What Hitler Will Do

 

Adolf Hitler’s foremost publicist expounds the doctrines of National Socialism in dialogue form. Here is the essence of the Germany of tomorrow.

 

by Dr. Joseph Goebbels

 

A Translation of Der Nazi-Sozi, Questions and Answers for the National Socialist. Published by the National Socialist Party of Germany Don ‘t trouble me with politics,’ says the average German; ‘it is a fraud and a swindle, nothing more. After the Revolution the public could be inflamed by slogans, but those days have passed. We are cleverer than we used to be. I no longer believe in such deceptions. I go to work and pay no more attention to politics. I’ve had enough.’

 

‘In that case,’ the National Socialist replies, ‘our common enemy, call him what you will, – capitalism, the Jews, democracy, parliament, or Marxism, – has attained his end.’

 

‘How so? I don’t quite understand.’

 

‘He wishes the German people to ignore politics. We are to drudge, toil, and slave – and then the Jew will make his own politics.’

 

‘You are relentless. But let me ask you whom I should trust to-day. Name me one party, either right or left, that hasn’t overstuffed us with phrases and promises since 1918 and that really means to make good any of its promises, even in the remote future.’

 

‘You are right. All parties have deceived and betrayed the people. Not one has acted honorably and tried to achieve in practice what it proclaimed in theory. They have recognized the people only on election day. But are these parties the same thing as Germany? And is the disillusionment that arises from their betrayal of us the same thing as despair for the future? If the parties are evil, away with them!’

 

‘Oh, no. It is too late for that. We no longer have the courage, belief, and determination to proclaim our desire for a new Germany.’

 

‘You would do better to say “I” and not “we,” for I’ve have the courage, belief, and determination. How about you? What do you think of the future? ‘

 

‘There is one factor in which I have a spark of hope – economics. I believe that the indestructible creative power of the German people will finally operate successfully. Work, economics – that is our destiny. We must work more and talk less.’

 

‘Good. I advise you to preach that gospel to our millions of unemployed. Like a voice crying in the wilderness, tell them, “We must work more and talk less.” Perhaps the insanity of such trivial remarks will be revealed to you more clearly than I can reveal it now.

 

‘“Economics is our destiny.” That was what Walter Rathenau said when he formed the first huge trusts that made the German process of production part of an international syndicate and subordinate to American high finance. You believe in economics. But isn’t economics intimately bound up with politics in the life of a people? Name me any nation in history that achieved or even maintained a productive economic system without a sound, purposeful policy; and then name me any nation with a clear, instinctively sound policy that was not able, through this policy, to achieve an economic system that assured the existence of its people.

 

‘Your point of view is utterly nonsensical. The only people who can maintain it are corrupt Jews and stupid Germans. The destiny of a people is not economics but politics. Sound politics necessarily create sound economics. A sound economic system is unthinkable without the firm foundation of a strong political policy. Finally, it is impossible to dignify with the word “policy” the things that our present so-called German statesmen are doing.

 

‘Political policy means responsible activity in the service of the people. Its purpose is to provide the people with conditions that enable them to maintain life on this hard earth of ours, protect themselves, procreate their kind, and guarantee freedom and bread to their descendants.’

 

‘And will your movement, supported as it is by callow young people who are inexperienced in life, further such a policy? Will you prevail by resorting to excesses and falsehood, street fighting and a reign of terror directed against all those who disagree with you?’

 

‘Yes, indeed. That’s just what we shall do. But let me make a few little corrections. If our policy is being put through by callow young people – we call them the youth of Germany – it is because we are full of proud joy that German youth has found the way out of the poisonous present into the new Germany. We do not care whether this youth is callow or not. You are not callow, but you do not understand the significance of politics. I know plenty of eighteen-year-old boys in our storm battalions who could put you to shame. We don’t advocate a violent policy, but when violence is necessary we are not too cowardly to resort to it. The bourgeois raises his voice against violence, perhaps because no one is willing to use it in behalf of his state. Furthermore, we resort to terrorism when we are opposed by terrorism. We go out into the street and fight the terror with our fists. We put in practice the theory of power and attack the bourgeois class state.’

 

‘That means you are a party of class warfare. In the beginning you called yourselves a labor party. That was the first step. Then you called yourselves a socialist party. That was the second step. Now you attack the bourgeois class state. That is the third and last step. What is there, then, that distinguishes you from the Marxians?’

 

‘There is nothing more disgusting than a fat, well-fed bourgeois protesting against the proletarian theory of the class struggle. He came through last winter all right. Therefore, his very person is a summons to class war. Why does he assume the right to attack the class struggle of the proletariat and to swell out his chest with national responsibility? Hasn’t the bourgeois state for nearly sixty years been an organized class state containing within itself the historic necessity of proletarian class warfare?

 

‘Yes, we call ourselves a labor party. That was the first step, the first step away from the bourgeois state. We call ourselves a labor party because we want to free labor. We are convinced that productive labor is what makes history move forward, because work means more than education, property, social position, or bourgeois ancestry. That is why we call ourselves a labor party.

 

‘Yes, we call ourselves socialists. That was the second step, the second step away from the bourgeois state. We call ourselves socialists as a protest against the lies of the social bourgeois sentimentalists. We don’t want any sympathy. We don’t want any social sentimentality. We despise the kind of rubbish that is known as social legislation. We want the justice that is ours by nature and by right. We want a full share of the yield that the heavens give us and that we create with our own hands and minds. That is socialism.

 

‘Why do we speak of the bourgeois state? Because this bourgeois state has become a class state, pure and simple. Because sacrifice and will power have no value in this state. Only education, property, and tradition count. We attack the bourgeois state because it has counterfeited the most holy thing in the life of a people, to wit, love of one’s own kind. It has fostered a low desire for property, although seventeen million German-feeling, German-thinking proletarians can never possess any property. What the bourgeois wanted is insignificant. What he has created is important. Maybe he wanted a strong Germany, but what did he create? An international slave colony that was ready to collapse on November 9,1918, under the assaults of the destroyer. That is the truth. We protest against the idea of the class struggle. Our whole movement is a single grandiose protest against the class struggle that has isolated our nation historically. But let us call things by their right names. If seventeen million proletarians on the left see their last hope in the class struggle, they feel as they do only because of what they have learned from sixty years of experience with the forces of the right. How shall we be able to attack the proletarian theory of the class struggle if we do not first annihilate the bourgeois state at its foundation and build up a new socialist German community?’

 

‘And who will help you to destroy the old system and build the new one?’

 

‘We trust in the sound instinct of the creative German people. Eventually the day will come when even the last man will see clearly. Once our hands and minds are aroused to protest, we shall be able to attack and pass judgment. We shall do everything we can to make sure that this will happen soon.

 

‘Then we shall all find ourselves, both the manual and intellectual laborers. Then we shall see who really loves his Fatherland beyond party and class. Then the young workers of the future will build the Third Reich. Then every callow youth will speak the decisive word, and wisdom and experience will fly like spray before the wind. Then we shall take Germany’s destiny in our hands. Then we shall solve the question of socialism radically and decisively, unconcerned by tradition, education, property, background, or class, thinking only of the future of the creative German people.

 

‘Then we shall show that nationalism is something more than a comfortable moral theology of the property-owning middle class and of the capitalist profiteer. From the poisonous wastes of defeat a new nationalism will arise as the most radical form of popular self-defense, and, at the same time, a new socialism will emerge as the most conscious creation of the requisite conditions.’

 

‘You praise socialism. But isn’t the German worker right in despairing of socialism and of the future of his class after his sixty-year struggle for socialism, which has ended in the complete bankruptcy of his civic ideals?’ ‘Not at all. For, in the first place, the German worker has not struggled for socialism for sixty years, but for Marxism, whose theories destroy races and nations and are the complete antithesis of living socialism. Marxism was never the ideal of the German worker, who accepted this waste of Jewish theory only because he had no other means of fighting for the freedom of his class. Marxism not only digs the graves of nations; it also destroys the class that fights most vigorously in its behalf, the working class. The worker, therefore, does not have the right to despair of socialism, but the duty to despair of Marxism.’

 

‘You make a great deal of the fact that you are against the Jews. Isn’t anti-Semitism an outworn theory in the twentieth century? Isn’t the Jew a human being? Isn’t it a bad sign if sixty million of us fear two million Jews?’

 

‘Listen. Try, for once, to think logically. If we were only anti-Semites, then indeed our creed would be out of date in the twentieth century. But we are also socialists. As far as we are concerned, Jews and socialists are not identical. Socialism – in other words, freedom for the German proletariat and therefore for the German nation – can be attained only against the Jews, and because we desire the freedom of Germany and desire socialism, we are anti-Semites. Of course the Jew is a human being. No one of us has ever doubted that. But so is the flea a kind of animal, though not a very pleasant one. And, since the flea is not a pleasant kind of animal, is it not our conscientious duty to protect ourselves against him and to kill him when he bites and annoys us so that he will not do us harm? The Jews should be treated in the same way.

 

‘It is not a bad sign for us, but for you, that sixty million Germans fear two million Jews, for we do not fear these two million Jews. We fight against them. But you are too cowardly to join in this fight and merely beat about the bush instead. If these sixty million would fight against the Jews, as we do, then they would not need to be afraid any more. But the Jews would be full of fear.’

 

‘Now you must show your colors. Are you monarchists or republicans?’

 

‘Neither. We regard the form of the state as unimportant. A nation that was ruined by the Versailles Treaty has more important matters to decide than whether to be a monarchy or a republic. That question should be decided by the people when they are free. But, fundamentally, we say this. A good republic is better than a bad monarchy, and a good monarchy is better than a bad republic. Each form of government has its advantages and disadvantages. To weigh the two is the task of a free people.’

 

‘Every party has its programme. What is yours? If you want to win over the German worker, what do you offer him?’

 

‘Our programme is short and simple: freedom for the productive German people. The way is clear and simple: freedom for the German worker and his restoration into the body of the nation. Every means is justified to achieve this end. We do not reject social revolution if it brings freedom to the nation. We do not fear breaking the chains that have been laid on the nation if we must break them to make sure that the German worker shall enjoy the necessities of life.

 

‘We promise the German worker nothing but this – that we shall fight with him to the last gasp for his right to live, regardless of what this fight costs or what may come of it. We offer him the highest thing that can be offered to a people and to its oppressed classes, the fight for freedom and bread.’

 

‘What must the German worker do ?’

 

‘Nothing ever came out of nothing in this world. The worker must remember that if he wants to be free he must sacrifice himself. No one will make him free. He must do that for himself. Since freedom is the highest good, he must be willing to sacrifice everything for it, even his life.’

 

‘Isn’t Marxism perhaps correct when it asserts that the National Socialist Party is a petty bourgeois movement led by broken-down officers, students, and teachers? How can the worker believe that you want to free him? Will you be able to rid him of the conviction that the worker can be freed only through the worker?’

 

‘You have spoken much nonsense in a few words. Listen. The National Socialist Party is not a petty bourgeois movement, but, on the contrary, is a protest against the transformation of socialism and social democracy into bourgeois movements. Our leaders are not petty bourgeois. Socialists like Scheidemann, Leinert, Noske, and Bauer were petty bourgeois, though they have now become members of the upper middle class.

 

‘You ask how we can free the workers. First, the worker must free himself from those presumptuous, Jewish liars and eject them from the labor movement. They attack the real labor leaders and are actually betraying the labor movement for their own low purposes. Then look about you. Has the worker ever found another worker who could free him ? No. The so-called leaders are men like Scheidemann, Weis, Noske, and Bauer. They have all become thick, fat bourgeois. They only fought against the middle class because they were jealous of it, and when they became bourgeois themselves the fight and the jealousy ceased.

 

‘The German laborer and the convert from the middle class should stand side by side as leaders of the German labor movement. For the convert has transcended his class consciousness and does not fight because he is jealous but because he hates a class that has brought Germany to the brink of ruin. He has not turned to the proletariat in order to become bourgeois but has been led by a deep inner need to find the path leading to the creative powers of the German people. This type of man will hold out his hand to the German worker, and his mind and hand will create the miracle of the future, the Third Reich.’

 

‘If I understand you rightly, this means that the National Socialist Party is a proletarian party with bourgeois leaders ? ‘

 

‘I have already noticed that you are able to think only in terms of a dying epoch. The Germany that we want will overwhelm all these outworn ideas. We are neither bourgeois nor proletarian. The conception of the middle class is dead, and the conception of the proletariat will never again come to life. We will have none of the bourgeois world that is now decaying, nor do we want the proletarian Marxian future for which the Jews and their followers are now fighting. We want a Germany of workers. We want a Germany in which work and sacrifice are the highest’ political and moral values. Therefore, we are to-day a labor party in the best sense of the word. Once we have gained control of the state, then Germany will become a labor state, a state of workers.’

 

‘Those are fine words, but tell me what lies behind them. Or are you going to continue to conceal your thought behind phrases?’

 

‘Not at all, my friend. Understand me rightly. The future Germany will be rebuilt from the ground up. It is a mistake to believe that the middle class, as a class, can create this new productive labor when it is likewise the guardian of the state against which all these new efforts will be directed, namely, the middle-class Germany of to-day. Of course, that doesn’t mean that members of the middle class cannot cooperate in building the new Germany, but the middle class, as such, has played its historic role and will have to give way before the creative spirit of a younger, more healthy class.

 

‘In its place, this young class, – we do not call it the proletariat because that would be an insult to the German worker, – this working class will include everybody who works for the future of Germany with hand or brain. The hand is linked to the brain and the brain will maintain itself through the brutal, creative power of the hand and thus construct the new German state. This cooperation between brain and brawn will weld the mental and manual laborers into a single whole. But, as long as German workers are led by Jews, their front will be weakened by the false cry of internationalism. All German workers, mental and manual, must unite.’

 

‘In other words, you want to oppose Marxian internationalism with the national spirit of German socialism?’

 

‘Quite so. At last we are beginning to understand each other.’

 

‘But you must answer one more question. If I have understood you correctly, the enemy, whether we call him the Jew or the capitalist, thinks and feels in international terms. Therefore he can be opposed only with international weapons, and the final outcome of this struggle will be a socialist internationalism that will completely and eternally replace capitalist internationalism.’

 

‘We recognize clearly that the international enemy is breaking the backs of the European nations. There is hardly any national capital left in Germany. Our railways, mines, factories, money, gold, and the Reichsbank have all been transformed into stock certificates that lie in the treasuries of the Jewish banks of London and New York. But shares are worthless in and of themselves. They do not run on tracks; they do not extract coal; they do not produce bread or goods; they make no money and mine no gold. They are able only to skim off interest. If we had a real German state, it would declare null and void all German securities held in Jewish banks. It would treat them like so many scraps of paper and would summon into existence in Germany a government of national labor. Since we have not got such a state, we have had to fall to the level of a Dawes colony. In such a position, there is no such thing as popular wealth or national capital belonging to the people and the nation. Everything is in the power of an international banking syndicate.

 

‘Of course, we must fight against this international world power, and we should be very shortsighted if we did not support similar movements in other countries that are fighting on our front. But the purpose of this battle never has been, and never will be, the world republic of socialism. That has never existed and never will exist. It lives only in the brains of Jewish labor traitors and misled German workers. Our goal is the foundation of a new national, socialist state. We play no part in the fight that nations are making through international channels against the international forces of gold. We recognize all the limitations of the various nations that prevent a common understanding. Furthermore, international capital will never be so stupid as to enslave all nations in the same way and at the same time. They will be enslaved one after the other, and, therefore, one nation does not think of another, since it believes it can save itself only through its own efforts.

 

‘Finally, my friend, we have no time to wait for the rest of the world. We are facing the last, complete collapse, and it would be foolish to expect the aid of other nations who have never helped us yet and give no evidence that they will help us in the future. Therefore, our motto is, “God helps them that help themselves.”‘

 

‘Well and good, but now show your colors. So far, you have only been skirmishing. Now comes the decisive, cardinal question. What do you think of the solution of the social problem?’ ‘The solution of the social problem is nothing more or less than the reinstallation of the dispossessed element into the framework of the state. In order to achieve this aim, we make the following demands: –

 

‘Everything that nature gave the people, – land and soil, fields, rivers, mountains, forests, the wealth below the earth and the wealth above, – all this belongs, in principle, to the people as a whole. When an individual possesses this wealth he must feel himself in duty bound to administrate it for the good of the nation. If he administrates it badly or against the interests of the community as a whole, then the state has the right to take this wealth away from him and restore it to the community.

 

‘Production, in so far as it concerns human strength, skill, inventiveness, enterprise, and originality, is to remain in the hands of the individual. The state guarantees that every creative producer, whether a hand or a brain worker, shall enjoy the largest possible share of the output and profits of this production.

 

‘All production that is fundamentally perfected, that does not need any fresh strength, skill, inventiveness, enterprise, and originality, – in other words, railway systems, trusts, and so on, – shall revert to the possession of the state. Thus the great circle of production is closed, and every creative worker is made responsible. In carrying out this programme, we free labor from the chains of wage slavery. Our aim is a free people with a free economic system on free soil and land.

 

‘It is an old historic law that a young party which knows what it wants and which overthrows the rule of a corrupt and inwardly rotten system takes over the state and its instruments of power for a certain length of time in order to bring about, through a self-conscious, responsible dictatorship, those conditions that are necessary to carry through the new idea. This will be the case with us. Once we have taken over the state, then that state becomes our state; then we, and we only, are the responsible representatives of that state. Though to-day we are a party and must be a party, fighting against a dead system, – though not, of course, a parliamentary party, – we shall ourselves become the state the moment this system falls. Then we shall would the state in accordance with our own ideas.

 

‘We want to make Germany free, nothing more. But a large portion of the German people has become so materialistic and cowardly that it can be made happy only against its will.’

 

‘So far, well and good. But even you cannot pretend that the dictatorship will be permanent. Something else must come afterward.’

 

‘Of course. And here, too, we have thought the thing out and announced our desires. We do not want to exclude the people from leadership. We only want to fight for, and establish, the only conditions that can possibly assure their life on this planet. Once these conditions have been won and established, then our task is fulfilled, then we shall have our National Socialist state.

 

“The party parliament of democracy will be replaced by the economic parliament of the National Socialist state. This will be elected by the whole of the working German populace, who will all enjoy the same voting privileges. But in this voting the people will not be divided into parliamentary-democratic parties but into -the various professional groups that exist in the community. The economic parliament will decide economic, not state, politics. Side by side with this will stand the senate. It will include two hundred individuals summoned by the dictator from all ranks and classes to lead the nation. These two hundred will represent the elite of the whole people. They will support the government with advice and action. They will serve for life and will be self-perpetuating. The chancellor will be elected from the senate. He will bear full responsibility for the whole policy of the Reich at home and abroad. He will be ready to give his life for this policy in case of need. The chancellor will appoint his own ministers and assistants. For them, too, he will assume complete responsibility and will exercise the powers of dismissal and appointment as he pleases. It is immaterial whether this government is headed by a president or a monarch. The chancellor is the decisive figure, and we shall see to it that he will be a fine man.’

 

‘You are the eternal disturber of peace. You don’t want quiet and order, but struggle. War is your idea of ultimate wisdom.’

 

‘Now you are almost weeping. When you speak of peace your eyelids quiver. Is this peace that we are preserving to-day? Is this peace, when millions of men lie in the streets without work, without bread? Is this peace when children go hungry, when the people are reduced to beggary, when this blooming land of Germany has been made to look like a desert? What we have lived through since 1918 is nothing but war, and this war is becoming more extensive and brutal every day. Read the international stock-exchange reports. They are like military dispatches from the general headquarters of the economic struggle. Look at the German workers and their families. They are the dead and wounded in this war.

 

‘That is your peace, the peace of a cemetery. Your orderliness is the rigor of death. No, my friend, we want none of this. Instead we proclaim struggle. We want to arouse the people and summon them to break the chains that the Jews have laid upon us. When a whole nation is dying, only struggle will bring real peace. Power, not justice, is the eternal principle of nature. Therefore we want to steel our people so that it can continue to fight for existence on this earth.’

 

‘And what will the end be?’

 

‘The end will be the freedom of the German people on German land and soil. This freedom will ensure bread and life to every productive German. It will contain within itself the moral and spiritual forces that will go into the building of the new century. We want to make this freedom into something more than a new system. We want to make new men who by living under the conditions for which we have fought will develop a better attitude toward the world. The future will be ours or it will not exist at all. Liberalism is dying that socialism may live. Marxism is dying that nationalism may live. Then we shall form the new Germany, the nationalist, socialist Third Reich.’