At the Last Moment

 

Source: SS Leitheft, Year 9, Issue 6, 1943

 

I.

 

The longer the war lasts, the more difficult and harder it becomes, the deeper become our insights into its essence, into its meaning and into its inner necessity.

 

How minor and coincidental does its origin appear compared to what has meanwhile become of it. For a long time it is no longer about individual cities, streets or regions. It is about world empires and continents, about world-views and about entire human races. The war has become an act of nature and has reached dimensions that were previously inconceivable. It has grown past the wills and fortunes of all individuals, even of the great, responsible leaders. All, especially the leaders of folks and races, of empires and continents, are tools in the context of a mighty, fateful happening. Although nobody can be released from his human responsibility, they are nonetheless first expression of the natural, fateful forces behind them, which clash and emerge. It comes down to the same thing, whether we speak of acts of nature, of fate, of Providence or of God. We know for example that among the ringleaders of our Bolshevik opponents natural drives and instinct play an especially big role. From our Führer we know that he sees himself especially selected by Providence for his task. Bismarck once called himself in his own words “God’s soldier”.

 

II.

 

Precisely in difficult times it is especially important that we again and again examine these facts anew. If the person peering deeper uses the language of earlier centuries, then he must recognize that many of the decisive figures of our present are no other kind of people than “scourges of God”. In the sense of the same pious speech, however, we realize that our Führer has been sent to us by God for our salvation and for the deflection of gigantic, lethal dangers.

 

In the appearance and in the character of their leaders, Providence shows the folks and races what it intends for them. Genuine and true leaders always rise from the same blood as they; for creative nature bears and creates at the right time for the preservation and protection of life necessary members and organs. Significant leader figures in folks and races are thus anything but coincidences; they are the deep expression of deep, organic growth and life necessities. As genuine leaders - in so far as they have not come over the folks as parasitical, foreign bodies and by pure force subjugated them - they are the most sublime and noblest organs thereof. Therefore, it makes no sense to make a difference between them and their folks or their race. Their virtue and their greatness are only the highest peak of the virtues as well as the greatness of the folks or races and visa versa.

 

Only in an already incurable sick and decaying organism would a separate and essential difference exist. It is the sign of a sick and degenerate thinking, when the fearful, the philistines and cowards in terms of threat, distress and danger want to hurriedly and preemptively excuse themselves by saying they are not the “responsible people”. Each individual member of a folk organism has as living part of the entirety an equal, responsible share in the fortune and misfortune as the in the narrower sense “responsible” people of the upper strata. Guilt and credit always belong equally to the entirety as to the members, never solely to the leadership organ. Nature and fate are hence just, when they afterward always equally place and distribute reward or fault on the whole and on all members. It is pious self- deception, when cowardly souls believe they can set themselves apart, when they want to disavow shared responsibility, when with each threating failure they believe they can hurriedly wash their hands in innocence. As much as a high degree of responsibility indeed concentrates at the leadership, so little should anyone, even the very last, believe that he is free of shared responsibility. In each individual always appears again only the entirety with all its strengths and weaknesses. Nobody can exclude himself unpunished and stand aside. Nobody may believe that is he there to “take a position” and can stay solely on the spectator side of the tribune of life. Nobody can be released from his personal, shared responsibility. Whoever wants to do that and excludes himself, is nothing else but a sick and withered member. The lively and healthy organism has the duty and must summon the strength to pitilessly cut off and annihilate such members, so they do no infect and do more harm.

 

III.

 

May the goals of all-creative nature and the intentions of Providence, which has given us the Führer, be ever so manifold, one thing is nonetheless today very clear to us: the Führer was given to us at the last moment, in the face of the most severe, mortal dangers that threatened and threaten us simultaneously from inside and outside. Our folk, and with it our whole race, yes the entire Occident itself, wandered along an abyss and were just about to take the last, fatal step in order to for always and forever have its existence be extinguished before history. In this life-threatening crisis the still healthy portion of our blood created for itself a knowing and strong organ, which immediately began the purification, the rejuvenation and the salvation. God, Fate or Providence have sent us the Führer so that he shakes our conscience and at the same time makes us strong, courageous and faithful for the overcoming of the tremendous, doubled internal and external danger. This, however, happened at the last moment, as our crisis approached the most dangerous point. We do not have to list the great historical deeds of our Führer. Almost without exception they stand under the sign that they had to happen at the last possible moment. Let us think in this war for example on the launching of the Norwegian campaign, where it came down to a matter of hours! Let us think fully of June 22, 1941, where, expressed visibly in the sense of the great life history of our folk and of our race, it came down to mere minutes. The thoughts of our Führer were shared with our folk at the last moment, when it was already in the process of surrendering its life through renunciation and resignation.

 

With a shudder we realize that the whole appearance of our Führer stands under this law of the last moment. Or were we not, through the defeat of 1918, according to all human reckoning, sent on the path of slow decline? With reverence and gratitude, we should hence step before Providence. The appearance of the Führer at the last moment is its sign that it has not yet given us up, that nature still trusts us with rejuvenation and recovery through ourselves. Only gradually have we become seeing and conscious of the danger in its full extent and totality. We should hence at the same time become conscious what a merciful dispensation it was that the Führer came for us.

 

The Führer’s arrival is the clearest proof that Providence has by no means decreed the decline or our folk, of our race and of the Occident. It gave us the possibility of a final, great test. It places it on us to be able to prove ourselves in the final test at the decisive moment.

 

Providence has spoken in that it has given us the Führer.

 

It is up to us to prove ourselves worthy of this mercy. It will guide us more secure and strong, the more we know that he and we are an inseparable unity, the more we place our trust in him, they more we support him with our faith, the more we naturally make his decisions and his responsibility our own. But if our faith in the Führer is as strong as his faith in us was, when he in the darkest hour started his march for our salvation, then the passed test will at the last moment become at the same time a new beginning for a great, deep and rich life such we have never experienced in our previous history.

 

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