You and the SS,
You wear on your paddock the words:
“My Honour is called Loyalty “
On your collar mirror you wear the double Sig rune of the SS. You have thus consciously placed yourself in a community which has assumed special duties within the whole of the people.
Are you aware that you have to carry a certain share of these duties? Have you ever thought about what the special duties of the SS-man are? Do you know what the law of fidelity means to you in detail?
Do you know anything about the SS’s achievements? Of their tasks during the struggle and in the new Germany? Of their commitment to the future of a new Europe?
In order for you to answer these questions, you should learn the most important things about the history of the SS, their tasks and goals. The path of the Black Corps began in the earliest days of the National Socialist movement. In March 1923, the nucleus of what would later become the SS the “Stabswache” - formed from specially selected, absolutely reliable party comrades. These men already wear the skull and crossbones on their caps and the black-rimmed armbands. In May of the same year, the Stabswache merged into the” Storm Trooper Hitler” - led by Josef Berchtold. This small unit, determined to the last, united Adolf Hitler’s most loyal fellow fighters. With tasks similar to those of the later SS, the Storm Trooper has gone down in history, but it steadfastly pursued its uncompromising path of struggle to the bitter end, which a treacherous system and the bullets of the reaction prepared for it on November 9, 1923.
After the re-founding of the Party in 1925, the Fuhrer ordered the establishment in the same year of a new, small, very mobile organization, which was to have its model in the “SS Hitler Strike Force” and was intended, firstly, to give the Fuhrer unconditional protection during his rallies and propaganda trips, if necessary by employing of their own lives, and secondly, to guarantee to the Party that security within, which the police give to the State itself.
At first, no more than eight men were selected for this great task, which demanded total commitment. Their leader was Julius Schreck. It was he who issued the first guidelines for the formation of the Black Corps. To the life of this faithful, proven fellow fighter of Adolf Hitler, death brought an all too early end on May 16, 1936, but imperishable for the future, by order of the Fuehrer, the 1st SS-Standarte in Munich today bears the name “Julius Schreck! “
The first eight SS-men adopted the uniform of the former Storm Trooper Hitler, except that the windbreaker was replaced by a brown shirt with a black tie, and the grey ski cap was exchanged for the black SS-cap.
On April 16, 1925, this SS appeared before the Munich public for the first time - however, it was a sad occasion, since the old fellow fighter of the Fuhrer of November 9, Pohner, had to be buried. So on this day four SS-men with torches in their hands walked on both sides of the coffin and gave the dead fighter his last escort. It was clear that due to the size of the mission only a few men, selected according to very special criteria, could be accepted into the SS. In every way they had to meet the high standards demanded of them. Unconditional loyalty, total commitment of personality, iron discipline - who else but frontline soldiers could have fulfilled these conditions!
They, who had dared the last mission a hundred times outside, formed the basis of the young formation. But the conditions went even further: only party comrades could become members of the SS, and each of them had to be able to name two guarantors, one of whom was an authoritative person in the local group in which the young SS- applicant was also listed. Each member was further required to be in the be between 23 and 35 years of age, of strong build and necessarily in good health. It was a matter of course that sissies, jammers afflicted with any vices, could never gain admittance! The best was just good enough for the young formation! Therefore it had to be the highest honour for every party member to be allowed to serve in the SS. But all virtues and qualities had to be preceded by total comradeship, which could not be shaken by anything:
All for one, one for all!
It was clear that in the long run the young association could not be recruited only from the front-line fighter generation. Thus, in the course of time, the conditions for admission changed, without, however, losing any of their rigor. From the beginning, however, one principle stood: numerical limitation and the strictest selection! The management in Munich was never concerned with having the largest possible number of SS-men, but the emphasis has always been on excellent quality of the men to be selected, which alone guaranteed the unconditional execution of all orders.
One guide and 10 men
Thus it was determined that in the individual towns a squadron could only have the strength of one leader and 10 men; these were the so-called “Zehner-Staffeln” (squadrons of ten). Their leaders (Zehnerführer) wore a silver star in the middle of the swastika on their armbands as the only external sign of their rank. At that time even a big city like Berlin had only a SS-squadron of 2 leaders and 20 men.
The FM Groups
One thing is for sure - even the best, most sacrificial organization cannot do without a healthy financial basis! So money! - For the expansion of the SS this demand was just as imperative as for the young party itself. But since the latter was also in the midst of building up and was not itself in a position to support the squadron financially, the SS (incidentally as the only branch of the movement) received from the Fuhrer the right to advertise for supporting members (F. M.). Adolf Hitler himself was the first to join this F.M. group.
This was indeed an ideal solution for the financial underpinning of the organization. There were many Volksgenossen who (due to their public position, their economic situation and other serious reasons) were not able to actively join the ranks of the movement. Through their silent F.M. membership they have not only rendered a great, unforgettable service to the squadron
The SS grew, and now, in addition to the original first task of protecting the Fuhrer, a second task was gradually added - that of propagandist! But the men under the skull and crossbones were not given textbooks on the “art of speaking “; it was known that each of them had what it took to be absolutely convincing wherever it was necessary to pull back lost members of the people from the slippery slope of false slogans and phrases. Each of the SS- men of that time was thus a constant propagandist wherever he might be: on the street, at home, throughout the day, if only the service permitted it allowed. How many lost, betrayed men and women have been brought back by these unknown preachers into the militant, creative element of the young movement! They have won many hundreds, thousands. They began with the declaration of a National Socialist pamphlet, they introduced the doubters, the illiterate of spirit, to the party press, and they brought out their heaviest gun, the Fuehrer’s “Mein Kampf,” and thus overcame the last doubts.
The year 1926 brought the lifting of the ban on the SA, and so in the following period the SS initially took a back seat. But this year also brought a historical high point for the Black Corps. At the Reich Party Congress in Weimar, the second of the NSDAP, the leader handed over the most sacred symbol of the movement - the blood flag of November 9, 1923 - to the protection of the SS.
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler
The day Heinrich Himmler was appointed Reichsführer-SS by Adolf Hitler marks the beginning of a new, decisive period in the history of the SS. It is January 6, 1929 270 men throughout the Reich territory, that was the base of the SS, the Heinrich Himmler took over at that time, when he received the order from the Fuhrer to form from this organization an absolutely reliable force - elite formation of the party.
“SS-Mann is every one of us, whether man without rank or Reichsführer-SS!” So Heinrich Himmler once said, and he indeed grew together with his men into an inseparable unit during the long years of struggle. He has made the Black Corps what it is today: the most dedicated to the Fuehrer, our blood, the Reich and Europe’s most committed force.
The order for a larger organization had been given, and it was clear to the Reichsführer, who devoted himself with his whole personality to the enormous task, that the new, larger SS could only fulfil its tasks if the guidelines given by the Fuhrer of the movement had unconditional validity as the highest demand, as the final standard for its selection and formation.
Only the noble blood, only real race are able in the long run to guarantee real performance! - This is the main insight with which Heinrich Himmler began his work when he issued his first order as Reichsführer-SS on January 20, 1929, which states:
“According to the order of our Fuhrer of January 6, 1929, I have taken over the leadership of the SS of the NSDAP! “
Now, then, the old fellow fighter and soldier began his tenacious, purposeful selection, according to which he surrounded himself with those people of whom he knew that, blood-wise and character-wise, they were really the best that the nation had at its disposal.
And so it was above all four guidelines and main virtues that determined their selection.
Race and clan
“Just as the seed breeder, who is to breed pure again an old, good variety that has been mixed and degraded, first goes over the field to the so-called Staudenauslese, we first set about sifting out purely externally those people whom we believed we could not use for the building up of the SS. The kind of selection concentrated on the selection of those who physically came closest to the desired image, the Nordic determined man. External characteristics such as height and racially appropriate appearance played and still play a role! “
This is how the Reichsführer once put it, and it is to his decisive credit that he courageously and convincingly took the path at a time when the racial question was still a thoroughly unsettled concept in the ranks of the movement itself, and that the theorical insights of the young movement now found their bodily resurrection in the midst of the building up for a unique organization. Here, for the first time, the racial question had been placed at the centre, or rather had become the centre itself, far beyond a negative concept, emanating from the self-evident hatred of the Jews. The revolutionary thought of the Fuhrer had been given blood-warming life. It is clear that with the growth of experience in these fields the determinations of the selection became sharper from year to year, even better hitting the actual core of things.
“It must be so that the conditions which will be set for our successors in a hundred or more years will demand many times more from the individual than can be the case today. Likewise we know that the first selection, made according to external points of view, can only be the first, but also only the very first principle of selection, that a process of selection going through all the years of life in the SS must be the continuation, and that the sifting out of all those who are not suitable for us in character, will, and thus in blood must follow!“
Thus says the Reichsführer, and with this he very briefly and succinctly puts a stop to any complacency and self-satisfaction. He clearly and unambiguously states that what has been achieved so far is and must be only piecemeal and that there can never be a standstill or an end in the tremendous planning of a human selection. For there is no standardized SS - man! There will be every generation of SS - m e n . must be better than the previous one.
“By laws which we give ourselves, we want to see to it for all future that not every son of a SS -family registered in the clan-book of the SS has the claim or even the right to become a SS -man again, but we want to see to it that only a part of the sons of this family are always taken up and recognized by us as SS -men, and will be further anxious that constantly the selection and bloodstream of the best German blood of the entire people may enter the SS!“
The racial selection and the building up of an association of men alone, however, could not in the long run bring success to the great work. No, all measures had to seem almost senseless at the moment when the wives of the selected men, their future families and clans were passed by. After all, our history is rich enough in mistakes made by soldiers’ and men’s unions of the past, forgetting the pure blood of breeding and the tradition of the clan. They all sank back into nothingness after a certain lapse of their existence - and may it have been centuries. For so says the leader of the kingdom:
“Only the generation nestled between ancestors and grandchildren takes within itself the proper measure of the greatness of its task and obligation, and of the tininess of its own and ephemeral significance.“
But who has this knowledge, he will be simple in the highest meaning of the word, and neither the times of highest personal success will be able to cloud his view - and the hours of greatest misfortune will never be able to drive him into the arms of despair. - Success and misfortune, he will accept them without complacency, without arrogance, without desolation - but he will also never become the victim of tormenting feelings of inferiority and hopeless self-loss. He will overcome happiness and misfortune with truly balanced calmness.
“We therefore teach the SS-man that all our struggle, the death of the two million of the World War, the political struggle of the last 15 years, the building up of our military power to protect our frontiers would be in vain and futile if the victory of the German spirit were not followed by the victory of the German child.“
The Reichsführer-SS therefore, in this clear realization, issued one of the most drastic and important laws of the SS on December 31, 1931, the “Heiratsbefehl”. This order hit Germany like a bomb at the time. For a liberal based system, for many of our people, who live only for the moment and stagger from pleasure to pleasure, he must have seemed almost incomprehensible.
To them it was the most brutal encroachment on so-called personal freedom. It is self- evident that the Jewish press and propaganda underlined this view with the necessary emphasis. But all the scorn and derision that was poured out on this order at the time bounced off the squadron without effect. The Reichsführer had foreseen it and said so in the 10th point of his order:
“The SS realizes that with this order it has taken a step of great importance. Mockery, scorn and misunderstanding do not touch us; the future is ours!“
Will to freedom and fighting spirit
The will to fight and an irrepressible desire for freedom, that is the second virtue and guideline: therefore, according to unwritten laws, the SS- man should be the best, where it
was at all possible - in battle, on the street, on the sports field, later in the greatest of all wars of freedom. But the better the opponent was, the better for the squadron! Because only so the title of an elite formation could be rightly led, if the SS was also really efficient the best troop!
In the years of the build-up, the Reichsführer therefore made sporting performance a duty and task over and over again. Year after year, every SS-man had to pass the most difficult performance tests. It was especially the Fuehrer Corps that was put to the test here again and again. Also, every promotion is dependent on the acquisition of the SA. or Reich Sports Badge.
Thus a great danger was averted from the outset, that of effeminacy. Gemutlichkeit and Vereinsseligkeit, the graveyards of so many men’s societies, had thus become impossible from the outset in the ranks of the Black Corps. The sedate existence on the basis of the regulars’ table, which may be beautiful and attractive for certain people, has never been able to spread in the SS.
Loyalty and honour
Loyalty binds the SS from the Reichsführer-SS to the last man and binds all among themselves as comrades to the Fuhrer. Loyalty begins only where duty is fulfilled, - this sacred knowledge makes the SS-man insurmountable as the Fuehrer’s follower. The Reichsführer-SS stamped it into the words:
“SS-Men, do more than your duty! “
He declares fidelity to be the further fundamental virtue of the SS which determines their nature and actions when he says:
“Many things, we teach the SS-man, can be forgiven on this earth, but one thing never can, infidelity. He who violates fidelity excludes himself from our German society. For faithfulness is a matter of the heart, never of the mind. The mind may stumble. That is sometimes harmful, but never inevitable. The heart, however, always has the same pulse to beat, and if it stops, the person dies, just as a nation dies if it breaks faithfulness. By this we mean loyalty of every kind, loyalty to the Fuhrer and thus to the German, Germanic people, its knowledge and its kind, loyalty to the blood, to our ancestors and grandchildren, loyalty to our clan, loyalty to our comrade and loyalty to the immutable laws of decency, cleanliness and chivalry. One sins against loyalty and honour not only when he idly lets his or the SS’s honour be violated, but especially when he does not respect the honour of others, when he mocks things that are sacred to others, or when he does not stand up for the absent, the weak, and the defenceless in a manly and decent manner.“
Unconditional obedience
That leaves obedience as the fourth and last guideline. It is an obedience that is especially difficult because it comes from pure voluntarism and demands all the sacrifices a man is capable of making in terms of personal pride, external honours, and many other things that are dear to him. It demands unconditional commitment without the slightest hesitation, and it demands the execution of every command of the leader even when the individual once believes that he cannot overcome it. But this obedience demands the highest degree of control and overcoming, even of the most ardent will for freedom, when it is forbidden to lift a finger against an enemy despite being on guard. The old SS-man knows what just this last point means. He has not forgotten them, the years of struggle, of holding still and waiting, as it twitched in the fists, because in every single comrade there was nothing but the will underpinned with boundless hatred: Down with the accursed system!
You’ve been thinking over and over: why don’t we hit it? - Why don’t we hit it? - Now is the time! - Why does the Fuhrer hesitate? They thought: We’re strong, we’ve beaten the Commune wherever we’ve met them. - We have conquered the Reichstag. - Down with the puppets of this rotten system! We want to drive them into pairs! But the Fuhrer’s order did not come. And so they kept silent and waited. The SS is proud of the fact that in all these years it looked only to him, obeyed only him, and believed unconditionally in his victory. It has fulfilled the demand for unconditional obedience as only one formation before it has ever done.
The SS -man in the use of fighting time
In the years of struggle, the men of the SS have been used again and again to protect the National Socialist thoughts and demands, internally as well as to the outside world. They fought in countless hall battles, they broke every terror in loyal camaraderie with the SA.
They were the wedge, which the movement drove again and again into the red and black front. They stood in front of wholly Communist enterprises and factories with the leaflets in their hands and drew to themselves what was good and valuable. They worked with the same means in grey tenements and brought the truth even to the poorest leafy colony.
A thousand and a thousand times they gave protection to the speakers of the movement. With their belts under their chins, their hands on their belt buckles, they stood year in and year out to the left and right of the lectern - in the sports palace as in the smallest rural hall. They stood still and motionless, but they observed everything in the room sharply and thoroughly. They were often hungry, because most of them were unemployed. But they were always there when the mission demanded it. And they died for their faith!
In the streets at night they were cowardly murdered, stabbed together until they lost consciousness. But they always held out until the end, even against superior power. And so the SS made many sacrifices of blood and life. Over and over again they carried one of their best to the grave, but each time they left the cemeteries even more dogged, even more fanatical. We do not want to forget those heroes of the Ostmark who, as SS-men, fearlessly suffered death at the stranglehold of a brutal system, and who, with their sacrificial deaths, made possible the annexation of the Ostmark to the Reich. But internal security was not forgotten either. More than once the SS had to be used against the enemies within the movement, against fragmentation and betrayal of the leader. In those hours of crises so dangerous for the entire existence of the movement, the Fuhrer was able to make use of this sharp instrument, which then always placed itself unconditionally behind him.
Thus Adolf Hitler gave his most faithful the sentence that has been written on every paddock lock since November 9, 1931:
“SS -Man, your honour is called loyalty! “
The 18-year-old Hitler Youth, after a thorough aptitude test by special SS- commissions on his SS-suitability and SS-fitness, initially becomes a SS-applicant. At the party congress of the same year he enters the SS-applicant and is sworn in to the Fuhrer on 9 November, after a short probationary period. In the first year of service the young aspirant has to acquire his Wehrsportabzeichen and the bronze Reichssportabzeichen. He then goes into labour service and the Wehrmacht and then returns to the SS . On the following 9 . November the SS -candidate is sent to again thorough ideological training as SS -man finally into the SS accepted into the SS clan. On this day he receives at the same time the right to carry the SS- dagger and vows that he and his clan will adhere to the basic laws of the SS for all times. He remains in General SS until age 35. He is then transferred to the SS-Reserve and transferred to the SS-Tribal Department upon reaching age 45.
In the same order it was stipulated that every SS-man had the right and duty to defend his honour with weapon in hand. This law is of extraordinary value to an SS-man, for he knows that he can be called to account for every word and every action at some point, and that the community is watching to see whether he is doing something dishonourable in word or deed and has thus sinned against the spirit of the community.
But secondly, he is urged to respect his own honour as much as that of others, so that he thus serves the life of the community as an unconditionally clean, blameless, political soldier.
January 30, 1933
When the day of the seizure of power finally dawned, 51,000 SS-men were counted, who carried forward the greatest of all revolutions at a storming pace, ready to solve every task set. The influx to our formations became in the following months, then so strong that from July 10, 1933 an admission ban for the SS occurs, which was lifted only in September 1934 for a very short time. For as before, the Reichsführer did not attach any importance to a mass organization, but demanded the strictest supervision and examination of all new recruits, in order to really integrate only the healthiest and most valuable forces into the ranks of the Black Corps.
It was not an easy path from the police of the constantly changing system governments to a National Socialist police force that has the respect and trust of the people.
An enormous organizational achievement was necessary in order to form a large, strong Reich Police from 16 state police forces. But what we see before us today as the police of the Reich is the work of one man, the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, who here, too, with his unheard-of tenacity and his never-failing faith went to work. What was the policeman of the system era? A compliant object for the advocacy of private interests of individuals. Beyond that, only the execution of laws passed by parliament came into question, but not the execution of a leader’s will. And yet, very soon, even in the ranks of that police force, the best fighters had their hearts set on our cause, although outwardly, if they were not forced to take a stand against the movement in the making, they at least had to adopt a “neutral” attitude.
Then we came to power. And the police also came into the hands of the man for whom there is no resistance. What resisted the new violence of the young state from the old police, and they were not a few, were weeded out. The good forces, however, were gathered and drawn over to us. Today the National Socialist police have two great tasks:
1. To carry out the will of the leadership of the State and to establish and maintain the order it desires;
2. To secure the German people as an organic whole, its vitality and its institutions against destruction and decomposition.
Today the police force consists neither of mere officials nor of mere soldiers, but it has to build itself up equally on the two powerful pillars of the state, on officialdom and soldiering. It is the goal of the Reichsführer-SS that this police force should once become one with the SS built on the blood. The directive that the police as an organ for the protection of the people and as a friend and helper of every member of the people.
As a political surveillance and intelligence agency, the Security Service (SD) emerged from the SS as early as the movement’s fighting days. Under the leadership of the SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, who was cowardly murdered in the service of Europe and the Reich, it was expanded after the seizure of power into an organization that was led by the blitz, the organization’s rapidity of impact and the precision of its scientific research are without precedent in the world. Above all, the creator of this organization, so important for the Party and the State, educated his men to unconditional ideological militancy, which such an activity requires to a particularly high degree. The activity of the SD, by its very nature, has become little known to the public, and it is always doomed to remain without praise and recognition.
Twice during this war, however, the world has had the opportunity to become acquainted with the lightning- quick precision of the SD’s work. Once, when it was necessary to track down those behind the explosive attack of November 8, 1939 in Munich, and again on the occasion of the world-historical act of the liberation of the Duce. On both occasions, the Security Service’s involvement was not only for the Reich and Europe, but also for the whole world.
Today, alongside the SD, there is a huge police organization all over Europe, which both maintain and guarantee the security, peace and order of the European community. Here it becomes clear in a particularly meaningful way that the European community of destiny forged together for the sake of prosperity, needs an uncorrupted organization that is solely concerned with the welfare of this community entrusted to it for protection. It will be left to history to determine what part the SD and the police of the Reich played in the achievement of the final victory.
With the Führer’s decree of October 7, 1939, by which the Reichsführer SS was appointed Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of German Nationality, the new German Eastern Bohemia received a responsible head. Time and again, at the height of its history, the German people turned to the East to develop its creative powers. But this history also teaches that military victory alone is never sufficient to win the ground. The tragedy of German Eastern Policy in past centuries lies in the fact that the popular movements which repeatedly advanced into the East lacked a unified national goal and thus an organic and planned distribution of forces.
Thus the task of the East is above all a political one. With the repatriation from abroad of those Germans of the Reich and of the people who are eligible for final return to the Reich, the loss of the people, which lay in the haphazard, individualistic emigration of past centuries, will be rectified. The third and most important task is the creation of new German settlement areas, above all through resettlement, through the settlement of the Reich and ethnic Germans returning from abroad, which the Fuehrer poses to the Reichsführer-SS in his decree. It contains the rectification of the centuries-old historical error of the Germans. The
Fuehrer had at his disposal a powerful apparatus, suitable for this task, for immediate use in this work of national politics. The Reichsführer SS as the standard-bearer of the knowledge of the natural connection between race and settlement has imparted to his SS, in untiring educational work, this body of thought of the National Socialist fundamental outlook, and has thus provided in it an executive organ for purposeful work in building up the people. Through conscious selection, the SS forms a community in which the best forces of the Reich and Europe are shown the way to creative shaping. For its final reclamation, the Eastern region needs purposeful and uniformly orientated towards Germans. This selection, which otherwise nature herself makes among a group of men engaged in a struggle for self-assertion, and for which generations are necessary, is secured by the leading and directing employment of the SS. The Eastern region is the frontier of Europe; it alone will forever and ever call the youth of Europe to the highest probation, to manly employment with the soldier’s weapon or the plough of the Farmers.
The SS had become the supporting pillar of the state. It was the guarantee of internal security, the perfect instrument ready for any internal use. But there was a danger: this elite formation, as a result of the fulfilment of its great, inward-looking tasks, would find itself prevented at the moment of war from being able to stand up with arms in hand. At the very moment when the whole nation was rising up to lay down its life and blood to the last, the men of the Black Corps, mindful of their command, would have to stand unarmed. The Fuhrer countered this danger by setting up an active barracked troop - the Waffen-SS. It was supposed to gather militarily and politically well-trained men. Thus, in the spring of 1933, the Leibstandarte SS “Adolf Hitler” was created. Within the framework of the further expansion of the SS - available troops (VT.), the Standarte SS was later added, “Deutscland” in Munich, SS2 “Germania” in Hamburg-Arolsen and Radolfzell and the Technical units SS- Pioniersturmbann in Dresden, SS-Night Tower in Unna and the SS-Junkerschulen Tolz and Braun-schweig, which provided for the new generation of leaders, were added. After the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the Fuehrer ordered the establishment of the fourth standard SS3 “Der Fuehrer” with the locations Vienna, Graz, Klagenfurt. In the meantime, the “SS-Totenkopfverbande” (TV.) had been established, which were formed from the volunteers of the Allgemeineine SS who had been called up to guard the concentration camps in 1933. The first use of the Waffen-SS takes place on the occasion of the repatriation of the Ostmark and the Sudetenland into the Reich. The Waffen-SS standards were also used during the creation of the Protectorate and the liberation of Memel. In this context, the SS - artillery , SS -reconnaissance division , SS -FlaMG divisions and all other special units were created. In the summer of 1939, in order to protect Danzig against Polish aggression, the “Heimwehr Danzig”. The Polish campaign, in which the Waffen-SS still fought regiment by regiment, brought the large-scale deployment with the weapon and the proving of the young SS - troop. This achievement was recognized by the Fuhrer’s order to establish divisions of the Waffen-SS.
The Waffen-SS as a champion of Europe
At the beginning of 1941, the Fuhrer ordered the establishment of the “Nordland” and “Westland” standards, which were to be recruited exclusively from members of the Germanic border states, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Flanders. This order meant a decisive act in the history of the political reorganization of Europe. For the first time, united units of Germanic peoples were included in a German federation. Once again, it was the SS that took the first step from theoretical knowledge to practical realization. True to its belief in the mission of the Nordic people and in a rebirth of Europe, it stepped out of the narrow borders of the nation-state and called upon the Germanic peoples of the same blood to fight for a common future. This appeal found a thousandfold echo. The Norwegian and Dutch Legions, the Flanders Legion, the Danish Free Corps and the Finnish Volunteer Battalion were founded. As a parable of the reawakened Germanic unity, the regiment “Wiking” was formed in June 1940 by order of the Fuehrer, in which Finns, Norwegians, Danes, Dutchmen and Flemings fought shoulder to shoulder with their German comrades. In the meantime, this truly Germanic unit of the Waffen-SS has grown into the “Wiking” Division, which has indelibly etched its name into the history of the Germanic people through the Eastern campaign. At the same time, strong protection squads were formed in the individual Germanic countries. The call of the Reich and Europe continued to be answered by many thousands of volunteer ethnic Germans, primarily from the south-eastern European states. The European fighting community, however, is nowhere better documented than in the formation of units in many European countries. Thus arose the SS-Volunteer Brigade “Wallonia “, the SS-Tank Grenadier Division “Neederland “, the Volunteer Division of Croatia, Galicia and Latvia and the Estonian SS-Volunteer Brigade. Out of the common blood sacrifices and hardships, out of the experience of the advance into the vastness of the East, spiritual values are growing which will make the old buried source of European and occidental solidarity flow again and form the cement of a new Europe.
The SS, however, is the great basin in which the forces are to gather, clarify and prove themselves, from which the new world is to grow. In the face of the immense threat from the East, in all nations of Europe, even outside the Germanic family of nations and our allies, a feeling of Western community of destiny has broken out that was hardly thought possible. Everything that is young and strong for the future gathers under the black flag with the sigrunes, volunteers from the mountains of Bosnia and from the Ardennes, from the far reaches of Estonia and from the southern Russian steppes. The SS stood at the beginning of that movement which gave Germany a new face and reshaped Europe. And it has become the fulfillment of being a pioneer in the world-historical struggle for a future and a new Europe. The fate of the European Occident.
The SS thus grows more and more into its European task: it gathers the awakened European youth in the struggle against Bolshevism and the Jewish plutocracies. Whoever believes that the SS thereby loses its original character or departs from the strict principles of race has no understanding for the revolutionary idea of the National Socialism, which transcends the borders of the nation-state.
No one in Europe today believes, whatever the outcome of the war, in the return of the small and larger states which owe their existence solely to British interference in European affairs. It is understandable that the force of this war should wipe away the whitewash of a historical development which has often lasted only a few decades, and that the common roots of the European family of nations should now come to light again. The fact of the Germanic migration and the former Germanic settlement between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea up to the Atlantic Ocean and North Africa has established the blood relationship of Europe and created what we call European culture. The reorganization of these peoples arises on the same basis. America and England have no real program for a state reorganization of the European continent. They already regard Europe only as a colony which they intend to exploit economically. Bolshevism has just as little in the way of ideas to offer Europe. Marxism knows no real Volkstum, just as little as it can include the concept of blood in its dictionary. National Socialism alone affirms the roots of every genuine Volkstum. It knows that only he who is true to his homeland can be true to wealth.
The revolutionary socialism of Adolf Hitler means for Europe not only a regulation of the relations between capital and labour, but also a regulation of the relations of the European peoples to each other on the basis of their historical achievement and their commitment in the present struggle. From the world-view of this movement alone springs the creative power and the rich abundance of possibilities for binding the peoples and nations of Europe to the leadership of a strong Reich. It must be clearly seen that an inner and outer order of Europe can only spring from the depth of the National Socialist evaluation of the forces of history. The SS today already forms the iron ring of those men who with a hot heart envision the reorganization of Europe under the leadership of a strong Germanic centre. Without the commitment of these men, the new cannot come into being. Our continent is shaken as if by a violent fever; these are the birth pangs of a new era, which wants to arise on the basis of the blood relationship of the European family of peoples and a socialist order of their coexistence.
No matter which way fate will lead us to this goal and which setbacks we will have to face, the goal itself remains unchangeable. It is the only goal for which it is worth living and fighting at all. The SS knows that everything must now be done to ensure that the comrades from the European East grow together with it into a fighting community just like those from the West. The task of the SS must be to unite the youth of Europe in a hard and resolute front. The Western adversary is not prepared to fight for a higher world to die because he does not know it. The enemy in the East has so far brought only oppression and dishonour to the peoples. If there are inviolable human values, they will be defended by the front of the German army. On our side stands the new idea. On our side, too, the scales of fate must one day tilt, if we remain firm and conscious of the full historical responsibility of this struggle. This holy seriousness before the greatness of the hour inspires the voluntary youth of Europe in the ranks of the Waffen-SS.
And so today the volunteers of Europe are eager to take part in the final, decisive struggle that will bring peace and a new face to Europe. Quisling, the leader of the Norwegian renewal movement, said to his SS-men:
“Germany has not asked us, we feel ourselves obliged. Germany’s struggle against England has developed into a general struggle against British world domination. We now want to do everything we can, of our own free will, to fight on Hitler’s and Germany’s side for the Germanic Volksgemeinschaft and the great Europe!“
The battles in Poland and Flanders, in Norway and France, in Serbia and Greece have been fought. They were battles such as history has never known, fought by the will of the greatest general who ever strode this earth. But the outcome of the struggle with the Soviet Union will decide the fate of the European community.
In the previous battles of annihilation there was only one victor: the German soldier of all arms. He proved to the world once again that there is no other like him. Germany’s youngest troop, the Waffen-SS, however, has received its baptism of fire and inscribed itself in the book of German soldiering history for all time. The men with the skull and crossbones have strode across the battlefields of Europe, storming and conquering. Like those first eight, like that first small SS, which once fought the red or black underworld in dark streets and smoky assembly halls. The unifying bond of the youth of Europe, however, is their unshakable faith, which constantly finds its final proof on fronts and battlefields in the great comradeship.
Europe and the Empire. The making of Europe
Until now, Europe was no more a political concept than it could be described as a fixed spatial size. As difficult as it was to demarcate the European peninsula geographically from the land mass of the Old World, as inconsistent and seemingly confused was the political development of our continent. But if we look at the continent in relation to the other large areas of the earth, thus from the outside, we notice that the name Europe is more than a mere geographical auxiliary name. We then realize that the concept of Europe has a certain spiritual content, and that Europe is to be addressed as an unchangeable blood and cultural unity. Through long centuries the consciousness of their unity outweighed the feeling of national uniqueness in the peoples of Europe. Only in the 19th . Only in the 19th century, when the national principle, taken to extremes, increased the mutual separation to the point of absurdity, the last remnant of a continental common consciousness sank in the blood of the European civil wars. Infinite suffering was the result of this delusion. The fragmented Europe, which could not keep up the competition with larger competitors all over the world, lost one position after the other outside. In our days, however, when it is no longer a question of distant external positions, but of the “Fortress Europe” itself in the struggle with the non-European powers from East and West, the peoples of the continent are again made painfully aware of the necessity of unification in the twelfth hour. The task of this section is to show, on the basis of the historical development, the foundations of the European continental consciousness from which the coming reorganization is to take its starting point.
The aim is to show how closely the overall interests of our continent are intertwined with the destiny of the empire anchored in its centre. Europe as a whole stands and falls with the existence of an organizing and leading power, which balances its numerous tensions within and shields its so vulnerable borders from the outside. But history shows that the heyday of the Empire coincided with the periods of Europe’s powerful standing in the world and the prosperous cooperation between its peoples. Europe and the Empire are fatefully linked, one is inconceivable without the other in the long run. The name Europa comes from the area of the eastern Mediterranean and is ancient. The Assyrians called all land lying in the direction of the setting sun “ereb”. It is also certain that the name Europe was used by the Greeks as early as the 8th century BC. But as a fixed concept of space “Europe” only became generally accepted around 1500.
Since then, the name of the politically torn and geographically indeterminable continent denotes a well-settled historical unity that is only similar to itself. We owe this to the circumstance that our continent is the work of a certain humanity, in spite of many blood imbalances:
Europe is a creation of the Indo-Europeans
When at the beginning of the 19th century linguistics discovered that a number of languages of ancient peoples were related to each other, the conclusion was obvious that the peoples who were carriers of these languages had emerged from a common original people. The most eastern of these peoples were the ancient Indians and the most western - according to the knowledge of that time - the Teutons. Thus linguistics called the circle of these related languages and also the language of the assumed original people “Indo- Germanic”. From the language, however, the term was transferred to the peoples themselves. This term has stuck and also that primitive people, whose existence has been proved today by prehistoric research, we know under the name “Indo-Europeans“. Its homeland is North Central Europe, and it emerged from the Nordic people who had been at home in this region since the end of the Ice Age. Since 4000 B.C., the original Indo-European people began to split up into individual tribes which, for lack of land and other reasons, went on their own migration. We probably also call these migrating Indo-European tribes the “Aryans”. Empires arose and cultures flourished wherever they went. The cultures of India, Persia, Greece, and Rome are their most famous creations. What we marvel at and admire in these ancient cultures was brought about by Aryan spirit. They carried the torch of creative action into the history-less darkness of prehistory. Indo-European mankind has also shaped the face of Europe for all time. Although some of the wandering tribes may have penetrated deep into Asia, the bulk of the Indo- Europeans remained on the soil of what later became Europe. The individual land-seeking tribal groups penetrated further and further to the west, south, and southeast of the continent and gradually filled it in its entire extent. They subjugated the other-racial original inhabitants of the individual conquered areas, superimposed themselves on them as a master class and stamped the Indo-European spirit on the emerging cultures. As different as the cultures of the Hellenes, Italics and Germanic peoples might be, depending on the influence of the respective racial and spatial environment, they were united by the unmistakable common origin of Indo- European kind. In this way, the European continent already in its prehistoric times grew the firm blood basis on which its spiritual unity was later to be founded.
In antiquity, Europe was by no means a space in itself. The centre of gravity of the world at that time lay first in the eastern, then in the western basin of the Mediterranean. The continental centre of the continent was considered by the people of those days to be the limit of the inhabited world. Nevertheless, we have to count the last centuries of antiquity as early European times. The supporting peoples of that period, Greeks and Romans, were in the truest sense of the word the forerunners of Europe. In the extreme southeast and south of the continent, respectively, these two Indo-Germanic sister peoples fought against the invasion of non- European blood carriers from the Near East and North Africa. The struggle of the Hellenes against the alienated Persians and their Asiatic auxiliary peoples was just as much a struggle for what was one day to be called Europe as were the battles of Rome with the alien Etruscans and Punic peoples.
When Greece had sunk into racial chaos and the defensive power of Rome had slackened, the Germanic tribes entered the scene as the last contingent of the original Indo- Germanic homeland. The Germanic migration of peoples - in truth the last of its kind - which began in the first centuries A.D. and lasted until the middle of the millennium. The Germanic migration of peoples - in fact the last of its kind - which started in the first centuries A.D. and lasted until the middle of the millennium, overthrew the Roman Mediterranean empire and created the conditions for an independent continental development of Europe.
The population mixture of the former empire was now covered with the thin warrior layers of the Germanic immigrants. From the Atlantic to the Black Sea and from the Rhine to the Atlas the states of the Goths, Heruls, Suebi, Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons were founded. It was truly a “holy spring” that took possession of the ancient cultural world. Out of the ruins of destruction a new world arose. The supply of creative blood from the mother soil of Indo-European mankind brought about the emergence of a new culture. The bearers of this culture, however, were the young peoples who emerged from the mingling of the old-established population with the Germanic immigrants. A process that lasted for centuries and was initially accompanied by chaotic confusion. In the system of states as it emerges at the beginning of the 6th century, we already recognize the outlines of the later Europe: Italy with the offshore islands and the Adriatic counter coast is united in the state of the Ostrogoths, on the ruins of which the Lombards then built theirs. In Gaul, Franks, Burgundians and the Visigoths, who crossed the Pyrenees, fought for supremacy. The Visigoths established a firm and lasting rule in Spain. North Africa forms the basis of the Wandalic naval power, which extends over the entire western and parts of the eastern Mediterranean basin. Finally, on the remote Britannic island in the northern sea, the empire of the Angles and Saxons, which had been established over the Celto-Roman population mixture of later England, flourished. This was the framework in which the formation of the later nations took place under different conditions of the geopolitical and national environment.
Admittedly, the enterprise of those founders of the state seems to us an all too daring throw. Blinded by the splendour of the old empire, whose perpetuating idea irresistibly attracted the untapped strength of the Teuton, he wasted himself uselessly in setting goals that went beyond his possibilities. The thin upper classes of the Germanic founders of the state, carried away by the impetuosity of their blood, fell prey to selection. The overgrown task consumed them. While the blood of the conquerors merged with that of the natives and gave life to a new morality, their empires fell to destruction.
The Franks were an exception. Emerging from the fusion of various Germanic peoples on the Lower Rhine, they had not participated in the great migration of the tribes.
They only gradually pushed their way into the northern parts of Roman Gaul. In contrast to all other Germanic tribes of the migration of the peoples, the Franks were not content with a mere subjugation of the foreign population, but they settled down permanently. Today it is considered proven that the flat country north of the Marne and Seine and partly up to the Loire was settled by the Franks. The Franks did not extend their power to infinity, but based it on a healthy settlement policy and remained in constant contact with the Germanic mother soil, which continually supplied them with fresh forces.
In the outstanding ruler Clovis arose a leader who initiated their rise and established the supremacy of the Frankish Empire in the emerging world of European states. At the turn of the 6th century Clovis unified the Frankish constituent states by cunning and force, fought successfully against the Burgundians and Visigoths, subdued the Alemanni, and thus extended his power from the Weser to the Garonne. - His successors continued this policy of expansion, pushed the Visigoths out of Gaul and incorporated Burgundy, Bavaria and Thuringia into their confederation.
A determined and purposeful policy, the favour of the geopolitical situation and the biological conditions had worked together to secure for the Franks the predominance in the system of states of the Europe of that time. Under the leadership of the important Charles Martel, the young empire passed its valid test. Between Tours and Poitiers, in the year 732, in a seven-day battle, the Arab hordes flooding over the Pyrenees were devastatingly defeated. One of those world-historical decisions had taken place that would determine the face of the world for centuries. The danger of Islam was averted from Europe and thus the development of the continent out of Germanic spirit was freed.
Towards the end of the 8th century, the Frankish Empire approached the peak of its power, which was embodied in Charlemagne. His importance, however, goes far beyond the framework of Frankish tribal history. He summarized, as it were, the results of the migration of peoples and gave the emerging European community of nations its overarching continental form.
Through Charlemagne, the unity of the continent found its first realization in idea and reality. After he had annexed the Lombards, finally included Bavaria and the area of the Eastern Alps in his sphere of power, and forced the Saxons into the empire, he reached out to the nonGermanic foothills of his domain and ordered the relations of the Slavic natives on the eastern border of the empire. For the first time the young continent was under one leadership. Germania and Galicia, Italy and Christian Spain, the Slavic peoples on the Elbe and Saale, the Bohemian region and that of the middle Danube formed a masterly system of European order. It is thanks to the work of Charlemagne that the beginnings of an occidental sense of community were formed, which was to survive the collapse of the Great Frankish state and decisively promote the later medieval order of the continent.
The main focus of the historical development was no longer the area of the Mediterranean Sea, but from now on Europe had its own centre, which in the course of the centuries shifted only insignificantly from the area of the Rhine to the centre of Germany. The continent now had all the prerequisites to become an independent spatial unit: It had its own centre of gravity, a uniform blood basis and a growing sense of community. Beyond the violent political unification of Europe by Charlemagne, what was the basis of the young European community feeling? During their invasion of the Mediterranean world, the Germanic tribes were confronted with three spiritual powers with which they had to deal: The cultural heritage of antiquity, Christianity, and the Romance nation with its distinctive social and intellectual morality. While the Germanic ruling classes gradually merged with the Romance element, they also adopted the Christian faith, which they imbued with their own beliefs. In addition, they came into contact with the partly still living cultural heritage of antiquity, which played an essential role in the formation of the new morality of Europe. This trinity: the young Germanic-Romanic people (the Slavic people would join them a little later), Christianity, which was at first strongly Germanic, and the spiritual heritage of antiquity formed the basis on which the inner commonality of the young Europe was founded. In addition, the world-political opposition to the Eastern Empire of Byzantium on the one hand and to the Arab Caliphate on the other hand brought the European peoples in the process of formation only became aware of their togetherness in this way.
The Empire and Europe in the Middle Ages
The political order of Europe created by Charlemagne collapsed after the death of his son, Louis the Pious (840), because the maintenance of the enormous power structure went beyond the possibilities of state leadership. The Carolingian Great State fell into inexorable decline and one division followed the other. In addition, the process of fusion, which was at its peak and from which the young nations were to emerge, led to chaotic turmoil on the former Roman soil, which could no longer be tamed by any powerful personality like that of Charles. Only the ethnically balanced East Frankish part of the empire - the later Germany - preserved a remnant of the old unity. It was from this core area of Europe that the rampant anarchy was to be eliminated and a sustainable continental order established. A decisive step in this direction was the election of Henry, Duke of Saxony, as German king in 919. The empire now came into being on the common basis that Charlemagne had once created for the German tribes.
There were two factors which decisively influenced the whole course of the German development from that time on and which had a great influence on the shaping of the European things:
Firstly, particularism, which, older than the nation itself, was only then taking political shape. From then on, it was to accompany its path like a shadow. On the other hand, the mission of order on the European continent, which was connected with the empire and which led the national development of the Germans beyond the national framework.
It is not given to the German people to lead a self-sufficient life alienated from Europe in the midst of the endangered continent, as the peripheral peoples were able to do.
The fateful intertwining of German statehood and pan-European obligation is already evident in the history of the founding of the Empire by Heinrich I.The medieval empire came into being under the pressure of an external danger that threatened Germany and Europe from the southeast. The raids of the Asiatic kingdom of the Madjars had been pouring unchecked over the old cultural areas of Europe for half a century without any significant resistance. Only Heinrich I. succeeded, after a long preparation, to confront the invaders with the concentrated power of the young empire and to defeat them so emphatically at Merseburg (933) that they kept their peace for more than two decades.
In addition, the borders of the empire were pushed further east and the East Elbian regions, sparsely populated with a Germanic-Slavic mixed population, were annexed. Thus, for the first time, the Slavic tribes in East-Central Europe were brought closer to the cultural centres of the continent. Gradually the empire imparted to the Slavs those elements of morality which enabled them to join the Germanic and Roman tribes as the third in the alliance, as the supporting elements of Europe. On the death of Heinrich I in 936, the German royal power had established a sufficiently solid foundation from which to tackle the greater task of leading Europe that fate had ordained for it. Henry’s son, the highly significant Otto I, had at first to struggle with internal difficulties, from which, however, the king’s power emerged strengthened. The king’s leadership became more punitive and uniform. Otto created a significant expansion of his power base by building up a German state church, dependent only on him, which he fully integrated into the empire and which not only supplied him with his diplomatic aides and important military auxiliaries, but above all provided him with the financial means to carry out his policies. The foreign policy also bore the stamp of the mighty personality of the Saxon ruler. When the Hungarians attacked again in 955, they were defeated so emphatically in the battle of Lechfeld that they stopped their raids forever. In the following, mainly under German influence, they were settled and brought to the occidental culture. Then followed Otto’s most decisive step - intervention in Italy. After the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, this country had fallen into a chaos of power struggles between the former Germanic nobility and the Carolingian part-princes. The papacy itself had become the plaything of the Roman greats and sank into a swamp of corruption and immorality. The German king answered the call for help and came to restore order in the sorely tried land. He created lasting conditions on the peninsula and established the supremacy of the empire there.
When he renewed Charlemagne’s dignity in 962 and became emperor, this merely meant the affirmation of his actual arbitration in Italy and thus in Europe in general. For the possession of Rome was at that time synonymous with dominion over the Occident. Proof of how strongly the authority of Otto the Great was rooted in the consciousness of the time is the smooth transfer of imperial power to his son, Otto II; for the young empire did not possess a monarchical right of succession. In accordance with the emperor’s task as ruler, which now encompassed the whole of the Occident, Otto II’s policy extended over a wide area. On the Eider, on the Elbe and Oder, before Paris and in southern Italy against Islam, he successfully represented the sovereignty of the empire. This grew as a matter of course into his superior position. In world politics, this fact was reflected in the relations with Byzantium, which the Empire confronted as the leading power of the West. After the premature death of Otto II, imperial policy suffered a severe setback under Otto III. Under the all-out attack of the Pole Boleslaw from Bohemia and from the Vistula, the eastern border began to waver. In Italy it came again to ferment. It was fortunate that the enthusiastic emperor died early and received in Henry II a capable, energetic successor. Boleslaw was defeated in hard battles, and the old order on the Slav frontier was restored. Likewise, Italy’s sovereignty was enforced anew.Under the first Salians, Conrad II and Henry III, the empire reached the height of its power. Their powerful position in Germany and Italy enabled the emperors to pursue a vast foreign policy. Burgundy was annexed to the empire in 1033, which thereby came into possession of the mouth of the Rhone and the Alpine passes; Bohemia, Poland and Hungary were united with the empire; King Knud III of Denmark and England came under the feudal sovereignty of the emperor. The papacy was still entirely subordinate to the imperial power. Henry III occupied the papal chair as he saw fit and was absolute master in Rome.
One may be of any opinion about the imperial policy of the Middle Ages, but the fact is, that it resulted from the nature of things themselves and was a quasi-legislative process.
The German task of order in those centuries did not arise out of a the central position, which did not exist at that time, nor to a numerical superiority, which did not exist either. It resulted from the national and military strength of Germany, which alone possessed a purposeful leadership with comprehensive planning, which could not be the case with the other nations, which were in the throes of their development. Germany alone possessed a degree of internal unity of blood, which spared her the difficult struggles of the balancing process and made a strong foreign policy possible. The unity of the Occident had been re-established in a new form. The emperor was regarded as the undisputed arbiter of the European world. The empire exercised its supremacy not so much by virtue of its power, but because it was perceived as the embodiment of the Western sense of community. A dark feeling of common racial origin may have contributed to the fact that the Occident was perceived as something entirely its own, as a whole, of which the Emperor was the natural head.
It is peculiar that the modern historical consciousness could be so obscured that one was no longer able to grasp the original idea of empire in its actual content. The example of the British Empire and the other modern empires has shown that the idea of empire is associated with the idea of oppression and desolate egalitarianism. The imperialism of the last centuries had dulled our view of the peculiar content of the concept of empire. We had forgotten that the medieval empire meant a system of order that was equal only to itself. It was only the latest research that cleared up the semi-darkness that had lain over the medieval creation of empires until recently, and revealed to us the picture of an almost perfect and in its kind exemplary organization of the inter-ethnic relations of the continent.
The Europe of those days was situated in a system of multiple, but balanced order, which was anchored in the centre of the continent. Around Germany, which was broadly positioned over the Central European area, were grouped various zones of assignment: Bohemia was directly attached to the empire; Italy and Burundi were united with it in personal union; Denmark, Poland and Hungary were in a relationship to the imperial power that varied in degree and time; England and France, later Byzantium, Cyprus, Jerusalem and Edessa were in vital relationship to it; finally, the kingdom of Sicily and North Africa, which depended on it, were temporarily attached. An immense power complex for the circumstances of that time. And yet, this order was maintained without any significant use of force. The empire did not rule, it led. It was the stronghold of peace and Walter of a comprehensive order. The medieval empire represented a historically unique power structure in that it did not know the apparent opposition between continental unification and national independence. Empire and nation were of equal importance and complemented each other. In the Golden Bull, which came into being around the middle of the 14th century, this fact found the following expression: “Because the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire has to order law and government to foreign nations, which are distinguished by customs, life and dialect”. The Emperor was followed not because he was the powerful one, but because his office of arbitration was felt to be a divine institution. An age-old longing of European mankind for the kingdom of peace found a realization in the political order of the Middle Ages for three centuries. On the unchallengeable basis of the imperial claim to leadership and in possession of the means of power of the entire Central European area, the empire continued to increase its political prestige. At the time of the Salian emperors, around the middle of the 11th century.
After a temporary weakening, it surpassed this peak during the reign of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Under the successor of the great Staufer Frederick Barbarossa, Henry VI, the empire experienced its greatest territorial expansion around 1190. Its influence extended from the coasts of the Atlantic too deep into the Near East and encompassed almost the entire Mediterranean basin.
The all too early death of the emperor (1197) proved on what an insecure foundation this mighty power structure rested. The papacy, which in its undisguised striving for political power had hitherto used every crisis of imperial power to undermine it, and had thus almost reached its goal in the time of Henry IV (Canossa), now set out on its most audacious foray into world domination. The Empire, looking after the interests of Europe in all directions, had failed to establish a firm national power base in Germany and to adapt itself to the incipient development of the nation-state on the continent. Now that an underage boy wore the crown (Frederick II), it was easy for the papacy to join forces with the strong special powers in Germany and with the rising national forces in Europe and thus to bring down the Western emperor-ship. Under the Staufer Frederick II, the greatness of the medieval empire once again shone in a radiant late glow, only to be extinguished forever (1250).It is not without a certain intention that the history of the old empire has been treated here in such detail in connection with the problem of the organization of Europe. It was intended to show that the medieval empire has an exemplary significance for the reorganization of Europe in the future. For more than three centuries Europe was a whole, whose characteristic was unity in diversity, whose cement was responsibility and whose idea was the realization of a creative order. Thereby, the actual history of the old empire takes a period of time that is longer than the lifetime of all modern European hegemonic systems (hegemony = supremacy).
A proof for the grown form and the inner necessity of the medieval order embodied in the empire is the fact that its political expression was outlasted by the social and cultural manifestations of this order. The blossoming of the occidental culture lasted beyond the Hohenstaufen period. The Reich still formed a truly European form of community, in which the consciousness of supranational togetherness far outweighed the national characteristics. In the Romanesque and Gothic architecture the idea of the Occident found its fulfilment in the artistic as well as in the spiritual-religious field of mysticism. These were the last overall achievements out of the common blood origin of the occidental peoples. With the collapse of the Reich, the German people was eliminated as a cohesive factor in European history. Through almost seven centuries, German history has been one of particular forces. It is all the more astonishing that these relatively weak partial forces were still able to master tasks of European proportions. Right at the beginning of the medieval empire, there are two such achievements of German special powers that have a continental format: The continuation of the cultivation of the East by the Teutonic Order and the economic-political creation of the Hanseatic League.
The Teutonic Order emerged from the Crusade movement.
It was transferred from Palestine first to Venice, then to Transylvania. When it received a leader of outstanding stature in the Grand Master Hermann of Salza, its rise began, which led it far beyond the framework of similar foundations to a world-historical task. The scene of this became the Baltic area and that of the lower Vistula. Summoned by the Polish princes themselves, the Teutonic Order was set to conquer and Christianize what would later become East Prussia. It subdued the Prussians, acquired the surrounding territories and founded its own state on the newly won soil. The sword was now followed by the plough. The Order called streams of peasant settlers into the country and founded numerous towns. In a short time the former wasteland was transformed into a flourishing cultivated area. The Teutonic Order state soon represented a masterpiece of state, military and economic leadership. With the exception of the Sicilian kingdom of Frederick II, it was the only European state of the Middle Ages to display modern features in the strictness of its structure and its exemplary social justice. The concept of service, applied for the first time by the Teutonic Order to the state as such, was later adopted and further developed by the Prussian kingdom. Around the middle of the 14th century, the Teutonic Order reached the peak of its power. Its foreign policy included the Baltic counter coast as well as the entire Eastern European region down to Persia in its system. Even though it was only a tiny part of the declining empire, this state was nevertheless a respected great power. This state of affairs lasted until the middle of the 15th century. When the so far loosely connected states at the Baltic Sea grew together to closed national states, the Order, which had been abandoned by emperor and empire, was not able to maintain its position and collapsed when, in addition, internal difficulties arose. The work of eastern colonization completed by the Order, however, was to continue and later form the basis of the Prussian state. The colonial achievement of the empire is unprecedented in history in its extent and nature. An area twice the size of Henry I’s Germany was opened up to European morality. It was Europe itself that advanced eastward with the German settlers and absorbed the Slavic peoples from the Baltic to the Adriatic into the continental community. The beginning of the eastward movement marked the birth of Central Europe.
This fact found its first world-historical proof in the defence against the Mongols around the middle of the 13-th century. Slavic warriors from the Galician and Silesian regions, led by a dynasty of princes who had closely aligned themselves with the Empire, achieved a great defensive success against the onslaught from the East with German support at Liegnitz in 1241. The Hanseatic League was no less important on the continent than the colonization work. It arose around the middle of the 13th century from an alliance between Hamburg and Lubeck to secure trade and to jointly represent their economic-political interests. - The long lasting internal peace under the Hohenstaufen and the expansion of traffic through the crusades caused an enormous increase of prosperity and a high bloom of trade. The gradual emergence of the money economy in turn influenced the development of the cities and increased their importance in trade policy.
When the decline of the imperial power brought about a state of general lawlessness, the cities took steps to help themselves. The alliance between Hamburg and Lubeck was gradually joined by the most important cities on the water’s edge, in the Low Countries and along the Rhine. An economic-political association for the purpose of protecting trade and traffic came into being, which had more than state functions and military.
For the first time, the Hanseatic League induced the Scandinavian North to step out of its self-sufficient isolation and to participate in the overall continental life, at first in terms of economic policy. Central, Western and Northern Europe were thus united in a single economic area.
It is also remarkable for that great epoch of continental trade policy that, in contrast to the later, Jewish-influenced merchant, an actually European type of merchant emerged at that time. From that time comes the great word of the “Royal Merchant”. The power of the Hanseatic League declined for the same reason as that of the Teutonic Order. Without the support of a strong empire, these two partial powers were no match for closed nation states like England. The “Holy Roman Empire” of the Habsburgs, however, was even hostile to the efforts of the Hanseatic League. Like the Flemings and the Dutch, it was sacrificed to Spanish interests. Thereby, the rise of the English sea power was decisively favoured.
The Age of European Civil Wars
The order that had sunk with the empire was replaced in Europe by chaos. Only now did the European peoples become aware of what that order had once meant to them. The division now took its course unhindered. In the struggle of all against all, Europe let pass the world-political chance which an incomparably favourable historical hour had given it through the discovery of the New World and which only a continent united in itself would have been able to exploit.
From the collapse of the Empire around the middle of the 13th century until the beginning of the 16th century, Europe experienced a process of progressive political and spiritual disintegration. The formation of national middle and small states led to a state of perpetual unrest and created that atmosphere of mistrust, of mutual scorn, of endless quarrels about trifles, which only our generation is beginning to outgrow.
Therefore, attempts were made again and again to bring the conflicting interests into a certain harmony. All these attempts suffered from the one evil that they were undertaken from the edge of the continent and consequently from too narrow a basis. For the German heartland was in a state of permanent fragmentation. Now, however, it became clear that just as the health of an organism depends on the condition of its heart, so an orderly Europe depends on the strength of its heartland. The order of the continent can only proceed from the Empire and must begin in Germany. As chance would have it, after the dissolution of the medieval empire, the first attempt to give Europe a new order came from the extreme southwest corner of the continent. On the soil of the old Visigothic empire arose, around the turn of the in the 16th century, the nation which fought for its unity and independence in a significant confrontation with the Moors, who at times penetrated far to the north of the peninsula. From this fierce struggle of race and faith, the nation had emerged steeled and filled with a high sense of mission. This tremendous impetus not only proved itself in the great voyages of discovery of those days, but also had an increasing effect on the European policy of the young Spanish great power. The arrangement of the dynastic relations accommodated this development. When at the beginning of the 16th century Habsburg took over the Spanish crown, it united the Netherlands, Burgundy, the Austrian hereditary lands and important Italian possessions with the Spanish rule. These areas of power, which were scattered all over Europe, seemed to be able to provide just as many brackets for a renewed unification of the continent; especially since the Habsburg Charles V, moreover, won the imperial crown and thus the possibility to give his claim for the leadership of the Occident by the admittedly strongly degraded emperor-ship a legitimate veneer. Charles V also made this attempt. But it was a mistake that the work of unification was started from the remote Iberian peninsula, because the emperor-ship of Charles V had to obey the natural balance of power of his empire; it failed because the unification of Europe was undertaken without and against the Germans. Another mistake was that Charles V himself took sides in the religious struggles of the century and subscribed to the counter-reformation efforts of the papacy. In doing so, he deprived himself of the arbitrator position that belonged to him as emperor. And it was on this that the Habsburg’s creation of an empire broke down. At the end of his reign, which was filled with long and dramatic struggles, he could consider his life’s work a failure. Although Philip II did not inherit the imperial crown from Charles around the middle of the 16th century, he took over the entire Habsburg possessions together with Spain, with the exception of the Austrian ancestral lands. After all, Spain had risen to become the first great power in Europe and now continued its efforts to complete its dominance. In France, however, an equal opponent arose whom she was not able to conquer. And when Philip II. failed in the subjugation of the rebellious Netherlands, this meant, beyond the loss of his richest provinces, the first great defeat of the Spanish world power. The people of the Pyrenean peninsula had overreached themselves and wasted their best strength on exaggerated aims. Things went rapidly downhill and the destruction of the Armada in 1588 was already considered by the contemporaries as the end of Spain’s world dominance.
The Netherlands would not have been able to hold their own against Spain if they had not been supported by England. Around that time, England took its first steps towards becoming a naval power and began to exert an influence on the shaping of European relations that would continue to this day and have pernicious effects.
Until the 15th century England tried to make conquests on the other side of the channel and to create a platform for a continental European policy. When these attempts failed and after severe upheavals the House of Tudor seized power, England’s continental aspirations suddenly came to an end. From now on British politics went its own way and became more and more alienated from the overall destiny of the continent. As already mentioned, the disintegration of the Hanseatic League, which until then had ruled the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic coast, largely promoted the importation of the English sea power. In addition to this, since the discovery of America the importance of the Atlantic shipping routes increased more and more and the small British island suddenly moved into the centre of world traffic and became the most important shipment point of Europe. Under these favourable conditions England took the step out to sea. It encouraged the Netherlands to revolt against Spain because its presence on the Channel coast was inconvenient to it, and finally intervened itself in the struggle against Philip II. It has already been suggested that the defeat of the Spanish fleet in 1588 marked the end of Spain’s world dominance, but at the same time the beginning of English power. From now on the colonial possession and the material prosperity of England grew at the expense of the sinking Spanish world empire.
When the Netherlands after the liberation from the Spanish rule unexpectedly rose to the most important sea and trade power of the time, the previous friendship of England changed into bitter enmity. She did not hesitate to ally herself with the former mortal enemy, the “tyrannical” Spain, against her comrade-in-arms in order to get rid of her competition on the sea. While the French king, who was also allied with England, attacked the small Holland on land, the English destroyed the Dutch fleet. But now it turned out that France had made her warlike undertakings in alliance with England on her own account. Spanish supremacy had been destroyed, Dutch naval power had fallen, but in its place, more powerful than it had been, came France. The English power, which since its appearance in world politics knew only one goal, to prevent the emergence of a superior great state on the continent, had there grown a new dangerous opponent.
France had begun and completed the development to a unitary state earlier than the other European countries, favoured by its geographical position. In the second half of the 15th century, Louis XI completed the consolidation of France into a closed, tightly governed nation state. At the time of the Spanish domination, Francis I was able to successfully throw the weight of the united state into the scales of European politics. At the turn of the 17th century, Henry IV rescued France from its most serious crisis, into which it had fallen as a result of decades of religious struggles, by establishing religious peace. Under this king the French state already reached such an importance that the minister Henry IV, Sully, could think of the creation of a federation of nations, which should secure France a permanent predominance in Europe. Cardinal Richelieu continued these hegemonic efforts with success. After the Peace of Westphalia (1648), France was indeed the undisputed military supremacy on the continent. Louis XIV had only to continue in this vein, and the century of Spanish rule was followed by a much more extensive French hegemony. The result, however, was that he thereby incurred the irreconcilable enmity of England. England unconcernedly allied itself with Holland, Spain and any other power that wanted to join it against the more and more powerful France. Such a proceeding resulted logically from the principles which England had followed unwavering since the beginning of her ascendancy and which have come to light in each of the periods of her foreign policy described so far. England’s policy obeys immutable laws. For the British, Europe is a hinterland and only of importance in relation to their overseas interests. England’s world power policy needs European backing. A continent united in itself, united to an energetic representation of its total interests would be able to defend itself against British paternalism. England, therefore, has an outstanding interest in a divided Europe which is concerned only with itself. This has at all times been the central point of the political wisdom of England, which has governed all her actions. England now applied this cardinal sentence of its policy for the third time and now to its relations with France. Again his proven recipe came to fruition, to fight the strongest power on the continent in alliance with the second strongest military power and with the many weak. This time, however, success was a long time coming. The power of France was constantly growing. For almost two centuries, France made more or less successful attempts to impose its will on Europe. In order to prevent this, England brought no less than a dozen coalitions against France in not quite 200 years. The first great European alliance against Louis XIV came about at the end of the 17th century during the Palatinate War. After initial successes by the French, the allied powers of Europe, led by England, succeeded in pushing back Louis XIV. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1714), which broke out soon after and shook Europe for 14 years, England again joined the new Grand Alliance against France. The conduct of British policy during this war is typical of her attitude to the European problem generally. Her means by which she seeks to undermine French supremacy are: the union of powers against France, her support by subsidy money, and blockade. When Louis XIV could not be forced down by these methods, England advised the Great Alliance and decided on the special peace of Utrecht (1712). The motives were obvious - the supremacy of France was broken and the main opponent of British policy in Europe was no longer Louis XIV, but the Kaiser, the hitherto confederate, who could now have tried to give Europe a new order. But this would have violated the laws of English foreign policy. For the world power of England was based on the disruption of the continent.
During the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) England still fought on the side of France against Austria. Afterwards, when Austria gained a lot of prestige by joining the Austrian-Russian alliance, England allied with the isolated Prussia during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) in order to restore the disturbed “European balance”. While for the narrow mind of the continental European this war seemed to be about the possession of the small province of Silesia, it was in fact a conflict of worldwide proportions: it was the final struggle of England and France for world domination. In India and Canada this fight was fought out, admittedly then decided in favour of England by the Grenadiers of Frederick the Great. Again as at the time of the War of the Austrian Succession England, when her aim was reached, left the Prussian ally and concluded the Peace of Paris with France (1762). Thus English world domination was secured, and the last important competitor of the Empire in India and North America was eliminated. But the further development of European conditions was not at all according to England’s wishes. The revolution that broke out in France in 1789 mobilized all the power of the people, threw the armies of old Europe to the ground in a mighty onslaught, and seized the coast of Flanders. This was the signal for England. The Great Coalition was formed, in which, under the leadership of England, almost the whole of Europe united against revolutionary France. The titanic force of Napoleon I, however, succeeded in unifying Europe militarily after chequered struggles. Even if the principle of order which he advocated was unfruitful and bore a negative omen, he nevertheless succeeded in temporarily uniting the forces of the continent. But in so doing he touched the root of British world domination.
But Napoleon’s plan went to pieces. After the failure of the Russian campaign, England brought all of Europe to its feet against the Emperor. Decisively defeated at Leipzig (1813), he was pushed to France and forced to abdicate. This also ended the Napoleonic attempt to give Europe an order. France’s attempts at order were doomed to failure for reasons of geopolitics alone. After Spain’s efforts, it was the second attempt to organize Europe from the periphery. Despite France’s unparalleled position, the basis for a sprawl over the entire continent was too narrow. The French claim to order contradicted the natural balance of power on the continent. Its basis was force, it lacked the idea and the ability to transform force into power and power into law. That is why it broke down as soon as the natural relationship of the European forces was restored and Germany reasserted her old rights. Had France at least had the will to give Europe a real and viable foundation, and under its supremacy to overcome the antagonisms to which the continual and permanent interference of England in European affairs bore the stamp of decomposition from the very beginning. All of England’s efforts to shape the continent in its own sense sailed under the slogan of the “European balance”. We can see the destructive effect of the British contribution to European coexistence in the endless disaster that this slogan has brought upon the continent.
The resurgence of the German centre of Europe
It was time for Germany to resume her old mission and give peace to Europe. After the worst consequences of the national catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War had been overcome, the signs of a slowly resuming ascendancy became noticeable. Under the cover of anarchy a decisive change had taken place in Germany. While the old imperial lands on the Rhine remained in disarray, two nuclei of power had formed on the eastern edge of the German soil, from which the rebirth of German and European unity emanated: Austria and Prussia.
The southeast had been the continent’s sore spot since the Turks invaded around the middle of the 14th century. The sorrowful disruption of the Balkan region was only too suitable to favour the spread of the Ottoman power, which was foreign to Europe. In heroic struggles, the peoples of South-eastern Europe - Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Croats and Hungarians - tried to resist the Turkish power one by one. But in the course of two centuries one after the other succumbed to the superior power. Thus the Turkish danger gradually grew into a European problem. In 1529 the Ottomans stood for the first time in front of Vienna and planned the conquest of Central Europe and Italy. Thus their onslaught was shattered by the resistance of Austria. This, which since the beginning of the 16th century, often had to form the dam against the surging waves of the Turks on its own, was able to cope with this truly European task. With difficulty and hardship it defended itself against the danger from the southeast for another century and a half, only to go on the attack itself. In 1683 the Turks undertook a second major attack, which again led them to the gates of Vienna. This time, however, the immediate danger shook Central Europe awake and for the first time in a long time created something like a continental sense of community. The Turkish attack on Vienna was not only repulsed, but the Austrian troops, joined by auxiliary peoples from all parts of Europe, now took the offensive. Hungary was cleared of the enemy as if by storm, and the Germans, advancing across the lowlands, advanced to the extreme arc of the Carpathians and to the lower reaches of the Danube. Prince Eugene, the hero of the Turkish wars, was not only an army commander of the first rank, but also one of the greatest statesmen in Europe. In him we see today one of the most important representatives of the imperial idea and of a true European order. This man, from whom Austria’s position of great power originated, encompassed the entire problem of the Empire in his enormous conception. In his conception of the world, Germany again took the first place in the total system, which can only be thought of from this its central point. The Savoyard’s actions were as many-sided as his thinking. It was he who referred to the Danube as the axis of south-eastern politics and who was at the same time concerned about the thousand details of the cultivation of that area - commander, statesman and colonizer in one. But he was also the one who put France’s arrogance in its place and shifted the centre of gravity back to Germany.
It was a misfortune for Germany and Europe that the House of Habsburg subsequently became unfaithful to the principles of Prince Eugene’s policy. With one-sided confessional ties, selfishly concerned only with their own dynastic interests, the Habsburgs were unable to do justice either to the needs of the maturing south-eastern peoples or to true continental concerns. The course of the north-eastern branch of the German Eastern movement was already mentioned in the context of medieval imperial history and traced until the collapse of the Teutonic Order. On its foundations the Prussian power arose in the northeast corner of the empire. The importance of Prussia for the German- and that always means European - history is of both a power-political and an intellectual nature. Prussia’s path was marked out from the very beginning. It led inevitably to the unification of Germany in terms of power. Moreover, we associate the term Prussia with more than a mere power-political conception. Prussia is for us the modern German type of state par excellence, the embodiment of the state-creating abilities of the German genius in the forms of modern times. Prussia, that is an attitude, an infinitely simple, dutiful and wordless world-view of action. It is the form of existence in which the German Empire was to realize itself anew. The course of development of this German state knows ups and downs - but it does not make any turns. The inner logic of human history as a question of will has never been more clearly and more clearly revealed than in the path that leads from the miserable small state on the sands of the March to the great power and to the empire.
The real foundations of a Prussian great power policy were laid under King Frederick William I. His significance goes far beyond the actual results of his governmental activity. How the soldier-king truly devoted himself only as the highest employee of this state with almost superhuman renunciation to his service as ruler and only to this, how he knew only the offer of the utmost fulfilment of duty in the midst of an easy-going and depraved time, all this borders on the incomprehensible. When Frederick II began his reign, however, he immediately possessed the foundation from which he could fight for Prussia’s position as a great power.
As fate would have it, Germany was to win its resurgence by the circuitous route of the fratricidal struggle between Prussia and Austria. The object of struggle of the two German powers was Silesia, at the same time the sliding weight, the possession of which decided the predominance of one or the other. The Silesian conquest fell easily into the king’s lap at first. But in the Seven Years’ War the struggle flared up anew. This time Prussia was isolated, apart from the doubtful English support; on the other side, however, an overwhelming superiority had accumulated, to which all the great European powers belonged. In this war Prussia passed the decisive test of her history. It had asserted itself against the allied Europe and had thus won the right to join the ranks of the great powers of the continent on an equal footing. The immediate result of this fact, however, was that Germany now had two great powers side by side, whose opposition finally split apart the already loose framework of the outdated imperial union. Nevertheless, Frederick the Great has become the ancestor of the new empire. Not so much his state and the system he founded, for this collapsed under the blows of Napoleon. But the Frederician example and the attitude exemplified by the great king were decisive for the further course of German history. In the superhuman hardship of those seven years he had shown so much shattering greatness that he became a myth during his lifetime. Currents of national energy which fertilized the Sturm und Drang of the middle of that century and decisively conditioned the emergence of the later heyday of the German spirit.
At first, however, the German people had to overcome another low point in their national development. At the turn of the 19th century, the French Revolution shook the outdated powers of absolutism. French armies advanced beyond the Alps and the Rhine and, under Napoleon’s leadership, brought about the collapse of one of the old states after another. Austria was defeated so emphatically that it sank to the rank of a middle power; finally the Prussian state also succumbed to the army of the Corsicans. But what sank in the battle of Jena (1806) was only the obsolete state shell of Frederick the Great’s Prussia. Its living content lived on and formed out of itself the germs of rebirth. The circle around Scharnhorst reformed the army and gave rise to the people’s army out of the Frederician spirit. In this rejuvenated Prussia, in 1813, the tremendous national enthusiasm found the firm state anchor and the political leadership it needed. This alone made possible the resounding success of the wars of liberation, which led the Germans and their allies all the way to Paris and swept away the Emperor (1814). After the elimination of Napoleon, all the conditions for the reconstruction of Germany seemed to be in place. At the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), however, it turned out how disjointed Germany’s and Europe’s affairs were and that the reestablishment of the Empire had to remain a pipe dream. The unification of Germany failed with natural necessity because of the Austro- Prussian dualism, apart from the constant interference of the European powers, one of which, England, even commanded German soil (Hanover). On the other hand, Austria grew more and more out of Germany, since it had lost the living connection with her. Accordingly, it could only be Prussia to whom the work of unification had to fall. But this still had a good while to come. In any case, around 1815, the re-foundation of the Empire lay outside the practical political possibilities of those days. The development of the European relations after the Congress of Vienna can only be described as disastrous. There was a deep tragedy in the fact that the period of Europe’s powerful expansion over the world coincided with the period of its greatest internal fragmentation. Diverging developments, whose roots reached back to the collapse of the medieval empire, grew to full maturity in the 19th century. While the spiritual consciousness of the European peoples had outlasted the former political unity for centuries, now, after countless continental civil wars, the last remnants of it had disappeared. The mutual national isolation took unbelievable forms. The hostile brothers no longer wanted to accept that all European nations were the results of a historical development and children of the one occidental culture.
Thus it came about that the great European colonial powers, in this decade when the distribution of the world was reaching its conclusion, advanced in isolation into the infinite overseas spaces. Mutual jealousy prevented them from coordinating their colonial policies and from making Europe as such useful. Under these circumstances, large-scale world powers like the USA and Russia had to win the race, especially since England, as always, placed itself outside the European community. Europe fell behind. Instead of that a serious danger arose in its immediate vicinity. Russia had always regarded Europe only as an arena for its power politics or as a reservoir of people for its own expansion. It did not count itself to the continental, for it wanted domination, not cooperation - regardless of whether it camouflaged its claim to power behind the slogan of the “Third Rome” or the “liberation of the proletariat”. Russian imperialism weighed on Europe as a nightmare pressure that was already felt by Frederick the Great, and it is only in our day that Europe has entered into a decisive confrontation with it.
The Empire and the Reorganization of Europe
The stark contrast to the worldwide expansion of Europe in the 19th century was formed by the state conditions of Germany. The largest nation on the continent was languishing in the sticky air of the most evil petty statehood. Sovereign territorial states, the real beneficiaries of the secretly smouldering antagonism between Austria and Prussia, divided the German soil among themselves. It was only when Bismarck took over the leadership of Frederick the Great that he resolutely returned to the path of Frederick the Great and thus to his true mission. This man of genius was destined to restore unity to the German people and to lead it once again to its historical task of order.
In Bismarck, Germany was born a statesman who was able to ignore the excesses of the national movement, but who grasped its essentials and was able to transfer them into reality according to the political possibilities. Undeterred, he followed his path, which led him through the fratricidal war of 1866 (Konigsgratz) and two foreign wars (the Danish War of 1864 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71) to the unification of Germany. He never went beyond the set goal or let himself be carried away by the success of the moment. In the hour of victory, at Nikolsburg and at Versailles, the greatest thing about him was moderation. Thus a German Empire was born anew. Admittedly, it was only a small German one, and its borders covered only a fraction of the area that had once enclosed the empire of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the act of 1871 was a milestone in continental development, for through it the historical mission of the German nation had regained political form. Immediately after the founding of the Reich, a shift of European forces and a reorientation towards the reinvigorated centre began to take place. The Germans automatically regained their historical mandate for order. At the Berlin Congress of 1878 this fact found its first defeat. With more right than of Metternich one could say of Bismarck that he was the “Coachman of Europe.” From Germany, he carefully shaped the organization of European peace. The guiding principle of Bismarck’s policy was the balancing of European tensions from the continental centre. In the Empire, as the centre of gravity of the continent, all antagonisms were to be resolved. After the death of the great chancellor, however, it turned out that the concept of order on which the political system of Europe after 1870 had been based was a Bismarckian one par excellence. The epigones did not fit into Bismarck’s work. They were neither able to secure it internally nor to continue it externally. The foreign policy of the post-Bismarckian period was particularly unsustainable. The peace period which Bismarck’s will for order had brought about was not of long duration. It was to be expected that the opposing forces would stir. That the successors of the Iron Chancellor did not heed the signs of this and did as little outwardly
The fact that the German government, both inwardly and outwardly, created the conditions for a successful struggle against the unavoidable passage of arms was a criminal negligence. Somewhat late England became aware of the change of things in Europe. Until the end of the 19th century it still saw France as its main opponent and fought it openly or covertly wherever the opportunity arose. At last it came to a quarrel between both because of colonial antagonisms in Africa. That England then compromised in the 90s at the height of the African crisis after Faschoda and joined forces with France followed from its traditional policy. France was no longer the strongest on the continent, therefore England buried the old enmity and united with it and with a new European coalition against the threatening German Empire. Germany had given Europe again a centre of gravity in itself, Germany had given peace to Europe and was able to put the continent in the position to stand united for the defence of its overall interests. It had thus made an arch-enemy of England, which had recognized the task of the Reich and its possibilities better than the Reich itself. From a historical point of view, the world war is a great uprising of the opposing forces against the Reich. Bismarck’s creation broke down because his heirs, in their intellectual narrowness, failed to think of the idea of empire in its proper European framework. They became unfaithful to the world-historical idea of an overarching order from Germany and decayed in the barrenness of liberalist thinking. Wilhelmine Germany perished because it had lost the idea of the empire. It failed because of its inner inadequacy. What the immeasurable sacrifice of the war apparently could not bring about for Germany, the Versailles Dictatorship brought about - the awakening of the nation, the reflection on itself and on its own mission. The basic error of the peacemakers of 1919 was a blessing for Germany: to believe that one could cut off the air of Europe’s largest nation simply by depriving it of its opportunities for life, and thereby rid it of its competition. Without the immense pressure that had set in since Versailles, the emergence of the National Socialist movement would have been inconceivable. It was truly the uprising of a people forced to fight for its very existence. The Fuhrer succeeded in summoning up the last reserves of national strength and in breaking the fetters of the dictate.
After two decades of truce, however, England called up the old enemies anew against Germany, especially since the pseudo-peace of the post-war period had emerged from an exhaustion, not from a balance of power. The realization of a new social justice inwardly and the prelude to a lasting European order outwardly by National Socialism called the British, who saw their plutocratic system threatened, back into action. In the Second World War, in which we see the continuation of the soon to be 30 years old struggle, it became clearer than ever that it is no longer about Germany alone, but about Europe. Again, as so often in history, the Reich stands up for the whole Occident against the anti- European powers from East and West. For the difference between the Bolshevik and the Anglo-American way of thinking, seen from our point of view, is one of form, not of essence, especially since here as there the stamp of Jewish spirit is unmistakable. Both have the same character, the crass materialism, the denial of the personality, the tendency towards the masses. The transfer of the culture- and race-destroying Americanism to the grown European morality would show the same result as the flooding by the Bolshevik mass delusion - the end of Europe. National Socialist Germany and her allies are waging this struggle for the immortal values of the European spirit: freedom and personality. For the aim is to pass on a great past as well as to ensure a great future. National Socialism first seized the German people with the revolutionary power of a religious movement. In the experience of the national revolution of 1933, which was the first true revolution in German history, the German people found their way back to themselves. Beyond that, however, the world-historical appearance of Adolf Hitler means a turning point in European history in general. The enormous energies which the personality of the leader triggered in the German people spilled over to the other nations of the continent and caused deep inner changes in them. The reorganization of Europe by Adolf Hitler reaches far beyond the realm of the state, for it is the result of a revolution in pan- European thought itself. But the visible expression of the changed European community of nations is THE REICH. The empire is more than a state, in which the old opposition between empire and nation finds its balance. The Reich represents the continental interests externally, guarantees a just coordination of the manifold national claims internally and ensures the autonomous self-life of each individual European people. The organization of the inter-ethnic relations of each individual state will be governed by the law of revolutionary European socialism, as will the coexistence of all the nations of the continent. According to the achievement for the whole, each people will be guaranteed its due place in the continental community. Under the hardships and travails of a bloody struggle Europe reaches unity. An ancient order and the command of the time for large-scale unification meet in our days and let the unity of the continent resurrect. The Europe of the future will be built on the foundations that have always been characteristic of German imperial thinking. The empire will be the fulfilment of a thousand years of history and the hoard of all that has come down to us as the living heritage of occidental culture.
The Fuhrer, his life and his significance for Europe
Youthful years - Viennese period - The Greater German Question
We know today that with Adolf Hitler, not only the German people, but also all of Europe, has arisen the great, ingenious leader who, called by Providence, will bring about the decisive turning point in the life of the peoples of Europe. Adolf Hitler has today become the outstanding fighter and shaper of an entire hitherto unhappy and inwardly torn continent. Under his leadership, in the hardships and painful travails of the present mighty struggle between nations, Europe is achieving a healthy and vital unity. One cannot fully understand the nature and work of this ingenious builder of the European future without a thorough study of the history of the development of this outstanding personality. As a child of the people in the centre of Europe, which has always been particularly exposed to the changing effects of national forces, but also to the influence of external powers, he became the leader of Europe. First of all, in his immense faith in the creative positive forces of his own people, he pulled them out of an apparently final decline and led them towards recovery in all fields. A new ideal of life became the starting point of the best human powers of his people. It is part of the nature of surprising ideas that they do not stop at the national borders of those people from whose blood the creator of the ideas came, but that they radiate beyond the borders in a formative and fruitful way and usher in a new age in an orderly manner. Thus, long before the beginning of this war, Adolf Hitler had become the great shining example of all the healthy and life-affirming forces of the peoples of Europe, who regard his thought processes as decisive and decisive, also for the development of their own national development. In the figure of Adolf Hitler the world today recognizes once more that “men make history. Adolf Hitler is one of those gifted great men whose personality cannot be measured by reason alone.
In view of his unique way of life and outstanding genuine leadership, we sense the action of a higher power, which only from time to time endows the nations with a truly creative genius. There is no privilege in Adolf Hitler’s cradle. He came from among the people; his career was not paved for him by traditional possessions and the sound and splendour of his name. His ancestors are at home in the so-called Waldviertel, in the northwest of today’s Gau Niederdonau (Lower Austria). It is a densely wooded, high-lying landscape, to which one climbs from the south out of the Danube valley and from which one reaches the Bohemian basin to the north. Its barren soil supports only poor peasantry. Hitler’s ancestors mostly belong to this small peasantry of the Waldviertel or practice a rural craft, such as milling. They are descendants of those Bavarian-Franconian settlers who colonized the Ostmark, cleared its forests, and thus opened up the country to German life and German ways. Adolf Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler (1 837-1903), was the first of his ancestors to leave the immediate home area. He first became a shoemaker and then a civil servant in the Imperial and Royal Customs Administration. Customs Administration. In 1885 he marries Clara Polzel (1860-1908), who comes from the Waldviertel. From this marriage Adolf Hitler is born on 20
April 1889. The birthplace is Braunau am Inn, where the father serves as a customs officer. In his book “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle), the Fuhrer referred to the historical significance of his birthplace. It is, after all, the site of a memorable blood testimony: Here, at Napoleon’s behest, the bookseller Palm was shot, who had published the polemic “Germany in its deepest humiliation”. Adolf Hitler spent his childhood in Passau, where his father was transferred, and then in various places in what is now the Gau Oberdonau (Upper Austria), where his father settled in his retirement. When Alois Hitler died in 1903 in Leonding near Linz, his mother moved with the family to Linz. In these first years, under her impressions and experiences, the basic features of Adolf Hitler’s nature and character are formed. He is considered to be a small ringleader, who has an impetuous urge to be active. He is anything but a couch potato. It becomes apparent that he has a tenacity and defiant will that rubs up against the resistance that his father and the school put up against him. His father sees in him a future civil servant and wants to determine his educational path accordingly. For his boy, however, the relative calm, security and isolation of being a civil servant is not an enticement. He was not a model boy at school. Out of defiance he does not develop a general eagerness to learn, but turns his interest to certain objects that arouse his inclination and lie in the direction of his plans.
Above all, it was history and geography that had a great attraction for him. At the secondary school in Linz, a warm-hearted and enthusiastic history teacher taught him history in a way that did not consist of a chronological series and dead accumulation of knowledge, but rather vividly imprinted the great historical contexts of the peoples and their culture.
“I learned to understand history in its true sense.“
Early on, he took a burning interest in the fate of the German nation. He understands its history in a national sense and not from a narrow, state-bound thinking or even from a dynastic point of view. The young pupil of the Linz Realschule is filled with enthusiasm for the great German cause; he reads with hot cheeks the history of the German-French war of 1870/71 and asks himself why the German people in Austria should not share in the pride of the victorious march of the German armies and why they are not included at all in a common German Reich. He becomes an ardent nationalist to whom the thought is ingrained, “Equal blood belongs in a common empire.” As the first political ideals are formed in the growing boy, he is simultaneously filled with artistic inclinations and desires. His mind is open to all that is beautiful and noble, which reveals itself to him in the fine arts, in works of music and in the theatre. His talent for drawing is unmistakable. Thus the desire to become a painter arose in him, and even his father’s resistance did not dissuade him from this wish. At the age of 18 he went to Vienna in the hope of being admitted to the school of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and to be able to enjoy his artistic training. However, he experienced a bitter disappointment; he was turned down and told that his abilities obviously lay in the field of architecture and that he should apply to the academy’s school of architecture. But since the admission depends on the attendance of the building school and the possession of the schoolleaving certificate, the way to the fulfilment of his artistic dream seems to be blocked. Dejected, he returns to Linz. Shortly afterwards, his mother died. Adolf Hitler does not despair, however, and moves to Vienna in 1908 with the plan to become a master builder and with the firm will to break all resistance. He takes up the struggle for life, which causes him many years of bitter hardship. The five years of his stay in Vienna will be a time of misery. But later he will judge this time:
“What then seemed to me the harshness of fate, I now praise as the wisdom of Providence. When the goddess of adversity took me in her arms and often threatened to break me, the will to resist grew, and at last the will remained victorious. I thank the time that I became hard and can be hard. And even more than this I praise her for tearing me away from the hollowness of the powerful life, for pulling the mama’s boy out of the soft down and now giving him to Mrs. Sorge as his new mother, for throwing the resisting man into the world of misery and poverty and thus letting him get to know those for whom he was later to fight.“
Adolf Hitler has to earn his bread as a construction worker, painter and draftsman. This hard school of life brings him into contact with people and problems that other politicians only know from hearsay. For Adolf Hitler, living views and experiences become the foundations of his world view, which he acquires during these years. The idea of National Socialism is not a product of bookish wisdom and was not born in cloud cuckoo land. Its authenticity and naturalness arise directly from human striving and struggle, from deep insight and sure grasp of the essential driving forces and tasks of our time. As a young man, Adolf Hitler experiences the Vienna of the time not on its poetic surface, as the outwardly untroubled, fun-loving city on the beautiful blue Danube, but as the political centre of a great empire that contains the most burning national and social questions as unsolved problems. He recognizes that the Habsburg Empire is heading towards a steadily increasing internal decay.
The most diverse power groups in the leadership of this state construction, the most diverse ethnic forces, are in the fiercest feud with each other, so that the parliament of this empire can only present the sad picture of a wild party quarrel and the fiercest ethnic disputes. The irresponsibility, narrow-mindedness and lack of strength of the leading statesmen of the Danube Monarchy have caused all these diverging forces to visibly undermine the artificial structure of this empire. No one can be found who can powerfully unite the positive national values which exist in themselves in a great common work for the welfare and future of the people of this State. Thus, even the numerically strongest ethnic group of this Reich, the Germans, are heading for dissolution through intrigue, corruption, political aimlessness and pusillanimity on the part of those responsible. Austria had been forced out of the circle of German states by the war of 1866. It had not been admitted into the North German Confederation and into Bismarck’s German Empire. This was not the result of Prussian selfishness or Bismarck’s short-sighted narrow- mindedness. Rather, it was the inevitable result of the nature of the Austrian monarchy, which included millions of Slavs and was closely connected with Hungary in terms of power. It was absolutely impossible to find a solution out of the one-sided nation-state thinking of the 19th century, which would have made possible the unification of different autonomous nationalities in a higher unity. In 1867, the Austro-Hungarian compromise caused the division of the Danube Monarchy into two halves and thus the separation of the two empires.
In the political debate in Parliament, even the idea of a threefold division, which would make the Slavs a third independent pillar of the Habsburg state, is gaining ground.
Thus the ominous deep shadows of folkish conflicts lay over Vienna and paralyzed every movement of internal strengthening and planned construction. Adolf Hitler’s observations in Vienna strengthened his rejection of the Austrian state structure and his opposition to the Habsburg dynasty: just as he was animated by a fervent love for his own German- Austrian homeland, he was filled with a deep hatred of the impossible Austrian state structure.
Workers’ Question and Jewish Question
National Socialism as the Only Salvation
The national problems intertwine and entangle themselves with the social question. The visual lessons that Adolf Hitler learns here are no less vivid. He experiences the world of the working class with its unspeakable hardships, insecurity of existence, unemployment, housing misery and many other worries. The triumph of the capitalist spirit in the 19th century had given rise to the workers’ question. The army of workers that had swelled in the factories was at first defenceless against the arbitrariness, exploitation and inhumanity of a system that did not recognize a moral obligation but invoked the immutability of so- called economic laws. The German workers’ will to live rebelled against impoverishment and fought for socio-political goals, more tolerable working conditions and worker protection. The selfishness and lack of understanding of the liberal bourgeoisie, the incapacity of the ruling circles did not allow them to recognize the task of fulfilling these justified demands in the spirit of a genuine nationalism and of allowing the German workers to share in the goods of the nation. Thus, tragically, the workers’ movement fell into the trajectory of Marxism, which has no interest in pacifying its followers and bringing them liberation from social hardship. Marxism sees the improvement of the situation of the working class only in the unification of the proletarians of all countries in the class struggle against capitalism.
To this end, the degradation of the worker to a homeless, homeless proletarian even seems desirable to him. Hitler recognizes that the German working class belongs to the blood and fate community of the German nation and that the whole nation is therefore responsible for the situation of the working class. Not a national para- this, but the nation is the home and mother of all working Germans. It becomes clear to him that nationalism and socialism are not opposites; on the contrary, their union is the basis of a healthy, modern German state.
Both forces of ideas, nationalism and socialism, must merge into one and must not be played off against each other - they are basically two sides of the same thing: the community of the people, which in nationalism outwardly makes its commitment to its struggle for destiny and in socialism brings about the fraternal bond and comradeship of all creative comrades of the people. Adolf Hitler experiences the practice of Marxism, its intolerance and the terror with which it dominates the masses, in his own body. The danger and the will to destroy of its doctrine become clear to him; he thus gains the firm conviction that genuine socialist striving must turn against Marxism, which is based on negative instincts, despair, envy and hate and cannot establish a sustainable order of life. True Socialism must not separate itself from the national womb; the solution of the social question can only proceed from an energetic, national-community attitude and has as its prerequisite the spiritual overcoming of the egoistic, materially directed instincts.
Through the phrases of Marxist propaganda the gaze penetrates to the human bearer of Marxist thought. He comes upon the Jew as the actual leader and mastermind of the sinister movement; thus the Jewish question becomes clear to him in its deep significance: Jews have placed themselves at the head of the workers’ movement. They see in the destruction of nations and in the proletarianization of all peoples the precondition for their world domination. Judaism is the corrosive, parasitic invader of the cultures of the working and value-creating peoples. The Jew lives his messianic hopes for world domination and offers in the most ingenious way his great influence in politics, economy, in scientific circles and in the art business in order to decompose healthy species and to paralyze the resistances opposing him. The Jewish financial strongman and the Jewish labour leader ultimately play together. The word uttered by the Jewish man of letters and Great British Prime Minister Disraeli coincides with the gained knowledge: “The race question is the key to world history.“
The only party in Austria which takes up the struggle against Judaism and Marxism is the Grossdeutsche Bewegung von Schonerers. But it lacks all understanding and psychological ability to influence the people in its broad strata. Thus it soon ebbs away in the barren mutual quarrels of the various parties, in intellectual talk and in the stifling air of parliament, to which its deputies inwardly devote themselves more and more. Quite in contrast to this, the Christian Social Party knows how to skilfully handle the means and tools of popular effect and to secure for itself a large following among the masses of the people. It creates for itself a broad organizational base on which it can base its power and rule. In its basic principles and objectives, however, it does not represent the folkish idealism of the Schonerer movement. Its opposition to the Jews does not spring from a basic racial conviction, but is bound to ecclesiastical-confessional thinking - as if the baptismal water could ever erase the racially conditioned characteristics of Jewish essence!
During these years Adolf Hitler also devoted his attention to the parliament with its gears, with the result that he sharply rejected this institution; for the picture that presents itself in the sessions and in the debates of the Reichsrat reveals that it is anything but a genuine governing body of the state and that in no way are the best of the people assembled in it. In the parliament the higher abilities of true leadership and expert insight cannot take effect, but demagogy, empty talk and above all irresponsibility hold a rendezvous here. He deepens these impressions through untiring study and the reading of fundamental books and writings. It is always a characteristic of great men that reading does not mean indiscriminate reading to them, but is based on a strict selection process. Hitler can later say of these years in Vienna that they gave him the foundations for his further life and work. The seeds of a great future becoming and maturing were already laid in this Viennese period of his life.
Adolf Hitler, who had been exempted from Austrian military service, enlisted as a war volunteer and was accepted into the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 16 (List).
The report of a fellow soldier says about his soldiering:
“Adolf Hitler was one of the few who took part in all the battles of the regiment; he performed superhumanly in the war of position as a combat orderly at a dangerous and responsible post. Sometimes he was shaken by fever, his teeth chattered, and we wanted to send him to the doctor, but he had much more important things to do, or he ignored us altogether? In the 23 months I was around him, he never went on leave, never went to a military hospital, only went to Lille for half a day. Since the beginning of the war he has always been in the firing range. Since 1914, always on the alert, he has never slept in a bed.“
Adolf Hitler fights in this war as a conscious soldier of the German people, whose fate is bound up with the Reich. He refuses to join the Austrian army and thus loses his Austrian citizenship. - Until the year 1932 he, who ruthlessly devoted himself and his life to the German cause, was considered stateless, and the blinded civic thinking of his opponents regarded him as a foreigner. In October 1915 he is promoted to corporal. He is awarded the Iron Cross II Class in 1914, and the Iron Cross I Class in 1918. For four years, with only a brief interruption due to a shrapnel injury, Adolf Hitler is in combat on the Western Front. Towards the end of the bitter struggle he suffers a severe gas poisoning in autumn 1918 and has to stay in the military hospital of Pasewalk from October 21 to November 19, 1918. He is half-blind when he has to experience the collapse of Germany during these days. The November revolt of the Marxists and Jews has put an end to the heroic fighting at the front and has delivered the German people to the hatred and the dictates of the enemy through miserable betrayal. Adolf Hitler feels deeply the shame of the collapse, which is characterized equally by the weakness and cowardice of the previous authoritative strata as by the dignity of the new rulers. The causes of the collapse do not lie in military defeat. Germany successfully held her ground for four years against a world of enemies. Military defeats alone do not cause nations to collapse; on the contrary, they can be an incentive to new advancement. But Germany collapsed in 1918 because her moral and social internal condition already bore the stamp of untruthfulness and rottenness. The economy had become the mistress of the state.
The peasantry had been outrageously weakened at the expense of an ever-increasing industrial proletariat. The contrasts of rich and poor clashed sharply. Money profit at any price dominated the economic life of a large part of the people. Class struggles and Jewish agitation destroyed the spirit of the national community. At the imperial court, men who dared to speak the truth became increasingly rare. Sycophancy and whitewashing became widespread. A consequence of perverse attitudes...
The main reason for this was the general shyness before responsibility. The natural and eternal orders of marriage and family were in the process of dissolution. It was above all the Jews who dominated the greater part of the German press, and who led there an insidious campaign, renewed daily, against God, the moral order of the world, the sense of duty, bravery, in short against all the higher values of the Nordic race, and thus prepared the Bolshevization of Germany. The internal collapse of Germany had therefore long been prepared by the Jewish decomposers of the people and was therefore all the more thorough in the wake of the military defeat.
The consequences of this internal collapse were the signing of the disgraceful Treaty of Versailles, the wave of Red terror that swept through the German capitals (the Jew Kurt Eisner, dictator in Munich!), the submission to foreign countries, which forced upon us a parliamentary system that was completely contrary to the German way.), the submission to foreign countries, which forced upon us a parliamentary system that was completely contrary to the German way, the shameful policy of fulfilment of the governments of the black-red system after 1918, the expropriation of the industrious German worker and employee through inflation, the complete triumph of the Jews, who finally patronized all intellectual movements of our people in the press, theatre, film and poetry as well as in the fine arts. It is out of the deep spiritual distress of this time that the emergence of the Fuehrer’s movement must be understood, the fanatical hardness of its struggle and the will to win that survived all disappointments and was inherent in it.
During this time Adolf Hitler vows to take up the fight against the spirit of November 1918, against the forces that brought about the downfall, and decides to become a politician.
“Education Officer” - Founding of the NSDAP and the SA
After Hitler is released from the military hospital, he is initially assigned to the replacement battalion of the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment in Traunstein. In Bavaria, the democratic Marxist revolt develops into an open council dictatorship. In April 1919, Bolshevism, under Jewish leadership, exercises its reign of terror in Munich. Adolf Hitler proves his personal courage during these perilous days. After the liberation of Munich, he is appointed education officer of the 1st Bavarian Rifle Regiment No. 41. He has made his mark through the firmness of his political opinion and is now to carry out political enlightenment work against the corrosive Marxist influences. It is clear to him that it is important to firmly anchor the national idea in the people’s consciousness - but that this cannot be done in a bourgeois style, but that it must be combined with the idea of socialism. During this period, a variety of folkish-minded groups and working-class circles emerged, which recognized the reasons for the German collapse and combined the idea of national renewal with social understanding and will. All these party formations and associations, however, fail in practice, since their good disposition and insight are not complemented by political decisiveness, hard will and readiness to act. There is no doubt that the small group of the German Workers’ Party, which had emerged in 1919 from a Munich group, the Free Workers’ Committee for a Good Peace, would also have met the same fate of failure. Adolf Hitler became acquainted with this group when he visited one of its small meetings at the Sternecker-Bräu in Munich in September 1919 on official business. He decided to become a member and was accepted on September 16, 1919 as the seventh member of the Workers’ Circle. This decision makes the chronicle of the Deutsche Arbeiter party German history. From a corner existence, the unknown corporal of the World War leads the German Workers’ Party to the height of world- historical significance. While all the other groups and endeavours that stirred for the national cause in post-war Germany failed, Adolf Hitler steered the young movement to victory, because through him it possessed the firm ideological foundation, the uncompromising, combative attitude and the bold will for the future. Adolf Hitler proves in a short time to be the driving force of the party. He overcomes the lukewarmness and timidity that shies away from any great enterprise and carries their struggle into the public arena with determination and purpose. He devises the methods of propaganda which will give it a greater echo; above all, he substitutes the power of speech, in the art of which he improves from year to year. It is a touching fact, after all, that in 1920 the Fuhrer personally carried from house to house a hundred typewritten invitations to a meeting. And when Adolf Hitler then wanted to speak at this meeting, it turned out that no comrade of the people had appeared at this meeting. A second attempt with 300 invitations also failed.
At last Hitler was able to speak before the first eleven visitors to a meeting. The number then rose to 34 and went down again. At that time Adolf Hitler called out to his first party comrades:
“We don’t just want to excite the German people, no, we want to whip them up! We want to preach the struggle, the relentless struggle against a system that will not end until Germany is either completely ruined or someday some iron skull comes, perhaps with dirty boots, but a clear conscience and a fist of steel, who puts an end to the talk and gives the nation the deed.“
The first mass meeting of the party in the ballroom of the Hofbräuhaus in Munich is memorable. On February 24, 1920, Adolf Hitler announces the party’s program in front of 2000 people. The 25 points, in the elaboration of which Adolf Hitler was decisively involved, set the principles for the political will of the party. The leaders of the party promise, if necessary at the risk of their own lives, to stand up ruthlessly for the implementation of the program. Adolf Hitler’s power of persuasion sweeps the assembly along, and so he can say of that evening that the movement now takes its course. In the spring of 1920, the party gives itself the name National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It creates the symbols with which it carries out the struggle for the soul of the German people and the German nationalization. The black hooked cross in the white field of the red banner (black, white, red, the colours of the Bismarck Empire, plus the sun sign of the swastika as a symbol of the vitality and resurrection of the people) testifies to the fact that the party is reflecting on the elemental forces of the nation and wants to relentlessly destroy all forces that distort the German essence and have become the undoing of German history as international ideologies.
In 1921 the principle of the Fuhrer was strengthened by the fact that Adolf Hitler, as the first chairman, could exercise special powers; in place of committees and majority decisions came the authority and responsibility of the one who was the soul of the movement and on whom rested the weight of the decision and the burden of the work. Thus a completely new style of political attitude and appearance emerges in the NSDAP.
On November 4, 1921, 800 Marxists attempted to overpower 46 National Socialists in Munich. The latter put up a fierce resistance and resolutely defeated the overwhelming force in a fierce counterattack. To commemorate that eventful day, on which the small band of the Saalschutz had proved their unbreakable loyalty to the movement and staked their lives for it, the Fuhrer gave the troop, which had to maintain order at the meetings, the name of “Sturmabteilung” (SA.). From now on it becomes a National Socialist principle that terror can only be broken by terror. The violence and the will to attack of Marxism cannot be countered with bourgeois weakness and the excuse that one fights only with spiritual weapons; violence must come into its own as a salutary antidote.
Breaking of the peace and November 9,1923
Adolf Hitler is tirelessly active as a “drummer” of the idea. The party soon gained a foothold outside Munich; however, due to the special political conditions in post-war Germany, it was only able to develop greater activity in Bavaria until 1923. In Bavaria, after the rule of the Councils, a bourgeois government was formed, which stood in some opposition to the Berlin government of the Reich, which was mainly supported by the Social Democrats, the Democrats and the Centre. The opposition of the Munich government, however, does not originate from a folkish sentiment, which defends national honour against the politics of fulfilment, political mire, and philandering, but is based on particularistic aspirations; the plan of political Catholicism plays a role, to create a South German special formation in relation to the North, which one would perhaps like to leave to Marxism for a time. From Munich, the lines could then be drawn to Cologne and Vienna. By upholding the Greater German idea and by setting up the ideal of a national community beyond all confessional, regional and social divisions, Adolf Hitler’s movement counteracted the dark machinations and plans of confessional particularist circles.
The year 1922 sees a strong growth of the NSDAP; it is now a significant power factor in Bavaria, as it proves in the successful move to Coburg, which clears up Marxist insolence. The year 1923 dawns with a heavy burden of fate, with the occupation of the Ruhr by the French and the proclamation of passive resistance. The NSDAP advocates that passive resistance, a conceptual contradiction in itself, be replaced by active resistance. She can consider as one of her own Albert Leo Schlageter, whose heroic sacrificial death on the Golzheimer Heide is a wake-up call for the national rebirth. The party world of the Weimar Republic, however, is unable to lead the German people to energetic resistance, and so developments drift towards chaos. Inflation takes on gigantic proportions and economically destroys the German middle class. Bolshevism is stirring, especially in Central Germany; on the Rhine, under the protection of the occupying army, traitorous riff-raff close to the centre are able to operate. In Bavaria, the white-blue circles are preparing to separate from the Reich. The situation demands an effective decision and swift action.
Thus Adolf Hitler decides to take action on November 8, 1923. In addition to the party, he has folkish fighting units behind him; the great general of the World War, Erich Ludendorff, will make himself available to the enterprise. When Adolf Hitler, on November 8, in the upper 192 hall of the Burgerbaukeller in Munich, he proclaims the German uprising and the abolition of the November criminals and calls for the outstanding members of the Bavarian government join him, and the turning point of German destiny seems to have been brought about that night. v. Kahr, v. Lossow and v. Seisser, however, do not keep their given word, and so the procession that forms from the Burgerbräu for a march through the city on the morning of November 9, 1923, marches into the bullets of the Reaction.
16 German men fall in front of the Feldherrnhalle and in the courtyard of the Bavarian War Ministry. Adolf Hitler, marching in the front line, is covered by his companion Graf, who is seriously wounded; he is pulled to the ground and sustains a severe shoulder injury. He is taken by car to a place outside Munich and arrested a few days later. Hermann Goring, the SA. commander, is seriously wounded. Among the fallen comrades is a large part
of the party leadership; among the victims of the day is also the poet and loyal collaborator Dietrich Eckart, who is arrested and whose weakened health is so affected by imprisonment that he dies in Berchtesgaden at Christmas 1923. November 9, 1923 proved that National Socialists not only live for their ideas, but also know how to die for them. The blood sacrifice of 9 November 1923 stands as a memorial to later times and acts there as a pledge of future victory.
For the moment, however, the opponents believe they have finished with the movement. The organization is banned and Adolf Hitler is brought before a court of law with Ludendorff and other co-accused. On April 1, 1924, the Hitler trial ended with Adolf Hitler being sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in a fortress; the verdict held out the prospect of parole after serving six months. In this trial Adolf Hitler did not regard himself as a defendant who had to conduct a personal defence, but opened the attack himself. In an impassioned closing speech, he settled accounts with the perpetrators of the November treason and those guilty of Germany’s downfall.
“May you find us guilty a thousand times over: the goddess of the eternal judgment of history will smile and tear up the prosecutor’s motion and the judgment of the court, for she acquits us!“
His words resonate throughout Germany. The folkish movement receives a boost from this process, and in the spring elections of 1924, 10 National Socialists are able to enter the Reichstag together with other folkish deputies. However, the leadership of the parliamentary group and the conduct of the political struggle in the country are in the hands of men who do not recognize Adolf Hitler’s supreme claim to leadership, and since Adolf Hitler cannot intervene from his fortress cell in Lands- berg am Lech, he refuses to take responsibility for further developments and resigns the leadership.
In Landsberg, the Fuhrer writes his book “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle), which contains his ideological and political confession. Re-establishment of the party
It takes over the leadership of the volkischen movement
The folkish movement of 1924 thus visibly lost its clout, and when Adolf Hitler left the Landsberg fortress in December 1924, he found the movement torn apart into feuding groups. There was great discouragement among his supporters; the German people had just elected a Reichstag which was making itself the compliant executor of the politics of fulfilment. German politics is under the sign of the so-called “Reichstag”.
The German economy is now in the grip of the so-called Dawes Plan, which has superseded the period of indiscriminate encroachments and interventions of the enemy’s policy, but which seals the obligation of Germany to pay tribute all the more strongly. After the end of the inflation, the German economy is supplied with credits from abroad, which cause a certain illusory flourishing; in the general striving for monetary gain, the realization of the true state of affairs, the will for national liberation and the struggle for socialism threatens to fade away. Adolf Hitler has the courage to declare war on this world of bourgeois contentment and stabilized conditions and to found the party anew. Only his greatness of soul, his unshakable faith in the German people and in his own mission enabled him to undertake this enterprise, which was ridiculed by the general public as hopeless and not given any further attention. The faithful core of the Munich followers, however, came together in the founding meeting of February 27, 1925, and so the movement began its existence anew. Now it has to reckon with different conditions than in the turbulent years of the period from 1920 to 1923. No quick, tangible success is to be expected, one has to use lawful methods; therefore the ideological foundations have to be worked out all the more clearly.
National Socialist ideas are consolidated and further deepened; a sharp line is drawn for the sake of Socialism against all merely patriotic associations and bourgeois groups. The party learns in a masterly manner to wield all the means of political enlightenment. It must now start all over again. Even if the successes matured only at a snail’s pace, the National Socialists worked with persistent tenacity. In 12 months, more than 2300 meetings and about 3500 speaking evenings were held and several million leaflets were distributed. At the end of 1925 there were 23 National Socialist districts with 27000 members in the Reich.
It is always Adolf Hitler who gives his party the decisive impetus. In the two volumes of his book “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle), published in 1925 and 1926, he lays down the iron principles which are the guiding principles of our will and actions. In the early days he was forbidden to speak in most areas of Germany. Where his word did not penetrate, however, the untiring efforts of his faithful followers made themselves felt. The movement spreads to areas where it had hitherto been unknown, and it soon conducts its struggle as well in the large cities, the industrial and rural economic areas of Northern Germany as in Southern Germany, in Austria, and in the shape of its brother party, the German National Socialist Workers’ Party in the Sudeten lands. Thus, in the first period of its new existence, which may last until 1928, the party succeeds in assuming the leading role in the folkish league. By virtue of the figure of its leader, the greater ideological clarity and the enthusiasm of its followers, it outstripped all the other folkish groups attempting to compete and proved itself to be the “Prussia of the folkish movement”.
For the first time in 1927 the party congress is held in Nuremberg. 12000 activists of the movement marched before their leader Adolf Hitler, including for the first time the newly formed columns of the SS. With 300 party comrades the fight for the red Berlin was taken up at that time.
Fight against the Young Plan - September Election 1930 - Horst Wessel - Banning of the SA. and SS
When the year 1929 comes, the NSDAP can enter the scene with a well-established, powerful organization and a fanatical will to attack. It now intervenes more decisively in political disputes. These were the days of the struggle over the Young Plan, which was to replace the Dawes Plan, but which, like the latter, had the German honour and German labour in the shackles of tribute, and bars the prospect of regaining national strength and the sovereign rights due to a sovereign state. Adolf Hitler puts himself and his party at the head of the movement against the Young Plan. Even if the petition for a referendum and the referendum on the Young Plan were unsuccessful, the seed had visibly been sown and the number of fighters was growing from day to day. The crisis symptoms of the system of the Weimar Republic are shaking the German national body more and more. The phony economy of the Dawes period (of pumping foreign money into the German economy at high interest rates) has collapsed, unemployment and economic distress are raging ever more devastatingly. Under the chancellorship of the centrist politician Brüning, attempts are made to save the system by emergency decree. But in vain.
The elections of September 14, 1930 represent the overwhelming breakthrough of Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP; instead of the previous 12 Reichstag seats, the party now has 107 mandates. The whole world is under the spell of this event, which affects it as a natural event, like a landslide. The party, however, did not take part in the elections in order to pay homage to parliamentarism and its laws; as a popular movement, it set out to gain power in the empire in a mighty onslaught. The dramatic final battle begins, in which the genius of Adolf Hitler’s leadership and his greatness as a human being are revealed in the spotlight of world publicity. His opponents try to use all their strength to block his path to the chancellorship.
Communism, commanded by Moscow, and its Jewish masterminds are issuing the murder slogan to which hundreds of upright fighters for the idea of Adolf Hitler are falling victim. On the other hand, the governmental authorities use all means of persecution, from slander to the police truncheon, to break the National Socialist will to fight and to divert the movement from its path. The “democracy” of the liberal, confessional and Marxist party world exposes itself and shows its true anti-people, tyrannical face.
On January 14, 1930, Horst Wessel, a National Socialist student who was educating German workers in Berlin about Bolshevism, was ambushed and shot in his apartment by communists. The terror of the “anti-fascist” subhumans did not even stop at death. When Horst Wessel was laid to rest, stones were thrown at the funeral procession, red mobs rushed out of their hiding places and tore the wreaths from the coffin. Horst Wessel’s murderers were later sentenced to only 6 years and 1 month in prison for manslaughter. That was the justice of the democratic system.
From February 1 to June 1, 1931, the movement alone had 12 deaths, 554 seriously injured and 664 lightly injured. Until August 7, 1931, 60 National Socialist newspapers were banned. On the part of the state of that time, no measure, not even the smallest, was omitted that was capable of damaging the movement. On 13, April 1932 the SA, SS and HJ were banned and dissolved. The reason given for this action was that these organizations were a source of constant alarm for the peaceful citizens who wanted to pursue their occupation under the protection of the law. Everywhere the SA. homes were closed, everywhere house searches took place, and the police tore the Hitler pictures from the walls. It is characteristic of the intolerable degree of Marxist terror that, for example, 50 seriously injured National Socialists had to be admitted to hospitals in Breslau at that time.
The red and black parties did not shy away from opposing the figure of the aged Field Marshal von Hindenburg to Adolf Hitler’s will for the future in the Reich presidential election of 1932. On the other hand, the two presidential elections of 1932 (especially the second) proved the strength and soldierly discipline of the party. The elections show that the name Hitler has a magnetic attraction. However, attempts were made to set traps for him and in the summer of 1932, efforts were made to intercept his popular movement and to give a reactionary direction to the development by introducing a so-called authoritarian course. Firm and unshakable, unwavering in his faith, Adolf Hitler defies all the dodges of his opponents. He holds the leadership of the party securely in his hand and does not give in to the lure of the moment. He knows how to steer the movement through difficult situations when, towards the end of 1932, the highest demands are made on his nerve and mental strength. His example shines before the followers. At the beginning of 1933 the elections in Lippe-Detmold showed that the movement was gathering for a new wave of attacks.
On January 30, 1933, the first goal is finally achieved: Adolf Hitler is entrusted by Hindenburg with the Chancellorship of the Reich. This day is not the date of a mere change of cabinet; all those will miscalculate who believe that National Socialism will soon be crippled by the other forces in government and that Adolf Hitler is merely a drummer, but not the great statesman and popular leader who would succeed in creatively reshaping Germany. In fact, January 30, 1933, is the beginning of a genuine revolution which will seize all spheres of human life and of national existence. The political momentum and energy of the National Socialist movement overcame in a very short time all the opposing forces. The disastrous diversity, the opposition and confusion of the earlier parties disappear, and the NSDAP of Adolf Hitler becomes the sole political leader of the German nation. After the death of Field Marshal v. Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler unites in his person the highest representation and supreme command in the German Reich. His name has become the symbol of Germany, he is the leader who will one day assume the same mythical contours for the German people as the great heroic figures of the German past.
When we survey today the work that the Fuhrer has accomplished since 1933, it is almost impossible to measure and appreciate it in all its parts. He has led a nation that was impoverished and divided to new greatness, to power and strength, and has brought about an inner purification in it. In all areas of his life he has given the sign for a new beginning and for new action. Economic distress and unemployment have been eliminated; the German economy is filled with the living rhythm of work, which is no longer overshadowed by the class struggle, but creates in the spirit of German Socialism.
His example always inspires us to help the spirit of the Volksgemeinschaft to triumph over the pride of class, blinded arrogance and prejudice that poison the life of the nation. Just as former employers and employees today, if the peasants have to regard themselves as the working representatives of the people, there is no longer any playing off of town against country; the peasantry has again been recognized in its values and has been consolidated in its new existence
Biologically, too, the German people have returned to the laws of nature and of life.
In racial legislation and in population policy the conditions have been created for a new healthy growth of the nation. The spirit of petty statehood and territorial segregation is banished by the living idea of the Reich. The unity of the Reich is embodied in the person of Adolf Hitler. In his name the dreams and longings of past generations are fulfilled. He obliges us to ensure that inner strife and the forces of division, whether they be economic, social, national or confessional interests, will never again be allowed to gain the upper hand.
Just as restlessly, his work is devoted to national liberation, to securing and strengthening German life in the outside world. Since 1933 he has guided German foreign policy with a sure hand. Thus its great successes, which even a world of opponents, unfavourable observers, and only a few friends must acknowledge, are his most personal deed. The shameful dictate of Versailles was torn apart by him, German honour restored and German sovereignty regained.
A mighty army shields the German land with bare arms. The German Ostmark has now also returned to the borders of the German Reich. The German people will never forget the image of the Fuhrer making the great announcement of his life on March 14, 1938, and announcing to German history the return of his homeland to the motherly bosom of the Reich.
A few months later another bulwark of the system of Parisian suburban dictates, which wanted to take the breath of life from the German people and mocked their right to self- determination, fell: the Sudetenland was brought into the Reich, and in the spring of 1939 the question of the Bohemian-Moravian area was solved by the establishment of the Protectorate. At the same time the Memelland is brought back. It is clear that in the course of these great decisions the question of Danzig and the Corridor must also be tackled. At this moment, however, a clique of warmongers in France, England and the United States is forcing a war upon us. They believe they can smother the German will to live in a world conflagration. But they have miscalculated. They come up against the welded bloc of a nation of hundreds of millions, which no longer stands alone in this sight. Italy and Japan are joining them. The decisive battle comes to a climax in the summer of 1941, when Bolshevik Russia joins our opponents. Now the fronts are clear. In this now beginning heroic struggle against the hordes of Bolshevism advancing from the East in the life-destroying spirit of Stalin, the young peoples of Europe unite.
The soldiers of the Reich are supported by the heroic Finns, the brave Romanians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Croats out of responsibility towards the fate of Europe. Volunteers from all Germanic countries of the North and West, from Spain, France, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will join the fight. Even members of the peoples of the wider eastern region of Europe, who belonged to the USSR until the first period of the struggle against Bolshevism, are turning against their brutal oppressors under our leadership. Thus, in truth, the struggle of all the healthy racial forces of Europe is breaking out against the world of destruction and condemnation.
As in the internal political struggle for power in 1933, world Jewry in all camps has now begun the desperate struggle against us. The apparently hostile brothers have found each other. But like our inner opponents, we will also crush our outer opponents: a newly ordered Europe and a newly ordered world will emerge from this struggle.
During these years the German people has always found the way to Adolf Hitler stronger. Just as he believed in the values and the healthy forces in the German people, so they now believe in him as their leader. He is a role model and an example; our eyes turn to him when timidity and pusillanimity threaten to afflict our minds. His name is our inner command. His human nature testifies to the genuine greatness that rests in itself and does not need externals. His simplicity does not tolerate flattery and sycophancy. He is not a dictator and ruler, but a leader who has a true relationship of loyalty with his people.
Adolf Hitler as artist, statesman and general
In Adolf Hitler, fate has given the German people and Europe an outstanding leader who embodies in perfect form the unity of artist, statesman and general, the likes of which have not been seen since Frederick the Great. In his genuine genius all sounds wonderfully together. He is the great master builder who feels obliged to the law of the noble and beautiful and to whom the cultural development of his people is his innermost need and divine mission. He himself draws up the plans according to which the enormous buildings and artistic works of National Socialist Germany are created. With his artistic spirit and will, he asserts architects, sculptors and painters and thus lets arise in stone, ore and colour those high works of a pure and genuine art, which will bear witness for all times to the strong, formative will to live of Adolf Hitler’s empire.
But he is not only the great builder of stones, he is also the ingenious builder and shaper of the spirit and the souls of his people, the people of his time. The political designer of the time of the inner struggle for power in the empire became the outstanding statesman who led his people out of disgrace and humiliation, out of hardship and hunger to the height of a strong national existence and, as a shaping and ordering force, today leads the young peoples of Europe, who are becoming aware of their own constructive ability, into an organic and healthy order. Before the outbreak of the struggle forced upon us by our enemies, he eliminated, in a genuine work of peace, by his strong statesmanship, all the festering wounds and substances of conflict in the sphere of radiation of the Reich, which had been created by powers foreign to the area in order to keep the centre of the continent of Europe in a constant, energy-sapping turmoil for their own selfish intentions. By eliminating these destructive forces he became the patron of the healthy, uplifting folkish values of Europe. Adolf Hitler wanted nothing else than to create for his people a meaningful, life- joyful way of thinking that would be secure for all the future; he saw his purpose in life in the creation of the highest cultural works for his people, he wanted to create the best social institutions in his empire.
This was and still is his last and highest task. But his honest will for peace and construction, so often shown to the world, is opposed by a world of enemies.
That Adolf Hitler since the beginning of the inevitable confrontation with the enemies of the Reich, the leadership of his people not only as a politician and statesman, but also as a general, is for us a fortunate twist of fate. Thus Adolf Hitler, out of his artistic genius and beyond his great development as a statesman, also became a creatively planning and responsibly deciding military commander. As one of his closest military associates once said, one must be deeply moved by the realization of how in Adolf Hitler a military genius took shape that was on a par with the political one and inevitably took its place alongside it. Thus his creative power flowed over into the field of the art of war, because fate left him only the hard and stony path of a conflict in arms, in order to let him reach his last and highest wishes and plans.
Adolf Hitler, as a statesman and commander, draws from his belief in his own strength and the strength of the people, as well as from the consciousness of a high historical mission, those energies which enable him to master every task which fate sets him. We recognize from history that a people is always really well led when a personality of the highest self-creative values directs its destiny with unlimited freedom of action. Thus, every real, final decision in military combat lies solely with Adolf Hitler.
He knows no lazy compromises in this struggle, he does not want to leave necessary decisions to a later time, only to have peace for a moment from the tremendous tension of forces in the present. He says himself: “It would be a crime to leave vital problems, which one can solve oneself, to a later generation.” For all his ruthless harshness to himself and for all the hard demands he must make on his followers in order to achieve victory, his nature is, however, sustained by a genuine human goodness and by a deep compassion for the needs and sorrows of his people. He never thoughtlessly and frivolously uses men to bring about a decision; if it is necessary, however, he demands the last from leadership and crew in order to achieve the great goal he has set! This high sense of responsibility towards his followers justifies every sacrifice before history and creates that boundless confidence of the followers towards his person which unlocks the best fighting values and creates that intimate and powerful bond between the commander and the common soldier which is the surest and strongest condition for final victory.
Adolf Hitler as leader of Europe and fighter for a real European socialism
The fact that Adolf Hitler tore the broad mass of his people out of a progressive proletarianization, that he gave the German people work and bread and dignified living conditions, that he promoted the cultural aspirations of the working classes with all possible emphasis, earned him the abysmal hatred and anger of the capitalist powers of the world. It was very clearly recognized in England and America that the new socialist spirit of Adolf Hitler’s Reich would one day irresistibly flow over the borders of this Reich like a broad, powerful stream, and would fruitfully take hold of other countries as well. It was well known that such an elementary, life-giving stream would not stop at geographical and political borders.
The plutocratic cliques in England and America could not and would not stand idly by and watch such a development for the sake of their sinecures. It was certain that here, out of the healthy power of the Reich and the great socialist will of its leader, for in the end, it was these forces which declared war on the socialist empire of Adolf Hitler, because they saw in it the last chance to continue their fragile plutocratic age. Thus it was ultimately these forces that declared war on Adolf Hitler’s socialist empire, because they saw in it the last chance to continue to endure their fragile plutocratic age. They saw in the war alone the last chance to perpetuate, by a victory over the Reich, the system of subjugation of mankind so finely and diabolically devised. They realized very well that a German victory would be the miserable end of the Jewish-plutocratic caste in Europe. And Stalin had to realize that in his unrestrained intentions of conquest in Europe only the power of Adolf Hitler’s empire could still put a limit to him. We are in no way thinking of imposing our social measures on other nations. Adolf Hitler himself said often enough that National Socialism is not an export commodity with which we want to make other nations happy. The peoples around us will one day have to decide for themselves how they want to organize things in the area of their own lives. The decisive factor will be how each individual nation, how each ethnic community in Europe approaches the great common questions of life on the continent. It is clear that there can be no compromise now on the question of the solution of the decisive questions of life for Europe and its people. The principles of European socialism will be put into practice not only within individual nations but also within the continental community. According to the measure of achievement for the whole, each nation will be guaranteed its proper rank. The prerequisite for this is the complete elimination of all liberal-capitalist methods. Thus it will not be the false” socialism” of the Soviets, which robs the peasant of his property and degrades all men to lawless laborers, that will rule in Europe, but the genuine socialism of free achievement with the sacred principle of private property for every creative person. As is already the case in Germany today, so in the new Europe an organically controlled planning will prevent every abuse of capital, every unjustified profit, every egoistic exploitation of human labour power and will put an end to the misery of unemployment and lawless poverty.
The principle of National Socialism, “common good before self-interest,” will prevail throughout Europe, and the principle of achievement will guarantee every work its just reward. What is now taking shape in the gigantic struggle of the young peoples of Europe against the world of capitalism and the all-destroying Bolshevism is that great European community order in which the overall interests of the continent and the interests of the individual peoples will find a reasonable balance. The great hour of the new Europe, which has written genuine socialism on its banner, has already dawned in this struggle. The fact that a large part of Adolf Hitler’s socialist goals had already been realized in the Reich before the beginning of the war forced upon us is our guarantee that after victory the Fuhrer will proceed to the completion of his great socialist will. This great effort of the Fuhrer will then fertilize and build up the life of the peoples of Europe on a healthy and viable basis. We are willing to assert the idea of a genuine socialism uniting the peoples of Europe against all attacks. We know that in the end we are nothing more than the defenders of the eternal laws of life, against which the collapsing powers of a rotten past try to rebel. Seen in this light, Adolf Hitler’s heroic struggle, the struggle of genuine Socialism against plutocracy and Bolshevik destructiveness, wins decisive victory beyond the borders of the Reich.
The life-law foundations of our world view
Europe is the richly structured, climatically particularly favoured head of the huge European continent. The people in this area have experienced, fought through and created everything together since the beginning. The manifold geographic characteristics have led to the formation of at first smaller, then by unification and merging to bigger and bigger communities, to tribal federations and state federations of changing types and changing relations to each other.
From a biological point of view, smaller communities of similar language, customs and culture developed into bigger, formed peoples as solid, cultural and state communities. Thus the individual peoples in Europe today stand with a double inheritance within the European community, on the one hand with their own closed biological inheritance and on the other hand with the cultural and historical inheritance acquired in the millennia- long struggle for life. The realization of the importance of the laws of life has brought about a re-evaluation of all concepts. The historically developed state terms have lost their meaning, dogmatic laws are invalidated in relation to the natural connections. Biological laws determine new borders and connections and enable an overall view of this European community.
The individual people has grown out of the forces of the hereditary substance and the environment. The hereditary world of a people is the sum of the existing hereditary factors.
As a basic biological substance, these always form the prerequisite for a further identical expression via the path of reproduction. To the hereditary world of a people does not only belong the fact of a hereditary community from the past, but the reproduction from itself as a basis for the future formation of this people.
The environment is a given:
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as natural through the geographical space and
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as artificial through language, history, art, economy, law, politics, education, religion and world view.
While the relations of a people to its hereditary world are essentially given, the environment is changeable and mutable. Biologically, therefore, a people is at once a hereditary, reproductive, and environmental community.
From this biological concept of people we draw the following insight:
The respect for the facts of life and therefore the God-ordained formations of the living, the people, determines our whole attitude. The living blood bearers of this community are responsible for the shaping of the coming generations. The people is a community of descent, destiny, and ability. Every people has its own ethnic character, the roots of which are anchored in the racial composition of the people. The people as a reproductive community obliges us to respect the hereditary values of the national substance (the folklore). The knowledge of the people as an environmental community furthermore determines our attitude towards the manifold influences of this environment. It demands a knowledge of God that is connected to and appropriate for the species and a world view that has grown in the people; an art and culture that has grown and is alive in the family and community; a language as the means of expression of this national community and history as the course of the struggle for existence of the respective living generation.
From the racially uniform basic elements the peoples have grown in the European area in historical times by the confluence of more or less closely related races. Each people, taken as a whole, shows the predominant characteristic imprint of a race. This thus represents the core race of the people concerned. Various factors have played a determining role in this characteristic shaping, in hereditary-biological terms the different forms of reproduction, which determine the quantitative and qualitative transmission of the genetic material, and the environment, which controls the development of this genetic material through good or bad living conditions. To this environment belong not only the geographical-climatic conditions, but above all also all influences from the sphere of action of the spiritual, such as education and culture. In addition to the fundamental preservation of the hereditary substance, it is essential for the preservation or promotion of a specific racial form that an environment favourable to this “race” be created. This can only be achieved, however, if the national community is consciously oriented towards these laws (breeding goal) and the bearers of this community live according to them. From the knowledge of the laws of life we have become aware of the development of smaller and larger communities of life. We recognize that in the European area often the historical coincidence and not the biological order and allocation was the decisive factor. From this results for us a new evaluation and the standard for the coexistence of the peoples (reorganization of Europe). The human being also stands within the order of natural law with his spiritual and mental ability that is far superior to that of all other living beings. In the systematic- scientific classification we have to call the whole mankind a “species”. All humans, whether white, yellow or black (racial groups) have as a “kind “, besides the common possibility of reproduction, certain characteristics and qualities that are characteristic for humans. In spite of these basic commonalities there are, however, mentally characterized groups that we call races. They are the last, biologically given units, where each one presents itself through harmoniously coordinated characteristics (physical and spiritual) and always produces the same out of their own kind.
Race is therefore a group of humans that are characterized by the common possession of certain hereditary traits. It always produces only its own kind; or more briefly: Race is a characterizing hereditary community. (According to Stengel v. Rutkowski)
The people of Europe can essentially be assigned to the six great basic races:
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Nordic race,
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Faelic race (referred to by many racial researchers as a strike of the Nordic),
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Dinaric race,
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Western race,
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Eastern race,
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Eastern Baltic race.
From a racial point of view, the historical borders of states and peoples fall within Europe. If we were to depict the people of our continent according to their predominant affiliation to one of the six great basic races as certain coloured little stones, the result would be a picture that looks something like this: Larger areas of stones of the same colour alternate with each other and often interlock strongly. In addition, there are often also differently coloured splinters in the areas of the same colour. Thus Europe shows itself as a mosaic picture, whereby the colour stones assigned to the Nordic races give the characteristic character to the whole by position, space and quantity.
Or in other words: Areas with predominantly one race reach into other-racial areas or form bigger or smaller islands in closed settlement areas. The Nordic racial component determines by its number and its central position as well as by its performance the core of European mankind and the connection to the others. The biological concept of race is based on the hereditary substance. The racial classification of people is done according to their biological equivalence (hereditary community).
Attempts by opponents to blur the biological concept of race and to deprive it of its binding force to the new order has led to deliberately false conceptualizations. It is unbiological to call a social class, a nation or a religious community a race, as it has been done many times and is still done today: “Spanish Race “, “Italian Race “, “Catholic Race “, “Proletarian Race” and others. The possibility of such a wrong control of life coming from spiritual-dogmatic principles is only given to man. Well, man can be brought together to nonbiological, even if strong communities. But such systems can only be kept in power as long as they have the possibility of a permanent influence through education and coercion.
A prime example of this is offered to us by Bolshevism. It deliberately destroys all expressions of the natural order of life, such as the family, the joy of children, of one’s own home, the attachment to one’s homeland and the soil, the bond with one’s clan and ancestors, etc. Only the complete eradication of all biological facts creates the prerequisite for Bolshevism to carry out its plans. Today we recognize from our life-law thinking why Bolshevism consciously acts in this way. The fact that every hereditary community is codetermined by the environment gives education a great importance in principle. Education has to contribute to the full development of the living and its permanent preservation from our knowledge.
The task of the school is to develop the biological possibilities that are hereditary and to bring them to fruition. We cultivate and promote the expressions of real life such as the joy of the family, of children, of house and land. We do not speak of the “beauty of work” and “strength through joy” for nothing. The biological order leads to a permanent and not only to an artificial one-time maximum performance.
Within the European community of peoples the race that has determined the European face is the Nordic. Radiating from its core area, the middle of the continent for thousands of years, it has had an unmistakable influence in all directions, even in the peripheral areas. The proof of this is provided by the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. Furthermore, the blood stream of the centre has flowed over Spain, Portugal and England into all continents in the age of colonization and has seeped into the wide spaces of the East.
The other races of Europe, such as the Dinaric, Western and Eastern, have also made very valuable contributions, especially with regard to the formation of certain ethnic groups and folk cultures. Their sphere of influence, however, has never permanently grown beyond their settlement cores, and they have neither been able to make a decisive contribution to the preservation of the continent at any time, nor have they impressed their stamp on our continent. Under the leadership of mainly Nordic elements the peripheral parts of Europe have reached out into the world by taking advantage of their special geographical position, but disregarding the vital problems of Europe as a whole. While the European centre as a settlement area of the Nordic race struggled with the pan- European problems, they were able to form expressions of European culture which, however, only embodied parts of the whole. The weakness of these parts always became apparent when Europe was threatened from without. In terms of racial history we have thus to see and evaluate the invasion of Africa, Asia Minor and Asia. Here it has to be emphasized once more that it does not correspond to the thinking according to the laws of life to emphasize the concept of value within the racial studies and racial history. Every expression of life and achievement of a race, as a hereditary and environmentally determined community, is respected by us because we see in it a natural expression of life. When we emphasize the commitment to the Nordic race for Europe, we do so not out of a biological valuation, but out of the real political realization that this race, both historically and in the present, has the ability to unite the whole and thus to unite Europe into a powerful community of life.
In addition to overcoming the current threat to Europe from Asia, this political will gives the continent security for the common good of all, the strength to defend everything that makes life worth living and in which everyone finds the conditions for his proper development.
From this it is also clear that we are never so presumptuous as it is always claimed by ignorant people and opponents that we ascribe all culture, also that of earlier times, only to the Nordic race. Peoples with a different racial composition have also created cultures. Only, other feelings are awakened in us when we try to feel ourselves into the cultures of ancient China, Babylon or into the ancient Indian cultures of the Aztecs (in today’s Mexico) and the Incas (in today’s Peru). We do not deny: these were also advanced civilizations. Yet we feel an undeniable strangeness toward them. The reason for this lies in the creators of these cultures themselves, for they are not akin to us but alien to our race; therefore a different spirit speaks from them. It cannot be denied that the cultural unity of Europe, which we find so excellently confirmed in all fields of intellectual and artistic life, in the works of the fine arts, of writing and of music, is essentially due to the penetration of the whole European area with Nordic blood. The Nordic race in Europe must be called the one that has shaped the spiritual face of the continent. The history of Europe, seen from a cultural-political point of view, starts from the moment when the Germanic peoples of the migration conquered the European area from the Atlantic to the Black Sea and from Scandinavia to the coasts of Africa in dramatic struggles. Therefore, it must be stated that from the point of view of European culture, the Nordic race has been the determining one.
If two different races mix, the hereditary factors never merge to a new hereditary mass, which is passed on uniformly. We know from the theory of heredity that, apart from the coupling of certain hereditary factors, the dispositions are inherited individually and independently of each other. During the reproduction of such a base breed, these predispositions diverge again and are distributed to the different offspring. Every mixture of breeds changes the harmonious picture of the breed. The more distant the mixing breeds are from each other, the greater will be the disturbance that such a bastardization will cause. In addition, there are all the disadvantages in health and especially in soul, which result from a mixture of breeds. Mixed breeds are physically and mentally disharmonious.
Race-mixing means a slow decline of the high-quality race and with it the certain loss of the folkish Eigenart. The consequences of harmful miscegenation are clearly taught us by history. From the moment a people loses its racial consciousness, moral, spiritual and cultural decay set in. The opinion, which is still held in many quarters today, that racial mixing has a culture-forming and even culture-creating effect, is wrong. On the other hand, it is true that an economic and cultural contact with foreign peoples has often only triggered the right awareness of one’s own nature. This realization, however, compels us all to a strict demarcation from all foreign races.
The German people is not a sum of 85 million people, but a community in which the Nordic heredity predominates. This hereditary property does not only show itself in the physical appearance, but primarily finds its expression in an equal racial soul. Because beside the outer visible characteristics, like hair color, eye color etc., the other numerous characteristics, which determine the breed, are just as important for an evaluation. The attitude is also a real proof for the existence of the corresponding racial characteristics.
It is absolutely wrong to make hasty judgments about the character of a person on the basis of superficial observations of physical features. People who profess their loyalty to us on the basis of their character prove that they possess Nordic qualities, even if they do not fully correspond to the Nordic ideal on the outside. The upright confession of a European volunteer to the empire is therefore not only a political factor, but also an expression of a biological assignment.
In Europe the corrosive influence of racial mixture with the Jews proved to be particularly pernicious. These parasites of mankind have managed to avoid a complete mixture with their host peoples up to the present day. Characteristic for this is the claim of the English Jew Disraeli: “Every race must perish that carelessly gives its blood to mixtures.
“If in 1928 there were 53 mixed marriages for every 100 purely Jewish marriages in Germany, this is only proof of how deeply this poison, which is slowly but surely taking effect, had crept into the German people. Furthermore, there was a special danger in the fact that Judaism had begun to systematically undermine the species-conscious thinking and acting of the peoples by means of mental decomposition, in order to use this as a basis for its political and economic ascendancy to the position of master everywhere. In addition to this, this racial corruption had spread mainly among the leading intellectual strata of the European peoples. The Jews made every genuine feeling contemptible, and their entire propaganda work was consciously aimed at an inner undermining and splitting of the people. The after-effects of this pre-1933 disintegrating decades-long infection can still be felt in the peoples even today.
It will require strenuous work to eradicate even the last traces of this plague and to return Europe to the natural and only correct course of life. The solution of the Jewish question has therefore become a vital question for the peoples of Europe today, beyond the borders of the Reich.
Elements of life-law thinking. The idea of development
Like all other living beings man is arranged in the great variety of life on earth. As a member of the whole of nature he is subordinated to the generally valid laws of life, but because of the special degree of development of the spiritual-emotional abilities he has a special position which raises him far above plants and animals. In spite of these abilities, which are peculiar only to man and which are so highly developed, it is fundamentally wrong to attempt to separate man from the whole of nature. Thinking according to the laws of life leads to the realization that the human being is a physical-spiritual-mental unity, which only through the harmonious cooperation of all these forces represents the typical human high quality. The non-biological systems divide this unity and either build their world on the purely material (materialism, bolshevism) and fight against the spiritual-mental, or they try to base themselves on the spiritual- mental and are thereby forced to disparage and despise the flesh. The doctrine of development, i.e. the knowledge of the coherence of all living things, places the human being in the overall events of nature and determines our attitude and behaviour towards the living world. Just as the earth, as it is today, did not exist from the beginning, but was formed and developed in the great events of the cosmos, life on earth has appeared in innumerable forms and shapes ever since it has existed. In the course of the history of the earth that variety has developed from the simplest forms, which today presents itself to us in the countless fixed forms and types as life.
The great thought is alive in our minds today. The great thought is alive to us today that every living being goes back again and again in an unbroken chain into the farthest primeval times through reproduction and multiplication of the elders. The scientific proofs for the idea of development are given by the theory of descent, which can be proven by a great number of facts. Already in pre-scientific times man has recognized relational connections in nature and expressed them in his language. Collective names like “fish “, “dogs “, “cats “, “grasses” etc. are evidence for this. In addition to these ideas gained from observation and experience, the comparative blood examination (serum diagnostics) has given the direct proof of relational connections in the animal as well as in the plant kingdom. Thus, the earlier classification and grouping of organisms, which was based on similarities in form, could be confirmed as a kinship. All living beings are made of cells. These cells, their basic substance (protein body), their structure, their fertilization and reproduction processes as well as their life expressions show extensive similarities in humans, animals and plants. Many diseases occur in the same way within related groups and show the same course of events.
A comparative view of the blueprints of the living beings often shows close relational connections, where outwardly due to different developmental trajectories such connections do not seem to exist anymore. This can be seen in a very impressive way e.g. in the skeleton of all vertebrates. The apparently so different limbs show a basic agreement in the arrangement of the single bones (e.g. wings of a bird, forelimbs of a horse, arms of a human being). Besides the same formation of egg and sperm cells the first stages of development of even distantly related animal forms are strikingly similar. These facts again can only be explained by the assumption of descent from a common ancestor group and by the fact that these organisms in their individual development go through the basic features of phylogenetic development once more.
“Memories of earlier stages of development” are furthermore the rudimentary organs, i.e. those that are still able to develop weakly, but are no longer able to perform their original function (e.g. vermiform appendix of the human appendix, wisdom teeth, nictitating fold in the eye as rest of the nictitating skin). The enormous richness of forms in nature is an expression of the ability of living beings to develop. We can prove it on the one hand by the breeding of cultivated plants and domestic animals and on the other hand by the fact of sudden and sudden changes that prove to be hereditary constancy. They are called mutations. The fact of hereditary mutability is a direct evidence for the changeability of organisms. The evidences for the development and descent from the now living world get a valuable completion by findings from the history of life on earth. This history shows certain gaps that are understandable because of the difficulty of the preservation of organic remains through millions of years and because of the coincidence of finding them. In many cases, however, prehistoric findings could be used to establish causal connections between developmental series that do not seem to be directly related to us today.
The fact of development in nature disturbs dogmatic world views that try to construct regularities from the spiritual alone in order to preserve the idea of creation by denying development. They like to point out the still existing gaps in the history of life in order to dissolve the whole of nature into self-sufficient groups and thereby leave open possibilities of intervention.
Reproduction, multiplication and heredity
Reproduction, multiplication and heredity were the basic facts of the development of life on earth so far, and they are the prerequisites for its further preservation. For every life- law thinking it is necessary that these basic processes are known to us all, at least in their main features. Every reproduction is initiated by fertilization. The fertilization process consists of the fusion of two cells (cell nuclei). Through this process, the hereditary carriers of two individuals anchored in the cell nuclei are always united to form a new hereditary community.
The numerous evidences we have used for the explanation of the development in nature showed the fact that parents and offspring have far-reaching similarities in characteristics and qualities. It is an ancient knowledge of mankind that in animal and plant breeding certain characteristics can be promoted or strengthened and other characteristics can be eliminated. Only in the last decades the Nordic spirit of research (Mendel, Correns, Tschermak, de Vries) succeeded in elucidating the laws of these processes, which we call heredity.
In the cell nuclei of all living beings there are in a certain order those protein bodies that determine the formation of hereditary characteristics (eye colour, hair colour, musicality, predisposition to diseases etc.). These hereditary carriers or chromosomes are constant for each species. Humans have 48 chromosomes in each of their body cells. During the formation of the fertilizable egg cells of the woman and the male sperm - a process called maturation of the sex cells - the hereditary mass is reduced to half. This process happens in such a way that the single hereditary carriers or chromosomes are splitted according to their length. During conception these half hereditary masses of both sexes unite in the egg cell and result in a confluence that is the prerequisite for the beginning of the development of a new individual (child). Thus, one hereditary material comes half from the father and half from the mother.
So for every trait and characteristic you get the disposition in equal parts from your parents. Therefore, in case of racial equality and racial unity of the parents, the children agree in their traits and characteristics with their producers and are also strikingly similar among themselves as siblings. The children of different-raced or mixed-raced parents, on the other hand, show no sibling resemblance. In them the different or mixed dispositions are put together anew. In this case it is important which hereditary disposition has a stronger or weaker effect and thus either appears visibly in the child (dominance) or is present as a hidden hereditary disposition but does not become effective (recessivity).
Heredity therefore consists in the passing on of characteristics and traits from parents to offspring. A crossbreed may be similar in appearance to the purebred as a result of possessing dominant traits. The suppressed traits are not extinguished. They just do not appear. That which appears healthy on the outside, may cause the covered hereditary dispositions to become diseases in themselves. One does not yet notice the individual human being’s inherent qualities. On the basis of a purely external individual assessment, therefore, we cannot yet say anything about the hereditary substance of a human being. However, we can get a picture of the hereditary structure of a human being if we compare his parents, siblings, cousins and bases (family and genealogy).
Hereditary factors and environment
The child created by the confluence of the parental hereditary masses has to assert itself in its environment. This environment is changeable and manifold. It includes father, mother, family, clan, home, people, space and climate, nutrition, illness, education, profession and so on. The individual human being is formed in a constant struggle with all these factors.
The existing manifold hereditary material experiences different forms in this struggle. Certain external circumstances will on the one hand promote hereditary dispositions, on the other hand inhibit them. Thus, even if the hereditary material is largely the same (breed unit), there will be a great dispersion in the formation of the characteristics. Therefore, appearance and heredity must be strictly distinguished. The comparative study of identical twins clearly shows the effect of heredity and environment. Identical twins are completely hereditary. Coming out of one egg, they are so to say the double formation of an individual. The similarity is so great that even the susceptibility to diseases (tuberculosis, tooth decay etc.), the same sensibility and the parallelism of the mental behaviour show the same processes. Nevertheless, in the course of development a different imprinting of the hereditary mass arises through pure environmental influence, which leads to individuality. The importance of the environment for the effect of the hereditary material within a whole nation can be seen by comparing the behaviour of the German people in 1918 and today. At that time the environment (state leadership) promoted and addressed other heritages than today. The face of our people was therefore also different than now, although from a hereditary-biological point of view the same substance was present. Despite the importance of the environment for the development of the individual and his position in the community, it has no influence on the genetic material. This remains unchangeable beyond the individual (germ line). Properties acquired during life are not inherited.
By physical training the musculature of the individual can be strengthened considerably: but the son of the athlete does not get stronger muscles than any average child without exercise. Likewise, intellectual possession is not inherited in any way. The child of the scholar has to start from the beginning with the ABC just as any other. If this child learns better than others, it is merely due to the hereditary quality by virtue of which his father was already able to become a scholar. It is not the possession that is inherited, but the disposition to acquire it. Marxists and democrats, in a one-sided overestimation of the effect of the environment, believed to be able to shape the face of whole peoples by changing this environment. For them all people are equal. In their opinion, only the environment is to blame for the fact that whites, blacks and yellows have not yet reached the same achievements in all fields.
The great task of a nation in general is to protect the hereditary stock of a people from unfavourable racial mixture, to prevent the increase of hereditary defects, and to shape the environment in such a way that the best hereditary carriers will achieve the strongest propagation. Space, seen as climate and landscape, has had a breeding influence on the people who inhabit it through the centuries. Breeds find their most favourable living conditions only in their natural environment. Climatic boundaries are essentially also racial boundaries.
Where such borders are sharp, like through mountains and seas, the racial borders are also clear. In those parts of the living areas of the earth, where there are wide climatic transition zones, there are more fluid racial borders. In such zones we have in the course of historical developments racial mixtures as a result of infiltration by other races. Even if the same environment has an effect, people of different races and species can never completely assimilate in even the longest periods of time. At the most, they can intermingle and thus give up themselves and their species. For the life-law thinking the problem of hereditary factors and environment leads to the following statements: Every human being is formed by the interaction of hereditary factors and environment. The environment and its influence remain without effect on the offspring. Acquired characteristics are not inherited.
In nature, wherever we look, there is an enormous fertility. All living beings bring forth more offspring than are necessary for the mere preservation of their existence. Eggs and seeds are formed in an inexhaustible abundance. But only a part of them reaches development through fertilization. In the course of growth again a large number perishes. Even if only a few offspring pass the way of development up to maturity, the condition for the preservation of the species is given. The fertility is the condition for the preservation of a sufficient number of living beings to bring the species to extinction. To what extent the existing fertility can have an effect as reproduction of a species depends on the habitat. Suddenly appearing favourable living conditions mostly cause a sudden multiplication. Thus, the knowledge of epidemics and their successful control was a precondition for the enormous increase of mankind in the last centuries. From a biological point of view, e.g. in the German people there was an enormous expansion of the hereditary mass, which was accompanied by a diversity of the hereditary disposition, which found its expression in numerous geniuses in all fields.
Genius is a happy combination of chosen heredity.
A general increase of race and people does not only cause an increase and strengthening of the good hereditary substance, but all too often also an increase of the inferior (hereditary diseases, imbecility etc.). A densely populated centre of Europe, carried by the sense of responsibility of the Nordic race and conditioned by the narrowness of the living space, was the first to grasp these problems on a broad basis and to raise the knowledge of the laws of life to the foundations of a state structure. While the world, in which one denies the different value of the hereditary substance, sees in the restriction of birth the solution of a no longer possible general increase, the demand of different reproduction applies to us out of the recognition of the law of life. From this point of view we consciously intervene in the natural course of development and in the following we will look at the conditions and the necessary measures of different reproduction.
Conditions of differential reproduction
Although fertility is very great everywhere in nature, there are nevertheless enormous differences in the numbers of the individual species. Highly developed creatures generally have a smaller number of offspring than simpler ones. An eagle produces at most 3 offspring per year, a rat, on the other hand, can often raise 12 young per month. Even within the human races the natural fertility is different. Thus the Eastern race has the advantage of greater natural fertility over the Nordic. In addition to the natural fertility the environment plays a bigger role the more developed the species is. The same is true for the human races.
The Nordic race for example has the longest development time until full maturity compared to the other Europides. All these processes cause a different fertility. If in the struggle for existence the less fertile races nevertheless prevail and preserve their kind in terms of quantity, this is based on the higher capacity of these races. They have developed in the constant struggle for life through especially hard selection conditions (ice age). The basic law of the eternal fight, to which all weak and inferior things have to succumb, thus finds its high value. In the free nature the conditions for the preservation of the species are coordinated and create a balance. Today it is not possible anymore for the majority of humans, especially the high quality races, to live only in a natural environment as it is represented by the farming community. But the artificial environment in which man is placed shows other selection conditions than the world that made him become the highly developed form in the course of history. Thus, through urbanization, the conditions of the “struggle for existence” were shifted. Thus, also in the centre of Europe suddenly living conditions arose that offered the special characteristics of the Jews possibilities for advancement and development. The Jew, according to his nature, was able to fit into a healthy urban development and to propagate in his own way a completely unnatural way of life, which we are only now becoming aware of after the elimination of this parasite. The high quality breeds have to go through a longer development. They are much more sensitive to the environment than the more primary ones. All changes of the environment cause different selection conditions, a fact that is important for the different reproduction. The knowledge of these biological conditions led the National Socialist state to pay special attention to the measures that serve the different reproduction.
Measures for differential reproduction
It is an untenable condition when in a state the relationship between the working and the sick takes on unhealthy forms. The active, industrious part of the population, those capable of community work, must expend the nation’s forces and resources. By eliminating those carriers of rotten genetic material, sums can be saved and made usable for other purposes. The measures of responsible state leadership must therefore serve the systematic cultivation of good blood. Each nature people merits in correct realization that. In both so- called “cultural peoples” a false charity, carried en-masse by ecclesiastical circles into the broad masses, has virtually promoted a counter-selection. From the dogmatic side, every reasonable intervention is branded as a violation of the divine world order.
Experience teaches us that most hereditary diseases and also the communally incapable have no sense of responsibility towards their offspring. In the year 1877, 40375 persons were boarded in the German insane asylums. In the year 1926 there were 252793! In the USA the percentage of the insane has increased from 1904- 1929 more than doubled.
The leader’s position on this problem is clear and unambiguous:
“The demand that defective human beings be prevented from procreating other equally defective human beings is a demand of the clearest reason and, if carried out according to plan, means the most humane deed of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved suffering, but in consequence will lead to an increasing recovery.“
The “Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring” of 14 July 1933 stipulates:
A person with a hereditary disease may be rendered infertile (sterilized) by surgical intervention if, according to the experience of medical science, it is highly probable that his or her offspring will suffer from severe physical or mental hereditary defects. The law lists the hereditary diseases recognized today, including a number of mental diseases and severe hereditary defects, such as hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, etc. In addition, those suffering from severe alcoholism may be rendered infertile. The court of hereditary health decides on infertility. With this legislation the beginning has been made for the necessary purification process of our national body. The effect of this law will already be felt in the next generations. A second law takes into account the fact that habitual criminals have a hereditary heavily burdened offspring. On November 24, 1933, the “Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals and on Measures of Security and Correction” was created. This law not only eliminates certain anti-community elements from the national body, but also keeps them from reproducing.
On September 15, 1933, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour” was promulgated. Among other things, this law forbids marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood. It prohibits extramarital intercourse between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood. Marriages between Jews and quarter Jews are forbidden, as well as between quarter Jews. Marriages between half-Jews and Germans or quarter-Jews require the approval of the Reich Minister of the Interior. The law also provides for the prevention of marriages of German-borns with descendants of the Negroes from the time of the occupation of the Rhine and with Gypsies.
The significance of this legislation was outlined by the Reichsmarschall:
“It is a confession of the powers and blessings of Germanic -Nordic spirit. We know that the blood sin is the original sin of the people. We ourselves, the German people, have had to suffer greatly from this original sin. We know that the ultimate root of all Germany’s decay came from this original sin. Therefore, we must try to reconnect with the lineages of ancient times. It has truly been salvation in the last hour, and if God and Providence had not given us the Fuhrer, Germany would never again have risen from original sin, from ruin.“
Another measure is the “Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People” (Marriage Health Law) of October 18, 1935, which prohibits marriages between sick people and thus prevents the transmission of defective genetic material to offspring. On 17 May 1942, the Maternity Protection Act was enacted, which legally stipulated the economic position of the expectant mother and the undisturbed care of the infant.
In addition to the general state laws for the promotion of good heredity, members of the SS have had a special marriage license since December 31, 1931. This, too, has the goal of promoting the high-quality heredity of the Nordic character, as the supporting performance race of the European community, through a well-considered choice of husband borne by a high level of racial consciousness.
The family is the last biological unit within the community of a people. In accordance with this significance, it is given the strongest support in all areas of our national life. Thus the preservation of the racially valuable for all the future has as its prerequisite the inclusion of the family and clan. The life of the individual links him with ancestors and descendants. The national community grows beyond the family and clan. The individual dies, subject to the laws of nature. Through the passing on of his hereditary property he becomes a living member of his national community. Through clan and family we are immortal.
“The family is the smallest but most valuable unit in the structure of the whole state.“ (Adolf Hitler.)
Every nationality can only be renewed from within the family. Out of the Germanic- German feeling we emphasize our clan thought. In close connection with the laws of life, we have to take account of regeneration on the way via the German family. Every marriage of a family member means the inclusion of a new hereditary property in the clan. Therefore, the choice of a husband is not only of decisive importance for those directly involved, but also for the preservation of the relationship between the family members. The choice of the wife gives the man the only opportunity in life to improve or spoil the heredity of the coming sex. Health or sickness, talent or incapacity of the offspring are decided by the choice of husband. In this decisive step, it is not position and wealth, but only mental and physical ability that must be decisive. It is clear that the one who is sure to be the bearer of unhealthy hereditary traits must renounce. The choice of the genus is the most important step in the course of life and for the passing on of life. That is why it is necessary that all findings of the laws of life are strictly observed when making this decision.
Marry early, for only then will you fully enjoy the family happiness. Do not marry a non-tribal woman. You are responsible to your people and your descendants for keeping the blood pure.
Don’t marry a woman with a hereditary disease. You will be responsible for the suffering of your own children and grandchildren. Choose only a perfectly healthy woman. The true picture of the health and qualities of your future wife will be shown to you by her clan. I want your wife to be at least as valuable racially as you are. Try to make your and your children’s environment as natural as possible. Avoid a relative marriage, because unfavourable hereditary dispositions almost always remain hidden from you and then come to develop twice in your children. Only the greatest possible number of children will guarantee the full development of your genetic makeup. To the professional fulfilment of duty must come the biological one. Only both together result in the life achievement. Remember that nature demands a struggle for what is valuable. Not what falls easily to hand fulfils the conditions of selection. Only what you win in hard struggle will be your whole satisfaction.
The diversity of the European peoples is today growing together into a common larger order. By shifting the emphasis from national-state thinking to the laws of life, biological processes are gaining decisive importance. Life in its manifestations, its variability and its possibilities of development triggers the different forces whose interaction has to be directed by a new order. The new, bio-political thinking is based on self-preservation and the responsibility for the prosperity of the whole. Just the recognition of the laws of life gives us the possibility to participate in the shaping of our life. In the course of history, biological strength and state form shifted among the European peoples. The causes lay partly in an inner development of forces, partly in the effect of foreign influences. The greater the tension between state and biological reality, the more unfortunate was the age. The better the biological equilibrium was, the happier and more efficient was our continent. The pacification of the European area and the creation of a greater unity can only be accomplished by thinking in terms of the laws of life. It is part of the leadership task of the Reich that this way of thinking is offered to all fellow inhabitants of our continent.
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