Artworks by Oskar Just

Source: Nordisches Blutserbe im süddeutschen Bauerntum (1938)

(Nordic Blood Lines in the Southern German Farmland)

Part I

Postcards Collection – Third Reich Military Flags

The Reich in Photos – Police Parades in Vienna and Munich, 1938

Die Deutsche Wochenschau – Newsreel No. 545 – 12 February 1941

Funeral of Hungary's Foreign Minister Csâky;

Reich Youth Leader Axmann Visits Oslo;

Grandiose Nazi Party Ceremonies in Silesia;

Submariners on a Skiing Holiday;

Minesweepers Patrol the English Channel;

Bombing Raids of British Positions in North Africa;

The Responsibility of the Political Leader and Standard-bearer

by Reichsorganisationsleiter Dr. Robert Ley

Source: Ich Kämpfe (IFight)! - the handbook of the National-Socialist

It is the goal and task of our National Socialist will to establish an eternal German nation. Any German has to be clear about the fact that he was sent by God to help the German people and to secure the existence of the German nation.

Before all human ideals it is our primary concern to make Germany as strong as possible so that it can forever defend its place in this world. If other nations and races think the same - it does not bother us. We are convinced that the quality of our race and the value of our nation will forever secure our existence as long as Germans think the way I mentioned above. There were ups and downs in German history and many a time it seemed that the development of the German nation had come to an end. There were moments in German history - and our generation lived through one - when the German nation was down so far that the thought of it still makes us shudder. We no longer live on the edge of an abyss, but the disgraceful treason of the 9th of November 1918 proves my point. We were already buried down at the bottom. Today, it seems like a miracle to us that this nation made its way up again. This is why all Germans now and forever, have to thank destiny that in the moment of urgent need and deep depression we were sent a leader who pulled the German nation up again and showed the way for a new ascent.

What really is the Führer’s great accomplishment? Beyond his genius and gigantic achievements as a politician, general and people’s leader, it has been his greatest deed that for the first time in history he provided real guidance for the German nation. Certainly, the nation always had a public administration -it was not always equally good and clean- and sometimes it happened that the one or the other organization presumed to provide guidance for the German nation. All these attempts either failed right at the beginning or they were used by foreign elements to secure dominion over the nation for their foreign ideals and alien elements. It was the National Socialist Movement that for the first time provided proper German guidance, bound to blood and race. The outward expression of this guidance is the NSDAP. In this party all those racial values that are seen as the nation’s finest, are united in selection and quality.

This elite moreover, was brought together by the best suited methods ever to be used by a leading party. It was the National Socialist struggle that prevented lazy, idle and indolent elements from joining the party. Only men of courage, valor, toughness and devotion were attracted to National Socialist ideals and kept believing in them. It was as if a magnet had gone through the nation picking the racially most valuable out of all layers, professions, social positions and classes, and out of all tribes, clans and families. 

To the individual the party ottered no advantage whatsoever. The party only demanded sacritices trom everybody, sacrifices of property and blood. The many dead and wounded members of the Movement are a good example of what ideas demand from man. For the fight and the success of the National Socialist idea, the following sentence is of unconditional truth. An idea gains its worth from the people who are willing to sacrifice, and they will be paid back by destiny. According to this view it can be said that the National Socialist Movement has produced an invoice for destiny so immense and unique, that more than a millennium of National Socialist history and development will be required to pay it.

It is not enough to simply accumulate hundreds and thousands of members and to anchor a million people to the Movement. To achieve better performance from these people and to work towards greater success it is vital to arrange them meaningfully and to organize them with respect to their talents and abilities. A reasonable organization that allows for the unfolding of individual resources is the preliminary condition for true effectiveness. This is true for the National Socialist party of course.

The NSDAP is a field of force that from a political core reaches out to the entire German nation by virtue of its sub-divisions and associations. In the center of this field we find the Hoheitstrager [standard-bearer] as represented by the Führer, surrounded by a circle of political experts who enable him to take up any urgent problem and to answer any question that stirs the nation.

Everything connected with the leading of the nation matters to the standard bearer of the NSDAP and there must not be a problem he would not deal with because it seems too easy, difficult or huge. The people must be given complete assurance so that they feel comfortable with the NSDAP and the Führer. They must be certain that this Movement acts, feels and thinks for the people, that it takes part in everything that matters for the people, in all their joys and worries. The nation is a child, especially if it is as young as the German nation, and therefore it needs to be treated like a child. This means that the party worries, cares and works for the people just like a kind-hearted father or dedicated parents would. The unconditional trust which is thus generated is a requirement for the party and its political leaders, especially the Hoheitstrager, if they want to successfully carry through their guiding mission. Authority rests on this confidence and thus the majesty captured in the word Hoheitstrager emerges. Authority is a rare treasure and is the only guarantee that a nation can really be guided. For good reasons it is said that a time without a Kaiser is the most dreadful experience. It is disastrous for any nation when their leaders fail or when there is no leadership at all. Authority is the first requirement in a living community of any species or race. It is the precondition of welfare, of property, of wages - in a word: of living conditions in general.

Without authority there is no culture, and joy is transformed to animal instincts: beauty and greatness are impossible when authority is lost. Therefore, the title „Hoheitstrager” of the Party is the highest and most excellent title the nation has to offer. The Führer holds the highest authority ever held by a German in this German nation. This authority is derived from the boundless faith the German people put into their Führer Adolf Hitler. And all Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, Kreisleiter or Ortsgruppenleiter- all are happy and honored that they can work for the party. They all derive their authority from Adolf Hitler’s authority and the German nation intuitively senses how much confidence the Führer puts into all political leaders and standard bearers.

The Führer’s confidence is our authority. It is our duty to win this confidence through incessant labor, circumspection and devotion. Whoever fails because of his laziness or negligence loses the Führer’s confidence and thus the nation’s confidence. In our functions and fields we are only place holders for the Führer and it is a great and wonderful experience to help lead the German nation supported by the Führer’s confidence.

In this way the party’s faith and structure have become the guarantees for a German triumph. For the first time in 2000 years, which is as far back as we can go in German history, the NSDAP offers true guidance for the German nation. A guidance so perfect and powerful that it will tear down and destroy anything that builds up against it.

There is no doubt for me -and let me affirm this here again- that the German nation with the party on the inside and a wonderful armed forces on the outside will surpass all difficulties. Come what may, we will win in the name of our flag. One flag, one National Socialist party, one National Socialist armed forces, one nation and one Führer! This is our triumph.

When or How?

by Joseph Goebbels

9 November 1941

The source: “Wann oder Wie?”, Das eherne Herz (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1943), pp. 78-84.

Source: http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb3.htm

Only during the course of this war has it become clear how sick postwar Europe was, and what comprehensive measures it needed, needs, and will need, to return it to health. Just as a harmless cold sometimes allows a series of other illnesses to take hold, an event not of particular significance in itself can plunge a whole region of the world into confusion. Those who do not understand politics, which is the process of history, sometimes believe that the occasion is the cause of great human catastrophes and national transformations. The shot fired in Sarajevo, for example, occasioned the World War, but did not cause it. Europe was ready for such a war, and had been for some years. Only Germany’s leadership did not want to see the danger, and thus found itself in a war that it could have fought more effectively at an earlier time, but instead faced it at the worst possible time. When one knows that a pitiless enemy is seeking the best position from which to shoot, one is well advised to shoot first. An irresponsible national leadership lets things gradually intensify without wanting to see the danger. It gives the call to arms when it is too late.

It is thus understandable that during the course of a great struggle for the existence or death of whole nations, the actual occasion that led to the struggle fades from human thought. In the midst of the gigantic dimensions of the war today, the occasion of its beginning in August 1939 seems almost trivial. The city of Danzig was to return to the Reich, and Germany was to receive a corridor through a corridor. These more than modest requests on Germany’s party were ignored by our enemies. Indeed, they were used as a pretext for war, with the consequences spreading like an earthquake across the continent. All the old or partially solved problems of Europe broke loose once again. Consider the questions facing Europe at the time. The Treaty of Versailles held our region in its chains, a socialist Germany with a growing population compressed into too small a space was being strangled by dying plutocracies, the young Axis powers were denied access to the riches and raw materials of the world and condemned to a slow decline ending in national death, England with the help of its obedient servants, was using any available opportunity to throw the continent into uproar and confusion, 170 million people in the Soviet Union were condemned to a wretched existence while Bolshevism was building an army that could fall upon the continent in a time of crisis, with the firm intention of bringing about barbaric national revolutions that would destroy economic, social, cultural, and community life.

These problems must all be resolved by this war, whether we like it or not. We must follow the laws in effect from its beginning. None of us has a way out any longer. We cannot postpone or delay anything. Each individual campaign of the war is necessary on its own. Were we not to fight them today, we would have to do so tomorrow, probably under much less favorable conditions. No one should imagine that Europe’s problems would have been solved had Poland given up Danzig and allowed a corridor, or if England and France had accepted the Führer’s offer of peace at the end of the Polish campaign. Does anyone believe that England would have gone to sleep or that the Soviet Union would have concluded that it had built its revolutionary army only as a toy? No, war would have returned in a few years, with the difference that the enemy would have learned the military lessons of the Polish campaign and improved its weapons to a degree that might have been beyond our capacities to handle.

Fate treats us in a hard and pitiless way, but it intends our good. It forces us to make decisions that we might not make if our enemies seemed agreeable, which doubtless would mean a deadly threat later on. The basic problems of our region have become clear, and their solution can no longer be delayed. It is more than a solution to various territorial difficulties; it is a matter of everything. That explains the war’s dimensions. There are connections between the various theaters of this war which sooner or later would have led to war, whatever the circumstances. In the midst of all the spiritual and physical burdens of this war, indeed of any war, we cannot forget that. The important question is not when the war will end, but rather how it will end. If we win, all is resolved: raw materials, food supplies, living space, the foundations of the social transformation of our state, and the national independence of the Axis powers. If we lose it, all that and much more will be lost: our whole national life itself.

That national life is exactly what our opponents’ question. They may differ in their ideas of how the Reich and its allies might be most efficiently and permanently destroyed. One calls for the dissolution of our military and economic unity, another for dividing us into smaller states, a third for birth control and the reduction of our population to 10 million, a fourth for the sterilization of every one of us under the age of sixty. But they all agree on one thing: in the firm resolve that if they once again defeat Germany, we must this time be crushed, destroyed, exterminated and wiped out. This time we cannot expect another Treaty of Versailles that would leave even the slightest chance of national recovery. The more hopeless the military situation looks for the other side, the more bloodthirsty their Old Testament fantasies of revenge become. Their slogans may sound seductive to the ears of the ignorant, but behind their humanitarian hypocritical phrases is a naked desire for destruction. The Axis powers are fighting for their very existence. The troubles and difficulties the war brings us all pale before the inferno that awaits us if we lose.

There is no point in concealing the truth. Clarity is never a cause of weakness, always a cause of strength. If a great national prophet had told the German people in 1917 everything that would happen to them after the capitulation of November 1918, we probably would have won the war instead of losing our breath in the last quarter of an hour. A political genius of the magnitude of Adolf Hitler was necessary to repair the damage done in November 1918 through a 20-year battle. Even then, his efforts often hung by a thread. There will be no second chance. The chance we have today is our greatest. It is also our last. We must every day be clear about that. The solder must realize that as he goes into battle, the worker as he goes to work, the farmer, when he harvests the nation’s daily bread, the engineer, the scientist, the civil servant, the doctor, the artist, wherever they may serve the nation. It must be our prayer every morning and every evening. It must be the motivating force of all we are and do.

We can win, and we will win. It will require a gigantic national effort by the whole people. No one can stand aside, it involves us all. Just as winning the war will benefit us all, losing it will destroy us all. As always at the decisive moments in our history, our people holds its fate in its own hand. We are the blacksmiths of our future, more today than ever before. We must show the other nations the way to end the general European confusion. Can we blame fate for giving us a last hard challenge before the last great triumph? Did anyone believe that our historic mission of reordering the continent would fall into our laps, without much exertion on our part? History gives no gifts, only opportunities. He who does not reach for and hold them loses everything.

That is how things are, and we must accept them as they are. We know all too well the great sacrifices the war demands from nearly everyone. But are not the sacrifices of the defeated nations much greater than ours, even if they are no longer in the war? Although we are bearing the heaviest burdens of the war, we still have the highest living standard of any European nation. We must accept limitations in every area of life, but nowhere are they unbearable. We must work as never before. The battle for the destiny of our people demands the whole of our devotion, energy and readiness. However difficult it may be, however, one needs only to look around to find someone for whom things are even more difficult. The war is hardly just a matter for soldiers, it is a hard, bitter, and bloody necessity for the entire nation. We did not want this war, despite our constricted and almost hopeless situation back then; it was forced upon us. But now we are at war. The worst is behind us. Now it is the duty of every last man and woman in the country to be filled with a firm and resolute conviction that this war must be fought to a conclusion such that it need not be repeated. We owe that to ourselves and to our posterity.

Let us then work and fight until victory is ours! Do everything that will lead to victory and avoid everything that stands in its way. Do not ask when it will come, but rather do everything to be sure that it will come. The day will come when fate gives our nation and those who fought for it the laurel wreath of victory. Then the deep lines on the face of our people will shine with the blessing of the century.

A Dark Secret of World War II Comes to Light

By Mark Weber

Published: 2001-01-15

Source: http://codoh.com/library/document/2935/

After more than half a century, facts about a grim chapter of World War II history are coming to light: the widespread rape by American military servicemen of local women on the Pacific island of Okinawa. The discovery in 1998 of the bones of three wartime US Marine Corps men, each one 19 years old and black, has – according to a New York Times report (June 1, 2000) – “refocused attention on what historians say is one of the most widely ignored crimes of the war, the widespread rape of Okinawan women by American servicemen.”

More than 200,000 soldiers and civilians, including one-third of the population of Okinawa, were killed in the April–June 1945 battle for the Pacific island.

As many as 10,000 Okinawan women may have been raped, one scholar estimates. Rape was so prevalent in the months following US subjugation of the island that most Okinawans over age 65 either know or have heard of a woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war. Marine Corps officials say they have no records of such mass rapes, but books, diaries, newspaper articles and other documents refer to rapes by American soldiers of various races and backgrounds. Apparently few if any Okinawan women reported being attacked out of fear and embarrassment, and those who did were ignored by the US military police.

The three black Marines whose bones were found in 1998, and who were identified by dental records, were apparently killed by men of the remote Okinawan village of Katsuyama because the three had repeatedly come to their village to rape their women. Elderly Okinawans who grew up in village told a New York Times reporter that three armed Marines would come to Katsuyama every weekend and force the village men to take them to their women, who were then carried off to the hills and raped. One day, villagers, with the help of two armed Japanese soldiers who were hiding in the jungle, ambushed three marines in a mountain pass. They were shot and beaten to death with sticks and stones, and their bodies dumped in a hillside cave. Because the three were black, the cave where their bodies were dumped became known as “Cave of the Negroes.”

“It would be unfair for the public to get the impression that we were all a bunch of rapists after we worked so hard to serve our country,” says Samuel Saxton, a retired Marine Corps Captain who has an interest in the case. There are no plans to prosecute anyone for the crimes.