ADOLF HITLER MEIN KAMPF Complete and Unabridged FULLY ANNOTATED EDITORIAL SPONSORS John Chamberlain Sidney B. Fay John Gunther Carlton J. H. Hayes aham Mutton in Johnson iam L Langer Iter Millis ul de Roussy de Sales oige N. Shuster REYNAL A HITCHCOCK 1941 NEW COPYRIGHT, IQ39. BY HOUGBTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM COPYRIGHT, Ip2S, BY VERLAG FRZ. EHER NACHF. G.m.D.H. COPYRIGHT, Z927. BY VERLAG FRZ. EHER NACHF. G.m.b.H. This Edition is published by ar- rangement with Hough ton Mifflin Company, Boston, Massachusetts. NINETEENTH PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. PUBLISHERS' NOTE BOTH the international situation and certain pub- lishing exigencies have dictated the preparation of this book at a far higher rate of speed than we should have liked. We wished it editorially to be, and we believe it is, a fine, scholarly, genuinely definitive edition of an enormously important book. If small errors have crept in, and we think even those are few and far between, they are due solely to the pressure of time. We cannot possibly thank here by name all those who have assisted in the task. The work could not have been possible without the devoted help of our editorial commit- tee, and notably Dr. Alvin Johnson, who has been a tower of strength in many directions. To Mr. George N. Shuster, who has labored with unwearying effectiveness night and day for many weeks, our debt is incalculable. Mr. Helmut Ripperger, on whom a heavy burden has fallen, and various friends and helpers at the New School for Social Research have likewise given without stint of their time and energy to the translation. Mr. C. H. Hand, Jr., will not like to find himself thus singled out, but we cannot overlook the tribute we owe him for his constant effective aid. Two other special friends of the enterprise who have been of enormous help, but who by their own wish shall be name- less, we none the less wish here to thank anonymously. Finally, to Houghton MifHin Company we wish to extend our hearty salutations. We should never ask for more fair- minded or resourceful collaborators in a publishing enter- prise. E. R. C. N. H. INTRODUCTION THIS is an accurate translation of a book which is likely to remain the most important political tract of our time, and which is now for the first time avail- able in complete form to the American reader. Until now the only version of M ein Kampf in English has been a con- densation of the complete book, published in 1933, con- taining less than half of the total text. The Austrian and Czecho-Slovakian crises of last year, culminating for the moment in the pact of Munich, have awakened the American public as never before to the seriousness to the world and to themselves of the Nazi program, and consequently to the possible significance of every page of the book that can justly be regarded as the Nazi gospel. Here, then, in its entirety, for the American people to read and to judge for themselves, is the work which has sold in Germany by the millions, and which is probably the best written evidence of the character, the mind, and the spirit of Adolf Hitler and his 'government. There are undoubtedly passages of great importance which now appear in English for the first time. For exam- ple, Chapter V of the condensed version left out the whole of what Hitler describes as his wartime reflections on propaganda and on methods for fighting Marxism. We have marked at various points in the text the important new material. Furthermore, any abridgment must neces- sarily fail, in proportion to the degree of its condensa- tion, to give the full flavor of the author's mind. Even the repetitions have their significance in conveying a sense of the character behind them. Mein Kampf is, above all, a book of feeling. vlii INTRODUCTION All this is in no sense a condemnation of the abridgement prepared by E. T. S. Dugdale in England and published under the title My Battle, as in 1933 it seemed most un- likely that any large American public would care to read Mein Kampf as a whole, and for its time and purpose it was undoubtedly adequate. Since then the whole book has as- sumed a more urgent character. The translation here offered is from the first German edi- tion the two volumes respectively of 1925 and 1927, which are now quite difficult to obtain. Continuous refer- ence hks been made, however, to later editions, and any changes of significance have been noted. Such changes are not as extensive as popularly supposed. The reader must bear in mind that Hitler is no artist in literary expression, but a rough-and-ready political pam- phleteer often indifferent to grammar and syntax alike. Departures from normal German form have not been re- produced, since no purpose would be served thereby, but where the demands of a perfectly smooth English style might seem to conflict with exactness of meaning, the original German forms have been followed as literally as possible. We believe the translation cannot be successfully challenged. We turn to our decision to annotate the text. Mein Kampf is frequently a difficult book for the American reader to understand. Few Americans are, in the very nature of things, so aware of the German historical background that they can surmise without help what the author is discuss- ing. What, for example, was meant by 'interest slavery 1 ? And who was Leo Schlageter? In making annotations of this kind, we have tried to adhere to a middle course, as- suming some familiarity with Nazi history, but leaving very recondite information for scholars. Notes of this kind are based almost exclusively on German sources, and we be- Ifeve we can vouch for their accuracy and objectivity. INTRODUCTION 1 Then, too, Mein Kampf is a propagandistic essay by a violent partisan. As such it often warps historical truth and sometimes ignores it completely. We have, therefore, felt it our duty to accompany the text with factual information which constitutes an extensive critique of the original. No American would like to assume responsibility for giving the public a text which, if not tested in the light of diligent inquiry, might convey the impression that Hitler was writ- ing history rather than propaganda. It is more probable, however, that we shall have to face the opposite criticism that we have been too impartial, too objective, too little concerned with rebuttal. To this we should like to reply that truth, the accurate truth, is the only argument which in the long run prevails. One may talk a fact out of exist- ence for a time, but it somehow survives. We are prepared to rest our case as editors on our belief in that ultimate triumph. One point in particular may need emphasis. Large por- tions of Mrin Kampf are devoted to the question of race as a substructure on which to erect an anti-Semitic policy. We have not let these passages go unchallenged, but we have also not felt it necessary to include a discussion of race of our own invention. The greatest anthropologists of the twentieth century are agreed that 'race' is a practically meaningless word. All one can legitimately do, therefore, is to challenge statements of 'race history' as being fig- ments of the imagination, and to point out that they are at bottom more or less subtle ways of supporting still more ab- solute and violent forms of nationalism than even the nine- teenth century knew. In addition we have made specific objections to Hitler's anti-Semitic statements where they contradict known historical facts. A word now concerning the method adopted for the pre- sentation of the notes. As a rule we have put information relative to the sources and origins of National Socialism * INTRODUCTION into the first volume, reserving for the second volume the history of Hitler's rise to power and of German achievement since that time. Departures from this method have been made when a given point seemed explainable in no other way. This arrangement will enable the reader, should he so desire, to read the notes independently of the text itself. Naturally these notes are not designed to form a treatise on Hitlerism, but if they were read together with the books mentioned by name, they should provide a fairly adequate history of the Third Reich* Most of the notes are set in close proximity to the passage to which they refer. In a few instances, however, it seemed important to write at greater length, so that the material appears in the form of an appendix to the chapter in question. The separation be- tween text and commentary is clearly indicated, so that the reader will have no difficulty on that score. In conclusion, what should one expect to learn from Mein Kampf? Read with a clear eye, the book will show what manner of man Der Ftihrer is one who as a boy had nothing excepting a passionate belief that Germany must obtain a larger place in the sun with the help of the sword once wielded so efficiently by Prussian kings; who learned to define to his own satisfaction what groups wanted this kind of Germany, and what other groups were indifferent or opposed to that ideal ; who after the War gathered round him all those who refused to concede that defeat neces- sarily meant the end of German expansion; and who, finally, with their help, got control of the government and then set out to mobilize the whole nation for a new advance. Before the War he lived in Austria and felt that the Habsburgs, by making concessions to the Slavic groups in their empire, were putting the German group on a level with others and therefore lessening its willingness to dom- inate. Therefore, he wanted the German group to get rid of the Habsburgs and join forces with the greater Prussian INTRODUCTION id Germany. After the War he felt that the leaders of the Re- public, by seeking to bring about internal reconciliation and by making concessions to the Allies, were doing exactly what the old Habsburgs had done, excepting that this time it was not Austrian Germany but the holy of holies, Prussia itself, that was being weakened. To those who said that it was war which had sapped the substance of Germany, and that another war would end European civilization, he re- plied that it was only 'eternal peace' which destroyed peo- ples and that neither the individual nor society could escape Nature's decree that the fittest alone survive. Yet this simple philosophy is by no means the whole Hitler. He has added to it the moving force which, re- vealed both in his struggle for power and in his use of that power since 1933, is the most startling phenomenon of our time. Only the leaders of the Mohammedan, French, and Russian revolutions have aroused a comparable driving power, and at present it dominates Europe. The forces in opposition have lacked the clearness of plan, the unity of motive, the certainty of conviction, needed to make their cause prevail. The engines of industry now spin round in trepidation, and the engines of war are piled giddily in higher and higher pyramids. Already in Europe, the last are all that really count the others work to create an illusion and to help meet the staggering costs. There is no stopping them until there are in the world ideas or ideals which are stronger than that contained in Mein Kampf. It is our profound conviction that as soon as enough people have seen through this book, lived with it until the facts they behold are so startlingly vivid that all else is obscure by comparison, the tide will begin to turn. We have all of us the deepest regard for the German peo- ple. Some of us have given a good deal of time and energy to the study of just German demands and to the fostering xii INTRODUCTION of better understanding of the German tradition. None of us has abandoned the sincere belief that Germany is des- tined to be a great and cherished member of the family of peoples. So we have elected to set down without malice, yet with all the truth we can muster, the record as we see it. JOHN CHAMBERLAIN SIDNEY B. FAY JOHN GUNTHER CARLTON J. H. HAYES GRAHAM HUTTON ALVIN JOHNSON t WILLIAM L. LANGER WALTER MILLIS R. DE ROUSSY DE SALES GEORGE N. SHUSTER DEDICATION ON NOVEMBER 9, 1923, at 12.30 in the afternoon, in front of the Feldherrnhalle as well as in the courtyard of the former War Ministry, the following men, steadfast in their belief in the resurrection of their people, were killed : ALFARTH, Felix, businessman, b. July 5, 1901 BAURIEDL, Andreas, hatter, b. May 4, 1879 CASELLA, Theodor, bank employee, b. August 8, 1900 EHRLICH, Wilhelm, bank employee, b. August 19, 1894 FAUST, Martin, bank employee, b. January 27, 1901 HECHENBERGER, Anton, locksmith, b. September 28,; 1902 KOERNER, Oskar, businessman, b. January 4, 1875 KUHN, Karl, headwaiter, b. July 26, 1897 LAFORCE, Karl, student of Engineering, b. October 28, 1904 NEUBAUER, Kurt, valet, b. March 27, 1899 PAPE, Claus von, businessman, b. August 16, 1904 PFORDTEN, Theodor von der, County Court Council- lor, b. May 14, 1873 RICKMERS, Johann, retired Cavalry Captain, b. May 7, 1881 ScHEUBNER-RicHTER, Max Erwin von, Doctor of Engineering, b. January 9, 1884 STRANSKY, Lorenz Ritter von, Engineer, b. March 14, 1889 WOLF, Wilhelm, businessman, b. October 19, 1898 So-called national authorities denied these dead heroes a common grave. Therefore I dedicate to them, for common memory, the first volume of this work, as the blood witnesses of which they may continue to serve as a brilliant example for the followers of our movement. ADOLF HITLER LANDSBBRG ON THE LECH PRISON OF THE FORTRESS October 16, 1924 PREFACE ON APRIL I, 1924, because of the sentence handed down by the People's Court of Munich, I had to begin that day, serving my term in the fortress at Landsberg on the Lech. Thus, after years of uninterrupted work, I was afforded for the first time an opportunity to embark on a task insisted upon by many and felt to be serviceable to the movement by myself. Therefore, I resolved not only to set forth, in two volumes, the object of our movement, but also to draw a picture of its development. From this more can be learned than from any purely doctrinary treatise. That also gave me the opportunity to describe my own development, as far as this is necessary for the understand- ing of the first as well as the second volume, and which may serve to destroy the evil legends created about my person by the Jewish press. With this work I do not address myself to strangers, but to those adherents of the movement who belong to it with their hearts and whose reason now seeks a more intimate enlightenment. I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers. Nevertheless, the basic elements of a doctrine must be set down in permanent form in order that it may be repre- sented in the same way and in unity. In this connection these two volumes should serve as building stones which I add to our common work. THE AUTHOR LANDSBERG ON THE LECH PRISON OF THB FORTRESS CONTENTS Volume I PUBLISHERS' NOTE v INTRODUCTION vii DEDICATION xiii PREFACE xv Chapter I AT HOME 3 The Young Ringleader 7 Enthusiasm for War 8 Drawing Talent IO Never State Official 12 But Painter 13 The Young Nationalist 15 The German Ostmark 15 The Fight for the German Nationality 16 History Lessons 1 8 History Favorite Subject 2O The Habsburgs' Policy of Slavization 21 The Young Wagnerian 23 Father's Death ' 24 Mother's Passing Away 25 Chapter II YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING IN VIENNA ... 26 An Architect's Ability 27 Five Years of Misery 29 Th Genius of Youth 30 Unsocial Vienna 31 The Contrasts 32 The Unskilled Worker 34 xviil CONTENTS The Uncertainty of Making a Living 35 The Worker's Fate 36 The Perpetual Mirage of Hunger 37 Unfortunate Victims of Bad Social Conditions 37 The Nature of Social Activity 39 The Lack of ' National Pride ' 41 The Rats of Political Poisoning 42 Martyrdom of the Worker's Child 43 The Presupposition for - Nationalization ' 44 Arduous Study 44 The Art of Reading 46-49 Social Democracy 50 First Encounter with Social Democrats 5I~53 The Red Terror 53 The Social Democrat Press 54 The Psyche of the Masses 56 Tactics of Marxism 58 The Victims of the Red Tempters 59 The Sins of the Bourgeoisie 59 The Necessity of Union Activity 60 The Struggle for Power 62 Politization of the Unions 63 The Threatening Thundercloud 64 The Key to Social Democracy 66 The Jewish Question 66 The So-called World Press 68 Criticism of Kaiser Wilhelm II 70 The Greatest German Mayor 72 Is This Also a Jew? 73 The Zionists 74 The Spiritual Pestilence of Jewry 76 The Cunning of the 'World Press' 77 The Manager of Vice 78 The Jew as Leader of Social Democracy 78-~79 Jewish Dialectics 8 1 The Cosmopolite Changes into a Fanatical Anti- Semite 83 Marxism and Nature 84 CONTENTS xlx Chapter III GENERAL POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS FROM MY TIME IN VIENNA 85 The Politician 86 Political Thinking 87 Vienna's Last Rise 88 Germanity in Austria 89 Centrifugal Forces 96 The Tragic Guilt of the Habsburge 93 The Revolution of 1848 94 The Historical Liquidation of the Danube Monarchy 94 Parliamentarianism 95 The Soil of the Marxist World Plague 99 Lack of Responsibility IOO The Leader and the Masses IO2 The Incompetents and the Babblers IO2 Hiding Behind the Majority 103 Lined up in a Queue 105 The Parliamentarian Profiteers 106 4 Public Opinion' 108 The Machine for Educating the Masses 108 The Cuttlefish I IO The Will of the Majority 1 12 The Intellectual Demi-monde 1 14 The Gist of the Matter 115 Germanic Democracy 1 1 6 The Collapsing Dual Monarchy 119 The Pan -German Movement I2O The Dreams of the Forefathers 121 The Rebellion of the German- Austrians 121 Human Rights Breaks State Rights 123 The Merit of the Pan-Germans in Austria 124 Schoenerer and Lueger 125-129 Pacifism of the German Bourgeoisie 130 The Fight Against Parliamentarism 132 Parliament and Peoples' Assembly 133 'Parliamentarians' Instead of Leaders 135 xx CONTENTS The Magic of the Word 136 The Power of Speech 137 Mistakes of the Pan-German Movement 138 Religion and Politics 139 The Los-von-Rom Movement 140-152 Concentration 152 The Way of the Christian Social Party 153 A Splash of Baptismal Water 154 The Christian -Social Sham Anti-Semitism 156 Pan-German and Christian-Social 158 Rising Aversion Against the Habsburg State 159 The Old Mosaic Picture 1 60 The School of my Life 161-162 Chapter IV MUNICH 163 Germany's Wrong Policy of Alliance 164 The Jugglery of the Triple Alliance 165 The Bearers of the Idea of the Alliance 1 66 Insane Attitude 167 The Four Ways of German Politics 169-179 Pyramids Standing on their Points 180 With England Against Russia 183 The Dream of World-Peace 185 With Russia Against England 1 88 4 Peaceful Economic ' Conquest The Greatest Folly 1 88 The Englishman as Seen by the German Cartoonist 189 The Inner Weakness of the Triple Alliance 190 Ludendorff on the Weakness of the Triple Alliance 192 The Jewish-Socialist War-Agitators Against Russia 193 The Tempting Legacy 193 Warnings from German Conservatives 194 The Nature of the State 195-201 Symptoms of Decay 201 The Years of Destruction 2OI Prattling Quackery 203 CONTENTS xxi Chapter V THB WORLD WAR 204 The Impending Catastrophe 205 The Slav's Greatest Friend is Murdered 206 Austria's Ultimatum 206 The German Nation's Existence or Non-existence 207 The Meaning of the Struggle for Freedom 210 Joining a Bavarian Regiment 212 The Baptism of Fire 213 A Monument to Immortality 216 The Parliamentarian Prattlers 216 Drops of Wormwood in the General Enthusiasm 217 Misunderstood Marxism 2l8 What Was to be Done Now? 220 The Use of Force 221 Perseverance 222 The Attack Against the View of Life 223 The Same Rubbish 224 The Great Gap 225 Chapter VI WAR PROPAGANDA 227 Propaganda a Means 228 The Purpose of Propaganda 229 Propaganda Only for the Masses 230 The Task of Propaganda 231-232 The Psychology of Propaganda 233 The Consequence of Half Measures 236 German Mania of Objectivity 237 Pacifistic Dishwater 238 Propaganda for the Masses 239 The Enemy's Propaganda 240 CONTENTS Chapter VII THE REVOLUTION 243 The Enemy's First Leaflets 245 Lamenting Letters from Home 246 The Poison on the Front 246 Wounded 247 Boasting of One's Own Cowardice 248 The Duty-Shirkers 249 The Most Ingenious Trick of the Jew 252 The Ammunition Strike The Greatest Villainy 253 Russia's Collapse 256-257 The 'German ' Revolution Awaited Its Entry 258 The Result of the Ammunition Strike 258 The Front and the Political Rascals 260 Increase of the Decay 262 The Younger Reinforcements Fail 264 Poisoned by Mustard Gas 264 'Republic' 266 In Vain all the Sacrifices 267 Wretched and Miserable Criminals! 268 Scoundrels Are Without Honor 269 Chapter VIII BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITY . . . .277 Social Revolutionary Party 280-281 Gottfried Feder 282 The Task of the Program-Maker 283 Program-Maker and Politician 284 The Marathon Runners of History 286 Breaking of the Tyranny of Interest 287 The ' Instruction Officer ' 289-290 CONTENTS xxlii Chapter IX THB 'GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY' 291 'My Political Awakening* 296 The Board Meeting in the 'Alte Rosenbad 9 297-298 The So-called ' Intelligentsia ' 300 The Seventh Member 301 Chapter X THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 302 Premonitory Symptoms of Collapse 3O3~~34 The Great Lie 306 The Culprits of the Collapse 307 Do Nations Perish by Lost Wars? 308 Among the Germans Every Third Man a Traitor 311 The Great Masters of Lying 313 Diseases of National Bodies 314 The Signs of Decay 315 The Idol of Mammon 316 Labor as the Object of Speculation 319 Half Measures One of the Most Evil Symptoms of Decay 322 The Gravediggers of the Monarchy 323 The Meaning of the Monarchy 324 The Cowards of 1918 326 Cowardice Towards Responsibility 327 Three Groups of Readers 328 The Pretended 'Freedom of the Press* 330 Mass Poisoning of the Nation 330 Tactics of the Jewish Press 331 The Result of Our Semi- Education 334 The ' Decent ' Press 335 Syphilis 336 The Miserable Products of Financial Expediency 337 The ' Defining of Attitude ' 338 CONTENTS The Sin Against the Blood and the Degradation of the Race 339 The Task of the Nation 341 Prostitution A Disgrace to Mankind 342 Marriage Not an End in Itself 343 Education of Youth 345~346 Premature and Prematurely Old 348 One of the Most Colossal Tasks 349 The 'Protective Paragraph* 350 The Energy for the Fight for Health 351 The Bolshevism of Art 352 The Decay of the Theater 355 The Tainting of the Great Past 356 Meaning and Purpose of Revolutions 358 Intellectual Preparation for Political Bolshevism 359 'Inner Experience* 360 'Human Settlements' 360 Monuments of the Community 362 Department Store and Hotel Characteristic Ex- pression of Culture 363 The Religious Situation 364 Organic State Laws and Dogmas 366 Political Abuse of Religion 367 Without Political Aims 368 The Failure of Parliamentarism 369 Half-hearted Solutions 370 The Lie of the German ' Militarism ' 374 The 'Idea of Risk' 376 The Parliamentarian Head, the Misfortune of the Navy 377 Villains, Scoundrels, Rascals, and Criminals 378 The German Advantages 380 Parade and Public Kitchen 381 The Stability of the State Authority 382 The Greatest Factor of Value The Army 383 The Greatest School of the German Nation 384 The Incomparable Body of Officials 386 The State Authority 387 The Ultimate Cause of the Collapse 388 CONTENTS xxv Chapter XI NATION AND RACE 389 The Race 390-391 The Result of All Race-crossing 392 Man and Idea 394 Race and Culture 396 Life is a Struggle 397 Founders of Culture 398 The Mirror of the Past 400 The Ingenious Race 402 The Aryan is the Bearer of Cultural Development 404 The Loss of the Purity of the Blood 406 The Aryan's Will to Sacrifice Himself 407 Purest Idealism Deepest Knowledge 41 1 The Aryan and the Jew 412 The 'Clever' Jew 412 Jewry's Instinct of Self-Preservation 414 Judaism's Sham Culture 416 The Jewish Ape 417 The Parasite 419 The First Great Lie 421 The Jewish Religion 422 Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion 423 The Development of Judaism 425 The Final Goal of Judaism 435 The ' Factory Worker ' 436 Employer and Employee 438 The Tactics of Judaism 440 The Nucleus of the 'Marxist* View of Life 441 The Organization of the Marxist World Doctrine 443 The Central Organization of International World Cheating 447 Dictatorship of the Proletariat 449 The Great, Final Revolution 450 Bastardized Nations 452 The Sham Prosperity of the Old Reich 453 A Germanic State of the German Nation 457 xx* CONTENTS Chapter XII THE FIRST PERIOD IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NA- TIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY 456 A People Tom in Two Parts 457 The Lacking Will for Self -Preservation 459 The Winning of the Broad Masses 461 The Weak Momentum 462 The Best Property of the Nation 463 The Nationalization of the Masses 464 The Demands for This 465 The Smashing of Parliamentarianism 479 The Ingenious Idea 481 The Organization of the National Socialist Movement 482 Fanaticism 486 The Honorary Scar 488 Personality Cannot be Substituted 488 The Eternal Hands 489 The Speech Evening 490 The First Meeting 491 The First Success 492 Fight Against the Red Terror 494 The Second Meeting 495 The Shaping of the Young Movement 496 German Folkish Wandering Scholars 498 Folkish Comedians 499 'Folkish' 501 Spiritual Marches Against Berlin 502 The ' Spiritual Weapon ' 503 Folkish Moths 504 The First Great Mass Meeting 505 Fraternization Between Marxism and Center 507 Pfchner and Frick , 58 The Foundations of the Coming State 5IO The Victory of the First Great Demonstration 512 The Coming Rise 515 POSTER APPENDIX 517 CONTENTS xxvii Velum* II Chapter I VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 563 Bourgeois 'Program Committees' 564 From the Life of a 'People's Representative' 565 Marxism and Democratic Principle $68 View of Life Against View of Life 570 The Conception ' Folkish ' 573 From Religious Feeling to Apodictic Belief 575 From 'Folkish ' Feeling to Political Creed 576 From Creed to Community of Struggle 57^ Marxism Against Race and Personality 579 Folkish Attitude Towards Race and Personality 579 The Challenge of the Free Play of Forces 581 Condensation in the Party 582 Crystallization of a Political Creed 583 Chapter II THB STATE 584 Three Reigning Conceptions of the State 585-587 False Notion of ' Germanization ' 588 Only Land Can Be Germanized 591 The State No End in Itself 592 Cultural Level Conditioned by Race 593 National Socialist Conception of the State 594 Viewpoints for Judging the State 596 Consequences of Our Racial Dismemberment 598 Mission of the German People 600 Task of the German State 6oi World History is Made by Minorities 603 The Bastard Must Succumb 604 Natural Process of Regeneration of the Race 605 Danger of Race-Mixing 606 xxviil CONTENTS 'Folkish ' State and Race Hygiene 608 Race-pure Border Colonies 6lO Call to German Youth 6ll The Bourgeoisie's Lack of Energy 6l2 Healthy Body Healthy Spirit 614 Educational Maxims of the ' Folkish ' State 615 The Value of Sports 616 Suggestive Force of Self -Confidence 618 Suggestive Force of United Action 618 Control Between School Age and Military Service Age 619 The Army as Final and Highest School 620 Character Formation 621 Education in Discretion 622 Cultivation of Will Power and Determination 623 Fostering Readiness for Responsibility 625 Principles of Scientific Schooling 626 No Overburdening of the Brain 626 Principles of Language Instruction 627 Principles of History Instruction 628 General Training Professional Training 630 Value of Humanistic Training 631 Current 'Patriotic* Education 632 Inspiring Force of Great Models 633 Awakening National Pride 633 Fear of Chauvinism is Impotence 636 Inculcation of a Racial Sense 636 Human Selection 637 Capability and Learning 638 Training Prodigies 640 State Selection of the Qualified 640 The Catholic Church's Link with the People 643 Appraisal of Work 645 Grading of Services 649 Ideal and Reality 650 CONTENTS mi* Chapter III SUBJECTS AND CITIZENS OF THE STATE .... 656 How One Becomes a Citizen Today 657 Citizens State Subjects Aliens 658 The State Citizen Master of the Reich 659 Chapter IV PERSONALITY AND THE CONCEPTION OF THE NATIONAL STATE 660 Construction on Aristocratic Principle 66 1 Rise of Human Culture 662 Personality and Progress of Culture 663 Value of Personality 664 The Majority Principle 666 Marxism Denies Personality 666 Marxism is Uncreative 668 The Best State Constitution 669 Advisory Chambers Responsible Leaders 670 Towards the Future State 672 Chapter V VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 673 Struggle and Criticism 674 Views of Life are Intolerant 676 Parties Seek Compromises 676 Community on the Basis of New View of Life 677 Leadership and Following- 678 Necessity of Guiding Principles 680 Formulation of Guiding Principles 68 1 Stability of Program 682 Spirit, Not Letter, Decides 683 National Socialism and Folkish Idea 684 THe Sham Folkish 685 xxx CONTENTS Chapter VI THE STRUGGLE OF THE EARLY DAYS THE SIGNIFI- CANCE OF THE SPOKEN WORD 695 Struggle Against Poisoning Propaganda 696 Against the Current 699 Politics at Far Sight 700 Oratorical Experiences 701 Enlightenment on the Peace Treaties 702 Speech More Effective than Writing 704 Psychological Aspects of Oratory 704 Oratory and Writing in the Service of Agitation 705 Psychological Conditions of Oratorical Effectiveness 709 Orators and Revolution 711 Printed Speech Disappoints 712 Bethmann and Lloyd George as Orators 712 Necessity of Mass Meetings 715 Significance of Community Feeling 715 Orators Who Break Down 716 Chapter VII THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT . . . 717 Bourgeois ' Mass Meetings ' 718 National Socialist Mass Meetings 720 The Equivocal Red Posters 721 Vacillating Tactics of the Marxists 723 Opponents Make Us Known 723 Law-Breaking Police Procedure 724 Psychologically Correct Rally Management 725 Marxist Rally Technique 726 Bourgeois Rally Technique 727 National Socialist Order Troops 729 Significance of the Unified Symbol 730 Old and New Black-Red-Gold 731 Old and New Reich Flag 733 The National Socialist Flag 734 CONTENTS xxxi Interpretation of the National Socialist Symbol 736 The First Circus Rally 739 Rally After Rally 743 Futile Attempts at Disruption 746 The Meeting Continues 749 Chapter VIII THE STRONG MAN is MIGHTIEST ALONE . . . 750 Right of Priority in a Movement 751 The Struggle for Leadership 753 Austria and Prussia 754 Causes of Folkish Dismemberment 757 The Formation of Joint Efforts 758 The Essence of Joint Efforts 760 The Collapse of Joint Efforts 762 Chapter IX FUNDAMENTAL THOUGHTS ON THE MEANING AND THE ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOPS 764 The Three Pillars of Authority 764 The Three Classes of Folk Bodies 766 The Sacrifice of the Best 767 The Hyperfecundity of the Bad 768 Resulting Disorganization 770 Founding of the Free Corps 771 Misplaced Leniency to Deserters 773 Deserters and Revolution 773 Fear of the Front Soldiers 775 Collaboration of Left Parties 776 The Capture of the Bourgeois 777 Capitulation of the Bourgeois 779 Why Did the Revolution Succeed? 780 Passivity of the State Guardians 781 Capitulation to Marxism 782 xx*K CONTENTS Breakdown of the National Parties 783 Without an Idea, No Force for Struggle 784 Advocacy of the Folkish Idea 786 Need for Guard Troops 787 Guarding the Nation, Not the State 790 Self-Protection, Not 'Defense League' 791 Why No Defense Leagues 792 Impossibility of Proper Drilling 793 Counter-Tendency of the State 795 The Sacrifice of Our Army 796 No Secret Organizations 797 The Danger of Secret Organizations 798 Shall Traitors be ' Eliminated ' ? 800 Sport Training of the S.A. 801 Designation and Publicity 802 First Parade in Munich 805 The March to Coburg 806 The Reception in Coburg 806 Red Demonstration 807 The S.A. Stands the Test as a Vital Organization of Struggle 809 The End of 1923 810 Chapter X FEDERALISM AS A MASK 816 War Associations and Anti-Prussian Sentiment 817 Anti- Prussian Agitation as a Diversion Maneuver 818 Kurt Eisner, 'Bavarian Particularist ' 819 My Struggle Against the Anti-Prussian Incitement 820 1 Federative Activity ' 822 Jewish Incitement Tactic 823 Anti-Semitism and Defense 824 The Jew Creates Confessional Conflict 825 The Curse of Religious Wars 826 Necessity for Agreement 827 Struggle Against the 'Center 1 828 CONTENTS xxxiii Federal or Unified State? 830 The Gentian Federal State 831 Bismarck's Creation 832 The Revolution and the Federal State 833 The Policy of Redemption and the Forfeiture of the Federal States' Sovereignty 834 Results of Reich Foreign Policy 836 National State or Slave Colony 837 Unifying Tendencies 838 Abuse of Centralization 839 Oppression of the Individual States 841 Centralization Benefits Party Coffers 841 Reich State Sovereignty 842 Cultural Tasks of the Provinces 842 Unification of the Army 843 One People One State 845 Chapter XI PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 846 Theoretician Organizer Agitator 847 Followers and Members 849 Propaganda and Organization 850 The Power for Struggle of Activistic Selection 853 Limitation on Membership Enrolment 854 Frightening the Half-Hearted 856 Reorganization of the Movement 857 Suspension of 'Parliamentarism* 858 Responsibility of the Chief 859 Principle of the Leader Idea 859 The Embryonic State of the Movement 860 Building the Movement 86l xxxhr CONTENTS Chapter XII THE TRADE-UNION QUESTION 868 Arc Trade Unions Necessary? 870 National Socialist Trade Unions? 871 Future Chambers of Economy 875 Corporation Chambers and Economic Parliament 876 No Dual Unions 877 First the Battle for the View of Life, Later the Libera- tion of the Individual 880 Better no National Socialist Trade Union than a Mis- carriage 882 Chapter XIII GERMAN POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR . . 885 Reasons for the Breakdown 886 The Goal of Foreign Policy: Freedom for Tomorrow 888 Precondition for the Liberation of the Lost Regions 888 Strengthening of Continental Power 892 False Continental Policy Before the War 894 European Relations of Power 894 England and Germany 895 Shifting of the 4 Balance of Power' 896 England's War Aim Unachieved 898 The Hegemony of France 899 Political Aims of France and England 899 On the Possibilities of Alliances 900 Necessity of Community of Interests 901 Is Germany Capable of an Alliance? 903 The Will to Destruction of Jewish Finance 905 Jewish World Incitement Against Germany 906 Adaptation to the Mentalities of Nations 907 Two Possible Allies: England Italy 908 Hobnobbing with France 909 The South Tyrol Question 911 CONTENTS XKXV Frustration of German-Italian Agreement 915 Who Betrayed the South Tyrol 915 Not Armed Force, But the Politics of Alliance 917 Three Questions on the Politics of Alliance 918 The First Symptom of German Rebirth 919 Neglected Exploiting of the Versailles Treaty 920 4 Lord Bless Our Struggle ' 921 Inversion of the Anti-German Psychosis 922 The Will to Liberation Struggle 923 Concentration on One Opponent 925 Settling Accounts with One's Own Traitors 925 War of the Nations Against Jewry 927 England and Jewry 928 Japan and Jewry 929 Jewry, the World Enemy 931 Chapter XIV EASTERN ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY . . 933 Prejudice in Questions of Foreign Policy 934 Significance of the State's Territorial Extensiveness 935 Area and World Power 936 French and German Colonial Policy 937 Out of the Constricted Existence! 939 The Strength of a State is Relative 941 The Fruits of a Millennium of German Policy 941 No Hurrah-Patriotism! 943 The Call to the Old Borders 944 Foreign Poljpy Aim of the National Socialists 947 No Sentimentality in Foreign Policy 948 Germanic Elements in Russia 951 End of Jewish Domination in Russia? 952 Bismarck's Russian Policy 953 The 'League of Oppressed Nations' 954 Is England's Hold on India Shaking? 955 Is England's Hold on the East Shaking? 957 German Alliance with Russia? 957 xxxvi CONTENTS Germany-Russia Before the War 960 A Political Testament 963 Advantages of an Anglo-German-Italian Alliance 964 The Preconditions for an Eastern Policy 965 The National Socialists 966 Chapter XV EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 968 Jewish Leadership of Foreign Policy 970 Seven Years to 1813 Seven Years to Locarno 971 Persecution of Unpleasant Prophets 972 France's Immovable War Aim 974 France's Immovable Political Aim 977 Settlement with France 978 The Occupation of the Ruhr District 979 Foreign and Domestic Political Results of the Ruhr Occupation 979 What Should Have Been Done After the Ruhr Oc- cupation? 981 The Neglected Accounting with Marxism 983 Not Weapons, but Will, Decides! 987 Cuno's Road 987 The 'United Front' 988 Passive Resistance 989 The Position of the National Socialists 990 November 1923 992 Our Dead as Monitors of Duty 993 * CONCLUSION 994 INDEX 995 Volume One AN ACCOUNTING This translation was prepared under the aus- pices of Dr. Alvin Johnson, of The New School for Social Research. The typography of the text of this book follows that of the first German edition. Both italics and bold-faced type are used wherever they occurred in the original. The more important portions of this book, omit- ted from the Dugdale Abridgment or condensed in that version, are indicated by a dagger at the beginning of such passages and by an arrow at the end. CHAPTER I AT HOME FODAY I consider it my good fortune that Fate de- 1 signated Braunau on the Inn as the place of my birth. For this small town is situated on the border between those two German States, the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to be furthered with every means our lives long. German-Austria must return to the great German mo- therland, and not because of economic considerations of any sort. No, no: even if from the economic point of view this union were unimportant, indeed, if it were harmful, it ought nevertheless to be brought about. Common blood be- longs in a common Reich. As long as the German nation is unable even to band together its own children in one com- mon State, it has no moral right to think of colonization as one of its political aims. Only when the boundaries of the Reich include even the last German, only when it is no longer possible to assure him of daily bread inside them, does there arise, out of the distress of the nation, the moral right to acquire foreign soil and territory. The sword is then the plow, and from the tears of war there grows the daily bread for generations to come. Therefore, this little town on the border appears to me the symbol of a great task. But in another respect also it looms up as a warning 4 MEIN KAMPF to our present time. More than a hundred years ago, this insignificant little place had the privilege of gaining an immortal place in German history at least by being the scene of a tragic misfortune that moved the entire nation. There, during the time of the deepest humiliation of our fatherland, Johannes Palm, citizen of Nurnberg, a middle- class bookdealer, die-hard 'nationalist, 1 an enemy of the The idealism of the Wars of Liberation, waged by Prussia against Napoleon, is reflected in the career of Johann Phillip Palm, Nurnberg book-seller, who in 1806 issued a work en- titled, Deutschland in seiner tiefsten Erniedrigung (Germany in the Hour of Its Deepest Humiliation). This was a diatribe against the Corsican. Palm was tried by a military tribunal, sentenced to death, and shot at Braunau on August 26, 1806. During the centenary year (1906) a play in honor of Palm was written by A. Ebenhoch, an Austrian author. It is possible that Hitler may have seen or read this drama. Leo Schlageter, a German artillery officer who served after the World War in the Free Corps with which General von der Goltz attempted to conserve part of what Germany had gained by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was found guilty of sabotage by a French military tribunal during the Ruhr invasion of 1923. He had blown up a portion of the railway line between Dusseldorf and Duisburg, and had been caught in the act. The assertion that he was 'betrayed* to the French is without historical foundation. It was the policy of the German govern- ment to discountenance open military measures and to place its reliance upon so-called 'passive resistance.' Karl Severing, then Social Democratic Minister of the Interior in Prussia, was a zealous though cautious patriot whose firm defense of the democratic institutions of Weimar angered extremists of all kinds. He was thus a favorite Nazi target. The governments oi the Reich and of Prussia made every effort to save Schlageter. The Vatican intervened in his behalf, and it is generally sup- posed that the French authorities would have commuted the sentence had it not been for a sudden wave of opposition to AT HOME 5 French, was killed for the sake of the Germany he ardently loved even in the hour of its distress. He had obstinately refused to denounce his fellow offenders, or rather the chief offenders. Thus he acted like Leo Schlageter. But like him, he too was betrayed to France by a representative of his government. It was a director of the Augsburg police who earned that shoddy glory, thus setting an example for the new German authorities of Heir Severing's Reich, t In this little town on the river Inn, gilded by the light of German martyrdom, there lived, at the end of the eighties of the last century, my parents, Bavarian by blood, Aus- trian by nationality : the father a faithful civil servant, the Poincar6's policy in the Chamber. That induced the govern- ment to make a show of firmness. Schlageter, whose last words are said to have been, 'Germany must live,' was executed on May 26, 1923. Immediately he became a German national hero. His example more than anything else hallowed the tradition of the Free Corps in the popular mind and thus strengthened pro- militaristic sentiment. One of the first cultural activities of the Nazi regime was a tribute to Schlageter. Hitler's family background has been a subject for much re- search and speculation. The father, Alois Hitler (1837-1903), was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber; and it is generally assumed that the father was the man she married Johann Hiedler. Until he was forty, he bore the name of his mother, being known as Alois Schicklgruber. Then on January 8, 1877, he legally changed the name to Hitler, which had been that of his maternal grandmother. His third wife was Klara Poelzl (1860-1908), who on April 20, 1889, gave birth to Adolf Hitler. There may have been a brother or half-brother if reports current in Nazi circles are to be credited. At any rate, Hitler has a living sister and a half-sister. The first has lived in retirement, but the second a woman of considerable charm and ability is known to have exercised no little influence at times. 6 MEIN KAMPF mother devoting herself to the cares of the household and looking after her children with eternally the same loving kindness. I remember only little of this time, for a few years later my father had again to leave the little border town he had learned to like, and go down the Inn to take a new position at Passau, that is in Germany proper. But the lot of an Austrian customs official of those days frequently meant 'moving on.' Just a short time after- wards my father was transferred to Linz, and finally retired on a pension there. But this was not to mean * rest' for the old man. The son of a poor cottager, even in his childhood he had not been able to stay at home. Not yet thirteen years old, the little boy he then was bundled up his things and ran away from his homeland, the Waldviertel. Despite the dissuasion of 'experienced' inhabitants of the village he had gone to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fifties of the last century. A bitter resolve it must have been to take to the road, into the unknown, with only three guilders for traveling money. But by the time the thirteen- year-old lad was seventeen, he had passed his apprentice's examination, but he had not yet found satisfaction. It was rather the opposite. The long time of hardship through which he then passed, of endless poverty and misery, strengthened his resolve to give up the trade after all in order to become something 'better.' If once the village pastor had seemed to the little boy the incarnation of all obtainable human success, now, in the big city which had so widened his perspective, the rank of civil servant became the ideal. With all the tenacity of one who had grown ' old ' through want and sorrow while still half a child, the sev- enteen-year-old youth clung to his decision . . . and became a civil servant. The goal was reached, I believe, after nearly twenty-three years. Now there had been realized the premise of the vow that the poor boy once had sworn, not to return to his dear native village before he had become something. AT HOME 7 Now the goal was reached, but nobody in the village remembered the little boy of long ago, and the village had become a stranger to him. When he retired at the age of fifty-six, he was unable to spend a single day in 'doing nothing.' He bought a farm near Lambach in Upper Austria which he worked himself, thus returning, after a long and active life, to the origin of his ancestors. It was probably at that time that my first ideals were formed. A lot of romping around out-of-doors, the long trip to school, and the companionship with unusually 'ro- bust 1 boys, which at times caused my mother much grief, made me anything but a stay-at-home. Though I did not brood over my future career at that time, I had decidedly no sympathy for the course my father's life had taken. I believe that even then my ability for making speeches was trained by the more or less stirring discussions with my comrades. I had become a little ringleader and at that time learned easily and did very well in school, but for the rest I was rather difficult to handle. Inasmuch as I received singing lessons in my spare time in the choir of the Lambach Convent, I repeatedly had an excellent opportunity of intox- icating myself with the solemn splendor of the magnificent church festivals. It was perfectly natural that the position of abbot appeared to me to be the highest ideal obtainable, just as that of being the village pastor had appealed to my father. At least at times this was the case. For obvious reasons my father could not appreciate the talent for ora- tory of his quarrelsome son in the same measure, nor could he perceive in it any hope for the future of the lad, and so he showed no understanding for these youthful ideas. Sadly he observed this dissension of nature. Actually, my occasional longing for this profession dis- appeared very quickly and made way for aspirations more in keeping with my temperament. Rummaging through MEIN KAMPF my father's library, I stumbled upon various books on mili- tary subjects, and among them I found a popular edition dealing with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. These were two volumes of an illustrated journal of the period which now became my favorite reading matter. Before long that great heroic campaign had become my greatest spiritual experience. From then on I raved more and more about everything connected with war or with militarism. Since Hitler's outlook and policies are rooted in Austrian ex- perience (it is sometimes said that he 'made Germany an Aus- trian's province') some remarks on the general situation in his home land may be helpful. The Austria-Hungary of the last three decades of the nineteenth century was only the remnant of a Habsburg Empire that had once included most of western Europe. It was a 'dual monarchy,' the crown belonging to the monarch as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Since most of Germany had been welded together (1871) by Bis- marck in an empire ruled by the Hohenzollern kings of Prussia, the Germans who remained in Austria-Hungary constituted a minority, even though most of the important bureaucratic positions were still in their hands. The position obtained by Hungary made their lot no easier. For soon every ' nationality ' wished to secure comparable advantages for itself. The monarchy itself had suffered many a reverse. Under Frederick the Great and Bismarck, the Prussians had inflicted several major defeats upon their Austrian rivals. While the revolutionary liberalism of 1848 was successfully put down at the cost of severe fighting, the power of the bureaucratic State was none the less seriously undermined and the eventual triumph of 'constitutionalism* in 1860-61 was assured. In addition the unification of Italy was achieved at the cost of Austrian prestige and possessions. And though the Partition of Poland had added Galicia to the Habsburg domains, it was always doubtful who ruled the province the Poles or the Austrians. Galicia was also the home of large Jewish com- munities, from which strong contingents moved to Vienna and other important cities. AT HOME 9 But this was to prove of importance to me in another direction as well. For the first time the question confronted me I was a bit confused, perhaps if and what differ- ence there was between those Germans fighting these bat- tles and the others. Why was it that Austria had not taken part also in this war, why not my father, and why not all the others? -< Are we not the same as all the other Germans? Do we not all belong together? This problem now began to whirl through my little head for the first time. After cautious questioning, I heard with envy the reply that not every German was fortunate enough to belong to Bis- marck's Reich. This I could not understand. I was to become a student. From 1880 onward, the problem of * nationalities' dominated Austrian life. On the one hand, the Hungarians were concerned lest the Slavic groups Czechs, Croats, Poles, etc. extend their demand for autonomy to the point where the Empire would become a * federation' of States, and therefore made common cause with the Germans on issues affecting the status quo. But a good many Germans, for their part, felt aggrieved at having been excluded from the Bismarckian Empire and saw no future for themselves in a predominantly Slavic State. On the other hand, the Czechs and kindred 'nationalities' con- tinued to urge the idea of a federation, and to insist upon the right to foster their own languages and cultures. The Habs- burg rulers had no choice save recourse to continual compro- mise. In the Austrian parliament common national interests, for example the army, were always being subordinated to hotly debated matters of domestic 'nationality' policy. Doubtless there was no way out except the establishment of a federation. To this idea Franz Ferdinand, the Crown Prince whose murder at Saravejo was the immediate cause of the World War, seems to have committed himself. 10 MEIN KAMPF Because of my entire nature, even more because of my temperament, my father thought he was right in concluding that attendance at the humanistic Gymnasium would not be in keeping with my ability. He thought that the Real- schule [a German secondary school for modern subjects and sciences] seemed more suitable. This opinion was strength- ened by my obvious talent for drawing; this subject, he thought, had been neglected in the Austrian schools. Per- haps his own lifetime of hard work was a decisive factor and made him appreciate humanistic studies to a lesser degree, for to him they appeared impractical. As a matter of prin- ciple, he was determined that like himself his son should, nay must, become an official. It was natural that the bitter experiences of his own youth made his later achievements appear so much greater, especially since they were exclu- Some Germans protested strongly against these tendencies. Nevertheless, the effort to create a party openly favorable to the separation of German Austria from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its merger in the Bismarckian State was far less successful than might have been anticipated. The early Na- tionalists of the iSSo's eventually gave rise to the Grossdeutsch Partei of Hitler's youth, which was violently critical of the Habsburgs and of all concessions made to the Slavs during the years 1879-1900. Perhaps it would have gained more ground if Bismarck had been vitally interested in the problem. But in addition to the dynastic question of the status of the Habsburgs, he had after 1871 to avoid giving the impression that Prussia was an expansion-hungry State. He also realized that the Vienna monarchy was a source of unity in the chaotic south- east of Europe, in the affairs of which he did not wish to involve Germany. Accordingly, the Grossdeutsch people got little sympathy from him. When he was dismissed from his post by Emperor Wilhelm II, the sole group remaining in Germany that could have given much support to the separationist move- ment in German Austria was the AUdeutscher Verband (Pan- AT HOME 11 sively the result of his own industry and energy. It was the pride of the self-made man which moved him to endeavor to bring his son to a similar position in life, if not a better one, and all the more since he hoped to make things easier for the child through his own industry. It was unthinkable that that which had become the con- tent of his whole life could be rejected. Thus the father's decision was matter-of-fact, simple, exact, and clear, quite comprehensibly in his own eyes. His domineering nature, the result of a lifelong struggle for existence, would have thought it unbearable to leave the ultimate decision to a boy who, in his opinion, was inexperienced and irrespon- sible. What is more, this would have been inconsistent with his idea of duty, a wicked and reprehensible weakness in exercising his paternal authority as he saw it in his respon- sibility for the future of his son. German League), an organization of chauvinists and expan- sionists. They, however, looked upon Austria-Hungary as a powerful ally and as a diving-board for the plunge eastward which they looked upon as the German destiny. In Austria itself the Grossdeutsch elements adopted a policy calculated to insure failure. They sponsored a little Kultur- kampf (religious war) of their own, attacking the clergy and the Church; they disassociated themselves from all social re- form and all concessions to other groups; and they were given to rabid attacks on the monarchy. As a consequence, the Ger- man group was more seriously divided than ever. These mis- takes all made, as is evident from the text of Mein Kampf , a deep and lasting impression upon Hitler. Just as he was dis- gusted with the wrangling about 'nationality' problems that characterized the Austrian parliament, so was he conscious of the mistakes which the pro- Prussia leaders had made. He never disassociated himself from the principles adopted by those leaders, but he learned to look askance at their methods. The extent of Austrian yearning for incorporation in the 12 MEIN KAMPF And yet the course of events was to take a different turn. For the first time in my life, I was barely eleven, I was forced into opposition. No matter how firm and deter- mined my father might be in carrying out his plans and intentions once made, his son was just as stubborn and obstinate in rejecting an idea which had little or no appeal for him. I did not want to become an official. Neither persuasion nor ' sincere ' arguments were able to break down this resistance. I did not want to become an official, no, and again no! All attempts to arouse my inter- est or my liking for such a career by stories of my father's life had the opposite effect. The thought of being a slave in an office made me ill ; not to be master of my own time, but to force an entire lifetime into the filling-in of forms, t What ideas this must have awakened in a boy who was anything but ' good ' in the ordinary sense of the word ! The ridiculously easy learning at school left me so much spare German Empire or, after 1918, the German Republic, is a moot question. Prior to the War, anti-Prussian sentiment was probably just as vigorous among the people generally as pro- Habsburg sentiment. After the defeat there was a general feeling that the little independent State of Austria could not survive. Even so it is very doubtful whether the demand for Anschluss was as 'elemental 1 as Hitler says it was. Some Austrians notably Professor Ludo Hartmann sponsored it with vigor and eloquence. A few unofficial plebiscites were held in Salzburg and elsewhere and seemed to show that senti- ment was overwhelmingly in favor of Anschluss; but individu- ally and collectively they have little value as evidence. Other sources of information (e.g., records of party deliberations) give a different impression. Undoubtedly the desire for union grew during the following years, but it is none the less doubtful whether an honest plebiscite in 1938 would have favored ab- sorption of Austria into the Third Reich. AT HOME 13 time that the sun saw more of me than the four walls of my room. When today my political opponents examine my life down to the time of my childhood with loving attention, so that at last they can point with relief to the intolerable pranks this 'Hitler 1 carried out even in his youth, I thank Heaven for now giving me a share of the memories of those happy days. Woods and meadows were the battlefield where the ever-present 'conflicts' were fought out. My attendance at the Realschule, which now followed, did little to deter me. But now it was a different conflict that had to be fought. This was bearable as long as my father's intention to make an official of me was confronted by nothing more than my dislike of the profession on general principles. I could restrain my private views and, after all, it was not always necessary for me to contradict. My own firm intention not to become an official was sufficient to set my mind at rest. This decision, however, was irrevocable. The question be- came more difficult as soon as my father's plan was met by one of my own. This took place when I was twelve years old. I do not know how it happened, but one day it was clear to me that I would become a painter, an artist. My talent for drawing was obvious and it was one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the Realschule, but he never would have thought of having me trained for such a career. On the contrary. When, after a renewed rejection of my father's favorite idea, I was asked for the first time what I intended to be after all, I unexpectedly burst forth with the resolve I had irrevocably made; in the meantime my father at first was speechless. 'A painter? An artist?' He doubted my sanity, he did not trust his own ears or thought that he had misunderstood. But when it had been explained to him and when he had sensed the sincerity of my intentions, he opposed me with the resoluteness of his 14 MEIN KAMPF entire nature. His decision was quite simple, and any con- sideration of those actual talents that I might have pos- sessed was out of the question. 'An artist, no, never as long as I live/ But as his son had undoubtedly inherited, amongst other qualities, a stubborn- ness similar to his own, he received a similar reply. Only its meaning was quite different. So the situation remained on both sides. My father did not give up his 'never* and I strengthened my 'nevertheless/ Obviously the consequences were not very enjoyable. The old man became embittered, and, much as I loved him, the same was true of myself. My father forbade me to entertain any hope of ever becoming a painter. I went one step farther by declaring that under these circumstances I no longer wished to study. Naturally, as the result of such 'declarations' I got the 'worst of it,' and now the old man relentlessly began to enforce his authority. I remained silent and turned my threats into action. I was certain that, as soon as my father saw my lack of progress in school, come what may he would let me seek the happiness of which I was dreaming. I do not know if this reasoning was sound. One thing was certain : my apparent failure in school. I learned what I liked, but above all I learned what in my opinion might be necessary to me in my future career as a painter. In this connection I sabotaged all that which seemed unimportant or that which no longer attracted me. At that time my marks were always extreme depending upon the subject and my evaluation of it. ' Praiseworthy ' and ' Excellent ' ranked with 'Sufficient' and ' Insufficient. 1 My best efforts were in geography and perhaps even more so in history. These were my two favorite subjects and in them I led my class.-* Now, after so many years, when I examine the results of that period, I find two outstanding facts of particular im- portance: AT HOME 15 First, / became a nationalist. Second, / learned lo grasp and to understand the meaning of history. Old Austria was a 'State of nationalities. 9 t A citizen of the German Empire, at that time at least, could hardly understand the bearing of this fact upon the daily life of the individual in such a State. After the amaz- ingly victorious campaign of the heroic German armies during the Franco- Prussian War, one had become more and more estranged from the Germans abroad, partly because one no longer knew how to appreciate them or perhaps because one was unable to do so. As far as the Austro German was concerned, it was easy to confuse the decadent dynasty with a people who were sound at heart. It was hard to understand that, were the German in Austria not actually of the best stock, he never would have been able to impress his mark upon a State of fifty-two mil- lion people in such a manner as to create even in Germany the erroneous impression that Austria was a German State. This was nonsensical, with the gravest of consequences, but brilliant testimony for the ten million Germans in the Ost- mark. Only a very few Germans in the empire had any idea of the continuous and inexorable struggle waged for the German language, the German schools, and the German mode of existence. Only today, when this misery has been forced upon millions of our people outside of the Reich proper, who, under foreign domination, dream of a common fatherland and in their longing for it strive to preserve their most sacred claim their mother tongue only today wider circles understand what it means to fight for one's nationality. It is now perhaps that the one or the other will be able to realize the greatness of the Germans abroad in the old East of the Reich who at first, dependent upon them- selves, for centuries protected the Reich in the East, and at last guarded the German language frontier in a war of 16 MEIN KAMPF attrition at a time when the Reich was greatly interested in colonies but not in its own flesh and blood outside its very doors. As everywhere and always, as in every struggle, there were also in the language struggle of the old Austria three groups: The fighters, the lukewarm, and the traitors. Even in school this segregation was apparent. It is sig- nificant for the language struggle on the whole that its ways engulf the school, the seed bed of the coming generation. The child is the objective of the struggle and the very first appeal is addressed to it: 'German boy, do not forget that you are a German.' 'German maid, remember that you are to be a German mother/ + Those who know the soul of youth will understand that it is youth which lends its ears to such a battle-cry with the greatest joy. In hundreds of forms, in its own way and with its own weapons, it carried on the battle. It refuses to sing non-German songs; the more one tries to estrange it from German heroic grandeur, the more enthusiastic it waxes; it stints itself to collect pennies for the fund of the grown-ups; it has an unusually fine ear for all that the non- German teacher says to it; it is rebellious; it wears the for- bidden emblem of its own nationality and rejoices in being punished or even in being beaten for wearing that emblem. On a smaller scale youth is a true reflection of its elders, but more often with a deeper and a more honest conviction. At a comparatively early age I, too, was given the oppor- tunity to participate in the national struggle of old Austria. Money was collected for the Sildmark and the school club; our conviction was demonstrated by the wearing of corn- flowers and the colors black, red, and gold; the greeting was 1 Heil ' ; ' Deutschland iiber alles f was preferred to the imperial anthem, despite warnings and punishments. In this man- AT HOME 17 ner the boy was trained politically at an age when a member of a so-called national State knows little more of his nation- ality than its language. It is obvious that already then I did not belong to the lukewarm. In a short time I had be- come a fanatical 'German nationalist/ a term which is not identical with our same party name of today. My development was quite rapid, so that at the age of fifteen I already understood the difference between dynastic 'patriotism* and popular 'nationalism'; at that time the latter alone existed for me. Those who have never taken the trouble to study closely the internal situation of the Habsburg monarchy may not be able to understand the full meaning of these events. In this State the origin for this development was to be found in the lessons in world history taught in the schools, since there is practically no specific Austrian history as such. The conservative cabinet headed (1879-1893) by Taafe at- tempted to solve the problems of the Empire by winning the support of the Slavic groups. In 1895-1897 Count Casimir Badeni sponsored legislation favoring the Czechs in linguistic and cultural matters; and violent opposition to these measures was aroused among the nationalistic Germans. The Deuischer Schulverein (German School Society), an organization founded in 1880 to promote German schools in foreign countries, was a center of resistance particularly in Carinthia, where the Slavs were looked upon as especially menacing. The corn-flower was a patriotic symbol in Wilhelmian days. Deutschland, DeiUsth- land uber alles, a lyric written by Fallersleben in 1841, was sung by the nationalistic groups in Austria to the tune written by Hayden for the Imperial hymn. Singing it was, therefore, an insult to the Habsburgs. The 'HeiF an old German form of greeting was used by Austrian nationalists instead of tfie native forms (e.g., Griiss Gotf), and had an anti-Semitic under- tone. It required little manipulation to transform all these things into the Nazi practices now current. 18 MEIN KAMPF The fate of this State is so closely bound up with the life and growth of the entire German nationality that it is unthinkable to separate its history into German and Austrian. As a matter of fact when Germany began to split into two supreme powers, this very separation became German history. The imperial crown jewels kept in Vienna, reminders of the old realm splendor, still seem to exercise a magic spell, a pledge of eternal communion. The German-Austrian's elementary outcry for a reunion with the German motherland during the days of the break- down of the Habsburg State was merely the result of a feeling of nostalgia slumbering deep in the hearts of the entire nation for a return to the paternal home which had never been forgotten. This would be inexplicable had not the political education of each individual German-Austrian been the origin of that common longing. In it there lies a longing which contains a well that never dries, especially in time of forgetfulness and of temporary well-being it will again and again forecast the future in recalling the past. Even today, courses in world history in the so-called secondary schools are still badly neglected. Few teachers realize that the aim of history lessons should not consist in the memorizing and rattling forth of historical facts and data; that it does not matter whether a boy knows when this or that battle was fought, when a certain military leader was born, or when some monarch (in most cases a very mediocre one) was crowned with the crown of his an- cestors. Good God, these things do not matter. To 'learn' history means to search for and to find the forces which cause those effects which we later face as historical events. Here, too, the art of reading, like that of learning, is to remember the important, to forget the unimportant. AT HOME 19 It was perhaps decisive for my entire future life that I was fortunate enough to have a history teacher who was one of the few who understood how essential it was to make this the dominating factor in his lessons and examinations. At the Realschule in Linz my teacher was Professor Doctor Ludwig Poetsch, who personified this requisite in an ideal way. The old gentleman, whose manner was as kind as it was firm, not only knew how to keep us spellbound, but actually carried us away with the splendor of his eloquence. I am still slightly moved when I remember the gray-haired man whose fiery descriptions made us forget the present and who evoked plain historical facts out of the fog of the centuries and turned them into living reality. Often we would sit there enraptured in enthusiasm and there were even times when we were on the verge of tears. Our happiness was the greater inasmuch as this teacher not only knew how to throw light on the past by utilizing the present, but also how to draw conclusions from the past and applying them to the present. More than anyone else he showed understanding for all the daily problems which held us breathless at the time. He used our youthful na- The educational ideas here expressed are in part the common property of all who have gone to school and in part the legacy of Turnvater Jahn, the founder of the Turnvereine, or gymnas- tic societies, whose Deutsches Volkstum (German Folkishness) appeared in 1810, and whose part in rallying Prussian youth against Napoleon was a most estimable one. When Hitler speaks of the girl who ought to remember that her duty is to become a German mother, or of history as the science which demonstrates that one's own people is always right, he is echoing Jahn in the first instance. The best discussion in Eng- lish of this interesting pedagogue is still an essay which appeared in the London Magazine during 1820, when these new Prussian ideas of education seemed important but strange to English- men. 20 MEIN KAMPF tional fanaticism as a means of education by repeatedly appealing to our sense of national honor, and through this alone he was able to manage us rascals more easily than would have been possible by any other means. He was the teacher who made history my favorite sub- ject. Nevertheless, although it was entirely unintentional on his part, I already then became a young revolutionary. Who could possibly study German history with such a teacher and not become an enemy of the State which, through its ruling dynasty, so disastrously influenced the state of the nation? And who could keep faith with an imperial dynasty which betrayed the cause of the German people for its own ig- nominious ends, a betrayal that occurred again and again in the past and in the present? Boys though we were, did we not already realize that this Austrian State did not and could not harbor love for us Germans? Our historical knowledge of the influence of the House of Habsburg was supported by daily experiences. In the North and the South the poison of foreign nationalities This is probably one of the most revealing passages in the book. Hitler has consistently considered himself a 'Revolu- tionary,' but has added little to the interpretation of the term given here. The longing to change the structure of society de- veloped, in his case, not out of the consciousness of real or fan- cied social and economic injustices, but out of the feeling that the Ruling House did not adequately support the demands of the German groups. After the War he took an identical point of view in Germany itself, laying siege to the Weimar Republic because its policy of international conciliation seemed to him a duplicate of the policy of making concessions to Slavic groups which Habsburg governments had sponsored. Cf . Adolf Hitter, by Theodor Heuss (1932). AT HOME 21 eroded the body of our own nationality, and it was apparent how even Vienna became less and less a German city. The Royal House became Czech wherever possible, and it must have been the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and inexorable retribution which caused Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the most deadly enemy of Austrian-Germanism, to fall by the very bullets he himself had helped to mold. For was he not the patron of Austria's Slavization from above ! The burdens which the German people had to bear were enormous, its sacrifices in taxes and blood unheard of, and yet, everyone who had eyes to see realized that all this would IDC in vain. What grieved us most was the fact that the whole system was morally protected by the alliance with Germany, and thus Germany herself, in a fashion, sanc- tioned the slow extermination of the German nationality in the old monarchy. The hypocrisy of the Habsburgs, who knew well how to create the impression abroad that Austria was still a German State, fanned the hatred against this house into flaming indignation and contempt. It was only in the Reich itself that the 'chosen ones' saw nothing of all this. As if stricken with blindness, they walked by the side of the corpse, and in the indications of decomposition they thought they detected signs of 'new' life. The tragic alliance between the young Reich and the old Austrian sham State was the source of the ensuing World War and of the general collapse as well. In the course of this book I shall find it necessary to deal further with this problem. It suffices to state here that from my earliest youth I came to a conviction which never de- serted me, but on the contrary, grew stronger and stronger: That the protection of the German race presumed the destruc- tion of Austria, and further, that national feeling is in no way identical with dynastic patriotism; that above all else, the 22 MEIN KAMPF Royal House of Habsburg was destined to bring misfortune upon the German nation. Even then I had drawn the necessary deductions from this realization: an intense love for my native German- The picture Hitler draws of his early youth is, therefore, one of idle years spent fighting off formal education under the pre- text that he wanted to become an artist. That he has ever since considered himself brilliantly gifted as a painter and archi- tect is indubitable. The flags, uniforms and insignia of the Party were designed by him. The 'senate chamber* and study in the Brown House, Munich, are proudly displayed as exam- ples of the Fuhrcr's (Leader's) work. In the first, which is primarily a study in red leather, the swastika serves as an al- lusion to the SPQR of ancient Rome. Later on his views were influenced by his Bavarian environment, more particularly it would seem by the art theories of Schulze-Naumburg, who in the Thuringia of 1930 led the attack on modernistic art and architecture. During 1937 Munich was stirred by an exposition of 'De- generate Art,' which gathered from the museums pictures ad- judged not to be in the strict Aryan tradition. Meanwhile there had been erected in the same city a Kunsthalle adorned with a row of simple classical pillars; and this structure is generally accepted as embodying Hitler's ideal of what a build- ing ought to be. The example of Mussolini also had its effect. In order to provide a suitable approach to the Kunsthalle, one of King Ludwig's ancient streets was torn down and widened. Down this avenue, festooned with countless flags and abundant drapery, II Duce proceeded upon the occasion of his historic trip to Munich in 1937. More recently the new Chancellery in Berlin has been com- pleted. A skyscraper, taller than any in New York, was pro- jected for Hamburg. Hitler is also known to have devised models of a Vienna and Berlin reconstructed according to his ideas of what a city ought to be. Enormous sums have already been diverted into building operations. AT HOME S3 Austrian country and a bitter hatred against the 'Austrian* State. The art of historical thinking, which had been taught me in school, has never left me since. More and more, world history became a never-failing source of my understanding of the historical events of the present, that is, politics. What is more, I do not want to ' learn ' it, but I want it to teach me. Since I had become a political 'revolutionary' at so early a stage, it was not much later that I became an 'artistic' one. At that time the capital of Upper Austria had a theater of fairly high standing. Almost everything was performed there. At the age of twelve I saw 'Wilhelm Tell' for the first time, and a few months later, I saw the first opera of my life, 4 Lohengrin.' I was captivated at once. My youth- ful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds. Again and again I was drawn to his works and today I con- sider it particularly fortunate that the modesty of that provincial performance reserved for me the opportunity of seeing increasingly better productions. All this served to confirm my deep-rooted aversion for the career my father had chosen for me, especially after I had left childhood behind and approached manhood a painful experience. I was more definitely convinced that I could never be happy as an official. And now that my talent for drawing had also been recognized in school, my resolve was even more firmly established. Neither pleas nor threats could influence me. I wanted to become a painter, and no power on earth could ever make an official of me. But it was strange that as the years passed, I demon- strated more and more interest in architecture. At that 24 MEIN KAMPF time I took it for granted that this was merely an augmen- tation of my talent for painting and secretly I was delighted at this widening of my artistic horizon. I had no idea that things were to turn out so differently. The question of my career was to be settled more quickly than I had anticipated. When I was thirteen my father died quite suddenly. The old gentleman, who had always been so robust and healthy, had a stroke which painlessly ended his wanderings in this world, plunging us all in the depths of despair. His dearest wish, to help his son to build up his existence, thus safe- guarding him against the pitfalls of his own bitter experi- ence, had apparently not been fulfilled. But unconsciously he had sown the seed for a future which neither he nor I would have grasped at that time. At first nothing changed in my daily life. My mother probably felt the obligation to continue my education in accordance with my father's wishes, in other words, to have me continue my studies for the career of an official. But I was determined more than ever not to be- come an official. My attitude became more and more in- different in the same measure that the subjects and the education which school afforded me deviated from my own ideal. Suddenly an illness came to my aid, and in the course of a few weeks, settled the perpetual arguments at home and, with them, my future. Because of a severe pulmonary illness, the doctor strongly advised my mother not to place me in an office later on under any circumstances. I was also to give up school for at least one year. With this event, all that I had fought for, all that I had longed for in secret, suddenly became reality. Impressed by my illness, my mother agreed at long last to take me out of school and to send me to the Akademie. AT HOME 25 These were my happiest days; they seemed like a dream to me, and so they were. Two years later my mother's death put a sudden end to all these delightful plans. It was the end of a long and painful illness that had seemed fatal from the very beginning. Nevertheless it was a terrible shock to me. I had respected my father, but I loved my mother. Necessity and stern reality now forced me to make a quick decision. My mother's severe illness had almost ex- hausted the meager funds left by my father; the orphan's pension which I received was not nearly enough for me to live on, and so I was faced with the problem of earning my own daily bread. I went to Vienna with a suitcase, containing some clothes and my linen, in my hand and an unshakable determination in my heart. I, too, hoped to wrest from Fate the success my father had met fifty years earlier; I, too, wanted to become 'something' but in no event an official. CHAPTER II YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING IN VIENNA t% ^W^ JTHEN my mother died, Fate had cast the die in \J\X one direction at least. T T During the last months of her suffering, I had gone to Vienna to take my entrance examination to the Akademic. I had set out with a lot of drawings, convinced that I would pass the examination with ease. At the Real- schulc I had been by far the best artist in my class; and since then my ability had improved greatly, so that my self- satisfaction made me hope both proudly and happily for the best. There was but one cloud which occasionally made its ap- pearance; my talent for painting sometimes seemed to over- shadow my ability for drawing, especially in nearly all of the branches of architecture. Also my interest in the art of building as a whole grew steadily. This was stimulated, when I was not quite sixteen, by the fact that I was allowed for the first time to spend a two weeks' vacation in Vienna. I went there especially to study the picture gallery of the Hofmuseum, but I had eyes for nothing but the buildings of the museum itself. All day long, from early morn until late at night, I ran from one sight to the next, for what at- tracted me most of all were the buildings. For hours on end YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 27 I would stand in front of the opera or admire the Parliament Building; the entire Ringstrasse affected me like a fairy tale out of the Arabian Nights. And now I was in this beautiful city for the second time, burning with impatience; I waited with pride and confi- dence to learn the result of my entrance examination. I was so convinced of my success that the announcement of my failure came like a bolt from the blue. And yet it was true. When I had obtained an interview with the director and asked him to explain why I had not been admitted to the general painting school at the Akademie, he assured me that the drawings I had submitted clearly showed my lack of painting ability, but that my talents obviously lay in the field of architecture; it was the school of architecture and not the school of painting where I belonged. They could not understand why I had not attended a school for archi- tecture or why I had not been given any instruction in this art. Downcast, I left von Hansen's magnificent building on the Schillerplatz, dissatisfied with myself for the first time in my life. What I had been told about my ability was like a bright flash of lightning which seemed to illuminate a dis- sonance from which I had long suffered, but as yet I had not been able to give myself a clear account of its wherefore and whyfore. A few days later I, too, knew that I would become an architect. However, the way was to be an extremely difficult one, for all that which I had stubbornly neglected at the Real- schule was to take its vengeance now. The admission to the school of architecture of the Akademie was dependent on attendance at the Polytechnic's building school, and admis- sion to this was only possible after having received a certifi- cate of maturity at a secondary school. I was without all this. In all human probability it seemed as though the realization of my artist dreams was no longer possible. 28 MEIN KAMPF When, after my mother's death, I went to Vienna for the third time and this time to remain there for many years, I had in the meantime regained my peace and my confi- dence. My former obstinacy had returned and my goal was finally fixed before my eyes. I wanted to become an archi- tect, and one should not submit to obstacles but overcome them. And I would overcome these obstacles, always bear- ing in mind my father's example, who, from being a poor village boy and a cobbler's apprentice, had made his way up to the position of civil servant. Now I was on surer ground and the chances for the struggle were better; what I then looked upon as the cruelty of Fate, I praise today as the wisdom of Providence. When the Goddess of Misery took me into her arms more than once and threatened to Hitler's mother died on December 21, 1908, leaving him vir- tually penniless. He left Vienna again in the spring of 1912. During the period intervening, he lived generally in the Refuge for Men, in Vienna-Brigittenau, Information concerning his activities has been supplied by various people who then knew him, primarily Rudolf Hanisch, a designer, whose memoirs have been evaluated by Heiden. It is often difficult to determine whether these traditions are historically accurate, since the Hitler of Vienna days was a bit of human flotsam who in addi- tion kept pretty much to himself. But we know that he slept in a ward with other derelicts, that he was fed at the gate of the monastery in the Gumpendorferstrasse; that in winter he earned an occasional schilling with a snow shovel; and that he drew little water-colors and sketches whicii Hanisch peddled around at the humbler art shops. It has been proved that at the time he had Jewish acquaintances and a number of Jewish friends. More important, however, is the fact that he spent much time in the cafes, reading the newspapers constantly available there. He was never, then, a 'house painter, 1 but remained a young man with a poor scholastic record who had time to read political journalism. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 29 crush me, the will to resist grew and was finally victorious. I owe much to the time in which I had learned to become hard and also that I know now how to be hard. I praise it even more for having rescued me from the emptiness of an easy life, that it took the milksop out of his downy nest and gave him Dame Sorrow for a foster mother, that it threw him out into the world of misery and poverty, tnus making him acquainted with those for whom he was later to fight. During this time my eyes were to be opened to two dan- gers which hitherto I had barely known by name ; but I did not perceive their terrible bearing upon the existence of the German race to its fullest extent. Vienna, the city that to so many represents the idea of harmless gaiety, the festive place for merry-making, is to me only the living memory of the most miserable time of my life. Even today it can waken only depressing thoughts in my mind. The name of this Phaeacian city means five years of sorrow and misery. Five years in which I had to make my living, first as a worker, then as a painter; a truly scanty living, for it was barely enough to appease even my daily hunger. Hunger was then my faithful guard; he was the only friend who never left me, who shared everything with me honestly. Every book I bought aroused his sympathy; a visit to the opera made him my companion for days; it was a constant struggle with a pitiless friend. And yet, dur- ing this time, I learned as I had never learned before. Apart from my interest in architecture and my visits to the opera for which I had to stint myself, books were my only pleasure. At that time I read endlessly, but thoroughly. The spare time my work left to me I spent entirely in study. So in a few years I built a foundation of knowledge from which I still draw nourishment today. 30 MEIN KAMPF But much more than that. At that time I formed an image of the world and a vie* of life which became the granite foundation for my actions. I have had to add but little to that which I had learned then and I have had to change nothing. On the contrary. Today it is my firm belief that in general all creative ideas appear in youth, provided they are present at all. Here I distinguish between the wisdom of old age, which, as the result of the experiences of a long life, is of value only in the form of a greater thoroughness and carefulness as contrasted with the genius of youth whose inexhaustible fertility pours forth thoughts and ideas without being able to digest them because of their abundance. Youth fur- nishes the building material and the plans for the future; maturity takes and cuts the stones and constructs the build- ing, provided the so-called wisdom of old age has not suf- focated the genius of youth. The life I had known in my father's house showed little or no difference from that of other people. I looked forward to each new day without a care and social problems were un- known to me. The surroundings of my childhood were the circles of the bourgeoisie, a world which had but very few connections with the working classes. Though at first sight Here Hitler describes very well the feeling which was later on to swell the ranks of the National-Socialist Party. 'The bourgeois and peasant middle classes still constitute forty-five per cent of the total population of Germany ,' wrote Guenter Keiser in June, 1931. 'Today they have a mass movement, the beginnings of a program, the nucleus of a leadership, a firm determination to have their way, a contagious activism, and a myth of the Third Reich. All these things are necessary YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 31 it may seem absurd, yet the difference between these two, unfavored as they are by economic conditions, is greater than one realizes. The reason for that which one could al- most call 'hostility* is the fact that a social class, which has only recently worked its way up from the level of manual labor, fears to fall back into the old, but little esteemed, class, or at least fears being counted in with that class. In addition many remember with disgust the misery existing in the lower class; the frequent brutality of their daily social contacts; their own position in society, however small it may be, makes every contact with the state of life and culture, which they in turn have left behind, unbearable. This explains why members of the higher social class can frequently lower themselves to the humblest of their fellow outgrowths of historical development and cannot be disposed of with an allusion to " demagogues." These masses are neither pro- nor anti-capitalistic. They are opposed to certain especial aspects of high capitalism and to certain particular ways in which capitalism manifests itself. Before the War . . . the handicrafts prospered, retail merchants profited by reason of expanding markets, and the peasants were benefited by the rise in the standard of living. But today, inside the far narrower boundaries of the post- War economy, the expansionist impulse latent in capitalism is carrying that capitalism into the dis- tribution process. Department stores, branch concerns, ten- cent stores, direct sales by the manufacturer, etc., are now nor- mal. Technical progress is also making it possible to organize on a wholesale, capitalistic basis what until now have been typical handicraft industries, e.g., baking, butchering, tailor- ing, building. . . . Finally, the more bureaucratic the corpo- rative enterprise becomes, the more dependent does the status of its white-collar employee become. That is the economic fundament upon which National Socialism rests. The middle classes, the peasants, and the white-collar employees want the economic situation which existed in pre-War days: a healthy 32 MEIN KAMPF beings with less embarrassment than seems possible to the 'upstarts/ For an upstart is anyone who, through his own energy, works his way up from his previous social position to a higher one. Finally, this relentless struggle kills all pity. One's own painful scramble for existence suffocates the feeling of sym- pathy for the misery of those left behind. In this respect Fate took pity on me. By forcing me back into this world of poverty and uncertainty, a world from which my father had emerged in the course of his own life, the blinders which a narrow bourgeois education had given me were cast off. It was only now that I learned to know man; I learned to distinguish between sham or the brutal appearance of human lives and their inner being. * At the turn of the century Vienna was already a city with unfavorable social conditions. Glamorous wealth and repulsive poverty were mixed in sharp contrast. In the heart of the city and in the inner dis- tricts, one could well feel the pulse of a realm of fifty-two million people, for all its doubtful charm, as a State of na- tionalities. Like a magnet, the Court with all its brilliant balance between big and little industry, and between agricul- ture and industry as a whole. Therefore they are against "High Capitalism" and "Marxism" alike. The second is held to en- courage competition through fostering the development of co-operatives, and accused, beyond that, of having helped the worker to climb the social ladder faster than the other classes an insupportable fact.' (Cf. Neue Blaetter fuer den Sozial- ismus, Vol. II, nr. 6.) The list of Nazis who fell during the putsch of 1923 is a striking demonstration of all this. It in- cludes intellectuals, white-collar employees, students and arti- sans, but no workers. And, of course, no 'capitalists.' YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 33 splendor attracted the wealth and intelligence from the rest of the State. To this was added the strong centralizing policy of the Habsburg monarchy in itself. This offered the only possibility of keeping this porridge of nations together. The result, however, was a concentra- tion of the higher and highest authorities in the capital and Court city. But Vienna was not only politically and intellectually, but also economically, the center of the old Danubian mon- archy. The host of high officers, civil servants, artists and savants was confronted by a still greater number of workers; the wealth of aristocracy and commerce was contrasted with a dismal poverty. Thousands of unemployed loitered about in front of the palaces in the Ringstrasse, and below that via triumphalis of the old Austria, in the twilight and the mud of the canals, the homeless sought shelter. There was hardly any other German city where social questions could have been studied better than in Vienna. But we must not deceive ourselves. This * study ' cannot be carried out from above. Those who have never felt the grip of this murderous viper will never know its poisonous fangs. On the other hand, the result is nothing but a superficial babbling or hypocritical sentimentality. Both are equally evil. The first, because it never penetrates into the nucleus of the problem; the second, because it passes it by. I do not know which is worse: the ignoring of the social misery by the majority of the fortunate, or by those who have risen through their own efforts, as we see it daily, or the graciously patronizing attitudes of a certain part of the fashionable world (both in skirts and trousers) whose 4 sympathy for the people 1 is at times as haughty as it is obtrusive and tactless. These people do more harm than their brains, lacking in all instinct, are capable of imagining. Therefore they are as- tonished to find that the response to their helpful social 'disposition' is always nil and frequently causes indignation 34 MEIN KAMPF and antagonism ; this, of course, is taken to prove the peo- ple's ingratitude. These minds fail to see that social work has nothing to do with this: that above all it must not expect gratitude, since it should not deal out favors but restore rights. I was prevented from learning the social question in this fashion. Because I was drawn into the confines of its suffer- ing, it seemed to invite me not to 4 learn/ but rather to use me for experimentation. It was none of its doing that the guinea pig recovered from the operation. t If I were to try now to describe chronologically my vari- ous stages of feeling, I could never fully accomplish it; I wish to present only those impressions which seemed most important and frequently those most moving for me, to- gether with the few lessons they had given me then. In general, I did not find it very difficult to secure work, because I was not a skilled laborer, but only a handy man, and I had to earn my living by doing occasional work. I had the point of view of all those who wish to shake Europe's dust from their feet with the firm resolve to create a new existence in the new world, to conquer a new home- land. Severed from all the paralyzing conceptions of class and profession, of surrounding and tradition, they seize any opportunity which is offered, take any kind of work, and gradually they come to realize that honest work is no dis- grace no matter what it may be. So I, too, had resolved to jump with both feet into the new world and to fight my way through. I soon learned that there is always work to be found and that it is lost just as easily. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 35 The uncertainty of earning one's daily bread seemed to me to be the darkest side of my new life. Of course the 'skilled' worker is not dismissed quite so frequently as the unskilled; but even he is not completely protected against such a fate. Instead of losing his income because of a shortage of work, he is confronted with a lock- out or a strike of his own choosing. Here the uncertainty of the daily income takes its most bitter revenge on the whole of economic life. The farmer's boy who comes to town, attracted by easier work, be it real or imaginary, by the shorter working hours, but most of all by the dazzling bright lights which the city sheds forth, is still accustomed to a certain security of in- come. He usually only gives up his job if there is at least another in sight. Finally, the shortage of farm hands is great and therefore the probability of long periods of un- employment is very slight. It is a mistake to assume that the young people who come to town are of inferior material to those who continue making their living by cultivating the soil. No, on the contrary: experience teaches that all migra- tory individuals consist of energetic and healthy elements rather than the reverse. But among those * immigrants' one counts not only the American immigrant, but also the young farmer boy who makes up his mind to leave his na- tive village to come to town. He, too, is ready to chance an uncertain destiny. Frequently he brings a little money with him to the big city so that he need not despair the very first day if he has had no luck in finding work for a pro- longed period of time. But the situation is more difficult when shortly thereafter he has to give up the job that he found. It is especially hard in winter, if not almost impossi- ble, to find a new home. The first few weeks may go well enough. He draws relief from the treasury of his union and he manages as best he can. But once he has spent his last cent and in consequence of his long period of unemployment 36 MEIN KAMPF the treasury suspends its relief payments, then the distress becomes great. Now he loiters about hungrily, he pawns or sells the last of his belongings, his clothes get shabbier day by day, and he sinks into surroundings which, apart from the material misery he experiences, also poison his spirit. If then he becomes homeless, and if this happens (as is often the case) in winter, then his misery becomes acute. Finally he finds work of some kind. But the game repeats itself. He is hit the same way a second time, a third time perhaps more severely, so that by and by he learns to endure the un- certainty of life with indifference. Finally the repetition be- comes a habit. Thus the entire concept of life of a fellow who is other- wise industrious is demoralized and he is gradually trans- formed into a tool for those who use him for their own ends. He has been out of work so many times through no fault of his own that one time more or less no longer matters; it may be no longer a question of fighting for economic rights, but the destruction of political, social, or cultural values in general. Though he may not like strikes, he is probably in- different to them. I was able to observe this process with my own eyes in thousands of cases. The longer I observed the game, the more my aversion grew against the metropolis which so greedily sucked the people in only to destroy them. When they arrived, they still belonged to their people; if they remained, they were lost to them. I had been knocked about by my life in the metropolis in a similar manner and I was able to test the effect of such a fate on my own person and to experience it spiritually. I saw one thing more there: the rapid change from working to unemployment and vice versa; the repeated changes in income and expenditure destroyed in many people the de- sire for saving and the realization of a balanced mode of living. The body apparently becomes accustomed to good YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 37 living in times of plenty and to going hungry in times of need. Even in times of better income, hunger often over- throws every resolve for a future balanced distribution, for, like a perpetual mirage, hunger conjures up before the eyes of its victim visions of a life of abundance and embellishes his dream until such a state of longing is achieved that it puts an end to all self-denial once earnings and income per- mit it. This is the reason why a laborer, as soon as he has found work, forgets to budget intelligently and becomes a spendthrift instead. This even leads to discarding the small household budget, because even here wise distribution is neglected; in the beginning there may be enough for five days out of seven, later only for three, finally hardly enough for one day, and at last the money is spent on the very first night. At home there are often wife and children. Sometimes they are drawn into this sort of life, especially if the man treats them well on the whole and loves them after a fashion. Then the weekly salary is spent jointly at home during the first two or three days; they eat and drink as long as there is some money left, and the remaining days of the week are spent in hunger. Then the wife sneaks away into the neigh- borhood and the surroundings, borrowing a little, making small debts at the grocer's so that the remaining lean days can be endured. At noon they are all gathered around meager dishes and sometimes there is nothing at all, and they await the next payday, talk of it and make plains, and while they are hungry, they already dream of the good fortune to come. So, from their earliest days, the young children become familiar with misery. But things end badly indeed when the man from the very start goes his own way and the wife, for the sake of her children, stands up against him. Quarreling and nagging set in, and in the same measure in which the husband be- 38 MEIN KAMPF comes estranged from his wife, he becomes familiar with alcohol. Now he is drunk every Saturday, and in her in- stinct of self-preservation for herself and her children, the wife fights for the few pennies which she wangles from him, and frequently her sole opportunity is on his way from the factory to the saloon. When he finally comes home on Sun- day or Monday night, drunk and brutal, but always with- out a last cent and penny, then God have mercy on the scenes which follow. I witnessed all of this personally in hundreds of scenes and at the beginning with both disgust and indignation; but later I began to grasp the tragic side and to understand the deeper reasons for their misery. Unfortunate victims of poor social conditions. Almost sadder were the housing conditions in those days. The housing distress of the Viennese unskilled workers was dreadful. Even now I shudder when I think of those piti- ful dens, the shelters and lodging houses, those sinister pictures of dirt and repugnant filth, and worse still. How would it be, and how will it be, when one day there pours forth the mass of unleashed slaves out of these mis- erable dens, overflowing the other so thoughtless fellow creatures and contemporaries! For this other world is thoughtless. Thoughtlessly it allows things to go as they will with- out foreseeing, in their lack of intuition, that sooner or later Fate will take its revenge if Fate is not reconciled in time. How grateful I am today to Providence which bade me go to this school ! There I could not sabotage what I dis- liked. It educated me quickly and thoroughly. If I were not to despair of the people of my surroundings, I had to learn to distinguish between their external ap- pearance and manners and the origins of their develop- ment. This was the only way possible to bear all this YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 39 without despairing. What grew out of this unhappiness and misery, of this filth and external decay, were no longer human beings, but the deplorable results of deplorable laws; however, the pressure of my own hard and no less easy struggle for life prevented me from capitulating in miserable sentimentality before the final results of this process of development. No, it must not be interpreted like that. < I saw then that only a twofold way could lead to the goal for the improvement of these conditions: A deep feeling of social responsibility towards the estab- lishment of better foundations for our development, combined with the ruthless resolution to destroy the incurable social tumors. Just as Nature concentrates, not on safeguarding that which exists, but on breeding the coming generation as the representative of the species, so in human life it is less a question of artificially cultivating the existing evils which, human nature being what it is, would be ninety-nine per cent impossible, but rather to assure healthier paths for future development from the start. Already during my struggle for life in Vienna, it had become clear to me that : Social activity must never see its task in the sentimental conception of welfare work which is as ridiculous as it is futile, but rather in the abolition of those fundamental defects in the organization of our economic and cultural life which must lead to, or at least encourage, the degradation of the individual. The difficulty of applying the most extreme and brutal means against the criminality endangering the State is to be found, above all, in the prevailing uncertainty concern- ing the inner motives or causes of the symptoms of our time. This uncertainty is only too deeply rooted in one's own 40 MEIN KAMPF feeling of being guilty of such tragedies of demoralization; it paralyzes every sincere and firm decision, thus adding to the wavering and half-heartedness with which even the most urgent measures of self-preservation are applied. Only when the time comes when a race is no longer over- shadowed by the consciousness of its own guilt, then it will find internal peace and external strength to cut down regardlessly and brutally the wild shoots, and to pull up the weeds. These pages indicate a possible debt to Karl Freiherr von Vogelsang, one of the founders of the Christian Social Move- ment in Austria, and one of the editors of the journal Vaterland. A conservative nobleman of Prussian ancestry, he had been received into the Catholic Church by Bishop Emanuel von Ketteler, the first German Catholic apostle of social reform, and had then migrated to Vienna. His group taught that the rights of all take precedence over the rights of the few (which Hitler phrases, Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz), demanded leg- islation to protect the worker against exploitation (a precept developed later on by Franz Hitze and others in Germany into a code of labor protection laws), and sponsored a type of eco- nomic organization akin in some ways to the kind of 'corpo- rative society' endorsed in the Papal Encyclical, Quadragesima Anno (i.e., not the 'corporative state* of Italian Fascism). Of especial concern to Vogelsang were the moral consequences of the liberalistic economy intemperance, improvidence, etc. He also attacked the taking of interest and the grip on industry exercised by the 'money lenders/ (Cf. the biography of Vogel- sang by Wiard Klopp, Vienna, 1930.) A more modern and very much more radical statement of the same views can be found in Economia Perennis, by Anton Orel (Graz, 1928). It seems probable that Hitler saturated himself at one time with Vater- land editorials, which afford interesting parallels to what he writes here. But he subordinates the Vogelsang teaching to hifc own chauvinistic Pan-German outlook. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 41 Since the Austrian State hardly knew social justice and social laws, its weakness in fighting even the worst excres- cences was glaringly obvious. I do not know what shocked me more at that time: the economic distress of my erstwhile comrades, their ethical and moral crudity, or the low level of their spiritual de- velopment. Does not our bourgeoisie rise in moral indignation when it hears from the lips of some miserable tramp that he doesn't care whether he is German or not, that he feels at home anywhere, as long as he has enough to live on? This lack of 'national pride* is deeply deplored and the horror at such an attitude is expressed in strong terms. But how many people ask themselves the question, what in their own case was the reason for their own better way of thinking? How many are there who understand the numerous memories of the greatness of the fatherland, of the nation, in all fields of cultural and artistic endeavor which, when summoned up, justify their pride in being privileged to belong to such a blessed nation? How many know how dependent their pride in their country is upon their knowledge of its greatness in all these domains? f Does our bourgeoisie realize to what a ridiculously small extent this assumption of pride in the fatherland is trans- mitted to the 'people'? We cannot excuse ourselves by saying ' it is not different in the other countries'; that 'in spite of this' the workers there stand up for their nationality. Even if this were so, it could not serve as the excuse of our own negligence. But it is not so. What we always term 'chauvinistic' education, that of the French nation, for example, is nothing but the 42 MEIN KAMPF stress upon France's greatness in all fields of culture or, as the French say, 'civilization.' The young Frenchman is not educated with an objective, but a subjective, point of view, which we can only understand as far as the politi- cal or cultural greatness of his country is concerned. This education should be limited to general and im- portant points of view, which, if necessary, should be im- pressed on the minds and feelings of the people by constant repetition. But to our negative sin of omission, we add the positive sin of destroying the little the individual is lucky enough to learn in school. The rats of the political poisoning of our nation gnaw away the little that is left in the hearts and the memories of the masses, if misery and distress have not already done so. Now let us imagine the following: In a basement apartment of two stuffy rooms lives a worker's family of seven people. Among the five children there is a boy, let us say, of three. This is the age at which a child becomes conscious of his first impressions. In many intelligent people, traces of these early memories are found even in old age. The smallness and the over- crowding of the rooms do not create favorable conditions. Quarreling and nagging often arise because of this. In such circumstances people do not live with one another, but on top of one another. Every argument, even the most un- important, which in a larger apartment would take care of itself for the reason that one could step aside, leads to a never-ending, disgusting quarrel. Among the children this does not usually matter; they often quarrel under such circumstances and forget completely and quickly. But when the parents fight almost daily, their brutality leaves nothing to the imagination; then the results of such visual education must slowly but inevitably become apparent in the little ones. Those who are not familiar with such con* YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 43 ditions can hardly imagine the results, especially when the mutual differences express themselves in the form of brutal attacks on the part of the father towards the mother or to assaults due to drunkenness. The poor little boy, at the age of six, senses things which would make even a grown-up person shudder. Morally infected, undernourished, his poor little head covered with lice, the young 'citizen* wanders off to the elementary school. He may learn to read and to write only with the greatest difficulty, and nothing more. Learning at home is out of the question. On the contrary. In front of the children, father and mother often speak about school and the teachers in a manner one cannot pos- sibly repeat, and are inclined them ; instead of placing the spanking some sense into The other things the litt tend to further his r single good shred is left tution is left unattacked ; the head of the State, be be it the State or society, abused, everything is pulled into the filth of a depraved of fourteen, the young lad is dismissed from school, it is difficult to say which is worse: his unbelievable ignorance as far as knowledge and ability are concerned, or the biting impudence of his behavior, combined with an immorality which makes one's hair stand on end, considering his age. But what place in society will the young man for almost nothing is sacred to him ; having learned nothing of greatness, he but guesses and knows all the meanness of life now take when he enters into life? The three-year-old child has now become a youth of fif- teen who despises all authority. Familiar with nothing things about knee and them. do not Not a insti- up to such, ing is manner at the age 44 MEIN KAMPF other than dirt and filth, the young fellow knows nothing that could rouse his enthusiasm for higher things. But now for the first time he enters the high school of life. Now the same mode of living, which he learned from his father during childhood, begins. Now he loiters about, and God only knows when he comes home; for a change he may even beat the poor creature who was once his mother, curses God and the world, and finally, for some reason or other, he is sentenced to a reformatory. There he receives the final polish. But his dear bourgeois fellow men are truly astonished at the lack of 'national' enthusiasm in this young 'citizen.' They see how theaters and movies, worthless literature and tabloid newspapers pour poison into the masses by the bucketful, and are surprised by their low 'morality,' their national 'indifference.' As though movie sentimentality, tabloid newspapers, and similar rubbish could lay the foundation for a realization of national greatness! To say nothing of the previous education of the individual. What I had never guessed before, I learned to under- stand now: quickly and thoroughly. The question of the ' nationalization f of a people is first of all a question of creating sound social conditions as the funda- mental possibility for educating the individual. For only those who, through education and schooling, get to know the cultural and economic, and above all the political, greatness of their own country, can and will be proud of being allowed to call themselves members of this nation. Moreover, I can only fight for what I love; only love what I can respect; only respect what I know. Now that my interest for the social question was awak- ened, I began to study it in all thoroughness. It was a YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 45 new and hitherto unknown world which opened itself before my eyes. In 1909-10 my own situation had changed somewhat, as I no longer had to earn my daily bread as an unskilled worker. I worked independently as a modest draftsman and painter of aquarelles. Though this was bitter as far as my earnings were concerned it was really barely enough for a living it was good for the career I had chosen. Now I was no longer dead tired as formerly when coming home from my work in the evening, unable to open a book without falling asleep after a short time. The work I was doing went hand in hand with my future profession. I was also master of my own time and I was able to arrange it better than before. I painted in order to earn a living and I learned for enjoyment. Thus I was enabled to supplement my practical ex- periences concerning social problems with the necessary theory. I studied almost every book on the subject I could get hold of, and for the rest I was steeped in thoughts of my own. I believe that those who knew me then must have thought me a queer fellow. But with all this it was natural that I devoted myself enthusiastically to my passion for architecture. Along with music, architecture appeared to me to be the queen of the arts: under such circumstances my occupation with it was not 'work,' but the greatest happiness. I was able to read or draw late into the night; I was never tired. Thus my belief, that my beautiful dream of the future would become reality, perhaps only after many years, was strengthened. I was firmly convinced that some day I would make a name as an architect. 1 did not place much importance on the fact that in addition I took the greatest interest in everything con- 46 MEIN KAMPF nected with politics. On the contrary; to me this was the natural duty of every thinking human being anyway. He who had no understanding for this simply had no right to criticize or to complain, t Here, too, I also read and learned a lot. But by 'reading* I may possibly mean something entirely different from the great average of our so-called 'intelli- gentsia/ I know people who endlessly 'read' a lot, book after book, letter for letter, yet I would not call them 'well read.' Of course, they possess a wide 'knowledge,' but their intellect does not know how to distribute and register the material gathered. They lack the ability to distinguish in a book that which is of value and that which is of no value to them; to keep the one in mind forever, and to Hitler was never more candid than in these pages, which must not be read, however, as a mere defense against the charge of ignorance. The educational program of National Socialism is based upon the theory that too much reading, too much fa- miliarity with different points of view, fosters criticism, and therewith disrupts the unity with which the nation must face the problem of war. Hitler's declaration that he read in order to fortify ideas he already held is, whether true in fact or not (the point has been raised by various biographers), highly im- portant because it happens to coincide with a trend in Ger- man pedagogical thought which, related in a sense to Plato and Fichte, has led to the 'Spartan ' ideal now dominant in German higher education and handed down thence to the elementary school. Aurel Kolnai, in his War against the West, summarizes the ideas of one spokesman for that trend Professor Alfred Baeumler, latterly Nazi appointee to the University of Berlin : 'We set ourselves the task of breeding types, not "individuali- ties." To the ideal of universality (many-sidedness) we oppose efficient and disciplined unity; to harmony, force; to refinement, greatness and simplicity; to complicated inwardness, an atti- YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 47 overlook, if possible, the other, instead of carrying it with them as so much unnecessary ballast. Reading, further- more, is not a purpose in itself, but a means to an end. It should serve, first of all, to fill in the frame which Is formed by the talents and abilities of the individual; thus reading has to furnish the tools and the building material which the individual needs for his profession, no matter whether it serves only the primitive purpose of making a living or whether it presents a higher vocation; secondly, reading has to give a general picture of the world. In both cases it is necessary that the content of what has been read is registered in the mind, not according to the sequence in the book, or according to the sequence in which the books are read, but that, like the small pieces of a mosaic, it is put into the place where it belongs, thus tude of steadfastness. The utmost dignity is accorded to bodily training, not for reasons of health, but as a direct expression of the preferred "mode of life." . . . Amidst a culture that has be- come too inward, too spiritual, athletics restore the principle of "visibleness." Our conditions of life must be simplified; we shall have to resort to the elemental forces in our people. 9 Concerning Hitler's own intellectual equipment, the follow- ing objective statement made by Professor Hans E. Friedrich in 1931 seems readable and interesting today: 'He is an orator, an organizer, a practical psychologist; and in addition he possesses physical courage, is unusually able to tap his own enthusiasm, and has a fund of glowing personal emotions. But in order to become a leader in the sense that Pericles and Napoleon were leaders, he would have to overcome his lack of that which gives a man in supreme command personal confidence in himself calmness of analysis (above all where he himself is concerned), hardness to the point of rigor, ability to face decisions of im- portance with an absolutely open mind, unemotional serious- ness in the act of looking things over, and that measure of inner objectivity that gives a man independence and stubborn per* 48 MEIN KAMPF helping to complete the general picture of the world in the mind of the reader. Otherwise, the result will be a terrible muddle of things learned, and this is not only of little value, but it also makes its unfortunate possessor presumptuous and vain. For now he thinks in all sincerity that he is 'educated'; he thinks he knows life and has knowledge; whereas in reality, with each new contribu- tion to this 'education,' he is more and more estranged from the world, till frequently he ends in a sanatorium, or as a 'politician* in parliament. Such a person will never succeed in finding, in an hour of need, the right thing in the medley of his 'knowledge,' as his mental ballast is not arranged according to the course of life, but in the order in which he has read the books and in which their contents are arranged in his mind. If Fate in his daily demands of life were always to remind him of the right use of that which he has once read, then it would also have to remind him of each book and the page number or else the poor devil in all eternity would never find the right thing. But since it does not do this, these extraordinarily wise men are terribly em- barrassed at critical moments and seek frantically for analogies, and then, of course, they are dead certain to chance upon the wrong recipe. If this were not so, we should not be able to understand the political achievements of our learned heroes in the highest government positions, unless we decided that they sistence. In addition Hitler seems to lack that elementary knowledge of economic and political situations and of history which a leader must have at his command, though he need not drag about with him a ballast of information.' (Cf. Die christ- Kche Well, Vol. XLV, nr. 9.) The practical consequences of Hitler's attitude towards edu- cation will be discussed later on. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 49 had pathological inclinations instead of infamous villainy. When studying a book, a magazine, or a pamphlet, those who master this art of reading will immediately pick out that which in their opinion is suitable for them because it serves their purposes or is generally worth knowing and therefore to be remembered forever. As soon as the knowledge so gained finds its due place in the one or the other existing picture of this or that thing which imagina- tion has created, it will act as a corrective or as a supple- ment, thus enhancing its truth or its clarity. When life suddenly presents some question to be examined or an- swered, then this manner of reading will immediately take the already existing picture as a standard, and from it it will take all the single contributions to this question which have been collected during past decades, and submit them to the intellect for examination and reconsideration till the question is clarified or answered. It is only in this fashion that reading is of use and has meaning. A public speaker, for instance, who does not in this way supply his intelligence with the necessary support will never, in case of contradiction, be able to present his opinion convincingly, no matter whether it may correspond a thousand times to truth or reality. His memory will shamefully desert him in all discussions; he will neither find supporting arguments for his contentions, nor will he find such with which to confound his adversary. This may be all very well if it only concerns a public speaker and only his own personal reputation is involved, but things take a bad turn when Fate appoints such a 'know-it-all/ who is really a know-nothing, the head of a State. From my early youth I took pains to read in the right manner, and in this I was happily assisted by my memory and intellect. And in this light the time I spent in Vienna was especially fruitful and useful. The experiences of 50 MEIN KAMPF everyday life gave me the stimulus for my renewed study of various problems. As I was thus finally enabled to sub* stantiate theory with reality, to examine theory in its re- lation to reality. I was spared being suffocated in theories and from becoming shallow through reality. Apart from the social problem, two other very important questions were also experienced in daily life, decisive and stimulating for a thorough theoretical study. Who knows when I might have plunged into studying the doctrines and ideas of Marxism if that period had not virtually pushed my nose into this problem ! What I knew of Social Democracy during my youth was precious little and mostly wrong. I was secretly glad to know that it fought for general suffrage and the secret ballot. My reason already told me that this would lead to the weakening of the Habsburg regime which I hated so much. In the conviction that the State on the Danube could never be preserved unless the German nationality was sacrificed, and that even paying the price of the gradual Slavicizing of the German element Faithful to its internationalist program, Socialism made every effort to organize Slav and German workers in a common front. When after the War a constitutional assembly convened in Austria, Viktor Adler declared: 'We extend fraternal greet- ings to our Slavic and Romanic brethren, and are ready to unite with the peoples that are our neighbors in a free federa- tion, if they so desire. Otherwise German Austria will be com- pelled to join Germany as a specially constituted state inside the German federation of states/ The position of the small Austrian National Socialist Party at that time was: it imme- diately repudiated every thought of a common association with the peoples comprising the old Habsburg Empire, and de- manded union with Germany. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 51 would in no way have guaranteed the survival of the State, as it was doubtful if the Slavic nationality could have ac- complished this, I therefore welcomed every development which in my opinion would lead to the breakdown of the State which had pronounced the death sentence on ten mil- lion German people. The more the linguistic tohuwabohu [Hebrew Genesis 1:2 meaning chaos, confusion, hubbub] ate into and tore at the parliament, the sooner would come the hour of doom of this Babylonian realm, and with it, the day of freedom for my German-Austrian people. Only in this way could the Anschluss with the old motherland be achieved. I rather liked the activity of Social Democracy. The fact that it finally endeavored to raise the standard of living of the working class in those days my innocent mind was foolish enough to believe this seemed to speak rather in its favor than against it. But what disgusted me most was its hostile attitude towards the fight for the preservation of the German nationality, its pitiful courtship of the Slav * comrades,' who readily accepted this wooing as long as it meant practical allowances, but were otherwise arrogantly aloof, thus paying the intruding beggars the wages they deserved. At the age of seventeen I had rarely heard the word 'Marxism,' whereas 'Social Democracy* and 'Socialism 1 were identical ideas to me. Here, too, the hand of Fate had to open my eyes to this unprecedented betrayal of the people. Till then I had known the Social Democratic Party only from a spectator's point of view, on the occasion of various mass demonstrations, without having the slightest insight into the mentality of its followers or the meaning of its doctrine; but now I suddenly came into contact with the products of its education and view of life; I now achieved in a few months what otherwise might have taken decades: 52 MEIN KAMPF the realization that it was a pestilential whore covered with the mask of social virtue and brotherly love, and that mankind must rid the world of her as soon as possible, or otherwise the world might easily be rid of mankind. While I was employed as a building worker, my first encounter with Social Democracy took place. It was not a very enjoyable experience from the begin- ning. My clothes were still in good shape, my language was refined, and my manners reserved. I still was so preoc- cupied with my own affairs that I did not bother much with my surroundings. I looked for work to prevent me from starving, thus hoping to find the possibility for further training, however slow it might be. Perhaps I would not have troubled about my new surroundings at all if some- thing had not happened on the third or fourth day which forced me to take a stand. I was asked to join the or- ganization. My knowledge of unions was nil at that time. I would not have been able to prove the suitability or the useless- ness of their existence. When I was told that I had to join, I refused. I gave as my reason that I did not understand the whole affair and that, on the whole, I would not let myself be forced into anything. The first was perhaps the reason why I was not thrown out immediately. Perhaps they hoped that in a few days I would be converted or would give in. In any event, they were thoroughly mis- taken. After two weeks 1 was not allowed to wait any longer, even if I had wanted to. During these two weeks I had become better acquainted with my surroundings, so that no power on earth could have induced me to join an organization whose representatives had meanwhile shown themselves in so unfavorable a light. The first few days I was annoyed. At noon some of the men went into the nearest public houses, while others remained on the spot where they in YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 53 most cases ate a very frugal meal. These were the married ones whose wives brought them their noonday soup in battered dishes. Their number grew steadily towards the end of the week; why, I knew only later. Now politics were discussed. I drank my bottle of milk and ate my piece of bread somewhere on the side, cautiously studying my new sur- roundings or pondering over my miserable fate. Yet I heard more than enough ; also, more than once it seemed to me as if they approached me intentionally in order to draw me out. In any case, what I heard served to annoy me extremely. Everything was rejected: the nation as an in- vention of the 'capitalistic' classes how often was I to hear just this word! ; the country as the instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the workers; the authority of the law as a means of suppressing the prole- tariat; the school as an institution for bringing up slaves as well as slave drivers; religion as a means for doping the people destined for exploitation; morality as a sign of sheepish patience, and so forth. Nothing remained that was not dragged down into the dirt and the filth of the lowest depths. In the beginning I tried to keep silent. But finally I could hold back no longer. I began to take part and to contradict. But soon I realized that this was entirely hope- less as long as I did not possess at least a certain knowledge of the subjects under argument. Thus I began to look into the sources from which the others drew their so-called wis- dom. I studied book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet. On the job the arguments often became heated. Being daily better informed about their knowledge than my ad- versaries themselves, I argued till finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason : terror and force. Some of the leaders of the other side gave me the choice of either leaving the job at once 54 MEIN KAMPF or of being thrown from the scaffold. As I was alone and resistance seemed hopeless, I preferred to follow the former, enriched by a new experience. I went away, disgusted, but at the same time I was so stirred that it would have been impossible for me to turn my back on the whole affair. No; after my first indignation had passed, my stubbornness gained the upper hand. I firmly resolved to return to another construction job. This decision was encouraged by Poverty, who, after I had eaten up my small savings in the course of a few weeks, clasped me in her unfeeling arms. Now I had to, whether I wanted to or not. The game began again from the beginning, only to end in a similar way as it had the first time. My mind was tormented by the question: Are these still human beings, worthy of being part of a great nation? A torturing question it was; if answered in the affirma- tive, then the fight for a nation is no longer worth the trouble and the sacrifices which the better ones have to make for such outcasts; if the answer is in the negative, then our nation is poor in human beings. During these days of pondering and reflection I watched with uneasiness the mass of those who could no longer be counted as belonging to the nation grow into a threatening legion. How different were my feelings when one day I stared at the endless columns of a mass demonstration of Viennese workers, marching by in rows of four! For nearly two hours I stood there and watched with bated breath this terrible human dragon creeping slowly along. Depressed and anxious I left the square and walked home. On my way I saw in a tobacco shop a copy of the Arbeiterzeitung, the mouthpiece of the old Austrian Social Democracy. It was also available in a cheap coffee shop where I sometimes used to go to read the newspapers; but so far I had not been able to bring myself to look at this wretched paper YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 55 for more than two minutes, for the effect of its language on me was like that of spiritual vitriol. Under the de- pressing influence of the demonstration, an inner voice now urged me to buy the paper for once and to read it thoroughly. I did this in the evening, though I sometimes had to fight down the rage rising in me because of this concentrated solution of lies. The daily reading of the Social Democratic newspapers enabled me better to study the inner meaning of these ideas than all of the theoretic literature put together. What a difference between the phrases about liberty, beauty, and dignity, the delusive swaggering which at- tempted to express the deepest wisdom, the disgusting and humane morality everything was written with an iron- faced prophetic certainty contained in the theoretic literature and this doctrine of salvation of a new mankind in a daily press which did not shrink from any baseness whatsoever, and which operated with the most brutal forces of calumny and a virtuosity for lying that was out- rageous! The one is intended for the innocent simpletons of the middle, and, of course, the upper, classes of the 4 intelligentsia ' ; the other for the masses. For me the concentration on the literature and press of this organization and its doctrine was my return to my people. What I first had looked upon as an impassable chasm now spurred me on to a greater love for my country than ever before. Aware of the terrible workings of this poison, only a fool would condemn the victim. The more independent I be- came in the following years, the greater the distance, the wider were my eyes opened to the inner causes of the Social Democratic successes. Now I understood the brutal demand to subscribe only to red newspapers, to attend only red meetings, to read only red books, and so on. My 56 MEIN KAMPF eyes saw with plastic clarity the enforced result of this doctrine of intolerance. *? The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to half measures or weakness. Like a woman, whose psychic feeling is influenced less by abstract reasoning than by an undefinable, sentimental longing for complementary strength, who will submit to the strong man rather than dominate the weakling, thus the masses love the ruler rather than the suppliant, and inwardly they are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom ; they often feel at a loss what to do with it, and even easily feel themselves deserted. They neither realize the impudence with which they are spiritually terrorized, nor the out- rageous curtailment of their human liberties, for in no way does the delusion of this doctrine dawn on them. Thus they see only the inconsiderate force, the brutality and the aim of its manifestations to which they finally always submit. // Social Democracy is confronted by a doctrine of greater truthfulness, carried out with the same brutality, then the latter will be victorious, though the struggle may be hard. Before two years had elapsed, the doctrine and the technical tools of Social Democracy had become clear to me. I understood the infamous mental terror which this movement exercised on the population which could neither morally nor psychically resist such attacks; Social De- mocracy, at a given signal, directs a bombardment of lies This statement is of cardinal importance, so that an analysis of the underlying thought development is suggested. Hitler, conscious of belonging to a higher social caste than his fellow- workers after all, his father had spent a lifetime struggling to rise instinctively retreats from the idea of accepting solidarity with them. They persist in their proselyting efforts. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 57 and calumnies towards the adversary who seemed most dangerous, till finally the nerves of those who had been attacked give out and they, for the sake of peace, bow down to the hated enemy. But the fools will not find peace after all. The play begins again and is so often repeated till the fear of the mad dog paralyzes them by suggestion. As Social Democracy knows, from its own experience, the value of strength, it assaults mostly those in whom it scents a trace of that rare material. On the other hand, it praises every weakling of the other side, sometimes cau- tiously, sometimes more boldly, according to the mental qualities they appreciate or suspect. It is less afraid of a powerless, irresolute genius than of a strong man of even moderate intelligence. Most of all it recommends those who are weaklings in mind and power. It knows how to create the appearance as though this were the only way in which peace could be maintained; yet relentlessly it conquers one position after another, An argument ensues; and appalled by their revolutionary attitudes, he loses his temper. There is a fight. Afterward he can only think bitterly of how these large groups of Germans are being weaned away from ardent zeal for the expansion of the German nation and made, by persistent regimentation and propaganda, to accept the creed of international class warfare. The trend could not, he decided, be halted with reasoning or evidence. Only a group still more disciplined, still more ruthless in its methods, would after a bitter struggle be able to suppress such a movement. These early reflections colored his later conduct. The Social Democracy of post-War years in Germany was not revolutionary but reformist. It was actuated by a deep and intelligent patriotism. But he refused to concede that his Vienna impressions needed revision. 56 MEIN KAMPF eyes saw with plastic clarity the enforced result of this doctrine of intolerance, < The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to half measures or weakness. Like a woman, whose psychic feeling is influenced less by abstract reasoning than by an undefinable, sentimental longing for complementary strength, who will submit to the strong man rather than dominate the weakling, thus the masses love the ruler rather than the suppliant, and inwardly they are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom ; they often feel at a loss what to do with it, and even easily feel themselves deserted. They neither realize the impudence with which they are spiritually terrorized, nor the out- rageous curtailment of their human liberties, for in no way does the delusion of this doctrine dawn on them. Thus they see only the inconsiderate force, the brutality and the aim of its manifestations to which they finally always submit. // Social Democracy is confronted by a doctrine of greater truthfulness, carried out with the same brutality, then the latter will be victorious, though the struggle may be hard. Before two years had elapsed, the doctrine and the technical tools of Social Democracy had become clear to me. I understood the infamous mental terror which this movement exercised on the population which could neither morally nor psychically resist such attacks; Social De- mocracy, at a given signal, directs a bombardment of lies This statement is of cardinal importance, so that an analysis of the underlying thought development is suggested. Hitler, conscious of belonging to a higher social caste than his fellow- workers after all, his father had spent a lifetime struggling to rise instinctively retreats from the idea of accepting solidarity with them. They persist in their proselyting efforts. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 57 and calumnies towards the adversary who seemed most dangerous, till finally the nerves of those who had been attacked give out and they, for the sake of peace, bow down to the hated enemy. But the fools will not find peace after all. The play begins again and is so often repeated till the fear of the mad dog paralyzes them by suggestion. As Social Democracy knows, from its own experience, the value of strength, it assaults mostly those in whom it scents a trace of that rare material. On the other hand, it praises every weakling of the other side, sometimes cau- tiously, sometimes more boldly, according to the mental qualities they appreciate or suspect. It is less afraid of a powerless, irresolute genius than of a strong man of even moderate intelligence. Most of all it recommends those who are weaklings in mind and power. It knows how to create the appearance as though this were the only way in which peace could be maintained; yet relentlessly it conquers one position after another, An argument ensues; and appalled by their revolutionary attitudes, he loses his temper. There is a fight. Afterward he can only think bitterly of how these large groups of Germans are being weaned away from ardent zeal for the expansion of the German nation and made, by persistent regimentation and propaganda, to accept the creed of international class warfare. The trend could not, he decided, be halted with reasoning or evidence. Only a group still more disciplined, still more ruthless in its methods, would after a bitter struggle be able to suppress such a movement. These early reflections colored his later conduct. The Social Democracy of post- War yeans in Germany was not revolutionary but reformist. It was actuated by a deep and intelligent patriotism. But he refused to concede that his Vienna impressions needed revision. 58 MEIN KAMPF either by quiet pressure or by downright robbery at mo- ments when public attention is occupied with other things and does not wish to be disturbed or because it considers the affair too trifling to be dealt with and does not wish to provoke the adversary anew. These tactics are based on an exact calculation of all human weaknesses; their result must lead to success with almost mathematical certainty, unless the other side also learns to fight poison gas with poison gas. Weak natures have to be told that it simply means 'to be or not to be/ The importance of physical terror against the individual and the masses also became clear to me. Here, too, we find exact calculation of the psychological effect. The terror in the workshops, in the factory, in the assembly hall, and on occasion of mass demonstrations will always be accompanied by success as long as it is not met by an equally great force of terror. Then, of course, the party will cry havoc; scornful of State authority it will now call for it, so that in most cases and in the general disorder, it will reach the goal that is, it will find some idiot of a higher official who, in the stupid hope of in this way gaining, for the future, perhaps the favor of the dreaded enemy, helps to break the adversary of this universal plague. Only those who know the soul of a people, not from books but from life, can understand the impression such success makes on the sensibilities of the masses of adherents and adversaries as well. While in the ranks of their ad- herents the victory gained is looked upon as the triumph of the right in its own cause, the beaten adversary in most cases despairs entirely of the success of all further re- sistance. The closer I became acquainted with the methods of YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 59 physical terror, the more I asked for forgiveness from those hundreds of thousands who succumb to it. I owe most of all to that period of suffering that it alone has given my people back to me, that I learned to dis- tinguish between victims and seducers. The results of these seductions cannot be called anything other than victims. For if I now were to try to draw from life the existence of these 'lowest 1 classes, the picture would not be complete without the assurance that in these depths I would also find light in the shape of a rare willing- ness to make sacrifices, a faithful comradeship, extreme contentedness, and reserved modesty, especially among the older generation of the working class. Though these virtues were lost more and more to the younger generation, espe- cially under the general influence of the big city, yet there were many whose sound and healthy blood mastered the mean baseness of life. If nevertheless these good-natured, plucky people, in their political activity entered the ranks of the deadliest enemy of our nationality, thus helping to close them up, the fault was that they did not and could not understand the baseness of the new doctrine, that no- body else took the trouble to look after them, and that finally social conditions were perhaps stronger than all the mutual will power present. The poverty into which they would fall sooner or later drove them finally into the camp of Social Democracy. As innumerable times the bourgeoisie, in the most stupid, but also the most immoral, manner turned against claims which were generally and humanly justified, without obtaining any advantages for themselves or expecting any, even the most decent worker was driven from trade unionism into political activity. t Millions of workers were certainly inwardly enemies of the Social Democratic Party at the beginning, but their resistance was overcome in a sometimes idiotic way and 60 MEIN KAMPF manner, because the parties of the bourgeoisie turned against all social demands. They foolishly suppressed all attempts to improve working conditions, safety devices on machines, abolition of child labor, and protection of the woman at least during those months when she carries under her heart the future fellow citizen, thus helping Social Democracy, which gratefully took up every such deplorable manifestation to drive the masses into its nets. Never can our political bourgeoisie repair the damage it has done. By its resistance to all attempts to remedy social abuses, it sowed seeds of hatred and condoned the claims of the arch-enemies of the entire nationality, that the Social Democratic Party alone represented the interests of the working classes. Thus it created above all the moral justification for the actual existence of trade unions, those organizations which from the beginning rendered the greatest touting service to the political party. During my years of apprenticeship in Vienna I was forced, whether I wanted or not, to define my attitude regarding the question of unions. As I looked upon them as an inseparable part of the Social Democratic Party as a whole, my decision was quick and wrong. It was natural that I should reject them flatly. In this enormously important question Fate itself gave me lessons. The result was the reversal of my first decision. ** By the time I was twenty I had learned to distinguish between the union as a means of defending the general social rights of the employees and of fighting for better living conditions for the individual, and the union as a party instrument in the political class war. The fact that Social Democracy realized the enormous importance of the union movement secured the instrument YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 61 for it, and with it, success; it cost the bourgeoisie its political position because it did not understand this. By an im- pudent rejection it thought that it would be able to put an end to a logical develgpment, whereas in reality it only forced it to assume illogical paths. It is nonsense and, furthermore, untrue that the union movement in itself is unpatriotic. Quite the contrary is true. If union activity Axes as its goal, and carries out, the uplifting of a class which forms part of the basic pillars of the nation, it does not act unpatriotically or inimically towards the State, but it is 'national' in the true sense of the word. After all, it helps to create the preliminary social conditions without which a general national education is unthinkable. It is the highest merit of the union movement that it abolishes deep-seated social evils and that it attacks physical and mental infections, thus adding to the general welfare of the national body. The question as to its necessity, therefore, is really superfluous. As long as there are amongst the employers people with little social understanding or even lacking a sense of justice and fairness, it is not only the right but even the duty of their employees, who after all form part of our national- ity, to protect the interests of all against the avarice and the unreasonableness of the individual; the safeguarding of the faith and loyalty of a national body is a concern of the nation, just as is the safeguarding of the health of the people. Both are seriously endangered by unworthy employers who do not consider themselves part of the entire national community. The ill effects of their avarice and reckless- ness cause grave dangers for the future. To abolish the causes of such a development means to deserve well of the nation, and not perhaps the reverse. We cannot say that the individual is free to draw the 62 MEIN KAMPF consequences from a real or imagined wrong that has been done to him, that means to go [sic]. Oh, no! This would be humbug and must be considered as an attempt at diverting one's attention. Either the abolition of evil and unsocial events is in the interest of the nation or it is not. If it is, then the battle against it has to be fought with the help of weapons which give hope for success. The individual worker is never in a position to maintain his position against the power of big business, because the question involved is not that of the victory of the higher right, for with its acknow- ledgment the whole argument, since there would be no reasons, would not exist; the question involved is only that of the greater power. On the other hand, the existing feel- ing of justice alone would end the quarrel in an honest manner, or, better still, the quarrel would never have started. No, if unsocial or unworthy treatment of human beings calls for resistance, and as long as no lawful and judicial authorities are created for the abolition of these evils, the struggle can be decided only by the stronger. But it is natural that the power of the employer, concentrated into one single person, can be opposed only by the masses of employees, united into one single body, as otherwise they would have to renounce aU hope for victory at the start. Thus the union organization may lead to a strengthening of a social idea in its practical effects on everyday life, and with it help towards the abolition of causes of irritation, which again and again bring about dissatisfaction ana complaint. That this is not the fact must for the most part be at- tributed to those who knew how to put obstacles in the way of every lawful regulation of social abuses or who have prevented it by means of their political influence. In the same measure in which the political bourgeoisie did not understand, or rather did not want to understand, YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 63 the union organization and showed resistance against it, Social Democracy embraced the disputed movement. Thus it clear-sightedly created a firm basis which has proved itself as a last support in more than one critical hour. Of course, the original purposes were abandoned gradually to make room for new goals. Social Democracy never thought of preserving the pro- fessional movement it had included as its original task. No, this was not its intention. In the course of a few decades, under its skilled hand, ihe means for protecting social and union rights had be- come the instrument for the destruction of national economics. The interests of the workers were not to prove the least hindrance. For in politics, also, the application of economic means of pressure permits the exercise of ex- tortion, as long as there exists a sufficient amount of the necessary recklessness on the one side, and enough stupid, sheepish patience on the other. Something which in this case applies to both sides. At the turn of the century the union movement had already long since ceased to serve its original purpose. From year to year it had entered more and more into the confines of Social Democratic politics, till finally its pur- pose was only that of a ram in the class war. By its con- tinued blows it was to bring about the fall of the entire economic body, built up with great care, so that the structure of the State, after its economic foundations had been destroyed, would easily meet with the same end. The representation of all the economic needs of the workers was receiving less and less consideration, till finally po- litical wisdom did not think it desirable to remedy the social or even cultural distress of the great masses any more, for once their demands had been satisfied, one would run the risk that they could no longer be used as helpless storm troops. 64 MEIN KAMPF So great was the fear that such an ominously perceived development had instilled in the leaders of the class war that they at last not only declined, but even opposed, any real beneficial social action. They never were at a loss for an explanation for such an apparently incomprehensible attitude. By screwing the demands higher and higher, their pos- sible fulfillment seemed so small and unimportant that one was able to convince the masses at any time that one had only to deal with the devilish attempt to weaken or even paralyze the force of the working class by such a ridiculous satisfaction of their holiest claims. Considering the limited thinking power of the masses, the success is not surprising. In the camp of the bourgeoisie, the indignation was great at this apparent insincerity of the Social Democratic tactics, but without drawing even the slightest deductions for a directive of their own. The Social Democrats' very fear of the actual raising of the workers from the depths of their present cultural and social misery should have led to the greatest efforts in this direction, so that the instru- ment would gradually have been wrenched from the repre- sentatives of the class war. But this was not done. Instead of conquering the position of the enemy by an attack of their own, they preferred to be pressed and pushed, till finally the actions which were taken were entirely in- adequate because they came too late; as they were too unimportant, it was easy to reject them. Thus in reality everything remained as it had been, only the dissatisfaction was greater than before. Like a threatening thundercloud, the 'free trades union' hung over the political horizon and the life of the individual. It was one of the most terrible instruments of intimida- tion against the security and the independence of national economy, the solidity of the State and personal freedom. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 65 It was the free trades union above all which turned the conception of Democracy into a ridiculous and repellent phrase, which profaned liberty and ridiculed fraternity forever with the words ' Und willst du nicht Gcnossc sein, so schlagen wir dir den Schaedel ein.' [And if you will not join with us, we'll crack your skull.] Thus I learned to know this 'Friend of mankind. 9 My opinion was enlarged and deepened in the course of the years, but I had no reason to change it. The more insight I gained into the externals of Social Democracy, the greater became my longing to penetrate to the nucleus of its doctrine. The official literature of the party, of course, was of little use. As far as economic problems are concerned, it is wrong in assertion and proof; as regards the political aims, it lies. In addition, I was disgusted with its modern petti- fogging methods and its writing. With an enormous amount of words of unclear content or unintelligible meaning it piles up sentences which are supposed to be as ingenious as they are meaningless. Only the decadent bohemianism of our big cities may feel at home in this labyrinth of reason, to pick up an 'inner experience 9 from the dung heap of this literary dadaism, supported by the proverbial modesty of part of our people, which senses deepest wisdom in the most incomprehensible things. However, by balancing the theoretical untruth and the nonsense of this doctrine with the reality of its appearance, I gradually gained a clear picture of its inner intention. In such hours I had sad forebodings and was filled with a depressing fear, I was faced by a doctrine consisting of egoism and hatred; it could be victorious, following mathe- matical laws, but at the same time it could bring about the end of mankind. 66 MEIN KAMPF Meanwhile I had learned to understand the connection between this doctrine of destruction and the nature of a race, which hitherto had been unknown to me. Understanding Jewry alone is the key to the comprehension of the inner, the real, intention of Social Democracy. He who knows this race will raise the veil of false concep- tions, and out of the mist and fog of empty social phrases there rises the grinning, ugly face of Marxism. Today I would find it difficult, if not impossible, to say when the word 'Jew* gave me cause for special thoughts for the first time. At home, as long as my father lived, I cannot remember that I ever heard the word. I am sure that if the old gentleman had mentioned the term in any special way, he would probably have been indicating antiquated culture. In the course of his life his opinions had been more or less cosmopolitan, which he not only retained despite his strong national feelings, but they also had an effect upon me as well. Even in school I found no reason which could cause me to change this accepted picture. At the Realschule I became acquainted with a Jewish boy whom we all treated with circumspection, but only because experience had taught us not to trust him too much on account of his reticence; neither I nor the others had any particular thoughts in the matter. It was only when I was fourteen or fifteen that I came upon the word 'Jew' more frequently, partly in connection with political discussions. I felt a slight dislike and could not ward off a disagreeable sensation which seized me whenever confessional differences took place in my presence. At that time I did not look upon this question from any other point of view. There were only a very few Jews in Linz. In the course YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 67 of the centuries their external appearance had become European and human; yes, I even looked upon them as Germans. The nonsense of this notion was not clear to me, since I saw the only distinguishing mark in their strange religion. The fact that they had been persecuted on that account (as I believed) turned my aversion against un- favorable remarks about them almost into abhorrence. I had no idea at all that organized hostility against the Jews existed. And so I arrived in Vienna. Captivated by the mass of architectural impressions, depressed by the burden of my fate, I was at first unaware of the classification of the population in the huge city. Although Vienna in those years already had two hundred thousand Jews among its two million inhabitants, I did not see them. During the first weeks, my eyes and my senses The position of the Jews in Austria was far different from what it was in Germany. Census figures for 1890 indicate that there were 17,693,648 Catholics, and 1,143,305 Jews in the Empire. Other groups Greek Catholics, Protestants, etc. together numbered less than 4,000,000. The only really large Jewish settlement in German Austria was in Vienna. Now during the nineteenth century, two sources of conflict other than economic class differences arose to plague the Habsburgs rising nationalist sentiment, which made every one of the linguistic groups avid for special favors, and growing hostility to the privileges accorded the Church. Liberalism, increasing in importance after 1848, had con- siderably strengthened the grip of educated Viennese Jews upon the press and literary production. They were then accused by the Catholic majority of having fomented antipathy to the Concordat under which the Catholic Church then lived, and more generally of spreading liberalistic ideas; and the shifting of responsibility for ill-feeling from one party to an- other became in time a normal feature of Austrian intellectual 68 MEIN KAMPF were unable to take in the rush of so many new values and ideas. Only after settling down, when the confused pictures began to grow clearer, did I look at my new world more attentively, and then I also came upon the Jewish problem. I cannot say that I particularly liked the way in which I was to become acquainted with them. I still saw nothing but the religion in the Jew, and for reasons of human tolerance I continued to decline fighting on religious grounds. In my opinion, therefore, the language of the anti-Semitic Viennese press was unworthy of the cultural traditions of a great race. I was depressed by the memory of certain events in the Middle Ages which I did not wish to see repeated. Since the newspapers in question had not a high reputation generally for what reason I myself did not exactly know I saw in them more the products of envious annoyance rather than the results of a fundamental but incorrect opinion. My own opinion was supported by what seemed to me the much more dignified manner in which the really great press replied to all these attacks, or, what I thought even more worthy of respect, it did not mention them or ignored them completely. I zealously read the so-called world press (Neue Freie and journalistic life. The differences might have been ironed out in time if nationalistic sentiment and the resultant tendency to look upon Austria-Hungary as a * state of nations ' had not played its part. The Jews were looked upon as a separate 4 nation ' side by side with Germans, Czechs, and others. Consequently, even those Jews who became Catholics or Protestants were no longer assimilated. By changing their creed, they separated confessionally from a group to which they were nevertheless bound 'nationally.' Theoretically, of course, Jewish converts to Catholicism or Protestantism were accepted as equals, but in practice an increasingly large number of persons came to look upon such conversions as spurious. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 69 Presse, Wiener Tageblatt, etc.) and I was astonished at the scope of what it offered its readers in general and at the objectivity of the representation in detail. I respected the dignified tone, though the extravagance of its style some- times did not quite satisfy me and at times even displeased me. But this was perhaps due to life in the metropolis in general. Since at that time I considered Vienna a metropolis, I thought I was justified in letting the explanation I had given myself pass for an excuse. What repelled me sometimes, however, was the un- dignified manner in which the press wooed the Court. There was hardly any occurrence at the Hofburg which was not reported to the reader either in raptures of enthusiasm or in complaining amazement, especially when the 'wisest of all monarchs' of all times was concerned, the fuss almost resembled the mating cry of the mountain-cock. To me this seemed artificial. In my opinion liberal democracy was blemished by this. To strive for the favor of the Court in such an indecent manner signified ridiculing the dignity of the nation. This was the first shadow to cloud my spiritual relation- ship with the 'great' Viennese press. In Vienna I continued, as I had done before, to follow up all events in Germany with the fieriest enthusiasms, no matter whether political or cultural questions were con- cerned. With proud admiration I compared the rise of the Hitler did not, therefore, share the prevailing Catholic feeling that Jewish intellectuals and journalists were under- mining the rights of the Church. He was a 'liberal 9 in the sense that he, though born a Catholic, refused to commit himself seriously to one side of a religious discussion. What annoyed him was that the 'liberal' newspapers, to a large extent edited by Jews, defended the hated Habsburg House, 70 MEIN KAMPF Reich with the decline of the Austrian State. But while foreign political events gave me undivided joy, the less enjoyable domestic affairs often distressed me. At that time I did not approve of the fight that was being waged against Wilhelm II. In him I saw not only the German Emperor but also the creator of the German navy. The restriction of speech which the Reichstag imposed on the Kaiser annoyed me very much for the simple reason that it was issued by that institution which in my opinion had really no authority to do so, especially as during one single session these parliamentarian ganders produced more honking nonsense than a whole dynasty of emperors, its sorriest weaklings included, could have produced in centuries. I was indignant at the fact that in a State where every halfwit not only claimed the right to criticize, but where in the Reichstag he was let loose on the nation as a ' legislator/ the bearer of the imperial crown could be given 'repri- mands' by the greatest babbling institution of all time. It infuriated me even more that the same Viennese press which made the deepest curtsy even to the lowest of the Court nags, and which was beside itself with joy at the accidental waving of its tail, now with an apparently sorrow- ful mien but, as I thought, with ill-concealed malice expressed its objections against the German Kaiser. It was advocated parliamentary government, and criticised the all- highest Kaiser Wilhelm II. Here is one reason why he would later on throw German Catholics and Marxists into one pot. Both were upon occasion critical of the Prussian znon- archs, and both were dyed-in-the-wool advocates of parliamen- tary procedure. In Austria he had no reason to make this identification. Because they felt that the Habsburgs had often failed to support the cause of the Church, numerous groups of Catholics had waxed critical of the monarchy. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 71 farthest from its intentions to interfere with the affairs of the German Reich no, God forbid! but by placing a friendly finger on these wounds one fulfilled the duty imposed by the mutual alliance, and on the other hand, one's duty to journalistic truth, etc. Now this finger probed about in the wound to its heart's content. Such things made the blood rush to my head. It was this that made me look upon the great press with increasing caution. I had to admit, however, that one of the anti-Semitic papers, the Deutsche Volkszeitung, behaved better on one of these occasions. The disgusting veneration which the press even then expressed for France got on my nerves. One had to be ashamed of being a German when seeing these sweetish hymns of praise to the 'great culture nation.' More than once this wretched wooing of France made me put down one of these 'world papers.' I turned more and more to the Volksblatt, which I considered much smaller but which was also much cleaner than the other papers as far as these things were concerned. I did not agree with its sharp anti- Semitic tone, but now and then I read explanations which made me stop to think. At any rate and because of this, I gradually learned to know the man and the movement who ruled Vienna's destiny: Doktor Karl Lueger and the Christian Socialist Party. Karl Lueger (1844-1910) founded the Christian-Social Party (to which Dr. Engelbert Dollf uss and Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg belonged) on the basis of a program that combined a good deal of progressive municipal legislation with a shrewd aware- ness of the political values latent in popular anti-Semitism. He had a Jewish ancestor in his family tree, had numerous Jewish friends, and as Mayor of Vienna issued the slogan. 72 MEIN KAMPF When I first came to Vienna I was inimical to both of them. In my opinion, the man and the movement were 're- actionary/ f My usual sense of justice made me change this opinion as I had the opportunity of getting acquainted with the man and the movement; and slowly my fair judgment turned into open admiration. Today more than before I look upon this man as the greatest German mayor of all times. How many of my deliberate opinions were thrown over by my change of attitude towards the Christian Socialist movement! When because of this my opinions in regard to anti- Semitism also slowly began to change in the course of time, it was probably my most serious change. This change caused me most of my severe mental strug- 4 1 am the one who decides who is a Jew.' Nevertheless Lueger's newspaper, the Volksblatt read by Hitler, was so violently anti- Semitic that the Archbishop of Vienna rebuked it in a Pastoral Letter which denounced 'heathenish race hatred.' To this Lueger retorted that to his great surprise and sorrow he found that the Archbishop was 'liberal through and through.' Rome took no definitive stand in the matter, the Papal Nuncio sup- porting the Archbishop while Cardinal Rampolla, then Papal Secretary of State, held a protecting hand over Lueger. The Volksblatt is indubitably a storehouse of information on the subject of Hitler's development. There one finds used, for example, the word voclkisch 'folkish,' i.e., pertaining to one's people, which is both 'race' and 'nation.' Even more delectable to Hitler were Lueger's constant brushes with the Emperor. Into this same period of time there also falls the origin of statements that the Talmud teaches pernicious ethics, encouraging Jews to gouge their Christian neighbors in every possible way. Dr. August Rohling's book, Der Talmud Judt (The Talmud Jew), appeared in 1871, was widely read or YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 73 gles, and only after months of agonizing between reason and feeling, victory began to favor reason. Two years later feeling had followed reason, and from now on became its most faithful guard and monitor. In the period of this bitter struggle between spiritual education and cold reasoning, the pictures that the streets of Vienna showed me rendered me invaluable services. The time came when I no longer walked blindly through the mighty city as I had done at first, but, with open eyes, looked at the people as well as the buildings. < One day when I was walking through the inner city, I suddenly came upon a being clad in a long caftan, with black curls. Is this also a Jew? was my first thought. At Linz they certainly did not look like that. Secretly and cautiously I watched the man, but the longer I stared at this strange face and scrutinized one feature after the other, the more my mind reshaped the first question into another form : Is this also a German? As was my custom in such cases, I tried to remove my doubts by reading. For the first time in my life I bought some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few pennies. They all started with the supposition that the reader already knew the Jewish question in principle or understood it to a certain quoted from in subsequent decades, and is still today the source from which all such accusations derive. It was debated pro and con at the time, being the object of litigation from which Rohling withdrew. Doubtless Hitler's anti-Jewish prejudice derives in part from his reading on this subject. For a Jewish treatment of this matter, cf. Erinnerungen aus mcinem Lcben, by Joseph S. Bloch (Vienna, 1922). For a succinct Catholic summary, cf. Zeitalter des Individualismus, by L. A. Veit (Freiburg, 193*)- 74 MEIN KAMPF degree. Finally, the tone was such that I again had doubts because the assertions were supported by such extremely unscientific arguments. I then suffered relapses for weeks, and once even for months. The matter seemed so monstrous, the accusations so unbounded that the fear of committing an injustice tortured me and made me anxious and uncertain again. However, even I could no longer actually doubt that they were not Germans with a special religion, but an entirely different race; since I had begun to think about this question, since my attention was drawn to the Jews, I began to see Vienna in a different light from before. Wherever I went I saw Jews, and the more I saw of them, the sharper I began to distinguish them from other people. The inner city especially and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which through its appearance alone had no resemblance to the German people. Even if my doubts had continued, my hesitation was finally dispelled by the attitude of part of the Jews them- selves. A great movement amongst them, which was widely represented in Vienna, was determined to affirm the na- tional character of Jewry: the Zionists. It appeared as though only part of the Jews approved of this attitude and the majority disagreed or even condemned it. The appearance, when closely examined, dissolved itself for reasons of expedience into an evil mist of excuses or Zionism, as proclaimed and finally established by Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jewish poet, was undoubtedly the clear- est manifesto of the difficulties in which Austrian Jews found themselves. For it accepted a 'national' status for the Jew thus barring the route to assimilation and added that such a status led logically to the ideal of separate Jewish State. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 75 even lies. For the so-called liberal Jews did not deny the Zionists for being non-Jewish, but for being Jews whose open acknowledgment of their Jewish nationality was impractical or even dangerous. This did not alter their internal solidarity in the least. Soon this apparent fight between Zionists and liberal Jews disgusted me; it was unreal throughout, based on lies, and little suited to the generally accepted high moral standard and purity of this race. The moral and physical cleanliness of this race was a point in itself. It was externally apparent that these were not water-loving people, and unfortunately one could frequently tell that even with eyes closed. Later the smell of these caftan wearers often made me ill. Added to this were their dirty clothes and their none too heroic appear- ance. Perhaps all this was not very attractive; aside from the physical uncleanliness, it was repelling suddenly to discover the moral blemishes of the chosen people. Nothing gave me more cause for reflection than the gradually increased insight into the activities of Jews in certain fields. Was there any form of filth or profligacy, above all in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not partici- pate? When carefully cutting open such a growth, one could tind a little Jew, blinded by the sudden light, like a maggot in a rotting corpse. The Jews' activity in the press, in art, literature, and the theater, as I learned to know it, did not add to their credit These criticisms do not reflect actual critical study of the literature of the subject, but are echoes of Volksblatt editorials. There were some Jewish scribes of an objectionable sort; and they had their gentile bedfellows. To the great poets of 76 MEIN KAMPF in my eyes. All unctuous assertions were of little or no avail. It was sufficient to look at the bill-boards, to read the names of those who produced these awful works for theaters and movies if one wanted to become hardened for a long time. This was pestilence, spiritual pestilence with which the people were infected, worse than the Black Death of former times! And in what quantities this poison was produced and distributed! Of course, the lower the spiritual and the moral standard of such an art manufac- turer, the greater his fertility, till such a fellow, like a centrifugal machine, splashes his dirt into the faces of others. Besides, one must remember their countless num- ber; one must remember that for one Goethe, Nature plays a dirty trick upon mankind in producing ten thousand such scribblers who, as germ carriers of the worst sort, poison the minds of the world. It could not be overlooked how terrible it was that the Jew above all was chosen in so great a number for this disgraceful task. Was this to prove the fact that the Jews were the chosen people? Carefully I began to examine the names of those who created these unclean products of artistic life. The result had a devastating influence on my previous attitude to- Jewish extraction, Hugo von Hoffmansthal or Karl Kraus for example, the nationalists were just as ferociously indifferent as they were to the literary efforts of Czechs and Hungarians. This attitude was later on transplanted to Germany. Ques- tioned as to German post- War literature, a member of Papen's Cabinet retorted in 1933 that of course none of it could be any good. A still more logical sequel was the ' burning of the books f in Nazi Germany. Since then the official report on literature written by racially inferior authors is eingestampft i.e., reduced to pulp. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 77 wards the Jews. No matter how much my feeling resisted, Reason had to draw its own conclusions. The fact was not to be denied that ninety per cent of all literary and artistic rubbish and of theatrical humbug was due to a race which hardly amounted to one-hundredth of all inhabitants of the country. Yet it was so. Now I also began to examine my beloved 'world press' from this point of view. The deeper I probed, the more the subject of my former admiration diminished. I could no longer stand its style, I had to reject its contents on account of its shallowness, the objectivity of ks presentation seemed untrue rather than honest truth ; the authors, however, were Jews. Now I began to notice tj^MA9H**&ihi n &s which previ- ously I had hardly seen^djE^giBBJI^attuierstand others which had already ca^ff^Sf^lSS^^^^^, Now I saw the libm-5intiide of th^^^sjain a different light; its dignified lapjS^^^ff 9fiF^$> % tac ^Si or its completely ignoring IranK, w^mv^Sedrd twapj a trick as clever as it was m Ww\he^^riJHpa* thratripfl criticisms always dealt with JewmK rathorel dna-ne^ecJold they attack anyone except the GfinXThe sljgtft^ypricks against Wilhelm II proved in mJ^ghsi^^c^J^^methods, and so did the commendation of F^tejSaaBrfrore and civilization. The trashy contents of the novel now became obscene, and the language contained tones of a foreign race; the general intention was obviously so detrimental to the German nationality that it could only have been intentional. But who had an interest in this? Was it all a mere accident? Slowly I became uncertain. This development was accelerated by my insight into a series of other events. This was the conception of manners and morality as it was openly shown and exercised by a great number of Jews. 7t MEIN KAMPF Again the life in the street gave some really evil demon- strations. In no other city ot western Europe could the relationship between Jewry and prostitution, and even now the white slave traffic, be studied better than in Vienna, with the possible exception of the seaports of Southern France. When walking at night through the streets and alleys of the Leopoldsstadt, with every step one could witness things which were unknown to the greater part of the German nation until the war gave the soldiers on the Eastern Front an opportunity to see similar things, or rather forced them to see them. An icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing for the first time the Jew as a cool, shameless, and calculating manager of this shocking vic, the outcome of the scum of the big city. 'L ^f ^ But then my indignation flare*? upa Now 1 did not evade the discussidn <$ the Jewish question any longer; no, I sought itou^:. A Cj&rned to look for the Jew in every field of our Cultural ajicj^ftistic l^ e > I suddenly bumped against him in a place where I* had never suspected. The scales dropped J rom n\y eye^<lvhen I found the Jew as the leader of SociaJ Dejpiocjrac^i This put an end to a long internal struggle* v ,, ^_, "* f During my daily contact with my worker comrades, I was struck by the changeability with which they demonstrated different attitudes towards one and .the same question, sometimes in the course of a few days, sometimes even after a few hours. I could hardly understand how people who expressed sensible opinions when talked to individually suddenly changed their minds when influenced by the spell of the masses. It often made me despair. After hours of talking I often thought that I had broken the ice or cleared up some nonsense and rejoiced at my success, only to find to my dismay on the following day that I had to start all YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 79 over again; everything had been in vain. The madness of their ideas seemed to swing back and forth like a pendulum in perpetual motion. I could still understand everything: that they were dissatisfied with their lot and cursed Fate for hitting them so hard ; that they hated the employers whom they looked upon as the cruel executives of Fate; that they cursed the authorities who in their eyes had no understanding for their situation; that they demonstrated against the high cost of living and marched in the streets to make their demands; all this I could understand at least without re- course to reason. But what I never understood was their boundless hate towards their own nationality, how they despised their national greatness, soiled its history and abused its heroes. The fight against one's own race, against one's own nest and homeland, was as senseless as it was incomprehensible. It was unnatural. One could cure them temporarily of this vice, but only for days or weeks at the most. If later one met the supposed convert again, he had become the same as before. The unnatural had taken hold of him again. < I gradually realized that the Social Democratic press was headed primarily by Jews; but I did not attach special importance to this fact, as it was the same with the other newspapers. But one thing struck me: there was not one paper that employed Jews which had a really national tendency, as I understood it, based on my education and attitude. Now, although I made an effort and tried to read these Marxian products of the press, my aversion was intensified ; I tried to get better acquainted with the producers of this mass of knavery. 80 MEIN KAMPF They all were Jews from the publishers downwards. I took all the Social Democratic pamphlets I could get hold of and traced the names of their authors: they all were Jews. I memorized the names of all the leaders; the greater part of them were also members of the 'chosen people'; no matter if they were representatives of the Reichsrat or secretaries of the unions, presidents of organizations or street agitators. One always found the same uncanny picture. The names Austerlitz, David, Adler, Ellenbogen, and so forth, will remain in my memory forever. One thing had become clear to me: the party with whose little representatives I had to fight the hardest struggle during many months were almost entirely in the hands of a foreign race; it brought me internal happiness to realize definitely that the Jew was no German. Only now I learned thoroughly to know the seducers of our people. Only a year of my stay in Vienna had sufficed to con- vince me that no worker was so stubborn as not to give in to better knowledge and better arguments. Gradually I be- came acquainted with their own doctrine and I used it as a weapon in the battle for my own internal conviction. Now success was nearly always on my side. It was possible to save the great masses, but only after the greatest sacrifices of time and patience. The theory of preponderant Jewish leadership in Austrian Social Democracy is not substantiated by the facts. After the War there were quite a number of Jewish intellectuals in dominant positions, yet even then the Party leadership through- out German Austria was overwhelmingly Aryan. Moreover the Anschluss, though marked by wholesale arrests, was character- ized by impressive leniency towards the former Socialists, who suffered little in comparison with the Legitimists. This would, of course, not have been the case had the Socialists been as non-Aryan as Hitler here suggests. YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 81 But it was never possible to free a Jew from his convic- tions. At that time I was still naive enough to try to make clear to them the madness of their ideas; in my small circle I talked until my tongue was weary and till my throat was hoarse, and I thought I could succeed in convincing them of the destructiveness of their Marxist doctrine of irra- tionality; but the result was only the contrary. It seemed as though the increasing realization of the destructive influence of Social Democratic theories would serve only to strengthen their determination. The more I argued with them, the more I got to know their dialectics. First they counted on the ignorance of their adversary; then, when there was no way out, they themselves pretended stupidity. If all this was of no avail, they refused to understand or they changed the subject when driven into a corner; they brought up truisms, but they immediately transferred their acceptance to quite different subjects, and, if attacked again, they gave way and pretended to know nothing exactly. Wherever one attacked one of these prophets, one's hands seized slimy jelly; it slipped through one's fingers only to collect again in the next moment. If one smote one of them so thoroughly that, with the bystanders watching, he could but agree, and if one thus thought he had advanced at least one step, one was greatly astonished the following day. The Jew did not in the least remember the day before, he continued to talk in the same old strain as if nothing had happened, and if indignantly confronted, he pretended to be astonished and could not remember anything except that his assertions had already been proved true the day before. Often I was stunned. One did not know what to admire more: their glibness of tongue or their skill in .lying. I gradually began to hate them. 82 MEIN KAMPF All this had one good side: in the measure in which the bearers, or at least the propagators, of Social Democracy caught my attention, my love for my own people grew. Knowing the infernal versatility of these seducers, who dared to condemn the unhappy victims? How difficult I found it myself to master the dialectical lies of this race! How futile was success with people who turned truth into untruth, who denied the word that just has been spoken only to claim it as their own the very next minute! No. The better I learned to know the Jew, the more 1 had to forgive the worker. In my eyes the fault was not his but theirs who did not consider it worth while to take pity on him, to give the son of the nation what was his due, and to smash the seducer and corrupter against the wall. Influenced by the experiences of everyday life, I myself began to trace the sources of the Marxist doctrine. Its workings had become clear to me in detail, my observant eye daily watched its success, and with a little imagination I was able to picture its consequences. The only remaining question was whether its founders imagined the result ot their creation in its ultimate form, or whether they them- selves were victims of an error. In my opinion both were possible. On the one hand it was the duty of every thinking human being to join the front ranks of the unhappy movement to prevent the worst possible disaster; on the other, the instigators of this national illness must have been devils incarnate; only in the brains 'of a monster not in the brains of a human being could the plan for an organiza- tion take shape and meaning, an organization whose activity must lead to the ultimate collapse of human culture and with it the devastation of the world. In this case the only remaining salvation was fight; a fight with all weapons which the human mind, reason, and YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING 83 will power are able to grasp, no matter which side will then be favored by Fate. Thus I began to make myself acquainted with the found- ers of this doctrine, in order to study the principles of the movement. The fact that I reached my goal more quickly than I dared to hope at first was due to the knowledge I had gained of the Jewish question, though at that time it had not gone very deep. This alone made possible a practical comparison between reality and the theoretical bragging of the apostles who founded Social Democracy, as it had taught me to understand the language of the people; they talk in order to conceal or at least to veil their thoughts; their real aim cannot be discovered on the lines, but slum- bers well hidden between them. This was the time in which the greatest change I was ever to experience took place in me. From a feeble cosmopolite I had turned into a fanatical anti-Semite. Only once more it was the last time I was sur- rounded with depressing thoughts in my state of deepest despair. While thus examining the working of the Jewish race over long periods of history, the anxious question suddenly occurred to me whether perhaps inscrutable Destiny, for reasons unknown to us poor mortals, had not unalterably decreed the final victory of this little race? Had this race, which always had lived only for this world, been promised the world as a reward? Have we the right to fight objectively for our self- preservation, or is this rooted in us only subjectively? While thoroughly studying the Marxist doctrine and by looking at the Jewish people's activity with calm clarity, Destiny itself gave me the answer. The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle in nature; instead of the eternal privilege of force 84 MEIN KAMPF and strength, it places the mass of numbers and its dead- weight. Thus it denies the value of the individual in man, disputes the meaning of nationality and race, depriving mankind of the assumption for its existence and culture. As the basis of the universe it would lead up to the end of all order conceivable to man. And as in this greatest discernible organism only chaos could be the result of the application of such a law, so on this earth the decline of its inhabitants would be the result. If, with the help of the Marxian creed, the Jew conquers the nations of this world, his crown will become the funeral wreath of humanity, and once again this planet, empty of mankind, will move through the ether as it did thousands of years ago. Eternal Nature inexorably revenges the transgressions of her laws. Therefore, I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work. CHAPTER III GENERAL POLITICAL CONSIDERA- TIONS FROM MY TIME IN VIENNA I f IT IS my conviction today that a man should not take any active public part in politics before the age of thirty, except in cases of outstanding ability. He should not do so because up to that time the formation of a general plat- form takes place from which he examines the various political problems and defines his own final attitude to- wards them. The man who has now matured at least mentally may or should take part in the political guidance of the community only after reaching a fundamental view of life and, with it, a stability of his own way of looking at the individual current problems. If this is not the case, he runs the risk that some day he will have to change his attitude towards vital questions, or, despite his better knowledge and belief, to uphold points of view which reason and conviction have long since rejected. The first case is very embarrassing for him, for now personally uncertain, he has no longer the right to expect that his followers have the same unshakable belief in him as before ; such a reversal on the part of the leader brings uncertainty to his followers and frequently a certain feeling of embarrassment as regards those they have been fighting. But in the second case there may happen what 86 MEIN KAMPF we so frequently see today: in the same measure in which the leader no longer believes in what he said, his defense will be hollow and shallow, and he will be base in his choice of means. While he himself no longer thinks seriously of defending his political revelations (one does not die for something one does not believe in), the demands he makes of his followers become greater and more impudent, till finally he sacrifices what is left of the leader in order to end up as a 'politician' ; that means that kind of man whose only real conviction is to have no conviction, combined with impudent obtrusiveness and the brazen-faced artful- ness of lying. If such a fellow, to the misfortune of decent people, be- comes a member of a parliament, it should be known from the beginning that the meaning of politics for him is only the heroic struggle for the feeding bottle for himself and his family. The closer his wife and children cling to it, the more tenaciously will he stick to his mandate. This alone makes all other men with political instincts his enemies; in every new movement he suspects the possible beginning of the end, and in every man greater than him- self he scents the probability of a renewed danger which threatens him. I will speak of these parliamentary bedbugs in detail later on. A man of thirty will also have to learn a lot more in the course of his life, but this will only be the supplement to, and the filling-out of, the frame which his view of life places before him. His learning will no longer be a re- learning in principle, but an adding to what he has learned, and his followers will not have to swallow the oppressing feeling that so far he has taught them the wrong ideas; on the contrary: the visible organic growth of the leader will give them satisfaction, as his learning means only the deepening of their own doctrine. This is, in their eyes, POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 87 the proof for the truth of the opinions they have held so fan The leader who has to give up the platform of his general view of life because he found that it was wrong only acts with decency if he is ready to face the ultimate consequences from the realization that his previous views have been wrong. In such a case he must for all future times renounce at least all public political activity. As he has been already once the victim of a basic error, the possibility exists that this may happen a second time. On no account is he entitled to continue to utilize, or even demand, the confidence of his fellow citizens. The general profligacy of the cads who today consider themselves authorized to 'make' politics hardly lives up to his standard of decency. Hardly one of them is predestined for this task. I restrained myself from appearing in public, though I believe that I have occupied myself with politics more than many others. I talked of what occupied my mind or attracted me only in the narrowest circle. This speaking within the most limited frame had many advantages; I learned less to 'speak* than to gain an insight into the un- believably primitive opinions and arguments of the people. Thus I trained myself for my own further education with- out losing time or ignoring opportunities. Nowhere in Germany was the opportunity for this so favorable as in Vienna at that time. < The general political thinking in the old Danubian monarchy was wider and more comprehensive in scope than in the old Germany, except for parts of Prussia, Hamburg, and the North Sea coast at that period. By 'Austria 1 I mean, in this case, that part of the great Habs- burg realm which, in consequence of its German coloniza- 88 MEIN KAMPF don, not only gave in every respect the original conditions for the formation of this State as a whole, but the popula- tion of which showed that force that exclusively for many centuries was able to give the inner cultural life to this artificial formation. The more time advanced, the more the existence and the future of this State depended on the maintenance of this germ cell of the realm. While the old hereditary lands represented the heart of the realm which continuously pumped fresh blood into the circulatory system of its political and cultural life, Vienna combined its brains and will power. Even the outward appearance of this city revealed the force it required to rule as the uniting queen over this conglomerate of nations, so that the splendor of her beauty made one forget the signs of approaching age of the whole. No matter how much the interior of the realm might twitch during the bloody struggles of the various nationali- ties, the countries abroad, especially Germany, saw only the lovely picture of that city. The delusion was the greater as Vienna in those days seemed to rise, perhaps for the last time, visibly and higher than before. Under the rule of a really ingenious mayor the venerable imperial residence of the emperors of the old realm once more awoke to a wonderfully young life. Officially, the last great German whom the ranks of the colonizing people of the Ostmark brought forth was not counted among the so-called 'states* men* ; but while Doktor Lueger, as mayor of the 'capital and the imperial residential city' of Vienna, produced as if by magic one amazing achievement after the other in nearly all domains of economic and cultural politics, he strengthened the heart of the entire realm, and in this roundabout fashion he became a statesman greater than all the so-called 'diplomats' of that period put together. If nevertheless the conglomeration of the nationalities called 'Austria 9 perished in the end, this does not speak POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 89 unfavorably in the least of the political ability of the German nationality in the old Ostmark, for it was the in- evitable result of the impossibility of trying to safeguard permanently with the help of ten million people a State of fifty million people of various nationalities, unless definite suppositions were established in time. The German-Austrian thought in more than large terms, He was always accustomed to living within the frame of a great realm, and he never lost his understanding for the tasks connected with it. He was the only one in this State who saw, beyond the boundaries of the narrow crownland, the frontiers of the Reich ; even when Destiny finally sepa- rated him from the common motherland, he still tried to master the enormous task and to guard for the German nationality what his forefathers once had wrested from the East in never-ending struggles. Whereby one should remember that this could only be done with divided energy ; for the hearts and the memories of the best men never ceased to feel sympathy for the common motherland, and only the rest remained to the homeland. The German-Austrian's general horizon already was comparatively wide. His economic relations frequently included almost the entire many-sided realm. Nearly all great enterprises were in his hands, he supplied the greater part of the leading technical experts and officials. But he was also the representative of the foreign trade, as far as the Jew had not laid his hands upon this domain which had been his of old. As regards politics the German alone held the State together. Even the period of the military service in the army thrust him far across the narrow borders of the homeland. Though the German-Austrian recruit might enlist in a German regiment, it might as possibly be stationed in Herzegovina as in Vienna or Galicia. The officers' corps was still German and so was predominantly the body of officials. Finally, art and science were German. 90 MEIN KAMPF Apart from the trash of the modern development of art, which might just as well have been produced by a Negro race, the German was the sole owner and propagator of a truly artistic mind. In music, architecture, sculpture, and painting, Vienna was the fountain which in inexhaustible profusion supplied the entire dual monarchy without ever visibly drying up. Finally, the German nation was also the pillar of the entire field of foreign politics, if one excepted a small number of Hungarians. Yet every attempt at preserving the realm was in vain, since the essentials were missing. In the Austrian State of nationalities there was but one way by which it could conquer the centrifugal forces of its various nations. Either the State was governed from the center and organized in the same way internally, or it was altogether unthinkable. This knowledge dawned on the Very highest 1 authority in various enlightened moments, but in most cases it was soon forgotten or put aside as being too difficult to be carried out. Every idea of giving the realm a more feder- alistic form was bound to fail in consequence of the absence of a strong germ cell of superior force in the State. To this was added the various other internal conditions of the Austrian State which in principle differed from those of the German Reich of Bismarck. In Germany, the main problem was only to overcome political tradition, as there always had been a common cultural basis. But the Reich, with the exception of a few foreign splinters, possessed only members of one race. In Austria the situation was the reverse. Here the political memory of the various nations' own greatness, except for Hungary, was either entirely lacking, or it had been wiped out by the sponge of time, or at least was blurred and indistinct. To make up for this, in the POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 91 period of the development of the principle of nationalities, the various countries began to develop popular forces; the conquering of these forces became the more difficult as nation-States began to form themselves on the border of the monarchy whose people were either similar or racially related to the individual Austrian national splinters and they were now able to exercise a greater force of attraction than that possible to the German -Austrian. Even Vienna was not able to keep up this fight in the long run. With Budapest's development into a capital, Vienna was for the first time faced with a rival whose task was no longer the concentration of the entire monarchy, but rather the strengthening of one of its parts. After a short time Prague was to follow this example, then came Lemberg, Laibach, etc. With the rise of these one-time provincial towns to national capitals of the individual countries, there were now also formed centers for a growing independ- ent cultural life. It was only through this that the national political instincts now received their spiritual foundation and depth. Thus the time was bound to come when the driving forces of the individual nationalities became more powerful than the force of their combined interests, and then Austria would be done for. Since the death of Joseph II, the course of this develop- ment could be distinctly traced. Its speed depended on a series of factors which were partly rooted in the monarchy itself, but which were, on the other hand, the results of the position of the realm in foreign politics. If the struggle for the preservation of the State was to be taken up seriously and fought to a finish, a ruthless and persistent centralization alone could lead to the goal. But the homogeneity was to be stressed by the establishment in principle of a uniform State language, while the admin- istration was to be given the technical instrument without 92 MEIN KAMPF which such a State simply cannot exist. Only then could permanent uniform State consciousness be cultivated through schools and education. This could not be achieved in the course of ten or twenty years; one had to count on centuries, as in all questions of colonization persistency plays a more important rdle than the energy of the moment. That the administration and the political guidance have then to be carried out in strict uniformity is obvious. It is now very enlightening for me to establish why this did not happen, or rather, why it had not been done. Only he who was guilty of this omission was also guilty of the collapse of the realm. Old Austria, more than any other State, depended on the greatness of its leaders. Here the foundation of the national State was missing, which always possesses a power of preservation in its national basis, no matter how weak the leaders may be. The uniformly national State, thanks to the inherent indolence of its inhabitants and the powers of resistance connected with it, can sometime sustain itself for astoundingly long periods of incompetent administration or government, without thereby destroying its internal existence. Often it seems as though there were no more life in such a body, as though it were dead and done for, till suddenly the supposedly dead rises again and gives the rest of mankind astonishing proofs of its imperishable force of life. It is different, however, with a realm which is not com- posed of similar nationalities and which is not kept to- gether by common blood but by a common fist. Here every weakness of the leadership will not cause the State to hibernate, but it will cause an awakening of all individual instincts which are present by virtue of blood and race, but which have no chance of developing in times of pre- dominating will power. Only centuries of common educa- tion, common tradition, common interests, etc.. can miti- POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 93 gate this danger. Therefore such State formations, the younger they are the more will they depend on the compe- tence of the leadership; even if they are the works of men of overwhelming force and of spiritual heroes, they will fall to pieces after the death of their one great founder. But even after centuries these dangers cannot be regarded as overcome; they merely slumber, and often awake quite suddenly as soon as the weakness of the common leader- ship, the force of education, and the sublimity of all tradi- tions are no longer able to overcome the sweep of the in- dividual vital instinct of the various tribes. The failure to understand this is perhaps the tragic guilt of the House of Habsburg. For only one of them did Fate uphold the torch over the future of his country, then it was extinguished forever. Joseph II, Roman Emperor of the German Nation, saw with trembling fear that his house, pushed toward the most remote corner of the realm, was bound to disappear in the maelstrom of a Babylon of nationalities unless the shortcomings of his forefathers were made good in the eleventh hour. This 'friend of man' opposed with super- human force the neglect of his ancestors and tried to recover, in the course of a decade, what centuries had let Joseph II (1765-1790) was actuated by a desire to strengthen the power of Austria, and believed the means to be adopted were a strong central government and a policy of Germaniza- tion. The official language was to be German; the Church was to be subordinated to the State, its servants being treated as dependent on the government in the normal sense of the civil service; and the universities were to teach, in the German lan- guage, whatever would serve to produce a well-trained official. These policies embroiled Austria in cultural strife of so serious an import that most of Joseph's laws were abrogated before his death. 94 MEIN KAMPF slip by. Had he been granted forty years for his work, and had only two generations continued after him to carry out what he had begun, then the miracle would probably have been achieved. But when he died after a reign of hardly ten years, worn out in body and soul, his work was en- tombed with him never to be awakened again and went to sleep in the crypt of the Capucins forever. His followers were unequal to the task, either in spirit or in will power. When the first revolutionary flashes of lightning of a new era flamed through Europe, Austria also began gradu- ally to catch fire. But when at last the fire broke out, it was fanned not so much by social or general political causes, but rather by impulsive forces of national origin. The revolution of the year 1848 may have been a class war everywhere else, but in Austria it was the beginning of a new race struggle. The German, forgetting or not ac- knowledging his origin, sealed his own doom by entering into the service of the revolutionary movement. He helped in awakening the spirit of Western Democracy which after a short time deprived him of the foundation of his own existence. The foundation stone for the end of the German nation- ality's domination in the monarchy was laid by the forma- tion of a parliamentary body of representatives without the establishment and the solidification of a common State language. But from this moment on the State itself was doomed. Everything that now followed was only the historical liquidation of a realm. It was as shocking as it was instructive to trace this dissolution. This execution of an historical sentence was carried out in thousands and thousands of individual forms. That the gods willed the destruction of Austria was proved by the fact that a goodly part of the people marched blindly through the signs of decline. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 95 I do not wish to lose myself in details, as that is not the purpose of this book. I want to include in the circle of closer observation only those events which are the constant causes of the decline of nations and States and which possess significance for our era as well, and which finally helped to guard the principles of my political thought. Among the institutions which might have revealed the disintegration of the Austrian monarchy, to the bourgeoisie who were not blessed with very sharp eyes, was one which should have chosen strength as its greatest quality the parliament, or, as it is called in Austria, the Reichsrat. Obviously, the example for this body was situated in England, the country of classical 'Democracy. 1 The entire blissful arrangement was transplanted from that country to Vienna with as little change as possible. The English two-chamber system celebrated its resur- rection in the Abgeordnetenhaus and the Herrenhaus. Only the 'houses' themselves were somewhat different. When Barry's Houses of Parliament reared themselves out of the waters of the Thames, he thrust his hand into the history of the British Empire and drew from it the decora- tions for the twelve hundred niches, consoles, and pillars of this magnificent building. Thus in sculpture and paint- ing the House of Lords and the Commons became the temple of the nation's glory. This was the first difficulty Vienna encountered. When the Danish Hansen had completed the last pinnacle on the marble building of the new diet, he had no choice but to borrow decorations from the ancient Greeks and Ro- mans. Roman and Greek statesmen and philosophers now embellish this theater building of 'Western Democracy,' and on top of the two houses, in symbolical irony, the quadrigae [sic] pull away from each other towards the four 96 MEIN KAMPF corners of the globe, thus giving the truest external expres- sion of what was then going on internally. The 'nationalities' considered the glorification of Austrian history in this work an insult and a provocation, just as in the Reich proper one did not dare to consecrate Wallot's building, the Reichstag, to the German people until the thunder of the World War's battles roared. I was not quite twenty years old when I went for the first time into the magnificent building on the Franzenring, in order to attend a meeting of the House of Deputies as a spectator and auditor, and I was filled with the most contradictory feelings. I had always hated the parliament, yet not at all as an institution in itself. On the contrary, as a liberal thinking man I could not imagine any other possible form of govern- ment, for my attitude towards the House of Habsburg being what it was, I would have considered any kind of dictatorship a crime against all liberty and reason. In consequence of my thorough reading of newspapers in my youth, I had been inoculated with a certain admira- tion for the English parliament, although I probably did not suspect it, and this fact, which I was not able to give up so easily, contributed not a little to my attitude. The dignity with which there the House of Commons devoted itself to its task our press know how to describe it so nicely made a great impression on me. Was there a more dignified form of self-government of a nation any- where? For this very reason, however, I was an enemy of the Austrian parliament. In my opinion the entire form of its behavior was unworthy of its great prototype. But now the following was added : The fate of the German nationality in the Austrian State was dependent on its position in the Reichsrat. Up to the introduction of general suffrage and the secret ballot, a POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 97 German majority existed in parliament, insignificant though it was. But this condition was precarious, for Social De- mocracy, with its unreliable attitude, always turned against the German interests so as not to estrange the followers of the individual foreign nationalities whenever critical questions concerning the German nationality were in- volved. Social Democracy could not be considered a German party even at that time. With the introduction of general suffrage, the German numerical superiority ceased to exist. Now the last obstacle to the de-Germanization of the State was removed. For this reason my national instinct of self-preservation did not inspire me with any love, for a representation of the people by which the German nationality was never 'represented* but always 'betrayed.' But like so many other things, these were faults that were not due to the matter itself, but were to be attributed to the Austrian State. In those days, I still believed that with the re- establishment of the German majority in the representative bodies I would no longer have any reason for objections on general principles, as long as the old State continued to exist. With all this in mind, I entered for the first time the sacred and much-disputed rooms. For me, however, they were only sacred because of the sublime beauty of the magnificent building. It was a Hellenic miracle on German soil. But how indignant I was, even after a short time, when seeing the miserable comedy that was going on before my eyes. t Several hundred of these representatives of the people were present who at that moment had to decide about a question of important economic significance. The first day sufficed to give me food for thought for many weeks. The spiritual content of what was said was on a truly 98 MEIN KAMPF depressing 'high level/ as far as the talk was at all intel- ligible; for some of the gentlemen did not speak German, but their Slavic mother tongue or rather dialects. What I had only known from reading the papers, I now had an opportunity of hearing with my own ears. It was a gesticu- lating mass, shrieking in all keys, wildly stirred, presided over by a good-natured old uncle who, by the sweat of his brow, tried to re-establish the dignity of the House by violently ringing a bell and by alternately kind and earnest remonstrances. I could not help laughing. A few weeks later I was again in the House. The picture had changed, it was hardly recognizable. The hall was empty. Down below everybody was sleeping. Some of the deputies were in their seats and yawned at each other, one of them 'spoke.' A vice-president of the House was present, looking around the hall, visibly bored. My first doubts arose. Now, whenever time permitted, I went there repeatedly, and quietly and attentively watched the scene of the moment, listened to the speeches as far as they were intelligible, studied the more or less intelligent faces of those elect of the nations of this de- plorable State and gradually I formed my own opinions. One year of this quiet observation sufficed to change, or to wipe out entirely, my former opinion of the nature of this institution. Now my mind no longer objected to this misshapen form which this idea had assumed in Austria; no, now indeed I was no longer able to accept parliament as such. So far I had seen the misfortune of the Austrian parliament in the absence of a German majority, but now I saw its doom in the makeup and nature of this institution altogether. Quite a number of questions occurred to me at that time. I began to familiarize myself with the democratic prin- ciple of decision by a majority as the basis of this entire POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 99 institution, but I paid no less attention to the spiritual and moral values of the gentlemen, who, chosen by the nation, were supposed to serve this purpose. Thus I learned to know the institution, and at the same time, its representatives. In "the course of a few years, therefore, my knowledge and realization created the type of the most dignified representative of modern times with plastic clarity: the parliamentarian. He began to make an impression on me in a form which never again underwent a fundamental change. This time, also, practical reality with its object lessons had guarded me against suffocating in a theory which at first sight appears so tempting to many people, but which nevertheless must be counted among the symptoms of the decay of mankind. < Democracy of the West today is the forerunner of Marxism, which would be inconceivable without it. It is democracy alone which furnishes this universal plague with the soil in which it spreads. In parliamentarianism, its outward form of expression, democracy created a 'monstrosity of filth and fire' (Spottgeburt aus Dreck und Feuer) in which, to my regret, the 'fire' seems to have burned out for the moment. I have to be more than thankful to Fate that it also made me examine this question while I was still in Vienna, for I feel that had I been in Germany I would have found the answer too easily. Had I become acquainted with this ridiculous institution called 'parliament' for the first time in Berlin, I probably would have gone to the opposite extreme and would have joined the side of those who see the salvation of the nation and the Reich in the exclusive promotion of the Imperial power alone, and who thus blindly and incomprehensibly confront mankind and the times. In Austria this was impossible. 100 MEIN KAMPF Here it was not so easy to fall from one mistake into another. If parliament was worth nothing, the Habsburgs were worth still less, certainly no more. Here the rejec- tion of 4 parliamentarianism ' alone would not do ; for then the question, 'What now?' still remained. The rejection and abolition of the Reichsrat would have left the House of Habsburg as the sole governmental power, and this idea was especially unbearable to me. The difficulty of this special case led me to a more thorough consideration of the problem as a whole than would otherwise have taken place at such an early age. First and most of all that which gave me food for thought was the visible lack of responsibility on the part of any single individual. Parliament makes a decision the consequences of which may be ever so devastating nobody is responsible for Hitler's argument is: the Germans of 1848 were led to water the principles which had guided their absolutistic leaders with 'western democracy/ The essence of this democracy is (he holds) the grant of the right of franchise and representation to all citizens, with the result that an outlet is provided for the hitherto suppressed cravings of the masses. These want, how- ever, constantly to improve their lot, and so demand from rather than give to the State. Marxism is the theory which most effectively and audaciously sponsors the needs of the largest and most destitute group, and therefore the movement which exacts most from the State. In Austria the Socialists were particularly reprehensible because their relentless champion- ing of the class struggle obliterated ' national ' boundaries and therewith weakened the position of the Empire's rightful rulers, the Germans. In Germany the strength of democracy, symbol- ized by the Reichstag, was far less impressive. This Reichstag had some rights of importance, but waged a continuous struggle to exercise them as a matter of fact. If Hitler had been in Berlin, therefore, he might possibly have been content with the POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 101 it, nobody can ever be called to account. For, does it mean assuming responsibility if, after an unheard-of collapse, the guilty government resigns? Or if the coalition changes, or even if parliament dissolves itself? Is it at all possible to make a wavering majority of people ever responsible? Is not the very idea of all responsibility closely con- nected with the individual? Is it practically possible to make the leading person of a government liable for actions, the development and execu- tion of which are to be laid exclusively to the account of the will and the inclination of a large number of men? Or must not the task of the leading statesman be seen in the birth of a creative idea or plan in itself, rather than in the ability to make the ingenuity of his plans under- stand taken by the Conservatives and as a consequence never have seen that salvation can come only from a dictatorship. Compare his statement at the Niirnberg Party Conference of 1935 : 'To build up the public service and the army in accord- ance with the law of personal responsibility and at the same time to fashion the general political direction of the State according to the principles of parliamentary democracy that is, of irresponsibility is bound to prove impossible. The democratic state, in its insecurity, proved helpless against the onslaughts of Bolshevistic Judaism. Confronted with this danger, monarchy was found to be equally ineffectual. So were the Christian confessions.' Elaborate theories of totalitarianism have since been devel- oped in number by German professors and writers. It may be doubted, however, whether they have more than an academic significance. On the other hand, Hitler's criticism of democracy as powerless to ward off Bolshevism had a profound effect upon the thinking of the middle classes. It is clear from the German newspapers of 1931 that many had begun to think that the only choice remaining to them was one between 102 MEIN KAMPF standable to a flock of sheep and empty-heads for the pur- pose of begging for their gracious consent? fls this the criterion of a statesman that he masters the art of persuasion to the same extent as that of the diplomatic shrewdness in the choice of great lines of direc- tion or decision? Is the inability of a leader proved by the fact that he does not succeed in winning the majority of a crowd of people for a certain idea, dumped together by more or less fine accidents? Has this crowd ever been able to grasp an idea before its success was proclaimed by its greatness? Is not every ingenious deed in this world the visible protest of genius against the inertia of the masses? But what is the statesman to do who does not succeed in winning, by flattery, the favor of this crowd for his plans? Is he to buy it? Or is he now, considering the stupidity of his fellow citizens, to give up the carrying-out of the tasks he recog- nizes as of vital importance, or is he to retire, or should he still remain? Does not, in such a case, a real character find himself in an inextricable dilemma between knowledge and de- cency, or rather honest conviction? Where is the border that separates duty towards the community from the obligations of personal honor? Must not every real leader refuse to be degraded in such a way to the level of a political profiteer? And must not, on the other hand, every profiteer feel Mussolini and Stalin. This feeling grew until the carefully planned Reichstag fire (both Centrist ex-Chancellors, Dr. Wirth and Dr Brtining, declared in public addresses a few days after the event that it had been carefully planned) of 1933 made large groups of voters feel that Communism was upon them. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 103 himself called on to 'make 1 politics, as it is not he who bears the ultimate responsibility, but rather some incom- prehensible crowd? Must not our parliamentary principle of the majority lead to the demolition of the idea of leadership as a whole? Or does one believe that the progress of the world has originated in the brains of majorities and not in the head of an individual? Or are we of the opinion that in the future we can do without this preliminary presumption of human culture? Does it not, on the contrary, appear more necessary today than ever before? << The parliamentary principle of decision by majority, by denying the authority of the person and placing in its stead the number of the crowd in question, sins against the aristocratic basic idea of Nature, whose opinion of aristocracy, however, need in no way be represented by the present-day decadence of our Upper Ten Thousand. The reader of Jewish newspapers can hardly imagine the devastation which results from this institution of modern democratic parliamentary rule, unless he has learned to think and examine for himself. It is above all the cause of the terrible flooding of the entire political life with the most inferior products of our time. No matter how far the true leader withdraws from political activity, which to a great extent does not consist of creative work and achievement, but rather of bargaining and haggling for the favor of a majority, this very activity, however, will agree with and attract the people of low mentality. The more dwarfish the mentality and the abilities of such a present-day leather merchant are, the more clearly his knowledge makes him conscious of the wretchedness of his actual appearance, the more will he praise a system that does not demand of him the strength and the genius of a giant, but rather which calls for the cunning of a 104 MEIN KAMPF village chief or which even prefers this kind of wisdom to that of a Pericles. Such a simpleton need never worry about the responsibility of his actions. He is relieved of this care for the reason that he knows, no matter what the result of his 'statesmanlike' bungling may be, that his end has long been predicted by the stars; some day he will have to make room for another, an equally great mind. It is, among other things, a symptom of such a decline that the number of great statesmen increases in the meas- ure in which the competence of the individual one de- creases. With increasing dependence on parliamentary majorities, he is bound to shrink, for great minds will refuse to serve as bailiff for stupid good-for-nothings and babblers, and on the other hand, the representatives of the majority, that is, of stupidity, hate nothing more ardently than a superior mind. For such an assembly of wise men of Gotham, it is always a comforting feeling to know that they are headed by a leader whose wisdom corresponds to the mentality of the assembly; for, is it not pleasant to let one's intellect flash forth from time to time, and finally, if Smith can be master, why not Jones also? This invention of democracy most closely conforms to a quality which lately has developed into a crying shame, that is, the cowardice of a great part of our so-called 'leaders.' How fortunate to be able to hide, whenever decisions of importance are involved, behind the coat-tails of a so-called majority! One has only to watch such a political footpad to see how he anxiously begs for the consent of the majority for every action so that he may secure the necessary accom- plices, so as to be able to cast off responsibility at any time. But this is one of the chief reasons why such political activity is loathsome and hateful to a really decent, and therefore courageous, man, while it is attractive to all POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 105 wretched characters and he who is not willing personally to assume the responsibility for his acts, but looks for cover, is a cowardly wretch. As soon as the leaders of a nation consist of such wretched fellows, vengeance will follow soon after. One will no longer be able to manifest the courage for decisive action; one would undergo any humiliating dishonor rather than make up one's mind ; be- cause there is nobody who is ready to risk his person and his head for the carrying-out of a ruthless decision. One thing we must and may never forget: here, too, a majority can never replace the Man. It is not only always a representative of stupidity, but also of cowardice. Just as a hundred fools do not make one wise man, an heroic decision is not likely to come from a hundred cowards. The easier the responsibility of the individual leader is, the more will the number of those grow who, even with the most wretched dimensions, will feel called upon to put their immortal energies at the disposal of the nation. Yes, they can hardly await their turn; lined up in a long queue, they count the number of those waiting ahead of them with sorrowful regret, and they figure out the hour when in all human probability their turn will come. Therefore, they long for every change in the office they aspire to, and are grateful for every scandal that thins out the ranks ahead of them. But if one of them refuses to vacate the place he has taken, they almost consider it a breach of the sacred agreement of mutual solidarity. Then they become vin- dictive, and do not rest till the impudent fellow, finally overthrown, puts his warm place at the disposition of the community. He will not regain his place quite so soon. For as soon as one of these creatures has been forced to give up his post, he will again try to push himself into the rows of the 'waiting,' provided he is not prevented from doing so by the outcry and the abuse of the others. The result of all this is the terrifyingly rapid change in 106 MEIN KAMPF the most important positions and offices in such a State entity, a result which is unfavorable in any case, but which sometimes is even catastrophic. But now not only the stupid and inefficient will be victims to this custom, but even more so the true leader, provided Fate is able at al! to place him in that position. Once this has been realized, a united front of defense will be formed, especially if such a head, not originating from the ranks, nevertheless tries to force his way into this sublime society. They want to be by themselves on general principles, and hate a head, which could turn out to be number one among all these naughts, as a common enemy. In this direction the instinct is the sharper, no matter how much it may lack in other respects. Thus the consequence will be an ever-increasing intel- lectual impoverishment of the leading classes. Anyone can judge what the results will be for the nation and the State if he does not personally belong to this kind of 'leaders.' fOld Austria already had parliamentary government in its purest breeding. Of course, it was the emperor and king who appointed the prime minister, but this appointing was nothing but the carrying-out of the parliamentary will. The bargaining and trading for the individual ministers' offices, however, was Western Democracy of the purest water. The results, of course, were in keeping with the principles applied. The change of personalities especially took place in even shorter periods of time, till finally it would become a regular chase. Also, the intellectual dimensions of the occasional 'states- men' shrank more and more, till finally there remained only that small type of parliamentary profiteers whose value as statesmen was measured and acknowledged ac- cording to the ability with which they succeeded in pasting together the coalition of the moment ; that means carrying out the smallest political trading transactions which alone POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 107 are able to justify the suitability of these representatives for practical action. Thus the Viennese school rendered the best insight in these fields. I was attracted no less by the comparison between the abilities and knowledge of these people's representatives and the tasks awaiting them. Whether one wanted to or not, one had to inspect more closely the intellectual horizon of these elected ones of the nations, whereby one could not avoid also paying the attention necessary to those events which led to the discovery of these magnificent specimens of our public life. Also the way and the manner in which the real abilities of these gentlemen were applied and put in the service of the fatherland, which is the technical side of their ac- tivities, was worthy of being examined and closely scruti- nized. The entire picture of parliamentary life became the more miserable the more one decided to penetrate into these internal situations and to study basic facts with ruthless and sharp objectivity. Indeed, one may apply this method towards an institution which leads one to point, by its supports, to this very 'objectivity 1 as the only justified basis for examination and defining of attitude. Therefore, one had better examine these gentlemen and the laws of their bitter existence, and the result will be surprising. There is no principle looked at objectively that is as wrong as the parliamentary principle. Here we must also disregard entirely the manner in which the people's representatives are elected, and how as a whole, they attain their offices and their new ranks. That only the smallest fraction of the common will or need is fulfilled here must be apparent to anyone who realizes that the political understanding of the great masses is not sufficiently developed for them to arrive at certain general 108 MEIN KAMPF political opinions by themselves and to select suitable persons. < What we mean by the word 'public opinion 1 depends only to the smallest extent on the individual's own ex- periences or knowledge, and largely on an image, frequently created by a penetrating and persistent sort of so-called 1 enlightenment.' Just as confessional orientation is the result of education, and religious need, as such, slumbers in the mind of man, so the political opinion of the masses represents only the final result of a sometimes unbelievably tough and thor- ough belaboring of soul and mind. By far the greatest bulk of the political 'education,' which in this case one may rightly define with the word 1 propaganda,' is the work of the press. It is the press above all else that carries out this 'work of enlightenment,' thus forming a sort of school for adults. This instruction, how- ever, does not rest in the hand of the State, but partly in the claws of very inferior forces. As a very young man in Vienna, I had the very best opportunity of becoming really acquainted with the owners and spiritual producers of this machine for educating the masses. At the beginning I was astonished how short a time it took this most evil of all the great powers in the State to create a certain opinion, even if this involved complete falsification of the wishes or opinions in the minds of the public. In the course of a few days a ridiculous trifle was turned into an affair of State, whereas, at the same time, problems of vital im- portance were dropped into general oblivion, or rather f were stolen from the minds and the memory of the masses. So they succeeded, in the course of a few weeks, in con- juring up some names out of nothing and attaching incred- ible hopes to them on the part of the great public, in even giving them a popularity which the really important man may never attain during his whole lifetime; names which. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 109 in addition, nobody had even heard of only a month before, whereas at the same time old and trustworthy representa- tives of public or political life, though in the bloom of health, simply died in the minds of their contemporaries, or they were showered with such wretched abuses that soon their names were in danger of becoming the symbol of villainy and rascality. It is necessary to study this infa- mous Jewish method with which they simultaneously and from all directions, as at a given magic word, pour bucket- fuls of the basest calumnies and defamation over the clean garb of honest people, in order to appreciate the entire danger of these rascals of the press. Then, too, there is hardly anything which does not suit the purposes of such an intellectual robber baron in order to reach his end. Then he spys into the most secret family affairs and does not rest till his truffle-searching instinct finds some trifling event destined to bring about the unfortunate victim's fall. But even if the most thorough nosing about does not stir up anything at all in his victim's public or private life, then such a fellow will turn to calumny with the firm conviction that not only something of it will stick to his victim, despite thousandfold refutation, but that, in consequence of the hundredfold repetition of the calum- nies by all his accomplices, the victim is in most cases \ The propagandistic usefulness of snooping around in the private lives of opponents was recognized early by anti- clericals in Austria, and the lesson has not been lost on the Nazis. The Volkischer Beobachter (Hitler's official daily) and its immediate predecessors, Dietrich Eckart's Auf gut Deutsch, reveled in stories purporting to be based on the private lives of wealthier Jews. The terrain was later extended to take in the secret orgies of the Republic's officials, the Nacktbatt (dance in the nude) being a specialty. Gradually Julius Streicher's 110 MEIN KAMPF unable to fight it; the motives of these scoundrels are never those which would be comprehensible or credible to others. God forbid! Such a rascal, by attacking the rest of his dear contemporary world in such an infamous fashion, wraps himself, like a cuttlefish, in a cloud of decency and unctuous phrases; he talks of 'journalistic' duty and simi- lar mendacious stuff; he even goes so far that during ses- sions and congresses occasions when one sees this plague assembled in greater numbers he twaddles of a special, that is, journalistic, "honor/ of which the assembled rascals bumptiously assure one another. This rabble, however, manufactures more than two- thirds of the so-called 'public' opinion, and out of its foam rises the parliamentary Aphrodite. One would have to write volumes to describe this pro- cedure correctly in its entire mendacity and untruthful- ness. However, if one leaves this out of account, and Sturmer outdistanced all rivals, becoming the world's champion illustration in pornographic defamation. More important, no doubt, was the use to which records taken from Catholic dio- cesan and monastic archives were put after 1934. Hundreds of trials for 'immorality' brought priests, religious, and lay- folk to court. Many were declared guilty; and even the inno- cent found themselves under a permanent cloud by reason of the difficulty with which such charges can be refuted. One amusing instance of how such stories were spread concerns Walther Rathenau, Foreign Minister in the Wirth Cabinet. He gave a dinner one evening for eighteen diplomats; and the next morning a very correct and honorable official came to call on the Chancellor. 'I regret having to warn Your Excellency against Heir Rathenau/ he said. 'But it is shocking last night he dined with eighteen naked ladies.' 4 I know all about it,' Dr. Wirth replied, 'I was there myself. But come into the next room and meet some of the ladies.' The surprised official was then introduced to half a dozen diplomats. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 111 looking only at the resulting product together with its activity, it should suffice that the objective lunacy of this institution would dawn on even the most orthodox mind. It will be easiest to understand this absurd and danger- ous human error if one compares the democratic parliamen- tarianism with true Germanic democracy. The characteristic of the first is that a number of say five hundred, men and recently also women, are elected, who are entrusted with the final decision on everything. They alone practically represent the government, for though they elect the cabinet which to all outward appear- ances seems to take on the guidance of the State's affairs, this is nevertheless mere pretense. In reality, this so-called government cannot take one step without having first These passages reflect dissatisfaction with parliamentary in- stitutions as the foes of the Republic saw them after 1918. The German Reichstag was during these years probably the intellectual and moral equal of any parliament in the world. Yet, apart from the difficulties with which it was steadily con- fronted and which naturally added little to its popularity, it was handicapped by the fact that, when compared with the gentry and nobility who had ruled before the War, its spokes- men and ministers were 'little people.' Even Ernst Trdltsch, a great scholar and in his way a democrat, could not avoid that feeling. Newspapers loyal to the Republic could jest that there was hardly a man in the government who knew how to enter- tain at dinner. Nothing worse could be said about Matthias Erzberger, who signed the armistice and then became Minister of Finance, than that he had been 'only a school-teacher'; and few were honestly proud that Friedrich Ebert had once worked as a saddler. The result was that many honest parlia- mentarians especially among the Social Democrats suf- fered from what is often termed an inferiority complex. After the depression of 1929 set in, these feelings were intensified and 112 MEIN KAMPF obtained the consent of the general assembly. Therefore, it cannot be held responsible for anything at all, as it is not the government which has the ultimate decision, but the majority of parliament. In all cases, therefore, the government is only the executive of the will of the major- ity. We could judge its political ability only by the skill it shows either in adapting itself to the will of the majority, or in winning it over. But then it sinks from the height of a real government to that of a beggar appealing to the majority. Its most important task now consists of securing either the favor of the majority, from case to case, or of taking upon itself the formation of a more gracious new majority. If it succeeds in this, then it may continue to 'rule* for a short time longer, but if it does not, it must go. Whether its intentions are right or not is of no consequence. mixed with hatred. The petty sums received by the 'little men ' as delegates to the Reichstag were magnified into fabulous salaries; and many were afraid to go to the theater lest they be accused of undue prodigality. But after the Nazis came to power, all was different. During 1937, Dr. Goebbels authorized a film showing his beautiful new villa and its lawns. The re- ception was so bad that the picture had to be withdrawn. Thereupon Der Angriff, Goebbels's newspaper, denounced all those who * muttered around ' that the Nazis were now strutting about in the top hats they had found so reprehensible on the heads of their predecessors. 'These critics forget/ the com- mentator wrote, ' that those we once stigmatized were skunks . . . while those who now represent the State are men who have achieved a great deal in four years. An American delegation cannot be asked to dine on sausage and sauerkraut by people going around in their shirtsleeves. They must be entertained as they are accustomed to being entertained, for we expect them to put in a good word for us when they return home. That is why we wear top hats and cutaways. That is also why we build villas/ POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 113 fBut with this all responsibility is practically excluded. To what consequences this now leads follows from a quite simple consideration : The internal composition of a group of these five hundred representatives, measured according to profession or abil- ities of the individual, gives a picture that is as confused as it is pitiful. For one cannot expect that these elected ones of the nation are also the elect of intellect or even of common sense! And I hope that one does not think that from the ballots cast by a body of voters which is anything but clever, the statesmen will come forth by hundreds! On the whole, one cannot contradict too sharply the absurd opinion that men of genius are born out of general elections. First, there is only one real ' statesman ' once in a blue moon in one nation and not a hundred or more at a time; and second, the masses' aversion to every superior genius is an instinctive one. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than that a great man is 'dis- covered ' in an election. What really stands out of the norm of the great masses generally personally announces its arrival in world history. So that it is five hundred men of more than modest com- petence who vote on the most important concerns of the nation; they appoint governments which, in turn, in each single case and in each special question, have to obtain the consent of the illustrious assembly, and thus politics are actually made by five hundred men. And it usually looks like it, too. Even when not speaking of the genius of these people's representatives, one should consider the different kind of problems awaiting solution and how widely spread the fields are in which solutions and decisions are to be made, and one will well understand how unfit this form of govern- ment must be for this task which puts the right of final decisions into the hands of a mass assembly of people, of 114 MEIN KAMPF whom only a small portion has the knowledge and experi- ence required by the affairs under consideration. Thus the most important economic measures are brought before a forum, while only one-tenth of its members can evidence any economic training. This means nothing short of plac- ing the final decision of affairs into the hands of men who entirely lack all qualification for this task. This is also the case with all other questions. They will always be decided by a majority of ignoramuses and incompetents, since the composition of this institution re- mains unchanged, while the problems to be dealt with extend to nearly all fields of public life, and therefore would require a continuous change of the deputies who have to judge and to decide them. It is indeed impossible to permit affairs of transportation to be passed upon by the same people who deal with a question, let us say, of high foreign politics. Indeed, they would all have to be universal gen- iuses, such hardly as come forth once in centuries. Un- fortunately, in most cases they are not at all ' heads, ' but narrow-minded, vainglorious, and arrogant amateurs, an intellectual demi-monde of the worst kind. From this there often results the inconceivable carelessness with which these gentlemen discuss and decide on affairs which would give even the greatest minds cause for careful reflection. Measures of the gravest importance for the future of an entire State, even of a nation, are taken, as though a hand of Schqffkopf [a game of cards especially popular in Southern Germany] or taroc, which would certainly suit them better, were before them on the table and not the fate of a race. But it would certainly be unjust to believe that each of the deputies of such a parliament was always endowed with so slight a feeling of responsibility. No, not at all. But because this system forces the individual to define his attitude towards questions for which he may not be POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 115 suited, it gradually spoils the character. None of them would have enough courage to declare: 'Gentlemen, I think we don't understand anything about this question. At least I can say that with certainty as far as I am con- cerned. 1 (Besides, this would hardly make any difference, for such honesty would certainly not be understood, and they would hardly permit the game to be spoiled by such an honest ass.) Those who know human beings will under- stand that in such an illustrious society nobody likes to be the most stupid, and in certain circles, honesty is synony- mous with stupidity. Thus a representative, at first still honest, is forced into the path of general mendacity and deceit. The very con- viction that the individual's non-participation would not alter the matter in the least stifles any honest impulse which perhaps may rise in one or the other deputy. Finally, he will persuade himself that he is not the worst by far among the others and that his participation might perhaps even prevent greater evil. Of course, one will now raise the objection that the indi- vidual deputy has actually but little understanding for the one or the other matter; that in coming to a decision he is advised by the parliamentary faction as the leader of the policies of the gentlemen in question ; that this faction always has its special committees which are more than amply advised by experts. At first sight this seems to be correct. Then the question would still be: Why does one elect five hundred if only a few of them have sufficient wisdom to define their attitudes towards the most important matters? This, then, was the gist of the matter! [Ja, darinliegt eben des Pudels Kern. A paraphrase of a line in Goethe's Faust.} * It is not the object of our present-day democratic parlia- mentarianism to form an assembly of wise men, but rather 116 MEIN KAMPF to gather a crowd of mentally dependent ciphers which may be more easily led in certain directions, the more lim- ited the intelligence of the individual. Only thus can parties make politics in the worse sense of the word today. Only thus is it also possible that the actual wirepuller is able to remain cautiously in the background without ever being personally called to account. Because no decision, no matter how detrimental it is to the nation, can now be charged to the account of a rascal who is in the public eye, but it is dumped on the shoulders of an entire faction. With this, however, all responsibility is practically re- moved, because it can only be the duty of an individual and never that of a parliamentary assembly of babblers. This institution can be pleasing and valuable only to the most mendacious sneaks who carefully shun the light of day, whereas it must be loathsome to every honest and straightforward fellow who is ready to assume personal responsibility. Therefore, this kind of democracy has become the instru- ment of that race which shuns the sunlight because of its internal aims, now and for all time. Only the Jew can praise an institution that is as dirty and false as he is himself. * This system is opposed by the true Germanic democracy of the free choice of a leader with the latter's obligation to take over fully all responsibility for what he does or does The legend of the 'freely chosen German leader* was proba- bly born in the fertile brain of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a Britisher who became an uncompromising Pan-German dur- ing the years preceding 1914 and who buttressed this contention with a theory of race superiority derived in part from Count Arthur de Gobineau, author of books which attributed the success of the 'supermen' of the Renaissance to their 'Aryan' POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 117 not do. There will be no voting by a majority on single questions, but only the decision of the individual who backs it with his life and all he has. If the objection were raised that under such circum- stances no one could be found ready to devote himself to such a hazardous task, there can be one reply: God be thanked, this is just the meaning of Germanic democracy, that no unworthy climber or moral shirker can come in the back way to rule his fellow citizens, but that the greatness of the position to be assumed will discourage incompetents and weaklings. But should, nevertheless, such a fellow try to sneak in, then he will be easily found out and ruthlessly rebuffed: Out with you, cowardly wretch ! Step back, you are soiling blood. It has since become a favorite topic of conversation. Not a few Nazi authors have attempted to unearth instances of such leadership. Favorite candidates from early Germanic history are Arminius, Widukind the Saxon King, and Genseric the Vandal chieftain. In Nazi usage the word Fuhrer (leader) has a very special connotation, difficult for an outsider to understand. The Fdhrcr is a man who gives expression to the divinity that is enshrined in his people a ' Traumlaller* (one who speaks oracularly in his dreams), in George Schott's phrase. Gottfried Feder, author of the Party program, once described the Fiihrer as follows : ' He must have a somnambu- listic feeling of certainty. ... In the pursuit of his goal, he must not shrink from bloodshed or war even/ For many, perhaps for himself, Hitler is the German Messiah, whose kingdom is to last thousands of years, even as has that of Christ. Hitler, too, began with a small number of disciples the first group was of the mystic number seven one or the other of whom proved unfaithful. Addressing Nazi congresses, he has fre- quently stressed his ability to wait until 'what is in the folk- sour dictates the course he is to pursue. That is why he con- tinuously needs assurance that the folk is actually one in spirit 118 MEIN KAMPF the steps; the front stairs leading to the Pantheon of History is not for sneaks but for heroes! 1 had come to this opinion after an internal struggle dur- ing the two years in which I visited the Viennese parlia- ment. Thereafter I never went again. The parliamentary r6gime had a great share in the progressive weakening of the old Habsburg State during the past few years. The more the superiority of the German nationality was broken up through its efforts, the more recourse was taken to a system of playing off the various nationalities against one another. In the Reichsrat this always was done at the expense of the Germans and so, in the last instance, at the expense of the realm; for at the turn of the century even the most simple-minded had to realize that the monarchy's power of attraction was no with him. The various plebiscites serve much the same pur- pose as would a mesmerist's look round to see whether the members of a group are joining hands. Hitler believes that ninety-nine per cent of the German people support him, and refuses to weigh evidence to the contrary. Accordingly any German who resists him is a pariah, a blasphemer against the decree of the German providence. Dr. Schuschnigg, who under- stood these things not at all who fully believed that if the Nazis gained Austria he could resume his law practice has been kept in confinement since March, 1938, for having sinned against the light. Hitler's anti-Semitism must likewise be weighed on this scale. It was out of gratitude to the German God for the successes of 1938 that he decreed the pogrom of November 9. He said earlier: ' I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: By warding off the Jew* I om fighting for the Lord's work' POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 119 longer able to counteract the individual countries' en- deavors towards separation. On the contrary. The poorer the means became which the State had at its disposal for its preservation, the higher rose the general contempt for it. Not in Hungary alone, but also in the individual Slav provinces, the people felt themselves so little identified with the common monarchy that its weak- ness was not looked upon as their own disgrace. They rather rejoiced over the signs of approaching old age; because they hoped more for its death than for its con- valescence. In parliament, the complete collapse was further pre- vented by an undignified submission and fulfillment of all and every extortion, for which the Germans then had to pay; in the realm this was done by a clever playing-off of the individual nations against one another. But the gen- eral line of development was directed against the Germans. Especially since his succession to the throne began to give some influence to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, order and organization were brought into the Czechization car- ried out from above. With all possible means this future ruler of the dual monarchy tried to facilitate and to pro- mote personally, or at least to shield, the de-Germanization of the realm. Thus purely German places were slowly but steadily pushed into the danger zone of mixed languages by roundabout official means. Even in Lower Austria this process began to progress rapidly, and many Czechs already considered Vienna as their biggest city. The leading idea of this Habsburg, whose family spoke only Czech (his wife, a former Czech countess, had married the prince morganatically; she came from circles in which the anti-German attitude was traditional) was gradually to form a Slav State in Central Europe to be founded on a strictly Catholic basis, as a protection against Orthodox 120 MEIN KAMPF Russia. In this manner, as the Habsburgs had done previ- ously on several occasions, religion once more was placed in the service of a purely political idea, above all at least from the German point of view of an unfortunate idea. The result was more than deplorable in many respects. Neither the House of Habsburg nor the Catholic Church received the expected reward. Habsburg lost the throne, Rome a great State. By using religious forces for political purposes, the crown awakened a spirit which it had not at first thought possible. The attempt to extinguish Germanism in the old mon- archy by all possible means was answered by the Pan- German movement in Austria. fin the eighties, Manchester Liberalism, with a basic Jewish tendency, had reached or already passed its climax in the monarchy. Reaction against it came, as was the case with everything in old Austria, not primarily from social, but from national, points of view. Its instinct of self-preservation forced Germanism to offer the sharpest possible resistance. Only in the second instance economic considerations began to gain a decisive influence. Thus out of the general political muddle emerged two party forma- tions, the one with a more national, the other with a more social, tendency, but both extremely interesting and in- structive for the future. After the depressing end of the war of 1866, the House of Habsburg harbored the idea of a revenge on the battle- field. Only the death of Emperor Max [sic] of Mexico, whose unfortunate expedition was attributed primarily to Napoleon III, and whose abandonment by the French roused general indignation, prevented a closer co-operation with France. Yet Habsburg was on the watch. Had the war of 1870-71 not become such a uniquely victorious cam- paign, the Court of Vienna would probably have risked the bloody game of a revenge for Sadowa. But when the first POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 121 amazing and incredible heroic tales arrived from the battle- fields, yet true, then the 'wisest* of all monarchs recognized that the hour was inconvenient, and ho had to grin and bear it as best he could. But the heroic fight of these two years had achieved a still greater miracle ; for the Habsburgs a changed attitude never corresponded to an impulse of the heart, but to the pressure of circumstances. The German people in the old Ostmark were carried away by the victorious ecstasy of the Reich, and, deeply moved, saw the dreams of the fore- fathers resurrected to glorious reality. For let there be no mistake : the really German-minded Austrian had recognized at Koeniggraetz the tragic though necessary condition for the resurrection of a realm which should not be, and which actually was not, afflicted with the foul marasmus of the old union. He thoroughly learned to understand, by his own experience, that the House of Habsburg had now finally ended its historical mission, and that the new realm was to elect as emperor only one who, through his heroic character, could offer a worthy head to the 'Crown of the Rhine/ How much more was Fate to be praised because it carried out this investiture on a member of a House which in the person of Frederick the Great had in times past given to the nation a brilliant symbol for the rise of the nation forever. < When after the Great War the House of Habsburg started with utmost determination to root out, slowly but steadily, the dangerous Germanism of the dual monarchy (about whose inner conviction there could be no doubt) for this would mean the end of the policy of Slavization the resistance of this doomed people broke out in a way that the German history of modern times had never known. For the first time men with national and patriotic feel- ings became rebels. Rebels, not against the nation, not against the State as 122 MEIN KAMPF such, but against a form of government which in their opinion was bound to lead their own nationality to its doom. For the first time in modern German history, traditional dynastic patriotism separated from national love for country and people. It was the merit of the Pan-German movement in Austria, during the nineties, that it clearly demonstrated beyond a doubt that a State authority can only demand respect and protection as long as it corresponds to the desires of a nationality and at least does not harm it. There can be no State authority as a means in itself, as in that case all tyranny on earth would be unassailable and sacred. If a people is led to destruction by the instrument of governmental power, then the rebellion on the part of each and every member of such a nation is not only a right but a duty. The question, however, when such a case arises, is not decided by theoretical treatises but by force and suc- cess. As every governmental power naturally claims the right of preserving the authority of the State, no matter how inferior it is or that it has betrayed the concerns of the nation a thousand times, the f olkish instinct of self-preserva- tion, when subduing such a power in order to gain freedom or independence, will have to use the same weapons with which the adversary is trying to hold his own. The struggle will be carried on with * legal ' means as long as the power to be overthrown uses such means; but one will not hesitate to use illegal weapons if the oppressor also uses them. But in general it should never be forgotten that not the preservation of a State or a government is the highest aim of human existence, but the preservation of its kind. But once the latter itself is in danger of being oppressed POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 123 or abolished, then the question of legality plays only a subordinate r6le. Then it may be that the ruling power may use a thousand so-called 'legal' means, yet the in- stinct of self-preservation of the oppressed then is always the most sublime justification for their fighting with all weapons. Only by acknowledging the above principle were the wars of rebellion, against enslavement from within and without, carried on in such great historical examples. Human rights break State rights. But if a nation succumbs in its struggle for the rights of mankind, then it was probably found weighing too lightly in the scales of destiny to justify its good fortune of being allowed to continue on this mortal globe. For if a man is not ready or able to fight for his existence, righteous Provi- dence has already decreed his doom. The world is not intended for cowardly nations. fBut how easy it is for a tyranny to drape itself with the mantle of so-called 'legality* is again shown most clearly and definitely by Austria's example. The legal State authority of that period was rooted in the anti-German soil of parliament with its non-German majorities and also in the ruling anti-German dynasty. The entire State authority was incorporated in these two factors. To attempt to change the fate of the German- Austrian people from this point was nonsense. In the opin- ion of our admirers of the only possible 4 legal ' way and of the State authority itself, all resistance would have had to be relinquished because it could not be carried out by legal means. But this would have meant the end of the German people within the monarchy in a very short time. As a matter of fact the German nation was only saved from such a fate by the collapse of this State. 124 MEIN KAMPF The bespectacled theorist, however, would rather die ior his doctrine than for his people. Because it is men who first make the laws, he thinks that they afterwards exist for these laws. To have thoroughly swept out this nonsense, much to the alarm of all theoretical dogmatists and other govern- mental insular fetishists, was the merit of the Pan-German movement in Austria at that time. As the Habsburgs tried to attack the German nationality with all possible means, this party in turn now attacked the 'exalted ' ruling house itself in the most ruthless manner. For the first time it probed into this foul State and opened the eyes of hundreds of thousands. It is to the credit of the party that it freed the glorious idea of patriotism from the embrace of this deplorable dynasty. At the time of its first appearance, the number of its fol- lowers was so enormous that it even threatened to develop into a very avalanche. But the success did not last. When I came to Vienna, the movement had long been overshad- owed, and had even been almost reduced to insignificance, by the Christian Socialist Party which had come into power in the meantime. < The entire process of the rise and decline of the Pan- German movement, on the one hand, and of the unheard-of rise of the Christian Socialist Party, on the other, was to gain the greatest importance for me as a classical object for study. When I came to Vienna, my sympathies were fully and wholly on the side of the Pan-German movement. That one had the courage in parliament to shout 'Heil Hohenzollern ' impressed me as much as it infinitely pleased me; that one considered oneself only temporarily separated from the Reich, and that no occasion was overlooked to manifest this publicly, awakened joyous confidence in me ; the fact that one openly demonstrated one's opinion in all POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 125 questions concerning German nationality and that one never yielded to compromises seemed to me the only way still open for the salvation of our people; but that the movement, after its first glorious rise, had sunk so deeply, this I could not understand. I could understand far less that at the same time the Christian Socialist Party was able to rise to such enormous power. It had just reached the zenith of its glory at that time. When I tried to compare the two movements, Fate, ac- celerated by my otherwise miserable situation, here also gave me the best instruction for the understanding of the causes of this riddle. I begin my reflections at first with the two men who may be looked upon as the leaders and the founders of the two parties : Georg von Schoenerer and Doktor Karl Lueger. From the purely human point of view they stand out, the one as well as the other, far above the frame and the dimensions of the so-called parliamentarian types. In the George von Schoenerer (1824-1921) was the mouthpiece of a pan-Germanistic hatred of the Jews which found expression in violent speeches. The beer hall was a favorite Schoenerer assembly room. But though his diction was crude, his followers were recruited from the upper middle classes and blended hatred of the Habsburgs and the Catholic Church with anti-Semitism. Nevertheless he had not a few sympathizers even among the clergy. Funds to support the movement were supplied by extremist Protestant groups in Germany, and Schoenerer him- self became a Protestant in a wave of secession from the Catholic Church that was the greatest Austria had known since the Reformation. The principal tenet of his political doctrine was that the Jews had undermined the national economy and therewith created the social problem, which in turn was costing much money. Close to Schoenerer was the Ostara group, the publication sponsored by whom is an important source of more modern anti-Semitic propaganda. 126 MEIN KAMPF swamp of general political corruption, their entire lives remained pure and unimpeachable. Nevertheless, at first my personal sympathy was more with the Pan-German Schoenerer, and then gradually turned to the Christian Socialist leader. Comparing their abilities, Schoenerer seemed to me even then the better and more thorough thinker in fundamental problems. He recognized more clearly and more correctly than anyone else the inevitable end of the Austrian State. Had one listened more attentively to his warnings, espe- cially in the Reich, about the Habsburg monarchy, then the misfortune of the World War which placed Germany against all Europe would never have come. But if Schoenerer recognized the internal nature of the problems, he was wrong as regards the people. That was again the strength of Doktor Lueger. He was a rare judge of human nature, especially on his guard against believing that men were better than they were. Therefore, he took more into account the real possi- bilities of life, while Schoenerer showed little understanding for this. Everything the Pan-German thought was correct from the theoretical point of view; but while the force and the understanding were lacking with which to transmit the theoretical knowledge to the masses that means to bring it into a form which was in keeping with their per- ceptive ability, which is and will always be limited all knowledge was only prophetic wisdom and had no chance ever to become reality. This lack of an actual knowledge of human nature, however, led later on to an error in the evaluation of the forces of entire movements as well as of age-old institu- tions. But Schoenerer finally had recognized that the questions involved were those of various views of life, but he had not understood that above all only the great masses of a people POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 127 are suited to be the bearers of such almost religious con- victions. Unfortunately, he understood only to a very small degree the extreme limitation of the will to fight in the so- called 4 bourgeois ' circles, in consequence of their economic situation which makes the individual fear to lose too much and therefore holds him back. And yet, a view of life may in general only hope for victory if the broad masses, as the bearers of the new doc- trine, declare themselves ready to take upon themselves the necessary fight. From this lack of understanding of the importance of the lower classes there resulted also a totally insufficient conception of the social question. In all this Doktor Lueger was the reverse of Schoenerer. His thorough knowledge of human nature made him The phrase 'religious faith' would seem to reflect Georges Sorel's theory of the revolutionary myth as expounded in his Reflexions sur la violence. It is improbable, however, that Hitler ever saw the book, and in addition there are important differences between Sorel's conception and Hitler's. Nor is the affinity with Friedrich Nietzsche, often taken for granted, in any sense real. It may well be that Sorel and Nietzsche induced many German intellectuals to join the Nazi movement, but the reasoning was clearly erroneous. Hitler subscribes to no doctrine of the superman. His strength and originality lie in the fact that he identifies himself with the masses in so far as these want to arm for national aggrandizement. It does not matter how much the individual component man or woman in these masses knows or what he or she is, so long as willingness is present to be subordinate to the instinct of common 'self- preservation* i.e., organization for the conquest of whatever is necessary to extend the sway of the folk as a whole. The leader is he who most strongly senses the needs and desires of the unified nation, and not he who as Nietzsche and Stefan 128 MEIN KAMPF estimate the possible forces just as correctly, as he was also prevented by this from underestimating existing institu- tions, and perhaps for this very reason he learned to use them as instruments in attaining his aims. He also understood only too well that in our time the up- per bourgeoisie's energy for a political fight was only limited and not sufficient to help a great movement to victory. Therefore, he put the weight of his political activity on win- ning over those classes the existence of which was threat- ened, and this, therefore, became a stimulant rather than an impediment of the will to fight. In the same way he was in- clined to use all the instruments of power already existing, and to gain the favor of influential institutions, in order to be able to draw the greatest possible advantage for his own movement from such old-established sources of power. So he based his party primarily on the middle classes which were threatened with extinction, and so assured him- self a group of followers almost impossible to unnerve, filled with a readiness for sacrifice as well as with a tough fighting strength. His infinitely clever policy towards the Catholic Church won for him in a short time the younger clergy to such an extent that the old Clerical Party was either forced to leave the battlefield or, more wisely still, to join the new party in order thus slowly to regain one po- sition after the other. If one were to consider this the sole characteristic of his George believed makes use of the * slaves ' in order to assure the triumph and happiness of a more regal aristocracy than the world has known. In short, for all his elements of patriotic mysticism, Hitler is no Platonist, but a Spartan in the simplest sense. That is why Germans have found it so difficult to resist him. As one of them has put it, ' He flatters us all into acqui- escence.' It may be added that when Hitler says that the 'psyche of the masses is feminine/ he is echoing Gustav Le Bon. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 129 nature, one would do him a grave injustice. For to the clever tactician were added the qualities of a really great and ingenious reformer. Also here, of course, his actions were limited by the exact knowledge of already existing pos- sibilities and also by the abilities of his own person. It was an infinitely practical goal which this really im- portant man had set for himself. He wanted to conquer Vienna. Vienna was the heart of the monarchy, and it was from this city that the last bit of vitality went out into the ailing and aging body of the decaying realm. The healthier the heart should become, the more freshly would the rest of the body revive. A fundamentally correct idea, which, how- ever, was applicable only for a prescribed and limited time. And therein lay the weakness of this man. What he achieved, as mayor of the city of Vienna, is im- mortal in the best sense of the word ; however, he was not able to save the monarchy, it was too late. This his adversary Schoenerer had realized more clearly. Doktor Lueger succeeded in everything he attacked prac- tically ; the result he had hoped for did not come. Schoenerer did not succeed in what he wanted, but what he feared occurred in an only too terrible manner. Thus neither man achieved his broader goal. Lueger was no longer able to save Austria, and Schoenerer could not save the German people from decline. Now, it is infinitely instructive for our time to study the causes of this failure of both parties. This is especially use- ful for my friends, as in many points circumstances are to- day similar to those of that period, and thus mistakes may be avoided which had already brought about the end of the first movement and the frustration of the second. In my eyes there were three causes for the collapse of the Pan-German movement in Austria : 130 MEIN KAMPF First, the confused conception of the importance of social problems for a new party, the inner nature of which was revolutionary. Inasmuch as Schoenerer primarily turned to the bour- geois classes, the result could only be a very weak and tame one. The German bourgeoisie in its higher circles, though the individual is not aware of this, is pacifistic to the degree of self-denial, where the domestic affairs of the nation or of the State are concerned. In good times that means in times under a good government such an attitude is a reason for the extreme value which these classes have for the State; in times of bad government, however, it has a really de- vastating effect. In order to make the carrying-out of a really serious struggle possible at all, the Pan-German move- ment should have devoted itself to winning over the masses. The fact that it did not do so took from it at the beginning the elementary impetus that such a wave requires if it is not to ebb after even a short time. But as soon as this principle is not observed and carried out from the beginning, the new party loses all chances to This passage gains in interest when one compares it with the tactic adopted by the Nazis after their political victory of September, 1930. They now entered the Reichstag in hitherto unparalleled numbers; but from the beginning they refused to accept any responsibility for what was being done and con- tinuously disrupted and hampered the proceedings. Some individual members were willing to share the burden of legisla- tive activity, but they were not permitted to have their way. Initially the 107 elected parliamentarians had marched into the Reichstag clad in brown uniforms. Outside the building, groups of partisans demonstrated, and when police detachments ap- peared they marched off to the Leipzigerstrasse and smashed the windows of Jewish shops. Later disturbances were even POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 131 make up later for what it had neglected. For now, with the admission of extremely great and moderate bourgeois elements, the internal attitude of the movement will always shape itself towards these, and thus it will lose all hope of ever winning any worth-while forces from the great masses of the population. What is more such a movement will not get over the stage of pale [sic] grumbling and criticizing. The more or less almost religious belief, combined with a similar readiness for sacrifice, will never be found again; whereas it might probably be replaced by the endeavor to polish gradually the harsh sides of the struggle by ' positive* co-operation; that means, in this case, by recognition of given facts, so that finally one will arrive at a foul peace. So it also happened to the Pan-German movement, be- cause it had not laid enough stress on winning its followers from the circles of the great masses at the start. It achieved a ' bourgeois dignity, mutedly radical/ From this mistake resulted the second cause of its rapid decline. The German nationality's situation in Austria was al- ready desperate at the time when the Pan-German move- ment appeared. From year to year parliament had become an instrument for the gradual destruction of the German people. Only the abolition of this institution could promise more grotesque. But with Hindenburg's re-election in 1931 the prestige of the Nazi Party began to fade, only to be revived again when Chancellor Brtining was dismissed and the govern- ment entrusted to Franz von Papen against the will of the Reichstag. Papen thereupon systematically undermined the Republic, so that it was virtually defenseless when in 1933 Hitler was entrusted with the government. Had it not been for this sudden change in the German leadership, Hitler might eventually have been compelled to seek a status as a normal political leader and try his hand at the parliamentarian game. 132 MEIN KAMPF moderate success in any attempted salvation in the elev- enth hour. fWith this the movement was approached by a question that was important in principle. In order to destroy parliament, was one to go into it and ' to hollow it out from within/ as one was accustomed to ex- press it, or was one to lead this fight from the outside by attacking the institution as such? One went in and came out beaten. Of course, one had to go in. To carry out the fight against such an institution from the outside means to arm oneself with unshakable courage, and also to be ready for unheard-of sacrifices. This means to seize the bull by the horns and to receive many blows, to fall to the ground sometimes, and perhaps to rise again with broken bones, and only after the hardest struggle will vic- tory turn to the courageous aggressor. Only the greatness of the sacrifices will win new fighters for the cause, till per- severance finally receives the reward of success. But for this one needs the children from the great masses of the nation. They alone are determined and tough enough to fight this struggle to the bloody end. But the Pan-German movement did not possess these broad masses; thus it had no other choice but to go into parliament. It would be wrong to believe that this decision had been the result of long mental agonies or even reflections; no, one did not think of anything else. The participation in this nonsense was only the sediment of general and confused conceptions of the importance and the effect of participa- tion in an institution which had already been recognized as being fundamentally wrong. In general, one probably hoped for relief in the work of the enlightenment of the great masses, because now one had an opportunity to speak POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 133 before the 'forum of the entire nation/ Further, it seemed evident that it was more successful to attack the evil at the root than from the outside. By protection through im- munity one believed the security of the individual protago- nist would be strengthened, so that the force of the attack could only be increased thereby. But in reality things came about quite differently. < The forum before which the Pan-German deputies spoke had not become greater but rather smaller; for everybody speaks only before the audience that is able to hear him, or that receives a description of what has been said through the reports of the press. But the greatest direct audience is not represented by the hall of parliament, but by the great public meeting. For there, there will be thousands of people who have only come to hear what the speaker has to say, whereas in the session hall of the House of Deputies there are only a few hundred, whose chief reason for coming is only to re- ceive their remuneration and not to let themselves be en- lightened by the wisdom of the one or the other of the ' peo- ple's representative.' But above all : It is always the same public which will never add to its knowledge, not only because it lacks the brains for this, but also the necessary, though modest, will power. Never will one of these deputies willingly do better [$ic] truth the honor of entering its service. No, not one of them will do that, except he hopes to save or to regain his mandate for a further session. For as soon as it is in the air that the existing party will not do very well in a coming election, only then will these ornaments of manliness set out to see how they can gain the other, prob- ably winning party or direction, whereby this change of po- sition takes place under a cloudburst of moral motivations. Therefore, whenever an existing party seems to be out of 134 MEIN KAMPF the people's favor to the extent that an annihilating defeat is threatened, a great migration begins: the parliamentary rats leave the party ship. This has nothing to do with greater knowledge or will power, but with that clairvoyant ability which warns such a parliamentary bedbug just in time, so that it can let itself drop on another warm party bed. To speak before such a 4 forum* means really to cast pearls before certain well-known animals. This is really not worth while. The result cannot be other than naught. This, then, was actually the case. The Pan-German deputies could talk on till their throats were hoarse; the effect was naught. The press, however, passed over it in silence or mutilated the speeches in a way that every connection, even often their meaning, was lost or distorted, so that public opinion was given only a very poor picture of the intentions of the new movement. It was of no importance whatsoever what the individual gentlemen now said; the importance rested in what one read of them. But this was only an abstract of their speeches, which, in its tattered condition, was nothing but nonsense and so it was intended. But the only forum before which they actually spoke consisted of barely five hundred parliamentarians, and that says enough. But the worst was the following: The Pan-German movement could hope for success only if it realized from the very first day that the question in- volved was not that of a new party but that of a new view of life. The latter alone was able to summon the internal strength to fight out this gigantic struggle. But for this only the best and the most courageous characters are suited to act as leaders. If the fight for a new view of life is not led by heroes will- ing to sacrifice themselves, then no more will death-defying fighters be found. He who in such a case fights for his POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 135 own existence cannot have much consideration left for the community. fBut in order to preserve this assumption, it is necessary for everybody to know that the new movement has nothing to offer to the present except the honor and the fame of posterity. The more easily-to-be-won positions such a movement has to offer, the greater will be the onrush of in- ferior stuff, till finally these political jobbers overcrowd a successful political party in such numbers that the honest fighter of an earlier time no longer recognizes the old move- ment, so that the newcomers themselves decidedly reject him as an unwelcome ' intruder/ With this the ' mission ' of such a movement is finished. From the moment the Pan-German movement sold itself to parliament, it gained 'parliamentarians' instead of lead- ers and fighters. Thus it deteriorated to the level of ordinary political parties of the day and lost the force to oppose a catastrophic destiny with the defiance of martyrdom. Instead. of fight- ing, it now learned to 'speak' and to 'negotiate.' The new parliamentarian considered it, within a short time, a nicer duty, because it involved less risk, to fight for the new view of life with the ' intellectual ' weapons of parliamentary elo- quence than to throw himself into a fight, and possibly risking his own life, whose end was uncertain and in any case did not promise any gain. But as now the party was in parliament, the followers out- side began to hope and to wait for miracles, which, of course, never happened and never could happen. Therefore, they became impatient within a short time; for also what one heard of one's own deputies in no way corresponded with the expectations of the voters. This was only too natural, as the hostile press took heed not to report a true-to-life picture of the Pan-German representative to the people. But the more the new deputies began to find palatable 136 MEIN KAMPF the rather mild form of 'revolutionary* fight in parliament and the diet, the less were they ready to return to the more dangerous work of enlightening the nation's great masses. Therefore, the mass meeting, being direct and personal, and which was the only way of exercising a really effective influence and which, therefore, alone could enable the win- ning of great parts of the nation, was pushed more and more into the background. Once the beer table of the meeting hall was exchanged for the platform of parliament, so that from this exalted forum speeches could be poured into the heads of the so-called 'elected representatives' instead of into the people, the Pan-German movement ceased to be a people's movement and gradually sank into a club for academic discussion, to be taken more or less seriously. Now also the bad impression that the press had rendered was in no way repaired by the personal assembly activity of the various gentlemen, so that finally the word 4 Pan-Ger- man' had a very bad sound in the ears of the great public. For let it be said to all knights of the pen and to all the political dandies, especially of today : the greatest changes in this world have never yet been brought about by a goose- quill! No, the pen has always been reserved to motivate these changes theoretically. But the power which set the greatest historical avalanches of political and religious nature sliding was, from the begin- ning of time, the magic force of the spoken word alone. The great masses of a nation will always and only suc- cumb to the force of the spoken word. But all great move- ments are movements of the people, are volcanic eruptions of human passions and spiritual sensations, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Misery or by the torch of the word thrown into the masses, and are not the lemonade-like out- pourings of aestheticizing literati and drawing-room heroes. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 137 Only a storm of burning passion can turn people's des- tinies, but only he who harbors passion in himself can arouse passion. Passion alone will give to him, who is chosen by her, the words that, like beats of a hammer, are able to open the doors to the heart of a people. He to whom passion is denied and whose mouth remains closed is not chosen by Heaven as the prophet of its will. Therefore, may every writer remain by his inkwell in order to work 'theoretically' if his brains and ability are sufficient for this ; such writers are neither born nor chosen to become leaders. Every movement with great aims has anxiously to watch that it may not lose connection with the great masses. It has to examine every question primarily from this point of view and to make decisions in this direction. Further, it has to avoid everything that could diminish or even weaken its ability to influence the masses; perhaps not for 'demagogic* reasons, no, but because of the simple realization that without the enormous power of the masses of a people no great idea, no matter how sublime and lofty it may appear, is realizable. Hard reality alone conditions the way that leads to every goal; shunning disagreeable ways means, in this world, only too often to renounce the goal; one may wish this or not. As soon as the Pan-German movement, because of its parliamentary position, began to place the weight of its ac- tivity upon parliament instead of upon the people, it lost its future and won cheap successes of the moment. It chose the easier fight, and therewith it was no longer worthy of the ultimate victory. Already in Vienna I had thought most thoroughly about just this question, and in its non-recognition I saw one of the causes for the decline of the movement whose mission. 138 MEIN KAMPF in my eyes, was to take the leadership of Germanity into its hands. The first two mistakes which made the Pan-German movement fail were related to each other. The lack of knowledge of the internal driving forces of great changes led to an insufficient evaluation of the importance of the great masses of the people ; from this resulted the scanty in- terest in the social question, the deficient and insufficient courting of the soul of the nation's lower classes, but also the attitude towards parliament that favored this condi- tion. If one had recognized the tremendous power which at all times is due to the masses as the bearer of revolutionary resistance, one would certainly have applied a different policy as regards social and propagandistic directions. Then the center of weight of this movement would not have been removed to the parliament, but stressed in the workshops and streets. But the third mistake also bears the ultimate germ in the non-recognition of the value of the masses, which, like a fly-wheel, gives impetus and uniform continuance to the force of the attack, once they have been set in motion in one certain direction by superior minds. < The serious struggle that the Pan-German movement had to fight out with the Catholic Church can be explained only by the insufficient understanding which one had for the spiritual disposition of the people. The new party's violent attacks against Rome were caused by the following: As soon as the House of Habsburg had reached the final determination to transform Austria into a Slavic State, it took up every means that seemed suitable in this direction. Religious institutions also were dishonestly taken into the service of the neW 'idea of State* by the most unscrupulous of all dynasties. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 139 The use of Czech pastorates and their spiritual pastors was only one of the many means to reach the goal of Aus- tria's general Slavization. The procedure involved was about the following: In purely German parishes Czech pastors were appointed who slowly but steadily began to put the interests of the Czech nation above those of the Church, thus becoming germ cells of the process of de-Germanization. Unfortunately, the German clergy almost failed com- pletely in the face of such a procedure. Not only that the clergy themselves were entirely unfit for a similar struggle from the German point of view ; they were not able to meet the attacks of the other with the necessary resistance. Thus, by way of religious abuse on the one hand, the German na- tion was not well enough defended on the other hand, and was being pushed back slowly but incessantly. If this happened in small matters, unfortunately the sit- uation in general was not very different. Here, too, the anti-German attempts of the Habsburgs did not meet the necessary resistance, especially on the part of the higher clergy, while the representation of the German interests was pushed completely into the back- ground. The general impression could but be that this was a bru- tal infringement on German rights by the Catholic clergy as such. With this, however, the Church did not seem to feel with the German people, but seemed unjustly to take sides with its enemies. The root of the evil was, especially in Schoener- er's opinion, that the head of the Catholic Church was not in Germany, a fact which accounted for the hostility to- wards the concerns of our nationality. The so-called cultural problems were almost completely pushed into the background, as was the case with nearly everything in Austria at that time Decisive for the atti- 140 MEIN KAMPF tude of the Pan-German movement towards the Catholic Church was far less the Church's attitude against, perhaps, science, etc., than, what is more, its insufficient representa- tion of German rights, and, on the other hand, its continued advancement of especially Slavic arrogance and greed. Now, George Schoenerer was not the man to do things by halves. He took up the fight against the Church with the conviction that only thus could the German people perhaps still be saved. The ' Los-von-Rom 9 movement seemed the most powerful, but also the most difficult, procedure of at- tack destined to smash the fortress of the enemy. If it was successful, then the unfortunate schism of the Church in Germany was overcome, and the internal strength of the Reich and the German nation could not fail to gain enor- mously by such a victory. But neither the assumption nor the conclusion of this fight was correct. In all questions concerning the German nationality, the national resistance of the Catholic clergy of German na- tionality was undoubtedly weaker than that of their non- German brethren, especially the Czechs. Also, only an ignoramus could fail to see that the Ger- man clergy never so much as thought of an active represen- tation of German interests. Also, everyone who was not blind had to admit that this was due first of all to a circumstance from which we Ger- mans all have to suffer severely; it is the objectivity of our attitude towards our nationality as well as towards anything else. Just as the Czech clergyman has an attitude that is sub- jective towards his people and only objective towards the Church, thus the German clergyman was subjective to- wards the Church and objective towards the nation. It was a fact which we may unfortunately observe in thou- sands of other cases. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 141 This is in no way a special hereditary feature of Cathol- icism, but in our country it eats into almost any, especially governmental or idealistic institutions. Compare the attitude which our officials show towards the attempts of a national rebirth with that which in such a case the officials of another nation would show. Or does one believe that the officers' corps of the rest of the world would in a similar way place the concerns of their nation in the background with the phrase of 'State authority/ as has been our custom for these past five years, a fact that is even looked upon as especially meritorious? Do not both reli- gions today, for instance, take an attitude towards the Jewish question that neither answers the concerns of the nation nor the real needs of religion? Compare the attitude of a Jewish rabbi towards all questions, even of only minor importance for Judaism as a race, with that of the far greater part of our clergy, but, if you please, of both reli- gions! We find this symptom whenever the representation of an abstract idea is involved. 'State authority/ 'democracy/ 'pacifism/ 'international solidarity/ etc., are all conceptions which in our country nearly always turn into stiff, purely doctrinary notions, so that every judgment of the general national necessities of life originates exclusively from their point of view. This unfortunate way of looking at all concerns from the angle of a previously accepted idea kills all ability to think subjectively of a thing that is objectively contradictory to one's own doctrine, and eventually it leads to a complete reversal of means and end. Then one will turn against every attempt at a national rising if this could take place only after first doing away with an inefficient, destructive regime, as this would mean an offense against 'State au- thority/ but since 'State authority' is not a means to an end, but in the eyes of such an 'objective' fanatic it repre- 142 MEIN KAMPF sents the end itself, that is sufficient to fill out his entire miserable life. Then one will indignantly resist an at- tempted dictatorship, even if it were Frederick the Great, and if the State artists of a parliamentary majority were only inefficient dwarfs or even inferior scoundrels, because to such a stickler for principles the law of democracy seems more sacred than the welfare of a nation. The one, there- fore, will protect the worst tyranny that ruins a people, as for the moment it represents the 'State authority/ while the other rejects even the most blessed government, as long as it does not represent his idea of 'democracy.' In exactly the same way our German pacifist will pass over in silence the most bloody rape of the nation, it may come from even the fiercest military powers, if a change of At no time was German pacifism more highly developed than pacifism was in any other country subscribing to the principles of civilization. But it is true that the Social Democrats had taught international worker solidarity more ardently than had some other Socialist groups, though they too barring a few leaders succumbed to the enthusiasm of 1914. Later on, when doubts concerning the War began to arise, some of the older feeling returned and the dissident leaders were able to muster considerable strength. Christian pacifism, on the other hand, was after the War given a powerful impetus by the Peace Encyclicals of the Pope, which made an impression on Catho- lics and Protestants alike. The coming of Hitler to power naturally spelled the end of such efforts. All members of pacifist organizations which did not question the legitimacy of national defense in a just war were penalized. A number of professors were dismissed from the universities, and State employees were thrown out of office whenever the label of pacifist could be affixed to them. The most sensational instance was the trial of Professor Friedrich Dessauer in 1933, when the Center Party statesman was subjected to imprisonment and loss of property for alleged pacifist activity. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 143 this lot could be brought about only by resistance, that means force, for this would be contrary to the spirit of his peace league. But the international German socialist may be robbed conjointly by the other world; he accepts it with fraternal affection and does not think oij^m^a^pr even mere protest, because he is a Ger This may be deplorable, but to means first to understand it. The same is the case with the] concerns by a part of the clergy. | This is neither wicked nor ma caused by orders from, let us sa) national determination in which a defective education for GermanisnT well as a complete submission to the i an idol. Education for democracy, for international socialism, for pacifism, etc., is such a stiff and exclusive one and so purely subjective from these various points of view, that therefore the whole picture of the remaining part of the world is also influenced by this principal conception, while from childhood on the attitude towards the German nation has been merely objective. Thus the pacifist, by giving him- self subjectively and entirely to his idea, in face of any threat to his people no matter how unjust and serious it may be (as long as he is a German), will always look first for the objective right and he never will join the ranks and fight with his flock out of pure instinct for self-preservation. How far this is true for the various denominations as well, the following shows: Protestantism represents the concerns of the German na- This point was to prove of the greatest importance. Lutheran teaching on the subject of baptism -- which is regarded as the greatest sacrament is that through baptism equality of 144 MEIN KAMPF tion in a better way, so far as this is already rooted in its birth and later tradition; but it breaks down in the moment when the defense of these national interests take place in a field which is not included in the general line of its ideal world and traditional development, or which perhaps is rejected for some reason or other. Thus Protestantism will always interest itself in the pro- motion of all things Gertnan as such, whenever it is a mat- ter of inner purity or increasing national sentiment, the de- fense of German^ life, the German language and German liberty, as all this is also rooted firmly in Protestantism; status before God and in the Church is conferred on men. Difference of race and endowment may and do subsist, but they are not of essential importance. Moreover, the sacred ministry is open to all who have been baptized and are called. Therewith Lutheranism denies the priority of race. When Hitler came to power, he immediately tried to place the governance of the Lutheran Church in the hands of men who were willing to alter the traditional teaching. A large group of 'German Christians' who subscribed to Hitler's views were recruited, and their representative Pastor Ludwig M tiller was named Archbishop at the command of the government. The majority of German theologians refused, however, to accept so drastic a tampering with their creed. Gradually they formed the Confessional Synod, and this has until now despite all pressure and suffering clung resolutely to the orthodox point of view. The best-known spokesman for this point of view is Pastor Martin Niemoller, who was imprisoned by command of Hitler and is still held in virtually solitary confinement; but there are hundreds of clergymen who have learned to know the meaning of opposition. More than twelve hundred of their number have gone to prison; some are dead. The crisis through which Lutherism is passing is unquestion- ably the gravest in its history. Cf. Der Kampfder cvangelischen Kircke in Deutschland. by Arthur Frey (Zollikon, 1937). POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 145 but it will immediately and sharply fight every attempt at saving the nation from the grip of its most deadly enemy, as its attitude towards Judaism is fixed more or less by dogma. But this involves a question without the solution of which all attempts at a German renaissance or a national revival are and will remain absurd and impossible, f During my time at Vienna I had enough leisure and op- portunity to examine this question also without prejudice, and in daily contacts I was able to determine the direction of this opinion in a thousand ways. In this focus of the various nationalities, it was shown most clearly that only the German pacifist tries to look ob- jectively at the concerns of his own nation, but the Jew, for instance, will never do the same with those of the Jewish people; that only the German socialist is ' international' in a sense that forbids him to ask for justice for his people other than by whining and moaning before his international comrades, but never the Czech or the Pole, etc. ; in short, I recognized even then that the misfortune is to be sought only partly in those doctrines, but, for the other part, in our entirely insufficient education for our own nationality as a whole, and, conditioned by this, in a weakened devo- tion to the latter. This eliminated the first purely theoretical motivation of the fight of the Pan-German movement against Cathol- icism in itself. One should educate the German people, from childhood These words seem to define Hitler's point of view at the time this book was written, and doubtless reflects the situation in which he found himself in the Bavaria of 1923. The statements here made aroused the ire of General Ludendorff, already then a violent opponent of Rome and the Jesuits, and were dealt with in magazine articles in which the General accused Hitler of having 'sold out' to Rome. The Fuhrer was at the time un* 146 MEIN KAMPF on, to the exclusive acknowledgment of the right of their own nationality, and one should not poison the children's hearts with the curse of our 'objectivity/ also in matters of the preservation of the ego, so that after a short time it will be seen (provided there exists also a radical national gov- ernment) that, as in Ireland, Poland, or France, in Germany also a Catholic will always be a German. The most convincing proof for this was offered at a time when for the last time our people were summoned, for the protection of its existence, before the tribunal of History for its struggle for life or death. As long as the leadership from above did not fail, the peo- ple fulfilled their duty in the most overwhelming manner. Whether they were Protestant or Catholic clergy, they both had an immensely large share in preserving for so long a time our force of resistance not only at the front but even certain of what the future might bring, and is known to have interviewed leaders of the Bavarian People's Party (Catholic) concerning the terms under which he might be admitted to that organization. Heiden puts the matter somewhat differently, suggesting that Hitler had merely been trying to get permission to reorganize the Nazi Party. In addition one of the best friends the Nazis had in the Bavarian regular army was General Franz von Epp, a Catholic who would have frowned on any- thing smacking of religious warfare. Perhaps it is not possible as yet to substantiate the state- ment in full the change in Hitler's personal attitude is attributable primarily to the conversion of Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, from monarchist restorationism to democracy and pacifism. The Cardinal proclaimed this new attitude in a sensational open letter which implied criticism of the Nazis. In addition Hitler had come more under the influence of Alfred Rosenberg, whose ideas on racialism and religion have since become standard Party fare. At any rate, the Catholic Church took up in earnest the fight against POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 147 more so at home. During these years, especially during the first flare-up, there existed for both camps only one single and sacred German Reich, and everyone turned to his own heaven for its existence and future. There is one question which the Pan-German movement in Austria ought to have asked itself: Is the preservation of the German nation in Austria possible under a Catholic faith? If it is possible, then the political party had no right to occupy itself with religious or even denominational af- fairs; if not, however, then a religious reformation had to set in, and not a political party. He who believes he may arrive at a religious reformation by the roundabout way of a political organization only shows that he really has not the slightest idea of the way in which religious conceptions or even dogmas originate and their effect upon the Church. the Nazi creed after the triumphant elections of 1930. A number of pastoral letters denounced the errors contained in the Party program and in the books of important leaders; and late in 1930 the Ordinary of the diocese of Mayence refused to grant Catholic burial to a Nazi. After Hitler came to powei , all this was changed. The Bishops revised their attitude; a Concordat was signed with the Holy See. Even more re- cently some Catholic leaders have professed to believe that a modus vivendi with Hitler might be reached. We possess authentic records of Chancellor Hitler's private views of the religious situation. One of these may be cited in part: 'Hitler said concerning Catholic opposition, especially in Bavaria, that its fomentors were wasting their time. They might as well stop pipe-dreaming. He would not follow the example of Bismarck. He was a Catholic. Providence had arranged that. Bismarck had failed because he had been a Protestant and Protestants have no conception of what the Catholic Church is. The important thing was to sense what 148 MEIN KAMPF Here one really cannot serve two masters. In this, I con- sider the foundation or the destruction of a religion essen- tially more important than the foundation or destruction of a State, let alone a party. But one must not say that this was only the warding- off of attacks from the other side! It is certain that at all times unscrupulous people did not shrink from making religion a tool of their political business affairs (for this is almost exclusively and nearly always the main object of such fellows) ; and it is equally certain that it would be wrong to hold religion or a denomination responsi- ble for a number of scoundrels who abuse it just as surely as they would very probably abuse anything else placed into the service of their base instincts. Nothing would suit such a parliamentary good-for- people felt in religious matters and what endeared the Church to them. If the clerical caste would not disappear voluntarily, he would direct propaganda against the Church until people would be unable to hide their disgust when the word ' Church ' was mentioned. Why, it was necessary only to make Church history popular. He would have films made. Looking at them the German people would see how the clergy had exploited them, lived off them. How they had sucked the money out of the country. How they had worked hand in glove with the Jews, how they had practiced immoral vice, how they had spread lies. These films would be so interesting that everybody would itch to see them. He would make the clergy ridiculous. He would expose all the tangled mass of corruption, selfishness and deceit of which they had been guilty. Let the bourgeoisie tear its hair. He would have the youth and the people on his side. He would guarantee that if he set his mind to it, he could destroy the Church in a few years. The whole institution was just a hollow shell. One good kick, and it would tumble together in a heap.' POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 149 nothing and sluggard better than if he were offered an op- portunity, at least later, of having some justification for his political wirepulling. For, as soon as religion or a denomination is made re- sponsible for his personal wickedness and is attacked for this reason, such a mendacious fellow will clamor aloud and call the world to witness how justified his actions were, and that the salvation of religion and church is due to him and to his eloquence alone. His fellow citizens, as stupid as they are forgetful, will not recognize the real orginator of the en- tire dispute, merely because of the great noise he makes, or they will no longer remember him, and so the scoundrel has actually achieved his goal. Such a sly fox knows only too well that this has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, and he will therefore laugh up his sleeve, while his honest and less skilled adversary loses the game, so that some day, despairing of faith and loyalty in mankind, he will withdraw from everything. But also in another direction it would be unjust to make religion as such or even the Church responsible for the mis- takes of various individuals. One should compare the visi- ble greatness of the organization which one has before one- self with the average faultiness of men in general, and one will have to admit that the proportion between good and bad is here perhaps better than anywhere else. Even among the priests there are certainly such to whom their sacred office is only the instrument for the gratification of their political ambition, and who, in the political fight, forget in a more than deplorable manner that they should be the guardians of a higher truth and not the promoters of lies and calumnies but such an unworthy individual is out- weighed, on the other hand, by a thousand and more honest pastors, most faithfully devoted to their mission, who stand out like little islands in a communal swamp in our menda- cious and demoralized time. 150 MEIN KAMPF However little I condemn the Church as such, or may, if perhaps a demoralized villain in a priest's frock offends morality in an unclean fashion, just as little may I condemn another among the many who befouls and betrays his na- tionality in times when this is almost a daily practice any- how. Especially today one should not forget that for one such an Ephialtes there are thousands who with bleeding hearts sympathize with the misfortune of their people and who, just like the best of our nation, long for the hour when at last Heaven will smile on us again. But to him who now answers that the problems involved are not everyday trifles but questions of essential truth or dogmatic content, one can only give the necessary reply by another question : If you believe yourself to be chosen by Destiny to an- nounce the truth, then do so; but then have the courage to do so not by way of a political party for this is also wire- pulling but instead of the present 'worse* place your 'better' of tomorrow! But if you lack the courage to do so, or if you are uncer- tain about your 'better,' then keep your hands off; in any case do not try to do by roundabout sneaking through a political movement what you would not dare to do with your visor open. < Political parties have nothing to do with religious prob- lems, as long as these are not hostile to the nation and do not undermine the ethics and morality of their own race; just as religion is not to be combined with the absurdity of politi- cal parties. Whenever ecclesiastical dignitaries make use of religious institutions or doctrines in order to harm their nationality, one should not follow them and fight them with the same weapons. To the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people should always be inviolable, or else he ought not to POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 151 be a politician but should become a reformer, provided he is made of the right stuff I Any other attitude would lead to a catastrophe, especially in Germany. While studying the Pan-German movement and its fight against Rome, at that time and especially in the course of the following years, I came to the following conclusion: The party of that time, through its limited understanding of the importance of social problems, lost the masses of the people that were really fit to fight; joining parliament de- prived it of its enormous impetus and burdened it with all the weaknesses of that institution ; it made itself impossible in numerous small and medium circles through its fight against the Catholic Church, thus robbing itself of innumer- able of the best elements which the nation can call its own. The practical result of the Austrian Kulturkampf was equal to nil. t However, one succeeded in tearing away from the Church almost one hundred thousand members, but she did not suf- fer any particular loss because of this. She really did not have to shed any tears for the lost 'lambs'; for the Church lost only what for a long time had not fully belonged to her internally. This was the difference between the new refor- mation and the old one : that once many of the best of the Church turned away from it because of their inner religious conviction, while now only those went who were not only lukewarm, but for 'considerations' of a political nature. But even from the political point of view the result was just as ridiculous and yet again saddening. Once more a political movement, promising success and salvation to the German nation, had perished, because it had not been led with the necessary ruthless sobriety, but lost itself in directions that were bound to lead to disunion. For one thing is certainly true: 152 MEIN KAMPF The Pan-German movement would probably never have made this mistake if it had not possessed too little under- standing for the psyche of the great masses. If its leaders had known that, in order to achieve any success, one must not present, for purely psychological reasons, two enemies to the masses, because this would lead to a complete split-up of the fighting strength, then for this reason alone the direc- tion of the blows of the Pan-German movement would have been aimed against one adversary alone. Nothing is more dangerous for a political party than to be led by those jacks-of-all-trades who want to do everything without ever attaining the least thing. No matter how much one had to criticize an individual denomination, the political party must not for a moment lose sight of the fact that, according to all previous experience of history, a purely political party, in a similar situation, has never succeeded in bringing about a religious refor- mation. But one does not study history in order to for- get its doctrines when they are to be applied in practice, or to believe that things are now different that is, that the eternal truth of history is now no longer applicable; but from history one learns just the practical application for the present. But he who is not able to do this must not imagine that he is a political 'leader* ; he is in reality a shallow, and also frequently a very vainglorious, simpleton, and no amount of good-will excuses his practical inability. As a whole, and at all times, the efficiency of the trulv national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy. The more uniformly the fighting will of a people is put into action, the greater will be the magnetic force of the movement and the more powerful the impetus of the blow. It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category only, because to weak and unstable characters POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 153 the knowledge that there are various enemies will lead only too easily to incipient doubts as to their own cause. As soon as the wavering masses find themselves con- fronting too many enemies, objectivity at once steps in, and the question is raised whether actually all the others are wrong and their own nation or their own movement alone is right. Also with this comes the first paralysis of their own strength. Therefore, a number of essentially different in- ternal enemies must always be regarded as one in such a way that in the opinion of the mass of one's own adherents the war is being waged against one enemy alone. This strengthens the belief in one's own cause and increases one's bitterness against the attacker. It cost the former Pan-German movement its success be- cause it did not comprehend this. Its goal was rightly viewed, its will was pure, but the way it chose was wrong. It was like a mountain climber who fixes the peak that he is to climb well and correctly with his eyes and who sets out on his way with the greatest determination and energy, but who, paying no attention to the way, always fixing his eye on the goal, neither sees nor examines the condition of the ascent thus finally failing. The situation seemed to be the reverse with its great competitor, the Christian Socialist Party. The way on which it set out was intelligently and rightly chosen, but it lacked the clear knowledge of the goal. < In nearly all matters in which the Pan-German move- ment failed, the attitude of the Christian Socialist Party was correct and carefully planned. It had the necessary understanding of the importance of the masses and it secured at least part of them by apparent stress on its social character from the very first day. By aiming essentially at the winning of the small and lower middle class and the craftsmen classes, it gained a body of 154 MEIN KAMPF followers that was as faithful as it was enduring, ready for sacrifice. It avoided all fights against a religious institu- tion, thus securing the support of such a mighty organiza- tion as the Church represents. Thus it had only one really great chief adversary. It recognized the value of large- scale propaganda and it was a virtuoso in influencing the spiritual instincts of the great masses of its followers. The fact that, nevertheless, it was unable to reach the desired goal of Austria's salvation was due to two faults of its way and to the obscurity of the goal itself. The new movement's anti-Semitism was built up on religious imagination instead of racial knowledge. The reason for making this mistake was the same as that which caused the second error as well. If the Christian Socialist Party was to save Austria, then in the opinion of its founders it was not to approach the question from the racial principle, as otherwise and after a short time the general dissolution of the State would set in. But the situation in Vienna especially re- quired, in the opinion of the party leaders, the greatest possible elimination of all disrupting circumstances and in its place a stress on all unifying points of view. Vienna, at that time, was already so heavily interspersed with Czech elements that only the greatest tolerance with respect to all racial problems was able to keep them in a party that was not anti-German at the start. If one wanted to save Austria, one could not renounce them. So, one tried to win the small Czech tradesmen, especially numerous in Vienna, for the fight against the liberal Manchester move- ment, and thereby believed that one had found a slogan against Judaism on a religious basis, overshadowing all of the racial differences of old Austria. It is obvious that a fight on such a basis gave Jewry but limited cause for worry. If the worse came to the worst, a splash of baptismal POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 155 water would always save the business and Judaism at the same time. With so superficial a motivation one never arrived at a serious and scientific treatment of the whole problem, and therefore only too many people, who could not understand this kind of anti-Semitism, were repelled altogether. The attractive force of the idea was therefore almost exclusively tied to intellectually limited circles, if one wanted to arrive at a real knowledge, by means of a purely senti- mental feeling. The intelligentsia, as a matter of principle, turned aside. Thus the matter was given more and more the appearance as though the question involved was only the attempt at a new conversion of the Jews or even the expression of a "certain competitive envy. But with this the fight lost the character of an inner and higher consecra- Traditional anti-Semitism had in Germany always been based on confessional differences. Any other motivation was forbidden by the Church ; and in all the pogroms of the Middle Ages, Jews were able to escape the rigor of the persecution by accepting baptism. Surprisingly few availed themselves of that opportunity; and on the Christian side Saint Bernard had pointed out that the worst possible way to attempt conversions was to inflict torture and death on the recalcitrant. Therefore racial anti-Semitism as an integral part of a program of political action remains Hitler's 'Copernican discovery. 1 For now there is no escape for the victim no escape even for his Jewish grandmother, by reason of whom he is a pariah under the Nazi laws. It must be conceded that however numerous the sources from which Hitler's anti-Semitism derives may be, his proposed solution for the 'Jewish problem 1 is original. Probably there were few among the older Nazi leaders who accepted it. Goer- ing, Strasser, Roehm and the rest envisaged certain Jews of whom they wished to rid Germany. Jealousy of Jewish business rivals or professional competitors ; popular views of Jewish meth- 156 MEIN KAMPF tion, and thus it appeared to many, and not the worst, as immoral and objectionable. The conviction was lacking that this was a question of vital importance to the whole of mankind and that on its solution the fate of all non-Jewish people depended. Through these half-measures the value of the Christian Socialist Party's anti-Semitic attitude was destroyed. It was a sham anti-Semitism that was worse than no anti-Semitism at all; because one was thus lulled into security; one thought that one had caught the enemy by the ears, whereas in reality one was being led about by one's own nose. The Jew, however, after a short time had so accustomed ods of investing capital; age-old, almost atavistic sentiment handed down from the days when Jews lived in ghettos; soldierly hatred of Jewish pacifists: all these things played their part, but there exists overwhelming evidence from the years 1933 and 1934 to show that even inside the Party the general view was that the anti- Jewish campaign would be kept within certain limits. Only Hitler has refused to budge. It was he who rode down all opposition and ordered the pogrom of November 9. As originally planned, the outbreak was to coincide with the opening of the 'Eternal Jew' exposition in Berlin, it being assumed that the Government could claim that the people' had been so 'impressed' by the material displayed there that a 'spontaneous uprising* was unavoidable. The murder of Ernst von Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, by a young Jewish refugee, provided a far better excuse. More than 70,000 Jews were arrested, and those among the victim? who had money were ordered to leave the country within a specified time. Many thousands more were ejected from their homes, made to walk the streets all night, and virtually suffered to starve. In Vienna and Innsbruck the spectacle was so fright- ful that even hardened Nazis are known to have protested. Yet from the point of view of ruthless politics such steps are POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 157 himself to this kind of anti-Semitism that he would cer- tainly have missed its absence more than its presence hindered him. As one had to make heavy sacrifices to the State of nationalities, one had to do so even more in the case of the representation of the German nationality itself. One could not be 'nationalistic' if one did not want to lose the ground under one's feet, even in Vienna. By gentle evasion of this question, one hoped to save the Habsburg State, while in reality one drove it towards its doom by this very attitude. But with this the movement lost its enormous source of power which in the long run alone is able to replenish a political party with its internal force. Only through this the Christian Socialist movement became a party like all the others. In those days I closely observed both movements, the one out of the beat of my heart, the other by being carried away with admiration for the rare man who even then appeared to me to be the bitter symbol of the whole German nationality in Austria. When the impressive funeral procession of the dead mayor left the Rathaus and turned towards the Ring- strasse, I, too, was among the many hundreds of thousands who watched the tragedy. My feelings told me with undeniably clever. For in view of the world-wide economic depression, the arrival of Jewish refugees in any number creates for the country harboring them a variety of difficult problems. First, giving them jobs will be resented by the unemployed; and establishing them in business or a profession will add to the pressure of competition. The total effect upon the national economy may be negligible, but the psychological effect may, owing to the fact that discussion of the refugee problem is constantly in the foreground, be very considerable. 158 MEIN KAMPF internal emotion that the work of this man too was bound to be in vain because of the fate that would lead this State to its inevitable doom. Had Doktor Karl Lueger lived in Germany, he would have been placed in the ranks of the great figures of our nation ; that he had labored in this impos- sible State was the misfortune of his work as well as his own. When he died, the little flames in the Balkans leaped up more greedily from month to month, so that Fate graciously spared him the sight of that which he still thought he would have been able to prevent. I, however, tried to find the causes of the ill success of the one movement and the failure of the second, and I came to the firm conclusion that, apart from the impossi- bility of ever reaching a consolidation of the State in old Austria, the mistakes of both parties were the following: The Pan-German movement was right on the whole in its fundamental opinion about a German rebirth, but it was unlucky in the choice of its way. It was nationalistic, but unfortunately not social enough to win the masses. Its anti-Semitism was based on the correct realization of the importance of the race problem and not on the im- possibility of religious ideas. Its fight against a certain denomination, however, was wrong both in fact and tactics. The Christian Socialist movement had an unclear con- ception as to the goal of a German renaissance, but it showed sense and was lucky in seeking its way as a party. It understood the social question's importance, but it was wrong in its fight against Judaism and had no idea of the power of the national idea. tHad the Christian Socialist Party, in addition to its clever knowledge of the great masses, also had the right conception of the importance of the race problem as the Pan-German movement had comprehended it, or if it had finally become nationalistic, or if the Pan-German move- ment had accepted, in addition to the correct realization of POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 159 the goal, of the Jewish question and the importance of the national idea, also the practical cleverness of the Christian Socialist Party, but especially the latter's attitude towards socialism, then this would have even then created that movement which in my opinion could have intervened suc- cessfully in the fate of the German nation. That this was not the case was due for the most part to the nature of the Austrian State. As I did not see this conviction of mine realized in any other party, I could not make up my mind in the days that followed to join or even to fight with one of the existing organizations. Even then I thought that all the political movements had failed and were incompetent, that a na- tional renaissance of the German people on a larger and not really superficial scale was impossible. My inner aversion to the Habsburg State grew more and more during that time. The more I began to occupy myself especially with the question of foreign politics, the more my opinion grew and the firmer it took root that this State formation was bound to become the misfortune of the German nationality. Finally, I saw more and more clearly that the fate of the German nation would not be decided from this place, but in the Reich proper. This was not only true of all general political questions, but no less for all manifestations of the entire cultural life. Here, too, the Austrian State also showed all symptoms of debility or at least of its unimportance for the German nation in the domain of purely cultural or artistic affairs. This was true most of all in the field of architecture. The new architecture could not be successful in Austria for the reason that since the completion of the Ringstrasse the commissions were unimportant, at least as far as Vienna was concerned, as compared with the increasing plans of Germany. 160 MEIN KAMPF Thus I began more and more to lead a double life: reason and reality forced me to go through a school in Austria that was as bitter as it was blissful, but the heart dwelt somewhere else.-^ At that time an oppressive feeling of dissatisfaction seized me; the more I recognized the internal hollowness of this State and the impossibility of saving it, the more I felt with certainty that in all and everything it only repre- sented the misfortune of the German people. I was convinced that this State was bound to oppress and to handicap every really great German, as, on the other hand, it promoted everything non-German. I detested the conglomerate of races that the realm's capital manifested ; all this racial mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, etc., and among them all, like the eternal fission-fungus [sic] of mankind Jews and more Jews. To me the big city appeared as the personification of incest. The German language of my childhood was the dialect that was spoken also in Lower Bavaria; I was neither able to forget it nor to learn the Viennese jargon. The longer I stayed in this city, the more my hatred increased against the mixture of foreign nations that began to eat up this site of old German culture. The idea that this State could still be maintained even then seemed ridiculous to me. Austria was at that time like an old mosaic; the cement which held the single little stones together had become old and brittle; as long as the masterpiece is untouched, it can still pretend to be existent, but as soon as it is given a blow, it breaks into a thousand fragments. The question, therefore, was only when the blow would come. Since my heart had never beaten for an Austrian mon- archy but only for a German Reich, I could only look upon POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN VIENNA 161 the hour of the ruin of this State as the beginning of the salvation of the German nation. For all these reasons the longing grew stronger to go there where since my early youth I had been drawn by secret wishes and secret love. I hoped to make a name for myself in the future as an architect, and thus, be it in a narrow or a wide frame that Fate was to bestow upon me, to devote my honest services to the nation. But finally I wanted to share the happiness of being allowed to work on that spot from which the most ardent wish of my heart was bound to be fulfilled: the union of my own beloved country with the common fatherland, the German Reich. There are many who even today will not be able to understand the intensity of such a longing, but now I appeal to those to whom Fate either has denied this hap- piness or from whom it has again cruelly taken it; I appeal to all those who, severed from the motherland, have to fight for the holy treasure of their language, those who, because of their faithful adherence to the fatherland, are being persecuted and tortured and who now in painful emotion long for the hour that will allow them to return to the arms of the beloved mother; I appeal to all those and I know they will understand me. Only he who through his own experience knows what it means to be a German without being allowed to belong to the dear fatherland will be able to comprehend the deep longing that burns at all times in the hearts of the children who are separated from the motherland. This longing tortures those it has seized and denies them contentedness and happiness until the doors of the father's house open and the common blood finds peace and quiet again in the common Reich. But Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, but 162 MEIN KAMPF also the most thorough, school of my life. I had once entered this city when still half a boy and I left it as a man who had become quiet and serious. In that city I received the basis of a view of life in general and a political way of looking at things in particular which later on I had only to supplement in single instances, but which never again deserted me. But it is only today that I am able to ap- preciate fully the real value of those years of learning. This is the reason why I have dealt with this period more fully, as it gave me the first object lessons in those very questions which formed part of the fundamental principles of the party which, rising from the smallest beginnings, is in the course of hardly five years on the way to develop into a great mass movement. I do not know what my attitude towards Judaism, Social Democracy, or better Marxism, social problems, etc., would be today if the basic stock of personal opinions had not been formed at so early a time under the pressure of fate and of my own learning. For, though the fatherland's misfortune may stimulate thousands upon thousands of people to thinking about the internal causes of this collapse, this can never lead to that thoroughness and deeper insight which is opened to him who only after years of struggle becomes master of his fate. CHAPTER IV MUNICH IN THE spring of 1912 I came to Munich for good, t The town itself was as familiar to me as if I had lived inside its walls for years. The reason for this was that my studies, step by step, directed me towards this metro- polis of German art. One has not only not seen Germany if one does not know Munich no, above all else, one does not know German art if one has not seen Munich. At any rate, this period before the War was the happiest and most satisfying time of my life. Although my income was still very meager, I did not live in order to be able to paint, but I painted in order to secure the possibility of my existence, or rather in order in this way to permit my- self further study. I harbored the conviction that, never- theless and finally, I would reach the goal that I had set before myself. And this alone made me bear all other little troubles of my daily life easily and indifferently. But to this was added the inner love that seized me, almost from the first hour of my stay, for this town more than any other place known to me.<- A German town! What a difference as compared with Vienna! It made me sick only to think back to this racial Babylon. What is more, the dialect here was much closer to me, and especially the contact with the Lower Bavarians reminded me of the 164 MEIN KAMPF days of my youth. There must have been thousands of things that were, that became, dear to me. But most of all I was attracted by the amazing union of inherent strength and delicate, artistic atmosphere, this unique line from the Hofbrauhaus to the Odeon, from the Oktoberfest to the Pinakothek, etc. That today I feel more attached to this town than to any other place in the world is probably ex- plained by the fact that it is inseparably connected with the development of my own life, and will remain so; but that I even then attained the happiness of a really inner contentedness was attributable only to the charm that this beautiful residence of the Wittelsbachs exercises on every human being who is blessed not only with calculating rea- son but also with appreciative feeling, f Apart from my professional work, what attracted me most was again the study of current political events, among them especially those of foreign politics. I arrived at the latter by way of the German coalition policy, which I had regarded as both wrong and erroneous ever since my time in Austria. However, when I was still in Vienna, the full extent of this self-deception of the Reich had not yet be- come fully clear to me. In those days I was inclined to assume (or perhaps I only tried to tell myself this as an excuse) that possibly Berlin already knew how weak and unreliable the ally would be in reality, but that for more or less mysterious reasons they were withholding this know- ledge, in order to support the coalition politics which Bismarck himself once had founded, for a sudden break was not desirable for fear one might arouse the foreign countries which were on the lookout, and alarm the phi- listines at home. However, contact with the people themselves especially very soon made me realize to my great horror that this belief was wrong. To my astonishment I ascertained that ~ven in well-informed circles everywhere one had not the MUNICH 165 slightest idea of the internal structure of the Habsburg monarchy. The people especially were ensnared with the delusion that one could look upon the ally as a serious power that in the hour of distress would certainly be up to the mark. The masses still considered the monarchy as a ' German ' State and believed that one could count on this. The opinion was prevalent that its force might be measured by millions, as perhaps in Germany itself, and completely forgot that, in the first place, Austria had long since ceased to be a German State-entity; that, in the second place, the internal conditions of this realm were constantly pressing towards dissolution. I had known this State formation better than these so- called official 'diplomats,' who, nearly blind as always, were swaying towards disaster; because the sentiments of the people were only and always the outflow of that which was poured into public opinion from above. But up above one worshiped this 'ally' like the golden calf. Perhaps one hoped to replace the sincerity which was lacking by ami- ability. In this one always accepted words instead of true values. It was already in Vienna that I was seized with fury when I looked at the difference between the speeches of the official statesmen and the contents of the Viennese press that was so apparent from time to time. Nevertheless, Vienna was still a German city, at least by appearance. But how different things were when, leaving Vienna or rather German- Austria behind, one came into the Slavic provinces of the realm ! One only had to pick up the news- papers published in Prague if one wanted to know how the sublime jugglery of the Triple Alliance was judged there. Nothing was left for this 'statesmanlike* masterpiece but cruel taunts and sneers. With absolute peace reigning, and the two emperors exchanging kisses of friendship, no secret was made of the opinion that this alliance would collapse 166 MEIN KAMPF the very day an attempt was made to lead it out of the glamor of the Nibelungen ideal into practical reality. How excited one got a few years later when, as the hour finally had come in which the alliances were to prove themselves, Italy jumped out of the Triple Alliance and let its two allies go their own way, and she herself finally be- came an enemy in the end! Only those who were not stricken with diplomatic blindness could not understand that people had even dared to believe for a single minute in the possibility of such a miracle, namely, that Italy would fight hand in hand with Austria. Even in Austria things did not differ by a hair's breadth. <* In Austria, the only bearers of the idea of the alliance were the Habsburgs and the Germans. The Habsburgs out of calculation and compulsion, the Germans out of good faith and political stupidity. Out of good faith because they thought that through the Triple Alliance they rendered a good service to the German Reich, that they helped to strengthen and to protect it: out of political stupidity, however, because neither was the first opinion right, but, on the contrary, they helped thus to shackle the Reich to a State carcass that was bound to pull them both into an abyss, but above all because through this alliance they themselves fell more and more to de-Germanization. For by the alliance with the Reich the Habsburgs were, and unfortunately could be, sure against an interference from this side; they were able to carry out more easily and with less risk their internal policy of the slow removal of Ger- manism. Not only that with the notorious 'objectivity' one no longer had to fear any objection on the part of the Reich's government, but by pointing at the alliance one was able to silence the German-Austrian voices that might be raised, from the German side, against Slavization in too infamous a fashion. Furthermore, what was the German in Austria to do if MUNICH 167 the Germans in the Reich proper expressed their esteem and confidence in the Habsburg regime? Was he to offer resistance, so that in the entire German public opinion he would be branded a traitor towards his own nationality? He who for centuries had made the most unheard-of sacri- fices for his nationality! But what was the value of this alliance, once the German nationality had been rooted out of the Habsburg monarchy? Did not the value of the Triple Alliance for Germany really depend on the preservation of the German superiority in Austria? Or did one really believe that one could still live in an alliance with a Slavic Habsburg realm? The attitude of official German diplomacy, but also that of the entire public opinion, towards the Austrian internal problem of nationalities was no longer stupid, no, it was absolutely insane. They trusted in an alliance, adjusted the safety of a people of seventy million to it and watched the partner systematically and relentlessly destroy the only foundation of this alliance from year to year. One day a ' treaty ' with the Viennese diplomacy would remain, but the allied assistance of a realm would be lost. This had been the case with Italy from the very begin- ning. If one had studied history a little more clearly in Ger- many, and if one had applied a little racial psychology, one would not have believed for even one hour that the Quirinal in Rome and the Hofburg in Vienna would ever stand side by side in a common battle front. Italy would rather have become a volcano before any government could have dared to place even one single Italian on the battlefield of the so fanatically hated Habsburg State, except as an enemy. In Vienna I saw the passionate contempt and the bottom- less hatred flare up more than once with which the Italian was 'devoted 1 to the Austrian State. The damage that the House of Habsburg had done to Italian liberty and in- 168 MEIN KAMPF dependence for centuries was too great to have been for- gotten, even if the will to do so had been present. But it was not at all present; neither among the people nor with the Italian government. For Italy, therefore, there existed only two possibilities for living together with Austria; either alliance or war. By choosing the first, one was able quietly to prepare for the second. The German policy of alliance was as absurd as it was dangerous, especially since Austria's relation to Russia was drifting more and more towards a bellicose settle- ment. It was a classical case in which the lack of any great and correct line of thought was lacking. Why, then, did one form an alliance at all? Certainly only in order to be able to guard the future of the Reich better than Germany, standing alone, would have been able to do. But the future of the Reich was nothing but the question of guarding the German people's possibility of existence. Therefore, the question could only be formulated thus: Along what lines should the life of the German nation develop in the near future, and how can one give this de- velopment the necessary foundations and the required security, within the frame of the general European rela- tions of power? When considering clearly the suppositions for German statesmanship's activity in foreign politics, one necessarily came to the following conclusion : Germany has an annual increase in population of almost 900,000 souls. The difficulty of feeding this army of new citizens would become greater with every year, and was bound some day to end in a catastrophe, provided ways and means were not found to avert this impending danger of hunger-pauperization in time. MUNICH 169 jThere were four ways in which to avoid such a terrible future: (i) One could, following the French example, arti- ficially restrict the increase of births and thus avoid over- population. Nature herself, in times of great distress or bad climatic conditions, or where the yields of the soil are poor, steps in by restricting the population of certain countries or races; this, however, is a method that is as wise as it is ruthless. She does not restrict the procreative faculty as such, but the conservation of the propagated, by subjecting them to such severe trials and deprivations that all less strong and healthy are forced to return to the bosom of the eternally Unknown. What she allows to endure beyond the inclemency of existence is tested in a thousand ways, hard and well suited to continue to procreate, so that the This is one of the most important and frequently misunder- stood passages in the book. Oddly enough it has been looked upon as substantiating the 'healthy outlook' of the Third Reich. It is true, of course, the chronic artificial limitation of the population increase leads to highly deplorable social con- sequences: the age structure of the nation may change, so that the burden of age is abnormally heavy; normal economic markets, dependent upon the birth of children and the supply- ing of things children need, may dry up; and the inner structure of the family may be adversely affected. Hitler's argument is, however, derived from the racialistic materialists who, in the balmy days before the World War, predicted that the German population structure guaranteed success in the coming conflict. Their statement that the survival of the fittest assures that the begetters of new generations will be stronger and therefore more martial is an un verifiable assumption; and the view that nature is an infallible selector can easily be tested by the history of savage races now under observation. More significant, however, is the view that a people can hold 170 MEIN KAMPF thoroughgoing selection may start again from the beginning. Thus, by acting brutally against the individual and calling him back to herself the moment he is not equal to weather the storms of life, she conserves the strength of the race and species itself and even spurs it towards the highest achievements. Her diminishing of the number is a strengthening of the individual, thus finally a strengthening of the species. But it is different if man decides to carry out the re- striction of his numbers. He is not cut out of the same wood as Nature, but is 'human. 1 He knows better than this cruel Queen of all Wisdom. He does not restrict the continued existence of the individual, but rather propaga- tion itself. This seems to him, who always sees only him- self and never the race, more human and more justified than the reverse. Unfortunately, the consequences are also now the reverse: While Nature, by giving free rein to propagation but its place in the world only if it produces sufficient excess popula- tion to assure victory in wars of conquest. There is hardly another statement which has so profoundly disturbed com- fortable visions of the terrestial future. For many years it has underlain prophecies concerning the eventual war between 'races'; and it has now for some time been a factor in the re- armament of Europe. All the dictatorships Russia, Italy, and Germany refer to their reservoirs of man-power as a warning to the weak and the small. In no other case, how- ever, has the campaign to increase the population because soldiers are needed been so dramatic as in Get many. The most eloquent summary of results to date is Hitler's Reichstag address of February, 1.938. He contended that there had been a notable increase in the number of children born. But when the figures advanced are set against the population curve, it becomes exceedingly doubtful whether the birth-rate per thousand married women is higher than it was previously. MUNICH 171 subjecting the conservation of life to the severest trials, and by choosing, from a surplus number of individuals, those who are most worthy of living, thus preserving them alone and now making them the bearers of the preservation of the species, man restricts propagation, but on the other hand he makes efforts to keep alive, at any price, every human being once it is born. This correction of the divine will seems to him to be as wise as it is human, and he is glad that he has outwitted Nature once more in such a matter, and that he even has given proof of her shortcomings. But, of course, the Lord's dear little monkey does not at all like to see or to hear that in reality, although the number has certainly been restricted, the value of the individual has been diminished. Because, once propagation as such has been limited and the number of births reduced, the natural struggle for existence, that allows only the very strongest and healthiest to survive, is replaced by the natural urge to 'save' at any price also the weakest and even sickest, thus planting the germ for a succession that is bound to become more and more miserable the longer this derision of Nature and of her will is continued. But the result will be that one day existence in this world will be denied such a people; because man may certainly defy the eternal law of the will to continue, but nevertheless revenge will come, sooner or later. A stronger generation will drive out the weaklings, because in its ulti- mate form the urge to live will again and again break the ridiculous fetters of a so-called * humanity' of the indi- vidual, so that its place will be taken by the 'humanity' of Nature which destroys weakness in order to give its place to strength. He who, therefore, would secure the German people's existence by way of a self-restriction of its increase robs it of its future. 172 . MEIN KAMPF (2) A second way would be the one that is being sug- gested and eulogized more and more frequently today; domestic colonization. This is a suggestion which is well intended by as many as it is generally badly understood by most, so that it causes the greatest imaginable damage. The productivity of the soil can undoubtedly be in- creased to a certain limit. But of course only to a certain limit, and not continuously without end. Therefore, one could be able to balance the increase of the German people by the increased yield of our soil for some time, without having to think immediately of hunger. But this is con- fronted by the fact that, generally, the demands upon life increase faster than the number of the population. Men's demands with regard to food and clothes increase from year to year, and even now they are no longer in proportion When Hitler wrote these passages, they meant more than they do now. Prior to the War, Germany had depended to a considerable extent upon the exchange of manufactured goods for foodstuffs. Afterward, instructed by the blockade and handicapped by a lack of foreign exchange, she began to encourage more intensive farming. The results were a steady rise in crop production, aided by rigidly controlled markets. As a matter of fact, the government was able to take grain from Russia and resell it at a profit through Amsterdam. The argument now arose as to whether the attempt to supply sufficient grain ought not to be abandoned in favor of more specialized farming the production of poultry, eggs, milk. This could be realized if the eastern section of the country were broken up into small farms. Advocates of such resettlement program, modest beginnings in carrying out which had been made, insisted that it would also stop the overcrowding of cities and place a cordon of dependable men along the Polish border. In an official statement issued during March, 1930, the Nazis also expressed their approval of the idea, and some of their fading spokesmen promised to carry it out efficiently if they MUNICH 173 ro the needs of our forefathers of about a hundred years ago. It is, therefore, erroneous to believe that each increase in production creates the presupposition for an increase of the population: no; this is true only to a certain degree, for at least part of the surplus yield of the soil is used to satisfy the increased demands of men. But even with greatest economy on the one hand, and with the utmost industry on the other, here, also, though postponed for some time, a limit will become apparent one day, prescribed by the soil itself. Famine will return from time to time in periods of poor harvests, etc. This will occur more and more often with the increasing number of the population, and finally will fail to appear only at such rare times when years of plenty will have filled the granaries. But finally the time comes when it will no longer be possible to satisfy the needs, and famine will have become the eternal companion of such a people. Now Nature has to help again and to choose among those she has selected to live, or man will again help himself; that means, he turns to artificial restriction with all the grave consequences for race and species alluded to. Now, one may object that this future will threaten entire mankind in this way or the other, and that thus the individual peoples will not be able to escape this fate. At first sight this is certainly correct. Yet here one has to consider the following: Certainly the time will come, in consequence of the impossibility of adapting the fertility of the soil to the number of the increasing population, when the whole of came to power. But when the Republic attempted in 1931 to carry out an inner colonization program in dead earnest, it was dismissed by President von Hindenburg, now himself the owner of an East Prussian estate. Since that time, no real ef- fort has been made to tackle the problem. 174 MEIN KAMPF mankind will be forced to stop the increase of the human race and either let Nature decide again or to create the necessary balance by self-help, if possible, but then in a better way than that of today. But this would hit all na- tions, whereas today only those races are stricken by such distress which no longer have sufficient energy and strength to secure for themselves the soil they need in this world. For even today things are such that there is still soil on this earth in enormous extent that is unused and only awaits its cultivator. But it is also correct that Nature did not reserve this soil in itself for a certain nation or race as re- served territory for the future, but it is land and soil for that people which has the energy to take it and the in- dustry to cultivate it. Nature does not know political frontiers. She first puts the living beings on this globe and watches the free game of energies. He who is strongest in courage and industry receives, as her favorite child, the right to be the master of existence. If a people limits itself to domestic colonization, at a time when other races cling to greater and greater surfaces of the earth's soil, it will be forced to exercise self-restriction even while other nations will continue to increase. For some day this case will occur, and it will arrive the earlier the smaller the living space is that a people has at its dis- posal. As, unfortunately only too frequently, the best nations, or, better still, the really unique cultured races, the pillars of all human progress, in their pacifistic blindness decide to renounce the acquisition of new soil in order to content themselves with 'domestic* colonization, while inferior nations know full well how to secure enormous areas on this earth for themselves, this would lead to the following result: The culturally superior, but less ruthless, races would have to limit, in consequence of their limited soil, their MUNICH 175 increase even at a time when the culturally inferior, but more brutal and more natural, people, in consequence of their greater living areas, would be able to increase them- selves without limit. In other words: the world will, there- fore, some day come into the hands of a mankind that is inferior in culture but superior in energy and activity. For then there will be only two possibilities in the no matter how distant future: either the world will be ruled according to the ideas of our modern democracy, and then the stress of every decision falls on the races which are stronger in numbers, or the world will be dominated ac- cording to the law of the natural order of energy, and then the people of brute strength will be victorious, and again, therefore, not the nations of self-restriction. But one may well believe that this world will still be subject to the fiercest fights for the existence of mankind. In the end, only the urge for self-preservation will eternally succeed. Under its pressure so-called 'humanity,' as the expression of a mixture of stupidity, cowardice, and an imaginary superior intelligence, will melt like snow under the March sun. Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace. For us Germans, however, the watchword 'domestic colonization' is unfortunate for the reason that with us it The 'Programme der N.S.D.A.P.' drawn up by Feder, stipu- lated that the government would insist upon a 'land reform consonant with our national needs, passage of a law to provide for the confiscation, without payment, of ground needed for communal purposes, abolition of interest on land, and preven- tion of every kind of speculation in land.' This passage created a good deal of bad blood, and on April 13, 1928, Hitler pub- lished an official correction stating that since the Party believed in private property, this clause could only mean that land ac- quired in unlawful or immoral ways by Jewish speculators. 176 MEIN KAMPF at once enhances, from the pacifistic outlook, the opinion that we have found a means which allows us to 'work out* an existence in twilight sleep. Once this doctrine will have been taken seriously with us, it would mean the end of every effort to secure in this world the place that is ours. Once the average German gained the conviction that he might secure his life and his future in such a way, every attempt at an active and fruitful representation of the German necessities of life would be eliminated. By such an attitude on the part of the nation all really useful foreign politics, and, with it, the future of the German people on the whole, could be looked upon as dead and buried. In realizing these consequences it is not by accident that primarily the Jew always tries, and knows how, to implant such deadly and dangerous thoughts in our people. He knows his customers only too well not to know that they gratefully fall victims to any Spanish treasure swindler who tries to make them believe that a means has now been found to play a trick on Nature, to make the hard and in- exorable struggle for life superfluous, so that in its place, be it by work or sometimes also by merely doing nothing, just 'as the case may be/ one can rise to be master of the planets. It cannot be emphasized sharply enough that all German domestic colonization has to serve, primarily, only to abolish social abuses, but above all to withdraw the soil from general speculation, and that it can never suffice to secure the future of the nation without new land and soil. If this is not done, then, after a short time, we will not Expropriation of property owned by Jews or political enemies has been fairly continuous, but reached new heights during 1938. In Austria Jewish cultural centers and Jewish homes alike were taken away, without any legal formality other than registration. MUNICH 177 only have arrived at the limit of our soil, but also at the end of our strength. But finally, the following must also be established : The restriction to a certain small surface of soil, as con- ditioned by domestic colonization, and the same final result which is achieved by limitation of propagation, lead to an extremely unfavorable military political situation of the nation involved. The size of a people's living area includes an essential factor for the determination of its outward security. The greater the amount of room a people has at its disposal, the greater is also its natural protection; because military victories over nations crowded in small territories have always been reached more quickly and more easily, espe- cially more effectively and more completely, than in the cases of States which are territorially greater in size. The size of the State territory, therefore, gives a certain pro- tection against frivolous attacks, as success may be gained only after long and severe fighting and, therefore, the risk of an impertinent surprise attack, except for quite unusual reasons, will appear too great. In the greatness of the State territory, therefore, lies a reason for the easier preservation of a nation's liberty and independence, whereas, in the reverse case, the smallness of such a formation simply in- vites seizure. The two first-mentioned possibilities for the creation of a balance between the rising numbers of population and the unchanging territory were indeed rejected by the so- called national circles of the Reich. The reasons for this attitude were of course different from those mentioned above: towards birth control one primarily showed a nega- tive attitude because of a certain moral feeling; domestic colonization was indignantly rejected, as in it one scented an attack against the great landowners, and with it the beginning of a general fight against private property aa 178 MEIN KAMPF such. The form in which the latter doctrine of salvation especially was recommended justified this assumption. In general, however, the defense against the great masses was not very skillful and did not meet the nucleus of the problem. Thus, there remained but two ways to assure work and bread to the increasing number of people. (3) One could either acquire new soil in order annually to send off the superfluous millions, and thus conserve the na- tion further on on the basis of a self-sustainment, or one could set about, (4) through industry and trade, to produce for foreign consumption and to live on the proceeds. <? That means: either territorial policy, or colonial and trade policy. Both ways were examined, investigated, recommended, and fought, till finally the second one was carried out. The healthier of the two, of course, was the first. The acquisition of new land and soil for the settling of the superfluous population has no end of advantages, especially when turning away from the present towards the future. The very possibility of preserving a healthy peasant class as the basis of the entire nation can never be sufficiently valued. To a great extent many of our present sufferings are only the consequences of the unhealthy proportion be- tween town and country population. A solid stock of small and medium peasants was at all times the best protection against social ills as we have them today. This is also the only solution that allows a nation to find its daily bread in the inner circle of its domestic economy. Industry and trade step back from their unwholesome leading positions into the general frame of a national economy of balanced demand and supply. Both are then no longer the basis of a nation's subsistence, but a means to it. Inasmuch as now they have a balance between their supply and demand in all MUNICH 179 fields, they make the entire support of the nation inde- pendent of foreign countries, thus helping to secure the lib- erty of the State and the independence of the nation, espe- cially in times of distress. Obviously, such a territorial policy, howe^ its fulfillment in the Cameroons, for exclusively only in Europe. One must i accept the point of view that it certainly/ intention to give fifty times as much earth to one nation as compared with ai! political frontiers must not keep us awaj of eternal right. If this earth really has : to live in, then one should give us the spa? for living. One will certainly not like to do this. Then, however, the Here Hitler, following Rosenberg and some other theorists, professes disinterestedness in what has since become a familiar Nazi demand. The two greatest apostles of colonial acquisi- tion in Africa and elsewhere have been Dr. Heinrich Schnee and Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. The first, who was a prominent Ger- man colonial officer before the War, has led the fight to revise the Treaty of Versailles to permit restoration to Germany of her former colonies. But the influence of Dr. Schacht has been far greater. In the memoirs of President Friedrich Ebert, one reads that Schacht, then a little known official whose affiliation with the Democratic Party had brought him good Jewish con- nections, had proposed a scheme whereby Germany was to purchase with American money the Portuguese colony of Angola. After 1933 Schacht intensified his drive, with the result that the point of view taken in Mein Kampf appeared to have been revised. It is probable, however, that recent agita- tion has been directed in the main towards getting possession of Southwest Africa and possibly indirect control of the whole of South Africa, where a great deal of money has been spent on propaganda and where the party is relatively strong. For a 180 MEIN KAMPF right of self-preservation comes into effect; and what has been denied to kindness will have to be taken with the fist. Had our forefathers once made their decisions dependent on the same pacifistic nonsense as that of our present time, we should own altogether only one third of our present terri- tory; but in that case a German people would not have any cause for uneasiness in Europe. No. To their natural de- termination to fight for their own existence we owe the two Ostmarks of the Reich and with it that internal strength of the greatness of our State and national territory that alone enabled us to exist to this day. This solution would have been the right one for another reason also: Many European States today are comparable to pyramids standing on their points. Their European territory is ridicu- lously small as compared with their burden of colonies, for- eign trade, etc. One may say, the point is in Europe, the base in the whole world ; in comparison with the American Union, which still has its bases in its own continent and touches the remaining part of the world only with its points. From this results, however, the unheard-of internal strength of this State and the weakness of most of the European colonial powers. Even England is no proof to the contrary, for because of the British Empire, one only too easily forgets the Anglo- Saxon world as such. England cannot be compared with any other State in Europe, if only because of her linguistic and cultural communion with the American Union. time it seemed as if the British were willing to make a deal, but more recently their ardor has cooled perceptibly. At the close of 1938 'colonial schools' in Germany were training young people for colonial administration. Some also feel that the Ger- man government would also not be averse to dividing the French colonies in Africa with the Italians. MUNICH 181 For Germany, therefore, the only possibility of carrying out a sound territorial policy was to be found in the acquisi- tion of new soil in Europe proper. Colonies cannot serve this purpose, since they do not appear suitable for settle- ment with Europeans on a large scale. But in the nine- teenth century it was no longer possible to gain such colo- nial territories in a peaceful way. Such a colonial policy could only have been carried out by means of a hard struggle which would have been fought out more suitably, not for territories outside Europe, but rather for land in the home continent itself. Such a decision, however, requires undivided devotion. It doesn't do to set out half-heartedly or even hesitatingly on a task, the execution of which seems possible only with the exertion of the utmost energy. Then also the entire The theory that Germany can expand at the expense of Russia has very complex origins and possibly an equally com- plicated future. A large section of the Nazi Party has always been skeptical of this idea; and after 1919 the dominant point of view among German nationalists was that Russia must be made an ally, with whose help the war of revenge might be waged against the Western Powers. Even Count Ernst zu Reventlow, a Nazi but with a nuance all his own, once conferred with Karl Radek on the possibility of such an alliance. From time to time since 1933 army officers in the two countries have discussed the thing anew. It is usually thought that the ' crisis ' which Stalin solved by ordering the execution of many high officials in the Soviet government and army was the product of one such conversation. It is therefore not at all improbable that this policy may triumph ultimately despite all that has been said to the contrary. Hitler's attitude as stated here seems in the main derivative from two sources: first, the speculations of Alfred Rosenberg, and the views entertained by Generals Ludendorff and Max Hoffman on the Treaty of Brest-Li tovsk, signed with Bolshevist 181 MEIN KAMPF political authority of the Reich would have had to serve this exclusive purpose; never should any step have been taken from considerations other than the realization of this task and its conditions. One had to make it clear to oneself that this goal could be reached only through fighting, and quietly to face the passage at arms. All the alliances should have been examined exclusively from this point of view and evaluated according to their suitability. If one wanted land and soil in Europe, then by and large this could only have been done at Russia's ex- pense, and then the new Reich would again have to start marching along the road of the knights of the orders [Ordensritter: it is possible that the author meant to use the word Ritterorden, i.e., crusaders] of former times to give, Russia in 1918. Rosenberg was born in Reval and educated in Moscow. Following the triumph of Lenin, he came to Germany and settled in Munich, where he met Hitler and became the 'philosopher* of the Nazi Party. His obscure racial origins he is certainly partly of Tartar blood and may even have Jewish ancestors his cloudy intellectual background, and his advo- cacy of a Germanic religion are familiar topics of conversation in all circles where Germany is discussed. He once drew from Dr. Brtlning, speaking before the Reichstag, the following fa- mous rebuke: 'I have been accused of a dearth of affection for my country by a gentleman who, while I was fighting for the fatherland, had not yet made up his mind if he had a father- land. 1 It is quite probable that Rosenberg was initiated in the out- look of the 'Black Hundred,' as a rightist secret organization which kept the Czarist police on their toes before the War was called. This ultra-nationalistic and violently anti-Semitic group may, indeed, have transmitted to Hitler, through Rosen- berg, the deeper bases of his doctrine. Careful study of the pos- sible sources of this man's views is badly needed. At any rate, Rosenberg: argued that just as a Bolshevist Russia had once MUNICH 183 with the help of the German sword, the soil to the plow and the daily bread to the nation. For such a policy, however, there was only one single ally in Europe: England. With England alone, one's back being covered, could one begin the new Germanic invasion. Our right to do this would not have been less than that of our forefathers. None of our pacifists refuses to eat the bread of the East, although the first plow was once called ' sword ' ! To gain England's favor, no sacrifice should have been too great. Then one would have had to renounce colonies and sea power, but to spare British industry our compe- tition. Only an unconditionally clear attitude could lead to such a goal: renouncing world trade and colonies; renouncing a almost seized Germany, so in turn a Nazi Germany might seize Russia. The coveted territory is sometimes held to be Ac Ukraine which Ludendorff and Hoffman set up as an independent State in 1918. This is a 'wheat granary' and much else besides. Assuming that the Ukrainians are dissatisfied with Soviet rule, the plan would be to foment a revolution there, set up an inde- pendent State, and exercise a protectorate over it. But in 1918 Poland objected bitterly to the cession of the Province of Cholm to the Ukraine, and without Cholm a united Ukraine is incon- ceivable. The effect of a new step in this direction during 1938 immediately caused the Polish government to foster better relations with Russia. Moreover, it is not dear whether, sup- posing that all obstacles were surmounted and an independent Ukraine were set up, Germany could exploit the region as the theorists assume. As for Russia, it cannot give up without a struggle a region upon which it depends for bread and inside which some of its major industrial plants are situated. Accordingly the arguments in favor of assuming that the German future lies where Hitler said it did in 1925 must be set 184 MEIN KAMPF German war fleet. Concentration of the State's entire means of power in the land army. The result would certainly have been a momentary re- striction, but a great and powerful future. There was a time when England would have permitted herself to engage in discussions such as these. She under- stood quite well that Germany, in consequence of her in- crease in population, had to look for some way out, and would find this either with England's co-operation in Europe, or without England in the world. It was attributable, probably, to this idea that at the turn of the century London herself tried to approach Germany. In those days there appeared for the first time that which we have had an opportunity of observing in a really terrify- ing manner in these times. One was unpleasantly affected off against arguments that stress the difficulties in the way. Equally important as a factor is the growing similarity between the Russian and the German regimes, now often pointed out. During 1920, a Social Democratic commission went from Ger- many to study the actual achievements of the Soviet system. The report then issued by one of its members, Wilhelm Ditt- mann, corresponds strikingly with any of the number of reports on the Nazi system now being written by observers of the same school. Rosenberg and others have been convinced that British sup- port could be gained for any serious attempt to undermine the Russian system and therewith stamp out the Third Interna- tional as a fomenter of world revolution. Two reasons for this conviction are usually advanced. The first is the support re- ceived by White Russian revolutionists from English sources, which support has occasionally been deflected to Hitler. The second is the feud long since in progress between certain British financiers and the Soviet system. Sir Henry Deterding, the oil magnate, was themost manifest of the partisans of Germany ; and MUNICH 185 by the idea that now one would have to 'pull the chestnuts out of the fire ' for England ; as if an alliance were at all con- ceivable on a basis other than that of mutual business transactions! Such a business could very well have been done with England. British diplomacy was still clever enough to know that, without reciprocal service, no service could be expected. Imagine that a clever German foreign policy assumed Japan's r61e in 1904, and one can hardly realize what conse- quences this would have had for Germany. It would never have come to a 'World War.' The blood of the year 1904 would have saved the tenfold amount of the years 1914 till 1918. But what position would Germany have in the world today? To be sure, the alliance with Austria was an absurdity in that case. Because this mummy of a State did not unite with Ger- many in order to fight a war, but rather for the conserva- tion of eternal peace, which then could have been cleverly used for the slow but certain extinction of the German na- tion in the monarchy. This alliance, however, was an impossibility, for the rea- son that one could not expect official representation of national German interests on the part of a State, so long as it had not even the power and the determination to make the reader can surmise the existence of other connections if he studies Ourselves and Germany, by Lord Londonderry, Doubt- less a more important factor has been the British endeavor to deflect a war if there must be war from western Europe. Yet, however willing London might be to let Germany become entangled in the East, the chances have grown less and less im- pressive that any support for such a maneuver would be forth- coming. 116 MEIN KAMPF an end to the process of de-Germanization outside its imme- diate frontier. If Germany did not possess enough national consciousness and also ruthlessness to tear the disposition of the fate of the ten million tribesmen from the hands of this impossible Habsburg State, then one could hardly expect that it would ever offer its help to such farseeing and daring plans. The attitude of the old Reich towards the Austrian question was the touchstone for its attitude in the entire nation's fateful struggle. IH any event, one should not have looked on idly while the German nation was being pushed back from year to year, as Austria's value as an ally was determined exclu- sively by the preservation of the German element. However, one did not go this way at all. One feared nothing more than a fight, so that finally in the least favorable hour one was nevertheless forced into it. One tried to escape Fate and was overtaken by it. One dreamed of the preservation of world peace and landed in the World War. For this was the most important reason why one never considered this third way of the formation of a German future. One knew that the acquisition of new soil was to be These passages imply not only a critique of Germany's pre- War policy, but also indeed, primarily a negation of the views then prevalent in the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League). Its leaders, Heinrich Class in particular, had looked upon a war with the western powers as inevitable, had there- fore cherished the alliance with Austria, and had counseled rapprochement with Russia. After the War generals who had sponsored the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk professed to believe that the opposite point of view had been theirs all along; and to their analysis Hitler added his contempt for the Habsburg State. It is still far too early to predict that the plan sponsored in Mein Kampf will be rigidly adhered to. MUNICH 187 attained only in the East, and one saw the necessary fight, and yet one wanted peace at any price; for the watchword of German foreign politics had long ceased to be, preserva- tion of the German nation by all means, but rather, preser- vation of the world peace by all available means. It is well known how this succeeded. I will come back to this point in particular. Thus there remained still the fourth possibility: industry and world trade, sea power and colonies. Such a development, in the first instance, could be reached more easily and more quickly. The settlement of land and soil is a slow process that often takes centuries; in this its inner strength may be sought that it does not mean a sudden flaring-up, but a slow but thorough and continued growing, as compared with the industrial development which can be blown up in the course of a few years, which then, however, resembles a soap bubble more than genuine strength. Of course, a fleet can be built more quickly than the establishment of farms and settling them with farmers, a tough struggle; but it can also be destroyed more quickly. If Germany, nevertheless, chose this way, then one had at least to recognize clearly that this development also would some day end in fighting. Only children could be- lieve that, through friendly and civilized behavior and con- tinued emphasis on a friendly disposition, could they gather their ' bananas' in a 'peaceful competition of na- tions/ as one so nicely and unctuously chattered, without ever being forced to take up arms. No; if we went this way, then England would some day become our enemy. It was more than absurd to get indig- nant at this, but it was in keeping with our own harmless- ness that England took the liberty of some day meeting our peaceful activity with the brutality of the violent egoist. We, I regret to say, would never have done this. If European territorial policy could be carried out against 188 MEIN KAMPF Russia only with England as an ally, then, on the other hand, colonial and world trade policy was conceivable only against England with the help of Russia. But then one would here also have had to accept the consequences ruth- lessly and above all one would have to drop Austria immediately. Looked at from any direction, this alliance was genuine madness as early as the turn of the century. However, one did not at all think of forming an alliance with Russia against England, nor with England against Russia, for in both cases the end would have been war, and to prevent this one decided in favor of a trade and indus- trial policy. With the 'peaceful economic' conquest of the world one had a formula which was supposed to break the neck of the former policy of force once and for all. But sometimes one was not quite sure of this, especially when from time to time quite unintelligible threats came over from England; therefore, one decided to build a fleet, but again not for attack or for the destruction of England, but for the 'defense' of the already mentioned 'world peace' and of the 'peaceful conquest' of the world. Therefore, it was kept a little more modestly in all and everything, not only in number, but also in tonnage of the single ships as well as in armament, so that finally one could manifest 'peaceful* intentions after all. The talk of the 'peaceful economic conquest' of the world was certainly the greatest folly that was ever made the leading principle of a State policy. This nonsense was still further increased by the fact that one did not shy off from calling England as the crown witness for the possibility of such an achievement. What sins the historical doctrine and conception of our professors helped on thereby can hardly be remedied, and it is only a striking proof of the manner in which people today 'learn' history without understanding or even grasping it. Precisely in England MUNICH 189 one should have realized the striking refutation of this theory: no nation has more carefully prepared its economic conquest with the sword with greater brutality and de- fended it later on more ruthlessly than the British. Is it not a characteristic of British statesmanship to draw economic conquests from political force and at once to mold every economic strengthening into political power? But what a mistake to believe that England was perhaps personally too * cowardly ' to shed her own blood in defense of her economic policy! The fact that the English people had no 'national army' in no way proved the contrary; for it is not the mili- tary form of the defensive power of the moment that counts, but rather the will and the determination to risk what is at hand. England always possessed the armament that she needed. She always fought with the weapons that were required for success. She fought with mercenaries as long as mercenaries sufficed; but she also dipped into the most valuable blood of the entire nation whenever such a sacrifice alone was able to bring about victory; but the determina- tion to fight and the tenacity and unflinching conduct always remained the same. In Germany, however, by way of school, press, and comic papers, one gradually created an image of the character of the Englishman and even more of his realm that led to one of the most catastrophic self-deceptions; because everything was gradually infected by this folly, and its consequence was an underestimation that took its most bitter revenge. This deception went so deep and was so great that one was This is doubtless intended for the consumption of the ' English cousins.' In 1914 Germany was not misled by a few cartoons into thinking that the English were gulls; it jumped, by reason of the British government's non-committal statements, to the belief that it would find England neutral . . . long enough, at any rate, to permit Moltke to defeat France. 190 MEIN KAMPF convinced that one saw in the Englishman a merchant as crafty as he was personally incredibly cowardly. That an empire of the size of the British had not been brought to- gether by sneaking and swindling never occurred to our sublime teachers of professorial wisdom. The few who uttered warnings were not listened to or were passed by in silence. I well remember the astonished faces of my com- rades, when in Flanders we faced the Tommies personally. After the first few days of battle the conviction dawned on everyone that these Scots did not quite correspond to those one had thought fit to describe to us in comic papers and newspaper dispatches. In those days I formed my first reflections about the use- fulness of the form of propaganda. But this falsification had one good side for those who spread it; by this example, although it was wrong, one was able to demonstrate the fact that the economic conquest of the world was correct. We, too, could succeed where the Englishman had succeeded, where by our greater honesty the lack of that specific English 'perfidy' could be looked upon as a special asset. For in this one hoped to win the sympathy of the smaller nations especially as well as the confidence of the greater ones more easily. For the reason alone that we believed all this quite seri- ously, we did not see that our honesty was an abomination in the eyes of the others, while the rest of the world consid- ered this behavior as the expression of an especially sly mendacity, till at last, to the greatest astonishment of all, the revolution gave a deeper insight into the unlimited stupidity of our 'honest' conviction. But from the nonsense of this 'peaceful economic con- quest 9 of the world the absurdity of the Triple Alliance was at once clear and understandable. With what other State, then, could we form an alliance? Together with Austria one could really not set out on a ' martial ' conquest, let us say, MUNICH 191 even in Europe. In this very fact lay the inner weakness of this alliance from the first day. A Bismarck was allowed to take this emergency measure, but not any bungling suc- cessor, and least of all at a time when the essential supposi- tions for Bismarck's alliance had long ceased to exist; for Bismarck still believed he had a German State in Austria. With the gradual introduction of general suffrage, however, this country had come down to the level of a parliamentar- ily ruled, un-German medley. Then, too, the alliance with Austria was disastrous from the point of view of a racial policy. One tolerated the rising of a new Slavic great power at the frontier of the Reich which sooner or later would take an attitude towards Ger- many quite different from that of, for example, Russia. But the alliance itself, therefore, was bound to become weaker from year to year and more hollow internally in the same proportion in which the only supporters of this idea lost their influence in the monarchy and were crowded out of the most authoritative posts. At the turn of the century the alliance with Austria had entered into exactly the same state as Austria's alliance with Italy. IJere, too, there existed only two possibilities: either one was in alliance with the Habsburg monarchy, or one had to protest against the suppression of the German nationality. Once one starts a thing like that, the end is usually open battle. The value of the Triple Alliance was psychologically mod- est, as the stability of an alliance increases in the measure in which the individual contracting parties hope to attain cer- tain seizable, expansive goals through it. On the other hand, an alliance will be the weaker the more it restricts itself to the preservation of an existing condition as such. Here also, as everywhere, the strength lies not in defense but in attack. 192 MEIN KAMPF This was already recognized in those days by various sides, unfortunately not by those who were the so-called 'chosen/ Especially Ludendorff, then Colonel in the Great Army Staff, pointed to these weaknesses in a memorandum of the year 1912. But on the part of the 'statesmen,' of course, no value or importance was attributed to the mat- ter; for, on the whole, clear common sense becomes appar- ent only through common mortals, but is not necessary where 'diplomats' are concerned. It was indeed fortunate for Germany that the war finally broke out in 1914 by way of Austria, so that the Habsburgs were forced to join; had it been the other way round, Ger- many would have stood alone. Never would the Habsburg State have been able or willing to join in a fight that had been caused by Germany. What later one judged so severely about Italy would have happened even earlier with Austria; one would have remained 'neutral/ so as to save the State from a revolution at the very beginning. The Austrian Slavic nationalities would have smashed the mon- archy in 1914 rather than have helped Germany. But only very few were able to realize how great the dangers and difficulties were which the alliance with the Danubian monarchy involved. First of all, Austria had too many enemies who hoped to inherit from the decaying State, so that a certain hatred was bound to break out against Germany in the course of time, as one considered Germany the cause preventing the decline of the monarchy, hoped for and longed for from all sides. One arrived at the conviction that Vienna was only to be reached by way of Berlin. But with this Germany lost, secondly, the best and most hopeful possibilities for an alliance. It was replaced by an ever-increasing tension with Russia and even Italy. In Rome especially the general mood was as pro-German as it was anti-Austrian in the heart of even the most humble Italian, sometimes flaring up vividly. MUNICH 193 t Now, since one had taken up a commercial and industrial policy, there was no longer even the slightest cause for a war against Russia. Only the enemies of both nations could still have a lively interest in that. Indeed, it was primarily only Jews and socialists who stirred and fanned public opinion towards a war between these two States with all possible means. Finally, and thirdly, this alliance must needs harbor an unlimited danger for Germany for the reason that a great power that was hostile to the Reich of Bismarck could easily succeed at any time in mobilizing quite a number of States against Germany, as one was able to promise enrichment for each of them at the expense of Austria's ally. One had to stir up the entire East of Europe against the Danubian monarchy, especially Russia and Italy. Never would the world coalition have come together that began to form itself with King Edward's initiating activity, had not Austria, as Germany's ally, represented a too tempting legacy. Only thus did it become possible to bring States, which otherwise had such heterogeneous wishes and aims, into one single front. With a general advance against Ger- many, every one of them could hope to receive enrichment at the expense of Austria. The danger was increased exceed- ingly by the fact that now Turkey also seemed to be a silent partner of this unfortunate alliance. But international Jewish world finance needed this bait in order to carry out the longed-for plan of a destruction of 4 International Jewry* as the instigator of war was one of divers concoctions made to soothe the patriotic ache. It is served up constantly in anti-Semitic brochures and periodicals of the post- War period. A favorite name was that of Mr. J. P. Morgan, who was endowed with Hebrew blood. The theory is a kind of extreme Rightist counterpart to the Marxist view that the drift to war is inherent in the capitalist system. 194 MEIN KAMPF Germany, which did not yet submit herself to the general super-State control of finance and economics. Only with this was one able to forge a coalition, made strong and cour- ageous by the armies numbering millions now on the march, ready to attack the horned Siegfried at last. The alliance with the Habsburg monarchy, which had filled me with discontent while I was still in Austria, now began to become the cause of long internal trials which in the interval merely strengthened the opinion I had previ- ously made.-* Even in those days, in the small circles which I fre- quented, I did not conceal my opinion that this unfortunate treaty with a State destined to destruction would also lead to a catastrophic collapse of Germany, unless one knew how to break away in time, I never wavered even for a moment in my firm conviction, even when the storm of the World War seemed to have excluded all reasonable thinking and the ecstasy of enthusiasm had even seized those for whom there should have existed the coldest consideration of real- ity. When I was at the front, whenever these problems were discussed, I upheld my opinion that the alliance should be broken, the sooner the better for the German nation, and that the price of the abandonment of the Austrian mon- archy would be no sacrifice at all, if by this Germany could gain a lessening in the number of her enemies; because it was not for the preservation of a dissolute dynasty that mil- lions had put on the steel helmet, but for the salvation of the German nation. A few times before the War it seemed as though at least in one camp there had appeared a slight doubt about the cor- rectness of the policy of alliance. German conservative cir- cles from time to time began to warn against too great a confidence, but this was thrown to the wind, as was done with all that was sensible. One was convinced that one was on the right way to a 'conquest' of the world, the success of MUNICH 195 which would be enormous, the sacrifices for which would be negligible. Once more the only choice of the notorious 'un-chosen* was to watch in silence why and how the 'chosen' marched straight towards destruction, drawing the innocent people behind them like the piper of Hamelin. The deeper causes of the possibility of presenting, and even of making understandable, the absurdity of an 'economic conquest' as a practical political way, the preservation of 'world peace' as a political goal, to an entire people was found in the general indisposition of our entire political thinking as a whole. With the victorious march of German technical skill and industry, with the rising successes of German trade, the knowledge was gradually lost that all this was only possible on the basis of a strong State. On the contrary, in many circles one went so far as to have the opinion that the State itself owed its existence only to these developments, that the State itself represented only an economic institution, that it was to be ruled according to economic rules, and that therefore it depended in its makeup on economics, a condi- tion which was then looked upon and praised as by far the soundest and most natural. But the State has nothing whatsoever to do with a definite conception of economics or development of eco- nomics. The State is not an assembly of commercial parties in a certain prescribed space for the fulfillment of economic tasks, but the organization of a community of physically and mentally equal human beings for the better possibility of the furtherance of their species as well as for the fulfill- ment of the goal of their existence assigned to them by Providence. This, and nothing else, is the purpose and the 196 MEIN KAMPF meaning of a State. Economy is, therefore, only one of the many auxiliary means necessary for reaching this goal. But it is never the cause or the purpose of a State, provided the latter is not based from the start on a foundation that is wrong because it is unnatural. Only thus can it be explained that the State, as such, need not even have a territorial limitation as its assumption. This will be necessary only with those nations which for their own part want to secure the maintenance of their fellow men; that means that they are ready to fight the struggle for existence by their own work. Nations which are able to sneak their way into the rest of mankind like drones, in order to make them work for them under all kinds of pretexts, are able to form States without any certain limited living area of their own. This may be said primarily of that people under the parasitism of which, especially today, the entire honest mankind has to suffer: the Jews. The Jewish State was never spatially limited in itself; it was universally unlimited in respect to space, but it was restricted to the collectivity of a race. This is the reason why this people always forms a State within other States. It was one of the most ingenious tricks that was ever in- vented to let this State sail under the flag of 'religion/ thus securing for it the tolerance that the Aryan is always ready to grant to a religious denomination. Actually the Mosaic religion is nothing but a doctrine of the preservation of the Jewish race. Therefore, it comprises also nearly all The Old Testament conceived of as a volume written to ex- pound the nationalistic philosophy of the Jewish race is now a favorite item on the Nazi cultural menu. Rosenberg writes in Mythus des 2on Jahrhunderts (Myth of the 2Oth Century): 4 As a book of religion, the Old Testament must be done away with once and for all. That will end the unsuccessful attempt of 1500 years to turn us mentally into Jews, with the result, MUNICH 197 sociological, political, and economic fields of knowledge which could ever come into question. fThe instinct of preserving the species is the first cause of the formation of human communities. But the State is a folk organism and not an economic organization. A difference that is as great as it remains incomprehensible to the so-called 'statesmen/ especially of today. They believe, therefore, that they can build up the State by economy, whereas in reality it is always the result of the activity of those qualities which lie in line with the will to preserve the species and the race. But these are always heroic virtues and never commercial egoism, since the pre- servation of the existence of a species presupposes the individual's willingness to sacrifice itself. This is the very among other things, that we are at present materially depend- ent upon Jews.' For him as for his assistants in Nazi educa- tional effort (J. Von Leers, for instance), the Old Testament is nothing but a collection of stories about prostitutes and cattle- traders. By comparison the Germanic legends and the German mystics teach heroism, soldierly conduct, and purity. The endeavors of the Christian Churches to defend the Sacred Books against the official propagandists are reflected in the answers to the Mythits written by Catholic and Protestant scholars. Of especial importance are the Advent sermons preached by Cardinal Faulhaber, of Munich, on the sub- ject. These are reprinted in Judaism, Christianity and Ger- many. A recent pamphleteer puts this more succinctly: 'Our people in arms is no longer an army. It has become the youthful fight- ing nation. The army, the police, the armed organizations of our youth, can now be used for greater national purposes. Producers of foodstuffs, members of the teaching profession, and all other groups in the community are now prepared to work for the good of the nation as a whole when emergency 198 MEIN KAMPF meaning of the poet's words ' Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben tin, nie wird Euch das Leben gewonnen sein* [Unless you stake your life, never will life be won], that the sacrifice of the personal existence is necessary in order to guarantee the preservation of the species. Thus the most essential sup- position for the formation and preservation of a State is the presence of a certain feeling of homogeneity on the basis of the same entity and the same species, as well as the readiness to risk one's life for this with all means, something that will lead nations on their own soil to the creation of heroic virtues, but parasites to mendacious hypocrisy and malicious cruelty; that is, these qualities must be present as the supposition for their existence which varies in the various State forms. But the formation of a State will always be brought about by at least originally risking these qualities, whereby in the struggle of self-preservation those people will be defeated that means be subject to enslave- ment and thus, sooner or later, die out who, in the mutual battle, call the smallest share of heroic virtues their own, or which are not adequate to the mendacious ruse of the hostile parasite. But in this case also this is due not so much to a lack of cleverness as to a lack of determination and danger arise.' Cf. Der ideak Stoat (The Ideal State), by Hanz Hartmann. Another writes: 'A people which seeks above all else to safeguard its national existence will endeavor to strengthen and increase its power. A weak state is always a temptation to neighboring states to expand their possessions at its expense. As a consequence there can be no peace in Europe until Germany is the equal in power and prestige of the other states. Frederick the Great's maxim that peace is best guar- anteed in the shadow of bayonets is still true today. A people's will to live and its military strength are one and the same.' Cf . Deutschland, Deutschland, nichts als Deutschland (Germany, Germany, Nothing but Germany), by Walter Wallowitz. MUNICH 199 and courage that tries to conceal itself under the cloak of a humanitarian attitude. However, how little the qualities forming and preserving a State are connected with economy is shown most clearly by the fact that the inner strength of a State coincides only in the very rarest cases with the so-called economic zenith, but that this usually announces in so many examples the already approaching decay of the State. If one had to ascribe the formation of human communities first of all to economic forces or impulses, then the highest economic development should at the same time indicate the greatest strength of the State, and not vice versa. The belief in the force of economy to form or preserve States seems especially unintelligible when it is predominant in a country which in each and every thing shows clearly and impressively the historical reverse. Particularly in Prussia it is shown with wonderful acuteness that not material qualities but idealistic virtues alone make possible the formation of a State. Only under their protection is economy able to flourish, but with the collapse of the purely State-forming abilities, economy also breaks down again; an event that we are able to observe just now in so terribly a saddening manner. Man's material interests are able to thrive best as long as they remain in the shadow of heroic virtues; but as soon as they try to enter the first circle of existence, they destroy the conditions of their own ex- istence. -*? Whenever in Germany an upswing of political power took place, economy also began to rise; but thereafter, whenever economy was made the sole content of our people's life, thus suffocating the ideal virtues, the State collapsed again, and after a certain time it pulled economy down with it into the grave. But if one asks oneself the question what the force* forming or otherwise preserving a State are in reality, it 200 MEIN KAMPF can be summed up with one single characterization: the individual's ability and willingness to sacrifice himself for the community. But that these virtues have really nothing whatsoever to do with economics is shown by the simple realization that man never sacrifices himself for them; that means : one does not die for business, but for ideals. Nothing proved the Englishman's psychological superiority in knowledge of the people's psyche better than the motivation with which he cloaked his fight. While we fought for bread, England fought for 'liberty,' and not even for her own, no, for that of the smaller nations. We laughed at this impu- dence or we were annoyed by it, thus only proving how thoughtless and stupid Germany's so-called statesmanship had become even before the War. Not the slightest idea was left concerning the nature of the force that leads men to death out of free will and resolution. As long as in 1914 the German people was still able to fight for ideals, it resisted; but as soon as it was allowed to fight only for its daily bread, it preferred to give up the game. But our wise 'statesmen* were astonished at this change of attitude. It never became clear to them, from the mo- ment a man fights for an economic interest he tries to avoid death, as this would rob him forever of the enjoyment of the reward of his fighting. The anxiety for the rescue of her own child turns even the most weak mother into a heroine, and only the fight for the preservation of the species and the hearth or the State that protected them, drove men at all times towards the spears of the enemy. The following sentence may be established as an eternally valid truth: Never was a State founded by peaceful economy, but always only by the instincts of preserving the species, no matter whether they are found in the field of heroic virtues or sly cunning; the one results then in Aryan States of MUNICH 801 work and culture, the other in Jewish colonies of parasites. But as soon as in a people or in a State, economy as such begins to choke these instincts, economy itself becomes the enticing cause for subjection and suppression. The belief of pre-War times, that by a trade or colonial policy the world could be opened or even conquered for the German people in a peaceful way, was a classical symptom of the loss of the virtues that really form and preserve a State and of all insight, will power, and active determina- tion resulting from them; the result of this was, by law of nature, the World War and its consequences. For one who did not make deeper researches, however, this attitude of the German nation for it was really almost general could only represent an insoluble riddle; was not just Germany a really wonderful example of a realm that had grown from fundamentals that were purely politi- cal from the point of view of power? Prussia, the germ cell of the Reich, was created by resplendent heroism and not by financial operations or commercial affairs, and the Reich itself was in turn only the most glorious reward of political leadership and military death-defying courage. How could just the German people's political instincts be- come so morbid? For the question involved here was not that of a single symptom, but instances of decay which flared up now in legion like delusive lights brushing up and down the national body, or which like poisonous ulcers ate into the nation now here, now there. It seemed as though a continuous flow of poison was driven into the farthest blood vessels of this one-time heroic body by a mysterious power, so as to lead to ever more severe paralysis of sound reason and of the simple instinct of self-preservation. By letting these questions pass through my mind in- numerable times, conditioned by my attitude towards the German policy of alliance and economy in the years 1912 to 1914, there remained more and more for the solution of 202 MEIN KAMPF the riddle that power that I had become acquainted with previously in Vienna, determined from quite different points of view: the Marxian doctrine and view of life and its ultimate organizatory effects. For the second time in my life I dug into this doctrine of destruction this time, of course, no longer led by the influences and effects of my daily surroundings, but directed by the observation of general events of political life. As I had recently begun to plunge into the theoretical literature of this new world and had tried to make clear to myself its possible effects, I compared these with the daily symptoms and events of its effect in political, cultural, and economic life. But now for the first time I also turned my attention to the attempts at mastering this world plague. I studied Bismarck's exemption laws as to their intention, struggle, and success. But gradually I gained a truly granite foundation for my own conviction, so that from that time on I was never forced to make a change in my internal attitude towards the matter. Also, the relation- ship between Marxism and Judaism was subjected to a further thorough examination. If formerly in Vienna, Germany had above all else ap- peared to me as an unshakable colossus, now, however, anxious doubts sometimes began to rise in my mind. With myself and in the small circles of my acquaintances, I was wrathful at German foreign politics, and also at what seemed to me an unbelievably frivolous manner with which one faced the most important problem that confronted Germany in those days: Marxism. I really could not understand how one was able to stagger blindly towards a danger the ultimate effects of which, corresponding to its own intentions, were one day bound to be monstrous. In those days I warned those around me, as I am doing today on a larger scale, against the fervent prayer of all cowardly MUNICH 803 wretches: 'Nothing can happen to us!' Was not Germany subject to exactly the same laws as all other human communities? In the years 1913 and 1914, in various circles, some of which today stand faithfully by the movement, I expressed for the first time the conviction that the question of the future of the German nation is the question of the destruc- tion of Marxism. In the fatal German policy of alliances I saw only one of the after-effects that were caused by the destructive working of this doctrine; for the terrible thing was just the fact that this poison almost invisibly destroyed all the foundations of a sound conception of State and economics, frequently preventing those who were attacked by it even from guessing how far their activity and intentions already were the results of this otherwise most decidedly objection- able view of life. The internal decline of the German nation had begun long before, but, as so frequently in life, without the people seeing clearly who the destroyer of their existence was. Sometimes one doctored about with the disease, but one confused the forms of the symptoms with the cause. As one did not know, or did not want to know, this, the fight against Marxism had only the value of prattling quackery CHAPTER V THE WORLD WAR DURING the years of my unruly youth nothing had grieved me more than having been born at a time when temples of glory were only erected to mer- chants or State officials. The waves of historical events seemed to have calmed down to such an extent that the future appeared really to belong to the 'peaceful compe- tition of nations/ that means a quiet mutual cheating, ex- cluding forceful measures. The individual States began more and more to resemble enterprises which cut the ground from under each other, stole each other's customers and orders, and tried to cheat each'other by every means, setting this in a scene which was as noisy as it was harmless. This development, however, not only seemed to endure, but it was intended to transform the world (with general ap- proval) into one big department store, in the lobbies of which the busts of the most cunning profiteers and the most harmless administration officials were to be stored for eter- nity. The business men were to be supplied by the English, the administration officials by the Germans; the Jews, how- ever, would have to sacrifice themselves to being propri- etors, because, as they themselves admitted, they never earn anything but only 'pay/ and, besides, they speak most of the languages. THE WORLD WAR 205 Why could one not have been born a hundred years earlier? For instance, at the time of the Wars of Liberation when a man really was worth something, even without 'business'?! 1 1 was often filled with annoying thoughts because, as it appeared, of the belated entrance of my journey into this world, and I looked upon this period of 'quiet and order' that awaited me as an unmerited mean trick of Fate. Even as a boy I was not a 'pacifist,' and all attempts at an educa- tion in this direction came to naught. The Boer War appeared to me like summer lightning. Every day I was on the lookout for the newspapers; I devoured dispatches and reports, and I was happy that 1 was being allowed to witness this heroic struggle, if only from afar. The Russo-Japanese War already found me much more mature and also more attentive. At that time I had taken sides more for national reasons, and when settling my opinions I had at once taken the side of the Japanese. In the defeat of the Russians I saw also a defeat of the Austrian Slavic nationalities. Many years since had passed, and what then appeared to me a foul and lingering illness when I was a boy, I now considered as the calm before the storm. Already during my Viennese time there hovered over the Balkans that fallow sultriness which usually announces a hurricane, but at times a brighter light flashed up only to return immedi- ately into the uncanny darkness. But then came the Bal- kan War, and with it the first gust of wind swept over a Europe which had grown nervous. The time that followed, however, weighed heavily upon the people like a nightmare, brooding like the feverish heat of the tropics, so that in consequence of the continued anxiety, the feeling of the impending catastrophe finally turned into longing; might Heaven at last let Destiny, no longer to be restrained, take 206 MEIN KAMPF its full course! The first powerful lightning flashed upon the earth; the storm broke out, and the thunder of the heavens mingled with the roaring of the batteries of the World War. < When the news of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdi- nand reached Munich (I was in the house and heard only vague details of the event), I was at first worried that the bullets might perhaps have come from the pistols of Ger- man students, who, because of their indignation at the continued Slavization activities of the Heir Presumptive, wished to free the German nation from this internal enemy. One could imagine well what the consequences would have been in that case: a new wave of persecutions which would now have been 'justified' and 'motivated' in the face of the whole world. When, however, soon after I heard the names of the suspected murderers, and read that their nationality had been established as Serbian, a slight horror began to creep over me because of this revenge of inscrutable Destiny. The greatest friend of the Slavs had been felled by the bullets of Slav fanatics. Those who had had an opportunity to observe continu- ously the relations between Austria and Serbia during the last few years could not doubt for even a moment that the stone had been set rolling on a course that could no longer be checked. One does the Viennese government an injustice when today one showers it with reproaches regarding the form and the contents of the ultimatum it issued. No other power on earth would have been able to act differently in a similar situation and under the same circumstances. On the south- east bordfer of her realm Austria had an inexorable and mortal enemy who challenged the monarchy at shorter and shorter intervals, and who would not have given in til! finally the favorable moment for the destruction of the THE WORLD WAR 207 realm had actually come. One had reason to fear that this event would happen not later than with the death of the old emperor; but then perhaps the monarchy would no longer be in a position to render any serious resistance. The entire State, during these last years, was represented to such an extent by the person of Franz Joseph that from the beginning, the death of this aged personification of the realm was looked upon by the great masses as the death of the realm itself. It was indeed the most cunning artfulness of the Slav policy to create the impression as though the Austrian State owed its existence to the really wonderful and unique skill of this monarch; a flattery which was the more favorably received in the Hofburg as it corresponded least of all to the actual merits of the emperor. One was not able to discover the sting tkat was hidden in this praise. One did not see, or perhaps one did not want to see, that the more the monarchy was based on the superior ruling skill of, as one used to say, this 'wisest of all monarchs' of all times, the more desperate was the situation bound to be- come when some day here too Destiny would knock at the door to collect its tribute. Would then the old Austria be conceivable without the old emperor? Would not the tragedy, which once had met Maria Theresa, immediately repeat itself? No, one really does an injustice to Viennese government circles if they are reproached with the fact that now they were driving towards a war which perhaps would have been avoidable after all. It was no longer avoidable, but it could have been postponed for only one or two more years at the most. But this was the very curse of the German as well as of the Austrian diplomacy that it had always tried to post- pone the unavoidable settlement till at last it was forced to strike at an unfavorable hour. One can be certain that a renewed attempt at preserving the peace would have SOB MEIN KAMPF brought on the war in spite of this at an even less favorable time. No, those who did not want this war would have had to summon the courage to assume the consequences. These, however, could have only consisted in the sacrificing of Austria. But even then the war would have come, though perhaps not in the form of a fight against all, but in the form of a dismemberment of the Habsburg monarchy. But there one would have had to decide whether one wanted to join or whether one wanted to watch, with empty hands, Fate take its course. It is just those who today curse most and pronounce the wisest opinions about the beginning of the war, who helped most catastrophically to steer towards war. For decades Social Democracy had carried on the most The question of responsibility for the War is still a moot one, but Hitler is not discussing it here in the sense in which it is usually propounded. He is taking his stand on the platform of Ludendorff, Graefe, Class and other Pan-Germans for whom the issue was never whether a war was coming or whether it could be avoided, but whether Germany would choose the right moment to strike and whether it would possess the requisite military strength. This group was bitterly antagon- istic to Bethmann-Hollweg for having desired to keep the peace and for having refused to endorse certain items proposed for inclusion in the military budget of 1913. That the 'people* were with them they have never doubted, and still do not doubt. The whole blame falls, they maintain, on Bethmann- Hollweg. Accordingly one readies this interesting conclusion: it seems impossible to hold the German government of 1914 solely responsible for the declaration of war, but the head of the German government of 1938 has gone on record in this book as wishing that his predecessor had assumed that responsibility. Hitler has promised to guarantee that the next time there be no such blunders. On November 28, 1934, Mr. Winston THE WORLD WAR 209 villainous war propaganda against Russia, but the Center Party, for religious reasons, had made the Austrian State most of all the center and turning-point of German poli- tics. Now one had to bear the consequences of this mad- ness. What now came had to come, and it was unavoidable under any circumstances. The German government's fault therein was that, in order to preserve peace, it again and again missed the favorable hour for striking; that it got entangled in the alliance for the preservation of world peace, thus finally falling victim to a world coalition which opposed the very preservation of peace with the determi- nation of a world war. If at that time the Viennese government had given the ultimatum another, milder wording, this would not have changed anything in the situation except perhaps the fact that the government itself would have been swept away by the indignation of the people. Because, in the eyes of the great masses, the tone of the ultimatum was much too con- Churchill addressed the House of Commons on the subject of Germany's program of rearmament. Referring to the air force, he said: 'On the same basis, that is to say, both sides con- tinuing with their existing program as at present arranged, by the end of 1936 that is, one year farther on, and two years from now the German military air force will be nearly 50 per cent stronger, and in 1937 nearly double. ... So much for the comparison of what may be called the first line air forces of the two countries/ Replying on behalf of the government, Stanley Baldwin said: 'I say there is no ground at this moment for undue alarm and much less for panic. There is no imme- diate danger confronting us or anyone else in Europe at this moment. But we must look ahead, and there is ground for grave anxiety, and that is why we have been watching the situation for months past, are watching it now, and shall continue to watch it.' S10 MEIN KAMPF siderate and in no way too brutal or even too far-reaching. Those who today try to deny this are either forgetful empty- heads or quite deliberately cheats and liars. The fight of the year 1914 was certainly not forced upon the masses, good God! but desired by the entire people itself. One wanted at last to make an end to the general uncer- tainty. Only thus is it understandable that for this most serious of all struggles more than two million German men and boys joined the flag voluntarily, ready to protect it with their last drop of blood. To me personally those hours appeared like the redemp- tion from the annoying moods of my youth. Therefore I am not ashamed today to say that, overwhelmed by impas- sionate enthusiasm, I had fallen on my knees and thanked Heaven out of my overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune of being allowed to live in these times. A struggle for freedom had broken out, greater than the world had ever seen before; because, once Fate had begun its course, the conviction began to dawn on the great masses that this time the question involved was not Serbia's or Austria's fate, but the existence or non-existence of the German nation. For the last time in many years, the German nation had become clairvoyant about its own future. Thus, at the very beginning of the enormous struggle the intoxication of the exuberant enthusiasm was mixed with the necessary serious undertone; for this realization alone made the national ris- ing become something greater than a mere bonfire. But this was only too necessary; even then one had no idea of the possible length and duration of the struggle now beginning. One dreamt of being home again in winter to continue work in renewed peace. THE WORLD WAR 211 What man desires, he hopes and believes. The over- whelming majority of the nation had long been tired of the eternally uncertain state of things; thus one could only too readily understand that one no longer believed in a peaceful adjustment of the Austro-Serbian conflict, but hoped for the final settlement. I, too, belonged to these millions. Hardly had the news of the assassination spread in Munich, when two ideas immediately entered my head: first, that war would now at last be unavoidable, and further, that the Habsburg State would be forced to keep the alliance; for what I had always feared most was the possibility that one day Germany herself, perhaps just in consequence of this alliance, would be entangled in a con- flict without Austria being the direct cause for this, but that in such a case the Austrian State, for domestic political reasons, would not summon the energy to decide to stand by its ally. The Slav majority would certainly immediately have begun to sabotage such an intention by the State itself, and would certainly have preferred to smash the entire State into bits rather than to give the required help to the ally. This danger, however, was now averted. The old State had to fight whether it wanted to or not. My own attitude towards the conflict was very clear and simple to me : in my eyes it was not Austria fighting for some Serbian satisfaction, but Germany fighting for her exist- ence, the German nation for its being or non-being, for freedom and future. Bismarck's work now had to fight; what the fathers once had gained by fighting with their heroic blood in the battles from Weissenburg to Sedan and Paris, now young Germany had to earn again. If this fight would be carried through victoriously, then our nation would also have returned to the circle of ,'the nations which arc great in external power, and only then could the German Reich prove a powerful shield of peace without being forced to reduce its children's daily bread for the sake of this peace. 212 MEIN KAMPF As a boy and a young man I had often formed the wish that at least once I might be allowed to prove by deeds that my national enthusiasm was not an empty delusion. Often I considered it a sin to shout 'hurrah' without per- haps having the inner right to do so; for who may use this cry without having proved himself there where all play is at an end and where the inexorable hand of the Goddess of Fate begins to weigh nations and men according to the truth and the durability of their convictions? Thus my heart, like that of a million others, was overflowing with proud happiness that at last I was able to free myself from this paralyzing feeling. So many times had I sung 'Deutsch- land uber dies' and shouted with full voice 'Heil,' that I considered it almost a belated favor that I was now allowed to appear as a witness before the tribunal of the Eternal Judge in order to proclaim the truth and the sincerity of my convictions. From the first hour I was certain that in the event of war (which appeared unavoidable to me), I would abandon my books in one way or the other. But I knew just the same that my place would be there where my inner voice directed me to go. I had left Austria primarily for political reasons: but what was more natural that now that the fight had begun that I had to act according to this conviction? I did not want to fight for the Habsburg State, but I was ready to die ^t any time for my people and the Reich it constituted. On August 3 I submitted a direct petition to His Majesty King Ludwig III with the request that I be permitted to serve in a Bavarian regiment. The cabinet office was cer- tainly more than busy in those days; my joy was the greater when on the following day I received the reply to my re- quest. My joy and my gratitude knew no end when I had opened the letter with trembling hands and read that my request had been granted and that I was summoned to report to a Bavarian regiment. A few days later I wore THE WORLD WAR 213 the uniform which I waa not to take off again for six years. Thus, as probably for every German, there began for me the most unforgettable and the greatest period of my mortal life. In the face of the events of this mighty struggle the entire past fell back into shallow oblivion. It is now ten years since this mighty event happened, and with proud sadness I think back to those weeks of the beginning of the heroic fight of our people which Fate had graciously per- mitted me to share. f As if it were yesterday, one picture after the other passes before my eyes: I see myself donning the uniform in the circle of my dear comrades, turning out for the first time, drilling, etc., till finally the day came when we marched. There was only one thing that worried me at that time, like so many others also: that was whether we would not arrive at the front too late. This alone disturbed my peace again and again. Thus in every jubilation over a new heroic deed there seemed to be a hidden drop of bitterness as with every new victory the danger of our being delayed seemed to increase. Finally, the day came when we left Munich in order to start fulfilling our duty. Now for the first time I saw the Rhine as we were riding towards the west along its quiet waters, the German river of all rivers, in order to protect it against the greed of the old enemy. When through the deli- cate veil of the dawn's mist the mild rays of the early sun set the Niederwalddenkmal shimmering before our eyes, the 'Watch on the Rhine' roared up to the morning sky from the interminably long transport train and I had a feeling as though my chest would burst. Then at last came a damp, cold night in Flanders through which we marched silently, and when the day began to emerge from the fog, suddenly an iron salute came whizzing over our heads towards us and with a sharp report the 214 MEIN KAMPF small bullets struck between our rows, whipping up the wet earth; but before the small cloud had dispersed, out of two hundred throats the first hurrah roared a welcome to the first messenger of death. But then it began to crackle and roar, to sing and howl, and with feverish eyes each one of us was drawn forward faster and faster over turnip fields and hedges till suddenly the fight began, the fight of man against man. But from the distance the sounds of a song met our ears, coming nearer and nearer, passing from com- pany to company, and then, while Death busily plunged his hand into our rows, the song reached also us, and now we passed it on : ' De utschland, DeutscUand uber alles, Uber dttes inderWeltl' After four days we came back. Even our step had be- come different. Boys of seventeen now resembled men. The volunteers of the regiment had perhaps not yet learned to fight properly, but they knew how to die like old soldiers. This was the beginning. <* Thus it continued year after year; but the romance of Hitler here set the example for what would later prove to be a deluge of war tales. Concerning his military record, the fol- lowing facts are known ; that he served as a messenger between regimental headquarters and the front; that he was a good soldier who refused to the very end to join in criticism of the way things were being run; that his temperament made his commanding officer doubt the wisdom of promoting him to any sort of non-commissioned rank above that of corporal, and that he occupies a modest but honorable place in the history of the Regiment List, to which he belonged. The particular ex- ploit for which he received the Iron Cross is shrouded in secrecy, but most biographers agree that there was no reason why it should not have been awarded. Hitler, by Rudolf Olden, at- tempts a critical evaluation of the legend that had grown up round Hitler's war experience. THE WORLD WAR 215 the battles had turned into horror. The enthusiasm gradu- ally cooled down and the exuberant joy was suffocated by the fear of death. The time came when everyone had to fight between the instinct of self-preservation and the ad- monition of duty. I, too, was not spared this inner struggle. Whenever death was on the hunt, an undefinable something tried to revolt, tried to present itself to the weak body in the form of reason and was really nothing but cowardice which in this disguise tried to ensnare the individual. A strong pulling and warning set in and only the last remain- ing spark of conscience made the decision. But the more this voice tried to warn me to take heed, the louder and the more urgently it lured, the sharper was my resistance, till finally after a long inner struggle my sense of duty tri- umphed. This struggle had already been decided for me during the winter of 1915-16. My will had finally become master. Whereas during the first days I was able to join exuberantly and laughingly in the storm, now I was quiet and determined. This was the most enduring. Only now could Fate set out for the last tests without tearing my nerves or my reason giving out. The young volunteer had become an old soldier. But this change had taken place in the entire army. It had become old and hard through perpetual fighting, and those who were not able to resist the storm were broken by it. But only now could one judge this army. Now, after two or three years during which it had been thrown from one battle into the other, constantly fighting against a force superior in number and weapons, suffering hunger and en- during deprivations, now was the time to prove the quality of this unique army. Thousands of years may pass, but never will one be allowed to talk about or mention heroism without remem- bering the German army of the World War. Then, out of the veil of the past, the iron front of the gray steel helmet 816 MEIN KAMPF will become visible, not wavering and not retreating, a mon- ument to immortality. As long as Germans live they will remember that these were the sons of their nation, f At that time I was a soldier and did not want to discuss politics. It really was not the time for it. I am still con- vinced today that even the most humble carter had done his fatherland more valuable services than the first, let us say, 'parliamentarian.' I never hated these prattlers more than just at that time, when every regular fellow who had to say something shouted it into the enemy's face, or, more appropriately, left his mouth at home and silently did his duty in some place. Yes, in those days I hated all these 'politicians, 1 and if I had had anything to say, a parlia- mentarian spade battalion would have been formed at once; then they would have been able to babble among themselves to their hearts 1 content if they had to, and they would not have been able to annoy or even to harm the decent and honest part of mankind. ^ At that time, therefore, I did not want to hear anything about politics, but I could not help defining my attitude towards certain manifestations which concerned, after all, the entire nation, but most of all us soldiers, f There were two things which in those days annoyed me and which I considered detrimental. Soon after the news of the first victories, a certain press Not a few of the Reichstag delegates served at the front; some were killed in action. Most of the others were beyond military age, and some of these served on difficult and danger- ous missions. More interesting is the unrestrained endorse- ment of LudendorfFa military totalitarianism the absolute disavowal of political action in time of war. The wicked ones are those who believed that peace might be reached, after years of destructive warfare, on a basis of compromise and who felt that Germany, by giving guarantees not to violate the integrity of Belgium, might divide her foes. THE WORLD WAR 217 began slowly, and at first perhaps unrecognizably to many, to pour drops of wormwood into the general enthusiasm. This was done under the mask of a certain benevolence and well-meaning, even of a certain anxiety. One harbored doubts about too great an exuberance in celebrating the victories. One feared that in this form it was unworthy and did not correspond to the dignity of such a great nation. The bravery and the heroic courage of the German soldier were really a matter of course, and one should not be carried away too much by thoughtless outbursts of joy, especially for the sake of public opinion abroad which would certainly be more impressed by a quiet and dignified form of joy than by excessive exultation, etc. Finally we Germans were not to forget even now that the war had not been our intention, and that therefore we should not be ashamed to admit, openly and like men, that we were ready to contribute, at any time, our share towards the reconciliation of mankind. Therefore it would not be wise to blacken the purity of the army's deeds with too much shouting, as the rest of the world would show but little understanding for such behav- ior. One admired nothing more than the modesty with which a genuine hero quietly and silently forgets his deeds; for this was supposed to be the essence of the whole affair. But now, instead of taking such a fellow by his long ears and leading him to, and pulling him up on, a high pole with a rope, so that the celebrating nation would no longer be able to insult the aesthetic feeling of this knight of the ink, one actually began to protest this 'unseemly' manner of jubilating over victories. One had not the faintest idea, however, that this enthu- siasm, once it has been broken, cannot be reawakened at will. It is an intoxication and it is best to keep it in this condition. But how was one to endure in a fight without this power, a fight which in all human probability made the 211 MEIN KAMPF most enormous demands on the spiritual qualities of the nation? I knew the psyche of the great masses only too well not to know that one would not be able to stoke the fire neces- sary to keep this iron hot with 'aesthetic 9 elation. In my eyes one was mad because nothing was done to increase this boiling heat of passion; but I simply could not understand that one even curtailed that which fortunately was present. The second thing that annoyed me was the way and the manner in which one thought fit to face Marxism. In my eyes, this only proved that one really had not the slightest idea of this pestilence. One seemed to believe, in all seri- ousness, that by the assurance that one no longer knew parties, one thought one had brought Marxism to reason and restraint. That here one has to deal not with a party but with a doctrine which must of necessity lead to the destruction of entire mankind, this one understood the less as one did not hear it in the Jew-infested universities, and as otherwise only too many of our higher officials, particularly, out of idiotic conceit, inculcated in them by education, did not think it worth the trouble to pick up a book and to learn something which did not belong in the curriculum of their high school. The most important changes pass by these 'heads' without leaving a trace, and therefore the State institutions nearly always lag behind the private ones. God knows that to them, most of all, the popular proverb ap- plies: 'Was der Bauer nicht kennt, das frisst er nicht 9 [a peasant does not eat what he does not know]. It was an unequaled absurdity to identify the German worker with Marxism in the days of August, 1914. In those hours the German worker had disentangled himself from the embrace of this poisonous plague, as otherwise he would never have been able to start this fight. But one was stupid enough to think that Marxism had now perhaps THE WORLD WAR 219 become ' national ' ; a flash of genius which only shows that during these long years none of these official State leaders had thought it worth the trouble to study the nature of this doctrine, for otherwise such insanity would hardly have occurred.-^ Marxism, the ultimate aim of which was and will always be the destruction of all non-Jewish national States, to its dismay saw during July, 1914, the German working class, which it had ensnared, awake to enlist in the service of the country more and more quickly from hour to hour. In a few days the whole show of this infamous deception of the nation had frittered away, and the Jewish rabble leaders stood there lonely and abandoned, as though not a trace of the idiocy and lunacy which it had infiltered into the masses for sixty years remained. It was a bad moment for the deceivers of the German nation 's working class. But immediately the leaders recognized the danger which threatened them, they at once pulled the magic cap of lies over their ears and impudently joined in aping the national rising. But now the time should have arrived for proceeding against the entire fraudulent company of these Jewish poisonmongers of the nation. Now one should have dealt summarily with them without the slightest consideration for the clamor that would probably arise, or, what would have been still better, without pity for all their lamenta- tions. In August of the year 1914, the Jewish haggling of international solidarity had disappeared at one stroke from the heads of the German working class, and instead, after a few weeks, American shrapnel began to pour down the blessings of fraternity on the helmets of the marching col- umns. It was the duty of a prudent government, now that the German laborer had found his way back to his nation- ality, to root out without pity the instigators against this nationality. 220 MEIN KAMPF If the best were killed on the front, then one could at least destroy the vermin at home. But instead of this, His Majesty the Kaiser in person extended his hand towards the old criminals, thus showing the cunning murderers of the nation forbearance and giving them the chance to set their minds at ease, f Now the serpent had a chance to continue its work, more carefully than before but also more dangerously. While the honest ones were dreaming of peace within the castle walls, the perjured criminals organized the revolution. It made me discontented in my mind that at that time one had decided on such terrible half measures; but that its end would be such a terrible one even I would not have thought possible. But what was to be done now? To put the leaders of the whole movement behind lock and bar, to put them on trial and deliver the nation of them. To apply ruthlessly the entire military means in order to root out this pestilence. The parties had to be dissolved, the Reichstag, if necessary, to be brought to reason at the point of the bayonet, but, better still, to adjourn it immediately. Just as today the Republic is allowed to dissolve parties, one would have had more reason to apply similar means in those days. The ex- istence or non-existence of an entire nation was at stake ! But then, of course, a question arose: Can spiritual ideas be extinguished by the sword? Can one fight 'views of life 1 by applying brute force? Even then I asked myself this question more than once. When thinking over analogous cases to be found in his- tory, particularly on a religious basis, the following funda- mental realization is the result: Conceptions and ideas, as well as movements with a cer- tain spiritual foundation, may these be right or wrong, can be broken at a certain point of their development with technical means of power only if these physical weapons are THE WORLD WAR 221 at the same time the supporters of a new kindling thought, an idea or view of life. Use of force alone, without the driving forces of a spir- itual basic idea as presupposition, can never lead to the destruction of an idea and its spreading, except in the form of a thorough eradication of even the last representative and the destruction of the last tradition. This, however, means the disappearance of such a State body for endless times, sometimes forever, from the circle of political and powerful importance, as such a sacrifice in blood, as shown by experience, often hits the best part of a nationality, be- cause every persecution that takes place without being based on a spiritual presupposition does not seem justified from the moral point of view, thus instigating just the more valuable parts of a nation to voice a protest which then expresses itself in the acquisition of the spiritual contents of the unjustly persecuted movement. This happens with many merely out of the feeling of opposition against the attempt at throttling an idea by brute force. With this, however, the number of the internal adher- ents grows in the measure in which the persecution grows. Therefore, the complete extinction of a new doctrine can be carried out only by way of an eradication which is thorough and so constantly increasing that by this all the really val- uable blood is withdrawn from the nation or the State involved. But this will take its revenge, because there now can take place a so-called 'inner' purification, this, however, at the expense of a general weakness. But from the very beginning such procedure will be in vain if the doctrine tc be fought has already stepped outside of a certain small circle. As with all growth, here, too, the early period of child- hood offers the best possibility for such extinction, for with the growing years the force of resistance increases, till finally with approaching age it again gives way to the 222 MEIN KAMPF weakness of youth, though in a different form and for other reasons. It is a fact that all attempts at the extinction of a doc- trine and its organizatory effects by force without a spir- itual foundation lead to failures and frequently even end contrary to that desired, for the following reason: The very first condition for such a manner of fight with the weapons of pure force is, and will always be, persever- ance. That means that only the continued and regular use of the methods applied for suppressing a doctrine permits of the possibility of success. But as soon as intermittent force alternates with indulgence, the doctrine to be sup- pressed will not only recover again and again, but it will be able to draw new values from every persecution, for after the ebbing of such a wave of pressure, the indignation at the misery suffered leads new followers to the old doctrine, but those who are already present will with sharper spite and deeper hatred than before adhere to it, and even those who have fallen off will try to return to their old attitude after the danger has been averted. Only in the eternally regular use of force lies the preliminary condition for success. This perseverance is only and always the result of a certain spiritual conviction alone. All force which does not spring from a firm spiritual foundation will be hesitat- ing and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical view of life. It is the outcome of the energy of the moment and the brutal determination of a single individual, but therefore it is subjected to the change of the personality and its nature and strength. But to this something else must be added : -<* Every view of life, be it more of a political or of a religious nature (sometimes the borderline between them can be as- certained only with difficulty), fights less for the negative destruction of the adversary's world of ideas, and more for the positive carrying-out of its own doctrine. Therefore, its THE WORLD WAR 223 fight is less a defense than an attack. Even as regards the definiteness of its goal, it has an advantage, as this goal represents the victory of its own idea, while the other way round it is difficult to decide when the negative aim of the destruction of the enemy's doctrine may be considered as completed and assured. For this reason alone the attack on a view of life will be more carefully planned and also more powerful than the defense of such a doctrine; as here, too, the decision is due to the attack and not to the defense. But the fight against a spiritual power by means of force is only a defense as long as the sword itself does not appear as the supporter, propagator, and announcer of a new spir- itual doctrine. Thus, summing up, one can say the following: Every attempt at fighting a view of life by means of force will finally fail, unless the fight against it represents the form of an attack for the sake of a new spiritual direction. Only in the struggle of two views of life with each other can the weapon of brute force, used continuously and ruth- lessly, bring about the decision in favor of the side it sup- ports. It was on this account that the fight against Marxism had failed so far. This was also the reason why Bismarck's anti-socialist laws finally failed and were bound to fail, despite all efforts. The platform of a new view of life was lacking for the rise of which the fight could have been fought. Only the pro- verbial wisdom of ministerial high officials could produce the opinion that the trash about the so-called 'State author- ity* and 'peace and order' could be a suitable basis for the spiritual impetus of a struggle for life and death. fBut because a really spiritual foundation of this fight was lacking, Bismarck was forced to hand the carrying-out of his anti-socialist laws to the judgment and the volition of those institutions which themselves were already the 2S4 MEIN KAMPF product of the Marxian way of thinking. Thus the Iron Chancellor, by handing over the responsibility for his fight against Marxism to the benevolence of the bourgeois democracy, set the wolf to mind the sheep. But all this was only the necessary result of the lack of a fundamentally new view of life opposed to Marxism, with an impetuous will to conquer. Thus the result of Bismarck's fight was only a severe dis- appointment. But were circumstances different during or at the begin- ning of the World War? Unfortunately not. The more I occupied myself in those days with the idea of a necessary change in the attitude of State governments towards Social Democracy as the present personification of Marxism, the more I recognized the lack of a suitable sub- stitute for this doctrine. What, then, did one want to give to the masses, if one were to suppose that Social Democracy would be broken? There was not one movement of which one could have assumed that it would have succeeded in drawing under its spell the more or less leaderless great masses of workers. It is absurd and more than stupid to assume that the international fanatic who has left the class party would now immediately join a bourgeois party; that means a new class organization. No matter how disagree- able this may be for several organizations, it cannot be denied that to the bourgeois politician the separation of classes appears absolutely natural as long as the political effects are not unfavorable to him. The denial of these facts proves not only the impudence but also the stupidity of the liars, i On the whole, one should guard against believing the great masses to be more stupid than they actually are. In political matters feeling often decides more accurately than reason. The opinion, however, that the masses 9 stupid international attitude is sufficient proof of the incorrectness THE WORLD WAR 225 of their feeling can be refuted thoroughly at once by the simple argument that the pacifistic democracy is not less insane, but that its supporters come almost exclusively from the bourgeois camp. As long as millions of citizens ardently worship the Jewish democratic press every morn- ing, it would not do for the masters to make jokes about the stupidity of the 'comrade' who, after all, devours only the same rubbish though in a different makeup. In both cases the manufacturer is one and the same Jew. Therefore, one should guard well against refuting things which actually exist. The fact that the class question is not at all one of spiritual problems as one would like to make us believe, especially before elections, cannot be denied. The class pride of a great part of our people, just like the low esteem of the hand laborer, is, above all, a symptom which does not come from the imagination of one who is moon- struck. But apart from this, it shows the inferior thinking ability of our so-called intelligentsia when just in those circles one does not understand that a condition which was not able to prevent the rise of a pestilence, such as Marxism, will far less be able to regain that which is lost. The ' bourgeois ' parties, as they call themselves, will never be able to draw the 4 proletarian ' masses into their camp, as here two worlds face each other, separated partly naturally, partly artificially, and their attitude towards each other can only be a fighting one. But here the younger one will succeed and this would be Marxism. ^ In fact, a fight against Social Democracy in 1914 was conceivable, but it was doubtful how long this condition could have lasted because of the lack of every practical sub- stitute. There was a great gap. I was of this opinion long before the War, and therefore I could not make up my mind to join one of the existing 226 MEIN KAMPF parties. This opinion was enhanced in the course of the events of the World War by the obvious impossibility of fighting ruthlessly against Social Democracy because of the absence of a movement which had to be more than a ' par- liamentarian' party. I talked openly about this to my more intimate friends. What is more, I now had for the first time the idea of occupying myself politically later on. And this was the particular reason that made me assure my small circle of friends that after the War I would be active as an orator along with my profession. I think that I meant this very seriously. CHAPTER VI WAR PROPAGANDA AT THE time of my attentive following of all political events, the activities of propaganda had always been of extremely great interest to me. In it I saw an instrument which just the Socialist-Marxist organiza- tions mastered and knew how to apply with expert skill. I learned very soon that the right use of propaganda repre- sents an art which was and remained almost entirely un- known to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Social- ist movement, especially during Lueger's time, acquired a certain virtuosity with this instrument and it owed much of its success to it. But it was shown only during the War to what enor- mously important results a suitably applied propaganda may lead. Unfortunately, everything has to be studied on the other side; for the activity on our side was more than modest in this respect. However, the very failure of the en- tire enlightenment on the side of the Germans a fact which was bound to stare in the face of every soldier now caused me to occupy myself still more thoroughly with this question. There was often more than enough time for thinking, but it was unfortunately the enemy who gave us only too good an object lesson. 228 MEIN KAMPF For what we failed to do in this direction was made up by the enemy with really unheard-of skill and ingenious deliberation. I learned infinitely much more from the enemy's war propaganda. But time marched on without leaving an impression on the brains of those who most of all should have taken this as a lesson; partly because they deemed themselves too clever to take lessons from others, and partly because the honest will to do so was lacking. Was there any propaganda at all on our side? To my regret, I can only answer no. Everything that was actually undertaken in this direction was so incomplete and wrong from the very first moment that it not only did not help, tnit sometimes did considerable harm. Insufficient in form its nature was psychologically wrong : this was necessarily the result of a careful examination of the German war propaganda. It seemed that one was not quite clear about the first question, namely: Is war propaganda a means or an end? It is a means, and therefore it has to be judged from the point of view of the end. But its form has to be properly adapted to the aim which it serves. But it is also clear that the importance of its aim can be a different one according to the point of view of the general demand and that there- fore propaganda is also defined differently according to its inner value. But the aim for which the War was fought was the most sublime and the most overpowering which man is able to imagine: it was the freedom and independence of our nation, the assurance of subsistence for the future, and the honor of the nation; something that, despite all opinions to the contrary, is still present today or rather ought to be present, as nations without honor usually lose their freedom and independence, which, in turn, cor- responds only to a higher justice, as generations of scoun- drels without honor do not deserve freedom. But he who wants to be a cowardly slave must not and cannot have WAR PROPAGANDA 2S9 any honor, as thus honor would become subject to general disdain within the shortest time. It was for the struggle for its human existence that the German people fought, and to support this si purpose of the war propaganda; the aim it to victory. But if nations fight for their existenc that means if they are approached by of ' to be or not to be ' all reflections ity or aesthetics resolve themselves to n^ eluded; because all these ideas are not flodKnc^atout in they^v world ether, but come from the imaginat* are connected with him. His departure from dissolves these ideas into insubstantial non-< Nature does not know them. But in mankind, too, they are characteristics of only a few people or rather races accord- ing to the measure in which they originate from their feel- ings. Humanity and aesthetics would even disappear from a world inhabited by men as soon as it lost the races which are the creators and bearers of these ideas. Where a people's fight for existence in this world is con- cerned, all these ideas are of subordinate importance; they even have no bearing on the form of this struggle at all as soon as they might bring on a paralysis of the struggling nation's force of self-preservation. But in this case this is always the only visible result. As regards the question of humanity, Moltke once ex- pressed himself to the effect that in case of war humanity always resides in the brevity of the procedure, so that the sharpest kind of fight is most suitable for it. However, if one were now to try to bring up the drivel of aesthetics, etc., where these considerations are concerned, there can be really only one answer to it: questions of des- tiny, as important as a people's struggle for existence, elim- inate all obligation towards beauty. The least beauti- 230 MEIN KAMPF ful that can exist in human life is and remains the yoke of slavery. Or does this Schwdbing decadence perhaps per- ceive tne present-day fate of the German nation as 'aes- thetic 1 ? There is certainly no need to discuss this with the Jews, the modern inventors of this culture perfume. Their entire existence is a protest incarnate against the aesthetics of the Lord's image. But once these^, points of view of humanity and beauty are beside the point where the struggle is concerned, they cannot be applied as a means to measure propaganda. During the War propaganda was a means to an end, but this in turn was the German people's fight for existence; thus propaganda could therefore be looked upon only from the principles proper to it. Then the most cruel weapons were humane if they conditioned the quicker victory, and beautiful were only those methods which helped the nation to secure the dignity of its freedom. This was the only possible attitude towards the question of war propaganda in such a fight for life or death. Had the so-called responsible authorities made this clear to themselves, the uncertainty about the form and the ap- plication of this weapon would never have originated; for this is also only a weapon, though a frightful one, in the hand of the expert. fThe second question of actually decisive importance was the following: To whom has propaganda to appeal? To the scientific intelligentsia or to the less educated masses? It has to appeal forever and only to the masses! : Propaganda is not for the intelligentsia or for those who unfortunately call themselves by that name today, but scientific teaching. But propaganda is in its contents as far from being science as perhaps a poster is art in its pre- sentation as such. A poster's art lies in the designer's ability to catch the masses' attention by outline and color. The poster for an art exhibition has to point only to the art WAR PROPAGANDA 231 of the exhibition; the more it succeeds in this, the greater therefore is the art of the poster itself. Further, the poster is to give to the masses an idea of the importance of the ex- hibition, but it is in no way to be a substitute for the art represented by the exhibition. Therefore, he who wants to occupy himself with art itself has really to study more than the poster; yes, for him it is by far not sufficient merely to 'walk through' the exhibition. It may be expected of him that he bury himself in the individual works by thoroughly looking them over so that then he may gradually form a just opinion for himself. The situation is a similar one with what today we call propaganda. The task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses towards certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses' field of vision. The art now is exclusively to attack this so skillfully that a general conviction of the reality of a fact, of the necessity Hitler says he awakened during the War to the importance of propaganda, discovered that German methods were too high-brow and too little adapted to drum up popular emotion, and learned that the first rule of the propagandist must be to find out what will affect the masses. In view of the fact that propaganda became a fundamental concern of the Nazi r6gime, some attention to Hitler's contributions to this science is called for. There is a convenient analysis in Propaganda Analysis, Vol. I (New York, 1938). This essay, prepared by experts, reveals very clearly how the various weapons of the militant propagandist e.g., calling names have been employed. It relegates to a position of minor importance, an aspect of the matter on which Hitler lays great stress that the propa- gandist who is trying to wage war must eliminate the 'esthetic' and concentrate on stirring up hatred. Therefore this may be emphasized here. Many are convinced (and base this convic- 232 MEIN KAMPF of an event, that something; that is necessary is also right, etc., is created. But as it is not and cannot be science in it- self, as its task consists of catching the masses 9 attention, just like that of the poster, and not in teaching one who is already scientifically experienced or is striving towards education and knowledge, its effect has always to be directed more and more towards the feeling, and only to a certain extent to so-called reason.** All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself. Therefore its spiritual level has to be screwed the lower, the greater the mass of people which one wants to attract. But if the prob- lem involved, like the propaganda for carrying on a war, is to include an entire people in its field of action, the caution tion on long personal experience) that the most effective in- strument in the Nazi propagandist's hands has been the spectacle of cruelty. When masses of men have been repressed for a long time by adverse social, political and economic con- ditions, they seem to accept the open expression above all the open demonstration of hatred with deep satisfaction. Almost every war is followed by strange manias of persecution which affect the civilian population more than they do the returning soldier, unless that soldier deems himself a victim of ingratitude. Thus after 1918 the United States witnessed the spread of the Ku Klux Klan, a crusade against the 'Reds/ and several anti-negro riots in major cities. In France hostility to American and other foreign troops was so marked that cantonments had to be evacuated more speedily than had been planned. In Germany, at all events, one principal reason why the Rightist revolt against the Republic succeeded was the progres- sive emphasis upon hatred in action. The bloody repression which marked the end of the short-lived 'Soviet' state in Bavaria did not arouse sentiments of pity in all the citizens of WAR PROPAGANDA 233 in avoiding too high spiritual assumptions cannot be too great. The more modest, then, its scientific ballast is, and the more it exclusively considers the feelings of the masses, the more striking will be its success. This, however, is the best proof whether a particular piece of propaganda is right or wrong, and not the successful satisfaction of a few scholars or ' aesthetic ' languishing monkeys. This is just the art of propaganda that it, understanding the great masses' world of ideas and feelings, finds, by a correct psychological form, the way to the attention, and further to the heart, of the great masses. That our super- clever heads never understand this proves only their men- tal inertia or their conceit. But if one understands the necessity of the attitude of Munich. The Hitler putsch of 1923 made the Party more popular in the city than it had been before. When the Nazis drove dissenters or imaginary dissenters from their meet- ings with cudgels, their audiences grew larger. Few people in Germany were at bottom anti-Semitic, but the joy large num- bers felt in promises of blood-curdling treatment to be meted out to the helpless minority made them responsive to the sug- gestion. Smashing windows and street fighting were relied upon to win the crowd. The propagandists encouraged them all. ' We shall reach our goal,' declared Goebbels, * when we have the courage to laugh as we destroy, as we smash, whatever was sacred to us as tradition, as education, as friendship and as human affection.' In the Vienna of March, 1938, ordinary citizens who had hitherto gone about peacefully, confessed to a strange delight in the sufferings visited upon the Jewish group. After a while that craving subsides in the great majority, to be followed by widespread loathing of what is termed 'barbarism. 9 The pogrom of 1938, for example, elicited widespread open criticism. With such lapses of fervor the agents of propaganda must deal. 234 MEIN KAMPF the attracting skill of propaganda towards the great masses, the following rule then results: It is wrong to wish to give propaganda the versatility of perhaps scientific teaching. The great masses 9 receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great. As a consequence of these facts, all effective propa- ganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans until even the very last man is able to imagine what is intended by such a word. As soon as one sacrifices this basic principle and tries to become versatile, the effect will fritter away, as the masses are neither able to digest the material offered nor to retain it. Thus the re- sult is weakened and finally eliminated. The greater the line of its representation has to be, the more correctly from the psychological point of view will its tactics have to be outlined. For example, it was completely wrong to ridicule the ad- versary as was done in Austrian and German propaganda in comic papers. It was basically wrong for the reason that when a man met the adversary in reality he was bound to re- ceive an entirely different impression; something that took its most terrible revenge; for now the German soldier, under the direct impression of the resistance of the enemy, felt himself deceived by those who so far were responsible for his enlightenment, and instead of strengthening his fight- ing spirit or even his firmness, quite the contrary occurred. The man despaired. Compared with this, the war propaganda of the British and the Americans was psychologically right. By introduc- ing the German as a barbarian and a Hun to its own people, it thus prepared the individual soldier for the terrors of war and helped guard him against disappointment. The most terrible weapon which was now being used against him then appeared to him only as the proof of the enlightenment al- WAR PROPAGANDA 835 ready bestowed upon him, thus strengthening his belief that his government's assertions were right, and on the other hand it increased his fury and hatred against the atrocious enemy. For the cruel effect of the weapon of his enemy which he learned to know by his own experience appeared to him gradually as the proof of the already proclaimed 'Hunnish' brutality of the barbaric enemy, without, how- ever, making him think for even a moment that his own weapons could have, perhaps, or even probably, a still more terrible effect. Thus the English soldier could not even for a moment have the impression that his country had taught him the wrong facts, something which was unfortunately the case to such an extent with the German soldier that he finally rejected everything that came from this side as 'swindle* and 'bunk' (Krampf). All these things were consequences of the fact that they believed they had a right to assign to propaganda just any idiot (or even 'otherwise* clever peo- ple) instead of understanding that sometimes even the most outstanding judges of the human soul are barely good enough for this purpose. Thus the German war propaganda offered an incom- Allied propaganda as such had no lasting effect upon soldiers at the Front; and we may be sure that Hitler was thinking rather of what could be done to keep enthusiasm alive among civilians. By 1917 French soldiers doubted every word that their papers printed; and yet those papers were no longer en- couraging waves of hatred but were stressing lofty ideals such as religious resignation and the beauty of a difficult task patiently done. ' I do not believe that the veteran soldier can thrive on hatred,' said an able writer at the time. And the greatest triumph British propaganda ever achieved was the promulgation of what later on became Mr. Wilson's ' Fourteen Points.' 236 MEIN KAMPF parable lesson for teaching and instruction for an 'enlight- enment' that worked in just the reverse direction, in con- sequence of a complete lack of all psychologically suitable consideration. The enemy, however, offered no end of study material for one who, with open eyes and a feeling that had not yet become calcified, pondered over the flood wave of the enemy's propaganda which had stormed upon him during four and a half years. But least of all did one understand the very primary con- dition for all propagandistic activity as a whole: namely, the subjectively biased attitude of propaganda towards the questions to be dealt with. In this field one sinned from above in such a manner, and from the very beginning of the War, that one was entitled to doubt whether so much non- sense could actually only be ascribed to stupidity. What would one say about a poster, for instance, which was to advertise a new soap, and which nevertheless de- scribes other soaps as also being 'good'? At this one would certainly shake one's head. Exactly the same is the case with political advertising. Propaganda's task is, for instance, not to evaluate the various rights, but far more to stress exclusively the one that is to be represented by it. It has not to search into truth as far as this is favorable to others, in order to present it then to the masses with doctrinary honesty, but it has rather to serve its own truth uninterruptedly. It was fundamentally wrong to discuss the war guilt from the point of view that not Germany alone could be made responsible for the outbreak of this catastrophe, but it would have been far better to burden the enemy entirely with this guilt, even if this had not been in accordance with the real facts, as was indeed the case. What, now, was the consequence of these half measures? The great mass of a people is not composed of diplomats WAR PROPAGANDA 237 or even teachers of political law, nor even of purely reason* able individuals who are able to pass judgment, but of human beings who are as undecided as they are inclined to- wards doubts and uncertainty. As soon as by one's own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is ad- mitted, the cause for doubting one's own right is laid. The masses are not in a position to distinguish where the wrong of the others ends and their own begins. In this case they become uncertain and mistrusting, especially if the enemy does not produce the same nonsense, but, in turn, burdens their enemy with all and the whole guilt. What is more easily explained than that finally one's own people believe more in the enemy's propaganda, which proceeds more completely and more uniformly, than in one's own? This, however, may be said most easily of a people which suffers so severely from the mania of objectivity as the German people does. For now they will take pains not to do an in- justice to the enemy, even at the risk of the severest strain on, or destruction of, his own nation and State. But the masses do not at all realize that this is not the in- tention of the responsible authorities. The people, in an overwhelming majority, are so feminine in their nature and attitude that their activities and thoughts are motivated less by sober consideration than by feeling and sentiment. This sentiment, however, is not complicated but very simple and complete. There are not many differentiations, but rather a positive or a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie; but never half this and half that, or partially, etc. The English propaganda understood and considered all this in the most ingenious manner. There were really no half measures which perhaps might have given cause for doubt. The proof of this brilliant knowledge of the primitiveness 238 MEIN KAMPF of feeling of the great masses was to be found in the atrocity propaganda that had been adapted to this, thus ruthlessly and ingeniously securing moral steadfastness at the front, even during the greatest defeats, and further in the just as striking pinning down of the German enemy as the only party guilty of the War's outbreak; a lie, the unsurpassed, impudent, and biased stubbornness of which and how it was brought forth took into account the sentimental and extreme attitude of this great people and therefore gained credence. fBut how effective this kind of propaganda is is shown most strikingly by the fact that after four years it was not only able to make the enemy hold his own, but it even be- gan to eat into our own people. We must not be surprised, however, that our propaganda was not rewarded with this success. Its inner ambiguity included the germ of failure. But finally, in consequence of its contents, it was hardly probable that it would make the necessary impression on the masses. Only our brainless 'statesmen' were able to hope that with this stale pacifistic dishwater one could succeed in arousing men to die volun- tarily. Thus this miserable stuff was useless, even harmful. Nevertheless, all geniality in the makeup of propaganda will not lead to success unless a fundamental principle is considered with continually sharp attention : it has to con- fine itself to little and to repeat this eternally. Here, too, persistency, as in so many other things in this world, is the first and the most important condition for success. In the field of propaganda particularly one must never be guided by aestheticists or blast persons; not by the first, because otherwise propaganda's form and expression would after a short time, instead of being suitable for the masses, only have an attraction for literary tea parties; but against the second one ought to guard oneself carefully for the rea- WAR PROPAGANDA 239 son that their shortage of fresh sentiments of their own is always looking for new stimulants. These people tire of everything after a short time; they want a change and they will never understand or be able to imagine the needs of their fellow citizens who are not yet so hard-boiled. They are always the first critics of propaganda, or rather of its content, which appears to them to be too old, too hack- neyed, then again too out-of-date, etc. They always want something new, they look for changes, thus becoming mor- tal enemies of any effective winning of the masses. For as soon as the organization and the content of a propaganda begin to orientate themselves after their needs, it will lose all complexity and will completely fritter itself away in- stead. Now the purpose of propaganda is not continually to produce interesting changes for a few blast little masters, but to convince; that means, to convince the masses. The masses, however, with their inertia, always need a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and they will lend their memories only to the thousandfold repetition of the most simple ideas. < A change must never alter the content of what is being brought forth by propaganda, but in the end it always has to say the same. Thus the slogan has to be illuminated from various sides, but the end of every reflection has al- ways and again to be the slogan itself. Only thus can and will propaganda have uniform and complete effect. This great line alone, which one must never leave, brings the final success to maturity by continually regular and consistent emphasis. But then one will be able to deter- This is very true and Hitler has demonstrated it. From 1920 to 1933 he permitted himself few variations. His was always the same pose, the same gestures (fists clutched and shaken in front of his face, right arm stretched above his head with the 240 MEIN KAMPF mine with astonishment to what enormous and hardly un- derstandable results such perseverance will lead. All advertising, whether it lies in the field of business or of politics, will carry success by continuity and regular uniformity of application. Here, too, the enemy's war propaganda set a typical ex- ample. It was limited to a few points of view, calculated exclusively for the masses, and it was carried out with un- tiring persistency. Basic ideas and forms of execution which had once been recognized as being right were em- ployed throughout the entire War, and never did one make even the slightest change. At the beginning it was appar- ently crazy in the impudence of its assertions, later it be- came disagreeable, and finally it was believed. After four and a half years a revolution broke out in Germany the slogan of which came from the enemy's war propaganda. In England, however, one understood one thing more: that for this spiritual weapon the possible success lies only in the mass of its application, but that success amply covers all expenses. There, propaganda was considered a weapon of the first order, whereas with us it was the last bread of the politician without office, and a pot-boiler for the modest hero. All in all, its effect was just nil. index finger pointing toward the heavens), the same theme. The rhythm of the National-Socialist march is unmistakable; the conventions which surround official meetings are never dispensed with. There is always music of an approved military variety. The propaganda intended for consumption in foreign coun- tries has been carefully adjusted to meet the requirements. Every country has its quota of agents, to whom money, ma- terials and instructions are freely supplied. Ernst Wilhelro Bohle, manager of the Foreign Organization WAR PROPAGANDA 241 isation) of the Party has associated with him the heads of a number of other groups also working in their way to inter- nationalize the doctrines of National Socialism. The two most effective weapons are these: the contention that Hitler is the bulwark of Western civilization against the revolutionary machinations of Moscow; and the doctrine that Jewry is the root of all evil. There are many people in this world who fear the Bolshevists; there are equally many who can be persuaded to dislike the Jew. Whenever violent nationalism is in the ascendancy, as is the case at present, both Jew and believing Christian necessarily suffer, but the first is at an especial dis- advantage because he can be stigmatized as a member of an alien race. Yet there are other things, too, which the propa- ganda attempts to stress the debt of civilization to the 'Nordic'; the sins inherent in the democratic system of gov- ernment; and the blessings of totalitarianism. Throughout the Balkans, where there are in every country important Jewish minorities, this propaganda falls on welcome ears, particularly since a great number of peasants now for the most part in economic straits have long since been anti-Semitic. In Slovakia and northern Hungary, the disarray attendant upon the Munich settlement seems to have encour- aged a kind of belief that Hitler is the Grand Mogul. Roumania, Jugoslavia, and other States are torn between 'Fascist* and 'anti-Fascist 1 propaganda. A particularly interesting example is Greece, whence young ladies and gentlemen have traveled to Germany at Nazi expense, then to set their experiences down in books and brochures. The government of the country being a dictatorship, there seems to be considerable official willingness to foster sympathy for Hitler. In Switzerland a determined government found it necessary during 1938 to ferret out a whole group of Nazi agents and spies. Some of these lived in fashionable hotels, adorning their rooms with photographs of Hitler and Goebbels and dispensing hospi- tality on a lavish scale. The Swiss government unearthed a scheme for settling all the German nationals in the Canton of St. Gallen, dose to the Austrian border. The Basle police ar- rested a ring of agents who had been active in Alsace-Lorraine 42 MEIN KAMPF Holland and Belgium, too, are under considerable Nazi pres- sure, but in both countries the vigorous stand taken by the Catholic hierarchy has presented a formidable obstacle. France has witnessed, primarily as a result of the ' new deal ' sponsored by L6on Blum, a recrudescence of anti-Semitism, but this has little to do, in all probability, with Nazi influence. There are some French propagandists for Nazism, notable Alphonse de Chateaubriant and Darquier de Pellepoix. Nazi aid was granted to General Franco in Spain, and as a result a vast amount of Nazi propaganda is spread throughout insurgent territory. The United States has had to deal with Nazi agents on nu- merous occasions. The Dickstein Committee and the Dies Committee have heard reams of testimony, usually of a some- what confused kind, concerning among other things the Deutscher Volksbund (German Folk Association) and other or- ganizations friendly to Hitler. During 1938 a federal grand jury indicted, tried, and found guilty a number of persons in- volved in a plot to obtain military secrets. A number of ' Fas- cist* organizations throughout the country receive literature directly from German sources, the most important of which are the Fichtc-Bund and World Service. Naturalized Germans resident in the country are expected to fill out formulae indi- cating their ancestry and their present political convictions. Subtler methods of exercising influence are analyzed in The German Reich and Americans of German Origin, which lists many ties binding citizens of this country to the Third Reich. Cf. also The Nazi International (London, Friends of Europe Publications, Nr. 69). CHAPTER VII THE REVOLUTION fiN THE year 1915 the enemy's propaganda had started I on our side ; in 1 9 1 6 it became more and more intensive, till finally, at the beginning of the year 1918, it swelled to a very flood. Now one could recognize the results of this fishing for souls on all sides. The army gradually learned to think the way the enemy wished it to. The German counter-action failed completely. The army, by virtue of the spirit and will power of its leader at that time, certainly had the intention and de- termination to take up the battle in this field also, but it lacked the instrument which would have been necessary to do so. From the psychological point of view also it was wrong that this enlightenment be carried out by the troops themselves. If it was to be effective, it had to come from home. Only then could one expect to be successful with men who, in the end, had performed immortal deeds of heroism and sacrifice for their home country for almost four years. But what did come from home? Was this failure stupidity or criminal? In the height of the summer of 1918, after the southern banks of the Marne had been cleared, the German press, above all. behaved so miserably and clumsily, nay crim- 244 MEIN KAMPF inally stupidly, that with my daily growing wrath the ques- tion arose in my mind whether there was really nobody at all who would put an end to this waste of the army's spirit- ual heroism? What happened in France, when in the year 1914 we rushed into that country in an unheard-of victorious storm? What did Italy do in the days of the collapse of its front on the Isonzo? What again did France do in the spring of 1918 when the stormy assaults of the German divisions seemed to unhinge its positions and when the far-reaching arm of the heavy long-distance batteries began to knock at the doors of Paris? How had the fever heat of national passion been whipped into the faces of the hastily retreating regiments! How did propaganda and ingenious influence work on the masses in order to hammer the faith in a final victory into the hearts of the broken fronts ! But what was done on our side? Nothing, or even worse than that. At that time I often felt fury and indignation rise in me whenever we received the latest papers which enabled us to read of this psychological mass-murder which was being carried out. But more than once I was tormented by the thought that, if Destiny had put me in the place of these incapable or criminal scamps or incompetents of our propagand a serv- ice, a different kind of battle would have been announced to Destiny. In those months, for the first time, I felt fully the whims of fortune which kept me at the front in a place where any lucky move on the part of a negro could shoot me down, while somewhere else I would have been able to render a different service to my country. For I was bold enough to believe even then that I would have succeeded in thuu THE REVOLUTION 245 However. I was one without a name, one among eight millions! Therefore it was better to keep my mouth shut and to do my duty as best I could. In the summer of 191 j the enemy's first leaflets fell into our hands. Despite some changes in form, their contents were nearly always the same, namely: that distress in Germany was growing more and more; that the duration of the war would be endless, while the hope of winning it was dwin- dling gradually; that the people at home were longing for peace for this reason, but that 'militarism' as well as the 'Kaiser' would not permit this; that the entire world (which was very well aware of this) therefore did not fight against the German people, but rather exclusively against the sole culprit, the Kaiser; that this fight would not end unless this enemy of peaceful mankind should be eliminated ; that after the end of the War, the liberal and democratic nations, however, would accept Germany into the league of eternal world peace which would be assured from the hour when ' Prussian ' militarism was destroyed. For the better illustration of what was thus presented 'letters from home' were not infrequently reprinted, the contents of which seemed to corroborate these statements. But in those days one generally merely laughed at these attempts. The leaflets were read, then passed on to the rear to the higher army staffs, then they were usually for- gotten till the wind forwarded a new shipment into the trenches from above; for it was mostly airplanes which served for bringing over these leaflets. In the nature of this propaganda, one point was bound to attract attention, that is, that in every section of the trenches where there were Bavarians, it persistently made 246 MEIN KAMPF front against Prussia by asserting not only that the latter was the real culprit and solely responsible for the entire War, but that there was not the slightest hostility against Bavaria; however, one would not be able to help her as long as she assisted in serving Prussian militarism, by pull- ing its chestnuts out of the fire. As early as the year 1915 this sort of persuasion actually began to have definite effects. Among the troops the feeling against Prussia grew quite visibly but the authorities did not even once interfere. This was even worse than a sin of omission, for sooner or later it was bound to take a most unfortunate revenge, not only on the 'Prussians' but on the German people, and to this the Bavarians themselves last but not least belong. In this direction the hostile propaganda began to show decided success as early as the year 1916. In the same way, the lamenting letters from home had long since begun to have an effect. Now it was no longer necessary for the enemy to forward these letters to the front in the form of leaflets, etc. Also nothing was done against this except for some indescribably stupid 'warn- ings' from the 'side of the government.' Now, as before, the front was flooded with this poison, manufactured by thoughtless women at home, without their guessing, how- ever, that this was the means to strengthen enormously the enemy's belief in his victory, thus prolonging and in- creasing the sufferings of their own people on the battle front. The German women's silly letters in the time that followed cost hundreds of thousands of men their lives. Thus it was already in 1916 that various symptoms be- came apparent which would better not have been present. At the front one abused and 'grumbled/ one was already discontented with many things and sometimes justly so. While the front suffered hunger and deprivations, while the families at home were in distress, there was abundance THE REVOLUTION 247 and revelry in other places. Nay, even on the battle front itself, not everything was as it should have been in this respect. Even then there was a slight crisis; however, these were still 'domestic' affairs. The same man who at first had cursed and grumbled, a few minutes later performed si- lently his duty as though this were a matter of course. The same company, which at first was discontented, clung to the section of the trenches it had to protect as though Germany's destiny depended upon these hundred meters of mud holes. It was still the front of the old and glorious army of heroes! I was to learn the difference between home and the army in a drastic change. At the end of September, 1916, my division joined in the Somme battle. For us this was the first of these enormous material battles, and it was only too difficult to describe our impressions. This really seemed to resemble hell rather than war. During weeks of a whirlwind of drum fire the German front stood its ground, pushed back a little at times, then pushing ahead again, but never retreating. On October 7, 1916, I was wounded. I was luckily brought to the rear and was to be sent to Germany with a transport. Two years now had passed since I had seen home, an almost endless time under these circumstances. I was hardly able to imagine what Germans who were not clad in uniforms looked like. When I was lying in the field hospi- tal at Hermies, I almost jumped from the shock when I suddenly heard the voice of a German woman she was a nurse speak to one of the men lying next to me. For the first time, a sound like that after two years! But the nearer the train which was to bring us home ap- oroached the border, the more restless each one of us be- 248 MEIN KAMPF came. All the places passed by through which we had marched two years before as young soldiers: Brussels, Louvain, Lige, and finally we thought that we recognized the first German house by its high gable and its beautiful shutters. The fatherland! In October, 1914, we burned with wild enthusiasm when we passed the frontier; now quiet and emotion prevailed. Each one was happy that Destiny allowed him once more to see what he had to protect so earnestly with his life; and each one was almost ashamed to look the other in the eye. It was almost on the anniversary of the day of my march- ing out that I was brought into the hospital at Beelitz near Berlin. What a change! From the mud of the Somme battle into the white beds of this building of marvels! At the begin- ning one hardly dared to lie down properly. Only slowly was one able to become accustomed again to this new world. Unfortunately, this world was new in still another direc- tion. The spirit of the army on the front seemed no longer to be a guest here. I heard here for the first time something that was still unknown at the front: bragging about one's own cowardice! For, no matter how much one heard cursing and 'grousing 1 at the front, it was never an invita- tion to shirk duty or even a glorification of the coward. No. The coward was still considered a coward, and no more; and the contempt he met with was still general, ex- actly as the admiration paid the real hero. But here in the hospital it was already the reverse: the unprincipled agita- tors had the word and tried with all the means of their mis- erable eloquence to picture the idea of the honest soldier as ridiculous and the coward's lack of character as an exam- ple to be followed. A few wretched fellows, above all, set THE REVOLUTION 249 the fashion. One of them bragged about having pulled his own hand through the barbed-wire fence so that he could come to the hospital; despite this ridiculous accident, he seemed to have been here an endless time, just as he had come in the transport to Germany by swindle. But this poisonous fellow actually went so far as to describe, with impudent cheek, his own cowardice as the result of a brav- ery higher than the heroic death of the honest soldier. Many listened in silence, others went out, but still others agreed with him. 1 felt disgust rise in my throat, but the instigator was quietly tolerated in the hospital. What was to be done? The authorities must have known, and did know who and what he was. Yet nothing was done. When I was able to walk again, I was given permission to go to Berlin. It was apparent that distress was very great everywhere. The city of millions suffered hunger. Discontent was great. In various homes, however, where soldiers visited, the feeling was similar to that of the hospital. The general impression was as though these fellows intentionally sought out such places in order to air their opinions. But how much worse were conditions in Munich! When, after being cured, I was dismissed from the hos- pital and turned over to the reserve battalion, I thought I The winter of 1916 was a difficult one in all armies. War weariness, privation, and dissatisfaction with inevitable gov- ernmental inefficiency were rife everywhere. What Hitler says here concerning the feeling in Germany could be matched with reports from France and England. But in Munich and in- deed throughout most of Bavaria the situation was in a measure different. Ancient Bavarian particularism now made a scapegoat of Prussia, attributing to it the militarism that had plunged the Empire into war. Separatism was openly advo- 250 MEIN KAMPF hardly recognized the town again. Anger, grumbling, and cursing met me on all sides. In the reserve battalion the feeling was beyond all criticism. The clumsy manner in which the soldiers from the front were treated by the old instruction officers, who had not been at the front for even an hour and who, for this reason alone, were able only par- tially to establish good relations with the old soldiers, con- tributed to this. The returning soldiers could not help but show certain peculiarities which were explicable by their service at the front, but which were and remained entirely incomprehensible to the leaders of the reserve units, while the officer who had also been at the front could understand them. Finally, the latter was respected by the men in quite a different way from the commanders from the rear. But quite apart from this, the general mood was more than bad ; shirking of duty was looked upon almost as a sign of higher wisdom, but faithful endurance as a sign of inner weakness and narrow-mindedness. But the offices of the authorities cated. By 1918, newspapers in northern Bavaria were counsel- ing sabotage of the War; and in alarm Crown Prince Rupprecht urged upon the High Command the necessity for making the speediest possible peace. Hitler's subsequent course was dic- tated in a measure by these phenomena. After the War Bavaria was a place of refuge for all nationalist agitators who were pursued by the Republic, but it was also the custodian of the monarchical and particularist doctrines. Its government was motivated by a desire to put Rupprecht on the throne, and to regulate the affairs of Bavaria more or less independently of those of Germany as a whole. This could not be Hitler's pur- pose, since he was a Pan-German. Accordingly he tried to force the issue and to compel the Bavarian government to participate in a march on Berlin by staging the putsch of 1923. In a measure he was abetted by the fact that Rupprecht was averse to accepting the crown of Bavaria unless monarchical restoration took place throughout Germany. THE REVOLUTION 851 were occupied by Jews. Almost every clerk a Jew and every Jew a clerk. I was amazed by this multitude of fighters of the Chosen People and could not help comparing them with the few representatives they had on the front. In the business world things were even worse. Here the Jewish people had really become 'indispensable/ fThe spider began slowly to suck the people's blood out of its pores. By way of the war societies one had found the instru- ment with which to put an end, bit by bit, to a national and free economy. Now one stressed the necessity of a limitless centraliza- tion. As early as in the year 1916-17 almost the entire pro- duction was indeed under the control of the Jewry of high finance. But against whom did the people's hatred direct itself? At that time I saw with horror a fate approach which, if it was not warded off in the eleventh hour, was bound to lead us to destruction. Jewish citizens of Germany at the time the War broke out numbered about 550,000. Of these 100,000 were in uniform, and of these four-fifths saw duty at the front. There were 12,000 casualties, BO that the ratio was virtually the same as that for the population as a whole; 35,000 Jews were decorated for bravery; 23,000 were promoted; and 2000 received com- missions a remarkable fact seeing that prior to the War the Prussian army had barred Jewish officers. There were 165 Jew- ish aviators, a fifth of whom were killed in action. These fig- ures are based on official German war records. The first asser- tion that Jews had shirked their duty in war-time was made by General Ernest von Wrisberg. (Cf. his Erinnerungen.) Jewish veterans formed an organization of their own. General von Linsingen, a distinguished commander on the eastern front, applied for admission to this organization during 1933, on the ground that he had a Jewish grandmother. 252 MEIN KAMPF While the Jew robbed the entire nation and pressed it under his rule, people agitated against the 'Prussians/ Exactly as on the front, at home nothing was done by the authorities against this poison propaganda. It seemed that one did not guess that Prussia's breakdown would not mean the rise for Bavaria, but that, on the contrary, the downfall of the one was also bound to hurl the other hope- lessly into the abyss. At that time I felt infinitely sorry because of this. In these things I could only see the most ingenious trick of the Jew to divert general attention from himself and draw it to others. While now the Bavarian and the Prussian quar- reled, the Jew pulled away their means of existence from under the very nose of both ; while abusing the Prussian, the Jew organized the revolution and smashed Prussia as well as Bavaria at the same time. I could not stand this cursed feud between the German tribes, and I was glad to return to the front for which I registered immediately after my arrival at Munich. During the War commerce in produce was regulated by the government, through the so-called Kriegsgesellschaften. Officials regulated prices, distributed ration cards, and supervised the stocks of materials needed for the conduct of the War. During 1914 and 1915, Walther Rathenau was director of the war ma- terials section of this organization. He was a Jewish industrial- ist and author of treatises on social problems, who later on became Foreign Minister in the Wirth Cabinet and whose mur- der by a band of Rightist assassins in 1922 almost precipitated another civil war. Doubtless the major reason for the hatred which nationalists of the kind to whom Hitler appealed felt for Rathenau was nothing more serious than a remark once ated from his writings by General Ludendorff. The charge that Rathenau could have used his office to further Jewish financial interests is a fabrication. THE REVOLUTION 253 At the beginning of March, 1917, I was again with my regiment. Towards the end of the year 1917 it seemed as though the depth of the army's despair had passed. After the Russian breakdown the entire army now breathed new hope and fresh courage. The conviction that the fight would yet end with a German victory began to take hold of the troops more and more. Now one could hear them sing again, and the croakers became fewer in number. Once more one be- lieved in the fatherland's future. Especially the Italian breakdown of the fall of 1917 had exercised the most wonderful influence; for one saw in this victory the proof of the possibility that one would be able to break through the front at a place distant from the Rus- sian battlefield. Now again a marvelous faith filled the hearts of the millions and made them look forward to the spring of 1918 with revived confidence. The enemy, how- ever, was visibly depressed. In this winter he remained a little more quiet than at other times. The calm before the storm had set in. While now the front undertook the ultimate preparations for the final termination of the eternal struggle, while end- less transports of men and material rolled towards the Western Front and the troops were given their final train- ing for the great attack, the worst piece of villainy of the entire War, up to that time, took place in Germany. Germany was not to be victorious; thus in the last hour, when victory already threatened to fasten itself to the Ger- man flags, one had seized means which seemed suitable to nip in the bud at one blow the German attack of that spring and to make victory impossible. The munitions strike was organized. !f it succeeded, then the German front was bound to S54 MEIN KAMPF break down, and the wish of the Vorwaerts, that this victory was not to entwine itself with the German flags, would be fulfilled. With the shortage of munitions the front must necessarily be pierced in the course of a few weeks, the attack was thus prevented, the Entente was saved, but international capital was made Germany's master; for this was the inner aim of the Marxist betrayal of the people. The smashing of the national economy in favor of the establishment of the rule of international capital; some- thing in which these gentlemen now succeeded, thanks to the stupidity and the credulity of the one and the bottom- less cowardice of the other. < However, the munitions strike had not the ultimately desired success as far as starving the front of weapons was concerned; it broke down too early to allow the shortage of munitions as such to sentence the army to doom, such as the plan presented itself. But how much more terrible was the moral damage which now had been done! First, for what, now, did the army continue to fight, if home itself no longer wanted victory? For whom the The Munitions Strike was declared in Berlin and some other cities during February, 1918. It was an effort to secure amelio- rations, particularly of the food ration; but it was also used by some of its sponsors as an act of protest against the continuance of the War. Leaders of the Socialist Party had entered the strike committee specifically in order to see to it that the move- ment did not sponsor sabotage. General Ludendorff placed Berlin under martial law, mass arrests were made, and large numbers of workers were sent to the front. This broke the strike before any military damage was done, but the psycho- logical effect on the workers was bad. They felt that their just demands had been answered with nothing but brutal repression. For their part the generals felt that German morale had been seriously undermined. (Cf . Die 14 Jahre, by Friedrich Stamp- fer.) THE REVOLUTION 255 enormous sacrifices and deprivations? The soldier was to fight for victory and at home they were striking against it! But what was, secondly, the effect on the enemy? In the winter of 1917-18 dark douds rose for the first time over the horizon of the Allied world. For almost four years now one had attacked the German giant and could not bring him to fall; but in addition, it was only the arm holding the shield which was free to defend himself, while he had to raise the sword for striking now in the East, now in the South. Now, at last, the giant was free in the back. Streams of blood had flown till he succeeded in finally striking down one of the enemies. Now in the West the sword was to help the shield, and had the enemy not succeeded so far in breaking the defense, now he was to be hit by attack. Vorwaerts, the Berlin Social Democratic daily, had demanded a peace of understanding rather than a peace of victory. But the sentence here quoted from an editorial of October 20, 1918, is taken out of its context, as will be evident when the passage as a whole is cited: 'We stand against overwhelming odds. We will not win this war. We will not fight a moment longer than we must fight, and we are fighting not for victory but for peace in which there will not be present the germ of another war. Germany shall that is our firm decision as Socialists furl its battle flags forever without having brought them home in victory the last time. That is a heavy moral burden for every people, and those who wish to make that burden heavier than it can be borne take a great measure of responsibility upon themselves. No peace can make us unable to defend ourselves. Even the victor can obtain security only from a peace that dis- arms all and makes friends of enemies. But a peace is a danger for him too, if it be a peace which sends a people home to read in the bloody history of the past that the vanquished of today are the victors of tomorrow.' It is, of course, perfectly obvious that this editorial written after the armistice parleys had be- gun was only a plea for a just treaty of peace. 256 MEIN KAMPF fOne feared him and one was worried about the victory. In London and Paris one conference chased the other, but on the front a sleepy silence prevailed. The gentlemen had suddenly lost their impudence. Even the hostile propa- ganda had hard work now; it was no longer so easy to prove the hopelessness of the German victory. But this was true also as regards the Allied troops on the fronts themselves. Now also an uncanny realization began to dawn gradually upon them. Their inner attitude towards the German soldier had changed now. Up till now he might be looked upon as a fool who was nevertheless destined to doom; now, however, they were confronted by the conqueror of the Russian ally. The limitations of the German attacks in the East, born of necessity, now seemed ingenious tactics. For three years now these Germans had stormed Russia, at the beginning without even the slight- est seeming success. One almost laughed at this senseless enterprise; because, by the overwhelming number of his men, the Russian giant was finally sure to remain the victor, Germany, however, would collapse after having bled herself out. Reality seemed to confirm this hope. Since September, 1914, when for the first time the end- less masses of Russian prisoners from the Tannenberg battle began to roll towards Germany on roads and rail- ways, this stream hardly ever came to an end; but for every beaten and destroyed army, a new one arose. In- exhaustibly the gigantic realm continued to give the Czar new soldiers and the war new victims. How long would Germany be able to hold her own in this race? Was not the day to arrive when, after the last German victory, still not the last Russian armies would march up for the very last battle? And what then? In all human probability, a Russian victory could well be postponed, but it was bound to come. Now all these hopes were at an end; the ally who had THE REVOLUTION 257 laid down the greatest sacrifice in blood on the altar of common interests was at the end of his strength and was lying prostrate on the ground before the inexorable aggres- sor. Fear and horror crept into the hearts of the soldiers who hitherto had trusted blindly. One feared the coming spring. For, if so far one had not succeeded in breaking the German even though he was able to present himself only in part on the Western Front, how could one still count on a victory now that the entire power of this un- canny State of heroes seemed to concentrate itself for an attack of its own? The shadows of the South Tyrolean mountains cast gloom on the imagination : as far as into the fogs of Flanders the beaten armies of Cadorna conjured up dreary faces, and the confidence in the victory gave way before the fear of the coming defeat. There, when out of the cool nights one thought one already heard the monotonous rolling of advancing storm units of the German army, and when one started with oppressing fear at the coming judgment, suddenly a fierce red light flashed up in Germany and threw its rays as far as into the remotest shell hole of the enemy's front ;< at the moment when the German divisions received their last instructions for the great attack, the general strike broke out in Germany. At first the world was speechless. But then the hostile propaganda threw itself with sighs of relief upon this aid in the eleventh hour. Now at one blow the means was found with which one was able to raise the sinking confi- dence of the Allied soldiers, to make the probability of victory appear realizable again, and to turn the gloomy This is part of the famous 'stab in the back* theory of why Germany lost the War. A statement concerning this theory is appended to this chapter. S58 MEIN KAMPF fear of the coming events into determined confidence. Now the conviction that the decision about the end of this war would not be due to the daring of the German storm, but to their endurance in warding it off, could be given to the regiments, expecting the German attack, on their way to the greatest battle of all times. One could let the Germans win as many victories as they might want to; Revolution awaited its entry into their country and not the victorious army. Now British, French, and American papers began to plant again this belief into the hearts of their readers, while an infinitely skillful propaganda whipped up the troops on the front. 'Germany on the eve of Revolution. Victory of the Allies inevitable/ This was the best medicine in order to set the wavering poilu or Tommy on his feet once more. Now rifles and machine guns could be made to fire once more, and a rushing away in panicky flight was replaced by hopeful resistance. This was the result of the munitions strike. It strength- ened the hostile nation's confidence in victory and elimi- nated the paralyzing despair of the Allied front. But in the time that followed, thousands of German soldiers had to pay for this with their blood. The originators of the villainous act were the aspirants to the highest State posi- tions of revolutionary Germany. On the German side one was at first certainly able appar- ently to overcome the most visible reaction to this act, but on the side of the enemy the consequences soon became apparent. The resistance had lost the aimlessness of any army that considered everything as lost, and in its stead appeared the exasperation of a fight for victory. For in all human probability, victory was now bound to come if the Western Front resisted the German attack for only a few months. In the parliaments of the Entente, THE REVOLUTION 259 however, one recognized the possibilities of the future, and one granted unheard-of funds for the continuation of the propaganda for Germany's destruction. I had the good fortune to be able to join in the first two attacks and in the last one. These have become the most enormous impressions of my life; enormous for the reason that now for the last time, as in 1914, the fight lost its character of defense and assumed that of attack. A breath of relief passed along the trenches and posts of the German army, when finally, after more than three years of perseverance in the hostile inferno, the day of revenge approached. Once more the victorious battalions jubilated, and the last wreaths of immortal On March 21, 1918, the Germans launched an attack on the British Fifth Army along the Picardy front. The onslaught waa heaviest at the point where the English and French forces joined, and for some days it seemed as if the Fifth Army would be destroyed. But French reinforcements arrived in time to stem the tide. In April the Germans struck another blow farther to the north, and in the battle of Armentiftres imperiled Calais and other Channel ports. British losses were heavy, but Ludendorff failed to reach his objective. Thereupon, during the months of May and June, three attacks were made in the hope of encircling Paris. The Germans succeeded in crossing the Marne at Chateau-Thierry, but the Rheims salient held and therewith the German thrust had failed. On July 18, Marshal Foch began the series of successful counter-attacks that ended the War. There can be no doubt that Ludendorff 's offensives consti- tute one of the most brilliant and most futile military opera- tions in history. A magnificent German army, sure that it could end the conflict and cheered by the elimination of Russia, struck with a vigor that will forever honor its history. But the 260 MEIN KAMPF laurel hung themselves on the flags around which victory waved. Once more the songs of the fatherland roared up to the sky along the endless marching columns and for the last time the Lord's grace smiled down on his ungrate- ful children. * In the height of the summer of 1918 oppressive sultriness hovered over the front. At home one quarreled. What about? Many stories were told in the various units of the field army. Now the War was hopeless, and only fools were still able to believe in victory. The people no longer had an interest in holding out any further, but only Capital and the monarchy this news came from home and was also discussed on the front. At first it reacted only very moderately to this. What had we to do with universal suffrage? Was it perhaps for this that we had fought for four years? It was a mean act of banditry to steal in this way the aim of the War from the heroes dead in their graves. Not with the call, ' Long live universal suffrage and the secret ballot,' had the young regiments once marched towards death in Flanders, but with the cry, 'Deutschland uber dttes inder Welt.' A small but not quite unimportant difference. But those who called for the right to vote had for the greater part not been there where now they wanted to fight for this. The front did not know the whole pack of political parties. One saw only a fraction of the 'parliamentarian' gentlemen there wisdom of LudendorfFs strategy in these battles von Hin- denburg was little more than a moral force has been doubted by the best German students of military science. He had staked the future of Germany on a desperate gamble, using all available man-power and destroying every hope of reaching a peace by negotiation. THE REVOLUTION 261 where decent Germans stayed at that time, provided their limbs were only straight. The front in its old makeup was therefore only little susceptible to these new war aims of the Messrs. Ebert, Scheidemann, Earth, Liebknecht, etc. Also, one did not at all understand why these shirkers should now suddenly have the right to assume control of the State by going over the heads of the army. My personal attitude towards this was fixed from the beginning: I whole-heartedly hated the entire Jot of these wretched party rascals who betrayed the people. Long since I had clearly seen the fact that this gang were really not concerned with the welfare of the nation, but rather with filling their own empty pockets. But that even now they were ready to sacrifice the entire people to this pur- Hitler, as Heiden points out in a brilliant passage, is here describing what may have been the experience which shaped his own future. He did not question the right fulness of the kind of leadership then directing the destinies of Germany. The hard-headed tenacity with which Ludendorff clung to a war of conquest, the declaration of U-boat warfare in spite of the United States, the harshness of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the march through Belgium, the sacrifice of all moral prestige in the world all these things and more he was wholly willing to accept because they meant the extension of German power. But he saw that this military government and the caste which had supported it had failed to catch the ear of the people. Even the instruments of propaganda which the nationalists devised among them the Vatcrlandspartei (Fatherland Party) and its orators who accused every moderate German of high treason failed abysmally to do the necessary work. Personal contact with other soldiers had brought Hitler as little success as had his relations with Viennese workingmen. The rest avoided him, looked upon his formalistic fidelity to military routine as 'bootlicking;/ and laughed at his patriotic 262 MEIN KAMPF pose, and, if necessary, to let Germany go to the dogs, this, in my eyes, made them ripe for the rope. To consider their wishes would mean to sacrifice the interests of the working classes in favor of a number of sluggards; but one could fulfill them only if one was ready to give up Germany. These were still the thoughts of by far the majority of the fighting army. Only the reinforcements coming from home now rapidly became worse and worse, so that their arrival did not mean a strengthening, but rather a weaken- ing, of the fighting forces. The young reinforcements especially were for the greater part worthless. Often one could believe only with difficulty that these were supposed to be the sons of the same nation which once had sent its youth into the battle of Ypres. During August and September the symptoms of decay increased rapidly, although the effects of the enemy at- tacks could not be compared with the horrors of our defensive battles of some time ago. Compared with them, speeches. The reason was, he decided, that these men had been misled by 'democratic* propaganda. They really believed that the War was being fought for the sake of the nobles and the rich. To them electoral reform did mean something, and their labor organizations were matters of great import to them. No- body had made them realize that alj^uch things were of minor consequence compared with the aggrandizement of Germany. For that aggrandizement would mean the nation's enrichment and therewith prosperity and prestige. In Hitler's mind there ripened the decision to supply the missing contact between Pan-Germanism and democracy. He would talk to the people in their own language, but he would persuade them to adopt the Pan-German outlook. Now his ad- miration for Lueger, and his respect for Allied statesmen like Wilson and Lloyd George, bred in him the conviction that he would give Germany the benefit of a similar methodology. THE REVOLUTION 263 the Somme and Flanders battles were ghastly memories of the past. At the end of September my division for the third time came to those positions we once, as young volunteer regi- ments, had attacked. What a memory! t There, in October and November, 1914, we had received our baptism of fire. With the love for the fatherland in our hearts and with songs on our lips, our young regiment had marched into battle as to a dance. The most valuable blood gave itself up joyfully in the belief that it would guard the fatherland's independence and freedom. In July, 1917, we stepped for the second time on the soil that was sacred to us. For under it there slumbered the best comrades, almost children still, who once with beaming eyes had run into the arms of death for the only and dear fatherland ! Now we old ones, who once had marched out with the regiment, stood in reverential emotion on the soil of the oath for 'loyalty and obedience unto death/ This soil which our regiment had conquered by storm three years before, it had now to guard in a difficult de- fensive battle. With continuous drum fire for three weeks, the British prepared the great attack of Flanders. There the spirits of the dead seemed to come to life again ; the regiment clutched the dirty mud and fastened its grip into the individual holes and craters and did not give way and did not waver, and thus, as once before in this place, it became smaller and thinner in number, till finally on July 31, 1917, the English attack broke out. In the first days of August we were relieved. The regiment had been reduced to a few companies; these now made their way back, stumbling and encrusted with mud, more like ghosts than human beings. But apart 264 MEIN KAMPF from a few hundred meters of shell holes, the English had only gained death. << Now, in the fall of 1918, we stood for the third time on the soil of the storms of 1914. Our one-time resting place, Comines, had now become the battlefield. However, even though the battlefield was the same, the men had changed; now one also 'discussed polities' among the troops. The poison from home, as everywhere else, began to show its effect here also. The younger reinforcements, however, failed completely, they came from home. In the night from October 13 to October 14 the English began to throw gas on the southern front of Ypres; yellow- cross gas was being used, the effects of which were unknown to us so far as personal experience was concerned. I was to get to know it personally in this very night. On the eve of October 13, on a hill south of Wervick, we had come under a drum fire of gas shells, lasting several hours, which continued more or less violently throughout the entire night. Towards midnight a part of us passed out, some of our comrades forever. Towards morning I, too, was seized with pains which grew worse with every quarter hour, and at seven o'clock in the morning I stumbled and tottered rearwards with burning eyes, but taking with me my last report in the War. Already a few hours later the eyes had turned into burning coals; it had become dark around me. Thus I was brought into the hospital at Pasevalk in Pomerania and there I was to experience the greatest villainy of the century. Something uncertain and disgusting had hovered in the air for a long time. People told each other that during the coming weeks it would 'go off, 9 but I was not able to imagine what was to be understood by this. First of all THE REVOLUTION 265 I thought of a strike, similar to that of spring. Unfavorable rumors continued to come from the navy which was said to be in ferment. But also this appeared to me more a product of the imagination of various fellows than some* thing that concerned the masses. In the hospital, however, everybody hoped that the end of the War might come soon, but nobody counted on an 'immediately.' However, I was not able to read newspapers. During November the general tension increased. There one day suddenly and without warning the disaster came upon us. Sailors arrived on trucks and called out for the Revolution; a few Jew boys, however, were the 'leaders' in the fight that now started also here, the fight for 'free- dom/ 'beauty/ and 'dignity' of our people's existence. None of them had been at the front. By way of a so-called 'gonorrhoea-hospital 1 these three Orientals had been sent home from the base behind the front. Now they pulled up the red rag here. I had been somewhat better lately. The boring pain in the sockets of my eyes had diminished; gradually I suc- ceeded in learning to distinguish my surroundings in rough outlines; I could hope to regain my eyesight at least enough that later I would be able to take up some profession ; how- ever, I could no longer hope that I would ever again be able to draw; nevertheless I was on the way to improve- ment when the iponstrous event happened. My first hope was still that the high treason was nothing but a more or less local affair. I also tried to convince some of my comrades to that effect. Especially my Bava- rian comrades in the hospital were more than receptive to this. The mood was anything but ' revolutionary.' Further, I could not imagine that the lunacy would break out in Munich also. The loyalty towards the honorable House of Wittelsbach seemed to me to be stronger than the will of a few Jews. Thus I could but believe that this was only a 266 MEIN KAMPF putsch on the part of the navy which would be suppressed in the following days. The following days came, and with them the most ter- rible certainty of my life. The rumors became more and more depressing. What I had taken to be a local affair was now to be a general revolution. To this was added the shameful news from the front. One intended to capitulate. Why was something of that kind really possible? On November 10 the pastor came into the hospital for a short address; now we knew everything. In utmost excitement, I, too, was present during the short speech: The dignified old gentleman seemed to tremble very much when he told us that now the House of Hohenzollern was no longer allowed to wear the German imperial crown, that the country had now become a 're- public/ and that now one should ask the Almighty not to deny His blessings upon this change and not to abandon our people in the time to come. He certainly could not help it, but in a few words he had to remember the Royal House, he wanted to praise its merits in Pomerania, in Prussia, even in the entire country and there he began to weep silently; but in the small hall deepest depression seized all hearts, and I believe that not one eye was able to hold back the tears. But then as the old gentleman tried to continue and began to tell us that now we had to end the long war, that even our fatherland would now be sub- mitted to severe oppressions in the future, that now the War was lost and that we had to surrender to the mercy of the victors . . , that the armistice should be accepted with confidence in the generosity of our previous enemies . . . there I could stand it no more. It was impossible for me to stay any longer. While everything began to go black again before my eyes, stumbling, I groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my cot and buried my burning head in the covers and pillows. THb REVOLUTION 267 I had not wept since the day I had stood at the grave of my mother. Whenever during my youth Fate handled me roughly, my stubbornness grew; when thereafter, dur- ing the long years of the War, Death called more than one of my dear comrades or friends from our ranks, to me it would have seemed almost a sin to complain. They died for Germany! And even when, during the last days of the terrible struggle, the creeping gas attacked me too and began to eat into my eyes, and when, under the impact of the shock of fear of becoming blind forever, I was about to despair for a moment, the voice of Conscience thundered at me: Miserable wretch, you want to cry while thousands are a hundred times worse off than you; then I bore my fate apathetically and silently. But now I could not help it any longer, only now I saw how completely all personal grief disappears in the face of the fatherland's disaster. Now all had been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and deprivations, in vain the hunger and thirst of endless months, in vain the hours during which, gripped by the fear of death, we nevertheless did our duty, and in vain the death of two millions who died thereby. Would not the graves of all the hundreds of thousands open up, the graves of those who once had marched out with faith in the fatherland, never to return? Would they not open up and send the silent heroes, covered with mud and blood, home as spirits of revenge, to the country that had so mockingly cheated them of the highest sacrifice which in this world man is able to bring to his people? Was it for this that they had died, the soldiers of August and Sep- tember, 1914, was it for this that the regiments of volun- teers followed the old comrades in the fall of the same year? Was it for this that boys of seventeen sank into Flanders Fields? Was that the meaning of the sacrifice which the German mother brought to the fatherland when in those days, with an aching heart, she let her most b*- 268 MEIN KAMPF loved boys go away, never to aee them again? Was it all for this that now a handful of miserable criminals was allowed to lay hands on the fatherland? Was it for this that the German soldier had persevered in burning sun and in snowstorms, suffering hunger, thirst, and cold, tired by sleepless nights and endless marches? Was it for this that he had lain in the hell of drum fire and in the fever of gas attacks, without receding, always his sole duty in mind, to guard the fatherland against the distress from the enemy? Truly, these heroes too deserve a memorial : 'Wanderer, ye who come to Germany, announce to the homeland that we are lying here, loyal to the fatherland and faithful to duty/ And the homeland? Was it only our own sacrifice which we had to throw into the balance? Was the Germany of the past worthless? Was there not also an obligation towards our own history? Were we still worthy of applying the fame of the past to us also? How was this deed to be submitted to the future for justification? Wretched and miserable criminals! The more I tried to clarify this terrible event in that hour, the stronger burned the shame of indignation and dishonor on my forehead. What was now all the pain of my eyes as compared with this misery? What now followed were terrible days and even worse nights. Now I knew that everything was lost. Only fools or liars and criminals were able to hope for the mercy of the enemy. In those nights my hatred arose, the hatred against the originators of this deed. In days that followed, I became aware of my own destiny. Now I had to laugh at the thought of my own future, which until recently had worried me so much. Was it not ridicu- lous to wish to build houses on such ground? Finally it THE REVOLUTION 269 also became clear to me that what happened was only what I had feared so long, and which my feelings had not been able to believe. Kaiser Wilhelm II was the first German Emperor who extended his hand to the leaders of Marxism without guess- ing that scoundrels are without honor. While they were still holding the imperial hand in their own, the other was feeling for the dagger. With the Jews there is no bargaining, but only the hard either or. I, however, resolved now to become a politician. It is important to note that Hitler's hatred was not directed primarily at the Treaty of Versailles. That was a mere minor detail a peace similar to what Germany would have dic- tated had it been victorious. National life is the expression of the law of the survival of the fittest; only fools like Kurt Eisner would have it otherwise. The horrible, the detestable, thing was that Germany had lost the War. Lost it, so ran the ex- planation, because of sabotage from within. Therewith the notion that Germany had been stabbed in the back became of primary political importance. Some time after the War, General Sir Neill Malcolm was dining with Ludendorff in Berlin, listening to Ludendorff main- tain that he had failed to win the War because of lack of sup- port from the government. ' Do you mean you were stabbed in the back?' the Englishman asked. 'Yes,' was the eager reply, 'stabbed in the back! 1 This version of the affair was then offered by von Hindenburg when he appeared before the Com- mittee of Enquiry which the Reichstag had appointed to find out why the War was lost. Speaking on November 18, 1919, the Marshal declared that the Revolution had only been the Mast straw* in a systematic process of undermining the army and that it had been on the testimony of British generals 'stabbed in the back.' (Cf. The Wooden Titan, by John W. Wheeler-Bennett.) The appointment of this committee had been necessitated bv 870 MEIN KAMPF debates which had deeply stirred the German Constitutional Assembly at Weimar. Nationalists, led by Karl Helfferich (war-time Minister of Finance), had denounced Matthias Erzberger, who signed the armistice, as a traitor to his country. Erzberger replied in bitter speeches which for the first time tore the mask from the methods employed by the High Command during the War. He accused Ludendorff of having undermined every effort to reach a peace by compromise, and in particulai of having looked upon the entry of the United States into the conflict as a mere bagatelle. Had not Helfferich said that Wil- son was just in time to pay the bills Germany had run up for military supplies? The effect of Erzberger's speeches was tre- mendous. Delegates screamed and wept aloud as the fiery or- ator attacked Pan-Germanism as the cause of national dis- aster. Thereafter the issue became one of central importance in the nation's political life. Immediately a campaign to ruin Erzberger was started by Helfferich, and as a result he was compelled to retire from public life. Neither the Centrists nor the Social Democrats realized at the time how great a blow the Republican cause had suffered ; and even when Erzberger was assassinated by a group of fanatics, the import of what had happened was clear only to a few. Soon the charge that every member of the Republican government was a 'November criminal* was being made in a great variety of nationalist journals or pamphlets; and a wave of political murders swept over the country. The Commission of Enquiry heard a great deal of testimony, which is enshrined in many volumes, but reached few conclusions. The prestige of the generals was still so great that few were in a position to challenge their authority. Perhaps the major result was that a vigorous critique of General Ludendorff s military policy in 1918 was read into the record, Professor Hans Delbrueck con- tending that every canon of the soldier's science had been violated. It was proved that when the offensives of that year were begun, the army had been in excellent condition, and that the supply of matirid de guerre was more than adequate. But on August 8 it had suffered a defeat described by Ludendorff as THE REVOLUTION 271 the 'black day in German history. 9 A few days later, the Kaiser discussed the situation with his generals and concluded : 1 1 see, we must add up accounts. We have arrived at the limit of our energies. The War must be stopped.' But on August 13 Ludendorff insisted to the Chancellor, Count von Hertling, that Germany could accept no peace that did not conserve German rights in Belgium and Poland ; and on the next day, at a Crown Council in Spa, he stated that the proper moment to sue for peace would have arrived as soon as he had won another victory on the western front. By the middle of September, however, the Austrians were suing for peace and the Mace- donian front had collapsed. On the 2ist of the same month, Ludendorff requested the German government to sound out the United States concerning peace, and followed this seven days later with a statement to the effect that the German situ- ation was so desperate that no further delay was possible. The effect of this precipitate action was that the government, com- pletely taken by surprise, was half out of its wits; and a new chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, was appointed. This change was made in accordance with the belief of the Foreign Office that only a 'democratic* government could successfully ap- proach President Wilson. Unfortunately the Social Democrats now made a serious blunder. They refused to enter a govern- ment in which the Conservative Party was represented a stipulation which was later, of course, to give that party a chance to throw all blame on the other groups. While the new chancellor was endeavoring to sound out the Allies, Ludendorff again intervened to say that at any moment the enemy might break through and that therefore a request for an armistice must be despatched immediately. The chan- cellor insisted that time was needed to negotiate acceptable terms, again Ludendorff countered, and thereupon the first armistice note was despatched to Wilson on October 3. Hin- denburg's letter describing the military situation, dated Sep- tember 29, attributed the crisis to the breakdown of the Mace- donian front and the inability to get troop replacements. When Walter Rathenau suggested, in the Vossische Zeitung, a levie en masse as the only way out, Ludendorff replied that this would do more harm than good. 272 MEIN KAMPF But after an exchange of notes between the State Depart- ment of the United States and the German government had shown that the only terms Wilson was willing to grant were harsh, Ludendorff changed his mind and declared that a levie m masse might be resorted to, after all. But the government now felt that the German people would not understand such a change of face, that a revolution was imminent, and that at- tempted resistance would only make matters worse. Luden- dorff handed in his resignation. He was succeeded by General Wilhelm Gr6ner, who saw at once that further resistance was out of the question. On November 8, the Kaiser was advised to abdicate. It is, therefore, apparent that Ludendorff was sure the War had been lost before any revolutionary movement had broken out in Germany. This view is confirmed by all who, on the Allied side, knew the situation that existed between Septem- ber 29 and November 8. As a matter of fact, the American commanders were so certain that a triumphal march on to Berlin would cost relatively little that some of them accepted the armistice with bad grace. Marshal Foch has often been severely criticized (e.g., by General Mordacq) for the 'human- itarianism' which induced him to end the struggle before the German border was reached. German deficiencies in supplies, man-power, and armament were so marked that, despite the stubbornness with which picked troops defended themselves, any other outcome than the utter rout of the German army was unthinkable. In addition the collapse of Austria and the break- down of Bulgaria opened the way for an advance into southern Germany. The major reasons why Germany lost the War are seen as inherent in the nature of the political action she sponsored. On this virtually all non-German students are agreed. The only real military issues are these : whether a different handling of the battle of the Marne might not have led to the speedy defeat of France, and whether Ludendorff could have won the Flanders battles of 1918 if he had taken additional troops out of Russia. Neither query is answerable. But these facts con- cerning the political situation are established: the march THE REVOLUTION 273 through Belgium forced Britain to enter the War; the insistence upon unrestricted U-boat warfare in 1917 induced the United States to enter the conflict; and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk may have dissuaded (cf. The Forgotten Peacv, by John W. Wheeler-Bennett) President Wilson from trying to reach a peace with Germany on the basis of the 'Fourteen Points.* One may add a number of minor political misadven- tures: the fantastically mismanaged attempt to obtain Polish support by setting up a vassal kingdom of Poland; the murder of Edith Cavell ; the bombing of London ; the contemptuous at- titude adopted towards the Austrians; and the strange maneu- vers of Colonel von Papen in Washington. Those who deny the validity of these contentions and they include all Germans who cherish some fondness for the Pan-German program maintain that if so magnificent an army failed under such leadership to win the War, the reason can only lie within Germany itself. In essence, the credibility of such a view must be sought in the realm of idea rather than in that of fact. The Prussian war machine was created to be the ideally perfect instrument of national action. If everything that could render it in practice what it was in theory had been done, it could not have been defeated. For what is absolutely right in conception must also be absolutely right in practice. The realm of the real is only the logical counterpart of the realm of the ideal. This conception of the army of 1914 is at the back of many German minds; and a similar attitude of mind is at the bottom of the doubts entertained by many about the army of 1938. They would not argue that France has a poorer or better army than Germany's, but only that the German army has defects. Now what was wrong with the German instrument during the War? The answer is that, as a result of Marxist agitation, germs of sabotage were introduced into the German system which developed into veritable cancers; and that, as a conse- quence of the 'pacifism' which formed part of the normal bourgeois outlook, large sections of the public were victims of the dishonest alien propaganda dispensed by President Wilson ahd others. Evidence to support these contentions was ad- 874 MEIN KAMPF vanced on three important occasions during the history of the Weimar Republic; the controversy between Erzberger and Helfferich during 1919; the Magdeburg Trial of December, 1924, when President Friederich Ebert defended himself against a reactionary journalist's assertions that he had committed high treason by helping to organize the Munitions Strike of 1918; and the Munich 'Stab in the Back' Trial, conducted during October and November, 1925, at which leading Social Democrats were the plaintiffs. It is impossible to do more here than summarize very briefly the facts and surmisals then advanced. The charge against Erzberger was that by sponsoring the Peace Resolution of 1917, which disclaimed any desire by Germany to annex territory or to hold other peoples under economic tutelage, he had under- mined the belief of the German people in ultimate victory and therewith weakened their morale. President Ebert was ac- cused of having sought to end the War by depriving the army of needed munitions; and his enemies insisted that all along he and his fellow-Marxists had waited for the chance to spring at the throat of a fatherland left prostrate before the enemy. The Munich Trial was far more important because the whole question of Social Democratic attitudes during and immediately after the War was threshed out. Sensational testimony was offered by General Gr6ner and others. The Erzberger case may be dismissed; for though it was of great importance to the history of the Weimar Republic, it offers nothing to substantiate the 'stab in the back' theory. The Reichstag Resolution failed to affect the conduct of the War either at home or abroad, and nothing Erzberger did checked in the least either Ludendorff's dictatorial policy or the flan of the army. The second and third cases are more perti- nent. As a matter of fact, the Minority (Independent) So- cialists did refuse, as the War went on, to vote the necessary credits to continue the conflict; a few of them maintained rela- tions with dissatisfied sailors, who then provoked the mutiny of 1918 which halted the German navy's projected sensational last-minute attack on the British fleet; and a number were in- volved both in the Munitions Strike and in the revolutionary THE REVOLUTION 275 activities which led to open revolt in November. Moreover, the extreme Spartacist movement, which during the War pub- lished subversive literature and which afterward led to the establishment of the Communist Party, was led by former Socialists among whom Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were the most important. It is therefore possible to say that opposition to the War did exist inside Germany, and that efforts were made to awaken in the masses a spirit of resistance to the Kaiser and the High Command. Liebknecht did obtain world-wide prominence for his pacifistic utterances, which no parliamentarian in any Al- lied country duplicated. Yet one notes immediately that the anti-war movement was utterly insignificant until late in 1918, when the half -starved population lost all hope of victory. The effects of the blockade were horrible and the physical health as well as the morale of Germany suffered greatly. When in history has a people been called upon to shoulder a heavier bur- den, and when has one responded to the summons with such astounding patience? Yet none of the agents of subversive activity helped to form the government of November, 1918. The men who undertook that difficult task knew exactly what they were doing. The Social Democrats had debated a long while before assenting to a suggestion that came from the High Command and the Foreign Office. Some of the ablest among them were certain that to accept responsibility under such circumstances would later on mean being charged with the defeat and its conse- quences. Ebert took up the Chancellor's duties on the basis of a secret understanding with the generals, as Groner explained at the Munich Trial. Neither he nor his fellows wanted the Revolution. The Republic was proclaimed, a little hastily, by Philip Scheidemann in order to forestall Liebknecht's declara- tion to the same effect. The Minority Socialists were, of course, far more pacifistic and revolutionary. Yet even the leading members of this group were stunned by the sudden collapse of the nation and were not prepared to deal with the situation thus created. The most serious blot on the national escutcheon was the 276 MEIN KAMPF mutiny in Wilhelmshaven on October 30. This was preceded by scattered instances of insubordination to some of which politi- cal intent was ascribed. Yet the situation was peculiar. Peace negotiations were under way; the abdication of the Kai- ser had been demanded ; and still the men were ordered to get ready for a sudden sortie which was virtual suicide. Therefore they had a certain right to assume that their own commanders were guilty of insubordination, and could justify their conduct accordingly. At any rate the navy had done its duty for four years; and to attribute Germany's loss of the War to their sabotage of a romantic and desperate maneuver is to strain credulity to the breaking point. CHAPTER VIII BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITY AT THE end of November, 1918, I came back to Munich. I went again to join the reserve battalion of my regiment which was now in the hands of 'Soldiers' Councils.' The entire business disgusted me to such a degree that I decided at once to go away again if possible. Together with my faithful war comrade, Schmiedt Ernst, I now came to Traunstein and remained there till the camp was broken up. In March, 1919, we again returned to Munich. Hitler, with no home to which to return he had been out of touch with his family for years walked to Munich, and arrived there shortly after the murder of Kurt Eisner, who had headed the revolution that had driven the Wittelsbachs from their thrones and had then up to the time of his assassina- tion by Count Arco- Valley been Prime Minister of Bavaria. Eisner, a Jew and not a native Bavarian, was an idealist who had been jailed during the War for writing pacifist tracts. The account of his reign reads like a fairy tale. Refusing to curb free speech or to put through any rash socialization measures, he set about attempting to prove to the Allies that Germany's workers fully acknowledged the guilt of the former Imperial government in starting the War and were therefore entitled to 278 MEIN KAMPF The situation was untenable and urged necessarily towards a further continuation of the Revolution. Eisner's death only hastened developments and led finally to the Soviet dictatorship, or, in other terms, to a temporary reign of the Jews as it had been originally intended by the originators of the whole revolution. In those days endless plans chased each other in my head. For days I pondered what could be done at all, but the end of all reflections was always the sober conclusion a just peace. In addition he proved himself a violent Bavarian particularist, and gave his government an artistic setting by staging festivals at which orchestral overtures preceded his addresses. The Eisner regime was succeeded by a Socialist government which in turn was driven out of Munich by a 'Soviet dictator- ship. 9 This did little except watch the various factions which comprised it fight one another. Just previously Sovietism had triumphed in Hungary; and not a few intellectuals were now of the opinion that the Russian idea was about to conquer the world. Several Moscow agents appeared in Munich, and two of them were Jewish. In addition a couple of unworldly Jew- ish poets, Ernst Toller and Gustav Landauer, joined the new movement. This extraordinary revolution, which the Munich citizenry welcomed as they would the plague, did irreparable damage to the cause of labor by murdering ten hostages, mem- bers of a Rightist secret society. In addition Jewish participa- tion in it opened the doors to anti-Semitic agitation. Angered and embittered citizens were now willing to ascribe all evils to the Hebrew race. Eisner's example had encouraged other dreamers to think that they, too, could renew the face of the earth. Government troops were sent to restore order in Munich. They were joined by a number of volunteer military organiza- tions, and on May 2, 1919, took the city after a stiff fight. Frightful vengeance was taken. Some estimates place the num- ber of those shot with or without court-martial at more than a BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITY 279 that I, as one without name, did not possess even the least presupposition for any useful activity. I will speak latei on of the reasons for which even then I could not make up my mind to join one of the existing parties. In the course of the Councils' Revolution I acted for the first time in a manner which invoked the displeasure of the Central Council. On April 27, 1919, early in the morn- ing, I was supposed to be arrested; but in facing the rifle I presented, the three fellows lacked the necessary courage and marched away in the same manner in which they had come. A few days after the liberation of Munich, I was sum- moned to join a commission for the examination of the events of the Revolution in the Second Infantry Regiment. This was my first more or less purely political activity. thousand. Poor Landauer was among those slain. Therewith Bavaria became what it had never previously been the most reactionary part of Germany. Inside its borders, Rightist rebels against the Republic, putschists and patriotic assassins found refuge. No doubt the major cause of the whole sad affair was the mur- der of Eisner. He was on his way to the Bavarian Landtag, and would there have turned over the government to the Majority Socialists, when he was felled; and some of his followers, not knowing what forces were responsible, committed other mur- ders that led to desperate and fateful strife between the factions which alone could govern. To Count Arco- Valley, whom he imprisoned in 1933, Hitler owes a debt he can never repay. The earliest reports concerning Hitler's political activities arc interesting. He was housed in barracks with a number of ' Red ' soldiers. When the army took the city, these barracks were seized, Hitler was first called aside, and then every tenth man was shot. The inference is that he was already in the service of the army. 880 MEIN KAMPF A few weeks later I was given orders to take part in a 'course' which was being held for the members of the army. There the soldier was to receive certain foundations of civic education. For me the value of the whole performance lay in the fact that now I was given the possibility of be- coming acquainted with some comrades who were of the same conviction and with whom I would then be able to discuss thoroughly the situation of the moment. All of us were more or less firmly convinced that Germany could no longer be saved from the approaching collapse by the parties of the November crime, the Center Party and Social Democracy, but that even the so-called 'bourgeois national' formations would never be able to remedy this despite their best intentions. Here quite a series of assump- tions were lacking, without which such a task could not succeed. The time that followed proved our opinions of those days to be right. Thus in our small circle one discussed the formation of a new party. The basic ideas which we had in mind thereby were the same which were realized later on by the 'German Workers' Party.' The name of the new move- ment to be founded was to offer, from the beginning, the possibility of approaching the great masses; for without these qualities the whole work seemed senseless and super- fluous. Therefore we arrived at the name 'Social-Revolu- tionary' Party; this for the reason that the social ideas of the new foundation indeed meant a revolution. He became one of the group of soldiers selected to receive in- struction in methods of 'political enlightenment.' Such courses were normal in many parts of Germany during the period of Reichswehr reorganization. Cf. Gen. L. R. G. Maercker, Vom Kaiserheer zur Reichswehr (From the Imperial Army to the Reich Army). Early biographers state that Hitler almost im- mediately attracted attention. BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITY 281 But the deeper cause for this was found in the following: No matter how much I had occupied myself even previ- ously with economic problems, this had always remained more or less within the limits which resulted from consider- ing social questions in themselves. Only later this frame expanded in consequence of my examining the German policy of alliances. The latter was to a great extent the result of a wrong estimation of economics, as well as the confusion about the possible bases of a feeding of the German people in the future. But all these thoughts were still rooted in the opinion that capital in every case was only the result of labor and, therefore, like the latter, was subject to the correction of all those factors which are either able to stimulate or to hinder human activity. Therein was supposed to be found also the national importance of capital, as capital itself in turn was supposed to depend so entirely upon the greatness of the State's, that is, the nation's, liberty and power; that this relation alone was bound to lead to an advancement of the State and the nation on the part of capital out of the mere urge for self- preservation or increase. This dependency of capital upon the independent and free State forces it also in its turn to stand up for this freedom, power, strength, etc., of the nation. Therefore, the State's task towards capital was com- paratively simple and clear: it had only to take care that the latter remained the servant of the State and did not pretend to be the master of the nation. This attitude, therefore, could confine itself within two borderlines: preser- vation of a prosperous national and independent economy on the one hand, securing social rights of workers on the other. In previous times I was not yet able to recognize the difference between this capital as purely the ultimate result of creative labor as compared with a capital the existence 282 MEIN KAMPF and nature of which rests exclusively on speculation. For this I lacked the first stimulation, for it had not come to me. This now was carried out thoroughly by one of the various gentlemen, lecturing in the course already men- tioned : Gottfried Feder. For the first time in my life I now heard a discussion, in principle, of the international exchange and loan capital. Immediately after I had listened to Feder's first lecture, the idea flashed through my mind that now at last I had found the way to one of the most essential principles for the foundation of a new party. In my eyes, Feder's merit was that he outlined, with ruthless brutality, the character of the stock exchange and Gottfried Feder, engineer born in Wtirzburg, was one of many persons moved by the disarray of post- War national economy to solve the monetary problem. In the United States he would doubtless have urged the coinage of silver at a ratio of 32 to I. 'Breaking the slavery of interest is,' he declared, 'the steel axle round which everything turns.' The meaning is: instead of taking up loans when it needs money, the govern- ment should, when undertaking public works, issue treasury certificates of the same value as the value of the structures erected. Thus, for example, a gas plant would be worth, say, $1,000,000. This value the government could then transmute into certificates. Opponents pointed out that Feder erred in assuming that money in circulation was covered by real values inside the country. Feder's most elaborate exposition of the point, which he maintained was his most original contribution to Party doctrine, is contained in his Brechung der Zinsknecht- schaft. Goebbels' verdict on the book is interesting but un- translatable: 'Brcchcn muss dabei nur dcr, der diesen Unsinn lesen muss.' Other Nazis also attacked Feder, but the Party never officially repudiated him. After 1933, however, he was BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITY 283 loan capital that was harmful to economy, and that he exposed the original and eternal presupposition of interest. His arguments were so correct in all fundamental questions that those who criticized them from the beginning denied less the theoretical correctness of the idea but rather the practical possibility of its execution. But what in the eyes of the others was a weakness of Feder's arguments was in my eyes their strength. fThe task of a program-maker is not to state the various degrees of a matter's realizability, but to demonstrate the matter as such ; that means, he has to care less for the way but more for the goal. Hereby an idea's correctness in principle is decisive and not the difficulty of its execution. relegated to a minor r&le. When Hitler began to make impor- tant friends, his adviser in financial matters became Dr. Paul Bang, an intimate friend of Dr. Hugenberg's and one of the directors of the Alldcutschcr Verband. After 1933 Dr. Hjalmar Schacht was installed as the official wizard, to be replaced in 1938 by Walther Funk. The best brief commentary on the significance of these mat- ters for National Socialist propaganda we have seen was writ- ten by Alfred Braunthal for Die Gcsellschaft, Vol. VII, nr. 12. (Decomer 1930). 'The National Socialist movement has had two peaks the first half of 1924, and the fall of 1930. At both times there existed a peculiar economic situation. The first half of 1924 was the time when the stabilization crisis was at its worst. Interest rates were fantastically high in the money market. During January the rate was between 90 and 100 per cent, sinking then in July to "only " 20 per cent. At the same time, however, the Reichsbank discount rate was only 10 per cent. Thereupon everything depended upon whether one had good banking connections and could, by using these, get to the Reichsbank and its cheap credits. The life and death of an enterprise was in the hands of the bank. 284 MEIN KAMPF As soon as the program-maker tries to take into account the 'useful reality* instead of absolute truth, his work will cease to be a pole star for inquiring mankind, becomes instead a prescription for everyday life. He who draws up the program of a movement has to fix its goal, the politician has to aim towards the fulfillment of the goal. Therefore, the one's thinking is governed by eternal truth, the other's activity more by practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one is founded in the absolute and abstract correctness of his idea, that of the other in the right attitude towards given facts and their useful application, whereby the aim of the program-maker has to serve as his leading star. While a politician's plans and acts that means their becoming reality may be looked upon as the touchstone for his importance, the program-maker's ultimate intention can never be realized, as the human mind is well able to grasp facts of truth and to establish crystal-clear goals, but their complete execution will necessarily fail because of the general human incompleteness and inadequacy. The more abstractly right and therefore powerful this idea may be, the more impossible remains its complete fulfill- ment as long as it depends on human beings. Therefore the program-maker's importance must not be measured by 'In 1930 also the interest rates for long-term credits were, despite the depression, almost as high as they had been during the boom period (when the rates were unduly high even for such times). And again the Reichsbank discount rates were much lower. Therefore the producers of consumers' goods and the merchants (by reason of their inventories) suffered under the heaviest interest burden, in relation to the general economic situation, during 1924 and 1930. The middle classes naturally felt it most, since its members could less easily find the way to the sources of credit. For this reason the middle classes turned with pleasure in such periods to a movement which promised to "break the slavery of interest." ' BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITY 285 the fulfillment of his aims, but rather by their correctness and the influence which they have taken on in the develop- ment of mankind. If it were different, one could not count the founders of religions among the greatest men on this earth, since the fulfillment of their ethical intentions can never be even a nearly complete one. Even the religion of love, in its effects, is only a weak reflection of the volition of its sublime founder; but its importance is to be sought in the orientation which it tried to give to a cultural, ethical, and moral development in general. The extremely great difference in the tasks of the pro- gram-maker and the politician is also the reason why a combination of both in one person is almost never to be found. This may be said especially of the so-called ' success- ful ' small politicians whose activity is for the most part only an 'art of the possible 9 as Bismarck described, somewhat modestly, politics in general. The freer such a 'politician* keeps himself from great ideas, the easier and frequently also the more visible, yet always faster, will his successes be. Of course, they are thereby also subject to worldly evanes- cence and sometimes they do not outlive the death of their fathers. The work of such politicians is, on the whole, un- important for posterity, since their successes in the present are based only on warding off all really great and incisive problems and ideas, which as such would also have been of value for coming generations. The execution of such aims as are of value and importance for the distant future brings little reward to him who de- fends them and finds little understanding with the great masses who, at the first, understand enactments concerning beer and milk better than farseeing plans for the future, the execution of which could arrive only later on, but the use- fulness of which would be of value only to posterity. Thus, out of a certain vanity which is always a relative of stupidity, the great mass of all politicians will keep away 286 MEIN KAMPF from all really difficult plans for the future, in order not to lose the sympathy of the mob of the present. The success and the importance of such politicians are to be found, therefore, exclusively in the present and they do not exist for posterity. For little minds this is not embarrassing ; they are content with this. With the program-maker the situation is different. His importance lies always almost exclusively in the future, as not infrequently he is what is described by the words 'se- cluded from the world.' For, if the politician's art may be looked upon really as an art of the possible, then the pro- gram-maker may be counted among those of whom it is said that the gods like them only if they ask for, and desire, the impossible. Nearly always he will have to renounce the recognition of the present, but in turn he will harvest, provided his ideas are immortal, the fame of posterity. During long periods of human life it thus may sometime happen that the politician unites with the program-maker. But the closer this amalgamation is, the greater are the obstacles which resist the politician's work. Then he works no longer for the requirements which are clear to any philis- tine, but for aims which are understood only by few. There- fore his life is torn between love and hate. The protest of the present, which does not understand this man, wrestles with the acknowledgment of posterity for which, after all, he works. For the greater a man's works for the future are, the less is the present able to understand them, and the more diffi- cult also is the fight and the more rare the success. But if, nevertheless, in the course of centuries one man succeeds in this, then he may perhaps, in his later years, be surrounded by a faint glimmer of the coming glory. But these great ones are only the marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present only just touches the temples of the dying hero. BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITY 28? But among them must be counted the great fighters in this world, those who, although not understood by their time, are nevertheless ready to fight the battle for their ideas and ideals. They are those who once will be nearest to the heart of the people; it almost seems as though everyone would then feel it his duty now to make good in the present what the past had once sinned against the great. Their life and work is followed in touchingly grateful admiration, and especially in gloomy days, it will be able to uplift broken hearts and despairing souls. These, however, are not only the really great statesmen, but also all other great reformers. Side by side with Fred- erick the Great stands a Martin Luther as well as a Richard Wagner. < When listening to Gottfried Feder's first lecture about the * Breaking of the Tyranny of Interest,' I knew immediately that the question involved was a theoretical truth which would reach enormous importance for the German people's future. The sharp separation of the stock exchange capital from the national economy offered the possibility of fighting the internationalization of German economic life, without threatening with the fight against capital in general, also the > l>asis of an independent folk autonomy. Germany's de- velopment already stood before my eyes too clearly for me not to know that the hardest battle had to be fought, not against hostile nations, but rather against international cap- ital. In Feder's lecture I sensed a powerful slogan for this coming fight. But here, too, the later development proved how correct our feeling of those days was. Today we are no longer laughed at by the sly-boots of our bourgeois politicians; today even they, provided they are not conscious liars, see that the international stock exchange capital was not only the great instigator of war, but that just now, after the fight has been ended, it does not refrain from turning peace into hell. 888 MEIN KAMPF The fight against international finance and loan capital has become the most important point in the program of the German nation's fight for its independence and freedom. But as regards the objections of the so-called 'practi- cians/ one can give the following answer: all your fears about the terrible economic consequences of carrying out the 'breaking of the tyranny of interest' are superfluous; because, first of all, the prescriptions you gave the German people so far have not done it any good at all; your attitude towards the questions of national autonomy remind us very much of the reports of similar experts of times past, for example of the Bavarian Medical Board on occasion of the question of introducing the railroads; it is well known that all the fears of this venerable corporation of those days were never justified; the passengers in the trains of the new 'steam horse' did not become dizzy, the spectators, too, were not taken ill, and one abandoned the wooden fences for making the new institution invisible; only the wooden fence in the head of all the so-called 'experts' was preserved for posterity. Secondly, however, one should remember the following: every and even the best idea becomes a danger as soon as it pretends to be an end in itself, but in reality only represents a means to an end; but for myself and all true National Socialists there is only one doctrine: people and country. What we have to fight for is the security of the existence and The meaning of 'international capital' at this time was 'capitalistic England. 1 Party philosophers saw in perfidious Albion a spider in a counting-house. With the help of smaller Jewish spiders, it had enmeshed Germany in its net and de- voured it. France was looked upon as a mere tool in the hands of the London 'City.' Gradually the term took on other mean- ings: the authors of the Dawes and Young Plans, investors in German bonds, and great speculators like Ivan Kreuger. BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITY 289 the increase of our race and our people, the nourishment of its children and the preservation of the purity of the blood, the free- dom and independence of the fatherland in order to enable our people to mature for the fulfillment of the mission which the Creator of the universe has allotted also to them. Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, have to serve this purpose. From this point of view everything has to be examined and to be employed or to be rejected according to its usefulness. Thus no theory can stiffen into a mortal doctrine, since everything serves only for life. Gottfried Feder's conclusions, however, were the cause which made me occupy myself thoroughly with this domain which had hitherto been little familiar to me. Now I began to learn again, and now for the first time I came to the understanding of the contents and the meaning of the life-work of the Jew Karl Marx. Only now his ' Cap- ital f became really comprehensible to me, as well as Social Democracy's fight against the national economy, the aim of which is to prepare the ground for its domination of the truly international finance and stock exchange capital. But these courses had the greatest effective consequence in still another direction. One day I wanted to speak in the discussion. One of the participants thought it his duty to enter the lists for the Jews, and he began to defend them in lengthy arguments. This aroused me to reply. An overwhelming number of the pupils who were present were of my point of view. The result was that a few days later I was ordered to report to one of the erstwhile Munich regiments as a so-called 'in- struction officer.' In those days the discipline among the troops was still rather weak. It suffered from the after-effects of the period 290 MEIN KAMPF of Soldiers' Councils. Only very slowly and cautiously could one change over to introducing, instead of the 'volun- tary' obedience as one so nicely named the pigsty under the rule of Kurt Eisner military discipline and subordi- nation. In the same way the unit was now to learn to feel and to think in terms of nation and fatherland. In these two directions lay the domains of my new activity. I started full of ambition and love. For thus I was at once offered the opportunity to speak before a large audi- ence; and what previously I had always presumed, merely out of pure feeling without knowing it, occurred now: I could 'speak.' My voice also had already improved so much that I could be heard sufficiently at least in the small squad rooms. No other task could make me happier than this one, because now I was able, even before my discharge, to render useful services to that institution which had been infinitely near to my heart, the army. Also, I could speak of some success. I thus led back many hundreds, probably even thousands, in the course of my lectures to their people and fatherland. I 'nationalized' the troops, and in this way I was able also to help to strengthen the general discipline. Again I became thereby acquainted with a number of comrades with the same convictions who later began to form the basic stock of the new movement. CHAPTER IX THE GERMAN WORKERS 1 PARTY ONE day I received orders from my headquarters to find out what was behind an apparently political society which, under the name of ' German Workers' Party,' intended to hold a meeting on one of the following days, in which also Gottfried Feder was supposed to speak; I was to go there and to look at the society and to report upon it. One could easily understand the curiosity which in those days the army showed towards political parties. Revolu- tion had bestowed the right of political activity on the sol- dier, and now those of them who were least experienced made ample use of it. Only in the moment when the Center Party and Social Democracy had to realize, to their regret, that the soldiers' sympathy began to turn away from the revolutionary parties towards the national movement and resurrection, one saw fit to deprive the soldiers again of the right of franchise and to forbid political activity. It was, therefore, clear that the Center Party and Marx- ism took up this measure, for, if one had not undertaken this curtailment of 'civil rights' (as one called the political equality of the soldier before the Revolution), there would have been no revolution a few years later, and therefore also no further national degradation and dishonor. In 292 MEIN KAMPF those days the troops were well on the way towards reliev- ing the nation of its bloodsuckers and the Entente's handy- men in the interior. That now also the so-called 'national 9 parties voted enthusiastically for the correction of the pre- vious opinions of the November criminals, and thus helped to render innocuous the instrument of the national rising, only shows where the purely doctrinary ideas of these most harmless of the harmless could lead to. The bourgeoisie, which was really suffering from mental senility, was, in all sincerity, of the opinion that now the army would again become what it had been, namely, a stronghold of German fighting power, while Center and Marxism thought only to break out its dangerous national poisonous fang, without which, however, an army will forever remain only 'police/ but will not be a 'troop' able to fight against the foreign enemy; something that later on was amply proved. Or did perhaps our ' national politicians ' believe that the army's development could be other than national? That really would be just like them. But this is the consequence of the fact that, instead of being a soldier in the War, one is a babbler, that means a parliamentarian, and that one has no idea what goes on in the minds of men who are reminded by the most glorious past that they were once the first soldiers of the world. Thus I decided to go to the abovementioned meeting of that party which was until then still entirely unknown to me. When in the evening I entered the 'Leiber' room which later on was to become of historical importance for us, of the former Sterneckerbrau in Munich, I met there about twenty to twenty-five people, chiefly from among the lower walks of life. Feder's lecture was already familiar to me from the courses, and therefore I could devote myself to looking at the assembly proper. THE GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY 293 Its impression on me was neither good nor bad; a new foundation like so many others. It was the time when every- one who was dissatisfied with the development things had taken so far, and who no longer had confidence in the existing parties, felt called upon to launch a new party. Thus such societies sprang up everywhere, only to disap- pear again silently after some time. The founders, in most cases, had no idea what it means to develop a society into a party or even into a movement. Thus these foundations nearly always suffocated in their ridiculous bourgeois at- mosphere. After listening for about two hours I did not judge the 4 German Workers' Party ' from any different point of view. I was glad when Feder finally finished. I had seen enough and was just about to go when the open discussion, which In Bavaria after the War strong groups, particularly among the peasants, came to the conclusion that Germany was ir- retrievably lost, and that the sole hope was to erect a Bavarian State, larger, if possible, than the Bavaria of pre-iSyo days. It was also believed that if such a State were formed, it would be granted concessions in the matter of reparations. The chief protagonist of these ideas was Dr. Georg Heim, a Center Party politician with a great following among the peasants. He sounded out President Wilson on the probable attitude of the Allies towards a separate Bavaria, and made a considerable effort to persuade Austria the Tyrol in particular to join the projected State. Nothing came of it, first of all because the Crown Prince kept aloof. But the agitation did have one consequence of fateful import the separation of the Bavarian People's Party from the Center Party, and therewith the weak- ening of the position of Catholics in the Reich as a whole. la the initial appeal issued by the sundered group, it was pro- claimed that Germany was only a 'uniting of the German States on a federal basis,' that any Constitution adopted by the nation as a whole would need ratification by the separate 294 MEIN KAMPF was announced at that moment, made me decide to stay after all. But here also everything seemed to take an unim- portant course, till suddenly a 'professor' was given the floor who first expressed doubts of the correctness of Feder's reasons, and then, after the latter had replied very ably, planted himself on the ground of ' facts,' not without recom- mending, however, to the young party to take up the 'severance' of Bavaria from 'Prussia' as an especially im- portant point of the party program. The man had the cheek to pretend that, in that case, German Austria espe- cially would immediately link itself to Bavaria, and that then the peace would be a far better one, and other similar nonsense. Thereupon I could not help but announce my intention to speak, in order to give this learned man my opinion on this point, with the result that the gentleman who had just spoken left the scene like a drenched poodle, even before I had finished.f When I spoke they had listened with astonished faces, and only when I was about to say good-night to the assembly, a man came running after me, introduced himself (I even did not understand his name, correctly), and handed me a small booklet, obviously a political pamphlet, with the urgent request that I read this by all means. This was very agreeable to me, for now I could hope that States, and that Bavaria would join the Reich only on the con- dition that the especial political, cultural, and economic rights to which it was entitled were respected 'in constitutional law.' It was a spokesman for this point of view whom Hitler ha- rangues out of the meeting like a 'drenched poodle.' Hitler had now proved that he could 'orate* as effectively as Feder and the other instructors appointed by his military superiors, one of whom a Captain Mayr later on joined the Social Democratic Party and the military organization (the Rcichsbanncr) associated with it. THE GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY 295 perhaps in this way I could become acquainted with this boring society in an easier manner, without being forced again to attend such interesting meetings. For the rest, this man who was apparently a worker, had made a good impression on me. With this now I went away. In those days I still lived in the barracks of the Second Infantry Regiment, in a tiny room which still showed very clearly the traces of the Revolution. During the day I was out, mostly with the Rifle Regiment 4, or at meetings or lectures with some other army unit, etc. Only at night I slept in my quarters. As I used to wake up in the morning before five o'clock, I had gotten into the habit of throwing pieces of bread or hard crusts to the little mice which spent their time in the small room, and then to watch these droll little animals romp and scuffle for these few delicacies. I had already known so much misery during my lifetime that I was able to imagine only too well the hunger, and there- fore also the pleasure, of the little things. On the morning after this meeting, towards five o'clock, I was lying awake in my cot and looking at this bustle and activity. Since I could not go to sleep again, I suddenly thought of the previous evening, and now I remembered the booklet which the worker had given to me. And so I began 3 The author of this pamphlet was Anton Drexler, a simple and sickly man who had been declared unfit for military service. A few copies of the brochure have been preserved. Its principal argument was that the German worker must turn, if he hoped for a decent livelihood, from internationalism to nationalism. If he remained addicted to the first, he would forever be gouged by a hostile international finance. During the War Drexler had joined the Vaterlandspartei and so expressed his disapproval of the Reichstag Peace Resolution of 1917. He called his first unit * Freier Arbeiterauschuss fuer einen guten Frieden* (Com- mittee of Free Workers for a Good Peace) ; and after the War he 296 MEIN KAMPF to read. It was a little pamphlet in which the author, this particular worker, described how, out of the medley of Marxist and unionist phrases, he again arrived at thinking in national terms; this explained the title, 'My Political Awakening/ Once I had started, I read the entire little document with interest; for in it an event was reflected which I had gone through personally in a similar way twelve years ago. Involuntarily I saw thus my own devel- opment come to life again before my eyes.-^ In the course of the day I thought about it several times and was finally just about to put it away when, less than a week later, to my astonishment, I received a postcard with the news that I had been accepted as a member of the ' German Workers' Party'; I was requested to express my opinion about this, and for that purpose I was expected to come to a committee meeting of the party on the following Wednesday. I was actually more than astonished at this manner of 'winning' members, and I did not know whether to be an- noyed or to laugh at it. I had no intention of joining a changed the name to 'Deutsche Arbeiterpartei' (German Work- ers' Party). A few similar groups sprang up here and there in Germany, advocating a Socialistic program to be realized out- side the Marxist sphere because internationalism had failed. The most famous exponent of this point of view in North Ger- many was to be August Winnig. The chairman of the German Workers' Party was Karl Harrer, a journalist who almost from the beginning took a dis- like to Hitler. He was opposed to violent anti-Semitism (as were the majority of Germans in that time), and he was not a man to wield the bayonet too ferociously. A year went by be- fore the recalcitrant Harrer could be ousted from his position. In retrospect the historian must conclude: at that time the question was not merely whether Hitler would join the Party but whether the Party would have Hitler. THE GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY 291 ready-made party, but wished to found a party of my own. This unreasonable demand was really out of the question for me. I was just about to send the gentlemen my written reply, when curiosity gained the upper hand and I decided to appear on the day fixed in order to define my reasons orally. Wednesday arrived. The restaurant in which the said meeting was to take place was the Alte Rosenbad in the Herrenstrasse; a very poor restaurant, to which only once in a blue moon somebody seemed to find his way by mis- take. This was not surprising in the year 1919, when the menus of even the larger restaurants were able to attract customers but very modestly and poorly. But until then I had not known this inn at all. I passed through the sparsely lit guestroom where not a soul was present, looked for the door to the adjoining room, and then I was face to face with the 'meeting. 9 In the twilight of a half-demolished gas lamp four young people were sitting at a table, among them also the author of the little booklet, who immediately greeted me in the most friendly terms and welcomed me as a new member of the 'German Workers' Party.' Now I was somewhat taken aback. As I was informed that the actual ' Chairman for the organization in the Reich ' was still to come, I intended holding back my explanation. The latter finally appeared. He was the chairman of the meeting in the SterneckerbrSu on the occasion of Feder's lecture. Meanwhile my curiosity was again aroused and I was full of expectation for the things to come. Now I finally learned the names of the various gentlemen. The chairman of the 'organization in the Reich' was a Herr Harrer, that of the Munich district, Anton Drexler. Now the minutes of the last session were read, and the confidence of the assembly was expressed to the secretary t 298 MEIN KAMPF Next followed the treasury report (there were all in all 7 Marks and 50 Pfennings in the possession of the party), for which the assurance of the general confidence was ex- pressed to the treasurer. Now this again was put down in the minutes. Then followed the First Chairman's reading of the answers to a letter from Kiel to one from Diisseldorf and to one from Berlin; everybody agreed to them. Now the documents received were read : a letter from Berlin, one from Diisseldorf, and one from Kiel, the arrival of which seemed to be accepted with great satisfaction. One ex- plained this growing correspondence as the best and most visible symptom of the spreading importance of the 'Ger- man Workers ' Party.' Then a lengthy discussion about the answers to be made took place. Terrible, terrible; this was club-making of the worst kind and manner. And this club I now was to join? Then the new memberships were discussed, that means, my being caught. Now I began to ask questions. Apart from a few leading principles, nothing existed; no party program, no leaflets, nothing in print at all, no membership cards, not even a miserable rubber stamp; only visibly good faith and good will. My smile had disappeared again, for what was all this but the typical symptom of utter helplessness and complete despair covering all previous parties, their programs, their intentions and their activities? What made these four young people come together to an outwardly so ridiculous activity was actually only the expression of their inner voice which, emotionally rather than consciously, made all the previous doings of parties appear as no longer suitable for a rise of the German nation as well as for the healing of its internal damages. I quickly read through the leading principles which were available in a typed copy, and in them I saw a seeking rather than knowledge. Many tilings THE GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY 299 *rere dim or uncertain, many things were missing, but nothing was there which in its turn could not be looked upon as a symptom of struggling toward realization. I, too, knew what these people felt; it was the longing for a new movement which was to be more than a party in the previous sense of the word. When I went home to the barracks on that evening, I had already formed my opinion of this society. Now I was faced by perhaps the most serious question of my life: was I to join or was I to refuse? My reason could only advise me to refuse, but my feeling would not let me find peace, and the more often I tried to keep the absurdity of this entire club before my eyes, the more often did feeling speak in favor of it. In the days that followed I was restless. I began to ponder about the pros and cons. I had long since made up my mind to take up political activity; that this could be only in a new movement was also clear to me, so far only the instigation for action had not come. I do not belong to those who start something one day in order to end it again the next day or to change over, if possible, to another affair. But this very conviction was the chief rea- son, among others, why it was so difficult for me to make up my mind to found such a movement. I knew that for me this would mean a decision forever, where there would never be a 'turn back.' For me it was not a temporary game, but dead earnest. Even in those days I had always had an instinctive aversion to people who start something without, however, also carrying it out; 1 loathed these jacks-of-all-trades. I considered the activity of these people worse than doing nothing. This opinion, however, was one of the chief reasons why I was not able, like perhaps so many others, to decide to found something which either was to become everything or which else, more suitably, should not be carried out atalL 300 MEIN KAMPF Now Fate itself seemed to give me a hint. I should never have joined one of the existing parties, and later on I will state the reasons for this; for this reason, however, this ridiculously small foundation with its handful of members seemed to me to have the advantage that it had not yet hardened into an 'organization/ but seemed to offer to the individual the chance for real personal activity. For this was the advantage which was bound to result: here one would still be able to work, and the smaller the movement was, the easier it would be to bring it into the right shape. Here the contents, the goal, and the way could still be fixed, something that with the existing great parties was impossible from the beginning. The longer I tried to think about it, the more the con- viction grew in my mind that just here, out of such a small movement, some day the rise of the nation could be pre- pared, but never from the political parliamentarian parties which clung much too much to the old ideas or even shared the advantages of the new regime. For what was to be announced now was a new view of life and not a new elec- tion slogan. t However, it was an infinitely hard decision to wish to transform this intention into reality. What prerequisites did I myself bring to this task? That I had no means and was poor seemed to me the most easily endurable, but it was more difficult that I sim- ply belonged to the great crowd of nameless people, that I was one among the millions who are allowed to continue to live by sheer accident, or who are called from life again without even their surroundings condescending to take notice of it. To this came the difficulty which was bound to result from my lack of schools. The so-called 'intelligentsia 9 at any rate looks down with really infinite condescension on everyone who has not been pulled through the obligatory schools in order to have the THE GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY 301 necessary knowledge pumped into his brains. Actually, the question is never, What can this man do, but what has he learned? To these 'educated' ones the greatest empty- head, provided he is only wrapped in a sufficient number of certificates, is worth more than even the most clever boy who does not possess these priceless paper bags. I was able to imagine in what way this 'educated' world would con- front me, and in that I was wrong only in so far as in those days I still believed people to be better than they unfor- tunately are, for the greater part, in sober reality. This, of course, as everywhere else, lights up the exceptions much more brightly. Thus I learned to distinguish all the more between the eternal ' pupils ' and the really competent. < After two days of agonized pondering and reflection I finally arrived at the decision to take the step. It was the most decisive decision of my life. There could not, and must not, be a retreat. Thus I registered as a member of the German Workers' Party and received a provisional membership ticket with the number seven. CHAPTER X THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE E depth of the fall of a body is always the measure for the distance of its momentary situation from the one it had originally. The same may also be said of the fall of nations and States. With this, however, a deci- sive significance must be attributed to the previous situation or rather height. Only that which usually rises above the general level can also fall or tumble visibly deep. This makes the collapse of the Reich so serious and terrible for every thinking and feeling man, that it brought the fall from a height hardly still imaginable in the face of the mis- ery of the present degradation. Even the very foundation of the Reich seemed to be gilded by the charm of an event that elated the entire na- tion. After an incomparably victorious course there arises finally, as the reward for immortal heroism, a Reich for the sons and the grandsons. Whether consciously or uncon- sciously, it makes no difference, all the Germans had the feeling that this Reich, which did not owe its existence to the cheating of parliamentary factions, stood out over the measure of other States solely by the sublime manner of its foundation; for, not in the cackling of parliamentary word battles, but under the thundering and roaring of the Parisian blockade front took place the solemn act of the THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 303 manifestation of the will, that the Germans, lords and people, were determined to form one realm in the future and again to elevate the imperial crown as a symbol; not with assassination had this been carried out, not deserters and duty-shirkers were the founders of the State of Bis- marck, but the regiments of the front. This unique birth and baptism of fire alone wove around the Reich a glimmer of historic fame, such as was but rarely the lot of the oldest States. And what a rise now set in! The freedom towards the exterior gave the daily bread to the interior. The nation became rich in numbers and worldly goods. The honor of the State, however, and with it that of the entire people, was guarded and protected by an army which most visibly showed the difference from the one-time German Union. So deep is the fall which hits the Reich and the German people that at first everybody, as if seized with dizziness, seems to have lost feeling and consciousness; one can hardly remember the previous height, so dreamlike and unreal appears, measured by the misery of the present, the greatness and splendor of that time. Thus it may also be explained that one is only too blinded by the sublime, and thereby forgets to look for the omens of the enormous collapse which certainly must have somewhere been present. This may be said, of course, only of those for whom Ger- many was more than a mere dwelling-place for making and spending money, as only they are able to experience the present condition as a breakdown, while to the others it is the fulfillment of their hitherto unsatisfied wishes, long desired. ^4- These omens, however, were visibly present at that time, though only very few tried to draw a certain lesson from them. 304 MEIN KAMPF Today this is more necessary than ever. Just as one is only able to arrive at the cure of an illness if the cause of it is known, the same may be said also as regards curing political evils. Of course, one usually sees and recognizes the outward form of an illness, the symp- toms that catch the eye, more easily than its inner cause. This is also the reason why so many people never go beyond the discovery of outward symptoms and therefore even confuse the symptoms with the cause, nay, even preferably try to deny the presence of such a cause altogether. There- fore also, most of us primarily see the German collapse only as a result of the general economic distress and its conse- quences. Almost everyone, however, has to share in carry- ing the burden of this distress, so that here is found a cogent reason for every single individual to understand the catas- trophe. But the great masses see far less the collapse in the political, cultural, and ethical-moral direction, etc. Here, feeling and also reason fail completely with many people. That this is so with the great masses may be allowable, but that also in the circles of the intelligentsia the German collapse is looked upon primarily as an 'economic catas- trophe,' and that therefore the cure is expected to come from economy, is one of the reasons why so far recovery has been impossible. Only if one realizes that here, too, econ- Criticism of the so-called 'business enterprise State* i.e., the State which looks upon economic enterprise as the chief source of riches and therefore of well-being was a favorite topic of post-War Rightist literature. Oswald Spengler held that the basis structure of modern society is national and politi- cal, so that industry depends upon its fundament, the State. On the other hand, it is independent in the sense that leader- ship must be developed inside the industry itself. Hence the necessity for personal leadership and initiative. (Cf . Neubau dtische THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 305 erniy is only of second or even third importance, but that political, ethical-moral, as well as factors of blood and race, are of the first importance, then one will strive at an under- standing of the causes of the present misfortune, and with it, one will be able to find means and ways to recovery. The quest for the causes of the German collapse is there- fore of decisive importance, above all for a political move- ment, the very goal of which is to be the conquest of the defeat. But also with such research into the past one has to guard very much against confusing the effects, which more surely catch the eye, with the less visible causes. The easiest and therefore also the most widespread ex- planation of today's misfortune is that the consequences involved are those of the lost war, and that therefore the latter is the cause of the present evil. Now there may be many who will seriously believe this nonsense, but there are many more out of whose mouths such an explanation can only be a lie and conscious un- truth. This may be said of all those who today have their place at the government's mangers. For, did not once the very announcers of the Revolution most urgently point out, again and again to the people, that for the great masses it would make no difference whatsoever how this war Oddly enough this is virtually the same reasoning to which the Majority Socialists resorted during the War in order to at- tack Minority Socialists who maintained that the worker had no interest in the struggle, and that therefore his party was not justified in supporting the government either by voting credits or by rendering patriotic service. Scheidemann, David, and Ebert maintained that if Germany did not defend herself to the utmost of her ability, German industry would lose its markets and therewith its ability to pay wages. But they all repudiated ware of conquest. 106 MEIN KAMPF would end? Have they not, on the contrary, asserted most seriously that at the utmost only the ' great capitalist 9 could have any interest in the victorious end of this colossal wrestling of nations, but never the German people itself, or even the German worker? Indeed, on the contrary, did not these apostles of world reconciliation assert 'militarism' could only be destroyed by the German defeat, but that the German people would celebrate its most glorious resur- rection? Did one not praise in these circles the benevo- lence of the Entente, and did one not charge Germany with the entire guilt of bloody struggle? But would one have been able to do so without the explanation that even defeat would have no special consequences for the nation? Was not the entire Revolution trimmed with the phrase that through it the victory of the German flag would be pre- vented, and that thereby the German people would face all the more its inner and outer freedom? Was this perhaps not so, you miserable and lying fel- lows? It really takes a truly Jewish impudence to attribute the cause of the collapse to the military defeat, while the cen- tral organ of all traitors of nations, the Vorwaerts of Berlin, wrote nevertheless that this time the German people would not be allowed to bring its flags home with victory! And this is now supposed to be the cause of our collapse? It would naturally be quite useless to quarrel with such forgetful liars, and therefore I would also not waste one word about it, if unfortunately this nonsense were not repeated parrot-like by so many entirely thoughtless people, without that maliciousness or conscious untruth- fulness that would give the cause for this. But, further- more, these explanations are intended to be helpful to our fighters for enlightenment, which is very necessary anyhow in a time when the spoken word is usually twisted in one's very mouth. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 307 Thus in reply to the statement that the lost war is guilty of the German collapse, the following is to be said : The loss of the War was certainly of terrible importance to the future of our fatherland, but this loss is not a cause, but, in turn, again only a consequence of other causes. That an unfortunate end of this fight for life and death was bound to lead to very disastrous consequences was cer- tainly entirely clear to every sensible and not malicious person, but unfortunately there were also those whose intelligence seemed to be lacking at the right time, or who, contrary to their better knowledge, nevertheless first dis- puted and denied this truth; these were for the greater part those who, after the realization of their secret wish, now suddenly receive the belated realization of the catastrophe which they helped to bring about. They, therefore, are the culprits of the collapse, and not the lost war, as it now This passage is first of all a defense of General Ludendorfl and of the dictatorship he exercised during the War. The argument is characteristic. Unfortunately the Pan-German element had to concede that the sacrifices of four years had been in vain ; and it determined now to fight down the popular feeling that war itself, as an instrument of national policy, had been repudiated. Therefore the argument that peace is the most effective solvent of national greatness re-appears in a thousand forms. Nevertheless relatively few Nazis have ven- tured to assert that war itself is good. Normally they shrink a little from drawing all the conclusions latent in Spengler's phrase, ' Man is a beast of prey.' What they generally advo- cate is an army ideally perfect, so that Germany may impose its peace upon the world without the shedding of blood. For as Houston Stewart Chamberlain said during the War, only the German word for peace Friede expresses what the world needs, a Masting realm of love and tenderness' (a kind of ex- tension of the last act of Tristan und Isolde). The French word Paix stands for nothing except a pact, a treaty. Hitler 308 MEIN KAMPF pleases them to say and to believe. For the loss of the Wai was only the consequence of their activity, and not, as they now assert, the result of 'bad' leadership. The enemy, too, did not consist of cowards; he, too, knew how to die; his number was, for the first day, greater than that of the Ger- man army, his technical armament had the arsenals of the whole world at his disposal; thus the fact that the German victories which were gained by fighting against a whole world during four years were due, with all heroic courage and all 'organization/ only to superior leadership, cannot be denied in the face of reality. The organization and the leadership of the German army were the most colossal affair which the earth has ever seen so far. Its deficiencies were within the bounds of general human imperfection as a whole. That this army broke down was not the cause of our pre- sent misfortune, but only the consequence of other crimes, a consequence which in its turn, however, introduced the beginning of a further and this time more conspicuous col- lapse. That this is the case may be derived from the following: When, then, is a military defeat bound to lead to such a complete breakdown of a nation and a State? Since when is this the result of an unlucky war? Do nations perish at all by a lost war as such? in office is fond of demanding that every German must be- come, physically and mentally, an instrument of the High Command, and of the turning the next minute to a proclama- tion of his ardent desire for peace. One may, perhaps, put the matter in a nutshell by saying: for Mr. Neville Chamberlain 1 peace' is something that will permit the British investor to keep on excelling at the hunt; for Mr. Hitler it is something that results from the scare that follows a mobilization of the German army. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 309 The answer to this can be very short: Whenever nations receive in their military defeat the return for their inner corruption, cowardice, and lack of character, in short, for their unworthiness. If this is not the case, then the military defeat will become the impulse for a coming greater rise rather than the tombstone of a nation's existence. History offers no end of examples for the correctness of this assertion. Unfortunately, the military defeat of the German people is not an undeserved catastrophe, but rather a deserved punishment by eternal retribution. We more than de- served this defeat. It is only the greatest outward symp- tom of decay among quite a series of internal ones which perhaps would have remained hidden to the eye of most people, or which perhaps one, in ostrich-like manner, did not want to see. One should only look at the accompanying symptoms with which the German people accepted this defeat. Had one not in many circles actually expressed joy at the mis- fortune of the fatherland in the most shameless way? But who does this if he does not really deserve such punish- ment? Indeed, did one not even go farther and boast of finally having caused the front to retreat? And it was not the enemy who did this, no, no, it was Germans who piled such disgrace upon their heads! Did misfortune perhaps hit them unjustly? Since when, however, does one step forward in order to attribute the war guilt to oneself? And this, despite realization and knowledge to the contrary! No, and again no: in the way and in the manner in which the German people accepted its defeat one is able to recog- nize most clearly that the true cause of our collapse is to be found in a place quite apart from the purely military loss of some positions or in the failure of an offensive; for if the front as such had really failed and if, by its misfortune, the doom of the fatherland had been caused, the German 310 MEIN KAMPF people would have accepted defeat in quite a different way. Then, with clenched teeth, one would have endured the misfortune that now followed, or one would have lamented it, overcome by pain; then wrath and fury against the en- emy who had become victorious by the cunning of chance or by the will of Destiny would have filled the hearts; then, like to the Roman Senate, the nation would have stepped up to the defeated divisions with the fatherland's thanks for the sacrifices made so far, and with the request not to despair of the Reich. Even the capitulation would have been signed only by force of reason, while the heart would have already beaten in expectation of the coming rise. After the War a strange frenzy of jubilation was indulged in by various groups of Germans. There was dancing all night in the streets of villages and towns; delirious welcomes to homecoming sweethearts shocked the sedate. The German government sent emissaries to welcome troops returning to Berlin and to invite their support in putting the new govern- ment on a firm basis; but few consented to stay, and those who did were normally soon out of control. Soldiers who took up quarters in the Berlin Schloss at Liebknecht's behest re- emerged decked in the ex-Kaiser's uniforms, their pockets stuffed with silver from the Imperial cupboards. Most striking detail of all, Berlin was on Christmas Eve, 1918, perilously close to the brink of revolution. The government had no armed forces on which it could rely; the revolutionaries had amassed considerable strength. But as if at a prearranged signal, everybody went off to celebrate and the crisis was over. One of the most serious charges brought against Erzberger was that he had written an old Suabian toast in a tavern book at Weimar. All this was, of course, the result of the attack of giddiness which followed a sudden release from four years of pressure such as no other people had ever been called upon to bear. For years nationalists referred to these things as indi- cations of the base Qualities that were hidden in the German peyche THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 311 In such a manner one would have accepted a defeat which would have been due to Fate alone. Then one would not have laughed and danced, then one would not have boasted of one's cowardice, and one would not have glori- fied the defeat; one would not have jeered at the fighting troops and one would not have torn its flag and cockade down into the dirt, but above all : then it would never have come to that terrible condition which caused an English officer, Colonel Repington, to utter the contemptuous re- mark: 'Among the Germans every third man is a traitor.' No, this pestilence would never have been able to swell up to such a suffocating flood which now for five years has drowned even the last remainder of respect on the part of the rest of the world. From this can best be seen the lie contained in the asser- The spectacle of Germany in defeat was in some respects undignified. Neither, for that matter, was the spectacle of Allied countries reveling in victory a highly edifying one. On both sides orgies of lust and madness, for which Europe could hardly parallel in history, marked the end of the conflict. In Germany, American and British observers saw passers-by young loafers and deserters for the most part beset officers, tear the insignia from their shoulders, and bash their sabres against the pavement. One such observer wrote in his diary at the time: 'There will be a reaction against these things^and it will not be pleasant to contemplate.' Yet such phenomena did not illustrate the sentiment of either the people or the army as a whole. In November, 1918, a battalion of veterans, covered with gray mud, starved to the bone, marched home- ward through the streets of Mtinster. On they came with firm tread, rifles slung on their shoulders, looking for all the world like a procession of wraiths arisen from the battlefields of the Marne. The thousands gathered along the streets stood in awe-struck silence, until finally a universal sob that shook the crowd seemed to come from every throat. In a small Moselle 312 MEIN KAMPF tkm that the lost war was the cause of the German col* lapse. No, the military collapse was in its turn only the consequence of quite a series of the symptoms of an illness and their causes, which had visited the German nation even in time of peace. It was this the first catastrophic conse- quence of moral poisoning, visible to all, the consequence of a decrease in the instinct of self-preservation and of the conditions for it, which had already begun to undermine the foundations of the people and the Reich many years ago. But it took the entire bottomless lying of Jewry and its Marxist fighting organization to burden with the guilt of the collapse just that man, the only one who tried, with superhuman will power and energy, to prevent the catas- trophe he saw approaching and to spare the nation the time of the deepest degradation and dishonor. By stamping village, officers of the Fourth Army Corps, A.E.F., attended a Christmas midnight Mass, in 1918. Widows in black ushered their little children, dressed in white, into the church from out of the snow-filled night; and not one of them stood dry-eyed as the music of ancient carols eddied round the tombs of village warriors dead a thousand years ago. No, it is historically un- just to cast aspersions on the German people. They were utterly stunned by the suddenness of their defeat, for which nothing had prepared them. And they were left to carve out their own destiny by officers who, after years of dictatorship, wished now to get the ruins off their hands. The most effective critics of Ludendorff were not 'Jewish writers' or 'Marxist journals, 9 but gentlemen of the Right Virtually no one in the Foreign Office at the end of the con- flict entertained any doubt that the General had ruined Ger- many, and the memoirs of Bernstorff, Solf, Ktthlmann, and others bear witness to this fact Nor has military criticism been less outspoken. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 313 Ludendorff aa the culprit of the loss of the World War, one took away from the hand of the only dangerous accuser, who was able to stand up against the traitors to the father- land, the weapon of moral right. Therewith one started out with the very correct assumption that in the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of a people may be more corrupt in the bottom of their hearts than they will be consciously and intentionally bad, therefore with the primitive simplicity of their minds they will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things, but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies. Thus such an untruth will not at all enter their heads, and therefore they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impu- dence of the most infamous distortion in others; indeed, they may doubt and hesitate even when being enlightened, and they accept any cause at least as nevertheless being true; therefore, just for this reason some part of the most impudent lie will remain and stick; a fact which all great lying artists and societies of this world know only too well and therefore also villainously employ. Those who know best this truth about the possibilities of the application of untruth and defamation, however, were at all times the Jews; for their entire existence is built on one single great lie, namely, that here one had to deal with a religious brotherhood, while in fact one has to do with a race what a race! As such they have been nailed down forever, in an eternally correct sentence of funda- mental truth, by one of the greatest minds of mankind; he called them 'the great masters of lying.' He who does not realize this or does not want to believe this will never be able to help truth to victory in this world. 314 MEIN KAMPF For the sake of the German people one has to consider it almost a piece of good fortune that the time of its latent illness was not suddenly cut short by such a terrible catas- trophe, because otherwise the nation would probably have perished more slowly, but nevertheless all the more cer- tainly. The illness would then have become a chronic dis- ease, whereas now in the acute form of the collapse it be- came clearly and distinctly visible at least in the eyes of a larger crowd. It was not by accident that man became master of the plague more easily than of tuberculosis. The one comes in terrible death waves, scourging mankind, the other sneaks in slowly; the one leads to terrible fear, the other to gradual indifference. But the consequence was that man opposed the one with the whole ruthlessness of his energy, while he tries to check consumption with weak means. Thus he mastered the plague, while he in turn is mastered by tuberculosis. Exactly the same is also the case with diseases of national bodies. If they do not appear in the form of a catastrophe, man begins gradually to get used to them and finally he will perish by them, though only after a long time, but never- theless more certainly. Then it is a good fortune (however bitter) if Destiny decides to intervene in this slow process of putrid corruption and, at one blow, to put before the eyes of him who is stricken the end of the disease. For this is what such a catastrophe amounts to more than once. Then it may easily become the cause of a recovery which sets in with utmost determination. But also in such a case the prerequisite is again the real- ization of the inner reasons which cause the disease in question. What is most important also here is the distinction be- tween the causes and the conditions they bring about. This will be the more difficult the longer the contagious matter has been in the nation's body and the more it had THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 315 already become a natural part and parcel of that body. For it may very easily happen that after a certain time one no longer considers an absolutely noxious poison as 'alien' as such, but that one looks upon it as consistent with one's nationality or tolerates it, at the utmost, as a necessary evil, so that one no longer considers imperative the search for the cause of the morbific agent. During the long pre-War years of peace certain patho- logic features had certainly appeared and been recognized as such, whereas, apart from a few exceptions, one did not at all take the morbific agent into account. It might be said that here again it was most of all the symptoms of eco- nomic life which became conscious to the individual more than perhaps the injurious consequences in quite a series of other domains. There were many signs of decay which ought to have stimulated serious reflection. In this respect, from the purely economic point of view, the following may be said : By the rapid increase of the German people's number before the War, the question of supplying the daily bread stepped into the foreground of all political and economic thought and activity in a more and more acute manner. Unfortunately, one could not make up one's mind to arrive at the only correct solution, but believed that one could reach the goal in a cheaper way. As soon as one renounced gaining new territory and, instead, entangled oneself in the delusion of a world-wide economic conquest, the end was bound to lead to an industrialization that was as limitless as it was detrimental. The first consequence of gravest importance was the weakening of the peasant class. In the same measure in which the latter class diminished, the mass of the prole-, 316 MEIN KAMPF tariat of the great cities grew more and more, till finally the balance was lost entirely. Now the sharp contrast between poor and rich became really apparent. Superabundance and misery now lived so dose together that the consequences of this could be and were bound to be necessarily very dreary. Distress and frequent unemployment began to play their game with people and left discontent and embitterment as a memory behind them. The consequence of this seemed to be the political class split. Thus, with all economic prosperity, discontent nevertheless became greater and deeper, and it even went so far that the conviction, 'it can no longer go on like this,' became a general one, without people forming or being able to form a definite idea of what should perhaps have come. These were the typical symptoms of a deep discontent which tried to express itself in such a manner. But worse than this were other consequential symptoms Which the economization of the nation brought with it. In the measure in which business rose to become the de* termining master of the State, money became the god whom now everybody had to serve and to worship. Now the celestial gods were put more and more into a corner as outmoded and old-fashioned, and instead of to them, in- cense was offered to the idol of mammon. A truly evil degeneration thus set in, especially evil for the reason that this took place at a time when the nation, more than ever, would probably need the highest heroic conviction at a threatening critical hour; Germany had to be prepared with the help of the sword to stand up some day for her attempt to secure her daily bread by way of a 'peaceful economic work.' Unfortunately, the domination of money was sanctioned also by that authority which should have resisted it most of all: His Majesty the Kaiser acted unluckily when he THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 317 drew the aristocracy particularly into the orbit of the new fiscal capital. Here, of course, one has to admit to his credit that in this respect unfortunately even Bismarck did not recognize the impending danger. With this, however, the ideal virtues had practically stepped back behind the value of money, for it was obvious that once one had started out on such a way, the nobility of the sword would very shortly have to take its place behind the aristocracy Attacks on the German nobility were to remain character- istic of National Socialism. Among nationalists, the princes were reproached for their poor war record. More generally, feeling waxed strong against the caste on social and economic grounds. Even the Center Party struck noblemen off its list of candidates a revolutionary action of which it was to re- pent later. The question concerning what disposition was to be made of the fortunes of the princes rocked German politics for years, leading eventually to a referendum which cut across all party alignments. Hitler's criticism seems to have been based primarily on intermarriages between the scions of noble houses and Jewish maidens. Such alliances were, as a matter of fact, common, many dating back to Napoleonic times. Anyone who takes the trouble to study the dedications of memoirs that appeared after the middle of the nineteenth century will find that in a great many instances this rule ap- plies: the nobler the author, the more certain he is to boast a Jewish grandmother. The late eighteenth century period of Lessing's Nathan der Wcisc was characterized by the homage paid to brilliant and beautiful Jewish women. Some of the marriages were, of course, based on money, but it must be added that the Jews brought from Vienna and Frankfort a culture superior to any that then existed in northeast Germany. The most voluminous Nazi critic of the German nobility is, however, R. Walther Darrfe, Hitler's Minister of Agriculture. Born in the Argentine and said to have specialized in veterinary science, Darr6 is above all the author of Neuadel aus Blut und Boden. He summarizes the faults of the princes as these have 318 MEIN KAMPF of finance. Financial operations succeed more easily thtin battles. Also, it was no longer inviting now for the real hero or statesman to be brought into contact with the next- best Jew banker, so that the really meritorious man could no longer have an interest in the bestowal of such cheap decorations, but refused them with thanks as far as he was concerned. This development was profoundly saddening also from the point of view of blood ; the nobility lost more long since been chalked up by Lagarde, Langbehn, Treitschke, and others. Then he attributes most of the blame to Charle- magne, who because the fact that he favored Roman law and custom proved that he 'no longer possessed a sense of the im- portance of the German nobility, by reason of the fact that he was deficient in the heritage of German blood, 1 The battle of Verden (782) was, he thinks, the deciding point. For there Charlemagne defeated the * Saxon nobles.' From that time on, 'a Christian nobility is dominant in Germany, formed for the most part of Prankish noblemen-officials, whose blood was of dubious purity in the Germanic sense, though in the course of time . . . this was replaced by or improved by better blood. But this history of the development of the German Christian nobility out of the Prankish noblemen-official caste is very basically the cause why, in contradistinction to the heathen Germanic nobility, it no longer acts as a leadership embedded in the people, but as a caste set apart by itself above the German people a caste which was dissolved only after the Crusades.' (Dane's diction and syntax retain certain veter- inarian characteristics.) How, then, is the situation to be remedied? In the Vdlkischer Bcobachter (1923) Darr proposed the establishment of Zucht- ivarten that is, offices for breeding control whose duty it would be to keep records of German breeding. German girls were to be divided into four classes: the ten per cent shown by inspectors to have the best German blood were to be set apart as the group from which the 'new German nobility* might freely choose ; the rest of those girls against whose blood streams THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 319 and more the racial presumption for its existence. For a greater part the designation 'non-nobility* would have been far more suitable. A symptom of serious economic decay was the slow ex- tinction of the personal right of possession and the gradual handing-over of the entire economy into the possession of stock- holders' companies. Only with this had labor truly sunk to the level of an object of speculation of unscrupulous hagglers; but the nothing important could be said were also to be within the 'new nobleman's' purview, provided he could obtain the Zuchtwarfs permission to wed with one of them; the group against which pertinent criticism could be advanced were to be free to marry, provided they were sterilized in advance; and those unfortunates whose blood proved to be beneath contempt were to be held away from the altar under all cir- cumstances. To these ideas Darr6 has often returned, particu- larly in the famous seventh chapter of Neuadel aus Blut und Boden, in which he attempts to apply the laws of breeding to the German people. Here also is the often quoted passage in which he maintains that an illegitimate child of 'good blood' is to be ranked higher than a legitimate child of 'bad blood.' The distinction is of importance, since girls of 'bad blood' are no longer permitted to marry peasants whom the law permits to inherit land. How much of this theory has been put into practice cannot be determined. The most important of the published decrees are the sterilization laws. No figures on the total number of operations are available, nor is there any certainty that 'feeble-mindedness' has been the major argument resorted to. Physicians recently employed in German hospitals estimate that the total number of operations since 1933 the law was decreed during July of that year exceed 200,000. migrt authorities whose veracity there is no reason to doubt insist that a good portion of these sterilizations were carried out for racial or political reasons. Some Catholic physicians have been 320 MEIN KAMPF alienation of property from the employee, however, was now increased ad infinitum. The stock exchange began to triumph and proceeded to take slowly but gradually the life of the nation in its charge and control. The internationalization of German economic life had been introduced even before the War by the roundabout way of the stock issues. Indeed, one part of German indus- try still tried to guard itself with determination against this fate; but then, in turn, it fell victim to the combined attack removed from their positions for unwillingness to enforce the law. (Cf. also Nazi Germany: Its Women and Family Life, by Clifford Kirkpatrick.) In addition the 'new nobility* is in process of formation. The most important caste is formed by the S.S. the black- garbed Schutzstaffd (Safety Staff) commanded by Himmler; and this is now governed by a rigid marital code. The Nttrn- berg Laws on Race and Citizenship, passed in 1935, provide (Articles I and 2 of Section II): 'Marriages between Jews and subjects of German or kindred blood are forbidden. Marriages contracted despite this law are invalid, even if they be con- cluded abroad in order to circumvent this law. . . . Extra- marital relations between Jews and subjects of German or kindred blood are forbidden.' In addition, certain 'experi- ments' in breeding have been conducted. Finally it may be added that the most famous recruit to National Socialism from the ranks of the German nobility is Prince August Wilhelm, fourth son of the ex-Kaiser. He was a familiar addendum to Nazi rallies prior to the Machtcr- greifung (seizure of power). But during the 'blood purge' of 1934 he was suddenly ordered by General Goering to take a holiday in Switzerland, with which request he conformed without delay. During the 'crisis' that developed in 1938 out of Hitler's relations with the Reichswehr, the ex-Crown Prince was despatched on a similar excursion into the Swiss Alps. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 321 of greedy capital which fought this battle especially with the aid of its faithful comrade, the Marxist movement. The continued war against the German 'heavy industry* was the visible beginning of the German economy's inter- nationalization, aimed at by Marxism's victory in the Rev- olution. While I am writing this, the general attack against the German State Railways, which is now handed over to the international capital, has finally been successful. With this the 'international' Social Democracy has again reached one of its high objectives. How far one had succeeded in this 'economization' of the German people is probably most visible from the fact that finally after the War one of the leading heads of German industry, and above all, German trade, was able to express the opinion that economy as such would be in a position to re-erect Germany, nonsense which was dished up in a very moment when France again based instruction in her schools primarily on the humanistic principles, in order to prevent the opinion that the nation and the State owed their exist- ence to business and not to eternally ideal values. The remark which in those days a Stinnes gave the world caused After the platform of the Social Democratic Party had be- come ' reformist ' in character, attention was devoted primarily to the question: 'What industries are ripe for socialization?' When the War was over, two commissions were appointed by the Reich government to look into the matter. The principal result was a theoretical decision that the coal industry ought to be socialized. Nothing else was accomplished, unless the law establishing 'industrial workers' councils' be considered an advance. Under the Dawes Plan, the German Railroads were organized into a separate 'company' (Reichsbahn- GeseUschaft) in the management of which the Reparations Commission had a share. The idea was to collect reparations money from the proceeds of the railroads, which remained, however, the property of the Reich. 322 MEIN KAMPF the most unbelievable confusion; because it was taken up immediately in order to become, with marvelous speed, the leit-motiv of all quacks and prattlers whom Heaven had let loose over Germany in the capacity of 'statesmen' since the Revolution. One of the most evil symptoms of decay in pre-War Germany was the constant spreading of half measures in all and every- thing. It is always the consequence of one's own uncer- tainty about some affair as well as of a cowardice resulting from these and other reasons. This disease is promoted further by education. German education before the War was afflicted with an extremely great number of weaknesses. Its intention was cut out, in a very one-sided manner, for the purpose of breeding pure 'knowledge'; it was orientated less towards 'abilities,' and far less emphasis was put on the cultivation of character in the individual (as far as this is at all pos- sible!), very little on the promotion of the joy of accepting Compare Spengler (Zucht oder Bildung?): 'First comes con- duct, and then knowledge. But as a nation we are not at all aware of what conduct is, and we have had far too much "education." We have been crammed full of knowledge that has no bearing on life, which is purposeless and directionless, by indefatigable teachers unable to propose to themselves any other task. But it is one thing to be pedantic, and another to possess prudence, knowledge of life, and experience in the ways of the world. ... I would place Latin in the foreground, even today. Germany owes to the thorough training in Latin af- forded by its gymnasia during the past century more than it realizes. To that training it owes its intellectual discipline, its talent for organization, and its progress in technology. 1 Spengler adds, in prophetic words, that teaching history and 'educting the people politically' are one and the same thing. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 323 responsibility, and none at all on the training of will power and determination. Its results were really not the strong man, but rather the pliable 'know-all/ as which we Ger- mans were generally looked upon before the War and were esteemed accordingly. One liked the German, as he was very useful, but one respected him too little, just in conse- quence of his weakness of will. Not without reason was it above all he, who of all people most easily lost his nation- ality and his fatherland. The nice proverb, ' M it dem Hute in der Hand komnti man durch das ganze Land' [with one's hat in one's hand one can go through the whole land], says all there is to say. This pliability became really disastrous, however, when it determined the forms with which alone one was per- mitted to approach the monarch ; that means, never to con- tradict him, but to agree to all and everything that His Majesty pleases to ordain. The free dignity of man was most needed just in this very place, if otherwise the mon- archistic institution was not to perish some day just because of this cringing; for it was cringing and nothing else, and only to miserable cringers and sneaks, in short, to the whole decadent pack which has always felt at home around the highest thrones more than the honorable, decent, and hon- est souls, this can pass for the only given form of contact with the wearers of a crown. These 'most humble 9 crea- tures, however, with all humility towards their master and bread-provider, have forever demonstrated their greatest impudence towards the other part of mankind, and most of all when it pleased them to have the cheek to present them- selves as solely 'monarchistic' to the other sinners; a gen- uine impudence which only such a titled or untitled maw- worm can exhibit. For in truth these people have been the gravediggers of the monarchy and especially of the mon- archistic idea. This is conceivable in no other way. A man who is ready to stand up for a cause will and can never be a 324 MEIN KAMPF sneak and a characterless cringer. He who is really seri- ously concerned about the preservation and the furtherance of an institution will cling to it with the last fiber of his heart, and will never be able to get over the fact if evils of some kind become apparent in that institution, but such a man indeed will not cry this out publicly, as the democratic 'friends' (?) of the monarchy did in exactly the same men- dacious manner, but he will most seriously warn and try to influence His Majesty in person, the bearer of the crown. Thereby he will not and must not take the point of view that His Majesty will nevertheless be at liberty to act according to his will, even if this may and is bound to lead to disaster, but in such a case he will have to protect the monarchy against the monarch, and this at any risk. For, if the value of this institution were to be found in the per- son of the monarch who happens to reign at the time in- volved, then this would be the worst institution conceiv- able as a whole, for only in the rarest cases are the monarchs the 61ite of wisdom and reason, or even of character, as one likes to describe them. Only the professional cringers and sneaks believe this, but all straightforward people and these are nevertheless still the most valuable individuals of the State will feel repulsed by the representation of such an absurd opinion. For them history is only history, and truth is truth, even if the parties involved are monarchs. No, the fortune to possess a great monarch in the person of a great man falls only so rarely to the share of the people that they have to be content if the malice of Fate at least abstains from making the very worst mistake. Thus the value and the importance of the monarchistic idea cannot lie in the person of the monarch himself, except Heaven resolves to place the crown on the temples of an heroic genius like Frederick the Great or of a wise character like Wilhelm I. This happens once in the course of cen- turies, and hardly more often. For the rest, however, the THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 325 idea takes precedence of the person, since the meaning of this arrangement lies exclusively in this institution itself. But with this the monarch himself falls into the circle of service. Now he, too, is only a wheel in this work, and in this capacity he is obligated to the work. He, too, has now to submit to the higher end, and 'monarchist' is no longer he who silently lets the bearer of the crown sin against him- self, but he who prevents this. If it were different, not even the dethronement of an obviously mentally deranged prince would be permissible, if the meaning were not found in the idea, but in the ' sacred * person at any price, t Today it is really necessary to put this down, as recently These remarks are, in view of much that has been entered into the ledger since 1923, a fairly beguiling temptation to be retrospective. The relationships between Hitler and Wilhelm II are worth studying for the light they throw on German psychology. In both cases oratorical talent was used to flutter the dovecotes in the majority of European capitals. Both were disciples of Chamberlain, and both believed firmly in the inevitable 'war of races. 1 God was with Wilhelm as he is with Hitler. Under the old regime, there was Prince Eulenberg; under the new there is Rudolf Hess. The court pianist tradi- tion survived into the Third Reich. The craving to be re- ceived into British society has endured, together with the same inability to 'arrive. 1 Before the War, naval officers preparing to receive the Kaiser on a tour of inspection, were surprised to find that a lofty pedestal had been erected, to the top of which a staircase led. The riddle was solved when Wilhelm ascended to that lofty perch and talked down to his dear navy. In 1 935 1 a similar pedestal was constructed for the Niirnberg Party Conference. Hitler mounted, and talked down to his beloved S.A. The Kaiser's picture, in days gone by, was ubiquitous; Hitler's is now, if possible, still more universal. But to date the fondness for uniforms has apparently been bequeathed to General Goering. 326 MEIN KAMPF more and more of those types begin again to emerge from obscurity to whose wretched attitude the collapse of the monarchy must be ascribed not in least degree. With a certain naive imperturbability, these people now talk again only of 'their' king (whom, however, they had nevertheless left in the lurch in the most wretched manner, in the criti- cal hour only a few years ago), and they begin to describe as a bad German every man who is not willing to tune in with their mendacious tirades, while in truth these are exactly the same poltroons who in the year 1918 dispersed and rushed away from each and every red arm badge, who let their king be king, immediately exchanged halberd for the walking stick, donned neutral neckties, and disap- peared, as peaceful 'citizens,' actually without leaving a trace. At that time they had disappeared at one blow, these royal champions, and only after the revolutionary hurricane had calmed down, thanks to the activity of the others, so that one could again blare out into the air one's ' Hail to the King, Hail,' these 'servants' and 'councillors' of the crown began again to emerge cautiously. But now they are all here, and they cast their eyes longingly backwards towards the fleshpots of Egypt, they hardly can restrain themselves for loyalty towards the king and for eagerness to accomplish great feats, till perhaps the first red arm badge will some day appear again, and the ghostly crowd of the parties inter- ested in the monarchy bolts again, like mice before the cat. If the monarchs themselves were not guilty of these things, one could only pity them most heartily because of their defenders of today. But they can be convinced, at any rate, that with such knights one loses perhaps one's throne, but that one does not fight for crowns. This devotion, however, was a fault of our entire educa- tion, a fault which took its revenge now in this place in an especially terrible manner. For in consequence of this, these wretched types were THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 387 able to hold their ground at all courts and to undermine gradually the foundations of the monarchy. But when the building then finally began to shake, they were blown away as it were and disappeared. Naturally: cringers and flunk- ies do not let themselves be killed for their master. That the monarchs never know this and on principle fail to learn this has been their doom of old. One of the worst symptoms of decay was the increasing cow- ardice towards responsibility as well as the half-heartedness in all things resulting from it. t The starting-point of this plague, however, lies with us to a great part in the purest cultivation of irresponsibility in our parliamentary institution: unfortunately, this plague invaded slowly also the remaining domains of life, most of all that of the State. Everywhere one began to evade re- sponsibility and for this reason one preferred to take up half and insufficient measures; because by their application the measure of the responsibility to be borne personally seems to be screwed down to the smallest size. One need only look at the attitude of the various govern- ments towards a series of really detrimental symptoms of our public life, and one will easily recognize the terrible meaning of this general half-heartedness and cowardice towards responsibility.-^ Here again Spengler is interesting. 'We must set to work here and now,' he declared in Der Sumpf, 'relentlessly finding the sore on the German body, if a long-drawn-out, creeping illness is to be cured.' But Spengler detected the evil, not in the parliamentary system as such, or even in Marxism, but rather in the mechanics of party life. Parties, he contended, became ends in themselves, and lost all relation to the bane central concerns of the nation. 328 MEIN KAMPF I take up only a few cases out of the vast number which is at our disposal: Just in journalistic circles one usually prefers to call the press a 'great power' of the State. As a matter of fact its importance is truly enormous. It cannot be overestimated ; it is indeed actually the continuation of the education of youth in advanced age. t Thereby one can divide the readers as a whole into three groups: First, those who believe everything they read; Secondly, those who no longer believe anything; Thirdly, those who critically examine what they have read and judge accordingly. The first group is numerically by far the greatest. It con- sists of the great masses of the people and therefore repre- sents the mentally simplest part of the nation. But it can- not at all be expressed in terms of professions, but, at the utmost, in general grades of intelligence. To it belong all those to whom independent thinking is neither inborn nor instilled by education, and who, partly through inability and partly through incompetence, believe everything that is put before them printed in black on white. Also those lazy- bones belong to it who are well able to think for themselves, but who, out of sheer mental inertia, gratefully pick up anything that someone else has thought before, with the modest assumption that the latter will probably have exer- cised the right kind of effort. Now with all these people, who represent the great masses, the influence of the press will be enormous. They are not in a position, or they do not wish personally, to examine what is offered to them so that their entire attitude towards all current problems can be led back almost exclusively to the outward influence of others. This may be of advantage in case their enlighten- ment is carried out by a sincere and truth-loving party, but it is evil as soon as scoundrels or liars do this. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 329 The second group is much smaller even in number. It is composed of the greater part of elements which first be- longed to the first group, and who after long and bitter dis- appointments changed over to the contrary and believe no longer in anything at all that comes in the form of print before their eyes. They hate every newspaper; either they do not read it at all or they are annoyed at the contents without exception, since in their opinion it is composed only of lies and untruths. These people are very difficult to handle, as they will also always face the truth mistrustingly. Therefore they are lost to every positive work. The third group finally is by far the smallest; it consists of the mentally truly fine heads whom natural gifts and education have taught to think independently, who try to form a judgment of their own about everything, and who submit most thoroughly everything they have read to an examination and further development of their own. They will not place a newspaper before their eyes without making their brains co-operate continuously, and then Mr. Author will not easily hold his own. The journalists therefore like such a reader only with reserve. For this third group, indeed, the nonsense which a news- paper may scribble together is of little danger or impor- tance. They have accustomed themselves anyhow in the course of their lifetime to see as a rule in every journalist a scoundrel who tells the truth only occasionally. Unfortu- nately, however, the importance of these excellent people lies only in their intelligence and not in their number; a mis- fortune in a time in which wisdom is nothing and the major- ity everything. Today, where the ballot of the masses de- cides, the decisive value lies with the most numerous group and this is the first one: the crowd of the simple ones and the credulous.** It is in the paramount interest of the State and the na- tion to prevent these people from falling into the hands ot 330 MEIN KAMPF evil, ignorant, or even malevolent educators. The State, therefore, has the duty to supervise their education and to prevent any nuisance. Therefore, it has to watch especially the press, for its influence is by far the strongest and most penetrating on these people, as it is applied not temporarily but permanently. In the persistent and eternal repetition of this instruction lies its entire unheard-of importance. Therefore, if in any place at all, the State must not forget that just in here all means must serve an end ; it must not let itself be misled by the boast of a so-called ' freedom of the press/ and must not be persuaded to fail in its duty and to put before the nation the food that it needs and that is good for it; it must assure itself with ruthless determination of this means for educating the people and to put into the service of the State and the nation. But what food was it that the German press of the pre- War time put before these people? Was it not the worst conceivable poison? Was not the worst kind of pacifism inoculated into the heart of our people, at a time when the rest of the world was about to throttle Germany slowly but surely? Did not this press, even in times of peace, instill into the brains of the people doubts about the rights of their own State, in order to restrict it from the beginning in the choice of the means for its defense? Was it not the German press which knew how to make palatable to our people the nonsense of 'Western Democracy/ till finally, captured by all these enthusiastic tirades, it thought that it could en- trust its future to a League of Nations? Did it not help in educating our people towards a wretched immorality? Did it not ridicule morals and customs, interpreting them as being old-fashioned and humdrum, till finally our people actually became 'modern'? Did it not, by continued attack, undermine the fundamentals of State authority for so long till a single blow was sufficient to cause the collapse of this building? Did it not once fight against every mani- THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 331 festation of the will to give to the State what belongs to it, did it not fight with all means, did it not disparage the army by continued criticism, did it not sabotage general conscription, and did it not solicit the refusal of military credits, etc., till the results could not fail to arrive? The activity of the so-called liberal press was the work of gravediggers for the German people and the German Reich. One can pass by in silence the Marxist papers of lies; to them lying is as necessary to their life as catching mice is to the cat; but its task is only to break the people's folkish and national spine, in order to make it ripe for the yoke of slav- ery of international capital and its masters, the Jews. But what did the State do against this mass poisoning of the nation? Nothing, actually nothing. A few ridiculous decrees, a few fines against too great villainies, and that was all. But instead, one hoped perhaps to gain the favor of this pest by bringing forth flatteries and acknowledgments of the 'value' of the press, its 'importance,' its 'educational mission,' and the other nonsense of that kind, which the Jews, slyly smiling, received and accepted with cunning thanks. The cause for this miserable failure, however, was not the non-recognition of the danger but rather a cowardice, crying to Heaven, and the half-heartedness of all resolu- tions and measures, born out of it. Nobody had the cour- age to take up thoroughgoing radical means, but here, as everywhere else, one bungled about with half prescriptions, and, instead of delivering the coup de grdce, one perhaps only irritated the viper, with the result that not only every- thing remained as it had been, but that, on the contrary, the power of the institution to be fought increased from year to year. The German government's defensive against the press horde, slowly corrupting the nation, of chiefly Jewish origin and of Jewish journals, was without a straight line, without 332 MEIN KAMPF determination, but above all without any visible goal. Here the brains of the privy councillors gave out completely, in the estimation of the importance of this fight as well as in the choice of the means, and the establishment of a clear plan. Planlessly one doctored about; at a time when one had been bitten too much one locked up such a journalistic viper for a few weeks or months, but one left the snake's nest as such well alone. This was partly, of course, also the consequence of the infinitely sly tactics of Jewry on the one hand and of a stupidity or harmlessness typical amongst privy councillors on the other. The Jew was much too clever to permit his entire press to be attacked uniformly. No, the purpose of a part of it was to cover up. While the Marxist papers, in the meanest way, went to battle against everything that The 'Jewish press 1 was a slogan then, as it has since been in other lands. As a matter of fact, a few of the ablest 'liberal' journals in Germany were edited by Jews. Nevertheless, when one views the press of the country as a whole, the Jewish in- fluence appears to have been limited to the 'democratic' news- papers of Berlin and Frankfort. More emotion was aroused by a number of vigorous Jewish opposition journalists of an in- dependent stamp Maximilian Harden, Kurt Eisner, L. Schwarzschild, Georg Bernhard. Since 1933 the German press has been completely 'subordi- nated' (gleichgeschaltet). The first to go were the labor news- papers, not the Marxist ones merely, but particularly those of the trade unions. Der Deutsche the paper which Dr. Hein- rich Brflning founded and which he once edited had been the organ of the Christian unions; now it was transformed into the daily mouthpiece of Dr. Robert Ley, leader of the Arbeitsfront (Labor Front). Oddly enough the Jewish-owned journals were the ones to retain longest a measure of inde- pendence, because they had been sold in time to powerful industrial organizations. The Frankfurter Zcitung, for ex- THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 333 may be sacred to man, while they attacked State and gov- ernment in the most infamous manner and set great parts of the people by the ears, the bourgeois democratic Jewish papers knew how to give themselves the air of the well- known 'objectivity'; they carefully avoided all strong language, well knowing that all empty-heads are able to judge all things only according to their appearance and that they never have the ability to penetrate into the interior, so that for them the value of a cause is judged by the ex- terior instead of by the contents ; a human weakness to which they fortunately owe also the attention they receive. For these people the Frankfurter Zeitung was and is in- deed the incorporation of all decency; for it never employs ample, had a fairy godmother in I. G. Farben, the chemical trust. Religious dailies, many of which had been strong and influential concerns, were thoroughly curbed. The editors were fired in lots of a dozen. What remained were journalistic torsos, which should have been permitted to die a respectable death. For a while Colonel Franz von Papen held a jittery protecting hand over the Catholic Germania of Berlin, once the organ to which all had turned for information concerning the views of the powerful Center Party. Then at last the miserable remnant of former glories was snuffed out in 1938. The Vienna Reichspost, organ of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, collapsed far more rapidly. The provincial newspapers became mere reprints of hand-outs from the Propaganda Office. The press is the Nazi Party's greatest source of income, being a monopoly of tremendous dimensions. The Volkische Beobachter is the official paper, but almost every Nazi chieftain has a journal peculiarly his own. Particular value is attached to the illustrated weeklies, many of which are highly effective propaganda media. Every Nazi event is a photographers* holiday. During a single Rosenberg speech in 1933, official cameramen took 456 flashlight pictures. The Party also main- tains a considerable number of newspapers in foreign countries. 334 MEIN KAMPF crude expressions, it rejects all physical brutality, and always appeals to fight with 'spiritual' means which, strangely enough, is nearest to the heart of just the most unintelligent people. This is a result of our semi-education which detaches the people from the instinct of nature, pumps a certain knowledge into them without being able to lead them to the ultimate realization, as for this purpose industry and good will alone are not useful, but the neces- sary reason has to be present, and not only that, it has to be inborn. The ultimate realization, however, is always only the understanding of the causes of the instinct; that means, man will then never fall into the lunacy of believing that he has now really advanced to the position of master and lord of Nature, which the conceit of a semi-education brings about so easily, but he will then understand all the more the fundamental necessity of the working of Nature, and he will realize how far also his existence is subjected to these laws of the eternal battle and struggle in an up- ward direction. We will then feel that, in a world in which the planets circle around the sun, where moons ride around planets, where power alone is always the master of weakness and forces it into obedient service or else breaks it, there can be no special laws valid for man. For him also the eternal principles of this ultimate wisdom apply. He can try to comprehend them, but he will never be able to free himself from them. But it is just for our intellectual demi-monde that the Jew writes his so-called intellectual press. For them the The Berliner Tageblatt, edited by Theodor Wolff, was the paper the Nazis most hated, excepting the much less influential Gerade Weg, of Munich. On the day the Party came to power, offices of the second journal were smashed to bits and the editor Dr. Fritz Gerlich was jailed. He was eventually executed. Theodor Wolff escaped from Germany in 1933. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 335 Frankfurter Zeitung and the Berliner TageblaU are made, for them their tone is tuned, and on them finally they exer- cise their influence. By avoiding most carefully all forms seeming outwardly rude, they nevertheless pour the poison from other vessels into the hearts of their readers. Under a geseires [Yiddish; from the Hebrew gezera, meaning unnec- essary talk] of nice sounds and phrases they lull them into the faith as though really pure science or even morality were the driving forces behind their activity, while in reality it is only the ingenious and cunning art of stealing in this man- ner from the hand of the enemy the weapon against the press. For while some are dripping with decency, all weak heads are the more inclined to believe that with the others it is a case of only minor excrescences, which, however, should never be allowed to lead to an infringement of the freedom of the press (as one calls this nuisance of unpunish- able lying to, and poisoning of, the people). Thus one shies from proceeding against this banditry, as one fears that in such a case one will immediately have the 'decent' press against oneself; a fear that is only too justified. For, as soon as one tries to proceed against one of these disgraceful papers, immediately all the others will take its side, but by no means perhaps in order to endorse its kind of fight, Heaven forbid ; only the principle of the freedom of the press and of public opinion are involved ; this alone has to be defended. But the strongest man weakens in the face of this clamor, since it comes from the mouth of only ' decent ' papers. . . . Thus the poison could penetrate into and work in the system of our people without hindrance and without the State having the power to master the disease. In the ridicu- lous and half-hearted means which it applied against it is shown the threatening decay of the Reich. For an institu- tion which is no longer determined to defend itself with all weapons practically gives itself up. Every half measure is then the visible symptom of internal decay which will 336 MEIN KAMPF and must be followed, sooner or later, by external col- lapse. I believe that the present generation, rightly guided, will more easily overcome this danger. It has experienced several things which were able to strengthen the nerves of those who did not lose them altogether. Surely in the future, the Jew will certainly raise an enormous clamor in his newspapers, once the hand is put on his favorite nest and an end is made of the misuse of the press, and once also this instrument of education is put into the service of the State and is no longer left in the hand of strangers and enemies of the people. But I also believe that this will annoy us younger ones less than it once did our fathers. A 30 cm. shell has always hissed more than a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers; therefore let them hiss. t A further example for the half-heartedness and the weak- ness of the leading authority in pre-War Germany in the most important vital questions of the nation can be the following: Parallel with the political and moral infection of the people went a no less terrible poisoning of the health of the national body. Syphilis began to spread more and more, especially in the great cities, while tuberculosis was steadily reaping its harvest of death almost throughout the entire country. Although in both cases the consequences for the nation This extensive philippic against syphilis is among the most interesting passages in Mein Kampf. Much medical or pseudo- medical speculation has been built up round about it, with which we do not associate ourselves. The essential point is that syphilis and Rassenschande (i.e., cohabitation between a German and a person of impure blood) are placed on the same level. The first can be cured, however. The second i irre- parable. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 337 were terrible, one could no longer bring oneself to take decisive measures. Towards syphilis especially one can describe the attitude of the national and State authority only with the words, complete capitulation. If one wanted to fight it seriously, one had to take quite different steps than was actually the case. The invention of a remedy of a questionable character as well as the commercial exploitation of the latter are able to help but little with this plague. Also here only the fight against the causes should be considered and not the aboli- tion of the symptoms. The cause, however, lies primarily in our prostitution of love. Even if the result of this were not this terrible disease, yet it would still be of deepest danger for the people, for the moral devastation which this depravity brings with it are sufficient to destroy a people slowly but surely. The Judaization of our spiritual life and the mammonization [sic] of our mating impulse sooner or later befouls our entire new generation, for instead of vig- orous children of natural feeling, only the miserable speci- mens of financial expedience come forth. For this becomes more and more the basis and the only prerequisite for our marriages. Love, however, finds an outlet somewhere else. Naturally, one can also here mock Nature for a certain time, but the revenge will not fail to appear, it only will appear later, or rather, it is often recognized too late by the people. However, how devastating are the consequences of a continued disregard of the natural presuppositions for mar- riage can be demonstrated by our aristocracy. Here one is presented with the results of a propagation which has been based for one part on purely social compulsion, for the other on financial reasons. The one leads to weakening altogether, the other to blood poisoning, as now every department-store Jewess is considered suitable to augment the offspring of 'His Highness. 9 The latter then looks like 131 MEIN KAMPF it. In both cases complete degeneration is the consequence. Our 'middle class 9 takes pains today to walk the same way and it will end at the same goal. With indifferent haste one tries to pass by disagreeable truths, as though by such an attitude one could make these things undone. No, the fact that the population of our big cities is prostituted more and more in its love life, and that just through this it falls victim to syphilis in more and wider circles, cannot just be abolished by denying it; it is there. The most obvious results of this mass contagion can be found on the one hand in the lunatic asylums, and on the other, unfortunately, in our children. These es- pecially are the sad certificates of misery of the irresistibly advancing tainting of our sexual life; in the diseases of the children the vices of the parents are revealed. Now there are different ways to reconcile oneself with this disagreeable, even terrible fact: some do not see any- thing at all, or rather they do not want to see anything: this is of course by far the most simple and cheapest 'atti- tude'; others wrap themselves in a saintly cloak of prudish- ness that is as ridiculous as it is also mendacious; they only talk of this entire domain as if it were a great sin, and, above all, in the presence of every sinner caught in the act, they express their deeply felt inner indignation in order then to close their eyes in pious disgust towards this vicious disease and to ask God (if possible after their own death) to rain fire and brimstone upon this Sodom and Gomorrah in order once again to make an elevating example of this disgraceful mankind ; a third group see very well the terrible consequences which this disease is bound to, and will, bring with it, but nevertheless they only shrug their shoulders, convinced that they can do nothing against this danger, anyhow, so that one has to let things go as they are going. All this is of course comfortable and simple, only one must not forget that a nation will fall victim to such inertia* THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 339 The excuse that the other nations are no better off of course can hardly change anything In respect to the fact of their own decline, except perhaps that the feeling that others also meet with misfortune would bring for many a mitigation of their own pains. However, the question is then all the more which nation first and by itself is able to master this plague, and which nations cannot help per- ishing. But that is what matters in the end. This also is only a touchstone for the value of a race, and that race which does not pass the test will die and make room for races healthier or at least tougher and of greater resistance. For, since this question primarily concerns the coming gen- eration, it belongs to those of whom it is said, with terrible correctness, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the tenth generation. But this is valid only for the sins against blood and race. The sin against the blood and the degradation of the race are the hereditary sin of this world and the end of a mankind surrendering to them. But how truly miserably did the Germany of pre-War times face just this one question. What was done in order to check the tainting of our young generation in the big cities? What was done to attack the infecting and mam- monization [sic] of our love life? What, in order to fight the resulting syphilization of our national body? The answer is most easily given by stating what should have been done. First, one should not be allowed to take this question too easily, but to understand that upon its solution will depend the happiness or the unhappiness of generations, nay, that it may be or even must be decisive for the entire future of our people. Such a realization, however, required ruthless measures and interventions. At the top of all re- flections the conviction should have been placed that first of all the attention of the entire nation has to be concen- 340 MEIN KAMPF trated on this terrible danger, so that every single indi- vidual becomes conscious in his mind of the significance of this fight. One can bring obligations and burdens which are incisive, and sometimes hard to bear, to a general effec- tiveness only when, apart from compulsion, also the real- ization of the necessity of this activity is given to the individual. But this demands an enormous enlightenment to the exclusion of all current questions which have an otherwise deviating effect. In all cases which involve the fulfillment of apparently impossible demands or tasks, the entire attention of a people has to be united uniformly on this one question in such a manner as though indeed its existence or non-existence de- pended upon its solution. Only thus will one make a people willing and able to undertake truly great achievements and efforts. This principle is valid also for the individual, as far as he wishes to attain great goals. He, too, will be able to do this only in step-like sections. He, too, will then always have to unite his entire efforts on the reaching of a certain limited task, until this seems to be fulfilled and the marking of a new section can be undertaken. He who does not carry out the partition of the way to be conquered into single sections, and then tries to conquer them plan- fully with sharpest concentration of all forces, one by one, will never be able to arrive at the goal, but he will remain lying somewhere on the way, perhaps even by the side of it. This gradual approach to a goal by work is an art and it requires at a time the staking of actually the utmost energy in order to conquer the way, step by step. This is, therefore, the very first preliminary condition which is necessary for the attack on so difficult a part of the human way, the condition that the leadership succeeds in presenting to the masses of the people just that part of the goal which has to be reached, or, rather, which has to THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 341 be fought for, as the one that is now solely and alone worthy of human attention, and upon the conquest of which everything depends. The great masses of the people, anyhow, can never see the whole way before them with- out getting tired and without despairing of the task. They will keep the goal before their eyes only to a certain extent, but they will be able to visualize the way only in small sections, similar to the wanderer who also knows and is aware of the end of his journey, but who overcomes the endless road better if he cuts it up into sections and now marches ahead towards each single one, as though this were the desired goal. Only thus he advances without despairing. Thus, by employing all propagandistic auxiliary means, one should have made the fight against syphilis appear as the task of the nation, not as one task among others. For this purpose one should have hammered into the people its evils as the most terrible misfortune in its full extent, and under application of all auxiliary measures, till the whole nation should have come to the conviction that upon the solution of this question really everything depends, future or doom. Only after such a preparation, carried out for years if To date the 'extensive propaganda* anent syphilis has not been one of the principal achievements of the Third Reich. In 1933 strong measures were taken to curb prostitution. Under the Republic, the Berlin Department of Health had taken the view that all the State could intelligently do was to control the health of the street- walker. The changes in the law resulted, however, in 40,000 new cases of syphilis within a few months (according to an official report). Recently there has been a tendency to control the effects of social disease by examining persons who wish to marry, especially if they seek a loan from the government in accordance with the laws provid- ing grants of aid to prospective bridegrooms. 342 MEIN KAMPF necessary, will the attention, and with it also the determina- tion, of a whole people be awakened to such an extent that now one will be able to take very difficult and sacrificial measures without running the risk that one will not be understood or that one will suddenly be left in the lurch by the willingness of the masses. For, in order to attack this plague seriously, enormous sacrifices and works just as great are necessary. The fight against syphilis requires a fight against prosti- tution, against prejudices, old habits, against previous ideas, general opinions, amongst them last but not least, against the mendacious prudishness in certain circles, etc. The first condition for only the moral right to fight against these things is to make early marriage possible for the coming generation. In late marriages alone lies the compulsion for keeping an institution which, no matter how much one may turn and twist oneself, is and remains a disgrace to mankind, an institution which damned badly suits a being who otherwise in modesty likes to consider itself the 'image' of God. Prostitution is a disgrace to mankind, but one cannot abolish it by moral lectures, pious intentions, etc., but its limitation and its final elimination warrant the abolition of quite a number of preliminary conditions. But the first is and remains the creation of the possibility of early marriage, according to human nature, above all for the man; because the woman is here only the passive part, anyhow. However, how erring, even how incomprehensible the people have partly become today may be derived from the fact that one not seldom hears mothers of the so-called 'better* society say that they are grateful to find a husband for their child who has 'already sown his wild oats/ etc. As in this direction there is in most cases less shortage than would be the case the other way round, the poor girl THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 343 therefore will fortunately find such a de-horned Siegfried, and the children will be the visible result of such a 'sen- sible 1 marriage. If one considers that, apart from this, a restriction of propagation itself, as far as possible, takes place, so that Nature is barred from all choice, as now naturally every human being, no matter how miserable, has to be kept alive, there remains only the question why then such an institution still exists at all and what purpose it is supposed to have? Is this then not exactly the same as prostitution itself? Does then the duty towards poster- ity no longer play any r&le at all? Or does one not realize with what curse one burdens oneself, towards children and children's children, by such a criminally careless manner in the guarding of the ultimate right of Nature and even of the ultimate obligation towards Nature? Thus the cultured people degenerate and perish gradually. Marriage also cannot be an end in itself, but has to serve the one greater aim, the propagation and preserva- tion of the species and the race. Only this is its meaning and its task. But if this is true, then its soundness can be measured only by the manner in which it fulfills this purpose. Evea for this reason, an early marriage is right, as it gives the young marriage still that force from which alone a healthy generation, capable of resisting, can ensue. Of course, to make this possible, quite a series of social conditions are necessary without which one cannot think of an early marriage. Therefore, the solution of this question, which is so small, cannot take place without incisive measures in Prior to 1925, the Republic had, it is true, been able to do very little towards solving the problem of housing. The end of the War not only brought the army back home, but also forced into the larger cities a constant stream of refugees from territories sundered from Germany by the peace treaties. 344 MEIN KAMPF social regard. What importance must be attributed to these should be understood most of all in a time when the so-called 'social' republic, by its inability in the solution of the housing question alone, simply prevents numerous marriages and thus favors prostitution. The absurdity of our way of arranging salaries, which considers the question of the family and its support far too little, is also a reason which makes so many an early marriage impossible. Therefore, one can approach a real fight against prosti- tution only if, by a fundamental change of social condi- tions, earlier marriage than can take place now is made It is sometimes estimated that 1,000,000 persons migrated from the regions ceded to Poland. In addition the country was overrun with fugitives from Russia and the Baltic States. The government had no money; and during the period of in- flation the very sources from which revenue might have been obtained dried up. But as soon as the Dawes Plan went into effect, housing plans of vast dimensions got under way. During the four years beginning with 1925, Germany erected more homes than did any other European country in the same period. There was much argument concerning the character of the work done. Socialist municipal governments, often committed to family limitation, favored apartment houses; Catholic and Protestant agencies, which sought to promote 'normal' family life, tried whenever possible to erect one- family houses. Sometimes, as in Cologne, the expenditures drew from critics the complaint that bankruptcy was inevitable. Under National Socialism, the trend has predominatingly been towards one-family housing. This has been aided by a marked tendency on the part of middle-class families to place their savings in real property. Yet there is no essential differ- ence between 1928 and 1935 in this regard, though such a build ing as the huge apartment-house erected in Neu-K6lln. Berlin, under the Republic would hardly be erected today. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 345 generally possible. This is the very first preliminary con- dition for a solution of this question. In the second place, however, education and training have to eliminate quite a series of evils about which one hardly cares at all today. Above all, in our present-day education a balance between intellectual instruction and physical training has to take place. What today calls itself a gymnasium is an insult to the Greek example. With our education one has entirely forgotten that in the long run a healthy mind is able to dwell only in a healthy body. Especially when, with a few exceptions, one looks at the great masses of the people, this principle receives absolute validity. In pre-War Germany there was a time when one no longer cared for this truth. One simply went on sinning against the body, and one thought that in the one-sided training of the 'mind' one possessed a safe guaranty for the greatness of the nation. A mistake which began to avenge itself much sooner than one thought. It is no acci- dent that the bolshevistic wave found nowhere a better ground than in those places where a population, degener- ated by hunger and constant undernourishment, lives: in Central Germany, Saxony, and the Ruhr district. In all these districts, however, a serious resistance on the part of the so-called ' intelligentsia ' to this Jewish disease hardly takes place any longer for the simple reason that the in- telligentsia itself is physically completely degenerated, though less by reasons of distress than by reasons of edu- cation. The exclusively intellectual attitude of our edu- cation of the higher classes makes them unable in a time where not the mind but the fist decides even to preserve themselves, let alone to hold their ground. In physical deficiencies there lies not infrequently the first cause of personal cowardice. The exceeding stress on a purely intellectual training 346 MEIN KAMPF and the neglect of physical training favor also in much too early youth the formation of sexual conceptions. The boy who, by sports and gymnastics, is brought to an iron- like inurement succumbs less to the need of sensual grati- fication than the stay-at-home who is fed exclusively on intellectual food. A reasonable education, however, must take this into consideration. Further, it must not forget that on the part of the healthy young man the expectations of the woman will be different than on the part of a pre- maturely corrupted weakling.^ Thus the entire education has to be directed towards employing the free time of the boy for the useful training of his body. He has no right to loaf about idly in these years, to make streets and movie theaters insecure, but after his daily work he has to steel and harden his young body so that life will not find him too soft some day. To get this under way and also to carry it out, to guide and to lead is the task of the education of youth, and not the exclusive infiltration of so-called wisdom. It has also to do away with the conception that the treatment of the body were the concern of each individual. There is no liberty to sin at the expense of posterity and, with it, of the race. Parallel with the training of the body, the fight against the poisoning of the soul has to set in. Our entire public life today resembles a hothouse of sexual conceptions and stimulants. One has only to look at the menus of our movie houses, vaudevilles, and theaters; and one can hardly deny that this is not the right kind of food, above all for youth. In shop windows and on billboards one works with the basest means in order to attract the atten- tion of the masses. That this is bound to lead to serious damage to youth is probably clear to everyone who has not lost the ability to imagine himself in the place of a youth's soul. This sensual sultry atmosphere leads to THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 347 ideas and stimulations at a time when the boy ought not yet to have an understanding for such things. The result of this education can be studied in a not very enjoyable way with the youth of today. From the courtrooms events sometimes penetrate to the public which permit a horrible insight into the inner life of our fourteen- and fifteen-year- old youths. Who will wonder, therefore, that even in the circles of this age syphilis begins to seek its victims? And is it not a misery to see how so many physically weak, and also mentally corrupt, young men receive their initiation into marriage by a whore of the big cities? No, he who wants to attack prostitution must primarily help to abolish the mental presupposition for it. He has to clear away the filth of the moral contamination of the * culture' of our big cities, and this ruthlessly and without There is no doubt that one of the sources of Nazi strength lies in the sanity of its attitude towards youth as compared with the view taken on the whole by German Communism. This last had a baneful hedonistic core : the result of the fact that it stressed the rights of the masses far more effectively than it did their duties. A good many sound people turned to Hitlerism because they could not stomach such Communist demands as these : free contraceptives, family aid to unmarried lovers, and 'week-ends.' However arguable it may be that young people without money will not abstain from love rela- tionships, it is nevertheless a prevalent belief that society ia something more than just an institute for having a 'good time.' However sinister the ultimate objectives of the Nazis may be, there is no doubt that Hitler's soldier helpers have often in- culcated a healthier attitude towards life. Unfortunately, the good thus accomplished has in part been destroyed again by forces inherent in the Nazi dynamic. The Nazi youth organizations take up ao much of the boy or girl'i leisure time that little is left for the hearth-side. Moreover, the 'anti-bourgeois' doctrine inculcated tends to make th 348 MEIN KAMPF hesitating despite all clamor and lamentations which then, of course, will be let loose. If we do not lift our youth out of the morass of its present surroundings, it will be sub- merged in it. He who does not want to see these things supports them and becomes thus a fellow culprit in the slow prostitution of our future, for the latter lies in the coming generation. This cleaning-up of our culture must extend to nearly all domains. Theater, art, literature, movies, the press, billposters and window displays must be cleaned of the symptoms of a rotting world and put into the service of a moral idea of State and culture. Public life has to be freed from the suffocating perfume of our modern eroticism, exactly as also of all unmanly prudish insincerity. In all these things the goal and the way have to be determined by the care for the preservation of our people's health in body and soul. The right of personal freedom steps back in the face of the duty of the preserva- tion of the race. f Only after the execution of these measures can the medical fight against this disease itself be carried on with some prospects of success. However, here, too, the ques- tion involved cannot be that of half measures, but also here one will have to come to the most serious and most incisive decisions. It is a half measure to allow incurably ill people the permanent possibility of contaminating the domestic virtues seem tame. Henri Lichtenberger concludes (The Third Reich) that 'the gulf between generations, far from being bridged, is only becoming greater under the Spartan regime installed by Hitlerism.' Moral conditions are often deplorable, judged by standards of Christian or bourgeois morality. The fact that an illegitimate child, if born of 'good stock/ is considered an asset to the Reich seems to have made many young girls lose their heads; and an increase in the practice of homosexual vice is conceded on all sides. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 349 other healthy ones. But this corresponds entirely to a humaneness which, in order not to hurt one individual, lets hundreds of others perish. The demand that for de- fective people the propagation of an equally defective off- spring be made impossible is a demand of clearest reason and in its planful execution it means the most humane act of mankind. It will spare undeserved suffering to millions of unfortunates, but in the future it will lead to an increas- ing improvement of health on the whole. The determina- tion to proceed in this direction will also put up a dam against the further spreading of venereal diseases. For here, if necessary, one will have to proceed to the pitiless isolation of incurably diseased people; a barbaric measure for one who was unfortunate enough to be stricken with it, but a blessing for the contemporaries and for posterity. The temporary pain of a century may and will redeem millenniums from suffering. The fight against syphilis and its pacemaker, prostitu- tion, is one of the most colossal tasks of mankind, colossal for the reason that it does not involve the solution of a single question in itself, but rather the abolition of quite a series of evils which, as their consecutive symptoms, give the cause for this disease. For the illness of the body is here only the result of an illness of moral, social, and racial instincts. If this fight, by reason of inertia or also cowardice, is not fought out, then one should look upon the nations five hundred years from now. Then one would be able to find only a few images of God, without deliberately insulting the All Highest. But how, in the old Germany, had one tried to deal with this plague? Upon quiet examination there results a really distressing answer to this. In the circles of the government one certainly knew the terrible ravages of this illness very well, though one was perhaps not quite able to visualize 350 MEIN KAMPF the consequences; but in the fight against it one failed completely, and instead of thoroughgoing reforms one preferred to take miserable means. One doctored about with the disease and one let the causes be causes. One subjected the individual prostitute to a medical examina- tion, supervised her as well as might be possible, and in case of an ascertained illness put her into some hospital, from which, after being outwardly cured, she was let loose again on the rest of mankind. Of course, one had introduced a 'protective paragraph, 9 according to which a person who was not quite healthy or cured had under penalty to avoid sexual intercourse. This measure is certainly right in itself, but in its practical execution it fails almost completely. First, the woman, in case she is met by misfortune in this way, solely in conse- quence of our, or rather of her, education, will in most cases refuse to let herself be dragged into the courtroom (under accompanying circumstances which are certainly often embarrassing) as a witness against the wretched thief of her health. Just to her this is of little use; anyhow, in most cases, she will be the one who has to suffer most from this; because she is hit much harder by the contempt of her heartless surroundings than would be the case with the man. But finally, imagine her situation if the conveyer of the disease is her own husband. Is she to put him on trial? Or what else, then, is she to do? But in the case of the man the fact is added that he unfortunately runs only too often into the way of this plague after ample consumption of liquor, as in this state he is least in a position to judge the qualities of his 4 beauty ' ; a fact that is only too well known to the prostitute who is sick, anyhow, and that, for this reason, causes her always to fish for men in this ideal condition. But the end is that he, disagreeably surprised later on, is not able to remember his one-time compassionate benefactress, despite frantic THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 351 reflections, something that must not be surprising in a city like Berlin or even Munich. To this is added further that the persons involved are frequently visitors from the pro- vinces who in any case face the whole humbug of the big cities with complete perplexity. Finally, however, who is able to know whether he is sick or healthy? Do not numerous cases occur where an apparently cured person suffers relapses and now causes the most terrible evil, without himself being aware of it in the end? Thus the practical effect of this protection by the legal penalty of a guilty infection is in reality equal to naught. Exactly the same can be said of the control of the prosti- tutes, and finally also the cure itself is still uncertain and doubtful even today. Only one thing is certain : the disease spreads more and more despite all the preventive measures of that time. By this, however, the ineffectiveness of these measures is proved in the most striking way. For everything that was done besides this was as ridicu- lous as it was insufficient. The fight against the prostitu- tion of the people's soul failed on the entire line; that means more rightly that here one did nothing at all. But he who wants to understand this easily need only study the statistical basic facts about the spreading of this plague, compare its growth during the last hundred years, and try to imagine this further development and he really would have the simple-mindedness of an ass if then an uncomfortable chill did not run down his spine. The weakness and the half-heartedness with which even then one defined one's attitude towards such a terrible symptom can be evaluated as a visible sign of the decay of a people. When the energy for the fight for one's own health is no longer present, the right of living in this world of strength begins gradually to withdraw. It belongs really only to the powerful 'whole' and not to the weak 'half/ 352 MEIN KAMPF One of the most visible symptoms of the old Reich's decay was the slow sinking of the general level of culture; by culture I do not mean what is called today by the word 'civilization.' The latter seems to be, on the contrary, rather an enemy of true spiritual and living levels. As early as before the turn of the century an element began to push its way into our att which up to that time could be looked upon as entirely alien and unknown. Per- haps in previous times errors of taste happened some- times, but the cases involved were artistic derailments to which posterity at least gave a certain historical value, rather than products of a degeneration which was no longer artistic at all but rather senseless. Through them the political collapse, which later on, of course, became better visible, began to announce its arrival in the cultural field. The bolshevism of art is the only cultural form of life, Here Hitler states, without philosophical elaboration, the doctrine which some groups of German intellectuals accepted as a bridge across which the German mind could pass to Na- tional Socialism. Civilization means the application of reason to life, a process which scored its greatest triumphs while Germany was struggling to emerge from the debris of the Thirty Years' War Goethe, Schiller, Kant, not to mention Lessing and Wieland, are reflections of the Western mind rather than original creations of the German soul. Even the great medieval Empire was based upon the triumph of Chris- tianity. Therefore the patriot prefers to seek out the 'life forces,' the irrational impulses, which seem to him more chat- acteristic of the German mind. This decision is sometimes couched in desperate phraseology: 'When I hear the word culture,' wrote Hans Johst (the first official Nazi playwright), 1 release the safety catch on my revolver.' And F. G. Jtinger that half-mad but gifted poet who eventually found Hitlerism tale and unprofitable, and went to prison for having indited, THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 353 and the only intellectual manifestation possible to bolshc- vism on the whole. He to whom this may seem strange should only subject to an examination the art of those States which have had the good fortune of being bolshevized, and to his horror he will observe the sickly excrescences of lunatics or of degenerate people which since the turn of the century we have learned to know under the collective conception of cubism or dadaism as the official art of those States. This phenomenon had become apparent even in the short dura- tion of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Even here one could see how all the official billposters, propaganda draw- ings in the newspapers, etc., showed the stamp of not only political, but also that of cultural, decay. As little as one could imagine about sixty years ago a political collapse of the greatness now arrived at, just as little was a cultural breakdown thinkable as it began to show itself in futuristic and cubistic representations since 1900. Sixty years ago an exhibition of so-called dadaistic the most violent attack on the Party ever penned inside Germany asks, 'Why do we need four walls? One wall is enough!' The wall is that against which the enemy is stood and shot. But one is not quite sure that J linger isn't being ironical. In so far as the philosophers (Klages, Heidegger, Baumler) are concerned, this development means a revival of certain aspects of early nineteenth-century idealism, with a militaristic emphasis. (Cf. Mensch und Erdc, by Dietrich Klages.) Hitler's views, re-emphasized in his Munich art lecture of 1937, crystallize in the teaching that there is only one art German-Nordic art. All attempts to sunder painting, for example, into various schools are mistaken. The most impor- tant exponent of these views is Professor Paul Schultze- Naumburg, who achieved fame when he was appointed director 354 MEIN KAMPF 'experiences' would have seemed simply impossible, and the sponsors would have been sent to the madhouse, while today they even preside in 'artists' unions.' This plague could not have appeared at that time, because neither would public opinion have suffered it nor would the State have looked on quietly. For it is an affair of the State that means of the government to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual lunacy. For in lunacy such a development would end one day. For on the day that this kind of art were actually to correspond to the general conception, one of the most severe changes of mankind would have begun ; the backward development of the human brain would have begun with this, but one would hardly be able to conceive the end. As soon, however, as from this point of view one lets pass before one's eyes the development of our cultural life of the Weimar Art School after the Nazi triumph of 1930. He immediately caused to be removed from the Weimar Museum all examples of expressionistic art, on the ground that this was an expression of a mankind subnormal from the racial point of view. Later on he delivered what was then considered a startling address, claiming that race dictated one's response to art, and that anyone who found esthetic pleasure in expres- sionism was not a German. Schultze-Naumburg contends that an artist cannot help reproducing 'the most signal racial characteristics of his own figure.' Therefore distortions, as practiced by the modernists, imply that the painter or sculptor is himself deformed in a racial sense. Many Nazis have ac- cepted these teachings with a wry grimace, pointing out that on such a basis the museums ought also to be cleansed of primitive, Egyptian, Byzantine, and even Italian art. On the subject of music, Hitler has been equally categorical: To me a single German military march is worth more than all the junk of these new musicians these people belong in a sanatorium.* THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 355 in the past twenty-five years, one will be shocked at seeing how far we already are on the way to this backward devel- opment. Everywhere we meet germs that represent the beginning of excrescences by which our culture is bound to perish sooner or later. Also, we are able to recognize in them the symptoms of decay of a slowly rotting world. Woe to the nations which are no longer able to master this disease ! One was able to find such diseases in almost all domains of art and general culture in Germany. Here everything seemed to have already passed the climax and to hurry towards the abyss. The theater sank visibly deeper and it would probably have retired completely as a cultural factor even then, had not at least the Court Theaters turned against this prostitution of art. If one leaves these and a few praiseworthy exceptions out of account, the perform- ances of the stage were such that for the sake of the nation it would have been more useful to avoid visiting them en- tirely.^- It was a sorrowful sign of inner decay that one no longer might send the young people to most of these so- called 'abodes of art,' which was openly and shamelessly admitted with the general warning of the penny arcades 1 Children are not admitted ! ' One should consider that one had to take such precau- tions in those places which primarily should exist for the education of youth and not for the amusement of old blast generations. What would the great dramatists of all times have said to such a rule and what, above all, about the cir- cumstances which gave the causes for them? How would perhaps a Schiller have flared up and a Goethe have turned away in indignation! However, what are Schiller, Goethe, or Shakespeare as compared with the 'heroes' of the new German dramatic art? Old, worn-out, and outlived, nay, 'conquered' types. For this was the characteristic of this time: not that it 356 MEIN KAMPF itself produced only dirt; what is more, it sullied everything that was really great in the past. This is, however, a symptom which one can see always at such times. The more villainous and wretched are the products of a time and its people, the more one hates the witnesses of a former greater time and dignity. But most of all in such times one would like to eliminate altogether the memory of the past of mankind, in order to disguise thus, by the exclusion of every possibility of comparison, one's own trash as 'art.' For this reason, the more wretched and miserable any new institution is, the more will it endeavor to extin- guish even the last traces of past times, whereas any really valuable renovation of mankind can also continue, with an easy mind, the good achievements of past generations, even often now tries to make them stand out. Then it has no fear to fade perhaps as compared with the past, but for its own part it makes such a valuable contribution to the general treasure of human culture that often, for the very evaluation of the latter, it wishes to keep awake the memory of the former achievements in order to secure thus all the more the full understanding of the present for the new donation. Only he who is not able to give anything valuable out of himself to the world, but tries to act as though he wants to give it God knows what, will hate Yet oddly enough it is precisely Goethe who, by reason of his bourgeois background, is today characteristic of the 'civi- lization' which the Nazi Revolution discountenances. Some- times he has been hated because foreigners relish his poetry; sometimes he has been tossed aside scornfully as the 'man without a musket.' The first generation of Nazi philosophers Rosenberg, Klages still numbered him among the nation's great. The second generation no longer reads him. Hauer's attempt to make him the 'prophet of the new German religion" has failed. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 357 everything that has already been given and would most of all like to deny it or even to destroy it. t This may be said not only for 'novelties' in the domain of general culture, but also for those of politics. Revolu- tionary new movements, the more inferior they themselves are, the more will they hate the old form. Also here one can see how the striving to make one's own trash appear as something leads to blind hatred towards the superior good of the past. As long as, for example, the historical memory of a Frederick the Great has not died, a Friedrich Ebert is only able to create moderate astonishment. The hero of Sans Souci is to the former barkeeper of Bremen approximately like the sun is to the moon. Only when the rays of the sun are gone is the moon able to shine. There- fore, the hatred of all new moons of humanity towards their fixed stars is only too understandable. In political life such naughts usually, if Fate throws the reign tempo- rarily into their laps, not only soil and stain the past with untiring zeal, but they also withdraw themselves, by ex- treme measures, from general criticism. As an example for this the protective legislation of the Republic may be considered. If, therefore, any new idea, a new doctrine, a view of life or also a political as well as an economic movement tries to deny the entire past, or wants to deride it and to make it valueless, for this reason alone one has to be extremely cautious and mistrusting. In most cases the reason for This attack on Ebert, first President of the Republic, is entirely in the spirit of the conservative opposition, which forgot that Ludendorff had said hopefully, 'Ebert will manage.' The laws referred to were passed after the murder of Rathenau to protect the government and its officials against arbitrary attacks from Rightist organizations. Spengler inveighs against them in much the same way. 358 MEIN KAMPF such hatred is either one's own inferiority or even an evil intention in itself. A genuinely blissful renovation of man- kind would always and forever have to continue to build in that place where the last foundation ends. It will not have to be ashamed of using existing truths. The entire human culture, as well as man himself, is only the result of one long single development, during which every genera- tion added to, and built in, its building stones. The mean- ing and the aim of revolutions is not to wreck the entire building, but rather to take away unsuitable stuff which has been badly fitted in and to continue to build on and add to the healthy spot that has been made free. Thus alone will one be able and allowed to speak of a progress of mankind. In the other case the world is never redeemed from chaos, as the right of rejection of the past would fall to every generation, and with this every genera- tion would be allowed, as the presupposition for its own work, to destroy the works of the past. The saddening fact of the deterioration of our culture of the pre-War time lay, however, not only in the complete impotency of the artistic and generally cultural creative force, but rather in the hatred with which the memory of the greater past was soiled and extinguished. In nearly all domains of art, and especially of the theater and of literature, one began to produce less important novelties at the turn of the century, in order, however, to deride instead the best old creations and to present them as inferior and conquered, as though this period of the most shameful inferiority would be at all able to 'conquer' anything. Out of this striving to remove the past out of the sight of the present, the evil intention of these 'apostles' of the future could clearly and distinctly be seen. From this one should have recognized that one had to deal, not with certain cul- tural intentions, even though they were wrong, but with a process of destruction of the basis of culture as a whole, THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 359 and with a ridiculing of sound art appreciation, made possible by this and with the intellectual preparation for political bolshevism. For if the time of Pericles appears incorporated in the Parthenon, so does the bolshevistic present in a cubistic grimace. In this connection one has also to point to the cowardice which again becomes visible through this of part of our people which by virtue of its education and its position should have been obliged to make front against this cul- tural disgrace. Out of pure fear of the clamor of these bolshevistic art apostles who most violently attacked and nailed down as an old-fashioned philistine everyone who did not want to recognize in them the crown of creation, one renounced any serious resistance and gave in to what seemed inevitable after all. One was seized with genuine fear of being denounced for lack of understanding by these half-wits or scoundrels; as though it were a^disgrace not to understand the products of intellectual degenerates or cunning deceivers. These disciples of culture, however, The hatred of expressionism which had its roots in Nietzsche is bound up in Hitler's mind with admiration foi Wagner's writings on art. The composer of Gotierddmmerung was a great musician, but he was in some ways a philistine; and it was against that philistinism that Nietzsche protested bitterly. Speaking in Dresden in 1848, Wagner said: 'What is the German thing? It is, it must be, the right thing!' In the apotheosis of Germanism which Wagner represents, Chamber- lain found a living justification of his theories. And through Chamberlain (whom he once met in Bayreuth, and from whom he received an emphatic endorsement) Hitler has learned how to expound Wagner. In a Wagnerian universe, there is room for expressionism ( which the war experience greatly furthered) because there is no nakedness of soul in Wagnerianism. There is only soulfulness a great quality, but one tinged constantly in the damp that rises from the waters of banality. 360 MEIN KAMPF had a very simple means to stamp their nonsense into God knows how enormous an affair by presenting to the astonished world as so-called 'inner experience* any unin- telligible and visibly crazy stuff, taking in this cheap man- ner the word of reply from the mouths of most people at the start. For there was no reason to doubt that this also could be an inner experience, but one could doubt whether it was permissible to put before the same world the hal- lucinations of insane people or criminals. The works of a Moritz von Schwind or of a Boecklin were also an 'inner experience' at that, of artists endowed with the grace of God, and not of fools. But here one could so well study the miserable cowardice of our so-called ' intelligentsia ' which shuns every serious resistance against this poisoning of the sound instinct of our people and left it to the people itself to be content with this impudent nonsense. In order not to be considered lacking in art understanding, one took then every derision of art into the bargain in order to become finally actually uncertain in the judgment of good or bad. Taken all in all, these were signs of a world getting worse and worse. As a doubtful symptom the following has to be stated : During the nineteenth century our cities began to lose more and more the character of 'culture places' in order to sink to mere 'human settlements.' The weak connection which our present-day proletariat of our big cities has with its dwelling-place is just the consequence of the fact that here really only the accidental local place of residence of the individual is involved and nothing else. This is partly connected with the frequent change of residence, caused by the social conditions, which does not grant sufficient time to man for closer connection with his city, THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 361 and partly the cause of this must be sought also in the general cultural unimportance and poverty of our present cities themselves. Still at the time of the Wars of Liberation, the German cities were not only few in number but also modest in size. The few really big cities were for the greatest part Court cities, and as such they possessed nearly always a certain cultural value and mostly also a certain artistic picture. The few places of more than fifty thousand inhabitants were, as compared with cities of the same population today, rich in scientific and artistic treasures. When Munich counted sixty thousand souls, it began to become one of the first German art centers ; today nearly every manufac- turing place has reached, if not even exceeded, this figure many times, without, however, sometimes being able to call its own even the most humble of genuine values. Pure collections of flats and dwelling-houses, nothing more. How, with such lack of importance, a special attachment to these places can originate must be a riddle. Nobody will be specially attached to a city which has nothing else to offer than what any other city has; one which lacks any individual touch and where everything is carefully avoided that could even look like art or something similar. But, as if this were not enough, the really big cities also become poorer and poorer in works of art, in proportion with the rising increase in the number of population. They appear more and more polished off and they present ex- actly the same picture, though on a larger scale, as the small and miserable factory towns. What modern times added to the cultural contents of our big cities was com- pletely insufficient. All our cities feast on the glory and the treasures of the past. It takes from the Munich of today everything that was created under the reign of Ludwig I ; one will be shocked at seeing how poor the addi- tion of important artistic creations since that time is. The 368 MEIN KAMPF same applies to Berlin and to most of the other big cities. The essential thing, however, is nevertheless the follow- ing: our present big cities have no monuments, dominating the entire picture of the city, which could somehow be called the symbol of the time. But this was the case in the cities of old, since nearly all of them had a special monument of its pride. The characteristic of the antique city was not found in the private buildings, but in the monuments of the community which seemed destined not for the moment but for eternity, for they were supposed to reflect not the riches of the individual owner but rather the greatness and the importance of the community. Thus monuments originated which were suited to attach the individual in- habitant to his city in a manner which today seems to us sometimes almost incomprehensible. For what he had before his eyes were not the miserable houses of private owners but the magnificent buildings of the whole commun- ity. Compared with them the living house was actually reduced to an insignificant object of secondary importance. For, only when comparing the dimensions of the antique State buildings with the contemporary private houses will one understand the overpowering sweep and force of this stress on the viewpoint to allot the first place to the public works. What today we admire in the wreckage and fields of ruins of the old world as the few still outstanding colos- Buses are not business palaces of the time but temples and State buildings; that means works the owner of which was the public. Even in the splendor of the later Rome, first place was not taken by the villas and the palaces of indi- vidual citizens, but by the temples and the thermae, the All this has now been changed. Munich has its Kunsthalle, Berlin its new Chancellery and Olympic Village. Millions have been spent on such buildings, and unlimited millions mav still be poured out. i THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 363 staia, circuses, aqueducts, basilicas, etc., of the State; that means of the entire people/* Even the Germanic Middle Ages maintained this point of view, though also under quite different conceptions of art as the leading principle. That which in antiquity found its expression in the Acropolis or in the Pantheon, now clad itself in the forms of the Gothic cathedrals. Like giants they stood out over the swarm of small frameworks, wooden or brick buildings of the medieval town, and thus they became symbols which today still define the character and the picture of these places, while at their sides the tene- ment-house blocks climb higher and higher. Cathedrals, town halls, and grain markets, as well as watch-towers, are the visible sign of a conception which ultimately cor- responded to that of antiquity. But how truly miserable the relation between State and private buildings has become today. If Berlin were to meet the fate of Rome, then the coming generations could one day admire the department stores of some Jews, and the hotels of some corporations the most imposing works of our time, as the characteristic expression of the culture of our days. Compare, therefore, the unfavorable disparity that prevails, even in a city like Berlin, between the build- ings of the Reich and those of finance and commerce. Even the amount of money allotted to the State buildings is in most cases truly ridiculous and insufficient. No works are created for eternity, but at the most those for the momentary need. No higher idea is at all predominant in this. The Schloss of Berlin was at the time it was built quite a different work from perhaps the new Library in the frame of the present. While one single battleship repre- sented a value of around sixty millions, hardly half of this amount was granted for the first magnificent building of the Reich, which was intended for eternity, the Reichstag Building. Indeed, when the question of the interior deco- 364 MEIN KAMPF ration was decided upon, the 'high' House voted against the use of stone, it ordered the walls trimmed with plaster; and this time the 'parliamentarians' had acted correctly for once: plaster heads do not belong between walls of stone. Thus our cities of the present lack the outstanding symbol of national community, and hence it is no wonder that the community does not see any symbol of itself in its cities. This must lead to a spiritual dullness which mani- fests itself in practice in a wholesale indifference of the present-day city dweller towards the lot of his city. This also is a sign of our declining culture and of our general collapse. The time is suffocated in petty expedi- ency, in other words, in the service of money. Thus one must not be surprised if under such a deity little under- standing for heroism remains. The present only harvests that which the immediate past has sown. All these symptoms of decay are ultimately only conse- quences of the lack of a certain, commonly acknowledged view of life and of the general uncertainty in the judgment, and the definition of an attitude towards the various great questions of the time, resulting from it. Therefore, everything, beginning with education, is half-hearted and wavering, shuns responsibility and ends thus in cowardly tolerance of even recognized evils. Dreamy humaneness becomes the fashion, and by a weak surrender to the ex- crescences and in sparing the individuals, one sacrifices in turn the future of millions.-* How much the general destruction spread is also appar- ent when looking at the religious conditions before the War. Here too, uniform and effective convictions, through a view of life, had long been lost in great parts of the nation. In this the adherents, freeing themselves officially from the Church, play a less important r61e than those who are THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 365 indifferent as a whole. While both denominations keep up missions in Asia and Africa, in order to lead new followers to the doctrine (an activity, which, compared with the advance of the Mohammedan faith, can show only very modest successes), in Europe proper they lose millions and again millions of adherents of inner homogeneousness, who now face religious life either as strangers or at least walk ways of their own. The consequences, especially as regards morality, are unfavorable ones. Remarkable is also the more and more violent fight begun against the dogmatic fundamentals of the various churches, without which, however, the practical existence of a religious faith is unthinkable in this world of man. The great masses of a people do not consist of philosophers, and it is just for them that faith is frequently the sole basis of a moral view of life. The various substitutes have not proved so useful in their success that one would be able to see in them a useful exchange for the former religious creeds. But if religious doctrine and faith are really meant to seize the great masses, then the absolute authority of the contents of this faith is the basis of all effectiveness. What, then, the customary style of living is for general This is the reverse of 'religion is the opium of the people. 1 Rauschning (cf . his Revolution des Nihilismus) has pointed out Hitler's deep respect for the Catholic Church and in particular for the Society of Jesus. In this he resembles Auguste Comte, who once proposed a liaison between Positivism and Rome. Both sundered their admiration from any kind of belief. Hitler praises the ability (as he sees it) of the Church to keep on resolutely proclaiming an article of faith, however powerful the arguments arrayed against it may be. If the nation can build dogmas about its new 'myth' and propagate them aa stubbornly, it may (so it is thought) give Germany a new faith, which the masses will cherish as tenaciously as they have until latterly cherished Christianity. 366 MEIN KAMPF life, without which certainly hundreds of thousands ol well-bred people would live sensibly and wisely, but mil- lions of others certainly would not, the organic laws are for the State and dogma is for religion. Only by this is the wavering and infinitely interpretable, purely spiritual idea definitely limited and brought into a shape, without which it could never become faith. In the other case, the idea would never grow beyond a metaphysical conception, in short, beyond a philosophical opinion. The attack upon the dogma in itself resembles, therefore, very strongly also the fight against the general legal fundamentals of the State, and, just as the latter would find its end in a com- plete anarchy of the State, thus the other in a worthless religious nihilism. But for the politician the estimation of the value of a religion must be decided less by the deficiencies which it perhaps shows than by the presence of a visibly better substitute. As long as there is no apparent substitute, that which is present can be demolished only by fools or by criminals. Of course, not the smallest share of the guilt of the unenjoyable religious conditions lies with those who burden the religious conception too much with worldly things, An attack on the Center Party, the official spokesmen for which were often priests and prelates. The fact that a Catholic Party entered into a coalition with Social Democracy in the Reich and in several States was described as a 'betrayal* of Christian principles not only by Right radicals with axes to grind, but also by a number of wealthy and conservative Catholics. As a matter of fact, that collaboration not only had the sanction of the highest ecclesiastical authorities in the land but was unimpeachable on any basis. The 'liberalism' of the 'political Catholics' was a favorite shibboleth among Jew baiters. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 367 thus bringing it frequently into a quite unnecessary con- flict with so-called exact science. Here the victory will, though after a serious struggle, nearly always fall to the latter, but religion will suffer serious damage in the eyes of all those who are not able to raise themselves above purely outward knowledge. But worse than all are the devastations which are brought about by the abuse of religious convictions for political purposes. One can really not proceed too sharply against those wretched profiteers who like to see in religion an instrument which may render them political, or rather com- mercial, services. These impudent liars, however, shout their creed into the world with a stentorian voice so that the other sinners can surely hear it, but not in order to die for it, if necessary, but in order to live better. For one single political job they offer the meaning of an entire faith for sale; for ten parliamentary mandates they ally themselves with the Marxist mortal enemies of all reli- gion and for one minister's seat they would certainly also marry the Devil, in so far as the latter would not be deterred by a remnant of decency. If in pre-War Germany the religious life had for many an after-taste, this was attributable to the misuse which was inflicted on Christianity on the part of a so-called 1 Christian ' party, as well as to the impudence with which one tried to identify the Catholic faith with a political party. This substitution was a fatality which perhaps brought parliamentary seats to a number of good-for-nothings, but injury to the Church. The result, however, had to be borne by the whole nation, as the consequences of the loosening of religious life caused by this occurred just in a time when everything began to give way and to change, anyhow, and when the traditional fundamentals of behavior and moralitv threat- ened to collapse. 368 MEIN KAMPF This, too, represented cracks and rifts in our national body which might well be harmless as long as no special strain occurred, but which were bound to cause disaster whenever, by the impetus of great events, the question of the inner solidarity of the nation became of decisive importance. * Also in the field of politics, when looked at with observant eyes, there were evils which might and must appear as symptoms of a coming decay of the Reich, provided no improvement or change were soon brought about. The aimlessness of German domestic and foreign politics was visible to anyone who did not deliberately wish to be blind. The business of compromise seemed to agree most of all with Bismarck's opinion that ' politics is the art of the pos- sible.' Now, however, there was just a slight difference between Bismarck and German chancellors who followed, which permitted the former to drop such a remark about the nature of politics, while the same opinion out of the mouths of his successors was bound to assume quite a different significance. For Bismarck only wished to express with this sentence that, in order to reach a certain political goal, all possibilities may be applied, or, one can proceed according to all possibilities; but his successors saw in this utterance only the solemn exemption from the necessity of having political thoughts or even aims at all. But political aims were really no longer present at that time for the leading authorities of the Reich; because for this the neces- sary foundation of a view of life and the necessary clarity on the laws of inner development of political life as a whole were missing. There were not a few to whom the prospects in this direction appeared dim and who castigated the planless- ness and thoughtlessness of the policy of the Reich, and THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 369 were, accordingly, very well aware of its inner weakness and hollowness, but they were only the outsiders of political life; the official authorities of the government passed by the observations of a Houston Stewart Chamberlain just as indifferently as this is still the case with us today. These people are too stupid to think for themselves, and too vain to learn which is necessary from others. Thus one sees incorporated in almost every councillor of the ministry an atom of that eternal truth which caused Oxenstierna to exclaim: 'The world is ruled only by a fraction of wisdom.' (This is no longer the case since Germany has become a republic. Therefore, it has also been forbidden by the law for the Protection of the Republic to believe, or even to discuss, anything like that. But Oxenstierna was lucky that he lived at that time and not in this wise republic of today.) As early as in pre-War times, that institution was recog- nized in which the strength of the Reich was to incorporate itself as the greatest weakness: the parliament, the Reich- stag. Here cowardice and irresponsibility presented them- selves in a rarely finished type. It is one of the greatest thoughtless observations which one may hear not infrequently, especially in these days, that in Germany parliamentarism 'has failed since the Revolution.' By this the appearance is only too easily given as though this had perhaps not been the case before the Revolution. But this institution can in reality have no other effect than a devastating one and this at a time when most people, still clad with blinders, did not or did not want to see anything. For, that Germany actually was crushed was not a little due to this institution, but that the catastrophe had not occurred before cannot be con- sidered as the merit of the Reichstag, but was attributable to the resistance which, still in the years of peace, con- fronted the activity of this gravedigger of the German nation and the German Reich. 370 MEIN KAMPF Out of the vast number of devastating evils which came forth from, or were caused by, this institution, 1 will point only to a single one which, however, exhibits most of all Ac inner nature of this most irresponsible institution of all times. The terrible half measures and weakness of the political guidance of the Reich in domestic and foreign affairs was due primarily to the working of the Reichstag; it became one of the chief causes of the political collapse. Half measure was everything that in any way was sub- ject to the influence of this parliament, no matter how one looks at it. Half measure and weak was the Reich's policy of alliances in foreign politics. While thus one wanted to preserve peace, one was bound to drive unresistingly towards war. Half measure was furthermore the policy towards Poland. The restraint of this passage is noteworthy. Prior to the War, the energetic Germanizing of Poland Was fostered by such men as Dr. Hugenberg, afterward leader of the Nationalist Party and pivot man in the deal which put Hitler in power. Disgusted with the failure of the pre-War Prussian government to stamp out all Polish opposition, Hugenberg resigned as an official, became a director of Krupp, and there made himself the systematic mole who ate away the financial underpinning of large portions of the German press and then boasted that he could make Germany read whatever he wanted it to read. After the War he took up the same work anew. Sums gathered from Chambers of Commerce, etc., to 'fight Bolshevism' were diverted into the purchases of daily and weekly papers until Hugenberg, as the controlling influence in the Scherl-Verlag, had under his thumb a multitude of German metropolitan and provincial dailies. He also acquired UFA, largest German film concern, which has more recently become the property of the German government. After 1922 when the Polish uprisings, intended to wrest from Germany more territory than the peace treaties had taken THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 971 One irritated without, however, ever proceeding seriously. The result was neither a reconciliation with the Poles nor a German victory, but instead enmity with Russia. Half measure was the solution of the question of Alsace- from her were in full swing Germany was again characterized by a resentment of Polish activities which often contrasted strangely with efforts to regulate the trade and minority problems. The Corridor, a strip of territory separating East Prussia from the main portion of the Reich and leading to the new harbor city of Gdynia, was considered a major political problem, and the fate of Danzig was kept dangling before the consciousness of the League of Nations. But when Hitler came to power, an attempt was made to counter Polish opposition by establishing friendly relations with that country. It was pointed out that after all both countries enjoyed the blessings of dictatorship. Many predicted that the Poles and the Germans would march arm in arm to the conquest of Russia. The Poles, however, were playing a difficult and crafty game. For a time they appeared to have rather the better of it. They kept a protecting hand over the Polish minority in Danzig, and at the same time did not relax the pressure that was brought to bear on German minority groups in Poland. It was the annexation of Austria that first tipped the scales in Hitler's favor. Almost immediately there appeared in various parts of the diplomatic world a ' memorandum ' purporting to be a plan for a 'Catholic group* of States in Central Europe, running from Italy through Croatia and Hungary to Slovakia and Poland. When the Czechoslovakian crisis was settled by giving Hitler what he wanted, the Poles acted quickly, but were unable to secure what, perhaps, they most needed a clear route tc the South. They did acquire the Teschen region, which is doubtless the richest morsel taken from the State once so hope- fully created by Masaryk and Wilson. But the inability of Slovakia and Hungary to reach a modus vivendi blocked any further progress. Most of the inhabitants ceded to Hungary changed their allegiance most unwillingly; and on both sides 372 MEIN KAMPF Lorraine. Instead of smashing with brutal fists once and for all times the head of the French hydra, or granting equal rights to the Alsatian, one did neither. (One was not even able to do so, because in the ranks of the greatest of the new boundaries the strange phenomenon of a National Socialism making great headway among the peasants though they were Slavs or Maygars completely changed the situa- tion. The swastika became a popular symbol. To some extent this was due to propaganda, but a more important factor was the feeling that under Hitler agriculture would be more prosper- ous, Jewry at a disadvantage, and all Leftist theories of social improvement for the masses abrogated. Poland tried very hard to effect the separation of Ruthenia from Czechoslovakia. So far it has failed. Far more significant, however, is the fact that the collapse of Prague as a center of military strength has radically altered the position of Poland. Its major natural resources and its armament manufactories are in the West, within range of German heavy artillery. Therefore its very good army (many rank its infantry with the best in Europe) was left dangling by a thread, and it had perforce to seek safety by trying to improve relations with Russia. The implications of the Ukrainian question have already been discussed, but one may add in addition that German control of Czechoslovakia can make this a haven for Ukrainian separatist agitators. Therefore Poland is imperiled. It is difficult to see why Warsaw could desire the dismemberment of the State on its southern boundaries, even if Teschen was a rich and long- coveted prize. Yet it could hardly be to Germany's advantage to threaten Poland with war. The cost of such a struggle, in treasure and possibly also in prestige, would not compensate for the possible gains, among which reacquisition of the Silesian coal and ore fields may be listed. After the War of 1870, Alsace-Lorraine was incorporated in the new German Empire; it eventually became an Imperial domain. The Alsatians did not conceal their desire for au- THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 373 parties there sat also the greatest traitors to the country. In the Center Party, for instance, Herr Wetterl6.) But all this would still have been bearable if that power had not also fallen victim to the general half measures, that power on the existence of which finally the existence of the Reich depended : the army. The way in which the so-called 'German Reichstag' had sinned here is enough alone to burden it for all times with the curse of the German nation. For the most wretched tonomy, which in many cases was more strictly a wish to return to France. Bismarck wisely refused to exert untoward pressure, believing that after a few generations the feeling would die out of its own accord. Nevertheless, he permitted himself to be involved in the Kulturkampf, and therewith also in ambitious programs for Protestantizing Catholic Alsace. The University of Strassburg was the symbol of the 'cultural reconstruction* sponsored by Prussia. Naturally the clergy now led the opposition, having in Abb6 Haegy a highly gifted leader. When the Kulturkampf was over, the Center Party took up the task of cementing relationships between Alsace and the Reich. It was sometimes sabotaged by the Prussian bu- reaucracy and the army (witness theZabern incident of 1913), but was none the less so effective on the whole that the vast majority of Alsatians fought loyally for Germany during the War and afterward became autonomists as a result of their opposi- tion to the annexation by France decreed by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitlerism abruptly broke off this development, although as a result of the Blum policies a new wave of opposi- tion arose during 1936. The Abb6 Wetterl6 was the leader of those who after the War welcomed enthusiastically the coming of the French. Very considerable Nazi propaganda efforts were uncovered in Alsace, especially in Strassburg, during 1938. The appeal seems to have been made on the basis of relative economic prosperity. Peasants in particular were induced to believe that a millennium had dawned across the Rhine. 374 MEIN KAMPF reasons, these parliamentary party rascals have stolen and struck from the hands of the nation the weapon of self- preservation, the only protection of the freedom and inde- pendence of our people. If today the graves of Flanders Field were to open, out of them would rise the bloody accusers, hundreds of thousands of the best young Germans, who were driven into the arms of death, badly and half-trained, due to the unscrupulousness of these parliamentary criminals; the fatherland has lost them and millions of cripples and dead, simply and solely in order to make possible for a few hundred traitors to the people, political wirepulling, extor- tion, or even the rattling forth of doctrinary theories. While Jewry, through its Marxist and democratic press, proclaimed to the whole world the lie of German 'mili- tarism' and thus strove to incriminate Germany with all possible means, the same parties refused any large-scale training of the strength of the German people. Thus the enormous crime which was brought about by this must at once become clear to everyone who even stops to think that in case of a coming war the entire nation would have to take up arms, that therefore by the rascality of these nice representatives of their own so-called 'representation of the people ' millions of Germans would be driven towards the enemy with bad, insufficient, or half-finished training. But even if one does not take into consideration at all the consequences of the brutal and rude unscrupulousness of the parliamentary panders, brought about in this manner, one must nevertheless not forget that the shortage of trained soldiers could easily lead, at the beginning of a war, The pre-War Reichstag had the power to veto budget ap- propriations. It is not correct to say that it hampered the de- velopment of the army of the ill-starred navy, though certain extreme demands put foward by Pan-Germanists were not found acceptable. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 375 to losing that war, something that happened in the great World War in such a terrible manner. The loss of the fight for the freedom and independence of the German nation is the result of the half measures and the weakness carried out even in peace in drafting the entire force of the people for the defense of the fatherland. t If too few recruits were trained on land, the same half measures were at work at sea, so that the weapon of na- tional self-preservation was made more or less worthless. Unfortunately, however, here the heads of the navy them- selves were infected by this poison. The tendency to build all ships, on the stocks, always a little smaller than the English ships launched from the stocks at the same time, waa little farseeing and still less ingenious. A navy which from the beginning cannot be brought to the same level with its prospective enemy, purely in terms of numbers, must try to replace the lack in numbers by the superior fighting power of the single ships. It is the superior fighting power that matters and not a legendary superior 'quality/ which is nonsense as long as it does not express itself in fighting power. In fact, modern technique has now ad- vanced to such an extent and has arrived at so great a uniformity in the various civilized States that it must be considered impossible to give to the ships of one power a considerably greater fighting value than to the ships of the same tonnage of another State. But it is far less con- ceivable to attain superiority with smaller displacement as compared with a greater. Indeed, the small tonnage of the German ships could be brought about only at the expense of speed and armament. The phrase with which one now tries to justify this fact shows, however, a very serious lack of logic on the part of the authority which was responsible for this in peace 376 MEIN KAMPF times. For one explained that the material of the German guns was so visibly superior to that of the British that the German 28 cm. gun barrel did not fall behind the British 30.5 cm. barrel in firing efficiency!! But just for this reason it would have been the duty now also to change over to the 30.5 cm. cannon, as the goal should not have been to reach the same, but a superior, fighting power. Otherwise the ordering of the 42 cm. mortar would have been superfluous as the German 21 cm. mortar was in itself superior to any French high-angled cannon, present at that time, but the forts would have fallen also before the 30.5 cm. cannon. The leaders of the land army thought correctly, but those of the navy unfortunately did not. The abandonment of a superior effect of the artillery as well as of a superior speed was founded entirely in the so-called 'idea of risk,' which was basically wrong. The heads of the navy, by the very form of its construction, re- nounced the offensive and thus necessarily stressed the defensive. But with this one also renounced ultimate suc- cess, which lies, and can lie forever, only in the offensive. A ship with less speed and weaker armature will in most It would be difficult to buttress these assertions with facts. It is surely not the fault of the Reichstag that the Admiralty adopted a type of gun later found inadequate. As a matter of fact, not a few Reichstag delegates notably Matthias Erzberger were almost pathetic in their efforts to induce Admiral von Tirpitz to speed up armament. The development of naval aviation was urged in particular. But Tirpitz, who did not wish to commit himself to any instrument of war until its efficiency had been established, was slow to act. In the end he was, of course, found to have guessed wrong. Believing that the War would necessarily be of brief duration, he had supposed that the British fleet would attack in the North Sea. and had not reckoned with the blockade. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 377 cases be sent to the bottom by the speedier and more heavily armed enemy with the firing distance which is more favorable to the latter. Quite a number of our cruisers had to experience this in the bitterest manner. However, the War showed how absolutely wrong was this opinion of the heads of the navy in peace time which, wherever possible, forced us to change the armature of the old, or to improve that of the new, ships. But if in the battle of the Skagerrak the German ships had had the same tonnage, the same armament, and the same speed as the British ships, then, under the hurricane of the better-hitting German 38 cm, shells, the British fleet would have sunk into a watery grave. Japan at one time had carried out a different policy for her navy. There one principally stressed the point of having in each single new ship a superior fighting power against the prospective enemy. This corresponded to the possi- bility of utilizing the navy in the offensive. While the leaders of the land][army still kept themselves free from such fundamentally wrong trains of thought, the navy, which unfortunately was represented * parliamenta- rily ' in a better way, succumbed also to the mentality of this institution. It was organized by halfway viewpoints and was later on also used according to similar ones. What nevertheless appeared in the form of immortal glory was attributable only to the solid German craftsmanship as well as to the ability and the incomparable heroism of the various officers and crews. But if the former headquarters of the navy had also been up to this in ingenuity, the sacri- fices would not have been in vain. Thus perhaps it was just the superior parliamentary ability of the leading head of the navy in peace time that turned out to be its misfortune, since, unfortunately also in its structure, instead of purely military viewpoints, parliamentary viewpoints began to play the decisive r61e. The half measures and the weakness, as well as the scanty 378 MEIN KAMPF logic which is the parliamentary institutions 9 own, began to tint also the heads of the navy. As already pointed out, the land army still refrained from such trains of thought, which were basically wrong. Especially the colonel in the Great General Staff of that time, Ludendorff , led a desperate fight against the criminal half measures and weakness with which the Reichstag faced the vital questions of the nation, and mostly denied them. If the battle which this officer fought at that time was nevertheless futile, the fault rested half upon parlia- ment, but half upon the, if possible, still more wretched attitude and weakness of the Reichs-Chancellor Bethmann- Hollweg. But this does not in the least hinder the culprits of the German collapse from trying to attribute today the guilt to the very man who alone turned against this negli- gent treatment of national interests. (One betrayal more or less never makes any difference to these born wire- pullers.) He who thinks over all these sacrifices which were bur- dened upon the nation by the criminal carelessness of these most unscrupulous men, he who leads before his eyes all the dead and the cripples, sacrificed in vain, as well as the boundless disgrace and dishonor, the unspeakable misery which now has met us, and he who knows that all this came only in order to open the way towards the minister's seat for a crowd of unscrupulously pushing persons and job- hunters, will also understand that one can call these crea- tures really only by words like scoundrel, villain, rascal, and criminal, because otherwise the meaning and the pur- pose of the existence of these expressions in the usage of the language would be incomprehensible. For, in compari- son with these traitors to the nation, every pimp is a gentle- man. . THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 379 But it is strange that all real shadow sides of the old Germany caught the eye only whenever by this the inner solidarity of the nation had to suffer injury. Indeed, in such cases, the disagreeable truths were simply shouted out to the great masses, while otherwise one preferred shame- fully to pass by in silence many things, even partly to deny them. This was the case whenever an improvement could perhaps have been carried out by public treatment of a question. In addition, the authoritative parties of the government understood next to nothing of the value and the nature of propaganda. That by propaganda, with permanent and clever application, even heaven can be palmed off on a people as hell, and, the other way round, the most wretched life as paradise, this only the Jew knew, who then acted accordingly; the German, or rather his government, had not the faintest idea of this. This was to take its most serious revenge during the War. All the numerous evils of the German life before the War, as pointed out here, and others, were set off also by many advantages. With a just examination one must even acknowledge that, to a great extent, the other countries and peoples also called most of our ills their own, and that Before the War, Germany had relied in the main on industrial rather than investment expansion. Branch plants were es- tablished in well-nigh all foreign countries; centers of trade influence were built up, often at great cost. When the War was lost, it was argued that the friendship which had bound the Allied countries together was a consequence of the financial ties which existed between them. A favorite thesis has been, for example, that Germany's freedom from indebtedness to the 'bankers 9 had been a great disadvantage, since no one had interests at stake inside her boundaries. German Jewish news- 380 MEIN KAMPF in many things they overshadowed us by far, while they did not possess many of our actual advantages. The loremost of these advantages may be said, among other things, to be the fact that the German people among nearly all European nations still tried most of all to pre- serve the national character of its economy, and that, despite many evil premonitions, it was least of all subject to the international finance control. A dangerous ad- vantage, however, which later on also became the greatest instigator of the World War. If one sets aside this and many other facts, then three institutions stand out among the vast number of the healthy sources of the nation's power which in their kind presented themselves as exemplary as well as partly unexcelled. There was first the State form in itself and the dis- tinct stamp which it had received in the Germany of modern times. Here one may set aside the various monarchs, who, as human beings, could not help being subject to all weak- nesses which are usually visited upon this world and its children, for otherwise one would really have to despair al- together of the present; for the representatives of the pres- ent regime, looked upon just as personalities, are perhaps mentally and morally the most modest that one is able to Imagine, even after prolonged reflection. He who measures the ' value* of the German Revolution with the value and the greatness of the personalities which it has given to the German people since November, 1918, will cover his face papermen and pacifists were (so ran the tale) employed to weaken the army of the fatherland. While they undermined German resistance, their brethren outside stirred up the rest of the world against Germany. Doubtless no astute Nazi leader has ever credited these hypotheses, which were designed for the consumption of the infantile. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 381 in shame before the judgment of posterity which one will not be able to stop from talking by protective laws, etc., and which therefore will say what all of us nevertheless recognize today, that is, that the brains and the virtues of our neo-German leaders are in the inverse proportion to the snouts and vices. The monarchy was certainly estranged from many, es- pecially from the great masses of the people. This was the consequence of the fact that the monarchs were not always surrounded let us say by the most brilliant, and particu- larly not by the most honest, heads. Unfortunately, they partly preferred the flatterers rather than the straightfor- ward natures, and therefore they were also ' instructed ' by flatterers. A very grave evil in a time when the world had undergone a great change in many old opinions, a change which now naturally did not stop before the judgment of many old-established traditions of the Courts. At the turn of the century, therefore, the common man and human being was no longer able to show special ad- miration for a princess clad in a uniform, riding along a front. It is obvious that one was not able to imagine the effect of such a parade in the eyes of the people, because otherwise such unfortunate incidents would probably never have taken place. Also, the humane dreams of these cir- cles, which were not always quite genuine, had a repelling rather than an attractive effect. If, for example, the Prin- cess X 'deigned' to taste a sample of the food in a people's kitchen with the wiell-known result, it might perhaps have looked well enough in former times, but the success at that time was to the contrary. In this case one may well assume that Her Highness had really no idea that on the day of her inspection the food was a little different from that of the other days ; but it was quite sufficient that the people knew this. Thus the best possible intention became ridiculous, if not actually irritating. 382 MEIN KAMPF Descriptions of the always proverbial frugality of the monarch, his much too early rising as well as his veritable drudgery till late at night, besides, with the continued danger of his threatening undernourishment, nevertheless caused very doubtful comments. One certainly did not want to know what and how much the monarch had the grace to take in; one did not begrudge him a 'sufficient 1 meal; also, one did not set out perhaps to deny him the necessary sleep; one was content if as a man and as a char- acter he only honored the name of his house and the nation and fulfilled his duty as a ruler. The telling of fairy tales was of little use, and it was all the more harmful.** However, this and many similar things were only trifles. But, unfortunately, the conviction that one was ruled any- how from above, and that the individual need not care for anything further, had a worse effect on very great parts of the nation. As long as the government was really good or at least had the best intentions, things might be all right. But alas! if in the place of the old government, which in it- self had good intentions, a new, less decent one, were to step in, then the irresolute obedience and the childlike faith were the most serious misfortune conceivable. But all these and many other weaknesses were set off also by undeniable values. There was the stability of the entire State authority, caused by the monarchistic State form, as well as the immunizing of the highest State posts from the turmoil of the speculations of ambitious politicians. Further, the respectability of the institution in itself, as well as the authority caused even by this; finally, the uplifting of the body of officials and especially of the army above the level of the obligations of political parties. To this was added the advantage of the personal representation of the head of the State by the monarch as a person, and the example of a responsibility which the monarch has to shoulder more THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 313 than the accidental crowd of a parliamentary majority. (The proverbial incorruptibility of the German administra- tion was primarily due to this.) But finally the cultural value of the monarchy was a high one for the German peo- ple and it was well able to balance other disadvantages. The German monarchs 1 residential towns were still the abodes of an artistic sense which nevertheless threatens to die out more and more in our materialistic time. What the German princes did for art and science even during the nineteenth century was exemplary. In any case, the present time must not be compared with this. t But as the greatest factor of value, in this time of the beginning and slowly spreading decomposition of our na- Perhaps the German army is rivaled only by the French army as an historical institution. Both were developed during that heyday of European nationalism which coincided with the French Revolution. Both taught discipline, health, con- duct. But whereas the French look back upon a national history more or less continuous since the days of ancient Rome, the Germany of 1913 was still a country of peoples, almost of tribes, held together by military leaders. The heroes were Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Moltke; and however deeply any citizen might resent drill and warfare, he could not escape the fact that Germany was the army. That is why the abdication of the army in 1918 the trans- fer of authority and responsibility to a government without a military foundation was so appalling even to the men who took up the burden of government. They had suddenly, in an hour of demoralizing defeat, to find some principle of unity which was not military in character. To have succeeded would have meant, not merely the creation of a new Germany, but also the creation of a new ideology. And unfortunately most of the leaders had to face the fact that the majority of their 384 MEIN KAMPF tional body, we have to list the army. It was the mightiest school of the German nation, and for no other reason did the hatred of all enemies direct itself precisely against this protection of national self-preservation and freedom. One cannot present a more glorious monument to this unique institution than the establishment of the truth that it was calumniated, hated, fought, but also feared, by all inferior people. That at Versailles the wrath of the international exploiters of the nation directed itself primarily against the old German army makes it all the more recognizable as the protection of the freedom of our people against the power of the stock exchange. Without this warning power, the meaning of Versailles would long have been executed upon our people. What the German people owes to the army may be simply summed up in one single word, namely: every- thing. The army trained for absolute responsibility at a time when this quality had become very rare and the shunning of responsibility had more and more become the order of the day, starting from the model example of all unscrupu- lousness, the parliament; the army further taught personal courage in a time when cowardice threatened to become a spreading disease, and when the willingness to sacrifice, to stand up for the general welfare, was almost looked upon as stupidity, and when only he seemed to be clever who un- derstood best how to spare himself and to advance his own 'ego'; it was the school which still taught the individual supporters wanted, not something new, but the restoration of the old. Not to have foreseen these things was the tragic psychological blunder of Woodrow Wilson a blunder which was really worse than a crime. Wilson came from a people unified, as probably no other people has ever been, by an ac- cepted tradition of constitutional law; and he imagined that this happy situation could be exported to other lands. THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 385 German to seek the salvation of the nation, not in the men- dacious phrases of international fraternity between negroes, Germans, Chinese, French, British, etc., but rather in the strength and the unity of his own nationality. The army taught determination, while otherwise in daily life lack of determination and doubt began to govern the actions of people. It actually meant something, at a time when the super-wise people set the fashion everywhere, of keeping up the principle that a command is still better than no command. In this sole principle was contained a still unspoiled, robust health which would long since have dis- appeared from the remainder of our life if the army and the education it gave had not provided for the continued re- newal of this primordial strength. One only has to see the terrible lack of determination of our present Reichs leaders who are not able to pull themselves together, unless they have to deal with the forced signing of a new dictate of ex- ploitation; in this case, of course, they decline all responsi- bility and with the speed of a court stenographer they sign everything that one may deem fit to put before them, for in this case the decision is easily taken: it is 'dictated* to them.-* The army further taught idealism and devotion to the fatherland and its greatness, while life had otherwise become the sole domain of greed and materialism. It educated a uniform people as compared with the separation into classes, and here it perhaps showed its only fault, the institution of the voluntary enlistment for one year. A fault for the rea- son that the principle of absolute equality was broken and the man with a higher education was lifted out of the frame of the general surroundings, while just the contrary would have been of advantage. With the seclusion from the world of our upper classes which was so great even then, as well as the always increasing estrangement from their own people, the army would have been able to have an especially 386 MEIN KAMPF beneficial effect if in its ranks at least it avoided every separation of the so-called 'intelligentsia. 9 That this was not done was a mistake; but what institution in this world is without mistakes? With this institution the good sides were predominant to such an extent that the few ills were far below the average of human imperfection. But the greatest service of the army of the old Reich was that, in a time of the general 'counting by majority' of the heads, it put the heads above the majority. In the face of the Jewish democratic idea of a blind worship of numbers, the army upheld the faith in personality. Thus it also bred what the newer times need most of all: men. Yes, indeed, in the swamp of a generally spreading softening and ef- feminacy, out of the ranks of the army there shot up every year 350,000 vigorous young men who in two years' train- ing had lost the softness of youth and had gained bodies hard as steel. The young man, however, who during this time practiced obedience, also learned to give commands. Even by his step, one recognized the trained soldier. This was the high school of the German nation, and it was not for nothing that the grim hatred of those who, out of envy and greed, needed and desired the weakness of the Reich and the defenselessness of its citizens, was concen- trated on the army. What many Germans in blindness or malicious will did not wish to see, the foreign world recog- nized in the German army; the most powerful weapon in the service of the freedom of the German nation and the nourishment of her children. Added to the State form as well as to the army came, as the third in the alliance, the incomparable body of officials of the old Reich. Germany was the best organized and the best adminis- tered country in the world. One could well accuse it of THE CAUSES OF THE COLLAPSE 387 bureaucratic red-tape, but this was no different in all the other States, even rather worse. But what the other States did not possess was the wonderful solidarity of this appara- tus as well as the incorruptible, honest loyalty of its repre- sentatives. Better to be a little pedantic, but honest and loyal, rather than enlightened and modern, but inferior of character, and, as is frequently shown today, ignorant and incompetent. For, if one likes to pretend that the German administration of the pre-War time was thought bureau- cratically genuine, but bad from the business point of view, to this one can answer only the following: Which land of the world had a better managed and commercially better or- ganized administration in her State railways than Ger- many? It was reserved only for the Revolution to destroy this model apparatus till finally it appeared ripe to be taken out of the hands of the nation and to become 'socialized' in the sense of the founders of this republic; that means, to serve the international stock exchange capital, the prin- cipal instigator of the German Revolution. What thereby distinguished especially the body of Ger- man officials and the apparatus of administration was its independence of the various governments whose political convictions were not able to exercise any influence on the position of German State officials. Since the Revolution, however, this has changed thoroughly. The place of com- petence and ability was taken by party conviction and a self-reliant and independent character was now an impedi- ment rather than an advantage. On the State form, the army and the body of officials rested the wonderful power and strength of the old Reich. These were primarily the causes of a quality which the pre- sent-day State lacks completely: the State authority! For this does not rest on drivel in the parliaments or diets, and also not on the laws for their protection, or on court sen- tences for the frightening of impudent deniers of this au- 388 MEIN KAMPF thority, but on the general confidence which may and can be shown in the management and the administration of a community. But this confidence is in turn only the result of an unshakable inner conviction of the unselfishness and the honesty of the government and the administration of a country as well as of a harmony between the meaning of the law and general moral views. For, in the long run, government systems are not held together by the pressure of force, but rather by the belief in the quality and the truthfulness with which they represent and promote the interests of a people. Therefore, no matter how seriously certain evils of the pre-War time ate into the inner strength of the nation and threatened to hollow it out, one must not forget that other States suffered from these diseases still more than Ger- many, and that nevertheless in the critical hour of danger they did not fail and did not perish. But if one considers that the German weaknesses before the War were balanced by strong sides which were just as great, then the ultimate cause for the collapse can and must be found in still an- other field; and this was also the case. The deepest and the ultimate cause for the ruin of the old Reich was found in the non-recognition of the race problem and its importance for the historical development of the people. For events in the lives of the nations are not expressions of chance, but, by the laws of nature, happen- ings of the urge of self-preservation and propagation of species and race, even if the people are not conscious of the inner reasons for their activitv. CHAPTER XI NATION AND RACE are statements of truth which are so obvious that just for this reason the common world does not see, or at least does not recognize, them. At times the world passes these well-known truisms blindly and it is most astonished if now suddenly somebody discovers what everybody ought to know. The ' Columbus eggs ' are lying about by the hundreds of thousands, only the Columbuses are rarely seen. Thus, without exception, people wander about in Na- ture's garden; they think they know almost everything, and yet, with few exceptions, they walk blindly by one of the most outstanding principles of Nature's working: the inner seclusion of the species of all living beings on earth. Even the most superficial observation shows, as an almost brazen basic principle of all the countless forms of expression of Nature's will to live, her limited form of propagation and increase, limited in itself. Every animal mates only with a representative of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the common mouse the common mouse, the wolf the wolf, etc. Only exceptional circumstances can change this; first of all the compulsion of captivity, as well as any other impos- 390 MEIN KAMPF sibility of mating within the same species. But then Nature begins to resist this with the help of all visible means, and her most visible protest consists either of denying the bas- tards further procreative faculty, or she limits the fertility of the coming offspring; but in most cases she takes away the capacity of resistance against disease or inimical at- tacks. This is then only too natural. Any crossing between two beings of not quite the same high standard produces a medium between the standards of the parents. That means: the young one will probably be on a higher level than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will succumb later on in the fight against the higher level. But such a mating contradicts Nature's will to breed life as a whole towards a higher level. The presumption for this does not lie in blend- ing the superior with the inferior, but rather in a complete victory of the former. The stronger has to rule and he is not to amalgamate with the weaker one, that he may not sacrifice his own greatness. Only the born weakling can consider this as cruel, but at that he is only a weak and limited human being; for, if this law were not dominating, all conceivable development towards a higher level, on the part of all organically living beings, would be unthinkable for man. The consequence of this purity of the race, generally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp limitation of the races outwardly, but also 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 the most, in the different measure of strength, force, cleverness, skill, perseverance, etc., of the various specimens. But there will never be found a fox which, according to its inner nature, would per- haps have humane tendencies as regards the geese, nor will there be a cat with a friendly disposition towards mice. NATION AND RACE 391 Therefore also, here the fight amongst one another originates less from reasons of inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks calm and even satisfied. The fight for daily bread makes all those suc- cumb who are weak, sickly, and less determined, while the males' fight for the female gives the right of propagation, or the possibility of it, only to the most healthy. But the fight is always a means for the promotion of the species' health and force of resistance, and thus a cause for its de- velopment towards a higher level. If it were different, every further development towards higher levels would stop, and rather the contrary would happen. For, since according to numbers, the inferior ele- ment always outweighs the superior element, under the same preservation of life and under the same propagating possibilities, the inferior element would increase so much more rapidly that finally the best element would be forced to step into the background, if no correction of this condi- tion were carried out. But just this is done by Nature, by subjecting the weaker part to such difficult living conditions This appeal to the sacred norm of the 'survival of the fittest* customary in Pan-German literature had been resorted to as well by critics of Socialism. The 'tearful sentimentality' of the humanitarians, forever attempting to salvage what had better be left to die, is denounced by Spengler and many others. But the application of 'fitness' to mating is something else entirely, deriving from Plato through a number of intermedi- aries some of whom can be sought out in modern anti-Semitic literature. There are considerable differences. Thus, Ludwig Schemann thinks that Nature does not mean the same thing by 'fitness* that man does, and that therefore any vigorous re- course to eugenics except in so far as purely negative matters (health, etc.) are concerned would prove impossible and impractical. Others have gone the whole way and advocated rigid public regulation of procreation. 392 MEIN KAMPF that even by this the number is restricted, and finally by preventing the remainder, without choice, from increasing, but by making here a new and ruthless choice, according to strength and health. Just as little as Nature desires a mating between weaker individuals and stronger ones, far less she desires the mix- ing of a higher race with a lower one, as in this case her en- tire work of higher breeding, which has perhaps taken hun- dreds of thousands of years, would tumble at one blow. -4- Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrible clarity that with any mixing of the blood of the Aryan with lower races the result was the end of the culture-bearer. North America, the population of which consists for the greatest part of Germanic elements which mix only very little with the lower, colored races displays a humanity and a culture different from those of Central and South America, where chiefly the Romanic immigrants have sometimes mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this example alone one may clearly and dis- tinctly recognize the influence of the race mixture. The Germanic of the North American continent, who has re- mained pure and less intermixed, has become the master of that continent, he will remain so until he, too, falls victim to the shame of blood-mixing. f The result of any crossing, in brief, is always the follow- ing: (a) Lowering of the standard of the higher race, (&) Physical and mental regression, and, with it, the be- ginning of a slowly but steadily progressive lingering ill- ness. To bring about such a development means nothing less than sinning against the will of the Eternal Creator. This action, then, is also rewarded as a sin. Man, by trying to resist this iron logic of Nature, be- comes entangled in a fight against the principles to which NATION AND RACE 393 alone he, too, owes his existence as a human being. Thus his attack is bound to lead to his own doom. Of course, now comes the typically Jewish, impudent, but just as stupid, objection by the modern pacifist: 'Man conquers Nature!' Millions mechanically and thoughtlessly repeat this Jewish nonsense, and in the end they imagine that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature; whereas they have no other weapon at their disposal but an 'idea,' and such a wretched one at that, so that accord- ing to it no world would be conceivable. But quite apart from the fact that so far man has never conquered Nature in any affair, but that at the most he gets hold of and tries to lift a flap of her enormous, gigantic veil of eternal riddles and secrets, that in reality he does not 'invent' anything but only discovers everything, that he does not dominate Nature, but that, based on the know- ledge of a few laws and secrets of Nature, he has risen to the position of master of those other living beings lacking The argument has been put another way by Professor Carl Schmitt (cited by Kolnai) : 'A universal organization in which there is no place for warlike preservation and destruction of human life would be neither a State nor an Empire : it would lose all political character/ Yet this is not Jewish but Christian teaching that is under criticism. Cardinal Faulhaber, meeting the objection that the Old Testament is filled with 'hymns of hate/ responded that Christianity had indeed changed those hymns into canticles of love, and added: 'There is no alterna- tive: either we are disciples of Christ, or we lapse into the Judaism of antiquity with its hymns of hate/ The letter which the evangelical churches addressed to Hitler in June, 1936, contained these words: 'When blood, race, creed, nationality and honor are thus raised to the rank of qualities that guarantee eternity, the Evangelical Christian is bound, by the first commandment, to reject the assumption/ 394 MEIN KAMPF this knowledge; but quite apart from this, an idea cannot conquer the presumptions for the origin and the existence of mankind, as the idea itself depends only on man. With- out men there is no human 'idea' in this world; thus the idea is always caused by the presence of men, and, with it, of all those laws which created the presumptions for this existence. And not only that! Certain ideas are even tied to cer- tain men. This can be said most of all of just such thoughts the content of which has its origin, not in an exact scientific truth, but rather in the world of feeling, or, as one usually expresses oneself so nicely and 'clearly' today, which re- flects an 'inner experience.' All these ideas, which have nothing to do with clear logic in itself, but which represent mere expressions of feelings, ethical conceptions, etc., are tied to the existence of those men to whose spiritual force of imagination and creation they owe their own existence. But precisely in this case the preservation of these certain races and men is the presumption for the existence of these 'ideas/ For example, he who actually desires, with all his heart, the victory of the pacifistic idea in this world would have to stand up, with all available means, for the conquest of the world by the Germans; for if it should come about the other way round, then, with the last German, the last pacifist would die off, as the other part of the world has hardly ever been taken in so deeply by this nonsense, ad- verse to nature and to reason, as unfortunately our own people. Therefore, whether one wanted to or not, if one had the serious will, one would have to decide to wage war in order to arrive at pacifism. This and nothing else was what the American world-redeemer Wilson wanted to have done, at least our German visionaries believed in this. With this, then, the purpose was fulfilled.-* Indeed, the pacifist-humane idea is perhaps quite good whenever the man of the highest standard has previously NATION AND RACE 395 conquered and subjected the world to a degree that makes him the only master of this globe. Thus the idea is more and more deprived of the possibility of a harmful effect in the measure in which its practical application becomes rare and finally impossible. Therefore, first fight, and then one may see what can be done. In the other case, mankind has passed the climax of its development, and the end is not the rule of some ethical 'idea/ but barbarism, and, in consequence, chaos. Naturally, here the one or the other may laugh, but this planet has driven on its course through the ether for millions of years without men, and the day may come when it will do so again, if people forget that they owe their higher existence, not to the ideas of some crazy ideologists, but to The foregoing passages are derived in the main from Houston Stewart Chamberlain, but with nuances that suggest the influence of Rosenberg, or at least of the Free Corps which imported so much militaristic anti-Semitism into Germany after the War. For Chamberlain the moral superiority of the 'Aryan* is undeniable; and therefore, if humanity is not to decline morally, it must hope for the victory of the 'Aryan* over lesser peoples. But Chamberlain is quite honest: for him a ' German ' and an ' Aryan ' are the same thing. He was bitterly disappointed when 1918 seemed to mean perpetual moral de- gradation for the human race. In his famous letter to Hitler, following their meeting in 1923, he wrote, therefore: 4 At one blow you have transformed the state my soul was in. Ger- many's vitality is proved if in this hour of its deepest need it can produce a Hitler/ Perhaps the basis of this attitude as a whole must be sought in those fears of an eventual 'war be- tween races' which were aired as early as the eighteenth cen- tury, but reached a kind of apogee during the nineteenth. Then the inferiority of the 'colored races ' was taken for granted, though the interest taken in a newly discovered Indian litera- ture, ascribed in theory to an ' Indo-Germanic invasion 9 of Asia, tended to make many place the Brahmins on a somewhat 396 MEIN KAMPF the knowledge and the ruthless application of Nature's brazen laws. Everything that today we admire on this earth science and art, technique and inventions is only the creative product of a few peoples and perhaps originally of one race. On them now depends also the existence of this entire cul- ture. If they perish, then the beauty of this earth sinks into the grave with them. t No matter how much the soil, for instance, is able to in- fluence the people, the result will always be a different one, according to the races under consideration. The scanty fertility of a living space may instigate one race towards the highest achievements, while with another race this may only become the cause for the most dire poverty and ulti- mate malnutrition with all its consequences. The inner dis- position of the peoples is always decisive for the way in which outward influences work themselves out. What leads one people to starvation, trains the other for hard work. All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died off through blood-poisoning. The ultimate cause of such a decline was always the for- getting that all culture depends on men and not the re- verse; that means, that in order to save a certain culture the man who created it has to be saved. But the preservation is bound to the brazen law of necessity and of the right of the victory of the best and the strongest in this world. higher level. Later on the 'negroid characteristics' of the Mediterranean races were stressed by Pan-German writers. The Latin, the Catholic, was of highly questionable value. The Germanic Aryan had a right to dominate, and eventually he surely would. After the War the stress was shifted to the Jew, partly because French 'inferiority' had not been satis- factorily demonstrated, after all, and partly because the Free Corps encouraged the view that Jewry was responsible for Germany's acquiescence in Allied demands. NATION AND RACE 397 He who wants to live should fight, therefore, and he who does not want to battle in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to be alive. Even if this were hard, this is the way things are. But it is certain that by far the hardest fate is the fate which meets that man who believes he can 'conquer' Nature, and yet, in truth, only seems to mock her. Misery, distress, and diseases are then her answer! The man who misjudges and disdains the laws of race actually forfeits the happiness that seems destined to be his. He prevents the victorious march of the best race and with it also the presumption for all human progress, and in con- sequence he will remain in the domain of the animal's help- less misery, burdened with the sensibility of man. It is a futile enterprise to argue which race or races were the original bearers of human culture and, with it, the ac- tual founders of what we sum up with the word 'mankind.' It is simpler to put this question to oneself with regard to the present, and here the answer follows easily and dis- tinctly. What we see before us of human culture today, the results of art, science, and techniques, is almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. But just this fact admits of the not unfounded conclusion that he alone was the founder of higher humanity as a whole, thus the prototype This idyl of 'Aryan ' pre-history is interesting because of the definition of 'culture' that is involved. For 'culture' in this sense is once again become the principal concern of Europe. The 'Aryan' succeeds in pushing his way onward and upward by conquering lesser peoples and using them as 'helping forces' (slaves). Then, however, master and slave intermarry, and tho ' culture ' decays. Perhaps this is only an analogy borrowed from some pictorial history of European colonizing effort: perhaps it is more philosophical. Spengler had taught in 398 MEIN KAMPF of what we understand by the word 'man.' He is the Prometheus of mankind, out of whose bright forehead springs the divine spark of genius at all times, forever re- kindling that fire which in the form of knowledge lightened up the night of silent secrets and thus made man climb the path towards the position of master of the other beings on this earth. Exclude him and deep darkness will again fall upon the earth, perhaps even, after a few thousand years, human culture would perish and the world would turn into a desert. -4- If one were to divide mankind into three groups: culture- founders, culture-bearers, and culture-destroyers, then, as representative of the first kind, only the Aryan would come in question. It is from him that the foundation and the walls of all human creations originate, and only the external form and color depend on the characteristics of the various peoples involved. He furnishes the gigantic building-stones and also the plans for all human progress, and only the exe- cution corresponds to the character of the people and races in the various instances. In a few decades, for instance, the entire east of Asia will call a culture its own, the ultimate bases of which will be Hellenic spirit and Germanic tech- nique, just as is the case with us. Only the external form will (at least partly) bear the features of Asiatic character. It is not the case, as some people claim, that Japan adds European techniques to her culture, but European science and techniques are trimmed with Japanese characteristics. the Decline of the West that cultures arise and fall cyclically; and Hitler here provides a convenient illustration of why they fall. Therewith the riddle proposed by Spengler is solved; the 'culture-making' folk is that which, obeying the law that only the fittest survive, embarks on conquest and exploitation; and the 'culture-destroying folk 9 is the slave breed which tempts the aristocratic group into intermarriage. This i Nietzsche materialized. NATION AND RACE 399 But the basis of actual life is no longer the special Japanese culture, although it determines the color of life (because out- wardly, in consequence of its inner difference, it is more visible to European eyes), but it is the enormous scientific and technical work of Europe and America, that is, of Aryan peoples. Based on these achievements alone the East is also able to follow general human progress. This creates the basis for the fight for daily bread, it furnishes weapons and tools for it, and only the external makeup is gradually adapted to Japanese life. But if, starting today, all further Aryan influence upon Japan should stop, and supposing that Europe and America were to perish, then a further development of Japan's present rise in science and technology could take place for a little while longer; but in the time of a few years the source would dry out, Japanese life would gain, but its culture would stiffen and fall back into the sleep out of which it was startled seven decades ago by the Aryan wave of culture. Therefore, exactly as the present Japanese development owes its life to Aryan origin, thus also in the dim past foreign influence and foreign spirit were the awakener of the Japanese culture. The best proof of this is the fact that the latter stiffened and became completely paralyzed later on. This can only happen to a people when the originally crea- tive race nucleus was lost, or when the external influence, which gave the impetus and the material for the first de- velopment in the cultural field, was lacking later on. But if it is ascertained that a people receives, takes in, and works over the essential basic elements of its culture from other races, and if then, when a further external influence is lack- ing, it stiffens again and again, then one can perhaps call such a race a 'culture-bearing' one but never a 'culture-cre- ating' one. An examination of the various peoples from this view- point evidences the fact that in nearly all cases one has to 400 MEIN KAMPF deal, not with originally culture-creating, but rather always with culture-supporting peoples. It is always about the following picture of their develop- ment that presents itself: Aryan tribes (often in a really ridiculously small number of their own people) subjugate foreign peoples, and now, stimulated by the special living conditions of the new terri- tory (fertility, climatic conditions, etc.) and favored by the mass of the helping means in the form of people of inferior kind now at their disposal, they develop the mental and organizatory abilities, slumbering in them. Often, in the course of a few millenniums or even centuries, they create cultures which originally completely bear the inner features of their character, adapted to the already mentioned special qualities of the soil as well as of the subjected people. Finally, however, the conquerors deviate from the purity of their blood which they maintained originally, they begin to mix with the subjected inhabitants and thus they end their own existence; for the fall of man in Paradise has always been followed by expulsion from it. f Often, after a thousand and more years, the last visible trace of the one-time overlords is shown in the fairer com- plexion which their blood has left, in the form of the color, to the subjected race, and in a petrified culture which they had founded as the original creators. For, just as the actual and spiritual conqueror lost himself in the blood of the sub- jected, thus also the fuel for the torch of human culture progress was lost! As through the blood the color of the former masters keeps a faint glimmer as a memory of them, thus also the night of the cultural life is faintly brightened by the creations that remained of the erstwhile bearers of light. These now shone through all the barbarism that has returned, and in the thoughtless observer of the moment they awaken only too frequently the opinion that he sees the picture of the present people, whereas it is only the mir- ror of the past at which he is looking. NATION AND RACE 401 Then it may happen that such a people for a second time, nay, even more often in the life of its history, comes into touch with the race of its one-time suppliers of culture, without a memory of former meetings necessarily being present. The remainder of the blood of the one-time mas- ters will unconsciously turn to the new apparition, and what first was only possible by compulsion will now succeed with the help of their own will. Then a new culture wave makes its entrance and lasts until its bearers have once more been submerged in the blood of foreign peoples. It will be the task of a future culture and world history to make researches in this sense and not to suffocate by re- flecting external facts, as this is unfortunately only too often the case with our present science of history. Merely from this sketch of the development of ' culture- bearing' nations results also the picture of the origin, the work, and the decline of the true culture-creators of this globe, the Aryans themselves. Just as in daily life the so-called genius requires a special No definition of the word 'Aryan* is acceptable. German lexicographers were hard pressed to hit upon an accurate description. The term itself is probably of Sanskrit origin, and seems to have meant 'friends/ It was next assumed that these 'friends' were Indo-Germans, who (it was further as- sumed) had invaded India and subjugated the 'lesser breeds/ Finally 'Aryan* became just a synonym for 'Indo-German.' The 1931 edition of the encyclopedia Der grosse Herder said: 'Recently some have used (ethnologically, in an incorrect way) 'Aryan* to indicate Indo-Germans in general. In this case, the term is used as in the nature of a slogan in the struggle over the self-determination and preservation of our race against Jewry, which is of a different order.' For this and similar definitions (surely discreet enough), the earlier volumes of this encyclopedia were ordered withdrawn from circulation. In practice the word is officially used today as a racial term 402 MEIN KAMPF cause, often even a real impetus in order to be made con- spicuous, the same is also the case with the ingenious race in the life of the peoples. In the monotony of everyday life even important people often seem unimportant and they hardly stand out over the average of their surroundings; but as soon as they are faced by a situation in which others would despair or go wrong, out of the plain average child the ingenious nature grows visibly, not infrequently to the astonishment of all those who hitherto had an opportunity to observe him, who had meanwhile grown up in the small- ness of bourgeois life, and therefore, in consequence of this process, the prophet has rarely any honor in his own coun- try. Never is there a better opportunity to observe this than during war. In the hours of distress, when others de- spair, out of apparently harmless children, there shoot sud- denly heroes of death-defying determination and icy cool- ness of reflection. If this hour of trial had never come, then hardly anyone would ever have been able to guess that a young hero is hidden in the beardless boy. Nearly always such an impetus is needed in order to call genius into action. excluding Jews and negroes. The second are frowned upon because (i.a.) they are admitted into the French army; and because, it is hoped, sympathy for the Nazi cause may be thus awakened among Southerners in the United States. Delegations of 'Brahmins 1 have, however, been cordially welcomed to the New Germany. Parallels to this can be found in the writings of Pan-Germans like Heinrich Class and Count Reventlow. In an address delivered during 1932, Hitler declared; 'Let them call us in- human! If we save Germany, we shall have done the greatest deed in the world. Let them call us unjust! If we save Ger- many, we shall have repaired the greatest injustice in the world. Let them say that we are without morality! If our people is saved, we shall have paved the way for morality!' NATION AND RACE 403 Fate's hammer stroke, which then throws the one to the ground, suddenly strikes steel in another, and while now the shell of everyday life is broken, the erstwhile nucleus lies open to the eyes of the astonished world. The latter now re- sists and does not want to believe that the apparently 'identical' kind is now suddenly supposed to be a 'differ- ent' being; a process which repeats itself with every eminent human being. Although an inventor, for instance, establishes his fame only on the day of his invention, one must not think that perhaps his genius in itself had entered the man only just at this hour, but the spark of genius will be present in the forehead of the truly creatively gifted man from the hour of his birth, although for many years in a slumbering condi- tion and therefore invisible to the rest of the world. But some day, through an external cause or impetus of some kind, the spark becomes fire, something that only then be- gins to stir the attention of other people. The most stupid of them believe now in all sincerity that the person in ques- tion has just become 'clever,' whereas in reality they them- selves now begin at last to recognize his greatness; for true genius is always inborn and never acquired by education or, still less, by learning. This, however, may be said, as already stressed, not only for the individual man, but also for the race.-*- Creatively active peoples are creatively gifted from the very bottom and forever, although this may not be recognizable to the eyes of the superficial observer. Here, too, external recogni- tion is always only possible as a consequence of accom- plished facts, as the rest of the world is not able to recognize genius in itself, but sees only its visible expressions in the form of inventions, discoveries, buildings, pictures, etc. ; but even here it often takes a long time till it is able to struggle through to this knowledge. Exactly as in the life of the in- dividual important man his genius or extraordinary ability 404 MEIN KAMPF strives towards its practical realization only when urged on by special occasions, thus also in the life of the peoples the real use of creative forces and abilities that are present can take place only when certain presumptions invite to this. We see this most clearly in that race that cannot help having been, and being, the supporter of the development of human culture the Aryans. As soon as Fate leads them towards special conditions, their latent abilities begin to develop in a more and more rapid course and to mold them- selves into tangible forms. The cultures which they found in such cases are nearly always decisively determined by the available soil, the climate, and by the subjected people. The latter, however, is the most decisive of all factors. The more primitive the technical presumptions for a cultural activity are, the more necessary is the presence of human auxiliary forces which then, collected and applied with the object of organization, have to replace the force of the ma- chine. Without this possibility of utilizing inferior men, the Aryan would never have been able to take the first steps towards his later culture; exactly as, without the help of various suitable animals which he knew how to tame, he would never have arrived at a technology which now allows him to do without these very animals. The words 'Der Mohr hoi seine Schuldigkeit getan, er kann gehen' [The Moor has done his duty, he may go] has unfortunately too deep a meaning. For thousands of years the horse had to serve man and to help in laying the foundations of a development which now, through the motor-car, makes the horse itself superfluous. In a few years it will have ceased its activity, but without its former co-operation man would hardly have arrived at where he stands today. Therefore, for the formation of higher cultures, the exist- ence of inferior men was one of the most essential presump- tions, because they alone were able to replace the lack of NATION AND RACE 405 technical means without which a higher development is un- thinkable. The first culture of mankind certainly depended less on the tamed animal, but rather on the use of inferior people. Only after the enslavement of subjected races, the same fate began to meet the animals, and not vice versa, as many would like to believe. For first the conquered walked be- hind [in later editions read : before] the plow and after him, the horse. Only pacifist fools can again look upon this as a sign of human baseness, without making clear to themselves that this development had to take place in order to arrive finally at that place from where today these apostles are able to sputter forth their drivel into the world. The progress of mankind resembles the ascent on an end- less ladder; one cannot arrive at the top without first hav- ing taken the lower steps. Thus the Aryan had to go the way which reality showed him and not that of which the imagination of a modern pacifist dreams. The way of real- ity, however, is hard and difficult, but it finally ends where the other wishes to bring mankind by dreaming, but un- fortunately removes it from, rather than brings it nearer to, it. Therefore, it is no accident that the first cultures origi- nated in those places where the Aryan, by meeting lower peoples, subdued them and made them subject to his will. They, then, were the first technical instrument in the serv- ice of a growing culture. With this the way that the Aryan had to go was clearly lined out. As a conqueror he .subjected the lower peoples and then he regulated their practical ability according to his command and his will and for his aims. But while he thus led them towards a useful, though hard activity, he not only spared the lives of the subjected, but perhaps he even gave them a fate which was better than that of their former so-called ' freedom/ As long as he kept up ruthlessly 406 MEIN KAMPF the master's standpoint, he not only really remained 'mas- ter* but also the preserver and propagator of the culture. For the latter was based exclusively on his abilities, and, with it, on his preservation in purity. But as soon as the subjected peoples themselves began to rise (probably) and approached the conqueror linguistically, the sharp separat- ing wall between master and slave fell. The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and therefore he also lost his place in the Paradise which he had created for himself. He be- came submerged in the race-mixture, he gradually lost his cultural ability more and more, till at last not only mentally but also physically he began to resemble more the sub- jected and aborigines than his ancestors. For some time he may still live on the existing cultural goods, but then petri- faction sets in, and finally oblivion. In this way cultures and realms collapse in order to make room for new formations. The blood-mixing, however, with the lowering of the racial level caused by it, is the sole cause of the dying-off of old cultures; for the people do not perish by lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in the pure blood. All that is not race in this world is trash. All world historical events, however, are only the expres- sion of the races' instinct of self-preservation in its good or in its evil meaning. That is, security is better than freedom. And security, carried to its ultimate in the 'total mobilization 9 of the nation, is very well analyzed by Rauschning. The masses still cling to the residue of personal liberty, of self-determination, which has been left to them. Yet all such things must disappear com- pletely before the absolute 'security' which is the inherent ob- jective of the Hitlerite revolution has been reached. NATION AND RACE 407 t The question about the inner causes of the overwhelming importance of Aryanism can be answered to the effect that they are to be sought less in a greater potentiality of the instinct of self-preservation in itself, than in the special way in which the latter expresses itself. The will to live, looked at subjectively, is the same everywhere and it is dif- ferent only in the form of its actual effect. With the most original living beings the instinct of self-preservation does not go beyond the care for their own 'ego.' Here the i ego- ism,' as we call this urge, goes so far that it even comprises time, so that the moment itself claims everything and be- grudges everything to the coming hours. The animal lives in this state only for itself, seeks food only whenever it feels hungry, and fights only for its own life. But as long as the instinct of self-preservation expresses itself in this way, every basis for the formation of a community, be it even the most primitive form of the family, is lacking. Even the community between male and female, beyond the mere mating, requires a broadening of the instinct of self-preser- vation, as now the care for their own 'ego' extends also to the other part; sometimes the male seeks food for the female, but not infrequently both of them for the young ones. Nearly always the one steps in for the protection of the other, so that here the first though infinitely simple forms of a readiness to sacrifice present themselves. As soon as this instinct extends beyond the limits of the narrow frame of the family, the prerequisite for the formation of greater unions and finally formal States is given. With the lowest people of the earth we find this quality only to a very small extent, so that often nothing but a family is formed. The greater the individual's readiness to subordinate his own purely personal interests is, the more increases also the ability for the establishment of extensive communities. This will to sacrifice in staking his personal labor and, if 408 MEIN KAMPF necessary, his own life for others, is most powerfully de- veloped in the Aryan. He is greatest, not in his mental capacities per se, but in the extent to which he is ready to put all his abilities at the service of the community. With him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the most noble form, because he willingly subjects his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour should require it, he also sacrifices it. Not in the intellectual abilities lies the Aryan's culture- creating and building ability. If he had only these, he would always be able to work only destructively, but in no case 'organizingly'; for the innermost nature of all organ- ization is based on just the fact that the individual re- nounces representing his personal opinion and his interests and sacrifices both in favor of a majority of people. Only The Aryan is therefore the best soldier. But he will also be the best 'worker,' in the sense adopted by Prussian Socialism, which is in theory a system rewarding men on the basis of the service they render the State, the community, as a whole. Today the world confronts the fact that German labor has, by and large, acquiesced in this theory. Its former Marxism has to a large extent been shuffled off; and perhaps it was the most fundamental characteristic of that Marxism that it based a conception of class warfare on an assumption of uni- versally valid human rights. The individual worker was held entitled to certain inalienable privileges, and for the sake of these the struggle against a society that refused to grant them was imperative. But just because Marxism respected human rights however secularistic its understanding of them may have been its revolutionary initiative was necessarily lamed. The shock which the best German Socialists felt when they confronted the Bolshevist regime was the result of their feeling that Lenin had betrayed the fundamental creed of Marxism. He had sold the faith in order to dominate. The Third Reich began by depriving the German worker of NATION AND RACE 409 by way of the general community is his share returned to him. Now, for instance, he no longer works directly for himself, but with his activity he joins in the frame of the community, not only for his own advantage, but for that of all. The most wonderful explanation of this disposition is offered by his word 'work/ by which he does not mean an activity for gaining his living, but only a creative toil that does not contradict the interests of the community. In the other case he calls the human activity, in so far as it does not serve the instinct of self-preservation without consid- eration for the welfare of the contemporary world, by the words theft, usury, robbery, burglary, etc. This disposition now, which causes the individual's ego to step back in the face of the preservation of the commun- ity, is really the first prerequisite for any truly human cul- ture. Only out of this all the great works of mankind are able to originate, works which bring little reward to the exactly what the Third Internationale had taken from him freedom of assembly, traditional organizations, the right to designate his leaders. But it manifested, in a manner in which the Republic could not manifest, its need for workers. And therewith (despite all material privations, such as bad bread, lack of fats, lower pay, harder work) the way was prepared for a revolution of the working class a revolution the dim outlines of which undoubtedly fascinate the German toiler today. For by abolishing the individual, the Third Reich automatically created the mass. And by establishing dominion, power, as the sole ethical norm, it automatically created a longing for power on a scale hitherto unknown. Sooner or later the two the new masses, and the new ethical absolute must coincide. Marxism is out of date in Germany, there- fore, simply because the theory of human rights is out of date. With that those who have destroyed Marxism will have to reckon. (Cf. Dcr Arbcitcr: Herrschaft und Gestalt, by Rrn$t Jtinger.) 410 MEIN KAMPF founder but the richest blessing to posterity. Out of this alone one can understand how so many are able to sustain a poor life in honesty, which imposes only poverty and mod- esty on themselves, but which guarantees the fundamen- tals of the community's existence. Every laborer, every peasant, every inventor, official, etc., who works without ever being able to attain happiness and well-being, is a carrier of this high idea, even if the deeper meaning of his actions remained hidden to himself forever. But what applies to work as the basis of human nutrition and all human progress applies to a far greater extent to the protection of man and his culture. In giving up one's own life for the existence of the community lies the crowning of all will to sacrifice. Only this prevents everything that human hands have built from being overthrown again by human hands, or destroyed by Nature for herself. < But just our German language has a word which in a glorious manner describes acting in this sense: fulfillment of duty (Pflichterfiillung) ; that means, not to suffice for one- self, but to serve the community; this is duty. Now the basic disposition out of which such an activity grows we call idealism, to distinguish it from egoism. By this we understand only the individual's ability to sacrifice himself for the community, for his fellow citizens, t But how necessary is it to recognize again and again that idealism is not perhaps superfluous or even dispensable expression of feeling, but that in truth it was, is, and will be the prerequisite for what we call human culture; indeed, that idealism alone has created the notion 'man.' To this inner attitude the Aryan owes his position in the world, and to it the world owes man; for this attitude alone has shaped the mere intellect into the creative force which now, in its unique blending of the crude fist with ingenious intellect, has created the monuments of human culture. Without its ideal attitude all, even the most brilliant, abil- NATION AND RACE 411 ities of the intellect would only be intellect in itself, but never creative force, outward appearance without inner value. But as true idealism is nothing but subjecting the indi- vidual's interest and life to the community, and as this again represents the presumptions for any kind of creative organizing forms, therefore in its very heart it corresponds to the ultimate will of Nature. Idealism alone leads men to voluntary acknowledgment of the privilege of force and strength and thus makes them become a dust particle of that order which forms and shapes the entire universe. Purest idealism is unconsciously deepest knowledge. How much this applies and how little genuine idealism has to do with playful imagination one can recognize imme- diately if the unspoilt child, the healthy boy, is permitted to judge. The same boy who is nauseated by the drivel of an * ideal ' pacifist is ready to throw away his young life for the ideal of his nationality. Here the instinct of realization unconsciously obeys the deeper necessity of the preservation of the species, if neces- sary at the expense of the individual, and it protests against the visions of the pacifist babbler who in reality as a crudely made-up yet cowardly egoist trespasses against the laws of development; for the latter is conditioned by the individual's willingness to sacrifice himself in favor of the Someone has written: 'Suffer the little children to come unto me; for theirs is the kingdom of death. 1 Three months after Hitler's rise to power, the traveler through Germany could see in school play-yards tots of four and five with sticks on their shoulders, going through military evolutions at the command of a drill-master. Austria, in the days following the Anschluss, was patrolled by boys of upper grammar school and high school age. They were armed with rifles and drawn bayonets. 412 MEIN KAMPF community and not by sickly imagination on the part of cowardly know-alls and critics of Nature, Just in such times, when the ideal attitude threatens to disappear, we can at once recognize a reduction of that force which forms the community and thus gives culture its presumption. As soon as egoism becomes the ruler of a na- tion, the ties of order loosen, and in the hunt for their own happiness people fall all the more out of heaven into hell. Even posterity forgets those men who only serve their own advantage, and it praises as heroes those who renounce their own happiness. < The Jew forms the strongest contrast to the Aryan. Hardly in any people of the world is the instinct of self- preservation more strongly developed than in the so-called 'chosen people/ The fact of the existence of this race alone may be looked upon as the best proof of this. Where is the people that in the past two thousand years has been ex- posed to so small changes of the inner disposition, of char- acter, etc., as the Jewish people? Which people finally has experienced greater changes than this one and yet has always come forth the same from the most colossal catas trophes of mankind? What an infinitely persistent will for life, for preserving the race do these facts disclose! Also the intellectual abilities were schooled in the course of centuries. Today the Jew is looked upon as 'clever,' and in a certain sense he has been so at all times. But his reason is not the result of his own development, but that of object lessons from without. For also the human mind is not able to climb the heights without steps; for every step forward he needs the foundation of the past, and, moreover, in that comprehensive meaning which can be revealed only through general culture. All thinking will rest only to a very small extent on one's own realization, but to the greater extent NATION AND RACE 413 on the experiences of the time past. The general level of culture supplies the individual, mostly without his noticing this, with such a profusion of preliminary knowledge that now, armed in this manner, he can set out towards further steps of his own. The young boy of today, for instance, grows up among a truly vast number of technical achieve- ments of the past few centuries that now, as being matters of course, he no longer pays attention to many things which were still a riddle to great minds a hundred years ago, though for the follow-up and the understanding of our progress in this field it is of decisive importance for him. If today even a genius of the twenties of the past century were suddenly to leave his grave, he would find it much harder to make his way about in the present time than this is the case of an average boy of fifteen of today. For he would lack all the infinite prerequisites which the individual takes in, so to speak, unconsciously, during his adolescence in the midst of the general culture of the corresponding time. As now the Jew (for reasons which will immediately be- come evident from the following) was never in the pos- session of a culture of his own, the bases for his spiritual 'The Jews, 1 said Chamberlain, 'are neither a race nor a people They are the unique example of a purely parasitic product of decay.' This point of view is based to a certain ex- tent on a corrupt reading of a sentence in Mommsen's Roman History, which reads: 'In the Old World, too, Jewry was an active ferment of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition, and was for that reason a preferred full-fledged member in the Caesarian States, the politics of which were in truth nothing but cosmopolitanism, and the folkdom of which was essentially nothing else than humanity/ Mommsen meant that the Jews, uprooted from their Fatherland, lived everywhere and served as links to tie Rome to the provinces. Chamberlain built up an elaborate theory to account for this 'parasitic product.' The 414 MEIN KAMPF activity have always been furnished by others. At all times his intellect has developed through the culture that sur- rounds him* Never did the reverse process take place, t For, even if the Jewish people's instinct of self-preserva- tion is not smaller, but rather greater, than that of other nations, and even if his spiritual abilities very easily create the impression as though they were equal to the intel- lectual disposition of the other races, yet the most essential presumption for a cultured people is completely lacking, the idealistic disposition. In the Jewish people, the will to sacrifice oneself does not go beyond the bare instinct of self-preservation of the indi- vidual. The seemingly great feeling of belonging together is rooted in a very primitive herd instinct, as it shows itself Jews were, he thought, a race mixed with other races too diverse in character to permit assimilation. They had married with Arabs and Syrians, and were as a result degenerate. Original sin as described in the Old Testament was, he held, only the 'sin of blood* i.e., the sin of intermarriage with inferior breeds. Few Nazis prior to 1933 put much faith in these teachings, at which Ernst Roehm is known to have laughed. To them Jew baiting was merely a highly effective form of drumming up prejudice against the hated Republic, which had given jobs to Rathenau, Eisner, Hilferding, and others. Even today one hears honest Nazi dissent from the official anti-Semitism, but this is probably more or less in- grained in youth. There was abundant protest against the November pogroms, but little of it was publicly manifested. The popular readiness to be stirred to a passion over the Jews witness the 'Juda vcrrecke' (May the Jews die) out- cry which the youth organizations in particular have taken up seems based partly on willingness to detest all things not strictly German (a consequence, no doubt, of the disap- pointments and privations that followed the War) and partly NATION AND RACE 415 in a similar way in many other living beings in this world. Thereby the fact is remarkable that in all these cases a common herd instinct leads to mutual support only as long as a common danger makes this seem useful or unavoidable. The same pack of wolves that jointly falls upon its booty dissolves when its hunger abates. The same is true of horses, which try to ward off the attacker in common, and which fly in different directions when the danger is gone. With the Jew the case is similar. His will to sacrifice is only ostensible. It endures only as long as the existence of the individual absolutely requires this. However, as soon as the common enemy is beaten and the danger threatening all is averted, the booty recovered, the apparent harmony among the Jews themselves ceases to make way again for on economic unrest. The Jew was represented as one who pro- fited by the inflation, or as the major cause of business and professional competition. But it is difficult to make a good argument to show Jewish economic dominance in pre-Hitler Germany, nor as Jewish cultural influence noteworthy outside Berlin. What can be said is that an unwise cult of publicity sometimes overstressed the importance of individual Jews. Many believed that anti-Semitic propaganda could be stopped if it were shown that Jews had contributed a great deal to the reputation of Germany abroad. Almost precisely the opposite effect was achieved. For a digest of statistics concerning the Jew in business, cultural and professional life, cf. The Jews in Nazi Germany, edited by the American Jewish Committee. A somewhat better case could be made out against the Jewish proletariat, since it was largely recruited from eastern Europe and was not immediately able to throw off the manners of the ghetto. But it was far too small and too isolated to be a factor of importance in German life, excepting as a source whence certain types of photography might be derived. The labor groups, both Marxist and Christian, frowned upon anti-Semi- tism. 416 MEIN KAMPF the inclinations originally present. The Jew remains united only if forced by a common danger or is attracted by a com- mon booty; if both reasons are no longer evident, then the qualities of the crassest egoism come into their own, and, in a moment, the united people becomes a horde of rats, fight- ing bloodily among themselves. If the Jews were alone in this world, they would suffocate as much in dirt and filth, as they would carry on a detest- able struggle to cheat and to ruin each other, although the complete lack of the will to sacrifice, expressed in their cowardice, would also in this instance make the fight a comedy. < Thus it is fundamentally wrong to conclude, merely from the fact of their standing together in a fight, or, more rightly expressed, in their exploiting their fellow human beings, that the Jews have a certain idealistic will to sacrifice them- selves. Here, too, the Jew is led by nothing but pure egoism on the part of the individual. Therefore also the Jewish 'State* (which is supposed to be the living organism for the preservation and the propa- gation of the race) is territorially completely unlimited. For a certain limitation of a State formation by space always presupposes an idealistic attitude by the State race, espe- cially above all a correct conception of the notion 'work/ In the same measure in which this attitude is lacking or absent, every attempt at a formation or even at the preser- vation of a territorially limited State fails. But with this also the basis on which a culture alone can originate is eliminated. For this reason, however, the Jewish people, with all its apparent intellectual qualities, is nevertheless without any true culture, especially without a culture of its own. For the sham culture which the Jew possesses today is the property of other peoples, and is mostly spoiled in his hands. NATION AND RACE 417 t When judging Jewry in its attitude towards the question of human culture, one has to keep before one's eye as an essential characteristic that there never has been and con- sequently that today also there is no Jewish art; that above all the two queens of all arts, architecture and music, owe nothing original to Jewry. What he achieves in the field of art is either bowdlerization or intellectual theft. With this, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish creatively and, with it, culturally blessed races. But how far the Jew takes over foreign culture, only imi- tating, or rather destroying, it, may be seen from the fact that he is found most frequently in that art which also appears directed least of all towards invention of its own, the art of acting. But here, too, he is really only the 'jug- gler/ or rather the ape; for here, too, he lacks the ultimate touch of real greatness; here, too, he is not the ingenious creator, but the outward imitator, whereby all the turns and tricks he applies cannot deceive us concerning the inner lack of life of his creative ability. Here the Jewish press alone comes lovingly to his aid, because about every, even the most mediocre, bungler, ^provided that he is a Jew, it raises such a clamor of hosannas that the rest of the world finally actually believes that it sees a real artist before its The statement that there had been no Jewish art in olden times is highly questionable. Historians of liturgical art now believe that the decorative schemes of early Christain churches may have been derived in part from the Synagogue. At all events, the Gregorian Chant certainly owes much to ancient Jewish music. To term all modern Jewish art 'derivative* is injudicious, particularly in Germany, as witness Max Lieber- mann in painting and Erich Mendelsohn in architecture. Modern Jewish stars of the stage include Elisabeth Bergner, Max Pallenberg, and Fritz Kortner. The most famous Jewish theatrical director was Max Reinhardt. 418 MEIN KAMPF eyes, whereas in reality it has only to deal with a wretched comedian. No, the Jew possesses no culture-creating energy what- soever, as the idealism, without which there can never exist a genuine development of man towards a higher level, does not and never did exist in him. His intellect, there- fore, will never have a constructive effect, but only a de- structive one, and in very rare cases it is perhaps stimulat- ing, at the utmost, but then in the form of the original pro- totype of that 'Kraft, die stets das Bose will und dock das Gute schafft ' [that force which always wants evil and never- theless creates good]. Any progress of mankind takes place not through him but in spite of him. As the Jew never possessed a State with definite terri- torial boundary, and as therefore he never called a culture his own, the conception arose that one had to deal with a people that had to be counted among the ranks of the nomads. This is an error that is as great as it is dangerous. The nomad certainly possesses a definitely limited living space, only he does not cultivate it like a sedentary peasant, but he lives on the yield of his herds with which he wanders about in his territory. The simplest reason for this is to be seen in the poor fertility of a soil which therefore does not permit of settlement. But the deepest cause lies in the dis- parity between the technical culture of a time or a people and the natural poverty of a living space. There are do- mains in which even the Aryan is unable to become master of the soil in closed settlements and to make a living from it, except by the technology he developed in the course of more than a thousand years. If he did not have this tech- nology, then he would either have to avoid these territories or he would also have to struggle along as a nomad in per- petual wandering (provided that his thousand-year-old education and custom of settlement did not make this ap- pear simply impossible to him). One has to consider, how- NATION AND RACE 419 ever, that at the time the American continent was opened, numerous Aryans fought for their living as trappers, hunt- ers, etc., and this frequently in large groups with women and children, always wandering about, so that their exist- ence resembled completely that of the nomads. Only when their increasing number and better instruments permitted them to clear the wild soil for tillage and to resist the abor- igines, more and more settlements sprang up over the country.^ The Aryan also was probably first a nomad, and in the course of time he settled down, but he never was, for this reason, a Jew! No, the Jew, is not a nomad; for the latter already has a definite attitude towards the conception 'work' which served as the basis for his later development, inasmuch as the necessary spiritual presumptions for that purpose are present. With him also the basically idealistic attitude exists, though in an infinite dilution, and therefore through his entire character he appears perhaps alien to Aryan peoples, but not uncongenial. With the Jew, how- ever, this attitude is non-existent; therefore he never was a nomad, but always only a parasite in the body of other peoples. That thereby he sometimes leaves his previous liv- This comment on American history is based upon the writ- ings of Karl May, a famous German 'thriller/ whose stories of Indians and pioneers Hitler has deeply relished. An interest- ing related passage on nomads in America may be found in Das Schwein als Kritcriuvn fucr nordische Vodker und Semitcn (The Hog as a Criterion for Nordic Peoples and Semites) by R. Walther Darr6. There an attempt is made to show that the Jewish prohibition of pork indicates that they were a nomadic desert people, while the Nordic addiction to that animal reveals an innate tendency to settle down. Hans Guenther also attributes Bodenstdndigktil (settling down instinct) to the Germans. Cf . Rasscnkunde des deutschen Volkes. 420 MEIN KAMPF ing quarters is not connected with his intention, but is the simple logic of his being thrown out from time to time by the host nation he abuses. But his spreading is the typical symptom of all parasites; he always looks for a new feeding soil for his race. t But this has nothing to do with nomadism for the reason that the Jew does not think of leaving a territory he occu- pies, but he remains where he is sitting, and that means so 'sedentary' that he may be expelled only with force and with great difficulty. His spreading to ever new countries takes place only in the moment when certain conditions for his existence are apparent there; without that he would (like the nomad) change his previous residence. He is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who, like a harmful bacillus, spreads out more and more if only a favorable medium invites 'him to do so. But the effect of his existence resembles also that of parasites; where he appears the host people die out sooner or later. Thus the Jew lived at all times in the States of other peoples and there he formed his own State, which, though disguised by the name of 'religious community/ generally sailed as long as external circumstances did not see fit to make a complete revelation of its nature. But once he be- lieved himself strong enough to be able to dispense with the protecting cover, then he always dropped the veil and sud- denly he was what so many others were unwilling to see and to believe in before : the Jew. In the Jew's life as a parasite in the body of other nations and States, his characteristic is established which once caused Schopenhauer to pronounce the sentence, already mentioned, that the Jew is the 'great master of lying. 9 Life urges the Jew towards the lie, that is, to a perpetual lie, just as it forces the inhabitants of northern countries to wear warm clothes.-* His life within other peoples can only exist in the long NATION AND RACE 421 run if he succeeds in creating the impression as though he were not a people but only a 'religious community,' though a special one. But with this the first great lie starts. In order to lead his existence as a peoples 9 parasite he is forced to deny his inner nature. Now the more intelligent the individual Jew is, the more will he succeed in this delu- sion. It can even go so far that great parts of the host nation finally believe in all sincerity that the Jew is really a French- man or an Englishman, a German or an Italian, though also of a special 'denomination.' f State authorities, which always seem to be animated only by the historical 'frac- tion' of wisdom, fall most easily victim of this infamous deception. In these circles independent thinking is looked upon as a genuine sin against the holy advancement, so that one must not be surprised that for example even today a Bavarian State minister has not the faintest idea that the Jew is a people and not a 'denomination' though only one look into the Jew's own newspaper world ought immedi- ately to demonstrate this to even the most modest mind. Of course, the Jewish Echo is not yet an official organ and therefore it is 'unauthoritative* for the brains of such a government potentate. The Jews were always a people with definite racial qual- ities and never a religion, only their progress made them probably look very early for a means which could divert disagreeable attention from their person. But what would have been more useful and at the same time more harmless than the 'purloining' of the appearance of being a religious community? For here, too, everything is purloined, or rather, stolen. But resulting from his own original nature the Jew cannot possess a religious institution for the very reason that he lacks all idealism in any form and that he also does not recognize any belief in the hereafter. But in the Aryan conception one cannot conceive of a religioo 422 MEIN KAMPF which lacks the conviction of the continuation of life after death in some form. Indeed, the Talmud is then not a book for the preparation for the life to come, but rather for a practical and bearable life in this world. The Jewish religious doctrine is primarily a direction for preserving the purity of the blood of Judaism as well as for the regulation of the Jews' intercourse with one an- other, but even more in connection with the rest of the world, that means, with non-Jews. But here, too, the prob- lems involved are not at all ethical, but rather extremely modest economic ones. About the moral value of the Jew- ish religious instructions there exist today and there have existed at all times rather exhaustive studies (on the non- Jewish side; the drivel of the Jews themselves about this is, of course, cut to the purpose) which make this kind of 'religion' appear even odious from Aryan viewpoints. But the best stamp is given by the product of this 'religious' education, the Jew himself. His life is really only of this world, and his spirit is as alien to true Christianity, for in- Jewish religion does stress belief in the immortality of the soul. The earlier portions of the Old Testament do not, it is true, explicitly go beyond affirmations concerning the im- mortality of the Jewish people as a whole. Later on, in the Book of Daniel and in Maccbabees, the ideas of the survival of the soul and of bodily resurrection are emphasized. Medie- val Jewry clung to the belief, and the records of 'saints' who died during persecutions breathe a firm hope of survival in God. For a liberal Jewish commentary, cf. A Social and Religious History of the Jews, by Salo Wittmayer Baron. The reasoning here is more explicitly formulated in Rosen- berg. Cf. also, St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 1 1 : 'As concerning the Gospel, they are enemies for your sake; but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers 9 sake*/ NATION AND RACE 423 seance, as his nature was two thousand years ago to the Sublime Founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of His disposition towards the Jewish people, and when necessary He even took to the whip in order to drive out of the Lord's temple this adversary of all humanity, who even then as always saw in religion only a means for his business existence. But for this, of course, Christ was crucified, while our present party Christianity disgraces itself by begging for Jewish votes in the elections and later tries to conduct political wirepulling with atheis- tic Jewish parties, and this against their own nation. Upon this first and greatest lie, that the Jew is not a race but simply a religion, further lies are then built up in neces- sary consequence. To them also belongs the language spoken at the time by the Jew. For him it is never a means of expressing his thoughts, but for hiding them. When he speaks French, he thinks Jewish, and when he turns out German poetry, he only gives an outlet to the nature of his people. As long as the Jew has not become the master of the other peoples, he must, whether he likes it or not, speak their lan- guages, and only if they would be his slaves then they might all speak a universal language so that their domination will be made easier (Esperanto!). How far the entire existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown in an incomparable manner and certainty in the 'Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion/ so The 'Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' were first circu- lated in Russia during the early years of the twentieth century. Apparently they formed part of the literary stock-in-trade of certain secret organizations. The tract purports to be an account of a meeting between Jewish leaders in the fall of 1897, which year marked the first convention of the Zionist Congress. Since pilgrimages to the Holy Land were popular in Russia, tht 424 MEIN KAMPF infinitely hated by the Jews. They are supposed to be a 'forgery' the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and cries out to the world once a week; the best proof that they are genuine after all. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here exposed consciously. But this is what matters. It makes no difference from the head of which Jew these disclosures come, but decisive it is that they demonstrate, with a truly horrifying certainty, the nature and the activity of the Jew- ish people and expose them in their inner connection as well as in their ultimate final aims. But the best criticism ap- plied to them is reality. He who examines the historical development of the past hundred years, from the points of view of this book, will also immediately understand the clamor of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish danger is bound to be considered as broken. combination of Zionism and terrorism was effective propa- ganda. A horrible plot to undermine society, overthrow governments, and destroy Christianity is revealed. The 'minutes' are copied verbatim from *A Dialogue in Hades Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, ' an attack on the Masons and the Bonapartists written in French by Maurice Joly in 1868. The 'Protocols' merely substituted the word 'Jew* for Joly's own devils. Another probable source is Biarritz, a novel published by John Retcliff in 1868, one scene in which described an imaginary annual meeting of 'the prince of the twelve Tribes of Israel* in the Jewish ceme- tery of Prague. They discuss measures calculated to destroy all Christians. Editions of the 'Protocols' edited by Rosen- berg and others are now widely circulated in Germany and other countries. Noteworthy is the fact that Hitler's justifi- cation of them (Count Reventlow had admitted their spurious- ness during a sensational trial in 1923) almost parallels the explanation given by the Reverend Charles Coughlin at the time they were reprinted in his periodical, Social Justice. NATION AND RACE 425 In order to become acquainted with the Jew, it is best to study the way he took inside the body of the other peoples in the course of the centuries. It suffices to follow this up on the basis of only one example in order to arrive at the necessary conclusions. As his development was always and at all times the same, as also the peoples he eats into are always the same, it is recommended for such a study to break his development up into certain sections which in this case, to simplify matters, I denote with letters. The first Jews came to ancient Germany in the course of the advance of the Romans, that is, as tradesmen as usual In the storms of the peoples' migration, however, an end seems to have been put also to this, and therefore the time of the first Germanic State formation may be considered the beginning of a new and now permanent Judaization of Cen- tral and North Europe. Now a development sets in which was always the same or a similar one, wherever Jews met Aryan peoples. (a) With the appearance of the first fixed settlements the Jew is suddenly 'there/ He comes as a tradesman, and at the beginning he puts little stress on the disguise of hia nationality. He is still a Jew, partly perhaps also for the reason that the external racial difference between him and the host nation is too great and his linguistic knowledge too small, and that the seclusion of the host nation is too strong for him to venture to appear as something different from a 'foreign tradesman.' With his versatility and the host nation's inexperience it is no disadvantage, but rather an advantage, for him to keep up his character as 'Jew'; one meets the stranger courteously. (ft) Now he gradually begins to become 'active' in eco- nomic life, not as a producer, but exclusively as an inter- mediary link. In his versatility of a thousand years' trading 426 MEIN KAMPF he is infinitely superior to the clumsy and boundlessly hon- est Aryans, so that after a short time trade threatens to become his monopoly. Further, he begins money-lending and that always at usurious interest. He actually intro- duces interest by this. The danger of this new institution is not recognized at first, but for the sake of the momen- tary advantages it is even welcomed. (c) The Jew has settled down completely; that means, he occupies special quarters in the towns and villages and more and more he forms a special State within the State. He considers trade as well as all money transactions as his very own privilege, which he exploits ruthlessly. (d) Money transactions and trade have now completely become his monopoly. His usurious rates of interest finally stir up resistance, his otherwise increasing impertinence causes indignation, his riches envy. The cup is filled to overflowing when he draws also the land and the soil into the circle of his mercenary objects and degrades it to the level of goods to be sold or rather to be traded. As he him- self never tills the soil, but only looks upon it as a property to be exploited, on which the peasant may well remain but only under the most wretched extortions on the part of his present master, the aversion against him finally grows into open hatred. His blood-sucking tyranny becomes so great that riots against him occur. Now one begins to look more and more closely at the stranger and one discovers more and more new repellent features and characteristics in him, till the chasm becomes an unsurmountable one. In times of most bitter distress the wrath against him finally breaks out, and the exploited and ruined masses take up self-defense in order to ward off the scourge of God. They have got to know him in the course of several cen- turies and they experience his mere existence as the same distress as the plague. (e) Now, however, the Jew begins to unveil his true qual- NATION AND RACE 427 ities. With disgusting flattery he approaches the govern- ments, he puts his money to work, and in this manner he secures again and again the privilege of a renewed exploi- tation of his victims. Although sometimes the people's fury against the eternal blood-sucker flares up like fire, this does not prevent him in the least from appearing again, after a few years, at the place he had barely left and to begin his former life all over. No persecution can deter him from ex- ploiting mankind, can expel him; after each one he is here again after a short time, and just the same as he was before. In order at least to prevent the worst, one begins to take the soil out of his usurious hands by making the acquisition of soil legally impossible for him. [j (/) In the measure in which the power of the monarchs begins to rise, he pushes nearer and nearer to them. He begs for 'privileges' and 'charters/ which he willingly re- ceives, against corresponding payment, from these gentle- men who are always in need of money. No matter what this costs him, he gets back with interest and compound in- terest in the course of a few years the money he has spent. A real blood-sucker which attaches itself to the body of the unfortunate people and which cannot be removed until the monarchs themselves again need money and in person tap the blood that he has sucked in. This game is repeated again, whereby the r61e of the For a history of these pogroms which were caused in the main by the enthusiasm incident to the Crusades cf. 'Die Judcnbck&mpfung im Mittdaltcr,' by Peter Browe, S.J., m Zcitschrift jtir katholische Theologie (Vol. LXII, nrs. 2 and 3). Saint Bernard preached against these disorders, and the Papal Bull Licet perfidia iudaeorum was published to stop them. Browe's conclusion is that charges of usury, etc., emerge rela- tively late, indicating possibly that the Jews resorted to such measures as means of defense. 418 MEIN KAMPF so-called 'German monarchs 9 is just as wretched as that of the Jews themselves. They were really God's chastisement for their 'dear' people, these gentlemen, and they find their parallel only in the various ministers of the present time. It was thanks to the German monarchs that the German nation was unable to free itself for good from the Jewish danger. Unfortunately, this fact did not change later on, so that by the Jew they were only allotted the thousandfold reward they deserved for the sins they once committed against their peoples. They had sold themselves to the Devil and had landed in his domain. (g) Thus his ensnaring the monarchs led to their ruin. Their attitude towards the peoples loosens slowly but surely in the measure in which they cease to serve the interests of the latter and, instead, become the usufructuaries of their 'subjects.' The Jew knows their end accurately, and he tries to speed it up if possible. He himself advances their eternal financial troubles by diverting them more and more from their true tasks; by toadying to them with the worst flattery, he induces them to vice and thus makes himself more and more indispensable. His versatility, rather his anscrupulousness, in all money matters knows how to extract, even to extort, more and more money from the ex- ploited subjects who tread the path to nothing in shortei and shorter periods of time. Every Court thus has its 4 Court Jew.' (This is the name of the monsters who tor- ture the beloved people to the point of despair and who pre- pare the eternal pleasure of the monarchs.) Who will won- der, then, that these 'ornaments' of the human race are finally also outwardly decorated and rise to the ranks of the hereditary 'nobility/ and thus help not only in making this institution ridiculous, but even in poisoning it. Another allusion to the Habsburgs, accused of having pro- tected the Jews and of having assured their rise in the world. NATION AND RACE 429 Now he is all the more able to use his position for the sake of his advancement. Finally, he only needs to submit himself to baptism in order to come into the possession of all possibilities and rights of the natives of the country. He puts through this 'business' not infrequently to the joy of the churches over the 'son' they have won and to Israel's joy at the successful swindle. (fi) Now a change begins to take place within Jewry. So far they were Jews; that means they did not want to appear as something else, and also they could not do so with such extremely pronounced race characteristics on both sides. Still at the time of Frederick the Great nobody would think of seeing in the Jew something other than a * foreign 1 people, and Goethe is still horrified at the idea that in future matri- mony between Christians and Jews would no longer be for- bidden by law. Now Goethe was, God knows, certainly no reactionary, far less a helot; what spoke out of him was nothing but the voice of blood and of reason. Thus, despite all disgraceful actions of the Courts, the people instinctively sees in the Jew the alien element in its own body and it takes a corresponding attitude towards him. This was to become different now. In the course of a thousand years he has learned to master the language of his host people to such an extent as to believe that he can in the future risk to accent his Judaism a little less and to put his ' Germanity ' more into the foreground ; for no matter how ridiculous, nay, absurd, it may seem at first, yet he permits himself the impudence of changing himself into a 'Ger- manic'; in this case therefore a 'German.' Thereby begins one of the most infamous lies conceivable. Since of Ger- manity he possesses really nothing but the ability to speak its language badly in the most terrible manner, since for the rest, however, he never blended with it, therefore his whole Germanitv rests only on the language. The race, however, 430 MEIN KAMPF ia not based upon the language, but upon the blood exclu- sively, something that nobody knows better than the Jew, who puts only very little value upon the preservation of his language, but everything on the preservation of the purity of his blood. One can change the language of a man with- out ado, that means he can use another language; but then he will express his old thoughts in his new language, his inner nature will not be changed. This is shown best of all by the Jew who is able to speak in a thousand languages and yet remains always the one Jew. His character qualities have remained the same, whether two thousand years ago he spoke Roman as a grain merchant in Ostia or whether as a flour profiteer of today he haggles German like a Jew. He is always the same Jew. That this matter of course is naturally not understood by a normal councillor of the min- istry or a higher police official of today is also a matter of course, as hardly any person endowed with less instinct or intellect walks about than these 'servants' of our exem- plary 'State authority 1 of the 'present time/ The reason why the Jew decides now suddenly to become a ' German ' is obvious. He feels that the power of the mon- archfe begins slowly to tumble, and therefore he seeks to get a platform under his feet in time. Further, his financial rule of the entire business life has already progressed so far that, without the possession of all the 'civil' rights, he is no longer able to support the whole enormous building, in any case no further increase of his influence can take place. But he wishes both; for the higher he climbs, the more allur- ingly rises out of the veil of the past his old goal, once pro- mised to him, and with feverish greed he watches in his brightest heads the dream of world domination step into tangible proximity. Therefore, his sole endeavor is aimed at putting himself into complete possession of the ' civil f rights. This is the reason for the emancipation from the ghetto NATION AND RACE 431 Thus the Court Jew develops slowly into the folk Jew; that means, of course, the Jew remains now as before in the surroundings of the high gentlemen, he even tries to push still more into this circle ; but at the same time another part of his race chums up to the 'dear people.' If one considers how much he has sinned against the masses in the course of the centuries, how again and again he squeezed and ex- torted without mercy, if one considers further how the people gradually learned to hate him for this and finally saw in his existence really nothing but a punishment of Heaven, then one can understand how hard this change must be for the Jew. Yes, it is tiresome work to present oneself sud- denly again as ' friend of mankind ' to the skinned victims. At first, therefore, he begins to make good, in the eyes of the people, what so far he had sinned against it. He begins his change as 'benefactor' of mankind. As his new benevo- lence has a genuine foundation, he cannot very well keep to the old words of the Bible that the left hand must not know what the right hand gives, but whether he wants it or not, he has to be content with letting as many people as possible know how much he feels the sufferings of the masses and what sacrifices he offers personally for this. In the form of this inborn ' modesty ' he calls out his merits to the rest Goethe, born in Frankfort, describes the ghetto as he had known it during his boyhood. In Berlin there was already a somewhat different situation, although Jews coming there to engage in business were obliged to pay tribute. Thus Moses Mendelssohn, founder of the famous banker family, was obliged to put down the purchase price for twelve porcelain monkeys of a kind then being produced at the Royal Factory. Emancipation of the Jew was not in effect everywhere in Ger- many until 1869. As a boy, Heinrich Heine knew no German. How many Jews had been converted previously the ghetto was a religious dividing line we have no means of telling. 432 MEIN KAMPF of the world until the world begins really to believe in them. Those who do not believe this do him a great injustice. After a short time he begins even to twist these things in such a way as to make it appear as though so far one had only wronged him, and not vice versa. Those who are especially stupid believe this and they cannot but have sympathy with the poor 'unfortunate' one. For the rest one ought to remark here that the Jew, despite all willingness to sacrifice, naturally never becomes poor. He knows very well how to manage; indeed, his char- ity is sometimes actually comparable to the manure which is spread on the field, not out of love for the latter, but out of precaution for one's own benefit later on. But in any case, everybody knows after a comparatively short time that the Jew has now become a ' Benefactor and friend of mankind.' What a strange change ! But for this reason alone, what to others is more or less natural now creates astonishment, and among many even visible admiration. Thus it happens that for this reason one gives him much more credit than to the rest of man- kind, for in their case it is considered a matter of course. But even more: the Jew becomes suddenly also 'liberal* and he begins to rave of the necessary 'progress' of man- kind. Thus he gradually makes himself the spokesman of a new time. Of course, he destroys then also more and more thor- oughly the foundations of a truly useful national economy. By the roundabout way of the 'share' capital he pushes his way into the circulation of national production, he makes the latter an object of usury by way of buying or rather of trading, and thus he robs the organizations of the basis of a personal ownership. Only thus there arises that inner estrangement between employer and employee which leads to the following political class cleavage. NATION AND RACE 433 But finally, where economic interests are concerned, the Jewish influence through the stock exchange grows with ter- rifying speed. He becomes the owner, or at least the con- troller, of the national labor force. For the strengthening of his political position he tries to pull down the racial and civil barriers which at first still restrain him at every step. For this purpose he fights with all his innate thoroughness for religious tolerance and in the completely deteriorated Freemasonry he has an excel- lent instrument for fighting out and also for 'putting over* his aims. By the strings of Freemasonry the circles of the government and the higher layers of the political and eco- nomic bourgeoisie fall into his nets without their even guessing this. Only the people as such, or rather that class which is now about to wake up, which fights for its own rights and its freedom, cannot yet be sufficiently seized by this in its deeper and broader layers. But this is more necessary than everything else; for the Jew actually feels that the possi- bility for his rising to a dominating r61e is only given if there is a 'pacemaker* before him; but the latter he believes he can recognize in the bourgeoisie, and this in its broadest lay- ers. But one cannot catch glovemakers and linen weavers in the fine net of Freemasonry; for this one has to apply more coarse but not less thorough means. Thus to Free- masonry the second weapon in the service of Jewry is Hence Rosenberg's crusade against Freemasonry. After 1933, powerful business influences were able to halt for a time the dissolution of the lodges. Masonry was inconsequential in Germany, the total number of initiates being 76,360 in 1931. They divided into two groups, one of which was 'Christian- national' (i.e., conservative), while the other was 'liberal. 9 The first group comprised more than two-thirds of the total membership. 434 MEIN KAMPF added ; the press. He puts himself into possession of it with all toughness, but also with infinite versatility. With it he begins slowly to grasp and to ensnare, to lead and to push the entire public life, because now he is in a position to pro- duce and to conduct that power which under the name of 'public opinion' is better known today than it was a few decades ago. But thereby he always presents himself as infinitely thirsty for knowledge, he praises all progress, but most of all, of course, that progress which leads others to destruc- tion; for in all knowledge and every development he sees forever only the possibility of the advancement of his own nationality, and, where this possibility does not exist, he is the inexorable and mortal enemy of all light, the despiser of all true culture. Thus he applies all knowledge which he takes in in the schools of the others, only to the service of his race. This nationality, however, he guards as never before. While he seems to overflow with 'enlightenment,' 'pro- gress/ 'freedom/ 'humanity,' etc., he exercises the strictest seclusion of his race. Although he sometimes hangs his women onto the coattails of influential Christians, yet he always keeps his male line pure in principle. He poisons the blood of the others, but he guards his own. The Jew does not marry a Christian woman, but always the Chris- tian a Jewess. Yet the bastards take to the Jewish side. Especially a part of the higher nobility degrades itself com- pletely. He knows this only too well, and for this reason he systematically carries out this kind of 'disarmament' of the A very curious generalization. Researches in several German Jewish family trees reveal the fact that since the emancipation, the majority of extra-confessional marriages were those of Jewish men marrying Christian girls. In the United States, Abie's Irish Rose emphasizes the same trend. NATION AND RACE 435 spiritually leading class of his racial adversaries. Yet, in order to disguise his activity and to put his victims to sleep, he speaks now more and more of the equality of all men, without consideration of race and of color. And those who are stupid begin to believe him. But as his entire being still smells too strongly of the stranger for the great mass of the people especially to fall without ado into his nets, he makes his press give a picture of himself which corresponds to reality as little as it serves, nevertheless, the purpose he intended. Especially in car- toons one endeavors to present the Jew as a harmless little folk which cannot help having its characteristics (as others also), but which even by its manners, appearing perhaps a little strange, gives forth symptoms of his possibly comic, yet always fundamentally honest and benevolent soul. On the whole one strives at making him always appear more 4 unimportant ' than dangerous. His final goal in this State, however, is the victory of 'democracy/ or as he understands it: because it eliminates Certainly no orthodox Jews on record have subscribed even to the Christian version of the doctrine that all men are equal. This teaching has, indeed, no meaning unless it signifies the equality of persons before the law, whether Divine (i.e., religious) or human. One of the most remarkable anti-Semitic addresses delivered by Hitler is dated from April, 1922. The following passage may be cited: 'Jewry has tried a ruse which, from the political point of view, is really very clever. This capitalistic people, which was the first on this earth to introduce the enslavement of men, has managed to take the leadership of the Fourth Estate into its hands. In so doing it had adopted two lands of tactic, one of the Right and one of the Left, since it has apostles in both camps. The Jew on the Right tries to make all faults that exist stand out so clearly that the man on the street, poor 436 MEIN KAMPF the personality and in its place it puts the majority of stupidity, incapacity, and last, but not least, cowardice. The final result of this development will be the overthrow of the monarch which is bound to arrive sooner or later. -4- The enormous economic development leads to a change in the social classification of the people. While the small craftsmen die out gradually and thus the worker's possi- bility of winning an independent existence becomes more and more rare, the worker becomes more visibly prole- tarian. The industrial 'factory worker 1 comes into being whose essential characteristic is to be seen in the fact that he hardly ever reaches the position of founding an existence of his own in his later life. He is * without property' in the truest meaning of the word, so that his old age means a tor- ture rather than life. Even previously a similar position had been created devil, will be irritated to the nth degree greed for money, unscrupulousness, hardness of heart, disgusting displays of wealth. More and more Jews had slid into the better families, you see, and therefore the ruling class has become estranged from its people. 'This was the premise on which work on the Left was under- taken. For he was there, to the Left the cheap little dema- gogue. He made it impossible for patriots of intelligence to accept positions of leadership in the workers' organizations, first by adopting an internationalist point of view, and then by sponsoring a Marxist theory which proclaimed that property as such is theft. Now the leadership of industry, in so far as it was patriotic-minded, also could not put up with what was happening. Therewith the Jew succeeded in bringing about the isolation of this movement from all nationalist elements. Next, through clever management of the press, he so influenced the masses that the Right looked upon the mistakes of the Left as mistakes of the German worker, while the mistakes made on the Right in their turn seemed to the German worker NATION AND RACE 437 which also categorically urged towards a solution which then also took place. To the peasant and draftsman, the official and employee, especially of the State, were slowly added as an additional class. They were 'without pro- perty' in the truest meaning of the word. The State at last helped itself out of this unsound state in a way by taking into its hands the provision for the State employees who could not provide for themselves in their old age and intro- duced the pension. Slowly more and more private enter- prises followed this example, so that today almost every intellectual, permanently employed, draws a pension later, provided the corporation has already reached or surpassed a certain size. Only the security of the State official in his old age was able to educate him to that unselfish loyalty to duty which in pre-War times was the most noble quality of German officialdom. Thus an entire class, which remained without property, was in a clever manner pulled out of social misery and thus joined in the entity of the people. Now this question again approached the State and the mistakes of the so-called bourgeois. And neither of the two noticed that the mistakes on both sides were the objectives sought by these devilish alien agitators. Thus did there come to pass the ghastliest joke in the world history Jewish specu- lators became Jewish labor leaders. While Moses Cohn, stock- holder, stiffens the backs of his company until it becomes as stern and uncompromising as possible towards the demands of its workers, Isaac Cohn, labor-leader, is in the courtyard of the factory rousing the workers. "Look at them," he cries, "they seek only to crush you. Throw your chains away." And up above his brother helps make it possible that the chains are forged at all. The people is to destroy the backbone of its independence its own industry in order that it may sink the more surely into the golden chains of the slavery of interest imposed by this race.' 438 MEIN KAMPF nation, and this time in a much greater extent. More ana more millions of people moved from peasant villages to the big cities in order to earn their daily bread as ' factory work- ers ' in the newly founded industries. Working and living conditions of the new class were more than pitiful. Even the former working methods of the one-time craftsmen 01 peasants, carried over mechanically to the new forms, were unsuitable in every respect. The activity of the one and the other was no longer comparable with the efforts which the industrial factory worker has to afford. With the old crafts- manship, time might perhaps play far less a r61e than was all the more the case with the new working methods. The formal taking-over of the old working hours to the great industrial enterprises had indeed a disastrous effect; for the actual work done before was only very little, in conse- quence of the absence of our present intensive working methods. Therefore, if at that time one was still able to bear a working day of fourteen or fifteen hours, one could no longer do so at a time when every minute is used and applied to the fullest extent. The result of this senseless transfer of old working hours to the new industrial activity was really an unfortunate one in two respects: it ruined health and destroyed confidence in a higher law. To this was added, finally, the miserable wages as well as, on the other hand, the visibly so much better position of the employer. In the country there was no social question, as the master and the servant did the same work, and, above all, they ate out of the same dish. But all this had now become different at one blow. The separation of the employee from the employer now seems to be carried out in all domains of life. How far in this the inner Judaization of our people has progressed can be seen from the low respect, not to say disdain, which is awarded the craftsman's work in itself. For this is not Ger- NATION AND RACE 439 man. Only the tainting of our life with foreign elements, which was in truth a 'Judaization,' turned the one-time respect for craftsmanship into a certain disdain of all physi- cal work as a whole. Thus a new class, which was very little respected, was actually created, and some day the question was bound to arise whether the nation would by itself have the energy to make this new class again a member of general society, or whether the social difference would widen into a class-like cleavage. But one thing was certain: the new class contained not the worst elements in its ranks, but the most energetic ones. Here the over-refinements of the so-called i culture ' had not yet exercised their deteriorating and destroying influences. In its broad masses, the new class was not yet infected by the poison of pacifist weakness; it was robust, and, if necessary, even brutal. While the bourgeoisie does not care at all about this enor- mously important question, but indifferently lets things take their course, the Jew seizes the unlimited opportunity for the future which is offered here, and while on the one side he organizes the capitalist methods of exploiting human beings to the ultimate consequence, he approaches the very victims of his spirit and his activity, and after a short time he becomes even the leader of their fight against himself. 'Against himself is, of course, only metaphorically ex- pressed, for the great master of lies knows how to make himself appear always as the 'pure 1 one and to charge the guilt to the others. As he has the impudence to lead the masses in such a manner, the latter does not even think at all that this could mean the most villainous betrayal of all times. And yet it was so. As soon as, out of the general economic transformation, the new class develops, the Jew sees also before him, dearly 440 MEIN KAMPF and distinctly, the new pacemaker of his own further ad- vancement. First he uses the bourgeoisie as the battle ram against the feudal world, then the worker against the bour- geois world. Just as at one time he knew how to gain by sneaking the civil rights for himself in the shadow of the bourgeoisie, thus he hopes now that in the worker's fight for his existence, he will find the way towards a leadership of his own. From now on the worker only has the task of working for the future of the Jewish people. He is unconsciously put into the service of that power which he believes he is fight- ing. By making him apparently storm against capital, one can most easily make him fight just for the latter. Thus one always cries out against international capital, whereas in reality one means the national economy. The latter is to be demolished so that on its field of carnage the triumph of the international stock exchange may be celebrated. The Jew's procedure in this is, in short, the following : He approaches the worker, pretends to have pity on him, or even to feel indignation at his lot of misery and poverty, in order more easily to gain his confidence in this way. He takes pains to study all the actual (or imagined) hardships of his life and to awaken a longing for changing such an existence. In an infinitely sly manner, he stimulates the need for social justice, dormant in every Aryan, to the point of hatred against those who have been better favored by for- tune, and thus he gives the fight for the abolition of social evils a definite stamp of a view of life. He founds the Marxist theory. By presenting it as inseparably connected with quite a number of socially justified demands, he promotes its spread, and, on the other hand, the decent people's aversion to fulfilling demands which, presented in such a form and accompaniment, appear unjust, nay, impossible from the beginning. For under this cloak of social thought, there are NATION AND RACE 441 hidden some more truly diabolic intentions, or they are reported in all publicity with the most impudent clarity. This doctrine is an inseparable mixture of reason and human frenzy, but always so that only lunacy can become reality, and never reason. By the categorical rejection of personal- ity and, with it, of the nation and its racial contents, it destroys the elementary foundations of the entire human culture which depends on just these factors. This is the true inner nucleus of the Marxist ' view of life,' as far as one may call this monstrous product of a criminal mind a 'view of life.' With the destruction of the personality and the race in this world, there vanishes the essential obstacle for the domination of the inferior: this, however, is the Jew. f The meaning of this doctrine lies just in the economic and the political frenzy. For by this all truly intelligent Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital, was the son of Protestant parents, converts from Judaism. Like many others who later on identified themselves with Socialism, known previously in its Utopian forms in France, he was educated in the neo- Hegelian philosophy. At the time this markedly evolutionistic doctrine ran foul of Lutheran Christianity in a conventional and fundamentalistic form. There appeared to be no chance for reconciliation between philosophy and religion. The phrase, 4 Religion is the opium of the people,' comes, however, not from Marx but from Bruno Bauer. Marx definitely turned to Social- ism during his exile, which followed the Revolution of 1848. His strength lies in his sharp insight into capitalistic procedure, not in his materialistic dialectic. This last, the especial theme of the neo-Hegolians, is much better exemplified in Ludwig Feuerbach and Arnold Rugo. It is difficult, therefore, to see how Marx's teaching can be linked up with Judaism in particular. The popular statement of his theory is the work of Friedrich Engels, an Aryan; and his philosophy is derivative from Hegel, another Aryan. More- over, Marx was a bitter critic of orthodox Judaism. A much 442 MEIN KAMPF members of the nation are kept from putting themselves into its service, while those who are mentally less active and economically badly trained, join its ranks with flying colors. The intelligentsia, however, which of course also needs this movement for its existence, is 'sacrificed* by the Jew from his own ranks. Thus there arises a movement of mere handicraft workers under exclusively Jewish leadership, apparently aiming at improving the situation of the worker, but in truth intend- ing the enslavement, and with it the destruction, of all non- Jewish peoples. The general pacifistic paralyzation of the national in- stinct of self-preservation, introduced into the circles of the more typically Jewish labor leader was Ferdinand Lassalle, whom the Nazis almost never attack because he affirmed the nationalist State and influenced Bismarck. Lassalle's influence also survived in the Christian Labor Union movement. How eager the early capitalistic entrepreneurs of Germany were to fulfill 'just* social demands may be seen from the history of the miners ' unions, where there was for a long time no question of 'Marxism. 1 But though the underfed and ex- ploited workers were led by their clergy, and though they 4 reverenced ' the ' human personality,' their fight for recognition met with a rebuff from Emperor and industry alike. Jewish intellectuals, rebuffed by the Stoecker movement which during the iSSos blended anti-Semitism with social reform on a conservative basis, turned quite generally to democratic ideas. In addition the Social Democratic Party, seldom getting recruits from 'Aryan 1 academic life, offered some opportunity to Jews. Their influence was, however, limited. In 1914 the Executive Committee of the Party had one Jewish member. In the trade unions organized under the Marxist banner, Jewish influence was virtually non-existent. But several Jews were Reichstag deputies, or were employed on Party journals. NATION AND RACE 443 so-called 'intelligentsia' by Freemasonry, is transmitted to the great masses, but above all to the bourgeoisie, by the activity of the great press, which today is always Jewish. To these two weapons of deterioration now comes as the third, and by far the most terrible, the or brutal force. Marxism, as the column of at should finish what the work of attrition of ripe in preparation of the collapse. Therewith a truly masterful that one really must not be surprised if just those institutions fail completely rrl much to present themselves as the bearers legendary State authority. At all times the a few exceptions) has found the most his work of destruction in our high and highest or of the State. Cringing submissiveness towards ' above ' and arrogant superciliousness towards 'below' mark this class as much as a narrow-mindedness that often cries to Heaven, which in turn is surpassed only by a sometimes truly aston- ishing presumption. These, however, are the qualities which the Jew wants of our authorities and which he correspondingly loves. The practical fight, sketched in broad outlines, which now sets in takes the following course : -4- Corresponding to the final aims of the Jewish fight which limit themselves not only to the economic conquest of the world, but which also demand the political subjection of the latter, the Jew also divides the organization of his Marxist world doctrine into two parts, which, apparently separated from each other, nevertheless in truth form one inseparable whole, the political and the trade-union move- ment. The union movement is that which is solicitous. To the worker in his difficult struggle for existence which he has to fight thanks to the greed or the short-sightedness of many 444 MEIN KAMPF employers, it offers help and protection, and with it the possibility of fighting for better living conditions. If the worker does not want to give up the representation of his human living rights to the mercy of people who are little conscious of responsibility and who are often also heartless, in times when the organized national community, that is, the State, cares next to nothing about him, then he has to take the defense of these rights into his own hands. In the same measure in which the so-called national bourgeoisie, blinded by financial interests, puts the severest obstacles into the way of this struggle for life, and not only resists all attempts at shortening the inhumanly long working hours, at abolishing child labor, safeguarding and protecting the woman, raising of the sanitary conditions in workshops and homes, but frequently actually sabotages them, the cleverer Jew takes charge of the thus oppressed people. He gradu- ally becomes the leader of the unionist movement and this the more easily as he is not concerned, in honest conviction, about an actual abolition of social evils, but rather about the formation of an economic fighting troop, blindly de- voted to him, for the destruction of the national economic independence. For, while the leaders of a sound social pol- icy will permanently movte between the directions of the preservation of national health on the one hand and the safeguarding of an independent national economy on the other, for the Jew these two viewpoints are not only dis- missed from his fight, but their abolition is, among others, the goal of his life. He does not wish the preservation of an independent national economy, but its destruction. Conse- quently, no pangs of conscience can prevent him, the leader of the unionist movement, from making demands which not only exceed the goal, but the fulfillment of which is either practically impossible or means the ruin of a national economy. But, further, he does not want to see before him a healthy, sturdy generation, but a decayed herd, able to NATION AND RACE 445 be subjected. This wish, however, again permits him to make demands of the most senseless kind, though to his own knowledge their practical fulfillment is impossible, and which therefore could not at all lead to a change of condi- tions, but at the utmost to a devastating stirring-up of the masses. This, then, is his concern, and not the genuine and honest improvement of its social condition. For this reason, however, Jewry's leadership of unionist affairs is uncontested until an enormous work of enlighten- ment supports the great masses and sets them right about their never ending misery, or until the State deals with the Jew and his work. For so long as the insight of the masses remains as limited as it is now, and the State remains as indifferent as it is now, the masses will always follow mostly him who first offers the most impudent promises in regard to economic affairs. But in this the Jew is master. For his entire activity is unrestricted by moral objections ! After a short time he thus necessarily expels all competi- tors from this field. According to his entire inner rapacious brutality, he first of all adapts the unionist movement to the most brutal application of force. The resistance and realiza- tion of those whose insight resists the Jewish allure is broken by terror. The successes of such activity are enormous. With the help of the union, which could be a blessing to the nation, the Jew actually wrecks the foundations of the national economy. Parallel with this the political organization advances. It plays hand in glove with the unionist movement in so far as the latter prepares the masses for the political organ- ization, and even drives them into it by the whip of force and compulsion. It is further the permanent financial source from which the political organization feeds its enor- mous apparatus. It is the controlling organ for the political activity of the individual, and in all great demonstrations 446 MEIN KAMPF of a political nature, it does the touting service. At last, however, it no longer represents economic concerns at all, but, in the form of the mass and general strike, it puts its main fighting means, the laying-down of work, at the dis- posal of the political idea. By the creation of a press, the contents of which is adapted to the mental horizon of people with the lowest education, the political and unionist movement finally is given an institution which, by its stirring effects, makes the lowest classes of the nation ripe for the most reckless acts. Its task is not to lead the people from the swamp of base mentality to a higher level, but rather to meet their lowest instincts. A business that is as speculative as it is remuner- ative with the masses, which are as inert as they are some- times also presumptuous. But it is the press above all which now, in a truly fanatic fight of calumny, derides everything which could be looked upon as the support of national independence, cultural height, and economic self-dependence of the nation. It continuously drums upon all those characters which do not want to bow to the Jewish assumption of rule, or whose ingenious ability in itself appears a danger to the Jew. For in order to be hated by the Jew, it is not necessary to fight him, but it is enough that he suspects the other may either be able to arrive some time at such thoughts or, based on his superior genius, to strengthen the force and the height of a nationality, hostile to the Jew. His unfailing instinct for such things senses in each indi- vidual the original soul, and his hostility is assured to him who is not the spirit of his spirit. As the Jew is not the one who is attacked, but the attacker, consequently his enemy is not only he who attacks, but also he who resists him. The means, however, by which he tries to break such daring but upright souls is not called honest fight, but lie and calumny. Here he is not frightened by anything at all, and his base- NATION AND RACE 447 ness becomes so gigantic that nobody need wonder that in our people the personification of the Devil, as the symbol of all evil, assumes the living appearance of the Jew. The ignorance of the great masses about the inner nature of the Jew, the lack of instinct and narrow-mindedness of our upper classes, make the people easily fall victim to this Jewish campaign of lies. While the upper classes, out of their inborn cowardice, turn from a man who is attacked by the Jew in such manner with lie and calumny, the great masses, out of stupidity or simplicity, usually believe everything. But the State authorities either wrap themselves in silence, or, as is mostly the case, they persecute him who is unjustly at- tacked, in order to make an end to the nuisance of the Jewish press, something which then, in the eyes of such an official idiot, appears as the preservation of State authority and as safeguarding peace and order, t Slowly the fear of the Marxist weapon of Jewry sinks into the brains and souls of decent people like a nightmare. One begins to tremble before the terrible enemy, and thus one has become his final victim. The Jew's rule in the State now appears secured to such an extent that he may not only again call himself Jew, but ruthlessly admits his final thoughts as regards nationality and politics. A part of his race even admits quite openly that it is a foreign people, however, not without again lying in this respect. For while Zionism tries to make the other part of the world believe that the national self- consciousness of the Jew finds satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian State, the Jews again most slyly dupe the stupid goiim. [Jewish colloquial expression : Gentile men or women.] They have no thought of building up a Jewish State in Palestine, so that they might perhaps inhabit it, but they only want a central organization of their inter- national world cheating, endowed with prerogatives, with* 448 MEIN KAMPF drawn from the seizure of others: a refuge for convicted rascals and a high school for future rogues. But it is the sign, not only of their rising confidence, but also their feeling of safety, that now, at a time when one part of them still mendaciously plays the German, the French- man, or the Englishman, the other part impudently and openly documents itself as the Jewish race. How far they keep the approaching victory before their eyes is seen from the terrible manner which their inter- course with the members of other peoples assumes. For hours the black-haired Jew boy, diabolic joy in his face, waits in ambush for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood and thus robs her from her people. With the aid of all means he tries to ruin the racial founda- tions of the people to be enslaved. Exactly as he himself systematically demoralizes women and girls, he is not scared from pulling down the barriers of blood and race for others on a large scale. It was and is the Jews who bring the negro to the Rhine, always with the same concealed During the War, French colonial troops were engaged at the front. Afterward some contingents of these formed part of the French Army of Occupation. Estimates of the 'morality* of this procedure naturally vary. The Germans, especially those who had been brought up on the 'war of races' doctrine, looked upon Senegambians encamped along the Rhine as the worst of all possible profanations. The normal French attitude was that if these troops were good enough to live under the French flag, they were also good enough to live in Germany. Yet there is no doubt that the use of colored troops caused the French considerable unnecessary loss of good will. The Jews, argues Hitler, were responsible, because the French nation (a satrap of England) is the tool of international Jewish bankers. In the background are exaggerated conceptions of the influence of the Grand Orient. No protest came from Germany over the use of Moorish troops by Insurgent Spain. NATION AND RACE 449 thought and the clear goal of destroying, by the bastardiza- tion which would necessarily set in, the white race which they hate, to throw it down from its cultural and political height and in turn to rise personally to the position of master. For a racially pure people, conscious of its blood, can never be enslaved by the Jew. It will forever only be the master of bastards in this world. Thus he systematically tries to lower the racial level by a permanent poisoning of the individual. In the political sphere, however, he begins to replace the idea of democracy by that of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the organized mass of Marxism he has found the weapon which makes him now dispense with democracy and which allows him, instead, to enslave and to 'rule' the people dictatorially with the brutal fist. He now works methodically towards the revolution in a twofold direction: economically and politically. Thanks to his international influence, he ensnares with a net of enemies those peoples which put up a too violent resistance against the enemy from within, he drives them into war, and finally, if necessary, he plants the flag of revolution on the battlefield. In the field of economics he undermines the States until the social organizations which have become unprofitable are taken from the State and submitted to his financial control. Politically he denies to the State all means of self- preservation, he destroys the bases of any national self- dependence and defense, he destroys the confidence in the leaders, he derides history and the past, and he pulls down into the gutter everything which is truly great. In the domain of culture he infects art, literature, the- ater, smites natural feeling, overthrows all conceptions of 450 MEIN KAMPF beauty and sublimity, of nobility and quality, and in turn he pulls the people down into the confines of his own swinish nature. Religion is ridiculed, customs and morality are presented as outlived, until the last supports of a nationality in the fight for human existence in this world have fallen. (e) [sic] Now begins the great, final revolution. The Jew, by gaining the political power, casts off the few cloaks which he still wears. The democratic national Jew becomes the blood Jew and the people's tyrant. In the course of a few years he tries to eradicate the national supporters of intelligence, and, while he thus deprives the people of their natural spiritual leaders, he makes them ripe for the slave's destiny of permanent subjugation. The most terrible example of this kind is offered by Rus- sia where he killed or starved about thirty million people That Bolshevism was a creation of Jewry has long been a favorite anti-Semitic assertion. In 1920 Hitler met Dietrich Eckart, a journalist of ability who for some years edited the Vdlkischer Bcobachtcr. Mein Kampf closes with his name, and some of it reflects his style. It may be that Eckart suggested writing the book. His statue, festooned with wreaths, is the ptice de resistance of the Brown House, Munich. Eckart was the author of a pamphlet, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin). It was believed at the time that Lenin was a Jew. The Russian Revolution had its roots in bad government. Jews suffered from this at least as much as did other groups, but in addition they had to contend with fanatical anti-Semitic organizations for which the Czar was not radical enough. That does not explain, however, why the Kerensky Revolution was undermined by Bolshevists, and the door is left open to specula- tion. Lenin was transported from Switzerland to Russia in 1917 in a sealed railway coach by order of General Ludendorff. The hope was that he would be able to wean the Russian army NATION AND RACE 451 with a truly diabolic ferocity, under inhuman tortures, in order to secure to a crowd of Jewish scribblers and stock exchange robbers the rulership over a great people. But the end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the Jew, but also the end of these peoples' parasites themselves. With the death of the victim this peoples' vampire will also die sooner or later. < If we let all the causes of the German collapse pass before our eyes, there remains as the ultimate and decisive cause the non-recognition of the race problem and especially of the Jewish danger. The defeats in the battlefield of August, 1918, would have been easily bearable. They were out of proportion to the victories of our people. Not the defeats have over- thrown us, but we were overthrown by that power which prepared these defeats by robbing our people systemati- cally, for many decades, of its political and moral instincts from thoughts of continuing the War, and thus make possible a separate peace with Germany. It is usually held that the original idea came from Dr. Helphand, an adventurer with a flair of genius and a gift for intrigue. Lenin, aided by Trotski, gained control of Russia, and the separate peace which al- most cost Lenin his prestige was negotiated at Brest- Litovsk. That (if one excepts Trotski) Jews had an unduly important part in these developments is disproved by two facts: that only a small percentage of either the Communist Party leadership or its following was Jewish ; and by the reac- tion of leading Jewish Socialists not favorable to the Bolshevist minority. There is little evidence to support any current as- sumptions that international Jewish aid was given to Lenin. In America, England, and France, Jewish groups naturally favored Kerensky. 452 MEIN KAMPF and forces which alone enable and entitle peoples to exist in this world. The old Reich, by inattentively passing by the question of the preservation of the racial foundations of our nation- ality, disregarded also the sole right which alone gives life in this world. Peoples which bastardize themselves, or permit themselves to be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence, and their ruin by the hand of a stronger nation is consequently not an injustice that is done to them, but only the restoration of right. If a people no longer wants to respect the qualities which Nature has given it and which root in its blood, then it has no longer the right to complain about the loss of its worldly existence. Everything in this world can be improved. Any defeat can become the father of a later victory. Any lost war can become the cause of a later rise, every distress the fertiliza- tion of human energy, and from every suppression can come the forces of a new spiritual rebirth, as long as the blood remains preserved in purity. Alone the loss of the purity of the blood destroys the inner happiness forever; it eternally lowers man, and never again can its consequences be removed from body and mind. Only upon examining and comparing, in the face of this sole question, all the other problems of life, one will be able to judge how ridiculously small the latter are as compared with the former. How all of them are only temporal, while the question of the preservation of the blood is one of human eternity. All really important symptoms of decay of the pre-War time ultimately go back to racial causes. No matter whether questions of general law or excres- cences of economic life, whether cultural symptoms of de- cline or political processes of degeneration, whether ques- tions of faulty education at school or evil influence on the grown-ups by the press, etc., are involved, always and NATION AND RACE 459 everywhere it is fundamentally the non-recognition of racial considerations of one's own people or the non-recog- nition of a foreign, a racial, danger. Therefore, all attempts at reforms, all works of social aid and political efforts, all economic rise, and every apparent increase of spiritual knowledge were nevertheless unimpor- tant in their consecutive symptoms. The nation and that organism which enables and preserves its life on this earth, that is, the State, did not become internally healthier, but they visibly languished more and more. All the sham pro- sperity of the old Reich could not conceal the inner weak- ness, and any attempt at an actual strengthening of the Reich failed again and again on account of passing by the most important question. It would be wrong to believe that the adherents of the various political doctrines which doctored about the Ger- man national body, nay, that even the leaders, to a certain extent, were bad or malevolent men. Their activity was condemned to unproductiveness for the sole reason that, in the most favorable case at best, they saw and tried to fight the symptomatic forms of our general sickness, but passed blindly by the germ. He who systematically follows the political development of the old Reich is bound to arrive, upon quiet examination, at the realization that even at the time of unity, and thus of rise of the German nation, the inner decay was already on its way, and that, despite all apparent political successes and rising economic wealth, the general situation became worse from year to year. Even the elections for the Reichstag, with their outward swelling of the Marxist votes, announced the more and more rapidly approaching internal, and, with it, external, collapse. All the successes of the so-called bourgeois parties were of no value, not only because they were unable to check the increasing numbers of the Marxist flood even with so-called bourgeois electoral victories, but because above all even 454 MEIN KAMPF they themselves harbored the ferment of deterioration. The bourgeois world itself, without its knowing it, was infected with the cadaveric poison of Marxist ideas, and its resistance originated frequently rather from the competi- tive envy of ambitious leaders than from a rejection in prin- ciple of the adversaries, determined to fight to the extreme* There was only one who, during these long years, fought with imperturbable regularity, and this was the Jew. His star of David then rose higher and higher in the same measure in which our people's will for self-preservation vanished. Therefore, in August, 1914, it was not a people, deter- mined to attack, which rushed to the battlefield, but what took place was only the last flaring-up of the national instinct of self-preservation in face of the progressing paci- fist Marxist paralyzation of our national body. As even in those fateful days one did not recognize the internal enemy, all outward resistance was in vain, and Providence gave the reward, not to the victorious sword, but it followed the law of eternal revenge. Out of this inner realization there were to be formed lor us the leading principles, as well as the tendency of the new movement which alone, in our conviction, was enabled to For assertions like these, General Ludendorff is primarily responsible. Irritated by failure and by some rather tactless attempts to taunt him for that failure, he took refuge in anti- Semitic utterances, and lent his great name to reckless calum- nies. Had either he or von Hindenburg remembeied the Jewish dead of their armies and stopped the tirades with one dear word of disapproval, the whole anti-Semitic campaign would have collapsed. It may be that this was too much to expect of men smarting under humiliation and defeat. In addition Ludendorff retreated into the shadows of a mystical German faith that lent fervor and significance to his attacks. NATION AND RACE 455 bring the decline of the German people not only to a stand- still, but also to create the granite foundation upon which one day there can exist a State which represents not a mech- anism of economic considerations and interests, alien to the people, but a f olkish organism : A Germanic State of the German Nation CHAPTER XII THE FIRST PERIOD IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS 1 PARTY IF NOW at the end of this book I describe the first period of development of our movement and deal briefly with a series of questions caused by it, it is not done in order to give a treatise on the spiritual aims of the move- ment. The goal and the task of the new movement are so enormous that one can deal with them only in a volume of their own. Therefore, in a second volume I will deal in de- tail with the foundations (and their programs) of the move- ment and will try to draw a picture of what we conceive by the word 'State. 1 With 'we* I mean all those hundreds of thousands who fundamentally long for the same thing with- out their finding the words in detail to describe the outward appearance of what is before their inner eye. For with all great reforms the remarkable thing is that at first they have as their champion perhaps only a single individual, but as their supporters many millions. For centuries their goal is often the inner ardent wish of hundreds of thousands, till one man stands up as the proclaimer of such a general will DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 457 and as the flag-bearer of an old longing he helps it to victory in the form of a new idea. That millions harbor in their hearts the longing for a fundamental change in the existing circumstances is proved by the deep discontent from which they suffer. It is ex- pressed in thousandfold forms of symptoms, with some in despair and hopelessness, with others in aversion, in wrath and indignation, with the one in indifference and with the other in furious exuberance. Also those who are sick and tired of elections, as well as the many who tend towards the most fanatical extreme of the left, may be looked upon as witnesses to this inner discontent. It was the aim of the young movement to appeal first of all to these elements. It ought not to form an organization of those who are content and satisfied, but to bring together those who are tortured by suffering, those who are without peace and unhappy and discontented, and above all it must not swim on the surface of the national body, but has to root in its foundations. f Taken from the purely political point of view, the fol- lowing picture presented itself in 1918: a people is torn into two parts. The one, by far the smaller, comprises the layers The elections of May, 1924, which followed the most hectic period in the history of the short-lived Republic the Ruhr invasion, inflation, the Hitler putsch, revaluations of the cur- rency, and the parleys that led to the signing of the Dawes Plan was marked by a trend to the Left and Right extremes. The conservative German National Party became the second strongest group in the Reichstag, the number of Communist deputies rose to 62 (there had been only 2 in 1920), and the DciUsch-voelkischc Frcihcitspartei (German Folkish Freedom Party), founded by Right radical dissidents from the conservm- 458 MEIN KAMPF of national intelligence with exclusion of all those who are physically active. It is outwardly national, but by this word it is unable to imagine something different from a very lukewarm and weak representation of so-called State in- terests which in turn seem identical with dynastic interests. It tries to fight for its ideas and aims with spiritual weapons which are as fragmentary as they are superficial, but which in themselves fail completely in the face of the enemy's brutality. With one single terrible stroke this class, which just previously was still the ruling one, is thrown over, and now, in trembling cowardice, it bears every humiliation on the part of the ruthless victor. It is faced, in the form of the second class, by the great mass of the working population. This class is integrated in more or less radical Marxist movements, determined to break any spiritual resistance by the power of force. It does not want to be national, but it consciously rejects any promotion of national interests as, in turn, it promotes all suppression on the part of foreign powers. Measured by figures it is the stronger party, but it comprises above all those elements of the nation without which a national re- surrection is unthinkable and impossible. For as early as 1918 one had to see clearly about this. tive group, elected 32 men. Under the circumstances, it looked as if dissatisfaction with the policies sponsored by the Re- publican governments was growing rapidly, and that the ' Re- volution ' was in danger. In many respects this election resem- bles that of 1930. Yet six months later December, 1924 another Reichstag election completely changed the picture. The Communists elected only 32 deputies, and the National Socialists 14. The number and percentage of citizens voting in- creased. Doubtless the principal causes of this reversal were two the manifest inability of the extremists to accomplish anything, and the beneficent effect to the capital that flowed into Germany under the Dawes Plan. DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 459 Any resurrection of the German people can take place only by way of regaining external power. But the prerequisites for this are not arms as our bourgeois 'statesmen' always babble, but the forces of will power. At one time the Ger- man people had more than enough arms. They were not able to secure its freedom, because the energies of the na- tional instinct of self-preservation, the will for self-preserva- tion, was lacking. The best arms are dead and useless ma- terial as long as the spirit is missing which is ready, willing, and determined to use them. Germany became defenseless, not because there was a shortage of arms, but because the will was missing to guard the arms for the preservation of the nation. If today especially our politicians of the left try to point to the lack of arms as the necessary cause of their irresolute and yielding policy, which in reality is a policy of betrayal to foreign powers, then one must answer them only one thing: No, the contrary is right. You have surrendered the arms by your anti-national and criminal policy of giving Bitterness was so great that moderate defenders of the poli- cies adopted since 1918 resorted to the defense that an unarmed Germany had no choice save acquiescence in Allied decrees. Hence Hitler's rejoinder. An attack on the German National Party, which had gained so dominant a position in 1924. If this party really succeeded in retaining large groups of Nationalist voters, Hitler's move- ment was doomed to failure. Therefore he taunted the con- servatives with their 'cowardice* in 1918 an epithet invented by Philipp Scheidemann, Socialist leader, after the War. The attack was politically shrewd. In this and subsequent passages, the especial situation of 1924-25 is hinted at. The German National leader up until October, 1924, was Oskar Hergt, an honest veteran civil servant, without the skill or callousnrsi needed to guide a party through such difficult times. 460 MEIN KAMPF up national interests. Now you are trying to present the shortage of arms as the fundamental cause of your misera- ble wretchedness. This is, as everything in your activity, lie and fraud. But this reproach applies just as much to the politicians of the right. For thanks to their miserable cowardice, the Jewish rabble who had come into power in 1918 was able to steal the arms from the nation. They, too, have there- fore no reason and no right to palm off the present lack of arms as the necessity for their clever caution (say 4 coward- ice'), but the defenselessness is just the consequence of their cowardice. -< Therefore, the question of regaining Germany's power is not, perhaps, How can we manufacture arms? but, How can we produce that spirit which enables a people to bear arms? Once this spirit dominates a people, the will finds a thousand ways, each of which ends with arms! But even if you put ten guns into the hands of a coward, yet he will be unable to fire one single shot in the event of an attack. They are therefore of less value to him than a knotty stick to a courageous man. Even for this reason the question of regaining the politi- cal power of our people is primarily a question of the recovery of our national instinct of self-preservation, since any preparatory foreign policy as well as every evaluation of a State in itself is directed, as experience shows, less Conservatives had inaugurated during this period a cam- paign for equality of armament. The argument which would become very familiar later on was that either the Al- lies must carry out their promise to disarm, or that Germany must be permitted to rearm. As such the plea was popular enough, at least potentially. Hitler and the Nazis generally retorted that arms would be worthless until the people had been inflamed with a desire to use them. DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 461 at existing arms than at the deliberate and acknow- ledged, or at least the presumed, moral capacity of re- sistance of a nation. A people's ability to form alliances is far less determined by a dead lot of existing arms than by the visible presence of a flaming will of self-preservation and heroic death-defying courage. For an alliance is not concluded with arms, but with human beings. Therefore, the English people must be looked upon as the most valu- able ally in the world as long as its leaders and the spirit of its great masses permit us to expect that brutality and toughness which is determined to fight out, by all means, to the victorious end a struggle once started, without con- sidering time and sacrifices, in which case the actual mili- tary armament need not be in any proportion to that of other States. But if one understands that the resurrection of the Ger- man nation is a question of regaining our political will of self-preservation, it is also clear that this is not fulfilled by winning elements which are national at least according to their will, but only by the nationalization of the deliberately anti-national masses. A young movement that sets before itself the goal of the re-establishment of a German State with its own sovereignty will have to direct its fight completely at winning the broad masses. No matter how wretched in general our so-called 'national bourgeoisie 9 is, how insufficient its national loyalty appears, it is just as certain that from this side a serious resistance to a powerful national internal and external policy is not to be expected. Even if, for notoriously nar- row-minded and short-sighted reasons, the German bour- geoisie were to remain in passive resistance, as once it faced Bismarck in the hour of a coming liberation, nevertheless, with its acknowledged and proverbial cowardice, an active resistance need never be feared. The situation is different with the masses of our fellow 462 MEIN KAMPF citizens who are internationally minded. In their primitive originality they are not only directed more towards the idea of force, but their Jewish leaders are more brutal and more ruthless. They will beat down any German rise just as once before they broke the German army's backbone. But above all, in this parliamentarily ruled State, by force of the superiority of their number, they will not only prevent any national foreign policy, but they will further exclude any higher evaluation of the German strength and with it any chance of potential alliances. For the weak momentum which lies in our fifteen million Marxists, Democrats, Paci- fists, and representatives of the Center is not only known to us, but is recognized even more by the foreign powers which measure the value of a possible alliance with us according to the weight of this burden. One does not form an alliance with a State in which the active part of the population has at least a passive attitude towards any resolute foreign policy. To this is added the fact that the leaders of these parties of national betrayal, merely out of their instinct of self- preservation, must and will be hostile to any rise. From the historical point of view it is simply inconceivable that the German people could once more take its former position without settling accounts with those who were the cause and the occasion of the unheard-of collapse which afflicted our State. For before the tribunal of posterity November, 1918, will not be evaluated as high treason, but as treason against the country. Thus the regaining of German independence in foreign affairs is primarily connected with the regaining of the domestic willful unity of our people. f But looked at from the purely technical point of view the thought of a German rise as regards foreign politics seems absurd as long as the great masses are not ready to enter into the service of this idea of freedom. Taken from DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 463 the purely military viewpoint, with a little reflection it will become clear, above all to every officer, that one cannot war against foreign powers with the help of students' battalions, but that for this purpose one needs, apart from the brains of a people, also its fists. Thereby one has to keep in mind that a national defense, which is based only upon the circles of the so-called 'intelligentsia/ would only spoil the price- less goods of the nation. The young German intelligentsia, which found its death with the voluntary regiments in the fields of Flanders in the fall of 1914, was sorely missing later on. They were the best property the nation possessed, and this loss could never be replaced in the course of the War. But it is not only impossible to carry through the fight it- self if the charging battalions do not have the masses of the workers among their ranks, but it is also impossible to carry out the technical preparation where the unifying will of the national body is missing. Just our people, which, under the thousand eyes of the Treaty of Versailles, has to live dis- armed, will be able to make technical arrangements for On November n, 1914, German regiments comprised of student volunteers stormed the French positions at Langhe- marcq (near Ypres) in Belgium, singing the DeutscUand song. The losses were fearful. This deed is looked upon as the most heroic in the German war record. The theory that the November Revolution was an act of high treason often led to highly emotional outbursts. Thus Dr. Wilhelm Frick declared in January, 1928: 'To the gallows with the criminals who have misgoverned us during the past ten years!' But oddly enough the Nazis also attacked the November Revolution on the ground that it was no genuine revolution. Speaking in Munich during 1929, Goering said: 'Our misfortune was that this "revolution" was no German revolution. Therefore we know the revolution is still coming, and that it must, bring the release of German energies.' 464 MEIN KAMPF regaining its freedom and human independence only if the host of professional informers is decimated to those whose inborn lack of character permits them to betray everything to everybody in return for the well-known thirty pieces of silver. One can manage these people. Unmanageable, how- ever, seem the millions of those who oppose the national rise out of political resistance, unless the cause of their ac- tivity, their international Marxist view of life, is fought and torn out of their hearts and brains. No matter, therefore, from which point of view one ex- amines the possibility of regaining the independence of our State and nation, whether from that of the preparation of foreign politics, that of technical armament, or from that of the struggle itself, there remains the preliminary winning over of the great masses of our people for the idea of our national independence as the presupposition for everything. But without regaining our external freedom, every idea of an inner reform itself remains, in the most favorable case, only the increase of our productivity as a colony. Every so-called economic uplift renders its surplus only to the commissions of international control, and every social improvement increases, in the most favorable case, only the capacity of working for them. Cultural achievements will no longer fall to the share of the German nation at all, they are too closely connected with the political independ- ence and dignity of a nationality. If, therefore, the German future's favorable solution is connected with the national winning of the great masses of our people, then this must also be the highest and the greatest task of a movement the activity of which is not to be exhausted in the satisfaction of the moment, but which has to examine every hour and every activity only as to their consequences for the future.** DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 465 Thus we realized as early as 1919 that the new movement has to carry out, first, as its highest aim, the nationaliza- tion of the masses. As regards tactics, a series of demands resulted from this. (l) In order to win the masses for the national rise, no social sacrifice is too great. No matter how many economic concessions are offered to the classes of our workers and employees today, they are not in proportion to the gain for the entire nation whenever this helps to give back their nationality to the broad masses. Only short-sighted narrow-mindedness, as unfortunately is often found in the circles of our business men, can fail to acknowledge that in the long run there can be no economic rise for them also, and with this no economic profit, as long as the inner national solidarity of the nation is not restored. Hitler never went farther than this in criticizing the capital- ist system after his release from prison. Other members of the Party objected, and Otto Strasser openly charged him with having sabotaged the 'revolution. 1 (Adolph Hitler: Wilhelm III, by Weigand von Miltenberg.) During September, 1930, this difference between Hitler and the Strasser group was brought out into the open when three army officers were tried in Ulm for high treason, on the ground that they had attempted to build Nazi 'cells' within the Reichswehr. Hitler repudiated the revolutionary ideas of Strasser, but added that if the Nazis came to power they would court-martial the 'Novem- ber criminals.' The result was that Lieutenant Scheringer, one of the officers tried, switched to the Communist Party. The incident throws much light upon the strength of anti-capitalis- tic sentiment in Germany at the time. Scheringer and Strasser charged that Hitler had sold out for money. Therewith the question as to how the Nazi Party was financed had been raised, but no satisfactory answer nas ever been given. During its early years, funds were obtained from Munich friends, from the Reichswehr, and probably from White 466 MEIN KAMPF If the German unions had ruthlessly guarded the interest of the workers during the War, they would have extorted a thousand times, by strike, the demands of the workers from the then dividend-hungry employers, even during the War, but if, as regards the considerations of the national defense, they had acknowledged their German nationality just as fanatically, and with the same ruthlessness, they would have given to the fatherland what is due the fatherland, then the War would not have been lost. But how ridiculous all and even the greatest economic concessions would have been as compared with the enormous importance of the War one would have won. Thus a movement which intends to give the German worker back to the German people has to be clear about the fact that economic sacrifices play no r61e whatsoever in this question, unless the preservation and the independence of the national economy are threatened by this. (2) The national education of the great masses can only take place through the d6tour of a social uplift, since ex- clusively by this all those general economic presuppositions are created which permit the individual to take part in the cultural goods of the nation. Russians who had access to foreign money. Whence came the stream of gold that poured through White Russian fingers is, indeed, one of the unsolved mysteries of post-War history. Certain organizers, e.g. Kurt Luedecke (cf. I Knew Hitler), have supplied further hints as to the sources whence support came. In later years abundant aid came from German industry and landed interests. Then the approved formula for contributions was a so-called 'loan* for which a 'receipt' was issued. The actual Mender' remained unknown, the money passing through the hands of some real or imaginary 'association.' How much Italian cash was furnished is not known. Evidence was intro- duced by the district attorney's office in Munich to show that Mussolini had helped to finance the putsch of 1923. DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 467 (3) The nationalization of the great masses can never take place by way of half measures, by a weak emphasis upon a so-called objective viewpoint, but by a ruthless and fanatically one-sided orientation as to the goal to be aimed at. That means, therefore, one cannot make a people 'na- tional* in the meaning of our present 'bourgeoisie,' that is, with so and so many restrictions, but only nationalistic with the entire vehemence which is harbored in the extreme. Poison is only checked by antidote, and only the insipidity of a bourgeois mind can conceive the middle line as the way to heaven. The great mass of a people consists neither of professors nor of diplomats. The small abstract knowledge it possesses directs its sentiments rather to the world of feeling. In this is rooted either its negative or positive attitude. It is open only to the expression of force in one of these direc- tions, and never to a half measure swaying between them. This hysteria was an important discovery. It was created by a kind of hypnotic influence seemingly exerted by the Party assemblies on people undoubtedly not wholly normal as a re- sult of the privations through which they had passed. Extraor- dinary phenomena of a similar kind were numerous during the post- War years e.g., the curious 'healer* of Hamburg, Hauser, who was followed by immense crowds; the Bibelfor- scher (Bible Students), who raised tides of adventistic emotion in Silesia and elsewhere; Rudolph Steiner, the anthropologist, who built houses resembling trees; etc. Those who heard Hitler during those years are unanimous in saying that he en- gendered a kind of emotional trance with methods quite his own. Party guards moved continuously round the place of as- sembly, and usually some interloper was found who could be dramatically shaken and bounced. Then there was a pause. Had anything gone wrong? Then Hitler appeared, looking as if he had run the final two hundred yards in record time, to unleash a torrent of words, working himself into a frenzy of 468 MEIN KAMPF Their sentimental attitude, however, is caused by their ex- ceeding stability. It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to re- spect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward. He who would win the great masses must know the key which opens the door to their hearts. Its name is not ob- jectivity, that is, weakness, but will power and strength. (4) One can only succeed in winning the soul of a people if, apart from a positive fighting of one's own for one's own aims, one also destroys at the same time the supporter of the contrary. In the ruthless attack upon an adversary the people sees half-somnambulistic energy that lasted for hours, and reveling in climaxes that were more like motifs in Wagnerian drama than like any kind of discourse. Perhaps he would suddenly break into a sort of weeping, pause, and shout ' Dcutschland, Dcutschland, Dcutschlandl' However the foreigner might react, even quite normal Germans were swept off their feet. Hitler's very entrance had effected an emotional release. Then his oratory wrung every listener dry provided that is, that he could bring himself to be en rapport with what was being said. In short, the psychology of the crowd that comes to see a prize-fight. The modern masses are not impressed with argu- ments directed against an opponent. They must see him actu- ally downed. And if they could then be cajoled further with bloodcurdling promises, all was well. The following quotation from the National- Sozialistischc Blatter was not intended to be meticulous prophecy, but its effect was calculated: 'During this fight, heads will roll in the sand, and they will be either ours or the others. Let us see to it, then, that those heads belong to the others! 9 DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 469 at all times a proof of its own right, and it perceives the re* nunciation of his destruction as an uncertainty as regards its own right, if not as a sign of its own wrong. The great masses are only a part of nature, and this feeling does not understand the mutual handshake of peo- ple who assert that they want various things. What they want is the victory of the stronger and the annihilation or the unconditional surrender of the weaker, t The nationalization of our masses will only be successful if, along with all positive fighting for the soul of our people, its international poisoners are extirpated. (5) All great questions of the times are questions of the moment, and they represent only consequences of certain causes. Only one of them is of causal importance, that is, the question of the racial preservation of the nationality. In the blood alone there rests the strength as well as the weakness of man. As long as the people do not recognize and pay attention to the importance of their racial founda- tion, they resemble people who would like to teach the grey- hound's qualities to poodles, without realizing that the greyhound's speed and the poodle's docility are qualities which are not taught, but are peculiar to the race. Peoples who renounce the preservation of their racial purity re- nounce also the unity of their soul in all its expressions. The torn condition of their nature is the natural, necessary consequence of the torn condition of their blood, and the change in their spiritual and creative force is only the effect of the change in their racial foundations. He who wants to redeem the German people from the qualities and the vices which are alien to its original nature will have to redeem it first from the alien originators of these expressions. Without the clearest recognition of the race problem and, with it, of the Jewish question, there will be no rise of the German nation. 470 MEIN KAMPF The race question not only furnishes the key to world history, but also to human culture as a whole. (6) Making the great mass of our people, which today stand in the international camp, a member of a national people's community does not mean to renounce the repre- sentation of justified class interests. Class and professional interests are not identical with class dissension, but they represent a natural consequence of our economic life. The division into professional groups is in no way opposed to a genuine people's community, as the latter expresses itself just in the nationality's unity in all those questions which concern this very nationality. Making a professional group which has become a class a member of the people's community, or even of the State, is not carried out by the descending of the higher classes, Cf. Rosenberg, Westn Ziele und Grundsdtze der N.S.D.A.P. (The Nature, Objectives, and Principles of the N.S.G.W.P.): 'The idea of the genuine folk-State was born out of the concept of race. This idea is today the final criterion of our judgment of all we do on earth.' It is sometimes thought that after 1933 the Nazis had been willing to mitigate their attack upon the Jews, and that agitation by Jews outside Germany e.g., the boycott was responsible for resumption of the attack. Un- doubtedly the Party was impressed, especially by the Foreign Office, with the need for care in handling the Jewish problem because relations with other States might be impaired. Rosen- berg, for example, then director of the Foreign Affairs Division of the Party, declared at the Niirnberg Party Congress of September, 1933, that the Party did not preach, had not preached, race hatred. But distinguished German- Americans who visited Hitler during 1933 with a view to counseling moderation were bluntly told that they did not understand history or the necessary steps to be taken in regenerating the German people. He himself spoke on the subject at the same Niirnberg Congress, and declared: 'National Socialism is a DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 471 but by the uplifting of the lower classes. Again, the bearer of this process can never be the higher class, but the lower one which is fighting for its equal right. The bourgeoisie of today did not become a member of the State by measures of the aristocracy, but by its own energy under its own leader- ship. The German worker is not lifted into the frame of the German people's community by the roundabout way of weak fraternizing scenes, but by the deliberate uplifting of his social and cultural position, until the most serious dif- ferences may be looked upon as overcome. A movement which establishes this development for its goal will have to draw its followers primarily from this camp. It is allowed to fall back on the intelligentsia only in so far as the latter has understood and realized completely the goal to be view of life. By absorbing the human being who belongs to the disciples of this view of life by reason of what is deepest in it, it becomes the Party of those who are really, according to their natures, attributable to a certain race. In doing so it recognized the fact that there are varying racial substances in our people. It is far removed from repudiating in itself this mixture, which constitutes the total picture of the expression given by our people to life. But it wishes that the political and cultural leadership of our people should become the function, the expression of that race which, through heroism, and thanks solely to its innate virtue, has created what would otherwise not be the German race. National-Socialism therewith pro- fesses an heroic teaching of the value of blood, or race and of the personality, as well as of the eternal principles on which selection is based, and therewith consciously enters into un- bridgable antitheses to the view of life which informs pacifistic- international democracy and its consequences.' That was, at least in intention, a philosophical speech; but it ought to have been warning enough that what has happened since was fated to happen even then. 472 MEIN KAMPF aimed at. This process of transformation and approach will not be finished in ten or twenty years, but experience shows that it will take many generations. -< The most serious reason against the present-day worker's approach towards a national people's community does not rest upon the representation of his class interests, but in his international leadership and attitude, hostile to people and fatherland. The same unions, led by national fanatics where political and folkish considerations are concerned, would make millions of workers the most valuable members of their nationality without considering the fights taking place in various instances where purely economic considera- tions are involved. A movement which honestly wants to give the German worker back to his people and to tear him away from the delusion of internationalism has to attack most sharply a conception which is predominate above all in the circles of employers, which, by a national community, understands the helpless economic surrender of the employees to the em- ployers, and which chooses to see, in every attempt at guarding even the most justified interests of the economic existence of the employee, an attack upon the people's com- munity. Such an assertion, then, is not only untrue, but deliberately mendacious, because the people's community imposes the same obligations not only on the one side but also on the other. Exactly as a worker sins against the spirit of a genuine people's community if, based on his power, he makes ex- tortionate demands without consideration for the common welfare and the existence of a national economy, an em- ployer breaks this community just as much if he abuses the national working strength by exploitation and an inhuman business management, and makes millions out of its sweat. Then he has no right to call himself national, he has no right to moan about a people's community, but he is an DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 473 egotistical rascal, who, by introducing social discontent, provokes future fights which are bound to injure the nation in one way or another. Thus the reservoir from which the young movement is to draw its adherents will primarily be the masses of our employees. The task involved is to tear them from the grip of the delusion of internationalism, to free them from their social distress, to take them out of their cultural mis- ery, and to lead them into the circle of the people's com- munity as a uniform and valuable factor which feels and wants to be national. Now in so far as in the circles of the national intelligent- sia there are human beings with very warm hearts for their people and its future, filled with deepest knowledge of the importance of the fight for the soul of these masses, they Assertions were many that the suppression of Marxist or Christian labor organizations would not mean a disadvantage to labor, since they could be replaced with adequate corpora- tive organizations. The question as to what a workers' party ought to be had disturbed the German National Socialist Party of Austria, whose ablest leader was Rudolph Jung. The organization dates from 1904, but the name as stated was adopted at the Vienna convention of 1918. It was Pan- German in outlook, adopted a program having much in com- mon with the ideas later formulated by Feder, and was con- cerned primarily with the question as to whether a workers' party had necessarily to favor the class struggle. During August, 1920, the party delegates met in Salzburg, and Nazi delegates from Munich also attended. The resolutions adopted stressed above all the necessity for an ultra-nationalistic point of view. It did not oppose the socialization of some of the means of production, but emphasized the inviolability of pri- vate property. Hitler spoke against the class struggle at this convention, averring that there was as little room on the N.S.G.W.P: 'for a class-conscious worker as for a grouo- 474 MEIN KAMPF are most welcome in the ranks of this movement as a valuable spiritual backbone. But the winning of the bourgeois ballot cattle must never be the aim or even the intention of this movement. In that case it would burden itself with a mass which, in its entire nature, would paralyze the force di- rected towards winning the broad layers of the people. For notwithstanding the theoretical beauty of the idea of leading together the great masses from above and from be- low, inside the frame of the movement and at this moment, yet this is opposed by the fact that by general proclama- tions one is perhaps able to create moods or even to render insight, but not qualities of character, or rather, that one does not wipe out bad habits the origin and growth of which have embraced centuries. The difference as regards the mutual cultural level and the mutual attitude towards the questions of economic concerns is still so great at this time that it would immediately manifest itself as an impediment, once the intoxication of various demonstrations has passed. But finally the goal is not to rearrange the layers of the camp that is national in itself, but to gain the anti-national camp. And this viewpoint is also exclusively decisive for the tactical attitude of the whole movement. (7) This attitude, one-sided though clear, has also to express itself in the propaganda of the movement, and on the other hand, it is in its turn required by reasons of propaganda. conscious bourgeois. 9 A year later, Jung had maneuvered his Aufltrians into accepting a class-conscious but anti-Marxist point of view. This action sundered Hitler from the Austrian National Socialists of the period, just as the same standpoint would later on sunder him from class-conscious followers in Germany. It is probably for this reason that he nowhere mentions Jung and his group. DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 419 If the propaganda IB to be effective for the movement, it has to be directed at one side, as in the other case, with the variance of the spiritual training of the two camps con- cerned, it would either not be understood by the one or the other would reject it as a matter of course and therefore as uninteresting. t Even the manner of expression and the language cannot be equally suitable in their effect upon two so extremely dif- ferent layers. If propaganda renounces the originality of expression, it will not find its way to the feeling of the great masses. But if in word and gesture it applies the coarseness of the masses' feelings and expressions, it will be rejected as rude and vulgar by the so-called intelligentsia. Among a hundred so-called speakers there are hardly ten who would be in a position to speak today with the same effect to an auditorium composed of street sweepers, locksmiths, sewer cleaners, etc., and to give on the following day a lec- ture of necessarily the same intellectual contents to univers- ity professors and students. But among a thousand speakers there is perhaps only a single one who is able to speak before locksmiths and university professors alike in a form which is equally satisfactory to both sides or even im- passions them towards a sweeping storm of applause. But one must keep before one's eyes that if it is to spread even the most beautiful thought of a sublime idea, it has to make use of small and smallest minds. It does not matter what These assertions may be correct. On the other hand, it is also possible to assume as many do that Hitler's triumph was not due to the 'stupid masses 9 which come to hear him peak, but to the intellectual reconstruction which the na- tionalist intelligentsia placed on Pan-German Socialism. For an analysis of these intellectuals, cf . Heiden and Kolnai. Heiden (who is critical) says they were discalced bourgeois who needed a new basis on which to attain to power and station. 476 MEIN KAMPF the ingenious inventor of an opinion has before his eye, but what its announcers transmit to the great masses, and in what form and with what success they do so. The strength of Social Democracy, even of the entire Marxist movement as a whole, in its capacity of an attract- ing force, rested for the greater part upon the unity and thus on the one-sidedness of the public to which they appealed. The more apparently limited, even narrow-minded, their trends of thinking were in this, the more easily were they accepted and worked over by the masses, the mental level of which corresponded to the food they were offered. But from this resulted also a simple and clear line for the new movement:^ Propaganda, in its contents and form, has to be directed at the great masses and its efficiency has to be measured exclusively by its effective success. At a meeting of the broad layers of a people not that speaker speaks best whose mentality is nearest to the in- telligentsia present, but he who conquers the heart of the masses. A member of the intelligentsia who is present at such a meeting and who criticizes the speaker, despite his obvious success in respect to the lower classes to be conquered, proves the complete inability of his thinking and the use- lessness of his person for the young movement. For this These requirements were met perfectly by Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels. Born in the Rhineland, for a time recipient of a scholarship in a Catholic educational institution, later a favorite pupil of Friedrich Gundolf and therewith an initiate into the mysteries of the Stefan George school, he was at first doubtless filled with honest resentment of social conditions in Germany. He once offered his services to the Social Demo- crats. AM a Nazi he first served as an assistant to Gregor Strasaer in Berlin, and then in a moment of crisis abandoned DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 477 movement only that intellectual comes into question who has understood the task and the goal of the movement to such an extent that he has also learned to judge the activity of propaganda according to its success and not according to the impressions which it makes upon himself. For the pur- pose of propaganda is not the amusement of people who al- ready are disposed towards nationalism, but the winning of the enemies of our nationality, in so far as they are of the same blood. But, generally speaking, those ideas which I have already summed up briefly under the heading of war propaganda should become decisive for the kind and the execution of the young movement's own work of enlightenment. Its success proved that it was right. (8) The goal of a political reform movement will never be reached by a work of enlightenment or by influencing the ruling powers, but only by the gaining of the political power. Every idea aimed at changing the world has not only the right but also the duty to assure itself of those means which make possible the carrying-out of its ideas. Its success is the only wordly judge of the right or the wrong of such an enterprise, whereby the word success one must not understand, as in the year 1918, the seizure of power in itself, but its effective consequences beneficial to the nationality. Thus a coup d'ttat must not be looked upon as successful, as thoughtless State attorneys of Germany mean today, if the revolutionaries succeeded in seizing con- Strasaer and went over to Hitler. Admittedly an unprincipled opportunist, he has been termed the 'Nazi Radek* and the 1 Nazi Mephisto.' But behind the exterior of club foot, big nose, receding chin, and nervous movements, there is an extraordi- narily mobile intelligence. Ae a speaker he still captivates younger German intellectuals as no other man in the Party does. 478 MEIN KAMPF trol of the State, but only if from the intentions and aims upon which such a revolutionary action is based there arises a higher welfare for the nation than that which existed under the previous r6gime. Something which cannot very well be said of the German Revolution as the gangster raid of the fall of 1918 is called. But if the gaining of the political power forms the pre- supposition for the practical execution of reformatory in- tentions, then a movement with such an intention must consider itself from the first day of its existence as a move- ment of the masses and not as a literary tea club or a philis- tine bowling club. (9) The young movement, according to its structure and its inner organization, is anti-parliamentarian; that means in general, and in its inner construction, it rejects a princi- ple of a decision by the majority, by which the leader is degraded' to the position of the executive of the will and the opinion of the others. The movement, in small things as well as big things, represents the principle of a Germanic democracy : choice of the leader, but absolute authority of the latter. The practical consequences of this principle in the move- ment are the following : The first chairman of a local group is elected, but he alone is then also its responsible director. All committees are under his jurisdiction and not inversely, he under that of a committee. There are no committees by election, but only committees for work. The work is divided up by the re- sponsible director, the first chairman. The same principle applies also to the next higher organization, the precinct, the district, or county. The first chairman is always elected, but with this he is the exclusive leader of the movement. All committees are subjected to him and not he to the com- mittees. He decides, and with this he also takes the re- sponsibility on his shoulders. The followers of the move- DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 479 ment are at liberty to call him to account before the forum of a new election, to divest him of his office, in so far as he has violated the principles of the movement or has served its interests badly. But in his place there then steps the more efficient, the new man, with the same authority, but also with the same responsibility. It is one of the primary tasks of the movement to make this the determining principle, not only within its own ranks, but also for the entire State. He who wants to be the leader bears, with the highest, unrestricted authority, also the ultimate and the most serious responsibility. He who is not able to do this or who is too great a coward to bear the consequences of his activity is unsuitable to be the leader. Only the hero is chosen for this. Progress and the culture of mankind, however, are not products of the majority, but they rest exclusively upon the genius and the energy of the personality. To breed and to establish it in its rights is one of the preliminary conditions of regaining our nationality's great- ness and power. With this, however, the movement is anti-parliamenta- rian, and even its share in such an institution can only have the meaning of an activity for the smashing of the latter, for the abolition of an institution in which we see one of the most serious symptoms of mankind's decay. (10) The movement decidedly refuses to define its atti- tude towards questions which either lie outside the frame of its political work, or which are unimportant for it because they are not of fundamental significance. Its task is not that of a religious reformation, but that of a political re- organization of our people. In the two religious denomina- tions it sees two equally valuable pillars for the existence of our people, and for this reason it fights those parties which wish to degrade this foundation of an ethical, religious, and 480 MEIN KAMPF moral prop of our national body to the instrument of their party interests. Finally, the movement sees its task, not in the re- establishment of a certain State form or in the struggle against another, but in the creation of those principle- foundations without which neither republic nor monarchy can exist in the long run. Its mission is not the foundation of a monarchy or the strengthening of a republic, but rather the creation of a Germanic State. The question of the external formation of this State, that means, its coronation, is not of fundamental impor- tance, but is conditioned only by questions of practical ex- pediency. Once a people has understood the great problems and tasks of its existence, the question of external formalities will no longer lead to inner struggles. (n) The question of the movement's inner organization is one of expediency and not of principle. The best organization is not that which puts the greatest, but that which puts the smallest, apparatus of mediation between the leaders of an organization and the individual followers. For the task of the organization is only to trans- mit a certain spiritual idea, which first springs from the head At the time this was written, the Party had not yet pledged itself to a Fascist ideology. Its organization was modeled after the pattern of the Free Corps, or 'private* soldier groups. Some important personalities, notably General von Epp, were still loyal to the monarchical idea. Others felt that a republic was the desirable form, provided the right people were running it. In addition the laws forbidding agitation against the Republic exacted caution. The precept enjoining restraint in the discussion of religion was dictated by similar considera- tions. Openly professed anti-clericalism would have brought down on Hitler's head the wrath of the Bavarian government. DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 4S1 of an individual, to a multitude of people, as well as the supervision of its execution. With this the organization is in all and everything only a necessary evil. In the best case it is a means to an end, in the worst case an end in itself. As the world is able to produce more mechanical beings than spiritual and ideal ones, the forms of the organization usually form themselves more easily than ideas in them- selves. The practical development of every idea that strives for realization in this world, especially that which has a re- formatory character, is, in broad outlines, the following: An ingenious idea originates in the brains of a man who now feels himself called upon to transmit his knowledge to the rest of mankind : he now preaches his views and gradu- ally he gains a certain circle of followers. This state of the direct and personal transmittal of the ideas of a man to the rest of the world is the most ideal and the most natural one. With the increase of the followers of the new doctrine, there gradually results the impossibility of the bearers of the idea to continue personally to influence and to lead and to guide the countless adherents. In the same measure now in which the direct and the shortest intercourse is excluded, in con- sequence of the growth of the community, there appears the necessity of connecting members: with this the ideal condi- tion is ended, and it is replaced by the necessary evil of an organization. Small sub-groups are formed, which in the political movement, for instance in the form of a local group, represent the germ cells for the future organization, f If one does not want to lose the uniformity of the doc- trine, this subdivision must take place only after the authority of the spiritual founder and the school he has called into life may be looked upon as recognized. In con- nection with this, the geo-political importance of a center of a movement cannot be overrated. Only the presence of 482 MEIN KAMPF such a center and of a place, bathed in the magic of a Mecca or a Rome, can at length give a movement that force which is rooted in the inner unity and in the recognition of a head that represents this unity. Thus, when forming the first organizing germ cells, one must never forget the need of not only preserving the im- portance of the original starting place of the idea, but also to increase it to a superior one. This increasing of the ideal, moral and actual transcendent importance of the starting and leading point of the movement, has to be carried out in the same measure in which now the lowest germ cells of the movement, the number of which has become countless, demand new alliances in the form of organizations. For as soon as the increasing number of single adherents and the impossibility of a further direct contact with them leads to the formation of lowest groups, the final countless increase of these lowest forms of organization commands the formation of higher groups which, politically speaking, one can then call perhaps county or district groups. For no matter how easy it may be to maintain the authority of the original center as compared with the lowest local groups, it will be just as difficult to preserve this posi- tion in the face of the higher forms of organization now de- veloping. But this is the presumption for the uniform existence of a movement and with it for the carrying-out of an idea. Finally, if also the greater middle divisions begin to shape themselves into uniform structures, then, even in the This extraordinary code, by which the dynamism of the Party was placed on a secure foundation, was pushed through by Hitler at a Party meeting on July 26 and 27, 1921. At the time serious divisions among the members threatened to undermine the stability of the whole enterprise. Drexler and most of his group resented the influence of Rosenberg, Feder, DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 483 face of these, the difficulty of safeguarding the absolutely leading character of the original place of foundation, its school, etc., is also increased. Therefore, the mechanical forms of an organization may only be worked out in the same measure in which the spirit- ual and ideal authority of a center seems to be uncondi- tionally safeguarded. For political formations this guar- anty can often appear to be given only by the practical power. ^ From this short description the following lines of direction for the inner structure of the movement result: (a) Concentration of the entire work first in a single place, Munich. Formation of a community of absolutely reliable adherents and establishment of a school for the future spreading of the idea. The gaining of the future Hess, and others. These they considered 'too intellectual/ Julius Streicher was also not ready to bow to the yoke of dictatorship. Hitler had gone to Berlin ostensibly to take lessons in public speaking, and had there discussed with several Junkers the feasibility of transferring Party headquarters to Berlin. The meeting led to nothing. The Junkers had ex- pected to do all the talking, and instead found themselves listening. Meanwhile Drexler and his friends were also de- bating a trek to Berlin, presumably in the hope of thus getting rid of Hitler. The Party meeting, suddenly decided upon, was therefore of crucial importance; and the whip was cracked over Drexler's head. Hitler threatened to quit, pointed out that the Party's influential friends were his friends, and left the assembly with nothing to do but capitulate. Thereupon Max Amann, later on official chief of the Nazi press, was in- stalled as business manager of the Party, and Hitler laid down the rules here enumerated. Most interesting doubtless was the declaration that no groups outside Munich were to be recognized until they had accepted Munich's leadership. This left Streicher feeling the edge of the axe. In 1922 he capitu- lated. 484 MEIN KAMPF necessary authority by successes, visible and as great aa possible, in this place only. In order to advertise the movement and its leaders, it was necessary not only to shake the confidence in the in- vincibility of the Marxist doctrine in one place, visible to all, but also to prove, if possible, the contrary. (b) Formation of local groups only after the authority of the central leading group in Munich may be looked upon as unconditionally recognized. f (c) The formation of district, county, or country groups also takes place, not only according to the demand in itself, but only after the security of an unconditional recognition of the central office has been achieved. Further, the formation of organizing structures depends on the heads which are present and which can come under consideration as leaders. For this there are two ways: (a) The movement has at its disposal the necessary financial means for the training and schooling of able heads for the future leadership. The material it thus has won is methodically employed according to the points of view of tactical and other expediency. This is the easier and the quicker way; but it requires great financial means, as this leader material is able to work for the movement only if it is paid. (&) The movement, in consequence of the lack of funds, is not in a position to install appointed leaders, but has to depend on honorary offices at first. This is the slower and the more difficult way. The leadership of the movement must leave large fields uncultivated, provided there does not emerge from the followers a head who is able and willing to put himself at the disposal of the leaders, and to organize and to lead the movement in the particular field. It may happen that in great districts nobody is found, DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 495 but that in other places two or even three approximately equally able people come forth. The difficulty which lies in such a development is great and can only be overcome after many years. The presumption for the creation of an organizing form is, and always remains, a head that is able to take over the leadership. Just as an army has no value in its organizing forms without its officers, thus a political movement is just as useless without the appropriate leader. When an appropriate leading personality is lacking, the omission of the formation of a local group is of greater use to the movement than its organization which failed in consequence of the lack of a leading and progressive head.-*- The leadership proper not only demands will power, but also ability, whereby one has to ascribe a greater importance to will power and energy than to genius itself, and most valuable is a combination of ability, determination, and perseverance. (12) The future of a movement is conditioned by the fanaticism, even more the intolerance, with which its ad- herents present it as the only right one and enforce it in the face of other formations of a similar kind. It is the greatest mistake to believe that the strength of a movement is increased by uniting it with another one of similar character. Each enlargement brought about in this way means, first, of course, an apparent increase in its outward size and with it also an increase of power in the eyes of superficial observers, but in reality it only takes over the germs for an inner weakening that will become effective later. t For no matter what one may say of the equality ot two movements, in reality it never exists. For if it did it would practically be, not two, but only one, movement. No matter where the differences lie and if they root only in 486 MEIN KAMPF the different abilities of the leaders they exist. The coupling of two not quite equal formations does not cor- respond to the natural law of evolution, but the victory of the stronger in the tense struggle, and the breeding of the strength and the force of the victor made possible by this. By uniting two approximately equal political formations there may arise momentary advantages, but every success gained in this way is the cause of inner weaknesses appearing later. The greatness of a movement is exclusively guaranteed by the unrestricted development of its inner strength and by the latter's permanent increase up to its final victory over all competitors. Yes, one can even say that its strength and with it its justification of existence increases only as long as it acknow- ledges the principle of fight as the presumption of its devel- opment, and that it has passed the climax of its strength in the moment when the complete victory is on its side. Thus it is only useful for a movement to aspire to this victory in a form which does not lead to a momentary victory, but which gives it a long period of growth due to the long duration of the struggle caused by absolute intol- erance. Movements, which owe their growth only to the so-called fusion of similar formations that means compromises are like hothouse plants. They shoot up, but they lack the strength to defy centuries and to resist heavy storms. -4- The greatness of every powerful organization as the in- corporation of an idea in this world is rooted in the religious This reproduces in part the reasoning of Sorel. It is worthy of note that the same idea, which probably originated with the French pholosopher, Auguste Comte, now reappears in the ideology of almost every revolutionary movement bent on doing exactly the opposite of what Christianity set out to do. DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 487 fanaticism with which it intolerably enforces itself against everything else, fanatically convinced of its own right. If an idea is right in itself, and if thus armed it embarks on the struggle in this world, it is invincible and every perse- cution will lead to its inner strengthening. The greatness of Christianity was not rooted in its attempted negotiations of compromise with perhaps simi- larly constructed philosophical opinions of the old world, but in the inexorably fanatical preaching and representa- tion of its own doctrine. The apparent advance which movements obtain by fusions is simply overtaken by the permanent growth of the strength of a doctrine that remains independent and that defends itself. (13) The movement has to educate its members in prin- ciple in a way that in the fight they do not see something that has been negligently put together, but something that is aimed at. Therefore, they must not fear the hostility of the adversaries, but they should perceive it as the presump- tion for the justification of their own existence. They must not shun the hatred of the enemies of our nationality and our view of life and its expressions, but they should long for it. But to the expressions of this hatred lie and calumny also belong. He who is not fought that means slandered and abused by the Jewish papers is not a decent German and no true National Socialist. The best standard for the value of his loyalty, the honesty of his conviction, and the force of his will is the hostility which he encounters on the part of the mortal enemy of our people. It must be pointed out again and again to the adherents of the movement, and in a wider sense to the entire people, that the Jew always lies in his papers, and that even a once asserted truth serves only to cover a greater fraud, and thus in turn it is again deliberate untruth. The Jew 488 MEIN KAMPF is the great master of lying, and lie and deception are his weapons in the fight. Every Jewish defamation and every Jewish lie is an honorary scar on the body of our fighters. He is nearest to us whom they abuse most, and he is our best friend whom they hate most mortally. He who picks up a Jewish newspaper in the morning without finding himself abused in it has not usefully applied the previous day; for if it were so, he would be persecuted, slandered, abused, cursed, and sullied by the Jew. And only he who most successfully opposes this mortal enemy of our nationality and of every Aryan people and culture has the right also to hope for himself for the calumnies of this race and thus for the attack of his people. If these principles enter the flesh and the blood of our adherents, the movement will become unshakable and invincible. (14) The movement has to promote the respect for the personality by all means; it must never forget that the value of all that is human is rooted in the personal value, and that every idea and every achievement are the results of the creative force of a man, and that the admiration for the greatness is not only a tribute of thanks to the latter, but that it also winds a unifying band around the grateful. f The person cannot be replaced ; especially in cases when it does not represent the mechanical, but the cultural and creative, element. As little as a famous master can be replaced and another able to complete the painting which he left behind half finished, just as little can one replace the great poet and thinker, the great statesman and the great general. For their activity lies always in the field of art; it has not been bestowed on them by mechanical education, but is born in them by divine grace. The greatest transformations and achievements in this world, their greatest cultural results, the immortal deeds DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 489 in the field of statesmanship, etc., are inseparably con- nected forever with a name and are represented by it, The renunciation of the homage to a great mind meant the loss of an immense energy which streams forth from the names of all great men and also women of this earth. The Jew knows this best of all. Just he, whose great men are only great in the destruction of mankind and its culture, sees to their idolatrous admiration. He attempts to pic- ture the people's admiration for their own geniuses as unworthy and stamps it with the word 'worship of the person/ As soon as a people becomes so cowardly that it succumbs to this Jewish arrogance and impudence, it renounces the powerful energy it possesses; for the latter is not based upon the admiration for the masses, but upon the venera- tion of the genius and the elation and the devotion brought about by him. If human hearts break and human souls despair, then the great conquerors of distress and worry, of shame and misery, of spiritual bondage and physical coercion, look down upon them, out of the twilight of the past, and offer their eternal hands to the despairing mortals! Woe to the people that is shamed of seizing them! ^ In the first period of the growth of our movement, nothing made us suffer more than our insignificance, the very fact that our names were not known made our success doubtful. But the most difficult thing at that time, during This has since been done efficiently enough. Hitler is the Messiah, whose faith is that which alone can save the world, in to far as the German people are concerned. Wilhelm Kube and Robert Ley, both prominent officials, have likened him to Christ. For many for himself, too he is the mouth- 490 MEIN KAMPF which often only six, seven, or eight heads came together in order to listen to the words of a speaker, was to awaken the faith in the powerful future of the movement and to preserve it in this small circle. f Think of six or seven men, all poor devils without names, joining together with the intention of forming a movement which is supposed to succeed some day in doing what the powerful great parties of the masses failed to do, the re-erection of a German Reich with greater power and glory! If we had been attacked at that time, nay, if one had only laughed at us, we would have been happy in both events. For the depressing thing was neither the one nor the other, but it was only the complete lack of attention we encountered at that time. This was true most of all for my person. When I entered the circle of the few men, there could be the question neither of a party nor of a movement. I have already described my impressions on the occasion of my first meeting with this small formation. In the weeks that followed thereafter, I had time and occasion to study the then impossible appearance of this so-called party. The picture was, God knows, really a depressing one. There existed nothing, really nothing at all. The name of a party, the committee of which represented practically the entire body of members, which in one way or another was just that which they tried to fight, a parliament on a small scale. Here also voting ruled, and if the great parliaments at least shouted their throats hoarse for months about great problems, here in this small circle endless discussions set in piece of German Providence. By others he is surrounded with the adjectives once applied to Stefan George by his 'circle.' Still more effective is the slogan, 'Ein Reich, ein Yolk, rin Ftihrcr,' which the Nazis chant at every demonstration. The meaning is, 4 One Reich, one folk, one leader/ DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 491 about the answer to a letter that had fortunately arrived! The public, of course, knew nothing at all about all this. No person in Munich knew the party even by name, except for its few adherents and their few friends. Each Wednesday there took place a so-called committee meeting in one of the Munich cafes, once a week a discus* sion evening. As all the members of the 'movement' were at first represented in the committee, the persons were naturally always the same. The question involved was now to break the small circle at last, to win new followers, but above all to make the name of the movement known at any price. The technique of this procedure was the following :-4 We tried every month, later on every fortnight, to hold a 'meeting.' The invitations for this were written on a typewriter and partly by hand on pieces of paper, and the first few times they were distributed that is, carried out by us personally. Each of us turned to his circle of friends in order to move the one or the other to visit one of these meetings. The success was a miserable one. I still remember how in this first period I myself once carried out about eighty of these bills, and how in the evening we waited for the masses of people that were to come. With one hour's delay the chairman had finally to open the meeting. We were again seven men, the old seven. We proceeded to have the invitation bills written and multiplied by machine by a Munich stationery shop. The result was a few spectators more at the next meeting* Thus the number rose gradually from eleven to thirteen, finally to seventeen, to twenty- three, and to thirty-four listeners. The funds were brought together by very small collec tions in the circle of us poor devils, so that at last we were 492 MEIN KAMPF able to announce a meeting by an advertisement in the then independent Munchner Beobachter in Munich. This time the success was indeed astonishing. We had arranged a meeting at the Munich Hofbrauhaus Keller (not to be confused with the Munich Hofbrauhaus Festsaal), a small hall which could hardly accommodate one hundred and thirty persons. To me personally the room seemed like a great hall, and each of us was afraid whether we would succeed in filling this 'mighty* building with people on the particular evening. At seven o'clock one hundred and eleven persons were present, and the meeting was opened. A Munich professor made the principal speech, and I for the first time in public was to speak second. In the eyes of the then first chairman of the party, Herr Harrer, the affair seemed a great venture. The other- wise certainly decent gentleman could not help being con- vinced that I could do everything but speak. Even in the future one could not alter his opinion. Events took a different course. I had been granted twenty minutes' speaking time in the first meeting to be addressed to the public. I spoke for thirty minutes, and what formerly I had felt in my mind, without knowing it somehow, was now proved by reality. I could speak. After thirty minutes the small room filled with people was electrified, and the en- thusiasm found its expression first in the fact that my appeal to the willingness to sacrifice led the audience to donate three hundred Marks. Through this we were relieved of great anxiety. In those days the financial restriction was so great that we did not even have the opportunity of having the leading principles of the movement printed, or even leaflets published. Now the foundation was laid for a small fund from which then at least the barest necessi- ties and our urgent needs could be covered. DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 493 But the success of this first greater meeting was important also in another direction. At that time I started to bring a number of fresh young forces to the committee. The many years I had spent with the army made me acquainted with a great number of faithful comrades who now slowly began to join the move- ment, moved by my persuasion. They were all energetic young men, accustomed to discipline, and in their time in the army they had been educated according to the prin- ciple: nothing is impossible, and everything can be done if one wants to. But how necessary such an influx of new blood was, I myself could recognize after a few weeks' cooperation. The then first chairman of the party, Herr Harrer, was actually a journalist and as such he was certainly exten- sively educated. He had, of course, a burden that was exceedingly heavy for the leader of a party; he was not a speaker for the masses. No matter how painstakingly exact he was in his work, yet it lacked, perhaps just in consequence of this lack of great oratorical talent, the great sweep. Herr Drexler, who was then chairman of the local group of Munich, was a simple workman, as a speaker equally little important, and for the rest he was not a soldier. He had not served with the army, also during the War he was not a soldier, so that he, whose entire nature was weak and uncertain, lacked the only school which made it pos- sible to turn uncertain and weak characters into men. This was, therefore, not the material equipped, not only able to harbor in its bosom the faith in the victory of a movement, but also with unshakable will power and, if necessary, with the most brutal ruthlessness, to do away with the obstacles which might step in the way of the rise of the new idea. For this, only those beings were suited whose spirit and body had assumed those military virtues which may perhaps best be described thus: quick 494 MEIN KAMPF as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Ki-upp steel. At that time I myself was still a soldier. My exterior and my interior had been shaped for almost six years so that at first I was probably looked upon as strange in this circle. I, too, no longer knew the words: one cannot do this, or this won't be possible; one cannot risk this, it is still too dangerous at this moment, etc. Of course, the thing was dangerous. Just as little as the reds took notice of a bourgeois bunkum club, the inner harmlessness of which they knew better than its own members, they were just as determined to do away by all means with a movement that seemed dangerous to them. Their most effective means in such cases were, however, at all times terror and force. In the year 1920, in many parts of Germany, a national meeting that dared to direct an appeal to the great masses and to extend an invitation publicly to visit it was simply impossible. The participants at such a meeting were dis- persed and driven away with bleeding heads. Such a trick, however, did not require much skill, as even the greatest so-called bourgeois mass meeting usually could be broken up by a dozen communists and made to disperse and take to its heels like hares before a dog. But naturally a movement, the exact goal of which was the winning of those masses which so far stood exclusively in the service of the international Marxist Jewish and stock exchange parties, was most loathsome to the Marxist betrayers of the people. The mere name ' German Workers' Party' had an irritating effect. Therefore, one could easily imagine that at the first suitable opportunity, they would begin to settle accounts with the Marxist drivers who were then still intoxicated by victory, f In the small circle of the movement of that time one was to a certain extent afraid of such a fight. One wanted to appear in public as little as possible for fear of being DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 49S beaten. In one's mind one saw the first great meeting blown up and the movement then perhaps done away with forever. I had a great deal of trouble with my opinion that one could not evade this fight, but that one had to meet it, and, furthermore, that for this reason one had to pro- cure that kind of armament which alone gives protection against force. Terror is not broken by power of mind, but by terror. The success of the first meeting strengthened my position in this direction. One gained courage for a second meeting, now already planned on a somewhat larger scale. About October, 1919, the second larger meeting took place in the Eberlbraukeller. Subject: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles. Four gentlemen appeared as speakers. I myself spoke for almost an hour, and the success was greater than on the occasion of the first demonstration. The number attending had risen to over a hundred and thirty-one. An attempted disturbance was at once nipped in the bud by my comrades. The disturbing individuals were thrown downstairs with their heads knocked about. Two weeks later another meeting took place in the same hall. The number attending had risen to over one hundred and seventy. With this the room was well filled. I spoke The bourgeois were not quite as passive as is here indicated. Immediately after the revolution of 1918, two associations were established in Berlin for the purpose of combating Bol- shevism. Both had money, arms and influence. The first assembly of protest in the history of the Republic was called by the Berlin Center Party in 1918, under the leadership of Dr. Maximilian Pfeiffer. Over 30,000 people attended, marched through the streets, and even threatened to throw Adolf Hoffmann Prussian Minister of Culture, and an Independent Socialist out of his office. The Spartacists seldom disturbed bourgeois political assemblies, venting all their spleen on the Majority Socialists. 496 MEIN KAMPF again, and again the success was greater than during the preceding meeting.-* I stressed the necessity of a larger hall. Finally we found one at the other end of the city in the German Reich in the Dachauer Strasse. The meeting in the new rooms was not so well attended as the previous one: hardly one hundred and forty people. The committee's hopes began to sink again, and the eternal doubters believed that they saw in the too frequent repetition of our 'manifestations' the cause of the poor attendance. Violent arguments took place, during which I represented the opinion that a city of seven hundred thousand inhabitants should be able to stand a meeting not only every second week, but ten meet- ings every week; that we should not allow ourselves to be deterred by failures; that the road on which we had set out was the right one, and that success was bound sooner or later to come if we continued the same perpetual per- sistency. On the whole, the entire winter of 1919-20 was one single fight to strengthen the faith in the victorious power of the young movement and to increase it to that fanaticism which then, in the form of faith, is able to move mountains. The next meeting in the same hall again proved that I was right. The number attending had risen to over two hundred, the outward as well as the financial success was brilliant. I urged the immediate settling of another meeting. It took place barely two weeks later, and the crowd of listeners rose to more than two hundred and seventy heads. Two weeks later we called together for the fourth time adherents and friends of the young movement and the same room was hardly able to hold the people, the number had risen to over four hundred. t At this time the inner formation of the young movement took place. Many times this caused more or less violent DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 497 discussions in the small circle. From various sides (and still today) the naming of the young movement as a party was being criticized. I have always looked upon such an opin- ion as the proof of the practical inability and the mental smallness of such a mind. There were and are those people who are always unable to distinguish the exterior from the interior, and who try to evaluate a movement according to the highly bombastic sounding titles, for which purpose unfortunately the vocabulary of our forefathers has to lend itself. In those days it was difficult to make people understand that every movement, as long as it has not reached the victory of its ideas, and with it its goal, is a party, even when it assumes a different name a thousand times. If a man wants to bring to practical execution a bold idea, the realization of which seems useful to the interest of his fellow citizens, he will first have to look for adherents who are ready to stand up for his idea. And if the intention were only to destroy the parties existing at the time, to end the split-up, then the representatives of this opinion, and the propagators of this decision themselves are a party until their goal may be looked upon as reached. It is hair- splitting and humbug if then some antiquated folkish theo- retician, whose practical successes are in the reverse propor- Emerson has defined genius as an ' infinite capacity for taking pains.' Junius Alter writes (cf. Nation&listen): 'Hitler was the first to manage the feat of opening a wide breach in the Marxist ranks and winning back to the ideas of Fatherland and folk not thousands merely but hundreds of thousands of German workers, particularly those of the younger generation. That this was not possible with pastoral exhortations and well- meaning little tracts, with charity bazaars and other similar * Humanitarian ' trinkets, is evident. Marxism could be beaten only with its own weapons.' 498 MEIN KAMPF tion to his wisdom, imagines that by a change in its title he can change the character which every young movement as a party has. On the contrary. If anything is contrary to the spirit of the people, it is this juggling with especially old Germanic expressions which neither have a place in this time nor represent any- thing definite, but which can easily lead to measuring the significance of a movement by its outward vocabulary. This is a real nuisance, which, however, one may observe today innumerable times. On the whole, even then and also in the time following I had to warn again and again against those wandering Ger- man folkish scholars whose positive achievement is always equal to naught, but whose conceit can hardly be excelled. The young movement had and has to guard itself against an influx of people whose sole recommendation is mostly their declaration that they have fought for the same idea for thirty or even forty years. But a person who for forty years has stood up for a so-called idea without being able personally to bring about even the smallest success, even without having prevented the victory of the opposition, has established the proof of his own inability in a fort} years' activity. The danger is rooted in the fact that such Immediately after the War, the Deutsch-volkischc Schutz und Trutzbund spread like lightning over various parts of Germany, preaching anti-Semitism and resistance to the Allies. It was undoubtedly an important disseminator of ideas which event- ually coalesced in the Nazi Weltanschauung, but the theoretical character of its discussions prevented longevity as an organiza- tion. The Dcutsch Vdlkischc Freiheitspartci, which in 1924 seemed destined to become the organization of which Hitler had always dreamed, was likewise steered by Graefe into waters cm which no boat could stay afloat. DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 499 tools do not want to join as members in the movement, but that they babble about leading circles in which alone they are able to see a suitable place for further activity, based upon their original activity. But woe if one gives a young movement into the hands of such people! As little as a business man, who in forty years' activity has methodically ruined a big business, is suited to become the founder of a new one, just as little is such a folk Methuselah (who in the same time messed up a great idea and brought it to calcification) suitable for the leadership of a new and young movement ! For the rest, only a fraction of all these people comes into the new movement in order to serve it, but in most cases to be able to rake up an old story under its protection and because of the possibilities it offers. They do not wish to be useful to the idea of the new doctrine, but it is only supposed to give them the possi- bility of making humanity unhappy once more through their own ideas. For what kind of ideas these are can hardly be told. The characteristic of most of these natures is that they abound in old Germanic heroism, that they revel in the dim past, stone axes, spear and shield, but that in natura they are the greatest cowards imaginable. For the same people who wave about old Germanic tin swords carefully imitated, and wear a prepared bearskin with bull's horns covering their bearded heads always preach for the present only the fight with spiritual weapons and flee quickly in sight of every communist blackjack. Posterity will have little cause for glorifying their heroic existence in a new epic. I got to know these people too well not to feel the deepest disgust at this miserable comedy. They make a ridiculous impression on the great masses, and the Jew has every reason to spare these folk comedians, even to prefer them 500 MEIN KAMPF to the true fighters for the coming German State. Thereby these people are even immeasurably conceited, despite all proofs of their complete inability they pretend to under- stand and to know everything better, and they become a real plague for all straightforward and honest fighters, to whom heroism appears not only venerable in the past, but who also endeavor to give posterity the same picture by their activity in the present. Thereby many a time it is difficult to distinguish which of these people act in this way out of inner stupidity or inability, or which only pretend to do so for deliberate reasons. Especially in regard to the so-called religious re- formers of the old Germanic type, I always have the feeling that they are sent by those powers which do not want the resurrection of our people. For their entire activity leads Since 1933, these 'religions' have basked in the sunlight of official favor. The most important have been: the German Faith Movement, which during the summer of 1933 was for- mulated by delegates assembled at Eisenach. Status as a separate religious confession was demanded. Its leading theo- rists have been Dr. Wilhelm Hauer, who holds that the Indo- Germanic religion (mother of all religions) awaits resurrection in modern Germany; and Dr. Ernst Bergmann, who believes that God has manifested Himself most completely in the Ger- man soul. This movement had for a time something like popularity, largely attributable to the influence of Dr. Hauer. The Tannenberg Bund, which was headed by General Luden- dorff until his death, is based upon the intuitions received from the 'German soul ' by his wife, Mathilda. The Hermann Wirth Society, which holds that the true religion of Nordic men was that of the lost continent of Atlantis and that modern faith must grow out of endeavors to reconstitute this faith, has come nearest to worshiping the ancient gods of Germany. In addi- tion, leaders of the S.S. and the Youth Organizations have in- stituted ritualistic exercises derived from a composite Germanic DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 501 the people away from the common fight against the com- mon enemy, the Jew, in order to have it instead eat up its energy in internal religious struggles which are as absurd as they are unfortunate. But just for these reasons the establishment of a strong central power in the sense of the absolute authority of the leadership of the movement is necessary. By this alone can such destructive elements be shackled. For this reason also, however, the greatest enemies of a uniform and energetically led and guided movement are to be found in the circles of these folkish Ahasueruses. In the movement they hate the power that checks their mischief.^ Not in vain has the young movement determined on a definite program and thereby did not use the word 'folkish. 1 The conception 'folkish/ in consequence of its boundless- ness, is not a possible foundation for movement and offers no measure for the membership of such a movement. The more practically undefinable this conception is, the more and freer interpretations it permits, the more increases also the possibility of having recourse to it. The insertion into the political fight of so undefinable a conception, inter- pretable in so many senses, leads to the diminution of every energetic fighting unity, as it is incompatible with this to leave to the individual the definition of his faith and his will. t For this reason it is a disgrace to see in these days those who drift about with the word ' folkish ' on their caps. And religion. Pagan ceremonies in honor of Christmas and Easter, old-German wedding ceremonies, and 'liturgical processions' are prevalent phenomena. The use of Hitler's picture on the altars of some churches is a kindred manifestation. Yet it is believed that all such things have failed to interest any large number of people and that the effect on youth has been nega- tivistic. 502 MEIN KAMPF every one of these people has his own conception of this idea. A Bavarian professor by the name of Bauer, a famous fighter with spiritual weapons and equally rich in spiritual marching achievements carried out against Berlin, sees the conception folkish only presented in a monarchistic form. The learned head, however, has so far forgotten to explain more in detail the identity of our German monarchies of the past with a folkish conception of today. I further fear that this gentleman would hardly succeed in this. For one is hardly able to imagine anything that is less identical with the conception folkish than most of the German monarchis- tic State formations. If this were not the case, they would never have disappeared, or their disappearance would offer the proof of the incorrectness of the folkish concep- tion. Thus everybody plays about with this conception ac- cording to his understanding. But such a Babel of opin- ions cannot serve as the basis of a political fighting move- ment. Thereby I will completely leave out of account the seclu- sion from the world and the ignorance of the people's soul The current edition omits the name of 'Professor Bauer.' So far as we have been able to determine, two men by this name would have qualified as spokesmen for the monarchist cause. During 1921, the movement to restore the Wittelsbachs was at its height in Bavaria, and it is usually stated that nothing was done because of Allied intimations that the attempt would meet with opposition. During this period, Hitler had a great deal of trouble with ' professors/ many of whom were teachers in secondary schools. Thus a Dr. Dickel, of Augsburg, waa Streicher's candidate for Flihrer in 1920, and spoke at the Party meeting held on July 21 of that year. He had organized a 'nationalistic labor union' something on which Hitler frowned and had conducted himself rebelliously in other ways. DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 503 on the part of these folkish Johns of the twentieth century. This is sufficiently illustrated by the absurdity with which they are treated by the left. One lets them talk and laughs at them. But a man who in this world does not succeed in being hated by his adversaries, seems to me of little value as a friend. Therefore, the friendship of these people was not only of no value for our young movement, but even harm- ful. This was also the main reason why we first chose the name 'party.' We had reason to hope that through this alone quite a swarm of these folkish sleepwalkers would be scared away. And secondly we called ourselves 'National Socialist German Workers' Party. 9 The first expression kept away from us the revelers in antiquity, the word -makers and outward talk-threshers of the so-called 'folkish idea/ but the second freed us from the entire host of knights of the 'spiritual' sword, and from all those miserable rags who hold up the 'spiritual weapon* as a shield for their actual cowardice. It is self-evident that in the following time we were at- tacked most seriously above all by the latter, of course not physically, but with the help of the pen, as cannot be ex- pected otherwise from such a folkish goosequill. For them, of course, our principle, ' those who attack us with force we will ward off with force,' had something terrifying. They not only reproached us for the brutal worship of the black- jack, but also for the lack of spirit in itself. But it makes no impression whatsoever on such a quack that in a peoples' assembly a Demosthenes can be silenced if only fifty idiots, supported by their talk and their fists, won't let him speak. Their inborn cowardice, of course, never lets them fall into such danger. For they do not work 'noisily' and 'ob- trusively,' but always in 'silence. 1 < Even today I cannot warn our young movement enough against falling into the net of these so-called ' silent workers. 1 504 MEIN KAMPF For they are not only cowards, but also incompetents and sluggards. A man who knows a thing, who realizes a given danger, and who sees with his eyes the possibility of a remedy, has the damned duty and obligation to work, not in 'silence/ but to stand up publicly against the evil and for its remedy. If he does not do so, then he is a disloyal, miserable weakling who fails either because of cowardice or because of laziness and inability. However, this is mostly not at all the case with these people, because they know nothing at all, but they act as though they knew God knows what; they are absolutely inefficient, but they try to cheat the whole world with their tricks; they are lazy, but with their pretended 'silent' work they create the appearance of an enormous and equally laborious activity; in short, they are cheats, characters of political profiteering, who hate the honest work of others. Just as such a folkish moth always appeals to the darkness of the silence, one can bet a thousand to one that under its cover he does not produce, but only steals steals from the fruits of the labor of others. But to this is always added the arrogance and conceited impudence with which this practically idling mob, shunning the light, throws itself upon the work of others and tries to criticize it from above, thus in reality aiding the mortal enemies of our nationality. Every last agitator who, standing among his adversaries upon the table of a tavern, has the courage manfully and openly to represent his opinion, achieves more than a thousand of these mendacious, treacherous sneaks. He will certainly convert the one or the other and win him over for the movement. One will examine his achievements, and one will be able to determine the effects of his activity by his success. Only the cowardly cheats, who praise their work in the 'silence' and wrap themselves in the protective cloak of a disdainful anonymity, are no good at all and may DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 505 be looked upon, in the truest meaning of the word, as the drones in the rise of our people. At the beginning of 1920 I urged holding the first very great mass meeting. There were many differences of opin- ion about this. Some of the leading party members con- sidered the matter as much too premature and therefore looked upon the effect as disastrous. The red press had begun to occupy itself with us, and we were happy enough gradually to gain its hatred. We had begun to appear as discussion speakers in other meetings. Of course, each of us was immediately shouted down. Nevertheless, we were successful. One learned to know us, and in the measure in which this knowledge deepened, the aversion and the wrath against us grew. Therefore, we had reason to hope that at our first great mass meeting we would receive the visit of our friends from the red camp to a great extent. I, too, was clear about the fact that there was a great possibility that the meeting would be blown up. But the struggle had to be carried out, if not now, then a few months later. It was up to us to perpetuate the movement, even from the first day, by blindly and ruthlessly standing up for it. I knew above all the mentality of the adherents of the red side only too well not to know that a resistance to the limit not only makes an impression but also wins ad- herents. Therefore, one had to be resolved to make this resistance. The first chairman of the party at that time, Herr Harrer, These are parting words directed at Drexler and other truc- ulent members of the aboriginal group. Dissension was rife at the time Mein Kampf was written, and the journals of the folkish groups were filled with acrid remarks, pro and contra, on the subject of Nazidom. 506 MEIN KAMPF believed that he could not agree with me upon the time chosen, and in consequence, as the honest, straightforward man he was, he withdrew from the leadership of the move- ment. His place was taken by Herr Anton Drexler. I had reserved for myself the organization of the propaganda, and now I carried it out ruthlessly. Thus the 24 of February, 1920, was fixed as the date for holding this first great peoples' meeting of the still unknown movement, I personally led the preparations. They were very brief. On the whole the entire apparatus was directed at being able to make rapid decisions. Its aim was to enable us by mass meetings to define our attitude towards current problems within twenty-four hours. The announcement of the latter was to be carried out by posters and leaflets the tendency of which was determined by those points of view which I have roughly outlined in my discussion on propa- ganda. Influence on the great masses, concentration on few points, continuous repetition of the latter, self-assured and confident wording of the texts in the form of apodictic assertion, greatest persistency in spreading, and patience in awaiting the effect. Red was chosen on principle as the color; it is the most This meeting, held at a time when the Party was still known as the Deutsche Arbriterpartei, presented the twenty-five points that later on attained fame as the program of the N.S.G.W.P. What Hitler conceals is that the leading orator of the occasion was a Dr. Dingfelder, then a speaker much in demand at nationalist organizations. He is worth following through the Rightist journals of the period. Newspaper accounts of the meeting assign a modest rdle to Hitler. He did, however, present the program. The first flag a black swastika in a white circle oa red background was slightly different in form from the flag now DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 507 inciting color and was to annoy and to irritate our enemies and to make us known to them and to bring us into their memory in one way or the other. In the following time the inner fraternization between Marxism and the Center as a party showed most clearly in Bavaria also by the care with which the Bavarian People's Party, ruling there, tried to weaken and later to destroy the effect of our posters upon the red workers' masses. If the police did not find any other means to proceed against this, 'considerations of traffic' had to lend themselves, till finally for the sake of the inner, silent red ally, with the promoting help of a so-called German National People's Party, one entirely suppressed these posters which had given back hundreds of thousands of international, goaded, and seduced workers to the German nationality. As a model for our young movement I add a number of these appeals in an appendix. They embrace a period of nearly three years; they are best able to prove the enormous struggle which the young movement fought out in those days. But they are also to give testimony to posterity of the will and the honesty of our convictions, and the despotism of the so-called national authorities in suppressing a nationaliza- tion amazing to them, and thus a regaining of the greater masses of our people. They may also help to destroy the opinion that there existed in Bavaria a national government in itself, and to document for posterity the fact that the national Bavaria of the years 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, and 1923 was not perhaps the result of a national government, but that the in use. Something similar appears to have been used by the Ehrhardt Brigade, comprised of soldiers who had fought in the Baltic States. Later on other 'banners' were added, strik- ingly akin in form to those carried in Southern German religious processions. 508 MEIN KAMPF latter was forced to take consideration of a people which slowly began to feel in national terms. The governments themselves did everything towards suppressing this process of recovery and to make it im- possible. One single exception has to be made. At that time the President of the Police, Ernst Poehner, with his faithful councillor, High Bailiff Frick at his side, was the only higher State official who even then had the courage to be first a German and then an official. He was the only one who did not curry favor with the masses, but who rather felt responsible for his nationality and who was ready to stake and to sacrifice everything, even, if neces- sary, his own existence, for the resurrection of the German people, which he loved more than anything else. For this The suppression of the Munich 'Soviet government* had been accomplished with the help of a citizens' 'guard* recruited in large measure from the country districts of Bavaria. Yet this did not yearn for military prowess with elemental zeal. In common with all other Bavarians, its members preferred to live in peace and criticize whatever government happened to be in power. They were cajoled by the Reichswchr (regular army) into overthrowing the Socialist government, which had been established in Bamberg, and into legalizing a quasi- dictatorship headed by Gustav von Kahr. Herr von Kahr was a monarchist, but also a very cautious, slow-moving, and confused little man. Beyond giving the dead King Ludwig a beautiful funeral in Munich and dreaming that Bavaria was the center of the restoration, he did little except worry the Berlin officials and keep a protecting hand over Rightist plotters on whom they were eager to lay hands. Ernst Poehner, the Bavarian chief of police, was a stout and uncomprising patriot of the old school. Believing that Germany must rearm and turn the tables on France, he extended a cordial reception to all the secret military organizations and their leaders. True DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 509 reason he was always the irritating thorn in the flesh of those venal creatures of officials, whose rules of conduct are not dictated by the interest of the people and its neces- sary rise to freedom, but rather by the order of their superiors, without consideration for the welfare of the national goods entrusted to them. And above all he belonged to those natures who, in con- trast to most of the guardians of our so-called State author- ity, do not fear the hostility of our people's and country's traitors, but who long for this as the natural property of every decent man. The hatred of the Jews and Marxists, their entire campaign of lie and calumny, were for him the sole happiness in the midst of the misery of our people. A man of granite honesty, of antique simplicity and of German straightforwardness, with whom the words 'rather dead than slave* were not a phrase, but the essence of his entire nature. He and his co-operator, Doktor Frick, are in my eyes the only people among the State authorities who have the right to be looked upon as the co-restorers of a national Bavaria. to form, he would assist Hitler's putsch in 1923. Dr. Wilhelm Frick was an official in the Munich police department, and also participated in the putsch of 1923. During 1930 he became Minister of Thuringia, and there arranged the appointment on the basis of which German citizenship was accorded to Hitler. Appointed Reich Minister of the Interior in 1933, he has usually been voted the 'most honest man* in Nazi administration. His bluntness of speech is famous. Replying to a criticism that his violent attacks on Marxism were based on ignorance he replied : ' I don't need to know anything about Marxism I know some Marxists.' This maxim is the regional device of Schleswig-Holstein, and is said to have originated in the War during which this province was won for Prussia. 510 MEIN KAMPF Before we proceeded to hold this first mass meeting, not only the necessary propaganda material had to be prepared, but also the leading articles of the program had to be put down in print. In the second volume I will more thoroughly develop the directions which we had in mind, while composing the program. Here I only wish to state that it was created not only in order to give the young movement form and content, but in order to make its aims comprehensible to the great masses. In the circles of the so-called intelligentsia one has joked and jeered at it and tried to criticize it. But the correct- ness of our conception of that time has been proved by the effectiveness of this program. During these years I saw dozens of new movements originate, and they all have disappeared and blown away again without leaving a trace. Only one of those of these years remained: the National Socialist German Workers' Party. And today more than ever I harbor the conviction that one can fight it, that one may try to paralyze it, that small party ministers can take from us the speech and the word, but they will never more prevent the victory of our ideas. If even memory will not mention the names of the entire present conception of State and their representatives, the foundations of the National Socialist program will be the foundations of a coming State. The four months' activity of meeting, previous to Janu- ary, 1920, had gradually permitted us to collect the small funds which we required for printing our first leaflet, our first poster, and our program. If I take the first great mass meeting of the movement as the conclusion of this volume, it is done for the reason that with it the party broke the narrow frame of a small dub and instead influenced decisively, for the first time, the most powerful factor of our time, public opinion DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. Ill I myself had at that time only one anxiety: Will the hall be filled, or will we have to speak to an empty hall? I had the unshakable inner conviction that, if the people would come, the day was bound to become a great success for the young movement. Thus I anxiously looked forward to that evening. At 7.30 the opening was to take place. At 7.15 I entered the banquet hall of the Hofbrauhaus at the Platzl in Munich, and my heart nearly burst with joy. The enormous room, for then it appeared to me like that, was overfilled with people, shoulder to shoulder, a mass numbering almost two thousand. And above all those people had come to whom we wished to appeal. Far more than half of the hall seemed to be taken by communists and independents. They The creation of an armed guard the function of which was to throw out of meetings any persons who ventured to heckle or question the speaker had some precedent in Communist practice of the time, but was on the whole original. It may also go back to secret military organization meetings, which had always to be on their guard against possible informants. At first the groups were small, being recruited from ex-soldiers, many of whom were then idle. By 1920 they had grown suffi- ciently numerous to permit organization in companies or 'hundreds. 1 The S.A. (Sturm Abteilung Storm Section) was founded on August 3, 1921, on the basis of a proclamation which declared that the Party had decided to create its own gymnastic and sport organization; that this was to exemplify 'the preparedness idea for the German people as a whole/ and to afford 'protection for the work of enlightenment to be done by the leaders 1 ; and that it was to preserve the ideals of loyalty and obedience. This proclamation was signed by Lieutenant Johann Klintsch, who had fled to Bavaria after being suspected of complicity in the murder of Rathenau. In the background, however, there was that remarkable officer and political leader, Captain Ernst Roehm, who had 512 MEIN KAMPF had decided our first great demonstration was to come to a rapid end. But things took a different course. After the first speaker had finished, I took up the word. A few minutes later inter- rupting shouts came down like showers of hail, violent clashes occurred in the hall, and a handful of the most faith- ful war comrades and other adherents were struggling with the disturbers and only by and by were they able to restore peace. I was able to continue. After half an hour applause gradually began to drown out the shouting and calling. And now I took up the program and began to interpret it for the first time. From one quarter of an hour to the next the interrupting shouts were more and more subdued by increasing encourag- ing shouts. And when finally I presented, point by point, undoubtedly been the real power behind the throne in the move which ended Bavaria's Socialist government and brought von Kahr to the fore. Ruthless, battle-scarred, and later addicted to homosexual practices, Roehm was a first-class organizer and a man who believed earnestly in social reform. He had friends in all walks of life, and (if one discounts the wish to fight the War all over again) took an interest even in international good will. Roehm, sensing Hitler's political ability, thought that by combining rearmament with the Nazi Party, he could soon create some kind of German army. Ac- cordingly he induced members of secret military organizations prescribed by the Reich to join the S.A. in Munich, and often even persuaded them to take some interest in drill and dis- cipline. But Roehm was fighting a hopeless fight. On the one .hand were the Reichswehr leaders, who very soon decided they wanted no such loose volunteer organization as Roehm was proposing; and on the other side there was Hitler, who (aware of the army's feeling) took no interest in the idea of appending his party to a sort of levie en masse. During 1922, Roehm and other army officers seriously contemplated a march on Berlin: DEVELOPMENT OF THE N.S.G.W.P. 513 the twenty-five points to the masses and asked them per* sonally to pronounce judgment upon them, one after the other was accepted with more and more joy, again and again unanimously, and as thus the last thesis had found its way to the heart of the mass, 1 was confronted by a hall filled with people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will. When after almost four hours the hall began to empty and the crowd, shoulder to shoulder, like a slow stream, began to push, to scramble, and to pour towards the exit, then I knew that now the principles of a movement which never could be forgotten walked out into the German people. A fire had been lighted, and out of its flames there was bound to come some day the sword which was to regain but largely owing to lack of co-ordination, the plan failed. It may be that some early groups of S.A. were Wack shirts. But the black-clad S.S. (Schutzstaffel Protection Unit) was not officially organized until December, 1924, when it was assigned the duty of being responsible to the Ftihrer and charged with his safety. In 1925 Hitler definitely broke with Roehm. The breach also involved Captain Brtickner, one of the ablest co-workers in the development and training of the S.A. Roehm went to South America, returned later, and took over the S.A. again in 1930. At about the same time, Briickner became Hitler's personal adjutant. What eventually happened to Roehm will be consid- ered later on. During the Party controversies attendant upon the Munich Crisis of 1938, Briickner mysteriously disappeared. Hitler's success in this task is extraordinary. The Treaty of Versailles limited the German army to 100,000 men, carefully circumscribed the production of armament materials and de- militarized the Rhineland. Today Germany has universal mili- tary service, its armament production constitutes at least 65 per cent of the total economic enterprise of the nation, its air fleet is presumed to be the most powerful in the world, it 514 MEIN KAMPF the freedom of the Germanic Siegfried and the life of the German nation. And side by side with the coming rise, I sensed that there walked the goddess of inexorable revenge for the perjured act of the 9 of November, 1918. Thus the hall became slowly empty. The movement took its course. has reoccupied and refortified the Rhineland, and under a special treaty its navy is entitled to build to 35 per cent of the strength of the British Navy. In addition this new German army has tested the value of its several arms on Spanish battle- fields, and has carried out two campaigns of occupation. Immediately after the Machtergreifung^ efforts were made to give Germany dominance in the air. Special collections were taken up to finance the construction of planes and the organ- ization of defense. Bomb-proof cellars were built in great num- bers as early as 1934, and air-raid drills became a normal aspect of German life. During 1937, the attics of all houses in the Rhineland were ordered cleared, to lessen the peril of fire. It was reported that special apparatus for engendering electro- magnetic waves had been installed, in the belief that such waves would destroy war-planes. The actual strength of Germany's air-raid squadron remains a matter for conjecture. In addition the effectiveness of anti- aircraft artillery is so much higher now than it was in 1918 that some authorities refuse to believe that a bombardment would be as ruinous to a city as is sometimes estimated by popular writers on the subject. Yet even so the air is the great unknown of modern warfare, and as such helps to mitigate enthusiasm for armed conflict. APPENDIX APPENDIX NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY In untiring agitation, the agents of the Jewish-international stock exchange and loan capital are trying to make Germany ripe for collapse, so that they may pass over State and economy into the hands of the International Finance Trusts The presumption for this is the laceration and, with it, the weakening of our people in the interior. Hence also the embittered fight of the MERCENARIES of international high finance against a party which, in distinction to all the other parties, is not composed of 'BOURGEOIS 9 or 'PROLETARIANS' but of the creative mental and manual workers of our people. They alone can and will be the supporters of the future Germany. Fellow Citizens! Friday, November 19, 1920, in the Hofbrduhausfestsaal (Platol) there will take place a great public MASS MEETING, 'THE WORKER IN THE GERMANY OF THE FUTURE 9 Speaker: Herr Adolf Hitler 518 APPENDIX in which the National Socialist Party will define its attitude to this question. We ask all Germans to come. Beginning of the meeting 8 p.m. Admission M.I.- War invalids free. Jews not admitted. Summoner: For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The meeting was attended by more than 2000 persons. * NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY Already for two years, the famous RECOVERY has lasted, the increase of the buying power of money, the con- solidation of economy, the awakening of the world conscience, the subjugating of militarism, etc., and there are parties which have the cheek to assure the people that this condition in which we live today represents happiness for our people and for the human 'CIVILIZATION 9 in general. In all their programs, promises follow promises of an economic prosperity to be attained only in the FREE STATE of curing all other evils of our present society, and while in reality the misery becomes and is bound to become greater from month to month, there are actually millions of people who still believe in this paradise. For: as long as the peace treaty of Versailles weighs on the German people, every promise of an economic recovery is fraud- APPENDIX 519 The National Socialist Party has not only recognized this from the beginning, but is the only political party that sees to it that our people, with ruthless frankness, becomes acquainted with the treaties which have been palmed off on it as a peace of recon- ciliation and understanding. Wednesday, November 24, 1920, therefore, there will take place at the Hofbrauhausfestsaal another MASS MEETING in which Herr Adolf Hitler will speak about: 4 VERSAILLES, GERMANY'S DESTRUCTION' Beginning of the meeting 8 p.m. Jews not admitted. Admission M.I.- War invalids free Summoner: For the party management, A. Drexler The meeting was attended by 2120 persons. NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY With diabolic cunning for two years, the representatives of the Principle of Freedom of the small nations, of world disarmament, of the League of Na- tions and of World Peace knew how to make our people deaf and blind with all kinds of phrases. A two years 1 swindle of honesty and of peace hypocrisy had to make our people ripe and pliable for the things now awaiting us. Who still believes that England was ever concerned with re- specting the freedom of the small nations, since it takes from one of the greatest civilized nations of this world that was and Germany even today its last remainder of freedom? Who still believes today that France ever fought German mili- tarism, only in order to make Germany free and to secure to the rest of the world the fortune of the general disarmament of alt nations? portei Afcmft*tt fatal c< We >6erf refer bef PfiHllpff dCf ffrei&Cft dCT fletaen 93tf0nen* dff to SWferbliUbe* an* J&tltfrttbaU, wrfUben, unfer 2otr bur* |id 3afrrt <j0en nrfgltyen Pftrafen faub unb blinb 50 nuufeen. Oin jtpetjd&rifltr e**itbel *. ttlefcectett nnb 3friebentf$eu4e!efen mufte unfer Self erft reif nub mQrbe maa)en ju ten, tutu* . 2Ber gfaabt Je^t no^ baran, bo c* Onglanb JtmaW borara to fun toar. Me 3frd(di bcr flrfnen ^aflonen ju otfifrn, ba erf cinem bcr ^r^fien 5utforo!fcr bfcfer 3Dt(( to UHT 9ettlfl&Umd nnb baf iff Cf attd betliC IW0, ben Irtftn Tlcfl ton 5rtU?cit rauW? 2Ber glaubi aud? heute noc^, bog 3rranrref^ ben beutf^eti XiUlarifmui je beMm^fie, nr um 2)euff(^l(inb frei ju moc^tn unb ber Qbrigen Cfrbe ba< (Slfitf ber ongeraemen Jffbrflflund flfler ^ationtn ju fidjrrn? Bar ertetutt no* nU6<, baft Jronfrei* and enaJanb wtf fa erf tteftrfaf nsaiftcii mttttea, mn nitf f e raWlM ma$en ia f otuieti, 61M ww 9erfiOe nw nor amtmebmett, fmbcm kite 0* W Wtcnttibncn ? Unb trer ifl enblicb ouch fteute no^ fo Hnblic^ twrmlo^, um Ritftt einiufeben, baf biefet Cnglanb, ba^ in plonmdfiger Xeiifeiei in etrigen ^cpoluH^nen 3rlanM 33o(f gum Xobefcetf unb in faura 803aftrcn pr Wlfte aurfgerotiei^al, batf 3nbien ebenfan^ ai<* oltrn STuKurftaot, ber, tei$ ott ni*t miHtdrlf* tror, unb bie ^reibeiien ber fldnen ^ationen bebro^e^ aurfaaunerf unb autyrefr; baf bieferf Sranfrei* etibli^ tat km Tfomen ber jtultur gunberttaufrnbe ton fd^vorgen 5Tfrifanern ouf bie europ&ften ^(od^tfelber fdjleiffe unb fie fyeufe nod) alrf Wringer einer l>6f)eren Bicllifotion ber rbelntfdben JTultur oW j^enfer^fne(f>fe oufjrofncit; &>er iff aud> Jrtf nod> fo trxi^nftnnig ja glauben. bap on 6fla9a* (attero anberw iu enoartni ri, ali 6fUiterei? tob ewb forbrrn tpir irtjt oof. 2kr 6flae fein ttHB f der toarde t* tmb KfUw M abr ttiftt Obtr not and (flcnb. 9er lebrn toitt, bet fumme wtdmrofeWere daaetcm <3 nun on* die JBdolWrtett ttitit iebcn roabt. 2Benn 60 IHifUpnen, OTonn unb IDeib, torn (Strife bltf gum ^un^en, fn einmfltiger <JnV frf)IofTtnf>eil erfldren, loir t(Ien nirf>l, bann folf brr 2Bifle biefer IHinionen un* gum mtnbef einN fi^ern, bie 34tun& bie roan bera oenvciaert, ber bie Peiifte hl^ bie ifri tvtr find 3Rettfcften tin5 feme r fMai ao doer BckNrc^^ fc* e* btetmal fein 3tr(Hmbd eftf, fonbtm daft 2Ber ber^anbelf, fturgi. bie UrrgetiHilflgnng einer $uiibcr$$ri0eii Bofnnfl nnferrt ^f4M in to ,_, ofle dtifiui(fn4fo6 onv* ttnb jToWafpener, Vrbeiier vno Gnibcnftn* 33eanife irafr WngefWJte. aOe, benen enbfltf? tia) bit Oberjeuauna aufaeMremert iff, bof nn4 auf Wefer 2Ddf fdii Xeufd ^Iff, meira trlr nn< nJJTfelber ^ftn, tta*fM4e f^bd Heine (tott. 3nr **tfuna ra aak unb JMatofunfoflen mi. CHnMM. t 8 i^r abenb*. Onbe 10 U^r 15 3Mnaien. Arlea^beMabiaie fret [ tar Mrttt wferraat afntentfer: 3fttr Me parWWhina tt. Defter. JDU SJerfammhmf IPOT cM MM 0*r 5600 J&erfonea. [ Facsimile ] flotionalfojiialiltififr gerififr art* ifcr.partri ft tanae iwr m* ACfttittt teftaffen ttwde. fluf Mefe neuerffge tmtrftdrte OrpreJTung Me etnjlg ri^tige ntoor1 )u geben, ndmll^ ben bar(^ Me <fntente obermaftf oerlt^ien fogenannten fc fftr 9erfV4Um Permit maftltfe * erfUren, M e^ulbbt icnntn.x om ftrle? anfer ^w ber ttMrfUftttl S>0Tnmatfe foforl ^ffentfl^ 30 aifrmifcn un& t)ie ^nberauraong efner i Jriefcwdhmfermj, fufenb of btn uni fetnerjfit Q\4 runbla^e nerfpro^enen 14 pontten OBIIfon<, |B forbera, tat Me beutf^e ^rgifmng etnen Or Ifl un4 Je^t frcfonni ta* flnt> ubtr 1500 TDiaiarfren patfermarf Me taiMe ettNreaicrmi0 fern fteoner frar^ 5a deaife 9ff tifitt tfber tw< tlr nle ftejtodfdt ^o^en. If! nun dn^drden. ZMefen IniertwHwwIen 95rfen^deni ^enfi^t <ud? batf ntd^L 2Jki fie ttoflen. Iff OentfcfcUmbtf ofifldnM9e Ucrfncoun^. Unb trofcbcm fofl ber Stu^nbd nnn Better fodgefdjt merbtnT 9oge0en proteftieren toir! ftonmit (elite 6onnfa, ten &JRfiri 1921, 10 OJr borat in ben mb 9crf ortdter mfercf 3oflt$, m3lr eftftttef SK erdttldoi. Aonnnt md DtolefHeff dMeoev* M ftrfeie Ira0e. ^rolefttart aeaen ben am Mm OetaHMMaen <m Wdcw ftHetc, feftkrt tetea 5* neee Porifer Mtet t6 Mr^efHert *or enbti* on* men dne Me nenerMna* Me ber Itunbgebnng 10 U^r, Cfobe 12 ttfc 2DL i. JWe0<btfd^4btgte frtU 3v^cn (wen lefnen BnlrffL flenc anb 25er^tolb, 3lgantii9er<W &l 54 dtebernfer: Jflr bk paritUdtinift tTnion Drejler. Serfammlung toot Don fiber 8000 ^njoncn befu$t [Facsimile] S22 APPENDIX Who does not yet recognize that France and England had to first make us so defenseless in order to be able to make us outlaws to such an extent that we not only accepted but even signed Spa and Versailles? And who, finally, is even today still so childish and innocent as not to see that this England which with methodical diabolism hunts Ireland's people to death in eternal revolutions and has extirpated half of it in less than 80 years, which cheats and exploits India, the old culture State, which, God knows, was certainly not militaristic, and threatened the freedom of the small nations; that this France finally, which in the name of cul- ture dragged hundreds of thousands of black Africans to the European battle fields and even today forces them, as the bearers of a higher civilization, on the Rhenish culture as henchmen ; who is even today so crazy as to believe, that from slave drivers any- thing but slavery can be expected? And now we invite you. He who wants to be a slave may be- come one, but then he must not complain about misery and dis- tress. He who wants to live may come and protest against the fact that they rob us of the possibility of living. If sixty millions, men and women, from the oldest man down to the young boy, declare in unanimous resolution, we do not want to, then the will of the millions ought to secure us at least one thing, the respect which is denied him who kisses the whip that beats him. We, too, are human beings and not dogs But sixty millions should make it clear to a Reich government that this time there is no place for negotiations, but that he who negotiates, falls. Fellow citizens! Come all of you today, Thursday, February 3, 1921, at 8 p.m. to the Z IRK US KRONE to the GIANT MANIFESTATION OF PROTEST against the rape of a hundred years' future of our people. Herr Adolf Hitler will speak about: 'FUTURE OR DECLINE 9 APPENDIX 513 Come without exception, manual and white collar workers, la- borers and students, officials and employees, all on whom finally the conviction had dawned that in this world no devil will help us unless we help ourselves. No discussion To cover the cost of the hall and the Beginning 8 p.m. posters, admission: M.I.- War invalids free End 10.15 P- m - Summoner: For the party management: No Jews admitted A. D r e x 1 e r The meeting was attended by more than 5600 persons. * NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY Of all the promises of the leaders of the November Revolution, nothing has arrived. Misery and distress, hunger and disease weigh more heavily than ever on our people. Profiteers and usurers, currency speculators and war-profiteers however, feast on the profits they made by usury before the eyes of the nation that has fallen into distress. Meanwhile an un- heard-of treaty awaits its fulfillment which once they had the cheek to palm off on us as 'Peace Treaty* of Reconciliation and Understanding A 42 years' exploitation is to destroy Germany's future, to make our people die off. There we ask: How is it possible that our people bears all this? What is the ultimate cause of this unheard-of weakness which makes Germany today the defenseless victim of its exploiters? // is the class struggle In terrible lunacy the Germans fight one another today, intel- lectuals against laborers, class against class, and they weaken ont 524 APPENDIX another until they both, in powerlessness and weakness, fall victim to the enemies of our people bent on plunder and eager in rapacity. GERMAN STUDENTS! Do you want to watch this doom inactively? Remember that for centuries of German history the German student, fighting for freedom and national right, stood by the side of his people. Think of it that it was he who many a time became the bearer and fighter for all the moral ideas which lifted our people out of misery and shame. Can there be a greater task for our people today than the solution of the fateful question of Germany, the class question ! We ask you: During the deepest misery of our people, do you want to linger in indifferent lethargy, do you want to barricade yourselves behind the class-spirit, or do you find the way to your people! FRIDAY, February 1 1 , 192 1 , a great public MASS MEETING takes place at the Hofbrauhausfcstsaal (Platxl). Herr Adolf HITLER will speak about: 'GERMAN YOUTH GERMAN FUTURE 9 Now we invite you, German students, who have still a heart for the present suffering of your people, come, listen and join where you belong: WITH THE PEOPLE Beginning of the meeting: 8 p.m. Jews not admitted Admission: M.I.- Students: 50 Pf. War invalids free Summoner: For the party management: A. Drexler The meeting was attended by more than 2200 persons. APPENDIX 525 NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY One year has passed, since our movement announced itself for the first time to the GREAT PUBLIC. On February 24, 1920, before an audience counting thousands, the program of the young movement was published and accepted with violent applause. In a grand sweep, the NATIONAL SOCIALIST IDEA has taken root in numerous places. First mocked, ridiculed, then passed by in silence, we have the experience that today we are already persecuted most cruelly. That is what we want. A movement which has not learned to conquer by a fight is not worthy of a victory The ultimate victory in this world, however, will be carried by truth. And in this we believe. In numerous mass meetings we have tried to spread it without consideration for favor or hatred, never guided by reflections or s*- called 'tactics,' but always animated only by the feeling of duty. In memory of this anniversary we invite our FELLOW CITIZENS to come Thursday, February 24, 1921, to the great public PEOPLE'S MEETING at the Hofbrduhausfestsaal (Platzl). Heir Adolf HITLER will speak about: 'ONE YEAR OF GERMAN HISTORY AND OUR PROGRAM 9 Beginning of the meeting 8 p.m. Admission M.I.- No Jews admitted. War invalids free Summoner : For the party management: A. Drexler 526 APPENDIX The fighting organ of the National Socialist movement ia the 'VOELKISCHE BEOBACHTER' Office: M&nchen, Thicrschstrasse 15 The meeting was attended by more than 2300 persons. * NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS 1 PARTY At last we know why the German government's reply to the Paris Note has been kept secret from us for such a long time. Instead of giving to this renewed unheard-of extortion the only right answer, that is to declare herewith the so-called 'Peace Treaty 9 of Versailles as invalid for Germany; to revoke immediately and publicly the confession of war guilt by presenting the genuine documents and to demand the calling of a new peace conference based on the 14 points of Wilson which then were promised us as the basis, the German government has worked out a 'Counter Proposal' This is now known to us. Around a hundred and forty-six billions of goldmarks that is more than 1500 billions of paper marks the Reich's government promises the enemy to be paid by the German people. A COMPLETE LUNACY But what we have never doubted has now arrived. But this is not enough for these international stock exchange vultures. APPENDIX 527 What they want is Germany's complete enslavement And yet this bargaining is to be continued? We protest against this! FELLOW CITIZENS! Come today, Sunday, March 6, 1921, 10 a.m. to the Giant Demonstration of Protest at the Zirktis Krone A. HITLER will speak about: 'LONDON AND US? 9 White collar and manual workers of our people, you alone have to suffer the consequences of this unheard-of treaty. Come and protest against Germany being burdened with the war guilt. Protest against the peace treaty of Versailles which has been forced upon us by the sole culprit of the war, the Jewish inter- national stock exchange capital; protest against the latest dictate from Paris; and protest, finally, against a Reich's government which again gives the most colossal promises without asking the German people. Beginning of the meeting 10 a.m., end 12 noon. Admission M.I.- War invalids free No Jews admitted Advance sale: The office and Berchtold, Cigar Store, Tal 54 Summoner: For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The meeting was attended by more than 8000 persons. 528 APPENDIX NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY While France, by breach of the Peace Treaty, occupies more and more territories, while Poland, freed of the bolshevistic danger, is about to annex Upper Silesia, despite all results of the plebiscite, a so-called German Reich government sees cause to destroy in the same moment the last remainder of our people's possibili- ties of resistance. It has learned nothing from Spa, Versailles, Paris, London. Now as before it trusts in phrases and assurances of 'world con- science,' 'culture solidarity/ and similar 'bunk. 1 Thus for Poland the rape of Upper Silesia will become just as without danger as the occupation of the Ruhr district, thanks to our present Reich's government, is already for France. Against this we protest. Not against the disarmament of some kind of organization, but against making our people defenseless for the purpose of its en- slavement and delivery into the hands of the international stock exchange capital and its henchmen. German fellow citizens! He who does not want Germany to offer herself forever in doglike submissiveness to the international world capital as a colony, should come today, March 15, 1921, at 8 p.m. to the Zirkus Krone to the GIANT DEMONSTRATION OF PROTEST Adolf Hitler will speak about: 'STATESMEN OR NATIONAL CRIMINALS' End 10 p.m. Jews not admitted Admission M.I.- War invalids free Summoner: For the party management, A. Drexler The meeting was attended by more than 5000 persons. APPENDIX 529 NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY Germany's fate hurries towards its decision. Ignoring the plebi- scite, a Foreign Commission will decide in whose possession UPPER SILESIA is to remain. The Commission consists of adversaries of Germany Its decision is dictated by the flaming hatred against our people. International high finance raises its arm for the most serious blow against the freedom of our people and its independence, it robs our economy of its daily bread, coal. Upper Silesia is to be lost for Germany. And our people? It fights not against its oppressors, but against itself. 4 For the revolutionary liberation of the proletariat you must be victorious, or die.' Thus the Jewish agents, paid by international stock exchange capital, fool our people, they drive it towards a fratricidal war, and instead of the ' revolutionary liberation ' they bring it the end of the sole freedom that exists, the freedom of its own nation. FELLOW CITIZENS! Friday, April 8, 1921, in the Hofbrauhausfesisaal (Platel) there will take place a great public MEETING. Herr Adolf Hitler will speak about: 'GERMANY A WAKE' Beginning 8 p.m., Doors open at 7 p.m. No Jews admitted Admission for covering expenses of rent and bill posters M.I.- War invalids free. Summoner: For the party management, An ton Drexler The meeting was attended by more than 2000 persons. 530 APPENDIX NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY Working Germans! We want to recall to your memory only a few of the hundreds of slogans which your leaders and tempters, since 1917, have ham- mered into your brains unceasingly. 'Reconciliation' 'Understanding 1 ' 14 points' 4 World disarmament ' ' Liberation work peace bread * A 'life in dignity and beauty 1 etc. Whose heart is not rent when comparing these promises with the state in which Germany is actually today. Is it surprising, therefore, if one who was revolutionarily in- clined and who as early as November 1918 was ready for death on the barricades for his supposed ideas, if now in the most bitter disappointment he joins the ranks and the storm columns of that party which not only promises him the realization of his Novem- ber dream but even the 4 Dictatorship of the Proletarian ' over the rest of his fellow citizens. Fed on slogans for decades, it makes no difference to him who offers them to him, whether an agitator who comes from his own ranks be it out of idealism or business mindedness or the Jewish millionaire with shining patent leather shoes and bedecked with diamonds who presents himself to him as also proletarian.' Lasalle's words that 'A workers 9 movement has to keep itself free from Jews and capitalists ' is forgotten. On the contrary, he who leads it today is the Jew exclusively, and it is the stock exchange in whose service they stand. Today the thinking worker has to aee with horror that he has APPENDIX 531 become the tool of those who have established as their final goal the government of the 'capitalist constitution/ the dictatorship of the exchanges and banks, the monopolization of the working forces, the smashing of the national economy in the interest of the stock exchange and the proletarization of the middle class. For this is the aim and the end of the World War and of the so-called world revolution. For not the 'proletarian* makes them but the Jewish interna- tional great capital makes the revolution against him with the proletarian. But the reply to this most unheard-of betrayal of the world and of the nation by the international powers can only be the resistance of the Organized, National Force We call you all to this resistance! Thursday, April 14, 1921, at the M&nchncr Kindl Keller, at a great public MASS MEETING, Deputy Herr Rudolf Jung, Mem- ber of the National Assembly of Prague and 2nd Chairman of the German National Socialist Party in Czechoslovakia, will speak about 'NATIONAL SOCIALISM AS NATIONAL REVOLUTION 1 Beginning 8 p.m. Jews not admitted Admission to cover cost of hall and posters, M.I.- War invalids free Advance sale: Cigar store Berchtold, Tal 54, and at the Party office. Summoner: For the party management: Adolf Hitler The fighting organ of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany is the ' Voelkische Beobachter.' Office: MQnchen, Thierschstrasse 15 The meeting was attended by more than 4800 persons. 53S APPENDIX NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY Today world Jewry presses without mercy on our people. One territory after the other is being occupied. EXTORTION follows EXTORTION The eternal peace has turned into an eternal war. If, instigated by the Jewish agents of stock exchange capital and the Entente, Germany continues to lacerate herself in the interior, then after a few years our people will be able to cele- brate instead fc of the International May festival its national memo- rial service. In the most critical hour of our people, in the moment when we, practically abandoned by all the world, made defenseless by our own fault, have to watch France setting out to occupy new territories, while African negroes rape our women and children, while in Upper Silesia bands of Polish murderers and arsonists slaughter German workers, we turn to those who alone will be able to redeem Germany from misery and misfortune. We turn to the German worker and the German youth! We invite you all, you who on the one hand begin to recognize the Jewish democratic swindle, and on the other hand the inter- national-socialist fraud, to come to the ranks of national soli- darity, to join the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany. TODAY Friday, May 6, 1921, TODAY a great public MASS MEETING takes place at the Hofbr&uhaus- festsaal (Platzt) Speaker Herr Adolf Hitler 'GERMAN WORKERS AND GERMAN YOUTir APPENDIX 533 Beginning 8 p.m. Jews not admitted To cover expenses of the hall and posters, Admission M.I. - War invalids free Summoner: For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The fighting organ of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany is the ' Voelkische Bcobachtcr,' Mttnchen, Thierschstr. 15 The meeting was attended by 2100 persons. NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY Fellow citizens/ German workers/ Do you know the peace treaties? NO You do not know the peace treaty of Brest-Utovsk, because it has been kept from you deliberately, only in order to lie to you that Brest-Litovsk was the most disgraceful treaty of violation of all times. And when finally the Dictate of Versailles was presented to the German government for signature, there again one kept all knowledge and enlightenment from the people, for this time one had to make it believe that now it had the peace of reconciliation and understanding which one time SCHEIDEMANN was able to describe so marvelously. And even today, after almost 2 years, the German people is not enlightened about a treaty which primarily does not concern the fate of the so-called GREAT CAPITALISTS, but which ruins the existence of the working people* If of that flood of promises of November 1918 even today not only nothing has arrived, but the misery is greater than ever 534 APPENDIX before, then it is for the reason that the peace treaty of Versailles prevents from the very beginning any economic recovery and socially just order in Germany. The cry for alteration of this MURDEROUS TREATY can be fulfilled only if the entire German people at least know it. Tuesday, May 31, 1921, a great public MEETING takes place at the Hofbrduhausfcstsaal (Platzl) Herr Adolf Hitler will speak about: ' GERM AN WORKER and the PEACE TREATIES' Beginning of the meeting 8 p.m. Jews not admitted. To cover expenses of the hall and posters admission M.I.- War invalids free Summoner: For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The fighting organ of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany is the ' Vodkische Beobachtcr* Munchen, Thierschstr. 15 The meeting was attended by more than 2000 persons. NATIONAL SOCIALISTS, MANUAL AND WHITE COLLAR WORKERS OF MUNICH! Like a giant spider, the Jewish international world stock exchange capital creeps over the peoples of this earth, gradually sucking their marrow and blood. Thousands and thousands of its paid agents are untiringly active in the press and in political parties, and they confuse public opinion until brother no longer recognizes brother. The people, in whose eyes one stigmatized the defense of its own existence as a crime against human life, kill themselves mutually. But while thus lacerating itself, it trusts all the more blindly in the solidarity and the help of others. There are still APPENDIX 535 Germans who hope that by their clemency or enlightenment our destiny will be changed. They forget that, even if the peoples wanted to, their leaders would prevent this. '300 men who know one another, dominate the world!' The man who said this ought to know it, for he is not a 'reactionary/ not a 'Pan-German/ not an 'anti-Semite, it is PAUL WALTER RATHENAU Thus unchallenged ruin takes its course. We still talk about ' world peace f and ' national reconciliation, 1 of 'solidarity of the proletarians 1 and of 'culture conscience, 1 but the inexorable war of destruction against our people has already set in. More than 4^ thousand Germans have been slaughtered in Upper Silesia, partly in a truly bestial manner. But the German people remains indifferent. They are only Germans! If somewhere in the world a disaster happens, we collect money. If in England there are strikes, we support them. If the Hungarian government hangs ten Jewish stock exchange profiteers, whose money is sticky with the blood and the sweat of hundreds of thousands of honest people, we protest, we cry about pogroms and we demand the boycott of an entire State. In this way one has made fools of our people. In a few months the pressure of Germany's merciless oppres- sors will make itself felt in the remotest cottage. We will lose Upper Silesia, the Ruhr district will be taken by France, our labor force will be pawned, the treasures of our soil will come under foreign management, and meanwhile the whip of a merciless military rabble oppresses Germany and destroys our people. And all this for the sake of quiet and world peace. Where are the political parties and where is the so-called German press. So far the sole movement, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, honestly and openly, has led the political fight, 536 APPENDIX not according to the considerations of so-called mendacious tactics, but according to the iron-like principle of truth. In a time when for the seat of a Deputy a man changed his principles like his shirts, when compromise was looked upon as the sole proof of true genius, as the only anti-parliamentarian movement it went straight ahead. It saw greatness not in the dead number, but in the living spirit, in the uncontrollable will for action. German fellow citizens! By an enormous Mass Demonstration of all those who accept these principles, who condemn the present parliamentarianism and who believe in the future of our people, blindly and unshakably like in God, we want again to establish and to harden the principles of the movement from which alone we hope for the resurrection of the German people. Wednesday Wednesday July 20, 1921 July 20, 1921 a GIANT DEMONSTRATION will take place at the ZIRKUS KRONE Speaker: Herr Adolf Hitler 'FATHERLAND or COLONY' Beginning 8 p.m., end 10 p.m. Jews not admitted To cover expenses of the hall and posters admission M.I. - War invalids free. Summoner of the meeting: Hermann Ester The meeting was attended by more than 6000 persons. APPENDIX 537 NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS 1 PARTY HELP SOVIET RUSSIA! A cry which today pierces the whole world. Hardly 3 years have elapsed since the Jewish apostles of the Future State promised to bring men, in Russia, the paradise by way of revolution. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity happiness and bread, progress and human culture were to be demonstrated to the peoples of the world in an unattained model example. A host of Jewish party secretaries and professional dema- gogues did not tire of describing and praising again and again this wonder State of human contentedness. Reactionary enemy of the people retrogressive capitalist mongrel these were the names one gave to the disbelieving doubter of this blessing. And today! Soviet Russia has become a desert! Now it can no longer be kept secret that the greatest agrarian State has become the greatest cemetery of mankind. While now millions of Russian workers, worn out by hunger and despair, drag themselves from the cities to the country that equally suffers hunger, yet perishing miserably just the same, the flood of the destroyers of this Russian people, covered with diamonds, rolls towards the west of Europe, towards Germany and Switzerland. But what is Germany to do? We German National Socialists demand that the Russian people be given help, not by supporting its present government, but by the elimination of its present corrupters. Those who today give for Russia do not give for the Russian worker but for hit exploiter, the Jewish commissar. 53S APPENDIX German f Maw citizens, come Thursday, August 4, 1921, to the great public GIANT DEMONSTRATION at the ZIRKUS KRONE Speaker: Herr Adolf Hitler about: 'DYING SOVIET RUSSIA 9 Beginning of the meeting 8 p.m. Jews not admitted To cover expenses for the hall and posters admission M.I.- War invalids free Summoner: For the party management, A. Drexler The fighting organ of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany is the ' Vodkische Beobachtcr,' Mtinchen, Thierschstr. 15. Contents of the next number: 'The pogrom against the German and the Russian people* 'High Finance and World Revolution.' The meeting was attended by about 6300 persons. NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY It is an old criminal trick to join, after the completed act, In the call of 1 Stop thief (Censorship gap) 'Down with the rise of food prices' shout today those who are its actual originators. The same parties, the same men, who once, without wincing signed the dictates of exploitation and enslavement of Spa, Versailles, Brussels, Paris and London; the same men who thus helped in winding the hunger rope around our people, who devalued our money, who made our national production the source of gratification of the permanent rapacity of our enemies, cry now against the consequences of their criminal activity. APPENDIX 539 We protest against this swindlel Parties and men, who tried to make the documents of our people's enslavement valid by their own signature, have no right to protest against the SLAVE YOKE German fellow citizens! As early as two years ago, at a time when one still lied to the German people that now it was marching towards a state of infinite happiness, freedom and welfare, the National Socialist Party has untiringly emphasized that the consequence of our unheard-of cheating of ourselves would be unheard-of misery. Today, Friday, August 12, 1921, a great public MASS MEET- ING takes place at the Hofbrduhaus. Speaker: Heir Adolf Hitler about: THE PROTEST AGAINST RISING PRICES, A JEWISH SWINDLE Beginning 8 p.m. War invalids free To cover expenses of the hall and posters admission M.I. Jews not admitted Summoner: For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The fighting organ of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany is the ' Voelkische Bcobachter,' Mtinchen, Thierschstr. 15. Contents of the coming number: 'Settling accounts with the Frankfurter Zeitung' The meeting was attended by more than 2000 persons. 540 APPENDIX NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY Slogan after slogan rain down on our people ! International Solidarity ! A state of intimate fraternization is to arrive between English- men and Hottentots, between Chinese and Zulu Kafirs, French and Japanese, Russians and Germans, etc. They are human beings and therefore all equal! Although the colors are different, the quantity of brains and the physique do not correspond, the way of thinking and the achievements are not the same, yet the Jew asserts: they are equal, and therefore they are equal. A consequence of this equality is therefore the 'international solidarity.' But while the peoples dream of this l the same Jew smashes the only natural and most intelligible solidarity which ought to exist, that of every nation in itself. Immeasurable misery has come over Germany today. In Upper Silesia, in continued slaughter, thousands of fellow citizens sink into the grave. The black disgrace works havoc on the Rhine. Women, girls, and children pay for the bestial negroes' lust with their death. An uninterrupted stream of poison and disease flows into the blood of our people. Moroccan syphilis drives thousands of victims towards a cruel death. Tens of thousands of young Germans, partly while dreaming, partly while intoxicated, are dragged to the Foreign Legion. Hundreds of thousands of our children die slowly of under- nourishment. And now we ask, where remains the international solidarity of assistance? Bloody mockery I While the Entente robs us of more than one million cattle, it graciously gives us back a present of 6000 of them as a sign of world fraternization. And while Paris still demands the strict APPENDIX 54t fulfillment of the peace treaties, one assures us of the pity of the French proletariat. No, in that way Germany will never be free! To trust in international help means to build on fog and mist. Every German ought to have understood today, that inter- national and solidarity is only one and the same thing, that is rascality, villainy and profiteering International, finally, is only the world stock exchange, its supporters and guard of followers, the Jewish race. We German National Socialists have recognized that not international solidarity frees the peoples from the ties of inter- national capital, but the organized national force. The presupposition of any solidarity of the nations that reaches beyond their own people presupposes the solidarity of one's own nation. But this means the integration of the creative forces, no matter whether they are intellectuals or manual workers, into the party of creative work as compared with the wasting drones. German Fellow Citizens! The National Socialist German Workers' Party asks you all to come Thursday, August 25, 1921, to the ZIRKUS KRONE to a GIANT DEMONSTRATION against the continued cheat- ing of our people by the Jewish agents of the international world stock exchange capital. Speakers will be: Dr. A. SCHILLING, author, leader of the National Socialist German Workers 1 Party at Maehrisch-Ostrau, and Herr A. HITLER, Munich, about INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY, A JEWISH WORLD FRAUD 542 APPENDIX Beginning 8 p.m., end 10.30 p.m. Jews not admitted To cover expenses of the hall and posters admission M.I. - War invalids free Summoner: For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The fighting organ of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany is the ' Voelkische Beobachtcr* Mtinchen, Thierschstrasse 15. Today's number: Our Counter-settlement What we want, if we want. The meeting was attended by more than 6000 persons. NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY November 9, 1918 Fortune upon Fortune! 'The hour of liberation from the yoke of capitalism has come ' 'Militarism is smashed' 'Germany in future no longer sacrifices to this Moloch' 'After a long time of reactionary barbarity our people are now respected and honored among all the others/ 'The fate of the nations is in future decided by free self- determination/ 'Secret diplomacy is destroyed. 9 ' The nation's right is proclaimed* ' Freed from war and war atrocities, the nations join in the League ' 4 The wounds of the World War are being cured. Ger- many gladly helps 9 'Prices will be reduced at once' APPENDIX 543 'All corruption of the previous mismanagement of the State gives way to greater order and economy/ 4 Hon- esty becomes the prime law in the life of the German people' And, in short, a model State is formed, a para- dise such as the world has not seen before, the 'German Republic: It has not come exactly like this, but similarly. Capital has been freed of every yoke. Germany's militarism is smashed. France no longer has to bring sacrifices to her own Moloch, this is done by Germany. Our people is loved too be- cause it industriously delivers tribute. Our fate is decided on in free self-determination, not by us, but by the League of Nations. Secret diplomacy is no longer necessary: one can sell the nations openly without punishment. Meanwhile Germany joy- fully cures all wounds which the enemies inflicted on one another. The prices have been lowered with ingenious skill, not so much for the German but for the foreign countries. The State management is purged of all elements of cor- ruption and of narrowmindedness of the former Bismarck era, clever men stand in its place. Wirth and Gessler, Gradnauer and Rathenau and similar cohnsorts. Germany faces the great sale Complete bankruptcy approaches with gigantic steps. Six months sufficed for the government for the fulfillment of devaluing the German Mark to zero. A corporation of inter- national stock exchange scoundrels has become unrestricted master of Germany. Instead of by the kings of the blood, Ger- many is ruled by the kings of the stock exchange. Leather straps are being cut out of our people. And yet, this people are not even allowed to criticize those who as the sole culprits threw us into this enormous misfortune. The offense against the sovereign has become the offense against every Jew in politics. Parties are bargaining, and meanwhile one piece of land after the other is lost to Germany. S44 APPENDIX Fellow citizens, in the face of the loss of an age-old German country and in the face of the villainous indifference of those who feel themselves called upon to represent a people, we invite you to come TODAY, Friday, October 21, 1921, at 8 p.m. to the ZIRKUS KRONE for the GIANT MANIFESTATION OF PROTEST of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Herr Adolf Hitler will speak about: 'UPPER SILESIA, THE VICTIM OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE PARLIAMENT' Jews not admitted To cover expenses of the hall and posters, admission, M.I.- War invalids free Summoner : For the party management, A. Drexler The meeting was attended by more than 6500 persons. NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS 1 PARTY Fellow Citizens! Remember the days when it was palmed off on the German people under promises, that now the end of capitalist rule had come and that the truly 1 Social Republic 9 would begin. And who jubilated and shouted most of all? The stock exchange press of Berlin and Frankfort And why? Because one certainly spoke of socializing shoemakers, tailors, carriers, bakers, etc., but not with one word did one mention what would have needed socialization most of all: stock exchanges and banks. APPENDIX 545 All that was then talked about socialization was clumsy fraud, in order to deceive the masses about the fact that the destruction of the social economy of our people does not take place for the purpose of leading it over into common possession, but in order to enable its acquisition by international world capital. Not socialization was the aim, but world capitalization! But today we see the first sign of this so-called three years 9 socialization in the selling below cost of the one-time German Reich's railways to private capital. Never has a people been cheated more wretchedly. Today, Friday, November 18, 1921, a great public people's meeting takes place at the Hofbrduhausfcstsaal (Platzl). Heir ADOLF HITLER will speak about: 'THE SALE OF THE REICH'S RAILWAYS AS THE BEGINNING OF SOCIALIZATION' Beginning 8 p.m. Jews net admitted To cover expenses of the hall and posters admission M.I.- War invalids free White collar and manual workers, officials and employees, come in greatest numbers to this meeting. Summoner: For the party management, A. Drexler The meeting was attended by 2100 persons. As early as 1921 the first attempts were made at delivering the German State Railways to private capitalist groups. The movement at once protested against this and was laughed at because of its fears. 546 APPENDIX NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY Fellow Citizens! A year ago we called you to the Zirkus Krone. For the first time we invited you to a giant protest against making Germany defenseless by disarmament. We declared that this making her defenseless would be the prelude for the loss of Upper Silesia. For the second time we invite you to resistance against the Paris Dictate. We called it the permanent enslavement of Germany. And a third time we called you to this huge room: 4 We raise our protest against the signing of the London Ultimatum, for in it we see the cause of a never-ending extortion and exploita- tion of our people, an eternal impoverization of our nation. 9 Three times we have been laughed all Today we ask: Do people laugh even now? Upper Silesia is lost. Germany is politically enslaved as never before. Poverty no longer begins to appear, it is here. And though one does not feel it in the armchairs of the parliaments and in the soft cushions of our people's leaders it is felt all the more by the millions who have been cheated, by the masses of the people who do not live by cheating, profiteering and usury, but by the sweat of their honest work. But we are not only a poor people, we are also a miserable people. We have forgotten the millions of our fellow citizens who once, during a long four and a half years, bled for Germany's existence on innumerable battlefields, and of whom our father- land has been robbed by a cruel fate. We have forgotten the millions of those Germans who long- ingly await the day which brings them home to a country that even as the poorest would still present the happiness of being their fatherland. We have forgotten the Rhineland and Upper APPENDIX 547 Silesia, forgotten German-Austria and the millions of our brothers in Czechoslovakia, forgotten Alsace-Lorraine and the Palatinate, and while our beloved Germany thus lies dismembered, power- less and torn, disgracefully robbed, a colony of the international world criminals, there we dance. We invite you to come Thursday, February 2, 1921, to a GIANT DEMONSTRATION for a coming GREATER GERMANY to the Zirkus Krone Engineer Rudolf JUNG, Deputy of the Prague Parliament, and Party Member Adolf HITLER will speak about: 'GERMANY IN HER DEEPEST HUMILIATION 9 Beginning 8 p.m., end 10 p.m. Jews not admitted To cover expenses of the hall and posters admission M.I. - War invalids free. Fellow citizens, white collar and manual workers, Germans from all countries of our fatherland, come in masses! Summoner : For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The meeting was attended by more than 7000 persons. * NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY For two years, our movement has been slandered and calumniated aa no other movement. Now we are 'bolshevists,' then again 4 reactionaries, ' then "monarchists' and again 4 revolutionaries/ according to the need of our opponents. The fight which for many a long day we led against the gang 548 APPENDIX of political profiteers and economic speculators is palmed off by them in a cunning manner as a 'FIGHT AGAINST THE FOLKISH STATE' In order to uncover the mendacity of this calumny, spread by the agents of the actual peoples' tyrants, the Jewish interna- tional world stock exchange, we will hold a great people's meet- ing on Friday, February 17, 1922, at the Burgerbr&ukcller, Rosen- heimer Strasse. Herr ADOLF HITLER will speak about: 'PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OR JEWISH STATE 9 Beginning of the meeting 8 p.m. Jews not admitted. To cover expenses of the hall and posters admission M.I.- War invalids free Summoner: For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The meeting was attended by 3600 persons. * NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY German Fellow Citizens! White collar and Manual Workers! In number 90 of the * MUnchner Post' we read the following sentence: 'Even the most honest "policy of fulfillment," which gives away its last shirt, will never be able to make the Poincarists relinquish their plans. It is no use whatsoever to make a secret of this simple truth. With all illusions of a unity of mankind and culture solidarity, with our hopes for a victory of right and reason, we cannot abolish the bare fact that these rulers of France want the ruin of the German Reich and the German people, and that so far nobody in this world has found the energy and the determination to stop their proceedings. 9 APPENDIX 549 For three years now we National Socialists preach this commonplace, and in return for this the same Milnchner Pest and its backers have called us 'Labor Traitors 9 and decried and calumniated us as 'capitalist dogs' and 'reac- tionary militarists/ Of course, for us the above-cited realization was not an empty phrase but a sacred obligation to act accordingly and to call this entire policy of fulfillment what it was and is, namely, a crime against our people. But once more they know how to pour new hope into the hearts of our credulous people: GENOA. After a few months the people will recognize here also that once more it has fallen victim to an enormous world fraud of the Jewish international stock exchange. It will recognize that the fruit of these negotiations will not come to the millions of our starved, suffering people, but exclusively again to the stock exchange and its backers. But with us distress will grow, as it has grown more and more, despite all the phrases and talks. Today, Friday, April 21, 1922, another great MASS MEET- ING takes place at the Burgcrbraukeller, Roscnheimer Strasse Herr Adolf Hitler will speak about: 'GENOA, AS A NATIONS 1 OR A STOCK EXCHANGE CONFERENCE' Beginning of the meeting 8 p.m. Jews not admitted To cover expenses of the hall and posters admission M.I. - War invalids free Summoner : For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The fighting organ of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany is the 'Voclkische Beobacktcr,' Munchen, 550 APPENDIX Thierschstr. 15. Friday, April 21, 1922, a special number will be published. Contents: Speech of our Party Member Adolf Hitler in the Mass Meeting of April 12, 1922. Price of this number M.2. - The meeting was attended by 3500 persons. As will be remembered, truly exuberant hopes were at that time attached to the Genoa Conference, a lunacy which the National Socialist German Workers' Party immediately opposed energetically and was right in the end. NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY German Fellow Citizens! German youth of all classes and professions/ The terror of the Jewish stock exchange and its henchmen weighs heavily upon Germany* The movement of folkish resistance against the exploitation of our people by international finance capital which today the Jew is no longer able to fight down with spiritual weapons, he has beaten down with force by the stock exchange parties. Meetings, celebrations, excursions, etc., were attacked, their participants are scattered by the force of the fist. Blood is flow- ing without the governments remembering that it is their duty to protect also the lives of those who according to their party belong perhaps to another direction than that represented by the one ruling at the moment. All this we saw coming. We never doubted that the moment the folkish movement should become a real danger for the international stock exchange race and for the gang of exploiters they would try to fight it by all i of violence APPENDIX 551 Therefore, as the only movement in Germany, we have set out to form a STORM TROOP Its purpose and its task is the work of liberation of our German people from the Jewish terror. And wherever the storm troops of the National Socialist Ger- man Workers' Party have been called into life, the Jewish Marx- ist brutality has not only been checked but has frequently broken down. But above all we succeeded in carrying out the security of the fight against the Jewish stock exchange power in Bavaria's capital. And we hope that in the course of the years the hundreds of our troops will turn into hundreds of thousands, so that the day may come when the working and creative German people will destroy the power and the force of the Jewish international stock exchange and its protecting parties. In memory of one year's existence of our storm troops in Munich there will take place a great German celebration on Thurs- day, August 3, 1922, at the Btirgerbr&ukeller, Rosenheimer Sir asse. The concert orchestra of Demmel's Band, increased to 42 mem- bers, as well as various excellent solos, will guarantee a successful celebration. Our Party Member Adolf Hitler will deliver the celebration address. Beginning 8 p.m. The doors will be opened 6.30 p.m. Tickets sold: Corneliusstr. 12. Admission: Party members on presenta- tion of membership card M.y.-, non-members M.io- Jews not admitted. Germans! We invite you: Fellow citizens, think of the hard times awaiting us, prepare for defense, come all of you. But above all we expect that the German youth, manual and white collar laborers, will appear in masses. Summoner: For the party management, Anton Drexler The meeting was attended by 2500 persons. 552 APPENDIX NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY When on November 9, 1918, the German people was driven into revolution, it was told that this was the beginning of the 'nations' liberation' from the bonds of * world capitalism.' Today the makers of the revolution of that time admit that the whole world is ruled by a gang of Jewish stock exchange ban- dits, that no longer the nations but the 'world bankers' decide on the destinies of this earth. In this way the true purpose of the revolution is fulfilled. While the power of the international stock exchange dictator- ship, thanks to the protection by the Marxist and democratic parties, grows more and more, the last remnants of millions of independent existences are destroyed. The extinction of our retail traders and of our retail commerce is the intended final goal of our present so-called 'Social' Policy A fraud upon the nations such as the world has never seen before. Fellow Citizens I Members of the doomed classes and professions, small business men and small tradesmen, manual laborers and officials, workers of all professions and classes! Come to the great public MASS MEETING at the Burger- brdukellcr-Fcstsaal (Rosmheimer Strasse), on Thursday, Septem- ber 28, 1922. Our party member Adolf Hitler will speak about: 1 THE POLICY OF THE DESTRUCTION OP OUR MIDDLE CLASS 9 APPENDIX 553 Beginning 8 p.m. Jews not admitted To cover expenses of the hall and posters admission M.I.- War invalids free Summoner : For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The meeting was attended by more than 2600 persons. NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY TODAY TODAY Tuesday. November 21, 1922, a great public MASS MEETING will take place at the Salvatorkeller (on the Nockherberg) Our Party Member ADOLF HITLER will speak about: WHY IS THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT BOUND TO BE VICTORIOUS? 9 Beginning 8 p.m. Admission M.S.- Jews not admitted Fellow Citizens I Lie and terror work against our movement as against no other movement in Germany. The parties of national fraud and decep- tion, the protective troops of the international stock exchange rule and of the nations' exploitation, Marxists and Democrats, feel the danger which our movement represents to them. They shun the hour in which the realization of the great masses will call them to account. Thus they believe that what the power of their ideas no longer accomplishes, the power of lie and brutality will do. Yet they are wrong. For parties may well be broken by this, but never the truth of a view of life. S54 APPENDIX White collar and manual workers, come in masses to this meeting. Summoner: For the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The meeting was attended by more than 2400 persons. * NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY National Socialists 1 Fellow Citizens! Anti-Semites I For three years the German people has been trying to fulfill a peace treaty which from the beginning was nothing but an assign- ment to centuries of compulsory labor and slavery, as well as to exploitation of the German workers. For three years the German people slaves and pays billions and billions, in order to prevent the enemy as the people are made to believe from proceeding to further compulsory steps against Germanity. And now? Now the moment has come when France's armies, which are nothing but the bailiffs and henchmen of ike international Jewish stock exchange capital, nevertheless set out on the inarch across the Rhine and occupy the heart of German economy and of German work, the Ruhr district. The Wirth policy of fulfillment, the trash of understanding and the impotent policy of the present parliament has broken down most miserably. And yet the new German government wants to continue a policy after the pattern of Heir Wirth. Fellow Citizens, we have to stand up against this. We invite you to manifest your will in our jive Mass Protest Meetings APPENDIX 555 Today! TODAY! Thursday, November 30, 1922, 8 p.m. at the Burgerbrdukeller Hofbrduhaus- Festsaal (Rosenheimer Str.) (Platzf) Lowenbrdukeller Schwabingerbrdu (Stiglmayerplatz) (Leopoldstrasse) ThomasbrdukeUer (Kapuzinerplatz) The following party members will speak: Anton Drexler Mttnchen Max Weber Munchen Dietrich Eckart Miinchen Alexander Schilling Walter Riehl Wien Czechoslovakia Hans Prodinger Salzburg Walter Kellerbaure Nttrn- Sepp Roller Salzburg berg Hermann Esser Munchen Anton Dorsch Rosenheim Hermann Wagner Odernheim (Occupied Territory) Our FQhrer, Party Member ADOLF HITLER will speak briefly at all meetings. Jews not admitted Admission M.S.- War invalids free Summoner: For the party management, A. Drexler The meetings were overcrowded and were attended by about 14,000 persons. NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY National Socialists! Anti-Semites! Germans of all professions and classes/ The party which in four and a half years of unequaled misman- agement has ruined Germany, which from the last weapon to the last Goldmark sacrificed the German national property to the 556 APPENDIX international stock exchange capital, which in numerous treaties pledged German enslavement and bondage, so that today, of eight hours' work, every German worker receives hardly two and a half hours for himself, because he is forced to sacrifice the rest to the Entente, this party now tries to exonerate itself of the sins of its criminal activity. In trembling fear of the awakening people one looks for the 'Gravediggers of the German Nation. 1 German fellow citizens 1 Now is the time for everybody to speak up openly I Those who are today of the conviction that the genuine and true gravediggers of the German nation are to be found in no other camp than in that of the ' Munchner Post* in the camp of the November criminals of 1918 and in their entire following of political and economic profiteers, speculators, usurers and stock exchange rogues, should come, as a reply to the five Auer meet- ings, TODAY! Wednesday, December 13, 1922, 8.30 p.m. TODAY! to our jo GIANT DEMONSTRATIONS at the following places: B&rgerbraukeller, Rosen- Hirschbraukeller, Zollstr. keimerstr. Salvatorkeller, Nockherberg Hofbrauhauskeller, Aeuss. Franziskanerkeller, Hochstr. Wienerstr. Lawenbrdukeller, Stiglmay- Hofbrauhaus- Festsaal, erpl. Platd Hacker ketter, TheresienhShe Grosser Wirt, Schwabing l Zur Bltite,' Bltitenstr. 18 Speakers from all German language districts Our Ftthrer Party Member ADOLF HITLER will speak at all meetings APPENDIX 557 Jews not admitted Admission for hall expenses M.5.- War invalids free Summoner: for the party management, A. Drexler The meetings were overcrowded long before the beginning. More than 20,000 attending. NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY Long live international solidarity! This was the slogan with which people beat down the few think- ing persons who had recognized the nations' fraternization and the solidarity drivel as Jewish stock exchange swindle Now our people will be able to open its eyes to the effect incor- porated in this 'Solidarity' Germany will starve, and nobody will care a straw for it. France occupied the Ruhr district, nobody from the rest of the world cares about it. Renewed extortions will follow, and nobody will feel pity for us. What alone could save Germany today? Self help! And of this sole help the German people has been robbed in fifty years' work of undermining by the international stock ex- change and its Marxist agents. Today the German people has to suffer the reward for the most infamous villainy of world his- tory, for its being made criminally defenseless by the NOVEMBER CRIMINALS of 1918 558 APPENDIX TODAY! Now come all TODAY? Thursday, January n, 1923, 8 p.m. to the GIANT MANIFESTATION in the CIRCUS BUILDING on the Marshfeld with the slogan : 'DOWN WITH THE NOVEMBER CRIMINALS 9 Our FCihrer, Party Member ADOLF HITLER will speak. Beginning 8 p.m. Admission to cover expenses of posters, Jews not admitted M . i o.- Summoner: for the party management, A. D r e x 1 e r The meeting was attended by more than 7000 persons. On this day was coined the phrase 'November Criminals* which since has become a by-word. * NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY National Socialists! Anti-Semites! What we have prophesied for 4 years has now arrived. Notwithstanding all the phrases of International Solidarity Drivel France has now set out to occupy the Ruhr district. Now the people can thank its erstwhile tempters. We, however, want to manifest in these days our solemn Protest against this Act of Vio- lence and our fanatical decision to call the culprits to account. Therefore we invite you to come to the GIANT DEMONSTRATION on Sunday, January 14, 1923, at 4 p.m. on the KOENIGSPLATZ National Socialists and anti-Semites meet at 2 p.m. in the rooms of the Btirgerbrdukeller and of the M tinchner-KiiuU-KeUer. APPENDIX 559 We march from there with music and flags at 2.30 p.m. Storm troops will meet in formation at 2 p.m. in the garden of the Btirgcrbr&ukeller. Germans, remember the importance of this historical hour, don't mind the weather but the obligation which you have to- wards a coming generation. Long live the Fatherland! The party leaders The demonstration was arranged by various organizations and it assembled about 80,000 people on the Konigsplatz in Munich. Speakers were: Dr. Buckeley and Adolf Hitler. END OF VOLUME ONE Volume Two THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT This translation was prepared under the aus- pices of Dr. Alvin Johnson, of The New School for Social Research. The typography of the text of this book follows that of the first German edition. Both italics and bold-faced type are used wherever they occurred in the original. The more important portions of this book, omit- ted from the Dugdale Abridgment or condensed in that version, are indicated by a dagger at the beginning of such passages and by an arrow at the end. CHAPTER I VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY ON FEBRUARY 24, 1920, the first great mass demonstration of our young movement took place. In the banquet hall of the Munich Hofbrauhaus the twenty-five points of the program of the new party were submitted to an audience of almost two thousand and each single point was accepted with jubilating agreement. With this the first leading principles and lines of direction for a fight which was to do away with a veritable host of handed-down conceptions and opinions and with unclear, even injurious goals, were issued. Into the lazy and cowardly bourgeois world as well as into the victorious march of the Marxist wave of conquest a new apparition of power was to step, in order to stop the wheel of destiny in the eleventh hour. - It was natural that the new movement might hope to gain the importance and the strength necessary for this gigantic fight only if, from the first day, it succeeded in awakening in the hearts of its adherents the sacred convic- tion that with it not a new election slogan was to be forced upon political life, but a new view of life of fundamental significance was to be put up. One has to consider out of what wretched viewpoints to-called 'party programs 9 are normally put together and 564 MEIN KAMPF made up or remodeled from time to time. One has to look through a magnifying glass at the driving motives of especially these bourgeois l program committees 1 in order to gain the necessary understanding for the evaluation of these program monstrosities. It is always one sole care which drives either towards renewed establishment of programs or towards changing those that exist: the fear of the result of the next election. Yes, as soon as in the heads of these parliamentary State artists the fear dawns that the beloved people revolts once more and tries to slip out of the harness of the old party carriage, they repaint the shafts. Then the stargazers and party astrologers come, the so-called 'experienced' and 'shrewd,' mostly old parliamentarians, who are able to remember analogous cases in their 'rich years of political experience' when finally the masses 1 patience was up, and who now feel that something similar menacingly approaches. Therefore they take up the old prescriptions, they form a 'committee, ' they go about listening among the dear people, they put their noses into the products of the press, and so they gradually scent what the dear great people would like to have, what it detests and what it hopes for. Every professional group, even every class of employees is minutely studied and searched as to their most secret wishes. Also the 'evil slogans' of the dangerous opposition are then suddenly ripe for an examination and not infrequently, to the greatest astonishment of their original inventors and propagators, they appear, quite innocently and naturally, in the treasury of knowledge of the old parties. Thus the committees are formed and they 'revise' the old program and issue a new one (whereby the gentlemen change their convictions in the way in which the soldier in the trenches changes his shirt, namely, whenever it is swarming with lice!) in which everybody is given what is everybody's. The peasant receives protection for his agri- VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 565 culture, the industrialist protection for his products, the consumer protection for his purchases, the teachers' salaries are increased, the official's pension is raised, widows and orphans are to be taken care of, to the greatest extent, by the State, traffic is promoted, the tariffs are to be lowered and even the taxes are to be abolished, though not com- pletely, but almost. Sometimes it happens that one has nevertheless forgotten one class or that one has not heard of a demand current among the people. Then at the last moment one patches in where there is room until with a clean conscience one may hope that one has calmed and has greatly satisfied the host of the normal petty bourgeois and their womenfolk. Thus armed in one's mind with confidence in the dear Lord and the unshakable stupidity of the bourgeois, entitled to vote, one can begin the struggle for the ' new shaping ' of the Reich, so to speak. Once the election day is over, and the parliamentarians have held their last peoples' meeting for five years to come, then, in order to turn from the training of the masses towards the fulfillment of higher and more agreeable tasks, the program committee is dissolved and the reshaping of the affair is again given the forms of the struggle for the dear daily bread: this, with the parliamentarian, is called diets. Every morning Mr. People's deputy betakes himself to the High House, though not quite into it, but into the lobbies where the lists of those present are posted. In the strenuous service of the people he signs his name there, and as a well-deserved reward accepts a small remuneration for these continued wearying efforts. After four years or during otherwise critical weeks, when the dissolution of the parliamentarian body again begins to approach more and more closely, an unconquerable urge suddenly creeps over the gentlemen. Just as the larva of the cockchafer cannot help turning into a cockchafer, thus 566 MEIN KAMPF now these parliamentary caterpillars leave the great com- mon pupae house, and, endowed with wings, they flutter out to the beloved people. Now they again talk to their voters, speak of their own enormous work and the malicious callousness of the others, but the foolish masses, instead of gratefully applauding, throw sometimes rude, even spiteful expressions at their heads. If this ingratitude of the people grows to a certain degree, only one means can help: the splendor of the party has to be brushed up, the program is in need of improvement, the committee is again called to life, and the swindle begins again from the beginning. Con- sidering the granite stupidity of our mankind, one should not be surprised at the success. Led by its press and blinded by the new enticing program, the 'bourgeois 9 as By 1930, general dissatisfaction with the parliamentary ideal was finding expression in two principal ways: antagonism to the ' Party system/ and antipathy to the coalition governments which the German electoral law made well-nigh inevitable. The political party in Germany was, first of all, a carefully controlled entity. There was an executive committee (Partei Vorstand) the members of which were often not themselves in political life; a Reichstag 'section, 9 paralleled by similar 'sec- tions' in the Landtags (Legislatures of the several States) ; and, last but not feast, an annual meeting attended by delegates from the country as a whole, at which, policies, programs, and personalities were passed in review. As a result there was a good deal of 4 party discipline/ but there was seldom much room for individual leadership and initiative. If a given states- man could not satisfy the various supervisory bodies set up by his own group, his popularity in the nation as a whole might be of little consequence. The German electoral law pushed proportional representa- tion to near the point of absurdity. On the theory that every vote is sacred, the establishment of smaller parties on a scale unknown in other countries was a normal aspect of political VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 567 well as the 'proletarian 9 ballot cattle return to their com- mon stable and elect their former deceivers. Thus the man of the people and candidate of the con- stituent estates again turns into a parliamentarian cater- pillar and continues to fatten on the branches of the State life, in order to change again, after four years, into an iridescent butterfly. There is hardly anything more depressing than to observe this entire procedure with sober reality, to be compelled to watch this betrayal repeat itself again and again. However, this is not the spiritual soil from which the bourgeois camp can draw the force for fighting out the struggle with the organized power of Marxism. The gentlemen never seriously think of doing so. f With all the admitted narrow-mindedness and mental inferiority life. Voting was on a mathematical basis; that is, in so far as the Reichstag was concerned, 60,000 votes elected a candidate. But additional votes from all the districts were added up, and one further candidate for each 60,000 such ballots was declared elected. As a consequence, the Party slate was a unit Reichstag deputies belonged to their Party rather than to their constituencies, and parties sponsoring a Weltanschauung could maintain nation-wide organizations although their real strength might lie in one district only. It is impossible to enter into further detail. We shall have to be content with a few generalizations which may help to explain why the attack on parliamentary government became so pop- ular: a widespread feeling that the parties existed for their own sakes rather than for the nation's, and were therefore concerned primarily in fostering their own well-being; a tendency to look upon the ' man in Berlin ' as a remote functionary, out of touch with the actual everyday needs of the people; and a belief that the constant maneuvering for power which characterized much of the Reichstag life was inherent in the parliamentary system, whereas, as a matter of fact, it was a consequence of the inev- 568 MEIN KAMPF of these parliamentary medicine men of the white race, they themselves cannot seriously imagine that by way of a western democracy they can fight a doctrine which, with everything involved, is in the best case a means to an end that is applied for paralyzing the opponent and for making the way free for their own activity. Although at present a part of Marxism in a very clever manner pretends to represent an inseparable connection with the principles of democracy, one should, if you please, certainly not forget that at the critical hour these gentlemen did not care a fig for a decision by a majority according to the western democratic conception! This happened in the days when the bourgeois parliamentarians saw the security of the Reich guaranteed in the monumental stupidity of a superior num- ber, while Marxism, with the help of a handful of street vagabonds, deserters, party bosses, and Jewish journalists, abruptly seized power, in this way giving Democracy a resounding slap in the face. But it actually takes the faithful mind of such a parliamentary juggler of the bourgeois democracy to imagine that now, or in future, the brutal determination of those interested in, and supporting, this world plague could be banished simply by the magic formulas of western parliamentarianism. Marxism will march with democracy until, by round- about means, it succeeds in winning for its criminal aims the support of the sane national spiritual world which it is determined to eradicate. But if today it came to the conviction that in the witch's cauldron of our parliamentary itable necessary quest for partners willing to enter into a coali- tion. In addition there was the same kind of friction inside the Landtags, not to mention the rivalry which existed between the Reich and the states. What the Weimar Constitution badly needed was reform not of its political essence but of its political methodology. VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 569 democracy a majority could suddenly be brewed which be it only a majority that is entitled to legislate would seriously attack Marxism, then the parliamentarian jug- glery would at once be at an end. Then the flag-bearers of the red International would, instead of directing an appeal to democratic conscience, issue a flaming call to the prole- tarian masses, and at one blow the fight would be trans- planted out of the stuffy atmosphere of the meeting halls of our parliaments into the factories and the streets. With this democracy would at once be done for; and where the spiritual agility of these folk apostles in the parliaments has failed, the crowbar and the sledgehammer of the incited masses of proletarians would succeed exactly as in the fall of 1918: with blows they would drive it home to the bourgeois world how mad it is to imagine that it could oppose the Jewish world conquest with the means of western democracy. As already stated, in the face of such a player, it takes a faithful mind to comply with rules which exist only for him for the purpose of bluffing or for his own advantage, and which are thrown overboard as soon as they no longer correspond to his ad vantage. -4- As with all parties of a so-called bourgeois orientation, the entire political fight consists actually only in fighting for individual parliamentary seats in which attitudes and prin- ciples are thrown overboard like sand ballast according to expediency, thus their programs are also tuned accordingly The Social Democratic Party had insisted from the beginning on free general elections as the basis for a constituent assembly. It fought down every attempt by radicals to create a govern- ment by Soldiers and Workers' Councils. That a constitutional assembly would be called had been agreed upon before Ebert assented to form a government with the co-operation of the General Staff. 570 MEIN KAMPF and although inversely their forces are also measured accordingly. They lack that great magnetic attraction which the broad masses follow only under the forceful im- pression of great overwhelming viewpoints, and of the convincing force of unconditional belief in these, coupled with the fanatical fighting courage to stand up for them. But at a time when the one side, armed with att the weapons of even a thousandfold criminal view of life, sets out to storm an existing order, the other side can give resistance only if this resistance itself is clad in the forms of a new, in our case a political, faith, and if it exchanges the slogan of a weak and cowardly defense with the battle cry of courageous and brutal attack. If therefore today our movement is reproached, especially by the so-called national bourgeois ministers, for Fear lest the Communist Party might stage a proletarian revolution, with or without the military assistance of Russia, naturally increased as the vote obtained by that party in- creased. That vote was, however, pretty generally an index to unemployment and the availability of political relief funds. Under the unpopular government headed by Franz von Papen, Communism gained appreciably, as a result of the anti-Left crusade inaugurated and of the quasi-dictatorial methods adopted. On July 31, 1932, the party polled 5,882,626 votes, while the Nazis obtained 13,745,780. The next Papen election was held on November 7 of the same year. The Communists gained 692,583 votes, while the Nazis lost more than 2,000.000 supporters. This meant that Hitler was back to where he had been during his first race against von Hindenburg for the presi- dency in 1932, while Thaelmann, the Communist leader, was a million and a half votes ahead. The great danger was not that the Communists would win by themselves. The real peril was that the masses which Hitler had activized might desert him and swing over to the opposite extreme, as a million of them obviously did in 1932. This risk becomes more real if one examines electoral statistics in some VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 571 instance the Bavarian Center Party, on the ground that it is working towards a 'revolution/ there is only one answer that one can give to such a political nitwit: yes indeed, we are trying to make up for what you, in your criminal stupid- ity, failed to do. By the principles of your parliamentary cattle trading you have helped to drag the nation into an abyss; we, however, in the form of attack and by establish- ing a new view of life and by the fanatically unshakable defense of its principles, will build the steps on which our nation some day will be able again to climb to the temple of freedom. Therefore in the time of the founding of our movement, our first anxiety had constantly to be directed toward pre- venting the host of fighters for a new sublime idea from of the hotly contested districts. There is reason to believe that this danger is one reason why the ' men behind the scenes* made Hitler Chancellor in 1933. At any rate, the menace of Com- munism was now taken very seriously; and when, on Febru- ary 27, 1933 just a few days prior to the election scheduled for March 5 the Reichstag building in Berlin was set afire, excitement grew by leaps and bounds. The government an- nounced that it had seized Communist papers indicating that a plot of great dimensions had been planned and that one of those who had kindled the fire had been captured red-handed. A great many Germans, especially in the rural districts of the South credited the reports. The vote for Hitler jumped to 17,277,180; and strangely enough a good many Communists appear to have changed their allegiance. General Goering's version of the Reichstag fire has not im- pressed observers. No evidence was advanced to show that the Communists had staged what from their point of view was a ridiculous fiasco; and the trial of van der Lubbe the fire- brand who had been apprehended only served to increase the general feeling that the unofficial version of that blaze was far more convincing than the official version. Newspapermen in Berlin at the time have never been able either to reveal in 572 MEIN KAMPF turning into an association for the promotion of parliament- ary interests. The first preventive measure was thereafter the creation of a program, which, in its aim, drove towards a develop- ment which merely by its inner greatness seemed suitable for scaring off the small and weak minds of our present- day party politicians. But how correct our conception was that programmatical aims have to be coined in the most pointed expressions, appeared most clearly from those catastrophic ailments which finally led to Germany's collapse. Out of this recognition a new State concept was to form full or to evaluate properly the volunteer ' information ' which at the time was supplied to them from many sources. No major witness has thrown light on the matter. The details are re- viewed in The Burning of the Reichstag, by Douglas Reed. After 1933, Hitler was publicized as the savior of the world from Bolshevism. Dr. Goebbels and others propagated the idea with great skill, and it was used especially as an argument against the Churches. These and their political spokesmen, said Goebbels, had been manifestly impotent to stamp out this plague, whereas Hitler had wiped the slate clean with one brush of the sponge. The Church, and in particular Pope Pius XI, were accused of ingratitude for having failed to appreciate so great a boon. The Propaganda gained a new impetus when civil war broke out in Spain, and General Francisco Franco emerged as the leader of a crusade against what was assumed to be a revolution fomented by Moscow. But it abruptly ceased for the moment on January 30, 1939, when Hitler, ad- dressing the Reichstag, aimed his shafts at democracy and neglected Communism. However that may be, the Communist Party of old has been decimated. Its leaders have, it is true, kept up an heroic fight against the regime; and their willingness to sacrifice life itself VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 573 itself which, in turn, is an essential part of our new concep- tion of life. In the first volume I have already dealt with the word 'folkish 1 in so far as I had to demonstrate that this designation does not seem strictly enough conceived to allow the formation of a closed fighting community. All kinds of conceptions which widely disagree with all the essentials of its significance are now at large, identifying themselves with the word 'folkish.' Therefore, before pro- ceeding to the tasks and the aims of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, I want to give a clarification of the conception 'folkish' as well as of its relationship to the party movement. The conception 'folkish' appears as vaguely defined, open to as many interpretations, and as unlimited in its practical application as, for instance, the word 'religious/ It is very difficult to imagine anything exact conveyed by this term, either in the sense of conception of thought or in practical application. The designation, religious, be- comes tangibly conceivable only the moment when it is fused with a definitely outlined form of its effects. It is a very nice, although a very cheap explanation to describe the nature of a man as 'fundamentally deeply religious.' for the good of the cause must command the respect even of those who disagree emphatically with their views. The laws designate all Communist activity high treason, punishable by death, but even so an almost continuous propaganda effort has been kept up. The number of agents executed for complicity is unknown, estimates varying between figures in hundreds and figures in thousands. Many observers predict that if the move- ment reappears at all, it will be in the form of ' National Bolshe- vism,' Communism in Russia, too, is no longer the Communism of 1930. 574 MEIN KAMPF There may perhaps be a few people who feel satisfied with such a general term, to whom it may even render a quite definite, more or less clear picture of such a condition of a soul. But as the great mass consists neither of philosophers nor of saints, such a quite generally religious idea will mean to the individual only the setting free of his individual thinking and acting, without, however, leading to that effec- tiveness which grows from the religious inner longing in the moment when, out of the purely metaphysically unlimited world of thought, a clearly outlined faith is formed. This is certainly not an end in itself, but a means to an end ; but it is the unavoidably necessary means for reaching the end at all. But this purpose is not only an ideal, but ulti- mately also an eminently practical one. As on the whole one has to make clear to oneself that the highest ideals correspond always to the deepest necessities of life, ex- actly as the nobility of the most sublime beauty is ulti- mately found only in what is logically most expedient, f While faith helps in lifting man above the level of an animal-like existence, it adds in reality to his power for fixing and securing his existence. If one were to take from present mankind its principles based on religion and faith, which in their practical effectiveness are ethical and moral, by eliminating this religious education and without replac- ing it by an equivalent, one would be confronted with a result amounting to a serious undermining of the founda- tions of their existence. Therefore one may well determine that man lives not only in order to serve higher ideals, but that these higher ideals, inversely, give also the presump- tion for his existence as man. Thus the circle is closed. Naturally, even in the general word 'religious 1 lie vari- ous basic thoughts and convictions, for instance, that of the indestructibility of the soul, of the eternity of its exist- ence, the existence of a higher being, etc. But all these thoughts, no matter how convincing they may be for the VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 575 individual, are subject to critical examination on his part and thus to a wavering affirmation or negation, until guess- ing or emotional realization assumes the binding force of apodictic faith. This above all is the fighting factor which now makes a breach and frees the way for the recognition of fundamental religious opinions. Without the clearly outlined faith, religiousness in its unclear manysidedness would not only be without value for human life, but would even probably add to general disintegration. The designation 'folkish' presents a similar situation'to that of the conception 'religious. 1 In it, too, there lie various basic realizations. However, although they are of the most eminent importance, they are, as far as their form is concerned, so little clearly defined that they rise above the value of an opinion to be more or less recognized only if, as the basic elements, they are integrated into the frame of a political party. For the materialization of the ideals of a view of life and the postulates derived from them takes place through pure feeling or the inner witt of men in themselves just as little as perhaps the gaining of freedom through a general longing for it. No, only if the ideal urge for independence receives, in the forms of military means of power, the fighting organization, can tJte urgent wish of a people be turned into glorious realization.** Every view of life, though it may be right a thousand times and of the highest value to mankind, will remain without importance for the practical working-out in detail of a nation's life, unless its principles have become the banner of a fighting movement which, in turn, will be a party until its effects have fulfilled themselves in the victory of its ideas, and its party dogmas now form the new basic State principles of tiie people's community. f But if a general spiritual conception is to serve as the foundation of a coming development, then the first pre- 576 MEIN KAMPF sumption is the creation of absolute clarity about the nature, the kind and the size of this conception, as only on such a basis can a movement be formed which by the inner homogeneity of its convictions is able to develop the force necessary for the fight. Out of general conceptions a politi- cal program, and out of a general view of life a definite political faith have to be coined. This faith, since its goal has to be one that can be practically achieved, will not only have to serve the idea in itself, but it will also have to consider the fighting means which exist and have to be applied for gaining the victory of this idea. The ab- stractly correct spiritual conception which the program- maker has to preach must be accompanied by the practical knowledge of the politician. Thus an eternal ideal, as the guiding star of mankind, must unfortunately resign itself to taking into consideration the weaknesses of mankind if it wants to avoid failing from the very beginning, in con- sequence of general human inadequacy. The searcher for truth, therefore, has to associate with the judge of the psyche of a people in order to draw and to shape, out of the realm of the eternally true and ideal, what is humanly possible for small mortals. The transformation of an ideal conception of highest veracity, based upon a general view of life, into a definitely limited, tightly organized political community of believers These passages are directed against the various folkish groups which were averse to being swallowed up in Hitler's organiza- tion or to accepting his leadership. References have been made to them in previous annotations. Particular attention may be called to three which loomed large in the years between 1924 and 1927. The South German branch of the D.N.V.H., an organization of Christian salaried employees, undertook a con- siderable amount of folkish educational work. Though a large part of the membership subsequently became Nazis, the great VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 577 and fighters, uniform in spirit and will power, is the most significant achievement, as solely on its fortunate solution the possibility of a victory of the idea depends. Therefore, out of the host of sometimes millions of people, who indi- vidually more or less clearly and distinctly guess this truth, partly perhaps understand it, one man must step forward in order to form, with apodictic force, out of the wavering world of imagination of the great masses, granite principles, and to take up the fight for their sole correctness, until out of the playing waves of a free world of thought a brazen rock of uniform combination of form and will arises. The general right for such an activity is based on its necessity, the personal right, in success. If we try to extract from the word ' folkish ' the innermost nucleus, representing its meaning, we come to the following Our present current political conception of life is gen- erally based upon the conception that one can ascribe to the State in itself a creative culture-forming force, but that majority voted for the German National Party at the time Hitler was writing. The German Folkish Freedom Movement, embodying the remnants of the party which Graefe had lead to a minor triumph in 1924, continued to hold out against Hitler. The two men fought many a long-distance oratorical duel, there was a lawsuit between them, but Graefe eventually lost ground. In addition Anton Drexler kept a Munich rival organ- ization alive the National-sozialtT Volksbund (National Social People's Union). For a time Hitler warred against these and similar groups more intensively than he did against the Marxists. The last important association of this land the Widerstands Kreis, led by Ernst Niekiesch was practically wiped out in 1938, when virtually all the leaders were sent to prison. 578 MEIN KAMPF it has nothing to do with racial presumptions, and that it is rather a product of economic necessities, but at best the natural result of the political urge for power. This fundamental view, in its further logical and consequent development, leads not only to a mistaken recognition of racial original forces, but also to an undervaluation of the individual. For the negation of the difference of the several races as regards their general culture-creating forces, must necessarily also transfer this greatest error to the judgment of the individual person. The belief in the equality of the races will then become the basis of an equal manner of observation of the peoples and further for the individual man. Therefore Marxism itself is nothing but the trans- mission, carried out by the Jew Karl Marx, of a long Long before Marx, the Catholic Church had taught the equality of men before God. It entrusted the defense of that equality to a Papacy 'set above the nations' in order to uphold the universalistic validity of Christian traditions concerning God and man. This Papacy has often been attacked as a source of 'divided Catholic allegiance/ But regardless of whether Vatican diplomacy acted rightly or wrongly in given concrete instances, there can be no doubt today that either those tradi- tions have international validity, or that they have no validity at all. Hitler carefully avoided any attack on the Catholic Church in Mein Kampf. But the conflict which has since then developed is implicit in his repudiation of all international values, as the ablest Christian students clearly saw long before 1933. Marx, faithful to his neo-Hegelian epistemology, did not recognize the validity of Christian theology ; but based his whole doctrine upon the validity of the teaching that human rights are universal. This he derives from Christian, not Jewish teach- ings; and as time has gone on it has become evident that the suppression of human rights as understood by the Marxist has its corollary in the suppression of human rights as understood by the Christian, in particular by the Catholic. VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 579 existing attitude and conception, conditioned by a view of life, to the form of a definite political creed : international Marxism. Without the basis of such a general, previously existing poisoning, the astounding political success of this doctrine would never have been possible. Karl Marx was really the only one among millions who, in the swamp of a gradually decomposing world, recognized, with the keen eye of the prophet, the most essential poison elements, took them out, in order to render them, like a magician of the black arts, into a concentrated solution for the quicker destruction of the independent existence of the free nations of this earth. But all this in the service of his race. The Marxist doctrine is the brief spiritual extract of the view of life that is generally valid today. Merely for this reason every fight by our so-called bourgeois world against it is impossible, even ridiculous, as this bourgeois world also is essentially interspersed with all these poison ele- ments, and worships a view of life which in general is dis- tinguished from the Marxian view only by degrees or per- sons. The bourgeois world is Marxist, but it believes in the possibility of a domination of certain human groups (bourgeoisie), while Marxism itself plans to transmit the world systematically into the hands of Jewry, f In opposition to this, the 'folkish' view recognizes the importance of mankind in its racially innate elements. In principle, it sees in the State only a means to an end, and as its end it considers the preservation of the racial existence of men. Thus it by no means believes in an equality of Here Hitler departs from Hegel, to whom his 'totalitarian- ism 9 seems to owe very little. In so far as it has a philosophic foundation, it derives from Fichte and Plato. The State is an instrument for the realization of a Weltanschauung. On the one hand, it is a propaganda instrument for inculcating into one's own and other peoples the doctrine of the superiority of the 580 MEIN KAMPF the races, but with their differences it also recognizes their superior and inferior values, and by this recognition it feels the obligation in accordance with the Eternal Will that dominates this universe to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and the weaker. Thus in principle it favors also the funda- mental aristocratic thought of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual. It sees not only the different values of the races, but also the dif- ferent values of individual man. In its opinion, out of the masses emerges the importance of the person, but by this it has an organizing effect, as contrasted with disorganiz- ing Marxism. It believes in the necessity of idealizing mankind, as, in turn, it sees in this the only presumption for the existence of mankind. But it cannot grant the right of existence to an ethical idea, if this idea represents a danger for the racial life of the bearers of higher ethics; for in a hybridized and negrified world all conceptions ol the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as all concep- Aryan race. On the other hand, it is also an instrument of war to be used in securing whatever is needed for the enrichment of that race. To the query, 4 Why should the superiority of the Aryan race be so important? ' Hitler also gives the answer in this vitally significant passage: the race must be maintained in a position of superiority because it is the only foundation on which superiority can be conceded to the leaders and exemplars of that race. Men are divided into rulers and ruled because only so can the two ends of an aristocracy rooted in nature be served : organization for racial improvement, and organization for racial aggrandizement. Those to whom the guardianship of the Weltanschauung and therewith of the State also are en- trusted cannot tolerate any other ethical idea. For in such an idea there can be neither goodness nor beauty as they under stand such things. VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 581 tions of an idealized future of our mankind, would be lost forever. * In this world human culture and civilization are in- separably bound up with the existence of the Aryan. His dying-off or his decline would again lower upon this earth the dark veils of a time without culture. The undermining of the existence of human culture by destroying its supporters appears, in a folkish view of life, as the most execrable crime. He who dares to lay hand upon the highest image of the Lord sins against the benevo- lent Creator of this minade and helps in the expulsion from Paradise. With this the folkish view of life corresponds to the innermost will of nature, as nature restores that free play of the forces which is bound to lead to a permanent mutual higher breeding, until finally the best of mankind, having acquired the possession of this earth, is given a free road for activity in domains which will lie partly above, partly outside it. We all sense that in the distant future problems could approach man for the conquest of which only a highest race, as the master nation, based upon the means and the possibilities of an entire globe, will be called upon. It is obvious that such a general establishment of the contents of a folkish view of life, according to its meaning, can lead to a thousandfold interpretation. Actually we find hardly one of our new political formations which does not call upon this conception of life in one way or another. This is probably an allusion to Nietzsche. On the other hand, it may embody some dimly visualized picture akin to Stefan George of a Roman Empire to be, wrestling with problems of over-population and kindred ills. 582 MEIN KAMPF But just by its own existence, as contrasted with the many others, it proves the differentiation of its conceptions. Thus the Marxist world concept, led by a central peak organization, is confronted with a hodge-podge of concep- tions which merely from the viewpoint of the idea is little impressive as compared with the closed hostile front. Vic- tories are not won with such weak weapons! Not until the international view of life politically led by organized Marxism is opposed by a folkish view of life, just as uniformly organized and led with equal fighting energy, will success take the side of eternal truth. But the organizing perception of a view of life can forever only take place on the basis of a definite formulation of the latter, and what the dogmas represent for faith, the party prin- ciples are for the political party in the making. With this, therefore, an instrument must be created for the folkish view of life which gives it the possibility of representa- tion by way of fighting, similar to the way in which the Marxist party organization frees the road for internationalism. This is the goal that the National Socialist German Workers' Party pursues. That such an establishment of the folkish conception from the party viewpoint is the presumption for the victory of the folkish view of life is most keenly proved by a fact which is admitted, at least indirectly, even by the oppo- nents of such a party tie. Just those who do not tire of emphasizing that the folkish view of life is not at all the 'hereditary estate' of an individual, but that it slumbers or 'lives' in the hearts of God knows how many millions, testify by this that the fact of a general presence of such conceptions was not able to prevent the victory of the hostile view of life, representing the party viewpoint of a class. If it were different, then the German people would already have gained a gigantic victory and would not be standing on the brink of an abyss. What gave the inter- VIEW OF LIFE AND PARTY 511 national conception of life its success was that it was represented by a political party, organized in the manner of storm troops; what made the opposing view of life suc- cumb was that so far it lacked a uniformly shaped repre- sentation. Not in an unrestricted release of the interpreta- tion of a general view, but only in the limited and thereby integrating form of a political organization, can a view of life fight and conquer. Therefore I saw my own task especially in extracting from the abundant and unshaped material of a general view of life and in molding into more or less dogmatic forms those nuclear ideas which in their clear demarcation are suitable for bringing together those people who take their allegiance to this. In other words: The National Socialist German Workers 9 Party takes over, out of the basic trend of thoughts of a general conception of life, the essential features, and out of these, with consideration of practical reality, of time and of the existing human material as well as of its weaknesses, a political creed that now, in turn, by the tightly organizing integration of great human masses, made possible by this, creates the presumption for the victorious fighting through of this view of life. CHAPTER II THE STATE AS EARLY as in the years 1920-21, our young move- ment was again and again reproached by the out- lived bourgeois world of today because our attitude towards the present State was one of rejection, and from this these footpads of political parties of all directions drew the justification of undertaking, with all means, the suppres- sion of the young and disagreeable announcer of a new view of life. But here, of course, they forget deliberately that the present bourgeois world itself is no longer able to produce a uniform conception of the State, and that a uniform defi- nition does not and cannot exist. For the interpreters are found, in most cases, in the guise of teachers of political law, whose highest task is to find explanations and inter- pretations for the more or less fortunate existence of their bread-supplying source of the moment. Xhe more impossi- ble the nature of such a State is, the more impenetrable, artificial and unintelligible are the definitions of its purpose of existence. What, for instance, should a former Imperial and Royal University professor have written about the meaning and the purpose of the State, in a country whose existence as a State probably embodied the greatest mon- strosity of the twentieth century? A difficult task, con- sidering that for the teacher of the affairs of political law THE STATE 585 there exists not so much an obligation to the truth, but rather a bondage to a definite purpose. But the purpose is: preservation at any price of the current monster of human mechanism, called State. Therefore one should not be sur- prised if, when discussing this problem, actual viewpoints are avoided as much as possible in order to dig oneself in- stead into a hodge-podge of 'ethical/ 'moral,' and other ideal values, tasks and aims. In general three conceptions can be distinguished : (a) The group of those who see in the State simply a more or less voluntary integration of people under one governmental power. This group is the most numerous. In its ranks are found especially the worshipers of our present principle of legiti- macy, in whose eyes the people's will plays no r61e whatso- ever in this entire affair. For these saints, in the fact of a State's existence alone lies its sacred inviolability. In order to support this lunacy of human brains, one needs an actu- ally doglike reverence for the so-called State authority. In the heads of these people a means is forthwith turned into the final end. The State's purpose is no longer to serve the people, but the people's purpose is to worship a State authority which includes even the most humble, in some way official spirit. To prevent this state of quiet, enrap- tured reverence from turning into one of unrest, the State authority's purpose is now to uphold quiet and order. It too is now a purpose and no longer a means. State author- ity has to care for quiet and order, and quiet and order, in their turn, have to make the State authority's existence possible. Thereupon all life has to revolve between these two poles. In Bavaria, such a conception is represented primarily by the State artists of the Bavarian Center Party, called 'Bavarian People's Party'; in Austria it was the black and yellow legitimists; in the Reich proper it is frequently un- 586 MEIN KAMPF fortunately the so-called conservative elements whose con- ception of the State moves along these tracks. (b) The second group of people is numerically a little smaller, because those have to be counted among it who attach to the existence of the State at least a few conditions. They not only desire equal administration, but also, if pos- sible, an equal language be it only from the viewpoints of administrative technics. The State authority is no longer the sole and exclusive purpose of the State, but to this is added the promotion of the welfare of the subjects. Ideas of 'liberty/ mostly incorrectly understood at that, are in- troduced into the State conception of these circles. The governmental form appears no longer inviolable by the fact of its existence in itself, but it is examined as to its expedi- ency. The sanctity of antiquity is no protection against The attack is directed not against the contrat social but against the so-called 'legitimist principle.' This was generally subscribed to by more conservative commentators on the nature of German government (e.g., Giese and Jellinek), who for example debated the question as to how the authority of the state had been transferred from the Kaiser, to whom by assumption it rightfully belonged, to the Weimar Republic. Elaborate proof was advanced to show that there had been a legal transfer from Wilhelm to Prince Max of Baden, from him to Friedrich Ebert, and from him to a constitutional as- sembly. Accordingly attacks on the Republic were considered intrinsically illegal, unless it was assumed (as many of the conservatives did) that the Kaiser had not made the transfer voluntarily and could therefore rightfully take the authority back again. In Bavaria the People's Party maintained, theo- retically at least, that the Wittelsbachs had not deeded away their authority, and that therefore it had been usurped by Eisner and the Revolution. The monarchy, in their view, re* mained the only rightful government. Austrian legitimists adopted the same attitude. And therefore, because Wilhelm THE STATE 587 criticism on the part of the present. For the rest it is a con- ception which demands of the State, above all, a favorite working-out of the economic life of the individual, and which therefore from the practical point of view passes judgment according to generally economic conceptions of lucrativeness. We meet the chief representatives of this opinion in the circles of our normal German bourgeoisie, especially in those of our liberal democracy. (c) The third group is numerically the weakest. It sees in the State a means for the realization of mostly very vaguely conceived tendencies of political power of a linguistically molded and united State people. Thereby the will for a uniform State language is not only expressed in the hope of creating with this a foundation of the State which would enable it to support its exterior growth in had formally abdicated, many supporters of the Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs felt that their princes had first right to the throne of the German Empire. In the circles which Hitler frequented, the legitimist point of view prevailed ; and he had as a matter of fact received support in the first place because it was felt that he and his followers would help restore the monarchy. The Weimar Constitution seemed to take the social contract point of view, in the statement, 'All power goes out from the people.' But this was interpreted in so many different ways by the signers of that Constitution that any one analysis of it would be unacceptable. This is, on the whole, an attempt to set forth the German 4 liberal ' tradition as it was reflected in the Weimar Constitu- tion. The preamble to that constitution reads: 'The German people, united in their racial elements and impelled by the will to renew and strengthen their Reich, to serve in freedom and justice the ends of peace at home and abroad, and to further social progress, have established this Constitution. ' By 'united in their racial elements 9 the signers doubtless meant more than 588 MEIN KAMPF power, but not less in the moreover basically wrong opinion, that by this nationalization could be carried out in a definite direction. During the past hundred years it was truly a misfortune to be compelled to observe how in these circles, sometimes in the best of faith, one played with the word ' Germanizing.' I myself remember how during my youth this very word led to quite unbelievably wrong conceptions. Even in Pan- German circles one could at that time hear the opinion that Austrian Germanity, with promoting help on the part of the government, could very well succeed in a Germaniza- tion of the Austrian Slavs, whereby, however, one did not in the least see clearly the fact that a Germanization can only be carried out with the soil and never with men. For what one generally understood by this word was only the enforced outward acceptance of the German language. But it is a hardly conceivable mistake in thinking to be- lieve that, let us say, a negro or a Chinese would become a German because he learns German and is prepared to speak the German language in the future and perhaps to give his vote to a German political party. It never became clear to our bourgeois national world that any Germaniza- tion of this kind is in reality a de-Germanization. For if to- day by the enforcement of a general language the differences 4 united by language.' The phrase was a reminder that the Assembly frowned upon separatist efforts and was determined to keep Prussians, Bavarians, and Suabians together inside the boundaries staked out by Bismarck. Nevertheless language would have been accepted on all sides at the time as the great single contributory factor toward the attainment of unity. The Weimar Constitution was not an innovation but a re- statement in terms of constitutional law of much that had thitherto been common law. Cf . The Crisis in German Democ- racy, by Herbert Kraus. THE STATE 589 between various peoples that hitherto caught the eye are bridged and finally wiped out, it would mean the beginning of a hybridization and with this, in our case, not a German- ization but a destruction of the Germanic element. In his- tory it happens only too frequently that the outward means of power of a conquering people succeeds in forcing their language upon the oppressed, but that after a thousand years their language is spoken by a different people and the conquerors thus become actually the vanquished. As the nationality, or rather the race, is not rooted in the language but in the blood, one could be permitted to speak of a Germanization only if one could succeed in changing, by such a procedure, the blood of the subjugated. But this is impossible. Except, perhaps, if by a blood blending a change were to take place which then, however, would mean the lowering of the standard of the higher race. Therefore the final result of such a procedure would be the destruction of just those qualities which once made the conquering peo- ple capable of victory. By a coupling with a lower race, the cultural energies especially would disappear, though the re- sulting mixture would speak a thousand times the language of the formerly higher race. For some time there will take place a certain wrestling between the various mentalities and it may be that then the more and more sinking people, in a last effort, so to speak, will bring to light astounding cultural values. But they are only the single elements per- taining to the higher race or bastards, in whom after the first crossing the better blood has the upper hand and which now tries to struggle through ; but never the final products of cross-breeding. In them a culturally backward move- ment will always show itself. t Today it must be considered a fortunate circumstance that a Germanizjation as it was intended by Joseph II of Austria was not carried out. Its success would probably have been the conservation of the Austrian State, but also 59C MEIN KAMPF the lowering of the racial level of the German nation, brought about by a linguistic community. In the course of the centuries a certain herd instinct would certainly have crystallized itself, but the herd itself would have become in- ferior. Perhaps a State people would have been born, but a culture people would have been lost. For the German nation it was better that this process of mixing did not take place, although not as the consequence of a noble realization, but by the short-sighted narrow- mindedness of the Habsburgs. If it had come about other- wise, then the German people could hardly be called a cul- ture factor today. But not only in Austria, also in Germany herself the so- called national circles were and are motivated by similar wrong trends of thought. The Polish policy in the sense of a Germanization of the East, demanded by so many, rooted unfortunately almost always in the same wrong conclusion. Here too one believed that one could bring about a Ger- manization of the Polish element by a purely linguistic in- tegration into the German nationality. Here too the result would have been an unfortunate one: people of an alien race, expressing its alien thoughts in the German language, compromising the height and the dignity of our own na- tionality by its own inferiority. How terrible is even today the damage that is indirectly inflicted upon our Germanity by the fact that the German haggling Jewry, upon stepping on American soil, is put on This is a critique of those German elements which before the War had a protagonist in Dr. Alfred Hugenberg. They more or less identified national growth with capitalistic expansion, and looked upon the enforcement of linguistic uniformity as a means of preventing disorder. In addition the spread of the German language meant the growth of German trade, prestige and power. THE STATE 591 our German account, in consequence of the ignorance of many Americans. But in the merely outward fact that this people's migration from the East, swarming with lice, speaks German, nobody will see the proof of their German descent and nationality. -4- What in history has been profitably Germanized was the soil which our forefathers acquired through the sword and settled with German peasants. In so far as they thereby led foreign blood to our national body, they helped toward that unhappy splitting up of our inner life unfortunately even often praised which expresses itself in the German super-in- dividualism. t Also in this third group the State, in a certain sense, it looked upon as a purpose in itself, and the preservation of the State therefore as the highest task of human exist- ence. In summing up, one can state the following: all these opinions have their deepest root not in the realization that the forces which create culture and values are primarily based upon racial elements and that therefore the State, according to its meaning, has to consider the preservation The process of Germanization defined as conquest of the soil by German peasants is simple enough if one thinks merely in terms of territorial extension. But the phrase has deeper con- notations. The Kaiser once coined the sentence, 'Wherever the German eagle sets down its talons, there is a land that is German and will remain German.' This strikes the note which Hitler deepened. Modern Nazi comment (Darr6 and Rosen- berg) gives the term 'soil' a whole set of mystical implications. Thus Karl Troebs writes: 'The deeper meaning of the term fatherland, patria terra, is this that it is not merely a land where our fathers have lived, but that it is the land which is our father the primal basis and source of our existence.' Cf. Deutsche Kultur in Leben der Voelker (1938). 592 MEIN KAMPF and the raising of the race, this fundamental condition of all human cultural development, as its highest task. The Jew, Karl Marx, was able to draw the ultimate con- clusion from those erroneous conceptions and opinions about the nature and the purpose of a State: the bourgeois world by severing the idea of the State from racial obliga- tions, without arriving at another, equally acknowledged formulation, paved the way for a doctrine which denies the State in itself. For this reason, even in this field the fight of the bour- geois world against the Marxist International was bound to fail completely. It has long sacrificed the very founda- tions which would be inevitably necessary for the support of its own structure, and with the weapons that these weak- nesses themselves supplied without knowing it, it storms upon it. Therefore, the first obligation of a new movement which is based upon the ground of a folkish view of life is to see to it that the conception of the nature and the purpose of existence of a State receives a uniformly clear Then the basic realization is that the State represents not an end, but a means. It is indeed the presumption for the for- mation of a higher human culture, but not its cause. On the contrary, the latter lies exclusively in the existence of a race capable of culture. Hundreds of exemplary States may ex- ist on this globe, but in case of a dying-off of the Aryan culture supporter, no culture would exist which would correspond to the spiritual level of the highest peoples of today. One can even go further and say that the fact of human State formation would not in the least exclude the possibility of the destruction of the human race, in so far as the superior intellectual ability and elasticity, in consequence of the lack of its racial supporters, would be lost. THE STATE 593 f If today, for instance, the surface of the earth were up- set by a tectonic event of some kind, and if out of the floods of the ocean a new Himalaya were to rise, thus by one sin- gle cruel catastrophe the culture of mankind would be de- stroyed. No State would exist any longer, all bonds of order would be dissolved, the documents of a thousand years 9 development would be smashed, one vast field of death, covered with water and mud. But if from this chaos of hor- ror only a few people of a certain culture-capable race were preserved, then the earth would, even after a thousand years' duration, after its quieting down, again receive proofs of human, creative energy. Only the destruction of the last culture-capable race and its individual supporters would turn the earth into a desert forever. But on the other hand we even see, from examples of the present, that State formations in their tribal beginnings, if their racial supporters lack genius, are not able to guard them against destruction. Exactly as great animal species of prehistoric times had to give way to others and perished without leav- ing a trace, thus man also will have to give way if he lacks a specific spiritual force which alone enables him to find the necessary weapons for his self-preservation.-^ It is not the State in itself that creates a definite cultural level, it can only preserve the race which conditions the latter. In the reverse case the State as such may be able to continue to exist unchanged for centuries, while, in con- sequence of a race blending which it did not prevent, the cultural ability of a people, and the general aspect of its life, conditioned by this, have long since suffered a pene- trating change. The present State, for instance, may as a formal mechanism, very well simulate an existence for so and so long a time, but the racial poisoning of our national body creates a cultural decline which already becomes ter- rifyingly apparent, Thus the presumption for the existence of a higher humanity 594 MEIN KAMPF is not the State, but the nationality which possesses the essen- tial ability. This ability will always be present in principle, and it has only to be aroused to practical materialization by defi- nite external conditions. Nations, or rather races, which are culturally and creatively talented harbor in themselves these useful qualities, even if for the moment unfavorable external conditions do not permit a materialization of these latent tendencies. Therefore it is also an unbelievable of- fense to portray the Germans of the pre-Christian era as 'cultureless,' as barbarians. This they never were. Only the harshness of their Nordic home forced them into cir- cumstances which prevented a development of their crea- tive energies. If, without any classical civilization, they had come to the more favorable areas of the South and if, from the material of the inferior nations, they had received the preliminary technical means, then the culture-forming abilities slumbering in them would have grown into most radiant bloom exactly as was the case, for example, with the Hellenes. But this culture-creating primeval force itself has its source not only in their Nordic climate. The Lap- lander, brought to the South, would have just as little a culture-creating effect as the Eskimo. No, it is just the Aryan who is endowed with this glorious, creatively active ability, no matter whether he harbors it in a latent condition or whether he presents it to an awakening life, depending on whether favorable circumstances permit this or inhospitable Nature prevents it. f From this results the following conclusion: The State is a means to an end. Its end is the preservation and the promotion of a community of physically and psy- chically equal living beings. This very preservation comprises first the racial stock and thereby it permits the free develop- An interesting criticism and evaluation of the United States. THE STATE 595 ment of all the forces slumbering in this race. Again and again a part of them will primarily serve the preservation of the physical life and only another part will serve the promotion of a further mental development. But actually the one always creates the presumption for the other. States that do not serve this purpose are faulty specimens, even miscarriages. The fact of their existence makes as little difference as perhaps the success of a filibuster community is able to justify robbery. We National Socialists, as the protagonists of a new view of life, must never stand on the famous 'ground and false at that of facts/ In this case we would no longer be the fighters for a new great idea, but the coolies of the pres- ent lie. We must sharply distinguish between the State as a vessel and the race as the content. This vessel has mean- ing only if it is able to preserve and to protect the contents; in the reverse case it is useless.-* Thus the highest purpose of the folkish State is the care for the preservation of those racial primal elements which, supply- ing culture, create the beauty and dignity of a higher humanity. We, as Aryans, are therefore able to imagine a State only to be the living organism of a nationality which not only safeguards the preservation of that nationality, but which, by a further training of its spiritual and ideal abilities, leads it to the high- est freedom. What today one tries to force upon us as a State is mostly only the product of deepest human aberration, with untold misery as a consequence. We National Socialists know that with this opinion we stand as revolutionaries in the world of today, and that we are branded as such. But our thinking and acting must not At this time the fortunes of the Party were at a low ebb, and Hitler reflects his discouragement in this appeal to the verdict of the future. 596 MEIN KAMPF be determined by the applause or the rejection of our time, but by the binding obligation to a truth which we have realized. Then we may be convinced that the higher in- sight of posterity will not only understand but also affirm and ennoble our procedure of today. f From this results, for us National Socialists, the measure for the evaluation of a State. This value will be a relative one from the viewpoint of the individual nationality; an absolute one from that of mankind itself. That means, in other words : The quality of a State cannot be evaluated according to the cultural height or the significance of power of this State in the frame of the rest of the world, but exclusively according to the degree of the quality of this institution with regard to the nationality involved in that particular case. A State can be called a model if it answers not only to the living conditions of the nationality it represents, but if it practically keeps this nationality alive by its very existence no matter what general cultural importance is due to this State formation in the frame of the rest of the world. For the task of a State is not to create abilities, but only to make the road free for those forces that exist. Therefore, reversely, a State can be called bad if, with all cultural height, it consecrates the bearer of this culture in its composition to doom. For through this it practically destroys the pre- sumption for the continuation of this culture, which it has not created, but which is the fruit of a culture-creating na- tion, safeguarded by the living integration through the State. The State, thus, does not represent a content, but a form. Therefore, the actual, momentary cultural height of a people is not the scale for measuring the quality of the State in which it lives. lit is easily understandable that a culturally highly endowed people gives a picture of a value higher THE STATE 597 than a negro tribe; nevertheless, the State organism of such a people, looked upon according to the fulfillment of its purpose, can be worse than that of a negro. Although the best State and the best State form are not in a position to extract from a people abilities which are simply lacking and have never existed, then a bad State is certainly in a posi- tion, through destruction of the racial culture-bearer which it permits or even promotes, to kill originally existing abili- ties. Thus the judgment about the quality of a State can primarily only be decided by the relative profit which it has for a certain nationality and by no means by the importance which it has as such in the world. This relative judgment can be passed easily and quickly; the judgment of the absolute value only with great diffi- culty, as this absolute judgment is actually no longer deter- mined merely by the State but rather by the quality and the height of the nationality in question. < If therefore one speaks of a higher mission of the State one must never forget that the higher mission rests essen- tially in the nationality, for which the State, by the organic force of its existence, has only to make the free develop- ment possible. If therefore we put the question how this S^tate, which we Germans need, has to be constituted, then we must first see clearly what kind of people it has to integrate and what purpose it has to serve. Unfortunately, our German nationality is no longer based on a racially uniform nucleus. Also, the process of the blending of the various primal constituents has not yet progressed so far as to permit speaking of a newly formed race. On the contrary: the blood-poisoning which affected our national body, especially since the Thirty Years' War, led not only to a decomposition of our blood but also of our eoul. The open frontiers of our fatherland, the dependence 598 MEIN KAMPF upon un-Germanic alien bodies along these frontier dis- tricts, but above all the strong current influx of foreign blood into the interior of the Reich proper, in consequence of its continued renewal does not leave time for an absolute melting. It is not a new race that results from the fusion, but the racial stocks remain side by side, with the result that especially in critical moments when in other cases a herd would assemble, the German people run in all direc- tions of the winds. The racial elements are situated dif- ferently, not only territorially but also in individual cases within the same territory. At the side of Nordic people there stand Easterners, at the side of Easterners Dinarics, at the side of both stand Westerners, and in between stand mixtures. This is, on the one hand, of great disadvantage: the German people lacks that sure herd instinct which is rooted in the unity of the blood and which guards the na- tion against ruin especially in dangerous moments, as with such peoples all the minor internal differences usually dis- appear immediately and the common enemy is confronted by the closed front of a uniform herd. In this side by side placement of our basic racial elements, which remained un- blended, is rooted what with us one calls by the word super- individualism. In peaceful times it may sometimes render good services, but taken all in all it has deprived us of world domination. If, in its historical development, the German people had possessed this group unity as it was enjoyed by other peoples, then the German Reich would today prob- ably be the mistress of this globe. World history would have Possibly a reference is made here to American protagonists of racial science, notably Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant. Some of this group had argued that the 'barbarism' of the Germans during the War had been due to the fact that the best elements of the German population has been annihi- lated during the Thirty Years' War. THE STATE 599 taken a different course, and no one would be able to decide if in this way there would not have arrived what today so many blinded pacifists hope to beg for by moaning and cry- ing: A peace, supported not by the palm branches of tearful pacifist professional female mourners, but founded by the victorious sword of a people of overlords which puts the world into the service of a higher culture. The fact of the non-existence of a nationality, uniform in its blood, has brought untold misery upon us. It has given residential towns to many small German potentates, but it has bereft the German people of its right of mastery. f Even today our people suffers from this inner dismember- ment; however, that which brought us misfortune in the past and in the present can be our blessing in the future. For no matter how detrimental it was on the one hand that a complete mixture of our original racial constituents did not take place, and that by this the formation of a uniform national body was prevented, it was just as fortunate on the other hand, that by this at least a part of our blood was preserved in purity and escaped racial decline. With the complete blending of our original racial ele- Manifestly the Germans have tended to break up into groups, and most efforts to keep them together have either failed or succeeded only in part. Doubtless the major reason for this divergence is not racial but religious. In addition, the feudal system was outgrown very slowly in Germany, primarily because of the constant warfare between Emperors and princes in times when modern national states were in the making elsewhere. After the War, Germany very nearly disintegrated again. Movements favoring an independent Rhineland, an independent Silesia, and an independent Bavaria gained con- siderable momentum. Many Germans will tell you that if the Hitler government should fall, a new break-up of Germany would follow. 600 MEIN KAMPF ments a dosed national body would certainly have ensued, but, as every racial cross-breeding proves, it would be en- dowed with an ability to create a culture inferior to that which the highest of the primal components possessed originally. This is the blessing of the failure of complete mixture: that even today we still have in our German na- tional body great stocks of Nordic-Germanic people who remain unblended, in whom we may see the most valuable treasure for our future. In the clouded time of the ignorance of all racial laws, when in completely equal evaluation man appeared simply as man, the clarity about the various values of the several primal elements might have been lack- ing. Today we know that a complete intermixture of the stocks of our national body, in consequence of the unity re- sulting from this, would perhaps have given us external power, but that the highest goal of mankind would not have been attained, as the only bearer whom Fate has visibly elected for this completion would have perished in the general racial mixture of a uniform people. But today, from the viewpoint of our knowledge now gained, we have to examine and to evaluate what, without our contribution, has been prevented by a kind destiny. He who speaks of a mission of the German people on this earth must know that it can exist only in the formation of a State which sees its highest task in the preservation and the This is the source of the 'restored German pride* and of 'the empire that will last a thousand years' well-known to students of Hitler's oratory. At last the State has been given a task worthy of it. During the medieval time, the German Empire's solemn duty was to act as ' God's viceroy on earth* and to be a partner in the Divine government of men. Hence- forth in the Third Reich its energies are expended on a still nobler endeavor the improvement, conservation and ag- grandizement of the chosen German race. THE STATE 601 promotion of the most noble elements of our nationality which have remained, even of the entire mankind, unharmed. By this the State for the first time receives an inner higher goal. In the face of the ridiculous slogan of a safe* guarding of peace and order for the peaceful possibility of mutual cheating, the task of the preservation and the pro- motion of a highest humanity which has been presented to this world by the benevolence of the Almighty appears a truly high mission.^ Out of a dead mechanism that claims to exist only for its own sake, a living organism has now to be formed with the exclusive purpose of serving a higher idea. The German Reich, as a State, should include all Germans, not only with the task of collecting from the people the most valuable stocks of racially primal elements and preserving them, but also to lead them, gradually and safely, to a dominating position. Therefore in the place of a fundamentally stabilized con- dition appears a period of fighting. But as everywhere and with everything in this world, here too the phrase 'who rests rusts' will keep its validity, and further tha<t vic- tory is forever contained only in attack. The greater there- Prior to 1914, Pan-German organizations circulated maps showing what the boundaries of Germany would be when the Bismarckian Empire had attained dimensions commensurate with the position of the Germanic peoples in Europe. Portions of Belgium and Holland were then included. After the annexa- tion of Austria in 1938, shop- windows displayed maps setting forth the eventual boundaries of the Third Reich. Included were Austria, portions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, German Switzerland, most of Holland, Alsace-Lorraine and Flemish Belgium. 602 MEIN KAMPF by the fighting goal that wte have in mind, and the less the understanding of the great masses may be at the moment, the most enormous are, according to world history, the suc- cesses and the importance of these successes if the goal is rightly understood and the fight is carried out with un- shakable persistency. Of course, for many of our present official State leaders it may be more comforting to work for the preservation of a given condition than to be compelled to fight for a coming one. They will find it much easier to see in the State a mechanism which simply exists for preserving its own life, as in turn their lives ' belong to the State 9 as they usually express themselves. As if anything that sprang out of the nationality could logically serve anything but just this na- tionality, or as though man could work for something other than man. As said before, it is of course easier to see in State authority only the formal mechanism of an organization rather than the sovereign incorporation of a nation's instinct of preserving itself on this earth. For in the one case, for these weak minds, the State as well as the Stale authority is an end in itself; in the other case, however, it is only the powerful weapon in the service of the great eternal struggle for existence, a weapon to which then everybody has to sub- mit, because it is simply not formally mechanistic, but the expression of a common will for preserving life. Therefore, in the fight for our new conception which en- tirely corresponds to the primal meaning of things, we will find only few fighting comrades in a society that is not only physically but also mentally antiquated. Only exceptions, old men with young hearts and with minds that have re- mained fresh, will cpme to us from those strata, but never those who see the ultimate meaning of their lives' task in the preservation of a given condition. We are .faced by the limitless host not so much of the deliberately bad people, but of the mentally inert and in- THE STATE 603 different ones, and even of those who are interested in preserving the present condition. But just in this seeming hopelessness of our enormous struggle lies the greatness of our task and also the possibility of success. The battle cry which from the very beginning either scares away the small minds or soon makes them despair becomes the signal for the assembling of real fighting characters. And about this one has to see clearly : if in a people a certain amount of energy and active force appears united towards one goal and thus is taken permanently from the inertia of the great masses, this small percentage has risen to be the masters of the whole number. World history is made by minorities whenever this numerical minority incorporates the majority of will and de- termination. Therefore, what today may appear a difficulty to many is in reality the presumption for our victory. In the very greatness and in the difficulties of our task lies the probability that for this struggle only the best fighters will be found. In this selec- tion, however, lies the guaranty for success. t In general even Nature has the habit of making certain corrective decisions about the racial purity of mortal beings. Nature likes bastards only little. Especially the first prod- ucts of such cross-breeding, say in the third, fourth or fifth generation, have to suffer bitterly. Not only the importance of the originally highest constituent of the cross-breeding is taken from them, but they lack, with the deficient unity of the blood, also the unity of will power and determination for life as a whole. In all critical moments, when the racially uniform being makes correct decisions, and consistent de- cisions at that, the racially torn will become uncertain, that means he will arrive at half measures. Taking both facts together, this means not only a certain inferiority of the racially unstable as compared with the racially uniform, but 604 MEIN KAMPF in practice also the possibility of a quicker decline. In countless cases where the race holds out the bastard breaks down. In this must be seen the correction of Nature. Frequently it goes even farther. It limits the possibility of propagation. By this Nature limits the fertility of remote crossings as a whole and thus makes them die off. If, for example, a single individual of a certain race were to enter into a union with a racially lower individual, the result would be, first, a lowering of the standard in itself; further it would mean a weakening of the offspring as com- pared with the surroundings which remained racially un- mixed. With the complete prevention of a further blood influx on the part of the highest race, the bastards, with con- tinued mutual crossing, would either die off because of Nature's wisely reducing their ability of resistance, or in the course of thousands of years they would form a new mixture in which the original individual elements, in consequence of a thousandfold crossing, are completely mixed and no longer recognizable. Thus a new nationality with a certain herd-like resistibility would have been formed, but com- pared with the highest race which helped in forming the first cross-breed, it would be considerably reduced in its spiritual and cultural importance. But also, in this case, the product of the crossing would succumb in the mutual struggle for life, as long as there exists a higher race, that remained unmixed, as opponent. Any herd-like inner com- pleteness of this new national body, formed in the course of a thousand years, would nevertheless, in consequence of the general lowering of the race standard and the diminishing of mental elasticity and creative ability, conditioned by it, not suffice for overcoming victoriously the struggle with an equally uniform but spiritually and culturally superior race. Thus one can establish the following valid conclusion : < Every race-crossing leads necessarily sooner or later to the decline of the mixed product, as long as the higher part of this THE STATE 605 crossing still exists in some racially pure unity. The danger for the mixed product is abolished only in the moment of the bastardization of the last higher, racially pure element. In this is rooted a slow yet natural process of regeneration which gradually eliminates racial poisonings, as long as there still exists a basic stock of racially pure elements and no further bastardization takes place. f Such a process can occur by itself with living beings with a strong race instinct who only through special circum- stances or some sort of pressure have been thrown from the road of normal, racially pure propagation. As soon as this pressing situation is over, that part which has remained pure will immediately strive again towards mating with equals, thus checking a further mixing. Thus the results of bastardization step automatically into the background, pro- vided their number has not yet increased so boundlessl} that a serious resistance on the part of those who have re- mained racially pure is no longer in question. Man, once he has become devoid of instinct and does not recognize the obligation imposed on him by Nature, can in general not hope for such a correction on the part of Nature until he has replaced his lost instinct by perceptive knowl- edge; the latter, now, has to do the necessary work of repair. Most of this emanates from Chamberlain, and resembles innumerable essays written for Nazi and other anti-Semitic journals. Recently German race theorists have qualified and rationalized a good deal of it, but the underlying thesis remains the same. More attention is now paid to the 'Nordic,' which term figures little in Hitler's writings. This 'Nordic' is the racial absolute that once found expression in all Germans before the process of 'bastardizing 1 began; it is also the point of per- fection to which the future will return. Opponents of Hitler were wont to derive pleasure from contemplation of the differ- ences between the Fuhrer and his racial ideal. 606 MEIN KAMPF But the danger is very great that the man who once has be- come blind will tear down the race barriers more and more, till finally even the last remainder of his best part is lost. Then there remains actually nothing but a uniform mixture, such as appears as ideal to the idiotic world reformers of our days; but after a short time it would expel ideals from the world. However: a great herd could be formed in this way; one can brew a herd animal ', but from such a mixture a man as culture-bearer and, better still, as culture-founder, will never re- sult. With this mankind's mission could be looked upon as finished. He who does not want the earth to march towards this condition has to convert himself to the opinion that it is the task of the Germanic States above all to take care primarily that in principle a further bastardization is checked. The generation of our present-day notorious weaklings will of course at once cry out against this and will moan and complain about infringements on the most sacred human rights, etc. No, there is only one most sacred human right, and this right is at the same time the most sacred obligation, namely: to see to it that the blood is preserved pure, so that by the preservation of the best human material a possibility is given for a more noble development of these human beings.** Thus afolkish State primarily will have to lift marriage out of the level of a permanent race degradation in order to give it the consecration of that institution which is called upon to be- get images of the Lord and not deformities half man and halj ape. The protest against this from so-called humane reasons damnably suits a time which on the one hand gives every depraved degenerate the possibility for propagation, but which burdens the products of such a union themselves as well as their contemporaries with untold misery, while on the other hand, the means for preventing births to even the THE STATE 607 healthiest parents are offered for sale in every drug store and by every street hawker. Thus in this present State of quiet and order, in the eyes of its representatives, this brave bourgeois national world, the prevention of the procreative faculty of sufferers from syphilis, tuberculosis, heredity diseases, of cripples and cretins is a crime, whereas the practical prevention of the procreative faculty of millions of the best is not looked upon as an evil and does not offend the good morals of this hypocritical society, but is rather of advantage to the short-sighted inertia of thought. For, if this were not the case, one ought at least to ponder seriously on the question of how to create the presumptions for the feeding and the preservation of those beings who as the healthy bearers of our nation will some day have to serve the same task with regard to coming generations. How boundlessly unideal and ignoble is this entire system! One no longer endeavors to breed the best for posterity, but one lets things go as they go. That thereby our churches sin also against the image of the Lord Whose importance is stressed most of all by them, lies entirely in the line of their present-day activity that always speaks of the spirit and lets its bearer, man, degenerate to the level of the depraved proletarian. Then, however, with sheepish faces, one gapes at the small effect of the Christian faith in one's own coun- try, about the terrible * ungodliness' of this physically botched, and therefore naturally also mentally degenerated, miserable lot, and one seeks compensation by success with Hottentots and Zulu Kafirs, with the blessing of the Church. While our European peoples, the Lord be praised and thanked, fall into a state of physical and moral leprosy, the pious missionary wanders to Central Africa and establishes negro missions, till there our 'higher culture' will have turned healthy, though primitive and inferior, human children into a foul breed of bastards. It would correspond to the meaning of the most noble in 608 MEIN KAMPF this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoy- ing the negroes with missions which they neither wish nor understand, would teach our European mankind with kind- ness but in all earnestness, that with unhealthy parents it is a God-pleasing work to take pity on a healthy, poor little orphan, in order to give him father and mother, rather than putting a sick child into the world which will bring itself and the rest of the world only misfortune and suffering. The folkish State has to make up for what is today neglected in this field in all directions. It has to put the race into the center of life in general. It has to care for its preservation in purity. It has to make the child the most precious possession of a people. It has to take care that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: to be sick and to bring children into the world despite one's own deficiencies; but one highest honor: to renounce this. Further, on the other hand this has to be looked upon as objectionable: to keep healthy children from the nation. Thereby the State has to appear as the guardian of a thousand years' future, in the face of which the wish and the egoism of the individual appears as nothing and has to submit. It has to put the most modern medical means at the service of this knowledge. It has to declare unfit for propagation everybody who is visibly ill and has inherited a disease and it has to carry this out in practice. On the other hand, it has to care that the fertility of the healthy woman is not limited by the financial mismanagement of a State regime which makes children a curse for the parents. It has to do away with that foul, nay criminal, indifference with which today the social presumptions of a family with many children is treated, and in its place it has to consider it- self the guardian of this precious blessing of a people. Its care belongs more to the child than to the adult. He who is not physically and mentally healthy and worthy must not perpetuate his misery in the body of his child. Here the folkish State has to achieve the most enormous work of THE STATE 609 education. Some day it will appear as a greater deed than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era. By educa- tion it has to teach the individual that it is not a disgrace but only a regrettable misfortune to be sick and weakly, but that it is a crime and therefore at the same time a disgrace to dis- honor this misfortune by one's egoism by burdening it again upon an innocent being; that in the face of this it gives proof of a nobility of the highest mind and of most admirable humaneness if the innocently sick, by renouncing his own child, gives his love and tenderness to an unknown, poor young descendant of his nationality, whose health promises that one day he will become a vigorous member of a powerful com- munity. With this work of education the State has to render the purely spiritual supplement of its practical activity. Without considering understanding or non-understanding, approval or disapproval, it has to act in this sense. t The prevention of the procreative faculty and possibility on the part of physically degenerated and mentally sick people, for only six hundred years, would not only free man- kind of immeasurable misfortune, but would also contribute to a restoration that appears hardly believable today. If thus the conscious methodical promotion of the fertility of the most healthy bearers of the nationality is realized, the result will be a race which, at least at first, will have elimi- nated the germs of our present physical, and with it of the spiritual, decline. For once a people and a State have set out on this way, then one will direct one's eyes at increasing the racially most valuable nucleus of the people and its very fertility, so that finally the entire nationality may share the blessing of a high-bred racial treasure. The way towards this is above all that the State does not leave the settlement of newly won land to chance, but that it subjects it to special norms. Specially formed race com- missions have to issue a certificate of settlement to the 610 MEIN KAMPF individual; but this is dependent on a certain racial purity, to be established. Thus frontier colonies can gradually be formed whose inhabitants are exclusively bearers of highest racial purity and with this of highest racial efficiency. They are a precious national treasure of the entire people; their growth must fill every national member with pride and joyful confidence, as in them there lies the germ for the ultimate great future development of their own people, even of mankind.^ In the folkish State the folkish view of life has finally to succeed in bringing about that nobler era when men see their cart no longer in the better breeding of dogs, horses and cats, but rather in the uplifting of mankind itself, an era in which the one knowingly and silently renounces, and the other gladly gives and sacrifices. That this is possible must not be denied in a world in which hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men volun- tarily impose celibacy upon themselves, obliged and bound by nothing but a command of the Church. Should not the same renunciation be possible if it is replaced by the admonition finally to put an end to the permanently continuous original sin of a race poisoning and to give the Almighty Creator beings as He Himself created them? Of course, the miserable host of our present petty bour- geois will never understand this. They will laugh at it or shrug their crooked shoulders and moaningly they will bring forth their eternal excuse : 4 That would be very nice in itself, but one will never be able to do this ! ' with you, of course, one cam no longer do this, your world is not suitable for this. You know only one care: your personal lives; and one god: your money! However, it is not to you that we appeal, but we turn to the great army of those who are so poor that their personal lives could not mean the highest fortune of the world, to those who do not see the ruling principle of THE STATE 611 their lives in gold but who believe in other gods. Above all we turn to the powerful host of our German youth. They grow up into a great turn of the time, and what the inertia and the indifference of their fathers have sinned will force them to fight. German youth will one day be either the builder of a new national State or it will, as the last witness, experience the complete collapse, the end of the bourgeois world. For if a generation suffers from faults which it realizes, even admits, but nevertheless, as today in our bourgeois world, is satisfied with the cheap explanation that nothing can be done against it, then such a society is doomed to destruction. But the characteristic of our bourgeois world is just the fact that it is no longer able to deny the diseases. It has to admit that many things are foul and evil, but it no longer finds the determination to stand up against the evil, to integrate through frantic energy the force of a people of sixty or seventy millions and thus to set it up firmly against the danger. On the contrary : if this is done elsewhere, then one even makes silly remarks about it, and tries to point out, at least from a distance, the theoretical impossibility of the procedure and to declare success unthinkable. Thereby no reason is stupid enough in order to serve as a support for their own dwarfishness and their mental attitude. If for instance an entire continent today at last takes up the fight against liquor poisoning in order to free a people from the grip of this devastating vice, then our A defense of prohibition as attempted in the United States. After the War, many of the folkish groups advocated total abstinence. Youth groups having a folkish inlay also frowned on tobacco and other luxuries. But though Hitler himset neither smokes nor drinks, no pressure of the sort was brought on members of the various organizations. Smoking in the Ftihrer's presence is not customary, but that practice is said 612 MEIN KAMPF European bourgeois world has no other comment about this than an empty stare and headshaking, a superior ridicule something that suits this ridiculous society superbly. But if nothing helps and if nevertheless in some place in this world someone steps up against the sublime, inviolable accustomed routine and that even with success, then, as pointed out before, at least the latter is doubted and derided, whereby one does not refrain from bringing up bourgeois moral viewpoints against a struggle that tries to do away with the greatest immorality. No, we all must not deceive ourselves about this: our present bourgeoisie has already become useless for every sublime task of humanity, simply because it has no quality, and is too evil ; and it is too evil if you will less because of willful viciousness, but rather in consequence of an un- believable indolence and of everything that springs from it. Therefore also those political clubs which are found under the collective name of 'bourgeois parties 1 have long ceased to be anything but associations of interests of certain vocational groups and class estates, and their most sublime task is nothing but the best possible egoistic representation of their interests. It is obvious that such a political 'bour- geois* guild is suitable for anything rather than for fighting; but especially if the opposition does not consist of pepper sacks [i.e., small tradesmen], but of masses of proletarians who have been incited towards the extreme and are de- termined for the ultimate. If as the State's first task in the service and for the welfare of its nationality we recognize the preservation, care and to be due to fears of aggravating a lung and throat malady. Recently (1938) efforts to revive abstinence from alcohol and tobacco have been made by certain Youth Organization Leaders- THE STATE 613 development of the racially best elements, it is natural that this care has to extend not only to the time of birth of the young member of people and race, but that it has to educate the young offspring towards becoming a valuable member in view of later propagation. Just as in general the presumptions for spiritual achieve- ments lies in the racial quality of the given human material, thus also the individual's education has to focus upon and to promote first of all physical health ; for, within the masses, a healthy, vigorous spirit will be found only in a healthy and powerful body. The fact that geniuses are sometimes physically badly formed, even sick beings, is no objection. They are the exceptions which as everywhere prove the rule. But if the mass of a people consists of physical degenerates, then out of this swamp a really great spirit will arise only very rarely. His activity will in no case be rewarded with great success. The degraded rabble will either not understand him at all, or it will be so weakened in its will power that it will be unable to follow the soaring flight of such an eagle. The folkish State, through this realization, has to direct its entire education primarily not at pumping in mere knowledge, but at the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies. Of secondary importance is the training of the mental abilities. But here again first of all the development of the character, especially the promotion of will power and determination, connected with education for joyfully assuming responsibility, and only as the last thing, scientific schooling. Thereby the folkish State has to start from the presump- tion that a man, though scientifically little educated but physically healthy, who has a sound, firm character, filled with joyful determination and will power, is of greater value to the national community than an ingenious weakling. A people of scholars, when they are physically degenerated, irresolute and cowardly pacifists, will not conquer heaven, nay it will 614 MEIN KAMPF not even be able to assure its existence on this globe. In the hard struggle of fate he who knows little succumbs most rarely, but always he who draws from his knowledge the weakest consequences and puts them into activity in the poorest manner. Finally, here also a certain harmony must exist. A rotten tody is not in the least made more aesthetic by a brilliant mind, nay, highest training of the mind could not at all be justified if its bearers were at the same time physically degenerated and crippled beings, irresolute and weak in character, hesitating and cowardly. What makes the Greek ideal of beauty immortal is the wonderful combination of the most glorious physical beauty with a brilliant mind and the noblest soul. If Moltke's words ' In the long run only the efficient one is lucky' are valid, then it is certainly so for the relation be- tween body and mind : The mind also, if healthy, will as a rule and at length only dwell in a healthy body. In the folkish State physical training therefore is not the concern of the individual, and also not an affair that con- Sport is one of the glories of the Third Reich, which has ac- complished much to satisfy the Fuhrer's desire for well-trained physical specimens in wholesale lots. Strenuous training is compulsory for male and female alike. Hiking, gymnastic exercises and military sports are vigorously encouraged. Nevertheless one must not forget that much the same things could have keen said about the Republic. The schools of physical education developed by Prussia and Saxony in par- ticular were models of their kind. In addition all youth organ- izations were ardently Devoted to sports, and most of the nationalistic groups fostered military exercises. At present the demands of military life predominate to such an extent that Germany has made less progress in the more normal sports than might have been anticipated. The results obtained at the Olympic Games of 1936 must still be chalked up to the credit of the Republic which, incidentally, produced Max Schmeling. THE STATE 61 S cerns primarily the parents and the community only in the second or third instance, but a requirement of the self- preservation of the nationality, represented and protected by the State. Just as the State, as far as the purely scientific training is concerned, intervenes even today in the right of self-determination of the individual and represents towards him the right of the community by subjecting the child, without asking for the agreement or non-agree- ment of the parents, to compulsory schooling, thus, in questions of the nationality's preservation, the national State will some day, to a much higher degree, enforce its authority against the ignorance or the non-understanding of the individual. It has to arrange its educational work in such manner that the young bodies, in their earliest child- hood, are treated according to the purpose and that they receive the necessary steeling for later days. But above all it has to care that not a generation of stay-at-homes is brought up. This work of care and education has to start even with the young mother. Just as it became possible, in the course of decades of work, to attain aseptic cleanliness during delivery and to limit puerperal fever to a few cases, thus it must and will be possible, by a thorough training of nurses and mothers, to bring about, even during the first years of the child, a treatment that serves as the most excellent basis for the later development. School as such, in a folkish State, has to set apart in- finitely more time for physical training. It won't do to burden the young brains with a ballast which they retain, according to experience, only to a fraction, whereby in most cases instead of the essential the unnecessary trifles remain, as the young child is not in a position to carry out a sensible selection of the material that has been infiltrated in him. If today, even in the curriculum of the middle schools, only two hours per week are devoted to gymnastics and 616 MEIN KAMPF the participation in it is optional with the individual, not compulsory, then this is, compared with the purely intel- lectual training, a gross disparity. Not a day should pass during which the young man is not trained physically for at least one hour in the morning and again in the evening, in every kind of sport and gymnastics. Here especially one kind of sport must not be forgotten which in the eyes of many 'nationals' is considered as brutal and undignified: boxing. It is incredible what erroneous opinions are current about this in the circles of the 'educated.' That the young man learns to fence and then goes about fighting duels is looked upon as natural and honorable, but that he boxes is supposed to be brutal! Why? There is no sport that, like this, promotes the spirit of aggression in the same measure, demands determination quick as lightning, educates the body for steel-like versatility. If two young people fight out a difference of opinion with their fists, it is no more brutal than if they do so with a piece of ground iron. Also, it is not less noble if one who has been attacked wards off his attacker with his fists instead of running away and calling for a policeman. But above all, the young and healthy boy has to learn to be beaten. This, of course, may appear wild in the eyes of our present spiritual fighters. But the folkish State has not the task of breeding a colony of peaceful aesthetes and physical degenerates. Not in the honest petty bourgeois or in the virtuous old maid does it see its ideal of humanity, but in the robust incorporation of manly forces and in women who in their turn are able to bring men into the world. Thus the meaning of sports is not only to make the individual strong, versatile and bold, but it has also to harden him and to teach him how to bear inclemencies. If our entire intellectual upper class had not been edu- cated so exclusively in teaching refined manners, and if instead of this it had learned boxing thoroughly, then THE STATE 617 a German revolution by pimps, deserters and similar rabble would never have been possible; for what gave the latter its success was not the bold, courageous energy of those making the Revolution, but the cowardly, miserable lack of determination by those who ruled the State and were responsible for it. However, our entire body of intellectual leaders had been educated only 'intellectually' and were bound to be defenseless in the moment when on the side of the opponents, instead of intellectual weapons, the crowbar came into action. But all this was possible only because our higher schools, in principle, did not educate men, but officials, engineers, technicians, chemists, lawyers, jour- nalists, and, in order to keep this mentality alive, professors. Our intellectual leadership always showed brilliant achievements, whereas our leaders in will power remained beneath all criticism. By education one will certainly not be able to turn one who is fundamentally a coward into a courageous man, but it is just as certain that a man who in himself is not without courage is paralyzed in the development of his qualities if t from the very beginning, his physical force and abilities, through the faults of his education, are inferior to those of the others. How far the conviction of physical efficiency promotes one's feeling of courage, even wakens the spirit of aggression, can best of all be seen in the army. Here, too, it was not fundamentally heroes that existed but the broad average. But the superior training of the German soldier in peace time inoculated this entire gigantic organism with this suggestive confidence in its own superiority to a degree which even our enemies had not thought possible. For the immortal spirit and the courage of aggression, demonstrated by the German armies during the months of the mid- summer and fall of 1914 were the result of that untiring education which during the long, long years of peace got the most incredible achievements out of often weak bodies and 618 MEIN KAMPF thus educated for that self-confidence which was not lost even in the horror of the greatest battles. It is precisely our German people, that today, broken down, lies defenseless against the kicks of the rest of the world, who need that suggestive force that lies in self -confidence. But this self-confidence has to be instilled into the young fellow citizen from childhood on. His entire education and development ha* to be directed at giving him the conviction of being absolutely superior to the others. With his physical force and skill he has again to win the belief in the invincibility of his entire na- tionality. For what once led the German army to victory was the sum of the confidence which the individual and all in common had in their leaders. The confidence in the possibility of regaining its freedom is what will restore the German people. But this conviction can only be the final product of the same feeling of millions of individuals. But here we must not deceive ourselves: Colossal was the breakdown of our people, but just as colossal will be the exertion to end this misery some day. He who believes that through our present bourgeois work of educating for peace and order our people will receive the force to break one day the present world order which means our doom, and to throw the shackles of slavery into the faces of our enemies, is bitterly wrong. Only by an excess of national will power, of thirst for freedom and highest passion, can we make up for what we once lacked. A frequently quoted passage, this reads like a formal promise of war. It should, however, be read as passages about 'heads shall roll ' are read. But the emphasis on dynamism is impor- tant. The child must not be prepared for a life of ' peace and order, 9 but for a part in a crusade in which readiness to fight and fanatical enthusiasm for fighting are normal. The enthu- siasm has failed to develop appreciably. THE STATE 619 f The clothes of the young people also have to be adapted to this purpose. It is truly miserable to be compelled to see that our youth also is subject to a lunacy of fashion which helped in converting the meaning of the old proverb 'Kleider machen Lcutc* [clothes make people] into a detri- mental one. Particularly with youth, clothes have to be put into the service of education. The young man who during summer walks about in long pipe-like trousers, covered up to the neck, loses, merely through his clothes, a stimulant for his physical fitness. For ambition, too, and we may as well say it, vanity also, have to be applied. Not the vanity in beautiful clothes which not everyone is able to buy, but the vanity in a beautiful, well-shaped body which everyone can help in building up. This is of use also for the future. The girl should become acquainted with her knight. If today physical beauty were not pushed completely into the background by our dandified fashionableness, the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bow-legged, disgusting Jewish bastards would never be possible. Also this is in the interest of the nation, that the most beautiful bodies find one another and thus help in giving the nation new beauty. Today, of course, this would be necessary most of all, because the military education is lacking and thus the only institution has been eliminated which during peace time made up, at least in part, for what was otherwise neglected by education. And also there the success was to be sought not only in the training of the individual, but in the influeace which it exercised on the relationship between the two sexes. The young girl preferred the soldier to the civilian.-* The folkish State has to carry through and to supervise the physical training not only during the official school years; it has to care also in post-school days that, as long as a boy is in physical development, this development turns 620 MEIN KAMPF into a blessing for him. It is nonsense to believe that with the end of school time the State's right for supervision of its young citizens could suddenly stop, in order to return with the military service. This right is a duty, and as such it is permanently existent. The present State that has no interest in healthy people has neglected this duty in a criminal manner. It lets the present young generation degenerate in the streets and in brothels, instead of taking them by the leash and training them physically further until one day a healthy man and a healthy woman have grown out of this. In what form the State continues this education is beside the point today, but the point is that it should do it and seek the ways that are useful for this purpose. The folkish State has to consider it a task of State and has to carry out through State institutions the physical education of the post-school days exactly as the intellectual education. Thereby this education, in broad outlines, can be the prepa- ration for the future service in the army. Then the army no longer has to teach the young men, as hitherto, the fundamentals of the most simple drills, nor will it receive recruits in the current meaning, but it has to turn the young man, who is already physically completely prepared, into a soldier. In the folkish State, therefore, the army no longer has to teach the individual how to walk and to stand, but it has to be looked upon as the ultimate and highest school of patriotic education. In the army, the young recruit should receive the necessary training in arms, but at the same time he should be formed further for his future life. But at the head of the military education should stand what had to be attributed even to the old army as its highest merit: in this school the boy should be turned into a man; and in this school he should not only learn to obey, but also acquire the training for commanding later on. He has to learn to be THE STATE 621 silent, not only when he is blamed justly, but he has also to learn, if necessary, to bear injustice in silence. Further, strengthened by the confidence in his own force, seized by the strength of the commonly experienced esprit de corps, he has to gain the conviction of the invincibility of his own nationality. After terminating the service in the army, he should be given two documents : his diploma as a State citizen as a legal document which now permits him public activity, and his certificate of health as the confirmation of physical health for marriage. Analogous with the education of the boy, the folkish State can also direct the education of the girl from the same viewpoints. Here too the main stress should be put on physical training, and only after this on the promotion of spiritual and last of all, the intellectual values. The goal of female education has invariably to be the future mother. As of secondary importance the folkish State has to pro- mote the modeling of the character in every way. It is certain that the essential features of character are fundamentally formed previously in the individual: one who is egoistic is and remains so once and forever, exactly as the idealist, in the bottom of his nature, will always be an idealist. But between the completely shaped characters there are millions of a type that appear dim and unclear. The born criminal will be and remain a criminal; but numerous people in whom a certain tendency towards criminality exists can still be made valuable members of the national community by proper education; while on the other hand by bad education vacillating characters can grow into really evil elements. 622 MEIN KAMPF How often one complained, during the War, that our people knew so little how to be silent! How difficult this made it to guard even important secrets from the know- ledge of the enemies! But one should ask oneself the question : Before the War, what did German education do towards training the individual for secrecy? Was not unfortunately even in school the little tattle-tale preferred to his more discreet comrade? Was not and is not tale- telling looked upon as honorable 'frankness,' and discre- tion as disgraceful obstinacy? Did one endeavor at all to present discretion as a manly valuable virtue? No, in the eyes of our present school education these are trifles. But these trifles cost the State uncounted millions in court expenses, for ninety per cent of all libel suits and similar trials arose only from a lack of discretion. Irresponsibly dropped remarks are passed on just as light-heartedly, our economy is constantly injured by a careless giving away of important methods of production, etc., even quiet prepara- tions for the defense of the country are made illusory as the people have not learned to be silent but spread every- thing. But in case of war this inclination to talk can even lead to the loss of battles and thus contribute considerably to the unfortunate end of a struggle. Here, too, one has to be convinced that what one has not practiced during youth one cannot exercise during old age. In this category belongs also the fact that in principle the teacher, for instance, ought not to try to gain information about the pranks of silly boys by encouraging evil tale-telling. Youth has a State for itself, it faces the grown-ups with a certain closed solidarity, and this is natural. The bond of a ten- year-old boy to a comrade of the same age is a natural one and greater than that to a grown-up person. A boy who gives his comrade away exercises treason and thus shows a mentality which, grossly expressed and enlarged, corre- sponds exactly to that of the traitor to his country. Such THE STATE 623 a boy can in no way be looked upon as a 'good, decent' child, but as a boy with few valuable characteristics. To the teacher it may be convenient, for the purpose of in- creasing his authority, to avail himself of such evil habits, but by this the germ of a mentality is planted in the young heart which later can have a catastrophic effect. More than once the young tattle-tale has become a great scoundrel! This should serve as only one example for many. Today the conscious development of good and noble character qualities at school is equal to naught. This, one day, will have to be emphasized in quite a different manner. Loyalty, willingness to sacrifice, and silence are virtues which a great people urgently needs, and their inculcation by education and training in school is more important than many of the things which now fill our curriculum. Also the elimination by education of tearful complaining, of lamenting, etc., belongs in this field. If an education forgets to influence even the child to the effect that sufferings and adversities have to be borne in silence, it must not be surprised if later, in a critical hour, for example when one day the man stands at the front, the entire mail service serves the transporta- tion of mutual letters of complaints and laments. If in our public schools one had instilled into our young people a little less knowledge and a little more self-restraint, this would have been amply rewarded in the years 1915-18. Thus the folkish State, in its work of education, has, besides the physical training, to put the greatest emphasis on the training of the character. By an education in this direction, numerous moral defects, which our present na- tional body harbors, can be, if not entirely abolished, at least greatly modified. Of highest importance is the training of will power and determination, as well as the cultivation of joy in taking responsibility. 624 MEIN KAMPF If formerly in the army the principle was valid that an order is always better than no order, for youth this must mean first of all : an answer is always better than no answer. The dread shown in giving no answer, out of fear of saying something wrong, must be mom humiliating than an incor- rectly given answer. Starting from this most primitive basis youth should be educated to the effect that it acquires the courage for action. One has often complained that in the time of November and December of 1918 actually all authorities failed, that beginning from the monarchs down to the last division com- mander nobody was any longer able to summon the energy for an independent decision. This terrible fact is the Mene tekel [Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin (Aramaic), colloquially known as 'the handwriting on the wall'] of our education, because in this cruel catastrophe is expressed, in a measure expanded to gigantic size, what generally existed in little things. It is this lack of will, and not the lack of arms, that today makes us incapable of all serious resistance. It is ingrained in our entire people, it prevents every decision which involves a risk, as though the greatness of an act did not lie in the very risk. Without being aware of it, a German general succeeded in finding the classical formula for this miserable irresoluteness: 'I will act only if I can reckon with fifty-one per cent probability of success. 1 In this 'fifty-one per cent' lies the tragedy of the German collapse; he who first demands of Fate the guaranty of success thereby automatically renounces the significance of a heroic act. For it lies in the fact that, with the con- A reference to General von Lossow, Reichswehr commander in Munich during 1923, whom Hitler tried to persuade to au- thorize his putsch. Von Lossow said that he would join in such a venture only if the chances were ' fifty-one per cent 9 in favor of success. THE STATE 625 viction of the mortal danger of a condition, one takes the step which can perhaps lead to success. A person suffering from cancer, whose death is otherwise certain, need not first figure out fifty-one per cent in order to risk an opera- tion. And if the latter promises a cure with only half a per cent probability, a courageous man will risk it, other- wise he should not whimper for his life. The epidemic of the present cowardly lack of will power and determination is, taken all in all, mainly the result of our fundamentally faulty education of youth, the devastat- ing effect of which extends into the future life, and which finds its final conclusion and its ultimate crown in the lack of civil courage of the leading statesmen. In the same line falls also the current prevailing coward- ice with regard to responsibility. Here, too, the fault lies in the education of youth, permeates next the entire public life and finds its immortal completion in the parliamentary institutions of government. Unfortunately, even at school one puts more stress upon the 'repenting* confession and the 'contrite abjuration* by the little sinner than upon a frank admission. The latter even appears to many a public educator of today the most visible symptom of an incorrigible depravity, and so many a boy, in an incredible manner, is threatened with the gal- lows for qualities which would be of priceless value if they were the common good of an entire nation. As some day the folkish State has to devote its highest atten- tion to the education of will and determination, it has to im- plant joy in taking responsibility and courage for confession into the hearts of the young from their early years of life. Only if it recognizes this necessity in its full importance will it finally have as a result, after hundreds of years of educa- tional work, a national body which will no longer succumb to those weaknesses which today have so fatally contributed to our decline. * 626 MEIN KAMPF The folkish State will be able to take over, with only minor changes, the scientific school training, which today is actually the be-all and end-all of the State's whole work of education. These changes lie in three domains. First, the youthful brains must in general not be burdened with things 95 per cent of which it does not need and therefore forgets again. Especially the curriculum of grammar and middle schools presents today a mongrel character; in many instances, in the various subjects the material of what has to be learned has swollen up to such a degree that only a fraction of it remains in the head of the individual pupil and only a fraction of this abundance can find application, while on the other hand it is not sufficient for the need of one who works in a certain field and earns his living therein. Let us take for instance the normal State official in the thirty-fifth or fortieth year of his life, who graduated from a Gymnasium or an Oberrealschule, and let us examine what he once painfully crammed into his head at school. How little of all that which was then infiltrated is still present ! fOf course one will receive the answer: 'Well, the mass of material then learned had not only the purpose of supplying a great deal of knowledge later, but also that of a training of the mental receptiveness, of the thinking ability and especially of the memorizing power of the brain.' This is partly true. Yet there is the danger that the youthful brain is swamped with a flood of impressions which it is able to master only in the rarest cases, and the single ele- ments of which it neither knows how to sift nor how to eval- uate, according to their greater or smaller importance; whereby, besides, not the unessential but the essential is forgotten and sacrificed in most cases. Thus the main pur- pose of this much-learning is again lost; for this purpose cannot mean making the brain capable of learning by an unmeasured accumulation of material; but giving for the future that treasure of knowledge which the individual THE STATE 627 needs and from which, through him, the community will benefit. But this becomes illusory if, in consequence of the superabundance of the material that was forced upon him during youth, man later either no longer possesses this material at all, or at least not the essential parts of it. One can, for instance, not see why millions of people, in the course of the years, have to learn two or three foreign lan- guages which thereafter only a fraction of which they can use and which therefore the majority of them forget again completely, for out of a hundred thousand pupils who, for instance, learn French, hardly two thousand will later on be able to use it actually, while ninety-eight thousand, through their entire further course of life, will no longer be in a situation where they can make use of what they have learned. During their youth, therefore, they have devoted thousands of hours to a matter which later is of no value or significance to them. Also the objection that this material is part of general education is wrong, as one could defend this opinion only if people had at their disposal during their entire lives what they had learned. Thus now for the sake of two thousand people for whom the knowledge of this language is of use, actually ninety-eight thousand have to be tortured in vain and to sacrifice valuable time. Besides, in this case a language is involved of which one cannot even say that it means a training of sharp logical thinking, as is perhaps the case with Latin. Therefore it would be far more useful if one would impart such a lan- guage to the young student only in its general outlines, or more correctly expressed, in its inner structure, that means to give him the knowledge of the most striking features of this language, perhaps introducing him to the principles of its grammar, pronunciation, syntax, etc., through model examples. This would suffice for general need, and, because easier to survey and to remember, it would be more valu- able than the present drilling of the entire language, which 628 MEIN KAMPF nevertheless he will not completely command and will forget later on. In addition, in this way one would avoid the risk that from the overwhelming abundance of the material only single, haphazard and unconnected fragments would remain in his memory, as the young man would be made to learn only what is most remarkable, and thus the selection ac- cording to value or non-value would have been carried out beforehand. The general foundation, imparted in this way, would suffice for most people anyway, for their future life as well, while to the others who actually need this language later on, it gives the possibility of building up on it further and of devoting themselves to learning it thoroughly according to their free choice. Thus, in the curriculum, the necessary time is gained for physical training as well as for the increased demands in the domains previously mentioned. -^ A change will have to be made especially in the present method of teaching history. There is probably hardly any people that learns more history than the German people; but there can hardly be a* people that applies it to less ad- vantage than our people. If politics is history in the mak- ing, then our education in history is condemned by our kind of political activity. Here, too, it will not do to complain about the wretched results of our political achievements, if one is not determined to care for a better education for politics. The result of our present teaching in history is, in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, a miserable one. A few dates, birth figures and names usually remain, while a great, clear line is completely missing. All essentials which would really count are not taught at all, but it is left to the more or less ingenious disposition of the individual to find the inner motives out of the flood of dates, in the order of events. One may protest against this bitter state- THE STATE 629 meat as much as one likes; but one has only to read the speeches, delivered by our parliamentary gentlemen, during the various sessions, on political problems, for instance questions of foreign policy; one should consider, in this con- nection, that there allegedly at least we have to deal with the choice of the German nation, and that in any case a great part of these people have warmed the benches of our high schools, partly even of our universities, and from this one will be able to see just how insufficient the his- torical education of these people is. If they had not studied history at all, but if they had only a sound instinct, this would be much better and of greater benefit to the nation. Particularly in history lessons a shortening of the ma- terial has to be carried out. The main value lies in recogniz- ing the great lines of development. The more the lessons are restricted to this, the more it is to be hoped that benefit will arise out of this for the individual later on, which, summed up, is beneficial also to the community. For one does not learn history merely in order to know what has been, but one learns history in order to make it a teacher for the future and for the continued existence of one's own nationality. This is the end, and the history lessons are only a means to it. But today here, too, the means have become the end, the end itself is completely ignored. One must not say that a thorough study of history demands the occu- pation with all these details as only out of them a great line can be established. To establish this line is the task of the particular science in question. The normal average man, however, is not a history professor. To him history means primarily to render him that amount of historical insight which he needs for forming his opinion on the political affairs of his nation. He who wants to become a history pro- fessor may devote himself thoroughly to this study later on. Of course, he will have to deal with all and even the smallest details. But for this purpose our present instruction in 630 MEIN KAMPF history cannot be enough ; because it is too vast for the nor- mal average man, but much too narrow for the scholar- specialist. For the rest, it is the task of a folkish State to see to it that at last a world history is written in which the race question is raised to a predominant position. Summing up: the folkish State, therefore, has to give the general history lessons a shortened form that comprises all that is essential. Beyond this the possibility of a most thor- ough, specialized education has to be offered. It is enough that the individual receives a general knowledge, kept along broad outlines, as a basis, and enjoys a most thorough special and individual training only in the field which be- comes later that of his life. Hereby the general education has to be compulsory in all fields, that of the specialty has to be left to the choice of the individual. The shortening of the curriculum and of the number of hours, brought about in this way, will be of benefit to the training of the body, of the character, and of will power and determination. How little bearing our present school education, espe- cially that of the middle schools, has on the vocation of the future life, is best proved by the fact that today people from three entirely different kinds of schools can come into one and the same position. What is of decisive importance is actually only the general education and not the infiltrated special knowledge. But in instances where as already said actually a special knowledge is necessary, it can of course not be acquired within the curriculum of our present middle schools. Some day the folkish State will have to do away with such half measures. THE STATE 631 The second change in the scientific curriculum of the national State has to be the following: It is a characteristic ot our present materialized time that our scientific education turns more and more towards the subjects of natural science only, namely, mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. No matter how necessary this is for a time in which techniques and chemistry dominate in daily life and represent its symptoms, at least as far as out- wardly recognizable, it is just as dangerous if the general education of a nation is always directed exclusively at this. On the contrary, this education has always to be an ideal one. It has to correspond more to the classic subjects and should only offer the foundations of a later training in a special field. Otherwise, one renounces forces which are still more important for the preservation of the nation than any technical or other ability. Especially in history instruc- tion one should not let oneself be deterred from studying antiquity. Roman history, rightly conceived in very broad outlines, is and remains the best teacher not only for today but probably for all times. The Hellenic ideal of culture, too, should be preserved for us in its exemplary beauty. One must not allow the differences of the individual races to tear up the greater racial community. The struggle that rages today involves very great aims: a culture fights for its existence, which combines millenniums and embraces Hel- lenism and Germanity together. A sharp difference should be made between general edu- cation and specialized knowledge. Since the latter, today more than ever, threatens to sink into the service of pure mammon, general education, at least in its more ideal orien- tation, has to be preserved as a counter-balance. Here, too, one has continuously to inculcate the principle that industry and techniques, trade and professions are able to flourish only as loni as an idedlistically disposed national community offers the necessary presuppositions. But the latter do not lie in ma- 632 MEIN KAMPF tcrial egoism, but in a joyous readiness to renounce and to sacrifice. The present education of youth has by and large aimed at pumping into the young man that knowledge which he needs for his advancement in his future life. This is expressed in the following: 'The boy must sometime become a useful member of human society.' By this one understands his ability to earn some day his daily bread in a decent manner. The superficial civic education which goes along with this stands on a weak footing from the beginning. As the State in itself represents only a form, it is indeed very difficult to educate or even to obligate people with regard to the latter. A form can break too easily. But the concept ' State ' as we have seen does not today possess a clear content. Thus there remains nothing but the traditional 'patriotic* education. In old Germany its emphasis, frequently little intelligent but mostly very stale, lay on an adoration of small and smallest potentates whose mass from the begin- ning made it necessary to renounce a comprehensive appre- ciation of the actually great men of our people. The result, therefore, was a very insufficient knowledge of German his- tory on the part of our broad masses. Here, too, the great line was lacking. It is obvious that in such a manner one could not arrive at a genuine national enthusiasm. Our education lacked the skill to lift out of the historical growth of our people a few names and to make them the common property of the en- tire German nation, so as to throw an equally unifying bond around the entire nation by equal knowledge and equal enthusiasm. One did not know how to make the really important men of our people appear, in the eyes of the present, as outstanding heroes, to concentrate the gen- eral attention on them and to create by this a uniform mood. THE STATE 633 In the various subjects one was not able to raise what was glorious for the nation above the level of objective presenta- tion and to kindle the national pride by such shining exam- ples. In those days this would have appeared as bad chau- vinism which in this form one would have liked but little. Simply dynastic patriotism appeared more agreeable and more bearable than the fervent passion of highest national pride. The first was always ready to serve, the latter might some day become mistress. Monarchic patriotism resulted in veterans' clubs; national passion would have been more difficult to direct in its way. It is comparable to a thor- oughbred horse which does not bear everyone on its back. No wonder that one preferred to keep back from such a danger. That some day a war would come which through drum fire and gas clouds would thoroughly test the inner steadfastness of patriotic feeling, nobody seemed to think possible. But when the War did come, the lack of highest national passion took its most terrible revenge. The gentle- men had but little inclination to die for their imperial and royal masters, but the 'nation' was unknown to most of them. Since the revolution has made its entry into Germany and with it monarchic patriotism disappeared by itself, the pur- pose of history lessons is actually only that of a pure acqui- sition of knowledge. For national enthusiasm this State has But during the Kapp putsch of 1920, when a Prussian general and the commander of a Free Corps unit attempted to over- throw the Republic, with the object of restoring Prussian mon- archical rule, the workers risked a general strike despite stem threats and won. And during the 'passive resistance* which followed French invasion of the Ruhr, hundreds of thousands of workingmen risked life and bread in the effort to defeat the French by sabotage. It may be added that after the Rathenau murder the workers were again ready. At no time did they 634 MEIN KAMPF no use, but what it wants it will never get. For just as little as there could be dynastic patriotism of ultimate resistibility in an era when the principle of nationalities is dominant, thus still less could there be republican enthusiasm. For about this there ought to be no doubt that with the slogan 1 For the German Republic ' the German people would not remain on the battlefield for four and a half years; least of all would those who have created this marvelous structure do so. Actually, this Republic owes its unharmed existence to the readiness, assured everywhere, of voluntarily assuming all tributes and signing any renunciation of territory. This Republic is liked by the rest of the world ; just as every weak- ling is considered more agreeable by those who need him than a rough man. True, the very sympathy for just this State form implies its devastating criticism. One likes the German Republic and lets it live because one could not find a better ally for the work of enslavement of our people. It is only to this that this glorious formation owes its present existence. Therefore it can renounce all really national education and be satisfied with the shouting of ' hoch ' by the heroes of the Reichsbanner who, by the way, if they had to protect this banner with their blood, would run away like rabbits. The folkish State will have to fight for its existence. It will not be able either to preserve or to defend its existence by Dawes signatures. But for its existence and its protec- tion it will need just what now one believes that one can get lack enthusiasm or courage. The issues, however, were nearly always so confused, and strife between moderate and radical elements inside the Socialist Party so rampant, that the edge of their activism was dulled by constant quarreling over minor matters. This is doubtless a penalty which every revolutionary party must pay when it assumes responsibility for government. THE STATE 635 along without. The more incomparable and valuable form and contents will be, the greater will also be the envy and the resistance of the opponents. Then the best protection will not be represented in its arms, but in its citizens; not fortress walls will protect it, but the living wall of men and women, filled with highest love for the country and with fanatical national enthusiasm. As the third point, the following has to be considered in connection with scientific education : Also in science the folkish State has to see a means for the promotion of national pride. Not only world history, but the entire culture history must be taught from this viewpoint. An inventor must appear great not only as an inventor, but greater still as a fellow citizen. The admiration for every great deed has to be recast into pride in the fortunate performer of this deed as a member of one's own nation. From the vast number of all the great names of German history the greatest have to be singled out and presented to youth so impressively as to become the pillars of an unshakable national sentiment. The subjects to be taught must be built up systemati- cally according to these viewpoints; education must be arranged systematically in such a way as to make the young man upon leaving school not half a pacifist, democrat or something of that kind, but a genuine German. In order to render this national sentiment genuine from the beginning and to prevent it from being only pretense, as early as during youth an iron principle has to be ham- mered into the still pliable heads: He who loves his people proves this solely by the sacrifices which he is ready to make for it. National sentiment that only seeks profit does not exist. Nor is there a nationalism that merely comprises dosses. Shouting hurrah proves nothing and gives nobody the right to call himself national, if it is not backed by the great, loving care for the preservation of a general and sound nationality. A rea- son, for pride in one's people exists only after one has no longer 636 MEIN KAMPF to be ashamed of any doss. But a people one-half of which is miserable and careworn, or even depraved, gives such a bad picture that nobody should feel pride in it. Only if a national- ity is sound in all its members, in body and soul, can the joy of belonging to it justly grow into that high feeling that we call national pride. But only he will feel this highest pride who knows the greatness of his nationality. f The intimate coupling of nationalism and feeling of social justice must be planted in the young heart. Then there will some day arise a people of State citizens, bound to one another and forged together by a common love and a common pride, unshakable and invincible for all times. Our time's fear of chauvinism is the sign of its impotence. Since it not only lacks but considers disagreeable all seething energy, Destiny has not chosen it for a great deed. For the greatest changes on this earth would not have been thinkable if their driving force, instead of fanatical, even hysterical passion, had been only the bourgeois virtues of peace and order. <+ It is certain, however, that this world approaches a great change. A nd there can be only the sole question whether it turns out for the benefit of Aryan mankind or for the profit of the eternal Jew. Thefolkish State will have to see to it that by a suitable edu- cation of youth a mature generation is produced for the ultimate and greatest decisions on this globe. That people, however, which as the first sets out on this way will be victorious. Thefolkish State's entire work of education and training has some day to find its culmination in branding, through instinct and reason, the race sense and race feeling into the hearts and brains of the youth with whom it is entrusted. No boy or girl must leave school without having been led to the ultimate knmvledge of the necessity and the nature of the purity of the THE STATE 637 blood. Thus the assumption is created for the racial founda- tions of our nationality and by it, in turn, the safeguarding of the presumptions for the future cultural development. For all physical and spiritual training would still remain useless unless it benefited a human being who is funda- mentally ready and determined to preserve himself and his kind. In the reverse case there would happen what we Germans have to deplore greatly even now, without the entire size of this tragic misfortune having perhaps been understood so far: thai also in future we would remain only cultural fertilizer, not only in the meaning of the limited conception of our present bourgeois opinion, which sees in the individual lost national member only the lost citizen, but in the meaning of the most painful realization that then, despite all our knowledge and skill, our blood is nevertheless doomed to decline. By mating again and again with other races, we may well lift those races out of their former cultural level to a higher one, but we sink down from our own high level forever. For the rest, this education, too, from the racial viewpoint, must find its final completion in the military service. A son the whole the period of the military service has to be considered the conclusion of the normal education of the average German. Great as the importance of the kind of physical and spiritual education in the folkish State will be, just as important will it be for the folkish State to select the right people. Today this selection is treated very casually. Generally, it is the children of higher placed, momentarily well-to-do parents who in turn are deemed worthy of a higher education. Hereby questions of talent play a subordinate rdle. Strictly speaking a talent can always be evaluated only relatively. A peasant boy can have many more talents than a child of parents in a position that has been elevated through many 638 MEIN KAMPF generations, although in general knowledge he may be far behind the bourgeois child. The greater knowledge of the latter has in itself nothing whatsoever to do with greater or smaller talent, but it is rooted in the considerably greater profusion of impressions which the child, in consequence of his many-sided education and richer surroundings of life, receives uninterruptedly. If the talented peasant boy had also grown up in such surroundings from his early child- hood, then his intellectual ability would be quite different. Today there is perhaps only one domain in which family station is actually less decisive than one's inborn ability: the domain of art. Here, where one cannot just ' learn ' and where everything has to be originally inborn and is subject to a more or less favorable development in the sense of wise promotion of the existing abilities, the parents' money and property is almost irrelevant. For this reason it is best proved in this field that genius is not bound to higher spheres of life or even riches. The greatest artists not sel- dom come from the poorest houses. And many a little vil- lage boy later becomes a much celebrated master. f It does not speak for great depth of thinking in our time that one does not make Use of such knowledge for the entire intellectual life. One thinks that what cannot be denied concerning art would not apply to the so-called exact sci- ences. One can undoubtedly endow man with definite mechanical abilities by education, just as by clever training it is possible to teach a poodle the most incredible tricks. However, as with this animal training the animal's under- standing does not lead from itself to such exercises, the same is the case with man. One can also teach man, without con- sidering any other talent, certain scientific tricks, but then it is exactly the same lifeless, inanimate procedure as with the animal. Based on a certain intellectual drill, one can cram super-average knowledge into an average man, but this remains dead and ultimately unfruitful knowledge. THE STATE 639 The result then is that land of man who is perhaps a living dictionary, but who nevertheless fails in the most deplor- able manner in all special situations and decisive moments of life; he will have to be trained again for every, even the most modest demand, but out of himself he will not be able to give even the smallest contribution towards a develop- ment of mankind. Such a knowledge, acquired by mechan- ical training, will at the utmost suffice, in our time, for tak- ing over State positions. It is a matter of course that in the total sum of a nation's population there will be found talents for all kinds of do- mains of everyday life. It is a further matter of course that the value of knowledge will be the greater the more dead knowledge is animated by the adequate talent of the indi- vidual. Creative achievements, in general, can arise only if ability and knowledge form a union. A further example may show how boundlessly today's mankind sins in this direction. From time to time it is dem- onstrated to the German petty bourgeois in illustrated peri- odicals that for the first time here or there a negro has be- come a lawyer, teacher, even clergyman, or even a leading opera tenor or something of that kind. While the stupid bourgeoisie, marveling, takes cognizance of this miraculous training, filled with respect for this fabulous result of our present educative skill, the Jew knows very slyly how to construe from this a new proof of the correctness of his What Hitler says here concerning the negro question is reiterated in a great deal of Nazi literature. A German official once said to an American journalist, who had protested against German retreat of the Jew, ' In America you lynch the nigger*. We're too cowardly to do as much with the Jews.' 'But,' the American objected, 'in America people who lynch negroes are sent to jail if they are caught. Here they seem to get all the plum*.' 640 MEIN KAMPF theory of the equality of men which he means to instill into the nations. It does not dawn upon this depraved bourgeois world that here one has actually to do with a sin against all reason; that it is a criminal absurdity to train a born half- ape until one believes a lawyer has been made of him, while millions of members of the highest culture race have to re- main in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the eternal Creator to let hundreds and hun- dreds of thousands of His most talented beings degenerate in the proletarian swamp of today, while Hottentots and Zulu Kafirs are trained for intellectual vocations. For it is training, exactly as that of the poodle, and not a scientific 'education.' The same trouble and care, applied to intelli- gent races, would fit each individual a thousand times bet- ter for the same achievements. Unbearable as this condition would be if it ever should concern anything but exceptions, it is equally un- bearable today where it is not talent and abilities that decide for the higher education. Indeed, it is an unbearable idea that annually hundreds of thousands of completely untalented people are deemed worthy of a higher education, while other hundreds of thousands of great talent remain without any higher education. The loss the nation suffers from this cannot be estimated. If during the past decades the wealth of important inventions, especially in North America, increased extremely, then it was not in small measure due to the fact that there considerably more talent from the lowest layers find the possibility of a higher train- ing than is the case in Europe. For inventing, purely crammed knowledge is not suf- ficient, but only knowledge animated by talent. This is not evaluated by us today ; the good mark alone is decisive. < Here, too, the folkish State will some day have to inter- vene by education. Its task is not to preserve the decisive influence of an existing social class, but its task is to pick out THE STATE 441 of the sum of all fdhw citizens the most able heads and to brint them to office and dignity. It has not only the duty of giving the average child a definite education in public schools, but also the duty of placing the talent on the tracks on which it belongs. Above all it has to consider it its highest task to open the doors of the State's institutes of higher learning to every talent, no matter from what circles they may come. It has to fulfill this task, as only thus out of the stratum of representatives of dead knowledge can grow the talented leadership of the nation. The State has to make provisions in this direction also for another reason: our intellectual classes, especially in Germany, are so secluded in themselves and so calcified that they lack the living connections towards the masses below. This takes its revenge in two directions: first, they lack by Education has changed radically since 1933. The first official Nazi statements on the subject were relatively moder- ate. Speaking on May 9, 1933, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior, told educators that the German school must stress the importance of race and the dignity of labor. He advocated more intensive physical training, and suggested that those who taught it should bear in mind the military virtues. But he added that the Nazi government would respect religious beliefs, and that the Party's ideal for the training of German youth had 'a Christian foundation.' The effects of anti- Semitism became more and more pronounced. Jewish children were ostracized; some were brutally treated. Gradually the universities were closed to Jewish students. Lessons in National Socialist ideology began to supplant the regular courses in history, and to prove a veritable source of tor- ment for dissident children. Today there can be no doubt that race hatred is being systematically instilled into the young German. The regular schoolbooks are bad enough, but 'official' supplementary readings are often still more violent. An excellent example of these is Der Giftpil* (the Poisonous 641 MEIN KAMPF this the understanding of, and the feeling for, the great masses. They have been uprooted from this connection for so long a time that they can no longer have the necessary psychological understanding for the people. They have become estranged from the people. Secondly, however, these upper layers lack the necessary will power. For will power is always weaker in these secluded intellectual circles than in the masses of the primitive people. But God knows that we Germans never lacked scientific education ; but all the more we lacked will power and determination. The more 'intellectual' for example our statesmen were, the weaker as a rule were their actual achievements. The poli- tical preparation as well as the technical armament for the World War were insufficient not for the reason that perhaps too unedticated heads ruled our people, but rather that those Mushroom), a collection of seventeen stories with illustrations. All the tales are pointed up with the inevitable moral that the Jew is the 'poisonous mushroom' of the civilized world. Fortunately, Jewish children are now segregated, and most of them will in all probability be removed from Germany during coming years. Under the Republic, the great majority of German schools had been confessional in character. Protestant groups soon began to feel the pressure of the new order. Their Youth Organizations were ordered to merge in the Hitler Youth. The right to give religious instruction was more and more infringed upon; and elections were held to determine whether parents preferred the old 'confessional* or the new 'community 1 schools, under auspices which virtually guaranteed the extinc- tion of the first. During 1936 the Synod of Oeynhausen protested not only against the restrictions which had been placed upon the Church, but asserted that two mutually exclusive views of life were fighting for the German school, and added that matters had gone so far that teachers who professed to be Christians were being discriminated against as 'politically THE STATE 643 ruling were over-educated people, stuffed with knowledge and intellect, but bare of any sound instinct and devoid of all energy and courage. It was a disaster that our people had to fight its struggle for life under the Reichs chancellor- ship of a philosophizing weakling. If instead of a Bethmann Hollweg we had had a more robust man of the people as a leader, the heroic blood of the common grenadier would not have been shed in vain. Also, the exaggerated purely intellectual high-breeding of our leaders was the best ally for the revolutionary November rabble. By neglecting in the most wretched manner, the national good with which they were entrusted, these very intellectuals created the presumption for the success of the others. Here the Catholic Church can be looked upon as a model example. In the celibacy of its priests roots the compulsion unreliable. 1 On May I, 1937, Hitler replied to these and similar charges by saying, 'There are some old fools with whom it is too late to do anything. But we take the children away from them! We educate them to be new German people. When the little rascals are ten years old, we take them and form them into a community. When they are eighteen, we still do not leave them alone.' The Concordat signed with the Holy See on July 3, 1933, guaranteed the independence of Catholic confessional schools throughout the Reich. The concessions made were, indeed, so impressive that the Bishops urged the hesitant Vatican to sign the agreement. Almost immediately, however, minor infractions of the Concordat were reported. The leadership of the Hitler youth was given to Baldur von Shirach, who professed having no religion save Germany, and 'Party medicine man/ Catholic school-teachers, anxious to avoid trouble, were caught between the rules governing religious instruction and the status of books by Hitler and Rosenberg as 'Nazi Bibles. 1 The campaign to legislate Catholic schools out of existence 644 MEIN KAMPF to draw the future generation of the clergy, instead of from its own ranks, again and again from the broad masses of the people. But this particular significance of celibacy is not recognized by most people. It is the origin of the in- credibly vigorous power that inhabits this age-old institu- tion. This gigantic host of clerical dignitaries, by uninter- ruptedly supplementing itself from the lowest layers of the nations, preserves not only its instinctive bond with the people's world of sentiment, but it also assures itself of a sum of energy and active force which in such a form will for- ever be present only in the broad masses of the people. From this results the astounding youthfulness of this giant organism, its spiritual pliability and its steel-like will power. It will be the task of afolkish State to take care by its educa- tional arrangements that, by fresh infusion of blood from by inducing parents to vote for community schools was soon under way. Few of the voters were in a position to withstand Party pressure. The Bishop took up the fight, and a series of pastoral letters urged all to stand by the Church. Only in Westphalia was this effort crowned with a measure of success. The sole weapon remaining was religious instruction; and during 1937, the authorities began to deprive the clergy of the right to teach in the schools. Today the Church has virtually lost every educational advantage. It is estimated that more than ten thousand teaching sisters have been removed from teaching positions, with the result that their impoverished communities must disband. Lay instructors in numbers have likewise been forced out. In Austria, the collapse of the religious educational system was far more rapid. All the old private schools, many of them world-renowned, were closed by decree; and the system of confessional education assured under the older Concordats has been abolished. At present religious instruction has practically degenerated into the exposition of anti-Semitic and racial doctrine, apothe- of the Fiihrer, and studies in the virtues of the * Aryan' THE STATE 645 below, a perpetual renovation of the existing intellectual layers takes place. The State has the obligation of selecting with utmost care and exactitude, out of the total of fellow citi- zens, that human material that is evidently favored by Nature and to employ it in the service of the community. For the object of the State and State positions is not to provide individual classes with a living, but to fulfill the tasks allotted to them. But this will only be possible if as its bearers, in principle, only able and strong-willed person- alities are developed. This is valid not only for all official positions, but for the intellectual leadership of the nation in all domains in general. In this, too, lies a factor for the greatness of a people, that one succeeds in training the most able heads for the domains that are congenial to them, and in putting them into the service of the people's community. // two nations that, generally speaking, are equally well soul. National history is taught in accordance with the spirit of Mein Kampf. German schools in foreign countries receive official literature containing poems such as this by Will Vesper: Nun steht um dich, mein Ftihrer, fest dein Volk, Und wenn du sprichst, in Cute wie im Griramc, so bist du seine gottgewollte Stimme. Gestalt und Wille ward in dir das Volk, du sein Gesetz. In deinen grossen Planen vollendet sich der reinste Traum der Ahnen. Die Enkel werden noch in tausend Jahren auf deinen Strassen, deinen Stromen fahren. About thee stand thy people, oh my Fuhrcr. And when, in kindness or in wrath, thou speakest, Thou art, by God's decree, the voice this people finds. In thee do they both form and will assume Thou art the law in them. In thy vast planning The fathers' purest dreams are made come true. Still in a thousand years our grandchildren Down roads of thine will travel, down thy stream*. 646 MEIN KAMPF endowed compete with each other, then that nation will win the victory that has its best talents represented in its intellectual leadership, and that nation will succumb whose leadership represents only one great common food crib for certain estates or classes, without consideration of the inborn abilities of the individual bearers. True, this seems impossible at first sight in our present world. One will immediately object that the small son of a higher State official for example cannot be expected to become, let us say, a craftsman, because some other boy whose parents were craftsmen, seems more able. This may be true lor today's evaluation of manual work. For this reason the folkish State will have to arrive at an attitude that is different in principle in regard to the conception of work. // will have to break, if necessary throvyh centuries of education, with the absurdity of disrespet^^jsical activ- ity. In principle, it will have to evaluate ^ne individual, not according to his kind of work, but according to the form and the quality of his achievements. This may appear monstrous to an era to which the most brainless columnist, solely for the reason that he works with the pen, is worth more than the most intelligent mechanic working with fine metals. This wrong evaluation, however, lies not in the nature of things, as said before, but has been artificially imposed by education and did not formerly exist. The present unnatural condition is based on the general symptoms of disease of our materialized time. More resistance to indoctrination is offered in the universities, less by professors than by students. It is too early to estimate the losses which the German university has suffered, or to speculate upon the probable intellectual future of the new ideology. But in addition to the 'non- Aryan' professors and instructors who have migrated, at least a hundred 'Aryan 1 faculty members have been removed. THE STATE 647 Fundamentally, the value of all work is a double one: one that is purely material and one that is ideal. The material value is based on the importance, that means the material importance, of a work for the life of the community. The more fellow citizens draw advantage from a certain com- pleted achievement, that means, a direct and an indirect advantage, the greater must the material value be esti- mated. This evaluation finds plastic expression in turn in the material reward which the individual receives for his work. This purely material value is contrasted to the ideal value. This is not based on the importance of the work achieved, measured materially, but on its necessity in itself. As certainly as the material advantage of an invention may be greater than that of an everyday handyman's service, just as certainly is the community dependent on this smallest service as on that greatest. Materially it may make a difference in the evaluation of the advantage of the in- dividual work for all, and it can express this in the corre- sponding reward ; but ideally it has to establish the equality of all in the moment when every individual endeavors to do his best in his field, no matter what it may be. It is on this that the evaluation of a man must rest, and not on the reward. Since in a sensible State care must be directed toward allotting to the individual an activity that corresponds to his abilities, or in other words, toward training the able heads for the work that is congenial to them, but as ability can fundamentally not be imposed by learning but has to be inborn, that means that it is a gift of Nature and not man's merit, the general civic appreciation cannot depend on the work that has been allotted, so to speak, to the individual. For this work comes on account of his birth and of the training conditioned by it which he received from the community. The evaluation of man must be founded on the kind and the manner in which he discharges the work 648 MEIN KAMPF that he has been given by the community. For the activity that the individual carries out is not the end of his exist- ence, but only a means for it. Rather has he to continue his education as a man and to refine himself, but he can do so only within the frame of his cultural community which must always rest upon the foundation of a State. He must contribute his share to the preservation of this foundation. The form of this contribution is decided by Nature; it is up to him to returii to the national community, by zeal and honesty, what it once itself had given to him. He who does so earns highest esteem and highest respect. Material reward may be granted to one whose achievement bears corre- sponding profit for the community; ideal reward, however, must lie in the evaluation which every man can claim who devotes to the service of his nationality the forces which Nature gave him and which the national community developed. But then it is no longer a disgrace to be a decent craftsman, but it is a disgrace, as an incapable official, to steal the day from the Lord and the daily bread from the nation. Then one will also consider it a matter of course that a man is not allotted tasks to which he is not suited from the beginning. Furthermore, such an activity offers the only yardstick for the law with regard to the general, equal, legal and civil activity. The present time is liquidating itself: it introduces general suffrage, it talks of equal rights but it does not find a justi- fication for them. In the material reward it sees the expres- sion of a man's value and by this it smashes the foundation of the most noble equality which can at all exist. For equal- ity is not based and can never be based upon the achieve- ments of the individuals in themselves, but it is possible in the form in which everyone fulfills his special obligations. Only by this is Nature's chance in the evaluation of man's value eliminated and the individual becomes the forger of his own significance. THE STATE 649 In the present time, when entire groups of human beings know only how to evaluate one another merely according to salary classes, one has as already said no under- standing for this. But this must not be a reason for us to renounce the presentation of our ideas. On the contrary: He who wants to cure this time which is intrinsically sick and rotten has first of all to have the courage to expose the causes of this disease. But this should be the care of the National Socialist movement: ignoring all petty bourgeoisism, to col- lect out of, and to arrange in, our nationality those forces which are capable of being the protagonists of a new view of life. Of course one will now raise the objection that in general it is difficult to separate the ideal evaluation from the material one, that even the diminishing evaluation of physi- cal labor is brought about just by its inferior reward. That this inferior reward in turn is again the cause of the limita- tions of the individual's participation in the cultural treasures of his nation. That it is precisely the ideal culture of man, which does not necessarily have to have anything to do with his activity in itself, that is impaired thereby. That the dread of physical labor is all the more founded in the fact that in consequence of the lower reward, the cul- tural level of the manual laborer is necessarily lowered and that by this the justification of a general, lower evaluation is given. In this lies a good deal of truth. But for this very reason one will have to guard in future against a too great differen- tiation in salary levels. One should not say that with this the achievements will disappear. This would be the most sorrowful symptom of the decay of a time if the impulse for a higher intellectual achievement were to be found only in the higher salary. If this viewpoint had been the only decisive one in the world so far, mankind would never have 650 MEIN KAMPF received its greatest scientific and cultural goods. For the greatest inventions, the greatest discoveries, the most revo- lutionary scientific works, the most glorious monuments of human culture have not been given to the world out of greed for money. On the contrary their birth not infre- quently meant the very renunciation of the worldly happi- ness of riches. It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but man will some day again bow to higher gods. Many things may today owe their existence only to the longing for money and property, but among them are only few the non-existence of which would make mankind poorer. This, too, is one of the tasks of our movement that as early as today it announces a time which will give to the individual what he needs for living, but at that same time upholding the principle that man does not live exclusively for material enjoyments. This must some day find its expression in a wisely limited sliding scale of earnings, which in any case will make possible for even the most humble honest worker a decent, orderly existence as fellow citizen and man. One must on no account say that this is an ideal condi- tion which, if carried out in practice, the world would not bear and would actually never attain. We, too, are not so simple as to believe that one could ever succeed in bringing about a faultless era. But this does not relieve us of the obligation of fighting recognized mistakes, of overcoming weaknesses and of striving toward the ideal. Crude reality will of itself bring about only too many limitations. For that very reason man has to try all the more to serve the ultimate aim, and failures must deter him from his intention just as little as he can renounce justice merely because the latter, too, is liable to make mistakes, and just as little as one rejects medicine because there will nevertheless always be tickness. THE STATE 651 One should beware of evaluating the force of an ideal too little. Those who today become faint-hearted in this regard, I would like to remind, in case they once were soldiers, of a time the heroism of which was the most overwhelming profession of the force of ideal motives. For, what made people die at that time was not care for their daily bread, but the love of their country, the confidence in its greatness, the general feeling for the honor of the nation. And only after the German people turned its back on these ideals in order to follow the material promises of the Revolution, and after it exchanged the gun for the knapsack it came, instead of into an earthly heaven, into the purgatory of general disdain and not less, of general distress. Therefore it is all the more necessary to oppose the cal- culating masters of the erstwhile material Republic with the faith in an ideal Reich. The major features of the Nazi economic program as carried out to date were developed in theory by Reichswehr experts during the later years of the Republic. After 1923, Hitler himself refused to be tied to a program of economic or fiscal change, though he continued to concern himself politically with the widefelt desire for such a change. The Rcichswekr program included three doctrines of the first order of impor- tance: (a) autarchy, or a conception of Germany as a State relying primarily on its own resources and their sale in the domestic market, export being conceived of as a government- controlled 'corporation,' the function of which would be to finance the purchase of such raw materials as the country needed; (b) the regimentation of industry, of labor and in a measure of capital, in order to make possible the program of rearmament without excessive strain to the structure of the national economy; and (c) a policy of controlled inflation, the purpose of which would be to increase production with govern- ment expenditures, made primarily for purposes indirectly beneficial to military efficiency. These ideas were all familiar 652 MEIN KAMPF projects prior to 1933, but were not regarded with official favor in Nazi circles, where the dominant mood at that time was 'Socialistic/ The magazine Tat was one of the principal media for their dissemination, and they had considerable support from younger intellectuals. In the speech with which Hitler opened the fateful Reichstag session of March 21, 1936, certain applications of these ideas were offered to the German people as a program of economic recovery. At that time his Cabinet still included a number of conservatives. Afterward, on the basis of the Enabling Act which that session of the Reichstag passed, he proceeded to use an authority on which there was no longer any check whatever, save possible the moral influence of the aged President, to enact the legislation on which the present economic activities of Germany are based. The March 2ist address was moderate, even conciliatory: pacific intentions were proclaimed; and even international industrial warfare was repudiated, when it was asserted that the 'exchange of goods' between the people of the world remained imperatively necessary. The first great 'drive 1 was levied against unemployment, which had been a problem since 1929 and which had assumed catastrophic dimensions early in 1933. Promised work within five years, the great jobless masses were given new hope. By the close of 1936, the 'drive 1 had as a matter of fact been won. The methods employed were in the main four: control of the labor employed by industry every business was told how many men to employ, and forbidden to discharge anyone with- out permission; stimulation of rural employment by subsidizing certain types of peasant labor, by forbidding exodus to the industrial centers, and by sending enlisted corps of workers out into the country; creation of public works on a scale hitherto unknown, and the subsidizing of 'autarchical' indus- trial experiments, calculated to assure the production of substitutes for raw materials not to be found in Germany (e.g., cellulose products, artificial rubber, etc.); and rearmament, which soon became the largest German enterprise, absorbing 37 per cent of the national income and capitalizing upon foreign wars and unrest. THE STATE 653 No nation, Soviet Russia included, has ever exercised such far-reaching control over labor as has the Nazi regime. The 'work book' adopted is outwardly similar to that used in Italy, but is intrinsically a deed to a place in the most compact system of ' managed labor ' in the history of the world. Workers can be shifted from their regular jobs to the armament factories at will, or sent from city to city; and the penalty for failure to comply is joblessness and starvation. In addition, a compulsory half-year in the Labor Corps has been decreed, and a similar service for women is being planned. If one asks what the worker gets as a result, the answer is simple: on the whole, poorer pay than formerly, longer hours, and less food and clothing. The obtainable diet usually lacks fats; the bread is often of poor quality. On the other hand, two things must be noted about the average man's reaction. First, the deteriora- tion in his standard of living has been so gradual that for the most part it has passed unnoticed, and is to some extent com- pensated for by the recreational facilities supplied by the Arbeitsfront (Labor Front). Second, if the supplies of food and other needed things produced in Germany were 20 per cent greater, there would be no appreciable hardship; and in stressing that fact, the propagandists for the government always hold out the hope that improvement will come soon. Production has been increased in industries which serve the government. But smaller employers, especially those engaged in the crafts, have been slowly pushed to the wall along with considerable numbers of shopkeepers. Unable to bear up under the charges imposed, many of these have now joined the working class; and one is left to confront the ironical fact that the group which the Nazi movement first set out to help is the one which has suffered most. The tendency towards industrial centralization is very marked, and is accentuated by the financial dependence of the 'autarchic* industries on existing big businesses. But all these tendences have nothing to do with Nazi theory, which has never had an economic doctrine and has none now. What has happened is that the job of getting Germany ready for war has involved the adjust- ments which have latterly been almost automatically made. 654 MEIN KAMPF A considerable number of laws govern the agricultural labor market, many of them having for their purpose the further stimulation of crop production. For the peasants the net results are: a certain amount of free labor, which is much appreciated, and strict crop and price control, which is natu- rally far less popular. It has been proved once again by German experience that the agricultural problem can be solved if there is a dearth of farm produce; but what is not yet clear is who pays for the effects of this shortage, and how much is paid. Effective crop and price control was begun in Germany during 1928, but the early measures hardly suggested what is in effect now. If one adds the numbers of men employed on public works and in the army, it is clear that the only term which can apply to the picture as a whole is 'totalitarian mobilization.' The amenities of life have been relegated to the background; and the nation is living through a time which has manifest resem- blances to the 'war period* itself. Unquestionably the total cost is enormous. If one year of financial depression sufficed to wreck the unemployment insurance system erected under the Republic, six years of financed employment must have cost a staggering sum. To date the government has relied upon several sources for funds. Taxation has increased very considerably, the levy amounting at present to about 26 per cent of the national in- come. In addition there are numerous forms of concealed tax- ation, disguised for the most part as contributions to Party funds. Second, the confiscation of various accumulated funds or properties has brought in considerable revenue, the principal victims being the organizations built up under the Republic (e.g., the trade unions, Catholic religious houses, etc.), the Jews and those designated as 'political enemies/ and the Austrian State (the gold and foreign exchange accumulated under Schuschnigg's regime, and alluded to in his famous 'fighting speech/ were extracted from the banks and shipped off to Berlin). In addition the government profited enor- mously by enforcing a moratorium on German public and pri- vate indebtedness, though the resultant drying up of its credit THE STATE 655 abroad has naturally offset those gains. Finally, some capital entered the country, especially during 1934-35. These measures have not been found adequate. The progress of inflation has been relatively slow, but all the more relentless for that. Levies have been made on the banks in the form of subscriptions to government loans, for which there is virtually no market. A vast secret debt, variously estimated by foreign observers, must be added to the huge published total deficit. The amount of currency in circulation has been increased, so that the gold coverage is purely hypothetical. Nevertheless the situation is by no means hopeless. Much depends upon the extent to which the resources of private industry are tapped in the future. One may conclude from all this that Germany also has not solved the riddle of putting labor back on the pay-rolls of private industry. In this respect the British government appears to have done far better, as a result of its policy of undertaking rearmament 'in a business way.' But no other country in the world, save the United States, could afford to pay the price which the British system entails. Nor are the figures for employment recovery in the United States from the low levels of 1932 very much less impressive than those of Germany, if one takes into account the military organizations of the two countries. It may be argued, to be sure, that the resources of the United States are far greater than are those of Germany. Cf . The London Economist and the Haagsche Post. For a brief survey of German labor experience, cf. 'Labor under Fascism/ by Arthur Feiler, in Survey Graphic (February, CHAPTER III SUBJECTS AND CITIZENS OF THE STATE IN GENERAL, the formation that today is wrongly called the State knows only two kinds of people : State citizens and aliens. State citizens are all those who either by birth or by later naturalization hold citizenship ; aliens are all those who enjoy the same right in another State. In between there are, further, comet-like apparitions: the so-called State-less. They are people who have the honor of belonging to none of the present States, that is, they hold citizenship nowhere. Citizenship today is acquired, as already said, primarily through birth within the frontiers of a State. Thereby race or nationality play no rdle whatsoever. Thus a negro, who formerly lived in the German protectorates and who now has his domicile in Germany, in the person of his child now puts into the world a 'German citizen.' In the same way, the child of any Jew, Pole, African or Asiatic can without further ado be declared a German citizen. Apart from becoming a citizen through birth, there is the possibility of acquiring citizenship later. This is con- nected with certain requisites, for example that the candi- date in question if possible is not a burglar or a pimp; that he is further politically unobjectionable, that means that he SUBJECTS AND CITIZENS OF THE STATE 657 is a harmless political idiot; and that finally he is not a public charge for his new home that makes him a citizen. By this of course one means in this materialistic era only a financial charge. It is even looked upon as an expeditious recommendation to present a supposedly prosperous future taxpayer, in order to speed up the acquisition of the present citizenship. Racial objections play no r&le whatsoever in this. The entire procedure of the acquisition of citizenship is not carried out much differently from admission to an automobile club, for instance. fThe man sends in his ap- plication, this is examined and passed upon, and one day it is brought to his attention by a handbill that now he has become a State citizen, whereby this is even clad in a witty and funny form. Namely, the former Zulu Kafir in question is informed 'You have hereby become a German!' Indeed, this magic trick is performed by a modern State president. What the heavens could not accomplish is carried out by such an official Theophrastus Paracelsus at the drop of a hat. A simple stroke of the pen, and a Mon- golian Wenceslaus has suddenly become a genuine 'German/ But not only that one does not care in the least as to the race of such a new citizen, one does not even pay at- tention to his physical health. No matter how much such a fellow may be eaten up by syphilis, he is nevertheless highly welcome to the present State as a citizen, provided, as already mentioned, he does not signify a financial burden and a political danger. Thus every year these formations, called States, take in poisonous elements which they are hardly able to overcome. The State citizen himself is distinguished from the alien by the fact that he is given free access to all public offices, that perhaps he may have to discharge his military duty and that, in turn for this, he can further take an active or a passive part in elections. On the whole this is all. For the 651 MEIN KAMPF protection of personal rights and of personal liberty is also enjoyed by the alien, frequently more so; this is the case at least in our present German Republic.-* I know that one does not like to hear all this; but there exists hardly anything that is more thoughtless, even more stupid than our present State citizenship law. There is at present one State where at least feeble attempts of a better conception are perceptible. This is of course not our German model republic, but the American Union where one endeavors to consult reason at least partially. The Ameri- can Union, by principally refusing immigration to elements with poor health, and even simply excluding certain races from naturalization, acknowledges by slow beginnings an attitude which is peculiar to the national State conception. Thefolkish State divides its inhabitants into three classes : State citizens, State subjects, and aliens. In principle, only birth confers the status of subject. Being a State subject as such does not entitle one to hold public offices, to exercise political activity in the sense of participation in elections, be it actively or passively. In principle, every State subject's race and nationality have to be ascertained. Every State subject is free at any time to abandon his status and to become a State citizen in that country the nationality of which corresponds to his own. The alien is distinguished from the State subject only by the fact that he is a State subject of an alien State. The young State subject of German nationality is obliged to undergo the school training prescribed to every German. By this he subjects himself to be educated to become a fellow citizen, conscious of his race and nation. Later he has to undergo the physical exercises further pre- scribed by the State, and finally he joins the army. The training in the army is a general one; it has to comprise every German and to educate him for the range of military activities for which he can be used according to his physical SUBJECTS AND CITIZENS OF THE STATE 659 and mental abilities* Thereupon the irreproachably healthy young man, after discharging his military duty, is in the most solemn manner given the State citizenship. It is the most valuable document for his entire earthly life. With this he enters upon all the rights of the State citizen and takes part in all its advantages. For the State has to draw a sharp distinction between those who as national members are cause and bearers of its existence and its greatness, and those who only as 'earning 1 elements make their domicile within the State. The bestowal of the State citizen certificate should be combined with the solemn oath to the national community and the State. This certificate must signify a bond that bridges all cleavages and unites all. It must be a greater honor to be a citizen of this Reich as a street cleaner, than to be a king in a foreign State. The State citizen, as compared with the alien, is privileged. He is the master of the Reich. But this higher dignity also involves obligations. One without honor or character, the common criminal, the traitor to the country, etc., can at any time be deprived of this honor. By this he becomes a State subject again. The German girl is State subject and only becomes a State citizen when she marries. But citizenship can be conferred also on those female German State subjects who are active in economic life. Abrogation of the right of citizenship has played a part in German history since 1933. More than five thousand exiles have been declared non-citizens. The number is steadily increasing. Immigration conditions throughout the world make such disenfranchisement a hardship. Conversely the idea of attributing real importance to citizenship is interesting. CHAPTER IV PERSONALITY AND THE CONCEP- TION OF THE NATIONAL STATE IF THE folkish and National Socialist State sees its main task in educating and preserving the bearer of the State, it is not enough to promote the racial elements as such, to educate them thereafter and finally to train them for practi- cal life, but it is necessary that it bring its own organiza- tion into harmony with this task. It would be a folly to appraise man's value according to his race, that means to declare war against the Marxist viewpoint, Man is equal to man, if on the other hand, one is nevertheless not determined to draw the ultimate conse- quences from this. The ultimate consequence of the recogni- tion of the importance of the blood, that means the racial basis in general, is, however, the transmission of this evalua- tion to the individual person. Just as in general I have to evaluate the nations differently on the basis of the race to which they belong, thus also the individuals within a national community. The statement that a people is not equal to a people is then transmitted to the individual within a national community in the sense that a head can- not be equal to a head, because here too the elements of the blood may be the same, in great lines, but in individ- ual cases are nevertheless subject to thousandfold, most minute differentiations. CONCEPTION OF THE NATIONAL STATE 661 t The first consequence of this realization is at the same time, I would say, the cruder one, that is, the attempt to promote those racial elements that have been recognized as racially most valuable within the national community and to care for their special increase. This task is cruder for the reason that one can recognize, and solve it almost mechanically. It is more difficult, however, to recognize, in the community of all, those heads that are mentally and ideally most valuable indeed, and to give them that influence which not only is due these superior minds, but which above all is beneficial to the nation. This sieving according to ability and efficiency cannot be carried out mechanically, but it is a work that is done uninterruptedly by the daily struggle for life. A view of life which, by rejecting the democratic mass idea, endeavors to give this world to the best people, that means to the most superior men, has logically to obey the same aristo- cratic principle also within this people and has to guarantee leadership and highest influence within the respective people to the best heads. With this it does not build up on the idea of the majority, but on that of the personality.^ He who believes today that a National Socialist folkish State can be distinguished from other States perhaps purely mechanically by a better construction of its economic life, that means by a better balance of richness and poverty or by granting a greater share in deciding on the economic This reasoning is the spirit of Fascism. Ludwig Bernhard has pointed out that the ideas in this chapter parallel those presented by Pisenti in an address to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1926. 'Personality* means, more succinctly defined, 'dictatorship. 1 Cf. Krisis: ein politisches Manifest (Weimar, 1932). A comparison with the ideas of Pareto would likewise be interesting, though there is little to indicate thai Pareto was read in Nazi circles. 662 MEIN KAMPF process to a larger part of the population, or by a juster payment for work, by elimination or too great differences in wages, has become stuck in the most superficial aspect of the matter and has not the faintest idea of what we call a view of life. All that has just been described does not offer the least guaranty for permanency and even far less for a claim on greatness. A people that would not go beyond these merely exterior reforms would not in the least receive by this a guaranty for its victory in the general struggle of the nations. A movement that sees the substance of its mission only in such a generally balancing, and certainly just, development will in reality not bring about a powerful and genuine, because deep-going, reform of the existing conditions, as its entire activity gets ultimately stuck in mere superficialities, without giving the people that inner preparedness which makes it finally overcome, I almost want to say with compelling security, those weaknesses from which we have to suffer today. In order to understand this more easily it is perhaps expedient to cast once more a glance at the real origins and causes of the development of human culture. The first step which visibly distinguished man from the animal was that towards invention. Invention itself is originally based upon the finding of tricks and ruses the use of which makes the struggle for life with other weapons easier and sometimes alone makes it come out favorably. These most primitive inventions do not yet allow the personality to become clearly visible, because they become conscious to the later, or rather to the present human spectator, only as a mass phenomenon. Certain tricks and sly measures which man is able to observe, for instance, in the animal, catch his eye only summarily, and as he cannot ascertain or examine their origin any more, he helps himself simply by calling such incidents 'instinctive 9 ones. In our case, however, the latter word does not mean CONCEPTION OF THE NATIONAL STATE 663 anything. For he who believes in a higher development of living beings has to admit that any demonstration of their urge for living and fighting must once have had a begin- ning; that one individual will have started with this, and that such a procedure has repeated itself more and more often and has spread more and more, till finally it passed into the subconscious mind of all members of a certain species, and then appeared in the form of instinct. One will understand and believe this more easily with man himself. His first intelligent measures in the fight with other animals have certainly been, according to their origin, acts of certain particularly able individuals. Here, too, personality undoubtedly was once motive for decisions and executions which were later adopted as matters of course by entire mankind. Exactly as any military matter of fact, which today has become the basis of all strategy, primarily owes its origin to some individual head and be- came completely natural and generally valid only in the course of many, perhaps even thousands of years. Man supplements this first invention by a second: he learns to put other things, and also ether living beings, into the service of his own struggle for life; and with this starts man's general activity of inventing, which today is gener- ally visible to all. These material inventions which start with using stone as a weapon, which lead to taming animals, which give man fire by artificial production, and so on to the many-sided and astounding inventions of our days make us recognize the individual as the bearer of such creations the more clearly the nearer the various inventions lie to our time or the more important and incisive they are. In any case we know: the material inventions we see before us are all the results of the creative energy and ability of the individual person. All these inventions ultimately help in lifting man from the level of the animal world more and more, indeed, in finally removing him from it. Thus they 664 MEIN KAMPF fundamentally serve the permanent process of man's be- coming a higher being. But even what once, as the most simple ruse, helped man in the primeval forest make his struggle for life easier today in the form of most intelligent scientific findings helps in alleviating mankind's struggle for its present existence and in forging its weapons for the battles of the future. All human thinking and inventing, in its ultimate effects, serves first man's struggle for life on this planet, even though the so-called material profit of an invention or a discovery or of a deep scientific insight into the essence of things is not visible at the moment. All these facts, together, by helping in lifting man more and more out of the frame of the living beings that surround him, strengthen and fortify his position in such a way that in every respect he turns out to be the dominating creature on this earth. Thus all inventions are the result of the creative ability of some person. All these persons themselves, whether willingly or unwillingly, are more or less great benefactors to all men. Later on their activity gives to millions, even billions of human beings aids for alleviating the execution of their struggle for life. If in the origin of the present material culture we see always individual persons as inventors who supplement one another mutually and who build upon one another, the same is the case with the exercise and the execution of the things thought up and discovered by the inventors. For also all procedures of production, according to their origin, have in turn to be identified with inventions and thus to be considered dependent on the individual. Also the purely theoretical work of thinking which in individual instances cannot even be measured but which is nevertheless the pre- sumption for all further material inventions, appears again as the exclusive produce of the individual person. Not the masses invent and not the majority organizes or thinks, but all in all only the individual, the person. CONCEPTION OF THE NATIONAL STATE 665 A human community appears well organized only if it makes the work of these creative forces easier in the most complying manner and applies them for the profit of the community. The most valuable thing in the invention itself, no matter whether it lies in the material world or in that of thought, is at first the inventor as a person. To employ him profitably for the community is the first and the highest task of the organization of the national com- munity. Indeed, the organization itself has to be only an execution of this principle. Only with this is it freed from the curse of mechanism and becomes something living. Organization in itself has to be the incorporation of the en- deavor of putting the heads above the masses and of subjecting the masses to the heads. Organization, therefore, must not only not prevent the heads from emerging from the masses, but on the contrary, by the nature of its own being it has to make this possible and to facilitate it in the highest degree. Thereby it has to start from the principle that for humanity blessing has never lain in the masses, but in its creative heads who therefore in reality have to be looked upon as the bene- factors of mankind. It is in the interest of all to safeguard their most decisive influence and to facilitate their activity. Certainly, this interest is not satisfied and is not served by the rule of the masses who are either unable to think or are inefficient, in any case not inspired, but solely by the leader- ship of those whom Nature has endowed with special gifts. The selection of these heads is carried out above all, as mentioned before, by the hard struggle for life. Many break and perish, thus proving that they are not chosen for the ultimate, and only a few appear finally as selected. In the fields of thinking, of artistic creation, even of econ- omy, this process of selection still takes place today, though especially in the latter it is exposed to a serious handicap. State administration and the power of the nation, as in- 666 MEIN KAMPF oorporated in the organized army, are equally dominated by this idea. Here in all cases the idea of the personality is still dominant, the authority of the latter towards below and the responsibility towards the higher person above. Political life alone has today completely turned away from this most natural principle. While the entire human culture is merely the result of the creative activity of the individual, the principle of the value of the majority makes its appearance a the decisive principle in the entire and above all in the highest leadership of the national community, and from there downward it begins gradually to poison the entire life, that means in reality to dissolve it. Also the destructive effect of Judaism's activity in other national bodies must basically be attributed only to its eternal at- tempts at undermining the importance of the individual in its host nations and to put the masses in its place. Thereby, however, in the place of the organizing principle of the Aryan mankind steps the destructive one of the Jew. By this he becomes the 'ferment of decomposition 1 of nations and races and, in a wider sense, the dissolver of human culture. Marxism, indeed, presents itself as the perfection of the Jew's attempt at excluding the overwhelming importance of the personality in all domains of human life and of re- placing it by the number of the masses. To this corresponds Marxism, by advocating collectivism, did not propose the abrogation of the person, in the commonly accepted sense. But, akin in this respect to all democratic theories, it did deny to the 'genius' the right to dominate others and to make them serve his purpose. Plato had criticized similar views, on the ground that thus society was estranged from the leadership of the intellectual. Hitler, for his part, would like to have both 'democracy' and the 'genius/ and finds them co-ordinated in the army-state. Inside the army soldiers do not ask what their CONCEPTION OF THE NATIONAL STATE 667 politically the parliamentary form of government which, from the smallest germ cell of the community to the highest leadership of the entire Reich, we see so disastrously effec- tive, and economically the system of a labor union move- ment that does not actually serve the interests of the employee but exclusively the destructive intentions of the international world Jew. In the same measure in which economy is deprived of the effect of the principle of person- ality and, instead, is exposed to the influences and effects of the masses, it is bound to lose efficiency, serving all and valuable for all, and will gradually fall into a definite re- gression. All the workshop organizations which, instead of representing the interests of the employees, try to win influence on production itself, serve the same destructive purpose. By impairing the collective achievement, they rights are, or insist upon being granted more privileges. They obey a 'leader/ who in turn is obligated to look out for his men. If (Hitler has argued) a similar relationship can be introduced into civil and economic life, there would come to be a 'totali- tarian army/ Many Nazi orators have insisted during recent years that Germany is the only true 'democracy/ By this they mean that no ' class ' differences exist, the sole distinctions being 'personal* i.e., those between 'leader' and 'follow- ers/ But one may object that the mere act of changing ' work- ers ' into 'privates' accentuates rather than destroys class distinctions. Nevertheless the fact does remain that the industrial or business leader in a ' totalitarian army ' retains few absolute rights. He, too, is subordinate. The Betriebsrat (Industrial Council) was established by law in 1919 as a sop to those worker groups who clung to the theory of government by Workers and Soldiers' Councils. It pro- vided for the creation in every industrial plant of a workers' group having specified powers of representation in disputes concerning labor conditions. 668 MEIN KAMPF actually harm the individual. For the members of a national body cannot be satisfied in the long run, by mere theoretical phrases, but only by the goods of everyday life, that fall to the share of the individual, and further by the ensuing conviction that a national community, in its collective achievements, guards the interests of the individual. It makes further no difference whether Marxism, based on its mass theory, might appear able to take over and con- tinue the present economy. Criticism about the correctness or the incorrectness of this principle is not decided by the proof that this principle is able to administer what exists for the future, but exclusively by the proof that it itself can create such a culture. Marxism may take over the present economy a thousand times and let it work on under its leadership, but even a success of this activity would not prove anything in the face of the fact that it would be unable, by application of its principles, to create itself what today it takes over as finished. Marxism has given the practical proof of this. Not only that nowhere was Marxism able to found a culture or even an economy creatively, it was actually not even in a posi- tion to continue those that existed in line with its prin- ciples, but after the shortest time, by way of concessions, it had to come back to the ideas of the principle of person- ality, exactly as in its own organization it cannot do with- out these principles. Indeed, what must distinguish the folkish view of life from that of Marxism in principle, is that it not only recognizes the value of the race, but by this also the importance of the person and therefore makes the individual the pillar of its entire edifice. These are the supporting factors of its whole conception of life. If especially the National Socialist movement were not to understand the basic significance of this fundamental knowledge, but instead should merely tamper with the CONCEPTION OF THE NATIONAL STATE 669 outside of the present State or even consider the mass view- point as its own, then it would actually only represent a competitive party of Marxism; it would not have then the right to call itself a view of life. If the social program of the movement consisted solely of pushing aside the personality and to put the masses in its place, then National Socialism itself could be said to be infected by the poison of Marxism, as is the case with our bourgeois party world. The folkish State has to care for the welfare of its citizens by acknowledging the significance of the value of the person in all and everything and thus introducing in all domains that highest degree of productive efficiency which grants the individual also the highest degree of participation. The folkish State, therefore, has to free the entire leader- ship especially the highest, that means the political leadership from the parliamentary principle of the deci- sion by majority, that means decision by the masses, in order to establish firmly in its place the right of the person. From this results the following conclusion: The best State constitution and State form is that which, with the most natural certainty, brings the best heads of the national community to leading importance and to leading influence. But just as in economic life the able personalities cannot be determined from above, but have to wrestle through for themselves, and exactly as here from the smallest shop up to the greatest enterprise, infinite training is given by itself and only life makes the necessary examinations, thus of course the political heads too cannot suddenly be 'dis- covered.' Geniuses of an extraordinary kind do not admit consideration of the normal mankind. The State in its organization, beginning with the smallest cell of the community up to the highest leadership of the entire Reich, must be built upon the principle of personality. There must be no decisions by majority, but only re- 670 MEIN KAMPF sponsible persons, and the word 'council' is once more reduced to its original meaning. At every man's side there stand councillors, indeed, but one man decides. f The principle which once made the Prussian army the most marvelous instrument of the German people has to be some day in a transformed meaning the principle of the construction of our whole State constitution: authority of every leader towards below and responsibility towards above. Even then one will not be able to do without those cor- porations which today we call parliaments. Their council- lors will then actually give counsel, but responsibility can and must be borne always only by one man and thus he alone can and must have the authority and right of com- mand. Parliaments in themselves are necessary, because it is above all in them that the heads to whom one can later allot special responsible tasks have the chance to raise themselves gradually. This gives the following picture : The folkish State, from the community up to the leader- ship of the Reich, has no representative body which decides by majority, but only bodies of councils who stand at the side of the respective elected leader, receiving their share of work from him, so that, as the circumstances require, they in turn have to assume absolute responsibility in certain This is 'Prussian Socialism/ of which there were many varying conceptions prior to 1933. Hitler derives relatively little of his ideology from Spengler or Moeller van den Bruck in this instance. The idea of a 'parliament* is borrowed in part from Mussolini, and in part from the conception of the general staff entertained by Prussian generals like Gneisenau and Moltke. Today the German 'Reichstag* is a purely passive organization. The true 'parliaments' are the cabinet and the inner Party council CONCEPTION OF THE NATIONAL STATE 671 domains, exactly as on a large scale has the leader himself or the head of the respective corporation.-^ The folkish State, in principle, does not tolerate that in concerns of a special kind, for instance of economic nature, people are asked for advice or judgment who, by virtue of their education and activity, are unable to understand any- thing of the matter. Therefore it divides its representative body from the beginning into political and professional chambers. In order to guarantee a profitable co-operation between them a special selected senate is provided above them. No voting ever takes place in any chamber or senate. They are working institutions and not voting machines. The individual member has an advisory vote but never a deciding one. The latter is the exclusive privilege of the respective responsible chairman. This principle of unconditional connection of absolute responsibility with absolute authority will gradually breed up a choice of leaders as is inconceivable today, in the era of irresponsible parliamentarianism. Thus the State constitution of the nation will be brought into harmony with that law to which the nation already owes its greatness in the domains of culture and economics. The pattern is copied from Italian Fascism. Almost imme- diately after the success of the 'March on Rome 1 (1922), Hitler's Munich organization concluded that something similar could be attempted in Germany. The putsch of 1923 was patently an imitation. Hitler had no choice but to convince himself that the army and the monarch (Crown Prince Rup- precht) would be as benevolently neutral as the King and his generals had been in Italy. But he failed to realize that so many differences separated Bavaria from the rest of Germany that it was impossible to proceed from the annexation of 672 MEIN KAMPF As to the possibility of carrying through these ideas, I want you not to forget that the parliamentary principle of democratic majority rule has not always dominated man- kind, but on the contrary it can be found only in very small periods of history which, however, have always been periods of decline of nations and States. Yet one must not believe that by purely theoretical measures from above one can bring about such a change, because logically it must not even stop at the constitution of the State but has to penetrate all the other legislation as well and even the general civil life. Such a fundamental change can and will take place only through a movement which itself is built up in the spirit of these ideas and thus already in itself contains the future State. Therefore, the National Socialist movement must not delay in devoting itself completely to these ideas and carry them to practical execution within its own organization, so that some day it may not only point out to the State these same principles but also place the already completed body of its own at the State's disposal. Munich to the capture of Berlin. Yet, though the Nazis of 1923 were relatively unfamiliar with the inside story of Fascism, they received detailed information later, when Hermann Goering returned from a pleasant period of exile spent in Italy. CHAPTER V VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION "^"HE folkish State, of which I have tried to draw a I picture in great outlines, does not become reality by the mere knowledge of what this State needs. It is not enough to know what a national State ought to look like. Much more important is the problem of its origin. One must not expect that today's parties, which are the principal beneficiaries of the present State, will of their own accord arrive at a reversal of their orientation and voluntarily undertake a change in their present atti- tude. This is the less possible as their actually leading ele- ments have always been Jews and again Jews. The devel- opment we are undergoing at present, if continued unre- strictedly, would some day fulfill the all-Jewish prophecy the Jew would actually devour the nations of the world, he would become their master. In the face of the millions of German 'bourgeois' and 4 proletarians' who for the greater part, out of indolence and stupidity coupled with cowardice, trot towards their doom, he, in the fullest consciousness of his future goal, unhesi- tatingly pursues his way. Therefore a party that is led by him can serve no other interests but his; these, however, have nothing in common with the concerns of Aryan nations. 674 MEIN KAMPF If one will try to transform into actual reality the ideal picture of a folkish State, then, notwithstanding the present powers of public life, one has to look for a new power that is willing and able to take up the fight for such an ideal. For a fight is involved in this case, inasmuch as the first task is not to create a folkish State conception, but above all to do away with the present Jewish concep- tion. As so many times in history, the main difficulty lies not in shaping the new state of affairs, but in making room for it. Prejudices and interests unite in a closed phalanx and try to prevent by all means the victory of an idea which they dislike and which threatens them. By this the fighter for such a new ideal, with all the emphasis on its positive side, is unfortunately compelled primarily to battle out the negative part of the fight which is to lead to the abolition of the existing condition. A young doctrine of great and principally new signifi- cance will have to apply as the first weapon the probe of criticism with all its acuteness no matter how disagreeable this may be to the individual. It shows little insight into historical developments if today people who call themselves folkish emphatically assure again and again that by no means they wish to be active in negative criticism but only in constructive work; a genuinely folkish stammering that is equally childishly stupid, and a proof showing how even the history of their time has passed by these heads without leaving any im- pression. Also Marxism had a goal, and even knows a constructive activity (although it relates merely to the establishment of a despotism of international world finance, Jewry!); but previously it has nevertheless exercised criti- cism for seventy years; and at that ruinous and destructive criticism and more criticism, until by this continuously corroding acid the old State was undermined and brought to collapse. Only then was its so-called 'construction 1 VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 675 started. And that was natural, correct and logical. An existing condition is not abolished by the mere stress and presentation of a future condition. For one cannot presume that the adherents of, or even those interested in, the pre- sently existing condition will be completely converted and won for the new condition merely by stating that there is a necessity. On the contrary, it may happen only too easily that then two conditions remain side by side, and thereby the so-called view of life becomes a party, out of the frame of which it will not be able to free itself. For the view of life is intolerant and cannot be content with the r61e of a 'party among others/ but it demands dictatorially that it be acknowledged exclusively and completely and that the entire public life be completely readjusted according to its own views. Therefore it cannot tolerate the simultaneous existence of a representation of the former condition. Exactly the same applies to religions. Christianity also could not content itself with building up its own altar, it was compelled to proceed to destroying the heathen altars. Only out of this fanatical intolerance could an apodictic creed form itself, and this intolerance is even its absolute presupposition. f Now one may very well raise the objection that with such phenomena in world history one has mostly to do with those of specifically Jewish ways of thinking; that indeed this kind of intolerance and fanaticism incorporates the very Jewish nature. This may be right a thousand times, and one may well regret this fact deeply and state its ap- pearance in the history of mankind with only too justified annoyance as something that had been unknown to history thus far yet this does not change the fact that this con- dition does exist today. The men who want to redeem our German people from its present condition must not torture their heads with thinking about how splendid it would be if this or that did not exist, but they must try to find out 676 MEIK KAMPF how one can abolish given facts. A view of life, filled with infernal intolerance, will be broken only by a new idea that is driven forward by a similar spirit, is fought for with the same strongest will, but is pure and genuine throughout. The individual may state with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror has been brought into the much freer old world, but he will not be able to deny the fact that since then the world has been threatened and dominated by this compulsion, and that compulsion is broken only by compulsion, and terror by terror. Only then can a new condition be created by con- struction. < Political parties are inclined towards compromises, views of life never. Political parties count with opponents, views oj life proclaim their infallibility. Political parties too have originally always the intention of coming to sole despotic domination ; nearly always they harbor a minor impulse towards a view of life. But the very narrowness of their programs robs them of the heroism that a view of life demands. The conciliating measures of their intention leads to them the petty and weak minds with whom one cannot make crusades. Thus in most cases they soon get stuck in their own pitiable pettiness. By this, however, they renounce the fight for a view of life and instead by so-called 'positive co-operation* they try to The idea that Christianity introduced 'spiritual terror' into a previously immune world is a favorite Rosenberg notion. (Cf. Mythus des 2on Jahrhunderts.) But it has had a still more fervent protagonist in Count Reventlow, whose Reichswart contained many articles denouncing the 'Chris- tian dualism 9 which sunders God from the world, and soul from body, has turned human beings into 'creatures without wills/ who propagate themselves 'with a guilty conscience, under the last of sermons against sin/ VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 677 conquer as quickly as possible a place at the food trough of existing institutions and to remain there as long as pos- sible. This, then, is their only endeavor. And if ever they should be pushed away from this general feeding crib, by a competing boarder with a somewhat brutal nature, then their every thought and wish is solely directed at getting again at the head of the herd of those who are also hungry, be it by force or by ruse, in order that finally, even at the cost of their most sacred conviction, they may refresh themselves at the beloved food source. Jackals of politics! Since a view of life is never willing to share with another one, it cannot be ready either to co-operate in an existing condition that it condemns, but it feels the obligation of fighting, by all available means, this condition and the entire hostile world of ideas; that means of preparing their collapse. This purely corrosive fight, which is recognized in its danger at once by all others and therefore meets general resistance and defense, as well as the positive fight which attacks for the purpose of putting through its own new world of ideas, demands determined fighters. Therefore a view of life will lead its ideas to victory only if in its ranks it unites the most courageous and most energetic elements of its era and of its people, and brings them into the solid forms of a forceful fighting organization. To this end, it is necessary that, with a view to these elements, it extract certain ideas from its own general world picture and clothe them with a form that in its precise, slogan-like brevity seems suitable to serve as a creed for a new com- munity of men. While the program of a political party, which is no more than that, is the recipe for favorable results in the next election, the program of a view of life means the formulation of a declaration of war against an existing order, against an existing condition, in short, against an existing conception of life in general. 678 MEIN KAMPF Thereby it is not necessary that each individual who fights for this view of life have full insight into, and exact knowledge of, the ultimate ideas and trends of thought of the movement's leader. Rather it is necessary that one make clear to him only a few but very great viewpoints and that the essential basic lines are unforgettably branded in his memory, so that he is completely imbued with the conviction that the victory of his movement and its doc- trine is necessary. The individual soldier, too, is not initiated into the thought development of higher strategy. As he is trained for strict discipline and a fanatical con- viction of the right and the force of his cause and for com- plete devotion to it, so must be trained the individual adherent of a movement of great scope, great future, and greatest intentions. As useless as an army would be the individual soldiers of which would all be generals, and be it only by their educa- tion and knowledge, just as useless would be a political movement as representation of a view of life if it were only the reservoir of 'intellectual' people. No, it needs the primitive soldier too, as otherwise inner discipline cannot be achieved. The very nature of an organization implies that it can exist only if the broad masses, motivated by sentiment, serves a highest intellectual leadership. A company of two hundred men, mentally all equally able, could in the long run be disciplined only with greater difficulty than a com- pany of one hundred and ninety mentally less able men and ten who are more highly educated. From this fact Social Democracy once drew the greatest profit. It integrated the members of the great masses of our people who were dismissed from military service and were trained in discipline, and took them into its equally strict party discipline. Its organization, too, presented an army of officers and soldiers. The German manual laborer. VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 679 discharged from military service, became the soldier, the Jewish intellectual the officer; the German labor union official thereby can be considered as the corps of non- commissioned officers. What our bourgeoisie regarded with a shaking of their heads, namely the fact that only the so- called uneducated masses belonged to Marxism, was in truth the presumption for its success. For while the bourgeois parties in their one-sided intellectuality present an unable, undisciplined gang, Marxism, by its material of intellectually untrained men has created an army of party soldiers who obeyed the Jewish director just as blindly as previously their German officer. The German bourgeoisie which principally never cared about psychologi- cal problems because it considered such problems far beneath their dignity found it unnecessary also in this case to think so that they might recognize the deeper meaning as well as the secret danger of this fact. On the contrary, people thought that a political movement that is formed only in the circles of the 'intelligentsia* was more valuable for this very reason, and had a greater claim and even more probability of coming into power than had the uneducated masses. One never understood that the strength of a political party lies by no means in a mentality, as great and as independent as possible, of the individual members but rather in the disciplined obedience with which its members follow their intellectual leadership. The decisive factor is the leadership proper. If two bodies of troops battle one another, not that will be victorious in which each individual received the highest strategic training, but that which has the most superior leaders and at the same time the best disciplined, blindly obedient, best drilled troop. This is a fundamental realization which, when examining the possibility of putting a view of life into activity, we must keep before our eyes. 680 MEIN KAMPF Therefore, if, in order to lead a view of life to victory, we have to transform it into a fighting movement, the pro- gram of the movement has logically to consider the human material that it has at its disposal. As immovable as the final aims and the leading ideas must be, just as ingenious and psychologically correct must the method be, by which the propaganda program is orientated at the souls of those without whose help the most sublime idea would forever remain only an idea. If thefolkish idea wants to proceed to a clear success from the unclear intentions of today, then it has to single out certain leading principles from its large world of thought, principles which, according to their nature and contents, are suitable for obligating a broad mass of people, namely, that mass which alone guarantees the fight for this idea according to a view of life. This is the mass of the German workers. For this reason, the program of the new movement was summed up in a few, altogether twenty-five articles. They are destined primarily to give the man in the street a rough picture of the movement's intention. They are in a way of speaking a political creed which on the one hand campaigns for the movement and which on the other hand is suited for uniting and welding together those who have been attracted by a generally acknowledged ob- ligation. Hereby the following realization must never leave us: since the so-called program of the movement is certainly absolutely correct in its final aims, but as in its formulation it had to take psychological momenta into consideration, there can well arise, in the course of time, the conviction that in individual instances perhaps certain leading pro- positions should be framed differently, or should receive a better formulation. But every attempt in this direction has, in most cases, catastrophic effects. For thereby some- thing that should stand unshakably firm is given free to VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 681 discussion which, once a single point is deprived of its faithful, dogmatic determination, does not result immedi- ately in a new, better, and above all a uniform determina- tion, but which will rather lead to never-ending debates and to general confusion. In such a case there remains always the reflection of what is better: a new, more fortu- nate formulation which causes a dispute within the move- ment, or a form which at the moment is perhaps not the best one, but presents an organism that in itself is complete, unshakable and entirely uniform. Every examination will show that the latter is preferable. Since changes always involve only the outward form, such corrections will again and again appear as possible or desirable. Finally, owing to people's superficiality there is the great danger that in such purely outward formulation of a program they see the most essential task of a movement. With this, however, the will and the force needed in fighting for the idea proper with- draws to the background, and the activity that ought to turn to the outside will wear itself out in internal fights, about the program. With a doctrine that in great lines is actually correct, it is less harmful to retain a formulation, even if in reality it were no longer quite up-to-date, than to deliver, by its correction, to general discussion and all its most evil con- sequences, a principle of the movement that so far has been looked upon as made of granite. This is impossible above all as long as a movement itself is still fighting for victory. For how does one think to fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine if by continued changes in its outward construction one spreads uncertainty and doubt? The essential has never to be sought in externals but always only in the inner meaning. And this is unchange- A note on the Program is appended to this chapter. 682 MEIN KAMPF able; and in its interest one can ultimately only wish that the movement, by keeping off all events that cause splits and uncertainty, will preserve the force necessary in fighting for it. Here, too, one can learn from the Catholic Church. Although its structure of doctrines in many instances collides, quite unnecessarily, with exact science and re- search, yet it is unwilling to sacrifice even one little syllable of its dogmas. It has rightly recognized that its resistibility does not lie in a more or less great adjustment to the scienti- fic results of the moment, which in reality are always chang- ing, but rather in a strict adherence to dogmas, once laid down, which alone give the entire structure the character of creed. Today, therefore, the Catholic Church stands firmer than ever. One can prophesy that in the same measure in which the appearances flee, the Church itself, as the resting pole in the flight of appearances, will gain more and more blind adherence. Therefore, he who actually and seriously desires the victory of a folkish view of life has not only to recognize that first, for gaining such a victory , only a strong fighting movement is suitable, but that secondly such a movement in turn will endure only on the basis of an unshakable security and firm- ness of its program. It must not dare to make allowances in the formulation of the latter to the spirit of the respective era, but must keep a form, once it has been found favorable, for- ever, in any case until it is crowned by victory. Before that, every attempt at bringing about settlements concerning the expedience of the one or the other point will split up the unity and the fighting force of the movement in the measure in which its followers take part in such an inner discussion. This does not mean that an 'improvement* that has been carried out today might not be subjected to critical re- examinations as early as tomorrow, only to find a better substitute the day after tomorrow. He who in such cases VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 683 tears the barrier down lays open a way the beginning of which is known, but the end of which loses itself in the Infinite. This important realization had to find its application in the young National Socialist movement. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, with its program of twenty- five points, received a foundation that is bound to be unshak- able. The task of the present members of the movement, and of those to come, must not consist of a critical reshaping of these leading principles, but rather in their pledge to them. For otherwise the next generation would in turn have the same right of wasting its force for such a purely formal work within the party instead of leading to the movement new adherents and with it new forces. For the great number of followers, the nature of our movement will lie less in the letter of our principles but rather in the mean- ing which we are able to give them. To these realizations the young movement once owed its name, in accordance with them its program was composed, and in them roots also the manner of its propagation. In order to help the folkish ideas to victory, a national party had to be created, a party that does not consist only of intellectual leaders, but also of manual laborers! Every attempt to proceed with the materialization of folkish ideas without such a forceful organization, today, as in the past and in the future, would be without success. With this the movement has not only the right but the duty to con- sider itself the protagonist and thus the representative of these ideas. As much as the basic idea* of the National Socialist movement are folkish, so much are, at the same time, the folkish ideas, National Socialist. If, however, National Socialism wants to be victorious, then it has to espouse this statement absolutely and exclusively. Here too it has not only the right but also the duty of stressing most sharply the fact that any attempt to represent the 684 MEIN KAMPF folkish idea outside of the frame of the National Socialist Party is impossible and in most cases based on downright fraud* If today someone reproaches the movement that it be- haves as though it exclusively 'owned* the folkish idea, there is only one correct answer to this: Not only owned but created for practical reality. For what hitherto existed under this heading was not suitable for influencing the fate of our people even to the smallest degree, as all these ideas lacked the clear, uniform formulation. What existed was mostly single, disjointed and more or less correct realizations, which not infrequently contradicted one another, but which at any rate had no inner bond among themselves. And even if this bond had existed, yet in its weakness it would never have sufficed as a basis towards which to orientate and upon which to construct a movement. Solely the National Socialist movement achieved this. If today all kinds of associations and little associations, groups and little groups, and for all I care, also 'great parties' claim the word 'folkish' for themselves, this is in itself a consequence of the activity of the National Socialist movement. Without its work all these organizations would never have thought of even pronouncing the word 'folkish,' they even would not have imagined anything by this word, and especially their leading heads would not have had any relation whatsoever to it. It was only the work of the N.S.G.W.P. which made this a pregnant word that is now being used by all kinds of people, above all, in its own suc- cessful work of propaganda the party has shown and proved the force of these folkish ideas so that the others are forced by their very greed of advantage at least to pretend wanting something similar* VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 685 f Just as hitherto they have put everything at the service of their petty ballot speculations, thus the conception 'folkish' has remained even today for these parties only an entirely superficial and hollow slogan with which they try to counterbalance, with their own members, the attractive force of the National Socialist movement. For only the care for their own existence, as well as their fear of the growth of our movement, that is carried by a new view of life, the universal significance of which they guess as well as its dangerous exclusiveness, makes them use words which eight years ago they did not know, at which they laughed seven years ago, which they called nonsense six years ago, fought five years ago, hated four years ago, persecuted three years ago, only to adopt them, at last, two years ago and now, combined with their own vocabulary, to use them as a battle cry in their fight. And even today one has always to point out again that all these parties have no idea what the German people needs. The most striking proof of this is the superficiality with which they use the word 'folkish.' Not less dangerous are all those who run around as sham folkish, making fantastic plans, mostly based on nothing but an id6e fixe which in itself might be right, but in its isolation is nevertheless without any significance for the formation of a great uniform fighting community, and in no case suited for building up such a community. These people who brew together a program partly of what they think themselves, partly of what they have read, are frequently more dangerous than the open enemies of the folkish idea. In the most favorable case they are sterile theorists, but most disastrous swaggerers, and not seldom they believe that with flowing beards and primeval Ger- manic doings they can disguise the spiritual and mental inanity of their activity and abilities. In contrast with all these futile experiments it is therefore 686 MEIN KAMPF well to remember the time in which the young National Socialist movement began its battle. ^ The twenty-five points of the Party program had been extensively criticized both inside and outside the organization. By 1927 Hitler had grown reasonably sure that the economic views of Gottfried Feder could never prevail in the world of real life. Still he very shrewdly refused to give up the program, and argued that good Nazis should be so aflame with zeal that they would believe what was set before them as unques- tioningly as Catholics believe the dogmas of their Church. To have adopted another program would have helped little, since the Party objective was not to enter the Reichstag and help to bring about better conditions, but solely and simply to create a disciplined organization with which to acquire and keep possession of the power of the State. The Nazi of 1938 may sometimes pause to wonder what has happened to the Party gospel. A cursory survey is interesting: Art. i: Inclusion, on the basis of the principle of self- determination, of all Germans in a Pan-German State. Comment: Austria and the Sudetenland have been annexed, but the principle of self-determination was not invoked. Art. 2: Annulment of the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain. Comment: The Treaty of Versailles is a dead letter in so far as these important matters are concerned the size of the German army, navy and air fleet; the maintenance of a demilitarized zone in the Rhineland; and the payment of reparations. These provisions are still in force the cessions of territory to Poland; the grant of Alsace-Lorraine to France; the severance of Eupen-Malmedy and of a third of the region of Schleswig from Germany; the loss of the former German colonies. In so far as the Treaty of St. Germain is concerned, the only changes to date are those which concern German annexations in the regions aforementioned, and the grant of certain Slovak territories to Hungary. Art. 3: Colonies are demanded. VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 687 Comment: Owing largely to the inability of Germany to decide what was meant by 'colonies' and what concessions would be offered by way of compensation, no success has been achieved in so far as this point is concerned. Art. 4 : Only persons of 4 German blood ' can be citizens. Comment: To date this article has been enforced against the Jewish group. But citizens of Czech, Polish, or Hungarian descent have not been molested. 'Enemies of the regime 1 have been disenfranchised despite their German blood. Art. 5: Non -citizens are to live under 'laws for strangers.' Comment: Minority legislation has been a constant problem in the Third Reich. The treatment accorded the Jewish minority is well-known. Polish and Czech minorities are under constant but varying pressure. The Dutch minority has been faced with a number of problems. Citizens of other States are welcome as guests, but have often been the victims of disorder. Art. 6 : Appointment to office must be made not on the basis of Party membership, but because of 'character and fitness.' Comment: Non-Party members have been systematically removed from office. In nearly every department of public life, appointments are made on the basis of political loyalty. The future 'leaders' of the country are to be selected from the elite of various Nazi organizations. Even the clergy of the Lutheran Church are 'graded 1 in accordance with their Party affiliations. Art. 7: In case the citizens of the country cannot be sup- ported, non-citizens must go. Comment: Evidently the events of November, 1938, must be linked to this Article. Art. 8: There must be no further immigration of non- Germans. Comment: The sole noted exceptions to this rule have been the incorporation of Czech minorities in the occupied areas, and the importation of Italian labor. Art. 9: All citizens 'must possess equal rights and duties/ Comment: Membership in Hitlerite organizations is volun- tary, but refusal to join has meant economic discrimination. 688 MEIN KAMPF More than 150,000 persons have been jailed for long terms in prisons or concentration camps for offenses most of which have antedated the Machtergreifung or the annexations. More than 50,000 Aryan Germans have gone into exile. The number of those who have served brief prison terms is not known. Art. 10: The first duty of every citizen is to work for the common good. Comment: 'Work cards' must be carried by all laboring people. The right to a place of employment is not recognized. Capital can be required to invest its funds in designated national enterprises. Savings banks can be compelled to invest their deposits in government loans. Art. 1 1 : Unearned income must be abrogated. Comment: No law has been passed abolishing unearned income. But investment funds are subject to an increasing number of restrictions. Art. 12: Confiscation of war profits. Comment: It might have been possible to confiscate war- time profits in 1919 and 1920. But legislation designed to acquire these profits met with so much opposition, and the situation in the Western provinces was so precarious, that little could be done. Once the wave of inflation had swept the country, the idea ceased to possess any significance. But profits accruing to Germans for assistance to other countries engaged in warfare have not been confiscated, as witness the steadily increasing German private holdings in Italy and Spain. Art. 13: All trusts must be turned over to the state. Comment: No trust has as yet met this fate. As a matter of fact, the Nazis turned back to the German Steel Trust packets of stock acquired by the government under the Republic. Through this transaction, Fritz Thyssen (once a heavy contributor to Hitler's campaign chest) reacquired control of that Trust. On the other hand, the trend towards State Socialism is so marked that the nationalization of private industries beyond a certain size may soon prove unavoidable. Art. 14: Profit-sharing is demanded. Comment: It was never quite clear what Feder meant by VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 689 'profit-sharing.' He offered a number of explanations, one of which seemed to possess a measure of finality. The only way to distribute profits was, he declared, to lower prices and raise wages. Since 1933 the government has settled the debate by taking recourse to price-fixing. Art. 15: A generous increase in old-age pensions is needed. Comment: Since 1933, the unemployment insurance fund has grown so rapidly that the government was able during 1937 to borrow heavily from it. The old-age pension fund remains, however, in a chronic state of anemia. No subsidies have been granted. Art. 16: The middle class must be protected; department stores must be divided into a number of small stores each of which is operated by an independent merchant. Comment: Perhaps no other item in the program elicited so much approval. During 1933, a weak attempt was made to carry out this interesting suggestion, but nothing came of it. Gradually Jewish interests were squeezed out, and foreign owners of department store stock deducted an appropriate amount from their income-tax reports. But the stores them- selves continue to operate as of old. Better equipped than the smaller shops to reckon with shortages in staple merchan- dise and price changes, they seemed destined to outlive most of their rivals. Art. 17: The land must serve communal purposes, and interest-taking is prohibited if it involves foreclosure. Comment: Special laws have been passed regulating the title to the so-called Erbhof (hereditary farm). Under this legislation, about 845,000 small farms are reserved for 'family* use, much in the same way as peasant holdings are regulated in France under the Code Napolfen. The land cannot be sold or divided without the permission of the special court (Erbhof s- gerichf), and there can be only one heir. The idea was born of a somewhat romantic impulse to foster a 'peasant nobility,' but at first had a wide popular appeal because foreclosures were made impossible. But, as always, the advantage was accompanied by a disadvantage. Since the farms cannot be old, they can also not be used as security for loans. In addi- 690 MEIN KAMPF tion the difficulty involved in providing for other children than the sole heir is considerable. The peasant's life is circumscribed by many laws. He must ell at a certain price. At specified times, he must turn over to the authorities a fixed amount of produce. Failure to comply would mean confession of inability to farm the land properly, and might lead to loss of the homestead. As a result of constant fighting against shortages of grain and other foodstuffs shortages which grow more noticeable as the army expands and as it is discovered that the agricultural districts of the annexed regions did not supply foodstuffs in quantities sufficient to feed their populations farming in Germany has passed through numerous interesting experi- mental phases. Thus a shortage of fodder led to inability to feed cattle, which in turn led to a shortage of milk, etc., etc. Art. 18: Usurers, speculators, and other criminals of the same ilk are to be punished with death. Comment: This article reflects the post- War feeling of indignation and despair caused by the high premiums on money. Today the stock exchange is controlled. The death penalty can be resorted to for violation of the currency laws which involve smuggling. Usury, however, is relatively uncommon, the manipulation of currency being chiefly a matter of obtaining permission to use one of the several kinds of Mark now in use. Art. 19: Roman law must be abrogated and replaced with German law. Comment: In retrospect this seems the most important article of all. Criticism of 'Roman law* as expounded in German jurisprudence has been a familiar theme of German political writing for more than fifty years. Based on Scholastic distinctions, this law did unquestionably lose itself in formali- ties and academic distinctions. After the War, the question became acute once more. Was the law there for its own sake, or for the sake of the people who lived under it? Doubtless Feder and his friends were thinking primarily of the law as it affected individuals during periods of monetary unsettlement. After the inflation, the legislatures and the courts laid down VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 691 broad rules of procedure on the basis of which mortgages and other debts were to be dealt with. In many individual cases, mortal havoc was wrought upon the fortunes of thousands. People naturally thought, as the literature of the time so clearly shows, that the law ought to have taken into considera- tion the nature of individual claims. Many felt that the very basis of right and wrong had vanished. Today German law has come to mean that anything which serves the national purpose, as that is interpreted by the government, is legal. The principle laid down by Hans Frank, Reich Minister of Justice, that 'Right is what serves the people; wrong, what is detrimental to them/ has led in practice to extraordinary conclusions. For it is obvious that such a theory of the law must perplex and unsettle the courts. In handling cases which involve friction with the police or the political authorities, recourse is often had to precedent that has been established in the enforcement of some edict. For example, there is the measure signed by President von Hinden- burg in 1933 empowering the government to suppress as treasonable any action that serves the Communist Party. Almost anything an official dislikes can be interpreted in the light of that measure. Thus, for example, clergymen have been sentenced for endeavoring to convert former Communists to Christianity. On the other hand, the courts also refuse in numerous instances to take action against Party members. Late in 1938, a young Nazi broke into St. Vincent's Church at Neuhausen, near Munich, and smashed both the baptismal font and the crucifix above the high altar. He was arrested and brought to trial. But the court's reaction to his declaration that he proposed to smash baptismal fonts whenever he had the chance was a verdict of not guilty. It is nevertheless possible to win difficult cases, if an attorney of sufficient energy and fearlessness can be found. Cases are known to have been won despite insistence by prominent officials that an adverse decision was expected. In short, the 'common law' is at present in a highly nebulous state. The statutory law seems to be enforced and interpreted conscien- tiously; but the maze of regulations governing virtually every 692 MEIN KAMPF form of endeavor naturally render procedure difficult. For example, all publishing is subject to the control of the various agencies entrusted with the supervision of culture. These are not always in agreement; and if an appeal is made from a lower instance to a higher, the decision may hinge upon a technicality based on an enactment made after the matter was first brought up. Art. 20: Higher education must serve the German cause, and be made available to the children of poor parents. Comment: Higher education has been thoroughly nation- alized, though it would be mistaken to assume that honest scientific work is a thing of the past. Attendance has been greatly curtailed; 'racial purity* is required of all students; and the academic outlook generally is cloudy. The 'children of poor parents ' are not favored. Art. 21 : It is the duty of the state to protect health. Comment: Feder was thinking of three things in particular: abolition of child labor, care for mothers employed in industry, and state support of 'associations interested in athletic de- velopment' (the S.A. was one such association). In addi- tion he seems to have been interested (cf. Das Programm der N.S.D.A.P.) is health as one aspect of the reform of the judiciary, since in his view the courts always placed 'property rights' above 'personal rights.' In all these matters, Feder's indebtedness to Karl Vogelsang is obvious. Art. 22: A 'people's army' is to replace the 'mercenary army.' Comment: By this Feder did not mean that restoration of the German military machine which has since become an accomplished fact. Writing in 1920, he thought of a government willing to foster the spirit of resistance wherever and whenever it could. Nevertheless there are some differences between the German army of 1938 and that of 1914. First, politics unques- tionably play a far greater rdle now than they did formerly. The older caste of officers have been loathe to abjure their tnonarchistic convictions, and eager to avoid what many have described as 'adventures.' If they had their way, rearmament would have proceeded at a far slower pace; Austria would have VIEW OF LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 693 been treated as an ally, and not as a colony; and great pains would have been taken to win friends abroad through a con- ciliatory foreign policy. Many of them do not believe (cf. Militdrisches Wochcnblatt) that Germany can achieve military preparedness on an 'autarchical' economic basis. Many of them have suffered for these convictions, after various 'crises' in the relationships between the army and the government. On the other hand, large numbers of younger officers have adopted the Nazi point of view. Many of them have come up through the Hitler organizations, to which they owe their present tenure of what in modern Germany is a 'dignified rank and station.' These men are unwilling to maintain the sharp distinction between politics and military leadership which was a dogma in the pre-War Prussian army. Nevertheless one cannot discount altogether even now the theory that the ultimate decision as to what Germany's fate is to be rests with the army, if only for the reason that the existing situation is too confused to warrant a decision. Art. 23 : Regulations are needed to govern the press. Comment: The Reichskulturkammcr (Reich Chamber of Culture) embraces in theory all the seven agencies of 'culture' authorship, the press, the radio, the movie, music, the arts, authors, musicians, and artists. Virtually all these endeavors have been subject to the control of Dr. Goebbels, but recently some of his authority has been delegated to others. The press and the radio are completely subordinated (glcichgcschaltct). In Berlin the shrinkage in the newspaper field is more and more startling, now that the Tagcblatt and the Deutsche Attgemeine Zeitung have merged, and the Germania has ceased publication. Old Vienna landmarks the Tagblatt, the Neue Freie Presse, and the Reichspost have disappeared. The holocaust in the provinces is comparable. Radio broadcasting has become an unadorned propaganda instrument. Authors, musicians and artists are carefully censored. What a given periodical may print is carefully prescribed. Recently, for example, religious periodicals have been forbidden to publish fiction or essays on topics of general interest. Still there is manifest a certain 'liberalizing' tendency. Authors, musicians 694 MEIN KAMPF and painters who at first were highly touted as representatives ot the new Weltanschauung are now somewhat less enthusi- astically advertised, but the critical tone of most Nazi journals (notably Der Schwarze Korps) has not grown more temperate. Art. 24: The Party professes the viewpoint of 'positive Christianity.' Comment: What did 'positive Christianity* mean? Feder himself was often in a dilemma. On the one hand, many rabid anti-Semitic journalists were carried along by a natural im- pulse to attack the Christian faith. On the other hand, it was manifestly impossible for a political party to survive in Bavaria if it identified itself with such attacks. In addition Feder himself had a high personal regard for religion. He therefore expounded his phrase as meaning that respect was due the Churches, despite all the evils with which they had identified themselves throughout history. Since 1933, however, another interpretation of 'positive Christianity* has been afforded. Cardinal Faulhaber and Pastor Martin Niemoeller have be- come symbols of the 'Christianity' that is not 'positive/ Art. 25: The 'central parliament* is to have exclusive con- trol of the Reich. Comment: At the time the Program was first drawn up, Feder was still thinking in pre-Fascist terms. His 'parliament* was doubtless conceived of as a kind of 'corporative assembly/ such as Austrian National Socialists had in mind, probably because of Vogelsang's teaching. It is needless to say that no such 'parliament* exists in Germany. As originally constituted in 1933, the Nazi Reichstag did, however, have a certain vague corporative appearance. CHAPTER VI THE STRUGGLE OF THE EARLY DAYS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SPOKEN WORD THE memory of the first great meeting on February 24, 1920, in the Hofbrauhausfestsaal had not yet died out when the preparations for the next meeting were made. While hitherto it had been looked upon as risky in a city like Munich to hold a small meeting every month or even every fortnight, now every seven days, that means once a week, a great mass meeting was scheduled to take place. I need not reassure you that thereby only one sole fear tortured us again and again: would people come and would they listen to us? although I personally was even then of the unshakable conviction that, once they are here, people will also remain and follow the speech. In that time the Munich Hofbrauhausfestsaal assumed an almost solemn significance for us National Socialists. Every week a meeting, almost always in this room, and every time the hall more crowded and people more atten- tive! Starting with the 'War Guilt' about which at that time nobody bothered, progressing over the peace treaties, 696 MEIN KAMPF nearly everything was being treated in some way as expe- dient in the way of agitation or ideas. Especially the peace treaties proper were given the most minute attention. What did the young movement in those days prophesy to the great masses again and again, and how nearly every- thing has arrived to date! Today it is easy to speak or to write about these things. But in those days a public mass meeting which consisted not of petty bourgeois but of goaded proletarians, and its subject 'The Peace Treaty of Versailles 1 meant an attack upon the Republic and a sign of a reactionary, if not even monarchist attitude. Even with the first sentence that contained a criticism of Ver- sailles, one would be bombarded with the stereotyped call : 'And Brest-Litovsk?' 'Brest-Litovsk!' Thus they would howl again and again until they gradually became hoarse or until the speaker gave up his attempt at convincing them. One could have crushed one's head against the wall in despair about such a people! They did not want to hear, did not want to understand, that Versailles was a disgrace and a shame, not even that this dictate meant an unheard- of plundering of our people. The Marxist work of destruc- tion and the hostile poisonous propaganda had carried these people beyond all reason. Besides, one was not even allowed to complain. For how immeasurably great was the guilt on the other side! What had the bourgeoisie done in order to check this terrible deterioration to face it and to open the way for truth by a better and more thorough en- lightenment? Nothing, and again nothing! In those days I saw them nowhere, all the great folkish apostles of today. Perhaps they talked in private circles, at tea parties or in This and the preceding pages embody further attacks on rival ultra-nationalist groups, especially those led by Graefe and Drexler. Hitler's success in relegating Graefe to a minor r61e is due chiefly to three things: the reorganization of the THE STRUGGLE OF THE EARLY DAYS 697 meetings of loyal friends, but there where they should have been, among the wolves, they did not dare to go; unless there was an opportunity when they could have howled with them. It was clear to myself at that time that for the small basic stock that at first formed the movement, the question of the war guilt had to be cleared up, that means cleared in the sense of historical truth. That our movement imparted the knowledge of the peace treaty to the broadest masses was one of the suppositions for the movement's success in the future. In those days, when everybody still looked upon this peace as a success of Democracy, one had to stand up against it and to dig oneself into the brains of the people forever as the enemy of this treaty, so that later, once bitter reality would expose this treacherous fallalery in all S.A., the activities of the Strassers in Berlin, and Hitler's friendship with Dr. Alfred Hugenberg. The first will be con- sidered later. In Berlin the Strassers, Otto and Gregor, preached Nazi doctrine with a marked 'socialistic' inlay. They veered towards acceptance of the 'anti-Marxist class struggle* theories of Rudolf Jung; and the more colorful attacks oi Goebbels on the 'profiteers' reflect their spirit. In Berlin there was an audience for such teachings an audience for which Feder's theses, derivative from Austrian ideology, would have meant nothing. During 1929 Hitler went to Berlin, where Hugenberg (then chief of the German National Party) was organizing a plebis- cite to veto the Young Plan, then up for discussion in the Reichstag. The two spoke from the same platform. This led to a breach between Hitler and Otto Strasser, who thereupon published a brochure attacking Hitler as an opportunist who had 'sold out the revolution. 1 But Hugenberg was now con- vinced that Hitler was 'amenable,' and presented him to a number of friends. Financial support was now assured, and Hitler also met Heir von Stauss, one of the directors of the 698 MEIN KAMPF its undisguised hatred, the memory of our attitude of those days would win us their confidence. Even in those days I was always in favor of making front against the entire public opinion, whenever it took a wrong attitude in questions of principle, without considering popularity, hatred or struggle. The N.S.G.W.P. must not become a bailiff of public opinion, but its ruler. It must not be the masses' slave, but their master! There exists, of course, and especially for every move- ment that is still weak, the great temptation of joining up and in shouting at moments when a superior enemy, by its skill of seduction, has succeeded in driving the people to a foolish decision or a wrong attitude, especially whenever a few reasons and be it only apparently could speak in favor of it from the young movement's viewpoint. In Deutsche Bank. Thus, though the move to veto the Young Plan failed, the whole episode was enormously advantageous to Hitler. All the propaganda made by Hugenberg against the Young Plan turned out to be propaganda advertising Hitler as 'safe' and 'sensible.' This did not prevent Nazi deputies in the Reichstag from introducing measures which advocated the nationalization of the banks, the confiscation of all bank profits made since the war, and the virtual abolition of the stock exchange. Eventually the contrast between Hitler's practice and Party doctrine was too much for Gregor Strasser as well; and his resignation left Ernst Roehm the sole important advo- cate of 'socialism' left in the upper tier of the Nazi Party. But Hitler was playing a crafty game. Indeed, he appears hardly to have been aware of the point to which forces nw abroad in the land were carrying him. One moment he would join hands with Hugenberg; the next, a rift would open itself up between them. Through all this period of uncertainty he was guided by Hugenberg, the German National Don Quixote, who failed to see that at a given moment he would find himself with his small group of followers face to face with the vast THE STRUGGLE OF THE EARLY DAYS 699 such cases human cowardice will so zealously seek for such reasons that then nearly always it finds something that would furnish a trace of justification to join in such a crime, even from its 'own viewpoint.' Several times I experienced such cases when the highest energy was needed for preventing the ship of the movement from floating into the artificially produced, general current, or rather, from letting it drift with it. This happened the last time when our infernal press, to which the German people's existence is Hecuba, succeeded in puffing up the South Tyrol question to an importance that will become fatal to the German people. Without considering whose cause they were serving, many so-called 'national' men and parties and associations have joined, purely out of cowardice, the public opinion, stirred up by the Jews, and helped stupidly in supporting the fight against a system that we Germans, just in our present situation, should consider the sole bright ray in this decaying world. While the international world Jew slowly but surely strangles our throats, our so-called patriots shout against the man and a system who have dared to free themselves at least in one spot on this earth from the Jewish-Masonic grip and to armed Nazi mob. Since he had always been the approved col- lector of funds for nationalist purposes, industrialists furnished the money which he in turn handed over to Hitler. Doubtless it can be maintained that everything which happened as a result of the 1929 alliance was logical and virtually inevitable. After 1933, Hugenberg still believed that Hitler was 'safe' and 'sensible.' He himself was a member of the Cabinet which governed after the fateful 2ist of March. A few months later, he was out. A defense of Mussolini. Yet oddly enough II Duce's ablest protagonists in Germany were Jews Theodor Wolff, of the Tabeblatt, and Emil Ludwig. 700 MEIN KAMPF put up a nationalistic resistance against this international world poisoning. But it was too tempting for weak char- acters simply to trim their sails with the wind and to capitulate in the face of the clamor of public opinion. And, it was a capitulation indeed! Although people with their inner mendacity and baseness may not want to admit it, perhaps not even to themselves, yet it remains the truth that it was only cowardice and fear of popular opinion, stirred up by the Jew, that made them join. All other reasons are miserable excuses of the little sinner, conscious of his guilt. There it was necessary to pull the movement sharply around with an iron fist in order to guard it against destruc- tion by this direction. To try suc,h an about-face in the moment when public opinion, fanned by all driving forces, is burning only in one direction, is indeed not very popular for the moment, it is even almost mortally dangerous for the one who is daringly courageous. But not few men in history have been stoned at such moments for an action for which posterity found later every reason to thank them on its knees. It is with this that a movement has to reckon and not with the momentary applause of the present. It may very well be that even in such hours an individual is seized with fear; but he must never forget that after every such hour salvation will eventually come, and that a movement that wants to renew a world has not to serve the moment, but the future. Thereby one can state that the greatest and most far- reaching successes in history are mostly those that in their beginning found the least amount of understanding, because they stood in sharpest opposition to the general public opinion, to its insight and to its will. This we were able to experience even then, on the firtt day of our public appearance. We have certainly not THE STRUGGLE OF THE EARLY DAYS 701 'curried the favor of the masses/ but we have stood up against the folly of this people, everywhere. Nearly always it was the case that in those years I stepped in front of an assembly of people who believed in the contrary of what I intended to say, and who desired the contrary of what I believed in. Then it was the task of two hours to lift two or three thousand people out of their previous conviction, to smash blow by blow the foundation of their previous opinions and finally to lead them over to the soil of our con- victions and of our view of life. In those days I learned something important in a short time, namely, to strike the weapon of reply from the enemy's hand myself. One soon found out that our enemies, espe- cially in the person of their debaters, appeared with quite a definite 'repertoire 1 in which ever-recurring objections were raised against our assertions, so that the similarity of this procedure pointed to a definite, uniform schooling. And indeed it was so. Here we had a chance to become ac- quainted with the incredible discipline of our opponents' propaganda, and still today it is my pride to have found the means not only for making this propaganda ineffective but also for beating finally its very makers. Two years later I was master in this craft. It was important to see clearly in advance of each single speech the probable contents and the form of the objections that might be expected during the discussion and then completely to pick them to pieces in one's own speech. Thereby it was advisable to mention at once the possible objections and to prove their untenability; thus a listener who had come, although stuffed with the objections he had been taught, but otherwise with an honest heart, was won more easily by the refutation of the doubts that had been impressed into his memory. The material he had been taught was automatically refuted and his attention was attracted more and more by the speech. 702 MEIN KAMPF This was the reason why, as early as after my first speech about the 'Peace Treaty of Versailles' which I had held when still a so-called 'training man' before the troops, 1 changed this speech so that I now spoke about the ' Peace Treaties of Brest-Li tovsk and Versailles.' For even after the shortest time, even in the course of the discussion about my first speech, I was able to ascertain that in reality people did not know anything about the peace treaty of Breit- Litovsk, but that the skillful propaganda of their parties had succeeded in presenting just this treaty as one of the most shameful acts of rape in the world. It had to be attrib- uted to the consistency with which the great masses were served again and again with this lie that millions of Germans saw in the peace treaty of Versailles only a justified retribu- tion for the crime we had committed at Brest-Litovsk, and that therefore they considered any fight against Versailles an injustice and sometimes remained in the most sincere moral indignation. And this was, among others, the cause why the shameless and monstrous word ' reparations ' began to make its home in Germany. This most mendacious hypocrisy appeared to millions of our harried fellow citizens really as the execution of a higher justice. Terrible, yet it was so. The best proof of this was furnished by the suc- cess of the propaganda, introduced by me, against the peace treaty of Versailles which I had heralded by an enlighten- ment about the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. I contrasted the two peace treaties, compared them point by point, demon- strated the truly actually limitless humaneness of the one treaty as contrasted with the inhuman cruelty of the second, with a telling result. In those days I spoke about this sub- ject in meetings of two thousand people, where often I was met by hostile glances from three thousand six hundred eyes. And three hours later I had before me a surging crowd filled with most sacred indignation and utter wrath. Once more a great lie had been torn out of the brains and THE STRUGGLE OF THE EARLY DAYS 703 the hearts of a multitude counting thousands and in its stead a truth had been implanted. In those days I considered the two lectures, namely, 'The True Causes of the World War' and 'The Peace Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles,' the most impor- tant ones, so that I repeated them again and again dozens ,of times in ever new formulations, till at last a definite, clear and uniform conception was spread about this point among the people from which the movement took its first members. In addition, these meetings were of benefit to me in that gradually I turned into a speaker for mass meetings, that I became familiar with the pathos and the gesture which the great room, holding a thousand people, demands. Except for small circles, as already stressed, I saw in those days no enlightenment in this direction on the part of those parties which today boast and behave as though it had been they who brought about a change in public opin- ion. But if actually a so-called national politician was making somewhere a speech to this effect, then it was only in circles which themselves for the most part already held his opinions and where what he brought forth was at the utmost a strengthening of their own conviction. But this did not matter in those days, but what mattered was exclusively to win by propaganda and enlightenment those people who so far, by virtue of their education and under- standing, stood on hostile ground. It may seem odd, but many Germans maintained and still maintain that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was eminently humane and reasonable. On the other hand, Nationalist speakers carefully avoided mentioning the less widely publicized Treaty of Bucharest,. signed with Rumania. By comparison with that, the Treaty of Versailles was an expression of frater- nal affection. 704 MEIN KAMPF We even put leaflets into the service of this enlighten- ment. When still with the army I had written a leaflet con- trasting the peace treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles, which was spread in very large editions. Later I took over parts of this stock for the party and here too the effect was good. As a whole, the first meetings were distinguished by the fact that the tables were covered with all kinds of leaflets, newspapers, and pamphlets, etc. But the main emphasis was put on the spoken word. And actually only the latter alone is in a position to bring about really great changes, and that for general psychological reasons. I have already mentioned in the first volume that all enormous world revolutionary events have not been brought about by the written, but by the spoken word. This entailed a lengthy discussion by a part of the press, whereby of course, especially on the part of our bourgeois wise- crackers, such an assertion was very sharply opposed. But the very reason why this was done disproves the doubters. For the bourgeois intelligentsia protests against such an opinion only for the reason that it obviously lacks the energy and the ability of mass influence by the spoken word, since one had turned more and more towards purely literary activity and renounced the really agitatory activity of speech. But such a habit, in the course of time, is bound to lead to what marks the bourgeoisie today, namely, the loss of the psychological instinct for mass effect and mass in- fluence. While the speaker receives from the mass before which he speaks a continuous correction of his lecture, in so far as he can uninterruptedly read from the faces of his listeners how far they are able to follow his arguments with under- standing, and whether the impression and the effect of his words lead to the desired goal, the writer does not know hia readers at all. For this reason he will, from the beginning, not aim at a certain crowd before his eyes, but he will keep SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SPOKEN WORD 705 his arguments on quite general lines. By this he loses, to a certain degree, psychological finesse, and consequently sup- pleness. In general, therefore, a brilliant speaker will still be able to write better than a brilliant writer will be able to speak, unless he trains himself continuously in this art. To this must be added that the mass of people is lazy in itself, that they lazily remain within the course of old habits and that by themselves they do not like to take up anything written unless it corresponds to what one believes oneself, and furnishes what one hopes for. Therefore a pamphlet with a certain tendency will in most cases only be read by people who themselves must be counted on its side. At the utmost, only a leaflet or a poster, by their brevity, can count on finding attention for a moment with one who thinks differently. Far greater chances has the picture in all its varieties up to and including the motion picture. Here man has to work still less with his brains; it is enough to view, perhaps to read a few very short texts, and thus many will be far more ready to take in a pictorial presentation than to read a lengthy piece of writing. The picture in a far shorter time, I would almost say at one blow, furnishes man with an enlightenment which he receives from literature only after tedious reading. But the most essential point is that a pamphlet never knows in whose hands it will come and that yet it has to retain its definite form. Generally, the effect will be the greater the more the form corresponds to the mental stand- ard and the nature of just those who will be its readers. A book that is intended for the broad masses must therefore try from the beginning to have in style and standard an effect different from a work intended for intellectually higher classes. Only by this kind of adaptability the written word ap- proaches the spoken word. The speaker may for instance, treat the same subject as that of a book, yet if he is a great 706 MEIN KAMPF and ingenious popular speaker he will hardly twice repeat in the same manner one and the same subject matter and material. He will always let himself be carried by the great masses in such a manner that he senses just those words that he needs in order to speak to the hearts of his respective listeners. But if he errs, no matter how slightly, he has always before him the living correction. As mentioned previously, he is able to read from the expressions of his listeners, firstly, whether they understand what he speaks, secondly, whether they are able to follow what has been said, and thirdly, in how far he has convinced them of the correct- ness of what has been said. If he sees firstly that they do not understand him, then he will become so primitive and clear in his explanation that even the least intelligent is bound to understand him, if he feels secondly that tliey are not able to follow him, then he will build up his ideas so carefully and slowly that even the weakest among them all does not remain behind any longer, and thirdly as soon as he guesses that they do not seem to be con- vinced of the correctness of what he has said he will repeat this so often and in so many new examples, he himself will bring in their objections which he feels although they have not been uttered, and he will refute them and disperse them till finally even the last group of an opposition, merely by its attitude and its expressions, lets him recognize its capitulation in the face of his argumentation. Here one has to deal not infrequently with overcoming prejudices of people, which are not founded in their reason, but which are most subconscious, supported only by feeling. It is a thousand times more difficult to overcome the barrier of instinctive aversion, of hatred conditioned by feeling, of prejudiced rejection than is the correction of a faulty or erroneous scientific opinion. Wrong conceptions and infer- ior knowledge can be abolished by instruction, but never obstacles of sentiment. Here solely an appeal to these SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SPOKEN WORD 707 mysterious forces themselves can be effective; and this the writer can hardly ever do, but almost exclusively only the speaker. The most striking proof of this is furnished by the fact that despite an often very skilfully made-up bourgeois press that swamps our people in unheard-of editions of millions, 'this press was not able to prevent the great masses from becoming the sharpest enemy of just this bourgeois world. The whole flood of newspapers and all the books that in- tellectualism produces year by year run off from the millions of the lowest classes like water from oiled leather. This can prove only two things : either the incorrectness of the con- tents of this entire written produce of our bourgeois world or the impossibility of penetrating to the heart of the masses merely by literature. True, especially in cases when this very literature is so little psychologically oriented as is the case here. One must not reply (as was tried by a great German national newspaper of Berlin) that just Marxism itself furnishes the proof against this assertion by its literature, chiefly by the effect of the groundwork of Karl Marx. Hardly ever has one tried in a more superficial manner to support an erroneous opinion. What gave Marxism its astounding power over the broad masses is in no way the formal work of Jewish labor of thinking, put down in writing, but rather the colossal oratorical wave of propa- ganda that took possession of the masses in the course of the years. Of one hundred thousand German workers, not one hundred, on the average, know this work, which always has been studied by a thousand times more intellectuals and especially Jews than by genuine followers of the move- ment from the great lower classes. This work has actually not been written for the great masses, but exclusively for the intellectual leaders of that Jewish machine of world con- quest; this, then, was fired with quite a different material; 708 MEIN KAMPF the press. For it is this which distinguishes the Marxist press from our bourgeois press: the Marxist press is written by agitators, and the bourgeois press would like to produce agitation by writers. fThe Grub-Street Social Democratic editor, who almost invariably comes from the meeting-hall into the publishing office, knows his customers as no other man does. But the bourgeois scribbler, who steps out of his study before the great masses, is sickened merely by their fumes and therefore he faces them helplessly also with the written word. What has won the millions of laborers for Marxism is less the literary work of Marxist patriotic writers, but rather the untiring and truly enormous propaganda work of tens of thousands of untiring agitators, beginning with the great apostle of harassment down to the smallest labor union official and the confidant and discussion orator; these are the hundreds of thousands of meetings where these popular speakers, standing upon the table in a smoky tavern, drummed upon the masses and thus knew how to obtain an unsurpassed knowledge of this human material, some- thing that put them all the more in the position to choose the most correct weapons for the attack against the fortress of public opinion. And there were further the gigantic mass demonstrations, these marches of hundreds of thousands, that branded the small, impoverished man with the proud conviction that although being a little worm, he was never- theless a member of a great dragon under whose flaming breath one day the much-hated bourgeois world would go up in fire and flames and the proletarian dictatorship would celebrate its ultimate and final victory. From such propaganda came forth those people who were ready and prepared to read a Social Democratic press, but a press that in its turn is not written but spoken. For while in the bourgeois camp professors and litterateurs, theorists and writers of all kinds try at times also to sueak, SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SPOKEN WORD 709 in Marxism the speakers try sometimes also to write. And particularly the Jew who comes here under special con- sideration, by virtue of his mendacious dialectical skill and agility, even as a writer, will be an agitating orator rather than a creative writer. This is the reason why the bourgeois newspaper world (to say nothing of the fact that for the greater part it is Judaized and therefore has no interest in really enlightening the great masses) is not able to exercise the slightest in- fluence on the attitude of the broadest layers of our people.^ How difficult it is to overthrow emotional prejudices, moods, sentiments, etc., and to replace them by others, from how many immeasurable influences and conditions the success in this depends, this the sensitive orator can tell from the fact that even the time of the day in which the speech takes place can be of decisive influence on its effect. The same speech, the same speaker, the same subject have an entirely different effect at ten o'clock in the morning, at three o'clock in the afternoon or in the evening. I per- sonally, when still a beginner, appointed meetings for the morning, and I remember especially one demonstration which we held as a protest 'against the oppression of German territories' at the Miinchner-Kindl- Keller. In those days this was Munich's greatest hall and the risk appeared very great. In order to facilitate specially the visit to the adherents of the movement and to all who otherwise came, I arranged the meeting for a Sunday morning, at ten o'clock. The result was depressing, but at the same time extremely instructive: the hall filled, the impression truly overwhelming, but the atmosphere icy: nobody warmed up, and I personally as the speaker, deeply unhappy, felt that I was not able to establish any connec- tion, not even the slightest contact with my listeners. I believe that I did not speak worse than on other occasions; but the effect seemed to be equal to naught. I left the meet- 710 MEIN KAMPF ing, entirely unsatisfied, but richer by an experience. Tests which I later carried out in the same way, led to the same result. This must not be surprising. One should go to a theater and see a performance at three in the afternoon and the same performance with the same cast at eight in the evening, and one will be astonished at the difference in effect and impression. A person with delicate feeling and with the ability to make this atmosphere clear to himself will im- mediately be able to find that the impression of the after- noon performance is not so great as that of the evening performance. The same statement applies even to a movie. This is important for the reason that for the theater one could say that in the afternoon the actor would perhaps not trouble himself as much as in the evening. But the movie is no different in the afternoon from at nine in the evening. No, it is the time itself that exercises here a certain effect, exactly as does the room upon me. There are rooms which leave one cold for reasons that are only difficult to recognize, which put up the most serious resistance to a creation of atmosphere. Also traditional memories and images which exist in man, are able to determine an im- pression decisively. Thus a performance of 'Parsifal' at Bayreuth will always have an effect different from that in any other place in the world. The mysterious magic of the house on the Festspielhuegel of the old city of margraves cannot be replaced or made up by externals. All these cases involve encroachments upon man's free- dom of will. This applies, of course, most of all to meetings to which people with a contrary orientation of will are coming, and who now have to be won for new intentions* It seems that in the morning and even during the day men's will power revolts with highest energy against an attempt at being forced under another's will and another's opinion. In the evening, however, they succumb more easily to the SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SPOKEN WORD 711 dominating force of a stronger will. For truly every such meeting presents a wrestling match between two opposed forces. The superior oratorical talent of a domineering apostolic nature will now succeed more easily in winning for the new will people who themselves have in turn experi- enced a weakening of their force of resistance in the most hatural way, than people who still have full command of the energies of their minds and their will power. The same purpose serves also the artificially created and yet mysterious dusk of the Catholic churches, the burning candles, incense, censers, etc. t In this wrestling match between the orator and the op- ponent to be converted, the speaker will gradually obtain that wonderful sensibility for the psychological conditions of propaganda which the writer nearly always lacks. Liter- ature, therefore, by its more limited effect, will in general serve more the preservation, strengthening and deepening of an already existing attitude or opinion. All really great historical changes have not been brought about by the written word, but have at the utmost been accompanied by it. One must not think that the French Revolution would ever have come about by philosophical theories, if it had not found an army of instigators, led by demagogues of the grandest style, who whipped up the passions of the tor- tured people, till finally that terrible volcanic eruption took place that paralyzed the whole of Europe with terror. And just the same, the greatest revolutionary change of most recent times, the bolshevistic revolution in Russia, has not come about by Lenin's writings, but by the hate-creating oratorical activity of countless greatest and smallest apostles of instigation. The people of illiterates has really not been enthused for the communist revolution by the theoretical literature of a Karl Marx, but only by the glittering heaven that 712 MEIN KAMPF thousands of agitators, although all of them in the service of an idea, described to the people. This has always been and will be so forever.** It fully corresponds to the cracked seclusion from the world of our German intelligentsia to believe that the writer is necessarily superior in mind to the speaker. This conception is superbly illustrated by a criticism of the already previously mentioned national newspaper in which it is stated that one is so frequently disappointed to see suddenly in print the speech of a well-known great speaker. This reminds me of another criticism which fell into my hands in the course of the War; it scrutinized, as with the magnifying glass, the speeches of Lloyd George, then still minister of munitions, and it came to the intelligent finding that these speeches were intellectually and scientifically inferior, and for the rest hackneyed and obvious products. Later, I personally obtained some of these speeches in the form of a small booklet and I had to laugh loudly at the fact that a normal German knight of the pen had no under- standing for these psychological masterpieces of influencing the soul of the masses. This man judged these speeches exclusively according to the impression that they left on his own conceit while the great English demagogue had directed them exclusively at exercising the greatest possible influence on the mass of his listeners and in the widest sense on the entire lower English people. Looked at from this viewpoint, the speeches of this Englishman were the most wonderful achievements, as they gave proof of an actually astounding knowledge of the soul of the greatest layers of the people. Their effect, then, was a truly telling one. With this one should compare the helpless stammering these of course more intellectual, but in reality they showed only this man's inability to speak to his people which he really did not know. Nevertheless, the average sparrow brain of SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SPOKEN WORD 713 a German scribbler, scientifically of course most educated, achieves the feat of evaluating the mentality of the English minister according to the impression that a speech, aiming at mass influence, leaves in his soul that is entirely calcified by knowledge, and of comparing it with that of a German statesman whose intellectual babble finds in him of course a more receptive soil. That, where genius is concerned, he was not only adequate but a thousand times superior to a Bethmann-Hollweg, Lloyd George proved by finding in his speeches that form and those expressions which opened to him the heart of his people and which made this people ultimately serve entirely his will. The very primitiveness of this language, the originality of its expressions and the application of easily understandable, most simple examples, contain the proof of the superior political ability of this Englishman, f Far I have to measure the speech of a statesman to his people not by the impression that it leaves with a university professor, but according to the effect that it exercises on the people. And this alone also furnishes the measure of a speaker's genius. * The astounding development of our movement, which was founded out of nothing only a few years ago and which even today is believed worthy of being persecuted most These remarks testify to a shrewd sense of the weaknesses of democracy, especially in a country not inured to democratic political processes. In countries like the United States and Great Britain, the demagogue is usually restricted to a small area because the machinery at the disposal of great political parties is not available to him. Moreover, in these countries audiences shrink unless the speaker says something new each time. In short, a coat of the varnish of cynicism seems to pro- tect a veteran democracy against its own most insidious invention. 714 MEIN KAMPF sharply by all internal and external enemies of our people, must be attributed to the constant consideration and appli- cation of these observations. Important as the movement's literature may be, yet f in our present situation, it will be of greater importance for the equal and uniform education of the higher and lower leaders than for the winning of adversely oriented masses. Only in the rarest cases will a convinced Social Democrat or a fanatical communist condescend to secure a National So- cialist pamphlet or even a book, to read it and to get from it an insight into our conception of life or to study the criti- cism of his conception of life. Even a newspaper will be read only very rarely, unless it bears from the beginning the stamp of partisanship. Besides, this would be of little use, for the entire picture of a single copy of a newspaper is so chopped up and its effect so splintered that from reading a single issue one must not expect any influence upon the reader. But one must and should not demand that a person, for whom even pennies play a r6le, will now, out of an urge for objective enlightenment, subscribe to a hostile news- paper permanently. Out of tens of thousands hardly one will do so. Only he who is already won for the movement will permanently read the organ of the party, as the cur- rent news service of his movement. The case is quite different with the ' spoken ' leaflet ! This will be picked up far more readily by the one or the other, especially if he gets it for nothing, and this all the more if even the headlines plastically treat a subject that at the moment is being discussed by everybody. After looking it through more or less thoroughly, such a leaflet may per- haps draw his attention to new viewpoints and attitudes, perhaps even to a new movement. But also by this, even in the most favorable case, only a slight stimulus is given, but never a fait accompli. For the leaflet also can only timulate or point out something, and its effect will only SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SPOKEN WORD 715 materialize in connection with a later thorough instruction and enlightenment of its readers. This, however, is and remains always the mass meeting.** The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear oj being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encour- aging effect on most people. The same man, in the frame of a company or a battalion, surrounded by all his comrades, would set out on an attack with a lighter heart than he would if left entirely to himself. In the crowd he always feels a little sheltered even if in reality a thousand reasons would speak against it. The community of the great demonstration, however, strengthens not only the individual, but it also unites and helps in creating esprit de corps. The man who, as the first representative of a new doctrine, is exposed to serious op- pression in his enterprise or his workshop urgently needs that strengthening that lies in the conviction of being a member and a fighter of a great embracing body. But he only received the impression of this corporation at the first common mass demonstration. If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction, if while looking around he is carried away by the powerful effect of the suggestive intoxication and the enthusiasm of three or four thousand others, if the visible success and the approval of thousands confirm the correctness of the new doctrine in his mind and waken for the first time the doubt about the truth of his previous conviction then he himself succumbs to the magic in- fluence of what we call mass suggestion. The will, the longing, but also the force of thousands accumulates in 716 MEIN KAMPF every individual. The man who comes to such a meeting doubting and hesitating, leaves it confirmed in his mind: he has become the member of a community, f The National Socialist movement must never forget this, and above all it must never become influenced by those bourgeois simpletons who know everything better, but who nevertheless have gambled away a great State together with their own existence, and the rulership of their class. Indeed, they are exceedingly cjever, they know everything, understand everything only one thing they did not understand: that is, to prevent the German people from falling into the arms of Marxism. Here they failed most wretchedly and most miserably, so that their present con- ceit is only bumptiousness that in the form of pride, along with stupidity, always grows on the same tree. If today these people do not attribute any special value to the spoken word, then they do so only because, thank the Lord, they have convinced themselves thoroughly by now of the ineffectiveness of their own talk.^4- CHAPTER VII THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT IN 1919-20 and also in 1921, I personally visited so-called bourgeois meetings. They always made the same im- pression on me as the prescribed spoonful of cod liver oil during my youth. One has to take it, and it is supposed to be very good, but it tastes horrible! If one would tie the German people together with ropes and if one would pull them into these bourgeois 'demonstrations 9 by force, and if one would lock the doors till after the end of the perform- ance, not letting anyone escape, this could perhaps also lead to success in the course of several centuries. But I have to admit openly that in this case I would probably no longer enjoy life and that I no longer would want to be a German. But since, God be praised and thanked, one cannot do this, one must not be surprised if the healthy and unspoilt people avoid 'bourgeois mass meetings' as the Devil avoids holy water. I got to know them, these prophets of a bourgeois view of life, and I am really not surprised but understand why they do not attribute any importance to the spoken word. In those days I visited meetings of the Democrats, the German Nationals, and also of the People's Party (Bavarian Center), 718 MEIN KAMPF What struck my attention at once was the homogeneous unity of the listeners. Nearly always it was only party members who took part in such a manifestation. The entire affair, without discipline, resembled more a yawning card club than a meeting of the people that has just gone through its greatest revolution. In order to preserve this peaceful atmosphere, all that could be done was done by the speakers. They spoke, or rather they read speeches, in the style of a sophisticated newspaper article or of a scientific treatise, they avoided all strong language, and now and then they put in a weak professorial joke, upon which the honorable committee began dutifully to laugh; to laugh not loudly, that means provokingly, but dignified, subdued and discreetly. t This committee anyway ! Once I saw a meeting at the Wagnersaal in Munich; it was a demonstration on the occasion of the anniversary of the battle of Leipzig. The speech was delivered or read by a worthy old gentleman, professor of some university. The committee was sitting on the platform. At the left a monocle, at the right a monocle, and in between one with- out a monocle. All three of them in frock coats so that one received the impression either of a court that is just about to pronounce sentence, or of a solemn baptism, in any case more of a solemn religious ceremony. The so-called speech that would perhaps have looked quite well in print was simply terrible in its effect. Only three quarters of an hour had passed when the entire public found itself in a condi- tion of a drowsy trance that was only interrupted by various men or women going out, by the rattling caused by the waitresses, and by the yawning of more and more of the listeners. Three workers who, be it out of curiosity or in their capacity of commandeered emissaries, were present %X ^Bfc TfcfeaJCK^, fcTv&\*&m& vtaom \ \iad taken my post, looked at one another from time to time with ill-concealed THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 719 grins, and finally they nudged one another with their elbows, whereupon they left the hall very quietly. One could see that they did not wish to disturb at any price. This was indeed not necessary with this society. Finally the meeting seemed to draw to its close. After the professor, whose voice meanwhile had become weaker and weaker, had finished his speech, the leader of the meeting, sitting between the two monocles, arose and roared at the 'Ger- man sisters' and 'brothers' who were present how great his feeling of thanks was and how great their sentiment in this direction ought to be for the unique and glorious lecture that Professor X had just given them, in a manner that was as enjoyable as it was thorough and deeply penetrating, and that in the truest meaning of the word was an 'inner experience,' even a 'deed.' It would mean a profanation of this solemn hour if one were to let a discus- sion follow this lucid presentation, so that therefore, speak- ing for all those present, he would not open such a discus- sion, and instead he asked them all to rise and to join in the call ' Wir sind tin einig Volk von Bruedern ' [We are a united folk of brothers], etc. Finally, in conclusion, he asked us to sing the ' Deutschlandlied. ' And then they sang, and it appeared to me as though already with the second verse the voices were becoming fewer and only swelled up again mightily at the chorus, and with the third verse this impression became stronger, so that I thought that not all of them were quite sure of the words. But what does this matter, if such a song, ardently sung by a German national soul, rings up to heaven! Thereupon the meeting broke up, that is, every one hurried to get out quickly, some to a glass of beer, others to a caf6, and still others out into the open air. Yes, indeed, out into the open air, out! This was my sole feeling. And this is to serve the glorification of the heroic 720 MEIN KAMPF battling of hundreds of thousands of Prussians and Ger- mans? What the hell, and again what the hell! The government, of course, may like something like that. This is naturally a 'peaceful' meeting. There the Minister for Quiet and Order need really not fear that the waves of enthusiasm might suddenly break the authorita- tive measure of bourgeois decency; that suddenly, in the intoxication of enthusiasm, people might pour forth from the hall, not in order to hurry to caf6s or taverns, but in order to march through the streets in rows of fours, with measured tread, singing ' Deutschland hoch in Ehren' in order to annoy a police force in need of rest. No, with such citizens one can be satisfied. <* Compared with this, the National Socialist meetings were indeed not 'peaceful* meetings. Here the waves of two views of life clashed, and the meetings did not end with some patriotic song lamely rattled off, but with the fanatical outburst of national passion. From the very beginning, it was important to introduce blind discipline into our meetings and absolutely to safe- guard the authority of the meeting's leaders. For what we discussed was not the powerless chit-chat of a bourgeois 'speaker/ but in content and form it was always suitable for provoking the opponent to reply. And there were opponents in out meetings! How many times did they come in huge crowds, individual hecklers among them and showing on all faces the conviction : today we will make an end of you ! Indeed, how many times in those days had they been led in literally in columns, our friends of the red color, with the previously definitely instructed task, to blow up the entire show on that night and to make an end of the whole affair. And how many times was everything touch and go, and THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 711 only the ruthless energy of our meetings' leaders and the brutal recklessness of our guards of the meeting was able to thwart again and again the enemy's attacks. And they had every reason to feel provoked, t The red color of our billposters alone drew them into our meeting halls. The normal bourgeoisie was genuinely horrified at the fact that we too had taken up the red of the bolsheviks, and in this they saw a very ambiguous affair. The German national minds quietly whispered to each other the suspicion that fundamentally we too were only a variety of Marxism, perhaps nothing but disguised Marxists, or rather Socialists. For even today these heads have not understood the difference between Socialism and Marxism. Especially when, in addition, they discovered that in our meetings we principally did not address 4 ladies and gentlemen' but only 'fellow citizens,' and that among ourselves we spoke only of party members, the Marxist ghost seemed to be proved for many of our enemies. How often we shouted with laughter at these stupid bourgeois cowards, in the face of the intelligent guessing at our origin, our intentions and our goal ! <* We chose the red color of our posters after exacting and thorough reflection, in order to provoke the leftists by this, to bring them to indignation and to induce them to come to our meetings, if only to break them up, so that in this way we were at least enabled to speak to these people. Now it was a treat to trace, in those years, the perplexity and also the helplessness of our enemies in their perpetually wavering tactics. First they asked their adherents to take no notice of us and to avoid our meetings. This was generally followed. But since in the course of time various individuals came nevertheless, and as this number slowly but gradually increased, and the impression of our doctrine was obvious, the leaders gradually grew nervous and restless, and they 722 MEIN KAMPF became obsessed with the conviction that one should not merely watch this development forever, but that an end must be put to it by terror. Thereafter they appealed to the 'class-conscious prole- tarians' to go in masses to our meetings, in order to strike the representatives of the 'monarchist, reactionary disturb- ance 1 with the fists of the proletariat. Then suddenly our meetings were crowded with workers as early as three quarters of an hour before the opening. They resembled a powder keg that might blow up at any moment and to which the burning fuse has been attached. Yet it always came about differently. The people came as our enemies and they left, although not yet our adherents, but reflecting, even critically examining the correctness of their own doctrine. But gradually it came about that after my three hours 1 speech followers and opponents melted together into one enthusiastic mass. Then every signal for a blowup was in vain. Thereupon the leaders became all the more afraid, and now they turned again to those who had previously opposed this policy and who now, with a certain appearance of justification, pointed at their opinion that the only correct thing to do was to forbid the worker in principle to attend our meetings. Then they came no more, or at least fewer of them. But after a short time the whole game began again from the beginning. The prohibition was nevertheless not observed, the com- rades came more and more often, and finally the adherents of the radical policy were victorious again. Our meetings were to be broken up. If then after two, three, frequently also eight or ten meetings it became apparent that the blowup was easier said than done, and the result of each single meeting meant a crumbling away of the red fighting troops, then suddenly there came again the other watchword: 'Proletarians and THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 723 comrades/ Avoid the meetings of the National Socialist dis- turbers/ 9 The same, perpetually changing policy was also found in the red press. First one tried to pass us by in silence, in order to convince oneself thereafter of the futility of this attempt and again to take up the contrary. Every day we were ' mentioned ' in some way, and that mostly in order to make clear to the worker the absolute ridiculousness of our whole existence. But after a certain time the gentlemen had to feel nevertheless that this not only did not injure us, but that, on the contrary, it was advantageous to us, since naturally many individuals asked themselves why one devoted so many words to an affair if it was so ridiculous. People became curious. Thereupon one suddenly turned about-face and for some time one began to treat us as genuine chief criminals of humanity. Article after article, in which our criminality was explained and proved again and again, scandalous stories, although produced out of nothing from beginning to end, were to do the rest. But after a short time one seemed to have convinced oneself of the ineffectiveness of these attacks as well ; fundamentally, this only helped to concentrate general attention on us all the more. In those days I took the viewpoint: no matter whether they laugh or swear at us, whether they present us as fools or as criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they occupy themselves with us again and again, and that gradually, in the eyes of the workers, we appear actually as that power with which alone one has to reckon at the time. What we really are and what we really want, this we will not fail to show to the rabble of the Jewish press when the day comes. One reason why in those days our meetings were hardly ever broken up directly was the quite incredible cowardice of the leaders of our opponents. In all critical cases they 724 MEIN KAMPF sent forward some little Tom, Dick or Harry or they waited for the result of the disruption outside the meeting-halls. Nearly always we were very well informed about the intentions of these gentlemen. Not only because we our- selves, for reasons of expediency, had left many party members inside the red ranks, but because the red wire- pullers themselves were seized with a talkativeness, very useful to us in this case, as unfortunately it is found very frequently among our German people. They could not keep their mouths shut when they had hatched out something like that, and besides they usually began to cackle even before the egg was laid. Thus, often and often we had met the most detailed preparations, without the red detachments for the breakup having the slightest ink- ling how soon they were to be thrown out. This time forced us to take into our own hands the pro- tection of our meetings; one can never count on the pro- tection of the authorities; on the contrary, it always benefits only the disturbers, as experience shows. For the only actual success of intervention by the authorities, with the aid of the police, was at the utmost that the meeting was dissolved, that means closed. And this was indeed solely the aim and the intention of the opposing disturbers. In this the police has developed a practice that represents the grossest injustice that one can imagine. For, if the authorities learn by some threats that there exists the danger of a breakup of a meeting, the police do not arrest those who threaten to do so, but it forbids the others, who are innocent, to hold the meeting, and of such wisdom a normal policeman's intellect is very proud. They call it a 1 precautionary measure for the prevention of an unlawful- ness.' t The determined gangster, therefore, is at any time free to thwart the political activity of a respectable man. The State authority, in the name of quiet and order, bows before THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 725 the gangster and requests the other fellow not to provoke him. Therefore, when National Socialists wanted to hold meetings at certain places and when the unions declared that this would lead to resistance on the part of their members, then the police by no means put these black- mailing fellows behind lock and key, but it forbade us to hold the meeting. In innumerable cases these organs of the law had even the incredible shamelessness to inform us of this in writing. If one wanted to protect oneself against such eventualities, then one had to take care that every attempt at a disturb- ance was nipped in the bud. But here the following also comes into consideration:^ Every meeting that receives its protection exclusively by the police discredits the sponsors in the eyes of the great masses. Meetings that can be guaranteed to be held only through the presence of a great police detachment do not attract people, in so far as a visibly existing force is always the presumption for winning the lower classes of a people, t Exactly as a courageous man will win women's hearts more easily than a coward, thus also an heroic movement wins the heart of a people more readily than a movement of cowards that is kept alive only through the protection of the police. Especially for the latter reason the young party itself had to take care that it represented its existence, protected itself and broke the enemy's terror. Hereby the protection of the meetings could be built up in two directions: (i) By an energetic and psychologically correct manage- ment of the meeting. If in those days we National Socialists wanted to hold a meeting, we were its masters and no one else. And we have most sharply emphasized this right of mastery uninterrupt- edly, every minute. Our enemies knew very well that in 726 MEIN KAMPF those days, he who provoked was thrown out ruthlessly, and even if we had been only half a dozen among half a thousand. In the meetings of those days, especially out- side Munich, fifteen or sixteen National Socialists were out- weighed by five, six, seven or eight hundred enemies. Yet we would not have tolerated any provocation, and the visitors of our meetings knew very well that we would have preferred far more to be killed than to capitulate.^- And it happened more than once that a handful of party members has heroically struggled to victory against a yowling and beating red majority. In such cases it was certain that these fifteen or twenty men would finally have been overpowered. But the others knew that before this at least twice or thrice as many of their skulls would have been smashed, and this they did not like to risk. f Here we have tried to learn and have indeed learned from studying the Marxist and bourgeois technique of meetings. The Marxists always had a blind discipline, so that on the bourgeois side the idea of breaking up a Marxist meeting could never arise. The reds occupied themselves all the more with such intentions. In time they had not only achieved a certain virtuosity in this field, but finally, in great parts of the Reich, they went so far as to call a non- Marxist meeting, in itself a provocation of the proletariat ; especially whenever the wirepullers scented that at the meeting the roll of their own sins might be reckoned up, in order to reveal how basely they were lying and were cheating the people. Thus, as soon as such a meeting was announced, the entire red press raised a furious clamor, whereby not infrequently they who disdained the law in principle, appealed first of all to the authorities with the urgent, and threatening request immediately to prohibit this 'provocation of the proletariat/ 'in order to prevent greater evil/ They chose their language and achieved their THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 727 success according to the size of the official blockhead. But if, as an exception, such a position was held by a genuine German official, not an official creature, and if he rejected the impudent demands, then there followed the notorious appeal not to tolerate such a 'provocation of the proletariat* but to appear in masses at a meeting, on such and such a date, in order to ' put a stop to the disgraceful activity of the bourgeois creatures with the help of the horny fist of the proletarian.' Now, one has to have seen such a bourgeois meeting, one has to have experienced its leadership in all its misery and its fear! Many a time a meeting was flatly called off upon such threats. But always the fear was so great that instead of at eight o'clock one rarely could open the meeting before a quarter to, or at nine o'clock. The chairman, with twenty-nine compliments, tried to make it clear to the 'gentlemen of the opposition' present how much he and all the others present rejoiced in their minds (pure lie!) at the visit of men who not yet stood on their ground, be- cause only by a mutual discussion (which he thereby guar- anteed most solemnly from the very beginning) could the conceptions be brought nearer to one another, could the mutual understanding be awakened and a bridge be thrown between them. Whereby, in addition, he assured them that it was not at all the intention of the meeting to lure people away from their present conviction. On no account was this so, everyone was allowed to seek happiness according to his own fashion, but he should also allow the others to seek their happiness and therefore he asked that the speaker, whose arguments would not be very long anyhow, should be allowed to finish undisturbed, so that the world would not be offered, by this meeting too, the shameful spectacle of the internal German fratricidal quar- rel... ugh! But the kinsfolk from the left had in most cases no 728 MEIN KAMPF understanding for this; even before the speaker had started, he had to leave the field under a shower of vilest abuses; and not infrequently one had the impression as though he were even grateful to Fate for the quick abbre- viation of the torturing procedure. Such toreadors of bourgeois meetings left the arena under a terrific noise, provided they did not fall down the stairs with their heads knocked in, something that happened in most cases. For the Marxists it was therefore indeed something new when and how we National Socialists staged our first meetings. They entered with the conviction that of course they could repeat also with us the little game they had played so often. 'Today we make an end.' How did not many a one, upon entering our meeting, shout this sentence boastingly to another one, in order to find himself, even before he could shout it a second time, outside the entrance of the hall. First, the very management of the meeting was different with us. We did not ask anyone graciously to tolerate our lecture, and, from the beginning, no one was guaranteed an endless discussion, but it was simply stated that we were the masters of the meeting, that consequently we had the authority, and that everyone who would dare to make only so much as one interrupting shout, would mercilessly be thrown out by the same door by which he had come in. That further we had to reject all responsibility for such a fellow; if there remained time enough and if we deemed fit, we would allow a discussion to take place ; if not, then there would be no discussion, and now the speaker, party member Blank, has the floor. They were even astonished at this. Secondly, we had at our disposal a tightly organized de- tachment for the protection of the meeting. With the bourgeois parties this protective attachment or rather, this supervising service, usually consisted of gentlemen who THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 729 thought that owing to the dignity of their age, they had a certain claim to authority and respect. But since the masses encouraged by Marxism did not heed age, authority and respect in the least, the existence of this bourgeois protec- tive detachment was practically annulled, so to speak. At the very beginning of our great meetings' activity I commenced the organization of a protective detachment at a supervision service that in principle consisted of young people throughout. Partly they were comrades whom I had known since my military service, others were recently won young party members who, from the very beginning, were instructed and trained to the effect that terror can be broken only by terror; that on this earth a man who is courageous and determined has always had success on his side; that we are fighting for a powerful idea, so great and sublime, that it very well deserves to be protected with one's last drop of blood. They were saturated with the doctrine that once reason is silent and force has the ultimate decision, the best weapon of defense is found in the attack; and that our troop of supervisors has to be preceded by the reputation that it is not a debating club but a fighting community, determined for the utmost. And how had this youth longed for such a slogan! How disappointed and indignant this war generation had been, filled with disgust and disdain for the bourgeois cowardice ! -* Precisely this made it clear that the Revolution was possible only because of the catastrophic bourgeois leader- ship of our people. The fists for protecting the German people would have existed even then, only the heads for assuming responsibility were missing. In those days, how did the eyes of my boys shine when I made clear to them the necessity of their mission, assuring them again and again that all wisdom in this world will remain futile ii force does not enter its service, defending and protecting it, 730 MEIN KAMPF that the mild Goddess of Peace can march only side by side with the God of War, and that every great deed of this peace needs the protection and the help of force! How much more vividly did the idea of military service dawn upon them ! Not in the calcified meaning of old and hard- ened officials, in the service of the dead authority of a dead State, but in the living knowledge of the individual's duty to stand up for and to devote his life to his people in its entirety, always and at any time, anywhere and in every place. And how these boys did stand up! Like a swarm of hornets they stormed upon the disturbers of our meetings, without considering their superior force, no matter how great it was, without considering wounds and bloody sacrifices, completely filled with the great idea of making a path for the holy mission of our movement. As early as in the midsummer of 1920 the organization of the supervising detachment gradually assumed definite forms, and in the spring of 1921 it was divided into com- panies of hundreds, which in turn were divided into groups. And this was very necessary, because meanwhile the meeting activity had risen continuously. Even now we still met frequently in the Miinchner Hofbrauhausfestsaal, but more often still in the larger halls of the city. The Buergerbraufestsaal and the Mtinchner-Kindl-Keller con- stantly saw more enormous mass meetings during the winter of 1920-21, and the aspect was always the same: even in those days, mass meetings of the N.S.G.W.P. had in most cases to be closed by the police because of overcrowding, even before they began. The organization of our supervising troop cleared a very important question. The movement so far had not pos- sessed any party emblem and also no party flag. The lack THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 731 of such symbols had not only disadvantages for the mo- ment, but it was unbearable for the future. The disad- vantages were above all that the party members lacked every outward sign of their belonging together, while for the future it was unbearable to lack an emblem that had the character of a symbol of the movement and that as such could be put up in opposition to the International. But what significance must be attributed to such a symbol from the psychological viewpoint I had an opportunity to observe and to feel more than once even during my youth. In Berlin after the War, I experienced a Marxist mass demonstration in front of the Royal Palace and in the Lustgarten. An ocean of red flags, red scarves and red flowers gave this demonstration, it is estimated that one hundred and twenty thousand persons took part, a powerful appearance at least outwardly. I personally could feel and understand how easily a man of the people succumbs to the suggestive charm of such a grand and impressive spectacle. The bourgeoisie that from the viewpoint of party politics does not present or represent a view of life at all had, for this reason, no flag of its own. It consisted of 'patriots 9 and therefore it walked about clad in the colors of the Reich. Had these very colors been the symbol of a certain view of life, one could have understood that the proprietors of the State saw in its flag also the representative of their view of life, because through their own activity the symbol of their view of life had become the flag of the State and the Reich, f But this was not the case. The Reich had been built up without the contribution of the German bourgeoisie, and the flag itself had been born out of the lap of war. By this, however, it was actually only a State flag and had no meaning whatsoever in the sense of a special mission and view of life. 732 MEIN KAMPF Only in one place of the German language territory there existed something like a bourgeois party flag in German Austria. One part of its national bourgeoisie, by having chosen the colors of the year of 1848, black, red, and gold, as its party flag, created a symbol that, although without any significance as a view of life, had a revolutionary character in reference to State politics. The greatest enemies of this flag black, red, and gold were in those days and this must never be forgotten today Social Democrats and Chris- tian Socialists, that is the party of the clergy. They in particu- lar have cursed, stained and soiled these colors in those days, exactly as later ; in 1918, they dragged the colors black, white, and red into the gutter. True, the black, red, and gold of the parties of the old Austria were the colors of the year 1848, that means of a time that was perhaps fantastic but that had the most honest German souls as its individual representatives, although the Jew stood invisibly in the background as the wirepuller. Thus it was treason towards the country and the disgraceful selling-out of the German people and of German wealth that made these flags so congenial to Marxism and the Center Party that today they worship them as their highest relic and that they create special organizations for the protection of the flag they once spat upon. Thus up to the year 1920 Marxism was actually not opposed by any flag that incorporated the polar contrast to its view of life. For, although the more valuable parties of the 'German bourgeoisie, after the year 1918, found it too much of an effort to take over as their own symbol the now suddenly discovered black, red, and gold flag of the Reich, they themselves had no program of their own that they could have put up against the new development for the future; the best they could show was the idea of the reconstruction of the Reich that had passed.** It is to this idea that the black, white, and red flag of the THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 733 old Reich owes its resurrection as the flag of our so-called national bourgeois parties. It is obvious that the symbol of a condition that was over- thrown by Marxism under circumstances little glorious is ill-suited as an emblem under which this same Marxism in turn is to be destroyed. As sacred and beloved these old and uniquely beautiful colors, in their fresh youthful combination, must be to every decent German who has fought under them and who has seen the sacrifice of so many, as little means this flag as a symbol for a fight of the future. t In contrast with the bourgeois politicians, I have always represented the opinion, in our movement, that for the German nation it was truly fortunate that it had lost its old flag. We do not have to care about what the Republic does under its flag. But we should thank Fate from the depths of our hearts that it was gracious enough to prevent the most glorious flag of all times from being used as a bed sheet of the most disgraceful prostitution. The present Reich that sells itself and its citizens should never be allowed to use the black, white, and red flag of honor and heroes. As long as the November disgrace lasts it should also wear its outward guise and should not try to steal also this It was decided at the Constitutional Convention, which met in Weimar during 1919, to adopt as a flag the black-red-gold banner of the Frankfort Assembly of 1848. It is true, as Hitler says, that in Austria this flag had another significance; but in Germany it had historical associations with movements favor- ing a constitutional monarchy or a republic. The choice was based upon a compromise. The Socialists, who constituted the majority in Germany, had their traditional red flag. The Con- servatives looked upon the black-white-red black of the Ho- henzollerns as a symbol of the monarchy and the army. Ac- cordingly the moderate groups proposed die black-red-gold flag. 734 MEIN KAMPF from a more honest past. Our bourgeois politicians should recall to their memories that he who desires for this State the black, white, and red flag, steals from our past. The erstwhile flag is actually suitable only for the erstwhile Reich, exactly as, the Lord be praised and thanked, the Republic chose the flag that is suitable for it. -4- This was also the reason why we National Socialists, in hoisting the old flag could not have seen an expressive symbol of our own activity. For what we want is not to reawaken from death the old Reich that had perished through its own mistakes, but to build up a new State. The movement that fights against Marxism in this sense has today consequently to carry incorporated in its flag the symbol of the new State. f The question of the new flag, that is its aspect, occupied us very much in those days. Suggestions were made from all sides which, however, were better meant than they were successful. For the new flag had to be as much a symbol of our own fight as on the other hand it had to have an effect as great as that of a poster. He who has occupied himself with the masses very much will recognize very important matters in these apparent trifles. In hundreds of thousands of cases, an effective emblem can give the first impetus for the interest in a movement. For this reason we had to reject all suggestions for identi- fying by a white flag, as was suggested from many sides, our movement with the old State or rather with those weak parties whose sole interest is the restoration of past conditions. Apart from this, white is not a color that carries people away. It is suitable for associations of chaste virgins, but not for the overpowering movement of a revolutionary time. Black, too, was suggested: though in itself suitable for the present time, it did not give a presentation that in any way interpreted the meaning of our movement. Finally! this color also is not thrilling enough. THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 735 White and blue was out of the question, despite the wonderful effect from the aesthetic point of view, as the color of a German individuaJ State and of /a political orientation directed at particularistic narrow-mindedness that did not enjoy the best of reputations. Besides, it would have been very difficult to find in this a reference to our movement. The same applied to black and white. Black, white, and gold was in itself out of question. Also black, white, and red was out, for reasons already mentioned, in any case not in the previous composition. In its effect, however, this color composition is high above all the others. It is the most resplendent harmony that exists. -* I personally always stood up for keeping the old colors, not only because to me, as a soldier, they are the most sacred thing I know, but also, because of their aesthetic effect, they correspond to my feeling by far to the greatest extent. Yet I had to reject, without exception, the numer- ous designs that in those days were handed in by the circles of the young movement and that mostly had placed the swastika on the old flag. I myself as the leader did not want to come forth immediately with my own sketch, as it was quite possible that someone else would produce one that was just as good or even better. In fact, a dentist from Starnberg produced a design that was not bad at all, and besides that approached my own design very closely, except that it had the one mistake that the swastika was composed in a white circle with curved hooks. Meanwhile, I myself, after innumerable attempts, had put down a final form: a flag with a background of red, with a white circle, and in its center, a black swastika. And this then was kept. In the same sense, arm bands were immediately ordered for the supervising detachments, that is a red band which also shows a white circle with a black swastika. 736 MEIN KAMPF The party emblem, too, was designed along the same lines: a white circle in a red field and in its center the swastika. A Munich goldsmith, Fuss, produced the first design that could be used and that then was kept. In the midsummer of 1920, the new flag appeared in public for the first time. It was superbly suited for our young movement. It was as young and new as the move- ment. No one had ever seen it before; in those days it had an effect like that of a flaming torch. We ourselves had an almost childlike joy when a faithful woman member had carried out the design for the first time and delivered the flag. Only a few months later we had in Munich half a dozen of these flags, and the continuously increasing body of supervisors especially contributed to spreading the new symbol of the movement. And a symbol it is indeed! Not only that, by the only colors, ardently loved by us all, that once had gained so much honor for the German people, our adoration for the The swastika had been used as a symbol of Germanic religion by folkish groups before the War, but without anti-Semitic implications. Junius Alter writes (in Nationalisteri): 'Those who at that time selected the swastika as the symbol of their spiritual communion were not thinking of it as something to be set, as a sign of conflict, in opposition to the Jewish 'Star of David 1 to which it has latterly been profaned but as that in which they beheld the age-old symbol of Aryan awareness of God. Consciously or unconsciously they realized that the folkish idea in its deeper implications would have to reckon most carefully with the religious problem, which is the basis of all our spiritual life. Not that anyone thought seriously of restoring the cult of Wotan in its primitive form. . . . But one did notice the indubitable fact (which many of our best have sensed though they have not always publicly expressed it) that the blow of the axe with which Charlemagne cut down the Irmin pillar at the Erseburg cut deep into the innermost THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 737 past is demonstrated, it was also the best incorporation of the movement's intentions. As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social idea of the movement, in the white the national idea, in the swastika the mission of the fight for the victory of Aryan man, and at the same time also the victory of the idea of creative work which in itself is and will always be anti- Semitic. Two years later, when the detachment of supervisors had long become a Storm Troop, embracing many thousand men, it appeared necessary to give to this armed organiza- tion of the young view of life also a special symbol of victory: the insignia. This too, I personally designed, and I gave it to the goldsmith master Gahr, an old faithful party member, for execution. Since then the insignia belongs to the'symbols and field signs of the National Socialist battle. core of our people and left behind it a grip in the whole psychic development of the Germanic World which has lasted even into our own time.' It has also been used as an anti-Semitic organization badge in Rumania prior to the War. During 1919, the Ehrhardt brigade was formed of soldiers who had fought in the Baltic region with the Free Corps. These men wore the swastika on their steel helmets, and it served them as a sign of identification and a theme for song. It is probable that they had found it used in Finland, where custom has sanctioned its use (without anti-Semitic implica- tions) since time immemorial. The Ehrhardt Brigade was anti- Semitic because it believed that the 'Jewish government' of the republic had compelled it to discontinue fighting. At any rate, it popularized the swastika as an anti-Semitic symbol. One finds the swastika used in 'racist* literature (cf. Der Hammer, edited by Theodor Fritzch) as early as 1918 and 1919. 738 MEIN KAMPF The meeting activity that increased more and more during 1920 finally led us to hold frequently as many as two meetings a week. People crowded in front of our posters, the largest halls of the town were always filled, and tens of thousands of misguided Marxists found the way back to their national community, in order to become fighters for a coming, free German Reich. The public of Munich had become acquainted with us. They talked of us, and the words 'National Socialist' became familiar to many and already meant a program. Also the host of adherents, even members, began to grow uninterruptedly, so that in Munich as early as in the winter of 1920-21 we could appear as a strong party. In those days there existed, apart from the Marxists, no party, especially no national party, that could have shown such mass demonstrations as ours. The Miinchner-Kindl- Keller, with a capacity of five thousand, was several times crammed to the point of bursting, and there was only one single room which we had not yet dared to take, and that was the Zirkus Krone. At the end of January 1921 serious troubles rose again for Germany. The Paris Agreement, according to which Ger- The London Ultimatum, presented by the Allies on May 5, 1921, fixed Germany's reparations obligations at 132 billion Marks, and demanded that within 25 days I billions Marks be paid either in gold or in notes maturing in three months. There- upon the Fehrenbach Cabinet resigned, and Dr. Josef Wirth formed a Cabinet willing to accept the ultimatum. The Democratic Party was maneuvered into line, so as to broaden the basis on which the government stood. It was, of course, easy to protest against exorbitant Allied demands, but refusal to pay meant as everybody realized full well the suicide of the nation. Nevertheless acceptance of the ultimatum became a favorite argument to prove the 'cowardliness' of the regime. THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 739 many had obligated herself to pay the fantastic sum of one hundred billions goldmarks, was to become reality in the shape of the London dictate. A Workers 1 Community of so-called folkish associations, existing for a long time in Munich, wanted to make this the cause to call for a greater, common protest. Time was pressing, and I myself, in view of this constant hesita- tion to bring about the executions of decisions made, was nervous. First one talked of a demonstration at the Koenigsplatz, but this was dropped as one was afraid of being dispersed by the reds, and one planned a demonstra- tion of protest in front of the Feldherrnhalle. But this plan was dropped also, and finally one suggested a common meeting in the Miinchner-Kindl-Keller. Meanwhile day after day had passed, the great parties had not taken any notice at all of the terrible event, and the Workers' Com- munity could not make up its mind at last to determine a definite date for the intended demonstration. Tuesday, February I, 1921, I urgently demanded a final decision. I was put off until Wednesday. Wednesday I now demanded an absolutely clear answer if and when the meeting would take place. The answer was again vague and evasive; I was told, one 'intended* to call upon the Workers' Community to make a demonstration on Wednes- day of the following week. With this my patience was at an end, and I decided to carry out the demonstration of protest on my own. Wednes- day noon I dictated the poster to a typist in ten minutes and at the same time I had the Zirkus Krone rented for the next day, Thursday, February 3. At that time this was an enormously great risk. Not only was it doubtful whether we would be able to fill the gigantic hall, we also incurred the risk of being dispersed. Our supervising detachment was still by far insufficient for the colossal room. Also, I had no correct idea of the 740 MEIN KAMPF possible procedure in case of a ruction. At that time I thought that it was far more difficult in the circus building than in a normal hall. But as was shown later, exactly the reverse was the case. In this enormous room it was actually easier to overpower a group of disturbers than was the case in tightly crowded halls. Certain was only one thing: any failure could throw us back for a very long time. For one single successful break- ing-up would have destroyed our nimbus at one blow and would have encouraged the opponents to try again and again in what they had once succeeded. This would have led to all our further meeting activity being sabotaged, something that could have been made good only after many months and after most difficult struggles. We had only one day for posting our bills, namely, Thursday itself. Unfortunately it rained from the morning on, and there seemed cause to fear whether under such cir- cumstances many people would not prefer to stay at home, instead of going to a meeting in rain and sleet where it was possible that assault and murder would take place. Thursday morning I was suddenly seized with fear that the room would not be filled after all (with this I would have been disgraced in the eyes of the Workers' Com- munity), so that now I hurriedly dictated some leaflets and had them printed, in order to have them distributed in the course of the afternoon. They contained, of course, the invitation to visit the meeting. Two trucks which I had rented were covered in as much red as possible, our flags were planted upon them and each of them was manned with fifteen or twenty party members; they were given instructions to drive through the streets of the town as much as possible, to throw out leaflets, in short to make propaganda for the mass demonstration of the evening. It was the first time that flag-adorned trucks, on which no Marxists were found, were driven through THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 741 the streets of the town. The bourgeoisie, therefore, gaped after the trucks that were decorated with red and with flying swastika flags, with their mouths open, while in the outer districts innumerable fists were raised whose owners were visibly enraged at this newest 'provocation of the proletariat.' For only Marxism had a right to hold meetings, exactly as it alone had the right to drive about in trucks. If both these things were done by others, then Marxism in turn had the sacred right to consider this a provocation of those who so far had been the sole owners of this mo- nopoly. t At seven in the evening the circus was not yet well filled. I was kept informed by telephone every ten minutes, and I personally was rather worried; for at seven or a quarter after seven the other halls had usually been already half filled, sometimes even filled. But this was soon explained. I had not counted with the gigantic dimensions of the new room : a thousand persons made the Hofbrauhaussaal appear very nicely occupied, while in the Zirkus Krone they were simply swallowed up. One hardly saw them. Shortly after- wards more favorable reports came in and at a quarter to eight it was said that the room was filled to three quarters and that great crowds were standing in front of the box offices. Upon this I drove off. Two minutes past eight I arrived in front of the circus. There was still a crowd of people to be seen, partly only the curious, also many opponents among them, who wanted to wait outside for the events to happen. < Upon entering the enormous hall I was seized with the same joy as a year previously on the occasion of the first meeting in the Munich Hofbrauhausfestsaal. But only after I had pushed my way through the walls of people and had reached the high stage, I saw the success in all its greatness. Like a gigantic shell the hall lay before my eyes, filled with thousands and thousands of people. Even the arena was 742 MEIN KAMPF black with crowds. More than five thousand six hundred tickets had been issued, and if one included the entire num- ber of unemployed, of poor students and our supervising troops, about six and a half thousand people may have been present. 'Future or Decline' was the subject, and my heart jubi- lated in view of the conviction that the future was lying down there in front of me. I began to speak and spoke for about two and a half hours, and my feelings already told me after the first half hour that the meeting was going to be a great success. The connection with all these thousands of individuals was es- tablished. Already after the first hour applause began to interrupt me in ever greater spontaneous outbursts, in or- der to ebb again after two hours and to give way to that solemn silence that later I was to experience in this room so many times and that will remain unforgettable to every in- dividual. Hardly anything but the breathing of this gigan- tic crowd was heard, and only after I had spoken the last word did applause roar up till it found its relaxing conclu- sion in the ' Deutschland-Lied,' sung most fervently. I stayed to see the gigantic room gradually emptying it- self and watched a colossal ocean of people pushing through the enormous middle door for almost twenty minutes. Only then did I myself leave my place, extremely happy, in order to go home. Pictures were made of this first meeting at the Zirkus Krone in Munich. They show better than words the great- ness of the manifestation. Bourgeois papers brought re- prints and notices, but they only mentioned that it was a 4 national 9 demonstration, but in their usual modesty they did not mention the producers. So we had for the first time stepped far beyond the frame of an ordinary everyday party. Now one could no longer paas us by. In order to prevent the impression that the sue- THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 743 of this meeting was only an ephemeral one, I immedi- ately scheduled for the second time a meeting at the Zirkus Krone for the coming week, and the success was the same. Again the gigantic room was crowded to the point of burst- ing, so that I decided to hold for a third time a meeting in the same hall in the coming week. And for the third time the gigantic circus was crammed with people from the floor to the roof. After this beginning of the year 1921 1 increased the meet- ing activity in Munich even more. Now I proceeded to hold a mass meeting not only every week, but some weeks even two mass meetings, indeed, during the height of summer and in the late fall there were sometimes three meetings. Now we always gathered in the circus and we had the satis- faction of seeing that all our evenings brought the same success. The result was an ever rising number of adherents of the movement and a great increase in members. Such successes, of course, did not leave our enemies at peace. After their always wavering policy had now favored terror, now passed us in silence, they were not able to hinder the development of the movement, as they themselves were compelled to recognize, neither by the one nor by the other. Thus as their ultimate effort they decided upon an act of terror in order to put a final stop to our further meeting activity. As the outward reason for this action they used a most mysterious attack upon a deputy of the Bavarian Diet named Erhard Auer. This Erhard Auer was supposed to have been shot at by someone one evening. That means he had not actually been shot, but it was said that it had been attempted to shoot at him. The unexcelled presence of mind as well as the proverbial courage of the Social 744 MEIN KAMPF Democratic party leader had not only frustrated the in- sidious attack but had forced the infamous assailants to flee. They had fled so hurriedly and so far that even later on the police was not able to find the slightest trace of them. This mysterious incident now was being used by the organ of the Social Democratic Party in Munich and in order to arouse public sentiment against the movement in the most excessive way and in their customary vociferousness to hint at what soon was bound to come. Care was taken that our trees were not to tower into the heavens, but that proleta- rian fists would now interfere at the right time. And a few days later the day of the interference had al- ready come. A meeting in the Munich Hofbrauhausfestsaal where I personally was scheduled to speak had been chosen for the final settlement. On November 4, 1921, in the afternoon between six and seven o'clock, I received the first definite news that the During the year 1921, a number of political assassinations by adherents of Rightist organizations stirred Bavaria. On June 10 of that year, a letter was received by the police in which the murder of Erhard Auer, Social Democratic leader, was predicted. Auer had led a vigorous campaign against the assassins, most of whom were spirited into hiding-places by the Bavarian police and government. On October 21, 1921, he was returning home from a Party meeting with several com- panions when shots were fired. Auer sought cover and returned the fire. The police were notified; and though the assassins had taken station inside the walled South Cemetery of Munich, they were permitted to escape. Socialists placed responsibility for this ambush on the S.A. because of the circumstances sur- rounding the earlier assassination of Herr Caries, a Landtag deputy. The Miesbacher Anzeigcf, a paper friendly to the Hitler movement, had suggested editorially that Caries ought to be shot 'like a mad dog.' THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 745 meeting would positively be broken up and that for this particular purpose one intended to send great masses of laborers from red factories to the meeting. It must be attributed to an unfortunate incident that we did not receive this information earlier. On the same day we had given up our old venerable office in the Sternecker- gasse in Munich and had moved to a new one, that means we had left the old and could not move into the new office, because the workers had not yet finished there. Since the telephone, too, had been taken out of the old office and had not yet been installed in the new one, quite a number of attempts at informing us by telephone of the intended dis- ruption were in vain. The consequence was that the meeting itself was pro- tected only by very weak detachments of supervisors. Of a detachment of usually a hundred only about forty-six men were present, and the alarm system was not yet so well worked out that in the evening, in the course of about one hour, a sufficient reinforcement could have been brought in. To this was added the fact that such alarming rumors had come to our ears innumerable times without anything remarkable having happened. The old proverb, that re- volutions that have been announced do mostly not occur, had so far proved correct also with us. This was perhaps also a reason why on that day, not everything was done that should have been done in order to meet a breaking-up with the most brutal determina- tion. Finally, we considered the Munich Hofbrauhausfestsaal most ill suited for a breakup. We had feared it more for the largest halls, especially for the circus. In this respect this day gave us a valuable lesson. Later on we studied these questions with, I may say, scientific methods and we came to results that were partly as unbelievable as they were interesting and that proved of fundamental signifi- 746 MEIN KAMPF cance for the organizing and tactical arrangement of our storm troops in the time that followed. When, at a quarter to eight, I arrived in the lobby of the HofbrSuhaus, there could be no longer any doubt of the existing intention. The hall was overcrowded and for that reason the doors had been closed by the police. The ene- mies who had come very early were in the hall and our ad- herents for the greater part outside of it. The small Storm Troop (S. A.) was expecting me in the lobby. I had the doors of the great hall closed and then I ordered the forty-five or forty-six men to line up. I made it clear to the boys that today for the first time they probably would have to prove their loyalty towards the movement to the point of bending or breaking and that none of us was to leave the hall, except he was carried out dead ; I myself would remain in the hall and did not think that even one of them would leave me; but if I myself would see one who turned out to be a coward, I personally would tear off his arm band and take away his party emblem; then I ordered them to proceed immediately upon the slightest attempt at a breaking-up and to remem- ber that he defends himself best who personally attacks. A threefold Heil that this time sounded rougher and hoarser than usually was the answer. Then I entered the hall and now I could survey the situa- tion with my own eyes. They were sitting inside, tightly packed, and tried to pierce me even with their eyes. In- numerable faces were turned toward me with sullen hatred, while again others, with mocking grimaces, sent forth very definite shouts. Today one would 'finish us/ we should watch our intestines, one would close our mouths for good, and what more of such nice sayings there were. They were conscious of their superior force and they felt accordingly. Yet the meeting could be opened and I began to speak. In the Hofbrauhausfestsaal I always stood on one of the long sides of the hall and my platform was a beer table. That THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 747 means I found myself actually among the people. This fact added perhaps to always creating an atmosphere precisely in this hall as I never found a similar one in any other place. In front of me, especially on the left, there sat and stood only enemies. They were robust boys and men throughout, to a greater part from the Maffei factory, from Kuster- mann, from the Isaria Meter Works, etc. Along the left wall of the hall they had pushed ahead closely to my table and now they began to collect beer mugs, that means they continued to order beer and put the empty mugs under the table. Whole batteries were thus created, and I would have been surprised if today the affair had again taken a good ending. After about an hour and a half that was the time I was able to speak despite all interrupting calls it appeared almost as though I would be master of the situation. The leaders of the disturbing detachments themselves seemed to feel this; for they became more and more restless, they went out more and more often, came back again and with visible nervousness talked to their people. A small psychological mistake which I made in warding off an interrupting shout and of which, hardly had I ut- tered the word, I became conscious, gave the storm signal. A few enraged shouts, and suddenly a man jumped on a chair and shouted into the hall: ' FreihcitI' [Freedom.] Upon which signal the fighters for freedom began their work. Within a few seconds the whole room was filled with a shouting and shrieking mass, over whose heads, like howit- zer shells, innumerable beer mugs were flying; in between the breaking of chair legs, the bursting of the mugs, bawl- ing, howling and yelling. It was a maddening racket. I stayed in my place and was able to observe how com- pletely my boys fulfilled their duty. 748 MEIN KAMPF I should have liked to see a bourgeois meeting under such circumstances! The dance had not yet started when my Storm Troopers, that was their name from that day on, attacked. Like wolves, in groups of eight or ten, again and again they pounced upon their opponents and actually began to beat them out of the hall. Hardly five minutes had passed that I did not see one of them that was not covered with blood. How many of them did I get to know properly only then ; at their head my good Maurice, my present private secre- tary Hess and many others who, although seriously wounded themselves, attacked again and again, as long as they could stand on their feet. For twenty minutes the in- fernal row lasted, but then most of the opponents, who counted perhaps seven or eight hundred men, were beaten out of the hall by not even fifty of my men and chased down the stairs. Only in the left rear corner of the hall a greater number stood its ground and offered bitter resistance. Then, suddenly, two shots were fired from the entrance to the hall, and now a wild shooting started. Yet our hearts almost jubilated in view of such a reawakening of old wai memories. From then on one was no longer able to discern who fired the shots; only one thing could be found, that is, that from this moment on the rage of my bleeding boys had con- siderably increased and that finally the last disturbers, overpowered, were driven out of the hall. About twenty-five minutes had passed; the hall itself looked as though it had been hit by a bomb. The wounds of many of my adherents were just being dressed, others had to be taken away in carriages, but we had remained the masters of the situation. Hermann Esser, who was the Emile Maurice was a member of the S.A. to whom Hitler dictated portions of Mtin Kampf while in prison. THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RED FRONT 749 chairman of the evening's meeting, declared : 4 The meeting continues. The speaker has the floor,' and then I spoke again. After we ourselves had already closed the meeting, an excited lieutenant of the police suddenly rushed on the scene and with wildly gesticulating arms he screeched into the auditorium, 'The meeting is dissolved. 1 I could not help laughing at this late comer to the events; the pomposity typical of the police. The smaller they are, the greater at least they have to appear. We had actually learned a great deal this evening, and our opponents also never forgot the lesson they in turn re- ceived. Up to the fall of 1923 the Munchner Post no longer an- nounced any more fists of the proletariat. The truth is a little different from the account given here. At the close of 1920, Hitler's S.A. formations were strong enough to make their influence felt. On January 4 of the next year, Hitler declared: 'The National Socialist movement in Munich will in the future prevent, without exception, and if need be with force, any meetings or addresses which are cal- culated to have a demoralizing effect upon our fellow citizens who are already decadent enough.' This was the first time since the Revolution that a political party had issued such a threat. But as a result of having broken up one meeting adjudged to be 4 demoralizing, ' Hitler was brought to trial and given three months in jail. The police let him off with one month, and he emerged crowned with the halo of martyrdom. CHAPTER VIII THE STRONG MAN IS MIGHTIEST ALONE IN WHAT I have said previously I mentioned the ex- istence of a Workers 1 Community of German folkish associations, and here I want to deal briefly with the problem of these working communities. By a workers' community one generally understands a group of associations which, in order to facilitate their common work, enter into a certain mutual relationship, choose a common leader of more or less great competence and carry out common actions in common. Merely by this it is shown that they are associations, unions or parties whose aims and ways are not too far apart. It is claimed that this is always the case. For the normal average citizen it is as enjoyable as it is comforting to hear that such unions finally, by finding themselves together in a workers 9 com- munity, have discovered what they have in common and what unites them and that they ignore that which separates them. Hereby the mutual conviction is prevalent that such a unification means an enormous increase in strength and that by this the otherwise weak little groups have suddenly become a factor of power. But this is mostly wrong! It is interesting and, in my eyes, important for the better THE STRONG MAN IS MIGHTIEST ALONE 751 understanding of this question to get a clear idea of the way in which the formation of unions, associations or such- like can be arrived at, all of which assert that they pursue the same aim. In and by itself, it would be logical that one aim is fought for only by one association and that it would be sensible if several associations were not fighting for the same goal. There is no doubt that this aim was envisaged first only by one association. One man announces the truth in some place, he calls for the solution of a certain question, he establishes a goal and forms a movement that is to serve the realization of his intention. Thus an association or a party is formed which, according to its program, is intended to bring about either the aboli- tion of existing evils or the establishment of a specific condition in the future. Once such a movement has been called to life it practically holds a certain right of priority. Now it should be a matter of course that all people who intend to fight for the same goal, join such a movement and thus increase its strength, in order to be better able to serve the common intention in this way. Especially every intellectually active head ought to see in just such a joining the supposition for the actual success of their common struggle. Thus, by virtue of reason and with a certain honesty (a lot depends on this, as I will prove later), there ought to be only one movement for one goal. That this is not the case can be ascribed to two causes. One of them I almost want to call a tragic one, while the second is to be sought in human weakness. But funda- mentally I see in both of them only facts that are suitable for increasing the will in itself, its energy and intensity, and, by higher breeding of human energy, to make the solution of the problem in question finally possible. The tragic cause why, for the solution of a certain task, we do not stop at one single association, is the following: in 752 MEIN KAMPF this world every deed of great style will generally be the fulfillment of a wish that for a long time has existed in millions of men, of a longing that has quietly been harbored by many. Indeed, it may happen that centuries yearningly long for the solution of a certain question, because they groan in consequence of the unbearableness of an existing condition, without the fulfillment of this general longing arriving. Nations who no longer find a heroic solution at all for such a distress can be called impotent, while we see the vital energy of a people and the determination for life that it guarantees proved most strikingly whenever, for its libera- tion from a great oppression, or for the abolition of bitter distress, or for the appeasement of its soul that has become restless because it became uncertain Destiny gives it some day the man who is blessed to this end, who will finally bring the long yearned-for fulfillment. The very characteristic of so-called great questions of the time implies that thousands work for their solution, that many think they are called upon, that even Destiny herself suggests many of them to be chosen, so that in the free play of energies she gives the final victory to the man who is stronger and more able, and entrusts him with the solution of the problem. f Thus it may be that centuries, dissatisfied with the shap- ing of their religious life, long for a renovation, and that out of this psychic urge dozens and more men arise who, based on their insight and knowledge, believe themselves called upon ior the solution of this religious distress, in order to appear as prophets of a new doctrine or at least as fighters against an existing one. It is certain that also here, by virtue of a natural order, the strongest man is chosen for fulfilling the great mission ; but the realization that this one man is the one who is exclusively called upon usually dawns upon the others very late. On the contrary, they all look upon themselves as THE STRONG MAN IS MIGHTIEST ALONE 753 having equal rights and as being called upon for the solution of this task, and their contemporaries usually are least able to distinguish who of them because solely capable of the highest achievements solely deserves their support. Thus in the course of centuries, frequently even within one and the same period, various men appear, they found movements in order to fight for objectives which at least so they assert are the same or are felt by the great masses to be the same. The people itself harbors vague wishes and has general convictions, without, however, being able to see perfectly clearly about the very nature of the objective or of its own wish, or even about the possibilities of realizing them. < The tragedy lies in the fact that those men aim at the same goal by quite different ways, without knowing one another, and that therefore, in the purest faith in their own mission, they consider themselves obliged to go their own way without considering the others. f That such movements, parties, and religious groups originate completely independent of one another, solely out of the general intention of the period, that is what appears as tragic at least at first sight because people are too much inclined towards the opinion that the energies, scattered over various ways, would, if concentrated upon one single way, lead to success more quickly and more surely. But this is not the case. Nature herself, in her inexorable logic, makes the decision by having the various groups compete with one another and by having them fight for the palm of victory, and by leading that movement to the goal that has chosen the clearest, shortest and surest way. But how should the correctness or incorrectness of a way be decided upon externally, if the free play of energies had not been given a free way, if the ultimate decision had not been taken from the doctrinary decision of human know- 754 MEIN KAMPF alls and had not been handed over to the infallible proof of visible success which will finally give the ultimate affirma- tion of the correctness of an action ! Therefore, if different groups march towards the same goal on separate ways, they will, as soon as they have be- come aware of the existence of similar endeavors, control the character of their way more thoroughly, will shorten this way if possible, and with the exertion of their utmost energy, they will try to reach the goal more quickly. Thus this competition results in a higher breeding of the individual fighter, and humankind owes its successes not infrequently also to those lessons that were drawn from the failure of frustrated former attempts. Thus in the split-up, caused without deliberate fault of the individuals and at first appearing a tragic fact we can recognize the means by which the best procedure was finally arrived at.^ In history we see that in the opinion of most people the two ways which once it was possible to take for the solution of the German question and which were chiefly presented and fought for by Austria and Prussia, Habsburg and Hohenzollern, should have been put together from the very beginning; in their opinion one should have entrusted one's combined forces to the one or the other way. But in that case one would then have set out on the way of the recently more important representative; the Austrian intention, however, would never have led towards a German Reich. And now the Reich of strongest German unity originated precisely from what millions of Germans, with bleeding hearts, had experienced as the ultimate and most terrible sign of our fratricidal war: the German imperial crown was in truth won on the battlefield of Koeniggraete and not in the battles before Paris, as one afterwards thought. Thus also the founding of the German Reich was by THE STRONG MAN IS MIGHTIEST ALONE 755 itself not the result of some common intention along com* mon ways, but rather the result of a conscious sometimes also unconscious wrestling for hegemony, out of which struggle Prussian finally emerged victorious. And one who, not blinded by party politics, does not renounce the truth, will have to admit that the so-called wisdom of men would never have made the same wise decision, such as the wis- dom of life, that means the free play of energies, made it at last become reality. For who, in German lands, would seriously have believed, two hundred years ago, that the Prussia of the Hohenzollerns, and not Habsburg, would some day become the germ cell, founder and teacher of the new Reich? Who, today, would still want to deny that Fate has acted more wisely in this manner; indeed, who could today imagine a German Reich at all, supported by the principles of a foul and degenerate dynasty? No, the natural development, although after a struggle of centuries, has after all put the best man in thai place in which he belonged. This will always be and remain so forever, as it has always been. Therefore, it must not be regretted if different people set out on the way in order to arrive at the same goal : the strongest and quickest is recognized in this manner and will be victorious. There is still a second cause why in the life of the nations frequently movements of seemingly equal kind try to reach the seemingly same goal still by different ways. This cause is not only tragic, but actually rather pitiful. It lies in the deplorable mixture of envy, jealousy, ambition, and thievish mentality which unfortunately one finds some- times combined in single individuals of humankind* For, as soon as there appears a man who deeply recog- nizes the distress of his people and who now, after he has made absolutely clear to himself the nature of the disease, 756 MEIN KAMPF seriously tries to remedy it, after he has focused a goal and chosen a way that may lead to this goal then im- mediately small and smallest minds become attentive and eagerly follow up the activity of this man who has drawn upon himself the eyes of the public. Exactly like sparrows who, apparently quite disinterested, but in reality most attentive, continuously watch a more fortunate comrade who has found a morsel of bread, so that suddenly, in an unguarded moment, they rob [him], thus do also these people. A man only needs to step out on a new way, and immediately many lazy loiterers will be startled and smell a promising bite which could perhaps lie at the end of this way. Once they have found out where perchance it may be found, they eagerly set out in order to arrive at the goal by a different, possibly shorter way. If now the new movement is founded and has been given its definite program, then these people come and pretend that they are fighting for the same goal; but by far not by honestly placing themselves into the ranks of such a movement and by thus recognizing its priority, but they steal from the program and upon it they found a new party of their own. Thereby they are impudent enough to assure their thoughtless fellow citizens that for a long time previously they have intended exactly the same things as the other one and not infrequently they succeed in placing themselves in a favorable light, instead of being justly subjected to general disdain. For is it not a great impudence to pretend that one inscribes on one's own ban- ner the task that someone else wrote on his banner, to borrow the other's lines of direction of his program, and then to go the ways of one's own, as though it was he himself who has brought about all this? But this im- pudence is shown most of all by the fact that the same ele- ments who first, by their new foundations, have caused the split-up talk most of all, as experience shows, of the THE STRONG MAN IS MIGHTIEST ALONE 757 necessity of unity and uniformity, as soon as they think they notice that the opponent is so far ahead that they cannot overtake him. To such a procedure we owe the so-called 'folkish split-up/ True, in the year 1918-19 the formation of quite a series of groups, parties, etc., that were called folkish had issued from the natural development of affairs without the founders' fault. Out of all of these parties, as early as in 1920, the N.S.G.W.P. had slowly become crystallized as the victorious party. The fundamental honesty of each individual founder could not be proved better than by the truly admirable decision of many of them to sacrifice their own, obviously less successful movement, to the stronger movement; that means to dissolve or to integrate it uncon- ditionally. This applies especially to the protagonist of the German Socialist Party in Nurnberg, Herr Julius Streicher. The N.S.G.W.P. and the G.S.P. (German Socialist Party) had originated with the same final goals, but quite independent of one another. The main fighter for the G.S.P. was, as Julius Streicher's ' D.S.P.' was the Deutschsozialistische Partci (German Socialist Party), which had a certain success in Franconia. We have seen that Streicher, for a long time dubious of the merits of Hitler's leadership, eventually acquiesced. Hitler has never broken with anyone who submitted completely to him, but few others have received the ostentatious support given to Streicher. Unquestionably one of the worst louts in the Party, Streicher is nevertheless a person of considerable power. His whip is famous; his obscenities are world-renowned. He has sported a Hitlerian mustache, and his oratorical style somewhat resembles the Fiihrer's. He was once a teacher, and rose to the rank of lieutenant during the War. Cf . Tk* Nazi Dictatorship, by Frederick L. Schumann. 758 MEIN KAMPF already mentioned, the erstwhile school-teacher Julius Streicher in Nurnberg. At first he, too, was solemnly con- vinced of the mission and the future of his movement. But once he was able to recognize clearly and undoubtingly the greater force and the stronger growth of the N.S.G.W.P., he discontinued his activity for the G.S.P. and the Workers' Community and asked his adherents to join the N.S.G.W.P. that had emerged victoriously from the mutual wrestling and to continue fighting in its ranks for the common goal. A decision that was personally as hard as it was thoroughly decent. t Accordingly, there remained no split-up whatsoever from this first time of the movement, but the honest intentions of the men of those days nearly throughout led to an honest, straight and correct end. What today we call by the words 'folkish split-up* owes its existence, as already pointed out, exclusively to the second cause I mentioned : ambitious men who previously never had ideas of their own, far less goals of their own, felt themselves 'called upon 9 precisely at the moment when they saw the success of the N.S.G.W.P. undeniably ripen. Suddenly programs originated which were completely copied from our programs, ideas were fought for that were borrowed from us, goals were established for which we had been fighting for years, ways were chosen which had long been pursued by the N.S.G.W.P. One tried to ex- plain by all means why one had been compelled to found these new parties, despite the long existing N.S.G.W.P.; however, the more noble the pretended motives were, the less true were these phrases. In truth one sole reason had been decisive: the founders 9 personal ambition to play a role for which their own dwarfish bearing was not equipped except for a great audacity to take over others' thoughts, an audacity which otherwise, in civil life, is usually called thievish. THE STRONG MAN IS MIGHTIEST ALONE 759 In those days there existed no conceptions and ideas of other people that such a political kleptomaniac would not have collected for his new business within the shortest time. Those who did so were the same people who later, with tears in their eyes, deeply deplored the 4 folkish split-up* and who uninterruptedly talked of the 'necessity of unity/ with the silent hope that after all they would be able to cheat the others to the effect that, tired of the eternally accusing clamor, they would throw to the thieves, in addi- tion to the stolen ideas, also the movements that had been created for their execution. But if they did not succeed in doing so and if the profit- ableness of the new enterprises, thanks to the scanty mental capacity of their owners, did not turn out as they had expected, then they usually reduced their prices and were happy even if they could wind up in one of the so- called Workers' Communities. Everything that in those days was too weak to stand on its own legs came together in such workers' communities; probably starting from the belief that eight lame people, arm in arm, will certainly make a gladiator. But if among the lame ones there ever was a healthy one, then he needed his whole energy in order to keep the others on their legs and by this he himself was finally paralyzed. We have always to look upon the marching in common with so-called workers' communities as a question of Is a political or social revolution to be achieved only if it is carried out by an organization determined to stand alone, and to have neither allies nor friends? The history of contem- porary Germany affords no direct answer to the question. Hitler broke with those among his subordinates who felt that the Party could succeed only by forming a coalition with other parties and thus accepting parliamentary government. But 760 MEIN KAMPF tactics; but we never must relinquish the following funda- mental realization: By the formation of a workers 9 community weak associations are never turned into strong ones, but a strong association can and will not seldom be weakened by it. The opinion, that by the integration of weak groups there ought to result a factor of strength is wrong, as experience shows that in every form and under all suppositions the majority will be the representative of stupidity and cowardice, and that thus any plurality of associations, as soon as it is ruled by a leader- he himself did form a union with the German National Party, without which he would still not have had a majority in March, 1933. Favorite examples of what are supposed to have been 'Unilateral revolutions 1 are Christianity and 'liberalism.' But, at least in the natural order, the success of Christianity was in part due to the presence of Jewish and Oriental religions in the Roman Empire. Paul spoke to the Athenians of their 'unknown God, 1 and Augustine discoursed on the 'hidden Revelation.' During the mediaeval period, the Church accepted the Empire as its confederate. 'Liberalism 1 was certainly the achievement of many different forces and minorities. It cannot be tfaced to the French Revolution or to the Free Masons. But of course a militaristic society, once established, must have a single leader of unchecked authority. Hitler has, if anything, been sterner with his enemies than with his friends. If trouble were taken to count lines in Mein Kampf, it would doubtless be found out that more space is devoted to scolding would-be rivals than to trouncing Marxism or democracy. Only Jews draw more fire than do the nation- alistic recalcitrants. Similarly, Hitler has left behind him a vast array of broken friendships, weary helpers, and disillu- sioned allies. Few have ever dared deflect him from his own favorite objectives and survived. Only one man continued to spurn him openly the great, the mad, the ceaselessly in- dividualistic Ludendorff. Others have seen the light too late. THE STRONG MAN IS MIGHTIEST ALONE 761 ship of several heads of its own choice, is surrendered to cowardice and weakness. Also, by such a combination the free play of energies is tied up, the struggle for choosing the best is stopped, and accordingly the necessary and final victory of the healthier and stronger man is prevented forever. There- fore, such fusions are enemies of the natural evolution, for in most cases they far more hinder than promote the solution of the problem which is fought for. It may happen that out of purely tactical considerations Spengler said before he died that for the world's sake the Pope should excommunicate Hitler a strange appeal from a man who professed to believe humanity a beast of prey. The most perfect demonstrations of Hitler's absolutism are, of course, the ' blood purge ' of 1934 and the treatment accorded the deposed Austrian Chancellor, Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg. Some aspects of the ' purge ' are easily enough explained. One can say that General Von Schleicher had threatened to get rid of the regime, and that the Nazis honestly believed him implicated in a plot. One can add that the army officer whose diaries were stupidly published in Paris might, by stretching the idea of martial law to the utmost, be found guilty of high treason; that the death of Von Kahr was a kind of retributory justice for the men who fell during the putsch of 1923; and that Arnold Probst, the Catholic Youth leader, was a victim to a belated act of vengeance. These and dozens of other killings may have been done to even scores and settle grudges. There is a kind of tribal vengeance which times like that in which we live are somehow tempted to take. But other deaths baffle the observer. What shall we make of a 'leader' who in an hour of fury orders shot down, without a trial or even a hearing, the man upon whom he leaned just a year previous as an indispensable support? Without Ernst Roehm Hitler would never have come to power; without him he would in all probability have been ousted during November, 1933. On January I, 1934, Hitler wrote Roehm calling him his 762 MEIN KAMPF the highest leadership of a movement, which sees into the future, unites nevertheless while treating certain ques- tions with similar associations for a very short period, and perhaps also proceeds in common. But this must never lead to a perpetuation of such a state, if the move- ment itself does not want to renounce its redeeming mis- sion. For, once it has entangled itself finally in such an alliance, it loses the possibility and also the right to give its force free rein in the sense of a natural evolution, and thus to beat its rivals and to reach victoriously the estab- lished goal.** One must never forget that everything that is actually great 'dear friend' and professing inability ever to thank him for his services. Yet six months later, he flew into a rage and ordered this man shot because, having to choose once more between the Army and the Party, he felt that the death of Roehm was the easiest way out. More than that. He tried to justify his action in a speech which told the world little of the truth except that Roehm was homosexual. With Roehm there fell dozens of S.A. leaders and men no one knows how many died, and in all probability no one will ever know. Dr. Schuschnigg was not a great man, but he was honest and idealistic. With almost touching sincerity he offered the Third Reich the friendship of Austria, and was at first incredulous when shown evidence that under cover of that friendship a revolutionary uprising was being prepared. He capitulated at Berchtesgaden, after a harrowing interview. He could have ordered a stand made later on he was really pledged to do so on his own legitimistic principles, and at all events he had a chance to win. But he capitulated by reason of his unwilling- ness a quixotic but noble unwillingness to shed blood. Nevertheless the victorious Hitler ordered him jailed and tried for 'insubordination.' Diplomatic intervention may have saved him from summary justice, but that is all it could do. The state of mind revealed in such attitudes is difficult to fathom. The world in which Hitlers rule is no place for lambs. THE STRONG MAN IS MIGHTIEST ALONE 763 in this world has not been fought for and won by coalitions, but that it was always the success of one individual victor. Coalition successes, by the very manner of their origin, harbor the germ for the later crumbling off; changing revolutions of the spirit are only conceivable and can be carried out only in the form of titanic battles of individual formations, but never as the enterprises of coalitions. Thus, above all, also the folkish Slate will never be created by the compromise-like intentions of a national workers' community, but only by the steel-hard will power of one sole movement which has struggled its way through against all others. CHAPTER IX FUNDAMENTAL THOUGHTS ON THE MEANING AND THE ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP * fHE strength of the old State rested on three pillars. I the monarchist form of government, the administra- tive body, and the army. The Revolution of the year 1918 abolished the constitution, deteriorated the army, and delivered the administrative body to corruption by political parties. With this, however, the most essential buttresses of a so-called State authority were smashed. State authority by itself is nearly always based upon the three elements which are the principal foundations of al) authority. The first foundation for forming authority is always of fered by popularity. However, an authority that is based solely on this foundation is still extremely weak, unstable, and vacillating. Any supporter of such an authority, rest- ing purely on popularity, must therefore endeavor to im- . prove and to safeguard this authority by creating power. In power, therefore, that means in force, we see the second foun- dation of all authority. This is far more stable, more secure. ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 765 but not always more vigorous than the first one. If popu- larity and force unite, and if thus combined they are able to last over a certain period of time, then an authority on an even more solid basis can arise, the authority of tradition. If finally popularity, force, and tradition combine, an authority may be looked upon as unshakable. This latter case has been completely eliminated by the Revolution. In fact, not even an authority of tradition existed any longer. With the collapse of the old Reich, with the elimination of the old State form, with the destruction of the former sovereign emblems and symbols of the Reich, tradition has abruptly been cut off. The consequence of this was the most serious disturbance of State authority. Even the second pillar of State authority, force, ceased to exist. In order to be able to carry through the Revolu- tion at all one was forced to disintegrate the embodiment of the organized force and power of the State, that is, the army; in fact, one actually had to use the deteriorated parts of the army as revolutionary fighting elements. Al- though the armies of the front had not uniformly fallen vic- tim to this dissolution, they were nevertheless eaten into by the acid of disorganization at home, the farther the> left behind the glorious fields of their four and a half years' heroic struggle, and after having arrived at the garrisons of demobilization, they equally ended in the muddle of the so-called voluntary obedience of the epoch of the Soldiers' Councils. The passage is a characteristic 'folkish' statement of how the ' Germanic State ' is supposed to proceed from choice of the leader to unquestioning submission to that leader. He is elected by reason of his popularity, but he is maintained against rivals by the power at his disposition. Finally he is so well established that the governed no longer reflect on what life was like before his election. 766 MEIN KAMPF Upon these mutineering gangs of soldiers who considered the military service in the light of an eight-hour day, one could indeed no longer base any authority. Thereby the second element, that which actually guarantees the stability of authority, was also abolished, and the Revolution had nothing left but the most original element, popularity, upon which to build its authority. This very foundation, how- ever, was extremely unstable. True, the Revolution, at one single powerful blow, succeeded in smashing the old State edifice, but in the last analysis only because the normal equilibrium within our nation's structure had already been abolished by the War. Every national body can be divided into three great classes: into an extreme of the best mankind on the one hand, good in the sense that they possess all virtues, es- pecially distinguished by courage and an eagerness to sacrifice themselves, but on the other hand, an extreme of the worst scum of the people, bad in the sense that they present all egotistic impulses and vices. Between the two extremes lies a third class, the large broad middle stratum which embodies neither brilliant heroism nor the basest criminal mentality. Periods of the rise of a national body distinguish themselves, nay, they exist merely through the leadership of the extreme best part. Periods of a normal, even development or of a stable condi- tion are marked and exist by the visible domination of the element of the middle, whereby the two extremes balance or rather cancel one another. Periods of collapse of a national body are marked by the predominant activity of the worst elements. But with this it is remarkable that the broad masses as In retrospect a somewhat curious remark, often quoted against Hitler. ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 767 the class of the middle as I will call it makes its ap pearance felt only whenever the two extremes themselves unite in mutual struggle, but that in case of a victory of one of the extremes it always willingly subordinates itself to the conqueror. In case the best elements dominate, the broad masses will follow them ; in case the worst elements rise, it will at least not put up any resistance against them; never will the masses of the middle engage in a fight, t The War, in its four and a half years' blood-shedding, has destroyed the inner balance of these three classes in so far as allowing for all sacrifices of the middle one must observe that it has almost completely bled white the ex- treme of the best human material. For what during these four and a half years has been shed of priceless German heroes' blood is truly exorbitant. One should sum up all the hundreds of thousands of individual cases when it was said again and again: volunteers to the front, voluntary patrols, voluntary dispatch runners, volunteers for telephone detach- ments, volunteers for bridge passages, volunteers for U-boats, volunteers for airplanes, volunteers for storm battalions, etc. again and again during four and a half years, volunteers and again volunteers in a thousand occasions and one sees always the same result: the beardless youngster, or the mature man, both filled with flaming patriotism, with great personal courage or highest sense of duty, they came forth. Thousands, even hundred thousands of such cases hap- pened, and gradually this human material thinned out more and more. Those who were not killed were either maimed or they gradually crumbled off in consequence of the small number that had remained. But one should consider above all that the year 1914 put up entire armies of so-called volunteers who, thanks to the criminal lack of conscience of our parliamentary good-for-nothings, had not been given an efficient peace-time training, and who thus now, as defense- less cannon fodder, were exposed to the enemy. The four 768 MEIN KAMPF hundred thousand who in those days were killed in the Flanders battles or who were crippled could never again be replaced. Their loss was more than the wiping-out of a mere number. By their death the good side of the scale, because not heavy enough, shot up, and more heavily than before weighed the elements of baseness, depravity, and of cowardice, in short the masses of the worst extreme. For another thing had to be considered : Not only that on the battlefields the extreme of the best had been cleared in the most dreadful manner throughout four and a half years, the extreme of the worst had mean- while preserved itself in the most wonderful manner. It is certain that each hero who came forward voluntarily, and after having died the sacred death of sacrifice climbed the steps to Valhalla, was outweighed by a duty shirker who very carefully turned his back on death, in order that, in- stead, he might be able to exercise a more or less useful activity at hornet Then the end of the War offers the following picture: the broad middle layer of the nation has paid its duty of loyal blood sacrifices; the extreme of the best, in an unparal- leled heroism, has almost completely sacrificed itself; the extreme of the worst, supported on the one hand by the most senseless laws and by non-application of the Articles of War on the other, has, unfortunately, been preserved just as completely. This well-preserved scum of our national body made the Revolution, and it was able to do so only because it was no The Revolution of 1918 was a compound of various moods. An exhausted people, shocked by the suddenness of defeat and psychologically unnerved by hunger and gloom; a group of pacifistic 'leaders,' incensed at the ruthless militarism which had driven Germany into economic and political misery; a small number of professional rebels, each of whom had a ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 769 longer opposed by the extreme of the best elements: it had ceased to exist. t With this, however, the German Revolution from the be- ginning was only a comparatively popular affair. It was not the German people as such that committed this act of Cain, but the rabble of its deserters, pimps, etc., that shunned the light. The man of the front welcomed the end of the bloody struggling, he was happy to be able to return home, to see wife and children again. But he, in his inner consciousness, had nothing to do with the Revolution proper; he did not like it and far less did he like its originators and organizers. During the four and a half years of the most serious fighting he had forgotten the party hyenas and all their quarrels had become alien to him. Only with a small section of the German people had the Revolution been really popular: that is, with that class of its helpers who had chosen the knapsack as the distinguish- ing mark of all honorable citizens of this new State. They loved the Revolution not for its own sake, as so many er- roneously believe still today, but because of its conse- quences. < But it was truly difficult to buttress authority perma- nently upon the popularity of these Marxist freebooters. And yet, just the young Republic needed authority at any price, if it did not want to be suddenly devoured, after a short period of chaos, by a power of revenge that emerged recipe of upheaval that would not work; and an army com- mand which capitulated to the 'revolution 1 without firing a shot, because capitulation was very much to its advantage: these were some of the factors. Two divisions could have crushed all the disorder there was in Germany, and no evidence has ever been furnished that those two divisions were not to be found. 770 MEIN KAMPF from the remaining elements of the good part of our people, t These supporters of the Revolution in those days then feared nothing more than to lose the ground in the mael- strom of their own chaos, and thus would suddenly have been seized and placed on a different ground by an iron fist, such as grows out of the life of the nations more than once during such periods of history. The Republic had to be consolidated at any price. Almost immediately it was forced to procure itself, along with the unstable pillar of its weak popularity, an organiza- tion of power in order to found upon it a more solid author- ity. When in the days of December, January, and February, 1918-19 these matadors of the Revolution felt that the ground under their feet was shaking, they looked out for people who would be ready to strengthen, by force of arms, the weak position that the love of their people offered them. The ' anti-militaristic ' Republic needed soldiers. But since the first and sole support of their State authority that is, their popularity was rooted only in a society of pimps, thieves, burglars, deserters, duty shirkers, etc., that means in that part of the people which we have to call the extreme of the worst, in these circles all courting of people who were ready to sacrifice their own lives in the service of the new ideal was Love's labor lost.<- The layer which supported the revolutionary idea and thus executed the Revolution was neither able nor ready to furnish the soldiers for its protection. For this layer by no means wanted the organization of a re- publican State body, but the disorganization of the existing one for the better gratification of their instincts. Their watch- word was not: order and construction of the German Republic, but rather: plundering of it. Thus the cry for help which in those days the people's deputies sent forth in their agony was found to die unheard, and on the contrary, even to release defense and bitterness ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 771 in this layer. For in such an undertaking one felt a breach of loyalty and faith, because in the formation of an author- ity that was no longer based solely on popularity but was supported by power, one sensed the beginning of the battle against that which for these elements was the sole criterion of the Revolution: against the right to commit theft and the undisciplined rule of a gang of thieves and looters, broken out of jail and released of their shackles, in short, of an evil rabble. The people's deputies could call as much as they liked, nobody came from their ranks, and only the call 'traitor' announced to them the opinion held by these bearers of their popularity. For the first time in those days countless young Germans were found ready, in the service of 'quiet and order' as they thought, to button up once more their soldiers' coats, to shoulder carbines and rifles, and with their steel helmets to stand up against the destroyers of their country. -45 voluntary soldiers they united in free battalions, and while General Maercker worked out a plan for reorganizing units of troops for the defense of law and order. He was aided in this endeavor by the General Staff, which finally saw that Friedrich Ebert and his associates were hopelessly mired in revolutionary Berlin unless the ordinary laws could be enforced. Under the auspices of Gustav Noske, sufficient fighting strength was then brought to the capital to end all disturbances. Unfortunately the officers in command themselves lacked discipline. Instead of waiting until the crowd had quieted down and the presence of authority had made itself felt, they soothed their shattered nerves by murdering prisoners, taking a fearful toll of life, and ruining what little chance there remained that the Republic would endear itself to the prole- tariat. Noske himself is hardly to be blamed. Bolshevism was in the air then, the government was being harassed day and night, and tumult was just around the corner. He was com- 772 MEIN KAMPF ardently hating the Revolution, they began to protect and there- by practically to establish this same Revolution. In the best of faith they acted thus. The real organizer of the Revolution and its actual wire- puller, the international Jew, correctly evaluated the situa- tion of those days. The German people was not yet so ripe that it could have been dragged into the bolshevist swamp of blood, as it happened in Russia. This was due to a large degree to the racially still greater unity between the Ger- man intelligentsia and the German manual laborer. This was further due to the extensive permeation with elements of education of even the broadest layers of the people as is similarly the case only in the other West European States, but was completely lacking in Russia. There the very in- telligentsia itself was for the greater part of non-Russian nationality or at least of non-Slavic racial character. The thin stratum of intellectuals in the Russia of that time could be taken off at any time, in consequence of the complete lack of connecting middle parts, linking it with great masses of the people. But there the intellectual, and also the moral, standard of the latter was terribly low. Once one succeeded, in Russia, in inciting the uneducated host of the great masses, unable to read and to write, against the thin intellectual stratum which had no relation and no connection whatsoever with it, the destiny of this pelled to accept such troops as were to be had. It is most regrettable that General Greener or General Maercker did not go to Berlin with a handful of picked officers and a picked command. Instead the leadership devolved on General Ltittwitz an old firebrand to whom the workers were just canaille and the mere mention of the name Liebknecht an excuse for exhausting the resources of the vocabulary. Maercker later handled his troops far more ably, though his sympathies were also with the monarchy and the old Prussia. ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 773 country was decided upon, the revolution succeeded; the Russian illiterate thus was made the defenseless slave of his Jewish dictators, who in their turn were, however, clever enough to have this dictatorship supported by the phrase 'people's dictatorship/ t Regarding Germany the following additional fact must be considered : as certainly as the Revolution could succeed only in consequence of the gradual decomposition of the army, as certainly was the actual supporter of the Revolu- tion and the destroyer of the army not the front soldier, but the more or less light-shunning rabble that either loi- tered about in the home garrisons or that served somewhere, as 'indispensable/ in the economic service. This army was further strengthened by tens of thousands of deserters who were able to turn their backs on the front without particular risk. At all times the genuine coward fears nothing more than death. But he had had death before his eyes on the front, day after day, in thousandfold manifestations. If, nevertheless, one wants to make weak, hesitating, or even cowardly fellows do their duty, then there is always only one possibility: the deserter must know that his desertion entails the very thing he tries to escape. At the front one may die, as a deserter one must die. Only by such a draconic threat against every attempt at fleeing the colors can a deterrent effect be achieved, not only for the individual, but also for all. And in this the meaning and the purpose of the Articles of War were rooted. It was sublime to believe that the great struggle for the The assertion that Russian Sovietism is a 'Jewish plot' is often made, but there is little evidence to support it. The first Soviet of the People's Commissars was selected in 1917. Of the fifteen members, not more than three can have been of Jewish origin. Only one Trotski was demonstrably a Jew. 774 MEIN KAMPF existence of a nation could be fought out merely on the basis of voluntary loyalty, born of and preserved by the recogni- tion of what is necessary. Voluntary fulfillment of duty has always determined the actions of the best; but not those of the average. This is the reason why such laws are necessary ; as, for example, those against theft which were not created for those essentially honest, but for the vacillating and weak elements. Such laws, by deterring the worse elements, are to prevent the development of a condition where finally the honest man would be considered the more stupid one, and thus more and more people would arrive at the opinion that it would be more expedient to take part in theft as such rather than to stand by with empty hands or even to let themselves be robbed. Therefore, it was wrong to believe that in a fight that in all human probability might rage for years, one could spare the aids which the experience of centuries, even of millen- niums, made appear as those that in serious times and in moments of most serious demands on the nervous system are capable of forcing unstable and weak people to fulfill their duty. For the voluntary war hero, of course, no Articles of War were necessary, but for the cowardly egoist who in the hour of his people's distress evaluates his life higher than that of the community. Such a spineless weakling, however, can be deterred from giving in to his cowardice only by applica- tion of the hardest penalty. If men continuously wrestle with death, and if for weeks they have to endure in mud- filled shell craters, without rest, sometimes with the worst kind of food, then the unreliable man, becoming uncertain, cannot be held by threatening him with prison or even penal servitude, but only by the ruthless application of the death penalty. For experience proves that in such times he looks upon prison as a place that is still a thousand times more agreeable than the battlefield, since in prison his priceless ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 775 life at least is not endangered. But that during the War one practically abolished the death penalty, that is that actually one put the Articles of War out of force, has taken its most terrible revenge. An army of deserters, especially in the year 1918, flooded the military base and the home country and helped towards forming that great and criminal or- ganization which, as the maker of the Revolution, we then saw suddenly before us after November 7, 1918. The front proper had virtually nothing to do with this. Only the longing for peace was, of course, felt by all of them. But this very fact implied an extraordinary danger for the Revolution. For when after the armistice the German armies began to approach home, the anxious question of the revolutionaries of those days was always the same: What will the front soldiers do? Will the field gray tolerate this?! *+ In those weeks the Revolution in Germany had to appear as modified, at least outwardly, if it did not want to run the risk of being smashed, with lightning-like rapidity, by some German divisions. For if in those days only one single divi- sion commander had come to the decision to pull down, with the help of the division loyally devoted to him, the red rags and to have the ' Councils ' stood up against the wall, and to break eventual resistance with mine-throwers and hand grenades, then this division would have swelled up to an army of sixty divisions in less than four weeks. Of this the Jewish wire- pullers were terrified more than of anything else. And just in order to prevent this, one had to restrain the Revolution to a certain degree; it was not allowed to degenerate into bolshevism, but, such as the situation was, it had to simu- late 4 quiet and order.' Hence the numerous great allow- ances, the appeal to the body of old officials, to the old army leaders. One needed them at least for a certain time, and only after the Moors had done their duty could one dare to give them the kick they deserved and to take the Republic 776 MEIN KAMPF from the hand of the old State servants and to deliver it to the claws of the revolutionary vultures. Only in this manner could one hope to dupe old generals and old State officials, in order to disarm, from the very be- ginning, their possible resistance by an apparent harmless- ness and clemency of the new condition. Praxis has shown how far this succeeded. However, the Revolution had not been made by ele- ments of quiet and order, but by those of riot, theft, and robbery. And neither the development of the Revolution corresponded to the latter's intentions, nor could one, for tactical reasons, explain and make palatable to them its course. Social Democracy, through its gradual increase, had lost more and more the character of a brutal revolutionary party. Not that in its thoughts it had ever worshiped a goal other than that of the Revolution, or that its leaders had other intentions; certainly not. But what finally re- mained was only the intention and a body that was no longer suitable for its execution. With a party of ten millions one can no longer make a revolution. With such a movement one is no longer faced by an active extreme, but by the great masses of the middle, that is, inertia. Out of this realization the famous cleavage of Social Democracy brought about by the Jew took place still dur- ing the War, i.e.: while the Social Democratic. Party, ac- cording to the inertia of its masses, clung to national de- fense like a dead weight, one extracted from it the radically effective elements and formed them into specially forceful new columns of attack. Independent Party and Spartacist Group were the storm battalions of revolutionary Marxism. They had to create the completed fact upon the basis of which thereafter the masses of the Social Democratic Party, having been prepared for decades, were able to step. The cowardly bourgeoisie, thereby, was correctly evaluated ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 777 by Marxism and was simply treated 'en canaille.' One took no notice of it at all, knowing that the doglike submissive- ness of the political formations of an old, outlived genera- tion would never be capable of any serious resistance. As soon as the Revolution had succeeded and the chief pillars of the old State could be looked upon as broken, and, on the other hand, the returning army of the front began to appear as an uncanny sphinx, the natural development of the Revolution had to be slowed down; the bulk of the So- cial Democratic army occupied the conquered position, and the Independents and Spartacist storm battalions were pushed aside. But this could not be done without fight. Not only that these effective attack formations of the Revolution now felt themselves to be betrayed because they were not satisfied and not only that they wanted to continue to battle of their own accord, their unruly rowdy- ism was only too welcome to the wirepullers of the Revolu- tion. For hardly was the overthrow over than there ap- parently existed two camps, namely: the party of quiet and order, and the group of bloody terror. But what was more natural now but that immediately our bourgeoisie marched with flying colors into the camp of quiet and order? Now suddenly these most wretched political organizations were given the chance of an activity whereby, without being compelled to say so, they had nevertheless quietly found a ground under their feet and had arrived at a certain solidar- ity with the power they hated, but which they feared even more profoundly. The German political bourgeoisie had Hitler holds that the Marxist movement was nothing but a cunning Jewish contrivance to undermine Germany and thus complete the triumph of Jewish international finance. But realizing that no victory can be won immediately with force, it cunningly devised a 'trick 9 by which the bourgeois groups 778 MEIN KAMPF been given the high honor of being permitted to sit down at the same table with the thrice-cursed Marxist leaders, for fighting the bolshevists. Thus, as early as in December, 1918, and January, 1919, the following condition crystallized : A revolution has been made by a minority of the worst elements, backed immediately by the entire Marxist parties. The revolution itself is of an apparently moderate character, a fact that draws upon it the hostility of the fanatical ex- tremists. The latter begin to shoot at large with machine guns and hand grenades, to occupy State buildings, in short, to jeopardize the moderate revolution. In order to banish the horror of such a further development, an armis- tice is declared between the supporters of the new condition and the adherents of the old one, so that now they can mutually wage a fight against the extremists. The result is that thereby the enemies of the Republic have ceased their fight against the Republic as such and help towards forcing down those who themselves, although from quite were duped into making a pact with its 'moderate 1 elements against the 'extremist* elements. Therewith the bourgeois groups are, of course, sold out to Jewry. The historical circumstances are these : When the result* of the general election of delegates to the Constituent Assembly of 1919 had been tabulated, it appeared that there was no Socialist majority. Accordingly some sort of coalition was necessary. Therefore the parties which had formed the government of Prince Max of Baden i.e., the Social Demo- crats, the Centrists, and the Democrats formed a coalition. The Democrats refused to sponsor acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles, so that thereupon for a time the government consisted of Centrists and Social Democrats only. Thereafter, until 1932, the Social Democrats were sometimes in the govern- ment and sometimes out of it. But they remained a powerful force because of the numerical strength of their party. ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 779 different viewpoints, are equally enemies of this Republic. The further result, however, is that hereby the danger of a fight of the adherents of the old State against those of the new one appears averted for good. f One cannot keep this fact before one's eye too often and too clearly. Only he who understands this fact understands how it was possible that a people, nine-tenths of whom have not made a revolution, seven-tenths of whom reject it, six- tenths of whom hate it, had this revolution imposed upon them by one-tenth. Gradually the Spartacist barricade fighters were bleeding out on one side, and the nationalist fanatics and idealists on the other, and in the same measure in which these two extremes wore one another out mutually, the masses of the middle as always were victorious. Bourgeoisie and Marxism found one another on the basis of given facts, and the Republic began to 'consolidate' itself. Which, however, did not prevent the bourgeois parties at first from cit- ing for some time longer especially before elections the monarchist idea, in order to be able to conjure up, along with the great spirits of the past, the smaller spirits of their adherents and to be able to ensnare them once more. This was not honest. In their minds they had long broken with the monarchy, and the uncleanliness of the new con- dition began to make its seductive influences felt also in the bourgeois party camp. The common bourgeois politician today feels more at ease in the republican mud of corruption A gibe at the expense of the German People's Party (Deutsche Volkspartei) and its leader, Gustav Stresemann. Throughout the Weimar Assembly period, this party remained quite staunchly conservative. Later Stresemann himself, and with him a good many other leaders, veered to republicanism and a foreign policy based on international conciliation. 780 MEIN KAMPF than in the clean hardness which he still remembers from the former State. As already mentioned, the Revolution, after smashing the old army, was forced to create a new factor of power for the strengthening of its State authority. The situation being what it was, it could win this only from adherents of a view of life that was actually opposed to it. From them alone a new army body could gradually rise which, exter- nally limited by the peace treaties, in the course of time had to be shaped in its mentality into an instrument of the new State conception. -< If one puts to oneself the question how, apart from all the real faults of the old State, which were its causes, the Revolution was able to succeed in actual reality, one arrives at the following conclusion : (1) In consequence of the deadening of our concepts of ful- fillment of duty and obedience, and (2) in consequence of the cowardly passivity of our so-called State-preserving parties. To this the following should be said : The deadening of our concepts of fulfillment of duty and obedience has its ultimate cause in our utterly non-national education, motivated always purely from the viewpoint of the State. The result of this, too, is the misconstruction of means and end. Consciousness of duty, fulfillment of duty, and obedience are not ends in themselves, just as little as the State is an end in itself, but they all are meant to be the means to make possible and to safeguard the existence in this world of a community of living beings, mentally and physically of the same order. In an hour when a body na- tional visibly collapses and to att appearances is abandoned to the most serious oppression thanks to the activity of a few scoundrels obedience and fulfillment of duty towards these ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 781 people mean doctrinary formalism, nay, pure lunacy, whereas by refusal of obedience and of 'fulfillment of duly ' it would be made possible to save a people from its doom. According to our bourgeois State conception of today, the division com- mander, who in those days was ordered from above not to shoot, acted according to his duty and correctly by not shooting, since to the bourgeois world thoughtless formal obedience is more valuable than the life of its own people. According to National Socialist conception, however, in such moments not the obedience towards weak superiors takes effect, but obedience towards the national commun- ity. In such an hour the duty of personal responsibility towards a whole nation becomes apparent. The fact that a living conception of these ideas was lost in our people, or rather in our governments, to make way for a purely doctrinary and formal conception, was the cause of the Revolution's success. With reference to the second point, the following may be said: The deeper reason for the cowardice of the 'State-pre- serving* parties is above all the departure from their ranks of the effective, well-meaning portions of our people which bled to death on the battlefields. Apart from this our bour- geois parties, which we can call the only political formations which stood on the ground of the old State, were convinced that they were allowed to present their opinions exclusively by intellectual means and with intellectual weapons, as the application of physical means was the exclusive privilege This same argument in a slightly different form once led to a curious fiasco. Addressing the students of Berlin University in 1930, Hitler declared: 'The War meant that the best men were continuously being rooted out, while those of doubtful value were being conserved. 9 A broad grin appeared on hundreds of academic faces. 782 MEIN KAMPh of the State. Not only has one to see in such a concep- tion the symptom of a decadent weakness that gradually shapes itself, it was also senseless in a time when a political opponent had long left this position and instead emphasized in all frankness that, if possible, he intended to fight for his political aims with force. At the moment in which in the world of the bourgeois democracy, as the consequence of the latter, Marxism appeared on the scene, its appeal to lead the struggle with ' intellectual weapons ' was a folly that was bound to take a terrible revenge eventually. For Marxism itself has always represented the opinion that the weapon has to be used only according to viewpoint of expediency and that the justification to do so is always derived from its success. f How correct this conception is was proved in the days from November 7 to November n, 1918. In those days Marxism did not care in the least for parliamentarianism and democracy, but it rendered both of them the death- blow by shouting and shooting gangs of criminals. It is a matter of course that the organizations of bourgeois bab- blers were defenseless at the same moment. * After the Revolution, when the bourgeois parties al- though by changing their signboards suddenly appeared and their leaders came creeping out of hideouts in dark cel- lars and airy attics, then, like all representatives of such formations, they had not forgotten their mistakes and had not learned anything additional. Their political program lay in the past, in so far as they had not already reconciled themselves in their minds with the new State, but their aim was to be permitted to take part, if possible, in the new State affairs, and their sole weapons thereby remained, as before, their words. Even after the Revolution, the bourgeois parties capitu- lated every time to the streets in the most wretched manner. When the Law for the Protection of the Republic came ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 783 up for consideration there was, at the first, no majority in favor of it. But in face of the two hundred thousand demonstrating Marxists these bourgeois 'statesmen* were seized with such fear that they accepted the law in spite of their conviction, in the edifying fear that otherwise, upon leaving the Reichstag, they would be beaten to a pulp by the furious masses. Which then, unfortunately, in conse- quence of the passing of the law did not take place. Thus the development of the new State took its course, as though no national opposition had ever existed. The sole organizations which at that time would have had the courage and the energy to step up to Marxism and its incited masses were first the Free Corps, later the organi- zations for self-defense, the citizens' guards, etc., and finally the traditional leagues. But the reason why their existence too did not bring about any change, however noticeable, in German history, was the following: Precisely as the so-called national parties were not able to exercise any influence, since they lacked any threatening power in the streets so on the other hand the so-called defensive leagues were not able to exercise any influence, because they lacked any sort of political idea and above all, any really political goal. What once gave Marxism its success was the perfect play- ing-together of political will and effective brutality. What barred national Germany from all practical shaping of the German development was the lack of a close co-operation of brutal power and ingenious political intention. Whatever the intentions of the 'national' parties might be, they had not the slightest power to fight for these intentions, least of all in the streets. The defense leagues had all the power, they were masters of the streets and of the State, and they had no political idea and no political goal for which their power, for the 784 MEIN KAMPF benefit of the national Germany, would have been, or even could have been, staked. In both cases it was the cunning of the Jew who by clever coaxing and intensification was able to bring about a genuine perpetuation, but in any case a growing deepening, of this unfortunate tragedy. It was the Jew who, through his press, knew, with infinite skill, how to launch the idea of the 'unpolitical character* of the defense leagues, as on the other hand in political life, just as cunningly, he always praised and demanded the 'pure spirituality' of the fight. Millions of German block- heads parroted this nonsense, without having the faintest notion that thereby they practically disarmed themselves and delivered themselves, defenseless, to the Jew. But for this, too, there again exists a natural explana- tion. The lack of a great, new, creative idea means at att times a limitation of the fighting power. The conviction of the justification of using even most brutal weapons is always dependent on the presence of a fanatical belief in the necessity of the victory of a revolutionary new order on this globe. A movement which does not fight for such highest aims and ideals will therefore never take the ultimate weapon. The demonstration of a new great idea was the secret of the French Revolution's success; to the idea the Russian Revolution owes its victory, and only by the idea did Fascism get the strength for subjecting a people in the most beneficial manner to a most comprehensive reshaping. Bourgeois parties are not capable of doing so. But not only bourgeois parties, but also the defense leagues, saw their political goal in the restoration of the past, in so far as they occupied themselves at all with political aims. In these leagues tendencies of old war veteran associations and of the 'Kyffhauser' came to life and helped towards blunting the edge of the sharpest weapon which the national Germany of those davs pos- sessed, and towards letting it decay in the mercenary ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 785 service of the Republic. The fact that hereby they them- selves acted in the best of intentions, but above all in best faith, does not change in the least the unfortunate folly of the events of that time. Through the Reichswehr, which consolidated itself, Marxism was gradually given the required powerful sup- port of its authority, and thereupon it began to liquidate methodically and logically the national defense leagues, appearing dangerous, as now being superfluous. Individual and especially courageous leaders whom one faced with mistrust were haled before the courts and were put behind The Wehrverbdnde (Defense Leagues) were akin to the Vigilantes and similar groups in American history. Recruited from war veterans, they were usually financed by some indus- trialist to whom the officer in charge had access. Among the more important groups were these: the Ehrhardt Brigade, which was the principal power behind the Kapp putsch of 1920; the Einwohnerwehren, organized in Bavaria by Escherisch, who refused to take part in any political activity; and the Korps Oberland, which took an important part in the German resistance to Polish uprisings in Upper Silesia. Gradually the cream of these organizations were absorbed into the Reichs- wehr, the National Socialist S.A., or the Stdhlhdm. The last was a conservative veterans' organization led by Franz Seldte, which combined (in later stages of its development) ideas of monarchical restoration with principles of military training. It sponsored the idea of 'labor batallions 1 to be recruited from the unemployed. No affection was wasted between the Stahlhelm and the S.A. The Stahlhdm suffered by reason of the fact that its leader and principal source of support, Seldte, went over to Hitler. Its ablest official, Colonel Duesterberg, had turned out to be non-Aryan. Hitlerites constantly taunted the Stahlhelm on its inability to gain enthusiastic mass support. It retorted by calling him a 'demagogue.' The Kyffhiuser Bund was an older veterans' association, reorganized in 1921. 786 MEIN KAMPF iron bars. But with all of them the lot that they had brought upon themselves was brought to pass. With the foundation of the N.S.G.W.P. for the first time a movement made its appearance whose goal lay not, similar to that of the bourgeois parties, in a mechanical restoration of the past, but in the endeavor to establish an organic folkish State in lieu of the absurd State mechanism of today. Thereby, from the first day on, the young movement upheld the view that its idea can be represented spiritually, but that the protection of this representation has to be secured, if neces- sary, by means of physical power. Faithful to its conviction of the enormous importance of the new doctrine, it appears a matter of course that for achieving this aim no sacrifice must be too great. I have already pointed out the momenta which oblige a movement in so far as it wants to win the heart of a The facts are these: After 1923, the Social Democrats had comparatively little influence in the Reich government. This suppressed the earlier, active Wehrverb&nde for three reasons: first, because of the Hitler putsch, some leaders in which had sought to stage another attempt in the Ruhr district after the breakdown of 'passive resistance'; second, because the Allied High Commission threatened to take drastic action if the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were not enforced; third, because the Reichswehr command regarded such groups as useless and even harmful. Moreover, most of them were never actually disbanded. The 'Black Reichswehr 1 i.e., the military formations whose existence no one in the government would admit, but which in 1931 numbered at least 60,000 had its own arms depots and training regula- tions, and was financed by the diversion to it of funds voted for some other purpose. ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 787 nation to draw from its own ranks the defense against the opponents' terroristic attempts. Furthermore, it is a perpetual experience of world history that a terror which is derived from a view of life can never be broken by a formal State power, but is apt to succumb only to a new view of life that proceeds with equal boldness and determination. This will at all times be annoying to the feelings of the official State guardians, but this does not abolish the fact. State power can guarantee quiet and order only if the State, according to its essentials, is identical with the currently prevalent view of life, so that brutal elements have merely the character of individual, criminal natures, and are not looked upon as the representatives of an idea that is the extreme opposite to the viewpoints of the State. In such a case the State may for centuries apply the strongest means of power against a terror by which it is threatened, but in the end it will be powerless, it will succumb. The German State is attacked most seriously by Marxism. During its seventy years* struggle it was unable to prevent the victory of this view of life, but despite sentences of hundreds of thousands of years of penal service and prison and despite most bloody means which in innumerable cases it inflicted upon the fighters for the Marxist view of life that endangered it, it was nevertheless forced to capitulate almost completely. (This, too, the normal bourgeois State leader will try to deny, of course without being able to be convincing.) The State, however, which on November 9, 1918, went down unconditionally on its knees before Marxism, will not suddenly rise tomorrow as its conqueror, but on the con- trary: today bourgeois empty-heads in ministers' chairs babble of the necessity not to rule against the workers, whereby with the notion 'worker' they have Marxism in mind. But by identifying the German worker with Marx- ism, they commit a falsification of truth that is not only 788 MEIN KAMPF as cowardly as it is mendacious, but by their motivation they try to hide their own collapse before the Marxist idea and organization. In view of this fact, namely, the complete subjection of the present State by Marxism, there arises all the more the duty for the National Socialist movement not only to prepare the victory of its idea spiritually, but to take in its own hands its defense against the terror of the Inter- national intoxicated with victory. I have already described how out of practical life slowly grew the guard for the protection of our meetings, how this gradually assumed the character of a definite order-mainte- nance troop to maintain order and strove towards assum- ing shape as an organizing body. However much the gradually rising formation might That the International was * drunk with victory ' could hardly be maintained seriously after 1924. By this time it was evi- dent that not only had socialization been postponed indefinitely in Germany, but also that the premises on which international labor co-operation could be established no longer existed. Prior to the War European labor, engaged in manufacturing, had thought of itself as more or less a class-bound unit which could extend a hand to the labor which, in colonial countries, was concerned primarily with the production of raw materials on farms or in the mines. The War, however, not only brought 'industrialization* to the 'colonies/ but dotted Europe with customs barriers unimaginable previously. In addition, Marxist leaders were quite aware of the fact that certain philosophic conceptions on which their economic system was based were no longer tenable. Few could any longer believe in Marx's view of the course of industrial evolution, and con- fidence in materialistic determination had grown weaker. Accordingly the ' International ' was confronted with a Russian rival which, having for its background a far more primitive society, discarded belief in the most basic of all Marxist assump- ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 789 outwardly resemble a so-called defense league, as little was it comparable with it. As already mentioned, the German defense leagues had no definite political idea of their own. In fact they were merely self-defense leagues of more or less expedient train- ing and organization, so that they actually represented an illegal supplement to the State's momentary legal means of power. Their character of a Free Corps was justified merely by the nature of their training and by the condition of the State in those days, but by no means can they claim such a title as perhaps that of free formations of the fight for a free conviction of their own. The latter they did not possess despite the anti-republican attitude of individual leaders and entire associations. For it is not enough that one is convinced of the inferiority of an existing condition in order to be allowed to speak of a conviction in a higher meaning, but the patter is rooted only in the knowledge of a new condition and is seeing with one's inner eye a condition which to attain one feels a necessity -, and for the realization of which to stake oneself, one considers the highest task of life. The fact that it was not in the least and did not want to be a servant of the conditions created by the Revolution, but that it struggled exclusively for a new Germany, is what, fundamentally, distinguishes the order-maintenance troop of the National Socialist movement of that time from all other defense leagues. tions human rights, and therewith also repudiated the ideas of democratic government and democratic management of industry which had been sacred theses in Germany. The Social Democrats had, therefore, to fall back upon a trade union policy and to seek to obtain by revisionistic procedure a steady improvement of the worker's status. This they pretty well managed to do; but they now lacked revolutionary momen- tum and therewith any desire to indulge in 'Terror.' 790 MEIN KAMPF This order-maintenance troop, however, had at the begin- ning only the character of a detachment for the protection of meetings. Its first task was limited: it consisted of making possible the holding of meetings which without it would have been flatly prevented by the opponents. As early as in those days it had been educated towards blindly carrying out attacks, but not perhaps because as was said in stupid German folkish circles it worshiped the rubber truncheon as the highest spirit, but because it under- stood that the greatest spirit can be eliminated if its bearer is slain by the rubber truncheon, as actually in history the most important minds not infrequently ended under the blows of smallest helots. It did not want to establish vio- lence as its aim, but it wanted to protect the messengers of the spiritual aim against oppression by violence. And thereby it has understood that it is not obliged to take over the protection of a State that offers no protection of the nation against those who threaten to destroy nation and State. After the rally battle in the Munich Hofbrauhaus the order-maintenance troop was once and forever given the name Storm Detachment in permanent memory of the heroic storm attacks of the small number of those days. As even the name implies, it thus represents only a detachment of the movement. It is a section in it, precisely as propa- ganda, the press, the scientific institutes, and other things represent merely sections of the party. How necessary its construction was we could see not only at this memorable meeting, but also when we attempted to expand the movement gradually from Munich over the rest of Germany. As soon as we had appeared dangerous to Marxism, the latter did not let any opportunity escape of nipping in the bud any attempt at a National Socialist meeting, or, respectively, of preventing, by disruption, its being held. Thereby it waa quite natural that the Marxist ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 791 party organizations of all shades blindly shielded any such intention and any such incident in the representative bodies. But what was one to say to bourgeois parties which in many places, although themselves beaten down by Marxism, could not dare to let their speakers appear in public and which nevertheless with a quite unintelligible, stupid satis- faction followed up our battles against Marxism whenever they took a course unfavorable to us? They were happy that he who could not be conquered by them, but rather conquered them, could not be broken also by us. What was one to say to State officials, presidents of the police, even ministers, who with really indecent lack of loyalty liked to present themselves outwardly as * national* men, but who, with all the differences which we National Socialists had with Marxism, offered the latter the most disgraceful handyman's services? What was one to say to men who in their self-abasement went so far as to persecute, for the wretched praise of Jewish papers, those men to whose heroic staking of their lives they in part owed it that a few years previously their maimed corpses had not been hung up on lampposts by the red mob? These were such sorry manifestations that at one time they caused the memorable late President Poehner, who in his hard straightforwardness hated all cringers as only a man with an honest heart is able to hate, to utter the harsh statement: ' During all my life I did not want to be anything but a German first, and then an official, and I never wish to be confused with those creatures who as prostitute- officials offer themselves to anyone who is able to play the master for the moment.' It was especially pitiful that this kind of people not only gradually overpowered tens of thousands of the most honest and decent German State officials, but also slowly infected them with their own lack of loyalty, persecuted the most honest of them with their bitter hatred, and finally drove 792 MEIN KAMPF them out of their offices and positions, while they them- selves, in hypocritical mendacity, still presented themselves as 'national' men. From such people we could never hope for any support, and we also received it but in the rarest cases. Solely the construction of our own protection could safeguard the ac- tivity of the movement and win for it at the same time the public attention and general respect which are given to him who, if attacked, puts up a resistance of his own. As the leading idea for the inner construction of this storm detachment, the intention was always predominant to train it along with all physical training to an unshak- ably convinced representative of the National Socialist idea and finally to secure its discipline in the highest degree. It was to have nothing to do with a defense organization of bourgeois conceptions, and equally nothing with a secret organization. The reason why as early as in those days I most sharply refused to have the S.A. [Storm Detachment] of the N.S.G.W.P. staged like a so-called defense league is the following consideration : From the purely objective viewpoint a nation's education for defense cannot be carried out by private associations, except with the help of the most enormous subsidiaries by the State. Any other belief is based on a great exaggeration of one's own abilities. It is impossible, once and for all, that with so-called 'voluntary discipline 1 one could con- struct beyond a certain size organizations which are of mili- tary value. Here the most important support of the com- manding power, namely, the punitive authority, is lacking. In the fall, or rather still in the spring, of 1919 it was possible to establish so-called ' Free Corps,' but not only did they con- sist, in the greater part, of old front fighters who had gone through the school of the old army, but the manner of the obligation which they imposed on the individual absolutely ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 793 subjected them to military obedience at least for a limited time. A voluntary 'defense organization' of today lacks this completely. The greater the association becomes, the weaker becomes discipline, the smaller must be the de- mands on the individual member, and the more will the whole assume the character of the old unpolitical associa- tions of soldiers and veterans. f A voluntary education for army service without secured absolute power of command will never be carried out in great measures. Always only a few will be ready to subject themselves voluntarily to a compulsion of obedience such as was self-understood and natural with the army. Beyond this a real training cannot be carried out, in con- sequence of the ridiculously small means which for such purposes a so-called defense league has at its disposal. But the best, the most reliable training ought to be precisely These twenty years have now passed, and the greatest problem confronting the new German army is the training of officers to lead the immense force it has recruited. Most of the available old officers are kept on the reserve lists, but it is realized that their usefulness in actual campaigning may be limited. In so far as the groups which lived through the war as children are concerned, the great difficulty is that the physical privations and the psychological unsettlement through which they passed may have impaired their usefulness. In addition the Nazis have selected for their own cadres, partic- ularly the S.S., thousands of the best physical specimens; and the function of these groups in a coming war is to be, as S.S. Commander Himmler has declared, the maintenance of order at home, the surveillance of munitions plants, and the pre- vention of strikes or sabotage. What is to be done with the S.A. is not quite clear, some holding that it will occupy what- ever regions are conquered. The Nazi army problem is there- fore very real, even if one discounts all matters of 'morale.' 794 MEIN KAMPF the main task of such an institution. Eight years have now passed since the War, and since that time not one class of our youth (Jahrgang) has been trained methodically. But it cannot be the task of a defense league to comprise the already trained classes of long ago, as in that case one could at once tell this league, mathematically, at what time the last member will leave this body. Even the youngest sol- dier of 1918, after twenty years, will be unable to fight, and we approach this date with considerable speed. Thus any so-called defense league will of necessity assume more and more the character of an old soldiers' association. But this cannot be the meaning of an institution that calls itself not a soldiers 9 but a defense league, and that by its very name tries to express that it sees its mission not only in upholding tradition and in establishing a common bond among former soldiers, but in the training of the defense idea and in the practical carrying-out of this idea, that means in creating a military body. This task, however, imperatively requires the training of the hitherto militarily still undrilled elements, and this is practically impossible. With a training of one or two hours a week one cannot create soldiers. With the enor- mously increased demands of today that the war service makes upon the individual, a two years' service is perhaps barely sufficient in order to turn the untrained young man into a trained soldier. On the front we all had before our eyes the terrible consequences resulting for young soldiers who were not thoroughly educated in the craft of war. Formations of volunteers, who during fifteen and twenty weeks had been drilled with iron determination and with infinite devotion, represented nothing but cannon fodder on the front. Only if apportioned to the ranks of old ex- perienced soldiers could younger recruits, trained for four to six months, become useful members of a regiment; thereby they were led by the old ones and then they grew gradually up to their tasks. ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 795 In view of this how hopeless appears the attempt at educating a troop, without distinct power of command and without sizable means, by a so-called training of one or two hours a week! With this one can perhaps freshen up old soldiers, but one can never turn young people into soldiers. How indifferent and completely futile such a procedure would be in its results can especially be proved by the fact that during the same time in which a so-called voluntary defense league with the greatest troubles and difficulties only just trains or tries to train for the military idea a few thousand people, good-natured in themselves (it cannot get at others at all), the State itself, by the pacifist democratic manner of education, methodically robs millions and mil- lions of young people of their natural instincts, poisons their logical patriotic thinking, and so gradually transforms them into a herd of sheep, patient towards any kind of high- handed proceeding. How ridiculous, in the face of this, are all the efforts on the part of the defense leagues of trying to impart their ideas to German youth ! But almost more important is the following viewpoint which always made me take a position opposed to any attempt at a so-called military defense training on the basis of voluntary associations:-* Supposing that despite the abovementioned difficulties an association should nevertheless succeed in training, year after year, a certain number of Germans to become able- bodied men, and that, with regard to their loyalty as well as to their physical efficiency and schooling in arms, the result would nevertheless be naught in a State which, ac- cording to its entire tendency, does not at all desire or even hates such a development of the defensive abilities, as it completely contradicts the innermost aim of its rulers, that means the corrupters of this State. But in any case such a result would be of no value under 796 MEIN KAMPF governments which not only have proved by their actions that they do not care in the least for the military strength of the nation, but which above all would never be willing to direct an appeal to this force, except perhaps for the sup- port of their own corruptive existence. Yet today this is so. Or, is it not ridiculous to try to drill, in the twilight of dawn, a regiment of some ten thousand men, although a few years previously the State gave up most wretchedly eight and a half million of best- trained soldiers, not only no longer utilized them, but as the thanks of their sacrifices even exposed them to general disgrace? Now one wants to train soldiers for a State r6gime that blemished and spat upon the most glorious soldiers of yore, had the marks of honor torn from their chests, took away from them their badges, trampled upon their flags and degraded their achievements! Or, has this present State r6gime even taken one single step toward restoring the honor of the old army, and to call to account its corrupters and defamers? Not in the least. On the con- trary: we can see the latter enthroned in the highest State offices. What did one say at Leipzig: 'Right goes with might.' But since today in our Republic might lies in the hands of the same men who once kindled the Revolution, but since this Revolution represents the most infamous high treason, nay, the most wretched villainy in all of German history, one can actually find no reason at all that the power of just these characters, by forming a new army, should be increased. All reason speaks against it. f But what value this State, even after the Revolution oi 1918, ascribed to the military strengthening of its position issued once more clearly and unambiguously from the attitude it took to the then existing great self-defense organ- izations. As long as they had to step in for the protection of personally cowardly creatures of the Revolution, they were not unwelcome. But as soon as, thanks to the gradual ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 797 depravity of our people, the danger appeared as averted and the existence of the associations now meant a national political strengthening, they were superfluous, and one did everything in order to disarm them, even, if possible, to disperse them. History demonstrates the gratitude of monarchs in only rare cases. But only a neo-bourgeois patriot is able to count on gratitude from murderous pyromaniacs, exploiters and traitors of the nation. When examining the problem whether voluntary defense leagues should be created, I could never refrain from asking the question : For whom do I train the young people? For what purpose are they used and when are they to be called up? The answer to this offers at the same time the guiding principles for one's own attitude. <+ If the present State were ever to come back to trained units of this kind, this would never be done for a representa- tion of national interests abroad, but always as a protection of the rapers of the nation in the interior against the general fury of the deceived, betrayed, and sold people that will perhaps flare up some day. For this reason alone, the S.A. [Storm Detachment] of the N.S.G.W.P. was not allowed to have anything to do with a military organization. It was a means for protection and education of the National Socialist movement, and its tasks lay in a domain entirely different from that of so-called defense leagues. Also, it was not supposed to have the character of a secret organization. The purpose of secret organizations can only be an illegal one. This fact, however, limits auto- matically the size of such an organization. It is impossi- ble especially in view of the talkativeness of the German people to build up an organization of conceivable size and at the same time to keep it secret from outsiders, or even to disguise its aims. Any such intention will be frus- 798 MEIN KAMPF trated a thousand times. Not only that today our police authorities have at their disposal a staff of pimps and simi- lar rabble who for the Judas reward of thirty pieces of silver betray what they can find, and invent what could be betrayed, even the very members of the organization can never be brought to observe the silence necessary in such a case. Only very small groups, through a sieving process of many years, can assume the character of real secret organizations. But the very smallness of such forma- tions would eliminate their value for the National Socialist movement. What we needed, and what we need, were and are not a hundred or two hundred daring plotters, but a hundred thousand and again a hundred thousand fanatical fighters for our view of life. The work has to be done, not in secret con- venticles, but in enormous mass demonstrations, and not by dagger and poison or pistol can the way be paved for the movement, but by the conquest of the streets. We have to drive home to Marxism that the future master of the streets will be National Socialism, exactly as some day it will be the master of the State. Today the danger of secret organizations lies further in the fact that its members frequently completely misunder- stand the greatness of the task and that, instead, the opinion is formed that actually the destiny of a nation could An allusion to the Organization-Consul which during the years following the War had to its credits most of the murders and attacks perpetrated on unpopular members of the govern- ment. Other secret organizations included the Thule Gescll- schaft, which at one time owned the Vdlkischer Beobachter, and the Kampfverband Sachsen, to which Manfred Killinger belonged. During the years 1920-1930, National Socialism appears to have had no secret organization. Now, however, the Party has at its command the dread Gestapo, a secret police organization modeled on the Russian Ogpu. ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 799 suddenly be decided upon in a favorable sense by a single murder. Such a belief can have an historical justification whenever a people groans under the tyranny of some in- genious oppressor of whom one knows that only his superior personality alone guarantees the inner solidity and the terror of the hostile pressure. In such an event it may happen that out of the nation there suddenly emerges a man who, willing to sacrifice himself, thrusts the weapon of death into the chest of the hated one. And only the republican mind of guilt-conscious small rascals will look upon such a deed as the most loathsome act, while the greatest bard of our nation's freedom has dared to give a glorification of such a deed in his 'Tell/ In the years 1919 and 1920 there existed the danger that some member of a secret organization, carried away by the great models of history and deeply stirred by the father- land's misfortune, might try to take vengeance on the corrupters of the home country in the belief that by this he could make an end of the distress of his people. But any such attempt was folly for the reason that Marxism had not been victorious thanks to the superior ingeniousness and the personal importance of a single individual, but rather by the boundless wretchedness, the cowardly failure of the bourgeois world. The most cruel criticism that one can apply to our bourgeoisie is the statement that the Revolu- tion itself has not brought forth one single head of any importance and that nevertheless the bourgeoisie surren- dered to it. It is understandable, to a certain degree, that one capitulates to a Robespierre, Danton, or Marat, but it is catastrophic to have gone down on one's knees before the lean Scheidemann, the fat Herr Erzberger, and a Friedrich Ebert and all the countless other political nit- wits. Actually, there was not one head in which one could perhaps have seen the ingenious man of the Revolution and with it the misfortune of the fatherland, but there were only 800 MEIN KAMPF revolutionary bedbugs, knapsack Spartacists, en gros and en dttati. To do away with any one of them was completely beside the point and had, at the utmost, the consequence that some other just as great and just as thirsty leeches would have stepped into his place all the more readily. f In those years one could not proceed sharply enough against a conception that had its cause and origin in really great phenomena of history, but which did not fit in the least into the momentary era of dwarfs. The same reflection must be made in the question of the elimination of so-called traitors of the country. It is ridicu- lously illogical to kill a fellow who has betrayed a cannon, while next door in the highest offices there sit scoundrels who sold an entire realm, who have two millions of dead on their consciences, who must be made responsible for millions of cripples, but who meanwhile unperturbedly go about carrying on their republican business transactions. To abolish small traitors of the country is senseless in a State whose very government frees these traitors of the country from all punishment. For thus it may happen that some day the honest idealist, who for the sake of his nation does away with a villainous traitor of arms, is called to account by capital traitors of the country. And here arises the im- portant question : Should one dispose of such a treacherous small creature by another creature in turn, or by an idealist? In the first case the success is doubtful and future treason almost certain; in the second case a small scoundrel is abolished and thereby the life of an idealist who cannot be replaced is perhaps endangered. For the rest, my attitude in this question is that one should not hang the little thieves in order to let the big ones escape; but that some day a German national court will have to sentence and to execute some ten thousand of the organizing and thus responsible criminals of the November treason and of all that is involved in this. Such an example ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 801 will then also be the necessary lesson for the little traitor of arms, once and for all. All these are reflections which caused me to prohibit again and again the participation in secret organizations and to guard the S.A. against assuming the character of such organizations. In those years I kept the National Socialist movement from experiments whose executors were in the most cases glorious, idealistically minded young Germans, but whose deed made them personally the victim, while they were not in the least able to improve the destiny of the fatherland.-* However, if the S.A. was allowed to be neither a military defense organization nor a secret association, the following consequences were bound to result from this fact: (l) Its training has to be carried out, not according to military viewpoints, but according to those of party expediency. In so far as by this the members have to be trained physically, the main accent must not be put on military drill, but rather on sport activity. To me boxing and jiujitsu have always appeared more important than some inferior, because half-hearted, training in shooting. Give the German nation six million bodies, faultlessly trained in sports, all of them glowing with love of country, and trained for the highest spirit of attack, and a national State if necessary in less than two years will have turned them into an army, at least in so far as there already exists a basic stock The nature of Hitler's relations with the Reichswehr remains an interesting conundrum. Prior to 1923, he had good con- nections in Roehm and General von Epp. They succeeded, for example, in getting him permission to stage a Party convention in Munich early in 1-923, though the police had officially for- bidden it. Afterward, however, the commanding generala 802 MEIN KAMPF for this. But such as the situation is today, this basic stock can only be the Reichswehr and not a defense league that has stuck in half-heartedness. The physical strengthening has to inoculate into the individual the conviction of his superiority which forever lies only in the consciousness of his own strength; in addition, it is to furnish him with that skill in sports which serves as a weapon for the defense of the movement. (2) In order to prevent the movement from the very beginning from assuming a secret character, its very size apart from the clothing immediately recognizable to everybody has to point out the way which is useful to the movement and which is known to the public at large. It must not meet secretly, but must march under the open sky, and thus it has to be led unambiguously to an activity that once and forever destroys demonstrably took little interest in so heterogeneous and rowdy a mob as the S.A. The 'fat paunches' of these men were notorious. Their brown shirts dated back to an inspired moment in the life of Lieutenant Rossbach, who saw that every other color had already been appropriated by other martial groups, and hit upon cheap, serviceable sail cloth. They were decorated in addition with swastika-inscribed arm- bands, black leather boots, and belts reminiscent of the old army. They looked for all the world like boy scouts well past the age limit. They copied the Fascist salute; they were given to singing songs (e.g., the Horst-Wcssel Lied). Neverthe- less Roehm dreamed he could make a fighting force out of this outfit, for reasons best known to himself. Why this organization, which proclaimed its readiness to destroy the Republic, was not forbidden is a question that takes one deep into the mysteries of political life under the Weimar Republic. In the first place, the Reich government was afraid to suppress the particularism of Bavaria, both because the votes of the ruling parties there were needed to form the difficult Reichstag coalitions, and doubtless also because the ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 803 all legends of a 'secret organization.' In order to detach it, also spiritually, from all attempts at satisfying its effective- ness by small plots, it had to be fully initiated into the great idea of the movement from the start, and it had to be trained so completely in the task of embodying this idea that from the very beginning its horizon expanded and that the individual did not see his mission in removing some smaller or greater scoundrel, but in staking himself for the establishment of a new National Socialist folkish State. By this, however, the fight against the State of today was taken out of the atmosphere of small actions of revenge and plotting and was lifted up tQ the greatness of a war of destruction conceived by a view of life against Marxism and its creatures. (3) The organization of the S.A., as well as its uniforms experience of the Kapp putsch had shown that states independ- ent of Prussia might prove havens in times of troubles. In addition that government had to conserve its strength, and to discourage by displays of good will separatistic tendencies. But unfortunately the Bavaria of the years between 1923 and 1929 was practically in the hands of monarchists fearful of seeming less patriotic than the rankest ranter for 'strong methods.' When Dr. Franz Guertner, conservative Minister of Justice, arranged after the 1923 putsch that Hitler was to serve nine months only and that afterward he was to go about as always, his associates in the government did not dare to protest. Someone might have doubted their patriotism. In Prussia the situation was different. Hitler was forbidden to speak for years, but the only reason this veto was sustained was because a minor official in the Ministry of the Interior Dr. Karl Abegg refused to give way. Social Democratic leaders like Karl Severing and Paul Loebe believed that for- bidding Hitler to speak was a violation of the right of free speech. Nazi formations in Prussia did not, as a result, become important until after the 1930 elections. Then they were 304 MEIN KAMPF and outfit, has to be carried out not according to the meaning oj the examples of the old army, but according to an expediency, motivated by its task. These viewpoints which guided me in the years 1920 and 1921, and which I gradually tried to inoculate into the young organization, had the effect that up to the summer of 1922 we had already at our disposal a considerable number of detachments of one hundred men each, which during the late fall of 1922 received by and by their specially dis- tinguishing uniforms. Three events were infinitely signifi- cant for the further shaping of the S.A. (i) The great general demonstration of all patriotic associations against the Law for the Protection of the Republic on the Konigsplatz in Munich, in the late summer of 1922. At that time the patriotic associations of Munich had probably advantageous to the government, which was attempt- ing to talk the Allies into concessions on reparations and other things. For the spectacle of dissatisfaction in Germany, and the threat to world stability which this dissatisfaction involved, were talking points in its favor. Having been assured of support from President Hindenburg and the army, Chancellor Brtining also believed that if the worst came to the worst he could always put down an insurrection. It seemed probable also that the money which was contributed by industrialists to the S.A. would be withdrawn, if a diplomatic victory of any importance could be achieved. After the re-election of President Hindenburg in 1932, the S.A. was forbidden throughout the Reich by General Groener, then Minister of the Interior. The effect of this action was largely wasted, however, when Groener, suffering from a bad cold, went to the Reichstag and made an ineffectual speech. In addition he had become involved in a somewhat ludicrous love affair. These were, however, minor details. Of decisive importance was the fact that the French and the British post* ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 805 issued an appeal which as a protest against the introduction of the Law for the Protection of the Republic invited to a gigantic demonstration in Munich. The National Socialist movement, too, was to take part in it. The closed line-up of the party was headed by six detachments from Munich of one hundred men each, which were followed by the section of the political party. In the column itself two bands of music marched, and about fifteen flags were carried. The arrival of the National Socialist on the large square that was already half filled, but which otherwise showed no flags, gave vent to an enormous enthusiasm. I myself had the honor to be allowed to speak as one of the ora- tors before the multitude now counting sixty thousand heads. The success of the rally was overwhelming, especially for the reason that despite all red threats it was proved for the first time that national Munich too was able to march in the streets, f Members of red republican defense leagues, who tried to proceed with terror against the march- ing columns, were driven asunder with bloody heads by the S.A. detachments of one hundred within a few minutes* At that time the National Socialist movement showed for the first time its determination to claim for the future the right to the streets for itself also and thus to wrench this monopoly from the hands of the international peoples' traitors and enemies of the country. The result of this day was the no longer contestable proof poned making any contribution to the settlement of Germany's problems. Even the effect of the Hoover moratorium was lost by reason of France's fears lest support from the United States and England make Germany's position too strong. Under such conditions, the intrigue which had meanwhile been developing round about the person of the aged President achieved its purpose, and the fateful Papen Cabinet was appointed. 806 MEIN KAMPF of the psychological and also organizational correctness of our opinion about the construction of the S.A. The latter now was energetically expanded on the basis that had proved so successful, so that barely a few weeks later twice the number of detachments of a hundred men was put up in Munich.** (2) The march to Coburg in October, 1922. 'Folkish' associations intended to hold a so-called 'Ger- man Day' at Coburg. I myself received an invitation to this, with the remark that it would be desirable if I would bring some people to escort me. This request, which was handed to me at eleven o'clock in the morning, suited me very well. Not more than an hour later the arrangements for visiting this German day had been made. As the ' escort ' I ordered eight hundred men of the S.A., who in about fourteen detachments of one hundred were to be dispatched by special train from Munich to the little town that had become Bavarian. Similar orders were dispatched to the National Socialist S.A. groups which meanwhile had been formed in other places. It was the first time that such a special train had run in Germany. At all places where additional S.A. men got in, the transport roused greatest attention. Many people had never before seen our flags; the impression they made was very great. Upon arriving at the station at Coburg, we were received by a deputation of the organizers of the ' German Day,' who brought us an order, called an * agreement,' from the local trade unions, that is, from the Independent and from the Communist Party, to the effect that we were not allowed to enter the town with flags unfurled and not with music (we had brought a band of our own of forty-two men) and not in dosed columns. I at once flatly rejected such disgraceful conditions, but did not omit to express, to those of the organizers of this ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 807 rally who were present, my surprise at their having nego- tiated with these people and having made agreements with them, and I declared that the S.A. would immediately line up in detachments of hundreds and would march into the town with resounding music and with flags flying. And thus it happened. Already on the square in front of the station we were received by a bawling and yowling multitude, counting many thousands. 'Murderers/ 'bandits/ 'robbers/ 'crimi- nals/ were the pet names which the exemplary founders of the German Republic lovingly showered upon us. The young S.A. maintained perfect order, the detachments were formed on the square in front of the station, and at first they took no notice of the abuses. By frightened police officials the marching procession was escorted through the town, completely unknown to us, not, as arranged, to our quarters a shooting gallery situated at the periphery of Coburg but to the Hofbrauhauskeller, near the center of the town. To the left and to the right of the procession the uproar of the accompanying masses of people increased more and more. Hardly had the last detachment turned into the courtyard of the Keller than immediately, under ear- splitting noise, great masses tried to push after them. In order to prevent this, the police locked the Keller. Since this condition was unbearable, I ordered the S.A. to line up once more, shortly admonished them, and demanded of the police the immediate opening of the gates. After lengthy hesitation they yielded. Now we marched back the way we had come, in order to arrive at our quarters, and now indeed one had finally to make a stand. After shouting and insulting calls had not been able to disturb the poise of the detachments, the representatives of the true Socialism, of Equality and Fraternity, began to throw stones. With this our patience was at an end, and so for ten minutes blows hailed down 808 ME1N KAMPF destructively from the right and from the left, and after a quarter of an hour nothing red was seen any more in the streets. During the night heavy clashes occurred. S.A. patrols had found National Socialists, who had been attacked singly, in terrible condition. Thereupon we dealt sum- marily with the opponents. As early as on the following morning the red terror, under which Coburg had languished for years, had broken down. With typical Marxist-Jewish mendacity, with the help of leaflets, one now tried once more to chase the 'comrades of the international proletariat* into the streets, by alleging, with complete distortion of the facts, that our 'gangs of murderers' had started the 'war of extermination against peaceful workers' in Coburg. At half-past one the great 'people's demonstration,' for which one hoped that tens of thousands of workers would arrive from the entire sur- roundings, was to take place. For this reason, firmly de- termined to make an end for good with the red terror, at noon I ordered the S.A., which meanwhile had increased to almost one and a half thousand men, to line up, and I set out with them on a march to the fortress of Coburg, across the great square in which the red demonstration was to take place. I wanted to see whether they would dare once more to molest us. Upon entering the square, there were, instead of the announced ten thousand, only a few hundred, who, when we approached, kept generally quiet, partly took to their heels. Only in a few places red troops, which mean- while had come in from the outside and who did not yet know us, tried to molest us again ; but at the drop of a hat they lost all inclination of doing so. And now one could see how the hitherto anxiously intimidated population slowly woke up, how they summoned courage, how by calling and waving they dared to greet us, and in the evening, when we marched away, in many places broke out in spontaneous jubilation. ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 809 t At the station the railway staff suddenly declared that they would not run our train. Thereupon I notified some of the gang leaders that in this case I intended to catch which- ever of the red bosses should fall into my hands, and that then we personally would run the train, and that we in- tended to take with us a few dozens of the brethren of the international solidarity on the locomotive and on the tender, and in each coach. I did not omit to point out to the gentle- men that with our own forces the trip would of course be an infinitely risky enterprise and that it would not be impos- sible that all of us would break our necks and our bones. But we would rejoice that then we would leave for the hereafter at least not alone, but in equality and fraternity with the red gentlefolk. Thereupon the train started on time, and on the following morning we arrived in Munich. Thus at Coburg, the citizens' equality in the eyes of the law was restored for the first time since the year 1914. For if today some nitwit of a higher official ventures to assert that the State protects the lives of its citizens, this was not true for those days; for in those days the citizens had to defend themselves against the representatives of the State of today. The significance of this day and its consequences could at first not be fully evaluated. Not only that the victorious S.A. was extremely strengthened in its self-confidence and in its belief in the correctness of its leadership, but also the rest of the world began to occupy itself with us more closely, and for the first time many recognized in the National Socialist movement that institution which in all probability would some day be called upon to make an end with Marxist lunacy. Only democracy groaned that one dared not to have one's skull smashed without offering resistance, but that in a democratic republic we had dared to oppose a brutal 810 MEIN KAMPF attack with fists and sticks instead of with pacifistic songs. The bourgeois press in general was partly miserable, partly mean, as usual, and only a few honest newspapers welcomed the fact that at least in one place one had made an end to the activity of the Marxist freebooters. In Coburg itself, however, at least a part of the Marxist workers who, incidentally, had to be looked upon as merely seduced had learned to see, taught by the fists of National Socialist workers, that these workers also fight for ideals, since experience shows that one deals out blows only for something in which one believes and which one loves. But the S.A. had the greatest advantage itself. Now it grew very rapidly, so that on the Party Day on January 27, 1923, almost six thousand men took part in the presentation of the colors and the first detachments of one hundred were completely clad in their new uniforms.*^ Indeed, the experiences in Coburg had shown how necessary it is to introduce a uniform outfit of the S.A., not only in order to strengthen the esprit de corps, but also in order to avoid confusion and to prevent mutual non- recognition. Up till then they wore only arm bands; now the windbreaker and the well-known cap were added. But the experiences of Coburg had the further significance that now we set out to break systematically the red terror These methods were employed until the end. The Berlin Germania estimated that between January i, 1923, and July 31, 1931, 457 persons had been killed and 1154 seriously wounded in political dashes. The losses were apportioned as follows: Communist organizations had 323 dead and 750 wounded; Hitlerite and kindred groups had 86 dead and 257 wounded; the Republican organizations (Reichsbanner) had 34 dead; and the police reported 14 dead. After July 31, 1931, the figures mounted higher and higher. During the first nine ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 811 in all places where for many years it had prevented all meetings of people with different opinions, and to restore the freedom of assembly. From now on National Socialist battalions were again and again called together in such places, and in Bavaria gradually one red stronghold after the other fell victim to the National Socialist propaganda. The S.A. had more and more grown up to its task, and thus it was more and more removed from the senseless and life- less character of a defense movement, and had risen to become the living, fighting organization for the establish- ment of a new German State. This logical development lasted up to March, 1923. Then an event occurred which forced me to take the move- ment from its previous course and to lead it to a change. (3) The occupation of the Ruhr district in the first months months of 1932, 155 persons were slain. The Communist 'Red Front' was the heaviest loser, being the least efficiently armed. The most sensational single occurrence was the *Po- tempa Murder* of 1932. Five Nazis had taken literally the songs they learned, and had slain a worker in a little Silesian village in a truly bestial fashion. They were caught and sentenced to death. Hitler thereupon declared that five men who had acted for the good of the nation must not be treated like criminals. The popular revulsion at this expression of solidarity with the assassins showed that Hitler had made the greatest blunder of his career. But Papen was not the man to take advantage of such a situation. The five murderers were not executed. After 1930, the Nazis developed a plan for surrounding the official districts of Berlin with a cordon of Nazi cantonments, from which an assault on the government could be launched at any time. In 1932 Hitler proposed staging a three-day attack on the Communists. This suggestion was not accepted. There were 108 Nazi 'homes' in the city, housing jobless men and supplying them with food and clothing. The guests were given 12 ME1N KAMPF of the year 1923 by the French had in the time that followed a great significance for the development of the S.A. Even today it is not possible, and especially for reasons of national interests it is not expedient, to speak or to write about this with full publicity. I can speak only so far as this subject has been touched upon in public negotiations and has thereby been made known to the public. The occupation of the Ruhr district, which was no sur- prise to us, gave birth to the well-founded hope that now we would break forever with the cowardly policy of evasion and that thereby the defense leagues would be given a quite definite task. The S.A., too, which at that time embraced many thousands of young, vigorous men, was not to be excluded from this national service. In the spring and in the midsummer of the year 1923 its re-orientation towards regular courses of instruction in the arts of street fighting. As for the cantonments proper, they were situated for the most part within a kind of triangle running from Steglitz northward to the working-class district of Wedding. Some of the largest were, however, situated in the outskirts of the city. All this was futile as long as the control of the Prussian police remained in good hands; but Papen's coup d'&tat in 1932, when he ousted the Prussian ministry, naturally removed every guarantee of security. The Machtcrgrrifung itself was potted with scenes of violence too numerous and too devious to have been chronicled. Some estimate of the extent of the disorder may be obtained if one notes that at least fifty foreign Jews were attacked and beaten. The number of slain, maltreated and imprisoned Communists will never be known. More than three thousand Social Demo- cratic functionaries were jailed. Virtually every person of any importance in the Bavarian People's Party was imprisoned. There have been numerous eye-witness accounts of certain aspects of the scene. One of the best is doubtless / Was Hitler's Prisoner, by Stefan Lorant. ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 813 a military fighting organization took place. To this the later development of the year 1923 has to be ascribed in part, in so far as it concerned our movement. Since I am dealing with the development of the year 1923 in great outlines in another place, I here will state only that the reshaping of the S.A. of that time if the presumptions that led to its reshaping, that means the resuming of the active resistance against France, were incorrect was injurious from the viewpoint of the movement. The close of the year 1923, however terrible it may seem at first sight, looked at from a higher instance was almost necessary in so far as thereby at one blow it ended the re-orientation of the S.A., made insignificant by the attitude of the German Reich's government which was now in- jurious and thus created the possibility that some day one Hitler does not describe in detail the putsch of 1923, which disrupted the Party and might have meant its disappearance from German life if the Bavarian government of the time had been anything else than the Bavarian government of that time. In essence the putsch was simple enough. The Ruhr invasion and 4 passive resistance* had undermined the last pillars of German economic society. International conciliation, the thorny road taken by Wirth, Rathenau, and Stresemann, seemed an impasse. The Hitlerites believed that the Bavarian monarchists were planning a new move to effect a restoration ; and therefore they resolved to secure, by hook or by crook, leadership of that movement for themselves and turn the whole venture into a Mussoliniesque march on Berlin. Hitler, in a move that blended theater with drama, captured Herr von Kahr (the monarchist manager) and General von Lossow (the Reichswehr commander in Munich), and obtained from them half a promise of support. But afterward Lossow backed out, and Kahr ordered a sign posted up saying that the National Socialist Party had been forbidden. But Hitler still had Lu- dendorff; and together with the real victor of Tannenbere 814 MEIN KAMPF could build up again where once one was forced to leave the right track. The N.S.G.W.P., newly founded in the year 1925, has again to establish, to train, and to organize its S.A. accord- ing to the aforementioned principles. Thus it has to return to the originally sound viewpoints, and again it has to consider it its highest task to create in its S.A. an instru- ment for the representation and the strengthening erf the movement's fight for a view of life. It must not tolerate that the S.A. either fall down to some kind of defense league or that it become a secret organiza- tion ; but what is more, it has to endeavor to build it up to become a guard of a hundred thousand men, fitting for the National Socialist, and with it the deepest folkish, idea. and a column of armed men he undertook the historic march through Munich on November 9, 1923. The Bavarian State police fired, a number of Nazis fell dead. The wounded Hitler fled, was picked up by an automobile, and eventually found a haven in the home of his friend Ernst Hanfstaengl. Ludendorff marched on, the police let him pass, and the great revolution was over. In the trial which followed, comedy was blended with strange revelations of the uncertainty which surrounded the future of Germany. The trial itself was a legal farce. The Reich laws for the protection of the Republic demanded that the instigators of attempts like this putsch were to be thrown out of Germany if they were not citizens. This regulation the judge seemingly ignored. Some Bavarians maintain, however, that an attempt was made at this time to send Hitler back to Austria, but that Vienna refused to allow him to enter. After Hitler's release from prison, the S.A. was reorganized, the new leader being Captain Pfeffer, a former Free Corps commander, who remained in office until 1930 when, as a consequence of the animosity of Goebbels and Goering, he was promoted to the dignity of a Reichstag deputy. Roehm ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOP 815 took command. In a special order Hitler insisted that the organization must remain what it had been 'until 1923* not a military organization, but a bodyguard ready to 'keep order 1 at assemblies and to 'keep the streets clear* when demonstra- tions were being held. To a certain extent the organization was modeled on that of the old Free Corps, especially the Einwohnerwahrcn commanded by Escherisch. Technically con- sidered, its structure was adapted to meet the requirements of men who were to meet regularly in small groups. Thirteen men constituted a Gruppe\ three Gruppen formed a Truppe; two Truppen equaled a Sturm. Furthermore, several Truppen form a Standarte, which when multiplied by two became a Gausturm, which multiplied similarly became a Brigade. The commonly accepted abbreviations for these units in the order named were Gritf, Truf, Stuf, Gaustuj, Brigaf. The highest leader was the Osaf, and as such wielded considerable power. It was inevitable that Hitler should constantly have to safe- guard his supreme authority against possible attacks from this quarter. Released from prison, Hitler was cautious. To this time there dates back his villa at Berchtesgaden, long the seat of Prince Rupprecht's summer residence. The site chosen was a little property belonging to a Hamburg merchant, who had offered it for rent. It was situated on the slope of a mountain known as the Obersalzberg. Hitler needed a place from which he could, in case of necessity, flee to Austria and thence to Italy. After 1933, the remodeled villa became more famous. Recently an important addition was made. A shaft was sunk through the mountain stone, an elevator was installed, and a perch erected above on which the Fiihrer can meditate alone or in company. CHAPTER X FEDERALISM AS A MASK IN THE winter of the year 1919, and even more in the spring and summer of 1920, the young party was com- pelled to adopt a position on a question which had al- ready acquired unusual importance during the War. In the first volume, in a brief description of the characteris- tics of the impending German collapse which had become apparent to me, I referred to the special type of propaganda emanating from English as well as from French quarters for the incitement of the old split between North and South. In the spring of 1915 appeared the first systematic agita- tional leaflets against Prussia as the War's sole culprit. By 1916 this system had become a complete structure, as slick as it was base. The incitement of South Germans against North Germans, based on the lowest of instincts, began to bear fruit after a little while, too. Against the con- trolling authorities of the time, both in the government and in the army command more accurately in the Bavarian headquarters must be made the unavoidable charge that, because of a damnable confusion and neglect of duty, these officials did not intervene against this with the neces- sary determination. Nothing was done! On the contrary, in certain quarters it seemed that this was not regarded so unfavorably and people were, perhaps, so narrow-minded FEDERALISM AS A MASK 817 as to think that by such propaganda not only would an obstacle be placed in the way of the development of the German people towards unity, but that thereby there must automatically also ensue a strengthening of federalist forces. Rarely in history has a malicious oversight been more maliciously avenged. The weakening, which was de- stined for Prussia, affected all Germany. Its result was the facilitation of collapse, which, however, wrecked not only Germany as a whole, but primarily the particular States themselves. Yet it certainly would be false to think that the manufac- ture of this anti-Prussian sentiment is attributable solely to hostile war propaganda, and that there existed no grounds for justification in the people it affected. The in- credible methods of our war-time economic organization, which placed a guardian and robber over the entire Reich territory by means of a really insane centralization, was a dominant cause of the rise of that anti-Prussian attitude. Because the war societies, which had their headquarters in Berlin, and Berlin itself, meant to the average small man the same thing as Prussia. The fact that the organizers of these institutions for theft, known as war societies, were neither Berliners nor Prussians, in fact, not Germans at all, was then barely realized by the individual. He saw only the great failure and the constant encroachments of these hated establishments in the Reich capital, and thereupon naturally projected his entire hatred equally onto that capital and Prussia, especially since, in certain quarters, not only was nothing done to prevent this, but such an in- terpretation was even secretly greeted with a smirk. The Jew was far too smart not to understand even then that the infamous campaign of robbery which he organized against the German people under cover of the war societies would, indeed, have to awaken opposition. As long as this did not grab for his throat, he did not have to worry- To 818 MEIN KAMPF prevent an explosion of the maddened and rebellious people in this direction, however, there could be no better recipe than to have their anger flame out in some other direction and thus exhaust it. f Let Bavarians fight Prussians and Prussians fight Bavarians, the more the better! The hottest conflict be- tween the two signified the surest peace for the Jews. Gen- eral attention was then completely diverted from the inter- national maggots of nations; they seemed to have been for- gotten. And if ever there seemed to arise the danger that the thoughtful element, of which there were many in Bava- ria, too, was calling for investigation, intervention, and restraint, and thereby threatening to wash out the embit- tered conflict, the Jew in Berlin needed only to stage some new provocation and await its success. Immediately all the exploiters of this fight between the North and the South jumped at every such occurrence, blowing on it until the glow of resentment broke into a roaring flame. In those days the Jew was playing a slick and polished game, constantly to preoccupy and divert the various German clans in order, meanwhile, to plunder them more thoroughly. < Then came the Revolution. If, down to the year 1918, or rather down to November of that year, the average man, and especially the meagerly cultured Babbitt and worker, particularly in Bavaria, still could not properly understand the real origin and inevitable consequences of this mutual conflict of German clans, at least the self -dominated 'nationalist' section should have grasped it on the day of the outbreak of the Revolution. For hardly had action begun before the leaders and organ- izers of the Revolution in Bavaria set themselves up as the representatives of 'Bavarian* interests. The international Jew, Kurt Eisner, began playing Bavaria off against Prussia. Of course, however, this Oriental, who had perpetually run FEDERALISM AS A MASK 819 around here and there throughout the rest of Germany as a journalistic canaille (Zeitungsjournaille), was just the last person to have been called on to defend Bavarian interests, and, of course, Bavaria was as indifferent to him as anything on the face of God's green earth could be. When Kurt Eisner gave the revolutionary uprising in Bavaria a thoroughly conscious impulse against the rest of the Reich, he did not in the slightest degree act on the basis of a Bavarian viewpoint, but only as Jewry's commissar. He utilized the existing instincts and aversions of the Bavarian people as a means of more easily smashing their Germany. The crushed Reich, however, would easily have become the loot of bolshevism. The tactics he applied were also continued right after his death. Marxism, which had always poured the blood- iest scorn particularly on the individual German States and their princes, suddenly, as an 'independent party/ called on just those very feelings and instincts which had their strongest roots in the princely houses and the individ- ual States. The struggle of the Republic of Councils against the ad- vancing troops of the liberation was worked up propagan- distically primarily as a 'struggle of Bavarian workers' against 'Prussian militarism.' This, too, is the only way of understanding why, quite differently from other German districts, the overthrow of the Republic of Councils in Eisner did, as a matter of fact, adopt a particularistic attitude. This was the result of his feeling that under his leadership Bavaria could treat for better peace terms. In fancying that President Wilson would favor him and his friends with special consideration, Eisner was, of course, quite naive. But this error does not make him responsible for Bavarian particularism, which is the birthright of every native. 820 MEIN KAMPF Munich led not to the broad masses' recovery of their senses, but rather to a still greater embitterment and sullenness against Prussia. The skill with which the bolshevist agitators were able to represent the defeat of the Soviet republic as a 'Prussian militarist' triumph over the 'anti-militarist' and 4 anti- Prussian' Bavarian people, bore rich fruit. While Kurt Eisner got less than ten thousand supporters in Mu- nich in the elections to the legislative Bavarian Landtag, and the Communist Party less even than three thousand, both parties together increased to almost one hundred thousand voters after the collapse of the Republic. Already at this time my personal struggle against the insane mutal incitement of the German clans began. I doubt that I have ever in my life undertaken a more un- popular cause than my opposition of that time to Prussian- baiting. In Munich, as early as the 'Soviet' period, there had taken place the first mass meetings in which hate against the rest of Germany, and especially against Prussia, was whipped up to such a boiling point that not only was it a risk of his life for a North German to attend such a meet- ing, but the conclusion of such demonstrations generally quite frankly ended with insane shrieks of 'Break with Prussia!' 'Down with Prussia!' 'War against Prus- sia!' sentiments which a particularly brilliant German Reichstag representative of the interests of Bavarian This bitterness towards Prussia was due, of course, to worker resentment of the brutality that had marked the suppression of the 'Soviet' government. In addition, the overthrow of the Socialist government relegated the Social Democrats to a minor position after 1920. The Austrian workers, too, were similarly affected; and the appeal made to them by the legitimists after 1933 was largely based on denunciations 01 Prussian militarism. FEDERALISM AS A MASK 821 sovereignty summed up iri the war-cry: 'Better to die Bava- rian than rot Prussian! 9 t One must have gone through those meetings in order to understand what it meant for me when, surrounded by a handful of friends at a meeting in the Munich Lowen- brSukeller, I first offered resistance to this madness. My support came then from war comrades, and perhaps our feelings can be imagined when a demented mass of people who during the time we were defending the fatherland had, in greatest part, been running around as deserters or slack- ers at staff headquarters or back home, howled at us and threatened to knock us down. For me, it is true, this pain- ful incident had the virtue that my squad of faithful fol- lowers first felt itself united with me and was soon sworn to live or die with me. These fights, which were constantly repeated and which dragged out through the whole of 1919, seemed, just at the beginning of the year 1920, to have become sharper. There were meetings I remember particularly one in the Wag- nersaal on Sonnenstrasse in Munich in which my group, meanwhile grown larger, had to weather the fiercest strug- gles, which not infrequently ended with dozens of my ad- herents being mishandled, knocked down, trampled on, finally tossed out of the halls more dead than alive. < The struggle which I first opened as an individual, backed solely by my war companions, was continued by the young movement as, I might almost say, a holy task. It is still a matter of pride to me that I can say that then dependent almost solely on our Bavarian supporters we nevertheless slowly but surely prepared the finish for this combination of stupidity and treason. I say stupidity and treason because, despite my complete conviction as to the stupid good intentions of the masses of followers, I can- not credit the organizers and inciters with such ingenuous- ness. I regarded them, and regard them still today, as 822 MEIN KAMPF traitors bought and paid for by France. In one case, in the Dorten case, history has, indeed, already given its verdict. What was particularly dangerous to the cause then was the cleverness with which it was contrived to conceal real tendencies, by pushing federalist schemes to the fore as the sole motive for this impulse. It is certainly obvious that the stirring-up of anti-Prussianism has nothing to do with federalism. Rather remarkable, too, a 'federative activity' which strives to split or divide another federal State. For an honest federalist, to whom citations of the Bismarckian conception of the Reich did not constitute mendacious phrases, could not speak in the same breath of wanting to separate portions from the Prussian State which Bismarck created, or at least completed, could not even publicly sup- port such separatist tendencies. How they would have howled in Munich, had a conservative Prussian party favored the separation of Franconia from Bavaria, or even demanded and promoted it by public activity! One could Money from France did buttress this or that tendency to separatism in Bavaria. It may even have found its way into the Hitler movement. Hugo Machaus, one of the editors of the Volkischer Beobachter, was accused during 1923 of having accepted money from a French agent. Two other Germans, one a Munich official, were also implicated. Before the matter could be cleared up, Machaus had committed suicide. The French agent escaped. It was then noted that for a time the Volkischer Beobachtcr had pursued a policy favorable to France. No one holds that Hitler had any knowledge of these intrigues. Dr. Dorten was a Rhineland separatist leader. A Prussian lawyer, he had offered his services to the city of Cologne in 1918. Little by little he emerged as the leader of a movement to form an independent Rhenish State, and (on his own ad- mission) the recipient of encouragement from the French military authorities. After an abortive attempt to proclaim his projected republic, Dorten fled to France. FEDERALISM AS A MASK 823 really feel sorry for all the honest federally inclined people, who had not seen through this infamous swindlers' game; for they were the ones primarily betrayed. By thus in- criminating the federative idea, its own supporters dug its grave. No federalist formation can be propagated for the Reich if the most essential link in such a State structure, that is, Prussia, is herself undermined, outraged, and be- fouled, in short, eliminated as a federal State if possible. This was all the more incredible, inasmuch as, into the bar- gain, the fight of these so-called federalists was directed precisely against that Prussia which least of all can be linked to the democracy of November. For the vilifications and attacks of these so-called 'federalists' were directed not against the fathers of the Weimar Constitution, who were themselves in largest part South Germans or Jews anyway, but against the representatives of the old conservative Prus- sia, that is, the antipodes of the Weimar Constitution. That attacks on the Jews were well warded off thereby should cause no surprise, but, perhaps, rather offers the key to the solution of the whole puzzle. Just as before the Revolution the Jew understood how to divert attention from his war societies, or rather from him- self, and how to turn the masses, especially the Bavarian nation, against Prussia, so after the Revolution he had somehow or other to cover up the new and tenfold greater campaign of robbery. And again he was able to agitate the then so-called 'nationalist elements' of Germany against each other: conservatively oriented Bavaria against equally conservative thinking Prussia. And again he, who alone held the threads of the Reich's destiny, was able to effect this in the slyest way, by provoking such gross and tactless clashes that the blood of those affected by them was constantly boiling up anew. Never against the Jew, of course, but al- ways against the fellow-German. The Bavarian visualized not the Berlin of four million industriously laboring, diligent. 824 MEIN KAMPF productive men, but the lazy, corrupt Berlin of the most vile West End/ And still his hate did not turn against this West End, but against the 'Prussian 1 city. t It was really often maddening. This slickness of the Jews in diverting public attention from themselves, and involving it somewhere else, can also be studied again today. In the year 1918 there was absolutely no systematic anti- Semitism. I still recall the difficulties which one ran into the minute one used the word Jew. One met either a dumb stare or experienced the most violent opposition. Our first endeavors to show the real enemy to the public then seemed almost hopeless and only very slowly did things begin to turn for the better. As unsuccessful as the * Guard and Ward League' was, its service in having again broached Many of the better class of Berlin Jews lived in the West End of the city. One may doubt, however, that many Bava- rians took note of such residential peculiarities. They were far more anti-Prussian than anti-Semitic. Prior to 1918, anti-Semitism has been limited to a few groups. The Schoenerer movement had some effect on Protestant feel- ing; and a few intellectuals in the western provinces copied some remarks, from Drumont, the French anti-Semite. These in- fluences and others were then reflected in the Christian Social movement headed by Adolf Stocker, a Lutheran clergyman who championed anti-Semitism. In Bavaria peasants were sometimes accustomed to curse the 'Jews 1 which term they applied to produce-buyers of all races. Though antipathy increased there after the War, it was never as violent as it became in Thuringia, Saxony and Braunschweig. The Schutz- und Trutz-bund (Guard and Ward League) was an ultra-nationalist organization which had a considerable following after the war. One of its primary concerns was th organization of a defense against the threat of Bolshevism. FEDERALISM AS A MASK 825 the Jewish question as such was, nevertheless, great.-* In any event, in the winter of 1918-19 something like anti-Semi- tism began slowly to take roots. Later, of course, the Na- tional Socialist movement drove the Jewish question to the fore in an entirely different way. It achieved, above all, the raising of this problem out of the narrowly restricted circles of little and big bourgeois strata, and its transforma- tion into a compelling motive of a great nationalist move- ment. Hardly, however, had the great unifying idea of struggle on this question been given to the German people than the Jew also moved to counter-attack. He seized on his old weapon. With amazing speed he threw into the folkish movement the arsonous torch of bickering. As the situation was then, the only chance of occupying public attention with other problems and thus stemming the con- centrated assault on Jewry lay in opening up the Ultra- montane question, and in the mutual clash of Catholicism and Protestantism arising from it. Those who flung this question among our people sinned against it in a manner for which they can never make amends. The Jew, in any event, achieved the desired goal : Catholics and Protestants The 'Ultramontane question* was raised by Ludendorff. After Hitler's release from prison, he saw that without the tacit consent of the Bavarian People's Party any resumption of his activities in Bavaria was out of the question. Therefore he publicly disavowed any interest in religious warfare, though other Nazis might keep up a fairly steady fire on the Church from behind their desks in the Volkischer Beobachter offices. Besides Mussolini had reached a kind of 'armistice' with the Catholic Church (though real peace did not come until 1929) the dramatic value of which made itself felt even north of the Alps. Ludendorff, whose second wife had instilled into him a loathing for the Jesuits in particular, viewed this profession of religious neutrality even of benevolence to religion, if one prefers with unconcealed antipathy. North German writer*. 826 MEIN KAMPF were merrily at war with one another, and the deadly enemy of Aryan humanity and of all Christendom laughed up hia sleeve. Just as the Jew was once able to occupy public opinion with the struggle between federalism and centralization, and thus undermine it, while he sold out the national freedom and betrayed our fatherland to international high finance, so he was again able to loose a storm between the two Ger- man denominations, while the foundations of both were eaten away and undermined by international world Jewry. Let the desolation which Jewish hybridization daily visits on our nation be clearly seen, this blood-poisoning that can be removed from our body national only after centuries or nevermore; let it be pondered, further, how racial decay drags down, indeed often annuls, the final Aryan values of our German nation, so that our force as a culture-bearing people is visibly more and more in retreat and we run the great danger of ending up, at least in our great cities, where southern Italy already is today. This infection of our blood, which hundreds of thousands of our people overlook as though blind, is, moreover, promoted systematically by the Jews today. Systematically these black parasites of the nations ravish our innocent young, Count Reventlow in particular, also took exception to Hitler's stand. No sooner had the Party come to power, however, than essays to which Ludendorff might have subscribed with gusto appeared on all kiosks. The preface to a brochure entitled Der Jesuit: der Vaterlandslose Dunkclmann, by Hubert Hermanns, said in part: 'This essay makes no pretense at being objective, since that would merely mean adding another to the enormously swollen tide of books and writings of that kind. It is offered, rather, as a clear-cut attack. . . . Potsdam, in the May-moon of the first year of the National Socialist Revolution. 9 FEDERALISM AS A MASK 827 blonde girls and thus destroy something that can never again be replaced in this world. Both, yes, both Christian denominations regard with indifference this desecration and annihilation of a noble and unique race to whom the earth was given by the grace of God. What is important for the earth's future is not whether Protestants vanquish Catho- lics or Catholics vanquish Protestants, but whether Aryan humanity maintains itself or dies out. Nevertheless, today the two denominations do not fight against the despoiler of this humanity, but strive to destroy one another. Pre- cisely he who is folkishly oriented has the most sacred duty, each within his own denomination, to see to it that God's will is not simply talked about outwardly, but that God's will is also fulfilled and God's labor not ravished. Because God's will once gave men their form, their being, and their facul- ties. Who destroys His work thereby declares war on the creation of the Lord, the divine will. Therefore, let every- one be active, and best of all each in his own denomination, and let everyone feel it his first and most sacred duty to op- pose him who, in his activity by word or deed, breaks out of the framework of his own creed and seeks to pry his way into the other. For the struggle against the essential peculiari- ties of a denomination within our present German religious division leads inevitably to a war of extermination between both denominations. Our relations in this respect permit no comparison whether with France or Spain or, certainly, Italy. For example, in all these three countries a struggle against clericalism or Ultramontanism can be preached without running the risk that through this attempt the French, Spanish, or Italian nation as such will fall apart. But this may not be done in Germany, since here Protes- tants, too, of course, would join in such an initiative. Consequently, however, the defense, which elsewhere would be solely by Catholics against political encroachments of their own prelates, would here immediately take on the na- 828 MEIN KAMPF ture of an attack by Protestantism against Catholicism. What would always be tolerated from adherents of the same denomination, even if it were unjust, immediately meets the sharpest rejection in advance the moment the opponent belongs to another creed. This goes so far that even men who would be ready, as far as that goes, to redress without more ado obvious grievances within their own re- ligious community, immediately quit and resist the outside world as soon as such a rectification is welcomed or, in any case, as soon as it is demanded in a quarter not belonging to their community. They feel it to be equally unjustified and inadmissible, indeed indecent, to mix in matters which are no concern of the said parties. Such attempts are not ex- cused even when based on the higher law of the interests of the national community, since today religious feeling still lies deeper than all national and political expediencies. And this is not in the least altered by the fact that now both denominations have been driven into a mutually embit- tered war, but can become otherwise only by a mutual tolerance which will endow the nation with a future so great that it will gradually have a conciliatory effect even in this field. I do not hesitate to declare that I see in those who to- day try to draw the folkish movement into the crisis of religious controversies worse enemies of my nation than I do in any internationally oriented Communist. For the National Socialist movement is called on to convert the latter. But whoever, from within its own ranks, takes the National Socialist movement away from its proper mission acts most reprehensibly. Whether he be aware of it or not is beside the point, he is a crusader for Jewish interests. For the Jewish interest today is to let the actual folkish movement bleed to death in a religious war, in the moment it begins to represent a danger to the Jews. And I expressly emphasize the words, let it bleed to death; because only a FEDERALISM AS A MASK 829 person totally uncultivated historically can today imagine solving, through this movement, a question on which cen- turies and great statesmen have been dashed to pieces. For the rest, the facts speak for themselves. The gentle- men who suddenly discovered in the year 1924 that the supreme mission of the folkish movement is the fight against 1 Ultramontanism 1 have not crushed Ultramontanism, but they have torn open the folkish movement. I must also protest against any immature head in the ranks of the folkish movement imagining that he can do what not even a Bismarck was able to do. It will always be the supreme duty of the leadership of the National Socialist movement to offer the keenest opposition to any attempt to put the National Socialist movement at the disposal of such fights, and instantly to drive the propagators of such a scheme from the ranks of the movement. And, in fact, down to the autumn of 1923 this was thoroughly done. The most be- lieving Protestant could stand in the ranks of our movement next to the most believing Catholic, without ever having to come into the slightest conflict of conscience with his re- ligious convictions. The great common struggle which both carried on against the destroyers of Aryan humanity had, on the contrary, taught them mutual respect and esteem. And this notwithstanding the fact that, in those very years, the movement fought most bitterly against the Center, not, of course, on religious, but exclusively on questions of na- tional, racial, and economic policy. Success proved us right then, just as today it proves the know-it-alls wrong. In recent years things have sometimes gone so far that folkish circles, in the God-forsaken blindness of their de- Ludendorff never swallowed the bitter pill which was here dispatched to him. All attempts to reconcile him to the new State failed, and he professed to see in it 'Italian theater' instead of the 'German earnestness* he wanted. 830 MEIN KAMPF nominational discussions, could not see the insanity of their doings at all; that atheistic Marxist newspapers suddenly became advocates of religious communities, indicting one or the other according to requirement, by peddling some utterly stupid remarks and thereby adding the utmost fuel to the fire. But all such battle cries are a deadly danger precisely in such a nation as the German, which has so often in its his- tory proved that it is capable of fighting for the sake of phantoms until bled white. Our nation is thereby con- stantly diverted from the real questions of its existence. While we devour each other in religious wrangles, the rest of the world is shared. And while the folkish movement is considering whether the Ultramontane danger is greater than the Jewish, or vice versa, the Jew destroys the racial bases of our existence and thus eternally ruins our nation. As far as this kind of folkish warrior is concerned, I can from a most candid heart only wish the National Socialist movement, and with it the German nation : Lord, keep them from such friends and they will then vanquish their enemies. The fight so slyly propagated by the Jews between federalism and centralization in the years 1919-20-21 and thereafter, despite our complete rejection of it, nevertheless forced the National Socialist movement to adopt a position towards its essential issues. f Should Germany be a federated State or a unified State, and what does each mean practically? The second question seems to me to be the more im- portant, because it is not only fundamental to an under- standing of the whole problem, but also because it haa a clarifying and conciliating character. What is a federated State? By a federated State we mean a union of sovereign States FEDERALISM AS A MASK 831 which voluntarily, by virtue of their sovereignty, unite with each other and thereby transfer to the totality those parts of the particular rights of sovereignty which make possible and guarantee the existence of the joint federation. This theoretical formulation does not, in practice, fit any of the existing federated States in the world today. Least of all the American Union, where far and away the majority of the individual States had absolutely no original sovereignty whatsoever, but many of which were, in the course of time, so to speak, sketched into the total area of the Union. Thus, too, the individual States of the American Union are in most cases small or large territories worked out for reasons of administrative technicalities, often delimited with a ruler, which previously had no State sovereignty of their own and could not have had any at all.^ For it was not these States which formed the Union, but it was the Union which gave form to a great part of these so-called States. The very extensive rights left to or, rather, assigned to the individual territories, moreover, conform not only to the whole system of this union of States, but, above all, also to the magnitude of its area, spatial dimen- sions which, indeed, approximate the scope of a continent. One can, therefore, not speak of State sovereignty in the case of the States of the American Union, but only of their constitutionally established and guaranteed rights, which, perhaps, would be better called privileges. Nor is the above formula altogether applicable to Ger- many. Although in Germany the individual States un- questionably existed first and as States, and the Reich was constructed out of them. But the very construction of the Reich did not take place on the basis of the free will or identical actions of the individual States, but as the effect ' of the hegemony of one State among them, Prussia. In itself, the purely territorially great difference among the German States permits no comparison with the form, tor 32 MEJN KAMPF example, of the American Union. The difference in size between the one-time smallest German federal State and the larger, not to speak of the largest, reflects the hetero- geneity of the services rendered as well as the inequality of the share in the founding of the Reich, in the formation of the federated State. In fact, however, in the case of most of these States, there could be no real sovereignty unless the words State sovereignty were to have no meaning except that of an official phrase. In reality, not only the past, but also the present, made a clean sweep of many of these so-called 'sovereign States' and thus most clearly proved the feebleness of these ' sovereign ' structures, I am not going to determine here in detail how these States were historically formed, beyond saying that in almost no case are they coterminus with clan boundaries. They are purely political phenomena, rooted largely in the most woeful period of the German Reich's impotence and our German fatherland's dismemberment which con- ditioned them and, conversely, by which they were them- selves conditioned. The constitution of the old Reich took at least partial account of all this, in so far as it did not concede the individual States the same representation in the federal council, but set up gradations corresponding to the in- dividual States' size and real importance, as well an to their performance in the construction of the Reich. The sovereign rights waived by the individual States to make possible the construction of the Reich were only in the smallest part voluntarily surrendered, besides in largest part they were practically either non-existent or they were simply taken away under the pressure of the superior power of Prussia. Of course, Bismarck did not work on the principle of giving the Reich whatever could be taken from the individual States, but of demanding from the individual States only what the Reich absolutely needed. A principle FEDERALISM AS A MASK 333 as moderate as wise, which, on the one hand, took the fullest account of custom and tradition, and, on the other, assured the new Reich in advance of a great amount of affection and willing co-operation. But it is fundamentally wrong to attribute this decision of Bismarck's to some conviction of his that now the Reich had enough sovereignty rights for all time. This conviction was in no way Bismarck's; on the contrary, he wanted only to leave to the future what at the moment would have been difficult to accomplish and to endure. He put his hope in the slow equalizing effect of time and in the pressure of events themselves, to which he attributed more strength in the long run than to an effort to break immediately the passing resistance of the individual States. Thereby he demonstrated and best proved the greatness of his statesmanship. For, in reality, the sovereignty of the Reich constantly increased at the expense of the sovereignty of the individual States. Time fulfilled the hopes Bismarck put in it. With the German collapse and the destruction of the monarchical State form, this tendency was inevitably ac- celerated. For, since the individual German States owed their existence less to clan bases than to pure political causes, the importance of these individual States neces- sarily declined at that moment to nullity, since the essential embodiment of the political development of these States, the monarchical State form and its dynasties, was eliminated. A whole series of these 'State structures' thus lost all in- ternal stability to such an extent that they voluntarily renounced further existence and, on grounds of pure ex- pediency, fused with others or voluntarily merged into larger States; the most striking proof of the remarkable weakness of real sovereignty in these little structures and of the limited esteem which they enjoyed even among their own citizens. If, then, the elimination of the monarchical State form 834 MEIN KAMPF and its bearers in itself administered a rude blow to the Reich's federated character, that was still more true of the acceptance of the obligations flowing from the 'peace' treaty. That financial sovereignty, which had previously inhered in the provinces, was lost to the Reich was natural and a matter of course, at the very moment when the Reich waa subjected by the loss of the War to a financial obligation which could never have been met by individual contribu- tions from the provinces. The further steps leading to the taking-over of the postal and railway services by the Reich were also inevitable consequences of the enslavement of our people begun gradually by the peace treaties. The Reich was compelled to take exclusive possession of ever- new capital in order to satisfy the obligations laid down as a result of further extortions. Insane as the forms often were under which the centraliza- tion took place, the development in itself was quite logical and natural. The guilt for it rests on those parties and individuals who previously had not done everything to terminate the War victoriously. The guilty were, especially in Bavaria, the parties which during the War veered away from the Reich idea in pursuit of egotistical goals of their own, only to have to restore ten times as much after the defeat. Avenging history! But rarely did the punishment of Heaven follow sin so rapidly as it did in this case. The same parties which, but a few years earlier, put the interests of their individual States and particularly Bavaria above the interests of the Reich, now were compelled to experience how, under the pressure of events, the interest of the Reich throttled the existence of the individual States. Entirely through their own complicity. To complain to the voting masses (for the agitation of our contemporary parties is directed only towards them) about the loss of die individual States' sovereign rights, FEDERALISM AS A MASK 835 while all these parties without exception overbid each other in a policy of fulfillment whose final consequences naturally had to lead also to profound alterations in internal Ger- many, is matchless hypocrisy. The Bismarckian Reich was externally free and unrestricted. It had no financial obliga- tions of such a burdensome, and at the same time entirely unproductive, kind as contemporary Dawes-Germany must bear. But internally, too, it was limited to a few and abso- lutely necessary concerns. Hence it cofcld dispense with any financial sovereignty of its own, and live off the con- tributions of the provinces; and it is natural that, on the one hand, the guarding of the possession of their own rights of sovereignty and, on the other hand, the relatively slight Reich financial imposition, very much fostered provincial satisfaction with the Reich. But it is erroneous, indeed deceitful, to try to make propaganda today with the conten- tion that the reigning dissatisfaction with the Reich might be attributable simply to the financial bondage of the provinces to the Reich. No, that is not really the situation. The decreased satisfaction with the Reich idea is not attributable to the loss of sovereignty rights by the proinnces, but is much more the result of the miserable representation that the German nation actually experiences through its State. Despite all the Reich Flag Days and constitution celebrations, the present Reich has remained alien to the hearts of the people of all strata, and republican protective laws may be able to frighten people from violating republican institutions, but can never win for themselves the love even of a solitary German. In the immense trouble of protecting the Republic against its own citizens by paragraph [in the constitution] and prison lies the most destructive criticism and disparagement of the whole institution itself. But for another reason, too, the contention made today by certain parties that the disappearance of satisfaction with the Reich is attributable to the encroachment of the *36 MEIN KAMPF Reich on certain provincial sovereignty rights, is false. Assuming that the Reich had not undertaken the expansion of its jurisdiction, it still should not be thought that then the love of the individual provinces for the Reich would be greater if the total of their Reich taxes were nevertheless what it is now. On the contrary: had the individual prov- inces today to put up with taxes such as the Reich would need for the fulfillment of the enslavement edict, hostility towards the Reich would only have been much greater. These taxes would not only be very difficult to raise, but would have to be collected by means of downright administrative coercion. For, since the Republic now rests on the ground of the peace treaties, and possesses neither the courage nor any sort of intention of breaking them, it must meet its obligations. Those guilty for this are, however, once again only the parties which incessantly lecture to the voting masses about the necessary independence oj the prov- inces, while at the same time demanding and supporting a Reich policy which quite inevitably must lead to the elimina- tion of the very last of these so-called 'sovereignty rights' I say inevitably because the present Reich has no alterna- tive for meeting the burdens imposed on it by an infamous domestic and foreign policy. Here, too, one wedge drives in another, and every new debt which the Reich assumes be- cause of the criminal representation of German interests abroad must be balanced domestically by a heavier pressure downwards, which, on its part, again requires the gradual elimination of all the individual States' sovereignty rights, in order that germ cells of resistance may not be permitted to persist or arise in them. t What is more, there must be established as a character- istic general difference between present and previous Reich policy : the old Reich gave internal freedom and showed strength abroad, while the Republic shows weakness abroad and oppresses the citizens internally. In both cases the one condi- FEDERALISM AS A MASK 837 tions the other: the powerful national State needs fewer internal laws because of the greater affection and attachment oj its citizens; the internal slave State can hold its subjects to their compulsory service only by force. For to speak of 'free citizens' is one of the present rfegime's boldest imperti- nences. Only the old Germany had such. The Republic, as the slave colony of foreign countries, has no citizens, but at best subjects. Consequently, it also has no national flag, but only a registered trade-mark, introduced and protected by official decrees and legal prescriptions. Because this symbol is perceived as the Gessler hat of German democ- racy, it will always remain essentially alien to our people. The Republic, which, on its part, without any feeling for tradition and without any respect for the greatness of the past, trampled their symbols in the mire, will some day be amazed to see how superficially its subjects support its own symbols. The Republic gave itself the character of an intermezzo in German history.-* Hence this State is today compelled, for the sake of its own existence, to amputate increasingly the sovereignty rights of the individual provinces, not simply from a general material, but also from ideal viewpoints. For, while squeez- The problem of the relationship between the Reich and the several States was one of the utmost importance, to which statesmen and jurists had given a great deal of thought. It was the Papen government which first sought to alter by force the modus vivendi agreed upon 'the signers of the Weimar Con- stitution. Prussia was subordinated to the Reich, and the Papen plan envisaged the ultimate disappearance of all State boundaries. Under Hitler, however, the problem has been 'solved* in another way. Just as the Osaf has under his com- mand a number of Brigaden, so Hitler, as Ftihrcr of the German people (a title conferred on him after Hindenburg's death on August 2, 1934)1 has delegated authority to the StaUhatier of 838 MEIN KAMPF ing the last drop of blood out of its citizens by its policy of financial extortion, it must inevitably also deprive them of their last rights if it does not want the universal dissatis- faction some day to burst into open rebellion. By inverting the above proposition, we derive the follow- ing fundamental rule for National Socialists: a powerful national Reich which enforces and protects its citizens' interests abroad on the widest scale will be able to offer internal freedom without worrying about the State's stability. On the other hand, a powerful national government will be able even to make and answer for great encroachments on the rights both of individuals and of provinces without damage to the Reich idea, provided that the individual citizen recognizes in such measures a means towards the greatness oj his nationality. Certainly all States of the world are approaching a certain unification in their internal organization. Nor will Germany be an exception to this. Today it is really nonsense to talk about the ' State sovereignty' of individual provinces which, in reality, is not in accord with the ridiculous size of these structures. The importance of the individual States will be ever more subordinated in both the technical each State, who is allowed considerable latitude in those matters which have not been reserved to the powerful central offices in Berlin. Just how far the Statthalter* s authority goes is not clear. It seems to depend largely upon how much per- sonal influence he can exert in given instances. Hitler himself has never felt at home in Prussia. He seems not to fit into the practical, matter-of-fact life that is character- istic of North Germany, and to long instead for the more impulsive manners of the South. Since the Machtergreifung, he has not remained in Berlin longer than necessity required. Few of the lieutenants have fared much better. Resistance to Nazi ideas is also much stronger in the North than in the South. FEDERALISM AS A MASK 839 domains of transportation and administration. - Modern transportation, modern technology, increasingly shrink distance and space. What was once a State constitutes to- day but a province, and the present States were equivalent to former continents. The difficulty, by purely technical standards, of administering such a State as Germany is not greater than the difficulty of controlling a province such as Brandenburg a hundred and twenty years ago. It is today easier to bridge the distance between Munich and Berlin than was that between Munich and Starnberg a century ago. And the whole present Reich territory is smaller in relation to actual transportation technique than was that of one of the medium-sized German federated States in the epoch of the Napoleonic Wars. Whoever reaches conclu- sions based on formerly valid facts is behind the times. People who do this have existed in all periods and will always be found in the future, too. They will, nevertheless, hardly contrive to impede the wheel of history, and never to bring it to a stop. We National Socialists must not blindly overlook the consequences of these truths. Here, too, we must not allow ourselves to be ensnared by the phrases of our so-called nationalist bourgeois parties. I say phrases because these parties themselves do not at all sincerely believe in a chance of carrying out their schemes, and because, secondly, they are themselves accomplices of and primarily guilty for the present development. Especially in Bavaria, the cry for decentralization is really nothing more than partisan trickery without any serious thought behind it. At every moment when these parties should have done something really serious about their phrases, they failed miserably without exception. Every so-called 'theft of sovereignty rights' of the Bavarian State by the Reich was accepted practically without resistance, except for disgusting yelps. Indeed, when one of their people really dared oppose this mad 840 MEIN KAMPF system seriously, he was outlawed and damned and hounded as 'not standing on the ground of the existing State,' until he had been gagged either by imprisonment or by an illegal prohibition of speech. Our supporters must best of all recognize the essential mendacity of these so-called federal- ist circles precisely from this fact. Just like, in part, religion, so is the federative State idea for them but a means in the service of their often filthy party interests. Natural as a certain unification, especially in the domain of transport, appears to be, we National Socialists have an obligation to take the sharpest position against such a develop- ment in the present State, that is, when the measures have only the objective of covering and making possible a fatal foreign policy. Precisely because the present Reich has undertaken the so-called nationalization of railways, postal service, finances, etc., not from the higher viewpoint of national policy, but only in order thereby to get hold of the means and securities for a boundless policy of fulfillment, we National Socialists must do everything which seems some- how calculated to impede and if possible prevent such a policy. And this includes the struggle against the present centralizing of institutions important to national life, which is undertaken only in order to make liquid for purposes of our post- War foreign policy sums of millions and items for hypothecation. The National Socialist movement also has taken a posi- tion against such attempts on these grounds. The second reason which can justify us in offering opposi- tion to that sort of centralization is the fact that the domestic power of a governmental system, which in its total effects has brought the worse misfortune to the German nation, might be reinforced thereby. The present Jewish- democratic Reich, which has become a real curse to the German FEDERALISM AS A MASK 841 nation, is trying to render ineffective the criticism of the in- dividual States, not all of which have yet been permeated by this spirit, by reducing them to complete insignificance. In the face of this, we National Socialists have every justification for trying not only to give the opposition of these individual States the foundation for a State power which promises success, but to turn their fight against centralization in general into an expression of a higher, universal German interest. While, then, the Bavarian People's Party is im- pelled to support special rights for the Bavarian State because of narrow-minded particularist motives, we must apply this special position to the service of a higher national interest opposed to the present November democracy. f The third reason which further motivates us to fight against this sort of centralization is the conviction that a large part of the so-called nationalization is in reality not nationalization, and certainly not simplification, but that in many cases it is solely a matter of taking away provincial sovereignty rights from institutions in order then to open their doors to the interests of the parties of the Revolution. Never in German history was there carried on such shame- less economic favoritism as in the democratic Republic. A great portion of the present centralizing passion must be credited to those parties which once promised to clear the road for the efficient, but who considered only party membership in filling offices and jobs. An incredible multitude of Jews particularly have, since the founding of the Republic, flooded the economic enterprises and administrative ap- paratuses grabbed by the Reich, so that today both these have become a domain of Jewish activity. This third consideration, above all, must for tactical reasons obligate us to examine most carefully all further measures on the road of centralization and, when necessary, to oppose them.-** But our motives must always be higher motives of national policy and never narrow particularism. 842 MEIN KAMPF This last remark is necessary in order that the view may not arise among our supporters that we National Socialists would not give the Reich in itself the right to embody a higher sovereignty than the individual States. There should and can be no doubt among us as to this right. Since the Slate in itself is for us only a form, while what is essential is its content, the nation, the people, it is clear that everything else must subordinate itself to its sovereign interests. We particularly cannot permit any individual State within the nation and the Reich, which represents it, sovereign power and independent State rank. The nuisance of individual federated States maintaining so-called missions abroad and among each other must and some day will cease. As long as that sort of thing can go on, we should not wonder that foreign countries still doubt the stability of our Reich structure and behave accordingly. The nuisance of these missions is all the greater since there cannot be ascribed to them the slightest utility to counterbalance their harmfulness. Any German's interests abroad which cannot be protected by the Reich ambassador can still much less be defended by the ambassador of one of the little States which look so ridiculous in the frame of the present world order. In these little federated States may really be seen only points of attack for the dissolution tendencies within and outside the German Reich, which are still looked upon favorably particularly by one State. For this reason, too, we National Socialists can show no appreciation of the fact that some patrician family grown feeble with senility should be pro- viding new soil for nourishment to a generally very barren sprig by clothing him with an ambassadorial post. Even in the time of the old Reich our diplomatic missions abroad were so pitiful that further supplementation of the ex- periences then gained would be quite superfluous. The importance of the individual provinces will certainly be shifted in the future more to the domain of cultural FEDERALISM AS A MASK 843 policy. The monarch who did most for the importance of Bavaria was not some stubborn, anti-German oriented particularism but rather Ludwig I, who was as Pan- German as he was sensitive to the arts. By applying State forces primarily to the building of Bavaria's cultural posi- tion and not to strengthening her political power, he built better and more enduringly than he could have in any other way. By pushing Munich out of the framework of a provincial capital of slight importance into the character of a great German artistic metropolis, he created a spiritual nexus which even today can bind the essentially different Franks to this city. Had Munich remained what it once was, then what happened in Saxony would have been repeated in Bavaria, with the difference that the Leipzig of Bavaria, Niirnberg, would have become not a Bavarian but a Prankish city. Munich was not made great by those who shouted ' down with Prussia/ but importance was given this city by that king who wanted, in her, to give the Ger- man nation an artistic gem which would have to be, and which was, respected and esteemed. And this holds a lesson for the future, too. The importance of the individual States will, in the future, lie altogether outside the field of State power and politics; I see it either in the field of tribal affairs or cultural policy. But even here time will have a leveling effect. The ease of modern transportation so intermingles people that slowly and steadily tribal boundaries are wiped out and thus even the cultural picture gradually begins to become uniform. The army must be especially sharply separated from all influence of the individual States. The coming National Socialist State should not fall into the error of the past and assign to the army a task which it does not and should not have. The German army is not there to be a school for the maintenance of tribal peculiarities, but rather a school for the mutual understanding and adjustment of all Germans. 844 MEIN KAMPF Whatever may have a divisive effect in national life should be given a unifying effect through the army. It should furthermore raise the individual youth above the narrow horizon of his little countryside and place him in the Ger- man nation. He must learn to respect, not the boundaries of his birthplace, but the boundaries of his fatherland ; for it is these which he, too, must some day defend. Therefore, it is senseless to leave the young German in his birthplace, but appropriate to show him Germany during his time in the army. This is all the more necessary today, since the young German no longer has as previously his wander-years with their broadening effect on his horizon. Recognizing this, is it not nonsensical to keep the young Bavarian as much as possible in Munich, the Frank in Niirnberg, the Badener in Karlsruhe, the Wiirttemberger in Stuttgart, etc., and is it not more intelligent to show the young Bavarian the Rhine and the North Sea by turn, the Hamburger the Alps, the East Prussian the central German mountains, and so on? Regional character should reside in the troop formation, not in the garrison. Every attempt at centralization may meet with our disapproval, but never that of the army. On the The idea that every German ought to see the whole of his country is old, and was propagated zealously by Wandervogel and other youth groups which fostered hiking to points of historic or scenic interest. Today, however, all Germany seems to wander to and fro. Military and labor units are shifted about considerably; numerous Party conventions and festivals bring caravans of young and old to selected points. The occupation of Vienna meant free transportation to that city for many thousands of school-children, who marched and sang in honor of the occasion. Popular recreational organ- izations such as Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) send large crowds to selected resorts. In addition the difficulties involved in getting foreign exchange compel the German burgher to spend most of his leisure time inside the fatherland. FEDERALISM AS A MASK 845 contrary, even if we welcomed no such attempts, we would have to be gratified by this one. Entirely apart from the fact that it would be absurd to maintain individual State troop formations in view of the size of the present Reich army, we see in the achievement of a unification of the Reich army a step which we, too, must never give up on the reintroduction of a national army in the future, f For the rest, a young, triumphant idea must reject all chains that might cripple its activity in the promotion of its conception. National Socialism must, in principle, claim the right to force its principles on the whole German nation and to educate it in its ideas and thoughts without regard to previous boundaries of federated States. Just as the churches do not feel themselves bound or limited by political frontiers, equally little the National Socialist idea by the individual State regions of our fatherland.*** The National Socialist theory is not the servant of the political interests of individual federated States, but shall some day be the mistress of the German nation. It must determine and reorder the life of a nation, and therefore must imperiously demand for itself the right to overlook boundaries drawn by a tendency which we have rejected. f The more complete the triumph of its ideas shall bt, the greater can then be the freedom of the individual which if basically offers.** CHAPTER XI PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION t'lFHE year 1921 had assumed special significance for I me and for the movement in an additional direction. " After my joining the German Workers' Party, I immediately took over the management of the propa- ganda. I considered this section by far the most important. For the first it r/as less important to rack one's brain about questions of organization than to impart the idea itself to a greater number of people.^ Propaganda had to precede far in advance of the organization and to win for the latter the human material to be utilized. I, too, am an enemy of too rapid and too pedantic organizing. The result, in most cases, is only a dead organism, very rarely a living organization. For organization is something that owes its existence to organic life, to organic evolution. Ideas which have seized a certain number of people will always strive for a certain order, and very great value is attributable to its essential construction. But here, too, one has to count with man's weakness which impels the individual to oppose, at least at the beginning, a superior mind* As soon as an organization is mechanically staged from above, the great danger exists that a personality, once it has been appointed although it is not correctly recog- PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 847 nized and is perhaps of minor capability will try, out of jealousy, to prevent the rise of more efficient elements within the movement. The damage arising in such a case can be of catastrophic significance, especially for a young movement. For this reason it is more expedient first to spread an idea by propaganda from a center and then to examine and to search for the leading heads in the human material which is gradually being assembled. Thereby it will some- times be apparent that insignificant people have neverthe- less to be looked upon as born leaders. But it would be quite wrong to see characteristic proofs of qualities of, and efficiency in leadership in, a wealth of theoretical knowledge. The contrary is frequently the case. Great theorists are only in the rarest cases great organizers, If the success of the Nazi Party is any criterion, this remark is true. Three brilliant intellects have had a share in the work which paved the way for Machtergreifung: Goebbels, Gregor Strasser, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The first brought a trained, unscrupulous, and analytical mind to the task of undermining the resistance of the middle classes to concepts of political action that did not consort with previously held ideals of conduct or belief; the second was an earnest, slow-moving, powerful Jacobin, whose theories of the Germany that was to be were Utopian but not devoid of a certain real grandeur; and the third has revealed a brilliant flair for political combina- tions, and a diplomatic intelligence not wholly unworthy of comparison with that of Bismarck himself. The other leaders are, taken by and large, either soldiers or interesting radicals. Rosenberg's is a thoroughly Nazi mind, important by reason of the power thrust upon it, but still not impressive for that or any other reason. He has undermined many a bulwark of the German character as history knows that character, but he erected nothing to take the place of those bulwarks. Goering, 848 MEIN KAMPF as the greatness of the theorist and the program-maker lies primarily in the recognition and in the establishment of abstractly correct laws, while the organizer has to be primarily a psychologist. He has to take man as he is, and for this reason he must know him. He must not over- valuate him just as he must not underestimate him in the mass. On the contrary, he must try to take account of the weakness and of the bestiality equally, so that, all factors considered, he will create a formation which as a living organism is filled with the strongest and most constant force, and is thus suitable for carrying an idea and paving its way to success. But still more rarely is a great theorist a great leader. More usually this will be the agitator, something that many people, who consider a question from the purely scientific viewpoint, do not like to hear; yet this is under- standable. An agitator who shows the ability of imparting an idea to the great masses must be a psychologist, even though he were only a demagogue. In that case he will still be better suited to be a leader than the theorist who is an alien to the people and to the world. For to lead means: to be able to move masses. The talent of shaping ideas has nothing whatsoever to do with the qualities of a leader. In this it is quite useless to argue which is of greater importance to establish ideals and aims of mankind or to realize them. Here happens what so many times happens in life: the Himmler, and Buch the three strong men of the Party are distinguished primarily for the qualities needed by superior police officers. More interesting are men like Dr. Otto Dietrich and Max Amann, who exemplify normal German business and managerial ability. The 'Jacobins' notably Streicher, Otto Kube, Hans Kerrl, Hermann Esser are absorbing: be- cause of the prominence to which abnormal times have elevated them. PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 849 one would be completely senseless without the other. The most sublime theoretical insight has no value and no pur- pose unless the leader moves the masses towards it. And. inversely, what would be the meaning of all leader genius and of all leader impetus unless the brainy theorist were to establish the goals for the human struggle? However, the combination of theorist, organizer, and leader in one person is the rarest thing to be found on this globe; this combination makes the great man. During the first period of my activity in the movement, as already mentioned, I occupied myself with propaganda. The latter had to succeed in gradually instilling a small nucleus of people with the new doctrine, in order to form thus the material which would later furnish the first ele- ments of an organization. Hereby the aim of propaganda lay far beyond that of the organization, f If a movement has the intention of pulling down a world and of building a new one in its place, then there must be absolute clarity about the following points in the ranks of its own leaders: Every movement, at first, will have to divide the human material it has won into two great groups: into followers and members. The task of propaganda is to attract followers; the task of organization to win members. A follower of a movement is one who declares himself in agreement with its aims; a member is one who fights for it. The follower is inclined to like a movement by its propa- ganda. The member is induced by the organization to help personally towards acquiring new followers who then, in turn, can be trained to become members. As follower ship demands only a passive appreciation of an idea, while membership demands an active presentation and defense, there will be ten followers for every one or two members almost. The follower ship is rooted only in recognition membership, 850 MEIN KAMPF in the courage to present personally, and to spread further what has been recognized. Recognition in its passive form corresponds to the majority of humankind, which is inert and cowardly. Membership requires an effective mind and thus corresponds only to the minority of men. Therefore propaganda will have to see to it that untiringly an idea wins followers, while the organization has to watch most sharply that from the followers only the most valuable ones are made members. Propaganda, therefore, needs not to rack its brain about the importance of each individual it en- lightens, about his ability, achievements, and understanding or of his character, while the organization has most carefully to collect from the masses of these elements those who really make possible the victory of the movement. Propaganda tries to force a doctrine upon an entire people; organization embraces in its frame only those who for psycho- logical reasons do not threaten to become a brake to a further spreading of the idea. Propaganda works on the community in the sense of an idea and it makes it ripe for the time of the victory of this idea, while the organization conquers victory by the permanent, organic, and fighting union of those followers who appear able and willing to lead the fight for victory. The victory of an idea will be the more possible the more extensively propaganda works on people in their entirety, and the more exclusive, the stricter, and stiff er the organization is which carries out the fight in practice. From this ensues the fact that the number of followers can- PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 851 not be too great, whereas the number of members can more easily be too large than too small. When propaganda has filled a whole people with an idea, the organization, with the help of a handful of people, can draw the consequences. Propaganda and organization that means followers and members have thus a definite mutual relation- ship. The better propaganda has been working, the smaller may be the organization, and the greater the number of followers is, the more modest can be the number of members, and vice versa: the worse propaganda is, the greater must and will be the organization, and the smaller the host of followers of a movement remains, the greater must be the number of members, if it still wishes to count on success at att. The first task of propaganda is the winning of people for the future organization; the first task of the organization is the winning of people for the continuation of propaganda. The second task of propaganda is the destruction of the existing condition and tlie permeation of this condition with the new doctrine, while the second task of the organization must be the fight for power, so that by it it will achieve the final success of the doctrine. Actual membership in the Party is still reserved for an 4 61ite/ enumeration among whom usually follows probation. It is estimated that at the close of 1938 about 3,500,000 were party members. A distinction still exists between the ordinary 4 Pg ' and the Alter Kaempfer (' Old Fighters ') Membership in the Hitler Youth, which by decree became a State agency on December 1 , 1936, is now a required initiation into * the spirit of National Socialism.' 852 MEIN KAMPF The most striking success of the revolution of a view of life will always be won whenever the new view of life is, if possible, taught to all people, and, if necessary, is later forced upon them, while the organization of the idea, that means the movement, has to embrace only so many people as absolutely necessary for the occupation of the nerve centers of the State involved. That means, in other words: In every really great revolutionary movement propa- ganda will first have to spread the idea of this movement. That means, it will untiringly try to make clear to the others the new train of thought, to draw them over to its own ground, or at least to make them doubtful of their own previous conviction. Since the propagation of a doctrine that means this propaganda has to have a backbone, the doctrine will have to give itself a solid organization. The organization receives its members from the followers in general won by propaganda. The latter will grow the more quickly, the more intensively propaganda is carried out, and the latter in turn is able to work the better, the stronger and the more vigorous the organization is that stands behind it.^ The highest task of organization, therefore, is to sec to it that no kind of internal disagreements among the mem- bers of the movement lead to a cleavage and with it to a weakening of the work in the movement; further, that the spirit of determined aggression does not die out, but that it continuously renews and fortifies itself. The number of members need not grow infinitely, on the contrary; since only a fraction of mankind is energetic and bold, a move- ment which enlarges its organization ad infinitum would necessarily some day be weakened by this procedure. Or- ganizations that means numbers of members which grow beyond a certain limit gradually lose their fighting force and are no longer able to support, or rather to benefit from, the propaganda of an idea by determination and attack. PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 853 f The greater and the more revolutionary, essentially, an idea is, the more active will its members become, since for its supporters the revolutionary force of the doctrine involves a danger; which appears suitable for keeping off small and cowardly petty bourgeois. They will quietly consider them- selves followers, but they will decline to manifest this pub- licly by membership. Through this, however, the organization of a truly revolutionary idea receives as members only the most active followers, won by propaganda. In this very activity of the membership of a movement guaranteed by natural selection lies the presumption for an equally active further propagation of the movement, as well as for the successful fight for the realization of the idea. The greatest danger which can threaten a movement is a membership that has abnormally increased by too rapid successes. For, as much as a movement as long as it has to fight hard is avoided by all cowardly and egoistic people, as rapidly will the latter usually acquire member- ship if in its development a great success of the party has become probable or is already a fact. To this it must be ascribed that, owing to an inexplicable inner weakness, many victorious movements suddenly fall back before success has been attained or rather, before the final completion of their intention, that they cease fighting and finally die off. In consequence of their first victory, so many bad, unworthy, but especially cowardly elements have come into the organization that these inferior ones finally outweigh those who are capable of fighting and they now force the movement into the service of their own inter- ests, press it down to the level of their own scanty heroism, and do nothing towards completing the victory of the original idea. With this the fanatical goal has been blurred, the fighting strength has been paralyzed, or, as the bourgeois world usually says quite correctly in such a case: 'The wine has been mixed with water.' And then, indeed, the trees can 854 MEIN KAMPF no longer grow up to the heavens [the mightiest will be curbed in their pride]. - Therefore, it is very necessary that out of pure instinct of self-preservation a movement as soon as it is crowned by success immediately limits the admission of members, and further carries out the enlarging of its organization only with the utmost caution and after the most thorough examination. Only by this will it be able to preserve the nucleus of the movement unspoilt, fresh, and sound. // has to see to it that thereafter solely this nucleus continues to lead the movement; that means directs the propaganda which is to lead to its gen- eral recognition and which, as the incorporator of power, carries out those actions which are necessary for the practical realization of its ideas. Out of the basic stock of the old movement it has to fill not only all the most important positions of the conquered structure, but also to form the entire leadership. And this [has to be continued] until the previous principles and doc- trines of the party have become the foundation and the It is notable that with the passing of time leadership has been more and more effectively concentrated in the hands of Nazi veterans. Economic and financial control (Hitler never claimed to have any views on these subjects) was at first exercised by relative outsiders Robert Schmitt, Karl Goerdeler, Hjalmar Schacht. But today Goering and Walther Funk reign supreme. Funk, in the days of his youth a journalist, was a Nazi Reichs- tag deputy in 1923, and was known as a private student of monetary problems. Ribbentrop, formerly a merchant, joined the Nazi Party in 1930. He is described as the man who on January 4, 1933, arranged the meeting between Hitler and Papen in the house of Herr Schroeder in Cologne, as a result of which Hitler became chancellor. Another survivor from older times is Colonel Konstantin Hierl, former Bavarian staff officer, whose duty is to supervise the activities of the Labor Corps. The struggle for control of the army has led to quite PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 855 content of the new State. Only then can one hand over the reins to the special constitution of this State, born of its spirit. But this in turn is carried out only in mutual strug- gle, since it is a question less of human knowledge than of the play and the effect of energies which, though recognized from the very beginning, can nevertheless not be guided forever. All great movements, whether they be of religious or oj political character, have to ascribe their enormous successes only to the realization and to the application of these principles, but especially all durable successes are unthinkable without considering these laws. AB the propaganda leader of the party I tried hard not only to prepare the ground for the greatness of the future movement, but by a very radical concept of this work I brought it about that the organization received only the best material. For, the more radical and inciting my propa- ganda was, the more it frightened off weaklings and irreso- lute characters and prevented their pushing into the first nucleus of our organization. Perhaps they have remained followers, but certainly not by stressing it loudly, but by anxiously hushing up this fact. How many thousands as- sured me in those days that in themselves they quite agreed with everything, but nevertheless they could not be mem- bers under any circumstances whatsoever. The movement was so radical that membership would expose the individual to the most serious difficulties, even dangers, so that one different results. General von Schleicher, the real power be- hind the scenes until 1933, is dead. General von Blomberg, first of the commanders-in-chief under Hitler, has disappeared in the wake of an interesting romance. More recently the man adjudged to be the hub round which the whole army turned General von Beck was likewise relieved of his command. 856 MEIN KAMPF could not blame the honest, peaceful citizen for standing aside, at least at first, although he completely belonged to the movement with his heart. And this was good t If all these people who in their innermost self did not agree with the Revolution had joined our party in those days that means as members today we could consider our- selves a pious fraternity, but no longer a young movement, eager to fight. The vital and reckless form which at that time I gave to our propaganda has fortified and guaranteed the radical tendency of our movement, since now only radicals with some exceptions were ready to assume membership. Yet this propaganda had the effect that after a short time hundreds of thousands not only agreed with us in their minds, but desired our victory, although they were person- ally too cowardly to sacrifice anything for it or even to stand up for it.-*- Up to the middle of 1921 this activity of propaganda could still suffice and benefit the movement. But special events in the summer of the same year made it appear expedient that now, after the slow visible success of propaganda, the or- ganization should be adapted and equalized to this. The attempt of a group of folkish visionaries, with the promoting support of the party committee of that time, at procuring for themselves the leadership of the party, led to the collapse of this little plot, and in a general meeting of members I was unanimously given the entire leadership of the movement. At the same time new articles were accepted which entrust the first chairman with full responsibility, which eliminates decisions of committees, and introduce in their stead a system of sharing the work which since that time has proved its value in the most blissful manner. I took over this inner reorganization of the movement on August I, 1921, and I found the support of a number of PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 857 excellent people whom I find it necessary to mention in a special appendix. During the attempt at profiting from and establishing the results of propaganda for the organization, I had to do away with a number of previous habits and had to introduce principles which none of the other existing parties possessed or even would have recognized. During the years 1919 to 1920 the movement had as its leaders a committee which was elected by meetings of mem- bers, which in turn were prescribed by the by-laws. The committee consisted of a first and a second treasurer, a first and a second secretary, and as their head a first and a second chairman. To this were added the membership secretaries, the chief of propaganda, and various additional committeemen. Funny as it was, this committee incorporated essentially what the movement wanted to fight most sharply, namely, parUamentarianism. For it was natural that here a prin- ciple was involved which, beginning with the smallest local group, through districts, counties, and countries, up to the Reich leadership, incorporated exactly the same system from which we all suffered and suffer still today. Here it was imperative to make a change some day, if the movement, in consequence of the inferior basis of its inner organization, was not to be ruined permanently and thus be made incapable some day of fulfilling its high mission. t The committee meetings, of which minutes were kept, and where votes were carried and decisions were made by majority, represented in reality a diminutive parliament. Here, too, any personal responsibility was lacking. Here, too, dominated the same absurdity and the same folly as in our great representative bodies of the State. For this committee secretaries were appointed, men were appointed for the party coffers, men for the membership of the organ- 858 MEIN KAMPF ization, men for propaganda and for the Lord knows what else, yet one made all of them together decide by vote on every single question. That means that the man who was appointed for propaganda voted on a matter which con- cerned the man of the finances, and the latter in turn voted on a matter concerning the organization, and he in turn on a matter which should have concerned the secretaries, etc. But why one first appointed a special man for propa- ganda, if treasurers, secretaries, membership secretaries, etc., had to judge a question that concerned him this to a sound mind appears just as incomprehensible as it would be incomprehensible if in a great industrial enter- prise the directors of the engineers of other departments or other branches were to decide on questions which have nothing whatsoever to do with their affairs.^ I did not give in to this lunacy, but after a very short time I stayed away from the meetings. I made my propa- ganda, and that was all, and for the rest I refused to permit the next-best good-for-nothing to try perhaps to interfere in this domain. Precisely as in the opposite case I did not interfere in the affairs of the others. When the acceptance of the new articles and my appoint- ment to the position of first chairman had given me mean- while the necessary authority and the corresponding right, this nonsense immediately found an end. Instead of the committee decisions the principle of absolute responsibility was introduced. The first chairman is responsible for the entire leadership of the movement. He divides the work among the com- mitteemen, subordinated to him, as well as among the otherwise necessary collaborators. Each of these gentle- men is therefore fully responsible for the tasks that have been allotted to him. He is subordinate only to the first chairman, who has to take care of the co-operation of all of them, or, respectively, by selecting the persons and by PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 859 issuing general principles, has to bring about this collabora- tion in person. This law of essential responsibility has gradually become a matter of course within the movement, at least in so far as it concerned the party leadership. In the small local groups and perhaps also in the counties and districts it will take years before one will be able to put through these principles, since, of course, cowards and duty shirkers will always resist this; the sole responsibility for an enterprise will always be disagreeable to them; they feel better and more at ease if for every serious decision they are backed by the majority of a so-called committee. But to me it appears necessary to take a stand against such an attitude with utmost energy, to make no concessions to cowardice in connection with responsibility, and thus, although after a long time, to create a concept of leader duty and leader ability which will exclusively bring to leadership only those who are really called upon and chosen for this purpose. In any case, a movement which wants to fight the parlia- mentary folly must be free of it. Only on such a basis can it gain the force necessary for its fight. A movement which during a time of the majority ride orients itself essentially in all and everything towards the leader idea and towards the responsibility conditioned by this will some day conquer the previous condition with mathe- matical certainty and will emerge victorious. Within the movement this thought led to its complete reorganization. And in its logical consequence also to a very definite separation of the business sections of the movement from the general political leadership. In prin- ciple, the idea of responsibility was extended also to all the party activities and in the same measure it necessarily brought about their recovery, since they were freed from political influences and oriented towards purely economic viewpoints. 860 MEIN KAMPF When in the fall of 1919 I joined the six-man party of that time, it had neither an office nor any employee, not even forms or rubber stamps; nothing printed existed. The place where the committee met was first a tavern in the Herrengasse and later a cafe on the Gasteig. This was an impossible situation. Therefore, a short while after, I set out and inspected quite a number of Munich's restau- rants and taverns with the intention of renting some spare room or some other room for the party. In the former Sterneckerbrau in the Tal there was a small, vault-like room which in times past had served as some kind of drink- ing room for the Reichs-councillors of Bavaria. It was dark and gloomy, and therefore it was as well suited for its former destination as it was ill-suited for its newly intended purpose. The little street which its only window overlooked was so narrow that even on the brightest summer day the room remained gloomy and dark. This became our first office. As the rent was only fifty marks a month (in those days an enormous amount for us!) we could not make great demands and could not even complain that before we moved in the paneling, once destined for the Reichs- councillors, was hurriedly torn out, so that now the room really gave the impression more of a vault than of an office. Yet this was an enormous progress. Slowly we acquired electricity, and even more slowly, a telephone; a table with a few borrowed chairs was put in, finally an open shelf, still a little later a cupboard; two sideboards, which be- longed to the innkeeper, were to serve for the keeping of leaflets, posters, etc. The previous arrangement that means the leadership of the movement by a meeting of the committee once a week was untenable in the long run. Only an official, paid by the movement, could guarantee continued office activity. At that time this was very difficult. The movement had still so few members that it required great skill to find PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 861 among them a suitable man who with the lowest demands for his own person would be able to fulfill the numerous demands of the movement. After a long search the first business manager of the party was found in the person of an old soldier, a former comrade of mine, Schuessler. First he came daily to our office be- tween six and eight, later from five to eight, finally every afternoon, and a short time afterwards, he was appointed full time, and now he discharged his services from morning till late at night. He was a man as decent as fundamentally most honest, who personally took the greatest pains, and who faithfully adhered especially to the movement itself. Schuessler brought with him a small Adler typewriter which was his property. It was the first of such machines in the service of the party. It was later acquired by the party by installment payments. A small safe seemed neces- sary in order to safeguard the card index and the member- ship books against theft. Its purchase, therefore, was not carried out in order to deposit the enormous amounts of money which then we might perhaps have owned. On the contrary, everything was most beggarly, and often I added out of my small savings. A year and a half later the little office was too small, and a move into a new place in the Corneliusstrasse took place. Again it was a tavern into which we moved, but now we no longer had only one room, but three rooms and a great counter in addition. In those days this appeared to us very much. Here we remained until November, 1923. In December, 1920, the acquisition of the Volkischer Beobachter took place. The latter which, according to its The Volkischer Beobachter was originally the property of the Thule Gesellschaft, a secret patriotic society with a fairly smart membership. It had a certain real value after the War because it was the only Right radical newspaper in Munich with a per* 862 ME1N KAMPF name, presented folkish concerns, was now to be turned into the organ of the N.S.G.W.P. First it was published twice weekly, at the beginning of 1923 it became a daily, and at the end of August, 1923, it was given its later known great size. As a complete newcomer in the field of newspaper life, I had to pay heavily for my experiences in those days. Looked at objectively, the fact that in the face of the enormous Jewish press there existed not a single really important folkish newspaper was bound to cause reflection. As afterwards I was able to determine in praxis innumer- able times, this was due for the greater part to the un- businesslike management of so-called folkish enterprises on the whole. They were conducted much too much ac- cording to the viewpoint that loyalty comes before achieve- ment. A thoroughly incorrect viewpoint, in so far as loyalty cannot be anything outwardly demonstrated, but some- mit to secure paper then a commodity difficult to acquire and carefully rationed out. The processes by which it was pried away from its owners and made a Nazi organ have never been fully cleared up. For a time it appears to have remained the property of Dietrich Eckart, whose position among the anti- Semitic journalists of Germany was a respectable one. During 1923, it is said, Hitler was able to buy the paper with the help of donations in foreign currency and a loan from his friend Hanfstaengl. Accidentally an American rotary press was offered for sale cheap. It was purchased, and so the daily Vdlkischer Bcobachter there was a daily in 1923, and publi- cation on this basis was resumed in 1925 had the largest format in Germany. Heiden says also that money came from Frau Gertrud von Seidlitz, an aristocratic lady residing in one of the Baltic States. Dietrich Eckart then retired, and Alfred Rosenberg became the editor-in-chief. Max Amann was the business manager. Though in financial straits for a time, the paper eventually became a gold mine. PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 863 thing that finds its most sublime expression in the very achievement. He who creates something really valuable for his people demonstrates by this a loyalty just as valuable, while someone else, who merely simulates loyalty, without actually rendering valuable services to his people, is an injury to any real loyalty. He also burdens the com- munity of his loyalty. The Voelkischer Beobachter also as its name already indicates was a so-called 'folkish' organ with all the advantages and even more the faults and the weaknesses which are characteristic of folkish institutions. As honor- able as its contents were, as impossible, from the business viewpoint, was the management of the enterprise. This, too, was based on the opinion that folkish newspapers must be (maintained by folkish donations, instead of the view- point that they have to maintain themselves in the compet- itive struggle with the other papers, and that it is an in- decency to cover the neglects or the mistakes of the business management of the enterprise by donations from well- meaning patriots. In any case, I took pains to abolish this condition which I soon had recognized in its seriousness, and luck assisted me in so far as it made me acquainted with the man who since then, not only as the business manager of the paper but also as the first business manager of the party, has rendered tremendously valuable services to the movement. In the year 1914, that means at the front, I got to know Amann now has most of Germany's important newspapers and publishing houses under his thumb. Hitler is said to place unlimited confidence in this man. A personage not mentioned in Mein Kampf is the photographer Heinrich Hoffman, who played an important part in the business organization of the Party propaganda and eventually rose to affluence as camera- man -in -chief to Hitler. Other early Party publications that S64 MEIN KAMPF (then still my superior) the present general business manager of the party, Herr Amann. During the four years of the War I had the opportunity to observe almost continuously the extraordinary ability, the industriousness, and the scrupulous conscientiousness of my future collaborator. In midsummer of 1921, when the movement was in a serious crisis and when I could no longer be satisfied with a number of employees, even had had the most bitter experience with one of them, I turned to my former comrade of the regiment whom chance brought to me one day, with the request that he now become the business manager of the movement. After long hesitation Amann was hold- ing a position with very good prospects he finally con- sented, but on the express condition that he would never have to serve as bailiff for any sort of inefficient committees, but that he would recognize only one single master. It is the everlasting merit of this first business manager of the party, who as a business man was really widely trained, that he brought order and cleanliness into the party affairs. Since then they have remained models and could never be reached, let alone surpassed, by any of the subdivisions of the movement. As always in life, superior efficiency is not infrequently the cause for envy and jeal- ousy. In this case, too, one had of course to expect this and to take it patiently into the bargain, t As early as in the year 1922 there existed generally firm directions for the business as well as for the organizing construction of the movement. There already existed a complete central card index which included all the members remain sources of information concerning the rise and the ideology of the movement are the N.S. Bibliothek, a series of brochures edited by Feder, and the N.S. Monatsheftc, founded in 1930 by Rosenberg. The official news-service, the N.S. , began to appear in 1932. PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 165 belonging to the party. The financing of the movement, too, had been brought into sound courses. Current expenses had to be covered by current receipts, unusual income was used only for unusual expenses. Despite the seriousness of the time, the movement by this procedure remained almost completely free of debt; it even succeeded in carrying out a continued increase of its resources. The work was carried on as in private business: the personnel employed had to distinguish itself through achievements and in no event could it merely rely upon the famous 'loyalty/ The loyalty of every National Socialist proves itself first of all in his readiness, in his industriousness, and his ability in achiev- ing the work allotted to him by the national community. He who does not fulfill his duty in this respect must not brag about a loyalty against which he sins in reality. The new business manager of the party, in the face of all sorts of influences, with the utmost energy represented the view- point that party affairs must not be a sinecure for followers or members who are but little willing to work. A movement which fights so sharply against the party corruption of our present administrative apparatus must keep its own ap- paratus free from such vices.^ The case happened that in the administration of the paper, employees were accepted who, according to their loyalty, beFonged to the Bavarian National Party, but measured by their achievements they proved themselves excellently qualified. The result of this experiment was generally outstanding. Precisely by the honest and frank acknowledgment of the actual achieve- ment of the individual did the movement conquer the hearts of these employees more quickly and more rapidly than would otherwise have been the case. They later be- came good National Socialists and remained so, not only by their words, but they proved it by the conscientious, proper, and honest work which they discharged in the service of the new movement. It is natural that the well- 866 MEIN KAMPF qualified party member was preferred to the equally well- liked non-party member. But nobody was given a position solely on the basis of his party membership. The deter- mination with which the new manager represented and gradually, despite all obstacles, fought out these principles was later of the greatest benefit to the movement. Only thus was it possible that in the difficult time of the in- flation, when tens of thousands of enterprises perished and thousands of newspapers had to close down, the manage- ment of the movement not only continued to exist and was able to fulfill its tasks, but that the Voelkischer Beobachter experienced an ever greater expansion. In those days it had entered the ranks of the great newspapers. The year 1921 had further the significance that through my position as chairman of the party I gradually succeeded in removing also the individual party sections from criticism and interference by any number of committee members. This was important because one could not win a really able head for a task, while good-for-nothings with their chatter continuously interfered, pretended to know everything better, only to leave behind them the most terrible muddle. Whereupon these know-alls usually retired quite modestly, in order to find a new field for their controlling and inspiring activity. There were people who were obsessed with an obvious disease of finding something behind everything and anything, and who lived in a kind of permanent preg- nancy with excellent plans, ideas, projects, and methods. Their most ideal and their highest aim was for the most part the formation of a committee which, as the controlling organ, had to put its expert nose into the orderly work of the others. But how insulting and how tin-National Social- istic is it if people, who do not understand a matter, con- tinuously interfere with the work of the real experts, probably never entered the consciousness of many of these professional committeemen. In any case, I considered it PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION 867 my duty in those years to protect all employees of the movement, who were burdened with responsibility and who did their work well, against such elements, to give them the necessary protection and to clear the working field ahead of them. The best means for rendering harmless such committees, which did nothing or which merely brewed together deci- sions that were practically inexcusable, was actually to give them some real work. It made one laugh to see how noiselessly then such a society evaporated and suddenly could not be traced any more. In this connection I thought of our greatest of such institutions, the Reichstag. How they would all suddenly evaporate if one were merely to give them real work instead of just speech-making; that means a task which each individual of these boasters would have to discharge under personal responsibility. As early as in those days I made the demand that, as everywhere in private life, also in the movement, the in- dividual sections should search until the obviously able and honest official, manager, or leader were found. The latter, then, would be given absolute authority and freedom of action towards below, with the duty of complete re- sponsibility towards above, in which case no one is given authority towards his subordinates unless he himself knows a better way of doing the work involved. In the course of two years I enforced my opinion more and more and today it is already a matter of course in the movement, at least in so far as the highest leadership is concerned. The visible success of this attitude, however, was shown on November 9, 1923: when I had joined the movement four years previously, there existed not even a rubber stamp. On November 9, 1923, the dissolution of the party, the sequestration of its property, took place. The latter, in- clusive of all objects of value and the paper, amounted to more than one hundred and seventy thousand gold Marks. CHAPTER XII THE TRADE- UNION QUESTION IN THE year 1922 the rapid growth of the movement compelled us to define our attitude towards a question which has not been fully solved even today. During our attempts at studying those methods which would be able to pave the movement's way to the hearts of the great masses most readily and most easily, we met again and again the objection that the worker would never fully belong to us as long as the representation of his in- terests in the purely vocational and economic domains was in the hands and the political organizations of people with a different political loyalty. t This objection, of course, was well founded. The worker who worked in a factory according to general opinion could not exist at all if he did not become a member of a union. Not only his vocational concerns seemed protected solely by this, also his position in the workshop was in the long run conceivable only when being a member of a union. The majority of the workers belonged to trade unions. The latter, in general, had fought out the wage struggles and had made the wage-scale agreements which now guar- anteed the worker a certain income. The results of these struggles doubtless benefited all workers of the shop, and especially for the decent man there were bound to arise con- THE TRADE-UNION QUESTION 869 flicts of conscience if he pocketed the wages fought for by the unions, but if he excluded himself from the fight. It was difficult to speak about these problems with the normal bourgeois employers. They had no understanding (or did not want to have any understanding) for the material side of the question, nor for the moral side. Finally, the economic interests, allegedly their own, speak from the very beginning against any integration into an organization of the workers employed by them, so that merely for this reason most of the employers find it hard to form an un- biased judgment. Therefore here, as so many times, it is necessary to turn to the outsiders who do not succumb to the temptation of overlooking the woods because of the trees. With good will they will more easily have under- standing for an affair which in one way or the other belongs to the most important questions of our present and future life.** In the first volume I have already expressed my opinion on the nature and the necessity of trade unions. There I held the viewpoint that, as long as a change in the attitude of the employer towards the employee does not take place, either by measures on the part of the State (which, how- ever, are unfruitful in most cases) or by a general, new edu- cation, the only thing the worker can do is to guard per- sonally his interests, by emphasizing his right as an equally important contracting party in economic life; I have further emphasized that such a safeguarding absolutely corresponds to the meaning of an entire national community if through it social injustices, which later are bound to lead to serious injuries of the entire community life of a people, can be prevented; I further declared that this necessity must be considered as existing as long as there are among the em- ployers people who themselves have not only no sense for social duties, but not even for the most primitive human rights; and from this I drew the conclusion that, once such 870 MEIN KAMPF self-defense is considered necessary, its form can sensibly exist only in an integration of the employees on the basis of a trade union. I did not change this general concept even in the year 1922. But I had to seek a clear and definite formulation for the attitude towards these problems. It would not do to content oneself further simply with conclusions, but it was necessary to draw practical consequences from them. The answer to the following questions was involved: (1) Are trade unions necessary? (2) Has the N.S.G.W.P. itself to take up trade-union activity or has it to bring its numbers to such an activity in some form or other? (3) Of what nature must a National Socialist trade union be? What are our tasks and their aims? (4) How can we arrive at such trade unions? I believe that I have answered the first question suffi- ciently. Such as the situation is today, trade unions can- The effect of the control exercised over production and prices during the World War was to shake the German economic structure to its foundations. It seemed as if a return to free capitalistic enterprise (though that was never as free in Ger- many as in Great Britain and the United States) would be im- possible. General Groener had called attention to the 'demo- cratic wave ' which had passed over the world as a result of the common war experience. Employer and employee had stood side by side at the front. Accordingly the leaders of German industry and of German labor were brought together during the summer of 1918 to consider the establishment of Reich- sarbietgemeinschaften (Reich Work Communal! ties), which were to associate capital and labor in the performance of indus- trial tasks. The theoretical beginnings were promising enough. But the upheaval incident to the Revolution, the shortages of goods and raw materials, and the pernicious effect of the infla- tion tended to convince both sides more deeply than ever be- THE TRADE-UNION QUESTION 871 not be dispensed with, in my opinion. On the contrary, they belong to the most important institutions of the economic life of the nation. But their importance lies not only in the social-political domain, but even more in a national politi- cal domain. For a people whose great masses receive the satisfaction of their vital needs by a correct union move- ment, but at the same time also an education, will thereby experience an extraordinary strengthening of its entire re- sistibility in the struggle for life. The trade unions are above all necessary as the building stones of the future economic parliaments, that is, the estate chambers. f The second question, too, can be answered easily. If the union movement is important, then it is clear that Na- tional Socialism has to define its attitude towards it not fore of the righteousness of their divergent points of view. Two experiences were especially embittering the recourse of organized labor to the general strike in order to put down the Kapp putsch, and the willingness of certain industrialists to capitulate when the Ruhr invasion, which had called forth so much heroic self-sacrifice on the part of the labor organizations, seemed to mean an economic dibdcle for Germany. The major Labor organizations were: the Free Trade Unions, which were theoretically neutral but maintained close contact with the Social Democratic Party; the Christian Trade Unions, members of which were to a great extent affiliated with the Center Party or the German National Party; and the Hindi- Duncker Unions, which retained democratic political connec- tions. Membership in these organizations increased greatly during post- War years. They were powerful exponents of the workingman's viewpoint, conducted successful co-operative banking and merchandising enterprises, and exercised very considerable educational influence. Nevertheless the struggle incident to the maintenance of the Republic sapped much of the energy of the unions. Many a Social Democratic function- 172 MEIN KAMPF only theoretically, but also practically. However, the 'haw' is even more difficult to explain. -4- The National Socialist movement, which as the goal of its activity has before its eyes the National Socialist folkish State, must not be in doubt that all future institutions of this future State must grow out of the very movement. It is the greatest mistake to believe that suddenly out of nothing, merely in the possession of power, one could carry out a certain reorganization, without already possessing a certain basic stock of humans who have previously been schooled especially as regards their loyalty. Here, too, the principle applies that more important than the outward form which can be created mechanically very quickly is the spirit which fills such a form. fOne can, for instance, graft the leader principle dictatorially upon a State organ- ism by command. But this will be a living thing only if, by a development of its own, it has gradually formed itself out of the smallest details, and if, by the continued selec- tion, which the hard reality of life carries out uninterrupt- edly, it receives, in the course of many years, the leader material necessary for carrying out this principle.^ Therefore, one must not imagine that one could suddenly ary was worn out by the constant struggle with the Commu- nists; and the hard work exacted of the Christian Union lead- ers, several of whom held offices in the government at one time or another, also took its toll. By 1930 the specter of unemploy- ment and of wage decreases haunted virtually every German citizen, bringing fear into the stoutest worker's heart. Re- sistance to dictatorship was impossible when that meant star- vation and joblessness. The first National Socialist plan was to undermine the Unions by establishing 'cells' in every plant. The maneuver failed to affect the workers to any appreciable extent. But the salaried employees found much that was at- tractive in the Nazi program, and the Party gained ground rapidly among them. THE TRADE-UNION QUESTION 873 take out of a briefcase the drafts for a new State constitu- tion and that one could ' introduce ' them now, by a decree of power, from above. One can try such a thing, but the result will certainly not be able to live, will in most cases be a stillborn child. This reminds me vividly of the origin of the Weimar Constitution and of the attempt at presenting the German people, together with a new constitution, also with a new flag which had no inner connection with the experiences of our people during the past half-century. The National Socialist State also has to beware of such experiments. It will some day only be able to grow out of an organization which has long existed. This organization must intrinsically have the life spark of National Socialism so that finally it can create a living National Socialist State. f As already stressed, the germ cells for the estate chambers will have to rest in the various vocational representations, that means above all in the trade unions. But if the future estate's representation and the central economic parlia- ment are to present a National Socialist institution, then also these important germ cells will have to be the bearers of a National Socialist loyalty and concept. The institu- tions of the movement have to be transferred to the State, but the State cannot suddenly conjure up corresponding in- stitutions out of nothing, unless they are to remain wholly lifeless formations. Merely out of this highest viewpoint, the National Socialist movement has to recognize the necessity of a trade- union activity of its own. It must do so further for the reason that a genuinely Na- tional Socialist education of employers as well as of em- ployees, in the sense of a mutual integration in the common frame of the national community, is not carried out by theoretical instruction, appeals, or remonstrances, but by the fight of everyday life. With it and by it the movement 874 MEIN KAMPF has to educate the various great economic groups and to bring them closer together as regards the great viewpoints. Without such a preparation any hope for the rise of a future genuine national community remains pure illusion. Only the great ideal of a view of life for which the movement fights can gradually form that general style which then, one day, makes the new era appear as internally really firmly founded and not as merely outwardly made. Thus the movement has to take an affirmative attitude towards the idea of the trade union as such, and by practi- cal activity it has to give the vast number of its followers and members the required education for the future Na- tional Socialist State. The answer to the third question results from what has been said before. The National Socialist trade union is not an instrument of doss fight, but an instrument of vocational representation. The National Socialist State knows no 'classes,' but in politi- cal respect only citizens with fully equal rights and, accord- ingly, also equal general duties, and on the other hand State subjects who, however, are completely without rights with re- gard to State politics. The trade union in the National Socialist sense has not the task of transforming, by integration, certain people within a national body into a class, in order to take up with it the fight against another similarly organized formation inside the national community. This task we cannot ascribe to the union as such at all, but it was given to it the moment it became the fighting instrument of Marxism. Not the union fights a doss fight ('Klassenkdmpferisch'), but Marx- ism has turned it into an instrument for its class struggle. It created the economic weapon which the international world Jew used for the smashing of the economic basis of the free, independent national States, for the destruction of their national industries and their national trade, and with this, THE TRADE-UNION QUESTION 875 finally, for the enslavement of free nations in the service of the international world finance Judaism. In view of this the National Socialist union, by integration of certain groups of participants in the national economic process, must increase the security of national economy itself and strengthen its power by corrective elimination of all those abuses which, in their ultimate consequences, have a destruc- tive influence on the national body, and which damage the vital force of the national community, and with it also that of the State, and which last, but nor least, turn out to be the mis- fortune and the destruction of economy itself. Therefore, for the National Socialist union the strike is not a means for smashing and undermining national produc- tion, but for its increase and for making it flow, by fighting all those abuses which, in consequence of their unsocial character, hamper the efficiency and with it the existence of the community. For the efficiency of the individual is al- ways causatively connected with the general legal and social position which he has in the economic process and the recog- nition, resulting solely from this, of the necessity of the thriving of this process for his own benefit. The National Socialist worker must know that the flowering of national economy means his own material fortune. The National Socialist employer must know that the fortune and the satisfaction of his employees are the premise for the existence and the development of his own economic importance. National Socialist employees and National Socialist em- ployers both are char gees and guardians of the entire national community. The great measure of personal freedom which There have been scattered attempts to strike since 1933, but not one has reached proportions worth mentioning. More im- pressive has been the increasing indifference of workers to Party instruction an indifference to which journalist and orator have often referred chidingly. 876 MEIN KAMPF is hereby granted to them in their activity can be explained by the fact that, according to experience, the efficiency of the individual is increased more by a far-reaching granting of freedom than by compulsion from above, and it must further prevent the process of natural selection, which is to promote the most efficient, the most able, and the most industrious, from being cut short. For the National Socialist union, therefore, a strike is a measure which can and must be applied only as long as there exists no National Socialist folkish State. The latter, how- ever, has to take over instead of the mass struggle of the two great groups employers and employees (which in its consequences, by decrease of production, always injured the national community as a whole!) the legal care and the legal protection of all individuals. The economic chambers will have to be entrusted with the obligation of keeping the national economy going and of abolishing defects and faults injurious to it. What today is fought out by a struggle of millions must one day find its settlement in estate chambers and in the central economic parliament. Thus the employers and workers will no longer rage against one another in wage and wage-scale battles, injuring the economic existence of both of them, but they will solve these problems in com- mon in a higher instance which above all has forever to have before its eyes, in brilliant letters, the welfare of the national community and of the State. Here, too, as everywhere, the iron-like principle has to hold that the fatherland comes first and thereafter the party. The task of the National Socialist union is the education and the preparation for these very aims, which means then: common work by all for the preservation and the safeguarding of our nation and its State, corresponding to the abilities and forces, inborn in the individual and developed by the national community. THE TRADE-UNION QUESTION 877 The fourth question: How can we arrive at such unions? seemed at that time by far the most difficult to answer. In general, it is easier to carry out a foundation in a new domain than in an old one which has already a similar foundation. In a place where there does not yet exist a shop of a certain kind one can easily open such a shop. It is more difficult if a similar enterprise already exists, and most difficult if conditions are given by which only a single enter- prise is able to thrive. For here the founders are faced with the task of introducing not only their own new business, but, in order to be able to exist, they must destroy that which already exists in the place. A National Socialist trade union, side by side with other unions, is senseless. For it must feel that it is permeated with its task of a view of life and with the obligation, born of it, of intolerance towards similar or even hostile forma- tions and of emphasizing the exclusive necessity of its ego. Here, too, there is no coming to terms and no compromise with related endeavors, but only the maintenance of its own absolute right. There were two ways for arriving at such a development: (1) A union of our own could be founded and then one could take up gradually the fight against the inter- national Marxist unions; or one could (2) penetrate into the Marxist unions and try to fill them with the new spirit; that means reshape them into in- struments of the new world of thoughts. The following objections spoke against the first way: our financial difficulties at that time were still very consider- able, the funds at our disposal were very insignificant. The gradually more and more spreading inflation aggra- vated the situation by the fact that in those years one could hardly have spoken of a tangible material advantage of the union for the individual member. The individual worker, looked at from this viewpoint, had at that time no reason 878 MEIN KAMPF for contributing towards the union. Indeed, the existing Marxist unions were near collapse, until millions were suddenly poured into their laps by the brilliant Ruhr activi- ties of Herr von Cuno. This so-called 'national' Reichs- chancellor must be called the savior of the Marxist trade unions. We could not count at that time with such financial possibilities; and nobody could be enticed to join a trade union which, in consequence of its financial weakness, was not able to offer him anything at all. On the other hand, I had to fight most sharply against creating, by such a new organization, merely a duty-shirking post for more or less great minds. The question of personalities was, among others, one of the most important. In those days I had not one single Gregor Strasser had doubtless been considered the man, who, if the Nazis came to power, would head the German labor movement. But after his break with Hitler, Dr. Robert Ley was groomed for the post. A more original labor leader could scarce be imagined, but behind him stands a group of bureau- crats who function with the customary German efficiency. The Arbeitsfront (Labor Front) is said to have a membership of more than 20,000,000 persons, and is of course the only legal workers' organization. It had been intended to create some- thing modeled after the system adopted in Fascist Italy; but Ley informs us that while he was wrestling with the difficulties which such a plan of reorganization involved, he conferred with Hitler and found that a perfect solution had been found by the Ftihrcr's genius. Treuhdnder der Arbeit were appointed, one for each of the thirteen districts into which economic Germany had been divided in accordance with the 'Four- Year Plan/ These offices are officially described, in the Law of May 19, 1933, as follows: 'Until the reorganization of the social consti- tution, the Treuhdnder take the places of the workers 9 trade unions, as well as of the employers and their organizations, io THE TRADE-UNION QUESTION 879 head whom I would have entrusted with the solution of this enormous task. He who in those days would really have smashed the Marxist trade unions, in order to help the Na- tional Socialist trade-union idea to victory instead of this institution of the destructive class struggle belonged to the very great men of our nation and his bust should one day have been dedicated to posterity in the Valhalla at Regensburg. But I did not know one head which would have been fitting for such a pedestal. It is a great mistake to have oneself diverted from this opinion by the fact that the international trade unions themselves had at their disposal only average heads. This means nothing at all in reality; for at the time those unions were founded there existed nothing else. Today the Na- tional Socialist movement has to fight against a long- the task of concluding agreements concerning contracts for work which shall be acceptable to all the interested parties.' Committees of experts chosen from both capital and labor have since (Decree of March 10, 1934) been associated with the Treuh&nder. At the same time, the organization of the 'eco- nomic interests' of the nation was undertaken, in accordance with ideas formulated, it would seem, by Dr. Robert Schmitt and a group of advisers. Since that time, a number of other attempts have been made to bridge the gap between capital and labor. For example, 'courts of honor 9 have been set up to regulate the conduct of employers; 'committees of study' have been ap- pointed to assure common inquiry, by representatives of both sides, into ways and means of co-operation ; and 'coordinators' have been appointed to supervise, speed up and utilize produc- tion. Recently there has been appointed (January 13, 1939) a 'seventh hierarchy/ the function of which is to 'co-ordinate the co-ordinators.' No adequate account of the relations between capital, labor and government in modern Germany is available. Even the regulations are often shrouded in secrecy, as witness the report 880 MEIN KAMPF existing colossal giant organization, worked out into the smallest detail. The conqueror, however, has always to be more ingenious than the defender, if he wants to overcome him. The fortress of Marxist trade unions can today be administered by ordinary bosses; but it can only be at- tacked by the ferocious energy and the ingenious efficiency of a superior great man on the other side. But if such a man is not found it is useless to quarrel with Fate, and even more senseless, to want to force the affair with inefficient substi- tutes. Here it means to make use of the realization that in life it is sometimes better to leave a matter alone at first, rather than, because of the lack of suitable forces, to start it half- heartedly or badly. Another reflection, which by no means must be called demagogic, was added. At that time and also today, I am of the unshakable conviction that it is dangerous to combine a great fight for a political view of life with economic ques- tions at too early a time. This is true especially of our German people. For in such a case, the economic struggle will here immediately draw the energy from the political fight. For, once the people have won the conviction that by on industry issued by General Goering during 1937, copies of which have been spirited out of the country despite the risk of incurring penalties. The best available testimony concerning the attitude of the workers is that supplied by the Dcutschland- Berichte der Sopadt (German Correspondence of the Social Democratic Party) which, though naturally colored by politi- cal bias, have come directly out of Germany itself. The general tendency among observers is to look upon the Nazi system as an experiment in Planwirtschaft (planned economy). Some dismiss all that has been done as callow exploitation. Others think that Germany is groping towards something new. Cf. also 'Labor under the Nazis/ by Norman Thomas, in Foreign Affairs (1936). THE TRADE-UNION QUESTION 881 economy they can obtain a small house, they will devote themselves to this task exclusively, and they will not have any spare time for the political fight against those who in one way or another intend some day to take away the pennies they have saved up. Instead of struggling in a political fight for the knowledge and the conviction they have won, they more and more wrap themselves in their 'settlement' ideas, and in the end, in most cases, they find themselves between two stools. Today the National Socialist movement stands at the beginning of its struggle. For the greater part it has first to shape and to complete the picture of its view of life. With all the fibers of its energy it has to struggle for the maintenance of its great ideals, and success is conceivable only if the entire force completely enters the service of this fight. But how much the occupation with merely economic problems is able to paralyze the active fighting force we see before us in a classical example, especially today: The Revolution of November, 1918, was not made by trade unions, but it struggled through in spite of them. And the German bourgeoisie does not wage a political fight for the German future, because il thinks that this future is sufficiently secured in the constructive work of economy. We ought to learn also from such experiences; for with us, too, things would not take a different course. The more we compress the entire force of our movement for the political fight, the sooner we will be allowed to count with success on the entire front; but the more we occupy our- selves prematurely with trade unions, settlement, and similar problems, the smaller will be the profit for our cause, taken as a whole. No matter how important these concerns may be, their fulfillment will arrive on a large scale only after we are in a situation to put the public power into the service of these ideas. Until then these problems would 882 MEIN KAMPF paralyze the movement the more, the earlier the movement would occupy itself with them and the more strongly thereby its intention as a view of life would be impaired. Then it could easily happen that trade-unionist momenta would lead the political movement, instead of the view of life forcing the union in its course. Actual profit for the movement as wett as for our nation as such can grow from a National Socialist trade union only if, in its view of life, it is already so strongly filled by our National Socialist ideas that it no longer runs the risk of falling into Marxist tracks. For a National Socialist trade union which sees its mission only in the competition with the Marxist unions would be worse than no union at all. It has to declare war on the Marxist trade union not only as an organization but above all as an idea. In it it has to meet the propagator of the class fight and of the class idea and in its stead it must become the guardian of the vocational interests of German citizens. At that time and still today, all these viewpoints spoke against the foundation of trade unions of our own, except that suddenly a head were to appear whom Fate has obviously called forth for the solution of this very question. Therefore, there were only two other possibilities: either to recommend to our party members to leave the trade unions, or to remain in the hitherto existing ones, in order to work there as destructively as possible. I generally recommended the second way. Especially in the year 1922-23 one could do so quite well; for the financial profit which during the inflation the trade union drew from the not very numerous members in consequence of the youth of our movement was equal to naught. But the damage done to it was very great, for the National Socialist adherents were its sharpest critics and by this its internal destroyers. I flatly rejected all experiments which from the outset THE TRADE-UNION QUESTION 883 harbored failure. I would have considered it a crime to take from the small wages of a worker an amount for an institution of whose benefit for its members I was not convinced in my mind. If a new political party disappears some day, then this is hardly ever a disadvantage, but always an advantage, for nobody has any right to complain about this; for what the individual gives to a political movement he gives d fond perdu. But he who contributes to a trade union has a claim on the fulfillment of advantages in exchange which were promised to him. If this is not taken into account, then the makers of such a union are cheats, or, to say the least, frivolous people who should be called to account.-^ In accordance with this view we acted in the year 1922. Others apparently knew better and founded trade unions. They reproached us with the absence of such a union as the reason for the most obvious sign of our faulty and narrow- minded attitude. But it did not take long before these very foundations disappeared, so that the final result was the same as ours. With the only difference that we had be- trayed neither ourselves nor others. The capitulation of the trade unions is not easy to explain. Four causes are usually enumerated. First, the workers and their leaders had grown so accustomed to a revisionistic atti- tude that they had lost the instinct for taking a stand on broad issues of political principle. Second, everyone was deluded by the re-election of President von Hindenburg. Since he had been put back into office after a hard fight by a democratic major- ity, it was assumed that he would respect the convictions of those who had elected him. Few estimated the dismissal of Brtining at its true worth, and the 'social policy* of General von Schleicher (chancellor in 1932) added to the confusion. Third, labor was weakened by the inexplicable attitude of the Communists, who seemed to feel that they could either make common cause with the Nazis or that the 'proletarian revolu- 884 MEIN KAMPF tion' would dawn after six months of Hitler. Fourth, the pre- vailing levels of unemployment made orthodox trade-union leaders hesitate to make use of the weapon of the general strike. Yet it is probable that, if carefully managed, such a strike would have kept von Schleicher in power and thus have foiled Hitler and Papen. The Christian trade unions were even more befuddled by the developments. Many of their leaders believed that under Hitler the management of the new labor organizations would be entrusted to them. From this illusion they were rudely awakened. CHAPTER XIII GERMAN POLICY OF ALLI- ANCE AFTER THE WAR "TP^HE utter thoughtlessness of the Reich's foreign- I policy leadership in drafting principles for a proper policy of alliance not only continued after the Revolution, but was even exceeded. Because, if general confusion of political concepts could pass as the cause of our unsuccessful pre-War statesmanship in dealing with foreign countries, after the War there was a lack of good faith. It was natural that the circles, which finally saw their destruc- tive scheme realized through the Revolution, could have no interest in a policy of alliance whose final outcome must be the re-establishment of a free German national sovereign State. Not only would such a development contradict the inner meaning of the November crime, not only would it have interrupted or even terminated the internationalizing of German economy and labor power: the internal political effects consequent on a fight for liberation in foreign policy would also be fatal in the future to the present holders of powers of the Reich. One can simply not conceive of a nation's rebellion without its previous nationalization, as, conversely, every mighty success in foreign policy neces- sarily has similar repercussions. Experience shows that every struggle for liberation leads to a heightening of 886 MEIN KAMPF national feeling, of self-consciousness, but likewise to a sharper sensitivity to anti-national tendencies and that sort of elements. Conditions and persons who, in peace-time, are tolerated, indeed, often not even noticed, are, in periods of aroused national enthusiasm, not only rebuffed, but meet a resistance not seldom fatal to them. For example, there may be recalled the general spy scare which, with the outbreak of wars, when human passions are at the boil- ing point, suddenly erupts and leads to the most brutal, sometimes even unjust, persecutions, although everybody knows that the spy danger would be greater in the long years of peace-time, while for natural reasons not attracting the same amount of general attention, f For this very reason, the delicate instinct of the State parasites washed to the surface by the November events senses the possible destruction of their own criminal exist- ence in a rise to freedom of our nation, supported by a genial policy of alliance and the consequent inflaming of national passions. Thus it becomes comprehensible why government bodies in control of foreign policy since the year 1918 failed, and why the State's rulers almost always methodically worked against the true interests of the German nation. For what might at first glance seem unplanned showed itself on closer examination to be but the logical further pursuit of the course which the November Revolution of 1918 took quite openly for the first time. Of course, one must here differentiate between the respon- sible or rather the 4 should-be-responsible f leaders of our affairs of State; the average of our parliamentary politicasters, and the great, stupid mutton herd of our sheepishly tolerant people. The first know what they want. The second go along, either knowingly or because, at least, they are too cowardly to oppose unhesitatingly what has been recognized and felt POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 887 to be detrimental. The rest, however, yield because of in- comprehension and stupidity. < As long as the National Socialist German Workers' Party amounted only to a small and little-known society, problems of foreign policy could have, in the eyes of many followers, only subordinate significance. This was especially true because our movement above all fundamentally stood for, and must always stand for, the view that external freedom will not be handed down as a gift either from heaven or through some earthly power, but rather can be only the fruit of an inner exercise of force. Only the elimina- tion of the causes of our collapse, along with the destruction of those who exploit it, can lay down the premises for an external struggle for freedom. One can therefore understand if, from such points of view, the value of foreign-policy questions as compared with the importance of the young movement's domestic reform plans was disregarded in the early days. As soon, however, as the frame of the small, unimportant society spread and was finally sprung, and the young organ- ism acquired the importance of a great association, there arose also the need to define its attitude on questions of foreign- policy development. It was important to lay down princi- ples which not only did not contradict the basic conceptions of our conception of life, but which constituted an emana- tion of this mode of thinking. Precisely because of the lack of foreign-policy training in our people, there arises the young movement's obligation to impart to individual leaders as well as to the broad masses, by means of grand leading principles, a form of thought on foreign policy which is the presumption of any eventual practical achievement of preparations in foreign policy for the work of regaining our national freedom as well as a real sovereignty of the Reich. The most essential maxim and guiding principle which 81 MEIN KAMPF must always shine before us in estimating this matter is that foreign policy, too, is only a means to an end, but the end must be exclusively the advancement of our own national- ity. No consideration of foreign policy can be guided by any point of view but this: Does it benefit our nation now or in the future, or will it be harmful to it? t This is the sole preconceived opinion permitted in dealing with this question. Partisan, religious, humanitarian, and all other points of view in general are completely beside the point. If, before the War, the task of German foreign policy was to guarantee the sustenance of our nation and its children on this globe through the preparation of ways which could lead to this goal, as well as the winning of the auxiliary forces necessary thereto in the form of suitable allies, then today it is the same, with only one difference: Before the War it was necessary to serve the preservation of the German nationality, having in mind a certain available force of the independent, free power State; today it is imperative first to restore to the people, in the form of the free power State, that strength which is the presumption for the later carrying-out of a practical foreign policy signifying the maintenance, promotion, and sustenance of our people for the future. In other words: The goal of a German foreign policy oj The conviction that foreign policy has nothing to do with 'humanitarian' considerations is an old tenet of the Pan- German doctrine, though it has its advocates in every country. Like the maxim, 'business is business, 9 it severs interests from morality. Yet there is evidence to show that the violation of treaties, the suppression of helpless minorities, and the bom- bardment of defenseless cities has upon occasion greatly inter- fered with the success of the foreign policy of indicted nations. POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 889 today must be the preparation of the reconquest of freedom for tomorrow. Moreover, one thing above all must be kept in mind as a directive: A nation's chance of reconquering its independ- ence is not absolutely bound up with the integrity of a Slate territory, but rather with the existence of a never so small remnant of this nation and State which, having the necessary freedom, has it in its power to be not only the bearer of the spiritual communion of the entire nationality, but also the pre- Parer of the military struggle for freedom. If a people of one hundred million men, to protect the State's integrity, jointly tolerates the yoke of slavery, then that is worse than if such a State and such a people had been demolished and only a part of it could remain in possession of full freedom, of course on condition that this last remnant were filled with the sacred mission not only constantly to proclaim spiritual and cultural inseparability, but also to achieve the armed preparation for final liberation and the reuniting of the unhappy oppressed portions with the motherland. < // should further be noted that the question of the regaining of lost portions of territory of a people and State is always in the first instance the question of regaining the political power and independence of the motherland; that consequently in such From the beginning Austria was the first important goal of the Nazi annexationists. Yet in 1933 this State was independ- ent, not merely by reason of the treaties signed with the vic- torious Allied powers after the War, but also by reason of the will of its government, which in this respect at least had the support of the majority of the Austrian people. Subsequently, however, the governments of France, Great Britain, and Italy issued a joint declaration dated February 17, 1934, which read as follows: 'The Austrian government has addressed itself to the governments of France, Great Britain, and Italy for the 890 MEIN KAMPF a case the interests of the lost regions as compared with the salt interest of the regaining of the freedom of the main territory must be unhesitatingly set aside. For the liberation of op- pressed, since separated splinters of a nationality or province of a realm takes place, not on the basis of a desire of the op- pressed or a protest of those remaining behind, but through the instruments of power of those remnants of the former com- mon fatherland which have remained more or less sovereign. Consequently, the premise for the winning of lost terri- tories is the intensive advancement and strengthening of the remaining remnant State as well as the unshakable decision, slumbering in the heart, to consecrate at the given moment to the service of the liberation and unification of the whole nation that new force, forming itself through this process: that is, setting aside the interests of the separated regions purpose of securing their interpretation of the documents which had been prepared and transmitted to them in order to demonstrate German interference in the internal affairs of Austria. The discussions which have been conducted between the three governments on this subject have led to a unanimous decision concerning the necessity for maintenance of the inde- pendence and integrity of Austria, in consonance with the Treaties in force.' This statement was corroborated three times during the year following, and on April 14, 1935, the three powers, meeting in Stresa, solemnly confirmed it. Hitler con- fronted, therefore, not merely the unwillingness of Austrians themselves to surrender their independence, but also the veto of the three major European powers. Nevertheless energetic measures were adopted to undermine the Austrian government with propaganda, and to prepare ground for an uprising. Un- fortunately, the Dollfuss Cabinet was caught between two fires. On the one hand the Hcimwehren (Home Defense Guards), backed by Mussolini, insisted upon a Fascist dictatorship; on the other hand, the Socialists resented the abrogation of parlia- mentary government by Dollfuw and feared the succe* of POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 891 aa opposed to the sole interest of winning for the remaining remnant that measure of political power and strength which is the premise for a rectification of the will of a hostile victor. For oppressed countries will not be brought back into the bosom of a common Reich by means of fiery protests, but by a mighty sword. To forge this sword is the task of the domestic political leadership of a people; to guard the work of forging and to seek comrades in arms is the task of the foreign-policy leadership. In the first volume of the work 4 Mein Kampf, 9 I analyzed the half-heartedness of our pre-War policy of alliance. Of the four roads to a future preservation of our nationality and its maintenance, the fourth and least favorable was the Heimwehren. Therewith the two forces to be relied on most in the event that resistance to Germany became necessary were arrayed against each other. Instead of attempting to solve the problem, Dollfuss ran away from it. While he was in Budapest, the Heimwehren announced that vigorous meas- ures were to be resorted to against the Socialists. On the fol- lowing day Socialist groups in various cities, acting without permission from their Party leaders, staged an uprising. This was easily put down, but the country was torn asunder by hatred and Nazi activity increased. Bombing outrages were frequent. On July 25, 1934, Dollfuss was assassinated by Nazi pulschists, and a rebellion fomented by German agents broke out in southeastern Austria. German troops waited at the border to take a hand, but Mussolini massed troops at the Brenner. The rebellion was crushed. Dollfuss was succeeded by Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg. He continued to believe that Germany was on the verge of an upheaval which would lead to the downfall of Hitler and the restoration of the monarchy. Like most legitimists, he favored Anschluss with Germany, provided that at the same time the 892 MEIN KAMPF chosen. In place of a healthy European land policy, a colonial and trade policy was adopted. This was particu- larly erroneous as it was then imagined that thereby a settlement by arms could be evaded. The outcome of this endeavor to wish to sit on all stools was the well-known fall 'between them, and the World War was only the final bill presented to the Reich because of its unsuccessful leader- ship in foreign affairs. f The correct road would, even then, have been the third: strengthening of continental power by the winning of new soil and territory in Europe, precisely by which means an expan- sion through subsequent colonial regions would have ap- peared raised to the realm of what is, as a matter of course, possible. This policy, of course, would have been possible of realization only in alliance with England, or under such Habsburg claimant were restored to the throne. Accordingly he removed one by one the barriers to a complete understand- ing with Germany, though always emphasizing what he took to be the Catholic sentiment and monarchical convictions of Austria. The Heimwehren were dissolved for the sake of peace; and nothing was done to reconcile the Socialists with the regime. Of all this the Nazis took full advantage. Sympathizers held high positions in the government; German propaganda, subtler than at first, had little to fear from an inactive Austrian counter-propaganda; and Schuschnigg's recurrent doubts con- cerning the wisdom of his policies led to nothing more striking than a half-hearted endorsement of legitimist activity. The final outcome was dramatically swift. Following a con- ference (February, 1938) at Berchtesgaden, during the course of which the threat to send a German army into Austria was openly made, Schuschnigg was compelled to grant amnesty to imprisoned Nazi agitators, to put men friendly to Hitler in his Cabinet, and to grant the Party what amounted to freedom of action. He was now forced to realize that the Stresa guar- anties meant nothing. Mussolini protested against what had POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 893 an abnormal development of instruments of military powei that for forty or fifty years cultural tasks would have been altogether pushed into the background. That would have been entirely justified. The cultural importance of a nation is almost always linked to its political freedom and inde- pendence; consequently, the latter is the premise for the existence of better establishment of the former. Hence no sacrifice to insure political independence and freedom can be too great. Whatever is withdrawn from general cultural matters by a disproportionate requirement of armament for the State is later restored in richest measure. Yes, one may say that, after such a concentrated exertion in the sole direction of the support of State independence by all means, a definite subsequent rise or compensation tends to ensue through an often really surprising flowering of the hitherto neglected cultural forces of a nationality. Out of the emer- gency of the Persian War grew the flower of the Periclean age, and over the woes of the Punic Wars the Roman State system began to dedicate itself to the service of a higher culture. To be sure, one cannot entrust to the power of decision been done, but took no further action. The British maintained an enigmatical silence. France, struggling with a major politi- cal crisis, sounded out Rome to no avail. On Friday, March 9, 1938, German troops crossed the border, Schuschnigg abdi- cated, and Austria had ceased to exist as an independent power. The ex-Chancellor was imprisoned and his fate shrouded in secrecy. The next days brought scenes which eye-witnesses have attempted in vain to describe. Sparta is to be followed by Athens. It cannot be otherwise, since Germany is the home of a superior race, from which all culture springs. 'The center of the world/ wrote Mailer van den Bruck, 'must forever be found there where men grow conscious of being the center.' 894 MEIN KAMPF of a majority of parliamentary dummies or incompetents such a thoroughgoing subordination of all other concerns of a nationality to the single task of the preparation of a con- templated passage at arms for the State's future security. The father of a Frederick the Great could do that, but the fathers of our Jewish variety of democratic parliament- ary nonsense cannot do it. For this reason alone, then, the armed preparation of the pre-War period for a conquest of soil and territory in Europe could be only of such magnitude that support by suitable allies could hardly be dispensed with.-*- Since, however, it was generally not desired to have any- thing to do with planned war preparation, the acquisition of territory in Europe was abandoned owing to the fact that instead of this there was devotion to colonial and trade policy, and an otherwise possible alliance with England was sacrificed, without, however, logically getting backing from Russia, and finally the government stumbled into the World War, abandoned by all except for the Habsburg hereditary evil. f Characterizing our contemporary foreign policy, k must be said that there is at hand no visible or even comprehen- sible line of direction in general whatsoever. If, before the War, they launched themselves mistakenly on the fourth road to follow even this, indeed, only indifferently, then the sharpest eye cannot distinguish any road since the Revolu- tion. Even more than before the War, all planned consider- These arguments are based on the claim that the Pan- Germans had seen the War coming and had actually predicted that it would break out during the summer of 1914. But it is maintained that their warnings went unheeded, and that their recipes for adequate preparedness were not adopted. POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 895 ation is lacking, unless it be an attempt to wreck even the last possibility of a resurrection of our people. A cold estimate of actual European relations of power gives the following resuh: For three hundred years the history of our continent was substantially determined by England's effort, by roundabout means of balanced, mutually binding relations of power among the European States, to maintain and secure the necessary protection in the rear for big British aims in world politics. -< The traditional trend of British diplomacy, which in Germany has an analogy only in the Prussian army tradi- tion, was, since the achievements of Queen Elizabeth, deliberately aimed at preventing by all means the rise of any great European power above the level of the general scale of magnitudes, and, if necessary, to crush it by military means. The instruments of power which England undertook to apply in such a case were diverse, depending on the task in- volved or visualized ; the determination and will power for the stake, however, always the same. Yes, the more difficult England's situation became with the course of time, the more necessary to British imperial leadership did appear the maintenance of a condition of general paralysis of the individual State powers of Europe as a result of mutually opposed magnitudes. Particularly, the political separation of the former North American colonial territory led, in the ensuing period, to the greatest exertions for the main- tenance of a European cover in the rear, dependable under all circumstances. Hence, after the destruction of Spain and the Netherlands as great sea powers, the might of the English State concentrated itself against aspiring France, until finally, with the fall of Napoleon I, the hegemony danger to England of this most dangerous military power could be regarded as broken. The shifting of British statecraft toward Germany was 196 MEIN KAMPF undertaken only slowly, not only because at first there was no visible danger to England owing to the lack of national unity of the German nation, but because public opinion, aroused propagandistically to a particular State objective, can only slowly grasp new goals. The sober knowledge of the statesman here appears transposed into emotional values which are not only more fruitful in particular operations, but also more stable with respect to duration. Consequently, after the achievement of a plan the states- man can devote his train of thought instantly to new ob- jects, whereas the mass can be emotionally transformed into an instrument of its leaders' new plan only through slow propagandist work. As early as the years 1870-71, however, England had formulated its new position. Vacillations which set in at times, owing to the world economic importance of America as England's rival, as well as to the development of Russia as a political force, were unfortunately not utilized by Germany, so that more and more there was bound to come about a reinforcement of the original trend of British statecraft. England saw in Germany that power whose commercial and hence world political importance, not least of all be- cause of its enormous industrialization, waxed to such a threatening extent that one could already balance the forces of the two States in the same fields. The 'peaceful economic 9 conquest of the world, which seemed to our State pilots to be the final wisdom of the highest emanation, became for English politicians the moral basis of her resistance to it. That this resistance clothed itself in the form of a comprehensively organized attack fully cor- responded, moreover, to the essence of a statecraft whose aims lay, not m the maintenance of a dubious world peace, but in the reinforcement of British world domination. That England simultaneously utilized all allies who could pos- POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 897 sibly be considered in a military sense corresponded equally well to her traditional foresight in estimating an opponent's strength and to her insight into her own momentary weak- nesses. Hence one cannot characterize this as 'unscrupu- lousness,' because such a comprehensive organization of a war is not to be judged from heroic but from practical view- points. // is the business of diplomacy to see to it, not that a people falls heroically, but that it is preserved practically. Every road leading to this is, therefore, suitable, and its evasion must be marked as criminal neglect of duty. With the inner revolutionizing of Germany, the British concern with a threatening German world hegemony met an end which liberated British statecraft. Hereupon, however, England also no longer had any further interest in the complete obliteration of Germany from the European map. On the contrary, the most horrible collapse which occurred in the November days of 1918 con- fronted British diplomacy with a new situation, one at first not conceived as possible : t The British Empire fought for four and a half years to crush the alleged preponderance of a continental power. Now there suddenly occurred a fall which seemed to remove this power from the scene altogether. A lack of the instinct of self-preservation, even in its simplest form, now so showed itself that the European balance seemed unhinged by an event of hardly forty-eight hours: Germany destroyed and France the prime continental political power of Europe. The enormous propaganda which in this war supported, recklessly incited, and aroused the British people in all their deepest instincts and passions, now weighed like lead on the decisions of British statesmen. With the colonial, economic, and commercial crushing of Germany, the British war aim was achieved ; what went beyond this was a curtail- ment of British interests. England's enemies alone could profit from the wiping-out of Germany as a power State in 898 MEIN KAMPF continental Europe. In the November days of 1918 and into midsummer of 1919, however, the changing of English diplomacy, which in this long war utilized the emotional forces of the broad masses more than ever before, was no longer possible. It was impossible from the point of view of the actual given situation of her own people, and was im- possible with respect to the disposition of the relations of military force. France had seized the initiative and could dictate to others: the one power, however, which in these months of haggling and negotiating could have brought about a change, Germany herself lay in the convulsions of domestic civil war, and over and over again announced, through the mouths of her so-called statesmen, her readiness to accept any dictate whatsoever. Now, if in international life a nation, as a result of a total lack of its own instinct of self-preservation, ceases to be a pos- sible 'active 9 ally, she tends to sink down to a slave people and her land to the fate of a colony. Precisely in order not to allow France's power to grow too great, participation in her hankerings for loot was England's sole possible form of action for herself. In reality England did not achieve her war aim. The rise of a European power above the balance of the European continental State system was not only not prevented, but was facilitated to a heightened degree. In the year 1914 Germany as a military State was wedged in between two countries one of which was equally, and the other more, powerful. In addition, there was the superior sea power of England. By themselves, France and Russia offered obstacles and resistance to every disproportionate development of German stature. The Reich's extraordinar- ily unfavorable geo-military situation counted as an added coefficient of security against over-great access of power to this country. The coastline especially, short and cramped, was from a military viewpoint unfavorable to a conflict with POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 899 England, while the land front was comparatively extensive and open. The situation of France today is otherwise: militarily the first power, without a serious rival on the continent, practically guaranteed on its southern borders against Spain and Italy, guaranteed against Germany by the im- potence of our fatherland, its coastline along a wide front lying opposite the life nerves of the British Empire. Not only do English population centers constitute a worth- while goal for aircraft and long-distance batteries, but British commercial traffic lines would also be most un- favorably exposed to submarine activity. A U-boat war, based on the long Atlantic coast as well as on the no less extensive stretch of French frontier region on the Mediter- ranean coasts of Europe and North Africa, would have ravaging effects. Thus the fruit of the struggle against the development oj German power was politically the precipitation of French hegemony on the continent. The military result: the reinforce- ment of France as the prime power on land and the recogni- tion of the Union as co-equal sea power. Economically: the delivery of the chief spheres of British interest to her former allies. Just as England's traditional political goals desired and required more or less a Balkanization of Europe, so those of France did a Balkanization of Germany.** England's desire is and remains the prevention of the im- moderate rise of any continental power to world political im- portance; that is, the maintenance of a fixed balance of power relation among European States; for this seems to be the premise of British world hegemony. France's desire is and remains the prevention of the fostering of a self -contained German power, the preservation of a system of small German States balanced against each other in strength, without unified leadership, along with the occupation of (he left 900 MEIN KAMPF bank of the Rhine, as essential to the creation and securing of her hegemony status in Europe. The ultimate goal of French diplomacy will always stand in opposition to the final tendency of British statecraft. f Whoever undertakes, from the above viewpoint, an estimate of the present possibilities of an alliance for Ger- many must reach the conviction that the last practicable tie remaining is only English support. However horrible the results of English war policy were and are for Germany, one must not ignore the view that there is today no longer a necessary English interest in crushing Germany, but that, on the contrary, England's desire must from year to year be These views, which Hitler may have absorbed from any one of a dozen nationalist writers, are undoubtedly in part correct. But they are also partly wrong; and that is why German efforts to sunder France from England after the War so often failed. For though the interests of the two nations were often diverse e.g., the task of defining spheres of influence in the Near East after the War was a serious problem the fact remains that England knew an attack from France was inconceivable, if for no other reason than that France could not afford to be hemmed in from two sides. On the other hand, England has never been able to feel certain that Germany would not attack that its professed policy of aggrandizement would regard treaties solemnly signed or pledges given. Therefore, though French hegemony on the Continent was distasteful to many in Britain, it was always known to be something quite different from German hegemony. Accordingly Englishmen may be more sympathetic to Germans than to Frenchmen in private life (and that matters a good deal), but they cannot identify the amenities of life with national interests. Cf. Spengler's discriminating treatment of the problem in Politische Schriften. POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 901 increasingly for a limitation of the unbounded French drive for hegemony. Now, alliance policies are not advanced from considerations of backward-looking discords, but rather fructified by a knowledge of past experiences. Experience, however, should now have taught us that alliances for the achievement of negative goals suffer from internal weak- nesses. National fates are solidly welded together only through a perspective of a common triumph, in the sense of common gains, conquests, in short, a joint expansion of power. How little foreign-policy-minded our people is can be most clearly seen from current press announcements con- cerning the greater or lesser 'friendship for Germany' of this or that foreign statesman, according to which such personalities, by the adoption of an alleged position towards our nation, are viewed as a special guaranty of a charitable policy towards us. This is entirely incredible nonsense, a speculation on the unique simple-mindedness of the average politicizing German Babbitt. < No English or American or Italian statesman was ever 'pro-German. 9 Every English- man as a statesman is, of course, first of all an Englishman, every American an American, and no Italian will be found prepared to play any other politics than pro-Italian politics. Whoever, then, thinks of succeeding in concluding alliances with foreign nations on the basis of a pro-German sentiment of their leading statesmen is either a jackass or a fraud. The premise for the linking of national fates never lies in mutual respect or even congeniality, but in a perspective of mutual expediency for both contracting parties. That is, let us say, however invariably an English statesman pursues pro-English policies and never pro-German, quite definite interests of these pro-English policies can, for the most diverse reasons, duplicate pro-German interests. This, of course, need be the case only to a limited degree, and can in time turn into the exact opposite: the skill of a leading 902 MEIN KAMPF statesman shows itself solely in exactly this, always to find for the achievement of his own needs in a specified period that partner who, for the advocacy of his own interests, must follow the same course. Practical application for today can, consequently, mean only: which States at the moment have no vital interest in French economic and military power achieving an absolute ruling position of hegemony by means of the total elimination of a German Middle Europe, yes, which States, owing to their instinct of self-preservation and their previous traditional political rule, would see in such a development a threat to their own future. Because we must at last become entirely clear about this: the German people's irreconcilable mortal enemy is and remains France. It does not matter who ruled or who will rule in France, whether Bourbons or Jacobins, Bonapartists or bourgeois democrats, clerical republicans or red Bolshe- viks, the final goal of her foreign-policy activity would always be an effort to hold the Rhine frontier and to guarantee this stream by means of a disintegrated and dis- membered Germany. England desires no German world power, but France desires no power at all called Germany: a really quite essential differ- ence. Today, however, we are not fighting for position as a world power, but we must struggle for the existence of our fatherland, our national unity, and for daily bread for our children. If, with this viewpoint, we want to keep our eyes open for European allies, then there remain practically two States: England and Italy. England does not want a France whose military might, unchecked by the rest of Europe, can undertake to push a policy which, one way or another, must some day cross English interests. England can never desire a France which, by possessing the enormous western European iron and coal deposits, has the premises of a threatening world POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 903 economic status. And England, further, can never desire a France whose continental political status, thanks to the smashing of the rest of Europe, seems so secure that the resumption of a broader line of French world policy is not only made possible but actually forced. The Zeppelin bombs of another day could multiply a thousandfold any night ; the military predominance of France weighs heavy on the heart of the British Empire. But Italy, too, can and would not desire further rein- forcement of French superiority in Europe. Italy's future must always lie in a development territorially centered in the Mediterranean Basin. What Italy pursued in the War was not really a desire to see France made greater, but rather the object of giving a deathblow to her hated rivals in the Adriatic. Every added continental reinforcement of France means, nevertheless, a future restriction on Italy, and thereupon let nobody deceive himself kinship rela- tions among nations cannot at all eliminate rivalries. On the soberest and coldest reflection, it is today pri- marily these two States, England and Italy, whose most natural self-interests, at least in all essentials, do not oppose the conditions of existence of the German nation, indeed, to a certain degree are identical with them. f We must, assuredly, not overlook three factors in con- sidering such a possibility of alliance. The first is within ourselves, the other two are in the very States under con- sideration themselves. Is it at all possible for anybody to ally himself with present- day Germany? Can a power, which seeks in an alliance help for the achievement of its own offensive goals, tie itself to a State whose leaders for years present a picture of the most pitiful incompetence and pacifistic cowardice, and the greater part of whose population, because of democratic- 904 MEIN KAMPF Marxist delusion, betrays its own nation and country in a way which cries to high Heaven? Can any power today, on the theory of an eventual joint struggle for common in- terests, hope to be able to establish a worth-while relation- ship with a State, if this-State obviously has neither courage nor desire to raise even a finger in defense of its own bare existence? Will any power for whom an alliance is and should be more than a treaty guaranty of the maintenance of a condition of slow decay, such as the fatal old Triple Alliance, obligate itself for better or worse to a State whose characteristic way of life consists only in cringing servility abroad and the shameful oppression of national qualities at home; a State which has no more greatness since, on the basis of its whole demeanor, it no longer deserves it; with governments which so little concern themselves with the respect of their own compatriots that abroad there is un- surpassable amazement at them? -4- No; a power which has respect for itself and which hopes for more from allies than provender for booty-hungry parliamentarians would not ally itself with contemporary Germany, yes, cannot do it. In our present unfitness for alliance lies, indeed, the deepest and final cause of the soli- darity of our despoilers. Since Germany never defends it- self, except by means of a couple of fiery 'protests' from our parliamentary cream, the rest of the world sees little reason to fight for our protection, and the good Lord does not make coward nations free on principle, as our patriotic societies would eagerly beg of Him, therefore even those States which have no direct interest in our complete de- struction have no choice but to participate in France's pillaging expeditions, if only in order, by such co-operation and participation in the pillage, at least to prevent the exclusive strengthening of France alone, f Secondly, there must not be overlooked the difficulty of undertaking, in countries hitherto inimical to us, a trans- POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 905 formation of the great popular masses which have been in- fluenced in a definite direction by mass propaganda. One cannot for years portray a nationality as 'Hunnish,' 'piratical/ 'vandalistic,' etc., and then discover the op- posite suddenly overnight and have the former enemy re- commended as tomorrow's ally. Even more attention must be paid to the third fact, which will be of essential importance for the formation of future European alliance relations. Slight as is England's interest, seen from a British State viewpoint, in a further destruction of Germany, that of international stock exchange Jewry in such a development is great. The disparity between official or, better, tradi- tional British statecraft and the controlling Jewish stock exchange powers reveals itself nowhere better than in the various positions adopted towards questions of English foreign policy. Jewish finance desires, in opposition to the interests of the British State's welfare, not only the thorough economic smashing of Germany, but also its complete political enslavement. The internationalization of our German economy, i.e., the passing of German labor power into the possession of Jewish world finance, can be carried out only in a politically bolshevized State. But if the Marxist shock troops of international Jewish stock exchange capital defin- itively break the spine of the German national State, this can be brought about only through friendly outside assist- ance. France's army, therefore, must pound the German State structure long enough until an internally wearied The Dawes Plan, which many looked upon at the time as a far-seeing plan to rescue German economy from collapse, was violently opposed by German ultra-nationalists as a 'deed to slavery.' The welcome accorded to Stresemann and others at Geneva was 'Jewish perfidy' and 'Masonic guile.' Stresemann was a Mason. 906 MEIN KAMPF Reich succumbs to the shock troops of international world Jew finance. Hence the Jew today is the great agitator for the complete destruction of Germany. Wherever in the world we read about attacks on Germany, Jews are their fabricators; indeed, just as both before and during the War, the Jewish stock exchange and Marxist press deliberately added fuel to the hate for Germany, until State after State abandoned neutrality and entered the service of the World War coalition against their true national interests. The Jewish train of thought is, moreover, clear. The bolshevization of Germany, i.e., the extermination of the national folkish intelligentsia and the exploitation of Ger- man labor power in the yoke of world Jewish finance facili- tated thereby, is thought of solely as a preliminary to a further extension of this Jewish tendency to conquer the world. Thus, as so often in history, the mighty struggle within Germany is the great turning-point. If our people and our State fall victims to this bloodthirsty and money- thirsty Jewish tyrant over nations, then the whole world will fall into this polyp's net; if Germany frees itself from this embrace, this greatest of all dangers to the nations can be regarded as crushed for the entire world. Just as surely, then, as Jewry will utilize all its agitational work, not only to sustain the enmity of the nations against Germany, but, if possible, to intensify it, this activity parallels only to a small extent the true interests of the nations which it poisons. In general, Jewry will always fight within particular national bodies with those weapons This was a favorite Rosenberg contention. Upon what evi- dence it is supposed to rest cannot be determined. Nazis regarded the press of London as Jewish, Lord Beaverbrook being singled out as especially Hebraic. The press of France was a 'prostitute* that did the bidding of London. POLICy OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 907 which seem most efficient and promise the greatest success in the light of the well-known mentalities of these nations. Consequently, in our body national, so jumbled from the viewpoint of blood, it uses in its struggle for power the pacifist ideological conceptions sprung from these more or less 'cosmopolitan/ in short, international, tendencies; in France it employs the well-known and well-understood chauvinism; in England, economic and imperial concep- tions; in short, it always utilizes the most essential char- acteristics exhibited by a people's mentality. Only when by such means it has added a certain luxuriant influence to its wealth of economic and political power does it slough off the hobbles of this transferred weapon and now equally advance the true inner intent of its will and struggle. It begins ever more quickly to destroy, until it thus trans- forms one State after another into a mass of ruins, on the basis of which shall later be established the sovereignty of the eternal Jewish empire. In England as well as in Italy the disparity between the conceptions of the better native statecraft and the will of world stock exchange Jewry is clear; indeed, sometimes it hits one in the eye. Only in France is there today more than even an inner unanimity between the plans of the Jew-controlled stock exchange and the desires of a chauvinistically oriented na- tional statecraft. In this very identity lies an immense danger for Germany. Exactly for this reason France is, and re- mains by far, the most terrible enemy. This people, which is constantly becoming more negrofied constitutes, by its tie That France was rapidly becoming a negro country seemed evident to many Germans, and quite particularly to Austrian nationalists. Thus Professor Hans Eibl (cf . his Vom Sinn der Gegenwart) declares that the r61e of Germany in the preserva- tion of world culture has now become immensely more im- 90S MEIN KAMPF with the aims of Jewish world dominion, a grim danger for the existence of the European white race. For infection in the heart of Europe through negro blood on the Rhine cor* responds equally to the sadistic perverse vengefulness of this chauvinistic, hereditary enemy of our people, and to the ice-cold plan of the Jews thus to begin bastardizing the European continent at its core ana, through infection by inferior humanity, to deprive the white race of the foundations for a sovereign existence. What France, spurred by its own vengefulness, methodi- cally led by the Jew, is doing in Europe today, is a sin against the existence of white humanity, and some day will inspire against that nation all the avenging spirits of a knowledge which will have recognized race pollution as the original sin against mankind. For Germany, however, the French danger means an ob- ligation to subordinate all considerations of sentiment, and to reach out the hand to those who, threatened as much as we are, will not tolerate and bear France's drive toward dominion. In Europe there can be for Germany in the predictable future only two allies: England and Italy. Anybody who, glancing back, takes the trouble today to follow the foreign-policy control of Germany since the portant, since it is the bastion lodged between a bolshevistic East and the 'onward march of Africa.' French publicists tried in vain to persuade the Professor that his diagnosis of their racial characteristics was somewhat premature. The coming war against France will be justified because it must be the duty of the Germans, having seen the light, to protect Europe from Rassenschande. It may be added that the Germans also employed negro troops in Africa during the War, though they were unable to transport them to European battlefields. POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 909 Revolution, will, with respect to the continual and in- comprehensible collapse of our government, be able either only to hold his head in simple despair, or to begin an in* ternal struggle in flaming rebellion against such a regime. These actions have nothing at all to do with lack of under- standing; for the spiritual centaurs of the November parties contrived everything which would have seemed unthink- able to any thinking brain: they sued like lovers for France's favor. Yes, through all these years they tried again and again, with the touching simplicity of incorrigible dreamers, to curry favor with France; again and again they fawned before the 'great nation, ' and in every wornout trick of the French hangman immediately thought they could see the first sign of a visible change of attitude, i.e., of course, the Rathenau, acting on the advice of the British, sought during 1922 to reach an understanding with the French. Meeting in Wiesbaden with Louis Loucheur, who represented French industry, he entered into a number of agreements which for the first time indicated that perhaps a more reasonable attitude towards the reparations problem might be arrived at through negotiation. It is noteworthy that as soon as the Nazis came to power efforts were made to profess friendship for France. Here Colonel von Papen had taken the lead. Anti-French passages in Mein Kampf were disavowed. It was hoped in Germany that Rightist groups would stage a revolution against the Third Republic, receiving whatever assistance from Ger- many might be needed. The date for this revolution was even fixed for December, 1936. Subsequently (1938) a friendship pact was negotiated. What relations have existed between French Right groups and the National Socialists cannot be determined. Pierre Flandin, upon whom rests the responsi- bility for permitting remilitarization of the Rhineland, also sent a telegram of felicitation to Hitler on the occasion of the Munich Peace. Such actions may be due to the fear of Bol- shevism which pervades a portion of French bourgeois society. 910 MEIN KAMPF real wirepullers of our policy never cherished these idiotic ideas. For them (he wheedling of France was the natural means of sabotaging in this way all practical alliance policy. They were never confused about France's and her backers' objectives. What made them act in this way, as though they nevertheless believed honestly in the possibility of a change in German fate, was the sober realization that, in any other case, our people would probably have taken another road by itself. -4- It is, of course, hard even for us in the ranks of our own movement to admit England as a possible future ally. Our Jewish press always knows how to concentrate special hate against England, whereby so many good German jack- asses have so eagerly crawled into the snare set by the Jews, chattered about the 'reinforcing* of German sea power, protested against the theft of our colonies, recom- mended their reconquest, and thus helped to provide material which a Jewish scamp could then turn over to a member of his own tribe in England for practical propa- gandistic use. For the fact that what we have to struggle As a matter of fact the 'Jewish press' (which term stands for all liberal groups in post- War Germany) tried in every possible way to encourage budding signs of British sympathy. The attitude of British army men in the occupied areas was praised and utilized; the British ambassador to Berlin, Viscount D'Abernon, became a sort of semi-official adviser to the Ger- man government; and the difficulties involved in rebuilding the German navy and getting the colonies back were estimated so carefully that interest in these things was kept alive only by the nationalistic Arbeitsausschuss der deutschen Vcrbdnde, in which a great many future Nazis held membership. Every year brought increasingly large numbers of trade-union and liberal observers to Germany. These were sent back duly fortified with propaganda. On the other hand, it may be added that many German nationalists believed firmly that POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 911 for today is not 'sea power, 1 etc., should gradually have dawned even in the heads of our bourgeois political simple- tons. The orientation of German national force on these goals, without the most fundamental preliminary securing of our position in Europe, was nonsense even before the War. Today such a hope belongs to those stupidities which, in the realm of politics, are labeled with the word crimes. It was really sometimes maddening to have to watch how the Jewish wirepullers managed to occupy our people with actually highly incidental matters, to drive them into demonstrations and protests, while in the same hour France tore piece after piece out of the carcass of our body national, and the foundations of our independence and autonomous existence were cut away. I must recall a special stalking horse which in these years the Jew rode with extraordinary cleverness: South Tyrol. Yes, South Tyrol. Where is our Babbitt in whose spiritual face there does not burn instantly the flame of holy rebel- lion for this cause? If I take up precisely this question at this point, it is not least of all in order to settle accounts with that most mendacious pack which has arrogated this matter unto itself, building on the forgetfulness and stu- pidity of our broad layers to fake a national rebellion, which is as especially remote from these parliamentary swindlers as is a respectable conception of property from a magpie. Britain wanted the Reich to rearm. Passages from public or private utterances by British diplomats and business men were freely quoted in certain circles as evidence of England's feeling that only a strong Germany could 'win allies.' In addition White Russian agents close to the Nazi Party were convinced that London would favor a vigorous German assault oo Bolshevism. 91 S MEIN KAMPF At the start I would like to emphasize that, personally, I was one of those people who, when the fate of the South Tyrol was being settled, that is, beginning in August, 1914, and down to November, 1918, took up their posts where the practical defense of this region among others was taking place, that is, in the army. In those years I did my bit, not in order that South Tyrol should be lost, but in order that, just like every other German region, it should be preserved for the fatherland. t Those who did not do their bit then were the parliament- ary footpads, the whole politics-playing party mob. On the contrary, while we were fighting in the conviction that only a victorious outcome of the War alone would preserve this South Tyrol to German nationality, the gabblers of these Ephialteses agitated and incited against this victory, until finally the warring Siegfried received a stealthy stab in the back. Because the holding of the South Tyrol in German possession was, of course, not guaranteed by the mendacious inflammatory speeches of sharp parliamentarians on the Vienna Rathausplatz, or in front of the Munich Feldherrn- hatte, but only by the battalions of the fighting front. Whoever smashed them betrayed the South Tyrol, exactly as he did alt other German regions. Whoever believes today that he can solve the South Tyrolean question by protests, declarations, clubby pa- rades, etc., is either specially rascally or else a German Babbitt. One must be quite clear about the fact that the regaining of the lost regions will not come about through solemn appeals to the dear Lord or through pious hopes in a League of Nations, but only by force of arms. There remains then only the question of who is pre- pared to get back these lost regions by the defiant force of arms. As far as I am concerned personally, I could here guaran- POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 913 tee with a clear conscience that I could still muster suf- ficient courage to participate in the victorious conquest of the South Tyrol at the head of any parliamentary shock troop which might be organized, consisting of parliamentary chatterers and other party leaders along with a batch of privy councillors. The Devil knows I would be glad if, for once, a couple of shrapnel shells suddenly exploded over the heads of one of those 'fiery' protest rallies. I think the cackling would hardly be more furious or the individual fowls' [Fcdervichs: poultry or literary gentry; untrans- latable pun] dash for safety ensue more precipitately were a fox* to break into a chicken coop than would such a splendid 'protest rally' take to its heels. But really the lowest thing about all this is the fact that these gentlemen themselves do not at all believe that they will be able to achieve anything whatsoever in this way. They realize personally better than anybody the impos- sibility as well as the innocuousness of all their pottering. They carry on in this way only because today it is, of course, Hitler was bitterly attacked at the time for his readiness to shower Mussolini with compliments. The question whether or not he was indifferent to the fate of the South Tyrolese there- fore became important, especially after the minority problems of the new Italy were aired before the League of Nations and the world generally voiced its disapproval of the way in which Germans, Croats, and Slovenes were being treated. Inside the Party itself there was some unconcealed disapproval erf a course which seemed to make light of these things. The issue was raised, for example, in a lawsuit which Hitler brought against Anton Drexler in 1926. One of the witnesses was a dissident Nazi chieftain who denounced the pro-Rome course of the Party, and cited Hitler as saying that he would visit Mussolini as soon as he could travel in state, 'with three automobiles.' The interest in his South Tyrol policy was so great that in 1926 Hitler issued those portions of Man Kampf which deal with 914 MEIN KAMPF easier to chatter about the rewinning of the South Tyrol than it once was to fight for its possession. Everybody does his bit: then we sacrificed our blood, and today this outfit sharpens its beak.^- t It is charming, moreover, to observe particularly how the Viennese legitimist circles punctiliously bristle their present labor of the reconquest of the South Tyrol. Seven years ago their magnificent and august Royal House, helped, it is true, by the villainous trick of a treacherous perjury, contrived for the victorious world coalition to secure, among other things, the South Tyrol. In those days these circles supported the policy of their treasonable dy- nasty and did not give a fig about the South Tyrol or any* thing else. Today, of course, it is easier to take up the fight for these regions, a fight, indeed, now being waged only this problem as a special brochure entitled, Die Stidtiroler Frage und das Deutsche Bundnis Problem (The South Tyrol Question and the German Problem of Alliances). Notwithstanding all this, German leaders in South Tyrol thought that the Anschluss of 1938 would mean separation from Italy for them. Not a few were arrested for demonstrating. An American journalist was told in Bolzano: 'The Fuhrer passed through here on his way to Rome, and he did not even look out the window.' Doubts concerning Mussolini were rampant in Nazi circles. Writing in the Volkischer Beobachter, Rosenberg expressed grave concern over the future of Fascism. This had not, he averred, solved the Jewish problem, and besides II Duce was under the influence of Toeplitz, a banker of Hebraic extraction. General Ludendorff said gruffly in the organ of the Tannenberg Bund that in case of war Italy would be a millstone round the neck of whatever country accepted her as an ally. Other Nazis looked upon II Duce as a kind of peacock, who had merely copied rather badly some aspects of Prussianism. Mussolini, for his part, did not mince words. There exist authentic records of conversations with notable German and POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 915 with 'spiritual 9 weapons, and it is certainly always easier to talk oneself hoarse in some 'protest meeting' from some magnificent inner indignation and to get calloused fingers writing newspaper articles than, say, to blow up bridges, tap wires, and the like during the occupation of the Ruhr region. The reason why, in recent years, the 'South Tyrolean' question was made the key to German-Italian relations by certain very definite circles is quite ready to hand. Jews and Habsburg legitimists have the greatest interest in pre- venting a German alliance policy, which might some day lead to the restoration of a free German fatherland. This pottering about is undertaken now, not out of love for the South Tyrol for the latter is not helped but only harmed thereby but out of fear of some possible German-Italian accord. It is quite typical of the general mendaciousness and backbiting inclinations of these circles when, with icy coldness and brazenness, they present the matter as though somehow it was we who 'betrayed' the South Tyrol. Let this be said with complete clarity to these gentlemen : The South Tyrol was betrayed first of aU by every German of sound limbs who in the years iQi4~i8 did not stand some- Austrian statesmen in which he is heard deriding Hitler and expressing his boundless contempt for anti-Semitism and other Nazi practices. But the Rome-Berlin axis has come into being since. How sound that alliance is must remain an open ques- tion. After Austria had been occupied, Hitler addressed a telegram to the Duce saying, 'Duce, I will never forget this.' On the other hand, it has been pointed out by realists that Germany would be better served by reannexing Bolzano and Trieste than by fighting anew over Alsace-Lorraine. To date, however, the concessions Mussolini has made have cost the Germans little and given them much. As long as this benevo- lence continues, the axis ought to last. 916 MEIN KAMPF where at the front and put his services at the disposal of his fatherland; secondly, everybody who, in those years, did not help fortify the resistive capacities of our body national for maintaining the War and to solidify the endurance of our people to carry through to the end of this fight; thirdly, everybody betrayed the South Tyrol who participated in the outbreak of the November Revolution whether di- rectly in deed or indirectly through cowardly tolerance of deeds and thus smashed the one weapon whereby the South Tyrol might have been rescued; and, fourthly, the South Tyrol was betrayed by all those Parties and their supporters who put their signatures to the treaties of shame of Versailles and St. Germain. Yes, indeed, my brave protestants of the word, that is the way matters really stand ! Today I am guided by the sober knowledge that one does not regain lost territories by means of the glibness of tongue of sharp parliamentarian gabblers, but that one must regain them by means of a sharp sword, that is, through a bloody struggle. To be sure, I do not hesitate to declare that, now that the die is cast, I not only regard the regaining of the South Tyrol by war as impossible, but personally I would reject it in the conviction that, on this question, it would not be possible to achieve the burning national enthusiasm of the entire German This is an interesting and characteristic bit of dialectic. Hitler says that he need not protest against the seizure of South Tyrol because he did not sign the Treaty of St. Germain. The main issue the treatment of the German minority is thus avoided, and the debate is transferred to the terrain of responsibility for the loss of the war. The fact that the protest was concerned, not with the reconquest of South Tyrol, but with the duty of the League of Nations to enforce the statutes governing minority rights, thus passes unnoticed. POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 917 people to an extent which would constitute the precondition for victory. On the contrary, I think that, if some day this blood is to be risked, it would be a crime to set the stakes at 200,000 Germans while approximately more than 7,000,000 languish under alien rule and the main artery of the German people flows through the playground of black African hordes. If the German people wants to terminate a condition of threatening extermination in Europe, then it must not fall into the errors of the pre-War period and make enemies of every- body in the world, but it must recognize the most dangerous enemy in order to strike him with all its concentrated force. And if this victory is gained through sacrifices at other points, then our nation's posterity will, for all that, not condemn us. The more brilliant the success springing therefrom, the more highly will it know how to appreciate the terrible need and the deep woes and the bitter determination born of them. What must guide us constantly today is the fundamental insight that the regaining of lost imperial territories is primarily a question of regaining the political independence and power of the motherland. To realize and secure this through a genial policy of al- liance is the first external task of any strong leadership of our State system. We National Socialists, however, must particularly guard The occupation of the Rhineland made France the enemy. This situation could only be changed, the ultra-nationalists believed, by declaring war on France. During the Ruhr in- vasion this idea made such headway in Germany that the thought of changing from passive to active resistance was popular even in high official circles. General Ludendorff was invited to come to Berlin and express an opinion. He declared with emphasis that any thought of an active military campaign against France was utter folly. Therewith the discussion ceased. Evacuation of the Rhineland was brought about through diplomatic action. 918 MEIN KAMPF ourselves against being taken in tow by our Jew-bossed patriots of the word. Alas, if our movement, too, instead oj preparing the battle, were to go in for protests/ Germany fell through the fantastic conception of a Nibelungen league with the Habsburg State cadaver. Fantastic senti- mentality in dealing with actual foreign-policy possibilities is the best means of preventing our resurrection.-* At this point I must also quite briefly take up those ob- jections which apply to the three questions raised above; that is, to the questions of whether anybody will firstly, make any alliance with present-day Germany with its visible weakness obvious to all eyes; secondly, whether hostile nations appear capable of such a transformation; and thirdly, whether the supposed influence of Jewry is not stronger than all knowledge and good will and consequently will frustrate and nullify all plans. f I think I have sufficiently discussed half of the first question. Naturally nobody will ally himself with present- day Germany. No power in the world will venture to link its fate to a State whose governments can but destroy all confidence. As for the attempt of many of our compatriots to condone the actions of the government because of the prevalent wretched mentality of our people at the time, or to let that pass as an excuse, one must adopt the sharpest attitude against this. True, the characterlessness of our people for the last six years has been deplorable, the indifference to the weightiest affairs of the nation really crushing, but cowardice of some cries to high Heaven. It is, however, never to be forgotten that this, nevertheless, refers to a people which only a few years earlier offered the world the most admirable example of human virtues. Beginning with the August days of 1914 POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 919 until the end of the great conflict of nations, no people of the earth displayed greater manly courage, tenacious persistence, and patient endurance than our German people, become today so piteous. No one will want to suggest that the shame of our day is characteristic of the essence of our nation. What we have to endure in and around us today is only the appalling, maddening, and dementing influence of the act of perjury of November 9, 1918. Here, above all, applies the poet's saying that evil begets evil. In this period, too, however, the sound basic elements of our people have not been wholly lost, they only slumber unawakened in the depths, and sometimes one may see, radiantly shining like summer lightning in a darkling firmament, virtues which a later Germany will some day recall as the first omen of a dawning convalescence. More than once there have been thousands upon thousands of young Germans with the self-sacrificing determination once again as in 1914 freely and gladly to bring their young lives as sacrifices to the altar of the beloved fatherland. Once again millions of men are assiduously and diligently laboring as though there had never been the disturbances of a revolution. The smith stands again at his anvil, the peasant walks behind his plow, and the scholar sits in his study, all equally toiling and endowed with the same devotion to their duty. Oppressions from the side of our enemies no longer meet, as once, justifying laughter, but bitter and woe-begone faces. Unquestionably a great change in sentiment has taken place. If all this does not yet even today express itself in a re- birth of the political power idea and our national instinct for self-preservation, then the blame is on those who, less by the grace of Heaven than by self-appointment, have ruled our nation to death since 1918. Yes, when anyone complains about our people today, he should pose the question: What has been done to improve 920 MEIN KAMPF it? Is the scant support given by the people to the decisions of our governments which in reality barely existed only a sign of our meager national life-force, or is it not rather a sign of complete failure in dealing with a valuable asset? What have our governments done to reimplant again in this people the spirit of proud self-respect, manly defiance, and wrathful hate? *+ When, in the year 1919, the peace treaty was imposed on the German people, one would have been justified in hoping that the cry for German freedom would be power- fully promoted through this very instrument of boundless oppression. Peace treaties whose demands are a scourge to a people not infrequently beat the first drum roll for a coming rebellion. What might have been done with the peace treaty of Versailles! How could this instrument of boundless extortion and shameful abasement have become, in the hands of a willing government, a means of whipping up national passions to the boiling point! How, by means of the genial propa- gandistic utilization of these sadistic atrocities, could a people's indifference be raised to indignation, and indigna- tion to the most blazing anger! t How every one of these points could have been burned into the brain and feeling of this nation until, finally, in the heads of sixty million men and women the same sense of shame and the same hate would have become a single fiery sea of flames, out of whose glow a steely will would have risen and a cry forced itself: We want arms once morel Yes, such a treaty of peace could do that. In the bound- lessness of its oppression, in the shamefulness of its de- mands, rests the greatest propaganda weapon for the re-arousing of the dormant life spirits of a nation. But for that, of course, everything, beginning with the POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 921 child's primer down to the last newspaper, every theater and every movie, every billboard and every bare wall, must be placed at the service of this single great mission, until the prayer of fear of our present-day parlor patriots, ' Lord deliver us! 9 changes in the mind of the smallest child to the burning plea: 'Almighty God, bless our arms; be just as Thou always wert; judge now, whether we deserve freedom; Lord, bless our battle/' Everything was shirked and nothing was done. Then who will be surprised if our people is not what it should be and could be? If the rest of the world sees in us only a handyman, an obsequious dog, who thankfully licks the hands which have just beaten him? Our capacity for an alliance is certainly burdened today by our people, but most heavily by our governments. They, in their depravity, are guilty of the fact that after eight years of the most boundless oppression there exists so little will to freedom. Just as intimately as an active alliance policy is linked to the necessary evaluation of our people, so is this evalua- tion again conditioned by the existence of a government power which does not seek to be a handyman for foreign States, not a taskmaster curtailing its own power, but rather the herald of the national conscience. The German government did whatever lay in its power to encourage ideas of resistance. It declared the anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles a day of mourning; it encouraged ef- forts to prove that Germany was not morally responsible for the War; and it financed, by every means at its disposal, all movements that seemed to promise a recrudescence of the ancient fighting spirit. Unfortunately, it did little to dramatize or popularize the form of government under which the people lived. Constant bickering between the parties took the place of a common joy in truly remarkable achievements. 922 MEIN KAMPF But should our people have a State leadership which sees its mission thus, not six years will elapse before a valiant Reich foreign-affairs leadership stands at the disposal of an equally valiant will of a freedom-hungry people. The second objection, the great difficulty of the trans- formation of hostile nations into friendly allies, can be well answered thus: The general anti-German psychosis inspired in other countries by war propaganda continues to exist, necessarily, as long as the German Reich does not, through re-establishing a German witt to self-preservation apparent to all, again reveal the characteristics of a State which sits at the general European chessboard and with which others can play. Only when the unconditional guaranty of a possible fit- Germany's restoration to a place of honor in the society of nations began during the Ruhr invasion, when the prevalent feeling of bitter antipathy gradually changed to one of sym- pathy. Later on, through the efforts of Stresemann and Wilhelm Marx, cordial good will replaced the defiant hatred of yore. The Brtining administration, waging a desperate battle for justice and bread, transformed the Anglo-Saxon world into a pro-German camp. In retrospect the newspapers of the United States for the years 1930-1932 look like German propaganda sheets. In the meantime German achievement in aviation, science, business, art and literature was more and more widely acclaimed. Museums began to display the works of modern German painters, thitherto unknown; the novels of Thomas Mann, the art of the theater as displayed by Max Reinhardt and others, and the standards set by German con- ductors and musicians, gave Germany a position of leadership in these fields; and the popularity of travel in the fatherland gave tens of thousands insight into Germany's problems while they were familiarizing themselves with the German landscape. POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 923 ness for alliance appears to be present in government and people can this or that power, moved by parallel interests, think of reconstructing public opinion by propagandist activity. Even this requires, of course, years of continuous adroit labor. In exactly this requirement of a long duration of time for the altering of popular sentiment lies reason for cautiousness in undertaking it, i.e., nobody will launch such an activity if he is not convinced without reservation of the value of such labor and of its future fruits. Nobody will want to alter a nation's spiritual orientation because of a more or less clever foreign minister's empty bragging without having a tangible guaranty of the real value of a new orientation. Otherwise this would induce a complete shattering of public opinion. The most dependable assur- ance for the possibility of a future alliance with a State, however, is likewise based, not on the bombastic oratorical style of individual government members, but rather on the obvious stability of a definite, apparently expedient govern- mental tendency, as well as in an analogously oriented public opinion. The belief in this will be all the more solid, the greater the visible activity of a government power is in the field of the propagandistic preparation and support of its work, and the more fanatically, on the other hand, the will of public opinion reflects itself in the tendency of the government. A nation, then, will be regarded as fit for alliance if (in our Spengler wrote (in Zur Weltlage) : ' It has been proved again and again that mass-meetings and class-conscious political parties are not schools which the shaper of a foreign policy can attend with impunity. France owes its great successes to the fact that all its leading men were trained in St. Petersburg dur- ing the period of the entente cordiale. Diplomacy is a trade by itself, which one must not confuse with war, business, or party politics. 9 924 MEIN KAMPF case) government and public opinion equally fanatically proclaim and advocate the will to struggle for freedom. This, then, is the first presumption for beginning the transforma- tion of public opinion in other States, which, because of their understanding of their very own interests, are willing to march next to the partner who seems to them appropriate to these interests, that is, to make an alliance. But there is one thing more in this connection : Since the transformation of a definite national spiritual constitution demands hard work in itself and cannot at first be understood by many, it is simultaneously a crime and a stupidity to give by one's own faults opposing elements weapons for counter- efforts. It must be understood that it will necessarily take some time before a people has thoroughly grasped the inner plans of a government, inasmuch as proclamations cannot be published concerning the final end-goals of a particular preparatory political work, but only the blind faith of the masses or the intuitive insight of the intellectually superior layers of leadership can be counted on. Since many people, however, do not possess this clairvoyant political sixth sense and prophetic gift, but explanations cannot be of- fered for political reasons, a section of the intellectual leadership will always oppose new tendencies which, be- cause of their opaqueness, are likely to be appraised as mere experiments. In this way the opposition of timid conservative elements is awakened. Particularly for this reason it is, however, a matter of the highest duty to take care that all usable weapons pos- sible be taken from the hands of such disturbers of the pre- paration of the road to mutual understanding, especially since, as in our case, there are involved anyway only the quite unrealizable, purely fantastic babble of windy parlor patriots and Babbitty coffee-house politicians. Because, on quiet reflection, nobody will really care to dispute that POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 925 yelling for a new navy, the reconquest of our colonies, etc., is really twaddle possessing not even a notion of practical execution. The way in which these most senseless effusions of the partially harmless, partially insane, protest strug- gles, which are always secretly serviceable to our mortal enemy, are politically exploited in England may not be called favorable to Germany. Thus we wear ourselves out in harmful little demonstrations against God and all the world and forget the first principle of every success, namely: whatever you do, do it whole-heartedly. While beefing against five or ten States, the concentration of the whole will power and physical force for a blow at the heart of our most execrable enemy is neglected and the possibility of reinforcement for this settlement of accounts by means of an alliance is sacrificed.^ We may suffer many bitter woes. But this is far from being grounds for abandoning reason and, with senseless howls, squabbling with all the world, instead of standing up with concentrated force against the most deadly enemy. Furthermore, the German people has no moral right to blame the rest of the world for its woes as long as it does not k*ing to book the criminals who sold and betrayed their awn This 4 concentration ' is one of the great reasons for the success to date of Nazi foreign policy . An objective is agreed upon. The relationship between the end to be reached and the general European situation is then carefully ferreted out. Thus Hitler waited until Mussolini was up to his ears in Ethiopia and Spain and Lord Halifax was breeding doves of peace, and then an- nexed Austria. The Czechoslovakia destiny was boiled down, in the final analysis, to the question whether Dr. Benes was to remain in office. By comparison Mussolini has so far appeared to disadvantage. He made a frontal assault on Ethiopia. He assumed that the whole Spanish army would support Franco, and thus became involved in a war lasting more than two and a half years. 926 MEIN KAMPF country. It is not really when, from a distance, we scold and protest against England, Italy, etc., but let walk among us the ruffians who, in the pay of hostile war propaganda, took from us our arms, broke our moral backbone, and jobbed the crippled Reich for thirty pieces of silver. The enemy is doing only what might have been foreseen. We should have learned from his attitude and his actions. Whoever will completely fail to rise to the height of such a view, however, may finally reflect that there then remains only renunciation, because then any alliance policy dis- appears for all the future. Because if we will not ally our- selves with England, owing to the fact that she stole col- onies from us, or with Italy, because she has the South Tyrol, with Poland or Czechoslovakia on general principles, then there remains nobody else in Europe but France, It can hardly be doubtful whether this serves the German people. It remains doubtful only whether such a view is represented by a simple-minded dunce or by a rapacious bandit. When it comes to leaders, incidentally, I always believe in the latter. Thus, in so far as human judgment can tell there can very well come about a transformation in the soul of hitherto hostile individual nations, whose true interests in the future will have a basis similar to ours, if the domestic power of our State, as well as the obvious will for the de- fense of our existence, makes us again appear to have value as an ally and, furthermore, if the opponents of such a The idea that the statesmen of the Republic were in the pay of foreign governments appears to have originated with Hugo Stinnes, the Westphalian magnate and speculator. Right radi- cal groups emphasized particularly the assumed venality of Stresemaim. Even otherwise reputable conservative journals echoed these charges, for the sake of their propagandist^ effect. POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 927 coining alliance with nations heretofore hostile to us are not again given food for their activity because of our own in- eptitude or even criminal actions. t The third objection is the most difficult to answer. Is it conceivable that the representatives of the real interests of the nations which might enter an alliance could realize their plans against the will of the Jewish mortal enemy of free folk States and national States? Can the forces for example, traditional British state- craft still break the destructive Jewish influence or not? This question, as we have already said, is very hard to answer. It depends on too many factors for a conclusive judgment to be given. One thing is certain: In one State the existing State power can be regarded as so solidly stabilized, and so unconditionally at the service of national interests, that we can no longer speak of a really effective blocking of political needs by international Jewish forces. The struggle which Fascist Italy is carrying on, perhaps at bottom unconsciously (although personally I do not think this is the case), against the three main weapons of Jewry is the best omen that, if only indirectly, the fangs will be torn out of this super-State power. The prohibition of Masonic spcret societies, the persecution of the super-national press as well Oddly enough, there is no mention here of 'international finance. 1 To have spoken of it would, indeed, have meant being guilty of a certain tactlessness, since II Duce's foremost service , to his people undoubtedly lay in the skill with which he made foreign investors believe that Italy was a going concern. Current quotations for Italian bonds are still comparatively high. Milan obligations sold (February, 1939) at four times the price asked for Berlin obligations. Masonry has always been an 928 MEIN KAMPF as the continuous undermining of international Marxism, and, on the other hand, the steady fortifying of the Fascist State conception, will, in the course of years, enable the Fascist government to serve the interests of the Italian nation in- creasingly, without concern for the hissing of the Jewish world hydra. The matter is more difficult in England. In this country of 'the freest democracy' the Jew still underhandedly dic- tates to public opinion almost without hindrance. And nevertheless here, too, there is proceeding a continuous struggle between the representatives of British State interests and the champions of a Jewish world dictator- ship. How sharply these antitheses sometimes crash against each other could be most clearly seen for the first time after the War in the different positions taken on the Japanese question, on the one hand, by British State leadership, and, on the other, by the press. Immediately after the end of the War the old American- Japanese mutual antagonism again began to manifest itself. Naturally, the great European world powers could not remain indifferent to this newly threatening danger of inconsequential factor in Italy, despite some rumors to the contrary. The 'international press* and Mussolini have seldom been friendly, the reason being censorship. It would hardly do to enumerate all the American 'Aryan ' reporters who have been propelled out of Italy. Mussolini is a convert from interna- tional Marxism. During 1938, the Quirinal revised its attitude toward the Jews. These were now considered a menace to the prosperity of the country, and a number of laws on the subject were passed. The Vatican expressed its disapproval of these measures, and the most pro-Fascist of the Italian Cardinals denounced them as indicative of heresy. The average Italian hook his head in amazement. POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 929 war. All the kinship connections, however, could not pre- vent a certain feeling of envious concern in England for the growth of the American Union in all fields of international economic and power politics. A new mistress of the world seemed to be growing out of the former colonial country, the child of the great mother. It is understandable if England today re-examines her former alliances in anxious disquiet and if British statecraft stares with dread toward a time when it will no longer be said : 4 England overseas, 1 but 'the seas for the Union.' The gigantic American State Colossus, with its enormous wealth of virgin soil, is more difficult to attack than the wedged-in German Reich. If some time here, too, the dice shall roll for a final decision, England would be doomed, were she to stand alone. Hence they anxiously reach out for the yellow fist and cling to an alliance which, viewed racially, is perhaps irresponsible, but which, nevertheless, politically offers the sole possibility of reinforcing the British world position in the face of the aspiring American continent. While, then, English State leadership did not, despite the joint struggle on the battlefields of Europe, wish to decide to relax the alliance with its Asiatic partner, the entire Jew press fell on this alliance from behind. < t How can the organ of a Northcliffe, the loyal shield- bearer of the British struggle against the German Reich, now suddenly practice disloyalty and take its own course? The destruction of Germany was not an English, but primarily a Jewish, interest, just as today, too, a destruc- tion of Japan serves British State interests less than the These reflections are copied, for the most part, from the Dearborn Independent, Mr. Henry Ford's newspaper. Much of the anti-Semitic propaganda once disseminated by this journal is still current in Germany. 930 MEIN KAMPF far-reaching desires of the leaders of the projected Jewish world empire. While England wears itself out maintaining its position on the globe, the Jew organizes his attack for the conquest of the same. He sees the contemporary European States already as powerless tools in his hand, whether through the indirect means of so-called Western Democracy, or in the form of direct rule through Russian bolshevism. Yet it is not only the old world which he regards as thus ensnared, but the same fate threatens the new, also. Jews are the regents of the stock exchange power of the American Union. Every year they manage to become increasingly the controlling masters of the labor power of a people of 120,000,000 souls; one great man, Ford, to their exasperation still holds out independently there even now. With rapacious cleverness they knead public opinion and form from it the instrument of a struggle for their own future. Already the greatest heads of Jewry envisage the ap- proach of the fulfillment of the hereditary slogan of the great devouring of the nations. Within this great herd of denationalized colonial regions, a single independent State could, at the last moment, still undo the entire job. Because a bolshevist world could survive only if it included everything. If only one State remains standing in its national power and greatness, the world empire of Jewish satrapies would and must, like every tyranny on the globe, succumb to the power of the national idea. The Jew knows only too accurately that, owing to his millennium of adaptation, he has it well within his power to undermine European peoples and to train them to be sexless bastards, only he would hardly be in a position to subject an Asiatic national State like Japan to this fate. Today he can ape Germans and English, Americans and POLICY OF ALLIANCE AFTER THE WAR 931 French, but he has no bridges to the yellow Asiatics. Therefore, he strives to break the Japanese national State by the power of existing similar structures, to finish off the dangerous opponent before the last State power is transformed in his hands into a despotism over defenseless beings. He dreads a Japanese national State in his millennial Jew empire, and therefore wishes its destruction in advance of the founding of his own dictatorship. Therefore, he is now inciting the nations against Japan, as against Germany, and it can happen that, while British statecraft still tries to build on the alliance with Japan, the British-Jewish press already demands struggle against the ally and prepares the destructive war under the proclama- tion of democracy and the battle cry: Down with Japanese militarism, and imperialism. Thus insubordinate has the Jew now become in England. The struggle against this Jewish world danger will, moreover, also start at this point. And again precisely the National Socialist movement has its mightiest tasks to fulfill : // must open the eyes of the people concerning foreign na- tions and must over and over again recall who is the real enemy of our present world. In place of the insane hate for Aryans f from whom almost anything at all can separate us, people to whom, however, we are united by common blood or the main lines of a related culture, it must condemn to general wrath the evil enemy of humanity as the true creator of all suffering. But it must see to it that, at least in our country, the most The rivalry between Japan and Russia over 'spheres of influence' in China indicates to Hitler that Judaism is bent on undermining the healthy structure of the Japanese State. Japan was regarded by White Russians as a possible ally. 932 MEIN KAMPF deadly enemy is recognized and that the struggle against him, like an illuminating sign of a brighter epoch, also shows to the other nations the road to the salvation of a struggling Aryan humanity. For the rest, may Reason be our leader, Will our might. The sacred duty to act thus gives us determination, and our highest protector remains our faith.-* CHAPTER XIV EASTERN ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY THERE are two reasons which induce me to subject the relations of Germany to Russia to a special examina- tion: (1) In this case we are concerned with perhaps the most decisive matter of German foreign affairs as a whole; and (2) this question is also the touchstone of the political capacity of the young National Socialist movement to think clearly and to act correctly. I must confess that sometimes the second point especially fills me with anxious concern. Since our young movement gets its membership material, not from the camp of the indifferent, but chiefly from very extreme views of life, it is only too natural if these men are, in the field of understand- ing foreign affairs as well as elsewhere, first burdened with the prejudices or narrow comprehension of the circles to which they previously belonged politically and by the views of life of those circles. This does not apply at all exclusively to him who comes to us from the left. On the contrary. However harmful his previous information on such problems may have been, in not a few cases it was at least again partially balanced by a surviving stock of natural and 934 MEIN KAMPF healthy instincts. Then it was necessary only to replace the earlier forced influence by a better attitude, and one may very often regard as the best allies the instincts still available and healthy in themselves and an impulse toward self-preservation. On the other hand, it is much harder to lead to clear political thinking a man whose previous training in this field was not only entirely without any reason and logic, but who has sacrificed, in addition to everything else, even the last bit of natural instinct on the altar of objectivity. It is precisely the members of our so-called intelligentsia who are the most difficult to bring to a really clear and logical advocacy of their interests and the interests of their people. They are not only burdened with a formal dead weight of the most senseless notions and prejudices, but they have, in addition, to make matters even worse, lost and abandoned every healthy impulse toward self-preservation. The National Socialist movement, too, must stand its ground with these people, a difficult job because, despite complete incompetence, they unfortunately are not infrequently possessed of extraordinary conceit, which leads them to look down upon other, generally even healthier, people, without any inner justification. Supercilious, arrogant know-it-alls without any capacity for testing and weighing, which, however, must be recognized as the pre-condition for every will and action in foreign affairs.^ Since just these circles are now starting to switch the direction of our foreign policy in the most fatal way from a real advocacy of folkish interests of our people, to place it instead at the service of their fantastic ideology, I feel myself bound before my supporters to treat the most im- portant foreign-affairs question that is, relations with Russia specially and as fundamentally as is necessary for a general understanding and possible within the scope of a work of this sort. ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 935 I want in general, moreover, to make the following addi- tional preliminary remarks: If we understand by foreign policy the regulation of the relations of one people to the rest of the world, then the manner of regulation is conditioned by quite definite facts. As National Socialists we can further lay down the following principle as to the essence of the foreign policy of a folkish State: The foreign policy of a folkish State is charged with guar- anteeing the existence on this planet of the race embraced by the State, by establishing between the number and growth of the population, on the one hand, and the size and value of the soil and territory, on the other hand, a viable, natural relation- ship. Moreover, only that relationship can ever be regarded as healthy which assures the nourishment of a people from its own soil and territory. Every other situation, though it may last centuries and even millennia, is nevertheless unhealthy, and will sooner or later lead to the injuring if not the destruction of the people concerned. Only a sufficiently extensive area on this globe guarantees a nation freedom of existence. Moreover, the necessary extent of the domain to be occupied cannot be judged exclusively by contemporary requirements, nor even by the quantity of the produce of the soil compared to the population. For, as I have already argued in the first volume, under 4 German Alliance Policy Before the War/ the area of a State has also another, military- political significance than as a direct source of nourishment of a people. When a people has secured its nourishment for The German press reported Hitler as saying in 1931 : 'I have no intention of promoting inner colonization on a grand scale. . . . We can undertake a purposive rural settlement program only when the room we need has been placed at our disposal.' 936 MEIN KAMPF itself by virtue of the extent of its soil and territory, k is nevertheless necessary to think also of securing the territory in hand. This depends on the State's general power-political force and strength which is to no small extent conditioned by geo-military considerations. Hence the German people can defend its future only as a world power. For almost two thousand years the defense of our nation's interests, as we shall term our more or less happy foreign policy, was world history. We ourselves wit- nessed this, because the great struggle of the nations in the years 1914-18 was only the German people's struggle for its existence on this planet, although we describe the type of event itself as World War. The German nation entered this battle as an alleged world power. I say alleged here, because in reality it was not. Had the German nation in the year 1914 had a different relation between territorial area and population, Germany would really have been a world power, and regardless of all other factors the War could have been happily terminated. It is not my task here, nor at all my intention, to point out the if in case the but had not existed. Nevertheless, I feel it an absolute necessity to expose the actual situation coldly and unvarnished, to point to its alarming weak- nesses, in order to deepen, at least in the ranks of the National Socialist movement, insight into what is required. Germany is no world power today. Even if our momentary military impotence were to be overcome, we would still have no claim to this title. What is the importance on this planet today of a structure, the relation of the population of which to its area stands so miserably as that of present- day Germany? In an epoch when the earth is gradually being divided among States, some of which encompass almost whole continents, one cannot speak of a structure as a world power the political mother country of which i? limited to the ridiculous area of barely five hundred thou- sand square kilometers. ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 937 Looked at purely territorially, the area of the German Reich compared with that of the so-called world powers altogether vanishes. One can really not take England as a standard of comparison, because the English mother country is really only the great capital of the British world empire which calls its own almost a fourth of the entire earth's surface. We must also consider as giant States first of all the American Union, then Russia and China. All magnitudes of greater area, some of them ten times greater than the present-day German Reich. And even France must be counted among these States. Not only because the colored human stock of its enormous empire supple- ments its army to an ever greater extent, she is racially making such progress in negrofying herself that one can really speak of the establishment of an African State on European soil. The colonial policy of present-day France cannot be compared with that of Germany in the past. Let the development of France continue three centuries more in the present manner, and the last remnants of Prankish blood will have succumbed in the developing European-African mulatto State. A mighty self-contained area of settlement from the Rhine to the Congo filled with This reflects the theory of 'Geographical Polities' (Geopoli- tik), which is presumably a scientific attempt to show that states and their history are determined by their geographical situations. Founded in Sweden by R. Kjellen, the science was introduced into Germany by R. Haushofer, who also founded the Zcitschfift fiir Geopolitik (Journal for GeopMtik). Many passages in this and other chapters of Mein Kampf have paral- lels in that periodical, and Haushofer is known to have in- fluenced Hitler's views. The principal result was the general Naxi theory that a Germany plus more space automatically meant a greater Germany. 'Geopolitical' proof for the neces- sity of Anschluss to Germany was disseminated throughout Austria. 938 MEIN KAMPF an inferior race developing out of continual hybridization, t That differentiates the French from the old German colonial policy. The former German colonial policy, like everything we did, was a half measure. It neither enlarged the area of settlement of the German race, nor did it make an attempt criminal though it would have been to bring about a strengthening of the Reich through the introduction of black blood. The Askaris in German East Africa was a small, dilatory step along this road. In reality, it served only for the defense of the colony itself. The idea of bring- ing black troops onto a European battlefield, entirely apart from its realistic impossibility in the World War, never came up even as a plan which might be carried out under more favorable circumstances, whereas, on the contrary, it was felt by the French to be another internal reason for their colonial activity. Thus we see on the globe today a number of power States, some of which not only far outstrip the strength of our German population, but which have the greatest support of their position of political power above all in their area. Never was the relation of the German Reich to other world States on the scene so unfavorable, measured in terms of area and population, than at the beginning of our history two thousand years ago and once again today. At that time, as a young people, we stormily entered a world of great State structures in decline, the last giant among which, Rome, we ourselves helped to kill. Today we find ourselves in a world of great power States in formation, with our own Reich increasingly falling into insignificance. We must keep this bitter truth coolly and soberly before our eyes. We must follow and compare the population and area of the German Reich with those of other States through the centuries, and I know that then everybody will with dismay come to the conclusion which I have already ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 939 stated at the beginning of this observation : Germany is no longer a world power, regardless of whether it is strong or weak in a military sense. <+ We have dropped out of all relation to the other great States of the earth, and this thanks alone to the really fatal foreign-policy leadership of our nation, thanks to the com- plete lack, I might almost say, of an inherited determination of a fixed foreign-policy goal, and thanks to the loss of every healthy instinct and impulse of self-preservation. If the National Socialist movement really desires to be consecrated by history to a great mission for our people, it must, penetrated by knowledge of, and filled with suffering for, her real situation on this earth, valiantly and conscious of its goal, take up the fight against the aimlessness and incompetence which have heretofore guided the German people on the course of foreign affairs. It must, then, without regard to 'traditions' and prejudices, find the courage to assemble our people and their might for a march forward on that road which leads out of the present constriction of the domain of life, and hence also Compare Ernst Ottwalt: 'The foreign policy of the N.S.G.W.P. is based on racial argumentation. England is viewed as the natural ally of Germany, because blood is thicker than water. An alliance with England is possible only if Germany refrains from competing with British trade, and restricts itself to its continental r&le. There must be a specific declaration that Germany does not seek to enlarge its terri- torial extent or the scope of its interests by attacking in a westerly direction. In exchange Germany must be given a free hand in the East, in order to rid the world of Bolshevism, to break up the present system of border states, and to use the whole of Eastern Europe as territory on which to settle the surplus German population. When it comes time to settle accounts with France, we reckon with British neutrality. Neutrality must be the British attitude, because France is succumbing more and more to 'negroidizing' and is therefore 940 MEIN KAMPF permanently liberates from the danger of vanishing off this earth or having to enter the service of others as a slave nation. The National Socialist movement must endeavor to eliminate the discrepancy between our population and our area the latter viewed not only as a source of nourishment, but also as a point of support for power politics between our historical past and the hopelessness of our impotence today. It must, moreover, remain conscious that we are also obligated to a high duty as the guardians of the highest human race on this earth, and it will be all the more able to fulfill this duty, the more it contrives that the German people recovers its racial sense and, in addition to breeding dogs, horses, and cats, takes mercy on its own blood. t If I describe previous German foreign policy as aimless and incompetent, the proof of my contention resides in the realistic failure of this policy. The result of the struggle on this earth could not have been worse than what we see it to be today had our nation been spiritually inferior or cowardly. Nor should the tendency of the last pre-War a constant threat to the preservation of the white race in Europe. 1 (Cf. Dcutschland Erwache!) The foregoing pages are derived primarily from the findings of geopolitical science. The Slavic peoples pushed up to the Vistula in the north and established themselves in the Bo- hemian Forest to the south. Thereupon the Teutonic knights launched a counter-offensive in the Vistula Region (East Prus- sia), while the Bavarians peopled with Germans the region south of the Bohemian forest. Nevertheless the Czechs clung to the forest proper; and thence they could not be dislodged by the Habsburgs. After the World War they fortified this region, which thereupon constituted a Slavic fortress sundering North from South 'Germany. 9 The taking of that bastion without firing a shot is Hitler's greatest achievement. ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 941 decades mislead us about this; because the strength of an empire cannot be measured against itself, but only through comparison with other States. Precisely such a comparison, however, provides the proof that the accession of strength of other States was not only more uniform but even greater in its effects in the final result; that, hence, despite all the apparent rise, Germany's road really diverged from that of the other States more and more and fell way behind ; in short, the difference in magnitude increased to our disfavor. Indeed, as time went on we fell behind more and more even in population. Now, since our people certainly is surpassed by no other on the earth in valor, and, indeed, taken all in all, has certainly staked the most blood of all the nations of the earth to maintain its existence, failure can be due solely to the wrong way in which it was staked. When we examine the political experiences of our nation for more than a thousand years in this connection, let all the innumerable wars and struggles march past our eyes, and examine the final result which they produced and which confronts us today, we will have to confess that there emerge from this sea of blood really only three phenomena of which we may speak as lasting fruits of clearly defined transactions in foreign and general politics. (1) The colonization of the Ostmark, carried out largely by the Bavarians; (2) the acquisition and penetration of the region east of the Elbe; and, (3) the organization by the Hohenzollerns of the Bran- denburg-Prussian State as a model and crystalliza- tion nucleus of a new Reich. An instructive warning for the future ! The first two great successes of our foreign policy remain the most enduring. Without them, our nation today would no longer play any r61e at all. These were the first, and unfortunately the only successful, attempts to bring the 942 MEIN KAMPF growing population into consonance with the extent of sofl and territory. And it must really be regarded as fatal that our German writing of history never understood how to estimate correctly these two, far and away greatest and, for posterity, most important achievements, but rather, compared with them, glorified everything possible, ad- miringly praised dreamy heroism and innumerable adven- turous wars and combats, instead of finally recognizing how unimportant most of these events have been for the main line of national development. * The third great achievement of our political activity consists of the creation of the Prussian State and the cultivation, which it precipitated, of a special State concep- tion, as well as of the bringing into organizational form and adaptation to the modern world of the German army's impulse of self-preservation and self-defense. The trans- formation of the individual defense idea into national defense duty sprung from this State structure and its new State conception. The importance of this development cannot in the least be exaggerated. Precisely the German nation, super-individualistically disintegrated because of its jumbled blood, regained from discipline through the Prussian army organism, at least in part, the capacity for organization which it had long missed. What is aboriginally present in other nations as a result of their herd instinct, we artificially reacquired for our national community, at least partially, through the process of military training. Con- sequently, moreover, the elimination of universal military service which might be of no great moment to dozens of other nations is of the most momentous significance to us. Ten German generations without corrective and pedagogical military training, abandoned to the evil effects of their jumbled blood and consequent jumbled view of life, and this nation would really have lost the last bit of any in- dependent existence on this planet. The German spirit ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 943 could make its contribution to culture only in individual men in the bosom of foreign nations, without even having its origin recognized. Culture-fertilizers, until the last trace of Aryan-Nordic blood had been ruined or extinguished in us. It is remarkable that the significance of these real political successes which our nation wrested from its struggles of more than a millennium is far better grasped and ap- preciated by our opponents than by ourselves. Even today we rave about heroism which robbed our nation of millions of its noblest blood-bearers, and which nevertheless re- mained entirely sterile in the end. The distinction between the real political successes of our nation and the staking of national blood for fruitless ends is of the highest significance for our present and future attitude. We National Socialists must never at any time join in the vile patrioteering of our contemporary bourgeois world. It is especially fatal to regard the last pre-War developments as even in the slightest binding on our own course. Not a single obligation of the entire historical period of the nineteenth century, which was laid down in that period, can be met by us. In contrast to the attitude of the representatives of that epoch, we must again profess the advocacy of the Not much has been done to date towards reaching this objective. Austria was an overpopulated country, though its possible future as a tourist paradise must not be discounted. The regions acquired from Czechoslovakia afford no notable additions in the form of soil on which to settle German peasants. Even from a military point of view, the gains are not appreci- able, apart from the capture of the Czech fortifications and the gain of additional man-power. In some ways Germany is now more open to attack than it was previously. This is a statement to the effect that Germany must gird for 944 MEIN KAMPF supreme point of view of every foreign policy; that is: To bring the land into consonance with the population. Yes, we can learn from the past only that we must undertake the setting of objectives for our political work in two directions: Soil and territory as the goal of our foreign policy, and a new unified foundation, solid in its view of life, as the goal of our domestic work. I want still briefly to take a position on the question of the extent to which the demand for soil and territory ap- pears to be ethically and morally justified. This is necessary because, unfortunately, even in so-called folkish circles, there turn up all sorts of pathetic babblers who occupy themselves sketching for the German people a rectification of the injustice of 1918 as the goal of its foreign-policy activity, but beyond that find it necessary to assure the entire world of folkish fraternity and sympathy. I would like, moreover, to say the following in anticipa- tion: The demand for the re-establishment of the frontiers of the year 1914 is political nonsense of such a degree and consequences as to look like a crime. Entirely aside from the fact that the frontiers of the Reich in the year 1914 were everything but logical. For they were, in reality, neither com- battle because it is possible to rectify in no other way the trea- ties by which its greatness has been impaired. Nevertheless the record of diplomacy is not as bad as it may seem. Belgium had virtually agreed to return Eupen-Malmedy, when the im- placable Poincare halted negotiations at the moment when success was assured; and it is quite generally conceded that in return for concessions to France on the armament question, a satisfactory solution of the Polish Corridor problem could have been found. The German attempt to form a customs union with Austria in 1930 was badly bungled, yet even so the World Court did not vote down the proposal by a wide margin. ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 945 plete with respect to the inclusion of people of German na- tionality, nor intelligent with respect to geo-military ap- propriateness. They were not the outcome of considered political action, but momentary frontiers of a political struggle in no way concluded, indeed, partly the result of the play of chance. With equal justice, and in many cases with greater justice, one could select any other milestone of German history to proclaim the re-establishment of the relations then prevailing as the goal of foreign-policy activity. The aforementioned demand, however, corresponds fully to our bourgeois world, which at this point, too, has not a single creative political thought for the future, but rather lives in the past and in the very recent past at that; for even their backward gaze does not reach beyond their own epoch. The law of inertia ties them to a given situation, compels them to offer resistance to any alteration of the same, with- out, however, ever increasing their defensive activity be- yond mere inertia. Thus it is a matter of course that these people's political horizon does not extend beyond the fron- tiers of the year 1914. But in so far as they proclaim the re-establishment of those frontiers as the political goal of their actions, they chain themselves permanently to the crumbling alliance of our opponents. This is the only ex- planation of why, eight years after a world struggle in which States with desires and aims, some of which were most heterogeneous in nature, participated, the coalition of the former victors can still keep itself together in a more or less tight form. All these States were, in their time, exploiters of the German collapse. The fear of our strength then induced subordination of the mutual greed and envy of the in- dividual powers. They saw the best protection against a coming rebellion in the most general possible inheriting of our Reich which could be managed. A bad conscience with fear of our national strength is even today still the most 946 MEIN KAMPF enduring cement holding together the individual members of this alliance* And we do not disappoint them. In so far as our bour- geois world lays down as a political program for Germany the re-establishment of the frontiers of the year 1914, it scares back every partner who might want to bolt the al- liance of our enemies, because he must fear being attacked in isolation and thereby forfeiting the protection of his individual allies. Every individual State feels itself dis- turbed and threatened by that slogan. It is, moreover, doubly senseless: (1) because the instruments of power with which to translate it from the smoke of club evenings to reality are lacking; and (2) because the result, if it were realized, would still be so miserable that it would not pay, by God, to invest the blood of our nation for that again. For the fact that even the re-establishment of the borders of the year 1914 could be achieved only with blood should seem questionable to hardly anybody at all. Only childishly naive souls can lull themselves with the idea that they can bring about a rectification of Versailles by intrigue and begging. Entirely apart from the fact that such an attempt would presuppose the nature of a Talleyrand, which we do not have. Half our political figures are rather cunning but equally characterless elements, who are on the whole inimically disposed towards our people, while the other half is composed of kind-hearted, harmless, and easy-going nitwits. Moreover, times have changed since the Congress of Vienna: princes and the mistresses of princes do not barter and haggle about frontiers, but the implacable world Jew is struggling for dominion over the nations. No nation can dis- lodge this fist from its throat except by the sword. Only the united, concentrated force of a mighty insurgent na- tionalist passion can defy the international enslavement of ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 947 the nations. But such a development is and remains a bloody one. If, however, one professes the conviction that the German future, one way or another, calls forth the supreme risk, one must, entirely aside from all considerations of political intelligence in itself, for the very sake of this risk, pose and fight for a goal worthy of it. The frontiers of the year 1914 signify nothing at all for the future of the German nation. They embodied neither a protection in the past, nor would they embody strength for the future. The German nation will neither maintain its internal integrity through them, nor will its sustenance be guaranteed by them, nor do these frontiers appear appropriate or even satisfactory from a military viewpoint, nor, finally, can they improve the relation in which, at the moment, we find ourselves with respect to the other world powers, or rather, the real world powers. The distance to England will not be shortened, the size of the Union not achieved; no, France will not even experience a material decrease in her world political importance. Only one thing would be certain : even assuming a favor- able outcome, such an attempt at re-establishing the frontiers of 1914 would lead to an additional bleeding of our national body, to an extent that no worth-while blood re- serve would be available for national life and for decisions and actions which would really insure the nation's future. On the contrary, in the intoxication of such a shallow success every added posing of goals would be the more readily abandoned, once the 'national honor* had been restored and some doors reopened, at least for a time, to commercial development. As opposed to this, we National Socialists must cling unflinchingly to our foreign-policy aims, that is to guarantee the German nation the soil and territory to which it is entitled an this earth. And this is the only action which, before God 948 MEIN KAMPF and our German posterity, would seem to justify an invest- ment of blood : before God, since we are placed in this world on condition of an eternal struggle for daily bread, as beings to whom nothing shall be given and who owe their position as lords of the earth only to the genius and courage with which they know how to struggle for and defend it: before our German posterity, however, in so far as we spill no citizen's blood except that out of it a thousand others are bequeathed to posterity. The soil and territory on which a race of German peasants will some day be able to beget sons sanction the investment of the sons of today, and will some day acquit the responsible statesmen of blood and guilt and national sacrifice, even though they be persecuted by their contemporaries. f I must attack most sharply those folkish scribbler souls who claim to see a 'breach of sacred human rights' in such an acquisition of territory, and who consequently direct their effusions against it. One really never knows who stands behind one of those fellows. It is only certain that the confusion which they are able to create is desired by and opportune to our national enemies. By such an attitude they wantonly aid from within in undermining and cutting the ground from under our nation's only means of properly The similarity of Mussolini's demands for more territory is obvious. It is remarkable that, in referring to eastern Europe as the terrain on which German farmers would be settled, Hitler never indicates what the fate of the present residents is to be. All the States lying between Germany and Russia are age-old agricultural States. Poland has a vast surplus popula- tion, and the highest birth-rate in Europe. A constant tide of emigrating Slovak and Lithuanian peasants has poured over- seas. These facts were pointed out by a number of dissident nationalist writers in the years after 1924, and it is against them that Hitler directs his shafts. Some indication of the contents of brochures by such authors is given by Heiden. ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 949 standing up for its life necessities. For no nation possesses even a single square kilometer of soil and territory on this earth because of a superior will, let alone a superior right. Just as the German frontiers are frontiers of chance and temporary frontiers in the day's passing political struggles, so are the frontiers of other nations' domain of life. And so, just as the formation of our earth's surface can seem un- alterable as granite only to the thoughtless nitwit, but in truth always amounts only to a seeming point of calm in a running development, created by the mighty forces of nature in a constant process of becoming, perhaps tomorrow already, to experience destruction and metamorphosis as a result of greater forces, such, too, are frontiers of the domain of life in the existence of nations. State frontiers are man-made and can be altered by man. The reality of a nation having managed a dispropor- tionate acquisition of territory is no superior obligation for its eternal recognition. It proves at most the might of the conqueror and the weakness of the victim. And, moreover, this might alone makes right. If the German people today, penned into an impossible area, face a wretched future, this is as little Fate's command as its rejection would constitute a snub to Fate. Just as little as some superior power has promised another nation more soil and territory than the German, or would be insulted by the fact of this unjust division of territory. Just as our forefathers did not get the land on which we are living today as a gift from Heaven, but had to conquer it by risking their lives, so no folkish grace but only the might of a triumphant sword will in the future assign us territory, and with it life for our nation.** Much as we all today recognize the necessity for a reckon- ing with France, it will remain largely ineffective if our foreign-policy aim is restricted thereto. It has and will retain significance if it provides the rear cover for an en- largement of our national domain of life in Europe. For 950 MEIN KAMPF we will find this question's solution not in colonial acquisi- tions, but exclusively in the winning of land for settlement which increases the area of the motherland itself, and thereby not only keeps the new settlers in the most intimate community with the land of origin, but insures to the total area those advantages deriving from its united magnitude. The folkish movement must be not the attorney for other nations, but the vanguard fighter of its own. Otherwise it is superfluous, and especially has no right to beef about the past. For then it is acting like the past. Much as the old German policy was improperly determined from dynastic viewpoints, equally little must the future be governed by dreamy folkish cosmopolitanism. Above all, however, we are not protective police for the well-known 'poor little nations,' but soldiers of our own nation. We National Socialists, however, must go further: the right to soil and territory can become a duty if decline seems to be in store for a great nation unless it extends its territory. Even more especially if what is involved is not some little negro people or other, but the German mother of all life, which has given its cultural picture to the contemporary world. Germany will be either a world power or witt not be at all. To be a world power, however, it requires that size which nowadays gives its necessary importance to such a power, and which gives life to its citizens. With this, we National Socialists consciously draw a line through the foreign-policy trend of our pre-War period. We take up at the halting place of six hundred years ago. We terminate the endless German drive to the south and west of Europe, and direct our gaze towards the lands in the east. We finally terminate the colonial and trade policy of the pre-War period, and proceed to the territorial policy of the future. But if we talk about new soil and territory in Europe to- ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 951 day, we can think primarily only of Russia and its vassal border states. Fate itself seems to seek to give us a tip at this point. In the surrender of Russia to bolshevism, the Russian people was robbed of that intelligentsia which theretofore produced and guaranteed its State stability. For the organization of a Russian State structure was not the result of Russian Slavdom's State-political capacity, but rather a wonderful example of the State-building activity of the German element in an inferior race. Thus have innumerable mighty empires of the earth been created. Inferior nations with German organizers and lords as leaders have more than once expanded into powerful State structures, and endured as long as the racial nucleus of the constructive State-race maintained itself. For centuries Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its superior strata of leaders. Another 'folkish' writer, N. von Holleben-Alzbey, published (1929) a treatise entitled Kleineuropa in which the following remarks occur: 'Paneuropa is inevitable, but the form it is destined to take is not that imagined by the Communistic liberals who today lead a movement bearing that name. The unification of Europe is to be achieved not only without England and Russia, but also without France, which with its colonies forms an empire of its own. In the 'Little Europe 1 thus remaining, Germany will exercise the leadership. . . . The renaissance of Germanism in Europe means that Germany has the duty to take the leadership of the States which are Fascisti- cally ruled, and itself perfect the Fascist system by transform- ing it into State Socialism of a genuine kind. The great obliga- tion resting upon Germany is to establish a world empire, and the method outlined is the most effective way of meeting that obligation. Yet it may be that Germany will not be able to perform its duty until it has defeated France, thus leaving the way dear towards the East. By fighting a war against Russia, it could then automatically solidify the center of 952 MEIN KAMPF Today it is uprooted and obliterated almost without a trace. The Jew has replaced it. Impossible as it is for the Russians alone to shake off the yoke of the Jews through their own strength, it is equally impossible in the long run for the Jews to maintain the mighty empire. Jewry itself is not an organizing element, but a ferment of decomposition. The Persian Empire, once so powerful, is now ripe for collapse; and the end of Jewish dominion in Russia will also be the end of the Russian State itself. We have been chosen by Fate to be the witnesses of a catastrophe which will be the most powerful substantiation of the correctness of the folk- ish theory of race. Our task, the mission of the National Socialist movement, however, is to bring our own nation to such political insight as will make it see its future goal fulfilled, not by an intoxicat- ing impression of a new Alexandrian campaign, but rather Europe under its leadership.' The ideas here expressed go back in part to the conception of Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) sponsored before the War by Friedrich Naumann. The 'Com- munistic liberals' referred to in the citation are the group welded together in the Pan-Europa movement by Count Coudenshove-Kalergi. The internal situation of Russia seemed quite desperate in 1926, and the downfall of the regime was confidently expected. Scheubner-Richter, Rosenberg, and other White Russian friends had assured Hitler that the crash was imminent and inevitable. The 'plan' was: the exiled 'Russian intelligence' would invite German assistance in putting down the revolution and restor- ing order. There was at that time no thought of a war on Russia, but only of a participation in a counter-revolutionary movement. Since 1933, the Nazis have certainly done every- thing in their power to foment trouble in Russia. There may be more real fact behind the Stalin 'purge' than has as yet leaked out. ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 953 by the industrious labor of the German plow which needs only to be given land by the sword. It is natural that Jewry declares the sharpest resistance to such a policy. It senses better than anybody else the importance of this action for its own future. Precisely this fact should have taught all really nationally minded men the correctness of such a reorientation. Unfortunately, how- ever, the opposite is the case. Not only in German nation- alist but even in 'folkish' circles violent challenges are issued to the idea of such an eastern policy, with people, as almost always in such matters, calling on somebody greater. Bismarck's spirit is cited to cover a policy as senseless as it is impossible and, in the highest degree, harmful to the German people. 'Bismarck himself of yore always put a value on good relations with Russia/ That is certainly true. Only they entirely forget to point out in this connec- tion that he put equally great value, for example, on good relations with Italy, indeed, that the same Herr von Bis- marck once allied himself with Italy the better to be able to finish off Austria. Then why not continue this policy, too? 'Because the Italy of today is not the Italy of that time,' it will be said. Good. But then, honorable gentlemen, permit the objection that present-day Russia is also no longer oldtime Russia. It never occurred to Bismarck to desire to lay down a political course of tactics as a matter of eternal principle. In this respect he was far too much the master of the moment to put such a chain on himself. The question, then, must not be: What did Bismarck do in his time? but rather: What would he do today? And this question is easier to answer. He would never, with his political intel- ligence, ally himself with a State which is doomed to decline. Furthermore, even in his time Bismarck viewed German colonial and trade policy with mixed feelings, since he was 954 MEIN KAMPF primarily concerned only with making possible in the surest way the consolidation and internal fortifying of the State structure he had created. This, too, was the only reason why he then welcomed the Russian rear cover, which gave him a free hand in the west. However, that which was then useful to Germany would today only harm us. Already in the year 1920-21, when the young National Socialist movement was slowly beginning to raise itself above the political horizon and here and there was pro- nounced the German national freedom movement, people came to the party from various quarters trying to establish some connection between it and the freedom movements of other countries. This was along the lines of the 'league of oppressed nations' propagated by many. There were in- volved chiefly representatives of individual Balkan States and, in addition, some from Egypt and India, who in- dividually always impressed me as gabbling pomposities without any realistic background. Not a few Germans, however, especially in the nationalist camp, let themselves be confused by such inflated Orientals and immediately believed they had before them, in the person of some ad- venturous Indian or Egyptian student or other, a 'repre- sentative ' of India or Egypt. These people were not at all clear that these were at most individuals behind whom stood nothing at all, who were, above all, authorized by nobody to conclude any agreement with anybody at all, so that the practical result of every relation with such elements was null, unless one particularly wants to record the loss of time as a deficit. I always guarded against such attempts. After 1933, however, delegations of Hindus were officially complimented on their 'revolutionary movement/ whether they had been associated with such an enterprise or not. Egyptians were placated, and sympathy was extended to the Arabs living under British rule. ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 955 Not only did I have something better to do than to fritter away weeks on such fruitless 'conferences,' but, even had it been a question of an authorized representative of such nations, I also held that the whole business was useless and even harmful. Even in time of peace it was bad enough for German alliance policy, as the result of a lack of our own active plans of attack, to end in a defensive union of ancient States pensioned off by world history. The alliance with Austria, as well as that with Turkey, embodied little that was gratifying. While the greatest military and industrial States of the earth joined in an active offensive league, a couple of old impotent State structures were collected and an attempt was made to present a bold front to an active world coalition by means of rubbish doomed to decay. Germany got the bitter bill for this error in foreign policy. But this bill still appears not to have been bitter enough to protect our everlasting dreamers from tumbling into the same error right away. For the attempt to disarm the all-powerful victors by a 'league of oppressed nations* is not only ridiculous but also disastrous. It is disastrous because our nation is thereby again diverted from real possibilities, so that it devotes itself not to reality but to fantastic, for all that, fruitless hopes and illusions. The present-day German really resembles the drowning man who grasps at every straw. And this can apply also to otherwise very educated people. Let only the will-o'-the- wisp of a never-so-unreal hope be visible anywhere, and these people trot out with the greatest haste and start chasing the phantom. Whether it be a league of oppressed nations, a League of Nations, or some other dreamy dis- covery, it will, in any case, find thousands of credulous souls. I still recall the equally childish and incomprehensible hopes that England was facing a collapse in India which 956 MEIN KAMPF suddenly arose in folkish circles in the years 1920-21. Some Asiatic fakir or other, perhaps, for all I care, some real Indian 4 fighters for freedom,' who were then running around Europe, contrived to stuff even otherwise quite intelligent people with the fixed idea that the British Empire, whose keystone is in India, was on the verge of collapse right there. Naturally, it did not occur to them that in this case, too, the father of all thoughts was only their own wish. Equally little the paradoxically of their own hopes. For, in so far as they expected the end of the British Empire and English power to result from a collapse of English rule in India, they admitted themselves that precisely India was of the most paramount importance to England, t This question of the greatest life import, however, would probably be known not only to a German folkish prophet as a most profound secret, but presumably also even to the guides of English destiny themselves. It is really rather childish to assume that in England they do not know how properly to estimate the importance of the Indian Empire for the British world union. And if anybody flatters himself that England will let India go without risking her last drop of blood, that is simply a bad sign of the absolute failure to learn from the World War and the complete misunderstand- ing and ignorance of Anglo-Saxon determination. It is, furthermore, a proof of the German's total lack of any notion of the whole method of British penetration and administration of this empire. England will lose India only if it either falls victim to racial degeneration within its own administrative machinery (something which, at the moment, is entirely excluded in India), or if it is compelled to by the sword of a powerful enemy. Indian rebels will, however, never achieve this. We Germans have learned well enough how hard it is to force England. Entirely aside from the fact that, as a German, I would, despite everything, still far rather see India under English than under some other rule* ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 957 Hopes in the legendary uprising in Egypt are exactly as wretched. The 'Holy War' can produce in our German muttonheads the pleasant thrill that now others are ready to shed their blood for us because this cowardly specula- tion has, to speak bluntly, been the silent father of all such hopes but in reality it will meet a ghastly end under the fire of English machine-gun companies and the hail of explosive bombs. It is simply an impossibility for a coalition of cripples to storm a powerful State determined, if need be, to risk the last drop of blood for its existence. As a folkish man, who estimates the value of humanity on racial bases, I may not, simply because of my knowledge of their racial inferiority, link my own nation's fate with that of these so-called 'oppressed nations/ But today we must adopt exactly the same attitude with respect to Russia. The former Russia, divested of its German upper stratum, is, entirely aside from its new rulers' private plans, no ally for a struggle of the German nation for freedom. Considered purely militarily, in the event of a Germano-Rustian war against western Europe, which would probably, however, mean against the entire rest of the world, the relations would be simply catastrophic. The struggle would proceed not on Russian but on German soil, without Germany being able to get from Russia even the slightest effective support. The present German Reich's instruments of power are so miserable and so impossible for an external fight that not even a border guard could be maintained against western Europe including England, and precisely the German industrial district would lie defenselessly abandoned to our opponents' concentrated weapons of attack. In addition, there lies between Germany and Rus- sia the Polish State, reposing entirely in French hands. In the event of a Germane-Russian war against western Europe, Russia would have to subdue Poland before it 958 MEIN KAMPF could bring its first soldiers to a German front. It is, how- ever, not nearly so much a question of soldiers as it is of technical armament. In this respect the World War situa- tion would repeat itself, only much more horribly. Just as German industry was then drained for our famous allies, and Germany had to fight the technical war almost entirely by itself, so would Russia completely drop out of this war as a technical factor in this struggle. The universal motori- zation of the world, which in the next war will be over- whelmingly decisive in the struggle, could hardly be met by us. For not only has Germany itself remained shamefully far behind in this most important field, but with the little it has, it would have to support Russia, which even today can still not call its own a single factory in which can be manufactured a motor vehicle that really runs. Moreover, such a struggle would have simply the character of a slaughter. Germany's youth would shed still more blood than of yore because, as always, the burden of the struggle would weigh only on us, and the result would be inevitable defeat. But even granting the case that a miracle were to tran- spire and that such a struggle would not terminate with Germany's total destruction, the final outcome would only be that the German nation, bled white, would afterwards as before remain surrounded by great military States and would consequently have altered its real situation in no way at all. Compare the point of view of Gregor Strasser, Hitler's great* est rival in the Nazi Party. He felt that Germany's foremost endeavor must be complete revision of the Treaty of Versailles, and held that the only possible ally was Russia. Speaking in the Reichstag on October 17, 1930, Strasser declared that the "major consideration' of German foreign policy must be the restoration of 'German honor' by wiping out completely every vestige of what had happened since 1918. ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 959 One should not now raise the objection that an alliance with Russia would not immediately imply a war, or, if it does, that it might be fundamentally prepared for. No. An alliance whose aim does not comprise a plan for war is senseless and worthless. One makes alliances only for fight- ing. And, however remote the clash may be at the moment of concluding a treaty of alliance, the plan of a belligerent development is nonetheless its inner motive. And let it not be thought that any other power will otherwise con- ceive the meaning of such an alliance. Either a Germano- Russian coalition remains on paper, in which case it would be pointless and worthless for us, or it would be trans- formed from the words of a treaty into a visible reality and the rest of the world would be warned. How naive to think that, in such an event, England and France would wait a decade until the Germano-Russian alliance had fin- ished its technical war preparations. No, the storm would break over Germany with the speed of lightning. Thus the fact of the conclusion of a treaty with Russia em- bodies the declaration of the next war. Its outcome would be the end of Germany. < In addition, there is the following: f I. The present rulers of Russia do not at all think of entering an alliance sincerely or of keeping one. We must never forget that the regents of present-day Russia are common bloodstained criminals; that here is the scum of humanity, which, favored by conditions in a tragic hour, overran a great State, butchered and rooted out millions of its leading intellects with savage bloodthirsti- ness, and for nearly ten years has exercised the most fright- ful r6gime of tyranny of all time. Nor must we forget that these rulers belong to a nation which combines a rare mixture of bestial horror with an inconceivable gift of lying, and today more than ever before believes itself called upon to impose its bloody oppression on the whole world. We 960 MEIN KAMPF must not forget that the international Jew, who today rules Russia absolutely, sees in Germany, not an ally, but a State marked for the same destiny. But one does not con- clude a treaty with someone whose sole interest is the destruc- tion of his partner. Above all, one does not make them with parties to whom no treaty would be sacred, since they inhabit this world, not as the advocates of honor and truth- fulness, but as the advocates of lying, deceit, theft, rapine, and plundering. If anybody thinks of going into treaty ties with parasites, this resembles a tree's efforts to con- clude to its own advantage an agreement with a mistletoe. 2. The danger which once overwhelmed Russia always faces Germany. Only a bourgeois simpleton can flatter himself that Bolshevism is banished. In this superficial thinking, he has no notion that this is a question of an instinctive matter i.e., the drive of the Jewish nation to world rule a matter just as natural as the impulse of the Anglo-Saxons on their side to secure dominion over this earth for themselves. And, just as the Anglo-Saxon pur- sues this course in his way and fights his struggle with his weapons, so also does the Jew. He pursues his course, the course of sneaking in among the nations and of gouging them internally, and he fights with his weapons, with lies and slanders, poison and destruction, intensifying the struggle to the point of bloodily exterminating his hated opponents. In Russian bolshevism we must see Jewry's twentieth-century effort to take world dominion unto itself, just as it sought to strive towards the same goal in other periods by other, if inwardly related, doings. Its effort is most profoundly based on the nature of its essence. As little as any other nation renounces of its own volition to yield to its impulse towards expanding its nature and power, but must be forced to do so by external relations or falls into senile impotence, so little also will the Jew abandon his course towards world dictatorship by volun- ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 961 tary self-denial or by suppressing his eternal drive. He, too f must be thrown back in his course either by forces lying outside himself or all his impulse towards world rule must be finished by dying of itself. The impotence of nations, their own death of old age, however, comes from the aban- donment of their purity of blood. And the Jew guards this better than any other people of the earth. Thereby he con- tinues to move farther on his fatal course, until another force opposes him and, in a mighty struggle, once more pitches the stormer of the heavens back to Lucifer. Germany is today the next great battle aim of bolshevism, It requires all the force of a young missionary idea once again to inspire our nation to break out of the snare of this international snake and internally to check the tainting of our blood, so that the nation's forces can thereby be de- voted to the securing of our nationality, which may make it possible to prevent a repetition of the final catastrophe until the end of time. But if one pursues this goal, then it is insanity to ally oneself with a power which has as its rulers the mortal enemy of our own future. How shall our own nation be freed from the chains of this poisonous embrace if we hand ourselves over to it? How reveal bolshevism to the individual German worker as an accursed crime against humanity if we ally ourselves with the organizations of this spawn of hell, and thereby recognize it as a whole? With what right shall we then condemn members of the broad masses for their sympathy for a view of life if the very leaders of the State choose the representatives of this view of life as allies? The struggle against Jewish bolshevization of the world requires a clear attitude towards Soviet Russia. You cannot drive out the Devil with Beelzebub. If even folkish circles today are smitten with an alliance with Russia, then let them merely contemplate Germany and become conscious of what support they are getting for 962 MEIN KAMPF their initiative. Or do folkish people lately regard an action which is welcomed and demanded by the international Marxist press as blessed for the German people? Since when do folkish people struggle with a weapon which the Jew offers us like a shield-bearer? -4* Against the old German Reich could be raised one main charge with respect to its policy of alliance. But not this one, that it no longer maintained good relations with Russia, but only that, as a result of a constant oscillating to and fro, trying in diseased weakness to maintain world peace at all costs, it ruined its relations with others. I confess openly that in pre-War times I already held it better had Germany, at the sacrifice of the senseless colonial policy and at the sacrifice of the merchant and naval fleet, stood in alliance with England against Russia, and thus switched from the feeble world-wide policy to a determined European policy of continental territorial acquisition. I do not forget the constant impudent threat which the then pan-Slav Russia dared level against Germany; I do not forget the constant practice mobilizations whose sole point was to offend Germany; I cannot forget the attitude of Russian public opinion which, even before the War, outdid itself in hateful sallies against our nation and Reich, cannot forget the influential Russian press which always was more enthusiastic for France than for us. But despite all that there had also been an alternative before the War; one could have relied on Russia in order to turn against England. Today relations are different. If, before the War, one could have gone with Russia at the cost of throttling every last feeling, this is today no longer possible. Since then the hand of the world clock has advanced farther and with mighty strokes it calls out to us that hour in which our nation's destiny must be decided one way or the other. The present consolidation of the earth's great States is ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 963 our last warning signal to stop and think, and to bring our nation back out of the world of dreams to hard reality, and to point the road to the future which alone leads the old Reich to a new blossoming. If the National Socialist movement frees itself from all illusions with respect to this great and most important task, and accepts reason as the sole leader, the catastrophe of 1918 can still become an eternal blessing for the nation's future. Then our nation may emerge from this collapse to a completely new orientation of its foreign-policy activity and, further, fortified by its new domestic view of life, also achieve a definitive stabilization of its foreign policy ex- ternally. It can then finally get what England has and what even Russia had, and what again and again enables France always to hit on decisions uniformly and basically correct for its interests, that is: a political testament. The political testament of the German nation for its deal- ings with the outside world, however, should and must always read substantially : Never tolerate the establishment of two continental powers in Europe. See an attack on Germany in any such attempt to organize a military power on the frontiers of Germany, be it only in the form of the creation of a State capable of becoming a military power, and, in that case, regard it not only a right, but a duty, to prevent the estab- lishment of such a State by all means including the application of armed force, or, in the event that such a one be already founded, to repress it. See to it that the There are three strong non-German military powers on the Continent today France, Poland, and Italy. The German plan is seemingly to push Italy gently off the Continent into Africa. Yet it is difficult to see how even the acquisition of Tunis, provided it were available, could help to compensate (or the loss of influence on the European mainland. 964 MEIN KAMPF strength of our nation is founded, not on colonies, but on the European territory of the homeland. Never regard the > Reich as secure while it is unable to give every national offshoot for centuries his own bit of soil and territory. Never forget that the most sacred right in this world is the right to that earth which a man desires to till himself, and the most sacred sacrifice that blood which a man spills for this earth. I do not want to conclude these reflections without re- ferring again to the sole possibility of an alliance which we have today in Europe. Already in the previous chapter on the German problem of alliance I have indicated England and Italy as the only two States in Europe an intimate relation with which is worth pursuing and promising of success for us. Here I merely wish to run over the military importance of such an alliance. The military consequences of the conclusion of this alliance would in each and every way be the opposite to those of an alliance with Russia. The most important is first the fact that an approach to England and Italy would in itself in no way evoke danger of war. The only power which would come into question as opposing the alliance, France, would not be in a position to do so. The alliance, however, would give Germany a chance to make quite calmly those pre- parations which, one way or another, must be undertaken within the bounds of such a coalition for a reckoning with France. For the momentousness of such a type of alliance lies precisely in the fact that Germany would not suddenly on concluding it be abandoned to a hostile invasion, but that the opposing alliance itself collapses, that Entente to which we owe such unending misfortune dissolves itself, and thereby the mortal enemy of our nation, France, is left in isolation. Even if this result had at first only a moral ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 965 effect, it would suffice to give Germany a degree of freedom of movement which today can hardly be imagined. For the initiative would be in the hands of the new European Anglo- German-Italian alliance, and no longer in those of France. t A further consequence would be that Germany would be freed from its adverse strategic situation at one blow. The most powerful protection of the flank on one side, the com- plete guaranty of our supply of the necessities of life and raw materials on the other side, would be the blessed effect of the new order of States. But almost more important would be the fact that the new union of States comprises a capacity for technical performance which, in many respects, is almost mutually complementary. For the first time Germany would have allies who do not suck like leeches on our own economy, but which both could and would contribute their share to the richest completion of our technical armament. Nor should one overlook the final fact that in both cases these would be allies whom one cannot compare with Turkey or present-day Russia. The greatest world power of the earth and a youthful national State would constitute different premises for a struggle in Europe than did the putrid State corpses with which Germany had allied itself in the last war. Of course, as I already emphasized in the previous chap- ter, the difficulties standing in the way of such an alliance are great. But was the building of the Entente a less diffi- cult job? What the genius of a King Edward VII achieved, partly almost against natural interest, must and will also be achieved by us if knowledge of the necessity of such a develop- ment so animates us that, exercizing intelligent self-control, we determine our own action accordingly. And this is possible the moment when, filled with warning need, one single course, conscious of its aim, is adopted and held, instead of the past decade's foreign-policy aimlessness. Neither western 966 MEIN KAMPF nor eastern orientation should be the future goal of our foreign policy, but an eastern policy signifying the acquisition of the necessary soil for our German people. Since we need strength for this, but the mortal enemy of our nation, France, relent- lessly throttles us and robs our strength, we must undertake every sacrifice which may help bring about a nullification of the French drive for European hegemony. Every power which, like us, finds intolerable France's aspiration to dominion over the continent, is today our natural ally. No path to such a power must seem too difficult to us and no renunciation must seem unspeakable if the end result only offers the possibility of subduing our most enraged enemies. Once we have been able to cauterize and close the biggest, we will calmly be able to leave to the gentle ministrations of time the healing of our little wounds. -4- Of course, today we encounter the hateful yapping of our internal national enemies. We National Socialists, however, should never be diverted thereby from proclaiming what is, according to our deepest conviction, absolutely necessary. Today, it is true, we must buck the stream of a public opinion duped by Jewish cunning in the exploitation of German thoughtlessness, and at times, it is true, the break- ers surge about us angrily and furiously, but he who swims with the current is more readily overlooked than he who bucks the waves. Today we are a reef; in only a few years The meaning of this passage is perfectly clear, and there have always been those who maintain that, all other passages in Mein Kampf to the contrary notwithstanding, the ultimate objective of Nazi foreign policy is the destruction of France. We think, however, that Hitler's original idea was that France was to be attacked only in order to open the way eastward. If this route is unbarred without a war, as seems to be the case at present, the reasons why Germany should attack France immediately are, of course, far less obvious. ORIENTATION OR EASTERN POLICY 967 Fate can throw us up as a dam against which the general stream will break, to flow in a new bed. t Precisely for this the National Socialist movement must be recognized and established in the eyes of the outside world as the bearer of a definite political plan. Whatever Heaven may have in store for us, let us be recognizable by our very visors. The instant we ourselves recognize the great need which our foreign-policy action must resolve, there will flow from this recognition the strength of inflexibility, which we will sometimes require when this one or that one, under the drum fire of the hostile hounds of our press, becomes rather anxiously uncomfortable, and there creeps on him the easy inclination to make a concession here or there, in order not to have everybody against him, and to howl with the wolves.-* On September 10, 1930, Hitler issued a 'Manifesto ' in which these criticisms of the foreign policy of the Republic were re- peated. The National Socialist movement will,' he said, 'not continue to pursue the policy of everlasting wooing of the good will of France once it has come to power. Every hand that is offered to us in Europe by nations whose needs and convictions are like ours will be accepted with thanks. We shall see to it that the prestige of our people is once more, in the future, consonant with its natural value.' Commenting on this 'Manifesto,' Count Reventlow said: 'Face to face with a Germany which National Socialism led and unified, and which was flushed with energy and determination, France would adopt a totally different attitude from that which has charac- terized its relationships with the Germany of Stresemann, of the Social Democrats, of the Free Masons, and of the big Jewish banks.' This is interesting in view of what has happened since 1933. CHAPTER XV EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT f% TWMITH the laying-down of arms in November, 1918, %JL^ a policy was introduced which, in all human proba- T v bility, was bound to lead slowly to complete sub- mission. Historical examples of a similar type show that nations which first strike arms without the most compelling reasons, in the time that follows put up with the greatest humiliation and extortions rather than attempt a change of their fate by a renewed appeal to violence. This is humanly explicable. An intelligent victor will, whenever possible, present his demands to the vanquished in installments. He can then be sure that a nation which has become characterless and such is every one which voluntarily submits will no longer find any sufficient reason in each of these detailed oppressions to take to arms once more. The more extortions thus cheerfully accepted, however, the more unjustified does it seem to people finally to set about defending themselves against some new, appar- ently isolated, although really constantly recurring, op- pression, especially if, taking everything together, so much more and greater misfortune has been borne silently and tolerantly without doing so. EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 969 Carthage's fall is the horrible picture of such a slow, self-earned execution of a nation. Consequently, Clausewitz, in his 'Drei Bekenntnissen? also singles out this thought in his incomparable manner and nails it down for all time, when he says: 'That the blemish of a cowardly submission is never to be eradicated ' ; that this drop of poison in a nation's blood is passed along to posterity and will cripple and lay low the strength of generations to come; that, compared to this, 'even the extinction of freedom after a bloody and honorable struggle insures the rebirth of a nation and is the seed of life out of which a new tree some day will strike fast roots. 9 Of course, a nation become dishonored and characterless will not care about that sort of teaching. For whoever cherishes it can certainly not sink so low, but he alone collapses who forgets or no longer wants to know it. So one must not expect embodiments of characterless sub- mission suddenly to repent in order, on the basis of intelli- gence and all human experience, to act otherwise than hitherto. On the contrary, these very people will hold every such lesson at a distance, until the nation is either once and for all accustomed to its slave's yoke, or until Belief in the possibility of international conciliation is taken to be a sign of deterioration. Pidder Lting writes: 'Every effort made towards cementing international ties, or bringing about international understanding and unification always takes its rise in individuals whose feelings are degenerate and rootless in a folkish sense, regardless of whether their motives are idealistic or economic. There is no international solidarity among plants, and there is none among animals. There is also none among men who found their notions on the laws of nature. The idea of "humanity " is an abstraction which cannot be translated into practical life.' Cf. Nationals ozialismus. 970 MEIN KAMPF better forces push to the surface to wrest power from the hands of the infamous corrupters. In the first case these people contrive to feel not at all badly, since they not in- frequently are entrusted by the victors with the office of slave overseer, which these characterless types then exer- cise over their own nation, at that generally more heart- lessly than any alien beast imposed by the enemy himself. Now, the development since the year 1918 demonstrates to us that the hope of winning the victor's grace by means of voluntary submission unfortunately determines fatally the political insight and actions of the broad masses. I want to attach great importance to the emphasis on the broad masses, because I cannot bring myself to accept the con- viction that the actions and inactions of our national leaders can be attributed to the same corrupting delusion. Inasmuch as the leadership of our destiny has, since the end of the War, been in the hands of Jews, by this time entirely openly, one can really not agree that the cause of our misfortune is only insufficient knowledge, but on the contrary one must be convinced that conscious intent is ruining our nation. And as soon as one examines, from this viewpoint, the apparent insanity of our national foreign- policy leadership, it reveals itself to be a highly refined, icy logic serving the Jewish idea and struggle for world conquest. Thus, too, it appears comprehensible that a span of time equal to that which, between 1806 and 1813, sufficed to infuse a totally collapsed Prussia with new life-force and fighting determination, today has not only lapsed unused, but on the contrary has led to an ever greater debilitation of our State. Gustav Stresemann's wife was Jewish, but he himself was a pure 'Aryan.' His daughter and son-in-law committed suicide after Hitler's Machtergfeifung. EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 971 Seven years after November, 1918, the Treaty of Locarno was signed! The course of events involved was that already indicated above: neither the energy nor the courage to offer sudden resistance to the opponents' oppressive measures, which later recurred repeatedly, was eliminated immediately on the signing of the shameful armistice. The opponents were, however, too smart to demand too much at once. They limited their extortions always to that amount which in their own opinion and that of our German leadership would momentarily still be sufficiently tolerable so as not to compel any fear of an explosion of popular opinion. The more, however, such isolated dictates were endorsed and crammed down, the less it seemed justified, because of some The final conferences which led to the signing of the Locarno Pact were held during the period between October 5 and 16, 1925. The signatory powers guaranteed the integrity of Germany's western boundaries, and subscribed to that provi- sion of the Versailles Treaty which demilitarized the Rhine- land. Special forms of arbitration to be resorted to in case disputes arose were agreed upon. In addition the promise was made that the Allied troops would evacuate Germany as soon as the feeling of 'mutual confidence' had made sufficient progress. German nationalists saw in the Pact a needless sacrifice of vital German interests. The powerful German National Party refused to endorse it, and the Cabinet headed by Dr. Hans Luther thereupon resigned. On March 7, 1936, Hitler repudiated the Locarno Pact and ordered German troops to reoccupy the Rhineland. Church bells rang out; a patriotic demonstration seemed to unite all Germans in an act of thanksgiving. The reasons given by the German government for this move were that German honor had been wounded by the French alliance with Russia, and that therefore Germany could underwrite no non-aggression pact until it was once more 'in full possession of its territory.' 972 MEIN KAMPF isolated further extortion or proposed humiliation, sud- denly to do what had not been done in the case of so many others: to offer resistance. This is just the 'drop of poison 1 of which Clausewitz speaks: the characterlessness which, once begun, must always intensify itself and which gradu- ally burdens every future decision like the worst heritage. It can become such a terrible dead weight that a nation can hardly shake it off again, but finally declines to the nature of a slave race. Thus there alternated in Germany disarmament and enslavement edicts, spiking of our political guns and eco- nomic piracy, to create finally that moral spirit which man- aged to see luck in the Dawes Plan and a success in the Locarno Treaty. In truth, viewing matters from a higher point of observation, one may speak of only one bit of luck in this misery, the luck that, although men could easily be deceived, Heaven, however, could not be bribed. For its blessing was withheld: need and woe have ever since been the constant companions of our people, and our one true ally is misery. Fate has made no exception in this case, either, but has given us our deserts. Since we no longer know how to treasure honor, it at least teaches us to ap- preciate freedom of the dinner plate. Men have already The French were aroused, but no preventive action was taken by their government. Mr. Anthony Eden, then British Foreign Minister, said of Hitler's action: 'It strikes a severe blow at the principle of the sanctity of treaties, which underlies the whole structure of international relations.' But barring a statement by Mr. Duff-Cooper to the effect that Britain's frontier was the Rhine, nothing was done in London to off-set Hitler's move. Against his will, Erzberger was designated by his govern- ment to sign the armistice. In response to queries concerning the attitude of the High Command to the proposed terms, EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 973 learned to cry for bread, but one of these days they will still pray for freedom. Bitter and obvious as was our national collapse in the years after 1918, equally relentless and violent was the attack on everybody who, at that very time, ventured to prophesy what later invariably transpired. Miserably bad as was our national leadership then, it was equally con- ceited, and especially when it came to finishing off disagree- able because unpleasant prophets. Then we saw (and one can still see it today) the prize parliamentary dunderheads, honest-to-goodness saddlers and glovemakers not simply by profession either, which would in itself mean nothing suddenly elevated to the pedestal of statesmen, thence to talk down to the ordinary mortal. It made and makes, moreover, no difference that such a 'statesman' generally was shown up in the sixth month of his activity as the windiest bungler, the butt of the rest of the world's ridicule and derision, who does not know which way to turn, and has strikingly produced unmistakable evidence of his complete incompetence! No, that makes no difference at all, quite the contrary: the harder up the parliamentary statesmen of this Republic are for real achievements, the more furi- ously do they consequently hound those who expected achievements from them, who have the cheek to prove the failure of their activity thus far, and to predict its future failure. If, however one definitively nails down one of these parliamentary honorables and if this artisan of state- craft can really no longer lie his way out of the collapse of his entire activity and its results, then they find thou- hc received orders to attempt to hold out for some ameliora- tions, but to 'sign nevertheless.' The Treaty of Versailles was signed, after stormy displays of indignation in the Weimar Assembly, because the generals stated that any thought of resistance was futile. 974 MEIN KAMPF sands upon thousands of reasons for excusing their failure, and will not admit one thing alone, that they are themselves the main reason for everything that is wrong. <* It should have been generally understood as early as the winter of 1922-23 that, even after the conclusion of peace, France would act with iron thoroughness to achieve still the war aim which she originally envisioned. For really nobody can think that France risked her people's blood, in itself not too rich, for four and a half years in the most decisive struggle of her history, solely to have earlier dam- ages compensated for afterwards by reparations. Even Alsace-Lorraine would, in itself, not explain the energy of On November 4, 1922, Josef Wirth resigned as chancellor, following insistence that conservative members of his own party (the Center) would consent to the 'fulfillment policy* only if the government were enlarged to include wider repre- sentation of the Right. He was succeeded by Dr. Wilhelm Cuno, a business man who had been director of one of Ger- many's largest steamship companies. His appointment was bitterly attacked by the Social Democrats. There followed a Conference of Ministers in London, which broke down be- cause Germany was weakly represented, and because Poin- car6 had already decided upon invasion of the Ruhr to 'as- sure the safeguard of French interests.' On January n, 1923, French troops occupied Essen. On the igth, the German government ordered all civil servants to refuse to comply with French demands. It also prohibited shipments of coal to the Entente. These actions meant recourse to 'passive re- sistance, 9 which was placed under the unavowed supervision of the Rcichswchr. This acted on the knowledge that all more active measures were futile and could only provide France with an excuse for direct annexation of the region. Passive resistance, as carried on, was indubitably heroic. EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 975 the French conduct of the War, had there not also really been involved part of French foreign policy's truly big future political program. But that goal is: the dissolution of Germany into a hodge-podge of little States. It was for that that chauvinist France fought, incidentally, it is true, selling her people as real serfs to the international world Jews. This French war aim could already have been achieved by the War itself if, as Paris originally hoped, the struggle had taken place on German soil. Imagine that the bloody battles of the World War had been fought, not on the Somme, in Flanders, in the Artois, at Warsaw, Nijni- Novgorod, Kovno, Riga, and where not, but in Germany, on the Ruhr and the Main, on the Elbe, at Hanover, Leip- zig, Niirnberg, etc., and one must really concede that there Officials and workers co-operated in a spirit of patriotic self- sacrifice. But the financial resources of the German nation were not adequate to meet the strain. On September 26 of the same year (1923) the new German chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, ordered passive resistance to cease. The conflict had been marked by progressive devaluation of the German currency to a point where money ceased to have any value. On November 20, 1923, a dollar equaled 4,200,000,000 marks. At that rate, a few dollars could today wipe out the entire in- debtedness of the Third Reich! But the Ruhr district had been saved, the French had also been pushed to the brink of financial catastrophe, and sentiment in both England and the United States was now very sympathetic with Germany. Hitler had taken no part in the struggle. The reserve with which his Party had faced efforts to maintain the nation's integrity was later censured so that behind his criticism of the policies adopted there is a defensive maneuver. All during 1923, extremists of the Right and the Left had planned re- volts in the belief that the government's forces were weak. In rapid succession Germany witnessed the Buchrucker putsch 976 MEIN KAMPF would have been a chance to break up Germany. It is very questionable whether our young federal State would, for four and a half years, have survived the same test of strain as a France rigidly centralized for centuries and look- ing towards Paris alone as its undisputed center. That this violent struggle of nations went on outside the frontiers of our fatherland was not only the old army's immortal con- tribution, but also the greatest luck for the future of Germany. It is my rock-ribbed, sometimes inwardly anguishing, conviction that in any other case there would long since have been no German Reich, but only ' German States/ And for this reason alone did the blood of our fallen friends and brothers flow at least not entirely in vain, f So everything happened differently! It is true that Germany suddenly collapsed in November, 1918. But when catastrophe came to the homeland, the troops in the field were still deep in enemy country. France's first concern in those days was not Germany's dissolution, but rather this: how most quickly to get the German armies out of France and Belgium? And so the first job of the Paris State leader- ship in winding up the World War was to disarm the Ger- man troops and, if possible, drive them back to Germany immediately; and only after that could they devote them- selves to the realization of the original and true aim of the War. By this very fact France was positively crippled. The War had really ended victoriously for England with the (a short-lived revolt led by the commander of an East Prussian garrison), a Separatist putsch in the Rhineland, a Communist uprising in Saxony, and the Hitler putsch in Munich. If these uprisings had taken place at the same time, the result might have been civil war. But each was crushed separately, the Communist rebellion being put down with great severity. Thereafter a period of reconstruction began, which led to relative stablity and prosperity over a six-year period. EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 977 obliteration of Germany as a colonial and commercial power and her reduction to the rank of a second-class State. Not only did they have no interest in the complete blotting-out of the German State, but they even had every ground to want in Europe a future rival to France. Hence French policy had to continue by a determined peace-time labor what the War initiated, and Clemenceau's epigram, that for him, too, peace is but a continuation of war, acquired increased significance. On every possible pretext, they had constantly to shatter the joints of the Reich. By the imposition of ever new dis- armament notes on the one hand, and by the thus facilitated economic extortions on the other hand, Paris hoped slowly to loosen the Reich's joints. The more national honor with- ered in Germany, the earlier could economic pressure and unending want lead to destructive political results. Such a policy of political oppression and economic pillage, con- tinued for ten or twenty years, must gradually ruin even the best State organism, and under some circumstances demolish it. This, however, would be the final realization of the French war aim. In the winter of 1922-23 this should have been long recog- nized as the French purpose. In that case, however, there remained only two possible alternatives: one might either hope gradually to blunt the French will on the endurance of the German body national, or once and for all to do that which was bound to come in the end; that is, in one or another particularly crass instance to turn the Reich ship's helm about, and ram the enemy. This meant, of course, a life-and-death struggle, and life would have been a con- ceivable outcome only had it previously been contrived so to isolate France that this second fight need no longer be a struggle of Germany against the world, but a defense of Germany against a France constantly disturbing the world and its peace. 978 MEIN KAMPF I emphasize and am firmly convinced that this second alternative must and will develop one way or another. I do not believe for a moment that France's intentions with respect to us can ever change; because they have their deepest motive nowhere but in the French nation's sense of self-preservation. Were I a Frenchman myself, and were France's greatness as dear to me as is Germany's sacred, then I could and would not act otherwise than Clemenceau himself did in the end. Only through the obliteration of Germany can a France, which is slowly withering, not only in its population figures, but especially in its racially best elements, maintain its world importance in the long run. French policy may make a thousand d6tours, but some- where at the end will always be this goal as the realization of its last desire and deepest yearning. But it is wrong to believe that a purely passive will, seeking only self-preserva- tion, can in the long run offer resistance to a not less power- ful but actively advancing will. As long as the eternal conflict between Germany and France is carried on only in the form of a German defense against French attack, it will never be de- cided, but Germany, from century to century, will lose one position after the other. Follow the wandering of the German language frontier from the twelfth century until today, and one will hardly be able longer to build on the success of an attitude and a development which has already done us so much damage. Only when this is fully understood in Germany so that the German nation's will to live is no longer allowed to waste itself in purely passive defensiveness, but is drawn together for a decisive, active settlement with France, and is thrown into a final, decisive battle for the vastest German final goals: only then will it be possible to bring to a con- clusion our eternal struggle with France, in itself so fruit- Jess; on condition, of course, that Germany really sees in France's destruction a means of subsequently and finally EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 979 giving our nation a chance to expand elsewhere. Today we are eighty million Germans in Europe! That foreign policy will be acknowledged as correct only if, a bare century from now, two hundred and fifty million Germans are living on this continent, and then not squeezed together as factory coolies for the rest of the world, but : as peasants and workers mutually guaranteeing each other's life by their pro- ductivity. In December, 1922, the situation between Germany and France seemed once more to have sharpened to a crisis. France contemplated new, unprecedented extortions, and needed security for them. Political pressure had to precede economic pillage, and it seemed to the French that only a violent attack on the nerve center of all our German exist- ence would suffice to make our ' stubborn ' people bow to a sharper yoke than ever. In France it was hoped that, with the occupation of the Ruhr district, not only would Germany's moral spine finally be broken, but that economically we would also be thrown into an embarrassing situation in which willy-nilly we would have to accept every obligation, even the most burdensome. We had to bend or break. And right at the start Germany bent, to end up later by breaking completely. With the occupation of the Ruhr district, Fate once more offered its hand to the German nation to rise again. For what must at the first moment have seemed only the worst of ill fortune bore within it, on closer consideration, an infinitely promising chance to terminate all German suffering. Abroad, the occupation of the Ruhr finally really deeply estranged France from England, and not only from British diplomatic circles, which had concluded and maintained the French alliance only with the sober eyes of cold calculators, but also from the widest circles of the English people. English industry, especially, viewed with ill-concealed dis- 980 MEIN KAMPF comfort this additional incredible reinforcement of French continental power. For not only did France now assume a position in Europe such as, considered purely from a politico-military viewpoint, not even Germany had previ- ously held, but it now also obtained an economic founda- tion which almost added a monopoly position to its capacity for economic competition. Europe's largest iron mines and coal fields were now united in the hands of a nation which, quite unlike Germany, had heretofore guarded its basic interests with as much determination as activity, and which newly reminded the whole world of its military dependability in the Great War. With France's occupation of the Ruhr coal fields, England's entire war achievement was again wrenched from her hands, and the victor was now no longer British diplomacy, diligent and nimble, but Mar- shal Foch and the France he represented. < f In Italy, too, sentiment towards France, not exactly rosy anyway since the end of the War, changed into real hate. Now was the great historic moment in which yesterday's allies might become tomorrow's foes. If things came out otherwise, and the allies did not break into a sudden internal feud as in the second Balkan War, that was attributable solely to the fact that Germany possessed no Enver Pasha but a Reichs-Chancellor Cuno. Not only from the standpoint of foreign, but also from that of domestic, policy, the French invasion of the Ruhr embodied very big potentialities for Germany's future. A considerable portion of our people which, thanks to the in- cessant influence of its mendacious press, still regarded France as the crusader for progress and liberalism, was cured of this insanity once and for all. Just as the year 1914 drove the dream of international solidarity of peoples from the heads of our German workers and suddenly led them back into the world of eternal struggle, throughout which one being feeds on another and the death of the feebler means the life of the stronger, so, too, the spring of 1923. EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 981 As the Frenchman carried out his threats and finally began to move into the lower German coal region, at first only very cautiously and waveringly, a great, decisive hour of fate struck for Germany. If, at this moment, our nation had combined a change of sides with a revision of its pre- vious attitude, then the German Ruhr district could have become for France the Moscow of Napoleon. There were, indeed, only two alternatives: either one permitted this, too, to be perpetuated on oneself and did nothing, or one moved the German people as it contemplated the region of fiery smelters and smoky furnaces, as well as of fiery wills, to end this eternal shame, and to prefer to accept the terror of the moment rather than bear an endless terror any longer. The immortal service of the then Reichs-Chancellor Cuno was to have discovered a third course, and the still more famous contribution of our German bourgeois party world was to have admired and followed it. I want here first to submit the second course to as brief as possible a consideration : With the occupation of the Ruhr district France made a resounding break in the Versailles Treaty. She thereby also put herself in opposition to a number of signatory powers, more especially England and Italy. France could no longer hope for any support whatsoever from these States for her own selfish plunder expedition. She was consequently obliged to bring this adventure and it was at first just that to whatever happy end by herself. For a German nationalist government there could have been but a single course, that is, the course prescribed by honor. Passive resistance was in the main the achievement of the Free and Christian Trade Unions, which were also responsible for the suppression of Separatist disturbances in the Western provinces. Hitler's chief meaning here is, of course, that Ger- many's failure to support his Munich putsch idea was a great mistake. 982 MEIN KAMPF It was certain that France at first could not be opposed by active, armed violence; but it was necessary to be clear that every negotiation which does not have power behind it would be ridiculous and fruitless. Without a chance to resist actively, it was senseless to take the position: 'we will not negotiate ' ; but it was still more senseless to go to negotiations anyway in the end, without having, in the meanwhile, fitted oneself out with power. Not that one could have prevented the Ruhr occupation by military measures. Only a madman could advise such a decision. But under the influence of this French action, and during the time of its execution, thought should and might have been given to insure, regardless of the Treaty of Versailles which France herself had broken, those military means which later could have been given negotiators to carry with them. For it was clear from the outset that, some day, a decision about this district occupied by France would be made at some conference table or other. But it should have been equally clear that even the best nego- tiators can achieve slight success as long as the ground on which they stand and the chair on which they sit is not the shield arm of their nation. A feeble little tailor cannot argue with athletes, and a defenseless negotiator must always tolerate the sword of Brennus on the hostile side of the balance if he has not his own to throw in as a counter- weight. Or was it not really a pity to have to watch the comedies of negotiations which, since the year 1918, in- variably preceded the recurring dictates? This debasing spectacle presented before the whole world, in which, as though to mock us, we were first invited to the conference table, in order there to be presented with decisions and programs long since prepared, which, it is true, might be talked about, but which in advance had to be regarded as unalterable. It is true that our negotiators were above the most modest average in hardly a single case, and that they EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 983 justified only too well, on the whole, the impudent assertion of Lloyd George, who mockingly remarked about ex-Reichs- Chancellor Simon, 'that the Germans did not understand how to select men of spirit as leaders and representatives.' But even geniuses would have achieved but little in the face of the hostile nation's determined will of power and his own nation's wretched defenselessness. But whoever wanted to grasp the French occupation of the Ruhr in the spring of 1923 as the occasion for a restora- tion of military means had first to present to the nation those spiritual weapons, to strengthen its will power, and to undo the corrupters of this most valuable national force. Just as in the year 1918 bloody vengeance was taken for the fact that in 1914 and 1915 we did not proceed to crush the head of the Marxist serpent underfoot, so, too, the most tragic vengeance would be taken if in the spring of 1923 the opportunity was not seized to forbid the exercise of their craft to the Marxist traitors and national murderers. Every notion of real resistance to France was complete nonsense without a declaration of war against those forces which, five years earlier, had smashed German resistance on the battlefields from the inside. Only bourgeois souls could work their way around to the incredible opinion that Marx- ism had, perhaps, now become something else, and that the canaille of bosses who in 1918 coldly trampled over two million corpses, the better to scramble into the various seats of government, were now, in the year 1923, ready to do their bit for the national conscience. An incredible and re- ally nonsensical notion, the hope that the one-time traitors would suddenly turn into fighters for German freedom. They had no idea of any such thing! A Marxist abandons treason as readily as a hyena abandons carrion. Please let us not hear that most stupid of objections, that so many workers once really did bleed for Germany. German work- 984 MEIN KAMPF ers, yes, but then they were no longer international Marx- ists. Had the German working class in the year 1914 still been composed of persons who were Marxists in their in- ner attitude, the War would have come to an end in three weeks. Germany would have collapsed before the first soldier had even put one foot across the frontier. No, the fact that the German nation was still fighting then proved that the Marxist madness had not yet been able to eat really deep. But to just the extent that the German worker and the German soldier again fell into the hands of the Marxist leaders during the War, to just that extent was he lost to the fatherland. If, at the beginning of the War and during the War, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebraic corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels opportunely eliminated and perhaps a million orderly, worth-while Germans had been saved for the future. But it is also part of bourgeois * statecraft' to deliver millions to a bloody end on the field of battle with- out blinking an eyelash while regarding ten or twelve thousand traitors, tricksters, usurers, and swindlers ad a priceless national shrine, and hence publicly to proclaim their inviolability. Indeed, one cannot tell whether this bourgeois world is richer in blockheadedness, feebleness, and cowardice, or thoroughly dissipated principles. It is truly a class doomed by Fate to decline, but which, unfortunately, is dragging a whole nation down with itself.**- In the year 1923, however, the situation was entirely like that of 1918. No matter what kind of resistance was chosen, the first premise had, in any case, to be the elimination of the Marxist poison from our body national. And, according to my conviction, the very first task of a really nationalist EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 985 government was then to seek and find forces determined to declare a war of annihilation against Marxism, and to give these forces a free hand; it was its duty not to prate about the idiocy of Maw and order' at a moment in which the fatherland's foreign foe was delivering the most annihilat- ing blow, while at home treason lurked at every street corner. No, a really nationalist government should then have desired turmoil and disorder had a principled reckon- ing with our nation's Marxist mortal enemies finally been possible and realized only out of such a chaos. This neg- lected, every notion of resistance, of no matter what sort, was pure insanity. An accounting of such genuine world historical momen- tousness, of course, does not occur as the result of a scheme of this or that privy councillor or dried-up bureaucrat, but in line with mundane laws of life, which are and remain the struggle for existence. It should have been realized that a steely, healthy body national has often grown out of the most bloody civil wars, while the rottenness of artificially nurtured conditions of peace has more than once stunk to high Heaven. National destinies are not altered with kid gloves. Consequently, in the year 1923, the fiercest grip was in order for the grasping of the vipers feeding off our body national. Only after it was forthcoming would preparation of an active defense have had meaning. Over and over I shouted myself hoarse in those days, and tried to clarify, at least for so-called nationalist circles, what was at stake in the situation and that there would inevita- bly be an end like that of 1918 if the same mistakes were made as in the year 1914 and the ensuing years. I begged repeatedly that Destiny be given free rein and our move- ment allowed a chance to settle with Marxism; but I preached to deaf ears. Everybody, including the head of the defense forces, understood everything better, until finally they were confronted by the most miserable capitula- tion of all time. 986 MEIN KAMPF Then did I know in my very heart that the German bourgeoisie had reached the end of its mission and is called to no further task. Then did I see how all these parties were squabbling with Marxism only because of competitive jealousy without seriously seeking to annihilate it ; they had finally reconciled themselves inwardly with the father- land's general decline, and what moved them was only a deep concern that they themselves have a place at the wake. It was for that alone that they were still ' struggling.' In those days I admit it openly I conceived the most profound admiration for that great man south of the Alps who, full of ardent love for his people, would not deal with the internal enemies of Italy, but pushed their anni- hilation in every way and by all means. What will rank Mussolini among the great of this earth is the determi- nation not to share Italy with Marxism, but to save the fatherland from it by dooming internationalism to anni- hilation. How wretchedly dwarfish our German State yes-men ap- peared in contrast, and how nauseating it is when these nonentities undertake, with boorish conceit, to criticize a man a thousand times as great; and how painful it is to think that this goes on in a country which, barely half a century ago, might still call a Bismarck its leader! The fate of any active Ruhr resistance in 1923 was de- cided in advance because of this bourgeois attitude and ten- derness towards Marxism. To want to fight France with the deadly enemy in one's own ranks would have been pure idiocy. What was then done was shadow boxing at best, undertaken in order to give some satisfaction to the nation- alist element in Germany, to calm the 'seething national soul/ in reality to dupe it. Had there been serious thought about what was being done, it must have been recognized that a nation's strength lies primarily not in its weapons but in its will, and that, before conquering alien foes, the EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 987 domestic foe must be wiped out; otherwise, should victory not reward the first day of struggle, beware. The moment even the shadow of defeat falls on a nation not freed of in- ternal enemies, its force of resistance will collapse and the foe will finally be the victor. That could have been foretold as early as the spring of 1923. Let us not even discuss the dubiousness of a military success against France ! For if the result of German action with respect to the French Ruhr invasion had been simply the annihilation of Marxism internally, success would thereby already have been ours. A Germany liberated from this deadly enemy of its existence and its future would have possessed a potency which not even the whole world could longer have strangled. On the day when Marx- ism is smashed in Germany, its chains will really be broken forever. For never in our history have we been conquered by the force of our foes, but always by our own vices and the enemy in our own camp alone. Inasmuch as the German State leadership then was in- capable of pulling itself together for such an heroic deed, it really had left, from any sensible standpoint , only the first course, that is, the course of doing nothinf at all, but of letting matters run along just as they were. But in that great hour, Heaven presented the German nation with a great man, too, Herr von Cuno. He was not exactly a professional statesman or politician, and, of course, still less one by birth, but he represented a kind of political hack needed solely to execute definite plans; -for the rest, he was more familiar with business matters. Con- sequently a curse for Germany, because this politicizing merchant regarded even politics as a business enterprise and oriented his activity accordingly. 'France has occupied the Ruhr district; what is in the Ruhr district? Coal. Well, then France has occupied the Ruhr district because of the coal. 9 Then what was more 988 MEIN KAMPF natural for Heir von Cuno than the notion of striking, so that the French would get no coal, whereupon, in the opin- ion of Heir von Cuno, they would certainly vacate the Ruhr one of these days since it was bad business. That was about the train of thought of this 'eminent' 'national' 'states- man,' who was permitted to address 'his people' at Stutt- gart and other places and whom this people quite blissfully admired. f For a strike, however, they naturally needed the Marx- ists, too, for it was, indeed, primarily the workers who had to strike. So it was necessary to bring the workers into a united front with all other Germans (and in the brain of this sort of bourgeois statesman the worker is always syn- onymous with the Marxists). In those days the glow of these putrid bourgeois party hacks about the genius of such a slogan was really something to see! Simultaneously nationalistic and a product of genius at last they really had what they had at bottom been looking for all the time! The bridge to Marxism had been found and the nationalist swindler was now enabled to stretch out a loyal hand to the international traitor, making a 'German' (' teutscher') face and spouting nationalist phrases. And the traitor seized the hand with the utmost haste. For much as Cuno needed the Marxist leaders for his 'united front? the Marxist leaders needed Cuno's money. Thus both sides were helped along. Cuno got his united front of nationalist chatterers and anti- nationalist rogues, and the international fakirs got State pay for their supreme mission of struggle, i.e., to wreck the national economy, and this time at the expense of the State itself. An immortal conception, to save a nation by means of a subsidized general strike, and certainly just the slogan to which even the most indifferent ne'er-do-well can agree with the greatest enthusiasm. // is universally known that a nation cannot be freed by prayer. But it had first to be proved historically whether, per- EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 989 haps, it could not be freed to idle. Had Herr von Cuno at that time, instead of catting for a subsidized general strike and es- tablishing this as the foundation of a * united front,' exacted just two hours' more work from every German, then this swindling ' united front ' would have washed up on the third day. But nations are not freed by doing nothing, but by sacri- fices. Of course, this so-called passive resistance did not last very long. For only a person completely alien to war could flatter himself that he could frighten armies of occupation by such ridiculous means. But that would have been the only sense to an action whose costs ran into millions and which substantially helped level the national defense to its very foundations. The French, of course, were at this point able to make themselves at home in the Ruhr district with a certain inner calm, inasmuch as they observed the opposition resort to that sort of means. They had, in fact, obtained from us the best recipe for bringing a stubborn civilian population to reason had its conduct constituted any serious threat tc the occupation authorities. How quickly, indeed, did we rout the Belgian guerrillas and make the seriousness of the situation clear to the civilian population when, nine years earlier, the German armies ran the danger of serious damage from their activities. As soon as passive resistance had be- come really dangerous to France in the Ruhr, the investing troops would, with playful ease, have put a ghastly finish to this quite childish mischief in less than a week. For, in the last analysis, the decisive question is always this: What is to be done if passive resistance finally really gets on the opponent's nerves and he launches a fight against it with brute force? Is one determined to offer further resistance? If so, bear, for better or worse, the most violent, bloodiest hounding. In that case one faces what one faces in active resistance, namely, struggle. Hence every so-called passive 990 MEIN KAMPF resistance has real significance only if backed up by a de- termination, if need be, to continue resistance by open struggle or by means of clandestine guerrilla warfare. In general, all such struggles depend upon a conviction of a chance of success. As soon as a besieged fortress hard pressed by foes is compelled to abandon all hope of raising the siege, it practically surrenders, especially if the defend- ers are still attracted by the certainty of going on living as an alternative to probable death. Deprive the garrison of a beleaguered fortress of its belief in the possibility of libera- tion, and all the defense forces collapse at once. Consequently, passive resistance in the Ruhr, in view of the end results which it could and must have produced had it really succeeded, could have had meaning only if an active front had been building back of it. Then, certainly, there would have been no limit to what might have been exacted from our people. Had each of these Westphalians known that the homeland was raising an army of eighty or one hundred divisions, the French would have walked on thorns. There are always more courageous men ready to sacrifice themselves for a success than for an obvious futility. That was a classic case which compelled us National Socialists to adopt a position against a so-called nationalist slogan. And we did it, too. During those months I was not seldom attacked by people whose entire nationalist senti- ment was simply a mixture of stupidity and superficial pre- tense, who were merely joining in the shouting because it afforded them the pleasant thrill of suddenly being able to 'Eighty or a hundred divisions' in a Germany without food, arms or discipline certainly entered no one's head at that time. The passage is dialectic to combat the accusation that his conduct had hampered rather than aided the success of Ger- many. EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 991 act nationally without any danger. I regarded this most pitiful of all united fronts as the most ridiculous phenome- non, and history proved me right. As soon as the trade unions had just about filled their coffers with Cuno's money, and passive resistance faced the issue of going over from sluggish defense to active offense, the red hyenas immediately stampeded from the nationalist sheep herd and became again what they always were. Herr von Cuno quietly stole back to his ships, but Germany had become richer by an experience and poorer by a great hope. Down to late midsummer many officers, and certainly not the worst, did not sincerely believe in such a disgrace- ful development. All hoped that, if not openly, then cov- ertly, preparations would be undertaken to transform this most impudent French incursion into a turning-point in German history. There were many even in our ranks who put confidence at least in the Reich army. And this con- viction was so vital as decisively to determine the actions and especially the education of innumerable young people. But when the disgraceful collapse and capitulation in such a crushing, ignominious fashion followed the sacrifice of millions of marks and thousands of young Germans (who had been stupid enough to take the promises of the Reich leaders seriously), rebellion flared up in a blaze against such a betrayal of our unfortunate nation. Then suddenly, bright and clear, there awoke in the heads of millions the conviction that only the most radical elimination of the en- tire ruling system could save Germany. Never was the moment riper, never did it cry more im- periously for such a solution than at the moment when, on the one side, open treachery to the fatherland showed itself shamelessly, while, on the other, a nation was economically delivered to lingering death from starvation. Since the State itself trampled on all the laws of loyalty and trust, mocked the rights of its citizens, swindled millions of its 992 MEIN KAMPF truest sons out of their sacrifice, and robbed millions of others of their last penny, it no longer had any right to ex- pect from its subjects anything but hate. And one way or another this hate for the corrupters of people and fatherland pressed towards an explosion. At this point I can only refer to the closing sentence of my last speech in the great trial in the spring of 1924:^ 'The judges of this State may calmly condemn us for what we did then, but History, as the goddess of a higher truth and a better law, will nevertheless some day laugh- ingly tear up this verdict, to acquit us all of guilt and sin.' t She will, however, then also call to the seat of judgment those in power who today trample on right and law, who lead our nation into misery and ruin, and who, in the mis- fortune of the fatherland, valued their own ego more than the life of the common wealth. < I do not intend here to portray those events which led to and determined November 8, 1923. I do not want to, be- cause I see therein nothing promising for the future and above all because it is futile to reopen wounds which seem today hardly healed; because it is, in addition, futile to speak of causes and guilt among men all of whom, perhaps in the depths of their hearts, love their nation equally well, and only missed the common road or failed to understand each other concerning it. t In view of the great common misfortune of our father* land, too, I do not now want to hurt any further and per- haps separate those who, some day in the future, will have to build the great united front of those who are truly Ger- man at heart against the common front of our national foes. Because I know that some day the time will come when even people who were hostile to us will think with veneration of those who took the bitter road of death for their German nation. EMERGENCY DEFENSE AS A RIGHT 993 At the end of this second volume I want to bring before the eyes of our adherents and of the crusaders for our doc- trine those eighteen heroes to whom I dedicated the first volume of my work, as those heroes who most consciously sacrificed themselves for all of us. They must always recall the weak and those who become irresolute back to the ful- fillment of their duty, to a duty which they themselves ful- filled with the best faith and despite all consequences. And I want also to reckon among them that man, who, as one of the best, by words and by thoughts and finally by deeds, dedicated his life to the awakening of his, of our nation: Dietrich Eckart <+ The 'eighteen heroes' have since come into their own. Annual ceremonies honor them, and their names must be conned by rote in German schools. A characteristic poem by Eckart may be reproduced here from Der Hammer (September, 1914): Vater in Himmel, entschlossen zum Tode, Knie'n wir vor Dir, O antworte nun! 1st noch ein Volk, das dem hehren Gebote Redlicher dient als wir Deutschen es tun? Gibt es ein solches? Dann, ewiger, spende Schicksalsgewaltig ihm Lorbeer und Sieg. Vater, Du laechelst? O Glueck ohne Endc! Auf ! und hinein in den heiligen Krieg. Father in Heaven, resolved to the death Kneel we before Thee, O answer us, then! Does aught other people Thine awful command More loyally follow than we Germans do? Is there one such? Then, Eternal One, send Laurel and victory to it, mighty with fate. Father, Thou smilest? O joy without end! Up! and onward, onward, to the holy crusade. CONCLUSION t^^^N NOVEMBER 9, 1923, in the fourth year of its l^^Jexistence, the National Socialist German Workers' Party was dissolved and forbidden throughout the entire territory of the Reich. Today, in November, 1926, it stands again before us, free through the whole Reich, stronger and internally more stable than ever before. Not all the persecutions of the movement and of its in- dividual leaders, not all the defamations and slanders, have been able to do it any harm. The correctness of its ideas, the purity of its purposes, the readiness of its adherents to sacrifice, have thus far enabled it to emerge from all oppres- sions stronger than ever. If, in the world of our contemporary parliamentary cor- ruption, it attends more and more to the deepest meaning of its struggle and feels itself and conducts itself as the pure embodiment of the values of race and personality, it will, in consequence of an almost mathematical law, some day bear victory from its struggle. Just as Germany must inevitably win its rightful place on this earth, should it be led and or- ganized on similar principles. A State which, in the epoch of race poisoning, dedicates itself to the cherishing of its best racial elements, must some day be master of the world. Let the adherents of our movement never forget this, should ever the greatness of the sacrifice lead them to a fearful comparison with the possible triumph.** INDEX Abegg, Or. Karl, 803 j Austrian National Socialist Party, 50, Abie 3 Irish Rose, 434 473, 474 Adler, Viktor, 50 Austrian Social Democracy, 80 Adolf Hitler: Wilhelm III, 465 Akademie (Vienna), 24, 27 Badeni, Casimir, 17 Alfarth, Felix, xiii Baeumler, Alfred, 46, 353 Alldeutscher Verband. See Pan-Ger- Baldwin, Stanley, 209 man Balkan War, 205 Allies, the, 256, 257, 271, 272, 277, Balkans, 241 292, 293, 396, 498, 738, 889 Bang, Dr. Paul, 283 Alsace-Lorraine, 241, 372, 373, 601, Baron, Salo Wittmayer, 422 686, 915, 974 Barth, 261 Alter, Julius, 497, 736 Bauer, Bruno, 441 Alte Kaempfer, 851 Bauer, Professor, 502 Amann, Max, 483, 848, 862, 864 Bauriedl, Andreas, xiii American Expeditionary Forces, 312 Bavarian People's Party, 146, 293, American history, 419 507, 585, 586, 717, 812, 825, 841 Amsterdam, 172 Beaverbrook, Lord, 906 Angriff, Der, 112 Beck, General von, 855 Anschluss, 12, 80, 411, 891, 937 Beelitz, 248 Anti-Semitism, 17, 68, 72, 73, 83, 118, Belgium, 216, 601, 944, 976 125, 155, 156, 193, 233, 241, 242, Benes, Dr., 925 278, 296, 391, 395, 414, 415, 435, Berchtesgaden, 815 442, 450, 454, 498, 641, 644, 694, Bergmann, Dr. Ernst, 500 737, 824, 862, 929 Bergner, Elizabeth, 417 Arabs, 414, 954 Berlin, 22, 100, 363, 415, 672, 697, Arbeitausschuss der deutschen Verb&nde, 81 1 , 910 910 Berlin University, 781 Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt, Der, Berliner Tageblatt, 334, 335, 693, 699 409 Bernard, Saint, 155 Arbeiterzeitung, 54 Bernhard, Georg, 332 Arbeitsfront, 332, 653, 878 Bernhard, Ludwig, 661 Arco- Valley, Count, 277, 279 Bernstorff, 312 Arminius, 117 Bethmann-Hollweg, 208, 378, 712, 713 Art, 352-362 Betriebsrat, 667 Aryan, 80, 1 16, 196, 395, 396, 397, 399, Biarritz, 424 400, 401, 404, 405, 408, 412, 418, Bibelforseher, 467 419, 425, 441, 580, 592, 594, 636, 644, Bible, 196, 414, 422, 431 646, 943 Birth control, 169 Aryan exiles, 688 Bismarck, 8, 9, 10, 90, 147, 191, 193, Asia, 395, 398 202, 223, 224, 303, 317, 368, 383, Auer, Erhard, 743, 744 44^, 461, 588, 601, 829, 847, 953, 986 Auf gut Dcutsch, 109 'Black Hundred,' 182 Augsburg, 5, 502 Bloch, Joseph S., 73 August Wilhelm, Prince, 320 Blomberg, General von, 855 Auslands-Or ganisation, 240 Blum, Leon, 242, 373 Austria, 8, 15, 16, 17, 87, 186, 411, 925, Bodenstdndigkcit, 419 944, 953, 955 Boecklin, Arnold, 360 996 INDEX Boer War, 205 Cologne, 344 Bohle, Ernst Wilhelm, 240 Colonies, German, 181 Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin, Communism, 102, 571, 572, 573, 691 Der, 450 Communist Party, 275, 451, 458, 465, Bolshevism, 101, 241. 370, 450, 572, 511, 570, 691, 806, 872, 884 909, 911, 960 Comte, Auguste, 365, 486 Bonapartists, 424 Concordat with Holy See, 147 Braunati, 3, 4 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Count, 952 Braunthal, Alfred, 283 Coughlin, Rev. Charles, 424 Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft, 282 Crisis in German Democracy, 588 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 4, 181, 186, Cuno, Chancellor von, 878, 974, 980, 261, 273, 451, 495, 533, 696, 703, 704 981, 987, 988, 989, 991 British fleet, 376, 514 Czechoslovakia, 9, 17, 21, 68, 76, 119, Browe, S.J., Peter, 427 139, 140, 145, 154, 371, 372, 601. Brown House, 22, 450 925, 940, 943 Brueckner, Captain, 513 Bruening, 102, 131, 182, 332, 883, 922 D'Abernon, Viscount, 910 Buch, Major, 848 Dantpn, 799 Bucharest, Treaty of, 703 Danzig, 371 Buchrucker putsch, 975 Darre, R. Walther, 317, 318, 419, 591 Buckeley, Dr., 559 David, 305 Budapest, 91 Dawes Plan, 288, 321, 344, 457, 458, Burning of the Reichstag, The, 572 634, 904 Dearborn Independent, 929 Cadorna, 257 Decline of the West, 398 Cameropns, 179 Delbrueck, Professor Hans, 270 Carinthia, 17 Dessauer, Friedrich, 142 Casella, Theodor, XIII Deterding, Sir Henry, 184 Catholic schools, 643 Deutsch-volkische Freiheitspartei, 457, Catholicism, 40, 67, 68, 70, 93, no, 498 1 20, 125, 128, 138, 146, 147, 148, Deutsch-volkische Schutn und Trut*- 293, 344, 364, 365, 366, 367, 682, bund, 498, 824 711, 825, 892 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 693 Cavell, Edith, 273 Deutsche Bank, 698 Center Party, 209, 280, 291, 293, 317, Deutsche, Der, 332 366, 373, 507, 871, 974 Deutsche Kultur im Leben der Vdlker, Central Africa, 607 591 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 116, Deutsche Volkszeitung, 71 307, 325. 359 369, 395. 413, 605 Deutscher Schulverein, 17 Chamberlain, Neville, 308 Deutscher Volksbund, 242 Charlemagne, 318, 736 DeutsMand, Deutschland, nichts al$ Chateaubriand, Alphonse de, 242 Deutschland, 198 China, 931 Deutschland Erwache/, 940 Cholm, 183 Dialogue in Hades Between Machia- Christ, 117, 489 velh and Montesquiou, 424 Christian Labor Union, 442 Dickel, Dr. Otto, 502 Christian Social Party, 40, 71, 124, Dickstein Committee, 242 125, 126, 153, 154, 158, 227, 732 Dies Committee, 242 Christianity, 365, 367, 393, 441, 487, Dietrich, Dr. Otto, 848 $75* 604* 76o Dingfelder, Dr., 506 Christliche Welt, Die, 48 Dittmann, Wilhelm, 184 Churchill, Winston, 209 Dollfuss, 71, 333, 890, 891 Citizenship, 656-659 Domestic colonization, 172, 175, 176, Qaas, Heinrich, 186, 208, 402 177 Clausewitz, 969, 972 Dorsch, Anton, 555 Clothing, 619 Dorten, Dr., 822 Coburg, 806, 808 Drei Bekenntnisse, 969 INDEX 997 Drexlei. Anton, 295* 297, 482, 483, 493. 505, 506, 518-529, 533~534. 538, 539. 542, 544. 545. 547. 548, 549. 551, 553. 554, 555, 557, 558, Diisseldorf , 4 Duesterbcrg, Colonel, 785 Duff-Cooper, 972 Duisburg, 4 Ebenhoch, A., 4 Ebert, Friedrich, in, 179, 261, 274, 275. 305, 357, 569, 586, 771, 799 Eckart, Dietrich, 109, 450, 555. 862, r," 3 r> Economic Perennis, 40 Eden, Anthony, 972 Education, 613, 692 Edward VII, 193, 965 Egyptians, 954 Ehrhardt Brigade, 507, 737, 785 Ehrlich, Wilhelm, xiii Eibl, Hans, 907 Eisner, Kurt, 269, 277, 278, 200, 332, 414, 586, 818, 819, 820 Elizabeth, Queen, 895 Emerson, 497 Engels, Friedrich, 441 England, 95, 180, 183, 184, 187, 188, 190, 235, 713, 805, 870, 889, 895, 898, 900, 002, 903, 907, 908, 910, 929, 939, 951. 955. 956, 979 Epp, Franz von, 146, 480, 80 1 Ernst, Schmiedt, 277 Erzberger, Matthias, in, 270, 274, 3io, 376, 799, 972 Eskimo, 594 Esperanto, 423 Esser, Hermann, 536, 555, 848 Ethiopia, 925 Eulenberg, Prince, 325 Eupen-Malmedy, 686, 944 Fallersleben, 17 Faulhaber, Cardinal, 146, 197, 393, 694 Faust, Martin, xiii Feder, Gottfried, 117, 175, 282, 287, 289, 291, 292, 294, 482, 690, 692, 694. 697, 864 Fehrenbach Cabinet, 738 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 441 Fichte, 579 j FichU Bund, 242 Flandin, Pierre, 909 Flemish Belgium, 601 Foch, Marshal, 259, 272 Folkish State, 584-655 Ford, Henry, 929 Foreign Affairs, 880 Forgotten Peace, The, 273 'Fourteen Points/ 235, 273 France, 41, 78, 146, 169, 189, 232, 244, 889, 893, 895. 897, 899, 900, 907, 908, 909, 917, 937, 939, 951, 963, 966, 967, 974, 976, 977, 978, 979, 980, 982, 983 Franco, General, 242, 572, 925 Franco-Prussian War, 8, 15, 120 Frank, Hans, 691 Frankfort, 317 Frankfurter Zeitung, 332, 333, 335, 424 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 9, 21, 119, 206 Franz Joseph, 207 Frederick the Great, 8, 198, 287, 324, 357, 383, 429, 894 Free Corps, 4, 5, 395, 396, 480, 633, 737, 789, 792, 814 Freemasons, 424, 433, 443. 699, 760, 927, 967 Freier A rbciterauschuss fur einen guten Frieden, 295 French army, 383 French colonial troops, 448 French colonies, 180 French Revolution, 383, 711, 760 Frey, Arthur, 144 Frick, Dr. Wilhelm, 463, 508, 509 Friedrich, Hans E., 47 Fritzch, Theodor, 737 Fiihrer (leader) principle, 117 Funk, Walther, 283, 854 Galicia, 8, 89 Gareis, 744 Gdynia, 371 Genseric, 117 George, Stefan, 127, 476, 490, 581 Gerade Weg, 334 Gerlich, Dr. Fritz, 334 German Africa, 963 German-Americans, 470 German armies, 15 German art, 163 German navy, 70, 375 German Revolution of 1848, 100 German Socialist Party, 757, 758 German Switzerland, 60 1 German Workers' Party, 280, 291- 301, 506 Germania, 333, 693, 810 Gestapo, 798 Giftptlt, Der, 641 998 INDEX Gneisenau, 670 Gobineau, Arthur de, 116 Goebbels, 112, 233, 241, 282, 476, 572, 693, 697, 814, 847 Goerdeler, Karl, 854 Goering, 155, 320, 325, 463, 57*, 672, 814, 847, 854, 880 Goethe, 352, 355, 356, 429, 431 Goltz, General von der, 4 Graefe, Albrecht von, 208, 498, 577, 696 Grant, Madison, 598 Greek Catholics, 67 Gregorian chant, 417 Groener, Wilnelm, 272, 275, 772, 804, 870 Grossdeutsch Partei, 10, T Guenther, Hans, 419 Guertner, Dr. Franz, 803 Gundolf, Friedrich, 476 Gymnasium, 10, 322, 345 Haagsche Post, 655 Habsburg, 8, 10, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 69, 7O, 87, 93, 96, 119, 120, 121, 124, 126, 138, 166, 167, 186, 191, 192, 196, 211, 428, 587, 590, 7^4, 755, 892, 894, 918, 940 Haegy, Abbe, 373 Haeuser, 467 Halifax, Lord, 925 Hamburg, 22, 87, 467 Hammer, Der, 737, 993 Hanfstaengel, Ernst, 814, 862 Hanisch, Rudolf, 28 Hansen, Theophilus von, 27 Harden, Maximilian, 332 Harrer, Karl, 296, 297, 493 Hartmann, Hanz, 198 Hartmann, Ludo, 12 Hauer, Wilhelm, 356, 500 Haushofer, R., 937 Haydn, 17 Hechenberger, Anton, xiii Hep;el, 441, 579 Heidegger, 353 Heiden, Konrad, 28, 146, 261, 475, 862, 948 'HeuY 17 Heim, Dr. Georg, 293 Heimwehren, 890, 891, 892 Heine, 431 Helfferich, Karl, 270 Helphand, Dr., 451 Herder, Der grosse, 401 Hergt, Oskar, 459 Hermann Wirth SociVtv, 500 Hermanns, Hubert, 826 Hertling, Count von, 271 Herzegovina, 89 Herzl, Theodor, 74 Hess, Rudolf, 325, 483 Heuss, Theodor, 20 Hiedler, Johann, 5 Hierl, Konstantin, 854 Hilferding, 414 Himmler, Heinrich, 320, 793, 848 Hindcnburg, 131, 173, 269, 271, 454, 570, 804, 883 Hirsch-Duncker Unions, 871 Hitler, Alois (Schicklgruber), 5 Hitler's picture, 501 Hitze, Franz, 40 Hoffman, Heinrich, 863 Hoffman, Max, 181 Hoffmann, Adolf, 495 Hoffmansthal, Hugo von, 76 Hohenzollerns, 8, 733, 754, 755, 941 Holland, 601, 895 Holleben-Alzbey, N. von, 951 Hoover Moratorium, 805 Horst-Wessel Lied, 802 Housing problem, 343 Hugenberg, Alfred, 283, 370, 590, 697, 699 Hungary, 76, 90, 119, 371 I. G. Farben, 333 / Knew Hitler, 466 I Was Hitler's Prisoner, 812 Ideate Staat, Der, 198 India, 956 Innsbruck, 156 Ireland, 146 Italian Fascism, 40, 661, 671, 878, 927 Italy, 166, 170, 180, 192, 244, 253, 889, 899, 902, 903, 907, 908, 953, 963 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 19 Japan, 185, 377, 399, 930, 931 Jesuit: der Vaterlandslose Dunkelmann. Der, 826 Jesuits, 145, 825 Jewish art, 417 Jewish newspapers, 103, 225, 332, 379, 424, 487, 488, 910, 929 Jewish Socialists, 451 Jewish soldiers, 251 Jewry, International, 193 Jews in Nazi Germany, The, 415 ~ohst, Hans, 352 oly, Maurice, 424 oseph II, 91, 93, 589 udaism, 66, 76, 77, 79, 82, 101, 154, INDEX 999 155. 176, 196, 202, 204, 219, 241, 251, 269, 278, 312, 313, 332, 337, 363, 374, 393, 396, 412, 414, 4i8, 419, 421, 423, 424, 435, 437, 441, 442, 446, 447, 454, 469, 509, 590, 654, 667, 673, 699, 777, 818, 824, 905, 9i8, 930, 952, 960, 966, 970 Judaism, Christianity and Germany, Judenbekdmpfung im Mittelalter, 427 "uenger, Ernst, 409 uenger, F. G., 352 ung, Rudolph, 473, 531, 697 linkers, 483 Kahr, Gustav von, 508, 521, 761, 813 Kampf der evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, 144 Kampfverband Sachsen, 798 Kant, 352 Kapital, Das, 289, 441 Kapp Putsch 1920, 633, 785, 803, 871 Keiser, Guenter, 30 Kellerbauer, Walter, 555 Kerensky, 450, 451 Kerrl, Hans, 848 Ketteler, Bishop von, 40 Killinger, Manfred, 798 Kirkpatrick, Clifford, 320 Kjellen, R., 937 Klages, Dietrich, 353 Kleineuropa, 951 Klintsch, Lieutenant Johann, 511 Klopp, Wiard, 40 Koeniggraetz, 121 Koerner, Oskar, xiii Roller, Sepp, 555 Kolnai, Aurel, 46, 393, 475 Kortner, Fritz, 417 Kraft durch Freudc, 844 Kraus, Herbert, 588 Kraus, Karl, 76 Kreuger, Ivan, 288 Krie^sgesellschaften, 252 Krists: tin politisches Manifest, 661 Kube, Wilhelm, 489, 84 Kuehlmann, 312 Kuhn, Karl, xiii Ku Klux Klan, 232 Kyffhauser Bund, 785 Laforce, Karl, xiii Lagarde, 318 Laibach, 91 Lambach,7 Landauer, Gustav, 278 Landsberg on the Lech, xiii, xv Langbehn, 318 Langhemarcq, 462 Languages, teaching of, 627 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 442 League of Nations, 371, 912, 955 'League of Oppressed Nations/ 955 Le Bon, Gustave, 128 Lemberg, 91 Lenin, 182, 450, 451, 711 Lessing, 317, 352 Ley, Robert, 332, 489, 878 Lichtenberger, Henri, 348 Liebermann, Max, 417 Liebknecht, Karl. 261, 275, 310 Linsingen, General von, 251 Linz, 6, 19, 66, 73 Lloyd George, 262, 712, 713, 983 Locarno Pact, 971 Loebe, Paul, 803 Londonderry, Lord, 185 London Economist, The, 655 London Magazine, 19 Lorant, Stefan, 812 Lossow, General von, 624, 813 Los-von-Rom, 140-152 Loucheur, Louis, 909 Ludendorff, 145, 181, 183, 192, 208, 216, 252, 254, 259, 269, 270, 271, 272, 307, 312, 313, 357, 378, 450, 454, 500, 760, 813, 814, 825, 826, 829, 914, 917 Ludendorff, Mathilda, 500 Ludwig I, 361 Ludwig III, 212 Ludwig, Emil, 699 Luedecke, Kurt, 466 Lueger, Karl, 71, 72, 88, 125, 126, 127, 129, 158, 227, 262 Lueng, Pidder, 969 Luettwitz, General, 772 Luther, Dr. Hans, 971 Luther, Martin, 287 Lutheranism, 143 Luxemburg, Rosa, 275 Machaus, Hugo, 822 Machtergreifung, 320, 514, 688, 812, 838, 847, 970 Maercker, General L. R. G., 280, 771, 772 Majority Socialists, 279, 305, 495 Malcolm, Sir Neill, 269 Manchester Liberalism, 120 Mann, Thomas, 922 Marat, 799 * March on Rome,' 671 1000 INDEX Maria Theresa, 207 Marriage, 342 Marx, Karl, 289, 441, 578, 579, 592, 711, 788 Marx, Wilhelm, 922 Marxism, 32, 51, 79, 81, 82, 83, 99, 100, 162, 193, 202, 203, 218, 223, 224, 225, 254, 269, 273, 291, 292, 296, 321, 327, 331, 367, 374, 408, 440, 441, 442, 443, 447, 449, 453, 458, 462, 473, 476, 497. 507. 509, 567, 568, 569, 577, 579. 58o, 582, 662, 668, 669, 674, 716, 726, 787, 874, 882, 928, 983, 984, 985, 988 Masaryk, President, 371 Maurice, Emile, 748 Max of Baden, Prince, 271, 586, 778 Maximilian, Emperor, 120 May, Karl, 419 Mayr, Captain, 294 Mendelsohn, Erich, 417 Mendelssohn, Moses, 431 Mensch und Erde, 353 Middle Ages, 155 Miesbacher Anzeiger, 744 Mtiitarisches Wochenblatt, 693 Miltenberg, Weigand von, 465 Minority Socialists, 274, 275, 305 Moltke, 189, 229, 383, 614, 670 Mommsen, 413 Mordacq, General, 272 Morgan, J. P., 193 MUller, Pastor Ludwig, 144 Munchner Beobachter, 492 Miinchner Post, 749 Mttnster, 311 Munich, 22, 163-203, 206, 211, 265, 277, 361, 450, 463, 466, 483, 563, 69?, 7i8, 749, 790, 801, 861 Munitions Strike, 254, 274 Mussolini, 22. 102, 466, 699, 825, 890, 892, 913, 9H, 925, 927, 928, 948, 986 My thus des son Jahrhunderts, 196, 676 Napoleon, 4, 19, 47, 895 Napoleon III, 120 Napoleonic Wars, 839 Nathan der Weisc, 317 National Socialism, 31, 46, 240, 241, 317,320,344,352 National Socialist German Workers Party, 30, 175, 45&-5I4, 573, 582, 583, 683, 684, 698, 730, 757, 758, 786, 792, 797, 814, 862 870, 887, 994 Natumal'Sozialer Volksbund, 577 Naiional-Sozialistische Bibliothek, 864 National-Sozialistische Blatter, 468 National- Sosialistische Korrespondent 864 National- Sotialistische Monatshefte, 864 Nationalistcn, 497, 736 Naumann, Friedrich, 952 4 Nazi Bibles, '643 Nazi Dictatorship, The, 757 Nazi flag, 506, 730, 73 1. 732, 733, 734, 735 Nazi Germany: Its Women and Family Life, 320 Negroes, 385, 639 Neuadel aus Blut und Boden, 317, 319 Neubau des deutschen Reiches, 304 Neubauer, Kurt, xiii Neue Blatter fur den Sozialismus, 32 Neue Freie Presse t 68, 693 New York, 22 Niekiesch, Ernst, 577 Niemoeller, Martin, 144, 694 Nietzsche, 127, 359, 398, 581 1 Nordic, 1 605 North America, 391 Noske, Gustav, 771 'November Criminals,' 270, 465, 557, 558, 885 November Revolution, 463, 495, 768, 88 1, 886 Niirnberg, 4, 757 Niirnberg laws on race and citizen- ship, 320 Niirnberg Party Conference 1935, 101, 325 470 Oeynhausen, Synod of, 642 Ogpu, 798 Olden, Rudolf, 214 Olympic Games 1936, 614 Orel, Anton, 40 Ostara group, 125 Ostmark, 15, 88, 89, 121, 180, 941 Ottwalt, Ernst, 939 Ourselves and Germany, 185 Oxenstierna, 369 Palestine, 447 Pallenberg, Max, 417 Palm, Johann Philip, 4 Pan-German, 10, 40, 116, 114, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 145, 147, 151, 152, 153. 15*. 186, 250, 262, 270, 273, 307, 374, 391, 396, 402, 473. 601, 686, 888, 894 Papacy, 578, 643 ... Pape, Claus von, xiii Papen Cabinet, 805 INDEX 1001 Pa pen, von, 76, 131, 273, 333, 570, Rcichskulturkammcr, 693 812, 837, 854, 884, 909 Reichspost, 333, 693 Pareto, 66 1 Reichsrat, 100 Parliament, British, 95 Reichstag, 70, 100, in, 112, 130, 131, Pasevalk, 264 182, 216, 269, 369, 373, 374, 376, 442, Passau, 6 453, 457, 458, 557, 572, 652, 670, Pellepoix, Darquier de, 242 694, 804, 867, 958 Pfeffer, Captain, 814 Reichstag fire, 102, 571, 572 Pfeiffer, Dr. Maximilian, 495 Reichswart, 676 Pfordten, Theodor von der, xiii Reichswehr, 280, 320, 465, 508, 512, Pisenti, 661 651, 785, 786, 801, 813, 974 Pius XI, 572 Reinhardt, Max, 417, 922 Planwirtschaft, 880 Repington, Col., 311 Plato, 391, 579, 666 Retcliff, John, 424 Poehner, Ernst, 508 Reventlow, Ernst zu, 181, 402, 424, Poelzi, Klara, $ 676, 826, 967 Poetsch, Ludwig, 19 Revolution des Nihilismus, 365 Pogrom of November 9, 1938, 118, Rhineland, 513, 514, 599, 686, 909, 156, 233 917, 971, 976 Poincare", 5, 944 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 847, 854 Poland, 8, 145, 146, 172, 183, 273, 344, Rickmers, Johann, xiii 370, 371, 372, 590, 686, 957, 963 Riehl, Walter, 555 Polish corridor, 371 Robespierre, 799 Politische Schriften, 900 Roehm, Ernst, 155, 414, 511, 698, 761, 'Potempa Murder, 1 811 801 Prague, pi, 165 Rohling, August, 72 Probst, Arnold, 761 Roman law, 318, 690 Prodinger, Hans, 555 Rome, 145, 151, 363, 893 Prohibition, 612 Rosenberg, Alfred, 146, 179, 181, 182, Propaganda, 108, 693, 846-867, 910 184, 196, 333, 356, 395, 433, 47<>, Propaganda, War, 227-242 482, 591, 643, 847, 862, 906, 952 Prostitution, 342, 349 Ruge, Arnold, 441 Protestants, 67, 68, 125, 344, 642, 825 Ruhr invasion, 457, 554, 633, 786, Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, 423 81 1, 813, 91 7, 975, 979, 981, 983, 987 Prussia, 4, 10, 87, 201, 246, 252 Rupprecht, Crown Prince, 250, 671, Putsch (1923), 32, 233, 250, 457, 466, 815 509, 671, 786, 803, 976, 981 Russia, 120, 170, 172, 181, 182, 183, 186, 191, 192, 193, 209, 256, 344, Ouadragesimo Anno, 40 371, 423, 450, 537, 772, 896, 931, Quirinal, 167 933, 934, 95*. 952, 953, 957, 958, 959, 96i, 962, 964, 965 Radek, Karl, 181 Russians, White, 184, 466, 911, 931, Rampolla, Cardinal, 72 952 Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, 419 Russo-Japanese War, 205 Rassenschande, 336, 908 Ruthenia, 371 Rath, Ernst von, 156 Rathenau, Walther, no, 252, 271, 357, Sadowa, 120 414, 511, 535, 633, 813 St. Germain, Treaty of, 686, 916 Rauschning, 365, 406 St. Petersburg, 923 Realschule, 10, 13, 19, 27, 66 Salzburg, 12, 473 Reed, Douglas, 572 Sans^Souci, 357 Reflexions sur la violence, 127 Sarajevo, 9 Reformation, 125 Schacht, Hjalmar, 179, 283, 854 Reichsarbeitsjzemeinschaften, 870 Scheidemann, Philipp, 261, 275, 305, Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft, 321 459, 533, 799 Reichsbank, 283, 284 Schemann, Ludwig, 391 Reichsbanner, 294, 634, 810 Scheringer, Lieutenant, 465 1002 INDEX Scherl-Verlag, 370 Scheubner-Richter, Max Erwin von, xiii, 952 Schicklgruber, Maria Anna, 5 Schiller, 352, 355 Schilling, Alexander, 555 Schirach, Baldur von, 643 Schlageter, Leo, 4, 5 Schleicher, General von, 761, 883, 884 Schleswig-Holstein, 509 Schmitt, Carl, 393 Schmitt, Robert, 854, 879 Schnee, Heinrich, 179 Schoenerer, Georg von, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 140, 824 Schopenhauer, 420 Schott, George, 117 Schuessler, 861 Schulze-Naumburg, Paul, 22, 353, 354 Schumann, Frederick L., 757 Schuschnigg, 71, 118, 333, 761, 891, 892 Schutzstaffel, 320, 513, 793 Schwabing, 230 Sckwarze Korps, Der, 694 Schwarzschild, L., 332 Schwein als Kriterium fur nordische Voelker und Semiten, Das, 419 Schwind, Moritz von, 360 Sedan, 211 Seidlitz, Gertrud von, 862 Seldte, Franz, 785 Senegambians, 448 Serbia, 206 Severing, Karl, 4, 5, 803 Shakespeare, 355 Skagerrak, 377 "octal and Religio Jews, 422 Social Democracy, 50, 51, 55~65, 78- 79, 81, 82, 97, in, 142, 162, 184, 208, 224, 225, 226, 270, 271, 274, 275, 280, 291, 294. 321, 366, 442, 476, 569, 678, 7H, 776, 778, 786, 789, 871, 967, 974 Social Justice, 424 Social-Revolutionary Party, 280 Socialism, 51, 634 'Soldiers' Cou Solf, 'Soldiers' Councils,' 277, 290, 569 Social and Religious History of the Somme battle, 247, 248, 263 Sorel, Georges, 127, 486 South Africa, 179 South Tyrol, 699, 9". 9", 913, 9*4, 915, 916 Soviet dictatorship (Bavaria), 232, 278, 353. 508, 820 Spain, 895, 899 Spain, Insurgent, 448 Spartacists, 495, 776 Spengler, Oswald, 304, 322, 327, 357, 39i, 397, 670, 761, 900, 923 Stahlhelm, 785 Stalin, 102, 181, 952 Stampfer, Friedrich, 254 Star of David, 736 Steiner, Rudolph, 467 Sterilization laws, 319 Stinnes, Hugo, 926 Stocker, Adolf, 824 Stoddard, Lothrop, 598 Stoecker movement, 442 Stransky, Lorenz Ritter von, xiii Strassburg, 373 Strasser, Gregor, 476, 697, 698, 847, 878, 958 Strasser, Otto, 465, 697 Streicher, Julius, 109, 483, 757, 758, 848 Stresa, 890, 892 Stresemann, Gustav, 779, 813, 905, 922, 926, 967, 975 Stunner, Der, no Sturm Abteilung, 511, 512, 697, 737. 744, 748, 749, 764-815 Slid mark, 16 Sudtiroler Frage und das Deutsche Bundnis Problem, Die, 914 Sumpf, Der, 327 Survey Graphic, 655 Swastika, 22, 735, 736, 737 Switzerland, 241, 450 Syphilis, 336-342, 345, 347, 349 Syrians, 414 Taafe, 17 Talmud, 72 Talmud Jude, Der, 72 Tannenberg, 256 Tannenberg Bund, 500, 914 Tat, 652 Teschen, 371, 37 2 Thaelmann, Ernst, 570 Third International, 184 Third Reich, The, 348 Thirty Years 1 War, 352, 597, 598 Thomas, Norman, 880 Thule Gesettschaft, 798, 861 Thuringia, 22 Thyssen, Fritz, 688 Tirpitz, Admiral von, 376 Toller, Ernst, 278 Trade unions, 52, 443-44$, 868-881, 910 INDEX 1003 1 Traumlaller ,' 117 Traunstein, 277 Treitschke, 318 Triple Alliance, 165, 167, 190, 191 Troebs, Karl, 591 TrSltsch, Ernst, ill Trotski, 451, 771 Tunis, 963 Turkey, 193, 955 Turnvereine, 19 U-boat warfare, 261, 273, 899 UFA, 370 Ukraine, 183, 372 Ultramontane Question, 825, 827, 829 Uniforms, 803 United States, 180, 232, 234, 242, 261, 270, 271, 272, 282, 399, 402, 434, 590, 639, 658, 713, 805, 870, 896, 901, 922, 929, 930, 975 van den Bruck, Moeller, 670, 893 van der Lubbe, 571 Vaterland, 40 Vaterlandspartei, 261, 295 Vatican, 4, 928 Veit, A. A., 73 Verdun, battle of, 318 Versailles, Treaty of, 179, 269, 373, 463, 495, 513, 519, 526, 686, 696, 702, 703, 704, 778, 786, 916, 921, 958, 971, 973, 982 Vesper, Will, 645 Vienna, 6, 18, 22, 25, 26-84, 85-162, 317 Vienna, Congress of, 946 Viennese press, 68, 69, 70, 77 Vierzehn Jahre, Die, 254 Vogelsang, Karl von, 40, 692, 694 Volkischer Beobachter, 109, 318, 333, 450. 798, 822, 825, 861, 862, 863, 866, 914 Volksblatt, 75 Vom Kaiser heer zur Reichswehr, 280 Vom Sinn der Gegenwart, 907 Von Leers, J., 197 Vorwaerts, 254, 255, 306 Vossiche Zeitung, 271 Wagner, Hermann, 555 Wagner, Richard, 23, 287, 307, 359 Wallowitz, Walter, 198 Wandervogel, 844 War Against the West, 46 Wars of Liberation, 4, 361 Weber, Max, 555 Wehrverbande, 785, 786 Weimar, 4, 270, 274, 568 Weimar Republic, 20, 310, 586, 587, 588, 802, 823, 837, 973 Weissenburg, 211 Wesen Ziele und Grundsatze der N.S.D.A.P., 470 Westphalia, 644 Wetterle, Abbe, 373 Wheeler-Bennett, John W., 269, 273 Widerstands Kreis, 577 Widukind, 117 Wieland, 352 Wiener Tagblatt, 69 Wilhelm I, 324 Wilhelm II, 70, 77, 220, 245, 269. 271, 272, 275, 276, 310, 316, 320, 325, 586, 591 Wilson, President, 235, 270, 271, 273, 293, 371, 384, 394, 819 Winnig, August, 296 Wirth, Chancellor, 102, no, 554, 738, 813, 974 Wittelsbach, 265, 277, 502, 587 Wolff, Theodor, 334, 699 Wooden Titan, The, 269 World Court, 944 World War, 4, 10, 21, 31, 96, 121, 126, 169, 185, 1 86, 204-226, 322, 380, 448, 712, 767, 788, 870, 892, 940, 958, 975, 976 Wnsberg, Ernst von, 251 Young Plan, 288, 697, 698 Zabern incident, 373 Zeitalter des Individualismus, 73 Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, 937 Zeitschnft fur katolische Theologie f ~ 42 7 Zionism, 74, 423, 447 Zucht oder Bildung?, 322 Zuchtwarten, 318 Zur Weltlage, 923