Adolf Hitler’s Triumphal Return from Memel – Munich, 1939

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Die Deutsche Wochenschau – Newsreel No. 650, 17 February 1943

1. Germany.

 

German miners at work.

 

– A miner drills into the rock.

 

– Coal is shovelled into mine cars.

 

– A view of the mine building; mine cars carrying coal are moving.

 

Dortmund, steelworks, general view.

 

– Workers at the blast furnaces; molten metal is flowing.

 

– Casting of turbine parts.

 

– Machining of parts.

 

– Molten metal is poured into a mould.

 

– Assembly of the turbine.

 

– The finished turbine is being taken out of the factory; it bears the inscription: ‘Wagner, Dortmund’.

 

– The new turbine on a railway platform.

 

– Power station, the new turbine is in operation.

 

– A worker at the control panel.

 

2. The Eastern Front.

 

The Murmansk region.

 

– Supplies being transported to the front by reindeer sleighs.

 

– Soldiers on skis leading reindeer.

 

– The first rays of the sun after the polar night.

 

– A soldier on guard duty with binoculars.

 

– Soldiers take up new positions.

 

– Soldiers with submachine guns and machine guns crawl through the snow.

 

– A soldier surveys the terrain through binoculars.

 

– The start of a firefight.

 

– German artillery firing.

 

– A crew manning a gun.

 

– A medical detachment of skiers on the move.

 

– A wounded man is being dressed in a trench; he is wrapped in a fur and placed on a dog-drawn sledge.

 

– Two soldiers unfurl a Red Cross flag on the snow; another fires a signal flare into the air.

 

– Arrival of a medical transport aircraft; loading of the wounded.

 

– The aircraft takes off.

 

– South of Lake Ladoga.

 

– Soldiers at their positions.

 

– Soviet aircraft in the air.

 

– A reconnaissance unit on the move.

 

– Transporting the wounded.

 

– The wounded are taken to the field hospital.

 

– A wounded man is being led away.

 

– Loading the wounded into an ambulance.

 

– The central sector of the Eastern Front along the Smolensk–Bryansk–Kursk line.

 

– A column of German reserve soldiers with supply wagons is moving through the snow.

 

– A field kitchen wagon skids on the slippery snow.

 

– An observation post in the forest, built from logs.

 

– A soldier climbs a ladder, enters the room from which the enemy is being observed.

 

– The observer raises the alarm at the appearance of Soviet soldiers.

 

– The start of a firefight near the village.

 

– Soldiers in camouflage uniforms fire grenade launchers, machine guns and anti-tank guns.

 

– The gun crew.

 

– The ‘Feldherrnhalle’ regiment in camouflage uniforms on the offensive.

 

– German soldiers take cover behind a haystack, find a communication cable and cut it.

 

– The end of the battle.

 

– The bodies of Soviet soldiers in the snow.

 

3. The Atlantic.

 

A German submarine in the North Atlantic.

 

– Four lookouts with binoculars scan the horizon in different directions.

 

– A British convoy is sighted.

 

– A diagram showing the movements of the convoy and the German submarines.

 

– German naval communications and intelligence operations.

 

– Officers at headquarters.

 

Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz coordinates the actions of German submarines off the coasts of Greenland and Labrador.

 

– A submarine receives orders to attack enemy ships.

 

– Alarm on the submarine; the crew takes their stations.

 

– Diagram of the German Navy’s submarine operations.

 

– Manoeuvres to evade an enemy destroyer.

 

– The convoy attempts to escape the submarine attack.

 

– The submarine dives.

 

– The enemy convoy is visible through the periscope.

 

– An attack according to plan.

 

– A voiceover announcing the destruction of the convoy.

 

– Sailors on the submarine.

 

– Shockwaves and damage to the boat caused by a depth charge explosion.

 

– Repairing the damage.

 

– Launching torpedoes.

 

– Sinking of Allied ships.

 

– Scenes from a night battle.

 

– Sinking of a tanker; oil burning on the surface of the water.

Economics and Ideology

Source: SS Leitheft, No. 2. 1938

 

The task of the economy is to support the state in its struggle to safeguard the vital principles of the people.

 

In the liberal age, no area of life has moved further away from our ideology than the economy. But since the economy is made up of human actions and results, and since any worthwhile action is only the result of a strong ideology and a responsible way of life, economic activity must also be the mark of a specific ideology and way of life. Even today, many ‘practitioners’ scoff at this requirement. It is seen as ‘fuzzy idealism’ or ‘romanticism’, when they demand harmony between economy and ideology and claim that the economy follows its ‘internal law’, which has very little to do with ideology.

 

The ‘internal law’ of the economy

 

National Socialism rejects such ideas because it has the good of the whole people constantly and everywhere in view. It clearly recognised that the term “internal law of the economy” was intended only to prevent the political management of the economic tasks of our time, which was regarded as an “unjustified encroachment of the state into the economy”. But it should not be forgotten that the consequences of this law were the absence of political authority, the collapse of the international economy, the misery of the peasantry, the scourge of unemployment and the annihilation of the people’s purchasing power, thus the total destruction of the economy.

 

When, on the other hand, National Socialism declared that the necessary political authority and control of the economy are the basic principles of all economic policy, it did away with the chimera of the internal law of the economy. The economy, too, can know only one law: to serve the good of the people. The more it follows this law, the more it submits to the vital needs of the people, and this makes it all the easier to establish a concordance between ideology and economy. For serving the people is the supreme law of our ideology.

 

When we try to outline in a few words the whole of our ideology, the following principles emerge: we believe in the law of soil and blood, the law of duty and honour, and the law of the people and the community. If we look at the past economic form and compare it with some of our fundamental laws, we must agree that practice and economic science have not recognised these laws. The dominant economic liberalism was much more in line with the English thinking of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and. The economic founder of this vision was Adam Smith. These ideas were as destructive in Germany as those of the French Revolution from the West. Even today, this English doctrine is often referred to as “classical” in Germany, which is more or less the same as calling parliamentary democracy a “classical” form of constitution. Today, this concept can no longer be considered to have any real value. Unfortunately, the ideas of the English school still prevail in the field of economics.

 

The pioneers of a German national economy

 

At the time, it was completely forgotten that a national and particular economic conception had also emerged in Germany. Friedrich List had disapproved of Adam Smith in the strongest terms. Gustav Ruhland had castigated the destructive consequences of the exploitative capitalist economy in his System of Political

 

Economy, previously published by R. Walther Darre. However, Ruhland was ignored. List was indeed favourably quoted, but his refutation of the English doctrine was not taken seriously. Finally, the great German philosopher Fichte, who had laid the foundations of patriotic liberation in his Discourses to the German Nation and who had presented important suggestions for economic policy in his “Autarkic Commercial State”, was not taken into consideration.

 

But a wrong lifestyle necessarily develops from a wrong doctrine. Foreign ideas can never produce a life-style that benefits the people. This is shown by the economic development before 1933.

 

The decline of the German economy

 

It was precisely in the economy that the assimilation of the Jews had the most disastrous consequences. While the foundations of any truly characteristic form of life and economy should be the goal, pride and duty, the type of the honourable merchant was replaced by that of the cunning tradesman. The peasant, whose work feeds the people and thus represents the basis of all economy, was described as inferior and despised. The social situation of the worker, who was increasingly adopting the idea of class struggle, was getting worse by the day. It was crushed by the palaces of the big banks and department stores. Capital, whose task was to serve the economy, was entrusted to its masters and the management of capital itself was handed over to anonymous powers. People spoke of the “infinite extension of the economy” and neglected the large tenement buildings and the slums of the big cities that they had created. They spoke of the “international economy” and failed to see that the internal foundations of the economy, the peasantry and the working class were terribly affected economically. The basis of the German food and raw material economy abroad had been changed because import and export were not carried out according to national points of view, but remained subject to the arbitrariness of the individual. The fact that the international powers had got their hands on the most important raw materials was overlooked. But also overlooked was the fact that the economic war against Germany had begun in 1914—and was continued in a different form. Germany’s tribute payments on the basis of the Dawe and Young plan, the private indebtedness ofthat country through a policy of foreign borrowing, the sudden deduction of short-term foreign credit in 1931 brought the whole front system crashing down. The boycott of Germany, but at the same time the entry of foreign capital, was in fact the most important economic struggle of all time.

 

National Socialism as the foundation of a new order

 

By saving the peasantry and the workers with the first four-year plan, the Führer thus laid the foundations for a new German economic order which could only be created on German soil by German labour. The second four-year plan logically continues this creative work: increasing efficiency in all areas of the economy, managing the foreign economy, organising work according to national goals, protecting and improving purchasing power and thus national power through responsible price management. All these measures are designed for the people and for the protection of the country. The second four-year plan encourages the people to work and express their determination, sets great goals that arouse the moral will of the individual and the creativity of the community in the service of the nation, and thus shows that the struggle is the origin of all that exists.

 

A new attitude, the result of a new worldview, is also beginning to emerge in Germany in the economic sphere.

 

SS-Hstuf. Dr Merkel

What is Race?

 

Source: Glauben und Kämpfen: für die SS-männer aus den deutschen Volksgruppen des Südostens (Journal „Believe and Fight”, for the SS of the South East German folk groups)

 

„What is not of good breed in this world is worthless.

 

(Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf)

 

Within the mass of living beings, groups can be discerned that are more or less similar to each other and have similar physical characteristics. They possess the same essence. We call these groups of living beings „species“.

 

Humanity, which is alive today, forms a „species“ because the individuals are mutually fertile. But when one considers and compares a white person, a Negro or a Mongolian, it becomes clear that one cannot speak unrestrictedly only of the species „man“, one has to make a new sub- classification in order to make an accurate judgement. This leads to the concept of human races.

 

We can distinguish each race by the differences it possesses due to the particularity of its hereditary, psycho-intellectual and physical characteristics, dispositions and qualities. Each race has certain qualities and characteristics that are unique to it. These racial characteristics are transmitted hereditarily to the descendants.

 

The race is thus a group of living beings distinguished by the common possession of certain hereditary characteristics. It always produces similar beings. Or, to summarise: The race is a community of inherited dispositions (Stengel v. Rutkowski).

 

As long as a race remains pure, its hereditary heritage is passed on intact from one generation to the next. It is therefore necessary for men of the same race to have a heightened racial awareness and to recognise the dangers leading to interbreeding, transformation, degeneration and thus the decline of the race concerned. Each people has evolved from specific races into a homogeneous community of life. The overall race defines the ethnic characteristic and is immutably externalised through its hereditary heritage. Like all Germanic peoples, the dominant Nordic race also marks the German people with its specificity.

 

What is a people?

 

Each people represents an outwardly visible community. The same blood, the same land, the same language, the same customs, the same culture and the same history form an inseparable bond. Both race and history and culture are necessary for peoplehood. The people are both a community of hereditary dispositions and a community of environment. Each generation is only one link in the chain that begins with the oldest ancestors and continues into the future with future generations. Together they form the people’s community. The existence of the individual therefore has a purpose when it is intimately connected with the people as a whole.

 

Every living blood holder in this community has a responsibility to give life to future generations.

 

Each people has its own ethnic characteristic. The racial composition of the people determines this characteristic.

 

The people are a community of origin and destiny. As a community of hereditary dispositions, it is capable of creating and largely shaping its environment.

 

The importance of races

 

The common hereditary mass conditions the physical and spiritual aptitude for creation that is proper to a race. Race” as a working concept not only refers to the particular vitality living and expressing in us, but also becomes the essential value, the ideological reference point.

 

There are races that can produce great civilisations and others that will never rise on their own. There are races with heroic attitudes and others without combative courage. Cultural creations are exclusively the work of races of great value. Humanity evolves or declines because of the preservation of the purity and strength of the civilisation-creating races.

 

The racial structure of a people is unique. Its modification always leads to a transformation of its character and civilisation. Any racial mixture means for the race worthy of the name a decrease in its value.

 

Related – foreign – same strain – different strain

 

Mankind has strongly separated racial groups within it. Broadly speaking, we distinguish between: whites, blacks and yellows. Each of these groups in turn comprises a number of sub-races that have certain traits in common. In this case, we speak of kinship or, briefly, of related races. Peoples who, in their racial composition, have the same components as the German people, are related to us. The majority of European peoples are in this case.

 

Since the essential racial substance often varies considerably among our relatives, the quantitative aspect of the racial components must be taken into account. The Germanic peoples have a predominance of Nordic blood in their racial mix. Their relationship to the German people is therefore defined as „of the same stock”. Other peoples who also have weak Nordic racial components, but are not Nordic in substance, we say are ‘of foreign stock’.

 

The favourable racial mixture present in the German people is based on the confluence of related races and the superior and predominant share of Nordic blood.

 

The origin of the Nordic breed

 

The central sphere of the Nordic breed includes the regions of Southern Scandinavia, Jutland, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and extends into the heart of Germany.

 

From early on, the Nordic man was a sedentary farmer. He invented the plough, which was later adopted by other peoples, grew cereals and raised domestic animals. The enormous increase in population of this Nordic mankind prompted them to acquire new territories and caused wave after wave to flow into neighbouring lands: into the European area and into large parts of Asia. The original settled population was marked by the Nordic way of life, even if often only temporarily.

 

The statement that „light comes from the East”, as science once claimed, is false. It should rather be said „strength comes from the North!

 

The importance of the Nordic race for humanity

 

The Führer says in Mein Kampf:

 

„All that we admire on this earth today, science and art, technology and inventions, are the creative product of a few peoples and perhaps, originally, of a race.

 

The great civilisations created by the Indo-Germans in India, Persia, Greece and Rome bear impeccable witness to the Nordic creative spirit. They also disappeared with the decline of the Nordic ruling class. Even today, we are aware of the kinship with these cultures, which have the same origin.

 

However, we are not so presumptuous as to believe that all culture, even that of ancient times, can be attributed to the Nordic race alone. People of other racial composition have also created civilisations. But we feel differently when we try to understand the cultures of ancient China, Babylon or the old Indian cultures of the Aztecs (in present-day Mexico) and the Incas (in present-day Peru). It is undeniable that these were also great civilisations; however, we feel the mark of an undeniably foreign nature in their contact. They are not related to us, but alien in race. Another spirit speaks in them. Never have these cultures of another kind reached a level comparable to that which has been influenced by the Nordic spirit.

 

Today’s technical development has also been the product of Nordic men. This is the case, for example, with the new Turkey, the rise of North America or the progress of the Far East, on an equivalent level.

 

In places of mixing with neighbouring races, the influence of the Nordic race has consistently proved to be extremely innovative and has involved active developmental tendencies, giving rise to the highest cultural creations.

 

The German people and the Nordic race

 

In spite of the often high mixture and intermingling of breeds in various parts of the Reich, we find in the different parts of Germany distinct breeds that are more strongly typed.

 

There are regions where a tall stature, narrow face and light hair, eye and skin colours dominate (the physical appearance of the Nordic race). Closely related to the Nordic man, often referred to as a ‘subspecies’ of the Nordic man, the Westphalian man turns out to be taller, broader and more massive.

 

In many parts of the Reich, on the other hand, we find tall, short-headed men with a narrow face, a large nose, brown eyes and black hair (the physical appearance of the Dinaric race).

 

In some parts, small, slender and agile men with dark eyes and skin colour (the physical appearance of the Western or Mediterranean race) live.

 

In other regions, the following characteristics predominate: medium-sized, stocky bodies, short heads, broad faces with prominent cheekbones, blond hair and light eyes (physical aspect of the Baltic-Eastern breed).

 

Finally, in some parts of the Reich, one encounters stocky, round-headed men with broad faces, brown eyes, brown to black hair and dark skin colour (physical appearance of the oriental race).

 

Nordic type – Baltic-Eastern type

 

Nordic type – Baltic-Eastern type

 

The Nordic race is more or less strongly represented in all parts of the Reich, whether in the north or south, west or east. Many of our people cannot be exactly identified with one race. With the exception of those representatives who appear to be purebred, each race is found among all peoples in a more or less strongly mixed form.

 

The Nordic hereditary heritage predominates in the German people. The Nordic race is not only the predominant race, but its blood is present in almost all Germans. The concepts of „Blood and Soil” are not an empty concept, but constitute our destiny. The aim of the selection of the German people has therefore also been defined. It is carried out in accordance with the vital law of its creative race.

 

The share of Nordic blood in the hereditary mass of the German people amounts to about 50%. Apart from that, genealogy teaches us that every German has Nordic blood.

 

Thus the German people are a racial community in the truest sense of the word. History interpreted according to a racial principle has long since shown that the Nordic race produces a far greater number of outstanding men than other races. The Nordic race is above all the holder of the genius of the German people. Great achievements in all fields have made them the leading race of mankind. No other human race has produced so many outstanding spiritual leaders, army leaders and statesmen.

 

In the course of bold expeditions, the Nordic man conquered vast territories, founded states and created civilisations. Already around the year 1000, the Vikings had landed in America. The Nordic spirit realised the development of large areas of land.

 

One of the most striking qualities of the Nordic race is its self-control. Nordic boldness has inspired warlike conquests. Probity and strength of will, combined with self-confidence, powerfully reinforce the feeling of independence. These qualities certainly diminish intuition, and the Nordic man is in great danger of losing and wasting himself. The Nordic man has a great predilection for sport and combat – he loves risk. He is therefore more likely than other men to be found in occupations that involve danger. But it must be said that the character of the individual is more decisive than the colour of the hair. The individual essentially belongs to a race whose virtues he professes through action.

 

When we examine each country of Europe in its racial composition, we notice that in almost all the states the same races are found. We find the Nordic race outside Germany, in the Scandinavian countries, in England and the Netherlands, as well as in Russia, Italy, France, Spain, etc. But we also find, for example, men of the Oriental type in the various European countries. The important thing, in the end, is not to make a general racial judgement about a people. It is rather to study the predominant elements of each race in the people concerned. And it can be seen that on a purely numerical level, the Reich is already ahead of the other peoples in terms of the proportion of Nordic blood.

 

Germany can legitimately claim to lead the German-Nordic peoples.