Background: This is one of Joseph Goebbels’s early propaganda efforts, a speech given at various cities in Germany. His early Marxist leanings are more evident than they were later.
This translation is a tad unusual. A visitor to the site provided me with a translation done by a company, which turned out to be so dreadful that I ended up doing it myself almost from scratch.
The source: Joseph Goebbels, Lenin oder Hitler? A Speech (Zwickau: Streiter-Verlag, 1926)
A speech delivered on 19 February 1926 at the Opera House in Königsberg (Prussia)
All rights reserved.
Streiter-Verlag (Fritz Tittmann) Zwickau (Saale)
At the urging of many of our friends, Dr. Goebbels has issued this lecture for the public in printed form. We are well aware that the remarks in book form must lack the appeal and forcefulness of the spoken word. Nevertheless, we are putting them up for public discussion, and are doing so all the more readily because they have been received with varying degrees of success in the most diverse major cities in Germany. While in Altona and Chemnitz they led to bloody clashes, in Berlin, Dresden, Plauen, Zwickau, etc., they were greeted with cheers. Let each reader form his own opinion.
Kreisleiter-Verlag, Zwieback i. SA.
My dear fellow Germans!
The poet Peter Ros egger once describes the German Michel as he sits asleep in his armchair behind the stove, his pointed cap pulled down over his ears. His enemies stand around him and laugh at him, mock and spit at him, and take away the last thing he has left. And every now and then a good friend comes along and tries to wake up the German Michel, to make him aware of the shameful goings-on of his enemies. And when Michel is halfway awake, he rubs his eyes, gets up grumbling unwillingly, and beats up the person who woke him up.
We Germans are the most unfortunate people on which God’s sun shines. A nation of 60 million, surrounded by enemies within the country and across its borders, bleeding from a thousand wounds. The most industrious people in the world sees its political task in tearing itself apart. A people that would have every reason to unite and fight its enemies as one is splintering into dozens of parties, organizations, and economic associations and, despite its best efforts cannot find its way to itself and to the recognition of its world-historical mission. If one feels connected to this nation with a beating patriotic heart and is forced to follow its wrong and painful path in the shaping of our national will with open eyes, one would surely despair of Germany's future at times. Then one can no longer believe that this nation will ever find the iron-bound path to freedom.
And yet an unshakable faith always awakens us to ultimate hope. Then we try to understand the driving forces of the times and the people with seriousness and objectivity and suddenly realize with a flash of insight that we are not as unhappy, as lost, as torn as we might appear to be on the outside. We continue to see dozens of parties and organizations in the public life of this nation, but suddenly we see that nothing fundamental separates these parties and organizations, that they can be traced back to simpler forms of principle and that they only feign profound differences for very specific reasons of their own existence. If we take a closer look at this train of thought, the entire internal political picture of Germany is simplified in one fell swoop, and we fundamentally recognize that in reality only three major movements are shaping German politics today, movements that are, however, fundamentally different from one another because they are expressions of fundamentally different types of political worldviews.
3 Amidst all political parties and organizations we see the large bloc of preservation, of reaction, the citizens’ bloc, the conservative bloc that is rooted in the system and sees its task as preserving the system of the present state by more or less clever means, but at all costs. The bloc that stretches from the Social Democrats up to and including the German Nationals. The bloc that wants the state to stay as it is today. One party or the other from this bloc claims to be ready for reforms, whether social or national. One party claims this with agitational vehemence, the other more demurely and bashfully, depending on the attitude of its electorate, but basically they all agree in protecting and shielding the system: democracy, liberalism, capitalism, things that are sacred and inviolable to them.
On the sides of this conservative central bloc are the revolutionary movements that fundamentally and clearly recognized: if we want the state of the future, then it is not a matter of reform, but of complete revolution. The system of liberal capitalist democracy is already so rotten inside that there is nothing left to mend or reform. It must be fundamentally destroyed, shattered spiritually and in terms of power politics, so that a young, new generation can build a future on the ruins of the past. They have recognized the essence of a consistent opposition in the necessity of directing the revolution not only against the supporters of the system being fought against, but against the system itself. This is the revolutionary idea of the two spiritual movements that found their political expression in the Communist Party and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
When I talk about Lenin or Hitler, I am not referring to these two men in their purely coincidental human or no longer coincidental political appearance. It is more than that: I am talking about these two men insofar as they are the embodiment, the representation of an idea that I believe we can all accept is of deep concern to us. It is about these two men insofar as they are overcoming an old idea of the state and pioneering a new one. That is what is at issue here.
Political minds, men of history, do not come about by chance. Man and time are deeply and causally interrelated. Time shapes man and man currently gives ultimate meaning and interpretation. This applies
4 above all to the political person. He cannot be understood outside his time. He comes out of his time, is a child of his time, his people, his history. He represents time, people, and history in the clearest form.
Lenin and Hitler are children of the system, they became conquerors of the system. If we want to understand them in their essence, we must trace the dark driving forces of their time, learn to recognize what they were born of in order to understand where they are leading and going. They are not only there, they must be there. Everything in history, including the political man, has its historical cause and only from the causes can we understand the things themselves.
Which system do we have to overcome in Lenin or Hitler? Let us start with Germany.
If we have to endure the shame of the present today, in burning pain for the future, then we are looking for reasons why everything had to happen the way it did. Is the war, 9 November 1918, or even the “insane system” of the Wilhelmine era to blame for our final collapse? No, a thousand times no! The causes lie much deeper, go back decades, almost a whole century. I will try to sketch them out. With the growing industrialization of Germany around the middle of the last century, German materialism grew in the country and among the people of poets and thinkers. At that time, gigantic industrial enterprises sprang up almost overnight from German soil, around which the millions of masses of the city proletariat who had migrated from the countryside gathered. These millions of the masses were forced onto the path of alienation from the state and the nation. The leading stratum of the people failed to incorporate them into the nation, to involve them in its joys and sorrows. The larger these masses became, the more they detached themselves from the unity of the state. They were pushed to the left and here the systematic shredder of every genuine workers’ movement, the Marxist Jew, had all too easy a game leading the yearning masses down the wrong path. It is the tragic fault of the bourgeois national intelligentsia not to have recognized this development, to have let things go as they did, instead of placing itself at the head of the workers fighting for their existence and fighting with them for their rights, for the sake of the workers and thus for the sake of the nation. The bourgeoisie watched this development with stubborn rejection, not even attempting to join the fourth estate to the nation through sacrifice. The Jew knew how to quickly and effectively get ahead of the socially reactionary bourgeoisie. He saw economic and political opportunities for the future in the fourth estate early and cleverly and chose to exploit them for himself in every case. He placed
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himself at the head of the proletariat. He who had never worked presented himself to the worker as a leader and the worker gladly and willingly took the only hand that was offered to him.
The satisfied bourgeoisie watches this development with a smile on its face. It does not suspect in the least that things are in the offing here which threaten its own existence in the most sensitive way, it shuts itself off from its social obligations out of arrogance, conceit, and lack of national will to sacrifice, subordinates its responsibility to the basest merchant instincts, wages wars for the sake of the nation when it is ordered to do so, and evades all the more deliberately the requirements of its social future. Social and national are things that are absolutely incompatible. The more strictly national, the more brutally antisocial. This nation wages a heroic war in 1870/71 and fights for its political existence and greatness. It struggles for the ultimate form of nationhood and fails to find it. What followed belongs to the worst German history has to offer. A satisfied people. A people that has everything it can desire, power, wealth, possessions. But this people is sick, it seems, incurably sick. It has the germ of death in its heart. It collapses internally. It is no longer a strong organism, no longer a cohesive state. It is bleeding to death from the open wound of social need. Occasionally a doctor comes to the bedside of this people, sees this gaping wound, is shocked, shakes his head and turns away in disgust. Perhaps out of pity, fear. and shame, he sticks the band aid of social care on the wound. Then it is no longer visible.
But this wound continues to gnaw and fester under the band aid, it eats its way to the marrow of the body and is about to destroy the entire organism.
“Germany is saturated! Germany no longer has any political needs! Germany wants to conquer the world in peaceful competition!” This is the final political wisdom of a liberal bourgeoisie that has degenerated into a spirit of greed and comfort.
In August 1914, a sick people once again pulls itself together, puts on steel helmets, and performs world-historical deeds, before which time and eternity hold their breath. For 4 years, this nation stands unshaken in storms pf steel, only to collapse more miserably than any other nation in history.
A cruel riddle! Just as cruel, but no longer so puzzling if we trace the deeper causes.
Neither the system nor 8 November 1918 are solely to blame for the collapse. Both work hand in hand in a tragic combination. We heard the word “November criminals” like a curse. For a long time in unfortunate blindness we saw only in those who played out the sad comedy of 9 November.
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Today we see more and deeper. The guilt of the miserable wretches who promised freedom, peace, and prosperity, but destroyed everything remains undiminished. But the guilt of those from the so-called national camp, who in selfish blindness created the historical foundations for 9 November by excluding millions from the community demands atonement from history.
9 November is a betrayal on both sides. Nationally, the ruling class is failing. They sit in their mouse holes and let the storm roar over them. Socialism chases Marxism away. It gladly and willingly allows itself to be taken in tow by international Jewish capitalist interests. That was not a revolution! It was mutiny, it was a miserable, pathetic, cowardly stock market revolt!
The revolt began during the war. While Germany's heroic youth threw away their thrice-sacred lives for the nation in the blood-drenched battles of the World War, Marxist traitors to the people traveled the country preaching understanding. Preaching understanding, even though they knew that the enemies’ brutal frenzy of victory wanted destruction and only destruction. They ruined the nation for the sake of the party. Marxist traitors willingly helped to bless and crown the decades-long social crime against the German people on 9 November 1918. In their newspapers, at a time when Germany was fighting for its existence, this heroic nation, before whose deeds the breath of time stood still, was reviled, abused, insulted, and defiled. Jewish lackeys and accomplices helped Marxism suck the marrow out of the bones of this people through vulgarity in art, press, and theater.
For the party and only the party.
This is how morals, customs, and strength were shattered. No storm of indignation swept through this nation when Vorwärts, that so-called workers’paper, wrote the most disgraceful words ever uttered with impunity in German history, namely that it was the sacred will of social democracy that the German people should strike down the flag forever without having brought it home victorious for the last time.
Is there a better example of Pharisaism than what social democracy allowed to happen during the war: although they had the means of power without needing a general strike or treason, unprecedented capitalistic exploitation descended upon the people. Why? Because it was for the good of the party, because it was a means to an end in the hands of those who wanted to use these means as a weapon against the people and nation. One gives them too much credit if one sees in them Ranke’s ferment of decomposition. They are too small for that, too loud, too crude, too corrupt.
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Behind it we see the whole front of the born hyenas hungry for power and plunder on the battlefield of German labor.
Social Democracy was placed at the head of the state by the confidence of German proletarians, and then smilingly and stupidly covered up this form of destruction, allowing the gruesome work of murdering an entire people to take place without protest — for the sake of the party.
So 9 November 1918 came, and so it had to come. There has never been a more ridiculous, cowardly, and unimaginative revolt in world history. Alongside all the hardship, all the misery, all the national and social humiliation, it brought us infinite shame before history. It was not a revolution. It was theater, lies, betrayal, and crudity, a revolt of baseness and the pettiest party instincts.
Mr. Scheidemann stood on the steps of the Reichstag and gave peace, freedom, and prosperity to the people, while over in the West the enemy guns were still thundering the most brutal will to annihilation into his stale phrases. He brought freedom: for his party, for the betrayal of 9 November. He brought us peace: the peace of Locarno and with it the capitalism that had been fought so hypocritically and so deceitfully. He brought us bread: the bread of servitude, which was eaten with tears.
He, yes, he and his party won across the board. But the German people lost, lost completely across the board.
Allow me to ask a single question: what material benefits, quite apart from idealistic values, did 9 November bring to the German workers? Where are the achievements of this despicable revolt? I hear the cry “eight-hour day.” The shout is its own judge. You will see, my friend, that you will no longer have to work 8 or 6 hours, that not one hour of work will be found in Dawes-Germany. Back then, people were talking about socialization. Certainly, they socialized: the posts of district administrator, district president, and mayor for Social Democratic party bigwigs. People spoke of housing settlements back then. Certainly, they settled: Mr. Scheidemann settled in a fat sinecure in Kassel, Mr. Leinert in Hanover, Mr. Severing in Prussia.
If the Marxist bigwigs meant this kind of socialization and settlement, then they were right, by God, they carried out their program in the clearest way. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of the social democratic leaders, however difficult that may be. They claimed that capitalism had to be destroyed, they saw capitalism embodied in the system of 1914, they believed they had to overthrow this system in order to clear the way for socialism. That would have been the historical meaning of 9 November 1918.
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However, they knew as well as anyone that Germany was surrounded by capitalist enemies who hated a socialist state like the plague, even one built to their modest standards. To protect this state, to protect socialism, they had the necessary means of power, weapons, will, fanaticism. As socialists, as labor leaders, maintaining these means of power had to be the order of the day. 9 November 1918 would have had historical significance if the Marxist leaders, as its apostles, had called on the people to fight for the rights of the socialist state. Instead, they destroyed weapons, will, and fanaticism, they systematically destroyed every effort and every instinct of resistance. Why? Because they did not want revolution in this sense, because they did not want socialism, they were not allowed to want it. Because weapons, will, and fanaticism would necessarily have been directed against those who, after 9 November, falsified socialism, who saw in it only a convenient way to the absolute rule of capitalism, who, as alien leaders of Marxism became the real gravediggers of socialism.
So November 9 had to become a revolt, a ridiculous, disgraceful revolt by stock market swindlers, and the Marxist leaders were stupid and simple-minded enough to provide the obligatory theatrical thunder with festive speeches and eulogies for the clever crooked tricks of the gentlemen from the lending guild
Then came all the terrible and ridiculous things. Windows were smashed and grocery stores burned down. All in the name of revolution. A Jew welcomed the returning troops in Berlin with stale phrases of freedom, beauty, and dignity. All in the name of the revolution. The way was cleared for exploitation, the most shameless in all history. All in the name of the revolution. Mr. Scheidemann spoke with a wink of the beginnings of socialism, sent paper protests across the Rhine, and acknowledged with bows the sneers of the enemy, for whom he had forged the sharpest weapon to fight the German people through 0 November. His hand did not wither — and yet Versailles was signed, was signed because he had cleared the way for it with 9 November.
How boundlessly brutal the consequences of this betrayal became for those for whom the people’s “representatives” pretended to have made 9 November, for the German workers. Let us not talk around the heart of the matter! How stupid and unscrupulous is the phrase that socialism is not feasible in a shattered economy. How often did Scheidemann and Ebert persuade us that socialization would in any case lift the economy and the state and make them more productive.
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Why did they not carry out socialization when they had the power to do so, when every means had to be tried to secure the people’s existence?
Because they did not want socialization — they were not allowed to want it.
That is the crime of Marxism against the nation, the crime of Marxism against the German working class. Betrayal of the national idea. Betrayal of the idea of socialism. That is the meaning of November 9, that Marxism surrendered to both its lords and masters, to capital and the hyenas of unrestrained exploitation.
Then everything happened as it had to, in a horrific sequence of events. A chain of national humiliations was laid upon the neck of the German people, and each national humiliation brought with it cruel consequences, new social misery. An enslaved people has no right and no time for socialism. It must work for its taskmasters.
In Germany, we have sunk to the lowest level of Helotism. We hunger and starve for foreign oppressors, paying interest and compound interest and do not have the opportunity to clear the way for the German spirit of the future according to our own will.
“First bread, then reparations” chanted a recent German politician, an incapable former senior mathematics teacher, who today is in wood and politics, traveling through Germany under the historical title of “Old Reich Chancellor” [Joseph Wirth, Reich Chancellor from 1921-1922] and unloading the political wisdom of old age in front of torch-bearing Reichsbanner youths.
“First reparations, but still no bread!” We have felt it, still feel it and will feel the truth of this reversal more and more in the future.
9 November 1918 is a milestone. It is a black day at the beginning of modern German history, from which follows everything that has come and will come with brutal, iron consistency.
We signed Versailles - and no hand withered.
We allowed ourselves to be humiliated from conference to conference, as no Negro people was ever humiliated —and no one came and thundered even once: No!
The Ruhr was occupied —and the German people hid their bourgeois cowardice behind passive resistance.
The Ruhr was lost — and Mr. Gustav Stresemann saw a silver lining on the horizon.
The Dawes Laws were signed —Mr. Excellency Hergt said he had no choice.
Gustav Stresemann's silver lining flashed like a comet. The Ruhr area was evacuated. High finance wanted it that way. France played its role as bailiff. The creditor paid voluntarily. Chauvinist French generals had to grit their teeth and leave the fat sinecures they had grown fond of. They were envied in Wall Street and the City [London].
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The Moor has done his duty – the Moor can go.
Gustav Stresemann continued national Realpolitik. His fat hand signed everything that grinning enemies held before him.
A new bible was given to this people: the Dawes Treaty, the bible of economics.
Then came Locarno —and Gustav Stresemann traveled to London with a sense of world political importance, leaving behind dubious assassination rumors — and signed.
A horrible line from Versailles to Locarno. How did this come about, why did it have to come about?
When Dawes threatened Germany, warning voices were raised. But the people were assured that Dawes was the only road to salvation. The big political questions were taken out of the sphere of power politics and placed in the hands of the bankers.
And now the mysterious powers of world politics are playing one card after another. You have to have watched this game once to gain an insight into this horrific events.
Public opinion dictates. The voice of the people, the voice of God. Public opinion is sacred to the people. What is public opinion in reality? A result of capitalism. Money is public opinion. It makes it as it pleases through the press and propaganda. Public opinion made by capitalism categorically demanded the signing of the Dawes Laws. They played Münchhausen to public opinion: they had swindled about peace in the economy, about reconciliation, about equalization, they spoke about flowing streams of money that were flooding into Germany in uninterrupted succession — and public opinion signed through Gustav Stresemann.
For a mess of pottage Germany sold all of its sovereign rights, minting sovereignty, economic sovereignty, transport sovereignty. We emasculated ourselves. After 29 August 1924 we have no right to call ourselves a cultured people. Germany is a colony of world finance.
That is how the Dawes Laws brought us economic peace.
Political success is infectious. Gustav Stresemann did not rest until he had transformed political peace into economic peace.
He gave it to us through Locarno.
What happened?
One morning the sovereign people woke up and learned through the factory of public opinion that Gustav Stresemann wanted peace. He had already prophesied this peace after the Dawes Acts had been passed, but now peace was finally to be made. And this was to be achieved by Germany giving its former enemies guarantees. Is there any greater political nonsense imaginable.
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Germany disarmed to the last child’s pistol, giving security to its enemies at its borders, who were themselves armed to the teeth and greedy for plunder. What other security than for the undisturbed exploitation of German industriousness?
And now the game begins behind the scenes. A legal expert travels to London. Non-binding discussions, says Mr. Stresemann. In reality, everything is a done deal. Then preparations for Locarno are hastily made over the heads of the sovereign people.
We are the freest people in the world because we completely obey the commands of high finance.
And now the important gentlemen are traveling to Locarno. Mr. Stresemann smiles once more into the Ullstein pages of the Berliner Illustrierte, and then goes off to make world history. The financial press artfully plays the instrument of the people’s soul. It gives the German philistine what he wants. One person is told about eternal peace: a piece of public opinion is finished. Another is told about the collapse and rebuilding of the economy: the second piece of public opinion is finished. The workers are told of the specter of unemployment: the third piece is finished.
What still remains is the tough, slimy mass of the tea-literati and coffee-table politicians, the last remnant of a once proud nation of poets and thinkers. The soft, the wistful, the sentimental. The gossips, both male and female. The Jewish press bandit has tasty food for them, too. They are told about the men, the heroes, who are making politics in Europe today. They are introduced to them in a human and personal way. That inspires confidence in a pleasant way.
We read that Mrs. Chamberlain wore a green silk dress. That causes a stir in the coffee parties. We read that one day [Chancellor] Luther and Briand set off to think about the deepest things out in the woods and fields, in the bosom of nature, so to speak. That is moving. You can literally see these men, these heroes, walking through the dust of the country road and talking about the peace of Europe with fervent earnestness. They stop off in a simple pub, unnoticed, unrecognized, no one suspects that these simple, dusty wanderers hold the fate of Europe in their hands. The next day, a Jewish schmuck interviewed the landlady, and a few hours later, the German Generalanzeiger and Tageblatt press presented the whole thing to that German animal, the public. The landlady's voice is the people’s voice is God’s voice.
This simple child of nature spoke enthusiastically about her two guests. The man with a lot of hair [Briand] had stroked the kitten, and the man with very little hair [Luther] did not miss the chance to stroke the kitten as well.
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The man with a lot of hair ordered wine and the man with little hair ordered grapes. And then they sat together for quite a while.
And at the end of the meal, there was a teasing argument about who should pay the small bill. The man with little hair did’t want to let the man with a lot of hair pick up the check, but finally the man with a lot of hair found solution: “I’ll pay here and you pay the bill in Locarno.”
As the security treaties were written in Locarno, firecrackers rang out from all heights and people hugged each other in tears on the street. Strangers shook hands and kissed each other with the words “Peace on earth to mankind.”
At the statesman’s farewell dinner, place cards were laid out with floating angels of peace bearing the faces of Chamberlain, Briand, Luther, and Stresemann.
The German people was told all this, it was allowed to be told, as its political death warrant was signed. It was a substitute for political truth. This is how they fed the public animal that was crying out for food. The last piece of public opinion was ready: the soft, the wistful, the sentimental, the gossipy, both male and female, were in favor of peace. And so, Locarno was signed. The high house with the low level had the parties make the obligatory speeches out of the window — and ratified. Gustav Stresemann bid farewell to his weeping wife, who was unable to show off her new evening dress due to period of mourning in London, traveled to London with his entourage and signed the German death warrant accompanied by music and empty speeches.
The new German Bismarck had given Germany the peace of economics. Now he gave it the peace of politics. The film is over.
And what does Locarno mean? — Not peace, but war!
Mr. Stresemann is not the father, but rather the foster father and lawyer of Locarno. The security treaties emanate from England, not from Berlin. World capitalism needs outlets and investment opportunities in Russia and the Far East. England hates the Soviets who continue the old pan-Slavist policy of tsarism. France made its mercenaries available to high finance for loans. In the gigantic struggle that is brewing between world capitalism and the exploited countries in the East, England has no use for a restless Europe. It demands calm for its foreign policy. The Western democracies are gearing up for a general campaign against Soviet Russia, and the Jew is behind it all, both in world capitalism and hidden in Russian Bolshevism, to set Russian and German actions against each other, to let them tear into each other and bleed to death in a final military conflict.
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Then Jewish capital will have achieved everything, then the whole of Europe will be pacified and ripe for international exploitation. Mr. Stresemann is a henchman for this final goal. He must maneuver Germany into the League of Nations in order to open it as a transit and deployment area for Western capitalist armies. As in the Thirty Years’ War and the Seven Years’ War, Germany should once again form the ideal theater for military conflicts in Europe.
A new world war looms on the political horizon like a threatening storm. The Peace of Locarno is high finance’s preparation for the next war. Today, the German worker is being told about eternal peace. He will become impoverished and unemployed so that he can be degraded all the better and more easily by the Jewish stock exchange in pursuit of its world capitalist goals, becoming the serf of high finance.
The first siren songs of the holy crusade against Bolshevism can already be heard in the national camp. The bourgeoisie is drumming up the national youth to fight against Russia for its own selfish purposes. The German Nationalists voted against Locarno, but with strong internal reluctance. And moreover: It is nonsense to accept the Dawes Laws and reject Locarno. Because both are one and the same. What Dawes was in the field of economic policy, Locarno is in the field of power politics: voluntary surrender of all German sovereign rights to world finance.
The next great world struggle is just around the corner. And in this world struggle, German youth will leave lecture halls and factories to perform mercenary services for their bitterest enemy, in the name of freedom, in the name of civilization, in the name of human rights.
This is Europe’s political development, both in the past and in the future. That is the system of equality and brotherhood. The system whose downfall we foresee and desire. All those who have contributed to this system have been complicit, from the Social Democrats to the German Nationals. None of these parties will be able to bring freedom to Germany. They will all be swept away in the coming collapse of the system. The final battle for the state of the future will not be between them and us, but between those who are in absolute, bitter, and consistent opposition to this state, between Communism and National Socialism. This battle is unfolding with clear historical consistency. It will be fought on German soil and will decide the final fate of Germany.
The realization of this coming development forces us to take responsibility. We have a duty to deal with it seriously, objectively, without demagoguery, and without worrying about the moment. We must come together. You on the left and us.
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After all, we basically want the same thing: our goal is freedom. It is only a matter of the difficult question: how do we achieve freedom and what does it look like? It is not possible for both of us to be right. We have two fundamentally different political worldviews: one is right and the other is wrong. But we are both always and forever right about capitalism.
The will to freedom rises up from the collapsing system. It finds its form in fundamentally new ideas: in Bolshevism and National Socialism. Both emerge with the ultimate belief that they will bring freedom to an entire world by overthrowing it. Bolshevism and National Socialism are embodied in two people who lead a purposeful minority in the will to the future: Lenin and Hitler.
They are the bearers of the idea.
Man and idea are up for debate.
Lenin-Ulyanov, the son of impoverished minor Russian nobility, grew up in the hardship and social distress of the already proletarianized Russian intelligentsia. He learns about hunger first hand. It was not in books, but in hard, cruel life that he learns about social hardship, his own and that of his fellow human beings. He becomes a revolutionary at an early age, and soon a Marxist revolutionary. He studies at Russian universities and struggles through bitter hardship; he gains an insight into the social, economic, and political situation of his country and people and is horrified by the dreadful future that threatens this giant empire of the Tsar.
During his studies, he becomes a daily guest of hunger. He is a member of the already completely proletarianized young Russian intelligentsia, which is thoroughly hostile to the Tsar’s state. He lives in a country where social hardship cries out to heaven. Just think of this: in Russia before the war, you can travel down the Volga for a week, always passing the huge estate of the same owner, and on the edges of this small kingdom lie the narrow, dull cottages in which the still half-enslaved Russian peasant lives.
The Russian peasant, the uneducated child of nature. Young, adult, close to the earth, untainted by Western civilization, full of faith, religiosity, fanaticism, and mysticism. Unawakened and unbred. The smell of earth and dirt surrounds this man. He accepts his bondage as fate, as destiny. Quietly and obediently, with a great ability to endure suffering and pain.
The Russian man is still bound by fate. He endures the hardships of his time, half willingly, half reluctantly, with a dull and unresolved longing for possessions and freedom. This people lacks the idea of freedom, not only this call, but every idea.
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He will welcome and greedily accept everything that promises freedom, surrendering to it with passion. Whoever shows this person a way out of trouble will be his savior, his apostle, his god.
Once this people tries to storm the Kremlin and the tsar fires into the packed crowd. It stands like a wall and does not waver or give way. It has to be like that. “They are now all brooding about faith in the streets and marketplaces,” says Dostoevsky somewhere, the greatest Russian thinker.
Lenin grows up among this people. He wants to show this people a way. He would one day become everything to this people.
He endures expulsion and persecution, believing in his idea. He waits for his day. The war comes. Russia sacrifices masses of human lives for the sake of a Western European phantom. Lenin waits. Kerensky comes. Kerensky is swept away. He wanted to involve Lenin. He offered positions, offices, money. Lenin says no. He wants to be sole ruler. His way tolerates no compromises.
His hour comes in 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution elevates him to the head of the state, of a shattered Russia after a bloody war — and he begins the work of revolution.
I will emphasize the fundamentals. Lenin sets about solving the most burning question: the social question. He revolutionizes the economy.
In Russia, we distinguish between agricultural and industrial reform. Both are proceeding in different stages, and both must be considered separately. The social problem in Russia lies in the agrarian problem. The industrial question, which concerns us most deeply in Germany as an industrialized country, plays only a subordinate role in Russia.
How does Lenin tackle the agrarian problem? He expropriates all land and gives it to the Russian peasant as property. Not directly. He leases the land to him for 99 years. But the Russian peasant today regards land as his property. In doing so, Lenin slaps the Marxist doctrine in the face. It calls for the socialization of the means of production. Lenin sacrifices Marx and gives in to the Russian peasant’s insistence on his own soil.
Under pressure from 90 million peasants, Lenin demonstrates the basic impracticality of Marxism in his agrarian reform.
Lenin fulfills what the Russian peasant had imagined Bolshevism to be: he gives him land and soil. In doing so, however, Lenin makes the landed class, the peasant, the actual bearer of the new system. The peasant, who received freedom and property from the new state, was henceforth ready to protect this new state, his state, to which he is tightly bound by his own soil.
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And as much as the Russian peasant hates the Jew, especially the Soviet Jew, he is a passionate supporter of agrarian reform and fervently loves his country, his land and soil.
Is the reason that the Russian peasant turned against the White Guards still a mystery? When the White Guards advanced, they were initially greeted with jubilation by the peasants; after all, the Bolshevik regiment had also claimed countless bloody sacrifices among the Russian peasants. Behind the White Guards, however, followed the emigres, the old landowners, who in the meantime had been living in Paris, Berlin, and London. Their slogan was: “Down with the Soviets! Down with agrarian reform!” Naturally, the Russian peasant turned against the White Guards: “Down with the Jewish Soviets; long live Lenin's agrarian reform!” This marked the collapse of the anti-Bolshevik uprising.
One hundred years ago when Prussia lay enslaved, Baron vom Stein said: “In order to ennoble a nation, its disenfranchised part must be given political independence, freedom, and property.” He acted accordingly and carried out the emancipation of the peasants; Prussia awoke and became free.
Lenin rejected Marx’s theories in practice; he followed the example of Baron vom Stein, indeed, he explicitly referred to him during the agrarian reform.
So, Lenin’s agrarian reform really wast a partial solution to the social problem for the Russian peasant.
But what about Lenin’s industrial reform? For us Germans, this question is far more important than the question of agrarian reform. In the last 50 years we have become an industrial nation, the economy is the critical factor for our present state, reaching deep into the life of the nation, and thus the life of the individual.
Lenin’s industrial reform is therefore for us the touchstone of the value or lack of value of Lenin’s system, of communism in Germany.
Certainly, Lenin socialized Russian industry. Nevertheless, it is headed for collapse. Why was that?
Industrial reform in Russia took place as Karl Marx had suggested. They actually tried to merge industry and the state. It failed. The Russian worker got rid of his Russian bloodsuckers — to leave the field to the Jew. Today the Jew is the master of Russia, Jewish capital rules, the Russian is a slave to stock market dictatorship.
When everything in Russia was so socialized that the economy was on the verge of collapse, foreign countries, America, had to step in with loans. Wall Street saved the day. That was the result of the realization of Karl Marx’s teachings!
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“We have to make concessions,” Zinoviev-Apfelbaum told his supporters as he desperately sought rescue abroad.
It is interesting that these concessions were made to the very people we accuse of having financed the Russian revolution. Lenin’s industrial reform shows that Bolshevism was practically nothing more than a toy in the hands of capital: it was only a stage towards the complete perfection of the stock market dictatorship.
Simply stated: capital and capitalism are two different things. The struggle is against capitalism, not capital. It is not the fact that there are factories, that there are mining assets, that is to blame for our misery, but rather the way in which they are managed and exploited contrary to the people’s welfare.
Capitalism is the immoral distribution of capital.
Marxism is Jewish there, too; it fights national capital in order to make it capitalism. Its theory is demagogic. Its practice is devastating.
It is certain that the Russian industrial reform followed Karl Marx exactly; the foundation of Bolshevism is Marxism. It suffered a shameful fiasco in Russia. It is, therefore, first of all necessary to deal with Marxism theoretically. The basis of this discussion is naturally the systematic summary of Marx's program in his book Capital. The middle class citizen regards it as the cause, the basic evil of our economic misery. Is that true?
Karl Marx described the causes of capitalist development reasonably correctly. The industrialization of the European peoples leads to the proletarianization of ever larger classes and the means of production are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. According to Marx, the means of production are slowly being lost to the working people. Two classes develop. The class of the exploited employee and the class of the exploiting employer. These two classes must wage a bitter struggle against each other. And so the slogan of Marxism is: class struggle against capital!
This is where our National Socialist criticism of Marx comes in. Marx, himself a Jew, knows only one kind of capital. And yet there is a world of difference between capital and capital.
There are two types of capital, and these two types are so fundamentally different from each other that we must treat them fundamentally differently. For the time being, we are not talking about the owners of capital, but about the capital they represent in and of itself. We National Socialists distinguish between a productive, a national state capital, and a grasping, an international loan capital. What is the difference?
What is a nation? What is national?
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For us, nation is the organic union of a people into a creative community of destiny. The people is all of us, whose common blood comprises the whole, and national is everything that gives life to this people, its national existence. National capital is the creative capital that works for the nation: it is bound to the borders of the country, to the people, to the state. It consists of factories, railroads, land, mines, city and state buildings; in short: national capital is state capital, which is absolutely necessary for the life of the people; we cannot imagine taking it out of the life of the people without having to think of the end of this people at the same time. National capital not only creates value, it is also rooted in land. Our mines, for example, cannot be transported abroad, they have to stay in the country.
National state capital is contrasted with international loan capital. Loan capital no longer consists of factories, mines, railroads, and buildings; it consists essentially of money, or better still, gold. And this gold, which was actually created from economic surpluses, has become an end in itself, the ruler of the economy. This gold has accumulated in the treasuries of the Jewish stock exchange. But with the help of this gold, the stock exchange seeks power over the economy, and even more: political power, i.e., power over the nations, that is the goal of loan capital. Gold is mobile, it can be moved from country to country, it is international, not tied to its country, which makes it easier for the stock exchange to realize its goal. It is easy to see how this realization takes place.
The main concern of the stock exchange must, of course, be to get rid of national states as quickly and completely as possible. In the national states, the national classes. It must wear them down in order to be able to establish the world dictatorship of money on their ruins. For the national classes will always rebel against the poison that threatens to destroy the body of the people.
Let us take Germany as an example, because we have felt this poisoning process at first hand and still experience it on a daily basis. In our country, loan capital had to destroy five things in order to achieve its goal: the national bourgeoisie, the national intelligentsia, the German economy, German agriculture, and finally the German labor force.
However, each of these five classes had certain weapons with which it could defend itself.
The stock market began with the bourgeoisie. Its two weapons are mobile and immobile capital, money and home ownership, land and property. That is why the stock market’s fight for destruction had to be directed against these two factors. And what happened? Swindlers caused inflation and devalued currency. But the “German” government, the executing, willing organ of the stock exchange, imposed such outrageous taxes on home ownership that property is in fact no longer property at all, leaving the middle classes defenselessly exposed to the lust for power of the stock market jobbers.
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Once the bourgeoisie was finished, the national intelligentsia was also dead. The national intelligentsia emerged almost exclusively from the bourgeoisie. Now that it had been beaten to death, it was easy for the international stock market bandits to overcome the national intelligentsia and, above all, to make it cowardly and receptive to pacifism and democracy. In Russia, resisters and those calling for conflict against the shameless destructive work of the stock exchange are put up against the wall [and shot]; in Germany, they tried to strangle the fighters for truth economically if they did not keep their mouths shut. The system is the same: Bolshevik-Jewish.
The weapons of the economy consist mainly in the possibility of gaining influence over wide circles of the people. Their welfare is the welfare of the people, their misery is the misery of the people. Even more appalling was the opinion of its bearers that, thanks to the poisonous influence of Judaism, it was better to go along with Jewish stockbrokers than with the German worker. They did not even notice how the Jew as industrialist and the Jew as labor leader cleverly widened the gap between workers and employers in order to pocket the profits from this dispute as the laughing third party, grinning and rubbing his hands together in amusement: Workers and employers alike became his wage slaves at the same time.
In order to stab the economy in the back, the stock exchange needed an ally. This ally was the Marxist working class. For the stock exchange had placed its men in Marxism and they lead Marxism in a way that it is hostile to national capital, makes national difficulties for it, so that the stock exchange can absorb this capital all the more easily. Industry and agriculture, however, have only themselves to blame for the fact that everything turned out this way. Only through the antisocial behavior of the bourgeoisie was the working class ripe for the ideas of the Jew, Karl Marx, ripe for what Judaism wanted to achieve with them.
It is the sin of our ancestors to have misunderstood and misjudged the justified union of the working class and thus to have driven our workers into the hands of the Jews, a sin of the fat bourgeoisie, which is not prepared to make any sacrifices and which today has taken bitter revenge.
We have seen all this in a very clear and terrible way in the collapse of the Stinnes Group [1925]. Stinnes, who, by the way, I don’t want to defend here at all — I have been fighting for years against the consolidation of private capital because I consider the accumulation of such huge economic assets in a group to be dangerous — Stinnes was a front man. He was happy to be pushed ahead. The true, brutal enemy stood behind him, invisible as ever, hidden from all hatred.
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Hugo Stinnes was ruined by the stock market. He owed his collapse international lending capital!
The stock exchange had an interest in ruining him because he was not yet completely in its hands, because his production was partly need-based, and therefore not an end in itself!
What happened? The stock exchange advised him to buy, promising to help him with loans. And Stinnes bought; when that happened, the stock exchange withdrew the loans. The result: Stinnes’ shares fell and fell until the whole concern finally collapsed.
In this event lies a tremendous tragedy, the tragedy of the German economy in general!
Stinnes and his predecessors, as unfortunately the majority of industrial magnates still today, did not realize, did not want to realize, how foolish they were acting by making enemies of their workers and not friends. They took the stock market Jews as allies, who wanted their destruction.
The young Edmund Stinnes learned from the collapse of his father’s life’s work. When he approached his workers and offered them a stake in his company, it was too late. Incited by their Jewish leaders, incited by their Jewish “workers’” press, they became allies of the stock exchange, believed they were fighting against capitalism when they refused the young Stinnes’s offered hand, and yet only helped to realize the plans of international banking and stock exchange capital. Proof? Vorwärts wrote in those days: Workers do not accept the shares offered by Mr. Stinnes. Why does not Mr. Stinnes go to the stock exchange and sell the shares there in order to give the workers cash? It’s all in this one sentence: everyone knows that a company that suddenly sells shares on the stock exchange is finished, because the sale is a sign of great distress. The result: the share price falls rapidly, the shares are dumped, cash-rich stock market jobbers buy them for nothing and become masters of the company!
Do we need any more proof that Marxism and stock market capitalism work hand in hand? Both pursue the same goal because the leadership is in the same hands. And one hand washes the other!
That is the tragedy of the German economy, the tragedy of the German worker.
The common goal of the stock exchange and Marxism is: the complete elimination of any national economy, the transfer of all economies to the rule of the one: Judah’s stock exchange capital! The miserable “revolution” of 9 November 1918, the Russian industrial reform, everything failed, had to fail, because the masses did not recognize who the real enemy was, with whom it was necessary to settle accounts, because people shied away from dealing with the Jewish question. Especially in bourgeois circles.
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Intellectual laziness and cowardice, the fear of perhaps having to part with cherished views and habits, gave the Jew loyal allies here. And it was easy for him to win them over!
Thus, we see that communism ignored the question of international Jewish capital, had to ignore it, because the same people who represent stock exchange capital are its leaders.
Thus, we see from Lenin and his industrial reform that no salvation can come to the German people from this side, because communism, Marxism, as an ally of the Jewish stock market swindlers, never wants real freedom. It needs compliant slaves for its system of exploitation, but no free people for its plans for world domination. Real freedom means its end.
Thus, the last gigantic battle has broken out, a battle that will bring us victory or defeat.
For us, the core problem of our time is the solution to the social question. The social question is not in the sense of less work and more pay. For us, the social question is the question of the possibility and ability of our people’s comrades [Volksgenossen] to communicate with each other.
Germany will be free the moment the 30 million on the left and 30 million on the right can come to an understanding.
The bourgeois parties can never achieve this goal. Marxism does not want to achieve it.
One movement alone is capable of achieving this: National Socialism, embodied in the Führer Adolf Hitler.
Who is the most hated man in Germany today?
Adolf Hitler does not come from the intelligentsia, not from the top 10,000. He is someone who has experienced all the social misery of his time, who has studied the social question not in books but through his own experience. Hunger and cold, unemployment, he experienced it all. It is no wonder that he thought about why everything was like this and that he began to research the causes of misery at an early age.
He took part in the World War, voluntarily, as an ordinary soldier in the Bavarian army. And the war made him completely aware. He investigates things for himself. And what he sees shocks him to the core.
Marxism betrayal of the creative German people in November 1918 and the poverty and cowardice of the national bourgeoisie, the enormous gulf between people that fate ordains belong together as people’s comrades, all this made Hitler decide to devote himself to political work in the future. Hitler realized that a new idea, that only the idea of national will and social justice was capable of building the Germany of the future. He saw that the bourgeois parties were not in a position to create the new state because they had never been able to defend the old one, because they had cowardly hid in 1918 and betrayed Germany, their fatherland in its hour of need.
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He sees that the Marxist parties did not turn 9 November 1918 into a revolution for their freedom, but into a revolt for the stock market, that they smashed Germany in order to hand it over completely to world capitalism. —
Marxism did not want socialism at all because the men stood and stand behind it preached phases of freedom, peace, and prosperity, but did not want social liberation at all, only using the workers as willing slaves for their purposes!
What we call National Socialism is the result of bourgeois betrayal of the national idea and Marxist betrayal of the socialist idea.
Once before, Prussia was in exactly the same state as Germany is today; once before, it lay gagged on the ground and once before, a man came along, the bearer of a new, a mighty idea of redemption, who liberated his people by realizing this idea.
When Napoleon, the Corsican, invaded Prussia in 1806, the Prussian people had fallen asleep, and there were some clever people, “fulfillment politicians,” who said: we must make peace, we must give in, otherwise we will be completely destroyed, we will perish completely. And peace was made and they gave in. And the Prussian people were enslaved.
Then a man who stood towering over all of this, who stood up for the will to freedom to the last extremity, fought his way through: Baron vom Stein. At that time, the peasant had no connection to the nation because he was no longer the owner of the nation. He was a serf in bondage. And then came Stein and, searching for future paths for Germany’s rise, he realized that the liberation of the people was only possible if they were once again made into a united nation, if the oppressed among the people were once again placed in the community of the nation, if they were once again given the awareness that they were members of a whole, connected to this whole for better or worse. Freedom and property: for Stein, this was the solution to the patriotic plight. He made the German peasant free, gave him property, i.e., management of the nation’s material values and thus also ideal values. The consequence of the baron’s action was the uprising of 1813.
It is our deepest realization of the fact that the German worker rejected the nation because he had no part in the nation. We have recognized the deep, causal connection between the social liberation of the worker and the national freedom of Germany. We no longer believe in the [Communist] International. We have seen it shatter under the blows of 9 November 1918, we have seen it shatter under the devastating collapse of the Ruhr occupation. We have recognized the enemy, the enemy of the world: international Jewry, anonymous international loan capital. We will no longer allow this enemy of the world to deceive us with its slogan about our own freedom, because we know that this slogan is a lie and a deception.
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We want to take up the fight against this enemy of the world. We want to turn Germany into a state, the German people into a nation. This people is to be made ready to plunge the dagger into the heart of the enemy.
Attempts are still being made to neutralize the great workers’ movement under the international slogan and to lead it down the wrong path. Every time a state system has become rotten and corrupt, it has inevitably and naturally become international. The more corrupt a system is, the more international are its ties. The International is the enemy. It is trying to talk us into the International because it knows that it will then be eternally invincible.
The International can only be eliminated by the national. Every time peoples have risen up against the international world enemy, they have united more closely at the national level. If we want to free the German worker, then we must free Germany from the world plague: loan capital. Here is the enemy. For the first time we dare to name him openly.
But if we want to make clear to the German worker the moral duty of fighting against this world plague, then we must show him what he is fighting for. We must give him back what was lost to him, what envious, irresponsible elements took from him.
Today this proletarian stands before us with the brutal accusation: “I have no fatherland called Germany.” We understand that. We no longer believe the bourgeois ignoramuses and phrase-mongers who say that the fatherland is a thing in itself. We no longer believe that Germany can be liberated with hurrahs and beer hall patriotism. When the proletarian stands before us with the accusation: “I have no fatherland,” we know that this accusation is deeply justified.
What does this fatherland give him? A life full of toil and labor, sweating from early morning until late at night. All this could be endured. But the final question: “For what? For whom do I work?” requires an answer. And if the answer is missing, then this question generates destruction and accusation. I cannot demand of people that they love something they do not respect; that they should respect something they do not know. The German proletarian does not love his fatherland because he has no part in it.
We want to give him this share. We demand a share in the property, a share in the management of the property, a share in the management of the state: and to you, German proletarian, we say: you do not hate Germany, you hate the form of this Germany, democracy, capitalism! You hate that rightly. If you fight that, then you will find us on your side. If you say “I have no fatherland,” we understand you. But it is wrong to say:“ I have no fatherland, and I don't want a fatherland.” The slogan that can lead you to freedom is: “I have no fatherland — it was taken from me by people who had no right to it.”
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They did not take it from me because they could insist on the right of the strongest. They were not stronger, but smarter, meaner, more cunning than me. I have no fatherland, but want to regain this fatherland with my fists! That is the slogan that can lead Germany to freedom.
The social problem is a problem of re-establishing the international metropolitan proletariat. The German worker is not international out of love for the International, but because he has no room to take root. Being rooted creates a sense of home. A sense of home is the nucleus of national consciousness. Let us take a simple example: if you come to a foreign city, you are a stranger in this foreign city. You will walk through the streets of the city without anything tying you to this city. You will long for the moment when you can shake the dust of these streets off your feet. When you see the towers of your hometown from afar, your heart will beat faster. Why? Because you are connected to this city by something that belongs to you, be it land, be it a house, be it a family, be it a mother. That binds you; here you can put down roots; here you are bound to the cares and joys of your homeland. The German proletarian does not love his homeland because he has no homeland.
That is why we want to give him space to take root. We want to give him a share in what he creates, we want to draw him back into the nation; we want to give him responsibly for the cares and joys of his fatherland: we want to make him a member of this fatherland, a member of the nation. We have recognized that we cannot do without him. We know that Germany’s destiny for the future is linked to him. We do not come to him with bourgeois pity and social compassion, but we come to him out of the deep realization that he is a piece of Germany, that perhaps he is Germany. It is about Germany, always about Germany!
The social question is not a question of bourgeois pity, but rather a question of socialist state necessity. We know that we will have to fight for these principles against the solid majority in Germany. We know that the path we want to take is not the way of the ballot box, but a path of steady overthrow, a path of revolution. We want this social revolution in order to make Germany nationally free, this national revolution in order to consolidate the social revolution forever. Our guiding will Lagarde’s phrase: that he who has not the courage, not the strength for the outer revolution is not man enough for the inner revolution within himself. We demand of the German man of the present this revolution within himself, this rebuilding, this overturning in man himself, this molding from the old to the young person of the new Reich.
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What we want goes far beyond the bourgeoisie, far beyond reaction. We want to overcome both bourgeois and proletarian thinking. Nothing connects us to this Reich of democracy. Nothing connects us to the state of 1914. We have seen and learned. We have seen that an empire was built that stood for a thousand years, we have seen that this empire collapsed because it had become old and rotten, collapsing under the malice, the envy, the incompetence of German princes.
The structure broke, the thought remained! We have seen a difficult period of development from the first Reich to the second. We have seen this second Reich being built under the thunder of cannons outside Paris. We had to witness how this Reich collapsed under the hammer blows of 9 November 1918, collapsed because it had outlived its time, collapsed because its bearers did not have the courage and strength to defend it. We are living in the collapse of this second Reich. What is happening around us is the process of decay of this state. The structure collapsed, the idea remained!
We want to shape the German idea into a new structure, into the structure of the third Reich. We want this third Reich from the depths of our hearts, the third Reich of a Greater Germany, the third Reich of a socialist community of destiny. This goes far beyond ideas of brotherhood, far beyond the primitive doctrine of envy. We approach the German people with the final, most brutal accusation. But this final, most brutal accusation contains within it the final and greatest reconciliation. We accuse the right and reconcile with the left. We accuse the left and reconcile with the right. Both sides were guilty of the German collapse. But the primary culprit was the one on the right and therefore he must atone and make sacrifices. If he demands that the left stop thinking in proletarian ways, he must first have the courage to stop thinking in bourgeois ways.
We do not want a bourgeois state. We do not want a proletarian state. We want Germany! The nation is the last and the greatest thing, the individual is nothing before it. But this nation is only completely united when every individual has his place in it. It is only a community of destiny when the 30 million from the left are part of it as a German working community rooted in its land.
We are national because we have recognized that every great idea of the state has its origins in native soil. We are national out of a deep longing for rootedness. We are national not out of the remains of the past, but rather out from the will for the future. We want to redeem the world through Germany, not redeem Germany through the world. We are national because we know that no one will help us in our distress, that only one has the task of making Germany free: ourselves!
We are socialist because we do not want to fight for the rights of our enslaved comrades as gifts given voluntarily or even involuntarily. We are socialist because we see those rights as a state necessity and as national justice.
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We call ourselves a workers’ party not because we believe the nonsense that only the laborer is called on to save Germany. We call ourselves a workers’ party because all German workers should be with us, whether a laborer of the mind or the body. Both belong together. To the one we say: You stand at the anvil and hammer out your fate. But you are nothing if someone else is not sitting in his office making plans for Germany’s great future. To the other we say: You sit in your study and develop plans and ideas. But you are nothing if the other does not stand before his anvil and hammers your ideas into reality. Together you are everything, alone you are both lost.
The struggle is raging not only in Germany, but in the whole world. Hundreds of millions are marching in the East. They are fighting for their freedom not under the slogan “Long live the Third International,” but rather under the slogan “China for the Chinese!” The same battle is raging in India. The flames of freedom are burning in the colonies. Only Germany thinks in international terms. Only we trust in the rights of humanity, a right to love peace, rights that do not exist in the world.
Adolf Hitler once coined the phrase: Justice is power! Only when you have power will you have justice! If you have no power, you can be in the right twenty times and you will still suffer injustice!
The 30 million on the left and the 30 million on the right fight against each other. The only one that profits is the international enemy of the world. The 30 million on the left and the 30 million on the right cancel each other out. If the right wants Germany's freedom, the left is prepared to stab it in the back and vice versa. Only when both stand together again, when both have become a nation of 60 million again, can this nation win its freedom. The prerequisite for German freedom is the will to be free. Building this will is the great task of our movement. Only when 60 million people want to become free from the depths of their hearts will the fate of the world, the god of history will give his blessing. This freedom is the last and greatest thing we want.
Ask us about our goal: freedom is our goal! Ask us about our path: socialism is the path to freedom! May the know-it-alls complain and clamor, it is in vain. We will not despair of freedom as long as someone still wants freedom with with all his heart.
The socialism we want has nothing to do with international Marxist-Jewish egalitarianism. We want socialism as a doctrine of the community.
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We see socialism as the ancient Germanic idea of destiny. We want to turn Germany into a nation that is socially united, not only in joy, but also in adversity. We want to turn Germany into a nation that shares hardship, prosperity [Brot], and destiny. These are insights that do not come from books, but are the deepest insights into the deepest things that a political instinct for the future gave us.
We lost a war. No people need be broken by that. We lost a revolution. This lost revolution must be made good. We no longer see the people divided by dozens of parties, by dozens of organizations, but as having only two parts, the creative and the greedy, the hungry and the full. They will have to come to terms one day. The rich, who before the war saw Germany as a bundle of shares, who turned the war itself into a business, who after the war put themselves on the comfortable foundation of facts. The starving, who were excluded from the nation before the war, who laid their lives and health on the altar of the Fatherland in the trenches during the war, who are now being forced into a brutal and irresponsible system the likes of which world history has never seen before. They are still working past each other; the rich have still managed to steer the will for freedom of the hungry in the wrong direction. But the day of collapse will come and all will be clear, the day on which the enemy will show itself in brutal nakedness, when the hungry will attack the full because they want life, because they want the state, because they want the nation, because they want Germany.
We may be insulted and reviled. We know one thing: there is no profit today in thinking and working for freedom. People may laugh at us, at this vanishing minority that is unfurling the flag of freedom in a country of majorities during a time of brutal collapse. History is only ever made by the purposeful minority led by the radical will to freedom, to renewal. One may laugh at the young who are outraged by the old. We are proud to find the youth in our ranks. For us, youth is not in and of itself a fault and age is not in and of itself a virtue. We want to encourage youthful activism and know that youth has the great task of accomplishing this work of freedom. We do not give a damn about the experience and the enlightened wisdom of old age. What we are living through has nothing to do with experience, nothing to do with wisdom. The collapse of a great people is so monstrous and so terrible that it affects everyone, young and old alike, with the same brutality. None of the living previously experienced what we are going through today. But young people have always been in the middle of it. They became men so early in the terrible years of the past.
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In their youth young people have seen and suffered more than any other generation. Who dares throw the first stone? We have shed the past and will continue to shed the past. We know that the battle will cost blood, but also that no drop of blood is in vain, but is rather the seed of longing on German soil. We are this youth, driven by a will for our mission, driven by the need to act, formed by the task that world history has given us. This youth is building the Germany of the future. They laugh at the experience, at the brilliant know-it-allism of those older and wiser than they. What we want is greater than experience and knowledge. Young National Socialist Germany wants nothing more than to help, to test to explain, and to work. They represent a new idea that will transform the future. They are conscious fighters for the spirit of the coming national state in the clearest possible form and structure. Their only relationship to the old state is one of boundless hatred against its spirit and against its representatives. They will lead the battle against the democratic-liberal system. The deepest power of a freedom movement comes not from cold reason, but rather from will, from passion, which one day will flow over the people with volcanic force and sweep away all that was half-hearted and cowardly. We are so terribly enslaved that no reasoning and no statistics can free us. The only thing than can free us is the will to freedom, and the decision to subordinate all thinking and feeling and action to this will.
We are not fighting against the International because we want to suppress the slaves’ will to freedom. The International knows no will to freedom. We have recognized the lie of the International. Never has an oppressed class been liberated through international protests, but only through the national will to the future. The French citizen at the end of the 18th century did not wait for the solidarity of German and English citizen. He shook off the chains by his own efforts, at the moment when they became unbearable for him. The powers of the old system tried to wear him down, but he fought back and carried his ideas of liberalism victoriously throughout the world. The same today. The German worker will only become free when he liberates himself by his own efforts, and he will do so when he can no longer endure the chains of slavery.
He still raves about the International without having understood it in its deepest sense. His and our most bitter enemy, democracy, money, is international. And money is not overcome by democracy and not by money, but by blood alone.
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The path to freedom goes through the nation. The more united this nation, the stronger and more fervent the will to freedom. The task of National Socialism to mobilize this passionate will to freedom in a national and socialist way. We want freedom, as do you German workers on the left, only by other means, by means that lead to the goal. International solidarity is your program. The solidarity of the nation, the people’s community, is ours. People will learn that our people’s community is not the pacifist mush that the bourgeoisie think it is. The people’s community today is nothing other than the struggle for the rights of the people, for the sake of the nation. We want this struggle because it alone can bring us freedom.
We must fight for the future. You from the left and we, we are fighting against each other without really being enemies. In the process, the forces fragment and we never reach our goal. Perhaps the final crisis will lead you to us. Perhaps! —— Don’t shake your head; this question is about the future of Germany, and even more about the future of Central Europe. The new state or ruin and chaos — both are in our hands.
We young men of Germany, we bear the fate of generations. Let us never forget that! From the left and from the right, people will find their way to us when the need is greatest. There is no way from us to you. Why can we not join forces with the bourgeois parties? Because we come from two worlds. They come from collapse, we from a prophetic premonition of the future state. They stand in our way. They preach to us as bourgeois complainers and want to dampen our will to freedom and moderate our national and social views. But we have learned this in the years of collapse: revolutions are never made in parliament, even if new motions and new resolutions are introduced every day. Outside, among the people, the force that is building the new state is fermenting, the force that the bourgeoisie cannot win over because it does not really want to win it over. To organize this strength is the task of the workers’ party, so much maligned by the bourgeois parties.
As terrible and hopeless as the German plight is, we believe in the day that will come. This day will come because it must come. Germany’s youth has not suffered in vain. History cannot ignore the fact that a generation of fighters bled to death on the battlefields for an idea, unconsciously perhaps, but it lived in all of them, this idea, as a belief for the far-sighted, as a premonition for the believers. A young Germany learned that we are on earth to make sacrifices for the nation. And so, his thoughts and actions revolve around Germany, Germany alone.
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We see Russia not as a problem of the present, but rather as a problem of the future. Russia is embedded in the larger problem of Europe, and if Russia awakes, the world will see a miracle. We young Germans sense this miracle with the instincts of people of the present. We are not unworldly dreamers who see Germany’s only hope for the future in this miracle. Our task much more is to leave nothing, absolutely nothing, undone so that when this coming miracle occurs we can face it as an equal partner or join at its side. Russia will have an awakening that will be more terrible than war. This awakening will bring about a socialist national state, for which the young generation in all countries fervently longs, consciously or unconsciously.
That we learned from the collapse of the International. From the misery and lies of an alien and slimy pacifism, from an empty solidarity of the classes, a national instinct is raising its victorious flags amidst the collapsing European systems. Almost unnoticed, the formation of national states of socialist nature begins.
Socialism cannot and will not redeem the world. The world will never be redeemed. A people, perhaps peoples, will be redeemed. That is the state doctrine of the nation of the future.
We no longer believe in the proletariat’s will to solidarity. We no longer believe in world revolution, no longer believe in world redemption. We believe in nothing more than our own strength. We believe in it all the more fervently with all the fanaticism, with all the will for the future that burns within us. No one can redeem us but ourselves. If anyone believed they could save us, we would not want them to, because we heroically believe that we can do it ourselves. We are socialists, German socialists. We do not want to be that in vain. We are not content with an attitude. We have learned and continue to learn. We seek to consolidate and deepen our convictions through work and constant creativity. We want clarity, clarity!
We are not yet known! The gentle, lukewarm, and cowardly will be terrified by the radicalism of our demands, by the relentless logic of what must be done and what we are willing to do because it has to be done. Today, people in Germany know that no one can outdo us in our national fanaticism for freedom. People will soon realize that we are also united in the will to socialism, that we are in the front line. One thing still holds us firm in the struggle, one thing still preserves our hope for the future and our passionate love for the people, freedom, and fatherland: our belief in the German worker of the mind and the fist. We believe in that. We believe in the will to sacrifice, in the berserk power of freedom that lies dormant within him and will one day awaken. We believe in socialism in the worker, we believe in the rhythm of the masses.
31
We believe in the future of history. That is our last comfort, our last support. If we ever have to say that we no longer believe in it, then despair is our last resort. But that cannot be, that will not be. We are struggling for the soul of the German worker. It is there. It slumbers under hardship, misery, and hunger, waiting for the one who will deliver it from death. Wake up to life! This is what fate has chosen us for. We are destined for greater things than mere power. We are to bring the new state and with it the new man. That is not just a phrase, it is a clear, sober truth. This new man is already raising his still tired, slumbering head and speaks words full of world-historical vastness: “A time of a brutality that we cannot yet imagine is approaching, indeed, we are already in the midst of it. In the face of these events, every debate is turning to foam. The call to action will sweep into the new Europe, a raging tidal wave with a blood-red crest, over all the idle talk that tires us fruitlessly, over the hucksters, literati, and weaklings. For peace dwells not with the coward, but with the sword. Not all the fearless are yet buried under the ruins that cover Germany.”
That will be fulfillment. But an endless path leads to this fulfillment. We all seek it with groping efforts. The pioneer is someone who leads the way for all of us — Adolf Hitler. He unfurled the flag of freedom for the first time in an age of boundless cowardice, in a time of brutal red terror. He fought for this flag with his passionate belief in freedom. He carried this flag forward in the stormy days of November 1923. As the leader of the idea, he led his followers into the hail of reactionary bullets. The Marxists may decry us as bourgeois and capitalist. It was not the workers, not the Marxists who shot at us on 9 November 1923, but reaction. They shot at us because we were not willing to cowardly and comfortably rest on the ground of facts, because we set the passionate will for freedom in motion, because we did not preach as our ultimate goal: “Peace is the first civic duty,” but as a precondition for freedom the passionate desire for this freedom.
This is how we forge ahead as those who still believe in Germany’s future. This is how we unloose the volcanic eruption of the new will for freedom and know that the volcano will one day become a reality on barricades of revolution.
That is what we want, that is what we are. We promise only one thing: that we are honest fighters for what we want
So, we call to battle. The flag of German revolution flutters before us: a red field with a white circle and a black swastika. Under this flag we fight for what today is just a phrase and empty magic: peace between mind and fist. People’s community!
Last edited 22 March 2024
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