by Gunther d’Alquen,
1937
When
the old National Socialists look back on the early years of the struggle, they
see a beautiful picture of a true community. Unencumbered, the men of that time,
who were of one mind, had come together and created a community such as the
world has rarely seen. Despite the lack of external organisation, these men
formed an incredibly strong force.
They accomplished great
things that took on an almost mystical dimension, expressing the loyalty of the
Germanic troop, and culminating in the supreme sacrifice. We see that this
strength of the Movement comes directly from this voluntary fusion which
nevertheless allows the individual to exist as a personality and thus to be an
independent fighter.
This community of fighters
was the first to give strength to the Movement. It is a matter of nurturing it
in the future and of ensuring that, in an age when the Movement should use
violence, there is never a danger of the community degenerating into a
collective. For never can the organised mass gathering, by destroying the values
of personality in the natural man, increase his strength.
On the contrary, a good
dose of violence is needed to hold together such a fundamentally non-German
formation. Anything that destroys the personality for the benefit of a mass is
not German, and anyone who thinks only in terms of the mass does so in a
Bolshevist way and must eventually come to that idea which a Marxist once
expressed when he preferred “to be wrong with the mass than to be right as an
individual”.
But every community is
spiritually based on the old Marxist fallacy of the equality of all men. This is
not the case in nature. On the contrary, men are unequal. Some are good, some
are bad, some are honest, some are dishonest, some are tall, some are short,
some are fat, some are skinny. The spiritual defenders of the community were
always faced with a desperate struggle, made all the more difficult by the fact
that they had to constantly deny manifest reality.
There is no doubt that,
apart from those who, as conscious enemies of National Socialism, defend the old
error of equality, all those who, by nature and character, cannot understand
National Socialism analogously are likely to act unconsciously in a collectivist
spirit.
This type of man is both
dangerous and comical when, in defence of the old Marxist egalitarian theory, he
introduces the National Socialist notion of community, and suspects of
professing class struggle anyone who notes that in a people there are
intelligent people and their opposite.
No, it has nothing to do
with a division of the people, for these are simply natural facts. But our old
National Socialist view of the “decisive minority” is just as much a political
translation of these natural facts as the “to each his own” demand that has
always opposed National Socialism to the Marxist slogan “all equal”.
A fundamental distinction
between community and collectivity is also manifested in leadership. The
community naturally and necessarily has a leader who holds power over the souls
and hearts of his fellows. The despot of a community is the supreme master of
the bodies of individuals. His position is based on fear, whereas the leader of
a community is driven by the love of the men who follow him voluntarily.
It is no coincidence that
real leaders see themselves as the servants of their community because of their
wisdom and sense of human superiority. Frederick the Great saw himself as ‘the
first servant of the state’. Adolf Hitler saw himself as the ‘agent of the
nation’, and the Führer’s representative drew the attention of the political
leaders at the swearing-in ceremony to their task of being the servants of the
people’s community.
We thus see that the
supporters of the community see their ideal in ‘domination’. Through their sense
of human inadequacy, they fall into the other excess and are as despotic towards
their subordinates as they feign submission to the higher echelons. They do not
know that the leader must have a superior faculty of understanding, but above
all that superiority of soul and strength of heart of which Fichte tells us that
it is these that bring victory.
Moreover, it can be seen
that the head of a community calls to him the most capable and qualified men,
and that the head of a community naturally has no need of independent
collaborators, but only of creatures who are his blind instruments and who must
constantly assure him of his worth. Thus it is clear what monstrous danger,
arising from collectivist thought, could directly threaten our people in the
time of their rebirth.
Here, too, the National
Socialist Movement has given the nation a principle of inestimable value by
presaging in exemplary form the notion of a community of loyal fellow workers.
In this way it has set an example for all time of the true pooling of forces and
has clearly rejected all collectivist ideas.
But the old soldiers of the
Movement will never admit that the powerful human masses of our demonstrations
and organisations can be wrongly regarded as a reign of the man-mass, and that
the National Socialist notion of community is thus consciously or unconsciously
distorted and transformed into collectivity.
The crowning
achievement of any spirit of sacrifice is the dedication of one’s own life for
the existence of the community.
Adolf
Hitler
