Adolf Hitler's Own Book Mein Kampf (My Battle)/Chapter 22

by Adolf Hitler

Chapter XXII

The Federalist Veil

Let Bavarians battle Prussians and Prussians battle Bavarians, and the more the better!—this was the propaganda of the enemy during the World War, and the greater the battle between the two the more peace the Jews had, for in this way attention was diverted from those international maggots of the nations.

German people have never fully realized how vital it is that they stand together, so after the revolution its leaders in Bavaria proclaimed themselves the guardians of Bavarian interests—the international Jew, Kurt Eisner, began pitting Bavaria against Prussia. He was of course acting solely as a Jew, and was not really interested in helping Bavaria in any way.

“Education should be confined to broad general views, which, if necessary, must be drummed into the minds and feelings of the people by perpetual repetition.”

Mein Kampf—Chapter II

I have probably never in my life taken up a more unpopular cause than I did when I stood up against the Prussian-baiting of that time. Just after the World War mass meetings used to be held in Munich against the rest of Germany, and it was actually dangerous for a North German to attend such meetings. They usually ended with mad bellows—“Liberty from Prussia!”—“Down with Prussia!”—“War on Prussia!”—feelings which one individual summed up in the cry, “Better die Bavarian than rot Prussian!”

I first offered opposition to this at a meeting in Munich’s Loewenbraukeller, surrounded by a few friends, and how great was the outcry against me! This incident had the good result of uniting the friends who were with me as true followers who soon after swore to stand with me unto death.

This great struggle which I launched as an individual with the protection of merely a few old war-time friends was carried on by our new movement, later, as a sacred duty.

I am proud to say that we were able slowly to end this mixture of stupidity and treason.

I call it stupidity and treason because—although I firmly believe that the stupid masses who followed the anti-Prussian movement did so in good faith—I cannot help but feel that the leaders of the movement were traitors paid in French francs.

(Similarly, many critics of the Nazis are reluctant to blame the average German for the actions of the Nazi German state of today.)

The most dangerous thing about this treason was that federalist campaigns were such a powerful weapon with which to disguise other aims.

No federalist organization of the empire was at all possible if one of the weapons used to create such a union was an attack upon Prussia, for Prussia—the part of Germany which can be least blamed for the November crime, was the indispensable first unit of such a body. It was naturally the international Jew who spread the story—and all similar stories—that Berlin was not a city of four million serious industrious people but a cluster of degenerates and bums.

The clever Jew used all this to divert attention from himself, so that in the year 1918 there was no organized anti-Semitism in Germany. If anyone even used the word Jew he was either met with a blank stare or violently opposed. Our first efforts to reveal this real enemy to the people seemed hopeless, but in the winter of 1918-19 some anti-Jew feeling began to develop, and later we began to really put this in the foreground as the driving force of a great national movement.

As soon as this idea began its unifying work upon the German people the Jew immediately counter-attacked by trying to start the Catholics and Protestants fighting among themselves.

(This is an absolute historical falsehood.)

We must understand how this Jewish poison entering our national blood stream will, unless we stop it, eventually destroy the last Aryan virtues of our German people, putting us soon, at least in the great cities, where southern Italy has already fallen!

I declare that I see in whoever would mix up the racial movement with religious controversy a worse enemy of my race than I see in a Communist! Whoever splits the German people among themselves over any cause is the mortal enemy of the German race, and so it is only the Jew who would provoke and profit by our suicide in religious warfare.

The Nazi movement must never allow itself to be drawn into disputes between religious beliefs.

The most pious Protestant could stand in our ranks beside the most faithful Catholic without ever troubling his conscience over his religious views.

(In Chapter XII is a long note relating how Catholics fare in Nazi Germany. Devout Protestants meet no better fate, suffer more and more. Pastor Martin Niemoller, who as a submarine commander was a German War hero, and who was for some years an ardent Hitler supporter, is an outstanding example. He protested against the worst excesses of Nazi paganism—and has lain in jail for years.

(Professor of Theology Ernst Bergmann of the University of Leipzig, declared recently: “The history of Christianity is a history of lies and swindles, murder and crime, oppression and violence … burning of cities and torturing of inhabitants, inquisitions, persecution of heretics, witch-hunting, plundering of the poor and the weak, jails, enslavement of the mind, execution of the innocent.”

(Does that sound like a record of Christianity, or a summation of Nazism?

(The Nazis are setting up their own pagan religion, with their hooked cross. Faithful Nazis are married before busts of Adolf Hitler, and after the ceremony they are presented with a carefully expurgated copy of Mein Kampf.)

The great battle which the two must wage against the poisoner of Aryan humanity teaches them mutual respect.

The battle fostered by the Jews in 1919-20-21 over the question of federalism versus a really unified state compelled the Nazi movement to take a definite stand on this matter. The loss of faith in the common Reich idea is not because the provinces have lost their individual rights, but because of the shameful way the German nation is represented by its present government.

All the waving of the flag, and the festivals, and the glorifying of the constitution has not won the heart of the German people for the present government. Laws may frighten the people and prevent them from overt acts of violence against institutions of this state, but they will never win the love of any German for this state. The great lengths to which the republic must go to defend itself against its own citizens by law and prison is actually the most devastating criticism and denunciation of the entire government.

(Who waves the flags now?

(Who is trying now to win the love of the German people by putting them in concentration camps?)

It must be made clear that what characterizes the present Reich from the empire of old is this: the old empire granted internal liberties, and was a great power in foreign affairs, while the present republic is horribly weak abroad but at home suppresses the people cruelly.

The powerful national state needs few internal laws because it earns the affection of its people; the internal slave state, weak abroad, can make its people serve in foreign battle only by force.

Oppressed by foreign powers, forced to pay reparations, the present state, in order to preserve its own existence, must increasingly take rights and wealth from individual citizens and individual provinces, and it must oppress these in order to prevent revolution from rising out of the general dissatisfaction.

Therefore we Nazis can set down this basic aim: a powerful national Reich protecting the interests of its citizens abroad and thus able to grant liberty at home without any fear of the stability of the state.

A strong national government will be able to encroach to a great extent on the rights of individuals and of provinces without destroying the idea of national solidity, if it is generally recognized that such measures increase the recognition and strength of his nationality.

All the great nations of the world are becoming more unified; modern invention, particularly transportation and communication, steadily makes each nation smaller and easier to govern.

We Nazis at present, however, must not work for any unification which means the strengthening of the present, government, especially in fields where this would aid the government in the enforcement of today’s disastrous foreign policy.

We must also struggle to transform the various campaigns for the rights of the different sections of Germany into a weapon to be used against the present state and for a higher racial interest.

When we consider this problem in the light of the future, we must see that the importance of the divisions of the German people lies not in the field of power politics, but in culture.

The coming Nazi state must use the army to unify the nation, constantly watching to see that no part of it is ever used only to represent or protect some special territory of the nation.

In the same way German youth must be made to respect not only his birthplace but every inch of soil up to the frontiers of his Fatherland. The Bavarian must come to love the North Sea, and the man from Hamburg the Alps.

Nazism must claim, on the basis of principle, the right to force itself on the entire German nation, with no regard of the previous boundaries of the different federal states, just as the churches recognize no frontiers.

The Nazi doctrine is not the servant of different federal states; it is to rule all Germany.

The greater the victory of the Nazi doctrine, the greater will be the freedom which it offers to every individual German.