Adolf Hitler's Own Book Mein Kampf (My Battle)/Chapter 15
Chapter XV
Peoples in the State
The structure today fraudulently called a state knows two kinds of people: citizens and aliens.
A citizen is generally any person born within the frontiers of the state—and this takes no consideration of race, so a negro, Jew, Pole, or Oriental can be declared a Germane citizen. Also, any burglar or pimp that is not politically objectionable—that is, a harmless political moron—can fill out a paper and thus become a citizen, in just about the way one joins an automobile club. It doesn’t matter, for instance, how corrupted by syphilis he may be.
Scarcely anything can be more stupid than our state citizenship law, which allows all this rotten poison to be incorporated into the nation every day.
The alien is marked off from the citizen in that he cannot hold public office nor vote, and he is freed from compulsory military service—generally he otherwise possesses equal rights with the citizen!
America a
German State
One state in this world is at present making at least some weak attempts to formulate somewhat more intelligent citizenship laws. Of course, this is not the German Reich; it is the United States of America, where reason is sometimes permitted to have a little influence. Excluding sickly immigrants, and absolutely barring certain races, the United States is gradually acknowledging the principles of a true racial state.
- (Hitler considers the United States to be predominantly a German racial state. A recent book published in Germany was entitled “Our America.”)
The racial state knows three classes of inhabitants: state citizens, state subjects, and aliens.
Birth itself gives nothing beyond the status of state subject; and a state subject cannot hold public office or vote. A state subject, if of foreign race, may at any time go away and become a citizen of his nation, if any.
The alien is singled out from the state subject only by the fact that he is a subject or a citizen of some foreign state.
The young state subject of German nationality must attend the schools prescribed by the government, must become fully conscious of the glory of his race and nation, must join the army, and after his discharge must pass a health test—then he is granted state citizenship, the most valuable document of his life.
He thus gains all the rights of the state citizen, and the resultant privileges. For the state must carefully draw a line between people living within the nation who are the cause of its existence and greatness, and those who are merely “employed” residents.
The German girl is a state subject, and can only become a citizen when she gets married. It is possible, however, for state citizenship to be granted to German female subjects active in the economic life of the nation.
- (Hitler simplified his classification of the Germans of his state on April 4, 1938, when in a speech delivered in Austria, he cried: “Every one in Germany is a Nazi—the few outside the Party are either lunatics or idiots.”)
It must be a higher honor to be a citizen of the German Reich as a street cleaner, than to be a king in any foreign state.
Compared to the alien the state citizen is a privileged character—he is master of the Reich.