I personally led the preparations. Everything was aimed at the creation of ability to make rapid decisions. We wanted to outline our stands upon current events on twenty-four hour notice. Announcements of mass meetings concerned with national doings were to be made in posters and leaflets concentrating on influencing the masses through perpetual repetition of a few points.
We deliberately chose red as the color, for it is the most inflammatory, and was sure to outrage our enemies. Before we held the first mass meeting, it was necessary, in addition to formulating propaganda, to set down in print the leading articles of the program. This was done to give the movement form and substance, and to make its aims clear to the masses.
I saw in those years dozens of new movements arise but they have all withered away. One alone has survived: The National Socialist German Workers Party. To-day more than ever I believe that it can be fought, that attempts may be made to terrorize it, that petty ministers may prohibit us from writing and taking, but that victory of our ideas cannot be prevented.
The foundations of the Nazi program are the basis of the coming state.
At the time of the first great mass meeting I had one great anxiety—will the hall be filled? I believed that if a crowd appeared, the meeting would mean a tremendous lot to the success of the party.
The meeting was scheduled to begin at 7:30 in the evening. At 7:10 I entered the banquet hall of the Hofbrauhaus at the Platzl in Munich—and my heart almost burst with joy. The great hall—it seemed great to me then—was filled with a great mass of people—shoulder to shoulder—almost 2,000 of them. Above all, those whom we had wanted to reach had come. Half of the hall was filled with Communists and Independents. They had decided upon a quick end for our first great demonstration.
It was second on the program, and soon after I began to speak, there was shouting and then some fighting in the hall—peace was restored and I continued. After half an hour applause began to be greater than the shouting.
Siegfried—
And the Goddess of Revenge
I began, for the first time, to interpret the program. The interruptions were less and less. When finally, point by point, I gave the 25 points to the crowd, asking judgment upon each of them, one after another was accepted with more and more cheering, unanimously. When I finished I was faced by a hall full of poeple united by a new conviction, a new belief, a new will.
When, after almost four hours, the hall began to empty and the crowd went out, I knew that the principles of the movement marched out into the German people, never to be forgotten.
A fire had been kindled, and the flames would one day win back freedom for the Germanic Siegfried and the German nation.
I sensed that beside the coming revival there walked the Goddess of Revenge, seeking those guilty of the act of November 9th, 1918.
So the hall gradually emptied.
The movement took its course.
Chapter XIII
View of World and Party
It is usually hard to understand the basic aims of the usual Bourgeois parties. This is partly because their leaders constantly go about eaves-dropping among the dear people, and as soon as it is found that the dear people seem to desire some particular thing, that thing is immediately incorporated in the party platform.
Of course, after the elections are over, all this is forgotten for quite some time.
The whole parliamentary system consists only of a number of individual battles for seats in parliament; at least this is true in the case of the Bourgeois parties. It is because of this that they lack the magnetic attraction which is needed to draw the masses, the follow only the overwhelming impression of principles which are so strongly emphasized as to create blind faith as well as fanatic fervor to fight in their defense.
A group equipped with all the powerful weapons of a world idea, no matter if the idea is criminal in a thousand ways, can be halted as it sets out to overcome the world only if resistance itself also takes up as a weapon a new faith, which has a brave battle cry of attack, and not a cowardly defense slogan.
As we formed our party we had constantly to avoid allowing it to become a club worrying over parliamentary interests. The first measure to be taken was the creation of an inalterable program, expressed in brief, strong language, promising relief for the terrible weaknesses which brought about Germany’s downfall.
Fight, Fight
For Anything
Every view of the world fails to make any dent unless its principles are written indelibly upon the banner of a fighting movement.
The current conception of the world in general depends upon the notion that while a state has culture-making energy, it is fundamentally an economic unit and has nothing to do with race.
This nation-leveling idea would inevitably lead to leveling of the individuals into a common lump—in other words, would wind up by making a negroid-inhabited planet.
Upon the existence of the Aryan depends the civilization of the world—he who dares to lay hands upon the great likeness of the Lord sins against the Creator of this miracle and provokes the expulsion from Paradise.
Only when the Marxist international view of life is directly opposed by a racial view of life, as strongly organized as are the Marxists and as ready to fight, will success fall to the side of Eternal Truth.
Make All Enemies Seem as One
“If they had only realized the stupidity of the masses, and understood that for purely psychological reasons one must present not two enemies to the masses, but only one! A single enemy must be pushed forward and all hate must be concentrated upon this sole opponent.
It is part of the genius of a true leader to make even widely different enemies appear to belong to but a single category….
Moreover, the thought that there are various enemies will frighten people and cause them to doubt their own right. Then they come to fear that perhaps they themselves are wrong and the others are right. Then they are paralyzed. But if the masses believe that they battle but a single enemy, then belief in their own cause is strengthened and hate of one enemy is ever more bitter; is in fact boundless.”
Mein Kampf—Chapter III
(Like every politician, Hitler had a variety of opponents—bankers, business men, labor leaders, democrats, capitalists, communists, Frenchmen. His technique was to lump them all into one—and call them Jews.
The Catholic is an “internationalist”. The Jew is an “internationalist”. Therefore, Nazi propaganda reasons: “The Pope is a Jew!”)But the new world view destined to overthrow Marxism must be built only upon a solid construction of the racial view.
This is the aim of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
Our party must awaken the slumbering tendencies of folkish unity, taking out of these only the strongest essentials. With these a devout racial political creed must be formed out of the masses of the nation, providing the basis and the belief for a smashing victory of this world view.
Chapter XIV
The State
Even so early as 1921-22, our young movement was reproached by the tired Bourgeois world because we were hostile to the present state. They did not realize that really, lacking any definite idea of what a state was, no state really existed.
There exist today several different views of a state; some of these views include all that “ethical” and “moral” junk, which so obviously denies reality. Broadly, these views of the state are represented by three groups:
(a) A group of those who think of the state simply as a more or less voluntary coming-together of people under some government.
This group is the largest, and its members respect the law of the state—its legitimacy—so much that they worship it like a dog worships a master, and think that it is in itself sacred. The heads of these people thus confuse a means with an end—and they think state authority must only consider the preservation of peace and order.
(b) Much smaller is the second group, for these people attach at least a few conditions to the existence of a state.
They desire, if possible, equal administration and a uniform language, sometimes only for the sake of mechanical perfection of administration.
To these people state authority is not the sole purpose of the state; it must consider the welfare of its subjects. They take into consideration ideas of “liberty”—and most of these ideas are misunderstandings. They examine the government according to its expediency.
The chief representatives of this group are our common German Bourgeoisie, and the first thing they think about when they think of the state is whether it satisfies their economic ideas.
(c) The third group is the smallest—it sees the state as a means to the realization of vague longing for political power; and they think of a state as something welded together simply become a number of people speak the same language.
I remember how in the days of the old Austrian Empire, the pro-German element used to believe that if the government would enforce the German language on the Austrian Slavs, the Empire could in that way be Germanized. If a negro or a Chinaman learns to speak German, or is forced to learn to speak it, is he thus Germanized?
It is obvious that if such a policy had been carried out in the Austrian Empire it would have led to de-Germanization, for the outward difference between Slavs and Germans would have become difficult to see, and the result would have been racial mixture and destruction, therefore, of the German element.
It is fortunate for the German nation that the Hapsburgs did not adopt this policy.
What’s in
A Name?
If the Slavs of the Austrian Empire had been compelled to speak German, the German people today could not rightly be called a culture factor.
- (When, in March, 1939, Hitler took over Czechoslovakia, and overwhelmed the Czechs and the Slavs, the names of countless streets, squares, villages, rivers, and mountains were changed overnight, German proper names replacing Czech and Slovak names.)
People of an alien race expressing their alien thoughts in the German language would be disastrous to the dignity of our nationality because of the certain inferiority of this alien race.
How horrible it is—how much damage is done to the German race—by the fact that the quarreling German Jew, when he goes to America, is judged to be a German, due to the ignorance of many Americans!
The only thing profitably Germanized by our forefathers was soil acquired by wielding the sword, and thereafter settled with German peasants. Conquests which introduced foreign blood to our national body split the inner life and unity of the German super-individualism, and therefore were catastrophes.
- (Thus, even from Hitler’s own standpoint, the 1939 German conquest of millions of Czechs and Slovaks was a catastrophe for Germany.
- (Many people hold the view that it is the nature of a dictatorship such as Hitler’s, or Mussolini’s, that it can never rest. It must continually express itself in violent action, for otherwise the subjected people would have time to think of what is happening to them, and then they would revolt. It is quite possible that Hitler was, against his will, forced to conquer Czecho-Slovakia—he perhaps felt that some violent act or emotion, such as springs out of military conquest, was vitally needed if he was to preserve eternal peace in Nazi Germany. The easiest thing was to take over betrayed Czecho-Slovakia, so that is what he chose to do.
- (In September, 1938, Hitler’s axis partner, Mussolini, published in his Milan newspaper, Popolo d’Italia, a letter addressed to Lord Runciman, in which he stated that be was in a position to reveal, confidentially, that if Hitler were offered all the millions of Czechs and the Slovaks for inclusion in the German state, Hitler would “politely but firmly decline to take them”.
- (Clearly, at that time, less than six months before Hitler absorbed the Czechs and the Slovaks, he told his ally, Mussolini, that he did not want them.)
To sum up, none of these three views of the state realize that the great forces which create culture and all things worthy of man are based upon race—and that therefore the state must above all consider the ends of the race.
The Jew, Karl Marx, realized that to break the Bourgeois world from the idea of the racial state opened the way for his terrible doctrine which denies the state itself. Thus, when they fell victim to the wiles of the internationalists, the Bourgeoisie could no longer preserve their race, and therefore their world was doomed to death unless they were awakened.
For this reason the first duty of a new movement which is based upon the racial view of life is to see that the state is clearly understood to be guardian of the race.
The state cannot create culture—it can only serve and protect the race which creates culture.
Thus the achievement of ever higher humanity does not depend upon any state, but upon the existence and flourishing life of the race capable of creating it.
Therefore it is an incredible outrage to say that the
