soil, the given climate, and-the
subjected people. This last item, to be sure, is almost the most decisive. The
more primitive the technical foundations for a cultural activity, the more
necessary is the presence of human helpers who, organizationally assembled and
employed, must replace the force of the machine. Without this possibility of
using lower human beings, the Aryan would never have been able to take his
first steps toward his future culture; just as without the help of various
suitable beasts which he knew how to tame, he would not have arrived at a
technology which is now gradually permitting him to do without these beasts.
The saying, 'The Moor has worked off his debt, the Moor can go,' unfortunately
has only too deep a meaning. For thousands of years the horse had to serve man
and help him lay the foundations of a development which now, in consequence of
the motor car, is making the horse superfluous. In a few years his activity
trill have ceased, but without his previous collaboration man might have had a
hard time getting where he is today.
Thus, for the formation of higher cultures the existence
of lower human types was one of the most essential preconditions, since they
alone were able to compensate for the lack of technical aids without which a
higher development is not conceivable. It is certain that the first culture of
humanity was based less on the tamed animal than on the use of lower human
beings.
Only after the enslavement of subjected races did the same fate
strike beasts, and not the other way around, as some people would like to
think. For first the conquered warrior drew the plow-and only after him the
horse. Only pacifistic fools can regard this as a sign of human depravity,
failing to realize that this development had to take place in order to reach
the point where today these sky-pilots could force their drivel on the
world.
The progress of humanity is like climbing an endless ladder; it is
impossible to climb higher without first taking the lower steps. Thus, the
Aryan had to take the road to which reality directed him and not the one that
would appeal to the imagination of a modern pacifist. The road of reality is
hard and difficult, but in the end it leads where our friend would like to
bring humanity by dreaming, but unfortunately removes more than bringing
it
Hence it is no accident that the first cultures arose in places
where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjugated them and bent
them to his will. They then became the first technical instrument in the
service of a developing culture.
Thus, the road which the Aryan had to take was clearly
marked out As a conqueror he subjected the lower beings and regulated their
practical activity under his command, according to his will and for his aims.
But in directing them to a useful, though arduous activity, he not only spared
the life of those he subjected; perhaps he gave them a fate that was better
than their previous so-called 'freedom.' As long as he ruthlessly upheld the
master attitude, not only did he really remain master, but also the preserver
and increaser of culture. For culture was based exclusively on his abilities
and hence on his actual survival. As soon as the subjected people began to
raise themselves up and probably approached the conqueror in language, the
sharp dividing wall between master and servant fell. The Aryan gave up the
purity of his blood and, therefore, lost his sojourn in the paradise which he
had made for himself. He became submerged in the racial mixture, and gradually,
more and more, lost his cultural capacity, until at last, not only mentally but
also physically, he began to resemble the subjected aborigines more than his
own ancestors. For a time he could live on the existing cultural benefits, but
then petrifaction set in and he fell a prey to oblivion.
Thus cultures and empires collapsed to make place for new
formations.
Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level
is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a
result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is
contained only in pure blood.
All who are not of good race in this world are
chaff.
And all occurrences in world history are only the expression of the
races' instinct of self-preservation, in the good or bad sense.
The question of the inner causes of the Aryan's
importance can be answered to the effect that they are to be sought less in a
natural instinct of self-preservation than in the special type of its
expression. The will to live, subjectively viewed, is everywhere equal and
different only in the form of its actual expression. In the most primitive
living creatures the instinct of self-preservation does not go beyond concern
for their own ego. Egoism, as we designate this urge, goes so far that it even
embraces time; the moment itself claims everything, granting nothing to the
coming hours. In this condition the animal lives only for himself, seeks food
only for his present hunger, and fights only for his own life. As long as the
instinct of self-preservation expresses itself in this way, every basis is
lacking for the formation of a group, even the most primitive form of family.
Even a community between male and female beyond pure mating, demands an
extension of the instinct of self-preservation, since concern and struggle for
the ego are now directed toward the second party; the male sometimes seeks food
for the female, too, but for the most part both seek nourishment for the young.
Nearly always one comes to the defense of the other, and thus the first, though
infinitely simple, forms of a sense of sacrifice result. As soon as this sense
extends beyond the narrow limits of the family, the basis for the formation of
larger organisms and finally formal states is created.
In the lowest peoples of the earth this quality is
present only to a very slight extent, so that often they do not go beyond the
formation of the family. The greater the readiness to subordinate purely
personal interests, the higher rises the ability to establish comprehensive
communities.
This self-sacrificing will to give one's personal labor
and if necessary one's own life for others is most strongly developed in the
Aryan. The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the
extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the
community. In him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest
form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to-the life of the community
and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.
Not in his intellectual gifts lies the source of the
Aryan's capacity for creating and building culture. If he had just this alone,
he could only act destructively, in no case could he organize; for the
innermost essence of all organization requires that the individual renounce
putting forward his personal opinion and interests and sacrifice both in favor
of a larger group. Only byway of this general community does he again recover
his share. Now, for example, he no longer works directly for himself, but with
his activity articulates himself with the community, not only for his own
advantage, but for the advantage of all. The most wonderful elucidation of this
attitude is provided by his word 'work,' by which he does not mean an activity
for maintaining life in itself, but exclusively a creative effort that does not
conflict with the interests of the community. Otherwise he designates human
activity, in so far as it serves the instinct of self-preservation without
consideration for his fellow men, as theft, usury, robbery, burglary,
etc.
This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to
the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly
human culture. From it alone can arise all the great works of mankind, which
bring the founder little reward, but the richest blessings to posterity. Yes
from it alone can we understand how so many are able to bear up faithfully
under a scanty life which imposes on them nothing but poverty and frugality,
but gives the community the foundations of its existence. Every worker, every
peasant, every inventor, official, etc., who works without ever being able to
achieve any happiness or prosperity for himself, is a representative of this
lofty idea, even if the deeper meaning of his activity remains hidden in
him.
What applies to work as the foundation of human sustenance and all
human progress is true to an even greater degree for the defense of man and his
culture. In giving one's own life for the existence of the community lies the
crown of all sense of sacrifice. It is this alone that prevents what human
hands have built from being overthrown by human hands or destroyed bat Nature.
Our own German language possesses a word which magnificently
designates this kind of activity: Pflichterfullung (fulfillment of duty); it
means not to be self-sufficient but to serve the community.
The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we
call-to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness-idealism. By this we
understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community,
for his fellow men.
How necessary it is to keep realizing that idealism does
not represent a superfluous expression of emotion, but that in truth it has
been, is, and will be, the premise for what we designate as human culture, yes,
that it alone created the concept of 'man' It is to this inner attitude that
the Aryan owes his position in this world, and to it the world owes man; for it
alone formed from pure spirit the creative force which, by a unique pairing of
the brutal fist and the intellectual genius, created the monuments of human
culture.
Without his idealistic attitude all, even the most dazzling
faculties of the intellect, would remain mere intellect as such
outward
appearance without inner value, and never creative force.
But, since true idealism is nothing but the subordination
of the interests and life of the individual to the community, and this in turn
is the precondition for the creation of organizational forms of all kinds, it
corresponds in its innermost depths to the ultimate will of Nature. It alone
leads men to voluntary recognition of the privilege of force and strength, and
thus makes them into a dust particle of that order which shapes and forms the
whole universe.
The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the
deepest knowledge.
How correct this is, and how little true idealism has to
do with playful flights of the imagination, can be seen at once if we let the
unspoiled child, a healthy boy, for example, judge. The same boy who feels like
throwing up I when he hears the tirades of a pacifist 'idealist' is ready to
give his young life for the ideal of his nationality.
Here the instinct of knowledge unconsciously obeys the
deeper necessity of the preservation of the species, if necessary at the cost
of the individual, and protests against the visions of the pacifist windbag who
in reality is nothing but a cowardly, though camouflaged, egoist, transgressing
the laws of development; for development requires willingness on the part of
the individual to sacrifice himself for the community, and not the sickly
imaginings of cowardly know-it-alls and critics of Nature.
Especially, therefore, at times when the ideal attitude
threatens to disappear, we can at once recognize a diminution of that force
which forms the community and thus creates the premises of culture. As soon as
egoism becomes the ruler of a people, the bands of order are loosened and in
the chase after their own happiness men fall from heaven into a real
hell.
Yes, even posterity forgets the men who have only served their own
advantage and praises the heroes who have renounced their own
happiness.
The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by
the Jew. In hardly any people in the world is the instinct of self-preservation
developed more strongly than in the so-called 'chosen.' Of this, the mere fact
of the survival of this race may be considered the best proof. Where is the
people which in the last two thousand years has been exposed to so slight
changes of inner disposition, character, etc., as the Jewish people? What
people, finally, has gone through greater upheavals than this one-and
nevertheless issued from the mightiest catastrophes of mankind unchanged? What
an infinitely tough will to live and preserve the species speaks from these
facts !
The mental qualities of the Jew have been schooled in the course of
many centuries. Today he passes as 'smart,' and this in a certain sense he has
been at all times. But his intelligence is not the result of his own
development, but of visual instruction through foreigners. For the human mind
cannot climb to the top without steps; for every step upward he needs the
foundation of the past, and this in the comprehensive sense in which it can be
revealed only in general culture. All thinking is based only in small part on
man's own knowledge, and mostly on the experience of the -time that has
preceded. The general cultural level provides the individual man, without his
noticing it as a rule, with such a profusion of preliminary knowledge that,
thus armed, he can more easily take further steps of his own. The boy of today,
for example, grows up among a truly vast number of technical acquisitions of
the last centuries, so that he takes for granted and no longer pays attention
to much that a hundred years ago was a riddle to even the greatest minds,
although for following and understanding our progress in the field in question
it is of decisive importance to him. If a very genius from the twenties of the
past century should suddenly leave his grave today, it would be harder for him
even intellectually to find his way in the present era than for an average boy
of fifteen today. For he would lack all the infinite preliminary education
which our present contemporary unconsciously, so to speak, assimilates while
growing up amidst the manifestations of our present general
civilization.
Since the Jew-for reasons which will at once become
apparent-was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of
his intellectual work were always provided by others. His intellect at all
times developed through the cultural world surrounding him.
The reverse process never took place.
For if the Jewish people's instinct of self-preservation
is not smaller but larger than that of other peoples, if his intellectual
faculties can easily arouse the impression that they are equal to the
intellectual gifts of other races, he lacks completely the most essential
requirement for a cultured people, the idealistic attitude.
In the Jewish people the will to self-sacrifice does not
go beyond the individual's naked instinct of self-preservation. Their
apparently great sense of solidarity is based on the very primitive herd
instinct that is seen in many other living creatures in this world. It is a
noteworthy fact that the herd instinct leads to mutual support only as long as
a common danger makes this seem useful or inevitable. The same pack of wolves
which has just fallen on its prey together disintegrates when hunger abates
into its individual beasts. The same is true of horses which try to defend
themselves against an assailant in a body, but scatter again as soon as the
danger is past.
It is similar with the Jew. His sense of sacrifice is
only apparent. It exists only as long as the existence of the individual makes
it absolutely necessary. However, as soon as the common enemy is conquered, the
danger threatening all averted and the booty hidden, the apparent harmony of
the Jews among themselves ceases, again making way for their old causal
tendencies. The Jew is only united when a common danger forces him to be or a
common booty entices him; if these two grounds are lacking, the qualities of
the crassest egoism come into their own, and in the twinkling of an eye the
united people turns into a horde of rats, fighting bloodily among
themselves.
If the Jews were alone in this world, they would stifle
in filth and offal; they would try to get ahead of one another in hate-filled
struggle and exterminate one another, in so far as the absolute absence of all
sense of self-sacrifice, expressing itself in their cowardice, did not turn
battle into comedy here too.
So it is absolutely wrong to infer any ideal sense of
sacrifice in the Jews from the fact that they stand together in struggle, or,
better expressed, in the plundering of their fellow men.
Here again the Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism
of the individual.
That is why the Jewish state-which should be the living
organism for preserving and increasing a race-is completely unlimited as to
territory. For a state formation to have a definite spatial setting always
presupposes an idealistic attitude on the part of the state-race, and
especially a correct interpretation of the concept of work. In the exact
measure in which this attitude is lacking, any attempt at forming, even of
preserving, a spatially delimited state fails. And thus the basis on which
alone culture can arise is lacking.
Hence the Jewish people, despite all apparent intellectual
qualities, is without any true culture, and especially without any culture of
its own. For what sham culture the Jew today possesses is the property of other
peoples, and for the most part it is ruined in his hands.
In judging the Jewish people's attitude on the question of
human culture, the most essential characteristic we must always bear in mind is
that there has never been a Jewish art and accordingly there is none today
either; that above all the two queens of all the arts, architecture and music,
owe nothing original to the Jews. What they do accomplish in the field of art
is either patchwork or intellectual theft. Thus, the Jew lacks those qualities
which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally
blessed.
To what an extent the Jew takes over foreign culture, imitating or
rather ruining it, can be seen from the fact that he is mostly found in the art
which seems to require least original invention, the art of acting. But even
here, in reality, he is only a ' juggler,' or rather an ape; for even here he
lacks the last touch that is required for real greatness; even here he is not
the creative genius, but a superficial imitator, and all the twists and tricks
that he uses are powerless to conceal the inner lifelessness of his creative
gift. Here the Jewish press most lovingly helps him along by raising such a
roar of hosannahs about even the most mediocre bungler, just so long as he is a
Jew, that the rest of the world actually ends up by thinking that they have an
artist before them, while in truth it is only a pitiful comedian.
No, the Jew possesses no culture-creating force of any
sort, since the idealism, without which there is no true higher development of
man, is not present in him and never was present. Hence his intellect will
never have a constructive effect, but will be destructive, and in very rare
cases perhaps will at most be stimulating, but then as the prototype of the '
force which always wants evil and nevertheless creates good.' Not through him
does any progress of mankind occur, but in spite of him.
Since the Jew never possessed a state with definite
territorial limits and therefore never called a culture his own, the conception
arose that this was a people which should be reckoned among the ranks of the
nomads. This is a fallacy as great as it is dangerous. The nomad does possess a
definitely limited living space, only he does not cultivate it like a sedentary
peasant, but lives from the yield of his herds with which he wanders about in
his territory. The outward reason for this is to be found in the small
fertility of a soil which simply does not permit of settlement. The deeper
cause, however, lies in the disparity between the technical culture of an age
or people and the natural poverty of a living space. There are territories in
which even the Aryan is enabled only by his technology, developed in the course
of more than a thousand years, to live in regular settlements, to master broad
stretches of soil and obtain from it the requirements of life. If he did not
possess this technology, either he would have to avoid these territories or
likewise have to struggle along as a nomad in perpetual wandering, provided
that his thousand-year-old education and habit of settled residence did not
make this seem simply unbearable to him. We must bear in mind that in the time
when the American continent was being opened up, numerous Aryans fought for
their livelihood as trappers, hunters, etc., and often in larger troops with
wife and children, always on the move, so that their existence was completely
like that of the nomads. But as soon as their increasing number and better
implements permitted them to clear the wild soil and make a stand against the
natives, more and more settlements sprang up in the land.
Probably the Aryan was also first a nomad, settling in
the course of time, but for that very reason he was never a Jew! No, the Jew is
no nomad; for the nomad had also a definite attitude toward the concept of work
which could serve as a basis for his later development in so far as the
necessary intellectual premises were present. In him the basic idealistic view
is present, even if in infinite dilution, hence in his whole being he may seem
strange to the Aryan peoples, but not unattractive. In the Jew, however, this
attitude is not at all present; for that reason he was never a nomad, but only
and always a parasite in the body of other peoples. That he sometimes left his
previous living space has nothing to do with his own purpose, but results from
the fact that from time to time he was thrown out by the host nations he had
misused. His spreading is a typical phenomenon for all parasites; he always
seeks a new feeding ground for his race.
This, however, has nothing to do with nomadism, for the
reason that a Jew never thinks of leaving a territory ·hat he has occupied, but
remains where he is, and he sits so fast that even by force it is very hard to
drive him out. His extension to ever-new countries occurs only in the moment in
which certain conditions for his existence are there present, without which-
unlike the nomad-he would not change his residence. He is and remains the
typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon
as a favorable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is also like
that of spongers: wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter
or longer period.
Thus, the Jew of all times has lived in the states of
other peoples, and there formed his own state, which, to be sure, habitually
sailed under the disguise of 'religious community' as long as outward
circumstances made a complete revelation of his nature seem inadvisable. But as
soon as he felt strong enough to do without the protective cloak, he always
dropped the veil and suddenly became what so many of the others previously did
not want to believe and see: the Jew.
The Jew's life as a parasite in the body of other nations
and states explains a characteristic which once caused Schopenhauer, as has
already been mentioned, to call him the 'great master in lying.' Existence
impels the Jew to lies and to lie perpetually, just as it compels the
inhabitants of the northern countries to wear warm clothing.
His life within other peoples can only endure for any
length of time if he succeeds in arousing the opinion that he is not a.people
but a 'religious community,' though of a special sort.
And this is the first great lie.
In order to carry on his existence as a parasite on other
peoples, he is forced to deny his inner nature. The more intelligent the
individual Jew is, the more he will succeed in this deception. Indeed, things
can go so far that large parts of the host people will end by seriously
believing that the Jew is really a Frenchman or an Englishman, a German or an
Italian, though of a special religious faith. Especially state authorities,
which always seem animated by the historical fraction of wisdom, most easily
fall a victim to this infinite deception. Independent thinking sometimes seems
to these circles a true sin against holy advancement, so that we may not be
surprised if even today a Bavarian state ministry, for example, still has not
the faintest idea that the Jews are members of a people and not of a '
religion' though a glance at the Jew's own newspapers should indicate this even
to the most modest mind. The Jewish Echo is not yet an official organ, of
course, and consequently is unauthoritative as far as the intelligence of one
of these government potentates is concerned.
The Jew has always been a people with definite racial
characteristics and never a religion; only in order to get ahead he early
sought for a means which could distract unpleasant attention from his person.
And what would have been more expedient and at the same time more innocent than
the 'embezzled' concept of a religious community? For here, too, everything is
borrowed or rather stolen. Due to his own original special nature, the Jew
cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks
idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to
him. And a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the
conviction of survival after death in some form. Indeed, the Talmud is not a
book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and
profitable life in this world.
The Jewish religious doctrine consists primarily in
prescriptions for keeping the blood of Jewry pure and for regulating the
relation of Jews among themselves, but even more with the rest of the world; in
other words, with non-Jews. But even here it is by no means ethical problems
that are involved, but extremely modest economic ones. Concerning the moral
value of Jewish religious instruction, there are today and have been at all
times rather exhaustive studies (not by Jews; the drivel of the Jews themselves
on the subject is, of course, adapted to its purpose) which make this kind of
religion seem positively monstrous according to Aryan conceptions. The best
characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the
Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as
alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the
great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his
attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip
to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then
as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence.
In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party
Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later
try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties-and this
against their own nation.
On this first and greatest lie, that the Jews are not a
race but a religion, more and more lies are based in necessary consequence.
Among them is the lie with regard to the language of the Jew. For him it is not
a means for expressing his thoughts, but a means for concealing them. When he
speaks French, he thinks Jewish, and while he turns out German verses, in his
life he only expresses the nature of his nationality. As long as the Jew has
not become the master of the other peoples, he must speak their languages
whether he likes it or not, but as soon as they became his slaves, they would
all have to learn a universal language (Esperanto, for instance!), so that by
this additional means the Jews could more easily dominate them!
To what an extent the whole existence of this people is
based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise
Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the
Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they
are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed.
And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain
these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively
terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people
and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. The best
criticism applied to them, however, is reality. Anyone who examines the
historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this
book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this
book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be
considered as broken.
The best way to know the Jew is to study the road which
he has taken within the body of other peoples in the course of the centuries.
It suffices to follow this up in only one example, to arrive at the necessary
realizations. As his development has always and at all times been the same,
just as that of the peoples corroded by him has also been the same, it is
advisable in such an examination to divide his development into definite
sections which in this case for the sake of simplicity I designate
alphabetically. The first Jews came to ancient Germany in the course of the
advance of the Romans, and as always they came as merchants. In the storms of
the migrations, however, they seem to have disappeared again, and thus the time
of the first Germanic state formation may be viewed as the beginning of a new
and this time lasting Jewification of Central and Northern Europe. A
development set in which has always been the same or similar wherever the Jews
encountered Aryan peoples.
(a) With the appearance of the first fixed settlement,
the Jew is suddenly 'at hand.' He comes as a merchant and at first attaches
little importance to the concealment of his nationality. He is still a Jew,
partly perhaps among other reasons because the outward racial difference
between himself and the host people is too great, his linguistic knowledge
still too small, and the cohesion of the host people too sharp for him to dare
to try to appear as anything else than a foreign merchant. With his dexterity
and the inexperience of his host people, the retention of his character as a
Jew represents no disadvantage for him, but rather an advantage; the stranger
is given a friendly reception.
(b) Gradually he begins slowly to become active in
economic life, not as a producer, but exclusively as a middleman. With his
thousand-year-old mercantile dexterity he is far superior to the still
helpless, and above all boundlessly honest, Aryans, so that in a short time
commerce threatens to become his monopoly. He begins to lend money and as
always at usurious interest. As a matter of fact, he thereby introduces
interest. The danger of this new institution is not recognized at first, but
because of its momentary advantages is even welcomed.
(c) The Jew has now become a steady resident; that is, he
settles special sections of the cities and villages and more and more
constitutes a state within a state. He regards commerce as well as all
financial transactions as his own special privilege which he ruthlessly
exploits.
(d) Finance and commerce have become his complete monopoly. His
usurious rates of interest finally arouse resistance, the rest of his
increasing effrontery indignation, his wealth envy. The cup is full to
overflowing when he draws the soil into the sphere of his commercial objects
and degrades it to the level of a commodity to be sold or rather traded. Since
he himself never cultivates the soil, but regards it only as a property to be
exploited on which the peasant can well remain, though amid the most miserable
extortions on the part of his new master, the aversion against him gradually
increases to open hatred. His blood-sucking tyranny becomes so great that
excesses against him occur. People begin to look at the foreigner more and more
closely and discover more and more repulsive traits and characteristics in him
until the cleft becomes unbridgeable.
At times of the bitterest distress, fury against him
finally breaks out, and the plundered and ruined masses begin to defend
themselves against the scourge of God. In the course of a few centuries they
have come to know him, and now they feel that the mere fact of his existence is
as bad as the plague.
(e) Now the Jew begins to reveal his true qualities. With
repulsive flattery he approaches the governments, puts his money to work, and
in this way always manages to secure new license to plunder his victims. Even
though the rage of the people sometimes flares high against the eternal
blood-sucker, it does not in the least prevent him from reappearing in a few
years in the place he had hardly left and beginning the old life all over
again. No persecution can deter him from his type of human exploitation, none
can drive him away; after every persecution he is back again in a short time,
and just the same as before.
To prevent the very worst, at least, the people begin to
withdraw the soil from his usurious hands by making it legally impossible for
him to acquire soil.
(f) Proportionately as the power of the princes begins to
mount, he pushes closer and closer to them. He begs for ' patents ' and
'privileges,' which the lords, always in financial straits, are glad to give
him for suitable payment. However much this may cost him, he recovers the money
he has spent in a few years through interest and compound interest. A true
blood-sucker that attaches himself to the body of the unhappy people and cannot
be picked off until the princes themselves again need money and with their own
exalted hand tap off the blood he has sucked from them.
This game is repeated again and again, and in it the role
of the so-called 'German princes' is just as miserable as that of the Jews
themselves. These lords were really God's punishment for their beloved peoples
and find their parallels only in the various ministers of the present
time.
It is thanks to the German princes that the German nation was unable
to redeem itself for good from the Jewish menace. In this, too, unfortunately,
nothing changed as time went on; all they obtained from the Jew was the
thousandfold reward for the sins they had once committed against their peoples.
They made a pact with the devil and landed in hell.
(g) And so, his ensnarement of the princes leads to their
ruin. Slowly but surely their relation to the peoples loosens in the measure in
which they cease to serve the people's interests and instead become mere
exploiters of their subjects. The Jew well knows what their end will be and
tries to hasten it as much as possible. He himself adds to their financial
straits by alienating them more and more from their true tasks, by crawling
around them with the vilest flattery, by encouraging them in vices, and thus
making himself more and more indispensable to them. With his deftness, or
rather unscrupulousness, in all money matters he is able to squeeze, yes, to
grind, more and more money out of the plundered subjects, who in shorter and
shorter intervals go the way of all flesh. Thus every court has its 'court
Jew'-as the monsters are called who torment the 'beloved people' to despair and
prepare eternal pleasures for the princes. Who then can be surprised that these
ornaments of the human race ended up by being ornamented, or rather decorated,
in the literal sense, and rose to the hereditary nobility, helping not only to
make this institution ridiculous, but even to poison it?
Now, it goes without saying, he can really make use of his
position for his own advancement.
Finally he needs only to have himself baptized to possess
himself of all the possibilities and rights of the natives of the country. Not
seldom he concludes this deal to the joy of the churches over the son they have
won and of Israel over the successful swindle.
(h) Within Jewry a change now begins to take place. Up
till now they have been Jews; that is, they attach no importance to appearing
to be something else, which they were unable to do, anyway, because of the very
distinct racial characteristics on both sides. At the time of Frederick the
Great it still entered no one's head to regard the Jew as anything else but a
'foreign' people, and Goethe was still horrified at the thought that in future
marriage between Christians and Jews would no longer be forbidden by law. And
Goethe, by God, was no reactionary, let alone a helot; I what spoke out of him
was only the voice of the blood and of reason. Thus-despite all the shameful
actions of the courts-the people instinctively saw in the Jew a foreign element
and took a corresponding attitude toward him.
But now all this was to change. In the course of more
than a thousand years he has learned the language of the host people to such an
extent that he now thinks he can venture in future to emphasize his Judaism
less and place his 'Germanism' more in the foreground; for ridiculous, nay,
insane, as it may seem at first, he nevertheless has the effrontery to turn
'Germanic,' in this case a 'German.' With this begins one of the most infamous
deceptions that anyone could conceive of. Since of Germanism he possesses
really nothing but the art of stammering its language -and in the most
frightful way-but apart from this has never mixed with the Germans, his whole
Germanism rests on the language alone. Race, however, does not lie in the
language, but exclusively in the blood, which no one knows better than the Jew,
who attaches very little importance to the preservation of his language, but
all importance to keeping his blood pure. A man can change his language without
any trouble-that is, he can use another language; but in his new language he
will express the old ideas; his inner nature is not changed. This is best shown
by the Jew who can speak a thousand languages and nevertheless remains a Jew.
His traits of character have remained the same, whether two thousand years ago
as a grain dealer in Ostia, speaking Roman, or whether as a flour profiteer of
today, jabbering German with a Jewish accent. It is always the same Jew. That
this obvious fact is not understood by a ministerial secretary or higher police
official is also self-evident, for there is scarcely any creature with less
instinct and intelligence running around in the world today than these servants
of our present model state authority.
The reason why the Jew decides suddenly to become a
'German ' is obvious. He feels that the power of the princes is slowly
tottering and therefore tries at an early time to get a platform beneath his
feet. Furthermore, his financial domination of the whole economy has advanced
so far that without possession of all 'civil' rights he can no longer support
the gigantic edifice, or at any rate, no further increase of his influence is
possible. And he desires both of these; for the higher he climbs, the more
alluring his old goal that was once promised him rises from the veil of the
past, and with feverish avidity his keenest minds see the dream of world
domination tangibly approaching. And so his sole effort is directed toward
obtaining full possession of 'civil' rights.
This is the reason for his emancipation from the
ghetto.
(i) So from the court Jew there-gradually develops the people's Jew,
which means, of course: the Jew remains as before in the entourage of the high
lords; in fact,-he tries to push his way even more into their circle; but at
the same time another part of his race makes friends with the ' beloved people.
' If we consider how greatly he has sinned against the masses in the course of
the centuries, how he has squeezed and sucked their blood again and again; if
furthermore, we consider how the people gradually learned to hate him for this,
and ended up by regarding his existence as nothing but a punishment of Heaven
for the other peoples, we can understand how hard this shift must be for the
Jew. Yes, it is an arduous task suddenly to present himself to his flayed
victims as a 'friend of mankind.'
First, therefore, he goes.about making up to the people
for his previous sins against them. He begins his career as the 'benefactor' of
mankind. Since his new benevolence has a practical foundation, he cannot very
well adhere to the old Biblical recommendation, that the left hand should not
know what the right hand giveth; no, whether he likes it or not, he must
reconcile himself to letting as many people as possible know how deeply he
feels the sufferings of the masses and all the sacrifices that he himself is
making to combat them. With this 'modesty ' which is inborn in him, he blares
out his merits to the rest of the world until people really begin to believe in
them. Anyone who does not believe in them is doing him a bitter injustice. In a
short time he begins to twist things around to make it look as if all the
injustice in the world had always been done to him and not the other way
around. The very stupid believe this and then they just can't help but pity the
poor 'unfortunate.'
In addition, it should be remarked here that the Jew,
despite all his love of sacrifice, naturally never becomes personally
impoverished. He knows how to manage; sometimes, indeed, his charity is really
comparable to fertilizer, which is not strewn on the field for love of the
field, but with a view to the farmer's own future benefit. In any case,
everyone knows in a comparatively short time that the Jew has become a
'benefactor and friend of mankind.' What a strange transformation!
But what is more or less taken for granted in others
arouses the greatest astonishment and in many distinct admiration for this very
reason. So it happens that he gets much more credit for every such action than
the rest of mankind, in whom it is taken for granted.
But even more: all at once the Jew also becomes liberal
and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.
Slowly he makes
himself the spokesman of a new era.
Also, of course, he destroys more and more thoroughly the
foundations of any economy that will really benefit the people. By way of stock
shares he pushes his way into the circuit of national production which he turns
into a purchasable or rather tradable object, thus robbing the enterprises of
the foundations of a personal ownership. Between employer and employee there
arises that inner estrangement which later leads to political class
division.
Finally, the Jewish influence on economic affairs grows with
terrifying speed through the stock exchange. He becomes the owner, or at least
the controller, of the national labor force.
To strengthen his political position he tries to tear
down the racial and civil barriers which for a time continue to restrain him at
every step. To this end he fights with all the tenacity innate in him for
religious tolerance-and in Freemasonry, which has succumbed to him completely,
he has an excellent instrument with which to fight for his aims and put them
across. The governing circles and the higher strata of the political and
economic bourgeoisie are brought into his nets by the strings of Freemasonry,
and never need to suspect what is happening
Only the deeper and broader strata of the people as such,
or rather that class which is beginning to wake up and fight for its rights and
freedom, cannot yet be sufficiently taken in by these methods. But this is more
necessary than anything else; for the Jew feels that the possibility of his
rising to a dominant role exists only if there is someone ahead of him to dear
the way; and this someone he thinks he can recognize in the bourgeoisie, in
their broadest strata in fact. The glovemakers and linen weavers, however,
cannot be caught in the fine net of Freemasonry; no, for them coarser but no
less drastic means must be employed. Thus Freemasonry is joined by a second
weapon in the service of the Jews: the press. With all his perseverance and
dexterity he seizes possession of it. With it he slowly begins to grip and
ensnare, to guide and to push all public life, since he is in a position to
create and direct that power which, under the name of 'public opinion,' IS
better known today than a few decades ago.
In this he always represents himself personally as having
an infinite thirst for knowledge, praises all progress, mostly, to be sure, the
progress that leads to the ruin of others; for he judges all knowledge and all
development only according to its possibilities for advancing his nation, and
where this is lacking, he is the inexorable mortal enemy of all light, a hater
of all true culture. He uses all the knowledge he acquires in the schools of
other peoples, exclusively for the benefit of his race.
And this nationality he guards as never before. While he
seems to overflow with 'enlightenment,' 'progress,' 'freedom,' 'humanity,'
etc., he himself practices the severest segregation of his race. To be sure, he
sometimes palms off his women on influential Christians, but as a matter of
principle he always keeps his male line pure. He poisons the blood of others,
but preserves his own. The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is
the Christian who marries a Jewess. The bastards, however, take after the
Jewish side. Especially a part of the high nobility degenerates completely. The
Jew is perfectly aware of this, and therefore systematically carries on this
mode of ' disarming ' the intellectual leader class of his racial adversaries.
In order to mask his activity and lull his victims, however, he talks more and
more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The fools
begin to believe him.
Since, however, his whole being still has too strong a
smell of the foreign for the broad masses of the people in particular to fall
readily into his nets, he has his press give a picture of him which is as
little in keeping with reality as conversely it serves his desired purpose. His
comic papers especially strive to represent the Jews as a harmless little
people, with their own peculiarities, of course-like other peoples as well-but
even in their gestures, which seem a little strange, perhaps, giving signs of a
possibly ludicrous, but always thoroughly honest and benevolent, soul. And the
constant effort is to make him seem almost more 'insignificant' than
dangerous.
His ultimate goal in this stage is the victory of '
democracy,' or, as he understands it: the rule of parliamentarianism. It is
most compatible with his requirements; for it excludes the personality-and puts
in its place the majority characterized by stupidity, incompetence, and last
but not least, cowardice.
The final result will be the overthrow of the monarchy,
which is now sooner or later bound to occur.
(j) The tremendous economic development leads to a change
in the social stratification of the people. The small craftsman slowly dies
out, and as a result the worker's possibility of achieving an independent
existence becomes rarer and rarer; in consequence the worker becomes visibly
proletarianized. There arises the industrial ' factory worker ' whose most
essential characteristic is to be sought in the fact that he hardly ever is in
a position to found an existence of his own in later life. He is propertyless
in the truest sense of the word. His old age is a torment and can scarcely be
designated as living.
Once before, a similar situation was created, which
pressed urgently for a solution and also found one. The peasants and artisans
had slowly been joined by the officials and salaried workers-particularly of
the state-as a new class. They, too, were propertyless in the truest sense of
the word. The state finally found a way out of this unhealthy condition by
assuming the care of the state employee who could not himself provide for his
old age; it introduced the pension. Slowly, more and more enterprises followed
this example, so that nearly every regularly employed brain-worker draws a
pension in later life, provided the concern he works in has achieved or
surpassed a certain size. Only by safeguarding the state official in his old
age could he be taught the selfless devotion to duty which in the pre-War
period was the most eminent quality of German officialdom.
In this way a whole class that had remained propertyless
was wisely snatched away from social misery and articulated with the body of
the people.
Now this question again, and this time on a much larger
scale, faced the state and the nation. More and more masses of people,
numbering millions, moved from peasant villages to the larger cities to earn
their bread as factory workers in the newly established industries. The working
and living conditions of the new class were more than dismal. If nothing else,
the more or less mechanical transference of the old artisan's or even peasant's
working methods to the new form was by no means suitable. The work done by
these men could not be compared with the exertions which the industrial factory
worker has to perform. In the old handicraft, this may not have been very
important, but in the new working methods it was all the more so. The formal
transference of the old working hours to the industrial large-scale enterprise
was positively catastrophic, for the actual work done before was but little in
view of the absence of our present intensive working methods. Thus, though
previously the fourteen-or even fifteen-hour working day had been bearable, it
certainly ceased to be bearable at a time when every minute was exploited to
the fullest. The result of this senseless transference of the old working hours
to the new industrial activity was really unfortunate in two respects: the
worker's health was undermined and his faith in a higher justice destroyed. To
this finally was added the miserable wages on the one hand and the employer's
correspondingly and obviously so vastly superior position on the other.
In
the country there could be no social question, since master and hired hand did
the same work and above all ate out of the same bowls. But this, too,
changed.
The separation of worker and employer now seems complete in all
fields of life. How far the inner Judaization of our people has progressed can
be seen from the small respect, if not contempt, that is accorded to manual
labor. This is not German. It took the foreignization of our life, which was in
truth a Jewification, to transform the old respect for manual work into a
certain contempt for all physical labor.
Thus, there actually comes into being a new class
enjoying very little respect, and one day the question must arise whether the
nation would possess the strength to articulate the new class into general
society, or whether the social difference would broaden into a classlike
cleavage.
But one thing is certain: the new class did not count the worst
elements in its ranks, but on the contrary definitely the most
energetic
elements. The overrefinements of so-called culture had not yet exerted their
disintegrating and destructive effects. The broad mass of the new class was not
yet infected with the poison of pacifist weakness; it was robust and if
necessary even brutal.
While the bourgeoisie is not at all concerned about this
all-important question, but indifferently lets things slide, the Jew seizes the
unlimited opportunity it offers for the future; while on the one hand he
organizes capitalistic methods of human exploitation to their ultimate
consequence, he approaches the very victims of his spirit and his activity and
in a short time becomes the leader of their struggle against himself. 'Against
himself' is only figuratively speaking; for the great master of lies
understands as always how to make himself appear to be the pure one and to load
the blame on others. Since he has th gall to lead the masses, it never even
enters their heads that this might be the most in
famous betrayal of all
times.
And yet it was.
Scarcely has the new class grown out of the general
economic shift than the Jew, clearly and distinctly, realizes that it can open
the way for his own further advancement. First, he used the bourgeoisie as a
battering-ram against the feudal world, then the worker against the bourgeois
world. If formerly he knew how to swindle his way to civil rights in the shadow
of the bourgeoisie, now he hopes to find the road to his own domination in the
worker's struggle for existence.
From now on the worker has no other task
but to fight for the future of the Jewish people. Unconsciously he is harnessed
to the service of the power which he thinks he is combating. He is seemingly
allowed to attack capital, and this is the easiest way of making him fight for
it. In this the Jew keeps up an outcry against international capital and in
truth he means the national economy which must be demolished in order that the
international stock exchange can triumph over its dead body.
Here the Jew's procedure is as follows:
He approaches the worker, simulates pity with his fate, or
even indignation at his lot of misery and poverty, thus gaining his confidence.
He takes pains to study all the various real or imaginary hardships of his
life-and to arouse his longing for a change in such an existence. With infinite
shrewdness he fans the need for social justice, somehow slumbering in every
Aryan man, into hatred against those who have been better favored by fortune,
and thus gives the struggle for the elimination of social evils a very definite
philosophical stamp. He establishes the Marxist doctrine.
By presenting it as inseparably bound up with a number of
socially just demands, he promotes its spread and conversely the aversion of
decent people to fulfill demands which, advanced in such form and company, seem
from the outset unjust and impossible to fulfill. For under this cloak of
purely social ideas truly diabolic purposes are hidden, yes, they are publicly
proclaimed with the most insolent frankness. This theory represents an
inseparable mixture of reason and human madness, but always in such a way that
only the lunacy can become reality and never the reason. By the categorical
rejection of the personality and hence of the nation and its racial content, it
destroys the elementary foundations of all human culture which is dependent on
just these factors. This is the true inner kernel of the Marxist philosophy in
so far as this figment of a criminal brain can be designated as a 'philosophy.'
With the shattering of the personality and the race, the essential obstacle is
removed to the domination of the inferior being-and this is the Jew.
Precisely in political and economic madness lies the sense of this
doctrine. For this prevents all truly intelligent people from entering its
service, while those who are intellectually less active and poorly educated in
economics hasten to it with flying colors. The intellectuals for this
movement-for even this movement needs intellectuals for its existence-are '
sacrificed ' by the Jew from his own ranks.
Thus there arises a pure movement entirely of manual
workers under Jewish leadership, apparently aiming to improve the situation of
the worker, but in truth planning the enslavement and with it the destruction
of all non-Jewish peoples.
The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct
of selfpreservation begun by Freemasonry in the circles of the so-called
intelligentsia is transmitted to the broad masses and above all to the
bourgeoisie by the activity of the big papers which today are always Jewish.
Added to these two weapons of disintegration comes a third and by far the most
terrible, the organization of brute force. As a shock and storm troop, Marxism
is intended to finish off what the preparatory softening up with the first two
weapons has made ripe for collapse.
Here we have teamwork that is positively brilliant-and we
need really not be surprised if in confronting it those very institutions which
always like to represent themselves as the pillars of a more or less legendary
state authority hold up least. It is in our high and highest state officialdom
that the Jew has at all times (aside from a few exceptions) found the most
compliant abettor of his work of disintegration. Cringing submissiveness to
superiors and high-handed arrogance to inferiors distinguish this class to the
same degree as a narrow-mindedness that often cries to high Heaven and is only
exceeded by a self-conceit that is sometimes positively amazing.
And these are qualities that the Jew needs in our
authorities and loves accordingly.
The practical struggle which now begins, sketched in broad
outlines, takes the following course:
In keeping with the ultimate aims of the Jewish struggle,
which are not exhausted in the mere economic conquest of the world, but also
demand its political subjugation, the Jew divides the organization of his
Marxist world doctrine into two halves which, apparently separate from one
another, in truth form an inseparable whole: the political and the trade-union
movement.
The trade-union movement does the recruiting. In the hard struggle
for existence which the worker must carry on, thanks to the greed and
shortsightedness of many employers, it offers him aid and protection, and thus
the possibility of winning better living conditions. If, at a time when the
organized national community, the state, concerns itself with him little or not
at all, the worker does not want to hand over the defense of his vital human
rights to the blind caprice of people who in part have little sense of
responsibility and are often heartless to boot, he must take their defense into
his own hands. In exact proportion as the so-called national bourgeoisie,
blinded by financial interests, sets the heaviest obstacles in the path of this
struggle for existence and not only resists all attempts at shortening the
inhumanly long working day, abolishing child labor, safeguarding and protecting
the woman, improving sanitary conditions in the workshops and homes, but often
actually sabotages them, the shrewder Jew takes the oppressed people under his
wing. Gradually he be comes the leader of the trade-union movement, all the
more easily as he is not interested in really eliminating social evils in an
honest sense, but only in training an economic storm troop, blindly devoted to
him, with which to destroy the national economic independence. For while the
conduct of a healthy social policy will consistently move between the aims of
preserving the national health on the one hand and safeguarding an independent
national economy on the other, for the Jew in his struggle these two criteria
not only cease to exist, but their elimination, among other things, is his life
goal. He desires, not the preservation of an independent national economy, but
its destruction. Consequently, no pangs of conscience can prevent him as a
leader of the trade-union movement from raising demands which not only
overshoot the goal, but whose fulfillment is either impossible for practical
purposes or means the ruin of the national economy. Moreover, he does not want
to have a healthy, sturdy race before him, but a rickety herd capable of being
subjugated. This desire again permits him to raise demands of the most
senseless kind whose practical fulfillment he himself knows to be impossible
and which, therefore, could not lead to any change in things, but at most to a
wild incitement of the masses. And that is what he is interested in and not a
true and honest improvement of social conditions.
Hence the Jewish leadership in trade-union affairs
remains uncontested until an enormous work of enlightenment influences the
broad masses and sets them right about their never-ending misery, or else the
state disposes of the Jew and his work. For as long as the insight of the
masses remains as slight as now and the state as indifferent as today, these
masses will always be first to follow the man who in economic matters offers
the most shameless promises. And in this the Jew is a master. For in his entire
activity he is restrained by no moral scruples!
And so he inevitably drives every competitor in this
sphere from the field in a short time. In keeping with all his inner rapacious
brutality, he at once teaches the trade-union movement the most brutal use of
violence. If anyone by his intelligence resists the Jewish lures, his defiance
and understanding are broken by terror. The success of such an activity is
enormous.
Actually the Jew by means of the trade union, which could be a
blessing for the nation, shatters the foundations of the national
economy.
Parallel with this, the political organization advances.
It
plays hand in glove with the trade-union movement, for the latter prepares the
masses for political organization, in fact, lashes them into it with violence
and coercion. Furthermore, it is the permanent financial source from which the
political organization feeds its enormous apparatus. It is the organ
controlling the political activity of the individual and does the pandering in
all big demonstrations of a political nature. In the end it no longer comes out
for political interests at all, but places its chief instrument of struggle,
the cessation of work in the form of a mass and general strike, in the service
of the political idea.
By the creation of a press whose content is adapted to
the intellectual horizon of the least educated people, the political and
trade-union organization finally obtains the agitational institution by which
the lowest strata of the nation are made ripe for the most reckless acts. Its
function is not to lead people out of the swamp of a base mentality to a higher
stage, but to cater to their lowest instincts. Since the masses are as mentally
lazy as they are sometimes presumptuous, this is a business as speculative as
it is profitable.
It is this press, above all, which wages a positively
fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be
regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the
economic independence of the nation.
Above all, it hammers away at the characters of all those
who will not bow down to the Jewish presumption to dominate, or whose ability
and genius in themselves seem a danger to the Jew. For to be hated by the Jew
it is not necessary to combat him; no, it suffices if he suspects that someone
might even conceive the idea of combating him some time or that on the strength
of his superior genius he is an augmenter of the power and greatness of a
nationality hostile to the Jew.
His unfailing instinct in such things scents the original
soul l in everyone, and his hostility is assured to anyone who is not spirit of
his spirit. Since the Jew is not the attacked but the attacker, not only anyone
who attacks passes as his enemy, but also anyone who resists him. But the means
with which he seeks to break such reckless but upright souls is not honest
warfare, but lies and slander.
Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes
so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the
personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape
of the Jew.
The ignorance of the broad masses about the inner nature
of the Jew, the lack of instinct and narrow-mindedness of our upper classes,
make the people an easy victim for this Jewish campaign of lies.
While from innate cowardice the upper classes turn away
from a man whom the Jew attacks with lies and slander, the broad masses from
stupidity or simplicity believe everything. The state authorities either cloak
themselves in silence or, what usually happens, in order to put an end to the
Jewish press campaign, they persecute the unjustly attacked, which, in the eyes
of such an official ass, passes as the preservation of state authority and the
safeguarding of law and order.
Slowly fear of the Marxist weapon of Jewry descends like
a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent people.
They begin to tremble before the terrible enemy and thus
have become his final victim.
The Jew's domination in the state seems so assured that
now not only can he call himself a Jew again, but he ruthlessly admits his
ultimate national and political designs. A section of his race openly owns
itself to be a foreign people, yet even here they lie. For while the Zionists
try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of
the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews
again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up
a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a
central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its
own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven
for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of
security that at a time when one section is still playing the German,
Frenchman, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the
Jewish race.
How close they see approaching victory can be seen by the
hideous aspect which their relations with the members of
other peoples takes
on.
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in
wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing
her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial
foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself
systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down
the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who
bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and
clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting
bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and
himself rising to be its master.
For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood
can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world he will forever be master over
bastards and bastards alone.
And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level
by a continuous poisoning of individuals.
And in politics he begins to replace the idea of
democracy by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the organized mass of Marxism he has found the weapon
which lets him dispense with democracy and in its stead allows him to subjugate
and govern the peoples with a dictatorial and brutal fist.
He works systematically for revolutionization in a
twofold sense: economic and political.
Around peoples who offer too violent a resistance to
attack from within he weaves a net of enemies, thanks to his international
influence, incites them to war, and finally, if necessary, plants the flag of
revolution on the very battlefields.
In economics he undermines the states until the social
enterprises which have become unprofitable are taken from the state and
subjected to his financial control.
In the political field he refuses the state the means for
its selfpreservation, destroys the foundations of all national self-maintenance
and defense, destroys faith in the leadership, scoffs at its history and past,
and drags everything that is truly great into the gutter.
Culturally he contaminates art, literature, the theater,
makes a mockery of natural feeling, overthrows all concepts of beauty and
sublimity, of the noble and the good, and instead drags men down into the
sphere of his own base nature.
Religion is ridiculed, ethics and morality
represented as outmoded, until the last props of a nation in its struggle for
existence in this world have fallen.
(e) Now begins the great last revolution. In gaining
political power the Jew casts off the few cloaks that he still wears. The
democratic people's Jew becomes the blood-Jew and tyrant over peoples. In a few
years he tries to exterminate the national intelligentsia and by robbing the
peoples of their natural intellectual leadership makes them ripe for the
slave's lot of permanent subjugation.
The most frightful example of this kind is offered by
Russia, where he killed or starved about thirty million people with positively
fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman tortures, in order to give a gang of
Jewish journalists and stock exchange bandits domination over a great
people.
The end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed
by the Jew, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations. After the death
of his victim, the vampire sooner or later dies too.
If we pass all the causes of the German collapse in
review, the ultimate and most decisive remains the failure to recognize the
racial problem and especially the Jewish menace.
The defeats on the battlefield in August, 1918, would
have been child's play to bear. They stood in no proportion to the victories of
our people. It was not they that caused our downfall; no, it was brought about
by that power which prepared these defeats by systematically over many decades
robbing our people of the political and moral instincts and forces which alone
make nations capable and hence worthy of existence.
In heedlessly ignoring -the question of the preservation
of the racial foundations of our nation, the old Reich disregarded the sole
right which gives life in this world. Peoples which bastardize themselves, or
let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence, and
when their ruin is encompassed by a stronger enemy it is not an injustice done
to them, but only the restoration of justice. If a people no longer wants to
respect the Nature-given qualities of its being which root in its blood, it has
no further right to complain over the loss of its earthly existence.
Everything on this earth is capable of improvement. Every defeat can
become the father of a subsequent victory, every lost war the cause of a later
resurgence, every hardship the fertilization of human energy, and from every
oppression the forces for a new spiritual rebirth can comes as long as the
blood is preserved pure.
The lost purity of the blood alone destroys inner
happiness forever, plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the
consequences can never more be eliminated from body and spirit.
Only by examining and comparing all other problems of
life in the light of this one question shall we see how absurdly petty they are
by this standard. They are all limited in time-but the question of preserving
or not preserving the purity of the blood will endure as long as there are
men.
All really significant symptoms of decay of the pre-War period can
in the last analysis be reduced to racial causes.
Whether we consider questions of general justice or
cankers of economic life, symptoms of cultural decline or processes of
political degeneration, questions of faulty schooling or the bad influence
exerted on grown-ups by the press, etc., everywhere and always it is
fundamentally the disregard of the racial needs of our own people or failure to
see a foreign racial menace.
And that is why all attempts at reform, all
works for social relief and political exertions, all economic expansion and
every apparent increase of intellectual knowledge were futile as far as their
results were concerned. The nation, and the organism which enables l and
preserves its life on this earth, the state, did not grow inwardly healthier,
but obviously languished more and more. All the illusory prosperity of the old
Reich could not hide its inner weakness, and every attempt really to strengthen
the Reich failed again and again, due to disregarding the most important
question.
It would be a mistake to believe that the adherents of the various
political tendencies which were tinkering around on the German national
body-yes, even a certain section of the leaders-were bad or malevolent men in
themselves. Their activity was condemned to sterility only because the best of
them saw at most the forms of our general disease and tried to combat them, but
blindly ignored the virus. Anyone who systematically follows the old Reich's
line of political development is bound to arrive, upon calm examination, at the
realization that even at the time of the unification, hence the rise of the
German nation, the inner decay was already in full swing, and that despite all
apparent political successes and despite increasing economic wealth, the
general situation was deteriorating from year to year. If nothing else, the
elections for the Reichstag announced, with their outward swelling of the
Marxist vote, the steadily approaching inward and hence also outward collapse.
All the successes of the so-called bourgeois parties were worthless, not only
because even with so-called bourgeois electoral victories they were unable to
halt the numerical growth of the Marxist flood, but because they themselves
above all now bore the ferments of decay in their own bodies. Without
suspecting it, the bourgeois world itself was inwardly infected with the deadly
poison of Marxist ideas and its resistance often sprang more from the
competitor's envy of ambitious leaders than from a fundamental rejection of
adversaries determined to fight to the utmost. In these long years there was
only one who kept up an imperturbable, unflagging fight, and this was the Jean
His Star of David I rose higher and higher in proportion as our people's will
for selfpreservation vanished.
Therefore, in August, 1914, it was not a people resolved
to attack which rushed to the battlefield; no, it was only the last flicker of
the national instinct of self-preservation in face of the progressing
pacifist-Marxist paralysis of our national body. Since even in these days of
destiny, our people did not recognize the inner enemy, all outward resistance
was in vain and Providence did not bestow her reward on the victorious sword,
but followed the law of eternal retribution.
On the basis of this inner realization, there took form in
our new movement the leading principles as well as the tendency, which in our
conviction were alone capable, not only of halting the decline of the German
people, but of creating the granite foundation upon which some day a state will
rest which represents, not an alien mechanism of economic concerns and
interests, but a national organism:
Chapter XII: The First Period of
Development of the National Socialist German Workers' Party
IF AT THE END of this volume I describe the first period in the
development of our movement and briefly discuss a number of questions it
raises, my aim is not to give a dissertation on the spiritual aims of the
movement. The aims and tasks of the new movement are so gigantic that they can
only be treated in a special volume. In a second volume, therefore, I shall
discuss the programmatic foundations of the movement in detail and attempt to
draw a picture of what we conceive of under the word 'state.' By 'us' I mean
all the hundreds of thousands who fundamentally long for the same thing without
as individuals finding the words to describe outwardly I what they inwardly
visualize; for the noteworthy fact about all reforms is that at first they
possess but a single champion yet many million supporters. Their aim has often
been for centuries the inner longing of hundreds of thousands, until one man
stands up to proclaim such a general will, and as a standard-bearer guides the
old longing to victory in the form of the new idea.
The fact that millions bear in their hearts the desire
for a basic change in the conditions obtaining today proves the deep discontent
under which they suffer. It expresses itself in thousandfold manifestations
with one in despair and hopelessness, with another in ill will, anger, and
indignation; with this man in indifference, and with that man in furious
excesses. As witnesses to this inner dissatisfaction we may consider those who
are weary of elections as well as the many who tend to the most fanatical
extreme of the Left.
The young movement was intended primarily to appeal to
these last. It is not meant to constitute an organization of the contented and
satisfied, but to embrace those tormented by suffering, those without peace,
the unhappy and the discontented, and above all it must not swim on the surface
of a national body, but strike roots deep within it.
In purely political terms, the following picture
presented itself in 1918: a people torn into two parts. The one, by far the
smaller, includes the strata of the national intelligentsia, excluding all the
physically active. It is outwardly national, yet under this word can conceive
of nothing but a very insipid and weak-kneed defense of so-called state
interests, which in turn seem identical with dynastic interests. They attempt
to fight for their ideas and aims with spiritual weapons which are as
fragmentary as they are superficial, and which fail completely in the face of
the enemy's brutality. With a single frightful blow this class, which only a
short time before was still governing, is stretched on the ground and with
trembling cowardice suffers every humiliation at the hands of the ruthless
victor.
Confronting it is a second class, the broad mass of the laboring
population. It is organized in more or less radical Marxist movements,
determined to break all spiritual resistance by the power of violence. It does
not want to be national, but consciously rejects any promotion of national
interests, just as, conversely, it aids and abets all foreign oppression. It is
numerically the stronger and above all comprises all those elements of the
nation without which a national resurrection is unthinkable and
impossible.
For in 1918 this much was clear: no resurrection of the
German people can occur except through the recovery of outward power. But the
prerequisites for this are not arms, as our bourgeois 'statesmen ' keep
prattling, but the forces of the will. The German people had more than enough
arms before. They were not able to secure freedom because the energies of the
national instinct of self-preservation, the will for self-preservation, were
lacking. The best weapon is dead, worthless material as long as the spirit is
lacking which is ready, willing, and determined to use it. Germany became
defenseless, not because arms were lacking, but because the will was lacking to
guard the weapon for national survival.
If today more than ever our Left politicians are at pains
to point out the lack of arms as the necessary cause of their spineless,
compliant, actually treasonous policy, we must answer only one thing: no, the
reverse is true. Through your anti-national, criminal policy of abandoning
national interests, you surrendered our arms. Now you attempt to represent the
lack of arms as the underlying cause of your miserable villainy. This, like
everything you do, is lees and falsification.
But this reproach applies just as much to the politicians
on the Right. For, thanks to their miserable cowardice, the Jewish rabble that
had come to power was able in 1918 to steal the nation's arms. They, too, have
consequently no ground and no right to palm off our present lack of arms as the
compelling ground for their wily caution (read ' cowardice '); on the contrary,
our defenselessness is the consequence of their cowardice.
Consequently the question of regaining German power is
not: How shall we manufacture arms? but: How shall we manufacture the spirit
which enables a people to bear arms? If this spirit dominates a people, the
will finds a thousand ways, every one of which ends in a weapon ! But give a
coward ten pistols and if attacked he will not be able to fire a single shot.
And so for him they are more worthless than a knotted stick for a courageous
man.
The question of regaining our people's political power is primarily
a question of recovering our national instinct of self preservation, if for no
other reason because experience shows that any preparatory foreign policy, as
well as any evaluation of a state as such, takes its cue less from the existing
weapons than from a nation's recognized or presumed moral capacity for
resistance. A nation1s ability to form alliances is determined much less by
dead stores of existing arms than by the visible presence of an ardent national
will for self-preservation and heroic death-defying courage. For an alliance is
not concluded with arms but with men. Thus, the English nation will have to be
considered the most valuable ally in the world as long as its leadership and
the spirit of its byroad masses justify us in expecting that brutality and
perseverance which is determined to fight a battle once begun t04 victorious
end, with every means and without consideration of time and sacrifices; and
what is more, the military armament existing at any given moment does not need
to stand in any proportion to that of other states.
If we understand that the resurrection of the German
nation represents a question of regaining our political will for
self-preservation, it is also clear that this cannot be done by winning
elements which in point of will at least are already national, but only by the
nationalization of the consciously anti-national masses.
A young movement which, therefore, sets itself the goal
of resurrecting a German state with its own sovereignty will have to direct its
fight entirely to winning the broad masses. Wretched as our so-called '
national bourgeoisie ' is on the whole, inadequate as its national attitude
seems, certainly from this side no serious resistance is to be expected against
a powerful domestic and foreign policy in the future. Even if the German
bourgeoisie, for their well-known narrowminded and short-sighted reasons,
should, as they once did toward Bismarck, maintain an obstinate attitude of
passive resistance in the hour of coming liberation- an active resistance, in
view of their recognized and proverbial cowardice, is never to be
feared.
It is different with the masses of our internationally minded
comrades. In their natural primitiveness, they are snore inclined to the idea
of violence, and, moreover, their Jewish leadership is more brutal and
ruthless. They will crush any German resurrection Just as they once broke the
backbone of the German army. But above all: in this state with its
parliamentary government they will, thanks to their majority in numbers, not
only obstruct any national foreign policy, but also make impossible any higher
estimation of the German strength, thus making us seem uradesirable as an ally.
For not only are we ourselves aware of the element of weakness lying in our
fifteen million Marxists, detmocrats, pacifists, and Centrists; it is
recognized even more by foreign countries, which measure the value of a
possible alliance with us according to the weight of this burden. No one allies
himself with a state in which the attitude of the active part of the population
toward any determined foreign policy is passive, to say the least.
To this we must add the fact that the leaderships of
these parties of national treason must and will be hostile to any resurrection,
out of mere instinct of self-preservation. Historically it is just not
conceivable that the German people could recover its former position without
settling accounts with those who were the cause and occasion of the
unprecedented collapse which struck our state. For before the judgment seat of
posterity November, 1918, will be evaluated, not as high treason, but as
treason against the fatherland.
Thus, any possibility of regaining outward German
independence is bound up first and foremost with the recovery of the inner
unity of our people's will.
But regarded even from the purely technical point of
view, the idea of an outward German liberation seems senseless as long as the
broad masses are not also prepared to enter the service of this liberating
idea. From the purely military angle, every officer above all will realize
after a moment's thought that a foreign struggle cannot be carried on with
student battalions, that in addition to the brains of a people, the fists are
also needed. In addition, we must bear in mind that a national defense, which
is based only on the circles of the so-called intelligentsia, would squander
irreplaceable treasures. The absence of the young German intelligentsia which
found its death on the fields of Flanders in the fall of 1914 was sorely felt
later on. It was the highest treasure that the German nation possessed and
during the War its loss could no longer be made good. Not only is it impossible
to carry on the struggle itself if the storming battalions do not find the
masses of the workers in their ranks; the technical preparations are also
impracticable without the inner unity of our national will. Especially our
people, doomed to languish along unarmed beneath the thousand eyes of the
Versailles peace treaty, can only make technical preparations for the
achievement of freedom and human independence if the army of domestic
stoolpigeons is decimated down to those whose inborn lack of character permits
them to betray anything and everything for the well-known thirty pieces of
silvery For with these we can deal. Unconquerable by comparison seem the
millions who oppose the national resurrection out of political
conviction-unconquerable as long as the inner cause of their opposition, the
international Marxist philosophy of life, is not combated and torn out of their
hearts and brains.
Regardless, therefore, from what standpoint we examine
the possibility of regaining our state and national independence, whether frost
the standpoint of preparations in the sphere of foreign policy, from that of
technical armament or that of battle itself, in every case the presupposition
for everything remains the previous winning of the broad masses of our people
for the idea of our national independence.
Without the recovery of our external freedom, however,
any internal reform, even in the most favorable case, means only the increase
of our productivity as a colony. The surplus of all socalled economic
improvements falls to the benefit of our international control commissions, and
every social improvement at best raises the productivity of our work for them.
No cultural advances will fall to the share of the German nation; they are too
contingent on the political independence and dignity of our nation.
Thus, if a favorable solution of the German future requires a
national attitude on the part of the broad masses of our people, this must be
the highest, mightiest task of a movement whose activity is not intended to
exhaust itself in the satisfaction of the moment, but which must examine all
its commissions and omissions solely with a view to their presumed consequences
in the future.
Thus, by 1919 we clearly realized that, as its highest
aim, the new movement must first accomplish the nationalization of the
masses.
From a tactical standpoint a number of demands resulted from
this.
(1) To win the masses for a national resurrection, no social
sacrifice is too great.
Whatever economic concessions are made to our working
class today, they stand in no proportion to the gain for the entire nation if
they help to give the broad masses back to their nation. Only pigheaded
short-sightedness, such as is often unfortunately found in our employer
circles, can fail to recognize that in the long run there can be no economic
upswing for them and hence no economic profit, unless the inner national
solidarity of our people is restored.
If during the War the German unions had ruthlessly guarded
the interests of the working class, if even during the War they had struck a
thousand times over and forced approval of the demands of the workers they
represented on the dividend-hungry employers of those days; but if in matters
of national defense they had avowed their Germanism with the same fanaticism;
and if with equal ruthlessness they had given to the fatherland that which is
the fatherland's, the War would not have been lost. And how trifiing all
economic concessions, even the greatest, would have been, compared to the
immense importance of winning the War!
Thus a movement which plans to give the German worker
back to the German people must clearly realize that in this question economic
sacrifices are of no importance whatever as long as the preservation and
independence of the national economy are not threatened by them.
(2) The national education of the broad masses can only
take place indirectly through a social uplift, since thus exclusively can those
general economic premises be created which permit the individual to partake of
the cultural goods of the nation.
(3) The nationalization of the broad masses can never be
achieved by half-measures, by weakly emphasizing a socalled objective
standpoint, but only by a ruthless and fanatically onesided orientation toward
the goal to be achieved. That is to say, a people cannot be made 'national' in
the sense understood by our present-day bourgeoisie, meaning with so and so
many limitations, but only nationalistic with the entire vehemence that is
inherent in the extreme. Poison is countered only by an antidote, and only the
shallowness of a-bourgeois mind can regard the middle course as the road to
heaven.
The broad masses of a people consist neither of professors nor of
diplomats. The scantiness of the abstract knowledge they possess directs their
sentiments more to the world of feeling. That is where their positive or
negative attitude lies. It is receptive only to an expression of force in one
of these two directions and never to a half-measure hovering between the two.
Their emotional attitude at the same time conditions their extraordinary
stability. Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to
change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to
the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a
scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired
them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward. Anyone who wants to
win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart. Its
name is not objectivity (read weakness), but will and power.
(4) The soul of the people can only be won if along with
carrying on a positive struggle for our own aims, we destroy the opponent of
these aims.
The people at all times see the proof of their own right
in ruthless attack on a foe, and to them renouncing the destruction of the
adversary seems like uncertainty with regard to their own right if not a sign
of their own unriglxt.
The broad masses are only a piece of Nature and their
sentiment does not understand the mutual handshake of people who daim that they
want the opposite things. What they desire is the victory of the stronger and
the destruction of the weak or his unconditional subjection.
The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when,
aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their
international poisoners are exterminated.
(5) All great questions of the day are questions of the
moment and represent only consequences of definite causes. Only one amongall of
them, however, possesses causal importance,land that is the question of the
racial preservation of the nation. In the blood alone resides the strength as
well as the weakness of man. As long as peoples do not recognize and give heed
to the importance of their racial foundation, they are like men who would like
to teach poodles the qualities of greyhounds, failing to realize that the speed
of the greyhound like the docility of the poodle are not learned, but are
qualities inherent in the race. Peoples which renounce the preservation of
their racial purity renounce with it the unity of their soul in all its
expressions. The divided state of their nature is the natural consequence of
the divided state of their blood, and the change in their intellectual and
creative force is only the effect of the change in their racial
foundations.
Anyone who wants to free the German blood from the
manifestations and vices of today, which were originally alien to its nature,
will first have to redeem it from the foreign virus of these
manifestations.
Without the clearest knowledge of the racial problem and
hence of the Jewish problem there will never be a resurrection of the German
nation.
The racial question gives the key not only to world history, but to
all human culture.
(6) Organizing the broad masses of our people which are
today in the international camp into a national people's community does not
mean renouncing the defense of justified class interests. Divergent class and
professional interests are not synonymous with class cleavages but are natural
consequences of our economic life. Professional grouping is in no way opposed
to a true national community, for the latter consists in the unity of a nation
in all those questions which affect this nation as such.
The integration of an occupational group which has become
a class with the national community, or merely with the state, is not
accomplished by the lowering of higher dasses but by uplifting the lower
dasses. This process in turn can never be upheld by the higher class, but only
by the lower class fighting for its equal rights. The present-day bourgeoisie
was not organized into the state by measures of the nobility, but by its own
energy under its own leadership.
The German worker will not be raised to the framework of
the German national community via feeble scenes of fraternization, but by a
conscious raising of his social and cultural situation until the most serious
differences may be viewed as bridged. A movement which sets this development as
its goal will have to take its supporters primarily from this camp.' It may
fall back on the intelligentsia only in so far as the latter has completely
understood the goal to be achieved. This process of transformation and
equalization will not be completed in ten or twenty years; experience shows
that it comprises many generations.
The severest obstade to the present-day worker's approach
to the national community lies not in the defense of his class interests, but
in his international leadership and attitude which are hostile to the people
and the fatherland. The same unions with a fanatical national leadership in
political and national matters would make millions of workers into the most
valuable members of their nation regardless of the various struggles that took
place over purely economic matters.
A movement which wants honestly to give the German worker
back to his people and tear him away from the international delusion must
sharply attack a conception dominant above all in employer circles, which under
national community understands the unresisting economic surrender of the
employee to the employer and which chooses to regard any attempt at
safeguarding even justified interests regarding the employee's economic
existence as an attack on the national community. Such an assertion is not only
untrue, but a conscious lie, because the national community imposes its
obligations not only on one side but also on the other.
Just as surely as a worker sins against the spirit of a
real national community when, without regard for the common welfare and the
survival of a national economy, he uses his power to raise extortionate
demands, an employer breaks this community to the same extent when he conducts
his business in an inhuman, exploiting way, misuses the national labor force
and makes millions out of its sweat. He then has no right to designate himself
as national, no right to speak of a national community; no, he is a selfish
scoundrel who induces social unrest and provokes future conflicts which
whatever happens must end in harming the nation.
Thus, the reservoir from which the young movement must
gather its supporters will primarily be the masses of our workers. Its work
will be to tear these away from the international delusion, to free them from
their social distress, to raise them out of their cultural misery and lead them
to the national community as a valuable, united factor, national in feeling and
desire.
If, in the circles of the national intelligentsia, there are found
men with the warmest hearts for their people and its future, imbued with the
deepest knowledge of the importance of this struggle for the soul of these
masses, they will be highly welcome in the ranks of this movement, as a
valuable spiritual backbone. But winning over the bourgeois voting cattle can
never be the aim of this movement. If it were, it would burden itself with a
dead weight which by its whole nature would paralyze our power to recruit from
the broad masses. For regardless of the theoretical beauty of the idea of
leading together the broadest masses from below and from above within the
framework of the movement, there is the opposing fact that by psychological
propagandizing of bourgeois masses in general meetings, it may be possible to
create moods and even to spread insight, but not to do away with qualities of
character or, better expressed, vices whose development and origin embrace
centuries. The difference with regard to the cultural level on both sides and
the attitude on both sides toward questions raised by economic interests is at
present still so great that, as soon as the intoxication of the meetings has
passed, it would at once manifest itself as an obstacle.
Finally, the goal is not to undertake a reskatification
in the camp that is national to begin with, but to win over the antinational
camp.
And this point of view, finally, is determining for the tactical
attitude of the whole movement.
(7) This one-sided but thereby clear position must
express itself in the propaganda of the movement and on the other hand in turn
is required on propagandist grounds.
If propaganda is to be effective for the movement, it must
be addressed to only one quarter, since otherwise, in view of the difference in
the intellectual training of the two camps in question, either it will not be
understood by the one group, or by the other it would be rejected as obvious
and therefore uninteresting
Even the style and the tone of its individual products
cannot be equally effective for two such extreme groups. If propaganda
renounces primitiveness of expression, it does not find its way to
the
feeling of the broad masses. If, however, in word and gesture, it uses the
masses' harshness of sentiment and expression, it will be rejected by the
so-called intelligentsia as coarse and vulgar. Among a hundred so-called
speakers there are hardly ten capable of speaking with equal effect today
before a public consisting of street.sweepers, locksmiths, sewer-cleaners,
etc., and tomorrow holding a lecture with necessarily the same thought content
in an auditorium full of university professors and students. But among a
thousand speakers there is perhaps only a single one who can manage to speak to
locksmiths and university professors at the same time, in a form which not only
is suitable to the receptivity of both parties, but also influences both
parties with equal effect or actually lashes them into a wild storm of
applause. We must always bear in mind that even the most beautiful idea of a
sublime theory in most cases can be disseminated only through the small and
smallest minds. The important thing is not what the genius who has created an
idea has in mind, but what, in what form, and with what success the proph ets
of this idea transmit it to the broad masses.
The strong attractive power of the Social Democracy, yes,
of the whole Marxist movement, rested in large part on the homogeneity and
hence one-sidedness of the public it addressed. The more seemingly limited,
indeed, the narrower its ideas were, the more easily they were taken up and
assimilated by a mass whose intellectual level corresponded to the material
offered.
Likewise for the new movement a simple and clear line thus
resulted.
Propaganda must be adjusted to the broad masses in
content and in form, and its soundness is to be measured exdusively by its
effective result.
In a mass meeting of all classes it is not that speaker
who is mentally closest to the intellectuals present who speaks best, but the
one who conquers the heart of the masses.
A member of the intelligentsia present at such a meeting,
who carps at the intellectual level of the speech despite the speaker's obvious
effect on the lower strata he has set out to conquer, proves the complete
incapacity of his thinking and the worthlessness of his person for the young
movement. It can use only that intellectual who comprehends the task and goal
of the movement to such an extent that he has learned to judge the activity of
propaganda according to its success and not according to the impressions which
it leaves behind in himself. For propaganda is not intended to provide
entertainment for people who are national-minded to begin with, but to win the
enemies of our nationality, in so far as they are of our blood.
In general those trends of thought which I have briefly
summed up under the heading of war propaganda should be determining and
decisive for our movement in the manner and execution of its own enlightenment
work.
That it was right was demonstrated by its success
(8) The goal of a political reform movement will never be
reached by enlightenment work or by influencing ruling circles, but only by the
achievement of political power. Every world-moving idea has not only the right,
but also the duty, of securing, those means which make possible the execution
of its ideas. Success is the one earthly judge concerning the right or wrong of
such an effort, and under success we must not understand, as in the year 1918,
the achievement of power in itself, but an exercise of that power that will
benefit the nation. Thus, a coup d'etat must not be regarded as successful if,
as senseless state's attorneys in Germany think today, the revolutionaries have
succeeded in possessing themselves of the state power, but only if by the
realization of the purposes and aims underlying such a revolutionary action,
more benefit accrues to the nation than under the past regime. Something which
cannot very well be claimed for the German revolution, as the gangster job of
autumn 1918, calls itself.
If the achievement of political power constitutes the
precondition for the practical execution of reform purposes, the movement with
reform purposes must from the first day of its existence feel itself a movement
of the masses and not a literary tea-club or a shopkeepers' bowling
society.
(9) The young movement is in its nature and inner organization
anti-parliamentarian; that is, it rejects, in general and in its own inner
structure, a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the
level of a mere executant of other people's will and opinion. In little as well
as big things, the movement advocates the principle of a Germanic democracy:
the leader is elected, but then enjoys unconditional authority.
The practical consequences of this principle in the
movement are the following:
The first chairman of a local group is elected, but then
he is the responsible leader of the local group. All committees are subordinate
to him and not, conversely, he to a committee. There are no electoral
committees, but only committees for work. The responsible leader, the first
chairman, organizes the work. The first principle applies to the next higher
organization, the precinct, the district or county. The leader is always
elected, but thereby he is vested with unlimited powers and authority. And,
finally, the same applies to the leadership of the whole party. The chairman is
elected, but he is the exclusive leader of the movements All committees are
subordinate to him and not he to the committees. He makes the decisions and
hence bears the responsibility on his shoulders. Members of the movement are
free to call him to account before the forum of a new election, to divest him
of his office in so far as he has infringed on the principles of the movement
or served its interests badly. His place is then taken by an abler, new man,
enjoying, however} the same authority and the same responsibility.
It is one of the highest tasks of the movement to make
this principle determining, not only within its own ranks, but for the entire
state.
Any man who wants to be leader bears, along with the highest
unlimited authority, also the ultimate and heaviest responsibility.
Anyone who is not equal to this or is too cowardly to bear the
consequences of his acts is not fit to be leader; only the hero is cut out for
this.
The progress and culture of humanity are not a product of the
majority, but rest exclusively on the genius and energy of the
personality.
To cultivate the personality and establish it in its
rights is one of the prerequisites for recovering the greatness and power of
our nationality.
Hence the movement is anti-parliamentarian, and even its
participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its
destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the
gravest symptoms of mankind's decay.
(10) The movement decisively rejects any position on
questions which either lie outside the frame of its political work or, being
not of basic importance, are irrelevant for it. Its task is not a religious
reformation, but a political reorganization of our people. In both religious
denominations it sees equally valuable pillars for the existence of our people
and therefore combats those parties which want to degrade this foundation of an
ethical, moral, and religious consolidation of our national body to the level
of an instrument of their party interests.
The movement finally sees its task, not in the
restoration of a definite state form and in the struggle against another, but
in the creation of those basic foundations without which neither republic nor
monarchy can endure for any length of time. Its mission lies not in the
foundation of a monarchy or in the reinforcement of a republic, but in the
creation of a Germanic state.
The question of the outward shaping of this state, its
crowning, so to speak, is not of basic importance, but is determined only by
questions of practical expediency.
For a people that has once understood the
great problems and tasks of its existence, the questions of outward formalities
will no longer lead to inner struggle.
(11) The question of the movement's inner organization is
one of expediency and not of principle.
The best organization is not that
which inserts the greatest, but that which inserts the smallest, intermediary
apparatus between the leadership of a movement and its individual adherents.
For the function of organization is the transmission of a definite idea-which
always first arises from the brain of an individual -to a larger body of men
and the supervision of its realization.
Hence organization is in all things only a necessary
evil. In the best case it is a means to an end, in the worst case an end in
itself.
Since the world produces more mechanical than ideal natures, the
forms of organization are usually created more easily than ideas as
such.
The practical development of every idea striving for realization in
this world, particularly of one possessing a reform character, is in its broad
outlines as follows:
Some idea of genius arises in the brain of a man who
feels called upon to transmit his knowledge to the rest of humanity. He
preaches his view and gradually wins a certain circle of adherents. This
process of the direct and personal transmittance of a man's ideas to the rest
of his fellow men l is the most ideal and natural. With the rising increase in
the adherents of the new doctrine, it gradually becomes impossible for the
exponent of the idea to go on exerting a personal, direct influence on the
innumerable supporters, to lead and direct them. Proportionately as, in
consequence of the growth of the community, the direct and shortest
communication is excluded, the necessity of a connecting organization arises:
thus, the ideal condition is ended and is replaced by the necessary evil of
organization. Little sub-groups are formed which in the political movement, for
example, call themselves local groups and constitute the germ-cells of the
future organization.
If the unity of the doctrine is not to be lost, however,
this subdivision must not take place until the authority of the spiritual
founder and of the school trained by him can be regarded as unconditional. The
geo-political significance of a focal center in a movement cannot be
overemphasized. Only the presence of such a place, exerting the magic spell of
a Mecca or a Rome, can in the long run give the movement a force which is based
on inner unity and the recognition of a summit representing this unity.
Thus, in forming the first organizational germ-cells we must never
lose sight of the necessity, not only of preserving the importance of the
original local source of the idea, but of making it paramount. This
intensification of the ideal, moral, and factual immensity of the movement's
point of origin and direction must take place in exact proportion as the
movement's germcells, which have now become innumerable, demand new links in
the shape of organizational forms.
For, as the increasing number of individual adherents
makes it impossible to continue direct communication with them for the
formation of the lowest bodies, the ultimate innumerable increase of these
lowest organizational forms compels in turn creation of higher associations
which politically can be designated roughly as county or district
groups.
Easy as it still may be to maintain the authority of the original
center toward the lowest local groups, it will be equally difficult to maintain
this position toward the higher organizational forms which now arise. But this
is the precondition for the unified existence of the movement and hence for
carrying out an idea.
If, finally, these larger intermediary divisions are also
combined into new organizational forms, the difficulty is further increased of
safeguarding, even toward them, the unconditional leading character of the
original founding site, its school, etc.
Therefore, the mechanical forms of an organization may
only be developed to the degree in which the spiritual ideal authority of a
center seems unconditionally secured. In political formations this guaranty can
often seem provided only by practical power.
From this the following directives for the inner
structure of the movement resulted:
(a) Concentration for the time being of all activity in a
single place: Munich. Training of a community of unconditionally reliable
supporters and development of a school for the subsequent dissemination of the
idea. Acquisition of the necessary authority for the future by the greatest
possible visible successes in this one place.
To make the movement and its leaders known, it was
necessary, not only to shake the belief in the invincibility of the Marxist
doctrine in one place for all to see, but to demonstrate the possibility of an
opposing movement.
(b) Formation of local groups only when the authority of
the central leadership in Munich may be regarded as unquestionably
recognized.
(c) Likewise the formation of district, county, or
provincial groups depends, not only on the need for them, but also on certainty
that an unconditional recognition of the center has been
achieved.
Furthermore, the creation of organizational forms is dependent on
the men who are available and can be considered as leaders
This may occur in
two ways:
(a) The movement disposes of the necessary financial means for the
training and schooling of minds capable of future leadership. It then
distributes the material thus acquired systematically according to criteria of
tactical and other expediency.
This way is the easier and quicker; however,
it demands great financial means, since this leader material is only able to
work for the movement when paid.
(b) The movement, owing to the lack of
financial means, is not in a position to appoint official leaders, but for the
present must depend on honorary officers.
This way is the slower and more difficult.
Under certain circumstances the leadership of a movement
must let large territories lie fallow, unless there emerges from the adherents
a man able and willing to put himself at the disposal of the leadership, and
organize and lead the movement in the district in question.
It may happen that in large territories there will be no
one, in other places, however, two or even three almost equally capable. The
difficulty that lies in such a development is great and can only be overcome in
the course of years.
The prerequisite for the creation of an organizational
form is and remains the man necessary for its leadership.
As worthless as an army in all its organizational forms
is without officers, equally worthless is a political organization without the
suitable leader.
Not founding a local group is more useful to the movement
when a suitable leader personality is lacking than to have its organization
miscarry due to the absence of a leader to direct and drive it forward.
Leadership itself requires not only will but also ability, and a
greater importance must be attached to will and energy than to intelligence as
such, and most valuable of all is a combination of ability, determination, and
perseverance.
(12) The future of a movement is conditioned by the
fanaticism yes, the intolerance, with which its adherents uphold it as the sole
correct movement, and push it past other formations of a similar sort.
It
is the greatest error to believe that the strength of a movement increases
through a union with another of similar character. It is true that every
enlargement of this kind at first means an increase in outward dimensions,
which to the eyes of superficial observers means power; in truth, however, it
only takes over the germs of an inner weakening that will later become
effective.
For whatever can be said about the like character of two
movements, in reality it is never present. For otherwise there would actually
be not two movements but one. And regardless wherein the differences lie-even
if they consisted only in the varying abilities of the leadership-they exist.
But the natural law of all development demands, not the coupling of two
formations which are simply not alike, but the victory of the stronger and the
cultivation of the victor's force and strength made possible alone by the
resultant struggle.
Through the union of two more or less equal political
party formations momentary advantages may arise, but in the long run any
success won in this way is the cause of inner weaknesses which appear
later.
The greatness of a movement is exclusively guaranteed by the
unrestricted development of its inner strength and its steady growth up to the
final victory over all competitors.
Yes, we can say that its strength and hence the
justification of its existence increases only so long as it recognizes the
principle of struggle as the premise of its development, and that it has passed
the high point of its strength in the moment when complete victory inclines to
its side.
Therefore, it is only profitable for a movement to strive for this
victory in a form which does not lead to an early momentary success, but which
in a long struggle occasioned by absolute intolerance also provides long
growth.
Movements which increase only by the so-called fusion of similar
formations, thus owing their strength to compromises, are like hothouse plants.
They shoot up, but they lack the strength to defy the centuries and withstand
heavy storms.
The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an
idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which,
fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will
against all others. If an idea in itself is sound and, thus armed, takes up a
struggle on this earth, it is unconquerable and every persecution will only add
to its inner strength.
The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted
negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the
ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for
its own doctrine.
The apparent head start which movements achieve by fusions
is amply caught up with by the steady increase in the strength of a doctrine
and organization that remain independent and fight their own fight.
(13) On principle the movement must so educate its members that they
do not view the struggle as something idly cooked up, but as the thing that
they themselves are striving ford Therefore, they must not fear the hostility
of their enemies, but must feel that it is the presupposition for their own
right to exist. They must not shun the hatred of the enemies of our nationality
and our philosophy and its manifestations; they must long for them. And among
the manifestations of this hate are lies and slander.
Any man who is not attacked in the Jewish newspapers, not
slandered and vilified, is no decent German and no true National Socialist. The
best yardstick for the value of his attitude, for the sincerity of his
conviction, and the force of his will is the hostility he receives from the
mortal enemy of our people.
It must, over and over again, be pointed out to the
adherents of the movement and in a broader sense to the whole people that the
Jew and his newspapers always lie and that even an occasional Ruth is only
intended to cover a bigger falsification and is therefore itself in turn a
deliberate untruth. The Jew is the great master in lying, and lies and
deception are his weapons in struggle.
Every Jewish slander and every Jewish
lie is a scar of honor on the body of our warriors.
The man they have most reviled stands closest to us and
the man they hate worst is our best friend.
Anyone who picks up a Jewish newspaper in the morning and
does not see himself slandered in it has not made profitable use of the
previous day; for if he had, he would be persecuted, reviled, slandered,
abused} befouled. And only the man who combats this mortal enemy of our nation
and of all Aryan humanity and culture most effectively may expect to see the
slanders of this race and the struggle of this people directed against
him.
When these principles enter the flesh and blood of our supporters,
the movement will become unshakable and invincible.
(14) The movement must promote respect for personality by
all means; it must never forget that in personal worth lies the worth of
everything human; that every idea and every achievement is the result of one
man's creative force and that the admiration of greatness constitutes, not only
a tribute of thanks to the latter, but casts a unifying bond around the
grateful.
Personality cannot be replaced; especially when it embodies not the
mechanical but the cultural and creative element. No more than a famous master
can be replaced and another take over the completion of the half-finished
painting he has left behind can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman
and the great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies always in the
province of art. It is not mechanically trained, but inborn by God's
grace.
The greatest revolutionary changes and achievements of this earth
its greatest cultural accomplishments the immortal deeds in the field of
statesmanship, etc., are forever inseparably bound up with a name and are
represented by it. To renounce doing homage to a great spirit means the loss of
an immense strength which emanates from the names of all great men and
women.
The Jew knows this best of all. He, whose great men are only great
in the destruction of humanity and its culture, makes sure that they are
idolatrously admired. He attempts only to represent the admiration of the
nations for their own spirits as unworthy and brands it as a 'personality
cult.'
As soon as a people becomes so cowardly that it succumbs to this
Jewish arrogance and effrontery, it renounces the mightiest power that it
possesses; for this is based, not on respect for the masses, but on the
veneration of genius and on uplift and enlightenment by his example.
When human hearts break and human souls-despair, then from the
twilight of the past the great conquerors of distress and care, of disgrace and
misery, of spiritual slavery and physical compulsion, look down on them and
hold out their eternal hands to the despairing mortals!
Woe to the people that is ashamed to take
them!
In the first period of our movement's development we
suffered from nothing so much as from the insignificance, the unknownness of
our names, which in themselves made our success questionable. The hardest thing
in this first period, when often only six, seven, or eight heads met together
to use the words of an opponent, was to arouse and preserve in this tiny circle
faith in the mighty future of the movement.
Consider that six or seven men, all nameless poor devils,
had joined together with the intention of forming a movement hoping to
succeed-where the powerful great mass parties had hitherto failed-in restoring
a German Reich of greater power and glory. If people had attacked us in those
days, yes, even if they had laughed at us, in both cases we should have been
happy. For the oppressive thing was neither the one nor the other; it was the
complete lack of attention we found in those days.
When I entered the circle of these few men, there could
be no question of a party or a movement. I have already described my
impressions regarding my first meeting with this little formation. In the weeks
that followed, I had time and occasion to study this so-called 'party' which at
first looked so impossible. And, by God the picture was depressing and
discouraging. There was nothing here, really positively nothing. The name of a
party whose committee constituted practically the whole membership, which,
whether we liked it or not, was exactly what it was trying to combat, a
parliament on a small scale. Here, too, the vote ruled; if big parliaments
yelled their throats hoarse for months at a time, it was about important
problems at least, but in this little circle the answer to a safely arrived
letter let loose an interminable argument!
The public, of course, knew nothing at all about this. Not
a soul in Munich knew the party even by name, except for its few supporters and
their few friends.
Every Wednesday a so-called committee meeting took place
in a Munich cafe, and once a week an evening lecture. Since the whole
membership of the 'movement' was at first represented in the committee, the
faces of course were always the same. Now the task was at last to burst the
bonds of the small circle, to win new supporters, but above all to make the
name of the movement known at any price.
In this we used the following technique:
Every month, and later every two weeks, we tried to hold a
'meeting.' The invitations to it were written on the typewriter or sometimes by
hand on slips of paper and the first few times were distributed, or handed out,
by us personally. Each one of us turned to the circle of his friends, and tried
to induce someone or other to attend one of these affairs.
The result was miserable.
I still remember how I myself in this first period once
distributed about eighty of these slips of paper, and how in the evening we sat
waiting for the masses who were expected to appear.
An hour late, the '
chairman ' finally had to open the 'meeting.' We were again seven men, the old
seven.
We changed over to having the invitation slips written on a machine
and mimeographed in a Munich stationery store. The result at the next meeting
was a few more listeners. Thus the number rose slowly from eleven to thirteen,
finally to seventeen, to twenty-three, to thirty-four listeners.
By little collections among us poor devils the funds were
raised with which at last to advertise the meeting by notices in the then
independent Munchener Beobachter in Munich. And this time the success was
positively amazing. We had organized the meeting in the Munich
Hofbrauhauskeller (not to be confused with the Munich Hofbrauhaus-Festsaal), a
little room with a capacity of barely one hundred and thirty people. To me
personally the room seemed like a big hall and each of us was worried whether
we would succeed in filling this 'mighty' edifice with people.
At seven o'clock one hundred and eleven people were
present and the meeting was opened.
A Munich professor made the main speech, and I, for the
first time, in public, was to speak second.
In the eyes of Herr Harrer, then first chairman of the
party, the affair seemed a great adventure. This gentleman, who was certainly
otherwise honest, just happened to be convinced that I might be capable of
doing certain things, but not of speaking. And even in the time that followed
he could not be dissuaded from this opinion. "
Things turned out differently. In this first meeting that
could be called public I had been granted twenty minutes' speaking
time.
I spoke for thirty minutes, and what before I had simply felt within
me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak
After thirty minutes the people in the small room were electrified and the
enthusiasm was first expressed by the fact that my appeal to the self-sacrifice
of those present led to the donation of three hundred marks. This relieved us
of a great worry. For at this time the financial stringency was so great that
we were not even in a position to have slogans printed for the movement, or
even distribute leaflets. Now the foundation was laid for a little fund from
which at least our barest needs and most urgent necessities could be defrayed.
But in another respect as well, the success of this first larger meeting was
considerable.
At that time I had begun to bring a number of fresh young
forces into the committee. During my many years in the army I -had come to know
a great number of faithful comrades who now slowly, on the basis of my
persuasion, began to enter the movement. They were all energetic young people,
accustomed to discipline, and from their period of service raised in the
principle: nothing at all is impossible, everything can be done if you only
want it.
How necessary such a transfusion of new blood was, I myself could
recognize after only a few weeks of collaboration.
Herr Harrer, then first chairman of the party, was really
a journalist and as such he was certainly widely educated. But for a party
leader he had one exceedingly serious drawback: he was no speaker for the
masses. As scrupulously conscientious and precise as his work in itself was, it
nevertheless lacked-perhaps because of this very lack of a great oratorical
gift-the great sweep. Herr Drexler, then chairman of the Munich local group,
was a simple worker, likewise not very significant as a speaker, and moreover
he was no soldier. He had not served in the army, even during the War he had
not been a soldier, so that feeble and uncertain as he was in his whole nature,
he lacked the only schooling which was capable of turning uncertain and soft
natures into men. Thus both men were not made of stuff which would have enabled
them not only to bear in their hearts fanatical faith in the victory of a
movement, but also with indomitable energy and will, and if necessary with
brutal ruthlessness, to sweep aside any obstacles which might stand in the path
of the rising new idea. For this only beings were fitted in whom spirit and
body had acquired those military virtues which can perhaps best be described as
follows: swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp
steel.
At that time I myself was still a soldier. My exterior
and interior had been whetted and hardened for well-nigh six years, so that at
first I must have seemed strange in this circle. I, too, had forgotten how to
say: 'that's impossible,' or 'it won't work'; 'we can't risk that,' 'that is
too dangerous,' etc.
For of course the business was dangerous. Little attention
as the Reds paid to one of your bourgeois gossip clubs whose inner innocence
and hence harmlessness for themselves theyknew better than its own members,
they were determined to use every means to get rid of a movement which did seem
dangerous to them. Their most effective method in such cases has at all times
been terror or violence.
In the year 1920, in many regions of Germany, a national
meeting that dared to address its appeal to the broad masses and publicly
invite attendance was simply impossible. The participants in such a meeting
were dispersed and driven away with bleeding heads. Such an accomplishment, to
be sure, did not require much skill: for after all the biggest so-called
bourgeois mass meeting would scatter at the sight of a dozen Communists like
hares running from a hound.
Most loathsome to the Marxist deceivers of the people was
inevitably a movement whose explicit aim was the winning of those masses which
had hitherto stood exclusively in the service of the international Marxist
Jewish stock exchange parties. The very name of ' German Workers' Party ' had
the effect of goading them. Thus one could easily imagine that on the first
suitable occasion the conflict would begin with the Marxist inciters who were
then still drunk with victory.
In the small circle that the movement then was a certain
fear of such a fight prevailed. The members wanted to appear in public as
little as possible, for fear of being beaten up. In their mind's eye they
already saw the first great meeting smashed and go the movement finished for
good. I had a hard time putting forward my opinion that we must not dodge this
struggle, but prepare for it, and for this reason acquire the armament which
alone offers protection against violence. Terror is not broken by the mind, but
by terror. The success of the first meeting strengthened my position in this
respect. We gained courage for a second meeting on a somewhat larger
scale.
About October, 1919, the second, larger meeting took place in the
Eberlbraukeller. Topic: Brestlitovsk and Versailles. Four gentlemen appeared as
speakers. I myself spoke for almost an hour and the success was greater than at
the first rally. The audience had risen to more than one hundred and thirty. An
attempted disturbance was at once nipped in the bud by my comrades. The
diturbers flew down the stairs with gashed heads.
Two weeks later another meeting took place in the same
hall. The attendance had risen to over one hundred and seventy and the room was
well filled. I had spoken again, and again the success was greater than at the
previous meeting.
I pressed for a larger hall. At length we found one at
the other end of town in the 'Deutsches Reich' on Dachauer Strasse. The first
meeting in the new hall was not so well attended as the previous one: barely
one hundred and forty persons. In the committee, hopes began to sink and the
eternal doubters felt that the excessive repetition of our 'demonstrations' had
to be considered the cause of the bad attendance. There were violent arguments
in which I upheld the view that a city of seven hundred thousand inhabitants
could stand not one meeting every two weeks, but ten every week, that we must
not let ourselves be misled by failures, that the road we had taken was the
right
one, and that sooner or later, with steady perseverance, success was
bound to come. All in all, this whole period of winter 1919-20 was a single
struggle to strengthen confidence in the victorious might of the young movement
and raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can move mountains.
The next meeting in the same hall showed me to be right.
The attendance had risen to over two hundred; the public as well as financial
success was brilliant.
I urged immediate preparations for another meeting. It
took place barely two weeks later and the audience rose to over two hundred and
seventy heads.
Two weeks later, for the seventh time, we called together
the supporters and friends of the new movement and the same hall could barely
hold the people who had grown to over four hundred.
It was at this time that the young movement received its
inner form. In the small circle there were sometimes more or less violent
disputes. Various quarters-then as today-carped at designating the young
movement as a party. In such a conception I have always seen proof of the
critics' practical incompetence and intellectual smallness. They were and
always are the men who cannot distinguish externals from essentials, and who
try to estimate the value of a movement according to the most
bombastic-sounding titles, most of which, sad to say, the vocabulary of our
forefathers must provide.
It was hard, at that time, to make it clear to people
that every movement, as long as it has not achieved the victory of its ideas,
hence its goal, is a party even if it assumes a thousand different
names.
If any man wants to put into practical effect a bold idea whose
realization seems useful in the interests of his fellow men, he will first of
all have to seek supporters who are ready to fight for his intentions. And if
this intention consists only in destroying the existing parties, of ending the
fragmentation, the exponents of this view and propagators of this determination
are themselves a party, as long as this goal has not been achieved. It is
hair-splitting and shadow-boxing when some antiquated folkish theoretician,
whose practical successes stand in inverse proportion to his wisdom, imagines
that he can change the party character which every young movement possesses by
changing this term.
On the contrary.
If anything is unfolkish, it is this tossing around of
old Germanic expressions which neither fit into the present period nor
represent anything definite, but can easily lead to seeing the significance of
a movement in its outward vocabulary. This is a real menace which today can be
observed on countless occasions.
Altogether then, and also in the period that followed, I
had to warn again and again against those deutschvolkisch wandering scholars
whose positive accomplishment is always practically nil, but whose conceit can
scarcely be excelled. The young movement had and still has to guard itself
against an influx of people whose sole recommendation for the most part lies in
their declaration that they have fought for thirty and even forty years for the
same idea. Anyone who fights for forty years for a so-called idea without being
able to bring about even the slightest success, in fact, without having
prevented the victory of the opposite, has, with forty years of activity,
provided proof of his own incapacity. The danger above all lies in the fact
that such natures do not want to fit into the movement as links, but keep
shooting off their mouths about leading circles in which alone, on the strength
of their age-old activity, they can see a suitable place for further activity.
But woe betide if a young movement is surrended to the mercies of such people.
No more than a business man who in forty years of activity has steadily run a
big business into the ground is fitted to be the founder of a new one, is a
folkish Methuselah, who in exactly the same time has gummed up and petrified a
great idea, fit for the leadership of a new, young movement!
Besides, only a fragment of all these people come into the
new movement to serve it, but in most cases, under its protection or through
the possibilities it offers, to warm over their old cabbage
They do not want to benefit the idea of the new doctrine,
they only expect it to give them a chance to make humanity miserable with their
own ideas. For what kind of ideas they often are, it is hard to tell.
The characteristic thing about these people is that they rave about
old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes spear and shield, but in
reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. For the same people who
brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed
bearskin with bull's horns over their bearded heads, preach for the present
nothing but struggle with spiritual weapons, and run away as fast as they can
from every Communist blackjack. Posterity will have little occasion to glorify
their own heroic existence in a new epic.
I came to know these people too well not to feel the
profoundest disgust at their miserable play-acting. But they make a ridiculous
impression on the broad masses, and the Jew has every reason to spare these
folkish comedians, even to prefer them to the true fighters for a coming German
state. With all this, these people are boundlessly conceited; despite all the
proofs of their complete incompetence, they daim to know everything better and
become a real plague for all straightforward and honest fighters to whom
heroism seems worth honoring, not only in the past, but who also endeavor to
give posterity a similar picture by their own actions.
And often it can be distinguished only with difficulty
which of these people act out of inner stupidity or incompetence and which only
pretend to for certain reasons. Especially with the so-called religious
reformers on an old Germanic basis, I always have the feeling that they were
sent by those powers which do not want the resurrection of our people. For
their whole activity leads the people away from the common struggle against the
common enemy, the Jew, and instead lets them waste their strength on inner
religious squabbles as senseless as they are disastrous. For these very reasons
the establishment of a strong central power implying the unconditional
authority of a Kadership is necessary in the movement. By it alone can such
ruinous elements be squelched. And for this reason the greatest enemies of a
uniform, strictly led and conducted movement are to be found in the circles of
these folkish wandering Jews. In the movement they hate the power that checks
their mischief.
Not for nothing did the young movement establish a
definite program in which it did not use the word 'folkish.' The concept
folkish, in view of its conceptual boundlessness, is no possible basis for a
movement and offers no standard for membership in one. The more indefinable
this concept is in practice, the more and broader interpretations it permits,
the greater becomes the possibility of invoking its authority. The insertion of
such an indefinable and variously interpretable concept into the political
struggle leads to the destruction of any strict fighting solidarity, since the
latter does not permit leaving to the individual the definition of his faith
and will.
And it is disgraceful to see all the people who run around today with
the word 'folkish' on their caps and how many have their own interpretation of
this concept. A Bavarian professor by the name of Bayer,l a famous fighter with
spiritual weapons, rich in equally spiritual marches on Berlin, thinks that the
concept folkish consists only in a monarchistic attitude. This learned mind,
however, has thus far forgotten to give a closer explanation of the identity of
our German monarchs of the past with the folkish opinion of today. And I fear
that in this the gentleman would not easily succeed. For anything less folkish
than most of the Germanic monarchic state formations can hardly be imagined. If
this were not so, they would never have disappeared, or their disappearance
would offer proof of the unsoundness of the folkish outlook.
And so everyone shoots off his mouth about this concept
as he happens to understand it. As a basis for a movement of political
struggle, such a multiplicity of opinions is out of the question.
I shall not even speak of the unworldliness of these
folkish Saint Johns of the twentieth century or their ignorance of the popular
soul. It is sufliciently illustrated by the ridicule with which they are
treated by the Left, which lets them talk and iaughs at them.
Anyone in this world who does not succeed in being hated
by his adversaries does not seem to me to be worth much as a friend. And thus
the friendship of these people for our young movement was not only worthless,
but solely and always harmful, and it was also the main reason why, first of
all, we chose the name of 'party'-we had grounds for hoping that by this alone
a whole swarm of these folkish sleepwalkers would be frightened away from
us-and why in the second place we termed ourselves National Socialist German
Workers' Party.
The first expression kept away the antiquity enthusiasts,
the big-mouths and superficial proverb-makers of the so-called folkish idea,'
and the second freed us from the entire host of knights of the 'spiritual
sword,' all the poor wretches who wield the 'spiritual weapon' as a protecting
shield to hide their actual cowardice.
It goes without saying that in the following period we
were attacked hardest especially by these last, not actively, of course, but
only with the pen, just as you would expect from such folkish goose-quills. For
them our principle, 'Against those who attack us with force we will defend
ourselves with force,' had something terrifying about it. They persistently
reproached us, not only with brutal worship of the blackjack, but with lack of
spirit as such. The fact that in a public meeting a Demosthenes can be brought
to silence if only fifty idiots, supported by their voices and their fists,
refuse to let him speak, makes no impression whatever on such a quack. His
inborn cowardice never lets him get into such danger. For he does not work
'noisily' and 'obtrusively,' but in 'silence.'
Even today r cannot warn our young movement enough against
falling into the net of these so-called 'silent workers.' They are not only
cowards, but they are also always incompetents and do-nothings. A man who knows
a thing, who is aware of a given danger, and sees the possibility of a remedy
with his own eyes, has the duty and obligation, by God, not to work 'silently,'
but to stand up before the whole public against the evil and for its cure. If
he does not do so, he is a disloyal, miserable weakling who fails either from
cowardice or from laziness and inability. To be sure, this does not apply at
all to most of these people, for they know absolutely nothing, but behave as
though they knew God knows what; they can do nothing but try to swindle the
whole world with their tricks; they are lazy, but with the 'silent' work they
claim to do, they arouse the impression of an enormous and conscientious
activity; in short, they are swindlers, political crooks who hate the honest
work of others. As soon as one of these folkish moths praises the darkness 1 of
silence, we can bet a thousand to one that by it he produces nothing, but
steals, steals from the fruits of other people's work.
To top all this,
there is the arrogance and conceited effrontery with which this lazy,
light-shunning rabble fall upon the work of others, trying to criticize it from
above, thus in reality aiding the mortal enemies of our nationality.
Every
last agitator who possesses the courage to stand on a tavern table among his
adversaries, to defend his opinions with manly forthrightness, does more than a
thousand of these lying, treacherous sneaks. He will surely- be able to convert
one man or another and win him for the movement. It will be possible to examine
his achievement and establish the effect of his activity by its results. Only
the cowardly swindlers who praise their 'silent' work and thus wrap themselves
in the protective cloak of a despicable anonymity, are good for nothing and may
in the truest sense of the word be considered drones in the resurrection of
ourpeople.
# #
At the beginning of 1920, I urged the holding of the
first great mass meeting. Differences of opinion arose. A few leading party
members regarded the affair as premature and hence disastrous in effect. The
Red press had begun to concern itself with us and we were fortunate enough
gradually to achieve its hatred. We had begun to speak in the discussions at
other meetings. Of course, each of us was at once shouted down. There was,
however, some success. People got to know us and proportionately as their
knowledge of us deepened, the aversion and rage against us grew. And thus we
were entitled to hope that in our first great mass meeting we would be visited
by a good many of our friends from the Red camp.
I, too, realized that there was great probability of the
meeting being broken up. But the struggle had to be carried through, if not
now, a few months later. It was entirely in our power to make the movement
eternal on the very first day by blindly and ruthlessly fighting for it. I knew
above all the mentality of the adherents of the Red side far too well, not to
know that resistance to the utmost not only makes the biggest impression, but
also wins supporters. And so we just had to be resolved to put up this
resistance.
Herr Harrer,l then first chairman of the party, felt he
could not support my views with regard to the time chosen and consequently,
being an honest, upright man, he withdrew from the leadership of the party. His
place was taken by Herr Anton Drexler. I had reserved for myself the
organization of propaganda and began ruthlessly to carry it out.
And so, the date of February 4, 19202 was set for the
holding of this first great mass meeting of the still unknown movement.
I
personally conducted the preparations. They were very brief. Altogether the
whole apparatus was adjusted to make lightning decisions. Its aim was to enable
us to take a position on current questions in the form of mass meetings within
twenty-four hours. They were to be announced by posters and leaflets whose
content was determined according to those guiding principles which in rough
outlines I have set down in my treatise on propaganda. Effect on the broad
masses, concentration on a few points, constant repetition of the same,
self-assured and self-reliant framing of the text in the forms of an apodictic
statement, greatest perseverance in distribution and patience in awaiting the
effect.
On principle, the color red was chosen; it is the most exciting; we
knew it would infuriate and provoke our adversaries the most and thus bring us
to their attention and memory whether they liked it or not.
In the following period the inner fraternization in
Bavaria between the Marxists and the Center as a political party was most
clearly shown in the concern with which the ruling Bavarian People's Party
tried to weaken the effect of our posters on the Red working masses and later
to prohibit them. If the police found no other way to proceed against them,
'considerations of traffic' had to do the trick, till finally, to please the
inner, silent Red ally, these posters, which had given back hundreds of
thousands of workers, incited and seduced by internationalism, to their German
nationality, were forbidden entirely with the helping hand of a so-called
German National People's Party. As an appendix and example to our young
movement, I am adding a number of these proclamations. They come from a period
embracing nearly three years; they can best illustrate the mighty struggle
which the young movement fought at this time. They will also bear witness to
posterity of the will and honesty of our convictions and the despotism of the
so-called national authorities in prohibiting, just because they personally
found it uncomfortable, a nationalization which would have won back broad
masses of our nationality.
They will also help to destroy the opinion that there had
been a national government as such in Bavaria and also document for posterity
the fact that the national Bavaria of 1919, 1920, 1921 1922, 1923 was not
forsooth the result of a national government, but that the government was
merely forced to take consideration of a people that was gradually feeling
national
The governments themselves did everything to eliminate this process
of recovery and to make it impossible.
Here only two men must be excluded:
Ernst Pohner, the police president at that tirne, and
Chief Deputy frick his faithful advisor, were the only higher state officials
who even then had the courage to be first Germans and then officials. Ernst
Pohner was the only man in a responsible post who did not curry favor with the
masses, but felt responsible to his nationality and was ready to risk and
sacrifice everything, even if necessary his personal existence, for the
resurrection of the German people whom he loved above all things. And for this
reason he was always a troublesome thorn in the eyes of those venal officials
the law of whose actions was prescribed, not by the interest of their people
and the necessary uprising for its freedom, but by the boss's orders, without
regard for the welfare of the national trust confided in them.
And above all he was one of those natures who,
contrasting with most of the guardians of our so-called state authority, do not
fear the enmity of traitors to the people and the nation, but long for it as
for a treasure which a decent man must take for granted. The hatred of Jews and
Marxists, their whole campaign of lies and slander, were for him the sole
happiness amid the misery of our people.
A man of granite honesty, of
antique simplicity and German straightforwardness, for whom the words 'Sooner
dead than a slave ' were no phrase but the essence of his whole being.
He
and his collaborator, Dr. Frick, are in my eyes the only men in a state
position who possess the right to be called cocreators of a national
Bavaria.
Before we proceeded to hold our first mass meeting, not only did the
necessary propaganda material have to be made ready, but the main points of the
program also had to be put into print.
In the second volume I shall thoroughly develop the
guiding principles which we had in mind, particularly in framing the program.
Here I shall only state that it was done, not only to give the young movement
form and content, but to make its aims understandable to the broad
masses.
Circles of the so-called intelligentsia have mocked and ridiculed
this and attempted to criticize it. But the soundness of our point of view at
that time has been shown by the effectiveness of this program.
In these years I have seen dozens of new movements arise
and thev have all vanished and evaporated without trace. A single one remains:
The National Socialist German Workers' Party. And today more than ever I harbor
the conviction that people can combat it, that they can attempt to paralyze it,
that petty party ministers can forbid us to speak and write, but that they will
never prevent the victory of our ideas.
When not even memory will reveal the names of the entire
present-day state conception and its advocates, the fundamentals of the
National Socialist program will be the foundations of a coming state.
Our four months' activities at meetings up to January, 1920, had
slowly enabled us to save up the small means that we needed for printing our
first leaflet, our first poster, and our program.
If I take the movement's first large mass meeting as the
conclusion of this volume, it is because by it the party burst the narrow bonds
of a small club and for the first time exerted a determining infiuence on the
mightiest factor of our tirne, public opinion.
I myself at that time had but one concern: Will the hall
be filled, or will we speak to a yawning hall? 1 I had the unshakable l inner
conviction that if the people came, the day was sure to be a great success for
the young movement. And so I anxiously looked forward to that evening.
The meeting was to be opened at 7:30. At 7:15 I entered the Festsaal
of the Hofbrauhaus on the Platzl in Munich, and my heart nearly burst for joy.
The gigantic hall-for at that time it still seemed to me gigantic-was
overcrowded with people, shoulder to shoulder, a mass numbering almost two
thousand people. And above all-those people to whom we wanted to appeal had
come. Far more than half the hall seemed to be occupied by Communists and
Independents. They had resolved that our first demonstration would come to a
speedy end.
But it turned out differently. After the first speaker had
finished, I took the floor. A few minutes later there was a hail of shouts,
there were violent dashes in the hall, a handful of the most faithful war
comrades and other supporters battled with the disturbers, and only little by
little were able to restore order.
I was able to go on speaking. After half an hour the
applause slowly began to drown out the screaming and shouting.
I now took up the program and began to explain it for the
first time.
From minute to minute the interruptions were increasingly
drowned out by shouts of applause. And when I finally submitted the twenty-five
theses, point for point, to the masses and asked them personally to pronounce
judgment on them, one after another was accepted with steadily mounting joy,
unanimously and again unanimously, and when the last thesis had found its way
to the heart of the masses, there stood before me a hall full of people united
by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will.
When after nearly four hours the hall began to empty and
the crowd, shoulder to shoulder, began to move, shove, press toward the exit
like a slow stream, I knew that now the principles of a movement which could no
longer be forgotten were moving out among the German people.
A fire was
kindled from whose flame one day the sword must come which would regain freedom
for the Germanic Siegfried and life for the German nation.
And side by side with the coming resurrection, I sensed
that the goddess of inexorable vengeance for the perjured deed of November 9,
1919, was striding forth.
Thus slowly the hall emptied.
The movement took its course.
Development of the National Socialist German Workers' Party
IF AT THE END of this volume I describe the first period in the
development of our movement and briefly discuss a number of questions it
raises, my aim is not to give a dissertation on the spiritual aims of the
movement. The aims and tasks of the new movement are so gigantic that they can
only be treated in a special volume. In a second volume, therefore, I shall
discuss the programmatic foundations of the movement in detail and attempt to
draw a picture of what we conceive of under the word 'state.' By 'us' I mean
all the hundreds of thousands who fundamentally long for the same thing without
as individuals finding the words to describe outwardly I what they inwardly
visualize; for the noteworthy fact about all reforms is that at first they
possess but a single champion yet many million supporters. Their aim has often
been for centuries the inner longing of hundreds of thousands, until one man
stands up to proclaim such a general will, and as a standard-bearer guides the
old longing to victory in the form of the new idea.
The fact that millions bear in their hearts the desire
for a basic change in the conditions obtaining today proves the deep discontent
under which they suffer. It expresses itself in thousandfold manifestations
with one in despair and hopelessness, with another in ill will, anger, and
indignation; with this man in indifference, and with that man in furious
excesses. As witnesses to this inner dissatisfaction we may consider those who
are weary of elections as well as the many who tend to the most fanatical
extreme of the Left.
The young movement was intended primarily to appeal to
these last. It is not meant to constitute an organization of the contented and
satisfied, but to embrace those tormented by suffering, those without peace,
the unhappy and the discontented, and above all it must not swim on the surface
of a national body, but strike roots deep within it.
In purely political terms, the following picture
presented itself in 1918: a people torn into two parts. The one, by far the
smaller, includes the strata of the national intelligentsia, excluding all the
physically active. It is outwardly national, yet under this word can conceive
of nothing but a very insipid and weak-kneed defense of so-called state
interests, which in turn seem identical with dynastic interests. They attempt
to fight for their ideas and aims with spiritual weapons which are as
fragmentary as they are superficial, and which fail completely in the face of
the enemy's brutality. With a single frightful blow this class, which only a
short time before was still governing, is stretched on the ground and with
trembling cowardice suffers every humiliation at the hands of the ruthless
victor.
Confronting it is a second class, the broad mass of the laboring
population. It is organized in more or less radical Marxist movements,
determined to break all spiritual resistance by the power of violence. It does
not want to be national, but consciously rejects any promotion of national
interests, just as, conversely, it aids and abets all foreign oppression. It is
numerically the stronger and above all comprises all those elements of the
nation without which a national resurrection is unthinkable and
impossible.
For in 1918 this much was clear: no resurrection of the
German people can occur except through the recovery of outward power. But the
prerequisites for this are not arms, as our bourgeois 'statesmen ' keep
prattling, but the forces of the will. The German people had more than enough
arms before. They were not able to secure freedom because the energies of the
national instinct of self-preservation, the will for self-preservation, were
lacking. The best weapon is dead, worthless material as long as the spirit is
lacking which is ready, willing, and determined to use it. Germany became
defenseless, not because arms were lacking, but because the will was lacking to
guard the weapon for national survival.
If today more than ever our Left politicians are at pains
to point out the lack of arms as the necessary cause of their spineless,
compliant, actually treasonous policy, we must answer only one thing: no, the
reverse is true. Through your anti-national, criminal policy of abandoning
national interests, you surrendered our arms. Now you attempt to represent the
lack of arms as the underlying cause of your miserable villainy. This, like
everything you do, is lees and falsification.
But this reproach applies just as much to the politicians
on the Right. For, thanks to their miserable cowardice, the Jewish rabble that
had come to power was able in 1918 to steal the nation's arms. They, too, have
consequently no ground and no right to palm off our present lack of arms as the
compelling ground for their wily caution (read ' cowardice '); on the contrary,
our defenselessness is the consequence of their cowardice.
Consequently the question of regaining German power is
not: How shall we manufacture arms? but: How shall we manufacture the spirit
which enables a people to bear arms? If this spirit dominates a people, the
will finds a thousand ways, every one of which ends in a weapon ! But give a
coward ten pistols and if attacked he will not be able to fire a single shot.
And so for him they are more worthless than a knotted stick for a courageous
man.
The question of regaining our people's political power is primarily
a question of recovering our national instinct of self preservation, if for no
other reason because experience shows that any preparatory foreign policy, as
well as any evaluation of a state as such, takes its cue less from the existing
weapons than from a nation's recognized or presumed moral capacity for
resistance. A nation1s ability to form alliances is determined much less by
dead stores of existing arms than by the visible presence of an ardent national
will for self-preservation and heroic death-defying courage. For an alliance is
not concluded with arms but with men. Thus, the English nation will have to be
considered the most valuable ally in the world as long as its leadership and
the spirit of its byroad masses justify us in expecting that brutality and
perseverance which is determined to fight a battle once begun t04 victorious
end, with every means and without consideration of time and sacrifices; and
what is more, the military armament existing at any given moment does not need
to stand in any proportion to that of other states.
If we understand that the resurrection of the German
nation represents a question of regaining our political will for
self-preservation, it is also clear that this cannot be done by winning
elements which in point of will at least are already national, but only by the
nationalization of the consciously anti-national masses.
A young movement which, therefore, sets itself the goal
of resurrecting a German state with its own sovereignty will have to direct its
fight entirely to winning the broad masses. Wretched as our so-called '
national bourgeoisie ' is on the whole, inadequate as its national attitude
seems, certainly from this side no serious resistance is to be expected against
a powerful domestic and foreign policy in the future. Even if the German
bourgeoisie, for their well-known narrowminded and short-sighted reasons,
should, as they once did toward Bismarck, maintain an obstinate attitude of
passive resistance in the hour of coming liberation- an active resistance, in
view of their recognized and proverbial cowardice, is never to be
feared.
It is different with the masses of our internationally minded
comrades. In their natural primitiveness, they are snore inclined to the idea
of violence, and, moreover, their Jewish leadership is more brutal and
ruthless. They will crush any German resurrection Just as they once broke the
backbone of the German army. But above all: in this state with its
parliamentary government they will, thanks to their majority in numbers, not
only obstruct any national foreign policy, but also make impossible any higher
estimation of the German strength, thus making us seem uradesirable as an ally.
For not only are we ourselves aware of the element of weakness lying in our
fifteen million Marxists, detmocrats, pacifists, and Centrists; it is
recognized even more by foreign countries, which measure the value of a
possible alliance with us according to the weight of this burden. No one allies
himself with a state in which the attitude of the active part of the population
toward any determined foreign policy is passive, to say the least.
To this we must add the fact that the leaderships of
these parties of national treason must and will be hostile to any resurrection,
out of mere instinct of self-preservation. Historically it is just not
conceivable that the German people could recover its former position without
settling accounts with those who were the cause and occasion of the
unprecedented collapse which struck our state. For before the judgment seat of
posterity November, 1918, will be evaluated, not as high treason, but as
treason against the fatherland.
Thus, any possibility of regaining outward German
independence is bound up first and foremost with the recovery of the inner
unity of our people's will.
But regarded even from the purely technical point of
view, the idea of an outward German liberation seems senseless as long as the
broad masses are not also prepared to enter the service of this liberating
idea. From the purely military angle, every officer above all will realize
after a moment's thought that a foreign struggle cannot be carried on with
student battalions, that in addition to the brains of a people, the fists are
also needed. In addition, we must bear in mind that a national defense, which
is based only on the circles of the so-called intelligentsia, would squander
irreplaceable treasures. The absence of the young German intelligentsia which
found its death on the fields of Flanders in the fall of 1914 was sorely felt
later on. It was the highest treasure that the German nation possessed and
during the War its loss could no longer be made good. Not only is it impossible
to carry on the struggle itself if the storming battalions do not find the
masses of the workers in their ranks; the technical preparations are also
impracticable without the inner unity of our national will. Especially our
people, doomed to languish along unarmed beneath the thousand eyes of the
Versailles peace treaty, can only make technical preparations for the
achievement of freedom and human independence if the army of domestic
stoolpigeons is decimated down to those whose inborn lack of character permits
them to betray anything and everything for the well-known thirty pieces of
silvery For with these we can deal. Unconquerable by comparison seem the
millions who oppose the national resurrection out of political
conviction-unconquerable as long as the inner cause of their opposition, the
international Marxist philosophy of life, is not combated and torn out of their
hearts and brains.
Regardless, therefore, from what standpoint we examine
the possibility of regaining our state and national independence, whether frost
the standpoint of preparations in the sphere of foreign policy, from that of
technical armament or that of battle itself, in every case the presupposition
for everything remains the previous winning of the broad masses of our people
for the idea of our national independence.
Without the recovery of our external freedom, however,
any internal reform, even in the most favorable case, means only the increase
of our productivity as a colony. The surplus of all socalled economic
improvements falls to the benefit of our international control commissions, and
every social improvement at best raises the productivity of our work for them.
No cultural advances will fall to the share of the German nation; they are too
contingent on the political independence and dignity of our nation.
Thus, if a favorable solution of the German future requires a
national attitude on the part of the broad masses of our people, this must be
the highest, mightiest task of a movement whose activity is not intended to
exhaust itself in the satisfaction of the moment, but which must examine all
its commissions and omissions solely with a view to their presumed consequences
in the future.
Thus, by 1919 we clearly realized that, as its highest
aim, the new movement must first accomplish the nationalization of the
masses.
From a tactical standpoint a number of demands resulted from
this.
(1) To win the masses for a national resurrection, no social
sacrifice is too great.
Whatever economic concessions are made to our working
class today, they stand in no proportion to the gain for the entire nation if
they help to give the broad masses back to their nation. Only pigheaded
short-sightedness, such as is often unfortunately found in our employer
circles, can fail to recognize that in the long run there can be no economic
upswing for them and hence no economic profit, unless the inner national
solidarity of our people is restored.
If during the War the German unions had ruthlessly guarded
the interests of the working class, if even during the War they had struck a
thousand times over and forced approval of the demands of the workers they
represented on the dividend-hungry employers of those days; but if in matters
of national defense they had avowed their Germanism with the same fanaticism;
and if with equal ruthlessness they had given to the fatherland that which is
the fatherland's, the War would not have been lost. And how trifiing all
economic concessions, even the greatest, would have been, compared to the
immense importance of winning the War!
Thus a movement which plans to give the German worker
back to the German people must clearly realize that in this question economic
sacrifices are of no importance whatever as long as the preservation and
independence of the national economy are not threatened by them.
(2) The national education of the broad masses can only
take place indirectly through a social uplift, since thus exclusively can those
general economic premises be created which permit the individual to partake of
the cultural goods of the nation.
(3) The nationalization of the broad masses can never be
achieved by half-measures, by weakly emphasizing a socalled objective
standpoint, but only by a ruthless and fanatically onesided orientation toward
the goal to be achieved. That is to say, a people cannot be made 'national' in
the sense understood by our present-day bourgeoisie, meaning with so and so
many limitations, but only nationalistic with the entire vehemence that is
inherent in the extreme. Poison is countered only by an antidote, and only the
shallowness of a-bourgeois mind can regard the middle course as the road to
heaven.
The broad masses of a people consist neither of professors nor of
diplomats. The scantiness of the abstract knowledge they possess directs their
sentiments more to the world of feeling. That is where their positive or
negative attitude lies. It is receptive only to an expression of force in one
of these two directions and never to a half-measure hovering between the two.
Their emotional attitude at the same time conditions their extraordinary
stability. Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to
change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to
the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a
scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired
them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward. Anyone who wants to
win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart. Its
name is not objectivity (read weakness), but will and power.
(4) The soul of the people can only be won if along with
carrying on a positive struggle for our own aims, we destroy the opponent of
these aims.
The people at all times see the proof of their own right
in ruthless attack on a foe, and to them renouncing the destruction of the
adversary seems like uncertainty with regard to their own right if not a sign
of their own unriglxt.
The broad masses are only a piece of Nature and their
sentiment does not understand the mutual handshake of people who daim that they
want the opposite things. What they desire is the victory of the stronger and
the destruction of the weak or his unconditional subjection.
The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when,
aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their
international poisoners are exterminated.
(5) All great questions of the day are questions of the
moment and represent only consequences of definite causes. Only one amongall of
them, however, possesses causal importance,land that is the question of the
racial preservation of the nation. In the blood alone resides the strength as
well as the weakness of man. As long as peoples do not recognize and give heed
to the importance of their racial foundation, they are like men who would like
to teach poodles the qualities of greyhounds, failing to realize that the speed
of the greyhound like the docility of the poodle are not learned, but are
qualities inherent in the race. Peoples which renounce the preservation of
their racial purity renounce with it the unity of their soul in all its
expressions. The divided state of their nature is the natural consequence of
the divided state of their blood, and the change in their intellectual and
creative force is only the effect of the change in their racial
foundations.
Anyone who wants to free the German blood from the
manifestations and vices of today, which were originally alien to its nature,
will first have to redeem it from the foreign virus of these
manifestations.
Without the clearest knowledge of the racial problem and
hence of the Jewish problem there will never be a resurrection of the German
nation.
The racial question gives the key not only to world history, but to
all human culture.
(6) Organizing the broad masses of our people which are
today in the international camp into a national people's community does not
mean renouncing the defense of justified class interests. Divergent class and
professional interests are not synonymous with class cleavages but are natural
consequences of our economic life. Professional grouping is in no way opposed
to a true national community, for the latter consists in the unity of a nation
in all those questions which affect this nation as such.
The integration of an occupational group which has become
a class with the national community, or merely with the state, is not
accomplished by the lowering of higher dasses but by uplifting the lower
dasses. This process in turn can never be upheld by the higher class, but only
by the lower class fighting for its equal rights. The present-day bourgeoisie
was not organized into the state by measures of the nobility, but by its own
energy under its own leadership.
The German worker will not be raised to the framework of
the German national community via feeble scenes of fraternization, but by a
conscious raising of his social and cultural situation until the most serious
differences may be viewed as bridged. A movement which sets this development as
its goal will have to take its supporters primarily from this camp.' It may
fall back on the intelligentsia only in so far as the latter has completely
understood the goal to be achieved. This process of transformation and
equalization will not be completed in ten or twenty years; experience shows
that it comprises many generations.
The severest obstade to the present-day worker's approach
to the national community lies not in the defense of his class interests, but
in his international leadership and attitude which are hostile to the people
and the fatherland. The same unions with a fanatical national leadership in
political and national matters would make millions of workers into the most
valuable members of their nation regardless of the various struggles that took
place over purely economic matters.
A movement which wants honestly to give the German worker
back to his people and tear him away from the international delusion must
sharply attack a conception dominant above all in employer circles, which under
national community understands the unresisting economic surrender of the
employee to the employer and which chooses to regard any attempt at
safeguarding even justified interests regarding the employee's economic
existence as an attack on the national community. Such an assertion is not only
untrue, but a conscious lie, because the national community imposes its
obligations not only on one side but also on the other.
Just as surely as a worker sins against the spirit of a
real national community when, without regard for the common welfare and the
survival of a national economy, he uses his power to raise extortionate
demands, an employer breaks this community to the same extent when he conducts
his business in an inhuman, exploiting way, misuses the national labor force
and makes millions out of its sweat. He then has no right to designate himself
as national, no right to speak of a national community; no, he is a selfish
scoundrel who induces social unrest and provokes future conflicts which
whatever happens must end in harming the nation.
Thus, the reservoir from which the young movement must
gather its supporters will primarily be the masses of our workers. Its work
will be to tear these away from the international delusion, to free them from
their social distress, to raise them out of their cultural misery and lead them
to the national community as a valuable, united factor, national in feeling and
desire.
If, in the circles of the national intelligentsia, there are found
men with the warmest hearts for their people and its future, imbued with the
deepest knowledge of the importance of this struggle for the soul of these
masses, they will be highly welcome in the ranks of this movement, as a
valuable spiritual backbone. But winning over the bourgeois voting cattle can
never be the aim of this movement. If it were, it would burden itself with a
dead weight which by its whole nature would paralyze our power to recruit from
the broad masses. For regardless of the theoretical beauty of the idea of
leading together the broadest masses from below and from above within the
framework of the movement, there is the opposing fact that by psychological
propagandizing of bourgeois masses in general meetings, it may be possible to
create moods and even to spread insight, but not to do away with qualities of
character or, better expressed, vices whose development and origin embrace
centuries. The difference with regard to the cultural level on both sides and
the attitude on both sides toward questions raised by economic interests is at
present still so great that, as soon as the intoxication of the meetings has
passed, it would at once manifest itself as an obstacle.
Finally, the goal is not to undertake a reskatification
in the camp that is national to begin with, but to win over the antinational
camp.
And this point of view, finally, is determining for the tactical
attitude of the whole movement.
(7) This one-sided but thereby clear position must
express itself in the propaganda of the movement and on the other hand in turn
is required on propagandist grounds.
If propaganda is to be effective for the movement, it must
be addressed to only one quarter, since otherwise, in view of the difference in
the intellectual training of the two camps in question, either it will not be
understood by the one group, or by the other it would be rejected as obvious
and therefore uninteresting
Even the style and the tone of its individual products
cannot be equally effective for two such extreme groups. If propaganda
renounces primitiveness of expression, it does not find its way to
the
feeling of the broad masses. If, however, in word and gesture, it uses the
masses' harshness of sentiment and expression, it will be rejected by the
so-called intelligentsia as coarse and vulgar. Among a hundred so-called
speakers there are hardly ten capable of speaking with equal effect today
before a public consisting of street.sweepers, locksmiths, sewer-cleaners,
etc., and tomorrow holding a lecture with necessarily the same thought content
in an auditorium full of university professors and students. But among a
thousand speakers there is perhaps only a single one who can manage to speak to
locksmiths and university professors at the same time, in a form which not only
is suitable to the receptivity of both parties, but also influences both
parties with equal effect or actually lashes them into a wild storm of
applause. We must always bear in mind that even the most beautiful idea of a
sublime theory in most cases can be disseminated only through the small and
smallest minds. The important thing is not what the genius who has created an
idea has in mind, but what, in what form, and with what success the proph ets
of this idea transmit it to the broad masses.
The strong attractive power of the Social Democracy, yes,
of the whole Marxist movement, rested in large part on the homogeneity and
hence one-sidedness of the public it addressed. The more seemingly limited,
indeed, the narrower its ideas were, the more easily they were taken up and
assimilated by a mass whose intellectual level corresponded to the material
offered.
Likewise for the new movement a simple and clear line thus
resulted.
Propaganda must be adjusted to the broad masses in
content and in form, and its soundness is to be measured exdusively by its
effective result.
In a mass meeting of all classes it is not that speaker
who is mentally closest to the intellectuals present who speaks best, but the
one who conquers the heart of the masses.
A member of the intelligentsia present at such a meeting,
who carps at the intellectual level of the speech despite the speaker's obvious
effect on the lower strata he has set out to conquer, proves the complete
incapacity of his thinking and the worthlessness of his person for the young
movement. It can use only that intellectual who comprehends the task and goal
of the movement to such an extent that he has learned to judge the activity of
propaganda according to its success and not according to the impressions which
it leaves behind in himself. For propaganda is not intended to provide
entertainment for people who are national-minded to begin with, but to win the
enemies of our nationality, in so far as they are of our blood.
In general those trends of thought which I have briefly
summed up under the heading of war propaganda should be determining and
decisive for our movement in the manner and execution of its own enlightenment
work.
That it was right was demonstrated by its success
(8) The goal of a political reform movement will never be
reached by enlightenment work or by influencing ruling circles, but only by the
achievement of political power. Every world-moving idea has not only the right,
but also the duty, of securing, those means which make possible the execution
of its ideas. Success is the one earthly judge concerning the right or wrong of
such an effort, and under success we must not understand, as in the year 1918,
the achievement of power in itself, but an exercise of that power that will
benefit the nation. Thus, a coup d'etat must not be regarded as successful if,
as senseless state's attorneys in Germany think today, the revolutionaries have
succeeded in possessing themselves of the state power, but only if by the
realization of the purposes and aims underlying such a revolutionary action,
more benefit accrues to the nation than under the past regime. Something which
cannot very well be claimed for the German revolution, as the gangster job of
autumn 1918, calls itself.
If the achievement of political power constitutes the
precondition for the practical execution of reform purposes, the movement with
reform purposes must from the first day of its existence feel itself a movement
of the masses and not a literary tea-club or a shopkeepers' bowling
society.
(9) The young movement is in its nature and inner organization
anti-parliamentarian; that is, it rejects, in general and in its own inner
structure, a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the
level of a mere executant of other people's will and opinion. In little as well
as big things, the movement advocates the principle of a Germanic democracy:
the leader is elected, but then enjoys unconditional authority.
The practical consequences of this principle in the
movement are the following:
The first chairman of a local group is elected, but then
he is the responsible leader of the local group. All committees are subordinate
to him and not, conversely, he to a committee. There are no electoral
committees, but only committees for work. The responsible leader, the first
chairman, organizes the work. The first principle applies to the next higher
organization, the precinct, the district or county. The leader is always
elected, but thereby he is vested with unlimited powers and authority. And,
finally, the same applies to the leadership of the whole party. The chairman is
elected, but he is the exclusive leader of the movements All committees are
subordinate to him and not he to the committees. He makes the decisions and
hence bears the responsibility on his shoulders. Members of the movement are
free to call him to account before the forum of a new election, to divest him
of his office in so far as he has infringed on the principles of the movement
or served its interests badly. His place is then taken by an abler, new man,
enjoying, however} the same authority and the same responsibility.
It is one of the highest tasks of the movement to make
this principle determining, not only within its own ranks, but for the entire
state.
Any man who wants to be leader bears, along with the highest
unlimited authority, also the ultimate and heaviest responsibility.
Anyone who is not equal to this or is too cowardly to bear the
consequences of his acts is not fit to be leader; only the hero is cut out for
this.
The progress and culture of humanity are not a product of the
majority, but rest exclusively on the genius and energy of the
personality.
To cultivate the personality and establish it in its
rights is one of the prerequisites for recovering the greatness and power of
our nationality.
Hence the movement is anti-parliamentarian, and even its
participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its
destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the
gravest symptoms of mankind's decay.
(10) The movement decisively rejects any position on
questions which either lie outside the frame of its political work or, being
not of basic importance, are irrelevant for it. Its task is not a religious
reformation, but a political reorganization of our people. In both religious
denominations it sees equally valuable pillars for the existence of our people
and therefore combats those parties which want to degrade this foundation of an
ethical, moral, and religious consolidation of our national body to the level
of an instrument of their party interests.
The movement finally sees its task, not in the
restoration of a definite state form and in the struggle against another, but
in the creation of those basic foundations without which neither republic nor
monarchy can endure for any length of time. Its mission lies not in the
foundation of a monarchy or in the reinforcement of a republic, but in the
creation of a Germanic state.
The question of the outward shaping of this state, its
crowning, so to speak, is not of basic importance, but is determined only by
questions of practical expediency.
For a people that has once understood the
great problems and tasks of its existence, the questions of outward formalities
will no longer lead to inner struggle.
(11) The question of the movement's inner organization is
one of expediency and not of principle.
The best organization is not that
which inserts the greatest, but that which inserts the smallest, intermediary
apparatus between the leadership of a movement and its individual adherents.
For the function of organization is the transmission of a definite idea-which
always first arises from the brain of an individual -to a larger body of men
and the supervision of its realization.
Hence organization is in all things only a necessary
evil. In the best case it is a means to an end, in the worst case an end in
itself.
Since the world produces more mechanical than ideal natures, the
forms of organization are usually created more easily than ideas as
such.
The practical development of every idea striving for realization in
this world, particularly of one possessing a reform character, is in its broad
outlines as follows:
Some idea of genius arises in the brain of a man who
feels called upon to transmit his knowledge to the rest of humanity. He
preaches his view and gradually wins a certain circle of adherents. This
process of the direct and personal transmittance of a man's ideas to the rest
of his fellow men l is the most ideal and natural. With the rising increase in
the adherents of the new doctrine, it gradually becomes impossible for the
exponent of the idea to go on exerting a personal, direct influence on the
innumerable supporters, to lead and direct them. Proportionately as, in
consequence of the growth of the community, the direct and shortest
communication is excluded, the necessity of a connecting organization arises:
thus, the ideal condition is ended and is replaced by the necessary evil of
organization. Little sub-groups are formed which in the political movement, for
example, call themselves local groups and constitute the germ-cells of the
future organization.
If the unity of the doctrine is not to be lost, however,
this subdivision must not take place until the authority of the spiritual
founder and of the school trained by him can be regarded as unconditional. The
geo-political significance of a focal center in a movement cannot be
overemphasized. Only the presence of such a place, exerting the magic spell of
a Mecca or a Rome, can in the long run give the movement a force which is based
on inner unity and the recognition of a summit representing this unity.
Thus, in forming the first organizational germ-cells we must never
lose sight of the necessity, not only of preserving the importance of the
original local source of the idea, but of making it paramount. This
intensification of the ideal, moral, and factual immensity of the movement's
point of origin and direction must take place in exact proportion as the
movement's germcells, which have now become innumerable, demand new links in
the shape of organizational forms.
For, as the increasing number of individual adherents
makes it impossible to continue direct communication with them for the
formation of the lowest bodies, the ultimate innumerable increase of these
lowest organizational forms compels in turn creation of higher associations
which politically can be designated roughly as county or district
groups.
Easy as it still may be to maintain the authority of the original
center toward the lowest local groups, it will be equally difficult to maintain
this position toward the higher organizational forms which now arise. But this
is the precondition for the unified existence of the movement and hence for
carrying out an idea.
If, finally, these larger intermediary divisions are also
combined into new organizational forms, the difficulty is further increased of
safeguarding, even toward them, the unconditional leading character of the
original founding site, its school, etc.
Therefore, the mechanical forms of an organization may
only be developed to the degree in which the spiritual ideal authority of a
center seems unconditionally secured. In political formations this guaranty can
often seem provided only by practical power.
From this the following directives for the inner
structure of the movement resulted:
(a) Concentration for the time being of all activity in a
single place: Munich. Training of a community of unconditionally reliable
supporters and development of a school for the subsequent dissemination of the
idea. Acquisition of the necessary authority for the future by the greatest
possible visible successes in this one place.
To make the movement and its leaders known, it was
necessary, not only to shake the belief in the invincibility of the Marxist
doctrine in one place for all to see, but to demonstrate the possibility of an
opposing movement.
(b) Formation of local groups only when the authority of
the central leadership in Munich may be regarded as unquestionably
recognized.
(c) Likewise the formation of district, county, or
provincial groups depends, not only on the need for them, but also on certainty
that an unconditional recognition of the center has been
achieved.
Furthermore, the creation of organizational forms is dependent on
the men who are available and can be considered as leaders
This may occur in
two ways:
(a) The movement disposes of the necessary financial means for the
training and schooling of minds capable of future leadership. It then
distributes the material thus acquired systematically according to criteria of
tactical and other expediency.
This way is the easier and quicker; however,
it demands great financial means, since this leader material is only able to
work for the movement when paid.
(b) The movement, owing to the lack of
financial means, is not in a position to appoint official leaders, but for the
present must depend on honorary officers.
This way is the slower and more difficult.
Under certain circumstances the leadership of a movement
must let large territories lie fallow, unless there emerges from the adherents
a man able and willing to put himself at the disposal of the leadership, and
organize and lead the movement in the district in question.
It may happen that in large territories there will be no
one, in other places, however, two or even three almost equally capable. The
difficulty that lies in such a development is great and can only be overcome in
the course of years.
The prerequisite for the creation of an organizational
form is and remains the man necessary for its leadership.
As worthless as an army in all its organizational forms
is without officers, equally worthless is a political organization without the
suitable leader.
Not founding a local group is more useful to the movement
when a suitable leader personality is lacking than to have its organization
miscarry due to the absence of a leader to direct and drive it forward.
Leadership itself requires not only will but also ability, and a
greater importance must be attached to will and energy than to intelligence as
such, and most valuable of all is a combination of ability, determination, and
perseverance.
(12) The future of a movement is conditioned by the
fanaticism yes, the intolerance, with which its adherents uphold it as the sole
correct movement, and push it past other formations of a similar sort.
It
is the greatest error to believe that the strength of a movement increases
through a union with another of similar character. It is true that every
enlargement of this kind at first means an increase in outward dimensions,
which to the eyes of superficial observers means power; in truth, however, it
only takes over the germs of an inner weakening that will later become
effective.
For whatever can be said about the like character of two
movements, in reality it is never present. For otherwise there would actually
be not two movements but one. And regardless wherein the differences lie-even
if they consisted only in the varying abilities of the leadership-they exist.
But the natural law of all development demands, not the coupling of two
formations which are simply not alike, but the victory of the stronger and the
cultivation of the victor's force and strength made possible alone by the
resultant struggle.
Through the union of two more or less equal political
party formations momentary advantages may arise, but in the long run any
success won in this way is the cause of inner weaknesses which appear
later.
The greatness of a movement is exclusively guaranteed by the
unrestricted development of its inner strength and its steady growth up to the
final victory over all competitors.
Yes, we can say that its strength and hence the
justification of its existence increases only so long as it recognizes the
principle of struggle as the premise of its development, and that it has passed
the high point of its strength in the moment when complete victory inclines to
its side.
Therefore, it is only profitable for a movement to strive for this
victory in a form which does not lead to an early momentary success, but which
in a long struggle occasioned by absolute intolerance also provides long
growth.
Movements which increase only by the so-called fusion of similar
formations, thus owing their strength to compromises, are like hothouse plants.
They shoot up, but they lack the strength to defy the centuries and withstand
heavy storms.
The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an
idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which,
fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will
against all others. If an idea in itself is sound and, thus armed, takes up a
struggle on this earth, it is unconquerable and every persecution will only add
to its inner strength.
The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted
negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the
ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for
its own doctrine.
The apparent head start which movements achieve by fusions
is amply caught up with by the steady increase in the strength of a doctrine
and organization that remain independent and fight their own fight.
(13) On principle the movement must so educate its members that they
do not view the struggle as something idly cooked up, but as the thing that
they themselves are striving ford Therefore, they must not fear the hostility
of their enemies, but must feel that it is the presupposition for their own
right to exist. They must not shun the hatred of the enemies of our nationality
and our philosophy and its manifestations; they must long for them. And among
the manifestations of this hate are lies and slander.
Any man who is not attacked in the Jewish newspapers, not
slandered and vilified, is no decent German and no true National Socialist. The
best yardstick for the value of his attitude, for the sincerity of his
conviction, and the force of his will is the hostility he receives from the
mortal enemy of our people.
It must, over and over again, be pointed out to the
adherents of the movement and in a broader sense to the whole people that the
Jew and his newspapers always lie and that even an occasional Ruth is only
intended to cover a bigger falsification and is therefore itself in turn a
deliberate untruth. The Jew is the great master in lying, and lies and
deception are his weapons in struggle.
Every Jewish slander and every Jewish
lie is a scar of honor on the body of our warriors.
The man they have most reviled stands closest to us and
the man they hate worst is our best friend.
Anyone who picks up a Jewish newspaper in the morning and
does not see himself slandered in it has not made profitable use of the
previous day; for if he had, he would be persecuted, reviled, slandered,
abused} befouled. And only the man who combats this mortal enemy of our nation
and of all Aryan humanity and culture most effectively may expect to see the
slanders of this race and the struggle of this people directed against
him.
When these principles enter the flesh and blood of our supporters,
the movement will become unshakable and invincible.
(14) The movement must promote respect for personality by
all means; it must never forget that in personal worth lies the worth of
everything human; that every idea and every achievement is the result of one
man's creative force and that the admiration of greatness constitutes, not only
a tribute of thanks to the latter, but casts a unifying bond around the
grateful.
Personality cannot be replaced; especially when it embodies not the
mechanical but the cultural and creative element. No more than a famous master
can be replaced and another take over the completion of the half-finished
painting he has left behind can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman
and the great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies always in the
province of art. It is not mechanically trained, but inborn by God's
grace.
The greatest revolutionary changes and achievements of this earth
its greatest cultural accomplishments the immortal deeds in the field of
statesmanship, etc., are forever inseparably bound up with a name and are
represented by it. To renounce doing homage to a great spirit means the loss of
an immense strength which emanates from the names of all great men and
women.
The Jew knows this best of all. He, whose great men are only great
in the destruction of humanity and its culture, makes sure that they are
idolatrously admired. He attempts only to represent the admiration of the
nations for their own spirits as unworthy and brands it as a 'personality
cult.'
As soon as a people becomes so cowardly that it succumbs to this
Jewish arrogance and effrontery, it renounces the mightiest power that it
possesses; for this is based, not on respect for the masses, but on the
veneration of genius and on uplift and enlightenment by his example.
When human hearts break and human souls-despair, then from the
twilight of the past the great conquerors of distress and care, of disgrace and
misery, of spiritual slavery and physical compulsion, look down on them and
hold out their eternal hands to the despairing mortals!
Woe to the people that is ashamed to take
them!
In the first period of our movement's development we
suffered from nothing so much as from the insignificance, the unknownness of
our names, which in themselves made our success questionable. The hardest thing
in this first period, when often only six, seven, or eight heads met together
to use the words of an opponent, was to arouse and preserve in this tiny circle
faith in the mighty future of the movement.
Consider that six or seven men, all nameless poor devils,
had joined together with the intention of forming a movement hoping to
succeed-where the powerful great mass parties had hitherto failed-in restoring
a German Reich of greater power and glory. If people had attacked us in those
days, yes, even if they had laughed at us, in both cases we should have been
happy. For the oppressive thing was neither the one nor the other; it was the
complete lack of attention we found in those days.
When I entered the circle of these few men, there could
be no question of a party or a movement. I have already described my
impressions regarding my first meeting with this little formation. In the weeks
that followed, I had time and occasion to study this so-called 'party' which at
first looked so impossible. And, by God the picture was depressing and
discouraging. There was nothing here, really positively nothing. The name of a
party whose committee constituted practically the whole membership, which,
whether we liked it or not, was exactly what it was trying to combat, a
parliament on a small scale. Here, too, the vote ruled; if big parliaments
yelled their throats hoarse for months at a time, it was about important
problems at least, but in this little circle the answer to a safely arrived
letter let loose an interminable argument!
The public, of course, knew nothing at all about this. Not
a soul in Munich knew the party even by name, except for its few supporters and
their few friends.
Every Wednesday a so-called committee meeting took place
in a Munich cafe, and once a week an evening lecture. Since the whole
membership of the 'movement' was at first represented in the committee, the
faces of course were always the same. Now the task was at last to burst the
bonds of the small circle, to win new supporters, but above all to make the
name of the movement known at any price.
In this we used the following technique:
Every month, and later every two weeks, we tried to hold a
'meeting.' The invitations to it were written on the typewriter or sometimes by
hand on slips of paper and the first few times were distributed, or handed out,
by us personally. Each one of us turned to the circle of his friends, and tried
to induce someone or other to attend one of these affairs.
The result was miserable.
I still remember how I myself in this first period once
distributed about eighty of these slips of paper, and how in the evening we sat
waiting for the masses who were expected to appear.
An hour late, the '
chairman ' finally had to open the 'meeting.' We were again seven men, the old
seven.
We changed over to having the invitation slips written on a machine
and mimeographed in a Munich stationery store. The result at the next meeting
was a few more listeners. Thus the number rose slowly from eleven to thirteen,
finally to seventeen, to twenty-three, to thirty-four listeners.
By little collections among us poor devils the funds were
raised with which at last to advertise the meeting by notices in the then
independent Munchener Beobachter in Munich. And this time the success was
positively amazing. We had organized the meeting in the Munich
Hofbrauhauskeller (not to be confused with the Munich Hofbrauhaus-Festsaal), a
little room with a capacity of barely one hundred and thirty people. To me
personally the room seemed like a big hall and each of us was worried whether
we would succeed in filling this 'mighty' edifice with people.
At seven o'clock one hundred and eleven people were
present and the meeting was opened.
A Munich professor made the main speech, and I, for the
first time, in public, was to speak second.
In the eyes of Herr Harrer, then first chairman of the
party, the affair seemed a great adventure. This gentleman, who was certainly
otherwise honest, just happened to be convinced that I might be capable of
doing certain things, but not of speaking. And even in the time that followed
he could not be dissuaded from this opinion. "
Things turned out differently. In this first meeting that
could be called public I had been granted twenty minutes' speaking
time.
I spoke for thirty minutes, and what before I had simply felt within
me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak
After thirty minutes the people in the small room were electrified and the
enthusiasm was first expressed by the fact that my appeal to the self-sacrifice
of those present led to the donation of three hundred marks. This relieved us
of a great worry. For at this time the financial stringency was so great that
we were not even in a position to have slogans printed for the movement, or
even distribute leaflets. Now the foundation was laid for a little fund from
which at least our barest needs and most urgent necessities could be defrayed.
But in another respect as well, the success of this first larger meeting was
considerable.
At that time I had begun to bring a number of fresh young
forces into the committee. During my many years in the army I -had come to know
a great number of faithful comrades who now slowly, on the basis of my
persuasion, began to enter the movement. They were all energetic young people,
accustomed to discipline, and from their period of service raised in the
principle: nothing at all is impossible, everything can be done if you only
want it.
How necessary such a transfusion of new blood was, I myself could
recognize after only a few weeks of collaboration.
Herr Harrer, then first chairman of the party, was really
a journalist and as such he was certainly widely educated. But for a party
leader he had one exceedingly serious drawback: he was no speaker for the
masses. As scrupulously conscientious and precise as his work in itself was, it
nevertheless lacked-perhaps because of this very lack of a great oratorical
gift-the great sweep. Herr Drexler, then chairman of the Munich local group,
was a simple worker, likewise not very significant as a speaker, and moreover
he was no soldier. He had not served in the army, even during the War he had
not been a soldier, so that feeble and uncertain as he was in his whole nature,
he lacked the only schooling which was capable of turning uncertain and soft
natures into men. Thus both men were not made of stuff which would have enabled
them not only to bear in their hearts fanatical faith in the victory of a
movement, but also with indomitable energy and will, and if necessary with
brutal ruthlessness, to sweep aside any obstacles which might stand in the path
of the rising new idea. For this only beings were fitted in whom spirit and
body had acquired those military virtues which can perhaps best be described as
follows: swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp
steel.
At that time I myself was still a soldier. My exterior
and interior had been whetted and hardened for well-nigh six years, so that at
first I must have seemed strange in this circle. I, too, had forgotten how to
say: 'that's impossible,' or 'it won't work'; 'we can't risk that,' 'that is
too dangerous,' etc.
For of course the business was dangerous. Little attention
as the Reds paid to one of your bourgeois gossip clubs whose inner innocence
and hence harmlessness for themselves theyknew better than its own members,
they were determined to use every means to get rid of a movement which did seem
dangerous to them. Their most effective method in such cases has at all times
been terror or violence.
In the year 1920, in many regions of Germany, a national
meeting that dared to address its appeal to the broad masses and publicly
invite attendance was simply impossible. The participants in such a meeting
were dispersed and driven away with bleeding heads. Such an accomplishment, to
be sure, did not require much skill: for after all the biggest so-called
bourgeois mass meeting would scatter at the sight of a dozen Communists like
hares running from a hound.
Most loathsome to the Marxist deceivers of the people was
inevitably a movement whose explicit aim was the winning of those masses which
had hitherto stood exclusively in the service of the international Marxist
Jewish stock exchange parties. The very name of ' German Workers' Party ' had
the effect of goading them. Thus one could easily imagine that on the first
suitable occasion the conflict would begin with the Marxist inciters who were
then still drunk with victory.
In the small circle that the movement then was a certain
fear of such a fight prevailed. The members wanted to appear in public as
little as possible, for fear of being beaten up. In their mind's eye they
already saw the first great meeting smashed and go the movement finished for
good. I had a hard time putting forward my opinion that we must not dodge this
struggle, but prepare for it, and for this reason acquire the armament which
alone offers protection against violence. Terror is not broken by the mind, but
by terror. The success of the first meeting strengthened my position in this
respect. We gained courage for a second meeting on a somewhat larger
scale.
About October, 1919, the second, larger meeting took place in the
Eberlbraukeller. Topic: Brestlitovsk and Versailles. Four gentlemen appeared as
speakers. I myself spoke for almost an hour and the success was greater than at
the first rally. The audience had risen to more than one hundred and thirty. An
attempted disturbance was at once nipped in the bud by my comrades. The
diturbers flew down the stairs with gashed heads.
Two weeks later another meeting took place in the same
hall. The attendance had risen to over one hundred and seventy and the room was
well filled. I had spoken again, and again the success was greater than at the
previous meeting.
I pressed for a larger hall. At length we found one at
the other end of town in the 'Deutsches Reich' on Dachauer Strasse. The first
meeting in the new hall was not so well attended as the previous one: barely
one hundred and forty persons. In the committee, hopes began to sink and the
eternal doubters felt that the excessive repetition of our 'demonstrations' had
to be considered the cause of the bad attendance. There were violent arguments
in which I upheld the view that a city of seven hundred thousand inhabitants
could stand not one meeting every two weeks, but ten every week, that we must
not let ourselves be misled by failures, that the road we had taken was the
right
one, and that sooner or later, with steady perseverance, success was
bound to come. All in all, this whole period of winter 1919-20 was a single
struggle to strengthen confidence in the victorious might of the young movement
and raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can move mountains.
The next meeting in the same hall showed me to be right.
The attendance had risen to over two hundred; the public as well as financial
success was brilliant.
I urged immediate preparations for another meeting. It
took place barely two weeks later and the audience rose to over two hundred and
seventy heads.
Two weeks later, for the seventh time, we called together
the supporters and friends of the new movement and the same hall could barely
hold the people who had grown to over four hundred.
It was at this time that the young movement received its
inner form. In the small circle there were sometimes more or less violent
disputes. Various quarters-then as today-carped at designating the young
movement as a party. In such a conception I have always seen proof of the
critics' practical incompetence and intellectual smallness. They were and
always are the men who cannot distinguish externals from essentials, and who
try to estimate the value of a movement according to the most
bombastic-sounding titles, most of which, sad to say, the vocabulary of our
forefathers must provide.
It was hard, at that time, to make it clear to people
that every movement, as long as it has not achieved the victory of its ideas,
hence its goal, is a party even if it assumes a thousand different
names.
If any man wants to put into practical effect a bold idea whose
realization seems useful in the interests of his fellow men, he will first of
all have to seek supporters who are ready to fight for his intentions. And if
this intention consists only in destroying the existing parties, of ending the
fragmentation, the exponents of this view and propagators of this determination
are themselves a party, as long as this goal has not been achieved. It is
hair-splitting and shadow-boxing when some antiquated folkish theoretician,
whose practical successes stand in inverse proportion to his wisdom, imagines
that he can change the party character which every young movement possesses by
changing this term.
On the contrary.
If anything is unfolkish, it is this tossing around of
old Germanic expressions which neither fit into the present period nor
represent anything definite, but can easily lead to seeing the significance of
a movement in its outward vocabulary. This is a real menace which today can be
observed on countless occasions.
Altogether then, and also in the period that followed, I
had to warn again and again against those deutschvolkisch wandering scholars
whose positive accomplishment is always practically nil, but whose conceit can
scarcely be excelled. The young movement had and still has to guard itself
against an influx of people whose sole recommendation for the most part lies in
their declaration that they have fought for thirty and even forty years for the
same idea. Anyone who fights for forty years for a so-called idea without being
able to bring about even the slightest success, in fact, without having
prevented the victory of the opposite, has, with forty years of activity,
provided proof of his own incapacity. The danger above all lies in the fact
that such natures do not want to fit into the movement as links, but keep
shooting off their mouths about leading circles in which alone, on the strength
of their age-old activity, they can see a suitable place for further activity.
But woe betide if a young movement is surrended to the mercies of such people.
No more than a business man who in forty years of activity has steadily run a
big business into the ground is fitted to be the founder of a new one, is a
folkish Methuselah, who in exactly the same time has gummed up and petrified a
great idea, fit for the leadership of a new, young movement!
Besides, only a fragment of all these people come into the
new movement to serve it, but in most cases, under its protection or through
the possibilities it offers, to warm over their old cabbage
They do not want to benefit the idea of the new doctrine,
they only expect it to give them a chance to make humanity miserable with their
own ideas. For what kind of ideas they often are, it is hard to tell.
The characteristic thing about these people is that they rave about
old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes spear and shield, but in
reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. For the same people who
brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed
bearskin with bull's horns over their bearded heads, preach for the present
nothing but struggle with spiritual weapons, and run away as fast as they can
from every Communist blackjack. Posterity will have little occasion to glorify
their own heroic existence in a new epic.
I came to know these people too well not to feel the
profoundest disgust at their miserable play-acting. But they make a ridiculous
impression on the broad masses, and the Jew has every reason to spare these
folkish comedians, even to prefer them to the true fighters for a coming German
state. With all this, these people are boundlessly conceited; despite all the
proofs of their complete incompetence, they daim to know everything better and
become a real plague for all straightforward and honest fighters to whom
heroism seems worth honoring, not only in the past, but who also endeavor to
give posterity a similar picture by their own actions.
And often it can be distinguished only with difficulty
which of these people act out of inner stupidity or incompetence and which only
pretend to for certain reasons. Especially with the so-called religious
reformers on an old Germanic basis, I always have the feeling that they were
sent by those powers which do not want the resurrection of our people. For
their whole activity leads the people away from the common struggle against the
common enemy, the Jew, and instead lets them waste their strength on inner
religious squabbles as senseless as they are disastrous. For these very reasons
the establishment of a strong central power implying the unconditional
authority of a Kadership is necessary in the movement. By it alone can such
ruinous elements be squelched. And for this reason the greatest enemies of a
uniform, strictly led and conducted movement are to be found in the circles of
these folkish wandering Jews. In the movement they hate the power that checks
their mischief.
Not for nothing did the young movement establish a
definite program in which it did not use the word 'folkish.' The concept
folkish, in view of its conceptual boundlessness, is no possible basis for a
movement and offers no standard for membership in one. The more indefinable
this concept is in practice, the more and broader interpretations it permits,
the greater becomes the possibility of invoking its authority. The insertion of
such an indefinable and variously interpretable concept into the political
struggle leads to the destruction of any strict fighting solidarity, since the
latter does not permit leaving to the individual the definition of his faith
and will.
And it is disgraceful to see all the people who run around today with
the word 'folkish' on their caps and how many have their own interpretation of
this concept. A Bavarian professor by the name of Bayer,l a famous fighter with
spiritual weapons, rich in equally spiritual marches on Berlin, thinks that the
concept folkish consists only in a monarchistic attitude. This learned mind,
however, has thus far forgotten to give a closer explanation of the identity of
our German monarchs of the past with the folkish opinion of today. And I fear
that in this the gentleman would not easily succeed. For anything less folkish
than most of the Germanic monarchic state formations can hardly be imagined. If
this were not so, they would never have disappeared, or their disappearance
would offer proof of the unsoundness of the folkish outlook.
And so everyone shoots off his mouth about this concept
as he happens to understand it. As a basis for a movement of political
struggle, such a multiplicity of opinions is out of the question.
I shall not even speak of the unworldliness of these
folkish Saint Johns of the twentieth century or their ignorance of the popular
soul. It is sufliciently illustrated by the ridicule with which they are
treated by the Left, which lets them talk and iaughs at them.
Anyone in this world who does not succeed in being hated
by his adversaries does not seem to me to be worth much as a friend. And thus
the friendship of these people for our young movement was not only worthless,
but solely and always harmful, and it was also the main reason why, first of
all, we chose the name of 'party'-we had grounds for hoping that by this alone
a whole swarm of these folkish sleepwalkers would be frightened away from
us-and why in the second place we termed ourselves National Socialist German
Workers' Party.
The first expression kept away the antiquity enthusiasts,
the big-mouths and superficial proverb-makers of the so-called folkish idea,'
and the second freed us from the entire host of knights of the 'spiritual
sword,' all the poor wretches who wield the 'spiritual weapon' as a protecting
shield to hide their actual cowardice.
It goes without saying that in the following period we
were attacked hardest especially by these last, not actively, of course, but
only with the pen, just as you would expect from such folkish goose-quills. For
them our principle, 'Against those who attack us with force we will defend
ourselves with force,' had something terrifying about it. They persistently
reproached us, not only with brutal worship of the blackjack, but with lack of
spirit as such. The fact that in a public meeting a Demosthenes can be brought
to silence if only fifty idiots, supported by their voices and their fists,
refuse to let him speak, makes no impression whatever on such a quack. His
inborn cowardice never lets him get into such danger. For he does not work
'noisily' and 'obtrusively,' but in 'silence.'
Even today r cannot warn our young movement enough against
falling into the net of these so-called 'silent workers.' They are not only
cowards, but they are also always incompetents and do-nothings. A man who knows
a thing, who is aware of a given danger, and sees the possibility of a remedy
with his own eyes, has the duty and obligation, by God, not to work 'silently,'
but to stand up before the whole public against the evil and for its cure. If
he does not do so, he is a disloyal, miserable weakling who fails either from
cowardice or from laziness and inability. To be sure, this does not apply at
all to most of these people, for they know absolutely nothing, but behave as
though they knew God knows what; they can do nothing but try to swindle the
whole world with their tricks; they are lazy, but with the 'silent' work they
claim to do, they arouse the impression of an enormous and conscientious
activity; in short, they are swindlers, political crooks who hate the honest
work of others. As soon as one of these folkish moths praises the darkness 1 of
silence, we can bet a thousand to one that by it he produces nothing, but
steals, steals from the fruits of other people's work.
To top all this,
there is the arrogance and conceited effrontery with which this lazy,
light-shunning rabble fall upon the work of others, trying to criticize it from
above, thus in reality aiding the mortal enemies of our nationality.
Every
last agitator who possesses the courage to stand on a tavern table among his
adversaries, to defend his opinions with manly forthrightness, does more than a
thousand of these lying, treacherous sneaks. He will surely- be able to convert
one man or another and win him for the movement. It will be possible to examine
his achievement and establish the effect of his activity by its results. Only
the cowardly swindlers who praise their 'silent' work and thus wrap themselves
in the protective cloak of a despicable anonymity, are good for nothing and may
in the truest sense of the word be considered drones in the resurrection of
ourpeople.
# #
At the beginning of 1920, I urged the holding of the
first great mass meeting. Differences of opinion arose. A few leading party
members regarded the affair as premature and hence disastrous in effect. The
Red press had begun to concern itself with us and we were fortunate enough
gradually to achieve its hatred. We had begun to speak in the discussions at
other meetings. Of course, each of us was at once shouted down. There was,
however, some success. People got to know us and proportionately as their
knowledge of us deepened, the aversion and rage against us grew. And thus we
were entitled to hope that in our first great mass meeting we would be visited
by a good many of our friends from the Red camp.
I, too, realized that there was great probability of the
meeting being broken up. But the struggle had to be carried through, if not
now, a few months later. It was entirely in our power to make the movement
eternal on the very first day by blindly and ruthlessly fighting for it. I knew
above all the mentality of the adherents of the Red side far too well, not to
know that resistance to the utmost not only makes the biggest impression, but
also wins supporters. And so we just had to be resolved to put up this
resistance.
Herr Harrer,l then first chairman of the party, felt he
could not support my views with regard to the time chosen and consequently,
being an honest, upright man, he withdrew from the leadership of the party. His
place was taken by Herr Anton Drexler. I had reserved for myself the
organization of propaganda and began ruthlessly to carry it out.
And so, the date of February 4, 19202 was set for the
holding of this first great mass meeting of the still unknown movement.
I
personally conducted the preparations. They were very brief. Altogether the
whole apparatus was adjusted to make lightning decisions. Its aim was to enable
us to take a position on current questions in the form of mass meetings within
twenty-four hours. They were to be announced by posters and leaflets whose
content was determined according to those guiding principles which in rough
outlines I have set down in my treatise on propaganda. Effect on the broad
masses, concentration on a few points, constant repetition of the same,
self-assured and self-reliant framing of the text in the forms of an apodictic
statement, greatest perseverance in distribution and patience in awaiting the
effect.
On principle, the color red was chosen; it is the most exciting; we
knew it would infuriate and provoke our adversaries the most and thus bring us
to their attention and memory whether they liked it or not.
In the following period the inner fraternization in
Bavaria between the Marxists and the Center as a political party was most
clearly shown in the concern with which the ruling Bavarian People's Party
tried to weaken the effect of our posters on the Red working masses and later
to prohibit them. If the police found no other way to proceed against them,
'considerations of traffic' had to do the trick, till finally, to please the
inner, silent Red ally, these posters, which had given back hundreds of
thousands of workers, incited and seduced by internationalism, to their German
nationality, were forbidden entirely with the helping hand of a so-called
German National People's Party. As an appendix and example to our young
movement, I am adding a number of these proclamations. They come from a period
embracing nearly three years; they can best illustrate the mighty struggle
which the young movement fought at this time. They will also bear witness to
posterity of the will and honesty of our convictions and the despotism of the
so-called national authorities in prohibiting, just because they personally
found it uncomfortable, a nationalization which would have won back broad
masses of our nationality.
They will also help to destroy the opinion that there had
been a national government as such in Bavaria and also document for posterity
the fact that the national Bavaria of 1919, 1920, 1921 1922, 1923 was not
forsooth the result of a national government, but that the government was
merely forced to take consideration of a people that was gradually feeling
national
The governments themselves did everything to eliminate this process
of recovery and to make it impossible.
Here only two men must be excluded:
Ernst Pohner, the police president at that tirne, and
Chief Deputy frick his faithful advisor, were the only higher state officials
who even then had the courage to be first Germans and then officials. Ernst
Pohner was the only man in a responsible post who did not curry favor with the
masses, but felt responsible to his nationality and was ready to risk and
sacrifice everything, even if necessary his personal existence, for the
resurrection of the German people whom he loved above all things. And for this
reason he was always a troublesome thorn in the eyes of those venal officials
the law of whose actions was prescribed, not by the interest of their people
and the necessary uprising for its freedom, but by the boss's orders, without
regard for the welfare of the national trust confided in them.
And above all he was one of those natures who,
contrasting with most of the guardians of our so-called state authority, do not
fear the enmity of traitors to the people and the nation, but long for it as
for a treasure which a decent man must take for granted. The hatred of Jews and
Marxists, their whole campaign of lies and slander, were for him the sole
happiness amid the misery of our people.
A man of granite honesty, of
antique simplicity and German straightforwardness, for whom the words 'Sooner
dead than a slave ' were no phrase but the essence of his whole being.
He
and his collaborator, Dr. Frick, are in my eyes the only men in a state
position who possess the right to be called cocreators of a national
Bavaria.
Before we proceeded to hold our first mass meeting, not only did the
necessary propaganda material have to be made ready, but the main points of the
program also had to be put into print.
In the second volume I shall thoroughly develop the
guiding principles which we had in mind, particularly in framing the program.
Here I shall only state that it was done, not only to give the young movement
form and content, but to make its aims understandable to the broad
masses.
Circles of the so-called intelligentsia have mocked and ridiculed
this and attempted to criticize it. But the soundness of our point of view at
that time has been shown by the effectiveness of this program.
In these years I have seen dozens of new movements arise
and thev have all vanished and evaporated without trace. A single one remains:
The National Socialist German Workers' Party. And today more than ever I harbor
the conviction that people can combat it, that they can attempt to paralyze it,
that petty party ministers can forbid us to speak and write, but that they will
never prevent the victory of our ideas.
When not even memory will reveal the names of the entire
present-day state conception and its advocates, the fundamentals of the
National Socialist program will be the foundations of a coming state.
Our four months' activities at meetings up to January, 1920, had
slowly enabled us to save up the small means that we needed for printing our
first leaflet, our first poster, and our program.
If I take the movement's first large mass meeting as the
conclusion of this volume, it is because by it the party burst the narrow bonds
of a small club and for the first time exerted a determining infiuence on the
mightiest factor of our tirne, public opinion.
I myself at that time had but one concern: Will the hall
be filled, or will we speak to a yawning hall? 1 I had the unshakable l inner
conviction that if the people came, the day was sure to be a great success for
the young movement. And so I anxiously looked forward to that evening.
The meeting was to be opened at 7:30. At 7:15 I entered the Festsaal
of the Hofbrauhaus on the Platzl in Munich, and my heart nearly burst for joy.
The gigantic hall-for at that time it still seemed to me gigantic-was
overcrowded with people, shoulder to shoulder, a mass numbering almost two
thousand people. And above all-those people to whom we wanted to appeal had
come. Far more than half the hall seemed to be occupied by Communists and
Independents. They had resolved that our first demonstration would come to a
speedy end.
But it turned out differently. After the first speaker had
finished, I took the floor. A few minutes later there was a hail of shouts,
there were violent dashes in the hall, a handful of the most faithful war
comrades and other supporters battled with the disturbers, and only little by
little were able to restore order.
I was able to go on speaking. After half an hour the
applause slowly began to drown out the screaming and shouting.
I now took up the program and began to explain it for the
first time.
From minute to minute the interruptions were increasingly
drowned out by shouts of applause. And when I finally submitted the twenty-five
theses, point for point, to the masses and asked them personally to pronounce
judgment on them, one after another was accepted with steadily mounting joy,
unanimously and again unanimously, and when the last thesis had found its way
to the heart of the masses, there stood before me a hall full of people united
by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will.
When after nearly four hours the hall began to empty and
the crowd, shoulder to shoulder, began to move, shove, press toward the exit
like a slow stream, I knew that now the principles of a movement which could no
longer be forgotten were moving out among the German people.
A fire was
kindled from whose flame one day the sword must come which would regain freedom
for the Germanic Siegfried and life for the German nation.
And side by side with the coming resurrection, I sensed
that the goddess of inexorable vengeance for the perjured deed of November 9,
1919, was striding forth.
Thus slowly the hall emptied.
The movement took its course.