Selection and counter-selection
Source: SS Leitheft, No. 3, 1939
In the first issue
of the New Year’s edition of the SS Notebooks, the causes of the death of a
people were examined and it was shown that for several decades the German people
had failed in their national duty of
numerical
preservation. It was shown how the population figure had continuously fallen
from 1870 to 1932, so that the danger arose that our people would not only grow
old, but die for lack of new youth.
We will
demonstrate below that our people, too, have failed in their duty of survival
and have contravened the
natural law of selection.
The value of a man or woman to the continued existence of the German people lies
in the purity of his or her blood, his or her hereditary qualities and his or
her value to the existence of his or her people.
Neglecting to encourage the maintenance of blood purity
The doctrine of the equality of men, taught to all peoples by the
Churches as well as by the apostles of Bolshevism, has tried to overcome the
original idea of race and to remove the natural barriers between peoples which
are the result of the laws of life and evolution. The Church brought together in
religious communities men who were separated and different by race. And,
according to the sermon of the pastors, a baptized Catholic Negro was closer to
a Catholic German girl than to a non-Catholic German related by the same blood.
The Church spoke of mixed marriages and included under this term a marriage of
Germans when one of them had in his youth learned and sung Lutheran psalms and
the other hymns to Mary. Ministers of religion refused to allow marriages
between Germans of different faiths, but would bless without hesitation, often
with a certain inner satisfaction, a marriage between a baptized Jew or Negro
and a baptized German Christian girl.
While the Church encouraged people to determine their marital choice on the
basis of religious considerations, liberal society tried to get its members to
choose their partner only on the basis of his or her social standing, so that
hereditary and racial value were mostly neglected. The choice of marriage
partner was therefore not determined by the man’s vigour, the woman’s charm and
joie de vivre, but by whether he belonged to the same community of ideas or by
the amount of the dowry.
And men, forgetting the selection of the species, united with impure foreign
blood and thus destroyed their hereditary heritage.
Bolshevism, which, like religious thought, originated in a Jewish conception,
finally abolished all natural barriers between races and peoples. For centuries
the Churches had taught that the ideal end of evolution was one shepherd and one
flock; Bolshevism likewise demanded the chaos of the races as its ultimate goal.
When elements of our people began to mix with men of a different species, their
vitality diminished as a result of this racial interbreeding. The species, which
the Roman Tacitus once said “resembled only itself’, mixed and became impure. In
place of the beautiful and healthy statures of our race, with their harmonious
attitudes and behaviour, there appeared species whose state of mind was
unstable. Outwardly disharmonious, they also had many souls in their hearts,
their character was no longer strong or homogeneous; they were inwardly torn in
their thoughts and values. When our countrymen lost their unity of race and
character, they soon no longer understood each other.
Men of the same race behave in the same way in the face of destiny because they
have the same soul and the same value of character, the same sense of life and
the same purpose. Men of the same blood and hereditary heritage not only have
the same conception of honour, freedom and fidelity; they have the same spirit
of decision in battle and in the face of danger, and they conceive God in the
same way. A people whose elements share the same hereditary character presents a
living unity, strong in itself, clear in all its decisions. A people is a
representation of God and the representation of God is always clear.
Men of different races think differently about the value of character, love and
marriage, right and wrong. They behave differently towards friends and enemies
and act differently in times of distress.
If a people is racially mixed, it lacks bodily and spiritual unity. It has no
common thought, no unitary will, no common belief or conception of life.
Thus our German people, as a result of racial interbreeding, have drifted away
from the ancient ideal of the beautiful and heroic man. Sick creatures and
miserable saints have been presented to them as ideal figures of life, whereas
their hero and model was once Siegfried. Such a development has always led to
the demise of a people.
We are aware of the profound truth contained in the Fiihrer’s words: “The
hereditary sin against blood and race is the one great sin of this world and the
end of the people who commit it.
Failure to comply with the law of natural selection
In nature, which has always organised itself according to divine laws, the law
of natural selection reigns mercilessly. The perpetual struggle for existence
destroys everything that is not viable, even in its embryonic state. The strong
and the brave can face the thousand dangers that nature presents; in the forests
and the seas no inferior or hereditarily sickly life can survive. Natural
selection works in such a way that only the strong and healthy survive by
fighting and multiply by procreation, but that everything that is sickly withers
and dies.
The strongest and best fulfil their destiny in selection according to the divine
laws, and thereby the maintenance of the value of the species constituting the
eternal meaning of the perpetual struggle for existence, for its improvement and
elevation is assured.
Our Germanic ancestors followed the laws of selection like all healthy peoples
whose intelligence and sensitivity were not yet contaminated by false doctrines
of pity.
The Church’s false conception of God denied the divine laws of nature. Church
teaching deliberately opposed the will of nature.
Once the people were preached that God died crucified out of pity for the weak
and sick, the sinners and the poor, the unnatural teaching of pity and a false
humanitarianism could promote the preservation of the congenitally ill. Yes, it
was considered a moral duty to care for and favour mainly the sickly, the
burdened and the poor in spirit.
Thus, the congenitally ill could multiply unhindered and the community of
healthy people had to bear the burden of caring for these hereditarily diseased
elements.
The large number of hereditary patients caused an almost unbearable financial
burden on the state and local budgets. A backward schoolboy costs the state two
to three times more than a normal child. A hereditary patient in a specialised
home, a mental patient or an epileptic receives on average five times more from
the state each year than a healthy social security recipient after a lifetime of
work. Millions were squandered every year on madhouses, while healthy working
families often lacked the bare necessities.
The hereditary heritage of the German people is also impoverished by the
undifferentiated reproduction of racially diverse citizens. The structure of a
people remains homogeneous when all its elements marry at the same age and
produce many children in each union. There is a necessary and natural increase
in the branch of the population whose members married early and have a greater
number of descendants. In Germany, late marriages and a lack of children were
the lot of the valuable people and thus of the valuable inheritance for decades,
which led to a significant decrease in the most valuable part of the nation.
Already in the years before the Great War, an undifferentiated reproduction was
observed in the German people.
In 1912, there were on average 2 children in the marriages of senior and very
senior officials, 2.5 children in the marriages of employees and professionals,
2.9 children in the marriages of educated workers and craftsmen, 4.1 children in
the marriages of labourers and office workers, and 5.2 children among
agricultural workers.
In recent years, families with higher education had an average of 1.9 children,
families of well-to-do employees and craftsmen 2.2, and educated workers 2.9.
Asocials, criminals and fathers of backward children had on average a large
number of children.
Thus, the number of hereditary sick and insane people increased among the German
people, while the number of healthy and valuable people decreased.
More than 700,000 patients with severe hereditary defects are treated in
specialised institutions. The total number of hereditary patients is probably in
the millions.
This shocking state of affairs is the consequence of doctrines of pity that are
contrary to the laws of life; it results from the glorification of the
incapable, the weak and the poor in spirit. All these hereditarily unhealthy
individuals, if they were to take charge of themselves, would not be able to
assert themselves and triumph with their energy in the struggle for life. In
this God-ordained struggle they are necessarily defeated, for nature in her holy
wisdom advocates the elimination of the weak and the sick.
Consequently, while in nature the law of selection reigns, the mismanagement of
the nation by the state and the disruption of life that it has brought about in
the people, have brought about precisely a counter- selection. As a result of
counter-selection, the non-value multiplies at the expense of the value, the
weak at the expense of the strong, and this because of the assistance and care
provided by civilisation.
Many large cities are also a source of counter-selection. The big city has
always attracted people who wanted to show themselves off and prove their
competence, but they inevitably disappeared there in the second generation.
Entire clans died in the big cities. If Berlin, for example, received no
immigrants, according to Burgdörfer, based on the current number of births, in
150 years only 100,000 descendants would remain out of the 4,000,000 souls
counted today.
Modern warfare is particularly effective in the sense of counter- selection. Men
of good physical and spiritual health are almost exclusively called up, so that
only those with a valuable hereditary heritage fall in the war. The battlefields
thus swallow up the blood of the best sons of the people whose hereditary
heritage is irreparably lost. Certainly, their death is a sacred sacrifice for
the honour and freedom of the people.
Similarly, several hundred brave young Germans fall victim to sport or
competition every year, in ice wrestling, in the snow, in car races or in
aeroplanes.
No people on Earth died because of war, crop failure or political recession.
Peoples have only disappeared when the living substance ensuring their
historical life, their blood, their race, has been exhausted. They therefore
only die in the following cases:
1.
When the number of births fell as a result of
the regression of popular strength and the possibility was thus offered to a
numerically and qualitatively stronger people to crush its weaker neighbour.
2.
By a racial crossbreeding that has robbed an
originally healthy people of their inner harmony.
3.
By disregarding the laws of selection, which
causes a reduction in the valuable hereditary heritage and leads to a reduction
in abilities and qualities in the population.
The death of a people is thus based on a wrong conception of life, and is due to
the non-observance of the eternal laws of the Earth. Man has learned to despise
the laws of life because he has lost his connection with nature and life.
The Churches frustrated millions of us with the Germanic belief in earthly
immortality, so that countless men and women gave up, in the name of an unreal
heavenly will, on producing healthy children. The churches called the sacred
earth a vale of tears and taught that procreation and birth were sinful and
wrong. When the essential source of life, the will to live, was replaced by the
pursuit of material or otherworldly happiness, the establishment of egoism and
eventually of Bolshevism was possible, the latter of which has only the
weakening and decadence of peoples as its aim.
National Socialism, teaching the eternal life of a people,
leads men back to respect the divine laws of life. The Führer says: “The great
revolution of National Socialism is that it has opened the door to the knowledge
that all the faults and errors of men are due to certain circumstances and are
therefore reparable, except for one: to despise the importance of preserving
one’s blood, one’s kind and thereby the state of mind and character which God
has bestowed upon them. We humans need not wonder why Providence created the
races; we need only note that it punishes those who despise its creation.”
“For
the first time, perhaps, since there has been a human history, attention has
been drawn in Germany to the fact that the first of all the tasks which devolve
upon us, the noblest and therefore the most sacred to men, is that of preserving
the blood and the species, as God created them.
As
SS we are aware of our national duty and we want, under the sign of reborn life,
of the holy swastika, to become fathers, and for love of the thrice-consecrated
land which is the homeland of our ancestors and ours, to give eternal life to
the German people.
The words of
our SS comrade Lothar Stengel von Rutkowski in
Kingdom of this World
are our own:
You are a grandson
To victories and worries
From your ancestors
You owe your existence.
As a grandfather
You hold in your hands
Happiness and unhappiness
From the most distant generations.
SS-Ustuf. Dr Gerhart Schinke
Does
a state have the right to practice eugenics to
prevent unfortunate people from being affected by hereditary defects?
National Socialism answered in
the affirmative.
On the right, a home for
children from the Lebensborn association.
Positive selection encouraged people of the same hereditary value to join
forces.
People have two weapons in their struggle for life: their ability to defend
themselves and their natural fertility. Let us never forget that the ability to
defend oneself alone cannot ensure the survival of a people in
the
distant future, but that the inexhaustible source of its fertility is necessary.
Let us see clearly and act so that the victory of the German weapons is followed
by the victory of the German child.
Heinrich
Himmler
