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:
Lowering of the level of the higher race;
Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.
To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else 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:
A German State of the
German Nation
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.