HITLER SPEAKS
Much of the significant material in the section derives from the writings of Hermann Rauschning.
Rauschning was born in Thorn (Toruń), at the time part of the German Empire, to a Prussian officer in the province of West Prussia
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| Deutschnationale Volkspartei DNVP |
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| FreieStadt Danzig Staatswappen |
He then joined the NSDAP, believing that they offered the only way out of Germany's troubles, including the incorporation of Danzig into Germany.
He became President of the 'Danzig Teachers' Association' in 1932.
After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the National Socialists in Danzig won control of the Free City's government, and Rauschning became the President of the Senate of Danzig on 20 June 1933; that is, head of state of the 'Free City Government'.
He was an excellent speaker.
In foreign matters Rauschning did not conceal that his personal desire was to return Poland to the Third Reich.
His 'Gespräche mit Hitler' (Conversations with Hitler) was a huge bestseller, but its credibility would later be criticised.
In 1941 Rauschning left Germany and moved to the United States, becoming a US citizen in 1942 and purchasing a farm near Portland, Oregon where he died in 1982.
The authenticity of the discussions Rauschning claims to have had with Hitler between 1932 and 1934, which form the basis of his book 'Hitler Speaks', was challenged shortly after Rauschning's death by Swiss researcher Wolfgang Hänel.
Hänel declared that 'Gespräche mit Hitler' (the German title of Hitler Speaks) was a fraud and that the book has no value "except as a document of Allied war propaganda" (?)
Other historians have not been convinced by Hänel′s research.
David Redles attacked Hänel′s method which consisted of:
'pointing out similarities in phrasing of quotations from other individuals in Rauschning's other books...and those attributed to Hitler in 'Voice of Destruction' [i.e. Hitler Speaks].
If the two are even remotely similar Hänel concludes that the latter must be concoctions, however the similarities, which are mostly slight, could be for a number of reasons....'they need not stem from forgery'.
Eberhard Jaeckel also concluded that, 'whilst the work cannot be regarded as a verbatim account, it is a good guide to Hitler's world view from someone who conversed with him'.
It is highly unlikely Rauschning could have simply invented the revelations that he reports Hitler as making as they relate to political and occult concepts that a person of Rauschning's education and experience simply would not have been aware.
Some have questioned whether Hitler would have made such revelation to a relatiovely unimportant individual, but the likelihood is that Hitler was simply 'letting off steam' with and individual unlikely to share such insights with others - and if they had shared such insights, would have been unlikely to have been believed.
Obviously, Hitler did not envision that Rauschning would subsequently leave the Party and defect to America.
HITLER SPEAKS
Hitler on Religion
The religions are all alike, no matter what they call themselves.
They have no future—certainly none for the Germans.
Fascism, if it likes, may come to terms with the Church.
So shall I. Why not?
That will not prevent me from tearing up Christianity root and branch, and annihilating it in Germany.
The Italians are naive; they're quite capable of being heathens and Christians at the same time.
The Italians and the French are essentially heathens.
Their Christianity is only skin- deep.
But the German is different.
He is serious in everything he undertakes.
He wants to be either a Christian or a heathen.
He cannot be both.
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| Benito Mussolini |
It doesn't matter there whether they're Christians or heathens.
But for our people it is decisive whether they acknowledge the Jewish Christ-creed, with its effeminate pity-ethics, or a strong, heroic belief in God in Nature, God in our own people, in our destiny, in our blood."
Leave the hair-splitting to others.
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| Houston Stewart Chamberlain |
It will not make us free.
A German Church, a German Christianity, is distortion.
One is either a German or a Christian.
You cannot be both.
You can throw the epileptic Paul out of Christianity - others have done so before us.
You can make Christ into a noble human being, and deny his divinity and his role as a savior.
People have been doing it for centuries.
I believe there are such Christians today in England and America—Unitarians they call themselves, or something like that.
It's no use, you cannot get rid of the mentality behind it.
We don't want people who keep one eye on the life in the hereafter.
We need free men who feel and know that God is in themselves."
You can't make an Aryan of Jesus, that's nonsense.
What Chamberlain wrote in his 'Foundations' is, to say the least, stupid. What's to be done, you say?
I will tell you: we must prevent the churches from doing anything but what they are doing now, that is, losing ground day by day.
Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again?
Nonsense! Never again.
That tale is finished.
No one will listen to it again.
But we can hasten matters.
The parsons will be made to dig their own graves.
They will betray their God to us.
They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.
What we can do?
Just what the Catholic Church did when it forced its beliefs on the heathen: preserve what can be preserved, and change its meaning.
We shall take the road back: Easter is no longer resurrection, but the eternal renewal of our people.
Christmas is the birth of our savior: the spirit of heroism and the freedom of our people.
Do you think these liberal priests, who have no longer a belief, only an office, will refuse to preach our God in their churches?
I can guarantee that, just as they have made Haeckel and Darwin, Goethe and Stefan George the prophets of their Christianity so they will replace the cross with our swastika.
Instead of worshiping the blood of their quondam savior, they will worship the 'pure blood' of our people.
They will receive the fruits of the German soil as a divine gift, and will eat it as a symbol of the eternal communion of the people, as they have hitherto eaten of the body of their God.
And when we have reached that point the churches will be crowded again.
If we wish it, then it will be so - when it is our religion that is preached there.
We need not hurry the process.
I'm a Catholic.
Certainly that was fated from the beginning, for only a Catholic knows the weaknesses of the Church.
I know how to deal with these gentry.
Bismarck was a fool.
In other words, he was a Protestant.
Protestants don't know what a church is.
In these things you must be able to feel and think with the people, know what they want and what they dislike.
Bismarck stuck to his legal clauses and his Prussian sergeant-majors.
That was not enough.
And least of all shall I institute a cultural struggle.
That was a blunder.
But I shall know how to deal with them, I can guarantee that.
The Catholic Church is a really big thing.
Why, what an organization!
It's something to have lasted nearly two thousand years!
We must learn from it.
Astuteness and knowledge of human nature are behind it.
Catholic priests know where the shoe pinches.
But their day is done, and they know it.
They are far too intelligent not to see that, and to enter upon a hopeless battle.
But if they do, I shall certainly not make martyrs of them.
We shall brand them as ordinary criminals.
I shall tear the mask of honesty from their faces.
And if that is not enough, I shall make them appear ridiculous and contemptible.
I shall order films to be made about them.
We shall show the history of the monks on the cinema.
Let the whole mass of nonsense, selfishness, repression and deceit be revealed: how they drained the money out of the country, how they haggled with the Jews for the world, how they committed incest.
We shall make it so thrilling that everyone will want to see it.
There will be queues outside the cinemas.
And if the pious burghers find the hair rising on their heads in horror, so much the better.
The young people will accept it—the young people and the masses. I can do without the others.
You see what I'm building on.
Our peasants have not
again.
It is through the peasantry that we shall one day be able to act as missionaries to the urban masses as well.
But there is plenty of time for that.'
You can't make an Aryan of Jesus, that's nonsense.
What Chamberlain wrote in his 'Foundations' is, to say the least, stupid. What's to be done, you say?
I will tell you: we must prevent the churches from doing anything but what they are doing now, that is, losing ground day by day.
Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again?
Nonsense! Never again.
That tale is finished.
No one will listen to it again.
But we can hasten matters.
The parsons will be made to dig their own graves.
They will betray their God to us.
They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.
What we can do?
Just what the Catholic Church did when it forced its beliefs on the heathen: preserve what can be preserved, and change its meaning.
We shall take the road back: Easter is no longer resurrection, but the eternal renewal of our people.
Christmas is the birth of our savior: the spirit of heroism and the freedom of our people.
Do you think these liberal priests, who have no longer a belief, only an office, will refuse to preach our God in their churches?
 |
| Stefan George |
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| Ernst Haeckel 1860 |
Instead of worshiping the blood of their quondam savior, they will worship the 'pure blood' of our people.
They will receive the fruits of the German soil as a divine gift, and will eat it as a symbol of the eternal communion of the people, as they have hitherto eaten of the body of their God.
And when we have reached that point the churches will be crowded again.
If we wish it, then it will be so - when it is our religion that is preached there.
We need not hurry the process.
I'm a Catholic.
 |
| Otto von Bismark |
I know how to deal with these gentry.
Bismarck was a fool.
In other words, he was a Protestant.
Protestants don't know what a church is.
In these things you must be able to feel and think with the people, know what they want and what they dislike.
Bismarck stuck to his legal clauses and his Prussian sergeant-majors.
That was not enough.
And least of all shall I institute a cultural struggle.
That was a blunder.
But I shall know how to deal with them, I can guarantee that.
 |
| Coat of Arms of the Holy See |
Why, what an organization!
It's something to have lasted nearly two thousand years!
We must learn from it.
Astuteness and knowledge of human nature are behind it.
Catholic priests know where the shoe pinches.
But their day is done, and they know it.
They are far too intelligent not to see that, and to enter upon a hopeless battle.
But if they do, I shall certainly not make martyrs of them.
We shall brand them as ordinary criminals.
I shall tear the mask of honesty from their faces.
And if that is not enough, I shall make them appear ridiculous and contemptible.
I shall order films to be made about them.
We shall show the history of the monks on the cinema.
Let the whole mass of nonsense, selfishness, repression and deceit be revealed: how they drained the money out of the country, how they haggled with the Jews for the world, how they committed incest.
We shall make it so thrilling that everyone will want to see it.
There will be queues outside the cinemas.
And if the pious burghers find the hair rising on their heads in horror, so much the better.
The young people will accept it—the young people and the masses. I can do without the others.
You see what I'm building on.
Our peasants have not
forgotten their true religion.
It still lives. It is merely covered over.
The Christian mythology has simply coated it like a layer of tallow.
The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure
The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure
And so the old beliefs will be brought back to honor
again.
The peasant will be told what the Church has destroyed for him: the whole of the secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the shapeless, the daemonic.
The peasant shall learn to hate the Church on that basis.
Gradually he will be taught by what wiles the soul of the German has been raped.
We shall wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race.
And this is where we must begin.
Not in the great cities!
There we shall only lose ourselves in the stupid godlessness propaganda of the Marxists.
The urban masses are empty.
Where all is extinguished, nothing can be aroused.
But our peasantry still lives in heathen beliefs and values.
It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood.It is through the peasantry that we shall one day be able to act as missionaries to the urban masses as well.
But there is plenty of time for that.'
+-++Coat+of+Arms+of+Austria+-+Art+of+Heraldry+-+Peter+Crawford.png)
Hitler on the Ostmark
'Austria is rotten with Jews.
Vienna is no longer a German city.
Slav mestizos have overrun the place.
A decent German is no longer respected. Priests and Jews rule the country. These scoundrels have got to be thrown out!
Austria must be renewed through the Reich.
This Dollfuss, these paid clerks and nonentities, these absurd dwarfs who imagine they're statesmen and don't see they're the twitching puppets of French and British wirepullers—I shall see that they do not escape their retribution.
I know that we cannot at once burst in with the Anschluss, but why do not these men carry on a German policy?"
We must not deceive ourselves - there is no longer an Austria.
The country that calls itself Austria is a corpse.
Austria must be colonized afresh from the Reich.
It is high time. Another generation, and this country will be lost to Germandom forever.'
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Hitler on National Socialism and the Party
'My Socialism is not the same thing as Marxism.
My Socialism is not class war, but order.
Whoever imagines Socialism as revolt and mass demagogy is not a National Socialist.
Revolution is not games for the masses. Revolution is hard work.
The masses see only the finished product, but they are ignorant, and should be ignorant, of the immeasurable amount of hidden labor that must be done before a new step forward can be taken.
The revolution cannot be ended. It can never be ended.
We are motion itself, we are eternal revolution.
We shall never allow ourselves to be held down to one permanent condition.
Externally I end the revolution, but internally it goes on, just as we store up our hate, and think of the day on which we shall cast off the mask, and stand revealed as those we are, and eternally shall remain.'
My Socialism, is not the same thing as Marxism. My Socialism is not class war, but order.
Whoever imagines Socialism as revolt and mass demagogy is not a
The party understands everything.
It is only a matter of explaining properly.
If you do not succeed in making your intentions clear to the party, then either you do not yourself see things simply and clearly enough, or you are not the right man.
If you become estranged from the party, so that it no longer understands your speech, it is always your own fault.
That is why I constantly insist that people should talk, discuss, hold meetings, remain always in close touch with the mass of the party.
If you lose that contact, you may have the best intentions in the world, but no one will understand you.
We must not make the mistake of the bourgeois representatives, who are strangers to the people, and have perhaps one or two meetings, usually a fortnight before elections, and then never bother about their constituents again.
It may be that our party comrades fail to understand certain matters because they have hitherto been unacquainted with them, but you cannot reproach them with being unwilling to understand.
It is my mission, as it is that of each one of my assistants, repeatedly to explain my views to the party comrades, until they have understood them, and have voluntarily accepted them.
Of course it is evident that in this continual striving, the sharp corners of your own views will be rounded off, and your judgment will often have to be re-adjusted.
So much the better ! This is the fruitful outcome of such a constant interchange of ideas.
The party is an incorruptible judge.
However correct your own motives and ideas may be, if the party rejects them, you must seek the fault first and foremost in yourself.
What is the meaning of our party ?
Why have we eliminated all the other parties, and fought against the whole of the parliamentary, democratic system ?
Was because we wanted to destroy all contact with the people ?
On the contrary: we have destroyed outworn institutions just because they no longer served to produce a fruitful relationship with the body of the nation, but led only to gossip and brazen deceit.
We have eliminated parasites who insinuated themselves between the people and their leaders.
Of course the part played by the masses is thereby also cut out.
There is no longer a voting herd periodically intoxicated with words.
In place of the mass, there is now the people's community, developed from the masses, the incorporated nation awakened to self-consciousness: our party.
The term 'party', however, is a misnomer.
I should prefer the term 'order'.
But perhaps this is romantic.
Nowwhat is the meaning of our party ?
Only he who accepts duties has a right to a voice in them.
But he who does so, he who joins our ranks, who is thought worthy of joining our ranks (and this without regard to person) - that man has a right to be heard, and is heard.
We stand in close contact with this flower of the nation.
We submit all questions to it.
We are doing a work of political education such as no other party has ever done before.
I shall never take an important decision without first being assured of the approval of the party.
I cannot give orders as I please.
What I command is not arbitrary, but the result of close understanding with the party.
We go far beyond any parliament on earth in our constant reference to the will of the people.
Only thus can a real people's unity be attained.
I am not dependent on the man in the street, but I am responsible to my party comrades.
The parliamentary democracies can influence public opinion as they like.
I am subject to an incorruptible judge, my party.
So I build the new Germany, not like a self-centered, and in the profoundest sense,
Above all, National Socialism is a Völkish Movement in essence, and under no circumstances a cult movement ! …
For this reason, the infiltration of the movement by mystically inclined researchers into the otherworldly cannot be tolerated.
They are not National Socialists, but something else – certainly something with which we have nothing to do. …
Cult-like activities are no our responsibility, but that of the churches.
Whoever imagines Socialism as revolt and mass demagogy is not a
National Socialist.
Revolution is not games for the masses. Revolution is hard work.
The masses see only the finished product, but they are ignorant, and should be ignorant, of the immeasurable
amount of hidden labor that must be done before a new step forward can be taken.
The revolution cannot be ended. It can never be ended. We are motion itself, we are eternal
revolution.
We shall never allow ourselves to be held down to one permanent condition.
The party is well-intentioned.The party understands everything.
It is only a matter of explaining properly.
If you do not succeed in making your intentions clear to the party, then either you do not yourself see things simply and clearly enough, or you are not the right man.
If you become estranged from the party, so that it no longer understands your speech, it is always your own fault.
That is why I constantly insist that people should talk, discuss, hold meetings, remain always in close touch with the mass of the party.
If you lose that contact, you may have the best intentions in the world, but no one will understand you.
We must not make the mistake of the bourgeois representatives, who are strangers to the people, and have perhaps one or two meetings, usually a fortnight before elections, and then never bother about their constituents again.
It may be that our party comrades fail to understand certain matters because they have hitherto been unacquainted with them, but you cannot reproach them with being unwilling to understand.
It is my mission, as it is that of each one of my assistants, repeatedly to explain my views to the party comrades, until they have understood them, and have voluntarily accepted them.
Of course it is evident that in this continual striving, the sharp corners of your own views will be rounded off, and your judgment will often have to be re-adjusted.
So much the better ! This is the fruitful outcome of such a constant interchange of ideas.
The party is an incorruptible judge.
However correct your own motives and ideas may be, if the party rejects them, you must seek the fault first and foremost in yourself.
What is the meaning of our party ?
Why have we eliminated all the other parties, and fought against the whole of the parliamentary, democratic system ?
Was because we wanted to destroy all contact with the people ?
On the contrary: we have destroyed outworn institutions just because they no longer served to produce a fruitful relationship with the body of the nation, but led only to gossip and brazen deceit.
We have eliminated parasites who insinuated themselves between the people and their leaders.
Of course the part played by the masses is thereby also cut out.
There is no longer a voting herd periodically intoxicated with words.
In place of the mass, there is now the people's community, developed from the masses, the incorporated nation awakened to self-consciousness: our party.
The term 'party', however, is a misnomer.
I should prefer the term 'order'.
But perhaps this is romantic.
Nowwhat is the meaning of our party ?
Only he who accepts duties has a right to a voice in them.
But he who does so, he who joins our ranks, who is thought worthy of joining our ranks (and this without regard to person) - that man has a right to be heard, and is heard.
We stand in close contact with this flower of the nation.
We submit all questions to it.
We are doing a work of political education such as no other party has ever done before.
I shall never take an important decision without first being assured of the approval of the party.
I cannot give orders as I please.
What I command is not arbitrary, but the result of close understanding with the party.
We go far beyond any parliament on earth in our constant reference to the will of the people.
Only thus can a real people's unity be attained.
I am not dependent on the man in the street, but I am responsible to my party comrades.
The parliamentary democracies can influence public opinion as they like.
I am subject to an incorruptible judge, my party.
So I build the new Germany, not like a self-centered, and in the profoundest sense,
unproductive artist of the present day, but like the pious cathedral builders of the Middle Ages.
National Socialism is a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression… .Above all, National Socialism is a Völkish Movement in essence, and under no circumstances a cult movement ! …
For this reason, the infiltration of the movement by mystically inclined researchers into the otherworldly cannot be tolerated.
They are not National Socialists, but something else – certainly something with which we have nothing to do. …
Cult-like activities are no our responsibility, but that of the churches.
The Aryan as Custodian of Culture
'The Volkish view recognizes the importance of mankind in its racially innate elements.
In principle, it sees in the state only a means to an end, and as its end it considers the preservation of the racial existence of men.
Thus it by no means believes in an equality of the races, but with their differences it also recognizes their superior and inferior values, and by this recognition it feels the obligation in accordance with the 'Eternal Will' that dominates this universe to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and the weaker.
Thus in principle it favors also the fundamental aristocratic thought of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual.
It sees not only the different values of the races, but also the different values of individual man.
In its opinion, out of the masses emerges the importance of the person, but by this it has an organizing effect, as contrasted with disorganizing Marxism. It believes in the necessity of idealizing mankind, as, in turn, it sees in this the only presumption for the existence of mankind, but it cannot grant the right of existence to an ethical idea, if this idea represents a danger for the racial life of the bearers of higher ethics; for in a hybridized world all conceptions of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as all conceptions of an idealized future of our mankind, would be lost forever.
In this world human culture and civilization are inseparably bound up with the existence of the Aryan.
His dying off or his decline would again lower upon this earth the dark veils of a time without culture.
The undermining of the existence of human culture by destroying its supporters appears, in a Volkish view of life, as the most execrable crime.
He who dares to lay hand upon the highest image of the Lord sins against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and helps in the expulsion from Paradise.
The Jewish people, with all its apparent intellectual qualities, is nevertheless without any true culture, especially without a culture of its own.
For the sham culture which the Jew possesses today is the property of other peoples, and is mostly spoiled in his hands.
When judging Jewry in its attitude toward the question of human culture, one has to keep before one's eye as an essential characteristic that there never has been and consequently that today also there is no Jewish art; that above all the two queens of all arts, architecture and music, owe nothing original to Jewry.
What he achieves in the field of art is either bowdlerization or intellectual theft.
With this, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish creatively and, with it, culturally blessed races.
The Jews and Culture
The Jewish people, with all its apparent intellectual qualities, is nevertheless without any true culture, especially without a culture of its own.
For the sham culture which the Jew possesses today is the property of other peoples, and is mostly spoiled in his hands.
When judging Jewry in its attitude toward the question of human culture, one has to keep before one's eye as an essential characteristic that there never has been and consequently that today also there is no Jewish art; that above all the two queens of all arts, architecture and music, owe nothing original to Jewry.
What he achieves in the field of art is either bowdlerization or intellectual theft.
With this, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish creatively and, with it, culturally blessed races.
The basic realization is that the state represents not an end but a means.
It is indeed the presumption for the formation of a higher human culture, but not its cause.
On the contrary, the latter lies exclusively in the existence of a race capable of culture.
Hundreds of exemplary states may exist on this globe, but in case of a dying off of the Aryan culture supporter, no culture would exist which would correspond to the spiritual level of the highest peoples of today.
One can even go further and say that the fact of human state formation would not in the least exclude the possibility of the destruction of the human race, insofar as the superior intellectual ability and elasticity, in consequence of the lack of its racial supporters, would be lost.
It is a characteristic of our present materialized time that our scientific education turns more and more toward the subjects of natural science only, namely, mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.
No matter how necessary this is for a time in which techniques and chemistry dominate in daily life and represent its symptoms, at least as far as outwardly recognizable, it is just as dangerous if the general education of a nation is always directed exclusively at this.
On the contrary, this education has always to be an ideal one.
It has to correspond more to the classic subjects and should only offer the foundations of a later training in a special field.
Otherwise, one renounces forces which are still more important for the preservation of the nation than any technical or other ability.
Especially in history instruction one should not let oneself be deterred from studying antiquity.
Roman history, rightly conceived in very broad outlines, is and remains the best teacher not only for today but probably for all times.
The Hellenic ideal of culture, too, should be preserved for us in its exemplary beauty.
One must not allow the differences of the individual races to tear up the greater racial community.
The struggle that rages today involves very great aims: a culture fights for its existence, which combines millenniums and embraces Hellenism and Germanity together.
A sharp difference should be made between general education and specialized knowledge.
Since the latter, today more than ever, threatens to sink into the service of pure mammon, general education, at least in its more ideal orientation, has to be preserved as a counterbalance.
Here, too, one has continuously to inculcate the principle that industry and techniques, trade and professions are able to flourish only as long as an idealistically disposed national community offers the necessary presuppositions, but the latter do not lie in material egoism, but in a joyous readiness to renounce and to sacrifice.
from a speech by Adolf Hitler on the dedication of the 'Haus der Deutschen Kunst'
In the collapse of Germany after the war, the economic decline had been generally felt, the political decline had been denied by many, the cultural decline had not even been observed by the majority of the people.
It was an age of phrases and catchwords: in the economic sphere the hard facts of misery and unemployment deprived these phrases of their force: in the political sphere such phrases as "international solidarity" had more success and veiled from the German people the extent of the political collapse, but in the long run the failure of the parliamentary-democratic form of government, copied from the West - a West which regardless of this democratic form still continued to extort from Germany whatever there remained to extort - defeated the phrase-mongers.
Far more lasting was the effect of these phrases in the cultural field, where they resulted in a complete confusion concerning the essential character of culture.
Here the influence of the Jews was paramount and through their control of the press they were able to intimidate those who desired to champion "the normal sound intelligence and instinct of men," Art was said to be "an international experience," and thus all comprehension of its intimate association with a people was stifled: it was said that there was no such thing as the art of a people or, better, of a race: there was only the art of a certain period.
Thus it was not Greeks who created the art of Greece, Romans the art of Rome, etc. - a particular period had found in each art its expression.
Art is a "time- conditioned phenomenon."
So today there is not a German or a French art, 'but a "modern art."
This is to reduce art to the level of fashions in dress, with the motto "Every year something fresh" - Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, perhaps also Dadaism.
These newly created art phrases would be comic, if they were not tragic.
It was an age of phrases and catchwords: in the economic sphere the hard facts of misery and unemployment deprived these phrases of their force: in the political sphere such phrases as "international solidarity" had more success and veiled from the German people the extent of the political collapse, but in the long run the failure of the parliamentary-democratic form of government, copied from the West - a West which regardless of this democratic form still continued to extort from Germany whatever there remained to extort - defeated the phrase-mongers.
Far more lasting was the effect of these phrases in the cultural field, where they resulted in a complete confusion concerning the essential character of culture.
Here the influence of the Jews was paramount and through their control of the press they were able to intimidate those who desired to champion "the normal sound intelligence and instinct of men," Art was said to be "an international experience," and thus all comprehension of its intimate association with a people was stifled: it was said that there was no such thing as the art of a people or, better, of a race: there was only the art of a certain period.
Thus it was not Greeks who created the art of Greece, Romans the art of Rome, etc. - a particular period had found in each art its expression.
Art is a "time- conditioned phenomenon."
So today there is not a German or a French art, 'but a "modern art."
This is to reduce art to the level of fashions in dress, with the motto "Every year something fresh" - Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, perhaps also Dadaism.
These newly created art phrases would be comic, if they were not tragic.
The result was uncertainty in judgments passed on art and the silencing of those who might otherwise have protested against this Kulturbolschewismus, while the press continued to poison our sound appreciation of art.
And just as in fashions one must wear "modern" clothes whether they are beautiful or not, so the great masters of the past were decried, but true art is and remains eternal, it does not follow the law of the season's fashions: its effect is that of a revelation arising from the depths of the essential character of a people which successive generations can inherit, but those who do not create for eternity do not readily talk of eternities: they seek to dim the radiance of these giants who reach out of the past into the future in order that contemporaries may discover their own tiny flames.
These facile daubers in art are but the products of a day: yesterday, nonexistent: today, modern: tomorrow, out of date.
The Jewish discovery that art was just the affair of a period was for them a godsend: theirs could be the art of the present time.
Theirs was a small art -- small in form and substance - and at the same time intolerant of the masters of the past and the rivals of the present.
There was a conspiracy of incapacity and mediocrity against better work of any age.
The new rich, having no judgment of their own in art matters, accepted these artists at their own valuation.
It was only an attraction that these works of art were difficult to understand and on that account very costly: no one wished to admit lack of comprehension or insufficient means!
And if one does not oneself understand, probably one's neighbor will not either, and he will admire one's comprehension of obscurity.
And just as in fashions one must wear "modern" clothes whether they are beautiful or not, so the great masters of the past were decried, but true art is and remains eternal, it does not follow the law of the season's fashions: its effect is that of a revelation arising from the depths of the essential character of a people which successive generations can inherit, but those who do not create for eternity do not readily talk of eternities: they seek to dim the radiance of these giants who reach out of the past into the future in order that contemporaries may discover their own tiny flames.
These facile daubers in art are but the products of a day: yesterday, nonexistent: today, modern: tomorrow, out of date.
The Jewish discovery that art was just the affair of a period was for them a godsend: theirs could be the art of the present time.
Theirs was a small art -- small in form and substance - and at the same time intolerant of the masters of the past and the rivals of the present.
There was a conspiracy of incapacity and mediocrity against better work of any age.
The new rich, having no judgment of their own in art matters, accepted these artists at their own valuation.
It was only an attraction that these works of art were difficult to understand and on that account very costly: no one wished to admit lack of comprehension or insufficient means!
And if one does not oneself understand, probably one's neighbor will not either, and he will admire one's comprehension of obscurity.
For this "modern art" National Socialism desires to substitute a "German" art and an eternal art.
The 'House of German Art' is designed for the art of the German people - not for an international art.
The people in the flux of phenomena is the one constant point.
It is that which is abiding and permanent, and therefore art as the expression of the essential character of the abiding people must be an eternal monument, itself abiding and permanent; there can be therefore no standard of yesterday and today, of modern or unmodern: there can be only the standard of 'valueless' or 'valuable,' of 'eternal' or 'transitory.'
And therefore in speaking of German art I shall see the standard for that art in the German people, in its character and life, in its feeling, its emotions, and its development."
The 'House of German Art' is designed for the art of the German people - not for an international art.
The people in the flux of phenomena is the one constant point.
It is that which is abiding and permanent, and therefore art as the expression of the essential character of the abiding people must be an eternal monument, itself abiding and permanent; there can be therefore no standard of yesterday and today, of modern or unmodern: there can be only the standard of 'valueless' or 'valuable,' of 'eternal' or 'transitory.'
And therefore in speaking of German art I shall see the standard for that art in the German people, in its character and life, in its feeling, its emotions, and its development."
From the history of the development of our people we know that it is composed of a number of more or less distinct races which in the course of millennia through the formative influence of a certain outstanding racial kernel produced that mixture which we see before us in Our people today.
This force which formed the people in time past and which still today continues that formative activity lies in the same Aryan branch of mankind which we recognize not only as the support of our own civilization but of the earlier civilizations of the ancient world.
This force which formed the people in time past and which still today continues that formative activity lies in the same Aryan branch of mankind which we recognize not only as the support of our own civilization but of the earlier civilizations of the ancient world.
The way in which our people was composed has produced the many-sidedness of our own cultural development, but as we look upon the final result of this process we cannot but wish for an art which may correspond to the increasing homogeneity of our racial composition, and thus present in itself the characteristics of unity and homogeneity.
Many attempts have been made through the centuries to define what "to be German" really means.
I would not seek to give an explanation in the first instance.
I would rather state a law - a law previously expressed by a great German: "To be German is to be clear," and that means that to be German is to be logical and true.
It is this spirit which has always lived in our people, which has inspired painters, sculptors, architects, thinkers, poets, and above all our musicians. When on June 6, 1931, the Glass Palace was burned down there perished with it an immortal treasure of German art.
The artists were called Romantics, and yet they were but the finest representatives of that German search for the real and true character of our people, for an honest and decent expression of this law of life divined by our people.
For it was not only their choice of subject which was decisive but the clear and simple mode of rendering these sentiments.
Many of their original works are lost, we possess only copies or reproductions, but the works of these masters are removed by a great gulf from the pitiable products of our modern so-called "creative artists."
These masters felt themselves to be Germans, and consequently they created works which should be valued as long as there should be a German people to appreciate them.
But these modern works we would also preserve as documents illustrating the depths of that decline into which the people had fallen.
The "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" is intended as a useful lesson.
Many attempts have been made through the centuries to define what "to be German" really means.
I would not seek to give an explanation in the first instance.
I would rather state a law - a law previously expressed by a great German: "To be German is to be clear," and that means that to be German is to be logical and true.
It is this spirit which has always lived in our people, which has inspired painters, sculptors, architects, thinkers, poets, and above all our musicians. When on June 6, 1931, the Glass Palace was burned down there perished with it an immortal treasure of German art.
The artists were called Romantics, and yet they were but the finest representatives of that German search for the real and true character of our people, for an honest and decent expression of this law of life divined by our people.
For it was not only their choice of subject which was decisive but the clear and simple mode of rendering these sentiments.
Many of their original works are lost, we possess only copies or reproductions, but the works of these masters are removed by a great gulf from the pitiable products of our modern so-called "creative artists."
These masters felt themselves to be Germans, and consequently they created works which should be valued as long as there should be a German people to appreciate them.
But these modern works we would also preserve as documents illustrating the depths of that decline into which the people had fallen.
The "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" is intended as a useful lesson.
During the long years in which I planned the formation of a new Reich I gave much thought to the tasks which would await us in the cultural cleansing of the people's life: there was to be a cultural renascence as well as a political and economic reform.
I was convinced that peoples which have been trodden underfoot by the whole world of their day have all the greater duty consciously to assert their own value before their oppressors, and there is no prouder proof of the highest rights of a people to its own life than immortal cultural achievements. I was therefore always determined that if fate should one day give us power I would discuss these matters with no one but would form my own decisions, for it is not given to all to have an understanding for tasks as great as these. Among the plans which floated before me in my mind both during the war and after the collapse was the idea of building a great new exhibition palace in Munich; and many years ago I thought of the place where the building now stands.
In 1931 I feared that I should be anticipated and that the "men of November" would erect an exhibition building.
Plans indeed were produced for an edifice which might well have served for a railway station or a swimming bath, but when we came to power in 1933 the plan had not been executed: the erection of the building was left to the Third Reich.
And the building is so unique, so individual, that it cannot be compared with anything else: it is a true monument for this city and more than that -- for German art.... It represents a turning point, the first of the new buildings which will take their place among the immortal achievements of German artistic life.
I was convinced that peoples which have been trodden underfoot by the whole world of their day have all the greater duty consciously to assert their own value before their oppressors, and there is no prouder proof of the highest rights of a people to its own life than immortal cultural achievements. I was therefore always determined that if fate should one day give us power I would discuss these matters with no one but would form my own decisions, for it is not given to all to have an understanding for tasks as great as these. Among the plans which floated before me in my mind both during the war and after the collapse was the idea of building a great new exhibition palace in Munich; and many years ago I thought of the place where the building now stands.
In 1931 I feared that I should be anticipated and that the "men of November" would erect an exhibition building.
Plans indeed were produced for an edifice which might well have served for a railway station or a swimming bath, but when we came to power in 1933 the plan had not been executed: the erection of the building was left to the Third Reich.
And the building is so unique, so individual, that it cannot be compared with anything else: it is a true monument for this city and more than that -- for German art.... It represents a turning point, the first of the new buildings which will take their place among the immortal achievements of German artistic life.
But the House is not enough: it must house an Exhibition, and if now I venture to speak of art I can claim a title to do so from the contribution which I myself have made to the restoration of German art.
For our modern German state that I with my associates have created has alone brought into existence the conditions for a new, vigorous flowering of art.
It is not Bolshevist art collectors or their henchmen who have laid the foundations: we have provided vast sums for the encouragement of art, we have set before art itself great, new tasks.
As in politics, so in German art-life: we are determined to make a clean sweep of phrases.
Ability is the necessary qualification if an artist wishes his work to be exhibited here.
People have attempted to recommend modern art by saying that it is the expression of a new age: but art does not create a new age, it is the general life of peoples which fashions itself anew and therefore often seeks after a new expression.
A new epoch is not created by litterateurs but by the fighters, those who really fashion and lead peoples, who thus make history.
It is either impudent effrontery or stark stupidity to exhibit to the people of today works which perhaps ten or twenty thousand years ago might have been made by a man of the Stone Age.
They talk of primitive art, but they forget that it is not the function of art to retreat backward from the stage of development which a people has already reached: its sole function must be to symbolize that development.
For our modern German state that I with my associates have created has alone brought into existence the conditions for a new, vigorous flowering of art.
It is not Bolshevist art collectors or their henchmen who have laid the foundations: we have provided vast sums for the encouragement of art, we have set before art itself great, new tasks.
As in politics, so in German art-life: we are determined to make a clean sweep of phrases.
Ability is the necessary qualification if an artist wishes his work to be exhibited here.
People have attempted to recommend modern art by saying that it is the expression of a new age: but art does not create a new age, it is the general life of peoples which fashions itself anew and therefore often seeks after a new expression.
A new epoch is not created by litterateurs but by the fighters, those who really fashion and lead peoples, who thus make history.
It is either impudent effrontery or stark stupidity to exhibit to the people of today works which perhaps ten or twenty thousand years ago might have been made by a man of the Stone Age.
They talk of primitive art, but they forget that it is not the function of art to retreat backward from the stage of development which a people has already reached: its sole function must be to symbolize that development.
The new age of today is at work on a new human type. Men and women are to be more healthy, stronger: there is a new feeling of life, a new joy in life. Never was humanity in its external appearance and in its frame of mind nearer to the ancient world than it is today.
This, my good prehistoric art-stutterers, is the type of the new age.
And what do you manufacture?
Misformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, children who, were they alive, must be regarded as cursed of God.
And let no one say to me that that is how these artists see things.
From the pictures sent in for exhibition it is clear that the eye of some men shows them things otherwise than as they are - that there really are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, the heaven green, clouds sulphur-yellow - or as they perhaps prefer to say "experience" them thus.
I need not ask whether they really do see or feel things in this way, but in the name of the German people I have only to prevent these pitiable unfortunates who clearly suffer from defects of vision from attempting with violence to persuade contemporaries by their chatter that these faults of observation are indeed realities or from presenting them as "Art."
Here only two possibilities are open: either these "artists" do really see things in this way and believe in that which they represent - then one has but to ask how the defect in vision arose, and if it is hereditary the Minister of the Interior will have to see to it that so ghastly a defect of vision shall not be allowed to perpetuate itself - or if they do not believe in the reality of such impressions but seek on other grounds to impose upon the nation by this humbug, then it is a matter for a criminal court.
There is no place for such works in this building.
The industry of architects and workmen was not spent to house canvases which were daubed over in five hours, the painters being assured that the boldness of the pricing could not fail to produce its effect, that the canvas would be hailed as the most brilliant lightning-birth of a genius.
No, they can be left to cackle over each other's eggs!
This, my good prehistoric art-stutterers, is the type of the new age.
And what do you manufacture?
Misformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, children who, were they alive, must be regarded as cursed of God.
And let no one say to me that that is how these artists see things.
From the pictures sent in for exhibition it is clear that the eye of some men shows them things otherwise than as they are - that there really are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, the heaven green, clouds sulphur-yellow - or as they perhaps prefer to say "experience" them thus.
I need not ask whether they really do see or feel things in this way, but in the name of the German people I have only to prevent these pitiable unfortunates who clearly suffer from defects of vision from attempting with violence to persuade contemporaries by their chatter that these faults of observation are indeed realities or from presenting them as "Art."
Here only two possibilities are open: either these "artists" do really see things in this way and believe in that which they represent - then one has but to ask how the defect in vision arose, and if it is hereditary the Minister of the Interior will have to see to it that so ghastly a defect of vision shall not be allowed to perpetuate itself - or if they do not believe in the reality of such impressions but seek on other grounds to impose upon the nation by this humbug, then it is a matter for a criminal court.
There is no place for such works in this building.
The industry of architects and workmen was not spent to house canvases which were daubed over in five hours, the painters being assured that the boldness of the pricing could not fail to produce its effect, that the canvas would be hailed as the most brilliant lightning-birth of a genius.
No, they can be left to cackle over each other's eggs!
The artist does not create for the artist: he creates for the people and we will see to it that henceforth the people will be called in to judge its art.
No one must say that the people has no understanding for a really valuable enrichment of its cultural life.
Before the critics did justice to the genius of a Richard Wagner he had the people on his side, while the people has had nothing to do with so-called "modern art."
The people regarded this art as the outcome of an impudent and unashamed arrogance or of a simply shocking lack of skill; it felt that this art-stammer -- these achievements which might have been produced by untalented children of from eight to ten years old - could never be valued as an expression of our own times or of the German future.
When we know today that the development of millions of years repeats itself in every individual compressed into a few decades, then this art, we realize, is not "modern"; it is on the contrary in the highest degree "archaic," far older probably than the Stone Age.
The people when it passes through these galleries will recognize in me its own spokesman and counselor: it will draw a sigh of relief and express its glad agreement with this purification of art.
And that is decisive: an art which cannot count on the readiest and most intimate agreement of the great mass of the people, an art which must rely upon the support of small cliques, is intolerable.
Such an art does but endeavor to confuse, instead of gladly reinforcing, the sure and healthy instinct of a people.
The artist cannot stand aloof from his people.
This exhibition is but a beginning, yet the end of the artistic stultification of Germany has begun.
Now is the opportunity for youth to start its industrious apprenticeship, and when a sacred conscientiousness at last comes into its own, then I doubt not that the Almighty, from the mass of these decent creators of art, will once more raise up individuals to the eternal starry heaven of the imperishable God-favored artists of the great periods.
We believe that especially today, when in so many spheres the highest individual achievements are being manifested, so also in art the highest value of personality will once again assert itself.
No one must say that the people has no understanding for a really valuable enrichment of its cultural life.
Before the critics did justice to the genius of a Richard Wagner he had the people on his side, while the people has had nothing to do with so-called "modern art."
The people regarded this art as the outcome of an impudent and unashamed arrogance or of a simply shocking lack of skill; it felt that this art-stammer -- these achievements which might have been produced by untalented children of from eight to ten years old - could never be valued as an expression of our own times or of the German future.
When we know today that the development of millions of years repeats itself in every individual compressed into a few decades, then this art, we realize, is not "modern"; it is on the contrary in the highest degree "archaic," far older probably than the Stone Age.
The people when it passes through these galleries will recognize in me its own spokesman and counselor: it will draw a sigh of relief and express its glad agreement with this purification of art.
And that is decisive: an art which cannot count on the readiest and most intimate agreement of the great mass of the people, an art which must rely upon the support of small cliques, is intolerable.
Such an art does but endeavor to confuse, instead of gladly reinforcing, the sure and healthy instinct of a people.
The artist cannot stand aloof from his people.
This exhibition is but a beginning, yet the end of the artistic stultification of Germany has begun.
Now is the opportunity for youth to start its industrious apprenticeship, and when a sacred conscientiousness at last comes into its own, then I doubt not that the Almighty, from the mass of these decent creators of art, will once more raise up individuals to the eternal starry heaven of the imperishable God-favored artists of the great periods.
We believe that especially today, when in so many spheres the highest individual achievements are being manifested, so also in art the highest value of personality will once again assert itself.
Nürnberg Reichsparteitag 1938
The proof of the endowment of a true artist is always to be found in the fact that his work of art expresses the general will of a period.
Perhaps that is most clearly shown in architecture ....
The religious mystical world of the Christian Middle Ages, turning inwards upon itself, found forms of expression which were possible only for that world. A Gothic stadium is as unthinkable as a Romanesque railway station or a Byzantine market hall.
The way in which the artist of the Middle Ages, of the beginnings of the modern world, found the artistic solution for the buildings which he was commissioned to create is in the highest degree striking and admirable.
That way, however, is no evidence that the conception of the content of life held by the folk of his day was in itself either absolutely right or absolutely wrong.
It is evidence only that works of art have rightly mirrored the inner mind of a past age.
It is therefore quite comprehensible that insofar as the attempt is made to carry on the life of that past age, those who search for solutions of artistic problems can still seek and find there fruitful suggestions.
Thus one can easily imagine that, for instance, in the sphere of religion men will always work backwards to the form-language of a period in which Christianity appeared to meet every need.
On the other hand, at the present moment, the expression of a new view of the world which is determined by the conception of race will return to those ages which in the past have already possessed a similar freedom of the spirit, of the will, and of the mind.
Thus, naturally, the manifestation in art of a European conception of the State will not be possible through civilizations, as, for example, the civilizations of the Far East, which -- because they are foreign to us -- have no message for our day.
By contrast we shall be influenced in a thousand ways through the evidences and memories of that mighty imperial Power of antiquity which, although in fact destroyed fifteen hundred years ago, still as an ideal force lives on and works on in the imaginations of men.
The more nearly the modern State approaches to the imperial idea of the ancient world-power, so more and more will the general character of that civilization be manifested in its influence upon the formation of the style of our own day.
National Socialism is not a cult-movement - a movement for worship; it is exclusively a "volkic" political doctrine based upon racial principles.
In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship.
Therefore we have no rooms for worship, but only halls for the people - no open spaces for worship, but spaces for assemblies and parades.
We have no religious retreats, but arenas for sports and playing-fields, and the characteristic feature of our places of assembly is not the mystical gloom of a cathedral, but the brightness and light of a room or hall which combines beauty with fitness for its purpose.
In these halls no acts of worship are celebrated, they are exclusively devoted to gatherings of the people of the kind which we have come to know in the course of our long struggle; to such gatherings we have become accustomed and we wish to maintain them.
We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement.
Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else - in any case, something which has nothing to do with us.
At the head of our program there stand no secret surmising but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief.
But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will -- not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord.
There were times when a half-light was the necessary condition for the effectiveness of certain teachings: we live in an age when light is for us the fundamental condition of successful action.
It will be a sorry day when through the stealing in of obscure mystic elements the Movement or the State itself issues obscure commissions ....
It is even dangerous to issue any commission for a so-called place of worship, for with the building will arise the necessity for thinking out so-called religious recreations or religious rites, which have nothing to do with National Socialism.
Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed.
Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men: it is to these we pay our respect.
Our commandment is the courageous fulfillment of the duties arising from those laws.
But for religious rites we are not the authorities, but the churches!
If anyone should believe that these tasks of ours are not enough for him, that they do not correspond with his convictions, then it is for him to prove that God desires to use him to change things for the better.
In no event can National Socialism or the National Socialist State give to German art other tasks than those which accord with our view of the world.
The only sphere in which the Jewish international newspapers still today think that they can attack the new Reich is the cultural sphere.
Here they attempt, by a constant appeal to the sentimentality - untroubled by any sort of knowledge - of the world-citizens of democracy to bewail the downfall of German culture: in other words, they lament the commercial closing-down of those elements which, as the heralds and exponents of the November Republic, forced their cultural characteristics, as unnatural as they were deplorable, upon the period between the two Empires; and which have now played out their role for good and all....
Fortunately, however, despite the short time which the National Socialist leadership has been able to allot to works of culture, positive facts, here too, speak louder than any negative criticism.
We Germans can today speak with justice of a new awakening of our cultural life, which finds its confirmation not in mutual compliments and literary phrases, but rather in positive evidences of cultural creative force.
German architecture, sculpture, painting, drama, and the rest bring today documentary proof of a creative period in art, which for richness and impetuosity has rarely been matched in the course of human history.
And although the Jewish-democratic press magnates in their effrontery even today seek brazenly to turn these facts upside down, we know that the cultural achievements of Germany will in a few years have won from the world respect and appreciation far more unstinted even than that which they now accord to our work in the material field.
The buildings which are arising in the Reich today will speak a language that endures, a language, above all, more compelling than the Jewish babblings of the democratic, international judges of our culture.
What the fingers of these poor wretches have penned or are penning the world will - perhaps unfortunately - forget, as it has forgotten so much else. But the gigantic works of the Third Reich are a token of its cultural renascence and shall one day belong to the inalienable cultural heritage of the Western world, just as the great cultural achievements of this world in the past belong to us today.
Moreover, it is naturally not decisive what attitude, if any, foreign peoples take toward our works of culture, for we have no doubt that cultural creative work, since it is the most sensitive expression of a talent conditioned by blood, cannot be understood, far less appreciated, by individuals or races who are not of the same or related blood.
Therefore we do not trouble in any way to make German art and culture suit the tastes of international Jewry....
The art of Greece is not merely a formal reproduction of the Greek mode of life, of the landscapes and inhabitants of Greece; no, it is a proclamation of the Greek body and of the essential Greek spirit.
It does not make propaganda for an individual work, for the subject, or for the artist; it makes propaganda for the Greek world as such, which confronts us in Hellenism.
And so art today will in the same way announce and herald that common mental attitude, that common view of life, which governs the present age.
It will do this not because this age entrusts commissions to artists, but because the execution of these commissions can meet with understanding only if it reveals in itself the true essence of the spirit of this age.
The mysticism of Christianity, at the period of its greatest intensity, demanded for the buildings which it ordered an architectonic form which not only did not contradict the spirit of the age, but rather helped it to attain that mysterious gloom which made men the more ready to submit to renunciation of self.
The growing protest against this crushing of the freedom of the soul and of the will, which had lasted for centuries, immediately opened the way to new forms of expression in artistic creation.
The mystic narrowness and gloom of the cathedrals began to recede and, to match the free life of the spirit, buildings became spacious and flooded with light.
Mystical twilight gave way before increasing brightness.
The unsteady, groping transition of the nineteenth century led finally in our days to that crisis which in one way or another had to find its solution.
.
Hitler on the Social Order and the Economy
'One should never build elaborate structures.
These things must grow, and what's more, they must grow up from below.
If you construct something from above, it will be a dead body that never fills with life-blood.
Do you know how an artist creates ?
In the same way the statesman must allow not only his own thoughts to mature, but even more the driving forces of the nation itself.
He may stimulate here and there, he may regulate and guide the forces, and he may even shut them all down again if he sees that the true forces have not yet arisen, but he cannot artificially bring forth anything.
Nothing is more false than to cloak an immature nation with plans from above; however well-thought-out they may be.
There is only one thing that can be done, and that is to keep alive the creative unrest that holds the true artist in constant tension.
This must never be allowed to become stunted.
No matter what you attempt, if an idea is not yet mature, you will not be able to realize it.
I know that as an artist, and I know it as a statesman.
Then there is only one thing to do: have patience, wait, try again, wait again. In the subconscious, the work goes on.
It matures, sometimes it dies.
Unless I have the inner, incorruptible conviction: this is the solution, I do nothing.
Not even if the whole party tries to drive me to action.
I will not act; I will wait, no matter what happens. But if the voice speaks, then I know the time has come to act.
The same thing applies to the party members, to the people.
If they do not understand a
measure, then it must be dropped.
It will have to be tried again later, continually tried again.
The right time will arrive in the end.
They will grasp it, carry it out, as though they had never had any other intention.
Naturally, I had to allow the party to become familiar with the theory of graded
classes.
I had to discover experimentally just how mature it was, and whether it could be carried
any further at this juncture.
I shall never act according to preconceived ideas.
It is a matter of
course that before I put something into practice, I must convince myself that it is feasible.
And I
must have men who will carry it out.
For example, I have given my party comrades a task to
perform.
Very well; if they can master it, then they are the right men for it; if not, others must do
it.
But if I find no one, then this too is an unmistakable sign that the time is not yet ripe.
There is a rigid relation between a problem and the men to solve it.If the men are not available,
then the problem has not yet matured, and the time is not ripe.
It is no use calling for a 'strong
man' then.
But if the time is ripe, the men will also be found.
I cannot realize my ideas without
the men for the job.
They are filled with glowing enthusiasm.
I must offer them something. Very well, let them try
their hand.
The graded class structure, after all, is not so important that they can do much harm in
it. Something useful is bound to result from all this activity.
Trust your instincts, your feelings, or what-ever you like to call them.
Never trust your knowledge.
The experts never have the true instinct.
Experts are caught in their routine like the spider in its web, incapable of spinning anything but eternally the same web.
Experts are always capable of thinking something diametrically opposed to their first opinion.
The instinct to earn and the instinct to possess cannot be eliminated.Natural instincts remain.
We should be the last to deny that, but the problem is how to adjust and satisfy these natural instincts.
The proper limits to private profit and private enterprise must be drawn through the state and general public according to their vital needs.
And on this point I can tell you, regardless of all the professors' theories and trades-union wisdom, that there is no principle on which you can draw any universally valid limits.
The needs of a state, varying according to time and circumstances, are the sole determining factor.
What may be necessary today need not be so tomorrow.
This is not a question of theoretical suppositions, but of practical decisions dictated by existing circumstances.
Therefore I must change or repudiate under changed conditions tomorrow what I consider correct today.
There is no ideal condition of permanent validity.
Only fools believe in a cut-and-dried method of changing the social and economic order.
There is no such thing as equality, abolition of private property, just wage, or any of the other ideas they've been splitting hairs over
And all the distinctions that are made between production for consumption and production for profit are just pastimes for idlers and muddle-heads.
I shall never alter National Socialust economic program; it is meant for the masses.
It points the direction of some of our endeavors - neither more nor less.
It is like the dogma of the Church.
Is the significance of the Church exhausted by the dogma ?
Does it not lie much more in the Church rites and activities ?
The masses need something for the imagination, they need fixed, permanent doctrines.
The initiates know that there is nothing fixed, that everything is continually changing.
That is why I impress upon you that National Socialism is a potential Socialism that is never consummated because it is in a state of constant change.
The economic structure of the state is like a triangle.
One side of the triangle is the 'Labor Front,' the social community, the classless community in which each man helps his neighbor.
Everyone feels secure here, each one gets assistance, advice and occupation for his leisure time.
All are equal here.
The second side is the professional class.
Here each individual is separate, graded, according to his ability and quality, to work for the general good.
Knowledge is the criterion here.
Each is worth as much as he accomplishes.
The third side represents the party, which, in one or other of its many branches, embraces every German who has not been found unworthy.
Each one in the party shares the privilege of leading the nation.
Here the decisive factors are devotion and resolution.
All are equal as party comrades, but each man must submit to a grading of ranks that is inviolable.
The party takes over the function of what has been society.
The party is all-embracing.
It rules our lives in all their breadth and depth.
We must therefore develop branches of the party in which the whole of individual life will be reflected.
Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good.
There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself.
This is Socialism - not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production.
Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape ?
Let them then own land or factories as much as they please.
The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers.
All that, you see, is unessential.
Our Socialism goes far deeper.
It does not alter external conditions; no, it establishes the relation of the individual to the State, the national community.
It does this with the help of one party, or perhaps I should say of one order.
The day of individual happiness has passed.
Instead, we shall feel a collective happiness.
Can there be any greater happiness than a National Socialist meeting in which speakers and audience feel as one ?
It is the happiness of sharing.
Only the early Christian communities could have felt it with equal intensity. They, too, sacrificed their personal happiness for the higher happiness of the community.
If we feel and experience this great era thus then we shall not be disturbed by details and individual failures.
We shall know then that every road leads us forward, no matter how much it seems to go in another direction.
And above all, we shall then maintain our passionate desire to revolutionize the world to an extent unparalleled in history.
It gives us also a special, secret pleasure to see how the people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them.
They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possessions and income and rank and other outworn conceptions.
As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied.
But in the meantime they have entered a new relation; a powerful social force has caught them up.
They themselves are changed.
What are ownership and income to that ?
Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories ?
We socialize can human beings.
Hitler on Marxism
"I have learned a great deal from Marxism.
I don't mean their tiresome social doctrine, or the materialist conception of history, or their absurd 'marginal utility' theories and so on, but I have learned from their methods.
The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun.
The whole of National Socialism is based on it.
Look at the workers' sports clubs, the industrial cells, the mass demonstrations, the propaganda leaflets written specially for the comprehension of the masses; all these new methods of political struggle are essentially Marxist in origin.
All I had to do was to take over these methods and adapt them to our purpose.
I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy.
National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.
What remains is a revolutionary creative will that needs no ideological crutches, but grows into a ruthless instrument of might invincible in both the nation and the world.
A doctrine of redemption based on science thus becomes a genuine revolutionary movement possessing all the requisites of power.
Marxism teaches that a vast upheaval quite suddenly changes the world.The millennium falls from the skies like a seventh heaven.
After that world history ceases.
There is no further development. Everything is in order. The shepherd tends his flocks.
The end of the world has come.
But we know there is never a final stage, there is no permanency, only eternal change.
Only death is unchanging.
The past is eternal, but the future is an inexhaustible fount of possibilities of further development.
In my youth, and even in the first years of my Munich period after the war, I never shunned the company of Marxists of any shade.
I was of the opinion that one or other of them showed promise.
Certainly they had every freedom to unfold their potentialities, but they were, and remained small men.
They wanted no giants who towered above the multitude, though they had plenty of pedants who split dogmatic hairs.
So I made up my mind to start something new.
Hitler on the Occult
Reason
'We are now at the end of the Age of Reason.
The intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life.
Our revolution is not merely a political and social revolution; we are at the outset of a tremendous revolution in moral ideas and in men's spiritual orientation.
Our movement has at last brought the Middle Ages, medieval times, to a close.
We are bringing to a close a straying of humanity.
The Ten Commandments have lost their validity.
Conscience is a Jewish invention.
It is a blemish, like circumcision.'
Science and Magic
'A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence.
The idea of free and unfettered science, unfettered by hypotheses, could only occur in the age of Liberalism. It is absurd.
Science is a social phenomenon, and like every other social phenomenon is limited by the benefit or injury it confers on the community.
The slogan of objective science has been coined by the professors, simply in order to escape from the very necessary supervision by the power of the State.
What is called the crisis of science is nothing more than that the gentlemen are beginning to see of their own accord how they have gone off the line with their objectivity and independence.
The simple question that precedes every scientific activity is: who is it who wants to know something, who is it who wants to find how he stands in the world around him ?
It follows necessarily that there can only be the science of a particular type of humanity and of a particular age.
It is reasonable to say that there is a Nordic Science, and a National Socialist Science, which are bound to be opposed to the Liberal-Jewish Science, which, indeed, is no longer fulfilling its function anywhere, but is in process of stultifying itself.'
Action
'We approach the realities of the world only in strong emotion and in action.
I have no love for Goethe, but I am ready to overlook much in him for the sake of one phrase - 'In the beginning was action.'
Only the man who acts becomes conscious of the real world.
Men misuse their intelligence.
It is not the seat of a special dignity of mankind, but merely an instrument in the struggle for life.
Man is here to act.
Only as a being in action does he fulfill his natural vocation.
Contemplative natures, retrospective like all intellectuals, are dead persons who miss the meaning of life.
We Germans above all, with our long-established habit of brooding and dreaming to excess, needed to be brought back to the great truth that only deeds and perpetual activity give meaning to life.
Every deed has its place.
All passivity, all inertia, on the other hand, is senseless, inimical to life.
We must distrust the intellect and the conscience, and must place our trust in our instincts.'
The Intellect
'We have to regain a new simplicity.
People set us down as enemies of the intellect
We are.
But in a much deeper sense than these conceited dolts of bourgeois scientists ever dream of.
Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.
Race
The problem is this: How can we arrest racial decay ?
Must what Count Gobineau
says come true ?
We have acted politically on it - no equality, no democracy !
But are we to allow the masses to go their way, or should we stop them ? Shall we form simply a select company of
the really initiated ?
An Order, the brotherhood of Templars round the Holy Grail of Pure Blood ?
We must interpret 'Parsifal' in a totally different way to the general conception, the interpretation.Behind the absurd externals of the story, with its Christian embroidery and its Good Friday mystification, something altogether different is revealed as the true content of this most profound drama.
It is not the Christian-Schopenhauerist religion of compassion that is acclaimed, but pure, noble blood, in the protection and glorification of whose purity the brotherhood of the initiated have come together.
The king is suffering from the incurable ailment of corrupted blood.
The uninitiated but pure man is tempted to abandon himself in Klingsor's magic garden to the lusts and excesses of corrupt civilization, instead of joining the élite of knights who guard the secret of life, the pure blood (das Geheimnis des Lebens, das reine Blut).
All of us are suffering from the ailment of mixed, corrupted blood.
How can we purify ourselves and make atonement ?
Note that compassion, through which man gains enlightenment, is only for the corrupted man at issue with himself, and that this compassion knows only one treatment - the leaving of the sick person to die.
The eternal life granted by the Grail is only for the truly pure and noble !"
For myself, I have the most intimate familiarity with Wagner's mental processes.
At every stage in my life I come back to him.
Only a new nobility (neuen Adels) can introduce the new civilization for us.
If we strip Parsifal of every poetic element, we learn from it that selection and renewal are possible only amid the continuous tension of a lasting struggle.
A world-wide process of segregation is going on before our eyes.
Those who see in struggle the meaning of life, gradually mount the steps of a new nobility.
Those who are in search of peace and order through dependence, sink, whatever their origin, to the inert masses.
The masses, however, are doomed to decay and self-destruction.
In our world-revolutionary turning-point the masses are the sum total of the sinking civilization, and of its dying representatives.
We must allow them to die with their kings, like Amfortas.
Take for example the Freemasons.
I don't seriously believe in the abysmal evilness and noxiousness of these people.
In Germany they are just a harmless union for the mutual protection of interests.
All the supposed abominations, the skeletons and death's-heads, the coffins and the mysteries, are mere bogeys for children.
But there is one dangerous element, and that is the element I have copied from them.
They form a sort of priestly nobility.
They have developed an esoteric doctrine, not merely formulated, but imparted through the medium of symbols and mysterious rites in degrees of initiation.
The hierarchical organization and the initiation through symbolic rites, that is to say without bothering the brains but by working on the imagination through magic and the symbols of a cult - all this is the dangerous element and the element that I have taken over.
Our party must be of this character.
An Order - the hierarchical Order of a secular priesthood.
The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god.
He must have come from another root of the human race.
I set the Aryan and the Jew over against each other; and if I call one of them a human being I must call the other something else.
The two are as widely separated as man and beast.
Not that I would call the Jew a beast. He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans. He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature.
Hitler on the Übermensch
Creation is not yet at an end.
At all events, not so far as the creature Man is concerned.
Biologically regarded, man has clearly arrived at a turning-point.
A new variety of man is beginning to separate out.
A mutation, precisely in the scientific sense.
The existing type of man is passing, in consequence, inescapably into the biological stage of atrophy.
The old type of man will have but a stunted existence.
All creative energy will be concentrated in the new one.
The two types will rapidly diverge from one another.
One will sink to a sub-human race, and the other rise far above the man of today.
I might call the two varieties the 'god-man' and the 'mass-animal'.
Man has to be passed and surpassed.
Nietzsche did, it is true, realize something of this, in his way.
He went so far as to recognize the superman as a new biological variety.
But he was not too sure of it.
Man is becoming 'god' - that is the simple fact.
Man is 'god in the making'.
Man has eternally to strain at his limitations.
The moment he relaxes, and contents himself with them, he decays and falls below the human level.
He becomes a quasi-beast.
Gods and beasts, that is what our world is made of.
And how simple, how elementary it all becomes.
And how simple, how elementary it all becomes !
Do you now appreciate the depth of our National Socialist movement ?
Can there be anything greater and more all-comprehending ?
Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it.
It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew.'
'The new man is among us! He is here !
I have seen the vision of the new
man - fearless and formidable. - I shrank from him !'
'The real destiny of Man is something that ordinary men could not conceive and would be unable to comprehend, even if given a glimpse of it.
Our revolution is a final stage in an evolution that will end by abolishing history.
It is my ultimate aim to perform an act of creation, a divine operation,
the goal of a biological mutation which will result in an unprecedented exaltation of the human race and the appearance of a new race of heroes, demi-gods and god-men.
My party comrades have no conception of the dreams that haunt my mind or of the grandiose edifice of which the foundations, at least, will have been laid before I die.
The world has reached a turning point, and will undergo an upheaval which the uninitiated cannot understand.'
'The real destiny of Man is something that ordinary men could not conceive and would be unable to comprehend, even if given a glimpse of it.
Our revolution is a final stage in an evolution that will end by abolishing history.
It is my ultimate aim to perform an act of creation, a divine operation,
the goal of a biological mutation which will result in an unprecedented exaltation of the human race and the appearance of a new race of heroes, demi-gods and god-men.
My party comrades have no conception of the dreams that haunt my mind or of the grandiose edifice of which the foundations, at least, will have been laid before I die.
The world has reached a turning point, and will undergo an upheaval which the uninitiated cannot understand.'
Hitler on the Ordensburg
I will tell you a secret. I am founding an Order.
In my great educative work I am beginning with the young.
We older ones are used up - we are old already.
We are rotten to the marrow.
We have no unrestrained instincts left.
We are cowardly and sentimental.
We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility.
But my magnificent youngsters ! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world ? Look at these young men and boys ! What material !
With them I can make a new world.
My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of them.
In my Ordensburgen a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back.
A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth - that is what I am after. Youth must be all those things.
It must be indifferent to pain.
There must be no weakness or tenderness in it.
I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey.
Strong and handsome must my young men be.
I will have them fully trained in all physical exercises.
I intend to have an athletic youth - that is the first and the chief thing.
In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material.
With that I can create the new order.
I will have no intellectual training.
Knowledge is ruin to my young men.
I would have them learn only what takes their fancy.
But one thing they must learn - self-command !
They shall learn to overcome the fear of death, under the severest tests.
That is the intrepid and heroic stage of youth.
Out of it comes the stage of the free man, the man who is the substance and essence of the world, the creative man, the 'god-man'.
In my Ordensburgen there will stand as a statue for worship the figure of the magnificent, self-ordaining 'god-man'; it will prepare the young men for their coming period of ripe manhood. More than that I cannot say.
In the Thicket of the Forest at Artois
Adolf Hitler (1916)
(Translated from the German)
It was in the thicket of the Artois Wood.
Deep in the trees, on blood-soaked ground,
Lay stretched a wounded German warrior,
And his cries rang out in the night.
In vain ... no echo answered his plea ...
Will he bleed to death like a beast,
That shot in the gut dies alone?
Then suddenly ...
Heavy steps approach from the right
He hears how they stamp on the forest floor ...
And new hope springs from his soul.
And now from the left ...
And now from both sides ...
Two men approach his miserable bed
A German it is, and a Frenchman.
And each watches the other with distrustful glance,
And threatening they aim their weapons.
The German warrior asks:
"What do you do here?"
"I was touched by the needy one's call for help."
"It's your enemy!"
"It is a man who suffers."
And both, wordless, lowered their weapons.
Then entwined their hands
And, with muscles tensed, carefully lifted
The wounded warrior, as if on a stretcher,
And carried him through the woods.
'Til they came to the German outposts.
"Now it is over. He will get good care."
And the Frenchman turns back toward the woods.
But the German grasps for his hand,
Looks, moved, into sorrow-dimmed eyes
And says to him with earnest foreboding:
"I know not what fate holds for us,
Which inscrutably rules in the stars.
Perhaps I shall fall, a victim of your bullet.
Maybe mine will fell you on the sand —
For indifferent is the chance of battles.
Yet, however it may be and whatever may come:
We lived these sacred hours,
Where man found himself in man ...
And now, farewell! And God be with you!"
to be continued
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