The Third Reich Sourcebook

PART ONE

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THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

1

The Munich Years and the Legacy of the War

NO EVENT IS MORE CRUCIAL to understanding the emergence of Nazism than Germany’s surrender to the Allies at 11 o’clock on 11 November 1918. Until the very end of World War I, wartime propaganda portrayed the undefeated Imperial German Army as invincible, giving no hint of the coming disaster on the Western Front. The anti-Hitler journalist Sebastian Haffner recalled that when he was eleven years old and saw the newspaper headline Armistice Signed, his entire inner world . . . collapsed.¹ Adolf Hitler, recuperating from partial blindness in a military hospital in Pasewalk, also recalled the trauma of defeat, later describing in Mein Kampf the moment when an elderly pastor told the stunned patients that the royal House of Hohenzollern had fallen, the Kaiser had gone into exile, and the German Empire had become a republic. For Hitler, as for many of his generation, his personal suffering vanished, as he wrote in Mein Kampf, in comparison with the tragedy of the fatherland. During the 1930s, much of the literature produced in National Socialist Germany mythologized the experience at the front and lauded war veterans. For example, Heinrich Lersch’s war poems presented a redemptive vision of death and destruction, and Otto Gmelin portrayed a simple but war-wise German in his saga Prohn Fights for His People (1938). Though the account in Mein Kampf, composed during Hitler’s brief fourteen-month imprisonment in the Landsberg Fortress for an abortive coup in Munich on 9 November 1923, may be questioned, Hitler claimed that on the day of Germany’s humiliation—9 November—he had vowed to go into politics.²

When Hitler joined the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party, DAP) in Munich in September 1919, he was still by his own description a nameless political neophyte. His pan-German sympathies did not begin to emerge until the summer of 1919 after he received political training as a military informer in an anti-Bolshevik instruction course, courtesy of the Reichswehr (Armed Services). In his first written statement on the Jewish Question, a letter dated 16 September 1919, written at the behest of Captain Karl Mayr, head of the Army Intelligence and Propaganda Unit, to a soldier, Adolf Gemlich, Hitler proposed a rational rather than emotional anti-Semitism in order to be all the more effective in the irrevocable removal of the Jews.

Hitler was greatly influenced by the economic theorist Gottfried Feder (1883–1941), whom he had heard speak and whose Manifesto for Breaking the Bondage of Interest had just appeared. Feder was a central figure in the DAP, which had been organized in 1919 and was one of many political groups that emerged on the fringes of Munich’s turbulent political scene. The DAP’s founding statement, published on 5 January 1919, addressed its appeal to the working class, promoted antipathy to the socialization of the German economy put forward by the parties of the Left, called for wage stabilization and profit sharing, and passionately demanded government by Germans rather than by foreigners and Jews. From its inception, the DAP embraced an ideological cluster of antiliberalism, pan-Germanic nationalism, antimodernism, racial anti-Semitism, and a mystical ideal of Germanic or Nordic spirituality derived from a variety of pre-1914 "völkisch sources. It blamed Germany’s defeat on the November criminals—Marxists and Jews—whom it held responsible for any and all of Germany’s misfortunes. The fourth point of the party’s twenty-five-point program, adopted on 24 February 1920, explicitly excluded Jews from citizenship, defining citizens as members of the nation who are of German blood." Along with Feder, who focused largely on economic issues like Germany’s debt and the need to nationalize the credit system, the main ideologues of the DAP were the poet Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923), who saw all life as a world-historical battle between the worldly Jew and the spiritual non-Jew, and Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946, executed at Nuremberg), whose writings were marked by biological and racial anti-Semitism and a radical hatred of Bolshevism.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they rewrote their early history to put Hitler at center stage from the beginning, publishing a highly fictionalized account of the founding of the DAP and of Hitler’s 1924 trial in a collector’s album illustrated with stick-on photographs that was offered with cigarette purchases. Though the official version of how Hitler joined the movement was fanciful, the miniscule size of the party at its inception, his discovery of his ability to mesmerize audiences, and the resulting mushrooming of membership were not exaggerated. After seizing control of the party in July 1921, Hitler revamped it, calling it the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, usually referred to in English as the Nazi Party and in German abbreviated as NSDAP); designing its red, white, and black swastika flag; creating the uniformed paramilitary Sturm Abteilung (Storm Troopers, SA); starting a daily newspaper (Völkischer Beobachter); staging countless mass meetings featuring speakers trained to create political fireworks; and adopting new propaganda techniques, some of which are described in Hans Hinkel’s One of a Hundred Thousand (1933).³ One of the greatest successes of the Nazi Party in the 1920s was in recruiting young activists and mobilizing the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth, HJ) and the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls, BDM), which by 1930 had twenty-five thousand members under eighteen. Hans Johst’s (1890–1978) play Schlageter, based on the life of a young Nazi martyr executed by the French in 1923, depicts party members as dynamic and idealistic, the mirror opposite of the cynical and exhausted older generation. Also typical of propaganda in the earlier years were the books by Wilfrid Bade. Combining his writer’s activity with his role as press chief (Reichsamtsleiter der Reichspressestelle) of the Nazi Party, Bade was an able popularizer of the history of the party and an advocate of its technological triumphs, especially the putative expansion of mass automobile ownership.

In the late 1920s, under the leadership of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party focused on winning the battle for the traditionally Social Democratic stronghold of Berlin by staging barroom brawls, disrupting meetings, and provoking street battles with Socialist and Communist opponents. Midlevel party organizers such as Fritz Oertner exhorted speakers to be drilled in effective anti-Marxist rhetoric. Though the party was already a formidable presence, not until its breakthrough in the elections of 14 September 1930, described here by Herman Führbach, did it become a force in German politics and a threat to the Weimar Republic.

NOTES

1. Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, translated by Oliver Pretzel (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002), 26.

2. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 204, 206.

3. The use of the term Nazi is a well-established convention in English. It emerged around 1924 among opponents of National Socialism, who borrowed it from the nickname Nazi (from the masculine proper name Ignatz, the German form of Ignatius), meaning a foolish, clumsy, or awkward person. The NSDAP briefly adopted the Nazi designation as what the Germans call a spite word, but they soon gave this up and generally avoided the term, considering it derogatory. Before 1930, English speakers had called the party members National Socialists, a term that dates from 1923. The use of Nazi Germany, Nazi regime, and so on was popularized by German exiles abroad. From them, the term spread into other languages and eventually was brought back to Germany after the war.

1

Guidelines of the German Workers’ Party

Announced on 5 January 1919. Published in Dokumente der Zeitgeschichte, edited by Fritz Maier-Hartmann and Adolf Dresler (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH, 1938), 85. Translated by Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp.

What is the German Workers’ Party?

The German Workers’ Party is a socialist organization, composed of all folk comrades engaged in mental and physical work. It may only be guided by German leaders who put aside all personal goals and allow national needs to be the highest concern of the party program.

What does the German Workers’ Party offer the worker?

The DAP seeks the ennoblement of the German worker. Skilled resident workers have the right to be considered members of the middle class. A sharp distinction between workers and proletarians should be made. An international agreement with the trade unions of other countries must stabilize wages, making it impossible for the working class of a particular country to engage in sharp bargaining. In the future, the competitive position of an individual country shall be determined not by the lowest wages but by the diligence and efficiency of its workers. In this way, the causes of friction among various countries will be avoided. Big business provides food and employment and is therefore to be protected, as long as it does not relentlessly exploit the worker and make it impossible for him to lead a worthwhile life. The DAP believes that the socialization of German economic life signals the collapse of the German economy. By controlling socialized businesses, our enemies would be in the best possible position to efficiently collect the war indemnities which have been imposed on us, and to do so at the expense of the German workers. Therefore, the German worker should not have socialization but profit sharing. Profit sharing can be facilitated by establishing labor cooperatives in the cities and farming cooperatives among agricultural workers in the country, to protect land and soil.

Who is the DAP fighting against?

The DAP is fighting with all its might against usury and inflation. Against all who create no values, who make high profits without any mental or physical work. We fight against the drones in the state, most of whom are Jews; they live the good life and reap what they have not sown. They control and rule us with their money. For these drones Germany and her entire Volk are but objects of speculation; their party slogans are much the same. All talk, no action. The DAP honors the principle that he who shall not work shall not eat. Our fight is for justice, true freedom, and happiness. No dictatorship of the proletariat! Equal justice for all. No rule of bayonets. Everyone shall feel himself free to be a free German. There is no happiness to be found in platitudes and hollow speeches at meetings, demonstrations, and election campaigns. Our striving is toward the free happiness of good work, the full pot, and prospering children.

To what extent is the DAP politically active?

The DAP opposes any threat to the unity of the Reich, but excludes the predominance of one single state. We want to be governed solely by Germans; foreigners and Jews govern us only in their own interest or in the interest of foreign countries. With the people and the government they make deals, not politics. The Foreign Office shall consist of German representatives from all the states participating in the federation, representatives elected by citizens of the federated states. The party advocates an international law for the press of all countries. By punishing the intentional reporting of false news, this law will prevent the kind of incitement of violence within the populace that occurred during the World War. The highest principles of justice and truth must again be made valid in today’s world.

How does the DAP think the costs of the war can be paid?

Our guiding star is this: war is a disaster for a country, and disaster means suffering. For this reason, no one had any right to gather riches at home while our soldiers fought abroad. Regardless of earnings before the war, we consider 10,000 marks to be the highest permissible annual earnings during the war; the rest is to be delivered to the central government, which will use it to pay war costs. Furthermore, property owners must be called upon to help cover the war costs, and any estates which are little encumbered are to be forced to take up compulsory mortgages.

2

ADOLF HITLER

Letter to Adolf Gemlich

Written on 16 September 1919. Published in Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924, edited by Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 88–90.

Dear Herr Gemlich,

If the danger posed by Jewry for our Volk today finds expression in the undeniable aversion among broad sectors of our population, the cause of this aversion is not to be sought, for the most part, in a clear recognition of the consciously or unconsciously systematic and pernicious effect of the Jews as a whole upon our nation. Rather, it arises largely from personal contact, from the personal impression left by the individual Jew—almost always an unfavorable one. For this reason, anti-Semitism is too easily characterized as a mere emotional phenomenon. And yet this is incorrect. Anti-Semitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts. These are the facts: First, Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association. Even a Jew never designates himself as a Jewish German, a Jewish Pole, or a Jewish American but always as a German, Polish, or American Jew. The Jew has never yet adopted much beyond the language of the foreign peoples in whose midst he lives. A German who is forced to avail himself of the French language in France, Italian in Italy, Chinese in China does not thereby become a Frenchman, Italian, or Chinaman anymore than the Jew who lives among us and is forced to avail himself of the German language becomes a German. Neither does the Mosaic faith, as essential as it is to the survival of this race, unequivocally settle the question of whether someone is a Jew or non-Jew. There is scarcely a race whose members belong exclusively to any one specific religion.

Throughout thousands of years of inbreeding, often restricted to a very limited group, the Jew has in general preserved his race and its peculiarities far more distinctly than many of the peoples amongst whom he has lived. And this is the reason that we have a non-German, alien race in our midst, which is neither willing nor able to sacrifice its racial character nor to deny its sentiments, thoughts, and aims, and yet still possesses all the political rights we do. If the Jew’s sentiments are restricted to the purely material realm, his thoughts and aims all the more so. His dance around the golden calf is becoming a ruthless struggle for all those earthly possessions that, in our heart of hearts, we know should not be the most highly prized and sought after on earth.

The value of the individual is no longer determined by his character or by the significance of his achievements on behalf of the whole, but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money.

A nation’s esteem is no longer to be measured by the sum of its moral and spiritual prowess, but rather by the wealth of its material possessions.

These sentiments are the basis for those thoughts and aims centering on money and power, both of which protect and preserve those very sentiments that render the Jew unscrupulous in his choice of methods and means and ruthless in their employment to these ends. In autocratically ruled states, he wheedles his way into the favor of His Majesty, then abuses that power like a leech to bleed the nation’s people. In democracies, he vies for the favor of the masses, bows down before the majesty of the people, and recognizes only the majesty of money.

He destroys the character of princes with Byzantine flattery, national pride (the strength of a Volk), with ridicule and the shameless cultivation of depravity. His weapon of war is public opinion that is never expressed in the press, but which is nonetheless orchestrated and falsified by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly by way of accrued interest, and which forces the Volk under the most dangerous of yokes whose ultimately tragic consequences are concealed by the initial attraction of gold and glitter. Everything men strive after as a higher goal—be it religion, socialism, or democracy—is to the Jew but a means to an end, a way for him to satisfy his lust for money and domination.

In his effects and consequences, he is like a racial tuberculosis of nations and peoples.

And this leads to the following conclusions: an anti-Semitism grounded solely on emotion will find its ultimate expression in the form of pogroms. An anti-Semitism grounded in reason, however, must lead to systematic legal eradication and elimination of those privileges that distinguish the Jew from the other aliens who live among us (through Legislation Concerning National Aliens). The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.

Only a government of national strength, never one of national impotence, is capable of achieving both these ends.

The Republic in Germany owes its birth not to the uniform national will of our Volk, but the clever exploitation of a series of circumstances which found general expression in a deep, widespread sense of dissatisfaction. These circumstances, however, were independent of the form of the state structure and are still operative today. Indeed, now more than before. Thus, a great portion of our Volk recognizes that altering the form of state cannot in itself alter and improve our situation—this, rather, will require a rebirth of the nation’s moral and spiritual powers.

And this rebirth cannot be initiated by a state leadership of irresponsible majorities, influenced by certain party dogmas, an irresponsible press, or platitudes and slogans generated by the international community. [It requires] instead the relentless installation of nationally minded leadership personalities [Führerpersönlichkeiten] possessed of an inner sense of responsibility.

This fact, though, robs the Republic of the essential inner support of the nation’s spiritual forces. And thus today’s state leaders are compelled to seek support among those who have used and continue to use the new reconstruction of Germany exclusively to their own advantage, and who for this reason were ultimately the driving force behind the revolution—the Jews. Even though today’s leaders fully realize the danger of Jewry (as various statements from leading personalities attest), they are forced, in their own self-interest, to accept the readily proffered support of the Jews and to return the favor. And this payoff consists not only in favoring the Jews in every possible way, but, above all, in hindering the struggle of a deceived Volk against its deceivers, that is—in repressing the anti-Semitic movement.

Respectfully,

Adolf Hitler

3

WILFRID BADE

The Founding of the Party in 1920

First published as Die Gründung der Partei 1920, Deutschland erwacht: Werden, Kampf, und Sieg der NSDAP, edited by Wilfrid Bade (Altona-Bahrenfeld: Cigaretten Bilderdienst, 1933), 12–13.

When the officer training instructor Hitler was charged with the task of attending a meeting of the German Workers’ Party, he had no idea that this evening would become a decisive one, not only for him. In a small back room—the Leiberzimmer of the Sterneckbräu beer hall in Munich—he met with between twenty and twenty-five people who were listening to a lecture given by Gottfried Feder.

You couldn’t speak in terms of a party. It was a club, a political debate club, in which all the overall uncertainty, and the dubitable nature of everything—every form of existence and every idea that had left its mark on the time around 1919—became utterly apparent. At any rate, a brochure that a young worker placed in Hitler the soldier’s hand as he was leaving the meeting offered more than the evening he’d just frittered away there. The brochure was titled My Political Awakening and penned by a certain Anton Drexler, head of said Workers’ Party in Munich. In this brochure were reflected soul-searching struggles such as Hitler had himself wrestled with intensively during his time in Vienna.

Another day, he received word that he had been accepted into the party, an announcement that elicited from him as much laughter as annoyance.

But he nevertheless pursued this most recent invitation calling him to the Altes Rosenbad, an obscure locale where Hitler thus encountered the whole listless, hapless clique of six people who had joined forces in the cause of rescuing the German worker. And yet, from somewhere in the midst of their flailing, apolitical, nonpropagandistic manner, something shined through to captivate Hitler: the sincere, honest belief that the German worker must succeed in winning back the fatherland from Marxism and the Red Revolution.

After two days’ deliberation, Hitler decided to join the German Workers’ Party.

He received provisional membership certificate number seven.

No one in Munich was familiar with the party whose members were thrilled just to receive a few letters from who knows where, which they spent hours debating how to respond.

Every Wednesday, there was a so-called committee meeting at Café Gasteig, and once a week an evening discussion forum [Sprechabend].

But since the whole movement was comprised of but seven men, the same people always met in rarefied seclusion—and isolation.

Shattering that seclusion seemed to be Hitler’s primary goal. If anything were to come of this whole thing, the party would have to emerge from anonymity.

Invitations to the meetings were written by hand. Hitler delivered eighty of them personally. But when the evening of the meeting arrived, again only the same old seven people gathered, and no one else.

So Hitler began having the invitations typed up—and the results were thus improved. The number of listeners increased to eleven, to thirteen, to seventeen, to twenty-three, to thirty-four.

Taking up a collection of money at one of these meetings afforded party members the opportunity for placing an announcement for the next one in the Münchener Beobachter. Lo and behold: 111 attended. It was a tremendous success.

For the first time, Hitler had the sense that he possessed the talent to speak before a greater circle—a fact that the party president could not bring himself to believe. Hitler’s appeal to the willingness to sacrifice on the part of attendees even succeeded in coaxing 300 marks from their pockets.

To the party, that was a fortune.

What is more, after this assembly, a number of young men made themselves available with whom it was possible to start thinking about working on a much more extravagant scale. Because the very moment that an anti-Marxist party first made a public appearance in the year 1919–20, there would be blood on the carpet and heads would begin to roll. The party leadership was afraid of such clashes. Hitler didn’t go out in search of them, nor did he go out of his way to avoid them and thought it better to let it come down to public clashes than to hide in the dark. So it was that on October 19, a new meeting was called to order. This time, 130 people were in attendance. An attempt to break up the meeting was nipped in the bud. Two weeks later, 170 men showed up at yet another demonstration. The numbers increased steadily. Before long, there were two hundred, three hundred people listening to the orator Adolf Hitler.

At the same time, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was formed from a smaller circle within the German Workers’ Party. The nascent organization began formulating the twenty-five points. The process wasn’t without fierce disputes, but ultimately the superior spirit of the party’s propaganda leader prevailed—it was Adolf Hitler.

The Marxist press had already begun covering the new party. The first articles dripping with malice appeared. Hitler’s supporters began speaking at other meetings. The movement was no longer unknown.

Even though the speakers of the German Workers’ Party were constantly being shouted down at the meetings of other parties, they were nevertheless becoming known, and even the most die-hard Marxist had to see that the Social Democrats and Communists were not the only ones running around out there who were not intimidated by a balled fist and were anything but bourgeois.

In the party, a conflict arose between the national party chairmen, Herr [Karl] Harrer and Hitler.

To Harrer, the tempo Hitler had set seemed too tempestuous, and when Hitler managed to call a truly mass meeting to order in the big banquet hall of the Hofbräuhaus, Harrer resigned from his post. He was afraid the party would collapse.

Hitler threw himself full throttle into preparations for the assembly. Impetuously, he ran roughshod over all the reservations held by the far too timid clubhouse politician.

Flyers and posters were printed. The color of the posters was a blood red that would be sure to attract attention whatever the occasion or purpose. What is more, these red posters must have especially provoked the Marxists, who believed themselves in possession of a hereditary lease on this color—and reaching Marxists was precisely what Hitler deemed most important; his most urgent task was to wrench precisely those indoctrinated, inveigled workers on the left from the clutches of the Jewish leaders. Before the demonstration took place, Hitler saw to it that the party program that had long been in the works was available. And then came that memorable February 24th, when, from the clatter of the movement’s first great beer-hall brawl and from the elation of two thousand people, when the program was announced, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was born.

4

DIETRICH ECKART

Jewishness in and around Us

First published as Das Judentum in und außer uns, parts IV and V, Auf gut Deutsch, nos. 1–7, January–April 1919, 28–31, 79–80, 95–96, 109–12. Translated by Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp.

IV

To repeat once again, and yet again, the most important thing up to now: in the Jewish religion, the belief in a spiritual life after death is completely lacking. One even gets the almost certain impression that in the course of time everything which could remind one even slightly of an incorporeal existence after death has been systematically eliminated and the Jews stand alone in the world with their purely earthly religion! Do not forget this for a moment: it is so significant. For in this exceptional position lies the reason that a cryptonation like the Jews survived the greatest and most glorious peoples and will continue to survive until the end of time, until the hour of salvation for mankind strikes. Sooner will the Jewish people not perish. The world is preserved, as we shall see, only through its affirmation. In the Jewish people this affirmation of the world is completely pure, without any admixture of negation of the world. All other peoples of the past or present had or have this admixture, characterized by the idea of the next world, if even only by a trace of it. Even this mere trace would have been or would be sufficient to give the necessary balance to the unmixed affirmation of the world embodied in the Jewish people. For the inner light—and the belief in immortality is the inner light—does not need to shine with the brightest glow all the time in order to be effective: but it must be there, it must not be extinguished, otherwise mankind would be lost forever to this world. Everything must have its appropriate moment, however—a fact that is often overlooked. The negation of the world still needs a long time in which to grow before it will gain lasting predominance over affirmation of the world. At the present time, negation of the world seems to have again fallen back to zero; its opposite, symbolized in the Jewish people, triumphs as never before; it looks as if the inner light had entirely disappeared from the earth. But to anticipate a little, it only looks that way. Negation of the world cannot perish because it belongs to the essence of the soul of mankind, and this is immortal. Where immortality dwells, longing for the eternal and renunciation of the temporal must continually reemerge; that is, the negation of the world must continually reappear. And that is the meaning of the non-Jewish peoples: they are the preservers of the negation of the world, of the idea of an existence after death, even if they preserve it ever so meagerly. Therefore one or the other of these peoples can perfectly well be destroyed; what is important will live on in the heirs. But if the Jewish people were to perish, there would no longer be a nation that cherished affirmation of the world: the end of time would have come.

But this would also be the case if the Zionist ideal were realized—that is, if all of Jewry came together in a national union, in Palestine or elsewhere. There has never been such a union of Jews; this fact must be emphasized here twice and three times, since it is so little known. Long before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, a good part of the Jews lived in the Diaspora—that is, scattered among the heathen peoples—just as every school child knows that at the very beginning of their history, they played the guests among the Egyptians. What arose later in Palestine was not a state: at best, it was an attempt at a state; at worst, the training ground for the exploitation or destruction of foreign peoples. To the Jew Weininger, his own nation appears to be an invisibly connected web of slimy fungus, always existing and spread over the wide earth; and precisely this spreading, he rightly remarks (without, however, giving reasons for it), lies in the idea, in the essence of Jewishness.¹ That becomes immediately clear if we again view the Jewish people as the embodiment of the affirmation of the world. Without this, nothing earthly is imaginable, no people either; and thus the Jew, the only consistent and therefore the only effective affirmer of the world, must be present everywhere as the ever-necessary counterweight, even where the other men have only the slightest impulse to overcome the world. For otherwise the former impulse would immediately reach fulfillment, and the world would not be redeemed (for the Jewish people would still remain) but would be destroyed in another way, by the elimination of the spiritual force without which it cannot exist. This, however, I shall explain later. Here it was only important to show that the world could not exist if the Jews lived by themselves, for which reason an old prophecy announces the destruction of the world on the day on which the Jews found a state in Palestine.

V

It follows from all of this that Jewishness belongs to the organism of mankind as, let us say, certain bacteria belong to the human body, and just as necessarily as these. As we know, the body contains a lot of small organisms without which it would be destroyed, although these organisms feed on it; and similarly mankind needs the Jewish presence in order to remain vigorous until the fulfillment of its earthly mission. In other words, the affirmation of the world, pernicious in itself, which is present in the purest form in Jewishness, is the condition of worldly existence as long as there are men and cannot be imagined away; only with the salvation of all mankind will it collapse.

Thus we must accept the Jews among us as a necessary evil for who knows how many centuries to come. But as our body would atrophy if those bacteria developed to more than a healthy extent, so also, to make an analogy, would our people gradually succumb to a permanent spiritual infirmity if the Jew got to be too much for it. That which Zionism wants or at least pretends to want, to leave completely, would be just as fatal as the Jew ruling us. The mission of the German people ends, it is my firm conviction, with the last hour of mankind, but we cannot get there if before that time we lose the affirmation of the world—the Jew among us; because without affirmation of the world no existence is possible. But on the other hand, if the Jew constantly stifled us, we would never be in a position to fulfill our destiny, which consists of the salvation of the world, but would, to put it bluntly, succumb to insanity, for pure affirmation of the world, as the unchecked desire for transitory existence, leads to no other end. It would literally amount to nothingness, to the annihilation not only of earthly appearances but also of what truly exists, the spiritual. Viewed in himself, the Jew represents nothing but this blind desire for annihilation, the madness of mankind. It is known that the Jewish people suffer to an exceptional degree from mental illness; we have already discovered the reason. Governed by madness, Schopenhauer too says of the Jew.

Some time ago the Jew Martin Buber gave a lecture in Munich in which he vividly dealt with the future state in Palestine.² Very vividly. The most important of his statements was the following hint, expressed unintentionally but with great sullenness: if this state should be founded and there should creep into it even the slightest trace of a supernatural tendency, then it also would have to be destroyed!

The secret of Jewishness could not have been revealed more plainly. It wants the despiritualization of the world and nothing else; but this would be the same as its annihilation. While the Jews still live among us, everything they do comes to this, and must come to this.

Their goal is the despiritualization of mankind. Therefore, they attempt to destroy every form behind which the living soul operates; because, as archmaterialists, they are of the insane opinion that the spiritual—only vaguely suspected by them—is connected as a matter of life and death with the form and must be destroyed together with it. Therefore they are all without exception anarchists, consciously or unconsciously; indeed, they cannot be anything but opponents of law and order because these two bear in incomparable fashion the shining stamp of a purer world. Schiller calls order the daughter of heaven, and in Schiller, but especially in Goethe, there are innumerable proofs of the divine origin of law.

But no idea of state can be realized without law and order; they are the indispensable basis for it. Therefore the Jew, their deadly enemy, can never create a viable state in Palestine. Instead, the Chaos would come again, for this word means, correctly translated: the infinite emptiness; in German, nothingness.

Here again Weininger approaches the truth, but here again he falls short of full understanding. First of all, he thinks the (pure) idea of state has never been even approximately realized in any historic form, which is true, but only because mankind has until now lacked the necessary profundity; but then he adds that, in spite of this, there is in every historic attempt to form a state something, perhaps only that minimum of a pure idea of state, which lifts the structure above a mere union of business and power interests. This is true in the Aryan attempts at forming a state, but Weininger did not know that previously this minimum could not become a maximum because until the present day the Aryans had not attained the corresponding maximum of spiritual force. But even the minimum sufficed to help the Aryan formation of states to prosper, at least for a while, often for centuries.

Notes

1. Otto Weininger (1880–1903) was an Austrian critic and philosopher and the author of Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), 1903.—Eds.

2. Martin Buber (1878–1965), Jewish philosopher and religious scholar active in the Zionist movement.

5

The Program of the German Workers’ Party

The Twenty-Five Points

Announced on 24 February 1920 in Munich. Published in Das Programm der NSDAP und seine weltanschaulichen Grundgedanken (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH, 1932), 15–19.

The program of the German Workers’ Party is of limited duration.¹ The leaders have no intention, once the aims announced in it have been achieved, of setting up fresh ones, merely in order artificially to increase the discontent of the masses, and so ensure the continued existence of the party.

  1.We demand the union of all Germans to form a Great Germany on the basis of the right of self-determination enjoyed by nations.

  2.We demand equality of rights for the German people in its dealings with other nations and abolition of the peace treaties of Versailles and Saint Germain.

  3.We demand land and territory (colonies) for the nourishment of our people and for settling our excess population.

  4.None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew therefore may be a member of the nation.

  5.Anyone who is not a citizen of the state may live in Germany only as a guest and must be regarded as being subject to foreign laws.

  6.The right of voting on the leadership and legislation is to be enjoyed by the state alone. We demand therefore that all official appointments, of whatever kind, whether in the Reich, in the country, or in the smaller localities, shall be granted to citizens of the state alone. We oppose Parliament’s corrupting custom of filling posts merely with a view to party considerations and without reference to character or capacity.

  7.We demand that the state shall make it its first duty to promote the industry and livelihood of citizens of the state. If it is not possible to nourish the entire population of the state, foreign nationals (noncitizens of the state) must be excluded from the Reich.

  8.All non-German immigration must be prevented.

  9.All citizens of the state shall be equal in rights and duties.

10.It must be the first duty of each citizen of the state to work with his mind or with his body. The activities of the individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good.

We demand therefore:

11.Abolition of incomes unearned by work.

Breaking the Bonds of Interest

12.In view of the enormous sacrifice of life and property demanded of a nation by every war, personal enrichment due to a war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. We demand therefore ruthless confiscation of all war gains.

13.We demand nationalization of all businesses (trusts)

14.We demand that the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared.

15.We demand extensive development of security for old age.

16.We demand creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class, immediate communalization of wholesale business premises, and their lease at a cheap rate to small traders, and that extreme consideration shall be shown to all small purveyors to the state, district authorities, and smaller localities.

17.We demand land reform suitable to our national requirements.

18.We demand ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Sordid criminals against the nation, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race.

19.We demand that the Roman Law, which serves the materialistic world order, shall be replaced by a legal system for all Germany.

20.With the aim of opening to every capable and industrious German the possibility of higher education and of thus obtaining advancement, the state must consider a thorough reconstruction of our national system of education.

21.The state must see to raising the standard of health in the nation by protecting mothers and infants, prohibiting child labor, increasing bodily efficiency by obligatory gymnastics and sports laid down by law, and by extensive support of clubs engaged in the bodily development of the young.

22.We demand abolition of a paid army and formation of a national army.

23.We demand legal warfare against conscious political lying and its dissemination in the press. In order to facilitate creation of a German national press, we demand:

(a)that all editors and their assistants of newspapers employing the German language must be members of the nation;

(b)that special permission from the state shall be necessary before non-German newspapers may appear. These are not necessarily printed in the German language;

(c)that non-Germans shall be prohibited by law from participation financially in or influencing German newspapers, and that the penalty for violating this law shall be the suppression of any such newspaper and the immediate deportation of the non-Germans involved.

It must be forbidden to publish papers that do not promote the national welfare. We demand legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature that exert a corrupting influence on our life as a nation, and the closing of institutions that contravene the requirements mentioned above.

24.We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the state, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the moral feelings of the German race. The party as such stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within us and outside of us.

The Common Interest over Individual Interest

25.That all the foregoing may be put into effect, we demand the creation of a strong central power of the Reich. Unconditional authority of the politically centralized parliament over the entire Reich and its organizations. The formation of chambers for classes and occupations for the purpose of carrying out the general laws promulgated by the Reich in the various federal states.

The leaders of the party swear with the utmost determination to bring about and—if necessary, to sacrifice their lives—to fulfill the foregoing points.

Note

1. The name of the German Workers’ Party was changed to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in August 1920.

6

GOTTFRIED FEDER

Manifesto for Breaking the Bondage of Interest

First published as Das Manifest zur Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft des Geldes, in Kritische Rundschau 2 (Summer 1919), 14–15. Translated by Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp.

Mammonism is the heavy, pervasive, stifling disease from which our present culture, and indeed all humanity, is suffering. It is like a devastating plague, like a devouring poison that has seized the peoples of the world.

By Mammonism we must understand:

On the one hand, the international financial superpowers, the supranational financial force that rules over all the rights of self-determination of individual peoples, the golden international;

And on the other hand, a frame of mind that has overcome the broadest segments of the population; the insatiable greed for gain, the view of life that is focused solely on worldly goods, [a view] that has already led to a frightening decline in moral values, and must continue to do so.

This frame of mind is embodied and carried to its extreme in the international plutocracy.

The source of Mammonism’s power is the effortless and infinite multiplication of wealth that is created by interest.

The golden international was born out of the thoroughly immoral idea of loan interest. Greed for loan interest produces a mental and moral outlook in the individual that has led to a frightening dissolution within one part of the bourgeoisie.

The ideal of loan interest is the diabolical invention of big capital. It alone makes possible the lazy drone life of a minority of financially powerful people at the cost of the productive peoples and their labor. It has led to deep insurmountable differences, to class hatred, out of which civil war and fratricide have been born.

The only remedy, the radical means to cure suffering humanity, is:

Breaking the bondage of interest.

Breaking the bondage of interest means the only possible and effective emancipation of productive labor from the secret financial superpowers.

Breaking the bondage of interest means the restoration of personal freedom, the redemption of mankind from slavery, from the magic spell in which his soul is ensnared by Mammonism. Whoever wants to do battle with capitalism must break the bondage of interest.

Where must breaking the bondage of interest begin? With loan capital!

Why?

Because loan capital is so overpowering in comparison to all industrial capital that the great monetary powers can be successfully combated only by breaking the bondage of interest to loan capital. Twenty to one is the ratio of loan capital to industrial capital. Every year the German Volk must raise more than 12 billion [marks] in interest for loan capital, in the form of direct and indirect taxes, rents and increasing cost of living, while even in the years of the war boom the total sum of all dividends paid by German corporations amounted to only 1 billion.

The avalanche-like growth of loan capital by the constant, endless, and effortless multiplication of wealth [caused by] interest and compound interest is beyond human comprehension.

What benefits will be brought by breaking the bondage of interest, for the working people of Germany, for the proletarians of all countries of the earth?

Breaking the bondage of interest allows us to undertake the abolition of all direct and indirect taxes. Hear this, you people of all lands, states, and continents, you who create value: all revenue from direct and indirect sources flows into the pockets of big loan capital.

The profits of commercial state enterprises, such as mail, telegraph, telephone, railroads, mining, foresting, and power, suffice completely to pay for the necessary outlays of the state for education, culture, administration, and social welfare.

This means that all true socialism will bring no benefits to humanity as long as economic enterprises of the community owe their profits to big loan capital.

We demand, therefore, first as a constitutional law for the various German peoples, then as basic law for all those brother peoples who want to enter with us into the cultural community of a league of peoples, the following:

1.That, by abolition of the obligation to pay interest, the shares of war loans, all other debt instruments of the German Reich, all other debt instruments of the German federal states, especially railroad loans, and further the bonds of all legally constituted governments, be declared legal tender at face value.

2.That, in the case of all other papers bearing a fixed rate of interest, mortgage bonds, industrial obligations, mortgages and the like, the obligation to pay interest be superseded by the obligation to repay principal. After twenty or twenty-five years, according to the rate of interest, the loan shall be repaid and the debt dissolved.

3.That all debts on real estate, mortgages, and the like be repaid in installments as before, according to the charges entered in the property register. Real estate properties—house or land—disencumbered in this way shall become partially owned by the state or legally constituted government. This will enable the state to determine and lower rents.

4.The entire monetary system is to be subordinated to a central state treasury. All private banks and bankers, as well as postal banks and savings and loan associations, shall be affiliated as branch establishments.

5.All real credit is only to be given out by the central state bank. Personal credit and credit on goods is given to private bankers by state license. This license is to be given according to need and will prohibit the establishment of branches in certain districts. The scale of fees is to be set by the state.

6.Dividends shall be redeemed in the same way as papers bearing a fixed rate of interest—in annual installments of five percent. Surplus profits shall be paid out in part to the stockholder as compensation for risked capital (in contrast to papers at a fixed rate of interest and gilt-edged securities). The remaining surplus reverts by independent right to the workers and is either to be distributed for social purposes or applied to the lowering of consumer prices.

7.All persons who, for physical reasons (old age, physical or mental inability to work, extreme youth) are not able to earn their living shall continue to receive the previous interest on securities paid out of existing capital funds as an annuity in return for depositing their bonds or securities.

8.In the interest of reducing existing inflation by substituting legal tender, a general, sharply graduated confiscation of property shall be undertaken. The property thus confiscated will take the form of war bonds or other debt instruments of the Reich or the states. These papers will be destroyed.

9.It must be made clear to the Volk by a most intensive popular enlightenment campaign that money is not and must not be anything but an exchange for labor; that any highly developed economy certainly does need money as a medium of exchange, but that this exhausts the function of money and can under no circumstances endow money, through interest, with the supernatural power to reproduce itself at the cost of productive labor.

Why have we not yet achieved all this, this perfect solution that seems as self-evident as the discovery of America, the ideal remedy for the social question?

Because in our mammonistic delusion we have forgotten how to see that the theory of the sacredness of interest is a monstrous self-deception, that the gospel of salvation by interest has entangled our entire thinking in the golden nets of the international plutocracy. Because we have forgotten, and the omnipotent money powers work industriously to foster this illusion, that, for all but a few financially well-endowed people, interest—supposedly so beloved and sweet, so dear to the thoughtless—is eaten up by taxes. Our whole tax law is and shall remain a tribute paid to big capital, and not, as we sometimes imagine, [a] voluntary sacrifice for the benefit of the community until we are freed from the bondage of interest.

Therefore, emancipation from the bondage of interest is the clear solution for the world revolution, for the emancipation of productive labor from the fetters of the international money powers.

7

OTTO GMELIN

Prohn Fights for His People

First published in Prohn kämpft für sein Volk (Jena: Eugen Diedrichs Verlag, 1933), 5–10.

When, in August of the year 1914, war broke out over the German people, a war that the great majority of Germans, after such a long and happy period of peace, never seriously thought possible, everyone was forced to pause for reflection and ask himself where he belongs now. For the strong, able-bodied men, everyone agreed, nothing was more urgent and important than taking up arms and defending against the enemy; everything else was secondary for the moment. For this reason, hundreds of thousands left their peacetime jobs and pursuits at the time and registered with the voluntary regiments, because it seemed to them—rightly so—pointless to sit bent over books or at typewriters as long as the fate of their people and thus their own fate would be decided by gunfire and cannons.

It was easy for all these men to find their place in those days because they knew exactly where they belonged. It was much more difficult for those whose physical condition prevented them from following that natural path. For these people in particular, the less they were able to intervene and actively participate themselves, the more acutely and with much more consternation they experienced events.

Even though I belonged to this latter group, none of this became apparent until I met Prohn. That was in November 1914. After I’d been relieved of my post as a volunteer enlisted man on medical grounds shortly after I signed up, I was transferred by the office of civil service to the beautiful town of T. in the Black Forest. I took up residence, with meals included, in the clean and modest Gasthof zum Hirschen because I liked its location near the forest and thus spared myself the burdensome search for a room. After several days, the proprietress, whose husband was on the battlefield, told me that all the seats at the table were taken for the afternoon meal and, if I didn’t mind, she’d like to seat me at the table with two gentlemen who were high school teachers. I had nothing against it. The next day, though, I was not very happy about the company at my table. The one named Spieß was a young, redheaded fellow with only one arm; one might have felt sorry for him on account of that had he not been the worst kind of flag-waving hoorah patriot who compensated for his inability to carry a weapon and march against the enemy with his comrades by boastfully shooting off at the mouth. The other was Prohn. My first impression of Prohn was not good. He was a small weakling of a man with disheveled dirty blond hair and a contorted face, which, despite his youth, was covered in wrinkles that assumed a certain contrived masculinity on account of his sizeable mustache. Behind the round lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses, a pair of small dark blue eyes peered out. But what stood out on this gnome-like little man already the first time I sat down to lunch with him and to this day, nearly twenty years after the events I am about to relate, what I can still see before me with unwavering clarity, were his hands. I saw—though I didn’t know it myself at the time because it didn’t dawn on me until much later, not until I began reminiscing about him—I watched these hands during the meal; they were small, slender, and delicate. His fingers were thin, lean on flesh and muscle—they almost looked like little twigs—[with] blue veins protruding all across the surface of the backs of his hands, and brownish ones leading to his wrist and forearms thick with hair, and flabby skin hanging in creases and wrinkles all over. His hand truly resembled a gorilla hand, even in its movements, which were abrupt and jerky. But, of course, as I would soon learn, a comparison of this nature was utterly superficial because this hand, in its very impracticability, expressed something else altogether.

But this was not something I was aware of immediately. Above all, what disgusted me was the way he ate—bent over his plate, shoving overstuffed spoons and forks into his mouth beneath the drooping moustache—the way he chewed, the way he wiped his mouth; all that seemed at first like a disregard for form that bordered on rudeness. In conversation, he was the opposite of his colleague, who simply couldn’t be grandiose enough in his talk; Prohn, on the other hand, with his curt, gruff responses, resisted all my efforts to strike up a conversation with him. Of course, I don’t know anymore exactly what I discussed with him, or tried to discuss with him, but what I do know for certain is that the way he responded to my question about whether he was a teacher of modern languages like his colleague was only to grumble:

Latin and Greek mean zilch to me!

All in all, I was not exactly happy with this less than stimulating and scarcely entertaining company at the table, but I nevertheless failed to do anything to try and find another table to sit at for lunch. That was probably because, at a time when others were lying in the mire of the trenches facing the enemy, it didn’t seem worth worrying about being selective in my choice of company at the table. Back in those days, one began attaching less significance to things that might have otherwise seemed important. Ultimately all the rules of etiquette stemming from my bourgeois upbringing were ridiculous trivialities compared to what friends and comrades were going through out there. When Germany’s fate was at stake, it seemed more than irrelevant to worry about the table manners of the men seated beside you at the table. These were the considerations and sentiments that prevented me from doing anything to change the situation and, on the contrary, to attempt to enter into a relationship that approached human understanding with my fellow men at the table. But, as far as the one-armed man is concerned, I did not succeed in this endeavor. He was one of those people who took refuge in empty words simply to avoid having to admit to himself his own inadequacy. But the more I kept my distance from him, in fact the more I developed a sort of antagonistic position toward him, the more I got to know the rest of the men at the table, and that was something I’d never live to regret.

It’s hard to say how I came to get so well acquainted with Prohn. At first, we sat together every day at lunch for a mere half hour, now and then perhaps an hour. I believe that people, even when they have nothing to say, whether they want to or not, always exude something of their character. If the person you’re with has a character that resembles your own, a bond gradually begins to form that is at first imperceptible.

If my recollection is correct, this first visible sign of commonality became apparent when I explained that I had tried in vain to register as a volunteer soldier in various regiments and that, once I’d finally secured a place, quickly had a physical collapse and was relieved of my duties.

Then Prohn peered at me through his glasses, indicating, for the first time, a sign of a certain attentiveness and scrutiny, and said,

So, so. So you’re another one of those men they don’t need. And then he added, in a tone rife with annoyance and self-irony, I didn’t even bother trying.

I responded by saying something like you had to figure out where you stood and from there, do everything in your power. But he seemed to take little fancy in this consolation that seemed shallow even to me.

Yeah, yeah, that’s easy for you to say, he answered, wiping his mouth and the bushy moustache and immersing himself again in the newspaper he was holding in his left hand while spooning soup with his right.

His curt that’s easy for you to say kept going through my head, though, and at any rate, from then on he was no longer just anyone to me. Perhaps, though it wasn’t something I was consciously aware of, this statement of his may have been what caused me to go sit down next to him one night in the Wirtstube zum Hirschen, where he was sitting alone in a corner with a glass of beer smoking a Swiss stogie. At first we talked about the daily news reports of triumphant advances in the East under General von Mackensen. A happy smile came over Prohn’s unsightly facial features as he said,

They’re putting the screws to the Russians! You can be glad for that! Glad for that! But then he immediately turned serious again and added, But you know, that won’t be without its costs. Many a man is going to bite the dust over there!

He simply put in words much of what I had thought and felt many a time. But I said, These are the bitter necessities. He fell silent, took another drink of his beer, sucked on his stogie, blew out the smoke in front of him, his elbows propped on the table top, and only after a long pause, while I was skimming the paper, he said,

You know what I think, those of us who are sitting here at home really don’t have anything to say about it. There’s much too much nonsense being said.

I had to concede that he was right.

8

HEINRICH LERSCH

The German Soldier

First published in Volk im Kriege. Gedichte (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1939), 13, 45.

There’s a line of troops rushing along the railroad tracks

A proud roaring of the train locomotives:

Our rail is headed straight to battle and victory.

To the slaughter, to the slaughter the young throats screamed.

The slogans on the walls stared at me;

My blood climbed from all the depths of my heart

when I saw the half-erased inscription:

"Hail! From our homeland into death.