The talk about the 'peaceful economic' conquest of the world was possibly the greatest nonsense which has ever been exalted to be a guiding principle of state policy. What made this nonsense even worse was that its proponents did not hesitate to call upon England as a crown witness for the possibility of such an achievement. The crimes of our academic doctrine and conception of history in this connection can scarcely be made good and are only a striking proof of how many people there are who 'learn' history without understanding or even comprehending it. England, in particular, should have been recognized as the striking refutation of this theory; for no people has ever with greater brutality better prepared its economic conquests with the sword, and later ruthlessly defended theme than the English nation. Is it not positively the distinguishing feature of British statesmanship to draw economic acquisitions from political strength, and at once to recast every gain in economic strength into political power? And what an error to believe that England is personally too much of a coward to stake her own blood for her economic policy! The fact that the English people possessed no 'people's army' in no way proved the contrary; for what matters is not the momentary military form of the fighting forces, but rather the will and determination to risk those which do exist. England has always possessed whatever armament she happened to need. She always fought with the weapons which success demanded. She fought with mercenaries as long as mercenaries sufficed; but she reached down into the precious blood of the whole nation when only such a sacrifice could bring victory; but the determination for victory, the tenacity and ruthless pursuit of this struggle, remained unchanged.
In Germany, however, the school, the press, and comic magazines cultivated a conception of the Englishman's character, and almost more so of his empire, which inevitably led to one of the most insidious delusions; for gradually everyone was infected by this nonsense, and the consequence was an underestimation for which we would have to pay most bitterly. This falsification went so deep that people became convinced that in the Englishman they faced a business man as shrewd as personally he was unbelievably cowardly. The fact that a world empire the size of the British could not be put together by mere subterfuge and swindling was unfortunately something that never even occurred to our exalted professors of academic science. The few who raised a voice of warning were ignored or killed by silence. I remember well my comrades' looks of astonishment when we faced the Tommies in person in Flanders. After the very first days of battle the conviction dawned on each and every one of them that these Scotsmen did not exactly jibe with the pictures they had seen fit to give us in the comic magazines and press dispatches.
It was then that I began my first reflections about the importance of the form of propaganda.
This falsification, however, did have one good side for those who spread it: by this example, even though it was incorrect, they were able to demonstrate the correctness of the economic conquest of the world. If the Englishman had succeeded, we too were bound to succeed, and our definitely greater honesty, the absence in us of that specifically English 'perfidy,' was regarded as a very special plus. For it was hoped that this would enable us to win the affection, particularly of the smaller nations, and the confidence of the large ones the more easily.
It did not occur to us that our honesty was a profound horror to the others, if for no other reason because we ourselves believed all these things seriously while the rest of the world regarded such behavior as the expression of a special slyness and disingenuousness, until, to their great, infinite amazement, the revolution gave them a deeper insight into the boundless stupidity of our honest convictions.
However, the absurdity of this 'economic conquest' at once made the absurdity of the Triple Alliance clear and comprehensible. For with what other state could we ally ourselves? In alliance with Austria, to be sure, we could not undertake any military conquest, even in Europe alone. Precisely therein consisted the inner weakness of the alliance from the very first day. A Bismarck could permit himself this makeshift, but not by a long shot every bungling successor, least of all at a time when certain essential premises of Bismarck's alliance had long ceased to exist; for Bismarck still believed that in Austria he had to do with a German state. But with the gradual introduction of universal suffrage, this country had sunk to the status of an unGerman hodgepodge with a parliamentary government.
Also from the standpoint of racial policy, the alliance with Austria was simply ruinous. It meant tolerating the growth of a new Slavic power on the borders of the Reich, a power which sooner or later would have to take an entirely different attitude toward Germany than, for example, Russia. And from year to year the alliance itself was bound to grow inwardly hollower and weaker in proportion as the sole supporters of this idea in the monarchy lost influence and were shoved out of the most decisive positions.
By the turn of the century the alliance with Austria had entered the very same stage as Austria's pact with Italy.
Here again there were only two possibilities: either we were in a pact with the Habsburg monarchy or we had to lodge protest against the repression of Germanism. But once a power embarks on this kind of undertaking, it usually ends in open struggle.
Even psychologically the value of the Triple Alliance was small, since the stability of an alliance increases in proportion as the individual contracting parties can hope to achieve definite and tangible expansive aims. And, conversely, it will be the weaker the more it limits itself to the preservation of an existing condition. Here, as everywhere else, strength lies not in defense but in attack.
Even then this was recognized in various quarters, unfortunately not by the so-called 'authorities.' Particularly Ludendorff, then a colonel and officer in the great general staff, pointed to these weaknesses in a memorial written in 1912. Of course, none of the 'statesmen' attached any value or significance to the matter; for clear common sense is expected to manifest itself expediently only in common mortals, but may on principle remain absent where 'diplomats' are concenned.

For Germany it was sheer good fortune that in 1914 the war broke out indirectly through Austria, so that the Habsburgs were forced to take part; for if it had happened the other way around Germany would have been alone. Never would the Habsburg state have been able, let alone willing, to take part in a confiict which would have arisen through Germany. What we later so condemned in Italy would then have happened even earlier with Austria: they would have remained 'neutral' in order at least to save the state from a revolution at the very start. Austrian Slavdom would rather have shattered the monarchy even in 1914 than permit aid to Germany.
How great were the dangers and difficulties entailed by the alliance with the Danubian monarchy, only very few realized a' that time.
In the first place, Austria possessed too many enemies who were planning to grab what they could from the rotten state to prevent a certain hatred from arising in the course of time against Germany, in whom they saw the cause of preventing the generally hoped and longed-for collapse of the monarchy. They came to the conviction that Vienna could finally be reached only by a detour through Berlin.
In the second place, Germany thus lost her best and most hopeful possibilities of alliance. They were replaced by an evermounting tension with Russia and even Italy. For in Rome the general mood was just as pro-German as it was antiAustrian, slumbering in the heart of the very last Italian and often brightly flanng up.
Now, since we had thrown ourselves into a policy of commerce and industry, there was no longer the slightest ground for war against Russia either. Only the enemies of both nations could still have an active interest in it. And actually these were primarily the Jews and the Marxists, who, with every means, incited and agitated for war between the two states.
Thirdly and lastly, this alliance inevitably involved an infinite peril for Germany, because a great power actually hostile to Bismarck's Reich could at any time easily succeed in mobilizing a whole series of states against Germany, since it was in a position to promise each of them enrichment at the expense of our Austrian ally.
The whole East of Europe could be stirred up against the Danubian monarchy-particularly Russia and Italy. Never would the world coalition which had been forming since the initiating efforts of King Edward have come into existence if Austria as Germany's ally had not represented too tempting a legacy. This alone made it possible to bring states with otherwise so heterogeneous desires and aims into a single offensive front. Each one could hope that in case of a general action against Germany it, too, would achieve enrichment at Austria's expense. The danger was enormously increased by the fact that Turkey seemed to be a silent partner in this unfortunate alliance.
International Jewish world finance needed these lures to enable it to carry out its long-desired plan for destroying the Germany which thus far did not submit to its widespread superst3te control of finance and economics. Only in this way could they forge a coalition made strong and courageous by the sheer numbers of the gigantic armies now on the march and prepared to attack the horny Siegfried at last.
The alliance with the Habsburg monarchy, which even in Austria had filled me with dissatisfaction, now became the source of long inner trials which in the time to come reinforced me even more in the opinion I had already conceived.
Even then, among those few people whom I frequented I made no secret of my conviction that our catastrophic alliance with a state on the brink of ruin would also lead to a fatal collapse of Germany unless we knew enough to release ourselves from it on time. This conviction of mine was firm as a rock, and I did not falter ill it for one moment when at last the storm of the World War seemed to have excluded all reasonable thought and a frenzy of enthusiasm had seized even those quarters for which there should have been only the coldest consideration of reality. And while I myself was at the front, I put forwards whenever these problems were discussed, my opinion that the alliance had to be broken off, the quicker the better for the German nation, and that the sacrifice of the Habsburg monarchy would be no sacrifice at all to make if Germany thereby could achieve a restriction of her adversaries; for it was not for the preservation of a debauched dynasty that the millions had donned the steel helmet, but for the salvation of the German nation.

On a few occasions before the War it seemed as though, in one camp at least, a gentle doubt was arising as to the correctness of the alliance policy that had been chosen. German conservative circles began from time to time to warn against excessive confidence, but, like everything else that was sensible, this was thrown to the winds. They were convinced that they were on the path to a world ' conquest,' whose success would be tremendous and which would entail practically no sacrifices.
There was nothing for those not in authority to do but to watch in silence why and how the ' authorities' marched straight to destruction, drawing the dear people behind them like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.




The deeper cause that made it possible to represent the absurdity of an ' economic conquest ' as a practical political method, and the preservation of 'world peace' as a political goal for a whole people, and even to make these things intelligible, lay in the general sickening of our whole political thinking.
With the victorious march of German technology and industry, the rising successes of German commerce, the realization was increasingly lost that all this was only possible on the basis of a strong state. On the contrary, many circles went so far as to put forward the conviction that the state owed its very existence to these phenomena, that the state itself Drimarilv represented an economic institution, that it could be governed according to economic requirements, and that its very existence depended on economics, a state of affairs which was regarded and glorified as by far the healthiest and most natural.
But the state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development.
It is not a collection of economic contracting parties in a definite delimited living space for the fulfillment of economic tasks, but the organization of a community of physically and psychologically similar living beings for the better facilitation of the maintenance of their species and the achievement of the aim which has been allotted to this species by Providence. This and nothing else is the aim and meaning of a state. Economics is only one of the many instruments required for the achievement of this aim. It is never the cause or the aim of a state unless this state is based on a false, because unnatural, foundation to begin with. Only in this way can it be explained that the state as such does not necessarily presuppose territorial limitation. This will be necessary only among the peoples who want to secure the maintenance of their national comrades by their own resources; in other words, are prepared to fight the struggle for existence by their own labor. Peoples who can sneak their way into the rest of mankind like drones, to make other men work for them under all sorts of pretexts, can form states even without any definitely delimited living space of their own. This applies first and foremost to a people under whose parasitism the whole of honest humanity is suffering, today more than ever: the Jews.
The Jewish state was never spatially limited in itself, but universally unlimited as to space, though restricted in the sense of embracing but one race. Consequently, this people has always formed a state within states. It is one of the most ingenious tricks that was ever devised, to make this state sail under the fiag of 'religion,' thus assuring it of the tolerance which the Aryan is always ready to accord a religious creed. For actually the Mosaic religion is nothing other than a doctrine for the preservation of the Jewish race. It therefore embraces almost all sociological, political, and economic fields of knowledge which can have any bearing on this function.
The urge to preserve the species is the first cause for the formation of human communities; thus the state is a national organism and not an economic organization. A difference which is just as large as it is incomprehensible, particularly to our so-called ' statesmen ' of today. That is why they think they can build up the state through economics while in reality it results and always will result solely from the action of those qualities which lie in line with the will to preserve the species and race. And these are always heroic virtues and never the egoism of shopkeepers, since the preservation of the existence of a species presupposes a spirit of sacrifice in the individual. The sense of the poet's words, 'If you will not stake your life, you will win no life,' is that the sacrifice of personal existence is necessary to secure the preservation of the species. Thus, the most sensible prerequisite for the formation and preservation of a state is the presence of a certain feeling of cohesion based on similarity of nature and species, and a willingness to stake everything on it with all possible means, something which in peoples with soil of their own will create heroic virtues, but in parasites will create lying hypocrisy and malignant cruelty, or else these qualities must already be present as the necessary and demonstrable basis for their existence as a state so different in form. The formation of a state, originally at least, will occur through the exercise of these qualities, and in the subsequent struggle for self-preservation those nations will be defeated- that is, will fall a prey to subjugation and thus sooner or later die out which in the mutual struggle possess the smallest share of heroic virtues, or are not equal to the lies and trickery of the hostile parasite. But in this case, too, this must almost always be attributed less to a lack of astuteness than to a lack of determination and courage, which only tries to conceal itself beneath a cloak of humane convictions.
How little the state-forming and state-preserving qualities are connected with economics is most clearly shown by the fact that the inner strength of a state only in the rarest cases coincides with so-called economic prosperity, but that the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state's approaching decline. If the formation of human societies were primarily attributable to economic forces or even impulses, the highest economic development would have to mean the greatest strength of the state and not the opposite.
Belief in the state-forming and state-preserving power of economics seems especially incomprehensible when it obtains in a country which in all things clearly and penetratingly shows the historic reverse. Prussia, in particular, demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish, until with the collapse of the pure state-forming faculties the economy collapses too; a process which we can observe in so terrible and tragic a form right now. The material interests of man can always thrive best as long as they remain in the shadow of heroic virtues; but as soon as they attempt to enter the primary sphere of existence, they destroy the basis for their own existence.
Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power, the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people's life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life along with it.
If, however, we consider the question, what, in reality, are the state-forming or even state-preserving forces, we can sum them up under one single head: the ability and will of the individual to sacrifice himself for the totality. That these virtues have nothing at all to do with economics can be seen from the simple realization that man never sacrifices himself for the latter, or, in other words: a man does not die for business, but only for ideals. Nothing proved the Englishman's superior psychological knowledge of the popular soul better than the motivation which he gave to his struggle. While we fought for bread, England fought for 'freedom'; and not even for her own, no, for that of the small nations. In our country we laughed at this effrontery, or were enraged at it, and thus only demonstrated how emptyheaded and stupid the so-called statesmen of Germany had becorne even before the War. We no longer had the slightest idea concerning the essence of the force which can lead men to their death of their own free will and decision.
In 1914 as long as the German people thought they were fighting for ideals, they stood firm; but as soon as they were told to fight for their daily bread, they preferred to give up the game.
And our brilliant 'statesmen' were astonished at this change in attitude. It never became clear to them that from the moment when a man begins to fight for an economic interest, he avoids death as much as possible, since death wo lid forever deprive him of his reward for fighting. Anxiety for the rescue of her own child makes a heroine of even the feeblest mother, and only the struggle for the preservation of the species and the hearth, or the state that protects it, has at all times driven men against the spears of their enemies.
The following theorem may be established as an eternally valid truth:
Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means, but always and exclusively by the instincts of preservation of the species regardless whether these are found in the province of heroic virtue or of cunning craftiness; the one results in Aryan states based on work and culture, the other in Jewish colonies of parasites. As soon as economics as such begins to choke out these Instincts in a people or in a state, it becomes the seductive cause of subjugation and oppression.
The belief of pre-war days that the world could be peacefully opened up to, let alone conquered for, the German people by a commercial and colonial policy was a classic sign of the loss of real state-forming and state-preserving virtues and of all the insight, will power, and active determination which follow from them; the penalty for this, inevitable as the law of nature, was the World War with its consequences.
For those who do not look more deeply into the matter, this attitude of the German nation-for it was really as good as general-could only represent an insoluble riddle: for was not Germany above all other countries a marvelous example of an empire which had risen from foundations of pure political power? Prussia, the germ-cell of the Empire, came into being through resplendent heroism and not through financial operations or commercial deals, and the Reich itself in turn was only the glorious reward of aggressive political leadership and the death defying courage of its soldiers. How could this very German people have succumbed to such a sickening of its political instinct? For here we face, not an isolated phenomenon, but forces of decay which in truly terrifying number soon began to flare up like will-o'-the-wisps, brushing up and down the body politic, or eating like poisonous abscesses into the nation, now here and now there. It seemed as though a continuous stream of poison was being driven into the outermost blood-vessels of this once heroic body by a mysterious power, and was inducing progressively greater paralysis of sound reason and the simple instinct of selfpreservation .
As innumerable times I passed in review all these questions, arising through my position on the German alliance policy and the economic policy of the Reich in the years 1912 to 1914-the only remaining solution to the riddle became to an ever-increasing degree that power which, from an entirely different viewpoint, I had come to know earlier in Vienna: the Marxist doctrine and philosophy, and their organizational results.
For the second time I dug into this doctrine of destruction- this time no longer led by the impressions and effects of my daily associations, but directed by the observation of general processes of political life. I again immersed myself in the theoretical literature of this new world, attempting to achieve clarity concerning its possible effects, and then compared it with the actual phenomena and events it brings about in political, cultural, and economic life.
Now for the first time I turned my attention to the attempts to master this world plague.
I studied Bismarck's Socialist legislation 1 in its intention struggle, and success. Gradually I obtained a positively granite foundation for my own conviction, so that since that time I have never been forced to undertake a shift in my own inner view on this question. Likewise the relation of Marxism to the Jews was submitted to further thorough examination.
Though previously in Vienna, Germany above all had seemed to me an unshakable colossus, now anxious misgivings sometimes entered my mind. In silent solitude and in the small circles of my acquaintance, I was filled with wrath at German foreign policy and likewise with what seemed to me the incredibly frivolous way in which the most important problem then existing for Germany, Marxism, was treated. It was really beyond me how people could rush so blindly into a danger whose effects, pursuant to the Marxists' own intention, were bound some day to be monstrous. Even then, among my acquaintance, just as today on a large scale, I warned against the phrase with which all wretched cowards comfort themselves: 'Nothing can happen to us!' This pestilential attitude had once been the downfall of a gigantic empire. Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same laws as all other human organisms?

In the years 1913 and 1914, I, for the first time in various circles which today in part faithfully support the National Socialist movement, expressed the conviction that the question of the future of the German nation was the question of destroying Marxism.

In the catastrophic German alliance policy I saw only one of the consequences called forth by the disruptive work of this doctrine; for the terrible part of it was that this poison almost invisibly destroyed all the foundations of a healthy conception of economy and state, and that often those affected by it did not themselves realize to what an extent their activities and desires emanated from this philosophy srhich they otherwise sharply ejected.
The internal decline of the German nation had long since begun, yet, as so often in life, people had not achieved clarity concerning the force that was destroying their existence. Sometimes they tinkered around with the disease, but confused the forms of the phenomenon with the virus that had caused it. Since they did not know or want to know the cause, the struggle against Malsisrs was no better than bungling quackery.

Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter V: The World War


As A YOUNG SCAMP in my wild years, nothing had so grieved me as having been born at a time which obviously erected its Halls of Fame only to shopkeepers and government officials. The waves of historic events seemed to have grown so smooth that the future really seemed to belong only to the 'peaceful contest of nations'; in other words, a cozy mutual swindling match with the exclusion of violent methods of defense. The various nations began to be more and more like private citizens who cut the ground from under one another's feet, stealing each other's customers and orders, trying in every way to get ahead of one another, and staging this whole act amid a hue and cry as loud as it is harmless. This development seemed not only to endure but was expected in time (as was universally recommended) to remodel the whole world into one big department store in whose vestibules the busts of the shrewdest profiteers and the most lamblike administrative officials would be garnered for all eternity. The English could supply the merchants, the Germans the administrative officials, and the Jews no doubt would have to sacrifice themselves to being the owners, since by their own admission they never make any money, but always 'pay,' and, besides, speak the most languages.
Why couldn't I have been born a hundred years earlier? Say at the time of the Wars of Liberation when a man, even without a 'business,' was really worth something?!
Thus I had often indulged in angry thoughts concerning my earthly pilgrimage, which, as it seemed to me, had begun too late, and regarded the period 'of law and order' ahead of me as a mean and undeserved trick of Fate. Even as a boy I was no 'pacifist,' and all attempts to educate me in this direction came to nothing.
The Boer War was like summer lightning to me.
Every day I waited impatiently for the newspapers and devoured dispatches and news reports, happy at the privilege of witnessing this heroic struggle even at a distance.
The Russo-Japanese War found me considerably more mature, but also more attentive. More for national reasons I had already taken sides, and in our little discussions at once sided with the Japanese. In a defeat of the Russians I saw the defeat of Austrian Slavdom.
Since then many years have passed, and what as a boy had seemed to me a lingering disease, I now felt to be the quiet before the storm. As early as my Vienna period, the Balkans were immersed in that livid sultriness which customarily announces the hurricane, and from time to time a beam of brighter light flared up, only to vanish again in the spectral darkness. But then came the Balkan War and with it the first gust of wind swept across a Europe grown nervous. The time which now followed lay on the chests of men like a heavy nightmare, sultry as feverish tropic heat, so that due to constant anxiety the sense of approaching catastrophe turned at last to longing: let Heaven at last give free rein to the fate which could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed and with the thunder of Heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries.
When the news of the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand arrived in Munich (I happened to be sitting at home and heard of it only- vaguely), I was at first seized with worry that the bullets may have been shot from the pistols of German students, who, out of indignation at the heir apparent's continuous work of Slavization, wanted to free the German people from this internal enemy. What the consequence of this would have been was easy to imagine: a new wave of persecutions which would now have been 'justified' and 'explained' in the eyes of the whole world. But when, soon afterward, I heard the names of the supposed assassins, and moreover read that they had been identified as Serbs, a light shudder began to run through me at this vengeance of inscrutable Destiny.
The greatest friend of the Slavs had fallen beneath the bullets of Slavic fanatics.
Anyone with constant occasion in the last years to observe the relation of Austria to Serbia could not for a moment be in doubt that a stone had been set rolling whose course could no longer be arrested.
Those who today shower the Viennese government with reproaches on the form and content of the ultimatum it issued, do it an injustice. No other power in the world could have acted differently in the same situation and the same position. At her southeastern border Austria possessed an inexorable and mortal enemy who at shorter and shorter intervals kept challenging the monarchy and would never have left off until the moment favorable for the shattering of the Empire had arrived. There was reason to fear that this would occur at the latest with the death of the old Emperor; by then perhaps the old monarchy would no longer be in a position to offer any serious resistance. In the last few years the state had been so bound up with the person of Francis Joseph that the death of this old embodiment of the Empire was felt by the broad masses to be tantamount to the death of the Empire itself. Indeed, it was one of the craftiest artifices, particularly of the Slavic policy, to create the appearance that the Austrian state no longer owed its existence to anything but the miraculous and unique skill of this monarch; this flattery was all the more welcome in the Hofburg, since it corresponded not at all to the real merits of the Emperor. The thorn hidden in these paeans of praise remained undiscovered The rulers did not see, or perhaps no longer wanted to see, that the more the monarchy depended on the outstanding statecraft, as they put it, of this 'wisest monarch' of all times, the more catastrophic the situation was bound to become if one day Fate were to knock at his door, too, demanding its tribute.
Was old Austria even conceivable without the Emperor?!
Wouldn't the tragedy which had once stricken Maria Theresa have been repeated?
No, it is really doing the Vienna circles an injustice to reproach them with rushing into a war which might otherwise have been avoided. It no longer could be avoided, but at most could have been postponed for one or two years. But this was the curse of German as well as Austrian diplomacy, that it had always striven to postpone the inevitable reckoning, until at length it was forced to strike at the most unfavorable hour. We can be convinced that a further attempt to save peace would have brought war at an even more unfavorable time.
No, those who did not want this war had to have the courage to face the consequences, which could have consisted only in the sacrifice of Austria. Even then the war would have come, but no longer as a struggle of all against ourselves, but in the form of a partition of the Habsburg monarchy. And then they had to make up their minds to join in, or to look on with empty hands and let Fate run its course.
Those very people, however, who today are loudest in cursing the beginning of the war and offer the sagest opinions were those who contributed most fatally to steering us into it.
For decades the Social Democrats had carried on the most scoundrelly war agitation against Russia, and the Center for religious reasons had been most active in making the Austrian state the hinge and pivot of Germany policy. Now we had to suffer the consequences of this lunacy. What came had to come, and could no longer under any circumstances be avoided. The guilt of the German government was that in order to preserve peace it always missed the favorable hours for striking, became entangled in the alliance for the preservation of world peace, and thus finally became the victim of a world coalition which countered the idea of preserving world peace with nothing less than determination for world war.
If the Vienna government had given the ultimatum another milder form, this would have changed nothing in the situation except at most one thing, that this government would itself have been swept away by the indignation of the people. For in the eyes of the broad masses the tone of the ultimatum was far too gentle and by no means too brutal, let alone too far-reaching Anyone who today attempts to argue this away is either a forgetful blockhead or a perfectly conscious swindler and liar
The struggle of the year 1914 was not forced on the masses- no, by the living God-it was desired by the whole people.
People wanted at length to put an end to the general uncertainty. Only thus can it be understood that more than two million German men and boys thronged to the colors for this hardest of all struggles, prepared to defend the flag with the last drop of their blood.




To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.
A fight for freedom had begun, mightier than the earth had ever seen; for once Destiny had begun its course, the conviction dawned on even the broad masses that this time not the fate of Serbia or Austria was involved, but whether the German nation was to be or not to be.
For the last time in many years the people had a prophetic vision of its own future. Thus, right at the beginning of the gigantic struggle the necessary grave undertone entered into the ecstasy- of an overflowing enthusiasm; for this knowledge alone made the national uprising more than a mere blaze of straw The earnestness was only too necessary; for in those days people in general had not the faintest conception of the possible length and duration of the struggle that was now beginning. They dreamed of being home again that winter to continue and renew their peaceful labors.
What a man wants is what he hopes and believes. The overwhelming majority of the nation had long been weary of the eternally uncertain state of affairs; thus it was only too understandable that they no longer believed in a peaceful conclusion of the Austro-Serbian convict, but hoped for the final settlement.
I, too, was one of these millions.
Hardly had the news of the assassination become known in Munich than at once two thoughts quivered through my brain: first, that at last war would be inevitable; and, furthermore, that now the Habsburg state would be compelled to keep its pact; for what I had always most feared was the possibility that Germany herself would some day, perhaps in consequence of this very alliance, find herself in a conflict not directly caused by Austria, so that the Austrian state for reasons of domestic policy would not muster the force of decision to stand behind her ally. The Slavic majority of the Empire would at once have begun to sabotage any such intention on the part of the state, and would always have preferred to smash the entire state to smithereens than grant its ally the help it demanded. This danger was now eliminated. The old state had to fight whether it wanted to or not.
My own position on the conflict was likewise very simple and clear; for me it was not that Austria was fighting for some Serbian satisfaction, but that Germany was fighting for her existence, the German nation for life or death, freedom and future. The time had come for Bismarck's work to fight; what the fathers had once won in the battles from Weissenburg to Sedan and Paris, young Germany now had to earn once more. If the struggle were carried through to victory, our nation would enter the circle of great nations from the standpoint of external power, and only then could the German Reich maintain itself as a mighty haven of peace without having, for the sake of peace, to cut down on the daily bread of her children.
As a boy and young man I had so often felt the desire to prove at least once by deeds that for me national enthusiasm was no empty whim. It often seemed to me almost a sin to shout hurrah perhaps without having the inner right to do so; for who had the right to use this word without having proved it in the place where all playing is at an end and the inexorable hand of the Goddess of Destiny begins to weigh peoples and men according to the truth and steadfastness of their convictions? Thus my heart, like that of a million others, overflowed with proud joy that at last I would be able to redeem myself from this paralyzing feeling. I had so often sung 'Deutschland uber Aloes' and shouted Neil ' at the top of my lungs, that it seemed to me almost a belated act of grace to be allowed to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim the sincerity of this conviction. For from the first hour r was convinced that in case of a war- which seemed to me inevitable-in one way or another I would at once leave my books. Likewise I knew that my place would then be where my inner voice directed me.
I had left Austria primarily for political reasons; what was more natural than that, now the struggle had begun, I should really begin to take account of this conviction. I did not want to fight for the Habsburg state, but was ready at any time to die for my people and for the Reich which embodied it
On the third of August, I submitted a personal petition to His Majesty, lying Ludwig III, with a request for permission to enter a Bavarian regiment. The cabinet office certainly had plenty to do in those days; so much the greater was my joy to receive an answer to my request the very next day. With trembling hands I opened the document; my request had been approved and I was summoned to report to a Bavarian regiment. My joy and gratitude knew no bounds. A few days later I was wearing the tunic which I was not to doff until nearly six years later.
For me, as for every German, there now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence. Compared to the events of this gigantic struggle, everything past receded to shallow nothingness. Precisely in these days, with the tenth anniversary of the mighty event approaching, I think back with proud sadness on those first weeks of our people's heroic struggle, in which Fate graciously allowed me to take part.
As though it were yesterday, image after image passes before my eyes. I see myself donning the uniform in the circle of my dear comrades, turning out for the first time, drilling, etc., until the day came for us to march off.
A single worry tormented me at that time, me, as so many others: would we not reach the front too late? Time and time again this alone banished all my calm. Thus, in every cause for rejoicing at a new, heroic victory, a slight drop of bitterness was hidden, for every new victory seemed to increase the danger of our coming too late.
At last the day came when we left Munich to begin the fulfillment of our duty. For the first time I saw the Rhine as we rode westward along its quiet waters to defend it, the German stream of streams, from the greed of the old enemy. When through the tender veil of the early morning mist the Niederwald Monument gleamed down upon us in the gentle first rays of the sun, the old Watch on the Rhine roared out of the endless transport train into the morning sky, and I felt as though my heart would burst.
And then came a damp, cold night in Flanders, through which we marched in silence, and when the day began to emerge from the mists, suddenly an iron greeting came whizzing at us over our heads, and with a sharp report sent the little pellets flying between our ranks, ripping up the wet ground; but even before the little cloud had passed, from two hundred throats the first hurrah rose to meet the first messenger of death. Then a crackling and a roaring, a singing and a howling began, and with feverish eyes each one of us was drawn forward, faster and faster, until suddenly past turnip fields and hedges the fight began, the fight of man against man. And from the distance the strains of a song reached our ears, coming closer and closer, leaping from company to company, and just as Death plunged a busy hand into our ranks, the song reached us too and we passed it along: 'Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles, uber Alles in der Welt!'
Four days later we came back. Even our step had changed. Seventeen-year-old boys now looked like men.
The volunteers of the List Regiment may not have learned to fight properly, but they knew how to die like old soldiers
This was the beginning.
Thus it went on year after year; but the romance of battle had been replaced by horror. The enthusiasm gradually cooled and the exuberant joy was stifled by mortal fear. The time came when every man had to struggle between the instinct of self-preservation and the admonitions of duty. I, too, was not spared by this struggle. Always when Death was on the hunt, a vague something tried to revolt, strove to represent itself to the weak body as reason, yet it was only cowardice, which in such disguises tried to ensnare the individual. A grave tugging and warning set in, and often it was only the last remnant of conscience which decided the issue. Yet the more this voice admonished one to caution, the louder and more insistent its lures, the sharper resistance grew until at last, after a long inner struggle, consciousness of duty emerged victorious. By the winter of 1915-16 this struggle had for me been decided. At last my will was undisputed master. If in the first days I went over the top with rejoicing and laughter, I was now calm and determined. And this was enduring. Now Fate could bring on the ultimate tests without my nerves shattering or my reason failing.
The young volunteer had become an old soldier.
And this transformation had occurred in the whole army. It had issued old and hard from the eternal battles, and as for those who could not stand up under the storm-well, they were broken.
Now was the time to judge this army. Now, after two or three years, during which it was hurled from one battle into another, forever fighting against superiority in numbers and weapons, suffering hunger and bearing privations, now was the time to test the quality of this unique army.
Thousands of years may pass, but never will it be possible to speak of heroism without mentioning the German army and the World War. Then from the veil of the past the iron front of the gray steel helmet will emerge, unwavering and unflinching, an immortal monument. As long as there are Germans alive, they will remember that these men were sons of their nation.
I was a soldier then, and I didn't want to talk about politics. And really it was not the time for it. Even today I harbor the conviction that the humblest wagon-driver performed more valuable services for the fatherland than the foremost among, let us say, 'parliamentarians.' I had never hated these bigmouths more than now when every red-blooded man with something to say yelled it into the enemy's face or appropriately left his tongue at home and silently did his duty somewhere. Yes, in those days I hated all those politicians. And if it had been up to me, a parliamentary pic*-and-shovel battalion would have been formed at once; then they could have chewed the fat to their hearts' content without annoying, let alone harming, honest, decent people.
Thus, at that time I wanted to hear nothing of politics, but I could not help taking a position on certain manifestations which after all did affect the whole nations and particularly concerned us soldiers.
There were two things which then profoundly angered me and which I regarded as harmful.
After the very first news of victories, a certain section of the press, slowly, and in a way which at first was perhaps unrecognizable to many, began to pour a few drops of wormwood into the general enthusiasm. This was done beneath the mask of a certain benevolence and well-meaning, even of a certain solicitude. They had misgivings about an excess of exuberance in the celebration of the victories. They feared that in this form it was unworthy of so great a nation and hence inappropriate. The bravery and heroic courage of the German soldier were something self-evident, they said, and people should not be carried away too much by thoughtless outbursts of joy, if only for the sake of foreign countries to whom a silent and dignified form of joy appealed more than unbridled exultation, etc. Finally, we Germans even now should not forget that the war was none of our intention and therefore we should not be ashamed to confess in an open and manly fashion that at any time we would contribute our part to a reconciliation of mankind. For that reason it would not be prudent to besmirch the purity of our army's deeds by too much shouting, since the rest of the world would have little understanding for such behavior. The world admired nothing more than the modesty with which a true hero silently and calmly forgets his deeds, for this was the gist of the whole argument.
Instead of taking one of these creatures by his long ears, tying him to a long pole and pulling him up on a long cord, thus making it impossible for the cheering nation to insult the aesthetic sentiment of this knight of the inkpot, the authorities actually began to issue remonstrances against ' unseemly ' rejoicing over victories.
It didn't occur to them in the least that enthusiasm once scotched cannot be reawakened at need. It is an intoxication and must be preserved in this state. And how, without this power of enthusiasm, should a country withstand a struggle which in all likelihood would make the most enormous demands on the spiritual qualities of the nation?
I knew the psyche of the broad masses too well not to be aware that a high 'aesthetic' tone would not stir up the fire that was necessary to keep the iron hot. In my eyes it was madness on the part of the authorities to be doing nothing to intensify the glowing heat of passion; and when they curtailed what passion was fortunately present, that was absolutely beyond me.
The second thing that angered me was the attitude which they thought fit to take toward Marxism. In my eyes, this only proved that they hadn't so much as the faintest idea concerning this pestilence. In all seriousness they seemed to believe that, by the assurance that parties were no longer recognized, they had brought Marxism to understanding and restraint.
They failed to understand that here no party was involved, but a doctrine that must lead to the destruction of all humanity, especially since this cannot be learned in the Jewified universities and, besides, so many, particularly among our higher officials, due to the idiotic conceit that is cultivated in them, don't think it worth the trouble to pic* up a book and learn something which was not in their university curriculum. The most gigantic upheaval passes these 'minds' by without leaving the slightest trace, which is why state institutions for the most part lag behind private ones. It is to them, by God, that the popular proverb best applies: 'What the peasant doesn't know, he won't eat.' Here, too, a few exceptions only confirm the rule.
It was an unequaled absurdity to identify the German worker with Marxism in the days of August, 1914. In those hours the German worker had made himself free from the embrace of this venomous plague, for otherwise he would never have been able to enter the struggle. The authorities, however, were stupid enough to believe that Marxism had now become national; a flash of genius which only shows that in these long years none of these official guides of the state had even taken the trouble to study the essence of this doctrine, for if they had, such an absurdity could scarcely have crept in.
Marxism, whose goal is and remains the destruction of all non-Jewish national states, was forced to look on in horror as, in the July days of 1914, the German working class it had ensnared, awakened and from hour to hour began to enter the service of the fatherland with ever-increasing rapidity. In a few days the whole mist and swindle of this infamous betrayal of the people had scattered away, and suddenly the gang of Jewish leaders stood there lonely and forsaken, as though not a trace remained of the nonsense and madness which for sixty years they had been funneling into the masses. It was a bad moment for the betrayers of the German working class, but as soon as the leaders recognized the danger which menaced them, they rapidly pulled the tarn-cap ' of lies over their ears, and insolently mimicked the national awakening.
But now the time had come to take steps against the whole treacherous brotherhood of they Jewish poisoners of the people. Now was the time to deal with them summarily without the slightest consideration for any screams and complaints that might arise. In August, 1914, the whole Jewish jabber about international solidarity had vanished at one stroke from the heads of the German working class, and in its stead, only a few weeks later, American shrapnel began to pour down the blessings of brotherhood on the helmets of our march columns. It would have been the duty of a serious government, now that the German worker had found his way back to his nation, to exterminate mercilessly the agitators who were misleading the nation.
If the best men were dying at the front, the least we could do was to wipe out the vermin.
Instead of this, His Majesty the Raiser himself stretched out his hand to the old criminals, thus sparing the treacherous murderers of the nation and giving them a chance to retrieve themselves.
So nova the viper could continue his work, more cautiously than before, but all the more dangerously. While the honest ones were dreaming of peace within their borders,l the perjuring criminals were organizing the revolution.
That such terrible half-measures should then be decided upon made me more and more dissatisfied at heart; but at that time I would not have thought it possible that the end of it all would be so frightful.
What, then, should have been done? The leaders of the whole movement should at once have been put behind bars, brought to trial, and thus taken off the nation's neck. All the implements of military power should have been ruthlessly used for the extermination of this pestilence. The parties should have been dissolved, the Reichstag brought to its senses, with bayonets if necessary, but, best of all, dissolved at once. Just as the Republic today can dissolve parties, this method should have been used at that time, with more reason. For the life and death of a whole nation was at stake!
One question came to the fore, however: can spiritual ideas be exterminated by the sword? Can 'philosophies' be combated by the use of brute force?
Even at that time I pondered this question more than once: If we ponder analogous cases, particularly on a religious basis, which can be found in history, the following fundamental principle emerges:
Conceptions and ideas, as well as movements with a definite spiritual foundation, regardless whether the latter is false or true, can, after a certain point in their development, only be broken with technical instruments of power if these physical weapons are at the same time the support of a new kindling thought, idea, or philosophy.
The application of force alone, without the impetus of a basic spiritual idea as a starting point, can never lead to the destruction of an idea and its dissemination, except in the form of a complete extermination of even the very last exponent of the idea and the destruction of the last tradition. This, however, usually means the disappearance of such a state from the sphere of political importance, often for an indefinite time and some-times forever; for experience shows that such a blood sacrifice strikes the best part of the people, since every persecution which occurs without a spiritual basis seems morally unjustified and whips up precisely the more valuable parts of a people in protest, which results in an adoption of the spiritual content of the unjustly persecuted movement. In many this occurs simply through a feeling of opposition against the attempt to bludgeon down an idea by brute force.
As a result, the number of inward supporters grows in proportion as the persecution increases. Consequently, the complete annihilation of the new doctrine can be carried out only through a process of extermination so great and constantly increasing that in the end all the truly valuable blood is drawn out of the people or state in question. The consequence is that, though a so-called 'inner' purge can now take place, it will only be at the cost of total impotence. Such a method will always prove vain in advance if the doctrine to be combated has overstepped a certain small circle.
Consequently, here, too, as in all growth, the first period of childhood is most readily susceptible to the possibility of extermination, while with the mounting years the power of resistance increases and only with the weakness of approaching old age cedes again to new youth, though in another form and for different reasons.
Indeed, nearly all attempts to exterminate a doctrine and its organizational expression, by force without spiritual foundation, are doomed to failure, and not seldom end with the exact opposite of the desired result for the following reason:
The very first requirement for a mode of struggle with the weapons of naked force is and remains persistence. In other words: only the continuous and steady application of the methods for repressing a doctrine, etc., makes it possible for a plan to succeed. But as soon as force wavers and alternates with forbearance, not only will the doctrine to be repressed recover again and again, but it will also be in a position to draw new benefit from every persecution, since, after such a wave of pressure has ebbed away, indignation over the suffering induced leads new supporters to the old doctrine, while the old ones will cling to it with greater defiance and deeper hatred than before, and even schismatic heretics, once the danger has subsided, will attempt to return to their old viewpoint. Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first prerequisite for success. This persistence, however, can always and only arise from a definite spiritual conviction. Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook. It emanates from the momentary energy and brutal determination of an individual, and is therefore subject to the change of personalities and to their nature and strength.
Added to this there is something else:
Any philosophy, whether of a religious or political nature- and sometimes the dividing line is hard to determine-fights less for the negative destruction of the opposing ideology than for the positive promotion of its own. Hence its struggle is less defensive than offensive. It therefore has the advantage even in determining the goal, since this goal represents the victory of its own idea, while, conversely, it is hard to determine when the negative aim of the destruction of a hostile doctrine may be regarded as achieved and assured. For this reason alone, the philosophy's offensive will be more systematic and also more powerful than the defensive against a philosophy, since here, too, as always, the attack and not the defense makes the decision. The fight against a spiritual power with methods of violence remains defensive, however, until the sword becomes the support, the herald and disseminator, of a new spiritual doctrine.
Thus, in summing up, we can establish the following:
Any attempt to combat a philosophy with methods of violence will fail in the end, unless the fight takes the form of attack for a new spiritual attitude. Only in the struggle between two philosophies can the weapon of brutal force, persistently and ruthlessly applied lead to a decision for the side it supports.
This remained the reason for the failure of the struggle against Marxism.
This was why Bismarck's Socialist legislation finally failed and had to fail, in spite of everything. Lacking was the platform of a new philosophy for whose rise the fight could have been waged. For only the proverbial wisdom of high government officials will succeed in believing that drivel about so-called 'state authority' or 'law and order' could form a suitable basis for the spiritual impetus of a life-and-death struggle.
Since a real spiritual basis for this struggle was lacking, Bismarck had to entrust the execution of his Socialist legislation to the judgment and desires of that institution which itself was a product of Marxist thinking. By entrusting the fate of his war on the Marxists to the well-wishing of bourgeois democracy, the Iron Chancellor set the wolf to mind the sheep.
All this was only the necessary consequence of the absence of a basic new anti-Marxist philosophy endowed with a stormy will to conquer.
Hence the sole result of Bismarck's struggle was a grave disillusionment.
Were conditions different during the World War or at its beginning? Unfortunately not.
The more I occupied myself with the idea of a necessary change in the government's attitude toward Social Democracy as the momentary embodiment of Marxism, the more I recognized the lack of a serviceable substitute for this doctrine. What would be given the masses if, just supposing, Social Democracy had been broken? There was not one movement in existence which could have been expected to succeed in drawing into its sphere of influence the great multitudes of workers grown more or less leaderless. It is senseless and more than stupid to believe that the international fanatic who had left the class party would now at once join a bourgeois party, in other words, a new class organization. For, unpleasant as it may seem to various organizations, it cannot be denied that bourgeois politicians largely take class division quite for granted as long as it does not begin to work out to their political disadvantage.
The denial of this fact only proves the effrontery, and also the stupidity, of the liars.
Altogether, care should be taken not to regard the masses as stupider than they are. In political matters feeling often decides more correctly than reason. The opinion that the stupid international attitude of the masses is sufficient proof of the unsoundness of the masses' sentiments can be thoroughly confuted by the simple reminder that pacifist democracy is no less insane, and that its exponents originate almost exclusively in the bourgeois camp. As long as millions of the bourgeoisie still piously worship their Jewish democratic press every morning, it very ill becomes these gentlemen to make jokes about the stupidity of the 'comrade' who, in the last analysis, only swallows down the same garbage, though in a different form. In both cases the manufacturer is one and the same Jew.
Good care should be taken not to deny things that just happen to be true. The fact that the class question is by no means exclusively a matter of ideal problems, as, particularly before the elections, some people would like to pretend, cannot be denied. The class arrogance of a large part of our people, and to an even greater extent, the underestimation of the manual worker, are phenomena which do not exist only in the imagination of the moonstruck.
Quite aside from this, however, it shows the small capacity for thought of our so-called 'intelligentsia' when, particularly in these circles, it is not understood that a state of affairs which could not prevent the growth of a plague, such as Marxism happens to be, will certainly not be able to recover what has been lost.
The 'bourgeois' parties, as they designate themselves, will never be able to attach the 'proletarian' masses to their camp, for here two worlds oppose each other, in part naturally and in part artificially divided, whose mutual relation 1 can only be struggle. The younger will be victorious-and this is Marxism.
Indeed, a struggle against Social Democracy in the year 1914 was conceivable, but how long this condition would be maintained, in view of the absence of any substitute, remained doubtful.
Here there was a great gap.
I was of this opinion long before the War, and for this reason could not make up my mind to join one of the existing parties. In the course of events of the World War, I was reinforced in this opinion by the obvious impossibility of taking up a ruthless struggle against Social Democracy, owing to this very lack of a movement which would have had to be more than a 'parliamentary' party.
With my closer comrades I often expressed myself openly on this point.
And now the first ideas came to me of later engaging in political activity.
Precisely this was what caused me often to assure the small circle of my friends that after the War, I meant to be a speaker in addition to my profession.
I believe that I was very serious about this.

Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter VI: War Propaganda


EVER since I have been scrutinizing political events, I have taken a tremendous interest in propagandist activity. I saw that the Socialist-Marxist organizations mastered and applied this instrument with astounding skill. And I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Social movement, especially in Lueger's time, achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its successes.
But it was not until the War that it became evident what immense results could be obtained by a correct application of propaganda. Here again, unfortunately, all our studying had to be done on the enemy side, for the activity on our side was modest, to say the least. The total miscarriage of the German 'enlightenment ' service stared every soldier in the face, and this spurred me to take up the question of propaganda even more deeply than before.
There was often more than enough time for thinking, and the enemy offered practical instruction which, to our sorrow, was only too good.
For what we failed to do, the enemy did, with amazing skill and really brilliant calculation. I, myself, learned enormously from this enemy war propaganda. But time passed and left no trace in the minds of all those who should have benefited; partly because they considered themselves too clever to from the enemy, partly owing to lack of good will.
Did we have anything you could call propaganda?
I regret that I must answer in the negative. Everything that actually was done in this field was so inadequate and wron
from the very start that it certainly did no good and sometimes did actual harm.
The form was inadequate, the substance was psychologically wrong: a careful examination of German war propaganda ca: lead to no other diagnosis.
There seems to have been no clarity on the very first question: Is propaganda a means or an end?
It is a means and must therefore be judged with regard to its end. It must consequently take a form calculated to support the aim which it serves. It is also obvious that its aim can vary in importance from the standpoint of general need, and that the inner value of the propaganda will vary accordingly. The aim for which we were fighting the War was the loftiest, the most overpowering, that man can conceive: it was the freedom and independence of our nation, the security of our future food supply, and-our national honor; a thing which, despite all contrary opinions prevailing today, nevertheless exists, or rather should exist, since peoples without honor have sooner or later lost their freedom and independence, which in turn is only the result of a higher justice, since generations of rabble without honor deserve no freedom. Any man who wants to be a cowardly slave can have no honor) or honor itself would soon fall into general contempt.
The German nation was engaged in a struggle for a human existence, and the purpose of war propaganda should have been to support this struggle; its aim to help bring about victory.
When the nations on this planet fight for existence-when the question of destiny, 'to be or not to be,' cries out for a solution-then all considerations of humanitarianism or aesthetics crumble into nothingness; for all these concepts do not float about in the ether, they arise from man's imagination and are bound up with man. When he departs from this world, these concepts are again dissolved into nothingness, for Nature does not know them. And even among mankind, they belong only to a few nations or rather races, and this in proportion as they emanate from the feeling of the nation or race in question. Humanitarianism and aesthetics would vanish even from a world inhabited by man if this world were to lose the races that have created and upheld these concepts.
But all such concepts become secondary when a nation is fighting for its existence; in fact, they become totally irrelevant to the forms of the struggle as soon as a situation arises where they might paralyze a struggling nation's power of selfpreservation. And that has always been their only visible result.
As for humanitarianism, Moltke said years ago that in war it lies in the brevity of the operation, and that means that the most aggressive fighting technique is the most humane.
But when people try to approach these questions with drivel about aesthetics, etc., really only one answer is possible: where the destiny and existence of a people are at stake, all obligation toward beauty ceases. The most unbeautiful thing there can be in human life is and remains the yoke of slavery. Or do these Schwabing 2 decadents view the present lot of the German people as 'aesthetic'? Certainly we don't have to discuss these matters with the Jews, the most modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord's image.
And since these criteria of humanitarianism and beauty must be eliminated from the struggle, they are also inapplicable to propaganda.
Propaganda in the War was a means to an end, and the end wvas the struggle for the existence of the German people; consequently, propaganda could only be considered in accordance with the principles that were valid for this struggle. In this case the most cruel weapons were humane if they brought about a quicker victory; and only those methods were beautiful which helped the nation to safeguard the dignity of its freedom.
This was the only possible attitude toward war propaganda in a life-and-death struggle like ours.
If the so-called responsible authorities had been clear on this point, they would never have fallen into such uncertainty over the form and application of this weapon: for even propaganda is no more than a weapon, though a frightful one in the hand of an expert.
The second really decisive question was this: To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses?
It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.
What the intelligentsia-or those who today unfortunately often go by that name-what they need is not propaganda but scientific instruction. The content of propaganda is not science any more than the object represented in a poster is art. The art of the poster lies in the designer's ability to attract the attention of the crowd by form and color. A poster advertising an art exhibit must direct the attention of the public to the art being exhibited; the better it succeeds in this, the greater is the art of the poster itself. The poster should give the masses an idea of the significance of the exhibition, it should not be a substitute for the art on display. Anyone who wants to concern himself with the art itself must do more than study the poster; and it will not be enough for him just to saunter through the exhibition. We may expect him to examine and immerse himself in the individual works, and thus little by little form a fair opinion.
A similar situation prevails with what we today call propaganda.
The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success in pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.
Once we understand how necessary it is for propaganda to be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in sloans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.
Thus we see that propaganda must follow a simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be psychologically sound.
For instance, it was absolutely wrong to make the enemy ridiculous, as the Austrian and German comic papers did. It was absolutely wrong because actual contact with an enemy soldier was bound to arouse an entirely different conviction, and the results were devastating; for now the German soldier, under the direct impression of the enemy's resistance, felt himself swindled by his propaganda service. His desire to fight, or even to stand film, was not strengthened, but the opposite occurred. His courage flagged.
By contrast, the war propaganda of the English and Americans was psychologically sound. By representing the Germans to their own people as barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual soldier for the terrors of war, and thus helped to preserve him from disappointments. After this, the most terrible weapon that was used against him seemed only to confirm what his propagandists had told him; it likewise reinforced his faith in the truth of his government's assertions, while on the other hand it increased his rage and hatred against the vile enemy For the cruel effects of the weapon, whose use by the enemy he now came to know, gradually came to confirm for him the 'Hunnish' brutality of the barbarous enemy, which he had heard all about; and it never dawned on him for a moment that his own weapons possibly, if not probably, might be even more terrible in their effects.
And so the English soldier could never feel that he had been misinformed by his own countrymen, as unhappily was so much the case with the German soldier that in the end he rejected everything coming from this source as 'swindles' and 'bunk.' All this resulted from the idea that any old simpleton (or even somebody who was intelligent ' in other things ') could be assigned to propaganda work, and the failure to realize that the most brilliant psychologists would have been none too good.
And so the German war propaganda offered an unparalleled example of an 'enlightenment' service working in reverse, since any correct psychology was totally lacking.
There was no end to what could be learned from the enemy by a man who kept his eyes open, refused to let his perceptions be ossified, and for four and a half years privately turned the stormflood of enemy propaganda over in his brain.
What our authorities least of all understood was the very first axiom of all propagandist activity: to wit, the basically subjective and one-sided attitude it must take toward every question it deals with. In this connection, from the very beginning of the War and from top to bottom, such sins were committed that we were entitled to doubt whether so much absurdity could really be attributed to pure stupidity alone.
What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as 'good'?
We would only shake our heads.
Exactly the same applies to political advertising.
The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.
It was absolutely wrong to discuss war-guilt from the standpoint that Germany alone could not be held responsible for the outbreak of the catastrophe; it would have been correct to load every bit of the blame on the shoulders of the enemy, even if this had not really corresponded to the true facts, as it actually did.
And what was the consequence of this halfheartedness?
The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even individuals capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of plain mortals, wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty. As soon as our own propaganda admits so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid. The masses are then in no position to distinguish where foreign injustice ends and our own begins. In such a case they become uncertain and suspicious, especially if the enemy refrains from going in for the same nonsense, but unloads every bit of blame on his adversary. Isn't it perfectly understandable that the whole country ends up by lending more credence to enemy propaganda, which is more unified and coherent, than to its own? And particularly a people that suffers from the mania of objectivity as much as the Germans. For, after all this, everyone will take the greatest pains to avoid doing the enemy any injustice, even at the peril of seriously besmirching and even destroying his own people and country.
Of course, this was not the intent of the responsible authorities, but the people never realize that.
The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.
English propagandists understood all this most brilliantly-and acted accordingly. They made no half statements that might have given rise to doubts.
Their brilliant knowledge of the primitive sentiments of the broad masses is shown by their atrocity propaganda, which was adapted to this condition. As ruthless as it was brilliant, it created the preconditions for moral steadfastness at the front, even in the face of the greatest actual defeats, and just as strikingly it pilloried the German enemy as the sole guilty party for the outbreak of the War: the rabid, impudent bias and persistence with which this lie was expressed took into account the emotional, always extreme, attitude of the great masses and for this reason was believed.
How effective this type of propaganda was is most strikingly shown by the fact that after four years of war it not only enabled the enemy to stick to its guns, but even began to nibble at our own people.
It need not surprise us that our propaganda did not enjoy this success. In its inner ambiguity alone, it bore the germ of ineffectualness. And finally its content was such that it was very vunlikely to make the necessary impression on the masses. Only our feather-brained 'statesmen' could have dared to hope that this insipid pacifistic bilge could fire men's spirits till they were willing to die.
As a result, their miserable stuff 1 was useless, even harmful in fact.
But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unfiagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.
Particularly in the field of propaganda, we must never let ourselves be led by aesthetes or people who have grown blase: not by the former, because the form and expression of our propaganda would soon, instead of being suitable for the masses, have drawing power only for literary teas; and of the second we must beware, because, lacking in any fresh emotion of their own, they are always on the lookout for new stimulation. These people are quick to weary of everything; they want variety, and they are never able to feel or understand the needs of their fellow men who are not yet so callous. They are always the first to criticize a propaganda campaign, or rather its content, which seems to them too old-fashioned, too hackneyed, too out-of-date, etc. They are always after novelty, in search of a change, and this makes them mortal enemies of any effective political propaganda. For as soon as the organization and the content of propaganda begin to suit their tastes, it loses all cohesion and evaporates completely.
The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blase young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convince the masses. But the masses are slowmoving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.
When there is a change, it must not alter the content of what the propaganda is driving at, but in the end must always say the same thing. For instance, a slogan must be presented from different angles, but the end of all remarks must always and immutably be the slogan itself. Only in this way can the propaganda have a unified and complete effect.
This broadness of outline from which we must never depart, in combination with steady, consistent emphasis, allows our final success to mature. And then, to our amazement, we shall see what tremendous results such perseverance leads to-to results that are almost beyond our understanding.
All advertising, whether in the field of business or politics, achieves success through the continuity and sustained uniformity of its application.
Here, too, the example of enemy war propaganda was typical; limited to a few points, devised exdusively for the masses, carried on with indefatigable persistence. Once the basic ideas and methods of execution were recognized as correct, they were applied throughout the whole War without the slightest change. At first the claims of the propaganda were so impudent that people thought it insane; later, it got on people's nerves; and in the end, it was believed. After four and a half years, a revolution broke out in Germany; and its slogans originated in the enemy's war propaganda.
And in England they understood one more thing: that this spiritual weapon can succeed only if it is applied on a tremendous scale, but that success amply covers all costs.
There, propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order, while in our country it was the last resort of unemployed politicians and a comfortable haven for slackers.
And, as was to be expected, its results all in all were zero.

Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter VII: The Revolution


WITH THE YEAR 1915 enemy propaganda began in our country, after 1916 it became more and more intensive, till finally, at the beginning of the year 1918, it swelled to a positive flood. Now the results of this seduction could be seen at every step. The army gradually learned to think as the enemy wanted it to.
And the German counter-action was a complete failure.
In the person of the man whose intellect and will made him its leader, the army had the intention and determination to take up the struggle in this field, too, but it lacked the instrument which would have been necessary. And from the psychological point of view, it was wrong to have this enlightenment work carried on by the troops themselves. If it was to be effective, it had to come from home. Only then was there any assurance of success among the men who, after all, had been performing immortal deeds of heroism and privation for nearly four years for this homeland.
But what came out of the home country?
Was this failure stupidity or crime?
In midsummer of 1918, after the evacuation of the southern bank of the Marne, the German press above all conducted itself with such miserable awkwardness, nay, criminal stupidity, that my wrath mounted by the day, and the question arose within me: Is there really no one who can put an end to this spiritual squandering of the army's heroism?
What happened in France in 1914 when we swept into the country in an unprecedented storm of victory? What did Italy do in the days after her Isonzo front had collapsed? And what again did France do in the spring of 1918 when the attack of the German divisions seemed to lift her positions off their hinges and the far-reaching arm of the heavy long-range batteries began to knock at the doors of Paris?
How they whipped the fever heat of national passion into the faces of the hastily retreating regiments in those countries ! What propaganda and ingenious demagogy were used to hammer the faith in final victory back into the hearts of the broken fronts!
Meanwhile, what happened in our country?
Nothing, or worse than nothing.
Rage and indignation often rose up in me when I looked at the latest newspapers, and came face to face with the psychological mass murder that was being committed.
More than once I was tormented by the thought that if Providence had put me in the place of the incapable or criminal incompetents or scoundrels in our propaganda service, our battle with Destiny would have taken a different turn.
In these months I felt for the first time the whole malice of Destiny which kept me at the front in a position where every negro might accidentally shoot me to bits, while elsewhere I would have been able to perform quite different services for the fatherland !
For even then I was rash enough to believe that I would have succeeded in this.
But I was a nameless soldier, one among eight million!
And so it was better to hold my tongue and do my duty in the trenches as best I could.




In the summer of 1915, the first enemy leaflets fell into our hands.
Aside from a few changes in the form of presentation, their Content was almost always the same, to wit: that the suffering was growing greater and greater in Germany; that the War was going to last forever while the hope of winning it was gradually vanishing; that the people at home were, therefore, longing for peace, but that 'militarism' and the 'Kaiser' did not allow it; that the whole world-to whom this was very well known- was, therefore, not waging a war on the German people, but exclusively against the sole guilty party, the Kaiser; that, therefore, the War would not be over before this enemy of peaceful humanity should be eliminated; that when the War was ended, the libertarian and democratic nations would take the German people into the league of eternal world peace, which would be assured from the hour when ' Prussian militarism ' was destroyed.
The better to illustrate these claims, 'letters from home' were often reprinted whose contents seemed to confirm these assertions.
On the whole, we only laughed in those days at all these efforts. The leaflets were read, then sent back to the higher staffs, and for the most part forgotten until the wind again sent a load of them sailing down into the trenches; for, as a rule, the leaflets were brought over by airplanes.
In this type of propaganda there was one point which soon inevitably attracted attention: in every sector of the front where Bavarians were stationed, Prussia was attacked with extraordinary consistency, with the assurance that not only was Prussia on the one hand the really guilty and responsible party for the whole war, but that on the other hand there was not the slightest hostility against Bavaria in particular; however, there was no helping Bavaria as long as she served Prussian militarism and helped to pull its chestnuts out of the fire.
Actually this kind of propaganda began to achieve certain effects in 1915. The feeling against Prussia grew quite visibly among the troops-yet not a single step was taken against it from above. This was more than a mere sin of omission, and sooner or later we were bound to suffer most catastrophically for it; and not just the 'Prussians,' but the whole German people, to which Bavaria herself is not the last to belong.
In this direction enemy propaganda began to achieve unquestionable successes from 1916 on.
Likewise the complaining letters direct from home had long been having their effect. It was no longer necessary for the enemy to transmit them to the frontline soldiers by means of leaflets, etc. And against this, aside from a few psychologically idiotic 'admonitions' on the part of the 'government,' nothing was done. Just as before, the front was flooded with this poison dished up by thoughtless women at home, who, of course, did not suspect that this was the way to raise the enemy's confidence in victory to the highest pitch, thus consequently to prolong and sharpen the sufferings of their men at the fighting front. In the time that followed, the senseless letters of German women cost hundreds of thousands of men their lives.
Thus, as early as 1916, there appeared various phenomena that would better have been absents The men at the front complained and 'beefed'; they began to be dissatisfied in many ways and sometimes were even righteously indignant. While they starved and suffered, while their people at home lived in misery, there was abundance and high-living in other circles. Yes, even at the fighting front all was not in order in this respect.
Even then a slight crisis was emerging-but these were still
'internal' affairs. The same man, who at first had cursed and grumbled, silently did his duty a few minutes later as though
this was a matter of course. The same company, which at first was discontented, clung to the piece of trench it had to defend as though Germany's fate depended on these few hundred yards of mudholes. It was still the front of the old, glorious army of heroes!
I was to learn the difference between it and the homeland in a
glaring contrast.
At the end of September, 1916, my division moved into the Battle of the Somme. For us it was the first of the tremendous battles of materiel which now followed, and the impression was hard to describe-it was more like hell than war.
Under a whirlwind of drumfire that lasted for weeks, the German front held fast, sometimes forced back a little, then again pushing forward, but never wavering.
On October 7, 1916, I was wounded.
I was brought safely to the rear, and from there was to return to Germany with a transport.
Two years had now passed since I had seen the homeland under such conditions an almost endless time. I could scarcely imagine how Germans looked who were not in uniform. As I lay in the field hospital at Hermies, I almost collapsed for fright when suddenly the voice of a German woman serving as a nurse addressed a man lying beside me.
For the first time in two years to hear such a sound!
The closer our train which was to bring us home approached the border, the more inwardly restless each of us became. All the towns passed by, through which we had ridden two years previous as young soldiers: Brussels, Louvain, Liege, and at last we thought we recognized the first German house by its high gable and beautiful shutters.
The fatherland!
In October, 1914, we had burned with stormy enthusiasm as we crossed the border; now silence and emotion reigned. Each of us was happy that Fate again permitted him to see what he had had to defend so hard with his life, and each man was wellnigh ashamed to let another look him in the eye.
It was almost on the anniversary of the day when I left for the front that I reached the hospital at Beelitz near Berlin.
What a change! From the mud of the Battle of the Somme into the white beds of this miraculous building! In the beginning we hardly dared to lie in them properly. Only gradually could we reaccustom ourselves to this new world.
Unfortunately, this world was new in another respect as well.
The spirit of the army at the front seemed no longer to be a guest here.l Here for the first time I heard a thing that was still unknown at the front; men bragging about their own cowardice! For the cursing and 'beefing' you could hear at the front were never an incitement to shirk duty or a glorification of the coward. No! The coward still passed as a coward and as nothing else; and al he contempt which struck him was still general, just like the admiration that was given to the real hero. But here in the hospital it was partly almost the opposite: the most unscrupulous agitators did the talking and attempted with all the means of their contemptible eloquence to make the conceptions of the decent soldiers ridiculous and hold up the spineless coward as an example. A few wretched scoundrels in particular set the tone. One boasted that he himself had pulled his hand through a barbed-wire entanglement in order to be sent to the hospital; in spite of this absurd wound he seemed to have been here for an endless time, and for that matter he had only gotten into the transport to Germany by a swindle. This poisonous fellow went so far in his insolent effrontery as to represent his own cowardice as an emanation 2 Of higher bravery than the hero's death of an honest soldier. Many listened in silence, others went away, but a few assented.
Disgust mounted to my throat, but the agitator was calmly tolerated in the institution. What could be done? The management couldn't help knowing, and actually did know, exactly who and what he was. But nothing was done.
When I could again walk properly, I obtained permission to go to Berlin.
Clearly there was dire misery everywhere. The big city was suffering from hunger. Discontent was great. In various soldiers' homes the tone was like that in the hospital. It gave you the impression that these scoundrels were intentionally frequenting such places in order to spread their views.
But much, much worse were conditions in Munich itself !
When I was discharged from the hospital as cured and transferred to the replacement battalion, I thought I could no longer recognize the city. Anger, discontent, cursing, wherever you went! In the replacement battalion itself the mood was beneath all criticism. Here a contributing factor was the immeasurably clumsy way in which the field soldiers were treated by old training officers who hadn't spent a single hour in the field and for this reason alone were only partially able to create a decent relationship with the old soldiers. For it had to be admitted that the latter possessed certain qualities which could be explained by their service at the front, but which remained totally incomprehensible to the leaders of these replacement detachments while the officer who had come from the front was at least able to explain them. The latter, of course, was respected by the men quite differently than the rear commander. But aside from this, the general mood was miserable: to be a slacker passed almost as a sign of higher wisdom, while loyal steadfastness was considered a symptom of inner weakness and narrow-mindedness. The offices were filled with Jews. Nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk. I was amazed at this plethora of warriors of the chosen people and could not help but compare them with their rare representatives at the front.
As regards economic life, things were even worse Here the Jewish people had become really 'indispensable.' The spider was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the people's pores. Through the war corporations, they had found an instrument with which, little by little, to finish off the national free economy
The necessity of an unlimited centralization was emphasized
Thus, in the year 191S17 nearly the whole of production was under the control of Jewish finance.
But against whom was the hatred of the people directed?
At this time I saw with horror a catastrophe approaching which, unless averted in time, would inevitably lead to collapse.
While the Jew robbed the whole nation and pressed it beneath his domination, an agitation was carried on against the 'Prussians.' At home, as at the front, nothing was done against this poisonous propaganda. No one seemed to suspect that the collapse of Prussia would not by a long shot bring with it a resurgence of Bavaria; no, that on the contrary any fall of the one would inevitably carry the other along with it into the abyss.
I felt very badly about this behavior. In it I could only see the craftiest trick of the Jew, calculated to distract the general attention from himself and to others. While the Bavarian and the Prussian fought, he stole the existence of both of them from under their nose; while the Bavarians were cursing the Prussians, the Jew organized the revolution and smashed Prussia and Bavaria at once.
I could not bear this accursed quarrel among German peoples, and was glad to return to the front, for which I reported at once after my arrival in Munich.
At the beginning of March, 1917, I was back with my regiment.




Toward the end of I911, the low point of the army's dejection seemed to have passed. The whole army took fresh hope and fresh courage after the Russian collapse. The conviction that the War would end with the victory of Germany, after all, began to seize the troops more and more. Again singing could be heard and the Calamity Lanes became rarer. Again people believed in the future of the fatherland.
Especially the Italian collapse of autumn, 1917, had had the most wonderful effect; in this victory we saw a proof of the possibility of breaking through the front, even aside from the Russian theater of war. A glorious faith flowed again into the hearts of the millions, enabling them to await spring, 1918, with relief and confidence. The foe was visibly depressed. In this winter he remained quieter than usual. This was the lull before the storm.
But, while those at the front were undertaking the last preparations for the final conclusion of the eternal struggle, while endless transports of men and materiel were rolling toward the West Front, and the troops were being trained for the great attack- the biggest piece of chicanery in the whole war broke out in Germany.
Germany must not be victorious; in the last hour, with victory already threatening to be with the German banners, a means was chosen which seemed suited to stifle the German spring attack in the germ with one blow, to make victory impossible:
The munitions strike was organized
If it succeeded, the German front was bound to collapse, and the Vorwarts' desire that this time victory should not be with the German banners would inevitably be fulfilled. Owing to the lack of munitions, the front would inevitably be pierced in a few weeks; thus the offensive was thwarted, the Entente saved international capital was made master of Germany, and the inner aim of the Marxist swindle of nations achieved.
To smash the national economy and establish the rule of international capital a goal which actually was achieved, thanks to the stupidity and credulity of the one side and the bottomless cowardice of the other.
To be sure, the munitions strike did not have all the hoped-for success with regard to starving the front of arms; it collapsed too soon for the lack of munitions as such-as the plan had been- to doom the army to destruction.
But how much more terrible was the moral damage that had been done!
In the first place: What was the army fighting for if the homeland itself no longer wanted victory? For whom the immense sacrifices and privations? The soldier is expected to fight for victory and the homeland goes on strike against it!
And in the second place: What was the effect on the enemy?
In the winter of 1917 to 1918, dark clouds appeared for the first time in the firmament of the Allied world. For nearly four years they had been assailing the German warrior and had been unable to encompass his downfall; and all this while the German had only his shield arm free for defense, while his sword was obliged to strike, now in the East, now in the South. But now at last the giant's back was free. Streams of blood had flown before he administered final defeat to one of his foes. Now in the West his shield was going to be joined by his sword; up till then the enemy had been unable to break his defense, and now he himself was facing attack.
The enemy feared him and trembled for their victory.
In London and Paris one deliberation followed another, but at the front sleepy silence prevailed. Suddenly their high mightinesses lost their effrontery. Even enemy propaganda was having a hard time of it; it was no longer so easy to prove the hopelessness of German victory.
But this also applied to the Allied troops at the fronts. A ghastly light began to dawn slowly even on them. Their inner attitude toward the German soldier had changed. Until then he may have seemed to them a fool destined to defeat; but now it was the destroyer of the Russian ally that stood before them. The limitation of the German offensives to the East, though born of necessity, now seemed to them brilliant tactics. For three years these Germans had stormed the Russian front, at first it seemed without the slightest success. The Allies almost laughed over this aimless undertaking; for in the end the Russian giant with his overwhelming number of men was sure to remain the victor while Germany would inevitably collapse from loss of blood. Reality seemed to confirm this hope.
Since the September days of 1914, when for the first time the endless hordes of Russian prisoners from the Battle of Tannenberg began moving into Germany over the roads and railways, this stream was almost without end-but for every defeated and destroyed army a new one arose. Inexhaustibly the gigantic Empire gave the Tsar more and more new soldiers and the War its new victims. How long could Germany keep up this race? Would not the day inevitably come when the Germans would win their last victory and still the Russian armies would not be marching to their last battle? And then what? In all human probability the victory of Russia could be postponed, but it was bound to come.
Now all these hopes were at an end: the ally who had laid the greatest blood sacrifices on the altar of common interests was at the end of his strength, and lay prone at the feet of the inexorable assailant. Fear and horror crept into the hearts of the soldiers who had hitherto believed so blindly. They feared the coming spring. For if up until then they had not succeeded in defeating the German when he was able to place only part of his forces on the Western Front, how could they count on victory now that the entire power of this incredible heroic state seemed to be concentrating for an attack on the West?
The shadows of the South Tyrolean Mountains lay oppressive on the fantasy; as far as the mists of Flanders, the defeated armies of Cadorna conjured up gloomy faces, and faith in victory ceded to fear of coming defeat.
Then-when out of the cool nights the Allied soldiers already seemed to hear the dull rumble of the advancing storm units of the German army, and with eyes fixed in fear and trepidation awaited the approaching judgment, suddenly a flaming red light arose in Germany, casting its glow into the last shell-hole of the enemy front: at the very moment when the German divisions were receiving their last instructions for the great attack, the general strike broke out in Germany.
At first the world was speechless. But then enemy propaganda hurled itself with a sigh of relief on this help that came in the eleventh hour. At one stroke the means was found to restore the sinking confidence of the Allied soldiers, once again to represent the probability of victory as certain,l and transform dread anxiety in the face of coming events into determined confidence. Now the regiments awaiting the German attack could be sent into the greatest battle of all time with the conviction that, not the boldness of the German assault would decide the end of this war but the perseverance of the defense. Let the Germans achieve as many victories as they pleased; at home the revolution was before the door, and not the victorious army..
English, French, and American newspapers began to implant this faith in the hearts of their readers while an infinitely shrewd propaganda raised the spirits of the troops at the front.
'Germany facing revolution! Victory of the Allies inevitable! This was the best medicine to help the wavering poilu and Tommy back on their feet. Now rifles and machine guns could again be made to fire, and a headlong flight in panic fear was replaced by hopeful resistance.
This was the result of the munitions strike. It strengthened the enemy peoples' belief in victory and relieved the paralyzing despair of the Allied front-in the time that followed, thousands of German soldiers had to pay for this with their blood. The instigators of this vilest of all scoundrelly tricks were the aspirants to the highest state positions of revolutionary Germany.
On the German side, it is true, the visible reaction to this crime could at first apparently be handled; on the enemy side, however, the consequences did not fail to appear. The resistance had lost the aimlessness of an army giving up all as lost, and took on the bitterness of a struggle for victory.
For now, in all human probability, victory was inevitable if the Western Front could stand up under a German attack for only a few months. The parliaments of the Entente, however, recognized the possibilities for the future and approved unprecedented expenditures for continuing the propaganda to disrupt Germany.




I had the good fortune to fight in the first two offensives and in the last.
These became the most tremendous impressions of my life; tremendous because now for the last time, as in 1914, the fight lost the character of defense and assumed that of attack. A sigh of relief passed through the trenches and the dugouts of the German army when at length, after more than three years' endurance in the enemy hell, the day of retribution came. Once again the victorious battalions cheered and hung the last wreaths of immortal laurel on their banners rent by the storm of victory. Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord's grace smiled on His ungrateful children.




In midsummer of 1918, oppressive sultriness lay over the front. At home there was fighting. For what? In the different detachments of the field army all sorts of things were being said: that the war was now hopeless and only fools could believe in victory That not the people but only capital and the monarchy had an interest in holding out any longer-all this came from the homeland and was discussed even at the front.
At first the front reacted very little. What did we care about universal suffrage? Had we fought four years for that? It was vile banditry to steal the war aim of the dead heroes from their very graves. The young regiments had not gone to their death in Flanders crying: 'Long dive universal suffrage and the secret ballot,' but crying: 'Deutschland uber Alles in der Welt.' A small yet not entirely insignificant, difference. But most of those who cried out for suffrage hadn't ever been in the place where they now wanted to fight for it. The front was unknown to the whole political party rabble. Only a small fraction of the Parliamentary ian gentlemen could be seen where all decent Germans with sound limbs left were sojourning at that time.
And so the old personnel at the front was not very receptive to this new war aims of Messrs. Ebert, Scheidemann, Barth, Liebnitz, etc. They couldn't for the life of them see why suddenly the slackers should have the right to arrogate to themselves control of the state over the heads of the army.
My personal attitude was established from the very start. I hated the whole gang of miserable party scoundrels and betrayers of the people in the extreme. It had long been clear to me that this whole gang was not really concerned with the welfare of the nation, but with filling empty pockets. For this they were ready to sacrifice the whole nation, and if necessary to let Germany be destroyed; and in my eyes this made them ripe for hanging. To take consideration of their wishes was to sacrifice the interests of the working people for the benefit of a few pickpockets; these wishes could only be fulfilled by giving up Germany.
And the great majority of the embattled army still thought the same. Only the reinforcements coming from home rapidly grew worse and worse, so that their arrival meant, not a reinforcement but a weakening of our fighting strength. Especially the young reinforcements were mostly worthless. It was often hard to believe that these were sons of the same nation which had once sent its youth out to the battle for Ypres.
In August and September, the symptoms of disorganization increased more and more rapidly, although the effect of the enemy attack was not to be compared with the terror of our former defensive battles. The past Battle of Flanders and the Battle of the Somme had been awesome by comparison.
At the end of September, my division arrived for the third time at the positions which as young volunteer regiments we had once stormed.
What a memory!
In October and November of I914, we had there received our baptism of fire. Fatherland love in our heart and songs on our lips, our young regiments had gone into the battle as to a dance The most precious blood there sacrificed itself joyfully, in the faith that it was preserving the independence and freedom of the fatherland.
In July, I917, we set foot for the second time on the ground that was sacred to all of us. For in it the best comrades slumbered still almost children, who had run to their death with gleaming eyes for the one true fatherland.
We old soldiers, who had then marched out with the regiment stood in respectful emotion at this shrine of 'loyalty and obedience to the death.'
Now in a hard defensive battle the regiment was to defend this soil which it had stormed three years earlier.
With three weeks of drumfire the Englishman prepared the great Flanders offensive. The spirits of the dead seemed to quicken; the regiment clawed its way into the filthy mud, bit into the various holes and craters, and neither gave ground nor wavered. As once before in this place, it grew steadily smaller and thinner, until the British attack finally broke loose on July 13, 1917.
In the first days of August we were relieved.
The regiment had turned into a few companies: crusted with mud they tottered back, more like ghosts than men. But aside from a few hundred meters of shell holes, the Englishman had found nothing but death.
Now, in the fall of 1918, we stood for the third time on the storm site of 1914. The little city of Comines where we then rested had now become our battlefield. Yet, though the battlefield was the same, the men had changed: for now 'political discussions went on even among the troops. As everywhere, the poison of the hinterland began, here too, to be effective. And the younger recruit fell down completely for he came from home.
In the night of October 13, the English gas attack on the southern front before Ypres burst loose; they used yellow-cross gas, whose effects were still unknown to us as far as personal experience was concerned. In this same night I myself was to become acquainted with it. On a hill south of Wervick, we came on the evening of October 13 into several hours of drumfire with gas shells which continued all night more or less violently. As early as midnight, a number of us passed out, a few of our comrades forever. Toward morning I, too, was seized with pain which grew worse with every quarter hour, and at seven in the morning I stumbled and tottered back with burning eyes; taking with me my last report of the War.
A few hours later, my eyes had turned into glowing coals; it had grown dark around me.
Thus I came to the hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania, and there I was fated to experience-the greatest villainy of the century.




For a long time there had been something indefinite but repulsive in the air. People were telling each other that in the next few weeks it would ' start in '-but I was unable to imagine what was meant by this. First I thought of a strike like that of the spring. Unfavorable rumors were constantly coming from the navy, which was said to be in a state of ferment. But this, too, seemed to me more the product of the imagination of individual scoundrels than an affair involving real masses. Even in the hospital, people were discussing the end of the War which they hoped would come soon, but no one counted on anything immediate. I was unable to read the papers.
In November the general tension increased.
And then one day, suddenly and unexpectedly, the calamity descended. Sailors arrived in trucks and proclaimed the revolution; a few Jewish youths were the 'leaders' in this struggle for the 'freedom, beauty, and dignity' of our national existence. None of them had been at the front. By way of a so-called 'gonorrhoea hospital,' the three Orientals had been sent back home from their second-line base. Now they raised the red rag in the homeland.
In the last few days I had been getting along better. The piercing pain in my eye sockets was diminishing; slowly I succeeded in distinguishing the broad outlines of the things about me. I was given grounds for hoping that I should recover my eyesight at least well enough to be able to pursue some profession later. To be sure, I could no longer hope that I would ever be able to draw again. In any case, I was on the road to improvement when the monstrous thing happened.
My first hope was still that this high treason might still be a more or less local affair. I also tried to bolster up a few comrades in this view. Particularly my Bavarian friends in the hospital were more than accessible to this. The mood there was anything but 'revolutionary.' I could not imagine that the madness would break out in Munich, too. Loyalty to the venerable House of Wittelsbach seemed to me stronger, after all, than the will of a few Jews. Thus I could not help but believe that this was merely a Putsch on the part of the navy and would be crushed in the next few days.
The next few days came and with them the most terrible certainty of my life. The rumors became more and more oppressive. What I had taken for a local affair was now said to be a general revolution. To this was added the disgraceful news from the front. They wanted to capitulate. Was such a thing really possible?
On November 10, the pastor came to the hospital for a short address: now we learned everything.
In extreme agitation, I, too, was present at the short speech. The dignified old gentleman seemed all a-tremble as he informed us that the House of Hollenzollern should no longer bear the German imperial crown; that the fatherland had become a ' republic '; that we must pray to the Almighty not to refuse His blessing to this change and not to abandon our people in the times to come. He could not help himself, he had to speak a few words in memory of the royal house. He began to praise its services in Pomerania, in Prussia, nay, to the German fatherland, and-here he began to sob gently to himself-in the little hall the deepest dejection settled on all hearts, and I believe that not an eye was able to restrain its tears. But when the old gentleman tried to go on, and began to tell us that we must now end the long War, yes, that now that it was lost and we were throwing ourselves upon the mercy of the victors, our fatherland would for the future be exposed to dire oppression, that the armistice should be accepted with confidence in the magnanimity of our previous enemies-I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.
Since the day when I had stood at my mother's grave, I had not wept. When in my youth Fate seized me with merciless hardness, my defiance mounted. When in the long war years Death snatched so many a dear comrade and friend from our ranks, it would have seemed to me almost a sin to complain- after all, were they not dying for Germany? And when at length the creeping gas-in the last days of the dreadful struggle- attacked me, too, and began to gnaw at my eyes, and beneath the fear of going blind forever, I nearly lost heart for a moment, the voice of my conscience thundered at me: Miserable wretch, are you going to cry when thousands are a hundred times worse off than you! And so I bore my lot in dull silence. But now I could not help it. Only now did I see how all personal suffering vanishes in comparison with the misfortune of the fatherland.
And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty; and in vain the death of two millions who died. Would not the graves of all the hundreds of thousands open, the graves of those who with faith in the fatherland had marched forth never to return? Would they not open and send the silent mud- and blood-covered heroes back as spirits of vengeance to the homeland which had cheated them with such mockery of the highest sacrifice which a man can make to his people in this world? Had they died for is, the soldiers of August and September, 1914? Was it for this that in the autumn of the same year the volunteer regiments marched after their old comrades? Was it for this that these boys of seventeen sank into the earth of Flanders? Was this the meaning of the sacrifice which the German mother made to the fatherland when with sore heart she let her best-loved boys march off, never to see them again? Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland?
Was it for this that the German soldier had stood host in the sun's heat-and in snowstorms, hungry, thirsty, and freezing, weary from sleepless nights and endless marches? Was it for this that he had lain in the hell of the drumfire and in the fever of gas attacks without wavering, always thoughtful of his one duty to preserve the fatherland from the enemy peril?
Verily these heroes deserved a headstone: 'Thou Wanderer who comest to Germany, tell those at home that we lie here, true to the fatherland and obedient to duty.'
And what about those at home-?
And yet, was it only our own sacrifice that we had to weigh in the balance? Was the Germany of the past less precious? Was there no obligation toward our own history? Were we still worthy to relate the glory of the past to ourselves? And how could this deed be justified to future generations?
Miserable and degenerate criminals!
The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery?
There followed terrible days and even worse nights-I knew that all was lost. Only fools, liars, and criminals could hope in the mercy of the enemy. In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.
In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me.
I could not help but laugh at the thought of my own future which only a short time before had given me such bitter concern. Was it not ridiculous to expect to build houses on such ground? At last it became clear to me that what had happened was what I had so often feared but had never been able to believe with my emotions.
Kaiser William II was the first German Emperor to hold out a conciliatory hand to the leaders of Marxism, without suspecting that scoundrels have no honor. While they still held the imperial hand in theirs, their other hand was reaching for the dagger.
There is no making pacts with Jews; there can only be the hard: either-or.
I, for my part, decided to go into politics.

Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter VIII: The Beginning of My Political Activity


AT THE END of November, 1918, I returned to Munich. Again I went to the replacement battalion of my regiment, which was in the hands of 'soldiers' councils.' Their whole activity was so repellent to me that I decided at once to leave again as soon as possible. With Schmiedt Ernst, a faithful war comrade, I went to Traunstein and remained there till the camp was broken up.
In March, 1919, we went back to Munich.
The situation was untenable and moved inevitably toward a further continuation of the revolution. Eisner's death only hastened the development and finally led to a dictatorship of the Councils, or, better expressed, to a passing rule of the Jews, as had been the original aim of the instigators of the whole revolution.
At this time endless plans chased one another through my head. For days I wondered what could be done, but the end of every meditation was the sober realization that I, nameless as I was, did not possess the least basis for any useful action. I shall come back to speak of the reasons why then, as before, I could not decide to join any of the existing parties.
In the course of the new revolution of the Councils I for the first time acted in such a way as to arouse the disapproval of the Central Council. Early in the morning of April 27, 1919, I was to be arrested, but, faced with my leveled carbine, the three scoundrels lacked the necessary courage and marched off as they had come.
A few days after the liberation of Munich, I was ordered to report to the examining commission concerned with revolutionary occurrences in the Second Infantry Regiment.
This was my first more or less purely political activity.
Only a few weeks afterward I received orders to attend a ' course ' that was held for members of the armed forces. In it the soldier was supposed to learn certain fundamentals of civic thinking. For me the value of the whole affair was that I now obtained an opportunity of fleeting a few like-minded comrades with whom I could thoroughly discuss the situation of the moment. All of us were more or less firmly convinced that Germany could no longer be saved from the impending collapse by the parties of the November crime, the Center and the Social Democracy, and that the so-called 'bourgeois-national' formations, even with the best of intentions, could never repair what had happened. A whole series of preconditions were lacking, without which such a task simply could not succeed. The following period confirmed the opinion we then held. Thus, in our own circle we discussed the foundation of a new party. The basic ideas which we had in mind were the same as those later realized in the ' German Workers' Party.' The name of the movement to be founded would from the very beginning have to offer the possibility of approaching the broad masses; for without this quality the whole task seemed aimless and superfluous. Thus we arrived at the name of ' Social Revolutionary Party'; this because the social views of the new organization did indeed mean a revolution.
But the deeper ground for this lay in the following: however much I had concerned myself with economic questions at an earlier day, my efforts had remained more or less within the limits resulting from the contemplation of social questions as such. Only later did this framework broaden through examination of the German alliance policy. This in very great part was the outcome of a false estimation of economics as well as unclarity concerning the possible basis for sustaining the German people in the future. But all these ideas were based on the opinion that capital in any case was solely the result of labor and, therefore, like itself was subject to the correction of all those factors which can either advance or thwart human activity; and the national importance of capital was that it depended so completely on the greatness, freedom, and power of the state, hence of the nation, that this bond in itself would inevitably cause capital to further the state and the nation owing to its simple instinct of self-preservation or of reproduction. This dependence of capital on the independent free state would, therefore, force capital in turn to champion this freedom, power, strength, etc., of the nation.
Thus, the task of the state toward capital was comparatively simple and clear: it only had to make certain that capital remain the handmaiden of the state and not fancy itself the mistress of the nation. This point of view could then be defined between two restrictive limits: preservation of a solvent, national, and independent economy on the one hand, assurance of the social rights of the workers on the other.
Previously I had been unable to recognize with the desired clarity the difference between this pure capital as the end result of productive labor and a capital whose existence and essence rests exclusively on speculation. For this I lacked the initial inspiration, which had simply not come my way.
But now this was provided most amply by one of the various gentlemen lecturing in the above-mentioned course: Gottfried Feder.
For the first time in my life I heard a principled discussion of international stock exchange and loan capital.
Right after listening to Feder's first lecture, the thought ran through my head that I had now found the way to one of the most essential premises for the foundation of a new party.




In my eyes Feder's merit consisted in having established with ruthless brutality the speculative and economic character of stock exchange and loan capital, and in having exposed its eternal and age-old presupposition which is interest. His arguments were so sound in all fundamental questions that their critics from the start questioned the theoretical correctness of the idea less than they doubted the practical possibility of its execution. But what in the eyes of others was a weakness of Feder's arguments, in my eyes constituted their strength.




It is not the task of a theoretician to determine the varying degrees in which a cause can be realized, but to establish the cause as such: that is to say: he must concern himself less with the road than with the goal. In this, however, the basic correctness of an idea is decisive and not the difficulty of its execution. As soon as the theoretician attempts to take account of so-called 'utility' and 'reality' instead of the absolute truth, his work will cease to be a polar star of seeking humanity and instead will become a prescription for everyday life. The theoretician of a movement must lay down its goal, the politician strive for its fulfillment. The thinking of the one, therefore, will be determined by eternal truth, the actions of the other more by the practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one lies in the absolute abstract soundness of his idea, that of the other in his correct attitude toward the given facts and their advantageous application; and in this the theoretician's aim must serve as his guiding star. While the touchstone for the stature of a politician may be regarded as the success of his plans and acts-in other words, the degree to which they become reality-the realization of the theoretician's ultimate purpose can never be realized, since, though human thought can apprehend truths and set up crystal-clear aims, complete fulfillment will fail due to the general imperfection and inadequacy of man. The more abstractly correct and hence powerful the idea will be, the more impossible remains its complete fulfillment as long as it continues to depend on human beings. Therefore, the stature of the theoretician must not be measured by the fulfillment of his aims, but by their soundness and the influence they have had on the development of humanity. If this were not so, the founders of religion could not be counted among the greatest men of this earth, since the fulfillment of their ethical purposes will never be even approximately complete. In its workings, even the religion of love is only the weak reflection of the will of its exalted founder; its significance, however, lies in the direction which it attempted to give to a universal human development of culture, ethics, and morality.
The enormous difference between the tasks of the theoretician and the politician is also the reason why a union of both in one person is almost never found. This is especially true of the so-called 'successful' politician of small format, whose activity for the most part is only an 'art of the possible,' as Bismarck rather modestly characterized politics in general. The freer such a 'politician' keeps himself from great ideas, the easier and often the more visible, but always the more rapid, his successes will be. To be sure, they are dedicated to earthly transitoriness and sometimes do not survive the death of their fathers. The work of such politicians, by and large, is unimportant nor posterity, since their successes in the present are based solely on keeping at a distance all really great and profound problems and ideas, which as such would only have been of value for later generations.
The execution of such aims, which have value and significance for the most distant times, usually brings little reward to the man who champions them and rarely finds understanding among the great masses, who for the moment have more understanding for beer and milk regulations than for farsighted plans for the future, whose realization can only occur far hence, and whose benefits will be reaped only by posterity.
Thus, from a certain vanity, which is always a cousin of stupidity, the great mass of politicians will keep far removed from all really weighty plans for the future, in order not to lose the momentary sympathy of the great mob. The success and significance of such a politician lie then exclusively in the present, and do not exist for posterity. But small minds are little troubled by this; they are content.
With the theoretician conditions are different. His importance lies almost always solely in the future, for not seldom he is what is described by the world as 'unworldly.' For if the art of the politician is really the art of the possible, the theoretician is one of those of whom it can be said that they are pleasing to the gods only if they demand and want the impossible. He will almost always have to renounce the recognition of the present, but in return, provided his ideas are immortal, will harvest the fame of posterity.
In long periods of humanity, it may happen once that the politician is wedded to the theoretician. The more profound this fusion, however, the greater are the obstacles opposing the work of the politician. He no longer works for necessities which will be understood by the first best shopkeeper, but for aims which only the fewest comprehend. Therefore, his life is torn by love and hate. The protest of the present which does not understand the man, struggles with the recognition of posterity-for which he works.
For the greater a man's works for the future, the less the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight, and the rarer success. If, however, once in centuries success does come to a man, perhaps in his latter days a faint beam of his coming glory may shine upon him. To be sure, these great men are only the Marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present touches only the brow of the dying hero.
Among them must be counted the great warriors in this world who, though not understood by the present, are nevertheless prepared to carry the fight for their ideas and ideals to their end. They are the men who some day will be closest to the heart of the people; it almost seems as though every individual feels the duty of compensating in the past for the sins which the present once committed against the great. Their life and work are followed with admiring gratitude and emotion, and especially in days of gloom they have the power to raise up broken hearts and despairing souls.
To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
As I listened to Gottfried Feder's first lecture about the 'breaking of interest slavery,' I knew at once that this was a theoretical truth which would inevitably be of immense importance for the future of the German people. The sharp separation of stock exchange capital from the national economy offered the possibility of opposing the internationalization of the German economy without at the same time menacing the foundations of an independent national self-maintenance by a struggle against all capital. The development of Germany was much too clear in my eyes for me not to know that the hardest battle would have to be fought, not against hostile nations, but against international capital. In Feder's lecture I sensed a powerful slogan for this coming struggle.
And here again later developments proved how correct our sentiment of those days was. Today the know-it-alls among our
bourgeois politicians no longer laugh at us: today even they, in so far as they are not conscious liars, see that international stock exchange capital was not only the greatest agitator for the War, but that especially, now that the fight is over, it spares no effort to turn the peace into a hell.
The fight against international finance and loan capital became the most important point in the program of the German nation's struggle for its economic independence and freedom.
As regards the objections of so-called practical men, they can be answered as follows: All fears regarding the terrible economic consequences of the ' breaking of interest slavery ' are superfluous; for, in the first place, the previous economic prescriptions have turned out very badly for the German people, and your positions on the problems of national self-maintenance remind us strongly of the reports of similar experts in former times, for example, those of the Bavarian medical board on the question of introducing the railroad. It is well known that none of the fears of this exalted corporation were later realized: the travelers in the trains of the new 'steam horse ' did not get dizzy, the onlookers did not get sick, and the board fences to hide the new invention from sight were given up-only the board fences around the brains of all so-called 'experts' were preserved for posterity.
In the second place, the following should be noted: every idea, even the best, becomes a danger if it parades as a purpose in itself, being in reality only a means to one. For me and all true National Socialists there is but one doctrine: people and fatherland.
What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.
Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose. And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or rejected according to its utility. Then no theory will stiffen into a dead doctrine, since it is life alone that all things must serve.
Thus, it was the conclusions of Gottfried Feder that caused me to delve into the fundamentals of this field with which I had previously not been very familiar.
I began to study again, and now for the first time really achieved an understanding of the content of the Jew Karl Marx's life effort. Only now did his Capital become really intelligible to me, and also the struggle of the Social Democracy against the national economy, which aims only to prepare the ground for the domination of truly international finance and stock exchange capital.




But also in another respect these courses were of the greatest consequence to me.
One day I asked for the floor. One of the participants felt obliged to break a lance for the Jews and began to defend them in lengthy arguments. This aroused me to an answer. The overwhelming majority of the students present took my standpoint The result was that a few days later I was sent into a Munich regiment as a so-called 'educational officer.'
Discipline among the men was still comparatively weak at that time. It suffered from the after-effects of the period of soldiers' councils. Only very slowly and cautiously was it possible to replace voluntary obedience-the pretty name that was given to the pig-sty under Kurt Eisner-by the old military discipline and subordination. Accordingly, the men were now expected to learn to feel and think in a national and patriotic way. In these two directions lay the field of my new activity.
I started out with the greatest enthusiasm and love. For all at once I was offered an opportunity of speaking before a larger audience; and the thing that I had always presumed from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated: I could 'speak.' My voice, too, had grown so much better that I could be sufficiently understood at least in every corner of the small squad rooms.
No task could make me happier than this, for now before being discharged I was able to perform useful services to the institution which had been so close to my heart: the army.
And I could boast of some success: in the course of my lectures I led many hundreds, indeed thousands, of comrades back to their people and fatherland. I 'nationalized' the troops and was thus also able to help strengthen the general discipline.
Here again I became acquainted with a number of like-minded comrades, who later began to form the nucleus of the new movement.

Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter IX: The 'German Workers' Party'


ONE DAY I received orders from my headquarters to find out what was behind an apparently political organization which was planning to hold a meeting within th next few days under the name of 'German Workers' Party'-with Gottfried Feder as one of the speakers. I was told to go and take a look at the organization and then make a report.
The curiosity of the army toward political parties in those days was more than understandable. The revolution had given the soldiers the right of political activity, and it was just the most inexperienced among them who made the most ample use of it. Not until the moment when the Center and the Social Democracy were forced to recognize, to their own grief, that the sympathies of the soldiers were beginning to turn away from the revolutionary parties toward the national movement and reawakening, did they see fit to deprive the troops of suffrage again and prohibit their political activity.
It was illuminating that the Center and the Marxists should have taken this measure, for if they had not undertaken this curtailment of ' civil rights '-as the political equality of the soldiers after the revolution was called-within a few years there would have been no revolution, and hence no more national dishonor and disgrace. The troops were then well on their way toward ridding the nation of its leeches and the stooges of the Entente within our walls. The fact that the so-called 'national' parties voted enthusiastically for the correction of the previous views of the November criminals, and thus helped to blunt the instrument of a national rising, again showed what the eternally doctrinaire ideas of these innocents among innocents can lead to. This bourgeoisie was really suffering from mental senility; in all seriousness they harbored the opinion that the army would again become what it had been, to wit, a stronghold of German military power; while the Center and Marxism planned only to tear out its dangerous national poison fang, without which, however, an army remains forever a police force, but is not a troop capable of fighting an enemy-as has been amply proved in the time that followed.
Or did our 'national politicians' believe that the development of the army could have been other than national? That would have been confoundedly like the gentlemen and is what comes of not being a soldier in war but a big-mouth; in other words, a parliamentarian with no notion of what goes on in the hearts of men who are reminded by the most colossal past that they were once the best soldiers in the world.
And so I decided to attend the above-mentioned meeting of this party which up till then had been entirely unknown to me too.
In the evening when I entered the 'Leiber Room' of the former Sterneckerbrau in Munich, I found some twenty to twenty-five people present, chiefly from the lower classes of the population.
Feder's lecture was known to me from the courses, so I was able to devote myself to an inspection of the organization itself.
My impression was neither good nor bad; a new organization like so many others. This was a time in which anyone who was not satisfied with developments and no longer had any confidence in the existing parties felt called upon to found a new party. Everywhere these organizations sprang out of the ground, only to vanish silently after a time. The founders for the most part had no idea what it means to make a party-let alone a movement out of a club. And so these organizations nearly always stifle automatically in their absurd philistinism.
I judged the 'German Workers' Party' no differently. When Feder finally stopped talking, I was happy. I had seen enough and wanted to leave when the free discussion period, which was now announced, moved me to remain, after all. But here, too everything seemed to run along insignificantly until suddenly a 'professor' took the floor; he first questioned the soundness of Feder's arguments and then-after Feder replied very well- suddenly appealed to 'the facts,' but not without recommending most urgently that the young party take up the 'separation' of Bavaria from 'Prussia' as a particularly important programmatic point. With bold effrontery the man maintained that in this case German-Austria would at once join Bavaria, that the peace would then become much better, and more similar nonsense. At this point I could not help demanding the floor and giving the learned gentleman my opinion on this point-with the result that the previous speaker, even before I was finished, left the hall like a wet poodle. As I spoke, the audience had listened with astonished faces, and only as I was beginning to say good night to the assemblage and go away did a man come leaping after me, introduce himself (I had not quite understood his name), and press a little booklet into my hand, apparently a political pamphlet, with the urgent request that I read it.
This was very agreeable to me, for now I had reason to hope that I might become acquainted with this dull organization in a simpler way, without having to attend any more such interesting meetings. Incidentally this apparent worker had made a good impression on me. And with this I left the hall.
At that time I was still living in the barracks of the Second Infantry Regiment in a little room that still very distinctly bore the traces of the revolution. During the day I was out, mostly with the Forty-First Rifle Regiment, or at meetings, or lectures in some other army unit, etc. Only at night did I sleep in my quarters. Since I regularly woke up before five o'clock in the morning, I had gotten in the habit of putting a few left-overs or crusts of bread on the floor for the mice which amused themselves in my little room, and watching the droll little beasts chasing around after these choice morsels. I had known so much poverty in my life that I was well able to imagine the hunger, and hence also the pleasure, of the little creatures.
At about five o'clock in the morning after this meeting, I thus lay awake in my cot, watching the chase and bustle. Since I could no longer fall asleep, I suddenly remembered the past evening and my mind fell on the booklet which the worker had given me. I began to read. It was a little pamphlet in which the author, this same worker, described how he had returned to national thinking out of the Babel of Marxist and trade-unionist phrases; hence also the title: My Political Awakening.l Once I had begun, I read the little book through with interest; for it reflected a process similar to the one which I myself had gone through twelve years before. Involuntarily I saw my own development come to life before my eyes. In the course of the day I reflected a few times on the matter and was finally about to put it aside when, less than a week later, much to my surprise, I received a postcard saying that I had been accepted in the German Workers' Party; I was requested to express myself on the subject and for this purpose to attend a committee meeting of this party on the following Wednesday.
I must admit that I was astonished at this way of 'winning' members and I didn't know whether to be angry or to laugh. I had no intention of joining a ready-made party, but wanted to found one of my own. What they asked of me was presumptuous and out of the question.
I was about to send the gentlemen my answer in writing when curiosity won out and I decided to appear on the appointed day to explain my reasons by word of mouth.

Wednesday came. The tavern in which the said meeting was to take place was the 'Aites Rosenbad' in the Herrenstrasse, a very run-down place that no one seemed to stray into more than once in a blue moon. No wonder, in the year 1919 when the menu of even the larger restaurants could offer only the scantiest and most modest allurements. Up to this time this tavern had been totally unknown to me.
I went through the ill-lit dining room in which not a soul was sitting, opened the door to the back room, and the 'session' was before me. In the dim light of a broken-down gas lamp four young people sat at a table, among them the author of the little pamphlet, who at once greeted me most joyfully and bade me welcome as a new member of the German Workers' Party
Really, I was somewhat taken aback. As I was now informed that the actual 'national chairman' had not yet arrived, I decided to wait with my declaration. This gentleman finally appeared. It was the same who had presided at the meeting in the Sterneckerbrau on the occasion of Feder's lecture
Meanwhile, I had again become very curious, and waited expectantly for what was to come. Now at least I came to know the names of the individual gentlemen. The chairman of the 'national organization' was a Herr Harrer, that of the Munich District, Anton Drexler.
The minutes of the last meeting were read and the secretary was given a vote of confidence. Next came the treasury report- all in all the association possessed seven marks and fifty pfennigs &shyp; for which the treasurer received a vote of general confidence. This, too, was entered in the minutes. Then the first chairman read the answers to a letter from Kiel, one from Dusseldorf, and one from Berlin, and everyone expressed approval. Next a report was given on the incoming mail: a letter from Berlin, one from Dusseldorf and one from Kiel, whose arrival seemed to be received with great satisfaction. This growing correspondence was interpreted as the best and most visible sign of the spreading importance of the German Workers' Party, and then-then there was a long deliberation with regard to the answers to be made.
Terrible, terrible! This was club life of the worst manner and sort. Was I to join this organization?
Next, new memberships were discussed; in other words, my capture was taken up.
I now began to ask questions-but, aside from a few directives, there was nothing, no program, no leaflet, no printed matter at all, no membership cards, not even a miserable rubber stamp, only obvious good faith and good intentions.
I had stopped smiling, for what was this if not a typical sign of the complete helplessness and total despair of all existing parties, their programs, their purposes, and their activity? The thing that drove these few young people to activity that was outwardly so absurd was only the emanation of their inner voice, which more instinctively than consciously showed them that all parties up till then were suited neither for raising up the German nation nor for curing its inner wounds. I quickly read the typed 'directives' and in them I saw more seeking than knowledge. Much was vague or unclear, much was missing, but nothing was present which could not have passed as a sign of a struggling realization.
I knew what these men felt: it was the longing for a new movement which should be more than a party in the previous sense of the wold.
That evening when I returned to the barracks I had formed my judgment of this association.
I was facing the hardest question of my life: should I join or should I decline?
Reason could advise me only to decline, but my feeling left me no rest, and as often as I tried to remember the absurdity of this whole club, my feeling argued for it.
I was restless in the days that followed.
I began to ponder back and forth. I had long been resolved to engage in political activity; that this could be done only in a new movement was likewise clear to me, only the impetus to act had hitherto been lacking. I am not one of those people who begin something today and lay it down tomorrow, if possible taking up something else again. This very conviction among others was the main reason why it was so hard for me to make up my mind to join such a new organization. I knew that for me a decision would be for good, with no turning back. For me it was no passing game but grim earnest. Even then I had an instinctive revulsion toward men who start everything and never carry anything out These jacks-of-all-trades were loathsome to me. I regarded the activity of such people as worse than doing nothing.
And this way of thinking constituted one of the main reasons why I could not make up my mind as easily as some others do to found a cause which either had to become everything or else would do better not to exist at all.
Fate itself now seemed to give me a hint. I should never have gone into one of the existing large parties, and later on I shall go into the reasons for this more closely. This absurd little organization with its few members seemed to me to possess the one advantage that it had not frozen into an 'organization,' but left the individual an opportunity for real personal activity. Here it was still possible to work, and the smaller the movement, the more readily it could be put into the proper form. Here the content, the goal, and the road could still be determined, which in the existing great parties was impossible from the outset.
The longer I tried to think it over, the more the conviction grew in me that through just such a little movement the rise of the nation could some day be organized, but never through the political parliamentary parties which clung far too greatly to the old conceptions or even shared in the profits of the new regime. For it was a new philosophy and not a new election slogan that had to be proclaimed.
Truly a very grave decision-to begin transforming this intention into reality!
What prerequisites did I myself bring to this task?
That I was poor and without means seemed to me the most bearable part of it, but it was harder that I was numbered among the nameless, that I was one of the millions whom chance permits to live or summons out of existence without even their closest neighbors condescending to take any notice of it. In addition, there was the difficulty which inevitably arose from my lack of schooling.
The so called 'intelligentsia' always looks down with a really limitless condescension on anyone who has not been dragged through the obligatory schools and had the necessary knowledge pumped into him. The question has never been: What are the man's abilities? but: What has he learned? To these 'educated' people the biggest empty-head, if he is wrapped in enough diplomas, is worth more than the brightest boy who happens to lack these costly envelopes. And so it was easy for me to imagine how this ' educated ' world would confront me, and in this I erred only in so far as even then I still regarded people as better than in cold reality they for the most part unfortunately are. As they are, to be sure, the exceptions, as everywhere else, shine all the more brightly. Thereby, however, I learned always to distinguish between the eternal students and the men of real ability.
After two days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally came to the conviction that I had to take this step.
It was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was and could be no turning back.
And so I registered as a member of the German Workers' Party and received a provisional membership card with the number 7.

Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter X: Causes of the Collapse


THE EXTENT of the fall of a body is always measured by the distance between its momentary position and the one it originally occupied. The same is true of nations and states. A decisive significance must be ascribed to their previous position or rather elevation. Only what is accustomed to rise above the common limit can fall and crash to a manifest low This is what makes the collapse of the Reich so hard and terrible for every thinking and feeling man, since it brought a crash from heights which today, in view of the depths of our present degradation, are scarcely conceivable.
The very founding of the Reich seemed gilded by the magic of an event which uplifted the entire nation. After a series of incomparable victories, a Reich was born for the sons and grandsons-a reward for immortal heroism. Whether consciously or unconsciously, it matters not, the Germans all had the feeling that this Reich, which did not owe its existence to the trickery of parliamentary fractions, towered above the measure of other states by the very exalted manner of its founding; for not in the cackling of a parliamentary battle of words, but in the thunder and rumbling of the front surrounding Paris was the solemn act performed: a proclamation of our will, declaring that the Germans, princes and people, were resolved in the future to constitute a Reich and once again to raise the imperial crown to symbolic heights. And this was not done by cowardly murder; no deserters and slackers were the founders of the Bismarckian state, but the regiments at the front.
This unique birth and baptism of fire in themselves surrounded the Reich with a halo of historic glory such as only the oldest states-and they but seldom-could boast.
And what an ascent now began!
Freedom on the outside provided daily bread within. The nation became rich in numbers and earthly goods. The honor of the state, and with it that of the whole people, was protected and shielded by an army which could point most visibly to the difference from the former German Union.
So deep is the downfall of the Reich and the German people that everyone, as though seized by dizziness, seems to have lost feeling and consciousness; people can scarcely remember the former height, so dreamlike and unreal do the old greatness and glory seem compared to our present-day misery Thus it is understandable that people are so blinded by the sublime that they forget to look for the omens of the gigantic collapse which must after all have been somehow present.
Of course, this applies only to those for whom Germany was more than a mere stop-over for making and spending money, since they alone can feel the present condition as a collapse, while to the others it is the long-desired fulfillment of their hitherto unsatisfied desires.
The omens were then present and visible, though but very few attempted to draw a certain lesson from them.
Yet today this is more necessary than ever.
The cure of a sickness can only be achieved if its cause is known, and the same is true of curing political evils. To be sure, the outward form of a sickness, its symptom which strikes the eye, is easier to see and discover than the inner cause. And this is the reason why so many people never go beyond the recognition of external effects and even confuse them with the cause, attempting, indeed, to deny the existence of the latter. Thus most of us primarily see the German collapse only in the general economic misery and the consequences arising therefrom. Nearly every one of us must personally suffer these-a cogent ground for every individual to understand the catastrophe. Much less does the great mass see the collapse in its political, cultural, ethical, and moral aspect. In this the feeling and understanding of many fail completely.
That this should be so among the broad masses may still pass, but for even the circles of the intelligentsia to regard the German collapse as primarily an 'economic catastrophe,' which can therefore be cured by economic means, is one of the reasons why a recovery has hitherto been impossible. Only when it is understood that here, too, economics is only of second or third-rate importance, and the primary role falls to factors of politics, ethics, morality, and blood, will we arrive at an understanding of the present calamity, and thus also be able to find the ways and means for a cure.
The question of the causes of the German collapse is, therefore, of decisive importance, particularly for a political movement whose very goal is supposed to be to quell the defeat.
But, in such research into the past, we must be very careful not to confuse the more conspicuous effects with the less visible causes.
The easiest and hence most widespread explanation of the present misfortune is that it was brought about by the consequences of the lost War and that therefore the War is the cause of the present evil.
There may be many who will seriously believe this nonsense but there are still more from whose mouth such an explanation can only be a lie and conscious falsehood. This last applies to all those who today feed at the government's cribs. For didn't the prophets of the revolution again and again point out most urgently to the people that it was a matter of complete indifference to the broad masses how this War turned out? Did they not, on the contrary, gravely assure us that at most the 'big capitalist' could have an interest in a victorious end of the gigantic struggle of nations, but never the German people as such, let alone the German worker? Indeed, didn't these apostles of world conciliation maintain the exact opposite: didn't they say that by a German defeat 'militarism' would be destroyed, but that the German nation would celebrate its most glorious resurrection? Didn't these circles glorify the benevolence of the Entente, and didn't they shove tile blame for the whole bloody struggle on Germany? And could they have done this without declaring that even military defeat would be without special consequences for the nation? Wasn't the whole revolution embroidered with the phrase that it would prevent the victory of the German flag, but that through it the German people would at last begin advancing toward freedom at home and abroad?
Will you claim that this was not so, you wretched, lying scoundrels?
It takes a truly Jewish effrontery to attribute the blame for the collapse solely to the military defeat when the central organ of all traitors to the nation, the Berlin Vorwarts, wrote that this time the German people must not bring its banner home victorious!
And now this is supposed to be the cause of our collapse?
Of course, it would be perfectly futile to fight with such forgetful liars. I wouldn't waste my words on them if unfortunately this nonsense were not parroted by so many thoughtless people, who do not seem inspired by malice or conscious insincerity. Furthermore, these discussions are intended to give our propaganda fighters an instrument which is very much needed at a time when the spoken word is often twisted in our mouths.
Thus we have the following to say to the assertion that the lost War is responsible for the German collapse:
Certainly the loss of the War was of terrible importance for the future of our fatherland; however, its loss is not a cause, but itself only a consequence of causes. It was perfectly clear to everyone with insight and without malice that an unfortunate end of this struggle for life and death would inevitably lead to extremely devastating consequences. But unfortunately there were also people who seemed to lack this insight at the right time or who, contrary to their better knowledge, contested and denied this truth. Such for the most part were those who, after the fulfillment of their secret wish, suddenly and belatedly became aware of the catastrophe which had been brought about by themselves among others. They are guilty of the collapse-not the lost War as it suddenly pleases them to say and believe. For its loss was, after all, only the consequence of their activity and not, as they now try to say, the result of 'bad' leadership. The foe did not consist of cowards either; he, too, knew how to die. His number from the first day was greater than that of the German army for he could draw on the technical armament and the arsenals of the whole world; hence the German victories, won for four years against a whole world, must regardless of all heroic courage and 'organization,' be attributed solely to superior leadership, and this iS a fact which cannot be denied out of existence. The organization and leadership of the German army were the mightiest that the earth had ever seen. Their deficiencies lay in the limits of all human adequacy in general.
The collapse of this army was not the cause of our present-day misfortune, but only the consequence of other crimes, a consequence which itself again, it must be admitted, ushered in the beginning of a further and this time visible collapse.
The truth of this can be seen from the following:
Must a military defeat lead to so complete a collapse of a nation and a state? Since when is this the result of an unfortunate war? Do peoples perish in consequence of lost wars as such?
The answer to this can be very brief: always, when military defeat iS the payment meted out to peoples for their inner rottenness, cowardice, lack of character, in short, unworthiness. If this iS not the case, the military defeat will rather be the inspiration of a great future resurrection than the tombstone of a national existence.
History offers innumerable examples for the truth of this assertion.
Unfortunately, the military defeat of the German people is not an undeserved catastrophe, but the deserved chastisement of eternal retribution. We more than deserved this defeat. It is only the greatest outward symptom of decay amid a whole series of inner symptoms, which perhaps had remained hidden and invisible to the eyes of most people, or which like ostriches people did not want to see.
Just consider the attendant circumstances amid which the German people accepted this defeat. Didn't many circles express the most shameless joy at the misfortune of the fatherland? And who would do such a thing if he does not really deserve such a punishment? Why, didn't they go even further and brag of having finally caused the front to waver? And it was not the enemy that did this-no, no, it was Germans who poured such disgrace upon their heads! Can it be said that misfortune struck them unjustly? Since when do people step forward and take the guilt for a war on themselves? And against better knowledge and better judgment!
No, and again no. In the way in which the German people received its defeat, we can recognize most clearly that the true cause of our collapse must be sought in an entirely different place from the purely military loss of a few positions or in the failure of an offensive; for if the front as such had really flagged and if its downfall had really encompassed the doom of the fatherland, the German people would have received the defeat quite differently. Then they would have borne the ensuing misfortune with gritted teeth or would have mourned it, overpowered by grief; then all hearts would have been filled with rage and anger toward the enemy who had become victorious through a trick of chance or the will of fate; then, like the Roman Senate, the nation would have received the defeated divisions with the thanks of the fatherland for the sacrifices they had made and besought them not to despair of the Reich. The capitulation would have been signed only with the reason, while the heart even then would have beaten for the resurrection to come.
This is how a defeat for which only fate was responsible would have been received. Then people would not have laughed and danced, they would not have boasted of cowardice and glorified the defeat, they would not have scoffed at the embattled troops and dragged their banner and cockade in the mud. But above all: then we should never have had the terrible state of affairs which prompted a British officer, Colonel Repington, to make the contemptuous statement: 'Of the Germans, every third man is a traitor.' No, this plague would never have been able to rise into the stifling flood which for five years now has been drowning the very last remnant of respect for us on the part of the rest of the world.
This most of all shows the assertion that the lost War was the cause of the German collapse to be a lie. No, this military collapse was itself only the consequence of a large number of symptoms of disease and their causes, which even in peacetime were with the German nation. This was the first consequence, catastrophic and visible to all, of an ethical and moral poisoning, of a diminution in the instinct of self-preservation and its preconditions, which for many years had begun to undermine the foundations of the people and the Reich.
It required the whole bottomless falsehood of the Jews and their Marxist fighting organization to lay the blame for the collapse on that very man who alone, with superhuman energy and will power, tried to prevent the catastrophe he foresaw and save the nation from its time of deepest humiliation and disgrace By branding Ludendorff as guilty for the loss of the World War they took the weapon of moral right from the one dangerous accuser who could have risen against the traitors to the fatherland. In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick-a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.
The foremost connoisseurs of this truth regarding the possibilities in the use of falsehood and slander have always been the Jews; for after all, their whole existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community while actually they are a race-and what a race ! One of the greatest minds of humanity has nailed them forever as such in an eternally correct phrase of fundamental truth: he called them 'the great masters of the lie.' And anyone who does not recognize this or does not want to believe it will never in this world be able to help the truth to victory.
For the German people it must almost be considered a great good fortune that its period of creeping sickness was suddenly cut short by so terrible a catastrophe, for otherwise the nation would have gone to the dogs more slowly perhaps, but all the more certainly. The disease would have become chronic, while in the acute form of the collapse it at least became clearly and distinctly recognizable to a considerable number of people. It was no accident that man mastered the plague more easily than tuberculosis. The one comes in terrible waves of death that shake humanity to the foundations, the other slowly and stealthily; the one leads to terrible fear, the other to gradual indifference. The consequence is that man opposed the one with all the ruthlessness of his energy, while he tries to control consumption with feeble means. Thus he mastered the plague, while tuberculosis masters him.
Exactly the same is true of diseases of national bodies. If they do not take the form of catastrophe, man slowly begins to get accustomed to them and at length, though it may take some time, perishes all the more certainly of them. And so it is a good fortune-though a bitter one, to be sure-when Fate resolves to take a hand in this slow process of putrefaction and with a sudden blow makes the victim visualize the end of his disease. For more than once, that is what such a catastrophe amounts to Then it can easily become the cause of a recovery beginning with the utmost determination.
But even in such a case, the prerequisite is again the recognition of the inner grounds which cause the disease in question.
Here, too, the most important thing remains the distinction between the causes and the conditions they call forth. This will be all the more difficult, the longer the toxins remain in the national body and the more they become an ingredient of it which is taken for granted. For it is easily possible that after a certain time unquestionably harmful poisons Bill be regarded as an ingredient of one's own nation or at best will be tolerated as a necessary evil, so that a search for the alien virus is no longer regarded as necessary.
Thus, in the long peace of the pre-War years, certain harmful features had appeared and been recognized as such, though next to nothing was done against their virus, aside from a few exceptions. And here again these exceptions were primarily manifestations of economic life, which struck the consciousness of the individual more strongly than the harmful features in a number of other fields.
There were many symptoms of decay which should have aroused serious reflection.




With respect to economics, the following should be said:
Through the amazing increase in the German population before the War, the question of providing the necessary daily bread stepped more and more sharply into the foreground of all political and economic thought and action. Unfortunately, those in power could not make up their minds to choose the only correct solution, but thought they could reach their goal in an easier way. When they renounced the acquisition of new soil and replaced it by the lunacy of world economic conquest, the result was bound to be an industrialization as boundless as it was harmful.
The first consequence of gravest importance was the weakening of the peasant class. Proportionately as the peasant class diminished, the mass of the big city proletariat increased more and more, until finally the balance was completely upset.
Now the abrupt alternation between rich and poor became really apparent. Abundance and poverty lived so close together that the saddest consequences could and inevitably did arise. Poverty and frequent unemployment began to play havoc with people, leaving behind them a memory of discontent and embitterment. The consequence of this seemed to be political class division. Despite all the economic prosperity, dissatisfaction became greater and deeper; in fact, things came to such a pass that the conviction that 'it can't go on like this much longer' became general, yet without people having or being able to have any definite idea of what ought to have been done.
These were the typical symptoms of deep discontent which sought to express themselves in this way.
But worse than this were other consequences induced by the economization of the nation.
In proportion as economic life grew to be the dominant mistress of the state, money became the god whom all had to serve and to whom each man had to bow down. More and more, the gods of heaven were put into the corner as obsolete and outmoded, and in their stead incense was burned to the idol Mammon. A truly malignant degeneration set in; what made it most malignant was that it began at a time when the nation, in a presumably menacing and critical hour, needed the highest heroic attitude. Germany had to accustom herself to the idea that some day her attempt to secure her daily bread by means of 'peaceful economic labor' would have to be defended by the sword.
Unfortunately, the domination of money was sanctioned even by that authority which should have most opposed it: His Majesty the Kaiser acted most unfortunately by drawing the aristocracy into the orbit of the new finance capital. It must be said to his credit, however, that unfortunately even Bismarck himself did not recognize the menacing danger in this respect. Thereby the ideal virtues for all practical purposes had taken a position second to the value of money, for it was clear that once a beginning had been made in this direction, the aristocracy of the sword would in a short time inevitably be overshadowed by the financial aristocracy. Financial operations succeed more easily than battles. It was no longer inviting for the real hero or statesman to be brought into relations with some old bank Jew: the man of true ment could no longer have an interest in the bestowal of cheap decorations; he declined them with thanks. But regarded purely from the standpoint of blood, such a development was profoundly unfortunate: more and more, the nobility lost the racial basis for its existence, and in large measure the designation of 'ignobility' would have been more suitable for it.
A grave economic symptom of decay was the slow disappearance of the right of private property, and the gradual transference of the entire economy to the ownership of stock companies.
Now for the first time labor had sunk to the level of an object of speculation for unscrupulous Jewish business men; the alienation of property from the wage-worker was increased ad infinitum. The stock exchange began to triumph and prepared slowly but surely to take the life of the nation into its guardianship and control.
The internationalization of the German economic life had been begun even before the War through the medium of stock issues To be sure, a part of German industry still attempted with resolution to ward off this fate. At length, however, it, too, fell a victim to the united attack of greedy finance capital which carried on this fight, with the special help of its most faithful comrade, the Marxist movement.
The lasting war against German 'heavy industry' was the visible beginning of the internationalization of German economy toward which Marxism was striving, though this could not be carried to its ultimate end until the victory of Marxism and the revolution. While I am writing these words, the general attack against the German state railways has finally succeeded, and they are now being handed over to international finance capitals 'International' Social Democracy has thus realized one of its highest goals.
How far this 'economization' of the German people had succeeded is most visible in the fact that after the War one of the leading heads of German industry, and above all of commerce, was finally able to express the opinion that economic effort as such was alone in a position to re-establish Germany. This nonsense was poured forth at a moment when France was primarily bringing back the curriculum of her schools to humanistic foundations in order to combat the error that the nation and the state owed their survival to economics and not to eternal ideal values. These words pronounced by a Stinnes created the most incredible confusion; they were picked up at once, and with amazing rapidity became the leitmotif of all the quacks and big-mouths that since the revolution Fate has let loose on Germany in the capacity of 'statesmen.'




One of the worst symptoms of decay in Germany of the pre-War era was the steadily increasing habit of doing things by halves. This is always a consequence of uncertainty on some matter and of the cowardice resulting from this and other grounds. This disease was-further promoted by education.
German education before the War was afflicted with an extraordinary number of weaknesses. It was extremely one-sided and adapted to breeding pure 'knowledge,' with less attention to 'ability.' Even less emphasis was laid on the development of the character of the individual-in so far as this is possible; exceedingly little on the sense of joy in responsibility, and none at all on the training of will and force of decision. Its results, you may be sure, were not strong men, but compliant ' walking encyclopedias,' as we Germans were generally looked upon and accordingly estimated before the War. People liked the German because he was easy to make use of, but respected him little, precisely because of his weakness of will. It was not for nothing that more than almost any other people he was prone to lose his nationality and fatherland. The lovely proverb, 'with hat in hand, he travels all about the land,' tells the whole story.
This compliance became really disastrous, however, when it determined the sole form in which the monarch could be approached; that is, never to contradict him, but agree to anything and everything that His Majesty condescends to do. Precisely in this place was free, manly dignity most necessary; otherwise the monarchic institution was one day bound to perish from all this crawling; for crawling it was and nothing else! And only miserable crawlers and sneaks-in short, all the decadents who have always felt more at ease around the highest thrones than sincere, decent, honorable souls-can regard this as the sole proper form of intercourse with the bearers of the crown! These 'most humble' creatures, to be sure, despite all their humility before their master and source of livelihood, have always demonstrated the greatest arrogance toward the rest of humanity, and worst of all when they pass themselves off with shameful effrontery on their sinful fellow men as the only 'monarchists'; this is real gall such as only these ennobled or even unennobled tapeworms are capable of! For in reality these people remained the gravediggers of the monarchy and particularly the monarchistic idea. Nothing else is conceivable: a man who is prepared to stand up for a cause will never and can never be a sneak and a spineless lickspittle. Anyone who is really serious about the preservation and furtherance of an institution will cling to it with the last fiber of his heart and will not be able to abandon it if evils of some sort appear in this institution. To be sure, he will not cry this out to the whole public as the democratic 'friends' of the monarchy did in the exact same lying way; he will most earnestly warn and attempt to influence His Majesty, the bearer of the crown himself. He will not and must not adopt the attitude that His Majesty remains free to act according to his own will anyway, even if this obviously must and will lead to a catastrophe, but in such a case he will have to protect the monarchy against the monarch, and this despite all perils. If the value of this institution lay in the momentary person of the monarch, it would be the worst institution that can be imagined; for monarchs only in the rarest cases are the cream of wisdom and reason or even of character, as some people like to claim. This is believed only by professional lickspittles and sneaks, but all straightforward men-and these remain the most valuable men in the state despite everything- will only feel repelled by the idea of arguing such nonsense. For them history remains history and the truth the truth even where monarchs are concerned. No, the good fortune to possess a great monarch who is also a great man falls to peoples so seldom that they must be content if the malice of Fate abstains at least from the worst possible mistakes.
Consequently, the value and importance of the monarchic idea cannot reside in the person of the monarch himself except if Heaven decides to lay the crown on the brow of a heroic genius like Frederick the Great or a wise character like William I. This happens once in centuries and hardly more often. Otherwise the idea takes precedence over the person and the meaning of this institution must lie exclusively in the institution itself. With this the monarch himself falls into the sphere of service. Then he, too, becomes a mere cog in this work, to which he is obligated as such. Then he, too, must comply with a higher purpose, and the ' monarchist' is then no longer the man who in silence lets the bearer of the crown profane it, but the man who prevents this. Otherwise, it would not be permissible to depose an obviously insane prince, if the sense of the institution lay not in the idea, but in the ' sanctified ' person at any price.
Today it is really necessary to put this down, for in recent times more and more of these creatures, to whose wretched attitude the collapse of the monarchy must not least of all be attributed are rising out of obscurity. With a certain naive gall, these people have started in again to speak of nothing but 'their King'- whom only a few years ago they left in the lurch in the critical hour and in the most despicable fashion-and are beginning to represent every person who is not willing to agree to their lying tirades as a bad German. And in reality they are the very same poltroons who in 1919 scattered and ran from every red armband, abandoned their King, in a twinkling exchanged the halberd for the walking stick, put on noncommittal neckties, and vanished without trace as peaceful ' citizens.' At one stroke they were gone, these royal champions, and only after the revolutionary storm, thanks to the activity of others, had subsided enough so that a man could again roar his 'Hail, hail to the King' into the breezes, these 'servants and counselors' of the crown began again cautiously to emerge. And now they are all here again, looking back longingly to the fieshpots of Egypt; they can hardly restrain themselves in their loyalty to the King and their urge to do great things, until the day when again the first red arm-band will appear, and the whole gang of ghosts profiting from the old monarchy will again vanish like mice at the sight of a cat!
If the monarchs were not themselves to blame for these things, they could be most heartily pitied because of their present defenders. In any case, they might as well know that with such knights a crown can be lost, but no crowns gained.
This servility, however, was a flaw in our whole education, for which we suffered most terribly in this connection. For, as its consequence, these wretched creatures were able to maintain themselves at all the courts and gradually undermine the foundations of the monarchy. And when the structure finally began to totter, they evaporated. Naturally: cringers and lickspittles do not let themselves be knocked dead for their master. That monarchs never know this and fail to learn it almost on principle has from time immemorial been their undoing.

One of the worst symptoms of decay was Mate increasing cowardice in the face of responsibility, as well as the resultant halfheartedness in all things.
To be sure, the starting point of this plague in our country lies in large part in the parliamentary institution in which irresponsibility of the purest breed is cultivated. Unfortunately, this plague slowly spread to all other domains of life, most strongly to state life. Everywhere responsibility was evaded and inadequate half-measures were preferred as a result; for in the use of such measures personal responsibility seems reduced to the smallest dimensions.
Just examine the attitude of the various governments toward a number of truly injurious manifestations of our public life, and you will easily recognize the terrible significance of this general half-heartedness and cowardice in the face of responsibility.
I shall take only a few cases from the mass of existing examples:
Journalistic circles in particular like to describe the press as a 'great power' in the state. As a matter of fact, its importance really is immense. It cannot be overestimated, for the press really continues education in adulthood.
Its readers, by and large, can be divided into three groups:
First, into those who believe everything they read;
second, into those who have ceased to believe anything;
third, into the minds which critically examine what they read, and judge accordingly.
Numerically, the first group is by far the largest. It consists of the great mass of the people and consequently represents the simplest-minded part of the nation. It cannot be listed in terms of professions, but at most in general degrees of intelligence. To it belong all those who have neither been born nor trained to think independently, and who partly from incapacity and partly from incompetence believe everything that is set before them in black and white. To them also belongs the type of lazybones who could perfectly well think, but from sheer mental laziness seizes gratefully on everything that someone else has thought, with the modest assumption that the someone else has exerted himself considerably. Now, with all these types, who constitute the great masses, the influence of the press will be enormous. They are not able or willing themselves to examine what is set before them, and as a result their whole attitude toward all the problems of the day can be reduced almost exclusively to the outside influence of others. This can be advantageous when their enlightenment is provided by a serious and truth-loving party, but it is catastrophic when scoundrels and liars provide it.
The second group is much smaller in number. It is partly composed of elements which previously belonged to the first group, but after long and bitter disappointments shifted to the opposite and no longer believe anything that comes before their eyes in print. They hate every newspaper; either they don't read it at all, or without exception fly into a rage over the contents, since in their opinion they consist only of lies and falsehoods. These people are very hard to handle, since they are suspicious even in the face of the truth. Consequently, they are lost for all positive, political work.
The third group, finally, is by far the smallest; it consists of the minds with real mental subtlety, whom natural gifts and education have taught to think independently, who try to form their own judgment on all things, and who subject everything they read to a thorough examination and further development of their own. They will not look at a newspaper without always collaborating in their minds, and the writer has no easy time of it. Journalists love such readers with the greatest reserve.
For the members of this third group, it must be admitted, the nonsense that newspaper scribblers can put down is not very dangerous or even very important. Most of them in the course of their lives have learned to regard every journalist as a rascal on principle, who tells the truth only once in a blue moon. Unfortunately, however, the importance of these splendid people lies only in their intelligence and not in their number- a misfortune at a time when wisdom is nothing and the majority is everything! Today, when the ballot of the masses decides, the chief weight lies with the most numerous group, and this is the first: the mob of the simple or credulous.
It is of paramount interest to the state and the nation to prevent these people from falling into the hands of bad, ignorant, or even vicious educators. The state, therefore, has the duty of watching over their education and preventing any mischief. It must particularly exercise strict control over the press; for its influence on these people is by far the strongest and most penetrating, since it is applied, not once in a while, but over and over again. In the uniformity and constant repetition of this instruction lies its tremendous power. If anywhere, therefore, it is here that the state must not forget that all means must serve an end; it must not let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called 'freedom of the press' and let itself be talked into neglecting its duty and denying the nation the food which it needs and which is good for it; with ruthless determination it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state and the nation.
But what food did the German press of the pre-War period dish out to the people? Was it not the worst poison that can even be imagined? Wasn't the worst kind of pacifism injected into the heart of our people at a time when the rest of the world was preparing to throttle Germany, slowly but surely? Even in peacetime didn't the press inspire the minds of the people with doubt in the right of their own state, thus from the outset limiting them in the choice of means for its defense? Was it not the German press which knew how to make the absurdity of 'Western democracy' palatable to our people until finally, ensnared by all the enthusiastic tirades, they thought they could entrust their future to a League of Nations? Did it not help to teach our people a miserable immorality? Did it not ridicule morality and ethics as backward and petty-bourgeois, until our people finally became 'modern'? Did it not with its constant attacks undermine the foundations of the state's authority until a single thrust sufficed to make the edifice collapse? Did it not fight with all possible means against every effort to give unto the state that which is the state's? Did it not belittle the army with constant criticism, sabotage universal conscription, demand the refusal of military credits, etc., until the result became inevitable?
The so-called liberal press was actively engaged in digging the grave of the German people and the German Reich. We can pass by the lying Marxist sheets in silence; to them lying is just as vitally necessary as catching mice for a cat; their function is only to break the people's national and patriotic backbone and make them ripe for the slave's yoke of international capital and its masters, the Jews.
And what did the state do against this mass poisoning of the nation? Nothing, absolutely nothing. A few ridiculous decrees, a few fines for villainy that went too far, and that was the end of it. Instead, they hoped to curry favor with this plague by flattery, by recognition of the 'value' of the press, its 'importance,' its 'educational mission,' and more such nonsense-as for the Jews, they took all this with a crafty smile and acknowledged it with sly thanks.
The reason, however, for this disgraceful failure on the part of the state was not that it did not recognize the danger, but rather in a cowardice crying to high Heaven and the resultant halfheartedness of all decisions and measures. No one had the courage to use thoroughgoing radical methods, but in this as in everything else they tinkered about with a lot of halfway prescriptions, and instead of carrying the thrust to the heart, they at most irritated the viper-with the result that not only did everything remain as before, but on the contrary the power of the institutions which should have been combated increased from year to year.
The defensive struggle of the German government at that time against the press-mainly that of Jewish origin-which was slowly ruining the nation was without any straight line, irresolute and above all without any visible goal. The intelligence of the privy councilors failed completely when it came to estimating the importance of this struggle, to choosing means or drawing up a clear plan. Planlessly they fiddled about; sometimes, after being bitten too badly, they locked up one of the journalistic vipers for a few weeks or months, but they left the snakes' nest as such perfectly unmolested.
True-this resulted partly from the infinitely wily tactics of the Jews, on the one hand, and from a stupidity and innocence such as only privy councilors are capable of, on the other. The Jew was much too clever to allow his entire press to be attacked uniformly. No, one part of it existed in order to cover the other. While the Marxist papers assailed in the most dastardly way everything that can be holy to man; while they infamously attacked the state and the government and stirred up large sections of the people against one another, the bourgeois-democratic papers knew how to give an appearance of their famous objectivity, painstakingly avoided all strong words, well knowing that empty heads can judge only by externals and never have the faculty of penetrating the inner core, so that for them the value of a thing is measured by this exterior instead of by the content; a human weakness to which they owe what esteem they themselves enjoy.
For these people the Frankfurter Zeitung was the embodiment of respectability. For it never uses coarse expressions, it rejects all physical brutality and keeps appealing for struggle with 'intellectual' weapons, a conception, strange to say, to which especially the least intelligent people are most attached. This is a result of our half-education which removes people from the instinct of Nature and pumps a certain amount of knowledge into them, but cannot create full understanding, since for this industry and good will alone are no use; the necessary intelligence must be present, and what is more, it must be inborn. The ultimate wisdom is always the understanding of the instinct '-that is: a man must never fall into the lunacy of believing that he has really risen to be lord and master of Nature-which is so easily induced by the conceit of half-education; he must understand the fundamental necessity of Nature's rule, and realize how much his existence is subjected to these laws of eternal fight and upward struggle. Then he will feel that in a universe where planets revolve around suns, and moons turn about planets, where force alone forever masters weakness, compelling it to be an obedient slave or else crushing it, there can be no special laws for man. For him, too, the eternal principles of this ultimate wisdom hold sway. He can try to comprehend them; but escape them, never.
And it is precisely for our intellectual demi-monde that the Jew writes his so-called intellectual press. For them the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt are made; for them their tone is chosen, and on them they exercise their influence. Seemingly they all most sedulously avoid any outwardly crude forms, and meanwhile from other vessels they nevertheless pour their poison into the hearts of their readers. Amid a Gezeires 2 Of fine sounds and phrases they lull their readers into believing that pure science or even morality is really the motive of their acts, while in reality it is nothing but a wily, ingenious trick for stealing the enemy's weapon against the press from under his nose. The one variety oozes respectability, so all soft-heads are ready to believe them when they say that the faults of others are only trivial abuses which should never lead to an infringement of the 'freedom of the press'-their term for poisoning and lying to the people. And so the authorities shy away from taking measures against these bandits, for they fear that, if they did, they would at once have the ' respectable ' press against them, a fear which is only too justified. For as soon as they attempt to proceed against one of these shameful rags, all the others will at once take its part, but by no means to sanction its mode of struggle, God forbid-but only to defend the principle of freedom of the press and freedom of public opinion; these alone must be defended. But in the face of all this shouting, the strongest men grow weak, for does it not issue from the mouths of 'respectable' papers?
This poison was able to penetrate the bloodstream of our people unhindered and do its work, and the state did not possess the power to master the disease. In the laughable half-measures which it used against the poison, the menacing decay of the Reich was manifest. For an institution which is no longer resolved to defend itself with all weapons has for practical purposes abdicated. Every half-measure is a visible sign of inner decay which must and will be followed sooner or later by outward collapse.
I believe that the present generation, properly led, will more easily master this danger. It has experienced various things which had the power somewhat to strengthen the nerves of those who did not lose them entirely. In future days the Jew will certainly continue to raise a mighty uproar in his newspapers if a hand is ever laid on his favorite nest, if an end is put to the mischief of the press and this instrument of education is put into the service of the state and no longer left in the hands of aliens and enemies of the people. But I believe that this will bother us younger men less than our fathers. A thirty-centimeter shell has always hissed more loudly than a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers-so let them hiss!




A further example of the halfheartedness and weakness of the leaders of pre-War Germany in meeting the most important vital questions of the nation is the following: running parallel to the political, ethical, and moral contamination of the people, there had been for many years a no less terrible poisoning of the health of the national body. Especially in the big cities, syphilis was beginning to spread more and more, while tuberculosis steadily reaped its harvest of death throughout nearly the whole country.
Though in both cases the consequences were terrible for the nation, the authorities could not summon up the energy to take
decisive measures.
Particularly with regard to syphilis, the attitude of the leadership of the nation and the state can only be designated as total capitulation. To fight it seriously, they would have had to take somewhat broader measures than was actually the case. The invention of a remedy of questionable character and its commercial exploitation can no longer help much against this plague. Here again it was only the fight against causes that mattered and not the elimination of the symptoms. The cause lies, primarily, in our prostitution of love. Even if its result were not this frightful plague, it would nevertheless be profoundly injurious to man, since the moral devastations which accompany this degeneracy suffice to destroy a people slowly but surely. This Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonization of our mating instinct will sooner or later destroy our entire offspring, for the powerful children of a natural emotion will be replaced by the miserable creatures of financial expediency which is becoming more and more the basis and sole prerequisite of our marriages. Love finds its outlet elsewhere.
Here, too, of course, Nature can be scorned for a certain time, but her vengeance will not fail to appear, only it takes a time to manifest itself, or rather: it is often recognized too late by man.
But the devastating consequences of a lasting disregard of the natural requirements for marriage can be seen in our nobility. Here we have before us the results of procreation based partly on purely social compulsion and partly on financial grounds. The one leads to a general weakening, the other to a poisoning of the blood, since every department store Jewess is considered fit to augment the offspring of His Highness-and, indeed, the offspring look it. In both cases complete degeneration is the consequence.
Today our bourgeoisie strive to go the same road, and they will end up at the same goal.
Hastily and indifferently, people tried to pass by the unpleasant truths, as though by such an attitude events could be undone. No, the fact that our big city population is growing more and more prostituted in its love life cannot just be denied out of existence; it simply is so. The most visible results of this mass contamination can, on the one hand, be found in the insane asylums, and on the other, unfortunately, in our-children. They in particular are the sad product of the irresistibly spreading contamination of our sexual life; the vices of the parents are revealed in the sicknesses of the children.
There are different ways of reconciling oneself to this unpleasant, yes, terrible fact: the ones see nothing at all or rather want to see nothing; this, of course, is by far the simplest and easiest 'position.' The others wrap themselves in a saint's cloak of prudishness as absurd as it is hypocritical; they speak of this whole field as if it were a great sin, and above all express their profound indignation against every sinner caught in the act, then close their eyes in pious horror to this godless plague and pray God to let sulphur and brimstone-preferably after their own death-rain down on this whole Sodom and Gomorrah, thus once again making an instructive example of this shameless humanity. The third, finally, are perfectly well aware of the terrible consequences which this plague must and will some day induce, but only shrug their shoulders, convinced that nothing can be done against the menace, so the only thing to do is to let things slide.
All this, to be sure, is comfortable and simple, but it must not be forgotten that a nation will fall victim to such comfortableness. The excuse that other peoples are no better off, it goes without saying, can scarcely affect the fact of our own ruin, except that the feeling of seeing others stricken by the same calamity might for many bring a mitigation of their own pains. But then more than ever the question becomes: Which people will be the first and only one to master this plague by its own strength, and which nations will perish from it? And this is the crux of the whole matter. Here again we have a touchstone of a race's value-the race which cannot stand the test will simply die out, making place for healthier or tougher and more resisting races. For since this question primarily regards the offspring, it is one of those concerning which it is said with such terrible justice that the sins of the fathers are avenged down to the tenth generation. But this applies only to profanation of the blood and the race.
Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it.
How truly wretched was the attitude of pre-War Germany on this one very question ! What was done to check the contamination of our youth in the big cities? What was done to attack the infection and mammonization of our love life? What was done to combat the resulting syphilization of our people?
This can be answered most easily by stating what should have been done.
First of all, it was not permissible to take this question frivolously; it had to be understood that the fortune or misfortune of generations would depend on its solution; yes, that it could, if not had to be, decisive for the entire future of our people. Such a realization, however, obligated us to ruthless measures and surgical operations. What we needed most was the conviction that first of all the whole attention of the nation had to be concentrated upon this terrible danger, so that every single individual could become inwardly conscious of the importance of this struggle. Truly incisive and sometimes almost unbearable obligations and burdens can only be made generally effective if, in addition to compulsion, the realization of necessity is transmitted to the individual. But this requires a tremendous enlightenment excluding all other problems of the day which might have a distracting effect.
In all cases where the fulfillment of apparently impossible demand.s or tasks is involved, the whole attention of a people must be focused and concentrated on this one question, as though life and death actually depended on its solution. Only in this way will a people be made willing and able to perform great tasks and exertions.
This principle applies also to the individual man in so far as he wants to achieve great goals. He, too, will be able to do this only in steplike sections, and he, too, will always have to unite his entire energies on the achievement of a definitely delimited task, until this task seems fulfilled and a new section can be marked out. Anyone who does not so divide the road to be conquered into separate stages and does not try to conquer these one by one, systematically with the sharpest concentration of all his forces, will never be able to reach the ultimate goal, but will be left lying somewhere along the road, or perhaps even off it. This gradual working up to a goal is an art, and to conquer the road step by step in this way you must throw in your last ounce of energy.
The very first prerequisite needed for attacking such a difficult stretch of the human road is for the leadership to succeed in representing to the masses of the people the partial goal which now has to be achieved, or rather conquered, as the one which is solely and alone worthy of attention, on whose conquest everything depends. The great mass of the people cannot see the whole road ahead of them without growing weary and despairing of the task. A certain number of them will keep the goal in mind, but will only be able to see the road in small, partial stretches, like the wanderer, who likewise knows and recognizes the end of his journey, but is better able to conquer the endless highway if he divides it into sections and boldly attacks each one as though it represented the desired goal itself. Only in this way does he advance without losing heart.
Thus, by the use of all propagandist means, the question of combating syphilis should have been made to appear as the task of the nation. Not just one more task. To this end, its injurious effects should have been thoroughly hammered into people as the most terrible misfortune, and this by the use of all available means, until the entire nation arrived at the conviction that everything-future or ruin-depended upon the solution of this question.
Only after such a preparation, if necessary over a period of years, will the attention, and consequently the determination, of the entire nation be aroused to such an extent that we can take exceedingly hard measures exacting the greatest sacrifices without running the risk of not being understood or of suddenly being left in the lurch by the will of the masses.
For, seriously to attack this plague, tremendous sacrifices and equally great labors are necessary.
The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution against prejudices, old habits, against previous conceptions, general views among them not least the false prudery of certain circles.
The first prerequisite for even the moral right to combat these things is the facilitation of earlier marriage for the coming generation. In late marriage alone lies the compulsion to retain an institution which, twist and turn as you like, is and remains a disgrace to humanity, an institution which is damned ill-suited to a being who with his usual modesty likes to regard himself as the 'image' of God.
Prostitution is a disgrace to humanity, but it cannot be eliminated by moral lectures, pious intentions, etc.; its limitation and final abolition presuppose the elimination of innumerable preconditions. The first is and remains the creation of an opportunity for early marriage as compatible with human nature- particularly for the man, as the woman in any case is only the passive part.
How lost, how incomprehensible a part of humanity has become today can be seen from the fact that mothers in so-called 'good ' society can not seldom be heard to say that they are glad to have found their child a husband who has sown his wild oats, etc. Since there is hardly any lack of these, but rather the contrary, the poor girl will be happy to find one of these worn-out Siegfrieds, and the children will be the visible result of this 'sensible' marriage. If we bear in mind that, aside from this, propagation as such is limited as much as possible, so that Nature is prevented from making any choice, since naturally every creature, regardless how miserable, must be preserved, the only question that remains is why such an institution exists at all any more and what purpose it is supposed to serve? Isn't it exactly the same as prostitution itself? Hasn't duty toward posterity passed completely out of the picture? Or do people fail to realize what a curse on the part of their children and children's children they are heaping on themselves by such criminal frivolity in observing the ultimate natural law as well as our ultimate natural obligation?
Thus, the civilized peoples degenerate and gradually perish.
And marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal, the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.
Under these conditions its soundness can only be judged by the way in which it fulfills this task. For this reason alone early marriage is sound, for it-gives the young marriage that strength from which alone a healthy and resistant offspring can arise. To be sure, it can be made possible only by quite a number of social conditions without which early marriage is not even thinkable. Therefore, a solution of this question, small as it is, cannot occur without incisive measures of a social sort. The importance of these should be most understandable at a time when the 'social' - republic, if only by its incompetence in the solution of the housing question, simply prevents numerous marriages and thus encourages prostitution.
Our absurd way of regulating salaries, which concerns itself much too little with the question of the family and its sustenance, is one more reason that makes many an early marriage impossible.
Thus, a real fight against prostitution can only be undertaken if a basic change in social conditions makes possible an earlier marriage than at present can generally take place. This is the very first premise for a solution of this question.
In the second place, education and training must eradicate a number of evils about which today no one bothers at all. Above all, in our present education a balance must be created between mental instruction and physical training. The institution that is called a Gymnasium today is a mockery of the Greek model. In our educational system it has been utterly forgotten that in the long run a healthy mind can dwell only in a healthy body. Especially if we bear in mind the mass of the people, aside from a few exceptions, this statement becomes absolutely valid.

In pre-War Germany there was a period in which no one concerned himself in the least about this truth. They simply went on sinning against the body and thought that in the one-sided training of the 'mind,' they possessed a sure guaranty for the greatness of the nation. A mistake whose consequences began to be felt sooner than was expected. It is no accident that th Bolshevistic wave never found better soil than in places inhabited by a population degenerated by hunger and constant undernourishment: in Central Germany, Saxony, and the Ruhr. But in all these districts the so-called intelligentsia no longer offers any serious resistance to this Jewish disease, for the simple reason that this intelligentsia is itself completely degenerate physically, though less for reasons of poverty than for reasons of education. In times when not the mind but the fist decides, the purely intellectual emphasis of our education in the upper classes makes them incapable of defending themselves, let alone enforcing their will. Not infrequently the first reason for personal cowardice lies in physical weaknesses.
The excessive emphasis on purely intellectual instruction and the neglect of physical training also encourage the emergence of sexual ideas at a much too early age. The youth who achieves the hardness of iron by sports and gymnastics succumbs to the need of sexual satisfaction less than the stay-at-home fed exclusively on intellectual fare. And a sensible system of education must bear this in mind. It must, moreover, not fail to consider that the healthy young man will expect different things from the woman than a prematurely corrupted weakling.
Thus, the whole system of education must be so organized as to use the boy's free time for the useful training of his body. He has no right to hang about in idleness during these years, to make the streets and movie-houses unsafe; after his day's work he should steel and harden his young body, so that later life will not find him too soft. To begin this and also carry it out, to direct and guide it, is the task of education, and not just the pumping of so-called wisdom. We must also do away with the conception that the treatment of the body is the affair of every individual. There is no freedom to sin at the cost of posterity and hence of the race.
Parallel to the training of the body, a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and stimulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth. In shop windows and billboards the vilest means are used to attract the attention of the crowd. Anyone who has not lost the ability to think himself into their soul must realize that this must cause great damage in the youth. This sensual, sultry atmosphere leads to ideas and stimulations at a time when the boy should have no understanding of such things. The result of this kind of education can be studied in present-day youth, and it is not exactly gratifying. They mature too early and consequently grow old before their time. Sometimes the public learns of court proceedings which permit shattering insights into the emotional life of our fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. Who will be surprised that even in these age-groups syphilis begins to seek its victims? And is it not deplorable to see a good number of these physically weak, spiritually corrupted young men obtaining their introduction to marriage through big-city whores?
No, anyone who wants to attack prostitution must first of all help to eliminate its spiritual basis. He must clear away the filth of the moral plague of big-city ' civilization ' and he must do this ruthlessly and without wavering in the face of all the shouting and screaming that will naturally be let loose. If we do not lift the youth out of the morass of their present-day environment, they will drown in it. Anyone who refuses to see these things supports them, and thereby makes himself an accomplice in the slow prostitution of our future which, whether we like it or not, lies in the coming generation. This cleansing of our culture must be extended to nearly all fields. Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral political, and cultural idea. Public life must be freed from the stifling perfume of our modern eroticism, just as it must be freed from all unmanly, prudish hypocrisy. In all these things the goal and the road must be determined by concern for the preservation of the health of our people in body and soul. The right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race.
Only after these measures are carried out can the medical struggle against the plague itself be carried through with any prospect of success. But here, too, there must be no half-measures; the gravest and most ruthless decisions will have to be made. It is a half-measure to let incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones. This is in keeping with the humanitarianism which, to avoid hurting one individual, lets a hundred others perish. The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole. The determination to proceed in this direction will oppose a dam to the further spread of venereal diseases. For, if necessary, the incurably sick will be pitilessly segregated-a barbaric measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it, but a blessing for his fellow men and posterity. The passing pain of a century can and will redeem millenniums from sufferings.
The struggle against syphilis and the prostitution which prepares the way for it is one of the most gigantic tasks of humanity, gigantic because we are facing, not the solution of a single question, but the elimination of a large number of evils which bring about this plague as a resultant manifestation. For in this case the sickening of the body is only the consequence of a sickening of the moral, social, and racial instincts.
But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.
But how did they try to deal with this plague in old Germany? Viewed calmly, the answer is really dismal. Assuredly, government circles well recognized the terrible evils, though perhaps they were not quite able to ponder the consequences; but in the struggle against it they failed totally, and instead of thoroughgoing reforms preferred to take pitiful measures. They tinkered with the disease and left the causes untouched. They submitted the individual prostitute to a medical examination, supervised her as best they could, and, in case they established disease, put her in some hospital from which after a superficial cure they again let her loose on the rest of humanity.
To be sure, they had introduced a 'protective paragraph' according to which anyone who was not entirely healthy or cured must avoid sexual intercourse under penalty of the law. Surely this measure is sound in itself, but in its practical application it was almost a total failure. In the first place, the woman, in case she is smitten by misfortune-if only due to our, or rather her, education-will in most cases refuse to be dragged into court as a witness against the wretched thief of her health-often under the most embarrassing attendant circumstances. She, in particular, has little to gain from it; in most cases she will be the one to suffer most-for she will be struck much harder by the contempt of her loveless fellow creatures than would be the case with a man. Finally, imagine the situation if the conveyor of the disease is her own husband. Should she accuse him? Or what else should she do?
In the case of the man, there is the additional fact that unfortunately he often runs across the path of this plague after ample consumption of alcohol, since in this condition he is least able to judge the qualities of his 'fair one,' a fact which is only too well known to the diseased prostitute, and always causes her to angle after men in this ideal condition. And the upshot of it all is that the man who gets an unpleasant surprise later can, even by thoroughly racking his brains, not remember his kind benefactress, which should not be surprising in a city like Berlin or even Munich. In addition, it must be considered that often we have to deal with visitors from the provinces who are completely befuddled by all the magic of the big city.
Finally, however: who can know whether he is sick or healthy? Are there not numerous cases in which a patient apparently cured relapses and causes frightful mischief without himself suspecting it at first?
Thus, the practical effect of this protection by legal punishment of a guilty infection is in reality practically nil. Exactly the same is true of the supervision of prostitutes; and finally, the cure itself, even today, is dubious. Only one thing is certain: despite all measures the plague spread more and more, giving striking confirmation of their ineffectualness.
The fight against the prostitution of the people's soul was a failure all along the line, or rather, that is, nothing at all was done.
Let anyone who is inclined to take this lightly just study the basic statistical facts on the dissemination of this plague, compare its growth in the last hundred years, and then imagine its further development-and he would really need the simplicity of an ass to keep an unpleasant shudder from running down his back.
The weakness and halfheartedness of the position taken in old Germany toward so terrible a phenomenon may be evaluated as a visible sign of a people's decay. If the power to fight for one's own health is no longer present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends. This world belongs only to the forceful 'whole' man and not to the weak 'half ' man.
One of the most obvious manifestations of decay in the old Reich was the slow decline of the cultural level, and by culture I do not mean what today is designated by the word ' civilization.' The latter, on the contrary, rather seems hostile to a truly high standard of thinking and living.
Even before the turn of the century an element began to intrude into our art which up to that time could be regarded as entirely foreign and unknown. To be sure, even in earlier times there were occasional aberrations of taste, but such cases were rather artistic derailments, to which posterity could attribute at least a certain historical value, than products no longer of an artistic degeneration, but of a spiritual degeneration that had reached the point of destroying the spirit. In them the political collapse, which later became more visible, was culturally indicated.
Art Bolshevism is the only possible cultural form and spiritual expression of Bolshevism as a whole.
Anyone to whom this seems strange need only subject the art of the happily Bolshevized states to an examination, and, to his horror, he will be confronted by the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men, with which, since the turn of the century, we have become familiar under the collective concepts of cubism and dadaism, as the official and recognized art of those states. Even in the short period of the Bavarian Republic of Councils, this phenomenon appeared. Even here it could be seen that all the official posters, propagandist drawings in the newspapers, etc., bore the imprint, not only of political but of cultural decay.
No more than a political collapse of the present magnitude would have been conceivable sixty years ago was a cultural collapse such as began to manifest itself in futurist and cubist works since 1900 thinkable. Sixty years ago an exhibition of so-called dadaistic 'experiences' would have seemed simply impossible and its organizers would have ended up in the madhouse, while today they even preside over art associations. This plague could not appear at that time, because neither would public opinion have tolerated it nor the state calmly looked on. For it is the business of the state, in other words, of its leaders, to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness. And this is where such a development would some day inevitably end. For on the day when this type of art really corresponded to the general view of things, one of the gravest transformations of humanity would have occurred: the regressive development of the human mind would have begun and the end would be scarcely conceivable.
Once we pass the development of our cultural life in the last twenty-five years in review from this standpoint, we shall be horrified to see how far we are already engaged in this regression. Everywhere we encounter seeds which represent the beginnings of parasitic growths which must sooner or later be the ruin of our culture. In them, too, we can recognize the symptoms of decay of a slowly rotting world. Woe to the peoples who can no longer master this disease!
Such diseases could be seen in Germany in nearly every field of art and culture. Everything seemed to have passed the high point and to be hastening toward the abyss. The theater was sinking manifestly lower and even then would have disappeared completely as a cultural factor if the Court Theaters at least had not turned against the prostitution of art. If we disregard them and a few other praiseworthy examples, the offerings of the stage were of such a nature that it would have been more profitable for the nation to keep away from them entirely. It was a sad sign of inner decay that the youth could no longer be sent into most of these so-called ' abodes of art '-a fact which was admitted with shameless frankness by a general display of the penny-arcade warning: 'Young people are not admitted!'
Bear in mind that such precautionary measures had to be taken in the places which should have existed primarily for the education of the youth and not for the delectation of old and jaded sections of the population. What would the great dramatists of all times have said to such a regulation, and what, above all, to the circumstances which caused it? How Schiller would have flared up, how Goethe would have turned away in indignation!
But after all, what are Schiller, Goethe, or Shakespeare compared to the heroes of the newer German poetic art? Old, outworn, outmoded, nay, obsolete. For that was the characteristic thing about that period: not that the period itself produced nothing but filth, but that in the bargain it befouled everything that was really great in the past. This, to be sure, is a phenomenon that can always be observed at such times. The baser and more contemptible the products of the time and its people, the Lore it hates the witnesses to the greater nobility and dignity of a former day. In such times the people would best like to efface the memory of mankind's past completely, so that by excluding every possibility of comparison they could pass off their own trash as 'art.' Hence every new institution, the more wretched and miserable it is, will try all the harder to extinguish the last traces of the past time, whereas every true renascence of humanity can start with an easy mind from the good achievements of past generations; in fact, can often make them truly appreciated for the first time. It does not have to fear that it will pale before the past; no, of itself it contributes so valuable an addition to the general store of human culture that often, in order to make this culture fully appreciated, it strives to keep alive the memory of former achievements, thus making sure that the present will fully understand the new gift. Only those who can give nothing valuable to the world, but try to act as if they were going to give it God knows what, will hate everything that was previously gives and would best like to negate or even destroy it.
The truth of this is by no means limited to the field of general culture, but applies to politics as well. Revolutionary new movements will hate the old forms in proportion to their own inferiority. Here, too, we can see how eagerness to make their own trash appear to be something noteworthy leads to blind hatred against the superior good of the past. As long, for example, as the historical memory of Frederick the Great is not dead, Friedrich Ebert can arouse nothing but limited amazement. The hero of Sans-Souci is to the former Bremen saloon keeper approximately as the sun to the moon; only when the rays of the sun die can the moon shine. Consequently, the hatred of all new moons of humanity for the fixed stars is only too comprehensible. In political life, such nonentities, if Fate temporarily casts power in their lap, not only besmirch and befoul the past with untiring zeal, but also remove themselves from general criticism by the most extreme methods. The new German Reich's legislation for the defense of the Republic may pass as an example of this.
Therefore, if any new idea, a doctrine, a new philosophy, or even a political or economic movement tries to deny the entire past, tries to make it bad or worthless, for this reason alone we must be extremely cautious and suspicious. As a rule the reason for such hatred is either its own inferiority or even an evil intention as such. A really beneficial renascence of humanity will always have to continue building where the last good foundation stops. It will not have to be ashamed of using already existing truths. For the whole of human culture, as well as man himself is only the result of a single long development in which every generation contributed and fitted in its stone. Thus the meaning and purpose of revolutions is not to tear down the whole building but to remove what is bad or unsuitable and to continue building on the sound spot that has been laid bare.
Thus alone can we and may we speak of the progress of humanity. Otherwise the world would never be redeemed from chaos, since every generation would be entitled to reject the past and hence destroy the works of the past as the presupposition for its own work.
Thus, the saddest thing about the state of our whole culture of the pre-War period was not only the total impotence of artistic and cultural creative power in general, but the hatred with which the memory of the greater past was besmirched and effaced. In nearly all fields of art, especially in the theater and literature, we began around the turn of the century to produce less that was new and significant, but to disparage the best of the old work and represent it as inferior and surpassed; as though this epoch of the most humiliating inferiority could surpass anything at all. And from this effort to remove the past from the eyes of the present, the evil intent of the apostles of the future could clearly and distinctly be seen. By this it should have been recognized that these were no new, even if false, cultural conceptions, but a process of destroying all culture, paving the way for a stultification of healthy artistic feeling: the spiritual preparation of political Bolshevism. For if the age of Pericles seems embodied in the Parthenon, the Bolshevistic present is embodied in a cubist
monstrosity.
In this connection we must also point to the cowardice which here again was manifest in the section of our people which on the basis of its education and position should have been obligated to resist this cultural disgrace. But from pure fear of the clamor raised by the apostles of Bolshevistic art, who furiously attacked anyone who didn't want to recognize the crown of creation in them and pilloried him as a backward philistine, they renounced all serious resistance and reconciled themselves to what seemed after all inevitable. They were positively scared stiff that these half-wits or scoundrels would accuse them of lack of understanding; as though it were a disgrace not to understand the products of spiritual degenerates or slimy swindlers. These cultural disciples, it is true, possessed a very simple means of passing off their nonsense as something God knows how important: they passed off all sorts of incomprehensible and obviously crazy stuff on their amazed fellow men as a so-called inner experience, a cheap way of taking any word of opposition out of the mouths of most people in advance. For beyond a doubt this could be an inner experience; the doubtful part was whether it is permissible to dish up the hallucinations of lunatics or criminals to the healthy world. The works of a Moritz von Schwind, or of a Bocklin, were also an inner experience, but of artists graced by God and not of clowns.
Here was a good occasion to study the pitiful cowardice of our so-called intelligentsia, which dodged any serious resistance to this poisoning of the healthy instinct of our people and left it to the people themselves to deal with this insolent nonsense. In order not to be considered lacking in artistic understanding, people stood for every mockery of art and ended up by becoming really uncertain in the judgment of good and bad.
All in all, these were tokens of times that were getting very bad.




As another disquieting attribute, the following must yet be stated:
In the nineteenth century our cities began more and more to lose the character of cultural sites and to descend to the level of mere human settlements. The small attachment of our present big-city proletariat for the town they live in is the consequence of the fact that it is only the individual's accidental local stopping place, and nothing more. This is partly connected with the frequent change of residence caused by social conditions, which do not give a man time to form a closer bond with the city, and another cause is to be found in the general cultural insignificance and poverty of our present-day cities per se.
At the time of the wars of liberations the German cities were not only small in number, but also modest as to size. The few really big cities were mostly princely residences, and as such nearly always possessed a certain cultural value and for the most part also a certain artistic picture. The few places with more than fifty thousand inhabitants were, compared to present-day cities with the same population, rich in scientific and artistic treasures When Munich numbered sixty thousand souls, it was already on its way to becoming one of the first German art centers; today nearly every factory town has reached this number, if not many times surpassed it, yet some cannot lay claim to the slightest real values. Masses of apartments and tenements, and nothing more How, in view of such emptiness, any special bond could be expected to arise with such a town must remain a mystery. No one will be particularly attached to a city which has nothing more to offer than every other, which lacks every individual note and in which everything has been carefully avoided which might even look like art or anything of the sort.
But, as if this were not enough, even the really big cities grow relatively poorer in real art treasures with the mounting increase in the population. They seem more and more standardized and give entirely the same picture as the poor little factory towns, though in larger dimensions. What recent times have added to the cultural content of our big cities is totally inadequate. All our cities are living on the fame and treasures of the past. For instance, take from present-day Munich everything that was created under Ludwig I,l and you will note with horror how poor the addition of significant artistic creations has been since that time. The same is true of Berlin and most other big cities.
The essential point, however, is the following: our big cities of today possess no monuments dominating the city picture, which might somehow be regarded as the symbols of the whole epoch. This was true in the cities of antiquity, since nearly every one possessed a special monument in which it took pride. The characteristic aspect of the ancient city did not lie in private buildings, but in the community monuments which seemed made, not for the moment, but for eternity, because they were intended to reflect, not the wealth of an individual owner, but the greatness and wealth of the community. Thus arose monuments which were very well suited to unite the individual inhabitant with his city in a way which today sometimes seems almost incomprehensible to us. For what the ancient had before his eyes was less the humble houses of private owners than the magnificent edifices of the whole community. Compared to them the dwelling house really sank to the level of an insignificant object of secondary importance.
Only if we compare the dimensions of the ancient state structures with contemporary dwelling houses can we understand the overpowering sweep and force of this emphasis on the principle of giving first place to public works. The few still towering colossuses which we admire in the ruins and wreckage of the ancient world are not former business palaces, but temples and state structures; in other words, works whose owner was the community. Even in the splendor of late Rome the first place was not taken by the villas and palaces of Individual citizens, but by the temples and baths, the stadiums, circuses, aqueducts, basilicas, etc., of the state, hence of the whole people.
Even the Germanic Middle Ages upheld the same guiding principle, though amid totally different conceptions of art. What in antiquity found its expression in the Acropolis or the Pantheon now cloaked itself in the forms of the Gothic Cathedral. Like giants these monumental structures towered over the swarming frames wooden, and brick buildings of the medieval city, and thus became symbols which even today, with the tenements climbing higher and higher beside them, determine the character and picture of these towns. Cathedrals, town halls, grain markets, and battlements are the visible signs of a Inception which in the last analysis was the same as that of antiquity.
Yet how truly deplorable the relation between state buildings and private buildings has become today! If the fate of Rome should strike Berlin, future generations would some day admire the department stores of a few Jews as the mightiest works of our era and the hotels of a few corporations as the characteristic expression of the culture of our times. Just compare the miserable discrepancy prevailing in a city like even Berlin between the structures of the Reich and those of finance and commerce
Even the sum of money spent on state buildings is usually laughable and inadequate. Works are not built for eternity, but at most for the need of the moment. And in them there is no dominant higher idea. At the time of its construction, the Berlin Schloss was a work of different stature than the new library, for instance, in the setting of the present time. While a single battleship represented a value of approximately sixty millions, hardly half of this sum was approved for the first magnificent building of the Reich, intended to stand for eternity, the Reichstag Building. Indeed, when the question of interior furnishings came up for decision, the exalted house voted against the use of stone and ordered the walls trimmed with plaster; this time, I must admit, the parliamentarians did right for a change: stone walls are no place for plaster heads.
Thus, our cities of the present lack the outstanding symbol of national community which, we must therefore not be surprised to find, sees no symbol of itself in the cities. The inevitable result is a desolation whose practical effect is the total indifference of the big-city dweller to the destiny of his city.
This, too, is a sign of our declining culture and our general collapse. The epoch is stifling in the pettiest utilitarianism or better expressed in the service of money. And we have no call for surprise if under such a deity little sense of heroism remains. The present time is only harvesting what the immediate past has sown.

All these symptoms of decay are in the last analysis only the consequences of the absence of a definite, uniformly acknowledged philosophy and she resultant general uncertainty in the judgment and attitude toward the various great problems of the time. That is why, beginning in education, everyone is half-hearted and vacillating, shunning responsibility and thus ending in cowardly tolerance of even recognized abuses. Humanitarian bilge becomes stylish and, by weakly yielding to cankers and sparing individuals, the future of millions is sacrificed.
How widespread the general disunity was growing is shown by an examination of religious conditions before the War. Here, too, a unified and effective philosophical conviction had long since been lost in large sections of the nation. In this the members officially breaking away from the churches play a less important role than those who are completely indifferent. While both denominations maintain missions in Asia and Africa in order to win new followers for their doctrine-an activity which can boast but very modest success compared to the advance of the Mohammedan faith in particular right here in Europe they lose millions and millions of inward adherents who either are alien to all religious life or simply go their own ways. The consequences, particularly from the moral point of view, are not favorable.
Also noteworthy is the increasingly violent struggle against the dogmatic foundations of the various churches without which in this human world the practical existence of a religious faith is not conceivable. The great masses of people do not consist of philosophers; precisely for the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude. The various substitutes have not proved so successful from the standpoint of results that they could be regarded as a useful replacement for previous religious creeds. But if religious doctrine and faith are really to embrace the broad masses, the unconditional authority of the content of this faith is the foundation of all efficacy. What the current mores, without which assuredly hundreds of thousands of well-bred people would live sensibly and reasonably but millions of others would not, are for general living, state principles are for the state, and dogmas for the current religion. Only through them is the wavering and infinitely interpretable, purely intellectual idea delimited and brought into a form without which it could never become faith. Otherwise the idea would never pass beyond a metaphysical conception; in short, a philosophical opinion. The attack against dogmas as such, therefore, strongly resembles the struggle against the general legal foundations of a state, and, as the latter would end in a total anarchy of the state, the former would end in a worthless religious nihilism.
For the political man, the value of a religion must be estimated less by its deficiencies than by the virtue of a visibly better substitute. As long as this appears to be lacking, what is present can be demolished only by fools or criminals.
Not the smallest blame for the none too delectable religious conditions must be borne by those who encumber the religious idea with too many things of a purely earthly nature and thus often bring it into a totally unnecessary conflict with so-called exact science. In this victory will almost always fall to the latter, though perhaps after a hard struggle, and religion will suffer serious damage in the eyes of all those who are unable to raise themselves above a purely superficial knowledge.
Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. In truth, we cannot sharply enough attack those wretched crooks who would like to make religion an implement to perform political or rather business services for them. These insolent liars, it is true, proclaim their creed in a stentorian voice to the whole world for other sinners to hear; but their intention is not, if necessary, to die for it, but to live better. For a single-political swindle, provided it brings in enough, they are willing to sell the heart of a whole religion; for ten parliamentary mandates they would ally themselves with the Marxistic mortal enemies of all religions-and for a minister's chair they would even enter into marriage with the devil, unless the devil were deterred by a remnant of decency.
If in Germany before the War religious life for many had an unpleasant aftertaste, this could be attributed to the abuse of Christianity on the-part of a so-called ' Christian ' party and the shameless way in which they attempted to identify the Catholic faith with a political party.
This false association was a calamity which may have brought parliamentary mandates to a number of good-for-nothings but injury to the Church.
The consequence, however, had to be borne by the whole nation, since the outcome of the resultant slackening of religious life occurred at a time when everyone was beginning to waver and vacillate anyway, and the traditional foundations of ethics and morality were threatening to collapse.
This, too, created cracks and rifts in our nation which might present no danger as long as no special strain-arose, but which inevitably became catastrophic when by the force of great events the question of the inner solidity of the nation achieved decisive importance.




Likewise in the field of politics the observant eye could discern evils which, if not remedied or altered within a reasonable time, could be and had to be regarded as signs of the Reich's coming decay. The aimlessness of German domestic and foreign policy was apparent to everyone who was not purposely blind. The regime of compromise seemed to be most in keeping with Bismarck's conception that 'politics is an art of the possible.' But between Bismarck and the later German chancellors there was a slight difference which made it permissible for the former to let fall such an utterance on the nature of politics while the same view from the mouths of his successors could not but take on an entirely different meaning. For Bismarck with this phrase only wanted to say that for the achievement of a definite political goal all possibilities should be utilized, or, in other words, that all possibilities should be taken into account; in the view of his successors, however, this utterance solemnly released them from the necessity of having any political ideas or goals whatever. And the leadership of the Reich at this time really had no more political goals; for the necessary foundation of a definite philosophy was lacking, as well as the necessary clarity on the inner laws governing the development of all political life.
There were not a few who saw things blackly in this respect and flayed the planlessness and heedlessness of the Reich's policies, and well recognized their inner weakness and hollowness but these were only outsiders in political life; the official government authorities passed by the observations of a Houston Stewart Chamberlain with the same indifference as still occurs today. These people are too stupid to think any-thing for themselves and too conceited to learn what is necessary from others-an age-old truth which caused Oxenstierna to cry out: 'The world is governed by a mere fraction of wisdom';l and indeed nearly every ministerial secretary embodies only an atom of this fraction. Only since Germany has become a republic, this no longer applies. That is why it has been forbidden by the Law for the Defense of the Republic 2 to believe, let alone discuss, any such thought. Oxenstierna was lucky to live when he did, and not in this wise republic of ours.
Even in the pre-War period that institution which was supposed to embody the strength of the Reich was recognized by many as its greatest weakness: the parliament or Reichstag. Cowardice and irresponsibility were here completely wedded.
One of the foolish remarks which today we not infrequently hear is that parliamentarism in Germany has 'gone wrong since the revolution.' This too easily gives the impression that it was different before the revolution. In reality the effect of this institution can be nothing else than devastating-and this was true even in those days when most people wore blinders and saw nothing and wanted to see nothing. For if Germany was crushed, it was owing not least to this institution; no thanks are owing to the Reichstag that the catastrophe did not occur earlier; this must be attributed to the resistance to the activity of this gravedigger of the German nation and the German Reich, which persisted in the years of peace.
Out of the vast number of devastating evils for which this institution was directly or indirectly responsible, I shall pick only a single one which is most in keeping with the inner essence of this most irresponsible institution of all times: the terrible halfheartedness and weakness of the political leaders of the Reich both at home and abroad, which, primarily attributable to the activities of the Reichstag, developed into one of the chief reasons for the political collapse.
Half-hearted was everything that was subject in any way to the influence of this parliament, regardless which way you look.
Half-hearted and weak was the alliance policy of the Reich in its foreign relations. By trying to preserve peace it steered inevitably toward war.
Half-hearted was the Polish policy. It consisted in irritating without ever seriously going through with anything. The result was neither a victory for the Germans nor conciliation of the Poles, but hostility with Russia instead.
Half-hearted was the solution of the Alsace-Lorraine question. Instead of crushing the head of the French hydra once and for all with a brutal fist, and then granting the Alsatian equal rights, neither of the two was done. Nor could it be, for in the ranks of the biggest parties sat the biggest traitors-in the Center, for example, Herr Wetterle.
All this, however, would have been bearable if the general halfheartedness had not taken possession of that power on whose existence the survival of the Reich ultimately depended: the army.
The sins of the so-called 'German Reichstag' would alone suffice to cover it for all times with the curse of the German nation. For the most miserable reasons, these parliamentary rabble stole and struck from the hand of the nation its weapon of self-preservation, the only defense of our people's freedom and independence. If today the graves of Flanders field were to open, from them would arise the bloody accusers, hundreds of thousands of the best young Germans who, due to the unscrupulousness of these parliamentarian criminals, were driven, poorly trained and half-trained, into the arms of death; the fatherland lost them and millions of crippled and dead, solely and alone so that a few hundred misleaders of the people could perpetrate their political swindles and blackmail, or merely rattle off their doctrinaire theories.
While the Jews in their Marxist and democratic press proclaimed to the whole world the lie about 'German militarism' and sought to incriminate Germany by all means, the Marxist and democratic parties were obstructing any comprehensive training of the German national man-power. The enormous crime that was thus committed could not help but be clear to everyone who just considered that, in case of a coming war, the entire nation would have to take up arms, and that, therefore, through the rascality of these savory representatives of their own so-called 'popular representation,' millions of Germans were driven to face the enemy half-trained and badly trained. But even if the consequences resulting from the brutal and savage unscrupulousness of these parliamentary pimps were left entirely out of consideration: this lack of trained soldiers at the beginning of the War could easily lead to its loss, and this was most terribly confirmed in the great World War.
The loss of the fight for the freedom and independence of the German nation is the result of the half-heartedness and weakness manifested even in peacetime as regards drafting the entire national man-power for the defense of the fatherland.




If too few recruits were trained on the land, the same halfheartedness was at work on the sea, making the weapon of national self-preservation more or less worthless. Unfortunately the navy leadership was itself infected with the spirit of halfheartedness. The tendency to build all ships a little smaller than the English ships which were being launched at the same time was hardly farsighted, much less brilliant. Especially a fleet which from the beginning can in point of pure numbers not be brought to the same level as its presumable adversary must seek to compensate for the lack of numbers by the superior fighting power of its individual ships. It is the superior fighting power which matters and not any legendary superiority in 'quality.' Actually modern technology is so far advanced and has achieved so much uniformity in the various civilized countries that it must be held impossible to give the ships of one power an appreciably larger combat value than the ships of like tonnage of another state. And it is even less conceivable to achieve a superiority with smaller deplacement as compared to larger.
In actual fact, the smaller tonnage of the German ships was possible only at the cost of speed and armament. The phrase with which people attempted to justify this fact showed a very serious lack of logic in the department responsible for this in peacetime. They declared, for instance, that the material of the German guns was so obviously superior to the British that the German 28-centimeter gun was not behind the British 30.5centimeter gun in performance!!
But for this very reason it would have been our duty to change over to the 30.5-centimeter gun, for the goal should have been the achievement, not of equal but of superior fighting power. Otherwise it would have been superfluous for the army to order the 42-centimeter mortar, since the German 21-centimeter mortar was in itself superior to any then existing high trajectory French cannon, and the fortresses would have likewise fallen to the 30.5-centimeter mortar. The leadership of the land army, however, thought soundly, while that of the navy unfortunately did not.
The neglect of superior artillery power and superior speed lay entirely in. the absolutely erroneous so-called 'idea of risk.' The navy leadership by the very form in which it expanded the fleet renounced attack and thus from the outset inevitably assumed the defensive. But in this they also renounced the ultimate success which is and can only be forever in attack.
A ship of smaller speed and weaker armament will as a rule be sent to the bottom by a speedier and more heavily armed enemy at the firing distance favorable for the latter. A number of our cruisers were to find this out to their bitter grief. The utter mistakenness of the peacetime opinion of the navy staff was shown by the War, which forced the introduction, whenever possible, of modified armament in old ships and better armament in newer ones. If in the battle of Skagerrak the German ships had had the tonnage, the armament, the same speed as the English ships, the British navy would have found a watery grave beneath the hurricane of the more accurate and more effective German 38-centimeter shells.
Japan carried on a different naval policy in those days. There, on principle, the entire emphasis was laid on giving every single new ship superior fighting power over the presumable adversary. The result was a greater possibility of offensive utilization of the navy.
While the staff of the land army still kept free of such basically false trains of thought, the navy, which unfortunately had better 'parliamentary' representation, succumbed to the spirit of parliament. It was organized on the basis of half-baked ideas and was later used in a similar way. What immortal fame the navy nevertheless achieved could only be set to the account of the skill of the German armaments worker and the ability and incomparable heroism of the individual officers and crews. If the previous naval high command had shown corresponding intelligence, these sacrifices would not have been in vain.
Thus perhaps it was precisely the superior parliamentary dexterity of the navy's peacetime head that resulted in its misfortune, since, even in its building, parliamentary instead of purely military criteria unfortunately began to play the decisive role. The half-heartedness and weakness as well as the meager logic in thinking, characteristic of the parliamentary institution, began to color the leadership of the navy.
The land army, as already emphasized, still refrained from such basically false trains of thought. Particularly the colonel in the great General Staff of that time, Ludendorff, carried on a desperate struggle against the criminal half-heartedness and weakness with which the Reichstag approached the vital problems of the nation, and for the most part negated them. If the struggle which this officer then carried on was nevertheless in vain, the blame was borne half by parliament and half by the attitude and weakness even more miserable, if possible- of Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. Yet today this does not in the least prevent those who were responsible for the German collapse from putting the blame precisely on him who alone combated this neglect of national interests-one swindle more or less is nothing to these born crooks.
Anyone who contemplates all the sacrifices which were heaped on the nation by the criminal frivolity of these most irresponsible among irresponsibles, who passes in review all the uselessly sacrificed dead and maimed, as well as the boundless shame and disgrace, the immeasurable misery which has now struck us, and knows that all this happened only to clear the path to ministers' chairs for a gang of unscrupulous climbers and job-hunters-anyone who contemplates all this will understand that these creatures can, believe me, be described only by words such as ' scoundrel, ' ' villain, ' ' scum, ' and ' criminal, ' otherwise the meaning and purpose of having these expressions in our linguistic usage would be incomprehensible. For compared to these traitors to the nation, every pimp is a man of honor.




Strangely enough, all the really seamy sides of old Germany attracted attention only when the inner solidarity of the nation would inevitably suffer thereby. Yes, indeed, in such cases the unpleasant truths were positively bellowed to the broad masses, while otherwise the same people preferred modestly to conceal many things and in part simply to deny them. This was the case when the open discussion of a question might have led to an improvement. At the same time, the government offices in charge knew next to nothing of the value and nature of propaganda. The fact that by clever and persevering use of propaganda even heaven can be represented as hell to the people, and conversely the most wretched life as paradise, was known only to the Jew, who acted accordingly; the German, or rather his government, hadn't the faintest idea of this.
During the War we were to suffer most gravely for all this.




Along with all the evils of German life before the War here indicated, and many more, there were also many advantages. In a fair examination, we must even recognize that most of our weaknesses were largely shared by other countries and peoples, and in some, indeed, we were put completely in the shade, while they did not possess many of our own actual advantages.
At the head of these advantages we can, among other things, set the fact that, of nearly all European peoples, the German people still made the greatest attempt to preserve the national character of its economy and despite certain evil omens was least subject to international financial control. A dangerous advantage, to be sure, which later became the greatest instigator of the World War. But aside from this and many other things, we must, from the vast number of healthy sources of national strength, pick three institutions which in their kind were exemplary and in part unequaled.
First, the state form as such and the special stamp which it had received in modern Germany.
Here we may really disregard the individual monarchs who as men are subject to all the weaknesses which are customarily visited upon this earth and its children; if we were not lenient in this, we would have to despair of the present altogether, for are not the representatives of the present regime, considered as personalities, intellectually and morally of the most modest proportions that we can conceive of even racking our brains for a long time? Anyone who measures the 'value' of the German revolution by the value and stature of the personalities which it has given the German people since November, 1919, will have to hide his head for shame before the judgment of future generations, whose tongue it will no longer be possible to stop by protective laws, etc., and which therefore will say what today all of us know to be true, to wit, that brains and virtue in our modern German leaders are inversely proportionate to their vices and the size of their mouths.
To be sure, the monarchy had grown alien to many, to the broad masses above all. This was the consequence of the fact that the monarchs were not always surrounded by the brightest -to put it mildly-and above all not by the sincerest minds. Unfortunately, a number of them liked fiatterers better than straightforward natures, and consequently it was the fiatterers who 'instructed' them. A very grave evil at a time when many of the world's old opinions had undergone a great change, spreading naturally to the estimation in which many old-established traditions of the courts were held.
Thus, at the turn of the century the common man in the street could no longer find any special admiration for the princess who rode along the front in uniform. Apparently those in authority were incapable of correctly judging the effect of such a parade in the eyes of the people, for if they had, such unfortunate performances would doubtless not have occurred. Moreover, the humanitarian bilge-not always entirely sincere-that these circles went in for repelled more than it attracted. If, for example, Princess X condescended to taste a sample of food in a people's kitchen, in former days it might have looked well, but now the result was the opposite. We may be justified in assuming that Her Highness really had no idea that the food on the day she sampled it was a little different from what it usually was; but it was quite enough that the people knew it.
Thus, what may possibly have been the best intention became ridiculous, if not actually irritating.
Stories about the monarch's proverbial frugality, his much too early rising and his slaving away until late into the night, amid the permanent peril of threatening undernourishment, aroused very dubious comments. People did not ask to know what food and how much of it the monarch deigned to consume; they did not begrudge him a 'square' meal; nor were they out to deprive him of the sleep he needed; they were satisfied if in other things, as a man and character, he was an honor to the name of his house and to the nation, and if he fulfilled his duties as a ruler. Telling fairy tales helped little, but did all the more harm.
This and many similar things were mere trifles, however. What had a worse effect on sections of the nation, that were unfortunately very large, was the mounting conviction that people were ruled from the top no matter what happened, and that, therefore, the individual had no need to bother about anything. As long as the government was really good, or at least had the best intentions, this was bearable. But woe betide if the old government whose intentions were after all good were replaced by a new one which was not so decent; then spineless compliance and childlike faith were the gravest calamity that could be conceived of.
But along with these and many other weaknesses, there were unquestionable assets.
For one thing, the stability of the entire state leadership, brought about by the monarchic form of state and the removal of the highest state posts from the welter of speculation by ambitious politicians. Furthermore, the dignity of the institution as such and the authority which this alone created: likewise the raising of the civil service and particularly the army above the level of party obligations. One more advantage was the personal embodiment of the state's summit in the monarch as a person, and the example of responsibility which is bound to be stronger in a monarch than in the accidental rabble of a parliamentary majority-the proverbial incorruptibility of the German administration could primarily be attributed to this. Finally, the cultural value of the monarchy for the German people was high and could very well compensate for other drawbacks. The German court cities were still the refuge of an artistic state of mind, which is increasingly threatening to die out in our materialistic times. What the German princes did for art and science, particularly in the nineteenth century, was exemplary. The present period in any case cannot be compared with it.




As the greatest credit factor, however, in this period of incipient and slowly spreading decomposition of our nation, we must note the army. It was the mightiest school of the German nation, and not for nothing was the hatred of all our enemies directed against this buttress of national freedom and independence. No more glorious monument can be dedicated to this unique institution than a statement of the truth that it was slandered, hated, combated, and also feared by all inferior peoples. The fact that the rage of the international exploiters of our people in Versailles was directed primarily against the old German army permits us to recognize it as the bastion of our national freedom against the power of the stock exchange. Without this warning power, the intentions of Versailles would long since have been carried out against our people. What the German people owes to the army can be briefly summed up in a single word, to wit: everything.
The army trained men for unconditional responsibility at a time when this quality had grown rare and evasion of it was becoming more and more the order of the day, starting with the model prototype of all irresponsibility, the parliament; it trained men in personal courage in an age when cowardice threatened to become a raging disease and the spirit of sacrifice, the willingness to give oneself for the general welfare, was looked on almost as stupidity, and the only man regarded as intelligent was the one who best knew how to indulge and advance his own ego. it was the school that still taught the individual German not to seek the salvation of the nation in lying phrases about an international brotherhood between Negroes, Germans, Chinese, French, etc., but in the force and solidarity of our own nation.
The army trained men in resolution while elsewhere in life indecision and doubt were beginning to determine the actions of men. In an age when everywhere the know-it-alls were setting the tone, it meant something to uphold the principle that some command is always better than none. In this sole principle there was still an unspoiled robust health which would long since have disappeared from the rest of our life if the army and its training had not provided a continuous renewal of this primal force. We need only see the terrible indecision of the Reich's present leaders, who can summon up the energy for no action unless it is the forced signing of a new decree for plundering the people; in this case, to be sure, they reject all responsibility and with the agility of a court stenographer sign everything that anyone may see fit to put before them. In this case the decision is easy to take; for it is dictated.
The army trained men in idealism and devotion to the fatherland and its greatness while everywhere else greed and materialism had spread abroad. It educated a single people in contrast to the division into classes and in this perhaps its sole mistake was the institution of voluntary one-year enlistment. A mistake, because through it the principle of unconditional equality was broken, and-the man with higher education was removed from the setting of his general environment, while precisely the exact opposite would have been advantageous. In view of the great unworldliness of our upper classes and their constantly mounting estrangement from their own people, the army could have exerted a particularly beneficial effect if in its own ranks, at least, it had avoided any segregation of the so-called intelligentsia. That this was not done was a mistake; but what institution in this world makes no mistakes? In this one, at any rate, the good was so predominant that the few weaknesses lay far beneath the average degree of human imperfection.
It must be attributed to the army of the old Reich as its highest merit that at a time when heads were generally counted by majorities, it placed heads above the majority. Confronted with -the Jewish-democratic idea of a blind-worship of numbers, the army sustained belief in personality. And thus it trained what the new epoch most urgently needed: men. In the morass of a universally spreading softening and effeminization, each year three hundred and fifty thousand vigorous young men sprang from the ranks of the army, men who in their two years' training had lost the softness of youth and achieved bodies hard as steel. The young man who practiced obedience during this time could-then learn to command. By his very step you could recognize the soldier who had done his service.
This was--the highest school of the German nation, and it was not for nothing that the bitterest hatred of those who from envy and-greed needed and desired the impotence of the Reich and the defenselessness of its citizens was concentrated on it What many Germans in their blindness or ill will did not want to see was recognized-by the foreign world: the German army was the mightiest weapon serving the freedom of the German nation and the sustenance of its children.




The third in the league, along with the state form and the army, was the incomparable civil service of the old Reich.
Germany was the best organized and best administered country in the world. The German government official might well be accused of bureaucratic red tape, but in the other countries things were no better in this respect; they were worse. But what the other countries did not possess was the wonderful solidity of this apparatus and the incorruptible honesty of its members. It was better to be a little old-fashioned, but honest and loyal, than enlightened and modern, but of inferior character and, as is often seen today, ignorant and incompetent. For if today people like to pretend that the German administration of the pre-War period, though bureaucratically sound, was bad from a business point of view, only the following answer can be given: what country in the world had an institution better directed and better organized in a business sense than Germany's state railways? It was reserved to the revolution to go on wrecking this exemplary apparatus until at last it seemed ripe for being taken out of the hands of the nation and socialized according to the lights of this Republic's founders; in other words, made to serve international stock exchange capital, the power behind the German revolution.
What especially distinguished the German civil service and administrative apparatus was their independence from the individual governments whose passing political views could have no effect on the job of German civil servant. Since the revolution, it must be admitted, this has completely changed. Ability and competence were replaced by party ties and a self-reliant, independent character became more of a hindrance than a help.
The state form, the army. and the civil service formed the basis for the old Reich's wonderful power and strength. These first and foremost were the reasons for a quality which is totally lacking in the present-day state: state's authority! For this is not based on bull-sessions in parliaments or provincial diets, or on laws for its protection, or court sentences to frighten those who insolently deny it, etc., but on the general confidence which may and can be placed in the leadership and administration of a commonwealth. This confidence, in turn, results only from an unshakable inner faith in the selflessness and honesty of the government and administration of a country and from an agreement between the spirit of the laws and the general ethical view. For in the long run government systems are not maintained by the pressure of violence, but by faith in their soundness and in the. truthfulness with which they represent and advance the interests of a people.




Gravely as certain evils of the pre-War period corroded and threatened to undermine the inner strength of the nation, it must not be forgotten that other states suffered even more than Germany from most of these ailments and yet in the critical hour of danger did not nag and perish. But if we consider that the German weaknesses before the War were balanced by equally great strengths, the ultimate cause of the collapse can and must lie in a different field; and this is actually the case.
The deepest and ultimate reason for the decline of the old Reich lay in its failure to recognize the racial problem and its importance for the historical development of peoples. For events in the lives of peoples are not expressions of chance, but processes related to the self-preservation and propagation of the species and the race and subject to the laws of Nature, even if people are not conscious of the inner reason for their actions.