Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 1/Chapter 4
4. Munich
In the spring of 1912 I moved to Munich for good.
The city itself was as familiar to me as if I had lived within its walls for years. My studies were the reason for this, since of course at every step they turned my attention upon this metropolis of German art. Not only have you not seen Germany if you do not know Munich, no, above all you do not know German art if you have not seen Munich.
In any case this period before the war was the happiest and by far the most contented of my life. Though my living was still a very scanty one, after all I did not live in order to paint, but painted to assure myself of a living, or rather to be able to continue my studies. I had the conviction that I would still some day attain the goal I had set myself. And this in itself made it easy for me to bear undisturbed the other small worries of daily life.
Furthermore there was the love that possessed me for this city, more than any other town I knew, almost from the first moment I arrived. A German city! What a difference after Vienna! Even to think back on that Babylon of races turned my stomach. Then there was the dialect, much more natural to me, which reminded me, particularly when I talked with Lower Bavarians, of the days of my youth. There must have been a thousand things which were or became dear and precious to me. But most of all I was attracted by the wonderful mating of natural vigor with a fine artistic temper, the unique line from the Hofbräuhaus to the Odeon, the Oktoberfest to the Pinakothek, etc. Today I am more attached to that city than to any other spot in the world, no doubt partly because it is and remains indissolubly bound up with the development of my own life; but the happiness of true inner contentment which I then enjoyed could be ascribed only to the magic spell which the wonderful Residence of the Wittelsbachs casts upon every person blessed not merely with a calculating intelligence but with a sensitive spirit.
Aside from my ordinary work, what attracted me most, here again, was the study of the day’s political events, particularly matters of foreign policy. To the latter I was brought by way of the German alliance policy, which even in my Austrian days I had considered absolutely mistaken. But in Vienna I had not fully realized the whole extent of the German Empire’s self-deception. I had been inclined to assume—or possibly I offered it only as an excuse to myself—that people in Berlin perhaps knew how weak and unreliable their ally would actually be, but were withholding this knowledge for more or less mysterious reasons. They might be trying to support an alliance policy which Bismarck himself had originally inaugurated and which it was not desirable suddenly to break off, if only to avoid startling the foreign countries that lay in wait or making the stodgy citizen uneasy at home.
But I was soon horrified to discover from my contacts, particularly among the people, that my belief was wrong. To my astonishment I found everywhere that even otherwise well-informed circles had not the faintest conception of the Hapsburg Monarchy’s nature. The common people particularly were victims of the notion that their ally could be considered a serious power, which would be quick to take a man’s part in the hour of need. The masses still considered the Monarchy a “German” state, and thought hopes could be built on it. They were of opinion that strength could be measured by millions there as in Germany itself; they quite forgot that in the first place Austria had long since ceased to be a German state, and in the second place the inner conditions of this Empire were moving from hour to hour ever closer to dissolution.
I understood this state structure better then than did so-called official “diplomacy,” which was reeling blindly (as almost always) toward the disaster; for the temper of the people was always but the outflow of what was poured into public opinion from above. But from above a cult like that of the golden calf was being fostered for the “ally.” They probably hoped to make up in affability for what they lacked in honesty. And yet words were always taken at face value.
Even in Vienna I had flown into a fury when I saw the occasional difference between the speeches of the official statesmen and the content of the Viennese newspapers. And yet even then, at least in appearance, Vienna was still a German city.
But how different was the situation if one traveled from Vienna, or rather from German Austria, into the Slavic provinces of the Empire! One had only to look at the Prague newspapers to see how the whole exalted thimblerigging of the Triple Alliance was judged there. They had nothing but cutting mockery and scorn for this “masterpiece of statesmanship.” In the midst of peace, while the two Emperors were pressing the kiss of friendship on each other’s brows, people did not trouble to disguise the fact that the Alliance would be done for on the day that there was any attempt to transport it from the mists of the Nibelungen ideal into practical reality.
How indignant people were a few years later when the moment came for the Alliance to prove itself, and Italy broke away from the Triple Affiance, left her two comrades to go their way, and finally herself became an enemy! That people had ever dared believe for a moment in the possibility of such a miracle—the miracle that Italy would fight on the same side with Austria—could not but have been absolutely incomprehensible to anyone not smitten with diplomatic blindness. Yet the situation in Austria was the same to a hair.
The sole support for the alliance idea in Austria came from the Hapsburgs and the Germans. The Hapsburgs gave it from calculation and because they could not help it, the Germans through good faith and political stupidity. Good faith, because in the Triple Affiance they thought they were doing the German Empire a great service, helping to strengthen and defend it; political stupidity because this belief was mistaken, and in fact they were helping to chain the Reich to a very corpse of a state, which was bound to drag both into the abyss, and above all because this very Alliance sacrificed them more and more to de-Germanization. For the Hapsburgs thought themselves—and unfortunately were in fact—protected by their alliance with Germany against interference from that quarter, and consequently it was considerably easier and less risky for them to carry out their domestic policy of slowly ousting Germanity. Not only were they shielded by the well-known “objectivity” from any protest of the German government, but by referring to the Alliance they could always stop the unseemingly mouth of Austrian Germanity if it threatened to open against some altogether too vile method of Slavicization.
And after all, what could a German in Austria do, when the Germanity of the Reich itself expressed admiration and confidence for the Hapsburg regime? Was he to resist, and be branded as a traitor to his own nationality throughout the German-speaking world? He, who for decades had made the most supreme sacrifices just for his nationality?
But what value had the Alliance once the Germanity of the Hapsburg Monarchy was exterminated? Was not the value of the Triple Alliance for Germany absolutely dependent upon the preservation of German supremacy in Austria? Or did they really suppose they could live in alliance with a Slavic Hapsburg Empire?
The attitude of official German diplomacy and the whole body of public opinion toward the Austrian domestic problem of nationalities was not even stupid—it was absolutely insane. They relied on an alliance, planned the future and safety of a people of seventy millions accordingly—and watched their partner from year to year deliberately and unwaveringly destroying the sole basis of the compact. Some day a remnant of the “treaty” with the Viennese diplomats would remain, but the aid of an allied empire would be lost.
With Italy this was the case from the outset anyway. If people in Germany had only studied history and national psychology a bit more clear-sightedly, they could never for a moment have believed that the Quirinal and the Vienna Hofburg would ever fight in a common front. Italy would have turned into a volcano before any government would have dared send a single Italian upon the battlefield, for the fanatically hated Hapsburg State, except as an enemy. More than once in Vienna I saw flare up the passionate contempt and bottomless hatred with which the Italian was “devoted” to the Austrian State. The sins of the House of Hapsburg against Italian freedom and independence through the centuries were too great to be forgotten, even if there had been any such inclination. But there was no inclination—either among the people or on the part of the Italian government.
In living together with Austria, therefore, Italy had but two possibilities: alliance and war. By choosing the first, she was able to prepare at leisure for the second.
The German alliance policy was both senseless, and dangerous, particularly since Austria’s relations with Russia came ever closer to armed conflict. Here was a classic example showing complete lack of any large and sound line of thought.
Why did they conclude an alliance at all? Only to assure the future of Germany better than Germany could have done if thrown wholly on her own resources. But the future of Germany was nothing more or less than the question of making possible the preservation of the German people’s existence.
But then the question could be only this: What shape must the life of the German nation take in the predictable future, and how can we assure the necessary basis and security for this development within the general limits of the European balance of power?
On clear consideration of the prerequisites for German statesmanship’s activity in foreign politics, we necessarily come to the following conclusion:
The yearly increase in Germany’s population is almost 900,000 souls. The difficulty of feeding this army of new citizens is bound to grow from year to year, and finally to end in catastrophe, unless ways and means are found in time to avert the danger of starvation.
There were four ways of avoiding this fearful development for the future.
1. On the French model, the increase in births could be artificially limited, and over-population thus avoided.
It is perfectly true that in times of great distress or bad climatic conditions or a poor crop yield, Nature herself takes steps to limit the increase of population in certain countries or races; but she does it both wisely and ruthlessly. She does nothing to destroy reproductivity as such, but does prevent the survival of what is reproduced, by exposing the new generation to such trials and privations that all the weaker and less healthy are forced to return to the womb of the eternally Unknown. Everything that Nature allows to survive the rigors of existence is a thousand times tested, is hard, and well fitted to go on propagating, so that the thoroughgoing winnowing may start anew. By thus brutally proceeding against the individual, and recalling him to herself instantly if he is not equal to the storms of life, she keeps the race and species strong, even pushes them to supreme achievement.
The reduction of numbers is thus a strengthening of the individual, and consequently in the end an improvement in the species.
It is otherwise when man begins to undertake a limitation of his own number. He is not carved from the granite of Nature, but is “humane.” He knows better than the cruel Queen of all wisdom. He limits not the survival of the individual, but reproduction itself. He sees himself always, and never the race; he believes this road is more human and better justified than its opposite.
But unfortunately the results as well are reversed: Nature, while allowing free propagation, puts a severe test upon survival, choosing the best among a great number of individual creatures as worthy of life, and thus retaining them alone to propagate their species; man, on the other hand, restricts breeding, but takes frantic care that every creature once born shall survive at any price. This correction of divine purpose seems to him as wise as it is humane, and he is delighted once more to have outwitted Nature, nay to have proved her inadequacy. But the Heavenly Father’s pet ape hates to see or behold the fact that while the number may indeed be restricted, the value of the individual is correspondingly reduced.
The moment propagation as such is restricted, and the number of births reduced, we have instead of the natural struggle for existence, which allows only the strongest and healthiest to live, a craving to “save” as a matter of course and at any price even what is weakest and most sickly—thus sowing the seeds of new generations which are bound to become more and more pitiful the longer this mockery of Nature and her will goes on.
But the end of it all can only be that some fine day such a people is deprived of its mundane existence; for man may indeed defy the eternal laws of the will to survive, but sooner or later there is retribution. A stronger race will drive out the weak ones: the urge for life in its final form will always break the ridiculous shackles of so-called humaneness of individuals, putting in its place the humaneness of Nature, which annihilates weakness, and puts strength in its stead.
Anyone who would assure the German people’s existence by way of a self-limitation of increase is simply robbing it of its future.
2. A second way might be the one we are again hearing constantly proposed and advocated today: internal colonization. This proposal is well-meant by many, and by fully as many is ill understood, causing the greatest imaginable harm.
No doubt the yield of a given soil can be increased within certain limits. But only within certain limits, and not indefinitely. For a certain length of time, that is, the increase of the German people can be balanced by increased productivity of our soil without danger of starvation. But against this we have the fact that the demands made upon life generally increase even faster than the population. People’s requirements for food and clothing grow from year to year, and even now, for instance, they bear no relation to the needs of our forefathers say a hundred years ago. In other words it is a mistaken belief that every increase in productivity makes possible an increase in population. No: this is true to only a certain extent, since at least part of the increased production of the soil is used up to satisfy men’s increased requirements. But even with the greatest self-denial on the one hand and the most assiduous industry on the other, a limit is still bound to come, set by the soil itself. All the assiduity in the world can wring no more out of it; and then, even if somewhat postponed, disaster again approaches. For a time starvation will recur only occasionally, with crop failures and the like. As the number of the people increases, it will recur oftener and oftener, so that at last it is absent only when rare bumper crops fill the graneries. Finally the time comes when the distress can no longer be alleviated, even then, and starvation is the eternal companion of the people. Now Nature must come to the rescue again, and make a selection among those she has chosen to live; or else man helps himself again—that is, he resorts to artificial restriction of his increase, with all the grave consequences for race and species already described.
It may still be objected that sooner or later, after all, this future awaits the whole of humanity, so that naturally no single people can escape it.
At first glance, this is absolutely true. Nevertheless we must consider the following:
Some day the impossibility of balancing the fertility of the soil with the ever-increasing population will of course compel all mankind to stop increasing the human race, and either to let Nature decide or to strike the necessary balance by self-help if possible (but then by a method better than that of today). But this will hold for every people, while at present only those races are thus distressed which no longer have the strength and energy to assure themselves of the land they require in this world. After all, the fact is that at present vast expanses of land still exist in the world quite unused, and but awaiting the cultivator. It is also true, however, that Nature is not holding this land as a reserve area against the future for a particular nation or race; the land is for the people which has the strength to take it and the industry to till it.
Nature knows no political boundaries. She simply deposits living creatures on this globe, and watches the free play of forces. The boldest and most industrious among her children is her favorite, and is set up as Lord of Creation.
If a people confines itself to internal colonization while other races are taking a grip on ever-greater areas, it will be driven to self-limitation at a time when the other peoples are still constantly on the increase. Some day that situation must occur, and the smaller the life-room at a people’s disposal, the sooner it will be. Unfortunately all too often the best nations, or rather the only truly civilized races, the mainstay of all human progress, decide in their pacifist blindness to abandon further acquisition of territory, and to content themselves with internal colonization. But inferior nations succeed in acquiring vast habitable areas of the globe.
The final result would be this: the culturally better but less ruthless races would be obliged by limited territory to restrict their increase at a time when peoples lower in civilization but more elemental and brutal would still be able, having vast territories, to increase without limit. In other words, the world will some day come into possession of the culturally inferior, but more energetic, part of humanity.
At some future day, no matter how distant, there will be two possibilities: either the world will be governed according to the ideas of our modern democracy, and the balance of every decision will he with the more numerous races; or the world will be ruled by the natural laws of relative strength, and the peoples of brutal will-power will triumph—and once again not the self-limited nation.
That the world will some day be the scene of fierce struggles for the existence of mankind, no one can doubt. In the end, the craving for self-preservation alone can be victorious. Beside it, so-called humanity, the expression of mingled stupidity, cowardice and imagined superior knowledge, melts like snow in the March sun. In eternal battle mankind became great; in eternal peace it will go to destruction.
For us Germans the slogan of “internal colonization” is perdition because (if for no other reason) it at once confirms the belief that we have found a means which on pacifist principles allows us to lead a gentle dream-life, assuring our existence by “working for” our living. If we should ever take this idea seriously, it would mean the end of any exertion to maintain the place which is rightfully ours in the world. Let the average German once become convinced that his life and future can be assured in this way as well as in some other, then every attempt actively (and thus alone fruitfully) to defend German vital necessities will be finished. If the nation took such an attitude we could regard any really useful foreign policy as dead and buried, and with it the future of the German people.
Considering these consequences it is no accident that the Jew always leads in planting such deadly ideas among our people. He knows his men too well not to realize that they will be grateful victims of any confidence man who can make them believe the means is found to snap their fingers at Nature, to render unnecessary the hard, implacable struggle for existence, to ascend (now by work, now by simply sitting still, “just however it comes”) to lordship over the planet.
I cannot sufficiently emphasize that all German internal colonization must serve primarily only to correct social abuses (particularly to withdraw the land from the reach of general speculation), but can never suffice to assure the future of the nation without new territory.
If we act otherwise, we shall soon be at the end not only of our territory, but of our strength.
There remains finally this to be pointed out:
Both the restriction to a certain small area consequent upon internal colonization and the similar eventual effect produced by a limitation of breeding lead to an extremely unfavorable military situation for the nation in question.
The size of a people’s home territory is in itself an important factor in its outward security. The greater the space at a people’s disposal, the greater too is its natural protection; for military decisions can be gained more quickly, more easily, more effectively and more completely against peoples in small, constricted territories than is possible against territorially extensive states. The large size of a state’s territory, that is, does offer a certain protection against offhand attacks, since any conquest could be accomplished only after long and severe struggles, so that the risk involved in a wanton assault will seem too great unless there are quite extraordinary reasons for it. That is to say, the very size of a state is a reason why its people can more easily preserve its freedom and independence, while conversely the smallness of such a country makes it absolutely provoke appropriation.
The first two possibilities of striking a balance between the rising population and the static amount of land were in fact opposed by so-called nationalist circles in Germany. The reasons for this attitude were, it is true, different from those given above; people were hostile to limitation of births chiefly through a certain moral feeling; they indignantly denounced internal colonization because they scented in it an attack against the great landholders, and saw here the beginning of a general struggle against private property as such. Considering the form in which this second doctrine of salvation in particular was advocated, they were in fact probably quite right in their assumption.
So far as the great masses were concerned, the defense was not very skillful, and by no means went to the heart of the problem.
There now remained but two ways to assure the rising population of work and bread.
3. Either new land could be acquired on which to push off the superfluous millions year by year, and thus to keep the nation on a self-sustaining basis, or
4. Industry and commerce could work for foreign consumption, and a living could be taken from the profits.
In other words: either a territorial or a colonial and commercial policy.
Both roads were looked at from various angles, discussed, advocated and opposed, until at last the second was definitely followed.
The sounder way would, it is true, have been the first one.
The acquisition of new land for transplantation of the overflowing population has countless advantages, particularly if we look not to the present but to the future.
The mere possibility of preserving a healthy peasant class as the cornerstone of the whole nation can never be sufficiently prized. Many of our present troubles result altogether from the unsound relation between country and city people. A solid nucleus of small and medium-scale peasant farmers has always been the best protection against such social ills as affect us today. This is, furthermore, the only solution which allows a nation to find its daily bread through the cycle of domestic economy. Industry and commerce then recede from their unhealthy position of leadership, and take their places in the general scheme of a national balanced consumption economy. Thus they are no longer the basis of the nation’s livelihood, but only auxiliary to it. By confining themselves to the role of a balance between home production and consumption in every field, they make the people’s whole livelihood more or less independent of foreign countries, or in other words they help to assure the freedom of the state and the independence of the nation, particularly in time of stress.
But it must be said that a territorial policy of this sort cannot be carried out in a place like the Cameroons, but, in these days, almost without exception only in Europe. We must take a cool, calm stand upon the position that it surely cannot be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much of this world’s soil as another has. In this case we must not let political frontiers distract us from the frontiers of eternal justice. If this earth really has room for all to live on, let us be given the soil we need in order to exist.
True, no one will do so willingly. But here the law of self-preservation takes effect; and what is denied to amity the fist must take. If our forefathers had made their decisions by the same pacifist nonsense as the present day does, we would possess but a third of our existing territory—but in that case there would scarcely be a German people left to suffer in Europe. No; it is to the natural determination to fight for our own existence that we owe the two Ostmarken of the Empire, and hence the inner strength of a large state and racial territory, which alone has allowed us to survive to the present day.
For another reason, too, this solution would have been the correct one: many European states today are like inverted pyramids. Their European territory is ridiculously small compared to their load of colonies, foreign trade, etc. We can rightly say, apex in Europe, base all over the world—as distinguished from the American Union, whose base is still on its own continent, while only the apex touches the rest of the earth. And hence indeed come the enormous strength of that State and the weakness of most European colonial powers.
England is no proof to the contrary, because in face of the British Empire we all too easily forget the Anglo-Saxon world as such. If only because of its linguistic and cultural ties with the American Union, England’s position cannot be compared with that of any other state in Europe.
For Germany, accordingly, the sole possibility of carrying through a sound territorial policy lay in acquiring new land in Europe itself. Colonies are useless for this purpose unless they are suitable for large-scale settlement by Europeans. But in the nineteenth century that sort of colonial territory could no longer be obtained by peaceful means. Such a colonial policy would of course have been possible only by way of a severe struggle, which in that case would have been more usefully directed not at extra-European territories, but at land on our own continent.
Once made, such a decision does require single-minded devotion. There must be no half-measures or hesitation in attacking a task whose accomplishment seems possible only by exerting the very last ounce of energy. The whole political guidance of the Empire, furthermore, would have had to be devoted exclusively to this purpose; no step could ever have been taken under the influence of any consideration other than realization of this task and what it involved. They would have had to realize that the goal could be attained by battle only, and, with that knowledge, to await the course of arms in calm and composure.
All the alliances, then, should have been considered and assessed for their usefulness from this standpoint alone. If European soil was wanted, by and large it could be had only at the expense of Russia; the new Empire must have returned to march the road of the ancient Knights of the German Order, to give sod to the German plow by the German sword, and to win the daily bread of the nation.
For such a policy as this there was but one ally in Europe—England.
Only with England covering our rear could we have begun a new Germanic migration. Our justification would have been no less than the justification of our forefathers. None of our pacificists refuses the bread of the East, although the first plowshare was once a sword!
No sacrifice should have been too great in winning England’s friendship. We should have given up all thought of colonies and sea power, and avoided competition with British industry. Here only absolute clear-sightedness could bring success—abandonment of world trade and colonies—abandonment of a German navy. Concentration of every means in the State’s power on the army.
The result no doubt would have been a momentary limitation, but a great and mighty future.
There was a time when England could have been talked to in that sense. England well understood that Germany, because of increasing population, had to seek some way out, and would find it either with England in Europe, or without England in the world.
Probably owing in large part to this supposition, London itself tried at the turn of the century to effect a rapprochement with Germany. Then for the first time a fact appeared which in the last few years we have been able to observe in truly alarming fashion. People were dismayed at the thought of having to pull chestnuts out of the fire for England—as if there could ever be an alliance on any other basis than that of a mutual business deal. Such a deal could easily have been made with England. British diplomacy was at least shrewd enough to know that nothing can be expected without something in return.
If we imagine a wise German foreign policy taking over Japan’s role in the year 1904, we can scarcely grasp all the results it would have had for Germany.
Things would never have got to the point of a “World War.” The bloodshed in 1904 would have saved ten times as much in the years 1914 to 1918. And what a position would be Germany’s in the world today!
True, the alliance with Austria would then have been nonsense. For this mummy of a state allied itself with Germany, not to fight a war, but to preserve a perpetual peace which could be shrewdly used for the slow but sure extermination of Germanity in the Monarchy.
But if for no other reason, this alliance was an impossibility because after all no aggressive upholding of German national interests could be expected of a state which had not even the strength and determination to put an end to the process of de-Germanization on its very borders. If Germany had not enough national common sense and even ruthlessness to wrest control over the fate of ten million of its own race, from the impossible Hapsburg State, it could hardly be expected to set its hand to such a far-sighted and daring plan. The attitude of the old Empire toward the Austrian question was the touchstone for its behavior in the whole nation’s struggle with Destiny.
In any case they had no business to watch idly while Germanity was driven back year by year; the value of Austria’s alliance after all depended wholly on the preservation of the German element.
But they did not go in that direction at all. They feared the struggle above everything, only to be forced into it finally at the least propitious moment. They hoped to flee Fate, and were overtaken by it. They dreamed of preserving world peace, and ended up in a World War.
And here was the chief reason why the third way of shaping a German future was not even considered. They knew that the acquisition of new territory could be accomplished only in the East; they saw the battle that would be necessary, and they wanted peace at any price. The watchword of German foreign policy had long since changed from “Preservation of the German nation by every means” to “Preservation of world peace by any means.” How they succeeded, everyone knows.
I shall have more to say on that subject later.
There remained the fourth possibility: industry and world trade, sea power and colonies.
At the beginning this development was, in fact, easier and quicker to achieve. The colonization of territory is a slow process, often lasting for centuries; indeed its real inner strength consists in the fact that it is not a sudden flaring up, but a sound and steady though slow growth, in contrast with industrial development, which can be inflated in the course of a few years, but which will then be more like a soap-bubble, than any kind of solid strength. It is quicker work building a navy than fighting doggedly to build farms and settle them with farmers; but the navy is also the more quickly destroyed of the two.
When Germany nevertheless chose that road, she had at least to realize clearly that even this development would end in battle some day. Only children could expect by pleasant and mannerly behavior and constant emphasis upon peaceful intentions to get their “bananas” in the “peaceful competition of nations” about which people talked such fine unctuous nothings—to succeed, that is, without ever having to resort to arms.
No: if we took this road, some day England was bound to be our enemy. It was more than silly (but quite in character with our native innocence) to be indignant because one fine day England took the liberty of rudely opposing our peaceful activity with an egotist’s violence.
We, unhappily, actually would never have done such a thing.
If European territorial politics could be carried on only against Russia and in league with England, conversely a colonial and world-trade policy was thinkable only against England and with Russia. But in that case the logical conclusion must be drawn here too—and above all, Austria must be sent packing at once.
Considered from any angle the alliance with Austria was, even by the turn of the century, true madness.
But they never dreamed of allying themselves with Russia against England, any more than with England against Russia, for in either case the result would have been war, and it was only to prevent this that the commercial and industrial policy had been decided on in the first place. In the shape of “peaceful economic” conquest of the world they had a formula which was supposed to break the neck of the old power policy once and for all. Perhaps they were sometimes not quite sure of the thing, particularly now and then when England uttered incomprehensible menaces; and so they decided to build a navy, but, once more, not to attack and annihilate England, but to “defend” the above-mentioned “world peace” and the “peaceful” conquest of the world. It was therefore kept on a somewhat more modest scale in general, not only in number, but in tonnage and armament of individual ships, so that the really “peaceable” intention might still be clear.
The fine talk about “peaceful economic” conquest of the world was probably the greatest nonsense ever elevated into a guiding principle of state policy. The nonsense was made yet worse by the fact that people did not hesitate to point to England as the chief witness for the possibility of this achievement. The share of our professorial teaching and concept of history in this blunder can scarcely be made good, and is but the most striking proof of how many people “learn” history without grasping or even understanding it. People should have recognized England as the very most crushing disproof of the theory; no people has ever more brutally prepared with the sword for its economic conquests, or more ruthlessly defended them afterward, than the English. Is it not the very most characteristic feature of British diplomacy to derive economic gain from political power, and, conversely, at once to transform every economic advance into political strength? And what a mistake to think that England was personally too cowardly to back up its economic policy with its own blood! The fact that the English people lacked a “national army” was no proof; for this is not a question of the particular military form of the armed forces, but of the will and determination to exert whatever force there is. England always had what armament she required. She always fought with the weapons which success demanded. She fought with mercenaries as long as mercenaries were enough; she dipped deep into the best blood of the whole nation when such a sacrifice was essential to bring victory; but the resolution for the struggle and the tenacity and ruthlessness with which it was conducted remained always the same.
But the German schools, press and comic journals gradually created an idea of the Englishman, and even more of his Empire, which was bound to lead to fatal self-deception. Everyone was gradually affected by this nonsense, and the result was an underestimate for which we paid most bitterly. The falsification was so profound that people firmly believed they were faced, in the Englishman, with a business man whose sharp practice was equaled only by his incredible personal cowardice. Unfortunately it did not occur to our exalted teachers of professorial wisdom that a world empire the size of England’s could not well be gathered together by sneak-thievery and swindling. The few men who sounded a warning were not listened to, or were met with a conspiracy of silence. I can still remember the astonishment upon my comrades’ faces when we clashed in person with the Tommies in Flanders. After the first few days of battle it began to dawn on everyone that these Scotsmen were not altogether like those it had been thought well to depict in comic journals and newspaper dispatches.
That was when I first began to consider what the most suitable form of propaganda was.
But this falsification did have one advantage for its perpetrators: the example, untrue though it was, could be used to demonstrate the soundness of economic conquest of the world. What the Englishman could do, we must be able to do also; our much greater honesty, the lack of any specifically English “perfidy” was considered a great advantage for us. People hoped thus the more easily to win the friendship particularly of the smaller nations, as well as the confidence of the great ones.
Because we believed it all quite seriously, we never dreamed that our honesty was an abomination to the rest of the world, which considered such behavior an extremely cunning form of mendacity. It was not until our Revolution, that they could realize the unbounded stupidity of our “honest” intentions, no doubt to their vast astonishment.
Only this nonsense of “peaceful economic conquest” of the world could make the nonsense of the Triple Alliance clear and comprehensible. With what other state could they possibly ally themselves? With Austria they could not, it is true, go forth to “warlike conquest,” even in Europe. This was the inward weakness of the Alliance from the first moment. Bismarck could permit himself this makeshift, but that did not mean every bungling successor could do the same, least of all in an age when the essential presuppositions even of Bismarck’s alliance had long since ceased to exist; for Bismarck still believed Austria was a German state. But with the gradual introduction of universal suffrage the country had sunk to a parliament-governed, un-German hurly-burly.
As a matter of race policy, too, the alliance with Austria was simply ruinous. The growth was tolerated of a new Slavic great power on the borders of the Empire, a power whose attitude toward Germany was bound sooner or later to be quite different from that of Russia, for example. At the same time, the Alliance itself was bound to grow hollower and weaker from year to year, to just the degree that the sole supporters of the idea lost influence in the Monarchy, and were crowded out of the most influential positions.
By the turn of the century the alliance with Austria had reached the same stage as Austria’s alliance with Italy.
Here again there were but two possibilities: either the Hapsburg Monarchy was an ally, or objection must be made to the ousting of Germanity. But a matter of this sort, once begun, usually ends in open battle.
Even psychologically the Triple Alliance had but a modest value, since the solidity of an alliance declines as soon as it begins to limit itself to preserving an existing situation. Conversely, an alliance increases in strength as it offers the separate parties hope of attaining tangible goals of expansion. Here as everywhere, strength is not in defense, but in attack.
This was recognized even then in various quarters, but unfortunately not in the so-called “competent” ones. The then Colonel Ludendorff, Officer on the Great General Staff, in particular, pointed to these weaknesses in a paper written in 1912. Of course the “statesmen” attached no value or importance to the matter; clear common sense apparently is needed for ordinary mortals only, while it can always be dispensed with in the case of “diplomats.”
It was lucky for Germany that in 1914 the war broke out by way of Austria, so that the Hapsburgs were compelled to take part; if it had come the other way about, Germany would have been alone. The Hapsburg State could never have taken part, or even wished to take part, in a struggle begun by Germany. Austria in that case would have done what Italy was later so loudly condemned for: it would have remained “neutral,” in order thus at least to protect the State from a revolution at the very outset. The Austrian Slavs would rather have broken up the Monarchy in 1914 than have offered help to Germany.
Very few people at that time realized how great were the dangers and added difficulties which the alliance with the Danube Monarchy involved.
In the first place Austria had too many enemies who hoped to inherit the decaying State; in the course of time Germany was bound to be exposed to some hatred as the obstacle to the universally longed-for dismemberment of the Monarchy. People came to the conclusion that in the end Vienna could be reached only by way of Berlin.
In the second place, Germany thus, lost its best and most promising possibilities of alliance. In their stead came ever-increasing tension with Russia and even with Italy. The general temper particularly in Rome, toward Germany was as friendly as that toward Austria, slumbering in the heart of every last Italian, and often even blazing high, was hostile.
Since the commercial and industrial policy had been chosen once and for all, there was no longer even the slightest reason for a struggle with Russia. Only the enemies of both nations could have any real interest in it. And in fact it was chiefly Jews and Marxists who used every means to stir up a war between the two states.
Thirdly and lastly the Alliance concealed one enormous threat to Germany: any great power hostile to Bismarck’s Empire could easily mobilize a whole string of states against Germany because enrichment at the expense of the Austrian ally could be promised to each one.
All of Eastern Europe, especially Russia and Italy, could be raised in uproar against the Danube Monarchy. The world coalition begun by King Edward would never have come into being if Austria as Germany’s ally had not been an irresistibly tempting legacy. Only thus was it possible to unite in a single attacking front states with such otherwise heterogeneous wishes and goals. In a general advance against Germany everyone could hope to enrich himself at the expense of Austria. The peril was increased to the extreme because Turkey also seemed to belong to this unlucky alliance as a silent partner.
International Jewish world finance needed this bait in order to carry out its long-cherished plan of destroying Germany, which had not yet yielded to the general international control of finance and the economic structure. It was the only way to forge a coalition which would be strong and bold enough by the pure numerical force of marching millions, and ready at last to do battle with the horned Siegfried.
The alliance with the Hapsburg Monarchy, which even in Austria had thoroughly displeased me, was now the subject of a long inward scrutiny which ended by confirming my previous opinion still further.
In the humble circles in which I moved, I made no secret of my conviction that this unhappy treaty with a state marked for destruction must lead to a catastrophic collapse of Germany as well, if we did not succeed in freeing ourselves in time. Nor did I waver for a moment in my rock-bottomed conviction, even when the storm of the World War seemed to have cut off all reasoned reflection, and the wave of enthusiasm had swept away even those whose duty it was to look absolutely coldly upon reality. Whenever I heard these problems discussed, even while I was at the front, I maintained my opinion that the alliance must be broken off, the sooner the better for the German nation, and that it would be no sacrifice at all to deliver up the Hapsburg Monarchy if Germany could thus limit the number of her adversaries; the millions had strapped on the steel helmet not to preserve a debauched dynasty, but to save the German nation.
Once or twice before the war it seemed as if at least one camp would have some faint doubt that the policy of alliance being pursued was sound. From time to time, German-Conservative circles began to give warning against too-great trustfulness, but this, like all other common sense, was but writ in water. People were convinced they were on the high road to a “conquest” of the world whose success would be enormous, and whose cost, nothing.
Once again there was nothing for the well-known “interlopers” to do but to watch in silence while the “elect” marched straight to damnation, trailing the good folk after them like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The underlying reason why it was possible to offer, and to make comprehensible to a whole people, the nonsense of “economic conquest” as a practical political method, and the preservation of “world peace” as a political goal, was a general diseased state of our entire political thinking.
With the triumphal march of German industry and invention, and the growing successes of German trade, people realized less and less that the whole thing was possible only on the presupposition of a strong state. On the contrary, in many circles people went so far as to argue that the state itself owed its existence solely to these facts, that it was primarily an economic institution, should be governed by economic interest, and hence depended for its existence upon economic life—a condition which was thereupon praised as by far the healthiest and most natural one.
But the state has nothing whatever to do with any particular economic concept or development. It is not a union of economic contracting parties within a definite limited area to perform economic tasks.
It is the organization of a community of physically and spiritually similar living beings, the better to make possible the preservation of their species as well as the attainment of the goal which Providence has set for their existence. That and that alone is the purpose and meaning of a state. The economic system is but one of the many means necessary to attain this goal. It can never be the cause or purpose of a state unless from the beginning it rests on a wrong, because unnatural, basis. That is the only explanation for the fact that the existence of a state as such need not even presuppose any definite territorial limitations. This is necessary only for peoples which desire to assure the sustenance of their own species on their own resources, that is, which are ready to decide the battle of existence by their own labor. Peoples which succeed in creeping in among the rest of mankind like drones, letting the others work for them under various pretexts, can form states without any definitely bounded life-room of their own. This is true particularly of that people from whose parasitism, today more than ever, the whole of honest humanity is suffering—Jewry.
The Jewish State has never been spatially limited, but universally unlimited in territory, while limited to the inclusion of one race. Hence this people has always formed a state within the states. It is one of the most brilliant tricks ever invented to have this State sail under the colors of a “religion,” and thus to assure it of the toleration which the Aryan is always ready to allow to a religious persuasion. For the Mosaic religion is in fact nothing but a doctrine for the preservation of the Jewish race. This is why it includes almost every field of sociological, political and economic knowledge which could possibly serve that purpose.
The instinct for preservation of the species is the original cause of the formation of human communities. But that means that the state is a popular organism, and not an economic organization. Great as the difference is, it is quite incomprehensible to the so-called “statesmen” of today. They consequently think they can build up the state by purely economic means, whereas in reality the state results only from the employment of those qualities connected with the will of species and race to survive. But these qualities are always heroic virtues, never the egoism of a tradesman, for after all the survival of a species presupposes readiness to sacrifice the individual. The words of the poet, “And if you do not stake your lives, life shall never be your prize,” signify that the surrender of personal existence is necessary to assure the survival of the species. But the most essential prerequisite for the formation and maintenance of a state is the existence of a certain feeling of community on the basis of like character and species, along with the willingness to back it by every means. With people on their own soil this leads to the creation of heroic virtues, with parasites it leads to lying hypocrisy and malicious cruelty—if these qualities cannot be proved to exist from the beginning as a prerequisite of their state existence, so different in form. Originally, the very formation of a state takes place only through the exertion of these qualities. In the consequent struggle for self-preservation those peoples will succumb (that is, will be subjugated, and thus sooner or later die out) which show the less of heroic virtues in the conflict, or are not equal to the lying craft of the hostile parasites. But even here it is almost never a lack of wisdom so much as of courage and determination, which merely tries to hide under the cloak of humane principles.
How slight is the connection between economics and the state-building and state-preserving qualities we can best see from the fact that the inner strength of a state only very rarely coincides with its so-called economic flowering. On the contrary, countless examples seem to show that the flowering is a sign of approaching decline. But if the formation of human communities were due chiefly to economic forces or impulses, the highest economic development must surely mean the greatest strength of the state, and not the reverse.
Faith in the state-building or state-preserving power of economics is particularly hard to understand when it holds sway in a country that clearly and emphatically demonstrates the historical opposite in every detail. Prussia wonderfully proved that not material qualities, but ideals and virtues alone, make possible the creation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish, until with the collapse of purely state-building capabilities the economic structure also topples—a process which we are now observing in the saddest of fashions. The material interests of mankind always flourish best while they remain in the shadow of heroic virtues; but when they attempt to take the highest place in life, they destroy the sine qua non of their own existence.
Whenever there has been progress in Germany of a strong power policy, economic life has always advanced; but whenever the economic system has become the sole content of our people’s life, smothering the virtues of idealism, the state has collapsed again, soon carrying its economic life with it into the game.
If we ask ourselves what the state-building or merely preservative forces really are, we can lump them all in one category; ability and willingness of the individual to sacrifice himself for the whole. These virtues have nothing whatever to do with economics, as we can see from the simple fact that man never sacrifices himself for economics; that is, people die not for business but only for ideals. Nothing showed the Englishman’s superiority of psychological insight into the soul of the people more clearly than the motivation he succeeded in giving to his struggle. While we were battling for bread, England was fighting for “freedom,” and not even for her own—no, for that of the little nations. We laughed at this impudence, or were annoyed at it, and thus showed the thoughtless stupidity into which so-called German statesmanship had fallen even before the war. There was no longer the faintest notion of the nature of that force which can lead men to die of their own free will and determination.
So long as the German people in 1914 still believed it was fighting for ideals, it held out; when it was told to fight simply for its daily bread, it preferred to give up.
Our intelligent “statesmen” were astonished at this change in feeling. They never understood that from the moment a man begins to fight for an economic interest he shuns death, which would prevent him forever from enjoying the reward of his struggle. To save her own child, the most delicate mother becomes a heroine; in all ages, the battle for the preservation of the species and of the hearth (or the state) that shelters it has alone driven men upon the spears of their enemies.
We may propound the following as an eternal truth:
No state has ever yet been founded by peaceful economy, but only by the instincts that preserve the species, whether they take the form of heroic virtue or crafty cunning; the former produces Aryan, working, civilized states, the latter Jewish parasite colonies. But when these instincts in a people or a state begin to be overrun by economics as such, the economic structure itself becomes a tempting cause of subjugation and oppression.
The pre-War belief that the world could be opened, or even conquered, for the German people by a peaceable colonial and commercial policy was a perfect sign that the really state-building and state-preserving virtues had been lost, and with them the consequent insight, strength of will, and determination for action; natural law brought the World War and its aftermath as retribution. To anyone who did not look below the surface, this attitude of the German nation—for it was really practically universal—could not but be an insoluble puzzle; after all, Germany, herself was the most wonderful example of an empire created on a basis of pure power politics. Prussia, the nucleus of the Empire, was created by radiant heroism, not by financial operations or business deals; and the Empire itself was but the magnificent reward of a leadership based on power politics and of soldierly courage to dare death. How could the political instincts of the Germans, of all peoples, become so diseased as this? For this was no single individual phenomenon, but a matter of disintegrating forces in terrifying number which now flickered hither and yon among the people, like will-o’-the-wisps, now attacked the nation as poisonous inflammations. It seemed as if a perpetual stream of poison was being sent by some mysterious power to the very uttermost blood-vessels of what had once been a hero’s body and was crippling common sense and the simple instinct of self-preservation more and more.
Forced by my attitude toward the German economic and alliance policy from 1912 to 1914, I reviewed these questions times without number; as the solution of the puzzle, elimination brought me more and more to that power which, from quite a different standpoint, I had already come to know in Vienna: the Marxist doctrine and world-view, and their resulting organization.
For the second time in my life I dug my way into this doctrine of destruction—being guided this time not by the impressions and effect of my daily surroundings, but by observation of the general processes of political life. I became absorbed once more in the theoretical literature of this new world, and tried to grasp its possible effects. These I compared with the actual events and course of its effect in political, cultural and economic life.
For the first time I devoted my attention also to the attempts to master this world plague.
I studied the purpose, struggle and effect of Bismarck’s emergency legislation. Gradually I laid a rock-ribbed foundation for my own belief, so that I have never since been forced to undertake a revision of my views in this question. I also further scrutinized the connection between Marxism and Jewry.
But while, in Vienna, I had taken Germany for an unshakable Colossus, now I began to have occasional uneasy misgivings. In my own mind and in the small circle of my acquaintances I quarreled with German foreign policy and with what I thought the incredibly negligent treatment of the most important problem that then existed in Germany, Marxism. I really could not understand how they could stagger so blindly toward a peril whose results as intended by Marxism itself must eventually be monstrous. Even then among my acquaintances, as I do now on a large scale, I warned against the soothing slogan of all cowardly wretches. “Nothing can happen to us!” A similar pestilential attitude had destroyed one giant empire already. Was Germany alone to be exempt from the laws applying to all other human communities?
In 1913 and 1914, in various circles some of which adhere faithfully to the National Socialist movement today, I announced my conviction that the question of the German nation’s future is the question of destroying Marxism.
In the pernicious German alliance policy I saw but one of the results of this doctrine’s disintegrating work; for the fearful thing was precisely that this poison almost invisibly destroyed every foundation of a healthy economic and state concept, often without the victims’ dreaming to what an extent their acts and wishes were the outcome of a world-concept which they otherwise sharply opposed.
The inner decline of the German people had already long since begun, as so often in life, without people’s recognizing the destroyer of their existence. Now and then there was some doctoring with the disease, but the symptoms were confused with the cause. And as people did not or would not see the cause, the struggle against Marxism had only the value of idle quackery.