War without Mercy

  Source: SS Leitheft, Year 9, Issue 12, December 1943

 

We have entered a stage of the struggle that is without mercy. The men who clash there are two types of human beings, are mortal enemies. War in a higher sense is being fought here, which is indeed the father of all things. Its outcome will decide the face of the future world. In the fury of this struggle the world must be transformed, the features of Satanic hatred and barbarism must be erased, for they have no place in the new world. The sword alone decides in this struggle, in which all bridges are destroyed that could lead together.

 

How many times in this campaign has the soldier of the eastern front stood eye to eye with this opponent. Even in the rage and fury of modem battle, that is always the decisive, the most difficult moment, when man faces man with weapon in hand, seething rage in the eyes, will to destruction in the heart, and one must fall, in order to open the other’s way to new battle. It will always remain the most terrible moment, when man collides with man and the final decision falls. Close combat is without pity! I or you, there is no longer anything else in the world. Who has never felt the enemy’s hot breath in his face and seen the murderous lust in his eyes, does not know war’s deepest secret which reveals itself in that moment. Man is the master of things; in his will, in his hands lie the strength of the world. Only who has felt it, who has passed through this merciless war and been purified, even stronger, knowing his own strength and the limitlessness of human will, passed through a hundred deaths and again stepped through the gate of life.

 

For a long time, we no longer fight for victories and successes as we know them from other battles. The whole Occident fights in us, in each individual, its final, decisive battle. Two worlds stand in conflict, one of which must break and will be broken, since world history would otherwise lose its meaning. With full consciousness each individual feels the might of this struggle and that of a battle in which everything fights with us that a thousand-year history has placed in us. And the good spirits of our comrades in Russian earth live day for day within us and admonish us so that we do not become weary. Bolshevism itself has taught us the lesson that there can be no half-measures in this conflict. We have become steel hard, now only will and decision. We know that fate is in our hands and we will master it.

 

Never again will men be allowed to experience and see what all of us have taken upon ourselves in this difficult test and bear until the final decision. An army of soldiers has grown in this war in which each is a fighter with clear consciousness, with deep faith and highest ability to sacrifice. Each individual has a hundred times passed through all tests and passed them.

 

The genuine soldier of a revolution has grown out of faith and knowledge. He fights for everything that was holy to previous generations, for the safety of the homeland in the fate- struggle of the nation, for the life of his children in a world whose first signs rise on the horizon of the Occident. Nothing is death, are heat, cold and all deprivations of a difficult struggle compared to the mighty river of strength and confidence that daily flow into him from the soldier’s devote knowledge and the hard realization of the higher necessity of this decisive battle. Ancestors and fathers fight in him, who is the knowing heir of a thousand-year history. Its virtues are his. From the creative might of his time he adds new forces; for him the destructive powers of war are only necessary means in the conflict of the world, in order to one day reveal their deepest meaning in the formative, constructive form of a future Reich. In this faith, with these strengths the German soldier and his allies will win the decision, which he himself has made when he recognized the deep meaning of his struggle. The day of victory will be his highest fulfillment, because he knows that it is the beginning of a new time.

 

New battles will flare up. Hundreds of kilometers of Russian roads will pain our feet. We have already seen and experienced everything. We will no longer charge with the roaring elan of youths, which was still in us when we assembled for the great judgment. We have become adepts - calm, modest and serious.

 

All the fires of hell have forged us, the searing sun and the icy breath of the snow steppe have hardened us. The images of the existence in the insanity of the most devilish idea mankind ever gave birth to live on within us as well as the knowledge of the gravity and pitilessness in which this struggle must end like it started.

 

The sun wheel rolls over the Soviet Union - in flames and blood a world will be born that should bring our sons space and peace for a happy future. We will be its molders. We have passed through hell and been forged in it for alert consciousness and highest hardness - our faith is firmer and stronger than ever. Death and the devil already lie behind us - new deaths and hells should not frighten us. Victory belongs to us!

 

Horst Slesina

 

The genuine man ’s celebration is the deed! - Goethe