To Remain Pure and Become Mature

Source: SS Leitheft, September 1944

by a Young SS Man on the Eastern Front

It wasn’t long ago that we used to consider purity and maturity as something curious; we even used to laugh at the notions. Wasn’t the rigour of battle our first command and purity something for young girls? But we have since changed. Now we see with different eyes and no longer derive the strength for our deeds from the storms of youth alone. The protractedness of the war has given us a deeper strength of endurance and rigour. Now we create strength from things, to which we used to never even give a thought. Today we are able to behold our home, the beauty of a field flower, and the smile of a child with eyes made wiser by the pain of loss and the consciousness of danger.

In short, we have grown up. In the middle of the destruction all about us, appears the one objective as substance of our purest longings and sacrifices: the Reich. And the path to this objective lead by way of warrior manliness.

The harder the fighting for our objective is, that much more unbending is the demand for purity of our will, integrity of our character, and unambiguity of our behaviour. The highest manly ideal must be embodied, if the Reich is to be attained, for the Reich represents a New Order of man; of families, of clans, and of individuals. And warfare is waged for this New Order.

We first perceived the threat of complete extinction in this war to the highest human denominator during the battles in the east. Surely the demands of race preservation are only a zoological affair, if preservation of Aryan spirituality and culture are not included therein. Even so, our answer to the annihilation of man in the world is not only warfare and resistance, but also our own transformed lives, and manliness and purity are the strongest weapons in this warfare. Yes, pure in the highest sense were the dead who sank at Langemarck into the Flemish soil; pure were the fallen who yet lie in unmarked graves in the east; and pure were also all those who in the hour of Germany’s greatest need hearkened to the call of the first years of this war.

So is also our national hymn „Germany, Germany above all“ to be understood: not as a battle cry of triumph, but as the deepest obligation to build a higher order of man and as the mentality of pride in the grandeur of the calling to be warriors for this New Order in the world. This mentality liberates us from the manifestations of decadence, which we behold at every turn: self-interest, profiteering, and political jobbery. It is not a matter of just keeping one’s own slate clean for appearance’s sake, - an altogether bourgeois consideration, - but it is a matter of consciously rejecting all superficiality as a mark of baseness, of doublespeak and infidelity as unworthy in marriage as it is among one’s comrades, and of all obscenity and licentiousness as entertainment. Why? Because all of that opens the way for the enemy to enter and obtain a foothold. To remain pure also means to have conscience and solicitude, and to practice kindness and comradeship.

An irrevocable answer is thus demanded from each of us with regard to every aspect of our being. The more we realize that we are working toward a social and political New Order, and the more we embody the consciousness that alone in service to the Reich does our nobility lie, in that degree will it become clear to us, that only they can exercise and retain dominion in this world who have kept themselves pure, - even in the face of error and disgrace.

We have seen comrades fall right next to us who were young and quite unfinished. That filled our hearts with grief and discouragement. It is then, however, that we experienced the truth that fulfilment in life is not a function of the quantity, but of the quality of the years, which we have been given. This is so, because every living man, woman and child can obtain the crown of life: to die for the fatherland.

Life without pure desire is meaningless. So, it is that we deeply embrace Goethe’s saying: „To live for pleasure is base; the noble live for law and order.” We cannot precisely know whether we climb in this struggle and what form and condition await us on the mountain peak above, but the Reich is an immediate mission, which we can presently recognize and fulfil. And to be innerly equipped for this task requires purity and manliness.

Note the bourgeois soldier, who enthrones every false and impure god. Perhaps such a one ignorantly despises purity and manliness, because all he has ever been exposed to are the empty forms of these virtues and never their racially spiritual content. In any case, only he is a true man, who roots the threads of his soul in the foundation: in the extremity, which alone engenders love of family and fatherland. In a faith in the divine law operative in the life of his race, and in the willingness to keep on marching serenely to one’s death, because he knows the meaning of that death as highest sacrifice to God.

To be a master means to be mature, to have spiritual insight, to look beyond appearances, to do the necessary, and not to lose one’s faith in the process. Not because we have power and weapons in our hands do we enjoy a certain rank in this world, but because we are actual warriors for the Reich. This means that we have chosen: responsibility, discipline, accountability, reverence, and kindness. - i.e. to become a stronger man and a new creature, and not to let the world prescribe its „law“ for us. We are masters, because we stand in relation to the world as instruments in the service of a higher order. This recognition makes us mature without respect to age. Eighteen-year olds have in this manner and through the rigour of war been made into men. The hour of trial has not found them wanting, but rather testifies, that they have indeed become mature.