The Principles of the SS Which the SS Were to Apply in Russia

 

Heinrich Himmler summed up the principles which the SS were to apply in Russia speech to SS leaders in Posen on 4 October 1943:

 

One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens: to a Russian or to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of goad blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or kick the bucket" interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be rough and heartless when it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals, But it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time with them, When somebody comes to me and says, ‘I cannot use women and children to dig the anti-tank ditch; it is inhuman, it would kill them’, then I have to say, “You are a murderer of your own blood because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug, German soldiers will die, and they are sons of German mothers, They are our own blood.’ ‘That is what I want to instil into the SS and what I believe I have instilled into them as one of the most sacred laws of the future. Our concern, our duty is our people and our blood. It is for them that we must provide and plan, work and fight, nothing else, we can be indifferent to everything else. I wish for the SS to adopt this attitude to the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians. All else is vain, false to our own nation, and an obstacle to the early winning of the war...?

 

If the peace is a final one, we shall be able to tackle our great work of the future, We shall colonize. We shall indoctrinate our boys with the laws of the SS. I consider it to be absolutely necessary to the life of our peoples that we should not only impart the meaning of ancestry, grandchildren and future, but feel these to be part of our being, Without there being any talk about it, without our needing to make use of rewards and similar material things, it must be a matter of course that we have children, It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial elite of the German people. In twenty to thirty years, we must really be able to provide the whole of Europe with its ruling class. If the SS together with the farmers, and we together with our friend Hacke, then run the colony in the east on a grand scale, without any restraint, without any question of tradition, but with nerve and revolutionary impetus, we shall in twenty years push the national boundary [Folbstamgerenze] 500 kilometres eastwards.

 

Today I have asked the Fuhrer that the SS, if we have fulfilled our task-and our duty by the end of the war, should have the privilege of holding Germany's most easterly frontier as a defence frontier. I believe this is the only privilege for which we have no competitors. I believe that not a single person will dispute our claim to this privilege. We shall be in a position there to exercise every young age-group in the use of arms. We shall impose our laws on the east. We shall charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals. I hope that our generation will successfully bring it about that every age-group has fought in the east, and that every one of our divisions spends a winter in the cast every second or third year, Then we shall never grow soft, then we shall never have SS members who come to us only because it is distinguished or because the black coat will naturally be very attractive in peacetime, Everyone will know: ‘If I join the SS, there is the possibility that I may be killed,’ He has contracted in writing that every other year he will not dance in Berlin or attend the carnival in Munich, but that he will be posted to the eastern frontier in an ice-cold winter.

 

Then we will have a healthy elite for all time. Thus we. will create the necessary conditions for the whole Germanic people and the whole of Europe, controlled, ordered and led by us, the Germanic people, to be able, in generations to come, to stand the testing her battles of destiny against Asia, which will certainly break out again. We do not know when that will be. Then, when the mass of humanity of 1-14 million lines up against us, the Germanic people, numbering, I hope, 250-300 million, and the other European peoples, making a total of foo- zoo millions (and with an outpost area stretching as far as the Urals, or in a hundred years beyond the Urals), must stand the test in its vital struggle against Asia. It would be an evil day if the Germanic people did not survive it. I would be the end of beauty and of Avatar, of the creative power of this earth. That is the distant future. It is for that we are fighting, pledged to hand down the heritage of our ancestors.

 

We see into the distant future, because we know what it will be. That is why we are doing our duty more fanatically than ever, more devoutly than ever, more bravely, more obediently and more thoroughly than ever. We want to be worthy of being permitted to be the first $S-men of the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, in the long history of the Germanic people stretching before us. Now let us remember the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, who will create the Germanic Reich and will lead us into the Germanic future.

 

Our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler!