Basic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SA

Basic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SABasic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the SA

THE STRENGTH OF THE OLD STATE rested on three pillars: the monarchistic state form, the civil service, and the army The revolution of 1918 eliminated the state form, disintegrated the army, and delivered the civil service to party corruption Thus the most essential pillars of a so-called state authority were shattered State authority

as such rests almost always on the three elements which lie at the basis of all

Through the revolution this last case was completely excluded Indeed, there is no longer even an authority of tradition With the collapse of the old Reich, the

elimination of the old state form, the destruction of the former sovereign emblems andsymbols of the Reich, tradition was abruptly broken off The consequence of this was the gravest shaking of state authority

Even the second pillar of state authority, force, was no longer present In order to carry out the revolution in the first place, it was necessary to disintegrate the

embodiment of the organized force and power of the state, the army; indeed, it was necessary to use the infected parts of the army itself as revolutionary fighting

elements Even though the front-line armies had not succumbed to this disintegration

in a uniform degree, they, nevertheless, the more they felt the glorious sites of their four and a half years of heroic struggle behind them, were corroded more and more bythe homeland's acid of disorganization, and, arrived in the demobilization

organizations, likewise ended up in the confusion of so-called voluntary obedience belonging to the epoch of the soldiers' councils

Naturally no authority could be based on these mutinous bands of soldiers, who conceived of military service in terms of the eight-hour day And thus the second element, the element which guarantees the firmness of authority, was also eliminated and the revolution now possessed only the original element, popularity, on which to build its authority But this particular basis was extremely uncertain To be sure, the revolution succeeded in shattering the old state structure with one mighty blow, but at

bottom only because the normal balance within the structure of our people had alreadybeen eliminated by the war.

Every national body can be divided into three great classes: into an extreme of the best humanity on the one hand, good in the sense of possessing all virtues, especially distinguished by courage and self-sacrifice; on the other hand, an extreme of the worsthuman scum, bad in the sense that all selfish urges and vices are present Between the two extremes there lies a third class, the great, broad, middle stratum, in which neitherbrilliant heroism nor the basest criminal mentality is embodied

Times when a nation is rising are distinguished, in fact exist only, by the absolute leadership of the extreme best part

Times of a normal, development of a stable state of affairs are distinguished and exist by the obvious domination of the clements of the middle, in which the two extremes mutually balance one another, or cancel one another

Times when a nation is collapsing are determined by the dominant activity of the worst elements

In this connection it is noteworthy that the broad masses, the class of the middle as

I shall designate them, only manifest themselves perceptibly when the two extremes are locked in mutual struggle, but that in case of the victory of one of the extremes they complaisantly submit to the victor In case the best people dominate, the broad masses will follow them; in case the worst element rises up, they will at least offer them no resistance; for the masses of the middle themselves will never fight

Now the war, with its four and a half years of bloody events disturbed the inner balance of these three classes, in so far as - though recognizing all the sacrifices and victims of the middle - we must nevertheless recognize that it drained the extreme of the best humanity almost entirely of its blood For the amount of irreplaceable

German heroes' blood that was shed in these four and a half years was really

enormous Just sum up all the hundreds of thousands of individual cases in which again and again the watchword was: volunteers to the front, volunteer patrols,

'volunteer dispatch carriers, volunteers for telephone squads, volunteers seers for bridge crossings, volunteers for U-boats, volunteers for airplanes, volunteers for stormbattalions, etc - again and again through four and a half years, on thousands of

occasions, volunteers and more volunteers - and always you see the same result: the beardless youth or the mature man, both filled with fervent love of their fatherland, with great personal courage or the highest consciousness of duty, they stepped

forward Tens of thousands, yes, hundreds of thousands of such cases occurred, and gradually this human element became sparser and sparser Those who did not fan

were either shot to pieces and crippled, or they gradually crumbled away as a result oftheir small remaining number Consider above all that the year 1914 set up whole armies of so-called volunteers who, thanks to the criminal unscrupulousness of our parliamentary good-for-nothings, had received no adequate peacetime training, and thus became helpless cannon fodder at the mercy of the enemy The four hundred thousand who then fell or were maimed in the battles of Flanders could not be

replaced Their loss was more than the loss of a mere number By their loss the scale, too lightly weighted on the good side, shot upward, and the elements of baseness, treachery, cowardice, in short, the mass of the bad extreme, weighed more heavily than before

For one more factor was added:

Not only that the extreme of the best had been most frightfully thinned on the battlefields in the course of the four and a half years, but the bad extreme had

meanwhile preserved itself in the most miraculous way For every hero who had volunteered and mounted the steps of Valhalla after a heroic death, you can be sure there was a slacker who had cautiously turned his back on death, in order to engage in more or less useful activity at home

And so the end of the War gives us the following picture: The middle broad

stratum of the nation has given its measure of blood sacrifices; the extreme of the best,with exemplary heroism, has sacrificed itself almost completely; the extreme of the bad, supported by the most senseless laws on the one hand and by the non-application

of the Articles of War on the other hand, has unfortunately been preserved almost as completely

This well-preserved scum of our people then made the revolution and was able to make it only because no longer opposed by the extreme of the best elements: - they were no longer among the living

This, however, made the German revolution only a relatively popular affair from the start It was not the German people as such that committed this act of Cain, but its deserters, pimps, and other rabble that shun the light

The man at the front welcomed the end of the bloody struggle; he was glad to return home again, to see his wife and children But with the revolution itself he had atheart nothing in common; he did not love it, and even less did he love its instigators and organizers In the four and a half years of hardest struggle he had forgotten the party hyenas, and all their quarrels had grown alien to him

Only with a small part of the German people had the revolution really been

popular: among that class of its helpers who had chosen the knapsack as the badge of recognition of all honorable citizens of this new state They did not love revolution forits own sake, as some people erroneously still believe today, but because of its

consequences

In truth, these Marxist gangsters could hardly base an authority on popularity for any length of time And yet precisely the young Republic needed authority at any price, if after a brief chaos it did not want to be suddenly devoured by a force of retribution gathering from the last elements of the good part of our people

There was nothing they more feared, those champions of the revolution, than to lose all foothold in the whirlpool of their own confusion, and suddenly to be seized by

an iron fist, such as more than once in such periods has grown out of the life of

peoples, and have the ground shifted under them The Republic had to consolidate itself at any price

And so it was compelled almost instantaneously to create, by the side of the

tottering pillar of its weak popularity, an organization of force, in order to base a firmer authority upon it

When the days of December, January, February of 1918-19 the matadors of the revolution felt the ground trembling beneath their feet, they looked around for men who would be ready to strengthen the weak position which the love of their people offered them, by the force of arms The 'anti-militaristic' Republic needed soldiers But since the first and sole support of their state authority - popularity - rooted only in the society of pimps, thieves, burglars, deserters, slackers, etc., in other words, in that part of the people which we must designate as the bad extreme- every effort to recruit men who were prepared to sacrifice their own lives in the service of the new ideal in these circles, was love's labor lost The class supporting the revolutionary idea and carrying out the revolution was neither able nor willing to provide the soldiers for its protection For this class by no means wanted the organization of a republican state body, but the disorganization of the existing state body for the better satisfaction of their instincts Their watchword was not: order and building up of the German

Republic, but: pillage it

And so the cry for help which the representatives of the people let out in their agony of fear inevitably went unheard; on the contrary, in fact, it aroused resistance and bitterness For in such an undertaking people felt a breach of loyalty and faith; in the formation of an authority based no longer solely on their popularity but supported

by force, they sensed the beginning of the struggle against the one aspect of the

revolution that was essential for these elements: against the right to rob and the

undisciplined rule of a horde of thieves and plunderers who had broken out of the prison walls and been freed of their chains, in short, of foul rabble.

The representatives of the people could cry as much as they liked; no one stepped forward from their ranks, and only the answering cry, 'traitor,' informed them of the state of mind of those supporters of their popularity

Then for the first time numerous young Germans once again stood ready to button

up their soldier's tunics, to shoulder carbine and rifle, and don their steel helmets in the service of 'law and order' as they thought, to oppose the destroyers of their homes

As volunteer soldiers they banded into free corps and began, though grimly hating the revolution, to protect, and thus for practical purposes to secure, this same revolution.This they did in the best good faith

The real organizer of the revolution and its actual wirepuller the international Jew,had correctly estimated the situation The German people was not yet ripe for being forced into the bloody Bolshevistic morass, as had happened in Russia This was due

in large part to the greater racial unity that still existed between the German

intelligentsia and the German manual worker Further in the great permeation of even the broadest strata of the people with educated elements, such as prevailed only in the other countries of Western Europe, but was totally lacking in Russia There the

intelligentsia itself was in large part not of Russian nationality or at least was of Slavic racial character The thin intellectual upper stratum of the Russia of that time could at any time be removed, due to the total lack of connecting intermediary

non-ingredients with the mass of the great people And the intellectual and moral level of these last was horribly low

Once it was possible in Russia to incite the uneducated hordes of the great masses,unable to read or write, against the thin intellectual upper crust that stood in no

relation or connection to them, the fate of the country was decided, the revolution had succeeded; the Russian illiterate had thus become the defenseless slave of his Jewish dictators, who for their part, it must be admitted, were clever enough to let this

dictatorship ride on the phrase of 'people's dictatorship.'

In Germany there was the following additional factor: As certainly as the

revolution could succeed only in consequence of the gradual disintegration of the army, just as certainly the real maker of the revolution and disintegrator of the army was not the soldier at the front, but the more or less light-shy rabble which either hungaround the home garrisons or, supposedly 'indispensable,' were in the economic

service somewhere This army was strengthened by tens of thousands of deserters, who were able to turn their backs on the front without special risk The real coward at

all times naturally shuns nothing so much as death And at the front, day after day, he faced death in thousands of different forms If you want to hold weak, wavering or actually cowardly fellows to their duty, there has at all times been only one

possibility: The deserter must know that his desertion brings with it the very thing that

he wants to escape At the front a man can die, as a deserter he must die Only by such

a Draconic threat against any attempt at desertion can a deterring effect be obtained, not only for the individual, but for the whole army

And here lay the meaning and purpose of the Articles of War

It was lovely to believe that the great fight for the existence of a people could be fought on the sole basis of voluntary loyalty born out of and preserved by the

realization of necessity Voluntary fulfillment of duty has always determined the best men in their actions; but not the average Therefore, such laws are necessary, as for example those against theft, which were not made for those who are basically the most honest, but for the pusillanimous, weak elements Such laws, by frightening the bad, are intended to prevent the development of a condition in which ultimately the honest man is regarded as the stupider, and consequently people come more and more

to the view that it is more expedient likewise to participate in theft than to look on with empty hands, or even to let themselves be robbed

So it was false to believe that in a struggle, which by all human prognosis might rage for years to come, we could dispense with the instruments which the experience

of many centuries, in fact millenniums, showed to be those which, in the gravest timesand moments of the heaviest strain on the nerves, can compel weak and uncertain men

to the fulfillment of their duty

For the volunteer hero we obviously needed no Articles of War, but we did for the cowardly egotist, who in the hour of his people's distress sets his own life higher than that of the totality Such a spineless weakling can only be deterred from giving in to his cowardice by the application of the hardest penalty When men struggle

ceaselessly with death and have to hold out for weeks without rest in mud-filled shell holes, sometimes with the worst possible food, the vacillating soldier cannot be held

in line by threatening him with prison or even the workhouse, but only by ruthless application of the death penalty For experience shows that at such a time he regards prison as a thousand times more attractive a place than the battlefield, considering that

in prison at least his invaluable life is not menaced And the fact that in the War the death penalty was excluded, that in reality the Articles of War were thus suspended, had terrible consequences An army of deserters, especially in 1918, poured into the reserve posts and the home towns, and helped to form that great criminal organization which, after November 7, 1918, we suddenly beheld as the maker of the revolution

The front itself really had nothing to do with it All its members felt only a longingfor peace But in this very fact lay tremendous danger for the revolution For when after the armistice the German armies began to near home, the anxious question of therevolutionaries was again and again: What will the front-line troops do? Will the men

in field gray stand for this?

In these weeks the revolution in Germany had to appear at least outwardly

moderate, if it did not want to run the risk of suddenly being smashed to bits by a few German divisions For if at that time even a single divisional commander had taken the decision to pull down the red rags with the help of his loyal and devoted division and to stand the 'councils' up against the wall, to break possible resistance with mine-throwers and hand-grenades, the division in less than four weeks would have swollen

to an army of sixty divisions This made the Jewish wirepullers tremble more than anything else And precisely to prevent this, they had to cover the revolution with a certain moderation; it could not take the form of Bolshevism, but, as things happened

to stand, had to make a pretense of 'law and order.' Hence the innumerable great concessions, the appeal to the old civil service personnel, to the old army leaders They were needed for a certain time at least, and only after the Moors had done their duty,1 could the wirepuller venture to give them the kicks they had coming to them and take the Republic out of the hands of the old state servants and surrender it into the claws of the revolutionary vultures

Only in this way could they hope to dupe old generals and old civil officials, to disarm in advance any possible resistance on their part by an apparent innocence and mildness in the new regime

And practice showed to what an extent this succeeded

1 This is a reference to Hitler's pet quotation from Schiller's

Fiesko.

However, the revolution had not been made by elements of law and order, but by elements of riot, theft, and plunder And for them, the development of the revolution neither accorded with their will, nor for tactical reasons could the course of events be explained and made palatable to them

With the gradual growth of the Social Democracy, it had lost more and more the character of a brutal revolutionary party Not that its thoughts had ever served any other goal than that of the revolution, or that its leaders had ever had other intentions;

by no means But what finally remained was only the purpose and a body no longer suited to its execution With a party of ten millions it is no longer possible to make a

revolution In such a movement you no longer have an extreme of activity, but the great mass of the middle, that is, of inertia.

Out of this realization, while the War was still going on, the famous split of the Social Democracy by the Jews took place; that is: while the Social Democratic Party,

in keeping with the inertia of its mass, hung on national defense like a lead weight, theradical-activistic elements were drawn out of it and formed into forceful new assault columns The Independent Party and the Spartacus League were the storm battalions

of revolutionary Marxism Their task was to create the accomplished fact, the

groundwork of which could be taken over by the masses of the Social Democratic Party, which had been prepared for this over a period of decades The cowardly

bourgeoisie, however, was not rightly estimated by the Marxists, and were simply treated 'en canaille.' Of them no notice was taken whatever, for it was realized that thedoglike submissiveness of the political formations of an old outlived generation wouldnever be capable of serious resistance

As soon as the revolution had succeeded and the main pillars of the old state could

be regarded as broken, but the front-line army, marching home, began to appear as a terrifying sphinx, a brake had to be applied to the natural development; the van of the Social Democratic army occupied the conquered position, and the Independent and Spartacist storm battalions were shoved aside

This, however, did not take place without a struggle

Not only that the activistic assault formations of the revolution were dissatisfied and felt cheated, and wanted to go on fighting on their own hook, but their unruly rowdyism was only too welcome to the wirepullers of the revolution For no sooner was the revolution over than there rose within it two apparent camps: the party of law and order and the group of bloody terror Now what was more natural than that our bourgeoisie should at once, with flying colors, move into the camp of law and order? Now, all at once, these wretched political organizations had an opportunity for an activity, in which, without being obliged to say so, they nevertheless quietly found some ground beneath their feet and came into a certain solidarity with the power which they hated but even more fervently feared The political German bourgeoisie had received the high honor of being permitted to sit down at the table with the

accursed Marxist leaders to combat the Bolshevists

Thus, as early as December, 1918, and January, 1919, the following condition took form:

With a minority of the worst elements a revolution has been made, and

immediately backed by all the Marxist parties The revolution itself has an apparently

moderate stamp, which nets it the hostility of the 'fanatical extremists The latter begin

to shoot off machine guns and hand grenades, to occupy public buildings, in short, to menace the moderate revolution To suppress the terror of such a further development,

an armistice is concluded between the supporters of the new state of affairs and the adherents of the old one, for the purpose of carrying on the struggle in common

against the extremists The result is that the enemies of the Republic have given up their fight against the Republic as such, and help to force down those who, though from totally different angles, are likewise enemies of this Republic And the further result is that the danger of a struggle of the adherents of the old state against those of the new one seems definitely averted

We cannot consider this fact often and closely enough Only those who understand

it can realize how it was possible that a people, nine tenths of whom did not make a revolution, seven tenths of whom reject it, and six tenths of whom hated it,

nevertheless could have this revolution forced on them by one tenth

Gradually the Spartacist barricade fighters on the one hand and the nationalist fanatics and idealists on the other were bled white, and in exact proportion as the two extremes wore each other out, as always, the mass of the middle was victorious The bourgeoisie and Marxism met on a 'realistic basis,' and the Republic began to be 'consolidated.' Which for the present, to be sure, did not prevent the bourgeois parties, especially before elections, from citing the monarchist idea for a time, in order, by means of the spirits of the past, to be able to conjure the smaller spirits of their

adherents and ensnare them once more

Honorable this was not At heart they had all broken with the monarchy long since, and the filth of the new condition had begun to spread its seductive influences

to the bourgeois party camp The usual bourgeois politician feels more at home today

in the muck of republican corruption than in the clean hardness which 'he still

remembers from the past state

As already stated, the revolution, after the smashing of the old army, had been forced

to create a new power factor for the reinforcement of its state authority As things were, it could gain this only from supporters of an outlook that was really opposed to

it From them alone there could slowly arise a new army which, externally limited by the peace treaties, would, with regard to its mentality, have to be reshaped in the course of time into an instrument of the new state conception

If we put to ourselves the question how - aside from all the real mistakes of the oldstate, which were among its causes- the revolution as an action could succeed, we come to the conclusion:

1 In consequence of the paralysis of our concepts of duty and obedience, and

2 In consequence of the cowardly passivity of our so-called state-preserving parties

On these points the following may be said:

The paralysis of our concepts of duty and obedience has its ultimate ground in our totally unnational education, oriented solely toward the state Here again this gives rise to a confusion between means and end Consciousness of duty, fulfillment of duty, and obedience are not ends in themselves, any more than the state is an end in itself; they should all be the means for making possible and safeguarding on this earth the existence of a community of spiritually and physically homogeneous beings In an hour when a national body is visibly collapsing and to all appearances is exposed to the gravest oppression, thanks to the activity of a few scoundrels, obedience and fulfillment of duty toward them amount to doctrinaire formalism, in fact pure insanity,

if the refusal of obedience and 'fulfillment of duty' would make possible the salvation

of a people from its ruin According to our present-day bourgeois state conception, thedivisional commander who at that time received from above the command not to shoot, acted dutifully and hence rightly in not shooting, since to bourgeois society, thoughtless formal obedience is more valuable than the life of their own people According to the National Socialist conception, however, it is not obedience toward weak superiors that goes into force at such moments, but obedience toward the

national community In such an hour, the duty of personal responsibility toward a whole nation manifests itself

The fact that a living conception of these terms had been lost in our people or rather in our governments, giving way to a purely doctrinaire and formal conception, was the cause of the revolution's success

On the second point, the following must be remarked:

The deeper reason for the cowardice of the 'state-preserving' parties is above all the departure of the activistic, well-intentioned part of our people from their ranks - those who bled to death in the field Aside from this, our bourgeois parties, which we can designate as the sole political formations which supported the old state, were convinced that they were entitled to defend their views exclusively in the spiritual way and with spiritual weapons, since the use of physical weapons was the sole

prerogative of the state Not only that in such a conception we must see a symptom of

a gradually developing decadent weakness, but it was also senseless at a time when a political opponent had long since abandoned this standpoint and openly emphasized his intention of putting forward his political aims by force when possible At the moment when Marxism appeared in the world of bourgeois democracy, as one of its results, the bourgeois-democratic appeal to carry on the struggle with 'spiritual

weapons' was an absurdity, which would one day bring dire consequences For the Marxists themselves from the very beginning came out for the conception that the use

of a weapon must be considered only according to criteria of expediency, and that the right to use it resides solely in success

How correct this conception is was shown in the days of November 7 to 11, 1918 -In those days the Marxists did not concern themselves in the least about

parliamentarianism and democracy, but gave both of them the death blow with yellingand shooting mobs of criminals It goes without saying that in this same moment the bourgeois talking clubs were defenseless

After the revolution when the bourgeois parties suddenly reappeared, though with modified firm names, and their brave leaders crawled out of the concealment of dark cellars and airy storerooms, like all the representatives of such formations, they had not forgotten their mistakes and likewise they had learned nothing new Their politicalprogram lay in the past, in so far as they had not reconciled themselves at heart with the new state of affairs; their aim, however, was to participate if possible in the new state of affairs, and their sole weapons remained, as they had always been, words

Even after the revolution, the bourgeois parties at all times "miserably capitulated

to the streets

When the Law for the Protection of the Republic came up for consideration, there was at first no majority in favor of it But in the face of the two hundred thousand demonstrating Marxists the bourgeois 'statesmen' were seized with such a fear that contrary to their conviction they accepted the law in the miserable rear that otherwise when they left the Reichstag they would be beaten to a pulp by the furious masses Which unfortunately in consequence of the law's acceptance, did not take place

And so the development of the new state went its ways, as though there had not been any national opposition at all

The sole organizations which at this time would have had the courage and strength

to oppose the Marxists and their incited masses, were for the present the free corps; later the self-defense organizations, citizens' guards, etc., and finally the tradition leagues 2

2 Veterans' organizations based on glorification of the old army.

But why their existence brought about no sort of shift that was in any way

discernible was due to the following:

Just as the so-called national parties could exert no sort of influence for lack of any threatening power on the streets, likewise the so-called defense organizations, in turn, could exert no sort of influence for lack of any political idea, and above all of any real political goal

What had given Marxism its success was its complete combination of political will and activistic brutality What excluded national Germany from any practical activity in shaping the German development was the lack of a unified collaboration of brutal force with brilliant political will

Whatever the will of the 'national' parties might be, they had not the least power tofight for this will, least of all on the streets

The combat leagues had all the power, they were the masters of the streets and the state, and possessed no political idea and no political goal for which their strength was

or even could be thrown in for the benefit of national Germany In both cases it was the slyness of the Jew who, by clever persuasion and insistence, was able to bring about a positive perpetuation, in any case an increasing intensification, of this

calamitous state of affairs It was the Jew who through his press knew how to launch with infinite dexterity the idea of the 'unpolitical character' of the combat leagues, as,

on the other hand, in political life he always praised and encouraged, with equal slyness, the 'purely spiritual nature' of the struggle Millions of German blockheads babbled this nonsense after him, without having even the faintest idea that in this way they were for practical purposes disarming themselves and exposing themselves defenseless to the Jew

But for this, too, indeed, there is again a natural explanation The lack of a great, creative, renewing idea means at all times a limitation of fighting force Firm belief in the right to apply even the most brutal weapons is always bound up with the existence

of a fanatical faith in the necessity of the victory of a revolutionary new order on this earth

A movement that is not fighting for such highest aims and ideals will, therefore, never seize upon the ultimate weapon

The fact of having a new great idea to show was the secret of the success of the French Revolution; the Russian Revolution owes its victory to the idea, and only

through the idea did fascism achieve the power to subject a people in the most

beneficial way to the most comprehensive creative renewal

Of this, bourgeois parties are not capable

But it was not only the bourgeois parties that saw their political goal in a

restoration of the past, but also the combat leagues, in so far as they concerned

themselves with any political aims at all Old veterans' club and Kyffhäuser 3

tendencies were alive within them and contributed to politically blunting the sharpest weapon that national Germany had in those days and making it languish in the

mercenary service of the Republic The fact that in this they acted in the best

conviction, and above all in the best good faith, changes nothing in the catastrophic madness of these occurrences

3 Kyffhäuserbund der deutschen Landeskriegerverbände, a veterans'

organization founded in 1898 Before the War of 1914 it had over

two million members It takes its name from the mountain in the

Harz, within which, according to the legend, Emperor Friedrich

Barbarossa lies sleeping, to awaken in the hour of Germany's

greatest need.

Gradually Marxism obtained the required power to support its authority in the Reichswehr that was being consolidated, and thereupon, consistently and logically, began to disband as superfluous the nationalist combat leagues, which seemed

dangerous Individual leaders of especial boldness, who were looker) on with distrust, were haled before the bars of justice and put behind Swedish curtains.4 But with all ofthem the destiny for which they themselves were responsible was fulfilled

4 Thieves' slang for prison bars.

With the founding of the NSDAP, for the first time a movement had appeared whose goal did not, like that of the bourgeois parties, consist in a mechanical restoration of the past, but in the effort to erect an organic folkish state in place of the present

senseless state mechanism

The young movement, from the first day, espoused the standpoint that its idea must be put forward spiritually, but that the defense of this spiritual platform trust if necessary be secured by strong-arm means Faithful to its belief in the enormous significance of the new doctrine, it seems obvious to the movement that for the

attainment of its goal no sacrifice can be too great

I have already pointed to the forces which obligate a movement, in so far as it wants to win the heart of a people, to assume from its own ranks its defense against the terrorist attempts of its adversaries And it is an eternal experience of world

history that a terror represented by a philosophy of life can never be broken by a formal state power, but at all times can be defeated only by another, new philosophy

of life, proceeding with the same boldness and determination This will at all times be displeasing to the sentiment of the official guardians of the state, but that will not banish the fact State power can only guarantee law and order when the content of the state coincides with the philosophy dominant at that particular time, so that violent elements possess only the character of individual criminal natures, and are not

regarded as proponents of an idea in extreme opposition to the state views In such a case, the state can for centuries apply the greatest measures of violence against a terror oppressing it; in the end it will nevertheless be able to do nothing against it, but will go down in defeat

The German state is gravely attacked by Marxism In its struggle of seventy years

it has not been able to prevent the victory of this philosophy of life, but, despite a sum total of thousands of years in prison and jail sentences and the bloodiest measures which in innumerable cases it applied to the warriors of the menacing Marxist

philosophy, has nevertheless been forced to almost total capitulation (This, too, the run-of-the-mill bourgeois political leader will want to deny, though obviously he will

be unable to convince anyone.)

The state which on November 9, 1918, unconditionally crawled on its belly beforeMarxism will not suddenly arise tomorrow as its conqueror; on the contrary: even today feebleminded bourgeois in ministerial chairs are beginning to rave about the necessity of not governing against the workers, and what they have in mind under the concept 'worker' is Marxism But by identifying the German worker with Marxism, they not only commit a falsification as cowardly as it is untrue, but attempt by this motivation to conceal their own collapse in the face of the Marxist idea and

organization

But in view of this fact - that is, the complete subjection of the present state to Marxism - the National Socialist movement really acquires the duty, not only of preparing the victory of its idea, but of taking over its defense against the terror of an International drunk with victory

I have already described how in our movement a body for the protection of

meetings gradually developed out of practical life, how it gradually assumed the character of a definite monitor troop, and strove for an organizational form