Examples

 

Source: Command and Obedience: SS Leadership Guide by Alfred Kotz

 

Question: Is Germany whatever is shown on a map with a colored border?

 

Answer: Did you stop viewing the Saar as part of Germany when the borders shown on a map where different than they are today? Was it otherwise with Austria, the Sudetenland and Danzig?

 

Question: Are the landscapes, cities, villages, rivers, bridges, monuments and everything else that is visible within these borders Germany?

 

Answer: Do not German ships sail on foreign seas? Do not the achievements of technology proclaim throughout the whole world German ability, German spirit and German industriousness?

 

Question: Are the people of German kind and German tongue within German borders Germany?

 

Answer: Do not our countrymen who live among foreign peoples belong to us, to Germany?

 

Question: And if we now take together everything that belongs to us, and the German people wherever they may live, is all that together Germany?

 

Answer: Does not that belong to Germany which is of German origin, that which once was, all that which emerges in and around Germany in unbroken struggle, of which history reports so much that warns and obligates?

 

Question: Is Germany the German folk of the present, the folk that today lives and works?

 

Answer: Whence do we come? Would we even exist without those before us? And what would we be if our ancestors had not cared, fought and hoped for more than just themselves, but also for us? Who did more for Germany: the creators of the present or the many who labored before us?

 

Question: Is Germany all of this? Past and present?

 

Answer: Do we not carry the seeds of new Becoming within us? Does not new life fulfill itself through us? Are we not the fathers, the parents of a coming generation? Does not our love and loyalty belong to it, our care and our duty? Who would wish something bad for his children?

 

Many things will be newly formed, newly established and newly created in Germany. Do not the works of the future also belong to Germany?

 

As a leader, ask your followers like this! When answering these questions he will feel his love grow for those who will come after him. This love will show him his duty toward those who have not even been born yet. And it will be easier for him to recognize what he owes those whom now live, live and suffer at his side. It will be of decisive importance for his life to clarify that his children and their children will one day be that what he now is, that they will one day harvest what he now sows, just like we now pay the price for what was neglected before us, and how we can enjoy what our fathers and grandfathers created.

 

Germany is the sum of what was German and what will be German. We stand right in the middle of this. We only live our life when we feel reverence and thankfulness toward the people who went to their graves before us, and toward the works they left in our worthy hands, and if we are conscious of the high responsibility we bear toward coming German people and things. Who among us would want to be cursed by our descendants?

 

Germany and the German nation are like a mighty storm that comes from the primeval past and continues into eternity.

 

The nation is an unbroken column, which marches there and then crosses the bridge connecting past and future. Even if only those standing and walking on this bridge are visible, even if only they think, feel, endeavor and create, nonetheless the Germans of the present alone are not the nation. To it also belong those lost in the vast distance on the other side as well as those coming from the distance who will one day step upon the bridge of the present.

 

Course and strength of this river, of this marching column depend on two great factors: on blood and soil. One or the other can dry up, if one is more fertile than the other. They depend on leadership and following, because the energy between them alone can overcome the danger that the soil is not as fertile as the blood or that the blood does not remain pure, that is dries up and foreign blood becomes master over the soil. Proper leadership alone gives the river a firm river bed and hence the invincible strength to secure its living space, the strength which would otherwise with deadly certainty dwindle senselessly into a thousand tiny streams.